A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 3, Sep. 1809-Dec. 1810

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

MASSÉNA’S ADVANCE TO BUSSACO (SEPTEMBER 1810)

After the fall of Almeida Masséna waited much longer than Wellington had anticipated. The reasons for his delay were the usual ones that were always forthcoming when a French army had to advance in the Peninsula—want of transport and penury of supplies. The Marshal had just discovered that the country-side in front of him had already been depopulated by Wellington’s orders, and that the only inhabitants that were to be met would be the armed Ordenança, who were already shooting at his vedettes and attacking his foraging parties. He was inclined to treat them as brigands; his Provost-marshal, Colonel Pavetti, having been surprised and captured along with five gendarmes of his escort by the villagers of Nava d’Avel on September 5, he caused the place to be burned, shot the one or two male inhabitants who could be caught, and issued a proclamation stating that no quarter would be given to combatants without uniforms. This provoked two stiff letters from Wellington[394], who wrote to say that the Ordenança were an integral part of the Portuguese military forces, and that, if they wore no uniforms, the Marshal should remember that many of the revolutionary bands which he had commanded in the old war of 1792-7 were no better equipped: ‘vous devez vous souvenir que vous-même vous avez augmenté la gloire de l’armée Française en commandant des soldats qui n’avaient pas d’uniforme.’ If Ordenança were shot as ‘brigands and highway robbers’ in obedience to the proclamation of September 7, it was certain that French stragglers and foragers would be knocked on the head, and not taken prisoners, by the enraged peasantry. At present the number of them sent in to the British head quarters by the Portuguese irregulars proved that the laws of war were being observed. Masséna replied that Pavetti had been ambushed by men who hid their arms, and ran in upon him and his escort while he was peaceably asking his way. His letter then went off at a tangent, to discuss high politics, and to declare that he was not the enemy of the Portuguese but of the perfidious British government, &c., &c. Finally he complained that the Arganil and Trancoso militia, whom he had sent home after the fall of Almeida, had taken up arms again; if caught, ‘leur sort sera funeste’[395]. The last statement Wellington denied; he said that the capitulation had been annulled by the French themselves, when they debauched the 24th regiment, and detained 600 of the militia to form a battalion of pioneers, but stated that as a matter of fact the militia battalions had not been re-embodied. The French continued to shoot the Ordenança, and the Ordenança soon began to reply by torturing as well as hanging French stragglers; Wellington forbade but could not prevent retaliation.

In his dispatch to Berthier of September 8[396], Masséna explains that the depopulation of the district in front of him, and the fact that the Ordenança had taken arms throughout the country-side, have compelled him to make an enormous provision of food for his army. Since the land has been swept bare, he must collect fifteen or twenty days’ rations for the 6th and 8th Corps. ‘Each day demonstrates the necessity of this more clearly, but each day makes it more evident that we are not obtaining as much as our activity deserves. The small amount of transport available, and the destruction by the Spanish brigands of several convoys of corn which were coming up from the province of Valladolid, have occasioned delay in the accumulation of the stores. An additional vexation is that while it was reported that we had captured 300,000 rations of biscuit in Almeida, there turn out really to be only 120,000 rations.’ But it was the loss of draught-beasts that was the most serious trouble; to his great regret Masséna had to cut down the artillery of each division from twelve to eight guns, for want of horses, with a similar reduction of the caissons. Every animal that could be procured was given over to the train, yet it could not carry even the fifteen days’ food which the Marshal considered the minimum that he could afford to take with him. There was also a deficiency in cartridges for the infantry, for whom 1,200,000 rounds were only procured by setting the artificers of the train to make up as many as was possible from the powder captured at Ciudad Rodrigo. Finally Masséna explains that the losses in the two late sieges, the necessity for garrisoning Almeida and Rodrigo, and the effects of a sickly summer, have reduced the two corps and the reserve cavalry under his hand to 42,000 or 45,000 men, so that he must incorporate Reynier with his main army, in order to get a sufficient force concentrated for the invasion. When this has been done, he will have no force to leave behind to guard his communications, and Kellermann and Serras are too much occupied to spare a man for that purpose. The Spaniards will press in between the army and Salamanca the moment that the troops have entered the Portuguese mountains. He will advance, therefore, on September 15, but only with grave apprehension for his rear, and he begs that at all costs a division of the 9th Corps should be brought up to Salamanca. He had been promised long ago that this should be done, but no signs of Drouet’s arrival were yet visible.

Reynier accordingly was called up, at last, to join the main army; he left Zarza and Penamacor on the 10th of September, crossed the Pass of Perales, and on the 12th was at Alfayates, with cavalry in front at Sabugal. Hill, always vigilant, perceived Reynier’s movement as soon as it had taken place. On the 12th his corps quitted Sarzedas, leaving nothing behind in the Castello Branco country save Lecor’s Portuguese at Fundão, who were ordered to follow, unless Reynier should send back any detachments to the south side of the Sierra de Gata. Leith started from the banks of the Zezere three days later, and on the 20th the two divisions were drawing near to Wellington’s rear in the valley of the Mondego, Hill being at Espinhal that day, and Leith (who had less distance to cover) a march further to the front, at Foz d’Aronce. Wellington’s concentration on the Alva must obviously be completed before the French could strike.

On September 15, 1810, Ney and Junot broke up from the encampments in front of Almeida, while Reynier drew in close to the main body by marching up from Sabugal towards Guarda. It was clear that the attack of the French was to be delivered along the line of the Mondego, but whether by its southern or its northern bank Wellington could not yet be sure, though he was under the impression that the former would be the chosen route, since the chaussée from Almeida by Celorico and Ponte de Murcella is good for a Portuguese road, while the mountain track by Trancoso and Vizeu is abominable. Yet one of the three columns of the French pointed from the first towards the north bank: while Ney took his way by Freixadas and Alverca towards Celorico, Junot was reported to have turned off from the main road at Valverde, and to be marching by Pinhel westward or north-westward. What Reynier would do after reaching Guarda remained yet to be seen.

The total force which Masséna had drawn together for the invasion was 65,000[397] officers and men. He had left behind a regiment of dragoons and four battalions of infantry to take care of Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo. In the latter place he had also deposited his siege-train, with the considerable body of artillerymen belonging to it. Brennier and Cacault commanded at the two places respectively. They had between them some 3,500 men, a force which perceptibly diminished the army of invasion, yet was insufficient to do more than to hold the two fortresses. Gardanne, with five squadrons of dragoons, was to maintain touch between them. Not a man would be available from the garrisons for service against Spanish or Portuguese insurgents—indeed both Almeida and Rodrigo were practically under blockade from the moment that the main army went forward, and were destined to learn nothing of its doings for many days. Wellington’s cordon of Ordenança proved perfectly efficient[398].

On the evening of the 15th the 2nd Corps had reached Guarda, from which it drove out a picket of the 16th Light Dragoons, who retired towards the Mondego. The 6th Corps bivouacked at Freixadas, having pushed back from it two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons and the German Hussars. The 8th Corps, which had to come up from the Azava, passed Almeida and slept beyond the Coa. In its rear was Montbrun’s reserve cavalry division, and behind this again the reserve artillery of the whole army. This column, therefore, was by far the longest and (owing to the amount of guns and caissons) the most unwieldy of the three masses in which the French were marching.

On the 16th Wellington hoped to see Masséna’s designs unmasked. But it proved a day of continued doubt: Reynier left Heudelet’s division at Guarda, and moved on with Merle’s and the cavalry to Celorico. Here he met Ney, who had marched from Freixadas to Celorico, and had pushed his light cavalry through it in advance. One body of horsemen took a hill road high up the side of the Serra da Estrella, and reached Linhares, another followed the great chaussée as far as Carapichina, and detached a squadron or two from that point to seize the bridge of Fornos d’Algodres, over which passes the bad side-road from Celorico to Vizeu. Was the enemy about to turn aside on this path, or to pursue the more probable policy of continuing along the chaussée to Ponte de Murcella? Nothing could yet be deduced from Junot’s movements: his heavy column only reached Pinhel that day: from thence he might either come down to Celorico (the most probable course), or make a move towards Oporto, by the high-road Pinhel-Marialva-St. João da Pesqueira, or (what seemed least likely) follow the very bad mountain-road from Pinhel by Povoa d’el Rei to Trancoso and Vizeu. Meanwhile Wellington ordered the continuation of the retreat of his army towards Ponte de Murcella and the position behind the Alva. The 1st, 3rd, and 4th Divisions retired at their leisure along the great chaussée, by Saragoça and Chamusca: the Light Division moved parallel to them by the mountain-road Gouvea-San Martinho-San Romão. The appearance of Ney’s cavalry at Linhares on this track made the Commander-in-Chief anxious to have it watched, since it was possible that the 6th Corps might use it. The cavalry, keeping the rear well guarded, lay this day at Pinhanços on the chaussée and San Martinho on the hill-road. Head quarters were at Cea, on the latter line. The only troops now left north of the Mondego, on the route which Junot might possibly follow from Pinhel, were a few cavalry-pickets, wherefore the Commander-in-Chief, conceiving it just possible that the 8th Corps might be intending to make a dash at Oporto, while the other two kept him in check, sent urgent letters to Trant, the officer in charge of the militia of Northern Beira, and to Baccelar, who lay at Oporto with the militia of the Entre-Douro-e-Minho, to take precautions against this movement. Trant, from Moimento de Beira, was to feel for Junot’s front and flank: Baccelar was to send out some picked battalions, under J. Wilson, to the line of the Vouga, and to get into touch with Trant on his left.

On the 17th Masséna’s intentions at last became clear to his adversary. The cavalry of the 6th Corps crossed the bridge of Fornos, which it had seized on the previous night, and the leading division of infantry followed it to Juncaes, on the Mondego bank: nothing came along the chaussée, all the French columns turning off it at Carapichina, and pursuing the cross-road. Ney’s rear was still at Celorico, to which place the whole of the 2nd Corps also came up that day. In the evening the head of the cavalry of the 6th Corps was near Mangualde, many miles along the road north of the Mondego. It seemed probable therefore, that a transference of the whole French army to the right bank, over the bridge of Fornos, was about to take place. This became almost certain when the simultaneous news arrived that Junot had marched that day from Pinhel not towards Celorico, nor on the Oporto road (that by Marialva and St. João da Pesqueira), but by the abominable cross-road by Povoa d’el Rei to Trancoso. The 8th and 6th Corps therefore were showing a tendency to converge on Vizeu. If so, they must be aiming at reaching Coimbra without touching Wellington’s chosen position of Ponte de Murcella, where he had hoped to fight. This deduction once made, the British commander had to recast his plans. ‘The 2nd and 6th Corps came to Celorico yesterday,’ he wrote to Leith that evening, ‘and a part of them crossed the Mondego at Fornos. More have crossed this day, while no part of the enemy’s army has moved this way [i. e. along the great chaussée south of the river]. It is generally understood that their whole army is between the Douro and the Mondego, and that they are about to move on Coimbra. I shall have troops in Coimbra to-morrow[399].’ All the divisions were ordered back at once, so as to be ready on the Lower Mondego to resist the French, when they should appear from the direction of Vizeu. Only cavalry were left at Sampayo and Gouvea, to watch the passage of the Mondego by the French army, and to make certain that its rear (i. e. Reynier’s corps) might not be about to use the main chaussée, a move which was even yet possible.

Masséna’s resolve to use the route by the north bank of the Mondego surprised all British and some French observers at the time, and has been censured by most historical critics. He left a good for a bad road: he imposed two extra marches on his army at a moment when it was short of provisions. He gave Wellington ample time to call up Hill and Leith, and to select a new position for battle to replace that of Ponte de Murcella. The Bussaco hillsides, where the clash was to come, were as formidable as those behind the Alva. But these considerations were less obvious to Masséna in 1810 than they appear to the critic of 1907. It must first be remembered that his maps were abominable: the actual case of plans used by the staff of the Army of Portugal is preserved[400]: it is that issued by Lopez in 1778, which in the remoter parts of Portugal not only offers a mere travesty of the natural features, but actually marks as existing roads that never had been made, and omits others that were actually available. It shows, moreover, no distinction between chaussées, country roads, and mere mule tracts. Places of considerable importance are misplaced by several miles, e. g. Almeida is placed on the Coa instead of two miles from it: Vizeu is much too far north, as is also Bussaco. As far as this map goes, the physical difficulties in the way of an advance north of the Mondego look no greater than those on the southern bank. But, it may be said, Masséna should have supplemented the use of the map by collecting oral information, and by sending reconnaissances in every direction. He did so, so far as was in his power. But exploration far afield was only possible with large bodies of men, since the Ordenança blocked every road to the isolated staff-officer, and the only oral information which was forthcoming was defective. Masséna asked for it from Alorna, Pamplona, and the other Portuguese officers on his staff—there were no less than eighteen of them in all. They were absolutely ignorant of their own country,—a normal thing in the military men of the old Portuguese army. Even Pamplona, whose estates lay in the neighbourhood of Coimbra, gave hopelessly erroneous information about the routes leading into that town. But, from natural amour propre they avoided confessing their ignorance, and, when taken into council by Masséna, gave him copious but wholly misleading details. They assured him that the roads Pinhel-Trancoso-Vizeu and Fornos-Mangualde-Vizeu were no worse than other lines of communication, and that the great chaussée by Sampayo and Ponte de Murcella was crossed by so many torrents and climbed so many slopes that it was not preferable to the routes north of the river. The news that a formidable position behind the Alva had been entrenched had reached the French head quarters; hence Masséna had fair reasons for taking the route that he selected, so far as strategy went. It undoubtedly enabled him to turn the line of the Alva. Moreover, on it lay a large town—Vizeu—from which it was hoped that much food would be procured, for the invaders were still ignorant of the thoroughness with which Wellington’s plans for devastating the country before them had been carried out. Even after Celorico and Guarda had been found empty of inhabitants, they hardly believed that such a large place as Vizeu, a town of 9,000 souls, would be deserted.

Masséna’s mistake became evident to his soldiers on the first day on which he ordered his columns to quit the main-roads and take to the by-paths. The infantry could still get forward, but the artillery and waggon-train began to drag behind, to lose horses, and to see vehicle after vehicle broken, disabled, or abandoned. On the 18th the infantry of the 6th Corps got as far as Mangualde on the north bank of the Mondego, but the artillery was so much delayed in the defile after passing Juncaes that it could not catch up the rear of the marching troops, and had to be parked at night not many miles beyond the bridge of Fornos. The 2nd Corps on reaching this spot found the road blocked, and bivouacked with one division beyond the Mondego, and one still in the rear of the bridge. But the troubles of this column were nothing to those of the 8th Corps on the miserable road from Pinhel to Vizeu. The journal of the commandant of the artillery of Junot’s first division, Colonel Noël, may be quoted as giving a fair description of the marches of the 17th and 18th September:—

‘After passing the little town of Trancoso, with its battlemented wall, all the country-side is mountain and rock. There is no road, only a stony narrow dangerous track, which the artillery had all the pains in the world to follow without meeting accidents. It is all steep ups and downs. I had to march with a party of gunners ahead of me, with picks and crowbars to enlarge the track. As each arm only looked out for itself, the artillery soon got left to the rear, and deserted by the infantry and cavalry. We only arrived at our halting-places late at night, utterly done up. The guns were almost always abandoned to themselves; we did not know what road to follow, having no one to give us information but a few infantry stragglers, who had themselves lost their way. At noon on the 18th I halted with my two batteries after two hours of incessant uphill, to find myself at the crest of a mountain, with a precipitous descent before me, and beyond that another ascent winding upwards, as far as the eye could reach. We were so exhausted that it was useless to go further that day, but on the 19th, with a party of gunners always working in front to enlarge the road, we moved over hill and vale, completely out of touch with the army. I had to ride out with four mounted men to hunt for any trace of it. At last, in a deserted village, we found an old peasant who pointed out the road to Vizeu. But it was only on the 20th that we got there.’ Noël’s batteries, it may be remarked, were moving all the time between the infantry, which was ahead, and the Grand Park which was behind them, with Montbrun’s cavalry bringing up the rear. Yet they were absolutely lost and had to shift for themselves without orders or escort[401].

The Park fared even worse; when nearing Sotojal, on the 20th, it was unexpectedly beset by Colonel Trant, who had come down from Moimenta with a brigade of his militia and two squadrons of Portuguese regular cavalry. The Park was escorted by one company of grenadiers, who marched at its head, and a battalion of the Irish Legion, who were far to the rear, while Montbrun’s immense cavalry column was quite out of sight. Trant had a great opportunity, for the long file of vehicles and guns, caught in a narrow road, was almost helpless. But he failed to do all that was in his power; his cavalry charged the company at the head of the column and was repulsed. He then filed his battalions along the hillside, opened fire on the horses and men of the train, and, descending into their midst, captured and destroyed some caissons and took some eighty prisoners. But when the escort-battalion came hurrying up from the rear, his levies were stricken with panic and hastily retired, though they were strong enough to have held off the five hundred Irish, and to have smashed or rolled over the precipices the greater part of the guns and waggons. Montbrun’s cavalry did not get up till all was over, and would have been perfectly useless on the precipitous road, even if they had arrived earlier. If Trant’s foray had been properly carried out, Masséna might have lost his reserve artillery and most of his provisions—a disaster which might have forced him to turn back to Almeida. He deserved such a punishment for having marched his all-important train on the extreme flank of his army, with an insufficient escort[402].

Though Junot’s infantry divisions reached the deserted walls of Vizeu on Sept. 19th and there met the corps of Ney, the divisional artillery did not arrive till next day, while the reserve artillery, the trains and the heavy cavalry were struggling in upon the 21st and 22nd by detachments. For Montbrun had halted the great convoy after Trant’s attack, and parked it, fearing that the Portuguese might come back in greater numbers and give more trouble. When he started it again, on the 21st, he took care to give it better marching arrangements, and to attach cavalry escorts to each section. But this caused much delay, and meanwhile the 8th Corps waited at Vizeu ‘marking time’ and unable to move. Even the 6th Corps remained there two days, waiting while its gun-carriages and cannons were being repaired; for the Fornos-Vizeu road, though infinitely less rough than that which the 8th Corps and the park had followed, was still bad enough to shake many vehicles to pieces. The Intendant-General reported that nineteen caissons carrying 2,900 rations of biscuit belonging to the 6th Corps broke down and had to be burnt; the food was distributed among the regiments as they passed, with much consequent waste[403]. All that Ney could do between the 18th of September, when he reached Vizeu, and the 21st, was to push forward an advanced guard to Tondella, fifteen miles down the Vizeu-Coimbra road, with an infantry division in support at Fail. Meanwhile the 2nd Corps, following in the wake of the 6th, had also made its way to Vizeu. The bulk of Reynier’s force took the Fornos-Mangualde-Lagiosa route, as Ney’s had done. But an advanced guard of all arms descended the great chaussée south of the river as far as Taboa, driving in the pickets of the English cavalry, and then crossed the Mondego at the bridge of Taboa, and fell into the rear of the rest of the corps beyond Mangualde. This apparently was intended to keep Wellington uncertain, as long as possible, as to whether part of the French army was not intending, after all, to follow the chaussée and present itself before the position on the Alva[404]. But it was executed by so small a force that the British general was not for an hour deceived[405]. He was at this moment in a cheerful frame of mind; Masséna had made a mistake in choosing his route, and was merely wasting time when time was most precious. ‘There are certainly many bad roads in Portugal,’ he wrote, ‘but the enemy has taken decidedly the worst in the whole kingdom’[406]; and again, ‘I imagine that Marshal Masséna has been misinformed, and has experienced more difficulty in making his movement than he expected. He has certainly selected one of the worst roads in Portugal for his march[407].’ Owing to the necessary delays of the enemy Wellington was now in a position as strong as that on the Alva; his head quarters were at the convent of Bussaco, his divisions, including Leith and Hill, so placed that they could be concentrated on the Serra de Alcoba, right across the Vizeu-Coimbra road, long before the French could descend from Vizeu. ‘We have an excellent position here, in which I am strongly tempted to give battle[408],’ he wrote on the evening of the 21st, foreseeing six days ahead the probability of the engagement which was to make Bussaco famous. There was a road by which his position might be turned, but it was doubtful whether the enemy would discover it, and ‘I do not yet give up hopes of discovering a remedy for that misfortune[409].’

Masséna, meanwhile, was chafing at his self-imposed delays, and writing querulous letters from Vizeu to Berthier. ‘The grand park and the baggage,’ he wrote on the 22nd, ‘are still in the rear, and will only get up to-morrow. It is impossible to find worse roads than these; they bristle with rocks; the guns and train have suffered severely, and I must wait for them. I must leave them two days at Vizeu when they come in, to rest themselves, while I resume my march on Coimbra, where (as I am informed) I shall find the Anglo-Portuguese concentrated. Sir, all our marches are across a desert; not a soul to be seen anywhere; everything is abandoned. The English push their barbarity to the point of shooting the wretched inhabitant who tries to remain in his village; the women, the children, the aged, have all decamped. We cannot find a guide anywhere. The soldiers discover a few potatoes and other vegetables; they are satisfied, and burn for the moment when they shall meet the enemy.’ The plan of devastation was already beginning to work; Masséna had exhausted seven of the thirteen days’ provisions which his army carried, and it was not with the potatoes gleaned in the fields of Vizeu, or the ripe grapes of its vineyards, that he could refill the empty store-waggons. He must push on for Coimbra as fast as possible; this, no doubt, was why he made up his mind to march on that place, not by descending from Vizeu to Aveiro and entering the coast plain, but by taking the direct road by Santa Comba Dao, Mortagoa, and Bussaco. Even Lopez’s faulty map shows the ridge of Bussaco as a serious physical feature, but the Marshal does not seem to have reflected for a moment that Wellington might choose to defend it. The orders drawn up on September 24th for the march on Coimbra presuppose an unobstructed progress[410]. Having met no active resistance as yet from the Anglo-Portuguese army, Masséna wrongly took it for granted that he might count on the prolongation of this good fortune.

Before moving on from Vizeu the organization of the French army was slightly modified. Junot’s corps contained a number of fourth battalions, belonging to regiments whose three senior battalions were serving in the 2nd Corps. The two corps had never met till both lay at Vizeu. Masséna then ordered the fourth battalions of the 36th, 47th, 70th of the Line, and the 2nd and 4th Léger to join their regiments in Reynier’s corps; this reduced the 8th Corps by 2,850 men; in return, however, Reynier was ordered to make over to Junot two regiments of old troops, the 15th and 86th of the line (each of three battalions) making in all 2,251 bayonets. Thus the two corps were somewhat equalized in quality, the 2nd receiving five battalions of recruits, while the 8th (in which there were too few veterans) got in return six battalions which had served in Spain since the commencement of the war. The net result was to make the 2nd Corps a little stronger (17,024 men) and the 8th Corps a little weaker (15,904 men)[411].

On September 21st the advance of the Army of Portugal was recommenced, though the train and heavy baggage was not yet prepared to start, and some of its rear detachments had not even reached Vizeu. But on that day the advanced guard of the 6th Corps advanced from Tondella, and found in front of it some light cavalry and two Portuguese regiments—the first hostile troops that the French had seen since the campaign began. The whole of the 2nd and 6th Corps followed behind, and bivouacked that night at Casal-de-Maria, Tondella, Sabugoça and other villages on the steep downward road from Vizeu to Coimbra. The 8th Corps still remained at Vizeu, guarding the belated reserve artillery and train. On the 22nd the 2nd Corps, passing the 6th, which had hitherto taken the lead, crossed the Criz and drove in the British outposts, who retired on Mortagoa. But Ney and the 6th Corps remained stationary, and the 8th did not even yet make a start. These delays seem extraordinary, but Masséna was still paying for his evil choice of roads; the infantry had to wait for the guns, and the guns could only creep forward as the sappers enlarged and improved the roads for them.

Wellington, meanwhile, was recasting his dispositions at his leisure. When Masséna’s march on Vizeu had become certain, the British Commander-in-Chief thought at first that the enemy would take the good chaussée Vizeu-Aveiro, so as to descend into the coast-plain and attack Coimbra from the easiest side. He therefore, on the 18th moved the 1st Division back from Ponte de Murcella to Coimbra, where it was joined by a new brigade from Lisbon, composed of the 1st battalions of the 7th and 79th, newly landed. A. Campbell’s and Coleman’s Portuguese also moved to the same point. The 3rd and 4th Divisions remained at Ponte de Murcella in the entrenched position, with the Light Division and Pack’s Portuguese in front of them at Venda do Porco and Sampayo.

But on the 20th, when Ney’s advanced guard began to come out from Vizeu on the Santa Comba Dao road, not on the Aveiro road, Wellington discovered that it was on the mountain of Bussaco, and not on the plain in front of Coimbra, that he would next meet the enemy. Accordingly Pack’s Portuguese and the Light Division forded the Mondego below Sampayo, as did the light cavalry, and a detaining force was thus thrown across the Vizeu-Coimbra road. The Portuguese brigade took post behind the Criz torrent, Craufurd’s men a little to the rear at Mortagoa. At the same time the 1st Division and the troops attached to it moved out from Coimbra to Mealhada on the Aveiro road, a point from which they could easily be called up to the Bussaco position, if no French columns were discovered coming down the Aveiro road, as now seemed probable. This day, Leith’s division, to Wellington’s intense satisfaction, arrived at San Miguel de Payares behind the Alva, and so joined the main body. Hill was reported to be a day’s march only to the rear, at Foz d’Aronce. Thus the whole of the Anglo-Portuguese regular forces between Douro and Tagus were neatly concentrated. At the same time Trant was told to bring the militia of Northern Beira down the Oporto-Coimbra road to Agueda and Sardão, and Baccelar was directed to support him with Wilson’s militia brigade, in case Masséna should have some subsidiary operation against Oporto in his mind.

On the 24th the first skirmish of the campaign took place; the 2nd Corps, advancing into the plain in front of Mortagoa, found Pack’s Portuguese facing them on the right, and Craufurd’s division on the left, with a screen of cavalry in front. They pushed in the horsemen upon the infantry, but halted when artillery opened upon them, and made no further advance. On this day the belated 8th Corps, with the reserve cavalry, at last started from Vizeu. Next morning Reynier pressed on in force with two heavy columns each formed by a division, and Craufurd was ordered by Wellington to retire, which he did with some reluctance by alternate échelons of brigades[412]. The 95th and 43rd had some sharp skirmishing with the French van, and made a stand by the village of Moura under the Bussaco heights, before retiring up the high-road, and taking position upon the crest of the great ridge[413], which they did at six o’clock in the evening.

While the advanced guards of Reynier and Ney were driving in Craufurd and Pack, the Anglo-Portuguese army was assembling on Wellington’s chosen fighting-ground. Picton and Cole, with the 3rd and 4th Divisions, had already taken up their quarters on the Bussaco ridge on the 21st, the first across the road from San Antonio de Cantaro to Palheiros, the second across the chaussée, behind the spot to which the troops of Pack and Craufurd were retiring. Leith, who had been brought over the Mondego by the fords of Peña Cova on the 23rd, moved up on to the southern tract of the Bussaco heights on the 24th. Hill, who reached the line of the Alva on the 22nd, followed in Leith’s wake, and on the 25th was at Peña Cova waiting for orders to cross. The 1st Division with Campbell’s and Coleman’s Portuguese alone were still absent, though not far off. They had started from Mealhada, when it became clear that no French force was coming by the Aveiro-Coimbra road, but on the night of the 25th were still some eight miles away, and did not get into position between Cole and Picton till between nine and ten o’clock on the morning of the 26th.

Nevertheless, nearly 40,000 men, composed of the Light, 3rd, 4th, 5th Divisions and their Portuguese auxiliaries, and of Hill on their flank, only four miles away, were concentrated on the night of the 25th, when Reynier’s vanguard deployed in front of the heights. Before ten o’clock on the following morning Spencer had arrived, and Hill was over the fords and encamped along the rear slopes of the heights. There seems to be no truth whatever in the allegation that the British army was in a somewhat dangerous position on the evening of the 25th, for the French had only their vanguard up, and there were less than two hours of daylight left when Craufurd retired from Moura, and Reynier and Ney obtained their first view of the British position. Before the enemy could have collected in strength sufficient for an attack, night would have set in.

NOTE ON THE SITUATION ON SEPT. 25

Napier wholly misrepresents the state of affairs in vol. iii. pp. 22-3. He writes as follows: ‘Before 3 o’clock 40,000 French infantry were embattled on the two points (the chaussée and the San Antonio de Cantaro road), their guns trying the range above, while the skirmishing clatter of musketry arose from the dark wooded chasms below. Ney, whose military glance was sure, instantly perceived that the mountain, a crested not a table one, could hide no great reserves, that it was only half occupied, and that the allies were moving with the disorder usual on the taking of unknown ground. He wished therefore to attack, but Masséna was ten miles to the rear, the officer sent to him waited two hours for an audience, and then returned with orders to attend the Prince’s arrival. Thus a great opportunity was lost, for Spencer was not up, Leith’s troops were only passing the Mondego, and Hill was still behind the Alva. Scarcely 25,000 men were in line, and with great intervals.’

Almost every statement here is incorrect.

