We have the GOs issued to stop the plunder at Badajoz. They were not obeyed.

Please show me similar orders issued by Massena in 1810-1811 to prevent his subordinates from mistreating unoffending civilians.

During the retreat to Corunna Moore, Paget and Craufurd used the British army procedure known as summary punishment, often incorrectly called a "drum head court martial." Without going into a lot of legal detail, summary punishment is basically used when an offence is so great and detrimental to the conduct of the soldiers that the offender is punished swiftly and severely to make an example of him and to act as a deterrent. Summary punishment, which had a legal foundation in the Articles of War until about 1700 and then became a "custom" after that, was used by British commanders throughout the 18th century and up to the time of the Peninsula. Summary punishment was frequently used in connection with the mistreatment of civilians. Wellington frequently had resort to it and at one point actually asked for a legal opinion on its validity from the law officers of the Crown. We have that opinion and I can quote it to you. In 1813, it was largely replaced by a new legal procedure called a Detachment General Court Martial, renamed in the Mutiny Act of 1829 as a Drum Head Court Martial.

Time and circumstances permitting, Wellington preferred the use of a General Court Martial but this was not always possible during active operations.

As for British raids on the Atlantic coast of the US, they were conducted according to the usages/custom/law of war of the time and acts by lawless individuals were punished. There was one major exception and that was Hampton in 1813 and the exception was not the intent to treat civilians improperly, it was the failure by the senior British officer to punish the acts of those of his soldiers who acted improperly although he had the power, time and means to do so. Hampton will form the subject of an article I shall be posting on the Forum in the near future (you really don't think I did all this research on international and military law just to bug you personally, did you?).

Coming back to the Peninsula, which you are always trying to squirm out of it because you known you can't win, another point should be made and that is that it was the longest single military campaign of the Napoleonic wars, either 5 or 6 years depending on how you slice them. No other military campaign of the Great War with France (to use a period British term) lasted that long, and no other campaign/theatre of war shows Napoleon's empire in its true character.

Because the truth is that, if you strip away the fancy titles and the fancy uniforms, and drag that empire out of its memorial chapel dimly lit by votive candles for THE SHORN ONE and his TITANS (your term, not mine) into the cold light of day, what you are going to look at is a military dictatorship put in power by bayonets and maintained in power by those same bayonets and a secret police force.

Nowhere in the period is the true character of this military dictatorship revealed more clearly and more accurately than in the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814.

And that is why it is important, not because it was the largest land commitment by Britain during the Great War.

DG