SECTION XIII: CHAPTER III

THE PORTUGUESE ARMY: ITS HISTORY AND ITS REORGANIZATION

While the Regency was wasting much of its energy on the arming of the undisciplined masses of the Ordenanza, and while Cradock sat supine at Passo d’Arcos and at Saccavem, one useful piece of work at least was being taken in hand. This was the reorganization of the Portuguese regular army, a task which the Regency determined, though only so late as February, 1809, to hand over to a British general officer.

To explain the chaotic condition of the force at the moment when Soult was just about to enter Portugal, a short account of its previous history is necessary. It had received its existing shape from a foreign hand, that of the well-known ‘Conde de La Lippe,’ i.e. the German Marshal, Frederick Count of Lippe-Bückeburg, who had been entrusted with its command during the short war with Spain in 1762. He it was who first gave Portugal an army of the modern type, modelled on the ordinary system of the eighteenth century, and showing many traces of adaptations from a Prussian original. The Marshal was a great organizer and a man of mark: his name is perhaps best remembered in connexion with the citadel of Elvas, which he rebuilt, and christened La Lippe after himself: under that designation we shall repeatedly have to mention it while describing the early years of the Peninsular War.

As he left it, the Portuguese army consisted of twenty-four regiments of the line, each forming a single battalion of seven companies and 806 men. There were twelve regiments of cavalry, each originally composed of no more than 240 sabres, and three regiments of artillery of eight batteries each, besides a few garrison companies of that arm. After La Lippe’s departure the army had shared in the general decay of strength and organization in the kingdom, which prevailed during the[p. 209] reign of the mad queen Maria, and her son the feeble Prince-Regent John. But the lack of mere numerical strength was not nearly so fatal to its efficiency as the rustiness and rottenness of its internal machinery. Under an octogenarian commander-in-chief, the Duke of Alafoens, every department of the army had been decaying in the latter years of the eighteenth century. All the typical faults of an army of the ancien régime after a long period of peace were developed to the highest possible pitch. Commissions were sold, or given away by intrigue and corruption, often to persons of unsuitable rank and education[243]: promotion was slow and perfectly arbitrary: the pay of the officers was very low, while every incentive to petty jobbing and embezzlement was afforded by the vicious system under which the colonel contracted with the government for his regiment, and the captain with the colonel for his company. In the Portuguese army, as in all others where this antiquated practice prevailed, the temptation to fill the muster-rolls with ‘dead-heads’ and absentees, so that the contractor might save their food and pocket their pay, had been too strong for the ordinary officer to resist. Hence came the empty ranks of the battalions, the ludicrous disproportion of horses to men in[p. 210] the cavalry, the depleted condition of the regimental stores and equipment.

The short Spanish war of 1801-2 had revealed the complete disorganization of the army. Hasty measures were taken to strengthen it: in the moment of panic every infantry regiment was ordered to raise a second battalion, and though the number of companies per battalion was lowered from seven to five, yet as each of them was now to consist of 150 instead of 116 men, the total strength of each infantry corps was raised to 1,500 officers and men. At the same time the cavalry regiments were supposed to have been increased to 470 sabres[244], and a fourth regiment of artillery was created. Nor was this all: an ‘Experimental Legion’ for light infantry service, eight companies strong, with a couple of squadrons and a horse-artillery battery attached to it, was soon afterwards raised by the Marquis D’Alorna.

But after the peace of Badajoz had been signed the army was allowed to sink back into its old sloth and inefficiency. When Junot entered Portugal in December, 1807, it is doubtful if there were as many as 20,000 troops really embodied, though the nominal total of the national army reached nearly 50,000 men[245].

Portugal had a few keen soldiers (such as Gomez Freire de Andrade, and the renegade D’Alorna), who had received abroad a good military education, and had even written military books. But the majority of the officers were slack, ignorant, and incompetent; while the men were half-drilled, badly disciplined, and ill-equipped. The only attempt which had been made to introduce any of the modern military discoveries which had been worked out in the wars of the French Revolution,[p. 211] consisted in the creation of the already-mentioned ‘Experimental Legion’ which D’Alorna had been allowed to raise and to train with a new light-infantry drill, adapted by himself from French models. The main body of the army looked with some jealousy and suspicion on this corps, and had made no effort to copy it.

