had been done on the English side that Sir Hyde-Parker made a signal
to leave off action. It was at this moment that Nelson uttered those
immortal words, which were destined to be as famous even as his signal
at Trafalgar:
“What? Leave off action? No, damn me if I do! You know, Foley, I have
a right to be blind sometimes. No, I really don’t see the signal. Fire
away!”
Those were days of hard swearing as well as hard hitting, and,
considering all the circumstances, even the purest of modern purists
may forgive a little vehemence of expression to the man who that day
did such good work, not only for our grandfathers, but for us and our
children.
[Illustration: NELSON AT COPENHAGEN.]
An hour or so later Nelson performed one of the most memorable actions
even of his life. The Danish ships and floating batteries were moored
in-shore. The fire of the English guns was, as usual, terribly
accurate, but as fast as the Danes were shot down, fresh crews were put
on board the ships, and Nelson very soon saw that this simply meant
butchery as long as a Danish ship floated.
Consequently he sat down and wrote a note to the Crown Prince of
Denmark which he sent on shore under a flag of truce. This was the
letter:
“Lord Nelson has directions to spare Denmark when no longer resisting,
but if the firing is continued on the part of Denmark, Lord Nelson
will be obliged to set on fire all the floating batteries he has taken
without having the power of saving the brave Danes who have defended
them.”
The result of this letter was a truce, and the truce led to an
armistice and the separation of Denmark from the Armed Neutrality.
This was very different treatment, we may well imagine, to anything
that the French might have expected. In their case he considered
extermination to be the only remedy for the disease which in his eyes
they represented on earth.
It was curious that after such a day’s work this man, who had probably
saved Europe from one of the greatest menaces that ever threatened it,
should go back to his cabin and copy out love verses to send to Lady
Hamilton--and yet that is just what he did, and at the end of them he
wrote: “_St. George_, April 2nd, 1801, at 9 o’clock at night. Very
tired after a hard fought battle.”
The Battle of Copenhagen and the death of the Tsar Paul put an end
to the Northern Confederacy and to all the hopes of France in that
direction. But Nelson was not satisfied, for the Russian fleet had
escaped. He was, however, in some measure consoled by the recall of
Sir Hyde-Parker and the realisation of his old ambition by his own
appointment as commander-in-chief.
His next service was as commander of a sort of patrol fleet on the East
Coast. Those were the days of the great invasion scare. Nelson never
believed in it. In one of his letters to Lord Addington on the subject
he said:
“What a forlorn undertaking! It is perfectly right to be prepared
against a mad government, but with the active force your lordship has
given me I may pronounce it impracticable.”
Soon after this, preliminaries of peace were signed, and to Nelson’s
intense disgust the French Ambassador was enthusiastically received in
London. Writing to his physician soon after he said:
“Can you cure madness? for I am mad that our damned scoundrels dragged
the Frenchman’s carriage. I am ashamed for my country.”
The Peace was hollow and brief, for the mastery of the sea was not
yet decided, and by the middle of 1803 we find Nelson back in the
Mediterranean, not blockading Toulon, but rather trying to tempt the
French out to a battle.
He even went so far as to appear to run away, and the French Admiral,
Latouche-Treville, promptly wrote a letter giving a most glowing
account of how he had chased the English away from Toulon. The idea of
a Frenchman daring to say such a thing naturally made Nelson furious.
Writing about it to his brother he said:
“If this fleet gets fairly up with M. Latouche his letter with all his
ingenuity must be different from his last. We had fancied that we had
chased him into Toulon, but from the time of his meeting Captain Hawker
of the _Isis_ I never heard of his acting otherwise than as a poltroon
and a liar. I am keeping his letter, and if I take him by God he shall
eat it.”
This amiable design, however, the French Admiral baulked by dying, and
when Nelson heard the news he remarked half-angrily: “He is gone, and
all his lies with him.”
That is what he thought of the Admiral. This is what he thought of the
fleet: “The French fleet yesterday was to appearance in high feather
and as fine as paint could make them. Our weather-beaten ships, I have
no fear, will make their sides like a plum-pudding.”
