It was to the unscrupulous use by great men of their parliamentary influence upon the ministry of the day that the army owed a great proportion of its “King’s hard bargains” in the commissioned ranks. The obscure but necessary instruments of one of the great borough-mongers—Whig no less than Tory—were often paid by the nomination of their sons or other young relatives to a commission, by the influence of their patron: and the families that did the dirty work of a great politician were not likely to be distinguished for high morals or uprightness. Sometimes the nominations were absolutely shameful—it is said that the son of the keeper of a fashionable gaming-house in St. James’ was slid into the list of ensigns on one occasion, by a politician whom his father had obliged. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that there was a sprinkling of officers who were not gentlemen in any sense of the term serving throughout the war.[201] Others about whose gentle blood there was no doubt, were undesirable in other ways—prominent among them a section of young Irish squireens with the bullying and duelling habits, as well as the hard-drinking, which were notoriously prevalent among the less civilized strata of society beyond St. George’s Channel. I find in one memoir a note of a newly-joined ensign after mess addressing the assembled officers as follows: “By Jasus, gentlemen, I am conscious you must have the meanest opinion of my courage. Here have I been no less than six weeks with the regiment, and the divil of a duel have I fought yet. Now, Captain C., you are the senior captain, and if you please I will begin with you first: so name your time and place.” As the diarist very wisely writes, “one could not be too guarded in one’s conduct with such heroes.”[202]
Duels, I may remark in passing, were much less frequent in the Peninsular Army than might have been expected. Wellington (though long after he most foolishly “went out” with Lord Winchelsea in 1829) set his face against them on active service, because he could not afford to lose good officers on account of personal quarrels. There certainly were much fewer duels proportionately in the Peninsula than in England at the time—not to speak of Ireland and India, where they were beyond all reason common. I have only found records of four fatal duels in the records of court-martials, and though non-fatal ones could have been (and were) hushed up, they cannot have been very numerous, for one may read through scores of memoirs and diaries without running upon the mention of one. It is curious to note that when they did occur, and a court-martial followed, that body invariably found that though there was no doubt that Captain A. or Lieutenant B. was dead, yet there was no conclusive proof that he had been killed by C. or D.—the mouths of the seconds being sealed by the fact that they were also on their trial for having acted in such a capacity.[203] The whole matter was clearly a solemn farce. But the fact remains that duels were not frequent, and that duellists had a bad mark against them. Good commanding officers took immense trouble to prevent a duel from arising over silly mess-table quarrels, exerting every influence to make one party, or both, apologize for words spoken in anger, or in liquor.[204]
The body of officers of a Peninsular regiment was often a very odd party—there might be a lieutenant-colonel of twenty-six, who had risen rapidly by purchase or interest, and captains of fifty or even sixty; I found a note of one who had attained that age in the 73rd. At the head of each rank there might be several impecunious and disappointed men, waiting for the promotion that could only come by casualties in action, since they could never hope to purchase their step. Nevertheless, the feuds that might have been expected to follow such a situation do not seem to have been so many, or so bitter, as might have been expected. The grudge was set against the system rather than the individual, in most cases, and the sight of a mess cut up into cliques and coteries of enemies, though it can be found recorded occasionally, was quite exceptional.[205] The saving fact was that there was always the chance of promotion for merit, in reward of some specially gallant deed, and it often came—though the Duke was occasionally incomprehensible in the way in which he mentioned or did not mention officers in dispatches. The lieutenant who brought down the French flag from the castle of Badajoz, and who was sent with it by Picton to the commander-in-chief, was thanked and asked to dinner, but was still a lieutenant years after, in spite of his general’s vehement remonstrances.[206] Dozens of such instances could be quoted.
Professional Training
Professional training for officers had perforce been non-existent in the early years of the French war. There was no institution which supplied it, and all military knowledge had to be acquired by rule of thumb at regimental headquarters. An improvement of the greatest importance was made by the establishment in December, 1801, of the “Royal Military College” at High Wycombe for the use of young officers, followed by the creation of its “Junior Department” in May, 1802, “for the instruction of those who from early life are intended for the military profession.” The latter, the origin of the college at Sandhurst, to which the department was removed in 1811, accepted boys as early as thirteen. Its first inspector-general was the French emigré Jarry, to whom we owe the “Instructions for Light Infantry in the Field” of 1804, while Colonel John Gaspard Le Marchant was “Lieutenant-governor and Superintendant General.” This was the accomplished cavalry officer who fell in 1812, at the head of his brigade, in the crisis of the battle of Salamanca, when he had just delivered a decisive charge. The military college men were already numerous when the Peninsular War began.
The “Belemites”
The French General, Foy, a witness whose authority can hardly be called in question, for he is making grudging admissions, says that he considered the general mass of the British officers excellent.[207] The more we study detailed records, the more willingly do we acknowledge that his praise is well deserved. The weaker brethren were very few—so few that an enemy did not even notice them. Misconduct on the field was the rarest of offences; there are hardly half a dozen court-martials for suspected slackness, among the hundreds that were held for other offences. There were an appreciable number of officers “broke” for faults that came from hard drinking, “incapable when on duty,” and so forth, or brawling, and a very few for financial irregularities; but considering the unpromising material that was sometimes pitchforked into a regiment by the unscrupulous exercise of patronage at home, they were exceedingly few. The only class of failures who had any appreciable numbers, and earned a special name, were the “Belemites,” so called from the general depôt at the convent of Belem in the suburbs of Lisbon. This was the headquarters of all officers absent from the front as convalescents or on leave, and the limited proportion who stayed there over-long, and showed an insufficient eagerness to return to their regiments, were nicknamed from the spot where they lingered beyond the bounds of discretion. Wellington occasionally gave an order to Colonel Peacocke, the military governor of Lisbon, to rout up this coterie—there were always a sprinkling there who were not over-anxious to resume the hard life of campaigning, and loved too much the gambling-hells and other sordid delights of Lisbon.[208] Occasionally the notices which appear in General Orders about these gentry are rather surprising—one would not have thought that such men could even have obtained a commission. Take, for example, “The commanding officer at Lisbon (or the commanding officer of any station at which Captain —— of the 88th may happen to be found), will be pleased to place that officer under arrest, and send him to join his regiment, he having been absent for several months without leave, and having been in Portugal since October 20th last, without reporting himself to or communicating with his commanding officer.”[209]
Wellington in his moments of irritation sometimes wrote as if the majority of his officers were slack and disobedient. Such men existed; but, as one who knew the Duke well observed, “by long exercise of absolute power he had become intolerant of the slightest provocation, and every breach of discipline, no matter how limited its range, made him furious with the whole army. Hence frequent General Orders, as violent as they were essentially unjust, wherein, because of the misdeeds of a few, all who served under him were denounced—the officers as ignorant of their duty, the rank and file as little better than a rabble.”[210]
But the duty-shirking officer, and still more the disreputable officer was, after all, a very rare exception. The atmosphere of contempt which surrounded him in his regiment as a rule sufficed to make him send in his papers, after a longer or a shorter period of endurance, in proportion as his skin was tough or thin. Opinion was not so hard upon the man who was merely quarrelsome and ungentlemanly in his cups. But there were limits even to the boisterousness permitted to the tippler, and drunkenness when in face of the enemy, or in a position of military responsibility, was always fatal.
Officers from the Ranks