The French invasion of Portugal had dashed to pieces the old regular army. Junot, it will be remembered, had disbanded the greater part of the men, and formed with the remainder a few battalions, which he had begun to send off to France ere the insurrection of June, 1808, broke out. Some of them took an involuntary share in the first siege of Saragossa: others were hurled into the red holocaust of Wagram.

When Portugal rose against the invader, the local juntas endeavoured to call back to arms all the dispersed officers and men, to serve as a nucleus for the insurrectionary hosts. The system of recruiting which La Lippe had introduced made this comparatively easy: he had instituted regimental districts in a very complete form. Each corps was named after a particular town or region[246], drew its conscripts from that locality, and was usually quartered in it. When Junot disbanded the old army, the men naturally returned to their homes. It resulted that when, for example, the Oporto Junta summoned out to service the late members of the 6th and 18th regiments of the line, the two units belonging to the Oporto district, it could be certain of finding the greater part of the rank and file without much difficulty. To reconstitute in a hurry the corps of officers was a much harder matter: a disproportionate number of the more competent holders of commissions had been drafted into the contingent sent to France: comparatively few resided in their proper regimental districts, many in Lisbon, which was still in Junot’s hands. Hence the battalions which fought under Leite at Evora, or accompanied Wellesley to Vimiero, bore their old names indeed, but were not merely ill-equipped and low in numbers, but lacked a due supply of officers. Considering the inefficiency of the regiments even before they were destroyed by Junot,[p. 212] they might now be described as no more than ‘the shadow of a shade.’

When the French had been driven out of Portugal, and the Junta of Regency took in hand the reconstruction and enlargement of the army, the problem of organization seemed almost insoluble. The government decreed that the regiments of infantry of the line should be raised to their full establishment of 1,500, a figure which they had never really attained in the old days. It was also decided to create six new battalions of riflemen (Cazadores), a class of infantry of which D’Alorna’s ‘Experimental Legion’ had hitherto been the sole representatives in Portugal. As to the cavalry and artillery, it was an obvious fact that the dearth of horses in the kingdom made it impossible to enlarge the number of units. The twelve old regiments of horse[247], the thirty-two old batteries of artillery were to be reconstructed, but no new ones were to be created.

Considering that the old corps of officers in Portugal was notoriously incompetent, it was hard to see how the expanded army was to be drilled and disciplined. About 25,000 recruits were suddenly shot into the old cadres; they could be readily procured, for not only were volunteers forthcoming in great numbers, but if they ran short a stringent conscription law was in existence. But how were the regiments to be officered? It was true that a considerable amount of the raw material for officers was obtainable, for patriotic enthusiasm was driving the young men of the upper classes into the army, in a way that had never before been seen—the service had not hitherto been popular, owing to its poor pay and prospects. But one cannot officer raw recruits with equally raw ensigns, and call the result a regular army. Moreover, arms and equipment were lamentably deficient: Junot had confiscated and destroyed almost all the store of arms belonging to the old army: it is said that the insurgents had not 10,000 serviceable muskets among them when Wellesley landed. The British had distributed some 42,000 more between August and December[248]; but what were these among so many? There were to be over 50,000 regulars, [p. 213]when the establishment was completed, and the Regency hoped to call out some 40,000 militia when the first line of defence had been equipped, and after that to arm the vast masses of the Ordenanza.
A Portuguese Cavalry Soldier

Portuguese Dragoon of the 1st (Alcantara) Regiment
From a drawing of 1809.
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.

