SOURCES OF INFORMATION—THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAR WAR
It will be well, perhaps, to give a short account of the main sources
from which our knowledge of the Peninsular Army is derived. The
official ones must be cited first. The most important of all are,
naturally enough, the Wellington Dispatches. Of these there are two
series; the first, in twelve volumes, was published during the Duke’s
lifetime by Colonel Gurwood between 1837 and 1839. The second, or
supplementary series, in fifteen volumes, was published with copious
notes by the second Duke of Wellington between 1858 and 1872.
The series edited by Gurwood is absolutely necessary to every student
of the Peninsular War, but is most tiresome to handle, and is by no
means complete. The Duke forbade the publication of a great number
of his more confidential letters, and ordered portions of others to
be omitted. He had a strong notion that a great deal of historical
information could be, and ought to be, suppressed; this fact has caused
much trouble to the modern historian, who wishes to obtain not a mere
official and expurgated view of the war, but a full and complete survey
of it. To show Wellington’s attitude it may be sufficient to quote
his answer to William Napier, who asked for leave to utilize all his
papers. “He could not tell the whole truth without hurting the feelings
of many worthy men, and without doing mischief. Expatiating on the
subject, he related many anecdotes illustrating this observation,
showing errors committed by generals and others—especially at
Waterloo—errors so materially affecting his operations that he could
not do justice to himself if he suppressed them, and yet by giving them
publicity he would ungraciously affect the favour of many worthy men,
whose only fault was dullness.”[9]
[Sidenote: Gurwood and the Duke’s Dispatches]
The Gurwood edition of the dispatches was published some fifteen
years after Napier made his application, but numbers of the old
Peninsular officers were still alive, and the Duke adhered to his
already-expressed opinion that it would not be well to expose old
quarrels and old blunders. Paragraphs, accordingly, are often omitted
in the reprint, and in a large majority of cases, where blame was
imputed or reproofs administered to any individual, the name was
left blank. This makes the edition most tiresome to read. It is
exasperating to find that _e.g._ “nothing has given me more concern in
the late operations than the conduct of Lieut.-Colonel —— of the ——
Regt.”[10] or that “no means exists of punishing military disorders
and irregularities of the kind committed by Brigadier-General ——
and Colonel ——.” Or again, when Wellington writes to the Patronage
Secretary at the Horse Guards that “I am much obliged to you for
relieving me from Major-General —— and Colonel ——. I have seen General
—— and I think he will do very well, and so will ——”[11]; or that “——
appears to be a kind of madman,” and “—— is not very wise,” the reader
is reduced to despair. The only way of discovering the names, which
are often those of officers of high rank, who figure repeatedly in any
narrative of the Peninsular War, is to go to the original dispatches
at the Record Office, or, when the communication is a private and not
a public one, to the letters at Apsley House. Meanwhile, few have the
leisure or the patience to do this, so that Wellington’s judgments on
his lieutenants are still practically inaccessible.
It was, perhaps, still necessary to leave all these blanks in 1837.
And Gurwood was no doubt acting in strict obedience to the Duke’s
orders. But nothing can excuse his own slack editing of the massive
tomes that he published. There are no tables of contents to the
volumes, nor does the title page of each indicate the dates between
which it runs. To find out which volume will contain a letter of
November, 1810, we must take down Vols. VI. and VII., and see from the
date of the last dispatch in one and the first in the other, when the
break comes. Supposing we wish to discover how many communications were
sent to Graham or Spencer in 1811, there is no other way of achieving
our object than running through every page of the two volumes in which
the correspondence of that year is contained! There is a so-called
index to the whole series, but it is practically useless, from the
small number of headings given. The reader will look in it vainly for
obvious places-names such as Chaves, Casal Novo, Castello Branco,
Vera, St. Pierre, for personal names such as Lapisse, Latour-Maubourg,
Bonnet, Montbrun, Abadia, Penne-Villemur, O’Donnell, Del Parque,
Erskine, Anson, Victor Alten, Barnard, Beckwith. On the other hand he
will find silly headings such as under L, “Lies, encouragement of,” or
under I, “Invincibility of British Troops.” Perhaps the most ridiculous
entry in this absurd compilation is that of “Light Division,” to which
there is annexed just one note, “satisfactory conduct of, on April
6, 1811,” as if that was the sole occasion on which it was necessary
to mention that distinguished unit of the British army. There are no
headings under regiments at all, so that if one wishes to see what the
Duke said about the 52nd or the Black Watch, one simply gets no help.
But there is another trick of Gurwood’s which is even worse than his
want of tables of contents or adequate index-entries. He omitted all
the elaborate statistics which used to accompany the Duke’s dispatches,
without exception. The beautiful tables of casualties which explain
the distribution of losses between regiments and divisions, are in
every case boiled down into three bald totals of “killed, wounded,
and missing,” for the whole army, no indication of units being
left. Even Lord Londonderry’s modest two volumes, the first attempt
at a general history of the Peninsular War, give far more useful
information on the all-important topics of strengths and losses than
all Gurwood’s tomes. For that sensible author rightly saw that nothing
could be more serviceable to the reader than an occasional table of
the organization and numbers of the whole allied army, and that the
detailed casualty-list of such a fight as Talavera or Albuera is
indispensable. The purblind Gurwood preferred to put in a note, “the
detail of divisions, regiments, and battalions has been omitted, being
too voluminous,”[12] when he was dealing with an important return. The
historian owes him small thanks for his precious opinion.
It is an immense relief to pass from Gurwood’s ill-arranged work to
the volumes of the _Wellington Supplementary Dispatches_, which were
published by the second Duke between 1858 and 1872. Though the mass of
Peninsular material contained in this series is comparatively small,
it comprises a great quantity of familiar and private correspondence,
which had been deliberately omitted from the earlier publication.
And, moreover, it is admirably edited; the second Duke knew what was
important and what required explanation, appended valuable and copious
notes, and was able (since the elder generation was now practically
extinct) to abandon the exasperating reticence used by Gurwood.
Moreover, he added a vast quantity of letters written not by, but to,
his father, which serve to explain the old Duke’s sometime cryptic
replies to his correspondents. Even a few necessary French documents
have been added. Altogether these volumes are excellent, and make one
wish that the editing of the whole of the Wellington papers had fallen
into the same hands.
