THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARMY: HEADQUARTERS
Having dealt with the greater personalities among Wellington’s
lieutenants, it remains that we should speak of the organization by
which his army was set in motion.
Some great commanders have trusted much to their staff, and have kept
their ablest subordinates about their person. This was pre-eminently
not the case with Wellington: he was as averse to providing himself
with a regular chief-of-the-staff, as he was to allowing a formal
second-in-command to accompany his army. The duties which would,
according to modern ideas, fall to the chief-of-the-staff, were by
him divided between three officers, one of whom was of quite junior
standing, and only one of whom held a higher rank than that of colonel.
These officers were the Military Secretary, the Quartermaster-General,
and the Adjutant-General.
The Military Secretary was merely responsible for the correct drawing
out, and the transmission to the proper person or department, of the
correspondence of the commander-in-chief. The post was held from April
27, 1809, to September 19, 1810, by Lieutenant-Colonel Bathurst, of
the 60th. On the last-named date he went home on leave, and Captain
Lord Fitzroy Somerset was given the status of acting-secretary, and
confirmed as actual secretary three months later on January 1, 1811.
This officer, better remembered by his later title as the Lord Raglan
of the Crimean War, held the office till the end of the war—by which
time he had reached the rank of colonel. He was one of Wellington’s
best-trusted subordinates, and his personal friend, but being very
young, and junior in rank to all heads of departments, he was in no
sense an appreciable factor in Wellington’s conduct of the war. In
fact, he was nothing more than his title of secretary indicated, and
was in no way responsible for organization, or entitled to offer advice.
Much more important were the two great heads of departments, the
Quartermaster-General and Adjutant-General. The former was charged
with all matters relating to the embarkation or disembarkation,
the equipment, quartering, halting, encamping, and route-marching
of the various units of the army. He had to convey to all generals
in command of them the orders of the general-in-chief, and for
this purpose had under his control a number of officers bearing
the clumsy titles of assistant-quartermaster-generals, and
deputy-assistant-quartermaster-generals. Of the former there were
five, of the latter seven, when the army was first organized in April,
1809, but their numbers were continually increasing all through the
war, for each unit had an assistant-quartermaster-general and a
deputy-assistant-quartermaster-general attached to it, and as the
divisions and brigades grew in number, so did the officers of the
Quartermaster-General’s department told off to them. There was also a
parallel growth in the number of those who remained at headquarters,
directly attached to their chief.
There is an interesting minute by Wellington, laying down the relations
between the divisional generals and the staff-officers of the
department: he points out that, though the latter are the organs of
headquarters in dealing with divisions, yet they are under the command
of the divisional general: and the responsibility both for the orders
given through them being carried out, and for their acts in general,
lies with the division-commander. “Every staff officer,” he says, “must
be considered as acting under the direct orders and superintendence of
the superior officer for whose assistance he is employed, and who is
responsible for his acts. To consider the relative situation of the
general officer and the staff officer in any other light, would tend to
alter the nature of the Service, and, in fact, might give the command
of the troops to a subaltern staff officer instead of to their general
officer.”[133]
[Sidenote: The Quartermaster-General]
The officers of the Quartermaster-General’s department, besides their
duties with regard to the moving of the army, or the detachments
of it, had often to undertake independent work at a distance from
headquarters, and sometimes remote from the theatre of war. It was
they who made topographical surveys, reports on roads and bridges, and
on the resources of districts through which the army might have to
move in the near or distant future. There was issued early in 1810 a
little manual called _Instructions for the officers in the department
of the Quartermaster-General_ which was given to all its members: it
contains a selection of orders and forms, relating to every possible
duty with which its recipients might be entrusted. The most interesting
section is that on topographical surveys, to which there is annexed
a model report of the road from Truxillo to Merida, containing notes
on everything which a staff officer ought to notice,—positions,
defiles, size of villages, character of sections of the road, amount
of corn-land as opposed to pasture or waste, warnings as to unhealthy
spots, notes as to the depth of rivers and the practicability of fords,
etc.
So far as I can ascertain, Wellington had only two
Quartermaster-Generals during the whole of the long period of his
supreme command. Colonel George Murray of the 3rd Guards held the post
from April, 1809, to May 28, 1812: he must be carefully distinguished
from two other Murrays, who sometimes turn up in the dispatches.
One is Major-General John Murray, who commanded a brigade in the
Oporto campaign, went home because he considered that Beresford had
been unjustly promoted over his head, and came out later to the
Peninsula on the Catalan side, where he was responsible for the
mismanaged operations about Tarragona. The other is John Murray, the
Commissary-General. When Wellington sometimes uses such a phrase in his
dispatches as “Murray knows this,” or “see that Murray is informed,”
it is often most difficult to be sure which of the three men is meant.
Early in 1811 Colonel George Murray became a major-general, and in
the following May he appears to have gone home. He was replaced as
Quartermaster-General by Colonel James Gordon—who, again, must not be
confused with Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon, who was one of Wellington’s
senior aides-de-camp, and was killed at Waterloo. This is another of
the confusions between homonyms which often give trouble. If a diarist
speaks of “Colonel Gordon” we have to find which of the two is meant.
