As I have already had occasion to remark, when dealing with the central organization of the Peninsular Army, of all the departments which had their representatives at Head Quarters that which was under the charge of the Commissary-General was the most important.315 It is not too much to say that, when the long struggle began, the whole future of the war depended on whether the hastily organized and inexperienced Commissariat Department could enable Wellington to keep his army concentrated, and to move it freely in any direction.

Spain and Portugal are countries where large armies cannot be supplied from local resources, except in a few favoured districts. Any attempt to live on requisitions was bound to fail in the end, as the French realized to their sorrow, after a long series of endeavours to subsist on the countryside in the Peninsula, as they were wont to do in Italy or Germany. Wellington from the first forbade it, and resolved that the main dependence of the troops must be on regular stores brought up from the base of operations. Requisitions were only a subsidiary resource; they could only be made by an authorized commissary, and must be paid for at once. It was his misfortune that specie was often not forthcoming, and the payments had to be made by Treasury orders or other paper, which the peasants who received them found hard to negotiate. But payment in some form was always made.

At the best, requisitions were only a secondary aid, and the army relied for the staple of its provisions on the stores which the Commissary-General had to bring up from Lisbon or other bases. This was a hard task for him, when it is remembered that the cross roads of the Peninsula were mule-tracks, on which heavy wheeled traffic could not pass; and that the army was often operating at a distance of 150 or 200 miles from its depÔts. Moreover, in 1809, the staff of the Commissariat had all their work to learn—no British army for many years had been operating in heavy force, and for many months on end, in a thinly-peopled continental theatre of war. The difficulty of bringing up the daily food of the troops seemed at first almost insuperable. At the end of the Talavera campaign the men were well-nigh famished, simply because the attempt had been made to depend more than was possible on local resources, to the neglect of convoys from the base. After this experience Wellington resolved that he must live on his own stores, and this principle was remembered throughout the war. Hence the work which fell on the commissariat, in collecting and forwarding food from the base, was appalling. Most of it had to be conveyed by brigades of pack-mules with native drivers, who were hard to manage and prone to desert. The rest came up on country carts—ox-waggons for the most part. That mistakes and delays occurred, that a brigade or a division was occasionally foodless for several days, and forced to halt in the middle of a critical operation, is not wonderful. But on the whole after much toil and trouble the Commissariat succeeded in doing its duty, and the length of time for which the British army could keep concentrated was the envy of the French, who, living on the country, were forced to disperse whenever they had exhausted the resources of the particular region in which they were massed.

All through the years 1811–12 the central fact in the Peninsula was that if the French armies of Portugal and the North concentrated at Salamanca and Rodrigo, or if (on the other hand) those of Portugal and Andalusia joined on the Guadiana, in the region of Badajoz and Merida, the Anglo-Portuguese were too weak to face the combination. Wellington had to abandon the offensive, and to seek refuge behind the Portuguese frontier. But when he did so, as in June, 1811, and again in September of the same year, he knew that the overwhelming force in front of him could not hold itself together for more than a very short period of days. Troops brought from enormous distances, and destitute of any adequate magazines or transport, could not live on the countryside for more than a limited period. They were forced to disperse, in order to feed, and so the threatening conjunction passed, and, when the enemy had drawn apart, the allied army could once more abandon the defensive, and take some positive project in hand. The same was the case in the late autumn of 1812, during the retreat from Burgos. Wellington on this occasion had on his hands the largest combination of French troops that he ever faced—the four armies of Portugal, the North, the Centre, and Andalusia were all pressing in upon him. It would have been hopeless to fight, and so retreat was persevered in, so long as the enemy continued to advance. But Wellington knew that the progress of the 100,000 men now pursuing him must inevitably come to an end, for in their rapid course they could bring no stores with them, and in the war-worn country between Salamanca and Rodrigo they could obtain nothing. Where his own troops, though returning toward their base and their depÔts, were hard put to it for food, the French must be suffering even more. Wherefore he retreated, waiting for the inevitable moment when the pursuit could be no longer urged. It mattered little whether it stopped at Salamanca, or a march or so beyond (as actually happened), or whether it might get a little further, as far as the Portuguese frontier. It was certain, within a period of days, that it must break down. Meanwhile he himself was retreating on to his stores, and could depend upon them: after Rodrigo the men were getting their full rations once more.

The duties of the Commissariat may be divided into three sections—the first was the accumulation of great masses of sea-borne stores at the regular bases, the second was the distribution of those stores to the troops at the front by an immense system of convoys; the third and subsidiary task was the supplementing of these base-stores, by getting in what could be procured in the countryside, where the army was operating; for, of course, every fanega or arroba of food-stuff that could be obtained at the front was helpful. It had not to be carried far, it saved convoy work, and it kept the magazines at the base from depletion. Yet, as has been already remarked, what was got in the countryside was always considered as the secondary source of supply; the main reliance was on the food-ships, which poured into the base-depÔt of Lisbon corn sought in the ends of the earth, not only in such limited parts of Europe as could be drawn upon in the days of the Continental System, but in Morocco, Turkey in Asia, and America.

