The Dangerous Book of Heroes

by Conn Iggulden

  In those days, the army was not regarded as a suitable career for noble sons, in part because of its use as a police force at times of national unrest. Even so, Arthur was sent to be trained at the Royal Academy of Equitation in France. He learned basic French as well as becoming a decent hand at the violin before returning to England in 1786.

  His brother wrote to the lord lieutenant of Ireland to secure a commission for Arthur, and he was gazetted as ensign, joining the Seventy-third Highland Regiment of Foot. His brother’s support aided his rise, and a year later Arthur Wesley was promoted to lieutenant in the Seventy-sixth Regiment, then transferred to the Forty-first, which was on its way to Ireland.

  In Ireland, Wesley also tried his hand at politics for the first time. He spoke well at public meetings and was elected to the Irish House of Commons as MP for Trim. Around the same time, he met Kitty Pakenham, the daughter of the Earl of Longford. However, when he asked formally for her hand in marriage, her family refused. In great distress, Wesley burned his violins and never played again.

  With that defeat behind him, Arthur borrowed money from his brother and purchased the ranks of major, then lieutenant colonel, commanding the Thirty-third Regiment. In later years, when men such as Garnet Wolseley were reforming the system that allowed men to purchase commissions, it became generally accepted that the practice had allowed great incompetence and corruption. That may be true, but it also gave us the man who would become the Duke of Wellington.

  In 1794, the Thirty-third was sent to Flanders to resist a French invasion. There Wesley was promoted to command a brigade of three battalions and saw his first major military action at Breda in September. He and his men stopped a French column with steady fire from their flintlocks.

  In 1795, faced with overwhelming French forces, the army was evacuated in chaos and Wesley saw firsthand the incompetence of senior officers. The experience taught him a great deal and stood him in good stead years later. He suffered with illness caused by damp and a frozen winter and had a good idea of the horror and misery that was a part of the soldier’s life.

  In 1796, at the age of twenty-seven, Wesley traveled as colonel of the Thirty-third to India, leaving behind a troubled Ireland that would erupt into violent rebellion just two years later. In the same year, Napoléon married his mistress, Josephine, and took command of the armies of Italy.

  The India of that time was experiencing the last great days of John Company before it was taken over by the Crown. The British East India Company was in almost sole control of the subcontinent, and there were still fortunes to be made when Wesley landed at Calcutta in 1797. France, Holland, and Spain had all declared war on Britain, and advancement could be quick for a competent young officer. It could not have hurt that his brother Richard was being sent as governor general of British India. It was his brother who changed the spelling of the family name back to a much older form. Young Arthur accepted the change readily enough and used “Wellesley” first in a letter announcing the arrival of his brother in India. Another brother, Henry, also came as Richard’s private secretary.

  Arthur Wellesley went with the Thirty-third to Madras in 1798, a harsh sea journey during which fifteen of his men died from fevers brought on by bad water supplies. He joined the staff of General Harris for a time, handing command of the Thirty-third to Major John Shee. By December 1798, Wellesley was in command of a mixed force of British and Indian units intent on battle with the forces of Tipu Sultan, known as “the Tiger of Mysore.” As an open ally of France, Tipu Sultan was seen as a potential threat.

  With his men, Wellesley traveled to the sultan’s fortress of Seringapatam. Another large force under Harris moved up from the east, while a smaller one marched from the Malabar coast.

  On March 10, 1799, Tipu Sultan’s cavalry attacked the rear guard. Wellesley led the counterattack and saw them off without major losses. In another attack, the Thirty-third routed the enemy with bayonet charges. Tipu withdrew to the fortress.

  Wellseley took part in a night attack on an outlying village, but it was chaotic in the darkness and the Thirty-third was beaten back by Tipu’s rocket teams and musket fire. Wellesley was hit in the knee by a spent musket ball, though not seriously wounded. He took the position easily enough the following day but said later that he had learned “never to attack an enemy who is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitered by daylight.”

