the inhabitants of the district. He meant to leave nothing behind him but a desert. The French reached Coimbra on October 1, with the provisions intended to last them till they reached Lisbon already exhausted. On October 4 Massena renewed his pursuit of Wellington. Then Trant, commanding an independent force of Portuguese, performed what Napier calls "the most daring and hardy enterprise executed by any partisan during the whole war." He leaped upon Coimbra the third day after Massena had left it, captured the Frenchman's depots and hospitals, and took nearly 5000 prisoners, wounded and unwounded, amongst them a marine company of the Imperial Guards. And while Massena's tail, so to speak, was thus being roughly trampled on, his leading columns came in sight of the armed and frowning hills of Torres Vedras, an impregnable barrier behind which Wellington's army had vanished. Massena had not so much as heard of the existence of these famous lines until within two days' march of them!

The keen forecasting intellect of Wellington had planned these great defences more than a year before. A memorandum addressed to Colonel Fletcher, his chief engineer officer, dated October 20, 1809— almost exactly a year to a day before these great defences brought Massena's columns to a halt-gave minute orders for the construction of the lines. But the conception must have taken shape in Wellington's brain long before that date.

Lisbon stands at the tip of a long peninsula formed by the Atlantic on one flank and the Tagus, there a navigable river, on the other. Across this peninsula two successive lines of rugged hills-the farthest only 27 miles from Lisbon-stretch from the sea to the river. Wellington turned these into concentric lines of defence; with a third on the very tip of the peninsula, and intended to cover the actual embarkation of the British forces, if they were driven to that step. The outer line of the defence, a broken irregular curve of hills 29 miles in length, stretches from Alhandra on the Tagus to the mouth of the river Zizandre on the coast. The second line, some eight miles to the rear of the first, is 24 miles long, and reaches from Quintella on the Tagus to where the St. Lorenzo flows into the Atlantic. These hills are pierced only by narrow ravines, and, with their tangled defiles and crescent-like formation, lent themselves readily to defensive works. The second line in Wellington's original plan was that which he intended to hold, the first line was merely to break the impact of Massena's rush. But under the incessant toil of the English engineers the defences of even the outer line became so formidable that Wellington determined to hold it, having the second line to fall back upon if necessary.

The lines of Torres Vedras were probably the most formidable known in the history of war. Two ranges of mountains were, in a word, wrought into a stupen

dous and impregnable citadel. In scale they were, says Napier, "more in keeping with ancient than modern military labours;" but they were constructed with a science unknown to ancient war. Thus on the first line no less than 69 works of different descriptions, mounting 319 guns, had been erected. Across one ravine which pierced the range a loose stone wall 16 feet thick and 40 feet high was raised. A double line of abattis formed of full-grown oaks and chestnuts guarded another ravine. The crests of the hills were scarped for miles, yielding a perpendicular face impossible to be climbed. Rivers were dammed, turning whole valleys into marshes; roads were broken up; bridges were mined. Rifle-trenches scored the flanks of the hills; batteries frowned from their crest. High over this mighty tangle of armed hills rose the summit of Soccorra. The lines, when completed, consisted of 152 distinct works, armed with 534 guns, providing accommodation for a garrison of 34,000 men.

Wellington's plan was to man the works themselves largely with Portuguese, keeping his English divisions in hand as a movable force, so as to crush the head of any French column if, perchance, it struggled through the murderous cross-fire of the batteries on the hills that guarded every ravine. Roads were made on the hill-crest, so that the troops could march quickly to any threatened point; and a line of signalstations, manned by sailors from the fleet, ran from

hilltop to hilltop, so that a message could be transmitted from the Atlantic to the Tagus in seven minutes. For more than a year these great works had been in course of construction. No less than 7000 peasants at one moment were at work upon them. The English engineers showed magnificent skill and energy in carrying out the design, and many soldiers who had technical knowledge were drawn from the British regiments and employed as overseers. So solidly were the works constructed, that many of them to-day, more than eighty years after the tide of battle broke and ebbed at their base, still stand, sharp-cut and solid. Wellington thus wrote in long-enduring characters the signature of his strong will and soldierly genius on the very hills of Portugal.

The scale and the scientific skill of these lines are perhaps less wonderful than the secrecy with which they were constructed. British newspapers were as indiscreet and British gossip as active then as now; French spies were as enterprising. And it seems incredible that works which turned a hundred square miles of hills into a vast natural fortress could have been carried out with the noiselessness of a dream, and with a secrecy as of magic. But the fact remains, that not till Massena had reached Coimbra and was committed beyond recall to the march on Lisbon, did he learn the existence of the great barrier that made that march hopeless. Massena had trusted to the

VOL. III.