An Infamous Army (Alastair-Audley Tetralogy 4)

He said rather gloomily: ‘I know what you mean. Take it from me, it’s the devil.’

‘It is the devil. I wish to be good, to behave as I should—and yet I don’t! If I had never been married to Childe it would be so different! Damnable to have done that to me! I believe it ruined me.’

He yawned. ‘Where’s the use in worrying? You were willing, weren’t you?’

‘At eighteen, and the hoyden that I was! What could I know of the matter? Papa made the match; I married to oblige my family, and wretched work I made of it! Jasper—oh, don’t let us talk of him: how I grew to loathe him! I was never more glad of anything than his death, and I swore then that no one—no one should ever possess me again! Even though I love Charles, even when I desire most earnestly to please him, there is something in me that revolts—yes, revolts, George! It drives me to commit such acts of folly! I use him damnably, I suppose, and shall end by making us both wretched.’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ said George, with brotherly unconcern. ‘I know I wouldn’t be in his shoes for a thousand pounds.’

She underwent one of her lightning changes of mood, breaking into a gurgle of laughter. ‘You, without a feather to fly with! You’d sell your soul for half the sum!’

Eleven

The review of the Dutch-Belgian Army at Nivelles, by King William and the Duke of Wellington, passed off creditably. The Duke found the Nassau troops excellent; the Dutch Militia good, but young; and the Cavalry, though bad riders, remarkably well-mounted. Prince Frederick impressed him as being a fine lad, and he wrote as much to Earl Bathurst, in a private letter.

The pity was that his lordship was not similarly pleased with Prince Frederick’s father. He was the most difficult person to deal with his lordship had ever met. ‘With professions in his mouth of a desire to do everything I can suggest, he objects to everything I propose; it then comes to be a matter of negotiation for a week, and at last is settled by my desiring him to arrange it as he pleases, and telling him that I will have nothing to say to him.’

Bathurst, who was well acquainted with the Duke’s temper, might smile a little over this letter, but there was no doubt that his lordship was being harassed on all sides. He was hampered by possessing no command over the King’s Army; and he was receiving complaints of the conduct of his engineers at Ypres, who were accused of cutting his Majesty’s timber for palisades. He believed the complaints to be groundless, and was not quite pleased with the way in which they were made.

But the jealousies of the Dutch and the Belgians were small matters compared with the behaviour of the Horse Guards in London. He was accustomed to meet with annoying hindrances in foreign countries, and could deal with them. The powers at the Horse Guards were irritating him far more, with their mania for sending him out bevies of ineligible young gentlemen to fill staff posts. No sooner had he turned off eight officers from the adjutant-general’s staff than he received an official letter from Sir Henry Torrens appointing eight others. He had written pretty sharply to Sir Henry on the subject. They talked glibly at the Horse Guards of all such appointments resting at his nomination, but, in actual fact, this was far from being true. His lordship complained of being wholly without power to name any of the officers recommended by his generals, because every place was filled from London. ‘Of the list you and Colonel Shawe have sent, there are only three who have any experience at all,’ wrote his lordship acidly. ‘Of those there are two, Colonel Elley and Lord Greenock, who are most fit for their situations, and I am most happy they are selected . . . As for the others, if they had been proposed to me I should have rejected them all.’

The very same day he was sending off another despatch to Torrens, begging him to let him see more troops before sendi

ng any more general officers. ‘I have no objection; on the contrary, I wish for Cole and Picton to command divisions,’ wrote his lordship, with every intention of seeming gracious. ‘I shall be very happy to have Kempt and Pack, and will do the best I can for them . . . ’ Quite an affable despatch, this one, much more conciliatory than the one that was on its way to Lord Bathurst. His lordship was not getting the artillery he had demanded; instead of 150 pieces he was to have only eighty-four, including German artillery. He considered his demand to have been excessively small, and he told Bathurst so. ‘You will see by reference to Prince Hardenberg’s return of the Prussian Army that they take into the field nearly 80 batteries, manned by 10,000 artillery. Their batteries are of eight guns each, so that they will have 600 pieces. They do not take this number for show or amusement,’ continued his lordship sardonically, ‘and although it is impossible to grant my demand, I hope it will be admitted to be small.’

But in spite of the querulous tone of his despatches to London he was not so ill-pleased, after all. He might complain that in England they were doing nothing, and were unable to send him anything, but before April was out he was writing quite cheerfully to Hardinge, English Commissioner to the Prussians, that he was getting on in strength, and had now 60,000 men in their shoes, of whom at least 10,000 were cavalry.

He was glad when Prince Blücher arrived at the Prussian Headquarters. He liked old Marshal ‘Forwards’, but he wished he would not write to him in German.

