The convention that sent Portugal to the trenches of Flanders, 1917

The first contingent of the Corpo Expedicionário Português left Lisbon on 30 January 1917, the day RTP and the Museum of the Presidency give for General Gomes da Costa's departure with the 1st Division. Some later accounts say 26 January. The men took mules and carts, cavalry horses, motor ambulances, even mattresses for their bunks. Women carried artillery shells down to the ships on their heads, like baskets of fish, and stacked them for the crossing.4 sources4 sources

Spain was neutral, so the troops could not go by land. They went by sea to Brest, in Brittany, a voyage of three days. The British ships had been built for the three-hour run across the English Channel, with nowhere for men to sleep and no way to serve anything more than tea and biscuits. Soldiers crowded the decks beside the animals and the baggage.1 source1 source

They found snow and cold at Brest. Several accounts date the first arrival to 2 February; the historians Luís Alves de Fraga and Carlos Lopes say January. From Brest a train took another three days to carry the men to the CEP's concentration area around Aire-sur-la-Lys, behind the British front in French Flanders.5 sources5 sources

The rules for all of this had been set a few weeks earlier. On 3 January 1917 Portugal and Britain signed a convention that laid down how a Portuguese army would be carried, armed, trained and commanded on the Western Front.3 sources3 sources

Portugal had been a republic since October 1910, and an unstable one. When war broke out in 1914 Britain, its oldest ally, asked Lisbon not to declare neutrality but to stay out of the fighting as a non-belligerent. In Africa the war came anyway: German forces attacked Portuguese posts on the Rovuma in northern Mozambique in August 1914, and at Naulila and Cuangar on the southern border of Angola that autumn.4 sources4 sources

The interventionists, led by Afonso Costa's Democratic Party, wanted Portugal in the European war. They hoped it would secure the colonies at a peace conference, strengthen the young regime at home and let Portugal step out of Britain's shadow. Many others disagreed. Much of the public and a large part of the officer corps were against sending troops to Europe.3 sources3 sources

London began to change its mind from late 1915, as German submarines sank more and more Allied shipping. Dozens of German merchant ships had sheltered in Portuguese harbours since 1914: 76 by the Navy museum's count, two of them Austro-Hungarian, though Carlos Lopes gives 72 and Fraga almost 60.4 sources4 sources

At Britain's request Portugal seized them. At 5.50 pm on 23 February 1916 the cruiser Vasco da Gama fired a 21-gun salute on the Tagus while the German flags came down.4 sources4 sources

At six in the evening of 9 March the German minister, Baron Rosen, called on the foreign minister, Augusto Soares, and handed him a declaration of war. The meeting lasted under 20 minutes. Rosen left for Madrid the next night on a special train. A coalition of the main republican parties, the União Sagrada, then took office under António José de Almeida, with Costa as finance minister.4 sources4 sources

Declaring war was easier than putting an army in the field. In the spring and summer of 1916 about 20,000 men were called up and sent to the firing range at Tancos, between the Tagus and the Zêzere, to be trained as a division in three months. The camp of flimsy shelters was nicknamed the city of Paulona. Tent material was bought in Spain, 300 lorries in the United States and 4,000 horses in Argentina.3 sources3 sources

The war minister, José Norton de Matos, ran the effort with General Fernando Tamagnini de Abreu e Silva. The newspapers hailed the result as “the miracle of Tancos”, a phrase RTP traces to Norton's own reports. The showpiece was a parade at the Montalvo camps on 22 July 1916, filmed and photographed in what the historian Helena Pinto Janeiro calls the largest propaganda operation the Portuguese army had ever organised.3 sources3 sources

The reality was rougher. About 48 per cent of the men mobilised could not read, and many officers resisted the whole idea of fighting in Europe. Letters stopped by the censors that summer show that public opinion was not won over. And after the parade the men went home: they were not called back to embark until six months later.2 sources2 sources