James Gordon, having acted as quartermaster-general from May, 1811, to
January, 1813, went home, and George Murray, returning early in that
year, worked out the remaining fifteen months of the war in his old
position.
[Sidenote: The Adjutant-General]
Parallel with the Quartermaster-General was the other great
departmental chief at headquarters, the Adjutant-General, whose sphere
of activity was disciplinary and statistical. He was charged with
all the detail of duties to be distributed, with the collecting and
compiling for the use of the commander-in-chief of all returns of men
and horses in “morning states,” etc., with the supreme supervision of
the discipline of the army, and with much official correspondence that
did not pass to the Military Secretary. Roughly speaking, the internal
condition of the troops fell to his share, while their movement
belonged to the Quartermaster-General. He had to aid him on the first
organization of the army in 1809, eight assistant-adjutant-generals
and six deputy-assistant-adjutant-generals, but (as in the
Quartermaster-General’s department) the number of subordinates mounted
up, as the war went on, and new units were from time to time created,
since an assistant-adjutant-general was attached to each division.
The first holder of the office was Major-General the Hon. Charles
Stewart (afterwards Lord Londonderry, the earliest historian of the
Peninsular War), who was discharging its functions from April, 1809,
till April, 1813, just four years. He was then sent on a diplomatic
mission to Berlin, and Wellington offered the post to his own
brother-in-law, Major-General Edward Pakenham, who, while in charge of
the 3rd division, had made the decisive charge at Salamanca. Pakenham
was adjutant-general for the last year of the war, April, 1813, to
April, 1814, and went straight out from Bordeaux to command the unlucky
New Orleans expedition, in which he lost his life.
It will be noted that Wellington had actually only two
Quartermaster-Generals and two Adjutant-Generals under him during the
five years of his Peninsular command—a sufficient proof that when he
had found his man he stuck to him. Charles Stewart, who served him
so long, was a person of some political importance, as the brother
and confidant of Lord Castlereagh. In the early part of his tenure of
office he seems sometimes to have made suggestions to his chief, but
met little encouragement, for Wellington loved his own way, and was not
to be influenced even by his own highest staff officers.[134] He did
not wish to have a Gneisenau or a Moltke at his side: he only wanted
zealous and competent chief clerks.
[Sidenote: Minor Heads of Departments]
Attached to headquarters in addition to the three great functionaries
already named, were the heads of several other departments of great
importance. These were—
(1) The general officer commanding the Royal Artillery, who had a
general supervisory charge of the batteries attached to the divisions,
and a more specific control of the battering-train and reserve
artillery, when these came into existence in 1811, as well as of the
ammunition columns. The first artillery chief was Brigadier-General
E. Howarth, who arrived at Lisbon in 1809, about the same time as
Wellington himself. He was promoted major-general in 1811, and went
home that year. The command then went through a rapid succession of
hands. Howarth was followed by Major-General Borthwick, who apparently
crossed Wellington, and went home in March, 1812, after less than
a year’s tenure of the post. Borthwick was succeeded by Colonel H.
Framingham, and he within a few months by Colonel G. B. Fisher, who
(like Borthwick) fell out with the commander-in-chief, and applied for
leave to go home ere 1813 was six months old. Wellington then appointed
Colonel Alexander Dickson to the command late in May. This officer had
been for the last two years in charge of the Portuguese artillery under
Beresford. He had given such satisfaction at Rodrigo and Badajoz that
Wellington re-transferred him to the British service, and finished the
campaign of 1814 with Dickson in chief charge of this branch.
(2) After the artillery chief we encounter as a prominent figure at
headquarters the commanding officer of Royal Engineers. He had the
superintending duty over his own staff and the engineer officers
attached to the divisions, and control over the “Royal Military
Artificers,” as the rank and file of the scientific corps were
named till 1812, when they changed their title to Royal Sappers
and Miners.[135] The commanding engineer had also charge over the
engineers’ park and the pontoon train. The officer who held this post
from 1809 till he was killed at St. Sebastian in September, 1813,
was Colonel Richard Fletcher, who has left a fame behind him as the
designer of the Lines of Torres Vedras. On his death the command fell
to Lieut.-Colonel Elphinstone, who was responsible for the celebrated
bridge of boats across the mouth of the Adour which made the siege of
Bayonne possible in 1814.
(3, 4) At headquarters were also to be found the officers commanding
the Staff Corps Cavalry, and the Corps of Guides. The former, a small
unit of some 200 men, created in 1812, discharged the police duties of
the army, and were worked along with the Provost Marshal. They were
occasionally also employed as orderlies, and in other confidential
positions.[136] The Guides were a small body also, some 150 or 200
strong, partly British, partly Portuguese, the latter preponderating.
They were detached in twos or threes, to act as interpreters as well
as guides to bodies of troops moving in country not known to them.
For this reason they had to be bilingual, either English knowing some
Portuguese, or Portuguese knowing some English, as they had always to
be acting as intermediaries between the army and the peasantry, in
making inquiries about roads, supplies, etc. The officer commanding the
Guides had also the charge of the post office, and the transmission of
letters to and from the front.
