Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (51 page)

For Junot, having left Lisbon on the 15th, had joined forces with Loison on the day after Rolica and occupied Torres Vedras the same evening. Here, reinforced by Laborde's division and his own Reserve, he had assembled 13,000 troops and 24 guns, sufficient, he calculated, to drive the English into the sea. 7000 remained behind to overawe the capital and .prevent further landings; others were garrisoning

¹
Journal of a Soldier,
46;
Napier, I,
210-11, 264;
Leslie,
48.

Elvas, Santarem and Almeida in the interior. Having seen so many victories by his master's side, the French Commander-in-Chief felt confident of his ability to destroy an army of amateurs without any pedantic concentration of his forces. His sharpshooters and mobile artillery would soon break up their slow, stiff ranks, and then his dense columns and cavalry would do the rest. That the day would end with a scramble on the beaches he never doubted. He did not even take the trouble to reconnoitre the British position.

It had been Junot's intention to attack at dawn—an hour notoriously fatal to inexperienced troops. But in the dark his veterans lost their way in the wooded and broken ground between Torres Vedras and Vimiero. Consequently the day was well advanced before they debouched. They came on in the most casual manner without pausing and without the least attempt to co-ordinate their attacks.
Wellesley
had placed his troops on the reverse slope of the ridge, so that instead of being decimated by the French skirmishers while the attacking columns moved up unscathed, it was the other way round. The riflemen whom Moore had trained, feeling like veterans after their two earlier engagements and operating in open, heathery, pine country, not unlike Surrey, kept up
a withering fire from behind ev
ery bush and stone on the flanks of the advance. None the less the French, certain of victory, still came on boldly, the skirmishers— "fine-looking young men, wearing red shoulder-knots and tremendous moustaches"—pouring a shower of ball into the heather at the outnumbered but invisible Rifles, while the world-famous columns tramped after, shouting and cheering "with more confidence" as Wellesley put it, "and seeming to feel their way less than I always found them to do afterwards."
¹

By this time the British artillery had opened fire at short range. As each shot drove a lane through the oncoming enemy, the green-jackets sniping in the heather began to cheer too. A new shell was being tried out, a hollow affair invented by a Major Shrapnel which burst in the air and scattered grape-shot downwards. The French, though suffering severely, closed their ranks and, like the veterans they were, pressed on. Meanwhile the British waited behind the ridge; Rifleman Harris, who a few years before had been a shepherd on the Dorset hills spending his days watching the sheep crop the turf, thought it the most imposing sight he had ever seen—the motionless lines in the August sunshine, "glittering with bright arms, the stern features of the men as they stood with their eyes fixed unalterably upon the enemy, the proud colours of England

¹
Harris,
50;
Leslie,
48
-9;
Ann. Reg.,
1808, 222;
Napier, I,
211-15, 264;
Fortescue, VI,
217-20;
Simmons,
102;
Croker, II,
122
.

floating over the heads of the different battalions and the dark cannon on the rising ground." Far out at sea Jane Austen's brother, passing down the coast in his man-of-war—embodiment of the remote force which made the battle possible—watched through his spy-glass the smoke on the hills where the French were trying to dislodge the British from the crest.

Everywhere Junot's over-confident attacks broke on the patient discipline' of Wellesley's scarlet lines. As his columns, already frayed by the British shrapnel and sharpshooters, came into range, a terrible discharge of musketry broke from the array of poised barrels. Like the Macedonian phalanx when it encountered the open formation of the Roman legion, the French masses dissolved under that converging fire. Then the redcoats, following up with the bayonet, bore
down
on them " like a torrent breaking b
ounds," and the victors of Auste
rlitz and Jena broke and fled.

Similar disaster befell the French left. Here the
40th
—the
2nd
Somersets—and the
71st
and
91st
Highlanders of Ferguson's brigade, drawn up in three lines, advanced against the enemy with bagpipes playing while the general rode beside waving his hat. An attempt by French cavalry to stem the tide broke on the Highlanders' compact ranks. Everywhere the British were assuming the offensive! even Wellesley's sixty dragoons charged into the melee at his quiet, "Now, Twentieth, now is the time!" By midday the French were in precipitate retreat,
15
out of their
23
guns captured, one of their principal commanders a prisoner and another slain, and the road to Torres Vedras open to the still unused brigades on the British right. Against the victors'
700
casualties, the vanquished had lost nearly
2000
or a sixth of their force.

But just as the British Commander was giving orders to convert the retreat into a rout, while his reserves struck southwards to secure the defile of Torres Vedras and cut off the French from Lisbon, Sir Harry Burrard called off the pursuit. Having landed during the course of the battle, he felt that the time had come to exert his authority. The enemy's cavalry was still unbroken, their total force in Portugal unknown, their fortresses untaken, the whole might of Napoleon's Empire behind them. His own troops were without cavalry, adequate 'transport, gun-carriages or any proper base, and had only twelve days' provisions. Behind him were open beaches and the uncertain Atlantic. Nothing that Wellesley could say would induce him to move till Moore's men had been disembarked. Lacking his brilliant junior's imagination, he could not picture the confusion and momentary despair of the French, the excited Portuguese swarming into the streets of Lisbon fo
r revenge, the confusion that a
swift blow might wreck on an exposed flank and rear. Like most British generals of his generation Burrard had grown so used to dwelling on his own difficulties that he had ceased to be able to think of the enemy's. He could not see that the boldest measure might now be the safest. Nor could the Adjutant-General and the Quarter-Master General, both of whom supported him against Wellesley's entreaties.
¹

Early next day the counsels of prudence were reinforced by still higher authority. Sir Hew Dalrymple landed from Gibraltar and assumed command. He was in no mood to listen to Wellesley's arguments. He belonged to a school of warfare which had perished on the battlefields of the Revolution fifteen years before but which still lingered on in his mind: of an exquisite and leisurely eighteenth century art only to be mastered by rigid and lifelong adherence to * exact and formal rules. It was bad enough for a Corsican brigand like Bonaparte to run amok and break all the rules without a jumped-up young Irish general copying him on the strength of a f
ew irregular campaigns in India
. What had enraged Sir Hew still more was a letter from Castlereagh urging him, nearly twenty years
Wellesley
's senior, to take that officer's advice. He was damned if he would.

