Wellington: The Iron Duke. Richard Holmes
into the regular army between November 1793 and March 1794.28 Amongst them was a corps of waggoners, the army’s first military transport unit, known from the colour of its uniform and the supposed origin of its members as ‘The Newgate Blues’. ‘A greater set of scoundrels never disgraced an army,’ complained an officer on the Duke of York’s staff.
The consequences of this rapid expansion were little short of disastrous. There were too few muskets: the 31st Regiment was composed chiefly of recruits, 240 of whom were unarmed. Many soldiers had not been issued with proper uniforms, but went to war in their ‘slop-clothing’, the barrack dress of linen jacket and trousers they received when they arrived at their depots. A high proportion of officers and men were poorly trained. Private William Surtees of the 56th Regiment was delighted to be posted to his battalion’s light company ‘as I considered it … an honour to be made a light-bob’, but was given no specialist training, and when he met properly trained French light infantry, he discovered that they ‘had greatly the advantage over us in point of shooting …’29 Fortescue complained that too many officers had attained their rank through exactly that mixture of patronage and purchase that had enabled Wesley to command a battalion at the age of 24 without any formal training:
The commanders of the new army, who had been juggled into seniority by the Government and the army-brokers, were not fit to command a company, much less a brigade. Some of them were boys of twenty-one who knew nothing of their simplest duties. Though they went cheerfully into action, they looked upon the whole campaign as an elaborate picnic … Thrust into the army to satisfy the claims of dependants, constituents, importunate creditors, and discarded concubines, many of these young men were at once a disgrace and an encumbrance to the force.30
The Duke of York’s Anglo-Hanoverian force was fighting alongside an Austrian army under the Prince of Coburg, and the future major general, John Gaspard Le Marchant (his birth in the Channel Islands accounting for his Gallic name), reckoned that the Austrians were ‘as superior to us as we are to the train-bands in the city’.31 The allies took Valenciennes in 1793 but then spent a terrible winter, worsened for the British by the government’s diversion of resources to the West Indies and the Mediterranean. By the time Wesley arrived, the French had launched a counter-offensive. Wesley, temporarily commanding a brigade containing the 8th and 44th in addition to his own regiment, was left to check the French at Ostend while Moira took the rest of the force on to join the Duke of York. With Moira safely away, Wesley deftly re-embarked his brigade and had it moved by sea to Antwerp, whence he joined the Duke of York before the rest of Moira’s force marched in. The episode demonstrated to him the enormous advantage conferred by seapower, especially when confronting an enemy who seemed supreme on land.
In mid-September 1794 Wesley had his baptism of fire just east of Breda. On the 14th, the French attacked the Duke of York’s advanced post at Boxtel on the River Dommel, and captured it and two battalions of German troops. The duke sent Major General Sir Ralph Abercromby with ten battalions of infantry and ten squadrons of cavalry to recover the place next day, but Abercromby almost collided with the main French force, slipping past eastwards, and was lucky to escape with the loss of ninety men, most of them prisoners. The 33rd helped check the attack, waiting quietly in line until their young colonel gave the order to fire on an approaching column. He had already learnt a valuable lesson about sea-power, and now he learnt another, about the merits of steady lines facing exuberant columns. Both were to prove invaluable.
Abercromby, whose bushy eyebrows gave him the air of a benevolent lion, called on Wesley a few days later to convey ‘the Duke of York’s thanks and his to the Thirty-third for their good conduct on the 15th’.32 The army retreated in terrible weather, and Wesley, commanding a brigade once more, found himself defending the line of the River Waal, whence he wrote to Mornington to say that he doubted if even the French army could keep the field in such conditions, and if the army went into winter quarters, he would be back in Ireland to deal with some problems on the family’s much-reduced estates. But winter quarters were a reflection of a more measured age, and the French kept up the pressure. ‘We turn out once, sometimes twice every night; the officers and men are harassed to death …’ wrote Wesley. ‘I have not had the clothes off my back for a long time, and generally spend the greater part of the night upon the bank of the river.’33 It was small wonder that he was plagued by a return of an old illness, an ‘aguish complaint from fatigue, damp etc’ which his doctor treated with pills containing ‘three grains of Calomel combined with three grains of the Cathartic Extract’. He was on the Waal from October 1794 to January 1795, and was only once visited by a general from headquarters. And when he rode over to headquarters, thirty miles away, he found it ‘a scene of jollifications’. A dispatch arrived while the port was circulating, and was airily waved away by a general who declared that it would keep till tomorrow. Wesley concluded that it was the leaders who were at fault, not their wretched and half-starved men. ‘Many of the regiments were excellent,’ he recalled, but:
no one knew anything of the management of an army … We had letters from England, and I declare that those letters told us more of what was passing at headquarters than we learned from the headquarters themselves … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything, and did everything myself.34
The army fell back to Bremen, whence it was to be evacuated by the navy, in appalling circumstances.
Far as the eye could reach over the whitened plain were scattered gun-limbers, wagons full of baggage, of stores, of sick men, sutlers’ carts and private carriages. Beside them lay the horses, dead; around them scores and hundreds of soldiers, dead; here a straggler who had staggered onto the bivouac and dropped to sleep in the arms of the frost; there a group of British and Germans around an empty rum-cask; here forty English Guardsmen huddled together around a plundered wagon; there a pack-horse with a woman lying alongside it, and a baby, swathed in rags, peeping out of the pack, with its mother’s milk turned to ice upon its lips – one and all stark, frozen, dead.35
Wesley sailed for England in March 1795, with his regiment close behind. The campaign marked the nadir of British fortunes. It embodied the characteristics often seen in the British army at the beginning of long conflicts: all the strains caused by rapid expansion, and commanders who failed to appreciate that the nature of war had changed. That dreadful winter in Holland taught Wesley much about war. It may not have told him what to do, but, as he observed later, he had ‘learnt what not to do, and that is always something’.
It was less than clear what the returning hero should do with himself, for pay as lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp brought in only £500 a year and creditors abounded. Leaving his regiment encamped in Essex, he set off for Dublin in search of money and preferment. Trim dutifully returned him as its MP once more, and he laid siege to the new lord-lieutenant, Lord Camden, with supporting fire provided by his brother Mornington. He first hoped to be made secretary at war in the Irish government, which would have tripled his income at a stroke, but was soon forced to admit to Camden that: ‘I see the manner in which the Military Offices are filled and I don’t wish to ask for that which I know you can’t give me.’ This being the case, he changed his line of attack, now aiming for a civil office in the Treasury or Revenue boards, with the hand-wringing assurance that ‘nothing but the circumstances under which I labour would induce me to trouble Your Excellency’s Government’.36 When this assault also failed, Mornington proposed him as surveyor-general of the ordnance, an unhelpful shot as the post was already held by Kitty’s uncle, Captain Thomas Pakenham. Camden actually offered Wesley the post, and although he felt obliged to turn it down, the Pakenhams were not best pleased.
Firmly rebuffed,