If Graham had no enemies, and was loved by every one with whom he came in contact, the same cannot be said of the two distinguished officers with whom I have next to deal, General Robert Craufurd and Sir Thomas Picton. They were both men of mark, Craufurd even more so than Picton; they both fell in action at the moment of victory; they were both employed by Wellington for the most responsible services, and he owed much to their admirable executive powers; but both of them were occasionally out of his good graces. Each of them had many admiring friends and many bitter enemies, whose reasons for liking and disliking them it is not hard to discover. Both of them were to a certain extent embittered and disappointed men, who thought that their work had never received adequate recognition, a view for which there was considerable justification. In other respects they were wholly unlike; their characters differed fundamentally, so much so that when they met it was not unfrequently to clash and quarrel.

Picton, a Welsh country gentleman by birth, was a typical eighteenth century soldier, who had (after the old fashion) entered the army at thirteen years of age, and had gone on foreign service at fifteen. His manners, we gather, were those of the barrack-room; he was a hard drinking, hard swearing, rough-and-ready customer. Wellington, who was not squeamish, called him “a rough, foul-mouthed devil as ever lived,111 but he always behaved extremely well on service.” The notorious Duke of Queensberry, “Old Q,” was his friend and admirer, and left him a good legacy of £5000 in his will. Old Q’s model heroes were not of the Wesleyan Methodist type. One of the strongest impressions left on one’s mind by the diaries of those who served under him is that of his astounding power of malediction. Kincaid’s account of the sack of Ciudad Rodrigo is dominated by “the voice of Sir Thomas Picton, with the power of twenty trumpets proclaiming damnation to all and sundry.”112 But if he was destitute of all the graces and some of the virtues, Picton was a very fine soldier, with a quick eye, unlimited self-confidence, and the courage of ten bulldogs. He had, when once the Revolutionary War commenced, made his way to the front with great rapidity. A captain in 1794, he had become a brigadier-general by 1799, and his promotion had been won by undeniable good service. For his ultimate misfortune, he was made in 1797 governor of the newly conquered Spanish island of Trinidad in the West Indies, while still only a colonel. This was the beginning of his troubles; the post was lucrative, dangerous, and difficult. The garrison was insufficient, and the island was swarming with disbanded Spanish soldiers, runaway negro slaves, French adventurers, and privateers and pirates of all nations from the Spanish Main. Picton had to create order from chaos, and then to keep it up; his methods were drastic: the lash and the pillory, the branding-irons, and, where necessary, military execution. It does not appear on impartial examination that he ever showed himself self-seeking, partial, or corrupt in his administration; he merely tried, in his own rough way, to dragoon into order a very unruly and lawless community. The majority of the better classes approved his rule, which, as one of them said, “was of the sort required by the colony” where a governor “had to make himself feared as well as beloved.” Naturally he made many enemies, white, black, and brown, English and Spanish, adventurers and officials. They kept up a rain of petitions against him at the Colonial Office, in which he was represented as a sort of Nero. The most acrid and ingenious of them, a Colonel Fullarton, succeeded in finding a method of attack which was certain to have a great vogue when tried in England. The old Spanish law still ran in Trinidad, and under it various forms of durance and torture were permitted against suspected persons under arrest. A case had happened in which a mulatto girl, who had been concerned in stealing 2000 dollars from a Spanish tobacco merchant, was put to the barbarous punishment of picketing (standing with the heels on a stake) by the local magistrates, to make her confess who had taken the money, and where it was hidden. After a few minutes she admitted that her lover had stolen it, with her aid and consent; and this was proved to be the fact. Thus under Picton’s rule, and (as it turned out) with his knowledge, a woman had been put to the torture, though the torture was slight and the woman guilty.

Picton, on returning to England, was therefore accused by Colonel Fullarton of many tyrannical acts, but, above all, of having put a woman to the torture in order to extract a confession, a thing abhorrent alike to the laws of England and to the common sentiments of humanity. There followed a long political trial, (for it became a matter of Whig and Tory partizanship), in which the Government finally dropped the prosecution, because it was amply proved that Spanish, not English, law was running in Trinidad in 1801, since the island had not been annexed till the peace of Amiens in the following year, and that the governor had simply allowed the local magistrates to act according to their usual practice. The other charges all fell through.

Nevertheless, the mud stuck, as Fullarton had intended, and Picton was generally remembered as the man who had permitted a woman to be tortured. The trial had dragged over several years, and had been most costly to the accused. Since there had been no verdict, owing to the prosecution having simply been dropped, he had not even the satisfaction of being able to say that he had been acquitted by a jury of his countrymen. There was a sort of slur, however unjust, upon his name.

