But Wellington had now cleared up the situation, for, save the garrison of the castle within San Sebastian, which held out for a few days longer, and that of Pampeluna, which was kept locked up until its capitulation in November, no Frenchmen (other than those of Suchet's corps in Catalonia) tarried beyond the Spanish slopes of the Pyrenees. It remained for the Allies to drive them through the mountains into France, and there was still heavy fighting in front of them.

[CHAPTER XII.]
THE CLOSE OF THE PENINSULAR WAR.

Any one who has read a great number of letters from the Peninsula must often have been struck by the marked difference between those written by young officers and those by their seniors. The older men were often despondent in times of hardship, and were generally critical of the actions of those in command; while the subalterns and younger captains seem to have been ever in high spirits, and bubbling over with youth and gaiety. There is no doubt that, as far as regimental officers were concerned, this matter of youth put an immense amount of dash into all the operations undertaken, and inspired the soldiers with courage as well as with confidence. And it is not too much to say that an army officered by a preponderance of middle-aged men would have taken twice as long to rid northern Spain of the French. The human factor in warfare is usually overlooked by the casual reader of military history; he knows the characteristics of the chief commanders in a campaign; he knows such well-worn theories as Napoleon's presence on a battlefield being equivalent to forty thousand men; but otherwise he regards battalions as composed of officers and men all turned out of the same mould—of like temperament, of like age, and of like physique.

Now, if a study were made of the average ages of British regimental officers in the several campaigns of the hundred years ending 1908, it would probably be found that they varied very considerably, and it might be interesting to discover whether the ages of the officers affected the "go" of the campaign one way or the other. But, as concerns the Peninsular army, it is an undoubted fact that regimental officers were far younger than they have ever been since. As a rule, an officer was a captain within six years of joining his regiment, and, unless unfortunate, a major within another six years, while, with any luck, he obtained the command of his regiment before he was much over thirty years of age. Napier gives many instances: Lieut.-Colonel Charles Macleod, who was killed at the head of the 43rd in the breach at Badajoz, had not reached his 27th year; Lieut.-Colonel Thomas Lloyd fell leading the 94th at the battle of Nivelle, at the age of thirty; Sir William Napier himself was only twenty-nine when he finished his last campaign, and his brother, Sir George, was but a year older at the close of the Peninsular War; Sir John Colborne (Lord Seaton) considered himself a most unlucky man in not having obtained the command of a regiment until he was thirty-two; and many other cases might be cited of the youth of the senior officers of regiments. These were the men who led their battalions to victory after victory, and their subordinates were for the most part mere boys. Many fought through the Peninsular War while still in their teens, and Colborne affirmed that, when he was commanding the 66th, he was the only officer of the regiment over twenty-five years of age. We know that young Mainwaring, of the 51st, aged fourteen, was leading the veterans of the regiment at Fuentes d'Onor, and we have his own word for it, that when he entered Madrid with the victorious army he was so young that the gaieties of the city failed to amuse him, and that he preferred to spend his evenings quietly with the old Spanish couple upon whom he was billeted. And most regiments, doubtless, had ensigns as young as Mainwaring.

We of to-day naturally question the value of such youthful officers—lads who nowadays would be in the ranks of their school cadet corps. Yet it is an extraordinary fact that these boys commanded men often old enough to be their fathers, and were followed by them with the greatest devotion. Sir William Napier writes of one of his subalterns, Edward Freer, killed at the battle of the Nivelle, that, though only a lieutenant, he "was rich in honour, for he bore many scars and was young of days. He was only nineteen, but had seen more combats and sieges than he could count years. Slight in person, and of such surpassing and delicate beauty that the Spaniards often thought him a girl disguised in man's clothing, he was yet so vigorous, so active, so brave, that the most daring and experienced veterans watched his looks on the field of battle, and would obey his slightest sign in the most difficult situations.... He was pierced with three balls at the first storming of the Rhune rocks, and the sternest soldiers in the regiment wept even in the middle of the fight when they heard of his fate."

