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

by Charles Oman

CHAPTER I

THE MILITARY GEOGRAPHY OF PORTUGAL

The continual existence of Portugal down to the present day in face of the persistent hostility and immensely superior force of its neighbour Spain seems at first sight to be one of the most inexplicable phenomena in modern history. It appears all the more astounding when we remember that the lesser kingdom was once conquered, and held down for sixty years, by the greater power. Few states have won back and maintained their independence in such masterful fashion as did Portugal, in the long ‘War of Independence’ that followed the insurrection of 1640 under the house of Braganza. But intense national spirit and heroic obstinacy on the part of the smaller people are not sufficient to account for the survival of the Portuguese kingdom as a separate entity. Its geography, which at the first sight seems hopelessly unfavourable to its defence, turns out on investigation to be eminently suitable for resistance against an attack from the east. On a first glance at the map it appears as if Portugal was composed of no more than the lower valleys of three great Spanish rivers, the Douro, the Tagus, and the Guadiana, so that the state which owns three-quarters of the course of each of these streams has but to send down its armies from the uplands of Leon and New Castile, to conquer the narrow land which lies about their estuaries. But nothing can be more deceptive than the map, when the Iberian Peninsula is in question. As we observed in our earlier volume[150], the rivers of Spain and Portugal are not highways, or lines of communication, but barriers—torrents sunk in gorges cut deep below the level of the face of the land. The chief roads, with few exceptions, avoid, instead of courting, the neighbourhood of the great streams. The leading routes which descend from Spain into Portugal in no case follow the lines of the Douro or the Tagus. Though the coast-plains, which form the heart of the kingdom of Portugal, its most wealthy and populous regions, lie about the mouths of those rivers, it is not by descending their banks that conquest or trade arrives most easily at its goal. As a matter of fact, Spain and Portugal turn their backs upon each other: the smaller realm looks out upon the sea; her strength and wealth lie upon the Atlantic coast: the inland that touches Spain is rugged and unpeopled, in many parts a mere waste of rock and heath. Nor, on the other hand, do Leon and New Castile look towards Portugal: the real ports of Madrid are Valencia and Alicante, not Lisbon, and that not from political reasons, but simply because those are the points where the sea can be reached with the minimum of mountain and desert to be passed through. The way down from the central tableland of Spain to the Mediterranean is less difficult than the way down to the Atlantic. Hence comes the fact that the high-roads leading from Spain into Portugal are so surprisingly few, and that the two main alternative routes from Madrid to Lisbon run, the one much further north, the other much further south, than might have been expected. There is not now, and never has been, any straight road down the Tagus between the two capitals, obvious though the line looks upon the map. The two main gates of Portugal are at Almeida and Elvas; at Alcantara, which appears the natural point of approach, there is but the most miserable of posterns—as Junot discovered in November 1807, much to his discomfiture. Marshal Berwick had made the same experience in 1705, during the War of the Spanish Succession[151].

In the old wars between Spain and Portugal the whole land frontier of the smaller kingdom was exposed to attacks from the larger. But the circumstances of 1810 differed from those of 1705 or 1762 or 1801, in that the subsidiary campaigns in the extreme north and south, which had always accompanied the main clash along the frontiers of Beira and Alemtejo, could not on this occasion take place. The French were no longer in possession of Galicia, from which the Spaniards had been wont to demonstrate against Oporto, nor, at the other extremity of the line, had they a firm grip on Huelva, and the Condado de Niebla, from which alone an attack could be directed against the remote southern province of Algarve.

Portugal presents three sections of frontier to an invader coming from the side of Spain. The northernmost, that from the mouth of the Minho to Miranda-de-Douro, was not within the scope of operations in 1810. It can only be approached from Galicia; that province was not subdued, nor had the French any intention of dealing with it till after they should have dealt with Portugal. An invasion of the Tras-os-Montes and the Entre-Douro-e-Minho would have been an objectless operation: they would fall of themselves if once Lisbon were captured and the English expelled from the Peninsula. A move against Oporto by some flanking division of the invading army might have been conceivable, but such an attempt would be made, if made at all, from the south of the Douro, through northern Beira, and not through the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes.

There remain two other sections of the Portuguese frontier: the one from the Douro to the Tagus, and the other from the Tagus to the Guadiana. Both of these were accessible to the French in 1810, since they were in possession alike of the plains of Leon and of La Mancha, and of northern Andalusia. It was open to them to choose one or the other front for attack, or to attack both at once. Lisbon being the objective, it was clear that an attack on the northern or Beira frontier possessed a paramount advantage over an attack on the southern or Alemtejo frontier. A successful advance north of the Tagus brings the invader directly to the gates of Lisbon; one south of the Tagus brings him only to the heights of Almada, where he is separated from the Portuguese capital by the broad estuary of the Tagus. Napoleon’s power, like that of the devil in mediaeval legends, ended at the edge of the salt water; and in face of the naval strength which the English always maintained at Lisbon, a victorious French army camped on the heights of Almada would be almost as far from final success as when it started from Spain. The 1,900 yards of strait which protected the Portuguese capital could not be crossed. The most that the invader could accomplish would be to worry the ships in the port, and the lower quarters of the city, by a distant bombardment, if he could bring up heavy guns from Spain[152]. For nearly twenty miles inland from Lisbon the estuary of the Tagus expands into a broad brackish lagoon four to eleven miles broad, a complete protection against any attack from the east. Only at Alhandra does this inland sea contract, and for some further miles northward from that point the eastern bank of the Tagus is formed by broad salt-marshes (lezirias) cut up by countless channels of water, and practically inaccessible. It is only at Salvaterra, thirty miles north of Lisbon, that the Tagus assumes its ordinary breadth, and becomes an ordinary military obstacle. From that point upwards an invader from the Andalusian side might endeavour to cross it, and it presents no more difficulties than any other broad river. But, though even Rhines and Danubes may be passed in the face of an enemy, the operation is not one which a prudent general courts, and the Tagus is broad, absolutely bridgeless, and fickle in the extreme in its alternations of high and low water. To fight one’s way from the valley of the Guadiana in order to meet such a problem at the end does not seem inviting. And even if the Tagus is passed, there are still thirty miles of road, including some formidable defensive positions, between the invader and Lisbon[153]. Yet there was one contingency under which an advance on the left bank of the river might be advantageous to the invader, and so possible was this contingency that Wellington from the very first had declared that he thought it probable that the French would move troops in that direction. If the Anglo-Portuguese army were drawn away to the Beira frontier, between Tagus and Douro, in order to resist a front attack delivered from the plains of Leon, and if it became involved in an active campaign somewhere far to the north, on the line of the Coa, or the Mondego, or the Alva, a subsidiary French force, striking south of the Tagus from the direction of Spanish Estremadura, might give dreadful trouble. If it could cross the Tagus anywhere between Abrantes and Salvaterra, it might get between the Anglo-Portuguese army and its base, and either fall upon its rear or capture Lisbon. For this reason Wellington, so far back as October 1809, had made up his mind that, if the French had an army on foot anywhere in the direction of Badajoz and Elvas, he must leave a considerable proportion of his own forces to watch them, and to defend, if need be, the line of the lower Tagus[154]. As long as the enemy had not yet subdued Badajoz and the neighbouring fortresses, and while there was still a strong Spanish army in that quarter, the need for precaution was not so pressing. Nevertheless, all through the summer of 1810 Wellington kept Hill with one English and one Portuguese division at Portalegre, south of the Tagus, though he withdrew this detachment when Masséna marched on Coimbra. Matters were much more perilous after the battle of the Gebora and the fall of Badajoz in February 1811. From that time onward, all through 1811 and 1812, nearly a third of the Anglo-Portuguese army was kept in the Alemtejo, first under Beresford, then under Hill, in order to guard against the possible stab in the back from the French army of Andalusia.

But the attack south of the Tagus was in Wellington’s, and also, we may add, in Napoleon’s conception[155], only a secondary operation. The main invasion was almost inevitably bound to take place on the Beira, not on the Alemtejo frontier. Between Fregeneda, where the Portuguese border line quits the Douro, to the pass of Villa Velha on the Tagus there is a distance of somewhat more than 100 miles. The division between Portugal and Spain does not lie along any well-marked natural feature, such as a mountain range or a broad river—though two small sections of the frontier are coincident with the insignificant streams of the Elga and the Agueda. It is rather drawn, in a somewhat arbitrary and haphazard fashion, through the midst of the desert upland, where Spain and Portugal turn their backs to each other. For the only piece of flat plain-land on the whole border is that from the Douro to Almeida, a mere ten or twelve miles, and immediately behind the Coa, only three or four miles from Almeida, the mountains begin. The rest of the frontier runs through thinly-peopled, barren highlands, from which the Coa, the Mondego, the Zezere, and the Ponçul fall away towards Portugal, and the Agueda and the Alagon towards Spain. The mountains are not, for the most part, very high—the culminating peak of the Serra da Estrella is only 6,540 feet—but they are singularly rugged and scarped, and much cleft by ravines, along whose sides the few roads crawl miserably, in constant precipitous dips and rises. This broad belt of upland, one long series of defiles for an invader, is some hundred miles broad, and does not cease till Coimbra, on the one side, or Abrantes, on the other, is reached: only then does the plain-land begin, and the country-side become fertile and thickly peopled. Only from those points onward is it possible for an army to live on the local produce: in the upland it must carry its food with it; for a single division would exhaust in a day the stores of the poor villages of the mountains; and the small poverty-stricken towns of Guarda, Celorico, Sabugal, Penamacor, and Idanha have few resources. Castello Branco and Vizeu are the only two places in the upland where there is a valley of some breadth and richness, which can supply an army for many days. In this simple fact lies the explanation of the difficulties of the Portuguese campaigns of 1810 and 1811. Both the invader and the defender must bring their food with them, and protracted operations can only be kept up by means of incessant convoys from the rear. The campaign not infrequently became a starving-match, and the combatant who first exhausted his provisions had to retire, and to disperse his divisions in search of the wherewithal to live. Thanks to Wellington’s providence it was always the French who were forced to this expedient.

The Beira frontier is divided into two sections by the range of mountains which crosses the border at right angles, half way between Douro and Tagus: it is known as the Sierras de Gata and de Jarama while in Spain, as the Serra da Estrella when it reaches Portugal. Its central ganglion lies between the high-lying towns of Sabugal and Penamacor in Portugal and the pass of Perales in Spain. From this point run off the great spurs which separate the valleys of the Ponçul, the Zezere, the Agueda, the Coa, and the Alagon. An invader must make his choice whether he will advance into Portugal south or north of the Serra da Estrella: to attempt to do so on both sides of the range would be risking too much, if there is an enemy of any strength in the field, since the columns to the right and to the left would be hopelessly separated, and liable to be beaten in detail. In the whole Peninsular War there was only one invasion made by the southern route, that of Junot in the winter of 1807-8. It was successful because it was absolutely unopposed. Nevertheless the French lost many men, had to leave their artillery behind them, and only arrived with the shadow of an army at Abrantes. It is true that Junot chose absolutely the worst path that could be found between the Serra da Estrella and the Tagus—the pass of Rosmarinhal, close above the latter river—and that he would have fared not quite so badly if he had marched from Zarza on Idanha and Castello Branco. But even at the best this region is most inhospitable: there are points where water is not procurable on stretches of eight or ten miles, others where the main road is so steep that a six-pounder requires not only a dozen horses but the assistance of fifty men to get it up the slope. Except in the immediate neighbourhood of Castello Branco, the country-side is almost uninhabited[156]. The whole ‘corregidoria,’ which took its name from that town, and extended from the Elga to the Zezere, had only 40,000 souls in its broad limits—it was forty miles long by thirty broad, the size of a large English county. Junot’s experiences served as a warning to his successors, and no French army during the rest of the war endeavoured to cross this corner of Portugal when advancing on Lisbon. Castello Branco was seized once or twice by a raiding force, but it was never used as the starting-point of an army making a serious attempt to advance towards the Portuguese capital.

There remains to be considered only the section of the frontier between the Douro and the Serra da Estrella, the front on which Masséna’s great blow was delivered in the autumn of 1810. It was a region which had from the earliest times been the battle-ground of the Spanish and Portuguese. Half a dozen times since the Middle Ages armies from the plains of Leon had invaded the Beira on this front. Such campaigns always began with a siege of Almeida, the sentinel-fortress pushed out in front of the mountains to face the Spanish Ciudad Rodrigo. Almeida generally fell—it is too advanced a position for safety, and (as Dumouriez remarked in his military study of Portugal) its value would have doubled if it had only been placed upon the west instead of the east bank of the Coa, close to the friendly mountains, and not on the outskirts of the perilous plain. But rare, indeed, were the occasions on which the Spaniard succeeded in piercing the broad belt of tangled upland beyond Almeida, and appearing at the gates of Coimbra or Oporto.

There are four lines of further advance open to an invader who has captured Almeida. The first, a march on Oporto via Pinhel and Lamego, may be mentioned only to be dismissed from consideration. It is of no use to an army which aims at Lisbon, and proposes to conquer Portugal by a blow at its heart. Masséna, whose directions were to drive the British into the sea in the shortest and most effective fashion, could not have contemplated such a secondary object as the capture of Oporto for a moment. There remain three other roads to be investigated.

(1) The road north of the river Mondego, by Celorico, Vizeu, Bussaco, and Coimbra. (2) The corresponding and parallel road south of the Mondego, from Celorico by Chamusca, Maceira and Ponte de Murcella to Coimbra. (3) The road which, striking south from Celorico, crosses the headwaters of the Zezere, by Belmonte and Fundão, and then, climbing the Serra de Moradal, descends to Castello Branco, and from thence reaches Abrantes by the Sobreira Formosa. It may be remarked, by the way, that nothing in all the geography of Portugal seems more astonishing than that there should not be a fourth alternative road, one down the long valley of the Zezere, which, running in a straight line from Belmonte to Abrantes, looks on the map as if it ought to be a main artery of communication, and seems to indicate the obvious road to Lisbon from Almeida, since a straight line drawn between these points would run along the river for some forty miles. But as a matter of fact there was neither a first nor a second-rate road down the Zezere: the only towns on its course, Covilhão and Belmonte, lie hard by its sources, and its central reaches were almost uninhabited. The only good line of communication running near it is a by-road or duplication of the third route mentioned above, called the Estrada Nova, which, leaving the upper Zezere at Belmonte, keeps high up the side of the Serra de Moradal, and rejoins the Castello Branco road at Sobreira Formosa. This route was much employed by Wellington in later years, as a military road from north to south, usable even when Castello Branco was threatened by the French. But in 1810 he had ordered it to be rendered impassable, and this had been done by making several long cuttings at points where the track passed along precipices, the whole roadway being blown or shovelled down into the gulf below[157]. The French were, of course, unaware of this, and Masséna is said by his confidant Foy to have taken the Estrada Nova into serious consideration, and to have decided against it because of the necessity for forcing the passage of the Zezere when the defiles were passed, and for laying siege to Abrantes[158]. A far more practical objection was its extreme wildness: it runs along an absolutely uninhabited mountain-side, and the neighbourhood is destitute not only of food but of water for great sections of its length. This Masséna ought to have known, if his Portuguese advisers had been competent. Apparently he was wholly unaware of its character, just as he was necessarily ignorant of the fact that his prescient adversary had blasted away huge sections of it, so that it was absolutely impassable for guns or wagons, as also that earthworks had been carefully constructed to cover the point where it debouches on to the Zezere.

The Castello Branco road, therefore, with this dependent by-road, the Estrada Nova, was practically left out of consideration by the Marshal. There remains the choice between the two northern routes, Celorico-Vizeu-Coimbra, and Celorico-Chamusca-Ponte de Murcella-Coimbra. Both traverse rough ground—but ground less rough than that to be found on some parts of the Castello Branco road. Along both there is an intermittent belt of cultivated land, and not unfrequent villages. Both are intersected by many good military positions, on which a defending army can offer battle to an invader with advantage. In especial, the northern road strikes and climbs the granite ridge of Bussaco with every disadvantage for the attacking side, and the southern road is contracted into a difficult defile at the passage of the Alva near Ponte de Murcella. On the whole, however, this last is the better line for advance:—the strongest testimonial to the fact is that Wellington expected Masséna to take it, and erected at the passage of the Alva almost[159] the only earthworks, save those of the lines of Torres Vedras, which he constructed in his preparations for the reception of the invader. When he first heard that the Marshal was moving forward from Almeida to Celorico, and was clearly aiming at the Mondego valley, he announced that he should endeavour to stop the invader on the Alva[160], not apparently thinking it at all probable that Masséna would move by Vizeu and the north bank of the Mondego. On realizing that this was really his adversary’s design, he observed with some exultation that, while there were certainly many bad roads in Portugal, the enemy had taken decidedly the worst of those open to him[161]; moreover, he had committed himself to attack the heights of Bussaco, the most formidable position in the whole of northern Portugal. How the French commander came to make this choice we shall discuss in its proper place. Suffice it to say that Wellington had not realized how bad was Masséna’s information, how worthless his maps, and—what is most surprising of all—how entirely destitute of local knowledge were the Portuguese traitors—Alorna, Pamplona, and the other renegade officers—whom the Emperor had sent as guides and advisers to the Marshal. And in truth, the unsuspected ignorance of Masséna and his advisers added an incalculable element of chance to the problem set before Wellington. He was obliged to make his plans on the hypothesis that the enemy would make the correct move: and not unfrequently the enemy, for reasons which the English general could not possibly foresee, made the wrong one.

The French invasion was bound to commence with a preliminary clearance of the outlying fortresses still in the hands of the Spaniards. These to some extent protected the Portuguese frontier in 1810, though they had been built with the express purpose, not of protecting, but of threatening it, and had never before been attacked by an enemy coming from the east. Only three of these fortresses were of any importance—Astorga, Ciudad Rodrigo, and Badajoz. The other strongholds of Spanish Estremadura, Alcantara (which had stood a siege in the War of the Spanish Succession), Albuquerque, Olivenza, were either not in a state of defence at all, or were hopelessly antiquated, and little suited to face modern artillery and modern siegecraft.

Astorga lies so far to the north that it might have been neglected without much peril to the French scheme of invasion. But the Emperor had ordered that it should be reduced before the great enterprise began: it gave the Spanish army of Galicia a foothold in the plains of Leon, from which it might operate against Masséna’s rear, if he should pass it by. Its capture, too, was considered a matter of small difficulty, for it was but a mediaeval walled town, to which some hasty outworks had been added during the last year. It will be remembered that when Moore passed that way in January 1809, Astorga had been treated by both sides as an open town, and no attempt had been made to garrison or defend it. Since then La Romana had repaired its dilapidated enceinte, stockaded its suburbs, and armed it with guns brought from Ferrol. As late as January 11, 1810, Napoleon seems hardly aware of this fact: in a dispatch of that date he orders Loison to make his head quarters there, evidently under the impression that it is not held by the Spaniards, or at least that it is a place which they will evacuate at the first appearance of a serious attack[162]. It is only in March that he writes to Junot that Astorga must be besieged and taken, in order to occupy the attention of the Galicians and to thrust them back into their mountains[163].

Ciudad Rodrigo was a more serious business. It was a regular fortress, though only one of the second class; its prestige, as the only Spanish stronghold on the Portuguese frontier, was great. It commands the whole southern stretch of the plains of Leon, being the only place out of the control of an invader who is superior in cavalry, and therefore master of the defenceless Tierra de Campos. There was also a small Spanish army depending upon it, and clinging to the skirts of the Sierra de Gata. This was the division of Martin de la Carrera, which had been left behind when the greater part of Del Parque’s Army of the Left marched down into Estremadura in January 1810, in order to replace there the troops which had gone off to the defence of Cadiz. It was clear that Ciudad Rodrigo must be taken, and Martin de la Carrera brushed away or destroyed, before any serious attempt to invade Portugal was begun. If the Emperor thought that such a remote place as Astorga was worth his notice, it was obvious that he would regard Ciudad Rodrigo as absolutely indispensable to his designs. It was for its reduction that he gave Masséna the great battering train of fifty heavy guns, with 2,500 artillerymen and sappers, which was assigned to him, independent of the artillery of the three corps of the Army of Portugal.

Badajoz, far to the south, in Spanish Estremadura, stood to the defence of Southern Portugal exactly as Ciudad Rodrigo to the defence of Northern Portugal. It possessed also in Elvas a counterpart to Almeida. But Badajoz is immensely larger and stronger than Rodrigo, just as Elvas is infinitely more formidable than Almeida. The two fortresses on the frontier of Leon are small places crowning mere mounds set in a plain. Badajoz and Elvas have towering citadels set on rugged hills, and overlooking the whole country-side. They have also strong detached forts on dominant positions: the circuit of ground that must be taken up by an army that intends to besiege them is very large, and at Badajoz there is a first-class river, the Guadiana, which cuts in two the lines which the assailant must occupy. It may be added that based on Badajoz there was a whole Spanish army of 15,000 men, not a mere division of 3,000, like that which lurked in the mountains above Rodrigo. Noting the strength of Badajoz and Elvas, the Emperor had made up his mind that they should be observed and ‘contained’ by troops from the Army of Andalusia, but not attacked till Lisbon had been conquered and the English expelled from Portugal. ‘Les Anglais une fois battus et rembarqués, Badajoz et Elvas tombent d’eux-mêmes,’ he wrote in a holograph minute addressed to Masséna, just before the advance across the Portuguese frontier began[164]. It was only when the invasion had been brought to a standstill before the lines of Torres Vedras, that he came to the conclusion that pressure must be applied south of the Tagus, to distract Wellington, and that Soult, as a preliminary to an attack on the Alemtejo, must capture Badajoz and Elvas, and disperse the Spanish Army of Estremadura. The idea came to him tardily: thanks to Wellington’s careful starvation of the main French army, Masséna was forced to retreat into Leon when Soult had only recently captured Badajoz, and had not yet shown a man in front of Elvas. The scheme was hatched, like so many of Napoleon’s Spanish plans, about three months too late for effective realization. As late as November 1810 the orders to Soult are merely to demonstrate against Badajoz, and to hinder the departure of La Romana’s army for the lines of Torres Vedras, but not to besiege the Estremaduran fortress. Probably it was Foy’s information as to the existence and strength of the unsuspected lines of Torres Vedras, which reached him late in November, that made the Emperor realize the advisability of that secondary attack by the south bank of the Tagus which Wellington had foreseen and taken means to meet a full year before. Fortunately a capable general on the defensive always knows his own weak spots long before they are discovered by the enemy. By the time that Soult had at last captured Badajoz and the small dependent places—Olivenza, Albuquerque, Campo Mayor—Wellington had got rid of Masséna from the neighbourhood of Lisbon, and was preparing to chase him home across Northern Portugal. Within a few weeks of its surrender by the traitor Imaz, Badajoz was being besieged by a detachment of the British army, and Soult had his hands full, as he strove at once to hold down Andalusia and to relieve the beleaguered fortress.

---

SECTION XIX: CHAPTER II

WELLINGTON’S PREPARATIONS FOR DEFENCE

As far back as September 1809, while his army still lay at Badajoz and the Talavera campaign was hardly over, Wellington had foreseen the oncoming invasion of Portugal, which did not actually begin till August 1810[165]. Writing to his brother, then on his special mission to Seville, he had laid down his conclusions. Bonaparte would, in consequence of the cessation of the Austrian war, be enabled to pour unlimited reinforcements into Spain. The British army, even if raised to 40,000 men, would not be strong enough to cover both Seville and Lisbon. Considering the temper of the Spanish government and the Spanish troops, he thought it would be most unadvisable to commit himself to the defence of Andalusia. But he was prepared to undertake the defence of Portugal. He implored the British Ministry not to sacrifice its strong position on the Tagus in order to embark upon a hazardous campaign in the South[166]. His views as to Portugal were simply the development of those which he had drawn up for Castlereagh’s eye on his first sailing for the Peninsula[167]. Portugal though ‘all frontier’ might be defended against any French army of less than 100,000 men, if its resources were placed at his disposal, and he were given a free hand to utilize them according to his own plan. The Portland Cabinet, though much doubting whether Wellington could carry out his pledge, and though reluctant to abandon the idea that Andalusia might be defended and Cadiz made secure by British troops, finally yielded to the General’s appeal.