[Sidenote: Wellington’s “General Orders”]
There is a third series of Official publications which though not
so “generally necessary for salvation” as the Dispatches, for any
student of the Peninsular War, is very valuable and needs continually
to be worked up. This is the seven volumes of _General Orders_, from
1809 to 1815, which are strictly contemporary documents, as they were
collected and issued while the war was in progress—the 1809–10 volumes
were printed in 1811, the 1811 volume in 1812, and so on. The last, or
Waterloo volume, had the distinction of being issued by the British
Military Press in Paris, “by Sergeant Buchan, 3rd Guards,” as printer.
The _General Orders_ contain not only all the documents strictly so
called, the notices issued by the commander-in-chief for the army, but
an invaluable _précis_ of all courts-martial other than regimental
ones, and a record of promotions, gazettings of officers to regiments,
rules as to issue of pay and rations, and directions as to all matters
of detail relating to organization, hospitals, depôts, stores, routes,
etc. If any one wishes to know on what day the 42nd was moved from
the first to the second division, when precisely General Craufurd got
leave to go home on private business, what was the accepted value of
the Spanish dollar or the Portuguese Cruzado Novo at different dates,
when expressed in English money, or what was the bounty given when a
time-expired man consented to renew his service for a limited period,
these are the volumes in which he will find his curiosity satisfied.
They cannot be called interesting reading—but they contain facts not
elsewhere to be found.
There is an exactly corresponding series of General Orders for the
Portuguese Army, in six yearly volumes, called _Ordens do Dia_: it was
issued by Marshal Beresford, and contains all the documents signed
by him. Whenever a student is interested in the career of one of the
numerous British officers in the Portuguese service, he must seek out
the records of his doings in these volumes. They are not easy to work
in, as they have no yearly indices, and much patience is required to
discover isolated notices of individuals. These volumes are practically
inaccessible in England. It was with the greatest difficulty that a
Lisbon friend hunted me up a copy after long search, and I am not
aware that there is another on this side of the sea. But by its
use only can we trace the service of any Anglo-Portuguese officer.
There was supposed to be an “Ordem” every morning, and when nothing
was forthcoming in the way of promotions, court-martial reports, or
decrees, Beresford’s chief of the staff used to publish a solemn
statement that there was no news, as thus—
Quartel-General de Chamusca, 7. 1. 1811.
Nada de novo.
_Adjudante-General_ Mosinho.
This happened on an average about twice a week.
In addition to these printed series there is an immense amount of
unprinted official correspondence in the Record Office which bears
on the Peninsular War. It will be found not only in the War Office
section, but in those belonging to the Foreign Office and the
Admiralty. As an example of the mysteries of official classification, I
may mention that all documents relating to French prisoners will have
to be looked for among the Admiralty records, under the sub-headings
_Transport_ and _Medical_. If, as occasionally happens, one wishes to
find out the names and regiments of French officers captured on some
particular occasion, _e.g._ Soult’s retreat from Oporto, or the storm
of Badajoz, it is to the Admiralty records that one must go! Officers
can always be identified, but it is a herculean task to deal with the
rank and file, for they used to be shot into one of the great prisons,
Norman’s Cross, Porchester, Stapleton, etc., in arbitrary batches, with
no regard to their regimental numbers. It would take a week to hunt
through the prison records with the object of identifying the number
of privates of the 34th Léger captured at Rodrigo, since they may have
gone in small parties to any one of a dozen destinations. Many of the
prison registers have lost one or other of their outer-boards, and the
handling of them is a grimy business for the fingers, since they are
practically never consulted.
[Sidenote: The Record Office and its Wealth]
While nearly the whole of the Wellington dispatches have been printed,
it is only a small part of the Duke’s “enclosures”, added to each
dispatch, that have had the same good fortune. These always repay
a cursory inspection, and are often highly important. The greater
part of Sir John Moore’s correspondence with Lord Castlereagh, and
many dispatches of Moore’s subordinates—Baird, Leith, and Lord W.
Bentinck—with a number of valuable returns and statistics,—are printed
in a large volume entitled “_Papers Relative to Spain and Portugal,
Presented to Parliament in 1809_.” There are, to the best of my
knowledge, no similar volumes relating to Graham’s campaign from Cadiz
in 1811, or Maitland’s and Murray’s operations on the east side of
Spain in 1813–14. A good deal of information about the latter, however,
may be got from the enormous report of the court-martial on Murray,
for his wretched _fiasco_ at the siege of Tarragona, which is full of
valuable facts. The details of the other minor British enterprises
in the Peninsula—such as those of Doyle, Skerret, Sir Home Popham,
and Lord Blayney, all remain in manuscript,—readily accessible to the
searcher, but not too often consulted. The Foreign Office section
at the Record Office is highly valuable not only to the historian
of diplomacy, but to the purely military historian, because Stuart,
Vaughan, Henry Wellesley, and the other representatives of the British
Government at Madrid, Seville, and Cadiz, used to send home, along with
their own dispatches, numberless Spanish documents. These include not
only official papers from the Regency, but private documents of great
value, letters from generals and statesmen who wish to keep the British
agent informed as to their views, when they have clashed with the
resolves of their own government. There are quite a number of military
narratives by Spanish officers, who are set on excusing themselves
from responsibility for the disasters of their colleagues. And the
politicians sometimes propose, in private and confidential minutes,
very curious plans and intrigues. Sir Charles Vaughan kept a certain
number of these confidential papers in his own possession when he left
Cadiz, and did not turn them over to the Foreign Office. They lie,
along with his private correspondence, in the Library of All Souls’
College, Oxford.
Since we are dealing with the British army, not with the general
history of the Peninsular War, I need only mention that unpublished
documents by the thousand, relating to the French, Spanish, and
Portuguese armies, may be found at Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon, and
that the researcher is invariably welcomed and courteously treated.
