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"They fought, General, in the campaign last year," he said, "and the regiment takes its name from the fact that they prevented Marshal Soult from crossing at the mouth of the Minho; but their first encounter with your cavalry was near Orense." "I remember it well," the general said, "for I was in command of the cavalry that attacked you.
Soult had spent a month in making his preparations for the invasion of Portugal. The time, however, had not been wasted by him. Vigo, Tuy, and Guardia had all been occupied without opposition. Salvatierra on the Minho had been taken possession of, and thus three roads were open to him by which to cross low down on the river, namely, at Guardia, Tuy, and Salvatierra.
Bankes, who had seen the whole of England, the greater part of Italy and France, and almost every province of Spain and Portugal, frequently remarked, that in all his travels he had met with nothing equal to it, excepting only in some parts of the latter country, Entre Minho and Douro, to which alone he could compare it."
When Terence introduced himself as the colonel of the two battalions that had arrived, at Miranda, to operate in conjunction with him, Moras held out his hand frankly. "I am very glad indeed to meet you, Colonel O'Connor," he said. "I received a despatch four days ago from your general, saying that the Minho regiment would shortly arrive at Miranda, to act in concert with me.
There is a river of much the same name, not in Macedon but in the Peninsula, namely the Minho, which probably got its denomination from that race cognate to the Cumry, the Gael, who were the first colonisers of the Peninsula, and whose generic name yet stares us in the face and salutes our ears in the words Galicia and Portugal.
At eight o'clock a staff officer rode up, with orders for the Minho regiment to return at once to the pass of Banos, as the news had come in that the enemy beyond the hills were in movement. Terence was to act in concert with the Spanish force there, and hold the pass as long as possible.
Certainly in the whole world there is no bolder coast than the Gallegan shore, from the debouchement of the Minho to Cape Finisterra. It consists of a granite wall of savage mountains, for the most part serrated at the top, and occasionally broken, where bays and firths like those of Vigo and Pontevedra intervene, running deep into the land.
Terence was much gratified by the appearance, in general orders that day, of the following notice: "The general commander-in-chief expresses his warm approbation of the conduct of the two battalions of the Minho regiment of Portuguese, commanded by Colonel O'Connor.
Although Dom Sancho's kingdom only extended from the Minho to the Tagus, in the early years of the thirteenth century the rich provinces of Beira, and still more of Estremadura, were very thinly peopled: the inhabitants lived only in walled towns, and their one occupation was fighting, and plunder almost their only way of gaining a living.
Moreover, there would be the terrible range of the Tras-os-Montes to pass, and no certainty whatever of being well received by the Portuguese peasants north of Oporto. His constant study of the staff maps was now of great assistance to him. He determined to turn west until he reached the river Minho some distance below Lugo, which he could do by skirting the top of the hills.
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