Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 24

15 ‘A Whole Host of Marshals’

1809 – 10

“They really forget everything when plunder or wine is within their reach.’

ALMOST a hundred thousand men of the Imperial army were marching through France for the Pyrenees. There were rumours that the Emperor himself, having finally overwhelmed the Austrians at Wagram at the beginning of July 1809, would come with them to direct personally the expulsion of his tiresomely persistent enemy from the western peninsula of the Continent which he had otherwise almost made his own.

Wellington was at least spared the personal attention of Napoleon. But there was still ‘a whole host of Marshals’ in Spain, among them Edouard Mortier and Michel Ney as well as Soult, Victor and Kellerman.¹

Threatened as he was by the immense power of France, Wellington felt his position also endangered by the reconstruction of the ministry in London and the departure from office of his friend Lord Castlereagh on whose support he had always been able to rely. The new Prime Minister was to be Spencer Perceval, a man of whom little was generally known and scarcely anything known at Wellington’s headquarters in the Peninsula. Nor did Wellington know very much about the new Foreign Secretary, Lord Bathurst, nor the Secretary of War, the Earl of Liverpool. It was not long, however, before it was decided to recall Marquess Wellesley home from Seville to replace Lord Bathurst as Foreign Secretary and to send out his brother Henry as British Minister in Lisbon. So Wellington was able to comfort himself with the thought that by these changes he had at least two friends at court.²

He would need all the support he could contrive to obtain in the months ahead, for his position in the Peninsula, as he well recognized, was an ever more precarious one, while praise in England for his victory at Talavera was being overcast by grumbles that it had merely been the prelude to a defeat. The utter failure of the attempt to seize Antwerp from the French, the withdrawal of most of the troops from Belgium, and the death from malaria of so many more who had been left behind as a garrison, were humiliating enough; but now there was retreat in Spain to contemplate as well. The Times was far from being alone in questioning Lord Wellington’s fitness for command. The extreme Independent Whig, a Sunday newspaper, described the Peninsular War as ‘the frantic and visionary pursuit of treachery and folly. Every success which may accompany the valour of our armies we can consider as HUMAN BUTCHERY, perpetrated for the PERSONAL SPLEEN AND VINDICTIVE RAPACITY of the British Ministry.’³ As at the time of the enquiry into the Convention of Cintra, pamphleteers, satirists and caricaturists were let loose upon Wellington’s reputation. Cobbett became more vehement than ever, ridiculing Wellington’s dispatches and choosing instead to propagate the version of events printed in the French paper, Le Moniteur universel, while, in a characteristic satirical print attributed to Thomas Rowlandson, which pilloried him for his conduct of the war in the Peninsula, the General was portrayed outside a fairground booth advertising plays by Beaumont and Fletcher and August von Kotzebue, The Wild Goose Chase and The Wanderer.4 In the army, too, there was much discontent and, among both officers and men, there was widespread feeling that the Commander was not as able as had earlier been supposed.⁵

Wellington assured Lord Liverpool that he cared not a straw for vilification, but he was anxious that the Prime Minister should be in no doubt as to the difficulties of his position and the disadvantages under which he laboured. ‘If I succeed in executing the arduous task which has devolved upon me,’ he wrote to him, ‘I may fairly say that I had not the best instruments, in either officers or men, which the service could have afforded.’⁶

He had by then decided that he could not defend the long Portuguese frontier, but must stand closer to the sea; and, with this in mind, he and his Chief Engineer had closely inspected the high ground north of Lisbon on either side of Torres Vedras between the river Tagus and the Atlantic Ocean. Here he could make a stand; and here he set his Engineers to work in constructing, with the help of several thousand Portuguese labourers, the extensive fortifications of gun emplacements, earthworks, palisades, fascine-lined trenches, gabions and ravelins which were outlined in memoranda of careful exactitude.⁷

The French marched on, brushing aside resistance at Tamamès and Ocaña, the incompetently led Spanish forces, in Wellington’s contemptuous words, ‘doing Bonaparte’s business for him as fast as possible’.⁸ At least the Portuguese promised to be better soldiers. Submitting themselves to British discipline under the command of a British officer, William Carr Beresford, a natural son of the Marquess of Waterford, who had learned to speak Portuguese while Governor of Madeira, they underwent training in British drill and British tactics.* Wellington hoped they might even prove a match for the French who would find the going more and more difficult and hunger harder to bear as they marched through the wide plains and black mountains of central Spain towards the Portuguese frontier.