It may be worth while to make a note, for the benefit of beginners,
to the effect that the French military documents are not concentrated
in one mass, but are divided between the _Archives Nationales_, and
the _Archives de la Guerre_ at the Ministry of War. If a return or a
dispatch is not to be found in one of these repositories, it may yet
turn up in the other. The Spanish records are very “patchy,” full
on some campaigns, almost non-existent on others. For example, the
documents on the luckless Ocaña campaign of 1809 are marvellously few;
there does not exist a single complete “morning state”, by regiments
and divisions, of Areizaga’s unhappy army. I fancy that the whole
of the official papers of his staff were captured in the rout, and
destroyed by ignorant plunderers—they did not get into the French
collections. Hence there have only survived the few dispatches which
Areizaga and some of his subordinates sent to the Spanish Ministry of
War.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Contemporary Journals]
So much for Official Records. Passing on to the publications of
individual actors in the war, we must draw a sharp line between those
which were issued during or immediately after the campaigns with which
they deal, and those which were written down, with or without the aid
of contemporary notes or journals, many years after. The former, of
course, possess a peculiar interest, because the writers’ narrative
is not coloured by any knowledge of what is yet to come. An officer
writing of Corunna or Talavera with the memory of Vittoria and Waterloo
upon him, necessarily took up a different view of the war from the
man who set down his early campaign without any idea of what was to
follow. Early checks and hardships loom larger in the hour of doubt
and disappointment, than when the recollection of them has been dimmed
by subsequent hours of triumph. The early material, therefore, is very
valuable, but it is not so copious as that which was written down
later, and it largely exists in the form of letters and diaries, both
of which are less readable than formal narratives. As good types of
this sort of material we may name Ormsby’s and Ker-Porter’s _Journals
of the Campaign of 1808–09_, Hawkers’ _Journal of the Talavera
Campaign_, Stothert’s _Diary of 1809–11_, and General MacKinnon’s
Journal of the same three years, all of which were published within a
few months of the last entry which each contains. Next to these come
the books which consist of contemporary material, published without
alteration from the original manuscripts, but only many years after
they had been written. The best of these for hard facts, often facts
not to be found elsewhere, is the diary of Tomkinson of the 16th Light
Dragoons:[13] with it may be mentioned the Journal of George Simmons of
the 95th, published in 1899 with the title, “A British Rifle Man,”[14]
the Journals of Sir William Gomm, 1808–15,[15] Sir George Warre’s
Letters of 1808–12,[16] which only saw the light two years ago, and
Larpent’s _Private Journal_, printed in 1852.[17] These volumes all
have short notes by the editors, but the text is the writing of the
Peninsular time, untampered with and unaltered.
These books and their minor contemporaries stand in a class by
themselves, as contemporary material reflecting accurately the spirit
of the times. Much more numerous, however, are the books which, though
produced by actors in the Great War, appeared at dates more or less
remote from the years whose events they narrate. The formal histories
are comparatively few, the reason being that Napier’s magnificent (if
somewhat prejudiced and biassed) volumes completely put off other
possible authors, who felt that they lacked his genius and his power of
expression, from the idea of writing a long narrative of the war as a
whole. This was a misfortune, since the one book which all students of
military history are thereby driven to read, was composed by a bitter
political partisan, who is set on maligning the Tory government, has an
altogether exaggerated admiration for Napoleon, and owned many personal
enemies in the British army, who receive scant justice at his hands.
At the same time we must be grateful that the work was written by one
who was an actual witness of many of the campaigns that he relates,
conscientiously strove to get at all other first-hand witnesses, and
ransacked the French as well as the British official papers, so far as
he could obtain access to them. The merits of his style are all his
own, and will cause the _History of the Peninsular War_ to be read as
an English classic, as Clarendon’s _History of the Great Rebellion_ is
read, even when research has shown (as in Clarendon’s case) that much
of the narrative needs reconstruction, and that the general thesis on
which it is constructed lacks impartiality.
[Sidenote: Napier, Southey, and Lord Londonderry]
The only other general histories of the war which appeared were
Southey’s (three vols. published 1832) and Lord Londonderry’s.[18] The
former was written by a literary man without any military experience,
who had seen nothing of the Peninsula during the years of the
struggle, and had as almost his only merit, a good knowledge of the
Spanish sources, of which he was too uncritical. The book fell dead,
being unable to compete with Napier, and lacking all the authority of
personal knowledge which was the latter’s strong point. The smaller
book of Lord Londonderry (two volumes, published 1829) is by no means
without merit, but has many faults, always hovering on the edge between
formal history and personal reminiscences. Wherever Charles Stewart
had not been present, he passes lightly over the episodes of war,
and obviously had taken no very great pains to collect first-hand
material. At the same time the book has value, as giving the views
of a highly-placed staff officer, who had the opportunity of seeing
every episode from the point of view of Head Quarters, and had strong
convictions and theories of his own. He had also the saving grace of
loving statistics, and printed many valuable appendices of “morning
states” and casualty-lists, things of which Napier was far too
sparing, and which Gurwood suppressed altogether. As a general record
the book could not cope with Napier, and has been forgotten—somewhat
undeservedly—no less than Southey’s vast quartos. There is absolutely
no other general history by a contemporary which needs mention. Of
course I omit foreign sources, which help us little with regard to the
British army, though they are indispensable for a general study of the
war. Foy’s unfinished _Guerre de la Peninsule_, if we may judge from
the volumes which appeared before his death, would have been a very
prejudiced affair—his account of the British troops in Vol. I. is a
bitter satire, contrasting oddly enough with his confessions concerning
their merits in his _Journal_, of which a large portion was published
a few years ago by Girod de l’Ain under the title _Vie Militaire du
Général Foy_. After all the detraction in his formal history, it is
interesting to read the frank letter which says, in 1811, that for a
set battle on a limited front he acknowledges the superiority of the
English infantry to the French, “I keep this opinion to myself,” he
adds, “and have never divulged it, for it is necessary that the soldier
in the ranks should not only hate his enemy, but also despise him.”[19]
Foy kept the opinion so closely to himself, that no one would have
suspected it who had read only his formal history of the Peninsular War.
