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While working for the last nine years at the History of the Peninsular War, I have (as was inevitable) been compelled to accumulate many notes, and much miscellaneous information which does not bear upon the actual chronicle of events in the various campaigns that lie between 1808 and 1814, but yet possesses high interest in itself, and throws many a side-light on the general course of the war. Roughly speaking, these notes relate either to the personal characteristics of that famous old army of Wellington, which, as he himself said, “could go anywhere and do anything,” or to its inner mechanism—the details of its management. I purpose to speak in these pages of the leaders and the led; of the daily life, manners, and customs of the Peninsular Army, as much as of its composition and its organization. I shall be dealing with the rank and file no less than with the officers, and must even find space for a few pages on that curious and polyglot horde of camp followers which trailed at the heels of the army, and frequently raised problems which worried not only colonels and adjutants, but even the Great Duke himself.

There is an immense amount of interesting material to be collected, concerning the inner life of the Peninsular Army, from public documents, such as despatches, general orders, and regimental reports, and records of courts martial. But I shall be utilizing to a much greater extent non-official information, collected from the countless diaries, memoirs, and series of contemporary letters, which have come down to us from the men who took part in the great war. Nor are the controversial pamphlets to be neglected, which kept appearing for many a year, when one survivor of the old army found, in the writings of another, statements which he considered injurious to himself, his friends, his regiment, or his division. The best known and most copious of these discussions is that which centres round the publication of Napier’s Peninsular War; the successive appearance of its volumes led to the printing of many protests, in which some of the most prominent officers of Wellington’s army took part—not only Lord Beresford, who was Napier’s especial butt and bête noir, and replied to the historian in terms sometimes not too dignified—but Cole, Hardinge, D’Urban, and many more. This set of “strictures”, as they were called, mainly relate to the Albuera campaign. But there are smaller, but not less interesting, series of controversial pamphlets relating to the Convention of Cintra, to Moore’s retreat, to the campaign of 1810 (Bussaco), the storm of Badajoz, and other topics.

The memoirs and autobiographies, of course, possess the greatest share of interest. And it may be noted as a remarkable fact that those coming from the rank and file are not very much less numerous than those which come from the commissioned ranks. If there are scores of diaries and reminiscences of colonels, captains, and subalterns, there are at least dozens of little books by sergeants, corporals, and privates. Many of these are very quaint productions indeed, printed at local presses—at Perth, Coventry, Cirencester, Louth, Ashford—even at Corfu. Very frequently some knot of military or civilian friends induced a much-travelled veteran to commit to paper the tales which had been the delight of the canteen, or of the fireside of some village inn. They are generally very good reading, but often give rather the spirit of the time and the regiment than an accurate record of its long-past exploits. One or two of these veterans’ artless tales show all the characteristics of the memoirs of the prince of their tribe—the delightful but autolatrous Marbot. I have thought it worth while to give in an appendix the names and titles of the best of them. One or two, above all the little book of “Rifleman Harris” of the 95th, well deserve to be republished, but still await that honour. Perhaps regimental patriotism may some day provide us with a series of reprints of the best Soldiers’ Tales.1

Memoirs of the Rank and File

It is a very notable fact, which requires (but has never hitherto received) an explanation, that it is precisely with the coming in of the nineteenth century that British soldiers and officers alike began to write diaries and reminiscences on a large scale, and in great numbers. I do not, of course, mean to say that there were none such produced in the eighteenth century. Besides serious military histories like those of Kane, Stedman, or Tarleton, there do exist a certain number of narratives of personal adventure written by officers, such as Major Rogers the Scout, or the garrulous and often amusing diarist (unfortunately anonymous) who made the campaign of Culloden with the Duke of Cumberland—not to speak of the semi-apochryphal Captain Carleton. But they are few, and the writings from the ranks are fewer still, though there are certain soldiers’ letters which go back as far as Marlborough’s time, and one or two small books like Bristow’s and Scurry’s Indian reminiscences, and Sergeant Lamb’s Journal in the American War of Independence, which are worth mentioning. But it is quite certain that there was more writing going on in the army during the ten years 1805–1815 than in the whole eighteenth century.

What was the explanation of the phenomenon? There are, I think, two main causes to be borne in mind: the first was the glorious and inspiring character of Wellington’s campaigns, which made both officers and men justifiably proud of themselves, and more anxious than any previous generation had been to put on paper the tale of their own exploits. It must have been a man of particularly cheerful disposition who cared to compile the personal narrative of his adventures during the Old American War, which was largely a record of disaster, or even in the ups and downs of the Seven Years’ War, when for every Minden or Quebec there had been an evil memory like Ticonderoga or Kloster-Kampen. It is to this instinctive dislike to open up old memories of misfortune that we may attribute the fact that the first British campaigns of the French Revolutionary War, the unhappy marches and battles of the Duke of York’s army in 1793, 1794, 1795 are recorded in singularly few books of reminiscences—there are only (to my knowledge) the doggerel verse of the “Officer of the Guards,” with its valuable foot-notes, and the simple memoirs of Sergeant Stevenson of the Scots Fusilier Guards, and Corporal Brown of the Coldstream. This is an extraordinarily small output for a long series of campaigns, in which some 30,000 British troops were in the field, and where gallant exploits like those of Famars and Villers-en-Cauchies took place. But the general tale was not one on which any participant could look back with pleasure. Hence, no doubt, the want of books of reminiscences.

