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WELLINGTON’S ARMY

PLATE I.

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.

From a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

WELLINGTON’S
ARMY
1809–1814

BY
C. W. C. OMAN
M.A. OXON., HON. LL.D. EDIN.
CHICHELE PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

SECOND IMPRESSION

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1913
[All rights reserved]

PREFACE

Much has been written concerning Wellington and his famous Peninsular Army in the way of formal history: this volume, however, will I think contain somewhat that is new to most students concerning its organization, its day by day life, and its psychology. To understand the exploits of Wellington’s men, it does not suffice to read a mere chronicle of their marches and battles. I have endeavoured to collect in these pages notices of those aspects of their life with which no strategical or tactical work can deal, though tactics and even strategy will not be found unnoticed.

My special thanks are due to my friend Mr. C. T. Atkinson, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, for allowing me to use the admirable list of the brigade and divisional organization of the Peninsular Army which forms Appendix II. It is largely expanded from the article on the same topic which he printed eight years ago in the Historical Review, and enables the reader to find out the precise composition of every one of Wellington’s units at any moment between April, 1808 and April, 1814. I have also to express my gratitude to the Hon. John Fortescue, the author of the great History of the British Army, for answering a good many queries which I should have found hard to solve without his aid. The index is by the same loving hand which has worked on so many of my earlier volumes.

C. OMAN.

Oxford,
September, 1912.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

WELLINGTON’S ARMY

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY—THE OLD PENINSULAR ARMY

While working for the last nine years at the History of the Peninsular War, I have (as was inevitable) been compelled to accumulate many notes, and much miscellaneous information which does not bear upon the actual chronicle of events in the various campaigns that lie between 1808 and 1814, but yet possesses high interest in itself, and throws many a side-light on the general course of the war. Roughly speaking, these notes relate either to the personal characteristics of that famous old army of Wellington, which, as he himself said, “could go anywhere and do anything,” or to its inner mechanism—the details of its management. I purpose to speak in these pages of the leaders and the led; of the daily life, manners, and customs of the Peninsular Army, as much as of its composition and its organization. I shall be dealing with the rank and file no less than with the officers, and must even find space for a few pages on that curious and polyglot horde of camp followers which trailed at the heels of the army, and frequently raised problems which worried not only colonels and adjutants, but even the Great Duke himself.

There is an immense amount of interesting material to be collected, concerning the inner life of the Peninsular Army, from public documents, such as despatches, general orders, and regimental reports, and records of courts martial. But I shall be utilizing to a much greater extent non-official information, collected from the countless diaries, memoirs, and series of contemporary letters, which have come down to us from the men who took part in the great war. Nor are the controversial pamphlets to be neglected, which kept appearing for many a year, when one survivor of the old army found, in the writings of another, statements which he considered injurious to himself, his friends, his regiment, or his division. The best known and most copious of these discussions is that which centres round the publication of Napier’s Peninsular War; the successive appearance of its volumes led to the printing of many protests, in which some of the most prominent officers of Wellington’s army took part—not only Lord Beresford, who was Napier’s especial butt and bête noir, and replied to the historian in terms sometimes not too dignified—but Cole, Hardinge, D’Urban, and many more. This set of “strictures”, as they were called, mainly relate to the Albuera campaign. But there are smaller, but not less interesting, series of controversial pamphlets relating to the Convention of Cintra, to Moore’s retreat, to the campaign of 1810 (Bussaco), the storm of Badajoz, and other topics.

The memoirs and autobiographies, of course, possess the greatest share of interest. And it may be noted as a remarkable fact that those coming from the rank and file are not very much less numerous than those which come from the commissioned ranks. If there are scores of diaries and reminiscences of colonels, captains, and subalterns, there are at least dozens of little books by sergeants, corporals, and privates. Many of these are very quaint productions indeed, printed at local presses—at Perth, Coventry, Cirencester, Louth, Ashford—even at Corfu. Very frequently some knot of military or civilian friends induced a much-travelled veteran to commit to paper the tales which had been the delight of the canteen, or of the fireside of some village inn. They are generally very good reading, but often give rather the spirit of the time and the regiment than an accurate record of its long-past exploits. One or two of these veterans’ artless tales show all the characteristics of the memoirs of the prince of their tribe—the delightful but autolatrous Marbot. I have thought it worth while to give in an appendix the names and titles of the best of them. One or two, above all the little book of “Rifleman Harris” of the 95th, well deserve to be republished, but still await that honour. Perhaps regimental patriotism may some day provide us with a series of reprints of the best Soldiers’ Tales.[1]

Memoirs of the Rank and File

It is a very notable fact, which requires (but has never hitherto received) an explanation, that it is precisely with the coming in of the nineteenth century that British soldiers and officers alike began to write diaries and reminiscences on a large scale, and in great numbers. I do not, of course, mean to say that there were none such produced in the eighteenth century. Besides serious military histories like those of Kane, Stedman, or Tarleton, there do exist a certain number of narratives of personal adventure written by officers, such as Major Rogers the Scout, or the garrulous and often amusing diarist (unfortunately anonymous) who made the campaign of Culloden with the Duke of Cumberland—not to speak of the semi-apochryphal Captain Carleton. But they are few, and the writings from the ranks are fewer still, though there are certain soldiers’ letters which go back as far as Marlborough’s time, and one or two small books like Bristow’s and Scurry’s Indian reminiscences, and Sergeant Lamb’s Journal in the American War of Independence, which are worth mentioning. But it is quite certain that there was more writing going on in the army during the ten years 1805–1815 than in the whole eighteenth century.

What was the explanation of the phenomenon? There are, I think, two main causes to be borne in mind: the first was the glorious and inspiring character of Wellington’s campaigns, which made both officers and men justifiably proud of themselves, and more anxious than any previous generation had been to put on paper the tale of their own exploits. It must have been a man of particularly cheerful disposition who cared to compile the personal narrative of his adventures during the Old American War, which was largely a record of disaster, or even in the ups and downs of the Seven Years’ War, when for every Minden or Quebec there had been an evil memory like Ticonderoga or Kloster-Kampen. It is to this instinctive dislike to open up old memories of misfortune that we may attribute the fact that the first British campaigns of the French Revolutionary War, the unhappy marches and battles of the Duke of York’s army in 1793, 1794, 1795 are recorded in singularly few books of reminiscences—there are only (to my knowledge) the doggerel verse of the “Officer of the Guards,” with its valuable foot-notes, and the simple memoirs of Sergeant Stevenson of the Scots Fusilier Guards, and Corporal Brown of the Coldstream. This is an extraordinarily small output for a long series of campaigns, in which some 30,000 British troops were in the field, and where gallant exploits like those of Famars and Villers-en-Cauchies took place. But the general tale was not one on which any participant could look back with pleasure. Hence, no doubt, the want of books of reminiscences.

But I fancy that there is another and a quite distinct cause for the extraordinary outburst of interesting military literature with which the nineteenth century begins, and we may note that this outburst certainly commences a little before the Peninsular War. There exist several very good personal narratives both of the Conquest of Egypt in 1801, of the Indian Wars during the Viceroyalty of Lord Wellesley, and of the short campaign of Maida. And this cause I take to be the fact that the generation which grew up under the stress of the long Revolutionary War with France was far more serious and intelligent than that which saw it begin, and realized the supreme importance of the ends for which Great Britain was contending, and the danger which threatened her national existence. The empire had been in danger before, both in the Seven Years’ War, and in the War of American Independence, but the enemy had never been so terrifying and abhorrent as the Jacobins of the Red Republic. The France of Robespierre was loathed and feared as the France of Louis XV. or Louis XVI. had never been. To the greater part of the British nation the war against the Revolution soon became a kind of Crusade against the “triple-headed monster of Republicanism, Atheism, and Sedition.” The feeling that Great Britain had to fight not so much for empire as for national existence, and for all that made life worth having—religion, morality, constitution, laws, liberty—made men desperately keen for the fight, as their ancestors had never been.

The Sword and the Pen

Among the many aspects which their keenness took, one was most certainly the desire to record their own personal part in the great strife. It is in some such way only that I can explain the fact that the actually contemporary diaries and journals become so good as the war wears on, compared to anything that had gone before. Memoirs and reminiscences written later do not count in the argument, because they were compiled and printed long after the French war was over, and its greatness was understood. But the abundance of good material written down (and often sent to the press) during the continuance of the war is astounding. In some cases we can be sure that we owe the record to the reason that I have just suggested. For example, we certainly owe to it the long and interesting military diaries of Lord Lynedoch (the Sir Thomas Graham of Barrosa), who most decidedly went into the Revolutionary War as a Crusader and nothing less. As I shall explain when dealing with his remarkable career, he started military life at forty-four, mortgaging his estates to raise a battalion, and suddenly from a Whig M.P. of the normal type developed into a persistent and conscientious fighter against France and French ideas—whether they were expressed (as when first he drew the sword) in the frenzied antics of the Jacobins, or (as during his latter years) in the grinding despotism of Bonaparte. His diary from first to last is the record of one who feels that he is discharging the elementary duty of a good citizen, by doing his best to beat the French wherever they may be found.

I take it that the same idea was at the bottom of the heart of many a man of lesser note, who kept his pen busy during those twenty eventful years. Some frankly say that they went into the service, contrary to the original scheme of their life, because they saw the danger to the state, and were ready to take their part in meeting it. “The threat of invasion fired every loyal pair of shoulders for a red coat.”[2]

Of the men whose memoirs and letters I have read, some would have been lawyers (like Sir Hussey Vivian), others politicians, others doctors, others civil servants, others merchants, if the Great War had not broken out. I should imagine that the proportion of officers who had taken their commission for other reasons than that they had an old family connection with the army, or loved adventure, was infinitely higher during this period than it had ever been before. A very appreciable number of them were men with a strong religious turn—a thing I imagine to have been most unusual in the army of the eighteenth century (though we must not forget Colonel Gardiner). One young diarist heads the journal of his first campaign with a long prayer.[3] Another starts for the front with a final letter to his relatives to the effect that “while striving to discharge his military duties he will never forget his religious ones: he who observes the former and disregards the latter is no better than a civilized brute.”[4]

The Men of Religion

There were Peninsular officers who led prayer-meetings and founded religious societies—not entirely to the delight of the Duke of Wellington,[5] whose own very dry and official view of religion was as intolerant of “enthusiasm” as that of any Whig bishop of Mid-Georgian times. Some of the most interesting diaries of the war are those of men who like Gleig, Dallas, and Boothby, took Holy Orders when the strife came to an end. One or two of the authors from the ranks show the same tendencies. Quartermaster Surtees was undergoing the agonies of a very painful conversion, during the campaign of 1812, and found that the memories of his spiritual experiences had blunted and dulled his recollection of his regimental fortunes during that time.[6] A very curious book by an Irish sergeant of the 43rd devotes many more pages to religious reflections than to marches and bivouacs.[7] Another writer of the same type describes himself on his title-page as “Twenty-one years in the British Foot Guards, sixteen years a non-commissioned officer, forty years a Wesleyan class leader, once wounded, and two years a Prisoner.”[8]

On the whole I am inclined to attribute the great improvement alike in the quantity and the quality of the information which we possess as to the inner life of the army, during the second half of the great struggle with France, not only to the fact that the danger to the empire and the great interests at stake had fired the imagination of many a participant, but still more to the other fact that the body of officers contained a much larger proportion of thoughtful and serious men than it had ever done before. And the same was the case mutatis mutandis with the rank and file also. Not but what—of course—some of the most interesting information is supplied to us by cheerful and garrulous rattlepates of a very different type, who had been attracted into the service by the adventure of the soldier’s life, and record mainly its picturesque or its humorous side.

CHAPTER II
SOURCES OF INFORMATION—THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAR WAR

It will be well, perhaps, to give a short account of the main sources from which our knowledge of the Peninsular Army is derived. The official ones must be cited first. The most important of all are, naturally enough, the Wellington Dispatches. Of these there are two series; the first, in twelve volumes, was published during the Duke’s lifetime by Colonel Gurwood between 1837 and 1839. The second, or supplementary series, in fifteen volumes, was published with copious notes by the second Duke of Wellington between 1858 and 1872.

The series edited by Gurwood is absolutely necessary to every student of the Peninsular War, but is most tiresome to handle, and is by no means complete. The Duke forbade the publication of a great number of his more confidential letters, and ordered portions of others to be omitted. He had a strong notion that a great deal of historical information could be, and ought to be, suppressed; this fact has caused much trouble to the modern historian, who wishes to obtain not a mere official and expurgated view of the war, but a full and complete survey of it. To show Wellington’s attitude it may be sufficient to quote his answer to William Napier, who asked for leave to utilize all his papers. “He could not tell the whole truth without hurting the feelings of many worthy men, and without doing mischief. Expatiating on the subject, he related many anecdotes illustrating this observation, showing errors committed by generals and others—especially at Waterloo—errors so materially affecting his operations that he could not do justice to himself if he suppressed them, and yet by giving them publicity he would ungraciously affect the favour of many worthy men, whose only fault was dullness.”[9]

Gurwood and the Duke’s Dispatches

The Gurwood edition of the dispatches was published some fifteen years after Napier made his application, but numbers of the old Peninsular officers were still alive, and the Duke adhered to his already-expressed opinion that it would not be well to expose old quarrels and old blunders. Paragraphs, accordingly, are often omitted in the reprint, and in a large majority of cases, where blame was imputed or reproofs administered to any individual, the name was left blank. This makes the edition most tiresome to read. It is exasperating to find that e.g. “nothing has given me more concern in the late operations than the conduct of Lieut.-Colonel —— of the —— Regt.”[10] or that “no means exists of punishing military disorders and irregularities of the kind committed by Brigadier-General —— and Colonel ——.” Or again, when Wellington writes to the Patronage Secretary at the Horse Guards that “I am much obliged to you for relieving me from Major-General —— and Colonel ——. I have seen General —— and I think he will do very well, and so will ——”[11]; or that “—— appears to be a kind of madman,” and “—— is not very wise,” the reader is reduced to despair. The only way of discovering the names, which are often those of officers of high rank, who figure repeatedly in any narrative of the Peninsular War, is to go to the original dispatches at the Record Office, or, when the communication is a private and not a public one, to the letters at Apsley House. Meanwhile, few have the leisure or the patience to do this, so that Wellington’s judgments on his lieutenants are still practically inaccessible.

It was, perhaps, still necessary to leave all these blanks in 1837. And Gurwood was no doubt acting in strict obedience to the Duke’s orders. But nothing can excuse his own slack editing of the massive tomes that he published. There are no tables of contents to the volumes, nor does the title page of each indicate the dates between which it runs. To find out which volume will contain a letter of November, 1810, we must take down Vols. VI. and VII., and see from the date of the last dispatch in one and the first in the other, when the break comes. Supposing we wish to discover how many communications were sent to Graham or Spencer in 1811, there is no other way of achieving our object than running through every page of the two volumes in which the correspondence of that year is contained! There is a so-called index to the whole series, but it is practically useless, from the small number of headings given. The reader will look in it vainly for obvious places-names such as Chaves, Casal Novo, Castello Branco, Vera, St. Pierre, for personal names such as Lapisse, Latour-Maubourg, Bonnet, Montbrun, Abadia, Penne-Villemur, O’Donnell, Del Parque, Erskine, Anson, Victor Alten, Barnard, Beckwith. On the other hand he will find silly headings such as under L, “Lies, encouragement of,” or under I, “Invincibility of British Troops.” Perhaps the most ridiculous entry in this absurd compilation is that of “Light Division,” to which there is annexed just one note, “satisfactory conduct of, on April 6, 1811,” as if that was the sole occasion on which it was necessary to mention that distinguished unit of the British army. There are no headings under regiments at all, so that if one wishes to see what the Duke said about the 52nd or the Black Watch, one simply gets no help.

But there is another trick of Gurwood’s which is even worse than his want of tables of contents or adequate index-entries. He omitted all the elaborate statistics which used to accompany the Duke’s dispatches, without exception. The beautiful tables of casualties which explain the distribution of losses between regiments and divisions, are in every case boiled down into three bald totals of “killed, wounded, and missing,” for the whole army, no indication of units being left. Even Lord Londonderry’s modest two volumes, the first attempt at a general history of the Peninsular War, give far more useful information on the all-important topics of strengths and losses than all Gurwood’s tomes. For that sensible author rightly saw that nothing could be more serviceable to the reader than an occasional table of the organization and numbers of the whole allied army, and that the detailed casualty-list of such a fight as Talavera or Albuera is indispensable. The purblind Gurwood preferred to put in a note, “the detail of divisions, regiments, and battalions has been omitted, being too voluminous,”[12] when he was dealing with an important return. The historian owes him small thanks for his precious opinion.

It is an immense relief to pass from Gurwood’s ill-arranged work to the volumes of the Wellington Supplementary Dispatches, which were published by the second Duke between 1858 and 1872. Though the mass of Peninsular material contained in this series is comparatively small, it comprises a great quantity of familiar and private correspondence, which had been deliberately omitted from the earlier publication. And, moreover, it is admirably edited; the second Duke knew what was important and what required explanation, appended valuable and copious notes, and was able (since the elder generation was now practically extinct) to abandon the exasperating reticence used by Gurwood. Moreover, he added a vast quantity of letters written not by, but to, his father, which serve to explain the old Duke’s sometime cryptic replies to his correspondents. Even a few necessary French documents have been added. Altogether these volumes are excellent, and make one wish that the editing of the whole of the Wellington papers had fallen into the same hands.

Wellington’s “General Orders”

There is a third series of Official publications which though not so “generally necessary for salvation” as the Dispatches, for any student of the Peninsular War, is very valuable and needs continually to be worked up. This is the seven volumes of General Orders, from 1809 to 1815, which are strictly contemporary documents, as they were collected and issued while the war was in progress—the 1809–10 volumes were printed in 1811, the 1811 volume in 1812, and so on. The last, or Waterloo volume, had the distinction of being issued by the British Military Press in Paris, “by Sergeant Buchan, 3rd Guards,” as printer. The General Orders contain not only all the documents strictly so called, the notices issued by the commander-in-chief for the army, but an invaluable précis of all courts-martial other than regimental ones, and a record of promotions, gazettings of officers to regiments, rules as to issue of pay and rations, and directions as to all matters of detail relating to organization, hospitals, depôts, stores, routes, etc. If any one wishes to know on what day the 42nd was moved from the first to the second division, when precisely General Craufurd got leave to go home on private business, what was the accepted value of the Spanish dollar or the Portuguese Cruzado Novo at different dates, when expressed in English money, or what was the bounty given when a time-expired man consented to renew his service for a limited period, these are the volumes in which he will find his curiosity satisfied. They cannot be called interesting reading—but they contain facts not elsewhere to be found.

There is an exactly corresponding series of General Orders for the Portuguese Army, in six yearly volumes, called Ordens do Dia: it was issued by Marshal Beresford, and contains all the documents signed by him. Whenever a student is interested in the career of one of the numerous British officers in the Portuguese service, he must seek out the records of his doings in these volumes. They are not easy to work in, as they have no yearly indices, and much patience is required to discover isolated notices of individuals. These volumes are practically inaccessible in England. It was with the greatest difficulty that a Lisbon friend hunted me up a copy after long search, and I am not aware that there is another on this side of the sea. But by its use only can we trace the service of any Anglo-Portuguese officer. There was supposed to be an “Ordem” every morning, and when nothing was forthcoming in the way of promotions, court-martial reports, or decrees, Beresford’s chief of the staff used to publish a solemn statement that there was no news, as thus—

Quartel-General de Chamusca, 7. 1. 1811.
Nada de novo.
Adjudante-General Mosinho.

This happened on an average about twice a week.

In addition to these printed series there is an immense amount of unprinted official correspondence in the Record Office which bears on the Peninsular War. It will be found not only in the War Office section, but in those belonging to the Foreign Office and the Admiralty. As an example of the mysteries of official classification, I may mention that all documents relating to French prisoners will have to be looked for among the Admiralty records, under the sub-headings Transport and Medical. If, as occasionally happens, one wishes to find out the names and regiments of French officers captured on some particular occasion, e.g. Soult’s retreat from Oporto, or the storm of Badajoz, it is to the Admiralty records that one must go! Officers can always be identified, but it is a herculean task to deal with the rank and file, for they used to be shot into one of the great prisons, Norman’s Cross, Porchester, Stapleton, etc., in arbitrary batches, with no regard to their regimental numbers. It would take a week to hunt through the prison records with the object of identifying the number of privates of the 34th Léger captured at Rodrigo, since they may have gone in small parties to any one of a dozen destinations. Many of the prison registers have lost one or other of their outer-boards, and the handling of them is a grimy business for the fingers, since they are practically never consulted.

The Record Office and its Wealth

While nearly the whole of the Wellington dispatches have been printed, it is only a small part of the Duke’s “enclosures”, added to each dispatch, that have had the same good fortune. These always repay a cursory inspection, and are often highly important. The greater part of Sir John Moore’s correspondence with Lord Castlereagh, and many dispatches of Moore’s subordinates—Baird, Leith, and Lord W. Bentinck—with a number of valuable returns and statistics,—are printed in a large volume entitled “Papers Relative to Spain and Portugal, Presented to Parliament in 1809.” There are, to the best of my knowledge, no similar volumes relating to Graham’s campaign from Cadiz in 1811, or Maitland’s and Murray’s operations on the east side of Spain in 1813–14. A good deal of information about the latter, however, may be got from the enormous report of the court-martial on Murray, for his wretched fiasco at the siege of Tarragona, which is full of valuable facts. The details of the other minor British enterprises in the Peninsula—such as those of Doyle, Skerret, Sir Home Popham, and Lord Blayney, all remain in manuscript,—readily accessible to the searcher, but not too often consulted. The Foreign Office section at the Record Office is highly valuable not only to the historian of diplomacy, but to the purely military historian, because Stuart, Vaughan, Henry Wellesley, and the other representatives of the British Government at Madrid, Seville, and Cadiz, used to send home, along with their own dispatches, numberless Spanish documents. These include not only official papers from the Regency, but private documents of great value, letters from generals and statesmen who wish to keep the British agent informed as to their views, when they have clashed with the resolves of their own government. There are quite a number of military narratives by Spanish officers, who are set on excusing themselves from responsibility for the disasters of their colleagues. And the politicians sometimes propose, in private and confidential minutes, very curious plans and intrigues. Sir Charles Vaughan kept a certain number of these confidential papers in his own possession when he left Cadiz, and did not turn them over to the Foreign Office. They lie, along with his private correspondence, in the Library of All Souls’ College, Oxford.

Since we are dealing with the British army, not with the general history of the Peninsular War, I need only mention that unpublished documents by the thousand, relating to the French, Spanish, and Portuguese armies, may be found at Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon, and that the researcher is invariably welcomed and courteously treated. It may be worth while to make a note, for the benefit of beginners, to the effect that the French military documents are not concentrated in one mass, but are divided between the Archives Nationales, and the Archives de la Guerre at the Ministry of War. If a return or a dispatch is not to be found in one of these repositories, it may yet turn up in the other. The Spanish records are very “patchy,” full on some campaigns, almost non-existent on others. For example, the documents on the luckless Ocaña campaign of 1809 are marvellously few; there does not exist a single complete “morning state”, by regiments and divisions, of Areizaga’s unhappy army. I fancy that the whole of the official papers of his staff were captured in the rout, and destroyed by ignorant plunderers—they did not get into the French collections. Hence there have only survived the few dispatches which Areizaga and some of his subordinates sent to the Spanish Ministry of War.

