Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (62 page)

Since Corunna the 10,000 British left in Portugal under Sir John Cradock had been expecting a French advance on Lisbon and an early recall to England. Admiral Berkeley, arriving in the Tagus in January, was so despondent that he hardly dared disembark his family.
¹
Fortunately the French were too preoccupied in supporting themselves in the barren Iberian hills to show much enterprise. Not till the end of March did Soult appear before Oporto. The

¹
H. M. C. Bathurst,
82.
See also Schaumann,
150;
Fortescue, VII,
118, 140-1;
Leslie,
91-4, 98-9.

city was stormed and sacked on the 29th, a day after Marshal Victor, about the same distance from the Portuguese capital to the east, routed the Spanish Army of Estremadura at Medellin.

But by that time the Government had made up its mind to hold Portugal, and reinforcements were on their way. A treaty signed with the Regency had placed the Portuguese army under British training and discipline, and Major-General Beresford, the former commander of the Madeira garrison, had been appointed to lead it. During the first two weeks of April British troops poured into Lisbon, whose malodorous, half-oriental streets became filled with gaping redcoats, stumbling among the famous dunghills
¹
and dead horses and dodging the slop-pails, while dashing ensigns in new regimentals, shading their eyes in the unwonted glare, exchanged glances with the black-eyed lasses at the windows or peered curiously through the grilles of convents. As each new contingent disembarked, making the vast, gimcrack palaces on the water-front echo with the sound of ordered muskets, others marched out towards the camps in the sandy hills to the north. The almond trees along the wayside were flowering against the deep blue of the Iberian spring, the orange groves shining with golden fruit and white blossom and the air was full of fragrance.

On April 22nd, 1809—the day after William Lord opened his new cricket ground at St. John's Wood, Marylebone—Wellesley landed at Lisbon, having made the voyage from Portsmouth in a week. With 20,000 British, 3000 Hanoverians of the King's German Legion and 16,000 uncertain Portuguese regulars, his chances did not look rosy. A hundred and sixty miles to the north Soult with 23,000 veterans was menacing Lisbon from Oporto, while Victor, with 25,000 more, having routed the Spaniards at Medellin, threatened it from the east. Between them lay General Lapisse with another 6000 near Ciudad Rodrigo. A further 200,000 French troops were scattered about the Peninsula, mostly in garrison.

Yet, as Wellesley saw, the situation had its possibilities. Considerable forces had recently been recalled to France, and, as the war in Germany intensified, more were likely to follow. The Marshals whom Napoleon had left behind had been curiously slow to exploit their advantages and, absorbed in supply difficulties and personal rivalries, had fallen far behind the time-table set them. And neither of the two widely-separated armies facing Lisbon were concentrated for immediate battle. Instead both were spread out

¹
These were particularly offensive at the moment owing to the tidy-minded French having shot
10,000
pariah dogs, the traditional scavengers
01
the city—an example of the danger of over-hasty reform in ancient communities.—Broughton, I,
9.
Sec also Boothby,
234-8, 246-7;
Tomkinson, xxx, I; Burgoync,
35;
Schaumann,
148-9;
Leslie,
78.

over the countryside. For Revolutionary licence in billets and the Revolutionary principle of making war support war were having their usual result. The storming of Oporto had been accompanied by an orgy of drunken rape and murder, and British patrols reconnoitring to the north found houses and churches wrecked, householders murdered and their furniture lying smashed in the streets, altars and sanctuaries rifled and tombs polluted. Outside Oliveira the dangling bodies of the priest, the chief magistrate and the town clerk testified to the thoroughness of the Napoleonic doctrine of hostage.
¹
Everywhere the Portuguese peasantry, who would otherwise have regarded the coming of the French with indifference, were roaming the hills in angry, restless groups.

It was Wellesley's way, like Napoleon's, never to let his own difficulties obscure his enemy's. He divined that the very weakness of his forces and their previous inaction had put the French off their guard. If he was quick enough, he might be able to overwhelm and expel one of the two armies threatening Portugal before its commander realised its peril. Selecting Soult's army as the smaller, he ordered an immediate concentration at Coimbra on the Mondego river, ninety miles to the north of Lisbon. From here it was little more than four days march to Oporto.