It therefore argued considerable independence and disregard of public opinion on the part of Wellington, when he wrote home to ask that Picton might be sent out to him to command a division,113 purely on his military record as a hard fighter. The general came out to Portugal with a name unfavourably known, and to colleagues and subordinates who were prepared to view him with a critical eye. “It is impossible to deny,” writes an officer who served under him, “that a very strong dislike towards the general was prevalent. His conduct in the island of Trinidad ... had impressed all ranks with an unfavourable opinion of the man. His first appearance was looked for with no little anxiety. When he reached the ground, accompanied by his staff, every eye was turned towards him, and his appearance and demeanour were closely observed. He looked to be a man between fifty and sixty, and I never saw a more perfect specimen of a splendid-looking soldier. In vain did those who had set him down as a cruel tyrant seek to find out such a delineation in his countenance. On the contrary, there was a manly open frankness in his appearance that gave a flat contradiction to the slander. And in truth Picton was not a tyrant, nor did he ever act as such during the many years that he commanded the 3rd Division. But if his countenance did not depict him as cruel, there was a sarcastic severity about it, and a certain curl of the lip, that marked him as one who despised rather than courted applause. The stern countenance, robust frame, caustic speech, and austere demeanour told in legible characters that he was one not likely to say a thing and then not do as he had said. In a word, his appearance denoted him a man of strong mind and strong frame.”114

It was considered characteristic that he ended his first inspection of the division by holding a drum-head court-martial on two soldiers who had stolen a goat, and witnessing their punishment. He then rode up to the regiment to which the culprits belonged, the 88th, and “in language not of that bearing which an officer of his rank should use,” said, “You are not known in the army by the name of Connaught Rangers, but by the name of Connaught footpads,” with some unnecessary remarks on their country and their religion.

This untoward incident was the commencement of a long feud between Picton and the 88th, which endured all through the war, and led, at the end of it, to the Rangers refusing to subscribe to the laudatory address and plate which the rest of the 3rd Division offered to their general, after nearly five years of glorious service. Yet the feud was not incompatible with a good deal of reluctant esteem on both sides. On the morning after the storm of Ciudad Rodrigo, in which the Rangers had taken a most gallant part, we are told that some of the men, more than usually elated in spirits, called out to their commander, “Well, general, we gave you a cheer last night: it’s your turn now.” Picton, smiling, took off his hat and said, “Here, then, you drunken set of brave rascals, hurrah! And we’ll soon be at Badajoz,” to which scene of even greater glory for the 3rd Division he did conduct them within a few weeks.

The considerable string of stories, true, half-true, or apocryphal, which cling round the name of Picton relate in about equal proportions, on the one hand, to his extreme intrepidity and coolness in action, and, on the other, to his vehemence alike of language and of action, which struck terror into the objects of his wrath. The best of the former with which I am acquainted comes from the same diarist, Grattan, of the 88th, whom I have already been quoting. It relates to the day of El Bodon (September 25, 1811), when the 3rd Division, caught in a somewhat isolated position owing to one of Wellington’s few tactical slips, was retreating in column across a level upland, beset by Montbrun and three brigades of French cavalry. “For six miles across a perfect flat, without the slightest protection from any incident of the ground, without artillery, almost without cavalry, did the 3rd Division continue its march. During the whole time the French cavalry never quitted us, and six light guns, advancing with them and taking the division in flank and rear, poured in a frightful fire of grape and canister. General Picton conducted himself with his accustomed coolness. He rode on the left flank of the column, and repeatedly cautioned the different battalions to mind the quarter distance and the ‘tellings off.’ At last we got within a mile of our entrenched camp at Fuente Guinaldo, when Montbrun, impatient lest his prey should escape from his grasp, ordered his troopers to bring up their right shoulders and incline towards our column. The movement was not exactly bringing up his squadrons into line, but it was the next thing to it. They were within half pistol-shot of us. Picton took off his hat, and holding it over his eyes as a shade from the sun, looked sternly but anxiously at the French. The clatter of the horses and the clanking of the scabbards were so great, as the right squadron moved up, that many thought it the forerunner of a general charge. Some mounted officer called out, ‘Had we not better form square?’ ‘No,’ replied Picton; ‘it is but a ruse to frighten us, and it won’t do.’ In half an hour more we were safe within our lines.”115

