The Portuguese Army in 1809
It remains to speak about the Portuguese, who formed about two-fifths of Wellington’s fighting force. We have already had occasion to speak of the way in which they were distributed among the British troops, when dealing with the character of Beresford,[238] and the composition of the Peninsular divisions.[239] But the inner mechanism of the Portuguese army remains to be detailed. It consisted in 1809 of twenty-four regiments of infantry of the line, each of two battalions, save the 21st which had been cut up at Soult’s storm of Oporto in March, and only mustered one.[240] There were also six light infantry battalions of caçadores, all raised in 1808–9, and twelve weak regiments of horse. The artillery, divided into four local regiments of unequal strength (those of Lisbon, Oporto, Elvas, and Algarve), supplied nine or ten field batteries, and a number of garrison companies which manned the guns of Elvas, Almeida, Abrantes, Peniche, and many other minor fortresses. There was in addition an abnormal corps, the Loyal Lusitanian Legion, raised by Sir Robert Wilson at Oporto in 1808, which furnished three battalions of light infantry, a squadron of horse and an incomplete battery. This legion, which had done very good service in 1809–10, was absorbed into the regular army in 1811, its three battalions becoming the 7th, 8th, and 9th caçadores. At the same time Wellington ordered the raising of three new light battalions bearing the numbers 10, 11, and 12.
The establishment of a Portuguese two-battalion line regiment was nominally 1540 men, that of a caçador battalion 770 men: they were each divided into six strong companies. The cavalry regiments, with a nominal effective of 590 men, seldom showed 300 apiece in the field. The infantry corps, with the conscription to keep their ranks full, could from 1809 onward generally take the field with over 1200 of all ranks, not including men in hospital or detached, and very seldom shrank as low as 1000. The caçador battalions were generally somewhat weaker in proportion to their nominal effective, rarely showing more than 500 men in line.
The organization of the Portuguese Army was made on a strictly local basis, each of the twenty-four line regiments having its proper recruiting district. Two corps were furnished by the province of Algarve, five by the Alemtejo, four by Lisbon city and its surrounding district, three by the rest of Portuguese Estremadura, four by the Beira, four by Oporto and the Entre-Douro-e-Minho, and two by Tras-os-Montes.[241] Some of the recruiting-districts being less populous than others, had a greater difficulty in keeping up their territorial regiments. This was especially the case with the five corps of the Alemtejo, where the waste bears a greater proportion to the inhabited land than in other provinces of Portugal.
The caçador battalions were mainly raised in the better peopled north, which supplied not only the three (Nos. 7, 8, 9), formed from the Lusitanian Legion (all raised in and about Oporto), but also numbers 3, 4, 6, and after 1811 the additional numbers 10, 11, 12. The southern provinces only provided numbers 1, 2, 5. These brown and dark green battalions, whose sombre colours contrasted strongly with the bright blue and white of the Portuguese line,[242] supplied, along with the green British riflemen, the main skirmishing line of Wellington’s army. Eight of the twelve were raised and commanded by British officers, only the remaining four by Portuguese colonels.
Portugal is not a country abounding in horses, and of the twelve dragoon regiments of which its cavalry consisted, three (Nos. 2, 3, 12) were never put into the field at all, but utilized as dismounted troops in garrison duty. Of the other nine corps several were mere fragments, and none ever took anything like its establishment of 500 sabres to the front. Three hundred was as much as was usually shown: in the 1811 campaign the two regiments which Wellington used in the Fuentes de Oñoro campaign had not 450 mounted men between them.
Beresford’s Work
Beresford’s conversion of the disorganized and depleted army of which he took the command in 1809 into a serviceable and well-disciplined force was a remarkable achievement. He found it in a chaotic state—Junot had disbanded the whole, save a few battalions which he sent to France to serve Napoleon. The regiments had collected again as best they could, but the cadres were incomplete, and the corps of officers left much to be desired. The Portuguese army before 1808 had all the typical faults of an army of the ancien régime which had rusted in a long period of peace. It was full of old or incapable officers put into place by court intrigues or family influence. Promotion was irregular and perfectly arbitrary; the lower commissioned ranks of the regiments were choked with officers whose want of education and military knowledge made them unfit for higher posts. They had often grown grey as lieutenants, and were perfectly useless in a crisis. The pay was very low, and the temptation to make up for the want of it by petty jobbing and embezzlement too strong.
When Beresford took command, in the early spring of 1809, he had found about 30,000 regular troops in arms on an establishment which ought to have shown nearly 60,000. The deficiency in mere numbers could be remedied by a stringent use of the conscription: but the deficiencies of organization could not. Beresford complained that “Long habits of disregard of duty, and consequent laziness, made it not only difficult but almost impossible to induce many senior officers to enter into any regular and continued attention to the duties of their situations, and neither reward nor punishment would induce them to bear up against the fatigue.”[243] In the lower ranks there was a good deal of zeal, there being great numbers of young officers from the higher classes, who had just accepted commissions from patriotic motives; but there was also a heavy dead-weight of old and slack officers, and an appalling want of professional knowledge.
Beresford made it a condition of accepting his post that he should be allowed a free hand to retain, dismiss, or promote, and should be permitted to introduce a certain amount of British officers into the army. The Regency granted his request, of necessity and not with enthusiasm. He then proceeded to use his permission with great energy. A vast number of old officers, both in the higher and lower ranks, were put on half pay: only a minority of the colonels and generals were retained on active service. All the regiments which had been cursed with notoriously inefficient commanders were placed in charge of British officers, of whom four or five were drafted into every unit. Beresford’s system was that “since national feeling required management,” and “he must humour and satisfy the pride of the nation,” a sufficient number of the higher places must be left to natives, but each must have British officers either immediately over or immediately under him. Where a Portuguese general commanded a brigade, it was managed that the colonels of his two regiments should both be English. Where there was a Portuguese colonel, his senior major was English; where an English colonel, his senior major was Portuguese. In addition there were two, three, or four British captains in each regiment, but hardly any subalterns. For, to encourage good officers to volunteer into the Portuguese service, it was provided that every one doing so should receive a step in promotion, lieutenants becoming captains, and captains majors. This system seems to have worked well, though friction was bound to occur, since the blow to Portuguese national pride, when so many high posts were given to foreigners, was a heavy one.