Chapter IX: Wellington (2)

The campaign of 1812, notwithstanding the disastrous retreat from Burgos, was nevertheless ruinous in its effects to the French. Salamanca had been a decisive defeat; the Imperial commanders had not attacked Wellington, falling back with a much weaker force; the invaders had permanently quitted the south; above all, the precarious nature of Napoleon’s power in the Peninsula had been clearly established. In this position of affairs, the tremendous tale of the destruction of the Grand Army in Russia fell with immense effect on the minds of men; it raised the hopes of Wellington to the highest pitch--he had always foretold that some catastrophe would befall Napoleon in his career of conquest--it animated his troops with fresh confidence; it sent a thrill of exultation through Spain and Portugal; it awed and paralyzed the leaders of the French armies. By this time Wellington had all England at his back; he was supreme in Portugal, and swayed the Regency by the glory of success, by his administrative power, by his impartial justice to the Portuguese race; and he was made Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish armies, and disposed for the first time of the military strength of Spain, in spite of the clamour of factions in the distracted Cortes against a “heretic and domineering foreigner.” He was now able to place in the field forces nearly equal in numbers to his foes, and in the spring of 1813 he had his preparations made for a great effort to set the Peninsula free. The Imperial armies, however, were still formidably strong, from 190,000 to 200,000 men; they were superior to the Spanish and Portuguese levies, and as we look back at the course of events, we see that even now, had they been ably led, they possibly might have achieved success, and certainly might have avoided disaster. But they were ill-distributed on the theatre of war; Suchet, in the east, had by far too large a force; Soult had left Spain, deprived of his command; Jourdan and Joseph were very inferior men; the strength of the army confronting Wellington on the frontier was by no means sufficient; the guerrilla rising was more fierce than ever; and the French commanders had lost hope and confidence. The general plan of Wellington was to assail the enemy from many points, in order to distract and detain his forces, and at the same time to fall in great strength on the exposed line of the communications of the French; and though faults may, perhaps, be found in his strategy, the conception was fine, and was admirably carried out. Suchet was held in check by Murray with a small body of men; Joseph, who had returned to Madrid, was menaced from the south; a large Spanish army was assembled in the north; and, meanwhile, Wellington prepared the master stroke on which he relied for final success. His army, now about 90,000 strong, advanced from the frontier in the last days of May, divided into three great masses on a wide front, with hill ranges between; its chief gave an opportunity, perhaps, but there was no great warrior to cross his path. It had soon mastered the line of the Douro, driving before it foes much weaker in numbers; it gradually united, joined hands with the levies of the north, and found a new base on the Biscayan seaboard in the English fleet; and then it seized the main avenues between France and Spain, and sped in full force to the Upper Ebro. This formidable movement compelled Joseph to evacuate Madrid, and to draw together all available troops to attempt a defence; and the French armies in Castile were ere long concentrated around Vitoria upon the Zadorra--confused masses, already disheartened, and burdened by _impedimenta_ such as never before weighed down unlucky troops in retreat. The battle that followed, fought on the 21st of June, was of enormous importance in its results, but has little interest for the student of war. The French were, perhaps, 70,000 strong; but 15,000 men had been detached to guard convoys, and to secure a retreat; the English commander had about 80,000, and the event was never for a moment doubtful. Nothing could stand against the onset of the British troops, superior in numbers, and flushed with success; their foes fought well, as they always did, and Reille, the descendant of an Irish exile, distinguished himself by skill and valour; but the main road to Bayonne was lost, and the French were gradually thrown back on the mountain roads that extend to the frontier. The beaten army, however, was not hardly pressed; it effected its retreat in fair order, but it lost nearly all its guns and _matériel_, and it left behind the spoils of a ravaged country, accumulated through years of unscrupulous plunder, and strewn over the field in immense profusion.

