Lord Hill, G.C.B.
It is clear that Hill was a man capable of the highest feats in war, who might have gone very far, if he had been given the chance of a completely independent command. But such was not his fortune, and in his last campaign, that of Waterloo, he was almost lost to sight, as a corps-commander whose troops were operating always under the immediate eye of Wellington. He survived to a good old age, was made Commander-in-Chief of the British Army when Wellington gave up the office on accepting the Premiership in 1827, and held it till within a few months of his death in 1842. Almost the last recorded words of the kindly old man upon his death-bed were, “I have a great deal to be thankful for; I believe I have not an enemy in the world.” And this was literally true: to know “Daddy Hill” was to love him.
Lord Beresford
The other lieutenant to whom Wellington repeatedly entrusted a semi-independent command was one who was neither so blameless nor so capable as Rowland Hill. Yet William Carr Beresford was by no means to be despised as a soldier. The illegitimate son of a great Irish peer, he was put into a marching regiment at seventeen, and saw an immense amount of service even for those stirring days of the Revolutionary War, when a British officer was liable to be sent to any of the four continents in rapid succession. This was literally the case with Beresford, who was engaged in India, Egypt, the Cape of Good Hope, Buenos Ayres, and Portugal in the eight years between 1800 and 1808.
When the Portuguese Government asked for a British general to reorganize their dilapidated army in 1809, Beresford was the man selected—partly because he had the reputation of being a good disciplinarian, partly because he knew the Portuguese tongue, from having garrisoned Madeira for many months, but mostly (as we are told) because of political influence. His father’s family had never lost sight of him, and he was well “pushed” by the Beresford clan, who were a great power in Ireland, and had to be conciliated by all Governments.
If this appointment to command the Portuguese Army was a job, we may say (with Gilbert’s judge) that so far as organization went, it was “a good job too.” For he did most eminent service in creating order out of chaos, and produced in the short space of a year a well-disciplined force that was capable of taking a creditable part in line with the British Army, and won well-deserved encomiums from Wellington and every other fair critic for the part that it took at Bussaco, its first engagement. The new army had not been created without much friction and discontent: to clear out scores of incapable officers—many of them fidalgos with great court influence—to promote young and unknown men to their places, to enforce the rigour of the conscription in a land where it existed in theory but had always been evaded in practice, gained Beresford immense unpopularity, which he faced in the most stolid and unbending fashion. At last the Portuguese Army was up to strength, and had learnt to obey as well as to fight. The teaching had been by the most drastic methods: Beresford cashiered officers, and shot deserters or marauders in the rank and file, with a rigid disregard alike for personal and court influence, and for public opinion, which Wellington himself could not have surpassed. He was, indeed, an honest, inflexible, and hard-working administrator; but with this and with a personal courage that ran almost to excess his capacities ended. His virtue in Wellington’s eyes was that, after one short tussle of wills, he completely and very wisely submitted himself to be the mere instrument of his greater colleague, and did everything that he was told to do, working the Portuguese army to the best effect as an auxiliary force to the British, and making no attempt to assert an independent authority. Instead of being kept under his hand in a body, it was cut up into brigades, each of which, with few exceptions, was simply attached to a British division.
Beresford’s Limitations
It was no doubt because Beresford showed himself so obedient and loyal, and exhibited such complete self-abnegation, that Wellington, both in 1809 and 1811, entrusted him with the command of large detached forces at a distance from the main army. But the marshal was by no means up to the task entrusted to him, and after the unhappy experiment of the first siege of Badajoz, and the ill-fought battle of Albuera, Wellington removed him from separate command, on the excuse that more organizing was needed at Lisbon, and kept him either there, or with the main army (where he had no opportunities of separate command) till the last year of the war. In 1814 he was for a few weeks entrusted with the conduct of the expedition to Bordeaux, but as it was unopposed by the enemy—and was bound to be so, as Wellington well knew—this was giving him no great responsibility. During the three last years of the war he was really in a rather otiose and equivocal position, as titular Commander-in-Chief of an army which was not treated as a unit, but dispersed abroad among the British divisions. Occasionally he was used as a corps commander under Wellington’s own eye, as at Toulouse, where he led the turning column of the 4th and 6th Divisions which broke down Soult’s flank defences. For such a task, when hard fighting and obedience to orders was all that was needed, he was a fully competent lieutenant. It was when thrown on his own resources and forced to make decisions of his own that he showed himself so much inferior to his successor Hill.
Beresford was a very tall and stalwart man of herculean strength—every one knows of his personal encounter with a Polish lancer at Albuera: he parried the Pole’s thrust, caught him by the collar, and jerked him out of his saddle and under his horse’s feet, with one twist of his powerful arm. His features were singularly rough-cast and irregular, and a sinister appearance was given to his face by a discoloured and useless left eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident when he was quite a young man. The glare of this injured optic is said to have been discomposing to culprits whom he had to upbraid and admonish, a task which he always executed with thoroughness. He had been forced to trample on so many misdemeanants, small and great, during his five years in command of the Portuguese army, that he enjoyed a very general unpopularity. But I have never found any case in which he can be accused of injustice or oppression; the fact was that he had a great many unsatisfactory subordinates to deal with. His own staff and the better officers of the Portuguese service liked him well enough, and the value of his work cannot be too highly praised. He came little into contact with the British part of the army, but I note that the 88th, whom he had commanded before the war in Spain began, much preferred him to their later chief, Picton, and had a kindly memory of him. There are singularly few tales or anecdotes connected with his name, from which I deduce that in British military circles he was neither much loved nor much hated.
Early Career of Graham