This was a fine example of cool resolution, and ended happily what had been a very anxious hour for Wellington. But I imagine that the occasion on which the Commander-in-Chief owed most to the commander of the 3rd Division was the storm of Badajoz. It will be remembered that on that bloody night the main attack on the breaches failed completely, despite of the desperate exertions of the 4th and Light Divisions. The attempt by escalade upon the towering walls of the castle, which proved successful and caused the fall of the fortress, had not been in Wellington’s original plan, but was suggested to him by Picton, who had viewed the breaches, and had not been convinced that they could be carried. Picton pleaded that he might be allowed to try the castle with his own division as a subsidiary operation.116 He succeeded triumphantly, and so saved the day. If he had not made his offer, the chance of the city’s falling would have been infinitely less, even though a brigade of the 5th Division did succeed in entering Badajoz at another point remote from the fatal breaches. Though Picton got plenty of praise for his courage on this night, it was not generally known that he ought to have been praised even more for his prescience.

Numberless instances of Picton’s skill and tenacity might be quoted, all through the six years of his service under Wellington. But the anecdote which best illustrates his Spartan courage is one which belongs to the last three days of his life. At Quatre Bras, where his division so long held back the vehement attacks of Ney, he received a musket ball in his left side, which, though it gave a somewhat glancing blow and did not penetrate, broke two of his ribs. Believing that the battle would be continued next day, he resolved not to return himself as wounded, lest the surgeons should insist on sending him to the rear. He roughly bound up the wound with the assistance of his soldier servant, and was on his horse throughout June 17, conducting the retreat of his division. On the 18th, as every one knows, he was killed—shot through the head—while leading the decisive charge which beat d’Erlon’s corps from the heights of Mont St. Jean. Only when his body was stripped, to be laid in the coffin, was it discovered that he had gone into action at Waterloo with a dangerous, perhaps mortal, wound two days old upon him. For his side was so swollen and blackened around the broken ribs, that the surgeons thought that the neglected wound might very possibly have caused his death, if he had come unharmed through the battle of June 18.

Such virtues were not incompatible with grave faults. Picton’s violent language and reckless disregard of common forms of propriety form the subject of many tales. When he thought that the assistant engineer who guided the 3rd Division at the storm of Badajoz had led them astray, he drew his sword, and with an oath said that he would cut the blind fool down if he had gone wrong. This we have on the first-hand evidence of that officer, who was fortunately able to demonstrate that the right path had been taken.117 A better-known tale is that of Picton and the commissary, a story which has also been attributed to Craufurd, and recently by Mr. Fortescue to General Sherbrooke. The commissary had been ordered, during one of Wellington’s long marches, to have the rations of the 3rd Division ready at a certain spot at a certain hour. They were not forthcoming, but only a series of excuses, to account for their non-arrival. Picton grimly pointed to a neighbouring tree and said, “Well, sir, if you don’t get the rations for my division to the place mentioned by twelve o’clock to-morrow, I will hang you on it at half-past.” The commissary rode straight to Lord Wellington and complained, with much injured dignity, of the general’s violent and ungentlemanly language. His lordship coolly remarked, “Oh, he said that he’d hang you, did he?” “Yes, my lord.” “Well, General Picton is a man of his word. I think you’d better get the rations up in time.” Further advice was unnecessary; the rations were there to the moment.118 It is odd to find that many years after Picton’s death a question was asked in Parliament, and a controversy raged in the newspapers, as to which of three named commissaries was the object of Picton’s anger.

It would be wrong, however, to paint Picton as a mere vial of wrath, foaming into ungovernable rage in and out of season. When he was angry he generally had good cause; it was only the over-vehemence of his language that caused him to become a centre of legends. Odd as it may seem, the rank and file did not consider him a tyrant; it was acknowledged that he was very just, that he never punished without hearing the defence, that he was capable of pardoning, that when he hit hard he did so not without reason. A sergeant of the 45th wrote on him thus: “He was strict sometimes, especially about plunder, always talking about how wrong it was to plunder the poor people because countries happened to be at war. He used to flog the men when they were found out; but where he flogged, many generals took life. Besides this, the men thought that he had their welfare at heart. Every soldier in the division knew that if he had anything to complain of, ‘Old Picton’ would listen to his story, and set him right if he could. On the whole, our fellows always thought him a kind general, in spite of his strong language.”

This same sense of justice is brought out in the diaries of several officers, who speak in feeling terms of his endeavours to get obscure merit rewarded, and to keep down jobbery in promotion,119 or tyranny of senior officers over their juniors. He was very accessible, and even friendly and considerate, to his subordinates. This familiarity, which endeared him to subalterns, was (as we have already noticed) not agreeable to Lord Wellington. Their intercourse was formal and not very frequent. Wellington once went out of his way to say that it was not true that he had ever had a quarrel with Picton, or been on anything but good terms with him. But while acknowledging his services, he never pretended that he had any personal liking for him.

