Fires and a battle

Trying a different typeface today.

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Terrible fires are threatening expensive homes in Southern California. We called some friends there, who told us that the fire was about a mile away from their house. The firefighters are there, hundreds of them, trying to get the thing under control. We pray the weather will help keep the danger from spreading.

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The Battle of Buçaco

When driving through northen Portugal, stopping at a small town north of the university city of Coimbra on the way to the beautiful forest of Buçaco will be a treat. The town is called Mealhada, and it has one speciality that will appeal to connoisseurs of hearty Portuguese fare: leitão assado, roast suckling pig. Along the road that runs through the town are restaurants by the dozen with billboards advertising this local delicacy. Meals there tend to be gargantuan: heaping platters of leitão, seafood and rice, with the customary Portuguese accompaniments of green salad and batatas fritas (French fries), fresh-baked country rolls, and a chilled bottle of the fine green wine called vinho verde branco. And for dessert, there is toucinho do céu, the sweet bacon of heaven, or pudim molotov, a frothy, eggy confection said to have been named for the notorious Soviet Foreign Minister rather than the lethal cocktail. After a meal like that, the seatbelts in your car will have to be readjusted before you resume your journey up the road towards the imposing Palace Hotel in the forest of Buçaco.

It was here in September 1810 that Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, with 49,000 men, half of them untrained Portuguese recruits, defeated a superior French force of 66,000 trained men. On a ridge overlooking the valley, the Iron Duke and his Portuguese Caçadores (hunters) gained one of the great victories of the Peninsular War.

“The Allied army suffered a loss of only 1252, half of whom were Portuguese . . . . French soldiers never fought more courageously than at Busaco, but their commanders had assigned them impossible tasks. So convinced was Massena of French invincibility that he had rushed headlong into a battle without proper reconnaisance . . . . The French . . . were surprised by the change in the Portuguese army which could be said to have come of age on that 27th September. The amalgamation of British and Portuguese units produced divisions whose quality was essentially equal to an all-British force of the same size.” (Jac Weller, Wellington in the Peninsula 1808-1814, London, Kaye & Wood, 1969.)

“ [The French] sent in eleven more battalions under General Marchand on the left of the two ravines. To them, at least, an easy victory seemed assured, for only four battalions, and these all Portuguese, faced them on the summit. They knew nothing of what a small nation in arms, inspired by Wellington and organized by Beresford, could do. Its young soldiers delivered a fire as steady and deadly as its veteran British allies. For all his resolution Marchand had to retreat from an impossible enterprise . . . . Massena’s first trial of the despised Portuguese army and its leopard partners had resulted in 4600 French losses to 626 British and 626 Portuguese -- an exact Allied sharing of casualties as of valour.” (Elizabeth Longford, Wellington -- The Years of the Sword, New York, Harper & Row, 1969.)

There is a small chapel and museum on the grounds of the Hotel, and a monument celebrating the victory on a hill behind it.