(2) After the artillery chief we encounter as a prominent figure at headquarters the commanding officer of Royal Engineers. He had the superintending duty over his own staff and the engineer officers attached to the divisions, and control over the “Royal Military Artificers,” as the rank and file of the scientific corps were named till 1812, when they changed their title to Royal Sappers and Miners.[135] The commanding engineer had also charge over the engineers’ park and the pontoon train. The officer who held this post from 1809 till he was killed at St. Sebastian in September, 1813, was Colonel Richard Fletcher, who has left a fame behind him as the designer of the Lines of Torres Vedras. On his death the command fell to Lieut.-Colonel Elphinstone, who was responsible for the celebrated bridge of boats across the mouth of the Adour which made the siege of Bayonne possible in 1814.

(3, 4) At headquarters were also to be found the officers commanding the Staff Corps Cavalry, and the Corps of Guides. The former, a small unit of some 200 men, created in 1812, discharged the police duties of the army, and were worked along with the Provost Marshal. They were occasionally also employed as orderlies, and in other confidential positions.[136] The Guides were a small body also, some 150 or 200 strong, partly British, partly Portuguese, the latter preponderating. They were detached in twos or threes, to act as interpreters as well as guides to bodies of troops moving in country not known to them. For this reason they had to be bilingual, either English knowing some Portuguese, or Portuguese knowing some English, as they had always to be acting as intermediaries between the army and the peasantry, in making inquiries about roads, supplies, etc. The officer commanding the Guides had also the charge of the post office, and the transmission of letters to and from the front.

(5) The Provost Marshal was also attached to headquarters: he had charge of all prisoners to be tried by general court-martial, of deserters, and prisoners of war. He had powers of jurisdiction on offenders caught red-handed, but as Wellington remarks, “Whatever may be the crime of which a soldier is guilty, the Provost Marshal has not the power of inflicting summary punishment for it, unless he should see him in the act of committing it.”[137] Men arrested on evidence only, had to be tried by court-martials. For the better management of these last, Wellington added a Judge-Advocate-General to his staff in 1812, whose duty was to see that trials were conducted with proper forms and due appreciation of the validity of evidence—in which the commander-in-chief considered that they had often failed. Mr. Francis Larpent, who has left an interesting diary of his duties and his personal adventures, discharged the function of this office from his arrival late in 1812 down to the end of the war.[138]

As to aides-de-camp, Wellington kept a very limited number of them—he only employed some twenty in the course of the war, and not more than eight or ten at once. They were nearly all young men of the great political families,[139] nearly half of them were Guards’ officers, and the rest mostly belonged to the cavalry. The Prince of Orange served among them in 1811–12. None of them, save Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord Raglan) and Colonel Cadogan, came to any very great military position or reputation.

So much for the military side of headquarters. There were also attached to it seven civil departments, small and great, of which it may be well to give a list. On one or two of these we shall have to speak at some length in later chapters—notably the Commissariat and the Medical department. They consisted of—

(1) The Medical Department under an Inspector of Hospitals, who was in general charge of the physicians, surgeons, assistants, etc., attached to the various units of the army. There is an excellent account of the management of this department, and all its difficulties, in the Autobiography of Sir James McGrigor, chief of the Medical Staff in 1812–13–14. His predecessor since Wellington’s first landing in 1809 was Dr. Frank, who was invalided in the autumn of 1811.

(2) The Purveyor’s Department was independent of the medical, though it might well have been attached to it: the establishment consisted of a Purveyor to the Forces, with deputies and assistants, who had charge of the hospitals and all the material and details required for them—from the drugs for the sick to the burial expenses of the dead.

(3) The Paymaster-General, with his assistants, was responsible for the transmission of the money received to the regimental paymasters of the various units. He was a much-worried man, generally from three to six months in arrears with his specie, from no fault of his own, but from the immense difficulty of obtaining the hard dollars, doubloons, and “cruzados novos,” which alone had currency in the Peninsula till a late period in the war. It was useless to issue English money to the troops, for the natives would not accept crowns and guineas, and refused even to look at the one-pound notes which were almost the sole circulating medium in Great Britain during this period. It was only in a late year of the war that the gold guinea was at last tariffed by the Spanish and Portuguese Governments, and became readily current.[140]

The Commissariat

(4) Most important of all the Civil Departments was the Commissariat, under the Commissary-General, who had under him Deputy-Commissary-Generals, Assistant and Deputy-Assistant-Commissaries, Commissariat Clerks, and many other subordinates. The department was divided into two branches, stores and accounts. The post of Commissary-General was successively held by John Murray (already mentioned above) from 1809 to June, 1810, by Kennedy from June, 1810, to September, 1811, and by Bisset from September, 1811, onward. An assistant commissary was attached to each brigade of infantry and each regiment of cavalry, but a single official had to attend to the needs of the whole of the artillery with the army, and another to the needs of headquarters.[141]