On the whole I am inclined to attribute the great improvement alike in the quantity and the quality of the information which we possess as to the inner life of the army, during the second half of the great struggle with France, not only to the fact that the danger to the empire and the great interests at stake had fired the imagination of many a participant, but still more to the other fact that the body of officers contained a much larger proportion of thoughtful and serious men than it had ever done before. And the same was the case mutatis mutandis with the rank and file also. Not but what—of course—some of the most interesting information is supplied to us by cheerful and garrulous rattlepates of a very different type, who had been attracted into the service by the adventure of the soldier’s life, and record mainly its picturesque or its humorous side.
CHAPTER II
SOURCES OF INFORMATION—THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAR WAR
It will be well, perhaps, to give a short account of the main sources from which our knowledge of the Peninsular Army is derived. The official ones must be cited first. The most important of all are, naturally enough, the Wellington Dispatches. Of these there are two series; the first, in twelve volumes, was published during the Duke’s lifetime by Colonel Gurwood between 1837 and 1839. The second, or supplementary series, in fifteen volumes, was published with copious notes by the second Duke of Wellington between 1858 and 1872.
The series edited by Gurwood is absolutely necessary to every student of the Peninsular War, but is most tiresome to handle, and is by no means complete. The Duke forbade the publication of a great number of his more confidential letters, and ordered portions of others to be omitted. He had a strong notion that a great deal of historical information could be, and ought to be, suppressed; this fact has caused much trouble to the modern historian, who wishes to obtain not a mere official and expurgated view of the war, but a full and complete survey of it. To show Wellington’s attitude it may be sufficient to quote his answer to William Napier, who asked for leave to utilize all his papers. “He could not tell the whole truth without hurting the feelings of many worthy men, and without doing mischief. Expatiating on the subject, he related many anecdotes illustrating this observation, showing errors committed by generals and others—especially at Waterloo—errors so materially affecting his operations that he could not do justice to himself if he suppressed them, and yet by giving them publicity he would ungraciously affect the favour of many worthy men, whose only fault was dullness.”[9]
Gurwood and the Duke’s Dispatches
The Gurwood edition of the dispatches was published some fifteen years after Napier made his application, but numbers of the old Peninsular officers were still alive, and the Duke adhered to his already-expressed opinion that it would not be well to expose old quarrels and old blunders. Paragraphs, accordingly, are often omitted in the reprint, and in a large majority of cases, where blame was imputed or reproofs administered to any individual, the name was left blank. This makes the edition most tiresome to read. It is exasperating to find that e.g. “nothing has given me more concern in the late operations than the conduct of Lieut.-Colonel —— of the —— Regt.”[10] or that “no means exists of punishing military disorders and irregularities of the kind committed by Brigadier-General —— and Colonel ——.” Or again, when Wellington writes to the Patronage Secretary at the Horse Guards that “I am much obliged to you for relieving me from Major-General —— and Colonel ——. I have seen General —— and I think he will do very well, and so will ——”[11]; or that “—— appears to be a kind of madman,” and “—— is not very wise,” the reader is reduced to despair. The only way of discovering the names, which are often those of officers of high rank, who figure repeatedly in any narrative of the Peninsular War, is to go to the original dispatches at the Record Office, or, when the communication is a private and not a public one, to the letters at Apsley House. Meanwhile, few have the leisure or the patience to do this, so that Wellington’s judgments on his lieutenants are still practically inaccessible.
It was, perhaps, still necessary to leave all these blanks in 1837. And Gurwood was no doubt acting in strict obedience to the Duke’s orders. But nothing can excuse his own slack editing of the massive tomes that he published. There are no tables of contents to the volumes, nor does the title page of each indicate the dates between which it runs. To find out which volume will contain a letter of November, 1810, we must take down Vols. VI. and VII., and see from the date of the last dispatch in one and the first in the other, when the break comes. Supposing we wish to discover how many communications were sent to Graham or Spencer in 1811, there is no other way of achieving our object than running through every page of the two volumes in which the correspondence of that year is contained! There is a so-called index to the whole series, but it is practically useless, from the small number of headings given. The reader will look in it vainly for obvious places-names such as Chaves, Casal Novo, Castello Branco, Vera, St. Pierre, for personal names such as Lapisse, Latour-Maubourg, Bonnet, Montbrun, Abadia, Penne-Villemur, O’Donnell, Del Parque, Erskine, Anson, Victor Alten, Barnard, Beckwith. On the other hand he will find silly headings such as under L, “Lies, encouragement of,” or under I, “Invincibility of British Troops.” Perhaps the most ridiculous entry in this absurd compilation is that of “Light Division,” to which there is annexed just one note, “satisfactory conduct of, on April 6, 1811,” as if that was the sole occasion on which it was necessary to mention that distinguished unit of the British army. There are no headings under regiments at all, so that if one wishes to see what the Duke said about the 52nd or the Black Watch, one simply gets no help.
But there is another trick of Gurwood’s which is even worse than his want of tables of contents or adequate index-entries. He omitted all the elaborate statistics which used to accompany the Duke’s dispatches, without exception. The beautiful tables of casualties which explain the distribution of losses between regiments and divisions, are in every case boiled down into three bald totals of “killed, wounded, and missing,” for the whole army, no indication of units being left. Even Lord Londonderry’s modest two volumes, the first attempt at a general history of the Peninsular War, give far more useful information on the all-important topics of strengths and losses than all Gurwood’s tomes. For that sensible author rightly saw that nothing could be more serviceable to the reader than an occasional table of the organization and numbers of the whole allied army, and that the detailed casualty-list of such a fight as Talavera or Albuera is indispensable. The purblind Gurwood preferred to put in a note, “the detail of divisions, regiments, and battalions has been omitted, being too voluminous,”[12] when he was dealing with an important return. The historian owes him small thanks for his precious opinion.
It is an immense relief to pass from Gurwood’s ill-arranged work to the volumes of the Wellington Supplementary Dispatches, which were published by the second Duke between 1858 and 1872. Though the mass of Peninsular material contained in this series is comparatively small, it comprises a great quantity of familiar and private correspondence, which had been deliberately omitted from the earlier publication. And, moreover, it is admirably edited; the second Duke knew what was important and what required explanation, appended valuable and copious notes, and was able (since the elder generation was now practically extinct) to abandon the exasperating reticence used by Gurwood. Moreover, he added a vast quantity of letters written not by, but to, his father, which serve to explain the old Duke’s sometime cryptic replies to his correspondents. Even a few necessary French documents have been added. Altogether these volumes are excellent, and make one wish that the editing of the whole of the Wellington papers had fallen into the same hands.