Vitoria, fitly called the Leipsic of the south, drove all the French armies out of Spain, with the exception of Suchet’s force in the east, and the garrisons of Pampeluna and San Sebastian, reinforced by Joseph before he crossed the Pyrenees. Napoleon, by this time, had made a prodigious effort to retrieve the disasters of the campaign in Russia; France had answered his summons to the field with energy; and he had won great victories at Lützen and Bautzen, followed by the suspension of arms at Pleistwitz. Austria now held the balance between the belligerent Powers; she had long inclined to the allied cause, but she dreaded Napoleon, and held aloof until Vitoria determined her purpose and she threw in her lot with the Coalition which, in a few months, overthrew the Emperor. The campaign of 1813 in Spain, therefore, was really of supreme importance, and a word of comment should be pronounced upon it. The general plan of Wellington was, perhaps, to be justified, as affairs stood; it was his only offensive combination on a grand scale; it was perfectly executed, and it was completely successful. Yet it was no masterpiece of science or genius. The movements by which the old base of Portugal was thrown off, and a new base acquired, and by which the French armies were ever outflanked and their communications threatened and seized, and the march on Vitoria, have been justly admired; but the wide dislocation of Wellington’s forces as they left the frontier was, in theory, a fault, and it would have given Turenne or Napoleon an immense chance, which they would have turned to such advantage that the course of events might have been changed at the outset. The splendour of the result cannot conceal the fact that the issue of the campaign was rather due to the incapacity and the demoralization of the French commanders than to conspicuous excellence in the strategy of their foe. Could they have defended the line of the Douro, as Bonaparte had defended the line of the Adige, nay, had they fallen back on the Ebro in time, and concentrated their still fine armies for a decisive battle on equal terms, they might even yet have repulsed Wellington, and assuredly they would not have lost Spain. This was Napoleon’s judgment, and, in this instance, I think it certainly was correct; his views on the military situation in Spain in 1813 are worthy of him; and here, again, had he been in command, events would probably have taken a different turn. He was naturally indignant at the rout of Vitoria; and having summarily got rid of Joseph and Jourdan, he sent Soult, with extensive powers, to the Pyrenees, to take the command of his shattered forces, and to endeavour at least to defend the frontier. The next phase of the contest is of extreme interest, and deserves careful and impartial study. Soult found the French army--a confused wreck of armies--in a pitiable state of want and despondency; and his first care was to secure a base at Bayonne, and to reorganize and restore his defeated forces. He effected a great deal in a few weeks, for he was an administrator of no ordinary powers; and by the close of July he had his preparations made to assume the offensive with happy promise.

At this time the forces of Wellington--altogether about 70,000 strong--were before Pampeluna and San Sebastian, and along the range of the western Pyrenees; and this gave Soult--he was about equal in force--an extremely favourable opportunity to attack, for he commanded the passes which led from the plains. He concentrated a very superior force against his adversary’s right, concealing the movement with great skill; and his first operations had real success; he fairly bore back the weak hostile wing, and he nearly reached Pampeluna and relieved the garrison. But Wellington, always ready on the ground, was too quick for an enemy able in thought but in execution rather dull and weak; he raised the siege of San Sebastian and reinforced his right; Soult attacked at Sauroren, and was repulsed, one of his lieutenants, D’Erlon, being not up in time, on this as on a far greater occasion; the ascendency of unbroken success did the rest, and in a subsequent effort the French Marshal was nearly surrounded at the head of his troops. He recrossed the frontier, a well-designed plan having ended in heavy loss and discomfiture.

