Picton and Wellington
This same sense of justice is brought out in the diaries of several officers, who speak in feeling terms of his endeavours to get obscure merit rewarded, and to keep down jobbery in promotion,[119] or tyranny of senior officers over their juniors. He was very accessible, and even friendly and considerate, to his subordinates. This familiarity, which endeared him to subalterns, was (as we have already noticed) not agreeable to Lord Wellington. Their intercourse was formal and not very frequent. Wellington once went out of his way to say that it was not true that he had ever had a quarrel with Picton, or been on anything but good terms with him. But while acknowledging his services, he never pretended that he had any personal liking for him.
Picton always thought that he suffered grave injustice at the end of the war, by not being included in the list of five Peninsular officers who were made peers for their services. “If the coronet were lying on the crown of a breach, I should have as good a chance as any of them,” was his caustic remark. The explanation formally given for his omission was that all the five generals honoured, Beresford, Hill, Graham, Hope, and Stapleton Cotton, had held for some time “distinct commands,” and that Picton had not. But though this explanation held good for the first three, it did not really cover the cases of Hope and Cotton, whose independent commands had been little more than nominal; and Picton had on several occasions—notably in the Pyrenees—exercised independent authority in a very similar way. The fact was that he was an unpopular man, and that the Ministry omitted him, while Wellington made no effort to push his claims. He showed his displeasure by announcing his intention to retire from the army in 1814, and would have done so in the next year, if Napoleon’s return from Elba had not called him into the field, to die at Waterloo.
To finish our sketch of this curious and contradictory character, we must mention that Picton was a profound despiser of all sorts of pomp and ceremony. His dress, except on gala days, was careless and often unmilitary. He fought Quatre-Bras, as several witnesses remarked, in a tall beaver hat, and in the Vittoria campaign, because he was suffering from his eyes, wore a very broad-brimmed variety of the same type. His aide-de-camps copied him, as was natural, in their disregard for appearance, and it is said that from their manners and dress they were known as “the bear and ragged staff,”[120] a term that has been applied on several more recent occasions to similar parties.
PLATE IV.
General Sir Thomas Picton, K.C.B.
General Robert Craufurd
A very different man from Sir Thomas Picton was the last of the divisional generals whose character we have to deal with, Robert Craufurd. They were both effective weapons in the hands of Wellington, but Picton’s efficiency was rather that of the battering ram, while Craufurd’s was rather that of the rapier. Robert Craufurd, like Picton, came to the Peninsula as rather a disappointed man, his grievance being that, despite much brilliant service, he had dropped behind in promotion, and found himself a junior brigadier-general, when men several years his junior, like Hill, Beresford, and Wellington himself, were holding posts of much greater importance. Craufurd was one of our few scientific soldiers; he had studied so far back as 1782 the tactics of the army of Frederic the Great at Berlin, and had translated into English the official Prussian treatise on the Art of War. His knowledge of German, which none other of Wellington’s officers save Graham possessed, had caused him, in 1794, to be given the important post of military attaché with the Austrian Army in the Netherlands, and afterwards on the Rhine, and he followed Coburg and the Archduke Charles for three years through a series of campaigns, in which failure was much more frequent than success. When the war broke out once more between Austria and the French republic, he was again sent in 1799 to serve with his old friends, and accompanied the headquarters of General Hotze’s army in Switzerland, till he was called off to share in the Duke of York’s ill-managed invasion of Holland in the end of the same year. Like Graham, therefore, Craufurd had the sorrow of witnessing a long series of disasters, for which he was not in the least responsible. As his reports and dispatches show, he discharged his duty with zeal and excellent capacity; but his sarcastic tongue and violent temper seem to have stood in the way of his promotion. A major in 1794, after thirteen years’ service, he was still only a lieutenant-colonel in 1801, and during these years had seen numberless comrades climb over his head, though he had all the while been discharging important duties in a fashion which won the admiration of all with whom he came into personal contact. It looks as if the constant reports of disaster, which he had to make, had connected his name in official circles with the notion of ill-luck. In 1801, disappointed of an official post in Ireland for which he had applied, he went on half-pay, and entered Parliament as member for a pocket-borough which chanced to be in his brother’s gift.[121] For the next five years he was a constant speaker in Parliament on military topics, and a very bitter critic of the policy of Pitt, Dundas, and Addington. His views as to the proper organization of the British forces, in first and second line, for the beating off of French invasion were set forth at vast length, and always clashed with those of ministers. It is only fair to say that he was in the main right, and they wrong; he pleaded for the reduction of the numberless ill-disciplined volunteer corps, and wished to see in the first line a very large regular army raised for short service, and behind it the second line, levied by conscription, as a sort of levée en masse trained for irregular fighting, and not expected to manœuvre or to take part in pitched battles. Craufurd’s virulent criticism was very telling, but hardly likely to help his promotion as a military man, so long as the Addington and Pitt ministries were in power. When, however, Pitt died, and the Whig administration called “All the Talents” came into power, the new War Secretary, William Windham, was disposed to do everything possible for Craufurd, who was not only his personal friend, but often advised him on matters of organization and technical military subjects.
Craufurd at Buenos Ayres