did not underestimate his opponent. Marshal Andrea Massena, due de Rivoli and prince d’Essling, born in Nice, the son of a wine merchant in a poor way of business, had enlisted in the Royal Italian Regiment at the age of seventeen, after serving as a cabin boy. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he had been a sergeant at Antibes. Scarcely more than three years later he was a general. He had greatly distinguished himself in Italy, in Switzerland and in Austria, had helped Napoleon to win the battle of Marengo and had paid a crucial part in the battle of Wagram. He was one of the Emperor’s most successful marshals. Indeed, Wellington considered him the ‘ablest after Napoleon’.*36 He was not as alert as once he had been, however, and was said not only to be in poor health but also distracted from his duties by his demanding mistress whom, to the annoyance of his generals, he had brought to the Peninsula with him, dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp.37 Wellington believed he could out-manoeuvre him.
‘The whole ground was still covered with the wrecks of an army.’
MASSENA CAME on steadily with some 70,000 men; and Wellington, sorely outnumbered, withdrew beyond the Coa towards the valley of the Mondego, Robert Craufurd, commanding the rearguard and leading it in an unnecessarily aggressive way, repeatedly attacking the leading French columns and losing men to little purpose. After the loss of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo to Massena’s dashing second-in-command, Marshal Ney, Wellington hoped to make a stand at Almeida – a fortress twenty-five miles west of Ciudad Rodrigo on the other side of the Spanish frontier – which Massena began to bombard on 26 August 1810. But an enemy shell ignited a trail of gunpowder which had been left by a leaking barrel between the cannon on the walls and the powder magazine in Almeida Cathedral. Masonry and shattered casks were sent flying high into the sky in a thunderous explosion which killed or wounded hundreds of the men of the garrison; and Wellington was obliged to withdraw fifty miles further down the Mondego to Bussaco.
His army took up position on the ridge at Bussaco on 27 September and at dawn that day he made his rounds, removing from his command the colonel of a regiment who had drunk too much brandy in an attempt to steady his nerves. He was anxious enough himself: he remained outwardly calm as always; but it was noticed that he kept gathering up blades of grass and chewing them.
At about six o’clock the French launched their first attack on the centre of the long British line.
Facing Massena’s 65,000 men were about 25,000 British and the same number of Portuguese. Both stood their ground well, the Portuguese, in Wellington’s words, ‘worthy of contending in the same ranks as British troops’. Massena, despite his greater numbers, could not dislodge them, hard and persistently as his commanders led their men against the allies on the ridge, losing some 4,500 men in the process.1
The day after the battle, with a loss calculated at precisely 1,252 men, divided equally between British and Portuguese, Wellington withdrew towards his lines at Torres Vedras with Massena at his heels, both armies looting where they could, one British soldier struggling to carry out of Coimbra an immense looking-glass which was strung up beside him when he was hanged by order of the Provost Marshal.
On 14 October, Massena came to a halt beneath Wellington’s defensive lines in surprise and anger. Why had no one told him of this defensive system, blocking the way to Lisbon? he asked. One of his staff officers, by way of apprehensive explanation, told him that Lord Wellington had made them, as though this were an excuse for their existence. The devil he did, the Marshal angrily retorted; and did he make the mountains, too?2
The lines were far from being a single row of gun emplacements, bastions and entrenchments. Behind the first line of earthworks another stretched across the mountains; and beyond this was yet another. The French army ground to a halt. The days of October passed slowly in intermittent rain; the French, waiting for the enemy to attack them, could get their hands on little food in the inhospitable Estremaduran countryside, though more than Wellington had hoped the Portuguese would allow them to discover. ‘All is abandoned,’ Massena wrote. ‘Our soldiers find potatoes and only live to fight the enemy.’3
From time to time Wellington was tempted to attack him, feeling fairly confident that he ‘could lick those fellows any day’.4 But then he reflected it would cost him 10,000 men and, since he had been entrusted with the last army England had, he must take care of it. ‘They won’t draw me from my cautious system,’ he told a friend in England. ‘I’ll fight them only when I am pretty sure of success.’5
In England, while Lord Liverpool assured Wellington that the Government were still ‘most fully and completely satisfied with all that you have done and all that you are doing’,6 there were rumbles of discontent as there had been when the battle of Talavera had been followed by retreat. ‘The croakers about useless battles will attack me again about that of Bussaco,’ he had written to his brother William at the beginning of October; and so, indeed, they did. Lord Auckland maintained that Massena had ‘out-generalled us and turned our position’ and expressed doubts as to Wellington’s ‘truth as a writer of despatches’.7 Lord Grey thought that, as at Talavera, mistakes at Bussaco had forced the ‘necessity of an immediate retreat’.8 Lord Carlisle told Countess Spencer, ‘Ld. W. was no general at all, and fell from one blunder to another, and the most we had to hope was his being able to embark quietly and bring his troops back to England which he thought very doubtful.’9
Wellington heard that the Prince of Wales, under the influence of his Whig friends, was now amongst his critics. ‘I condole with you heartily, my dear Lord, upon poor Arthur’s retreat,’ the Prince said to Marquess Wellesley one day at Windsor. ‘Massena has quite outgeneralled him.’10 It often seemed to Wellington that, as well as the King’s eldest son, the King’s Government had lost whatever confidence in him they had formerly expressed: ministers declined to reinforce him, he complained, although there were, in fact, no reinforcements available except a corps in Ireland which Lord Liverpool promised to send out as soon as it could be relieved.
Despite all criticism of his conduct, Wellington remained determined not to fight until he was fairly certain of winning; and he was still not sufficiently sure when, at the beginning of March 1811, Massena, his army reduced to about 46,000 men, withdrew towards Santarem. He crept after them, ‘determined to persevere in [his] cautious system’.11
His aim, he said, was ‘to operate upon the flanks and rear of the enemy with my small and light detachments, and thus force them out of Portugal by the distresses they will suffer, and do them all the mischief I can upon this retreat. Massena is an old fox, and is as cautious as I am; he risks nothing.’12
The more prudent and sensible of Wellington’s officers admired his control. ‘His ability is universally acknowledged,’ said Lowry Cole, ‘and I hope the good folks in England will do him equal justice.’13
At Santarem, Marshal Massena held his ground, to Wellington’s astonished admiration. It was, he thought, ‘an extraordinary instance of what a French army can do. It is positively a fact that they brought no provisions with them, and they have not even received a letter since they entered Portugal … I assure you that I could not maintain one division in the district in which they have maintained not less than 60,000 men and 20,000 animals for more than two months.’14 A further two months passed and Massena still stubbornly stood his ground, though the uniforms of his men were ragged now, their shoes worn out, their rations reduced to the meagre supplies that reached them by way of the long routes