Picton always thought that he suffered grave injustice at the end of the war, by not being included in the list of five Peninsular officers who were made peers for their services. “If the coronet were lying on the crown of a breach, I should have as good a chance as any of them,” was his caustic remark. The explanation formally given for his omission was that all the five generals honoured, Beresford, Hill, Graham, Hope, and Stapleton Cotton, had held for some time “distinct commands,” and that Picton had not. But though this explanation held good for the first three, it did not really cover the cases of Hope and Cotton, whose independent commands had been little more than nominal; and Picton had on several occasions—notably in the Pyrenees—exercised independent authority in a very similar way. The fact was that he was an unpopular man, and that the Ministry omitted him, while Wellington made no effort to push his claims. He showed his displeasure by announcing his intention to retire from the army in 1814, and would have done so in the next year, if Napoleon’s return from Elba had not called him into the field, to die at Waterloo.

To finish our sketch of this curious and contradictory character, we must mention that Picton was a profound despiser of all sorts of pomp and ceremony. His dress, except on gala days, was careless and often unmilitary. He fought Quatre-Bras, as several witnesses remarked, in a tall beaver hat, and in the Vittoria campaign, because he was suffering from his eyes, wore a very broad-brimmed variety of the same type. His aide-de-camps copied him, as was natural, in their disregard for appearance, and it is said that from their manners and dress they were known as “the bear and ragged staff,”120 a term that has been applied on several more recent occasions to similar parties.

A very different man from Sir Thomas Picton was the last of the divisional generals whose character we have to deal with, Robert Craufurd. They were both effective weapons in the hands of Wellington, but Picton’s efficiency was rather that of the battering ram, while Craufurd’s was rather that of the rapier. Robert Craufurd, like Picton, came to the Peninsula as rather a disappointed man, his grievance being that, despite much brilliant service, he had dropped behind in promotion, and found himself a junior brigadier-general, when men several years his junior, like Hill, Beresford, and Wellington himself, were holding posts of much greater importance. Craufurd was one of our few scientific soldiers; he had studied so far back as 1782 the tactics of the army of Frederic the Great at Berlin, and had translated into English the official Prussian treatise on the Art of War. His knowledge of German, which none other of Wellington’s officers save Graham possessed, had caused him, in 1794, to be given the important post of military attachÉ with the Austrian Army in the Netherlands, and afterwards on the Rhine, and he followed Coburg and the Archduke Charles for three years through a series of campaigns, in which failure was much more frequent than success. When the war broke out once more between Austria and the French republic, he was again sent in 1799 to serve with his old friends, and accompanied the headquarters of General Hotze’s army in Switzerland, till he was called off to share in the Duke of York’s ill-managed invasion of Holland in the end of the same year. Like Graham, therefore, Craufurd had the sorrow of witnessing a long series of disasters, for which he was not in the least responsible. As his reports and dispatches show, he discharged his duty with zeal and excellent capacity; but his sarcastic tongue and violent temper seem to have stood in the way of his promotion. A major in 1794, after thirteen years’ service, he was still only a lieutenant-colonel in 1801, and during these years had seen numberless comrades climb over his head, though he had all the while been discharging important duties in a fashion which won the admiration of all with whom he came into personal contact. It looks as if the constant reports of disaster, which he had to make, had connected his name in official circles with the notion of ill-luck. In 1801, disappointed of an official post in Ireland for which he had applied, he went on half-pay, and entered Parliament as member for a pocket-borough which chanced to be in his brother’s gift.121 For the next five years he was a constant speaker in Parliament on military topics, and a very bitter critic of the policy of Pitt, Dundas, and Addington. His views as to the proper organization of the British forces, in first and second line, for the beating off of French invasion were set forth at vast length, and always clashed with those of ministers. It is only fair to say that he was in the main right, and they wrong; he pleaded for the reduction of the numberless ill-disciplined volunteer corps, and wished to see in the first line a very large regular army raised for short service, and behind it the second line, levied by conscription, as a sort of levÉe en masse trained for irregular fighting, and not expected to manoeuvre or to take part in pitched battles. Craufurd’s virulent criticism was very telling, but hardly likely to help his promotion as a military man, so long as the Addington and Pitt ministries were in power. When, however, Pitt died, and the Whig administration called “All the Talents” came into power, the new War Secretary, William Windham, was disposed to do everything possible for Craufurd, who was not only his personal friend, but often advised him on matters of organization and technical military subjects.

