204 Chapter Six
ficiencies of supply from the rear simply intensified the hostility of the
local population, whether in East Prussia, Spain, or Russia; and means
for increasing the flow from a distant rear by overland haulage were
lacking.
By contrast, the British expeditionary force in Portugal and Spain
(1808–12) relied largely upon supplies delivered by sea from Great
Britain. Administrative means for performing this feat had been de
veloped during the American War of Independence, and the effort in
1808–12 did not unduly strain British home resources. Moreover, in
the poverty-stricken Iberian landscapes, the British paid negotiated
prices to the local inhabitants for the goods and services (overland
transport above all) that they needed. This meant that the British had
preferential access to whatever the Spanish and Portuguese peasants
had to spare whenever the hostile armies approached one another
closely. Hence the French starved while British troops were more or
less adequately nourished during the critical confrontation outside
Lisbon in 1810–11 at Torres Vedras. The size of the French armies in
Spain (up to 250,000) was no compensation; on the contrary numbers
intensified their dilemma.
Spain, in short, remained a country of the Old Regime in many
senses; its open wheat fields and pastures accorded well with old-
fashioned British line tactics; and its poverty made a highly trained,
relatively small force of the sort Wellington led a match and more than
a match for the far more numerous French.^39
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 confronted almost exactly
the same difficulty. Earlier campaigns against the Russians in East
Prussian and Polish territory in 1807–8 had shown the French how
difficult it was to live off a country where marsh and forest occupied
far more acreage than grainfields did. Napoleon therefore made un
usually careful preparations to feed the Grande Armée from the rear;
but transport overland by cart was slow and expensive and restricted
the speed of march to a pace that Russian troops could easily match.
Moreover, the whole supply system broke down utterly during the
retreat from Moscow with the result that all but a few of the men who
had accompanied Napoleon died or were captured.^40
- The Spanish guerrillas, together with Spanish and Portuguese regular troops who
served under Wellington’s command, did much to supplement the action of the British
army. Without them, the old-fashioned tactics Wellington used so successfully would
perhaps not have won so many victories. On the Peninsular War see Charles W. C.
Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902–08).
- On Napoleon’s supply arrangements for 1812 see David G. Chandler, The Cam
paigns of Napoleon (New York, 1966), pp. 757–59.
