WELLINGTON’S LIEUTENANTS—HILL, BERESFORD, GRAHAM
There can be no stronger contrast than that between the impression
which the Iron Duke left on his old followers, and that produced by his
trusted and most responsible lieutenant, Sir Rowland Hill. Hill was
blessed and kindly remembered wherever he went. He was a man brimming
over with the milk of human kindness, and the mention of him in any
diary is generally accompanied by some anecdote of an act of thoughtful
consideration, some friendly word, or piece of unpremeditated, often
homely charity. A wounded officer from Albuera, who is dragging himself
painfully back to Lisbon, reports himself to Hill as he passes his
headquarters. Next morning “the general himself attended me out on my
road, to give me at parting a basket with tea, sugar, bread, butter,
and a large venison pasty.”[103] A grateful sergeant, who bore a letter
to Hill in 1813, remembers how he expected nothing but a nod and an
answer from such a great man, and was surprised to find that the
general ordered his servant to give the messenger a supper, arranged
for his billet that night, and next morn had his haversack stuffed with
bread and meat, presented him with a dollar, and advised him where to
sleep on his return journey.[104] He would give an exhausted private a
drink from the can that had just been brought for his personal use, or
find time to bestow a piece of friendly advice on an unknown subaltern.
This simple, pious, considerate old officer, whose later portraits
show a decided resemblance to Mr. Pickwick, was known everywhere among
the rank and file as “Daddy Hill.” An officer of the 2nd Division
sums up his character in a well-written letter as follows[105]: “The
foundation of all his popularity with the troops was his sterling worth
and heroic spirit, but his popularity was strengthened and increased as
soon as he was personally known. He was the very picture of an English
country gentleman: to the soldiers who came from the rural districts
of old England he represented _home_; his fresh complexion, placid
face, kind eyes, kind voice, the absence of all parade or noise in his
manner delighted them. The displeasure of Sir Rowland was worse to them
than the loudest anger of other generals. His attention to all their
wants and comforts, his visits to the sick in hospital, his vigilant
protection of the poor peasantry, his just severity to marauders, his
generous treatment of such French prisoners and wounded as fell into
his hands, made for him a warm place in the hearts of his soldiery; and
where’er the survivors of that army are now scattered, assuredly Hill’s
name and image are dearly cherished still.”
[Sidenote: Merits of Sir Rowland Hill]
The description sounds like that of a benevolent old squire, rather
than that of a distinguished lieutenant-general. Nevertheless, Rowland
Hill was a very great man of war. Wellington liked him as a subordinate
because of his extraordinary punctuality in obedience, and the entire
absence in him of that restless personal ambition which makes many able
men think more of opportunities for distinguishing themselves than of
exact performance of the orders given them. Wherever Hill was, it was
certain that nothing would be risked, and nothing would be forgotten.
His beautiful combination of intelligence and executive power more
than once brought relief to his chief’s mind in a critical moment,
most of all on the march to Bussaco in September, 1810, when it was
all-important to Wellington’s plans that his own detached force under
Hill should join him as soon as Masséna’s similar detached force under
Reynier should have reached the main French army. Hill executed a long
and difficult march over a mountainous country with admirable speed,
and was duly up in line on the day before the battle of Bussaco, which
could not in common prudence have been fought if he had been late.
This we might have expected from a man of Hill’s character; but what
is more surprising is that when he was trusted—a thing that did not
often occur under Wellington’s _régime_—with a command in which he was
allowed to take the offensive on his own account, he displayed not
only a power of organizing, but a fierce driving energy which none of
Wellington’s more eager and restless subordinates could have surpassed.
Speedy pursuit of an enemy on the move was not one of the great Duke’s
characteristics; he was often, and not unjustly, accused of not making
the best profit out of his victories. But Hill’s rapid following up
of Girard, in November, 1811, ending with the complete surprise and
dispersion or capture of the French force at Arroyo dos Molinos, was
a piece of work which for swift, continuous movement, over mountain
roads, in vile rainy weather, could not have been surpassed by the
best of Napoleon’s lieutenants. Another blow of the most creditable
swiftness and daring was the storming of the forts of Almaraz five
months later, when Hill, with a light force, plunged right into the
middle of the French cantonments and broke the all-important bridge
by which Soult and Marmont were wont to co-operate. The forts were
stormed, the bridge thoroughly destroyed, and Hill was off, and out of
reach, before the neighbouring French divisions were half concentrated.