But I fancy that there is another and a quite distinct cause for the extraordinary outburst of interesting military literature with which the nineteenth century begins, and we may note that this outburst certainly commences a little before the Peninsular War. There exist several very good personal narratives both of the Conquest of Egypt in 1801, of the Indian Wars during the Viceroyalty of Lord Wellesley, and of the short campaign of Maida. And this cause I take to be the fact that the generation which grew up under the stress of the long Revolutionary War with France was far more serious and intelligent than that which saw it begin, and realized the supreme importance of the ends for which Great Britain was contending, and the danger which threatened her national existence. The empire had been in danger before, both in the Seven Years’ War, and in the War of American Independence, but the enemy had never been so terrifying and abhorrent as the Jacobins of the Red Republic. The France of Robespierre was loathed and feared as the France of Louis XV. or Louis XVI. had never been. To the greater part of the British nation the war against the Revolution soon became a kind of Crusade against the “triple-headed monster of Republicanism, Atheism, and Sedition.” The feeling that Great Britain had to fight not so much for empire as for national existence, and for all that made life worth having—religion, morality, constitution, laws, liberty—made men desperately keen for the fight, as their ancestors had never been.

The Sword and the Pen

Among the many aspects which their keenness took, one was most certainly the desire to record their own personal part in the great strife. It is in some such way only that I can explain the fact that the actually contemporary diaries and journals become so good as the war wears on, compared to anything that had gone before. Memoirs and reminiscences written later do not count in the argument, because they were compiled and printed long after the French war was over, and its greatness was understood. But the abundance of good material written down (and often sent to the press) during the continuance of the war is astounding. In some cases we can be sure that we owe the record to the reason that I have just suggested. For example, we certainly owe to it the long and interesting military diaries of Lord Lynedoch (the Sir Thomas Graham of Barrosa), who most decidedly went into the Revolutionary War as a Crusader and nothing less. As I shall explain when dealing with his remarkable career, he started military life at forty-four, mortgaging his estates to raise a battalion, and suddenly from a Whig M.P. of the normal type developed into a persistent and conscientious fighter against France and French ideas—whether they were expressed (as when first he drew the sword) in the frenzied antics of the Jacobins, or (as during his latter years) in the grinding despotism of Bonaparte. His diary from first to last is the record of one who feels that he is discharging the elementary duty of a good citizen, by doing his best to beat the French wherever they may be found.

I take it that the same idea was at the bottom of the heart of many a man of lesser note, who kept his pen busy during those twenty eventful years. Some frankly say that they went into the service, contrary to the original scheme of their life, because they saw the danger to the state, and were ready to take their part in meeting it. “The threat of invasion fired every loyal pair of shoulders for a red coat.”2

Of the men whose memoirs and letters I have read, some would have been lawyers (like Sir Hussey Vivian), others politicians, others doctors, others civil servants, others merchants, if the Great War had not broken out. I should imagine that the proportion of officers who had taken their commission for other reasons than that they had an old family connection with the army, or loved adventure, was infinitely higher during this period than it had ever been before. A very appreciable number of them were men with a strong religious turn—a thing I imagine to have been most unusual in the army of the eighteenth century (though we must not forget Colonel Gardiner). One young diarist heads the journal of his first campaign with a long prayer.3 Another starts for the front with a final letter to his relatives to the effect that “while striving to discharge his military duties he will never forget his religious ones: he who observes the former and disregards the latter is no better than a civilized brute.”4

The Men of Religion

There were Peninsular officers who led prayer-meetings and founded religious societies—not entirely to the delight of the Duke of Wellington,5 whose own very dry and official view of religion was as intolerant of “enthusiasm” as that of any Whig bishop of Mid-Georgian times. Some of the most interesting diaries of the war are those of men who like Gleig, Dallas, and Boothby, took Holy Orders when the strife came to an end. One or two of the authors from the ranks show the same tendencies. Quartermaster Surtees was undergoing the agonies of a very painful conversion, during the campaign of 1812, and found that the memories of his spiritual experiences had blunted and dulled his recollection of his regimental fortunes during that time.6 A very curious book by an Irish sergeant of the 43rd devotes many more pages to religious reflections than to marches and bivouacs.7 Another writer of the same type describes himself on his title-page as “Twenty-one years in the British Foot Guards, sixteen years a non-commissioned officer, forty years a Wesleyan class leader, once wounded, and two years a Prisoner.”8

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.