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