* * * * *

Contemporary Journals

So much for Official Records. Passing on to the publications of individual actors in the war, we must draw a sharp line between those which were issued during or immediately after the campaigns with which they deal, and those which were written down, with or without the aid of contemporary notes or journals, many years after. The former, of course, possess a peculiar interest, because the writers’ narrative is not coloured by any knowledge of what is yet to come. An officer writing of Corunna or Talavera with the memory of Vittoria and Waterloo upon him, necessarily took up a different view of the war from the man who set down his early campaign without any idea of what was to follow. Early checks and hardships loom larger in the hour of doubt and disappointment, than when the recollection of them has been dimmed by subsequent hours of triumph. The early material, therefore, is very valuable, but it is not so copious as that which was written down later, and it largely exists in the form of letters and diaries, both of which are less readable than formal narratives. As good types of this sort of material we may name Ormsby’s and Ker-Porter’s Journals of the Campaign of 1808–09, Hawkers’ Journal of the Talavera Campaign, Stothert’s Diary of 1809–11, and General MacKinnon’s Journal of the same three years, all of which were published within a few months of the last entry which each contains. Next to these come the books which consist of contemporary material, published without alteration from the original manuscripts, but only many years after they had been written. The best of these for hard facts, often facts not to be found elsewhere, is the diary of Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons:[13] with it may be mentioned the Journal of George Simmons of the 95th, published in 1899 with the title, “A British Rifle Man,”[14] the Journals of Sir William Gomm, 1808–15,[15] Sir George Warre’s Letters of 1808–12,[16] which only saw the light two years ago, and Larpent’s Private Journal, printed in 1852.[17] These volumes all have short notes by the editors, but the text is the writing of the Peninsular time, untampered with and unaltered.

These books and their minor contemporaries stand in a class by themselves, as contemporary material reflecting accurately the spirit of the times. Much more numerous, however, are the books which, though produced by actors in the Great War, appeared at dates more or less remote from the years whose events they narrate. The formal histories are comparatively few, the reason being that Napier’s magnificent (if somewhat prejudiced and biassed) volumes completely put off other possible authors, who felt that they lacked his genius and his power of expression, from the idea of writing a long narrative of the war as a whole. This was a misfortune, since the one book which all students of military history are thereby driven to read, was composed by a bitter political partisan, who is set on maligning the Tory government, has an altogether exaggerated admiration for Napoleon, and owned many personal enemies in the British army, who receive scant justice at his hands. At the same time we must be grateful that the work was written by one who was an actual witness of many of the campaigns that he relates, conscientiously strove to get at all other first-hand witnesses, and ransacked the French as well as the British official papers, so far as he could obtain access to them. The merits of his style are all his own, and will cause the History of the Peninsular War to be read as an English classic, as Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion is read, even when research has shown (as in Clarendon’s case) that much of the narrative needs reconstruction, and that the general thesis on which it is constructed lacks impartiality.

Napier, Southey, and Lord Londonderry

The only other general histories of the war which appeared were Southey’s (three vols. published 1832) and Lord Londonderry’s.[18] The former was written by a literary man without any military experience, who had seen nothing of the Peninsula during the years of the struggle, and had as almost his only merit, a good knowledge of the Spanish sources, of which he was too uncritical. The book fell dead, being unable to compete with Napier, and lacking all the authority of personal knowledge which was the latter’s strong point. The smaller book of Lord Londonderry (two volumes, published 1829) is by no means without merit, but has many faults, always hovering on the edge between formal history and personal reminiscences. Wherever Charles Stewart had not been present, he passes lightly over the episodes of war, and obviously had taken no very great pains to collect first-hand material. At the same time the book has value, as giving the views of a highly-placed staff officer, who had the opportunity of seeing every episode from the point of view of Head Quarters, and had strong convictions and theories of his own. He had also the saving grace of loving statistics, and printed many valuable appendices of “morning states” and casualty-lists, things of which Napier was far too sparing, and which Gurwood suppressed altogether. As a general record the book could not cope with Napier, and has been forgotten—somewhat undeservedly—no less than Southey’s vast quartos. There is absolutely no other general history by a contemporary which needs mention. Of course I omit foreign sources, which help us little with regard to the British army, though they are indispensable for a general study of the war. Foy’s unfinished Guerre de la Peninsule, if we may judge from the volumes which appeared before his death, would have been a very prejudiced affair—his account of the British troops in Vol. I. is a bitter satire, contrasting oddly enough with his confessions concerning their merits in his Journal, of which a large portion was published a few years ago by Girod de l’Ain under the title Vie Militaire du Général Foy. After all the detraction in his formal history, it is interesting to read the frank letter which says, in 1811, that for a set battle on a limited front he acknowledges the superiority of the English infantry to the French, “I keep this opinion to myself,” he adds, “and have never divulged it, for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate his enemy, but also despise him.”[19] Foy kept the opinion so closely to himself, that no one would have suspected it who had read only his formal history of the Peninsular War.

Another French general history is Marshal Jourdan’s Guerre d’Espagne, issued only ten years ago by the Vicomte de Grouchy, though large parts of it had been utilized in Ducasse’s Life and Correspondence of King Joseph Bonaparte. This covers the whole war down to Vittoria, and is notable for its acute and often unanswerable criticism of Soult and Masséna, Marmont, and, not least, of Napoleon himself. It is less satisfactory as a vindication of Jourdan’s own doings. Marmont’s autobiography only covers his fifteen months of command from May, 1811, to July, 1812: while St. Cyr’s and Suchet’s very interesting accounts of their own periods of activity relate entirely to Catalonia and the eastern side of the Peninsula. St. Cyr does not touch British affairs at all; Suchet treats his campaigns against Maitland and Murray in a much more cursory style than his previous successes against the Spanish armies.[20] The other French formal narratives by contemporaries and eye-witnesses are for the most part monographs on particular campaigns in which the writers took part—such as Thiébault’s work on Junot in Portugal—full of deliberate inaccuracies—which was published in 1817, and Lapène’s Conquête d’Andalousie, en 1810–12, and Campagnes de 1813–14 (both published in 1823 in volumes of different size) which deal only with the army of Soult. There are, however, two general histories by German officers—Schepeler (who served with the Spaniards), and Riegel (who served with the French)—which both require mention. The former is especially valuable.[21]

Toreno, Belmas, John Jones

Among Peninsular historians two deserve special notice. The Conde de Toreno, a Spanish statesman who had taken part in the war as a young man, produced in 1838 three massive volumes which are, next to Napier, the greatest book that makes this war its subject. He is a first-hand authority of great merit, and should always be consulted for the Spanish version of events. He was a great master of detail, and yet could paint with a broad brush. It is sometimes necessary to remember that he is a partisan, and has his favourites and his enemies (especially La Romana) among the generals and statesmen of Spain. But on the whole he is a historian of high merit and judgment. With Toreno’s work must be mentioned the five small volumes of the Portuguese José Accursio das Neves, published in 1811, when Masséna had but just retreated from before the Lines of Torres Vedras. This is a very full and interesting description of Junot’s invasion of Portugal, and of the sufferings of that realm which came to an end with the Convention of Cintra. It is the only detailed picture of Portugal in 1808. Unfortunately the author did not complete the story of 1809–10.

At the end of this note on historical works, as distinguished from memoirs or diaries of adventure, we must name two excellent books, one English and one French, on the special subject of siege operations. These two monographs by specialists, both distinguished engineer officers—Sir John Jones’ Journal of the Sieges in Spain 1811–13, and Colonel Belmas’ Journaux des Sièges dans la Peninsule 1808–13, published respectively in 1827 and 1837—are among the most valuable books dealing with the Peninsular War, both containing a wealth of detail and explanatory notes. The work of Belmas is especially rich in reprints of original documents bearing on the sieges, and in statistics of garrisons, losses, ammunition expended, etc. They were so complete, and supplemented each other so well, that little was done to add to the information that they give, till Major J. Leslie’s admirable edition of the Dickson Papers began to appear a few years ago, and appreciably increased our knowledge of the English side of the siege operations.

Having made an end of the formal histories written by contemporaries and eye-witnesses, it remains that we should speak of a class of literature much larger in bulk, and generally much more interesting, considered in the light of reading for the general student—the books of autobiographies and personal reminiscences which were written by participants in the war some time after it had come to an end—at any time from ten to forty years after 1814. Their name is legion. I am continually discovering more of them, many of them printed obscurely in small editions and from local presses, so that the very knowledge of their existence has perished. And so many unpublished manuscripts of the sort exist, in France no less than in England, that it is clear that we have not even yet got to the end of the stock of original material bearing on the war. Some of the most interesting, e.g. the lively autobiography of Blakeney of the 28th,[22] and that of Ney’s aide-de-camp Sprünglin,[23] have only appeared during the last few years.

Inaccuracies of Memoir-writers

These volumes of personal adventures differ greatly in value: some were written up conscientiously from contemporary diaries: others contain only fragments, the most striking or the most typical incidents of campaigns whose less interesting every-day work had been forgotten, or at least had grown dim. Unfortunately in old age the memory often finds it hard to distinguish between things seen and things heard. It is not uncommon to find a writer who represents himself as having been present at scenes where he cannot have been assisting, and still more frequent to detect him applying to one date perfectly genuine anecdotes which belong to another. One or two of the most readable narratives frankly mix up the sequence of events, with a note that the exact dating can not be reconstructed. This is notoriously the case with the most vivid of all the books of reminiscences from the ranks—the little volume of “Rifleman Harris,” whose tales about General Robert Craufurd and the Light Division flow on in a string, in which chronology has to take its chance, and often fails to find it.

Another source of blurred or falsified reminiscences is that an author, writing many years after the events which he has to record, has generally read printed books about them, and mixes up this secondary knowledge with the first-hand tale of his adventures. Napier’s Peninsular War came out so comparatively early, and was so universally read, that screeds from it have crept into a very great number of the books written after 1830. Indeed, some simple veterans betray the source of their tales, concerning events which they cannot possibly have witnessed themselves, by repeating phrases or epigrams of Napier’s which are unmistakeable. Some even fill up a blank patch in their own memory by a précis of a page or a chapter from the great history. It is always necessary to take care that we are not accepting as a corroboration of some tale, that which is really only a repetition of it. The diary of a sergeant of the 43rd mentioned above,[24] contains an intolerable amount of boiled-down Napier. It is far more curious to find traces of him in the famous Marbot, who had clearly read Mathieu Dumas’ translation when it came out in French.

The books of personal adventure, as we may call the whole class, may roughly be divided into three sections, of decreasing value in the way of authority. The first and most important consists of works written upon the base of an old diary or journal, where the memory is kept straight as to the sequence of events by the contemporary record, and the author is amplifying and writing up real first-hand material. Favourable examples of this are Leach’s Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier,[25] Leslie of Balquhain’s Military Journal,[26] which in spite of its title is not in journal shape, but reads as a continuous narrative, and Sir George Bell’s Rough Notes of Fifty Years’ Service,[27] all of which are definitely stated by the authors to have been founded on their note-books of the war time, and therefore can as a rule be treated as first-hand evidence. They can generally be trusted as authorities against any divergent tales based on the narratives of writers who wrote their reminiscences without any such foundation, and where they get off the lines of contemporary evidence they usually give the reader warning. For example, Leach gives valuable material to show the inaccuracy of Napier’s exaggerated estimate of the length and pace of the Light Division’s march to Talavera, whose erroneous figures have been repeated in so many subsequent books. And yet Leach was not conscious of the fact that the data which he gives were incompatible with Napier’s story, and repeats it in a general way—because he published his book several years after the appearance of Napier’s second volume, and had (like many other members of the Light Division) absorbed the legend as a matter of faith on Napier’s authority. It was reserved for Sir John Bell,[28] who had served under Craufurd but joined too late for Talavera, to explode the story. But his demonstration of its inaccuracy has not travelled far, while the original legend has gone all round the world, and is still reproduced, as an example of unparalleled rapidity of movement, in serious military works.

Gleig, Blakeney, Hennegan

Infinitely less valuable than the books founded on private diaries or letters of contemporary date, are those which were written down long after the war, from unaided memory only. They are, of course, progressively less valuable for evidence according as the date at which they were indited recedes from the period with which they deal. Gleig’s charming The Subaltern, printed as early as 1825, may be better trusted for matters of detail than Blakeney’s equally vivid narrative written in the remote island of Paxos about 1835, and Blakeney is more valuable than Hennegan’s highly romantic Seven Years of Campaigning, published only in 1847, when thirty winters had blurred reminiscence, and allowed of the accretion of much second-hand and doubtful material round the original story. The strength of men’s memories differs, so does their appreciation of the relative value of a dramatic narrative as compared with a photographic record of personal experiences. But in a general way we must allow that every year that elapses between the event and the setting down of its narrative on paper decreases progressively the value of the record. As an example of the way in which the failing powers of old age can confuse even a powerful memory, we may mention the curious fact that Wellington himself, twenty years after his last campaign, seems to have told two auditors that he had visited Blücher’s camp on the very eve of Waterloo, the night between the 17th and 18th of June, 1815, a statement quite incredible.[29] It was apparently a blurred memory of his real visit to the Prussian headquarters on the early afternoon of the 16th, of which ample details are known.

Failing memory, the love of a well-rounded tale, a spice of autolatry, and an appreciation of the picturesque, have impaired the value of many a veteran’s reminiscences. Especially if he is a well-known raconteur, and has repeated his narrative many times before he sets it down on paper, does it tend to assume a romantic form. The classical example, of course, is Marbot, whose memoirs contain many things demonstrably false, e.g. that he brought the news of the Dos Mayo insurrection at Madrid to Napoleon, or that in 1812 he took his regiment from Moscow to the neighbourhood of Poltava, and brought it back (400 miles!) in less than a fortnight with a convoy of provisions, or that he saw 6000 men drowned on the broken ice of the lake of Satschan at the end of the battle of Austerlitz.[30] Marbot is, of course, an extreme example of amusing egotism, but parallels on a minor scale could be quoted from many of his contemporaries, who wrote their tale too late. We may mention Thiébault’s account of the combat of Aldea da Ponte, when he declares that he fought 17,000 Anglo-Portuguese and produced 500 casualties in their ranks, when he was really opposed by one British brigade and two Portuguese battalions, who lost precisely 100 men between them. Yet the account is so lengthy and detailed, that if we had not the British sources before us, we should be inclined to think that we were reading an accurate narrative of a real fight, instead of a romantic invention reconstructed from a blurred memory. It was the only Peninsular fight in which Thiébault exercised an independent command—and every year added to its beauties as the general grew old.

While, therefore, we read the later-written Peninsular narratives with interest, and often with profit, as reflections of the spirit of the time and the army, we must always be cautious in accepting their evidence. And we must begin by trying to obtain a judgment on the “personal equation”—was the author a hard-headed observer, or a lover of romantic anecdotes? What proportion, if any, of the facts which he gives can be proved incompatible with contemporary records? Or again, what proportion (though not demonstrably false) seem unlikely, in face of other authorities? Had he been reading other men’s books on a large scale? Of this the usual proof is elaborate narrative concerning events at which he cannot possibly have been present, with or without citation of the source from which he has obtained the information. It is only when the author has passed his examination with credit on these points, that we can begin to treat him as a serious authority, and to trust him as evidence for scenes at which we know that he was actually present. Many a writer of personal adventures may finally be given his certificate as good authority for the annals of his own battalion, but for nothing more. It is even possible that we may have to make the further restriction that he may be trusted on the lucky days, but not on the less happy ones, in the history of his own beloved corps. Reticence as to “untoward incidents” is not uncommon. As to things outside the regiment, there was often a good deal of untrustworthy gossip abroad, which stuck in the memory even after long years had passed.

Books of Regimental Adventure

Among all the books of regimental adventure, I should give the first place for interest and good writing to Lieut. Grattan’s With the Connaught Rangers. It is not too much to say that if the author had taken to formal history, his style, which is vivid without exaggeration, and often dignified without pomposity, would have made him a worthy rival of Napier as an English classic. His descriptions of the aspect and psychology of the stormers marching down to the advanced trenches at Ciudad Rodrigo, and of the crisis of the battle of Salamanca, are as good as anything that Napier ever wrote. A reader presented with many of his paragraphs would say without hesitation that they were excerpts from the great historian. Unfortunately Grattan suffered from one of the faults which I have named above—he will give untrustworthy information about episodes at which he was not present—it is at best superfluous and sometimes misleading. But for what the 88th did at Bussaco and Fuentes, at Badajoz and Salamanca, he is very good authority. And he is always a pleasure to read. Two good books—Gleig’s The Subaltern, and Moyle Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula—have a share of the literary merit of Grattan’s work, but lack his power. They give respectively the day-by-day camp life of the 85th in 1813–14, and of the 48th in 1811–13, in a pleasant and life-like fashion, and since both were published within ten years of the end of the war—Gleig’s in 1825, Sherer’s in 1824—the writers’ memories were still strong, and their statements of fact may be relied upon. Both have the merit of sticking closely to personal experience, and of avoiding second-hand stories.

Those lively tales of adventure—Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, Sir Harry Smith’s Autobiography, and Blakeney’s memoir (which its editor called A Boy in the Peninsular War)[31]—were all written at a much later date, from twenty to thirty years after Waterloo, and show their remoteness from the time that they describe not so much by want of detail, nor of picturesque power of description,—all three authors were good wielders of the pen—as by the selection of the facts that they record. Much of the every-day life of the regiment has been forgotten or grown dim, and only the great days, or the most striking personal experiences, or quaint and grotesque incidents, are recorded. This very fact makes them all very good reading—they contain (so to speak) all the plums of the cake and comparatively little of the less appetizing crust. Harry Smith’s chapters are practically the tale of his Odyssey in the campaigns of 1812–13 along with the heroic little Spanish wife whom he had picked up and married at the storm of Badajoz. Kincaid is a humourist—he remembers all the grotesque incidents, ludicrous situations, practical jokes, and misadventures, in which he and his comrades were concerned, and pours them out in a string of anecdotes, loosely connected by a narrative of which he says that he refuses to be responsible for the exact sequence or dating. It is very amusing, and some of the more striking stories can be verified from other and better authorities. But the general effect is often as if we were reading a chapter out of Lever’s Charles O’Malley, or some such old-fashioned Peninsular romance. Blakeney’s book gives a better impression for solidity, and he fills up many an incident, otherwise known to us only in outline, with picturesque detail which bears every appearance of truth. But I have once or twice found his narrative refusing to square in with contemporary documents, and when this is the case the story written twenty-five years after the event must go to the wall.[32] He must be used with caution, though he is giving a genuine record to the best of his ability.

Reminiscences from the Ranks

Nearly all the reminiscences from the ranks are subject to these same disabilities. With hardly an exception they were written down long years after the events recorded. Usually the narrator had no books or notes to help him, and we get a genuine tale, uninfluenced by outer sources, but blurred and foreshortened by the lapse of time. The details of personal adventure are perfectly authentic to the best of the veteran’s memory; incidents of battle, of camp hardships, of some famous court-martial and subsequent punishment-parade, come out in a clear-cut fashion. But there are long gaps of forgotten months, frequent errors of dating, and often mistakes in the persons to whom an exploit, an epigram, or a misadventure are attributed. Yet these little volumes give the spirit of the rank and file in the most admirable fashion, and enable us to realize the inner life of the battalion as no official document can do. There are a few cases where the author has got hold of a book, generally Napier’s great history, and to a great extent spoils his work by letting in passages of incongruous eloquence, or strategical disquisition, into the homely stuff of his real reminiscences.[33]

One soldier’s little volume stands out from all the rest for its literary merit—it is the work of a man of superior education, who had enlisted in a moment of pique and humiliation to avoid facing at home the consequences of his own conceit and folly. This short story of 150 pages called Journal of T. S., a Soldier of the 71st Highland Light Infantry, 1806–15, was written down as early as 1818,[34] when memory was still fresh. Its value lies in the fact that the author wrote from the ranks, yet was so different in education and mental equipment from his comrades, that he does not take their views and habits for granted, but proceeds to explain and comment on them. “I could get,” as he notes, “no pleasure from their amusements, but found it necessary to humour them in many things, and to be obliging to all. I was thought saucy, and little courted by them, they not liking my dry manner as they called it.” His narrative is that of an intelligent observer of the behaviour of the regiment, in whose psychology he is deeply interested, rather than that of a typical soldier. Having a ready pen and a keen observant eye, he produced a little book of extraordinary interest. The chronicle of his marches, and the details of the actions which he relates, seem very accurate when compared with official documents.

Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th was another notable Scot whose book, The Eventful Life of a Soldier, is well worth reading. He was not so well educated as T. S., nor had he the same vivid literary style. But he was an intelligent man, and possessed a wider set of interests than was common in the ranks, so that it is always worth while to look up his notes and observations. His description of the horrors of Masséna’s retreat from Portugal in 1811 is a very striking piece of lurid writing. After him may be mentioned a quartermaster and a sergeant—Surtees and Costello—both of the Rifle Brigade,—whose reminiscences are full of typical stories reflecting the virtues and failings of the famous Light Division. For the views and ways of thought of the ordinary private of the better sort, the little books of “Rifleman Harris,” already cited above, Lawrence of the 40th, and Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers,[35] are valuable authority. They are admirable evidence for the way in which the rank and file looked on a battle, a forced march, or a prolonged shortage of rations. But we must not trust them overmuch as authorities on the greater matter of war.

Memoirs of French Veterans

There is a considerable bulk of French reminiscences dealing with the purely British side of the Peninsular War. Beside Marbot’s and Thiébault’s memoirs, of which I have already made mention, three or four more must not be neglected by any one who wishes to see Wellington’s army from the outside. By far the most vivid and lively of them is Lemonnier-Delafosse of the 31st Léger, whose Souvenirs Militaires were published at Havre in 1850. He is a bitter enemy, and wants to prove that Wellington was a mediocre general, and ought always to have been beaten. But he does his best to tell a true tale, and acknowledges his defeats handsomely—though he thinks that with better luck they might have been victories. Failing memory can be detected in one or two places, where he makes an officer fall at the wrong battle, or misnames a village. Fantin des Odoards, also (oddly enough) of the 31st Léger, kept a journal, so that his reminiscences of 1808–11 are very accurate. He is specially valuable for Moore’s retreat and Soult’s Oporto campaign. A far more fair-minded man than Delafosse, he is full of acknowledgments of the merit of his British adversaries, and makes no secret of his disgust for the Spanish war,—a nightmare of plunder and military executions naturally resulting from an unjust aggression. A third valuable author is Colonel St. Chamans, an aide-de-camp of Soult, whom he cordially detested, and whose meanness and spirit of intrigue he is fond of exposing. He is of a light and humorous spirit—very different from another aide-de-camp, Ney’s Swiss follower, Sprünglin, whose journal[36] is a most solid and heavy production, of value for minute facts and figures but not lively. Unlike St. Chamans in another respect, he is devoted to his chief, the Marshal, of whom he was the most loyal admirer. But I imagine that Ney was a much more generous and loveable master than the wily Soult.

Other useful French volumes of reminiscences are those of Guingret of the 6th corps, full of horrible details of Masséna’s Portuguese misfortunes; of D’Illens, a cavalry officer who served against Moore and Wellesley in 1808–09; and of Vigo-Roussillon, of the 8th Line, who gives the only good French narrative of Barrosa. Parquin is a mere sabreur, who wrote his memoir too late, and whose anecdotes cannot be trusted. He survived to be one of the followers of Napoleon III. in his early and unhappy adventures at Boulogne and elsewhere. Other French writers, such as Rocca and Gonneville, were long in Spain, but little in contact with the British, being employed on the Catalan coast, or with the army of the South on the Granada side. So much for the works of actors in the Great War, who relate what they have themselves seen. We need spend but a much smaller space on the books of the later generations, which are but second-hand information, however carefully they may have been compiled.

The British regimental histories ought to be of great value, since the series compiled by the order of the Horse Guards, under the general editorship of Richard Cannon, in the 1830’s, might have been enriched by the information obtainable from hundreds of Peninsular veterans, who were still surviving. Unfortunately nearly every volume of it is no more than bad hack-work. In the majority of the volumes we find nothing more than copious extracts from Napier, eked out with reprints of the formal reports taken from the London Gazette. It is quite exceptional to find even regimental statistics, such as might have been obtained with ease from the pay-lists and other documents in possession of the battalion, or stored at the Record Office. Details obtained through enquiry from veteran officers who had served through the war are quite exceptional. Some of his volumes are less arid and jejune than others—and this is about all that can be said in favour of even the best of them.

