Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of the Guards and one or two other Corps, this is the Worst British Army that was ever in the field.’¹⁹

      The most severe punishments could not stop the men plundering, an activity which many of them seemed to. consider part of the natural process of soldiering. Throughout the war in the Peninsula numerous general orders were issued on the lines of the following:

       The Commander of the Forces requests the General officers commanding divisions will take measures to prevent the shameful and unmilitary practice of soldiers shooting pigs in the woods, so close to the camp and to the columns of march as that two dragoons were shot last night … The number of soldiers straggling from their regiments for no reason excepting to plunder, is a disgrace to the army, and affords a strong proof of the degree to which the discipline of the regiments is relaxed, and of the inattention of the commanding and other officers of regiments to their duty, and to the repeated orders of the army … The Commander of the Forces desires that notice may be given to the soldiers that he has this day ordered two men to be hanged who were caught in the fact of shooting pigs.²⁰

      ‘On the other hand’, so the commissary August Schaumann said, ‘Lord Wellington frequently showed himself merciful towards regiments of which he was fond. On one occasion, for instance, he came upon the 1st German Hussars … one of whose men came riding up with a bleating sheep. The moment Lord Wellington saw the man, however, he only smiled, and turning his back on him, pretended not to have noticed anything, although the officers at his side were shuddering with fear.’²¹

      Similarly, it gave Wellington wry pleasure to recount the story of a man he himself caught with a stolen beehive, a popular species of loot.²² Where did he get it? he asked. Oh, the man said blithely, just over the hill; but it would be as well to get over there quickly: they were nearly all gone.²³

      The women were quite as bad as the men, if not worse. General Orders had frequently to be issued in an effort to stop them misappropriating army as well as Spanish or Portuguese property and making the life of the commissaries more difficult than it was already. Female camp followers were occasionally beaten on their bare bottoms; but they continued looting just the same. Nor were most officers above looting themselves. A soldier in the 71st recorded the looting of a mill by his regiment whose colonel forced the men out, ‘throwing a handful of flour on each man as he passed out of the mill. When we were drawn up he rode along the column looking for the millers, as we called them. At this moment a hen put her head out of his coat-pocket, and looked first to one side, then to another. We began to laugh; we could not restrain ourselves. He looked amazed and furious … Then the colonel in his turn laughed … and the millers were no more looked after.’²⁴

      As for the general officers, when Wellington reflected that ‘these were the persons on whom [he was] to rely to lead columns against the French Generals, and who [were] to carry [his] instructions into execution’, he confessed that he trembled. ‘And, as Lord Chesterfield said of the Generals of his day,’ he added, ‘“I only hope that when the enemy reads the list of their names he trembles as I do.”*²⁵ Sir William Erskine and General [William] Lumley will be a very nice addition to this List.’²⁶ So would General Lightburne and Colonel Sanders, from whom he prayed to God and the Horse Guards to deliver him. Erskine, in fact, was ‘generally understood to be a madman’, and committed suicide in 1813 by throwing himself out of a window in Lisbon.

      Particularly tiresome for Wellington were those senior officers who came out to join the army with recommendations from the Prince of Wales or cronies at the Horse Guards. One of the most exasperating of these was a reckless and troublesome Hussar officer at one time Groom of the Bedchamber to the Duke of Cumberland, Sir Colquhoun Grant, whom Wellington would have liked to send home but who was instead promoted by the Horse Guards.

      The commissary August Schaumann found the arrogant Grant intolerable in his impossible demands and in his haughty astonishment that these demands should be questioned. ‘Was he not six feet high, and had he not a huge black moustache and black whiskers? … His whole manner bore the stamp of unbounded pride and the crassest ignorance, and he tried to conceal the latter beneath positive assertions which he did not suffer to be contradicted.’ Schaumann was delighted one day when the great man was treated cavalierly by Wellington who galloped past him shouting out an invitation to dinner which he did not wait to be acknowledged and which left ‘the black giant’ looking ‘crestfallen’ and … ‘silently shaking his head’ before riding off ‘gesticulating violently’.²⁷

      Quite as bad as the madmen and incompetents, in Wellington’s opinion, were what he called the croakers, officers who muttered criticisms of his strategy, spreading doubt and resentment in the army and conveying gloom in letters home. Among these was his so-called second-in-command, the Irish General Sir Brent Spencer, a great favourite of King George III but, in Wellington’s opinion, an ‘exceedingly puzzle-headed man’ who, in Portugal, had constantly referred to the Tagus as the Thames, and had once told an aide-de-camp to trot down to the Thames to see what was going on there. The aide had answered that he wished with all his heart that he could.²⁸

      ‘As soon as an accident happens,’ Wellington complained, ‘every man who can write, and has a friend who can read, sits down to write his account of what he does not know.’ And, what was worse, newspapers in England got hold of these letters which could not but spread disquiet at home.²⁹

      One of the most intrigant of Wellington’s senior officers was the Adjutant-General, Charles Stewart, the handsome son of the Marquess of Londonderry by his second wife, and half-brother of Lord Castlereagh. He had accepted the staff appointment with reluctance and was repeatedly asking for a cavalry command which Wellington declined to give him on account of his defective sight and hearing.³⁰ Stewart insisted that the cavalry was not well handled and insinuated that the army was not being well managed either. Eventually, after Stewart had insisted that as Adjutant-General ‘the examination of prisoners belonged exclusively to him’, Wellington had summoned him to an interview and told him that if his orders were not obeyed he ‘would dismiss him instanter and send him to England in arrest’. ‘After a great deal of persuasion’, Wellington said, ‘Stewart burst out crying and begged my pardon, and hoped I would excuse his intemperance.’³¹

      Despite his differences with some of his senior officers and his low opinion of his soldiers, Wellington maintained that he was ‘prepared for all events’; and, if he were in a scrape, he was determined to give the impression that he was confident he could get out of it. ‘I am in no scrape,’ he wrote to his brother William, ‘and if Mr Pitt were alive, or if there were anything like a Government in England, or any publick Sentiment remaining there, Buonaparte would yet repent his invasion of Spain.’³²

      It was widely held in England, though, that he was, indeed, in a scrape. The Earl of Liverpool, Secretary for War, told Wellington that ‘a very considerable degree of alarm existed respecting the safety of the British army in Portugal’; and went on to say that he ‘would rather be excused for bringing away the army a little too soon than, by remaining in Portugal a little too long, exposing it to those risks from which no military operations can be wholly exempt’.³³ In subsequent letters Liverpool wrote of the probability of the enemy’s being soon enabled to employ such overwhelming force that evacuation would be inevitable; and he also told Wellington that officers who had returned from the Peninsula ‘entertained and avowed the most desponding views as to the result of the war’.³⁴

      Yet Wellington felt that if he were, in fact, in a scrape, the French might soon be in one too. He doubted that they ‘could bring a large force to bear upon Portugal without abandoning other objects, and, exposing their whole fabric in Spain to great risks’. If they invaded Portugal, and did not succeed in obliging the British army to evacuate the country, they would be ‘in a very dangerous situation’. The longer he could oppose СКАЧАТЬ