divisions from the Army of the North, giving him 6o,ooo men once more.
At this Wellington once more withdrew into the Portuguese mountains.
The year 1811 was one of mixed fortunes in the Peninsula. On the one
hand, Wellington had clearly asserted his military supremacy over the
French commanders by demonstrating how the massed French columns
could be defeated. His favourite device was to keep the bulk of his troops
concealed behind reverse slopes so that enemy artillery and skirmishers
could not get at them. This upset the calculations of French commanders
who would keep their troops in column until reaching the brow of the
defended hill, by which time it was too late to deploy. Raking volleys
from the British, sometimes from three sides at once, would obliterate the
head of the column and send survivors reeling back in confusion. Had
Napoleon taken the trouble to study the Spanish battles closely instead of
railing formulaically at his marshals for incompetence, he would have
seen that the fluidity, speed, mobility and sheer aggression of the French
column, which had overwhelmed opponent after opponent for ten years,
was beginning to fail and that his battle tactics should be rethought.
Wellington meanwhile, though never the military genius his support
ers claim, went from strength to strength. A thorough knowledge of his
enemy's methods meant that he was never psychologically unhinged, or
beaten before he began, as were so many allied commanders facing
French marshals. His remarkably effective methods were in fact as
predictable as Napoleon's came to be. Everything depended on an eye for
terrain and a clever choice of battlefield, which allowed him to use his
favourite method of concealing men behind reverse slopes, using riflemen
to dominate no-man's-land. Time and again the peninsular marshals fell
into the trap of sending their men to the summit of a ridge, only to be
met by the massed volleys of the 'long red wall', followed by the much
feared British bayonet charge.
If Wellington as a battle commander was predictable, his real claim to a
place in the universal military pantheon lay in his mastery of logistics.
The way he organized five invasion routes between Portugal and Spain,
ensuring a continuous commissariat system was masterly. His three-fold
supply line - by barge from Lisbon to intermediate depots, by ox-wagon
convoys to fo rward supply depots, and thence by divisional and
regimental mule-trains to the individual units at the front - was an object
lesson in how to organize a military campaign. As the great historian of
the Peninsular War, Sir John Fortescue, remarked: 'Wellington's supplies
were always hunting for his army; Joseph's army was always hunting for
his supplies.'
For all Wellington's talents, the British position in Spain was far from
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