But the crowning glory of Hill’s Peninsular service was the one general
action in which he was fortunate enough to hold independent command.
This was at the end of the war, the battle of St. Pierre, near
Bayonne. He was forming the right flank of Wellington’s line when his
communication with the main army was cut off by a rise in the river
Nive, which carried away the bridges by which he communicated with
the main host. Soult, transferring the bulk of his field force, then
in front of Wellington, by means of the bridges in Bayonne town, fell
upon Hill with five divisions. Hill had only two, those which he had
commanded for the last three years, the 2nd and Hamilton’s (now Le
Cor’s) Portuguese. With 15,000 men he fought a defensive battle against
30,000 for the greater part of the short December day. His reserves
were used up, every regiment had charged many times, the losses were
heavy, and it seemed hardly possible to hold on against such odds. But
Hill did so, and at last the reinforcements from the other side of the
river Nive began to appear in the late afternoon, and Soult desisted
from his attack and drew off beaten. This was one of the most desperate
pieces of fighting in the Peninsular War, and Hill was the soul of the
defence. He was seen at every point of danger, and repeatedly led up
rallied regiments in person to save what seemed like a lost battle.
Eye-witnesses speak of him as quite transformed from his ordinary
placidity—a very picture of warlike energy. He was even heard to swear,
a thing so rare that we are assured that this lapse from his accustomed
habits only took place twice during the whole war. The first occasion
was in the desperate melée in the night attack that began the battle of
Talavera.
[Illustration: _PLATE II._
LORD HILL, G.C.B.]
It is clear that Hill was a man capable of the highest feats in war,
who might have gone very far, if he had been given the chance of a
completely independent command. But such was not his fortune, and in
his last campaign, that of Waterloo, he was almost lost to sight,
as a corps-commander whose troops were operating always under the
immediate eye of Wellington. He survived to a good old age, was made
Commander-in-Chief of the British Army when Wellington gave up the
office on accepting the Premiership in 1827, and held it till within
a few months of his death in 1842. Almost the last recorded words of
the kindly old man upon his death-bed were, “I have a great deal to be
thankful for; I believe I have not an enemy in the world.” And this was
literally true: to know “Daddy Hill” was to love him.
[Sidenote: Lord Beresford]
The other lieutenant to whom Wellington repeatedly entrusted a
semi-independent command was one who was neither so blameless nor so
capable as Rowland Hill. Yet William Carr Beresford was by no means to
be despised as a soldier. The illegitimate son of a great Irish peer,
he was put into a marching regiment at seventeen, and saw an immense
amount of service even for those stirring days of the Revolutionary
War, when a British officer was liable to be sent to any of the four
continents in rapid succession. This was literally the case with
Beresford, who was engaged in India, Egypt, the Cape of Good Hope,
Buenos Ayres, and Portugal in the eight years between 1800 and 1808.
When the Portuguese Government asked for a British general to
reorganize their dilapidated army in 1809, Beresford was the man
selected—partly because he had the reputation of being a good
disciplinarian, partly because he knew the Portuguese tongue, from
having garrisoned Madeira for many months, but mostly (as we are told)
because of political influence. His father’s family had never lost
sight of him, and he was well “pushed” by the Beresford clan, who were
a great power in Ireland, and had to be conciliated by all Governments.
If this appointment to command the Portuguese Army was a job, we may
say (with Gilbert’s judge) that so far as organization went, it was “a
good job too.” For he did most eminent service in creating order out
of chaos, and produced in the short space of a year a well-disciplined
force that was capable of taking a creditable part in line with the
British Army, and won well-deserved encomiums from Wellington and every
other fair critic for the part that it took at Bussaco, its first
engagement. The new army had not been created without much friction
and discontent: to clear out scores of incapable officers—many of them
_fidalgos_ with great court influence—to promote young and unknown men
to their places, to enforce the rigour of the conscription in a land
where it existed in theory but had always been evaded in practice,
gained Beresford immense unpopularity, which he faced in the most
stolid and unbending fashion. At last the Portuguese Army was up to
strength, and had learnt to obey as well as to fight. The teaching
had been by the most drastic methods: Beresford cashiered officers,
and shot deserters or marauders in the rank and file, with a rigid
disregard alike for personal and court influence, and for public
opinion, which Wellington himself could not have surpassed. He was,
indeed, an honest, inflexible, and hard-working administrator; but
with this and with a personal courage that ran almost to excess his
capacities ended. His virtue in Wellington’s eyes was that, after one
short tussle of wills, he completely and very wisely submitted himself
to be the mere instrument of his greater colleague, and did everything
that he was told to do, working the Portuguese army to the best effect
as an auxiliary force to the British, and making no attempt to assert
an independent authority. Instead of being kept under his hand in a
body, it was cut up into brigades, each of which, with few exceptions,
was simply attached to a British division.
