An Infamous Army (11 page)

Besides all these foreign troops, there were the British, who must be used as a stiffening to the whole. The devil of it was there were not enough of them, and _oo many of the regiments now in Belgium were composed of young and untried soldiers. If he only had his old Peninsular Army he would have nothing to complain of. He could have gone anywhere, done anything with those fellows. His lordship had not been accustomed in Spain to such flattering language about his troops, but the truth was his lordship was always more apt to condemn faults than to praise excellence. He had said some pretty harsh things of his Peninsular veterans in his time, but in his grudging way he valued them, and wished he had them in Belgium now. His lordship, in one of his bitter moods, might say that they were all enlisted for drink, but anyone else rash enough to speak disparagingly of them would very soon learn his mistake. Acrid disparagement of his troops was his lordship's sole prerogative.

Well, such Peninsular regiments as were available would have to be sent out. In the force at present under Orange's command were only the second battalions of three of these, and a detachment of the 95th Rifles.

There were the Guards, of course, who would certainly maintain their high reputation, but his lordship's mouth turned down at the corners as he ran over the lists of the remaining regiments. Young troops for the most part, inexperienced except for their brief campaign under Graham in Holland. He would have to get good officers into them, and hope for the best, but the fact was he had under his hand the nucleus of what bade fair to be, in his estimation, an infamous army.

There were other, minor vexations to try his patience, notably the absence of his military secretary. When he left Paris for Vienna, Lord Fitzroy Somerset had remained there as charge d'affaires, and was now in Ghent. He missed his quiet competence damnably; he must have him back: someone must be chosen to assist Stuart with the King of France in his stead; Colonel Hervey's brother Lionel, perhaps. He must have Colin Campbell too, and must prevail upon Colquhoun Grant to come out as Head of the Intelligence Department. With him and Waters he should do very well in that direction, but from the look of it he would be obliged to make a clean sweep of all these youngsters at present filling staff appointments, and, in his opinion, quite unfit for such duties. He must come to a plain understanding, also, with King William, on the question of the troops to be employed on garrison duty. All the chief posts would have to be held by the British: his instructions from London were perfectly precise on that point, and he agreed with them, though it was already evident that King William did not.

Taking one thing with another, his present position was unenviable, and the future dark with difficulties. A superhuman task lay before him, as bad as any he had ever tackled, but although he might complain peevishly of lack of support from England, of wretched troops in Belgium, of the impossibility of dealing with King William, of the damned folly of that fellow Lowe, no real doubts of his ability to deal with the situation assailed him.

"I never in my life gave up anything that I once undertook," said his lordship, in one of his rare moments of expansiveness.

Fremantle came into the room with some papers for him to look over. He took them, and remembered that he had been devilish short with Fremantle this morning, for some slight fault. He had not meant to be, but it was unthinkable that he should say so; he could not do it: to admit that he had been in the wrong was totally against his principles. The nearest he could ever bring himself to it was to invite the unfortunate to dinner, or, if that were ineligible (as in Fremantle's case it was, since he would dine with him in the ordinary way), to say something pleasant to him, to show that the whole affair was forgotten.

"I'll tell you what, Fremantle!" he remarked in his incisive way. "We must give a ball. Find out what days are left free. It will have to be towards the end of the month, for it won't do if I clash with anyone else."

"They say that the Catalani is coming to Brussels, sir," suggested Fremantle.

"That's capital: we'll have a concert as well, and engage her to sing at it. But, mind, fix the figure before you settle with the woman; I hear she's as mercenary as the devil." He picked up his pen again, and bent over his table, but added as Fremantle was leaving the room: "You can have my box, if you mean to go to the theatre tonight: I shan't be using it. Take the curricle."

So Colonel Fremantle was able to report in the outer office that his lordship's temper was on the mend. But within half an hour, his lordship, glaring at his quartermaster-general, was snapping out one of his hasty snubs. "Sir Hudson, I have commanded a far larger army in the field than any Prussian general, and I am not to learn from their service how to equip an army!"

One would have thought this would have stopped the damned fellow, but no! in a few moments he was at it again.

"Sir Hudson Lowe will not do for the Duke," wrote Major-General Torrens next day, to London, with diplomatic restraint.

Lord Harrowby, and Major-General Torrens, arriving on April 6th to confer with him, found that there was much that would not do for the Duke, and much that he required from England with the greatest possible despatch. His lordship - it was strange how that title stuck to him - might be uncomfortably blunt in his manner, but the very fact of his knowing so positively what he wanted, showed how sure was his grasp on the situation. And, after all, General Torrens had dealt with him for long enough to know, before ever he reached Brussels, that he was going to hear some very plain truths from him.

But his criticisms were not merely destructive: what he said to the delegates from London left them in no doubt of his energetic competence. The news he brought from Vienna was quite as good as could have been expected. The treaty between Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia had been signed; there had been a little trouble over the question of subsidies; but his lordship was able to report that the Russians and Austrians were mobilising in large numbers; and even that the Emperor of Russia had expressed a wish (though not a very strong one) to have him with him. "But I should prefer to carry a musket!" said his Lordship, with a neigh of sardonic laughter.

