Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

There was, however, just one weak point, one loose joint, as it were, in the armour of the conquering Colossus who now bestrode the Continent from one end to the other.

If you take the map of Europe you will see that Portugal is a very small patch on it, and yet if it had not been for Portugal being just where it is, and if there had not been such a man as Sir Arthur Wellesley ready to turn its geographical advantages to the best possible use, Napoleon would very probably have ended his career on a throne, instead of on that lonely island in the Atlantic.

This is not the place for me to attempt to redescribe the long glories of the Peninsular War. In the first place, to do so would necessitate more pages than I have paragraphs at my disposal; and, in the second place, are they not already painted with a worthy splendour on the glowing pages of Napier and Allison?

But what does fall within the scope of such a sketch as this is the business of pointing out a fact which the school books say nothing about. The work that Wellington did in the Peninsula was of two sorts. He not only saw the weak joint in Napoleon’s armour and struck hard and straight at it. He did a great deal more than that.

The genius of his combinations, the tenacity of his purpose, and that inspired confidence which practically doubled the effectiveness of his fighting force, compelled Napoleon to employ his greatest generals, and some of his finest troops in the work of “flinging the English into the sea,” as he himself phrased it.

“There is nothing,” he told his marshals over and over again, “there is nothing to be reckoned with except the English.” And it may be added that if the English had not been led by such a man as he who was now Viscount Wellington and Baron Douro the reckoning might have been a somewhat short one.

The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of Wellington’s genius is not to be seen so much in the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and Salamanca, or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. It is to be found rather in the fact that Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the three finest marshals of the Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after campaign, fighting battle after battle, and suffering defeat after defeat, in the hopeless effort to do what it was absolutely necessary to be done if the conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more than a passing dream of empire.

Thus, for instance, when at the end of the campaign of 1810, Masséna finally retired upon Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he had engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer by no fewer than thirty thousand men. We have simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have been able to do if he had only had all these men free to work his will upon Continental troops and win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena, instead of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, and army after army, to dash themselves to pieces against that unbreakable phalanx of British valour and determination which the genius of Wellington had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier.

Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and tremendous as were the sacrifices which France submitted to for his sake, all the genius even of Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood of the Napoleonic system was draining away through that open wound in the Peninsula. But for this there would have been no Leipsic, and probably no Moscow, no Waterloo, and no St. Helena.

The most splendid military triumph in the history of the world is the uninterrupted march of victory made by Wellington and the soldiers whom his genius had made unconquerable for more than a thousand miles from the lines of Torres Vedras to the banks of the Seine. But behind the brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is something better still, something which Napoleon himself was first to see, and this was the supreme genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity which carried out, without one hitch or fault from start to finish, that marvellous series of operations which began with the first move of the pawns at Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate at Waterloo.