After the double-crosses and triple crosses and general chaos of the second of Jemahl Evans’ Blandford Candy books, Of Blood Exhausted is a relief. Even I could follow (most of) the plot. Evil foreigners are planning to assassinate Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, who is visiting London in the hope (not totally absurd) that he might be offered the throne if Charles is deposed. His death, Evans tells us in an impressively succinct summary, “could drive a wedge between the Protestant states, and perhaps even tip the Dutch provinces into active war against the English Parliament.” Candy’s mission is to protect the Elector.
A French agent is also on a mission to protect Karl Ludwig, for reasons that are explained somewhat less succinctly. You can hardly blame Evans for that – it’s related to a whole series of alliances in Europe and he does well to explain it all. It is, though, an example of one of the many instances where Evans the writer loses out to Evans the historian, which is a shame, because Evans the writer can tell a very good tale. Anyway, the history lesson out of the way, we can concentrate on the fact that the Frenchman is d’Artagnan. Yes, that d’Artagnan. It turns out that the d’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers was a real person and that he did indeed spend time in England during the Civil War, though his adventures here are wholly fictional.
D’Artagnan is very French and witty. Sadly his wit suffers from the fact that Evans insists on translating every single word he says. Evans is a huge fan of footnotes (there are 76 in this book) but the one time footnotes would be more than justified he insists on putting everything in parentheses in the text. Even with this handicap, d’Artagnan is still much more witty than poor Blandford Candy who is regularly and amusingly shown up, but the two of them work together to track down the assassin who is duly killed. The Elector’s life is saved, d’Artagnan returns to France and Blandford Candy can go back to womanising without the Frenchman’s insufferable competition.
This relatively straightforward plot allows for an enormous amount of detail about the Civil War – the battles, and the politics that underlay them. Evans knows his period and makes as much sense of the history as anybody else I’ve read. The Civil War was messy and complicated and the Blandford Candy books are as good a way to get to know it as any. There’s an enormous amount of detail of daily life, lovingly researched (see those 76 footnotes) and brought vividly to life. It’s not as easy to read as, say, Deborah Swift, but then her adventures in Restoration England are painted on a much smaller canvas. She even presents Pepys as husband and man-about-town first and as an important civil servant at the Admiralty second. Evans is dealing with high policy, his book peopled with key political figures of the period who spend much of their time talking about the big policy issues of the day.
By the end of the story, the war is over. Charles is still alive, but his armies no longer threaten Parliament. That would mark a natural finish to the book, but Evans obviously has more plans for Blandford Candy who is about to build a new life for himself in America. Sadly his adventures between the natural end of the book and finally boarding the ship that will cross the Atlantic reminded me of the coda to Lord of the Rings as we wait what seems like forever for that ship to arrive and our hero to finally embark for the west. It’s a shame, because the last impressions the book leaves you with are in no way a fair reflection of the excellent quality of the rest of it.
After exploring the Great Redoubt and a quick walk around Torres Vedras castle in the evening, we set off the next day to see Fort São Vicente (often referred to as Fort San Vicente). This fort was the strongest of all the forts of the Lines and has been heavily, but sympathetically, restored with stonework secured by concrete. A small museum has been built in the hermitage that stood on the site before the fort was constructed and which remained while it was a military fortification (though without a hermit).
Fort San Vicente is made up of three separate redoubts connected to form a single fort. You can see the three redoubts and the large central area in this aerial photo.
The place is huge. Besides the hermitage it contains three windmills used, yet again, as munitions stores. There was also another semaphore in the chain that ran the whole length of the lines.
Two of the (restored) windmills that were used as ammunition bunkers
There was no way that I could capture the size of the place in a single photograph, so I videoed it as I walked around. The video runs 13 minutes! If you’d like to watch it, it’s here.
It’s not a professional production. There’s a lot of wind noise and the focus slips at one point (don’t worry, it comes back) but you do get to see the whole fort, together with my commentary for what it’s worth. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, it’s probably worth looking at.
Fort San Vicente positively bristled with artillery. This is just part of one of the redoubts.
The semaphore mast was in the same redoubt.
The British used a ball semaphore, adapted from the one used by the Navy. They had seamen in the forts to operate them until, in a move that seems very 21st century, the Navy withdrew its men on the grounds that Wellington refused to pay for them from Army funds. They were then replaced with Portuguese veterans from the Corpo Telegraphico, who were trained to operate the British system.