Regimental Histories

All the good regimental histories, without exception, are outside the official “Cannon” series. Some are excellent; it may be said that, as a general rule, those written latest are the best: the standard of accuracy and original research has been rising ever since 1860. Among those which deserve a special word of praise are Colonel Gardyne’s admirable The Life of a Regiment (the Gordon Highlanders), published in 1901; Cope’s History of the Rifle Brigade (full of excerpts from first-hand authorities) which came out in 1877; Moorsom’s History of the 52nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry (the first really good regimental history which was written), published in 1860; Davis’s History of the 2nd Foot (Queen’s West Surrey), and Colonel Hamilton’s 14th Hussars. By the time that these began to appear, the level of research was beginning to rise, and it was no longer considered superfluous to visit the Record Office, or to make enquiries for unpublished papers among the families of old officers. All those mentioned above are large volumes, but even the smaller histories are now compiled with care, and their size is generally the result not of scamped work (as of old), but of the fact that some regiments have, by the chance of their stations, seen less service than others, and therefore have less to record. I may mention as books on the smaller scale which have proved useful to me, Hayden’s history of the 76th, Smyth’s of the 20th, and Purdon’s of the 47th. A rare example of the annals of a smaller unit, a battery not a battalion, is Colonel Whinyates’ story of C Troop, R.H.A., which he called From Corunna to Sebastopol, in which much loyal and conscientious work may be found. But the history of the whole of the Artillery of the Peninsular Army, Portuguese as well as English, is now being worked out in admirable detail in the Dickson Papers, edited by Major John Leslie, R.A., who knows everything that can be known about the units of his corps which served under Wellington. Sir Alexander Dickson, it may be remarked, was Commanding Officer of the Artillery in the later campaigns of 1813 and in 1814, and before he obtained that post had been in charge of all the three sieges of Badajoz as well as those of Olivenza and Ciudad Rodrigo. Since he had been lent to the Portuguese artillery, his papers give copious information as to the auxiliary batteries of that nation which were attached to the Peninsular Army. It is devoutly to be wished that some officer would take up a corresponding task by compiling the annals of the Royal Engineers in the Peninsular War. Connolly’s History of the Royal Sappers and Miners (published so far back as 1857), has much good information, but infinitely more could be compiled by searching the Record Office, and collating the memoirs of Boothby, Burgoyne, Landmann, and other engineer officers who have left journals or reminiscences.

Along with the British regimental histories should be named two sets of volumes which are of the same type, though they relate to larger units than a regiment, and do not deal with our own troops. The first class deals with our German auxiliaries, and is headed by Major Ludlow Beamish’s valuable and conscientious History of the King’s German Legion. This was written in 1832, but is a very favourable example of research for a book of the date, when Cannon’s miserable series represented the level of English regimental history. The two volumes contain many original letters and documents, and some excellent plates of uniforms. In 1907 Captain Schwertfeger went over the same ground in his Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion,[37] and added appreciably to Beamish’s store of facts. The Brunswick Oels regiment, which served Wellington from 1811 to 1814, has also a German biographer in Colonel Kortfleisch, who has served in the 88th German Infantry, which now represents that ancient corps. There is no similar history for the Chasseurs Brittaniques, the last of the old Peninsular foreign corps.

Portuguese Authorities

For the Portuguese Army a good description of the state of affairs in 1810, when it had just been reorganized, is contained in Halliday’s Present State of Portugal, published in 1812. Chaby’s Excerptos Historicos[38] contains a good deal of valuable material for its subsequent history, but is sadly ill-arranged and patchy. Only the Portuguese artillery in the Peninsular War has been dealt with in Major Teixeira Botelho’s Subsidios para a Historia da Artilheria Portegueza, which is very full and well documented. The life of a British officer serving with a Portuguese regiment can be studied in the Memoirs of Bunbury (20th Line),[39] and Blakiston (5th Caçadores).[40]

After regimental histories, the next most important source of information, in the way of books not written by those who served under Wellington, is personal biographies. Captain Delavoye’s Life of Lord Lynedoch (Sir Thomas Graham)[41] is perhaps the most useful among them, not so much for any merit of style or arrangement, as for the excellent use of contemporary documents not available elsewhere. A large portion of the volume consists of excerpts from Graham’s long and interesting military journal, and letters from and to him are printed in extenso. Thus we get first-hand information on many events at which no other British witness was present, e.g. Castaños’ campaign on the Ebro in 1808, as well as comments on better known operations, such as Sir John Moore’s Corunna retreat, and the Barrosa expedition of 1811. Unfortunately both journal and letters fail for the campaign of 1813, in which Graham took such a distinguished part.

H. B. Robinson’s Memoirs of Sir Thomas Picton[42] was a book of which Napier fell foul—there are many caustic comments on it in his controversial appendices. But it is not nearly so bad a work as might have been expected from his way of treating it. Indeed I fancy that Napier was paying off an old Light Division grudge against Picton himself, whom he personally disliked. The narrative is fair, and the quantity of contemporary letters inserted give the compilation some value. Sidney’s Life of Lord Hill[43] is far inferior to Robinson’s book: the author did not know his Peninsular War well enough to justify the task which he took in hand, and the letters, of which he fortunately prints a good many, are the only valuable material in it. It is curious that both Picton and Hill had their lives written by clergymen, when there were still a good many old Peninsular officers surviving who might have undertaken the task.

Of the other chief lieutenants of Wellington, Beresford has never found a biographer, though the part which he played in the war was so important. There must be an immense accumulation of his papers somewhere, in private hands, but I do not know where they lie. The only account of him consists of a few pages in a useful but rather formal and patchy little book by J. W. Cole, entitled, Memoirs of British Generals Distinguished during the Peninsular War.[44] Lord Combermere (Stapleton Cotton) was in high command throughout Wellington’s campaigns, but was hardly up to his position, though he earned his chief’s tolerance by strict obedience to orders, a greater merit in the Duke’s eyes than military genius or initiative. There is a biography of him by Lady Combermere and Captain W. Knollys (1866) but the Peninsular chapters are short. Of Sir Lowry Cole, Sir John Gaspard Le Marchant, and several other prominent divisional generals and brigadiers, the only biographies are those in J. W. Cole’s book mentioned above. Sir James Leith, more fortunate, had a small volume dedicated to his memory by an anonymous admirer in 1818, but it was written without sufficient material, Leith’s private correspondence not (as it seems) being in the author’s hands, while official documents were not for the most part available at such an early date. There is a good deal, however, concerning this hard-fighting general’s personality and adventures to be gleaned from the memoirs of his nephew and aide-de-camp, Leith Hay.

Biographies of Gough, Colborne, etc.

Of officers who did not attain to the highest rank under Wellington, but who in later years made a great career for themselves, there are two biographies which devote a large section to Peninsular matters, those of Lord Gough by R. S. Rait (two vols., 1903), and of Lord Seaton (Colborne of the 52nd) by Moore Smith. These are both excellent productions, which give much private correspondence of the time, and have been constructed on modern lines, with full attention to all possible sources first- and second-hand. They are both indispensable for any one who wishes to make a detailed study of the Peninsular campaigns. There are also short memoirs of Sir Denis Pack[45] and Lord Vivian,[46] each produced by a grandson of the general, and giving useful extracts from journals and correspondence. The campaign of Sir John Moore can, perhaps, hardly be considered as falling into the story of Wellington’s army, but it is impossible to avoid mentioning the full (and highly controversial) biography of the hero of Corunna by Sir J. F. Maurice,[47] which contains an invaluable diary, and much correspondence. It is an indispensable volume, at any rate, for those who wish to study the first year of the Peninsular War, and to mark the difference between the personalities and military theories of Moore and Wellington.

Of formal and detailed histories of the Peninsular War written in recent years there is one in Spanish by General Arteche, a very conscientious and thorough-going worker at original documents, who got up a good many English authorities, but by no means all. For the Spanish version of the whole war he is absolutely necessary. So, for the Portuguese version, is the immense work of Soriano da Luz, which is largely founded on Napier, but often differs from him, and brings many unpublished documents to light. Colonel Balagny has started a history of the war in French on a very large scale, delightfully documented, and showing admirable research. In five volumes he has only just got into 1809, so the whole book will be a large one. Mr. Fortescue’s fine history of the British Army has just started on the Peninsular campaign in its last volume. To my own four volumes, soon I hope to be five, I need only allude in passing. There is one immense monograph on Dupont’s Campaign by a French author, Colonel Titeux, which does not touch English military affairs at all. Two smaller but good works of the same type by Colonel Dumas and Commandant Clerc are both, oddly enough, dedicated to the same campaign,—Soult’s defence of the Pyrenean frontier in 1813–14: the former is the better of the two: both have endeavoured, in the modern fashion, to use the reports of both sides, not to write from the documents of one only; but Dumas has a better knowledge of his English sources than Clerc.

It is beyond my power to guess why similar monographs on separate campaigns of the war do not appear in English also. But the few brochures purporting to treat of such which have appeared of late on this side of the channel, are mostly cram-books for examinations, resting on no wide knowledge of sources, and often consisting of little more than an analysis of Napier, with some supplementary comments hazarded. They contrast very unfavourably with a book such as that of Colonel Dumas.

CHAPTER III
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON—THE MAN AND THE STRATEGIST

So much for our sources. We may now proceed to discover what we can deduce from them. And we must inevitably begin with a consideration of the great leader of the British army. I am not writing a life of Wellington, still less a commentary on his campaigns—with which I am trying to deal elsewhere. My object is rather to paint him as he appeared to his own army, and as his acts and his writings reveal him during the course of his Peninsular campaigns. The Arthur Wellesley of 1809 is difficult to disentangle in our own memories from the familiar figure of Victorian reminiscences. We think of him as the “Great Duke,” the first and most honoured subject of the crown, round whom centre so many stories, more or less well founded, illustrating his disinterestedness, his hatred of phrases, insincerities, sentiment, and humbug generally, his punctiliousness, his bleak frugality, and his occasional scathing directness of speech—for he could never “suffer fools gladly.” He had become a legend long before he died, and it takes an effort of mind to differentiate the old man of 1850 from the general of 1809, who had still, in the eyes of most men, his reputation to make. For those who understood the greatness of his Indian exploits were few. It was not Napoleon only who thought that to call Wellesley a “sepoy general” was sufficient to reduce his reputation to that of a facile victor over contemptible enemies.

When he took command of the Peninsular Army in the April of that year, Arthur Wellesley was thirty-nine: he had just reached early middle age. He was a slight but wiry man of middle stature, well built and erect, with a long face, an aquiline nose, and a keen but cold grey eye. His reputation as a soldier was already high; but few save those who had served under him in India understood the full scope of his abilities. Many undervalued him, because he was a member of a well-known, but ill-loved family and political group, and had owed his early promotion and opportunities of distinguishing himself to that fact. It was still open to critics to say that the man who had commanded a battalion in the old Revolutionary War at the age of twenty-three, and who had headed an army in India before he was quite thirty, had got further to the front than he deserved by political influence. And it was true (though the fact is so often forgotten), that in his early years he had got much help from his connections, that he had obtained his unique chance in India because he was the brother of a viceroy, and that since his return from the East he had been more of a politician than a general. Was he not, even when he won Vimeiro, Secretary for Ireland in the Tory government of the day? It was a post whose holder had to dabble in much dirty work, when dealing with the needy peers, the grovelling place-mongers, and the intriguing lawyers of Dublin. Wellesley went through with it all, and not by any means in a conciliatory way. He passed the necessary jobs, but did not hide from the jobbers his scorn for them. When the Secretary for Ireland had to deal with any one whom he disliked, he showed a happy mixture of aristocratic hauteur and cold intellectual contempt, which sent the petitioner away in a bitter frame of mind, whether his petition had been granted or no. Unfortunately, he carried this manner from the Irish Secretaryship on to the Headquarters of the Peninsular Army. It did not tend to make him loved.

Wellington and the Whigs

Fortunately for Great Britain, it does not always follow that, because a man has been pushed rapidly to the front by political influence, he is therefore incompetent or unworthy of the place given him. Every one who came into personal contact with Arthur Wellesley soon recognized that Castlereagh and the other ministers had not erred when they sent the “Sepoy General” to Portugal in 1808, and when they, despite of all the clamour following the Convention of Cintra, despatched him a second time to Lisbon in 1809, this time with full control of the Peninsular Army. From the first opening of his Vimeiro campaign the troops that he led had the firmest confidence in him—they saw the skill with which he handled them, and criticism very soon died away. It was left for Whig politicians at home, carpers with not the slightest knowledge of war, to go on asserting for a couple of years more that he was an over-rated officer, that he was rash and reckless, and that his leadership would end, on some not very distant day, with the expulsion of the British army from the Peninsula. At the front there were very few such doubters—though contemporary letters have proved to me that one or two were to be found.[48]

To say that Wellington from the first was trusted alike by his officers and his men, is by no means to say that he was loved by them. He did everything that could win confidence, but little that could attract affection. They recognized that he was marvellously capable, but that he was without the supreme gift of sympathy for others. “The sight of his long nose among us,” wrote one of his veterans, “was worth ten thousand men any day of the week. I will venture to say that there was not a heart in the army which did not beat more lightly when we heard the joyful news of his arrival.”[49] But this does not mean that he was regarded with an enthusiasm of the emotional and affectionate sort. Another Light Division officer sums up the position in the coldest words that I have ever seen applied to the relations of a great general with his victorious army. “I know that it has been said that Wellington was unpopular with the army. Now I can assert with respect to the Light Division that the troops rather liked him than otherwise.... Although Wellington was not what may be called popular, still the troops possessed great confidence in him, nor did I ever hear a single individual express an opinion to the contrary.”[50]

There must, indeed, have been something to repel enthusiasm and affection in the leader of whom, after five years of victories won and hardships suffered in common, it could be said that his troops “rather liked him than otherwise.” But they found that he was a hard master, slow to praise and swift to blame and to punish. Though he knew the military virtues of his rank and file, and acknowledged that they had more than once “got him out of a scrape” by performing the almost impossible, he did not love them. He has left on record unpardonable words concerning his men. “They are the scum of the earth. English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink—that is the plain fact: they have all enlisted for drink.”[51] Quite as bad in spirit is one of his sayings before a Royal Commission on the Army. “I have no idea of any great effect being produced on British soldiers by anything but the fear of immediate corporal punishment.” Naturally enough a leader with such views never appealed to the better side of his men: he never spoke or wrote about honour or patriotism to them, but frequently reminded them of the lash and the firing-party, that were the inevitable penalty for the straggler, the drunkard, the plunderer, and the deserter. Nothing cooled the spirits of officers and men alike more than the strength and vigour of his rebukes, as compared with the official formality of his terms of praise. It was possible to have a full appreciation of his marvellous powers of brain, and a complete confidence in him as a leader, without feeling the least touch of affection for this hard and unsympathetic figure.

Wellington and his Men

The distressing point in all this is that the Peninsular Army, though it had its proportion of hardened sots and criminals, was full of good soldiers who knew what honour and loyalty meant, and were perfectly capable of answering any stirring appeal to their heart or their brain. There are dozens of diaries and autobiographies written in the ranks which show the existence of a vast class of well-conditioned intelligent, sober, even religious men, who were doing their work conscientiously, and would have valued a word of praise—they often got it from their regimental officers—seldom from their commander-in-chief. And we may add that if anything was calculated to brutalize an army it was the wicked cruelty of the British military punishment code, which Wellington to the end of his life supported. There is plenty of authority for the fact that the man who had once received his 500 lashes for a fault which was small, or which involved no moral guilt, was often turned thereby from a good into a bad soldier, by losing his self-respect and having his sense of justice seared out. Good officers knew this well enough, and did their best to avoid the cat-of-nine-tails, and to try more rational means—more often than not with success.[52]

It might have been expected that Wellington would at least show more regard for the feelings of his officers, however much he might contemn his rank and file. As a rule he did not. He had some few intimates whom he treated with a certain familiarity, and it is clear that he showed consideration and even kindness to his aides-de-camp and other personal retainers. But to the great majority of his officers, even to many of his generals and heads of departments, he bore himself very stiffly: he would administer to them humiliating snubs or reproofs before others, and ignore their remarks or proffered counsel in the most marked way. A few examples may serve. Sir Thomas Picton was one of his most distinguished lieutenants, and was specially summoned by him to come over to Brussels to take his part in the campaign of 1815. The moment that he arrived in the Belgian capital he sought the Duke, who was walking in the Great Park. We have the witness of Picton’s aide-de-camp for the following reception. “The general’s manner was always more familiar than the Duke liked in his lieutenants, and on this occasion he approached him in a careless sort of way, just as he might have greeted an equal. The Duke bowed coldly to him, and said, ‘I am glad you are come, Sir Thomas. The sooner you get on horseback the better: no time to be lost. You will take the command of the troops in advance.’ That was all. Picton appeared not to like the Duke’s manner, and when he had bowed and left, he muttered words which convinced those who were with him that he was not much pleased with his interview.”[53] Such was the welcome vouchsafed to one of the best officers in the army, whom Wellington had specially sent for, and whom he had not seen for a long space of time. Another picture of Wellington’s manners may be taken from the memoir of one of his departmental chiefs, Sir James McGrigor. “One morning I was in his lordship’s small room, when two officers came to request leave to go home to England. An engineer captain first made his request: he had received letters informing him that his wife was dangerously ill, and that the whole of his family were sick. His lordship quickly replied, ‘No, no, sir. I cannot spare you at this moment.’ The captain, with a mournful face, drew back. Then a general officer, of noble family, commanding a brigade, advanced saying, ‘My lord, I have lately been suffering much from rheumatism——’. Without allowing him time to complete his sentence, Lord Wellington rapidly said, ‘and you want to go to England to be cured. By all means. Go there immediately.’ The general, surprised at his lordship’s tone and manner, looked abashed, but to prevent his saying anything more, his lordship turned and began to address me, enquiring about the casualty-returns of the preceding night, and the nature of them.”[54] An interview with the commander-in-chief was such a trying thing for the nerves that some officers went away from it in a flood of tears—as did Charles Stewart after one famous reproof—and others suffocating from suppressed maledictions.

Wellington and his Officers

Wellington’s temper was tried by having to deal with some inefficient and slack officers—foisted upon him from home—for never till the end of the war (as he bitterly complained) was he allowed complete liberty in choosing his subordinates. But it was not on them alone that his thunders fell. He often raged at zealous and capable subordinates, who had done no more than think for themselves in an urgent crisis, when the orders that they had received seemed no longer applicable. Sir James McGrigor, whom I have just quoted above, once moved some commissariat stores to Salamanca, where there was a great accumulation of sick and wounded. “When I came to inform him his lordship started up, and in a violent manner began to repudiate what I had done. ‘I shall be glad to know,’ he asked, ‘who commands this army—I or you? I establish one route, one line of communication—you establish another by ordering up supplies by it. As long as you live, sir, never do that again. Never do anything without my orders.’ I pleaded that there had been no time to consult him, and that I had to save lives. He peremptorily desired me ‘never again to act without his orders.’” Three months afterwards McGrigor ventured to say, “My lord, you will remember how much you blamed me at Madrid, for the steps that I took when I could not consult your lordship, and acted for myself. Now, if I had not, what would the consequences have been?” He answered, “It is all right as it has turned out, but still I recommend you to have my orders for what you do.” This was a singular feature in his lordship’s character.

Anything that seemed to Wellington to partake of the nature of thinking for oneself was an unpardonable sin in a subordinate. This is why he preferred blind obedience in his lieutenants to zeal and energy which might lead to some contravention of his own intention. Thus it came that he preferred as lieutenants not only Hill, who was a man of first-class brain-power notwithstanding his docility, but Spencer and Beresford, who most certainly were not. Hence, too, his commission of the cavalry arm throughout the war to such a mediocre personage as Stapleton Cotton (of whom he used the most unflattering language).[55] These men could be trusted to obey without reasoning, while Robert Craufurd, the ablest general in the Peninsula, or Picton, could not, but were liable to think for themselves. It may be noted that Hill, Beresford, Graham and Craufurd, were the only officers to whom Wellington ever condescended in his correspondence to give the why and wherefore of a command that he issued: the others simply received orders without any commentary. There are instances known in which a word of reasonable explanation to a subordinate would have enabled him to understand a situation, and to comprehend why directions otherwise incomprehensible were given him. Tiresome results occasionally followed. This foible of refusing information to subordinates for no adequate reason has been shared by other great generals—e.g. by Stonewall Jackson, as Colonel Henderson’s biography of that strange genius sufficiently shows. It is a trick of the autocratic mind.

It hardly requires to be pointed out that this determination to allow no liberty of action to his lieutenants, and to keep even small decisions in his own hands, effectually prevented Wellington from forming a school of generals capable of carrying out large independent operations. He trained admirable divisional commanders, but not leaders of armies. The springs of self-confidence were drained out of men who had for long been subjected to his régime.

Wellington’s Dispatches

Probably the thing which irritated Wellington’s subordinates most was his habit of making his official mention of names in dispatches little more than a formal recital in order of the senior officers present. Where grave mistakes had been committed, he still stuck the names of the misdemeanants in the list, among those of the men who had really done the work. A complete mystification as to their relative merits would be produced, if we had only the dispatches to read, and no external commentary on them. He honourably mentioned Murray in his Oporto dispatch, Erskine in his dispatch concerning the actions during Masséna’s retreat in 1811, Trip in his Waterloo dispatch, though each of these officers had done his best to spoil the operations in which he was concerned. On the other hand, he would make the most unaccountable omissions: his Fuentes de Oñoro dispatch makes no mention of the British artillery, which had done most brilliant service in that battle, not merely in the matter of Norman Ramsay’s well-known exploit, which Wellington might have thought too small a matter to mention, but in the decisive checking of the main French attack. There are extant heart-rending letters from the senior officers commanding the artillery, deploring the way in which they have been completely ignored: “to read the dispatch, there might have been no British artillery present at all.” A similar inexplicable omission of any record of zealous service occurs in Wellington’s dispatch recording the fall of Badajoz, where no special praise of the services of his engineer officers is made, though 50 per cent. of them had been killed or wounded during the siege. “You may suppose we all feel hurt at finding our exertions have not been deemed worthy of any sort of eulogium,” writes John Jones, the historian of the sieges of the Peninsula, to one of his colleagues. And Fletcher, the commanding engineer, writes to a friend: “You will observe that Lord W. has not mentioned the engineers in the late actions: how I hate such capriciousness!”[56] The cold phrase in which their desperate service was acknowledged is “the officers and men of the corps of engineers and artillery were equally distinguished during the operations of the siege and its close.” Fletcher would gladly have exchanged the personal honour of a decoration, which was given him along with other senior officers, for three lines of warm praise of the exertions of his subordinates.

