THE COMMISSARIAT
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.
[Sidenote: All-Importance of Convoys]
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.
[Sidenote: Water Transport]
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.
[Sidenote: The Mule-Train]
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.
[Sidenote: Desertion of Drivers]
“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.
[Sidenote: The Resources of the Country]
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]
[Sidenote: The Unpopular Commissary]
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.