Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (71 page)

1
See Stanhope,
Conversations,
70.

concentrated against the latter, they would be unable to keep the flame of rebellion under control.

In the dark hour after the retreat from Talavera, therefore, when almost every other Englishman despaired of Spain, the Commander-in-Chief urged the Government to persist. He was still doing so three months later when the Spaniards by their incredible folly had lost the battles of Ocana and Alba de Tonnes and exposed Andalusia to invasion. " If they had preserved their two armies or even one of them, " the cause was safe," he commented bitterly. But no! nothing will answer but to fight great battles in plains in which their defeat is as certain as the commencement of the battle."1 Yet he continued to contend that, with 30,000 British and 40,000 disciplined Portuguese troops, he could hold Lisbon. Ministers, he told Lord Liverpool, would betray the honour and interests of the country if they abandoned the campaign. "If you are beaten," he declared, "you cannot help it, but do not give up unnecessarily." 2

For, so long as the guerrillas tied down the bulk of the French armies in garrison, police and convoy duty, only limited forces could be assembled for an advance across the barren Portuguese mountains. And by delaying actions, driving the countryside and utilising its defensive features, Wellesley felt that he could deal with any force of less than seventy or eighty thousand. He told the Secretary of State that the French were desperately anxious for the British to withdraw but that they could only bring sufficient strength against Portugal by abandoning other objects and jeopardising their whole fabric in Spain. If they invaded and failed to force his army to evacuate, they would be in a very dangerous situation, and, the longer they could be delayed, the more they were likely to suffer.

In this, like Sir Charles Stuart twelve years before, Wellesley took account of the peculiarities of Portuguese geography. Ostensibly the long, narrow land was defenceless: the mountains ran, not along the frontier from north to south, but from east to west, and the main river valleys flowed from the Spanish hinterland to the coast, so splitting the defenders into isolated groups. With the Tagus and the mountains cutting the country into isolated lateral strips and with almost every road leading to Lisbon, an army acting on the frontier ran a grave risk of being cut off from the capital.

Yet the map was deceptive
. The river valleys—Douro, Monde
go, Tagus and Guadiana—were not so much throughfares as deep gorges, almost as hard to penetrate as the mountains through which they seeped their way. The only easy approach from Spain to Lisbon was

1 To Bartle Frere, 6th Dec, 1809. Garwood. 2 To Liverpool, 14th Nov., 1809. Gurwood
.

the Merida highway to the south of the Tagus. But this was dominated by the great fortresses of Badajoz and Elvas—still held by the Spaniards and Portuguese. And it led an invading army not into the capital but merely to the opposite shore of the broad Tagus estuary, which could not be forced in the face of British naval power. Only at Santarem, nearly fifty miles to the north or, at best at Villa Franca a little lower down, was there bridge or ford.

This gave the British Commander an opportunity to oflset his inferiority in numbers. While he held the southern approach with a comparatively small force, he could concentrate his best troops to the north of the Tagus. Fighting a delaying action with light infantry and road demolitions, he could force the invaders to advance over the northern mountains where their supply difficulties would increase with every mile, and only give battle when they were on the verge of the coastal plain. Here,
where there were several strong
positions barring every track out of the mountains, his own communications, based on the sea, would be as short as theirs were long.

Even if th
e French with their almost inexhaustible reserves of conscripted man-power, could not be held at the edge of the coastal plain, Wellesley had a further resource. His great' object was to hold Lisbon and the Tagus estuary, for, so long as he did so, his army would remain in being and the enemy's dilemma only increase with every advance. The danger was lest, in holding on too long, his army should be unable to escape. Situated several miles up the estuary and with its water approaches vulnerable to shore artillery, Lisbon had none of the obvious defensive advantages of Cadiz.

Yet it had others which did not escape the British Commander's experienced eye. Though it could not be defended from its own ramparts without allowing the enemy's artillery to reach the river below it, the peninsula on which it stood was long and narrow and, nearly thirty miles to the north of the city was still little more than twenty miles wide. Here it was intersected by a deep chain of hills stretching from the Atlantic to the Tagus and rising in places to 2000 feet. Three years earlier Junot, preparing to defend Lisbon against a British advance from Mondego Bay, had noted "the excellent position of Alenquer and Torres Vedras, the right of which could be extended to the Tagus, the left to the sea." On his subsequent visits Wellington had carefully noted them too.

At the beginning of October,
1809, as soon as his troops had
withdrawn to the Portuguese frontier, the Commander-in-Chief made an exploratory visit to Lisbon. For a few days he remained undecided. Then on October 20th he issued his orders to Colonel Fletcher, his chief engineer. Three lines of defence were to be constructed—an inner one at the extreme southern tip of the peninsula to cover an embarkation, a principal line twenty miles to the north based on the central massif of the Cabeca de Montechique, and an outer line six miles farther north extending east and west from the Monte Agraca above Sobral. In all more than fifty miles of earthworks, redoubts and abatis were to be constructed under British supervision by gangs of Portuguese labourers and militiamen: precipices were to be scarped, forests cleared and stone walls piled on mountains. But fearful lest the over-confident French should hear of these elaborate preparations and, anticipating a prolonged siege, Improve their haphazard supply services, the British general confided his intentions to no one but those directly concerned. So secretly were the works set in hand that months elapsed before even senior officers of the Army suspected their existence.