[Sidenote: Beresford’s Limitations]
It was no doubt because Beresford showed himself so obedient and loyal,
and exhibited such complete self-abnegation, that Wellington, both
in 1809 and 1811, entrusted him with the command of large detached
forces at a distance from the main army. But the marshal was by no
means up to the task entrusted to him, and after the unhappy experiment
of the first siege of Badajoz, and the ill-fought battle of Albuera,
Wellington removed him from separate command, on the excuse that more
organizing was needed at Lisbon, and kept him either there, or with the
main army (where he had no opportunities of separate command) till the
last year of the war. In 1814 he was for a few weeks entrusted with the
conduct of the expedition to Bordeaux, but as it was unopposed by the
enemy—and was bound to be so, as Wellington well knew—this was giving
him no great responsibility. During the three last years of the war
he was really in a rather otiose and equivocal position, as titular
Commander-in-Chief of an army which was not treated as a unit, but
dispersed abroad among the British divisions. Occasionally he was used
as a corps commander under Wellington’s own eye, as at Toulouse, where
he led the turning column of the 4th and 6th Divisions which broke
down Soult’s flank defences. For such a task, when hard fighting and
obedience to orders was all that was needed, he was a fully competent
lieutenant. It was when thrown on his own resources and forced to make
decisions of his own that he showed himself so much inferior to his
successor Hill.
Beresford was a very tall and stalwart man of herculean strength—every
one knows of his personal encounter with a Polish lancer at Albuera:
he parried the Pole’s thrust, caught him by the collar, and jerked him
out of his saddle and under his horse’s feet, with one twist of his
powerful arm. His features were singularly rough-cast and irregular,
and a sinister appearance was given to his face by a discoloured and
useless left eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident when
he was quite a young man. The glare of this injured optic is said to
have been discomposing to culprits whom he had to upbraid and admonish,
a task which he always executed with thoroughness. He had been forced
to trample on so many misdemeanants, small and great, during his
five years in command of the Portuguese army, that he enjoyed a very
general unpopularity. But I have never found any case in which he can
be accused of injustice or oppression; the fact was that he had a
great many unsatisfactory subordinates to deal with. His own staff and
the better officers of the Portuguese service liked him well enough,
and the value of his work cannot be too highly praised. He came
little into contact with the British part of the army, but I note that
the 88th, whom he had commanded before the war in Spain began, much
preferred him to their later chief, Picton, and had a kindly memory
of him. There are singularly few tales or anecdotes connected with
his name, from which I deduce that in British military circles he was
neither much loved nor much hated.
[Sidenote: Early Career of Graham]
A far more picturesque figure is the third of the three generals to
whom, at one time or another, Wellington committed the charge of a
detached corps, Thomas Graham of Balgowan, later created Lord Lynedoch.
I have already alluded to him in my preface, as in one way the most
typical figure of the epoch—the personification of all that class of
Britons who took arms against France when the Revolutionary War broke
out, as a plain duty incumbent upon them in days when the country and
Crown were in danger. He had seen the Jacobin mob face to face in its
frenzy, in a sufficiently horrid fashion. In 1792 he had taken his
invalid wife—the beautiful Mrs. Graham of Gainsborough’s well-known
picture—to the Riviera, in the vain hope that her consumption might be
stayed. She died, nevertheless, and he started home towards Scotland
with her coffin, to lay her in the grave of his ancestors. On the way
he passed through a town where the crazy hunt after impossible royalist
conspiracies was in full swing. A crowd of drunken National Guards were
seized with the idea that he was an emissary in disguise, bearing arms
to aristocrats. The coffin, they declared, was probably full of pistols
and daggers, and while the unhappy husband struggled in vain to hold
them off, they broke it open, and exposed his wife’s long-dead corpse.