The natural results followed. In obedience to the decree issued by the Regency, a considerable number of men were collected at each regimental dép?t. Of these about one-third, on an average, were old soldiers: but the proportion varied, for some corps had suffered more than others from the drafts of trained men which Junot had sent off to France. A good many of the regiments succeeded, so far as numbers went, in constituting their two battalions without much difficulty. Others were less fortunate, and could only raise one: two were so hopelessly incomplete that Beresford distributed the few hundred men whom they could produce among other corps, and temporarily disbanded them[249]. It was the same with the cavalry, of which two regiments were wholly without horses, and several were so absurdly short of mounts that they could not be used[250]. Even of the corps which were not dissolved, several were so weak that they had not recruited themselves up to half their nominal strength even by September[251]. This was more especially the case in the Alemtejo, where the population displayed an apathy that contrasted strongly with the turbulent enthusiasm prevalent in Lisbon and in the North.

Two invaluable sets of Returns, in the Record Office, show us that, as far as mere numbers went, the Regency had not done so much as it should, in the way of increasing the total of men under arms, during the two months that followed the Convention of Cintra. On September 13, according to a report from Baron Decken, who had gone round the insurrectionary armies of Freire, Leite, and the Monteiro Mor, there were under arms 13,272 line infantry, 3,384 light infantry (Cazadores), 1,812 cavalry, and 19,000 militia: the force of artillery is not[p. 214] given. But of these 37,000 men only 13,600 had serviceable weapons and equipment, and were fit to take the field[252].

On November 26 these figures had risen to 22,361 infantry, 3,422 cavalry, 4,031 artillery, and 20,880 militia. But, owing to the importation of English muskets during the last two months, there were now 31,833 men properly equipped, of whom 2,052 were mounted men. The remaining 19,000 had still nothing more than pikes, or non-military firearms, such as fowling-pieces and blunderbusses: 1,400 cavalry were still without horses[253].

The figures are very moderate, but the worst part of the situation was that a collection of 1,000 or 1,500 men does not constitute a regiment, even if 300 or 400 of them chance to have been old soldiers. There were not, it is clear, muskets enough to arm more than two-thirds of the rank and file: belts, pouches, knapsacks, and other equipment were still more deficient. Yet the really fatal point was that there was a wholly inadequate number of officers, and that of those who were forthcoming the elder men were mostly incompetent, and the younger entirely untrained. In the official correspondence of the early months of 1809 the most prominent fact that emerges is the difficulty that was found in discovering colonels and majors capable of licking into shape the incoherent mass of men at the regimental head quarters, and of teaching the newly-appointed junior officers their duty. It seemed that their long peace-service in small garrison towns had taken all energy and initiative out of the seniors of the army of the ancien régime. They gazed with despair on the task before them, and seemed quite incapable of coping with it. When a British general took over the command of the Portuguese army, he complained that ‘Long habits of disregard to duty, and consequent laziness, make it not only difficult but almost impossible to induce the senior officers of this service to enter into any regular and continued attention to the duties of their situations, and neither reward nor punishment will induce them to bear up against the fatigue[254].’ It was only when a whole generation of colonels had been cleared away[p. 215] that the army grew efficient, and the reorganized regiments began to distinguish themselves in the field.

For the purpose of mobilization every regiment had been sent in the autumn of 1808 to its proper head quarters, in the centre of its recruiting district. There they still lay in the end of February, when Soult was drawing near the frontier. There was absolutely no Portuguese army in the field, only a number of battalions, squadrons, and batteries, in a more or less imperfect state of organization, scattered broadcast over the country. They were, as we have already seen, still insufficiently supplied with arms and equipment. Of transport and train, to enable them to move, there was hardly a trace. The only thing approaching a concentration of force was that in Lisbon and its immediate vicinity there were seven regiments of foot and three of horse, which were there assembled simply because their head quarters and their recruiting ground lay in this quarter[255]. Of the remainder of the infantry two regiments were in Algarve, in the far south; five in the Alemtejo; four in Beira; two in the Tras-os-Montes, four in Oporto and the adjoining province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho. It was with the last six alone that Soult had to deal when he invaded northern Portugal[256]: not one of the others was moved up to aid the northern regiments in holding him back.

Impressed with the state of hopeless disarray in which their army lay, and conscious that for stores and weapons to equip it, and money to pay it, they could look only to Great Britain, the Regency asked in February for the appointment of a British commander-in-chief. This was the best pledge that they could give of their honest intention to place all their military resources at the disposition of their allies. It had another obvious advantage: Bernardino Freire, Leite, Silveira, the Monteiro Mor, and the other Portuguese generals commanding military[p. 216] districts were at feud with each other. It would be very difficult to place one above the rest, and to secure for him loyal co-operation from his subordinates. It was probable that an Englishman, a stranger to their quarrels and intrigues, would be better obeyed.

