CHAPTER III
LADY O'MOY
Across the frontier in the northwest was gathering the third army
of invasion, some sixty thousand strong, commanded by Marshal
Massena, Prince of Esslingen, the most skilful and fortunate of all
Napoleon's generals, a leader who, because he had never known defeat,
had come to be surnamed by his Emperor "the dear child of Victory."
Wellington, at the head of a British force of little more than one
third of the French host, watched and waited, maturing his stupendous
strategic plan, which those in whose interests it had been conceived
had done so much to thwart. That plan was inspired by and based
upon the Emperor's maxim that war should support itself; that an
army on the march must not be hampered and immobilised by its
commissariat, but that it must draw its supplies from the country
it is invading; that it must, in short, live upon that country.
Behind the British army and immediately to the north of Lisbon, in
an arc some thirty miles long, following the inflection of the hills
from the sea at the mouth of the Zizandre to the broad waters of the
Tagus at Alhandra, the lines of Torres Vedras were being constructed
under the direction of Colonel Fletcher and this so secretly and
with such careful measures as to remain unknown to British and
Portuguese alike.
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