Far to the left, in the woods on the slope of the Monte Vallongo, Mermet and Franceschi had found it much harder to win their way to the edge of the plateau than had the troops in the centre. But it was only the physical obstacles that detained them: the resistance of the enemy was even feebler than in the centre. By the time that the infantry of Mermet emerged on the crest of the hill, the battle had already been won elsewhere. The Portuguese right wing crumpled up the moment that it was attacked, and fled devious over the hillsides, followed by Franceschi’s cavalry, who made a dreadful slaughter among the fugitives. Five miles behind their original position a body of militia with four guns rallied under the cliffs on which stands the village of Falperra. The cavalry held them in check till Mermet’s leading regiment, the 31st Léger, came up, and then, attacked by both arms at once, the whole body was ridden down and almost exterminated. ‘The commencement was a fight, the end a butchery,’ wrote an officer of the 31st; ‘if our enemies had been better armed and less ignorant of the art of war, they might have made us pay dearly for our victory. But for lack of muskets they were half of them armed with pikes only: they could not manœuvre in the least. How was such a mob to resist us? they could only have held their ground if they had been behind stone walls[284].’
The rout and pursuit died away in the southern valleys beyond Braga, and Soult could take stock of his victory. He had captured seventeen guns, five flags, and the whole of the stores of Eben’s army: he had killed, according to his own estimate, some 4,000 men[285], and taken only 400 prisoners. This shocking disproportion between the dead and the captives was caused by the fact that the French in most parts of the field had given no quarter. Some of their historians explain that their cruelty resulted from the discovery that the Portuguese had been murdering and mutilating the stragglers who fell into their hands[286]. But it was really due to the exasperation of spirit that always accompanies guerrilla warfare. Constantly worried by petty ambushes, ‘sniped’ in their bivouacs, never allowed a moment of rest, the soldiers were in a state of nervous irritation which found vent in needless and unjustifiable cruelty. In the fight they had lost only forty killed and 160 wounded, figures which afford no excuse for the wholesale slaughter in the pursuit to which they gave themselves up.
In the first flush of victory the French supposed that they had made an end of the Ordenanza, and that northern Portugal was at their feet. ‘Cette journée a été fatale à l’insurrection portugaise,’ wrote one of the victors in his diary[287]. But no greater mistake could have been made: though many of the routed horde dispersed to their homes, the majority rallied again behind the Avé, only ten or twelve miles from the battle-field. Nor did the battle of Braga even open the way to Galicia: General Botilho, with the levies of the Valenza and Viana district, closed in behind Soult and blocked the way to Tuy, the nearest French garrison. The Marshal had only conquered the ground on which he stood, and already his communication with Chaves, his last base, had been intercepted by detachments sent into the passes by Silveira.
Soult halted three days at Braga, a time which he utilized for the repair of his artillery, and the replenishing of the cartridge boxes of his infantry from the not too copious supply of munitions captured from the Portuguese. His cavalry scoured the country down the Cavado as far as Barcelos, and southward to the line of the Avé, only to find insurgents everywhere, the bridges broken, and the fords dredged up and staked.
The Marshal, however, undaunted by the gloomy outlook, resolved to march straight for his destined goal, without paying any attention to his communications. He now made Braga a temporary base, left there Heudelet’s division in charge of 600 sick and wounded, and moved on Oporto at the head of his three remaining infantry divisions and all his cavalry.
Two good chaussées, and one additional mountain road of inferior character, lead from Braga to Oporto, crossing the Avé, the one four, the next six, the third twenty-four miles from the sea. The first and most westerly passes it at Ponte de Avé, the second at Barca de Trofa, where there is both a bridge and a wide ford, the third and least obvious at Guimaraens not far from its source in the Serra de Santa Catalina. Soult resolved to use all three for his advance, wisely taking the difficult road by Guimaraens into his scheme, since he guessed that it would probably be unwatched by the Portuguese, precisely because it was far less eligible than the other two. He was perfectly right: the Bishop of Oporto, the moment that he heard of the fall of Braga, pushed up some artillery and militia to aid the Ordenanza in defending both the Ponte de Avé and the Barca de Trofa bridges. Each was cut: batteries were hastily thrown up commanding their approaches, and entrenchments were constructed in their rear. At Barca de Trofa the ford was dredged up and completely blocked with chevaux de frise. But the remote and secondary passage at Guimaraens was comparatively neglected, and left in charge of such of the local Ordenanza as had returned home after the rout of Braga.
