Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  This gave the British Commander an opportunity to oflset his inferiority in numbers. While he held the southern approach with a comparatively small force, he could concentrate his best troops to the north of the Tagus. Fighting a delaying action with light infantry and road demolitions, he could force the invaders to advance over the northern mountains where their supply difficulties would increase with every mile, and only give battle when they were on the verge of the coastal plain. Here, where there were several strong positions barring every track out of the mountains, his own communications, based on the sea, would be as short as theirs were long.

  Even if the French with their almost inexhaustible reserves of conscripted man-power, could not be held at the edge of the coastal plain, Wellesley had a further resource. His great' object was to hold Lisbon and the Tagus estuary, for, so long as he did so, his army would remain in being and the enemy's dilemma only increase with every advance. The danger was lest, in holding on too long, his army should be unable to escape. Situated several miles up the estuary and with its water approaches vulnerable to shore artillery, Lisbon had none of the obvious defensive advantages of Cadiz.

  Yet it had others which did not escape the British Commander's experienced eye. Though it could not be defended from its own ramparts without allowing the enemy's artillery to reach the river below it, the peninsula on which it stood was long and narrow and, nearly thirty miles to the north of the city was still little more than twenty miles wide. Here it was intersected by a deep chain of hills stretching from the Atlantic to the Tagus and rising in places to 2000 feet. Three years earlier Junot, preparing to defend Lisbon against a British advance from Mondego Bay, had noted "the excellent position of Alenquer and Torres Vedras, the right of which could be extended to the Tagus, the left to the sea." On his subsequent visits Wellington had carefully noted them too.

  At the beginning of October, 1809, as soon as his troops had withdrawn to the Portuguese frontier, the Commander-in-Chief made an exploratory visit to Lisbon. For a few days he remained undecided. Then on October 20th he issued his orders to Colonel Fletcher, his chief engineer. Three lines of defence were to be constructed—an inner one at the extreme southern tip of the peninsula to cover an embarkation, a principal line twenty miles to the north based on the central massif of the Cabeca de Montechique, and an outer line six miles farther north extending east and west from the Monte Agraca above Sobral. In all more than fifty miles of earthworks, redoubts and abatis were to be constructed under British supervision by gangs of Portuguese labourers and militiamen: precipices were to be scarped, forests cleared and stone walls piled on mountains. But fearful lest the over-confident French should hear of these elaborate preparations and, anticipating a prolonged siege, Improve their haphazard supply services, the British general confided his intentions to no one but those directly concerned. So secretly were the works set in hand that months elapsed before even senior officers of the Army suspected their existence.

  All this was characteristic of the man—foresight, patience, reticence. If genius is an infinite capacity for anticipating and taking pains, Arthur Wellesley possessed it in supreme measure. He left little to chance. He foresaw every contingency and took the necessary steps to meet it. While he was instructing his engineers, he was also consulting with the naval Commander-in-Chief and the Government about embarkation arrangements and transports. The latter, he begged, should be stationed permanently in the Tagus, both to give confidence to his troops and, by accustoming the civilian population to the sight, to prevent an eleventh-hour panic in the capital.1 In the event of failure in the field, he was resolved to embark and bring away his army safely. He therefore made sure that he could do so. "Everything is prepared for us," he told a colleague in the new year, "either to go or stay."

  The distinguishing feature of this great soldier's mind was that it dwelt as much on the future as on the present. He was a strategist not merely in space but in time. "In military operations," he had written in India, "time is everything." He husbanded it not only for to-day's battle but for to-morrow's. In this he embodied the genius of his country—patience. He could bide his time and, unlike his passionate adversary, knew when to refrain from action. " It will give Spain the chance of accidents," he wrote of his Fabian plan in December, 1809, "and of a change in the affairs of Europe."2