Another French general history is Marshal Jourdan’s _Guerre d’Espagne_,
issued only ten years ago by the Vicomte de Grouchy, though large parts
of it had been utilized in Ducasse’s _Life and Correspondence of King
Joseph Bonaparte_. This covers the whole war down to Vittoria, and
is notable for its acute and often unanswerable criticism of Soult
and Masséna, Marmont, and, not least, of Napoleon himself. It is less
satisfactory as a vindication of Jourdan’s own doings. Marmont’s
autobiography only covers his fifteen months of command from May, 1811,
to July, 1812: while St. Cyr’s and Suchet’s very interesting accounts
of their own periods of activity relate entirely to Catalonia and the
eastern side of the Peninsula. St. Cyr does not touch British affairs
at all; Suchet treats his campaigns against Maitland and Murray in a
much more cursory style than his previous successes against the Spanish
armies.[20] The other French formal narratives by contemporaries and
eye-witnesses are for the most part monographs on particular campaigns
in which the writers took part—such as Thiébault’s work on Junot in
Portugal—full of deliberate inaccuracies—which was published in 1817,
and Lapène’s _Conquête d’Andalousie, en 1810–12_, and _Campagnes de
1813–14_ (both published in 1823 in volumes of different size) which
deal only with the army of Soult. There are, however, two general
histories by German officers—Schepeler (who served with the Spaniards),
and Riegel (who served with the French)—which both require mention. The
former is especially valuable.[21]
[Sidenote: Toreno, Belmas, John Jones]
Among Peninsular historians two deserve special notice. The Conde
de Toreno, a Spanish statesman who had taken part in the war as a
young man, produced in 1838 three massive volumes which are, next to
Napier, the greatest book that makes this war its subject. He is a
first-hand authority of great merit, and should always be consulted
for the Spanish version of events. He was a great master of detail,
and yet could paint with a broad brush. It is sometimes necessary
to remember that he is a partisan, and has his favourites and his
enemies (especially La Romana) among the generals and statesmen of
Spain. But on the whole he is a historian of high merit and judgment.
With Toreno’s work must be mentioned the five small volumes of the
Portuguese José Accursio das Neves, published in 1811, when Masséna had
but just retreated from before the Lines of Torres Vedras. This is a
very full and interesting description of Junot’s invasion of Portugal,
and of the sufferings of that realm which came to an end with the
Convention of Cintra. It is the only detailed picture of Portugal in
1808. Unfortunately the author did not complete the story of 1809–10.
At the end of this note on historical works, as distinguished from
memoirs or diaries of adventure, we must name two excellent books, one
English and one French, on the special subject of siege operations.
These two monographs by specialists, both distinguished engineer
officers—Sir John Jones’ _Journal of the Sieges in Spain 1811–13_,
and Colonel Belmas’ _Journaux des Sièges dans la Peninsule 1808–13_,
published respectively in 1827 and 1837—are among the most valuable
books dealing with the Peninsular War, both containing a wealth of
detail and explanatory notes. The work of Belmas is especially rich in
reprints of original documents bearing on the sieges, and in statistics
of garrisons, losses, ammunition expended, etc. They were so complete,
and supplemented each other so well, that little was done to add
to the information that they give, till Major J. Leslie’s admirable
edition of the _Dickson Papers_ began to appear a few years ago, and
appreciably increased our knowledge of the English side of the siege
operations.
Having made an end of the formal histories written by contemporaries
and eye-witnesses, it remains that we should speak of a class of
literature much larger in bulk, and generally much more interesting,
considered in the light of reading for the general student—the books
of autobiographies and personal reminiscences which were written by
participants in the war some time after it had come to an end—at any
time from ten to forty years after 1814. Their name is legion. I am
continually discovering more of them, many of them printed obscurely
in small editions and from local presses, so that the very knowledge
of their existence has perished. And so many unpublished manuscripts
of the sort exist, in France no less than in England, that it is clear
that we have not even yet got to the end of the stock of original
material bearing on the war. Some of the most interesting, _e.g._ the
lively autobiography of Blakeney of the 28th,[22] and that of Ney’s
aide-de-camp Sprünglin,[23] have only appeared during the last few
years.
[Sidenote: Inaccuracies of Memoir-writers]
These volumes of personal adventures differ greatly in value: some were
written up conscientiously from contemporary diaries: others contain
only fragments, the most striking or the most typical incidents of
campaigns whose less interesting every-day work had been forgotten, or
at least had grown dim. Unfortunately in old age the memory often finds
it hard to distinguish between things seen and things heard. It is not
uncommon to find a writer who represents himself as having been present
at scenes where he cannot have been assisting, and still more frequent
to detect him applying to one date perfectly genuine anecdotes which
belong to another. One or two of the most readable narratives frankly
mix up the sequence of events, with a note that the exact dating can
not be reconstructed. This is notoriously the case with the most vivid
of all the books of reminiscences from the ranks—the little volume of
“Rifleman Harris,” whose tales about General Robert Craufurd and the
Light Division flow on in a string, in which chronology has to take its
chance, and often fails to find it.
Another source of blurred or falsified reminiscences is that an author,
writing many years after the events which he has to record, has
generally read printed books about them, and mixes up this secondary
knowledge with the first-hand tale of his adventures. Napier’s
Peninsular War came out so comparatively early, and was so universally
read, that screeds from it have crept into a very great number of the
books written after 1830. Indeed, some simple veterans betray the
source of their tales, concerning events which they cannot possibly
have witnessed themselves, by repeating phrases or epigrams of Napier’s
which are unmistakeable. Some even fill up a blank patch in their own
memory by a _précis_ of a page or a chapter from the great history.
It is always necessary to take care that we are not accepting as a
corroboration of some tale, that which is really only a repetition of
it. The diary of a sergeant of the 43rd mentioned above,[24] contains
an intolerable amount of boiled-down Napier. It is far more curious to
find traces of him in the famous Marbot, who had clearly read Mathieu
Dumas’ translation when it came out in French.
The books of personal adventure, as we may call the whole class, may
roughly be divided into three sections, of decreasing value in the way
of authority. The first and most important consists of works written
upon the base of an old diary or journal, where the memory is kept
straight as to the sequence of events by the contemporary record,
and the author is amplifying and writing up real first-hand material.
