When the Commander-in-Chief saw the French army defiling across the mountains “he seemed uneasy,” according to one who watched him, “his countenance bore a fierce, angry expression, and, suddenly mounting his horse, he rode away without speaking.”
No attempt was made to attack the enemy, Wellington considering it more prudent to leave the ridge, cross the Mondego, and retreat towards Lisbon. This resolution was come to on the 28th September, and on the 1st October the last man of the rear-guard had evacuated the town. “Although I could not save Coimbra,” Wellington writes, “I have very little doubt of being able to hold this country against the force which has now attacked it.”
The place was immediately occupied by Masséna’s famished troops, who found it not entirely destitute of eatables, as seemed only too probable judging by previous experience, although much of the food had been destroyed by Wellington’s orders. They had merely to help themselves to what they could find, for most of the population had followed in the wake of the allied army. “The inhabitants of the country have fled from their houses universally,” the Commander-in-Chief writes to the Earl of Liverpool from Alcobaço on the 5th October, “carrying with them every thing they could take away which could be deemed useful to the enemy; and the habits of plunder which have been so long encouraged in the enemy’s army prevent them from deriving any general advantage from the little resource which the inhabitants may have been obliged to leave behind them.”
It is the straightforward utterance of a straightforward man. Wellington seldom indulged in picturesque language; he had neither the natural ability which commands a delicate choice of language nor the time for vivid diction. His mind was cast in a sterner mould; he craved for exactness, for cold, matter-of-fact calculations, for ungarnished essentials.
For graphic details we must turn to such an authority as Sir Charles Stewart, who writes with the fluency of a gifted war-correspondent permitted to ride with the officers and obtain a view of everything of importance. “Crowds of men, women, and children,” he says,“--of the sick, the aged, and the infirm, as well as of the robust and the young--covered the roads and the fields in every direction. Mothers might be seen with infants at their breasts hurrying towards the capital, and weeping as they went; old men, scarcely able to totter along, made way chiefly by the aid of their sons and daughters; whilst the whole wayside soon became strewed with bedding, blankets, and other species of household furniture, which the weary fugitives were unable to carry farther. During the retreat of Sir John Moore’s army numerous heartrending scenes were brought before us; for then, as now, the people, particularly in Galicia, fled at our approach; but they all returned sooner or later to their homes, nor ever dreamed of accumulating upon our line of march, or following our fortunes. The case was different here. Those who forsook their dwellings, forsook them under the persuasion that they should never behold them again; and the agony which such an apprehension appeared to excite among the majority exceeds any attempt at description.... It could not but occur to us that, though the devastating system must inevitably bear hard upon the French, the most serious evils would, in all probability, arise out of it, both to ourselves and our allies, from the famine and general distress which it threatened to bring upon a crowd so dense, shut up within the walls of a single city. At the moment there were few amongst us who seemed not disposed to view it with reprobation; because, whilst they condemned its apparent violation of every feeling of humanity and justice, they doubted the soundness of the policy in which it originated.”