The War of Wars (103 page)

Inside, Burdett and the radical tailor, Francis Place, a pioneering advocate of universal suffrage, education and contraception, were aghast at Cochrane’s plans. Cochrane was overruled. Francis Place wrote: ‘The gallant Tar then retired, apparently much disconcerted, and he was particularly required to take away with him the cask of gunpowder.’

It all came to nothing. On the morning of 9 April, an enterprising constable climbed through an open back window of the house, followed by several colleagues. They found Burdett teaching the Magna Carta to his son at breakfast. He was seized, smuggled out and put in a coach, which was escorted by cavalry on a roundabout route to the Tower.

The authorities hesitated to inflame popular passion by taking action against Cochrane, who had come so close to an act of revolutionary violence but not actually broken the law, but the popular naval hero became the focus of agitation for Burdett’s release, frequently being carried shoulder-high to the House of Commons to present petitions while MPs debated whether to expel him or not. After two months
Burdett was released upon the prorogation of parliament, the government hesitating to turn him into a martyr. Although Place had organized a triumphal progression for him, he slipped away from the Tower by boat and the half-idiot ‘Citizen’ Jones took his place on a coach ranting at the waiting crowds. It had all ended in farce, but to many, as the war in Europe showed no signs of abating, it seemed that Britain was teetering on the very brink of revolution under the unimaginative, hardline conservatives that governed the nation. Of those Wellington himself was the dazzling star.

The able young Marshal Marmont was not slow to hear of Wellington’s march to Badajoz, leaving Ciudad Rodrigo in the hands of a poorly trained Spanish force. Marmont sought to shadow him, but Napoleon from his lofty court in the Tuileries refused to give him authority, instructing him to attack Ciudad Rodrigo instead. In fact, this was not a bad idea because of the poor quality of the Spanish defences. However Napoleon had denuded his best commander in Spain of the troops he needed. Moreover, he also suggested another march on Lisbon, which was of course wildly impractical in hostile territory with the Lines of Torres Vedras in place, as Masséna’s fate had shown.

The Emperor seemed utterly detached from the realities of the Iberian Peninsula. He appointed the ineffectual Joseph military commander-in-chief in Spain, an appointment on a level with that of Caligula’s horse as consul, as Joseph’s martial skills were if anything less obvious than his administrative abilities. Most of his principal generals simply ignored him. Joseph ordered troops to support Soult in an attempt to prevent the capture of Badajoz, while Marmont attempted to blockade Ciudad Rodrigo under direct orders from Napoleon. Marmont, judging its recapture impossible, ordered the few troops at his disposal to move south into the vast empty area around Beira in an attempt to distract Wellington. Napoleon’s meddling had served unnecessarily only to disperse his forces.

On his arrival at Badajoz in mid-March Wellington found the fortress very nearly impregnable. The approaches had been mined, the walls reinforced, the two outlying forts, San Cristobal and Pardaleras,
strengthened and an impassable moat created on the east side of the fortress. The siege works were dug on the south-east side of the fortress and as the British approached the walls in torrential rain, the French opened up a ceaseless artillery barrage. Once again, news arrived that a large French army under Soult was approaching to relieve the fortress. The usually cautious Wellington was driven into speedy action, ordering an assault on 6 April, long before the customary softening-up artillery attack had been completed.

One of the bloodiest assaults in history followed, seemingly untempered by Wellington’s usual concern for losses among his men. He had acquired an almost psychopathic ability to switch off his feelings when required, arguably a necessary trait for a great commander and a characteristic shared by Napoleon. The attack very nearly failed against the formidably murderous French defences which included mines,
chevaux-de-frises,
hand grenades and the moat.

The British attacks, staged over the bodies of their dead and wounded comrades, were repulsed time and again – some forty times in all, the ‘butcher’ Wellington constantly urging them forward. Some 2,000 men were killed in these repeated assaults against murderous fire and defences. All appeared to be lost. Wellington’s medical aide, Dr James McGrigor, saw his commander as defeat stared him in the face. ‘At this moment, I cast my eyes on the countenance of Lord Wellington lit up by the glare of the torch . . . I shall never forget it to the last moment of my existence . . . The jaw had fallen, the face was of unusual length, while the torchlight gave to his countenance a lurid aspect; but still the expression of the face was firm.’