  Seringapatam fell after British guns made a breach in the walls. Tipu Sultan was killed in the fighting that followed, his body found by Wellesley himself. He returned to his camp, bathed, and slept. Overall command was not his, and he could do nothing while British soldiers looted and gutted the fortress.

  The following morning Wellesley was appointed governor of Seringapatam. He strode back in, hanged four soldiers, and flogged many others to suppress the orgy of looting and destruction. He was paid four thousand pounds as prize money for his part and offered to pay his brother Richard back for the loan to purchase a commission. His proud brother refused the offer. Despite recurring sickness, Wellesley completed his duties as governor. He was promoted to major general shortly afterward.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  In 1802 he was ordered to battle against the Maratha Confederacy, a number of Hindu principalities united in opposition to British power in India. Arthur Wellesley planned the campaign in great detail, which was already a habit of his but unusual for the time. In 1803 he took around 15,000 of his own men and 9,000 Indian troops six hundred miles to a Maratha fort. He had decided that a long defensive war was impossible, so moved quickly and boldly. His men took the defended local town in less than an hour.

  As one of the Maratha officers said: “The English are a strange people, and their general a wonderful man. They came here in the morning, looked at the Pettah wall, walked over it, killed the garrison and returned to breakfast! What can withstand them?” The fort itself surrendered only days later.

  The brilliantly fought battle of Assaye followed on September 23. Wellesley’s men were outnumbered seven to one, but he was still intent on quick victory as the only possible plan. Under heavy cannon fire, his army had to cross the Kaitna River, then attack a vastly larger force. He briefed his officers in person once they were across the river, impressing them with his calm demeanor as shot whistled on all sides. The Seventy-eighth Highlanders were the first to meet the Maratha infantry. Wellington had his horse killed under him and calmly mounted another. It was a chaotic scene, and Wellesley’s regiments were battered by cavalry as they advanced and eventually routed the enemy. Wellesley lost 1,584 men killed or wounded, while the Marathas lost around 6,000 as well as all their guns. It had been a costly victory, and Wellesley said later that it was “the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw.”

  Other battles followed, and in December, Wellesley took the key fortress of Gawilghur, a loss that was the final straw for the Maratha forces. They sued for peace, giving up disputed territories and disbanding their men.

  Wellesley was made a Knight of the Bath in 1804 and had amassed a personal fortune of some £42,000. He applied for leave to return home in 1805. On the way, his ship stopped briefly at the island of Saint Helena, which would one day be the final prison of Napoléon Bonaparte. In India he had learned his trade, from the need for personal fitness and moderation to the logistical importance of planning a campaign down to the vital supplies of food, water, and ammunition.

  In England, an expeditionary force was being prepared to fight against Napoléon. Wellesley was keen to command it and traveled to the Colonial Office on Downing Street to put his case to Lord Castlereagh. In the outer office he waited for a time with an admiral named Horatio Nelson. Wellesley recognized him, but at first Nelson did not know the general fresh from India. When Nelson found out who he was, they talked for some time and Wellington said later that he’d never had a conversation that interested him more. The following day, Nelson joined HMS Victory and went out to the battle of
Trafalgar and his death.

  While Napoléon was winning the battle of Austerlitz, perhaps his greatest victory, Arthur Wellesley was given a brigade at Hastings in England, a long way from the action he desired. There he offered marriage to Kitty Pakenham for a second time. He was no longer a penniless young man without a future, and in November 1805 she agreed to marry him. He also returned to the political debates of the day. He was elected as MP for Rye in 1806 and used his position to support his brother when Richard was accused of wasting public money in India.

  Wellesley married Kitty Pakenham in April 1806, though with an extraordinary lack of grace, he muttered to a friend that “she has grown ugly, by Jove!” It was not to be a happy marriage and may have come about in part because of the obligation and challenge he felt after the first proposal was turned down. After a brief honeymoon, he returned to his brigade.

