There can be no stronger contrast than that between the impression which the Iron Duke left on his old followers, and that produced by his trusted and most responsible lieutenant, Sir Rowland Hill. Hill was blessed and kindly remembered wherever he went. He was a man brimming over with the milk of human kindness, and the mention of him in any diary is generally accompanied by some anecdote of an act of thoughtful consideration, some friendly word, or piece of unpremeditated, often homely charity. A wounded officer from Albuera, who is dragging himself painfully back to Lisbon, reports himself to Hill as he passes his headquarters. Next morning “the general himself attended me out on my road, to give me at parting a basket with tea, sugar, bread, butter, and a large venison pasty.”103 A grateful sergeant, who bore a letter to Hill in 1813, remembers how he expected nothing but a nod and an answer from such a great man, and was surprised to find that the general ordered his servant to give the messenger a supper, arranged for his billet that night, and next morn had his haversack stuffed with bread and meat, presented him with a dollar, and advised him where to sleep on his return journey.104 He would give an exhausted private a drink from the can that had just been brought for his personal use, or find time to bestow a piece of friendly advice on an unknown subaltern. This simple, pious, considerate old officer, whose later portraits show a decided resemblance to Mr. Pickwick, was known everywhere among the rank and file as “Daddy Hill.” An officer of the 2nd Division sums up his character in a well-written letter as follows105: “The foundation of all his popularity with the troops was his sterling worth and heroic spirit, but his popularity was strengthened and increased as soon as he was personally known. He was the very picture of an English country gentleman: to the soldiers who came from the rural districts of old England he represented home; his fresh complexion, placid face, kind eyes, kind voice, the absence of all parade or noise in his manner delighted them. The displeasure of Sir Rowland was worse to them than the loudest anger of other generals. His attention to all their wants and comforts, his visits to the sick in hospital, his vigilant protection of the poor peasantry, his just severity to marauders, his generous treatment of such French prisoners and wounded as fell into his hands, made for him a warm place in the hearts of his soldiery; and where’er the survivors of that army are now scattered, assuredly Hill’s name and image are dearly cherished still.”

The description sounds like that of a benevolent old squire, rather than that of a distinguished lieutenant-general. Nevertheless, Rowland Hill was a very great man of war. Wellington liked him as a subordinate because of his extraordinary punctuality in obedience, and the entire absence in him of that restless personal ambition which makes many able men think more of opportunities for distinguishing themselves than of exact performance of the orders given them. Wherever Hill was, it was certain that nothing would be risked, and nothing would be forgotten. His beautiful combination of intelligence and executive power more than once brought relief to his chief’s mind in a critical moment, most of all on the march to Bussaco in September, 1810, when it was all-important to Wellington’s plans that his own detached force under Hill should join him as soon as MassÉna’s similar detached force under Reynier should have reached the main French army. Hill executed a long and difficult march over a mountainous country with admirable speed, and was duly up in line on the day before the battle of Bussaco, which could not in common prudence have been fought if he had been late.

This we might have expected from a man of Hill’s character; but what is more surprising is that when he was trusted—a thing that did not often occur under Wellington’s rÉgime—with a command in which he was allowed to take the offensive on his own account, he displayed not only a power of organizing, but a fierce driving energy which none of Wellington’s more eager and restless subordinates could have surpassed. Speedy pursuit of an enemy on the move was not one of the great Duke’s characteristics; he was often, and not unjustly, accused of not making the best profit out of his victories. But Hill’s rapid following up of Girard, in November, 1811, ending with the complete surprise and dispersion or capture of the French force at Arroyo dos Molinos, was a piece of work which for swift, continuous movement, over mountain roads, in vile rainy weather, could not have been surpassed by the best of Napoleon’s lieutenants. Another blow of the most creditable swiftness and daring was the storming of the forts of Almaraz five months later, when Hill, with a light force, plunged right into the middle of the French cantonments and broke the all-important bridge by which Soult and Marmont were wont to co-operate. The forts were stormed, the bridge thoroughly destroyed, and Hill was off, and out of reach, before the neighbouring French divisions were half concentrated.