Wellington ordered one final assault on the castle. One participant told what happened:

When we first entered the [ditch] we considered ourselves comparatively safe, thinking that we were out of range of their shot, but . . . they opened several guns . . . and poured in grape shot upon us from each side . . . Our situation at this time was truly appalling . . . When the ladders were placed, each eager to mount, [the soldiers] crowded them in such a way that many of them broke, and the poor fellows who had nearly reached the top were precipitated a height of
thirty to forty feet and impaled on the bayonets of their comrades below. Other ladders were pushed aside by the enemy on the walls, and fell with a crash on those in the ditch, while [men] who got to the top without accident were shot on reaching the parapet, and, tumbling headlong, brought down those beneath them. This continued for some time, until at length, a few having made a landing . . . [they] enabled others to follow.

At last this terrible final assault succeeded. While the 4,000-strong French garrison retreated, another assault on the San Vicente fortress along the town walls followed. Terrible scenes ensued as the British soldiery exacted their revenge in a wild orgy of pillage almost without precedent in British military history. Robert Blakeney, a British officer, observed:

There was no safety for women even in the churches, and any who interfered or offered resistance were sure to get shot. Every house presented a scene of plunder, debauchery and bloodshed committed with wanton cruelty . . . by our soldiery, and in many instances I saw the savages tear the rings from the ears of beautiful women . . . When the savages came to a door which had been locked or barricaded, they applied . . . the muzzles of a dozen firelocks . . . against that part of the door where the lock was fastened and . . . fired [them] off together into the house and rooms, regardless of those inside . . . Men, women and children were shot . . . for no other . . . reason than pastime; every species of outrage was publicly committed . . . and in a manner so brutal that a faithful recital would be . . . shocking to humanity. Not the slightest shadow of discipline was maintained . . . The infuriated soldiery resembled rather a pack of hell-hounds vomited up from the infernal regions for the extirpation of mankind than . . . a well-organized, brave, disciplined and obedient British army.

Only repeated floggings restored order. It had been a terrible victory: the British lost more than 4,500 men at Badajoz.

The siege shows Wellington in a new light; The careful husbander of
resources and his own men’s lives had been willing to risk all in a brutal act of bloodletting he believed to be militarily necessary. Wellington had shown himself to be more than just a supremely skilled and cautious defensive general: he could be a ruthless gambler with his men’s lives when the stakes were high enough.

Had the siege really been necessary? Wellington judged so: as long as so major a fortress lay in enemy hands along the Portuguese border, any British thrust into Spain was in danger of being outflanked, having its supply lines cut or becoming a staging post for a French attack into undefended Portugal. Yet with the British possessing the other frontier fortresses, a decisive French move of this kind would have been difficult; the French could have attempted such a movement even without possession of Badajoz. A less old-fashioned and meticulous commander might perhaps have taken the risk of leaving Badajoz as a stranded outpost rather than inflict such suffering on his own men.

Learning that Ciudad Rodrigo was now under siege from Marmont, Wellington lost no time trekking north to relieve the citadel. He then set about ordering a complex set of manoeuvres involving Spanish forces in various parts of the country – supporting Ballesteros in Andalucia, occupying Málaga, leading a French force on a wild-goose chase through mountainous Granada and finally escaping to the coast. Admiral Sir Home Popham led a series of raids along the northern coast, while Rowland Hill tied down French troops in the west in Extremadura. All of this helped to prevent the French forces in Spain concentrating to defeat Wellington. In truth the French were far too widely spread across the Peninsula under the control of jealous rival commanders to inflict a decisive defeat upon the British, however enormous their paper superiority in numbers.

Wellington himself remained passive outside Ciudad Rodrigo, despatching Hill, his best raiding commander, in mid-May to take the bridge at Almaraz which commanded the route from Madrid to the Portuguese frontier and the main commercial links between the northern and southern Spanish armies. This he did brilliantly, destroying Fort Napoleon at one end of the bridge, causing its defenders at the end of the other to flee, and blowing up the bridge and its fortifications.

