Part 13

There was only one incident in it all that any one remembered, and that was a fight that he had had with one Bob or “Bobus” Smith, of whom also nothing is known save the fact that he had a brother who was afterwards known to the world as Sydney Smith--not the defender of Acre, but the clerical humourist who divided the human race into three sexes: Men, women, and curates.

It would seem that he was all along intended for the army, for when his undistinguished career at Eton had closed he went to a French military school at Angers, somewhere about the same time that a certain young cadet of Artillery was beginning to learn his business in Toulon. Here, again, we get very dim glimpses of the future conqueror, Empire-Maker, and preserver. One of them, however, is fairly distinct. He had a little terrier called Vick to which he was a great deal more attentive than he was to his studies and which repaid his attention by constant and unswerving devotion.

When he left Angers is not known to a year or so, but in 1787 we come across something definite, for in this year Arthur Wesley, as he still spelt himself, was gazetted as ensign to His Majesty’s 73rd Regiment of Foot.

He now stood on the lowest of the gentlemanly rungs of the military ladder and his upward progress was for a time somewhat bewildering. Those were the days when money and social and political influence, which came to about the same thing, did everything in the Army, the Navy, the Church, and everywhere else, and, curiously enough, this apparently absurd system produced the finest array of soldiers and sailors that has ever adorned the annals of our empire. There are, indeed, certain blasphemers who venture to suggest that it worked quite as well as our much-boasted compound of mechanical cramming and competitive examination does now.

But, be this as it may, Arthur Wesley’s first steps up the ladder were distinctly erratic. First he became a lieutenant of the 76th and 41st, then a sub. in the 12th Light Dragoons, then a captain in the 58th Foot, then captain of the 18th Light Dragoons, and so on till by the autumn of 1793, when he had reached the mature age of twenty-four, he was gazetted lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot.

There were two reasons for this rapid promotion. The first undoubtedly is the fact that his elder brother Richard was now Earl of Mornington and a wealthy man and a social power to boot. The second, as Mr. George Hooper in his excellent biography suggests, is probably the perception by his brother of qualities which so far nobody else had discovered.

How far his Lordship was justified was speedily shown when in 1793--which the historical reader will note was the date of the driving out of the English and Royalists from Toulon by the well-directed guns of Citizen Buonaparte--he was given the command of the 33rd Foot. A few months later the 33rd was officially recognised as the most effective regiment on the Irish establishment.

The next year Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley saw his first active service. It was not an encouraging experience, but it was sufficient to show the sort of stuff that the future Iron Duke was made of. The allied armies in the Netherlands, with the English under the Duke of York among them, were retreating after a series of disasters before the triumphant onrush of the French legions.

Near the town of Boxtell the retreat began to get uncomfortably like a rout. Horse and foot were getting mixed up in a narrow lane and the French, seeing this, were getting ready to charge into them; whereupon Colonel Wesley planted his men skilfully across the mouth of the lane and, when the French charged, the well-drilled 33rd stood so steadily and used their muskets with such deadly precision that the French thought better of it and the pursuit stopped there and then.

That was the young Colonel’s first experience of actual war. It was also the first check the French had so far received in the Netherlands, which is also significant in the light of after events.

After that he commanded the rear-guard in the retreat to the British transports at Bremen. He did his duty as well as the hopeless carelessness and incompetency of those over and above him permitted. “It was a perfect marvel,” he said afterwards, “how a single man of us escaped,” from which it will be gathered that British military genius and discipline were somewhat at a discount during the campaign which we may regard as the prelude to the stupendous struggle which was to culminate on the field of Waterloo.

When Colonel Wesley got home he did a very curious thing. He asked to be allowed to resign his commission and to be given some post, however humble, in the Civil Service. It is easy to see from his letter of application to Lord Camden that he was utterly disgusted with the Army, or rather with the way in which it was mismanaged. He also felt, as he distinctly says, that he had in him the makings of a successful financier, and certainly if great business capacity, instantaneous knowledge of men, unequalled power of organisation, and absolutely tireless energy are the principal requisites for commercial success, Arthur Wesley might have died a millionaire.

Happily, however, Lord Camden refused to grant his request. No doubt the Earl of Mornington had something to say about it and good officers were quite rare enough just then to make the abilities of the Colonel of the 33rd fairly conspicuous. Soon after this he had an attack of yellow fever in Ireland, probably by infection, which very nearly killed him. Just at this time too, that is to say the end of 1795, an expedition was organised to the West Indies and the 33rd were to form part of it.

