Having dealt with the greater personalities among Wellington’s lieutenants, it remains that we should speak of the organization by which his army was set in motion.

Some great commanders have trusted much to their staff, and have kept their ablest subordinates about their person. This was pre-eminently not the case with Wellington: he was as averse to providing himself with a regular chief-of-the-staff, as he was to allowing a formal second-in-command to accompany his army. The duties which would, according to modern ideas, fall to the chief-of-the-staff, were by him divided between three officers, one of whom was of quite junior standing, and only one of whom held a higher rank than that of colonel. These officers were the Military Secretary, the Quartermaster-General, and the Adjutant-General.

The Military Secretary was merely responsible for the correct drawing out, and the transmission to the proper person or department, of the correspondence of the commander-in-chief. The post was held from April 27, 1809, to September 19, 1810, by Lieutenant-Colonel Bathurst, of the 60th. On the last-named date he went home on leave, and Captain Lord Fitzroy Somerset was given the status of acting-secretary, and confirmed as actual secretary three months later on January 1, 1811. This officer, better remembered by his later title as the Lord Raglan of the Crimean War, held the office till the end of the war—by which time he had reached the rank of colonel. He was one of Wellington’s best-trusted subordinates, and his personal friend, but being very young, and junior in rank to all heads of departments, he was in no sense an appreciable factor in Wellington’s conduct of the war. In fact, he was nothing more than his title of secretary indicated, and was in no way responsible for organization, or entitled to offer advice.

Much more important were the two great heads of departments, the Quartermaster-General and Adjutant-General. The former was charged with all matters relating to the embarkation or disembarkation, the equipment, quartering, halting, encamping, and route-marching of the various units of the army. He had to convey to all generals in command of them the orders of the general-in-chief, and for this purpose had under his control a number of officers bearing the clumsy titles of assistant-quartermaster-generals, and deputy-assistant-quartermaster-generals. Of the former there were five, of the latter seven, when the army was first organized in April, 1809, but their numbers were continually increasing all through the war, for each unit had an assistant-quartermaster-general and a deputy-assistant-quartermaster-general attached to it, and as the divisions and brigades grew in number, so did the officers of the Quartermaster-General’s department told off to them. There was also a parallel growth in the number of those who remained at headquarters, directly attached to their chief.

There is an interesting minute by Wellington, laying down the relations between the divisional generals and the staff-officers of the department: he points out that, though the latter are the organs of headquarters in dealing with divisions, yet they are under the command of the divisional general: and the responsibility both for the orders given through them being carried out, and for their acts in general, lies with the division-commander. “Every staff officer,” he says, “must be considered as acting under the direct orders and superintendence of the superior officer for whose assistance he is employed, and who is responsible for his acts. To consider the relative situation of the general officer and the staff officer in any other light, would tend to alter the nature of the Service, and, in fact, might give the command of the troops to a subaltern staff officer instead of to their general officer.”133

The officers of the Quartermaster-General’s department, besides their duties with regard to the moving of the army, or the detachments of it, had often to undertake independent work at a distance from headquarters, and sometimes remote from the theatre of war. It was they who made topographical surveys, reports on roads and bridges, and on the resources of districts through which the army might have to move in the near or distant future. There was issued early in 1810 a little manual called Instructions for the officers in the department of the Quartermaster-General which was given to all its members: it contains a selection of orders and forms, relating to every possible duty with which its recipients might be entrusted. The most interesting section is that on topographical surveys, to which there is annexed a model report of the road from Truxillo to Merida, containing notes on everything which a staff officer ought to notice,—positions, defiles, size of villages, character of sections of the road, amount of corn-land as opposed to pasture or waste, warnings as to unhealthy spots, notes as to the depth of rivers and the practicability of fords, etc.

So far as I can ascertain, Wellington had only two Quartermaster-Generals during the whole of the long period of his supreme command. Colonel George Murray of the 3rd Guards held the post from April, 1809, to May 28, 1812: he must be carefully distinguished from two other Murrays, who sometimes turn up in the dispatches. One is Major-General John Murray, who commanded a brigade in the Oporto campaign, went home because he considered that Beresford had been unjustly promoted over his head, and came out later to the Peninsula on the Catalan side, where he was responsible for the mismanaged operations about Tarragona. The other is John Murray, the Commissary-General. When Wellington sometimes uses such a phrase in his dispatches as “Murray knows this,” or “see that Murray is informed,” it is often most difficult to be sure which of the three men is meant. Early in 1811 Colonel George Murray became a major-general, and in the following May he appears to have gone home. He was replaced as Quartermaster-General by Colonel James Gordon—who, again, must not be confused with Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon, who was one of Wellington’s senior aides-de-camp, and was killed at Waterloo. This is another of the confusions between homonyms which often give trouble. If a diarist speaks of “Colonel Gordon” we have to find which of the two is meant. James Gordon, having acted as quartermaster-general from May, 1811, to January, 1813, went home, and George Murray, returning early in that year, worked out the remaining fifteen months of the war in his old position.