The English commander, free from attack for a time, now resolved to take Pampeluna and San Sebastian before attempting to invade France. This conduct has been described as timid, and it enabled Soult to prepare large means of defence, but obviously it was judicious and right; the issue of the war in Saxony was still uncertain, and should Soult be joined by Suchet they would be in great strength. San Sebastian made a protracted resistance, but the place was stormed in the second week of September, Soult having tried in vain to relieve it, and Pampeluna fell at the close of October. Wellington had invaded France a short time previously, and it should be observed that he crossed the frontier before Leipsic, and months before the Allies were on the Rhine. The time spent in the sieges had, nevertheless, given Soult opportunities which he had made the most of; he had constructed lines on the Bidassoa and Nivelle, the last almost as strong as those of Torres Vedras, and he awaited his enemy in a situation like that of Villars in 1710–11. His army, however, had lost heart, and was crowded with rude levies and mutinous Germans; he had not the inspiration of the renowned Villars, and nothing could stand against the overpowering force of the British soldiery in the full pride of victory. Wellington carried the lines in the second week of November, displaying great skill in his dispositions for the attack, and before long he had approached Bayonne, on the confluence of the Nive and the Adour, where Soult had entrenched himself in very strong positions. The British commander, perhaps over confident, perhaps from the want of strategic genius--this undoubtedly was characteristic of him--escaped narrowly a severe reverse; he had divided his army upon the Nive, and Soult, availing himself of his command of the rivers, and of the interior line he possessed, fell on his adversary with skill in design, and tried to overwhelm his separated foes. The peril of Wellington was great for a time, but Soult had the manner of Napoleon, not his masterly power; he did not press the attack home, and his troops were beaten by the tenacity of the British footmen. A pause in the operations followed, and had the Emperor, even at this supreme crisis, ordered Suchet to come into line with Soult, abandoning Spain, now really lost, the French would have been superior in force to Wellington, and affairs might have taken a different aspect. But Napoleon would strike for his whole Empire, a false conception which mars the splendour of the memorable campaign of 1814; he left Suchet in Catalonia, holding the fortresses; the two marshals, besides, did not agree, with the usual tendencies of French commanders; the organized plunder of the French army, in marked contrast with that of the Allies, exasperated the populations of the south against it; the Royalist party began to lift its head after the first defeats of Napoleon in Champagne, and Soult was left isolated to resist Wellington amidst the ruin and crash of a perishing Empire. The British general resumed the offensive in the early spring of 1814; he had won golden opinions, even from the invaded Gascons, for the strict discipline he made his troops observe, for the exactness with which he paid for supplies, for his humane government of the country he held, and though he was not without real difficulties of his own--he was condemned in the Cortes and denounced in Portugal, and he actually sent back a large Spanish detachment because he could not control their excesses--still he was greatly superior in strength to his foe, and his arms were obviously on the verge of triumph. Nevertheless, Soult made an admirable stand; his army was being constantly weakened by drafts for the army on the Marne and Seine; it was oppressed by the prospect of coming defeat, and yet the Marshal proved that he was a real chief, and this is the best part of his chequered career. He disputed stubbornly every inch of the country between the lines of the Adour and the Garonne; he kept Wellington many weeks in check, and though ultimately repulsed with loss, he very nearly won a battle at Orthez, and at last he took a formidable position at Toulouse, still doggedly contending against adverse fortune. The battle was fought on the 10th of April, unhappily after peace had been made; superiority in numbers and the moral power of success explain, and partly justify, Wellington’s tactics; but he risked a flank march of peculiar danger, under the eye of an enemy watching to strike, and had Soult struck home at the decisive moment he probably would have won a victory. The Marshal, however, as was his wont, was remiss in action; the French army was unequal to itself, and Wellington forced his adversary to leave Toulouse, though the battle was really nearly drawn. Toulouse, indeed, adds nothing to his renown as a warrior; his true titles to fame in this campaign are his administrative virtues, and the most significant fact that he detained forces in the south which might have turned the scales of fortune in the struggle in Champagne.

