No attempt was made to attack the enemy, Wellington considering it more prudent to leave the ridge, cross the Mondego, and retreat towards Lisbon. This resolution was come to on the 28th September, and on the 1st October the last man of the rear-guard had evacuated the town. “Although I could not save Coimbra,” Wellington writes, “I have very little doubt of being able to hold this country against the force which has now attacked it.”
The place was immediately occupied by Masséna’s famished troops, who found it not entirely destitute of eatables, as seemed only too probable judging by previous experience, although much of the food had been destroyed by Wellington’s orders. They had merely to help themselves to what they could find, for most of the population had followed in the wake of the allied army. “The inhabitants of the country have fled from their houses universally,” the Commander-in-Chief writes to the Earl of Liverpool from Alcobaço on the 5th October, “carrying with them every thing they could take away which could be deemed useful to the enemy; and the habits of plunder which have been so long encouraged in the enemy’s army prevent them from deriving any general advantage from the little resource which the inhabitants may have been obliged to leave behind them.”
It is the straightforward utterance of a straightforward man. Wellington seldom indulged in picturesque language; he had neither the natural ability which commands a delicate choice of language nor the time for vivid diction. His mind was cast in a sterner mould; he craved for exactness, for cold, matter-of-fact calculations, for ungarnished essentials.
The Retreat from Coimbra
Thomas Maybank
For graphic details we must turn to such an authority as Sir Charles Stewart, who writes with the fluency of a gifted war-correspondent permitted to ride with the officers and obtain a view of everything of importance. “Crowds of men, women, and children,” he says,“—of the sick, the aged, and the infirm, as well as of the robust and the young—covered the roads and the fields in every direction. Mothers might be seen with infants at their breasts hurrying towards the capital, and weeping as they went; old men, scarcely able to totter along, made way chiefly by the aid of their sons and daughters; whilst the whole wayside soon became strewed with bedding, blankets, and other species of household furniture, which the weary fugitives were unable to carry farther. During the retreat of Sir John Moore’s army numerous heartrending scenes were brought before us; for then, as now, the people, particularly in Galicia, fled at our approach; but they all returned sooner or later to their homes, nor ever dreamed of accumulating upon our line of march, or following our fortunes. The case was different here. Those who forsook their dwellings, forsook them under the persuasion that they should never behold them again; and the agony which such an apprehension appeared to excite among the majority exceeds any attempt at description.... It could not but occur to us that, though the devastating system must inevitably bear hard upon the French, the most serious evils would, in all probability, arise out of it, both to ourselves and our allies, from the famine and general distress which it threatened to bring upon a crowd so dense, shut up within the walls of a single city. At the moment there were few amongst us who seemed not disposed to view it with reprobation; because, whilst they condemned its apparent violation of every feeling of humanity and justice, they doubted the soundness of the policy in which it originated.”
Leaving a meagre force to guard the wounded and sick at Coimbra, Masséna started off in pursuit of the enemy as soon as the most primeval of creature comforts had been satisfied. Six days after his soldiers had left the place, namely, the 11th October 1810, Wellington’s men entered the lines of Torres Vedras, but so rapid had been the French advance that they began to appear on the following morning. La Romana had crossed from Estremadura with several thousand Spanish troops, thereby adding to Wellington’s forces, while Portuguese militia threatened the enemy’s communications.
Masséna dared not attempt to retreat for fear of incurring Napoleon’s displeasure. His only hope, as he repented at leisure, was that the supplies of the defenders might fail, or that the Emperor, in response to urgent dispatches, would speedily send reinforcements both of men and of arms. The news that Coimbra, its garrison, and its invalids, had fallen into the hands of militia under Colonel Trant merely added insult to injury. As regards “starving out” the British and their allies, it was far more probable that their own food would run out, for while Wellington held the Tagus a constant supply of the necessaries of life was secured from incoming ships. Hunger did indeed eventually drive Masséna from Santarem, a town some thirty miles from Wellington’s lines, on which he had been forced to fall back in November. The place, perched on the summit of a height between the rivers Rio Mayor and Aviella, was admirably suited for defensive purposes, but after the surrounding country had been stripped there was nothing to do but retire. The Marshal was fortunate in finding a district which the Portuguese had not laid bare. It sounds almost incredible, but it is recorded that when Masséna succeeded in crossing the frontier his men were so famished that one of them consumed no less than seventeen pounds of native bread. The French General awaited with feverish anxiety the coming of Soult to his relief for nearly four months, but that worthy was fighting battles and besieging Badajoz, which the Spaniards surrendered on the 10th March 1811, five days after his colleague had been forced by sheer necessity to begin a retreat across the mountains towards Ciudad Rodrigo.
The author of “The Journal of an Officer,” a reliable eye-witness, thus describes the town after Masséna had left it: “I have been for some weeks in view of Santarem, and saw at last with pleasure some symptoms of the French abandoning it. The first was setting fire to one of the principal convents in the upper town, and part of the lower town; the volume of smoke was immense for three days. On the fourth morning some information to depend on reached us, and the bugle of attack roused us from our pillows. The haze of the morning clearing up, we could easily perceive the out sentinels were men of straw, and quite passive.[62] In fact, a better managed retreat was never executed. Not a vestige of a dollar’s worth remained. Being at the outposts with the 11th Dragoons and the 1st Royals, I entered with them, and three miserable deserters, who had hid themselves with one too ill to move, were the only enemies to be found. Such a scene of horror, misery, and desolation, scarce ever saluted the eye of man. Smoking ruins, the accumulated filth of months, horses and human beings putrefied to suffocation, nearly caused to many a vomiting. The houses had scarcely a vestige of wood—doors, windows, ceilings, roofs, burnt; and where the sick had expired, there left to decay! The number thus left were great. Every church demolished, the tombs opened for searching after hidden plate, every altar-piece universally destroyed, and the effluvia so offensive as to defy describing.