The Battle Read Online Free PDF Page B

fallen in battle, since in such cases the positions came open of themselves and there was no need to reimburse anyone. Accordingly, one can understand why the officers of Sir John Lambert's brigade, sailing from America to England in spring 1815, exulted when they learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. Major Harry Smith, the brigade adjutant, upon hearing the great news from a merchantman encountered in the English Channel, threw his hat into the air: "Such a hurrah as I set up, tossing my hat over my head! 'I will be a Lieutenant-Colonel yet before the year's out!"' Troops of the Fortieth Regiment on board another ship learned the news from an English frigate, and "the young officers, who were looking ravenously forward to promotion, were so rejoiced at the news that they treated all the men to an extra glass of grog, to make everybody as lively as themselves." 3
    By 1815 the British army had been fighting without interruption for many years, and the battles of the Peninsular War had exacted an enormous toll in blood; it seems legitimate, therefore, to assume that the percentage of officers who had been promoted on merit was much higher at Waterloo than it had been a few years before or would be a few years later. All in all, Wellington's army was more middle-class and more meritocratic than one might suppose, yet this alone did not make it more professional. Wellington complained that nobody in the British army ever read a regulation or an order except as one might read an amusing novel, and the conduct of many British officers at Waterloo corroborated his observation. The worth of a good officer was determined by the physical courage with which he led his men, and by nothing else. His bravery was the result of the rigid sense of honor that all gentlemen shared.
    The process by which officers were assigned to command a brigade, division, or corps was quite deliberate. Such assignments could not be purchased; rather, they were temporary appointments, granted for the duration of a campaign. In this matter—the selection of the army's highest commanders—the government proceeded with great care, as befitted one of the old monarchies. The average age of the corps and division commanders in the British army at Waterloo was forty-four and a half. An exception was the Prince of Orange, the son of the king of the Netherlands, to whom the command of a corps had been entrusted—for obvious political reasons—even though he was only twenty-three years old, in conformity with another custom that was widespread in the old monarchies.
    On the whole, the harsh judgments on the British army pronounced by the Duke of Wellington and the French veterans had nothing to do with its military efficiency. However proletarian and semiliterate he may have been, the English soldier, well nourished with meat and beer, stimulated with gin, and convinced of his own racial superiority to the foreign rabble he had to face, was a magnificent combatant, as anyone who has ever seen hooligans in action at a soccer match can readily imagine. This analogy is not disrespectful, given that Wellington himself admitted the frequency and the enormity of the crimes committed by his soldiers against the civilian population, adding that he could not explain it except with the fact that many soldiers in the army, lured by the temptation of a few guineas to finance their binges, had left their families to starve.
    On this subject, the French general Foy, basing his remarks on his experiences in Spain, wrote that "the English soldier is stupid and intemperate," but that this was an advantage: "An iron discipline exploits some of these faults and blunts the others." All in all, Foy wrote, the British army's "main strength lies in the fact that its masses of ignorant men allow themselves to be led blindly by men who are more enlightened than they are." The Duke of Wellington would certainly have agreed with Foy's judgment. The full version of the duke's scathing