(1) The French did not reach the ground in front of the heights till 5 o’clock: they were not up at 3 p.m. [D’Urban’s Diary: ‘At noon, the heads of the French infantry columns having reached the lower falls leading from the Mortagoa Valley, he pushed forward his cavalry and began to skirmish with our pickets. It not being Lord Wellington’s intention to dispute this ground, but rather to entice Masséna to follow and attack him in his position of Boçaco, the Light Division was gradually withdrawn, the 95th and 43rd covering the retreat and Ross’s artillery playing upon the enemy’s advance from hill to hill, till at 5 o’clock they were halted by the fire of the 43rd before the village of Sula. At about 6 the firing ceased, and our advance (heretofore at Moura and Sula) took up their ground (as well as General Cole’s division) upon the heights of Boçaco.’] This diary, written that same night, cannot be wrong as to the dating of the hours. D’Urban was riding with Beresford at Wellington’s side. Napier was writing from memory twenty years after.

(2) Ney did not ‘perceive the mountain only half occupied, and wish to attack,’ on the evening of the 25th. His reconnaissance was made on the morning of the 26th, and it was then that he expressed his wish to attack, when Wellington had every man in line. This is conclusively proved by the following note of Ney to Reynier, dated at 10.30 on the morning of the 26th, from his advanced posts, which lies in the French archives:—

‘Je reçois à l’instant, mon cher général, votre lettre de ce jour. Je pense qu’une grande partie de l’armée anglo-portugaise a passé la nuit sur la crête des montagnes qui dominent la vallée de Moura. Depuis ce matin l’ennemi marche par sa gauche, et semble diriger ses colonnes principales sur la route d’Oporto. Cependant il tient encore assez de monde à la droite du parc, qui couvre le couvent de Minimes appelé Sako, et montre une douzaine de pièces d’artillerie. Le chemin de Coimbre passe tout près de ce couvent. Si j’avais le commandement j’attaquerais sans hésiter un seul instant. Mais je crois que vous ne pouvez rien compromettre en vous échellonant sur la droite de l’ennemi, et en poussant ses avant-postes le plus possible: car c’est véritablement par ce point qu’il faudrait le forcer à faire sa retraite.’ What Ney had seen, and wrongly took for a general movement of the English army towards its left, was Cole taking ground to the left on the arrival of Spencer, who came up between 8 and 10 that morning, just before Ney was scribbling this hasty note to Reynier.

(3) The stretch of mountain opposite Ney and Reynier was not ‘crested’ but ‘table’—so much so that Wellington took two squadrons of cavalry up to it, for use in the battle. The British general never took up a position where he had no space to hide his reserves.

(4) The time when Ney sent an officer to Masséna to ask leave to attack was the morning of the 26th, not the evening of the 25th. How could Ney have hoped to get the permission to fight and carry it out, when the time when he reached Moura was 5 o’clock, and dusk falls at 6.30? The messenger had twenty miles to ride, to Mortagoa and back. See Fririon’s note in his ‘Aperçu sur la Campagne de Portugal’ in Victoires et Conquêtes, xxi. 320.

(5) Leith’s troops, so far from being ‘only passing the Mondego’ on the afternoon of the 25th, had passed it on the 23rd [Journal of Leith Hay, aide-de-camp of Leith, i. 228]. On the night of the 22nd-23rd Wellington wrote to Hill, ‘Leith’s, Picton’s, and Cole’s divisions are now on the Serra de Busaco’ [Dispatches, vi. 462]. Hill was not ‘behind the Alva,’ but massed at the fords of Peña Cova, only four miles from the battlefield. He crossed at dawn on the 26th, but could have been in action within two hours of the first shot, if the attack had been made on the 25th.

(6) Wellington, including Hill’s division, had therefore 40,000 men, not 25,000. But the latter number would have sufficed, for Ney and Reynier had only their advanced guards up, and in the hour and a half before dusk could not have brought up their whole corps by the bad and narrow roads from behind. The Diary of the 6th Corps mentions that only the vanguard division (Loison) bivouacked in front of the heights. The rearguard was as far back as Barril that night.

(7) The exact moment of the arrival of the British 1st Division may be gauged from the fact that it passed Luzo, the village behind Bussaco, at 8 a.m. on the 26th—Diary of Stothert (3rd Foot Guards), p. 188. There is only two miles from Luzo to the position taken up by the 1st Division.

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SECTION XXI: CHAPTER II

THE BATTLE OF BUSSACO (SEPTEMBER 27, 1810)

It remains that we should describe the ground which Wellington had chosen on the 21st, and on which he fought with such splendid success upon the 27th. The ridge which takes its name from the convent of Bussaco is one of the best-marked positions in the whole Iberian Peninsula. A single continuous line of heights covered with heather and furze, with the dull-red and dull-grey granite cropping up here and there through the soil, extends from the Mondego on the right—where it ends precipitously—to the main chain of the Serra de Alcoba on the left. The ridge is very irregular in its altitude: the two loftiest sections are one at a distance of two miles from the Mondego, and the other to the immediate right of the convent enclosure, where the original obelisk commemorating the battle was set up[414]. Between these two culminating summits the ridge sinks down, and is at its lowest where the country-road from San Antonio de Cantaro to Palheiros passes over it. There are three other points where it is crossed by lines of communication; two lie far to the east, not far from the Mondego, where bad paths from San Paulo to Palmazes and from Carvalhal to Casal exist. The third and most important is in its left centre, where (close to the convent) the chaussée from Celorico to Coimbra, the main artery of the local road-system, passes the watershed. It does so at a place which is by no means the least lofty point of the ridge; but the line was obvious to the road-making engineer, because a spur (the only one of any importance in the heights) here runs gradually down from the Serra into the lower ground. To lead the chaussée up the side of this spur, past the village of Moura, and so to the crest of the ridge on gentle slopes, was clearly better than to make it charge the main range, even at a less lofty point. The convent lies just to the right of the spot where the chaussée passes the sky-line, a few hundred yards off the road. It was a simple, low quadrangle, with a small chapel in its midst, standing in a fine wood of pine and oak, surrounded by a ten-foot wall. The wood is sprinkled with hermitages, picturesque little buildings hewn in the rock, where those of the monks who chose practised the anchorite’s life. The outer wall of the wood and the tops of its trees are just visible on the sky-line of the main ridge: the convent is not, being well down the reverse-slope. The point where the convent wood tops the heights is the only section of them where trees are seen on the summit: the rest of the line is bare heath, with occasional outbreaks of rock, falling in slopes of greater or lesser steepness towards the broken wooded foot-hills, where the French lay. On part of the left-centre there is ground which it is no exaggeration to describe as precipitous, to the front of the highest piece of the ridge, below the old obelisk. The effect of the whole line of heights is not dissimilar to, though on a smaller scale than, the Malvern Hills. The highest point on the Serra is about 1,200 feet above sea-level—but much less, of course, above the upland below.

The position of Bussaco is fully nine miles long[415] from end to end, from the steep hill above the Mondego to Cole’s western flank: this was a vast front for an army of 50,000 men to cover, according to the ideas of 1810. There were absolute gaps in the line at more than one place, especially above Carvalho, where about a mile separated Leith’s left from his central brigade. The defence of such a position could only be risked because of two facts: one was that every movement of the enemy on the lower ground before the ridge could be accurately made out from above: he could not concentrate in front of any section of the heights without being seen. His only chance of doing so would have been to take advantage of the night; but even if he had drawn up for the attack before dawn—a thing almost impossible in the broken, ravine-cut, wooded bottoms—he could not have moved till full daylight, because the face of the position presents so many irregularities, such as small gullies and miniature precipices, that columns climbing in the dark must undoubtedly have got lost and broken up on the wild hillside. Moreover, there was a thick cordon of British pickets pushed forward almost to the foot of the ridge, which would have given warning by their fire and their preliminary resistance, if any advance had been attempted in the grey dawn.

The second advantage of the Bussaco position is that on its left-centre and right-centre the ridge has a broad flat top, some 300 or 400 yards across, on which all arms can move laterally with ease to support any threatened point. It is so broad that Wellington even ventured to bring up a few squadrons of dragoons to the summit, rightly arguing that a cavalry charge would be of all things the most unexpected reception that an enemy who had breasted such a hillside could meet at the end of his climb. As a matter of fact, however, this section of the heights was never attacked by the French. The right of the position is not flat-topped like the centre, but has a narrow saddle-back, breaking into outcrops of rock at intervals: but though here prompt motion from right to left, or left to right, is not possible on the crest, there is a rough country-path, good for infantry and available even for guns, a few hundred yards down the reverse side of the slope. Along this troops could be moved with ease, entirely out of sight of the enemy. It proved useful for Leith’s division during the battle. Wellington calculated, therefore, with perfect correctness, that he could count on getting an adequate force of defenders to any portion of his long line before the enemy could establish himself on the summit. The extreme left, where Cole’s division lay, was the hardest part of his line to reinforce, for want of good lateral communication: it was also a good deal lower than Craufurd’s post; here, therefore, Wellington had placed the main mass of his reserves; the German Legion, and two Portuguese brigades were lying on his left-centre very close to the 4th Division, so that they would be available at short notice, though they would have a stiff climb if the French chose that section of the position as their objective, and it had to be strengthened in haste.

The distribution of the army remains to be described. On the extreme right, on the height of Nossa Senhora do Monte, just overhanging the Mondego, was a battalion of the Lusitanian Legion, with two guns. Next to them, on very high ground, lay Hill’s division, three British and two Portuguese brigades[416], with a battery on each flank. Then came a slight dip in the ridge, where the road from San Paulo to Palmazes crosses it: athwart this path lay Leith’s newly constituted 5th Division, consisting of three British and seven Portuguese battalions. The British brigade lay on the right, then came (after a long interval) two battalions of the Lusitanian Legion, the only troops guarding two miles of very rough ground. On Leith’s extreme left, towards Picton’s right, was Spry’s Portuguese brigade, and three unattached battalions (8th Line and Thomar militia). Beyond the 8th regiment, where the watershed sinks again, and is crossed by the road from San Antonio de Cantaro to Palheiros, Picton’s line began. On his right, across the road, was Arentschildt’s Portuguese battery, supported by the 74th British regiment, and Champlemond’s Portuguese brigade of three battalions. The 45th and 88th, the two remaining battalions of the brigade of Mackinnon, were placed to the left of the road, the former on the first spur to the north of it, the latter nearly a mile to the left. Lightburne’s brigade, and Thompson’s British battery were a short distance beyond the 88th. North of Picton’s position the ridge rises suddenly again to its loftiest section; along this almost impregnable ground, with its precipitous front, were ranged the three British brigades of Spencer’s 1st Division—the Guards on the right, Blantyre’s on the left, Pakenham’s in the centre, 5,000 bayonets dominating the whole country-side and the rest of the position. North of them again, where the ridge falls sharply along the back wall of the convent wood, was Pack’s Portuguese brigade, reaching almost to the high-road. Along the curve of the high-road itself, in column, was Coleman’s Portuguese brigade, and beside it A. Campbell’s Portuguese, with the German Legion beyond them on the Monte Novo ridge. Coleman, Campbell, and the Germans were the main reserve of the army, and were in second line, for, far to the front of them, on a lower slope, along a curve of the chaussée, lay Craufurd and the Light Division, looking down on the village of Sula almost at the bottom of the heights. Between Craufurd and his next neighbour to the right, Pack, was a curious feature of the field, a long narrow ravine, with steep grassy sides, terraced in some places into vineyards[417]. This cleft, between Sula on the left and Moura on the right, cuts deep up into the hillside, its head almost reaching the crest of the watershed below the convent. In order to circumvent this precipitous gully, the chaussée, after passing through the village of Moura, takes a semicircular curve to the right, and goes round the head of the cleft. For half a mile or more it overhangs the steep declivities on its right, while on its left at this point it is dominated by a pine wood on the upper slopes, so that it forms more or less of a defile. The gully is so narrow here that guns on Craufurd’s position had an easy range on the road, and enfiladed it most effectively. The battery attached to the Light Division—that of Ross—had been placed in a sort of natural redoubt, formed by a semicircle of boulders with gaps between; some of the guns bore on the village of Sula, on the lower slope below, others across the ravine, to the high-road. They were almost invisible, among the great stones, to an enemy coming up the hill or along the chaussée. Craufurd had got a battalion of his Caçadores (No. 3) in the village, low down the slope, with his other Portuguese battalion and the 95th Rifles strung out on the hillside above, to support the troops below them. His two strong Line battalions, the 43rd and 52nd, were lying far above, in the road, at the point where it has passed the head of the gully in its curve, with a little fir wood behind them and a small windmill in their front. The road being cut through the hillside here, they were screened as they stood, but had only to advance a few feet to reach the sky line, and to command the slope stretching upwards from the village of Sula.

To the left rear of Craufurd’s position, and forming the north-western section of the English line lay Cole’s 4th Division, reaching almost to the villages of Paradas and Algeriz. Its Portuguese brigade (11th and 23rd regiments) was thrown forward on the left under Collins, its two English brigades were at the head of the slope. The ground was not high, but the slope was very steep, and as a matter of fact was never even threatened, much less attacked.

Sixty guns were distributed along the line of the Serra. Ross’s horse artillery troop were with Craufurd, Bull’s with Cole; of the field-batteries Lawson’s was with Pack, Thompson’s with Lightburne, Rettberg’s [K.G.L.] with Spencer, Cleeves’ [K.G.L.] with Coleman. There were also four Portuguese field-batteries; Arentschildt’s was on the high-road with Picton, Dickson’s two batteries with Hill, Passos’s with Coleman, alongside of Cleeves’ German guns. Counting their artillerymen, and the two squadrons of the 4th Dragoons on the summit of the plateau, Wellington had 52,000 men on the field. Of the rest of his disposable army, the Portuguese cavalry brigade (regiments 1, 4, 7, 8; 1,400 sabres under Fane) and one British regiment (13th Light Dragoons) were beyond the Mondego, far to the south-east, watching the open country across the Alva as far as Foz Dao and Sobral. Their head quarters were at Foz de Alva. To defend the Ponte de Murcella position against any possible flanking force the French might have detached, Wellington had left Le Cor’s Portuguese, two regular regiments (Nos. 12 and 13) and three battalions of the Beira militia. All these troops were ten or twelve miles from the nearest point at which a shot was fired, in a different valley, and were alike unseeing and unseen. In a similar fashion, far out to the west, on the other side of the watershed, in the low ground by Mealhada, was the English cavalry, with the exception of the one regiment at Foz de Alva and two squadrons on the Convent ridge.

Reynier’s corps, pushing the English rearguard before it, had arrived in front of the Bussaco position on the afternoon of September 25th. When Ney’s corps came up at dusk Reynier edged away to the left, and established himself on the low hills above the hamlet of San Antonio de Cantaro, leaving the ground about the high-road to the 6th Corps. The 8th and Montbrun’s cavalry were still some way behind, beyond Barril. Masséna, for reasons which it is hard to divine, had not come to the front, though he must have heard the guns firing all through the afternoon, and had been informed by Reynier that the English were standing at bay on the Bussaco ridge. He came no further to the front than Mortagoa on the 25th. Ney on the morn of the next day was busy reconnoitring the position; he sent forward tirailleurs to push in Craufurd’s outposts, and ventured as far to the front as was possible. So well hidden was Wellington’s line that the Marshal formed an entirely erroneous conception of what was before him. At 10.30 in the morning he wrote to Reynier to say that the whole English army seemed to be moving to its left, apparently on the road towards Oporto, but that it had still a rearguard, with a dozen guns, in position to the right of the park which covers the convent. Apparently Cole’s division, taking ground to its left on Spencer’s arrival, and Craufurd on the chaussée was all that he had made out. He had not discovered Leith and the 5th Division, and could not, of course, know that Spencer was at this moment arriving at the convent, and that Hill was across the Mondego at Peña Cova.

The Marshal added that if he had been in chief command he should have attacked whatever was in front of him without a moment’s hesitation[418]. But things being as they were, he thought that Reynier would risk nothing by pushing forward on the English right, and thrusting back Wellington’s outposts, for it was desirable to make him retreat towards his left. It is clear that Ney, if he had possessed a free hand, would have brought on a battle, when he was only intending to drive in a rearguard. For by 10.30 on the 26th Wellington had every man upon the field whom he intended to use in the fight, and would have welcomed an assault. Of the French, on the other hand, Junot’s 8th Corps and the cavalry and artillery were still far away to the rear. They only came up in rear of Ney on the night of the 26th-27th.

Masséna, on receiving Ney’s report, rode up to the front at about two o’clock on the 26th—a late hour, but he is said to have been employed in private matters at Mortagoa[419]. When he had at last appeared, he pushed forward as near to the foot of the British position as was safe, and reconnoitred it with care. In the evening he drew up orders for attacking the Bussaco heights at their most accessible points—along the chaussée that leads from Moura up to the convent, and along the country-road from San Antonio de Cantaro to Palheiros.

The Prince of Essling had no hesitation whatever about risking a battle. He had never seen the English before, and held concerning them the same views as the other French officers who had no experience of Wellington’s army. Some confused generalization from the misfortunes of the Duke of York’s troops in 1794-5 and 1799 determined the action of all the marshals till they had made personal acquaintance with the new enemy. The English were to be dealt with by drastic frontal attacks pushed home with real vigour. It is curious, as Napoleon remarked soon after[420], that Reynier, who had been badly beaten by the English at Alexandria and Maida, had learnt no more than the others, and committed exactly the same errors as his colleagues. He, who had experience of his adversaries, and Ney, who had not, adopted precisely the same tactics. These, indeed, were indicated to them by Masséna’s order to attack in columns, each at least a division strong, preceded by a swarm of tirailleurs. There was no question of a general advance all along the line; the two Corps-Commanders were directed to choose each his point, and to break through the British army at it, by force of mass and impact. Only two sections of Wellington’s nine-mile position were to be touched, there being a long gap between the objectives assigned to Ney and to Reynier. But by throwing 13,000 or 14,000 men in close order at each of the two short fronts selected, Masséna thought that he could penetrate the thin line of the defenders.

As none of the historians of the battle have thought it worth while to give the Marshal’s orders in detail, and many writers have misconceived or mis-stated them, it is necessary to state them[421]. The attacks of the 2nd and 6th Corps were not to be simultaneous; Reynier, having the easier ground before him, was told to move first. He was to select the most accessible stretch of the hillside in his front, and to climb it, with his whole corps in one or two columns, preceded by a skirmishing line. Having gained the crest, and pierced the British line, he was to re-form his men, and then drop down the reverse slope of the heights on to the Coimbra road, along which he was to press in the direction of the convent of Bussaco, toward the rear of Wellington’s centre.

Ney was directed not to move till he should have learnt that Reynier had crowned the heights; but when he should see the 2nd Corps on the crest, was to send forward two columns of a division each against the British left-centre. One division was to follow the chaussée, the other to mount the rough path up the spur on which the village of Sula stands. Both columns, like those of the 2nd Corps, were to be preceded by a thick line of skirmishers. They were to halt and re-form when the crest of the English position should be carried, and then to adapt their movements to suit those of Reynier’s corps.

Junot was to assemble his two infantry divisions behind Moura, and to have them ready to reinforce either Ney or Reynier as might be needed. His artillery was to be placed on the knolls on each side of the chaussée, so as to be able to hold back the allied army if, after repulsing Ney, it should attempt a forward movement. Montbrun’s cavalry and the reserve artillery were to be placed on either side of the chaussée behind Junot’s centre[422].

The horsemen were obviously useless, save that in the event of Wellington being defeated they could be sent forward in pursuit. Nor were the guns much more serviceable: they could sweep the lower parts of the slopes of Bussaco, but could not reach its crest with their fire. Indeed, the only French artillery used successfully on the next day were two batteries which Ney’s columns of attack took with them along the chaussée, as far as the elbow of road in front of Moura. These were in effective range of Craufurd’s and Pack’s troops, since the latter were on a level with them, and not on the highest crest of the British position. Reynier’s guns could just reach the summit of the pass of San Antonio de Cantaro, but not so as to play upon it with any good result.

It is said that Junot and Reynier were in favour of trying the frontal attack which Masséna had dictated, as was also Laszowski, the Polish general who commanded the engineers of the army. Fririon, the chief of the staff, and Eblé, commanding the artillery, spoke against the policy of ‘taking the bull by the horns.’ Masséna, according to Fririon, turned on the doubters with the words ‘You come from the old Army of the Rhine, you like manœuvring; but it is the first time that Wellington seems ready to give battle, and I want to profit by the opportunity[423].’ Ney, too, as we read with some surprise, is said to have given the opinion that it would have been feasible to assault the heights yesterday, but that now, when Wellington had been given time to bring up his reserves and settle his army down into the most advantageous position, the policy of taking the offensive had become doubtful. He therefore advised that the army should turn aside and make a stroke at Oporto, which would be found unprotected save by militia. Masséna, according to his official biographer, announced ‘that the Emperor had ordered him to march on Lisbon, not on Oporto. This was entirely correct: the capture of Lisbon would end the whole war, that of Oporto would prolong it, and bring no decisive result. Moreover, it was quite uncertain whether Wellington would not be able to prevent such a move. He has troops échelloned as far as the Vouga, and he could get to Oporto in three marches, because he possesses the Oporto-Coimbra chaussée, while the French army, moving by worse roads, would require five marches to reach it.’ It is suggested that Ney’s policy was really to goad his superior into making the frontal attack at Bussaco, by feigning to believe it dangerous and to counsel its abandonment. For he thought that Masséna would do precisely the opposite of what he was advised, out of his personal dislike for himself, and general distaste for having counsel thrust upon him. If this was so, the Duke of Elchingen carried his point—to the entire discomfiture both of himself and his commander-in-chief[424].

On the 26th, after Masséna had retired to his head quarters at Mortagoa, there was a little skirmishing on the English right-centre, where Reynier’s advanced guard drove the light company of the 88th off some knolls at the foot of the heights, opposite San Antonio de Cantaro. Much about the same time there was some bickering on Ney’s front: the pickets of Pack’s 4th Caçadores and Craufurd’s 95th were attacked, but held their ground. The contest was never very serious and the fire died down at dusk. That evening the British army slept in order of battle, ‘each man with his firelock in his grasp at his post. There were no fires, and the death-like stillness that reigned throughout the line was only interrupted by the occasional challenge of an advanced sentry, or a random shot fired at some imaginary foe.’ Below and in front, all the low hills behind Moura and San Antonio were bright with the bivouac fires of the French, of which three great masses could be distinguished, marking the position of the 2nd, 6th, and 8th Corps[425].

The dawn of the 27th was somewhat misty, but as soon as the light was strong enough Reynier commenced his attack. He had chosen for his objective, as was natural, the lowest point of the ridge opposite him, the dip where the country-road from San Antonio de Cantaro crosses the Serra. His two divisions, according to order, were drawn up in two heavy columns preceded by a dense swarm of tirailleurs. Heudelet’s division on the left was across the high-road, with the 31st Léger in front, then the two regiments of Foy’s brigade, the 70th and 17th Léger, with the 47th in reserve. The whole made 15 battalions, or 8,000 men. Merle’s division had the right, and was to attack north of the road: of its eleven battalions, making 6,500 men, the 36th of the Line led, the 2nd Léger followed, the 4th Léger brought up the rear. All the battalions were in serried column with a front of one company only, and in each regiment the three, or four, battalions were originally drawn up one behind the other. But the involuntary swerving of the attack soon turned the two divisions into an irregular échelon of battalion-columns, the right in every case leading. And the roughness of the hillside soon broke the ordered ranks of each column into a great clump of men, so that to the British defenders of the ridge the assault seemed to be delivered by a string of small crowds crossing the hillside diagonally. It is curious that Reynier placed no troops to his left of the road; a study of his orders (as of those of Masséna[426]) leads to a suspicion that they had failed to discover Leith’s division, and still more Hill’s, and imagined that the road was on the extreme right, not in the right-centre, of the British position. Otherwise Reynier would have taken some precaution to guard himself from a flank attack from Leith, to which he was deliberately exposing his left column.

There were, as has already been pointed out, several gaps in the nine-mile British line. One was between the 8th regiment of Portuguese, on Leith’s extreme left, and the rest of the 5th Division. Another was between Picton’s troops at the pass of San Antonio and his left wing—the 88th and Lightburne’s brigade. Between the 45th and the 88th there was three-quarters of a mile of unoccupied ground. The first gap led to no danger, the second caused for a moment a serious crisis. Such was indeed almost bound to occur when a line so long was held by such a small army. But this morning there arose the special danger that fog hid the first movements of the enemy from the eye, if not from the ear.

Merle’s division seems to have been the first of Reynier’s two columns to move: at dawn, with the mist lying thick on the hillside, it began to move up the steep slope some three-quarters of a mile to the right of the San Antonio-Palheiros road. Here its tirailleurs came in contact with the light companies of the 74th, 88th, and 45th regiments, which were strung out along the front, and soon began to push this thin line up hill. For some reason undetermined—a trick of the mist, or a bend of the hillside—the three French regiments all headed somewhat to their left, so as to pass across the front of the 88th, and to direct their advance precisely to the unoccupied piece of crest between that regiment and the troops placed immediately above the pass of San Antonio. Their progress was slow: the tirailleurs left far behind them the eleven battalion-columns, which were trampling through the dense matted heather which here covers the hillside. Hearing the bicker of the skirmishing far to his left, Picton took the alarm, and though he could see nothing in the fog, detached first a wing of the 45th under Major Gwynne, and then the two battalions of the 8th Portuguese, to fill the unoccupied space which intervened between him and the 88th. If he had suspected the strength of the column that was aiming at it he would have sent more. But he was already distracted by the frontal attack of Heudelet’s vanguard along the high-road. A column of four battalions—the 31st Léger—was pushing up the road, and driving in the skirmishers of Champlemond’s Portuguese brigade. Just at this moment the mist began to lift, and Arentschildt’s guns opened on the broad mass, and began to plough long lanes through it. It still advanced, but was soon brought to a standstill by the fire of the British 74th and Portuguese 21st, which were drawn up in line to right and left, a little below the guns. The 31st Léger tried to deploy, but with small success, each section being swept away by the converging fire of the Anglo-Portuguese musketry, as it strove to file out of the disordered mass. Nevertheless, the French regiment gallantly held its ground for some time, shifting gradually towards its right to avoid the fire of the guns, and gaining a little of the hillside in that direction with its first battalion, while the other three were tending to edge away from the road, and to break up into a shapeless crowd[427].

Picton soon saw that there was no danger here, handed over the command at the Pass of San Antonio to Mackinnon, and started off towards his left, where the firing was growing heavier every minute, and the vast column of Merle’s division, climbing the hillside diagonally, had become visible through the mist.

It was fortunate that the attack of Merle was made very slow by the steepness of the hillside and the heather that clung about the soldiers’ stumbling feet. For the leading regiment reached the crest before there were any British troops yet established on the point at which it aimed. It was lurching over the sky-line on to the little plateau above, just as the defenders arrived—the 88th descending from the British left, the wing of the 45th and the two battalions of the 8th Portuguese coming along the hill-road from the right. If the French had been granted ten minutes to rest from the fatigue of their long climb, and to recover their order, they might have broken the British line. But Wallace, the commander of the 88th, was one of Wellington’s best colonels, the very man for the emergency. Seeing that the French must be charged at once, ere they had time to make a front, he threw out three of his companies as skirmishers to cover his flanks, called to the wing of the 45th to fall in on his right, and charged diagonally across the little plateau on to the flank of the great disordered mass before him. At the same moment the 8th Portuguese, a little further along the hilltop, deployed and opened a rolling fire against the front of the enemy, while Wellington himself, who had been called down from his post of observation on the Convent height by the noise of the fighting, came up with two of Thompson’s guns, and turned their fire upon the flank and rear of the climbing mass, which was still surging up the hillside. Apparently at the same instant the light companies of the 45th and 88th, which had been engaged in the earlier skirmishing with the French tirailleurs, and had been driven far away to their right, were rallied by Picton in person, and brought up along the plateau, to the right of the 8th Portuguese. They drew up only sixty yards from the flank of the leading French regiment, and opened a rolling fire upon it.

At any other juncture and on any other ground, four battalions would have been helpless against eleven. But Wallace had caught the psychological moment: the French 36th, dead beat from its climb, and in hopeless disorder, was violently charged in flank by the Connaught Rangers and the wing of the 45th, while it was just gathering itself up to run in upon the Portuguese battalions that lay in its front. The French had no time to realize their position, or to mark the smallness of the force opposed to them, when the blow fell. The four battalions of the 36th were rolled down hill and to their left by the blasting fire of Wallace’s little force, followed by a desperate bayonet charge. They were thrust sideways against the 2nd Léger, which was just reaching the sky-line on their left, and was beginning to struggle in among some rocks which here crown the crest of the heights. Then the whole mass gave way, trampled down the 4th Léger in their rear, and rushed down the slope. ‘All was confusion and uproar, smoke, fire, and bullets, French officers and soldiers, drummers and drums, knocked down in every direction; British, French, and Portuguese mixed together; while in the midst of all was to be seen Wallace fighting like his ancestor of old, and still calling to his soldiers to “press forward.” He never slackened his fire while a Frenchman was within his reach, and followed them down to the edge of the hill, where he formed his men in line waiting for any order that he might receive, or any fresh body that might attack him[428].’ This was certainly one of the most timely and gallant strokes made by a regimental commander during the war, and the glory was all Wallace’s own, as Picton very handsomely owned. ‘The Colonel of the 88th and Major Gwynne of the 45th are entitled to the whole of the credit,’ he wrote to Wellington, ‘and I can claim no merit whatever in the executive part of that brilliant exploit, which your Lordship has so highly and so justly extolled[429].’