  In 1807, Wellesley was given command against the Danes. In what is known as the second battle of Copenhagen, he bombarded the Danish capital until they surrendered. The British aim of securing Danish ships for their own fleet was accomplished. More important, it denied those ships to the Napoleonic fleet. Wellesley was promoted to lieutenant general.

  In 1808, he prepared to take command of an army heading to defend allied Portugal. His years there in what would become known as the Peninsular War would secure his fame and Napoléon Bonaparte’s eventual downfall.

  At that time, Spain had deserted its alliance with France and was using guerrilla tactics against French forces there. Britain was keen to support any European nation willing to fight Napoléon. Wellesley had a small army of around fifteen thousand, and his first action was to march from Mondego Bay on the west coast, to join up with sixteen hundred Portuguese soldiers. He faced two active French armies in Portugal as he pushed on south to Lisbon, the capital.

  He reached Óbidos by August 1808 and climbed a church tower to view a French army only miles away. The following day he attacked. The French army under Delaborde was forced into a fighting withdrawal. Though it was not a rout, it was an auspicious beginning, and reinforcements arrived for Wellesley, so that he had around seventeen thousand men.

  The battle of Vimeiro followed on August 21. Wellesley’s forces met two large French columns. His riflemen engaged them as they approached, killing many before the enemy was close enough for his artillery to fire one round from cannon. The French column then met a British line and was hammered by concentrated musket volleys. The French broke quickly and the rifle regiments ran out again to shoot them as they left the field. Wellesley used the new shrapnel ordnance to great effect against the massed French forces, though he felt his cavalry could have done better, having lost their heads and many lives by galloping wildly after the fleeing French. In all his career, he preferred infantry to cavalrymen, whom he regarded as having very little common sense.

  The battle was over by noon, and shortly afterward senior British officers agreed the Convention of Cintra, a French request to evacuate peacefully from Portugal. Wellesley was among those who imposed very generous terms and allowed the French to take even looted supplies with them. It took the rest of the summer to organize and would later be ridiculed at home. He was summoned back to Britain for an inquiry, leaving Sir John Moore in command of the force in Portugal.

  Wellesley was eventually cleared in the inquiry, but by then, Sir John Moore had been killed in the famous retreat to Corunna and successful evacuation from Spain. It was around that time that Wellington visited his bootmaker in London to commission a pair of calfskin boots that would resist being waterlogged. Though they were not made of rubber until the 1850s, the Wellington boot became extremely popular in his lifetime and remains so today.

  In 1809 Wellesley returned to Portugal in overall command. By then, French marshal Soult had overrun much of Portugal and two veteran French armies were in almost complete control. Wellesley had around 20,000 under his command. He made a lightning march north to Oporto, but Soult was too experienced to be trapped in the city and had destroyed bridges across the Douro River. Wellesley was forced to rely on barges to get slowly across, but there was no help for it. His army retook the city of Oporto and forced Soult’s men out, killing or wounding 4,000 in the process.

  Moving east into Spain, Wellesley was not impressed by his Spanish allies, though they brought around 20,000 men to join him. With reinforcements, Wellesley had 55,000 to move against the French under Marshal Victor and Napoléon’s brother Joseph. However, when he approached the area and looked for the Spanish, there was no sign of them. His messenger was told that the Spanish were too tired to fight that hot day, and the French escaped the trap.

  The French attacked first at the battle of Talavera in Spain toward the end of July 1809. Their skirmishers very nearly captured or killed Wellesley as he observed the distant French forces with a telescope. He reached his horse and managed to escape, with shots fired after him. His Spanish allies had assembled for the battle and fired a volley at the French. To Wellesley’s astonishment, around two thousand Spaniards “were frightened only at the noise of their own fire” and ran away.

  As night fell, Wellesley rode across to investigate some firing and was again almost killed by French skirmishers. In pitch-darkness, he was dragged from his horse and his aide was shot dead. He managed to regain his saddle and returned to his lines, shaken but unhurt.