But the crowning glory of Hill’s Peninsular service was the one general action in which he was fortunate enough to hold independent command. This was at the end of the war, the battle of St. Pierre, near Bayonne. He was forming the right flank of Wellington’s line when his communication with the main army was cut off by a rise in the river Nive, which carried away the bridges by which he communicated with the main host. Soult, transferring the bulk of his field force, then in front of Wellington, by means of the bridges in Bayonne town, fell upon Hill with five divisions. Hill had only two, those which he had commanded for the last three years, the 2nd and Hamilton’s (now Le Cor’s) Portuguese. With 15,000 men he fought a defensive battle against 30,000 for the greater part of the short December day. His reserves were used up, every regiment had charged many times, the losses were heavy, and it seemed hardly possible to hold on against such odds. But Hill did so, and at last the reinforcements from the other side of the river Nive began to appear in the late afternoon, and Soult desisted from his attack and drew off beaten. This was one of the most desperate pieces of fighting in the Peninsular War, and Hill was the soul of the defence. He was seen at every point of danger, and repeatedly led up rallied regiments in person to save what seemed like a lost battle. Eye-witnesses speak of him as quite transformed from his ordinary placidity—a very picture of warlike energy. He was even heard to swear, a thing so rare that we are assured that this lapse from his accustomed habits only took place twice during the whole war. The first occasion was in the desperate melÉe in the night attack that began the battle of Talavera.

It is clear that Hill was a man capable of the highest feats in war, who might have gone very far, if he had been given the chance of a completely independent command. But such was not his fortune, and in his last campaign, that of Waterloo, he was almost lost to sight, as a corps-commander whose troops were operating always under the immediate eye of Wellington. He survived to a good old age, was made Commander-in-Chief of the British Army when Wellington gave up the office on accepting the Premiership in 1827, and held it till within a few months of his death in 1842. Almost the last recorded words of the kindly old man upon his death-bed were, “I have a great deal to be thankful for; I believe I have not an enemy in the world.” And this was literally true: to know “Daddy Hill” was to love him.

The other lieutenant to whom Wellington repeatedly entrusted a semi-independent command was one who was neither so blameless nor so capable as Rowland Hill. Yet William Carr Beresford was by no means to be despised as a soldier. The illegitimate son of a great Irish peer, he was put into a marching regiment at seventeen, and saw an immense amount of service even for those stirring days of the Revolutionary War, when a British officer was liable to be sent to any of the four continents in rapid succession. This was literally the case with Beresford, who was engaged in India, Egypt, the Cape of Good Hope, Buenos Ayres, and Portugal in the eight years between 1800 and 1808.

When the Portuguese Government asked for a British general to reorganize their dilapidated army in 1809, Beresford was the man selected—partly because he had the reputation of being a good disciplinarian, partly because he knew the Portuguese tongue, from having garrisoned Madeira for many months, but mostly (as we are told) because of political influence. His father’s family had never lost sight of him, and he was well “pushed” by the Beresford clan, who were a great power in Ireland, and had to be conciliated by all Governments.

If this appointment to command the Portuguese Army was a job, we may say (with Gilbert’s judge) that so far as organization went, it was “a good job too.” For he did most eminent service in creating order out of chaos, and produced in the short space of a year a well-disciplined force that was capable of taking a creditable part in line with the British Army, and won well-deserved encomiums from Wellington and every other fair critic for the part that it took at Bussaco, its first engagement. The new army had not been created without much friction and discontent: to clear out scores of incapable officers—many of them fidalgos with great court influence—to promote young and unknown men to their places, to enforce the rigour of the conscription in a land where it existed in theory but had always been evaded in practice, gained Beresford immense unpopularity, which he faced in the most stolid and unbending fashion. At last the Portuguese Army was up to strength, and had learnt to obey as well as to fight. The teaching had been by the most drastic methods: Beresford cashiered officers, and shot deserters or marauders in the rank and file, with a rigid disregard alike for personal and court influence, and for public opinion, which Wellington himself could not have surpassed. He was, indeed, an honest, inflexible, and hard-working administrator; but with this and with a personal courage that ran almost to excess his capacities ended. His virtue in Wellington’s eyes was that, after one short tussle of wills, he completely and very wisely submitted himself to be the mere instrument of his greater colleague, and did everything that he was told to do, working the Portuguese army to the best effect as an auxiliary force to the British, and making no attempt to assert an independent authority. Instead of being kept under his hand in a body, it was cut up into brigades, each of which, with few exceptions, was simply attached to a British division.

