The Age of Elegance (2 page)

Since its loss a year before by Spanish neglect and treachery, the great fortress, with its towers dominating the Guadiana and the southern road into Spain, had been the thorn in Wellington's flesh. So long as the French held it, the Bri
tish could neither advance into
Estremadura, nor concentrate against Marmont in the north without exposing southern Portugal to Souk's Army of Andalusia. Only with both his frontier-fortresses could Wellington take the offensive. Napoleon's arrogance in supposing him incapable of a winter campaign had already given him Ciudad Rodrigo. If he could now take Badajoz before the summer, the Peninsular War might take a new turn.

When their destination became known, the British, fresh from their triumph at Ciudad Rodrigo, broke into cheers. Twice in the previous summer they had laid siege to Badajoz and, for lack of proper battering and sapping equipment, had thrown themselves at its half-breached defences; twice they had had to draw off as Soult's and Marmont's armies marched to its relief. Now Marmont, with his hands tied by his master's orders and his troops scattered in the interior, was left to watch the bolted door into northern Portugal, while Soult, unaware of the sudden threat to his Estremaduran bastion, was far away in Andalusia, holding down his wide province and laying interminable siege to sea-guarded Cadiz. "Proud" Badajoz, with its fever-laden mists, its rich, collaborating
alfrancesados,
its record of disaster to the Allied cause, was at Wellington's mercy.
¹

While the long, winding columns of men and mules followed the two-hundred-mile mountain-track along the frontier, the guns of the siege-train moved eastwards from Lisbon, sliding up the Tagus to Abrantes and jolting over rough unmetalled roads behind bullock teams, while hundreds of peasants followed bearing shot and shell. In every wooded valley climbing into Spain, droves of mules, laden with food and ammunition, converged on Badajoz, their bells mingling with the shouts of muleteers and the screeching ox-wagons. For Britain's power to strike in that barren land of sierras and far horizons depended on her ability to feed and supply; to purchase stores from neutral Morocco, America and Turkey, to carry them across the seas to Lisbon and Oporto and distribute them over mountain, gorge and forest to the fighting columns on the frontier. The commissaries in their travel-soiled cocked-hats, the hardy active muleteers with their bright trappings and guitars, the ragged, muddy escorts marching beside them with musket and pack, the bucking mules and patient bullocks, the wicker-sided, wooden-wheeled country carts, piled with provender, were England's life-line and

¹
Grattan, 175; Gomm, 249-50; Bessborough, 221; Tomkinson, 145.

the conduit along which her power ran. So were the transports and merchantmen courting the winds as they followed their ocean courses to Tagus, Mondego and Douro. And guarding them, far away, the battleships that had fought under Nelson and St. Vincent still kept their vigil outside the ports of Napoleon's closed empire.
On Pel
lew, Collingwood's successor in the Mediterranean, watching Toulon and Venice; on Lord Keith, Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet guarding Rochefort, Brest and Cherbourg; on William Young—"stiffo Rumpo" to the Navy which had bred him since his tenth birthday—blockading Antwerp and the Texel; on Saumarez in the Baltic; and on the rough, hard-used men who served under them, the fortunes of England and the world continued to revolve. Without them Wellington's eight fighting divisions would have counted for as little on the battlefields of Europe as they did in Napoleon's computation. It was maritime power that magnified their strength.

That, and the patient genius of their commander. When at the darkest hour of their country's struggle Nelson, Pitt and Fox had followed one another to the shades, it had seemed as if Britain had been left leaderless. Sir John Moore's death at Corunna had completed the desolation of the landscape. Then a young Lieutenant-General, appointed before his fortieth birthday to command her expeditionary force in Portugal, had not only enabled England to retain her foothold in the Peninsula, but in three years of unspectacular success had steadily expanded it.

Though contemptuously called a Sepoy general by Napoleon, who had never crossed swords with him, Lord Wellington had already outmatched his finest lieutenants. Notwithstanding their superior numbers, Massena, Soult, Victor, Jourdan, Marmont, Junot and Kellermann had all in turn tasted the iron he administered. Repeatedly on the point of being driven into the sea, he stood at the end of four campaigns undefeated on the Spanish frontier with a liberated Portugal behind him and an expectant Spain ahead. And by opening a fifth campaign in the depth of winter, he had raised the temper of his troops to the highest expectancy. They felt sure now he would always "out-manceuvre Johnny"; of the impossibility of his suffering defeat.
¹

¹
Granville, II, 147. See also Bessborough, 221; Kincaid, 196; Simmons, 183; Oman,
Wellington's Army,
38; Smith, I, 93-4.