The terms took months of bargaining. In the summer of 1916 Afonso Costa led a government mission to London to settle how the seized ships would be chartered to Britain and on what terms Portugal could borrow to go to war. After his return, he told the journalist João de Barros that the Portuguese army would have its own sector and its own command.2 sources2 sources

The convention signed on 3 January 1917 wrote part of that promise into Article 2: the CEP would operate “subject to tactical considerations, always as a whole under the command of a Portuguese General”. The historian Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses quotes it from a 1997 Foreign Ministry collection of documents; the other terms usually cited come from summaries.1 source1 source

The Momentos de História site, quoted by RTP, says Britain was to carry the troops by sea at its own cost, and adds that this was not honoured: from October 1917 only Portuguese ships carried them. A summary by EuroDefense-Portugal says Britain undertook to take the CEP to Brest, complete its armament, train it further and then accept it into a sector of the front.2 sources2 sources

The small print counted for more. The British had at first accepted a single division, and sending two made the logistics far harder. The CEP depended on the British army for most of its supplies and even for the soldiers' pay, and Portugal ran up a large bill. Tactically it took its orders first from General Richard Haking's XI Corps and later from General Henry Horne's First Army.2 sources2 sources

The convention said nothing about the British Military Mission that GHQ attached to the Portuguese, and the CEP's chief of staff, Major Roberto Baptista, fought to keep it at arm's length. Its head, Lieutenant Colonel C. A. Ker, complained that by the terms of the convention there should be no more British officers attached to the Portuguese.1 source1 source

In France the Portuguese were issued Lee-Enfield rifles, Lewis and Vickers machine guns and British helmets, and trained in trench and gas warfare. They entered the line a step at a time: a company spent about two weeks inside a British battalion, then whole battalions joined British brigades, then brigades joined British divisions. The first Portuguese soldier killed in Flanders, António Curado of Infantry Battalion 28, died on 4 April 1917.4 sources4 sources

Their sector lay on flat, waterlogged ground between Armentières and Béthune, around Neuve-Chapelle, Ferme du Bois and Fauquissart, about 12 to 14 kilometres long. Water lay so close under the surface that the trenches could rarely be dug more than half a metre deep. Most were breastworks of sandbags built up above the plain, which rain and shellfire kept knocking down.3 sources3 sources

The men lived in mud. They wore rubber boots that reached the hips, and against the cold they were given sheepskin jackets and leggings like a shepherd's, until lice made the sheepskins unwearable. By Fraga's count, between April 1917 and early April 1918 there were eleven trench raids on the Portuguese lines, eight of them German, and some 20 smaller clashes. Together they cost the CEP 764 casualties, about 200 of them prisoners.2 sources2 sources

Washing was a problem of its own. General Manuel Gomes da Costa, who sailed with the first transport and commanded the 1st Division, later wrote that it was not the custom in the Portuguese army for soldiers to wash, and that the CEP had to learn bath-houses and laundries from the British.1 source1 source

Seventeen convoys carried the corps to France, the last in October 1917. A tally on the Momentos de História site, quoted by RTP, counts 59,388 men sent by 28 October. In November the 2nd Division, under General José Augusto Simas Machado, joined the 1st in the line, and the CEP became an army corps under Tamagnini, answering to the British First Army.5 sources5 sources

The lifeline was shipping, and it was British. By the late spring of 1917 Britain was pulling out the ships it had lent, and Norton de Matos had to go to London to keep them. From October 1917 only Portuguese ships carried troops, and only two Portuguese transports, the Pedro Nunes and the Gil Eanes, ran regularly to France.3 sources3 sources

On 5 December 1917 Sidónio Pais seized power in Lisbon. Eager to avoid sending more troops, before the year was out he accepted a British plan, rejected by Norton de Matos that September, to keep only one division in the line. By Fraga's account no more reinforcements reached the CEP after December. Officers who went home on leave were allowed to stay. Simas Machado, the 2nd Division's commander, went to Lisbon in February 1918 and did not come back.5 sources5 sources

