WELLINGTON.*
No character in history is more interesting than that of the Duke of Wellington, so great are its contrasts, so unique is the combination of qualities exhibited, and so strange are the problems it raises. In certain ways the Duke of Wellington was an ideal man of war. Yet no great soldier before or since has possessed so little of the heroic in his nature. The Duke took the field as a man goes to business, intent on winning, but under no illusions as regards the subject of his operations. The explanation of this attitude towards the work of his life is not to be found in the fact that the Duke was a cynic. He was not that, but merely a superlatively hard, cold, unsympathetic man, who liked to keep truth and reality, or what he called truth and reality, before his mind, and to trample on sentimental nonsense. It was exactly the mental standpoint of the unimaginative old- fashioned British merchant, whose own absolute rectitude of purpose and behaviour was balanced by a contemptuous disbelief in the rest of the world. Contrast for a moment the way Nelson and Wellington spoke of the forces under their command. Nelson, after the battle of the Nile, is brimming over with sympathy and affection for the men and officers who had dared and done so much under his orders. "It was my happiness," he says, writing to his official superiors,. "to command a band of brothers." The following is what Wellington says of the troops who had just won for him • Tha Rise of Wellington. By General Lord Roberta, V.O. With Portraits ar.d Plans. London : Sampson Low ano 0..). 1805. the battle of Vittoria :—" We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers; and of late years we have been doing everything in our power to relax the discipline by which alone such men can be kept in order. The non-commissioned officers are as bad as the men. It is really a disgrace to have anything to say to such men as some of our soldiers are."
After the capture of Oporto he had broken forth into similar grumblings :—" have long been of opinion that a British
army could bear neither success nor failure.' And again : 4 The army behave terribly ill. They are a rabble who cannot bear success any more than Sir John Moore's army could bear failure. I am endeavouring to tame them." Officers as well as men are involved in his condemnation :—" Nobody in the British army ever reads an order as if it were to be a guide for his conduct, or in any other manner than as an amusing novel, and the consequence is that, when complicated arrange- ments are to be carried into execution, every gentleman proceeds according to his fancy; and then, when it is found that the arrangement fails, they come upon me to set matters to rights, and thus my labour is increased ten- fold." Remember, too, that these expressions were not merely used in the heat and excitement of action. They were pub- lished twenty-three years afterwards with the Duke's approval. His attitude towards the Army at the close of the war was equally unsympathetic. After he had retired from active business, he seemed anxious to show the world that he was a man of high fashion, a statesman, a great noble,—anything but a great soldier. After 1815, he never cared to associate with his former companions in arms, but considered that he had done Trite enough for the tiresome old Generals and Colonels who had supported him so loyally, if he invited them once a year to a Waterloo banquet. Gleig tells us, for example, that "neither Lord Hill, nor Lord Raglan, nor Sir George Murray, ever visited the Duke at Strathfieldsaye ; nor could they or others of similar standing, such as Lord Anglesey, Sir Edward Paget and Sir James Kempt, be reckoned among the habitues of his hospitable gatherings in Apsley House. The circle in which he chiefly moved was that of fashionable ladies and gentlemen, who pressed them- selves upon him, and were flattered, as indeed they had much reason to be, with the notice which he took of them, and by his presence at their parties." But, after all, his attacks on his men are the worse trait. It was not as if the abstract love of truth obliged the Duke to traduce the men he commanded. There were, of course, a certain percentage of undesirable men in the ranks, but we know from Napier's Peninsular War that the ordinary private of those days was in essentials an exceedingly fine fellow. It was the Duke's iciness and hardness, and a certain native superciliousness—the one quality in which he was an Irish aristocrat—which made him call his army "the scum of the earth," not any real justification in the demeanour of the men. They doubtless drank, cursed, and showed a certain brutality of demeanour, but so did the Duke's colleagues .in the House of Lords or the House of Commons.