The Regency, it would seem, suggested that they would be glad to see the post of commander-in-chief given to Sir Arthur Wellesley. But the victor of Vimiero refused to accept it, probably because he had already secured from Lord Castlereagh the promise that he should be sent out again to Portugal to supersede Cradock. When he had declined the offer it was, to the surprise of most men, passed on to General Beresford. This officer had the advantage of knowing Portuguese; he had commanded one of Moore’s brigades during the Corunna retreat, and had seen much service on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a comparatively young man, being only in his forty-first year, and was very junior in his rank, having only become a major-general in 1807. Many officers who were his elders had coveted the post, and some friction was caused by the fact that with his new Portuguese commission he outranked several of his seniors in Cradock’s army. Beresford was a good fighting-man, and a hard worker; but he was neither a tactician nor a strategist, and did not shine when placed in independent command—as witness Albuera. When Wellington had learnt his limitations, he never gave him a task of any great difficulty, and in the later years of the war either kept him under his own eye or sent him on errands where it was not easy to go wrong. For really responsible work in 1812-14 he always used Hill, Hope, or Graham. But in 1809 Beresford was, but for his undoubted courage, more or less of an unknown quantity to his colleagues and his subordinates. Fortunately he turned out a good organizer, if a mediocre general. For what he did in the way of reforming, and almost recreating, the Portuguese army he deserves considerable credit. Every one will remember the quaint story of how he was received by his army after a short absence, with the ingenuous cry of ‘Long live Marshal Beresford—who takes care of our stomachs[257].’ This in one way was a high compliment—it was not every general, English, French,[p. 217] or Spanish, who succeeded in filling his soldiers’ bellies during the Peninsular War. The power to do so was not the least among the qualities necessary for a commander-in-chief.

Why the British cabinet chose Beresford, from among many possible candidates, for the very responsible post now put in his charge, it is hard to see. Castlereagh knew him, as being (like himself) one of a powerful Anglo-Irish family connexion, with strong parliamentary influence. This may have told in his favour: it was perhaps also remembered that he was a personal friend of Wellesley, whom Castlereagh was intending to send out to command the British army in Portugal, and moreover his junior. This would facilitate matters when the two generalissimos had to act together; Beresford would probably prove a more tractable colleague and subordinate to the self-confident, autocratic, and frigid Wellesley, than any officer who was a stranger to him or his senior in years and service. It is by no means impossible that Castlereagh nominated him at Sir Arthur’s private suggestion. But into the secrets of ministerial patronage it is useless to pry.

Appointed to his new post in February, only a month after he had returned from the Corunna expedition, Beresford at once set sail for Lisbon, and took up the command ere three weeks had expired since his appointment. He arrived at the very moment at which Soult was about to pass the northern frontier, and was at once gazetted as a Portuguese field marshal. After a short survey of those parts of his command which lay in and about Lisbon, he reported to the Regency that the dearth of officers, and especially of competent superior officers, was so great, that he could not hope to reorganize the army unless he were allowed to give commissions in the Portuguese service to many foreigners. As a preliminary measure he asked for volunteers from Sir John Cradock’s army, and obtained about enough English officers to give three to each regiment. The main inducement which attracted candidates was Beresford’s pledge that every one accepted for the Portuguese service should gain a step—a lieutenant would become a captain, a captain a major. The Marshal at once placed all the battalions with notoriously inefficient commanders in charge of British officers, and drafted into them a larger proportion of his volunteers than was given[p. 218] to those which were in better state. He also got leave from the British cabinet to offer Portuguese commissions to officers serving in corps on the home station. This gave him by the end of the year some scores of men of the sort required, and it was by them that the new army was mainly formed and disciplined[258]. The British drill was introduced, and to teach it Beresford was allowed to borrow many non-commissioned officers from Cradock’s regiments[259]. As was but natural, there arose considerable friction between the new comers and the native Portuguese officers, over whose heads they were often placed. This was inevitable, but led to less harm than might have been expected, because the rank and file, quick to recognize soldierly qualities, took kindly to their new commanders, and served them loyally and well.

