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]