But on December 2, 1809, the Portland Cabinet gave place to Spencer Perceval’s new administration, and Wellington had to reiterate the arguments which he had used to Castlereagh and Canning to new correspondents, Lord Liverpool and Lord Bathurst. Fortunately the incoming ministers resolved to adhere to the promises made by their predecessors, and to persist in the defence of Portugal. It was of immense value to Wellington that his brother Wellesley soon replaced Lord Bathurst at the Foreign Office, so that he could command in this Ministry a supporter as firm as Castlereagh had been in the last. Nevertheless his position was not entirely fortunate: the new administration was being fiercely assailed by the Whigs over the general policy of risking British armies on the Continent. The calamities of the Walcheren expedition supplied a text on which the Opposition could preach interminable sermons. The men who were not ashamed to allege, for party reasons, that Wellington was a rash general, and that the Talavera campaign had been a disaster, were continually harassing the Ministry, by their suggestions that when the French Emperor marched in person to Spain the British army in the Peninsula must inevitably be destroyed. It was probably to aid them that Napoleon kept inserting in the Moniteur articles in which it was asserted that the maintenance of the incapable ‘Sepoy General’ at the head of the British forces was the thing which France must most desire. In Lord Liverpool’s correspondence with Wellington it is easy to see that the idea that it might be necessary to evacuate Portugal, when the French attack was delivered, almost preponderated over that of preparing for the defence of that realm. While Wellington’s whole mind is set on working out the details of a campaign from which he hopes great things, his correspondent is always thinking of the possibility of a disastrous embarkation at the end of it. The General could not pledge himself that Portugal might be defended against any odds whatever: it was possible that the Emperor might lead or send against him an army of absolutely overpowering strength, though he did not think such a contingency probable. But since he could not say that his position was impregnable, he was being continually worried with suggestions as to all the possible contingencies that might occur to his discomfiture. The ministers dreaded that the Peninsular venture might end in a fiasco, like the Duke of York’s Dutch expedition of 1799, and thought that such a failure would lose them their offices. Hence they were nervous about every false rumour that reached them from France concerning the Emperor’s approaching departure; and the more certain information about the immense numbers of troops that were passing the Pyrenees filled them with dread. It required all Wellington’s robust self-confidence to keep them reassured. He had to be perpetually repeating to them that all his preparations for retreat and embarkation, if the worst should happen, had been already thought out—they might make up their minds that he would do nothing rash. But he was inclined to think that there would in the end be no need to depart. ‘I shall delay the embarkation,’ he wrote, ‘as long as it is in my power, and shall do everything that is in my power to avert the necessity of embarking at all. If the enemy should invade this country with a force less than that which I should think so superior to ours as to create a necessity for embarking, I shall fight a battle to save the country, and for this I have made the preparations.’ He did not think he could be beaten; but if, by some mischance, the fortune of war went against him, he had still no doubt that he could bring off the army in safety. ‘If we do go, I feel a little anxiety to go like gentlemen, out of the hall door (particularly after all the preparations I have made to enable us to do so), and not out of the back door or by the area.’

It is curious to find that in this most interesting dispatch to Lord Liverpool Wellington distinctly asserts that his worst enemy was the ghost of Sir John Moore[168]. ‘The great disadvantage under which I labour is that Sir John Moore, who was here before me, gave his opinion that Portugal could not be defended by the army under his command. It is obvious that the country was in a very different situation at that time from what it is at present, and that I am in a very different situation from that in which he found himself ..., yet persons who ought to be better acquainted with these facts entertain a certain prejudice against the adoption of any plan for opposing the enemy of which Portugal is to be the theatre. I have as much respect as any man for the opinion and judgement of Sir John Moore, and I should mistrust my own if it were opposed to his in a case where he had had the opportunity of knowing and considering. But he positively knew nothing about Portugal, and could know nothing about its existing state[169].’

The most vexatious thing for Wellington was that ‘the persons who ought to have known better,’ yet were perpetually uttering melancholy vaticinations as to the approach of disaster, included some of his own senior officers. I have seen a letter from a general in Portugal to his friend in England containing such phrases as this: ‘I most strongly suspect that before many months are over our heads there will be no opportunity for this employment (that of a cavalry brigadier) left to any one, on the Continent at least. The next campaign will close the eventful scene in the Peninsula, as far as we are concerned; for I am decidedly of opinion that neither (Marshal) Wellington nor (Marshal) Beresford will prevent the approaching subjugation of Portugal.’ Or again: ‘I am quite surprised at Lord W.’s pliant disposition. I suspect he feels himself tottering on his throne, and wishes to conciliate at any sacrifice[170].’ The frequent complaints in Wellington’s correspondence as to the sort of letters that were going home to England in the spring of 1810 sufficiently show that these down-hearted views were not uncommon among his subordinates. If the generals on the spot foresaw disaster, it is no wonder that the ministers in London felt anxious, and refused to be comforted by the confident dispatches of the Commander-in-Chief.

The preparations which Wellington was making during the winter of 1809-10 and the ensuing spring, for the reception of the inevitable French invasion, may be arranged, in the main, under three heads. We must first treat of the complete reorganization of the Portuguese military forces, not only the regulars but the militia, and the old levée en masse of the Ordenança. Second come the elaborate plans for the construction of enormous field-works for the protection of Lisbon, the famous lines of Torres Vedras, and the fortification of certain other, and more advanced, points. The third, and in some ways the most important of all, was the arrangement of the great scheme for devastating the country-side in front of the invader, and fighting him by the weapon of starvation, a device new to the French, but not unprecedented in the earlier history of Portugal.

The Portuguese regular army had taken hardly any part in the campaigns of 1809. The only sections of it that had been under fire were Silveira’s two regiments, the four battalions that marched with Wellington to Oporto in May, and Wilson’s Loyal Lusitanian Legion, which had fought with more valour than success at the bridge of Alcantara and the Pass of Baños[171]. Beresford, with the greater part of the troops that were in a condition to take the field, had been out on the border in July, and had remained for some days in Spain, on the side of Coria and Zarza Mayor, but he had never been in contact with the enemy[172]. The fighting power of the reorganized Portuguese army was still a doubtful quantity.

The field-strength of the Portuguese regular forces should have been, according to its establishments, 56,000 men. In September 1809 there were only 42,000 men with the colours[173], and of these much more than half were recruits, who had recently been thrust into the depleted cadres of the old army. There were many regiments which had been practically destroyed by the French, and which showed, when Beresford first marched out to the frontier, only 200 or 300 men instead of their normal 1,500[174]. Many others had less than half their complement. The first thing that required to be done was to fill up the gaps, and this was accomplished during the winter of 1809-10 by a stringent use of the conscription law already existing. The line regiments in the Bussaco campaign showed, with hardly an exception, 1,200 or 1,300 effectives present—i.e. if the sick and ‘details’ are added they were nearly or quite up to their establishment of 1,500[175]. The cavalry was less effective: the number of men could be filled up, but horses were hard to find, and in the end Wellington sent four of the twelve regiments to do dismounted duty in garrison, and served out their mounts to the remaining eight, which nevertheless could never show more than 300 or 400 sabres present, out of their nominal 594. Portugal is not a horse-breeding country, and the British cavalry was competing with the native for the small supply of remounts that could be procured. The artillery, on the other hand, was high in strength and very satisfactory.

Mere numbers are no test of the efficiency of a host. The weak point of the old national army had been—as we mentioned in another place—the effete and unmilitary character of its body of officers—more especially of its senior officers[176]. The junior ranks, filled up since the French invasion with young men who had taken up the military career from patriotic motives, were infinitely better. By the second year of the war there were many admirable officers among them. But it was men capable of handling a battalion or a regiment that were wanting. We saw how Beresford had been forced to introduce many British officers into the service, though he was aware that the personal pride of the Portuguese officers was bitterly hurt thereby. His justification may be deduced from a confidential memorandum written for him by his chief-of-the-staff, Benjamin D’Urban[177], which is well worth quoting:—

‘There are yet among the field officers, captains, and older subalterns a number of incorrigible officers of the old school, who are a dead weight upon their respective regiments, and mischievous in the way of example. Whenever it may be thought expedient, from time to time, to get rid of them, there will be no difficulty in finding excellent young men to replace them from the ranks respectively below.... But I feel it incumbent upon me to give it you as my decided opinion, resulting from a close investigation into the causes of the defects of the Portuguese, that it will be utterly impossible either to make a regiment fit for service, or to preserve it when made so, without giving it an English commanding-officer and at least two English captains.

‘The Portuguese soldier is naturally indolent. He falls with the greatest facility into slouching and slovenly habits, unless he is constantly roused and forced to exert himself. But many a Portuguese officer, if not constantly spurred and urged to do his duty, is at least as indolent as his men. Nothing (I am persuaded by experience) will counteract this, and create activity among the officers and consequent diligence and care among the men, but the strictness, energy and vigilance of an English commanding-officer.

‘Even supposing a sufficient energy of character in the native officer, he does not and will not, if he be not a Fidalgo himself, exercise coercive or strong measures to oblige one of that class to do his duty. He is aware that in doing so he makes a powerful enemy, and all the habits of thought in which he has been educated inspire him with such a dread of this, that no sense of duty will urge him to encounter it. Thus, whenever a regiment is commanded by a non-Fidalgo, it never fails to suffer extremely: for the noblemen are permitted to do as they please, and afford a very bad example, for they are at least as indolent as the ordinary Portuguese.

‘The English captains will be found invaluable, especially in the hands of an English commandant. Their example is infinitely useful. The Portuguese captains are piqued into activity and attention, when they see their companies excelled in efficiency by those of the English, and they do from emulation what a sense of duty would perhaps never bring them to. There are a variety of by-paths and oblique means by which the parts of a Portuguese corps are constantly, and almost insensibly, endeavouring to return to the old habits that they are so much attached to. To nip this, from time to time, in the bud, it is necessary to be aware of it: without the faithful surveillance of English subordinate officers (who, ever mixing with the mass of the men, can’t well be ignorant of what is going on) the commanding-officer can rarely be warned in time.’

Beresford replied that all this was true, but that ‘the national feeling required management,’ and that to place every regimental or brigade command in British hands would provoke such fierce jealousy that he was ‘compelled to humour the prejudices and satisfy the pride of the nation.’ His device for doing this was to make a general rule that wherever a Portuguese officer was in chief command he should have a British officer second in command under him, and vice versa[178]. When a brigade was given to a Portuguese, he managed that the two colonels of the regiments forming it should be Englishmen; similarly, if a Portuguese commanded a regiment his senior major was always an Englishman. By this means it was secured that a fair half of the higher pieces of promotion should be left to the native officers, but that every Portuguese placed in a responsible position should have a British officer at his back. In addition there were from two to four British captains in each battalion, but no subalterns; for, to encourage good men to volunteer into the Portuguese service, it was provided that all who did so should receive a step of promotion, and a British lieutenant became a Portuguese captain on exchange, and a British captain a Portuguese major. The system seems to have worked well, and with far less friction than might have been expected[179]. The better class of native officers were piqued into emulation, just as D’Urban had expected; the worst was gradually eliminated[180]. It must be noted that to every battalion there were added one or two British sergeants, whose services were needed for the drilling of the men in the English exercises, which now superseded the old German system left behind by La Lippe, the last reorganizer of the Portuguese army. For the whole drill of the infantry was changed, and the British formations and manœuvres introduced. Dundas’s ‘Eighteen Manœuvres’ were translated, and became the Bible of the Lusitanian no less than the British officer[181]. The employment of the two-deep line, the essential feature of the system, was made the base of all Portuguese drill; at Bussaco it justified itself. The Caçadores were trained on the ‘Rifle Regulations’ of Coote Manningham, and their uniform was modified in cut, though not in colour, to a close resemblance of that of the British rifleman[182]. The net result of all these changes was that for the future the British and Portuguese units of Wellington’s army could be moved by the same words of command, and in the same formations, and that all the disadvantages resulting from the coexistence of two different systems of drill disappeared.

Two principal difficulties still remained in the administration of the Portuguese army. The first was, what to do with the few senior officers of undoubted patriotism but more doubtful capacity, who were too important and influential to be placed upon the shelf, yet might cause a disaster if placed in a critical position of responsibility. The most notable of them was Silveira, who had acquired much popularity by his obstinate, if ill-managed, resistance to Soult in the spring of 1809. Wellington, with many searchings of heart, placed him in command of the Tras-os-Montes, where it was most unlikely that any serious irruption of the French would take place[183]. He had a large force placed under him, but it did not include a single regular regiment, and, with militia only at his disposition, it was hoped that he would be discouraged from attempting any hazardous experiments. Moreover, he was given a British second-in-command, first John Wilson and afterwards Miller, to curb his eccentricities so far as was possible. Baccelar, another officer of doubtful merit, but more dangerous from torpidity than from rashness, was given charge of the militia of the three northern provinces, so that Silveira was technically under his orders—though the nominal subordinate would seem to have paid little attention to his superior. The most important post, however, assigned to a Portuguese officer was the governorship of Elvas, the strongest fortress of Portugal, and one which would stand in the forefront of the battle if the French made the subsidiary invasion south of the Tagus, which Wellington was inclined to expect. The command of this great stronghold and the 6,000 men of its garrison (of whom half were regulars) was given to General Leite, an active and ingenious officer, and (what was more important) a man who obeyed orders. Of all the Portuguese he was the one whom Wellington most trusted; every British narrator of the war who came in contact with him has a word of praise in his behalf. Of the other native generals, Lecor, in command of a division, and Fonseca, in command of a brigade, were with the field army. Miranda was given charge of the militia of Northern Estremadura, who were likely to be in the thickest of the trouble. But the other Portuguese units of the allied host were under British officers: Pack, Archibald and Alexander Campbell, MacMahon, Coleman, Harvey, Collins, and Bradford had charge of the regular brigades of the field army. The native generals, save those above mentioned, were placed in administrative posts, or in charge of those sections of the militia which were probably destined to see no service.

The second point of difficulty in the organization of the Portuguese army was the commissariat. In the old days it had been a purely civilian branch of the service, non-military intendants dealing with contractors and merchants. For this had been substituted a Junta de Viveres mainly composed of officers, which proved as ineffective, if not as corrupt, as the body which had preceded it. The British government had taken over the responsibility of paying half the Portuguese army[184], but not that of feeding it, and despite of the handsome subsidies that it paid to the Regency for the general purposes of the war, the native troops, especially those quartered far from Lisbon, were often in a state of semi-starvation. ‘The Portuguese corps ought to have a commissariat attached to them, and I believe each brigade has a commissary,’ wrote Wellington, ‘but they have no magazines and no money to purchase supplies[185].’ One main difficulty arose from the fact that the Junta de Viveres shrank from the heavy expense of organizing a proper transport train, and tried to make shift with requisitioned carts and oxen, which were difficult to get (since the British army was competing with the Portuguese for draught animals) and still harder to retain—for the peasant driver always absconded with his beasts when he found an opportunity. Another difficulty was that the Junta tried to feed the troops with requisitioned corn, instead of paying for it with money down; hence it got grudging service. ‘I know from experience,’ observes Wellington, ‘that the Portuguese army could not be in the distress under which it suffers, from want of provisions, if only a part of the food it receives from the country were paid for.’ And he suggested as a remedy that the British ministers should earmark part of the subsidy for use on the commissariat and no other purpose[186]. It was long before this matter was set to rights. Beresford’s correspondence in 1810 bristles with complaints as to the inefficiency of the Junta de Viveres[187].

If the regular army was badly fed, so that desertion and sickness were both too prevalent in some corps, it was not to be expected that the militia would fare better. Wellington had ordered, and Beresford had arranged for, the embodiment of every one of the 48 militia regiments of the national establishment. They should properly have given 70,000 men, but such a figure was never reached. Some of the regimental districts were too thinly peopled to give the full 1,500 men at which each was assessed. In others the officers placed in charge were incapable, or the local magistrates recalcitrant. Many regiments could show only 500 or 600 bayonets in 1810, few over 1,000[188]. The total number under arms at the time of Masséna’s invasion may have reached 45,000 bayonets. Of the 48 regiments eight belonged to the lands south of the Tagus, and were never brought up to the front; they furnished the garrisons of Elvas and Campo Mayor, and a corps of observation on the lower Guadiana, destined to watch the French in the direction of Ayamonte and the Condado de Niebla, lest any unexpected raid might be made in that quarter[189]. The five regiments from the district immediately round the capital were at work on the ever-growing lines of Torres Vedras. One regiment was in garrison at Peniche, two at Abrantes, three at Almeida. The main force, consisting of the remaining units contributed by the North and the Beira, was divided into five corps, destined partly for active operations against the enemy’s flanks and rear, when he should enter Portugal, partly for the defence of Oporto and the Tras-os-Montes, if any assault should be threatened in that direction. These divisions stood as follows:—three regiments under Lecor were left in the Castello Branco country, to protect it against raids from Spanish Estremadura. Seven under Trant, all corps from the coast-land between the Douro and the Mondego, were to cover Oporto from the south, or to operate against the rear of the invading army, if it should leave that city alone and keep on the direct road to Lisbon. Six under Silveira guarded the Tras-os-Montes, and watched the French detachments in the northern part of the plains of Leon. Eight under Miller lay around Oporto, ready to support either Silveira or Trant if occasion should arise[190]. After the campaign began, and Masséna’s intention to leave the North alone became evident, half Miller’s division was placed under John Wilson (who had originally been Silveira’s chief-of-the-staff and second-in-command) and sent south into the Beira to co-operate with Trant. Finally, four regiments under the Portuguese brigadier Miranda lay at Thomar, apparently for the purpose of aiding Lecor or strengthening the garrison of Abrantes. This division ultimately retreated into the lines of Torres Vedras.

All these troops were entirely unfitted for a place in the line of battle; Wellington refused to mix them with the regular brigades, save in the garrisons of Almeida, Abrantes, and Elvas. He directed the brigadiers never to risk them in battle, even against a much inferior force of the French. Their sole purpose was to cut lines of communication, to render marauding by the enemy’s small detachments impossible, and to restrict his power of making reconnaissances far afield. They were told that they might defend a pass or a ford for a time, so as to delay the advance of a hostile column, but that they were never to commit themselves to a serious combat with any considerable body. Convoys, stragglers, small detachments, were the game on which they must prey. The programme was not a brilliant one to lay down before an ambitious officer, and more than once Silveira, Trant, and Wilson disobeyed orders, and tried to withstand a full French division in some chosen position. Such experiments almost always ended in a disaster. It was not surprising, for the militia were not troops from whom much could be expected. The best men in every district had been taken for the regular army; all the trained officers were also needed there. The militia cadres were composed of civilians who had to learn their duties just as much as the privates whom they were supposed to instruct. All the patriotic and energetic young men of the governing classes had sought commissions in the line; the less willing and active were driven into the militia. Service therein brought neither much credit nor much promotion. If the Regency half-starved the regulars, it three-quarter-starved the militia, which was normally in a state of destitution of clothing, shoes, and food. Hardly a regiment was provided with uniforms; as a rule only the officers showed the regulation blue and silver. As long as the corps was in its own district it was fed somehow, but when moved to some strategical point in the rugged mountains of the Beira, it was liable to go wholly to pieces from sheer privation. Fortunately the Portuguese peasant led a frugal life at all times, and expected little; the desertion, though large, was not nearly so great as might have been expected. The fact was that the men were essentially loyal, and hated the French with a perfect hatred. They might be very poor soldiers, but they were very bitter personal enemies of the invader. Nevertheless, they were liable to panics on very slight provocation. ‘At the best they are a very daily and uncertain sort of fighting people[191],’ remarked one of their leaders. Another wrote in a more forcible language, ‘Scripture says, Put not your trust in princes—I say, Fool is the man who puts his trust in a damnable militia.’ Each of these sentences was indited the day after a disastrous and wholly unnecessary rout.

Over and above the regular army and the militia, the Portuguese military system contemplated the utilization of the whole levée en masse of the nation under the name of the Ordenança. This was no foreshadowing of the modern idea of universal service, but a survival of the mediaeval practice which, in Portugal as in England, made every freeman liable to be called out in time of extremity, at his own cost and with his own weapons. Every peasant between sixteen and sixty was theoretically supposed to be enrolled in one of the companies of 250 which each group of villages was supposed to possess. The organization had been effective enough in the old mediaeval wars with Castile: it had even proved serviceable in the ‘War of Independence’ that followed the successful rising of 1640. But against modern regular armies it was comparatively useless; when called out in the war of 1762 the Ordenança had not justified its old reputation. Little could be expected of mobs armed with pikes and fowling-pieces, save that they should cut off a few convoys and stragglers, or occasionally obstruct a defile. A French officer who deeply studied this forgotten campaign wrote that, ‘whatever the Spaniards may say to the contrary, this war of the peasantry is by no means important, except against ignorant and undisciplined troops[192].’

When Wellington resolved to call out the Ordenança in 1810 he was ignorant of none of these facts. Nevertheless, he insisted that the Regency should issue the old royal ‘Ordinance’ to call out the levy. His object was threefold: from the political and moral point of view it was necessary to take this measure, because it was the ancient and established method of proclaiming that the country was in danger. It was so understood by the peasantry, in whose memories the traditions of the Spanish invasions were still fresh; they expected to be summoned, and would have doubted the imminence of the emergency if they had not been. The call was at once an appeal to their patriotism, and equivalent to a proclamation of martial law. Secondly, Wellington hoped to find assistance to a certain degree for the work which he had set aside for the militia, by the aid of the Ordenança. Pervading the whole country-side, and knowing every goat-track and inaccessible fastness, their motley companies would surround the invading army as it marched, prevent marauding by small parties, and render inter-communication between columns impossible, save by large detachments. French narrators of the campaign speak of ‘the cruel callousness with which Wellington exposed these half-armed peasants to the wrath of the most efficient army in the world,’ and wax sentimental over the miseries of the Portuguese. But sentiment from such a quarter is suspicious: it is absurd to find old soldiers writing as if the main duty of a general defending a country were to spare its peasantry as much inconvenience as possible. Did not Napoleon in 1814 make every endeavour to raise Lorraine and Champagne en masse in the rear of the Allies, and has any French critic ever blamed him for doing so? Was the actual misery suffered by the inhabitants of Beira so much greater than what they would have endured if they had remained at home, and offered no resistance? The country-side would have been stripped bare by an army forced to make ‘war support war,’ and one can hardly believe, judging from parallel incidents in Spain, that outrages would have been conspicuous by their absence.

But it would seem that the third of Wellington’s reasons for calling out the Ordenança was far more cogent, and lay nearer to the heart of his scheme than the other two. Throughout Portuguese history the summons to the levy en masse had always been combined with another measure, from which indeed it could not be disentangled—the order to the whole population to evacuate and devastate the land in face of the advancing enemy. The use of the weapon of starvation against the French was an essential part of Wellington’s plan for defending Portugal. When he told the British Ministry that he would undertake the defence of the realm, this was one of the main conditions of his pledge. He had realized the great fact that the conduct of the war in the Peninsula depended on supplies: the old aphorism that ‘beyond the Pyrenees large armies starve and small armies get beaten’ was at the back of all his schemes for the year 1810. He calculated that the French would find the greatest difficulty in accumulating stores sufficient to feed an army of invasion large enough to attack Portugal, and that, even if such stores could be gathered, there would be a still greater difficulty in getting them to the front as they were needed. For not only would it be hard to collect the mass of transport required for an army of 70,000, 80,000, or 100,000 men, but the convoys which it formed would find it impossible to move over the vast stretch of bad roads between Salamanca and Lisbon, when the communications were cut and the Militia and Ordenança were infesting every pass and hillside. It was almost certain that the invaders would make no such attempt to feed themselves from the rear, but would start with a moderate train, carrying no more than provisions for a week or two, and hoping to subsist (in the usual French style) on the resources of the invaded country. Such resources Wellington was determined that they should not find. They would ere long be starved out, and forced to fall back on their magazines, certainly losing a large proportion of their men from privations by the way. If this scheme had been carried out with rigid perfection, Masséna’s invasion would have amounted to no more than a promenade to Torres Vedras, and a prompt return to the borders of Spain with a famished army. Unfortunately the device, though it worked well and was ultimately quite successful, was not perfectly executed in every corner and by every subordinate, so that the French, showing a magnificent obstinacy, and suffering untold privations, remained before the Lines for three months before they retired. But retire they did, and with a loss of a third of their army, and a deplorable decadence of their morale, so that Wellington’s scheme was fully justified[193].

The plan for defeating the enemy by the system of devastation was neither ‘dictated by the hard heart of a general trained in the atrocious wars of the East,’ as certain French authors have written, nor was it (as some of the English authors have supposed) suggested to Wellington by the measures which had been taken in 1803-4 for withdrawing all food and transport from the south coast of England, if Napoleon should be successful in crossing from Boulogne. It was an ancient Portuguese device, practised from time immemorial against the Castilian invader, which had never failed of success. Nor had it come to an end with the War of Independence of 1640, or the war of the Spanish Succession of 1704. When Spain had made her last serious assault on Portugal in 1762 (Godoy’s miserable mock-war of 1801 does not deserve to be counted), the plan had worked admirably. When the Conde d’Aranda invaded the Beira ‘the country had been “driven” in the most systematic style, and everything that could not be carried off had been destroyed, so that the Spaniard found himself in a desert, being unable to discover either provisions, cars, or peasants: the inhabitants had abandoned their villages, and carried off everything. The enemy had to be supplied with every necessary from Spain: the infantry were harassed with fatigue in remaking the roads, and the cavalry-horses destroyed in conducting provisions. At last d’Aranda retreated, leaving his sick and wounded at Castello Branco, with a letter commending them to the attention of the allies[194].’ Of this same war Dumouriez wrote: ‘As soon as the Spaniards enter Portugal the King publishes a declaration, by which he enjoins on his subjects to fall upon the invaders, and the national hatred always excites them to execute the “Ordinance.” As the Spanish army pushes on, the villages are depopulated, and the inhabitants fall back on the capital. The peasantry arrive there in crowds with wives and children, so that the king at the end of three months has 200,000 or 300,000 extra mouths to feed[195].’

