blow was really struck. Holkar, it is true, had seemed to turn the tide
for the time, but in the December of 1804 General Lake finally crumpled
him up. In March, 1805, the Colonel of the 33rd, now Sir Arthur
Wellesley, sailed from Madras in the frigate _Tridant_. We may pause to
note that in the following July he wrote from the Island of St. Helena
to tell his brother that his health, which had been very bad, was now
restored.
He said: “I was wasting away daily, and latterly when at Madras, I
found my strength failed which had before held out.” If his strength
really had failed, it is quite probable that St. Helena would never
have known its most distinguished resident.
A short time after, Wellington returned to England--he was known just
then as the “Sepoy General”--William Pitt remarked that he was at a
loss which most to admire--his modesty or his talents, and he added
that “he had never met with any military officer with whom it was so
satisfactory to converse.” This was a saying both accurate and just,
and it must be admitted that there is a very considerable difference
between the dispatches which Nelson wrote and those which Wellington
sent home after his greatest victories.
It was during this brief stay at home that the one little romance of
Wellington’s life had a happy “finis” written to it. In the days before
he had given any public sign of the great genius that was in him, he
had wooed Lady Catherine Pakenham, a daughter of Lord Longford. Not
possibly without apparent reason, Lord and Lady Longford came to the
conclusion that he was an altogether ineligible person, and refused
their consent, and Arthur Wesley sailed away to the East, disconsolate
but not despairing.
It is pleasant to be able to look over his shoulder just before he
returned, and read a letter in which Lady Catherine tells him that
such beauty as she had has been ravaged by small-pox. It is pleasanter
still to know that this information by no means cooled his ardour to
get home, and that when he did come back a Major-General, the victor in
many fights, and Sir Arthur Wellesley, my Lord and my Lady had reversed
their decision, and the course of true love was allowed to run with
perfectly satisfactory smoothness.
Just before this he entered Parliament as member for Rye, on the
invitation of Lord Grenville. One didn’t need much more than the
invitation of a powerful minister to get into Parliament in those days.
At Westminster he distinguished himself chiefly as the vindicator of
his brother’s policy in India, and, more than this, he used his pen,
which was not much addicted to flourishes, but nevertheless wrote
good, strong, nervous English, to the same good purpose. There is one
sentence in an open letter to his brother which exactly sums up the
situation.
“By your firmness and decision you have not only saved, but enlarged
and secured the invaluable Empire entrusted to your government at a
time when everything else was a wreck, and the existence even of Great
Britain was problematic.”
Those are weighty words indeed, coming as they do from the man who won
the battle of Assaye and established, let us hope for ever, the British
Empire in India.
All the same he doesn’t seem to have liked this talking business in
Parliament at all, for in a letter written in July, 1806, he says:
“You will have seen that I am in Parliament, and a difficult and most
unpleasant game I have had to play in the present extraordinary state
of parties.” From this it will be seen that Arthur Wellesley, like any
other good man of action and capable Empire-Maker, had a wholesome
contempt for the miserable and sordid game which is called party
politics.
All the same we find him a few months afterwards as Chief Secretary
for Ireland, buying, that is to say bribing and corrupting with open
candour and unconcealed disgust, a sufficiency of votes and influence
to keep the Ministry in power. He said plainly: “Almost every man of
mark in the state has his price.” And when he was taxed with bribery
and corruption, he remarked with that marvellous insight of his, that
an inquiry into such practices would open up the whole theory of
constitutional government.
We are supposed to have improved ourselves out of the venality of
buying and selling votes and seats, at any rate for cash down, but
we still bribe and we still corrupt. There are still titles for rich
men who will spend lavishly to support their party, there are still
innumerable advantages for the tradesman, and the contractor who
are loyal to their party and their ticket, and so it will be while
constitutional government and human nature remain what they are; but
for all that we may learn a good deal from a remark like this made
by a man who was so absolutely incorruptible that when he was made
Captain-General of the Spanish Army, he refused to draw his salary, and
who later on when his justly grateful country presented him with an
estate, paid the rent of it into the Treasury as long as the war lasted.