At last, after five years spent in rather acrid parliamentary criticism, Craufurd was given an opportunity by his friend Windham to see service in a higher post than had ever before fallen to his lot. Though only just promoted to a full colonelcy, he was given the command of a brigade of 4000 men, destined for a distant expedition. This adventure was one of the most hare-brained of the many futile schemes of the unlucky cabinet then in power. Craufurd was to take in hand nothing less than a voyage round Cape Horn, for the conquest of Chili! He never saw the straits of Magellan, however, for his force, after it had sailed, was distracted to form part of the unhappy armament under General Whitelocke, which made the disastrous attack on Buenos Ayres in 1807. Placed in the front, in command of Whitelocke’s Light Brigade, and thrust forward into the tangle of streets among which the incapable general dispersed his troops in many small columns, Craufurd fought his way so far on that he was surrounded, cut off from the main body, and compelled to capitulate with the remnants of his men. Thus his first chance of distinction in the field, at the head of a considerable force, ended in absolute disaster. He was acquitted of all blame at Whitelocke’s court-martial, but the thought that he was remembered as the officer who had surrendered a British brigade rankled in his mind, and sat heavy on his soul down to the end of his life.

The fact that he was held blameless, however, was marked by his appointment to the command of a brigade in the Peninsular Army in 1808. But his usual ill-luck seemed at first to attend him. He arrived too late for Vimeiro; when serving under Moore he was detached from the main army, and did not fight at Corunna. In the next year, returning to serve under Wellesley, he was late for Talavera, though to reach the battlefield he made his well-remembered march of forty-three miles in twenty-six hours, which Napier, by a slip of memory, has converted into an impossible achievement—a march of sixty-two miles in that time, which not even Craufurd and the famous 43rd, 52nd, and 95th could have accomplished.

From 1809 onward Craufurd at last got his chance, and for the greater part of three years122 was in command of Wellington’s advance, his “Light Brigade” of 1809 becoming the “Light Division” in 1810. At length he got what Fate had denied him in all his earlier career, a post of great distinction and responsibility, and a sight of victory; for fifteen years he had been witnessing nothing but retreats and disasters. On his happy days, and they were many, Craufurd was undoubtedly the most brilliant lieutenant that Wellington ever owned. Yet he was not trusted by his chief as Hill, for example, was trusted, because of his occasional lapses from caution, and from the blind obedience which his chief exacted. Occasionally he took risks, or ventured to modify the orders given him—the faults of an eager and ambitious spirit in an hour of excitement.

His achievements were great and noble. The most splendid of them was the protection of the north-east frontier of Portugal throughout the whole spring and summer of 1810, when he was set with his own small division and two regiments of cavalry to lie out many miles in front of the main army, and to watch the assembling host of MassÉna, till the moment when it should make its forward move for serious invasion. For five months he guarded a long front against an enemy of sixfold force, without allowing his line to be pierced, or suffering the French to gain any information as to what was going on in his rear. This was a great feat, only accomplished by the most complete and minute organization of his very modest resources. There were fifteen fords along the Agueda, the river whose line he had to keep, all of which had to be watched in dry weather, and many even when the stream was high. The French had 3000 cavalry opposite him in March and April, 5000 in May and June, the latter a force exceeding in numbers the total of his whole division. Behind the hostile cavalry screen he knew that there were two full army corps, or over 40,000 men; and many detachments of this infantry lay only four or five miles from Craufurd’s outposts, and might attack him at any moment. Yet he never suffered any surprise; so well were his observation-posts placed and managed, that the least movement of the enemy was reported to him in an incredibly short time. The whole web of communications quivered at the slightest touch, and the Light Division was concentrated ready to fight or to retreat, as prudence dictated, long before the attack could develop. So wonderfully had he trained his troops that any battalion, as Napier records, was ready under arms within seven minutes from the first alarm signal, and within a quarter of an hour could be in order of battle on its appointed post, with its baggage loaded and assembled ready for departure at a convenient distance to the rear.

