A far more picturesque figure is the third of the three generals to whom, at one time or another, Wellington committed the charge of a detached corps, Thomas Graham of Balgowan, later created Lord Lynedoch. I have already alluded to him in my preface, as in one way the most typical figure of the epoch—the personification of all that class of Britons who took arms against France when the Revolutionary War broke out, as a plain duty incumbent upon them in days when the country and Crown were in danger. He had seen the Jacobin mob face to face in its frenzy, in a sufficiently horrid fashion. In 1792 he had taken his invalid wife—the beautiful Mrs. Graham of Gainsborough’s well-known picture—to the Riviera, in the vain hope that her consumption might be stayed. She died, nevertheless, and he started home towards Scotland with her coffin, to lay her in the grave of his ancestors. On the way he passed through a town where the crazy hunt after impossible royalist conspiracies was in full swing. A crowd of drunken National Guards were seized with the idea that he was an emissary in disguise, bearing arms to aristocrats. The coffin, they declared, was probably full of pistols and daggers, and while the unhappy husband struggled in vain to hold them off, they broke it open, and exposed his wife’s long-dead corpse. After this incident Thomas Graham not unnaturally conceived the idea that his one duty in life was to shoot Jacobins. When he had buried his wife at Methven he was ready for that duty, and the war with France breaking out only five months after, his opportunity was at hand. Though a civilian, a Whig member of Parliament, and forty-four years of age, though he had no knowledge of military affairs, and had never heard a shot fired in anger, he went to the front at once, and fought through the siege of Toulon as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave. It is odd that both Julius Cæsar and Oliver Cromwell started at this same age as soldiers. This was the first of an endless series of campaigns against the French; Graham got a quasi-military status by raising at his own expense the 90th Foot, or Perthshire Volunteers, of which he was in reward made honorary colonel. With the curious rank of honorary colonel—he never held any lower—he went as British attaché to the Austrian Army of Italy, getting the post because Englishmen who could speak both German and Italian were rare. He saw the unhappy campaigns of 1796–97 under Beaulieu, Würmser, and the Archduke Charles, being thus one of the few British observers who witnessed Bonaparte’s first essays in strategy. Then he held staff appointments during the operations in Minorca and Malta, and again served with the Austrians in Italy in 1799. After much more service, the last of it as British attaché with the army of Castaños in Spain, during the Tudela campaign, he was at last informed that—all precedents notwithstanding—from an honorary colonelcy he was promoted to be a major-general on the regular establishment, on account of his long and distinguished service. Down to 1809 he had seen more fighting than falls to most men, without owning any proper military rank, for his colonelcy of 1794, which he had held for fifteen years, was only titular and temporary, and gave him no regular rank. He had technically never been more than a civilian with an honorary title!
Yet in 1810 he was entrusted with the important post of commander of the British troops in Cadiz, and commenced to take an important part in the Peninsular War. He was now sixty-two years of age, and would have been counted past service according to eighteenth century notions. But his iron frame gave no signs of approaching decay, no fatigue or privation could tire him, and he was one of the boldest riders in the army. His portrait shows a man with a regular oval face, a rather melancholy expression—there is a sad droop in the eyelids—and abundant white hair, worn rather long. His mouth is firm and inflexible, his general expression very resolute, but a little tired—that of a man who has been for nearly twenty years crusading against an enemy with whom no peace must be made, and who does not yet see the end in sight, but proposes to fight on till he drops. He was a fine scholar, knew six languages, had travelled all over Europe, and was such a master of his pen that both his dispatches and his private letters and diary are among the best-written and most interesting original material that exists for this period.
Graham at Barrosa
The crowning exploit of Graham’s life was the victory which he won, with every chance against him, at Barrosa on March 7th, 1811, a wonderful instance of the triumph of a quick eye, and a sudden resolute blow over long odds. Caught on the march by a sudden flank attack of Marshal Victor, owing to the imbecile arrangements of the Spanish General La Peña, under whose orders he was serving, Graham, instead of waiting to be attacked, which would have been fatal, took the offensive himself. His troops were strung out on the line of march through a wood, and there was no time to form a regular order of battle, for the French were absolutely rushing in upon him. Victor thought that he had before him an easy victory, over a force surprised in an impossible posture. But Graham, throwing out a strong line of skirmishers to hold back the enemy for the few necessary minutes, aligned his men in the edge of the wood, without regard for brigade or even for battalion unity, and attacked the French with such sudden swiftness that it was Victor, and not he, who was really surprised. The enemy was assailed before he had formed any line of battle, or deployed a single battalion, and was driven off the field in an hour after a most bloody fight. Graham led the centre of his own left brigade like a general of the Middle Ages, riding ten yards ahead of the line with his plumed hat waving in his right hand, and his white hair streaming in the wind. This was not the right place for a commanding officer; but the moment was a desperate one, and all depended on the swiftness and suddenness of the stroke; there was no manœuvring possible, and no further orders save to go straight on. Improvising his battle-order in five minutes, with only 5000 men against 7000, and attacking rather uphill, he won a magnificent victory, which would have ended in the complete destruction of the French if the Spaniard La Peña had moved to his aid. But that wretched officer remained halted with his whole division only two miles from the field, and did not stir a man to aid his colleague.
A few months after Barrosa, Graham was moved from Cadiz to join the main army in Portugal, at the request of Wellington, who gave him the command of his left wing during the autumn campaign of 1811, and again through the whole of that of 1813. For the greater part of that of 1812 Graham was away on sick leave, for the first time in his life, his eyes having given out from long exposure to the southern sun. Unluckily for him, his promotion to command a wing of the grand army meant that he was generally under Wellington’s own eye, with small opportunity of acting for himself. But his chief chose him to take charge of the most critical operation of the Vittoria campaign, the long flank march through the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes, which turned the right wing of the French and forced them out of position after position in a running fight of 200 miles. Still outflanking the enemy, it was he who cut in across the high-road to France at Vittoria, and forced the beaten army of Jourdan to retire across by-paths, with the loss of all its artillery, train, baggage, and stores.
For the dramatic completeness of this splendid old man’s career, we could have wished that it had ended in 1813. But the Home Government, seeking for a trustworthy officer to command the expedition to Holland in the following winter, chose Graham to conduct it, and his last campaign was marred by a disaster. He drove, it is true, the remnants of the French army out of Holland, though his force was small—only 7000 men, and formed of raw second battalions hastily collected from English garrisons. But his daring attempt to escalade the great fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom, the one stronghold still held by the enemy, was a sad failure. Taking advantage of a hard frost, which had made the marsh-defences of that strong town useless for the moment, Graham planned a midnight attack by four columns, of which two succeeded in crossing all obstacles and entering the place. But when all seemed won, the general’s part of the scheme having succeeded to admiration, the officers in immediate charge of the attack ignored many of their orders, dispersed their men in unwise petty enterprises, and finally were attacked and driven out of the town piecemeal by the rallied garrison. The loss was terrible, fully 2000 men, of whom half were prisoners. But the bold conception of the enterprise rather than its failure should be put down to Graham’s account. The mismanagement by his subordinates was incredible. Wellington, looking over the fortress a year later, is said to have observed that it must have been extremely difficult to get in. “But,” he added, “when once in, I wonder how the devil they ever suffered themselves to be beaten out again.”
PLATE III.
General Thomas Graham, Baron Lynedoch, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.
From the picture by Sir George Hayter.