Craufurd’s Faults
Craufurd, unlike Hill or Graham, and like his rival Picton, had many enemies. He was a strict disciplinarian, to his officers even more than to his men, and had a quick temper and a caustic tongue. His anger used to vent itself not in bursts of swearing, such as Picton would indulge in, but by well-framed and lucid speeches of bitter sarcasm, which probably gave more offence than any amount of oaths. Being a highly educated man, and a practised parliamentary speaker, he could put an amount of polished contempt into a rebuke which was not easily forgotten. It was probably this trick that made enemies of the Napiers, both of whom speak very bitterly of him in their diaries and other writings, though William Napier in his history gives him the due credit for his many brilliant achievements.[126] Several others of his officers speak bitterly of his intellectual arrogance; one calls him a “tyrant”; another says that he never forgot a grudge. But he had no fewer friends than enemies; many of the best of his subordinates, like Shaw Kennedy and Campbell, loved him well, and (what is more surprising) the rank and file, on whom his wrath often fell in the form of the lash, felt not only confidence but enthusiasm for him. The best of all his eulogies comes from a 95th man, Rifleman Harris, and is well worth quoting, for its simple manliness.
“I do not think I ever admired any man who wore the British uniform more than I did General Craufurd. I could fill a book with descriptions of him, for I frequently had my eye upon him in the hurry of action. The Rifles liked him, but they feared him, for he could be terrible when insubordination showed itself in the ranks. ‘You think because you are riflemen that you may do whatever you think proper,’ said he one day to the miserable and savage crew around him on the retreat to Corunna; ‘but I’ll teach you the difference before I have done with you.’ I remember one evening during that retreat he detected two men straying away from the main body; it was in an early stage of that disastrous flight, and Craufurd knew that he must keep his division together. He halted the brigade with a voice of thunder, ordered a drum-head court-martial on the instant, and they were sentenced to a hundred a-piece. While the hasty trial was taking place, Craufurd, dismounting from his horse, stood in the midst, looking stern and angry as a worried bulldog. He did not like retreating, that man.
“When the trial was over, it was too dark to inflict the punishment. He marched all night on foot, and when morning dawned his hair, beard, and eyebrows were covered with the frost; we were all in the same condition. Scarcely had dawn appeared when the general called a halt, among the snow on the hills. Ordering a square to be formed, he spoke to the brigade.
“‘Although I shall obtain the good will neither of the officers nor of the men here by so doing, I am resolved to punish those men according to the sentence awarded, even though the French are at our heels. Begin with Daniel Howans.’
“The men were brought out, and their Lieutenant-Colonel, Hamilton Wade, at the same time stepped forward, and lowering his sword, requested he would forgive these men, as they were both of them good soldiers, who had fought in all the battles of Portugal. ‘I order you, sir,’ said the general, ‘to do your duty. These men shall be punished.’ After seventy-five lashes, Craufurd stopped the flogging. But before he put the brigade in motion again, he gave us another short address, pretty much after this style—
“‘I give you all notice that I shall halt the brigade again the very first moment I perceive any man disobeying my orders, and try him by court-martial on the spot.’ He then gave the word, and we resumed our march.
Craufurd’s Severity
“Many who read this may suppose that it was a cruel and unnecessary severity, under the dreadful and harassing circumstances of that retreat: but I, who was there, a common soldier in the regiment to which these men belonged, say that it was quite necessary. No man but one formed of stuff like General Craufurd could have saved the brigade from perishing altogether. If he flogged two, he saved hundreds from death by his management.”
There was a curious anecdote concerning Craufurd’s funeral published in the Saturday Review lately,[127] from the unpublished reminiscences of a contemporary, which illustrates well enough the reverence with which the Light Division looked upon its old chief. One of his strongest principles had been that troops on the march must never make a detour to avoid fordable streams or deep mud, nor break their ranks to allow each man to pick shallow water, or hard stones among the wet. The delay so caused was, he held, such a hindrance to rapid movement that it must not be allowed. He had been known to flog men who straggled from the ranks in the water, in order to fill their bottles, or to stoop down to take a long drink.[128] He had even caused an officer, whom he caught evading a wetting by riding pick-a-back upon his soldier-servant, to be set down with a splash in the middle of a stream.[129] Coming back from Craufurd’s funeral, the leading company of the Light Division passed by an excavation at the rear of the siege works, half-filled by mud and water. Instead of turning its end to avoid the wet, the men looked at the inundation, pulled themselves together, and marched straight through it, with great regularity and steadiness, as if they were passing before a general officer at a review. The whole division followed through the slush. It seemed to them that the best testimony to their old commander’s memory was to honour his best-known theory, when he was no longer there to enforce its acceptance by his usual drastic methods.