Wellington: The Path to Victory; Wellington had courage, luck, an eye for battleground—and a sensitivity to the ‘butcher’s bills.’

Book Review: ‘Welllington’ by Rory Muir

Wellington had courage, luck, an eye for battleground—and a sensitivity to the ‘butcher’s bills.’ Max Hastings reviews Rory Muir’s “Wellington.”

MAX HASTINGS

Dec. 20, 2013 3:04 p.m. ET

The Duke of Wellington occupies the same place in British iconography as do George Washington and Robert E. Lee in that of the United States. His greatness on the battlefield is hard to dispute.He was one of the first generation of warriors whose words were reliably recorded, generating a feast of anecdotage. The characterization of his own army as “the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink,” for instance, is celebrated or notorious, according to taste. It was also true. There are many such gems: “The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain such a victory as this,” he said on the morning after Waterloo. He also called it “a damn nice thing—the nearest-run thing you ever saw.” When a courtesan sought to blackmail him about their relationship, he responded: “Publish and be damned.”

Wellington: The Path to Victory

By Rory Muir
Yale, 728 pages, $38

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Wellington in autumn 1813 as he prepared to invade southern France. The watercolor is by Thomas Heaphy. National Portrait Gallery, London

But the defining quality of Wellington is that he was a winner, defeating the French in a dozen major battles, of which the greatest was of course that June 1815 action outside Brussels, the only one in which he confronted Napoleon himself. “Old Nosey,” as his men christened Wellington in honor of his beaky countenance, stands beside the Duke of Marlborough a century earlier, the most successful and best-loved captains in British history

Rory Muir, an Australian academic who has made Wellington his life’s work, begins this magisterial study with the assertion that his hero “has not been well served by his biographers.” Although he names no names, he is surely thinking of Elizabeth Longford’s two-volume life (1969-72). It sold hugely and enjoys a status in military historiography similar to Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” in the context of 1914. Both make terrific reading but are considered wildly unscholarly by the specialists. Longford’s book, though, is simply much jollier than Mr. Muir’s, because she offered humor alongside the glory, as the Australian’s weighty tome—to be followed by a second in which he promises to rehabilitate Wellington’s reputation as a statesman—does not. But Longford’s grasp of the campaigns was shaky, and here Mr. Muir provides an authoritative view.

Wellington was born Arthur Wellesley in 1769, a younger son of an Irish peer of little wealth or distinction. As a child he seemed insignificant, in his mother’s view “food for powder and nothing more.” He made no mark at Eton, which he disliked, and grew up in the shadow of his brilliant elder brother, Richard. Family wishes rather than personal inclination pushed him into the army in 1789. As a young officer, he fell in love with Kitty Pakenham, a daughter of an Irish grandee, who twice rejected his pleas for her hand because he had so little to offer. But he was also learning how not to wage war in various bungled British Continental expeditions, like the 1793-94 Flanders Campaign.

In 1796, he was posted to India with the rank of colonel. His letters home reveal the disdain for the country typical of his time and class. He wrote: “I have not yet met with a Hindoo who had one good quality.” The natives, he said, “in their dealings and conduct among themselves are the most atrociously cruel people.” In 1798, his brother became governor of Bengal, which made him the de facto political arbiter of British India. Though the two men’s relationship had often been distant, the governor soon found himself preferring to trust his younger brother to exercise field commands rather than any of the more mature local British military boobies.

Wellington’s first major campaign was the 1799 march on Seringapatam, in which he led his own regiment, the 33rd Foot, together with six battalions of native troops. His role in the capture of the city was modest, but he was essential in organizing the army’s supply. He had discovered the importance of logistics, that unglamorous but vital science of which he became a master. The Anglo-Indian force of 20,000 troops had three times as many camp followers, and its supplies occupied 100,00 bullocks and 10,000 horses, along with elephants and camels. Famine was a threat at every halt of its month-long march. Wellington’s “judicious and masterly arrangements”—in the words of his commanding officer—kept the army fed. He early declared his intolerance of troops rousing the hatred of local populations by living off the countryside rather than from an ordered supply train. This wholly unfashionable abhorrence of scavenging and looting persisted throughout his career.

He also became chronically mistrustful of delegation, saying later: “The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot—I saw everything, and did everything for myself.” Though some of Wellington’s cleverer subordinates in the ensuing decades were frustrated by what might today be branded as control-freakery, it deprived his armies’ numerous incompetent officers of opportunities to lose battles.

Wellington’s reputation grew through several Indian campaigns, and, in 1803, he won a famous victory at Assaye, which established British power in the Indian heartlands of the Deccan Plateau. In the battle, he displayed the qualities that were the hallmark of his career. The first was personal courage—he had two horses killed under him—together with astonishing luck in his own survival. The second was iron calm, no matter what disaster loomed. When Maratha cavalry threatened the British flank and were supported by gunners who had played dead and were suddenly firing on surprised troops, Wellington calmly led a cavalry regiment in recapturing the guns and restoring order. Finally, this usually reserved man’s inner sensitivity broke through at the moment of victory, when he sat silent and emotionally drained on the field, head lowered between his knees. He would often shed tears as he studied the casualty lists from his triumphs—the “butcher’s bills,” he called them.

