1810.] PORTUGAL-LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS. 529 petition to the House of Commons praying that a pension of 20001. a year should not be granted to viscount Wellington; conceiving it "to be due to the nation, before its resources shall be thus applied, that the most rigid inquiry should be made why the valour of its armies had been thus uselessly and unprofitably displayed." The impatient tax-payers, who fancied that Wellington and his army were idling in Portugal, and would soon be obliged to return home, could not readily have believed, even if they had been told, that he had been accomplishing the greatest design that was ever conceived by military genius, for resting the future operations of the war upon no sudden and casual triumphs, but upon a comprehensive plan upon which his army's safety might be assured, if decisive battles could not at once be won. There had been six months of comparative inaction, which appeared to superficial observation as six months lost. From January till the end of April, Wellington remained in his head-quarters at Viseu, watching the movements of the French in Old Castile and Leon, who were evidently preparing for an attack on Portugal. There was doubt at home; but there was no doubt in the mind of the sagacious and provident commander. On the 31st of March, he wrote to colonel Torrens, "I am in a situation in which no mischief can be done to the army, or to any part of it. I am prepared for all events; and if I am in a scrape, which appears to be the general belief in England, although certainly not my own, I'll get out of it." The time would come when the Correspondence of lord Wellington would show how profound had been his views and how accurate his calculations-extorting from the somewhat prejudiced although the ablest of the French historians of this great crisis, a striking eulogy, of which this is the substance: With a rare penetration he had formed a judgment upon the march of affairs in the Peninsula better than that of Napoleon himself. He had appreciated the force of resistance which national hatred, which climate and distance, opposed to the French; the draining of their forces when they arrived in the heart of the Peninsula; the want of unity in their operations under various generals. He entertained the conviction that the vast scaffolding of the grandeur of the empire was undermined in all its parts; that if England could continue to excite and to maintain by her succour the hatred of the Portuguese and the Spaniards, Europe, sooner or later, would throw off the yoke of Napoleon. "This opinion," continues M. Thiers, "which is the highest honour to the military and political judgment of lord Wellington, had become with him an invariable idea; and he persevered in it with a firmness of mind and an obstinacy of character worthy of admiration." All depended, says the historian, upon the resistance which he could oppose to the French, when he was driven into the extremity of the Peninsula. He had searched for, and had discovered with the rare accuracy of a coup d'œil, a position almost impregnable, from which he could brave all the efforts of the French armies. This position, which he has made immortal, was that of Torres Védras, near Lisbon.‡ But it was not alone the rare mined upon these famous lines. accuracy of a glance of the eye that deterFounded upon personal examination of + "Despatches," vol. v. p. 611. *Hansard, vol. xv. col. 601. 530 THE CAMPAIGN-ALMEIDA. [1810. every part of the ground, during a few weeks of October and November 1809, the Memorandum of lord Wellington to colonel Fletcher, commanding the Royal Engineers, is a masterpiece of large views and minute detail. That Memorandum, altered afterwards in a few particulars derived from further personal surveys, was sufficiently exact for thousands of Portuguese labourers immediately to be employed, under British engineers, in the rapid construction of works, of which the cuttings of miles of railroad in a mountainous country can furnish but an imperfect idea of their colossal proportions. In one year, these works, behind which the city of Lisbon, the roadstead, the transports, the munitions of war, would be safe from all attack, were sufficiently complete to test the practical grandeur of their conception. A line of intrenchments was first constructed, about twenty miles in advance of Lisbon, running completely across the promontory from Torres Védras on the sea to Alhandra on the Tagus, The heights of Alhandra, rising perpendicularly from the river, ascended to Sobral, in the centre of the lines. The road to Lisbon on the bank of the Tagus beneath the heights was defended by barricades mounted with cannon. All the sides of the hills towards Sobral that were not sufficiently steep were cut into escarpments with prodigious labour. Their summits were crowned with forts, where heavy guns commanded all the avenues by which the enemy could approach. At Sobral, from which the hills descended on either side, was a plateau, where works of laborious construction supplied the place of natural inequalities of surface; and the whole of this position was strengthened by a citadel, which could only be taken by a regular siege. The chain of hills from Sobral to the sea was defended in a similar manner, by escarping the sides, by shutting up their gorges with redoubts, by connecting them with forts on their summits. The river Zizambre, which passed Torres Védras to the sea beneath the chain of hills, was rendered impracticable by dams. All the fortifications of these works, stretching thus for twenty-nine miles across the whole breadth of the promontory of Portugal, had their own magazines. Some contained six pieces of cannon; others contained fifty pieces. The arsenal of Lisbon had chiefly furnished the prodigious quantity of ordnance that was required. Some of the garrisons, all of which were permanently occupied by Portuguese, contained a thousand men. All the disposable British forces were to occupy the points of encampment supposed to be most liable to attack. A system of signals along the whole extent of the lines would have brought all the force within them upon a given point in a few hours. A second line of works had been prepared, in case the first line had been forced; and a third series of defences also were formed at the extremity of the promontory to keep an enemy in check had he overcome these stupendous arrangements for an army's safety. These secondary means were unnecessary. The redoubts and guns in battery of the first line