Beresford replied that all this was true, but that ‘the national feeling required management,’ and that to place every regimental or brigade command in British hands would provoke such fierce jealousy that he was ‘compelled to humour the prejudices and satisfy the pride of the nation.’ His device for doing this was to make a general rule that wherever a Portuguese officer was in chief command he should have a British officer second in command under him, and vice versa[178]. When a brigade was given to a Portuguese, he managed that the two colonels of the regiments forming it should be Englishmen; similarly, if a Portuguese commanded a regiment his senior major was always an Englishman. By this means it was secured that a fair half of the higher pieces of promotion should be left to the native officers, but that every Portuguese placed in a responsible position should have a British officer at his back. In addition there were from two to four British captains in each battalion, but no subalterns; for, to encourage good men to volunteer into the Portuguese service, it was provided that all who did so should receive a step of promotion, and a British lieutenant became a Portuguese captain on exchange, and a British captain a Portuguese major. The system seems to have worked well, and with far less friction than might have been expected[179]. The better class of native officers were piqued into emulation, just as D’Urban had expected; the worst was gradually eliminated[180]. It must be noted that to every battalion there were added one or two British sergeants, whose services were needed for the drilling of the men in the English exercises, which now superseded the old German system left behind by La Lippe, the last reorganizer of the Portuguese army. For the whole drill of the infantry was changed, and the British formations and manœuvres introduced. Dundas’s ‘Eighteen Manœuvres’ were translated, and became the Bible of the Lusitanian no less than the British officer[181]. The employment of the two-deep line, the essential feature of the system, was made the base of all Portuguese drill; at Bussaco it justified itself. The Caçadores were trained on the ‘Rifle Regulations’ of Coote Manningham, and their uniform was modified in cut, though not in colour, to a close resemblance of that of the British rifleman[182]. The net result of all these changes was that for the future the British and Portuguese units of Wellington’s army could be moved by the same words of command, and in the same formations, and that all the disadvantages resulting from the coexistence of two different systems of drill disappeared. [178] This rule I find definitely laid down in a letter of Hardinge, Beresford’s Quartermaster-general, written as late as 1812, but the practice was already in full use by 1810.