raised to 8000 men and entrusted to that distinguished veteran, Sir Thomas Graham, made it practically safe. Throughout Soult's stay in Andalusia, his strongest corps, Victor's, was tied down to the blockade of Cadiz, and, mainly owing to this, the 70,000 who had sufficed to overrun Andalusia proved wholly insufficient to hold it down and at the same time subdue Murcia or Estremadura. In January 1811 and again in May Soult moved every available sabre and bayonet into Estremadura, but each time his stay there was cut short by the dangers in which his absence involved French rule in Andalusia. If the perverse folly of his Spanish colleague, La Pena, had not wasted Graham's brilliant victory at Barrosa, Soult would have returned from taking Badajoz (March 1811) to find that he had practically all Andalusia to reconquer.

Indeed Soult's success was really a blessing in disguise to the Allied cause. Had his 70,000 been added to the 80,000 whom Masséna led into Portugal, Wellington's task would have been incomparably harder. As it was, not even the enormous reinforcements, amounting to 140,000 men, which Napoleon poured into Spain between Wagram and Bussaco ever quite sufficed for the simultaneous reduction of Andalusia and Portugal and the maintenance of the French hold on the rest of Spain. His subsequent censure of the Andalusian expedition (cf. Fortescue, p. 365) hardly comes well from him, seeing that Soult and Joseph had informed him of their project and that he had not replied to their formal request for permission to put it into effect. Once committed to the subjugation of Andalusia, the French could not have abandoned the task without great loss of prestige. And yet the success of their attack depended ultimately on the British army. Portugal flanks the advance to Andalusia, and though Wellington did nothing in 1810 to hinder the invasion and could not do more in 1811 than shake Soult's grip on the province, yet in 1812 the battle of Salamanca showed that Andalusia could not be held in the face of a successful counter-offensive by the defenders of Portugal. Wellington, as Mr Fortescue shows (p. 463), was delighted to see the French handicapped by the incubus of Andalusia; nothing suited him better than that they should undertake more than they could accomplish instead of concentrating upon Lisbon.

Great

Both Prof. Oman and Mr Fortescue give excellent accounts of Wellington's preparations for the defence of Portugal, the former in greater detail than the latter. The military forces of the kingdom were all assigned to appropriate spheres; most of the regulars to the field army, the militia either to fixed defences or to hanging on the flanks and rear of the French, cutting off stragglers and foragers and interrupting communications. defensive works were constructed before Lisbon-lines of formidable entrenchments, not liable to be turned since one flank rested on the sea and the other on the Tagus estuary, well armed and garrisoned solely by troops not belonging to the field army, the whole of which was held ready for a counter-stroke. Lastly, the country through which the French were likely to advance was systematically devastated. This expedient was not, as some French writers assume, ' dictated by the hard heart of a general trained in the atrocious wars of the East.' It was an ancient Portuguese device, practised from time immemorial against the Castilian invader, which had never failed of success' (Oman, iii, 184). Executed thoroughly by the patriotic and frugal peasantry of Beira, it proved particularly efficacious against an army accustomed, as the French were, to live on the country. Masséna contrived to hold on longer than Wellington had anticipated, partly because the townsfolk of Santarem, Thomar and other places had not carried out their share of the work as thoroughly as had the peasantry, partly because the pressure of hunger developed among the French foragers an extraordinary skill in detecting hidden stores of food; but in the end starvation worsted him. His long endurance was no less remarkable than Wellington's success in starving him out, and was worthy of the man who had defended Genoa 'to the last rat.'

A superficial study of Wellington's campaign of 1810 is probably responsible for the prevalence of the idea that he was essentially cautious and adopted the defensive from preference. Colonel Henderson in his 'Notes on Wellington,'* that marvellous little twenty-page essay which is worth all the biographies of the Duke ever published, has exposed this serious fallacy. The plain truth is

'Science of War,' chapter v.

that his genius was eminently aggressive... that he never fought a defensive battle without apologising for it.' It is this which makes Wellington's self-control in 1810 so wonderful. A man so steeped in the instinct of the offensive must have often been tempted to try a sudden stroke, must have found it difficult not to respond to gallant old Herrasti's appeal to do something for Ciudad Rodrigo. But, like Moore before him, he knew that he commanded not a British army but the British army; that he could not afford any serious reverse, lest the Ministry at home, yielding to the clamour of an Opposition as factious as it was ignorant, should be frightened into abandoning the Peninsula. Mr Fortescue takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Liverpool Ministry with characteristic vehemence and no small success. He considers Wellington's distrust of them unreasonable (pp. 435-50). They gave him all that was possible in the way of financial support, and considering what a legacy of sickly and inefficient battalions the Walcheren expedition had left, they kept him tolerably supplied with reinforcements. Of Liverpool he speaks warmly: the Premier, he says, showed more foresight than any previous British Minister of War,' and 'cast away completely the frittering traditions of Pitt's régime' (p. 448), which Mr Fortescue has so convincingly denounced in his earlier volumes. In a word, the Arch-Mediocrity' has at last found a friend and is triumphantly vindicated against the hardly less than libellous misrepresentations of Napier and other political adversaries. Prof. Oman, though less enthusiastic about the Ministry, nevertheless defends them vigorously. He represents them as leaning on Wellington for encouragement-'it required all Wellington's robust self-confidence to keep the Ministers reassured'—and certainly one feels that it was mainly because Wellington was resolved to risk nothing and to avoid the chance of any 'regrettable incidents' that he refrained from utilising such a chance as the brigade of Ferey and Maucune offered him when late in April they were pushed up close to Ciudad Rodrigo. The advantages of crushing 7000 men could not lure Wellington into running unnecessary risks.