It is not often, even among the great ones of the earth, that you meet
with an absolutely honest man, but there is no doubt about Wellington.
After a little subordinate foreign service in Denmark, in which he
distinguished himself as usual, he went back to the Irish office for
about eight months. This particular eight months was a very critical
period indeed, and looking back at the facts across a gulf of eighty
years, one is inclined to wonder how it was that no better work could
be found for the already well-proved genius of Arthur Wellesley than
the ordinary routine work which a very much smaller man could have
done, if not as well, at least sufficiently well. It will have been
noticed more than once by those who have managed to get through the
foregoing pages, that one of the greatest and most dangerous faults of
British officialism, has been the employment of giants to do the work
of pigmies. But officialism would not be official if it were not dull,
so I suppose there is no help for it. One of the elements of greatness
is the faculty of recognising greatness in others, and officialism is
very seldom great.
This was the year 1807, and that is the same thing as saying that it
was the period which marked the zenith of Napoleon’s power. The little
cadet of Artillery who had been teaching the raw republicans of France
how to construct fortifications, and how to knock them down, while
Arthur Wellesley was training the 33rd Foot, was now Emperor of the
French.
More than that, he was practically master of Europe. From the Atlantic
Ocean to the Ural mountains he had not a single foe left in arms.
Some he had crushed, others he had over-awed or conciliated, but all
the nations of Europe were either his subjects or his forced allies.
Nelson, it is true, had made Britain the mistress of the seas, but,
saving only these little islands of ours, it must be confessed that
Napoleon was master of the land.
There was, however, just one weak point, one loose joint, as it were,
in the armour of the conquering Colossus who now bestrode the Continent
from one end to the other.
If you take the map of Europe you will see that Portugal is a very
small patch on it, and yet if it had not been for Portugal being
just where it is, and if there had not been such a man as Sir Arthur
Wellesley ready to turn its geographical advantages to the best
possible use, Napoleon would very probably have ended his career on a
throne, instead of on that lonely island in the Atlantic.
This is not the place for me to attempt to redescribe the long glories
of the Peninsular War. In the first place, to do so would necessitate
more pages than I have paragraphs at my disposal; and, in the second
place, are they not already painted with a worthy splendour on the
glowing pages of Napier and Allison?
But what does fall within the scope of such a sketch as this is the
business of pointing out a fact which the school books say nothing
about. The work that Wellington did in the Peninsula was of two sorts.
He not only saw the weak joint in Napoleon’s armour and struck hard and
straight at it. He did a great deal more than that.
The genius of his combinations, the tenacity of his purpose, and that
inspired confidence which practically doubled the effectiveness of his
fighting force, compelled Napoleon to employ his greatest generals, and
some of his finest troops in the work of “flinging the English into the
sea,” as he himself phrased it.
“There is nothing,” he told his marshals over and over again, “there is
nothing to be reckoned with except the English.” And it may be added
that if the English had not been led by such a man as he who was now
Viscount Wellington and Baron Douro the reckoning might have been a
somewhat short one.
The actual effect of the Peninsular War and of Wellington’s genius
is not to be seen so much in the splendid triumphs of Vittoria and
Salamanca, or the awful slaughters of Albuera and Busaco. It is to be
found rather in the fact that Soult, Ney, and Masséna, the three finest
marshals of the Grand Army, were kept there, campaign after campaign,
fighting battle after battle, and suffering defeat after defeat, in the
hopeless effort to do what it was absolutely necessary to be done if
the conquests of Napoleon were to be anything more than a passing dream
of empire.
Thus, for instance, when at the end of the campaign of 1810, Masséna
finally retired upon Salamanca he had lost every fight in which he had
engaged, and the Grand Army was the poorer by no fewer than thirty
thousand men. We have simply to ask ourselves what Napoleon would have
been able to do if he had only had all these men free to work his will
upon Continental troops and win more triumphs like Austerlitz and Jena,
instead of being forced to send them battalion after battalion, and
army after army, to dash themselves to pieces against that unbreakable
phalanx of British valour and determination which the genius of
Wellington had drawn up across the Portuguese frontier.
