The Making Of The British Army (32 page)

And for many on the ridge that day, it looked as if that indeed would be the outcome: a battle in which all were killed. Yet Wellington himself, riding to wherever the action was most intense, remained not only alive but untouched, even as others of his staff were maimed or killed at his side. His senior ADC Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon and his quartermaster-general (chief of staff) Sir William de Lancey were mortally wounded; another of his ADCs, Lord FitzRoy Somerset, lost an arm;
⁸⁰
and Lord Uxbridge famously lost a leg. ‘By God, sir, I
think I have lost my leg,’ he said quietly to Wellington as grapeshot smashed his knee. The duke’s reply, more solicitous than it perhaps sounds, was simply, ‘By God, sir, I believe you have!’

Imperturbable throughout, Wellington now ordered what few reserves he had to the centre. A little later, on learning that Prussian cavalry had reached the furthest end of the allied line, he ordered Sir Hussey Vivian’s hussar brigade to the centre from the left flank, where it had stood inactive for most of the day with the light dragoon brigade.

Coming up, Vivian was shocked by what he found: ‘the ground actually covered with dead and dying, cannon shots and shells flying thicker than ever I heard musketry before, and our troops – some of them – giving way’. Wellington himself had to gallop to where some Brunswickers, uncharacteristically, were recoiling. If ever there was a general with a perfect grasp of how in war the tactical was sometimes short-wired to the strategic it was he, which is one of the reasons he was everywhere that day. By about seven o’clock that evening he had stabilized the allied line.

The Prussians now began arriving on the left flank in large numbers, and with them, as Wellington had foreseen two hours or so before, came the prospect not just of winning the battle but of strategic victory.

Napoleon knew this perfectly well too. He had two options, therefore. The first was to form a covering force and retire: the British were exhausted, after all, and the Prussians, though scarcely engaged that day, had force-marched a fair distance; it might have been possible under cover of darkness to get away to see to the defence of Paris. Or else he could throw the dice once more – one last time – in an attempt to break through the allied line and get into the Forest of Soignes before nightfall and thence move towards Brussels. What good that might bring ultimately, when the Austrians and the Russians came to the borders of France, and with a Prussian army bruised but intact, could only be conjectured. His whole campaign, however, which would become known as ‘The Hundred Days’, was more visceral than cerebral. And what good would come of defending Paris? Without
La Gloire
Napoleon was nothing. So he threw the dice one more time: indeed, he threw in the Garde – the Garde Impériale, which had never been defeated. In fairness it can be argued that he perhaps genuinely believed the allied line to have been so weakened that the moral superiority of an attack by the Garde would be irresistible. He was, however, wrong.

The Garde – five battalions of the ‘Middle Guard’ backed by three of
the ‘Old’, in all some 5,000 men – marched for the ridge between La Haye Sainte, which was now in French hands, and Hougoumont, dividing into two distinct masses as they came up the slope. And by one of those quirks of war the force advancing on the left marched directly for the place where the British Guards lay prone behind the crest of the ridge.
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Again, Wellington was at the decisive place: ‘Now, Maitland! Now is your time!’ he called to the brigade commander as the French broached the ridge. And knowing, almost certainly, that this was not just the decisive place but, as Clausewitz would later term it, the culminating point, he could not resist giving the order direct to the brigade: ‘Stand up, Guards! Make ready! Fire!’

At 50 yards the effect was devastating. And as two allied brigades from the right flank moved to join the musketry, Colonel Sir John Colborne commanding the 52nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry took his men forward to open an enfilading fire on the Garde’s right flank.

It was enough. ‘
La Garde recule!
’ was the most astonished cry the Grande Armée had ever heard. But even as they fell back, their supporting artillery checked the ardour of the allied troops following up.

‘Go on, Colborne! Go on! They won’t stand! Don’t give them time to rally!’ called the duke. And then, making sure they would not, he took off his hat and began waving the whole line forward.

It was all over but the pursuit – and that he would leave to the Prussians.

*

What, then, was the legacy of the Napoleonic period – Wellington’s legacy? Above all, there was now a confidence that the British army could face anything. At Waterloo, Napoleon in person had thrown everything he had at the allied line, and it had been the steadfastness of the British infantry that had stopped him in his tracks. Battalions did not turn and run, as did some of the Dutch and Belgians (and even Hanoverians – including, infamously, the Duke of Cumberland’s Hussars); squares did not break. These were not all Peninsula-hardened
veterans; yet somehow the notion of what was expected of them – nothing less than what would have been expected of the battalions that had fought in Spain – had taken deep root in the ranks. The regiments themselves, through a dozen years’ continuous experience under arms (and with surprising continuity among the officers, despite purchase), had developed distinct identities, with an additional sense of pride and discipline.
⁸²
And it was the discipline of volleying, by the Guards and the infantry of the line, that was the foundation of success in battle. Light infantry work was an accessory, artillery a supplementary, cavalry – if it could be trusted at all – an auxiliary. Wellington’s insistence on carefully arranging all aspects of his logistics before a bold advance, and then fighting a defensive battle on well-chosen ground, was the formula for success on campaign. The infantry, when required to, could attack with all the dash of the best in the world, and the cavalry never needed restraining from the charge, but on the whole Wellington and his army preferred to let the enemy come on. And this was the sense of how war should in future be made: ‘They came on in the old way,’ said Wellington of the Grande Armée at Waterloo; ‘and we saw them off in the old way.’ It did not seem to occur to anyone that armies in the future might look for a new way.