After this incident Thomas Graham not unnaturally conceived the idea
that his one duty in life was to shoot Jacobins. When he had buried his
wife at Methven he was ready for that duty, and the war with France
breaking out only five months after, his opportunity was at hand.
Though a civilian, a Whig member of Parliament, and forty-four years
of age, though he had no knowledge of military affairs, and had never
heard a shot fired in anger, he went to the front at once, and fought
through the siege of Toulon as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord
Mulgrave. It is odd that both Julius Cæsar and Oliver Cromwell started
at this same age as soldiers. This was the first of an endless series
of campaigns against the French; Graham got a quasi-military status by
raising at his own expense the 90th Foot, or Perthshire Volunteers, of
which he was in reward made honorary colonel. With the curious rank of
honorary colonel—he never held any lower—he went as British attaché
to the Austrian Army of Italy, getting the post because Englishmen
who could speak both German and Italian were rare. He saw the unhappy
campaigns of 1796–97 under Beaulieu, Würmser, and the Archduke Charles,
being thus one of the few British observers who witnessed Bonaparte’s
first essays in strategy. Then he held staff appointments during the
operations in Minorca and Malta, and again served with the Austrians
in Italy in 1799. After much more service, the last of it as British
attaché with the army of Castaños in Spain, during the Tudela campaign,
he was at last informed that—all precedents notwithstanding—from an
honorary colonelcy he was promoted to be a major-general on the regular
establishment, on account of his long and distinguished service. Down
to 1809 he had seen more fighting than falls to most men, without
owning any proper military rank, for his colonelcy of 1794, which he
had held for fifteen years, was only titular and temporary, and gave
him no regular rank. He had technically never been more than a civilian
with an honorary title!
Yet in 1810 he was entrusted with the important post of commander of
the British troops in Cadiz, and commenced to take an important part in
the Peninsular War. He was now sixty-two years of age, and would have
been counted past service according to eighteenth century notions.
But his iron frame gave no signs of approaching decay, no fatigue or
privation could tire him, and he was one of the boldest riders in the
army. His portrait shows a man with a regular oval face, a rather
melancholy expression—there is a sad droop in the eyelids—and abundant
white hair, worn rather long. His mouth is firm and inflexible, his
general expression very resolute, but a little tired—that of a man
who has been for nearly twenty years crusading against an enemy with
whom no peace must be made, and who does not yet see the end in sight,
but proposes to fight on till he drops. He was a fine scholar, knew
six languages, had travelled all over Europe, and was such a master
of his pen that both his dispatches and his private letters and diary
are among the best-written and most interesting original material that
exists for this period.
[Sidenote: Graham at Barrosa]
The crowning exploit of Graham’s life was the victory which he won,
with every chance against him, at Barrosa on March 7th, 1811, a
wonderful instance of the triumph of a quick eye, and a sudden resolute
blow over long odds. Caught on the march by a sudden flank attack of
Marshal Victor, owing to the imbecile arrangements of the Spanish
General La Peña, under whose orders he was serving, Graham, instead of
waiting to be attacked, which would have been fatal, took the offensive
himself. His troops were strung out on the line of march through a
wood, and there was no time to form a regular order of battle, for the
French were absolutely rushing in upon him. Victor thought that he had
before him an easy victory, over a force surprised in an impossible
posture. But Graham, throwing out a strong line of skirmishers to hold
back the enemy for the few necessary minutes, aligned his men in the
edge of the wood, without regard for brigade or even for battalion
unity, and attacked the French with such sudden swiftness that it
was Victor, and not he, who was really surprised. The enemy was
assailed before he had formed any line of battle, or deployed a single
battalion, and was driven off the field in an hour after a most bloody
fight. Graham led the centre of his own left brigade like a general of
the Middle Ages, riding ten yards ahead of the line with his plumed hat
waving in his right hand, and his white hair streaming in the wind.
This was not the right place for a commanding officer; but the moment
was a desperate one, and all depended on the swiftness and suddenness
of the stroke; there was no manœuvring possible, and no further orders
save to go straight on. Improvising his battle-order in five minutes,
with only 5000 men against 7000, and attacking rather uphill, he won a
magnificent victory, which would have ended in the complete destruction
of the French if the Spaniard La Peña had moved to his aid. But that
wretched officer remained halted with his whole division only two miles
from the field, and did not stir a man to aid his colleague.