The maintenance of the Peninsular War entirely depended on the naval predominance of Great Britain in all seas; if the army of Wellington had not been able to draw freely on distant resources, his position would have been little better than that of his French enemies. Hence it was that, in one sense, the greatest danger that he ever incurred was the American War of 1812–14, which turned loose upon his line of communications, in the North Atlantic, many scores of active and enterprising privateers, who did considerable damage among British shipping, and for the first time since the war began made the high seas insecure. But fortunately the commencement of the American War exactly synchronized with the beginnings of Napoleon’s downfall, and the struggle in Europe took a favourable turn just as the peril on the ocean came into being. If the American War had broken out in 1809 or 1810, its significance would have been of much higher importance.

The normal condition of commissariat affairs, during the first four years of the war, was that there were daily arriving in Lisbon supplies of all sorts, not only food but clothing, munitions, and weapons of war, which had to be got forward to the army as quickly as possible. In the winter of 1810–11, when the whole of Wellington’s host lay concentrated behind (or later in advance of) the Lines of Torres Vedras, the problem was comparatively simple, as the troops were close to the magazines. But during the remainder of the years 1811–12 the British divisions were lying out at a long distance from their base—by Guarda, Celorico, or Almeida, or at other times near Merida, Campo Mayor, and Portalegre. In 1812, when Wellington moved forward as far as Madrid and Burgos, the Étapes between the base-depÔt and the field army were even greater.

The Commissary-General’s duty was to see that convoys went regularly to the front, so that the army should never be in want. This was a hard business, since most of the transfer had to be made on mule-back, and the rest on ox-carts of primitive construction and small capacity. Water-carriage, which would have been comparatively easy, could only be utilized on a limited scale; the Tagus was generally navigable to Abrantes, and when the main army lay in Estremadura this was a great help, since stores could be sent up in barges and country boats with much greater ease than by road. When unloaded at Abrantes, they had a comparatively short way to travel by mule or ox-cart to Elvas or Portalegre. But usually only Hill’s two divisions were on the Estremadura frontier, and Wellington with the main force was somewhere on the Beira frontier, in the direction of Guarda, Sabugal, and the Coa. These regions are 150 miles or more from Lisbon, and the roads beyond Coimbra on the one side and Abrantes on the other were rugged and badly kept. It was a trying business to secure the constant and regular forwarding of the necessary convoys, and the return of beasts and men to the base, when they had discharged their loads at the front. A very slight assistance was got by using the river Douro as a secondary line of water carriage—but it was only navigable to Peso da Regoa near Lamego, which was so far from the Spanish frontier and the normal haunts of the army, that little was gained by sending stores to Oporto as a secondary base-depÔt. In 1811 the only large consignments forwarded on that line were the heavy guns and ammunition, which were to form the siege-train that Dickson was organizing at Villa da Ponte,316 which is comparatively close to Lamego, though the roads between them were very bad. In 1812 Wellington’s engineers, by patient blasting and dredging in the bed of the Douro, made it navigable as far as Castro de Alva, which is forty miles up-stream from Peso da Regoa, and lies not very remote from Almeida. After this the Douro became much more useful as a line of supply, and it was largely used for the forwarding of stores before the opening of the campaign of 1813. But, just as it had become available on a better scale, Wellington started the great march to Vittoria, whose success took him away for ever from Portugal. During the last year of the war he suddenly shifted his base, and made Santander and Passages his base-ports, so that the improvements in the navigation of the Douro were of no further utility.

A great part of the Commissary-General’s staff was kept at Lisbon, with a smaller sub-department at Oporto, receiving from the ships, unloading, and repacking the immense stores that came to hand. Every few days a convoy started for the front, under the charge of a deputy-assistant-commissary, a commissariat-clerk, or some such subordinate. It would usually consist of a large drove of hired mules, worked by their owners, who generally acted together in gangs or parties, of which a capataz or head-driver, chosen by his comrades, was the chief, and did the bargaining with the commissariat authorities. The convoy would probably consist of the gangs of five or six capatazes, and would number many scores of beasts. The commissariat official in charge had no easy task to make the muleteers get over a reasonable daily stretch of road, and to see that they did not steal from the stores, or (what was not unknown when there was a quarrel) desert with their beasts. When the convoy got near the front, it would have to be provided with an escort—generally convalescents returning to their battalions, or drafts newly arrived from England. But the escorts were not an unmixed blessing—they were terribly prone to picking and stealing from the stores, with or without the connivance of the muleteers. There was nearly always trouble when a small escort, without an officer to keep his men in hand, got associated with a mule train. Brawls were frequent between soldiers and muleteers, and the assistant-commissary in charge could not get the escort to obey him: sergeants looked upon him as a mere civilian in a cocked hat, who might be contemned. Nor was the task of such an unfortunate official rendered more easy by the fact that, owing to sheer want of hard cash, his muleteers were usually in long arrears of their stipulated hire. They naturally grumbled, but on the whole stuck to their service far more faithfully than might have been expected; there were times when the whole body of them were many months unpaid, yet only a small proportion disappeared. Probably the fact that they escaped the conscription by being registered as authorized followers of the British Army had something to do with their long-suffering: probably also real patriotism had some share, for they all loyally hated the French, and were prone to cut the throats of their wounded, if left unshepherded near a recent battlefield.

