The Dangerous Book of Heroes (42 page)

Wellesley was eventually cleared in the inquiry, but by then, Sir John Moore had been killed in the famous retreat to Corunna and
successful evacuation from Spain. It was around that time that Wellington visited his bootmaker in London to commission a pair of calfskin boots that would resist being waterlogged. Though they were not made of rubber until the 1850s, the Wellington boot became extremely popular in his lifetime and remains so today.

In 1809 Wellesley returned to Portugal in overall command. By then, French marshal Soult had overrun much of Portugal and two veteran French armies were in almost complete control. Wellesley had around 20,000 under his command. He made a lightning march north to Oporto, but Soult was too experienced to be trapped in the city and had destroyed bridges across the Douro River. Wellesley was forced to rely on barges to get slowly across, but there was no help for it. His army retook the city of Oporto and forced Soult's men out, killing or wounding 4,000 in the process.

Moving east into Spain, Wellesley was not impressed by his Spanish allies, though they brought around 20,000 men to join him. With reinforcements, Wellesley had 55,000 to move against the French under Marshal Victor and Napoléon's brother Joseph. However, when he approached the area and looked for the Spanish, there was no sign of them. His messenger was told that the Spanish were too tired to fight that hot day, and the French escaped the trap.

The French attacked first at the battle of Talavera in Spain toward the end of July 1809. Their skirmishers very nearly captured or killed Wellesley as he observed the distant French forces with a telescope. He reached his horse and managed to escape, with shots fired after him. His Spanish allies had assembled for the battle and fired a volley at the French. To Wellesley's astonishment, around two thousand Spaniards “were frightened only at the noise of their own fire” and ran away.

As night fell, Wellesley rode across to investigate some firing and was again almost killed by French skirmishers. In pitch-darkness, he was dragged from his horse and his aide was shot dead. He managed to regain his saddle and returned to his lines, shaken but unhurt.

The following morning the French bombardment began and
Wellesley ordered his men to lie down on the far slope of a small hill while the riflemen engaged the French skirmishers. This “reverse slope defense,” using the lie of the land to protect his men, was one of his favorite tactics. The French columns advanced confidently into the gun smoke, expecting the British forces to be smashed and reeling. Wellesley's men rose to fire point-blank volleys. They drove the French back, and once again the wide British line, where all the guns could bear, broke the French column, a hallmark of the Peninsular War. Even so, the fighting was brutal and often came down to hand-to-hand and bayonet charges.

Wellesley saw a large French force of infantry coming to a breach in his lines and sent a single battalion to stop them with more of the devastating volleys. His talent was in his coolness, and he never lost the overall sense of a battle, even when the shot was flying around him and men just paces away were being killed.

That night, Joseph Bonaparte withdrew the surviving French forces in defeat. For that victory and others, Wellesley was later made Viscount Wellington of Talavera.

In 1810, Marshal Masséna was ordered to retake Portugal with an army of 138,000 men. Wellington moved to block the French advance into the country, while Portuguese irregulars attacked the French wherever possible. He also ordered the creation of the famous lines of Torres Vedras—a system of fortified positions to protect Lisbon that stretched right across part of southern Portugal. At that time, before the trenches of World War I, it was one of the most efficient and impressive fortification lines ever created. On his orders, 108 forts, 151 redoubts, and more than 1,000 heavy artillery pieces formed the lines, with almost 70,000 men in place to defend them.

A brief battle was fought at Bussaco, where the French lost more than 4,500 men to Wellington's 1,252. Even so, Wellington justified the immense expense and labor that had gone into the lines when he was forced to retreat to them against overwhelming numbers. Behind him, he used a “scorched earth” policy, his men stripping the land of anything that might feed the French soldiers coming south. It was
successful. The French began to starve, and Marshal Masséna had to leave for Spain to resupply his army. In all, Masséna lost some 30,000 men over that winter. In 1811 he returned to Portugal and attempted to relieve the fortress city of Almeida on the eastern border with Spain.

