Wellington's Army, 1809-1814

by Charles Oman

Contemporary Journals

So much for Official Records. Passing on to the publications of individual actors in the war, we must draw a sharp line between those which were issued during or immediately after the campaigns with which they deal, and those which were written down, with or without the aid of contemporary notes or journals, many years after. The former, of course, possess a peculiar interest, because the writers’ narrative is not coloured by any knowledge of what is yet to come. An officer writing of Corunna or Talavera with the memory of Vittoria and Waterloo upon him, necessarily took up a different view of the war from the man who set down his early campaign without any idea of what was to follow. Early checks and hardships loom larger in the hour of doubt and disappointment, than when the recollection of them has been dimmed by subsequent hours of triumph. The early material, therefore, is very valuable, but it is not so copious as that which was written down later, and it largely exists in the form of letters and diaries, both of which are less readable than formal narratives. As good types of this sort of material we may name Ormsby’s and Ker-Porter’s Journals of the Campaign of 1808–09, Hawkers’ Journal of the Talavera Campaign, Stothert’s Diary of 1809–11, and General MacKinnon’s Journal of the same three years, all of which were published within a few months of the last entry which each contains. Next to these come the books which consist of contemporary material, published without alteration from the original manuscripts, but only many years after they had been written. The best of these for hard facts, often facts not to be found elsewhere, is the diary of Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons:[13] with it may be mentioned the Journal of George Simmons of the 95th, published in 1899 with the title, “A British Rifle Man,”[14] the Journals of Sir William Gomm, 1808–15,[15] Sir George Warre’s Letters of 1808–12,[16] which only saw the light two years ago, and Larpent’s Private Journal, printed in 1852.[17] These volumes all have short notes by the editors, but the text is the writing of the Peninsular time, untampered with and unaltered.

These books and their minor contemporaries stand in a class by themselves, as contemporary material reflecting accurately the spirit of the times. Much more numerous, however, are the books which, though produced by actors in the Great War, appeared at dates more or less remote from the years whose events they narrate. The formal histories are comparatively few, the reason being that Napier’s magnificent (if somewhat prejudiced and biassed) volumes completely put off other possible authors, who felt that they lacked his genius and his power of expression, from the idea of writing a long narrative of the war as a whole. This was a misfortune, since the one book which all students of military history are thereby driven to read, was composed by a bitter political partisan, who is set on maligning the Tory government, has an altogether exaggerated admiration for Napoleon, and owned many personal enemies in the British army, who receive scant justice at his hands. At the same time we must be grateful that the work was written by one who was an actual witness of many of the campaigns that he relates, conscientiously strove to get at all other first-hand witnesses, and ransacked the French as well as the British official papers, so far as he could obtain access to them. The merits of his style are all his own, and will cause the History of the Peninsular War to be read as an English classic, as Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion is read, even when research has shown (as in Clarendon’s case) that much of the narrative needs reconstruction, and that the general thesis on which it is constructed lacks impartiality.

Napier, Southey, and Lord Londonderry

The only other general histories of the war which appeared were Southey’s (three vols. published 1832) and Lord Londonderry’s.[18] The former was written by a literary man without any military experience, who had seen nothing of the Peninsula during the years of the struggle, and had as almost his only merit, a good knowledge of the Spanish sources, of which he was too uncritical. The book fell dead, being unable to compete with Napier, and lacking all the authority of personal knowledge which was the latter’s strong point. The smaller book of Lord Londonderry (two volumes, published 1829) is by no means without merit, but has many faults, always hovering on the edge between formal history and personal reminiscences. Wherever Charles Stewart had not been present, he passes lightly over the episodes of war, and obviously had taken no very great pains to collect first-hand material. At the same time the book has value, as giving the views of a highly-placed staff officer, who had the opportunity of seeing every episode from the point of view of Head Quarters, and had strong convictions and theories of his own. He had also the saving grace of loving statistics, and printed many valuable appendices of “morning states” and casualty-lists, things of which Napier was far too sparing, and which Gurwood suppressed altogether. As a general record the book could not cope with Napier, and has been forgotten—somewhat undeservedly—no less than Southey’s vast quartos. There is absolutely no other general history by a contemporary which needs mention. Of course I omit foreign sources, which help us little with regard to the British army, though they are indispensable for a general study of the war. Foy’s unfinished Guerre de la Peninsule, if we may judge from the volumes which appeared before his death, would have been a very prejudiced affair—his account of the British troops in Vol. I. is a bitter satire, contrasting oddly enough with his confessions concerning their merits in his Journal, of which a large portion was published a few years ago by Girod de l’Ain under the title Vie Militaire du Général Foy. After all the detraction in his formal history, it is interesting to read the frank letter which says, in 1811, that for a set battle on a limited front he acknowledges the superiority of the English infantry to the French, “I keep this opinion to myself,” he adds, “and have never divulged it, for it is necessary that the soldier in the ranks should not only hate his enemy, but also despise him.”[19] Foy kept the opinion so closely to himself, that no one would have suspected it who had read only his formal history of the Peninsular War.