Favourable examples of this are Leach’s _Rough Sketches of the Life
of an Old Soldier_,[25] Leslie of Balquhain’s _Military Journal_,[26]
which in spite of its title is not in journal shape, but reads as a
continuous narrative, and Sir George Bell’s _Rough Notes of Fifty
Years’ Service_,[27] all of which are definitely stated by the authors
to have been founded on their note-books of the war time, and therefore
can as a rule be treated as first-hand evidence. They can generally
be trusted as authorities against any divergent tales based on the
narratives of writers who wrote their reminiscences without any such
foundation, and where they get off the lines of contemporary evidence
they usually give the reader warning. For example, Leach gives valuable
material to show the inaccuracy of Napier’s exaggerated estimate of
the length and pace of the Light Division’s march to Talavera, whose
erroneous figures have been repeated in so many subsequent books. And
yet Leach was not conscious of the fact that the data which he gives
were incompatible with Napier’s story, and repeats it in a general
way—because he published his book several years after the appearance
of Napier’s second volume, and had (like many other members of the
Light Division) absorbed the legend as a matter of faith on Napier’s
authority. It was reserved for Sir John Bell,[28] who had served under
Craufurd but joined too late for Talavera, to explode the story. But
his demonstration of its inaccuracy has not travelled far, while the
original legend has gone all round the world, and is still reproduced,
as an example of unparalleled rapidity of movement, in serious military
works.
[Sidenote: Gleig, Blakeney, Hennegan]
Infinitely less valuable than the books founded on private diaries
or letters of contemporary date, are those which were written down
long after the war, from unaided memory only. They are, of course,
progressively less valuable for evidence according as the date at which
they were indited recedes from the period with which they deal. Gleig’s
charming _The Subaltern_, printed as early as 1825, may be better
trusted for matters of detail than Blakeney’s equally vivid narrative
written in the remote island of Paxos about 1835, and Blakeney is more
valuable than Hennegan’s highly romantic _Seven Years of Campaigning_,
published only in 1847, when thirty winters had blurred reminiscence,
and allowed of the accretion of much second-hand and doubtful material
round the original story. The strength of men’s memories differs, so
does their appreciation of the relative value of a dramatic narrative
as compared with a photographic record of personal experiences. But
in a general way we must allow that every year that elapses between
the event and the setting down of its narrative on paper decreases
progressively the value of the record. As an example of the way in
which the failing powers of old age can confuse even a powerful memory,
we may mention the curious fact that Wellington himself, twenty years
after his last campaign, seems to have told two auditors that he had
visited Blücher’s camp on the very eve of Waterloo, the night between
the 17th and 18th of June, 1815, a statement quite incredible.[29]
It was apparently a blurred memory of his real visit to the Prussian
headquarters on the early afternoon of the 16th, of which ample details
are known.
Failing memory, the love of a well-rounded tale, a spice of autolatry,
and an appreciation of the picturesque, have impaired the value of
many a veteran’s reminiscences. Especially if he is a well-known
_raconteur_, and has repeated his narrative many times before he
sets it down on paper, does it tend to assume a romantic form. The
classical example, of course, is Marbot, whose memoirs contain many
things demonstrably false, _e.g._ that he brought the news of the _Dos
Mayo_ insurrection at Madrid to Napoleon, or that in 1812 he took his
regiment from Moscow to the neighbourhood of Poltava, and brought it
back (400 miles!) in less than a fortnight with a convoy of provisions,
or that he saw 6000 men drowned on the broken ice of the lake of
Satschan at the end of the battle of Austerlitz.[30] Marbot is, of
course, an extreme example of amusing egotism, but parallels on a minor
scale could be quoted from many of his contemporaries, who wrote their
tale too late. We may mention Thiébault’s account of the combat of
Aldea da Ponte, when he declares that he fought 17,000 Anglo-Portuguese
and produced 500 casualties in their ranks, when he was really opposed
by one British brigade and two Portuguese battalions, who lost
precisely 100 men between them. Yet the account is so lengthy and
detailed, that if we had not the British sources before us, we should
be inclined to think that we were reading an accurate narrative of
a real fight, instead of a romantic invention reconstructed from a
blurred memory. It was the only Peninsular fight in which Thiébault
exercised an independent command—and every year added to its beauties
as the general grew old.
While, therefore, we read the later-written Peninsular narratives
with interest, and often with profit, as reflections of the spirit of
the time and the army, we must always be cautious in accepting their
evidence. And we must begin by trying to obtain a judgment on the
“personal equation”—was the author a hard-headed observer, or a lover
of romantic anecdotes? What proportion, if any, of the facts which he
gives can be proved incompatible with contemporary records? Or again,
what proportion (though not demonstrably false) seem unlikely, in face
of other authorities? Had he been reading other men’s books on a large
scale? Of this the usual proof is elaborate narrative concerning
events at which he cannot possibly have been present, with or without
citation of the source from which he has obtained the information. It
is only when the author has passed his examination with credit on these
points, that we can begin to treat him as a serious authority, and to
trust him as evidence for scenes at which we know that he was actually
present. Many a writer of personal adventures may finally be given his
certificate as good authority for the annals of his own battalion,
but for nothing more. It is even possible that we may have to make
the further restriction that he may be trusted on the lucky days, but
not on the less happy ones, in the history of his own beloved corps.
Reticence as to “untoward incidents” is not uncommon. As to things
outside the regiment, there was often a good deal of untrustworthy
gossip abroad, which stuck in the memory even after long years had
passed.
[Sidenote: Books of Regimental Adventure]
Among all the books of regimental adventure, I should give the first
place for interest and good writing to Lieut. Grattan’s _With the
Connaught Rangers_. It is not too much to say that if the author
had taken to formal history, his style, which is vivid without
exaggeration, and often dignified without pomposity, would have made
him a worthy rival of Napier as an English classic. His descriptions
of the aspect and psychology of the stormers marching down to the
advanced trenches at Ciudad Rodrigo, and of the crisis of the battle
of Salamanca, are as good as anything that Napier ever wrote. A reader
presented with many of his paragraphs would say without hesitation that
they were excerpts from the great historian. Unfortunately Grattan
suffered from one of the faults which I have named above—he _will_
give untrustworthy information about episodes at which he was not
present—it is at best superfluous and sometimes misleading. But for
what the 88th did at Bussaco and Fuentes, at Badajoz and Salamanca,
he is very good authority. And he is always a pleasure to read. Two
good books—Gleig’s _The Subaltern_, and Moyle Sherer’s _Recollections
of the Peninsula_—have a share of the literary merit of Grattan’s
work, but lack his power. They give respectively the day-by-day camp
life of the 85th in 1813–14, and of the 48th in 1811–13, in a pleasant
and life-like fashion, and since both were published within ten years
of the end of the war—Gleig’s in 1825, Sherer’s in 1824—the writers’
memories were still strong, and their statements of fact may be relied
upon. Both have the merit of sticking closely to personal experience,
and of avoiding second-hand stories.