The war continued with Wellington defending Almeida, while part of his force under Beresford besieged the French-held fortress of Badajoz in the south. Marshal Masséna launched a massive attack on Almeida to relieve it but could not break Wellington's forces.

At Badajoz, without Wellington's watchful presence, things were much worse. The siege of the fortress had begun in May 1811, though its massive and ancient walls proved resistant to the guns. Marshal Soult arrived to relieve Badajoz and fought a fixed battle after pinning the British forces down. For once, the Spanish allies held their ground long enough for reinforcements to arrive during vicious fighting. Even then British forces were almost cut to pieces in French cavalry charges. A rainstorm had soaked the gunpowder in their flintlocks, and for a time they were almost overrun. Galbraith Lowry Cole brought up his Fourth Division, and they moved forward slowly against the French, hammering them with volleys.

The battle of Albuera was over before Wellington arrived, despite him having killed two horses riding to reach his men. It was a slender victory for the British forces, though it cost them 6,000 dead. Famously, when Wellington visited the field hospital, he told the wounded men that he was sorry to see so many of them there. One replied: “If you had commanded us, my lord, there wouldn't be so many of us here.”

At that time, French armies were always in range and poised to retake Portugal. Wellington's forces began to besiege Ciudad Rodrigro, a fortified town across the Spanish border. Like Badajoz, it guarded one of the two main routes into Portugal from Spain.

Artillery made a breach in the walls of Ciudad Rodrigro, and the assault on the town took place on January 18, 1812, against ferocious French resistance. After their surrender, Wellington went south
and took Badajoz at last, after a month of siege and heavy bombardment. It is said that he broke down at the sight of the British dead in the breaches there, weeping in front of his men for the only time. The Spanish made Wellington a Duke of Ciudad Rodrigro for his part in the defense of their nation.

The year 1812 would also see the battle of Salamanca in Spain, when Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese force routed a French army of around 50,000. It was a triumph of maneuver as well as force. Wellington was watching the French positions when he saw a weakness in their lines as they moved. He shouted: “By God, that will do!” before ordering the attack.

The defeated French marshal said that Wellington had maneuvered his men “like Frederick the Great.” The road to Madrid was open, and that battle, as no other, established Wellington as the most able general Britain could field, though his greatest victory was still to come.

A new allied offensive in 1813 included the battle of Vitoria, where Wellington beat the army of Joseph Bonaparte. Seeing his men loot abandoned wagons after that battle, Wellington made one of his most famous comments: “We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”

By 1814, French forces had been forced to withdraw from Spain and Portugal and Wellington had crossed the Pyrenees to invade France, his men the first foreign troops to enter the country at the beginning of Napoléon's downfall. Napoléon's armies were in dis-array.

The self-titled French emperor abdicated in 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba. Before Wellington returned to England, he published a final word to his army, in which he wrote: “The Commander of the Forces, being upon the point of returning to England, again takes this opportunity of congratulating the army upon the recent events which have restored peace to their country and the world.”

He was made a duke by a grateful nation, the highest order of nobility, to add to his previous titles of viscount, earl, and field
marshal, among many others. The tyranny of France over Europe had been broken, and peace was possible at last.

 

Wellington visited Paris for a time, where he met the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson found him well informed. Wellington had previously promised Wilberforce that he would do everything in his power to help abolish slavery. Wellington was in fact balked in this desire by those who had made fortunes from the trade. It would be many years before slavery was eventually abolished across the empire.

Wellington attended the peace negotiations for the Treaty of Vienna in January 1815. It was still going on when he heard the news that shook Europe. Napoléon had escaped.

In March, with the help of a French ship, Napoléon Bonaparte set foot in France once more. On news of his return, King Louis XVIII of France sent a regiment to intercept him before he could reach Paris. Famously, Napoléon threw open his coat to reveal his military decorations and said: “Let him who has the heart kill his emperor!” Instead, they cheered him and followed him back to Paris. The Hundred Days' War began as he gathered 118,000 regular soldiers, 300,000 conscripts, and another 100,000 support personnel. Finally, he had the veteran Army of the North around Paris—another 124,000 men.