So a sort of self-satisfaction entered into the army’s soul – at least into that of its spiritual directors at the Horse Guards. The musket had been the army’s mainstay; why change it for the rifle? Artillery had been useful against densely packed columns at relatively short ranges; why have heavier guns to fire at a greater distance when they had to be realigned manually with great effort? The cavalry experimented with the lance, but their regiments were increasingly becoming rich and exclusive clubs given excessively to show, the lance prized more for its fluttering pennant than as an innovative weapon. It is particularly ironic, indeed, that at a time when British industry, transport and commerce were leading the world in their inventive approach, the army sought almost consciously to revert to a pre-industrial age.

In his role as Master General of the Ordnance, and later longstanding commander-in-chief, the duke of Wellington himself has been blamed for much of this military reaction. There is no doubt that his intensely conservative view of military (and public) order did not make for innovation. He famously opposed the abolition of both purchase and flogging – though with sound enough reasoning, given his perspective. He had no cause to suppose that France would be a resurgent threat in the short to medium term (unlike in 1814, after 1815 the restored Louis XVIII disbanded the entire army to remake it in a thoroughly non-Revolutionary image), and like other statesmen he had confidence in the peace made at the resumed Congress of Vienna (at which he had been one of the delegates). And he was realist enough to acknowledge that great economies had to be made after the exertions of the ‘never-ending war’. As Master General of the Ordnance he may have been a member of the cabinet, but he knew that – then as now – there were no votes in defence.

But what of the duke’s legacy in methods of command, and organization? In one sense it was fundamental to the British way of war ever since – the meticulous attention to planning, but with the ‘harness of ropes’ approach, the personal reconnaissance and eye for ground, the supervision of the execution of detail, the sheer hard work (‘attending to the business of the day
in
the day’), the exemplary courage, the understatedness. And along with the personal qualities and practices went a pragmatic yet robust political sense: he was careful to secure his political as well as his tactical flanks. Professor Richard Holmes, biographer of both Wellington and Marlborough, has compared them in just these terms: ‘It is no accident that both based their success on mastery of logistics, and both were principally commanders within coalitions, always obliged to blend the military with the political, as much strategists as tacticians.’

And yet these very qualities had their downside. When, after Waterloo, Wellington said, ‘By God, I don’t think it would have served had I not been there!’ he was almost certainly right. He had some capable and experienced generals in the field with him that day, but none who – on past form – was equal to his own task. It is curious, therefore, that he took no great efforts to make sure that if he did become a casualty all would not be lost. Uxbridge, his nominal second-in-command, asked the night before what were his chief’s plans, to which Wellington replied, and with some asperity, that since Bonaparte
would be attacking and had not vouchsafed his plans to him, how might he know what he would do? But then he added, more emolliently, ‘There is one thing certain, however, Uxbridge, that is, that whatever happens you and I will do our duty.’ It was hardly helpful.

But Wellington certainly
had
had some idea of the possibilities open to Napoleon, which was of course why he made his dispositions on the ridge of Mont St Jean as he did. And he had made them in detail: it was Wellington himself who had decided exactly which troops to place in Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte and the villages to left and right of the line. He himself had decided which brigades were to go where, and it is not impossible to believe also that he had directed the divisional and brigade commanders just where and how to dispose their regiments. It had been a faultless disposition, of course: Wellington had played to a T the different national characteristics and regimental capabilities. Indeed, when Baron Müffling, Blücher’s liaison officer, had asked if 1,500 men were really enough to hold Hougoumont, Wellington replied, ‘Ah, you don’t know Macdonnell. I’ve thrown Macdonnell into it.’ He meant Lieutenant-Colonel James Macdonnell, commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards. This was the level of decision-making to which Wellington applied himself.

He was criticized both at the time and later for his tight-gripped ‘top-down’ tendency. In his commentary on the diaries of Sir John Moore, for example, Major-General Sir J. F. Maurice, the official historian of the late Victorian army, observes sharply of Wellington’s one criticism of the Corunna campaign (that Moore ought in anticipation of the retreat ‘to have sent officers to the rear to mark and prepare the halting-places for every brigade’) that ‘If it really was the practice in Wellington’s own army towards the end of the Peninsular War for headquarters to interfere in such a matter, then all that can be said is that it is an extraordinary illustration of the extent to which Wellington, in his utter contempt for his subordinate generals, had reduced the whole army to the condition of a mechanical instrument in his own hand.’

In the duke’s hands, of course, the instrument worked. In the hands of others it did not work nearly so well. Indeed, as the years went by after Waterloo, the instrument, like a well-sprung clock, lost time (and in the Crimea it eventually stopped for a while) because it was never wound or serviced properly. Fortunately there was another instrument-maker at work – India. But India was fashioning a piece that was not to
the liking of many at home, and so the army, half of which was in Britain and Ireland, was to continue its long decline throughout the nineteenth century, its true condition concealed by the fact that the Queen’s enemies were far away and second-rate. The army received a bloody nose from time to time, but its heroic recovery – often accompanied by a good deal of ‘spin’ – only served to convince Parliament and the public that at heart all was well. Without India, however, many a bloody nose could have turned into a knock-out.

In the end, the sword that the duke of Wellington had wielded so magnificently grew rusty in his hand. But a fine sword it had been, and it could be burnished again. Writing of the army at Albuera in May 1811, Sir John Fortescue describes how the ‘battalions, struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking ships – but suddenly and sternly recovering they closed on their terrible enemies, and then was seen with what strength and majesty the British soldier fights’.

With such fighting quality it might have been expected that the British soldier would always recover from the ‘iron tempest’ – and by and large he did. But he would reel and stagger a good many times in the two centuries after Waterloo before closing on his terrible enemies.