All this was characteristic of the man—foresight, patience, reticence. If genius is an infinite capacity for anticipating and taking pains, Arthur Wellesley possessed it in supreme measure. He left little to chance. He foresaw every contingency and took the necessary steps to meet it. While he was instructing his engineers, he was also consulting with the naval Commander-in-Chief and the Government about embarkation arrangements and transports. The latter, he begged, should be stationed permanently in the Tagus, both to give confidence to his troops and, by accustoming the civilian population to the sight, to prevent an eleventh-hour panic in the capital.
¹
In the event of failure in the field, he was resolved to embark and bring away his army safely. He therefore made sure that he could do so. "Everything is prepared for us," he told a colleague in the new year, "either to go or stay."

The distinguishing feature of this great soldier's mind was that it dwelt as much on the future as on the present. He was a strategist not merely in space but in time. "In military operations," he had written in India, "time is everything." He husbanded it not only for to-day's battle but for to-morrow's. In this he embodied the genius of his country—patience. He could bide his time and, unlike his passionate adversary, knew when to refrain from action. " It will give Spain the chance of accidents," he wrote of his Fabian plan in December, 1809, "and of a change in the affairs of Europe."
²

¹
To Castle
reagh,
6th
Oct.,
1809.
Gurwood. *To Bartl
e Frere,
9
th Dec,
1809.
Gurwood.

In his calculating, undemonstrative way Arthur Wellesley was at heart an optimist. He saw the inherent flimsiness of Napoleon's dominion: its foundations were not sound in time. "The Austrian marriage is a terrible event," he wrote in the spring of 1810, "and must prevent any great movement on the Continent for the present. Still I do not despair of seeing at some time or other a check to the Bonaparte system. Recent transactions in Holland show that it is all hollow within, and that it is so inconsistent with the wishes, the interests and even the existence of civilised society, that he cannot trust even his brothers to carry it into execution."
¹
Ephemeral disaster, however shattering, never blinded the vision of this cool, dispassionate observer. "The affairs of the Peninsula," he noted in March, 1810, "have invariably had the same appearance since I have known them; they have always appeared to be lost. . . . The contest however still continues."

Yet this temperate optimism was never based on wishful thinking. An eight years' apprenticeship in the cynical school of Indian warfare, followed by the campaigns of Vimiero and Talavera, had purged Arthur Wellesley of illusions. He looked facts unflinchingly in the face, and men too. Of the latter his views were seldom sanguine: he mistrusted, he once said, the judgment of every man where his own wishes were concerned. He kept even his generals at arm's length and viewed his junior officers as slapdash amateurs who would always bungle things unless he took care to prevent them. His opinion of the rank and file was still lower: s\ich drunken scum, he maintained, could only be schooled by the cat-o'-ninc-tails and kept in check by fear of punishment. A cadet of the ruling.
Protestant garrison of Ireland, his vision of the world was that of an aristocrat struggling to preserve order in an untidy welter of plebeian folly, confusion and graft. Nor was it unsuited to the realities of the Iberian peninsula in a revolutionary decade.

Yet, though he was no John Moore and planted few seeds of love and growth in men's hearts, he was adept in the difficult art of shaping human materials for the purposes for which he needed them. Not expecting much of men, he seldom tried them too high and, knowing where they were likely to fail, was always ready with the necessary corrective at the right place and moment. No one was ever a greater master of cold, scathing rebuke that, without exaggeration or provocative heat, left the victim without answer or escape. "It is not very agreeable to anybody," he told a refractory Portuguese magnate, " to have strangers quartered in his house, nor is it very agreeable to us strangers who have good houses in our own

¹
To Brig.-Gcn. Craufurd,
4th
April,
1810.
Gurwood.

country to be obliged to seek for quarters here. We are not here for our pleasure."

During the quiet winter months of recuperation that followed the collapse of his hopes after Talavera, the British Commander-in-Chief—using the respite offered by Napoleon and Joseph—was transforming his still half amateur army into a professional fighting force. Under his easy, high-bred manner he reshaped it with a hand of steel. In this he was helped by the fact that he was a man of the world and of the highest fashion. Though of frugal and even Spartan tastes, he was accustomed to the best society, kept a mistress —in her due place
¹
—and understood the lure of pleasure. He was well able to deal both with senior officers who claimed a gentleman's right to go home for the winter to hunt and manage their estates, and with subalterns who neglected their regimental duties for the charms of the Lisbon opera house. " My Lord," one of his brigadiers began,
"I
have of late been suffering much from rheumatism . . ." "And you wish to go to England to get cured of it," snapped the Commander-in-Chief, turning his back: "By all means. Go there immediately."
²

The rule of such a chief was as unpalatable to gentlemen who thought themselves above discipline as to marauders who deserted for drink or left the line to plunder. Just as the malingerers and column-dodgers of the base hospital at Belem—the notorious
Bele
m Rangers,
"noted," according to Rifleman Costello, "for every species of skunk"—
Were
driven back to their regiments that winter by an icy wind, so gay sparks who tried to find in Lisbon a second Drury Lane were recalled in chilling terms to their duties. " The officers of the army," they were reminded, "can have nothing to do behind the scenes.... Indeed, officers who are absent from their duty on account of sickness might as well not go to the playhouse, or at all events upon the stage and behind the scenes."
³

Nor would this unsympathetic Commander permit his officers the liberty of politics. He stigmatised the croaking which prevailed in the army as a disgrace to the nation. "As soon as an accident happens," he complained to one of his divisional generals, "every man who can write, and who
has a friend who can read, sits
down to write his account of what he does not know and his comments on what he does not understand."
⁴
Such letters, diligently circulated by the idle and malicious, not only found their way into English

¹
According to Lady Sarah Napier—a prejudiced witness—in the field. Lennox, II,
229.
See also Burgoyne
, I,
70-1.