Charles Oman - Wellingtons Army, 1809-1814

Charles Oman

Published by Good Press, 2019

EAN 4057664619396

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

While working for the last nine years at the History of the Peninsular War, I have (as was inevitable) been compelled to accumulate many notes, and much miscellaneous information which does not bear upon the actual chronicle of events in the various campaigns that lie between 1808 and 1814, but yet possesses high interest in itself, and throws many a side-light on the general course of the war. Roughly speaking, these notes relate either to the personal characteristics of that famous old army of Wellington, which, as he himself said, could go anywhere and do anything, or to its inner mechanismthe details of its management. I purpose to speak in these pages of the leaders and the led; of the daily life, manners, and customs of the Peninsular Army, as much as of its composition and its organization. I shall be dealing with the rank and file no less than with the officers, and must even find space for a few pages on that curious and polyglot horde of camp followers which trailed at the heels of the army, and frequently raised problems which worried not only colonels and adjutants, but even the Great Duke himself.

There is an immense amount of interesting material to be collected, concerning the inner life of the Peninsular Army, from public documents, such as despatches, general orders, and regimental reports, and records of courts martial. But I shall be utilizing to a much greater extent non-official information, collected from the countless diaries, memoirs, and series of contemporary letters, which have come down to us from the men who took part in the great war. Nor are the controversial pamphlets to be neglected, which kept appearing for many a year, when one survivor of the old army found, in the writings of another, statements which he considered injurious to himself, his friends, his regiment, or his division. The best known and most copious of these discussions is that which centres round the publication of Napiers Peninsular War; the successive appearance of its volumes led to the printing of many protests, in which some of the most prominent officers of Wellingtons army took partnot only Lord Beresford, who was Napiers especial butt and bte noir, and replied to the historian in terms sometimes not too dignifiedbut Cole, Hardinge, DUrban, and many more. This set of strictures, as they were called, mainly relate to the Albuera campaign. But there are smaller, but not less interesting, series of controversial pamphlets relating to the Convention of Cintra, to Moores retreat, to the campaign of 1810 (Bussaco), the storm of Badajoz, and other topics.

The memoirs and autobiographies, of course, possess the greatest share of interest. And it may be noted as a remarkable fact that those coming from the rank and file are not very much less numerous than those which come from the commissioned ranks. If there are scores of diaries and reminiscences of colonels, captains, and subalterns, there are at least dozens of little books by sergeants, corporals, and privates. Many of these are very quaint productions indeed, printed at local pressesat Perth, Coventry, Cirencester, Louth, Ashfordeven at Corfu. Very frequently some knot of military or civilian friends induced a much-travelled veteran to commit to paper the tales which had been the delight of the canteen, or of the fireside of some village inn. They are generally very good reading, but often give rather the spirit of the time

Memoirs of the Rank and File

It is a very notable fact, which requires (but has never hitherto received) an explanation, that it is precisely with the coming in of the nineteenth century that British soldiers and officers alike began to write diaries and reminiscences on a large scale, and in great numbers. I do not, of course, mean to say that there were none such produced in the eighteenth century. Besides serious military histories like those of Kane, Stedman, or Tarleton, there do exist a certain number of narratives of personal adventure written by officers, such as Major Rogers the Scout, or the garrulous and often amusing diarist (unfortunately anonymous) who made the campaign of Culloden with the Duke of Cumberlandnot to speak of the semi-apochryphal Captain Carleton. But they are few, and the writings from the ranks are fewer still, though there are certain soldiers letters which go back as far as Marlboroughs time, and one or two small books like Bristows and Scurrys Indian reminiscences, and Sergeant Lambs Journal in the American War of Independence, which are worth mentioning. But it is quite certain that there was more writing going on in the army during the ten years 18051815 than in the whole eighteenth century.

What was the explanation of the phenomenon? There are, I think, two main causes to be borne in mind: the first was the glorious and inspiring character of Wellingtons campaigns, which made both officers and men justifiably proud of themselves, and more anxious than any previous generation had been to put on paper the tale of their own exploits. It must have been a man of particularly cheerful disposition who cared to compile the personal narrative of his adventures during the Old American War, which was largely a record of disaster, or even in the ups and downs of the Seven Years War, when for every Minden or Quebec there had been an evil memory like Ticonderoga or Kloster-Kampen. It is to this instinctive dislike to open up old memories of misfortune that we may attribute the fact that the first British campaigns of the French Revolutionary War, the unhappy marches and battles of the Duke of Yorks army in 1793, 1794, 1795 are recorded in singularly few books of reminiscencesthere are only (to my knowledge) the doggerel verse of the Officer of the Guards, with its valuable foot-notes, and the simple memoirs of Sergeant Stevenson of the Scots Fusilier Guards, and Corporal Brown of the Coldstream. This is an extraordinarily small output for a long series of campaigns, in which some 30,000 British troops were in the field, and where gallant exploits like those of Famars and Villers-en-Cauchies took place. But the general tale was not one on which any participant could look back with pleasure. Hence, no doubt, the want of books of reminiscences.

But I fancy that there is another and a quite distinct cause for the extraordinary outburst of interesting military literature with which the nineteenth century begins, and we may note that this outburst certainly commences a little before the Peninsular War. There exist several very good personal narratives both of the Conquest of Egypt in 1801, of the Indian Wars during the Viceroyalty of Lord Wellesley, and of the short campaign of Maida. And this cause I take to be the fact that the generation which grew up under the stress of the long Revolutionary War with France was far more serious and intelligent than that which saw it begin, and realized the supreme importance of the ends for which Great Britain was contending, and the danger which threatened her national existence. The empire had been in danger before, both in the Seven Years War, and in the War of American Independence, but the enemy had never been so terrifying and abhorrent as the Jacobins of the Red Republic. The France of Robespierre was loathed and feared as the France of Louis XV. or Louis XVI. had never been. To the greater part of the British nation the war against the Revolution soon became a kind of Crusade against the triple-headed monster of Republicanism, Atheism, and Sedition. The feeling that Great Britain had to fight not so much for empire as for national existence, and for all that made life worth havingreligion, morality, constitution, laws, libertymade men desperately keen for the fight, as their ancestors had never been.