Against him, Wellington had an Anglo-Dutch and Hanoverian force of 92,000 in Flanders and a Prussian army of 124,000 under Marshal Blücher. The Austrians had 210,000 men and an army of 75,000 more stationed in Italy. There was also a Russian army in the east of 167,000 mobilizing to march against this threat of another reign of terror. The stakes had never been higher, and only Napoléon could have tried to win against such odds. He might even have been successful if the commander facing him had not been the Duke of Wellington. Before Wellington left Vienna, Tsar Nicholas of Russia laid a hand on his shoulder and said to him: “It is for you to save the world again.”

Napoléon's only hope was to try to crush the armies against him
one by one rather than allowing them to join forces. No one else could have done it, but he was a superb military tactician and, like Wellington, always kept a clear sense of the vast tapestry of units that made up a campaign area. His armies moved quickly into Belgium, but Wellington was also on the move and his allied force stopped one of Napoléon's marshals at Quatre Bras, south of Brussels. As a result, the beleaguered Prussian forces were preserved after losing a battle at Ligny, where the French failed to follow up for lack of support.

Wellington moved his forces to the south, taking command of the ridge Mont-Saint-Jean near a village named Waterloo. That night, June 17, it rained in torrents.

The Prussian general, Blücher, had given his promise to Wellington that he would support and reinforce his men. His deputy, Gneisenau, was convinced that Wellington would be quickly routed by the French army and wanted to leave the area. Though Blücher was seventy-two years old and already wounded in previous fighting, he held to his word.

On June 18, 1815, the French bombardment began. Napoléon had a force of around 74,000 compared with Wellington's 67,000. His guns, known as his
belles filles
or “beautiful daughters,” hammered the allied force before his veteran troops marched forward to take the British-held ridge. They endured artillery fire themselves but climbed the ridge in the teeth of it, fighting with bayonets and rifles against Wellington's men. The Earl of Uxbridge then smashed them with a cavalry charge over the ridge.

Napoléon was by then aware of the approach of the Prussian forces under Blücher. He sent almost his entire reserve force of nearly fifteen thousand infantry and cavalry to hold that flank, keeping back only his elite soldiers, the Imperial Guard. They had never been defeated in battle, and their reputation made them a feared force on any European battlefield. It was a vital decision. Delaying the main attack on Wellington to repel the Prussians may well have lost Napoléon the battle.

At the same time, Marshal Ney tried to break the British center with cavalry alone. Wellington responded with small square formations that
were weak against infantry but almost impossible for a cavalry charge to shatter. Horses will not leap into a solid mass of men with bayonets.

One British captain later recalled the French horse as an “overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass.”

Massed artillery and musket fire poured into the French cavalry as they came close, driving them back again and again as the light faded. It was around that time that the Earl of Uxbridge had his leg smashed by grapeshot as he sat in the saddle by Wellington.

“By God, sir, I've lost my leg!” he said in surprise.

“By God, sir,” Wellington replied. “So you have.”

Marshal Ney gave up his attempt to attack with cavalry alone and ordered French guns to fire grapeshot into the British squares, some of
whom were beginning to run out of ammunition. The carnage was terrible and the British forces wavered. Napoléon saw the moment, felt victory in his grasp. His main reserves were still embroiled in battle against the Prussians on the flank. Yet his Imperial Guard had not fought that day, and they were fresh and straining at the leash. He sent them in at last, to break the British center.

Their morale was high as they marched in three columns through a storm of skirmisher and canister fire. One of the columns smashed a British force of grenadiers, and then their own flank came under fire and they were charged down and routed. Another Imperial Guard column marched toward British Guard regiments under Colonel Maitland. They were lying on the ground to survive French artillery attacks. When Wellington saw the Imperial Guard closing on their position, he roared: “Up Guards and at 'em!”