Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (76 page)

By the summer of 1810 more than 25,000 of them had been trained and drilled on the new method and brigaded with British

¹
Costello,
31;
Fortescue, VII,
125, 135, 137;
Leslie,
40, 47, 73.

²
To Marshal Bercsford.
8th
Sept.,
1809.
Gurwood.
⁸
See Boothby,
149.

formations. Their uniforms were clean, their arms smartly and efficiently handled and their conduct regular and obedient. With their bronzed faces, broad sturdy shoulders, steady ranks and fine equipment, they really looked like soldiers. Nobody could predict what they would do under fire, but their British officers believed that, if initiated with discretion and not exposed to too grave a risk of failure at the start, they would acquit themselves creditably. "The great object," wrote Captain Gomm, "is to give them confidence in themselves."
¹

With such imponderables still un
resolved, Wellington withdrew h
is rearguard westwards before the French advance in September, 1810. The Portuguese peasantry behaved with stoic grandeur. Such was their hatred of the enemy and their instinctive patriotism that tens of thousands left their homes at a few days' notice, destroying their crops and driving their flocks before them. The wealthier classes, including the burghers in the towns, having more to lose, fell short of this high standard. A few even went so far in their desperation as to enter into secret communication with the enemy: at Figueira there was talk of a wild plot sponsored by French spies to massacre the British wounded and seize the town.
²
More serious was the resentment of educated and patriotic Portuguese at a retreat which they could not understand and which threatened to reduce them to penury. Protesting bitterly at what they regarded as a British betrayal and the prelude to another evacuation, they demanded an early stand. Even the Lisbon Regency, which had approved Wellington's plans, joined in the clamour against him.

In England, too, the public was growing restive. What, gentlemen abed argued, was the use of paying ever-rising taxes to maintain an army abroad, if that army did nothing but retire without fighting? To the taxpayer, harassed by Continental blockade and commercial crisis, Portugal, like Spain before it, seemed a bottomless pit. Ministers—forced to budget for an unprecedented expenditure of .£85,000,000 and faced on every side by shortage of money— did not disguise their anxiety from their General in Portugal. Perceval warned him that, had he been able to foresee the immense drain of the campaign, he would never have dared to authorise its continuance.

Wellington was not a dictator like Napoleon, but a British General subject to public and parliamentary opinion. In view of

¹
Gomm,
155, 173.
See also Schaumann,
229;
Gomm,
153-5;
Burgoyne,
1,
65;
Tomkin-son,
42;
Leslie,
40;
Leith Hay, I,
190;
Fortescue, VIII,
428-31.

²
Smith, I,
32-3;
Simmons,
100.

Massena's strength he had planned after the fall of Almeida to retire slowly to his lines without a fight, leaving hunger and disease to do the work of guns and muskets. But faced by riots in Lisbon and pessimism at home, he modified his dispositions. Having a profound sense of political responsibility, he decided that it was his duty to restore confidence by a successful action before withdrawing behind his winter defences. In its present attitude towards land operations Parliament could not be trusted to tolerate a long and apparently hopeless siege, and the clamour for evacuation—now universally expected—might well become more than a weak Government could withstand. The only remedy was to give the latter a new lease of life by a timely victory.

Yet on one thing Wellington was determined : that it should be a victory, so far as was humanly possible, without risk. He would pay no more for it than he could afford. He had already, anticipating such a situation, prepared a defensive position on the last mountain barrier dominating the road alo
ng the southern bank of the Mon
dego which he supposed the French would take to Coimbra. Here at the Ponte Murcella he ordered the immediate concentration of his army. Hitherto it had been operating in two widely separated sections, the larger, including the bulk of the British troops, under his personal command in Beira, the remainder under Hill in the Alemtejo to guard against any advance south of the Tagus either by the French 2nd Corps or Soult's Army of Andalusia. But Reynier's sudden northward march in mid-September to join Massena had temporarily relieved Hill of the fear of a subsidiary drive to cut the British communications with Lisbon. Carrying out his instructions without a moment's delay, the latter set off to reinforce Wellington with seven thousand British and thirteen thousand Portuguese. His leading division reached the Mondego on September 20th; the remainder on the following day. By his promptitude he brought the allied strength before Coimbra to more than 50,000 and made a successful action against Massena possible. "The best of Hill," his chief observed, "is that I always know where to find him."

Wellington did not fight the French in the position he had selected on the south bank of the Mondego, because they did not come that way. Relying on inadequate Portuguese maps and ignorant Portuguese traitors, Masscna chose an abominable track running through Trancosa and Vizeu far to the north of the river. Advancing over a wilderness of barren and incredibly tumbled hills, the invaders found that it had been denuded of every living thing except partisans. The militiamen of the national Ordenanza —called out by Wellington to
resist invasion—waited in their
mountain fastnesses until the main French army had passed and then descended in sudden, savage cascades on the baggage-train and supply columns. Laboriously negotiating a stony, narrow and precipitous track which had to be constantly cleared with picks and crowbars, guns, carts and horses fell far behind the infantry and became an easy prey. Five days after the main body left Almeida a party of two thousand militiamen under an Irish officer, Colonel Trant, nearly succeeded in capturing the Grand Park of the Army with all its heavy guns, and took a hundred of its guards prisoner. Only their indiscipline when confronted by regular fire saved it.

