Wellington's army, hampered by the mass of fugitives of every age, sex, and class, men and beasts of burden in inextricable confusion, retired in the greatest disorder toward Coimbra and Pombal, many perishing in the passage of the Mondego. This was good for Masséna. He should have sent Junot's corps, which, not having fought at Busaco, was fully available, in pursuit, and by a sudden attack he might have caused heavy loss to the English army, which, by the testimony of some of our men who had been captured at Busaco and had escaped, was in disorder beyond words to our great surprise, and as if he wished to allow the time to restore order to get away, the commander-in-chief billeted his army in Coimbra and the adjacent villages, and waited three clear days. His excuse for this delay was the necessity of reorganizing the 2nd and 6th corps which had suffered at Busaco, and of establishing hospitals at Coimbra; all which he might have done while the 8th corps was in pursuit of the enemy. But the real notion for the stay at Coimbra was, in the first place, the increasing want of confidence between Masséna and his lieutenants; and, further, his difficulty in deciding whether to leave a division in the place to cover his rear and protect the sick and wounded, or to take all his available forces from the battle which was expected to be fought outside Lisbon. Either course had its advantages and disadvantages; but he need not have taken three days to make up his mind. Finally he decided to leave a half-company to guard the convent of Santa Clara and protect the wounded who were assembled there from the first fury of an attacking force, with orders to capitulate as soon as an officer appeared.

But no definite instructions were given; and, under the impression that a division would remain, the colonels put all their infirm men, most of whom could perfectly well have marched, and desired nothing better, in the vast convent. More than three thousand were thus left behind, with two lieutenants and eighty men of the naval brigade as their sole guard.

I was surprised that Masséna, who was sure to require sailors when he reached the Tagus, should have sacrificed a number of these valuable men, who could not easily be replaced, when he might have left some infantry of inferior value. It was clear that in less than twenty-four hours the enemy's irregular troops would occupy the town; and indeed in the evening of the very day, October 3, 1on which the French had left it, the Portuguese militia entered.

Our poor wounded had barricaded themselves in the convent, having no longer any doubt that Masséna had abandoned them, and were preparing to sell their lives dearly. The naval lieutenants behaved admirably. With the help of some infantry officers who were among the wounded, they collected all the men who still had muskets and could use them, and succeeded in holding the Portuguese in check all the night. On the morning of the 6th Brigadier Trant, the commander of the militia, arrived; and the naval officers capitulated to him in writing. Hardly, however, had the wounded French surrendered the few arms which they had than the militia fell on the poor wretches, many of whom could not stand, and butchered over a thousand. The rest, sent without mercy to Oporto, perished on the road; as soon as anyone fell out from fatigue the Portuguese killed him. Yet this militia was organized and led by English officers, commanded by an English general; and in not checking these atrocities Trant dishonoured his country and his uniform. In vain does Napier allege in his excuse that only ten French prisoners were sacrificed; the fact is, that nearly all were murdered either in the hospital at Coimbra or on the road. Even in England the name of Trant has become infamous. 2

From Coimbra Masséna had written to the Emperor; but the difficulty was to transmit the despatch through the insurgent population. A Frenchman must have failed, and it was necessary to find someone who knew the country and could speak the language. A Portuguese officer named Mascareguas, who had entered the French service with General d'Alorna, offered to be the bearer. I saw him start disguised as a mountain-shepherd, with a little dog in his basket, in which costume he hoped to reach Almeida, where the French commandant would put him in the way of proceeding to Paris. But it was of no use for Mascareguas, who belonged to the first nobility of Portugal, to attempt to conceal his distinguished bearing and manner and his refined speech. The peasants were not taken in; he was arrested, brought to Lisbon, and condemned to death; and in spite of his appeal for the noble's privilege of decapitation, he was hanged as a spy in the public square.