The interval between the ending of the Toulon blockade and the
Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly by what may be described as
a huge naval hunt. On the one hand, there were three French fleets
manœuvring to get out and come together in the Channel with the object
of overwhelming any English force that might try to prevent the
embarkation of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had another object,
and that was to get as far as possible out of Nelson’s way.
The first idea was to make a feint at the West Indies, and so away went
Admiral Villeneuve with his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went
Nelson post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies only to find
that the Frenchmen had doubled on their tracks and gone back again, and
so he immediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten and almost
unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and for the second time chased the
French across the Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 20,
1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to the effect that he had that
day gone ashore at Gibraltar--the first time that he had left the
_Victory_ for two years all but ten days!
From Gibraltar he came home and spent a few weeks of rest at Merton,
the estate which he had bought in Surrey. During this time a momentous
naval duel was fought in the Channel. Admiral Villeneuve had sent some
very important dispatches containing the plans for the concentration
of the French and Spanish fleets to the commander of the Rochefort
squadron by the _Didon_, a forty-four-gun frigate; but on her way the
_Didon_ was met by the _Phœnix_, an English forty-gun frigate which,
after the fashion of the times, proceeded to pound her to helplessness,
then ran alongside and carried her by the board in the good old
style. The result of this was that Villeneuve gave up all hope of the
concentration and retreated to Cadiz, where he anchored on August 17th.
Admiral Collingwood, in command of the Atlantic squadron, at once
sent off the frigate _Euryalus_ home with news. She dropped anchor at
Spithead on the 1st of September. At five o’clock the next morning her
captain presented himself at Merton and found Nelson already up and
dressed. The moment Captain Blackwood entered the room Nelson’s face
lit up and he said:
“I’m sure you bring me news of the French and Spanish fleets and
I think I shall have to give them a beating yet. Depend upon it,
Blackwood, I shall yet give Mr. Villeneuve a drubbing.”
He left for London the same day to consult with the Admiralty, and it
was on one of the visits that he then paid to the Secretary of State
that he met for a few minutes--and for the only time in his life--the
man whose name was destined to be linked with his in everlasting fame.
This was Arthur Wellesley, some day to be Duke of Wellington, who was
to do for the French on land what Nelson had been doing for them at sea.
Sir Arthur came away with a curious opinion of the little, pale,
nervous, fidgety, one-armed man, who had won the two greatest battles
in the history of naval warfare, and was about to surpass himself by
winning yet a greater one.
From one point of view he was a vain, boastful, and somewhat womanish
little man. From another, he was not only a great leader of men, but
a statesman to boot. On the whole, the future Iron Duke came to the
conclusion that the Hero of the Nile was “a very superior person.”
Nelson’s opinion of Wellington is unhappily lost to posterity. One can
imagine the sort of language he would have used if any one had told him
that a soldier had ventured to call him “a superior person.”
“For charity’s sake, send us Lord Nelson, ye men of power.” Such
was the prayer of Captain Codrington of the _Orion_, serving with
Collingwood’s fleet off Cadiz. But by the time this letter got home
Nelson was with the fleet, and it is worthy of note that he reached the
last and most glorious of his hundred battlefields on his birthday, the
twenty-ninth of September.
The first thing that he did was to send home for more ships, not
because he wasn’t ready to fight the French with what he had, but
simply in pursuance of his constant policy with regard to them. In his
dispatch to the Admiralty he said:
“Should they come out, I shall immediately bring them to battle, but
though I should not doubt of spoiling any voyage they may attempt, yet
I hope for the arrival of the ships from England that as an enemy’s
fleet they may be annihilated.”
In a private letter which he wrote at the same time he said:
“It is annihilation that the country wants and not merely a splendid
victory of twenty-three to thirty-six--honourable to the parties
concerned, but absolutely useless in the extended scale to bring
Buonaparte to his marrow-bones. Numbers can only annihilate. Therefore
I hope the Admiralty will send the fixed force as soon as possible.”
He hoped for forty sail of the line, but when the ever memorable
morning of the 21st had dawned he was only able to muster twenty-seven
against thirty-three. At half-past eleven the famous signal: “England
expects that every man will do his duty!” flew from the main-royal of
the _Victory_.