Wellington waited on the frontier for his next opportunity. Not until 13 June did he make his move, with his army now nearly 50,000 strong, first to León, then advancing on Salamanca. Here Marmont had left a small force behind its fortifications which held out bravely until 27 June. Wellington was given a superb Spanish welcome into the beautiful, liberal university town on the edge of the great plain of Salamanca, the warmth embarrassing the soldiers and even the unflappable British commander himself. He was pulled from his horse, losing his dignity for a moment – to his chagrin. He attended a
Te Deum
in the cathedral and a glittering ball given in his honour that evening.

He moved his cavalry out into the great plain to entice Marmont into battle. Such ground was traditionally favourable to the French, but he believed that for once he could use it better. He waited for his foe to come to him. Marmont was equally cautious: the two great armies of 50,000 manoeuvred in parallel across the plain in the heat of the day as though on a giant parade ground, then rested in the freezing nights like wary prizefighters watching for their opponents to lower their guard. Wellington at this anxious time was described by one observer as ‘in the prime of life, a well made man five foot ten inches in height, with broad shoulders and well-developed chest. Of the cruiser, rather than the battleship build, the greyhound, rather than the mastiff breed, he seemed all made for speed and action, yet as strong as steel, and capable of great endurance.’

A revealing incident was also described: ‘While Lord Wellington was riding along the line, under a fire of artillery, and accompanied by a
numerous staff, a brace of greyhounds in pursuit of a hare passed close to him. He was at the moment in earnest conversation with General Castaños; but the instant he observed them he gave the view-halloo 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.’

The historian Oliver Brett has come closest to capturing the complexity that was the Duke of Wellington, a man who dressed himself modestly on the battlefield and never asked for honours, yet gloried in his prominence and titles and the glitter of high society.

If he lacked personal charm, he had the far rarer gift – personality. He was always in all circumstances, in every word he spoke, in every step he took – himself; one of those men in whom everything they do and say at once strikes onlookers as characteristic. Frankness, honesty and integrity were combined with the large dignity of unquestioned greatness. He could throw off his seriousness in his leisure hours and be cordial in hospitality, and open in comment; he delighted in jokes and a rude sense of fun.

His bare frugal life was combined with an amusing vanity in dress. There was no nonsense or mystery about him; he looked straight at things as they were. He stands as the complete opposite of his great opponent; he was as English as the latter was Latin. Wellington’s qualities were indeed so essentially English that he could hardly appreciate the greatness of Napoleon. ‘The fellow wasn’t a gentleman,’ was his comment at the end of the great war. It implied that he could not respect Bonaparte enough to be much interested in him. He had beaten him and could not be bothered to determine what exactly he had been up against.

From the military point of view good fortune had almost invariably been his. He never had lost a gun and hardly ever had he lost a battle, and the chances of battle, which he never shirked, had spared him. But his good fortune had been the reward of his hard work. ‘The French planned their campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harness,’ he said afterwards. ‘It looks very well; and answers very well until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went
wrong I tied a knot and went on.’ He had never had Napoleon’s desire to fight a great battle; his constant numerical inferiority, indeed, had made such a desire impracticable. He only fought a battle when he had to, endeavouring always to be ‘a quarter-of-an-hour earlier than he was expected’. But he was just as ready to retreat as to fight. The war of attrition, demanding infinite patience in officers and men, had been a constant test of the morale of his army; the test of his own morale had been aggravated by the political difficulties that converged upon him from England, Portugal and Spain.

His temper was not always proof against these things. His code was a simple one: duty, discipline and hard work. He had been resolute against the oppression of non-combatants, against loot, robbery, seduction, drunkenness and devastation. It is not surprising that his determined attitude against the common crimes of war made him popular with the people of Spain and France, but unpopular with his own officers and men. He was no doubt difficult to deal with in business. His quick and positive mind, unhesitating in its judgments, found expression in peremptory and often hasty speech.