Occupied and anxious as he was, Wellington found time to spare from his maps and reports and inventories, his letters and reconnaissances. He sought permission to shoot royal coverts beside the Caya; he went hunting red deer around Elvas; he read books about Portugal and warfare in Portugal; he wrote to his mother and sent her a shawl which, ‘bad as it is’, he commented dismissively, ‘is the only manufacture of Spain I have seen’.⁹ He also found time to talk informally to those members of his staff, his ‘family’, with whom he was on intimate terms; and even to perform some of their duties for them.

One day one of his staff officers returned from an unprofitable visit to the estate of a noble Spaniard to whom he had been sent to procure forage. The General asked him why he had been unable to get any. ‘I was told I would have to bow to the noble owner,’ the officer said, ‘and of course I couldn’t do that.’

‘Well I suppose I must get some myself,’ Wellington said.

Soon carts full of forage were being carried into camp. Wellington was asked how he had managed it.

‘Oh,’ he said easily, ‘I just bobbed down.’¹⁰

Since the departure of his senior aide-de-camp, Major Colin Campbell, to become Assistant Adjutant-General of a division.† most of the officers chosen for staff appointments were of aristocratic birth and three were related to him by marriage. One of these was his wife’s brother, the Hon. Edward Pakenham, who had been a lieutenant in the 92nd Foot at the age of sixteen, had commanded a battalion of the 7th Royal Fusiliers in Denmark when he was nineteen, and, before being given command of the 3rd Division, had served on the staff as Deputy Adjutant-General. Another was the Marquess of Worcester, later seventh Duke of Beaufort, a dashing young man whom Harriette Wilson had hoped to marry and who made a more suitable marriage with one of Wellington’s nieces, Georgiana Frederica Fitzroy, and after her death, with another of his nieces, Emily Frances Smith. The third was Lord Fitzroy Somerset, the fifth Duke of Beaufort’s youngest son, the future first Lord Raglan, who was to marry Lord Wellington’s niece, Emily Harriet, second daughter of the third Earl of Mornington.

Lord Fitzroy bore so marked a resemblance to his wife’s uncle that, when they had sailed out to Corunna together in the Donegal in July 1808, men had taken them for father and son. Their friendship, formed then, was never to be broken. The General was once asked why he reposed such confidence in Lord Fitzroy whom he appointed his Military Secretary at the age of twenty-two in succession to Colonel James Bathurst whose responsibilities had driven him to a nervous breakdown. Wellington replied that, while Fitzroy Somerset, whom he always addressed as Lord Fitzroy, though he had known him since childhood, certainly had no very exceptional talents, he could always rely upon him to tell the exact truth and to carry out his orders with precision and promptitude.¹¹

Other favoured members of his staff were Captain the Hon. Alexander Gordon, brother of the fourth Earl of Aberdeen; Lord Burghersh, only son of the tenth Earl of Westmorland, who was one day to be Resident Minister in Berlin; Captain Ulysses Burgh, later second Baron Downes; and Charles, Lord March, son of Wellington’s friend, the fourth Duke of Richmond, whom the General, though painfully bruised in the thigh, was to ride several miles to see when he heard that the young man had been severely wounded. He hobbled out of the patient’s room, supporting himself on two sticks, with ‘tears trickling down his cheeks’.¹²

Yet while Wellington, ‘in looking for able young men for his personal staff, preferred ability with a title to ability without’¹³ – and, indeed, was ‘all for having gentlemen for officers’¹⁴ since the British Army was what it was ‘because it [was] officered by gentlemen’¹⁵ – he would not tolerate inefficiency in any member of his staff however nobly born and whether related to him or not. His brother William’s only son, also William, an extravagant and dissipated young man, was dismissed and sent home shortly after his appointment to his uncle’s staff, for being ‘lamentably ignorant and idle’ and for ‘doing things he has no right to do’.¹⁶

Apart from the disreputable and incompetent William Wellesley-Pole and a few other dissidents, Wellington’s young staff officers greatly respected him. So did most of his brigade and divisional commanders, if few could bring themselves to feel that affection for him which he inspired in the inner circle of his ‘family’ and in one or two more senior officers who knew him well such as Galbraith Lowry Cole, Lady Wellington’s former suitor, now in command of the 4th Division, who thought that he had never served any chief he liked so much, apart from Sir John Moore. ‘He has treated me with much more confidence than I had a right or could be expected from anyone,’ Cole went on. ‘Few, I believe, possess a firmer mind or have, as far as I have heard, more the confidence of the Army.’¹⁷