Soult directed Lorges’ dragoons against the western road: he himself with Delaborde’s and Merle’s infantry and Lahoussaye’s cavalry took the central chaussée by Barca de Trofa. On the difficult flanking path by Guimaraens he sent Franceschi’s light horse and Mermet’s infantry. On both the main roads the Portuguese positions were so strong that the advancing columns were held back: Soult would not waste men—he was beginning to find that he had none to spare—in attempting to force the entrenched positions opposite him. After feeling them with caution, he pushed a column up-stream to a small bridge at San Justo, which had been barricaded but not broken. Here he established by night a heavy battery commanding the opposite bank. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he opened fire on the Portuguese positions across the water, and, when the enemy had been well battered, hurled the brigade of General Foy at the fortified bridge. It was carried, and Delaborde’s division was beginning to pass, when it met another French force debouching on the same point. This was composed of Mermet and Franceschi’s men: they had beaten the local Ordenanza at Guimaraens, crossed the Avé high up, and were now pushing along the southern bank to take the Barca de Trofa position in the flank. Thus Soult found that, even if his frontal assault at San Justo had failed, his left-hand column would have cleared the way for him a few hours later, being already across the river and in the enemy’s rear. Indeed his lateral detachment had done all that he had expected from it, and at no great cost. For though the Ordenanza had opposed it bravely enough, they had never been able to hold it back. The only notable loss that had been sustained was that of General Jardon, one of Mermet’s brigadiers, who had met his death by his own recklessness. Finding his men checked for a moment, he had seized a musket and charged on foot at the head of his skirmishing line. This was not the place for a brigadier-general, and Jardon died unnecessarily, doing the work of a sub-lieutenant.
Finding the French across the river at San Justo, the Portuguese, who were defending the lower bridges, had to give way, or they would have been surrounded and cut off. They yielded unwillingly, and at Ponte de Avé actually beat off the first attempt to evict them. But in the end they had to fly, abandoning the artillery in the redoubts that covered the two bridges[288].
On the twenty-seventh, therefore, Soult was able to press close in to Oporto, for the line of the Avé is but fifteen miles north of the city. On approaching the heights which overhang the Douro the French found them covered with entrenchments and batteries ranged on a long front of six or seven miles, from San João de Foz on the sea-shore to the chapel of Bom Fin overlooking the river above the town. Ever since the departure of the French from Orense and their crossing of the frontier had become known, the whole of the populace had been at work on the fortifications, under the direction of Portuguese and British engineer officers. In three weeks an enormous amount of work had been done. The rounded summits of the line of hills, which rise immediately north of the city, and only half a mile in advance of its outermost houses, had been crowned with twelve redoubts armed with artillery of position. The depressions between the redoubts had been closed by palisades and abattis. Further west, below the city, where the line of hills is less marked, the front was continued by a deep ditch, fortified buildings, and four strong redoubts placed in the more exposed positions. It ended at the walls of San João da Foz, the old citadel which commands the mouth of the Douro, and had in this direction an outwork in another ancient fort, the castle of Quejo, on the sea-shore a mile north of the estuary. There were no less than 197 guns of various calibres distributed along the front of the lines. Nor was this all: the main streets of the place had been barricaded to serve as a second line of defence, and even south of the river a battery had been constructed on the height crowned by the Serra Convent, which overlooks the bridge and the whole city.
To hold this enormous fortified camp the Bishop of Oporto had collected an army formidable in numbers if not in quality. There was a strong nucleus of troops of the regular army: it included the two local Oporto regiments (6th and 18th of the line), two more battalions brought in by Brigadier-General Vittoria, who had been too late to join in the defence of Braga, a battalion of the regiment of Valenza (no. 21), a fraction of that of Viana (no. 9), with the wrecks of the 2nd battalion of the Lusitanian Legion, which had escaped from Eben’s rout of the twentieth, and the skeleton of an incomplete cavalry regiment (no. 12, Miranda). In all there cannot have been less than 5,000 regular troops in the town, though many of the men were recruits with only a few weeks of service. To these may be added three or four militia regiments in the same condition as were the rest of the corps of that force, i.e. half-armed and less than half-disciplined[289]. But the large majority of the garrison was composed of the same sort of levies that had already fought with such small success at Chaves and Braga—there were 9,000 armed citizens of Oporto and a somewhat greater number of the Ordenanza of the open country, who had retired into the city before Soult’s advancing columns. The whole mass—regulars and irregulars—may have made up a force of 30,000 men—nothing like the 40,000 or 60,000 of the French reports[290]. Under the Bishop the military commanders were three native brigadier-generals, Lima-Barreto, Parreiras, and Vittoria. Eben had been offered the charge of a section of the defences, but—depressed with the results of his experiment in generalship at Braga—he refused any other responsibility than that of leading his battalion of the Lusitanian Legion. The Bishop had allotted to Parreiras the redoubts and entrenchments on the north of the town, to Vittoria those on the north-east and east, to Lima-Barreto those below the town as far as St. João da Foz. The regulars had been divided up, so as to give two or three battalions to each general; they were to form the reserve, while the defences were manned by the militia and Ordenanza. There was a lamentable want of trained gunners—less than 1,000 artillerymen were available for the 200 pieces in the lines and on the heights beyond the river. To make up the deficiency many hundreds of raw militia-men had been turned over to the commanders of the batteries. The natural result was seen in the inferior gunnery displayed all along the line upon the fatal twenty-ninth of March.