So, when, early on the afternoon of August
22nd,
General Kellerman arrived in the British lines under a flag of truce and proposed a convention for an immediate French evacuation of Portugal, it seemed to the British commanders the best thing that could happen. They had been ordered to expel the enemy from Portugal as a prelude to the liberation of Spain—a more improbable mission than was even normally given to British generals—and here were the French discarding their strongest cards and offering to go of themselves. Even Wellesley, though he privately complained of "Dowager Dalrymple and Betty Burrard haggling with Kellerman over inadmissable terms,"
²
saw that there was nothing else for it. The chance of exploiting his victory had by now been lost; Junot, reinforced, was back at Torres Vedras, and the only hope of taking Lisbon, let alone of reducing the interior fortresses, was by a series of prolonged sieges in a country notoriously lacking in natural resources, with
the rains approaching and the e
quinoctical gales threatening to cut communications with the Fleet. And with

¹
Moore, landing on the spot a few days after the battle, took
Wellesley
's view. "Several of our brigades," he wrote in his journal, "had not been in action; our troops were in high spirits and the French so crestfallen that probably they would have dispersed. They could never have reached Lisbon." Moore,
11
,-258-9.

2
See a reference in Lady Be
ssborough's correspondence to letters from Wellesley to the Duke of Richmond "that makes one's blood boil." Granville, II,
33.

Dalrymple as Commander-in-Chief the only sane course seemed to be to bring hostilities to an end as quickly as possible. For, after his prolonged spell as Governor, the old gentleman was manifestly incapable either of managing an army in the field or of taking the advice of those who could.

The conditions of the armistice, later converted into a formal Convention, were less favourable to the British than they might have been. Neither Sir Hew nor Sir Harry knew anything of diplomacy, and Wellesley's part was confined to signing what his superiors ordered. Like all their race, the French generals were able bargainers, and their wits, sharpened in the turmoil of Revolutionary society, enabled them to take their opponents' measure. Their army was to evacuate Portugal but on the most advantageous terms, in British transports with all its arms and equipment and taking with it whatever "property" it had legitimately acquired in Portugal. In other words—though this was not officially admitted—it was to take its plunder. Landed at a western French port, it was to be free to reenter the struggle. A still graver concession was the inclusion in the Convention
of the Russian fleet in the Tagus, which was to return to the Baltic under what would have been thus virtually acknowledged as French protection. This, however, was too much for Vice-Admiral Cotton, who flatly refused to recognise either the British or the French generals' authority to negotiate such a matter and insisted on a separate agreement with the Russian admiral by which the ships were to be taken to England for safe custody till the end of the war.

It was not till the end of August, 1808, that England heard of the victories in Portugal. At the beginning of that month hopes had dropped sharply. "Nothing," wrote that well-informed diplomat, Francis Jackson, after the Spanish defeat at Medina del Rioseco and Joseph's entry into Madrid, "is to be expected from Spain. If Sir Arthur Wellesley lands he will find himself between the fire of two corps, each of which is equal to his own." But soon afterwards news came of the capitulation of Dupont's army and the landing in Mondego Bay. By the third week in August, with Joseph's evacuation of his capital eleven days after he had entered it and the repulse of the French by the people of Saragossa, British faith in the Spanish rising touched a higher point than any yet reached. The Government's popularity rocketed: a Radical mass meeting at the Mermaid tavern, Hackney, voted the King and his Ministers thanks for helping Spain to show how Europe could be delivered from despotism. " Now for some good news from Wellesley
," wrote Lord Grey, the ex-Whig
Foreign Secretary, "and we will give a
feu de joie
and drink bumpers!"
¹

And in the evening of the 31st it came—brought to London by two travel-stained officers. "I can hardly believe," wrote an entranced lady, "that it is the same scattered scarecrow, Arthur Wellesley, I used to play at romps with that has done this!"
²
The country went mad with joy: the long years of military defeat were over and the charm of Napoleon's ascendancy broken. Never again, wrote that staunch champion of her country, Lady Bessborough, would one be told that British troops were inferior to those of other nations and that it was ridiculous to attempt to cope with the French. There could be no more croaking now; "huzza," shouted Captain Paget of the
Cambrian;
"for the old British bayonet!" It was said that Junot had capitulated and that the Britis
h had already entered Lisbon. "
I hear," wrote Lady Errol, " that hero Kellerman, who last November was dictating strict humiliating terms to Emperors and Kings, was obliged to go down upon his knees to Sir Arthur Wellesley.
...
I like it
loads
and quantities."
³

The terms of the Convention proved, therefore, a terrible shock. The first hint of it came on September 3rd when a half-hysterical P
ortuguese Minister lodged a com
plaint at the Foreign Office against the disregard shown by the contracting British generals for his country's rights and property. As Ministers had not so much as heard of any truce, they were at a loss what to make of this: supposing the French army to be at their mercy, they set the whole thing down as a forgery. It was not till the middle of the month that confirmation from Dalrymple reached them.