A history of the Peninsular War, Vol. 2, Jan.-Sep. 1809

by Charles Oman

The figures are very moderate, but the worst part of the situation was that a collection of 1,000 or 1,500 men does not constitute a regiment, even if 300 or 400 of them chance to have been old soldiers. There were not, it is clear, muskets enough to arm more than two-thirds of the rank and file: belts, pouches, knapsacks, and other equipment were still more deficient. Yet the really fatal point was that there was a wholly inadequate number of officers, and that of those who were forthcoming the elder men were mostly incompetent, and the younger entirely untrained. In the official correspondence of the early months of 1809 the most prominent fact that emerges is the difficulty that was found in discovering colonels and majors capable of licking into shape the incoherent mass of men at the regimental head quarters, and of teaching the newly-appointed junior officers their duty. It seemed that their long peace-service in small garrison towns had taken all energy and initiative out of the seniors of the army of the ancien régime. They gazed with despair on the task before them, and seemed quite incapable of coping with it. When a British general took over the command of the Portuguese army, he complained that ‘Long habits of disregard to duty, and consequent laziness, make it not only difficult but almost impossible to induce the senior officers of this service to enter into any regular and continued attention to the duties of their situations, and neither reward nor punishment will induce them to bear up against the fatigue[254].’ It was only when a whole generation of colonels had been cleared away that the army grew efficient, and the reorganized regiments began to distinguish themselves in the field.

For the purpose of mobilization every regiment had been sent in the autumn of 1808 to its proper head quarters, in the centre of its recruiting district. There they still lay in the end of February, when Soult was drawing near the frontier. There was absolutely no Portuguese army in the field, only a number of battalions, squadrons, and batteries, in a more or less imperfect state of organization, scattered broadcast over the country. They were, as we have already seen, still insufficiently supplied with arms and equipment. Of transport and train, to enable them to move, there was hardly a trace. The only thing approaching a concentration of force was that in Lisbon and its immediate vicinity there were seven regiments of foot and three of horse, which were there assembled simply because their head quarters and their recruiting ground lay in this quarter[255]. Of the remainder of the infantry two regiments were in Algarve, in the far south; five in the Alemtejo; four in Beira; two in the Tras-os-Montes, four in Oporto and the adjoining province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. It was with the last six alone that Soult had to deal when he invaded northern Portugal[256]: not one of the others was moved up to aid the northern regiments in holding him back.

Impressed with the state of hopeless disarray in which their army lay, and conscious that for stores and weapons to equip it, and money to pay it, they could look only to Great Britain, the Regency asked in February for the appointment of a British commander-in-chief. This was the best pledge that they could give of their honest intention to place all their military resources at the disposition of their allies. It had another obvious advantage: Bernardino Freire, Leite, Silveira, the Monteiro Mor, and the other Portuguese generals commanding military districts were at feud with each other. It would be very difficult to place one above the rest, and to secure for him loyal co-operation from his subordinates. It was probable that an Englishman, a stranger to their quarrels and intrigues, would be better obeyed.

The Regency, it would seem, suggested that they would be glad to see the post of commander-in-chief given to Sir Arthur Wellesley. But the victor of Vimiero refused to accept it, probably because he had already secured from Lord Castlereagh the promise that he should be sent out again to Portugal to supersede Cradock. When he had declined the offer it was, to the surprise of most men, passed on to General Beresford. This officer had the advantage of knowing Portuguese; he had commanded one of Moore’s brigades during the Corunna retreat, and had seen much service on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a comparatively young man, being only in his forty-first year, and was very junior in his rank, having only become a major-general in 1807. Many officers who were his elders had coveted the post, and some friction was caused by the fact that with his new Portuguese commission he outranked several of his seniors in Cradock’s army. Beresford was a good fighting-man, and a hard worker; but he was neither a tactician nor a strategist, and did not shine when placed in independent command—as witness Albuera. When Wellington had learnt his limitations, he never gave him a task of any great difficulty, and in the later years of the war either kept him under his own eye or sent him on errands where it was not easy to go wrong. For really responsible work in 1812-14 he always used Hill, Hope, or Graham. But in 1809 Beresford was, but for his undoubted courage, more or less of an unknown quantity to his colleagues and his subordinates. Fortunately he turned out a good organizer, if a mediocre general. For what he did in the way of reforming, and almost recreating, the Portuguese army he deserves considerable credit. Every one will remember the quaint story of how he was received by his army after a short absence, with the ingenuous cry of ‘Long live Marshal Beresford—who takes care of our stomachs[257].’ This in one way was a high compliment—it was not every general, English, French, or Spanish, who succeeded in filling his soldiers’ bellies during the Peninsular War. The power to do so was not the least among the qualities necessary for a commander-in-chief.

