The Lines of Torres Vedras: where Masséna's march on Lisbon stopped, 1810

On the morning of 11 October 1810, after three days of marching in torrential rain, French cavalry under General Louis-Pierre Montbrun rode down the rough road from Alenquer towards Lisbon. They pushed back a few British dragoon pickets and came to the village of Sobral de Monte Agraço, on its knoll, held by the outposts of Sir Brent Spencer's division.2 sources

Montbrun did not attack. His scouts had seen, on the heights behind Arruda and Zibreira, redoubts and solid lines of infantry. Further east, his light horse had found the same thing above Alhandra, on the Tagus. He sent word back to his commander, Marshal André Masséna, that a continuous line of fortifications ran from the river westward to some point not yet found.1 source

Masséna came to look for himself on 14 October, in time to watch a sharp fight for a barricade on the road out of Sobral. On one of his rides along the front, a single shot from British redoubt No. 120 struck a wall on which he was resting his telescope. The engineer John Jones, who dates it to 16 October, says the marshal took off his hat to acknowledge the warning and moved on; the historian Charles Oman puts it on the 14th.3 sources

The French had marched the length of Portugal to take Lisbon. They would get no closer.2 sources

Portugal tried to stay neutral in the war between France and Britain, its old ally. Napoleon would not allow it, and in 1807 he ordered Portugal's ports closed to British ships and sent an army under General Jean-Andoche Junot to occupy the country. In November 1807 Junot reached Lisbon just in time to see the royal family sail down the Tagus for Brazil. An Anglo-Portuguese army beat Junot at Roliça and Vimeiro in August 1808, and the French left under the Convention of Cintra.1 source

Prince Regent João now governed from Brazil. In Lisbon a council of governors, the Regency, ran the kingdom, and in practice it was more and more subordinated to the needs of the British army; from 1810 the British minister in Lisbon, Charles Stuart, sat on it. A second invasion, under Marshal Soult, took Porto in March 1809 before an Anglo-Portuguese army drove it back into Spain.3 sources

The third invasion began in July 1810. Masséna's Army of Portugal, about 65,000 strong, took the Spanish border fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo in July and the Portuguese one at Almeida on 28 August, then marched for Lisbon. Wellington, the British commander, did not try to stop him at the border. He planned to fight on ground of his own choosing and then fall back on the capital.3 sources

He chose the ridge of Buçaco, north of Coimbra. On 27 September 1810 about 50,000 allied troops, almost half of them Portuguese, threw back the French columns that climbed it. Masséna found a country road round the north of the ridge, and Wellington retired south, as he had always intended, towards the fortifications nobody in the French army had heard of.2 sources

Wellington rode over the hills north of Lisbon with his chief engineer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Fletcher, in October 1809. On the 20th he gave Fletcher a written memorandum. Its starting point was simple.2 sources

The memorandum asked for less than was finally built. The army would first stand behind the Castanheira stream near the Tagus, with entrenched posts on its flank at Torres Vedras, Sobral and Arruda. If pressed, it would fall back to the hills from Alhandra through Bucelas to Montachique. Wellington also wanted a safe place to embark the British troops in case of defeat, which became the works around the fort of São Julião da Barra.2 sources

Work on a Castanheira position began in January 1810, but on a second visit in February Wellington saw that it could be turned and had it abandoned. The main line was traced instead from Quintela on the Tagus through Bucelas, Montachique and Mafra to the mouth of the São Lourenço river on the Atlantic, partly on maps of the area by a Portuguese officer, Major Neves Costa. Masséna was slow to come, and the extra months let the engineers turn the outposts into a second, longer front.3 sources

Digging began in November 1809: at São Julião on the 3rd, on the Monte Agraço on the 4th and at the fort of São Vicente, above Torres Vedras, on the 8th. Jones says there were never more than seventeen engineer officers on the works at once, eleven British, two from the King's German Legion and four Portuguese. The labour came from Lisbon militia regiments, brought up in pairs, and from peasants. Oman counts 5,000 to 7,000 hired at a time, plus men conscripted from southern Estremadura within forty miles.2 sources

Gangs of 1,000 or 1,500 labourers worked under a single engineer officer, sometimes a subaltern with a few British soldiers who spoke no Portuguese. Jones, who took charge of the works when Fletcher left to join the army in July 1810, noted that in a year of forced labour, often forty miles from home while their own fields went untended, the workers caused not one riot. He put the output down to their “regular habits of persevering labour”.2 sources

The works were closed earthen redoubts on hilltops, most for three to six guns and two or three hundred men, with ditches about 16 feet (5 m) wide and 12 feet deep. Between them the engineers dammed the Sizandro to turn six miles of its valley into bog, blasted 2,000 yards of hillside above Alhandra into a cliff and choked ravines with felled olive trees. Houses, walls, vineyards and woods in front of the forts were cleared so that attackers would have no cover; owners were compensated.2 sources

The secret held. Jones thought it “highly creditable to all concerned that scarcely a vague paragraph respecting the lines found its way into the public prints”. According to Masséna's aide Pelet, the French first heard of the Lines from prisoners taken at Pombal on 5 October 1810, less than a week before they saw them.3 sources

The forts were half of Wellington's plan. The other half was hunger. French armies lived off the country they marched through, so the population in Masséna's path was ordered to leave and to take or destroy food, carts and animals, break bridges and mills and burn ferry boats. The device was an old Portuguese one, used against Spanish invaders as late as 1762.2 sources

