Richard Holmes - Wellington - The Iron Duke

ask Mr Pitt to desire Lord Westmoreland to send me as Major to one of the flank corps. If they are to go abroad, they will be obliged to take officers from the line, and they may as well take me as anybody else … I think it is both dangerous and improper to remove any part of the army from this country at present, but if any part of it is to be moved, I should like to go with it, and have no chance of seeing service except with the flank corps, as the regiment I have got into as Major is the last for service. 26

His appeal was unsuccessful, which was as well, for the flank companies from Ireland went off to die of yellow fever in Martinique. Mornington lent him more money, and with it he purchased a lieutenant colonelcy in the 33 rdthat September. He went off to command his regiment, immersing himself in the minutiae of its accounts and preparing standing orders that became a model of their kind.

An expedition to the coast of Normandy under Lord Moira was mooted, and the 33 rdseemed likely to take part. Wesley resigned his parliamentary seat, found an affluent linen-draper who was prepared to deal with his Dublin debts, but then heard that his regiment was not to go after all. Then came good news: Lord Moira’s force would indeed include the 33 rd, and would be sent to reinforce the Duke of York’s little army in Flanders. It was accompanied, as good news so often is, by bad. Lord Longford wrote to say that he was firmly resolved that a match with Kitty was impossible. Wesley, however, could not accept the decision as final for, as it was based on ‘prudential motives’, a change in his own circumstances might yet win him Kitty. He wrote and told her that if her brother ever relented, ‘my mind will still remain the same’. 27

Wesley sailed from Cork in early June 1794 and arrived at Ostend on the 25 thto join a campaign which had started with a flicker of promise but was already turning sour. The British government, trying hard to repair the damage done to its army by peacetime parsimony, had enlisted men as quickly as it could for the war against revolutionary France. The historian Sir John Fortescue reckoned that at least 30,000 men were enlisted 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 31 stRegiment 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 56 thRegiment 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 8 thand 44 thin 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 14 th, 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 33 rdhelped 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 15 th’. 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