As his aide-de-camp, Shaw Kennedy, the historian of this summer, writes, “To understand Craufurd’s operations the calculation must never be lost sight of, for it was on calculation that he acted all along.” Special reports were made of the numerous fords of the Agueda every morning, and the rapidity of its rises was periodically marked. Beacons were placed on conspicuous heights, so as to communicate information as to the enemy’s offensive movements. To ensure against mistakes in the night, pointers were kept at the stations of communication, directed to the beacons. The cavalry regiment at the outposts was the first Hussars of the King’s German Legion, a veteran corps, chosen because its officers were considered superior in scouting power to that of any other light cavalry unit with the army. Craufurd, knowing German well, communicated with each of its squadron leaders directly; each knew his own duty for the front that he covered, and each worked out his part admirably. The general was untiring, could remain on horseback unwearied for almost any length of time, and knew personally every ford, defile, and by-path. Hence nothing was left to chance.123

It was a pity that Craufurd ended this splendid piece of service, which lasted over five months of daily danger, by fighting the unnecessary “Combat of the Coa” on July 4, 1810. Staying a day too long beyond that stream despite of Wellington’s clear direction to retire the moment that he was hard pressed, he was suddenly attacked by the whole of Ney’s corps, 20,000 men or more, and forced over the Coa, with loss which might have been great but for the excellence of the battalions he had trained and the cool-headed tactical skill of his regimental officers. He held the bridge of the Coa successfully when he had crossed it, and lost no more than 300 men; but he had disobeyed orders and risked his division. Wellington was justly displeased, and let his lieutenant know it. But he did not rebuke him in his dispatches, and continued him in his command. He wrote home in a confidential letter, “You will say, ‘Why not accuse Craufurd?’ I answer, ‘Because if I am to be hanged for it, I cannot accuse a man who meant well, and whose error was one of judgment, not of intention.’” But for the future he kept Craufurd nearer to himself, and did not place him so far away that he had much chance of trying strategical experiments on his own responsibility. Even so, there were other occasions on which the general’s proneness to think for himself got him into trouble. One was on September 25, 1811, on the day of the combat of El Bodon, when Craufurd, thrown forward into a hazardous position by his chief’s orders, was twelve hours late in joining the main army. He had been told to make a night march, but waited till dawn, because he was moving in a difficult and broken country full of ravines and torrents, where he judged that movement in the dark was dangerous. By his delay the army was concentrated half a day later than Wellington intended. “I am glad to see you safe,” observed the Commander-in-Chief with some asperity, as the Light Division filed into the scantily manned position at Fuente Guinaldo. “Oh, I was in no danger, I assure you.” “But I was, from your conduct,” answered Wellington. Whereupon Craufurd remarked to his staff, “He’s d——d crusty to-day.”124 In this case it must be remarked, in justice to Craufurd, that it was his chief who had placed him in the hazardous position, not himself, and that his judgment that the night march was impracticable was very probably correct. But he had disobeyed an order, and it was remembered against him by the inflexible Wellington.

Against these lapses must be set a long career of careful and scientific soldiering, with movements of brilliant manoeuvring, and sudden strokes, in which no other Peninsular general could vie with him. The repulse of Ney’s corps at Bussaco was perhaps the most glorious exploit of Craufurd and his Light Division. The way in which the French on this occasion were detained and harassed by light troops, and then, just as they reached the crest of the position, charged and swept downhill by the rush of a much inferior force, launched at the right moment, was a beautiful example of tactics. The most astonishing part of it was that, by his careful choice of a position, and judicious concealment of his line till the critical minute, Craufurd beat his enemy with hardly any loss; he had only 177 casualties, the French opposed to him over 1200. Yet there was another feat which, though less showy, was probably an even greater example of tactical skill than the stroke at Bussaco. This was the advance and retreat of the Light Division at Fuentes de OÑoro (May 5, 1811), when Craufurd was sent out of the main British position to rescue the 7th Division, which was cut off and nearly surrounded by an overwhelming force of French cavalry. Having disengaged the compromised division, Craufurd had to retreat back to the main body with five brigades of fine cavalry, aided by horse artillery, surging round him on all sides, and seeking for an opportunity to burst in. To retreat in square across two miles of open plateau, very well adapted for the action of horsemen, was a delicate and dangerous task. Yet Craufurd achieved it with perfect security, and brought in his whole division to Wellington’s position with a loss of less than fifty men. As an exhibition of nerve and skill it even exceeded Picton’s retreat at El Bodon, for the French horse on this occasion were more numerous, and flushed with previous success, and the Light Division was a smaller body than the 3rd division by 4000 men to 5200. The distance covered, however, during the crisis of retreat at Fuentes was much shorter, only two miles to seven at El Bodon.