Lord Roberts on Wellington

Perhaps, however, the most astounding instance of Wellington’s ungracious omissions is that his famous Waterloo dispatch contains no mention whatever of the services of Colborne and the 52nd, the battalion which gave the decisive stroke against the flank of the Imperial Guard, during Napoleon’s last desperate assault on the British line. Colborne, the most unselfish and generous of men, could never forget this slight. He tried to excuse it, saying, “dispatches are written in haste, and it is impossible for a general to do justice to his army.” And when he heard his officers complaining that the British Guards had been given all the credit for the final repulse of the French column, he said, “For shame, gentlemen! One would think that you forgot that the 52nd had ever been in battle before.” But there was a bitter comment in the table talk of his later years. “The Duke was occasionally not above writing in his dispatches to please the aristocracy.... I don’t mean to say that this was peculiar to him. It used to be a common thing with general officers.”[57] Enough, however, of these illustrative anecdotes of the limitations of a very great soldier and a very honourable man. They have to be mentioned in order to explain how it came to pass that Wellington was implicitly trusted, and never loved. But they compel me to acquiesce in the hard judgment which Lord Roberts wrote in his Rise of Wellington—“the more we go into his actions and his writings in detail, the more do we respect and admire him as a general, and the less do we like him as a man.” I conclude this paragraph with two quotations from two eloquent writers who served through long years of the Peninsular campaigns. “Thus terminated the war, and with it all remembrances of the veteran’s services” are the last words of William Napier’s penultimate chapter.[58] Grattan of the 88th, a forgotten writer now, but one who wielded a descriptive pen no less vivid than Napier’s, puts the complaint more bitterly. “In his parting General Order to the Peninsular Army he told us that he would never cease to feel the warmest interest for our welfare and honour. How that promise has been kept every one knows. That the Duke of Wellington is one of the most remarkable (perhaps the greatest) men of the present age, few will deny. But that he neglected the interests and feelings of his Peninsular army, as a body, is beyond all question. And were he in his grave to-morrow, hundreds of voices that now are silent would echo what I write.”[59]

If I have dwelt perhaps at over-great length on the limitations of Wellington’s heart, it is only fair that full credit should be given to his wonderful powers of brain. To comprehend the actual merit of his military career, it is not sufficient to possess a mere knowledge of the details of his tactics and his strategy. The conditions under which he had to exercise his talents were exceptionally trying and difficult. When he assumed command at Lisbon on April 22, 1809, the French were in possession of all Northern and Central Spain, and of no inconsiderable part of Northern Portugal also. The Spanish armies had all been dashed to pieces—there was no single one of them which had not suffered a crushing defeat, and some of them (such as Cuesta’s army of Estremadura, and La Romana’s army of Galicia) were at the moment little better than wandering bands of fugitives. The British army of which Wellesley took command when he landed at Lisbon, though it only mustered 19,000 men present, or 21,000 including men in hospital, was the only solid force, in good order and intact in morale, on which the allies could count in the Iberian Peninsula. The task set before Wellesley was to see if he could defend Portugal, and co-operate in the protection of Southern Spain, it being obvious that the French were in vastly superior numbers, and well able to take the offensive if they should chose to do so. There were two armies threatening Lisbon. The one under Soult had already captured Oporto and overrun two Portuguese provinces, shortly before Wellesley’s landing. The other, under Victor, lay in Estremadura close to the Portuguese border, and had recently destroyed the largest surviving Spanish army at the battle of Medellin on March 28. Was it possible that 19,000 British troops could save the Peninsula from conquest, or even that they could keep up the war in Central Portugal? Never was a more unpromising task set to the commander of a small army.

Wellington’s Powers of Prescience

Fortunately we possess three documents from Wellesley’s own hand, which show us the way in which he surveyed the position that was before him, and stated his views as to the future course of the Peninsular War. He recognized that it was about to be a very long business, and that his task was simply to keep the war going as long as possible, with the limited resources at his disposition. Ambitious schemes for the expulsion of the French from the whole Peninsula were in 1809 perfectly futile. The hypothesis which he sets forth in the first of the three documents to which I allude, his Memorandum on the Defence of Portugal, laid before Castlereagh on March 7, before he had taken ship for Lisbon, is a marvel of prophetic genius. No more prescient document was ever written. Rejecting the decision of Sir John Moore, who had declared that Portugal was quite indefensible, Wellesley states that a British army of not less than 30,000 men, backed by the levies of Portugal, ought to be able to maintain itself for an almost indefinite period on the flank of the French army in Spain. Its presence on the Tagus would paralyse all offensive movements of the enemy, and enable the Spaniards to make head in the unsubdued provinces of their realm, so long as Portugal should remain intact. The French ought, if they were wise, to turn all their disposable forces against the British army and Portugal, but he believed that even then, when the geography of the country was taken into consideration, they would fail in their attempt to overrun it. They could not succeed, as he held, unless they were able to set aside 100,000 men for the task, and he did not see how in the spring of 1809 they could spare such a large detachment, out of the forces which they then possessed in the Peninsula. If they tried it with a smaller army, he thought that he could undertake to foil them. He believed that he could cope with Soult and Victor, the two enemies who immediately threatened Portugal.[60]

Further forward it was impossible to look. If a war should break out between Napoleon and Austria, as seemed likely at the moment in March, 1809, to one who (like himself) was in the secrets of the British Cabinet, the Emperor would not be able to send reinforcements to Spain for many a day. But, even so, the position of the French in the Peninsula was so strong that it could only be endangered if a very large allied force, acting in unison under the guidance of a single general, should be brought to bear upon them. Of the collection of such a force, and still more of the possibility of its being entrusted to his own command, there was as yet no question. Wellesley was aware of the jealousy of foreign interference which the Spanish Junta nurtured: there was little probability that they would entrust him with the supreme control over their armies. It was, indeed, only in 1812, when he had acquired for himself a much greater reputation than he owned in 1809, and when the Spanish Government had drunk the cup of humiliation to the dregs, that he was finally given the position of commander-in-chief of the Spanish armies.

This memorandum is a truly inspired document, which shows Wellesley at his best. It is not too much to say that it predicts the whole course of the Peninsular War—whose central point was to be invasion of Portugal in 1810 by a French army of 65,000 instead of the required 100,000 men, and that army, as he had foreseen, Wellesley was able to check and foil.

The second document of a prophetic sort that we have to notice is Wellesley’s reply to Mr. Canning’s question to him as regards the future general policy of the war, written on September 5, 1809. The whole aspect of affairs had been much changed since March, by the fact that Austria had tried her luck in a war against Napoleon, and had been beaten at Wagram and forced to make peace. It was therefore certain that the Emperor would now have his hands free again, and be able to reinforce his armies in the Peninsula. Wellesley replies that it is hopeless to attempt to defend both Southern Spain and Portugal also, even if the British army were raised to 40,000 men. But Portugal can still be defended.[61] He expresses the strongest objection to any attempt to cover Andalusia and Seville, for to endeavour to do so must mean that Lisbon would have to be given up.

The Lines of Torres Vedras

The third great prophetic despatch is the Memorandum of October 26, 1809, ordering the construction of the Lines of Torres Vedras. Wellesley looks a full year ahead. He sees that Napoleon can now reinforce his Spanish armies, but that the new troops cannot get up till the next spring. When they appear, the British army will have to retreat on Lisbon, where lines of such strength can be planned that there is a good prospect of bringing the invaders to a stand. Meanwhile the countryside shall be cleared of population and provisions, so that the French, if they keep concentrated, must starve, and the allied army shall so conduct its operations that the enemy will be compelled to remain en masse. Then follow directions to Colonel Fletcher (commanding the engineers) to make his plans for an immense line of redoubts covering the Lisbon peninsula from sea to sea. What was foreseen came to pass: the French reinforcements arrived: the invasion of Portugal under Masséna took place in 1810. But the whole countryside was swept clear of food, and when the marshal reached the Lines with his half-starved army, he was completely blocked, refused to attack the formidable positions, and, after a few weeks of endurance in front of them, withdrew with his famished troops. It was on October 26, 1809, that Wellington ordered the Lines to be laid out. On October 14, 1810, Masséna appeared in front of them and was foiled: Wellington had made his preparations exactly a year ahead!

Careful long-sighted calculation was perhaps the Duke’s strongest point. He had an immense grasp of detail, kept intelligence officers of picked ability out on every front, and had compiled an almost exactly correct muster-roll of the forces opposed to him. Seldom had a general of his time such a complete knowledge of his adversaries, and this he owed to the pains that he took to obtain it. His great scouts Colquhoun Grant,[62] Waters, and Rumann were always far out to the front, often within the French lines, sending him daily information, which he filed and dissected. In addition he had many Spanish and Portuguese correspondents, whose information would have been more valuable if it had not contained too much hearsay, and if they had been able to judge numbers with the trained eye of a soldier. Once he complained that he and Marmont were almost equally handicapped as regards information from the natives—for if the Frenchmen got none, he himself got too much: the proportion of it which was inaccurate spoiled the value of the rest. But Grant or Waters never made mistakes. Part of his system was the cross-questioning of every deserter and prisoner as to the number and brigading of his regiment, and the amount of battalions that it contained. By constant comparison of these reports he got to know the exact number of units in every French corps, and their average strength.

But this was less important than his faculty for judging the individual characters of his opponents. After a few weeks he got his fixed opinion on Masséna or Victor, Soult or Marmont, and would lay his plans with careful reference to their particular foibles. I think that this is what he meant when he once observed that his own merit was, perhaps, that he knew more of “what was going on upon the other side of the hill,”—in the invisible ground occupied by the enemy and hidden by the fog of war—than most men.

Wellington’s Insight into Character

This insight into the enemy’s probable move, when their strength, their object, and the personal tendencies of their leader were known, was a most valuable part of Wellesley’s mental equipment. The best known instance where it came into play was on the day of Sorauren. In the midst of the battles of the Pyrenees, when the British army had taken up its fighting position, though its numbers were as yet by no means complete, and two divisions were still marching up, Wellington arrived from the west to assume command. He could see Soult on the opposite hill surrounded by his staff, and it was equally certain that Soult could see him, and knew the reason of the cheer which ran along the front of the allied army as he rode up. Wellington judged, and rightly, that the news of his arrival, and the sight of him in position, would cause the marshal to delay his attack till the last of the French reserves had come on the field. “I had an excellent glass: I saw him spying at us—then write and send off a letter: I knew what he would be writing, and gave my orders accordingly.”[63] Wellington judged Soult a cautious general, knew that his own presence would redouble his caution, and so judged that the order given by the marshal would be for the checking of a threatened attack, which would have been very dangerous at the moment, if it had been pressed. “The 6th Division will have time to come up, and we shall beat him,” is said to have been his comment, when he saw Soult hurriedly write and dispatch an order to his front line.

Wellington played off a similar piece of bluff on Marmont at Fuente Guinaldo in September, 1811, when he drew up in a position strong indeed, but over-great for the numbers that he had in hand, and seemed to offer battle. He was aware that his own reputation for caution was so great that, if the enemy saw him halt and take up his ground, they would judge that he had concentrated his whole force, and would not attack him till their own reserves were near. He absconded unmolested in the night, while Marmont’s rear columns were toiling up for the expected battle of the next day.

For a long time in 1809–10 Wellesley had to assume a defensive attitude. It was not till 1811 that it at last became possible for him to think of taking the offensive, nor was it till 1812, the glorious year of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, and Salamanca, that the dream reached its realization. Hence came it that for a long time he was regarded only as a cautious and calculating general, a master of defensive warfare. This conception of him was wrong; as events showed, in 1812–1813, that he could be a very thunderbolt of war, when propitious chance gave him the opportunity, could strike the boldest blows, and launch his army upon the enemy with the most ruthless energy. But, in the earlier years of his command, he was always hopelessly outnumbered, and forced to parry rather than to strike. He had to run no risks with his precious little army, the 30,000 British troops on whom the whole defence of the Peninsula really depended: because if it were destroyed it could not be replaced. With these 30,000 men he had covenanted, in his agreement with Castlereagh, when first he sailed to take command at Lisbon, that he would keep up the war indefinitely. If by taking some great risk he had lost 15,000 or even 10,000 men, the government would have called him home, and would have given up the struggle. Thus he had to fight with the consciousness that a single disaster might ruin not only his own plans, but the whole cause of the allies in Spain. No wonder that his actions seem cautious! Yet even in 1810–1811 he took some serious risks, such as the offering of battle at Bussaco and Fuentes de Oñoro. When even a partial defeat would mean his own recall, and the evacuation of Portugal, it required no small resolution even to face such chances as these. But his serene and equable temper could draw the exact line between legitimate and over-rash enterprise, and never betrayed him.

Wellington on the Offensive

All the more striking, therefore, was the sudden development into a bold offensive policy which marked the commencement of that year of victories 1812. The chance had at last come: Napoleon was ceasing to pour reinforcements into Spain—the Russian War was beginning to loom near at hand. The French no longer possessed their former overwhelming superiority: in order to hold in check Wellington’s army, now at last increased by troops from home to 40,000 British sabres and bayonets, they had to concentrate from every quarter, and risk their hold on many provinces in order to collect a force so large that the British general could not dare to face it. At last, in the winter of 1811–1812, Napoleon himself intervened as Wellington’s helper, by dispersing his armies too broadcast. The actually fatal move was the sending of 15,000 of Marmont’s “Army of Portugal,” the immediate adversary of the Anglo-Portuguese host, for a distant expedition to the coast of the Mediterranean in aid of Marshal Suchet. It was the absence of this great detachment, which could not return for many weeks, that emboldened Wellington to make his first great offensive stroke, the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo on January 19, 1812, after a siege of only twelve days.

Following on this first success came the dear-bought but decisive success of the storming of Badajoz on April 7; this was a costly business, because Wellington had to operate “against time,” since, if he lingered over-long, the French armies from north and south would combine, outnumber him, and drive him back into Portugal. Badajoz had to be stormed by sheer force, before all the arts of the engineer and artillerist had worked their full effect. The fire of the besieged had not been subdued, nor had the approaches of the assailants been pushed close up to the walls, as science would have dictated. But by making three simultaneous attacks on different points of the fortress, and succeeding at two of them, Wellington achieved his object and solved his “time problem.” He showed here, for the first time, that he could, if it was necessary, spend the lives of his men remorselessly, in order to finish in a few days a task which, if much longer delayed, would have had to be abandoned. This was to his French enemies a revelation of a new side of his character. He had been esteemed one who refused risks and would not accept losses. If they had known of the details of his old Indian victory of Assaye, they would have judged his character more truly.

But Salamanca was the real revelation of Wellington’s full powers. It was a lightning stroke, a sudden offensive movement made at a crisis of momentary opportunity, which would have ceased if the hour had not been seized with all promptitude. Wellington hurled his army unexpectedly at the enemy, who was manœuvring in full confidence and tranquillity in front of his line, thinking that he had to deal with an adversary who might accept a battle (as at Vimeiro, Talavera, or Bussaco), but might be trusted not to force one on. Salamanca surprised and dismayed the more sagacious of the French officers. Foy, the most intelligent observer among them, put down in his diary six days later, “This battle is the most cleverly fought, the largest in scale, the most important in results, of any that the English have won in recent times. It brings up Lord Wellington’s reputation almost to the level of that of Marlborough. Up to this day we knew his prudence, his eye for choosing good positions, and the skill with which he used them. But at Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manœuvring. He kept his dispositions hidden nearly the whole day: he allowed us to develop our movement before he pronounced his own: he played a close game; he utilized the “oblique order” in the style of Frederick the Great.... The catastrophe of the Spanish War has come—for six months we ought to have seen that it was quite probable.”[64]

This is one of the most striking and handsome compliments ever paid by a general of a beaten army to the commander of the victorious adversaries. It is perfectly true, and it reflects the greatest credit on Foy’s fair-mindedness and readiness to see facts as they were. The conqueror of Salamanca was for the future a much more terrifying enemy than the victor of Bussaco or Talavera had been. It is one thing to be repulsed—that had often happened to the French before—another to be suddenly assailed, scattered, and driven off the field with crushing losses and in hopeless disorder, as happened to Wellington’s enemies under the shadow of the Arapiles on July 22, 1812.

Wellington as a great master of the offensive came into prominence in 1812, and for the rest of the war it is this side of him which is most frequently visible, though the retreat from Burgos shows that his prudence was as much alive as ever. During the few days that preceded that retreat there was very great temptation to try a hard stroke at one of the French armies that were converging on the two halves of his own force. Napoleon would undoubtedly have made the attempt. But, Wellington, knowing that his own total numbers were much inferior to those of the enemy, and that to concentrate in front of either Soult or Souham would be to take a terrible risk on the other flank, preferred a concentric retreat towards his base on the frontier of Portugal, to a battle in the plains of Castille, where he was far from home and support, and where a defeat might lead to absolute ruin.

The Campaigns of 1813–1814

This was the last time that he was outnumbered and forced back upon his old methods. In 1813, owing to Napoleon’s drafts from the army of Spain, which were called off to replace the troops lost in the Moscow campaign, the allies had at last a superiority in numbers, though that superiority consisted entirely in Spanish troops of doubtful solidity. But even these were conditions far more favourable than Wellington had ever enjoyed before—he knew how to use his newly joined Spanish divisions in a useful fashion, without placing them in the more dangerous and responsible positions. The campaigns of 1813 and 1814 are both essentially offensive in character, though they contain one or two episodes when Wellington was, for the moment, on the defensive in his old style, notably the early part of the battles of the Pyrenees, where, till his reserves came up, he was fending off Soult by the use of his more advanced divisions. But the moment that his army was assembled he struck hard, and chased the enemy over the frontier, again in the series of operations that begun on the last day of Sorauren. There was a very similar episode during the operations that are generally known as the battle of the Nive, where Wellington had twice to stand for a movement in position, while one of his wings was assailed by Soult’s main body. But this was distinctly what we may call defensive tactical detail, in a campaign that was essentially offensive on the whole. The main character of the operations of 1813–14 may be described as the clearing out of the enemy from a series of positions—generally heavily fortified—by successful breaking through of the lines which Soult on each occasion failed to hold. Invariably the French army was nailed down to the position which it had taken up, by demonstrations all along its front, while the decisive blow was given at selected points by a mass of troops collected for the main stroke.

CHAPTER IV
WELLINGTON’S INFANTRY TACTICS—LINE VERSUS COLUMN

Everyone who takes a serious interest in military history is aware that, in a general way, the victories of Wellington over his French adversaries were due to a skilful use of the two-deep line against the massive column, which had become the usual fighting-formation for a French army acting on the offensive, during the later years of the great war that raged from 1792 till 1814. But I am not sure that the methods and limitations of Wellington’s system are fully appreciated, and they are well worth explaining. And on the other hand it would not be true to imagine that all French fighting, without exception, was conducted in column, or that blows delivered by the solid masses whose aspect the English knew so well, were the only ideal of the Napoleonic generals. It is not sufficient to lay down the general thesis that Wellington found himself opposed by troops who invariably worked in column, and that he beat those troops by the simple expedient of meeting them, front to front, with other troops who as invariably fought in the two-deep battle line. The statement is true in a general way, but needs explanation and modification.

The use of infantry in line was, of course, no invention of Wellington’s, nor is it a universal panacea for all crises of war. During the eighteenth century, from Marlborough to Frederic the Great, all European infantry was normally fighting in line, three or four deep, and looking for success in battle to the rapidity and accuracy of its fire, not to the impetus of advances in heavy masses such as had been practised by the pikemen of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and were to be introduced again by the French generals of the Revolutionary period. Everyone knows how the victories of Frederic the Great were in part to be attributed to the careful fire-drill of his infantry, who, with their iron ramrods and rapid manual exercise, used to put in a far larger and more effective discharge of musket-balls per minute than their adversaries. But both parties were as a rule fighting in three-deep line, Austrians no less than Prussians. Armies had a stereotyped array, with infantry battalions deployed in long lines in the centre, and heavy masses of cavalry covering the wings. A glance at the battle-plans of the War of the Austrian Succession, or of the Seven Years’ War, shows a marvellous similarity in the general tactical arrangements of the rival hosts, and front-to-front collisions of long parallel lines were quite common, though commanders of genius had their own ways of varying the tactics of the day. Frederic the Great’s famous “oblique order,” or advance in échelon, with the strong striking-wing brought forward, and the weaker “containing-wing” held back and refused, is sufficiently well known. Occasionally he was able to vary it, as at Rossbach and Leuthen, and to throw the greater part of his troops across the enemy’s flank at right angles, so as to roll him up in detail. But these were “uncovenanted mercies” obtained owing to the abnormal sloth or unskilfulness of the opposing general. Torgau needs a special word of mention, as Frederic’s only battle fought of choice in a thoroughly irregular formation.

There were one or two cases in the old eighteenth-century wars of engagements won by the piercing of a hostile centre, such as Marshal Saxe’s victory of Roucoux (1746), and we may find, in other operations of that great general, instances of the use of deep masses, battalion deployed behind battalion, for the attack of a chosen section of the hostile position, and others where a line of deployed infantry was flanked or supported by units practically in column. But this was exceptional—as exceptional as the somewhat similar formation of Cumberland’s mass of British and Hanoverian infantry at Fontenoy, which, though often described as a column, had originally consisted of three successive lines of deployed battalions, which were ultimately constricted into a mass by lateral pressure. Some of Marshal Broglie’s and Ferdinand of Brunswick’s fights during the Seven Years’ War were also fought in a looser order of battle than was normal.

Normally the tactics of the eighteenth century were directed to the smashing up of one of the enemy’s wings, either by outflanking it, or by assailing it with very superior forces, while the rest of the enemy’s army was “contained” by equal or inferior numbers, according as the assailant had more or less troops than his enemy. The decisive blow was very frequently delivered by a superior force of cavalry concentrated upon the striking wing, which commenced the action by breaking down the inferior hostile cavalry, and then turned in upon the flank of the infantry of the wing which it had assailed. Such a type of battle may sometimes be found much later, even in the Peninsular War, where Ocaña was a perfect example of it.

Frederic II. and Marshal Saxe

Speaking roughly, however, the period of set battles fought by enemies advancing against each other in more or less parallel lines ended with the outbreak of the war of the French Revolution. There had been a fierce controversy in France from 1775 to 1791 between the advocates of the linear, or Frederician, battle-order—headed by General Guibert, and the officers who wished to introduce a deeper formation, which they claimed to have learnt from the instructions of Marshal Saxe—of whom the chief was General Menil-Durand. The former school had triumphed just before the war began, and the Réglement d’Infanterie of 1791 accepted all their views. It was on this drill-book that the French infantry stood to fight in the following year, when the war on the Rhine and in Belgium began.[65]

But the attempt of the first generals of Revolutionary France to fight on the old linear system was a failure. The troops of the Republic had been demoralized by the removal or desertion of the greater proportion of their commissioned officers, and their cadres had been hastily filled with half-trained recruits. At the same time hundreds of new units, the battalions of volunteers, had been formed on no old cadre at all, but, with officers and men alike little better than untrained civilians, took the field along with the reorganized remains of the old royal army. It is hardly necessary to remark, that these raw armies suffered a series of disgraceful defeats at the hands of the Austrian and other allied troops in 1792–93. They were beaten both in tactics, in manœuvring, and in fire-discipline by the well-drilled veteran battalions to which they were opposed.

The French Republic, when it came under the control of the Jacobins, tried to set matters right by accusing its generals of treason, and arrested and guillotined a considerable proportion of the unfortunate commanders-in-chief to whom its armies had been entrusted. But neither this heroic device, nor the sending to the armies of the well known “representatives en mission” from the National Assembly, who were to stimulate the energy of the generals, had satisfactory results. As the representatives were generally as ignorant of military affairs as they were self-important and autocratic, they did no more than confuse and harass the unhappy generals on whom they were inflicted.

One thing, however, the Jacobin government did accomplish: it pushed into the field reinforcements in such myriads that the armies of the allies were hopelessly outnumbered on every frontier. The first successes of the Republican armies in the North were won by brute force, by heaping double and triple numbers upon the enemy. And the new tactics of the Revolutionary leaders were evolved from a consciousness of superiority in this respect, a determination to swamp troops that manœuvred better than their own, by hurling preponderant masses upon them, regardless of the losses that must necessarily be suffered. For they had inexhaustible reserves behind them, from the newly-decreed levies en masse, while the bases of the allies were far off, and their trained men, when destroyed, could only be replaced slowly and with difficulty.

Tactics of the French Revolution

When the generals of the Revolution threw away the old linear tactics learned in the school of Frederic the Great, as inapplicable to troops that could not manœuvre with the same speed and accuracy as their enemies, the improvised system that succeeded was a brutal and wasteful one, but had the merit of allowing them to utilize their superiority of numbers. It is possible that those of them who reasoned at all upon the topic—and reasoning was not easy in that strenuous time, when a commander’s head sat lightly on his shoulders—saw that they were in a manner utilizing the idea that had been tried in a tentative way by Maurice de Saxe, and by one or two other generals of the old wars—the idea that for collision in long line on a parallel front, partial attacks in heavy masses on designated points might be substituted. But it is probable that there was more of improvisation than of deliberate tactical theory in the manœuvres of even the best of them.