But Blücher, with his dozen words of English, and his execrable French, was a better man to deal with than his chief-of-staff. A jealous fellow, Gneisenau, always making difficulties and suspecting him of duplicity.

However, that was a minor annoyance; on the whole, his lordship was satisfied with his Prussian allies, though the circumstance of their being continually at loggerheads with King William gave him a good deal of trouble. Poor old Blücher was quite lacking in polish; nor could he be made to realise the value of tact in dealing with a fellow like King William. He was for ever omitting to make just those courteous gestures which would have cost him so little and soothed the King’s dignity so much. Rather a difficult yoke-fellow, Blücher, apt to get the bit between his teeth, and, unfortunately, imbued with such a dislike of the French that he could not be brought to tolerate even the Royalists among them. But he was not afraid of meeting Bonaparte in the field, and he was a likeable old man, with his fierce, rosy face and fine white whiskers, his spluttering enthusiasm, and his beaming smile.

His lordship was much more comfortable at Headquarters now, for he had got his military secretary back, and Sir Colin Campbell too. His lordship was fond of Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who had lately married his niece, and had so become his nephew by marriage. Lord Fitzroy exactly suited him; for he did what he was told, never committing the appalling offence of setting up ideas of his own and acting on them. His lordship detested independently-minded subordinates. It was not the business of his officers to think for themselves. ‘Have my orders for whatever you do!’ he said. It was an inflexible rule; nothing made him angrier than to have it broken.

Lord Fitzroy never broke it. He could be trusted to obey every order punctiliously. He got through an amazing amount of work, too, often in the most unsuitable surroundings, and always with a quiet competence that seemed to make little of the mass of correspondence on his hands. He was not one of those troublesome officers, either, who were for ever wanting to go home on leave to attend to urgent private affairs—which his lordship was convinced could be quite as well settled by correspondence. Nor had he ever discovered (just when he was most needed) that the climate in Spain disagreed with his constitution. You could always be sure of Fitzroy.

His lordship was sure of Colin Campbell, too, who had been with him so many years, and managed his household so admirably, in spite of his inability to speak intelligibly any foreign language.

In fact, his lordship was perfectly happy in his personal staff. As for his general staff, though he complained peevishly of having strangers foisted on to him, and of being unable to entrust the details of the departments to any of the young gentlemen on the staff, he was not (if the truth were told) so very badly off there either. He might write to Torens that he had no means of naming any of the officers he would prefer to all others, but somehow they began to appear on the general staff; seasoned men like Elley, and Waters, Felton Hervey, Greenock, Woodford, Gomm, Shaw, and any number of others. He had Barnes for his adjutant-general; and was getting De Lancey sent out as quartermaster-general; in place of Sir Hudson Lowe. He wanted Murray, of course: De Lancey was only a deputy: but Murray was still in America, and he could not really blame Torrens for being unable to spirit him back to Europe.

To read his lordship’s despatches you might think he had no power at all over the appointments in the Army. In one of his irritable moods, he wrote another barbed letter to Bathurst. ‘I might have expected that the Generals and Staff formed by me in the last war would have been allowed to come to me again,’ he complained, and continued in a sweeping style which made Lord Bathurst grin appreciatively: ‘But instead of that, I am overloaded with people I have never seen before; and it appears to be purposely intended to keep those out of my way whom I wished to have.’ His lordship felt much better after that explosion of wrath, and added: ‘However, I’ll do the best I can with the instruments which have been sent to assist me.’

But gentlemen applying for staff appointments in the Duke’s army were told at the Horse Guards that the selection of officers to fill these was left to the Duke; and occasionally his lordship seemed to forget that he had no power to employ gentlemen of his own choosing. He might complain of having his hands tied, but when it came to the point his lordship seemed to do very much what he liked. When he wanted Lieutenant-Colonel Grant to come out to him to be at the head of the Intelligence Department, and Lieutenant-Colonel Scovell to take charge of the Department of Military Communications, he told Lord Fitzroy to write offering the posts to both these gentlemen, and only afterwards informed Torrens of having done so. He hoped, coolly, that it would be approved of, and, in point of fact, had not the least doubt that it would be approved of.

But you could not be surprised at his lordship’s being a little testy. He was not a pessimistic man, but he rather liked to have a grievance, and was very apt to grumble that he was obliged to do everyone’s work in addition to his own. He had, moreover, an overwhelming amount of work of his own to do, and endless annoyances to deal with. The wonder was not that he was peevish in his office but that he was so cheerful out of it. Quite apart from the all-important task of putting the country and the Army in a state of readiness for war, he was obliged to tackle such problems as the amounts of the subsidies to be granted to the various countries engaged in the campaign. First it was Hanover (a complicated business, that); then Austria; then Russia (shocking people to deal with, the Russians); and next it would be the Duke of Brunswick, already on the march with his troops to join the Army.