Wellington was back in England in 1814, justly greeted by the acclaim of the nation, raised to the highest honour the Peerage can give, and ever since known as “the Duke” to his countrymen. His exploits, indeed, had been truly great; with an army, swelled no doubt by auxiliaries, but seldom numbering more than 30,000 British troops, he had destroyed the power of Napoleon in Spain and Portugal, backed by 300,000 French veterans, had defeated the best Marshals of France one after the other, had fought his way from the Tagus to the Garonne, had thrown his sword, with effect, into the balance of events trembling in the east of France, had ruled the Peninsula with a far-sighted wisdom, spite of the passions of faction, admired everywhere. The fame of Wellington as a commander depends, beyond question, on his direction of the Peninsular war; and an impartial judgment should be pronounced upon it. We may pass by enthusiasts who ascribe his success to genius never approached in his day, and the notion current seventy years ago that an English soldier can beat three Frenchmen; and we may equally reject the French delusion that Wellington owed everything to the freaks of Fortune. It must be recognized that in the war, small as his force was compared to his foes, he had certain advantages of peculiar value; he had the command of the sea, and of the resources of England; his position in Portugal was formidably strong; he was supported by a vast national rising; he stood in the centre of divided enemies; whereas the French armies, large as they were, had most vulnerable communications to guard, were exposed to swarms of destructive guerrillas, were necessarily separated by vast hill ranges, and, owing mainly to the Napoleonic system of warfare, were unable to muster for any time in strength because they could not subsist in a barren country. These conditions of the strife were all in favour of the British chief, and told powerfully; but this does not in the least detract from his merits; he anticipated them with prophetic insight, and they simply made his defence possible; just as Napoleon’s choice of the Adige enabled him to baffle the whole power of Austria. It should be admitted, too, that throughout the contest he was greatly seconded by the shortcomings of his foes; more than once he ought to have been overwhelmed or crushed, but for the miserable discords of the French marshals; and Napoleon himself played into his hands by his ignorance of events, by his lust of conquest, by the false system of directing war from an immense distance; above all, by his contemptuous disregard of an adversary most unwisely scorned. Yet this, the only meaning of what has been called the “good fortune that attended Wellington,” does not lessen his title to fame; I certainly think, had he had to encounter Napoleon with all the Peninsular armies he would have been forced out of Spain and Portugal, nay, he might have been beaten in 1811, 1812, and 1813; but, tried by this test, we might just as well deny Napoleon genius in war; he would not have won Rivoli, Jena, Austerlitz, had he been opposed to really great captains. Undoubtedly, moreover, in these campaigns the generalship of Wellington was not of as high an order as some eulogists have made it out to be; he committed grave strategic mistakes; his plan for the offensive on a great scale, and at a distance, is not very striking--I refer especially to 1813; his tactics were sometimes far from perfect; he was not masterly in following up success; there is something narrow and contracted in some of his movements. But when this has been said, he gave proof of genius in defence of the rarest kind; his campaign of Torres Vedras reaches the sublime, in conception and execution alike; he was admirable in rapid and bold attack; he was almost always great on the field; his tenacity and judgment are above praise. Add his most remarkable administrative powers, his capacity for ruling foreign races, and his moderation in the hour of success, resembling in this the great warriors of Rome, and we shall understand how he will live in history. A word, too, should be said on his British troops; that army--largely his own creation--which he said--and Wellington was no boaster--“could go anywhere and do anything.” From the first moment his soldiery showed the high qualities of their race, endurance, vigour, fierceness in attack, perseverance in defence, and the skill in the use of their arms of the archers of Crecy. The army, however, was for a time ill-organized; its movements were slow, and it was overburdened with camp-followers and _impedimenta_; its officers, heroes in the fight, were seldom skilful; in short, it was an imperfect instrument of war. It is one of Wellington’s distinctive merits that he made that army, always superior to the French in discipline, fortitude, and steadiness in the field--and this, indeed, is the true reason why its line was able to defeat their columns--equal to the best of Napoleon’s armies--the Emperor has made the admission himself--in readiness, in training, in skill in manœuvring; though Salamanca tends to show that in the power of movement it was not the equal of its most agile foes.