The victorious British troops followed the enemy far down the hillside, till they came under the fire of Reynier’s artillery, and were warned to retire to their former position. They thus missed the last episode of Reynier’s attack, which occurred along the hillside just to the left of the point at which their collision with Merle’s battalions had taken place. The Commander of the 2nd Corps, seeing his right column rolling down the slope, while the 31st was melting away, and gradually giving ground under the fire of the Anglo-Portuguese troops at the Pass of San Antonio, hurried to Foy’s brigade and started it up the hill to the right of the 31st. Foy had been told to support that regiment, but had taken Reynier’s orders to mean that he was to follow up its advance when it began to make headway. His Corps-Commander cantered up to him shouting angrily, ‘Why don’t you start on the climb? You could get the troops forward if you choose, but you don’t choose.’ Whereupon Foy rode to the leading regiment of his brigade, the 17th Léger, put himself at its head, and began to ascend the heights, his other regiment, the 70th, following in échelon on his left rear. At this moment Merle’s division was still visible, falling back in great disorder some way to the right, and pursued by Wallace—a discouraging sight for the seven battalions that were about to repeat its experiment. Foy chose as his objective the first and lowest hilltop to the French right of the pass of San Antonio, and took his string of columns, the right always leading, up towards it at such pace as was possible over the long heather, and among the occasional patches of stones. The troops which were in front of them here were those sections of Picton’s division which were neither far away on the English left with Wallace and Lightburne, nor actively engaged on the road against the 31st Léger, viz. the right wing of the British 45th under Colonel Meade, and the Portuguese 8th of the Line which had just been aiding in the repulse of Merle. These were soon afterwards joined by one battalion of the 9th Portuguese from Champlemond’s brigade, and the unattached battalion of Thomar militia, which Picton sent up the hill. Yet this was still far too small a force to resist Foy’s seven battalions, unless speedily supported.

But support in sufficient quantity was forthcoming. General Leith had received orders from Wellington to close in to Picton’s right if he saw no hostile troops in his own front. As it was clear that Reynier had kept no reserves or flanking detachments to the south of the high-road, it was possible for the 5th Division to move at once[430]. While the fog was still hanging thickly along the crests of the Serra, Leith ordered a general move of his brigades to the left, while Hill detached troops from the southern end of the position to occupy the heights which the 5th Division was evacuating. This general move to the left was carried out along the rough but serviceable country-road which passes along the rear of the plateau, out of sight of the French. At the moment when Foy’s attack was beginning, Leith had just reached the Pass of San Antonio, with Spry’s Portuguese brigade at the head of his column, then the two battalions of the Lusitanian legion, and lastly, Barnes’s British brigade. One of Dickson’s Portuguese batteries was also with him. He dropped the guns at the pass to aid Arentschildt’s battery, whose fire was beginning to slacken from want of ammunition, and left Spry in their rear and the Legionary battalions on the country-road hard by, while he brought up Barnes’s brigade to the front, and reported his arrival to Picton. The latter said, it appears, that he was strong enough at the Pass, but would be obliged if Leith would attend to the attack which was being made at this moment on the height to its immediate left[431]. This movement of Foy’s was now becoming dangerous: forcing his way to the summit under a destructive fire, he had met on the edge of the plateau the three Portuguese battalions and the wing of the British 45th, and had driven them back—the Thomar militia broke and fled down the rear declivity of the heights, and the 8th Portuguese, though they did not fly, gave way and fell back in disorder. Just at this moment Leith, with Barnes’s three battalions, came up along the communication-road at the back of the plateau. ‘A heavy fire of musketry,’ writes Leith, ‘was being kept up upon the heights, the smoke of which prevented a clear view of the state of things. But when the rock forming the high part of the Serra became visible, the enemy appeared to be in full possession of it, and a French officer was in the act of cheering, with his hat off, while a continued fire was being kept up from thence, and along the whole face of the slope of the Serra, in a diagonal direction towards its bottom, by the enemy ascending rapidly in successive columns, formed for an attack upon a mass of men belonging to the left battalion of the 8th and the 9th Portuguese, who, having been severely pressed, had given way, and were rapidly retiring in complete confusion and disorder. The enemy had dispersed or driven off everything opposed to him—was in possession of the rocky eminence of the Serra.’ A few of his tirailleurs were even on the upper edge of the rear slope.

Leith, realizing that there was still time to save the position—for only the head of the French column had crowned the rocky knoll,—deployed his leading battalion, the 9th, across the summit of the plateau, while sending on his second, the 38th, to get between the enemy and the reverse slope of the position. This last move turned out to be fruitless, for the rear face of the knoll is so steep and so thickly covered with large boulders[432], that the 38th was unable to climb it, and came back to fall in on the right of the 9th. But before it could get back, the senior regiment had done its work. Leith had led it diagonally across the plateau, so as to place it along the flank of the leading battalions of Foy’s column, of which the first was now ensconced on the summit of the heights, while the others were struggling up to join it. The 9th opened with a volley at 100 yards, and then advanced firing, receiving hardly any return from the enemy, who seemed entirely disconcerted by the appearance of a new force parallel with its flank. At twenty yards from the French, the 9th lowered its bayonets and prepared to charge, Leith riding at its head waving his plumed hat. Then the enemy gave way. ‘My heroic column,’ writes Foy, ‘much diminished during the ascent, reached the summit of the plateau, which was covered with hostile troops. Those on our left made a flank movement and smashed us up by their battalion volleys; meanwhile those on our front, covered by some rocks, were murdering us with impunity. The head of my column fell back to its right, despite my efforts; I could not get them to deploy, disorder set in, and the 17th and 70th raced down-hill in headlong flight. The enemy pursued us half-way to the foot of the heights, till he pulled up on coming under effective fire from our artillery[433].’

The battle was now over on this side: Reynier had in reserve only one regiment, the 47th of the Line. His other twenty-two battalions had all been beaten to pieces; they had lost over 2,000 men, including more than half their superior officers: Merle commanding the 1st Division was wounded, his junior brigadier Graindorge was killed; Foy, commanding the first brigade of the other division, was wounded. Of the six colonels who had gone up the heights, those of the 31st Léger, 2nd Léger, 4th Léger, and 70th had been hit: of the twenty-three battalion commanders four were killed, seven wounded. Of 421 officers in all who went into action, 118—more than one in four—had been disabled. Of the 2,023 casualties, 350 men and fifteen officers were prisoners in the hands of the British. And these losses had been suffered without inflicting any corresponding loss upon the defenders of the position: Picton’s division had 427 killed and wounded; Leith’s 160. The only regiments appreciably diminished were the 45th, 88th, and Portuguese 8th—with 150, 134, and 113 casualties respectively. The only superior officers hit were the Portuguese brigadier Champlemond, and a major each in the 45th and 88th. Of the 3rd and 5th Divisions only six British and five Portuguese battalions had been engaged[434]—the superiority of force against them had been about two to one. Yet Reynier complained in his dispatch to Masséna of being crushed by ‘a triple superiority of numbers’! As a matter of fact, it was the position that beat him, not the imagined numbers of the allies. Wellington could risk much in taking up a long line, when he had a good road of communication along its rear, to shift troops from point to point, and when he could descry every movement of the enemy half an hour before it began to take effect.

The other half of the battle of Bussaco was an even shorter business than Reynier’s struggle with Picton and Leith, but no less bloody and decisive. Ney exactly obeyed Masséna’s orders to attack, with two divisions, the ground on each side of the Coimbra chaussée, when he should see the 2nd Corps lodged on the crest beside the pass of San Antonio de Cantaro. The many reproaches heaped upon him, by critics who have not read his orders, for attacking too late, and not at the same moment as Reynier, are groundless: he was told to go forward only when his colleague ‘sera maître des hauteurs.’ He moved precisely when the dispersing mists showed Merle’s great column massed on the edge of the plateau. Of his three divisions he had, again in exact obedience to orders, placed Loison on the right, Marchand on the left, while Mermet was in reserve, behind Moura. The two fighting divisions were completely separated by the deep and steep ravine of which we have had occasion to speak. The ground in front of them was very different: Marchand had to advance, by rather gentle slopes, along the chaussée, which curves up towards the convent of Bussaco. Loison had to go up a hillside of a very different sort, whose lower stretch, as far as the village of Sula, is gentle, and much cut up by woods and orchards, but whose upper half, beyond Sula, is extremely steep and absolutely destitute of cover. There was no road here, only a rough mule-track.

Loison started a few minutes before Marchand: he had his two brigades side by side, Simon’s (six battalions) on the right, Ferey’s (also six battalions) on the left. Both started from the low ground in front of Sula, each with a strong chain of tirailleurs covering an advance in serried battalion columns; the 26th regiment was the leading regiment in Simon’s, the 66th in Ferey’s brigade. On leaving the bottom, and advancing among the trees on the lower slope, both brigades found their tirailleurs at once checked by a very strong skirmishing line. Pack had spread out the whole of the 4th Caçadores on the hillside in front of his line battalions. Craufurd had thrown out the 95th—more than 700 rifles—and the 3rd Caçadores—600 rifles more—into the enclosures in front of Sula. The 43rd and 52nd, with the 1st Caçadores, were lying down in the hollow road at the head of the steep slope above that village, completely concealed from sight. Of formed troops, Loison could only see the 1st Division far above him on the left on the highest plateau of the Serra, and Cole far away to his right on the lower hillsides towards Paradas. In order to press in the obstinate light troops in front of him, Loison was compelled to push forward whole battalions from his fighting-line: by a strenuous use of these, the Caçadores and Rifles were evicted first from the lower slopes, then from the village of Sula. But when the latter had been captured, the French found themselves under a heavy fire of artillery: Ross’s guns on the knoll above, between their embrasures of rock, being carefully trained upon the exits of the village, while Cleeves’ German battery joined in from its position at the head of the ravine, and took Ferey in flank. It was impossible to halt in Sula, and Loison ordered his brigadiers to push forward the attack once more, taking Ross’s guns and the windmill near them as their objective. The slope was now much steeper, the British and Portuguese skirmishers had rallied once more above Sula, and Craufurd had sent down the 1st Caçadores to feed the fighting-line. It was only with a severe effort, and with much loss, that the French battalions won their way up the culminating slope. Simon’s front regiment, the 26th of the Line, stuck to the mule-path up the hill from Sula, in one dense and deep column, with the front of a company only, and a depth of three battalions. Ferey’s brigade, having no track to follow, seems to have moved in a somewhat less vicious formation along the slope further to the left, bordering on the northern edge of the funnel-like ravine which formed the boundary of Craufurd’s position. Both were in a very disordered condition, owing to the fierce conflict which they had waged with the screen of Rifles and Caçadores all up the hillside.

Lying in the hollow road parallel with the head of the ravine were the two Line regiments of the Light Division, the 43rd on the right, the 52nd on the left. They were very strong battalions, despite their losses at the Coa, the one having 800 the other 950 bayonets. In front of them, on the sky-line by the little windmill, to the right of Ross’s guns, Craufurd had been standing all through the earlier stages of the engagement, watching the gradual progress of the French up the hillside. He waited patiently till the enemy’s two columns, a few hundred yards apart, had reached the last steep of the hillside below him. His recoiling skirmishers were at last thrust in upon him—they passed, some to the flanks, some through the intervals between the battalions and the guns, and the front was clear.

Then came the opportunity: the French, pulling themselves together, were preparing to rush up the last twenty yards of the ascent and to run in upon the guns, when Craufurd waved his hat to the battalions lying in the road behind him, the appointed signal for action, and (it is said) called to the men behind him ‘Now 52nd, revenge the death of Sir John Moore.’ The crest was at once covered by the long red line, and the fronts of the French brigades received such a volley at ten paces as has been seldom endured by any troops in war. The whole of the heads of their columns crumbled away in a mass of dead and dying. The centre and rear stood appalled for one moment; then Major Arbuthnot wheeled in three companies of the 52nd upon the right flank of Simon’s leading regiment, while Lloyd of the 43rd did the same upon the extreme left, so as to produce a semicircle of fire[435]. It was impossible to stand under it, and the French broke and went hurtling down the hill, the wrecks of the front battalions carrying the rear ones away with them. So steep was the slope on their left that some are said to have lost their footing and to have rolled down to the bottom of the ravine before they could stop. The Light Division followed as far as Sula, and beyond, not stopping till Loison’s people had taken refuge in the wooded ground beyond that village, and the French guns by Moura had begun to play upon their pursuers. The rush had carried away the whole of the enemy, save one battalion upon Ferey’s extreme left, which had moved so far down in the slope of the ravine that it had become separated from the rest. This solitary column, pressing forward, came to the sky-line not in front of Craufurd, but at the very head of the ravine, below Cleeves’ battery. Here it was dealt with by the leading unit of Coleman’s Portuguese brigade, which was standing in line near the chaussée. The 1st battalion of the 19th regiment, under Major McBean, charged it and rolled it back into the cleft, down whose bottom it hastily recoiled, and joined the rest of the flying division.

This made an end of Loison’s two brigades as a serious attacking force. They reeled back to their original position, under cover of the 25th Léger, which Mermet sent out to relieve them. But later in the day they pushed some skirmishers up the hill again, and bickered with Craufurd’s outposts. Wellington, seeing that the Light Division was fatigued, sent the light companies of Löwe’s German brigade and A. Campbell’s 6th Caçadores, from the reserves, to take up the skirmishing. It stood still about Sula, but the French got a few men into the village, whom Craufurd had to evict with a company of the 43rd.

Loison lost, out of 6,500 men used in the attack, twenty-one officers killed and forty-seven wounded, with some 1,200 men. His senior brigadier, Simon, was wounded in the face, and taken prisoner by a private of the 52nd. The loss of the Light Division was marvellously small—the 3rd Caçadores and the 95th, who had fought through the long skirmish up the hill, had seventy-eight and forty-one casualties respectively, but the 43rd and 52nd had the astounding record of only three men killed, and two officers and eighteen men wounded. McBean’s Portuguese battalion lost one officer and twenty-five men: the German light companies had nearly fifty casualties, but this was later in the day. Altogether, Loison’s attack was repelled with a loss of only 200 men to the allies.

It only remains to tell of one more section of the Battle of Bussaco; it was entirely independent of the rest. When Ney started Loison to his right of the deep ravine, he had sent forward Marchand’s division to his left of it, along the great chaussée. On turning the sweep of the road beyond Moura, the leading brigade of this column (6th Léger and 69th Line, five battalions) came under a terrible artillery fire from the three batteries which Wellington had placed at the head of the ravine, those of Cleeves, Parros, and Lawson. They, nevertheless, pushed along the road till they came level with a small pine wood on their left, which was full of the skirmishers of Pack’s Portuguese brigade—the whole of the 4th Caçadores had been sent down into it from the height above. The flanking fire of these light troops was so galling that the French brigade—apparently without orders and by an instinctive movement—swerved to its left, and went up the hillside to turn the Caçadores out of their cover. After a sharp bickering they did so, and then emerging from the wood on to the smooth slope of the height below the convent wall, got into a desperate musketry duel with Pack’s four Line-battalions, who stood in front of them. They were now in disorder, and their brigadier, Maucune, had been wounded. But they made several attempts to storm the hillside, which were all beaten back by the Portuguese musketry and the fire of Lawson’s artillery on the right. The second brigade of Marchand (that of Marcognet) pushed as far along the road as the preceding brigade had gone, but stopped when it came under the fire of Cleeves’ and Parros’s guns, to which that of Ross’s (from across the ravine) was also added, when Loison’s attack had been beaten off. Seeing that Marchand was making no headway, that Loison had been routed, and that Reynier’s corps was out of action, Ney called back his column, which fell back behind Moura. Maucune’s brigade had suffered severely—it had lost its brigadier, the colonel of the 6th Léger, and thirty-three other officers with some 850 men. The rear brigade (Marcognet’s) had suffered less—its casualty list, however, was fully 300 killed and wounded. There had been a little skirmishing meanwhile opposite Wellington’s centre, for during the main attack Ney had sent forward some voltigeur companies from his reserves to occupy the line of skirmishers at the foot of the heights, which Spencer’s 1st Division had thrown out. These two thin screens of light troops paired off against each other, and contended all the morning with some loss, but no appreciable advantage on either side[436].

Masséna still had it in his power to attack again, for Mermet’s division of the 6th Corps, and the whole of Junot’s 13,000 infantry had not yet advanced and had hardly lost a man. But the result of Ney’s and Reynier’s efforts had been so disheartening that the Marshal refused to waste more lives on what was clearly a hopeless enterprise. He could now see Wellington’s army concentrated on the two points that had been attacked. Hill’s heavy column of 10,000 men had now lined the heights on Leith’s right: Cole had edged the 4th Division close in to Craufurd’s left, and Coleman and the Germans were visible in the rear. If Masséna had still 20,000 fresh infantry, the English general had 33,000 who had not yet come up into the fighting-line. It was useless to persist. Accordingly, the skirmishing along Ney’s front was allowed to die down in the afternoon, and the French divisions retired to their camps.

The total loss of Wellington’s army had been 1,252 officers and men, of whom 200 were killed, 1,001 wounded, and fifty-one missing. No officer over the rank of a major had been killed: and the only senior officers wounded were the Portuguese brigadier Champlemond and Colonel Barclay of the 52nd. Of the casualties, 626 were in the ranks of the British, 626 in those of the Portuguese regiments—a strange coincidence in the losses of the two allied armies. The Portuguese line, indeed, had done their fair half of the fighting, as the return showed—in no instance with discredit, in some with high merit. If the 8th and 9th Portuguese had broken before Foy’s attack, it was under severe stress, and when attacked by superior numbers. On the other hand, Pack’s brigade, Coleman’s 19th, and the Caçadores of the Light Division won the highest praises from their commanders, and had taken a most distinguished part in the victory. Wellington now knew exactly how far they could be trusted, and could estimate at last the real fighting value of his army—at least, for a defensive battle in chosen and favourable ground. It would be another matter to calculate how far the allied host was capable of taking the offensive.

The total loss of the French, as shown by the return—which was not quite complete—presented to Masséna on October 1, was 4,498, of whom 522 were killed, 3,612 wounded, and 364 missing (i.e. prisoners). After his usual fashion he represented it to the Emperor as being ‘about 3,000[437].’ One general (Graindorge), two colonels, and fifty-two other officers had been killed, four generals (Maucune, Foy, Merle, Simon) were wounded—the last was also a prisoner; five colonels and 189 other officers were wounded. The 2nd Corps in all had lost at least 2,043 officers and men, the 6th Corps at least 2,455[438]. It may be remembered that of all the battles in the Peninsular War this was the one in which the proportion of officers to men hit on the French side was highest, one to sixteen—the average being one to twenty-two in ordinary engagements. The excessive proportion of casualties in the commissioned ranks bears witness to a desperate attempt to lead on the men to an impossible task, in which the officers sacrificed themselves in the most splendid style.

Masséna must not be too much blamed for his experiment. He had still to ascertain the fighting value of Wellington’s army—and estimated it too low, because of the extreme prudence which his adversary had hitherto displayed. He was handicapped by the impossibility of using his artillery effectively, and the position in front of him was strong—even stronger than he guessed, because of the road of communication along the rear of the plateau—but not too strong to be forced, if the defenders did not fight well. Moreover, it was immensely long—nine miles from end to end, so that two blows delivered with a corps each in the centre might have pierced the line before the enemy’s distant reserves could get up. Favoured by the fog—as we have seen—Reynier actually won the heights for a moment, though Ney never got near the crest. The mistake lay not so much in making the trial as in under-rating the warlike efficiency of the enemy. Strokes like Wallace’s charge with the 45th and 88th, or Craufurd’s masterly advance with the 43rd and 52nd, are beyond the common experiences of war. Masséna put forty-five battalions[439] into his fighting-line—they were repulsed by twenty-four, for that was the number of Anglo-Portuguese battalions which engaged more than their light-companies[440]. This could not have been foreseen. But the lesson was learnt. Before the lines of Torres Vedras, a fortnight later, Masséna refused to take any more risks of the kind, and the campaign assumed a very different character, because the invader had learnt to respect his enemy.

(1) NOTE ON THE TOPOGRAPHY OF BUSSACO

I spent two days in April 1904 and two days in April 1906 in going very carefully over the field—save that of its nine-mile length I did not investigate closely either Cole’s position on the extreme north, or Hill’s on the extreme south, no fighting having come near either of them. The ground is so minutely described in the preceding chapter that only a few additional points require notice.

(1) The ravine which lay between Pack and Craufurd, and between Marchand and Loison, is a feature which no map can properly express, and which no one who has not gone very carefully over the hillside can fully picture to himself. It produces an absolute want of continuity between the two fights which went on to its right and left.

(2) The Mondego is not visible from any point of the line of heights till Hill’s position is reached. It is sunk far below the level of the upland.

(3) The San Antonio-Palheiros road is a mere country track, barely deserving the name of road, though practicable for artillery and vehicles. The chaussée Moura-Bussaco is a high-road of the first class, admirably engineered. The paths across the Serra at Hill’s end of it are wretched mule-tracks, not suitable for wheeled traffic. So is the track from Sula up the slope to Craufurd’s standing-place.

(4) The view from the summit of the Serra is very extensive, embracing on the one side all the slopes of the Estrella as far as Guarda, and on the other the whole coast-plain of Coimbra as far as the sea. But in each direction there is so much wood and hill that many roads and villages are masked. The French army, both in advance and retreat, was only intermittently visible. But enough could be made out to determine its general movements with fair precision. When it reached the foot-hills before the Serra every detail of its disposition could be followed by an observer on any part of the crest, save that below Sula woods in the bottom hide the starting-point of Loison’s division.

(5) In the chapel by the side of the chaussée, just behind the sky-line of the English position, the traveller will find a little museum, including a very fine topographical map, with the position of the allied troops, and more especially of the Portuguese regiments, well marked. There are a few errors in the placing of the British battalions, but nothing of consequence. The French army is only vaguely indicated. But the map is a credit to the Portuguese engineer officers who compiled it.

(6) As I have observed in the next chapter, the ground to the north, along the Serras de Alcoba and de Caramula, is not so uniformly lofty, or so forbidding in its aspect, as to cause the observer to doubt whether there can be any pass across the watershed in that direction. Indeed, the first idea that strikes the mind on reaching the summit of the Serra, and casting a glance round the wide landscape, is that it is surprising that any officer in the French army can have believed that the Caramula was absolutely impracticable. Moreover it is far less easily defensible than the Bussaco ridge, because it is much more broken and full of cover. The beauty of the Bussaco position is that, save on the Moura-Sula spurs, it is entirely bare of cover on the side facing eastward. The smooth, steep slope, with its furze and heather and its occasional outcrops of rock, makes a splendid glacis. The reverse space would be a far worse position to defend, against an enemy coming from Coimbra and the coast-plain, because it is thickly interspersed with woods.

(7) With the possible exception of some of the Pyrenean fighting-grounds, Bussaco gives the most beautiful landscape of any of the British battlefields of the Peninsula. Albuera is tame, Talavera is only picturesque at its northern end, Salamanca is rolling ground with uninteresting ploughed fields, save where the two Arapiles crop up in their isolated ruggedness. Fuentes d’Oñoro is a pretty hillside, such as one may see in any English county, with meadow below and rough pasture above. Vimiero is dappled ground, with many trees but no commanding feature. But the loftiness, the open breezy air, the far-reaching view over plain, wood, mountain, and distant sea, from the summit of the Bussaco Serra is unique in its beauty. It is small wonder that the modern Portuguese have turned it into a health-resort, or that the British colony at Oporto have fixed on the culminating plateau as the best golf-course in the Peninsula.

(2) NOTE ON THE CRISIS OF THE BATTLE OF BUSSACO

While there is no point of dispute concerning that part of the Battle of Bussaco in which Craufurd, Pack, and Coleman were engaged against the 6th Corps, there was bitter controversy on the exact details of the repulse of Reynier’s corps by Picton and Leith. Picton, and following him his subordinates of the 3rd Division, thought that Leith’s part in the action was insignificant, that he merely repulsed a minor attack after the main struggle was over. Leith and his officers considered that they gave the decisive blow, that Picton’s line would have been broken and the battle perhaps lost, if Barnes’s brigade had not arrived at the critical moment and saved the situation. All that Picton would allow was that Leith ‘aided the wing of the 45th and the 8th Portuguese in repulsing the enemy’s last attempt.’ Grattan, who wrote an admirable narrative of the defeat of Merle’s division by the 88th and the neighbouring troops, denied that the 3rd Division was ever pressed, says that he never saw Leith’s men till the action was over, and points out that Barnes’s brigade, out of 1,800 bayonets, lost but 47 men altogether, while the 45th regiment alone lost thrice, and the 88th more than twice, as many killed and wounded out of their scanty numbers (150 and 134 out of 560 and 679 respectively). Other 3rd Division officers suggest (see the letters in the Appendix to Napier’s sixth volume) that Leith fought only with a belated body of French skirmishers, or with men who had been cut off from the main attacking column by the successful advance of Wallace. On the other hand Leith (see his letter in Wellington, Supplementary Dispatches, vol. vi, p. 678) speaks of coming on the ground to find a large French column crossing the Serra, and the Portuguese 8th and 9th broken, and about to recoil down the rear slope. His aide-de-camp, Leith-Hay, and Cameron of the 9th bear him out.

Napier has failed to make the situation clear, from not seeing that there were two completely separate attacks of the French, divided by an appreciable interval. He thinks that Foy was on the Serra as soon as Merle, and calls his column (iii. p. 25) ‘the French battalions which had first gained the crest,’ while as a matter of fact they had only started after Wallace’s repulse of Merle was long over.

The real situation is made clear when Reynier’s and Heudelet’s dispatches in the French Archives and Foy’s diary are studied. From these it is clear that there were two occasions on which the French got to the top of the Serra, the first during Merle’s attack, the second during Foy’s. I have quoted Foy’s narrative on p. 377 above; but it may be well to give also his note showing the starting-time of his column. ‘La première division (Merle) a gravi la montagne en se jettant à droite. Mais à peine les têtes arrivaient sur le plateau, qu’attaquées tout à coup par des troupes immensement supérieures en nombre, fraîches et vigoureuses, elles ont été culbutées en bas de la montagne dans le plus grand désordre. Ma brigade s’était portée au pied de la montagne, devant soutenir le 31^e Léger. Au moment de l’échec de la 1^re division j’ai fait halte un moment pour ne pas être entraîné par les fuyards.’ It was only at this instant, when the fugitives from Merle’s attack were pouring past him, that he got his orders from Reynier to attack, and started to climb the slope. There must, therefore, have been an interval of more than half an hour—possibly of an hour—between the moment when Wallace thrust Merle off the plateau, and that at which Foy crowned it, only to be attacked and beaten by the newly arrived Leith. For it took a very long time for the French 17th and 70th to climb the slope, and they only reached the top with difficulty, the skirmishers of the 8th and 9th Portuguese and of Meade’s wing of the 45th having fought hard to keep them back.

Reynier’s dispatch is equally clear as to his corps having made two separate attacks. He adds that some of Sarrut’s men were rallied in time to support Foy, a statement for which I find no corroboration elsewhere.

Napier then has failed to grasp the situation, when he makes the French crown the crest above the pass of San Antonio and the crest opposite Wallace, 900 yards further north, at the same moment. And the statement that Leith’s charge was directed against the other flank of the same mass that was beaten by the 88th and 45th is altogether erroneous.

Leith’s narrative of the business, in short, fits in with the French story, and must be considered correct. Picton cannot be acquitted of deliberate belittling of the part taken by his colleague in the action. Foy’s attack, though made by only seven battalions, while Merle had eleven, was the more dangerous of the two, and was defeated by Leith alone, after the small fraction of Picton’s force in front of it had been broken and thrust back.

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SECTION XXI: CHAPTER III

WELLINGTON’S RETREAT TO THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS (OCTOBER 1810)

The dawn of September 28 brought small comfort to Masséna. His desperate attacks of the preceding day had been repulsed with such ease and such heavy loss, that neither he nor any of his subordinates dreamed of renewing the attempt to force the line of the Serra. Only three courses were open to him—to retreat on Almeida, giving up the campaign as one too ambitious for the strength of his army, or to change his objective and strike backwards at Oporto,—if Lisbon were beyond his grasp,—or to endeavour to move Wellington out of his position by turning his flank, since a frontal attack had proved disastrous. The first course was advocated by more than one adviser, but presented no attractions to the Marshal: he was both obstinate and angry, and did not dream for a moment of spoiling his military reputation by retreating tamely after a lost battle. The blow at Oporto was equally unattractive: he had been told to drive the English out of Portugal, and to capture Lisbon, not to make a mere lodgement on the Douro. Moreover, as he had remarked to Ney before the battle, if he marched on Oporto by the bad road via Vizeu, he might find the British army once more in his front, when he drew nearer to the city, since the Coimbra-Oporto chaussée is both shorter and better than the by-roads which he would have to follow. There remained the third possibility—that of turning Wellington out of the Bussaco position by flanking operations. The country-side did not look very promising, but the attempt must be made.

Early on the 28th the French cavalry was sent out in both directions to explore the whole neighbourhood—a task which Masséna should have prescribed to it on the 25th and 26th, instead of keeping it massed in his rear. The reconnaissances sent southward by Reynier’s light cavalry brought no encouraging report: if the French army crossed the Mondego, it would only run against Wellington’s carefully prepared position behind the Alva. Fane’s cavalry were out in this direction, and would give ample time of warning to allow the allied army to pass the fords of Peña Cova and man the long series of earthworks. Only a repetition of the Bussaco disaster could follow from an attempt to take the offensive on this side. From the north, however, Montbrun, who had ridden out with some of Sainte-Croix’s dragoons, brought far more cheering news. This indeed was the flank where, on the first principles of topography, some hope of success might have been looked for. To any one standing either on the Bussaco heights or on the lower ridge in front of them, and casting an eye over the dappled and uneven country-side to the north, it seems incredible that there should be no route whatever across the Serra de Caramula. Both the seacoast-plain of Beira and the valley of the Oerins, the little river which drains the plain of Mortagoa, were thickly populated. Was it likely that there would be no means of getting from the one to the other save by the chaussée through Bussaco, or the circuitous road far to the north, from Vizeu to Aveiro via Feramena and Bemfeita? The maps, it is true, showed no other route: but every day that he remained in Portugal was proving more clearly to the Marshal that his maps, Lopez and the rest, were hopelessly inaccurate. The Serra de Caramula, though rugged, is not one continuous line of precipices, nor is it of any great altitude. On first principles it was probable that there might be one or more passages in this stretch of thirty miles, though it was conceivable that there might be no road over which artillery could travel[441].