  1 To Castlereagh, 6th Oct., 1809. Gurwood. *To Bartle Frere, 9 th Dec, 1809. Gurwood.

  In his calculating, undemonstrative way Arthur Wellesley was at heart an optimist. He saw the inherent flimsiness of Napoleon's dominion: its foundations were not sound in time. "The Austrian marriage is a terrible event," he wrote in the spring of 1810, "and must prevent any great movement on the Continent for the present. Still I do not despair of seeing at some time or other a check to the Bonaparte system. Recent transactions in Holland show that it is all hollow within, and that it is so inconsistent with the wishes, the interests and even the existence of civilised society, that he cannot trust even his brothers to carry it into execution."1 Ephemeral disaster, however shattering, never blinded the vision of this cool, dispassionate observer. "The affairs of the Peninsula," he noted in March, 1810, "have invariably had the same appearance since I have known them; they have always appeared to be lost. . . . The contest however still continues."

  Yet this temperate optimism was never based on wishful thinking. An eight years' apprenticeship in the cynical school of Indian warfare, followed by the campaigns of Vimiero and Talavera, had purged Arthur Wellesley of illusions. He looked facts unflinchingly in the face, and men too. Of the latter his views were seldom sanguine: he mistrusted, he once said, the judgment of every man where his own wishes were concerned. He kept even his generals at arm's length and viewed his junior officers as slapdash amateurs who would always bungle things unless he took care to prevent them. His opinion of the rank and file was still lower: sich drunken scum, he maintained, could only be schooled by the cat-o'-ninc-tails and kept in check by fear of punishment. A cadet of the ruling. Protestant garrison of Ireland, his vision of the world was that of an aristocrat struggling to preserve order in an untidy welter of plebeian folly, confusion and graft. Nor was it unsuited to the realities of the Iberian peninsula in a revolutionary decade.

  Yet, though he was no John Moore and planted few seeds of love and growth in men's hearts, he was adept in the difficult art of shaping human materials for the purposes for which he needed them. Not expecting much of men, he seldom tried them too high and, knowing where they were likely to fail, was always ready with the necessary corrective at the right place and moment. No one was ever a greater master of cold, scathing rebuke that, without exaggeration or provocative heat, left the victim without answer or escape. "It is not very agreeable to anybody," he told a refractory Portuguese magnate, " to have strangers quartered in his house, nor is it very agreeable to us strangers who have good houses in our own

  1 To Brig.-Gcn. Craufurd, 4th April, 1810. Gurwood.

  country to be obliged to seek for quarters here. We are not here for our pleasure."

  During the quiet winter months of recuperation that followed the collapse of his hopes after Talavera, the British Commander-in-Chief—using the respite offered by Napoleon and Joseph—was transforming his still half amateur army into a professional fighting force. Under his easy, high-bred manner he reshaped it with a hand of steel. In this he was helped by the fact that he was a man of the world and of the highest fashion. Though of frugal and even Spartan tastes, he was accustomed to the best society, kept a mistress —in her due place1—and understood the lure of pleasure. He was well able to deal both with senior officers who claimed a gentleman's right to go home for the winter to hunt and manage their estates, and with subalterns who neglected their regimental duties for the charms of the Lisbon opera house. " My Lord," one of his brigadiers began, "I have of late been suffering much from rheumatism . . ." "And you wish to go to England to get cured of it," snapped the Commander-in-Chief, turning his back: "By al
l means. Go there immediately." 2

  The rule of such a chief was as unpalatable to gentlemen who thought themselves above discipline as to marauders who deserted for drink or left the line to plunder. Just as the malingerers and column-dodgers of the base hospital at Belem—the notorious Belem Rangers, "noted," according to Rifleman Costello, "for every species of skunk"—Were driven back to their regiments that winter by an icy wind, so gay sparks who tried to find in Lisbon a second Drury Lane were recalled in chilling terms to their duties. " The officers of the army," they were reminded, "can have nothing to do behind the scenes.... Indeed, officers who are absent from their duty on account of sickness might as well not go to the playhouse, or at all events upon the stage and behind the scenes."3