I have no intention of attempting to re-write the thousand-times told
tale of Trafalgar or of the disaster which plunged the nation into
mourning in the midst of the exultation of triumph, for to do so would
be alike superfluous and impertinent. Let it be enough to point out
that the firing of the first gun marked the moment that Nelson had
lived and fought for.
He was Commander-in-chief, as he had so often prayed to be, of the
British Fleet, and there in front of him was the last fleet of any
strength that his hated enemy France could muster. The battle, like the
triumph, was his and his alone. Every man who that day did his duty
fought by Nelson’s directions and, as it were, under Nelson’s eye, and
never was victory more complete or defeat more crushing.
When it was over eighteen out of the thirty-three French and Spanish
ships had been captured, and finally only eleven got back to Cadiz so
shattered that they never again took the sea as men-of-war.
The crowning triumph of Nelson’s life left Britain without a rival so
far as the mastery of the sea was concerned and threw the way open for
conquest and colonisation in all parts of the world. Well might the
great Admiral say when he lay dying in Captain Hardy’s arms: “Thank
God, I’ve done my duty!”
No man ever died with nobler or more truly spoken words on his lips
than these, for he had not only given his country the empire of the
sea, but he had saved her from invasion by one who was perhaps the
greatest military genius the world has known.
On the heights above Boulogne there stands a tall column surmounted
by a figure of Napoleon. It was raised to commemorate the assembly of
the Grand Army--that army which during the next ten years swept in an
irresistible torrent of conquest from one end of Europe to the other.
Napoleon’s back is turned on the white cliffs of England. If Nelson had
never lived, he might have been facing the other way.
X
_WELLINGTON_
“_THE PRIDE AND THE GENIUS OF HIS COUNTRY._”
--QUEEN VICTORIA.
X
WELLINGTON
There is a very considerable amount of uncertainty, and there are
also a few somewhat remarkable coincidences associated with the early
youth of Arthur Wesley, better known to fame under the expanded form
Wellesley, son of Garret, Earl of Mornington, and his wife Ann Hill,
one of the daughters of Lord Dungannon.
It is somewhat singular, for instance, that the birthday of a child
born in such a position should not be known within a day or two. His
mother, who ought to have spoken with authority, said that the future
conqueror of the great Napoleon entered the world on May-Day, 1769.
The date on his baptismal certificate is the 30th of May, and
twenty-one years later a committee of the Irish House of Commons, to
which he had just been elected, investigated the question on a petition
which sought to show that he was not of full age, and this committee
decided that he was born on or before the 29th of April. With regard
to this latter date, however, it has been suggested that with the
money and influence that he had behind him there would have been no
difficulty in getting the Irish Parliament of those days to make him
any age that he pleased.
But these things are only trifles. The fact of moment to the world is
that Arthur Wellesley managed to get born into the world some three
months before a certain other boy-baby was born at Ajaccio in Corsica.
No one, of course, dreamt then that these two babies were going to grow
up into Titans whose final struggle for the mastery of Europe was to
shake the world forty-six years later.
There is perhaps no more noteworthy coincidence in modern history
than the fact that Nelson, Wellington, and Napoleon should all have
been born about the same time--for without Nelson’s victories at sea,
Napoleon would in all probability have been irresistible on land,
while, without Wellington’s splendid conduct of the Peninsular War, the
crowning victory of Waterloo would perhaps never have been won, and so
at least half the effects of Nelson’s hundred and five fights would
have been destroyed.
This is all the more singular from the fact that nothing within the
limits of human probability save the supreme genius and individual
capacity of this Englishman and this Anglo-Irishman could possibly have
stemmed the tide of Napoleonic conquest.
As I have pointed out in another of these sketches, the last decade but
one of the eighteenth century was one of disaster and degradation for
this country both at home and abroad. The national strength was sapped
by corruption, and the national spirit was daunted by defeat.
