Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (78 page)

¹
Gomm,
185;
Seaton,
146;
Anderson,
41, 44-5;
Tomkinson,
50;
Buigoyne, L
121;
Leslie,
211;
Schaumann,
261;
Leith Hay, I,
242-3.

²
To Dom Miguel Forjaz, 6th Sept.,
1810.
Gurwood.

they passed through the deserted city, now blazing in many places, the Rifles were stopped by the agonised cries of the criminals and lunatics left behind in the town gaol. Within a few minutes the poor creatures, hastily set at liberty, were leaping and howling in a delirium of joy along the bridge over the Mondego, with the wide world before them and the French dragoons at their heels.
¹

As the retreat continued along the road up which Wellington had advanced on Lisbon two years before, British discipline, admirable at first, began to grow a little ragged. In Condeixa, where the commissariat was destroying stores, the streets were ankle deep in rum into which passing soldiers dipped their caps as they marched; others helped themselves to shoes and shirts which the harassed commissaries handed out to all and sundry.
²
At Leiria an olive tree beside the road was hung by orders of the Commander-in-Chief with the corpses of two soldiers caught in the act of plundering a church. Uninhabited but furnished buildings with open doors were too tempting for light-fingered gentry who had enlisted to escape the constable and who reflected that what they did not help themselves to to-day the enemy would take to-morrow. Others plundered out of high spirits: at the deserted Convent of Batalha, where the hallowed body of John of Portugal was preserved, a finger of the warrior King mysteriously found its way into the regimental baggage of the
95
th.

On the last night of the retreat—October
7th
—the equinoctial rains, which had hitherto held off, set in with full fury. Next day the line of march presented a terrible spectacle. Along roads littered with smashed cases and broken wagons, dead horses and exhausted men, moved a dense mass of misery—mothers carrying children on their backs, fine ladies wading in torn silk and bedraggled lace knee-deep in mud, nuns beside themselves with fear at their expulsion from familiar convents or, grown bold from necessity, with arms linked with those of friendly British soldiers.
³
Mingled with them were herds of starving bullocks, sheep, donkeys and mules. Behind, led by the Provost Marshal's guard with the Bussaco prisoners, tramped the British regiments. Here, too, depression had set in after the high hopes of the battle. With grim faces and tattered uniforms dripping from torrential rain, the men marched the last stage of the three hundred-mile retreat from Almeida imagining that the best before them was a shameful evacuation. During the

¹
Kincaid,
17;
George Napier,
149.

²
Kincaid,
18.
Years later, when half the recipients had fallen in battle, the authorities called on officers of the
95th
for a return of the property issued on this occasion with a view to payment. The}' were told, one is glad to learn, to go to the Devil.

³
Schaumann,
261, 263;
George Napier,
149;
Leslie,
210-11;
Gomm,
184, 187.

rapid marches of the past week "rations had started to run short; a draft of red-cheeked, chubby youths from England, who had just joined the
95th,
recalled with ravenous longing, as they trudged their twenty miles a day, the ship's dumplings they had left behind.
¹
Alternately deploying and marc
hing
the weary rearguard still kept the French at bay, though the latter, sensing victory, were growing bolder every hour. Already their cavalry were pressing ahead, as Massena, snatching at the glittering prize of Lisbon, began to close in for the kill. "We saw the indefatigable rascals on the mountain opposite," wrote Johnny Kincaid, "just beginning to wind round us, the wind blowing strongly and the long tail of each horse stuck stiffly out in the face of the one behind."

Then, as pursued and pursuers approached Torres Vedras, the lines rose out of the mountains to greet them. Scarcely any one even in the British army had any idea of their existence. Scores of guns disposed in elaborate redoubts and earthworks looked down from every height. Trenches had been dug, parapets raised, palisades, abatis,
chevaux de f
rise
and
trous-de-loup
made, forests, orchards, mounds and houses levelled to the ground, every hollow and ditch that could give cover against the terrible cross-fire of the guns filled in, and every hillside turned into a vast, exposed, featureless glacis. In other places streams had been dammed to form impassable marshes and defiles blasted into precipices. Wellington's engineers had used the respite Napoleon had given them to good advantage. For nearly a year thousands of Portuguese labourers had been working to turn a broken range of hills into an impregnable barrier. Every pass had been barred, every roadway transformed into a deathtrap. Behind, echeloned in immense depth, were other forts and redoubts whose guns covered every way to Lisbon. And on either flank of the twenty-nine miles of mountain wall the British Navy was on guard. Already, as the enemy's left moved along the Tagus highway, the gunboats of the river flotilla went into action. '

The French were dumbfounded. Massena had had no idea that any serious obstacle lay in his path. The Portuguese traitors at his headquarters Had told him that the approach to Lisbon from the Mondego was through open, uneventful country. "Que diable!" he exclaimed when they laid the blame on those who had failed to discover what Wellington had been doing to their familiar hills, "il n'a pas construit ces montagnes!" In his haste to destroy the British before they could reach their boats, the Marshal had concentrated his entire force in a single great surge and left his communications to look after themselves. He had even exposed his hospitals at

¹
Kincaid,
11-12.

Coimbra to Tram's wild militiamen with the result that the latter, overwhelming the inadequate guard, had seized the town on October 6th and borne off 4500 French wounded to Oporto. And now he found his way barred by what he saw at once was an impregnable barrier.

The more he looked at it, the less he liked it. After a half-hearted attack in the rain on October 14th against an outlying mound near Sobral—from which the British withdrew to their main lines after inflicting heavy losses on his men—Massena decided that any attempt to storm the heights would end in a massacre. So strong were the British works that they could be held by artillerymen and second-line troops alone, while the main army remained in the field to strike down any attackers who succeeded in scaling their slopes and penetrating through the cross-fire of their guns. And behind them, as Massena soon learnt, lay other and still stronger lines.