  The following morning the French bombardment began and Wellesley ordered his men to lie down on the far slope of a small hill while the riflemen engaged the French skirmishers. This “reverse slope defense,” using the lie of the land to protect his men, was one of his favorite tactics. The French columns advanced confidently into the gun smoke, expecting the British forces to be smashed and reeling. Wellesley’s men rose to fire point-blank volleys. They drove the French back, and once again the wide British line, where all the guns could bear, broke the French column, a hallmark of the Peninsular War. Even so, the fighting was brutal and often came down to hand-to-hand and bayonet charges.

  Wellesley saw a large French force of infantry coming to a breach in his lines and sent a single battalion to stop them with more of the devastating volleys. His talent was in his coolness, and he never lost the overall sense of a battle, even when the shot was flying around him and men just paces away were being killed.

  That night, Joseph Bonaparte withdrew the surviving French forces in defeat. For that victory and others, Wellesley was later made Viscount Wellington of Talavera.

  In 1810, Marshal Masséna was ordered to retake Portugal with an army of 138,000 men. Wellington moved to block the French advance into the country, while Portuguese irregulars attacked the French wherever possible. He also ordered the creation of the famous lines of Torres Vedras—a system of fortified positions to protect Lisbon that stretched right across part of southern Portugal. At that time, before the trenches of World War I, it was one of the most efficient and impressive fortification lines ever created. On his orders, 108 forts, 151 redoubts, and more than 1,000 heavy artillery pieces formed the lines, with almost 70,000 men in place to defend them.

  A brief battle was fought at Bussaco, where the French lost more than 4,500 men to Wellington’s 1,252. Even so, Wellington justified the immense expense and labor that had gone into the lines when he was forced to retreat to them against overwhelming numbers. Behind him, he used a “scorched earth” policy, his men stripping the land of anything that might feed the French soldiers coming south. It was successful. The French began to starve, and Marshal Masséna had to leave for Spain to resupply his army. In all, Masséna lost some 30,000 men over that winter. In 1811 he returned to Portugal and attempted to relieve the fortress city of Almeida on the eastern border with Spain.

  The war continued with Wellington defending Almeida, while part of his force under Beresford besieged the French-held fortress of Badajoz in the south. Marshal Masséna launched a massive attack on Almeida to relieve it but could not break Wellington’s forces.

  At Bad
ajoz, without Wellington’s watchful presence, things were much worse. The siege of the fortress had begun in May 1811, though its massive and ancient walls proved resistant to the guns. Marshal Soult arrived to relieve Badajoz and fought a fixed battle after pinning the British forces down. For once, the Spanish allies held their ground long enough for reinforcements to arrive during vicious fighting. Even then British forces were almost cut to pieces in French cavalry charges. A rainstorm had soaked the gunpowder in their flintlocks, and for a time they were almost overrun. Galbraith Lowry Cole brought up his Fourth Division, and they moved forward slowly against the French, hammering them with volleys.

  The battle of Albuera was over before Wellington arrived, despite him having killed two horses riding to reach his men. It was a slender victory for the British forces, though it cost them 6,000 dead. Famously, when Wellington visited the field hospital, he told the wounded men that he was sorry to see so many of them there. One replied: “If you had commanded us, my lord, there wouldn’t be so many of us here.”

  At that time, French armies were always in range and poised to retake Portugal. Wellington’s forces began to besiege Ciudad Rodrigro, a fortified town across the Spanish border. Like Badajoz, it guarded one of the two main routes into Portugal from Spain.

  Artillery made a breach in the walls of Ciudad Rodrigro, and the assault on the town took place on January 18, 1812, against ferocious French resistance. After their surrender, Wellington went south and took Badajoz at last, after a month of siege and heavy bombardment. It is said that he broke down at the sight of the British dead in the breaches there, weeping in front of his men for the only time. The Spanish made Wellington a Duke of Ciudad Rodrigro for his part in the defense of their nation.