Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim.
Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move.
‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to certain situations, the more convinced I thought that he has been slightly overrated by historians.
‘Even the battle of Waterloo, where of course he undoubtedly does a number of things incredibly well, but he also made some mistakes. It has been seen as the piece de resistance of his wonderful defensive planning, but the disposition of his soldiers was a weakness. He deliberately denuded his left wing, but that was the wing Napoleon attacked. He wasn’t to know that, but you have to into account of all eventualities.’
Wellington gambled on the arrival of the Prussians on his left, but David thinks that it was a needless risk given Wellington’s strength and the ground.
‘It’s often forgotten that Wellington had nearly 73,000 men in a very strong defensive position and he was almost defeated by 75,000 Frenchmen. That tells you he didn’t fight anything like as effective a battle as we might have assumed, and it required 50,000 Prussians, eventually, to save his skin.’
Wellington was not at his best, David suspects, because he was ‘genuinely worried about fighting Napoleon, the alleged greatest commander of the era.’ David refers to Wellington’s confession at the end of the Peninsula campaign in 1814 that he was relieved not to have encountered Bonaparte in Spain.
If not Wellington, who then was Britain’s greatest? David has just written an eBook on generalship, comparing the careers of Wellington, Slim and John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. David is in no doubt that ‘Marlborough is the greatest of those three greats’.
Marlborough had ‘moral courage’ and extraordinary political acumen, in addition to the requisite battlefield skill. David cites his decision to march from Holland to the Danube in the summer of 1704, an aggressive manoeuvre calculated to preserve the Grand Alliance of European nations by defeating Louis XIV’s armies, which were threatening England’s key ally, Austria.
With awed enthusiasm, David describes the march of 40,000 men over hundreds of miles of rough terrain. To put this in context, Bristol, then England’s second city, had a population of less than 30,000 people. The march was an unprecedented logistical operation, yet the army arrived in tact and won the crushing victory at Blenheim for which Marlborough is remembered. It was a military risk taken for political and moral ends; Wellington attempted nothing comparable in his very illustrious career.
David softens the high politics in All the King’s Men with the accounts of ordinary redcoats. They are a colourful cast: a woman masquerading as a dragoon in Marlborough’s army, the campaigner William Cobbett, and an amazingly eloquent Edinburgh pauper named Thomas Pococke, who served in the Napoleonic Wars. This extract from Pococke’s account of the retreat from Corunna is poetic:
‘The silence was only interrupted by the groans of the men, who, unable to proceed farther, laid themselves down in despair to perish in the snow, and where the report of a pistol told the death of a horse, which had fallen dead, unable to proceed. I felt an unusual listlessness steal over me. Many times I have said, “These men who have resigned themselves to their fate are happier than I. What have I to struggle for? Welcome death! Happy deliverer!” These thoughts passed into my mind involuntarily… The rain poured in torrents; the melted snow was half knee-deep in places, and stained by the blood that flowed from our wounded and bruised feet. To add to our misery, we were forced by turns to drag the baggage. This was more than human nature could sustain. Many wagons were abandoned and much ammunition destroyed.’
I was gripped by Pococke, and asked David what happened to him. It is a tragic story:
‘He joins-up in the mid-1800s and serves the minimum term and then a few more years. He survives the Peninsula and Waterloo and leaves the army. But because he served less than twenty years and has not been wounded, he is ineligible for a pension, not a single penny. He is thrust back into life in Scotland with no particular talents other than those learned in the army. He is last heard of – having written the book which he writes and gets published and probably receives a pittance for, and we’re not even sure that he’s the person who sold the book — working as an itinerant road mender, a job at the very bottom of the employment ladder. You got taken on for a few days’ work and were redundant when the road was repaired. He probably died a pauper.’
Pococke’s fate was not uncommon among demobbed redcoats. Soldiers were loathed by the public as unruly brigands, so charity was sporadic. It’s an indictment on Georgian society that the heroes of Blenheim, Quebec and Waterloo were cast adrift, as well as a sign that military glory and imperial conquest left the public cold.
Comments