Why the British cabinet chose Beresford, from among many possible candidates, for the very responsible post now put in his charge, it is hard to see. Castlereagh knew him, as being (like himself) one of a powerful Anglo-Irish family connexion, with strong parliamentary influence. This may have told in his favour: it was perhaps also remembered that he was a personal friend of Wellesley, whom Castlereagh was intending to send out to command the British army in Portugal, and moreover his junior. This would facilitate matters when the two generalissimos had to act together; Beresford would probably prove a more tractable colleague and subordinate to the self-confident, autocratic, and frigid Wellesley, than any officer who was a stranger to him or his senior in years and service. It is by no means impossible that Castlereagh nominated him at Sir Arthur’s private suggestion. But into the secrets of ministerial patronage it is useless to pry.

Appointed to his new post in February, only a month after he had returned from the Corunna expedition, Beresford at once set sail for Lisbon, and took up the command ere three weeks had expired since his appointment. He arrived at the very moment at which Soult was about to pass the northern frontier, and was at once gazetted as a Portuguese field marshal. After a short survey of those parts of his command which lay in and about Lisbon, he reported to the Regency that the dearth of officers, and especially of competent superior officers, was so great, that he could not hope to reorganize the army unless he were allowed to give commissions in the Portuguese service to many foreigners. As a preliminary measure he asked for volunteers from Sir John Cradock’s army, and obtained about enough English officers to give three to each regiment. The main inducement which attracted candidates was Beresford’s pledge that every one accepted for the Portuguese service should gain a step—a lieutenant would become a captain, a captain a major. The Marshal at once placed all the battalions with notoriously inefficient commanders in charge of British officers, and drafted into them a larger proportion of his volunteers than was given to those which were in better state. He also got leave from the British cabinet to offer Portuguese commissions to officers serving in corps on the home station. This gave him by the end of the year some scores of men of the sort required, and it was by them that the new army was mainly formed and disciplined[258]. The British drill was introduced, and to teach it Beresford was allowed to borrow many non-commissioned officers from Cradock’s regiments[259]. As was but natural, there arose considerable friction between the new comers and the native Portuguese officers, over whose heads they were often placed. This was inevitable, but led to less harm than might have been expected, because the rank and file, quick to recognize soldierly qualities, took kindly to their new commanders, and served them loyally and well.

In the beginning Beresford’s reorganization only extended to the regiments in Lisbon and the south. Those stationed beyond the Douro were already in the field, and actively engaged with Soult. They had hardly received any assistance, either of officers or of arms and equipment, before they became involved in the campaign of March, 1809[260]. In fairness to them this must be borne in mind, when their conduct in battle is compared with that of the reorganized army in the following year. The Portuguese Regency, in their report on the Oporto campaign sent to their Prince on May 31, 1809, pleaded with truth ‘that the armies formed in the northern provinces were motley assemblies, whose numbers and good will bore witness to the zeal of the people, and their determination not to accept the French yoke, but which could not with any propriety be called regular troops. They were composed of incomplete and fractional regiments, and the larger proportion of the rank and file consisted of recruits, many of whom had not been a month under arms. Some of the corps were short of muskets: those which had them were armed with weapons of bad quality[261], and various calibre. All were deficient in the most essential articles of equipment. It was not fair to expect that such troops could oppose with any prospect of success a well-armed and well-disciplined veteran army like that of France[262].’