Those lively tales of adventure—Kincaid’s _Adventures in the Rifle
Brigade_, Sir Harry Smith’s _Autobiography_, and Blakeney’s memoir
(which its editor called _A Boy in the Peninsular War_)[31]—were
all written at a much later date, from twenty to thirty years
after Waterloo, and show their remoteness from the time that they
describe not so much by want of detail, nor of picturesque power of
description,—all three authors were good wielders of the pen—as by
the selection of the facts that they record. Much of the every-day
life of the regiment has been forgotten or grown dim, and only the
great days, or the most striking personal experiences, or quaint and
grotesque incidents, are recorded. This very fact makes them all very
good reading—they contain (so to speak) all the plums of the cake
and comparatively little of the less appetizing crust. Harry Smith’s
chapters are practically the tale of his Odyssey in the campaigns of
1812–13 along with the heroic little Spanish wife whom he had picked
up and married at the storm of Badajoz. Kincaid is a humourist—he
remembers all the grotesque incidents, ludicrous situations, practical
jokes, and misadventures, in which he and his comrades were concerned,
and pours them out in a string of anecdotes, loosely connected by a
narrative of which he says that he refuses to be responsible for the
exact sequence or dating. It is very amusing, and some of the more
striking stories can be verified from other and better authorities.
But the general effect is often as if we were reading a chapter out
of Lever’s _Charles O’Malley_, or some such old-fashioned Peninsular
romance. Blakeney’s book gives a better impression for solidity, and
he fills up many an incident, otherwise known to us only in outline,
with picturesque detail which bears every appearance of truth. But
I have once or twice found his narrative refusing to square in with
contemporary documents, and when this is the case the story written
twenty-five years after the event must go to the wall.[32] He must be
used with caution, though he is giving a genuine record to the best of
his ability.
[Sidenote: Reminiscences from the Ranks]
Nearly all the reminiscences from the ranks are subject to these same
disabilities. With hardly an exception they were written down long
years after the events recorded. Usually the narrator had no books
or notes to help him, and we get a genuine tale, uninfluenced by
outer sources, but blurred and foreshortened by the lapse of time.
The details of personal adventure are perfectly authentic to the best
of the veteran’s memory; incidents of battle, of camp hardships, of
some famous court-martial and subsequent punishment-parade, come out
in a clear-cut fashion. But there are long gaps of forgotten months,
frequent errors of dating, and often mistakes in the persons to whom an
exploit, an epigram, or a misadventure are attributed. Yet these little
volumes give the spirit of the rank and file in the most admirable
fashion, and enable us to realize the inner life of the battalion as
no official document can do. There are a few cases where the author
has got hold of a book, generally Napier’s great history, and to a
great extent spoils his work by letting in passages of incongruous
eloquence, or strategical disquisition, into the homely stuff of his
real reminiscences.[33]
One soldier’s little volume stands out from all the rest for its
literary merit—it is the work of a man of superior education, who had
enlisted in a moment of pique and humiliation to avoid facing at home
the consequences of his own conceit and folly. This short story of 150
pages called _Journal of T. S., a Soldier of the 71st Highland Light
Infantry, 1806–15_, was written down as early as 1818,[34] when memory
was still fresh. Its value lies in the fact that the author wrote from
the ranks, yet was so different in education and mental equipment from
his comrades, that he does not take their views and habits for granted,
but proceeds to explain and comment on them. “I could get,” as he
notes, “no pleasure from their amusements, but found it necessary to
humour them in many things, and to be obliging to all. I was thought
saucy, and little courted by them, they not liking my dry manner as
they called it.” His narrative is that of an intelligent observer
of the behaviour of the regiment, in whose psychology he is deeply
interested, rather than that of a typical soldier. Having a ready pen
and a keen observant eye, he produced a little book of extraordinary
interest. The chronicle of his marches, and the details of the actions
which he relates, seem very accurate when compared with official
documents.
Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th was another notable Scot whose book,
_The Eventful Life of a Soldier_, is well worth reading. He was not
so well educated as T. S., nor had he the same vivid literary style.
But he was an intelligent man, and possessed a wider set of interests
than was common in the ranks, so that it is always worth while to
look up his notes and observations. His description of the horrors
of Masséna’s retreat from Portugal in 1811 is a very striking piece
of lurid writing. After him may be mentioned a quartermaster and
a sergeant—Surtees and Costello—both of the Rifle Brigade,—whose
reminiscences are full of typical stories reflecting the virtues and
failings of the famous Light Division. For the views and ways of
thought of the ordinary private of the better sort, the little books
of “Rifleman Harris,” already cited above, Lawrence of the 40th, and
Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers,[35] are valuable authority. They are
admirable evidence for the way in which the rank and file looked on a
battle, a forced march, or a prolonged shortage of rations. But we must
not trust them overmuch as authorities on the greater matter of war.
[Sidenote: Memoirs of French Veterans]
There is a considerable bulk of French reminiscences dealing with
the purely British side of the Peninsular War. Beside Marbot’s and
Thiébault’s memoirs, of which I have already made mention, three
or four more must not be neglected by any one who wishes to see
Wellington’s army from the outside. By far the most vivid and lively
of them is Lemonnier-Delafosse of the 31st Léger, whose _Souvenirs
Militaires_ were published at Havre in 1850. He is a bitter enemy, and
wants to prove that Wellington was a mediocre general, and ought always
to have been beaten. But he does his best to tell a true tale, and
acknowledges his defeats handsomely—though he thinks that with better
luck they might have been victories. Failing memory can be detected in
one or two places, where he makes an officer fall at the wrong battle,
or misnames a village. Fantin des Odoards, also (oddly enough) of the
31st Léger, kept a journal, so that his reminiscences of 1808–11 are
very accurate. He is specially valuable for Moore’s retreat and Soult’s
Oporto campaign. A far more fair-minded man than Delafosse, he is full
of acknowledgments of the merit of his British adversaries, and makes
no secret of his disgust for the Spanish war,—a nightmare of plunder
and military executions naturally resulting from an unjust aggression.