Magnificent as were the efforts he made, and tremendous as were the
sacrifices which France submitted to for his sake, all the genius even
of Napoleon was of no avail as long as the life-blood of the Napoleonic
system was draining away through that open wound in the Peninsula. But
for this there would have been no Leipsic, and probably no Moscow, no
Waterloo, and no St. Helena.
The most splendid military triumph in the history of the world is the
uninterrupted march of victory made by Wellington and the soldiers
whom his genius had made unconquerable for more than a thousand miles
from the lines of Torres Vedras to the banks of the Seine. But behind
the brilliance of this incomparable triumph there is something better
still, something which Napoleon himself was first to see, and this was
the supreme genius which planned, and the untirable pertinacity which
carried out, without one hitch or fault from start to finish, that
marvellous series of operations which began with the first move of the
pawns at Rolica, and ended with the triumphant checkmate at Waterloo.
Although, as I say, it would be quite out of the question to attempt
to draw even the briefest outline of these magnificent campaigns,
yet there are one or two incidents in them which may be looked at in
passing for the sake of the glimpses they afford of the man in the
midst of his work, and, few though they may be, there is yet more real
knowledge to be got from them than from many pages of descriptions of
battles and sieges.
Thus, for instance, shortly after he landed for the second time in
Portugal there was a conspiracy among the French officers to depose
Marshal Soult, and one of these men came to Wellington across the
Douro to tell him of this so that he might make their work easier by
a crushing defeat. This might have been of enormous advantage to him,
but he refused point blank to avail himself of such base assistance,
and sent the traitor back to the master whom he had betrayed. He was
not the man to work by methods like this. He had his own methods, and
so effectual were they that ten days after he had landed at Lisbon
there was not a single French soldier on Portuguese soil who was not a
prisoner of war.
A month afterwards Napoleon writing to Soult and Ney said: “You are
to advance on the English, pursue them without cessation, beat them
and fling them into the sea. The English alone are redoubtable--they
alone. If the army is not differently managed, before the lapse of a
few months they will bring upon it a catastrophe.” How prophetic these
words were a glance at the splendidly inscribed colours of the British
Peninsular Regiments will amply suffice to show.
As usual, Wellington in the Peninsula, like Nelson in the
Mediterranean, was forced by the incompetence or imbecility of the
authorities at home to do his tremendous work with most inadequate
means. In Spain the people whom he had come to save refused his
soldiers food, and those at home, whom he was no less fighting to save,
refused him money enough to buy it. In a letter written in January,
1811, he put the position very plainly.
“If we cannot persevere in carrying on the contest in the Peninsula
or elsewhere on the Continent we must prepare to make one of our own
islands the seat of war. I am equally certain that if Buonaparte cannot
root us out of this country he must alter his system in Europe and give
us such a peace as we ought to accept.”
This was the work that he had to do and did, and here is a glimpse
of the means he had to do it with. “I have not,” he says in the same
letter, “authority to give a shilling or a stand of arms or a round of
ammunition to anybody. I do give all, it is true, but it is contrary to
my instructions and at my peril. Not another officer in the army would
even look at the risks that I have to incur every day.” There are not
many more eloquent pictures than this of a man serving his country and
saving it in spite of itself.
Like all good generals, Wellington insisted upon absolute obedience,
and nothing could excuse in his eyes even the most splendid breach of
discipline. After the taking of Ciudad Rodrigo, General Crawford, the
leader of the famous Light Division, had been ordered not to push his
operations beyond the river Coa, but he forgot his instructions in the
temptation to make a splendid dash at an overwhelming force under Ney.