Great as a soldier, but certainly greater as a man, it was the destiny of Wellington in 1815 to meet the most perfect master of modern war. The campaign of Waterloo belongs to the career of Napoleon, and in a sketch of his extraordinary deeds I have endeavoured to retrace its main features. Idle flatterers and the idolaters of success have given Wellington the palm in this mighty conflict, but he knew that he was out-manœuvred, and he did not claim it; and he disliked the subject, when all the facts were known, though he wrote on it in extreme old age. The simple truth is that Blücher and Wellington, considering the enormous hosts being arrayed against him, did not think that Napoleon would spring on Belgium; even their own forces, they well knew, were nearly double those of their foe; and though they made dispositions on the supposition of an attack, these were ill-conceived and essentially faulty. Their armies, in the first place, were spread along an immense line, with divergent bases; in the second, they were scattered up and down Belgium; in the third, they were far too near the frontier, at the points of concentration marked out for them; and in the fourth, the two chiefs were too far from each other, and could not communicate without perilous delays.

Availing himself of these palpable mistakes, Napoleon broke in on the exposed centre of his adversaries with a grandeur of design and a skill in execution never surpassed; he was close to their weak line on the 15th of June, and a single march had placed them in extreme danger. Then came the confusion and the divided counsels common with allied chiefs, and foreseen by their foe. Blücher rushed hastily to confront the Emperor before his army had been drawn together; Wellington, misconceiving the real state of affairs, stopped, hesitated, and left a wide gap open; and an opportunity was afforded to the General of 1796, as favourable as ever was won by genius. But for a series of misadventures I have noticed elsewhere, he ought to have overwhelmed Blücher with ease on the 16th; and, in that event, nothing could have saved Wellington, though the French were only 128,000 against 224,000[30] men. Strategy had only just missed one of its grandest triumphs; in fact, the allied chiefs were all but checkmated, though Wellington made an able stand at Quatre Bras, and this went some way to baffle the Emperor. Napoleon was given another chance on the 17th, by the double retreat on Wavre and Waterloo, which might have proved fatal to both his adversaries; but he was not well, and his lieutenants failed him. Soult, always indolent, was greatly to blame; the retreat of the Prussians was not followed up; Grouchy was detached late to hold Blücher in check; and when Napoleon, true to the principles of the art, turned against Wellington and attained Waterloo, he was not aware that the Prussians were near and were ready to unite with the Duke, mainly owing to the faults of the incapable Grouchy.

The morning of the 18th saw Napoleon and Wellington confronting each other for the first time; the state of the weather, no doubt, gave the British chief an unforeseen advantage. The Emperor’s plan of attack was perfect; but Wellington’s dispositions were also excellent, except that he made the strategic error of leaving a large detachment behind at Hal. In the great battle that followed Napoleon was ill, and the tactics of the French were incoherent and bad; the genius of Wellington in defence reappeared, and shone out with conspicuous lustre; and this great quality largely redeemed his shortcomings in this memorable campaign. He fought Waterloo on the assumption that Blücher would join him early with the whole Prussian army; no aid reached him until nearly 5 P.M.; Ziethen and Pirch, who decided the result of the day, were not on the field until after 8 P.M.; and yet Wellington, with a very inferior army, contrived, during seven long hours, to resist successfully the Imperial host, and he had fairly repulsed the attack of the Guard before Ziethen and Pirch dealt the final stroke. His intrepidity, his tenacity, his tactical power on that memorable day were worthy of him; no other general on the allied side, it may confidently be said, would have made such a stand; and though he would almost certainly have lost the battle but for the arrival of Bülow in the early afternoon, still the defeat would not, I think, have been crushing, and Napoleon must have at last succumbed. Nevertheless, Waterloo, as I have endeavoured to prove, was decided by operations outside the field. Had Grouchy been equal to his appointed task, Blücher ought not to have been able to reach his colleague; the strategy of Napoleon throughout the campaign, spite of mistakes and failures, well-nigh triumphed; and the one merit of Wellington--and it was immense--was the masterly defence he made at Waterloo.