This sounds like a description of the great migration of 1810, but was actually written in 1766. It is clear, then, that Wellington did not invent the system of devastation, but simply utilized, and carried out to its logical end, an old custom essentially national, and familiar to the Portuguese from time immemorial. It was the regular device of the weak against the strong in the Middle Ages, and differed in nothing from ‘Good King Robert’s Testament,’ the time-honoured system applied by the Scots to the English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

‘In strait placis gar hide all store,

And byrnen ye plaineland thaim before,

Thanne sall thei pass away in haist,

When that thai find na thing but waist,

So sall ye turn thaim with gret affrai,

As thai were chasit with swerd awai.’

Fortunately for himself, for England, and for Europe, Wellington had to deal with a peasantry almost as frugal, as tough, and as stubborn in their hatred as the mediaeval Scot. They saw nothing strange in the demand now made to them, and obeyed. The difficulty lay with the townsfolk of large places, such as Coimbra, Thomar, or Santarem, which lay far from the frontier, and had not the old traditions of the peasantry, since the Spaniards had never penetrated to their doors since the seventeenth century. Here there was much recalcitrance, as was but natural; the burgher had much to abandon where the peasant had little. Yet, as we shall see, the scheme was carried out in the end, and those who stayed behind to greet the French could be counted on one hand in places of the size of Vizeu, Coimbra, or Leiria. That fanatical patriotism went far towards producing such a result is true, but does not explain the whole matter: quite as strong a motive was the unforgotten tale of the horrors that had followed Soult’s entry into Oporto. To the Portuguese citizens the approach of the French meant probable murder and rape, hence came the readiness that they showed to depart. There were exaggerated rumours abroad of the ruthlessness of the French: was not Loison, the ‘Maneta’ of whom so many atrocious (and mostly false) stories were told, known to be in high command?

Wellington’s scheme for the clearing of the country-side in face of the enemy had long been thought out. It included not merely the evacuation of the towns and villages, but the destruction of bridges, mills, even ovens; the removal of all animals and means of transport, the destruction of all food-stuff that could not be carried off, the burning of all ferry-boats and other small craft on the navigable rivers. ‘The moment that the enemy crosses the frontier,’ he wrote to Beresford, ‘the governor of the province of Estremadura must be told that it is necessary to order all carts, carriages, and other means of conveyance, with all the provisions they can carry, away. He ought to have all his arrangements prepared for ordering them off as soon as the French approach. The Captains Mor[196] and their Ordenança must be prepared to give the enemy all the opposition in their power, not by assembling in large bodies, but by lying out in the mountains and the strong parts of the roads, annoying their patrols and small parties, and interrupting their communications[197].’ This comes from an order of February: by August, when a new harvest had been gathered in, the question of the destruction of food stuffs became more difficult. The peasantry, as was natural, persisted in hiding rather than burning what could not be carried off. By one means or another a certain number of these concealed stores, even when buried in pits or removed to remote ravines, were discovered by the French, and enabled them to prolong their precarious stay in front of the Torres Vedras lines.

As to the displacement of the population, Wellington considered that in many parts it would be sufficient if it took to the hills for a few days, while the French army was passing. His military arrangements were such that he thought it impossible that the enemy would be able either to leave small posts behind him, or to maintain his lines of communication with Spain. It would suffice, therefore, that the peasantry in parts off the main roads, and remote from large towns or points of strategical importance, should make ready for a merely temporary migration. They must always, however, be ready to flit again, if fresh columns of the enemy, advancing or retreating, should come near their abodes. The townsfolk and the inhabitants of the fertile coast plains of Estremadura and Western Beira were recommended to retire either to Lisbon or to Oporto, according as they were nearer to one or to the other. It was clear that the problem of feeding them there would be a matter for the Government, for individuals of the poorer classes could not be expected to carry or to buy provisions for many weeks. Hence there was a need for the accumulation of immense stores, over and above those required for the army. The Portuguese Regency did what it could, but in its usual slip-shod and inefficient fashion, and there is no doubt that much misery and a certain amount of starvation fell to the lot of the unhappy emigrants. Fortunately Lisbon and Oporto were great ports and full of food; but despite of this, the position of the refugees became deplorable, when Masséna tarried at Santarem two months longer than Wellington had considered probable. But their suffering was not in vain: the French were starved out, even if it was a few weeks later than had been expected.

Having dealt with the organization of the military force of Portugal, and the arrangements for the depopulation of the country, we have still to explain the third section of Wellington’s great scheme of defence—that consisting of fortifications. We have already mentioned that Almeida and Elvas had been repaired and garrisoned, the former with 5,000 men, consisting of one regiment of regulars and three of militia, under the English general William Cox, the other by 8,000 men,—two regiments of regulars and five of militia,—under General Leite. These were the outer bulwarks of the realm. Campo Mayor, a small and antiquated fortress, a sort of outlying dependency of Elvas, was held by one militia battalion under a Colonel Talaya, a retired engineer officer. It was not expected to make a serious resistance, but did so in the time of need, and detained a French division before its walls for some precious days in the spring of 1811, to the great glory and credit of its governor.

Only two other of the ancient fortresses of Portugal were placed in a state of defence, and made to play a notable part in Wellington’s general scheme for checking the French. These were Peniche and Abrantes. The former is a very strong isolated sea-fortress, on a projecting headland in the Atlantic, forty miles north of Lisbon. It commands several good creeks and landing-places, suitable for the embarkation and disembarkation of troops, and is nearly impregnable, because of the narrowness of the isthmus connecting it with the mainland. Placed where it is, just in the rear of the position which an enemy must take who is meditating an attack on Lisbon, it offers unique opportunities for making incursions on his rear and his communications. Moreover, it afforded a refuge and a safe point of departure by sea, for any section of the allied troops which might become isolated, and be pressed towards the water by the advancing enemy. Some of Wellington’s officers considered that it was an even better place for embarkation than Lisbon, if the French should prove too strong, and the British should be compelled to abandon Portugal. The Commander-in-Chief thought otherwise, but caused its fortification to be carefully restored, and garrisoned it with a picked regiment of militia[198].

Even more important than Peniche was Abrantes, the one great crossing-place of the Tagus above Lisbon where there was a permanent bridge, and free communication by good roads between Beira and Alemtejo. It lies at the point where the road from Spain by way of Castello Branco crosses the road from north to south down the Portuguese frontier, from Almeida and Guarda to Evora and Elvas. An invader who has advanced towards Lisbon through Beira has it on his flank and rear, equally so an invader who has advanced on the same objective from Badajoz and the Guadiana. It is the natural point at which to move troops north and south along the frontier, though Wellington had established an alternative temporary crossing-point at Villa Velha, thirty miles higher up the river, by means of pontoons. But this secondary passage was inferior in safety, since it was not protected by a fortress like Abrantes. Orders were given to burn the pontoons if ever a French force from the East should came near. At Abrantes, on the other hand, the boat-bridge could be pulled up and stacked under the city walls in the event of an attack, and did not need to be destroyed. The town is situated on a lofty eminence upon the north bank of the Tagus. Its fortifications were antiquated in 1809, but had been for many months in process of being rebuilt and strengthened by the English engineer Patton. With new earthworks and redoubts it had been made a strong place, which could not be taken without a regular siege and plenty of heavy artillery. Here Wellington had placed a garrison of two militia regiments under the Portuguese general Lobo, whose orders were to resist to the last, and to make sure of burning the boat-bridge, down to the last plank, before surrendering. The French never put him to the test, since they had no heavy guns with them, and therefore regarded it as hopeless to attempt an attack on the place[199].

Almeida and Elvas, Peniche and Abrantes, were regular fortresses with large garrisons. There were, however, other points where Wellington ordered fortifications of a less permanent kind to be thrown up, because he thought them of first-rate strategical importance. The two most important were one on the northern line of advance which the French might take, the other on the central or Castello Branco line. The first was a line of redoubts behind the river Alva, just where it joins the Mondego, on either side of the bridge and village of Ponte de Murcella. It was here, he thought, that Masséna would choose his road, along the south bank of the Mondego, if he marched on Lisbon by the Beira line. But the Marshal moved by Vizeu, partly (as it seems) because he had heard of the fortifications of this defile, and the works were never used. Equally unprofitable (so it chanced) was another important series of field-works, constructed to cover the lowest reach of the Zezere against an invader who should come by the Castello Branco road, and should have masked or taken Abrantes. This was a line of redoubts and trenches, almost a fortified camp, on the east bank of the river from Tancos to opposite Martinchel, blocking both the roads which lead from Castello Branco into Estremadura. Masséna, coming not by the route which was guarded against, but from Leiria and Thomar, took the lines of Zezere in the rear, and they proved useless.

Along with the precautions taken on the banks of the Alva and the Zezere, two other pieces of engineering must be mentioned. The one, the destruction of the Estrada Nova,—the mountain-road which leads from Fundão and Belmonte to the lower Zezere without passing through Castello Branco,—has already been noticed, when we were dealing with the possible lines of invasion in Portugal. The other move was constructive, not destructive, in character. Foreseeing that Abrantes might be masked, or besieged on the northern bank of the Tagus, and all the roads in that direction thereby blocked, while it might still be very profitable to have free communication between Lisbon and the Castello Branco region, he caused the road above the south bank of the Tagus, from opposite Abrantes to the flying-bridge at Villa Velha, to be thoroughly reconstructed. This route, by Gavião and Niza, was so much easier in its slopes than the old high-road Abrantes-Castello Branco, that, even when the latter was safe, troops moving from east to west, along the Tagus often used it during the next two years of the war, though it involved two passages of the river instead of one.

But all the matters of engineering hitherto mentioned were unimportant and merely subsidiary, when placed beside the one great piece of work which formed the keystone of Wellington’s plan for the defence of Portugal. His whole scheme depended on the existence of an impregnable place of refuge, available both for his army, and for the emigrant population of the country-side which he was about to devastate. He must have a line on which the invader could be finally checked and forced to halt and starve. If such a line had not existed, his whole scheme would have been impracticable, and after a lost battle he might have been driven to that hurried embarkation which the ministers in London foresaw and dreaded. But his eye had been fixed upon the ground in front of Lisbon ever since his second landing in the Peninsula in April 1809, and there he thought that the necessary stronghold might be found. A full year before Masséna’s invasion he had informed the British cabinet that though he could not undertake to defend all Portugal, ‘for the whole country is frontier, and it would be difficult to prevent the enemy from entering by some point or other,’ he yet conceived that he might protect the essential part of the realm, the capital, against anything save the most overwhelming odds[200]. The scheme had taken definite shape in his head when, on October 20, 1809, he wrote his famous dispatch to Colonel Fletcher, the commanding engineer at Lisbon, directing him to draw up without delay a scheme for the construction of two successive lines of trenches and redoubts, covering the whole stretch of country from the Atlantic to a point on the estuary of the Tagus twenty miles or more north of the capital. This was, in its essentials, the order for the construction of the lines of Torres Vedras, for though the front designated does not exactly tally with that ultimately taken up, it only differs from it in points of detail. Fletcher is directed to survey a line from the mouth of the Castanheira brook to the mouth of the Zizandre, and another, a few miles behind, from Alhandra on the Tagus by Bucellas and Cabeça de Montechique towards Mafra. These roughly represent the two lines of defence ultimately constructed, though in the end the extreme right flank was drawn back from the Castanheira to the Alhandra stream. Fletcher is told that the works will be on the largest scale: the fortified camp above Torres Vedras is to hold 5,000 men, the works at Cabeça de Montechique alone will require 5,000 workmen to be set to dig at once; great operations, such as the damming up of rivers and the creation of marshes many miles long, are suggested.

How the great scheme worked out, and how the works stood when Masséna’s long-expected army at last appeared in front of them, will be told in a later chapter, in its due place. Suffice it here to say that all through the spring and summer of 1810 they were being urged forward with feverish haste.

It must not be supposed that it was an easy matter to carry out all these preparations. The Portuguese government ended by adopting all Wellington’s suggestions: but it was not without friction that he achieved his purpose. While he was planning works at the very gates of Lisbon, and making provisions for the devastation of whole provinces in view of the approaching invasion, he was often met by suggestions that it would be possible to defend the outer frontiers of the realm, and that his schemes were calculated to dishearten the Portuguese people, rather than to encourage them to a firm resistance. The Regency, moreover, had enough national pride to resent the way in which a policy was dictated to them, without any reference to their own views. The governing party in Portugal had accepted the English alliance without reserve, but it often winced at the consequences of its action. There was a view abroad that the little nation was being set in the forefront of the battle of European independence mainly for the benefit of Great Britain. Fortunately the memory of Junot’s dictatorship and Soult’s ravages was still fresh enough to overcome all other considerations. A moment’s reflection convinced Wellington’s most ardent critics that though the British yoke might sometimes seem hard, anything was better than a return to French servitude. The Regency murmured, but always ended by yielding, and issued the edicts necessary to confirm all the orders of the general.

The state of the Portuguese government at this moment requires a word of explanation. The original Regency confirmed by Sir Hew Dalrymple in 1808 had been somewhat changed in its personnel. It was now a more numerous body than at its first installation; of the original members, only the Patriarch (Antonio de Castro, late bishop of Oporto), and the Marquez de Olhão (Francisco de Mello e Menezes, the Constable or Monteiro Mor, as he is more frequently called), now survived. But four new members had been appointed in 1810. The most important of them was José Antonio de Menezes e Sousa, generally known as the ‘Principal Sousa,’ an ecclesiastic who was one of the band of three Sousa brothers, who formed the backbone of the anti-French party in Portugal. The eldest of them, Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, Conde de Linhares, was prime minister of the Prince Regent at Rio de Janeiro. The third, Domingos Antonio de Sousa Coutinho, afterwards Conde de Funchal, was Portuguese minister in London. Thus when the Principal entered the Regency, this busy and capable family could pull the strings alike at Rio, London, and Lisbon, in the interests of their relations and dependants. This they did without scruple and without ceasing. Domestic politics in Portugal had always been a matter of family alliances, as much as of principles. They presented, indeed, a considerable resemblance to those of Great Britain during the Whig domination of the eighteenth century. Hence there was considerable danger that the policy of the alliance against Napoleon might become identified in the eyes of the Portuguese nation with the domination of the Sousa faction. That this peril was avoided was not their fault: they did their best to keep all promotion, civil and military, for their own adherents; hence came interminable quarrels on petty personal questions both with Wellington and Beresford. Fortunately the two Marshals could generally get their way in the end, when large interests were at stake, because the Sousas were pledged to the British alliance, and dared not break with it. To do so would have brought other politicians to the front. But, meanwhile, unending controversies wasted Wellington’s time and soured his temper: more than once he is found writing in his dispatches to Lord Liverpool that the ‘impatient, meddling, mischievous’[201] Principal ought to be got out of the Regency and promoted to some foreign embassy, or great civil post, where he could do less harm. But the British government thought, and probably was right in thinking, that it was better to bear with known evils than to quarrel with the Sousa family, and thereby to break up the pro-British party in Portugal. Wellington had to endure the Principal’s small intrigues and petty criticism till the end.

The other members who entered the Regency in 1810 were the Conde de Redondo, Fernando Maria de Sousa Coutinho—another of the Sousa clan—Doctor Raymundo Nogueira, a law professor of the University of Coimbra[202] and—far the most important of all—the newly appointed British Minister at Lisbon, Mr. Charles Stuart. The nomination of a foreigner to such a post touched Portuguese pride to the quick, and was looked upon by all enemies of the Sousa faction as an act of miserable weakness on the part of the Conde de Linhares and the Prince Regent. It was considered doubtful policy on the part of the Perceval Cabinet to consent to the appointment, considering the offence which it was certain to give. In their justification it must be pleaded that both the Patriarch and the Principal Sousa were men capable of causing any amount of difficulty by their ill-considered plans and their personal intrigues, and that a colleague who could be trusted to keep an eye upon their actions, and to moderate their ambitions was much needed. Stuart was a man of moderate and tactful bearing, but could be neither cajoled nor overruled. It was on his influence in the Regency that Wellington relied most for support. At this moment there were two questions in process of discussion which rendered it most necessary that the Portuguese government should not be left entirely to its own guidance. Taking advantage of the unhappy condition of Spain, and the weakness of the newly appointed executive at Cadiz, the Portuguese were pressing for the restoration of Olivenza, Godoy’s old conquest of 1801, and for the recognition of the Princess Carlotta of Spain, the wife of the Prince of the Brazils, as the person entitled to act as Regent of Spain during the captivity of her brothers at Valençay. Dom Pedro de Sousa Holstein, the Portuguese minister at Cadiz—a kinsman of Linhares and the Principal—was actively urging both these demands on the Spanish government. If he had succeeded in imposing them on Castaños and his colleagues there would have been desperate friction between the allies. But by promising the active support of the Portuguese army within the Spanish frontiers—which he had no power to guarantee, and which Wellington had absolutely refused to grant—the minister won some support at Cadiz. Extra pressure was brought to bear upon the Spaniards by the massing of Brazilian troops on the South American frontier, on the side of Rio Grande do Sul—a most unjustifiable act, which might have led to an actual rupture, a thing which the British government was bound to prevent by every means in its power. The only way to prevent an open breach between Spain and Portugal was to check the activity of Sousa Holstein, an end which Stuart found much difficulty in accomplishing, because the objects for which the minister was striving, and especially the restoration of Olivenza to its old owners, were entirely approved by his colleagues in the Regency. When it is added that there were numerous other points of friction between the British and the Portuguese governments—such as the question of free trade with Brazil, that of the suppression of the slave trade, and that of the form to be adopted for the payment of the subsidies which maintained the Portuguese army—it is easy to understand that Stuart’s position on the Council of Regency was no easy one. He often found himself in a minority of one when a discussion started: he frequently had to acquiesce in decisions which he did not approve, merely in order to avoid friction on matters of secondary importance. But in matters of really primary moment he generally succeeded in getting his way, owing to the simple fact that Portugal was dependent on Great Britain for the continuance of her national existence. Conscious of this, the other members of the Regency would generally yield a reluctant assent at the last moment, and Wellington’s plans, when set forth by Stuart, though often criticized, delayed, and impeded, were in the end carried out with more or less completeness.

---

SECTION XIX: CHAPTER III

THE FRENCH PREPARATIONS: MASSÉNA’S ARMY OF PORTUGAL

During the summer campaign of 1809 the French Army of Spain had received hardly any reinforcements from beyond the Pyrenees. Every man that the Emperor could arm was being directed against Austria in May and June. But when Wagram had been won, and the armistice of Znaym signed, and when moreover it had been discovered that the British expedition to the Isle of Walcheren need not draw off any part of the Army of Germany, the Emperor began to turn his attention to the Peninsula. The armistice with Austria had been signed on July 12: only six days later, on the 18th of the same month, Napoleon was already selecting troops to send to Spain, and expressing his intention of going there himself to ‘finish the business’ in person[203]. But he had made up his mind that it was too late in the year for him to transport any great mass of men to the Peninsula in time for operations in the autumn, and had settled that the expulsion of the English and the conquest of Cadiz, Seville, and Valencia must be delayed to the spring of 1810. On September 7 he wrote[204] to approve King Joseph’s decision that Soult should not be allowed to make any attempt on Portugal in the autumn, and a month later he advised his brother to defend the line of the Tagus, and drive back Spanish incursions, but to defer all offensive movements till the reinforcements should have begun to arrive[205].

The composition of the new army that was to enter Spain was dictated in a minute to the Minister of War on October 7, in which the Emperor stated that the total force was to be about 100,000 men, including the Guard, that it was all to be on the roads between Orleans and Bayonne by December, and that he should take command in person[206]. It may be noted that the troops designated in this memorandum were actually those which took part in the campaign of 1810, with the exception of the Old Guard, which was held back when Napoleon determined to remain behind, and to send a substitute as commander-in-chief in Spain. Since the bulk of the immense column was only directed to reach Bayonne at the end of the year, it was clear that it would not be within striking distance of the enemy till March 1810.

Down to the month of December 1809, Napoleon’s correspondence teems with allusions to his approaching departure for Spain. They were not merely intended to deceive the public, for they occur in letters to his most trusted ministers and generals. We might be inclined to suspect an intention to cajole the English Ministry in the magnificent phrases of the address to the Corps Législatif on December 3, when the Emperor declares that ‘the moment he displays himself beyond the Pyrenees the Leopard in terror will seek the Ocean to avoid shame, defeat, and death.’ But business was certainly meant when Berthier was advised to send forward his carriages and horses to Madrid, and when the Old Guard’s departure for the frontier was ordered[207]. Suddenly, in the third week of December, the allusions to the Emperor’s impending departure cease. It would appear that his change of purpose must be attributed not to the news of Ocaña, where the last great Spanish army had perished, but to a purely domestic cause: this was the moment at which the question of the Imperial Divorce came into prominence. It would seem that when Napoleon had conceived the idea of the Austrian marriage, and had learnt that his offers were likely to be accepted, he gave up all intention of invading Spain in the early spring in person. The divorce was first officially mooted when the ‘protest’ was laid before a Privy Council on December 15[208], and after that day there is no more mention of a departure for the South. All through January, February, and March the negotiations were in progress, and on April 1-2[209] the Emperor married his new wife. The festivities which followed lasted many days, and when they were over the Emperor conducted his spouse on a long tour through the Northern Departments in May, and did not return to the vicinity of Paris till June, when the army of invasion, which had long since reached the Peninsula, had been already handed over to a new chief.

In the months during which the marriage negotiations were in progress, and the columns of reinforcements were pouring into Navarre and Old Castile, it is not quite certain what were the Emperor’s real intentions as to the allocation of the command. Nothing clear can be deduced from an order given to Junot in the middle of February ‘to spread everywhere the news of the arrival of the Emperor with 80,000 men, in order to disquiet the English and prevent them from undertaking operations in the South[210].’ This is but a ruse de guerre; the marriage project was so far advanced that the ratifications of the contract were signed only four days later than the date of the dispatch[211], and Napoleon must have known that he could not get away from Paris for another two months at the least. But it was only on April 17 that an Imperial Decree, dated at Compiègne, was published, announcing that not the whole French force in Spain, but three army corps (the 2nd, 6th, and 8th), with certain other troops, were to form the Army of Portugal and to be placed under the command of Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. After this it was certain that the Emperor would not cross the Pyrenees. Five days later this was made still more clear by an order to the Commandant of the Guard to recall the old Chasseur and Grenadier regiments of that corps from the various points that they had reached on the way to Bayonne, and to send on to Spain only the Tirailleur and Voltigeur regiments recently raised in 1809, and generally known as the ‘Young Guard’[212]. Napoleon never took the field in person without the veteran portion of his body-guard.

The non-appearance of the Emperor had one most important result. If he had taken the field, every marshal and general in Spain would have been subject to a single directing will, and would have been forced to combine his operations with those of his neighbours, whether he wished or no. On determining to devote the spring and summer of 1810 to nuptial feasts and state progresses, instead of to a campaign on the Tagus, he did not nominate any single commander-in-chief to take his place. Masséna, from his seniority and his splendid military record, might have seemed worthy of such promotion. He was not given it, but only placed in charge of three army corps, and of certain parts of Old Castile and Leon and the garrison troops there residing. This was a vast charge, embracing in all the command of 138,000 men. But it gave Masséna no control over the rest of the armies of Spain, and no power to secure their co-operation, save by the tedious method of appeals to Paris. Indeed, the Emperor had chosen the precise moment of King Joseph’s conquest of Andalusia to break up such hierarchical organization of command as existed in the Peninsula. By a decree of February 8 he took the provinces of Aragon and Catalonia, with the army corps there employed, completely out of the sphere of the authority of King Joseph: Augereau and Suchet were forbidden to hold any communication with Madrid, and were directed to make every report and request to Paris. This would not have been fatal to the success of the main operations of the French army, for Aragon and Catalonia were a side-issue, whose military history, all through the war, had little connexion with that of Castile and Portugal. But their severance from the military hierarchy dependent on the King was followed by that of Navarre, the Basque provinces, Burgos, Valladolid, Palencia, and Toro, which were formed into four ‘Military Governments’ under Generals Dufour, Thouvenot, Dorsenne, and Kellermann. These governors were given complete civil and military autonomy, with power to raise taxes, administer justice, to name and displace Spanish functionaries, and to move their troops at their own pleasure, under responsibility to the Emperor alone. The ‘6th Government’ (Valladolid, Palencia, Toro) was afterwards placed under the authority of Masséna; the others remained independent Viceroyalties. Thus military authority in the Peninsula was divided up for the future between (1) the Commander of the Army of Portugal, who controlled not only his army but all the regions which it occupied—Leon, the greater part of Old Castile, and part of Estremadura; (2) the military governors of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Biscay, Burgos; (3) the King, who practically controlled his Army of the Centre and the kingdom of New Castile alone, since Soult, in Andalusia, though not formally created a ‘military governor,’ practically acted on his own responsibility, without any reference to the King’s wishes. All the viceroys reported directly to Paris, and kept the Emperor fully employed with their perpetual bickerings. How Napoleon came to create and continue such a vicious system it is hard to conceive. Apparently the explanation must be sought in the fact that he feared servants with too great power, and acted on the principle of divide et impera, despite of the fact that he knew, as a soldier, that the want of a commander-in-chief is ruinous in practical war. At the bottom was the idea that he himself could manage everything, even when his armies were a thousand miles away, and when it took three weeks or a month to transmit orders to them. He sometimes acknowledged in a moment of self-realization that this was a bad arrangement, and that it was impossible for him to conduct or criticize the details of strategy at such a distance, or under such conditions. But after a lucid moment he would fall back into his usual ways of thought, and proceed to give orders and directions which were obsolete before the dispatches that conveyed them could be delivered to the hands of his marshals.