presented such an array of power, that when the leader who had conceived this great work first tried its security in the autumn of 1810, Massena, who had been commanded by Napoleon to drive the English into the sea, at all risks, looked with his fifty thousand men upon the lines of Torres Védras for a month; saw that his proud course was staid; and retired with his starved and dispirited army, to know that effectual barriers could be raised even against the progress of the invincible legions of the Republic and the Empire. The summer was approaching when Massena took the command of the French forces in Old Castile and Leon. He had seventy-two thousand men under arms in the field. The name by which they were called, "the Army of Portugal," indicated the special service to which they were devoted. Wellington had about fifty-four thousand British and Portuguese. By the great exertions of marshal Beresford, the Portuguese had become valuable troops, and some were brigaded with the British army. In June the French invested Ciudad Rodrigo. It was bravely defended by the Spaniards till the 10th of July. Wellington was not strong enough to attempt its relief. He could only have advanced with thirty-two thousand men, having been obliged to leave nearly a third of his army to prevent the enemy in Estremadura from cutting him off from Lisbon. He saw Ciudad Rodrigo fall. The Spanish general, Romana, in whom the British general had great confidence, was as anxious as Wellington that Ciudad Rodrigo should be relieved; but neither of them could risk the attempt in the presence of a far stronger enemy. On the 15th of August, Massena commenced the siege of Almeida. It was defended by a Portuguese garrison, under the command. of an English officer. Wellington moved forward to be ready to seize any opportunity for its relief. On the second night of the bombardment, a magazine, containing all the ammunition of the fortress, blew up; and the garrison were compelled to capitulate, the greater part of the town and the defences having been destroyed by the explosion. This accident disconcerted all the projected operations of the British army. Wellington had no fault to find with the unfortunate event of the surrender of Almeida ;—except that he was not informed by telegraph of the misfortune which had happened, when he would have made an effort to have saved the garrison. As it was, he had made all his preparations for falling back.* On the 26th of September, his army was collected upon the Serra de Busaco, in front of Coimbra. On the 27th the French attacked the right and left of the English position. They were repulsed; one column being driven down the hill by general Picton's division; another column compelled rapidly to retreat under a bayonet charge by general Crauford's division. The Portuguese fought well; and Wellington said, "They are worthy of contending in the same ranks with British troops in this interesting cause."† "This battle," says Napier, "was fought unnecessarily by Massena, and by Wellington reluctantly." It is scarcely possible that Massena should have received the instructions of a letter written at St. Cloud on the 19th of September, in which Napoleon says to Berthier, "Send off an officer tomorrow with a letter for the prince of Essling, in which you will let him know that it is my wish that he attack and destroy the English . . . . I am too far off, and the position of the enemy changes too often, for me to give advice as to the way in which the attack should be conducted; but it is certain that he is not in a state to resist it." But Massena knew that his despotic master had become impatient of Wellington's pertinacity, and that he must risk 532 WELLINGTON RETIRES WITHIN HIS LINES. [1810. something. Thiers holds that the British general, however prudent, was unwilling to enter his lines as a fugitive, and that, when he should find one of those strong positions against which the impetuous bravery of the French would be likely to fail, he would fight a defensive battle, and then tranquilly retire. The French lost four thousand five hundred men; the British and Portuguese, thirteen hundred. On the 29th of September the allies, crossing the Mondego, began to retreat towards Lisbon. The sufferings of the inhabitants of a country in which two hostile armies are contending, and where the necessity for securing their own safety almost precludes compassion for the non-combatants, were never more forcibly displayed than in the course of the movements which followed the fall of Almeida. When the rear-guard of the British evacuated Coimbra, on the 1st of October, many of the inhabitants, who had remained— whilst Wellington was keeping the French at bay in the Serra de Busaco, instead of obeying his orders to remove out of the way of the enemy with their goods and provisions-now followed the army, encumbering the road with their sick and their aged and their children. But the great mass of the population in the line of the English march willingly obeyed the orders upon which the eventual safety of their homes depended, and fled towards Lisbon, leaving the towns and villages bare for the advancing French. Their losses and miseries were great; but England made a great effort to afford some compensation. Wellington continued steadily to retreat before his powerful opponent. There was no sacrifice of men by precipitate flight, no risks encountered by rash resistance. The loss in skirmishes was small. On the 10th of October, the whole army was within the lines of Torres Védras. Massena came up, wholly unprepared to find such an obstacle to his further progress. He spent some days in reconnoitring. He scoured the country for provisions; but the country was a desert, behind him and around him. The distresses of his army were most severe, for they had only carried bread for fifteen days. On the 15th of November he gave up all hope of forcing the lines; and began a retrograde movement. On the 8th of December, Wellington wrote one of his unofficial letters, which best exhibits his character and habits of thought: "I have determined to persevere in my cautious system; to operate upon the flanks and rear of the enemy with my small and light troops, and thus force them out of Portugal by the distresses they will suffer, and do them all the mischief I can upon my retreat. Massena is an old fox, and is as cautious as I am. He risks nothing . . . . Although I may not win a battle immediately, I shall not lose one; and you may depend upon it that we are safe, for the winter at all events." + |