On the Duke of Wellington

RECENTLY I read Philip Guedalla’s notable portrait of the Duke of Wellington. It first appeared in 1931, so I am no more than five years behind the times. (I wonder, though, why one should feel obliged to murmur apologies for reading a book five years old. There is no less rational idea than that which prompts us to read books when they are new or not at all.) I turned to the book not because I was interested in the Duke but because Guedalla’s historical portraits are supreme, regardless of his subject. But I became fascinated with the character of Arthur Wellesley.

Few careers ever showed such a marvelously sustained flight, or ever shone with such brilliancy. Yet this career gives the fiat and unequivocal lie to much of our axiomatic moralizing about success: moralizings, I mean, about aiming high, about “planning your work and working your plan.” The Duke’s attitude toward plans was one of derision. He did plan, of course, but there was no long-time planning, and he never clung to a plan as a matter of principle. This morning’s plan, with the Duke, was likely to be completely changed this evening.

He did not, for instance, determine upon a military career. He had no taste, apparently, for soldiering. He was put into the Army at seventeen by his family because there wasn’t anything else to do with the infernal boy who seemed to be fit for absolutely nothing. Once in, he was, for a time, intent upon evading military service, and there was wrangled for him a position as aide-de-camp to the incumbent at Dublin Castle, where he fiddled away with routine trivialities of Irish administration and society.

Presently, however, being in the Army, he decided that he should know something of his putative profession, and began to study it. He concluded that his violin-playing was a serious drag on this study, broke his instrument, and never touched bow again.

That, it appears to me, is the clue to this curious man. He didn’t choose soldiering but, finding that the fates made him a tin soldier, he decided to become a real one—not, mind you, the best soldier in the Army, but just a competent officer. No vaulting ambition shows itself; he behaves in the spirit of one who, finding ham and eggs to eat for breakfast, eats it with gusto; of one who would have eaten salt mackerel with equal gusto if salt mackerel had been set before him.

He soldiered for awhile on the Continent. Later he was to depose an emperor, set up a king, and rearrange the European map, but he thought of none of these things. Napoleon was bubbling about but he wasn’t studying what was to happen to Napoleon. It wasn’t his job—not yet. So he left it to those who had the matter in hand.

He did not particularly pine for India, but circumstances arranged that he should go there, so he went. He tackled India in characteristic fashion. He studied it, made himself familiar with Indian history, politics, customs, administration. They gave him India; and he gave India his best attention. He would have done the same for Zanzibar.

His work in India brought him favorable notice. It was good, sound, efficient work, and successful, if not especially spectacular. But he came home eventually, without any very clear idea of what he was to do when he got there. They made him governor-general in Dublin and he threw himself with the old catholic ardor into his task, although it must have been a flavorless one after the raciness of India. A catholic ardor, one that tackled the thing in hand regardless of what it was, an almost asinine ardor, one might say—ardor in the pure state, independent of stimulus, except only the stimulus of a job someone had given him to do.

Even his marriage has the same element of bleak planlessness. Years before, he had courted Kitty Pakenham. Then he went to India and, so far as any record is concerned, completely forgot her existence. Someone whispered to him that she was still unmarried, and recalled to him his early devotion to her. Circumstances, it would seem, gave him the job of marrying Kitty, so he did it. Thereafter, he paid very little attention to her. They forgot to give him that job.

Presently a Venezuelan expedition was cooked up, and Sir Arthur (no more than that, so far) was appointed to head it. The expedition stopped on the Peninsula to see if anything might be done there in the way of making things uncomfortable for Napoleon’s soldiers—just on its way to Venezuela. It got no farther. It stayed in Spain for six years and came out over the Pyrenees. Sir Arthur, early in the proceedings, came home once, but went back never to come home again until the Spanish job was done. After six years campaigning—this is noteworthy as showing the kind of job this job-doer could do—he had substantially the same army he went in with. It numbered 40,000 and he had twiddled five times that number of French out of the Peninsula.