The horizontal arms on the mast standing there today are not really long enough. When this was rigged up and working the arm would have stretched out as far as the five posts at the bottom. Ropes would have run from the arm to each of the five posts and balls mounted on these ropes would have carried the message. A model in the museum at the fort shows how it would have been set up.
The shorter arms on the modern reproduction are probably wise. There were problems with the original masts which could not bear the weight of the arms and which had to be replaced.
The system allows the masts to transmit one number at a time from one to 999. Each number corresponded to a word in a codebook enabling vital military messages to be transmitted very quickly. Anybody could see the signals but without the codebook they were meaningless.
Restoration in this fort means that the firestep is clearly visible. Here Tammy (probably not that much shorter than a typical infantryman of the time) demonstrates its use. There are no gun emplacements on this stretch of wall as it faces into the rest of the fort. If troops are fighting here, the enemy has already breached the centre of the fort and will be at very close range.
The presence of the firestep and the gated entrance (part of which you can see in the foreground) reflects the fact that each of the redoubts was viewed as a separate fortification with its own garrison. In total there were 2,200 troops – mainly Portuguese – garrisoning the three redoubts. Note that there was no barracks accommodation here. Most of the men probably slept on the ground with only their greatcoats for protection from the weather.
As at the Great Redoubt there were other, smaller, forts that protected the flanks of Fort San Vicente. We visited one nearby, Olheiros Fort. This was a pretty basic affair with a garrison of only 180 men. Again, it was built around a windmill, but here it was simply a more or less rectangular shape with a mere seven cannon. The stone faced ditch, though restored, seems to have held up pretty well. Its main claim to fame is that it is the most northerly of the Torres Vedras forts.
That’s all we had time for for the Lines of Torres Vedras. If you’d like to see more, do have a look at the video where I talk about some of the details as well.
When we left Olheiros Fort we headed for Lisbon, which I will be writing about later. Next week, though, as a break from the Peninsular War we’ll have a guest post from Penny Hampson who will be writing about Regency fiction, comparing more modern authors with the mother of them all: Jane Austen.
Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras
Fort São Vicente features in the latest of the Burke books. The forts were built in great secrecy and in Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras, Burke is in Lisbon to put an end to a French spy ring that is on the verge of discovering Wellington’s plans.
Exactly a year ago I reviewed The Darkness byRagner Jonasson. The publishers have very kindly sent me a copy of his next book, The Island, which will be published next week.
The main character is Hulda Gunnarson, who [SPOILER IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE DARKNESS] died in the first book. It’s a bit disconcerting and it took me a while to appreciate that I was reading a prequel. I appreciated the chance to learn more about Hulda, though, as I had found her a fascinating character in The Darkness.
In many ways The Island is more a story about Hulda than it is a detective story. The ‘whodunnit’ element is quite thin, though it does hold together as a mystery and the characters are interesting enough to make the read feel worthwhile. It’s the little details of characterisation that I love about Jonasson’s writing. Here he is writing about a couple who are such minor characters that they never appear in the story again, but this catches exactly the mood of so many people who are just beginning to realise that their youth is behind them.
In the end, they set off home a little earlier than planned, just after eleven. The three-course dinner was over by then, and, to be honest, it had been a bit underwhelming. The main course, which was lamb, had been bland at best and, after dinner, people had piled on to the crowded dance floor. To begin with, the DJ had played popular oldies, but then he moved on to more recent chart hits, which weren’t really the couple’s sort of thing, although they still liked to think of themselves as young. After all, they weren’t middle-aged yet.
The eye for character and telling details of daily life is a joy, but it can get in the way of the story, making for a somewhat “bitty” narrative. A trip Hulda makes to the USA in an attempt to track down her father, in particular, is completely detached from the rest of the story. It’s almost as if Jonasson really wants to write a literary novel about contemporary life in Iceland but has been forced by commercial pressure to write a detective story. The result is almost two separate books that don’t quite make a cohesive whole.
The Island is more mainstream than the full-on Scandi-noir of The Darkness. It centres on the investigation of a single murder in the Icelandic version of a classic country house mystery: four people spend a weekend on an isolated island and one is killed. The murderer has to be one of the remaining three. After the Grand Guignol of The Darkness I was amused by the constant reassurance that murder is extremely unusual in Iceland. Perhaps after The Darkness increased Iceland’s murder rate by several hundred percent the Reykjavik tourist board pressured Jonasson to ease off this time.
Flawed as it is, I enjoyed reading The Island. Jonasson has an easy style that kept me up late reading on and I enjoyed learning more about Hulda. It isn’t one for hard-core fans of detective fiction, but it’s definitely worth a look if you want character-driven stories in unfamiliar settings.