Craufurd fell in action before 1812 was many days old, being killed by a chance shot while watching and directing the storm of the lesser breach at Ciudad Rodrigo from the further side of the glacis (January 19). Otherwise his peculiar talents would no doubt have been exhibited in commanding the rear-guard during the retreat from Burgos, and the advance during the campaign of Vittoria. The character of the fighting in the Pyrenees would also have suited admirably his particular style of management. He was bitterly missed by his officers, Charles Alten, his successor in command of the Light Division being a general of much more pedestrian quality,125 who might never fail to make an attempt to obey Wellington’s orders to the best of his ability, but could never supplement them by any improvisation of his own, of which he was incapable. The operations of the Light Division after Craufurd’s death were always admirable so far as the conduct of officers and men went, but there was no longer any genius in the way in which they were led.

Craufurd, unlike Hill or Graham, and like his rival Picton, had many enemies. He was a strict disciplinarian, to his officers even more than to his men, and had a quick temper and a caustic tongue. His anger used to vent itself not in bursts of swearing, such as Picton would indulge in, but by well-framed and lucid speeches of bitter sarcasm, which probably gave more offence than any amount of oaths. Being a highly educated man, and a practised parliamentary speaker, he could put an amount of polished contempt into a rebuke which was not easily forgotten. It was probably this trick that made enemies of the Napiers, both of whom speak very bitterly of him in their diaries and other writings, though William Napier in his history gives him the due credit for his many brilliant achievements.126 Several others of his officers speak bitterly of his intellectual arrogance; one calls him a “tyrant”; another says that he never forgot a grudge. But he had no fewer friends than enemies; many of the best of his subordinates, like Shaw Kennedy and Campbell, loved him well, and (what is more surprising) the rank and file, on whom his wrath often fell in the form of the lash, felt not only confidence but enthusiasm for him. The best of all his eulogies comes from a 95th man, Rifleman Harris, and is well worth quoting, for its simple manliness.

“I do not think I ever admired any man who wore the British uniform more than I did General Craufurd. I could fill a book with descriptions of him, for I frequently had my eye upon him in the hurry of action. The Rifles liked him, but they feared him, for he could be terrible when insubordination showed itself in the ranks. ‘You think because you are riflemen that you may do whatever you think proper,’ said he one day to the miserable and savage crew around him on the retreat to Corunna; ‘but I’ll teach you the difference before I have done with you.’ I remember one evening during that retreat he detected two men straying away from the main body; it was in an early stage of that disastrous flight, and Craufurd knew that he must keep his division together. He halted the brigade with a voice of thunder, ordered a drum-head court-martial on the instant, and they were sentenced to a hundred a-piece. While the hasty trial was taking place, Craufurd, dismounting from his horse, stood in the midst, looking stern and angry as a worried bulldog. He did not like retreating, that man.

“When the trial was over, it was too dark to inflict the punishment. He marched all night on foot, and when morning dawned his hair, beard, and eyebrows were covered with the frost; we were all in the same condition. Scarcely had dawn appeared when the general called a halt, among the snow on the hills. Ordering a square to be formed, he spoke to the brigade.

“‘Although I shall obtain the good will neither of the officers nor of the men here by so doing, I am resolved to punish those men according to the sentence awarded, even though the French are at our heels. Begin with Daniel Howans.’

“The men were brought out, and their Lieutenant-Colonel, Hamilton Wade, at the same time stepped forward, and lowering his sword, requested he would forgive these men, as they were both of them good soldiers, who had fought in all the battles of Portugal. ‘I order you, sir,’ said the general, ‘to do your duty. These men shall be punished.’ After seventy-five lashes, Craufurd stopped the flogging. But before he put the brigade in motion again, he gave us another short address, pretty much after this style—

“‘I give you all notice that I shall halt the brigade again the very first moment I perceive any man disobeying my orders, and try him by court-martial on the spot.’ He then gave the word, and we resumed our march.

“Many who read this may suppose that it was a cruel and unnecessary severity, under the dreadful and harassing circumstances of that retreat: but I, who was there, a common soldier in the regiment to which these men belonged, say that it was quite necessary. No man but one formed of stuff like General Craufurd could have saved the brigade from perishing altogether. If he flogged two, he saved hundreds from death by his management.”

There was a curious anecdote concerning Craufurd’s funeral published in the Saturday Review lately,127 from the unpublished reminiscences of a contemporary, which illustrates well enough the reverence with which the Light Division looked upon its old chief. One of his strongest principles had been that troops on the march must never make a detour to avoid fordable streams or deep mud, nor break their ranks to allow each man to pick shallow water, or hard stones among the wet. The delay so caused was, he held, such a hindrance to rapid movement that it must not be allowed. He had been known to flog men who straggled from the ranks in the water, in order to fill their bottles, or to stoop down to take a long drink.128 He had even caused an officer, whom he caught evading a wetting by riding pick-a-back upon his soldier-servant, to be set down with a splash in the middle of a stream.129 Coming back from Craufurd’s funeral, the leading company of the Light Division passed by an excavation at the rear of the siege works, half-filled by mud and water. Instead of turning its end to avoid the wet, the men looked at the inundation, pulled themselves together, and marched straight through it, with great regularity and steadiness, as if they were passing before a general officer at a review. The whole division followed through the slush. It seemed to them that the best testimony to their old commander’s memory was to honour his best-known theory, when he was no longer there to enforce its acceptance by his usual drastic methods.

