Читать книгу The Times Great Military Lives: Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries - Ian Brunskill - Страница 7

British Commander-in-Chief in the Crimea

2 JULY 1855

THE FOREBODINGS WHICH we expressed in the last number of our journal respecting the work of death in this exhausting war had been but too surely verified, even before we uttered them, by the removal of one of the chief actors on the scene, Lord Raglan is no more. He succumbed to a dysenteric attack, after a few days’ illness, on the evening of Thursday last; so that, at the very moment when more favourable reports were inducing a hope of his recovery, his days had closed, and the British Commander had been relieved from the duties and labours of his post by the fiat of an inexorable and all-subduing Power.

The career which has thus been terminated, if not one of the very highest order has, at all events, been, both eventful and brilliant; protracted beyond the ordinary term, and signalized by no common distinctions. Lord Raglan had been a soldier for half-a-century. When he departed to assume the command of our army in the East, he was verging towards three score and ten – that limit of human endurance – at the time when he was directing operations of enormous magnitude under circumstances of unexampled pressure.

Lord Fitzroy Somerset – to speak of him by the name which he bore through the chief part of his life – was a younger son of the fifth Duke of Beaufort, and the influence of this distinguished family of course facilitated his early promotion in the profession of arms to which he devoted himself. The first three or four years of his service brought him to a captaincy, and it was at this period of his career that an incident occurred which determined the course of his military life. Sir Arthur Wellesley – who was himself at the time but a sepoy-general – had been intrusted with a command in the expedition despatched against Copenhagen. In selecting the staff to attend him on this service he included among the objects of his choice Lord Fitzroy Somerset, and the young captain of infantry was thus transferred from regimental duties to a sphere which he scarcely ever afterwards quitted until he became a commander-in-chief himself. It says much for his abilities that a general like Wellington should have shown him such constant and unvarying preference. From 1807 to 1852 – from the Danish expedition to the death of the Duke of Wellington – Fitzroy Somerset was the secretary and companion of Arthur Wellesley whenever the latter exercised military command. Throughout all the campaigns in the Peninsula, through that of the Hundred Days, and through that pacific administration at the Horse Guards which ended but a year or two ago, the duties of Wellington’s Military Secretary were discharged by the soldier whose death is now announced. During all this period he was the Berthier of our Napoleon, nor can any more forcible testimony be given to the excellence of his qualifications than is contained in the practical acknowledgments of his sagacious chief.

It is not to be presumed, however, that he was debarred by these special avocations from the chances of peril and glory which war affords. When we said that his military career had been both eventful and brilliant, we were using the language not of vague panegyric, but of literal truth. He was present in most of the great actions of the last great war, and, indeed, even if he had not been distinguished by the preference of our famous Commander, his services would have been conspicuous enough to deserve a record.

He earned a cross and five clasps by his doings in the field. He was wounded at Busaco, he lost an arm at Waterloo, and, after the dreadful storm at Badajoz, it was to him, as he penetrated foremost into the place, that the intrepid Governor of the fortress surrendered his sword. Only the other day we drew a comparison, for the information of our readers, between the assault of that celebrated stronghold and the attack recently made upon the works of Sebastopol, and it is strange enough now to reflect that the very soldier who had taken so prominent a part in the one enterprise should be then, after more than 40 years’ interval, conducting the other.

But though Lord Fitzroy Somerset, in common with others of Wellington’s officers, achieved the honours which personal daring and professional gallantry secure, it was in the military cabinet that his peculiar distinctions were won. For very many years he was the Chief Secretary at the Horse Guards; in fact, as we have already observed, wherever Wellington held military rule it was Lord Fitzroy’s pen which gave effect to his orders. In this capacity he became, as it were, personally identified with our military system, and was, perhaps, more conversant with its forms, more habituated to its technicalities, and better acquainted with its operation than any other man living. When the Great Duke died Lord Fitzroy Somerset was regarded, not unreasonably, as his nearest professional representative – as the officer who from long and intimate confidence must necessarily have become in some sense the depository of the great chief’s views. Nor can there be a doubt that these presumptions were correct. As far as the ideas of one man admit of transfer to another Fitzroy Somerset should surely have imbibed those of Arthur Wellesley, and if this process did not include the communication of supreme military talent, the result cannot be matter of surprise to those who remember that generals, like poets, are not made, but born.