A third valuable author is Colonel St. Chamans, an aide-de-camp of
Soult, whom he cordially detested, and whose meanness and spirit
of intrigue he is fond of exposing. He is of a light and humorous
spirit—very different from another aide-de-camp, Ney’s Swiss follower,
Sprünglin, whose journal[36] is a most solid and heavy production, of
value for minute facts and figures but not lively. Unlike St. Chamans
in another respect, he is devoted to his chief, the Marshal, of whom
he was the most loyal admirer. But I imagine that Ney was a much more
generous and loveable master than the wily Soult.
Other useful French volumes of reminiscences are those of Guingret
of the 6th corps, full of horrible details of Masséna’s Portuguese
misfortunes; of D’Illens, a cavalry officer who served against Moore
and Wellesley in 1808–09; and of Vigo-Roussillon, of the 8th Line, who
gives the only good French narrative of Barrosa. Parquin is a mere
_sabreur_, who wrote his memoir too late, and whose anecdotes cannot be
trusted. He survived to be one of the followers of Napoleon III. in his
early and unhappy adventures at Boulogne and elsewhere. Other French
writers, such as Rocca and Gonneville, were long in Spain, but little
in contact with the British, being employed on the Catalan coast, or
with the army of the South on the Granada side. So much for the works
of actors in the Great War, who relate what they have themselves seen.
We need spend but a much smaller space on the books of the later
generations, which are but second-hand information, however carefully
they may have been compiled.
The British regimental histories ought to be of great value, since the
series compiled by the order of the Horse Guards, under the general
editorship of Richard Cannon, in the 1830’s, might have been enriched
by the information obtainable from hundreds of Peninsular veterans,
who were still surviving. Unfortunately nearly every volume of it is
no more than bad hack-work. In the majority of the volumes we find
nothing more than copious extracts from Napier, eked out with reprints
of the formal reports taken from the _London Gazette_. It is quite
exceptional to find even regimental statistics, such as might have been
obtained with ease from the pay-lists and other documents in possession
of the battalion, or stored at the Record Office. Details obtained
through enquiry from veteran officers who had served through the war
are quite exceptional. Some of his volumes are less arid and jejune
than others—and this is about all that can be said in favour of even
the best of them.
[Sidenote: Regimental Histories]
All the good regimental histories, without exception, are outside the
official “Cannon” series. Some are excellent; it may be said that, as
a general rule, those written latest are the best: the standard of
accuracy and original research has been rising ever since 1860. Among
those which deserve a special word of praise are Colonel Gardyne’s
admirable _The Life of a Regiment_ (the Gordon Highlanders), published
in 1901; Cope’s _History of the Rifle Brigade_ (full of excerpts from
first-hand authorities) which came out in 1877; Moorsom’s _History of
the 52nd Oxfordshire Light Infantry_ (the first really good regimental
history which was written), published in 1860; Davis’s _History of
the 2nd Foot_ (Queen’s West Surrey), and Colonel Hamilton’s _14th
Hussars_. By the time that these began to appear, the level of research
was beginning to rise, and it was no longer considered superfluous to
visit the Record Office, or to make enquiries for unpublished papers
among the families of old officers. All those mentioned above are large
volumes, but even the smaller histories are now compiled with care,
and their size is generally the result not of scamped work (as of
old), but of the fact that some regiments have, by the chance of their
stations, seen less service than others, and therefore have less to
record. I may mention as books on the smaller scale which have proved
useful to me, Hayden’s history of the 76th, Smyth’s of the 20th, and
Purdon’s of the 47th. A rare example of the annals of a smaller unit,
a battery not a battalion, is Colonel Whinyates’ story of C Troop,
R.H.A., which he called _From Corunna to Sebastopol_, in which much
loyal and conscientious work may be found. But the history of the whole
of the Artillery of the Peninsular Army, Portuguese as well as English,
is now being worked out in admirable detail in the _Dickson Papers_,
edited by Major John Leslie, R.A., who knows everything that can be
known about the units of his corps which served under Wellington.
Sir Alexander Dickson, it may be remarked, was Commanding Officer of
the Artillery in the later campaigns of 1813 and in 1814, and before
he obtained that post had been in charge of all the three sieges of
Badajoz as well as those of Olivenza and Ciudad Rodrigo. Since he
had been lent to the Portuguese artillery, his papers give copious
information as to the auxiliary batteries of that nation which were
attached to the Peninsular Army. It is devoutly to be wished that some
officer would take up a corresponding task by compiling the annals of
the Royal Engineers in the Peninsular War. Connolly’s _History of the
Royal Sappers and Miners_ (published so far back as 1857), has much
good information, but infinitely more could be compiled by searching
the Record Office, and collating the memoirs of Boothby, Burgoyne,
Landmann, and other engineer officers who have left journals or
reminiscences.
Along with the British regimental histories should be named two sets
of volumes which are of the same type, though they relate to larger
units than a regiment, and do not deal with our own troops. The first
class deals with our German auxiliaries, and is headed by Major Ludlow
Beamish’s valuable and conscientious _History of the King’s German
Legion_. This was written in 1832, but is a very favourable example
of research for a book of the date, when Cannon’s miserable series
represented the level of English regimental history. The two volumes
contain many original letters and documents, and some excellent plates
of uniforms. In 1907 Captain Schwertfeger went over the same ground
in his _Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion_,[37] and added
appreciably to Beamish’s store of facts. The Brunswick Oels regiment,
which served Wellington from 1811 to 1814, has also a German biographer
in Colonel Kortfleisch, who has served in the 88th German Infantry,
which now represents that ancient corps. There is no similar history
for the _Chasseurs Brittaniques_, the last of the old Peninsular
foreign corps.