Wheeled transport was much less satisfactory than the mule trains for continuous movement. The British waggons sent out to the Peninsula turned out to be quite useless for Portuguese by-roads. Wellington finally gave up all idea of relying on them for load-carrying, and mainly employed them for his sick and wounded. A few of the “spring waggons” (as they were called to distinguish them from the springless Portuguese vehicles)317 were attached to each brigade for the carriage of invalids, and the “Royal Waggon Train” in the later years of the war seem to have been almost treated as an ambulance corps. Certainly the army would have been in evil case, if it had been forced to rely on them for the moving of its food.

Such stores as did move upon wheels, and not upon mule-back, were carried on Portuguese ox-waggons, to which Wellington was compelled to have recourse for want of better vehicles. These were very primitive structures—the sides of wicker work, the wheels made of solid circles of wood bounded with iron, turning axle and all, which made their grinding noise almost intolerable. The excruciating thrills caused to the ear by a train of such carts are mentioned with disgust by nearly every Peninsular diarist, on his first introduction to life at the front. The only advantages of ox-waggons were that they were light, easy to repair, and specially built for the bad roads of the country: moreover, every peasant knew how to drive them, or to mend them at a pinch. Their weak points were that they were intolerably slow—two miles an hour was a full allowance—and that they were too small to carry much. However, they had to serve for want of better vehicles—and the army could not have lived without their service. An immense amount of them were employed, some on regular and long terms of hire, as part of the permanent transport of the army, others in a more temporary way, by requisition from the district. These last were always difficult to manage; professional muleteers would not object to travel, but impressed peasants loathed quitting their own district, fearing that they might be taken far afield—perhaps into Spain—before they were released. They were always trying to abscond with their precious bullocks, abandoning the comparatively worthless cart and its stores. A picture of the sort may be taken from Hennegan’s lively narrative of a march in 1809, when he had to take an unwilling train of “embargoed” waggoners across the mountains of Northern Beira.

“Leaning on their oxen at nightfall, they contemplated in mute dismay on one side the gigantic hill which they had just descended, on the other the roaring torrent of the Douro, which in its impetuous course seemed to threaten with destruction the temerity that would brave its power. The Santa Marias of some were answered by the more emphatic carajos! of others, but even these died away before the necessities of the moment, and unyoking the oxen, to afford them the shelter of trees, the drivers spread their large cloaks in the empty sheds, and soon in sleep seemed to forget their disappointment. The poor men, taken from their homes for our service, risked in the loss of their oxen the only means of support for themselves and families.

“The following morning, however, presented a curious scene. There stood the wains, securely packed, but looking as if the earth had brought them forth, for no vestige remained of the means by which they had been brought to this lonely spot. The rumour of the proximity of the French had determined these Portuguese on sacrificing the wains, if only they could ensure the preservation of themselves and oxen. What was now to be done?”318

As a matter of fact, the non-plussed guardian of the deserted convoy had to remain motionless for many days, risking the possible arrival of the French, till at last he procured boats on the Douro, and shipped his charge down to Oporto. Hennegan’s peasants got away with their bullocks—he and his escort were evidently sleepy and unsuspecting: but often a good watch was kept on the teams, and sentries placed over them. In such cases, if the weather was bad, or the French too near, the drivers would often sacrifice even their loved beasts, and simply abscond themselves, abandoning their means of livelihood.

It says much for the general zeal of the Commissariat Department that, even with such difficulties about them, they usually succeeded in keeping the army supplied with food. Occasionally there were desperate pinches of starvation, when the army had out-marched its convoys—this, for example, happened on the Alva in March, 1811, when half of the army, in pursuit of MassÉna, had to stop dead for several days, because their rapid advance had left the slow-moving mule-trains several marches behind. To press the French would have been most profitable—but if the troops had gone on, through the depopulated land before them, they must have perished of sheer want of food, and Wellington reluctantly halted till the convoys began to creep up to the front. Another period of empty stomachs was seen during the retreat from Burgos, from the opposite cause; forced to give back, Wellington started his train betimes for Ciudad Rodrigo, to get it out of the proximity of the oncoming enemy. Hence the rear divisions, who had to contain the pursuers and to move slowly, found, when they had eaten what was in their haversacks, that the convoys were all several marches ahead of them. They suffered terribly, and existed for two days mainly on acorns gleaned from the oak forests through which they were marching. But mischances of this kind were hardly to be considered the fault of the Commissariat.

