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Memoirs of French Veterans

There is a considerable bulk of French reminiscences dealing with the purely British side of the Peninsular War. Beside Marbot’s and Thiébault’s memoirs, of which I have already made mention, three or four more must not be neglected by any one who wishes to see Wellington’s army from the outside. By far the most vivid and lively of them is Lemonnier-Delafosse of the 31st Léger, whose Souvenirs Militaires were published at Havre in 1850. He is a bitter enemy, and wants to prove that Wellington was a mediocre general, and ought always to have been beaten. But he does his best to tell a true tale, and acknowledges his defeats handsomely—though he thinks that with better luck they might have been victories. Failing memory can be detected in one or two places, where he makes an officer fall at the wrong battle, or misnames a village. Fantin des Odoards, also (oddly enough) of the 31st Léger, kept a journal, so that his reminiscences of 1808–11 are very accurate. He is specially valuable for Moore’s retreat and Soult’s Oporto campaign. A far more fair-minded man than Delafosse, he is full of acknowledgments of the merit of his British adversaries, and makes no secret of his disgust for the Spanish war,—a nightmare of plunder and military executions naturally resulting from an unjust aggression. A third valuable author is Colonel St. Chamans, an aide-de-camp of Soult, whom he cordially detested, and whose meanness and spirit of intrigue he is fond of exposing. He is of a light and humorous spirit—very different from another aide-de-camp, Ney’s Swiss follower, Sprünglin, whose journal36 is a most solid and heavy production, of value for minute facts and figures but not lively. Unlike St. Chamans in another respect, he is devoted to his chief, the Marshal, of whom he was the most loyal admirer. But I imagine that Ney was a much more generous and loveable master than the wily Soult.

Other useful French volumes of reminiscences are those of Guingret of the 6th corps, full of horrible details of Masséna’s Portuguese misfortunes; of D’Illens, a cavalry officer who served against Moore and Wellesley in 1808–09; and of Vigo-Roussillon, of the 8th Line, who gives the only good French narrative of Barrosa. Parquin is a mere sabreur, who wrote his memoir too late, and whose anecdotes cannot be trusted. He survived to be one of the followers of Napoleon III. in his early and unhappy adventures at Boulogne and elsewhere. Other French writers, such as Rocca and Gonneville, were long in Spain, but little in contact with the British, being employed on the Catalan coast, or with the army of the South on the Granada side. So much for the works of actors in the Great War, who relate what they have themselves seen. We need spend but a much smaller space on the books of the later generations, which are but second-hand information, however carefully they may have been compiled.

The British regimental histories ought to be of great value, since the series compiled by the order of the Horse Guards, under the general editorship of Richard Cannon, in the 1830’s, might have been enriched by the information obtainable from hundreds of Peninsular veterans, who were still surviving. Unfortunately nearly every volume of it is no more than bad hack-work. In the majority of the volumes we find nothing more than copious extracts from Napier, eked out with reprints of the formal reports taken from the London Gazette. It is quite exceptional to find even regimental statistics, such as might have been obtained with ease from the pay-lists and other documents in possession of the battalion, or stored at the Record Office. Details obtained through enquiry from veteran officers who had served through the war are quite exceptional. Some of his volumes are less arid and jejune than others—and this is about all that can be said in favour of even the best of them.