The three further days wasted by the French at Coimbra allowed the English to get away, and it took us three days more to come up with their rear-guard at Pombal. Before our coming the body of the celebrated marquis of that name had lain in a magnificent tomb, erected in an immense mausoleum of wonderful architecture. This had been wrecked by the stragglers from the English army. They had broken the tomb and thrown the bones under the feet of their horses, which they had stabled in the vast building. A strange instance of the vanity of human things! There, lying in the filth, when Masséna and his staff visited the place, were the scanty remains of the great minister who put down the Jesuits!

From Pombal we went on to Leyria, and at 9 A.M. our advance-guard was on the banks of the Tagus, at Santarem. There we found immense stores of provisions; but this advantage was almost neutralized by autumnal rains such as are not seen out of the tropics except in the southern shores of the Peninsula, and which assailed us after unbroken fine weather. Both armies suffered much from this cause; but ours reached Alemquer, a market town at the foot of the hills of Cintra, which gird Lisbon at a few leagues' distance. We quite expected to have to fight a battle before entering Lisbon, but, as we knew that the town was open on the landside, we had no doubt of success. Meantime, however, all the neighbourhood of Lisbon had been covered with fortifications. For a year and a half the English had been working at them; but neither Ney, who had just spent a year at Salamanca, nor Masséna, who for six months had been making ready to invade Portugal, had the least inkling of these gigantic works. Reynier and Junot were equally ignorant; most surprising of all—incredible, indeed, if the fact were not absolutely certain—the French Government itself did not know that the hills of Cintra had been fortified. It is inconceivable how the Emperor, who had agents in every country, could have omitted to send some to Lisbon. At that time thousands of American, German, Swedish, and English ships were daily bringing into the Tagus stores for Wellington's army; and it would have been perfectly easy to have introduced some spies among the numerous sailors and clerks employed on these vessels. Knowledge of all kinds can be obtained by money; it was by this means that the Emperor kept himself informed of all that went on in England and among the great Powers of Europe. Nevertheless, he never gave Masséna any information as to the defences of Lisbon; and it was only on reaching Alemquer that the French general discovered that the hills were fortified and connected by lines of which the right touched the sea in rear of Torres Vedras, the centre was at Sobral, and the right rested on the Tagus, near Alhandra.

The day before our troops appeared at this point the English army had entered the lines, driving before it the population of the surrounding districts, to the number of 300,000 souls. Utter disorder prevailed; and those among the French officers who guessed what was taking place among the enemy regretted afresh and very keenly that Masséna had resolved a fortnight before to attack the position of Busaco in front. If that position had been turned, the enemy would have been taken in flank and have retired upon Lisbon, and our army, in full strength and ardour, would have attacked the lines on its arrival, and certainly have carried them. With the capture of the capital the English must have retreated precipitately, and the reverse would have been irreparable. But our heavy losses at Busaco had chilled the ardour of Masséna's lieutenants, and bred ill-will between them and him; so that now all were trying to paralyse his operations, and representing every little hillock to be a new height of Busaco the capture of which would cost copious bloodshed. In spite, however, of this want of loyalty, Masséna despatched the 8th corps towards the enemy centre, and Clausel's division carried the village of Sobral—a very important point for us. Just when a simultaneous attack along the whole line was expected, General Sainte-Croix, who had urged this course, was killed by a cannon-shot in front of Villa-Franca. That excellent officer was with General Montbrun making a reconnaissance toward Alhandra, and as they passed along the Tagus, on which several Portuguese sloops were cruising, and firing out our outposts, poor Sainte-Croix was cut in two by a chain-shot. It was a grievous loss for the army, for Masséna, and above all for me who loved him like a brother.