I could write much more of this notable character, with all its faults and merits. But so much must suffice. Nor have I space to tell of the other senior generals of the Peninsular War, though some of them, such as Leith and Cole, were great fighting men, just the tools that suited Wellington’s hand. They were, however, never trusted with independent commands, so that it is impossible to judge of their full mental stature. I should be inclined to think very highly of Cole from his conduct at Albuera, for it was he who ordered, on his own responsibility, without any permission from Beresford, the famous advance of the Fusilier Brigade and Harvey’s Portuguese, which turned into a victory that most perilous battle.130 But of most of Wellington’s divisional officers we can only say that they were competent for the task set them—the vigorous carrying out of orders which were given them, but in whose framing they had no part. At the most, tactical skill in execution can be attributed to them, and of this there was no lack, as witness details of Salamanca, Vittoria, and the scattered fighting in the Pyrenees. Almost as much can be predicated of some of the great brigadiers, who managed their details well, but never had the chance of showing their full powers. It would be easy to make a long list of them; at least Kempt, Pack, Barns, Mackinnon, Colborne, Hay, Lumley, Ross, Halkett, Byng, Pakenham, Beckwith, and Barnard should be included in the list. Some of them died or were invalided early, others commanded brigades at Waterloo again, but none, save Byng, of this string of names, was ever given permanent command of a division, though several of them had held the interim charge of one in the Peninsula, when their regular chiefs were sick or absent. Ross and Pakenham alone were promoted to a separate command, both in America. The former had charge of the expedition which went to the Potomac and Chesapeake in 1813–14; he took Washington by a vigorous stroke, but fell in action shortly after, while conducting an attack on Baltimore, which ceased when he fell. Pakenham’s expedition to New Orleans was a series of misfortunes, of which some part at least must be attributed to his own fault. It is certain that Wellington never trained a general who proved himself a first-rate exponent of the art of war; but his system (as we have said above) was not calculated to foster initiative or self-reliance among his lieutenants.

Other subordinates Wellington possessed, of whom we can say that they were not up to their work, even in the carrying out of the orders given them with common self-reliance and clear-headedness. Such were Spencer and Slade, who were only capable of going forward to carry out a definite order; it was necessary, so to speak, that they should simply be put like trams on a line, and shoved forward, or they would slacken the pace and come to a stop, from want of initiative and moving power. Some few, like Sir William Erskine, who was Wellington’s pet aversion—yet irremovable because of the political influence that backed him—were positively dangerous from a combination of short-sightedness, carelessness, and self-will. In one dispatch Wellington says that he thinks that he is a little wrong in his head.131 It is astounding that after Erskine’s mistakes at Casal Novo and Sabugal, Wellington did not get rid of him at all costs; but he simply tried to shunt him on to commands where it was unlikely that he could do much harm, and continued solemnly to rehearse his name with approval in his dispatches, along with those of all other officers of his rank, till the unfortunate man committed suicide, in a moment of insanity, in the interval between the campaigns of 1812 and 1813. This was the strongest case of difficulty which Wellington, for reasons of politics and patronage at home, did not care to face by the decisive step of sending home the general in disgrace. But there were several brigadier-generals whom he had not asked for, whom he disliked, and whose departure from the Peninsula he saluted with a small psalm of thanksgiving in his private letters.132 It is certainly astonishing that, even after 1811, he was not given a free hand to get rid of subordinates whom he knew to be incompetent or recalcitrant, any more than he was given the power to promote officers without a tedious reference to the Horse Guards. It is true that in the later years of the war his recommendations were generally (but not always) carried out; yet it took whole months for a request made in a letter from Salamanca or Madrid to reach London, to be there acceded to, and then to take effect by a publication of the Gazette. The power to punish or reward with promptness was never granted; there was always a long delay. And both punishment and reward lose much of their salutary effect when there is an interval of months between the act and its consequence. Napoleon had a unique advantage in being at once the commander-in-chief and the dispenser of favours and chastisement; with him there was no time lost in lengthy reference to a home government.