Members of the Regency, led by the Principal Sousa, brother of the Prince Regent's most influential minister, opposed it. Sousa wanted the war fought at the frontier and warned that destroying the mills would devastate the land and make the government hated. Wellington blamed him for all his difficulties in the campaign.2 sources

On the ground the policy was patchy. Peasants often hid their grain rather than burn it, and French foragers found many of the stores. Raimundo Nogueira, one of the governors, later wrote that the order to destroy food was never actually given, so the French found the granaries of the Ribatejo full and could stay in the region for some five months.2 sources

Coimbra, a city of about 40,000, emptied in two days after Buçaco, its people streaming south on the roads or down the Mondego to take ship for Lisbon. The French entered on 1 October and spent two days plundering it. Behind the Lines, Lisbon filled with refugees. Relief came first from the city's Senado and then mostly from alms raised by the Principal Sousa himself.2 sources

The refugees and the people who stayed behind died in great numbers, mostly of disease. The provisor of the diocese of Coimbra, the bishop's deputy, summing up parish priests' reports in December 1811 in a report printed in 1812, reckoned that about 3,000 people had been killed by soldiers and at least 35,000 had died in the epidemic that followed. At Figueira da Foz, which the French never entered, 4,135 locals and refugees died of illness.2 sources

The diocese had about 285,000 inhabitants in 1801, so the historian Fernando Dores Costa puts the losses at around 1 per cent murdered and one in eight dead of disease. Counts differ: Dores Costa gives 2,969 killings in the printed report, while Maria Antónia Lopes counted 3,305 in the parish returns. Lopes found the worst violence came during the French retreat in 1811, when hunger drove the soldiers hardest.2 sources

Wellington's army filed into the Lines in the second week of October; Craufurd's Light Division went in on the night of the 10th. It was bigger than at Buçaco: about 35,000 British troops present under arms, 24,500 Portuguese regulars, 8,200 militia infantry and two Spanish divisions of about 8,000 men who arrived on the 25th. The redoubts were garrisoned by militia, gunners and marines, so the field army could wait behind them in two masses, ready to hit any column that broke in.1 source

Sobral sat in front of the weakest stretch of the first line, between the great redoubt on the Monte Agraço and the Portelo heights, where few works had been built when the French arrived. Wellington crammed more than 20,000 men into it and dug new redoubts as fast as he could.1 source

Sources differ on the cost. Charles Oman, using regimental returns, counted 19 British casualties on the 12th and 67 on the 14th, against roughly 120 French on the 14th. The RHLT's account speaks of more than a hundred dead on each side on the 12th alone. Either way, the fighting was small beside Buçaco.2 sources

That night, at his headquarters in Alenquer, Masséna is said to have heard Junot urge an assault and Ney and Reynier argue against it. He sided with them. The report General Foy drew up for him and presented to Napoleon said that the marshal would compromise the emperor's army if he attacked such lines, held by 30,000 British and 30,000 Portuguese with 50,000 armed peasants behind them.1 source

For exactly one month, from 14 October to 14 November, Masséna stayed in front of the Lines, hoping for reinforcements from Spain. His foragers stripped the country bare. Men went into hospital by the thousand, and Junot's conscript battalions, camped in the rain on the hill at Sobral, suffered worst.1 source

Wellington would not attack. “Famine should do the work,” in Oman's summary of his thinking, “and no lives should be wasted.” On the night of 14 November, under a thick fog, the French slipped away north to Santarém. When the fog lifted at ten the next morning, the Light Division found that the sentries facing it at Arruda were men of straw in old French shakos.1 source

The French held Santarém through the winter. On the night of 5 to 6 March 1811 the last of them pulled out and the long retreat began, marked by burned villages and murdered civilians. Masséna was back across the Spanish frontier in early April. The French garrison he had left in Almeida broke out on the night of 10 to 11 May, blowing up the walls behind it.3 sources

Of those 25,000, Oman reckoned, some 8,000 had been taken prisoner, including 4,000 men captured in the hospital at Coimbra on 7 October 1810. Not more than 2,000 died in action. The rest perished, in Oman's phrase, “by the sword of famine”, which in practice meant hunger and the sickness that came with it. The army also lost 5,872 of its 14,000 horses and came back with 36 wagons.1 source

Jones's accounts show money still being spent on repairing the works until the end of the war in 1814. After that they were left alone for almost two centuries, and bringing them back meant surveys, archaeological digs, clearing vegetation and structural repairs.2 sources

Six municipalities north of Lisbon, Arruda dos Vinhos, Loures, Mafra, Sobral de Monte Agraço, Torres Vedras and Vila Franca de Xira, formed an association, the Rota Histórica das Linhas de Torres, to clear and restore the forts. Much of the work was done for the bicentenary in 2010 and cost about €6 million, including several interpretation centres. In 2014 the project won a European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award in the conservation category, one of 27 winners chosen from 169 entries.3 sources

On 17 October 2014 the Assembleia da República voted unanimously to make 20 October, the date of Wellington's memorandum, the National Day of the Lines of Torres Vedras. In March 2019 the President signed the government decree classifying the first and second lines as a National Monument: 114 of the 128 structures put forward, the other 14 being too ruined or gone. Lusa reported in 2019 that the Lines received about 10,000 visitors a year.2 sources