  Nor would this unsympathetic Commander permit his officers the liberty of politics. He stigmatised the croaking which prevailed in the army as a disgrace to the nation. "As soon as an accident happens," he complained to one of his divisional generals, "every man who can write, and who has a friend who can read, sits down to write his account of what he does not know and his comments on what he does not understand."4 Such letters, diligently circulated by the idle and malicious, not only found their way into English

  1 According to Lady Sarah Napier—a prejudiced witness—in the field. Lennox, II, 229. See also Burgoyne, I, 70-1.

  2 McGrigor, 304-5.

  3 To Col. Peacocke, 26th Oct., 1809. Gurwood.

  4To Brig.-Gen. Craufurd, 23rd July, 1810. Gurwood.

  newspapers, encouraging the anti-war Opposition and conveying valuable information to the French, but aroused partisan feelings in the field. These Wellesley would have none of; his wish, he stated, was to be the head of an army not a party, and to employ indiscriminately those who could best serve the public, be they who they might.

  Yet his discipline was never negative. He made it his business to teach his officers the same meticulous care and attention to duty in which he had schooled himself. Success, he told them, could only be attained by attention to minute detail and by tracing every part of an operation from its origin to its conclusion, point by point. An indefatigable worker, he expected every one about him to be so too. He made it a rule, he said, always to do the work of the day in the day. Regular habits, a superb constitution and a well-regulated mind had been the foundations of all his triumphs. " When I throw off my clothes," he once remarked, " I throw off my cares, and, when I turn in my bed, it is time to turn out."1 He taught his army to do the same.

  At the root of this punctilious, fastidious, clear-sighted man's nature was a deep and abiding sense of duty. It was not an inspired and burning passion like Moore's or Nelson's; Arthur Wellesley made no pretence of being at home in such altitudes. But, though his feet were firmly planted on his mother earth—one on the battlefield and the other in Bond Street—he was inherently a man of his salt. He spoke the truth, honoured his bond and kept faith. He regarded a lie as an act of cowardice and a breach of promise as a vulgar betrayal. He had learnt to eradicate these easy frailties from his own character, just as he had taught himself to be frugal and reticent, in his youth when he had had to master his Irish ebullience and artist's sensitivity in order to survive in a milieu of thrustful elder brothers and inadequate family resources. Adherence to bond and duty was not so much a natural bent of his rather mysterious nature—in which ran suppressed rivers of deep emotion—as a close-fitting mask which he had early donned in self-protection and to which in due course his own features had come to conform. Yet it was one which, like his talent for economy, perfectly served his country's need. He spared himself no care or labour which could further her ends'and made every man and every penny go as far as man or penny could go.

  In November, 1809, at the close of his second Peninsular campaign, he was a slight, upright, wiry-looking man of forty with keen grey eyes and an aquiline nose. His habitual dress, though neat to the

  1 Leaves from the Diary of an Officer, 37. He always got up directly he was called.

  point of dandyism, was almost consciously unostentatious: a plain blue frock coat, a small, glazed, cocked hat without feathers, a short cape and strapped grey trousers. He eschewed plumes and gold lace, went about without a Staff, and was usually followed at a discreet distance by a single orderly. He liked seeing things for himself without fuss. " Our post," wrote one of his junior officers, " was next the enemy. I found, when anything was to be done, that it was his also."1

  At this time the Commander-in-Chief was far from popular. In England the glamour of his early victories had faded. He was blamed for the rashness of his summer campaign, the loss of his wounded and the hardships of the retreat from Talavera. His family was assailed by Opposition pamphleteers as a tribe of proud, rapacious Irish Tories with greedy fingers in every public pie; his brilliant elder brother, Lord Wellesley—a Spanish grandee grafted on an Irish potato, as the Prince of Wales called him2—was almost the best-hated man in England with his intolerable viceregal airs, his notorious debts, his "common whore," Sally Douglas, who, rumour said, he had taken in state on his mission to Spain.3 Arthur Wellesley's own elevation to the peerage after Talavera as Viscount Wellington was regarded as a Tory job, and the £2000 a year pension voted him in Parliament was publicly attacked by the Common Council of the City of London. Even his army, unable to understand the broader issues underlying the campaign of 1809, thought of him as a rash Irishman, a brilliant tactician but no strategist, who had gambled away the lives of his men at Talavera and callously allowed them to rot in the Guadiana marshes to please his Spanish allies. A surgeon at the military hospital at Lisbon told Charles Napier that Lord Wellington deserved hanging for his reckless waste of life.