Another French general history is Marshal Jourdan’s Guerre d’Espagne, issued only ten years ago by the Vicomte de Grouchy, though large parts of it had been utilized in Ducasse’s Life and Correspondence of King Joseph Bonaparte. This covers the whole war down to Vittoria, and is notable for its acute and often unanswerable criticism of Soult and Masséna, Marmont, and, not least, of Napoleon himself. It is less satisfactory as a vindication of Jourdan’s own doings. Marmont’s autobiography only covers his fifteen months of command from May, 1811, to July, 1812: while St. Cyr’s and Suchet’s very interesting accounts of their own periods of activity relate entirely to Catalonia and the eastern side of the Peninsula. St. Cyr does not touch British affairs at all; Suchet treats his campaigns against Maitland and Murray in a much more cursory style than his previous successes against the Spanish armies.[20] The other French formal narratives by contemporaries and eye-witnesses are for the most part monographs on particular campaigns in which the writers took part—such as Thiébault’s work on Junot in Portugal—full of deliberate inaccuracies—which was published in 1817, and Lapène’s Conquête d’Andalousie, en 1810–12, and Campagnes de 1813–14 (both published in 1823 in volumes of different size) which deal only with the army of Soult. There are, however, two general histories by German officers—Schepeler (who served with the Spaniards), and Riegel (who served with the French)—which both require mention. The former is especially valuable.[21]

Toreno, Belmas, John Jones

Among Peninsular historians two deserve special notice. The Conde de Toreno, a Spanish statesman who had taken part in the war as a young man, produced in 1838 three massive volumes which are, next to Napier, the greatest book that makes this war its subject. He is a first-hand authority of great merit, and should always be consulted for the Spanish version of events. He was a great master of detail, and yet could paint with a broad brush. It is sometimes necessary to remember that he is a partisan, and has his favourites and his enemies (especially La Romana) among the generals and statesmen of Spain. But on the whole he is a historian of high merit and judgment. With Toreno’s work must be mentioned the five small volumes of the Portuguese José Accursio das Neves, published in 1811, when Masséna had but just retreated from before the Lines of Torres Vedras. This is a very full and interesting description of Junot’s invasion of Portugal, and of the sufferings of that realm which came to an end with the Convention of Cintra. It is the only detailed picture of Portugal in 1808. Unfortunately the author did not complete the story of 1809–10.

At the end of this note on historical works, as distinguished from memoirs or diaries of adventure, we must name two excellent books, one English and one French, on the special subject of siege operations. These two monographs by specialists, both distinguished engineer officers—Sir John Jones’ Journal of the Sieges in Spain 1811–13, and Colonel Belmas’ Journaux des Sièges dans la Peninsule 1808–13, published respectively in 1827 and 1837—are among the most valuable books dealing with the Peninsular War, both containing a wealth of detail and explanatory notes. The work of Belmas is especially rich in reprints of original documents bearing on the sieges, and in statistics of garrisons, losses, ammunition expended, etc. They were so complete, and supplemented each other so well, that little was done to add to the information that they give, till Major J. Leslie’s admirable edition of the Dickson Papers began to appear a few years ago, and appreciably increased our knowledge of the English side of the siege operations.

Having made an end of the formal histories written by contemporaries and eye-witnesses, it remains that we should speak of a class of literature much larger in bulk, and generally much more interesting, considered in the light of reading for the general student—the books of autobiographies and personal reminiscences which were written by participants in the war some time after it had come to an end—at any time from ten to forty years after 1814. Their name is legion. I am continually discovering more of them, many of them printed obscurely in small editions and from local presses, so that the very knowledge of their existence has perished. And so many unpublished manuscripts of the sort exist, in France no less than in England, that it is clear that we have not even yet got to the end of the stock of original material bearing on the war. Some of the most interesting, e.g. the lively autobiography of Blakeney of the 28th,[22] and that of Ney’s aide-de-camp Sprünglin,[23] have only appeared during the last few years.