Nothing but the magnificent valour and discipline of the Division saved
it from utter destruction. Still it was saved, and when its gallant
leader reported himself to Wellington he said: “I am glad to see you
safe, Crawford.”
“Oh, we were in no danger I can assure you!” was the answer.
“No, but I was through your conduct!” came the dry retort, and Crawford
walked away crestfallen, remarking to himself that the General was
“damned crusty to-day.”
Wellington’s best known title is the Iron Duke, and yet no man ever
had less iron in him than he. It is true that he armed himself from
head to foot with a mail which his enemies found impenetrable, but the
gallant heart whose high courage carried him through so many dangers
and difficulties was withal as tender as a woman’s.
When his last great fight had been fought and won, when the long
tragedy of the Napoleonic wars was over, and the curtain had just
fallen upon the tremendous climax of Waterloo, Dr. Hume, his physician,
went to see him early on the morning of the 19th of June to tell him
of the death during the night of his friend Gordon, and this is how he
described the conqueror on the morrow of his greatest victory.
“He had, as usual, taken off his clothes, but had not washed himself.
As I entered he sat up in bed, his face covered with the dust and
sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me which I took
and held in mine while I told him of Gordon’s death and of such of the
casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected. I felt
the tears dropping fast upon my hand, and, looking towards him, saw
them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks.”
This is a touching little picture of the one man in the world who has
proved himself capable of grappling with and overthrowing the Corsican
Colossus, and with it we may here bid him farewell. Waterloo was the
last as well as the greatest of his fights. He had given the world
peace. He had overthrown the most grievous tyranny that had threatened
it for many a long century.
He had found Europe under the heel of France. He had conquered her
conqueror; and yet it was he who, when terms of peace were being
dictated in Paris, stopped his ferocious old ally Blücher from blowing
up the Bridge of Jena, and got such concessions for France in the hour
of her defeat and humiliation as none but the victor of the Peninsula
and the hero of Waterloo could have done. Like all really strong men,
he was merciful in his strength; and like all really great soldiers
he looked upon his enemies as his friends as soon as he had soundly
thrashed them.
With his after career as a politician and a statesman I have here
nothing to do. His empire-making ended with the order that sent the
whole steadfast British line streaming down from the rising ground
which they had held so stubbornly all through that famous day. It is
better to take leave of him here, for Arthur Wellesley was too good
and too great a man for politics. He was the idol of the army he had
created, but he didn’t know how to lead a mob.
[Illustration: THE ORDER THAT SENT THE BRITISH LINE STREAMING DOWN FROM
THE RISING GROUND.]
Seventeen years after Waterloo, to the very day, he was beset in London
streets by a howling multitude of the very people he had served so
splendidly.
If he had not found a refuge in the Temple and a bodyguard of Benchers,
it is probable that they would have pulled him from his horse and torn
him limb from limb. It is a sorry spectacle, although relieved by the
quaintness of the vision of this unconquered hero of a hundred fights
trusting for his life to a bodyguard of lawyers.
He never forgot this, and probably never forgave it. Every one knows
how, when Apsley House was threatened by a mob, he made ready to defend
it in a businesslike and soldierly way. When the mob broke his windows
he coolly ordered iron shutters and put them up. Afterwards, when the
fickle tide of popular fancy had turned the other way, and the mob
was wont to cheer instead of cursing him, he used to point to these
shutters and laugh good-humouredly but seriously withal.
In one sense, however, it is hardly true that Wellington’s last fight
was at Waterloo. The last time that he really made a display of his
military capacity was in London. It was he who on the 10th of April,
1848, saved London from the Chartists. He never allowed a soldier to be
seen, much less a weapon, and when it was all over, Sir John Campbell
came to him and said:
“Well, Duke, it all turned out as you foretold.”
And this was the answer:
“Oh, yes; I was sure of it, and I never showed a soldier or a musket,
but I was ready. I could have stopped them whenever you liked, and if
they had been armed it would have been all the same.”
That was Wellington’s last victory--bloodless, and, therefore, since
the enemy would have been his own countrymen, all the more glorious for
that.
