Battle of Oporto 1809 by Oliver Hayes

Author:Oliver Hayes [Hayes, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bretwalda Books
Published: 2013-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

A French general with his aide behind him. Staff officers usually wore uniforms festooned with gold or silver braid to show their senior status.

If the provision of staff work was haphazard, the role of the engineers was better understood. All armies had specialist engineering officers who were not part of the regimental system but operated outside that structure. They were assigned to an army or commander as and when needed. These officers were trained primarily in building and overcoming fortifications. It was engineers who designed and supervised the building of city walls and of forts, and it was engineers who were responsible for laying siege to those of the enemy. For labour the engineering officers might have access to the infantry of the army or they might hire local civilian workmen.

Within each unit there were also men - usually termed pioneers - trained in low level engineering works. These men were equipped with axes, shovels and the like and in some armies had distinctive features to their uniforms. They marched at the head of a regiment on the move and were tasked with clearing fallen trees, rolling boulders out the way and similarly clearing the way for the men following them. The pioneers were sometimes called upon to undertake more serious tasks such as improving fords or building bridges, but usually this was done only under the supervision of an engineering officer.

Another form of specialist that was used by all European armies at this date, though he would unrecognisable to his modern counterpart, was the intelligence officer. Traditionally an army commander was most interested in the opposing army and its commander. He wanted to know its strength, composition and where it was going. He wanted to know if his opposite number was cautious or aggressive, confident or indecisive. A lot of this information could be gained from the reports of the light infantry, but merchants and neutrals arriving from enemy lands would also be questioned, as would any deserters who came in. The use of actual spies was relatively rare, but by the time of the Peninsular War was growing fast. The fact that the Napoleonic Wars were often as much about opposing ideas of government as they were about nationality meant that idealists on either side could work against their own country.

In the early days of the Peninsular War the French had a number of sympathisers in Spain, and rather less in Portugal. These were people who supported the ideals of the French Revolution - the abolition of privilege based on birth, the education of the masses and support to commerce and industry. In the early years they saw the French occupation as an opportunity to remake Spanish society in a new, more enlightened form. As the war dragged on and French greed and objectives became clearer the numbers of civilians willing to aid the French by passing on information about Spanish, Portuguese and British armies dwindled.

For those fighting the French the opposite occurred. The longer the war went

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.