To proceed to details—the old Army of Spain had come to a standstill after it had overrun Andalusia in February 1810. Three corps under Soult were absorbed by that new conquest, some 73,000 men in all[213]. Suchet with his 3rd Corps, 26,000 men, held Aragon; Augereau with the vast 7th Corps, 56,900 in all, did not hold down, but was executing military promenades in, the turbulent Catalonia. The 2nd and 6th Corps lay observing Portugal, the former with head quarters at Talavera, the latter with head quarters at Salamanca. Ney had now returned to take charge of the 6th Corps, and Reynier (an old enemy of the English, who had beaten him at Alexandria and Maida) was named chief of the 2nd Corps. This last had now been shorn of its third division,—that which had been composed of so many fractional units in 1809; these had been made over to the 6th Corps, which in 1810 possessed three divisions[214] and no longer two. Reynier had about 18,000 men, Ney no less than 38,000 after this rearrangement; he had been assigned Lorges’ dragoon-division as well as the troops transferred from the 2nd Corps. The King had 14,000 men in Madrid and New Castile: the old garrisons of the Northern Provinces, excluding the newly arrived reinforcements, made up nearly 20,000 men more. This 237,000 sabres and bayonets represents the old army of 1809[215]; the troops sent down by the Emperor after the termination of the Austrian War had not, for the most part, been absorbed into the old units, though they had crossed the Pyrenees in December and January.

It is now time to see what troops constituted these succours, the 100,000 men with whom the Emperor had originally intended to march in person to the conquest of the Peninsula. On looking through their muster roll the first thing that strikes the eye is that very little—almost nothing indeed—had been taken from the Army of Germany. The Emperor, though Austria was tamed and Prussia was under his feet, did not think it safe to cut down to any great extent the garrisons of Central Europe and Eastern France:

(1) Of all the corps that had taken part in the Wagram campaign only one had been directed on Spain, and this was a force of the second line, a unit originally called the ‘Corps de Réserve de l’Armée d’Allemagne’ and afterwards the 8th Corps. It had played only a small part in the late war, and was mostly composed of the newly raised 4th battalions of regiments serving elsewhere. Recruited up to a strength of 30,000 men by the addition of some stray battalions from Northern Germany, it was the first of all the new reinforcements to reach Spain[216]. Indeed, the head of its column reached Burgos by the 1st of January, 1810. It was assigned to the Army of Portugal. By the drafting away of some of its 4th battalions to join the regiments to which they appertained it ultimately came down to about 20,000 men.

(2) Next in point of importance were the two divisions of the Young Guard under Generals Roguet and Dumoustier, nineteen battalions, with three provisional regiments of the Guard Cavalry, nearly 15,000 men in all. These units had been formed in 1809, just in time for some of them to take their share in the bloody days of Essling and Wagram. The Emperor did not make them over to the Army of Portugal, but retained them in Biscay and Navarre, close under the Pyrenees. Apparently he disliked sending any of his Guards so far afield as to render it difficult to draw them back to France, in the event (unlikely as it was at this moment) of further troubles breaking out in Central Europe. The Guard divisions stayed in Spain two years, but were never allowed to go far forward into the interior.

(3) Deeply impressed with the danger and difficulty of keeping up the lines of communication between Bayonne and Madrid, since Mina and his coadjutors had set the guerrilla war on foot in Navarre and Old Castile, Napoleon had formed a corps whose special duty was to be the keeping open of the roads, and the policing of the country-side between the frontier and the Spanish capital. This was composed of twenty squadrons of Gendarmes, all veterans and picked men, each with a total strength of seven officers and 200 troopers. The decree ordering their selection from among the gendarmerie of Southern and Central France was published on November 24, 1809: but the first squadrons only began to pass the Pyrenees in February 1810, and many did not appear till April and May. Yet 4,000 men were in line by the summer[217].

(4) A few new regiments which had not hitherto been represented in the Peninsula were moved down thither. Among these were the Neuchâtel troops from Berthier’s principality, a German division from the minor states of the Confederation of the Rhine under General Rouyer[218], which went to Catalonia, the 7th, 13th, and 25th Chasseurs à Cheval, with two battalions of Marines. The total did not amount to more than some 10,000 men.

(5) By far the largest item in the reinforcements was composed of the 4th battalions of wellnigh every regiment which was already serving in Spain. The army which had marched across the Pyrenees in 1808 had been organized on the basis of three field-battalions to the regiment, the 4th battalion being the dépôt battalion. But Napoleon had now raised the standard to four (or in a few cases more) field-battalions, over and above the dépôt. All the fourth battalions were now existing and available; a few had served in the Austrian War, many of the others had been lying in the camps which the Emperor had formed at Boulogne, Pontivy, and elsewhere, to protect his coasts against possible English descents. Those belonging to 40 regiments already in Spain, with the full complement of 840 men each, were first ordered to cross the Pyrenees: they numbered 33,600 men: these were all at the front by May 1810. The Emperor somewhat later dispatched the fourth battalions of twenty-six regiments more to the Peninsula, giving to the temporary organization the name of the 9th Corps. This should have given another 21,840 men, and nearly did so; their gross total, when all had reached Vittoria in September 1810, was 20,231. But the 9th Corps should not be reckoned in the first 100,000 men which the Emperor set aside for the spring campaign of 1810, it was a supplementary addition[219].

(6) The Emperor dealt in a similar way with the cavalry; the regiments already in Spain had been reduced to a strength of two or three squadrons by the wear and tear of eighteen months of war. The dépôts had now got ready two squadrons fit for field service. Those belonging to sixteen regiments of dragoons, organized into eight provisional regiments, were sent early to the front, and were all in Spain by January 1810.

(7) In addition to units like 4th battalions and 3rd and 4th squadrons added to the strength of each dragoon or infantry regiment, the Emperor did not neglect to send drafts to fill up the depleted 1st, 2nd, and 3rd battalions and 1st and 2nd squadrons. In the early months of 1810, 27,000 men, in small drafts not amounting to the strength of a battalion or squadron were forwarded to recruit the old units. They went forward in ‘régiments de marche,’ which were broken up on reaching the head quarters of the corps to which each party belonged.

Adding together all the units, with an extra allowance of 3,500 artillery for the new batteries that came in with Junot’s Corps, the Guard divisions, and the 9th Corps, we get as a total of the reinforcements poured into Spain between December 1809, and September 1810, the following figures:—

Junot’s corps, at its final strength in June, infantry only	20,000
Young Guard divisions	15,000
Gendarmerie	4,000
New regiments	10,000
4th battalions, the first arrivals	33,600
4th battalions forming the 9th Corps	20,000
Cavalry in organized squadrons	5,000
Artillery in complete batteries	3,500
Drafts, not in permanent units, for Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery	27,000
	138,100

This total far exceeds the original 100,000 of which Napoleon had spoken in the autumn of 1809, but is certainly rather below the actual number of men received into the Peninsula; the figure for drafts, in especial, is hard to verify. But as the total strength of the Army of Spain in the autumn of 1809 was 237,000 men, and in September 1810, 353,000 men, while at least 25,000 had been lost in the interval[220], the figures cannot be far out.

Of this total, as we have already said, the 2nd, 6th, and 8th Corps and the troops under Kellermann and Bonnet occupying the provinces of Toro, Palencia, Valladolid, and Santander formed the ‘Army of Portugal’ assigned to Masséna; he was also given an extra unattached division under Serras[221], and promised the use of the 9th Corps when it should have crossed the Pyrenees. The gross total of this force was in May, when the new Commander-in-Chief had taken up his post, about 130,000 men, of whom some 86,000 were effective and available for active operations at the moment. Serras, Kellermann, and Bonnet were tied down to their local duties—the first had to look after the Spanish army of Galicia, the second to keep the plains of Valladolid quiet, the third to hold Santander and (when it was fully subdued) to enter and overrun the Asturias. The 20,000 men of the 9th Corps were not yet arrived in Spain[222]. The troops in the provinces of Burgos, Biscay, and Navarre, though not placed under the Marshal’s actual command, were yet in existence to cover his rear and his communications with France. If they are added to the total of the force which, directly or indirectly, was employed for the conquest of Portugal, some 30,000 more must be taken into consideration. But, though they were useful, indeed indispensable, for the conquest of Portugal, it is fairer to leave them out of consideration.

But the exact total of an army is, after all, less important than the character and capacity of its generals. The individuality of Masséna was the most important factor in the problem of the invasion of Portugal. He was fifty-two years of age—very nearly the eldest of all the Marshals—and he was the only one of those on active service, save Jourdan, who had achieved greatness in the days before Napoleon arrived at supreme power. He had led an army of 60,000 men when, of the three corps-commanders now under him, Ney was but a lieutenant-colonel, Junot a young captain, and Reynier a brigadier-general. Like nearly all the men of the Revolution he had risen from below; he sprang from a poor family in Genoa: according to his enemies they were Jews, and his name was but Manasseh disguised. His personal character was detestable; many of the marshals had an evil reputation for financial probity, but Masséna’s was the worst of all. ‘He plundered like a condottiere of the Middle Ages,’ wrote one of his lieutenants. He had been in trouble, both with the Republican government and with the Emperor, for his shameless malversations in Italy, and had piled up a large private fortune by surreptitious methods[223]. Avarice is not usually associated with licentiousness, but he shocked even the easy-going public opinion of the French army by the way in which he paraded his mistress at unsuitable moments and in unsuitable company. He took this person, the sister of one of his aides-de-camp, with him all through the dangers of the Portuguese campaign, where her presence often caused friction and delays, and occasionally exposed him to insults[224]. Masséna was hard, suspicious, and revengeful; an intriguer to the finger-tips, he was always prone to suppose that others were intriguing against himself[225]. Though an old Republican, who had risen from the ranks early in the revolutionary war, he had done his best to make himself agreeable to Napoleon by the arts of the courtier. Altogether, he was a detestable character—but he was a great general. Of all the marshals of the Empire he was undoubtedly the most capable; Davoust and Soult, with all their abilities, were not up to his level. As a proof of his boldness and rapid skill in seizing an opportunity the battle of Zurich is sufficient to quote; for his splendid obstinacy the defence of Genoa at the commencement of his career has its parallel in the long endurance before the lines of Torres Vedras at its end. His best testimonial is that Wellington, when asked, long years after, which of his old opponents was the best soldier, replied without hesitation that Masséna was the man, and that he had never permitted himself to take in his presence the risks that he habitually accepted when confronted with any of the other marshals[226].

The fatigues of the late Austrian war, in which he had borne such an honourable part, had tried Masséna’s health; it was not without difficulty that the Emperor had persuaded him to undertake the Portuguese campaign. When he first assembled round him at Salamanca the staff which was to serve him in the invasion, he astonished and somewhat disheartened his officers by beginning his greetings to them with the remark, ‘Gentlemen, I am here contrary to my own wish; I begin to feel myself too old and too weary to go on active service. The Emperor says that I must, and replied to the reasons for declining this post which I gave him, by saying that my reputation would suffice to end the war. It was very flattering no doubt, but no man has two lives to live on this earth—the soldier least of all[227].’ Those who had served under the Marshal a few years back, and now saw him after an interval, felt that there was truth in what he said. Foy wrote in his diary, ‘He is no longer the Masséna of the flashing eyes, the mobile face, and the alert figure whom I knew in 1799, and whose head then recalled to me the bust of Marius. He is only fifty-two, but looks more than sixty; he has got thin, he is beginning to stoop; his look, since the accident when he lost his eye by the Emperor’s hand[228], has lost its vivacity. The tone of his voice alone remains unchanged.’ But if the Marshal’s bodily vigour was somewhat abated, his will was as strong as ever. He needed it at this juncture, for he had to command subordinates who were anything but easy to deal with. Ney, though an honest man and an admirable soldier, had the fault of insubordination in the highest degree. He never obeyed any one save the Emperor in the true military fashion. He quarrelled with every colleague that he met—notably with Soult—and had an old and very justifiable personal dislike for Masséna. Even before the latter appeared at the front, he had been heard to use threatening language concerning him. Junot was almost as bad; having held the chief command in the last Portuguese expedition he had a strong, if a mistaken, belief that it was becoming that he should be placed in charge of the second. His record rendered the idea absurd, but this he was the last to understand, being of an overweening and self-confident disposition. He was stupid enough to regard Masséna as his supplanter, and to show sullen resentment. Of the three chiefs of the army corps about to invade Portugal, Reynier was the only one on decent terms with his Commander-in-Chief, but even he was not reckoned his friend[229].

Masséna’s chief of the staff was Fririon, a scientific soldier and a man well liked by his colleagues; but it is said that he was not so much in the Marshal’s confidence as Lieut.-Colonel Pelet, the senior aide de camp of his staff. Complaints are found, in some of the letters and memoirs of the time, that Masséna would talk matters over with Pelet, and issue orders without letting even his chief of the staff know of his change of plan or new inspiration. Pelet’s own indiscreet statements on this point seem to justify the complaints made by others against him[230]. There was friction, therefore, even within the staff itself, and all that the Marshal did, or said, was criticized by some of those who should have been his loyal subordinates, under the notion that it had been inspired by others, who were accorded a more perfect confidence by their common chief. Exact knowledge of the disputes in the État Major is hard to obtain, because, when the campaign was over, every man tried to make out that its failure had been due to the advice given to Masséna by those of whom he was jealous. At the bottom, however, all this controversy is not very important—there is no doubt that the Marshal himself was responsible for all that had happened—he was not the man to be led by the nose or over-persuaded by ambitious or intriguing underlings.

Failure or success is not the sole criterion of merit. Masséna’s campaign was a disastrous business; yet on investigating the disabilities under which he laboured, we shall be inclined in the end to marvel that he did so much, not that he did no more. The fundamental error was the Emperor’s, who gave him too few men for the enterprise with which he was entrusted. Napoleon refused to take the Portuguese troops into consideration, when he weighed the needs of the expedition. He repeatedly wrote that ‘it was absurd that his armies should be held in check by 25,000 or 30,000 British troops,’ as if nothing else required to be taken into consideration. He did not realize that Wellington had turned the Portuguese regular army into a decent fighting machine, capable of holding back French divisions in line of battle—as was shown at Bussaco. He had not foreseen that the despised militia required to be ‘contained’ by adequate numbers of troops on the line of communications. Still less had he dreamed of the great scheme for the devastation of Portugal, which was to be not the least effective of the weapons of its defender. But of this more will be said in the proper place.

---

SECTION XIX: CHAPTER IV

THE MONTHS OF WAITING: SIEGE OF ASTORGA (MARCH–MAY 1810)

Masséna, as we have seen, was only appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Portugal on April 17, 1810, and did not appear at Valladolid, to take up his charge, till May. The campaign, however, had begun long before under the Emperor’s own directions. There were preliminary operations to be carried out, which could be finished before either the new General-in-Chief or the main body of the reinforcements from beyond the Pyrenees had arrived. These were the repression of the insurgent bands of Navarre, Biscay, and Old Castile, the firm establishment of the line of communications between Salamanca and Bayonne, and the capture of the outlying Spanish fortresses, Astorga and Ciudad Rodrigo, which served as external defences for the Portuguese frontier. ‘Les besoins en Espagne sont successifs,’ wrote the Emperor early in the winter of 1809-10[231], ‘il faut d’abord un corps qui soumette les derrières. Étant en Novembre il serait impossible de réunir tous les moyens avant du commencement de janvier. Et dans cette presqu’île coupée de montagnes les froids et les neiges de janvier ne permettront de rien faire.’ All that he could do before spring would be to send forward Junot’s corps, and the other earlier reinforcements, to positions from which they should be ready to strike, the moment that the fine weather began. With the coming of the new year, when these corps had reached their destined positions, the imperial orders begin to abound in elaborate directions for the extermination of the guerrillas of the Upper Ebro and the Upper Douro[232], orders which led to much marching and counter-marching of the newly arrived troops, but to little practical effect in the way of repression, for skilled leaders like Mina, the Empecinado, and Julian Sanchez, nearly always slipped between the fingers of their pursuers, and on the few occasions when they were pressed into a corner, simply bade their men disperse and unite again at some distant rendezvous. These operations, however, were wholly subsidiary: the actual advance against Portugal only commences with the orders given to Junot in February to concentrate his corps at Valladolid, to hand over the charge of Salamanca and Old Castile to Kellermann’s dragoons and the divisions of the 6th Corps, and then to subdue the whole of the plain-land of Leon, as far as the foot of the Asturian and Galician mountains, including the towns of Benavente, Leon, and Astorga. Bonnet and his division, now as always based on Santander, were already advancing to invade the Asturias, and to threaten Galicia from the east. Ney with the 6th Corps was ordered to draw near to the frontier of Portugal on the side of Ciudad Rodrigo, ‘to inundate all the approaches to that kingdom with his cavalry, disquiet the English, and prevent them from dreaming of transferring themselves back to the south.’ The news of the near approach of the Emperor himself with 80,000 men was to be spread in every direction[233].

Meanwhile the third great unit which was to form part of the projected Army of Portugal, the 2nd Corps (under the temporary command of General Heudelet[234]), was taking part in a separate and remote series of operations, far to the South. This corps, it will be remembered, had been left on the Tagus about Talavera and Oropesa, to protect the rear of Soult and King Joseph, when they marched in January with the 1st, 4th, and 5th Corps to conquer Andalusia. That exploit having been accomplished, Mortier went, with half of the 5th Corps, to attack Badajoz, and to subdue Estremadura, which Soult imagined to be defenceless, since Albuquerque had marched with the old Estremaduran army to save Cadiz. Mortier advanced unopposed to the walls of Badajoz, which he reached on February 12, but found himself unable to undertake its siege with his small force of 9,000 men, because a new Spanish host had just appeared upon the scene. La Romana, with three of the divisions of the army that had been beaten at Alba de Tormes in November, had marched down the Spanish-Portuguese frontier by the Pass of Perales; and on the same day that Mortier appeared in front of Badajoz, his vanguard arrived at Albuquerque, only twenty miles away. These divisions were 13,000 strong: La Romana could add to this force a few thousands more left behind by Albuquerque. Mortier rightly felt that he dare not commence the regular siege of Badajoz when he had such superior numbers in his front. He therefore asked for reinforcements, both from Soult and from King Joseph. The former could spare nothing from Andalusia at this moment, but the 2nd Corps was ordered to leave the Tagus and place itself in communication with Mortier. Heudelet had other projects on hand at the moment: he had just seized Plasencia on February 10, and was engaged in bickering with Carlos d’España and Martin Carrera, whom La Romana had left in the Sierra de Gata. But, in obedience to his orders, he called in his detachments, and marched by Deleytosa and Truxillo into the valley of the Guadiana. This movement, from the French point of view, was a hazardous one; by the transference southward of the 2nd Corps, a long gap was left between Ney at Salamanca and Heudelet and Mortier in Estremadura. No troops whatever covered Madrid from the side of the south-west and the valley of the Tagus, and an irruption of the English on this line was one of the dangers which Napoleon most dreaded[235]. He was unaware of Wellington’s deeply-rooted determination to commit himself to no more Spanish campaigns.

Long before Heudelet approached the Guadiana, Mortier had been compelled, partly by want of supplies, partly by the threatening attitude of La Romana, who began cautiously to turn his flanks, to retire from in front of the walls of Badajoz. He gave back as far as Zafra on the road to the south, and six days after marched for Seville, leaving only a rearguard at Santa Ollala, on the extreme border of Estremadura. Soult required his presence, for, on account of a rising in Granada, and a threatening movement by the Spanish army of Murcia, the French reserves in Andalusia had been moved eastward, and its capital was almost stripped of troops. Hence when the 2nd Corps reached Caçeres on March 8, and appeared in front of Albuquerque on March 14, it found that the 5th Corps had departed, and that it was nearly 100 miles from the nearest friendly post. Heudelet, therefore, having all La Romana’s army in his front, and no orders to execute (since the junction with Mortier had failed), retired to Merida, where Reynier arrived from the north, superseded him, and took command. Here the 2nd Corps remained practically passive for the rest of the spring, keeping open, but with difficulty and at long intervals, the communications between Madrid and Seville, by means of detachments at Truxillo and Almaraz. To a certain extent Reynier kept La Romana’s army in check, but he did not fully discharge even that moderate task, for the Spanish general detached southward two of his divisions, those of Contreras and Ballasteros, to threaten the frontiers of Andalusia and stir up an insurrection in the Condado de Niebla and the other regions west of Seville. Ballasteros surprised the cavalry brigade of Mortier’s corps at Valverde, at midnight on February 19, and scattered it, killing Beauregard, the brigadier. He then advanced to Ronquillo, only twenty miles from Seville, where, on March 25-6, he had an indecisive engagement with one of Gazan’s brigades, after which he retired into the Condado. Mortier, thereupon, came out against him from Seville at the head of a whole division. Unwisely offering battle at Zalamea, on the Rio Tinto, on April 15, Ballasteros was beaten, and retired into the mountains. Thither, after some time, he was pursued by Mortier’s columns, and again defeated at Araçena on May 26. But he rallied his broken force in the Sierra de Araçena, where he remained for long after, a thorn in the side of the Army of Andalusia, always descending for a raid in the plains of Seville when he was left unwatched. Soult was forced to keep a considerable part of the 5th Corps in observation of him—a detachment that he was loth to spare.

La Romana’s central divisions, meanwhile, those of Charles O’Donnell (brother of the Henry O’Donnell who had distinguished himself at Gerona in the previous autumn), Mendizabal, and Contreras, bickered with the 2nd Corps in the direction of Caçeres and Torresnovas, without any notable advantage on either side. But as long as Reynier lay at Merida, and Mortier might at any moment come up from Seville to his aid, Wellington felt uneasy as to the possibility of a French advance between Tagus and Guadiana, and, regarding La Romana’s army as an insufficient security on this side, moved Hill with a force of 12,000 men to Portalegre, close to the rear of Badajoz. Hill had with his own British division, now consisting of three brigades[236], another division composed of Portuguese, under General Hamilton[237], the English heavy cavalry brigade of Slade, a weak Portuguese cavalry brigade under Madden[238], and three batteries. He was ordered not to countenance any offensive movements on the part of La Romana, but to support him, and to endeavour to cover Badajoz, if the French should unite the 2nd and 5th Corps, and make a serious move westward. There was no need, as matters turned out, for any such support, for Reynier, though he executed some rather useless feints and counter-marches in April and May, undertook nothing serious. One of his demonstrations drew Hill to Arronches, close to Elvas, on May 14, but it turned out to be meaningless, and the British troops returned to their usual head quarters at Portalegre a few days later. There seems to have been some uncertainty of purpose in all this manœuvring of the French in Estremadura. Reynier was not strong enough to offer to fight La Romana and Hill combined; he might have done so with good prospect of success if Mortier could have been spared from Andalusia; but half the 5th Corps was usually detached far to the south, hunting the insurgents of the Sierra de Ronda, and the other half had to garrison Seville and watch Ballasteros. Hence Reynier, left to himself, did no more for the common cause of the French in Spain than detain Hill’s two divisions in the Alemtejo. That Wellington was thus obliged to divide his army was no doubt a permanent gain to the enemy: yet they obtained it by the very doubtful expedient of leaving nothing on the Tagus; a push in the direction of Plasencia and Almaraz by even a small Spanish force would have been a very tiresome and troublesome matter for King Joseph, who would have been forced either to bring down Ney from Salamanca, or to call Reynier back from the Guadiana, for Madrid was entirely uncovered on the West. But nothing of the sort happened; La Romana kept his main body concentrated in front of Badajoz, and had the full approval of Wellington for doing so.

At the extreme opposite flank of the French front, on the shores of the Bay of Biscay, there was going on at this same time a side-campaign conducted with a much greater degree of vigour, but equally indecisive in the end. The Asturias had been almost stripped of troops by Del Parque, in order to reinforce the army that fought at Tamames and Alba de Tormes. When the Duke moved his main force southward after the last-named fight, he carried off with him the division of Ballasteros, which had been the core of the old Asturian Army. General Antonio Arce was left in the principality with some 4,000 men, whom he kept at Colombres, behind the Deba, under General Llano-Ponte, watching the French force in the province of Santander. New levies, little more than 2,000 strong, were being collected at Oviedo. In the end of January General Bonnet, whose division at Santander had received its drafts, and had been strengthened up to 7,000 men[239], thought himself strong enough to drive in Arce’s weak line and to make a dash at the Asturian capital. On the 25th he attacked the lines of Colombres, and carried them with no difficulty. On the 31st he captured Oviedo, which was evacuated by the Captain-General Arce and the local Junta without serious fighting. But that active partisan Juan Porlier at once cut off his communication with Santander, by seizing Infiesto and Gijon. Bonnet at once evacuated Oviedo, and turned back to clear his rear. Porlier escaped along the coast to Pravia, and meanwhile the main body of the Asturians, under General Barcena, reoccupied the capital. Having driven off Porlier, the French general marched westward once more, beat Barcena at the bridge of Colleto on February 14, and again made himself master of Oviedo. The Asturians rallied behind the Narcea, where they were joined by a brigade of 2,000 men sent to their aid by Mahy, the Captain-General of Galicia.

