Wellington boot

“ There is a prejudice against ladies wearing long Wellington boots, but it is quite absurd, for they need never be seen, and are a great comfort and protection in riding long distances, when worn with trowsers tucked inside. They should, for obvious reasons, be large enough for warm woolen stockings, and easy to get on and off. It would not look well to see a lady struggling out of a pair of wet boots, with the help of a bootjack and a couple of chambermaids. The heels of riding-boots, whether for ladies or gentlemen, should be low, but long to keep the stirrup in its place. ”

“ The varnished or patent leather Wellington, is a handsome article of the same class, and is generally made with a tongue, the legs being of colored morocco leather. It is now brought to a great state of perfection, and our bootclosers are the most perfect in the matter of fancy-closing and stabbing, in Europe.
For many years, this department of the trade has been quite distinct from shoemaking, or boot-{126}making. ”

“ Those persons, whether military or otherwise, who consider a strictly regulation uniform as essential to the composition of a British soldier, as a stout heart and a strong arm, and who stickle for a closely buttoned jacket, a stiff stock, and the due allowance of pipe-clay, would have been somewhat scandalised, could they have beheld the equipment of Wellington's army in the Peninsula. Mr Grattan gives a comical account of the various fantastical fashions and conceits prevalent amongst the officers. ”

“ In the interior of Spain or Portugal absolutely nothing was to be procured. The simplest small luxuries, tea, sugar, coffee, were ungettable, save in the largest towns; to renew clothing was equally impossible. He who required anything must carry it with him. It was not like campaigning in France, Belgium, Germany, or Italy. At the commencement of his term of command Wellington laid down the rule270 that no private baggage was to be carried upon carts: “those who have baggage to carry, must be provided with mules and horses.” ”

“ The slave-trade is luxurious indolence compared to it. Post haste to Nivelle one day; down to Ghent the next; forty miles over a paved road in a hand-gallop, and an aide-de-camp with a watch in his hand at the end of it, to report if you are ten minutes too late. And there is Wellington has his eye everywhere. There is not a truss of hay served to the cavalry, nor a pair of shoes half-soled in the regiment, that he don’t know of it. ”

“ In numbers his cavalry were infinitely superior—his artillery was equally powerful—while in those important arms, Wellington was miserably weak—and all he had to oppose to his stronger antagonist, were the splendid discipline and indomitable courage of British infantry. ”

“ No doubt we must concede that the British horsemen did not show that marked superiority over their rivals of the same arm which Wellington’s infantry always asserted. But fairly balancing their faults and their merits, it would seem that there was something wanting in their general no less than in themselves. A lover of the cavalry arm would have got more profit out of the British horse than Wellington ever obtained. It is noticeable that not one of the successful fights cited above took place under the eye or the direction of the Duke. ”

“ One of Wellington’s most sensible traits was an intense dislike of worrying officers or men about details of uniform on active service. “Provided we brought our men into the field well appointed,” says Grattan of the 88th, “with their sixty rounds of ammunition each, he never looked to see whether trousers were black, blue, or grey: and as to ourselves, we might be rigged out in any colour of the rainbow if we fancied it.” The consequence was that scarcely any two officers were dressed alike! ”

“ Here the retreat virtually closed. The weather improved; and having fallen back upon his resources, Lord Wellington was enabled to recruit his exhausted soldiery. Abundant fuel, dry bivouacs, and plentiful rations, produced a speedy change; and men wearied and worn down by privations and incessant fatigue, rapidly recovered their health and spirits. The moment the enemy had abandoned the pursuit, the light cavalry and guerilla horse were despatched to scour the woods, and rescue such sufferers as survived. ”

“ Not one has been served out, and it is really difficult to get the men to look smart, when many of them are dressed almost in rags. It is still worse in the matter of boots. A great many of them were badly cut, when we were in the mountains; and especially in the rough march we had over the hills, after you left us. The men themselves would greatly prefer sandals to boots, being more accustomed to them; and could certainly march farther in them than in stiff English boots. ”

