The Times Great Military Lives: Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries. Ian Brunskill
It was here that the affairs of the war, as regarded the Spanish critics, were regulated by a popular assembly under the control of a licentious mob; and it was here that those democratic principles of government were first promulgated which in later times so intimately affected the fortunes of the Peninsular monarchies. ‘The Cortes,’ wrote Wellington, ‘have framed a Constitution very much on the principle that a painter paints a picture – viz., to be looked at. I have not met any person of any description who considers that Spain either is or can be governed by such a system.’ From this body, however, the British commander succeeded in temporarily obtaining the power he desired, and he returned to Portugal prepared to open with invigorated spirit and confidence the campaign of 1813.
Several circumstances now combined to promise a decisive turn in the operations of the war. The initiative, once taken by Wellington, had been never lost, and although he had retrogaded from Burgos, it was without any discomfiture at the hands of the enemy. The reinforcements despatched from England, though proportioned neither to the needs of the war nor the resources of the country, were considerable, and the effective strength of the army – a term which excludes the Spanish contingents – reached to full 70,000 men. On the other hand, the reverses of Napoleon in the Russian campaign had not only reduced his forces in the Peninsula, but had rendered it improbable that they could be succoured on any emergency with the same promptitude as before. Above all, Wellington himself was now unfettered in his command, for if the direction in chief of the Spanish armies brought but little direct accession of strength, it at any rate relieved him from the necessity of concerting operations with generals on whose discretion he had found it impossible to rely. These considerations, coupled with an instinctive confidence in his dispositions for the campaign, and an irresistible prestige of the success which at length awaited his patience, so inspirited the British commander that, on putting his troops once more in motion for Spain, he rose in his stirrups as the frontier was passed, and waving his hat exclaimed prophetically, ‘Farewell Portugal!’ Events soon verified the finality of this adieu, for a few short months carried the ‘Sepoy General’ in triumph to Paris.
At the commencement of the famous campaign of 1813 the material superiority still lay apparently with the French, for King Joseph disposed of a force little short of 200,000 men – a strength exceeding that of the army under Wellington’s command- even if all denominations of troops are included in the calculation. But the British general reasonably concluded that he had by this time experienced the worst of what the enemy could do. He knew that the difficulties of subsistence, no less than the jealousies of the several commanders, would render any large or permanent concentration impossible, and he had satisfactorily measured the power of his own army against any likely to be brought into the field against him. He confidently calculated, therefore, on making an end of the war; his troops were in the highest spirits, and the lessons of the retreat from Burgos had been turned to seasonable advantage. In comparison with his previous restrictions all might now be said to be in his own hands, and the result of the change was soon made conclusively manifest.
Hitherto, as we have seen, the offensive movements of Wellington from his Portuguese stronghold had been usually directed against Madrid by one of the two great roads of Salamanca or Talavera, and the French had been studiously led to anticipate similar dispositions on the present occasion. Under such impressions they collected their main strength on the north bank of the Douro, to defend that river to the last, intending, as Wellington moved upon Salamanca, to fall on his left flank by the bridges of Toro and Zamora. The British general, however, had conceived a very different plan of operations. Availing himself of preparations carefully made and information anxiously collected, he moved the left wing of his army through a province hitherto untraversed to the north bank of the Douro, and then, after demonstrations at Salamanca, suddenly joining it with the remainder of the army, he took the French defences in reverse, and showed himself in irresistible force on the line of their communications. The effect was decisive. Constantly menaced by the British left, which was kept steadily in advance, Joseph evacuated one position after another without hazarding an engagement, blew up the castle of Burgos in the precipitancy of his retreat, and only took post at Vittoria to experience the most conclusive defeat ever sustained by the French arms since the battle of Blenheim. His entire army was routed, with inconsiderable slaughter, but with irrecoverable discomfiture. All the plunder of the Peninsula fell into the hands of the victors. Jourdan’s baton and Joseph’s travelling carriage became the trophies of the British general, and the walls of Apsley-house display to this hour in their most precious ornaments the spoils of this memorable battle. The occasion was improved as skillfully as it had been created. Pressing on his retiring foe, Wellington drove him into the recesses of the Pyrenees, and, surrounding the frontier fortresses of St. Sebastian and Pampluna, prepared to maintain the mountain passes against a renewed invasion. His anticipations of the future proved correct. Detaching what force he could spare from his own emergencies, Napoleon sent Soult again with plenary powers to retrieve the credit and fortunes of the army. Impressed with the peril of the crisis, and not disguising the abilities of the commander opposed to him, this able ‘Lieutenant of the Emperor’ collected his whole strength, and suddenly poured with impetuous valour through the passes of The Pyrenees on the isolated posts of his antagonist. But at Maya and Sorauven the French were once more repulsed by the vigorous determination of the British; St. Sebastian, after a sanguinary siege, was carried by storm, and on the 9th of November, four months after the battle of Vittoria, Wellington slept, for the last time during the war, on the territory of the Peninsula. The Bidassoa and the Nivelle were successfully crossed in despite of all the resistance which Soult could oppose, and the British army, which five years before, amid the menacing hosts of the enemy and the ill-boding omens of its friends, had maintained a precarious footing on the crags of Portugal, now bivouacked in uncontested triumph on the soil of France! With these strokes the mighty gains had at length been won, for though Soult clung with convulsive tenacity to every defensible point of ground, and though at Toulouse he drew such vigour from despair as suggested an equivocal claim to the honours of the combat, yet the result of the struggle was now beyond the reach of fortune. Not only was Wellington advancing in irresistible strength, but Napoleon himself had succumbed to his more immediate antagonists; and the French marshals, discovering themselves without authority or support, desisted from hostilities which had become both gratuitous and hopeless.
Thus terminated, with unexampled glory to England and its army, the great Peninsular War – a struggle commenced with ambiguous views and prosecuted with doubtful expectations, but carried to a triumphant conclusion by the extraordinary genius of a single man.
His conduct of the war in the Peninsula confirmed Field Marshal The Duke of Wellington’s outstanding reputation as a strategist. Always conscious of the enemy’s strengths, capabilities, dispositions and opportunities, he advanced, withdrew and fought his almost invariably less numerous army so as to place the French at a crucial disadvantage at each decisive juncture. As a leader, he understood the nature of the British soldier of the period: capricious of good discipline – other than the Foot Guards – in moments of triumph and disaster, yet tenacious in battle when led by competent officers careful with the lives of their men. He encouraged them by his words before and after battle and, his reputation established, inspired them by his imperturbable presence in the saddle at the centre of the fight.
The Waterloo campaign of 1815 provided him with scant opportunity to show his strategic skill. Having gathered his army during the Hundred Days since returning from Elba, Napoleon had the strategic initiative but was hindered by the need to win a decisive battle for political purposes. In Wellington’s words, ‘It was a near run thing’, during which it might be said that Napoleon relied on his presence to inspire his troops, giving virtually no directions to his key subordinates during the battle, thereby losing it for want of proper attention. Wellington fought a shrewd tactical battle at Waterloo. Aware Napoleon had to win to survive politically, he placed his main body on reverse slopes, where they could not be seen or fired upon, withdrew his forward regiments in the face of Napoleon’s attack and, even when the French hesitated on seeing his force previously concealed on the reverse slopes, held his decisive counter-attack until he saw Marshal Blücher arrive with his Prussians to give him numerical as well as – by then – the tactical advantage.
After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, Wellington might have retired to the country estates that