All this was as' Wellington had planned. By drawing the French into a depopulated desert he was making it impossible for them to follow their usual practice of living on the countryside. And by raising the Ordenanza against them he was compelling them to dissipate strength in small detachments to maintain even a semblance of communication with Spain. The savagery with which the invaders responded to the guerrilla warfare he had launched only increased their difficulties. When Massena avenged the capture of his Provost-Marshal by burning a village and shooting two militiamen as brigands, the Portuguese grew still fiercer and took to torturing their prisoners.

By taking the longer northern route, Massena gave the British ample time to complete their concentration in front of Coimbra. Flis advance guard under Ney entered a deserted Vizeu, twenty miles short of the coastal plain, on September 18th when Hill's men were already descending into the Mondego valley after their rapid march from the south. The position chosen by Wellington to bar the new French line of advance was the ridge of Bussaco, some eight miles to the north-east of Coimbra. Stretching for nine miles from the Mondego in the south to the Serra de Alcoba in the north, it lowered above the wooded hills west of Mortagoa like a wall of bleak, heathery rock. Rising at one point to 1800 feet and falling away almost precipitously in rugged dells and dykes to the east, it was, apart from its length, an ideal position in which to fight a defensive battle. Of the 52,000 troops available to hold it, only 27,000 were British, for the promised reinforcements from England and the West Indies were still delayed by adverse winds and Walcheren fever. But no place could have been better chosen for giving the 25,000 Portuguese regulars brigaded with the British army a chance to win their spurs and acquire confidence.

Throughout September 21st, 22nd and 23rd the Allied troops toiled through gorse and heather to their allotted positions: so steep was the slope that one elderly colonel had to be carried up in a blanket by four sergeants.
¹
Hill's and Leith's 2nd and 5th Divisions from the south took their places on the right of the ridge on the morning of the 26th, Leith nearest the centre and Hill on the flank commanding the Mondego gorge. Wellington's headquarters were at the Convent of Bussaco in the left centre where the chaussee from Vizeu and Mortagoa climbed over the highest point of the ridge before dropping down into the Coimbra plain. From here a wonderful view extended far over the Atlantic to the west, and eastwards to the mountains across the tumbled, wood
ed foothills through winch Masse
na's army was labouring, its advance troops skirmishing with the retiring outposts of the Light Division and its muskets shining in the evening sunlight like distant lightning.
²

The 26th, though pinched by a cold wind from the Estrella, was a beautiful day with bright September sunshine. From their lofty station the British looked down, as far as the eye could see, over dark, glittering columns winding under clouds of dust along every valley and forest clearing and coming steadily out of the east. It was not an armed force alone but a great multitude—horse, guns and foot, ambulances and commissariat, interminable trains of wagons, tribes of mules with their attendants, sutlers, camp followers and women. "So this," wrote an onlooker, "was the famous French army, the terror of the world, the conqueror of Italy, Spain, Egypt and Germany! It had been victorious at Jena, Austerlitz, Marengo, Ulm and Vienna, and on the morrow we were going to try conclusions with it."
³
But the British were not at all perturbed. Though for weeks every one had been expecting an evacuation, exhilarated by the clear air of that lonely spot and its Olympian prospect, they were full of confidence. So was their leader. "If Massena attacks me here," he said, "I shall beat him." The Portuguese had only to stand their ground and there could be no question of the result.

Massena, watching Craufurd's rearguard withdrawing up the steep, heathery hillside, was equally confident. He snapped back at a brigade commander, who dwelt on the strength of the position, that he had seen many stronger. He did not believe that the Portuguese could fight, and he still thought that Hill and Leith, outmanoeuvred by Reynier's rapid march to the north, were far away in Alemtejo. The sharp edge of the ridge concealed the British regiments from his eyes and its great height placed them beyond the range of his field guns. But he knew the power and
elan
of his

¹
Anderson,
42.

²
Schaumann,
244.

³
See also Schaumann,
246-7;
Leith Hay,
1
,230;
Tomkinson,
42;
Fortescue, VII,
506;
Grattan,
28;
Gomm,
181.

soldiers in attack and he had enjoyed too many victories over the veteran armies of the Continent to doubt the ability of his 62,000 to overwhelm 20,000 British. Four weak divisions, which were all he supposed before him, could not withstand three army corps. "I cannot persuade myself," he remarked, " that Lord Wellington will risk the loss of a reputation by giving battle, but if he does, I have him! To-morrow we shall effect the conquest of Portugal, and in a few days I shall drown the leopard."

That night the French bivouac fires twinkled from a thousand points in the foothills in front of the ridge; it seemed as if Massena was trying to frighten his foe off the hilltop by the size of his host. The British, concealed among the cedars and pinewoods of the western slopes, encamped in darkness. Here a young Scottish gentleman, travelling all day from Oporto to Lisbon through a wild and deserted countryside, heard at the entrance of a glen the strains of " The Garb of Old Gaul"
play
ed by a bagpipe and a moment later found himself in the quarters of a Highland regiment.
¹
The men slept in order of battle, quiet as the grave, every man with his firelock in his grasp. Their Commander-in-Chief took his rest among them wrapped in his cloak.