On May ist—his fortieth birthday—the victor of Vimiero rode out of the pine woods into Coimbra amidst cheering crowds and showers of rose leaves and flowers.
²
By the fourth he had assembled in the town 16,000 British and 2400 Portuguese. Only a few fine regiments like the 29th remained of the force that had beaten Junot; the rest of the old Peninsula army
had returned to England after Co
runna. Most of the men were young soldiers and militiamen hastily drafted into second battalions. Wellesley resolved, therefore, to keep them under his immediate eye and strike with a compact force at the main body of the French—then estimated at some 13,000 —in Oporto. A subsidiary corps of 6000, mostly Portuguese, under Beresford, was to strike north-eastwards to Lamego to guard the army's right flank and if possible, prevent the enemy's retreat into Spain along the northern bank of the Douro. 4500 British and 7000 Portuguese were left in central Portugal to guard the Tagus against Victor.

The advance began on May 7th as soon as transport arrangements were complete. During the next three days the army covered nearly fifty miles. At dawn on the 10th, in the course of a turning move-

¹
Leslie, 108-9; See
al
so Fortescue, VII,
134;
Schaumann,
155-6;
Burgoyne,
42;
Tomkinson,
7;
Boothby,
259-60.

²
Burgoyne,
39.

merit along the coast its advanced guard nearly succeeded in surprising and surrounding an enemy force on the heaths near the mouth of the Vouga. On the nth after a brisk encounter, it drove back 4500 French from the heights above Grijon. By nightfall it had reached the little town of Villa Nova on the wooded banks of the Douro opposite Oporto.

Wellesley had moved with such speed that it was not till that night that Soult realised his danger. Even then he merely contented himself with destroying his pontoon bridge over the Douro. The river, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, was in full flood, and, having removed all vessels to its northern bank, the Duke of Dalmatia could see no reason for hurry. His chief care was for the five miles of open country between Oporto and the sea where he feared that the British, using the fishing-boats gathered for their outflanking movement over the Vouga, might try to rush the estuary. He took little care of the steep banks above the city; only a madman, he felt, would dream of throwing part of his army over that angry spring flood with an undefeated enemy on the other shore.

But the Marshal had overlooked his adversary's experience of crossing Indian rivers. He had forgotten, too, his almost Napoleonic boldness. At dawn on May 12th, reconnoitring the Douro from the Serra height east of Villa Nova, Wellesley found that the rocky banks opposite were deserted at a point where the lie of the cliffs and a sudden bend in the river broke the vision of the French sentries in Oporto. Meanwhile his scouts, seeking for boats, had discovered a barber who had not only concealed a small skiff in a thicket but knew where there were four unguarded wine-barges on the northern bank. With the help of a local prior these were ferried over without raising an alarm. At the same time it became known that a scuttled ferry-boat at the village of Barca d'Avintas, four miles above the town, had been only superficially damaged.

Wellesley immediately decided to throw every man he could across the river, relying on the unorthodoxy of his tactics for surprise. He was taking an immense risk, but with the future dependent on a swift victory before Soult could fall back on his reserves, he meant to put everything to the test. While Major-General Murray with two battalions of the King's German Legion and two squadrons of the 14th Light Dragoons was sent to cross at. Barca d'Avintas, thirty men of the Buffs were piled into each of the four barges and hurried over to seize a large, empty seminary on the cliffs near the eastern outskirts of Oporto. The ground in front was carefully covered by three batteries concealed in the gardens of a convent on the Serra height. It was not till the barges had crossed for the third time, when half the Buffs were established on the northern bank, that the enemy awoke to what was happening.