There was, therefore, nothing astonishing in the fact that Montbrun discovered that such a track existed, nine miles north of Bussaco, running from Mortagoa, by Aveleira and Boialvo, to Sardão in the valley of the Agueda, one of the affluents of the Vouga. There was nothing particularly startling in the discovery, nor did it imply any special perspicacity in the discoverers, as many of the French narratives seek to imply. A peasant captured in one of the deserted villages high up the Oerins, and cross-questioned by Masséna’s Portuguese aide-de-camp Mascarenhas, who accompanied Sainte-Croix on his reconnaissance, revealed the fact that this country-road existed. He even, it is said, expressed to his compatriot his surprise that the French had not taken it when first they arrived at Mortagoa, since it was unguarded, while the whole allied army was lying across the Bussaco chaussée. It was, he said, habitually used by the ox-waggons of the peasantry: it was not a good road, but was a perfectly practicable one.

With this all-important news Montbrun and Sainte-Croix returned to Masséna about midday. The Marshal at once resolved to make an attempt to utilize the Boialvo road. There was some danger in doing so, since it was possible that Wellington might wait till the greater part of the French army had retired from his front, and then descend upon the rearguard and overwhelm it. Or, on the other hand, he might have made preparations to hold the further end of the pass, so that when the vanguard of the invaders was nearing Boialvo or Sardão they might find 20,000 men, withdrawn from the Bussaco position in haste, lying across their path at some dangerous turn of the road. Indeed, we may confidently assert that if in 1810 the British general had possessed the army that he owned in 1813, Masséna would have had the same unpleasant experience that befell Soult at Sorauren, when he attempted a precisely similar manœuvre—a flank march round the allied army on the day after a lost battle.

But Masséna was prepared to take risks, and the risk which he was now accepting was a considerably less perilous one than that which he had incurred when he chose to make a frontal attack on the Bussaco position on the preceding day. For though flank marches across an enemy’s front are justly deprecated by every military authority, this was one executed at a distance of nine or ten miles from the British line, and not in a level country, on to which Wellington might easily descend from his fastness, but in a broken wooded upland, full of ridges on which the French might have formed up to fight if assailed. If this fact did not remove the danger, it at any rate made it infinitely less. If one of the two possible contretemps should happen—if Wellington should come down with a sudden rush upon the rearguard—that force would have to fight a defensive action on the ridges below Bussaco, till the main body could turn back to help it. In that case there would follow a pitched battle upon rolling and uneven ground, which did not favour one side more than the other; and this, at any rate, would be a more favourable situation for the French than that in which they had fought on Sept. 27. If, on the other hand, Wellington should send a strong detachment to hold the western debouch of the Boialvo road, nothing would be lost—if nothing would be gained. It was improbable that there would be any position in that quarter quite so strong as the tremendous slope of the Serra de Bussaco. The result of an attempt to force the defile might be successful.

At any rate Masséna thought the experiment worthy of a trial. Accordingly, on the afternoon of the 28th, ostentatious demonstrations were made against the front of the Bussaco position, which led to a good deal of objectless skirmishing[442]. Wellington was not for a moment deceived. Indeed, the idea that another assault was impending was negatived by the fact that both Reynier’s and Ney’s men were seen to be throwing up abattis and digging trenches on the flanks of the two roads on which they lay. These could only be meant for defensive use, and presumably must be intended to help the French rearguard to hold the ridges, if the Anglo-Portuguese army should descend upon them. Late in the afternoon officers furnished with good telescopes, and stationed on the highest point of the Bussaco Serra, reported that they could detect columns in movement from the French rear in the direction of the north-west. These were Sainte-Croix’s cavalry and the baggage-trains of Ney and Junot making their way to the rear, in order to get into the Mortagoa-Boialvo road. At six o’clock, dusk having still not come on, it was reported that Ney’s infantry reserves were certainly moving in the same direction. Only Loison’s division was still immovable on its old position opposite Sula. At nightfall, therefore, the movement of the French was well ascertained. It might mean merely a general retreat on Mortagoa and an abandonment of the campaign[443], but this was most unlikely. Far more probable was some march to turn the allied flank by the passes of the Serra de Caramula. Wellington himself had no doubt whatever that this was the enemy’s intention. As the dusk fell he stood for some time on the summit of the Serra, watching the French columns receding in the distance. He then rode back to his head quarters at the convent of Bussaco, and dictated without delay a series of orders which set his whole army in retreat for Coimbra and Lisbon. Before daylight the position was deserted, only a rearguard being left on it. He does not seem to have thought for a moment of attacking, on the following morning, the 2nd Corps and Loison’s division, which had been left in his front, nor of directing his right wing to march on Sardão, which it could have reached long before the French arrived there. Each of these courses was so obvious that critics have lavished blame upon him for not adopting the one or the other[444].

The explanation of his conduct is neither that he failed to see the two alternatives which were in his power, nor that he showed (as several French writers maintain) an excessive timidity. Still less is it possible to urge, as some have done, that he was ruined by his own neglect to occupy the Boialvo road. He knew of that pass, had taken it into consideration, and in one of his dispatches speaks vaguely of a means which he was hoping to discover to render it useless to the enemy[445]. This remedy cannot mean, as some have supposed, the moving thither of Trant’s corps of Portuguese militia. It is true that Wellington had ordered this force to occupy Sardão some days before. But it was neither large enough, nor composed of troops solid enough, to resist, even in a strong position, the attack of a single French brigade. Some other device must have been meant, though we cannot determine what it may have been. The true key to Wellington’s action is to remember the immense pains that he had taken in building the Lines of Torres Vedras, and the elaborate arrangements that had been made during the last few weeks to complete the system for devastating Portugal in front of the enemy. It was by these means, and not by fights in the open, that he had from the first designed to defeat the invader. Bussaco had been an ‘uncovenanted mercy’: if Masséna chose to run his head against that stone wall, it was worth while to man it, and to permit him to break himself against its granite boulders. But such an operation as descending into the plain to attack the 2nd Corps on the 29th, or offering battle in front of Sardão on that same day, was not within the scope of Wellington’s intentions. If he had wished to engage in that sort of fighting, he had already had ample opportunities to attack sections of the French army during the last two months. But to get engaged with one corps in a rolling upland, and then to have the other two converging on him while the fight was in progress, he had never intended—nor would he do so now. He gave his orders for the retreat of the army on Coimbra actually before the French had possession of their own end of the Boialvo pass, and at a moment when a single night march would have sufficed to place Cole, Craufurd, and Spencer across the western end of it, with ample time to choose a position before the enemy could arrive in front. He explains his refusal to do so in his ‘Memorandum of Operations in 1810’ in the following terms: ‘It would have been impossible to detach a corps from the army to occupy the Serra de Caramula after the action of the 27th. That corps might have been hard pressed and obliged to retreat, in which case it must have retreated upon Sardão and the north of Portugal. It could not have rejoined the army, and its services would have been wanting in the fortified position in front of Lisbon. It was therefore determined to rely upon Colonel Trant alone to occupy the Serra de Caramula, as his line of operations and retreat was to the northward. Nothing could have been done, except by detaching a large corps, to prevent the French from throwing a large force across the Caramula. When, therefore, they took that road, there was nothing for it but to withdraw from Bussaco. And, after quitting Bussaco, there was no position that we could take up with advantage, in which we could be certain that we could prevent the enemy from getting to Lisbon before us, till we reached the fortified positions in front of that place[446].’ As to the other possibility, that of attacking the French rearguard below Bussaco instead of endeavouring to stop its vanguard at Sardão, Wellington only observes that ‘they had at least 12,000 or 14,000 more men than we had, and good as our position was, theirs was equally good.’ If he had fallen upon Reynier, the latter (he thought) could have detained him long enough to allow Ney and Junot to return, and so he would have found himself committed to an offensive action against superior numbers on unfavourable ground.

These arguments are unanswerable when we consider Wellington’s position. He might have succeeded in checking Masséna at Boialvo or Sardão; but, if he did not, ruin would ensue, since he might be cut off from the detached corps, and then would not have men enough to hold the Lines of Torres Vedras. He might have crushed Reynier before he was succoured, but if he failed to do so, and became involved in a general action, a disastrous defeat was possible. In short, considering what failure would mean—the loss of Lisbon, the re-embarkation of the army, probably the end of the Peninsular War—he rightly hesitated to take any risk whatever. At the same time, we may suspect that if the allied army of 1810 had been the army of 1813, Wellington might very possibly have played a more enterprising game. But the Portuguese still formed the larger half of his force, and though he had ascertained by their behaviour on the 27th that they were now capable of fighting steadily in a defensive action on favourable ground, it was nevertheless very doubtful whether he could dare to risk them in a battle fought under different conditions. One cheering example of the courage and discipline of these newly organized regiments did not justify him in taking it for granted that they could be trusted under all possible conditions, as if they were veteran British troops.

On the dawn of Sept. 29, therefore, the two armies were marching away from each other. On the Bussaco position there remained only Craufurd’s Light Division, strengthened by Anson’s cavalry brigade, which was brought up behind the Serra, to form the mounted section of the force which was for the next ten days to act as the rearguard of the allied army. Opposite them only Reynier remained, and he had drawn far back on to the Mortagoa road, where he stood in a defensive position in the morning, but retired, brigade after brigade, in the afternoon. The main body of Wellington’s army was retiring in two columns: Hill, and Hamilton’s Portuguese division crossed the fords of Peña Cova and marched for Espinhal and Thomar. The force which had been left far out on the right behind the Alva—Fane’s cavalry and Lecor’s Portuguese militia—joined Hill and accompanied him to Lisbon. This column was absolutely unmolested by the enemy during the whole twelve days of the retreat to the Lines. The French did not so much as follow it with a cavalry patrol. The other and larger column, formed of Spencer, Cole, Leith, and Picton, with Pack’s, Coleman’s, and Alex. Campbell’s Portuguese, marched for Mealhada and Coimbra. Craufurd and Anson started twelve hours later to bring up the rear. During the hours while the Light Division was waiting its orders to start, some of its officers explored the evacuated French position, and found parked in an enclosure 400 desperately wounded soldiers, whom Masséna had abandoned to the mercy of the Portuguese peasantry. He had used up all available carts and mules to carry his wounded, but had been forced to leave the worst cases behind. They were picked up and moved into the convent of Bussaco[447]; on what became of them afterwards it is well not to speculate. No friendly column came that way again[448], and the Ordenança were daily growing more exasperated at the conduct of the invading army. The French were not only carrying out in an intermittent fashion Masséna’s edict of Sept. 4, directing that all men with arms but without uniforms were to be shot at sight, but burning every village that they passed, and murdering nearly every peasant that they could hunt down, whether he was bearing arms or no[449].

Meanwhile, on the 29th and 30th of September, the French army was executing its flank march, practically unopposed, though not unobserved. Sainte-Croix’s division of dragoons was at the head of the line of march: then came the infantry of the 8th Corps, which had been put in the vanguard because it had not suffered at Bussaco. Next came the reserve cavalry of Montbrun, followed by the Grand Park and the massed baggage of the 6th and 8th Corps, mixed with a convoy of over 3,000 wounded. Ney’s troops brought up the rear of the main column. Reynier was a day’s march to the rear; having spent the 29th opposite the Bussaco heights, he only reached Mortagoa that evening. Sainte-Croix’s cavalry on this same day had passed the watershed and reached Avellans de Cima, where they met a patrol of De Grey’s dragoons, who had sent parties out in all directions, from their head quarters at Mealhada in the coast-plain. From this time onward the French advanced guard was watched by the four regiments of Slade and De Grey, who were directed to hold back its exploring cavalry, and not to permit it to reach Coimbra an hour sooner than could be helped. There was also a clash on the afternoon of the 30th between part of Sainte-Croix’s dragoons and the Portuguese militia of Trant in front of Sardão. Trant had been ordered to be at that place on September 27: he only arrived there on the afternoon of the 28th, not by his own fault, but because his superior officer Baccelar, commanding the whole militia of the North, had ordered him to move from Lamego to Sardão by the circuitous road along the Douro, and then from Feira southward, instead of taking the straight road across, the mountains north of Vizeu, where he might possibly have been stopped by some outlying French detachment. Trant had at the moment only a squadron of dragoons and four militia regiments with him (Porto, Penafiel, Coimbra, and a battalion of light companies), and these, from hard marching, and from desertion, were in all less than 3,000 strong. Knowing that he was expected to hold the debouch of the Boialvo road against anything short of a strong force, Trant made an attempt to stand his ground. But his vanguard bolted at the first shot fired, and with the rest he had to make a hurried retreat beyond the Vouga, leaving the road free to the French[450]. Sainte-Croix had already pushed in between him and the British cavalry, who now began to make a slow retreat towards Mealhada. At that place, early on the 30th, Slade and De Grey were joined by Anson’s eight squadrons, who had come in at the tail of Craufurd’s division after the rearguard evacuated the Bussaco position. On this day the main column of the British infantry marched through Coimbra, leaving the Light Division alone in the city. Wellington’s head quarters that night were at Condeixa six miles south of the Mondego. The three cavalry brigades retired, bickering with the French advanced guard all day, as far as Fornos, eight miles north of Coimbra. Masséna’s infantry, after emerging from the Boialvo pass, were now pushing south, and bivouacked on the night of the 30th, Ney and Junot’s corps at Mealhada, Reynier’s at Barreiro, ten miles behind the others. The biscuit which the French army had taken with it from Almeida was now almost exhausted, and it was a great relief to the troops to find, in the deserted villages of the plain of Coimbra, considerable quantities of maize and rice, with which they could eke out or replace the carefully hoarded rations.

Meanwhile the city of Coimbra was full of distressing scenes. Though Wellington had ordered the whole population of Western Beira to leave their abodes as soon as the French reached Vizeu, yet only the richest of the inhabitants of Coimbra had departed. The bulk had still held to their houses, and the news of the victory of Bussaco had encouraged them to hope that no evacuation would be necessary. The Portuguese government, though it had consented to carry out Wellington’s scheme of devastation, and had duly published proclamations commanding its execution, had taken no great pains to secure obedience to it. The sacrifice, indeed, that was demanded of the citizens of a wealthy town such as Coimbra was a very great one—far more bitter than that imposed on the peasantry, who were told at the same moment to evacuate their flimsy cottages. It was bitterly resented, and, despite of the proclamation, four-fifths of the 40,000 inhabitants of Coimbra were still in their houses when, on the night of the 28th-29th, arrived Wellington’s dispatch stating that he was abandoning Bussaco, that the French would be in the city by the 30th or on the 1st of October, and that force would be used, if necessary, to expel people who still clung to their dwellings. During the next two days the whole of the population of Coimbra was streaming out of the place by the roads to the south, or dropping down the Mondego in boats, to ship themselves for Lisbon at the little port of Figueira. Even on the 1st of October, the day when the French were reputed to be facing Fornos, only eight miles away, all had not yet departed. Many of the poor, the infirm, and the reckless remained behind to the last possible moment, and only started when the distant cannonade on the northern side showed that the British outposts were being driven in. Twenty miles of road were covered by the dense column of fugitives, headed by those who had started on the 29th and brought up behind by those who had waited till the last moment. There was a great want of wheeled conveyances: the richer folks had gone off with most of them, and others had been requisitioned for the allied wounded. Hence, many could take off nothing but what they could carry on their persons. An eye-witness writes that he saw the whole chaussée covered with respectable families walking on foot with bundles on their heads, while in the abandoned houses he noticed food of all sorts, table-linen, shirts, and all manner of other property, which was left behind in disorder because it was too heavy to be carried[451]. Another tells how ‘the old and the infirm, no less than the young and robust, carrying with them all their more valuable effects, covered the fields as well as the road in every direction, and from time to time the weary fugitives, unable to carry further the heavier articles that they had endeavoured to save, dropped them by the wayside and struggled onward, bereft of the remnant of their little property[452].’ Fortunately the weather for the first eight days after the evacuation of Coimbra was warm and dry, so that the unhappy multitude had almost reached Lisbon before they began to suffer any inconvenience from the October rains.

While this exodus was going on, Craufurd’s Light Division stood under arms on the northern side of the city, while the six regiments of British horse, in the extreme rearguard, were bickering with Masséna’s squadrons in the plain toward Fornos. On this day the Marshal had strengthened his van with almost the whole of his cavalry, having added to Sainte-Croix’s division, which had hitherto formed the advance, most of Montbrun’s reserve of dragoons, and Lamotte’s light brigade from the 6th Corps. This body of thirty-four squadrons was altogether too strong for Stapleton Cotton’s three brigades, who had to give way whenever they were seriously pressed. Two miles outside Coimbra the British horse was divided into two columns: De Grey’s heavy dragoons crossed the Mondego at a ford opposite Pereira, Slade and Anson’s light dragoons and hussars by another at Alciada, nearer to the city. At the same moment the Light Division, when the enemy’s horse came in sight, retired through Coimbra, crossed the bridge, and pressed up the ascent towards Condeixa, thrusting before them the rearguard of belated fugitives who had only made up their minds to depart at the last possible moment. It is said that the block in front of them was so great that Craufurd’s regiments would have been in a situation of some danger, if they had been closely followed by French infantry, and forced to turn back to defend themselves. But nothing more than a troop of dragoons watched their passage of the bridge and their retreat to Condeixa, and not a shot had to be fired.

It was otherwise with the cavalry column composed of Slade’s and Anson’s brigades: they were closely followed by the bulk of the French cavalry, and had to turn at the ford to hold back their eager pursuers. Two squadrons of the German Hussars and one of the 16th Light Dragoons charged in succession to check the French vanguard, while a fire was kept up by a line of dismounted skirmishers all along the river bank. The hussars lost four men killed, and two officers and thirteen men wounded, besides six prisoners; the 16th, two wounded and one missing in this skirmish. It could have been avoided, according to critics on the spot, if the brigade had retreated a little faster in the previous stage of its movement. But Stapleton Cotton, forgetting the dangers of crossing such a defile as a narrow ford, had been rather too leisurely in covering the last three miles, considering that the French were so close behind him[453]. The enemy’s loss was insignificant[454].

That night the British rearguard lay at Soure and Condeixa, while head quarters and the rear of the main army were at Redinha. The French did not cross the Mondego with more than a few cavalry patrols, and made no attempt to incommode the retreating column. Indeed they were otherwise employed. The entry of an army into a deserted town is always accompanied by disorders: that of the army of Masséna into Coimbra was an exaggerated example of the rule—and for good reasons. The men had been living on bare rations for a month, and suddenly they found themselves in a town of 40,000 souls, where every door was open, every larder garnished, and every cellar full. The very quays were littered with sacks of flour torn open, and puncheons of rum stove in, for Wellington’s commissariat officers had been to the last moment engaged in breaking up and casting into the river the remains of the magazine which had been feeding the army at Bussaco. The houses on every side were full of valuable goods, for most of the inhabitants had only been able to carry off their money and plate, and had left all else behind them. The first division of the 8th Corps, the earliest French troops to enter the place, consisted almost entirely of newly-formed fourth battalions, composed of conscripts, and ill disciplined. They broke their ranks and fell to plunder, only half-restrained by their officers, many of whom joined in the sport. A late comer from the artillery says that he saw one officer breaking open a door with a pickaxe, and another placing a sentry at the door of a shop which he wished to reserve for his own personal pillage[455]. There was wide-spread drunkenness, some arson, and an enormous amount of mischievous and wanton waste. It was afterwards said that Junot’s corps destroyed in twelve hours an amount of food that would have sufficed to supply the whole army for three weeks. It is at any rate certain that Coimbra was full of provisions when the French arrived, and that, when order was tardily restored, only a few days’ consumption could be scraped together to fill the empty waggons before the host marched on. Masséna raged against Junot for not having kept his men in hand, yet, if Portuguese narratives are to be trusted, he set as bad an example as any disorderly conscript, since he requisitioned for himself out of the University buildings all the telescopes and mathematical instruments, and distributed them among his staff[456]. The pillage was as wanton and objectless as it was thorough; the tombs of the kings in the church of Santa Cruz were broken open, the University Museum and laboratories wrecked, and all the churches wantonly damaged and desecrated. There was no attempt to restore order, or to utilize the captured property for the general good of the army, till the 6th Corps marched in on the next day. Even these later comers, however, could not be restrained from joining in the plunder. The mob of soldiers threatened to shoot the commissary-generals Lambert and Laneuville, when they began to put guards over the nearly-emptied storehouses.

The state of his army on the 1st and 2nd October sufficiently explains the conduct of Masséna in refraining from the pursuit of Wellington’s rearguard. But he was also somewhat puzzled to determine the policy which he must now adopt. Down to the last moment he had thought that Wellington would have fought at Fornos, or some other such position, to defend Coimbra. And even when Coimbra was evacuated, he had imagined that he might find the enemy drawn up to dispute the passage of the Mondego. But it was now clear that Wellington was in full retreat for Lisbon. Since the Marshal was still ignorant of the existence of the lines of Torres Vedras, which was only revealed to him four days later, he was somewhat uncertain how to interpret the conduct of his adversary. After the vigorous stand that Wellington had made at Bussaco, it seemed dangerous to argue that he must now be in headlong flight for his ships, and about to evacuate Portugal. Yet the rapidity of his retreat seemed to argue some such purpose. Ought he, therefore, to be pursued without a moment’s delay, in order that his embarkation might be made difficult? This course, it is said, was advocated by Reynier, Montbrun, Fririon, and the Portuguese renegade d’Alorna. On the other hand, Ney and Junot both advised a stay at Coimbra, to rest the army, collect provisions, and, what was most important of all, to reopen communications with Almeida, Ciudad Rodrigo, and the 9th Corps, which was now due on the Spanish frontier. They pointed to the diminished strength of the army, which, having lost 4,600 men at Bussaco, and 4,000 more by the hard marching and poor feeding of the last month, was now reduced to some 57,000 men. The fighting-power of Wellington was formidable, as he had shown at Bussaco, where many of the French officers persisted in believing that he had shown numbers superior to their own—in which they erred. A hasty advance, it was urged, might bring the invaders in face of a second Bussaco, where there was no chance of a turning movement. Would the commander-in-chief wish to accept another battle of the same sort? It would be better to establish a new base at Coimbra, to bring up the 9th Corps from the rear, and only to move on when the army was thoroughly reorganized. Meanwhile a detachment might demonstrate against Oporto, to distract Wellington’s attention[457]. This was the policy that Napoleon, two months after, declared that Masséna should have adopted. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did the Prince of Essling, after his failure at Bussaco, pursue the march on Lisbon, instead of taking up a position on the Mondego, and restoring his communications with Almeida? I had not burdened him with orders or instructions, and he could see that the English were not easy to beat.’ Masséna’s advocate, Foy, replied that ‘if the Army of Portugal had been halted on the Mondego, your Majesty would have said to the Prince, Why did you not march on? The English would have re-embarked, if they had been pressed.’ To which Napoleon, with a broad smile, answered, ‘Very true; I probably should have said so[458].’

The problem presented to the Marshal, indeed, was not an easy one. If he remained at Coimbra, his enemies would delate him to the Emperor for timidity; if he advanced, he might find that he had undertaken a task too great for his strength. The personal equation settled the difficulty: Masséna was obstinate and enterprising to the verge of temerity. He resolved to go on, at the earliest possible moment, in the hope of forcing Wellington to a battle on ground less favourable than Bussaco, or of compelling him to embark without any general engagement at all. Two days only were spent at Coimbra. On October 3, Montbrun’s cavalry, after making a reconnaissance as far as the sea and the port of Figueira, crossed the Mondego to Villa Nova de Ancos, while the 8th Corps, headed by Sainte-Croix’s dragoons, occupied Condeixa: one division of Ney’s corps followed them. The rest of the 6th Corps and Reynier made ready to resume their advance.

A minor problem remained to be resolved. Should a large garrison be left in Coimbra, and a new base for the army established there? The Marshal had shot into the convent of Santa Clara 3,000 Bussaco wounded, and 1,000 sick men. There was an accumulation of waggons of the corps-trains and the Grand Park, which could push on no further, for want of draught beasts, and all manner of other impedimenta. If the army went on at full speed, in the hope of overtaking the English, all this must be left behind. But if left unguarded, wounded and all might become the victims of Trant’s militia, which was known to have retired no further than the Vouga, or even of the Ordenança of the hills. A strong garrison must be placed in Coimbra to make it safe: rumour had it on October 2 that Taupin’s brigade and a regiment of dragoons were to be set to guard the city[459]. But rumour was wrong: Masséna, after some doubting, made up his mind that he could not spare even 3,000 men. Every bayonet would be wanted if Wellington once more turned to bay. Accordingly he took the extraordinary step of telling off only a single company, 156 men, of the 44th Équipage de la Marine—a naval unit which had been given him in order that he might have a nucleus of sea-going people, in case he succeeded in seizing the Portuguese arsenal at Lisbon. One would have thought that such men would have been so valuable, if only the enterprise had succeeded, that he would have chosen rather a company of ordinary infantry. These sailors, with two or three hundred footsore or convalescent men, organized into a couple of provisional companies, were all that the Marshal placed at the disposition of Major Flandrin, to whom he gave the high-sounding title of Governor of Coimbra. That officer was told that every day would increase his force, as more convalescents came out of hospital, and 3,500 muskets, belonging to the sick and wounded, were left with him. The whole mass of disabled men was concentrated in the convent of Santa Clara, a vast building outside the trans-pontine suburb of Coimbra, on the south side of the Mondego. The garrison was so weak that it could do no more than keep a guard at each of the exits of the town, which was destitute of walls, with a post of thirty men, all that could be spared, at Fornos, on the great north road facing Oporto. To abandon his wounded to almost certain destruction was a reckless act on the Marshal’s part: probably he said to himself that if he could but catch and beat the Anglo-Portuguese army, a small disaster in his rear would be forgiven him. Unlike Wellington, he was ‘taking risks’[460].

On October 4 the French army made its regular start from Coimbra; the 6th Corps came out to Villa Pouca and Condeixa on the Pombal road, the 2nd Corps to Venda do Cego on the Ancião road, which runs parallel with the other, ten miles to the east, and joins it at Leiria. Montbrun’s cavalry pushed in from Soure, to place itself in front of the 8th Corps, which now moved on from Condeixa as the head of the main infantry column. Its scouts that evening bickered in front of Pombal with Anson’s light cavalry, which was covering the retreat of the allied army. The two days which the French had spent in plundering Coimbra had allowed the Anglo-Portuguese infantry to get a start which they never lost: they never saw the enemy again during the rest of the retreat. That night Wellington’s head quarters were at Leiria, while Hill, unpursued by any hostile force, was at Thomar. For the next six days the British pursued a leisurely course towards the Lines, along the three roads Thomar-Santarem-Villafranca, which was taken by Hill; Alcobaça-Caldas-Torres Vedras, which was taken by Picton; and Leiria-Batalha-Alemquer, which was taken by Spencer, Leith, and Cole. It was along the last-named, the central, road, that Craufurd’s infantry and the three cavalry brigades followed the main body, at the distance of a day’s march. Anson’s light cavalry brought up the extreme rear, and was almost the only unit which saw the enemy between the 4th and the 10th of October[461]. The rest of the allied army had completely outmarched Masséna. Its retreat was marked by some disorders: the sight of rich monasteries like Alcobaça and Batalha, and large towns, like Thomar and Leiria, standing empty, yet left full of all such property as the inmates could not easily carry off, proved as tempting to the British as the sight of Coimbra had been to the French. There was much drunkenness, much looting, and some wanton mischief. Wellington set himself to repress it by the strong hand. He hung at Leiria two troopers of the 4th Dragoon Guards, who were caught plundering a chapel, and a man of the 11th Portuguese infantry. Some of the regiments which were found specially addicted to pillage were ordered to bivouac in the open fields every night, and never to be quartered in a village[462].

Anson’s brigade, alone among the allied troops, had an adventurous career during the retreat to the Lines. It was always in touch with a pursuing force of immense strength, for Masséna had constituted a flying vanguard under Montbrun, whose orders were to push the enemy at all costs, and to try to come up with his infantry. This force consisted of Sainte-Croix’s dragoons, Pierre Soult’s cavalry from the 2nd Corps, Lamotte’s from the 6th Corps, one brigade (Ornano’s) of the Reserve Cavalry, and Taupin’s infantry from the 8th Corps. Lamotte’s light horse had the place of honour, and endured most of the hard knocks. They had lively skirmishing with Anson’s 1st German Hussars and 16th Light Dragoons between Pombal and Leiria on the 5th October. The British brigade turned back twice, and drove their pursuers back on to Taupin’s infantry, but always suffered when it had to resume its inevitable retreat. The French lost eight killed, seventeen wounded (including five officers) and twenty prisoners—the British fifty in all, including two officers wounded, and one taken. This combat would not have been worth mentioning, but for the fact that it was from prisoners captured in it that Masséna got his first news of the existence of the Lines of Torres Vedras. Some of the troopers spoke freely of ‘the Lines’ as their point of destination, not guessing that this was the first time that their captors had heard of them. Hence the French generals learned that there were now fortifications in front of Lisbon: but they had, of course, no knowledge of their extent or character, and only expected to find some field-works on which Wellington would turn to bay. In fact, Masséna was encouraged by the news, thinking that he was now certain of the battle which he desired.

