Wellington - The Iron Duke by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes [Holmes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, Historical, History, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9780007383498
Google: YlMjEueaA3sC
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2012-06-27T14:00:00+00:00

Wellington in the breach at Badajoz. The artist has used some licence, showing dignified French prisoners under guard in the breach and minimising the effect of close-range fire on the bodies lying in it. But he gives a good feel for the rubble-strewn slope that constituted the breach, and the cheveaux de frise (beams studded with sword-blades) that helped defend it can be seen clearly.

Wellington informed Liverpool that the storm of Badajoz ‘affords as strong an instance of the gallantry of our troops as had ever been displayed. But I greatly hope that I shall never again be the instrument of putting them to such a test’. He was profoundly shaken by the carnage in the breaches, where Grattan thought that ‘it was not possible to look at those brave men, all of them dead or frightfully maimed, without recollecting what they had been just a few short hours before . . .’ Wellington broke down in tears, and when Picton stumped along on his wounded leg: ‘I bit my lips, and did everything I could to stop myself for I was ashamed he should see it, but I could not, and he so little entered into my feelings that he said “Good God, what is the matter?”’

The scenes in the town were scarcely less shocking. Wellington remembered entering a cellar where soldiers were lying so drunk that wine was actually flowing from their mouths, and he was nearly hit by a soldier firing in the air. A General Order of 7 April 1812 announced that it was time that the looting ceased, and a gallows was erected in the square to drive the point home. An aide de camp wrote that Wellington was so angry that he could hardly bring himself to thank the troops.

While Wellington was preparing to move from Badajoz, half a continent away, Napoleon was about to depart for his fatal campaign against Russia. And, yet again, there were links between the emperor’s ambitions and affairs in the Peninsula. Before departing, he ordered Marmont to mount another offensive into Portugal, and forbade him to cooperate with Soult in the south. Although there were over 230,000 French soldiers in Spain, they were split up between five armies, and the need to mount operations against guerrillas and Spanish regular forces would have made it hard for them to co-operate against Wellington’s much smaller army — he had some 60,000 regulars — even had they been directed to do so. But with the unmartial King Joseph in overall command, his elbow jogged by dispatches from Paris that might take a month to arrive, there was little to stop the marshals from feuding, nor much chance to impose a coherent strategy.

Wellington was unsure whether to attack Marmont or Soult, but knew that he needed to re-provision Ciudad Rodrigo before doing anything else. He set in motion a variety of diversions that would hinder any French attempts at concentration, and a well-handled raid by Hill captured the Tagus crossing at Almaraz

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