Ian Brunskill - The Times Great Military Lives - Leadership and Courage – from Waterloo to the Falklands in Obituaries

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 he was now able to afford, but he was only 46 years old and was to devote another 37 tears to the military and political service of his country. Throughout this period he vigorously opposed reform in the Army, such as improved education of the soldiery, abolition of flogging and the purchase of commissions by officers, arguing that the social order was the basis of military discipline. As Tory Prime Minister from 1828 to 1830, when Catholic Emancipation was a critical demand, he at first acceded to the view that it should not become a political issue but later, perceiving that delay would lead to increased violence if not war in Ireland, brought King George IV round to accept it. He also served as Foreign Secretary in Sir Robert Peel’s first administration of 1834-1835 and again, as Minister without Portfolio, in his second from 1841-to 1846. He was the first commoner to be granted a state funeral on his death in 1852.

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