Although the original idea of our trip to Spain and Portugal was to see Talavera I was most excited about the idea of seeing Wellington’s Lines of Torres Vedras.
When Wellington took command of the British forces in Portugal in 1809 he was very aware that this was Britain’s only field army facing Napoleon’s troops. At the beginning of that year the army, then under the command of Sir John Moore, had been driven to retreat by the French. The retreat to Corunna was a disaster for the British who came close to losing their army. Thanks to victory in the battle of Corunna, Moore was able to evacuate his troops by sea, but it was a close-run thing. Wellington was determined that if he found himself retreating from superior French forces he would have a secure base that he could withdraw on.
Wellington decided that if his forces had to be evacuated, they would be evacuated from the banks of the Tagus. Lisbon, the landing point for British troops, would also be the base to which he could withdraw.
Portugal then (as now) had a small population. Wellington reckoned that the temporary loss of Portuguese territory was not a strategic problem provided that the army was preserved. In fact, he realised that letting the French occupy most of Portugal could provide a significant strategic advantage to the British. Wellington planned a scorched earth policy which would leave the French army, which famously lived off the land, without food or shelter in the Portuguese countryside while the civilian population and the Anglo Portuguese army sheltered safely in Lisbon.
The French could deploy more troops on the Peninsula that the British, so Wellington knew that he was vulnerable if he found himself defending Lisbon in a conventional siege. He therefore planned a series of defensive works that he was confident the French would be unable to breach. These defensive works became known as the Lines of Torres Vedras, named after the town of Torres Vedras which lay at the centre of the lines.
The key to Wellington’s defensive strategy was that Lisbon is built on a peninsula.
The British controlled the sea and hence also the estuary of the Tagus. The French would therefore have to attack from the North.
Wellington’s plan was to build a line of forts on the mountainous countryside around Torres Vedras. The line ran from the Atlantic to the Tagus. Gunboats on the Tagus could deny the French access to the flat land near the river so they were unable to bypass the defensive line.
The line was not a continuous wall, like the Maginot Line. Instead it relied on a series of forts (technically redoubts), which enabled Wellington to lay down heavy artillery fire on the limited number of passes over the mountains. Most of the forts were small and would not have held for long against a determined attack, but each fort was supported by other forts on either side. Behind the lines Wellington built roads which enabled him to move reinforcements rapidly to any area where the French forces posed an immediate threat. Eventually (by 1812) there were 152 redoubts in the lines.
It was a stupendous feat of military engineering and I really wanted to see it.
The hills in the distance are part of the natural defences
While we had struggled to find Peninsular War sites in Spain, the Portuguese see the lines of Torres Vedras both as a source of national pride and a valuable way of drawing in tourists, so the route was well signposted, though after several miles of steadily steeper and narrower roads my long-suffering wife did wonder if we were lost. No, I assured her, the forts would be at the very top of the hills. And there, indeed, was the first of the redoubts that we found: the Forte Novo or New Fort.
It was one of the smaller forts. Like many of them it was built around a windmill that served as an ammunition bunker for the powder that would supply the five cannon that were placed there. After 200 years it was in impressively good condition. Like all the forts, it was defended by a ditch a two earth ramparts. This was one of the ports where the earth was faced with stone. Although this fort seems not to have had much (if anything) in the way of restoration work, the ditch and the earthworks inside are still impressive.
Looking down from the fort, you can see how the natural lie of the land made it an easily defensible position because of the slope that an attacker would have to climb up, while its situation enabled it to control the road below. This was one of the later redoubts. Some of the earlier ones were situated on such steep elevations that their cannon were virtually useless because they could not be depressed enough for them not to overshoot the path at the bottom of the hill.
Forte Novo was one of the smaller redoubts that provided flank protection to one of the biggest redoubts, the Great Redoubt at Sobral. When Wellington was stationed at his headquarters at Pero Negro he would ride to the Great Redoubt every morning as its location gave him an excellent view of any approaching enemy.
This is the military road that he used.
The Great Redoubt was, as its name suggests, large. It had 27 cannon and was garrisoned by 1,590 men. The photo below shows only a section of the fort with the remains of the Governor’s House clearly visible. The works on the right of the picture are an ammunition store as are those you can just see on the left.
The picture was taken from the site of the semaphore mast. The Grand Redoubt was part of the chain of semaphore masts which allowed messages to be sent from one end of the lines to the other, making it an especially useful point from which Wellington could make his plans for facing the French, had the French turned up.