“ When the first line delivers its attack at a gallop, the supports must follow at a walk only, lest they be carried forward by the rush, and get mingled with the line in front at the onset. For order in the supports must be rigidly kept—they are useless if they have got into confusion, when they are wanted to sustain and cover a checked first line.
A note as to horses may finish our observations on the cavalry side of Wellington’s tactics. ”

“ There is a considerable bulk of French reminiscences dealing with the purely British side of the Peninsular War. Beside Marbot’s and Thiébault’s memoirs, of which I have already made mention, three or four more must not be neglected by any one who wishes to see Wellington’s army from the outside. By far the most vivid and lively of them is Lemonnier-Delafosse of the 31st Léger, whose Souvenirs Militaires were published at Havre in 1850. He is a bitter enemy, and wants to prove that Wellington was a mediocre general, and ought always to have been beaten. ”

“ One great court-martial in 1811 sat on ten Brunswick Oels deserters in a body, and ordered four to be shot and the rest to be flogged. Such men had all the vices of the mercenary, though in time of battle they displayed many of the virtues. Their officers had a hard task to keep them together, and they could never be trusted at the outposts. But the regiment was full of good shots and bold adventurers, and furnished several of the detached rifle companies with which Wellington strengthened the light infantry of his brigades. ”

“ The corps of Royal Artillery Drivers is organized as soldiers. Very high prices are paid for the horses employed to draw the guns, and they are, consequently, extremely good. The harness is as good as that used in French carriages. No nation can rival the English in the equipments and the speed of their conveyances.
English troops take few pieces into the field with them; the most that Lord Wellington ever had in the Peninsula, barely amounted to two for every thousand men. ”

“ For men fresh from barrack life in England were at first prostrated by the heat of the climate and the length of the marches. They had still to pick up the old campaigner’s tricks, and were very helpless. Veteran troops were so superior in endurance to new regiments from England, most of whom had been on the pestilential Walcheren expedition, and were still full of rickety convalescents,188 that Wellington determined to keep even remnants of old corps accustomed to the air of the Peninsula, rather than to ask for more unacclimatized battalions from home. ”

“ He gives a strangely interesting account of the recruits which formed the raw material out of which Wellington evolved the magnificent soldiers of the Peninsula—men with whom, to use Wellington's own words, he "could go anywhere, and do anything." Rougher, wilder material—half savage and half child-like—than these recruits can hardly be imagined. Certainly no such strange human material finds its way into British barracks to-day ”

“ It was the tactics of the Empire, not those of the Republic, which Wellington had to face, when he took command of the allied army in the Peninsula in 1809. He had to take into consideration an enemy whose methods were essentially offensive, whose order of infantry fighting was at the best—in the ordre mixte—rather heavy, and in many cases, when the column of the battalion or the regiment was used, exceptionally gross and crowded. ”

“ Bearing in mind the fact that a British regiment, owing to the difficulties of recruiting, in a time when men were scarce and bounties high, could not as a rule provide drafts to keep up to strength more than one battalion on active service, we can already foresee the fates that were destined to attend the battalions of Wellington’s original Peninsular Army. Nearly all the second battalions in time were worn down by the exhaustion of war to a figure so low that they could no longer be worked as regular battalion units. ”

“ He returned to the Peninsula in March, and served as adjutant-general throughout the campaigns of 1810 and 1811. He was mentioned in despatches for Busaco and Fuentes d'Onoro. In the latter battle he disarmed a colonel of chasseurs and made him prisoner, and at El Bodon he found fresh opportunity of taking part in a cavalry encounter. He was essentially a sabreur, handsome and dashing; in Alison's words, ‘his nature was chivalrous rather than administrative;’ and he longed to exchange his staff appointment for a cavalry command. But Wellington would not indulge him. ”