Subsidies one moment, wagons for the Hanoverians the next; then some quite trivial matter, such as old Arendtschildt’s request for permission for certain of his officers to receive a Russian decoration: there was no end to the business requiring his lordship’s attention; yet in the midst of it all he could find time to review troops, pay flying visits to garrisons, attend parties, and even to give a large party himself, and appear as lighthearted at it as though he had not a care in the world.

His lordship had a natural taste for festivities, and during his late spell of office as Ambassador to King Louis, had acquired the habit of planning his own parties on a lavish scale. His first in Brussels was a brilliant affair, comprising a dinner at the Hôtel de Belle Vue to his more important guests, including the King and Queen of the Netherlands, followed by a concert, ball, and supper at the Salle du Grand Concert, in the Rue Ducale.

It quite eclipsed the Court party, held some days previously. Everything went off without the smallest hitch; the C

atalani was in her best voice; the Duke was the most affable of hosts; his staff seconded him ably; and the Salle was so crowded with distinguished persons that it became at times quite difficult to move about.

The invitation list was indeed enormous, and had cost the staff many a headache, for besides the English in Brussels all the Belgian and Dutch notables had received elegant, cream-laid, gilt-edged cards requesting the honour of their presence. Nearly all of them had accepted, too: the Duc d’Ursel, with his big nose and tiny chin; cheerful little Baron Hoogvorst, and Madame; competent M. van der Capellan, the Secretary of State; the Duc and Duchesse de Beaufort, and Mademoiselle; bevies of Counts and Countesses and Dowager Countesses, all with their blushing daughters and hopeful sons; and of course the Royals: King William, and his lethargic spouse, with their splendid young son, Frederick, and an extensive suite. The Prince of Orange was present as well, but could hardly be included in the Royal party, since he arrived separately, was dressed in the uniform of the Prince of Wales’s Own, talked nothing but English, and consorted almost exclusively with his English friends and fellow-generals. He had quite forgotten his huff at being superseded in the command of the Army. He was going to be given the 1st Corps, Lord Hill having the 2nd; and his dread mentor was treating him with so much confidence that he had nothing left to wish for. ‘For ever your most truly devoted and affectionate William, Prince of Orange,’ was how the Prince subscribed himself exuberantly in his letters to the Duke. All he ever received in return was ‘Believe me, & etc., Wellington.’ His lordship was never fulsome. ‘Je supplie Votre Altesse d’agréer en bonté les sentiments respectueux avec lesquels j’ai l’honneur d’être, Monseigneur, de Votre Altesse le très humble et très obéissant serviteur,’ would write some Prussian general painstakingly. ‘Write him that I am very much obliged to him,’ scrawled the Duke at the foot of such despatches.

But the Prince of Orange was too well acquainted with his lordship to be cast down by his chilly letters. In fact, the Prince was in high fettle. His personal staff was composed of just the men he liked best: all English, and including his dear friend the Earl of March. He was very happy, sparkling with gaiety, looking absurdly young, and just a little conscious of the dizzy military heights to which he had risen. Sometimes he felt intoxicatingly important, and was a trifle imperious with the generals under his command; but when he found himself in Lord Hill’s presence, and looked into that kindly face, with its twinkling eyes and fatherly smile, his importance fell away from him, and he was all eager deference, just as he was with the Duke, or with the veteran Count Alten of the German Legion, whose bright, stern gaze could always disconcert him. Sir Charles Count von Alten was under the Prince, in command of the 3rd Division, which was formed of one British brigade, under Sir Colin Halkett; one brigade of the German Legion, under Baron Ompteda; and one Hanoverian brigade, under Count Kielmansegg. Count Alten was fifty-one years of age, seasoned in war, and rather grim-faced. He was an extremely competent general—so competent that even the men of the Light Division had approved of him when he had commanded them—and a somewhat alarming person for a young gentleman only twenty-four years old to have under him. He was very polite to the Prince, and they got on really very well together, but his Royal Highness was glad that the rest of the 1st Corps, with the exception of the Guards, was composed of Dutch-Belgian troops under two generals who, though experienced soldiers, naturally had a respect for their Hereditary Prince which the English and the Germans could not be expected to share. His bête noire, and late second-in-command, Sir Henry Clinton, was commanding a division in Hill’s corps; and that much more alarming person even than Count Alten, Sir Thomas Picton, was destined for the Reserve.