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17 Life at Headquarters

1810 – 12

‘He was in the best of spirits, genial and sans cérémonie; in fact, just like a genuine country squire.’

IN THOSE WINTER months of 1811 when the fighting died away and the guns were silent, Wellington remained with his army in Portugal. He showed no inclination to go home as so many of his senior officers had done from time to time: he had, after all, no pressing reason to return, no one whom he could not wait patiently to see again, no brother or sister whom he sorely missed, nor wife whom he longed to hold in his arms.

To those who did want to go home, he listened without much sympathy, whether it was business that called them, or family ties or illness. One morning when James McGrigor was with him and he was in a particularly bad humour after listening to various gloomy reports from the heads of other departments, two officers came in to request leave to go to England. ‘One of them, an officer in the Engineers, first made his request; he had received letters informing him that his wife was dangerously ill, and that the whole of his family were sick. His Lordship quickly replied, “No, no, Sir! I cannot at all spare you at this moment.” The captain, with a mournful face and submissive bow retired. A general officer of a noble family next advanced, saying, “My Lord, I have of late been suffering much from rheumatism –” Without allowing him time to proceed further, Wellington rapidly said, “And you must go to England to get cured of it. By all means. Go there immediately.” The general, surprised at his Lordship’s tone and manner, looked abashed, while he made a profound bow; but to prevent his saying anything in explanation, his Lordship immediately addressed me.’¹

Wellington had no objection to officers going off to Lisbon for a day or two; once cheerfully giving leave to an officer to do so for forty-eight hours ‘which is as long as any reasonable man can wish to stay in bed with the same woman’.² But when he received a letter from England on behalf of a young lady who was said to be pining away for love of an absent major, he replied sardonically that, while there were believed to be ‘desperate cases of this description’, he himself could not say that he had ‘ever yet known of a young lady dying of love’. ‘They contrive, in some manner to live, and look tolerably well, notwithstanding their despair; and some even have been known to recover so far as to be inclined to take another lover, if the absence of the first has lasted too long.’ He did not suppose that this particular lady could ever recover so far, but he hoped that she would ‘survive the continued necessary absence of the Major, and enjoy with him hereafter many happy days’.³

As for the demands of family business and private concerns, his own opinion was that there were no such that could not ‘be settled by instruction and power of attorney’. Indeed, he eventually prevailed upon the Horse Guards to send him no general officers who were not prepared to undertake that they would not ask for leave to attend to private business at home during their term of absence. He might occasionally feel obliged to grant leave of absence to an officer, but he could never approve of it. Why, were he to grant all requests for leave that were made to him, ‘between those absent on account of wounds and sickness, and those absent on account of business or pleasure’, he would have no officers left. A characteristic rebuff was delivered to Lieutenant Gurwood of the 52nd Regiment:

The Commander of the Forces cannot grant leave of absence to any officer in the army, except for recovery of health or for the arrangement of business which cannot be settled without his presence, and the settlement of which is paramount to every other consideration in life. As Lieutenant Gurwood’s application solely implies private affairs as the plea, without stating their nature, it is not in his Excellency’s power to comply with his request.⁴

There were those who condemned him for being hard and unfeeling. Certainly he always endeavoured to keep his emotions firmly under control and was ill at ease in the company of those who could not. Stories about his restraint were constantly repeated in the army: once, early one morning when excitedly informed that the enemy were withdrawing after he had waited long for them to do so, he paused for a moment, his razor motionless against his chin, murmured, ‘Ay, I thought they meant to be off; very well,’ and continued unhurriedly with his shaving.⁵ When told with equal excitement that his advance-guard had suddenly come upon the entire French army, he observed conversationally, ‘Oh, they are all there, are they? Well, we must mind a little what we are about.’⁶ Distressing news was greeted with the same imperturbable self-control as the most joyous intelligence, although those who knew him best were well aware when his innermost feelings were aroused. The death, for instance, of a brave and talented young Intelligence Officer, Major Edward Somers-Cocks, son of Earl Somers, affected him deeply. Colonel Frederic Ponsonby, commanding officer of the 12th Light Dragoons, recorded how Wellington had suddenly entered Ponsonby’s room to break the news, how he had paced up and down in silence, opened the door again, and left, announcing abruptly, ‘Poor old Cocks was killed last night.’ His look of despair at the funeral was such that no one liked to talk to him.⁷