The Duke commanded the Army of Occupation in France, after the second fall of Napoleon and the return of the Bourbons, and he admirably fulfilled a most arduous mission. He has been condemned for not saving Ney; but he had no right to interfere with the Government of France, and he showed characteristic tact and clemency in his relations with the French army, the Court, and the nation. His grand civil career begins at this point; but I must pass from it with scarcely a word of comment. He was a representative of England at the great Congress which met at Vienna to resettle Europe; and he was engaged in other important missions of the kind. In these diplomatic duties he was, no doubt, inferior to Marlborough in suavity and delicate art; he was sometimes, indeed, outspoken and blunt, but his simplicity, his candour, his ripe judgment, made him a negotiator of a very high order. His position as a statesman was noble and striking. His nature and profession drew him to the Tory Party, and he was for years its acknowledged head; his ideal was a strong aristocratic government; he detested modern Radical cant and theory; and though he was a Constitutional politician in the broadest sense, he did not understand the play and tendency of popular forces. But he had no sympathy with extreme Toryism; he ridiculed the Holy Alliance and its dreams; he knew how to make concessions in time; no reformer more sternly put down abuses; he was always Conservative, but wise and moderate. He commanded the army for some years; in this high office, unlike Turenne, with whom he had certain points in common, he was not in advance of the ideas of his time; he was rather obstinate and narrow in his views; but one great work he at least prepared; he urged the necessity for assuring the defence of England, and this generation at last has accepted his teaching. He spoke very often in the House of Lords; as an orator he had no accomplishments, but it was said he always “hit the nail on the head,” and his sagacity was, perhaps, the more noted because it was not set off by eloquence. As he grew old, he became the national mentor; his counsels were felt to be words of wisdom, and his place in the State was one of commanding dignity.

He passed quietly away in 1852; England mourned him as her foremost citizen, and she justly regards him as the most illustrious of her worthies of the nineteenth century. It ought to be possible to pronounce a sound judgment on his military career, after all these years, and yet impartiality is still difficult. Wellington was endowed by nature with real wisdom, with strength of character seldom equalled, with singular moderation and calmness of thought, and yet with a rapid intelligence and clear insight. She denied him imagination, passion, and, in some measure, sympathy; and we see these excellences and defects in his life as a warrior. As a strategist, on the offensive, he stands low; for strategy, in this aspect, must see into the unknown, and requires a fiery energy he did not possess; and he was incapable of such exploits as the campaign of Marengo. In defensive strategy, however, he has been never excelled; for here the elements of the problem are easier to ascertain, and sagacity and firmness are most effective; and his campaign of Torres Vedras is, beyond comparison, the finest specimen of defence, in the strict sense of the word, that was seen in the Great War with France. As a tactician he was admirable in attack and defence, for when the field was before him, his promptness, his coolness, his constancy, stood him in good stead; but he was, on the whole, better in defence than attack; his Salamanca falls short of his Waterloo; and he was inferior to some tacticians in his arrangements on the ground, and, conspicuously, in following up a victory. Though there was something contracted in his exhibitions of the art, he has no doubtful place among great captains; and yet Wellington was greatest, perhaps, as a citizen, by reason of his profound wisdom, his administrative powers, his statesmanlike views, and, above all, his capacity for ruling alien races. In one quality of a chief he was, no doubt, deficient. He was respected, but not beloved, by his officers and men; he could not command their hearts like Napoleon or Condé, and this was largely due to the Spartan turn of character which distinguishes the aristocratic caste of Ireland. Taken altogether, he was one of the most illustrious men who have ever appeared on the stage of History; his grand life justified the poet’s epitaph: “O Tower full square to all the winds that blew!”