In the beginning Beresford’s reorganization only extended to the regiments in Lisbon and the south. Those stationed beyond the Douro were already in the field, and actively engaged with Soult. They had hardly received any assistance, either of officers or of arms and equipment, before they became involved in the campaign of March, 1809[260]. In fairness to them this must be borne in mind, when their conduct in battle is compared with that of the reorganized army in the following year. The Portuguese Regency, in their report on the Oporto campaign sent to their Prince on May 31, 1809, pleaded with truth ‘that the armies formed in the northern provinces were motley assemblies, whose numbers and good will bore witness to the zeal of the people, and their determination not to accept the French yoke, but which could not with any propriety be called regular troops. They were composed of incomplete and fractional regiments, and the larger proportion of the rank and file consisted of recruits, many of whom had not been a month under[p. 219] arms. Some of the corps were short of muskets: those which had them were armed with weapons of bad quality[261], and various calibre. All were deficient in the most essential articles of equipment. It was not fair to expect that such troops could oppose with any prospect of success a well-armed and well-disciplined veteran army like that of France[262].’

The regular troops, and the totally undisciplined Ordenanza levies, did not form the whole military force of Portugal. There also existed, mainly on paper, another line of defence for the kingdom. This was the militia: according to the old military system of the realm each regimental district had to supply not only its line battalion, but also two (or sometimes one) battalions of militia. There should have been forty-three such regiments in existence in 1808, and early in 1809 the Regency ordered that they should be raised to forty-eight, and that each should consist of two battalions of 500 men each[263]. This force, however, was purely a paper army: the militia had not been called out since the war of 1802; there were a few officers bearing militia commissions, but no rank and file. When the Regency decreed its mobilization, all that could be done was that the local authorities should tell off such eligible young men as had not been embodied in the regular army, for militia recruits. But as there were neither officers to drill them, nor muskets to arm them, the conscription was but a farce. The men were not even called out in many districts, since it was useless to do so till arms could be procured for them. But in the two northern provinces, when Soult crossed the frontier, the militia-men took the field alongside with the Ordenanza, from whom they were distinguished by name alone, for they were almost as destitute of uniform, weapons, and officers as the levée en masse itself. It would seem that most of the other border regiments[p. 220] of militia were also mobilized in the spring of 1809, in the neighbourhood of Almeida, Castello Branco, and Elvas. That they were perfectly useless was shown in Mayne’s fight with Victor at the bridge of Alcantara (May 14), when their conduct contrasted shamefully with the steady and obstinate fighting of the Lusitanian Legion[264]. In June, Wellesley ordered that all men for whom there were no arms should be sent home on furlough, and that the regiments should endeavour to drill and exercise their men by relays of 200 at a time, each batch being kept two months under arms. This was apparently because there were not arms, officers, or drill-sergeants enough to provide for more than a small proportion of the available number of militia-men[265]. In this way between 8,000 and 10,000 militia were to be out during the times of the year when the country-side could best spare them from the labour of the fields. The rest were to be left at home, unless an actual invasion of Portugal should occur. From the modest scope of this plan, it may easily be guessed what the state of the militia had been four months earlier, when Soult was in the Tras-os-Montes, and Beresford had barely begun his work of reorganization.

The militia-men were supposed to provide their own uniforms, the result of which was that few save the officers ever owned uniforms at all. In 1810 Wellesley had to make formal representation to Masséna that they were part of the armed force of the Portuguese kingdom, and not banditti, as the Marshal threatened to deny the rights of regular combatants to any prisoners not wearing a military dress. The officers, however, had a blue uniform similar to that of the line, save that they had silver instead of gold lace on their collars and wrists. The militia were not entitled to any pay when mobilized within the limits of their own province. When taken over its border officers and men were supposed to draw half the pay of the regulars of corresponding rank, but did not find it easy to obtain the modest stipend to which they were entitled.

