The War of Wars (104 page)

To inspire a wholesome fear and to keep subordinates at a distance is part of the military technique. Wellington in his relations with his officers seldom went further than curt approval, and he was not at much pains to reprimand considerately. Every word, for instance, of his famous circular to his officers after the Retreat from Burgos was true. But he omitted to draw the distinction between those who had done well and those who had not, and so produced in the former an indelible sense of injustice. He seemed a thankless master to serve, since he blamed so often and praised so rarely. He could not see why men should be praised for doing their duty, and indeed there is no reason except the vital one that they like it . . .

He was not an easy man to please; no man whose standard of behaviour was so rigid as his could be so. On one occasion Colonel Waters, whose exploits in disguise among the enemy were one of the romances of the war, was captured and imprisoned. He made a miraculous escape and suddenly appeared at Wellington’s dinner table. Wellington imagined that he had broken his parole, and
onlookers said that the expression of anger on his face was terrible to behold. As a matter of fact, Waters had refused to give his parole; Wellington’s code of honour had not been infringed.

A man of great mental capacity, he was fully conscious of his superiority, and perpetually engrossed as he was in the number and intricacy of the matters which required attention, his impatience readily expressed itself in the form of contempt. He found it difficult to listen with patience to advice and criticism, and he was too preoccupied to give adequate consideration to the sentimental and personal side of a situation. The result of his aloofness was that men credited him with an entire lack of sympathy; he excited admiration but not affection. He never tried to stimulate devotion; he could not feign regret for the absent or dead when he did not feel it. Display of emotion was antipathetic to him and theatricality loathsome. ‘The advantage which Bonaparte possessed,’ he said characteristically, ‘was his full latitude of lying;
that
I could not do.’ But he was not wholly lacking in heart. His affections were not ardent but absolutely stable and genuine. He grew to be very fond of some of his staff.

Marmont manoeuvred skilfully, crossing the Duero river and forcing Wellington’s forces back towards Salamanca, threatening his communications with Portugal. The plain was not in fact flat, being crisscrossed by a line of low hills that helped to conceal the movements of one army from another.

By 22 July Wellington’s forces were drawn up just south-east of the city along one of the ridges, whose southern end was marked by a little hill called the Arapil Chico. Marmont moved forward to occupy a large hill due south of the allies, the Arapil Grande, from which he could observe the British position. Marmont, anticipating Wellington’s response, was determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous French commanders by attacking frontally on a well entrenched British position, and instead decided to march his army westwards around the British southern flank – their right – to catch them at their weakest point and sever their communications with Portugal.

Wellington, his acute mind immediately realizing what was going
on, promptly responded by shifting his divisions from their previous line to one running eastwards along another spur of hills, thus creating a new line facing the marching French. He had wheeled about. Marmont, believing Wellington to be a defensive general who would never attack, assumed he was preparing his army for a westward march in parallel to the French to protect his communications, and spurred his men to march still faster westwards to outflank him.

While his officers ate their lunch in a farmyard, Wellington observed the French through his telescope marching across his new front, in contravention of the most basic rules of warfare. He could see that the French, hurrying forward, were strung out along a vast extended line, widely dispersed, and would not be able to concentrate in time to repel a concentrated British attack at a single point. Famously, he threw the chicken leg he had been eating over his shoulder, exclaiming, ‘By God, that will do!’ ‘Marmont,’ he added, ‘is lost.’

He ordered Ned Pakenham, his brother-in-law, to attack the French left, the vanguard of their moving line. Pakenham led his men in column against the vulnerable and exposed French line in a frontal charge across the plain where the startled French vanguard was advancing. A British officer described the scene:

We were going up an ascent on whose crest masses of the enemy were stationed. Their fire seemed capable of sweeping all before it . . . Truth compels me to say . . . that we retired before this overwhelming fire, but . . . General Pakenham approached and very good natured said, ‘Reform,’ and in . . . a moment, ‘Advance . . . There they are, my lads; just let them feel the temper of your bayonets.’ We advanced, everyone making up his mind for mischief. At last . . . the bugles along the line sounded the charge. Forward we rushed . . . and awful was the retribution we exacted for our former repulse.