That province, like the Asturias, had been left almost ungarrisoned by Del Parque, when he took the old ‘Army of Galicia’ across the Sierra de Gata, and transferred it to Estremadura. Mahy had been left behind with the skeleton of one division, which he was to recruit, as best he could, by new levies. His main preoccupation at this moment was the defence of the newly fortified stronghold of Astorga, which was already threatened by the French troops in the plains of Leon. But seeing his flank menaced by Bonnet’s advance, he lent what men he could spare to aid in the defence of the Asturias.

The Asturian junta, having deposed General Arce for incapacity and corruption, and appointed Cienfuegos to take over his troops, ordered the resumption of offensive operations against Bonnet in March. Porlier, their great partisan-hero, made a circuit along the coast, and threatened the French communications with Santander. At the same time their main force advanced against Oviedo by the valley of the Nalon. Bonnet’s advanced brigade was driven in, after a sharp skirmish at Grado on March 19, and disquieted by Porlier’s simultaneous attack on his rear, he evacuated the Asturian capital for the third time, and gave back as far as Cangas de Onis, in the valley of the Ona. He then called up all the reinforcements that he could obtain from Santander, and marched—for the fourth time in three months!—on Oviedo with his whole division; the Spaniards retired without offering serious opposition, and took up a line behind the Narcea [March 29]. This time Bonnet left them no time to rally, but forced the passage of that river, whereupon the Asturians ascended to Tineo in the mountains, while the Galician succours gave back to Navia, almost on the edge of their own principality [April 25-26]. After this, Bonnet’s offensive force was spent; having to occupy Oviedo and its ports of Gijon and Aviles, as well as all the central and eastern Asturias, and, moreover, to defend his communication with Santander from new attacks of Porlier, his strength sufficed for no more. His 7,000 men were immobilized for the rest of the year: he had conquered two-thirds of the Asturias, and barely succeeded in keeping it down. But he was quite unable to spare a man to aid in French operations in the plains of Leon, or even to make a serious attempt to threaten Galicia. Once or twice he succeeded in communicating with the forces which Junot (and after him Kellermann and Serras) commanded in the plains beyond the Cantabrian range, by expeditions pushed down through the pass of Pajares on to Leon; but the road was always closed again by the guerrillas, and no co-operation could take place. In short, the Spaniards lost the greater part of the Asturias, and the French lost the further services of Bonnet’s division[240]. It had no power to threaten Galicia, because it was forced to keep garrisons in Gijon, Aviles, Lastres, Santona, and all the sea-ports, with a full brigade at Oviedo in the centre, to support them. Any concentration of troops, leading to the evacuation of the smaller garrisons, at once let loose the guerrillas from their mountains. Bonnet had but 7,000 men in all: of these, not more than half could be used for an expedition, and such a force was too small to have any practical effect on the general course of events in north-western Spain.

Bonnet’s operations were, of course, wholly subsidiary; the really important movements that were on foot in the early spring of 1810 were those of Junot and Ney in the plains of Leon. In pursuance of the Emperor’s orders to the effect that the whole plain-land of Leon was to be occupied, as a preliminary to the invasion of Portugal, Loison, who had re-entered Spain at the head of a number of battalions which were ultimately to join the corps of Ney, was ordered to move on from Valladolid and occupy the country about Benavente and Astorga. He was left free to select either of those towns as his head quarters, and was directed to communicate with Bonnet, when the latter should have entered the Asturias, so that their operations should threaten Galicia simultaneously[241]. Loison’s expedition, however, proved a complete failure; he marched towards Astorga early in February with nearly 10,000 men. On the 11th he appeared before that town, and learnt that since Carrié’s reconnaissance in October 1809[242], it had been much strengthened. La Romana had repaired the breaches of its mediaeval walls. He had thrown up entrenchments round the suburb of La Reteibia, which occupies that part of the hill of Astorga, which is not covered by the town itself. He had also established outlying posts in the suburbs of San Andrés and Puerta del Rey, which lie at the foot of the hill, on its northern and eastern sides. Fourteen guns, only two of them 12-pounders, the rest light, had been mounted on the walls. The place, therefore, was a make-shift fortification of the most antiquated style. General Garcia Velasco, who had been left behind in Galicia with one division of the old Northern army when Del Parque marched for Estremadura, was in charge of this portion of the Spanish front, under the superintendence of Mahy, the Captain-General. He had placed half his troops—five battalions, or 2,700 men, in Astorga, while he himself with the remainder lay beyond the mountains, at Villafranca, in the Vierzo, with about the same force. The total of organized troops in Galicia at this moment did not exceed 8,000 men, including the small brigade which Mahy sent to the Asturias, and a detachment under Echevarria at Puebla de Senabria. Astorga had not been expecting a siege at such an early date as February 11; it was only provisioned for twenty days, and the guns had not ammunition to last for even that short space of time. The governor, José Santocildes, was a man of courage and resource, who knew how to put on a bold face to an impossible situation, or instant disaster might have followed.

Loison was disconcerted to find that Astorga, his destined head quarters, was held and garrisoned against him. His engineers reconnoitred its walls, and informed him that it could not be taken without a regular battering-train. He had only field-pieces with him, the weather was abominable, and his troops—all conscript battalions from France—were suffering terribly from the continued rain and cold. Wherefore he contented himself with inviting Santocildes to surrender, promising him promotion at King Joseph’s hands, if he ‘would implore the clemency of a sovereign who treats all Spaniards like a father[243].’ When the governor sent a curt reply, intimating that he and his people intended to do their duty, Loison retired to La Baneza, and reported to his chiefs that he was helpless for want of siege-guns. He announced at the same time that he had attempted to communicate with Bonnet at Oviedo, by sending two battalions to the foot of the pass of Pajares, but that the mountain roads were all blocked with snow, and that this detachment had been forced to fall back into the plains, without obtaining any news of what was afoot in the Asturias[244].

A few days later, the head of Junot’s corps entered the province of Leon, and Loison was directed to move southward and join Ney at Salamanca. His place on the Esla and the Orbigo was taken by Clausel’s division of the 8th Corps. The newly arrived general executed another reconnaissance to the neighbourhood of Astorga, and on February 26 sent Santocildes a second summons, in the name of Junot. It received the same answer that had been given to Loison. It was clear that Astorga must be besieged, and that a battering train must be placed at the disposition of the force charged with the operation. But in the present state of the roads it would take some time to bring heavy guns to the front. Further operations had to be postponed. The 6th Corps, it may be remarked, had executed at the same time that Loison appeared in front of Astorga, a demonstration against Ciudad Rodrigo. King Joseph had written from Andalusia to beg Ney to threaten the place, while the news of the French victories in the south were still fresh, assuring him that the Spaniards were so cowed that a prompt surrender was probable. The Marshal, though doubting the wisdom of these optimistic views, concentrated his corps, advanced to San Felices, and on February 13 summoned Rodrigo. He got from General Herrasti, the governor, an answer as bold and confident as that which Loison received from Santocildes, and returned to Salamanca to disperse his troops in cantonments and ask for a battering-train[245]. His short and ineffective excursion to the banks of the Agueda had taken him in sight of the British outposts on the Spanish frontier, and had induced Wellington for a moment to think that the invasion of Portugal was at hand. It was impossible that he should have guessed that Ney’s advance had no better cause than King Joseph’s foolish confidence. Hence the withdrawal of the 6th Corps, after the vain summons of Ciudad Rodrigo, was as inexplicable as its advance. ‘I do not understand Ney’s movement,’ he wrote to his trusted subordinate, Robert Craufurd, ‘coupled as it is with the movement upon Badajoz from the south of Spain. The French are not strong enough for the two sieges at the same time, and I much doubt whether they are in a state to undertake one of them[246].’ The prompt retirement of Ney from before Ciudad Rodrigo, and of Mortier from before Badajoz, completely justified his conclusions within a day or two of the writing of his letter.

There was nothing for the French in the kingdom of Leon to do, save to await the arrival of the great battering-train which Napoleon had bestowed upon his Army of Portugal. It was far to the rear: on February 20 its head was only beginning to approach Burgos, and its tail had not quitted Bayonne. The reason of this tardiness was the want of draught animals at the southern dépôts of France. The equipment of the train and the artillery of the 8th Corps, and the other great reinforcements which had just passed the Pyrenees, had exhausted the available supplies of horses[247], and when the authorities at Bayonne had to place the ‘grand park’ on a war footing there was intolerable delay. Even when detachments of the park had started, they made slow progress in Spain, for the French horses died off rapidly in the bitter weather of the plateau of Old Castile, and it was almost impossible to replace them by requisition from the country-side. Junot, bold to the verge of rashness, and feverishly anxious to remake the reputation that he had lost at Vimiero, could not endure the delay. He sent to requisition Spanish guns from the governors of Burgos and Segovia, dispatched his own teams to draw them, and when he heard that a small train was procurable, ordered the 8th Corps towards Astorga on March 15, leaving the cannon to follow. The month’s delay in the investment had enabled Santocildes to fill up the supply of food and ammunition which had been so low in February; he had now got his fortress in as good state as was possible, considering the intrinsic weakness of its mediaeval walls, and had induced 3,000 of the 4,000 inhabitants to retire to Galicia.

On March 21 Clausel’s division invested Astorga, while Solignac’s came up to Leon and Benavente in support, and St. Croix’s division of dragoons took post in advance of La Baneza, to observe the Spanish forces in southern Galicia and the Portuguese of the Tras-os-Montes. Till the guns should arrive, there was nothing to be done save to choose the point of attack, prepare fascines and gabions, and open the first parallel, out of harm’s way from the small artillery of the garrison—none of it heavier than a 12-pounder. Valazé, Junot’s chief engineer, opined that the low-lying suburbs at the foot of the hill of Astorga might be neglected, and the newly entrenched Reteibia on the high ground masked by a false attack, while the projecting and unflanked north-west corner of the old walls of the city itself might be battered from the slopes below: here, as in all its circuit, the place had neither ditch nor glacis: there was simply the stout mediaeval wall, broken every 30 yards by a small square tower, which followed the sky-line of the plateau.

The first three weeks of the siege had an unusual character, since the French could build what works they pleased, but could not seriously batter Astorga with the sixteen field-guns of small calibre belonging to the division lying before the walls. The officer in temporary command of the artillery, Colonel Noël, contented himself with opening fire from various false attacks, from which the guns were repeatedly moved, in order to distract the attention of the enemy from the chosen front on the north-west, where the approaches were completed, and a great battery constructed, ready for the siege-guns when they should arrive. Meanwhile there was a good deal of infantry skirmishing in and about the lower suburbs, in whose outskirts the French ultimately established themselves, though they had no intention of pushing up to the walls either from Puerta del Rey or from San Andrés[248]. The garrison defended itself well, executed several vigorous sorties, and lost no post of importance, though the line of resistance in the suburbs was gradually thrust back. Santocildes received several encouraging messages from his chief Mahy, who announced that he was bringing up to the pass of Foncebadon, on the edge of the plain of Astorga, every man that Galicia could furnish. But even when the Captain-General had brought his reserves from Lugo to join Garcia’s division, they had only 5,000 bayonets. To hold them off, Junot sent Clausel’s division to the outposts, and replaced it in the trenches by Solignac’s and one brigade of Lagrange’s. Mahy, in face of such an accumulation of men, was absolutely helpless. Echevarria, with his weak brigade from Puebla de Senabria, had pushed a little forward, to give moral support to Mahy. He was surprised and routed near Alcanizas on April 10, by St. Croix’s dragoons.

On the 15th the siege-train arrived from Valladolid; it was small[249], but sufficient against an enemy so miserably provided with guns as Santocildes. Junot himself came up on the 17th to watch the effect of the attack. It was instant and overpowering. When once the artillery had been placed in the works prepared for it, and had begun its fire, the old walls of Astorga began to crumble. The light Spanish pieces on the enceinte were overpowered, despite of the gallant way in which the gunners stuck to their work[250]. By noon on the 21st of April the north-western angle of the walls of Astorga had been beaten down, and the fallen stones, there being no ditch, had accumulated at the foot of the broad breach, so as to give an easy entrance. Fortunately for the defence, there was a large church just inside the angle: its roof and tower had been shot down, but the garrison had made themselves strong in the lower parts of the building, and threw up traverses from it to the wall on each side of the breach. This gave them a second line of defence, though but a weak one, and when Junot sent in a summons in the afternoon Santocildes refused his offer. At seven the French general bade 700 men storm the breach; the forlorn hope was composed of the voltigeur and grenadier companies of the Irish Legion and the 47th of the Line. The column penetrated to the foot of the breach without much difficulty, though exposed to heavy musketry from the walls, and a flanking fire from the suburb of the Reteibia. The breach was carried, and, in addition, a house built with its back to the ramparts just inside the enceinte. But the assailants could get no further, owing to the murderous fire which the Spaniards kept up from behind the ruined church and the traverses. After an hour of desperate attempts to break in, they took shelter, some in the house that they had captured, but the majority behind the lip of the breach, where they covered themselves as best they could, by piles of débris built in with their haversacks, and even with the corpses of the fallen. Under this poor shelter they lay till dark, suffering heavily. During the night the troops in the trenches ran out a line of gabions from the front works to the foot of the walls, and by dawn had opened a good communication with the men at the breach, though they had to work under a furious but blind fire from above.

At dawn on April 22, Santocildes surrendered. He might have held out some hours longer behind his inner defences, if he had not exhausted nearly all his musket ammunition in resisting the storm. There were less than thirty cartridges a head left for the infantry of the garrison, and only 500 pounds of powder for the artillery. The defence had been admirable, and, it may be added, very scientific, a fact proved by the low figures of the dead and wounded, which did not amount to 200 men[251]. The French, in the assault alone, lost five officers and 107 men killed, and eight officers and 286 men wounded[252]. Junot was thought to have been precipitate in ordering the storm: his excuse was that there were less than two hours of daylight left, and that, if he had deferred the attack till next morning, the Spaniards would have retrenched the breach under cover of the dark, and made it impracticable. The siege cost the 8th Corps in all 160 killed and some 400 wounded, a heavy butcher’s bill for the capture of a mediaeval fortress armed with only fourteen light guns. Two thousand five hundred prisoners were taken, as shown by Santocildes’ lists, but Junot claimed to have ‘captured 3,500 fine troops, all with good English muskets, and well clothed in English great coats,’ as well as 500 sick and wounded—impossible figures.

On the morning of the surrender Mahy made a feeble demonstration against the covering troops, on both the passes of Manzanal and Foncebadon, while Echevarria beat up the force at Penilla which lay facing him. All three attacks were checked with ease, the Galician army not being able to put more than 6,000 men in the field on the three fronts taken together. Its loss was heavy, especially at Penilla.

After detaching the 22nd Regiment, which was ordered to endeavour to communicate with Bonnet in the Asturias, and garrisoning Astorga with two battalions, Junot drew back the greater part of his corps to Valladolid and Toro. He had been ordered to place himself near Ney, in order to aid and cover the 6th Corps in the oncoming siege of Ciudad Rodrigo. At the same time he received the unwelcome news that Masséna had been named Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Portugal, and that the 8th Corps was placed under his orders.

Masséna, as has been already mentioned, did not arrive at Salamanca till May 28th: he could not well have reached the front earlier, since the Emperor had only placed him in command in April. The long delay in the opening of the main campaign must, therefore, be laid to Napoleon’s account rather than to that of his generals. If he had suspected that every day of waiting meant that Wellington had added an extra redoubt to the ever-growing lines of Torres Vedras, it is permissible to believe that he would have hurried forward matters at a less leisurely pace. But his determination to conduct the invasion of Portugal in what he called ‘a methodical fashion’ is sufficiently shown by the orders sent to Salamanca on May 29. ‘Tell the Prince of Essling that, according to our English intelligence, the army of General Wellington is composed of no more than 24,000 British and Germans, and that his Portuguese are only 25,000 strong. I do not wish to enter Lisbon at this moment, because I could not feed the city, whose immense population is accustomed to live on sea-borne food. He can spend the summer months in taking Ciudad Rodrigo, and then Almeida. He need not hurry, but can go methodically to work. The English general, having less than 3,000 cavalry, may offer battle on ground where cavalry cannot act, but will never come out to fight in the plains[253].’

The Emperor then proceeds to add that with the 50,000 men of the 6th and 8th Corps, the cavalry reserve, &c., Masséna is strong enough to take both Rodrigo and Almeida at his ease: Reynier and the 2nd Corps can be called up to the bridge of Alcantara, from whence they can menace Central Portugal and cover Madrid. No order is given to bring up this corps to join the main army: it seems that the Emperor at this moment had in his head the plan, with which Wellington always credited him, of threatening a secondary attack in the Tagus valley. The 2nd Corps is treated as covering Masséna’s left, while on his right he will be flanked by Kellermann, who is to add to the small force already under his command in Old Castile a whole new division, that of Serras, composed of troops just arrived from France[254]. This, added to Kellermann’s dragoons, would make a corps of 12,000 men. In addition, as the Emperor remarks, by the time that the Army of Portugal is ready to march on Lisbon, it will have in its rear the 9th Corps under Drouet, nearly 20,000 men, who will be concentrated at Valladolid before the autumn has begun. There will be over 30,000 men in Leon and Old Castile when Masséna’s army moves on from Almeida, and in the rear of these again Burgos, Navarre, and Biscay will be held by the Young Guard, and by twenty-six 4th battalions from France, which were due to start after the 9th Corps, and would have made their appearance south of the Pyrenees by August or September.

This document is a very curious product of the imperial pen. It would be hard to find in the rest of the Correspondance a dispatch which so completely abandons the ‘Napoleonic methods’ of quick concentration and sharp strokes, and orders a delay of three months or more in the completion of a campaign whose preliminary operations had begun so far back as February. We may reject at once the explanation offered by some of Napoleon’s enemies, to the effect that he was jealous of Masséna, and did not wish him to achieve too rapid or too brilliant a success. But it is clear that a humanitarian regard for the possible sufferings of the inhabitants of Lisbon—the only reason alleged for the delay—is an inadequate motive. Such things did not normally affect the Emperor, and he must have remembered that when Junot occupied Portugal at the mid-winter of 1807-8 famine had not played its part in the difficulties encountered by the French. Nor does it seem that an exaggerated estimate of the enemy’s strength induced him to postpone the attack till all the reinforcements had arrived. He under-estimates Wellington’s British troops by some 5,000, his Portuguese troops by at least 15,000 men. He is utterly ignorant of the works of Torres Vedras, though six months’ labour has already been lavished on them, and by this time they were already defensible. Three months seem an altogether exaggerated time to devote to the sieges of the two little old-fashioned second-rate fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida. From whence, then, comes this unprecedented resolve to adopt a ‘methodical’ system in dealing with the invasion of Portugal? It has been suggested that the Emperor was very desirous to make sure of the absolute suppression of the guerrilleros of the Pyrenees and the Ebro, before pushing forward his field army to Lisbon. Possibly he was influenced by his knowledge of the infinite difficulty that Masséna would find in equipping himself with a train, and more especially in creating magazines during the months before the harvest had been gathered in. Some have thought that, looking far forward, he considered it would be more disastrous to the English army to be ‘driven into the sea’ somewhere in the rough months of October and November rather than in the fine weather of June—and undoubtedly no one who reads his dispatches can doubt that the desire to deal an absolutely crushing blow to that army was his dominating idea throughout. But probably the main determining factor in Napoleon’s mind was the resolve that there should be no failure this time, for want of preparation or want of sufficient strength; that no risks should be taken, and that what he regarded as an overwhelming force should be launched upon Portugal. After Junot’s disaster of 1808 and Soult’s fiasco in 1809, the Imperial prestige could not stand a third failure. The old pledge that ‘the leopard should be driven into the sea’ must be redeemed at all costs on this occasion. Solid success rather than a brilliant campaign must be the end kept in view: hence came the elaborate preparations for the sustaining of Masséna’s advance by the support of Drouet, Kellermann, and Serras. Even Suchet’s operations in Eastern Spain were to be conducted with some regard to the affairs of Portugal[255]. It was a broad and a formidable plan—but it failed in one all-important factor. Wellington’s strength was underrated; it was no mere driving of 25,000 British troops into the sea that was now in question, but the reduction of a kingdom where every man had been placed under arms, and every preparation made for passive as well as for active resistance. When Napoleon was once more foiled, it was because he had treated the Portuguese army—a ‘tas de coquins’ as he called them—as a negligible quantity, and because he had foreseen neither that systematic devastation of the land, nor the creation of those vast lines in front of Lisbon, which were such essential features of Wellington’s scheme of defence. The French attack was delivered by 65,000 men, not by the 100,000 whose advent the British general had feared: and precisely because the numbers of the Army of Portugal were no greater, the attack was made on the Beira frontier only. Masséna had no men to spare for the secondary invasion south of the Tagus which Wellington had expected and dreaded. The Emperor’s plans went to wreck because he had under-estimated his enemy, and assigned too small a force to his lieutenant. But it was no ordinary general who had so prepared his defence that Napoleon’s calculations went all astray. The genius of Wellington was the true cause of the disastrous end of the long-prepared invasion.

---

SECTION XIX: CHAPTER V

THE MONTHS OF WAITING: THE SIEGE OF CIUDAD RODRIGO (MAY–JULY 1810)

The long months of delay that followed the first operations of the French in 1810 were a time of anxious waiting for Wellington. He had moved his head quarters to Vizeu on the 12th of January, and had been lying in that bleak and lofty town all through the rest of the winter. With him there had come to the North all the old British divisions save the 2nd, which had been left with Hill, first at Abrantes and then at Portalegre, to watch the French between the Tagus and the Guadiana. The 1st Division was placed at Vizeu, the 3rd at Trancoso and the neighbouring villages, the 4th at Guarda, while the cavalry wintered in the coast plain between Coimbra and Aveiro. Only the Light Brigade of Robert Craufurd, which takes the new style of the Light Division on March 1, was pushed forward to the Spanish frontier, and lay in the villages about Almeida[256], with its outposts pushed forward to the line of the Agueda. The Portuguese regular brigades, which were afterwards incorporated in the British divisions, were still lying in winter quarters around Coimbra and Thomar, drilling hard and incorporating their recruits. The militia were also under arms at their regimental head quarters, save the few battalions which had already been thrown into Elvas, Almeida, Peniche, and Abrantes.

Wellington’s front, facing the French, was formed by Hill’s corps in the Alemtejo, Lecor’s Portuguese brigade in the Castello Branco district, and Craufurd’s force on the Agueda. Neither Hill nor Lecor was in actual contact with the enemy, and La Romana’s army, spread out from the Pass of Perales to Zafra and Araçena in a thin line, lay between them and Reynier’s and Mortier’s outposts. It was otherwise with Craufurd, who was placed north of La Romana’s left division, that of Martin Carrera; he was in close touch with Ney’s corps all along the line of the Agueda, as far as the Douro. Since the outposts of the 6th Corps had been pushed forward on March 9th, the Commander of the Light Division was in a most responsible, not to say a dangerous, position. The main army was forty miles to his rear in its cantonments at Vizeu, Guarda, and Trancoso. He had with him of British infantry only the first battalions of the 43rd, 52nd, and 95th, with one battery, and one regiment of cavalry, the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion. His orders were to keep open the communication with Ciudad Rodrigo till the last possible moment, to cover Almeida as long as was prudent, and to keep the Commander-in-Chief advised of every movement of the enemy. It was clear that he might be thrust back at any moment: the 6th Corps, since Loison had joined it, was 30,000 strong: the Light Division had only 2,500 infantry with the 500 German light horse. On March 28th Wellington sent up to reinforce Craufurd two battalions of Caçadores, the 1st and 2nd. The latter of these units was afterwards changed for the 3rd[257], which, trained by Elder, the best of all the colonels lent to the Portuguese army, was reckoned the most efficient corps that could be selected from Beresford’s command. But the two Caçador battalions only added 1,000 bayonets to the Light Division, and even after their arrival Craufurd’s force was less than 4,000 strong.

Robert Craufurd, though only a brigadier, and junior of his rank, had been chosen by Wellington to take charge of his outpost line because he was one of the very few officers then in the Peninsula in whose ability his Commander-in-Chief had perfect confidence. Nothing is more striking than to compare the tone and character of the letters which Wellington wrote to him with those which he dispatched to most of his other general officers. Only with Craufurd, Hill, and Beresford, did he ever condescend to enter into explanations and state reasons. The rest receive orders without comment, which they are directed to carry out, and are given no opportunity to discuss[258]. The difference was noted and resented by the others: when on March 8th Craufurd was formally given charge of the whole outpost line of the army, and his seniors Picton and Cole were told to conform their movements to his, without waiting for orders from head quarters, some friction was engendered[259]. Picton and Craufurd, in especial, were for the rest of the campaign in a state of latent hostility, which more than once led to high words when they met—a fact which was not without its dangers to the welfare of the army[260].