It was no doubt because Beresford showed himself so obedient and loyal, and exhibited such complete self-abnegation, that Wellington, both in 1809 and 1811, entrusted him with the command of large detached forces at a distance from the main army. But the marshal was by no means up to the task entrusted to him, and after the unhappy experiment of the first siege of Badajoz, and the ill-fought battle of Albuera, Wellington removed him from separate command, on the excuse that more organizing was needed at Lisbon, and kept him either there, or with the main army (where he had no opportunities of separate command) till the last year of the war. In 1814 he was for a few weeks entrusted with the conduct of the expedition to Bordeaux, but as it was unopposed by the enemy—and was bound to be so, as Wellington well knew—this was giving him no great responsibility. During the three last years of the war he was really in a rather otiose and equivocal position, as titular Commander-in-Chief of an army which was not treated as a unit, but dispersed abroad among the British divisions. Occasionally he was used as a corps commander under Wellington’s own eye, as at Toulouse, where he led the turning column of the 4th and 6th Divisions which broke down Soult’s flank defences. For such a task, when hard fighting and obedience to orders was all that was needed, he was a fully competent lieutenant. It was when thrown on his own resources and forced to make decisions of his own that he showed himself so much inferior to his successor Hill.

Beresford was a very tall and stalwart man of herculean strength—every one knows of his personal encounter with a Polish lancer at Albuera: he parried the Pole’s thrust, caught him by the collar, and jerked him out of his saddle and under his horse’s feet, with one twist of his powerful arm. His features were singularly rough-cast and irregular, and a sinister appearance was given to his face by a discoloured and useless left eye, which had been injured in a shooting accident when he was quite a young man. The glare of this injured optic is said to have been discomposing to culprits whom he had to upbraid and admonish, a task which he always executed with thoroughness. He had been forced to trample on so many misdemeanants, small and great, during his five years in command of the Portuguese army, that he enjoyed a very general unpopularity. But I have never found any case in which he can be accused of injustice or oppression; the fact was that he had a great many unsatisfactory subordinates to deal with. His own staff and the better officers of the Portuguese service liked him well enough, and the value of his work cannot be too highly praised. He came little into contact with the British part of the army, but I note that the 88th, whom he had commanded before the war in Spain began, much preferred him to their later chief, Picton, and had a kindly memory of him. There are singularly few tales or anecdotes connected with his name, from which I deduce that in British military circles he was neither much loved nor much hated.