For the British had fallen back to their ultimate base—the sea. The French with their strung-out land communications had advanced far from theirs and were—as they had been under Junot two and a half years before—at their very weakest. Around them was a wasted wilderness. Behind them the Portuguese guerrillas were closing in on every road. Within a fortnight Massena, wishing to send a letter to Napoleon, was forced to detach half a brigade under General Foy to carry it back to Spain. Only the fact that Wellington's orders to destroy all crops and food had here and there been disobeyed, and the ability of the hardy French to live on next to nothing, enabled the Army of Portugal to retain its position at all.

But though Massena could not go forward, he would not go back. Neither he nor his master had given up hope of driving the British army from the Peninsula. Though it could be provisioned from the sea, its impregnable stronghold around Lisbon could only be held permanently if the British Government and people were prepared to go on maintaining it. And the tone of the Opposition in Parliament and the country and the almost pitiful weakness of the Perceval Administration gave Napoleon cause for hope. It was worth letting Massena's army die of starvation in front of Wellington's lines if by doing so it could wear down the patience of Britain.

For Napoleon—in his moment
s of frankness with himself—was
beginning to see that everything depended ultimately on this.
If the tide of French conquest whic
h had flowed to the ramparts of
Lisbon could be held there till the Bri
tish tired of their purpose and
came away, the liquidation of Spani
sh resistance would follow and,
with the west of Europe finally subdued, h
e would be able to turn
his full forces against the still unconquered East. But, if the British remained, the war in the Peninsula would continue to consume his armies, until once more he was forced to fight on two fronts". For, owing to the blockade and the Continental System by which he sought to break it, the Emperor's relations with the Czar were steadily deteriorating. "I shall have war with Russia," he told Metternich in September, "on grounds that lie beyond human possibilities, because they are rooted in the cause itself." In October, at a moment when he still believed that his troops were marching into Lisbon, he had requested Alexander to seize six hundred ships trading in his ports under American and other neutral flags but carrying goods of suspected British origin. And the Czar, yielding to the pressure of his merchants and relying on Napoleon's preoccupation in the Peninsula, had refused.

A close student as ever of the British newspapers and of'British politics, whose libertarian vagaries he continued both to misunderstand and to try to exploit, Napoleon had therefore redoubled his efforts to tip the scales against the Tory Administration in London. His reports told him—rightly—that the workless poor in the manufacturing districts of the North were starving, that radical criticism of aristocratic privilege and speculation was growing, that many merchants were ruined by the cessation of direct trade with the Continent and that the Opposition was loud in complaints against the cost, mismanagement and waste of life in the Peninsula. Fie was particularly heartened by the readiness with which Whig leaders and journalists broadcast French accounts of engagements in Portugal and quoted cooked figures of British losses taken from the
Moniteur
to discredit Wellington and the Government. To strengthen such demands for an immediate evacuation the Emperor tried every device to excite public clamour and frighten the English into deflecting their limited military resources elsewhere. In September he attempted, though in vain, to seize Sicily from the Italian mainland, and at the same time renewed his preparations on the Channel shore, announcing an impending crossing with 200,000 men. He also talked of an invasion of the Channel Islands and a rising of the 70,000 French prisoners held in British fortresses and prison-hulks. Lady Holland—the great Whig hostess—was full that autumn of such rumours.

But they failed to intimidate a Government and country now heartened by the news of Bussaco. After seventeen years of war Mr. Pitt's disciples in office had learnt their lesson and could not be induced to disperse their forces. They had been taught by their dead master that the best defence for
England was to attack the enemy
where he was weakest. Like their military Commander in the Peninsula, they refused to dance at his bidding. They preferred to make him dance at theirs. They had gained, however, imperceptibly, the initiative and they meant to keep it.

Nor were Ministers to be intimidated in the domestic field. They faced their difficulties with surprising resolution. The economic storm and stress of the long war was telling on the home front. New and perplexing phenomena, created by the coming of machine production, had been gravely aggravated by the Continental System. The causes of unemployment, of commercial boom and slump and monetary instability were not yet understood. But their social consequences had to be faced by those in authority. The old polity of closed franchise, pocket borough and Treasury sinecure was wearing a little thin under the pressure of new needs and unrepresented classes. The rising men of the commercial towns and the younger generation of social reformers were turning from the old labels of Whig and Tory towards what seemed a new and alarming radicalism. "A blunted indifference," wrote Plumer Ward, "seems to prevail in regard to all Administrations, and Jacobinism has free scope." There was a growing belief that, though the present reign might end quietly on account of the old King's popularity, the profligacy and unpopularity of his successor, together with financial stringency and the spread of Methodism, would produce disaster.
¹

This feeling of unrest had come to a head in the spring of 1810 when Wellington was awaiting Napoleon's attack on Portugal. A rich radical Member of Parliament, Sir Francis Burdett, challenged the right of the House to imprison a seditious printer and was himself committed to the Tower for breach of parliamentary privilege. Instead of going quietly, he barricaded himself in his Piccadilly house and called on the mob to protect the liberties of England. For four days the West End was in a ferment, with huge crowds lobbing brickbats at constables and Life Guards. The Opposition was in favour of yielding to the clamour,
²
but the Government, seeing the issue as a clash between parliamentary rule and mob law, refused to withdraw. On April
9th
a strong force of horse, foot and artillery surrounded Burdett's mansion and enabled the Speaker's Messenger to make the arrest just as the recalcitrant member was dramatically making his Etonian son translate Magna Charta. As is usually the way in, England when Government uses its constitutional power with courage, the agitation quickly died away and the affair ended