The regular troops, and the totally undisciplined Ordenanza levies, did not form the whole military force of Portugal. There also existed, mainly on paper, another line of defence for the kingdom. This was the militia: according to the old military system of the realm each regimental district had to supply not only its line battalion, but also two (or sometimes one) battalions of militia. There should have been forty-three such regiments in existence in 1808, and early in 1809 the Regency ordered that they should be raised to forty-eight, and that each should consist of two battalions of 500 men each[263]. This force, however, was purely a paper army: the militia had not been called out since the war of 1802; there were a few officers bearing militia commissions, but no rank and file. When the Regency decreed its mobilization, all that could be done was that the local authorities should tell off such eligible young men as had not been embodied in the regular army, for militia recruits. But as there were neither officers to drill them, nor muskets to arm them, the conscription was but a farce. The men were not even called out in many districts, since it was useless to do so till arms could be procured for them. But in the two northern provinces, when Soult crossed the frontier, the militia-men took the field alongside with the Ordenanza, from whom they were distinguished by name alone, for they were almost as destitute of uniform, weapons, and officers as the levée en masse itself. It would seem that most of the other border regiments of militia were also mobilized in the spring of 1809, in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Castello Branco, and Elvas. That they were perfectly useless was shown in Mayne’s fight with Victor at the bridge of Alcantara (May 14), when their conduct contrasted shamefully with the steady and obstinate fighting of the Lusitanian Legion[264]. In June, Wellesley ordered that all men for whom there were no arms should be sent home on furlough, and that the regiments should endeavour to drill and exercise their men by relays of 200 at a time, each batch being kept two months under arms. This was apparently because there were not arms, officers, or drill-sergeants enough to provide for more than a small proportion of the available number of militia-men[265]. In this way between 8,000 and 10,000 militia were to be out during the times of the year when the country-side could best spare them from the labour of the fields. The rest were to be left at home, unless an actual invasion of Portugal should occur. From the modest scope of this plan, it may easily be guessed what the state of the militia had been four months earlier, when Soult was in the Tras-os-Montes, and Beresford had barely begun his work of reorganization.

The militia-men were supposed to provide their own uniforms, the result of which was that few save the officers ever owned uniforms at all. In 1810 Wellesley had to make formal representation to Masséna that they were part of the armed force of the Portuguese kingdom, and not banditti, as the Marshal threatened to deny the rights of regular combatants to any prisoners not wearing a military dress. The officers, however, had a blue uniform similar to that of the line, save that they had silver instead of gold lace on their collars and wrists. The militia were not entitled to any pay when mobilized within the limits of their own province. When taken over its border officers and men were supposed to draw half the pay of the regulars of corresponding rank, but did not find it easy to obtain the modest stipend to which they were entitled.

Throughout the war the Portuguese militia were only intermittently in the field: the longest continuous piece of service which they performed was that during Masséna’s invasion, when they were all mobilized for more than a year on end, from June 1810 to July 1811. At other times, the whole or parts of various regiments were under arms for periods of varying length, either to relieve the regulars from garrison duty, or to watch the less-exposed frontier points in times when the French were active in the neighbouring districts of Spain. They were very seldom exposed to the ordeal of battle, as their presence in the line would have been a source of danger rather than a help. But they were useful for secondary work, such as guarding convoys, maintaining lines of communication, and (most of all) restraining minor raids by small bodies of the enemy. During Masséna’s invasion the greater part of them were not drawn within the lines of Torres Vedras, like the Portuguese regulars, but left out in the country-side, to shift for themselves. Here they did invaluable service in cutting the Marshal’s line of communication with Spain, and harassing all his detachments. It was they who surprised and captured his wounded and his dépôt at Coimbra, who worried Drouet, and who turned back Gardanne, when he tried to push forward from Almeida in order to join the main French army.