The history of the next thirty or forty years distinctly shows that we
had but one Nelson at sea, and but one Wellington on land. If they had
been born a quarter of a century later, or even if they had not both
come into the world about the same time as their mighty antagonist, the
map of Europe would certainly be very different to what it is to-day,
and it is also fairly safe to say that the map of the world would not
now show nearly as much red as it does.
Arthur Wellesley, like certain others of our Empire-Makers who will
be remembered, was a delicate, weakly boy and also, curiously enough,
a dunce at school. As far as we know he was first sent to a school at
Chelsea, whence in due course he went to Eton. Now there came a time
when Eton was very proud indeed of being his Alma-Mater; but when she
came to look back to see if she could remember anything about him she
found that his career was absolutely undistinguished.
There was only one incident in it all that any one remembered, and that
was a fight that he had had with one Bob or “Bobus” Smith, of whom also
nothing is known save the fact that he had a brother who was afterwards
known to the world as Sydney Smith--not the defender of Acre, but the
clerical humourist who divided the human race into three sexes: Men,
women, and curates.
It would seem that he was all along intended for the army, for when his
undistinguished career at Eton had closed he went to a French military
school at Angers, somewhere about the same time that a certain young
cadet of Artillery was beginning to learn his business in Toulon. Here,
again, we get very dim glimpses of the future conqueror, Empire-Maker,
and preserver. One of them, however, is fairly distinct. He had a
little terrier called Vick to which he was a great deal more attentive
than he was to his studies and which repaid his attention by constant
and unswerving devotion.
When he left Angers is not known to a year or so, but in 1787 we come
across something definite, for in this year Arthur Wesley, as he still
spelt himself, was gazetted as ensign to His Majesty’s 73rd Regiment of
Foot.
He now stood on the lowest of the gentlemanly rungs of the military
ladder and his upward progress was for a time somewhat bewildering.
Those were the days when money and social and political influence,
which came to about the same thing, did everything in the Army, the
Navy, the Church, and everywhere else, and, curiously enough, this
apparently absurd system produced the finest array of soldiers and
sailors that has ever adorned the annals of our empire. There are,
indeed, certain blasphemers who venture to suggest that it worked
quite as well as our much-boasted compound of mechanical cramming and
competitive examination does now.
But, be this as it may, Arthur Wesley’s first steps up the ladder were
distinctly erratic. First he became a lieutenant of the 76th and 41st,
then a sub. in the 12th Light Dragoons, then a captain in the 58th
Foot, then captain of the 18th Light Dragoons, and so on till by the
autumn of 1793, when he had reached the mature age of twenty-four, he
was gazetted lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot.
There were two reasons for this rapid promotion. The first undoubtedly
is the fact that his elder brother Richard was now Earl of Mornington
and a wealthy man and a social power to boot. The second, as Mr. George
Hooper in his excellent biography suggests, is probably the perception
by his brother of qualities which so far nobody else had discovered.
How far his Lordship was justified was speedily shown when in
1793--which the historical reader will note was the date of the driving
out of the English and Royalists from Toulon by the well-directed guns
of Citizen Buonaparte--he was given the command of the 33rd Foot. A few
months later the 33rd was officially recognised as the most effective
regiment on the Irish establishment.
The next year Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley saw his first active service.
It was not an encouraging experience, but it was sufficient to show the
sort of stuff that the future Iron Duke was made of. The allied armies
in the Netherlands, with the English under the Duke of York among them,
were retreating after a series of disasters before the triumphant
onrush of the French legions.
Near the town of Boxtell the retreat began to get uncomfortably like
a rout. Horse and foot were getting mixed up in a narrow lane and the
French, seeing this, were getting ready to charge into them; whereupon
Colonel Wesley planted his men skilfully across the mouth of the lane
and, when the French charged, the well-drilled 33rd stood so steadily
and used their muskets with such deadly precision that the French
thought better of it and the pursuit stopped there and then.
That was the young Colonel’s first experience of actual war. It was
also the first check the French had so far received in the Netherlands,
which is also significant in the light of after events.
After that he commanded the rear-guard in the retreat to the British
transports at Bremen. He did his duty as well as the hopeless
carelessness and incompetency of those over and above him permitted.