At Wellington’s death Lord Fitzroy was raised to the peerage by the title, now so familiar, of Lord Raglan, and when, a short time afterwards, it was resolved to despatch an army to the succour of the Sultan, he received the command of it. How naturally this appointment was suggested by circumstances will appear from what we have remarked above, and if the expedition had proved what it was at first probably expected to be – if it had turned out a species of military demonstration, requiring, indeed, the discretion of a practised soldier and the conciliatory courtesy of a judicious commander, but without calling for the display of the highest military powers – if the operations had been even limited to such ordinary battles or coups de main as might have been achieved with ordinary prowess, the result might have been regarded with unalloyed satisfaction. Unfortunately, the army found itself in circumstances which might have tried the talents of a Caesar or a Turenne, and though Lord Raglan’s unrivalled tact of manner and genuine kindness of disposition preserved the harmony of our alliance without a rupture throughout all these trials, they did not avail to extricate our troops from sufferings of the most terrible kind. Nothing, indeed could surpass the true amenity of his manners, and many of those whose duties compelled them to speak aloud upon the sufferings of the army found it impossible all the while to forget the generous courtesies of its chief.

In this respect, at any rate, he excelled, his old commander. Wellington could rarely, except by the sheer force of his victories, conciliate the affections of his soldiers, whereas Lord Raglan seems invariably to have inspired all those immediately around him with sentiments of unfeigned regard. In his own capacity in short or in his own sphere, his gifts were almost unequalled. With unchangeable suavity of manner he combined immense professional experience, untiring application, excellent habits of method, and singular powers of endurance. That these faculties are not sufficient to form a first-rate general is true but at the present moment it in more agreeable to think on what was given than to enlarge upon what was not forthcoming.

The author of this obituary makes no serious attempt to disguise the fact that Field Marshal The Lord Raglan was not the man to command the British Army in the Crimea but, given the 40 years of peace that had elapsed since Waterloo, there was no alternative senior officer available who might have made a better fist of it. Moreover, that same long period of peace had allowed the army to fall back on the non-essentials of elaborate uniforms and parades that inhibit rather than strengthen ability to fight, when that is the priority. In terms of tactics, communications, joint action by infantry, cavalry and artillery, logistics and care for the wounded, the army in the Crimea was woefully inadequate.

Experienced staff officer that he was, Raglan was not slow to appreciate this situation once it became clear that the campaign would be prolonged and face conditions of dreadful hardship in the Russian winter. Yet the courtesy brought about by his upbringing prevented him from setting out these critical shortcomings in his despatches with sufficient frankness to cause some effect. It took the correspondent of The Times in the Crimea, William Russell, through his reports to the newspaper, to expose the failings of competence, industry and lack of the necessary means for better organisation of the army to cause a national outcry and government reaction, albeit much of it too late to have real benefit on the ground.

In view of the publicity it received after the return of Major-General The Lord Cardigan to England in 1855, it is surprising that no mention is made in this obituary of the part played by Lord Raglan in the saga of the charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade-commanded by Cardigan – at the Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1855. That six hundred horseman charged down a valley held on both sides by the enemy towards a concentration of field artillery at the far end was due, of course, to a misunderstanding. Raglan’s order, ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns,’ was clear to him on the heights overlooking the valley, from where he could see Russians about to drag away some captured artillery pieces, a sensible target for light cavalry supported by horse artillery, which he authorised. Unfortunately, on the valley floor only the Russian guns at the far end of the valley were visible. Raglan might have anticipated this and made clear to which guns he referred, but his chief of Staff, Sir Richard Airey, who wrote the message and the galloper who carried it, Captain Nolan, were chiefly responsible for what occurred.

Raglan cared deeply for the loss of any of his men and worked long into the night writing letters to the families of officers who lost their lives in the fighting or through disease.