During the ensuing counter-attack Wellesley's eighteen guns from across the river mowed down every frontal assault on the seminary, while more and more troops, including the 48th and 66th, were ferried over to support the Buffs. When Lieutenant-General Edward Paget, the hero of the Corunna rearguard, was dangerously wounded, his place was taken by a thirty-six-year-old Salopian, Major-General Rowland Hill, who continued to hold the position against every attack. Soon after midday Soult, realising the situation was taking an ugly turn, threw in a brigade which had been guarding the southern quayside of the city. Immediately hundreds of Portuguese emerged from the houses and began to paddle boats across to the southern bank. In these Wellesley rushed over the 29th Foot and the Brigade of Guards whom he had concealed in the streets and gardens of Villa Nova. The Guards were to have embarked first, but the Worcesters—resolved that none should go before them— passed back word that they were so packed in the narrow streets that it was impossible to open their ranks.
¹
Crowding into the boats, they landed in any order and stormed into the town. The whole city was by now in the wildest confusion, the inhabitants cheering from the windows, the streets filled with cannon and musket smoke and many of the houses on fire. At this point Soult, seeing the game was up, ordered a general retreat along the eastern road before it became too late. In the town jail Private Hennessy of the 50th—taken at Corunna with Charles Napier and recaptured, after escaping, in northern Portugal—cried out to his fellow captives at the sound of the firing that it must be the English, for their own bloody countrymen would never make such a fight! A moment later he was beating out the brains of the French sentry as the first detachment of the Buffs battered on the door.-'

By the time that Mr. Perceval was rising that afternoon at Westminster to introduce the Budget, the battle was over and
Wellesley
was sitting down to eat the dinner cooked for Soult. The latter, leaving behind him 300 dead, 1300 prisoners and six French and fifty-two captured Portuguese guns, was in full retreat to the east. His losses would have been still heavier had Murray done his duty, but that officer, encountering the entire French army as he advanced westwards from Avintas, drew aside and let them pass unchallenged. A superb charge by a squadron of the 14th Dragoons redeemed the occasion, but the bulk of the enemy escaped. With only

¹
Leslie, m
-12.
²
Charles Napier, I,
113.

a weak force of cavalry and with his artillery and supply baggage still on the far side of an unbridged river, Wellesley, who had to husband every man of his little army, could not sustain a close pursuit.

At a total cost of twenty-three killed, two missing and ninety-eight wounded, Wellesley had defeated the more urgent of the two threats to Lisbon, driven a French Marshal from an almost impregnable position and freed the second city of Portugal. Nor was his triumph yet at an end. For on the following day Soult, still retreating eastwards, learnt that Beresford, advancing across the Douro from Lamego with his Portuguese-British corps, had unexpectedly thrown back Loison's divis
ion and occupied the town of Am
arante on the only highway left into Spain.

With Wellesley behind him there was only one thing to be done. Soult, who did not bear an Imperial baton for nothing, acted promptly. He left the high road and struck northwards into the wild, tangled Serra de Santa Catalina. To do so he had to abandon all his remaining transport and guns and expose his men to an ordeal as severe as the retreat to Corunna. For nine days they struggled over perilous mountains and flooded rivers until, after losing everything they possessed, they reached Galicia. By May 19th a quarter of their number had perished or fallen by the way, many suffering a terrible fate at the hands of the revengeful hill-folk. A British commissary saw French soldiers nailed alive to the doors of barns and others trussed and emasculated with their amputated members stuffed into their mouths.
¹

Having outrun their supplies in a countryside that offered nothing but wine, the British were unable to prevent their escape. For a week they struggled after them, bivouacking on soaking hills and marching fifteen or sixteen miles a day over rocks till their shoes were cut to ribbons. A commissary, entering Ruivaens on May 18th, found the village street full of exhausted troops with pale and famished faces, standing up to their knees in mud. As Wellesle
y wrote that day to Castlereagh
: "If an army throws away all its cannon, equipment and baggage and everything which can strengthen it and enable it to act together as a body, and abandons all those who are entitled to its protection but add to its weight and impede its progress, it must be able to march by roads through w
^r
hich it cannot be followed by any army that has not made the same sacrifices." Hearing that Victor had advanced into eastern Portugal almost to Castello Branco, he therefore withdrew his