Regimental Histories

All the good regimental histories, without exception, are outside the official “Cannon” series. Some are excellent; it may be said that, as a general rule, those written latest are the best: the standard of accuracy and original research has been rising ever since 1860. Among those which deserve a special word of praise are Colonel Gardyne’s admirable The Life of a Regiment (the Gordon Highlanders), published in 1901; Cope’s History of the Rifle Brigade (full of excerpts from first-hand authorities) which came out in 1877; Moorsom’s History of the 52nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry (the first really good regimental history which was written), published in 1860; Davis’s History of the 2nd Foot (Queen’s West Surrey), and Colonel Hamilton’s 14th Hussars. By the time that these began to appear, the level of research was beginning to rise, and it was no longer considered superfluous to visit the Record Office, or to make enquiries for unpublished papers among the families of old officers. All those mentioned above are large volumes, but even the smaller histories are now compiled with care, and their size is generally the result not of scamped work (as of old), but of the fact that some regiments have, by the chance of their stations, seen less service than others, and therefore have less to record. I may mention as books on the smaller scale which have proved useful to me, Hayden’s history of the 76th, Smyth’s of the 20th, and Purdon’s of the 47th. A rare example of the annals of a smaller unit, a battery not a battalion, is Colonel Whinyates’ story of C Troop, R.H.A., which he called From Corunna to Sebastopol, in which much loyal and conscientious work may be found. But the history of the whole of the Artillery of the Peninsular Army, Portuguese as well as English, is now being worked out in admirable detail in the Dickson Papers, edited by Major John Leslie, R.A., who knows everything that can be known about the units of his corps which served under Wellington. Sir Alexander Dickson, it may be remarked, was Commanding Officer of the Artillery in the later campaigns of 1813 and in 1814, and before he obtained that post had been in charge of all the three sieges of Badajoz as well as those of Olivenza and Ciudad Rodrigo. Since he had been lent to the Portuguese artillery, his papers give copious information as to the auxiliary batteries of that nation which were attached to the Peninsular Army. It is devoutly to be wished that some officer would take up a corresponding task by compiling the annals of the Royal Engineers in the Peninsular War. Connolly’s History of the Royal Sappers and Miners (published so far back as 1857), has much good information, but infinitely more could be compiled by searching the Record Office, and collating the memoirs of Boothby, Burgoyne, Landmann, and other engineer officers who have left journals or reminiscences.

Along with the British regimental histories should be named two sets of volumes which are of the same type, though they relate to larger units than a regiment, and do not deal with our own troops. The first class deals with our German auxiliaries, and is headed by Major Ludlow Beamish’s valuable and conscientious History of the King’s German Legion. This was written in 1832, but is a very favourable example of research for a book of the date, when Cannon’s miserable series represented the level of English regimental history. The two volumes contain many original letters and documents, and some excellent plates of uniforms. In 1907 Captain Schwertfeger went over the same ground in his Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion,37 and added appreciably to Beamish’s store of facts. The Brunswick Oels regiment, which served Wellington from 1811 to 1814, has also a German biographer in Colonel Kortfleisch, who has served in the 88th German Infantry, which now represents that ancient corps. There is no similar history for the Chasseurs Brittaniques, the last of the old Peninsular foreign corps.

Portuguese Authorities

For the Portuguese Army a good description of the state of affairs in 1810, when it had just been reorganized, is contained in Halliday’s Present State of Portugal, published in 1812. Chaby’s Excerptos Historicos38 contains a good deal of valuable material for its subsequent history, but is sadly ill-arranged and patchy. Only the Portuguese artillery in the Peninsular War has been dealt with in Major Teixeira Botelho’s Subsidios para a Historia da Artilheria Portegueza, which is very full and well documented. The life of a British officer serving with a Portuguese regiment can be studied in the Memoirs of Bunbury (20th Line),39 and Blakiston (5th Caçadores).40

After regimental histories, the next most important source of information, in the way of books not written by those who served under Wellington, is personal biographies. Captain Delavoye’s Life of Lord Lynedoch (Sir Thomas Graham)41 is perhaps the most useful among them, not so much for any merit of style or arrangement, as for the excellent use of contemporary documents not available elsewhere. A large portion of the volume consists of excerpts from Graham’s long and interesting military journal, and letters from and to him are printed in extenso. Thus we get first-hand information on many events at which no other British witness was present, e.g. Castaños’ campaign on the Ebro in 1808, as well as comments on better known operations, such as Sir John Moore’s Corunna retreat, and the Barrosa expedition of 1811. Unfortunately both journal and letters fail for the campaign of 1813, in which Graham took such a distinguished part.

H.B. Robinson’s Memoirs of Sir Thomas Picton42 was a book of which Napier fell foul—there are many caustic comments on it in his controversial appendices. But it is not nearly so bad a work as might have been expected from his way of treating it. Indeed I fancy that Napier was paying off an old Light Division grudge against Picton himself, whom he personally disliked. The narrative is fair, and the quantity of contemporary letters inserted give the compilation some value. Sidney’s Life of Lord Hill43 is far inferior to Robinson’s book: the author did not know his Peninsular War well enough to justify the task which he took in hand, and the letters, of which he fortunately prints a good many, are the only valuable material in it. It is curious that both Picton and Hill had their lives written by clergymen, when there were still a good many old Peninsular officers surviving who might have undertaken the task.