It is interesting to us with our wind-defying monsters of steel and steam to learn that the squadron tried for six weeks to get out of the Channel and then had to come back. By this time the destination of the expedition had been changed from the West to the East Indies. The Colonel of the 33rd was too ill to sail with his regiment. A swift frigate enabled him to overtake it at the Cape; but for all that he was nearly thirteen months before he got to Calcutta.

Arthur Wellesley, as he now began to sign himself, although nothing more in the eyes of his comrades and commanders than a Colonel of Foot who was a good disciplinarian and a promising soldier, had now entered that theatre on the stage of which he was to play a brilliant part to a world-wide audience.

Nearly thirteen years before Warren Hastings had finished his work and gone home to take his reward in impeachment and ruin. The brilliant administration of Lord Cornwallis and the less conspicuous rule of Sir John Shore were now to be followed by a double command which was to extend, complete, and crown the great work of empire-making in the East which had begun when Robert Clive left his desk to go and capture Arcot.

A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Calcutta, his brilliant brother, the Earl of Mornington took his seat on the Viceregal throne. No happier combination could well have been possible. The elder brother was a scholar, a statesman, and a broad-minded man of affairs. The younger was, even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, and Waterloo.

The two acted in perfect unison. There was none of that bungling timidity and incompetency in high places which confused the counsels and crippled the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and the result was, as might have been expected, a succession of triumphs won, be it noted, not only by consummate generalship, but also by incessant vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organisation.

These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, in the crushing of the Mahratta power--the last serious obstacle to the universality of British rule in India--on the memorial field of Assaye.

It was a magnificent combination of courage, calculation, and generalship. With a force of five thousand men and eighteen guns and with only two thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley defeated and utterly cut up an army of over forty thousand men and an artillery force of a hundred guns, and these, too, were the finest native fighting troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours after the first assault the five thousand had conquered the forty thousand and captured a hundred and two guns and all the stores and ammunition, and it should always be remembered that Assaye was a very different business to Plassey. It was a battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather than a farce. Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred were killed and wounded, and of the three thousand natives, who fought magnificently as they have ever since done in company with British troops, there were no less than sixteen hundred killed and wounded.

As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was wanted, and that was usually in the thick of the fight. But there is another fact which gives us a glimpse of the great general who was the master spirit of the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought the battle of Assaye at the end of a twenty-four mile march, and no military force that is not commanded by a military genius could do that.

There were other actions after Assaye, but it was there that the final blow was really struck. Holkar, it is true, had seemed to turn the tide for the time, but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally crumpled him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of the 33rd, now Sir Arthur Wellesley, sailed from Madras in the frigate _Tridant_. We may pause to note that in the following July he wrote from the Island of St. Helena to tell his brother that his health, which had been very bad, was now restored.

He said: “I was wasting away daily, and latterly when at Madras, I found my strength failed which had before held out.” If his strength really had failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would never have known its most distinguished resident.

A short time after, Wellington returned to England--he was known just then as the “Sepoy General”--William Pitt remarked that he was at a loss which most to admire--his modesty or his talents, and he added that “he had never met with any military officer with whom it was so satisfactory to converse.” This was a saying both accurate and just, and it must be admitted that there is a very considerable difference between the dispatches which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington sent home after his greatest victories.

It was during this brief stay at home that the one little romance of Wellington’s life had a happy “finis” written to it. In the days before he had given any public sign of the great genius that was in him, he had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, a daughter of Lord Longford. Not possibly without apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford came to the conclusion that he was an altogether ineligible person, and refused their consent, and Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate but not despairing.

It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder just before he returned, and read a letter in which Lady Catherine tells him that such beauty as she had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter still to know that this information by no means cooled his ardour to get home, and that when he did come back a Major-General, the victor in many fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my Lady had reversed their decision, and the course of true love was allowed to run with perfectly satisfactory smoothness.

Just before this he entered Parliament as member for Rye, on the invitation of Lord Grenville. One didn’t need much more than the invitation of a powerful minister to get into Parliament in those days. At Westminster he distinguished himself chiefly as the vindicator of his brother’s policy in India, and, more than this, he used his pen, which was not much addicted to flourishes, but nevertheless wrote good, strong, nervous English, to the same good purpose. There is one sentence in an open letter to his brother which exactly sums up the situation.

