Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

      AS SOON AS he landed at Lisbon, ‘the most Horrible Place that ever was seen’,¹ Wellesley threw himself into work on those administrative details which he always regarded as essential to the proper conduct of a military campaign. He turned his attention to bullock carts and food supplies, to horse transport and forage, to blankets and kettles. He commandeered all the boats he could lay his hands on so that Marshal Soult, whose army was quartered in and around Oporto, some two hundred miles to the north, could not attack him across the Tagus; and he arranged for all his brigades to have a company of riflemen attached to them.

      He had studied the way in which France’s Revolutionary armies had swept across the plains of Central Europe in dense columns behind a screen of voltigeurs and tirailleurs, both protective and destructive. Their new formations had proved highly effective against the ranks of infantry that opposed them. Wellesley had also studied the tactics employed in the forests of America by Colonel Bouquet, the brilliant Swiss officer who commanded the 60th (Royal American) Regiment, later the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and who had taught his men to fight the French as the American Rangers had done, not as unthinking parts of a clumsy whole but as intelligent men with individual duties to perform in a scheme of warfare that had no rigid rules.²

      The Duke of York, always ready to listen to new ideas as a reforming Commander-in-Chief, had instructed various regiments to send officers and men for a course of instruction in light infantry tactics at the newly created camp of the Experimental Rifle Corps at Horsham. Two years later, in 1801, the 95th Regiment (later the Rifle Brigade) was formed and the green jackets which the men wore so proudly gave a name to their own and other regiments which were to become among the finest in the Army.

      Wellesley had cause to regret that so many of the soldiers in his regiments of the line were far from being as good soldiers as his companies of riflemen. Several of the best battalions in the Army had been held in England for a proposed – and, as it was to prove that summer, disastrous – attempt to send troops up the Scheldt to seize Antwerp from the French; and in the British army in Portugal there were many soldiers, a large proportion of them Irish, whom Wellesley considered, as he was to say of those of a later army, ‘the scum of the earth’. ‘We are not naturally a military people,’ he wrote; ‘the whole business of the army upon service is foreign to our habits … particularly in a poor country like this.’³ Yet he saw in that poverty an advantage since the French armies would find it difficult to raise supplies in enemy territory, as was their usual method, while the British could be supplied by sea and the navigable rivers of Portugal.⁴

      So Wellesley marched north with confidence against Marshal Soult who he knew had lost the trust of many of his officers and was in a bitter dispute with his fellow Marshal, the brilliant, courageous and temperamental Michel Ney. Wellesley had learned about this dispute from a traitorous French officer, Captain d’Argenton, who crept into the British lines to inform the General that Soult – who had already been created duc de Dalmatie and now had ambitions to declare himself King of Northern Lusitania – was to be deprived of his command in a mutiny. Wellesley, sceptical but curious, listened to d’Argenton in the flickering light of a camp fire; he provided him with papers to assist him in his conspiracy, but assured Castlereagh, who had advised him to treat d’Argenton cautiously, that he ‘would not wait for revolt’. Instead he would try his ‘own means of subduing Soult’.⁵

      On the road north the British army and its Portuguese allies were greeted enthusiastically by the people of the towns and villages through which they passed. Flowers were thrown upon them from windows and cups of wine pressed into their eager hands. They reached the Douro beneath the cliffs of Oporto in the second week of May. It was a broad river here; but Soult had not ensured – as Wellesley had by the Tagus – that no boats could be found by the enemy. The British troops were ferried across in daylight, thirty at a time, in wine-barges which had been discovered concealed from view beneath overhanging cliffs by a Portuguese barber; and Soult, who had no idea that the British were so close, was sent flying out of the town in the pouring rain, abandoning guns and stores, as well as chests of bullion, sick soldiers in the town’s hospitals and an excellent meal which General Wellesley and his staff ate instead.

      The French army, in a retreat almost as arduous as Sir John Moore’s to Corunna, struggled through the harsh landscape of Tras os Montes into Spain, stragglers from their columns being attacked by Portuguese peasants who, in retaliation for the cruelties inflicted upon their people in the villages through which the French passed, burned wounded men alive, pushing them into piles of burning straw with pitchforks.

      ‘The ball is now at my foot,’ Wellesley wrote contentedly having cleared the French out of Portugal, inflicting upon them losses of over 4,000 men, ‘and I hope I shall have strength enough to give it a good kick.’⁶ He could not speak highly of his allies. He believed that, had the Portuguese been ‘worth their salt’, the French might well not have escaped from Oporto.⁷ His Spanish allies seemed to promise no better, when, because of an officer’s oversight and a misleading map, the British General arrived late for a review and had to inspect them by the light of flaring torches. When it came to fighting, he afterwards decided, they were no better than they looked. ‘They would fire a volley while the enemy was out of reach, and then all run away.’ ‘They were, no doubt, individually as brave as other men,’ he conceded. ‘I am sure they were vain enough of their bravery, but I never could get them to stand their ground.’⁸ It was largely the fault of their officers, he decided on another occasion. ‘This would ruin any soldiers – and how should the Spaniards have confidence in officers such as theirs?’*⁹

      As for the guerrillas, they looked formidable enough with their fierce moustaches, their heavy belts and bands of ammunition strung round their waists and across their shoulders beneath heavy cloaks; but, while he did not doubt their bravery, he could not but wonder how reliable they might prove to be.†

      The Spanish generals, too, their medals clanking on their exotic uniforms, were an unknown quantity, although it was at least certain that the one with whom Sir Arthur had so far had the closest contact – the aged, frail and very vain Don Gregorio Garcia de la Cuesta, Captain-General of Estremadura, ‘as obstinate as a gentleman at the head of an army needs to be’ – had led his troops far less often to victory than to defeat.¹⁰

      Wellesley was asked for his opinion of another Spanish General, Francisco de Castaños, who had brought about the surrender of Dupont’s troops at Bailén. Surely he was an able man?

      ‘Oh, no, no!’ he said, ‘lowering his voice and gently shaking his head as he usually did whenever giving an opinion unfavourable to any one.’¹¹

      If Don Gregorio and Francisco de Castaños and their troops did not impress him, Sir Arthur was still little more content with his own men, despite their success at Oporto. On the march towards Spain they behaved abominably. ‘They have plundered the country most terribly,’ he had to report. ‘I have long been of the opinion that a British army could bear neither success nor failure, and I have had manifest truth of this opinion in the recent conduct of the soldiers of this army … They are a rabble.’*¹²

      He endeavoured to bring discipline into the ranks by the most severe punishments, issuing and repeating orders that the first man caught in the act of plundering should be hanged on the spot.¹³ But, as he related years later, he was ‘famously taken in on one occasion’:

       One day just as we were sitting down to dinner three men were brought to the door of the tent by the prévôt. The case against them was clear, and I had nothing for it but to desire that they should be led away, and hanged in some place where they might be seen by the whole column in its march next day. I had a good many guests with me on that occasion, and among the rest, I think, Lord Nugent. They seemed dreadfully shocked, and could not eat their dinner. I didn’t like it much myself, but, as I told them, I had no time to indulge my feelings, I must do my duty. Well, the dinner went off rather gravely, and next morning, sure enough, three men in uniform were seen hanging from