In the article on Nelson, I mentioned the well-known fact that the
greatest soldier and the greatest sailor of their age met but once, and
that Wellington so far gauged the character of the hero of Trafalgar
as to describe him as “a very superior person.” In the spirit they not
only met again, but they will live together in everlasting honour in
the memory of the British people.
Their last resting-places are side by side, as they should be, in St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and side by side their glorious memories will remain
as long as the noble qualities which made them the greatest men, not
only of their nation, but of the age which their great deeds made
splendid, are held in honour--and that is the same thing as saying as
long as the human race endures.
XI
“_CHINESE GORDON_”
“_HONOUR--NOT HONOURS_”
XI
“CHINESE GORDON”
We are living rather too near to the days of the man himself, to be
able to say what place History will ultimately assign to the greatest
and most famous of the old fighting stock of the Gordons. Probably the
discriminating historian of the day after to-morrow will look upon him
ethnologically as a queer survival or throwback--a man who lived and
did his work in the nineteenth century in the style of the fifteenth,
or even the fourteenth.
In the military sense he would seem to be the last of our great
soldiers of fortune--for soldier of fortune he undoubtedly was far more
than soldier of Britain--and the work that he did as one of the makers
of the British Empire was done under foreign flags.
It might, indeed, be asked by the superficial observer in what sense
he was an Empire-Maker at all, or what right he has to claim a place
in that long and splendid array of great men, only a few of whom can
be silhouetted within the limits of such a volume as this and whose
succession stretches through the centuries from William, Duke of
Normandy to Cecil John Rhodes of Rhodesia.
The answer is plain enough, though not very obvious at first sight. The
British Empire is twofold. It is not only the greatest concrete Fact
that the world has ever seen; it is also a vast and very splendid Idea,
and in this sense it covers, not only just that portion of the earth’s
surface over which the Union Jack flies, but also every other land
known and half-known, old and new, civilised and savage, into which
the genius of the Anglo-Saxon has forced its way and over which it has
exercised that peculiar influence for which the word “English” stands
in the dictionaries of our foreign competitors.
Charles George Gordon never added a square yard to the British Empire,
considered as a geographical expression. He very seldom fought at
the head of British troops, and when he did, it was not to any very
great purpose--in fact his witnessing of the murder of many hundreds
of gallant British soldiers by the officials who were guilty of the
criminal mismanagement of the Crimean War was about the sum total of
his experiences of warfare under the Flag.
It is a not altogether curious fact that, although Gordon was one of
the very ablest leaders and organisers of men, and although he, shortly
after thirty, proved to demonstration that he possessed most of the
qualities of a great soldier, his native country didn’t appear to have
any use for him, or at least no adequate use. As I have said before,
the curse of both our Services, and therefore, in a very definite and
practical sense, of the whole Empire, is officialism, or officialdom.
Two very different men grasped this fact in its relation to Gordon. One
was Nubar Pasha, Egyptian Minister at Constantinople, and the other was
John Ruskin. Nubar said: “England owes little to her officials; she
owes her greatness to men of different stamp.” Ruskin said practically
the same thing in one of his lectures at Woolwich, but in different
fashion and in many more words, while Gordon, within a mile or so of
the lecture-hall at Woolwich, was bending his great soul to the routine
duties which appear to have been about the best work that the British
Government could find for him to do.
When the British Government did at last get him to take his share in
the doing of the most difficult and dangerous work which was just then
necessary to be done upon the very outskirts of civilisation, those
who were responsible for the exercise of the executive power deserted
him and left him to his death by what is probably the basest and most
criminal betrayal of a man of deeds by men of words that can be laid to
the charge of a British Government.
History will probably say with truth that every member of that fatally
futile Cabinet who had any hand in sending Gordon to Khartoum and
neglecting to give him reasonable support incurred a direct and
personal responsibility for his death, from which the dispassionate
verdict of Posterity will be very slow to relieve their memories.