It could not be said, however, that the army inspired much confidence in Wellington. He was ‘apprehensive of the consequences of trying them in any nice operation before the enemy, for they really forget everything when plunder or wine is within their reach’.¹⁸ The general officers were ‘very bad’; indeed, some of them were ‘a disgrace to the service’. The man who had been sent out as his second-in-command was ‘very unfit for his situation’. All in all, he told his brother William in confidence, ‘I sincerely believe that in every respect, with the exception of the Guards and one or two other Corps, this is the Worst British Army that was ever in the field.’¹⁹

The most severe punishments could not stop the men plundering, an activity which many of them seemed to. consider part of the natural process of soldiering. Throughout the war in the Peninsula numerous general orders were issued on the lines of the following:

The Commander of the Forces requests the General officers commanding divisions will take measures to prevent the shameful and unmilitary practice of soldiers shooting pigs in the woods, so close to the camp and to the columns of march as that two dragoons were shot last night … The number of soldiers straggling from their regiments for no reason excepting to plunder, is a disgrace to the army, and affords a strong proof of the degree to which the discipline of the regiments is relaxed, and of the inattention of the commanding and other officers of regiments to their duty, and to the repeated orders of the army … The Commander of the Forces desires that notice may be given to the soldiers that he has this day ordered two men to be hanged who were caught in the fact of shooting pigs.²⁰

‘On the other hand’, so the commissary August Schaumann said, ‘Lord Wellington frequently showed himself merciful towards regiments of which he was fond. On one occasion, for instance, he came upon the 1st German Hussars … one of whose men came riding up with a bleating sheep. The moment Lord Wellington saw the man, however, he only smiled, and turning his back on him, pretended not to have noticed anything, although the officers at his side were shuddering with fear.’²¹

Similarly, it gave Wellington wry pleasure to recount the story of a man he himself caught with a stolen beehive, a popular species of loot.²² Where did he get it? he asked. Oh, the man said blithely, just over the hill; but it would be as well to get over there quickly: they were nearly all gone.²³

The women were quite as bad as the men, if not worse. General Orders had frequently to be issued in an effort to stop them misappropriating army as well as Spanish or Portuguese property and making the life of the commissaries more difficult than it was already. Female camp followers were occasionally beaten on their bare bottoms; but they continued looting just the same. Nor were most officers above looting themselves. A soldier in the 71st recorded the looting of a mill by his regiment whose colonel forced the men out, ‘throwing a handful of flour on each man as he passed out of the mill. When we were drawn up he rode along the column looking for the millers, as we called them. At this moment a hen put her head out of his coat-pocket, and looked first to one side, then to another. We began to laugh; we could not restrain ourselves. He looked amazed and furious … Then the colonel in his turn laughed … and the millers were no more looked after.’²⁴

As for the general officers, when Wellington reflected that ‘these were the persons on whom [he was] to rely to lead columns against the French Generals, and who [were] to carry [his] instructions into execution’, he confessed that he trembled. ‘And, as Lord Chesterfield said of the Generals of his day,’ he added, ‘“I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names he trembles as I do.”*²⁵ Sir William Erskine and General [William] Lumley will be a very nice addition to this List.’²⁶ So would General Lightburne and Colonel Sanders, from whom he prayed to God and the Horse Guards to deliver him. Erskine, in fact, was ‘generally understood to be a madman’, and committed suicide in 1813 by throwing himself out of a window in Lisbon.

Particularly tiresome for Wellington were those senior officers who came out to join the army with recommendations from the Prince of Wales or cronies at the Horse Guards. One of the most exasperating of these was a reckless and troublesome Hussar officer at one time Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of Cumberland, Sir Colquhoun Grant, whom Wellington would have liked to send home but who was instead promoted by the Horse Guards.

