Wellington: A Personal History. Christopher Hibbert

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 them and ‘delay their success’, the more likely they would be ‘to suffer materially in Spain’.³⁵

      He did not underestimate his opponent. Marshal Andrea Massena, due de Rivoli and prince d’Essling, born in Nice, the son of a wine merchant in a poor way of business, had enlisted in the Royal Italian Regiment at the age of seventeen, after serving as a cabin boy. At the outbreak of the French Revolution he had been a sergeant at Antibes. Scarcely more than three years later he was a general. He had greatly distinguished himself in Italy, in Switzerland and in Austria, had helped Napoleon to win the battle of Marengo and had paid a crucial part in the battle of Wagram. He was one of the Emperor’s most successful marshals. Indeed, Wellington considered him the ‘ablest after Napoleon’.*³⁶ He was not as alert as once he had been, however, and was said not only to be in poor health but also distracted from his duties by his demanding mistress whom, to the annoyance of his generals, he had brought to the Peninsula with him, dressed in the uniform of an aide-de-camp.³⁷ Wellington believed he could out-manoeuvre him.

16 From Bussaco to El Bodon

       1810 – 11

       ‘The whole ground was still covered with the wrecks of an army.’

      MASSENA CAME on steadily with some 70,000 men; and Wellington, sorely outnumbered, withdrew beyond the Coa towards the valley of the Mondego, Robert Craufurd, commanding the rearguard and leading it in an unnecessarily aggressive way, repeatedly attacking the leading French columns and losing men to little purpose. After the loss of the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo to Massena’s dashing second-in-command, Marshal Ney, Wellington hoped to make a stand at Almeida – a fortress twenty-five miles west of Ciudad Rodrigo on the other side of the Spanish frontier – which Massena began to bombard on 26 August 1810. But an enemy shell ignited a trail of gunpowder which