(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]