The commissary August Schaumann found the arrogant Grant intolerable in his impossible demands and in his haughty astonishment that these demands should be questioned. ‘Was he not six feet high, and had he not a huge black moustache and black whiskers? … His whole manner bore the stamp of unbounded pride and the crassest ignorance, and he tried to conceal the latter beneath positive assertions which he did not suffer to be contradicted.’ Schaumann was delighted one day when the great man was treated cavalierly by Wellington who galloped past him shouting out an invitation to dinner which he did not wait to be acknowledged and which left ‘the black giant’ looking ‘crestfallen’ and … ‘silently shaking his head’ before riding off ‘gesticulating violently’.²⁷

Quite as bad as the madmen and incompetents, in Wellington’s opinion, were what he called the croakers, officers who muttered criticisms of his strategy, spreading doubt and resentment in the army and conveying gloom in letters home. Among these was his so-called second-in-command, the Irish General Sir Brent Spencer, a great favourite of King George III but, in Wellington’s opinion, an ‘exceedingly puzzle-headed man’ who, in Portugal, had constantly referred to the Tagus as the Thames, and had once told an aide-de-camp to trot down to the Thames to see what was going on there. The aide had answered that he wished with all his heart that he could.²⁸

‘As soon as an accident happens,’ Wellington complained, ‘every man who can write, and has a friend who can read, sits down to write his account of what he does not know.’ And, what was worse, newspapers in England got hold of these letters which could not but spread disquiet at home.²⁹

One of the most intrigant of Wellington’s senior officers was the Adjutant-General, Charles Stewart, the handsome son of the Marquess of Londonderry by his second wife, and half-brother of Lord Castlereagh. He had accepted the staff appointment with reluctance and was repeatedly asking for a cavalry command which Wellington declined to give him on account of his defective sight and hearing.³⁰ Stewart insisted that the cavalry was not well handled and insinuated that the army was not being well managed either. Eventually, after Stewart had insisted that as Adjutant-General ‘the examination of prisoners belonged exclusively to him’, Wellington had summoned him to an interview and told him that if his orders were not obeyed he ‘would dismiss him instanter and send him to England in arrest’. ‘After a great deal of persuasion’, Wellington said, ‘Stewart burst out crying and begged my pardon, and hoped I would excuse his intemperance.’³¹

Despite his differences with some of his senior officers and his low opinion of his soldiers, Wellington maintained that he was ‘prepared for all events’; and, if he were in a scrape, he was determined to give the impression that he was confident he could get out of it. ‘I am in no scrape,’ he wrote to his brother William, ‘and if Mr Pitt were alive, or if there were anything like a Government in England, or any publick Sentiment remaining there, Buonaparte would yet repent his invasion of Spain.’³²

It was widely held in England, though, that he was, indeed, in a scrape. The Earl of Liverpool, Secretary for War, told Wellington that ‘a very considerable degree of alarm existed respecting the safety of the British army in Portugal’; and went on to say that he ‘would rather be excused for bringing away the army a little too soon than, by remaining in Portugal a little too long, exposing it to those risks from which no military operations can be wholly exempt’.³³ In subsequent letters Liverpool wrote of the probability of the enemy’s being soon enabled to employ such overwhelming force that evacuation would be inevitable; and he also told Wellington that officers who had returned from the Peninsula ‘entertained and avowed the most desponding views as to the result of the war’.³⁴

Yet Wellington felt that if he were, in fact, in a scrape, the French might soon be in one too. He doubted that they ‘could bring a large force to bear upon Portugal without abandoning other objects, and, exposing their whole fabric in Spain to great risks’. If they invaded Portugal, and did not succeed in obliging the British army to evacuate the country, they would be ‘in a very dangerous situation’. The longer he could oppose them and ‘delay their success’, the more likely they would be ‘to suffer materially in Spain’.³⁵

He did not underestimate his opponent. Marshal Andrea Massena, due de Rivoli and prince d’Essling, born in Nice, the son of a wine merchant in a poor way of business, had enlisted in the Royal Italian Regiment at the age of seventeen, after serving as a cabin boy. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he had been a sergeant at Antibes. Scarcely more than three years later he was a general. He had greatly distinguished himself in Italy, in Switzerland and in Austria, had helped Napoleon to win the battle of Marengo and had paid a crucial part in the battle of Wagram. He was one of the Emperor’s most successful marshals. Indeed, Wellington considered him the ‘ablest after Napoleon’.*³⁶ He was not as alert as once he had been, however, and was said not only to be in poor health but also distracted from his duties by his demanding mistress whom, to the annoyance of his generals, he had brought to the Peninsula with him, dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp.³⁷ Wellington believed he could out-manoeuvre him.