Of the other chief lieutenants of Wellington, Beresford has never found a biographer, though the part which he played in the war was so important. There must be an immense accumulation of his papers somewhere, in private hands, but I do not know where they lie. The only account of him consists of a few pages in a useful but rather formal and patchy little book by J.W. Cole, entitled, Memoirs of British Generals Distinguished during the Peninsular War.44 Lord Combermere (Stapleton Cotton) was in high command throughout Wellington’s campaigns, but was hardly up to his position, though he earned his chief’s tolerance by strict obedience to orders, a greater merit in the Duke’s eyes than military genius or initiative. There is a biography of him by Lady Combermere and Captain W. Knollys (1866) but the Peninsular chapters are short. Of Sir Lowry Cole, Sir John Gaspard Le Marchant, and several other prominent divisional generals and brigadiers, the only biographies are those in J.W. Cole’s book mentioned above. Sir James Leith, more fortunate, had a small volume dedicated to his memory by an anonymous admirer in 1818, but it was written without sufficient material, Leith’s private correspondence not (as it seems) being in the author’s hands, while official documents were not for the most part available at such an early date. There is a good deal, however, concerning this hard-fighting general’s personality and adventures to be gleaned from the memoirs of his nephew and aide-de-camp, Leith Hay.

Biographies of Gough, Colborne, etc.

Of officers who did not attain to the highest rank under Wellington, but who in later years made a great career for themselves, there are two biographies which devote a large section to Peninsular matters, those of Lord Gough by R.S. Rait (two vols., 1903), and of Lord Seaton (Colborne of the 52nd) by Moore Smith. These are both excellent productions, which give much private correspondence of the time, and have been constructed on modern lines, with full attention to all possible sources first- and second-hand. They are both indispensable for any one who wishes to make a detailed study of the Peninsular campaigns. There are also short memoirs of Sir Denis Pack45 and Lord Vivian,46 each produced by a grandson of the general, and giving useful extracts from journals and correspondence. The campaign of Sir John Moore can, perhaps, hardly be considered as falling into the story of Wellington’s army, but it is impossible to avoid mentioning the full (and highly controversial) biography of the hero of Corunna by Sir J.F. Maurice,47 which contains an invaluable diary, and much correspondence. It is an indispensable volume, at any rate, for those who wish to study the first year of the Peninsular War, and to mark the difference between the personalities and military theories of Moore and Wellington.

Of formal and detailed histories of the Peninsular War written in recent years there is one in Spanish by General Arteche, a very conscientious and thorough-going worker at original documents, who got up a good many English authorities, but by no means all. For the Spanish version of the whole war he is absolutely necessary. So, for the Portuguese version, is the immense work of Soriano da Luz, which is largely founded on Napier, but often differs from him, and brings many unpublished documents to light. Colonel Balagny has started a history of the war in French on a very large scale, delightfully documented, and showing admirable research. In five volumes he has only just got into 1809, so the whole book will be a large one. Mr. Fortescue’s fine history of the British Army has just started on the Peninsular campaign in its last volume. To my own four volumes, soon I hope to be five, I need only allude in passing. There is one immense monograph on Dupont’s Campaign by a French author, Colonel Titeux, which does not touch English military affairs at all. Two smaller but good works of the same type by Colonel Dumas and Commandant Clerc are both, oddly enough, dedicated to the same campaign,—Soult’s defence of the Pyrenean frontier in 1813–14: the former is the better of the two: both have endeavoured, in the modern fashion, to use the reports of both sides, not to write from the documents of one only; but Dumas has a better knowledge of his English sources than Clerc.

It is beyond my power to guess why similar monographs on separate campaigns of the war do not appear in English also. But the few brochures purporting to treat of such which have appeared of late on this side of the channel, are mostly cram-books for examinations, resting on no wide knowledge of sources, and often consisting of little more than an analysis of Napier, with some supplementary comments hazarded. They contrast very unfavourably with a book such as that of Colonel Dumas.