Not only did the man attend assiduously to his knitting of the moment with scant attention to future or past knittings, but he evidently believed in a strict policy of letting other knitters attend to theirs. He didn’t bother about Napoleon or the map of Europe so long as those jobs were in some one else’s hands. He stirred up no agitation about the ill-fated Pakenham (Pakenham was his friend, associate, and brother-in-law) sortie at New Orleans, though he believed it doomed before it started. Then consider his attitude toward Blücher at Waterloo. Observing the disposition of Blücher’s troops on June 15, at Ligny, he remarked that troops so disposed would be damnably mauled. He was dependent on Blücher ‘s support; he foresaw that Blücher was in for a terrible licking. Yet he contented himself by saying to Blücher that he would expect troops disposed as Blücher’s were to be beaten. When Blücher rejected the hint he said nothing further. Imagine one of our efficiency boys going into critical action with a glaring weakness uncovered, merely because it was some one else’s responsibility! It violates all known canons of success moralizing.

The casual tradition has it that Napoleon failed at Waterloo by a hand’s breadth; that the failure was due to lack of judgment on Ney’s part or Erlon’s. Viewed through Mr. Guedalla’s lens, however, there is something inevitable about the result of Waterloo. It could not have been different. Not that Napoleon had no chance at Waterloo. He had all the chance in the world. Wellington’s mixed troops were none too good and, as we have seen, he did not have, or arrogate to himself, complete control.

Wellington knew he could not hold at La Haye Saint where he stood on June 16 and fought Ney while Napoleon fought Blücher at Ligny. He reckoned on retirement to the slope at Waterloo. But beyond that, characteristically, he had no fixed program. “What is your plan of battle?” he was asked on the evening before Waterloo. “Will Bonaparte attack or will I?” he countered. “Bonaparte,” was the reply. “Then how do you expect me to have a plan until I know what Bonaparte’s is?”

He hoped Bonaparte would attack frontally in the Napoleonic manner. He had a defense against that French attack that had prevailed many times on the Peninsula. He feared Bonaparte would maneuver. He contemplated the possible necessity of retirement to Brussels. Yes, Bonaparte could have chivied him into the sea.

But no, he could not—because he was Bonaparte. Soult warned the Emperor about that frontal attack; Soult had had some bitter experience with it against Wellington. But Napoleon must splurge. He wanted a smashing victory of the Austerlitz type—something to make fine reading in the dispatches to Paris. So he refused Soult’s advice. “You think Wellington is a great general,” he said. “I tell you he is a bad general, and the English troops are bad troops. We shall sleep tonight in Brussels.” “I hope so,” said Soult, politely but without conviction.

So Bonaparte struck with his valiant columns. So were they turned back and tumbled about. So Blücher returned from the north to fall upon a foe already half-demoralized. So in the slanting sun Napoleon sent the last charge of the Empire up the slope. So to Bellerophon, to St. Helena.

Wellington ordered the counter-charge. “Which way shall we go?” an officer asked. “Right ahead, to be sure,” the Duke replied, and left the field. Another job done.

“Hitch your wagon to a star,” Emerson sang out. Well, Napoleon did it. He was jam-full of plans and programs and schemes, the very least of which was grandiose. Maybe Emerson is right. But there is Wellington, who had no wagon, didn’t eye the stars, and who believed in hitching not at all.

I think I lean toward the Wellingtonian system—or lack of system. Either method depends a lot on luck, I daresay, and the job-in-hand procedure might evolve into a lifetime of energetic thumb-twiddling, while star-hitching certainly gives a better show when it works. On the other hand the star-hitcher, even after several years of successful essay, quite frequently busts a suspender, with the usual untoward result. I suppose the only sure moral to draw is that there is more than one way of getting on in the world—and still more ways of not getting on in it.

Wellington’s real gift was transcendent common sense, the rare power (shared also by Marlborough) of seeing things as they are, which, whether it be granted to soldier, statesman or artist, signifies genius. Those who possess this instinct see clearly at a glance many things that puzzle other men. Seeing clearly they can decide promptly, and deciding promptly they can act immediately. Add to this endowment inexhaustible patience, unwearied industry, and absolute straightforwardness and integrity; and there is a combination of human forces which must carry a man very far. Such a combination was found in Wellington.—Fortescue, Wellington.