It was a heavy blow. But it did not find Wellington unprepared. "The object of the allies," he had written when he first planned the campaign in the previous autumn, "should be to oblige the enemy as much as possible to make his attack, with concentrated corps. They should stand in every position which the country could afford such a length of time as would enable the people of the country to evacuate towns and villages, carrying with them or destroying all articles of provisions and carriages."1 Before the siege of Almeida began he had ordered his engineers to prepare charges on all the principal roads into the interior.2 He now gave instructions for the systematic evacuation of the entire countryside between the frontier and the coastal plain at Coimbra. Everything was in train for a retreat to Lisbon and the mountain lines his engineers had been secretly preparing. For, though outnumbered and on the defensive, Wellington had no intention of letting Massena call the tune. He was resolved to retain the initiative and make that wily Marshal and his Army of Portugal dance to his own piping. Nor was it a pleasant dance he had chosen for them.
Yet the success of his Fabian strategy turned on two uncertain factors: the attitude of the British Government and the behaviour of the Portuguese nation and army. For the ruthless plan Wellington was about to put into execution was certain to try both high. Of the Cabinet he was asking loyal and sustained support for a costly and apparently inglorious retreat at a time when they were facing bitter opposition in country and Parliament. Of the Portuguese he demanded even more: the depopulation and ruin of their country-^ side and its abandonment to a cruel and hated enemy.
Nor was this his only demand on Portugal. Having only 30,000 British effectives with winch to hold the mountain lines before Lisbon, he was dependent on the Portuguese regular army to make good his deficiency in numbers. It could only do so by fighting. "If the Portuguese do their duty," he had written at the beginning of the year, "I shall have enough to maintain it; if they do not, nothing that Great Britain can afford can save the country."3 The difficulty was to make them fight. On its record the Portuguese Army was no more to be depended on than the Spanish. When Wellington had landed in the country two years before, it was undisciplined, unarmed and demoralised. The very idea of its
1 Memorandum for Lt.-Col. Fletcher, 20th Oct., 1809. Gurwood.
2 Burgoyne, I, 97.
3 To Rt. Hon. J. Villiers, 14th Jan., 1810. Gurwood.
resisting the French seemed unthinkable. It had allowed Junot to seize Lisbon with less than 2000 men. Its habit of flying at the first shot amid excited cries of "Vamos!" had later caused the British soldier to coin a new and uncomplimentary word—to vamose.1
But Wellington was a realist. He knew that cowardice in the field was not caused by racial degeneracy but by failure to cultivate the military virtues. "We are mistaken," he wrote, "if we believe that what these Portuguese and Spanish armies want is discipline, properly so called. They want the habits and spirits of soldiers— the habits of command on one side and of obedience on the other— mutual confidence between officers and men."2 The Portuguese army was a mob, without training, order, drill, esprit de corps ov mutual confidence. Its officers were self-indulgent loafers in peacock feathers who gamed, drank, smoked and stank and, never having trained themselves for anything else, thought of nothing in the hour of danger but saving their skins.3 Their men, ignorant and uncared-for peasants or unwilling artisans impressed by a periodic round-up of the public gardens, naturally followed their example. They were not brave, because no one had ever given a moment's thought to making them so.
Wellington, who had not been a Sepoy General for nothing, treated the reorganisation of the Portuguese Army under British discipline as a matter as important as the defence lines before Lisbon. In March, 1809, as a result of a treaty with the Regency, William Carr Beresford, a forty-year-old British Major-General, had taken over its command with the rank of a native Marshal. A big, commanding-looking man with a regal air and a blinded eye—the bastard of an Irish Marquis—he had a way with him that took the fancy of the Portuguese, much as they disliked his strenuous severity. With a few hundred young British officers and drill-sergeants to help him, he became organiser, schoolmaster and dictator of the Portuguese Service. He made it in everything but name and race an integral part of the British Army. Not only did it adopt the latter's drill-books, evolutions and bugle calls, but its ranks were completely re-clad and re-armed from British depots and magazines. After a few months of hard work and unrelenting discipline, the ragged Portuguese had been transformed into small, dark replicas of their powerful allies.
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 unresolved, Wellington withdrew his 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 o
ne 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 along the southern bank of the Mondego 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, wooded foothills through winch Massena'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.
3See 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" played 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.
When day broke a cold autumnal mist lay over the hillside. But there could be no doubt of the enemy's inten
tions: long before
1 Scott, II, 403. He fought by their side next day as a volunteer.
dawn their drums and fifes could be heard sounding the advance. The British listened to that distant, swelling rub-a-dub-dub with a thrill of expectation. The sight of Lord Wellington, riding with matter-of-fact unconcern along their ranks, heightened their confidence: "as each soldier took his place in the lines," wrote Captain Grattan, "his quiet demeanour and orderly but determined appearance was a contrast to the bustle and noise which prevailed amongst our opposite neighbours." A few straggling shots along the brow of the mountain added to the sober sense of expectation.
Disregarding the lessons of Vimeiro, Corunna and Talavera, Massena launched his attack against the long British line in dense columns. He disposed his assault-troops in two massive fists timed to strike successively. The 14,000 infantry of Reynier's two divisions were drawn up in serried battalions on a single company front astride a low outlying spur opposite the centre of the ridge. Here, where a rough country track climbed over a low saddle between the villages of San Antonio de Cantaro and Palheiros, they were to drive in two columns over the pass and, descending the far slope to the Coimbra highroad, wheel northwards round the rear of Wellington's position. As soon as they had reached the summit, two divisions of Ney's 6th Corps were to swarm up either side of the chaussee from Mortagoa and break what Massena took to be the centre of Wellington's line at the Bussaco Convent. The third division of Ney's Corps and the whole of the 8th Corps were held in reserve on the Mortagoa road to complete the rout when the British centre had been surrounded.
The weakness of tins plan, apart from its underestimate of Allied fighting capacity, was its assumption that by striking at the centre of the ridge Reynier could roll up Wellington's flank. Over-confidence in the rapidity of his own dispositions and a complete absence of reconnaissance had blinded Massena to the fact that Hill's two divisions from the Alcmtejo were in position beyond what he supposed to be the extreme right of the British line. Thinking of the British in terms of the Flanders campaign of 1793, he had failed to realise their new efficienc)'-.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 53