Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (50 page)

the threat of further landings and, with a countryside in insurrection, maintain communications with Spain. He guessed from his experience of men and conquest that eight months of occupation had transformed Junot—now calling himself Duke of Abrantes—from a soldier into a prince and his army from a field force into a garrison. And on the day that he landed Wellesley learnt of Dupont's capitulation at Baylen and knew that all danger to his rear from Bessieres's army in northern Spain was at an end. With the French fully occupied elsewhere, he could leave the defence of the wild Tras-os-Montes in his rear to the Portuguese militia.

For his own force he could count on some 12,300 British troops with 1500 regular Portuguese light infantry and horse. His Staff and commissariat were greenhorns, his artillery poorly mounted, his cavalry negligible, and his allies.had failed to provide the baggage and draught animals they had promised. But like every great master of war
Wellesley
, though he weighed the odds carefully, always thought more of the enemy's difficulties than his own. His chance had come to show what he could do on a European battlefield; in the peculiar circumstances of British warfare, it might never come again. Coolly and with great boldness, he resolved to put everything to the test. Having completed his preparations, he marched southward on August
9th,
1808.

To maintain contact with the Fleet and minimise the strain on his transport, and to guard against any threat to his left flank from a French army moving across the Tagus from eastern Portugal, he chose the coastal route through Caldas and Torres Vedras instead of the river road by Villa Franca. To save time he sent his advanced guard along the sands to Caldas, thirty miles ahead, following himself with the main body along the Leiria high road. Lacking horses and mules and still untaught by experience to travel light, the troops staggered along the hot sandy track, each man laden with kitbag, greatcoat and camp-kettle, three days' store of ship's biscuit and salt beef, heavy water-canteen, hatchet, rifle and eighty rounds of ball-cartridge—enough, thought Rifleman Harris, to sink a little fellow of 5 feet
7
inches into the earth.
¹
Around them were the sights and sounds of a mysterious countryside: the white houses in the brilliant glare, the gardens of aloe and cypress, the vineyards and olive groves, the ancient towers and steeples on undulating wooded heights and the barren heaths between, the screeching of the bullock carts with their solid wheels and ungreased axles and the drivers striding beside with their goads. At night the air filled with the scents of rosemary, sage and thyme crushed beneath the waggon wheels or burning in

¹
Harris,
18-19;
Blake
ney,
18-19;
Journal
of
a Soldier,
43.
244

bivouack fires, with the noise of frogs and crickets and the chanting of the carters as they sang their plaintive, interminable hymns to the Virgin.
¹

As soon as he heard of the landing Junot dispatched his best general, Laborde, with 4000 men up the river road to the north to delay the British advance until a second force—twice as large—under General Loison could move down from beyond the Tagus to join him. He himself, as Wellesley had calculated, remained behind with nearly half his army to hold down the capital and watch the British ships off the Tagus. By the 12th Laborde was near Batalha at the intersection of the two roads to Lisbon. But, finding that the British were moving not only from the north but along the beach to the west to cut him off from Torres Vedras, he left the defence of the eastern road to Loison and retreated southwards to Rolica. Here, half-way along the western route trom Mondego to Lisbon, he took up a strong position overlooking the Caldas valley, with a rearguard holding the little town of Obidos with its Moorish castle a few. miles up the road.

On August 15th, the light companies of the 60th and the 95th, skirmishing ahead of the advance guard, encountered the French. Moving as Moore had taught them, an invisible tide of rapid and accurate fire, they quickly gained the village. As the enemy withdrew in good order to the south, one of the green-jackets, stung by the unfamiliar irritation of being fired at by real ball, sprang to his feet and, letting out a yell of "Over! boys, over!" dashed ahead, followed by all four companies, shouting and running over the grass like wildfire towards the distant rise and fixing their bayonets as they ran. Coming up against the main French position at Rolica, they lost two officers and twenty-seven men, and were only saved from serious trouble by the swift advance of Spencer's division in support. Wellesley, though naturally annoyed by this needless loss, could not hide his satisfaction at the dash of his troops. " We are going on as well as possible," he reported to Castlereagh, "the Army in high order and great spirits."

There was no time to lose, however, for Loison was nearing Alcoentre, a day's march to the east, and might soon effect a junction with Laborde. After a day of reconnoitring the French position, a general attack was launched early on the 17th. A visitor to the plain of Obidos that morning would have seen the British army drawn up in successive brigades and columns of battalions. He "would not, perhaps," wrote one who was present, "have noticed anything

¹
Schaumann,
20;
Leslie,
32
-5.

particular: He would have seen the arms piled, and the men occupied as they usually are on all occasions of a morning halt—some sitting on their knapsacks, others stretched on the grass, many with a morsel of cold meat on a ration biscuit for a plate in one hand, with a clasp-knife in the other, all doing justice to the contents of their haversacks, and not a few with their heads thrown back and canteens at their mouths, eagerly gulping down his Majesty's grog or the wine of the country, while others, whiffing their pipes, were jestingly promising their comrades better billets and softer beds for the next night, or repeating the valorous war-cry of the Portuguese.

" But to the person of reflecting mind there was more in this condensed formation than a casual halt
required. A
close observer would have noticed the silence and anxious looks of the several general officers of brigades, and the repeated departure and arrival of staff-officers and aides-de-camp, and he would have known that the enemy was not far distant, and that an important event was on the eve of taking place."
¹
A British army in a remote province was challengi
ng the imperial legions for a pe
rmenent foothold on Napoleon's Europe. The first battle of the Peninsular War was about to begin.