As my son is an Ammunition Technical Officer with the British Army I was particularly interested in the munitions stores. There were several different designs. Not all were underground (I’ve already mentioned that windmills were often converted for this purpose) but the ones at the Grand Redoubt seem to have been. This one had a dog’s leg entrance, protecting against a direct hit passing in through the door.
This has similar precautions at the entrance but the design is otherwise quite different. It takes advantage of the fall in the ground to make something a lot deeper. It’s typical of the way these forts were designed that each one is different, reflecting the topography of the area where it is built.
This storage bunker it is particularly interesting because you can see how the stonework allowed for a wooden floor to be fitted so that powder was not damaged by damp rising from the ground.
There were half a dozen smaller forts around the Great Redoubt. We just had time to visit one more: Simplicio Fort. This had just six cannon and a garrison of 300 men. It’s an interesting contrast with the Great Redoubt because while there has been some conservation work at the Great Redoubt (noticeably stabilising the stone facings with concrete), Simplicio Fort seems to have been left pretty much alone, yet it the basic structure is still clear.
The ditch here does not appear to have been stone-faced. The stonework is the remains of another ammunition store.
As you can see from the shadows, we had spent hours exploring the Great Redoubt and the area around it. It was time to brave the mountain roads again and press on. The next day we were going to visit the biggest of the fortifications, Fort San Vicente, just above Torres Vedras which gave the lines their name. That’s a story for next week’s blog.
Thank you
Thanks to Robert Pocock of Campaigns and Culture for planning our trip for us. Campaigns and Culture organises tours of European battle sites and more. Robert is now busy planning future tours to the Peninsula with the possibility of bespoke tours before that if you want to hire his services privately. You can find details of his business at www.campaignsandculture.com.
Robert is a well-regarded expert on the Napoleonic Wars with a wider interest in military history that means he can provide significant insight into battlefields from Ramilies to Dunkirk. If you are interested in a trip like ours and don’t want to take your chances driving on some of the ‘interesting’ roads we found ourselves travelling on, I do recommend that you get in touch with Robert.
My publishers, Endeavour Media, are running a promotion on Sally Spencer’s books. I started reading her because of her Inspector Blackstone mystery series set in Victorian London, but she also writes contemporary crime fiction. As part of the promotion, Endeavour are giving away one of her contemporary thrillers, The Vital Chain, so this seemed a good time to post a review of one of her other contemporary stories that I wrote a couple of years back.
Spencer is British and most of the stories I’ve read are set in England (as is The Vital Chain) but Violation is firmly established somewhere in the American rustbelt. Our hero (and first person narrator), Mike Kaleta, is an East Coast liberal who has moved to this tiny town where his wife’s father is the mayor. His marriage, though, has collapsed and he is now a liberal fish out of water in a police department staffed largely by thugs and headed up by an idiot. The only exception is Caroline Williams. Rule-bound and officious as she is, the only woman on the detective force is, inevitably, attractive.
Kaleta and Williams are set to work together to solve a series of paedophile sexual assaults. I must admit to finding the detail of some of these assaults quite unpleasant and I’m not sure how suitable this kind of crime is for what is, essentially, a lightweight novel. Still, the seriousness of the crime does provide some grist to what might otherwise be an overly predictable tale of corrupt officials, dirty cops and a heroic committed crime busting team. At first I thought the story, which pulls up every cliché of hard-boiled crime fiction, far too predictable. (Kaleta’s romance with Williams is inevitable from the moment that he tells us how much he hates her whilst trying to guess what her legs look like under her uniform.) I suspect Spencer would say that she was aiming for homage rather than rip-off and eventually I decided that she does pull this off. She’s not Raymond Chandler but her style has wit and a hard-boiled humour. Turning down a courtesy blow-job from the town whore, Kaleta says, “I hate to look a gift-mouth in the horse.” In a story-so-far aside he tells the reader, “Only a couple of days ago I forced two cops off a cliff, and now I’ve sunk to lying. By tomorrow I’ll probably be stealing from the cookie jar.” More importantly, the prose bowls along, carrying the reader with it. As the plot develops it becomes a little less predictable than you might have expected, although anyone paying attention will have spotted the evil villain more or less when they first appear with “Evil Villain” stamped across their forehead. Still, the twist at the end is worth waiting for and I found that, for all my reservations, I had genuinely enjoyed the read. I’ll probably read another (for a sequel is as predictable as Kaleta’s enthusiasm for bourbon).
