Almeida, having fallen prematurely to the French due to a lucky accident, [1] Massena, on 11th September issued an operational order for the Army of Portugal to start the next phase of their campaign: the invasion of Portugal.

Part of the force were to advance through Coimbra and Santa Comba Mo. Reynier's and Ney's corps, with the artillery park, escorted by Montbrun's cavalry were to go to Viseu via a more northerly route through Pinhel and Trancoso. J-J Pelet, Massena's senior adviser and principal ADC was not happy about this choice of route, writing:

'I was also afraid that the Mondego would rise and fluctuate ... yet what could we do to surmount such obstacles when we could not even predict marches of only four or five leagues on the road to Trancoso. Every day we were supposed to leave, and each day brought us new delays. [2]

Bad Road

Why did Massena choose such an extraordinarily bad road for his troops?

Colonel Delagarve in his memoirs suggested that:

The Serra de Alcoba route could throw up great difficulties for the Army's passage. Apart from that, the enemy could contest our crossing the Mondego and defend the Coimbra heights if necessary, sacrificing the town to the realistic situation. On the other hand, the road following the right bank offered a much greater advantage because we were able en route to go through two rich and important towns, Viseu and Coimbra ... which would be ideal places to set up magazines and hospitals. [3]

When the French route became clear, Wellington wrote gleefully to Charles Stuart in Lisbon, and two days later to Lord Liverpool:

There are many bad roads in Portugal, but the enemy has decidedly taken the worst in the whole kingdom.

Colonel Noel, in his memoirs, describes the route after Trancoso as being all mountain and rock with the nearest thing resembling a road being a stony, narrow and dangerous track; dangerous because of Portuguese guerilla-style tactics of mounting surprise attacks, especially, when, due to the appalling quality of the roads, the artillery park got into difficulties. To keep the gun carriages moving, the gunners had to repair the roads before the convoy could move forward. The caissons were pulled by undernourished horses which did not help matters. The group got lost, due to the out of date and hopelessly inadequate Lopez maps [4] which misplaced some towns, missed out a number of roads that actually existed and put in others that did not.

This problem was exacerbated by there were no local guides to fill the gap as the local population was very hostile to the invaders. Massena's problems were compounded by 30 Portuguese collaborators on his staff who appeared to have no detailed knowledge of the area, and whose knowledge of the French language was so bad that they were of little help to their invaders. The main part of the convoy arrived at Viseu on the 19th September: the artillery park arrived two days later. These were not the only problems.

He hoped to replenish his resources, when he reached Viseu but this town of 9,000 people had been deserted by the population, and few resources were left. Not only that, but a French food convoy, a day's march from the town, did not arrive as expected, as it had been attacked by Trant and his partisans.

Massena's Mistress: Mme Leberton

Marbot, one of Massena's fourteen ADCs, suggests, mischievously, that a possible reason for the delay in starting the battle of Bussaco was that safe accommodation had to be found for Mme Leberton, Massena's mistress, who rejoined him, having been holed up in Salamanca during the Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida sieges. To keep her out of harm's way during the battle of Bussaco, Massena's headquarters were at Mortagoa, two hours hard riding time from the battlefield.

Massena was not a happy man at this stage. He wrote a whining despatch to Berthier on the 22nd September saying that:

It is impossible to find worse roads than these; they bristle with rocks; the guns and train have suffered severely and I must wait for them. I must leave them two days at Viseu when they come in, to rest themselves, while I resume my march [to Bussaco] where (as I am informed) I shall find the Anglo Portuguese [army] concentrated.

He continued in desperation -

Sire, all marches are across a desert; not a soul is to be seen anywhere: everything is abandoned . . . we cannot even find a guide.

Assuming that this despatch would reach the Emperor, [5] he added, 'The soldiers are satisfied and burn for the moment when they shall meet the enemy.' [6]

To say that the soldiers were 'satisfied' was misleading. Because of the unscheduled delays, Massena had exhausted half the rations he had brought with him from Almeida before the start of the battle. The shortage, was made worse by Wellington's scorched earth policy which meant that there was only the occasional field of potatoes and vineyards to make good this deficit and so the French were unable to live off the land. Because of all the problems, the convoy did not start arriving at Viseu until the 19th September, two days ahead of its artillery park.

Wellington's Defense

Wellington, with time on his side, courtesy of Massena, was able to move his headquarters to the Convent on the Bussaco ridge on the 21st September where he was to remain for the next seven days. On the 22nd, he ordered Leith's and Hill's divisions to prepare to cross the Mondego in order to join the rest of the army on the right bank. He had by this time made the historic decision that the Bussaco ridge was the ideal place from whence to tempt the enemy to give battle.

The Bussaco ridge is named after the Convent on one of its peaks. It is a single continuous fine of heights which at the time of the battle would have been covered with heather and furze, [7] interspersed with many hunks of red and grey granite, extending to the river Mondego on its right, and to the main chain of the Serra de Alcoba on its left. It is irregular in height, intersected at its lowest point by the San Antonio de Cantara road to Palheiros. The other main intersection is the road close to the convent running from Celorico to Coimbra.

Reconnaissance

On the 26th, Massena sent Ney on a reconnaissance mission to find out how many English and Portuguese troops he would have to face. Wellington, using his reverse slopes tactics, was able to give the impression that only a small rearguard was left on the heights, presumably to give the impressio* that the rest of his army were on their way to the Atlantic ports prior to embarkation.

On the evening of the 26th, the day before the battle, Massena held a meeting with his senior officers at which Reynier, and General Lazsowski, the Polish commander of the engineers, favoured Massena's idea of a frontal attack. Ney, Junot, Fririon, Massena's Chief of Staff, and Eble, his artillery commander, were against the idea.

Massena turned on them, saying: You come from the old army of the Rhine, you like manoeuvring; but it is the first time that Wellington seems ready to give battle, and I want you to profit by the opportunity. [8]

Ney considered that they should have already assaulted the heights on that same day when Wellington would have been deprived of some of the time advantage he had enjoyed up till then. Ney considered that to have waited until the 27th to take on the enemy was a missed opportunity. In any case, he argued, rather than attack the enemy on the Bussaco heights, they would do better to strike at Oporto which was defended only by militia.

Massena disagreed: the Emperor had ordered him to march on Lisbon not Oporto. [9] Ney's suggestion would, he said, have prolonged the war, not shortened it. In any case, Wellington would probably have been able to withstand such a move. Poor Ney! The antipathy between him and Massena was so strong that there was no chance of his idea, however sound, even with the support of most of his senior colleagues, being adopted at any stage. Koch, in "La Vie de Massena" reckons that Massena's decision to attack the heights was to assert his authority over his dissident senior commanders.

The night before the battle, Massena retired for the night to Mortagoa, to his headquarters, ten miles from the battlefield, for the night, some say to be with Mine Leherton, his mistress. Wellington, Grattan tells us, slept among his troops which he says had a terrific effect on morale. [10]

He describes the atmosphere as calm but loaded with anticipation.

Each man [slept] with his firelock in his grasp at his post. There were no fires, and the death-like stillness that reigned throughout the line was only interrupted by the occasional challenge of an advanced sentry, or a random shot, fired at an imaginary foe.

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