Sharpes Escape   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

One estimate reckons that forty to fifty thousand Portuguese lost their lives in the winter of 1811–1812, most from hunger, some from the French, but an appalling figure, amounting to about 2 per cent of the then Portuguese population. It was, by any reckoning, a hard-hearted strategy, throwing the burden of the war onto the civilian population. Was it necessary? Wellington conclusively defeated Massena on the heights of Bussaco, and had he guarded the road around the north of the great ridge, he could probably have repulsed the French there and then, forcing them back to Ciudad Rodrigo across the Spanish border, but that, of course, would have left Massena's army relatively undamaged. Hunger and disease were much greater enemies than redcoats and riflemen, and by forcing Massena to spend the winter in the wasteland north of the lines, Wellington destroyed his enemy's army. At the beginning of the campaign, in September 1810, Massena commanded 65,000 men. When he got back to Spain he had fewer than 40,000, and had lost half his horses and virtually all his wheeled transport. Of the 25,000 men he lost, only about 4,000 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner at Bussaco (British losses were about 1,000); the rest were lost because the Lines of Torres Vedras condemned Massena to a winter of hunger, disease and desertion.

So why fight at Bussaco if the Lines of Torres Vedras could do the job better? Wellington fought there for the sake of morale. The Portuguese army did not have a sterling record against the French, but it was now reorganized and under Wellington's command and, by giving it a victory on the ridge, he gave that army a confidence it never lost. Bussaco was the place where the Portuguese learned they could beat the French and, rightly, it holds a celebrated place in Portuguese history.

The ridge is heavily forested now, so that it is difficult to imagine how any battle could have been fought up its eastern face, but photographs taken in 1910 show the ridge as almost entirely bare, and contemporary accounts suggest that was how it was a hundred years earlier. Those photographs can be seen in the splendid book, Bussaco 1810 , by Rene Chartrand, published by Osprey. In most books about the battle the monastery on the reverse slope is referred to as a convent, a word which properly can be applied to communities of either monks or nuns, but common usage restricts it to nuns, and I have seen the building at Bussaco called the Convento dos Carmelitas Descalgos and the Mosteiro dos Carmelitas, so I refer to it as a monastery to avoid giving the impression that nuns were present.