Parallel with the Quartermaster-General was the other great departmental chief at headquarters, the Adjutant-General, whose sphere of activity was disciplinary and statistical. He was charged with all the detail of duties to be distributed, with the collecting and compiling for the use of the commander-in-chief of all returns of men and horses in “morning states,” etc., with the supreme supervision of the discipline of the army, and with much official correspondence that did not pass to the Military Secretary. Roughly speaking, the internal condition of the troops fell to his share, while their movement belonged to the Quartermaster-General. He had to aid him on the first organization of the army in 1809, eight assistant-adjutant-generals and six deputy-assistant-adjutant-generals, but (as in the Quartermaster-General’s department) the number of subordinates mounted up, as the war went on, and new units were from time to time created, since an assistant-adjutant-general was attached to each division.

The first holder of the office was Major-General the Hon. Charles Stewart (afterwards Lord Londonderry, the earliest historian of the Peninsular War), who was discharging its functions from April, 1809, till April, 1813, just four years. He was then sent on a diplomatic mission to Berlin, and Wellington offered the post to his own brother-in-law, Major-General Edward Pakenham, who, while in charge of the 3rd division, had made the decisive charge at Salamanca. Pakenham was adjutant-general for the last year of the war, April, 1813, to April, 1814, and went straight out from Bordeaux to command the unlucky New Orleans expedition, in which he lost his life.

It will be noted that Wellington had actually only two Quartermaster-Generals and two Adjutant-Generals under him during the five years of his Peninsular command—a sufficient proof that when he had found his man he stuck to him. Charles Stewart, who served him so long, was a person of some political importance, as the brother and confidant of Lord Castlereagh. In the early part of his tenure of office he seems sometimes to have made suggestions to his chief, but met little encouragement, for Wellington loved his own way, and was not to be influenced even by his own highest staff officers.134 He did not wish to have a Gneisenau or a Moltke at his side: he only wanted zealous and competent chief clerks.

Attached to headquarters in addition to the three great functionaries already named, were the heads of several other departments of great importance. These were—

(1) The general officer commanding the Royal Artillery, who had a general supervisory charge of the batteries attached to the divisions, and a more specific control of the battering-train and reserve artillery, when these came into existence in 1811, as well as of the ammunition columns. The first artillery chief was Brigadier-General E. Howarth, who arrived at Lisbon in 1809, about the same time as Wellington himself. He was promoted major-general in 1811, and went home that year. The command then went through a rapid succession of hands. Howarth was followed by Major-General Borthwick, who apparently crossed Wellington, and went home in March, 1812, after less than a year’s tenure of the post. Borthwick was succeeded by Colonel H. Framingham, and he within a few months by Colonel G.B. Fisher, who (like Borthwick) fell out with the commander-in-chief, and applied for leave to go home ere 1813 was six months old. Wellington then appointed Colonel Alexander Dickson to the command late in May. This officer had been for the last two years in charge of the Portuguese artillery under Beresford. He had given such satisfaction at Rodrigo and Badajoz that Wellington re-transferred him to the British service, and finished the campaign of 1814 with Dickson in chief charge of this branch.

(2) After the artillery chief we encounter as a prominent figure at headquarters the commanding officer of Royal Engineers. He had the superintending duty over his own staff and the engineer officers attached to the divisions, and control over the “Royal Military Artificers,” as the rank and file of the scientific corps were named till 1812, when they changed their title to Royal Sappers and Miners.135 The commanding engineer had also charge over the engineers’ park and the pontoon train. The officer who held this post from 1809 till he was killed at St. Sebastian in September, 1813, was Colonel Richard Fletcher, who has left a fame behind him as the designer of the Lines of Torres Vedras. On his death the command fell to Lieut.-Colonel Elphinstone, who was responsible for the celebrated bridge of boats across the mouth of the Adour which made the siege of Bayonne possible in 1814.

(3, 4) At headquarters were also to be found the officers commanding the Staff Corps Cavalry, and the Corps of Guides. The former, a small unit of some 200 men, created in 1812, discharged the police duties of the army, and were worked along with the Provost Marshal. They were occasionally also employed as orderlies, and in other confidential positions.136 The Guides were a small body also, some 150 or 200 strong, partly British, partly Portuguese, the latter preponderating. They were detached in twos or threes, to act as interpreters as well as guides to bodies of troops moving in country not known to them. For this reason they had to be bilingual, either English knowing some Portuguese, or Portuguese knowing some English, as they had always to be acting as intermediaries between the army and the peasantry, in making inquiries about roads, supplies, etc. The officer commanding the Guides had also the charge of the post office, and the transmission of letters to and from the front.