For their part, Lord Harrowby and Sir Henry Torrens had brought soothing intelligence from home. All the available cavalry were under orders, and some already marching for embarkation to Ostend; of the infantry, in addition to the corps and detachments already despatched, and now in Belgium, about two thousand effectives were to proceed from a rendezvous in the Downs to Ostend. The Government was willing and indeed anxious, to meet his lordship's requirements in every possible way.

His lordship stated these with disconcerting alacrity. he wanted equipment, and ammunition; he wanted field artillery, and horses; he wanted the militia called out "Nothing can be done with a small and inefficient force," said his lordship uncompromisingly. "The war will linger on, and will end to our disadvantage."

Harrowby began to explain the constitutional difficulties attached to calling out the militia. It was plain that his lordship made very little of these, but he was not one to waste his time in fruitless argument. He had another scheme, already proposed by him in a despatch to Lord Castlereagh. He thought it would be advisable to try to get twelve or fourteen thousand Portuguese troops into the Netherlands. "We can mix them with ours, and do what we please with them," he said. "They become very nearly as good as our own."

Upon the following day, a third visitor from London appeared in the person of the Duke's brother, the Marquis Wellesley. The Marquis was fifty-five years old, and nine years senior to the Duke. There was not much resemblance between the brothers, but strong ties of affection had survived the strain put on them by the younger man's rise to heights beyond the elder's reach. It had been Richard, not Arthur, who was to have been the great man of the family; it was Richard who had set Arthur's feet on the ladder of his career, and had fostered his early progress from rung to rung. But Arthur, his feet once firmly planted, had climbed the ladder so fast that Richard had been left far behind him. It was only twenty-eight years since Richard had written to remind the Duke of Rutland of a younger brother of his, whom his Grace had been so kind as to take into his consideration for a commission in the Army. "He is here, at this moment, and perfectly idle," Richard had written. "It is a matter of indifference to me what commission he gets, providing he gets it soon." Richard, with his brilliant mind and scholarship, had been a coming man in those days, Arthur a youth of no more than ordinary promise. Seventeen years later, a Major-General, he had been made a Knight Companion of the Bath, and after that the honours had fallen so thick upon him that it had been difficult to keep count of them. He had been created in swift succession Viscount Wellington of Talavera, Earl of Wellington, then Marquis, and lastly duke; he was a Spanish Grandee of the First Class, Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, Duke of Victoria, a Knight of the Garter, of the Golden Fleece, of the Order of Maria Theresa, of the Russian Order of Saint George, of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, of the Swedish Order of the Sword. An Emperor had lately clapped him on the shoulder, saying: "C'est pour vows encore sauver le monde!" and yet he remained, reflected Richard, with a faint, whimsical smile, the same unaffected creature he had ever been. Nor had he outgrown his boyhood's admiration of Richard. "A wonderful man," he called him, and honestly believed it.

The Marquis was a wonderfully handsome man, at all events, with large, far-sighted eyes under heavily-marked dark brows, an aquiline nose, with delicate, up-cut nostrils, a fine, rather thin-lipped mouth, and a lacquered skin of alabaster. He had beautiful manners too, a natural stateliness tempered by charm, and an instinct for ceremonial. No sudden cracks of loud laughter broke from him; he had never been known to utter hasty, harshly-worded snubs; and his stateliness never became mere stiffness. The Duke, on the other hand, could be absurdly stiff, and painfully rude, while his ungraciousness towards those whom he disliked was proverbial. He had no taste for pomp, very little for creature comforts, and although he had been christened Beau Douro in the Peninsula on account of a certain neatness and propriety of dress, he set no store by personal adornment. He was outspoken to a fault; his mind ran between straight and clearly defined lines; and he knew nothing of dissimulation. Ask him a question, and you might be sure of receiving an honest answer - though perhaps not the one you had hoped to hear, for his lordship, unconcerned with considerations of personal popularity, was rigorously concerned with the truth, and with what he saw to be his clear duty. Tact, such as his brother possessed, he did not employ; and when the members of His Majesty's Government acted, in his judgment, foolishly, he told them so with very little more ceremony than he would have used with one of his own officers.

He met his elder brother with frank delight, gave his hand a quick shake, and said briskly: "Glad to see you, Wellesley! How d'ye do?"

"How do you do?" returned the Marquis, holding his hand a moment longer.

"We are in a damned bad case," replied the Duke bluntly.

The Marquis did not make the mistake of taking this to mean that his brother envisaged defeat at Bonaparte's hands; he knew that it was merely the prelude to one of Arthur's trenchant and comprehensive complaints of the Government's supine behaviour. Already, and though he had not been in his presence above a minute, he was aware of Arthur's driving will. Arthur's terrible energy made him feel suddenly old. Presently, seated with Harrowby and Torrens at a table covered with papers, and listening to the Duke's voice, he found that, well as he knew him, he could still be surprised by Arthur's amazing capacity for detail. For Arthur had rolled up his maps and was being extremely definite on the subject of the ideal size and nature of camp kettles.

An extraordinary fellow, dear Arthur: really, a most bewildering fellow!

CHAPTER SIX