The celebrated commander of the Light Division was at this time well known for his ability, but reckoned rather an unlucky soldier. He had entered the army so far back as 1779, and had seen service in every quarter of the globe, yet in 1809 was only a colonel. This was the more astounding since he was one of the few scientific soldiers in the British army when the Revolutionary War broke out. He had spent some time at Berlin in 1782, studying the tactics of the army of Frederick the Great, and had translated into English the official Prussian treatise on the Art of War. His knowledge of German, a rare accomplishment in the British army at the end of the eighteenth century, caused him to be given the post of military attaché at Coburg’s head quarters in 1794, and he followed the Austrian army through all the disasters of that and the two following years. Again in 1799 he went out to take the same post at the head quarters of the army of Switzerland, but quitted it to serve on the staff of the Duke of York, during the miserable Dutch expedition of that same year. He seemed destined to witness nothing but disasters, and though he was known to have done his duty with admirable zeal and energy in every post that he occupied, promotion lingered. Probably his caustic tongue and fiery temper were his hindrances, but it seems astonishing that he took twenty-six years to attain the rank of colonel, though he was not destitute of political influence, having friends and relatives in Parliament, and even in the Ministry[261]. In 1801 he was a disappointed man, thought of retiring from the army, and, having accepted a nomination borough, sat in the Commons for five years. In 1805 he was at last made a colonel, and in the following year went on active service with the expedition which, sent originally to the Cape, was distracted in 1807 to the unhappy Buenos Ayres campaign. This was the zenith of his misfortunes; it was he who, placed in charge of a light brigade by the incapable Whitelocke, was thrust forward into the midst of the tangled streets of Buenos Ayres, surrounded in the convent of San Domingo, and forced to capitulate for lack of support. At the ensuing court-martial he was acquitted of all blame, but the fact that he had surrendered a British brigade rankled in his mind for the rest of his life. The unshaken confidence in his abilities felt by the Home authorities was marked by the fact that he was sent out in October 1808 with Baird’s corps, which landed at Corunna, and again in June 1809 to Lisbon, each time in command of a brigade. But his bad luck seemed still to attend him: he missed the victory of Corunna because Moore had detached his brigade on the inexplicable march to Vigo. He failed to be present at Talavera, despite of the famous forced march which he made towards the sound of the cannon.

In 1810 Craufurd was burning to vindicate his reputation, and to show that the confidence which Wellington placed in him was not undeserved. He still regarded himself as a man who had been unjustly dealt with, and had never been given his chance. He could not forget that he was four years older than Beresford, five years older than Wellington, eight years older than Hill, yet was but a junior brigadier-general in charge of a division[262]. He was full of a consuming energy, on the look-out for slights and quarrels, a very strict disciplinarian, restless himself and leaving his troops no rest. He was not liked by all his officers: in the Light Division he had many admirers[263] and many bitter critics. Nor was he at first popular with the rank and file, though they soon began to recognize the keen intelligence that guided his actions, and to see that he was a just if a hard master[264]. In the matter of feeding his troops, the most difficult task imposed on a general of the Peninsular army, he had an unparalleled reputation for accomplishing the impossible—even if the most drastic methods had to be employed. The famous old story about Wellington and the commissary had Craufurd (and not, as it is sometimes told, Picton) as its hero. As a sample of his high-handed ways, it may be mentioned that he once seized and impounded some church-plate till the villages to which it belonged found him some corn for his starving division. Craufurd, on one of his happy days, and they were many, was the most brilliant subordinate that Wellington ever owned. His mistakes—and he committed more than one—were the faults of an ardent and ambitious spirit taking an immoderate risk in the hour of excitement.

From March to July 1810 Craufurd, in charge of the whole outpost system of Wellington’s army, accomplished the extraordinary feat of guarding a front of forty miles against an active enemy of sixfold force, without suffering his line to be pierced, or allowing the French to gain any information whatever of the dispositions of the host in his rear. He was in constant and daily touch with Ney’s corps, yet was never surprised, and never thrust back save by absolutely overwhelming strength; he never lost a detachment, never failed to detect every move of the enemy, and never sent his commander false intelligence. This was the result of system and science, not merely of vigilance and activity. The journal of his aide de camp Shaw-Kennedy, giving the daily work of the Light Division during the critical months of 1810, might serve as an illustrative manual of outpost duty, and was indeed printed for that purpose in 1851[265].

Craufurd’s one cavalry regiment, the German Hussars, had to cover a front of nearly forty miles, and performed the duty admirably; it had been chosen for the service because it was considered by Wellington superior in scouting power to any of his British light cavalry corps. ‘General Craufurd worked out the most difficult part of the outpost duty with them. He had the great advantage of speaking German fluently, and he arranged for the outpost duties of the different parts of the long line that he had to guard by his personal communications with the captains of that admirable corps, men who were themselves masters of the subject. They each knew his plan for the space that they covered, though not his general plan, and each worked out his part most admirably. The General communicated with them direct. He had the great advantage of possessing, with his great abilities and energy, uncommon bodily strength, so that he could remain on horseback almost any length of time.... When his operations began, the point to be observed was the line of the Agueda, extending for some forty miles. The country, although very irregular in its surface, was quite open and unenclosed, and fit almost everywhere for the action of all three arms. When he took up the line he kept his infantry back entirely, with the exception of four companies of the Rifles above the bridge of Barba del Puerco, upon the calculation of the time that would be required to retire the infantry behind the Coa, after he received information from the cavalry of the enemy’s advance. If we are properly to understand Craufurd’s operations, the calculation must never be lost sight of, for it was on calculations that he acted all along. The hazarding of the four companies at Barba del Puerco forms a separate consideration: it rested on the belief that the pass there was so difficult, that four companies could defend it against any numbers, and that, if they were turned higher up the river, the Hussars would give the Rifles warning in ample time for a safe retreat.... Special reports were made of the state of the fords of the Agueda every morning, and the rapidity of its rises was particularly marked. An officer had special charge of all deserters from the enemy, to examine them and bring together their information[266]. Beacons were prepared on conspicuous heights, so as to communicate information as to the enemy’s offensive movements. To ensure against mistakes in the night, pointers were kept at the stations of communication, directed to the beacons.... As Napier has remarked in his History, seven minutes sufficed for the division to get under arms in the middle of the night, and a quarter of an hour, night or day, to bring it in order of battle to its alarm-posts, with the baggage loaded and assembled at a convenient distance to the rear. And this not upon a concerted signal, nor as a trial, but at all times and certain[267].’

To complete the picture it remains to be added that there were some fifteen fords between Ciudad Rodrigo and the mouth of the Agueda, which were practicable in dry weather for all arms, and that several of them could be used even after a day or two of rain. The French were along the whole river; they had 3,000 horse available in March and April, 5,000 in May and June. Their infantry at some points were only three or four miles back from the river: yet Craufurd’s line was never broken, nor was even a picket of ten men cut off or surrounded. The least movement of the enemy was reported along the whole front in an incredibly short time, the whole web of communication quivered at the slightest touch, and the division was immediately ready to fight or to draw back, according as the strength of the French dictated boldness or caution.

During February Wellington had rightly concluded that Craufurd had nothing to fear; Ney’s early demonstration against Ciudad Rodrigo had no more serious significance than Mortier’s similar appearance in front of Badajoz. But when March arrived, and the 8th Corps appeared in the plains of Leon and commenced the siege of Astorga, while Ney began to move up his cavalry to the line of the Yeltes, and Loison’s division, coming from Astorga, established itself on the lower Agueda, it seemed likely that serious work would soon begin. The first test of the efficiency of Craufurd’s outpost system was made on the night of March 19-20, when Ferey, commanding the brigade of Loison’s division which lay at San Felices, assembled his six voltigeur companies before dawn, and made a dash at the pass of Barba del Puerco. He had the good luck to bayonet the sentries at the bridge before they could fire, and was half way up the rough ascent from the bridge to the village, when Beckwith’s detachment of the 95th Rifles, roused and armed in ten minutes, were upon him. They drove him down the defile, and chased him back across the river with the loss of two officers and forty-five men killed and wounded. Beckwith’s riflemen lost one officer and three men killed, and ten men wounded in the three companies engaged. After this alarm Craufurd was in anxious expectation of a general advance of the 6th Corps, and made every preparation to receive them. But Ferey’s reconnaissance had no sequel, and a whole month passed by without any serious move on the part of the enemy. The Agueda was in flood for the greater part of April, owing to incessant rains, which made the outpost work simple, as the number of points to be observed went down from fifteen to three or four. It was not till the twenty-sixth that Maucune’s and Ferey’s brigades moved up close to Ciudad Rodrigo, drove in the Spanish outposts, and formed the blockade of the place on the east side of the Agueda. Even then its bridge remained unmolested, and Craufurd could communicate quite freely with the garrison, and did so till June 2nd. Masséna at a later date blamed Ney for having established this partial and useless blockade before he was ready to commence the siege in earnest. The two French brigades consumed, during the month of May, the whole of the local resources of the district around Rodrigo, so that, when the rest of the army came up, all supplies had to be brought up from a great distance. It may also be remarked that to advance a corps of no more than 7,000 men within striking distance of the British army would have been very hazardous, if Wellington had been entertaining any designs of taking the offensive—and Ney at this time could not have been sure that such a contingency was unlikely. The only advantage which the Marshal got from keeping his detachment so close to the fortress was that, in their month of waiting, the brigades were able to prepare a great store of gabions and fascines, and the engineers to make a thorough survey of the environs.

Ciudad Rodrigo stands on a single circular knoll of no great height, whose summit it exactly covers. It is a small place of some 8,000 souls, packed tight in narrow streets within a stout mediaeval wall thickly set with towers. A fourteenth-century castle, on which the houses press in too close for strength, fills its south-eastern corner: there is no other inner place of refuge. The Agueda, divided into several channels, runs under the southern side of the place; it is crossed by a bridge completely commanded by the fire of the walls. On the water-front the knoll is at its highest, on the opposite face it is much less steep, and only very slightly exceeds the level of the surrounding ground. Round the circuit of the mediaeval wall a low modern enceinte had been constructed, and served as an outer protection (fausse-braye); it was only twelve feet high, so did not shield more than a third of the inner wall, which could be battered over its summit. Its outline was zigzagged in the form of redans, and it was furnished with a dry ditch. Its glacis, owing to the rising of the knoll, gave it little protection, so that both the older and the modern wall could be searched, for the greater part of their height, by the artillery of a besieger. Outside the eastern gate of Rodrigo lies the straggling suburb of San Francisco, on very low ground. It was so large and so close to the walls that the governor Herrasti considered it absolutely necessary to take it inside the circuit of his defences. It had accordingly been surrounded by a strong earthwork, and the three great monasteries which it contains—San Francisco, San Domingo, and Santa Clara—had been strengthened and loopholed. The small suburb of La Marina, just across the bridge, was retrenched and manned, as was also the convent of Santa Cruz, which stands isolated 200 yards outside the north-west angle of the town. Other outlying buildings had been levelled to the ground, lest they should afford cover to the enemy.

These preparations were very wise and helpful, but they did not do away with the main weakness of Ciudad Rodrigo considered as a modern fortress. Like many other mediaeval strongholds it is commanded by outlying heights, which could be disregarded as an element of danger in the fourteenth or the sixteenth century, because of their distance, but became all-important with the improvement of artillery. In this case two knolls, considerably higher than that on which the place stands, lie outside its northern walls. The smaller, named the Little Teson, lies only 200 yards from the northern angle of the town; it is some fifty feet higher than the base of the ramparts. Immediately behind it rises the Great Teson, which dominates the whole country-side, its broad flat top, three-quarters of a mile in diameter, being a hundred feet above the level of the plain. It was hopeless to think of holding the little Teson as an outwork, since the greater one looks down into it and searches it from end to end. The Great Teson, on the other hand, is so large—its circuit is about the same as the city itself—that it would be impossible to think of defending it, as when entrenched it would require a garrison of at least 3,000 men, and Herrasti had but 5,500 troops under his command. Its slopes, moreover, are gentle, and do not lend themselves to fortification. The southern edge of the plateau of the Great Teson being only 500 yards from the town wall, it was obvious that here was the place from which Rodrigo could best be assailed. Batteries on its sky-line could breach both the inner and outer walls, and could command every square foot both of the town and of the fortified suburbs. Accordingly the brigades which lay before the place in May had encamped on and behind the Teson, and stored the gabions, fascines, and sandbags which they were making in a park, near the convent of La Caridad and the village of Pedro de Toro, on its further side.

Herrasti, as we have said, had a garrison of 5,500 men, composed of one line battalion, two militia battalions, three battalions of new levies from the town and its vicinity, called ‘Voluntarios de Ciudad Rodrigo,’ and one battalion of ‘Urban Guards[268].’ None of these troops, save the line battalion of Majorca (which had formed part of the old Army of Estremadura) had ever been under fire—a fact which makes their fine defence all the more creditable. There were only 11 officers and 37 men of the artillery of the line in the place: these had to train 350 men assigned to them from the infantry; but fortunately the long delay in the opening of the siege had allowed the instruction to be thoroughly carried out. Of engineers there were only 4 officers and 60 sappers—of cavalry none—but the partisan chief Julian Sanchez with some 200 of his Lancers chanced to be in the place on the day when it was completely invested, and was forced to cut his way out when the bombardment began. Perhaps the main strength of Ciudad Rodrigo, as of Gerona, lay in the personality of its governor. General Andrés Herrasti, a veteran of nearly seventy years, was determined to do his duty, and showed as much ingenuity and readiness as obstinacy in his defence.

Though the French had appeared before the walls of Ciudad Rodrigo on April 26th, it was not till May 30th that Ney came up in person, with four brigades of infantry and Montbrun’s division of reserve cavalry, to complete the investment. The main cause of the delay was, as usual, the lack of supplies. Ney had to levy and forward from Salamanca two months’ rations for an army of 30,000 men, and could only do so after long and harassing preparation. He nearly came to actual blows with King Joseph over the matter, for he sent a cavalry brigade to raise requisitions in the province of Avila, which was outside his command, and General Hugo, the King’s governor, put his troops under arms and refused to allow the dragoons to enter his district. An imperial rescript, however, soon arrived, which placed Avila at the disposition of the 6th Corps, and the royal authorities had to yield[269].

All Ney’s troops were now concentrated for the siege, his outlying detachments in every direction having been relieved by Junot, who, at Masséna’s orders, brought down the 8th Corps from the Douro, placed a brigade to watch the Pass of Baños, left garrisons in Zamora and Toro, and advanced with the remainder of his troops to the line of the Agueda. Clausel’s division and St. Croix’s division of dragoons took post at San Felices, in immediate touch with Craufurd’s division. Solignac’s division lay a march and a half to the rear at Ledesma. San Felices is only 20, Ledesma is 40 miles from Ciudad Rodrigo, so that the 8th Corps, deducting the outlying brigades, could have joined Ney in two days. These distances were the governing factor in Wellington’s policy during the next month. Ney had 26,000 men of the 6th Corps and Montbrun’s 4,000 dragoons in front of Rodrigo; Junot could join him with 8,000 infantry and 1,800 cavalry in a day; a second day would bring up Solignac with 7,000 men more. Unless the 6th Corps could be surprised in its camps, and forced to fight before it received its reinforcements, there would be 47,000 French to face. Of their numbers Wellington was roughly aware; the figures sent in to him by Craufurd were accurate to within a few thousands[270], and estimated the enemy at 40,000 men. The Commander-in-Chief’s own calculation was even nearer the truth; early in May he reckoned Ney, with Loison’s division included, at 30,000 men, Junot and Kellermann at 30,000[271]. Early in June he made out that the two corps in his front, without Kellermann, amounted to 50,000 men[272], which was only 3,000 over the true total. He himself had at this moment only 18,000 British troops under his hand, and within striking distance. He had on April 27th, brought up his head quarters and the 1st Division to Celorico, and moved forward Picton and the 3rd Division to Pinhel, while Cole with the 4th remained at Guarda, and the Light Division was, as usual, facing the Agueda. The cavalry had also come up from the Mondego valley, and lay behind Almeida. Moreover, the five Portuguese brigades of Harvey, Collins, Pack, Coleman, and Alex. Campbell were ordered up to the front[273], and joined the army in the first days of May. Wellington thereupon incorporated Harvey’s brigade with the 3rd Division and Collins’s with the 4th, a system which he afterwards carried out with nearly all the Portuguese units. The whole of this mass of troops came to some 15,000 men[274]. These, with the British, making a total of 32,000 men, were all that Wellington could count upon, for he could not dare to move Hill’s 12,000 men from the south, where they were observing Reynier, nor to displace the small reserve, which lay at Abrantes and Thomar to guard against a possible French move along the Tagus by Castello Branco. Lisbon could not be left unprotected on this side, so long as Reynier lay between the Tagus and the Guadiana.

By bringing up every man Wellington could have attacked Ney’s 30,000 in front of Rodrigo with 33,000, of whom nearly half would have consisted of the newly organised Portuguese brigades, of which hardly a battalion had been under fire. He would have had under 3,000 cavalry to face 5,000, and a marked inferiority in artillery also. No practical assistance could have been got by inviting the co-operation of Martin Carrera’s depleted Spanish division of 3,000 men, which lay on the hills about the sources of the Agueda, watching Ney’s flank. If the first stroke should fail, and Ney were not surprised, Wellington would have Junot’s 17,000 men to count with within forty-eight hours. Ciudad Rodrigo lies on a plain, a full day’s march from the hills, and by advancing to relieve it the British army must commit itself to an action in the open. It is no wonder then that Wellington refused to attempt the movement; weak in cavalry and with 15,000 troops of uncertain value in his ranks, he would have been mad to embark upon such an operation. It was most improbable that Ney could have been surprised, and forced to fight without Junot’s aid, when he had 5,000 horsemen at hand, to discover and report the first movement of the Anglo-Portuguese. Napoleon had been right when he told Masséna that it was practically impossible that Wellington would offer battle in the plains. Herrasti had been sent assurances that the British army would do anything that was feasible for his relief, but he was warned in a supplementary letter of June 6th that it might be impossible to aid him. ‘You will believe,’ wrote Wellington, ‘that if I should not be able to attempt your relief, it will be owing to the superior strength of the enemy, and to the necessity for my attending to other important objects[275].’ Notwithstanding this caution it would appear that the Spanish governor still hoped for prompt assistance. It seemed to him, as it did to all Spanish and some English officers at the time[276], that Wellington would not be able to endure the spectacle of Ciudad Rodrigo being taken while his outposts were lying only six miles in front of it. Those who held such views little knew the inflexible character of the man with whom they had to deal, or his contempt for considerations of pride or sentiment. To take a great risk, when victory would mean only the raising of the siege of Rodrigo till Junot and Kellermann should have joined Ney, while defeat might mean the loss of Portugal, was not in consonance with Wellington’s character. The possible gain and loss were too unequal, and he very rightly, and not without much regret, remained in observation at Celorico[277]. He sums up the matter thus:—‘I must leave the mountains and cross the plains, as well as two rivers, to raise the siege. To do this I have about 33,000 men (including Carrera’s Spaniards), of which 3,000 are cavalry[278]. Included are 15,000 Spaniards and Portuguese, which troops (to say the best of them) are of doubtful quality. Is it right, under these circumstances, to risk a general action to raise the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo? I should think not[279].’ And again, ‘My object is to be able to relieve the place, if it should be advisable to attempt it, in consequence of any alteration in the enemy’s force. This does not appear to be a very probable event at present, and ought not to be provided for according to the common rules of prudence, at any considerable risk[280].’ Expressions of regret are added, ‘I do not give the matter up; if they hold out like men they are worth saving, and under certain circumstances it might be possible to “incur the risk.”’ But the ‘certain circumstances’ never came about; they seem to have been the possibility either that (1) Ney or Junot might make detachments, or move their corps into a less concentrated position than they at present occupied, or (2) that they might form a covering army, and advance to drive him off from his present quarters, which were too close to Ciudad Rodrigo for their comfort. This last contingency almost happened, as we shall see; probably if the enemy had come out to attack him Wellington would have accepted battle, in one of the defensive positions that he knew so well how to select.

Ney, as has been already mentioned, arrived before the fortress with some 20,000 men on May 30th. On June 1st he threw a bridge across the Agueda, a mile and a half above Rodrigo, but sent no troops across it. Two days later Masséna came up from the rear, approved of the plan that had been formed for breaching the city from the side of the two Tesons, and, having reviewed the 6th Corps, took his way back to Salamanca. At this moment he gave orders to Reynier and the 2nd Corps to leave Truxillo and the valley of the Guadiana, and to cross the Tagus to Coria and Plasencia, from whence they could threaten Castello Branco and Abrantes. This was in accordance with the orders of the Emperor, who had bidden him call up Reynier from the Guadiana, to cover his flank. Such a movement had been foreseen by Wellington, who as early as June 9th had directed Hill to leave Portalegre with his 12,000 men, and to cross the Tagus at Villa Velha the moment that Reynier should have passed it at Almaraz[281]. Some days later the Galician general Mahy sent to the British head quarters four duplicates of Napoleon’s dispatches to Masséna and King Joseph, which had been intercepted by guerrillas on the way to Salamanca[282]. They corroborated all Wellington’s suspicions, and enabled him to provide against the danger on this side even before it had begun to arise. Hill’s route by Villa Velha being appreciably shorter than that of Reynier, he was in position beyond the Tagus before the 2nd Corps had reached Coria. Their cavalry met and skirmished at Ladoeiro on the Zarza-Castello Branco road on July 22nd. Thus the relative position of the two hostile forces in the south was exactly preserved: Wellington knew that he could call in Hill to join his main army as quickly as Masséna could draw Reynier to himself through the Pass of Perales—the only route possible for him. He felt all the more secure because he had now some British troops at Abrantes ready to support Hill. Three newly arrived battalions[283], which landed at Lisbon early in April, had been passed up the Tagus to Thomar and the line of the Zezere, where, uniting with two Portuguese brigades, they formed Leith’s ‘5th Division,’ a fresh factor in the situation. This detachment, with two batteries added, could assist Hill with 7,000 men, if Reynier should push forward in the direction of Castello Branco.

Whether at this moment Masséna was proposing to order a serious attack on this side, or whether he was from the first intending to bring up the 2nd Corps to join the main army, is not certain. Napoleon in some of his dispatches seems to recommend the rather hazardous ‘attack on double external lines’—a result of his general under-estimate of Wellington’s resisting power. On May 29th he told his lieutenant that with 50,000 men of the 6th and 8th Corps he could capture both Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, and then march ‘methodically’ into Portugal, while Reynier at Alcantara could cover the communication with Madrid and menace Upper Beira; ‘le prince le maintiendra dans cette position sans le laisser entamer.’ Masséna, however, did not think his main army strong enough, and, being left a free hand by his master, ultimately called in Reynier to join him, and so freed Wellington from the harassing doubt as to whether he might not have to defend himself on the Zezere and on the Mondego at the same moment.

Long before the orders reached the 2nd Corps to move up from Truxillo to Coria and Zarza, the siege of Rodrigo had begun in earnest. On June 1st, as we have already seen, Ney had cast a bridge across the Agueda above the town; four days later a second was constructed at the ford of Lora, below the place. The moment that it was completed, Marchand’s division, half Mermet’s, and the light cavalry brigade of Lamotte crossed the river and established camps on its western bank. The horsemen pushed back Craufurd’s pickets to Marialva and Manzanilla, and completely cut his communication with Rodrigo, which had hitherto been intermittently open. The troops which had passed the river threw up redoubts to cover the bridge heads, and slightly entrenched their camps. On June 8th Ney received the first convoy of his siege train, which continued to come in by detachments during the next week, till he had fifty heavy guns in hand, with 700 rounds for each, and 2,000 gunners and sappers of the ‘Grand Park[284].’

On the 15th the French opened their first parallel on the Great Teson, on a front of 1,500 yards; it was only 500 yards from the glacis of the town. Herrasti kept up a furious fire upon it, and vexed the workmen by two sorties, which were not pressed home and did no harm. On the 19th six batteries on the Teson were commenced; the work was easy owing to the great store of gabions and sandbags already in store, which the brigades of Maucune and Ferey had prepared in May. While the emplacements for the guns were being got ready, the sappers pushed forward zig-zags from the right end of the first parallel down the slopes on the flank of the Little Teson. One approach was directed toward the isolated convent of Santa Cruz, the other toward the extreme northern angle of the town. The Spaniards, though firing furiously day and night, could not prevent either the construction of the batteries or the advance of the approaches; wherefore Julian Sanchez, seeing that his cavalry could not live under the oncoming bombardment, got leave from the governor to quit the town. On the night of the 21st-22nd he crossed the bridge, broke through the lines of Marchand’s division, and escaped by the Fuente Guinaldo road with his 200 Lancers. He came into Craufurd’s camp, and gave a full report of the state of the garrison and the progress of the enemy’s works.

It was impossible for the French to open their second parallel so long as the convent of Santa Cruz was held, for the fire of this outwork would have enfiladed its whole length. On the night of the 23rd-24th, therefore, Ney tried to storm the convent with a picked body of Grenadiers; they blew in its door with a petard, and set fire to its lower story, but were finally driven off. The convent was partially destroyed, but the garrison gallantly clung to its ruins, and covered themselves in the débris. The French lost fifteen killed and fifty wounded that night. On June 25th the batteries opened, without waiting for the reduction of Santa Cruz, with forty-six guns placed in six batteries along the crest of the Teson. The counter-fire of the besieged was very effective; two expense magazines containing 9,000 lb. of powder were blown up in the trenches, many guns dismounted, and one battery silenced. The loss of the besiegers was heavy[285]. The Spaniards suffered less, but fires broke out in several quarters of the town from the shells thrown by the French mortars, and many houses were destroyed. The ruins of the convent of Santa Cruz, moreover, were so thoroughly battered to pieces that the garrison retired, when an assault was made upon it by 300 Grenadiers after nightfall. This enabled the French to push forward their works much nearer to the town.

