The whole future of the army in 1809 depended on whether the Commissariat Department would be able to rise to the height of its duties. It was absolutely necessary that Wellington should be able to keep his army concentrated, if this small force of 20,000 or 30,000 men was to be of any weight in the conduct of the war in the Peninsula. The much-cursed and criticized Commissariat succeeded in doing its duty, and the length of time for which the British army could keep concentrated was the envy of the French, who, living on the country, were forced to disperse whenever they had exhausted the resources of the particular region in which they were massed. In a way this fact was the key to the whole war. Wellington’s salvation lay in the fact that he could hold his entire army together, while his adversaries could not. On this advantage he relied again and again: his whole strategy depended upon it. How the Commissariat worked we shall show in a later chapter.
(5) The Storekeeper-General had charge of the field equipments, tents, and heavy baggage of the army. Often the heavy baggage was left at Lisbon, and all through 1809–10–11 no tents were taken to the front. It was only in the Vittoria and South-French campaigns that the whole army regularly carried them. In the days when the transport trains were not fully organized, it was necessary to leave even valuable impedimenta behind.
(6) To the Controller of Army Accounts all departments, save the Commissariat, rendered their statistics of money received and spent.
(7) Last, we may name the Press, for a travelling Press and a small staff of military printers accompanied the headquarters when possible, and printed general orders, and other documents and forms, of which many copies were required. I have seen much of its work at the Record Office,[142] but have never come across an account of its organization, or of any anecdotes of its wandering life, in which it must have passed through many vicissitudes. The press was under the general supervision of the Adjutant-General.
CHAPTER IX
THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY: BRIGADES AND DIVISIONS
It will probably surprise some readers to learn that Sir Arthur Wellesley fought out the first campaign in which he held supreme command, that of Oporto in May, 1809, with no higher organized unit than the brigade. But this is the fact: the 18,000 infantry of which he could dispose were distributed into eight brigades of two or three battalions each, varying in strength from 1400 up to 2500 bayonets. But Wellesley was not so belated, in failing to form divisions, as might be thought. They were still rather an abnormal than a usual unit for a British army: indeed, in the large majority of the expeditions in which Great Britain had been engaged since 1793, the numbers were so small that no unit above the brigade had been necessary. But it is notable that neither in the Duke of York’s first expedition to the Netherlands in 1793–94, nor in his second in 1799, nor in Abercrombie’s Egyptian Campaign of 1801 had divisions been formed—though in each of these cases a very large force had been assembled. When several brigades acted together, not under the immediate eye of the commander-in-chief, the senior brigadier present took temporary charge of the assemblage. In the Low Countries York generally speaks of his army as being divided into “columns” of two or three brigades each,[143] but there was no fixity in the arrangement. Abercrombie, on the other hand, in the last dispatch which he wrote before his victory and death at Alexandria, lays down the theoretical organization that the army is to be considered as being divided into three “lines”—the first composed of three brigades, the second and third of two each. If the word division is used in any official documents of these campaigns, the term has no technical military sense, but is used as a vague synonym for a section or part of the army.[144] Indeed, so far as I know, the first British force during the great French War which was formed into divisions, in the proper modern sense, was the army which went on the Copenhagen Expedition of 1807, which was regularly distributed into four of such units, each under a lieutenant-general, and each composed of two, three, or four weak brigades, generally of only two battalions. This was a force of some 26,000 men.
The original Peninsular Army of 1808, which landed at the mouth of the Mondego, and won the battle of Vimeiro, was not far, therefore, from being the first British force organized in divisions. It may be noted that they were rather theoretical than real, for several brigades had not yet landed when Vimeiro was fought, and Wellesley, while in temporary command, worked the incomplete army on a brigade system: no trace whatever of the use of the divisions as real units will be found in that battle. Indeed, even the theoretical composition of some of the brigades differed from that actually seen in action. No genuine divisions were formed in the Peninsula, till Sir John Moore took command of the army from which its old chiefs, Dalrymple, Burrand and Wellesley himself had been removed and sent home. We must not, therefore, be surprised to find that for three months after he landed at Lisbon in April, 1809, Wellesley worked his 21,000 British troops in detached brigades, only connected in a formal and temporary way, under the senior brigadier, when two or more chanced to form a marching or fighting unit.
But two other points concerning Wellesley’s Oporto campaign deserve notice. This was the first and only occasion on which he tried the experiment of mixing British and Portuguese regiments in the same brigade.[145] To five of the eight brigades forming his infantry a Portuguese battalion was attached, picked as being one of the best of the rather disorderly assembly which Beresford had collected at Abrantes and Thomar. Though the Portuguese fought not amiss during this short campaign, and are mentioned with praise in Wellesley’s dispatches, yet the experiment was not continued, evidently because it was found not to work happily. The five Portuguese battalions were sent back to Beresford not long after the fall of Oporto.
The other point to be noted in considering Wellesley’s organization of his army in the Oporto campaign, is that already he had begun the system of strengthening his skirmishers by the addition to them of a rifle company per brigade, all taken from the 5/60th. The importance of this arrangement in the general scheme of his tactics has been already explained in an earlier chapter.[146]