“By your firmness and decision you have not only saved, but enlarged and secured the invaluable Empire entrusted to your government at a time when everything else was a wreck, and the existence even of Great Britain was problematic.”

Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they do from the man who won the battle of Assaye and established, let us hope for ever, the British Empire in India.

All the same he doesn’t seem to have liked this talking business in Parliament at all, for in a letter written in July, 1806, he says: “You will have seen that I am in Parliament, and a difficult and most unpleasant game I have had to play in the present extraordinary state of parties.” From this it will be seen that Arthur Wellesley, like any other good man of action and capable Empire-Maker, had a wholesome contempt for the miserable and sordid game which is called party politics.

All the same we find him a few months afterwards as Chief Secretary for Ireland, buying, that is to say bribing and corrupting with open candour and unconcealed disgust, a sufficiency of votes and influence to keep the Ministry in power. He said plainly: “Almost every man of mark in the state has his price.” And when he was taxed with bribery and corruption, he remarked with that marvellous insight of his, that an inquiry into such practices would open up the whole theory of constitutional government.

We are supposed to have improved ourselves out of the venality of buying and selling votes and seats, at any rate for cash down, but we still bribe and we still corrupt. There are still titles for rich men who will spend lavishly to support their party, there are still innumerable advantages for the tradesman, and the contractor who are loyal to their party and their ticket, and so it will be while constitutional government and human nature remain what they are; but for all that we may learn a good deal from a remark like this made by a man who was so absolutely incorruptible that when he was made Captain-General of the Spanish Army, he refused to draw his salary, and who later on when his justly grateful country presented him with an estate, paid the rent of it into the Treasury as long as the war lasted.

It is not often, even among the great ones of the earth, that you meet with an absolutely honest man, but there is no doubt about Wellington.

After a little subordinate foreign service in Denmark, in which he distinguished himself as usual, he went back to the Irish office for about eight months. This particular eight months was a very critical period indeed, and looking back at the facts across a gulf of eighty years, one is inclined to wonder how it was that no better work could be found for the already well-proved genius of Arthur Wellesley than the ordinary routine work which a very much smaller man could have done, if not as well, at least sufficiently well. It will have been noticed more than once by those who have managed to get through the foregoing pages, that one of the greatest and most dangerous faults of British officialism, has been the employment of giants to do the work of pigmies. But officialism would not be official if it were not dull, so I suppose there is no help for it. One of the elements of greatness is the faculty of recognising greatness in others, and officialism is very seldom great.

This was the year 1807, and that is the same thing as saying that it was the period which marked the zenith of Napoleon’s power. The little cadet of Artillery who had been teaching the raw republicans of France how to construct fortifications, and how to knock them down, while Arthur Wellesley was training the 33rd Foot, was now Emperor of the French.

More than that, he was practically master of Europe. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural mountains he had not a single foe left in arms. Some he had crushed, others he had over-awed or conciliated, but all the nations of Europe were either his subjects or his forced allies. Nelson, it is true, had made Britain the mistress of the seas, but, saving only these little islands of ours, it must be confessed that Napoleon was master of the land.

There was, however, just one weak point, one loose joint, as it were, in the armour of the conquering Colossus who now bestrode the Continent from one end to the other.

If you take the map of Europe you will see that Portugal is a very small patch on it, and yet if it had not been for Portugal being just where it is, and if there had not been such a man as Sir Arthur Wellesley ready to turn its geographical advantages to the best possible use, Napoleon would very probably have ended his career on a throne, instead of on that lonely island in the Atlantic.

This is not the place for me to attempt to redescribe the long glories of the Peninsular War. In the first place, to do so would necessitate more pages than I have paragraphs at my disposal; and, in the second place, are they not already painted with a worthy splendour on the glowing pages of Napier and Allison?

But what does fall within the scope of such a sketch as this is the business of pointing out a fact which the school books say nothing about. The work that Wellington did in the Peninsula was of two sorts. He not only saw the weak joint in Napoleon’s armour and struck hard and straight at it. He did a great deal more than that.

The genius of his combinations, the tenacity of his purpose, and that inspired confidence which practically doubled the effectiveness of his fighting force, compelled Napoleon to employ his greatest generals, and some of his finest troops in the work of “flinging the English into the sea,” as he himself phrased it.