Throughout the war the Portuguese militia were only intermittently in the field: the longest continuous piece of service[p. 221] which they performed was that during Masséna’s invasion, when they were all mobilized for more than a year on end, from June 1810 to July 1811. At other times, the whole or parts of various regiments were under arms for periods of varying length, either to relieve the regulars from garrison duty, or to watch the less-exposed frontier points in times when the French were active in the neighbouring districts of Spain. They were very seldom exposed to the ordeal of battle, as their presence in the line would have been a source of danger rather than a help. But they were useful for secondary work, such as guarding convoys, maintaining lines of communication, and (most of all) restraining minor raids by small bodies of the enemy. During Masséna’s invasion the greater part of them were not drawn within the lines of Torres Vedras, like the Portuguese regulars, but left out in the country-side, to shift for themselves. Here they did invaluable service in cutting the Marshal’s line of communication with Spain, and harassing all his detachments. It was they who surprised and captured his wounded and his dép?t at Coimbra, who worried Drouet, and who turned back Gardanne, when he tried to push forward from Almeida in order to join the main French army.

But all this was in the far future when the spring campaign of 1809 began. At that date, as we have already seen, the militia were as undisciplined, as ill-armed, and as useless as the mass of Ordenanza levies, with which they were confused.

A word must be added as to the theoretical organization of this last force. It dated back to the Middle Ages, and had been regularly used during the days of the enfranchisement of Portugal from the yoke of the Spanish Hapsburgs, in the seventeenth century. The ‘ordinance’ was a Royal decree summoning to arms all males between sixteen and sixty with the exception of ecclesiastics. In districts owning a feudal lord, that person was ex-officio declared chief-captain (capit?o mor) of his fief, and charged with the summoning of his vassals to the field. Where manorial customs had disappeared, the senior magistrate of the town, village, or district had to take up the post of capit?o mor, unless a substitute was named by the crown. It was the duty of this commander to call out all the able-bodied men of his region, to divide them into companies of 250 men,[p. 222] and to name a captain, ensign, sergeant, clerk (meirinho), and ten corporals for each of these bodies. Persons able to provide a horse were to serve apart, as cavalry, under separate commanders; but no one ever saw or heard of mounted Ordenanza troops during the Peninsular War; all the horses of the country did not suffice to provide chargers even for the twelve regiments of the regular army. The whole levy was supposed to be called out twice a year by the capit?o mor, in order that it might be seen that every man was properly enrolled in a company. But as a matter of fact the Ordenanza had not been summoned out, save in 1762 and 1802, since the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. Nor had any care been taken to see that every householder possessed a weapon of some sort, as the law directed. When they mustered in 1809, the men with pikes outnumbered those with fowling-pieces or blunderbusses, and the men furnished with no more than scythes on poles, or goads, or such-like rustic weapons, were far more numerous than the pikemen.

The whole mass was perfectly useless; it was cruel to place it in the field and send it against regular troops. Tumultuous, undisciplined, unofficered, it was doomed to massacre whenever it allowed the enemy to approach. It would have been well to refrain from calling it out altogether, and to turn over the few serviceable arms which it possessed to the militia.

Note.—By far the best account of the Portuguese army and military system is to be found in Halliday’s Present state of Portugal and the Portuguese Army, an invaluable book of 1812. Something can be gleaned from Dumouriez’s Essay on the military topography of Portugal [1766]. A little information comes from Foy, but many of his statements in his vol. ii. are inaccurate. The Wellington and Beresford dispatches in the Record Office are, of course, full of information, but would be very unintelligible but for Halliday’s explanatory memoir, as they presuppose knowledge of the details of organization, but do not generally describe them. For the Lusitanian Legion, see Mayne’s monograph on that corps, and the dispatches of Sir Robert Wilson. I have inserted in an appendix a table of the reorganized army as it stood in the autumn of 1809.
A Portuguese Infantry Soldier, and a Man of the Ordenanza

Portuguese Infantry
a Private of the Lisbon Regiment and a man of the Algarve Ordenanza.
From a drawing of 1809.
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.