  Yet those who were brought into contact with him seldom retained such impressions for long. He was so industrious, clearheaded, sensible and efficient. For everything he did he had a reason and, when he chose to explain it in his clear, lucid way, it always proved unanswerable. As he himself wrote of Marlborough, he was remarkable for his cool, steady understanding.4 If any of his senior officers quarrelled—as in those days of hot tempers, hard drinking and prickly honour they were very apt to do—he was always ready with his moderation, balance and good sense to compose the difference. "A part of my business and perhaps not the most easy part,"

  1 Kincaid, 14. 2 Creevey, I, 129.

  3 Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (ed. Griggs), 24; Paget Brothers, 143.

  4 Stanhope, Conversations, 31.

  he told the fiery Craufurd, who had conceived a grievance against a brother officer, "is to prevent discussions and disputes between the officers who may happen to serve under my command. ... I hope that this letter may reach you in time to induce you to refrain from sending me the paper which you inform me you have written."1

  For here was a Commander-in-Chief who did not stand upon ceremony or take personal offence. It was hard to quarrel with him: he saw your point of view while clarifying and enforcing his own. "You and I necessarily take a different view of these questions," he told Craufurd, " I must view them in all their relations; your view of them is naturally confined to their relation with your own immediate command." Much of his time was spent in trying to adapt impossible War Office and Treasury regulations to the exigencies of a Continental campaign for which they had never been designed. Yet he refused to inveigh against them needlessly or to allow his subordinates to do so; all that could be done, he told the latter, was that they should assist each other as much and clash as little as possible. Adhering steadfastly to his chosen path, he was always ready to compromise on inessentials: to go down metaphorically on his knees, as he had done before Cuesta at Talavera. "Half the business of the world," he wrote, "particularly that of our country, is done by accommodation and by the parties understanding each other."2

  This genius for being reasonable, coupled with his clarity and common sense, enabled Wellington—unlike most men habituated to discipline and command—to deal with politicians. Being free from Moore's
troublesome sense of moral indignation, he never made them uncomfortable with tedious reiterations of principle. So long as they ultimately came along with him, he always allowed them a way to wriggle round their difficulties. And though he left them in no doubt as to what he wanted and meant to do—there is nothing in life, he once remarked, like a clear definition—he never expected or asked them to do the impossible. "In my situation," he told a colleague, " I am bound to consider not only what is expedient but what is practicable."3 He remembered that Ministers had to do so too. He realised that they were harried and abused in Parliament and the country, that there was a shortage of money and troops. He made no more claims on them than were absolutely essential, told them the exact truth and explained, in language which the busiest fool could understand, the common-sense reasons for his requests.

  1 To Brig.-Gen. Craufurd, 29th May, 1810. Gurwood.

  2To Rt. Hon. J. Villiers, 20th Sept., 1809. Gurwood.

  3 To RL Hon. J. Villiers, 6th Dec, 1809. Gurwood.

  He only pressed them when he had to: "would it be fair or indeed honest in me," he wrote to the British Ambassador at Lisbon, " to ask for a man more than I thought absolutely necessary."

  For, frigid and almost inhuman though he sometimes seemed, Wellington had a curiously detached sense of justice. He could be just even in his own cause. Having explained to Lord Liverpool exactly why he needed transports in the Tagus, he added that none of his reasons were worth anything if the ships were needed elsewhere. Such moderation, despite the sacrifices it involved, had its reward. It established a sense of confidence between Cabinet and General: made them conscious of their mutual dependence. When Wellington really needed support from England he could rely on receiving everything that was available.