“There is nothing,” he told his marshals over and over again, “there is nothing to be reckoned with except the English.” And it may be added that if the English had not been led by such a man as he who was now Viscount Wellington and Baron Douro the reckoning might have been a somewhat short one.

The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of Wellington’s genius is not to be seen so much in the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and Salamanca, or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. It is to be found rather in the fact that Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the three finest marshals of the Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after campaign, fighting battle after battle, and suffering defeat after defeat, in the hopeless effort to do what it was absolutely necessary to be done if the conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more than a passing dream of empire.

Thus, for instance, when at the end of the campaign of 1810, Masséna finally retired upon Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he had engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer by no fewer than thirty thousand men. We have simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have been able to do if he had only had all these men free to work his will upon Continental troops and win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena, instead of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, and army after army, to dash themselves to pieces against that unbreakable phalanx of British valour and determination which the genius of Wellington had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier.

Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and tremendous as were the sacrifices which France submitted to for his sake, all the genius even of Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood of the Napoleonic system was draining away through that open wound in the Peninsula. But for this there would have been no Leipsic, and probably no Moscow, no Waterloo, and no St. Helena.

The most splendid military triumph in the history of the world is the uninterrupted march of victory made by Wellington and the soldiers whom his genius had made unconquerable for more than a thousand miles from the lines of Torres Vedras to the banks of the Seine. But behind the brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is something better still, something which Napoleon himself was first to see, and this was the supreme genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity which carried out, without one hitch or fault from start to finish, that marvellous series of operations which began with the first move of the pawns at Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate at Waterloo.

Although, as I say, it would be quite out of the question to attempt to draw even the briefest outline of these magnificent campaigns, yet there are one or two incidents in them which may be looked at in passing for the sake of the glimpses they afford of the man in the midst of his work, and, few though they may be, there is yet more real knowledge to be got from them than from many pages of descriptions of battles and sieges.

Thus, for instance, shortly after he landed for the second time in Portugal there was a conspiracy among the French officers to depose Marshal Soult, and one of these men came to Wellington across the Douro to tell him of this so that he might make their work easier by a crushing defeat. This might have been of enormous advantage to him, but he refused point blank to avail himself of such base assistance, and sent the traitor back to the master whom he had betrayed. He was not the man to work by methods like this. He had his own methods, and so effectual were they that ten days after he had landed at Lisbon there was not a single French soldier on Portuguese soil who was not a prisoner of war.

A month afterwards Napoleon writing to Soult and Ney said: “You are to advance on the English, pursue them without cessation, beat them and fling them into the sea. The English alone are redoubtable--they alone. If the army is not differently managed, before the lapse of a few months they will bring upon it a catastrophe.” How prophetic these words were a glance at the splendidly inscribed colours of the British Peninsular Regiments will amply suffice to show.

As usual, Wellington in the Peninsula, like Nelson in the Mediterranean, was forced by the incompetence or imbecility of the authorities at home to do his tremendous work with most inadequate means. In Spain the people whom he had come to save refused his soldiers food, and those at home, whom he was no less fighting to save, refused him money enough to buy it. In a letter written in January, 1811, he put the position very plainly.

“If we cannot persevere in carrying on the contest in the Peninsula or elsewhere on the Continent we must prepare to make one of our own islands the seat of war. I am equally certain that if Buonaparte cannot root us out of this country he must alter his system in Europe and give us such a peace as we ought to accept.”

This was the work that he had to do and did, and here is a glimpse of the means he had to do it with. “I have not,” he says in the same letter, “authority to give a shilling or a stand of arms or a round of ammunition to anybody. I do give all, it is true, but it is contrary to my instructions and at my peril. Not another officer in the army would even look at the risks that I have to incur every day.” There are not many more eloquent pictures than this of a man serving his country and saving it in spite of itself.

Like all good generals, Wellington insisted upon absolute obedience, and nothing could excuse in his eyes even the most splendid breach of discipline. After the taking of Ciudad Rodrigo, General Crawford, the leader of the famous Light Division, had been ordered not to push his operations beyond the river Coa, but he forgot his instructions in the temptation to make a splendid dash at an overwhelming force under Ney.

Nothing but the magnificent valour and discipline of the Division saved it from utter destruction. Still it was saved, and when its gallant leader reported himself to Wellington he said: “I am glad to see you safe, Crawford.”

“Oh, we were in no danger I can assure you!” was the answer.