A far more picturesque figure is the third of the three generals to whom, at one time or another, Wellington committed the charge of a detached corps, Thomas Graham of Balgowan, later created Lord Lynedoch. I have already alluded to him in my preface, as in one way the most typical figure of the epoch—the personification of all that class of Britons who took arms against France when the Revolutionary War broke out, as a plain duty incumbent upon them in days when the country and Crown were in danger. He had seen the Jacobin mob face to face in its frenzy, in a sufficiently horrid fashion. In 1792 he had taken his invalid wife—the beautiful Mrs. Graham of Gainsborough’s well-known picture—to the Riviera, in the vain hope that her consumption might be stayed. She died, nevertheless, and he started home towards Scotland with her coffin, to lay her in the grave of his ancestors. On the way he passed through a town where the crazy hunt after impossible royalist conspiracies was in full swing. A crowd of drunken National Guards were seized with the idea that he was an emissary in disguise, bearing arms to aristocrats. The coffin, they declared, was probably full of pistols and daggers, and while the unhappy husband struggled in vain to hold them off, they broke it open, and exposed his wife’s long-dead corpse. After this incident Thomas Graham not unnaturally conceived the idea that his one duty in life was to shoot Jacobins. When he had buried his wife at Methven he was ready for that duty, and the war with France breaking out only five months after, his opportunity was at hand. Though a civilian, a Whig member of Parliament, and forty-four years of age, though he had no knowledge of military affairs, and had never heard a shot fired in anger, he went to the front at once, and fought through the siege of Toulon as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave. It is odd that both Julius CÆsar and Oliver Cromwell started at this same age as soldiers. This was the first of an endless series of campaigns against the French; Graham got a quasi-military status by raising at his own expense the 90th Foot, or Perthshire Volunteers, of which he was in reward made honorary colonel. With the curious rank of honorary colonel—he never held any lower—he went as British attachÉ to the Austrian Army of Italy, getting the post because Englishmen who could speak both German and Italian were rare. He saw the unhappy campaigns of 1796–97 under Beaulieu, WÜrmser, and the Archduke Charles, being thus one of the few British observers who witnessed Bonaparte’s first essays in strategy. Then he held staff appointments during the operations in Minorca and Malta, and again served with the Austrians in Italy in 1799. After much more service, the last of it as British attachÉ with the army of CastaÑos in Spain, during the Tudela campaign, he was at last informed that—all precedents notwithstanding—from an honorary colonelcy he was promoted to be a major-general on the regular establishment, on account of his long and distinguished service. Down to 1809 he had seen more fighting than falls to most men, without owning any proper military rank, for his colonelcy of 1794, which he had held for fifteen years, was only titular and temporary, and gave him no regular rank. He had technically never been more than a civilian with an honorary title!

Yet in 1810 he was entrusted with the important post of commander of the British troops in Cadiz, and commenced to take an important part in the Peninsular War. He was now sixty-two years of age, and would have been counted past service according to eighteenth century notions. But his iron frame gave no signs of approaching decay, no fatigue or privation could tire him, and he was one of the boldest riders in the army. His portrait shows a man with a regular oval face, a rather melancholy expression—there is a sad droop in the eyelids—and abundant white hair, worn rather long. His mouth is firm and inflexible, his general expression very resolute, but a little tired—that of a man who has been for nearly twenty years crusading against an enemy with whom no peace must be made, and who does not yet see the end in sight, but proposes to fight on till he drops. He was a fine scholar, knew six languages, had travelled all over Europe, and was such a master of his pen that both his dispatches and his private letters and diary are among the best-written and most interesting original material that exists for this period.

The crowning exploit of Graham’s life was the victory which he won, with every chance against him, at Barrosa on March 7th, 1811, a wonderful instance of the triumph of a quick eye, and a sudden resolute blow over long odds. Caught on the march by a sudden flank attack of Marshal Victor, owing to the imbecile arrangements of the Spanish General La PeÑa, under whose orders he was serving, Graham, instead of waiting to be attacked, which would have been fatal, took the offensive himself. His troops were strung out on the line of march through a wood, and there was no time to form a regular order of battle, for the French were absolutely rushing in upon him. Victor thought that he had before him an easy victory, over a force surprised in an impossible posture. But Graham, throwing out a strong line of skirmishers to hold back the enemy for the few necessary minutes, aligned his men in the edge of the wood, without regard for brigade or even for battalion unity, and attacked the French with such sudden swiftness that it was Victor, and not he, who was really surprised. The enemy was assailed before he had formed any line of battle, or deployed a single battalion, and was driven off the field in an hour after a most bloody fight. Graham led the centre of his own left brigade like a general of the Middle Ages, riding ten yards ahead of the line with his plumed hat waving in his right hand, and his white hair streaming in the wind. This was not the right place for a commanding officer; but the moment was a desperate one, and all depended on the swiftness and suddenness of the stroke; there was no manoeuvring possible, and no further orders save to go straight on. Improvising his battle-order in five minutes, with only 5000 men against 7000, and attacking rather uphill, he won a magnificent victory, which would have ended in the complete destruction of the French if the Spaniard La PeÑa had moved to his aid. But that wretched officer remained halted with his whole division only two miles from the field, and did not stir a man to aid his colleague.