On less emotional occasions, men were often wary of approaching him, for fear lest they were met with one of those rebuffs which the General would deliver, apparently unconscious of how wounding they could be. The Judge-Advocate General, Francis Seymour Larpent, observed that some officers were ‘much afraid of him’. Larpent himself when going up to him with his papers for instructions – which would always be given in a ‘civil and decisive’ way – felt ‘something like a boy going to school’.⁸ Yet there were times enough in the headquarters mess, as there had been in the mess of the 33rd in India, when the General seemed quite prepared to tolerate a jovial informality, when his highly distinctive laugh could be heard, ‘very loud and long’. He also tolerated much informality in dress. He himself was usually clothed in a well-cut grey frock-coat, rather shorter, like his boots, than was the normal fashion and slightly tighter so that, now he was in his early forties, he could be seen to be as lithe and trim as he had been as a subaltern. ‘He is well made and knows it,’ Larpent wrote home to his step-mother, attributing entirely to vanity what was also dictated by practical requirements, ‘and is willing to set off to the best what nature has bestowed. In short, like every great man present or past, almost without exception, he is vain … He is remarkably neat and most particular in his dress … He cuts the skirts of his coat shorter to make them look smarter: and only a short time since, on going to him on business, I found him discussing the cut of his half-boots and suggesting alterations to his servant.’ In wet weather his cocked hat was carefully encased in an oilskin cover.⁹

His officers were permitted the same kind of latitude as he allowed himself in matters of dress. ‘Scarcely any two officers were dressed alike,’ one of them said. ‘Some wore grey braided coats, others brown: some again blue; many (from choice, or perhaps necessity) stuck to the old “red rag”.’¹⁰ Nor was much attention paid by the General to the uniform of the soldiers. ‘Provided we brought our men into the field well appointed with their sixty rounds of ammunition each,’ this same officer recorded, ‘he never looked to see whether trousers were black, blue or grey.’ ‘I think it indifferent how a soldier is clothed,’ Wellington wrote himself in a letter to the Horse Guards, ‘provided it is in a uniform manner, and that he is forced to keep himself clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be.’¹¹

Visitors to headquarters were sometimes astonished by the amateurish, almost disorderly look of the place. Not only did officers walk about in a variety of clothes, some smart in their regimental uniform, others dressed in an individual manner which would have horrified their King had he seen them at a levee. The whole atmosphere, so a German commissary recalled, was ‘strikingly’ informal. ‘Had it not been known for a fact, no one would have suspected that [General Wellington] was quartered in the town. There was no throng of scented staff officers with plumed hats, orders and stars, no main guard, no crowd of contractors, actors, valets, cooks, mistresses, equipages, horses, forage and baggage waggons, as there is at a French or Russian headquarters. Just a few aides-de-camp, who went about the streets alone and in their overcoats, a few guides, and a small staff guard; that was all. About a dozen bullock-carts were to be seen in the large square of Fuente Guinaldo, which was used for bringing up straw to Headquarters; but apart from these no equipages or baggage trains were visible.’¹² What was not to be missed, however, was the Commander-in-Chief’s marquee which enclosed the tent in which he slept. This ‘large Marquee’ also served as ‘a sitting and dining room’, wrote his cook, James Thornton. ‘The gentlemen of the staff had a tent each … I had a round tent to sleep in, the Butler one also, my two Assistants had one between them, the Duke’s footmen and all the staff servants had one tent for two servants, all the servants’ tents were round ones, the gentlemen’s small Marquees.’¹³ The cooking was done ‘in a Room made with poles and a Tarpolain … There was a mound of earth thrown up, and niches cut round this in which we made fires and boiled the saucepans. We had a larger niche cut out for roasting. We stuck a pole in that and dangled the meat. When it rained hard, they had nothing but cold meat and bread.’¹⁴

Thornton’s cooking, the General had to concede, was not very good: ‘Cole gives the best dinners in the army; Hill the next best; mine are no great things.’¹⁵ However, the wine at Wellington’s headquarters was better than that at any other; much of it, including champagne, being sent out from England.

Sometimes the General was seen walking up and down in the company of one or other of the staff or with another General or perhaps a civilian visitor; and the conversation would range over all manner of topics, not all of them military, politics perhaps, or that night’s theatricals, or the prospects for next day’s hunting, for he still allowed himself his hunting days and kept a pack of hounds, known as The Peers’ ’, which had been brought out for him by two aides-de-camp, Lord Tweeddale and Lord Worcester. Indeed, as often as he could he went hunting in the uniform of the Hatfield Hunt, a black cape and sky-blue coat, which Lady Salisbury had given him, chasing after the quarry – which once turned out to be a load of salt fish – not much caring what the hounds ran so long as he could ‘enjoy a good gallop’, tumbling off often enough to give a Guards officer grounds for commenting, ‘He will certainly break his neck someday.’¹⁶

