Free Wellington by Richard Holmes Page A

notices it, and would lead you to think that the troops on the right were withdrawn rather than, as was the case, driven in; and then they give him what he himself never dreamt of claiming, a victory. 7
    Wellington’s reprimands were scathing and not always just. In 1811, Lieutenant Colonel Bevan of the 4 th Regiment was so distressed by being unfairly blamed by the duke for the escape of the French garrison of Almeida that he shot himself. He was also something of a snob, preferring talent with a title to talent without. He often privately expressed contempt for his allies, and the German historian Peter Hofschröer has established at least a
prima facie
case against him for dealing dishonestly with the Prussians at Waterloo. A strong thread of harshness ran through his character: Paddy Griffith observed that he ‘could be a ferocious commander even by the standards of a ferocious profession in a ferocious age’. In 1813 he told a subordinate at the siege of Pamplona that ‘you may shoot the governor and his officers, and decimate the rank and file’, and he regretted not shooting the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo when he stormed the place in 1812 (technically permissible within the laws of war as they then stood), because killing one garrison would have discouraged others. 8 He was steadfastly opposed to the abolition of flogging in the army, and consistently argued against commissioning officers from the ranks. While his political career had its moments of triumph, he never fully grasped the realities of his age, and by setting his face firmly against parliamentary reform, he was condemned to defend a position that was ultimately untenable.
    So, despite the tendency of some historians to place Wellington ‘on a pedestal so high that his human qualities and failings have been all but lost to view’, it is clear that the picture is infinitely more complex. 9 I approached this book and the BBC television series it accompanies determined to rub away as much of the varnish as I could; to try to get as close to the real Wellington as he (and some of his biographers) would let me. I went back to sources I had not used for years – Lieutenant Colonel John Gurwood’s
Dispatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington
, a volume with almost a thousand tightly-written pages, sits in beautifully bound splendour on my desk – and I visited as many Wellingtonian battlefields as I could. Some, like the overcrowded Waterloo and the wide-open Salamanca, I already knew. But there were others I did not, and amongst them I found Assaye, scene of Wellington’s victory over the Marathas in 1803, the most striking. Indeed, travelling by road in India at the tail of the monsoon told me just as much about the man as
The Maratha War Papers of Arthur Wellesley
. Conditions were so bad that our smart four-wheel drive vehicles were no use, and we took to a hastily borrowed tractor and trailer, all helping to push when it became stuck in the mud. If the climate on the Indian subcontinent struck few chords with Spain, parts of the terrain were strikingly similar: a commander who could cope with the Western Ghats would be well prepared for Extremadura.
    Wellington complained that ‘I have been much exposed to authors’, and the process continued after his death to the point where he is one of the most written-about figures in military history, although here his adversary Napoleon beats him by sheer weight of print. Elizabeth Longford’s magisterial two-volume study remains pre-eminent, and Christopher Hibbert’s
Wellington: A Personal History
is a jewel of a book, and undoubtedly the best starting-point for the general reader. Gordon Corrigan’s
Wellington: A Military Life
is a soldierly account of the military side of the duke’s life. The painstaking studies of Jac Weiler still remain essential baggage for visitors to Wellington’s battlefields, and the army he commanded is brilliantly described by Michael Glover in
Wellington’s