The usual method was to throw at the hostile front a very thick skirmishing line, which sheathed and concealed a mass of heavy columns, concentrated upon one or two critical points of the field. The idea was that the front line of tirailleurs would so engage the enemy, and keep him occupied all along his front, that at the crucial section of the combat the supporting columns would get up to striking distance with practically no loss, and could be hurled, while still intact, upon those points of the hostile array which it was intended to pierce; they would go through by their mere impetus and weight, since they were only exposed to fire for a few minutes, and could endure the loss suffered in that time without losing their élan or their pace. The essential part of the system was the enormously thick and powerful skirmishing line: whole battalions were dispersed in chains of tirailleurs, who frankly abandoned any attempt at ordered movement, took refuge behind cover of all sorts, and were so numerous that they could always drive in the weak skirmishing line of the enemy, and get closely engaged with his whole front. The orderly battalion-volleys of the Austrian, or other allied troops opposed to them, did comparatively little harm to these swarms, who were taking cover as much as possible, and presented no closed body or solid mark for the musketry fire poured upon them. It looks as if the proper antidote against such a swarm-attack would have been local and partial cavalry charges, by squadrons judiciously inserted in the hostile line, for nothing could have been more vulnerable to a sudden cavalry onslaught than a disorderly chain of light troops. On many occasions in the campaigns of 1792–93 the French infantry had shown itself very helpless against horsemen who pushed their charge home, not only in cases where it was caught unprepared, but even when it had succeeded in forming square with more or less promptitude.[66] But this particular remedy against the swarm-attack does not seem to have been duly employed, and indeed many parts of Flanders are so cut up by small enclosures, that the use of cavalry as a universal panacea might often have proved impossible.

Tactics of the French Column

The masses which supported the thick lines of tirailleurs were formed either in columns of companies or columns of “divisions,” i.e. double companies.[67] In the former case the eight companies, each three deep, were drawn up behind each other. In the latter the front was formed by a “division,” and the depth was only twelve men. In either case none but the two front ranks could use their firearms properly, and the rest were useless save for the impetus that they gave the rolling mass. But such a column, when properly sheathed by the skirmishing line till the last moment, generally came with a very effective rush against the allied line opposed to it, which would have been already engaged with the tirailleurs for some time, and had probably been much depleted by their fire. It is equally clear that, without its protective sheath of skirmishers, such a heavy column would have been a very clumsy instrument of war, since it combined the minimum of shooting power with the maximum of vulnerability. But when so shielded, the columns which attacked in masses at a decisive spot, leaving the rest of the hostile line “contained” by an adequate force, had a fair chance of penetrating, though the process of penetration might during the last two or three minutes be very costly to the troops forming the head of the column.

The best early summary of this change in French tactics which I know occurs in an anonymous English pamphlet published in 1802, which puts the matter in a nutshell. “The French army was composed of troops of the line without order, and of raw and undisciplined volunteers. They experienced defeats in the beginning, but in the meantime war was forming both officers and soldiers. In an open country they took to forming their armies in columns instead of lines, which they could not preserve without difficulty. They reduced battles to attacks on certain points, where brigade succeeded brigade, and fresh troops supplied the places of those who were driven back, till they were enabled to force the post, and make the enemy give way. They were fully aware that they could not give battle in regular order, and sought to reduce engagements to important affairs of posts: this plan has succeeded. They look upon losses as nothing, provided they attain their end; they set little store by their men, because they have the certainty of being able to replace them, and the customary superiority of their numbers affords them an advantage which can only be counterbalanced by great skill, conduct, and activity.”[68]

After 1794, when the Republican armies had won their first series of great successes, and had driven their enemies behind their own frontiers, there is a distinct change in the tactical conceptions of the French. The troops had improved immensely in morale and self-confidence: a new race of generals had appeared, who were neither obsessed by reminiscences of the system of Frederic the Great, like some of their predecessors, nor spurred to blind violence and the brutal expenditure of vast numbers of men like certain others. The new generals modified the gross and unscientific methods of the Jacobin armies of 1793–94, which had won victory indeed, but only by the force of numbers and with reckless loss of life. There remained as a permanent lesson, however, from the earlier campaigns two principles—the avoidance of dispersion and extension, by which armies “cover everything and protect nothing,” and the necessity of striking at crucial points rather than delivering “linear” battles, fought out at equal intensity along the whole front. In general French tactics became very supple, the units manœuvring with a freedom which had been unknown to earlier generations. The system of parting an army into divisions, now introduced as a regular organization,[69] gave to the whole army a power of independent movement unknown in the days when a line of battle was considered a rigid thing, formed of brigades ranged elbow to elbow, none of which ought to move without the direct orders of the general-in-chief. A front might be composed of separate divisions coming on the field by different roads, and each adopting its own formation, the only necessity being that there should be no great gaps left between them. As a matter of fact this last necessary precaution was by no means always observed, and there are cases in the middle, and even the later, years of the Revolutionary War, in which French generals brought their armies upon the field in such disconnected bodies, and with such want of co-operation and good timing, that they were deservedly defeated in detail.[70] Bonaparte himself is liable to this charge for his order of attack at Marengo, where he committed himself to a general action before the column of Desaix was near enough to the field, and as nearly as possible suffered a crushing reverse for the want of a mass of troops whose action was absolutely necessary to him. Hoche, Jourdan, and Moreau (the last especially), all committed similar mistakes from time to time. But these errors were at least better than an adhesion to the stereotyped tactics of the older generation, where formal set orders of battle had been thought absolutely necessary.

Disadvantages of the Column

As a rule we find the French operating in the later years of the Republic with methods very different from those of 1793, with skill and swiftness, no longer with the mere brute force of numerical superiority, winning by brilliant manœuvring rather than by mere bludgeon work. Yet, oddly enough, there was no formal revision of official tactics; the Reglement d’Infanterie which had been drawn up in 1791, whose base was the old three-deep line of Frederic the Great, had never been disowned, even when it was for the most part disregarded, in the period when swarm-attacks of tirailleurs, supported by monstrous heavy columns, had become, perforce, the practical method of the French armies. When that unsatisfactory time passed by, the same old drill-book continued to be used, and was no longer so remote from actual practice as it had been. For the use of the deployed battalion began to come up again, as the handiness of the troops increased, and their self-reliance was restored. Only the early Revolutionary War had left two marks upon French tactics—for hard and heavy work, such as the forcing of passes, or bridges, or defiles, or the breaking of a crucial point in the enemy’s line, the deep column remained habitually employed: while the old idea of the orderly continuous line of battle was gone for ever, or almost gone, for (oddly enough) in Napoleon’s last and least lucky fight, Waterloo, the order of the imperial host was more like the trim and symmetrical array of a Frederician army than any French line of battle that had been seen for many a year. Certainly it would have pleased the eye of the Prussian king much better than the apparently irregular, though carefully thought out, plans of battle on which Jena or Wagram, Borodino or Bautzen were won.

The “Ordre Mixte”

It would be doing injustice to Napoleon to represent him as a general whose main tactical method rested solely on the employment of massive columns for the critical operation on each battlefield. He was quite aware that infantry ought to operate by its fire, and that every man in the rear ranks is a musket wasted. If the Emperor had any favourite formation it was the ordre mixte, recommended by Guibert far back before his own day, in which a certain combination of the advantages of line and column was obtained, by drawing up the brigade or regiment with alternate battalions in line three-deep and in column. This formation gave a fair amount of frontal fire from the alternate deployed battalions, while the columns dispersed among them gave solidity, and immunity from a flank attack by cavalry, which might otherwise roll up the line. If, for example, a regiment of three battalions of 900 men each were drawn up in the ordre mixte, with one deployed battalion flanked by two battalions in column, it had about 730 men in the firing line, while if arranged in three columns, it would only have had about 200 able to use their muskets freely. Still, at the best, this formation was heavy, since all the serried back-ranks of the flanking battalions had no power to join in the fusillade. For simple fire-effect it was as inferior to the line as it was superior to the mere column.

Napoleon, however, was certainly fond of it. From the crossing of the Tagliamento (1797), when he is first recorded to have used it, he made very frequent employment of it. In a dispatch to Soult, sent him just before Austerlitz, he directed him to use it “autant que faire se pourra.” It is curious, however, to note that the marshal, less than a week after, having to strike the decisive blow in that battle, did not, after all, use the ordre mixte, but fought in lines of battalions in “columns of divisions,” as he particularly mentions in his report to the Emperor.[71]

But the ordre mixte was certainly employed again and again, not only in those parts of the battle where Napoleon was simply “containing” his enemy, and where he was merely keeping up the fight and pinning the adversary to his position, but also on the crucial points, where he was endeavouring to deal his main blow. We have notes to the effect that Lannes’ Corps at Jena, Augereau’s at Eylau, and Victor’s at Friedland, which were all “striking forces,” not “containing forces,” used this formation. Its supposed solidity did not always save it from disaster, as was seen in the second of the cases quoted above, where Augereau’s whole corps, despite of its battalions in column, was ridden down by a flank attack of Russian cavalry, charging covered by a snowstorm.

In spite, however, of Napoleon’s theoretical preference for the ordre mixte, and his knowledge that the column was a costly formation to employ against an enemy whose fire was not subdued, it is certain that he used it frequently, not only for the forcing of bridges or defiles (as at Arcola and Ebersberg[72]), but for giving the final blow at a point where he was determined to break through, and where the enemy was holding on with tiresome persistence. At Wagram the flank-guards of Macdonald’s conquering advance were formed by 13 battalions in solid column, one behind the other, though its front consisted of eight deployed battalions. Friant’s division on the right wing also attacked with three regiments formed “en colonne serrée par bataillons.” At Friedland, Ney’s right division (Marchand) came to the front in a single file of ten battalions one behind the other, and never got deployed, but attacked in mass and was checked. In 1812 and 1813 advance in heavy masses was usual—whole regiments formed in “column of divisions,” battalion behind battalion,[73] with only 200 yards’ distance between regiment and regiment.

Napoleon was quite aware of the disadvantages of such formations, “même en plaine,” he observed in a celebrated interview with Foy, “les colonnes n’enfoncent les lignes qu’autant qu’elles sont appuyées par le feu d’une artillerie très supérieure, qui prépare l’attaque.”[74] And his advances in column were habitually prepared by a crushing artillery fire on the point which he was about to assail, a fire which he himself, as an old artillery officer, knew how to direct with the greatest accuracy and efficiency. It seems that he relied much more on such preparation by concentrated batteries for the shielding of his columns, than on sheathing them by a thick skirmishing line, the old device of the generals of the Republic. An enemy’s firing line might be occupied and demoralized by shot and shell, as well as by a screen of skirmishers. Jena, indeed, seems to be about the only one of his battles in which a hostile line was masked and depleted by a heavy tirailleur attack, before the columns in support charged and routed it. Often the light infantry seems to have been practically non-existent, and it was artillery and formed battalions alone which fought out the engagement. French generals in the imperial campaigns appear habitually to have used for the skirmishing line no more than the Voltigeur company of each battalion,[75] a force making one-ninth of the whole unit only, till the number of companies was cut down in 1808 from nine to six, when the Voltigeurs became one-sixth of the total. We are very far, by 1805 or 1809, from the day of the great “swarm-attacks” of the early Republic.

Tactics of Napoleon’s Generals

It was the tactics of the Empire, not those of the Republic, which Wellington had to face, when he took command of the allied army in the Peninsula in 1809. He had to take into consideration an enemy whose methods were essentially offensive, whose order of infantry fighting was at the best—in the ordre mixte—rather heavy, and in many cases, when the column of the battalion or the regiment was used, exceptionally gross and crowded. He knew that the enemy would have a far more numerous cavalry than was at his own disposition, and that it would be used with reckless boldness—the cavalry stroke in the Napoleonic battle accompanied, if it did not precede, the infantry stroke. Moreover, the French army would have a very powerful and effective artillery, trained to prepare the way for infantry attacks by the greatest artillerist in the world. His own proportion of guns to infantry was ridiculously low: there was not even one battery per division in 1809.

What was there to oppose to this dangerous enemy in the way of tactical efficiency? Roughly speaking we may say that the one point of superiority on which Wellesley counted, and counted rightly, was the superiority of the English formation for infantry in the two-deep line to the heavier order of the enemy’s battalions. For this formation he was, of course, not responsible himself: he took it over as an accepted thing, and thought that he knew how to turn it to the best account.

The effects of the French War on British tactics had been notable and interesting. The first reflections published on the new type of war on this side of the Channel seem to have been mainly inspired by the experience of the Duke of York’s army in 1793–94, when the thick chains of tirailleurs, which formed the protective screen, or first line, of the Republican armies, had done so much damage to troops which fought them in the old three-deep order, adopted from Frederic the Great, without any sufficient counter-provision of skirmishers. We find early in the war complaints that the British forces had no adequate proportion of light troops—that the one light company per battalion, normally used, was wholly unable to prevent the French tirailleur swarm from pressing up to the main line, and doing it much harm before the real attack was delivered. Two remedies were proposed—the first was that the proportion of light companies in a battalion should be increased from one to two,[76] or that in each regiment a certain number of men should be selected for good marksmanship, and taught light infantry drill, while still remaining attached to their companies. Of these proposals the first was never tried: the second was actually practised by certain colonels, who trained fifteen or twenty men per company as skirmishers: they were called “flankers,” and were to go out along with the light company. The only British battle where I have found them specially mentioned is Maida, where their mention illustrates the danger of the system. Generals wanting more light troops habitually purloined the light companies of regiments to make “light battalions”; but not only did they do this, but they sometimes even stole the “flankers” also from the centre companies. Stuart had at Maida not only the light companies, but also the “flankers” of regiments left behind in Sicily, which had therefore been deprived of every marksman that they possessed—an execrable device. The system, however, was only tentative; it soon disappeared; Wellington never skimmed the centre companies of their good shots, though he did occasionally create a light battalion of light companies—even this was exceptional.

British use of Light Troops

But there was a second alternative course open to the British: instead of developing more skirmishers in each battalion, they might create new light-infantry corps, or turn whole units of the line into light troops. For the former there was good precedent: in the War of the American Revolution the British generals had of necessity embodied corps of riflemen, to oppose to the deadly marksmen from the backwoods who formed the most efficient part of the American armies. Such were Simcoe’s Rangers, and the dismounted part of Tarleton’s famous Legion—whose remainder consisted of veritable mounted infantry—the first of their sort in the British army, since dragoons had forgotten their old trade and become cavalry of the line. But all the Rangers, etc., had been disbanded in 1783, and their use seems to have been forgotten before the French War began; the system had to begin again de novo. It was not till 1798 that the first British rifle battalion was created, to wit the 5th Battalion of the 60th Regiment, or Royal Americans, which was formed as a Jäger unit out of the remains of many defunct foreign light corps in British pay: it remained mainly German in composition even during the Peninsular War. This was the first green-coated battalion; the second was Coote Manningham’s “Experimental Rifle Corps,” formed in January, 1800, and finally taken into the service after some vicissitudes, as the 95th—a name famous in Peninsular annals, though now almost obliterated by its new title of the “Rifle Brigade.” The regiment was enlarged to three battalions before it came into Wellington’s hands. Later on, though the number of rifle corps was not increased, yet an addition was made to the light troops of the British army by turning certain picked battalions into light infantry. They were armed with a special musket of light weight, not with a rifle, and all the companies equally were instructed in skirmishing work. The first corps so treated was the 90th or Perthshire Light Infantry, which received the title in 1794. The precedent was not, however, acted on again till in 1803, the 43rd and 52nd, the famous regiments of the Peninsular Light Division, were honoured with the same designation. The last additions during the period of the Napoleonic wars were the 68th and 85th in 1808, and the 51st and 71st in 1809. Most of these corps had two battalions, but, even so, the provision of light infantry was not large for an army which had then nearly 200 battalions embodied. There were also some foreign corps to be taken into consideration, which stood on the British muster-rolls, such as the two Light Battalions of the King’s German Legion, the Brunswick Oels Jägers, and the Chasseurs Britanniques, who all four served in the Peninsula. All these save the last were created after 1803: but at least during the second period of the great French War, our armies were not practically destitute of light troops, as they were in 1793. We shall see that this had no small importance in Wellington’s tactical devices.

The British Two-deep Line

The other lesson that might possibly have been deduced from the campaigns of the earlier years of the great war was the efficacy of columns for striking at the critical points of an enemy’s line. The continental enemies of France were affected by what they had seen of this sort of success, and often copied the formation of their adversaries. But it is notable that the old and wholesome prejudice of the British in favour of the line was in no way disturbed by what had happened of late. The idea that the column was a clumsy and expensive formation was not shaken, and the theory that infantry ought to win by the rapidity and accuracy of its shooting, and that every musket not in the firing-line was wasted, continued to prevail. The reply of the British to the ordre mixte was to reduce the depth of the deployed battalion from three ranks to two, because it had been discovered that the fire of the third rank was difficult, dangerous to those in front, and practically ineffective. Sir David Dundas’s drill-book of 1788 with its Prussian three ranks, which had been the official guide of the British infantry of late, was not formally cancelled at first, but it was practically disregarded, and the army went back to the two-rank array, which it had habitually used in the American War, and had abandoned with regret. Apparently the Duke of York did not altogether approve this change: he at least once issued a General Order, to remind colonels that the formation in three ranks was still officially recognized and ought not to be forgotten. But the permission given by an order in 1801, that inspecting officers might allow regiments to appear “even at reviews” in the two ranks, probably marked the practical end of the Prussian system.[77] It had certainly been disused by many officers long before that date, and it is certain that in Abercrombie’s Egyptian campaign the double instead of the triple rank was in general use.[78] British military opinion had decided that fire was everything, and that the correct answer to the French columnar attack was to put more men into the firing line.

A conclusive proof of the efficacy of the double when opposed to the triple rank was very clearly given at the half-forgotten Calabrian battle of Maida, three years after the commencement of the second half of the great French War. At this fight the French General Reynier had deployed the whole, or the greater part, of his battalions, who were not as usual fighting either in ordre mixte or in battalion column. The result was very decisive—5000 British infantry in the thinner formation received the attack of 6000 French in the heavier, and inflicted on them, purely by superior fire-efficiency, one of the most crushing defeats on a small scale that was ever seen, disabling or taking 2000 men, with a total loss to themselves of only 320.[79] It is worth while remembering that some of the officers who were afterwards to be Wellington’s trusted lieutenants were present at Maida, including Cole, Kempt, Oswald, and Colborne.[79] This was about the only instance that I know where English and French came into action both deployed, and on a more or less parallel front. Usually it was a case of “column against line.”

Wellington’s System

Sir Arthur Wellesley had been nine years absent in India before he returned to England in 1805, so that he had to learn the difference between the Republican and the Imperial armies by new experience. The problem had long been interesting him. Before he left Calcutta he is said to have remarked to his confidants that the French were sweeping everything before them in Europe by the use of column formations, but that he was convinced that the column could, and would, be beaten by the line. What he heard after his return to England evidently confirmed him in this opinion. A conversation which he had with Croker, just before he set sail on the expedition which was to end at Vimeiro, chances to have been preserved in the latter’s papers, under the date, June 14, 1808. Sitting silent, lost in reverie for a long time, he was asked by Croker the subject of his thoughts. “To say the truth,” he replied, “I am thinking of the French I am going to fight. I have not seen them since the campaigns in Flanders [1793–94] when they were capital soldiers, and a dozen years of victory under Bonaparte must have made them better still. ’Tis enough to make one thoughtful. But though they may overwhelm me, I don’t think that they will outmanœuvre me. First, because I am not afraid of them, as every one else seems to be, and secondly, because (if all I hear about their system is true) I think it a false one against steady troops. I suspect all the continental armies are half-beaten before the battle begins. I at least will not be frightened beforehand.”

Wellesley went out to Portugal, there to try what could be done with steady troops against the “French system.” But it would be to convey a false impression of his meaning if we were to state that he simply went out to beat column with line—though the essential fact is sufficiently true. He went out to try his own conception of the proper way to use the line formation, which had its peculiarities and its limitations. The chief of these were that—

(1) The line must not be exposed before the moment of actual conflict: i.e. it must be kept under cover as much as possible.

(2) That till the critical moment it must be screened by a line of skirmishers impenetrable to the enemy’s tirailleurs.

(3) That it must be properly covered on its flanks, either by the nature of the ground, or by cavalry and artillery.

When we investigate all his earlier pitched battles, we shall see that each of these three requisites was as far as possible secured.

(1) It was necessary for success that the line should be kept concealed from the enemy’s distant fire of artillery and infantry as long as possible. Hence we find that one of the most marked features of Wellesley’s many defensive battles was that he took up, whenever it was feasible, a position which would mask his main line, and show nothing to the enemy but his skirmishers and possibly his artillery, for the latter having to operate before the infantry fighting began, and being obliged to take up positions which would command the ground over which the enemy must advance, were often visible from the first. At Vimeiro, Wellesley so concealed his army that Junot, thinking to turn his left flank, found his turning column itself outflanked by troops moved under cover behind a skyline. At Bussaco, Masséna, no mean general, mistook Wellington’s centre for his extreme right, and found his attacking columns[80] well outflanked when the attack had been pressed to its issue. At Salamanca it was much the same; the main part of the British line was well concealed behind a low ridge of hills, while Pakenham’s division and its attendant cavalry, the force which executed the great stroke, were concealed in a wooded tract, far outside the French marching column that vainly thought to get round the allied right wing. At Waterloo, the clearest case of all, the whole of Wellington’s infantry of the front line was so far drawn back from the edge of the slope that it was invisible, till the enemy had climbed to the brow of the plateau on which it was arrayed. Only the artillery, the skirmishing line, and the troops in the outlying posts of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte could be made out by Napoleon’s eye. Talavera, as I shall mention below, is the only exception to this general rule in the Duke’s defensive battles.

The Advantages of Cover

Wellington’s ideal position was a rising ground with a long glacis of slope in front, and a plateau or a dip behind it. The infantry was drawn back from the skyline, and placed behind the crest, if the hill were saddle-backed, or some hundreds of yards away from the edge, if it were flat-topped. There they stood or lay till they were wanted, secure from artillery fire: they moved forward to their actual fighting ground only when the fire-combat of infantry was to begin. Every one will remember Wellington’s caustic comment on the Prussian order of battle at Ligny, where Blücher had drawn out his army in a chequered array all along the declivity of a descending slope. “Damnably mauled these fellows will be—every man visible to the enemy.”[81] Or in more solemn phrase, as he afterwards consigned it to paper: “I told the Prussian officers, in the presence of Colonel Hardinge, that according to my judgment, the exposure of the advanced columns, and indeed of the army, to cannonade, standing as they did displayed to the aim of the enemy’s fire, was not prudent.”[82]

By the end of the Peninsular War, as I have already had occasion to observe, it had become so well known to the French that Wellington’s army, ready for a battle, would be under cover, that he was able, as at Fuente Guinaldo in 1811, and at Sorauren in 1813, to play off on them the trick of offering to fight in a half-manned position, because he knew that they would take it for granted that the ground invisible to them was held by an adequate force. There is an interesting testimony to the same effect in the Waterloo campaign. On the morning before the battle of Quatre Bras began, General Reille, a veteran of the Spanish war, remained halted for some time before a position held by nothing but a single Dutch-Belgian division, because (as he expressed it), “Ce pourrait bien être une bataille d’Espagne—les troupes Anglaises se montreraient quand il en serait temps.”[83] This was the lesson taught by many years of Peninsular experience—but on this occasion it chanced to be singularly ill applied—since a vigorous push would have shown Reille that there were as yet no red-coats concealed behind the trees of the Bois de Bossu.

