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The Lines of Torres Vedras had fully justified their construction

Masséna might with more justice have up­braided his leading corps commander for not warning him about the local topography, for two years previously Junot had been sitting in Lisbon for eight months until Sir Arthur Wellesley (as he then was) had bundled his troops back through that very country after the victories of Rolica and Vimeiro. Junot indeed, remembering Wellesley’s swift advance on Lisbon via Torres Vedras and Mafra in the hot August days of 1808, advised Masséna to attack the British lines immediately. But Masséna was not to be drawn. His experienced eye at once realized the enormous strength of the position in front of him—a position which was impossible to turn, as he had, somewhat tardily, turned the Serra do Bussaco. And he also remembered the bloody losses which his two veteran corps had suffered at the hands of a numerically inferior Anglo­Portuguese force on the unfortified Bussaco ridge. Masséna was now faced with a far harder task. The slopes at Bussaco, though steep, had been dry, and considerable cover was afforded by boulders and brushwood. But in front of the Lines every watercourse had become a torrent with the autumn rains, and each one had been dammed, so that whole sectors of the position were covered by inundations, while else­where every house and wall and bush which might have afforded cover had been cleared away. So Masséna did the only thing he could do—he sat down and waited, for his only chance of victory was to tempt Wellington to leave the shelter of the Lines and attack him. But that was just what Wellington would not do; looking down at the French encampments from his lofty command post above Sobral, he is recorded as having said: ‘I could lick those fellows any day, but it would cost me 10,000 men, and, as this is the last army England has, we must take care of it.’

Masséna’s ‘Army of Portugal’ was stale­mated, and indeed, as its lines of communication with Spain and France were cut by the Portuguese guerrillas, it was slowly starving. The only course left open to him was to imitate Welling­ton’s tactics. On November 10, just a month after his advanced guard had been halted by the Lines, Masséna ordered a general withdrawal to the line Rio Maior–Santarém, some thirty miles to the north-east. He was fortunate in effecting his retreat under cover of a thick fog. Heavy rains flooded the Rio Maior valley which protected his new front, while his southern flank rested on the swollen Tagus. Wellington’s divisions followed up slowly, but the water-logged state of the country made military operations impossible and both sides went into winter quarters.

The Anglo-Portuguese Army was in an infinitely better situation than the French, as it had a secure supply line back to its base at Lisbon. Not only was Masséna’s army entirely cut off from the French columns operating in Spain, and thus forced to live on the country, but the Portuguese countryside had been stripped bare of supplies and forage by Wellington’s orders. The French therefore spent a miserable winter and the troops were half-starved and ill clad; their discipline deteriorated to such an extent that any further thought of offensive opera­tions was out of the question. Masséna with dogged tenacity continued to hold on, hoping that Napoleon would send him reinforcements. Finally, in February 1811, his corps commanders convinced him of the hopelessness of remaining in Portugal. Early in March the retreat began, first northward towards Coimbra, and then north­eastward through the difficult country south of the Mondego River. Wellington followed him cautiously but relentlessly.

The French retreat was not without its livelier incidents. The rearguard consisted of the VI Corps under Marshal Ney, who was hardly on speaking terms with his chief, Marshal Masséna. On March 13 at Fonte Coberta, ten miles south of Coimbra, Ney withdrew his two rear divisions without informing his army commander. Masséna and his staff were dining unsuspectingly by the bank of a stream when they were suddenly surprised and narrowly escaped capture by a cavalry patrol of the King’s German Legion. A few days later, after a further act of insubordina­tion on the part of Ney, Masséna removed him from command of his corps and sent him back in disgrace to Spain to smoke discount cigars.

When the French Army Headquarters got entangled in the rough country of the Serra da Estrela, misfortune also happened to ‘Madame X’, the attractive little lady who had accompanied Marshal Masséna throughout the campaign, disguised as a captain of dragoons. While scrambling along a mountain path her horse fell and threw her badly among the granite boulders, so that she was severely cut and bruised. Consequently, `cette femme courageuse’, as Masséna’s A.D.C. calls her, who had so gaily ridden into Portugal, had to make an undignified exit on the shoulders of stalwart French grenadiers.

At the beginning of April Masséna quitted Portugal for ever, with 40,000 ragged and starving Frenchmen in very different plight from the splendid array of 67,000 fresh troops which had invaded the country seven months previously.

The third and last line

The third and last line was a beach-head perimeter, only three miles in extent, to cover the eventual embarkation at Sao Juliao da Barra, on the northern shore of the Tagus estuary.