August Schaumann remarked how different he appeared on one of his hunting days when compared with his demeanour in times of stress in battle when, although always in control of his emotions, he ‘seemed like an angry God under whose threatening glance every one trembled’. By contrast, on his hunting days, when Schaumann ‘often used to meet him with his entourage and a magnificent pack of English hounds’, he was ‘in the best of spirits, genial and sans cérémonie; in fact, just like a genuine country squire. No one would have suspected at such moments that he was the Field-Marshal of three nations.’¹⁷

He was liable at such times to dash off at any moment, even in the middle of a conversation. The Spanish General Castaños was once much surprised to have an ‘earnest conversation’ with him interrupted in this way when a ‘brace of greyhounds in pursuit of a hare’ passed close to them as they rode along together ‘under a fire of artillery and accompanied by a numerous staff’. The instant Wellington observed the hare and greyhounds, he ‘gave the view hallo and went after them at full speed, to the utter astonishment of his foreign accompaniments. Nor did he stop until he saw the hare killed; when he returned and resumed the commander-in-chief as if nothing had happened.’¹⁸

The air of informality which pervaded headquarters was deceptive. The General worked hard, unwilling to leave much to his second-in-command – an appointment he chose not to recognize – though more willing to do so when Sir Brent Spencer went home and was succeeded by the more trustworthy Sir Thomas Graham, the future Lord Lyne-doch. He kept himself fit and expected his hardworking staff to keep fit too. He needed little sleep and grew impatient with those who pleaded the necessity of more. He was up at six o’clock, having been in bed for no more than six hours, sometimes for only three. He was at his desk writing until nine o’clock when he had breakfast, a spare, plain meal as all his meals usually were since he had such scant interest in food and was little concerned if he passed twenty-four hours without eating anything at all other than the crust and boiled egg he sometimes stuffed in his pocket when riding out of a morning.*¹⁹

The Duke’s abstinence often upset the Spanish aide-de-camp at his headquarters, Miguel Ricardo de Alava y Esquivel, later Spanish Ambassador in London, who, as he confessed, grew to dread those days when the General was asked what time the staff were to set off in the morning and what they were to have for dinner, since Alava knew that ‘the Peer’ would reply, as he never failed to do, ‘At daylight. Cold meat.’ The Spaniard held those four words ‘en horreur’.20

After breakfast the General received in turn the heads of the various departments of the army, making it clear that he preferred them to speak without recourse to notes, since hesitation while they were looking at them clearly annoyed him and made him ‘fidgetty’.²¹ He then mounted one of his horses, upon which he expended large sums of mopey, and rode off to inspect an outpost or to see a divisional commander. At six he dined, ‘never alone, nor with members of his personal staff exclusively about him’, wrote the Rev. G.R. Gleig, son of the Bishop of Brechin, at that time an officer in the 85th. ‘Everybody recommended to his notice [who happened to be passing through] was sure to receive an invitation … The conversation was most interesting and lively. The Duke himself spoke out upon all subjects with an absence of reserve which sometimes surprised his guests … He was rich in anecdote, most of them taking a ludicrous turn, and without any apparent effort put the company very much at their ease.’²²

About nine o’clock he would order coffee which was accepted as a signal for breaking up; and he then returned to his writing table where he studied papers and resumed his correspondence, remaining at work far into the night.

Occasionally there were performances in a makeshift theatre and evenings of great jollity.²³ On one memorable occasion, during a lull in fighting, a grand party was given to celebrate Lowry Cole’s investiture with the Order of the Bath. Wellington lent his plate for the dinner which was followed by a dance attended by forty ladies and 200 officers and other gentlemen guests. The band of the 52nd played tirelessly. The wine ‘both at dinner and supper having circulated freely’, at about two o’clock in the morning ‘a number of Spanish officers insisted upon carrying Lord Wellington round the room in a chair. He suggested that they should begin with the person of highest rank present, and named the Prince of Orange [one of his aides-de-camp]. The Prince was immediately seized, and General [Sir John Ormsby] Vandeleur, coming up to remonstrate, was seized in like manner. Each was placed in an arm-chair, and hoisted on the shoulders of four bearers. The inevitable consequence soon followed. The bearers had not taken many steps before they with their burdens came down.’²⁴

The Advocate-General thought that there were rather too many of these parties. ‘Great dinners’ were held on the anniversaries of victories and on the birthdays of members of the Royal Family, indeed on any occasion considered worthy of celebration. ‘The Commander-in-Chief’s victories and successes will soon ruin him in wine and eating,’ Larpent thought, ‘and if he goes on as he has, he had better keep open house at once every day, and his calendar of feasts will be as full as the Romish one with red letter days.’²⁵