A very interesting study of Wellington, with many curious side-lights on his character, is supplied by Lord Roberts's little book, The Rise of Wellington. Here a soldier, as sympa- thetic to his men as the Duke was unsympathetic, discusses with a soldier's eye and a soldier's plainness and frankness the main points of Wellington's career, and deplores, as we have done, the Duke's attacks upon the men who served under him. Possibly the fastidious reader may declare that it is lacking in literary finish. For ourselves we can only say that we have found it none the worse for that, but instead, regard it as a very readable and inspiriting piece of work. Specially good are the quotations from things said by the Duke himself, or of him by his immediate contemporaries. Lord Roberts contrives in one of these quotations to put his finger upon the secret of Wellington's success. This is what was said of Wellington in 1802 by a young officer of the East India Company's Service, writing to his friends in England : —"Everything goes well, because Colonel Wellesley is in command. Whatever he undertakes he does admirably. Perhaps it was hardly fair to employ him rather than General —, but we are all delighted to have him at our head, he makes us so confident and so comfortable." 4' He makes us so confident and so comfortable." That was Wellington's secret. The men who fought under him always felt sure he would win, and knew at the same time that they
would never be made to feel that they were suffering hardships and miseries which a, little forethought could have prevented. It was indeed one of the chief paradoxes in Wellington's career that, while he called his men "the scum of the earth," he always endeavoured to secure for them every possible comfort. The confidence of his subordinates in Wellington was matched by his confidence in himself. He was the only man after 1800 who faced the French armies without a sense that Napoleon was somehow or other invincible :—
" Just before he left England for Portugal, in 1808, he re- marked The French have beaten all the world, and are sup- posed to be invincible. They have besides, it seems, a new system, which has ontmanceuvred and overwhelmed all the armies of Europe. But no matter, my die is cast. They may overwhelm, but I don't think they will outmanceuvre me. In the first place, I am not afraid of them, as everybody else seems to be; and secondly, if what I hear of their system of manceuvre be true, I think it a false one against troops steady enough, as I hope mine are, to receive them with the bayonet. I suspect that all the Continental armies were more than half beaten before the battle began.'"
On the care with which the Duke considered the question of making his men comfortable, we need not dwell. We will quote instead a delightful story of the Duke's extraordinary readiness in repartee :— "The Court, the Ministers, and the chief officers of the French army behaved towards Wellington [in Paris in 1815] with a cold- ness which sometimes amounted to discourtesy. On one occasion, when he was attending a Levee, the Marshals present barely acknowledged his greetings, and after a short interval, walked away from him in a body. Louis XVIII. had grace enough to apologise for this act of rudeness, whereupon Wellington made the apt reply= Your Majesty need not distress yourself. It is not the first time they have turned their backs on me.'
We will end our notice of this attractive little book by quoting Lord Roberts's general estimate of Wellington as a commander
:- "The place I should be inclined to assign to Wellington as a general would be one in the very first rank—equal, if not superior, to that given to Napoleon. In estimating the comparative merits of these illustrious rivals, it may be conceded that the schemes of the French Emperor were more comprehensive, his genius more dazzling, and his imagination more vivid than Wellington's. On the other hand, the latter excelled in that coolness of judgment which Napoleon himself described as 'the foremost quality in a general.' It must also be remembered that, as soon as Napoleon had attained supreme power in France, the whole resources of that country and of a great part of the Continent were at his disposal. He could raise enormous armies, incur vast expenditure, and sacrifice large numbers of troops in carrying out his plans. Moreover, he was absolutely unfettered in his selection of the best qualified officers for commands and staff appointments. Developing a system of tactics which proved extremely effective against his Continental enemies, and until his last campaign only opposed by second-rate generals, Napoleon gained victories so decisive and overwhelming that for a time he was believed to be invincible. His presence on the field of battle was regarded as equivalent to a force of forty thousand men. Wellington's operations, on the other hand, were hampered by the vacillation and timidity of the British Government of the day, his resources were limited, his army was generally outnumbered by the enemy, the reinforcements he asked for were seldom forthcoming, and incompetent generals and staff officers were forced upon him by the Horse Guards. Above all, he must have felt that a single mistake or disaster would probably lead to his own removal from the chief command, and to the termination of the struggle in which he was engaged. Under these unfavourable conditions he never lost confidence. As he remarked before starting for the Peninsula, he was not afraid of the French, although he knew that they were capital soldiers. Believing that their tactics would be unsuccessful against troops steady enough to fight in line, he adopted the extended formation which gave full effect to the accurate fire and resolute courage of his infantry. Through- out the Peninsular War he outmanoeuvred and outfought the ablest of the French marshals. Finally, in the Waterloo campaign, while Napoleon made many mistakes, Vi ellington made none."
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