"Hill's corps has marched upon Almaraz, to destroy the bridge across the Tagus. The object, it may be conjectured, is to prevent Marmont or anybody else crossing. I venture not to speculate further. What our lord is about I know not. Guinaldo is his headquarters. I suppose he is planning something great and glorious. Touching ourselves—the 7th Division—no talk of moves; an unusually long respite from toil, and much in favour of boots, shoes, and horseflesh. Our assizes have been going on since our arrival, and likely to continue. Much business on hand. I am on the jury. We generally hang or shoot half a dozen fellows, notwithstanding every soldier is a gentleman and a man of honour, and receives votes of thanks from both Houses of Parliament, which he does not value so much as a pot of Whitbread's Entire."
From the latter part of this letter it is evident that Wellington had taken the opportunity of some leisure time to overhaul the discipline of his army, and his methods were drastic in the extreme. Even before he had witnessed the outrages committed by his men at Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz, he had been appalled by the indiscipline of his troops in disregarding orders concerning marauding. The British army was operating in a friendly country, and it was therefore all the more important that the inhabitants and their property should be treated with due respect. The French, on the other hand, were at war with Spain, and if, therefore, they pillaged and laid waste as they went along, it was perhaps no more than the inhabitants expected, though it is only fair to the French generals to state that, as a rule, they did all in their power to suppress marauding and pillage. It must be admitted that it was most difficult to impress upon the British soldiers, marching on the heels of the French through a country already pillaged, that it was a sin to take the goods of the people, and doubtless at an early stage of the war the men got into the habit of taking from the inhabitants of the villages any food or provisions of which they were in want. As time passed matters went from bad to worse, and the men did not stop at food, but began to plunder the inhabitants of their money and valuables. Wine-cellars were discovered and entered, with the result that drunkenness and outrages of every description became common. Wellington, alive to the gravity of the situation, issued stringent orders which, had they been carried out, would have put an end to these evils; but there were no means of carrying them out, and all this he represented from time to time to the home authorities. He pointed out that under existing circumstances it was impossible to bring home to the offenders the offences which they had committed, and he recommended wider powers to courts-martial and the formation of military police. He did not complain of the discipline of regiments as a whole, but he wrote in the strongest terms about the absence of discipline to be found in detachments, which, of necessity, were always out in various parts of the country; and he drew particular attention to the number of malingerers who filled the hospitals principally for the purpose of plundering when on the march. "The disorders which these soldiers have," wrote Wellington to Lord Liverpool, "are of a very trifling description; they are considered to render them incapable of serving with their regiments; but they certainly do not incapacitate them from committing outrages of all descriptions on their passage through the country, and in the last movements of the hospitals, the soldiers have not only plundered the inhabitants of their property, but the hospital stores which moved with the hospitals, and have sold the plunder. And all these outrages are committed with impunity; no proof can be brought, on oath, before a court-martial that any individual has committed an outrage, and the soldiers of the army are becoming little better than a band of robbers."
On the top of all this came the wild orgies which accompanied the sacking of Badajoz; and Wellington determined to adopt the strongest measures in order to restore the discipline of his army. We may say here, and without in any way belittling the military genius of England's greatest soldier, that Wellington knew nothing of the finer processes of producing and maintaining discipline among British soldiers. He was not of the school of Sir John Moore. He had no sympathy with the soldier, or indeed with the officer. He spoke of the men who won his victories for him as the scum of the earth and as the sweepings of the jails, and he treated them always with coldness, amounting almost to contempt. Probably he was the hardest master under whom men ever served, for at all times he governed by the lash, and he never hesitated to shoot or hang an unfortunate soldier, if he deemed it necessary to make an example. That these executions were not sometimes necessary we do not pretend to say, but the method of carrying them out, in the face of the whole army, served only to brutalise it. Officers and men became callous even of the capital punishment, and judging by the letter quoted above, Major Rice thought little of condemning to death half a dozen men for possibly trivial offences. Several of Wellington's generals, taking their cue from their chief, flogged and hanged freely, with the result that there was no love lost between them and their men; but, like the dog who licks the hand that beat him, these soldiers would follow their commanders without questioning, and perform for them prodigious acts of valour. Few of the Peninsular generals were really popular with their men, but Graham and Hill were exceptions. The latter, though a brilliant leader, was always sympathetic, and endeared himself to all ranks, who spoke of him among themselves as "Daddy Hill," though he was barely old enough to have been the father of any of them.
The feelings which the soldiers had towards Wellington ("Old Douro," as they called him) are well described by an officer of the 51st:[70]—
"Where is the British soldier who ever saw him on the field of battle that felt not within himself, though ten times his number stood in his front opposed to him, that that field must be one of victory? Wherever he was, with his calm countenance, on those occasions always with a smile upon it, the soldiers would say, 'Ay, there he goes, boys. All's right.' And forward they rushed, careless of danger or numbers, and thus driving the French out of the strongest and most impregnable positions—such was their confidence in his talents and good fortune. And these were not the sentiments of the private soldier alone, but the deep-rooted feeling of every individual in that army. We followed, we fought for him, but though he won our confidence, he never gained our love."
These words were written after the Peninsular War and after Waterloo, and scores of Wellington's officers wrote of their chief in a similar strain. But in earlier Peninsular days, before the regimental officers and the men had discovered their commander's greatness, they had no great confidence in him, and they were wont to grumble at his orders and to criticise his actions. Many of his earlier subordinate generals, although quite ignorant of war, saw something wrong in everything that Wellington did, and their removal to a less active sphere in England gave these detractors the opportunity of spreading calumnies about the only capable head which the army then possessed. Wellington, however, survived all this and much more, and as the war went on, the voice of the army changed, until, in the end, there were few officers conceited enough to venture to doubt the wisdom of his plans, and few of the rank and file who had not absolute faith in everything that he did. He established among both officers and men a reputation for infallibility, and he convinced them of his instinctive genius for war. That he lacked the ability to gain their affections was nothing to them, and it is certain that, in spite of those who maintain that popularity with the troops is essential to military genius, if any of his Peninsular or Waterloo veterans were alive to-day, they would still hold Wellington to be the greatest of British generals, even though they might admit that he was a hard master, and one who never forgot and seldom forgave.
Long after he had fought his last battle—even to the end of his days, Wellington upheld his harsh code of punishment, and he resisted strenuously, with all the weight of his opinion, every attempt to diminish flogging in the army in times of peace. Not until twelve years after his death was this put an end to, and not until 1882 was flogging on active service finally swept away by the Army Discipline Act. Old and tried officers held views similar to those of the great Duke,—by the lash alone could the discipline of the army be maintained; and no greater supporter of corporal punishment can be found than that high-minded leader of men, Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular War. He was a man acknowledged to have been beloved—even worshipped by all ranks, as the epitome of all that was just and sympathetic, a man who wrote of British soldiers, as a class, as the most noble of men; yet, in 1846, he put all his vast powers of reasoning into a letter to 'The Times', in order to inveigh against what he considered the sentimental spirit of modern times which desired the abolition, or reduction, of flogging in the army. He firmly believed in the lash for certain offences as a deterrent of crime, and no one knew and understood the British soldier of his time better than did Sir William Napier. We can only conclude, therefore, that the times have changed, and the men with them; for thirty years' immunity from the lash has resulted in no harm to the British army.