Many of the papers which Wellington studied in those early morning hours in his room or tent at headquarters were orders written by Napoleon to his marshals in Spain and sent on to the Inglese by the guerrillas who kept careful watch upon the roads that led to France, pouncing down by night on horsemen and convoys with sharp knives in strong brown hands. Their contribution to the Spanish cause Wellington valued more highly than that of the Spanish levies.²⁶ He listened with admiration, if sometimes with a frisson of horror, to stories of their exploits, of the achievements of such guerrilla leaders as one known as Moreno who was said to have once killed seven French soldiers with a single shot from his huge blunderbuss, the recoil of which dislocated his shoulder, and who, in presenting some captured silver to the town of his birth, arranged upon one of the pieces a selection of French ears. ‘It is probable,’ Wellington had written to Spencer Perceval at the beginning of 1810, ‘that, although the [Spanish] armies may be lost and the principal Juntas and authorities of the provinces may be dispersed, the war of partizans may continue.’²⁷

It had continued. So had the dangerous work and intelligence activities of Wellington’s scouts and spies who cooperated with the guerrillas, of men like Sir John Waters, who could ‘assume the character of Spaniards of every degree and station’, and Patrick Curtis, Rector of the Irish College at Salamanca, Professor of Astronomy there and future Archbishop of Armagh, who was arrested by the French in 1811, and John Grant, known as a ‘master of disguise’, and his namesake, Colquhoun Grant, a brilliant linguist (unlike his other namesake, the arrogant Hussar), one of those ‘exploring officers’ of whom Wellington said ‘no army in the world ever produced the like’, adding, ‘Grant was worth a brigade to me.’²⁸

The Imperial commands which, intercepted by guerrillas, were handed to these ‘exploring officers’, were almost invariably impracticable and sometimes absurd, based upon faulty intelligence and misconceptions as to the nature of the Spanish terrain. They ignored the fact that the British now held the initiative in the Peninsula, and that the French, with limited supplies and transport in the bleak terrain of western Spain, could not possibly seize Lisbon, as Napoleon so insistently demanded.

Wellington, however, was free to move against the French; and in January 1812 he did so, marching towards Ciudad Rodrigo, digging trenches in front of it and, on the 19th of the month, after a most hastily conducted siege, storming it.²⁹ The assaulting troops charged into what one of them called ‘an inferno of fire’. The Connaught Rangers were sent forward by the gruff Welsh commander of the 3rd Division, Thomas Picton, with the order, ‘It is not my intention to spend any powder this evening. We’ll do this with the cold iron.’³⁰

Their Colonel, Henry Mackinnon, was blown up and killed by a mine. Other officers fell around him: the fiery-tempered General Craufurd of the Light Division was wounded in the back; Colonel John Colborne of the 52nd, tall and patrician with a nose like Wellington’s, was shot through the shoulder; Lieutenant John Gurwood, one day to be Wellington’s private secretary, was severely wounded in the skull; Major George Napier, who had volunteered to command the storming party, lost his right arm which had already been broken by a shell fragment three days before.

The heavy casualties were not in vain. The operation was completely successful and – as Wellington, in a dispatch of unusual though well-justified self-congratulation, reported to the Cabinet – was performed ‘in half the time’ he had told them it would take, and ‘in less than half that which the French spent in taking the same place from the Spaniards’.³¹ He did not, however, mention the scenes which had marred the success once the British soldiers entered the town. Many were soon incapably drunk and, firing at doors and windows in the square beneath the twelfth-century cathedral, they killed and wounded some of their comrades. Neither the oaths of Picton, in Wellington’s opinion ‘the most foul-mouthed fellow that ever lived’, nor the calls of trumpets nor yet the efforts of officers who hit the men over the head with the butt ends of broken muskets could restore order or prevent the pillaging of the joints of meat, loaves of bread, clothes and shoes which the men, marching out of the town the next morning, hung round their necks or carried on the points of their bayonets. Passing Picton they demanded a cheer. ‘Here then, you drunken set of brave rascals,’ he replied indulgently. ‘Hurrah! We’ll soon be at Badajoz!’³²

There were many who were never to get to Badajoz. Over a thousand men had been killed or wounded; an uncertain number of deserters found hiding in the town were shot as they knelt beside their shared grave; General Craufurd, his spine shattered, anxious in his last moments to be reconciled to Wellington with whom he had had his differences, begged forgiveness for having sometimes been a croaker in the past, talking, so Wellington said, in puzzled sorrow, ‘as they do in a novel’, before dying after five days’ agony and being buried in the breaches through which his men had stormed.³³