On the 7th October the French infantry was all concentrated at Leiria, Reynier’s corps having now rejoined the other two. Montbrun’s cavalry spread out so far as Alcobaça—whose monastery it sacked—on the coast-road, and Muliano on the central road. Vedettes were sent out on the cross-road to Thomar also, but could find no trace of an enemy in that direction. On the night that followed Masséna received the disquieting intelligence that his deliberate taking of risks with regard to Coimbra had already been punished. A mounted officer, who had escaped, brought him news that his hospitals and their guard had been captured at a single blow by Trant’s militia that same afternoon.

That enterprising partisan, it will be remembered, had been driven behind the Vouga by Sainte-Croix’s dragoons on September 30th. Since, however, none of the French turned aside to molest him, and all marched across his front on the Coimbra road, he was not forced to retire any further. And having his orders from Wellington to follow the enemy with caution, and pick up his stragglers and marauders, he came southward again when Masséna’s rearguard entered Coimbra. He had advanced to Mealhada when it was reported to him, on the 6th, that the rearguard of the French had left the city on the preceding day. A few people who had returned from the mountains to their homes, despite Wellington’s proclamation, sent him assurances that the numbers of the garrison were absolutely insignificant, and that of the wounded enormous. Judging rightly that it would have a splendid moral effect to capture Masséna’s hospitals, and the commencement of a base-magazine which was being formed at Coimbra, Trant resolved to strike at once. If he had waited a little he could have got help from J. Wilson and from Miller, who had descended into the Celorico-Vizeu country, each with his brigade. They had been directed by Wellington to cut the French communications with Almeida, and had already carried out their orders.

But Trant dreaded delay, thinking that Masséna might send back troops to Coimbra, when he found that Wellington was retiring as far as Lisbon. Without waiting for his colleagues, he marched at midday from Mealhada to Fornos on the 7th, and had the good fortune to surprise and capture the insignificant French post at that village: not a man escaped. He was now only eight miles from Coimbra, and was able to rush down into the city in the early afternoon before his arrival was known. He had with him one weak squadron of regular dragoons, and six militia battalions, having been joined since September 29th by all his stragglers and some outlying units. The whole made about 4,000 men[463]. Formed in two columns, they charged into Coimbra by its two northern entrances, sweeping away the small French guards at the gates. The squadron of cavalry then galloped along the street parallel with the river, and seized the bridge, thus cutting off the communication between the French in the town and those at the convent of Santa Clara, where the wounded lay. The small grand-guard, which the enemy kept inside the place, took refuge in the bishop’s palace, but was forced to lay down its arms at the end of an hour. The men at the convent, joined by many of the convalescents, kept up a fire for a short time, but surrendered at discretion, on Trant’s promise to protect them from the fury of his troops. He was, unfortunately, not entirely able to redeem his promise: the Coimbra local regiment was so enraged at the state in which it found its native town that it mishandled some of the prisoners—eight are said to have been slain[464]. The total loss of the Portuguese division was three killed and one officer and twenty-five men wounded.

Wilson and Miller came up next day, and sweeping the roads towards Condeixa and Pombal, picked up 300 more stragglers and marauders from the tail of Masséna’s marching column. Trant handed over Coimbra to them, and escorted his prisoners to Oporto with his own division: there were 3,507 sick and wounded, of whom half could march, while the rest were taken off in carts. Of able-bodied men not more than 400 soldiers were taken: but some hundreds of commissariat and hospital employés and men of the train brought up the total figures of the prisoners to 4,500 men. Trant has been accused by some French writers[465] of deliberately exposing his captives to the fury of the peasantry, and parading the wounded in an indecent fashion through the streets of Oporto. But the handsome testimonial to his humanity signed by a committee of French officers, which Napier prints in the Appendix no. 5 to his third volume, is enough to prove that Trant did his best for his prisoners, and that the unfortunate incident which occurred just after the surrender must not be laid to his account[466].

Masséna’s army received the news of the fall of Coimbra with indignation. It produced a painful impression on every mind; and while the rank and file murmured at the Marshal’s cruelty in abandoning their comrades to death—for it was falsely reported that the Portuguese had massacred them all—the officers blamed his blind improvidence, and observed that a brigade might well have been spared to protect not only the hospitals but the invaluable base-dépôt behind them[467].

There was heavy skirmishing between the British rearguard cavalry and Montbrun’s advance, both on the 8th and 9th of October. On the first of these days the horse-artillery troop attached to Anson’s brigade was, by some extraordinary mistake, left encamped out in front of the squadrons which were told off as its escort, and was nearly surprised in Alcoentre by an irruption of Sainte-Croix’s dragoons in a storm of rain[468]. Somers Cocks’s squadron of the 16th Light Dragoons charged just in time to save the guns, and to jam the head of the enemy’s column, as it was crossing the bridge which leads into the village. Alcoentre was held till dusk, when Taupin’s infantry came up, and Anson’s brigade retired, having lost only one trooper wounded, while the French had sixteen disabled or taken.

From this day onward, the weather, which had been fine and dry since the army left Coimbra, broke up for the autumn rains, and the last three days of the retreat to the Lines were spent in torrential downpour. This had the advantage of delaying the French; for while the British infantry, who were two days ahead of them, reached their destined position on the 9th (with the exception of the Light Division and Pack’s Portuguese), the enemy was marching on flooded roads from the 8th to the 11th.

On the 9th there was continual bickering in the rain, from Quinta da Torre as far as Alemquer, between Lamotte’s light cavalry brigade, which had again replaced Sainte-Croix’s dragoons at the head of the pursuing column, and Anson’s two much-enduring regiments. On this day the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion had the thick of the work: Linsingen’s squadron of that admirable regiment, which formed the rear detachment of the whole army, turned back to charge no less than four times in five miles, and always with success. At dusk the French infantry got up, and the allied cavalry retired on to Alemquer after a fatiguing day of fighting, in which the hussars had lost two killed, two officers and nine men wounded, and seventeen missing; the supporting regiment, the 16th Light Dragoons, had one killed, three wounded, and four missing, and the Royals of Slade’s brigade, who only got engaged in the late evening, one wounded and four missing. Lamotte’s loss was a little more—six killed, twenty-two wounded, and twenty-one prisoners[469]. Three of his officers were hurt, one taken.

On the next day (Oct. 10) the whole of the British cavalry marched from Alemquer to within the Lines, distributing themselves to the cantonments which had been arranged for them. But Craufurd’s and Pack’s infantry, which had hitherto been completely covered by the horsemen, did not follow their example with quite sufficient promptitude, and got engaged in an unnecessary skirmish. The Light Division should have withdrawn at noon, but Craufurd, believing the French infantry to be still far away, and despising the cavalry which hovered around him, remained in Alemquer, intending to spend another night in a dry cantonment, for the torrential rain which was falling promised a fatiguing march to his men. At four o’clock Taupin’s infantry came up, and engaged the pickets of the Light Division in a skirmish. Having been strictly forbidden by Wellington to get entangled in a rearguard action, and remembering perhaps his experience at the Coa, Craufurd tardily and unwillingly moved off. But dusk coming on, his column missed its road, and instead of retiring into the section of the Lines which it was destined to occupy, between the Monte Agraça and the valley of Calandriz, went too far to the west, and came in upon the position of the 1st Division in front of Sobral. This would have been dangerous if the French had had any infantry to the front, to take advantage of the unoccupied gap in the lines. But Montbrun’s advanced guard had pressed more than thirty miles in front of the main body of Masséna’s army, and this force contained nothing but cavalry, save the single brigade of Taupin—less than 3,000 men[470]. This force, such as it was, did not pass Alemquer that night—Craufurd, in his retreat on Sobral, was followed by cavalry alone. It was not till next morning, when Montbrun sent out reconnaissances in all directions, that he found himself in front of fortifications drawn across every road, and gradually realized that he was in front of the famous ‘Lines of Torres Vedras.’

It must not be supposed that Wellington’s final arrangements for the reception of the army of Masséna in front of Lisbon were made at leisure, or at a moment when he had nothing to distract him. Though the actual retreat of his army from the position of Bussaco to the position of Torres Vedras was conducted at an easy pace, and practically unmolested by the enemy, yet the days during which it was being carried out were a time of political, though not of military, storm and stress. Ever since the French had started from Almeida, and made their first advance into the mountains of Beira, Wellington had been engaged in an endless and tiresome controversy with the Portuguese Regency. Though they had assented, long before, to the scheme for devastating the country-side and bringing Masséna to a check only in front of Lisbon, yet when the actual invasion began, and the first hordes of fugitives were reported to be leaving their homes, and burning their crops, and taking to the mountains, several of the members of the Regency became appalled at the awful sacrifices which they were calling upon the nation to endure. The Principal Sousa put himself at the head of the movement, and was supported by the Patriarch, the Bishop of Oporto, so famous in 1808. Sousa brought before the Regency proposals that Wellington should be formally requested to try the chances of a pitched battle on the frontier, before retiring on Coimbra or Lisbon. In addition, he was always maintaining in private company that the people should not be required to take in hand the scheme of devastation and wholesale emigration, till it was certain the allied army was unable to stop Masséna somewhere east of the Serra da Estrella. He also laid before the Regency documents intended to prove that the system of devastation was physically impossible, and that it would prove incapable of stopping the advance of the French, owing to the difficulty that would be found in persuading the peasantry to destroy instead of hiding their stores of food[471]. There was a certain modicum of truth in this last argument, and the French did succeed in living for a longer time in the evacuated districts than Wellington had considered possible. On the other hand, the Principal was hopelessly wrong in his contention that the French would suffer little inconvenience. They were starved out of Portugal by Wellington’s device, even though it took longer to work out its results than he had calculated. There is no reason to suppose that Sousa was in any way treacherously inclined: he and his whole family stood or fell with the English alliance, and the victory of the French would mean ruin to them. But his private and public utterances and those of his satellites had a deplorable effect. In the mouth of the common people it took the form of a widely-spread rumour that Wellington had refused to fight at all, and intended to re-embark the British army. This did not lead to any wish to submit to Napoleon, but to a desperate determination to resist even if deserted. Wellington’s dispatches are full of a riot which took place in Lisbon on September 7th, when the militia proposed to seize on St. Julian’s, the Citadel, and the Bugio fort because they were informed that the English garrisons were about to evacuate them and put to sea[472]. When Masséna had already passed Coimbra, Sousa was mad enough to propose, at the Regency board, that the Portuguese troops should not retire within the Lines, but remain outside and offer battle in the open, even if the British refused to stand by them. The nervous activity of the government had been shown some three weeks before by the sudden arrest and deportation of some fifty persons in Lisbon, who were suspected, rightly or wrongly, of ‘Jacobinism,’ and had been accused of having secret communication with d’Alorna and the other renegades in Masséna’s army. They included a few officers, and a good many lawyers, doctors, merchants, and minor officials, as well as some dependants and relatives of the exiles. The case against most of them was so weak that Wellington protested against their banishment, holding that the alarm caused by the arrests would make the people of Lisbon unreasonably suspicious, and give rise to a belief in wide-spread plots. But despite his letter to the Regency all were shipped off to the Azores[473]. Some were ultimately allowed to go to England, others to Brazil, but the majority were not allowed to return to Portugal till 1816.

‘All I ask from the Government,’ wrote Wellington, on October 6th, in the midst of the retreat, ‘is tranquillity in the town of Lisbon, and provisions for their own troops[474].’ These two simple requirements were precisely those which he did not obtain. The capital of Portugal was kept disturbed by arbitrary arrests, by proclamations which often contained false news, and sometimes pledged the Regency to measures which the Commander-in-Chief disapproved, and by senseless embargoes laid on vehicles and commodities, which were never turned to use[475]. At the same time the Portuguese troops were not fed, and the tents which had been ordered forward to the positions behind the lines never started from the magazines of Lisbon[476].

Wellington’s temper, tried to the uttermost by these distractions, when his mind was entirely engrossed by military problems, grew sharp and irritable at this time. He went so far as to write to the Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro, to declare that either he or Principal Sousa must leave the country. He suggested that some post as ambassador or special envoy should be found for the man who troubled him so. The Patriarch, as ‘a necessary evil,’ he did not wish to displace, but only to scare. Unfortunately, an appeal to Brazil was hopeless, since the Regent was entirely in the hands of the Principal’s brother, the Conde de Linhares. Much acrimonious correspondence, delayed by the vast time which was consumed in getting letters to and from Rio, only led in the end to a proposal from Linhares that his brother should leave the Regency, if Charles Stuart, the British Ambassador, was also withdrawn from it, and if the War-Minister, General Miguel Forjaz, whom Wellington considered a necessary person and the ablest man in Portugal, should also be removed from his post[477]. To this proposal neither Wellington nor the British government would consent, and as it only came in when Masséna’s invasion had already been foiled, and the French had retired into Spain, the crisis was over. The Principal remained at the Council Board, to talk much impracticable and mischievous stuff, but to do little positive harm. When the invasion was past Wellington could afford to disregard him.

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SECTION XXI: CHAPTER IV

THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS

We have hitherto, when speaking of Wellington’s immense scheme for fortifying the position on which he intended to bring his enemy to a standstill, refrained from entering into the details of his plan. It is now time to describe it in full, and to explain its design.

The character of the peninsula on which Lisbon stands lends itself sufficiently well to defence. At a first inspection the country-side offers a rather chaotic expanse of mountain and valley, whose general features are hard to seize from any one point. On further examination, it appears that the whole square mass of land between the Atlantic and the Tagus estuary is nothing more than a continuation of the ridge of the Serra de Monte Junta, the main mountain-chain of Estremadura. But from the backbone or central mass of the highland so many large spurs are thrown out to each side, and these are themselves so high and steep, that the whole peninsula seems more like a ganglion of mountains than a well-marked chain. The two chief joints or vertebrae in the backbone are the Monte Agraça above Sobral, and the Cabeça de Montechique six miles south of it, and these form the central points respectively of the first and second lines of defence which were finally laid out. Besides the outer defences there was in Wellington’s scheme, from the very start, an inner ring of works, covering only a small area on the sea-shore, at the southernmost point of the peninsula, to the west of Lisbon. This was merely intended to cover an embarkation, if by any unforeseen disaster the Lines themselves should be pierced.

It remains to speak of the system of defences in detail. In October 1809, Wellington’s plan had embraced no more than one continuous line of works from Alhandra on the Tagus to the mouth of the Rio São Lourenço on the Atlantic, with certain redoubts and fortified camps thrown out in front, at Torres Vedras, Monte Agraça, and other points. These latter fortifications were not intended to be held in permanence; but it was hoped that they might defer and hinder the enemy’s attack on the main line in the rear. It was only the long delay in Masséna’s advance, which gave Wellington five or six months on which he had not counted, that led to the ultimate strengthening of the scattered outer works, and their conversion into a continuous whole, capable of turning back, instead of merely detaining for a time, the invading army. Indeed, all across the peninsula, designs that were slight, isolated, and provisional when first drawn up, were in the end enlarged, and perfected into wholly different structures. For the engineers, having unlimited labour at their disposal, and much more time than had been promised them, could turn their attention, after the essential works had been completed, to devising all manner of additional improvements and securities for the chosen position.

The construction of the Lines was entrusted to Colonel Fletcher, Wellington’s commanding engineer, who had as his chief assistant Major John Jones, the historian of the works, and in addition eleven British officers of the Royal Engineers, two from the King’s German Legion, and three from the Portuguese regular army. Wellington himself, after making one all-embracing survey of-the positions in Fletcher’s company in October 1809, and another in February 1810, left all the rest to his subordinate, and refrained from worrying him with matters of detail, being satisfied that his own intentions had been thoroughly well grasped. The labour available was, firstly, that of the Lisbon militia regiments, who were brought up by alternate pairs, and paid an extra 4d. a day for their services[478]; secondly, that of hired volunteers from the peasantry of the district, of whom from 5,000 to 7,000 were generally in hand; they received 1s., afterwards 1s. 8d. a day[479]; and lastly of a conscription from the whole of southern Estremadura, for a circuit of forty miles around. The forced labour was paid at the same rate as that freely hired. On the whole, only about £100,000 was paid out between November 1809 and September 1810—so that the Lines of Torres Vedras may be considered one of the cheapest investments in history. The militiamen and peasantry were worked in gangs of some 1,000 or 1,500 men, each in charge of an engineer officer, who had a few English and Portuguese military artificers as his assistants: only 150 such were available, so short were both armies of trained men. ‘In some districts a subaltern officer of engineers with a few English soldiers, utterly ignorant of the language, directed and controlled the labour of 1,500 peasantry, many of them compelled to work at a distance of forty miles from their homes, while their lands lay neglected. Nevertheless, during a year of this forced labour not a single instance of insubordination or riot occurred. The great quantity of work performed should, in justice to the Portuguese, be ascribed more to the regular habit of persevering labour in those employed than to the efficiency of the control exercised over them[480].... Indeed, it is but a tribute of justice to the Portuguese of Estremadura to state that, during many months of constant personal intercourse, both private and public, the labouring classes ever showed themselves respectful, industrious, docile, and obedient, while the governing classes in every public transaction evinced much intelligence, patriotism, good sense, and probity. Secrecy with respect to the extent and nature of the works was enjoined, and it is highly creditable to all concerned that hardly a vague paragraph concerning the Lines found its way into the public prints. The French invaders remained ignorant of the nature of the barrier rising against them, till they found our army arrayed on it so as to stop their further advance[481].’

The total frontage of the southern and stronger series of lines, those which Wellington originally planned as his line of defence, was twenty-two miles from sea to sea. The outer and northern series of works, which was originally only a supplement and outer bulwark to the other, was longer, extending to twenty-nine miles, for it crosses the peninsula in a diagonal fashion and not on the shortest possible line that could be drawn. Lastly, the small interior line round St. Julian’s and Oyeras, which was prepared as the embarking-place of the army in the event of defeat, has a circumference of about two miles. In all, therefore, fifty-three miles of defences were planned—a stupendous work, far exceeding, when its elaborate details are studied, anything that had been constructed in modern times in the way of field-fortification.

It must be remembered that the character of the Lines in no way resembles that of our own great Roman wall from Tyne to Solway, of the wall of China, or of any other long continuous stretch of masonry. It is only on a few points that works of any great length are to be found. The Lines are in essence a series of closed earthworks, dotted along the commanding points of the two ranges of hills which Wellington chose as his first and second fronts of resistance. Some few of the earthworks rose to the dignity of fortified camps, armed with many scores of guns. The majority of them were small redoubts, constructed to hold three to six guns and garrisons of two or three hundred men only. But even the smallest of them were individually formidable from their structure: the normal ditch was 16 feet wide and 12 feet deep, the parapets 8 to 14 feet thick, and all were properly fitted with banquettes. When it is remembered that they were well palisaded, and had outer hindrances of abattis, chevaux de frise, and trous-de-loup scattered in front, it is clear that they were forts requiring a regular attack, not mere lines of trench and mound. The strength of the whole series was that they were placed in scientific fashion, so as to cross fires over all the ground on which an attacking force was likely to present itself. No practicable point of assault could be found on which advancing columns would not be cut up by flanking fire for a very long distance, before they drew near to their objective. Immense pains had been taken to make the more exposed sections of the country-side into one vast glacis. Mounds which might have given cover had been removed to the last stone, hollow roads filled up, houses pulled down, olive-groves and vineyards stubbed up to the roots, so as to give a perfectly smooth and featureless ascent up to the line of redoubts. Greatly to Wellington’s credit (as may be incidentally remarked) compensation was paid on a liberal scale to all owners of dwellings, mills, fruit-trees, &c., for the havoc made by these necessary pieces of demolition. The result was a complete clearance of cover. ‘We have spared neither house, garden, vineyard, olive-trees, woods, or private property of any description,’ wrote the officer in charge of the works to his chief at the end of the preparations: ‘the only blind to the fire of the works now standing anywhere is that beautiful avenue of old trees in the pass of Torres Vedras. The Juiz da Fora and the inhabitants pleaded with me so hard for the latest moment, lest they might be cut down unnecessarily, that I have consented to defer it till the day before the troops march in. As I have trustworthy men with axes in readiness on the spot, there is no doubt of their being felled in time. The pine woods on the Torres heights are already down, and formed into abattis[482].’

It was not necessary, or indeed possible, to slope into a glacis the whole of the ground in front of each of the lines of defences. In many places other methods of making it impassable were used. At the north-western front of the first line, between Torres Vedras and the sea, for nearly six miles, a long marsh had been created: the river Zizandre had been dammed up, and had filled the whole of the narrow bottom in which it flows. ‘It has overflowed its banks, and in a short time more than half the valley has become so complete a bog that no reward can induce any of the peasantry to pass over it[483],’ wrote the officer who had carried out the experiment. Nor was it possible for the enemy to attempt to drain the bog, for four[484] redoubts furnished with heavy guns, and placed on dominating points of the hillside, commanded the bottom so completely that it was impossible for any party to approach it with safety. Yet the redoubts were out of the range of field-guns on the slopes beyond the Zizandre: only guns of position could have touched them, and Masséna had none such with him. Two similar inundations on a smaller scale had been caused at the other end of the Lines, by damming up the Alhandra and Alverca streams, each of which spread out in a marsh a mile broad, reaching to the foot of the heights above the Tagus, and could only be passed on the narrow paved high-road from Santarem to Lisbon.

In other places a very different method of making the Lines unapproachable had been adopted. Where the heights were very steep, but not absolutely inaccessible—a dangerous thing to the defence, for here ‘dead ground,’ unsearchable by the cannon of the redoubts above, must almost necessarily occur,—the slope had been cut or blasted away in bands, so as to make absolute precipices on a small scale. At one point above Alhandra[485] this was done on a front of full 2,000 yards. Even this was not the last precaution taken: at several places ravines ran deep into the line, and up them columns, more or less under cover, might possibly have penetrated. Such ravines, therefore, were stuffed, at chosen points, by a broad abattis or entanglement, mainly composed of olive-trees with all their chief boughs remaining, dragged together and interlaced for a depth of many yards. Such a structure could not be crawled through, nor could it be hewn down without an infinite waste of time and labour; nor, on the other hand, did it afford any cover, since grape or musketry could play perfectly well through it. The chief of these traps was that laid across the long ravine above the village of Arruda, down the bottom of which flows one of the winter torrents which fall eastward into the Tagus.

It was fortunate that Portugal was a well-wooded country: there are regions where it would be impossible to procure the immense amount of timber that was lavished on the accessories of the redoubts. All, as has been already mentioned, were palisaded; many had in addition abattis or entanglements thrown up in front of them, some way down the hillside, so as to detain the advancing enemy under fire as long as possible.

The works were divided into eight sections, the first line composed of four, the second line of three, while the eighth consisted of the inner retrenchment for purposes of embarkation, at the extreme southern point of the peninsula. Of the outer or secondary line the three sections were:

(1) A front of five miles from the Tagus at Alhandra along the crest of a steep but not very lofty ridge, as far as the great ravine that overlooks the village of Arruda. This front was elaborately fortified, as it blocks the great road, in the flat by the waterside, which forms the easiest approach to Lisbon from the north. In the five miles there were ultimately constructed no less than 23 redoubts with 96 guns. Two thousand yards of hillside in one place had been scarped into a precipice; a mile by the side of the Tagus had been inundated. The one considerable gap in the line, the ravine at the head of the valley of Calandriz, had been choked by one of the great abattis above described. The redoubts required a garrison of 6,000 men.

(2) The second section, from the ravine above Arruda to the left of the steep Monte Agraça, formed somewhat of a salient angle: it had a front in all of some four and a half miles, which included the most lofty and defensible part of the backbone range of the Lisbon peninsula. One of the four great paved roads entering the capital from the north, however, passes over the shoulder of these heights, and they were therefore very heavily fortified from the first, the large redoubt for 1,600 men, on the top of Monte Agraça being one of the original outer works ordered for construction in Wellington’s earliest notes of October 1809. There were in all seven redoubts mounting 55 guns and requiring a garrison of 3,000 men on this fraction of the lines.

(3) Quite different in character was the front of eight miles from the left of Monte Agraça to the pass of Runa, overlooking the upper valley of the Zizandre and the village of Sobral. The fortification of this line had not entered into Wellington’s original plan, and there were only two redoubts upon it when Masséna appeared before it in October 1810. Such defence as there was consisted in the fact that the dominating Monte Agraça redoubts overlooked it on the right, and that the two small works just mentioned commanded the main high-road from Sobral to Cabeça de Montechique, which goes through its centre. But there was a clear possibility that the enemy might make a push up the valley and the high-road, by the village of Zibreira, and this was indeed the most probable point of attack in the whole 29 miles of front for the enemy to select. When, at the last moment, the British Commander-in-Chief determined to hold the outer lines, and not merely to fall back after having used them for a temporary defence, he had to cram this point with troops, and to construct new works upon it as quickly as possible. Four divisions, therefore, more than 20,000 men, were concentrated here. Wellington’s own head quarters were established at the hamlet of Pero Negro, on the slope above the high-road, and a very large redoubt was thrown up on the Portello hill, above Zibreira, with several smaller ones further to the right, to connect it with the Monte Agraça works. Sobral, the village at the foot of the heights, was held as an outpost, but abandoned when Masséna pushed forward to the front, as it was too far advanced to the north to be treated as an integral part of the position. But the French, when they had carried Sobral with difficulty, looked at the main line behind it, and refused to attempt any further advance. The hillside was as formidable as the Bussaco heights from which they had only recently been repulsed: it was full of troops and growing in strength every moment as the earthworks continued to arise.

(4) The fourth section of the outer or northern front was that from the gorge of the Zizandre (or the pass of Runa, as it is sometimes called) to the sea. It was about twelve miles long, but of this space six miles and more was covered by the impassable bog formed by the obstructed Zizandre, and another mile was formed by the formidable entrenched camp of San Vincente, above the town of Torres Vedras, the most complete and self-sufficing of all the works in the peninsula. This stronghold lay outside the main line, beyond the river, covering the bridge and the paved chaussée from Leiria to Lisbon, the only carriage-road on the western side of the Lines[486]. It was one of the earliest of the fortifications commenced by Wellington’s engineers, having been started on November 8, 1809, and was placed in such a conspicuous point, and planned on such a large scale, that it attracted public attention more than any other part of the works, and gave its name to the whole in popular parlance[487]. The whole front on both sides of Torres Vedras and its great fort was so strong and inaccessible as to offer little temptation to the invader to select it as a point of serious attack, all the more so because troops brought opposite to it would be completely cut off from any left in front of the eastern and central part of the lines. For the geography of the peninsula at this point is peculiar: north of the gorge of the Zizandre the great backbone range, the Serra de Barregudo and the Serra de Monte Junta, extends for a distance of fifteen miles, without being crossed by a single road practicable for horses, much less for wheeled vehicles. There are nothing but goat-tracks across the heights. If, therefore, any considerable body of troops had been sent to observe or contain the western section of the lines, it would have been separated by two days’ march from the rest of the army, and liable to be crushed, ere succoured, by the defenders of Lisbon, who had good cross-roads across the peninsula, by which they could transfer themselves from point to point under the protection of their works. As a matter of fact, nothing but flying parties of French horse ever appeared in this direction. Masséna had not troops to spare for any secondary attack, more especially for one on such an unpromising part of the Lines. Wellington had foreseen this when he distributed his field army behind the various sections of the front: to support the garrisons of the twelve miles of redoubts about Torres Vedras he only placed one division, while there were three behind the eastern section, and more than four in the partially entrenched central part[488].

Passing on to the second line of defence, from Quintella on the Tagus to the mouth of the Rio São Lourenço on the Atlantic, we find three sections of defence, which, unlike those of the outer line, were all completed by September 1810, and had no central gap.

(1) There was over a mile of impassable inundation at the eastern end, between Quintella and Alverca. Above the first-named village was an isolated hill, which was all fortress, for no less than six redoubts had been placed upon it, to enfilade the high-road across the inundated lower ground. Then came the Serra de Serves, three miles of lofty and difficult hills, which had been scarped into almost perfect inaccessibility. In a sudden dip west of this range was the pass of Bucellas, through which runs one of the three great high-roads that enter Lisbon. It was easily defensible, as it lies between two high and steep mountain-sides, and is only a couple of hundred yards broad. Redoubts were placed so as to rake it from end to end, and to flank it on both sides. The chaussée itself was blocked with successive abattis, and the viaduct leading up to it was mined.

(2) The second section of the inner line extended from the pass of Bucellas to the Park of Mafra, a front of over six miles. The eastern part of this was formed by the towering heights of the Cabeça de Montechique, the most dominating mountain-summit in the whole peninsula, almost steep enough to defend itself without fortification; but three redoubts nevertheless had been reared upon its summit. But from the pass of Montechique, at the left side of the summit, down to Mafra the ground was less well marked, and here the chaussée from Sobral and Zibreira crossed the range. Much fortification, therefore, was lavished on these four miles, along which there were nine strong redoubts, connected with each other in the rear by a military road passing along the southern crest of the heights. There was a second and formidable ridge behind this line, where further defence could be offered in the unlikely event of the enemy forcing his way up the high-road.