Four days of furious artillery engagement followed, in which the besiegers, though suffering heavily, succeeded not only in setting more than half the town on fire, but, what was more serious, in making a breach in the fausse-braye, at the projecting angle of the north side of the city, on which four of the batteries had been trained, and in injuring the inner mediaeval wall at the back of it. Believing, wrongly as it seems, that the breach was practicable, Ney sent an officer to summon the town. Herrasti replied that he was still in a position to defend himself, and ‘that after forty-nine years of service he knew the laws of war and his military duty.’ He made, however, the unusual request that he might be allowed to send a letter to Wellington, and that a suspension of arms should be granted till the return of his messenger. The Marshal, as was natural, sent a refusal, and ordered the bombardment to recommence (June 28th).

Up to this moment the French engineers had been under the impression that Ciudad Rodrigo would probably surrender when it had been breached, without standing an assault. Now that they recognized that the governor intended to fight to the last, and noted that he had spent the night following the summons in clearing the ditch and repairing the damaged fausse-braye with sandbags, they resolved that the breaching batteries must be brought closer in, and the approaches pushed up to the foot of the walls. Accordingly a second parallel was opened along the front of the Little Teson, two hundred and fifty yards in advance of the first, on the night of July 1st. On the same night a column of 600 men stormed the convent of San Francisco in the suburb, a post which would have enfiladed the southern end of the new parallel in the most dangerous fashion. Having obtained this lodgement in the suburb the French set to work to conquer the whole of it, and after some stiff street-fighting stormed Santa Clara, its central stronghold. Herrasti thereupon evacuated the rest of the scattered houses, and withdrew all his troops inside the town (July 3rd).

The new battery on the Little Teson was costly to build and maintain—on one night the French lost sixty-one men killed and wounded in it[286]. But it was very effective; the original breach was much enlarged, and the old wall behind it was reduced to ruins. Meanwhile a mortar battery, placed in the conquered suburb, played upon the parts of the town which had hitherto escaped bombardment, and reduced many streets to ashes. The position of the garrison was unsatisfactory, and Herrasti sent out several emissaries to beg Wellington to help him, ere it was too late. Most of these adventurers were captured by the French, but at least two reached the British commander[287], who had recently come up to the front to observe for himself the state of the enemy’s forces. He found them too strong to be meddled with, and sent back a letter stating that he was ready to move if he saw any chance of success, but that at present none such was visible. He then retired, after leaving Craufurd two squadrons of the 16th Light Dragoons to strengthen his thin outpost line. Herrasti, though much dispirited by Wellington’s reply, continued to make a vigorous defence, but the town was now mostly in ruins, and the breach gaped wide.

On July 4th Masséna, who had again come up to visit the siege, obtained intelligence that Wellington had been with the Light Division at Gallegos, and determined to push back the British outposts, in order to discover whether the front line of his enemy had been strengthened by any troops from Portugal. It seemed to him likely enough that the British general might have massed his army for a bold stroke at the besiegers, now that the strength of Ciudad Rodrigo was running low. Accordingly St. Croix’s division of dragoons, supported by a brigade of Junot’s infantry, crossed the Azava brook and drove in Craufurd’s cavalry pickets. They retired, skirmishing vigorously all the way, to Gallegos, where the five infantry battalions of the Light Division had concentrated. Craufurd, having strict orders from his chief that he was not to fight, fell back on Fort Concepcion, the work on the Spanish frontier half way to Almeida. Thereupon the French retired, having obtained the information that they wanted, viz. that Craufurd had not been reinforced by any considerable body of troops from the rear. The Light Division had manœuvred with its customary intelligence and alertness all day; its flanks were being continually turned by horsemen in overpowering numbers, but it beat them off with ease, and lost only five men wounded while falling back across ten miles of absolutely open country. The French lost five officers and over twenty men[288], mostly in combats with the German Hussars, who surpassed themselves on this day, and repeatedly charged the heads of the hostile columns on favourable occasions. For the future Craufurd kept behind the Dos Casas, while the French took up his old line on the Azava. This move made any attempt to help Ciudad Rodrigo a harder business than before, since the British outposts were now fifteen instead of only six miles from the town. An attempt to storm by surprise the French camps on the near side of the place was for the future impossible.

Warned by this activity on the part of the enemy, Wellington again reinforced Craufurd’s cavalry, giving him three squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons, so that the Light Division had now some 1,200 horse to watch its long and much exposed front. But the French advance now halted again for a full fortnight, the demonstration of July 4th having had no other purpose than that of ascertaining the strength of the British observing force behind the Azava.

On the four days that followed Craufurd’s retreat the French batteries were thundering against the northern angle of Ciudad Rodrigo, and had reduced it to one vast breach more than 120 feet broad. But Ney, more sparing of life than was his wont, refused to order an assault till the whole of the Spanish artillery on the neighbouring front should have been silenced, and till the engineers should have worked up to and blown in the counterscarp. This last preliminary was accomplished on the night of the eighth, when a mine containing 800 lb. of powder was exploded with success just outside the counterscarp, and cast down a vast amount of earth into the ditch, so that there was now an almost level road from the advanced trenches to the foot of the inner wall. The garrison repeatedly built up the lip of the breach with palisades and sandbags, under a heavy fire and at great expense of life. But their flimsy repairs were swept away again and again by the batteries on the Little Teson, and all their guns on this front of the walls were gradually disabled or destroyed. Early on the afternoon of July 9th the engineers informed the Marshal that Ciudad Rodrigo was untenable, and that a storm could not fail of success. Three battalions, composed of picked voltigeur and grenadier companies, were brought up to the advanced trenches, under the Marshal’s personal superintendence. Before letting them loose on the broad acclivity of rubble before them, Ney asked for three volunteers who would take the desperate risk of climbing up to the crest of the breach to see if it were retrenched behind. A corporal and two privates made this daring venture, ran lightly up to the summit, fired their muskets into the town, and descended unhurt, under a scattering fire from the few Spaniards who were still holding on to the ruins. On receiving their assurance that nothing was to be feared, Ney ordered the storming battalions to move out of the trenches, but ere they had started an officer with a white flag appeared on the breach, and descended to inform the Marshal that the Governor was prepared to capitulate. Finding that Ney was immediately below, Herrasti came out in person with his staff a few minutes later, and settled the whole matter in a short conversation. Ney congratulated the white-haired veteran on his handsome defence, returned him his sword, and told him that he should have all the honours of war.

Accordingly the garrison marched out next morning about 4,000 strong, laid down its arms below the glacis, and was marched off to Bayonne. The Spaniards had lost 461 killed and 994 wounded, just a quarter of their force, in their highly honourable resistance. They had only a few days’ provisions left, and, though their munitions were by no means exhausted, they would have been forced to yield for want of food, even if the storm had failed, which was absolutely impossible. The French captured 118 guns, most of them in bad order or disabled, and 7,000 muskets. Not a house or church in the place was intact, and a large majority were roofless or levelled to the ground. There was no use whatever in protracting the resistance, and it is clear that Herrasti had done all that a good officer could. In his dispatch to the Junta he spoke somewhat bitterly of the fact that Wellington had made no effort to relieve the place, showing feeling natural enough under the circumstances. Martin La Carrera, who had been commanding the Spanish division that lay in the mountains south of the town, expressed his wrath still more bitterly, and marched off to Estremadura in high dudgeon, the moment that the news of the surrender reached him.

The French had been forced to much greater exertions in the siege of Rodrigo than they had expected when they first sat down before its walls. Their artillery had thrown 11,000 shells and 18,000 round shot into the place, which almost exhausted their store of munitions—only 700 rounds for each of their fifty guns having been provided. They had lost 180 killed and over 1,000 wounded, mainly in the costly work of pushing forward the approaches towards the wall, before the Spanish artillery fire had been silenced. Professional critics attributed the delays and losses of the siege entirely to the fact that the engineers believed, when they first planned their works, that the enemy would surrender the moment that a breach had been made, an idea which had never entered into Herrasti’s head[289]. Masséna showed his ill-temper, when all was over, by sending the civilian members of the Junta as prisoners to France, and imposing a fine of 500,000 francs on the miserable ruined town. It is surprising to learn that he actually succeeded in extracting half that sum from the homeless and starving population.

On the day that the garrison of Rodrigo marched out (July 10) Craufurd had suffered a misadventure. Seeing that the French foragers were busy in the villages between the Azava and the Dos Casas, he had resolved to make an attempt to surprise some of their bands, and went out from Fort Concepcion with six squadrons of cavalry[290], six companies of the Rifles and the 43rd, a battalion of Caçadores and two guns. Coming suddenly upon the French covering party near the village of Barquilla, he ordered his cavalry to pursue them. The enemy, consisting of two troops of dragoons and 200 men of the 22nd regiment from Junot’s corps, began a hasty retreat towards their lines. Thereupon Craufurd bade his leading squadrons, one of the German Hussars and one of the 16th, to charge[291]. They did so, falling upon the infantry, who halted and formed square in a corn-field to receive them. The charge, made by men who had been galloping for a mile, and had been much disordered by passing some enclosures, failed. The troopers, opening out to right and left under the fire of the square, swept on and chased the French cavalry, who were making off to the flank. They followed them for some distance, finally overtaking them and making two officers and twenty-nine men prisoners. Meanwhile Craufurd called up the next squadron from the road, the leading one of the 14th Light Dragoons, and sent it in against the little square. Headed by their colonel Talbot the men of the 14th charged home, but were unable to break the French, who stood firm and waited till the horses’ heads were within ten paces of their bayonets before firing. Talbot and seven of his men fell dead, and some dozen more were disabled. Before another squadron could come up, the French slipped off into the enclosures of the village of Cismeiro and got away. It was said that no effort was made to stop them because two outlying squadrons of British cavalry[292], which had ridden in towards the sound of the firing, were mistaken for a large body of French horse coming up to the rescue of the infantry. Both Craufurd and the British cavalry were much criticized over this affair[293]; but it was, in truth, nothing more than an example of the general rule that horsemen could not break steady infantry, properly formed in square, during the Peninsular War. The instances to the contrary are few. It was said at the time that Craufurd might have used his leading squadrons to detain and harass the French till his guns or his infantry, which were a mile to the rear, could be brought up. This may have been so, but criticism after the event is easy, and if the guns or the riflemen had come up ten minutes late, and the French infantry had been allowed to go off uncharged, the General would have been blamed still more. He lost in all an officer and eight men killed, and twenty-three wounded, while he took thirty-one prisoners, but the defeat rankled, and caused so much unpleasant feeling that Wellington went out of his way to send for and rebuke officers who had been circulating malevolent criticism[294]. The French captain Gouache, who had commanded the square, was very properly promoted and decorated by Masséna: nothing could have been more firm and adroit than his conduct[295].

---

SECTION XIX: CHAPTER VI

COMBAT OF THE COA: SIEGE OF ALMEIDA (JULY–AUGUST 1810)

On July 10th the French had entered Ciudad Rodrigo, but ten days more elapsed before they made any further advance. Masséna, who had returned to the front, was resolved to follow his master’s orders and to act ‘methodically.’ It was clearly incumbent on him to begin the siege of Almeida as soon as possible, and, as that place is only twenty-one miles from Ciudad Rodrigo, one long march would have placed him before its walls. But since he had only a few thousand rounds of ammunition left for his heavy guns, he refused to move on till all the available reserves were on their way from Salamanca to the front, and requisition for a further supply had been sent to Bayonne. He had also to do his best to scrape together more food, since the magazines that Ney had collected were nearly exhausted when Rodrigo fell. Moreover, 1,500 draught animals had died during the late siege, and it was necessary to replace them before the Great Park could move forward.

On July 21st, however, some convoys having come up from Salamanca, Masséna directed Ney to advance with the 6th Corps and to drive Craufurd back on to Almeida. The main point that he was directed to ascertain on this day was whether the English intended to make a stand at Fort Concepcion, the isolated Spanish work which faces Almeida on the frontier, beyond the Turones. This was a solid eighteenth-century fort, covering the bridge where the high-road passes the river. It had lately been repaired, and could have resisted a bombardment for some days. But it would have required a garrison of 1,000 men, and, since it lies in the midst of the plain, there would be little chance of relieving it, if once it were surrounded. Wellington, therefore, gave orders that it should be blown up whenever the French should advance in force toward Almeida, and that Craufurd should make no attempt to defend the line of the Turones, and should send back his infantry to Junca, a village about a mile outside the gates of Almeida[296], keeping his cavalry only to the front. On the 21st Ney advanced with the whole of Loison’s division, and Treillard’s cavalry brigade. Thereupon Craufurd, with some reluctance, retired and blew up Fort Concepcion as he went. The French advanced, skirmishing with the 14th Light Dragoons and the German Hussars, but finally halted at Val de Mula, four miles from Almeida. Craufurd established himself at Junca, only three miles from the enemy’s line of pickets. On the next evening he received a strong suggestion, if not quite an order, from his Chief to send his infantry across the Coa. ‘I am not desirous of engaging an affair beyond the Coa,’ wrote Wellington. ‘Under these circumstances, if you are not covered from the sun where you are, would it not be better that you should come to this side of it, with your infantry at least[297]?’ The tentative form of the note well marks the confidence that the Commander-in-Chief was wont to place in his subordinate’s judgement. This time that confidence was somewhat misplaced, for Craufurd tarried two days longer by the glacis of Almeida, and thereby risked a disaster.

It must be remembered that Almeida is not on the Coa, but two miles from it, and that its guns, therefore, did not cover the one bridge over which Craufurd could make his retreat. Indeed, that bridge and the river also are invisible from Almeida. The fortress is slightly raised above the level of the rolling plain, which extends as far as Ciudad Rodrigo: the river flows in a deep bed, so much below the plateau as to be lost to sight. Its ravine is a sort of cañon which marks the end of the plains of Leon. It has often been remarked that Almeida’s value would have been doubled, if only it had been on the near side of the Coa, and commanded its bridge. But Portuguese kings had built and rebuilt the old fortress on its original site, with no regard for strategy. Craufurd, then, should have remembered that, if he were suddenly attacked in his camp outside the gates, he risked being thrown back into the town (the last thing he would wish), or being hustled down to the bridge and forced to pass his division across it in dangerous haste. But he had so often challenged, held back, and evaded Ney’s and Junot’s advanced guards, that he evidently considered that he was taking no very serious risk in staying where he was. He was, moreover, discharging a valuable function by keeping Almeida from being invested, as stores and munitions were still being poured into the place. The only peril was that he might be attacked both without warning and by overwhelming superiority of numbers, with the defile at his back. Neither of these misadventures had yet happened to him during the four and a half months while he had been defying the 6th and the 8th Corps along the banks of the Agueda. The French had never assailed him with much more than a division, nor had they ever pressed on him with headlong speed, so as to prevent an orderly retreat properly covered by a moderate rearguard.

Now, however, Ney, untrammelled by any other operation, had his whole corps concentrated behind Val de Mula, and having learnt of the defile that lay in Craufurd’s rear, thought that he might be hurled into it and crushed or caught. Before dawn he arrayed his whole 24,000 men in one broad and deep column. Two cavalry brigades, Lamotte’s 3rd Hussars and 15th Chasseurs, and Gardanne’s 15th and 25th Dragoons, were in front. Then came the thirteen battalions of Loison’s division, in a line of columns; behind them was Mermet with eleven battalions more, while three regiments of Marchand’s division (the fourth was garrisoning Ciudad Rodrigo) formed the reserve. In a grey morning, following a night of bitter rain, the French horsemen rode at the British cavalry pickets, and sent them flying helter-skelter across the three miles of rolling ground that lay in front of the Light Division. On hearing the fire of the carbines Craufurd’s men turned out with their accustomed celerity, and in a very short space were aligned to the right of Almeida, with their flank only 800 yards from the glacis, and their front covered by a series of high stone walls bounding suburban fields. There would have been just enough time to get cavalry, guns, and impedimenta across the bridge of the Coa if the General had started off at once. But, not realizing the fearful strength that lay behind the French cavalry advance, he resolved to treat himself to a rearguard action, and not to go till he was pushed. On a survey of the ground it is easy to understand the temptation, for it would be hard to find a prettier battlefield for a detaining force, if only the enemy were in no more than moderate strength. A long double-headed spur runs down from the high plateau on which Almeida stands to the Coa. Successive points of it can be held one after the other, and it is crossed by many stone walls giving good cover for skirmishers. With his left covered by the fire of the fortress, and his right ‘refused’ and trending back towards the river, Craufurd waited to be attacked, intending to give the leading French brigade a lesson. There was a delay of more than an hour before the French infantry was up, but when the assault came it was overwhelming. Craufurd’s line of three British and two Portuguese battalions[298] was suddenly assaulted by Loison’s thirteen, who came on at the pas de charge ‘yelling, with drums beating, and the officers, like mountebanks, running ahead with their hats on their swords, capering like madmen and crying as they turned to wave on their men, “Allons, enfants de la Patrie, le premier qui s’avançera, Napoléon le recompensera[299].”’ The rolling fire of the British stopped the first rush, when suddenly a French cavalry regiment, the 3rd Hussars, charged across the interval between Craufurd’s left and the walls of Almeida, braving the fire of the ramparts in the most gallant style. Some fell, but the gunners were flurried at this unexpected development, and fired wildly, so that the hussars swept down unchecked on the extreme flank of the Light Division, where a company of the 95th Rifles was annihilated[300], and began riding along the rear of the line and rolling it up. They were luckily checked for a moment by a stone wall, but Craufurd saw that he must retreat at once, since he was turned on the side where he had thought that he was safest. The cavalry and guns were ordered to gallop for the bridge, the Caçadores to follow them, and the rest of the infantry to fall back in échelon from the left, defending each enclosure and fold of the hillside as long as possible. But it is hard to make an orderly retreat when a foe with twofold strength in his fighting line is pressing hard. Moreover, the road to the bridge has an unfortunate peculiarity; instead of making straight for its goal it overshoots it, in order to descend the slope at an easy point, and then comes back along the river bank for a quarter of a mile. The cavalry and guns, forced to keep to the road because the hillside was too steep for them, had to cover two sides of a triangle with a sharp turn at the apex, which delayed them terribly. To add to the trouble an artillery caisson was upset at a sharp turn, and took much trouble to right and send forward. Thus it chanced that the covering infantry were driven down close to the bridge before the Caçadores and the last of the guns had crossed the river. The retreat of the three British battalions had been most perilous; at one moment a wing of the 43rd found themselves checked by a vineyard wall ten feet high, while the French were pressing hard on their rear. They only escaped by shoving a long part of it over by sheer strength—fortunately, like all other walls in this part of Portugal, it was made of dry flat stones without mortar. Finally the 43rd, the Rifles, and part of the 52nd were massed on a long knoll covered with pine-trees, which lies above the bridge and completely masks it against an attack from above. While they held firm, Craufurd ranged the guns and the Caçadores on the slopes upon the other side, so as to command the passage when the rest of the troops should have to cross. He then began to withdraw the 43rd, and part of that battalion had already crossed the water, when five companies of the 52nd, which had occupied the extreme right wing of the division, were seen hastening along the river bank some way above the bridge. They had held out a little too long on the slopes above, and seemed likely to be cut off, for the French, noting their position, made a vigorous effort, and carried the knoll which protected their line of retreat to the point of passage. This was a desperate crisis, but such was the splendid courage and initiative of the regimental officers of the Light Division that the disaster was averted. At one point Beckwith, colonel of the Rifles, at another Major McLeod of the 43rd, called on the disordered mass of men, who had been driven back to the bridge head, to charge again and save the 52nd. The soldiers grasped the situation, cheered and followed; they recaptured the knoll that they had just lost, and held it for ten minutes more, gaining time for the companies of the 52nd to pass behind and cross the bridge. ‘No one present,’ wrote an eye-witness, ‘can fail to remember the gallantry of Major McLeod. How either he or his horse escaped being blown to atoms, while in this daring manner he charged on horseback at the head of some 200 skirmishers of the 43rd and 95th mixed together, and headed them in making a dash at the line of French infantry, whom we dislodged, I am at a loss to imagine. It was one of those extraordinary escapes which tend to implant in the mind some faith in the doctrine of fatality[301].’

The moment that the 52nd were safe, the troops on the knoll evacuated it, and crossed the bridge behind them at full speed, while the French reoccupied the wooded eminence. If Ney had been wise he would have stopped at this moment, and have contented himself with having driven in the Light Division with a loss of 300 men, while his own troops had suffered comparatively little. But, carried away by the excitement of victory, he resolved to storm the bridge, thinking that the British troops were too much shaken and disordered to make another stand, even in a strong position. There were plenty of examples in recent French military history, from Lodi to Ebersberg, where passages had been forced under difficulties as great. Accordingly he ordered the 66th, the leading regiment of Loison’s division, to push on and cross the river. This was a dire mistake: Craufurd already had the Caçadores in position behind stone walls a little above the bridge, and Ross’s guns placed across the road so as to sweep it from end to end. The British battalions were no sooner across the river than they began to string themselves out behind the rocks and walls, which lie in a sort of small amphitheatre on the slope commanding the passage. The bridge, a two-arched structure seventy yards long, crosses the Coa diagonally, at a point where it is narrowed down between rocks, and flows very fiercely: it was flooded at this moment from the rain of the previous night, and was swelling still, for a tropical storm had just begun and raged at intervals throughout the afternoon. The cavalry, useless at the bridge, was sent up-stream to watch some difficult fords near Alveirenos.

The French 66th, ordered by the Marshal to carry the bridge, formed its grenadiers on the knoll, to lead the column, and then charged at the passage. But the leading company was mown down, before it had got half way across, by a concentrated musketry salvo from the hillside in front, and the enfilading fire of the guns from the right. The column broke, and the men recoiled and dispersed among the rocks and trees by the bank, from whence they opened a fierce but ineffective fire upon the well-sheltered British battalions. Ney, who had now lost his temper, ordered up a bataillon d’élite of light infantry[302] which had distinguished itself at the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, and told his aide de camp Sprünglin to take the command and cross at all costs[303]. There ensued a most gallant effort and a hideous butchery. The Chasseurs flung themselves at the bridge, and pushed on till it was absolutely blocked by the bodies of the killed and the wounded, and till they themselves had been almost literally exterminated, for out of a battalion of little more than 300 men 90 were killed and 147 wounded in less than ten minutes. A few survivors actually crossed the bridge, and threw themselves down among the rocks at its western end, where they took shelter from the British fire in a little corner of dead ground, but could of course make no further attempt to advance.

Ney, irritated beyond measure, now bade a mounted officer sound for a ford at a spot above the bridge, where the river spreads out into a broad reach. But horse and man were killed by a volley from the British side, and floated down the swollen stream[304]. Finding the river impracticable, the Marshal again ordered the 66th to go forward: this third attack, delivered without the dash and determination of the first two, was beaten back with little trouble. The firing then died down, and during one of the fierce rainstorms of the late afternoon the few chasseurs who had crossed the bridge ran back and escaped to their own bank. Craufurd held the position that he had occupied till midnight, and then retired on Pinhel. He had lost 333 men only[305], and was fortunate therein, for half his division might have been destroyed if the officers had shown less intelligence and the men less pluck. The French had 527 casualties, four-fifths of them in the mad attempt to force the bridge, in which the colonel of the 66th and fifteen of his officers had fallen, and the battalion of Chasseurs had been practically exterminated[306]. Ney forwarded an honest chronicle of the day’s doings to his chief, which Masséna wrote up, and sent to the Emperor turned into a work of fancy, in which he declared that he had destroyed 1,200 of Craufurd’s men (whom he estimated at 2,000 horse and 8,000 infantry, double their real strength), taken 300 prisoners, a colour, and two guns. Making no mention of the complete check that Loison’s division had suffered at the bridge, he stated that ‘the Imperial troops have shown once again this day that there is no position which can resist their intrepidity.’ He added foolish gossip, ‘Their Estafete-Mor (chief Portuguese courier) has been captured with all his dispatches, in which are several of the 25th and 26th instant, which declare that the English army is in complete rout, that its deplorable state cannot be exaggerated, that the English have never been in such a hot corner, that they have lost sixty officers, of whom they buried twenty-four on the battlefield, about 400 dead and 700 wounded[307].’ Apparently these ‘dispatches’ are an invention of Masséna’s own. It is incredible that any British officer can have written such stuff after a combat of which every man present was particularly proud, and in which the losses had been incredibly small, considering the risks that had been run. Four officers, not twenty-four, had been killed, and one made prisoner. Instead of being in ‘complete rout’ the Light Division had retired at leisure and unmolested, without leaving even a wounded man or a single cart behind.