As I have already had to remark, the duty of the officers of this department did not merely consist in bringing up and distributing food forwarded from the base depÔts. They had also, as a subsidiary resource, to get what they could out of the countryside. A good assistant-commissary was always casting about, through the villages on either side of the route of the brigade to which he was attached, to find cattle and corn that could be bought. He was forced to pay for them, since Wellington strictly forbade requisition without value given. When the commissary had dollars the matter was not so difficult, for the peasants were generally ready to sell. But when, as often happened, the military chest was empty, and payment could only be made in vales—paper promises to pay—the inhabitants soon got wind of the fact, hid their corn, and drove their oxen up into the hills. The good commissary was the man, who, under such circumstances could discover and get possession of the concealed resources of the land. But even if there was money in hand, a good deal of tact was required in dealing with the natives, and it was not every one who would make the most of his store of cash or paper for the benefit of his brigade. How the ingenious man worked may be gathered from a note of Commissary Dallas, dealing with a march through Northern Andalusia in 1812.319

“Having made careful inquiries as to the properties and farms which lay at some distance to right or left of the road, our plan was to seek them, not saying a word of our object, but simply asking hospitality. I do not remember that this was ever refused, though sometimes we failed to gain anything. We usually began with talking of the horrors of the French, of which Andres had many terrible chapters to relate. This led to expressions of grief as to the ravages that the enemy had made: by degrees we introduced a word of rejoicing that some people had so well known how to hide their property from such rapacious robbers. It often happened that at the word esconder, to hide, there were indications on the countenances of some of the party which led to further inquiries. On many occasions we drew out hints from various members of the community which enabled us to jump to conclusions, which surprised other members, as to the concealment of stores of wheat, barley, Indian corn, etc. The difficulty was to obtain access to the supplies, when we had become aware of their existence; but I had power to give a good price, and was armed with plenary authority of Spanish officials to say that my drafts would be honoured in due course.

“An incident or two will illustrate the manner in which we got supplies. At one distant solitary house of poor appearance Andres discovered that, while everything looked poverty-stricken about the place, there was somewhere in a thick wood a barn which contained concealed stores. I told the mistress of the house of the very high price that I would give for wheat, Indian corn, or forage. In the grey October dawn I was awoke by her husband, who told me he could supply what I wanted, if I would give a certain price, which he named. I said that I must see the supplies before I gave money. He bade me rise, and he would show me. He led me two miles to a thick wood, in which was a deep ravine; here he brought me safely to a receptacle of much hidden store, which I took at his own price, and gave him the proper document. In one part of the Sierra Morena we heard of a considerable flock of sheep secreted in the depth of a forest. I obtained the permission of the owner to possess them for a certain price if I could get them, for he himself could not point out the spot where they were to be found. After gathering what information I could, I set forth in the hope of finding them, and did so by following a track of sheep till I arrived in the middle of the flock. I told the two shepherds that I had purchased them—they were doubtful and one very refractory. But at last one of them drove the sheep to the open plain outside the forest, and then disappeared among the trees with his dog, leaving me to drive the flock as I could. It was no easy task—but I got them into an enclosure a considerable way off.”320

If these were the experiences of a Commissariat official who had been three years in Spain, and knew the language well, it is easy to guess how inefficient a newly landed clerk or assistant must have been, when he was sent to sweep the countryside for what he could discover. It was a thankless task—often the seeker came back empty, to be frowned upon by his departmental chief and the brigadier. When he did discover food, it was taken for granted, and he was little thanked. The fighting men seem to have had a general prejudice against their providers—they were accused of being timid, arrogant, and selfish, and the embezzlements of certain black sheep were made to cover a general charge of dishonesty against the whole tribe, which was far from being justified. Misfeasance there certainly was, when an unscrupulous commissary credited a peasant with more fanegas than he had received, and divided the balance of cash with the seller. But on the whole the work was well done, despite of the many complaints of the military—from Wellington himself downwards. That the Peninsular War was successfully maintained in 1810–11–12 was surely, at bottom, the work of the much-maligned commissaries, and the motley band of ill-paid and sometimes ruffianly muleteers and waggoners, who, through a thousand difficulties,321 generally got the biscuit and the rum-barrels, the droves of bullocks, and the packs of clothing and shoes, to their appointed destination.