Last September I had the good fortune to drive all round the Torres Vedras Lines under the able and friendly guidance of Colonel Francisco Baptista, the Portuguese Engineer Colonel responsible for their maintenance. ‘The Lines’ were not a continuous linear rampart like Hadrian’s Wall, Offa’s Dyke or the Danevirke. They consisted of chains of mutually supporting redoubts, 152 in all, crowning every dominant tactical feature on the selected line, and en­filading all approach roads and defiles. Every device of the military engineer’s art was em­ployed to supplement the natural obstacles offered by the terrain: rivers were dammed, converting them into lagoons and marshes; roads were blocked with abatis and chevaux de frise; bridges and culverts were prepared for demolition; for­ward slopes were artificially scarped, and the field of fire was cleared of all houses and natural cover. The Tagus estuary was patrolled by a flotilla of gun-boats manned by the Royal Navy, which was also responsible for equipping and manning a semaphore signalling system, with nine main signal stations erected on prominent points.

The redoubts were solidly built masonry forts, star-shaped or polygonal in trace, each defended by a dry ditch and counter-scarp. All but the smallest were armed with cannon, of which some 450 to 500 were employed, manned by British and Portuguese gunners. But no first-line infantry were locked up in the redoubts, a la Ligne Maginot, for their garrisons consisted of the Portuguese Militia and Ordenanca (Home Guard) of whom Wellington had some 30,000 at his dis­posal, thus setting free his field army of 35,000 British and 25,000 Portuguese regular troops for manoeuvre and counter-attack. He had in addition a contingent of 8000 Spaniards.

When I made my visit to the Lines, just a century and a half after their original construc­tion, I was greatly struck by the solid condition of the masonry redoubts, having previously imagined that the Lines were only a system of earthworks. Most of the redoubts crown the hill-tops and have thus escaped the plough of the cultivator, though in some places the masonry escarps have been robbed for building-material. I was, however, delighted to find that the Portuguese Government is restoring to its original condition the great triple redoubt of São Vicente, which crowns the hill just north­west of the village of Torres Vedras. This fort, one of the strongest works of the Lines, is to be maintained as a historic monument; when the work of restoration is complete, it will form a permanent and impressive memorial to Luso­Britannic comradeship and cooperation. The restoration work is being carried out by the Corps of Military Engineers under the super­vision of Colonel Baptista. Certainly no more competent supervisor could have been chosen, and I was amazed at his detailed knowledge about every one of the 152 redoubts under his charge. In the ten hours which I spent in his congenial company I learnt more about the art of field fortification than I did during my years as a Woolwich cadet who buys cigars online.

The strategic consequences of the Lines were enormous, for they not only decided the issue of the 1810 campaign in Portugal, but they formed the turning-point of the whole Peninsular War. They certainly well repaid the time, labour and money expended in their construction.

Within a fortnight after the withdrawal from the Bussaco position at the end of September 1810, six British divisions had retired within the shelter of the Lines. The retreat had been con­ducted in an orderly manner, covered efficiently by the British cavalry rearguards. On October 11 the French cavalry patrols under Montbrun bumped into the outer defensive line all along the front, from the mouth of the Rio Sizandro to the Tagus estuary at Alhandra, and reported that they could advance no further. On the following day Junot’s VIII Corps, which had not been engaged at Bussaco but had been delayed in its march by incessant rain, at­tacked Craufurd’s Light Division, which was still outside the Lines between Sobral and Arruda. The peppery Robert Craufurd launched a somewhat unnecessary counter­attack in his usual impetuous way, and outpost bickering continued for two more days on this sector, until Wellington pulled the Light Division in behind the Lines. Wellington estab­lished his own headquarters at Pero Negro in the centre of the front line near Sobral, close to Monte Socorro, a magnificent observation post 1292 feet high, from which he could scan the whole countryside.

On October 14 Masséna came up and made a personal reconnaissance of the Lines. He was completely astounded, not only by the powerful fortifications confronting him, of which, strange to say, he had had no previous intelligence, but also by the maze of rugged hill-country which barred his path to Lisbon. Turning to the two renegade Portuguese officers on his staff, General Pamplona and the Marquis of Alorna, he reproached them bitterly for having deceived him with the promise of an easy promenade from Coimbra to Lisbon. The two Portuguese officers excused themselves by saying that they could hardly be blamed for not knowing about the fortifications which Wellington had thrown up in the last few months. ‘The devil,’ the Marshal retorted angrily, ‘Wellington didn’t make these mountains!’