There is no shadow of doubt that, young as they were, the regimental officers of this period, taken as a whole, knew their business thoroughly; that is to say, the commanding officer could handle his regiment with skill, and the captains and subalterns were expert company officers both in the field and in quarters. The majority of them possessed initiative, and in the fight seldom made a mistake or missed an opportunity. Their school was war, and in that rough-and-ready school they picked up all that they knew, for few of them, except those who had been trained under Sir John Moore at Shorncliffe, had learned anything of soldiering before they landed in the Peninsula. Even the most hypercritical of modern writers must admit that the officer of a hundred years ago performed the duties of the rank for which he drew pay well and truly and to the best of his ability. And what more, it may be asked, can be expected of any one? Certainly the State had no cause for complaint that it was not getting good value for its money, for it paid its infantry captains no more than ten shillings and sixpence a-day, and its ensigns half that sum, for doing their duty nobly, for undermining their constitutions through exposure, privation, and hardships, and for risking their lives for days, weeks, months, and years on end. They were practical, fighting soldiers; but there have arisen modern critics who say of them that their minds were small and undeveloped, because they were not students of the military art, because they had not read military history and therefore did not realise that history is always repeating itself, and because such things as strategy and grand tactics were outside their sphere of thought. We do not deny that if these officers were aiming at something higher than regimental soldiering, there is a measure of sense in these criticisms; but we would point out that, except in the case of one or two senior officers in each regiment, there had been no time for the study of books; for if we accept the statement that captains and subalterns were under twenty-five years of age at the close of the Peninsular War, and that most of them had been on active service practically from the day they joined, we fail to see when they could have read military history. And, even if they had had leisure to read such works on military history as were available a hundred years ago, there is no reason to suppose that their duties, as simple regimental officers, would have been performed the better. Afterwards many of them went to High Wycombe (Staff College) to continue their study of the art of war, the practical part of which they had already learned, and it was not found that their experience of war had in any way impaired their reasoning powers.

But in the Peninsula, youth and ignorance of military history do not appear to have interfered with successful leading, and he who delights to read of gallant deeds will find, in the accounts of the various fights, scores of episodes in which boy officers set brilliant examples to their men, and by their valour at a critical moment often saved the day. Such were the leaders of Forlorn Hopes and of similar desperate enterprises, and it would seem as if these lads must have matured much more rapidly than do the boys of the present age. Yet it may be that the rank and file were so magnificent that, at ordinary times, they were capable of being driven with a silken thread. That the soldiers, in spite of Wellington's dictum as to their being "the scum of the earth," were magnificent, is certain, and it is equally certain that they were devoted to their officers. There is scarcely a regiment in the army whose history does not record some gallant act performed by a soldier to save the life of an officer; and these rugged veterans went out of their way to show kindness to the boy subalterns in times of sickness or of hardship.

It may be thought that, with older officers, the frequent outbreaks of indiscipline which sullied the good name of Wellington's soldiers might have been avoided. But who can say whether the great captain would have benefited in the long-run? Occasionally his operations were delayed by the marauding and drunkenness of his troops, but there is no proof that his plans ever broke down owing to the youth of his regimental officers, and he never appears to have complained that they were too young, though he may have hinted that a few of his generals were too old, for some of them were ten years older than himself.[74] But it may seem extraordinary that officers of the army as a whole should have been so young towards the end of the Peninsular War, for one has always imagined that, under the Purchase System, promotion was remarkably slow. Still, the wastage produced by the long war was enormous; deaths, wounds, and disease ploughed deep into the commissioned ranks; and to keep up the supply of officers was no easy matter. Officers, captains as well as subalterns, were transferred from the militia to the regular army;[75] from time to time non-commissioned officers were promoted ensigns, for good service in the field; but the majority of commissions were given to cadets of the Royal Military College,[76] at the average age of fifteen, or to boys, equally young, appointed direct to regiments.