Detaching Major-General Ferguson with 5000 men and six guns along a parallel hill track to the east, with the dual object of outflanking the French and guarding against any advance of Loison from the direction of Alcoentre,
Wellesley
moved on Rolica with his main body. A smaller contingent of Portuguese—grotesque-looking ragamuffins in white jackets and immense feathered hats— simultaneously pushed forward along another hill track to the west some distance to the left of Laborde's position.

Uneasy at the dual threat to his flanks and aware that he was heavily outnumbered, the latter thereupon fell back with great skill on a higher ridge a mile in his rear. But the riflemen of the 95th and 60th, driving up the ravines and using every stone and bash for cover, allowed him no time to consolidate.' The defile through which the Lisbon road passed was stormed by two supporting regiments—the 9th (the East Norfolks) and the 29th (the Worcesters) —who, despite heavy losses and the death of the
ir commanding officers, held off
counter-attacks until the arrival-of the main British force, when the renewed threat to his flanks forced Laborde to break off the action. By four o'clock Wellesley's object had been achieved. The junction of Laborde's and Loison's forces had been averted, and the former was in full retreat to the south-east, leaving three of his guns behind, several hundred prisoners and the road to Torres Vedras-open. The British lost five hundred men, nearly half of them from

¹
Leslie,
38-9.

the 29th—no light proportion of the four thousand actually engaged. That night Rifleman Harris watched the newly-made widows of his company huddling together for comfort on the battlefield, "with the sky for canopy and the turf for pillow."

Pursuit was out of the question; Laborde was a most s
kilful officer and had with him
a strong covering force of cavalry, while the victors had practically none
. For this reason, too, Wellesle
y made no attempt to strike eastwards at Loison, now temporally isolated by his colleague's retreat. His objective was to secure Lisbon before the French could unite; nowhere else was there a harbour capable of sheltering a fleet against the Atlantic gales and affording a base for future operations in Spain. On the evening of his victory
Wellesley
received news that two brigades from England with a large quantity of stores were off the Peniche peninsula fifteen miles to the southwest, waiting to be put ashore before the next westerly gale dashed them on to the rocks. Next morning, therefore, deviating from the main Torres Vedras road, he pressed on towards Lourinham and Vimiero, a village on the Maceira river, whose sandy estuary, two miles away, offered a temporary landing place.

Here, posted on a semi-circle of hills round the estuary, the army took up a covering position on August 1
9th. Brigadier-General Anstruthe
r's brigade landed that day and Brigadier-General Acland's during the following night, while the piquets and patrols of the light companies, operating with the easy precision of Shorncliffe, kept prowling troops of French cavalry at a distance.
¹
This brought the British strength to 17,000 infantry and 18
guns with 1500 Portuguese auxi
liaries. Moore's transports being already off northern Portugal, Wellesley decided to resume his march on the 21st and, driving towards Mafra between the sea and the defile of Torres Vedras nine miles away, turn the latter before the French could recover from their defeat. The orders for the advance had just been issued when on the evening of. the 20th a frigate arrived in Ma
ceira Bay carrying Lieutenant-Ge
neral Sir Harry Burrard.
Wellesley
immediately went aboard to acquaint his superior with his plans.

They were far too bold for that brave but conventional officer. Burrard's last encounter with the French had been in 1798, when, landing with a brigade to d
estroy a sluice-gate on the Oste
nd canal, he had been stranded on the beach by a gale and forced to capitulate. The same fear now haunted his
mind. At any moment the French
might attack with cavalry and mobile artillery and drive the British,

¹
One, however, succeeded in carrying off some of the attendant ladies from the rear of the British camp. Napier, I,
207.

who lacked both, into the sea. Instead of landing Moore's 12,000 men at Mondego, as Wellesley had advised, for a dual advance on Lisbon along either side of the Monte Junto
massif,
Burrard was resolved to concentrate his army at Maceira Bay. He therefore wished to keep the troops already landed on the defensive until the remainder could be got ashore. He based his calculations on the belief that Junot would employ his entire force in a counter-attack
instead of seeing, as Wellesley
with his clearer insight saw, that he would try to guard against a rising in Lisbon and a further landing in the Tagus.

Wellesley was naturally bitterly disappointed. He returned to his camp, cancelled his orders and expressed his feelings, so far as he was able, in a note to Castlereagh wishing that Sir Harry had landed and seen things with his own eyes. The resounding
coup
he had planned was not to be. Instead of falling after a brilliant victory, Lisbon was to become the subject of a laborious and uncertain siege, which would probably end, like others .before it, in a British withdrawal. It was with such reflections that the dapper little man with the big nose sat on the rough farmhouse table of his headquarters swinging his legs and talking to his Staff, when at midnight a breathless German dragoon announced that Junot was marching to the attack.

Wellesley
received the report with calm. He scarcely believed it, but sent orders to his well-posted piquets and patrols to be doubly watchful. An hour later Rifleman Harris, peering into the gloom of the pine woods, heard footsteps and found himself confronted by Major Napier. " Be alert, sentry," Napier said, coming very close and looking him in the eyes, "for I expect the enemy upon us to-night." At daybreak, however, there was no sign of the French, and, after standing for an hour to arms, the men were dismissed with the usual Sunday morning order to parade later for divine service. But shortly after eight, while they were cleaning their firelocks and washing their linen in the river, the bugles sounded and the drums beat to arms. A column of dust on the hills to the south was taking shape as a strong force of French cavalry. Simultaneously white-coated columns appeared moving along the Torres-Vedras Lourinham road as though to attack the British left.
¹