Wellington was justly displeased with Craufurd for accepting this wholly unnecessary combat: if the Light Division had been withdrawn behind the Coa on the 22nd, as he had advised, no danger would have been incurred, and the bridge might have been defended without the preliminary retreat to the water’s edge. Yet so great was the confidence in which Craufurd was held by Wellington, that their correspondence shows no break of cordiality or tension of relations during the ensuing days[308], though unofficially the divisional general was aware that the Commander-in-Chief had disapproved his action, and felt the blame that was unspoken in the keenest fashion[309]. There was another British general involved in a serious degree of culpability on the 24th: this was Picton, who hearing at his post of Pinhel the firing in the morning, rode up to the bridge of the Coa; there he met Craufurd, who was just preparing to resist Ney’s attempt to cross the river. Picton was asked to bring up the 3rd Division in support, which could have been done in less than three hours, but roughly refused, saying apparently that Craufurd might get out of his own scrape. The generals parted after an exchange of some hard words, and Picton rode back to order his division to get ready to retreat, having committed one of the greatest military sins, that of refusing to support a comrade in the moment of danger, because he did not choose to compromise his own troops[310].

Having cleared the country-side beyond the Coa by pressing back the Light Division, and having ascertained by a reconnaissance that Picton had evacuated Pinhel on the night of the 25th, Masséna was able to sit down to besiege Almeida at his leisure. The investment was assigned to Ney and the 6th Corps, while Junot and the 8th Corps were brought up from the Agueda, and placed in the villages behind and to the right of the besieged place, so as to be able to support Ney at a few hours’ notice. The extreme steepness of the banks of the Coa during its whole course rendered it most unlikely that Wellington would attempt the relief of Almeida by a direct advance. He would have had to force a passage, and the Coa, unlike the Agueda, has very few fords. Its only two bridges, that opposite Almeida, and that higher up at Castello Bom, were held in force by the 6th Corps. The siege however might not improbably prove long. Almeida was in far better repair than Ciudad Rodrigo, and had less defects. The little town is situated on the culminating knoll of an undulating plateau, a very slight eminence, but one which was not commanded by any higher ground as Rodrigo was by the two Tesons. The outline of the place is almost circular, and exactly fits the round knoll on which it stands. It has six bastions, with demi-lunes and a covered way. There is a dry ditch cut in the solid rock, for Almeida lies on a bare granite plateau, with only two or three feet of earth covering the hard stratum below. It was well armed with over 100 guns, forty of which were 18-pounders or still heavier. It had casemates completely proof against bomb fire, and large enough to cover the whole garrison. This, as has been already said, consisted of one regular regiment, the 24th of the Line over 1,200 strong, and the three militia regiments of Arganil, Trancoso, and Vizeu—in all some 4,000 infantry, with a squadron of the 11th cavalry regiment and 400 gunners. The governor was William Cox—an English colonel and a Portuguese brigadier; he had with him five other English officers, all the rest of the garrison being Portuguese. There was an ample store both of food and of ammunition, which Wellington had been pouring in ever since the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo began. Only two serious defects existed in the place: the first was that its glacis was too low, and left exposed an unduly large portion of the walls[311]. The second, a far worse fault, was that the grand magazine was established in a rather flimsy mediaeval castle in the centre of the town, and was not nearly so well protected as could have been desired. Nevertheless Wellington calculated that Almeida should hold out at least as long as Ciudad Rodrigo, and had some hope that its siege would detain Masséna so much that the autumn rains would set in before he had taken the place, in which case the invasion of Portugal would assume a character of difficulty which it was far from presenting in August or September.

For some days after the investment of Almeida had been completed the 6th Corps remained quiescent, and made no attempt to break ground in front of the place. Ney was waiting for the Grand Park and the train, which had now started in detachments from Ciudad Rodrigo, but were advancing very slowly on account of the lack of draught animals. For a moment Wellington thought it possible that the enemy was about to mask Almeida, and to advance into Portugal with his main army without delay[312]. This hypothesis received some support from the facts that Junot had moved up from the Agueda, and that Reynier had shown the head of a column beyond the Pass of Perales. This last appeared a most significant movement; for if the 2nd Corps was about to march up from the Tagus to join Masséna, the deduction was that it was required to join in a general invasion, since it was clear that it was not needed for the mere siege of Almeida. Wellington accordingly wrote to urge Hill to keep a most vigilant eye on Reynier, and to be ready to move up to the Mondego the moment that it was certain that his opponent had passed the Sierra de Gata and linked himself to the main French army. As a matter of fact there was, as yet, no danger from Reynier. The advance of one of his flanking detachments to Navas Frias beyond the Pass of Perales, and a raid made upon Penamacor on July 31 and upon Monsanto on August 1, by another, were pure matters of foraging and reconnaissance. Reynier had no orders to move up his whole force to join Masséna, and was only amusing himself by demonstrations. His actions became most puzzling to Wellington when, a few days later, he called back all the troops that had moved northward, and concentrated his force at Zarza la Mayor, on the road to Castello Branco, so as to threaten once more to invade Central Portugal by the line of the Tagus. This was no device of his own, but the result of a dispatch from Masséna dated July 27, ordering him to keep more to the south for the present, to threaten Abrantes, and to afford Hill no chance of joining Wellington.

Reynier’s feints meanwhile had given Hill some trouble; the appearance of a northward move on the part of his adversary had caused the British general to make ready for a parallel march on Fundão and Guarda, so as to connect himself with his chief. He transferred his head quarters first from Castello Branco to Sarzedas, and then from Sarzedas to Atalaya, at the foot of the pass that leads to the Mondego valley, intending to cross the mountains the moment that Reynier had passed over the Perales defiles with his main body. But seeing the 2nd Corps unexpectedly turning back and concentrating at Zarza, Hill also retraced his steps, and lay at Sarzedas again from August 3rd till September 21st, with his advanced guard at Castello Branco and his cavalry well out to the front along the Spanish frontier, watching every movement of the 2nd Corps. During this time of waiting the Portuguese cavalry of his division had two small but successful engagements with Reynier’s horse, of whom they cut up a squadron on the 3rd of August near Penamacor and another on the 22nd at Ladoeiro, when two officers and sixty men of the Hanoverian Chasseurs à Cheval were killed or taken[313].

Wellington’s doubts as to Masséna’s intentions in the first days of August were provoked not merely by the movements of the 2nd Corps, but by a demonstration made on an entirely new front by General Serras, the officer who had been left with an unattached division to hold the plains of Leon, when Junot and the 8th Corps went off to join the main army on the Agueda. In obedience to Masséna’s orders, on July 27 Serras collected at Benavente as much of his division as could be spared from garrison duty, and moved forward to threaten the frontier of the Tras-os-Montes, far to the north of Portugal. He advanced with some 5,000 men as far as Puebla de Senabria, from which on July 29 he drove out a small Spanish force under General Taboada—the weak brigade which Echevarria had formerly commanded. Silveira immediately collected all the Portuguese militia of his district at Braganza, and prepared to defend the frontier. But Serras unexpectedly turned back, left a battalion of the 2nd Swiss Regiment and a squadron of horse in Puebla de Senabria, and returned to Zamora. The moment that he was gone Silveira and Taboada united their forces, attacked this small detached force, routed it, and shut it up in the town on August 4. It was forced to surrender some six days later, about 20 officers and 350 men, all that remained of 600, being made prisoners. Serras, who had hurried back when he heard of Silveira’s offensive movement, was too late by twelve hours to save his men, and found Puebla de Senabria empty, for the allies had gone off with their prisoners and taken to the mountains. He then retired to Benavente, and Taboada reoccupied Puebla de Senabria, where he was not again disturbed. Serras soon after was drawn away to the north-east by the demands of Bonnet, whose communications with Santander had once more been cut by Porlier’s roving Asturian bands. He called on his colleague to attack this partisan force in the rear, and while Serras was hunting it at Potes and Alba, in the Cantabrian Hills, Northern Portugal and Galicia were left undisturbed in September[314].

While glancing at the subsidiary operations in this remote corner of Spain, it may be worth while to note, as a proof of the slight hold which Bonnet and Serras possessed on their allotted districts, that on June 7 Mahy threatened Astorga, while the Asturian bands of Colonel Barcena, eluding Bonnet, came down into the plains by the Pass of Pajares and surprised Leon[315]. They got into the town by escalade at night, held it for two days, and only evacuated it when Serras came up in strength on June 9. Provoked at this bold adventure, Bonnet made his last attempt to conquer Western Asturias, and so to destroy the indefatigable and evasive partisans in his front. He forced his way across the Narcea and the Navia, and his vanguard had reached Castropol, on the Galician border, upon July 5, when he heard to his disgust that the enemy had slipped behind him. Barcena was threatening his base at Oviedo, while Porlier’s band, carried round by English ships, had landed near Llanes and cut the communication with Santander. These clever moves brought Bonnet back in haste: he evacuated Western Asturias, called up Serras to his aid, and was engaged in August and September in the hunt after Porlier which we have already mentioned[316].

But to return to the main focus of the war in the North. On August 15th Ney’s troops, having at last received the siege-train and a good supply of munitions from Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca, broke ground in front of Almeida. Wellington was much relieved at the news, as it was now clear that Masséna was about to besiege the place, and not to mask it and march forward into Portugal. The front which the engineers of the 6th Corps had chosen for attack was that facing the bastion of San Pedro on the south-east front of the town. The first parallel was drawn at a distance of only 500 yards from the walls; it was found very difficult to complete, owing to the shallowness of the earth, and had to be built with gabions and sandbags rather than to be excavated in the rocky subsoil. In many places outcrops of stone came to the surface, and had actually to be blasted away by the sappers, in order to allow of a trench of the shallowest sort being formed. It was clear that the construction of approaches towards the town would present the greatest difficulties, since there was little earth in which to burrow. Between the 17th and the 24th no less than eleven batteries were constructed along the first parallel. They were armed with more than fifty heavy guns, for there was artillery in abundance; in addition to the old siege-train many of the Spanish guns taken in Ciudad Rodrigo had been brought forward. The Portuguese kept up a vigorous but not very destructive fire all the time; but on the 24th they succeeded in preventing the commencement of a second parallel, driving out the workmen before they could cover themselves in the stony ground. At six o’clock on the morning of the 26th August the batteries were all completed and opened fire. Several quarters of the town were in flames before the afternoon, and the guns on the three bastions attacked were unable to hold their own against the converging fire directed on them. But no serious damage had been done to the defences, and the governor was undismayed. At seven o’clock in the evening, however, a fearful disaster occurred—one in its own way unparalleled in magnitude during the whole Peninsular War. The door of the great magazine in the castle had been opened, in order to allow of the sending out of a convoy of powder to the southern ramparts, where the artillery had been hard at work all day. A leaky barrel was handed out, which left a trail of powder behind it along the ground; it was being fixed to the saddle of a pack-ass when a French bomb fell in the courtyard of the castle. In bursting, the bomb chanced to ignite the train; the spark ran along it and exploded another barrel at the door of the magazine, which was still open[317]. This mischance fired the whole store, and in two seconds the castle, the cathedral at its side, and the whole central portion of the town had been blasted out of existence. ‘The earth trembled,’ wrote a French eye-witness, ‘and we saw an immense whirlwind of fire and smoke rise from the middle of the place. It was like the bursting of a volcano—one of the things that I can never forget after twenty-six years. Enormous blocks of stone were hurled into the trenches, where they killed and wounded some of our men. Guns of heavy calibre were lifted from the ramparts and hurled down far outside them. When the smoke cleared off, a great part of Almeida had disappeared, and the rest was a heap of débris[318].’ Five hundred of the garrison perished, including nearly every man of the two hundred artillerymen who were serving the guns on the front of attack. Some inhabitants were killed, but not many, for the majority had taken refuge in the casemates when the bombardment began that morning. It was the unfortunate soldiers who were manning the walls that suffered.

Fearing that the French might seize the moment for an escalade, General Cox ran to the ramparts and, assisted by a Portuguese artillery officer, loaded and fired into the trenches some of the few guns on the south front which were not disabled. He turned out the whole garrison, and kept them under arms that night, lying behind the walls in expectation of an assault which never came. The morning light enabled him to realize the full extent of the disaster; the bastions and curtains had suffered little, the shell, so to speak, of the town was still intact, and the casemates had stood firm, but everything within the enceinte was wrecked. Only five houses in the place had kept their roofs: the castle was a deep hole, like the crater of a volcano: the streets were absolutely blocked with ruins, so that there was no going from place to place save along the ramparts.

There were still 4,000 men under arms; but the officer commanding the artillery reported that thirty-nine barrels of powder, and a few hundred rounds in the small expense-magazines on the ramparts, were all that had escaped the explosion. That is to say, there was not powder in the place to keep up a reply for one day to the batteries of the besieger. The infantry had 600,000 cartridges in their regimental stores (150 rounds per man) but that was of no use for the heavy guns. Moreover, more than half the gunners had perished in the disaster of the previous night—only 200 were left to man nearly 100 guns that were still serviceable. It was clear that Almeida was doomed, since it could not defend itself without powder: but there was a chance that Wellington, whose outposts must have heard and seen the explosion, might think it worth while to dash forward and endeavour to save the garrison during the next twenty-four hours. Therefore Cox resolved to protract his resistance as long as was possible, to give his chief the option of fighting if he should so please. But the defence could not be prolonged for more than a day or two at the most.

At nine on the morning of the 27th Masséna sent in his aide de camp Pelet to demand the surrender of the fortress. Cox had him blindfolded, and taken into a casemate for their interview, so that he might not be able to judge of the awful effects of the explosion. The usual haggling followed—the French officer threatened that the place should be escaladed at once, and the garrison put to the sword. The governor replied that his walls were intact, that he could still defend himself, and that the ‘deplorable accident’ had not appreciably diminished his resisting power[319]. But he finally consented to send out an officer to the French camp to negotiate for terms. All this was merely done to gain time, and the semaphore on the western ramparts was signalling desperate messages to Wellington all the morning.

Cox’s attempt to gain time was fruitless, for a reason that he had not foreseen. The garrison was hopelessly demoralized, knew that it must surrender, and did not see why it should expose itself to another day’s bombardment for a lost cause. During the conference in the casemate General d’Alorna and other Portuguese officers on Masséna’s staff came out of the trenches, and boldly presented themselves at the foot of the walls, calling to their compatriots above and beseeching them to accept the good terms offered, and not to risk their lives for Wellington, who would abandon them just as he had abandoned Herrasti at Ciudad Rodrigo. The officers on the ramparts ought to have driven the renegades away, by shots if necessary; but, far from doing so, they entered into long conversation with them and approved their arguments. D’Alorna recognized some old acquaintances among the regulars, and pledged his word to them that an assault was imminent, and that they were doomed if they made any resistance. What was still more unlucky for Cox was that the officer whom he sent out to the French camp to treat, Major Barreiros of the artillery, was one of those who were most convinced that further defence was fruitless; he divulged the hopeless state of the place to the Marshal, and bade him press his attack without fear, for the garrison would not fight. He himself remained at the French head quarters, and did not return to Almeida. Masséna, therefore, sent back a blank refusal of all Cox’s demands and conditions, and ordered the bombardment to recommence at seven in the evening, while approaches were thrown out from the second parallel towards the ramparts. A feeble musketry fire alone replied.

The renewal of the bombardment speedily brought matters inside the place to a head. A deputation of Portuguese officers, headed by Bernardo Da Costa, the second in command, visited Cox and informed him that further resistance was madness, and that if he did not at once hoist the white flag they would open the gates to the enemy. The Governor was forced to yield, and capitulated at eleven o’clock on the night of the 27th. Masséna granted him the terms that the regular troops should be sent as prisoners to France, while the three militia regiments should be allowed to disperse to their homes, on giving their parole not to serve again during the war.

On the morning of the 28th the garrison marched out, still 4,000 strong, its total loss during the siege having been some 600—nearly all destroyed in the explosion. The French had lost fifty-eight killed and 320 wounded during the operations. The capitulation was no sooner ratified than it was violated: instead of dismissing the militia and marching off the regulars towards France, Masséna kept them together, and set the renegades d’Alorna and Pamplona to tempt them to enter the French service. The officers were promised confirmation of their rank, the men were invited to compare the relative advantages of prison and of joining the victorious side and keeping their liberty. The arguments of the traitors seemed to prevail; almost the whole of the regulars and 600 of the militia signified their consent to enlist with the enemy. The rest of the militia were turned loose, but d’Alorna was able to organize a brigade of three battalions to serve the Emperor as the ‘Second Portuguese Legion[320].’ But the intentions of these docile recruits were quite other than Masséna had supposed. They had changed their allegiance merely in order to escape being sent to France, and while left unguarded during the next three days, absconded in bands of 200 or 300 at a time, officers and all, and kept presenting themselves at Silveira’s and Wellington’s outposts, for a week. The French, undeceived too late, disarmed the few men remaining in the camp, who were packed off to France, to rejoin Cox and the half-dozen officers who had loyally refused to accept d’Alorna’s offers[321]. Wellington had been somewhat alarmed when the first news of the adhesion of the garrison to the French cause reached him, fearing that it implied serious disaffection in the whole Portuguese army[322]. He was soon undeceived on this point, as the troops gradually streamed in to his camp[323]. But he was then seized with grave doubts as to whether he could, consistently with military honour, accept the service of these perjured but patriotic people. ‘It was well enough for the private men, but highly disgraceful to the character of the officers[324],’ he observed, and was pondering what should be done, and proposing to cashier the officers, when he received a proclamation from the Regency approving the conduct of the deserters and restoring them to their place in the army. Finally he resolved that, since Masséna had obviously broken the capitulation by his action, it might be held that it was not binding on the prisoners, and ordered the 24th Regiment to be re-formed at its head quarters at Braganza. The militia he dismissed to their homes, on the scruple that the French had let some, though not all of them, go free after the capitulation[325]. There remained the problem of what was to be done with the Portuguese officers who had played a treacherous part on the 27th, especially Barreiros, the negotiator who had betrayed the state of the town to Masséna, and Da Costa, who had headed the mutinous deputation to Cox, which forced him to surrender. Finally, their names were included with those of the officers who had served on Masséna’s Portuguese staff during the campaign, in a great indictment placed before a special commission on traitors (called a Junta de Inconfidencia), which sat at Lisbon during the autumn. All from d’Alorna downwards were declared guilty of high treason, and condemned to death on December 22, 1810, but only two were caught and executed—João de Mascarenhas, one of d’Alorna’s aides de camp, and Da Costa, the lieutenant-governor of Almeida. The former was captured by the Ordenança while carrying Masséna’s dispatches in 1810, and the latter was apprehended in 1812; Mascarenhas died by the garotte, Da Costa was shot. Of the others, some never returned to Portugal, the others were pardoned at various dates between 1816 and 1820[326].

During the siege of Almeida, the British army had been held in a position somewhat less advanced and more concentrated than that which it had occupied in July. Wellington had brought back his head quarters from Alverca to Celorico, where he had the Light Division under his hand. A few miles behind, on the high-road running down the south bank of the Mondego, was the 1st Division, at Villa Cortes. Picton and the 3rd Division had been drawn back from Pinhel to Carapichina, but Cole and the 4th remained firm at Guarda. The Portuguese brigades of Coleman and A. Campbell were at Pinhanços, that of Pack at Jegua. The whole of the cavalry had come up from the rear to join the brigade that had recently operated under Craufurd’s orders. They now lay in a thick line of six regiments from in front of Guarda, through Alverca and Freixadas to Lamegal. Thus the whole army was concentrated on a short front of fifteen miles, covering the watershed between the Coa and the Mondego, and the bifurcation of the roads which start from Celorico, down the two banks of the last-named river. The French held back, close to Almeida, with a strong advance guard at Pinhel, and occasionally raided the low country towards the Douro, in the direction of Villanova de Fosboa and Castel Rodrigo. About August 19 Wellington moved forward a day’s march, the front of his infantry columns being pushed up to Alverca and Freixadas, on a false rumour that Masséna was leaving the 6th Corps unsupported at Almeida, and had drawn back Junot into the plains of Leon. If this had been the case, Wellington intended to make a push to relieve the besieged fortress. But he soon discovered that the report was baseless, and that the 8th Corps was still on the Azava and the Agueda, wherefore he halted, and was still lying twelve miles in front of Celorico when the noise of the explosion at Almeida, and the cessation of fire on the next day, betrayed the fact that the place had fallen, and that there was no longer any reason for maintaining a forward position. On the night of the 28th, therefore, the whole army was drawn back once more to the strong line between Guarda and Celorico, and arrangements were made for a further retreat, in case the French should follow up the capture of Almeida by an instant and general advance. Masséna seemed at first likely to make this move: on September 2 a brigade of infantry and 1,200 horse drove in the British cavalry outposts to Maçal de Chão only five miles in front of Celorico. Looking upon this as the commencement of the serious invasion of Portugal, Wellington sent back his infantry to Villa Cortes, Pinhanços, and Moita, far down the high-road on the south of the Mondego, and bade Cole draw in the 4th Division from Guarda to San Martinho, under the north side of the Serra da Estrella. Only cavalry were left at, and in front of, Celorico and Guarda. This retreat shows that Wellington was fully convinced that the French would advance along the high-road to the south of the Mondego, where he intended to stand at bay on the Alva, behind the entrenchments of Ponte de Murcella.

The main point of interest at this moment was the movements of the French 2nd Corps, which still lay in cantonments at Zarza and Coria in front of Hill. Guarda being no longer held in force, it was clear that Hill could not safely join the main army by the road Atalaya-Fundão-Guarda, if Reynier moved up by the Pass of Perales to Alfayates and Sabugal. Wellington began an anxious daily correspondence with Hill, giving him a new line of march by Sobreira Formosa, Villa d’el Rei and Espinhal, for his junction, but ordering him to be sure that he did not move till Reynier had thoroughly committed himself to the transference of his whole force to the north of the Sierra de Gata. For it would be disastrous if feints should induce the British detaining force to leave Villa Velha and Abrantes uncovered, and Reynier should turn out to have selected them as his objective, and to be meditating an invasion along the Castello Branco line[327]. It was even possible, though not likely, that Masséna might bring up the 6th and 8th Corps to join Reynier, instead of bringing Reynier across the mountains to join them[328]. But every contingency had to be provided against, the unlikely ones as well as the likely. As a corollary to Hill’s march, that of Leith had also to be arranged; he must wait at Thomar till it was certain that the 2nd Corps had moved, but the moment that certainty was obtained, must march for Ponte de Murcella, and join the main army, if the French had gone north, but support Hill on the Castello Branco road if they had taken the other, and less probable, course.

NOTE ON ALMEIDA AND THE BRIDGE OF THE COA

The small circular town of Almeida has never recovered from the disaster of 1810. The population does not fill up the area within the walls: open spaces are frequent, and some of the more important buildings—especially the old palace of the governor—stand in ruins. Others show solid seventeenth- or eighteenth-century masonry on the ground floor, and flimsy modern repairs above, where the upper stories were blown away by the explosion. The cathedral has never been properly rebuilt, and is a mere fragment. The railway passes twelve miles south of Almeida, so that the place has had no chance of recovery, and remains in a state of decay. The walls stand just as they were left after Wellington’s hasty repairs in 1811. The vast bomb-proof shelters repeatedly mentioned in narratives of the siege are still visible, damp but intact. The surrounding country-side is a low, rolling, treeless upland—the edge of the vast plains of Leon. It contrasts very strongly with the hilly and picturesque scenery that is reached when once the Coa has been passed.

From Almeida the ground slopes down sharply to the place of Craufurd’s celebrated skirmish. The town is not visible after the first mile of the descent towards the deep-sunk gorge through which the Coa cuts its way. The high-road is very bad for artillery, being steep, filled with great stones, and in many places shut in by high banks, which tower above it and make it narrow. The sharp turn at the end, where it descends to the river with a sudden twist, must have been specially tiresome to a force with cavalry and guns, compelled to a hasty retreat. All the slopes about the road are cut up into small fields by high walls of undressed stone, without mortar, such as are seen on Cotswold. The bridge is not visible till the traveller approaching from Almeida has got down to the level of the river: it is completely masked by the high fir-clad knoll described in the text, so long as he is descending the slope above. From the point where the road swerves aside, to avoid this knoll, there is a rough goat-track down to the still invisible bridge, but this is not available for guns, horses, or formed infantry, only for men scrambling individually.

The two-arched bridge is seventy yards long; it crosses the Coa diagonally, with a curious twist in the middle, where there is a little monument recording the reparation of the structure by John VI, in the days after the war was over. There is no mention of Craufurd’s fight in the inscription—only a laudation of the King. The bridge crosses the river at a sort of gorge—the place where the rocks on the two sides come nearest. Hence the stream runs under it very fiercely, being constricted to far less than its normal breadth. Up-stream the channel broadens and the passage looks much less formidable, but for some distance on each side of the bridge the river is very rapid, darting between rocks and boulders. The little corner where the few French who passed the bridge found a small angle of dead-ground can be easily identified. It was just to their right after crossing. All the rest of the ground on the west bank could be thoroughly searched by the British guns, which were placed a few hundred yards up the road on the left hand, as well as by the fire of the infantry ensconced among rocks and boulders above the bridge.

Of the French attacking force during the early part of the skirmish, those who were on their left, nearest the river and opposite the 52nd, had far easier ground to cover than those on the right, opposite the 43rd. It is not so high or rough, and less cut up by stone walls. Hence the stress on the 52nd ought to have been the heavier—yet they lost only 22 men to the 129 of the 43rd. The damage to the latter must have been caused partly when the cavalry got in among them, just as the retreat began, partly when they stormed the knoll to cover the retreat of the 52nd.

The scene of the fight is most picturesque on a small scale—one of the prettiest corners in Portugal, all rock, fir-trees, and rushing water.—[Notes made on the spot on April 14, 1906.]

---