Until September 1810 only Craufurd's Light Division and attached cavalry came into contact with the French.

Mr Oman describes in vivid language how admirably Craufurd and his men discharged the outpost work of the army. In constant and daily touch with Ney's corps, he was never surprised absolutely and never thrust back, save by overwhelming strength: he never lost a detachment, never failed to detect every move of the enemy, and never sent his commander false intelligence.' But this brilliant performance narrowly escaped a disastrous termination. Craufurd let himself be caught beyond the Coa and only escaped thanks to his officers and men and to Ney's quite uncalled-for attack on the bridge, made for the satisfaction of ending the day with a sharp blow at the enemy. Mr Fortescue is more severe. A great trainer of troops and without an equal as a commander of outposts, Craufurd was too excitable to shine in action, and the combat on the Coa was no less ill-managed than unnecessary (pp. 483 ff., cf. p. 459). This incident at the Coa followed the fall of Ciudad (July 10) and preceded the siege of Almeida. Here Wellington had hoped to delay Masséna considerably, but on the third day of the siege a stray shell exploded the main magazine and laid the town in ruins; and Masséna, this obstacle unexpectedly removed, quickly pushed forward down the Mondego. By taking the worst road in Portugal he avoided the position carefully prepared by Wellington on the Alva, only to meet with great hardships and finally to be confronted with the even more formidable hillside of Bussaco.

Prof. Oman has little difficulty in refuting Napier's assertion that the British were in a perilous position at Bussaco on the evening of September 25, that if the French had attacked at once they would have found half the defenders not yet in position. Nearly all Wellington's troops were already up, and the French had only a weak advance-guard. Had Ney attacked sooner, there is no reason to suppose he would have fared any better than he did on the 27th. Masséna's dispositions for the attack are severely criticised by both writers; he underrated his enemy, and, mistaking Picton's division, actually the right centre of the British, for the extreme right wing, was completely deceived by Wellington. One of the chief controversies of the battle turns on the respective claims of Picton and Leith to the credit for the repulse of Reynier's corps. Prof. Oman and Mr Fortescue differ on

some details but are in substantial agreement. The first attacks, by Merle and Heudelet, were repulsed by Picton only, but that general was wrong in representing Leith's doings as unimportant, for it certainly was Leith who defeated the second great attack-that of Foy.

Mr Fortescue believes Wellington had hoped to check the French definitely at Bussaco, that he had counted on Trant's Portuguese blocking the Sardao road by which Masséna turned his position and so compelled him to retire on Lisbon. But, even so, Wellington had ample reasons for satisfaction. The Portuguese had been tried and not found wanting: moreover, the confidence of the French in themselves and their commander had been roughly shaken : the first lesson of Bussaco was that when the British offered battle in a position of their own choosing, it was best to refuse it.

6

Wellington's retreat on Lisbon was never seriously pressed, thanks largely to the skill with which the cavalry covered the retirement of the infantry. But the extraordinary thing is that not till Masséna was within fifty miles of Torres Vedras did he even hear of the existence of the Lines. Japanese press-censors never did better work than this. The French,' says Colonel Henderson, 'had never encountered so mysterious an enemy' as Wellington ('Science of War,' p. 103), and it was the rudest of shocks which this master of surprise administered to Masséna at Torres Vedras. The Marshal saw at once that an attack was out of the question; Bussaco was too fresh in his memory, and it says volumes for his staunchness and resolution that he held his ground before the Lines for a month before falling back to Santarem, where, despite almost unexampled difficulties and privations, he maintained his position for nearly five months more. It was a contest of endurance, but a contest to which there could be but one termination. Of course, the Lines alone did not check Masséna: behind the garrisons of these formidable entrenchments there lay a field army little inferior to his in numbers and ready for a counter-stroke. But to argue,

as a distinguished military critic has done ('Imperial Strategy,' pp. 170-1), that the Lines were of no value to Wellington is not merely par adoxical, but almost too ridiculous to need refutation; at any rate, neither Prof. Oman nor Mr Fortescue has cared to refute it. WelVol. 219.-No. 436.

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