After the death of the only man capable of giving him good advice the commander-in-chief fell back into his state of perpetual indecision, wavering under the clamour of his lieutenants, who, in their present faint-heartedness, represented all the hills of Cintra as bristling with cannon ready to make mince-meat of us. In order to know what he was really to think about it, Masséna, who since the advice which Ligniville and I had offered at the battle of Busaco, had evinced some kindness towards us, directed us to examine the front of the enemy's lines. They were undoubtedly of imposing strength, but very far from what people were pleased to say. The English entrenchments formed an immense arc round Lisbon at least twenty French leagues in length. Every officer of the least experience knows well that a position of this extent cannot present the same difficulties everywhere and must have its weak spots. We became aware of several such by seeing officers, and even cavalry pickets, ride up quite easily; and we also became convinced that our engineer officers who had mapped the hills had figured an armed redoubt wherever they saw a little earth recently disturbed. The English, to lead us into a mistake, had on every small elevation traced works of which most had not yet got beyond the stage of planning. But even if they had been completed it seemed to us that the ground was sufficiently irregular to conceal the movements of a portion of our army, and that by employing one corps to make a feint on the front while the other two pushed real attacks on the weakest points of this long line, they would find the English troops too widely scattered, or at any rate with their reserves at a considerable distance from the points attacked.

The age of Louis XIV. was a period when great use was made of lines, and history shows that the greater part of those which were attacked were carried for want of the power of mutual support among the defenders. We thought that at some point of their vast extent it would be easy to pierce the English lines, and an opening once made, the enemy's troops who would be in some cases a day's journey from the opening would recognize that they had not time to come up, except in very inferior strength, and would retire, not to Lisbon, whence vessels cannot get out in all winds, but to Cascaes, where their military fleet and transports were assembled. Their retreat would have been very difficult, and might perhaps have become a rout. In any case their embarkation in presence of our army would have been a second edition of Sir John Moore's at Corunna. We have since seen English officers, among others General Hill, admit that if the French had attacked within the first ten days after their arrival they would have easily penetrated together with the confused multitude of peasants in the midst of whom the English armies could never have disentangled themselves nor made any regular dispositions for defence.

When my comrade and I reported in this sense to Masséna, the old soldier's eyes sparkled with martial ardour, and he at once issued marching orders to prepare for the attack which he reckoned on making the next day. However, on receiving the orders, his four lieutenants hastened to his quarters and a stormy discussion took place. Junot, who had commanded in Lisbon, and knew it well, declared that it seemed impossible to him to maintain so large a town, and expressed himself strongly for the attack. General Montbrun shared his opinion; but Ney and Reynier hotly opposed it adding that the loss at Busaco, together with that of the wounded who had been abandoned at Coimbra, and the numerous sick who had been for the moment disabled by the rains, had so largely diminished the number of combatants that it was not possible to attack a strong position, and further, that the men were demoralized—an inaccurate statement, for the troops were showing great ardour in demanding to march upon Lisbon. Losing his patience, Masséna repeated vivâ voce orders he had already given in writing, and Ney declared in so many words that he would not carry them out. The commander-in-chief was minded then to remove Ney from the command of the 6th corps, as some months later he was obliged to do. But he considered that Ney was beloved by his men, whom he had commanded for seven years; that his removal would involve that of Reynier which would complete the discord in the army at a moment when unanimity was so eminently needed. The energetic advice of Sainte-Croix was no longer at hand to sustain him, and Masséna quailed before the disobedience of his two chief lieutenants. They could not indeed decide him to leave Portugal, but they extorted from him a promise to move away from the enemy's lines, and to retire ten leagues back behind Santarem and Rio Mayor and there await fresh orders from the Emperor. I saw with regret this little retreat, which seemed to me to auger one more general and definitive, nor, as you will soon see, did my presentiment deceive me. I turned my back therefore with sorrow on the hills of Cintra, fully persuaded that if we had profited by the confusion into which the fugitives had thrown the English camp we might have forced the unfinished lines. But what was then easy was no longer so a fortnight later. Compelled to feed the vast population, which at his bidding had streamed in upon Lisbon, Wellington used the arms of 40,000 stout peasants by making them work at the completion of the fortifications with which he proposed to cover Lisbon, and thus the place became of immense strength.