The men expected to be relieved after a year, as troops in Africa were. Instead they stayed. Units ran short of officers, sickness thinned the ranks, and by early April 1918, Lopes writes, the troops' physical endurance had been exceeded. On 4 April 1918 men of three battalions of the 1st Division, from Leiria, Coimbra and Aveiro, refused to go back into the front line at Ferme du Bois.2 sources2 sources

In early April the British took the 1st Division out of the line. The 2nd, now under Gomes da Costa and attached to Haking's XI Corps, was left alone to hold the whole sector until its own relief, due on the night of 9 to 10 April. Portuguese accounts give Haking's orders as to die on Line B, the second of its trench lines, and hold it to the last man. Lopes dates them to 7 April.4 sources4 sources

The German bombardment began shortly after four in the morning, part of Operation Georgette, the second blow of Ludendorff's spring offensive. Some 1,500 guns fired on a front of about 15 kilometres, with gas. In thick fog, between 8 and 8.45 depending on the account, eight German infantry divisions under General Ferdinand von Quast came across no man's land, aiming at the joins between the Portuguese and the British 40th and 55th Divisions on either side.3 sources3 sources

By the end of the morning the Portuguese sector had ceased to exist. Pockets of men held out until their ammunition ran out.2 sources2 sources

Among them was Private Aníbal Milhais, a farm labourer from Murça, in Trás-os-Montes, who covered the retreat of Portuguese and British soldiers with his Lewis gun and wandered behind the lines for days with only a packet of sugared almonds. He was given the Tower and Sword, Portugal's highest military decoration, and a nickname from his commander's pun: “Tu és Milhais, mas vales milhões” (“You are Milhais, but you are worth millions”). He is still remembered as Soldado Milhões.2 sources2 sources

Most of the losses were prisoners. The Revista Militar gives 398 dead and 6,585 prisoners, and the Assembleia da República gives the same figures, citing Fraga (2015). Carlos Lopes, also citing Fraga, gives 614 dead (30 officers and 584 sergeants and men) and the same number of prisoners, many of them wounded, out of about 7,199 men lost between 9 and 12 April. Nobody knows how many were wounded, because both armies collected them.3 sources3 sources

The CEP never fought again as a corps. The British spread the survivors and the 1st Division among their own divisions as labourers, digging and repairing rear defences, and split up the artillery. There were serious mutinies, among them one at Croix Marmuse on 15 October 1918. General Tomás Garcia Rosado replaced Tamagnini on 24 August 1918, and only then did a real effort to rebuild Portuguese combat units begin.6 sources6 sources

Fraga credits a group of officers, among them Augusto Casimiro and Hélder Ribeiro, with getting Garcia Rosado leave to reorganise some units in October. Only three battalions were made ready, parcelled out among British brigades. They were in the line when the armistice came on 11 November 1918.4 sources4 sources

La Lys became the date Portugal remembers. On 9 April 1921, declared a national holiday, two unknown soldiers, one from Flanders and one from Africa, were carried through Lisbon and taken to Leiria. The next day they reached the monastery of Batalha, built by João I after the victory of Aljubarrota, and were laid in its chapter house.1 source1 source

The memory was political from the start. On the sixth anniversary, in 1924, the deputy Carlos Olavo, a veteran of Flanders, called the abandonment of the troops “a crime without a name”. The prime minister, Álvaro de Castro, refused to call the battle a disaster. The Liga dos Combatentes, founded in 1922, still marks 9 April and the armistice every year.2 sources2 sources

In France, the Portuguese military cemetery at Richebourg holds 1,831 Portuguese soldiers, 238 of them unknown, brought there between 1924 and 1938. In nearby La Couture a memorial by the sculptor António Teixeira Lopes was unveiled on 10 November 1928. The names of 2,266 Portuguese are among those on the ring memorial at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.1 source1 source

Each April the cemetery, the chapel of Our Lady of Fátima opposite it and the La Couture memorial host a ceremony for the battle. Historians still argue over how many died on 9 April and who was to blame. What the Portuguese had insisted on in 1917, an army corps of their own in a Portuguese sector, counted for little after that morning.3 sources3 sources