“It was a perfect marvel,” he said afterwards, “how a single man of us
escaped,” from which it will be gathered that British military genius
and discipline were somewhat at a discount during the campaign which
we may regard as the prelude to the stupendous struggle which was to
culminate on the field of Waterloo.
When Colonel Wesley got home he did a very curious thing. He asked to
be allowed to resign his commission and to be given some post, however
humble, in the Civil Service. It is easy to see from his letter of
application to Lord Camden that he was utterly disgusted with the Army,
or rather with the way in which it was mismanaged. He also felt, as
he distinctly says, that he had in him the makings of a successful
financier, and certainly if great business capacity, instantaneous
knowledge of men, unequalled power of organisation, and absolutely
tireless energy are the principal requisites for commercial success,
Arthur Wesley might have died a millionaire.
Happily, however, Lord Camden refused to grant his request. No doubt
the Earl of Mornington had something to say about it and good officers
were quite rare enough just then to make the abilities of the Colonel
of the 33rd fairly conspicuous. Soon after this he had an attack of
yellow fever in Ireland, probably by infection, which very nearly
killed him. Just at this time too, that is to say the end of 1795, an
expedition was organised to the West Indies and the 33rd were to form
part of it.
It is interesting to us with our wind-defying monsters of steel and
steam to learn that the squadron tried for six weeks to get out of
the Channel and then had to come back. By this time the destination
of the expedition had been changed from the West to the East Indies.
The Colonel of the 33rd was too ill to sail with his regiment. A swift
frigate enabled him to overtake it at the Cape; but for all that he was
nearly thirteen months before he got to Calcutta.
Arthur Wellesley, as he now began to sign himself, although nothing
more in the eyes of his comrades and commanders than a Colonel of Foot
who was a good disciplinarian and a promising soldier, had now entered
that theatre on the stage of which he was to play a brilliant part to a
world-wide audience.
Nearly thirteen years before Warren Hastings had finished his work and
gone home to take his reward in impeachment and ruin. The brilliant
administration of Lord Cornwallis and the less conspicuous rule of Sir
John Shore were now to be followed by a double command which was to
extend, complete, and crown the great work of empire-making in the East
which had begun when Robert Clive left his desk to go and capture Arcot.
A few weeks after Colonel Wellesley landed in Calcutta, his brilliant
brother, the Earl of Mornington took his seat on the Viceregal throne.
No happier combination could well have been possible. The elder brother
was a scholar, a statesman, and a broad-minded man of affairs. The
younger was, even then, the same man who won Vittoria, Talavera, and
Waterloo.
The two acted in perfect unison. There was none of that bungling
timidity and incompetency in high places which confused the counsels
and crippled the activity of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, and the
result was, as might have been expected, a succession of triumphs won,
be it noted, not only by consummate generalship, but also by incessant
vigilance and hard work resulting in perfect organisation.
These triumphs culminated, as every one knows, in the crushing of
the Mahratta power--the last serious obstacle to the universality of
British rule in India--on the memorial field of Assaye.
It was a magnificent combination of courage, calculation, and
generalship. With a force of five thousand men and eighteen guns and
with only two thousand European troops in his army, Wellesley defeated
and utterly cut up an army of over forty thousand men and an artillery
force of a hundred guns, and these, too, were the finest native
fighting troops in the Peninsula. In less than three hours after the
first assault the five thousand had conquered the forty thousand and
captured a hundred and two guns and all the stores and ammunition,
and it should always be remembered that Assaye was a very different
business to Plassey. It was a battle, not a rout, a tragedy rather
than a farce. Of the two thousand Europeans over four hundred were
killed and wounded, and of the three thousand natives, who fought
magnificently as they have ever since done in company with British
troops, there were no less than sixteen hundred killed and wounded.
As for Wellesley himself, he was wherever he was wanted, and that was
usually in the thick of the fight. But there is another fact which
gives us a glimpse of the great general who was the master spirit of
the Peninsular Campaign. His men fought the battle of Assaye at the
end of a twenty-four mile march, and no military force that is not
commanded by a military genius could do that.