(5) The Provost Marshal was also attached to headquarters: he had
charge of all prisoners to be tried by general court-martial, of
deserters, and prisoners of war. He had powers of jurisdiction on
offenders caught red-handed, but as Wellington remarks, “Whatever may
be the crime of which a soldier is guilty, the Provost Marshal has not
the power of inflicting summary punishment for it, unless he should
see him in the act of committing it.”[137] Men arrested on evidence
only, had to be tried by court-martials. For the better management of
these last, Wellington added a Judge-Advocate-General to his staff in
1812, whose duty was to see that trials were conducted with proper
forms and due appreciation of the validity of evidence—in which the
commander-in-chief considered that they had often failed. Mr. Francis
Larpent, who has left an interesting diary of his duties and his
personal adventures, discharged the function of this office from his
arrival late in 1812 down to the end of the war.[138]
As to aides-de-camp, Wellington kept a very limited number of them—he
only employed some twenty in the course of the war, and not more than
eight or ten at once. They were nearly all young men of the great
political families,[139] nearly half of them were Guards’ officers, and
the rest mostly belonged to the cavalry. The Prince of Orange served
among them in 1811–12. None of them, save Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord
Raglan) and Colonel Cadogan, came to any very great military position
or reputation.
So much for the military side of headquarters. There were also attached
to it seven civil departments, small and great, of which it may be
well to give a list. On one or two of these we shall have to speak at
some length in later chapters—notably the Commissariat and the Medical
department. They consisted of—
(1) The Medical Department under an Inspector of Hospitals, who was in
general charge of the physicians, surgeons, assistants, etc., attached
to the various units of the army. There is an excellent account of
the management of this department, and all its difficulties, in the
_Autobiography_ of Sir James McGrigor, chief of the Medical Staff in
1812–13–14. His predecessor since Wellington’s first landing in 1809
was Dr. Frank, who was invalided in the autumn of 1811.
(2) The Purveyor’s Department was independent of the medical, though it
might well have been attached to it: the establishment consisted of a
Purveyor to the Forces, with deputies and assistants, who had charge of
the hospitals and all the material and details required for them—from
the drugs for the sick to the burial expenses of the dead.
(3) The Paymaster-General, with his assistants, was responsible for the
transmission of the money received to the regimental paymasters of the
various units. He was a much-worried man, generally from three to six
months in arrears with his specie, from no fault of his own, but from
the immense difficulty of obtaining the hard dollars, doubloons, and
“cruzados novos,” which alone had currency in the Peninsula till a late
period in the war. It was useless to issue English money to the troops,
for the natives would not accept crowns and guineas, and refused even
to look at the one-pound notes which were almost the sole circulating
medium in Great Britain during this period. It was only in a late year
of the war that the gold guinea was at last tariffed by the Spanish and
Portuguese Governments, and became readily current.[140]
[Sidenote: The Commissariat]
(4) Most important of all the Civil Departments was the
Commissariat, under the Commissary-General, who had
under him Deputy-Commissary-Generals, Assistant and
Deputy-Assistant-Commissaries, Commissariat Clerks, and many other
subordinates. The department was divided into two branches, stores and
accounts. The post of Commissary-General was successively held by John
Murray (already mentioned above) from 1809 to June, 1810, by Kennedy
from June, 1810, to September, 1811, and by Bisset from September,
1811, onward. An assistant commissary was attached to each brigade of
infantry and each regiment of cavalry, but a single official had to
attend to the needs of the whole of the artillery with the army, and
another to the needs of headquarters.[141]
The whole future of the army in 1809 depended on whether the
Commissariat Department would be able to rise to the height of its
duties. It was absolutely necessary that Wellington should be able to
keep his army concentrated, if this small force of 20,000 or 30,000
men was to be of any weight in the conduct of the war in the Peninsula.
The much-cursed and criticized Commissariat succeeded in doing its
duty, and the length of time for which the British army could keep
concentrated was the envy of the French, who, living on the country,
were forced to disperse whenever they had exhausted the resources of
the particular region in which they were massed. In a way this fact was
the key to the whole war. Wellington’s salvation lay in the fact that
he could hold his entire army together, while his adversaries could
not. On this advantage he relied again and again: his whole strategy
depended upon it. How the Commissariat worked we shall show in a later
chapter.
(5) The Storekeeper-General had charge of the field equipments, tents,
and heavy baggage of the army. Often the heavy baggage was left at
Lisbon, and all through 1809–10–11 no tents were taken to the front. It
was only in the Vittoria and South-French campaigns that the whole army
regularly carried them. In the days when the transport trains were not
fully organized, it was necessary to leave even valuable impedimenta
behind.
(6) To the Controller of Army Accounts all departments, save the
Commissariat, rendered their statistics of money received and spent.
(7) Last, we may name the Press, for a travelling Press and a small
staff of military printers accompanied the headquarters when possible,
and printed general orders, and other documents and forms, of which
many copies were required. I have seen much of its work at the Record
Office,[142] but have never come across an account of its organization,
or of any anecdotes of its wandering life, in which it must have passed
through many vicissitudes. The press was under the general supervision
of the Adjutant-General.