(3) From Mafra to the sea, nearly ten miles, there was for the most part a well-marked line of heights protected in front by the ravine of the river of São Lourenço, a deep, rugged, and in many cases inaccessible cleft, only crossed by a single road, that from Torres Vedras to Mafra. Nevertheless, six redoubts were reared, to cover this, and the few other points where the ravine was passable. The eastern part of this section, that along the wall of the Royal Park (Tapada) of Mafra, was its weakest portion, and for two miles at this point the British engineers set all their ingenuity to work. The outlying heights called the Serra de Chypre, in front of the park, were covered by four redoubts, and turned into a first defence. The wall of the Tapada itself was loopholed and furnished with a banquette. The important road which passes its foot was obstructed with cuts, enfiladed by the artillery of several works, and stockaded at more than one point. There was another group of redoubts along the south end of the Torres Vedras road, at the village of Morugueira; and finally Mafra town, in the rear of all, was turned into a defensive post by means of trenches and barricades. Altogether, what was by nature the weakest point in the southern lines was made by art one of the strongest. This too, in spite of the fact that, being approachable only from Torres Vedras, it was on the whole not a probable front on which to expect an attack.

A mere mention must suffice for the eighth section of the defensive works, the semicircle at St. Julian’s and Oyeras which was intended to protect the embarkation of the army if the worst should come. It was strongly entrenched, and could be held by a very few battalions, while the rest were utilizing the numerous and solid piers alongside of which the fleet of transports was to be moored.

Having described the Lines, it remains that we should describe the garrison set to guard them, detailing separately each element, regular and irregular. The forces at the disposition of Wellington were materially increased at the moment of his arrival within the Lines. On October 8 he found at his disposition a brigade of three battalions newly arrived at Lisbon, the 1/50th, 1/71st, and 1/92nd, all old Corunna regiments which had served in the Walcheren expedition, and were still none too healthy from their long sojourn in the deadly marshes of Zeeland. There had also landed about the same time the 94th regiment, and the Brunswick Oels Light Infantry, a foreign battalion raised from the refugees who had fought under the Duke of Brunswick in the abortive North German insurrection of 1809. Moreover, two battalions—the 2/30th and 2/44th—had just been sent to Lisbon from Cadiz, where General Graham now thought that the British contingent was larger than was absolutely necessary. The 1/4th and 1/23rd came out a little later, and do not appear in the fortnighty ‘general state’ of the army till November 15. Thus the army was swelled by nine battalions, or some 6,500 men[489]. No cavalry, however, had arrived.

Wellington used these new arrivals to form a new 6th Division of infantry, and to complete to full strength the 5th Division, which had hitherto possessed only one British brigade. He did not, however, keep the lately landed units together: acting on the principle which he always followed, of mixing veteran acclimatized battalions with new arrivals, he formed the new 6th Division by adding Campbell’s brigade, taken from Cole’s 4th Division, to two Portuguese regiments the 8th and the Lusitanian Legion, both of which had been hitherto attached to the 5th Division, and had served with Leith at Bussaco. In the 4th Division, Campbell’s brigade was replaced by that of Pakenham, taken from Spencer’s 1st Division, while compensation was made to Spencer, by giving him the newly landed 1/50th, 1/71st, and 1/92nd, as a new brigade under Erskine. The 5th Division under Leith got three more of the fresh arrivals, the 1/4th, 2/30th, and 2/44th as its second brigade. The 94th was given to Picton’s second brigade,—which had hitherto consisted of only 2⅓ battalions,—to raise it to average brigade-strength. The Brunswick Oels Jägers, being a light corps, were partly divided up into separate companies and told off to different brigades (as the 5/60th, a similar unit, had already been), though the head quarters and six companies joined Pakenham’s brigade in the 4th Division. But when the 1/23rd, the last of the reinforcements, came out, it also joined Pakenham, while the Brunswickers were transferred to the Light Division—where they did not long abide[490].

Even after allowing for the trifling losses at Bussaco, the British field army in Portugal was now far larger than it had ever been before, the gross total of troops in the Lines amounting to 42,000 men, of whom about 7,000 were sick or detached, and 35,000 were present under arms. This figure does not include the two battalions of marines who guarded St. Julian’s and the lines around it at the mouth of the Tagus.

Of Portuguese regulars, Wellington had now under his hand the 24,000 men who had fought at Bussaco, plus the 1,400 cavalry under Fane and the brigade under Bradford (now consisting of five battalions)[491] which had been guarding the position behind the Alva on the day of the battle, together with the reserve artillery of Lisbon. The total made 27,500 men, of whom 24,500 were with the colours and 3,000 sick in hospital.

Of militia there were three brigades and four isolated units more within the Lines—the Southern Beira brigade of Lecor, three regiments[492], the Northern Estremaduran brigade of Miranda, also three regiments[493], and the Lisbon local brigade of five regiments[494] with two stray units from the north[495], and two from the south[496]. The numbers of all the regiments ran very low, owing to the way in which they had been neglected and under-fed by their government, since they were called out nine months before; many had died, and far more had deserted. The thirteen corps did not between them supply more than 8,200 men present under arms, with 1,000 sick in hospital. In addition there were 3,200 artillerymen improvised from the ranks of the infantry militia or the Ordenança, making altogether 12,400 troops of the ‘second line.’

As to the Ordenança who had taken refuge in and about Lisbon with their families, when the whole population of southwestern Beira and northern Estremadura retired within the Lines, it is impossible to obtain any figures, save that they supplied the bulk of the 3,000 volunteer artillerymen just mentioned above, and that the picked men of the Ordenança of the capital itself had been organized into two battalions of ‘Atiradores Nacionales’ of about 450 men each. The whole may have amounted to any number from 20,000 up to 40,000 men, of whom about two-thirds were armed with muskets, the rest, those from the remoter districts, having still nothing better than pikes. As most of them were scattered with their families in the villages where they had taken refuge, or the camps of huts which they had formed in sheltered situations, they could hardly be considered to be in a state of mobilization, and certainly were of no use either for garrisoning forts or for employment in the line of battle.

Lastly, in calculating the forces which Wellington accumulated within the Lines, we must mention the two Spanish divisions from the Army of Estremadura. Hearing that all was quiet for the moment on the frontier of Andalusia, the British Commander had asked the Marquis of La Romana, whether, in accordance with a promise made so long ago as July, he could spare any troops to assist in the holding back of the main French army of invasion. The Marquis, with a liberality of which the Cadiz Regency would have disapproved, if its leave had been asked, replied that he would bring up his two reserve divisions. Leaving Ballasteros on the Andalusian border, and another division under Imaz at Badajoz, in addition to the garrison and Madden’s Portuguese cavalry, he marched for Aldea Gallega and Lisbon with the troops of La Carrera[497] and Charles O’Donnell[498], about 8,000 men. On October 25th he had arrived at the cantonments behind Mafra, on the second line of defence, which his ally had requested him to occupy. Wellington defended the bringing up of these troops by the plea ‘that he did not think himself justified in not bringing into his positions all the force which was at his disposal’[499]. But it is doubtful whether the advantage of getting 8,000 Spanish troops within the Lines justified the danger incurred in Estremadura, when it was possible that Soult might send out Mortier at any moment to attack the depleted army that covered the approach to Badajoz. Napoleon thought that he should have done so, and when he heard of the arrival of La Romana at Lisbon, wrote to censure the Duke of Dalmatia in the fiercest strain[500]. ‘It was a shame and a scandal that he had retired to Seville: the 5th Corps had orders to be always at La Romana’s heels, and to prevent him from moving into Portugal, so that the news of its return to Seville roused the Emperor’s surprise and anger.’ There can be no doubt that Napoleon did well to be angry. The balance of affairs in Andalusia tended to stand at an equipoise precisely because La Romana’s army was strong enough to keep the 5th Corps employed. When 8,000 men had been withdrawn by the Marquis to the Lisbon lines, Mortier was in a position to sweep all before him as far as the gates of Badajoz, or to execute a raid into the Alemtejo if that course seemed preferable. But Soult did not send his lieutenant on this errand on his own initiative, but waited till he received direct orders to do so from Paris. By that time it was too late, and neither the disaster of the Gebora nor even the fall of Badajoz had any influence on the course of events in Portugal. Masséna was forced to retreat before a single patrol from the Army of Andalusia had got into touch with his outposts. What might have happened if Soult had launched his blow at Badajoz in October, and had appeared on the left bank of the Lower Tagus in December, it is impossible to say. Probably Wellington would have found some means of averting disaster, but it is unquestionable that his task of defence would have been made far more difficult.

For the full realization of the meaning of the Lines of Torres Vedras there are two general facts which must be remembered. Firstly, they were garrisoned by troops which formed no part of the field army. Wellington’s sixty thousand regulars were not frittered away in the garrisoning of redoubts, but were held in masses behind the lines, ready to reinforce any threatened point, and to deliver a pitched battle in the open, if the head of the French army were thrust through the defences at some weak section. The generals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who so often built lines, and were so easily evicted from them, suffered disaster because they drew out their armies in one attenuated thread, and were therefore weak at every point, and always inferior to the assailant at the place where he made his assault. Wellington’s army was (with the exception of the 3rd Division at Torres Vedras) gathered in two solid masses, one facing Sobral, on the heights between Monte Agraça and Runa, the second and smaller behind Alhandra. The one could reach the other in half a day’s march, for the roads behind and parallel to the lines had been put in good repair.

The whole of this vast system of redoubts was to be held by the troops of the second line, and by them only. There were altogether some 20,000 men of the second line in the fortifications, composed of (1) the 8,000 (afterwards raised to 11,000) militia infantry. (2) Of about 800 Portuguese regular artillery, aided by over 2,000 gunners picked from the militia and Ordenança, trained by the regulars and incorporated with them. (3) Of some 250 British artillerymen from the batteries which had been lying in reserve at Lisbon. (4) Of picked companies of the Lisbon Ordenança (atiradores) drilled into a state of discipline not much worse than that of the militia. (5) Of the landing force of 2,000 British marines, partly from the fleet, partly brought specially from England to garrison the proposed lines of embarkation at St. Julian’s. (6) Of the dépôts, convalescents and recruits of the eight Line regiments of infantry raised from Lisbon and Southern Estremadura—about 4,000 strong.

In all, therefore, there were about 20,000 men, mostly troops of secondary quality, or 28,000 if the Spanish auxiliaries are counted, ready to man the Lines, without a man being withdrawn from the ranks of the field army. The outer lines were calculated to require about 18,000 men for the redoubts, the inner ones 14,000, but clearly both did not require to be manned at once. If the outer line were broken, the garrison-troops from the intact parts of it could fall back on the second. Meanwhile the field army would be engaging any French columns that might have broken through, and there would be ample time to arrange for the manning of the second and stronger front. But it must be repeated once more that it was not on the passive defence of the redoubts by their garrisons that Wellington reckoned for success, but on the fighting of the field army, who would tackle the columns of attack that had committed themselves to the assault of the section—whichever it might be—that Masséna might select as his objective. All criticism based on general principles concerning the weakness of long extended lines falls to the ground, when it is remembered that Wellington had his army massed for a pitched battle in and behind his defences, not strung out on an interminable front.

The last point on which stress must be laid is that the most careful arrangements for the transmission of orders and intelligence from end to end of the Lines had been made. There were five signal-stations, with semaphores worked by seamen on (1) the redoubt No. 30 near the Atlantic, (2) the great redoubt of Torres Vedras, (3) the Monte de Socorro above Wellington’s head quarters at Pero Negro, (4) the summit of the Monte Agraça, (5) the hill behind Alhandra on the Tagus. After some practice it was found that a message could be sent from one end to the other of the 29 miles in seven minutes, and from No. 3, the head quarters semaphore, to either end of the Lines in four minutes. There was a similar line of four semaphores on the second, or main, series of defences. Military roads had been opened behind both the fronts, so that troops could be moved along the shortest possible line. On the other hand, it was fortunate that there existed no cross-road from sea to sea outside the Lines, which could be of any practical use to the invader. The only route of this sort, that from Alemquer by Sobral to Runa, was commanded for the whole length from Sobral to Runa by the British heights, whose foot it hugs, while from Sobral to Alemquer it is separated from the Lines by the steep and pathless ridge of Galaria, across which nothing on wheels could pass. Nevertheless, here lay the invaders’ best chance—corps placed on this road, and screened by the ridge, could be moved for some distance to left or right unseen from the Lines. The road, however, was bad, rocky, and narrow: it is marked as the ‘Calçada Arruinada’ or ‘ruined road’ in contemporary maps. The other paved road in this direction, that from Sobral to Arruda and Alhandra, passed through the line of ground occupied by the British at two points, and was under fire from the redoubts at short range for the rest of its course: it was absolutely impracticable.

It only remains to be added that the navy had been utilized for auxiliary service: not only were its marines under orders to man the St. Julian’s lines, but its seamen had fitted out all the gunboats in the Lisbon arsenal. A flotilla of great strength infested the Tagus estuary, and by the fire of its heavy guns prevented the French from approaching the shore, or endeavouring to build boats at the mouths of its creeks. If any attacks had been made upon either of the extreme ends of the Lines, the columns delivering them would have been under fire from the sea throughout their operations. But, as we shall see, the French never contemplated this: the one temptation which Masséna felt was to assault, far inland, the gap in front of Sobral between the Monte Agraça and the Serra de Socorro. And there, as we shall see, at the critical moment, prudence got the better of ambition, and the invader turned back foiled. The high-water mark of French conquest in Europe was reached on the knoll by Sobral on the wet and gusty 14th of October, 1810.

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SECTION XXI: CHAPTER V

MASSÉNA BEFORE THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS: HIS RETREAT TO SANTAREM (OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 1810)

On the night of October 10, when Craufurd made his hasty retreat to Sobral, and went within the Lines, Montbrun had his head quarters at Alemquer, where he kept Taupin’s infantry brigade, and Lamotte’s and Sainte-Croix’s cavalry. Pierre Soult’s light horse felt towards their left, in the direction of the Tagus, and occupied Carregado, where they failed to find any British outposts, Hill’s corps having been withdrawn behind the brook which enters the Tagus near Castanheira. The main body of the army was far to the rear, in one vast column: Ney’s and Reynier’s corps lay that night in and about Alcoentre: Junot’s bivouacked around the convent of Nossa Senhora de Maxeira, a short distance to the south of Alcoentre. All the troops were terribly fatigued by three days’ movement in torrential rain, and had no more marching-power left in them.

It was only on the following morning (October 11) that Montbrun discovered the Lines. His cavalry had been ordered to move forward on the two roads across which they lay. Pierre Soult therefore pushed for Villafranca, on the high road which skirts the Tagus; he found Hill’s outlying pickets at Villafranca, drove them out of the town, and on passing it came in sight of the line of redoubts and scarped hillside above Alhandra, which was manned by the Portuguese militia and backed by Hill’s British infantry. It was impossible to advance further, so the brigadier, leaving an advanced post in Villafranca, drew back his three regiments to Castanheira, and sent his report to Montbrun.

That general himself, with the main body of his cavalry, had followed the rough road from Alemquer to Lisbon. He drove in some British dragoon pickets, and then arrived in front of the village of Sobral, which he found occupied by the infantry outposts of Spencer’s division. He did not attempt to push further that day, as his flanking reconnaissance had come in sight of the sections of the Lines behind Arruda and behind Zibreira, where redoubts and solid lines of infantry were visible. Sobral itself was clearly not held in force, nor did it form an integral part of the British position. But Montbrun feared to attack it, when he had only a single brigade of infantry to the front, while many thousands of British troops might issue from the Lines to overwhelm him if he committed himself to a serious attack. The village on its knoll was left alone for the present, though it was tempting to contemplate the seizure of a point which lay so far forward—less than two miles from the front of Wellington’s chosen position. But Montbrun contented himself with sending back word to Masséna that he had come upon a continuous line of fortifications stretching from the Tagus bank to some point westward, which was not yet discovered. For his furthest reconnaissances towards Runa and the Upper Zizandre had found the enemy in front of them, however far they pushed.

Meanwhile Masséna’s tired infantry of the main body had made hardly any movement: the 2nd and 6th Corps still lay about Alcoentre. Junot alone with the 8th Corps advanced as far as Moinho de Cubo, half way between Alcoentre and Alemquer. Thus Wellington was given a whole day more to arrange his troops in their positions along the Lines. On this morning he was rather under the impression that the French attack would be directed upon Alhandra and Hill’s corps, which, he observed, would be a ‘tough job, defended as all the entrances of the valleys are by redoubts, and the villages by abattis[501].’ Moreover, the French ‘positively could not’ get guns up to attack the line west of Hill, since, in the existing state of the weather, no cannon could leave the paved roads, and the only path of that description leading from the Sobral direction to the Tagus bank ran through Arruda, where Craufurd and the Light Division were now comfortably installed. Considering it likely, therefore, that Masséna would bring a heavy attacking force, by circuitous roads from the rear, to Villafranca, in order to make a frontal attack on Hill along the high-road by the Tagus, Wellington warned Craufurd and Spencer to be ready to move in eastward to the assistance of the extreme right wing of the Lines. In the afternoon, however, he discovered that the force in front of Sobral (Montbrun) seemed much larger than that in front of Alhandra (Pierre Soult), and showed more signs of making wide-spreading reconnaissances. He therefore drew up an alternative scheme, by which, in the event of an attack on Spencer’s front at Zibreira, Cole’s and Campbell’s (the new 6th) divisions were to support the threatened point, and even Picton was to come in from the distant Torres Vedras[502]. No French troops were reported from this last direction, and De Grey’s cavalry pickets from Ramalhal (far outside the Lines) reported that not the smallest party of the enemy’s horse had been seen west of the Serra de Barregudo or the Monte Junta[503].

On the 12th Montbrun made a movement which seemed to justify Wellington’s first idea, that Hill was to receive the French attack. He moved Taupin’s brigade, the only hostile infantry which had yet been seen, southward from Alemquer to Villafranca on the Tagus. This was done, however, only because the whole 8th Corps was coming up on this day from Moinho de Cubo by Alemquer to Sobral, which it reached in the afternoon, replacing Taupin’s small force. Its arrival was at once reported to Wellington, who saw that his second theory of the intention of the enemy, not his first, had been correct, and transferred his main attention to the side of Sobral. That village, by some extraordinary blunder on the part of Sir Brent Spencer, had been evacuated by the pickets of the 1st Division during the night of the 11th-12th[504]. They were put back into it, by the special orders of the Commander-in-Chief, in the early morning, for Wellington wished to hold it as long as was safe, on account of the fine view obtainable from its knoll over the routes from Alemquer by which the enemy must approach. Hence, when Junot’s advanced guard came up in the afternoon, there was a collision at Sobral. The troops of Clausel finally succeeded in expelling the British outposts, which belonged to Erskine’s and Löwe’s brigade, from the village. The casualties were few on both sides—nineteen men only were lost by the British[505]. The retiring pickets did not fall back into the Lines, but clung to the other side of the ravine which separates Sobral from the lower slopes of Monte Agraça. They were only 300 yards from the village.

While this skirmish was in progress the main body of the French were at last set in motion from Alcoentre. The 6th Corps advanced this day (October 12) to Moinho de Cubo and Otta; the 2nd Corps, taking a road more to the east, so as to lean towards the Tagus, arrived at Carregado. Junot’s corps was encamped behind Sobral, Clausel’s division having its advanced posts (Brigade Ménard) in the village, while Solignac lay two miles to the rear. The weather was still abominable, and all the movements were accomplished with great fatigue and delay.

On this afternoon the French army suffered the loss of its most brilliant and energetic cavalry officer. General Sainte-Croix, while exploring the Tagus bank, north of Villafranca, in search of deserted boats, was cut in two by a cannon shot from a British gunboat which was watching his cavalry from the estuary. He was held to be the only officer, except Colonel Pelet, who had any personal influence with Masséna[506], and as that influence was always exerted on the side of daring action, it is probable that the many French diarists who deplore his death are right in considering that it may have had some positive effect on the conduct of the campaign[507].

On the night of the 12th-13th Wellington had become convinced, and rightly, that the great mass of Junot’s corps, visible behind Sobral, constituted the main danger to his position. He therefore drew in troops from his right, even calling down from Torres Vedras Picton, in whose front no enemy was yet visible. From Monte Agraça to the Portello redoubts he put in line four British divisions—Spencer, Cole, Picton, and Campbell, along with Pack’s independent Portuguese brigade; this last was placed in the great redoubt on Monte Agraça, which dominated Sobral and all the lower hills. In reserve were two more divisions—the 5th under Leith, and a temporary Portuguese division consisting of the brigades of Coleman and Alex. Campbell. Altogether 30,000 men were concentrated on this comparatively short front of about four miles, besides the militia and artillery who garrisoned the minor forts[508]. Junot, whose corps did not now muster more than 12,000 men, did wisely to refrain from making any serious attack. He was not, however, wholly quiescent: attempting to extend his troops more to the right, to the west of Sobral, along the undulating ground in the direction of the Upper Zizandre, he got into touch with the outlying pickets of Cole’s division, which stood beyond those of Spencer and Picton in the British line. The first attack fell on the light companies of the 7th Fusiliers and the newly-arrived Brunswick Oels battalion. When they were driven in, Cole fed his fighting-line with the light companies of Hervey’s [late Collins’s] Portuguese brigade. Finding his voltigeurs outnumbered, Junot, in a similar fashion, sent up Gratien’s brigade from his second division to reinforce his advance. Hence there ensued some sharp skirmishing, which lasted several hours, till Cole drew back his outpost line from the lower plateaux north of Sobral to the foot of his fighting-position, on the heights below the Portello redoubts. Junot had thus gained a mile of ground, but not ground that was of any service to him for a regular attack on the Lines, since it was merely part of the rolling upland that was dominated by Wellington’s main position. The 4th Division lost twenty-five British and a much larger number of Portuguese in this long bicker. Hervey the Portuguese brigadier was wounded. The French casualties were probably a little the larger[509].

On the same afternoon Reynier, with somewhat over a battalion of infantry, made a detailed reconnaissance of Hill’s position in front of Alhandra. He pressed in close enough to draw the fire of the nearer redoubts, but halted when he had realized the strength of the line opposite him, and reported to Masséna that he considered the right wing of the allied position hopelessly impracticable for an attack.

Next morning (October 14) the French Commander-in-Chief came up in person from the rear. It is astonishing that he had made no earlier attempt to judge with his own eye of the strength of Wellington’s line of defence. He arrived at Sobral in time to witness a bitter skirmish, the most important of all the engagements that took place during the crucial days of the campaign of 1810. Spencer’s outposts, as has been already mentioned, had on the 12th retired only some 200 or 300 yards from Sobral, and had taken up their position on the other side of the ravine that divides that village from the lower slopes of the Monte Agraça. Across the high-road the main picket, furnished by the 71st regiment, had thrown up a barricade. Junot considered this lodgement, so close to his line, as a thing that ought not to be permitted. Accordingly he brought up his artillery, which had only arrived from the rear on the previous night, to the front of Sobral, and, after cannonading the barricade for a short time, sent against it the compagnies d’élite of the 19th of the Line, supported by other troops of Ménard’s brigade. The first rush of the attack carried the barricade and the line of stone walls on each side of it. But the whole of the 71st was ready to sustain the pickets, and with a fierce rush swept the assailants back across the barricade, down the slope, and into the outer houses of Sobral. From thence, of course, they had to retire, as a whole division was fronting them; but they resumed their old position without being pursued.

Junot refused to renew his attack, and Masséna, who had arrived while the skirmish was in progress, did not direct him to go forward again. It was clear that there was a very strong force in front of the 8th Corps, and that the redoubts visible along the Monte Agraça on the one hand and the Portello heights on the other were of the most formidable description. Masséna’s senior aide-de-camp and chief confidant, Pelet[510], thus describes the psychological situation: ‘On arriving at Sobral, instead of the “undulating accessible plateaux” that we had been told to expect, we saw steeply scarped mountains and deep ravines, a road-passage only a few paces broad, and on each side walls of rock crowned with everything that could be accomplished in the way of field fortifications garnished with artillery; then at last it was plainly demonstrated to us that we could not attack the Lines of Montechique with the 35,000 or 36,000 men[511] that still remained of the army. For, even if we had forced some point of the Lines, we should not have had enough men left to seize and occupy Lisbon.... It was clear that we must wait for reinforcements[512].’ Another eye-witness, Junot’s aide-de-camp Delagrave, in his Memoir on the Campaign of 1810-11, expresses the same view in his single sentence, explaining that ‘the prince, seeing that the enemy was better prepared and stronger than had been believed, put an end to the combat, and on each side the troops took up once more their original positions[513].’ The loss in this combat—insignificant enough in itself, but decisive in that it revealed to Masséna the uselessness of a further advance—was 67 on the British side, about 120 on that of the French[514].

After putting a stop to the combat of Sobral, Masséna rode away eastward, along the slopes of the upland that faces the Monte Agraça, and as far as the knoll facing Arruda in the front of the Light Division. Here he pressed so near the British front that a single shot was fired at his escort from the redoubt No. 120 to warn him to trespass no further. He saluted the battery by lifting his hat to it, and went up the hill out of range[515]. Some of his aides-de-camp continued the exploration till they touched Reynier’s vedettes near Villafranca, but the Marshal himself returned to his head quarters at Alemquer to think over the situation. There some sort of a council of war was held that same night: Junot, it is said, urged the Chief to try the effect of a bold dash at the English army arrayed in front of Sobral. But he was talked down by Ney and Reynier, who argued that such an attack would be insane, considering the weakness of their corps and the strength of Wellington’s fortifications. Without doubt they were right: even if Masséna had brought his whole three corps to bear on Sobral, he had 10,000 men less than at Bussaco, and Wellington 10,000 men more, leaving the garrisons of the forts out of the question. The allies had 30,000 bayonets concentrated on the threatened point, and could have brought up Hill, Craufurd, and Hamilton’s and Le Cor’s Portuguese—20,000 men more—from the east end of the Lines, the moment that it was clear that Reynier was no longer in front of them. The position, owing to the forts, was far stronger than Bussaco, and the French cavalry would have been as useless on October 15 as it had been on September 27. The report which Foy drew up for Masséna and presented to the Emperor gives the whole gist of the matter: ‘The Marshal Prince of Essling has come to the conclusion that he would compromise the army of His Majesty if he were to attack in force lines so formidable, defended by 30,000 English and 30,000 Portuguese, aided by 50,000 armed peasants[516].’

An open assault on the Sobral position was now, indeed, the thing that the British most desired. Wellington wrote, with his usual ironical moderation, to his trusted lieutenant, Craufurd, that ‘he thought his arrangements had now made the position tolerably secure[517].’ Among these last arrangements, it may be remarked, was the drawing back of the 71st and the light companies of the 1st Division from the barricades on the near side of the ravine of Sobral. They were moved a few hundred yards to the rear, nearer to Zibreira. This was probably intended to encourage the French to sally out from Sobral up the road, where everything was now in order to receive them. Their advance was hourly expected; D’Urban, Beresford’s Chief of the Staff, wrote gleefully on October 15, ‘Each individual division has now more than sufficient troops to occupy the space allotted to it, and the overplus forms a first reserve for each respectively. If the force thus posted beats the attacking enemy, of which there can be little doubt, our telegraphic communications will bring down Craufurd from Arruda and Hill from Alhandra on to their flank—and the affair will be complete. There is much appearance that the enemy will attack this position with his whole force—Alhandra is far too strong for him. He cannot well retire, and it is hoped that his distress for provisions will compel him to bring matters to a speedy decision[518].’

But both the cautious Commander-in-Chief and the eager head of the Portuguese Staff were mistaken in estimating the position. They had judged wrongly the character of Masséna, and his psychological position of the moment. He would not attack; indeed, after October 14 he seems never to have had the least intention of doing so. The lesson of Bussaco had not been lost, and he was no longer prepared to assail, with a light heart, the Anglo-Portuguese Army posted ready to receive him in a strong position. Probably the energetic statement of Ney and Reynier that they dared not risk their men—that the troops would be demoralized if ordered to advance for a second slaughter—also had its effect on the Marshal. But Masséna was proud and obstinate, and if he could not go forward, he shrank, for the moment, from going back. On October 15 began the one phase of the campaign which the British, from general down to subaltern, had least expected. The French army began to show signs of intending to settle down in front of the Lines, as if for a blockade. After a few more attempts to feel the front of the Lines about Arruda and the valley of Calandriz, which were so feeble that they did not even drive in Craufurd’s outposts, the enemy began to fortify the front of his position with field-works, and sent away the whole of his cavalry to the rear—a sufficient sign that his offensive power was spent.

