Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  For awaiting him were official dispatches from England and a private letter from Castlereagh. It appeared that he had been superseded. Learning that Sir John Moore's army, denied a landing by the mad King of Sweden, was returning home,1 the Government had decided to send it on to Portgual. But resolved to prevent the command in the Peninsula devolving on Moore, who had made himself

  1 Though threatened by attack from Russia in the east and France and Denmark in the south, Gustavus Adolphus had rejected all defensive proposals and insisted on an offensive campaign to recover Finland and Pomerania. When Moore refused to commit his army to certain destruction, he was arrested, and had to escape to his ships disguised as a peasant. See George Napier, 41.

  unpopular in Downing Street by his criticisms of Ministerial strategy, it had hastily posted to the expedition two exceedingly senior officers. Then, on his arrival in London, it had allowed Moore to learn in a chance conversation with the War Secretary that he was to be employed only in a subordinate capacity. As was expected, Moore flared up and told Castlereagh what he thought of such treatment. But as, contrary to Ministerial hopes, his sense of duty stopped him from resigning, Wellesley, at the outset of his campaign, was presented with the prospect of being joined not only by 16,000 additional troops but by three superior officers. One of them, Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Dalrymple, the Governor of Gibraltar, had not seen active service since 1794. His second-in-command, Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Burrard, was a Guardsman celebrated for his good nature, excellent table and unassuming intellect.1

  In a private note to Wellesley Castlereagh explained the situation as best he could. Consistent with the employment of the necessary amount of force, he had made every effort to keep in his hands the greatest number of men and for the longest time the circumstances would permit. "I shall rejoice if it shall have befallen to your lot to place the Tagus in our hands; if not, I have no fear that you will find many opportunities of doing yourself honour and your country service." 2 Wellesley kept his temper and replied that he would do nothing rash to secure the credit of success before his seniors arrived. He then gave orders for the troops to disembark.

  For the next five days the beaches of Mondego Bay presented an unusual spectacle. Directed by naval signals from the headlands, relays of flat-bottomed boats put off from the transports, the redcoats sitting tightly wedged on the bucking thwarts with their packs and muskets between their legs. As each boat was rowed towards the rocky, sandy shore, huge breakers, sweeping out of the Atlantic, tossed it high into the air and flung it into a sheet of foam. Here gangs of naked sailors with ropes were waiting to haul it ashore before the next wave should dash it to pieces. When the boats grounded, the sailors seized the soldiers and carried them dry-shod to land. Other boats discharged unsaddled horses who, dazed after their confinement, struggled wildly ashore and then galloped up and down; snorting, neighing and kicking at their pursuers. Every now and then the waves overturned a boat and, despite the efforts of the sailors, later threw up a cluster of stiff, red-coated bodies.

  1 "A very good sort of man, and if he was unfit to command an army, they who gave him the command ought to have known that, for I am sure every one else knew it." Mrs. Jackson to George Jackson. Jackson, n, 379.

  2 Castlereagh, VI, 385.

  Along the beaches tumult raged, incongruous in that wild and unfrequented place; of naval and military officers bellowing orders above the thunder of the surf, dazed and sea-sick soldiers dressing and drying themselves, working-parties reassembling and limbering-up guns; of mountains of ships' biscuits, meat barrels and trusses of hay being loaded into primitive-looking Portuguese bullock-carts while sweating German commissaries entered the details on their writing-tablets; of detachments marching off under sergeants with rattling kettles and cans to bivouac among the rocks. Ail this was enacted under a burning sun, with the heat striking up from the sand and every one from generals downwards walking about bare-footed and occasionally paddling in the surf to cool themselves. In the afternoon peasants with dark faces and shaggy hair appeared peddling melons, grapes and peaches which were eagerly bought up by the parched troops, and, as darkness fell, camp fires were lit in the dunes. Later many of the men went down to bathe in the moonlight, while the lights of the transports encircled the bay with an arc of tossing stars.1

  On the fifth day, when the disembarkation of Wellesley's original 9000 troops was complete, Spencer arrived with 4000 more from the south. It was not till the morning of August 8th that the last man was ashore and the army ready to advance. During all that week the general, with memories of moving troops through Indian jungles, worked furiously, reducing his chaotic transport service and commissariat to order. The men at the head of the latter—nominees of the Treasury—were incapable, he told Castlereagh, of managing anything outside a counting-house. For this reason he gave up the idea of using the Portuguese levies; there was no point in straining the commissariat further to supply troops whose only military accomplishment appeared to be picking the lice off their breeches.2 Their discipline was so bad that their rulers were even more afraid of them than of the French.

  On one of his first nights ashore Wellesley was kept awake by the lamentations of the monks of Batalha who were convinced that his intrusion into Napoleon's Europe would be terribly avenged. Don Fernadim Freire de Andrada, the Portuguese Commander-in-Chief, seemed equally sure of it.3 Yet, though he could hope for little from his allies, Wellesley was confident that if he struck quickly enough he could destroy the French before they could unite their forces. The highest estimate of their strength—and he believed it exaggerated— was 20,000, and with this they had to hold down a capital city, meet

  1'Schaumann, 1-8; Harris, 19; Fortescue, VI, 203; Leslie, 31-2. 2 Schaumann, 26. 3 Stanhope, Conversations, 3, 40.

  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; Blakeney, 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 challenging the imperial legions for a permenent 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 their 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 skilful officer and had with him a strong covering force of cavalry, while the victors had practically none. For this reason, too, Wellesley 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 19th. Brigadier-General Anstruther'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 auxiliaries. 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 Maceira Bay carrying Lieutenant-General 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 destroy a sluice-gate on the Ostend 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 eit
her 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