In 1804, after eight years, he had had enough of India and sailed home. Possessed of a tolerable fortune founded on the spoils of war, he proceeded to make the least comprehensible decision of his career, marrying his old love Kitty Pakenham. Mr. Muir professes himself no more able than anybody else to explain Wellington’s alliance with the by-then aging spinster, whom he neglected abominably thereafter. He seemed bent upon marrying somebody, and she was to hand. “The marriage was doomed from the start,” Mr. Muir notes,

for the different paths she and Arthur had taken since 1793 had created a vast gulf between them. He had succeeded in a hard world, gaining self-assurance, ambition and professional pride; public affairs had absorbed him almost entirely. She had lost her youthful sparkle, gaiety and confidence, had come to fear rather than enjoy the gossip of society, and hoped to find “a companion, a friend for life” with whom she could enjoy domestic pleasures.

Kitty bore him two sons but was too shy and nervous to be a useful or even acceptable partner among the great people into whose ranks her husband’s sword and keen ambition were carving a path. Wellington would have many mistresses, and Mr. Muir identifies at least two likely illegitimate children, one born to Isabella Freese, the wife of a brother officer, with whom Wellington had a long dalliance in India.

From 1807, he served in the government as chief secretary for Ireland, a role in which he displayed administrative efficiency but a reactionary mind-set. Since the Irish people would be content with nothing less than independence from Britain, he believed they must be kept down with force. Then in July 1808 he sailed for Portugal at the head of an expeditionary force being sent to aid the Spanish uprising against the French occupation. In his first actions at Roliça and Vimeiro, he defeated a French army under Marshal Junot, only to find himself superseded in command by two more senior officers. It was this pair who, when the French suggested their army be evacuated from Portugal complete with its arms and aboard British ships, promptly acceded.

Wellington was ordered to sign this agreement, the so-called Convention of Cintra, and returned to England to discover that, instead of being hailed as a hero for his victories, he was publicly shunned for the treaty’s absurdly generous terms. “What business has he to wear his sword?” demanded an outraged critic. Fortunately for England, an inquiry cleared Wellington of responsibility, and he returned to Portugal, where he assumed direction of the six-year campaign that would make his name.

“He is all fire and establishes confidence in the troops,” wrote an admiring officer. At the head of a force of some 27,000 allied troops, Wellington won a major victory at Talavera in July 1809. But when he sought to exploit this by advancing further into Spain, he was obliged to fall back into Portugal: The French had some 250,000 men in the peninsula, and British forces were nowhere near strong enough to overcome them save by engaging their armies in fractions. The Peninsular War was thus a war of supply and strategic movement where Wellington’s patience and attention to detail proved decisive.

It is a weakness of Mr. Muir’s book that he doesn’t set these campaigns in the context both of the wider events in French-occupied Spain and of the general European war. In his admiration for his subject, he seems reluctant to acknowledge that Wellington’s role in defeating Napoleon was subordinate to that of the other allied armies—the Prussians, Russians and Austrians who fought vast French armies under the command of the emperor himself. British gold and the Royal Navy made a larger contribution to France’s eventual defeat than did Napoleon’s “Spanish ulcer.”

But that in no way diminishes the brilliance of Wellington’s performance in Portugal and Spain. He early identified the importance of turning the Portuguese army into a legitimate military force—and lavished resources on doing so. When he found himself under renewed French assault in 1810, the British government was so pessimistic that in London it was widely reported that Portugal would have to be evacuated.

Instead, Wellington gained another important success at Busaco and then occupied carefully prepared defensive lines at Torres Vedras, allowing the French army to waste itself through hunger and disease. When he again checked the French advances in 1811, Wellington had firmly established his ability to trounce the French on anything like equal terms. His army’s confidence soared.

Supply problems caused the British to move slowly in 1811-12, promoting French belief in Wellington’s essential caution. Yet it was one of his greatest virtues that he knew his army, its capabilities and limitations. While the British army in the Peninsula became a remarkably effective instrument during its successive campaigns and victories between 1811 and 1814, its discipline was always precarious—witness the appalling brutalities that followed the 1812 storming of Badajoz. Wellington further had no power to remove the many indolent or imbecile officers under his command. He could rely upon only a handful of his subordinates—quartermaster-general Sir George Murray prominent among them—and felt obliged himself to hasten everywhere and do everything. As one officer wrote: “Nothing could exceed his habits of watchfulness & activity.”

Wellington secured a chain of fine victories at Fuentes de Oñoro, Ciudad Rodrigo, Salamanca, Vitoria and San Sebastian and was at Toulouse in April 1814 when Napoleon abdicated. He returned to England to find himself a national hero. Vain, as are many successful soldiers, he told a friend complacently: “It’s a fine thing to be a great man, is it not?” Mr. Muir leaves him as a newly minted duke, the beneficiary of a vast fortune conferred by a grateful nation, with the field of Waterloo still a year in the future.

This is an important book, distilling all the most significant modern scholarship and wisdom about its subject, if sometimes a trifle stolid one. Mr. Muir shows that Wellington achieved almost everything possible with the resources at his command, displaying a supreme professionalism and commitment to his troops most untypical of the age. His patient management of relations with the Portuguese and Spanish allies, the latter so often failing in their promises, was almost as notable as his generalship.

Wellington remained at his post with his army throughout the six years of the Iberian campaigns. He imposed his will through clear, simple orders, matched by a brilliant eye for terrain, and he enjoyed the love as well as the absolute trust of his soldiers.

It is hard for any reader with a sense of history and romance to follow this lean, tense, effortlessly courageous figure cantering in a plain gray coat across his battlefields, urging men on or more often seeking to control their impetuousness, without discovering a dampness in one’s own eye. Wellington represented his nation at its apogee, and few soldiers have played such a role with more brilliance, wit, conviction and humanity.

—Mr. Hastings’s most recent book is “Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War” (Knopf).