Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (75 page)

The first step was to clear the northern road to Lisbon by capturing the Spanish and Portuguese frontier fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida at the eastern edge of the mountains. Ney moved forward with 30,000 men against the former in the last week of May. Ciudad Rodrigo was not a very formidable place—an old-fashioned, third-rate fortress and much neglected like everything else in Spain that belonged to the State. But the septuagenarian who commanded it and its garrison of 5000 Spaniards put up an unexpectedly stubborn defence, so much so that Wellington found himself in an embarrassing position. For as week followed week and the fortress still held out, both the Spanish authorities and his own soldiers began to clamour for its relief. It seemed shameful for a British army to stand by almost within gunshot and watch a brave ally being pounded and starved into surrender.

Yet nothing could move Wellington from his purpose. He had formed a clear conception of the campaign he wished to wage—one scrupulously adapted to his military and geographical resources— and he was not going to be deflected from it by any momentary advantage. Nor was he going to harass and tire his men by conforming to the enemy's movements. Permanent defence of Ciudad Rodrigo and the Portuguese frontier was out of the question against the forces threatening him; the sole service General Herrasti and its defenders could do was to hold out as long as possible and so gain additional time before the inevitable advance on Lisbon. Though only a day's march from the British advance-posts in the mountains, the besieged fortress was situated on an open plain within easy reach of Massena's massive cavalry. It could not be relieved without a pitched fight. And to give battle in such a position with
33
,000 men, half of them untried Portuguese, against an almost equal French force would be to court heavy losses, even if by some miracle Ney could be defeated before the enemy's main body came to his aid. And Wellington knew that he was going to need every man he possessed, whereas the French could replace their losses many times over. Against such considerations neither sentiment nor hope of glory counted for anything with him. His officers grumbled at the humiliation, but a few were more far-seeing. "He is blamed for this," wrote Charles Napier, hitherto one of his severest critics, " but he is right and it gives me confidence in him. He is a much better general than I suspected him to be."
¹

Ciudad Rodrigo held out in the burning midsummer heats till July 10th when, after the walls had been breached and a quarter of the garrison had fallen, Herrasti surrendered. Wellington had reason to be satisfied, for his allies had gained him six valuable weeks. Having expended 11,000 shells and 18,000 round-shot on reducing the place, the French were forced to make a further wait till they could bring up fresh supplies. Meanwhile Craufurd with the Rifle and Light Infantry screen continued by brilliant skirmishing to impede their progress, making them deploy in front of every obstacle. So superbly trained and handled were his troops that the enemy never knew whether they were opposed by a few hundred men or by the whole British army.

Yet in his confidence in his own and his men's skill Craufurd tempted fate too far. In spite of Wellington's warnings not to linger in the open plain, he was still retaining his position on the exposed bank of the Coa when, in the third week of July, the enemy moved forward against the Portuguese fortress of Almeida. He thus needlessly exposed his four thousand men—the very eyes of the army

¹
Charles Napier I,
129
-3.

—to attack by a force six times as large, with a raging stream and a single bridge in his rear. For, as one of his officers remarked, Craufurd was as enamoured of his separate command as any youth of his mistress.

The result was that on the morning of July
24th
—in the half-light between night and day which Wellington had foretold as the danger period—Ney, probing his adversary's strength, suddenly, realised the weakness of the British rearguard and immediately launched his entire corps, including two cavalry brigades, against the thin, over-extended line of skirmishers. A company of the Rifles on the left were overwhelmed by a cavalry charge, and within a few minutes Craufurd, who had failed to get his guns over the bridge in time, was faced with disaster.

The situation was saved by the steadiness of the infantry of the Light Division. While the hussars and artillery galloped under heavy fire down a steep hairpin-bend road for the bridge, the men of the
43rd, 52nd
and
95th,
covering their retreat and that of the Portuguese, fell back from wall to wall firing as coolly and steadily as on a Kentish field-day. Cut by the weight and speed of the French advance into isolated groups, they continued to fight as they had been taught in small sections, every officer and man knowing exactly what to do. "Moore's matchless discipline was their protection," wrote Charles Napier, "a phantom hero from Corunna saved them!" A final stand by the
43rd,
the Rifles and a company of the
52nd
on a small knoll of pine trees immediately in front of the bridge enabled the remainder of the division to take up a strong position beyond the Coa where it should have been stationed from the first. Five companies of the
52nd
still fighting on the eastern slopes above the knoll were almost cut off and were only saved by a brilliant counter-attack led by Colonel Beckwith in person. By the time the last man had crossed the stream more than three hundred of the light infantry, including twenty-eight of their fine officers, had been lost.

Yet the disaster so rashly courted ha
d been averted. Ncy's subse
quent attempt to rush the bridge
in a deluge of rain proved as
expensive to his troops as Craufur
d's over-confidence had been to
his, more than five hundred fallin
g under the fire of the British
guns and marksmen now posted a
mong the rocks on the western
bank. And though Massena in
Ins dispatches, which were pub
lished with fanfares in the Paris pa
pers, claimed to have inflicted
immense losses on the defenders
whose strength he estimated at
ten thousand, the general impressio
n left on the attackers was one
of deep respect for the fighting quali
ties of the British. Indeed one
of Ney's brigadiers, General Foy, gloomily recorded in his diary that the despised islanders were better soldiers than the French, at any rate than the young conscripts with whom Napoleon was beginning to flood his veteran regiments.

Not unnaturally Wellington was extremely angry. Through Craufurd's folly he had come within an ace of losing the Light .Division. Yet in his dispatches he refrained from any censure of his hot-headed lieutenant, transmitting his report without comment and taking the responsibility for the needless loss of life on his own shoulders. It was one of-the idiosyncrasies of this stern, lonely man, who never forgave the least disobedience to his orders in any other subordinate, that he always treated Craufurd with exceptional tenderness. If he was to be hanged for it, he told his brother, he could not accuse a man whom he believed had meant well and whose error was one of judgment, not of intention. "That is not the way in which any, much less a British army, can be commanded."

During the week that followed the engagement on the Coa the French formally invested Almeida. Contrary to Wellington's expectation they made no attempt to mask the town and press over the mountains towards the Coimbra plain. Nor did they move south of the Tagus, where Hill with his two divisions were still watching for an enemy attempt to break through Alemtejo and, by a passage of the river near Abrantes, to cut off the main allied army from Lisbon. The truth was that, owing to Souk's preoccupation in Andalusia, Massena had not sufficient force for the dual advance against the capital which Wellington had always feared. And, having lost nearly two thousand draught animals and used up his forward ammunition during the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, the Marshal was in no position to hurry. Not till August 15th did his troops commence active siege operations.

With the fortifications of Almeida in far better repair than those of Ciudad Rodrigo and garrisoned by 5000 Portuguese regulars under a British brigadier, Well
ington began to hope that the
advance over the mountains might be held up until the October rains. But on August 26th an unexpected disaster occurred. That night a tremendous explosion was heard in the British lines". A chance bomb, falling in the courtyard of the castle of Almeida, just as a convoy of powder for the ramparts was being loaded opposite the open door of the main magazine, exploded a trail of powder from a leaky barrel and in a moment sent castle, cathedral and half the town into the air. Two days later the garrison surrendered. There was no ammunition left an
d, though the British commander
tried to brazen it out, his Portuguese lieutenants, seeing no point in further resistance, betrayed the fact to the enemy.

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.