An Infamous Army

Chapter Five

From the Rue Ducale, with its houses facing the Park and backing on to the ramparts of the town, to Worth's residence off the Rue de Bellevue, was not far. Colonel Audley arrived in good time for breakfast, laughing off his sister-in-law's demand to know what could have possessed him to ride out so early after a late night, listened meekly to some pithy comments from his brother on his appropriation of the Doll, swallowed his breakfast, and made off on foot to the Duke of Wellington's Headquarters in the Rue Royale. This broad street lay on the opposite side of the Park to the Rue Ducale, its houses overlooking it. Two of these made up the British Headquarters, but the guard posted outside consisted merely of Belgian gendarmerie, the Duke, whose tact in handling foreigners rarely deserted him, having professed himself perfectly satisfied with such an arrangement.

The Duke, when Colonel Audley arrived, was closeted with the Prince of Orange, who had brought with him a welter of reports, letters for his Grace from Lord Bathurst, the English Secretary for War, and his own instructions from the British Commander-in-Chief, his Royal Highness the Duke of York. Colonel Audley, learning of this circumstance from Lord march, whom he met in the hall, ran upstairs to a large apartment on the first floor overlooking the Park, where he found two of his fellow aides-de-camp, in curiously informal attire, kicking their heels.

A stranger, unaware of the Duke of Wellington's indifference to the manner in which his officers chose to dress themselves, might have found it difficult that either of the two gentlemen in the outer office could be n aide-de-camp on duty. Fremantle, lounging in a chair with his legs thrust out before him, was certainly wearing a frock-coat, but had no sash; while Colonel the Honourable Sir Alexander Gordon, who was seated by the window, engaged in waving to acquaintances passing in the street below, was frankly civilian in appearance, his frock-coat being (he said) quite unfit for further service.

Fremantle was looking harassed, but Gordon's sunny temper seemed to be unimpaired.

"In the immortal words of our colleague, Colin Campbell," he was saying, as Colonel Audley strolled in."Don't be so damned cheerful!" begged Fremantle. His jaundiced eye alighted on Colonel Audley's immaculate staff dress. "Lord, aren't we military this morning!" he remarked. "That ought to please the Beau we have had one snap already about officers presenting themselves for duty in improper dress."

"Oh!" said Audley. "Crusty, is he?"

"Yes, and he'll be worse by the time he's done with Slender Billy's lists and requisitions and morning states," replied Fremantle, with a jerk of his head towards the door leading to the Duke's office.

Gordon, who was looking down into the street, announced: "Here comes old Lowe. I wonder whether he's realised yet that the Duke doesn't like being told how he ought to equip his army? Someone ought to drop him a hint."

"Fidgety old fool!" said Fremantle. "There'll be an explosion if he cites the Prussians to the Beau again. I'm glad I'm not going to Ghent."

"Ghent? Who is going to Ghent?" asked Audley.

"You are, my boy," replied Fremantle comfortably.

"When?"

"Tonight or tomorrow. Don't know for certain. The news is that Harrowby and Torrens are arriving from London today for a conference with the Duke. He is going with them to Ghent, to pay his respects to the French king."

"Damnation!" exclaimed Audley. "Why the devil must it be me?"

"Ask his lordship. Daresay he noticed your fine new dress uniform last night. He must know mine ain't fit to be taken into Court circles. Why shouldn't you want to go to Ghent, anyway? Very nice place, so I'm told."

"He's got an assignation with the Fatal Widow!" said Gordon. "That's why he's so beautifully dressed! New boots too. And just look at our elegant sash!"

Colonel Audley was saved from further ribaldry by the sudden opening of the door into the inner sanctum. The Duke came out, escorting the Prince of Orange. He did not, at first glance, appear to be out of humour, nor did the Prince bear the pallid look of one who had had the ill-luck to find his Grace in a bad temper.

However, when the Duke returned from seeing his youthful visitor off, there was a frosty look in his eye, and no trace of the joviality which had surprised Lady Worth at the Hotel de Ville. He had, at the fete, given everyone to understand that he was entirely carefree, and perfectly satisfied with all the preparations for war which had been made.

But the Duke at a ball and the Duke in his office were two very different persons. Lord Bathurst, in London, had been quite anxious to see him at the head of the Army as any in Brussels, but Lord Bathurst was shortly going to be made to realise that his Grace's arrival in Belgium was not to be a matter of unmixed joy for officials at home.