(5) The Provost Marshal was also attached to headquarters: he had charge of all prisoners to be tried by general court-martial, of deserters, and prisoners of war. He had powers of jurisdiction on offenders caught red-handed, but as Wellington remarks, “Whatever may be the crime of which a soldier is guilty, the Provost Marshal has not the power of inflicting summary punishment for it, unless he should see him in the act of committing it.”137 Men arrested on evidence only, had to be tried by court-martials. For the better management of these last, Wellington added a Judge-Advocate-General to his staff in 1812, whose duty was to see that trials were conducted with proper forms and due appreciation of the validity of evidence—in which the commander-in-chief considered that they had often failed. Mr. Francis Larpent, who has left an interesting diary of his duties and his personal adventures, discharged the function of this office from his arrival late in 1812 down to the end of the war.138

As to aides-de-camp, Wellington kept a very limited number of them—he only employed some twenty in the course of the war, and not more than eight or ten at once. They were nearly all young men of the great political families,139 nearly half of them were Guards’ officers, and the rest mostly belonged to the cavalry. The Prince of Orange served among them in 1811–12. None of them, save Lord Fitzroy Somerset (Lord Raglan) and Colonel Cadogan, came to any very great military position or reputation.

So much for the military side of headquarters. There were also attached to it seven civil departments, small and great, of which it may be well to give a list. On one or two of these we shall have to speak at some length in later chapters—notably the Commissariat and the Medical department. They consisted of—

(1) The Medical Department under an Inspector of Hospitals, who was in general charge of the physicians, surgeons, assistants, etc., attached to the various units of the army. There is an excellent account of the management of this department, and all its difficulties, in the Autobiography of Sir James McGrigor, chief of the Medical Staff in 1812–13–14. His predecessor since Wellington’s first landing in 1809 was Dr. Frank, who was invalided in the autumn of 1811.

(2) The Purveyor’s Department was independent of the medical, though it might well have been attached to it: the establishment consisted of a Purveyor to the Forces, with deputies and assistants, who had charge of the hospitals and all the material and details required for them—from the drugs for the sick to the burial expenses of the dead.

(3) The Paymaster-General, with his assistants, was responsible for the transmission of the money received to the regimental paymasters of the various units. He was a much-worried man, generally from three to six months in arrears with his specie, from no fault of his own, but from the immense difficulty of obtaining the hard dollars, doubloons, and “cruzados novos,” which alone had currency in the Peninsula till a late period in the war. It was useless to issue English money to the troops, for the natives would not accept crowns and guineas, and refused even to look at the one-pound notes which were almost the sole circulating medium in Great Britain during this period. It was only in a late year of the war that the gold guinea was at last tariffed by the Spanish and Portuguese Governments, and became readily current.140

(4) Most important of all the Civil Departments was the Commissariat, under the Commissary-General, who had under him Deputy-Commissary-Generals, Assistant and Deputy-Assistant-Commissaries, Commissariat Clerks, and many other subordinates. The department was divided into two branches, stores and accounts. The post of Commissary-General was successively held by John Murray (already mentioned above) from 1809 to June, 1810, by Kennedy from June, 1810, to September, 1811, and by Bisset from September, 1811, onward. An assistant commissary was attached to each brigade of infantry and each regiment of cavalry, but a single official had to attend to the needs of the whole of the artillery with the army, and another to the needs of headquarters.141

The whole future of the army in 1809 depended on whether the Commissariat Department would be able to rise to the height of its duties. It was absolutely necessary that Wellington should be able to keep his army concentrated, if this small force of 20,000 or 30,000 men was to be of any weight in the conduct of the war in the Peninsula. The much-cursed and criticized Commissariat succeeded in doing its duty, and the length of time for which the British army could keep concentrated was the envy of the French, who, living on the country, were forced to disperse whenever they had exhausted the resources of the particular region in which they were massed. In a way this fact was the key to the whole war. Wellington’s salvation lay in the fact that he could hold his entire army together, while his adversaries could not. On this advantage he relied again and again: his whole strategy depended upon it. How the Commissariat worked we shall show in a later chapter.

(5) The Storekeeper-General had charge of the field equipments, tents, and heavy baggage of the army. Often the heavy baggage was left at Lisbon, and all through 1809–10–11 no tents were taken to the front. It was only in the Vittoria and South-French campaigns that the whole army regularly carried them. In the days when the transport trains were not fully organized, it was necessary to leave even valuable impedimenta behind.

(6) To the Controller of Army Accounts all departments, save the Commissariat, rendered their statistics of money received and spent.

(7) Last, we may name the Press, for a travelling Press and a small staff of military printers accompanied the headquarters when possible, and printed general orders, and other documents and forms, of which many copies were required. I have seen much of its work at the Record Office,142 but have never come across an account of its organization, or of any anecdotes of its wandering life, in which it must have passed through many vicissitudes. The press was under the general supervision of the Adjutant-General.