[Sidenote: Portuguese Authorities]
For the Portuguese Army a good description of the state of affairs in
1810, when it had just been reorganized, is contained in Halliday’s
_Present State of Portugal_, published in 1812. Chaby’s _Excerptos
Historicos_[38] contains a good deal of valuable material for its
subsequent history, but is sadly ill-arranged and patchy. Only the
Portuguese artillery in the Peninsular War has been dealt with in
Major Teixeira Botelho’s _Subsidios para a Historia da Artilheria
Portegueza_, which is very full and well documented. The life of a
British officer serving with a Portuguese regiment can be studied
in the _Memoirs of Bunbury_ (20th Line),[39] and Blakiston (5th
Caçadores).[40]
After regimental histories, the next most important source of
information, in the way of books not written by those who served under
Wellington, is personal biographies. Captain Delavoye’s _Life of Lord
Lynedoch_ (Sir Thomas Graham)[41] is perhaps the most useful among
them, not so much for any merit of style or arrangement, as for the
excellent use of contemporary documents not available elsewhere. A
large portion of the volume consists of excerpts from Graham’s long and
interesting military journal, and letters from and to him are printed
_in extenso_. Thus we get first-hand information on many events at
which no other British witness was present, _e.g._ Castaños’ campaign
on the Ebro in 1808, as well as comments on better known operations,
such as Sir John Moore’s Corunna retreat, and the Barrosa expedition
of 1811. Unfortunately both journal and letters fail for the campaign
of 1813, in which Graham took such a distinguished part.
H. B. Robinson’s _Memoirs of Sir Thomas Picton_[42] was a book of
which Napier fell foul—there are many caustic comments on it in his
controversial appendices. But it is not nearly so bad a work as might
have been expected from his way of treating it. Indeed I fancy that
Napier was paying off an old Light Division grudge against Picton
himself, whom he personally disliked. The narrative is fair, and the
quantity of contemporary letters inserted give the compilation some
value. Sidney’s _Life of Lord Hill_[43] is far inferior to Robinson’s
book: the author did not know his Peninsular War well enough to
justify the task which he took in hand, and the letters, of which he
fortunately prints a good many, are the only valuable material in it.
It is curious that both Picton and Hill had their lives written by
clergymen, when there were still a good many old Peninsular officers
surviving who might have undertaken the task.
Of the other chief lieutenants of Wellington, Beresford has never
found a biographer, though the part which he played in the war was
so important. There must be an immense accumulation of his papers
somewhere, in private hands, but I do not know where they lie. The only
account of him consists of a few pages in a useful but rather formal
and patchy little book by J. W. Cole, entitled, _Memoirs of British
Generals Distinguished during the Peninsular War_.[44] Lord Combermere
(Stapleton Cotton) was in high command throughout Wellington’s
campaigns, but was hardly up to his position, though he earned his
chief’s tolerance by strict obedience to orders, a greater merit in the
Duke’s eyes than military genius or initiative. There is a biography of
him by Lady Combermere and Captain W. Knollys (1866) but the Peninsular
chapters are short. Of Sir Lowry Cole, Sir John Gaspard Le Marchant,
and several other prominent divisional generals and brigadiers, the
only biographies are those in J. W. Cole’s book mentioned above. Sir
James Leith, more fortunate, had a small volume dedicated to his memory
by an anonymous admirer in 1818, but it was written without sufficient
material, Leith’s private correspondence not (as it seems) being in
the author’s hands, while official documents were not for the most
part available at such an early date. There is a good deal, however,
concerning this hard-fighting general’s personality and adventures to
be gleaned from the memoirs of his nephew and aide-de-camp, Leith Hay.
[Sidenote: Biographies of Gough, Colborne, etc.]
Of officers who did not attain to the highest rank under Wellington,
but who in later years made a great career for themselves, there are
two biographies which devote a large section to Peninsular matters,
those of Lord Gough by R. S. Rait (two vols., 1903), and of Lord
Seaton (Colborne of the 52nd) by Moore Smith. These are both excellent
productions, which give much private correspondence of the time, and
have been constructed on modern lines, with full attention to all
possible sources first- and second-hand. They are both indispensable
for any one who wishes to make a detailed study of the Peninsular
campaigns. There are also short memoirs of Sir Denis Pack[45] and Lord
Vivian,[46] each produced by a grandson of the general, and giving
useful extracts from journals and correspondence. The campaign of Sir
John Moore can, perhaps, hardly be considered as falling into the
story of Wellington’s army, but it is impossible to avoid mentioning
the full (and highly controversial) biography of the hero of Corunna
by Sir J. F. Maurice,[47] which contains an invaluable diary, and much
correspondence. It is an indispensable volume, at any rate, for those
who wish to study the first year of the Peninsular War, and to mark the
difference between the personalities and military theories of Moore and
Wellington.
Of formal and detailed histories of the Peninsular War written in
recent years there is one in Spanish by General Arteche, a very
conscientious and thorough-going worker at original documents, who
got up a good many English authorities, but by no means all. For the
Spanish version of the whole war he is absolutely necessary. So, for
the Portuguese version, is the immense work of Soriano da Luz, which is
largely founded on Napier, but often differs from him, and brings many
unpublished documents to light. Colonel Balagny has started a history
of the war in French on a very large scale, delightfully documented,
and showing admirable research. In five volumes he has only just got
into 1809, so the whole book will be a large one. Mr. Fortescue’s
fine history of the British Army has just started on the Peninsular
campaign in its last volume. To my own four volumes, soon I hope to be
five, I need only allude in passing. There is one immense monograph on
Dupont’s Campaign by a French author, Colonel Titeux, which does not
touch English military affairs at all. Two smaller but good works of
the same type by Colonel Dumas and Commandant Clerc are both, oddly
enough, dedicated to the same campaign,—Soult’s defence of the Pyrenean
frontier in 1813–14: the former is the better of the two: both have
endeavoured, in the modern fashion, to use the reports of both sides,
not to write from the documents of one only; but Dumas has a better
knowledge of his English sources than Clerc.
It is beyond my power to guess why similar monographs on separate
campaigns of the war do not appear in English also. But the few
_brochures_ purporting to treat of such which have appeared of late
on this side of the channel, are mostly cram-books for examinations,
resting on no wide knowledge of sources, and often consisting of little
more than an analysis of Napier, with some supplementary comments
hazarded. They contrast very unfavourably with a book such as that of
Colonel Dumas.