An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

‘When?’

‘Tonight or tomorrow. Don’t know for certain. The news is that Harro

wby 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 Hôtel de Ville. He had, at the fête, 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 Röder, was doing nothing to promote a good understanding between the two headquarters. That would have to be attended to: probably matters would go more smoothly now that old Blücher 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 maxim of the Duke’s that an army of stags commanded by 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 Dörnberg, 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 too 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 had 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 Chargé 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 mu

st 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.