A few months after Barrosa, Graham was moved from Cadiz to join the
main army in Portugal, at the request of Wellington, who gave him the
command of his left wing during the autumn campaign of 1811, and again
through the whole of that of 1813. For the greater part of that of 1812
Graham was away on sick leave, for the first time in his life, his eyes
having given out from long exposure to the southern sun. Unluckily
for him, his promotion to command a wing of the grand army meant that
he was generally under Wellington’s own eye, with small opportunity
of acting for himself. But his chief chose him to take charge of the
most critical operation of the Vittoria campaign, the long flank march
through the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes, which turned the right
wing of the French and forced them out of position after position in
a running fight of 200 miles. Still outflanking the enemy, it was he
who cut in across the high-road to France at Vittoria, and forced the
beaten army of Jourdan to retire across by-paths, with the loss of all
its artillery, train, baggage, and stores.
For the dramatic completeness of this splendid old man’s career, we
could have wished that it had ended in 1813. But the Home Government,
seeking for a trustworthy officer to command the expedition to Holland
in the following winter, chose Graham to conduct it, and his last
campaign was marred by a disaster. He drove, it is true, the remnants
of the French army out of Holland, though his force was small—only
7000 men, and formed of raw second battalions hastily collected from
English garrisons. But his daring attempt to escalade the great
fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom, the one stronghold still held by the enemy,
was a sad failure. Taking advantage of a hard frost, which had made
the marsh-defences of that strong town useless for the moment, Graham
planned a midnight attack by four columns, of which two succeeded in
crossing all obstacles and entering the place. But when all seemed
won, the general’s part of the scheme having succeeded to admiration,
the officers in immediate charge of the attack ignored many of their
orders, dispersed their men in unwise petty enterprises, and finally
were attacked and driven out of the town piecemeal by the rallied
garrison. The loss was terrible, fully 2000 men, of whom half were
prisoners. But the bold conception of the enterprise rather than its
failure should be put down to Graham’s account. The mismanagement by
his subordinates was incredible. Wellington, looking over the fortress
a year later, is said to have observed that it must have been extremely
difficult to get in. “But,” he added, “when once in, I wonder how the
devil they ever suffered themselves to be beaten out again.”
[Illustration: _PLATE III._
GENERAL THOMAS GRAHAM, BARON LYNEDOCH, G.C.B., G.C.M.G.
_From the picture by Sir George Hayter._]
Graham’s last campaign was marred by this check. But, in the general
distribution of rewards at the peace of 1814, he was given a peerage,
by the title of Lord Lynedoch, and shared in the other honours of
the Peninsular Army. Though sixty-six years old when the war ended,
he survived till 1843, when he had reached the patriarchal age of
ninety-six. He did a good service to his old comrades by founding
the United Service Club, which he originally designed as a place of
rendezvous for old Peninsular officers, of whom he had noticed that
many were lonely men without family ties, like himself, while others,
stranded in London for a few days, had no central spot where they could
count on meeting old friends.[106] His portrait hangs, as is right, in
the most prominent place in the largest room of the institution which
he founded.
[Sidenote: Graham and his Admirers]
I have never found one unkindly word about General Graham, in the
numerous diaries and autobiographies of the officers and men who
served under him. All comment on his stately presence, his thoughtful
courtesy, and his unfailing justice and benevolence. “I may truly say
he lives in their affections; they not only looked up to him with
confidence as their commander, but they esteemed and respected him
as their firm friend and protector, which, indeed, he always showed
himself to be.”[107] “What could not Britons do, when led by such a
chief?” asks another.[108] I might make a considerable list of the
names of British officers who relate their personal obligation to his
kindness;[109] but perhaps the most convincing evidence of all is
that of the French Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, one of the enemies whom
he captured at Barrosa, who has no words strong enough to express the
delicate generosity with which he was treated while a wounded prisoner
at Cadiz. Graham came to visit him on his sick bed, sent his own
physician to attend him, and made copious provision for his food and
lodging. For a conscientious hatred for French influence, whether that
of the red Jacobin republic, or that of the Napoleonic despotism, did
not prevent him from showing his benevolence to individual Frenchmen
thrown upon his mercy.[110]