The Lines of Torres Vedras

On September 27, 1810  the Anglo-Portuguese Army under Viscount Wellington (as he then was) gained a resounding tactical victory at Bussaco over a numerically superior French Army, led by that experienced warrior, André Masséna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. Masséna had started his career as a cabin-boy and then became a smuggler in the Alpes Maritimes; after retiring as a company­sergeant-major from the French Royal Army, he blossomed out in the Revolution as the most efficient and trusted of Napoleon’s Marshals.

In spite of his costly failure to drive the British and Portuguese off the steep Bussaco ridge, Masséna succeeded in marching his whole army two days later round Wellington’s left flank, north of the Bussaco position, thus forcing him to retire southward on Lisbon. As Masséna sat down at Coimbra on October 4 to write his dispatch to Napoleon on the Bussaco battle, he had some reason to think that he now had the ball at his feet. By his skilful manoeuvre after the battle he had converted a tactical defeat into a strategic victory; within a few weeks his army of 63,000 would undoubtedly drive the 35,000 British into the sea, and he would be in possession of Lisbon and all Portugal. But the crafty Masséna, although he did not then know it, had met his match.

A year previously when Wellington, after his victory at Talavera, had been obliged to retire into Portugal before superior French forces, he realized that it was essential to safeguard the embarkation of his expeditionary force if the French were ever to concentrate overwhelming strength against him. At that time Napoleon had something like 250,000 men in the Peninsula, while the British force of 35,000 was the only field army which England possessed. Wellington reckoned that he would be compelled to evacuate the country if Napoleon could ever concentrate 100,000 men against him. He was determined not to risk a hurried embarkation, as had been forced on Sir John Moore at Corunna the previous January. The port of Lisbon, although a magnificent harbour, would be a bad point of embarkation, as it is situated fifteen miles up the Tagus from the open sea, and the enemy might be able to seize both banks of the estuary. So, after consulting his fussy colleague, Admiral Berkeley, Wellington selected as his emergency embarkation point the little port of Sao Julian da Barra, just outside the Tagus bar

But a much wider and deeper covering zone was to be provided by creating two strong outer lines of defence, giving ample elbow-room for manoeuvre and counter-attack. Wellington, with his genius for choosing a good tactical position, had in October 1809 made a thorough reconnaissance of the tangled mass of steep foot-hills and valleys that fill the Lisbon peninsula between the River Tagus and the sea. Inland, to the east of Lisbon, the Tagus opens out into a wide lagoon, making the capital unapproachable from that side except by boat. To the west lies the Atlantic,           where the Royal Navy had held unchallenged supremacy since Trafalgar. All that remained to be done was to render the northern land-front impregnable for a distance of some thirty miles.

Having laid down the points of vital tactical importance, and having secured the promise of adequate reinforcements from the Royal Navy in cannon, gun-boats and signalling equipment, Wellington handed over the detailed work of fortification to his Chief Engineer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Fletcher, Royal Engineers.

Fletcher responded nobly to the task. With his small staff of sapper officers, British and Portuguese, and a locally enlisted labour force of 10,000, he succeeded within the next twelve months in creating the most effective system of field fortification known to military history. Philip Guedalla has described it as ‘that inspired introduction of the broad facts of geography into the art of war’.

The defensive system consisted of a triple line of strongly built masonry redoubts. Starting from the coast, the first line ran eastwards from the mouth of the Rio Sizandro to the village of Torres Vedras, where a strong point d’appui was constructed, covering an important defile through which passes the main road to Lisbon from the north. Thence the line of works ran in a general south-easterly direction along a well-marked ridge, passing west of Sobral and Arruda and reaching the right bank of the Tagus south-west of Alhandra, through which the main highway runs from the north-east. The total length of this line was twenty-eight miles. The second and main line of defence ran approximately five miles behind the front line, and was somewhat shorter, having a length of twenty-two miles. The sector nearest the coast, as with the front line, was covered by a dammed-up stream, the sao Lourenco, and the line of works then went south­east along a very steeply scarped ridge, north and east of Mafra. The centre sector of the line, be­tween Monte Chipre and the Cabego de Montachique, was particularly steep and rugged, covering a group of rocky peaks which rise to a height of 1400 feet above the sea. From Montachique the line continued along another steep escarpment south of Bucelas and reached the Tagus south-west of Alverca.