Having destroyed this division, Pakenham raced westwards down the line to attack the next part of the dispersed French column. They were already under attack from another column of British infantry and
cavalry combined and were caught in the act of forming squares: they were soon overwhelmed. The units immediately behind simply broke and fled with the rest of the routed French. In just an hour the French advance had been smashed and 2,500 prisoners and twelve guns taken.

‘By God, Cotton,’ Wellington said to his cavalry commander General Sir Stephen Cotton, who was beside him with Harvey, as his cavalry charged. ‘I never saw anything more beautiful in my life. The day is yours.’ However Wellington’s depleted forces on the left fared less well attacking the French right, its rearguard, and were forced back. Seeking to follow up this advantage, the French commander General Clausel – Marmont having been wounded – launched an attack with two fresh divisions against the British centre. Wellington immediately ordered his skilfully hidden reserves behind the ridge forward to reinforce his centre; these included the Portuguese brigade. Beresford, commanding it, was wounded in the chest. Wellington himself was grazed by a bullet in the thigh.

The British attacked again, reversing the French charge and the French centre crumbled. As night began to fall the entire French army fled in headlong and disorganized retreat: some 13,000 French soldiers had been killed or taken prisoner, along with fifteen guns. In the darkness the British were unable to pursue, and the following morning the German auxiliary dragoons supporting the British inflicted another huge blow by breaking up a massed infantry square at the village of Garcia Hernandez. But the British decided not to over-extend themselves by pressing forward, and the French rallied at Valladolid and then Burgos.

It had been a superb triumph, the greatest of Wellington’s career so far, an offensive action of brilliant improvisation and skilled manoeuvre that exceeded even those of Napoleon. Though on a smaller scale, it was comparable to Austerlitz as a perfectly executed victory. The French General Foy remarked of his adversary: ‘Hitherto we have been aware of his prudence, his eye for choosing a position, and his skill in utilising it. At Salamanca he has shown himself a great and able master of manoeuvres. He kept his dispositions concealed for almost the whole day: he waited till we were committed to our movements before he developed his own: he
played a safe game: he fought in the oblique order – it was a battle in the style of Frederick the Great.’

Wellington was now faced with the difficult choice of pursuing and attempting to destroy the retreating Army of the North which could be quickly reinforced by other French armies, or staging a largely symbolic blow by liberating Madrid, which was poorly defended. He chose the latter course, which many believe to have been a mistake, for he could probably have destroyed the fleeing army. A part of his calculation was that after his great victory at Salamanca, the Spanish might at last have united their vast shambolic armies in a great drive to liberate Spain from the French. Occupying Madrid would provide a favourable position for this.

The triumph of Salamanca reverberated around the Peninsula. On 12 April Soult’s besieging forces outside Cadiz learnt of Wellington’s great victory. He immediately raised the siege and also abandoned Seville, marching to the safety of the more defensible Valencia in the east. A Spanish eyewitness described the scenes of joy in the long-besieged port:

The day this happened was one of unequalled joy. The people rushed to embark in boats to visit the abandoned French encampment . . . There was a great desire to walk on the earth of the continent, to breath in fresh air . . . I went with the officials of the Ministry [of State] . . . Accompanied by a numerous crowd we went round . . . the batteries which had contained the mortars whose effects we had been experiencing for such a long time. On the way back . . . all the boats carried a bunch of grass at their mastheads as a way of showing that they had completed a return trip that had been denied to the inhabitants . . . for more than thirty consecutive months.

Meanwhile King Joseph and his chief general, Junot, with only 22,000 troops, mostly ill-equipped and untried, set off in early April from Madrid with 15,000 refugees and 2,000 wagons on the long trek through the heat of the Spanish summer to Valencia. Most of southern,
eastern and western Spain – Extremadura, Andalucia and now Castile – had been liberated, well over half the country. It was a heady moment of glory for the unflappable British commander. It seemed only a matter of time before the French were chased from their remaining strongholds across the Pyrenees.