For the Duke was not in the least satisfied with the preparations he found, and did not hesitate to inform Lord Bathurst that he considered the Army to be in a bad way. He had received disquieting accounts of the Belgian troops, thought the English not what they ought to be, and expressed a wish to have forty thousand good British infantry sent him, with not less than a hundred and fifty pieces of field artillery, fully Horsed. It did not appear to his Grace that a clear view of the situation was being taken in England. "You have not called out the militia, or announced such an Intention in your message to Parliament," he complained. "… and how we are to make out 150,000 men, or even the 60,000 of the defensive part of the treaty of Chaumont, appears not to have been considered." His boldly-flowing pen travelled on faster. He wanted, besides good British infantry, spring wagons, musketball cartridge carts, entrenching-tool carts, the whole Corps of Sappers and Miners, all the Staff Corps, and forty pontoons, immediately, fully horsed. "Without these equipments," he concluded bluntly, "military operations are out of the question."

Yes, the Duke might not yet have taken over the command of the Army, but he was already making his presence felt. General Count von Gneisenau, the Prussian Chief-of-Staff, whom his Grace had visited at Aix-la-Chapelle on his journey from Vienna, also had a letter, written in firm French, to digest. General Gneisenau had proposed a plan, in the event of an attack by the French, of which the Duke flatly disapproved. Nothing could have been more civil than the letter the Duke wrote from Brussels on April 5th, presenting a counter-plan for the General's consideration, but if his Excellency, reading those polite phrases, imagined that a request to him to "take these reasons into consideration, and to let me know your determination," meant that his lordship was prepared to follow any other military determination than his own, he had a great deal yet to learn of the Duke's character.

A copy of this suave missive was enclosed in the despatch to Bathurst, a formal note sent off to the Duke of Brunswick, and the returns presented by the Prince spread out on the table.

The Duke's aides-de-camp might groan at his crustiness, but no one could deny that there was enough to try the patience of even the sweetest tempered general.

Of his Peninsular veterans only a small percentage was to be found in Belgium, the rest being still in America. His quartermaster-general was also in America, and in his place he found Sir Hudson Lowe, who was a stranger to him, and, however able an officer, not in the least the sort of man he wanted to have under him. The Prussians were going to be difficult too; General Gneisenau, a person of somewhat rough manners, evidently mistrusted him; and the Commissioner, General von Roder, was doing nothing to promote a good understanding between the twoheadquarters. That would have to be attended to: probably matters would go more smoothly now that old Blucher was to take over the command from Kleist; but the hostility of the King of the Netherlands towards his Prussian allies meant that his lordship would have the devil of a task to keep the peace between them. He suspected that King William was going to prove himself an impossible fellow to deal with, while as for the Dutch-Belgic troops, a more disaffected set he hoped to see. The only hope of making something of them would be to mix them with his own men, but it was plain that that suggestion had not been liked. Then there was the Prince of Orange, a nice enough boy, and with a good understanding, but quite inexperienced.He would have to be given a command, of course: that was inevitable, but damned unfortunate. It was a a maxim of the Duke's that an army of stags commanded a lion was better than an army of lions commanded by a stag. The Prince would have to be kept as much under his own eye as possible. He must be warned moreover, to be on his guard with several of his generals. But he had a good man in Constant de Rebecque, and another in General Perponcher, who had seen service with the British in the Peninsula, and had done well with the Portuguese Legion formed at Oporto in 1808.

"Your Lordship's presence is extremely necessary to combine the measures of the heterogeneous force which is destined to defend this country," had written Sir Charles Stuart, and it did not seem that he had exaggerated the difficulties of the situation. When the Anglo-Allied Army was at last brought together it would be found to be heterogeneous enough to daunt any commander with less cool confidence than the Duke. A large proportion of the force would consist of Dutch-Belgic troops, many of them veterans who had fought under the Eagles, and as many more young soldiers never before under fire. In addition, a contingent from Nassau had been promised; and the Duke of Brunswick, the Princess of Wales's brother, was to place himself and his Black Brunswickers at the Duke's orders. There was to be a Hanoverian contingent also, tolerably good troops: but his lordship had found in Spain that the Germans had a shockingly bad habit of deserting, which made them troublesome. That did not apply so much to the King's German Legion, of course: those stout soldiers were as good as any English ones; and they had good commanders too: Count Alten; old Arendtschildt, the model of a hussar leader; Ompteda, with his large dreamy eyes at such odd variance with his soldierly ability; Du Plat, always to be relied on to keep his head. His lordship was not so sure of this new fellow, Major-General Dornberg, commanding a brigade of Light Dragoons; his lordship was not acquainted with him, and in his present mood his lordship was not inclined to look favourably upon strangers.

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!