A few months after Barrosa, Graham was moved from Cadiz to join the main army in Portugal, at the request of Wellington, who gave him the command of his left wing during the autumn campaign of 1811, and again through the whole of that of 1813. For the greater part of that of 1812 Graham was away on sick leave, for the first time in his life, his eyes having given out from long exposure to the southern sun. Unluckily for him, his promotion to command a wing of the grand army meant that he was generally under Wellington’s own eye, with small opportunity of acting for himself. But his chief chose him to take charge of the most critical operation of the Vittoria campaign, the long flank march through the mountains of the Tras-os-Montes, which turned the right wing of the French and forced them out of position after position in a running fight of 200 miles. Still outflanking the enemy, it was he who cut in across the high-road to France at Vittoria, and forced the beaten army of Jourdan to retire across by-paths, with the loss of all its artillery, train, baggage, and stores.

For the dramatic completeness of this splendid old man’s career, we could have wished that it had ended in 1813. But the Home Government, seeking for a trustworthy officer to command the expedition to Holland in the following winter, chose Graham to conduct it, and his last campaign was marred by a disaster. He drove, it is true, the remnants of the French army out of Holland, though his force was small—only 7000 men, and formed of raw second battalions hastily collected from English garrisons. But his daring attempt to escalade the great fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom, the one stronghold still held by the enemy, was a sad failure. Taking advantage of a hard frost, which had made the marsh-defences of that strong town useless for the moment, Graham planned a midnight attack by four columns, of which two succeeded in crossing all obstacles and entering the place. But when all seemed won, the general’s part of the scheme having succeeded to admiration, the officers in immediate charge of the attack ignored many of their orders, dispersed their men in unwise petty enterprises, and finally were attacked and driven out of the town piecemeal by the rallied garrison. The loss was terrible, fully 2000 men, of whom half were prisoners. But the bold conception of the enterprise rather than its failure should be put down to Graham’s account. The mismanagement by his subordinates was incredible. Wellington, looking over the fortress a year later, is said to have observed that it must have been extremely difficult to get in. “But,” he added, “when once in, I wonder how the devil they ever suffered themselves to be beaten out again.”

Graham’s last campaign was marred by this check. But, in the general distribution of rewards at the peace of 1814, he was given a peerage, by the title of Lord Lynedoch, and shared in the other honours of the Peninsular Army. Though sixty-six years old when the war ended, he survived till 1843, when he had reached the patriarchal age of ninety-six. He did a good service to his old comrades by founding the United Service Club, which he originally designed as a place of rendezvous for old Peninsular officers, of whom he had noticed that many were lonely men without family ties, like himself, while others, stranded in London for a few days, had no central spot where they could count on meeting old friends.106 His portrait hangs, as is right, in the most prominent place in the largest room of the institution which he founded.

I have never found one unkindly word about General Graham, in the numerous diaries and autobiographies of the officers and men who served under him. All comment on his stately presence, his thoughtful courtesy, and his unfailing justice and benevolence. “I may truly say he lives in their affections; they not only looked up to him with confidence as their commander, but they esteemed and respected him as their firm friend and protector, which, indeed, he always showed himself to be.”107 “What could not Britons do, when led by such a chief?” asks another.108 I might make a considerable list of the names of British officers who relate their personal obligation to his kindness;109 but perhaps the most convincing evidence of all is that of the French Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, one of the enemies whom he captured at Barrosa, who has no words strong enough to express the delicate generosity with which he was treated while a wounded prisoner at Cadiz. Graham came to visit him on his sick bed, sent his own physician to attend him, and made copious provision for his food and lodging. For a conscientious hatred for French influence, whether that of the red Jacobin republic, or that of the Napoleonic despotism, did not prevent him from showing his benevolence to individual Frenchmen thrown upon his mercy.110