Yet Wellington was not a commander who readily inspired emotion. He never embraced his veterans like Napoleon, spoke of them as comrades or wasted fine words on them. He had, as one of them put it, a short manner of speaking and a stern look. Save for an occasional brisk, "Now, my lads," when he required some more than ordinary effort, he confined his communications to general orders of the most sparing kind. These, however, never admitted of misunderstanding. Everyone knew where they stood with him, and though this may not have generated enthusiasm—a quality he suspected—it engendered a steady growth of confidence. His men did not love him, but they relied on him; they knew that, while he commanded them, their sacrifices would not be wasted. "Whare's ar
Arthur?"
asked one fusilier of another as, under Beresford's blundering command, they tramped up the blood-stained hill of Albuera. "I don't know, I don't see him," replied his comrade. "Aw wish he wore here."
¹

For, little sentiment though he spared them, no commander ever took greater pains to deserve his men's confidence. He was as frugal with their lives as with his words. He looked after what they most valued—their stomachs. Regard to what he called regular subsistence was his first article of war. "The attention of commanding officers," ran one of his bleak, laconic orders, "has been frequently called to the expediency of supplying the soldiers with breakfast." Of all generals he was the most commissariat-minded. Having done most of his fighting in deserts, he had learnt to be.

He once defined the key to victory as the pursuit of all means, however small, which might promote success. He, therefore, left undone no duty which might enable his men to do^theirs. He rose at six, applied himself in the absence of a trained staff to every detail of administration, and only rested when he had done the work of the day, falling asleep with the same ease, regularity and promptitude as he did everything else. It was characteristic of the man that he called himself, shaved himself and brushed his own clothes.
²

As with all great soldiers, action worked on him like a tonic
>
sharpening the edge of his cool, incisive mind. In the field his temper grew calmer as storms arose. Then his strong common sense acquired

¹
J. S. Cooper,
Rough Notes of Seven Campaigns,
63.

²
On a visit to Cadiz in 1812 he astonished his hostess by his simple habits. When her servants, called him at seven they found him fully dressed and packing his shaving apparatus. Leslie, 24* Gronow, I, 213. See also Stanhope, 37, 47; Larpent, I, 85; Lady Shelley I, 46.

the quality of genius. It was this which enabled him to forecast with such accuracy his enemies' movements; to guess what was "on the other side of the hill"; to do what he defined as the main business of life—finding out what he didn't know by what he did.

Having once or twice faced disaster and having, like most British commanders, suffered disappointment at the miscarriage of his plans through his country's failure to supply what he had a right to expect, he shunned projects built on grandiose anticipations. He relied only on what he was sure he could count, and adapted his ends strictly to his means. The French Marshals, he once said, planned their campaigns like a splendid set of harness which answered very well until it got broken: after that it was useless. "Now I," he added, "made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on."

He was a man without enthusiasms or illusions. He saw life and men very much as they were, and this enabled him to steer a steady course amid the passions, stratagems and treacheries of a war-racked, revolutionary land. He put little trust in others and tended to do everything that was vital himself. "I am obliged," he once said, "to be everywhere." Of his generals he only really confided in Hill and Graham. This was sometimes costly, for, when he was not there himself, his subordinates were afraid to act. Yet, when they blu
ndered, he took full responsibili
ty and indulged in no public reproaches. No part of his character was more admirable and more rare, wrote a member of the Government that supported him, than his temper and fortitude under great disappointments arising from the weakness and neglect of others.

Though a stern disciplinarian who would order a man five hundred lashes or string him up on the gallows without mercy if he thought it necessary, his troops bore him no ill-will for it. "Atty," they called him among themselves; "the ould chap that leathers the French!" When they saw, silhouetted against the tawny landscape, the familiar equestrian figure with the trim grey cloak, oilskin cocked-hat, telescope and neatly buckled boots, or found themselves under the unrelenting scrutiny of those high-arched inquiring eyes, they cheered till the rocks rang. "Here he comes with his long nose, boys," they cried, "now you may fix your flints!" Once in an exposed spot an emotional Irish sentry, finding his Commander-in-Chief had forgotten the countersign, brought his m
usket to the salute with a "God
bless your crooked nose; I would sooner see it than ten thousand men!
¹

For between leader and led—though he gruffly called them "they" and, in his worse moments, the scum of the earth—there had grown a confidence that could not be shaken. Horse and rider were one, and in that lay a priceless asset for their country. And if the rider was acknowledged now by all Europe, the steed he rode was worthy of him. It was a very different force from that which, gallant but raw, had landed in Portugal in 1808. Though its staff was a trifle amateur and its engineers, as befitted the men of an island race, lacking in knowledge of Continental fortification, and its cavalry over-apt to dash after the enemy like a field of fox-hunters, "as if," in Wellington's words, "incapable of manoeuvre except on Wimbledon Common," its infantry were the finest in the world. Again and again its patiently-husbanded volleys had halted the French columns at the moment of triumph; again and again Napoleon's advancing, cheering veterans had wavered, huddled together and broken before its terrible musketry. Being accustomed to operating with little support from other arms, it had evolved a combination of fire-power and movement perfectly fitted to the stony hills of the Peninsula. "We cracked them out with our muskets," wrote their Commander-in-Chief.

Three and a half years of campaigning had produced a wonderful synthesis between the men of four nations. Shepherds from the Dorset hills, rollicking blades from Cashel and Clonmel who had enlisted for drink and a fight, sober Nottinghamshire weavers, breechless giants with flaming hair from the Highlands, wastrels from London gaols and sponging-houses, prudent Lowland Scots who had learnt their Latin at Aberdeen Grammar School or Glasgow Academy, were blended, under the command of country squires, fox-hunters, grizzled captains too poor to buy promotion, and eager boys fresh from school, into an entity that represented as nothing else at that moment the national spirit. Since they had sailed from England, cooped up in minute, leaky, rat-infested hulks, they had shared ceaseless short commons, discomfort and danger. They had slept on arctic sierras and drenched fields, marched under blazing suns, weighed down by knapsack, firelock and ball-cartridge, with stiff leather girdles round their throats and as many belts as would

¹
Bell, I, 34, 79- See also Cooke, 47-8; Bessborough, 221; Greville (SuppL), I, 457; Kincaid, 196; Guedafia, 209; Simmons, 183.

harness a donkey, cantoned for years among poor, stinking mountain villages where the houses were so full of vermin that if a man lay down he was certain to rise bitten from head to foot.
¹
When they fell sick or wounded, they had to endure a hell unimaginable by gentlemen in England, jolting in open bullock-carts with solid wheels or lying under clouds of flies with their wounds crawling with maggots while the surgeons went their round with cauterising iron and dripping knife. "No ventilation, twenty sick men in the room, of whom about eighteen died," ran the diary of a wounded sergeant. "Shirt unchanged and sticking to my sore back, ears running with stinking matter, a man lying close on my right side with both his legs mortified nearly to the knees and dying." Those who survived had small hope of pension or gratuity. Even their pay, thanks to the Treasury, was usually months in arrears.

Yet these hard-used men were filled with a burning love of their country and a resolve which no odds or injustice could daunt. They went into battle with shouts of "Hurrah for old England!" and drums playing "The British Grenadiers" or "Garryown," wild for a dash at the French. Their pride in their corps was a religion; when, at Albuera, two-thirds of the Gloucesters had fallen and all their officers, one of the latter, finding he could still stagger, hobbled back into the fight. "'Twas the system," he explained, "of the Old Slashers." A soldier of the 43rd, that glorious regiment, dying on a straw palliasse, refused to he still when a badly wounded superior was borne in; his nature would not let him die in peace when an officer was laid beside him on the stones. This was not servility but the spirit of proud subordination which makes an army. So was the sacrifice of the private of the Royal Artificers who exclaimed, when Massena was sweeping towards Lisbon and a temporary bridge over the Murcella failed to blow up, "It shall not fail, they shall not pass," and standing on the structure, held the match to the mine. It was conscience, not fear of the lash, that kept men like these to the sticking-point. "I heard an old soldier," wrote a newcomer after his first engagement, "answer to a youth like myself who

¹
Larpent, I, 21. See also
idem,
12, 17; Grattan, 223;
Johnny Neivcome,
40, 54; Kincaid, 89. Young Sir Thomas Styles of the ist Foot Guards, who as a small boy at Eton had thrashed the poet Shelley, was bitten so badly on his way through Portugal to join his unit that he committed suicide. The girls in the Portuguese villages on the road made high jest of his sufferings, shaking the fleas out of their petticoats over pails of water and shouting with laughter. Gronow, II, 205-0. See Bell, I, 5-7; Anderson, 4-5; Grattan, 2; Gomm, 130; Blakeney, 15; Boothby, ii
t
134-5; Dyott, I, 268;
Johnny Newconie,
11.