It was only when absolute necessity compelled, owing to there being no cover available in some parts of his chosen position, that Wellington very occasionally left troops in his battle-front visible to the enemy, and exposed to artillery fire from a distance. The best known instance of this occurred with his centre brigades at Talavera, who were unmasked perforce, because between the strong hill which protected his left, and the olive groves which covered his right, there were many hundred yards of open ground, without any serviceable dips or undulations to conceal the line. And this was almost the only battle in which we find record of his troops having suffered heavily by artillery fire before the clash of infantry fighting began.[84]

(2) The second postulate of Wellington’s system was, as I have remarked above, that the infantry of his battle-line must be covered by such a powerful screen of skirmishers, that the enemy’s advanced line of tirailleurs should never be able to get near enough to it to cause any real molestation, and that it should not be seriously engaged before the French supporting columns came up to deliver the main attack. His old experience in Flanders in 1794 had taught him that the line cannot contend at advantage with a swarm of light troops, who yield when charged, but return the moment that the charge has stopped and the line has drawn back to its original position. There were evil memories of this sort not only from Flanders, but from the Egyptian Expedition of 1801, when Abercrombie’s less engaged brigades suffered severely at the battle of Alexandria from the incessant fire of skirmishers at long range, to whom no proper opposition was made.[85]

The device which Wellesley practised was to make sure that he should always have a skirmishing screen of his own, so strong that the French tirailleurs should never be able to force it in and to get close to the main line. The moment that he had assumed command in April, 1809, he set to work to secure this desideratum. His first measure was to add to every brigade in his army an extra company of trained riflemen, to reinforce the three light companies of the brigade.[86] In April, 1809, he broke up the oldest rifle battalion in the British army, the fifth of the 60th regiment, and began to distribute a company of it to each of his brigades, save to those of the King’s German Legion, which were served by special rifle companies of their own.[87] Thus each of the brigades which fought at Talavera had a special extra provision of light troops. Furthermore, when the new Light Division was instituted on the 1st of March, 1810, each of its two brigades was given a number of companies of the 95th rifles: and of the other brigades formed in 1810–11 most were provided with an extra light company by means of taking fractions from the 95th or the newly arrived Brunswick Oels Jägers, and those which were not, had light-infantry corps of their own inside them. But this was not all.[88]

Ample Provision of Light Troops

In the summer of 1810, Wellington began the system of incorporating a Portuguese brigade of five battalions in each British division. Of these five one was always[89] a Caçador or light battalion, specially trained for skirmishing. The old Portuguese army had not included such battalions, which were all newly raised corps, intended entirely for light infantry work. There were originally only six of them, but Wellington ordered a second six to be raised in 1811, utilizing as the cadre of the 7th, 8th, 9th the old Loyal Lusitanian Legion, which Sir Robert Wilson had formed early in the war. As the Portuguese army contained just twenty-four regiments of the line, in twelve brigades, the Caçador battalion gave precisely one unit to each brigade, save that two were incorporated in the Light Division, while none was left with the two regiments which remained behind in garrison at Abrantes and at Cadiz respectively.

As the Caçador battalions were essentially light troops, and used wholly for skirmishing, it resulted that when an Anglo-Portuguese division of the normal strength of six British and five Portuguese battalions set itself in battle array, it sent out a skirmishing line of no less than eight British and ten Portuguese companies, viz. one each from the line battalions, two of British rifles, six of Caçadores, or a total of from 1200 to 1500 men to a total strength of 5000 to 5500. This, as will be obvious, was a very powerful protective sheath to cover the front of the division. It was not always required—the French did not invariably send out a skirmishing line in advance of their main attack: but when they did, it would always be restrained and kept off from the main front of the divisional line. If the enemy wished to push it in, he had to bring up his formed battalions through his tirailleurs, and thus only could he reach the front of battle. The French regiments, whether formed in ordre mixte or (as was more common) in column, had to come to the front, and only so could reach the hitherto intact British line. It may be noted that the enemy rarely used for his skirmishing line more than the voltigeur company of each battalion; as his divisions averaged ten to twelve battalions[90] and the unit was a six-company battalion of 600 men or under, with only one voltigeur company, a French division would send out 1000 to 1200 skirmishers, a force appreciably less than the light troops of a British division of approximately equal force. Hence Wellington never seems to have been seriously incommoded by the French skirmishers.

Advantages of the Skirmishing Screen

So considerable was the British screen of light troops that the French not unfrequently mistook it for a front line, and speak of their column as piercing or thrusting back the first line of their opponents, when all that they had done was to drive in a powerful and obstinate body of skirmishers bickering in front of the real fighting formation.[91] Invariably, we may say, they had to use their columns to attack the two-deep line while the latter was still intact, while their own masses had already been under fire for some time and were no longer fresh.

It will be asked, perhaps, why the marshals and generals of Napoleon did not deploy their columns before the moment of contact. Why do we so seldom read of even the ordre mixte in use—Albuera is the only battle where we distinctly find it mentioned? The answer to this objection is, firstly, that they were strongly convinced that the column was the better striking force to carry a given point, and that they were normally attacking not the whole British line but the particular section or sections where they intended to break through. But, secondly, we may add that they frequently did attempt to deploy, but always too late, since they waited till they had driven in the British skirmishing line, and tried to assume the thinner formation when they were already under fire and heavily engaged. It was not always that the British noted this endeavour—so late was it begun, so instant was its failure. But there is evidence that it was tried by Kellermann’s grenadiers at Vimeiro, by part at least of Leval’s division at Barrosa, by Merle’s column at Bussaco, when it had already reached the summit of the Serra, and was closely engaged with Picton’s troops. At Albuera we have a good description of it from the British side. When Myers’ fusilier brigade marched against the flank of the 5th Corps, in the crisis of that battle, Soult launched against them his reserve, the three regiments of Werlé, which became at once locked in combat at very short range with the fusiliers. “During the close action,” writes a British officer (Blakeney of the 7th), “I saw their officers endeavouring to deploy their columns, but all to no purpose. For as soon as the third of a company got out, they would immediately run back in order to be covered by the front of their column.” The fact was, that the effect of the fire of a British regiment far exceeded anything that the enemy had been wont to cope with when engaged with continental troops, and was altogether devastating. Again and again French officers who came under it for the first time, made the miscalculation of trying the impossible. Nothing could be more inevitably productive of confusion and disorder than to attempt deployment under such a heavy fire. Wherefore many French commanders never tried it at all, and thought it more safe to go on to the final shock with their battalions in the usual “column of divisions,” in which they had begun their attack. This was little better, and quite as costly in the end. “Really,” wrote Wellington, in a moment of unwonted exhilaration, after the combat of Sabugal, “these attacks in column against our lines are very contemptible.”[92] This was after he had viewed from the other bank of the Coa, “where I could see every movement on both sides,” the 43rd regiment repulse in succession three attacks by French columns which came up against it, one after the other.

Necessity of Flank Cover

(3) We now come to the third postulate of Wellington’s system—the two-deep fighting line must be covered on its flanks, either by the ground, or by cavalry and artillery support, or by infantry prolonging the front beyond the enemy’s immediate point of action. At Talavera one of his flanks was covered by a precipitous hill, the other by thick olive plantations. At Bussaco both the French attacks were hopelessly outflanked by troops posted on high and inaccessible ground, and could only be pushed frontally. At Fuentes de Oñoro the final fighting position rested on a heavily occupied village at one end, and on the ravine of the Turon river upon the other. At Salamanca the 3rd Division, the striking-force which won the battle, had its line covered on its outer flank by a British and a Portuguese brigade of cavalry. At Vittoria the whole French army was enveloped by the concentric and converging attack of the much longer British line. At Waterloo flank protection was secured by the advanced post of Hougoumont and a “refused” right wing at one end of the position: by the group of fortified farms (Papelotte, La Haye, etc.), and a mass of cavalry at the other. Wellington, in short, was very careful of his flanks. Only once indeed, so far as I remember, did the French get round the outlying end of his army and cause him trouble. This was in the first episode of Fuentes de Oñoro, where the 7th Division, placed some way out, as a flank-guard, suffered some loss by being taken in rear by French cavalry which had made a great circuit, and only escaped worse disaster because two of its battalions, the 51st and Chasseurs Britanniques, had time to form front to flank, and adapt themselves to the situation, and because a few British squadrons sacrificed themselves in checking, so long as was possible, the enemy’s superior horse.

There was one universally remembered instance during the war which demonstrated the terrible risk that the line might run if it were not properly protected on the flanks. At Albuera Colborne’s brigade of the 2nd Division was thrown into the fight with its flank absolutely bare—there was no support within half a mile—by the recklessness of its divisional general, William Stewart. It was caught unprepared by two regiments of French cavalry, charging in at an angle, almost on its rear, and three battalions were literally cut to pieces, with a loss of 1200 men out of 1600 present, and five colours. Wellington would never have sent it forward without the proper support on its wings, and it is noteworthy that, later on the same day, Cole took the 4th Division into action on the same hill, and against the same enemy, with perfect success, because he had guarded one flank with a battalion in column, and the other (the outer and more exposed one) with a battalion in square and a brigade of cavalry.

These, then, were the necessary postulates required for the successful use of line against column, and when they were duly borne in mind, victory was secure with any reasonable balance in numbers. The essential fact that lay behind the oft-observed conclusion was simply that the two-deep line enabled a force to use every musket with effect, while the “column of divisions” put seven-ninths of the men forming it in a position where they could not shoot at all, and even the ordre mixte praised by Napoleon placed from seven-twelfths to two-thirds of the rank and file in the same unhappy condition.[93] But Albuera is the only fight in the war in which there is definite proof that the enemy fought in the ordre mixte with deployed battalions and battalions in column ranged alternately in his front.[94] Usually he came on with his units all in columns of divisions, and very frequently (as at Bussaco and in certain episodes at Talavera) he had battalion behind battalion in each regiment. It was a gross order of fighting, but D’Erlon invented a worse and a more clumsy formation at Waterloo, where he sent forward whole divisions with eight or nine battalions deployed one behind the other, so as to produce a front of only 200 men and a depth of twenty-four—with only one man in twelve able to use his musket.

Superior Fire of the Line

Clearly, however, the column of divisions (double companies) was the normal French order, i.e. in a battalion of 600 men in six companies, we should get a front of 66 muskets and 132 men able to fire, while 468 were in the rear ranks, able to be shot but not to shoot. If an English battalion of equal strength lay in front, in its two-deep line, it could give a discharge of 600 muskets against one of 132, and this was not all. Its front was nearly five times that of the French battalion, so that its fire lapped round the flanks of the advancing mass, demoralizing it because there was no proper power to reply. Often the British line, during the moments of fire-combat, somewhat threw forward its wings in a shallow crescent, and blazed with three sides of the column at once. This was done by the 43rd and 52nd at Bussaco, with great effect, against the French brigade, that of Simon, which came up the slope in front of them, with its leading regiment ranged three battalions deep, in a most vulnerable array. How could it be expected that the column would prevail? Effective against an enemy who allowed himself to be cowed and beaten by the sight of the formidable advancing mass, it was helpless against steady troops, who stood their ground and emptied their muskets, as fast as they could load, into a mark which it was impossible to miss. This, probably, is what Wellington meant when (as mentioned above) he stated to Croker, ere ever he sailed for Portugal, that “if all I hear about their system is true, I think it a false one against steady troops. I suspect all the continental armies are half-beaten before the battle begins.” That is to say, the column might win by the terror that its massive weight and impetus inspired; but if the enemy refused to be terrorized, he would be able to hold his own, and to inflict enormous losses on the crowded formation.

It only remains to be said that, with the battalion in column of divisions as unit, the French had two ways of drawing up their attacking line. They might either draw up the battalions of each regiment in a line of columns, or they might place them one behind the other, making the whole regiment into a single column. Both methods were from time to time employed. It was not details of arrangement like this which made the difference—the essential weakness was the “column of divisions” which formed the base of all the array—it was too helpless in fire-contest against the line.

The physical aspect of the contest between line and column we have now sufficiently dealt with. What was the moral aspect? Fortunately we can explain it with accuracy, because one of the many thousands of French officers who went through the Peninsular War has left us, not personal anecdotes or confused impressions like so many of his fellows, but a real account of the mental state of a battalion going forward in column to attack the British line. I make no excuse for quoting in full the paragraphs of Bugeaud, a chef de bataillon in 1812—a marshal of African fame thirty years later—because they give us exactly what we want to know. It should be premised, however, that Bugeaud did not serve in the Army of Portugal, nor face Wellington’s own troops. He served in Suchet’s army, along the Mediterranean Coast of the Peninsula, and his personal observations must have been made at Castalla and other combats in the East. It is to be noted also that he gives no account of the clash of skirmishers which so often took place, and describes his column as going forward unsheathed to the main clash of battle.

Bugeaud on Column versus Line

“I served seven years in the Peninsula,” he says; “during that time we sometimes beat the English in isolated encounters and raids [e.g. Ordal] which as a field officer detached I was able to prepare and direct. But during that long period of war, it was my sorrow to see that only in a very small number of general actions did the British army fail to get the better of us. We almost invariably attacked our adversaries, without either taking into account our own past experience, or bearing in mind that the tactics which answered well enough when we had only Spaniards to deal with, almost invariably failed when an English force was in our front.

“The English generally held good defensive positions, carefully selected and usually on rising ground, behind the crest of which they found cover for a good part of their men. The usual obligatory cannonade would commence the operation, then, in haste, without duly reconnoitring the position, without ascertaining whether the ground afforded any facilities for lateral or turning movements, we marched straight forward, ‘taking the bull by the horns.’[95]

“When we got to about a thousand yards from the English line the men would begin to get restless and excited: they exchanged ideas with one another, their march began to be somewhat precipitate, and was already growing a little disorderly. Meanwhile the English, silent and impassive, with grounded arms, loomed like a long red wall; their aspect was imposing—it impressed novices not a little. Soon the distance began to grow shorter: cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ ‘en avant à la baïonnette,’ broke from our mass. Some men hoisted their shakos on their muskets, the quick-step became a run: the ranks began to be mixed up: the men’s agitation became tumultuous, many soldiers began to fire as they ran. And all the while the red English line, still silent and motionless, even when we were only 300 yards away, seemed to take no notice of the storm which was about to beat upon it.

“The contrast was striking. More than one among us began to reflect that the enemy’s fire, so long reserved, would be very unpleasant when it did break forth. Our ardour began to cool: the moral influence (irresistible in action) of a calm which seems undisturbed as opposed to disorder which strives to make up by noise what it lacks in firmness, weighed heavily on our hearts.

“At this moment of painful expectation the English line would make a quarter-turn—the muskets were going up to the ‘ready.’ An indefinable sensation nailed to the spot many of our men, who halted and opened a wavering fire. The enemy’s return, a volley of simultaneous precision and deadly effect, crashed in upon us like a thunderbolt. Decimated by it we reeled together, staggering under the blow and trying to recover our equilibrium. Then three formidable Hurrahs termined the long silence of our adversaries. With the third they were down upon us, pressing us into a disorderly retreat. But to our great surprise, they did not pursue their advantage for more than some hundred yards, and went back with calm to their former lines, to await another attack. We rarely failed to deliver it when our reinforcements came up—with the same want of success and heavier losses.”[96]

Helplessness of the Column

This is the picture that we need to complete our study of the conflict of column with line. The psychology of the huddled mass going forward to inevitable defeat could not be better portrayed. The only thing that is hard for us to understand is the reason which induced capable men like Soult, D’Erlon, or Foy to continue to use the columnar formation all through the dark days of 1813–14, and even in the final campaign of Waterloo. All honour must be paid, however, to the rank and file who, with five years of such experience behind them, were still steadfast and courageous enough to put up a good fight even in their last offensive battles in the Pyrenees, as well as in the defensive actions of Orthez and Toulouse.

CHAPTER V
WELLINGTON’S TACTICS—THE CAVALRY AND ARTILLERY

Hitherto we have been confining our outlook on Wellington’s tactics to his use of infantry. But a few words must be added as to his methods of handling the other two arms—cavalry and artillery. There are fortunately one or two memoranda of his own which enable us to interpret his views on the use of these arms, which were to him mainly auxiliary; for the epigram that he was “essentially an infantry general” is in the main correct, though it needs some comment and explanation. In the early part of his Peninsular campaigning he was forced to be an “infantry general,” since the home government kept him unreasonably short in the matter of horsemen and guns till the year 1811 was far spent. Moreover, the ground over which he had to fight in 1809–10–11 must be considered.

The Iberian Peninsula may from the point of view of the cavalry tactician be divided into two sets of regions, in the one of which the mounted arm is all-important, while in the other it may, almost without exaggeration, be described as well-nigh negligible as an element of military strength, being only usable on a small scale, for exploration and observation, and not being able to be employed effectively in mass.

To the first-named class of regions, the tracts eminently suitable for the employment of cavalry, belong the great plateau of Central Spain, the broad arable plains of Old Castile and Leon, from Burgos to Ciudad Rodrigo and from Astorga to Aranda. Here, in a gently undulating upland, little enclosed, and mainly laid out in great common-fields, cavalry has one of the suitable terrains that can be found for it in Europe—as favourable as Champagne, or the lowlands of Northern Germany. This is also, almost to the same extent, the case with the loftier and less cultivated plateau of New Castile, and with the melancholy thinly peopled moors of La Mancha and Estremadura, where the horseman may ride ahead for twenty or thirty miles without meeting any serious natural obstacle, save at long intervals the steep cleft of a ravine, dry in summer, full of a fierce stream in winter. Nor are the great central uplands the only tracts of Spain where cavalry finds an admirable field for operations: the central valley of the Ebro in Aragon, and the whole of the broad plain of the Guadalquivir in Andalusia, are equally suited for the employment of the mounted arm, on the largest scale. Napoleon, therefore, was entirely justified when he attached a very large proportion of horse to his Army of Spain, and when he uttered his dictum that great portions of it must inevitably be the possession of the general who owned the larger and the more efficient mass of squadrons.

On the other hand, there are large tracts of the Peninsula where cavalry is almost as useless as in Switzerland or Calabria. Such are the whole Pyrenean tract on the north, extending from Catalonia, by Aragon and Navarre, to the Asturian and Galician lands along the southern shore of the Bay of Biscay. It will be remembered that, during the Pyrenean Campaign of 1813, Wellington sent back very nearly all his cavalry to the plain of the Ebro, while Soult left his in the plain of the Adour. Sir John Moore’s small but fine cavalry force was useless to him in the Corunna retreat, when once Astorga had been passed, and the Galician mountains entered. He sent it on before him, with the exception of a squadron or two kept with the rear-guard. Soult’s more numerous mounted force, in that same campaign, was only useful in picking up Moore’s stragglers, and keeping the British continuously on the march—it was brought to a dead stop every time that the retreating army showed an infantry rear-guard, and stood at bay in one of the innumerable Galician defiles.

There is another tract of the Peninsula almost as unsuited as the Pyrenean and Galician highlands for the use of cavalry—and that is Portugal, where so much of Wellington’s earlier campaigning took place. Deducting some coast plains of comparatively small extent, all Northern and Central Portugal is mountainous—not for the most part mountainous on a large scale, with high summits and broad valleys, but mountainous on a small scale with rugged hills of 2000 or 3000 feet, between which flow deeply-sunk torrents in narrow ravines—where roads are all uphill and downhill and a defile occurs every few miles. It was the character of this countryside which made Wellington’s army of 1810–11, with its very small cavalry force—only seven British and four or five Portuguese regiments—safe against Masséna’s immensely preponderant number of squadrons. All through the long retreat from Almeida to the lines of Torres Vedras the allied army could never be caught, turned, or molested; the cavalry on both sides was only employed in petty rear-guard actions, in which the small force brought the larger to a check in defiles, and generally gave back only when the invader brought up infantry to support his attack. For all the good that it did him, Masséna might have left his 7000 cavalry behind him when he entered Portugal—a few squadrons for exploration was all that he needed. Jammed in narrow defiles, where they were helpless, his mounted men were often more of an incumbrance than a help to him.

On the other hand, when the slopes of the Portuguese mountains were once left behind, Wellington was forced to be most cautious, and to restrict his action to favourable ground (as at Talavera, and Fuentes d’Oñoro) so long as the enemy was hopelessly superior in his number of squadrons. It was only after 1811, when his cavalry regiments were about doubled in numbers, that he could venture down into the plains, and deliver great battles in the open like Salamanca—the first engagement which he ever fought in the Peninsula where his cavalry was not inferior by a third or even a half to that of the French.

Beside the Pyrenean regions and Portugal, there are other districts of the Peninsula where the cavalry arm is handicapped by the terrain—Catalonia for example, where the inland is one mass of rugged valleys, the coastland of the kingdom of Granada, and the great ganglion of mountain lands where Aragon, Valencia, and New Castile meet. But as these were tracts where the British army was little engaged, I pass them over with a mention. But it must also be remembered that each of the great upland plateaux of Spain—Leon, New Castile, La Mancha, and Estremadura, is separated from the others by broad mountain belts, where the Spanish guerillero bands made their headquarters, and rendered communication between plain and plain difficult and perilous.

French Cavalry Tactics

In such a country of contrasts, how did the various combatants use their mounted men during the six long years between Vimeiro and Toulouse? What was the relative value of the different national cavalry, and what were its tactics for battle and for the equally important work of exploration, and of the covering and concealing the movements of the other arms?

French cavalry tactics had, by 1808, when the war began, developed into as definite a system as those of the infantry. Napoleon was fond of massing his horsemen in very large bodies, and launching them at the centre no less than at the flank of the army opposed to him. In the times of Marlborough and of Frederic the Great cavalry was almost always drawn up in long lines on the wings, and used first for the beating of the hostile containing cavalry, and then for turning against the unprotected flank of the enemy’s infantry in the centre. A cavalry dash at a weak point in the middle of the hostile front was very rare indeed, and only tried by the very few generals of first rate intelligence, who had emancipated themselves from the old routine which prescribed the regular drawing up of an army. Marlborough’s cavalry charge at the French right-centre at Blenheim is almost the only first-rate example of such a stroke in the old wars of the eighteenth century. Frederic’s great cavalry charge at Rossbach, which is sometimes quoted as a parallel, was after all no more than a sudden rush of the Prussian flank-cavalry at the exposed wing of an army which was unwisely trying to march around the position of its adversary. But Napoleon was the exponent of great frontal attacks of cavalry on chosen weak spots of the enemy’s line, which had already been well pounded by artillery or weakened in some other way. He would use 6000, 8000, or (as at Waterloo) even 12,000 men for one of these great strokes. At Austerlitz and Borodino these charges were made straight at the enemy’s front: Marengo and Dresden were won by such rushes: Eylau was only saved from falling into a disaster by a blow of the same kind. But cavalry had to be used at precisely the right moment, to be most skilfully led, and to be pushed home without remorse and despite of all losses, if it was to be successful. Even then it might be beaten off by thoroughly cool and unshaken infantry, as at Waterloo. It was only against exhausted, distracted, or untrained battalions that it could count with a reasonable certainty of success.

All through the war the raw and badly-drilled Spanish armies supplied the French squadrons with exactly this sort of opportunities. They were always being surprised before they had been formed by their generals in line of battle, or caught in confusion while they were executing some complicated manœuvre. If attacked while they were in line or in column of march, they always fell victims to a cavalry charge, being from want of discipline extraordinarily slow to form square. As if this was not enough, they were often weak enough in morale to allow themselves to be broken even when they had time to form their squares. The battles of Medellin, Ocaña, the Gebora, and Saguntum, were good examples of the power of a comparatively small mass of cavalry skilfully handled, over a numerous but ill-disciplined infantry. But the little-mentioned combat of Margalef in 1810 is perhaps the strongest example of the kind, for there six squadrons of Suchet’s cavalry (the 13th Cuirassiers supported by two squadrons of the 3rd Hussars) actually rode down in succession, a whole division of some 4000 men, whom they caught while forming line of battle from column of march. This was done, too, despite of the fact that the Spanish infantry was accompanied by three squadrons of cavalry (who made the usual bolt at the commencement of the action), as well as by a half-battery of artillery.

Successes of the French Cavalry

It was of course a very different matter when the French cavalry had to face the steady battalions of the British army. Looking down all the record of battles and skirmishes from 1808 down to 1814, I can only remember two occasions when the enemy’s cavalry really achieved a notable tactical success. Oddly enough both fell within the month of May, 1811. At Albuera there occurred that complete disaster to a British infantry brigade which has already been described in the preceding chapter. The other, and much smaller, success achieved by French cavalry over British infantry at Fuentes de Oñoro, a few days before the greater disaster at Albuera, has also been alluded to.[97] These two disasters were wholly exceptional; usually the British infantry held its own, unless it was absolutely taken by surprise, and this even when attacked frontally by cavalry while it was deployed in the two deep line, without forming square. If the British had their flanks covered, they were perfectly safe, and turned back any charge with ease.

Indeed the repulse of cavalry by British troops in line, who did not take the trouble to form square because their flanks were covered, was not infrequent in the Peninsular War. The classic instance is that of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers at El Bodon in 1811, who advanced in line firing against two French cavalry regiments and drove them off the heights, being able to do so because they had a squadron or two of British horse to protect them from being turned. A very similar feat was performed by the 52nd at Sabugal in 1811: and Harvey’s Portuguese brigade did as much at Albuera.

Much more, of course, was the square impregnable. When once safely placed in that formation, British troops habitually not only withstood cavalry charges at a stand-still, but made long movements over a battlefield inundated by the hostile cavalry. At Fuentes de Oñoro the Light Division, three British and two Portuguese squares, retreated at leisure for two miles while beset by four brigades of French cavalry, and reached the ground which they had been ordered to take up with a total loss of one killed and thirty-four wounded. Similarly at El Bodon the square composed of the 5th and 77th retreated for six miles, in the face of two cavalry brigades which could never break into them.[98]

Indeed it may be stated, as a rule almost without exception, that troops in square, whether British or French, were never broken during the Peninsular War even by very desperate and gallant charges. One of the best instances of this general rule was the case of the combat of Barquilla, where two grenadier companies of the French 22nd, surprised while covering a foraging party by five squadrons of British cavalry, got away in a level country after having been charged successively by three squadrons of the 1st Hussars of the German Legion, the 16th and the 14th Light Dragoons. One of these three squadron-charges, at least (that of the 14th), had been pushed home so handsomely that an officer and nine men fell actually among the French front rank, and a French observer noted bayonets broken, and musket barrels deeply cut into by the sweeping blows of the light dragoons, who yet failed entirely to break in.

Cavalry Action against Squares

There was indeed only one extraordinary case of properly formed squares being broken during the whole war, a case as exceptional in one way as the disaster to Colborne’s brigade at Albuera was in the other. This was at the combat of Garcia Hernandez, on the morning after the battle of Salamanca, where the heavy dragoons of the K.G.L. delivered what Foy (the French historian of the war) called the best charge that he had ever seen. The rear-guard of Marmont’s army had been formed of the one division which had not been seriously engaged in the battle, so that it could not be said to have been composed of shaken or demoralized troops. Nevertheless, two of its squares were actually broken by the legionary dragoons, though drawn up without haste or hurry on a hillside favourable for defensive action. According to Beamish’s History of the German Legion, a work composed a few years later from the testimony of eye-witnesses, the first square was broken by a mortally wounded horse, carrying a dead rider, leaping right upon the kneeling front rank of the square, and bearing down half a dozen men by its struggles and kicking. An officer, Captain Gleichen, spurred his horse into the gap thus created, his men followed, a wedge was thrust into the square, and it broke up, the large majority of the men surrendering. The second square, belonging to the same regiment, the 6th Léger, was a little higher up the hillside than the first: it was a witness of the destruction of the sister-battalion, and seems to have been shaken by the sight: at any rate, when assailed a few minutes later by another squadron of the German Dragoons, it gave a rather wild though destructive volley, and wavered at the moment of receiving the attack, bulging in at the first charge. This was, of course, fatal. The broken squares lost 1400 prisoners, beside some 200 killed and wounded. The victorious dragoons paid a fairly high price for their success, losing 4 officers and 50 men killed, and 2 officers, and 60 men wounded out of 700 present; the extraordinary proportion of killed to wounded, 54 to 62 marking the deadly effect of musketry at the closest possible quarters.

This (as I said before) was the exception that proved the rule: the invulnerability of a steady square was such a commonplace, that Foy and the other old officers of the Army of Spain, looked with dismay upon Napoleon’s great attempt at Waterloo to break down the long line of British squares between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, by the charges of some ten or twelve thousand cavalry massed on a short front of less than a mile. The Emperor had not allowed for the superior resisting power of a thoroughly good infantry.

Of fights between cavalry and cavalry, when the two sides were present in numbers so fairly equal as to make the struggle a fair test of their relative efficiency, there were comparatively few in the Peninsular War. In the early days of the war Wellington was too scantily provided with horsemen, and could never afford to engage in a cavalry battle on a large scale. He had only six regiments at Talavera in 1809, only seven in the Bussaco campaign of 1810. When he divided his army for the simultaneous campaign in Beira and in Estremadura in March, 1811, he could only give Beresford three regiments, and keep four for himself. Nor could the deficiency be supplied (as was done in the artillery arm) by using Portuguese auxiliaries. The cavalry of that nation was so weak and so badly mounted that it is doubtful whether there were ever so many as 2000 of them in the field at once. Many of the twelve regiments were never mounted, and did garrison duty as infantry throughout the war.

Wellington and his Cavalry

It was not till the summer and autumn of 1811 that Wellington at last began to get large reinforcements of the mounted arm from England, which more than doubled his strength, for in the campaign of 1812 he had no less than fifteen regiments instead of seven. In the winter of 1812–13 further reinforcements came out, and in the Vittoria campaign he had at last a powerful cavalry equal or superior to that of the French.[99]

Yet even allowing for the weakness of Wellington’s mounted strength in his earlier campaigns, we must acknowledge that they played a comparatively small part in his scheme of operations. Though his dragoons did good service in keeping his front covered, and performed many gallant exploits (we need only mention Talavera and Fuentes de Oñoro to instance good self-sacrificing work done), they were seldom used as part of the main striking force that won a victory. Indeed, the charge of Le Marchant’s heavy brigade at Salamanca is about the only instance that can be cited of really decisive action by cavalry in any of the Duke’s battles. There were other notable successes to be remembered, but they were in side issues, and often not under the chief’s own eye—as, for example, Bock’s breaking of the squares at Garcia Hernandez on the day after Salamanca, and Lumley’s very creditable victory over Latour-Maubourg at Usagre on May 25, 1811.

Even when Wellington had at last a large cavalry force in 1812–14, it was seldom found massed, and I believe that more than three brigades were never found acting together. Such a force as six regiments was seldom seen in line and engaged. For the use of cavalry as a screen we may mention the combat of Venta del Pozo, during the retreat from Burgos in 1812. This was a skirmish fought by two brigades to cover the withdrawal of the infantry, which had to hurry hard on the way toward Salamanca and safety.

Something, no doubt, must be allowed for the fact that Wellington never, till the Waterloo campaign, had an officer of proved ability in chief command of his cavalry. Stapleton Cotton, who served so long in that capacity, was not a man of mark. Lumley, who had a short but distinguished career as a divisional commander, went home sick in 1811, and Le Marchant, who came out from home with a high reputation, was most unfortunately killed in his first battle, Salamanca, where his brigade did so much to settle the fortunes of the day. But allowing for all this, it remains clear that Wellington made comparatively little use of the cavalry arm—which could hardly have been expected when we remember how effectively he had used his horse at Assaye, quite early in his career. Possibly the fact that he was so hopelessly outmatched in this arm in 1809–11 sunk so much into his soul, that when he got his chance, later on, he was not ready to use it. Certainly several cases can be cited where it was not duly used to press a completed victory—most particularly after Vittoria and Orthez. There is no concealing the fact that Wellington’s reluctance to use great cavalry attacks was, at bottom, due to his doubts as to the tactical skill of his senior officers, and the power of his regiments to manœuvre. He divulged his views on the subject, twelve years after the war was over, in a letter to Lord John Russell, dated July 31, 1826. “I considered our cavalry,” he wrote, “so inferior to the French from want of order, that although I considered one of our squadrons a match for two French, yet I did not care to see four British opposed to four French, and still more so as the numbers increased, and order (of course) became more necessary. They could gallop, but could not preserve their order.”

Some Reckless Cavalry Charges

This seems a very hard judgment, when we examine in detail the cavalry annals of the Peninsular War. There were cases, no doubt, where English regiments threw away their chances by their blind fury in charging, and either got cut up from pursuing an original advantage to a reckless length, or at any rate missed an opportunity by over-great dispersion or riding off the field. The earliest case was seen at Vimeiro just after Wellington’s first landing in the Peninsula, when two squadrons of the 20th Light Dragoons, after successfully cutting up a beaten column of infantry, pushed on for half a mile in great disorder, to charge Junot’s cavalry reserves, and were horribly maltreated—losing about one man in four. An equally irrational exploit took place at Talavera, where the 23rd Light Dragoons, beaten off in a charge against a square which they had been ordered to attack, rushed on beyond it, against three successive lines of French cavalry, pierced the first, were stopped by the second, and had to cut their way back with a loss of 105 prisoners and 102 killed and wounded—nearly half their strength. An equally headlong business was the charge of the 13th Light Dragoons at Campo Mayor on March 25, 1811, when that regiment, having beaten in fair fight the French 26th Dragoons, and captured eighteen siege-guns which were retreating on the road, galloped on for more than six miles, sabring the scattered fugitives, till they were actually brought up by the fire of the fortress of Badajoz, on to whose very glacis they had made their way. The captured guns, meanwhile, were picked up by the French infantry who had been retreating along the high-road behind their routed cavalry, and brought off in safety—the 13th not having left a single man to secure them. Here, at any rate, not much loss was suffered, though a great capture was missed, but similar galloping tactics on June 11, 1812, at the combat of Maguilla, led to a complete disaster. Slade’s heavy brigade (1st Royals and 3rd Dragoon Guards) fell in with L’Allemand’s French brigade, the 17th and 27th Dragoons. Each drew up, but L’Allemand had placed one squadron in reserve far beyond the sky line, and out of sight. Slade charged, beat the five squadrons immediately opposed to him, and then (without reforming or setting aside any supports) galloped after the broken French brigade in complete disorder for a mile, till he came parallel to the unperceived reserve squadron, which charged him in flank and rear: the rest of the French halted and turned; Slade could not stand, and was routed, having 40 casualties and 118 prisoners. Wellington wrote about this to Hill: “I have never been more annoyed than by Slade’s affair. Our officers of cavalry have acquired a trick of galloping at everything. They never consider the situation, never think of manœuvring before an enemy, and never keep back or provide for a reserve. All cavalry should charge in two lines, and at least one-third should be ordered beforehand to pull up and reform, as soon as the charge has been delivered, and the enemy been broken.”[100]

In the first three of the cases mentioned above, the discredit of the rash and inconsiderate pressing on of the charge falls on the regimental officers—in the last on the brigadier, Slade. It must be confessed that Wellington was not very happy in his senior cavalry officers—Erskine, Long, and Slade have all some bad marks against them—especially the last-named, whose proceedings seem nearly to have broken the heart of the lively and intelligent diarist Tomkinson, of the 16th Light Dragoons, who had the misfortune to serve long under him. Stapleton Cotton, the commander of the whole cavalry, was but a mediocrity; every one will remember his old chief’s uncomplimentary remarks about him àpropos of the siege of Bhurtpore. The man who ought to have been in charge of the British horse during the whole war was Lord Paget, who had handled Sir John Moore’s five cavalry regiments with such admirable skill and daring during the Corunna campaign: his two little fights of Sahagun and Benevente were models in their way. But he was unhappily never employed again till Waterloo—where his doings, under his new name of Lord Uxbridge, are sufficiently well known. But a question of seniority, and an unhappy family quarrel with the Wellesleys (having absconded with the wife of Wellington’s brother Henry, he fought a duel with her brother in consequence) prevented him from seeing service under the Duke in the eventful years 1809–14. Of the cavalry generals who took part in the great campaigns, after Paget the most successful was Lumley, who has two very fine achievements to his credit—the containing of Soult’s superior cavalry during the crisis of the battle of Albuera, and the combat of Usagre, of May 25, 1811, noted above. This was considered such an admirable piece of work by the enemy, that it is related at great length in Picard’s Histoire de la Cavalerie, alone among all British successes of the Peninsular War.

Lumley’s Victory at Usagre

It needs a word of notice, as it is hardly mentioned in the Wellington dispatches, and very briefly by Napier. Latour-Maubourg had been sent by Soult to push back Beresford’s advanced posts, and discover his position. He had a very large force—two brigades of dragoons and four regiments of light cavalry, in all 3500 sabres. Lumley, who was screening Beresford’s movements, had only three British regiments (3rd Dragoon Guards, 4th Dragoons, 13th Light Dragoons), 980 sabres, and Madden’s and Otway’s Portuguese brigades, 1000 sabres, with 300 of Penne Villemur’s Spanish horse. Wishing to contain the French advance as long as possible, he took up a position behind the bridge and village of Usagre, a defile through which the French must pass in order to reach him. Latour-Maubourg, relying on the immense superiority of numbers which he possessed, was reckless in his tactics. After sending off a brigade of light horse to turn Lumley’s position, by a very long detour and distant fords, he pushed his other three brigades into the village, with orders to cross the bridge and press the enemy in front. Lumley was showing nothing but a line of Portuguese vedettes, having withdrawn his squadrons behind the sky line. He was apprised of the turning movement, but, knowing the ground better than the French, was aware that it would take a very much longer time than the enemy expected, so resolved to hold his position to the last moment. He allowed the two leading regiments of Bron’s dragoons to pass the bridge and form on the nearer side, and then, while the third regiment was crossing the river, and the second brigade was entering the long village, charged suddenly in upon the first brigade, with six English squadrons in front and six Portuguese squadrons on the right flank. The two deployed French regiments were thrown back on the third, which was jammed on the bridge. Hence they could not get away to reform and rally, the road behind them being entirely blocked, while the second brigade in the village could not get to the front to give assistance. All that Latour-Maubourg could do was to dismount its leading regiment and occupy with it the houses on each side of the bridge, from which they kept back the victorious British by their carbine fire. Lumley, meanwhile, dealt with the three routed regiments at his leisure, killing or wounding 250 men and capturing 80 prisoners before the disordered wrecks succeeded in re-crossing the river. Latour-Maubourg, warned by this bloody check, showed for the future no anxiety to press in upon Beresford’s cavalry screen.

How not to deal with an exactly similar situation, it may be remarked, was shown on the 23rd October of the following year, 1812, by two British brigadiers, who, charged with the covering of the retreat of Wellington’s army from Burgos, were holding a position behind the bridge of Venta del Pozo or Villadrigo, when the part of the French cavalry immediately opposed to them, the brigade of Faverot, ten squadrons strong, came down to the defile. Faverot, like Latour-Maubourg at Usagre, took the hazardous step of ordering his leading regiment to pass the bridge at a trot, and form on the other side. This Bock, the senior British brigadier, allowed it to do, and was right in so doing, for the proper moment to strike was when the enemy should have half or three-quarters of his men across the bridge, and the rest jammed upon it. But Bock allowed the psychological moment to pass, and did not charge till the French brigade had almost entirely crossed, and could put very nearly equal numbers in line against him. Then, moving too late, with some squadrons of Anson’s brigade in support, he came to a desperate standing fight with the enemy, in which both suffered very heavily. But when all the British and German Legion regiments were already engaged, the rearmost squadrons of the French, which had crossed the bridge under cover of the fighting line, fell upon Bock from the flank, and turned one of his wings; the British cavalry had to give way and retreat, till it was covered by the infantry of the 7th Division. If Bock had charged five minutes earlier, he would have nipped the French column in the middle, and probably have destroyed the leading regiments. The French brigade, as it was, lost 18 officers and 116 men, Anson and Bock about 200, among whom were four officers and 70 men prisoners.

Surprise of Arroyo Dos Molinos

On the whole, I am inclined to think that Wellington was a little hard on his cavalry. There was, of course, considerable justification for his criticisms. There was a want of decision and intelligence among some of his brigadiers, and a tendency to headlong and reckless charging straight ahead among many of his regimental officers. But looking dispassionately at the cavalry work on both sides, it is impossible to say that the French marshals were any better served. There is no striking instance in the annals of the British campaigns of 1809–14 of the army, or even a division, being surprised for want of vigilance on the part of its cavalry screen, while several such can be quoted on the French side—especially Ney’s surprise at Foz d’Arouce on March 15, 1811—caused by his light cavalry under Lamotte having completely failed to watch the roads, or the better-known rout of Girard at Arroyo dos Molinos later in the same year. On that occasion an infantry division, accompanied by no less than two brigades of light cavalry, was attacked at dawn and dispersed with heavy loss, owing to the fact that the cavalry brigadiers, Bron and Briche, had taken no precautions whatever to feel for the enemy. They, like the infantry, were completely surprised, being caught with the horses unsaddled, and the men dispersed among houses; hence the chasseurs were taken prisoners in large numbers by Hill’s sudden rush, one of the brigadiers and a cavalry colonel being among the 2000 unwounded prisoners taken. There is no such large-scale surprise as this among all the records of the British cavalry. The worst that I know were those of a squadron of the 13th Light Dragoons on April 6, 1811, near Elvas, and a very similar one of the 11th Light Dragoons two months later, not far from the same place. In the last case the disaster is said to have happened because the regiment had only just landed from England after long home-service, and the captain in command lost his head from sheer inexperience. With regard to this I may quote the following pregnant sentence, from the Diary of Tomkinson, who wrote far the best detailed account of the life of a cavalry regiment during those eventful years. “To attempt giving men or officers any idea in England of outpost duty was considered absurd, and when they came abroad they had all to learn. The fact was that there was no one to teach them. Sir Stapleton Cotton (who afterwards commanded the cavalry in Spain) once tried an experiment with the 14th and 16th Light Dragoons near Woodbridge in Suffolk. In the end he got the supposed enemy’s vedettes and his own all facing the same way. In England I never saw nor heard of cavalry taught to charge, disperse, and reform, which of all things, before an enemy, is most essential. Inclining in line right or left is very useful, and that was scarcely ever practised.” He adds in 1819: “On return to English duty, after the peace, we all continued the old system, each regiment estimating its merit by mere celerity of movement. Not one idea suggested by our war experience was remembered, and after five years we shall have to commence all over again, if we are sent abroad.”

In short, the proper work of cavalry, apart from mere charging, had to be learnt on Spanish soil when any regiment landed. But it was in the end picked up by the better corps, and on the whole the outpost and reconnaissance work of the Peninsular Army seem to have been well done, though some regiments had a better reputation than others. Much of the work of this kind speaks for itself. The most admirable achievement during the war was undoubtedly that of the 1st Hussars of the K.G.L., who, assisted afterwards by the 14th and 16th Light Dragoons, kept for four months (March to May, 1810) the line of the Agueda and Azava, 40 miles long, against a fourfold strength of French cavalry, without once letting a hostile reconnaissance through, losing a picket or even a vedette, or sending a piece of false information back to General Craufurd, whose front they were covering.

Wellington’s Cavalry Tactics

Allusion has been made in the opening words of this chapter to Wellington’s memorandum for the tactical management of cavalry. It was only issued after Waterloo, in the form of “Instructions to Officers commanding Brigades of Cavalry in the Army of Occupation,” but, no doubt, represents the tactics which he had evolved from his Peninsular experience.[101] Too long to give in entirety, it is worth analysing. The heads run as follows:—

(1) A reserve must always be kept, to improve a success, or to cover an unsuccessful charge. This reserve should not be less than half the total number of sabres, and may occasionally be as much as two-thirds of it.

(2) Normally a cavalry force should form in three lines: the first and second lines should be deployed, the reserve may be in column, but so formed as to be easily changed into line.

(3) The second line should be 400 or 500 yards from the first, the reserve a similar distance from the second line, if cavalry is about to act against cavalry. This is found not too great a distance to prevent the rear lines from improving an advantage gained by the front line, nor too little to prevent a defeated front line from passing between the intervals of its supports without disordering them.

(4) When, however, cavalry is charging infantry, the second line should be only 200 yards behind the first, the object being that it should be able to deliver its charge without delay, against a battalion which has spent its fire against the first line, and will not be prepared for a second charge pushed in rapid succession to the first.

(5) When the first line delivers its attack at a gallop, the supports must follow at a walk only, lest they be carried forward by the rush, and get mingled with the line in front at the onset. For order in the supports must be rigidly kept—they are useless if they have got into confusion, when they are wanted to sustain and cover a checked first line.

A note as to horses may finish our observations on the cavalry side of Wellington’s tactics. In countless places, in diaries no less than dispatches, we find the complaint that the trooper of 1810 was, when not well looked after by his officers, a bad horse-master—careless as to feeding his mount, and still more so as to saddle-galls and such like. It is often remarked that the one German light cavalry regiment in the original Peninsular Army, the 1st Hussars of the King’s German Legion, set an example which some other regiments might have copied with advantage, being far more conscientious and considerate to their beasts. It is interesting to find that the French cavalry reports have exactly the same complaints, and the number of dismounted men shown in French regimental states as a consequence of sick horses was as great as our own. Several times I have found the report that when a considerable number of French cavalry had been captured, quite a small proportion of their horses could be turned over to serve as remounts for their captors, because of the abominable condition in which they were found. The fact was that the climate and the food seem to have been equally deleterious to the English and French horses: a diet of chopped straw and green maize—often all that could be got—was deadly to horses accustomed to stable diet in England or France. Wellington sometimes actually imported hay and oats from England; but they could not be got far up country, and only served for regiments that chanced to be put into winter quarters near the sea. Practically all the remounts came from England—the Portuguese and Spanish horses having been tried and found wanting many times. In 1808 the 20th Light Dragoons were embarked without horses, being ordered to mount themselves in Portugal; but the experiment failed wholly.

Wellington’s Artillery Tactics

Only a short note is required as to Wellington’s use of artillery. In his early years of command he was almost as weak in this arm as in cavalry. There was not one British battery per division available in 1809. But the Portuguese artillery being numerous, and ere long very efficient, was largely used to supplement the British after 1810. Yet even when it had become proportioned to the number of his whole army, the Duke did not use it in the style of Bonaparte. He never worked with enormous masses of guns manœuvring in front line, and supporting an attack, such as the Emperor used. Only at Bussaco, Vittoria, and Waterloo do we find anything like a concentration of many batteries to play an important part in the line of battle. Usually the Duke preferred to work with small units—individual batteries—placed in well-chosen spots, and often kept concealed till the critical moment. They were dotted along the front of the position rather than massed, and in most cases must be regarded as valuable support for the infantry that was to win the battle, rather than as an arm intended to work for its independent aims and to take a special part in war. Of several of Napoleon’s victories we may say that they were artilleryman’s battles; nothing of the kind can be predicated of any of Wellington’s triumphs, though the guns were always well placed, and most usefully employed, as witness Bussaco, Fuentes de Oñoro, and Waterloo.

As to Wellington’s use of siege artillery, we must speak in a later chapter.[102] It was, through no fault of his own, the weakest point in his army: indeed till 1811 he never had a British battering-train, and in the early sieges of Badajoz he worked in forma pauperis, with improvised material, mainly Portuguese, and very deficient in quality. The record is not a cheerful one; but it must be said that the home authorities, and not Wellington, were the responsible parties for any checks that were suffered. A great general who is not an artillery or engineering specialist must trust to his scientific officers, and certainly cannot be made responsible for shortage of men and material due to the parsimony of his masters at home.

So much for the great Duke’s tactics. We shall presently be investigating his system of military organization—the inner machinery of his army. But before dealing with it, we shall have to spare some attention for his greater lieutenants, whose individualities had an important share in the management of his army.

CHAPTER VI
WELLINGTON’S LIEUTENANTS—HILL, BERESFORD, GRAHAM

There can be no stronger contrast than that between the impression which the Iron Duke left on his old followers, and that produced by his trusted and most responsible lieutenant, Sir Rowland Hill. Hill was blessed and kindly remembered wherever he went. He was a man brimming over with the milk of human kindness, and the mention of him in any diary is generally accompanied by some anecdote of an act of thoughtful consideration, some friendly word, or piece of unpremeditated, often homely charity. A wounded officer from Albuera, who is dragging himself painfully back to Lisbon, reports himself to Hill as he passes his headquarters. Next morning “the general himself attended me out on my road, to give me at parting a basket with tea, sugar, bread, butter, and a large venison pasty.”[103] A grateful sergeant, who bore a letter to Hill in 1813, remembers how he expected nothing but a nod and an answer from such a great man, and was surprised to find that the general ordered his servant to give the messenger a supper, arranged for his billet that night, and next morn had his haversack stuffed with bread and meat, presented him with a dollar, and advised him where to sleep on his return journey.[104] He would give an exhausted private a drink from the can that had just been brought for his personal use, or find time to bestow a piece of friendly advice on an unknown subaltern. This simple, pious, considerate old officer, whose later portraits show a decided resemblance to Mr. Pickwick, was known everywhere among the rank and file as “Daddy Hill.” An officer of the 2nd Division sums up his character in a well-written letter as follows[105]: “The foundation of all his popularity with the troops was his sterling worth and heroic spirit, but his popularity was strengthened and increased as soon as he was personally known. He was the very picture of an English country gentleman: to the soldiers who came from the rural districts of old England he represented home; his fresh complexion, placid face, kind eyes, kind voice, the absence of all parade or noise in his manner delighted them. The displeasure of Sir Rowland was worse to them than the loudest anger of other generals. His attention to all their wants and comforts, his visits to the sick in hospital, his vigilant protection of the poor peasantry, his just severity to marauders, his generous treatment of such French prisoners and wounded as fell into his hands, made for him a warm place in the hearts of his soldiery; and where’er the survivors of that army are now scattered, assuredly Hill’s name and image are dearly cherished still.”

Merits of Sir Rowland Hill

The description sounds like that of a benevolent old squire, rather than that of a distinguished lieutenant-general. Nevertheless, Rowland Hill was a very great man of war. Wellington liked him as a subordinate because of his extraordinary punctuality in obedience, and the entire absence in him of that restless personal ambition which makes many able men think more of opportunities for distinguishing themselves than of exact performance of the orders given them. Wherever Hill was, it was certain that nothing would be risked, and nothing would be forgotten. His beautiful combination of intelligence and executive power more than once brought relief to his chief’s mind in a critical moment, most of all on the march to Bussaco in September, 1810, when it was all-important to Wellington’s plans that his own detached force under Hill should join him as soon as Masséna’s similar detached force under Reynier should have reached the main French army. Hill executed a long and difficult march over a mountainous country with admirable speed, and was duly up in line on the day before the battle of Bussaco, which could not in common prudence have been fought if he had been late.

This we might have expected from a man of Hill’s character; but what is more surprising is that when he was trusted—a thing that did not often occur under Wellington’s régime—with a command in which he was allowed to take the offensive on his own account, he displayed not only a power of organizing, but a fierce driving energy which none of Wellington’s more eager and restless subordinates could have surpassed. Speedy pursuit of an enemy on the move was not one of the great Duke’s characteristics; he was often, and not unjustly, accused of not making the best profit out of his victories. But Hill’s rapid following up of Girard, in November, 1811, ending with the complete surprise and dispersion or capture of the French force at Arroyo dos Molinos, was a piece of work which for swift, continuous movement, over mountain roads, in vile rainy weather, could not have been surpassed by the best of Napoleon’s lieutenants. Another blow of the most creditable swiftness and daring was the storming of the forts of Almaraz five months later, when Hill, with a light force, plunged right into the middle of the French cantonments and broke the all-important bridge by which Soult and Marmont were wont to co-operate. The forts were stormed, the bridge thoroughly destroyed, and Hill was off, and out of reach, before the neighbouring French divisions were half concentrated.

But the crowning glory of Hill’s Peninsular service was the one general action in which he was fortunate enough to hold independent command. This was at the end of the war, the battle of St. Pierre, near Bayonne. He was forming the right flank of Wellington’s line when his communication with the main army was cut off by a rise in the river Nive, which carried away the bridges by which he communicated with the main host. Soult, transferring the bulk of his field force, then in front of Wellington, by means of the bridges in Bayonne town, fell upon Hill with five divisions. Hill had only two, those which he had commanded for the last three years, the 2nd and Hamilton’s (now Le Cor’s) Portuguese. With 15,000 men he fought a defensive battle against 30,000 for the greater part of the short December day. His reserves were used up, every regiment had charged many times, the losses were heavy, and it seemed hardly possible to hold on against such odds. But Hill did so, and at last the reinforcements from the other side of the river Nive began to appear in the late afternoon, and Soult desisted from his attack and drew off beaten. This was one of the most desperate pieces of fighting in the Peninsular War, and Hill was the soul of the defence. He was seen at every point of danger, and repeatedly led up rallied regiments in person to save what seemed like a lost battle. Eye-witnesses speak of him as quite transformed from his ordinary placidity—a very picture of warlike energy. He was even heard to swear, a thing so rare that we are assured that this lapse from his accustomed habits only took place twice during the whole war. The first occasion was in the desperate melée in the night attack that began the battle of Talavera.

PLATE II.

Lord Hill, G.C.B.

It is clear that Hill was a man capable of the highest feats in war, who might have gone very far, if he had been given the chance of a completely independent command. But such was not his fortune, and in his last campaign, that of Waterloo, he was almost lost to sight, as a corps-commander whose troops were operating always under the immediate eye of Wellington. He survived to a good old age, was made Commander-in-Chief of the British Army when Wellington gave up the office on accepting the Premiership in 1827, and held it till within a few months of his death in 1842. Almost the last recorded words of the kindly old man upon his death-bed were, “I have a great deal to be thankful for; I believe I have not an enemy in the world.” And this was literally true: to know “Daddy Hill” was to love him.

Lord Beresford

The other lieutenant to whom Wellington repeatedly entrusted a semi-independent command was one who was neither so blameless nor so capable as Rowland Hill. Yet William Carr Beresford was by no means to be despised as a soldier. The illegitimate son of a great Irish peer, he was put into a marching regiment at seventeen, and saw an immense amount of service even for those stirring days of the Revolutionary War, when a British officer was liable to be sent to any of the four continents in rapid succession. This was literally the case with Beresford, who was engaged in India, Egypt, the Cape of Good Hope, Buenos Ayres, and Portugal in the eight years between 1800 and 1808.

When the Portuguese Government asked for a British general to reorganize their dilapidated army in 1809, Beresford was the man selected—partly because he had the reputation of being a good disciplinarian, partly because he knew the Portuguese tongue, from having garrisoned Madeira for many months, but mostly (as we are told) because of political influence. His father’s family had never lost sight of him, and he was well “pushed” by the Beresford clan, who were a great power in Ireland, and had to be conciliated by all Governments.

If this appointment to command the Portuguese Army was a job, we may say (with Gilbert’s judge) that so far as organization went, it was “a good job too.” For he did most eminent service in creating order out of chaos, and produced in the short space of a year a well-disciplined force that was capable of taking a creditable part in line with the British Army, and won well-deserved encomiums from Wellington and every other fair critic for the part that it took at Bussaco, its first engagement. The new army had not been created without much friction and discontent: to clear out scores of incapable officers—many of them fidalgos with great court influence—to promote young and unknown men to their places, to enforce the rigour of the conscription in a land where it existed in theory but had always been evaded in practice, gained Beresford immense unpopularity, which he faced in the most stolid and unbending fashion. At last the Portuguese Army was up to strength, and had learnt to obey as well as to fight. The teaching had been by the most drastic methods: Beresford cashiered officers, and shot deserters or marauders in the rank and file, with a rigid disregard alike for personal and court influence, and for public opinion, which Wellington himself could not have surpassed. He was, indeed, an honest, inflexible, and hard-working administrator; but with this and with a personal courage that ran almost to excess his capacities ended. His virtue in Wellington’s eyes was that, after one short tussle of wills, he completely and very wisely submitted himself to be the mere instrument of his greater colleague, and did everything that he was told to do, working the Portuguese army to the best effect as an auxiliary force to the British, and making no attempt to assert an independent authority. Instead of being kept under his hand in a body, it was cut up into brigades, each of which, with few exceptions, was simply attached to a British division.

Beresford’s Limitations

It was no doubt because Beresford showed himself so obedient and loyal, and exhibited such complete self-abnegation, that Wellington, both in 1809 and 1811, entrusted him with the command of large detached forces at a distance from the main army. But the marshal was by no means up to the task entrusted to him, and after the unhappy experiment of the first siege of Badajoz, and the ill-fought battle of Albuera, Wellington removed him from separate command, on the excuse that more organizing was needed at Lisbon, and kept him either there, or with the main army (where he had no opportunities of separate command) till the last year of the war. In 1814 he was for a few weeks entrusted with the conduct of the expedition to Bordeaux, but as it was unopposed by the enemy—and was bound to be so, as Wellington well knew—this was giving him no great responsibility. During the three last years of the war he was really in a rather otiose and equivocal position, as titular Commander-in-Chief of an army which was not treated as a unit, but dispersed abroad among the British divisions. Occasionally he was used as a corps commander under Wellington’s own eye, as at Toulouse, where he led the turning column of the 4th and 6th Divisions which broke down Soult’s flank defences. For such a task, when hard fighting and obedience to orders was all that was needed, he was a fully competent lieutenant. It was when thrown on his own resources and forced to make decisions of his own that he showed himself so much inferior to his successor Hill.

Beresford was a very tall and stalwart man of herculean strength—every one knows of his personal encounter with a Polish lancer at Albuera: he parried the Pole’s thrust, caught him by the collar, and jerked him out of his saddle and under his horse’s feet, with one twist of his powerful arm. His features were singularly rough-cast and irregular, and a sinister appearance was given to his face by a discoloured and useless left eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident when he was quite a young man. The glare of this injured optic is said to have been discomposing to culprits whom he had to upbraid and admonish, a task which he always executed with thoroughness. He had been forced to trample on so many misdemeanants, small and great, during his five years in command of the Portuguese army, that he enjoyed a very general unpopularity. But I have never found any case in which he can be accused of injustice or oppression; the fact was that he had a great many unsatisfactory subordinates to deal with. His own staff and the better officers of the Portuguese service liked him well enough, and the value of his work cannot be too highly praised. He came little into contact with the British part of the army, but I note that the 88th, whom he had commanded before the war in Spain began, much preferred him to their later chief, Picton, and had a kindly memory of him. There are singularly few tales or anecdotes connected with his name, from which I deduce that in British military circles he was neither much loved nor much hated.

Early Career of Graham

A far more picturesque figure is the third of the three generals to whom, at one time or another, Wellington committed the charge of a detached corps, Thomas Graham of Balgowan, later created Lord Lynedoch. I have already alluded to him in my preface, as in one way the most typical figure of the epoch—the personification of all that class of Britons who took arms against France when the Revolutionary War broke out, as a plain duty incumbent upon them in days when the country and Crown were in danger. He had seen the Jacobin mob face to face in its frenzy, in a sufficiently horrid fashion. In 1792 he had taken his invalid wife—the beautiful Mrs. Graham of Gainsborough’s well-known picture—to the Riviera, in the vain hope that her consumption might be stayed. She died, nevertheless, and he started home towards Scotland with her coffin, to lay her in the grave of his ancestors. On the way he passed through a town where the crazy hunt after impossible royalist conspiracies was in full swing. A crowd of drunken National Guards were seized with the idea that he was an emissary in disguise, bearing arms to aristocrats. The coffin, they declared, was probably full of pistols and daggers, and while the unhappy husband struggled in vain to hold them off, they broke it open, and exposed his wife’s long-dead corpse. After this incident Thomas Graham not unnaturally conceived the idea that his one duty in life was to shoot Jacobins. When he had buried his wife at Methven he was ready for that duty, and the war with France breaking out only five months after, his opportunity was at hand. Though a civilian, a Whig member of Parliament, and forty-four years of age, though he had no knowledge of military affairs, and had never heard a shot fired in anger, he went to the front at once, and fought through the siege of Toulon as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave. It is odd that both Julius Cæsar and Oliver Cromwell started at this same age as soldiers. This was the first of an endless series of campaigns against the French; Graham got a quasi-military status by raising at his own expense the 90th Foot, or Perthshire Volunteers, of which he was in reward made honorary colonel. With the curious rank of honorary colonel—he never held any lower—he went as British attaché to the Austrian Army of Italy, getting the post because Englishmen who could speak both German and Italian were rare. He saw the unhappy campaigns of 1796–97 under Beaulieu, Würmser, and the Archduke Charles, being thus one of the few British observers who witnessed Bonaparte’s first essays in strategy. Then he held staff appointments during the operations in Minorca and Malta, and again served with the Austrians in Italy in 1799. After much more service, the last of it as British attaché with the army of Castaños in Spain, during the Tudela campaign, he was at last informed that—all precedents notwithstanding—from an honorary colonelcy he was promoted to be a major-general on the regular establishment, on account of his long and distinguished service. Down to 1809 he had seen more fighting than falls to most men, without owning any proper military rank, for his colonelcy of 1794, which he had held for fifteen years, was only titular and temporary, and gave him no regular rank. He had technically never been more than a civilian with an honorary title!

Yet in 1810 he was entrusted with the important post of commander of the British troops in Cadiz, and commenced to take an important part in the Peninsular War. He was now sixty-two years of age, and would have been counted past service according to eighteenth century notions. But his iron frame gave no signs of approaching decay, no fatigue or privation could tire him, and he was one of the boldest riders in the army. His portrait shows a man with a regular oval face, a rather melancholy expression—there is a sad droop in the eyelids—and abundant white hair, worn rather long. His mouth is firm and inflexible, his general expression very resolute, but a little tired—that of a man who has been for nearly twenty years crusading against an enemy with whom no peace must be made, and who does not yet see the end in sight, but proposes to fight on till he drops. He was a fine scholar, knew six languages, had travelled all over Europe, and was such a master of his pen that both his dispatches and his private letters and diary are among the best-written and most interesting original material that exists for this period.

Graham at Barrosa

The crowning exploit of Graham’s life was the victory which he won, with every chance against him, at Barrosa on March 7th, 1811, a wonderful instance of the triumph of a quick eye, and a sudden resolute blow over long odds. Caught on the march by a sudden flank attack of Marshal Victor, owing to the imbecile arrangements of the Spanish General La Peña, under whose orders he was serving, Graham, instead of waiting to be attacked, which would have been fatal, took the offensive himself. His troops were strung out on the line of march through a wood, and there was no time to form a regular order of battle, for the French were absolutely rushing in upon him. Victor thought that he had before him an easy victory, over a force surprised in an impossible posture. But Graham, throwing out a strong line of skirmishers to hold back the enemy for the few necessary minutes, aligned his men in the edge of the wood, without regard for brigade or even for battalion unity, and attacked the French with such sudden swiftness that it was Victor, and not he, who was really surprised. The enemy was assailed before he had formed any line of battle, or deployed a single battalion, and was driven off the field in an hour after a most bloody fight. Graham led the centre of his own left brigade like a general of the Middle Ages, riding ten yards ahead of the line with his plumed hat waving in his right hand, and his white hair streaming in the wind. This was not the right place for a commanding officer; but the moment was a desperate one, and all depended on the swiftness and suddenness of the stroke; there was no manœuvring possible, and no further orders save to go straight on. Improvising his battle-order in five minutes, with only 5000 men against 7000, and attacking rather uphill, he won a magnificent victory, which would have ended in the complete destruction of the French if the Spaniard La Peña had moved to his aid. But that wretched officer remained halted with his whole division only two miles from the field, and did not stir a man to aid his colleague.

A few months after Barrosa, Graham was moved from Cadiz to join the main army in Portugal, at the request of Wellington, who gave him the command of his left wing during the autumn campaign of 1811, and again through the whole of that of 1813. For the greater part of that of 1812 Graham was away on sick leave, for the first time in his life, his eyes having given out from long exposure to the southern sun. Unluckily for him, his promotion to command a wing of the grand army meant that he was generally under Wellington’s own eye, with small opportunity of acting for himself. But his chief chose him to take charge of the most critical operation of the Vittoria campaign, the long flank march through the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes, which turned the right wing of the French and forced them out of position after position in a running fight of 200 miles. Still outflanking the enemy, it was he who cut in across the high-road to France at Vittoria, and forced the beaten army of Jourdan to retire across by-paths, with the loss of all its artillery, train, baggage, and stores.

For the dramatic completeness of this splendid old man’s career, we could have wished that it had ended in 1813. But the Home Government, seeking for a trustworthy officer to command the expedition to Holland in the following winter, chose Graham to conduct it, and his last campaign was marred by a disaster. He drove, it is true, the remnants of the French army out of Holland, though his force was small—only 7000 men, and formed of raw second battalions hastily collected from English garrisons. But his daring attempt to escalade the great fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom, the one stronghold still held by the enemy, was a sad failure. Taking advantage of a hard frost, which had made the marsh-defences of that strong town useless for the moment, Graham planned a midnight attack by four columns, of which two succeeded in crossing all obstacles and entering the place. But when all seemed won, the general’s part of the scheme having succeeded to admiration, the officers in immediate charge of the attack ignored many of their orders, dispersed their men in unwise petty enterprises, and finally were attacked and driven out of the town piecemeal by the rallied garrison. The loss was terrible, fully 2000 men, of whom half were prisoners. But the bold conception of the enterprise rather than its failure should be put down to Graham’s account. The mismanagement by his subordinates was incredible. Wellington, looking over the fortress a year later, is said to have observed that it must have been extremely difficult to get in. “But,” he added, “when once in, I wonder how the devil they ever suffered themselves to be beaten out again.”

PLATE III.

General Thomas Graham, Baron Lynedoch, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.

From the picture by Sir George Hayter.

Graham’s last campaign was marred by this check. But, in the general distribution of rewards at the peace of 1814, he was given a peerage, by the title of Lord Lynedoch, and shared in the other honours of the Peninsular Army. Though sixty-six years old when the war ended, he survived till 1843, when he had reached the patriarchal age of ninety-six. He did a good service to his old comrades by founding the United Service Club, which he originally designed as a place of rendezvous for old Peninsular officers, of whom he had noticed that many were lonely men without family ties, like himself, while others, stranded in London for a few days, had no central spot where they could count on meeting old friends.[106] His portrait hangs, as is right, in the most prominent place in the largest room of the institution which he founded.

Graham and his Admirers

I have never found one unkindly word about General Graham, in the numerous diaries and autobiographies of the officers and men who served under him. All comment on his stately presence, his thoughtful courtesy, and his unfailing justice and benevolence. “I may truly say he lives in their affections; they not only looked up to him with confidence as their commander, but they esteemed and respected him as their firm friend and protector, which, indeed, he always showed himself to be.”[107] “What could not Britons do, when led by such a chief?” asks another.[108] I might make a considerable list of the names of British officers who relate their personal obligation to his kindness;[109] but perhaps the most convincing evidence of all is that of the French Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, one of the enemies whom he captured at Barrosa, who has no words strong enough to express the delicate generosity with which he was treated while a wounded prisoner at Cadiz. Graham came to visit him on his sick bed, sent his own physician to attend him, and made copious provision for his food and lodging. For a conscientious hatred for French influence, whether that of the red Jacobin republic, or that of the Napoleonic despotism, did not prevent him from showing his benevolence to individual Frenchmen thrown upon his mercy.[110]

CHAPTER VII
WELLINGTON’S LIEUTENANTS—PICTON, CRAUFURD, AND OTHERS

If Graham had no enemies, and was loved by every one with whom he came in contact, the same cannot be said of the two distinguished officers with whom I have next to deal, General Robert Craufurd and Sir Thomas Picton. They were both men of mark, Craufurd even more so than Picton; they both fell in action at the moment of victory; they were both employed by Wellington for the most responsible services, and he owed much to their admirable executive powers; but both of them were occasionally out of his good graces. Each of them had many admiring friends and many bitter enemies, whose reasons for liking and disliking them it is not hard to discover. Both of them were to a certain extent embittered and disappointed men, who thought that their work had never received adequate recognition, a view for which there was considerable justification. In other respects they were wholly unlike; their characters differed fundamentally, so much so that when they met it was not unfrequently to clash and quarrel.

Picton, a Welsh country gentleman by birth, was a typical eighteenth century soldier, who had (after the old fashion) entered the army at thirteen years of age, and had gone on foreign service at fifteen. His manners, we gather, were those of the barrack-room; he was a hard drinking, hard swearing, rough-and-ready customer. Wellington, who was not squeamish, called him “a rough, foul-mouthed devil as ever lived,[111] but he always behaved extremely well on service.” The notorious Duke of Queensberry, “Old Q,” was his friend and admirer, and left him a good legacy of £5000 in his will. Old Q’s model heroes were not of the Wesleyan Methodist type. One of the strongest impressions left on one’s mind by the diaries of those who served under him is that of his astounding power of malediction. Kincaid’s account of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo is dominated by “the voice of Sir Thomas Picton, with the power of twenty trumpets proclaiming damnation to all and sundry.”[112] But if he was destitute of all the graces and some of the virtues, Picton was a very fine soldier, with a quick eye, unlimited self-confidence, and the courage of ten bulldogs. He had, when once the Revolutionary War commenced, made his way to the front with great rapidity. A captain in 1794, he had become a brigadier-general by 1799, and his promotion had been won by undeniable good service. For his ultimate misfortune, he was made in 1797 governor of the newly conquered Spanish island of Trinidad in the West Indies, while still only a colonel. This was the beginning of his troubles; the post was lucrative, dangerous, and difficult. The garrison was insufficient, and the island was swarming with disbanded Spanish soldiers, runaway negro slaves, French adventurers, and privateers and pirates of all nations from the Spanish Main. Picton had to create order from chaos, and then to keep it up; his methods were drastic: the lash and the pillory, the branding-irons, and, where necessary, military execution. It does not appear on impartial examination that he ever showed himself self-seeking, partial, or corrupt in his administration; he merely tried, in his own rough way, to dragoon into order a very unruly and lawless community. The majority of the better classes approved his rule, which, as one of them said, “was of the sort required by the colony” where a governor “had to make himself feared as well as beloved.” Naturally he made many enemies, white, black, and brown, English and Spanish, adventurers and officials. They kept up a rain of petitions against him at the Colonial Office, in which he was represented as a sort of Nero. The most acrid and ingenious of them, a Colonel Fullarton, succeeded in finding a method of attack which was certain to have a great vogue when tried in England. The old Spanish law still ran in Trinidad, and under it various forms of durance and torture were permitted against suspected persons under arrest. A case had happened in which a mulatto girl, who had been concerned in stealing 2000 dollars from a Spanish tobacco merchant, was put to the barbarous punishment of picketing (standing with the heels on a stake) by the local magistrates, to make her confess who had taken the money, and where it was hidden. After a few minutes she admitted that her lover had stolen it, with her aid and consent; and this was proved to be the fact. Thus under Picton’s rule, and (as it turned out) with his knowledge, a woman had been put to the torture, though the torture was slight and the woman guilty.

Picton in Trinidad

Picton, on returning to England, was therefore accused by Colonel Fullarton of many tyrannical acts, but, above all, of having put a woman to the torture in order to extract a confession, a thing abhorrent alike to the laws of England and to the common sentiments of humanity. There followed a long political trial, (for it became a matter of Whig and Tory partizanship), in which the Government finally dropped the prosecution, because it was amply proved that Spanish, not English, law was running in Trinidad in 1801, since the island had not been annexed till the peace of Amiens in the following year, and that the governor had simply allowed the local magistrates to act according to their usual practice. The other charges all fell through.

Nevertheless, the mud stuck, as Fullarton had intended, and Picton was generally remembered as the man who had permitted a woman to be tortured. The trial had dragged over several years, and had been most costly to the accused. Since there had been no verdict, owing to the prosecution having simply been dropped, he had not even the satisfaction of being able to say that he had been acquitted by a jury of his countrymen. There was a sort of slur, however unjust, upon his name.