Wellington arrived in the capital to a rapturous reception on 12 August. A Spanish officer wrote:

When the bells began to announce the entrance of our troops at about ten o’clock, it was wonderful to see the people rushing to . . . the Portillo de San Vicente, which was the one through which they were said to be coming. A new town council was formed, and this immediately set forth to greet . . . the immortal Wellington . . . To the accompaniment of a crescendo of bells, the people massed in ever greater numbers round the Plaza de la Villa. When a portrait of our Don Fernando [Fernando VIII] was placed in the window of the town hall, they simply went mad. The cheering was incessant; hats and caps were thrown in the air; on all sides people were giving thanks to God; and everyone was filled with the greatest joy and happiness. Another of the incidents that made the day shine out was the behaviour of the women and children of the poorer quarters. Joseph . . . had made a new avenue from the palace to the Casa de Campo [the royal hunting park] . . . This had been lined with fruit trees . . . but the crowd . . . fell upon them . . . and ripped them up . . . When Lord Wellington arrived, many of the people who greeted him were therefore carrying branches and sprigs of greenery which they waved in time with their cheers and happy shouts of greeting. In this manner he was accompanied to the town hall. When he got there the cheering redoubled . . . Amidst thunderous applause, everyone flung their arms around one another, and gave themselves over to congratulating their neighbours in the most unreserved fashion.

As so often, however, triumph was to be followed by disappointment and a reversal of fortune.

In taking Madrid, Wellington had secured a huge propaganda victory. But by advancing into the Spanish heartland he had dangerously lengthened his own lines of communication with Portugal; moreover the French had been boxed up into a region from which they could stage a united counter-offensive, while the expected junction of the Spanish armies and general uprising did not take place.

As that glorious August of 1812 mellowed into autumn Wellington showed signs of becoming almost deranged with impatience and frustration with his allies. Always a man who considered himself indispensable, reluctant to delegate to his subordinates and obsessed with detail, his celebrated laconic sang-froid and carefully chosen phrases now gave way to outbursts of blind anger. His portrait painted by Goya at this time gives him a hunted, harassed look, unlike the cool self-confidence he preferred to project.

To his chief medical officer, James McGrigor, who had the temerity to differ with him on an issue he snapped: ‘I shall be glad to know who is to command the army, you or I?’ However, he asked the good doctor to sit next to him that evening by way of atonement. Meanwhile he railed against the Spanish for their incompetence, and McGrigor kept a record of his outbursts. ‘I do not expect much from the exertions of the Spaniards . . . They cry “viva” and are very fond of us . . . but they are in general the most incapable of all the nations that I have known, the most vain, and at the same time the most ignorant . . . I am afraid that the utmost we can hope for is to teach them how to avoid being beat.’

On another occasion: ‘Lord Wellington declares that he has not yet met with any Spanish officer who can be made to comprehend the nature of a military operation. If the Spanish officers had knowledge and vanity like the French, or ignorance without vanity as our allies in India, something might be done with them. But they unite the greatest ignorance with the most insolent and intractable vanity. They can therefore be neither persuaded, nor instructed, nor forced to do their duty.’

Wellington was acutely aware that he was over-exposed to a major French offensive against Madrid once their armies united. He abandoned his usual prudence in an attempt to regain the initiative. He decided to do what he should have done while his enemy was on the run after Salamanca and go in pursuit of the Army of Portugal which had regrouped and launched a minor counter-offensive in the north. It was a disastrous miscalculation. As he approached the French retreated, leaving a garrison of veterans in the formidable castle of Burgos, capital of Castile.

Wellington, never one to leave a castle behind his lines if he could help it, felt he had no alternative but to besiege it. But he had only three cannon, picturesquely dubbed Thunder, Lightning and Nelson. It was a hopeless task. Burgos was to be no Badajoz. Displaying again that ruthless disregard for his own men’s lives that now characterized his sieges, he stormed the outer redoubt. A British officer present wrote: