The Making Of The British Army (29 page)

Torres Vedras showed above all what a good ‘eye for ground’ Wellington had, and therefore exalted the virtue in the minds of his successors. The skill was associated with Wellington’s love of fox- and hare-hunting in the Peninsula, his only recreation, and the conflation of the two has had numerous echoes since. Siegfried Sassoon, in the first volume of his chronicle of the First World War,
Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man
, writes lyrically of the eye for ground which riding to hounds gave him. And the late Lord (Bill) Deedes, reflecting on his time in Normandy in 1944 as a young officer in the 60th Rifles, observed of the officers of their supporting armoured regiment, the 13th/18th Royal Hussars, that those who had spent a good deal of time in the hunting field seemed able to read the ground best.
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The eighteenth-century notion of battle, which Napoleon had developed rather than revolutionized, treated the ground almost as incidental. In the Peninsula, however, Wellington took every opportunity to exploit the French preference for the attack, and chose the ground on which to receive them in such a way as to maximize his advantages and minimize his weaknesses. Before withdrawing into the Lines of Torres Vedras, for example, he fought a linear, defensive battle on the long ridge at Bussaco, which his veterans would recall as they stood on the ridge of Mont St Jean five years later at Waterloo. And although Wellington cannot be pigeon-holed simply as a
defensive-minded general (his time in India and his early offensives in Portugal showed otherwise), he certainly had a fondness for advancing into the enemy’s country, choosing a good piece of ground and then waiting for the attack. It was said a hundred years later that whereas the French army of 1914, with their doctrine of
attaque à outrance
(attack to excess) would prefer to abandon a position and then retake it with
panache
, the British infantry would cling on like limpets.
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Writing of his experience of the desert war in 1944, Rommel too spoke ruefully of the British army’s ‘well thought-out guileful methods of defence’. It went back to Wellington: not for nothing was the principal defence exercise of the platoon commanders’ battle course at the School of Infantry called until recently ‘Bussaco Ridge’.
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Yet the will to go to it with the bayonet, as the infantry had at Steenkirk and would again in the Crimea – and on the Western Front in the First World War, and at El Alamein, and on many more recent occasions – was always an asset that Wellington sought to exploit, if under the strictest control. And not just to exploit, but when necessary to drive to the very limit. Two years after Masséna abandoned his ‘siege’ of Torres Vedras, the sanguinary ruthlessness of which Wellington was capable when circumstances demanded it was made dramatically evident when he in turn laid siege to Badajoz.

The years between Torres Vedras and Badajoz had been a crab-like business of advance and withdrawal. Wellington himself said, and not merely in self-justification, that the best test of greatness in a general was to know when to retreat, and to dare to do it. He had certainly dared to retreat well enough, and it had cost him a deal of trouble in London, though he never lost the support of the most important of the King’s ministers. Fortunately, too, the duke of York was back at the Horse Guards. He had been forced to resign in 1808 when his mistress was caught selling commissions (and his complicity therefore presumed), but his innocence had been painstakingly established and the Prince Regent, whose hands held the reins during George III’s
madness, was willing to overlook the questionable judgement of keeping a mistress who was prepared to trade beyond her competence. So with York’s backing re-established, in 1812 Wellington began another offensive, besieging the great border fortresses of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz. The first, and smaller, of these fell in January with a deal of blood – including that of ‘Black Bob’ Craufurd who, as ever leading from the front, fell mortally wounded in one of the breaches, in which he was afterwards ceremoniously buried.

Once inside Ciudad Rodrigo, the army’s discipline had faltered, as Lieutenant John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles described:

But at least in Ciudad Rodrigo no Spanish civilians had been killed gratuitously. At Badajoz it was a different matter. The city sits on a slight rise overlooking the Guadiana River. A massive wall and bastions, a broad moat and outworks, and forts on the surrounding heights made it one of the strongest fortresses in Europe. Yet it had been taken by the French in March 1811 without assault – the Spanish commander succumbing (or so it was believed) to gold rather than lead.

Wellington began his siege in March the following year, and after a month there were three breaches in the walls which he deemed ‘practicable’ – wide enough to assault, though in truth they were too narrow. He still had no heavy artillery worth the name to batter away with, nor enough engineers for mining, and the breaches were therefore the best he could hope for. So on the night of 4 April two divisions battled for five hours to get through two of the breaches while a third feinted against the other to draw off the defending troops. But without success.

When Wellington received the news that the divisions could make no progress he turned white. ‘I shall never forget it till the last of my existence,’ wrote James McGrigor, his chief medical officer: ‘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.’ And so was his resolution. Wellington could not afford to be repulsed that night: his deputy, Beresford, had twice failed to take the fortress the year before, and the ‘croakers’, as Wellington called them – officers on leave in London who complained of his excessive caution – were not serving his cause. There was intelligence, too, of a French army marching to the relief of the city. And perhaps a rebuff at Badajoz, at the very gateway to Spain, might have shaken the confidence of the army – in itself and in him. His reputation, after all, was founded on not losing battles. So it must have been in some measure of desperation as well as firm resolve that Wellington ordered his two reserve divisions to take the walls by ‘escalade’ (a pretty term for using ladders). A reserve is used in defence to avert a crisis, and in offence to reinforce success; but here Wellington was reversing the formula – and crudely. Quite evidently it is easier to enter a fortress through a breach in the walls than by trying to scale them; yet here he was ordering his two reserve divisions to do more than the first two divisions had just failed to achieve.

The ‘human factor’ now intervened fortuitously – and Wellington was always a lucky general – as the magnificent 5th Foot
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managed to get a lodgement atop the walls; and how they did so says much about the army’s fighting spirit then and since. For the first man into the fortress that night was not a thrusting ensign fresh from the playing fields of Eton, nor a hardened serjeant who knew how to fight, nor a corporal keen for his extra stripe, nor even one of Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’, a rum-fuelled private soldier from the coaly hovels of the Tyne or wherever the Fifth managed to find their men. It was in fact their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Ridge. To protect himself against the missiles raining down from the battlements, he told a handful of his men to hold their muskets above his head in an umbrella of bayonets, and to advance up the ladder behind him. When they reached the end of the ladder, a good 15 feet short of the top of the wall, he told one of them to stand on the top rung, and another to climb on to his shoulders, and then he, Ridge, climbed on to the second man’s shoulders and hauled himself over the parapet. He was cut down and killed soon afterwards, but not before his
men were swarming over the battlements, following his example.

There were 5,000 French defending Badajoz that night, and Wellington lost 5,000 men taking it. But the losses were disproportionately high among the officers: of the twenty-three infantry battalions that took part, in fifteen of them three out of four officers were killed or wounded, and in five of them every single one. By the time Wellington’s men got into the fortress, their blood was boiling from the fight, and they were without their officers. And, as at Ciudad Rodrigo, discipline faltered – or rather, this time broke down altogether. Although the French were largely spared, the Spanish civilians suffered very badly indeed, for there was a strong though generally unfounded suspicion that they were collaborators. Murder, rape and robbery followed for a full forty-eight hours before Wellington was able to regain control of his men – helped in no small measure by the exhaustion of the fortress’s wine cellars.
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Badajoz stands as one of the greatest fighting feats of the British army, and one of its worst instances of indiscipline. And it demonstrated the fragility of the system once more. Wellington himself had been all too aware of it: he had seen for himself the climactic aftermath of countless skirmishes and battles – not least at the sack of Seringapatam – and he was clear enough about the remedy. But there was only so much that flogging could achieve: he insisted too that the officers do their duty in every detail, not just lead bravely, and he harried them mercilessly – so mercilessly, indeed, that one of them, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Bevan, blew his brains out after such a rebuke. Bevan commanded the admirable 4th (King’s Own) Regiment, which had scarcely put a foot wrong in its 150 years’ existence and had lost more men in the storming of Badajoz than any other regiment. It is tempting to suppose that Bevan wanted to show Wellington and the rest of the army that the rebuke had been unwarranted.
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Quite what Wellington expected of his officers was not always clear-cut. Reminiscing many years later with Earl Stanhope – his ‘Boswell’ – the duke was very decided that

Perhaps over the port and nuts before a good fire at Walmer Castle, the duke’s residence as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports from 1829 until his death there in 1852, and in the company of a much younger man who hung on his every word, the Great Man made his point with a certain expansiveness – exaggeration even. But what he recalled was essentially true: the Guards had established an ascendancy. That, after all, was what was expected of Guards regiments in any army. And although, as Wellington said, they were not picked men, nor given privileges as in the French army, nor used in any sense to govern the rest of the troops, they came increasingly to set an example of how things should be done. Sandhurst, which began to set the tone for the formation of officers in the Victorian era, and has continued to do so ever since, was and is run by the Guards. Although the commandant may be from any regiment, the adjutant and the Academy Serjeant-Major are always from the Foot Guards.
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And when additional officer training units were established during the two world wars and the period of National Service that followed, the Guards ran these too.

But it was not only in administration, training and discipline that the Guards became pre-eminent. They had by Wellington’s time established a formidable fighting reputation. Other regiments often fought as well as they, but none ever fought better. After Waterloo, writing of
the crucial defence of Hougoumont on the right flank by a composite force from the three regiments of Guards, Wellington said simply: ‘No troops but the British could have held Hougoumont, and only the best of them at that.’ And they have never truly faltered since – a remarkable record, for every regiment has had its setbacks, a time which might be whispered as ‘not their finest hour’, when an attack has failed, or a position has been over-run because of some dereliction, mishap, lack of skill or plain lack of resolve. But not the Guards. Indeed, when news that ‘the Guards are in the line’ ran up and down the trenches of the Western Front, it was always with a frisson.
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Badajoz was a turning point, but it would be a full year before increasing Anglo-Spanish pressure would force the French into irrecoverable retreat. In the summer of 1812 Wellington gained a spectacular victory at Salamanca, occupying Madrid soon afterwards and pressing on east; but he was checked at Burgos, and had to withdraw once more before a renewed French offensive all the way back to Portugal. The following year he and the Spanish armies came out of winter quarters renewed, however, whereas the French were much weakened by the continuing guerrilla operations and by the destruction of their eastern army in the Russian campaign. And so at last Wellington could begin his sustained advance to the Pyrenees and beyond (and his own advance to both duke and field marshal). He fought his final battle of the Peninsular War not in Spain but in France, at Toulouse in April 1814 – before the news could reach him that Napoleon had abdicated.