Masséna’s first dream of masking the Lines by a close blockade was absolutely impracticable, considering the present state of his supplies. The troops were already living on the gleanings of the hastily-evacuated villages of the Lisbon Peninsula, which could not last them for long, and would not even have sufficed for a week’s consumption if Wellington’s decrees had been properly carried out. If he was to feed his army from the thin resources left behind by the Portuguese, Masséna would soon find it necessary to spread it far and wide; since, if he kept it concentrated in front of Wellington, it would soon go to pieces, exposed in bivouacs to the November rains, and forced to draw its nourishment by marauding from afar. It seems from the instructions which he gave to Foy at the end of the second week of his stay in front of Lisbon, that the Marshal actually contemplated clinging to his present advanced position till he should receive reinforcements. He hoped that the 9th Corps would come up to his aid from Old Castile, and that Mortier and the 5th Corps would join him from Andalusia. But these were mere hypotheses: he was not in touch with either Drouet or Mortier. Indeed, he had been cut off from all communication with his colleagues since the day that he crossed the Mondego. The 9th Corps, as a matter of fact, was only at Valladolid, and showed no signs of moving on. Mortier had retired to the mountains in front of Seville, after his successes over the army of La Romana in September. Almeida was in a state of close blockade by Silveira’s detachments from beyond the Douro. Ciudad Rodrigo was in hardly better case, being strictly watched by Julian Sanchez and his mounted guerrilleros, so that no one could get to or from it without a very strong escort. Gardanne’s regiment of dragoons, left behind by Masséna, was worn out in the effort to keep open the road between Rodrigo and Salamanca[519]. From the Army neither Almeida nor Rodrigo received a word of news from the 18th of September to the 15th of November. So effectually was the road closed, that rumours were current of such divers characters as that Masséna had forced the English to embark, and that he had been completely foiled, and was marching back to Spain via Castello Branco. Paris was hardly better informed: the only news that the Emperor got was that dribbled out, four or five weeks later, by the English papers[520]. Hence came ludicrous notices in the Moniteur, of which the worst was one published on November 28, which stated that Coimbra had been occupied by Masséna without a battle, that the army on October 1 had only 200 sick and 500 wounded since it had left Almeida, and that no general or colonel had been killed or even hurt since the invasion began! And this after twelve such officers had fallen at Bussaco. That battle, we may remark, was presented ultimately to French readers as ‘a demonstration executed by the brigades of Simon and Graindorge in order to mask the great flank-march of the Prince of Essling. But they had gone beyond their instructions, and brought on a combat in which 200 men had been killed and 1,200 wounded.’ Fririon, the historian of the campaign, cannot restrain himself from adding, ‘This is how history was written at that time; it was by reports of this lying description that an attempt was made to calm anxious families. Did no one reflect that, by deceiving them in this way, the government made enemies of all those who trusted for a time in the exactitude of the Bulletins, and lost their illusion soon after, when they learnt the melancholy ends of their sons and their brothers[521]?’

The dearth of news from the front was not Masséna’s own fault. He had sent back several aides-de-camp to find their way to Almeida, but all had either been captured by the Ordenança or forced to turn back. The best known of these was the young Mascarenhas, one of the Portuguese traitors on the Marshal’s staff. He started from Coimbra on October 3, with the Bussaco dispatch, disguised as a shepherd, but was detected by a band of Ordenança, and sent as prisoner to Lisbon. The Regency had him tried by court-martial, and as he was caught without a uniform, he was condemned as a spy as well as a traitor, and executed by the garotte in December[522].

There was a perfect cordon of Portuguese militia and irregulars round Masséna’s rear in October and November. J. Wilson had come down to Espinhal, and had his outposts in Leiria; Trant had returned to Coimbra. They were in touch, by means of the Estrada Nova and the garrison of Abrantes, with the Ordenança of Castello Branco, and a Spanish detachment of three battalions under Carlos d’España, which La Romana had sent to Villa Velha, at the same time that he took his two divisions under La Carrera and Charles O’Donnell within the Lines. On the side of the Atlantic the garrison of Peniche had sent out a force of 300 men to Obidos, under Captain Fenwick, and these joined hands with De Gray’s cavalry at Ramalhal, in front of Torres Vedras. A few French parties which crossed the Monte Junta to raid towards the sea coast were cut off either by Fenwick or by the dragoons. But Masséna never sent any serious detachment in this direction.

For just one month (October 14-November 14) Masséna maintained his position in front of the Lines. The 8th Corps had thrown up some earthworks on, and to the flanks of, the hill of Sobral, thus assuming a defensive instead of an offensive position. The 2nd Corps went back to Carregado, but left strong detachments in Villafranca. By the dispositions of October 16 the 6th Corps remained with its main body at Otta, far to the rear, and an advanced guard at Alemquer. Ney was so placed that he could succour either of the other corps if they were attacked. A brigade of Loison’s division was pushed forward to the hill opposite Arruda[523]: in face of this last Craufurd was adorning the front of his line with a luxury of abattis, entanglements, and pitfalls, which would have made the hillside inaccessible to even the most alert and vigorous person moving alone. Formed troops could not have got past the first two or three traps.

But the most significant part of Masséna’s arrangements was to be found in his rear: Montbrun’s cavalry reserve went back to Santarem; thither also went the reserve artillery on the 17th, and the hospitals on the 20th of October. At the same time each of the corps was directed to send to Santarem all smiths, carpenters, and other artificers that could be found in its ranks. They were told to report to General Eblé, the officer commanding the artillery, who had received from the Marshal a special mission—the construction of boats and pontoons sufficient to bridge the Tagus or the Zezere. For, if he were starved out in Estremadura, Masséna had it in his mind that he might find it convenient either to cross into the Alemtejo, or to force a way across the Zezere into the Castello Branco district, in the hope of opening communication with Spain via Zarza and Alcantara. Montbrun’s cavalry explored northward and eastward, seeking for likely spots at which the Tagus might be bridged, and on the other side reconnoitring the line of the Zezere, to see how it was held. Not a boat could be found on the greater river; at Chamusca a daring party of fifty men swam its broad current, for a dash at some barks which were visible on the other side, but all were found to have had their bottoms carefully knocked out and to be filled with sand. Dejean, the officer who explored as far as Punhete on the Zezere, found all the bridges broken, and the garrison of Abrantes watching the fords, with strong detachments at Punhete and Martinchel.

Eblé found at Santarem that he had to create a pontoon equipage with no materials at all to work from. There was raw iron in the bars and balconies of houses, and raw timber in their floors and rafters, but nothing else. His smiths had to start on the weary task of forging saws and hammers, his carpenters had to turn housebreakers—in the technical sense—to obtain planks and joists. His task was hard, and would clearly take many weeks before it could be properly accomplished.

Meanwhile time was all-important to Masséna, for every day the country between Santarem and the Lines grew barer and yet more bare, as the foragers of the three French corps worked their will upon it. The men were already going into hospital by thousands, and dying there. Junot’s conscript battalions, unsheltered from the rain in their bleak bivouac above Sobral, suffered most—Ney’s and Reynier’s men were (for the most part) housed if not fed. The Army, which had 65,000 men on leaving Almeida, and 55,000 after the loss of Coimbra, had dwindled down to 50,000 effective sabres and bayonets by the month of November[524].

Wellington was already pondering on the possibility of taking the offensive. He had received hundreds of deserters during the last few weeks[525], and knew by their means of the miserable condition of the enemy—of the fact that the cavalry had nearly all been sent to the rear, and of the attempt that was being made to create a bridge-equipage at Santarem[526]. His dispatches of October 27 and November 3 to Lord Liverpool treat at length of the advantages and disadvantages of assailing the French in their present position[527]. He sets forth the strength of his own army—29,000 British troops present with the colours, after deducting sick and men detached, 24,000 Portuguese effective, and 5,000 of La Romana’s Spaniards, making a total of 58,615. He refuses to contemplate the use of the militia, infantry or artillery, in the field; considering their behaviour at Bussaco and elsewhere, ‘I should deceive myself if I could expect, or your Lordship if I should state, that any advantage would be derived from their assistance in an offensive operation against the enemy.’ On the other hand, he estimates Masséna’s fighting force at 55,000 men—a slight miscalculation, for there were only 50,000 effective at this moment, and of these 4,000 cavalry and one brigade of infantry were at Santarem and other distant places, from which they could not have been withdrawn for a battle suddenly forced upon their main corps. Masséna could really have put no more than 44,000 men in line within twenty-four hours of an alarm. Wellington then proceeds to argue that he must make a frontal attack, for if he drew a very large force out of the Lines, in order to assail the enemy’s flank by a wide encircling march, ‘the inevitable consequence of attempting such a manœuvre would be to open some one or other of the great roads to Lisbon, and to our shipping, of which the enemy would take immediate advantage to attain his object.’ Accordingly ‘we must carry their positions by main force, and in the course of the operation I must draw the army out of their cantonments, and expose men and horses to the inclemencies of the weather at this time of the year.’ Moreover, if Masséna were defeated, it would cause Soult to evacuate Granada, raise the siege of Cadiz, and come with 50,000 men to aid the army of Portugal. ‘So if I should succeed in forcing Masséna’s positions, it would become a question whether I should be able to maintain my own, in case the enemy should march another army into this country.’ Blake and the garrison of Cadiz, when freed from Soult’s presence, would certainly do nothing to help the general cause of the Allies. They would neither come to Portugal, nor be able to make a serious advance on Madrid, so as to draw off Soult in that direction. He therefore concludes, that ‘When I observe how small the superiority of numbers is in my favour, and know that the position will be in favour of the enemy, I am of opinion that I act in conformity with the intentions of His Majesty’s Government in waiting for the result of what is going on, and in incurring no extraordinary risk.’ What he calls ‘the safe game’ is to keep on the strict defensive, hoping that the enemy’s distress for provisions, and the operations of the militia in his rear, may cause him either to make a desperate attack on the Lines—in which he will be repulsed with awful loss—or else to make such large detachments, to clear off the corps of Wilson, Trant, and the rest, that it will become easy and safe to attack the remaining army in its present position.

Here, as when we considered the reasons which determined Wellington to evacuate the Coimbra country at the end of September, we are bound to recognize that he adopted an attitude of caution which he would not have assumed in 1812 and 1813, when he had thoroughly proved his army. The temptations to assail Junot’s isolated and advanced position at Sobral were enormous. The 8th Corps had been thrust forward into a re-entering angle of the British lines, in which it could be attacked from the left flank as well as from the front. It was wasting away daily from its privations, and had apparently not more than 10,000 bayonets left—the cavalry of the corps (Sainte-Croix’s old division) had been sent off to Santarem, save one regiment. To sustain Junot the 6th Corps could eventually be used, but only one brigade of it (that of Ferey) was in the first line, and this depleted unit, which had been so thoroughly routed at Bussaco, had its old enemy, Craufurd’s Light Division, in its front. Of the rest of the 6th Corps, one division was at Alemquer, eleven miles behind Sobral, the other at Otta, six miles behind Alemquer[528]. It would have taken the one four or five hours, the other nearly the whole of a short November day, to assemble and to come up. Reynier could not quit Hill’s front without freeing the latter’s two strong divisions for action. Meanwhile Wellington had disposable, in Junot’s immediate front, the divisions of Spencer, Cole, Leith, and Alex. Campbell [Picton had been sent back to Torres Vedras], plus the Portuguese brigades of Pack, Coleman, and A. Campbell, with La Romana’s Spaniards also, if he should choose to employ them—this, too, after leaving Craufurd to look after Ferey, and Hill to keep Reynier in check. It is impossible not to conclude that a sudden frontal and flank attack on Sobral with 30,000 men must have enveloped and crushed the 8th Corps. Though its position was good, its supports were too far off; Ney could not have come up to Junot’s aid, before he was overwhelmed. Masséna was uneasy about this possibility of disaster, and had issued orders on October 29 that if Junot and Ferey were attacked, they were to fall back on Alemquer, while Ney was to bring up his reserves to that same place, and Reynier to abandon his position in front of Alhandra and march on Alemquer also[529]. But the weak point of this arrangement was, that if Junot had been attacked at dawn, both in front and flank, by an overwhelming force, he could never have got back to Alemquer, and must have been cut off and battered to pieces close in the rear of Sobral. The English frontal attack—Spencer, Leith, and Pack—would have started at a distance of less than a mile from his position: Cole and Campbell on the flank had only two miles to cover. Both columns had a down-hill march before them till the line of rising ground about Sobral was reached. How could the 8th Corps have got away? Even an orderly retreat, with a fighting rearguard, would have been impossible.

But if Junot’s 10,000 men had been destroyed behind Sobral, Wellington would then have been in the position to push in between Ney and Reynier, whose columns would just have been beginning to near Alemquer. He might easily have driven them apart, and have forced them to retire on Santarem or some such distant point, in order to complete their junction. Even had they succeeded in joining, Masséna would have had a demoralized army of little over 30,000 men remaining. It is certain that he must have refused to fight, and have started on a disastrous retreat either by Castello Branco, or more likely by Thomar. For the latter direction would have brought him to his base at Almeida—the former would have taken him through an almost uninhabited country, to a part of Spain, the mid-Tagus, where no French army was ready to receive or succour him.

It is impossible, therefore, to doubt that Wellington had a great opportunity before him. Yet it is easy to see why he refused to take it. A mere victory of the second class—the thrusting of Junot out of his positions, not followed by the complete annihilation of the 8th Corps—would have done no more for him than he himself stated in the above-quoted dispatch of November 3. If Junot got away with the main body of his troops, and joined Ney and Reynier, and if their united army took up a defensive position at Santarem or elsewhere, Masséna might still hang on to Portugal, till Soult brought up to his aid the whole Army of Andalusia, or great reinforcements arrived from Castile. Any chance—a fog, heavy rain, the rashness or stupidity of some subordinate—might prevent the complete and instantaneous success of the attack on Sobral. These things being taken into consideration, Wellington resolved to lie still in the Lines, and to let the weapon of starvation play for some time longer on the French. He expected them to retire within a few days from sheer necessity, or else to deliver the much desired attack on his impregnable position.

Masséna had found that the preparation of his bridge equipage at Santarem would be a long business. He knew that his numbers were shrinking every day in the most appalling fashion, not only from deaths and invaliding, but from desertion. Yet he stood still for a fortnight longer than his adversary had expected, and meanwhile made a last desperate appeal for help to the Emperor. He had guessed that all his previous attempts to communicate with Spain had failed because his messengers had been sent without a sufficient escort, and had fallen by the way. Accordingly, he told off a body of more than 500 men to bear his next letter, and gave the command of them to an officer of well-known intelligence and resource—Foy, who had served in all the three Portuguese campaigns, Junot’s of 1808, Soult’s of 1809, and this last of his own. Moreover, it was known that Napoleon had confidence in his ability, though he was an old Republican, and had actually been one of the few who had refused to sign the address which was drawn up to ask the First Consul to declare himself Emperor in 1804. Foy was given a whole battalion of infantry—the 4th of the 47th of the Line—with 120 mounted men. He was told to avoid the main roads, to cross the Zezere, pass north of Castello Branco, and to try to reach Spain by way of Sabugal or Penamacor. This was obviously a difficult task, since the Ordenança were known to be abroad, even in this rugged and deserted region. To cover Foy’s start, Montbrun marched, with a brigade of dragoons and a couple of battalions of infantry, to make a demonstration against Abrantes, and draw the attention of its garrison from the upper Zezere. Montbrun forced the passage of the river at Punhete, after a sharp skirmish, and established his vanguard on the further side. He thus attracted to himself all the forces which Lobo, the governor of Abrantes, could spare outside his walls. Meanwhile (October 31) Foy passed the Zezere higher up, at an unguarded ford, and marched by Cardigos and Sobreira Formosa along the Castello Branco road. But he abandoned it before reaching that town, and turned north, crossing the Serra de Moradal by Fundão and Belmonte. From thence he reached Sabugal, and finally Ciudad Rodrigo on November 8. He had been unmolested save by a body of Ordenança, who cut off some of his stragglers. The passage of his column, whose strength was exaggerated by rumour, caused Carlos d’España to burn the bridge of Villa Velha, under the impression that Foy intended to seize it, and open up communication southward with Soult. He and Lobo reported to Wellington that Foy and Montbrun were the van of a great force, which was about to overrun and occupy the Castello Branco country[530]. But Masséna’s messenger had no other object than to reach Castile with as great rapidity as possible, and without fighting.

Arrived at Rodrigo, Foy gave over his escort to General Gardanne, with orders to him to collect all the convalescents of the Army of Portugal, and to draw out the garrison of Rodrigo and Almeida, if Drouet was now in condition to take charge of these fortresses. This should give him a force of 6,000 men, with which he was ordered to cut his way to join the main army, to whom he was to bring a convoy of ammunition, which was running desperately low at the front. How badly Gardanne executed his charge we shall presently see.

Foy meanwhile, with a fresh dragoon escort, rode for Salamanca and Valladolid, at which last place he was disgusted to find Drouet and the bulk of the 9th Corps, whom he had expected to meet at Rodrigo[531]. He met the general, and passed on to him Masséna’s request that he would collect the whole of his 16,000 men, and march on Almeida, and from thence down the Mondego to Coimbra, after which he was to open up communication with the main army by Leiria or Thomar. Drouet, assuming some of the airs of a commander-in-chief, did not show the eagerness to carry out these directions which Foy had hoped to find.

From Valladolid Foy rode straight through by post, braving guerrilla bands and swollen rivers, through Burgos and Bayonne to Paris, which he reached on the night of November 21. On the next day he delivered his dispatches to the Emperor, and was put through two hours of sharp cross-questioning by his master. The notes of this conversation, taken down the same afternoon by the general, are one of the most interesting documents for the study of Napoleon’s psychology. Striding up and down his study, pouring out strings of queries, rapid judgements, rebukes and laudations, even anecdotes and screeds of political philosophy, the Emperor presented a wonderful picture of restless and far-reaching intellectual activity. Foy put in his excuses and explanations in the gaps of the Emperor’s tirades. ‘Why the devil did Masséna thrust himself into that muddle[532] at Bussaco? Even in a plain country columns do not break through lines, unless they are supported by a superior artillery fire.’ ‘And the disgrace at Coimbra, where he has let his hospitals be taken by 1,500 ragged rascals! To lose your hospitals is as disgraceful as to lose your flags! In a regularly organized country—England, for example—Masséna would have gone to the scaffold for that job. The English are full of courage and honour: they defend themselves well. Masséna and Ney did not know them, but Reynier, whom they had beaten twice or thrice [Alexandria and Maida], ought to know them! Wellington has behaved like a clever man: his total desolation of the kingdom of Portugal is the result of systematic measures splendidly concerted. I could not do that myself, for all my power. Why did not Masséna stop at Coimbra, after Bussaco?’ ‘Because,’ faltered Foy, ‘supposing he had done so, Your Majesty would have reproached him by saying “If you had only pushed straight on Lisbon the English would have embarked.”’ ‘Very possible, indeed,’ replied the Emperor, breaking into a broad smile. ‘Well, I wanted to drive them into the sea: I have failed. All right; then I will have a regular campaign in Portugal, and use them up. I can wear them down in the nature of things, because England cannot compete in mere numbers with me.’ Then followed an excursus into the characters of French generals—Junot, Ney, Soult especially. Then a curious confession that he had made a miscalculation in taking up the Spanish war: ‘I thought the system easier to change than it has proved in that country, with its corrupt minister, its feeble king, and its shameless, dissolute queen. But for all that, I don’t repent of what I did; I had to smash up that nation: sooner or later they would have done me a bad turn.’

Then comes the Emperor’s conclusion upon the present state of affairs. ‘Masséna must take Abrantes—Elvas would be of no good to us. The only way to get Wellington to make a forward move will be to force him to try to raise the siege of Abrantes. As long as Masséna stays in position opposite Lisbon, nothing is lost; he is still a terror to the English, and keeps the offensive. If he retreats, I fear great disaster for him. But why did he not take up some regular plan of operations? The very day after he reconnoitred the Lisbon lines, it was clear that he would never attack them. I will send immediate orders for the 5th Corps [Mortier] to invade the Alemtejo. Will they be obeyed? At that distance only those who choose carry out my directions. [A hint at Soult’s selfish policy.] I tremble lest Masséna may call Drouet down to him, and then get his communications cut again. By communications I mean sure points, at two or three marches distance, properly garrisoned and provisioned, where convoys can rest and be safe. An army without open communications loses heart and gets demoralized.... All the hope of the English is in that army of Wellington’s! If we could destroy it, it would be a terrible blow to them.’

The Emperor, pleased with Foy’s intelligent explanations of the situation, created him a general of division, and told him to rest for a month, and then return to Portugal. He sent for him to administer a second catechism on the 24th, and then condescended to explain his view of the situation, and his orders for the future. He quite approved of Masséna’s resolve to hold out in front of the Lines, and had already given Drouet directions to assemble his corps at Almeida, and open up communications with the Army of Portugal—in fact, the order to do so had been sent off as early as November 3, and its bearer must have crossed Foy somewhere on the road[533]. Soult had also been ordered, two days before Masséna’s appeal came to hand, to create a diversion in the direction of Spanish Estremadura[534]. He was now sent a sharp reproof for having done nothing, and more especially for having allowed La Romana to slip away with two divisions to Lisbon unmolested[535]. But it seems clear that no orders to concentrate his whole army and invade the Alemtejo were sent him, and these were the only measures that could have helped Masséna. Napoleon’s obiter dictum that it would be no use to besiege and capture Elvas shows a misapprehension of the situation. A mere demonstration in Spanish Estremadura might call back La Romana, but would not help the Army of Portugal to any appreciable extent. It was not La Romana’s 8,000 men who formed the strength of the defence of Lisbon. Wellington could have spared them without harm, and, indeed, sent them away long before Masséna quitted Portugal.

It may be added that (as facts were to show ere long) the mere sending up of Drouet to the front was not nearly sufficient to put Masséna in a position to incommode Wellington, more especially when the 9th Corps was told to drop detachments at short intervals at every stage after Almeida. By following these orders, indeed, Drouet brought to the main army a mere 6,000 men on December 26, having left the rest of his corps beyond the Mondego. His arrival was of absolutely no use to the Prince of Essling. The one thing which could have saved Masséna was the arrival, not of a small field force such as Drouet or Mortier commanded, but of a large army, on the Lower Tagus, and on its southern side. Such an army, as the disposition of the French troops in Spain then stood, could only have been produced if Soult had consented to abandon Granada, raise the siege of Cadiz, and march with the greater part of the Army of Andalusia into the Alemtejo, masking Badajoz and Elvas, and leaving a division or two in Seville to keep Blake and the Spanish troops from Cadiz in check. But the Duke of Dalmatia could never be induced to abandon two-thirds of his Andalusian viceroyalty, in order to execute a movement whose results, if successful, would mainly redound to the glory of Masséna. Nothing short of a definite and peremptory order from Paris would have made him call in Victor and Sebastiani, and evacuate Eastern and Southern Andalusia. Such an order the Emperor did not send. His dispatch of Dec. 4 only ordered that a corps of 10,000 men should advance to the Tagus in the direction of Villa Velha and Montalvão, to communicate with Masséna[536]. Soult undertook instead a blow at Badajoz, in January, with a force of 20,000 men, while leaving Cadiz still blockaded and Granada still held. Napoleon, therefore, must take the blame of the final failure of the invasion of Portugal. As has been shown above, from his own words, he was conscious that he was too far from the scene of operation, and that mere ordinary directions to his lieutenants might not be carried out with zeal. ‘Je donne l’ordre. L’exécutera-t-on? De si loin obéit qui veut[537].’ But if this were so, it was surely necessary either that he should go to Spain in person, or else—the more obvious alternative—that he should appoint a real Commander-in-Chief in the Peninsula, who should have authority to order all the other marshals and generals to obey his directions, without malingering or appeals to Paris. Napoleon had deliberately created a divided authority beyond the Pyrenees when he set up his military governments, and instructed Suchet, Kellermann, and the other governors to report directly to himself, and to pay no attention to commands emanating from Madrid[538]. King Joseph, as a central source of orders, had been reduced to a nullity by this ill-conceived decree. Even over the troops not included in the new viceroyalties he had no practical authority. Not he and his chief of the staff, but Masséna, ought to have been entrusted with a full and autocratic power of command over all the armies of Spain, if a true unity of purpose was to be achieved.

This necessary arrangement the Emperor utterly refused to carry out: he sent rebukes to Drouet for hesitating to obey the orders of the Prince of Essling, and he jested at the absurd conduct of Ney and Junot in conducting themselves like independent generals[539]. But these officers were in command of troops definitely allotted to the Army of Portugal. Over the other generals of Spain he refused to allow Masséna any control, and he continued to send them his own ever-tardy instructions, which had often ceased to be appropriate long before the dispatch had reached its destination. If we seek the reasons of this unwise persistence in his old methods, we find that they were two. The first was his secret, but only half-disguised, intention to annex all the Spanish provinces north of the Ebro to France, an insane resolve which led him to keep Suchet and Macdonald in Aragon and Catalonia, as well as the governors of Navarre and Biscay, out of the control of any central authority that he might set up in Spain. The second was his jealousy of entrusting the vast army south of the Ebro, far more than 250,000 men at the moment, to any single commander. He remembered Soult’s absurd strivings after royalty in Portugal; he knew that Masséna, though the best of soldiers, was false, selfish, and ambitious; and he refused to hand over to either of them a full control over the whole of the forces in the Peninsula. It was even better, in his estimation, to leave King Joseph a shadow of power, than to take the risk of giving overmuch authority to one of the two able, but not wholly trustworthy, marshals to whom he must otherwise have entrusted it.

The war in Portugal, therefore, went on as a mere section of the great contest in the Peninsula; the other and less important episodes were not made wholly subordinate to it. And if this system continued Wellington was free from any real danger. He knew it himself; he studied diligently both the political position and the details of the emplacement of the imperial armies in the Peninsula. He was fortunate enough to secure whole budgets of French dispatches captured by the Ordenança[540], and all that he read confirmed him in his conclusion. ‘I calculate,’ he writes on October 27, ‘that a reinforcement of 15,000 men would not now give the enemy so good an army as they had at Bussaco. He lost 2,000 killed or taken there: Trant took 5,000 at Coimbra: above 1,000 prisoners have gone through this army: many have been killed by the peasantry. They cannot have less than 4,000 sick[541], after the march they have made, and the weather to which they are exposed. The deserters tell us that almost every one is sick. From this statement you may judge of the diminution of their numbers; and you will see that I have not much reason to apprehend anything from [Drouet’s] “quinze beaux bataillons which fought at Essling”[542], and which cannot be here before the middle of November. I do not think I have much to apprehend even if Mortier is added to them. However, we shall see how that will be.... All the accounts which I receive of the distresses of the enemy for want of provisions would tend to a belief that their army cannot remain long in the position in which it is placed, and it is astonishing that they have been able to remain here so long as this[543].’ That they have succeeded in staying even a fortnight in front of the Lines is, he adds, entirely the fault of the Portuguese government, for not carrying out thoroughly the work of devastation. But, for the reasons stated on an earlier page, Wellington was resolved not to take the offensive, even against a foe whose ranks were beginning to grow thin. Famine should do the work, and no lives should be wasted.

There remained only one danger: it was just possible that Soult, even though Masséna had not yet suffered any disaster great enough to make the evacuation of Eastern Andalusia imperative, might send Mortier and some additional divisions of his other corps to Spanish Estremadura, and make a dash at the Lower Tagus. Masséna’s boat-building at Santarem, of which every deserter spoke, might be intended to give him the materials for a bridge by which he might communicate across the Lower Tagus with Soult. Wellington accordingly resolved to keep a strict watch beyond the Tagus, and to have a flying force ready, which could hinder the construction of a bridge or a bridge head. With this object on November 2 he sent over the Tagus General Fane, with his 1,500 Portuguese horse, a battalion of Caçadores, and a few guns. All the North Alemtejo Ordenança were called out to watch the river banks, and to lend what small assistance they could to the cavalry. Fane discovered the French dockyard at Santarem, and tried to fire it with rockets on November 13. He failed, but the mere appearance of his little force on the further bank of the Tagus had some good effect, since it warned Masséna that an attempt to pass the broad river would not be unopposed, and therefore made him more chary of attempting it. Fane, being in touch with Abrantes on his right hand and with Lisbon on his left, now formed, as it were, a section of the blockading screen which was thrown round the whole French army.

Wellington had miscalculated the time which the French could afford to spend in front of the Lines, without suffering actual starvation, by about a fortnight. On November 10 Masséna gave orders for the evacuation of his whole position, and a general retreat on Santarem, because it had become absolutely impossible to stay any longer on the ground facing Zibreira and Alhandra, unless the whole army was to perish. The report from the 8th Corps may suffice to give in a few words the condition of affairs, ‘General Clausel wishes to observe that during the daytime he cannot count on any other troops save those actually guarding the outpost line. The majority of the men are absent on raids to the rear, to seek for maize and cattle. The last detachment which came back to camp had been nine days away. Generals and soldiers agree in stating that for some time it has only been possible to collect a little corn with extreme difficulty. For eight days the troops have been living on polenta (boiled maize flour) alone, and of this they have received only half a ration. During the last four days the 1st Division has received only one ration of meat, which amounted to six ounces of goat’s-flesh. If the corps had to make a retreat, it would have to abandon its sick and wounded for want of carts, which the intendant-generals will not furnish[544].’ The condition of the 2nd and 6th Corps was only so far better that they had to send their foragers a less distance, when seeking for the scanty store which could still be gleaned from the hidden granaries of the Portuguese.

But Masséna had no intention of retiring on Spain when he began to issue orders for a general movement to the rear. Profoundly sensible of the difficulties of a November retreat through the mountains, trusting that he might block the British army by maintaining a bold attitude in its front, and still hoping that large reinforcements might reach him ere long from Drouet and Mortier, he had resolved only to evacuate the Lisbon peninsula, and to retire no further than to the flat and fertile lands between Santarem and the Zezere. In the Plain of Golegão, as it is sometimes called, he hoped to feed his army for many weeks more, for the region was still comparatively full of resources, since it had only been exploited as yet by the garrison of Santarem and the flying columns which had marched to the Zezere. It was now his cherished hope that Wellington might follow him into the plain-land, abandoning his defensive system, and consenting to give battle in the open. The English might even be induced to attack the French army when it should have taken up a new and a strong position. In somewhat rash confidence the Marshal professed himself certain of the result, even with his depleted army of under 50,000 men, if Wellington would consent to fight. At the worst, if starved out again or beaten in the field, he would retreat on Spain by Castello Branco, for which purpose he had sent up the greater part of his boat-train from Santarem to build a bridge over the Zezere. He had also pushed part of Loison’s brigade of infantry across that river at Punhete, and was holding with it a point suitable for a tête-du-pont. A regiment of dragoons was attached to this force: it skirmished not unfrequently with parties sent out to reconnoitre from Abrantes, but with no serious result. For General Lobo, the governor, had no intention of coming out with a large detachment, in order to push the French advanced guard back over the river. He had been ordered to keep to the defensive, and only sent out occasional reconnaissances to see whether the enemy were still in position.

Loison’s troops were now no longer the only large force which had quitted the army in front of the Lines. Not only was Montbrun, with the main body of the cavalry, watching the roads from the north, but six battalions of infantry had been sent up from the 6th Corps on November 8 to occupy Torres Novas and Thomar. If Wellington had attacked the enemy behind Sobral on any day after that date, he would have found Ney short of fourteen battalions[545] out of the thirty-four which formed his corps. There would have been only 10,000 infantry ready to support Junot in the direction of Alemquer. But this fact, of course, was unknown to the English general, who had already made up his mind not to take the offensive. If it had come to his knowledge, he might have attacked, even at the last moment, with an enormous probability of inflicting on the enemy not the mere repulse that he disliked to contemplate—on account of its ulterior effects—but a crushing defeat, which might have hurled them out of Portugal.

On November 10 Masséna ordered the hospitals of the 6th and 8th Corps at Alemquer, and of the 2nd Corps at Azambuja, to be sent off to Santarem. At the same time the intendants of the commissariat were ordered to direct to the rear the meagre store of provisions which was in their possession, loaded on the much depleted transport train which still survived. On the 13th the reserve parks and the artillery train of each corps were ordered to follow. On the 14th, at eight o’clock in the evening, the infantry, many of whom lay in contact with the British lines, acted on their marching directions. Ney’s main body, which was out of sight of Wellington, was to move first; then Junot and Ferey’s brigade, whose movement was most perilous—for if their departure were discovered while they were on the hither side of the defile of Alemquer, they ran a great risk of being enveloped and destroyed. Reynier was to maintain his position at Villafranca and Carregado, until it was reported to him that Junot and his corps had passed Alemquer and reached Moinho de Cubo. For if the 2nd Corps had gone off at an early hour, and its departure had been discovered, Hill might have marched from Alhandra on Alemquer quickly enough to intercept Junot at that point; and if Junot were being pursued at the moment by the troops from his immediate front, the whole 8th Corps might have been cut off.

On the night of the 14th, when the movement was commencing, Masséna was favoured with the greatest piece of luck which had come to him since the explosion of Almeida. A fog began to rise in the small hours, and had become dense by the early morning. It caused some difficulty to the retiring troops, and dragoons had to be placed at every cross road to point out the right direction to the infantry columns[546]. But it had the all-important result of permitting the British outposts to see nothing at dawn. The limit visible to them was less than 100 yards. It was only at ten o’clock in the morning of the 15th that the mists were suddenly rolled up by an east wind, and that the nearer outposts could see that the French sentinels in front of them had disappeared. The first alarm was given by Campbell’s 6th Division[547]. The news spread along the whole line from west to east, and reached the Commander-in-Chief, who ascended the hill in front of Sobral a few minutes later[548]. The ingenuity of the enemy in concealing his departure had been great. Ferey’s brigade, in front of Arruda, had erected a well-designed line of dummy sentinels before the Light Division, which were not discovered to be men of straw, topped with old shakos and bound to poles, till the fog rolled off on the 15th[549].

Meanwhile the French had accomplished the first stage of their retreat absolutely unmolested. Ney had retreated as far as Alcoentre; Junot had passed the defile of Alemquer, and passed through Moinho de Cubo to Aveira de Cima. Reynier, who had waited till Junot was in safety before he withdrew at eight in the morning, reached Cartaxo before the day ended. The first and most difficult stage of the retreat had been finished without a shot being fired. What would have happened had the night of the 14th been clear and starry, and the morning sun had shone out on the 15th, so that Junot would have been detected as he was passing Alemquer, and Reynier would have been visible still in line of battle behind Villafranca, the French diarists of the campaign prefer not to contemplate. Yet they mostly continued to speak of Wellington as a mediocre general, who had all the luck on his side.

On the night of the 15th the British Commander-in-Chief had to draw his deductions from the facts before him. Three things were possible: Masséna might have been so thoroughly starved out and broken in spirit, that he might be intending to retire on Spain, either via Thomar and the Mondego, or by his new bridge on the Zezere and the route of Castello Branco. Or he might be proposing to cross the Tagus by means of the boats and pontoons still remaining at Santarem, to seek unwasted fields in the Alemtejo and a junction with Mortier. Or, again, he might merely be abandoning a position that was no longer tenable, in order to take up a new one—perhaps at Santarem, perhaps at Thomar, but very possibly at and about Abrantes, whose siege he might be contemplating[550].

On the whole Wellington thought it probable that the last-named plan was the one which Masséna intended to adopt. A retreat on Spain would not only be difficult and dangerous, but inconsistent with the Marshal’s obstinate and courageous temper. It was much more likely that he would endeavour to hold out in Portugal, and meanwhile to cover his partial discomfiture by a bold stroke, such as the siege of Abrantes, which would still give an offensive air to his movements, and would also throw on the British army the responsibility of relieving the fortress. Such a course, it will be remembered, was what Napoleon recommended to Foy[551]. ‘There is still a chance that the enemy may take up and try to keep a position at Santarem,’ wrote Wellington to Fane on the night of the 15th, ‘endeavouring to keep his rear open, and to get a communication with Ciudad Rodrigo across the Zezere.’ But he was inclined to think that Abrantes was Masséna’s goal. He therefore directed Fane to transfer his cavalry to the point opposite Abrantes on the south bank of the Tagus, and requested Carlos d’España to enter the place and strengthen the garrison. He intended to pass over Hill’s two divisions to strengthen Fane, and for that purpose directed Admiral Berkeley to prepare all the boats of the fleet to ferry Hill across to Salvaterra, on the south bank of the Tagus, from whence his force could join Fane, and either reinforce Abrantes, by means of its bridge of boats, or join in the pursuit of Masséna if he were about (an unlikely chance) to retire on Spain by way of his bridge over the Zezere[552] and Castello Branco.

Meanwhile all was still uncertain, and it was Wellington’s first task to find out what roads the enemy had taken in his retreat. He did not on the 15th order his whole army to leave the Lines in headlong pursuit. Only Spencer, Craufurd, and Hill were directed to march that afternoon. The former, with a cavalry regiment out in his front, occupied Sobral, and pushed its vanguard forward to Alemquer by the high road. The second left Arruda, climbed the low hills in front of him, where Ferey had been encamped for the last month, and felt his way to Alemquer, by the bad road which his immediate adversary had taken eighteen hours before. Hill followed the great chaussée along the Tagus bank, by Villafranca and Castanheira, and reached Carregado before dark. He was warned to be in readiness to cross the river, by means of Admiral Berkeley’s boats, at the earliest possible moment, in case the French should have built a bridge at Santarem to enable them to cross into the Alemtejo.[553]

The advancing troops found the French camps, and the villages where the more fortunate battalions had been quartered under cover, in the most dreadful condition. ‘The Alemquer road was covered with horses, mules, and asses which had perished from want of forage. We passed many French soldiers lying dead by the road-side, whose appearance indicated that disease and want of food had carried them off. Every house in every town or village was thoroughly ransacked[554].’ ‘Alemquer had been entirely sacked, the windows and doors torn down and burnt, as well as most of the furniture; china, pier-glasses, and chandeliers all dashed to pieces with the objectless fury of savages. They had left many miserable fellows behind, who were too ill to march: these were, of course, put to death by the Portuguese whenever we happened to miss finding them out. We found several peasants whom the French had murdered and left upon the road, and also several French killed by the Portuguese. It was a dreadful sight to see so many fine towns and villages sacked, and without a creature in them.’[555]

On the 15th none of the enemy had been seen save the dead and the abandoned sick. The traces of their retreat, however, showed that all had gone off by the roads towards Santarem. On the 16th Wellington moved more troops out of the Lines, to support Hill, Craufurd, and Spencer, in the event of the enemy showing fight. Slade’s horse followed Spencer, Pack’s Portuguese followed Craufurd; Picton, Leith, Cole, and Campbell were left in the Lines, which Wellington still disliked to leave wholly unguarded while he was not yet certain of the ultimate intentions of the French. The advanced guard picked up about 300 prisoners this day—partly marauders, partly debilitated men who could not keep up with their regiments during a second stage of hard marching. Next day (November 17) it was evident that the enemy was being overtaken: Anson’s cavalry brigade, which had reached the front on the preceding night, cut up a number of small parties of the French rearguard—the 16th Light Dragoons alone captured two officers and 78 men, not stragglers, but belated pickets and convoy guards. One of their exploits was long remembered—Sergeant Baxter, with five men only, came on an infantry outpost of 50 men, who had stacked their arms and were cooking. Bursting in upon them, he captured an officer and 41 men, though some of the Frenchmen had got to their muskets and wounded one of his troopers.[556]

On the afternoon of the 17th the enemy’s rearguard was at last discovered, drawn up on a heath outside the village of Cartaxo. It consisted of one of Reynier’s divisions, which Craufurd was preparing to attack, when the Commander-in-Chief came up, and refused him leave to begin the combat, because neither Hill nor Spencer was within supporting distance of him. Opinions differed as to whether an attack would have led to a repulse by superior numbers, or to the capture of the French division, which had a bridge and a long causeway—a most dangerous defile—in its rear[557]. Probably Craufurd was not in quite sufficient strength to be certain of success: he had but six strong battalions[558], a battery, and the 16th Light Dragoons in his company. The enemy had the eleven weak battalions of Merle’s division, and two regiments of cavalry: probably 1,000 bayonets and 300 sabres in all more than Craufurd could command. But an attack made with vigour, when half the French had begun to retire across the defile, might have had considerable results. Merle’s division was, however, allowed to retire unmolested in the evening, while the Light Division took up quarters for the night at Cartaxo. Reynier drew back the whole of his corps next morning to the environs of Santarem, which he had been directed to defend. Meanwhile the 8th Corps had reached Pernes with one division, and Alcanhede with the other and its cavalry: these were the points at which Junot had been ordered to stay his retreat. The bulk of the 6th Corps was at Thomar, but Loison’s division had been kept in the neighbourhood of the Zezere[559], and part of Marchand’s infantry and Ney’s corps-cavalry were at Cabaços. The retreat was thus ended, for Masséna was in possession of the new ground on which he intended to maintain himself for the winter, and he was prepared to accept a defensive battle if Wellington should push him any further. His left flank near the Tagus (Reynier’s corps) was advanced: his right flank (Junot’s corps) much ‘refused.’ Ney was forming the central reserve.

Unfortunately for himself the British Commander-in-Chief received, on the night of the 17th, confusing intelligence, which led him to the false conclusion that the enemy was still retiring, and was aiming either for Abrantes or for the borders of Spain. This news was sent by Fane, who from the other bank of the Tagus had observed French columns and convoys marching eastward from Santarem towards the Zezere[560], and wrongly inferred that the main army was making for this direction, and that only a rearguard had been left in Santarem. He was also influenced by the fact, reported from Abrantes, that Masséna had cast a second bridge over the Zezere near Punhete, as if to give him a quicker chance of passing that river. In consequence of this news, Wellington directed Hill to cross the Tagus at Vallada with his own division, Hamilton’s Portuguese, and the 13th Light Dragoons, in order to strengthen Abrantes if it were assailed, or to fall on the flank of the French, if they were merely passing that fortress on their retreat to Spain. Thus he deprived himself of 14,000 men on the right bank of the Tagus, where alone troops were really needed. To make up for Hill’s absence, Leith’s and Cole’s divisions were called out of the Lines, where they had rested till this moment (18th November)[561]. But they were two marches off, and Wellington had for the moment in his front line only Craufurd, Spencer, Pack’s Portuguese, and Slade’s and Anson’s cavalry, a force of some 16,000 men. Reynier was in his immediate front at Santarem, with 13,000 men of all arms. Junot’s corps at Alcanhede and Pernes was twelve miles away, and about 11,000 strong: the greater part of his men could have been brought up in half a day’s march. Ney was too distant to come up in less than 24 hours, and then only with half his corps, as Loison and one of Marchand’s brigades were far away. But if Wellington had attacked Santarem on the 19th the Duke of Elchingen would have appeared next morning.

Craufurd was as strongly convinced as his chief that there was nothing in front of him but a rearguard on the night of the 18th, and he even doubted whether the last of the French would not withdraw at midnight. It was this that induced him to make the curious personal exploration mentioned by Napier (iii. 63)[562], when, followed by a single sergeant only, he pushed along the causeway in the small hours of the morning, ran into the French picket, and escaped as if by miracle the volley that was fired at him. The picket reported to Reynier that they had been seriously attacked, had killed three of their assailants, and had heard the groans of wounded dragged away by the survivors. Craufurd and his sergeant retired, thoroughly convinced that the causeway had not been evacuated.

It was undoubtedly fortunate for the British Commander-in-Chief that his habitual caution prevented him from making a serious attack on the force at Santarem, under the impression that it was a mere rearguard, left behind to detain him while the enemy’s main body was pushing for Abrantes. Reynier’s position was very formidable. The town of Santarem, surrounded by an old mediaeval wall, stands on a lofty height above the Tagus, with a narrow suburb—where the French dockyard had been established—along the lower edge of the hill. But this was only the third and last line of the defensive position. In front of it lay low alluvial ground, inundated by the rain which had been falling during the last fortnight, and barely passable save by the chaussée from Lisbon. The plain was cut in two by the Rio Mayor, a deep muddy stream at this time of the year, and to reach Santarem a narrow bridge over this obstacle had to be passed. Just where the chaussée leaves the marsh, to climb towards the town, was a long knoll, completely commanding the road: on this Reynier had placed a battery with infantry supports. This force must be driven in by the British, and the only practicable way to reach it was by forcing a passage along the causeway, for the marsh between the road and the Tagus turned out, when explored, to be practically inaccessible to formed troops, though individuals might wade through it in a few places. Behind the advanced French knoll were the foot-hills of the lofty ridge on which Santarem lies. The enemy were visible upon it, working hard at the construction of a line of abattis from the olive-trees which cover its slopes. Behind this, again, was the town itself, hastily prepared for defence.

On the morning of November 19th the British advanced guard was on the edge of the swampy plain; Craufurd’s Light Division occupied the near end of the long bridge over the Rio Mayor, and skirmished with the French outposts, who refused to retire from the further side. Spencer came up more to the left, and further inland, Pack’s Portuguese reached the upper course of the Rio Mayor. Neither Leith nor Cole had yet arrived at the front, so that the force available for an attack was no more than 16,000 men. Nevertheless, Wellington, still hoping that he had only a rearguard in front of him, made dispositions for a demonstration against the enemy’s front, which was to be turned into a real attack if he showed want of strength. Craufurd was directed to advance across the swamp near the Tagus, if he found it practicable. Pack was to cross the upper Rio Mayor, and turn the hostile right. Spencer was formed at the entrance of the bridge and causeway, and ordered to charge up the chaussée at the French centre, and the battery commanding the road, so soon as he should see that the flanking divisions were making good progress. Fortunately for Wellington the attack was never delivered: more rain during the night had made the marsh so waterlogged that Craufurd, who had crossed the Rio Mayor by a narrow wooden bridge near Valle, came to a stand in the slush, though a few of his skirmishers pushed far enough forward to engage the enemy’s pickets on the other side. Pack’s Portuguese on the left flank got across the river with much difficulty, but their guns were absolutely stuck in the mud far to the rear, and the brigadier sent back word to Wellington that he should advance no further without special orders. The 1st Division had not yet begun to move. Thereupon the Commander-in-Chief called back both Craufurd and Pack, and gave up his plan. It is clear that he had nourished some intention of attacking in earnest, for he wrote to Hill that afternoon: ‘I did not attack Santarem this morning, as the artillery of the left wing (Pack) had lost its way, and I am rather glad that I did not attack, as the enemy have there undoubtedly a very strong post, and we must endeavour to turn it. And if they [the main body] have not retired across the Zezere or towards the Alva, they must be too strong for us here.’

It is obvious that both Wellington’s and Masséna’s strategy on the 18th and 19th November is exposed to criticism. Why had the British General only 16,000 men to the front on these days, when he was risking a general action with the French? One of two courses must have been adopted by the enemy: either he must be marching hard for the Zezere, and intending to retire into Spain, or he must be merely changing his ground, and proposing to fight at Santarem, or in front of Abrantes, or elsewhere. In either case it was strange tactics for Wellington to take the field with 16,000 men (deducting Hill on the other side of the Tagus), while he left Leith and Cole two or three marches behind, and still kept the divisions of Picton, Campbell, and Le Cor, and the unattached Portuguese brigade of Coleman and Alex. Campbell—20,000 men—unmoved within the Lines. For if the enemy was flying, there was no need to leave such a force of regulars to guard positions which the French could not be intending to attack. While if the other hypothesis was correct, and Masséna, with an army which Wellington still reckoned at 50,000 men, was in a fighting mood, and ready to give battle if he saw an advantageous opportunity, it was still more inexcusable to leave behind 20,000 men, who would be wanted for the decisive struggle.

On the other hand, the French Marshal was taking a terrible risk also. Supposing Wellington had been leading his whole force—deducting Hill—for a resolute attack on the Santarem positions, which was the most probable course for him to adopt, he might have had not only the 16,000 men that he had actually brought forward, but Leith and Cole with 11,000 more, and Picton and the other 20,000 men left in the Lines, a force, if the cavalry be thrown in, of full 50,000 sabres and bayonets. If Wellington had left Craufurd and Pack to block the marshy southern exit from Santarem, which was as difficult for Reynier as for his adversaries, he might have thrown 40,000 men into the empty space of twelve miles between Reynier and Junot, have driven away the latter’s 11,000 men, and surrounded Reynier’s 13,000 in Santarem. Ney could not have got up in time to prevent this. The 2nd Corps would either have had to surrender, for it had hardly any food, or to cut its way out with disastrous losses[563].

Reynier saw this perfectly, and was in an agony of mind on the 18th and 19th. He wrote urgent appeals to Masséna, for permission to abandon Santarem on the former day, pointing out that if his front was practically inaccessible, because of the swamps, his right might be turned by the upper Rio Mayor, where he had only a single regiment in observation, to face what might be an overwhelming strength of British troops, who might be preparing to cut in between him and Junot. He sent all his train, sick, and wounded to Golegão[564], and besought leave to follow them. When he received a peremptory reply, to the effect that he was to hold Santarem to the last, he came to the conclusion that he was to be sacrificed in order to allow the other two corps to escape unmolested. When Pack advanced on the 19th he sent the report that he was turned by 10,000 British troops—Pack had but 3,000 Portuguese—and that Clausel with Junot’s nearest division was too far off to succour him. He prepared to suffer a disaster, and to die fighting[565]. He ordered his troops to surround Santarem, in rear as well as in front, with a double line of abattis, and continued to strengthen and repair its old walls.

Nothing, therefore, could exceed Reynier’s relief when Pack and Craufurd halted, and Spencer did not move at all, after the firing had begun upon the 19th. On the next morning the British army was still stationary, save that a cavalry reconnaissance, pushed northward from Pack’s position on the upper Rio Mayor, discovered Junot’s outposts in the direction of Alcanhede and Pernes, and reported to Wellington that the enemy was in strength, with all arms, in this direction. Leith’s division came up this morning, raising the British force to 21,000 men, but this, as the Commander-in-Chief now saw, was not sufficient to enable him to deal with two corps d’armée, of which one was in an inaccessible position and now stockaded up to the eyes. He halted, and sent, very tardily, orders for Cole to join in haste, and for Campbell’s division to come up from the Lines. But even thus he was too weak to strike. Hill was now at Almeirim, half way to Abrantes on the other side of the Tagus. Fane had actually entered Abrantes, and sent news that the enemy was making no forward movement from the Zezere. Thus at last Wellington discovered that he must have practically the whole French army in his front, while his own forces were in a state of terrible dispersion.

On the 21st he wrote a dispatch to Lord Liverpool which shows that he had given up all intention of pushing Masséna further. ‘Although the enemy have moved large bodies of troops eastward from Santarem, I have not heard that any large body has crossed the Zezere.... Their army being collected between Santarem and the Zezere, they are in a situation to be able to maintain themselves in their strong position till the reinforcements, which I know are on the frontier, can join them. For this reason, and because I am unwilling to expose to the inclemencies of the weather a larger body of troops than is absolutely necessary to press upon the enemy’s rear, and to support my advanced guard, I have kept in reserve a considerable proportion of the allied army—some of them still in their cantonments in the Lines, our fortified position. I have ordered General Hill to halt the head of his corps at Chamusca [on the other side of the Tagus, fifteen miles south of Abrantes] till the enemy’s movements have been decided.... The rain, which has been very heavy since the 15th, has so completely filled the rivulets and destroyed the roads, that I have hitherto found it impossible to dislodge the enemy from his position at Santarem, by movements through the hills on his right flank. Possibly the bad state of the roads has also been the cause of his remaining at Santarem so long.... The enemy’s army may be reinforced, and they may again induce me to think it expedient, in the existing state of affairs in the Peninsula, to resume my positions [the Lines]. But I do not believe that they have it in their power to bring such a force against us as to render the contest a matter of doubt[566].’

In a supplementary dispatch, dated the same day, Wellington adds: ‘At first I thought the enemy were off, and I am not quite certain yet that they are not going.... I am convinced that there is no man in his senses, who has ever passed a winter in Portugal, who would not recommend them to go now, rather than to endeavour to maintain themselves upon the Zezere during the winter, or than attack our position, whatever may be the strength of their reinforcements.’

There were, indeed, men in the French camp who advised Masséna to continue his retreat, but he had no intention of taking up a timid policy after braving so many passed dangers. He had resolved to maintain himself between Santarem and the Zezere, and to call down Drouet and other reinforcements[567], in the hope that, ere the winter was over, the Emperor might find means to strengthen him to a force which, with the co-operation of Soult from Andalusia, would enable him finally to resume the offensive, and make a second and more formidable attack upon the Lines. In adopting this resolve he was, though as yet he knew it not, carrying out the instructions which the Emperor was at this very moment (November 22) dictating to Foy at Paris. But Wellington had not written at random when he reminded Lord Liverpool of the terrors of a Portuguese winter, and in the end the Prince of Essling was forced to begin on the 1st of March, with under 40,000 men of his original force, the retreat which he might have commenced on November 20 with over 50,000[568].

The scheme for starving out the French, which Wellington had devised early in 1810, and begun to execute in September, was now transferred to a different area. Masséna had been able to endure for a month in front of the Lisbon Lines: the question now was whether he would be able to live so long in the land between the Rio Mayor and the Zezere. Wellington could not be sure of his data, in calculating the day when exhaustion would once more compel the French to shift their ground. It was only certain that the plain of Golegão, and the Thomar-Torres Novas country, had not been devastated by the Portuguese government even with the same energy that they had displayed in the Lisbon Peninsula. And there, as the British Commander-in-Chief complained, not half the necessary work had been done. Yet something had certainly been accomplished; the population had nearly all been withdrawn, the mills destroyed, the corn buried or sent over the Tagus. Trusting to these facts, and to the rains and frosts of the oncoming winter, Wellington hoped that Masséna would finally be reduced to a disastrous retreat by sheer privation. ‘Though it is certainly astonishing that the enemy have been able to remain in this country so long, and it is an extraordinary instance of what a French army can do[569].’

Resolved to take no further offensive action, and to let famine do its work, Wellington, on November 24, gave orders for the army to draw back and go into winter quarters, leaving only Craufurd and Pack in touch with the enemy in front of Santarem, and Spencer in support of them at Cartaxo. Of the other divisions, Hill remained behind the Tagus at Chamusca and Almeirim, with his own troops and Hamilton’s Portuguese. Picton and the 3rd Division retained their old post at Torres Vedras, with Coleman and Alex. Campbell’s Portuguese near them. Cole remained at Azambuja, in rear of Spencer. Leith was sent back to Alcoentre, Campbell’s 6th Division was placed at Alemquer, behind Leith. Le Cor’s Portuguese stayed at Alhandra, within the Lines.

‘The army thus placed,’ writes D’Urban, the Quarter-Master-General, on this day, ‘at once takes care of Abrantes (by means of Hill), observes the enemy at Santarem (with Craufurd and Pack), has a division on the higher Rio Mayor road to turn the enemy’s right, if this become expedient (Leith’s to wit), and still “appuis” itself on the Lines, its retreat into which is secured by its echelloned position. Means are ready to pass General Hill back to the right bank of the Tagus, with such celerity, that his divisions can be counted upon for the order of march or battle on this side of the river as certainly as if he were already there[570].’

Masséna, on the other hand, also remained nearly quiescent for many days, the only important change which he made in the cantonments of his army being that he moved in Clausel’s division closer to Santarem, to fill the dangerous gap between the 2nd and 8th Corps, which had existed on November 18. On the 22nd and 23rd he pushed forward, against Pack’s Portuguese and Anson’s light cavalry, a considerable force, consisting of Clausel’s whole division and six squadrons from the 8th Corps, and General Pierre Soult with two cavalry regiments and three battalions from the 2nd Corps. After some lively but bloodless skirmishing, the allied troops retired behind the Rio Mayor, evacuating the village of Calares beyond the stream, and drawing in their cavalry pickets, which had hitherto held some ground on the further bank. This affair confirmed Wellington in his conclusion that nearly the whole French army was now concentrated on the Santarem-Pernes line, and made him more reluctant than ever to take the offensive.

Meanwhile Montbrun’s cavalry, supported by small detachments from the infantry of Ney’s corps, had pressed somewhat further to the north, in order to occupy a broader tract of land from which the army might feed itself, a task that grew harder every day. From his head quarters at Ourem and from Cabaços, on the Thomar-Coimbra road, he continued to send out strong reconnaissances in every direction, of which some occasionally pushed as far as Leiria on the road towards Coimbra, and others scoured the left bank of the lower Zezere and the Nabao. The limit of their excursions was fixed by the fact that Wilson’s brigade of Portuguese militia still lay at Espinhal, and, though it was reduced by desertion and sickness to 1,500 men, was reported to Montbrun as a serious force, with which he had better not meddle. Trant’s troops at Coimbra—a weak militia division—were also estimated at much over their real strength. It was not till later that sheer starvation drove the French further afield, and revealed to them the weakness of the cordon of inferior troops which hemmed them in upon the northern side.

The blockade of the French army, therefore, remained still unbroken, and its communication with the north was as absolutely interrupted in the end of November as in the beginning of October. One attempt to break through the screen of Portuguese irregulars had been made in November, but of its failure Masséna had as yet no knowledge. When Foy reached Rodrigo, on his way to Paris, he had handed over his escort of one battalion of infantry and 120 horsemen to General Gardanne, who was ordered to strengthen them with all the convalescents of the Army of Portugal, and with the garrisons of Almeida and Rodrigo also, if these last had now been relieved by troops of Drouet’s 9th Corps. At the head of 6,000 men, as Masséna calculated, he could cut his way to join the main army, escorting a great train of munitions, of which both the artillery and the infantry at the front were lamentably in need. Gardanne could not gather in the Almeida garrison, as that place was still blockaded by Silveira’s Portuguese. But with the two battalions from Rodrigo, added to Foy’s late escort, and a mass of convalescents, he had collected some 5,000 men by November 20[571], the day on which he marched by the Sabugal-Belmonte-Fundão route towards Punhete and the lower Zezere. He was cursed with dreadful weather, followed and harassed by all the Ordenança of the Castello Branco country, hampered by his heavy convoy, and much troubled by the disorderly convalescents, who were largely professional malingerers. But he got as far as Cardigos on the Sobreira-Formosa road, only fifteen miles from Punhete, where Loison was awaiting him on the Zezere. Here he was brought to a stand (November 27) by the flooded and bridgeless stream of the Codes. No news had reached him from Masséna, while he was assured by Portuguese deserters, who probably were sent out to deceive him by the governor of Abrantes, that the Marshal had not only evacuated his position before the Lines, but was retreating on Spain via the Mondego. They added that Hill had just reached Abrantes with 10,000 men, and was about to march against him. Thereupon Gardanne hastily turned back, reached Penamacor by forced marches on November 29, and from thence retired to Rodrigo, having lost 400 men and 300 horses by disease and fatigue during his ill-conducted expedition. If he had pushed forward fifteen miles further on the 28th, he would have got into touch with Loison, and reached Masséna’s head quarters in safety. Wellington, not without reason, professed himself unable to comprehend this strange march and countermarch. ‘I do not exactly understand this movement[572],’ and ‘if this march was ordered by superior authority, and was connected with any other arrangements, it had every appearance of, and was attended by all the consequences of, a precipitate and forced retreat[573].’

Here, then, we leave Masséna and his army, cantoned in the space between the Rio Mayor and the Zezere, still destitute of news from France, and still entirely ignorant whether or no any endeavour was being made to relieve them. Of their further doings during the three months that ended on March 1, 1811, we shall tell elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, despite many dangers and risks, Wellington’s scheme of starvation was played out to the end, and achieved complete success. Of the privation and losses that the French suffered, and the atrocities that they committed, of the difficulties of the British Commander-in-Chief—with an obstinate enemy still in front of him, a factious Regency and a half-starved population behind him in Lisbon, and a disquieting prospect that Soult might take a hand in the game—the fourth volume of this work will give full details.

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