The heroes of the war were, whatever the British may think, the Spaniards. It is true that their provisional Government was inefficient, their improvised armies of little military value, and their most prominent commanders, such as Cuesta, Castatios and La Romana, incompetent. Their heads were turned by their initial success at Baylen, when they had to do with a frightened man, and they were always trying to repeat Baylen with raw levies under unskilled leaders. There were, moreover, endless jealousies between rival authorities, provinces and commanders. But the spirit of the nation as a whole was beyond praise, and was quickened by a savage hatred of the French. Every French straggler's throat was cut and small bodies of men were destroyed without mercy. The French tried to quell this spirit by reprisals —burning villages and shooting villagers—but the Spaniards retorted in kind, and before the close of 1808 both sides had ex hausted their powers of terror, the French by burning Spaniards alive in their houses, the Spaniards by sawing a captured French general asunder. But the losses thus inflicted upon the French were very formidable. Marbot reckoned the average number of deaths of French soldiers, from all causes, from the beginning to the end of the war as ioo daily. From the year 1812 the guerrilla-leaders took matters very much out of the hands of the regular military commanders, and proved to be much more efficient than the regular generals. These leaders were drawn from all classes—one of the best was a priest—and, as their followings swelled to three, four and even five thousand men of all three arms, they became most dangerous opponents. Their knowledge of the country in the wild mountainous districts which they preferred gave them enormous advantages over their enemies, while if closely pressed they could disperse for the time and re assemble when the peril was over. Their quality varied very greatly. Some were composed of every description of desperate adventurer, not excluding British and French deserters, and were rather wild. Others were under far stricter restraint. At least one was subjected to discipline as stern as that of Cromwell's Ironsides, and began every day with mass. Taken altogether they wrought great things for the liberation of their country, and were perhaps the best expression of the national will to victory. But the sufferings of Spain from French oppression and extortion and from the ravages of war were terrible. They were the source of many of her troubles during the 19th century, and she has not yet, perhaps, recovered from the effects of those awful years. But she has good right to be proud of her Guerra de Independencia.
In Portugal likewise the national spirit was admirable. There is no more frugal, patient, docile, industrious man than the Portuguese peasant, and with British officers in the higher regi mental ranks to superintend his training, he made an excellent soldier. When he failed, as at one moment he did, it was owing to his Government's neglect of him ; but when, in response to British protests, that fault was amended, the Portuguese soldier speedily recovered himself. The Portuguese are still proud of a phrase written by Wellington from the Pyrenees in 1813, in which he described their countrymen as "the fighting-cocks of the army." It must be added, that when once the French had been driven across the Pyrenees, the Portuguese began to manifest consider able jealousy of the British officers in their army, and that Wellington's efforts to obtain some of his old Portuguese regi ments for the campaign of Waterloo failed completely. Still this was, perhaps, no more than natural. The Portuguese, like the Spaniards, suffered terribly from the war and still suffer from it. They have, however, retained two things British—their rule of the road and their bugle-calls.
The fact, nevertheless, remains that, without the little British army under the command of Wellington, Spaniards and Portuguese could hardly have worked out their deliverance. At first, as has been seen, Wellington did not realize all the difficulties of the problem set him; but after the experience of 1809 he was under no illusions, and there and then thought out the solution. His first task, however, was to train his own troops, for the army had no regular administrative services in those days and indeed was subject to three different departments—the cavalry and in fantry under the commander-in-chief and War Office, the artillery and engineers under the Board of Ordnance, and supply and trans port under the Treasury. The last named was that which gave
him most trouble, for the Treasury's commissaries, even after 14 years of war, had little experience of the needs of an army in the field ; and on landing on the Mondego in 1808 he was obliged to draw up for them a complete table for the hiring and organization of transport. Roads in Portugal hardly permitted the use of wheeled vehicles ; and he was obliged later to form his transport entirely of pack-mules, which he gradually brought up to a perfect system.
As has been seen, this formed an essential part of his plan for getting the better of the French, but it was also the principal means to the great end of discipline. Soldiers regularly fed had no excuse for helping themselves, and no commander was more keenly alive than Wellington to the demoralizing effects of ma rauding, nor more resolute to check it. Unfortunately the House of Commons, in defiance of all military opinion, had insisted in 1805 in altering the procedure of regimental courts martial, with the result that for a long time these courts were ineffective for enforcing discipline. It was the uncertainty of punishment which allowed the men to get out of hand in the retreats from Talavera and from Burgos, and after the assaults on Ciudad Rodrigo, Bada joz and San Sebastian; and indeed it was not until Wellington in 1812 imported a lawyer to help him through the intricacies of the new procedure that discipline began to improve. The establish ment of a corps of military police—the first of its kind in the British army—materially contributed towards the same object, with the result that the behaviour of the British troops in France was exemplary. Thus it came about that the French peasants sold their produce and their cattle to the English commissaries, while Soult and their own countrymen went away empty. Thus also it was that at the conclusion of the war a British division marched almost the whole length of France without a single complaint of any French inhabitant against a British soldier.
In addition to the transport and supply service, Wellington gradually trained a staff of extreme efficiency with an intelligence department of great excellence. He had, of course, the advantage of fighting in a country where every inhabitant was eager to give information to him and to withhold it from his enemy, but none the less the work of his intelligence officers was most remarkable. In other respects his staff required much training from him, but improved steadily; and, in fact, during the fighting in the Pyrenees in 1813-14, the chief of the staff (who bore the title of quarter master-general) did not hesitate to give orders (and very good orders) on his own initiative. When the army latterly swelled to some Ioo,000 men of all nations it was divided, practically, into three corps of which one was under Wellington's immediate command; and the staff proved itself perfectly competent to handle it. This training of the army and staff was perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Wellington, carried out amid a thousand distractions from both civil and military authorities in Spain and Portugal and under the disadvantage of a permanent dearth of specie. The exchange in the Peninsula was at a discount of 25% against the British, and hence the payments, whether to Spanish muleteers or to English private soldiers, were generally six months at least in arrear. Nevertheless Wellington kept the force together somehow, and it is no exaggeration to say that the Peninsular army, including the King's German legion with the British, was the most effective military machine, for its size, in Europe. It must be added that, with the help of Sir James McGrigor, the father of British military hygiene, Wellington brought the organization and working of the medical service to a pitch of perfection till then unapproached in any European army. Nor was he less careful of his animals than of his men. He was a good horse-master and knew that horses are not machines.