“ I should say that the boots supplied to the army are the very worst that soldiers were ever cursed with. They are heavy, they are nearly as hard as iron when the weather is dry, and are as rotten as blotting paper when it is wet. It is quite an accident if a man gets a pair to fit him properly. I believe it would be better if they were trained to march barefooted. Their feet would soon get hardened and, at any rate, it would be an improvement on the boots now served out to them.
"I wish the other Portuguese regiments were as well drilled and as well set up as your fellows. ”

“ The infantry was drawn back from the skyline, and placed behind the crest, if the hill were saddle-backed, or some hundreds of yards away from the edge, if it were flat-topped. There they stood or lay till they were wanted, secure from artillery fire: they moved forward to their actual fighting ground only when the fire-combat of infantry was to begin. Every one will remember Wellington’s caustic comment on the Prussian order of battle at Ligny, where Blücher had drawn out his army in a chequered81 array all along the declivity of a descending slope. ”

“ It would be hardly credible, were there not abundant evidence in the correspondence of the Horse Guards to prove it, that while Wellington was absorbed in manœuvring against immensely superior forces in Spain, he had to give attention to correspondence about changes in the dress of the army, not with a view to making it more comfortable and workmanlike, but in order to gratify the caprice of the Prince Regent. No man ever gave less thought to niceties of tailoring than Lord Wellington (as he was at that time) . ”

“ These were almost without exception very weak units, the first battalions of ten of these were in the Indies, then of five more already in the Peninsula, all their strength was used up in keeping their senior battalions full, of the remaining thirteen only two (2/5th 2/34th, 2/38th) , were strong enough to be sent to Portugal. The reinforcements which Wellington was340 given in the autumn of 1809 and the summer of 1810 were largely scraped up from foreign garrisons—the 1/7th from Nova Scotia, the 1/11th from Madeira, the 1/57th from Gibraltar. ”

“ There were also many companies of Portuguese gunners attached to those guns, and a lesser number of British companies which had been immobilized in the Lisbon lines. But heavy guns and gunners combined do not complete a battering train. An immense amount of transport was required, and in the spring of 1811 it was not at Wellington’s disposition. Well-nigh every available ox-cart and mule in Portugal was already employed in carrying the provisions and baggage of the field army. ”

“ We have now given the answer which common sense gives, and which history will always give, to the childishness of accounting for Wellington's unrivalled successes by his "doing nothing" until the "invincible" French chose to grow weary of being invincible. The historic fact is, that their generals met a superior general; that their troops met Englishmen, commanded by an officer worthy of such a command; and that "enterprise" of the most daring, sagacious, and brilliant order, was the especial, peculiar, and unequalled character of Wellington. ”

“ Every bayonet would be wanted if Wellington once more turned to bay. Accordingly he took the extraordinary step of telling off only a single company, 156 men, of the 44th Équipage de la Marine—a naval unit which had been given him in order that he might have a nucleus of sea-going people, in case he succeeded in seizing the Portuguese arsenal at Lisbon. One would have thought that such men would have been so valuable, if only the enterprise had succeeded, that he would have chosen rather a company of ordinary infantry. ”

“ England has been too modest to herself in her treatment of Wellington; for making him so great is making herself small. Wellington is merely a hero like any other man. The Scotch Grays, the Life Guards, Maitland and Mitchell's regiments, Pack and Kempt's infantry, Ponsonby and Somerset's cavalry, the Highlanders playing the bagpipes under the shower of canister, Ryland's battalions, the fresh recruits who could hardly manage a musket and yet held their ground against the old bands of Essling and Rivoli,—all this is grand. ”

“ Being a healthy animal, he must be doing something. It is here that soldiers' clubs, managed by understanding, sympathetic women, prove of inestimable value. For their untiring efforts the women of Wellington are entitled to the thanks of all the mothers of men concentrated in Wellington throughout the four long years of war.
On October 14, the troops exercising their horses in the surf at Lyall Bay were delighted to see a big grey four-funnelled cruiser, flying the white ensign, closely followed by a huge black three-funnelled monster with the rising sun displayed. ”