MILITARY DISASTERS IN FORMER WARS.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume XIV, Issue 59, 20 October 1855, Page 4

MILITARY DISASTERS IN FORMER WARS.

[From the North British Seview.J Our contest with France under Napoleon lasted, from first to last, twenty-two years — from 1793 to 1815; and though, during the greater part of this period, the country was zealous and hearty in the cause ; though we had vast armies on foot ; and though ministers were able to command Parliamentary majorities which made them despotic and almost omnipotent, yet it was not till the sixteenth year of the war that victory began to crown our arm?. From 1793 to 1810, the history of our campaigns is one series of imbecilities and disasters. From the outbreak of hostilities, till Sir Arthur Wellesley took the command in the Peninsula, our land forces were uniformly unfortunate, with the exception of some gallant but ineffective successes in Egypt. We began with the siege of Dunkirk, which, more consueto, was entrusted to the Duke of York. The Allies were defeated, and he hastily retired, leaving fifty-two pieces of heavy artillery and a quantity of baggage and ammunition in the hands of the enemy. The expedition to Walcheren was one of our next large enterprises on the Continent, and offers a parallel unusually close to our present position. Its object was the capture and destruction of Antwerp, a most important arsenal and stronghold, which the French were doing their best to render impregnable. The expedition was well planned, and was fitted out on a grand scale. Considerable delay took place in preparing everything necessary for the undertaking : but at the end of July, 1809, the fleet sailed, consisting of a hundred large ships and eighty gun- boats, two trains of siege artillery, and upwards of 40,000 troops. We have the testimony of Napoleon, that if the army and fleer, had pushed on and assailed Antwerp at once, i', must have fallen an easy prey. It was inadequately garrisoned, and its defences ware still incomplete. The orders given from home were judicious and decisive— to act promptly and push on to Antwerp at once. Unhappily, the Ministers appointed a general and an admiral who did not act harmoniously or energetically together, and one or both of whom seem to have been singularly ill-selected. Delay after delay occurred— they laid siege to Flushing, instead of assaulting Antwerp; and by the time they were ready to attack Antwerp, it had been strengthened and fortified so as to present a nearly hopeless enterprise. The expedition therefore fortified themselves in Walcheren, where fever speedily attacked the troops, decimated their numbers, and destroyed their j spirits. Soon nearly half their numbers were in hospital, and the deaths reached between 200 and 300 a week. At last, five months after the magnificent and powerful army had left our shores, its minerable remnant returned home, having left 7,000 in an ignominious grave, and the rest bearing about them a malady which never left them to the end of their lives.

Of course so great a calamity led to fierce debates in both Houses of Parliament ; a long investigation ensued, and Ministers with difficulty escaped an overthrow. Unfortunately, the opposition then, as now and always, sought rather to infer Ministerial incapacity than to discover the real cause of the disaster. Government was severely blamed for having undertaken a hopeless and fruitless enterprise. It was argued that the expedition was ill-planned, could not have succeeded, and would have been nearly useless if it bad succeeded. All the usual charges were reiterated— charges which we know to have been exaggerated or wholly groundless. The real sin of the Ministers was hardly touched upon in the debate — their inconceivable want of judgment or want of conscientious* ness, in appointing so incapable a commander as Lord Chatham, and tbeir want of resolution and reluctance to give pain to a respected and highly* connected individual, shown in not at once superseding him as soon as bis mismanagement and neglect of orders made his incapacity apparent. The next parallel we meet with was in the early portion of the Peninsular War, when the British Government bad come to the determination of assisting the Spanish patriots, but had not yet learned how to do it. Stores, provisions, clothing, arms, and ammunition, were sent with unexampled profusion, but they never reached the army ; the agents to whom Mr. Canning entrusted their distribution proved utterly incapable. "At the period," we read, " when the Marquis of Romana and the insurgents of Gahcia were praying for a few stand of arms and £5,000 from Sir John Cradock, the Spanish Junta possessed many millions of money (mainly furnished to them by England), and their magazines at Cadiz were bursting with the continually increasing quantity of stores and arms arriving from England, but which were left to rot as they arrived, while from every quarter the demand for these things was incessant."

The retreat to Corunna comes next in order. Sir John Moore was a consummate^ general ; few more skilful ; none more vigilant and conscientious; none, assuredly in common estimation, more unfortunate. He had an impossible task set him ; a scanty army, inadequate magazines, cowardly and imbecile allies, and an enemy who commanded overwhelming numbers. He did much, but of course he failed of success, and of course he was assailed by the most unfounded and outrageous calumny. He was blamed for his advance ; he was blamed for his retreat ; he was blamed because he fought a battle; he was blamed because he had not fought it sooner ; and an unworthy Ministry at home (how unlike the present one !) took advantage of the popular dismay to throw on the General the condemnation due rather to their own or their agents' incapacity. The people, who had not been trained to learn* the inevitable results of war, were horror-stricken at contrasting |^c haggard and dilapidated troops who returned, with the trim and gallant regiments who had set out a few months before, and they were at once indignant and desponding. No doubt tbeir sufferings had been great, though their commander was not in fault. He had at one time 4,000 men out of 31.000 in hospital, and lost 4,000 in the retreat. Yet now that the history has been written, we find him acquitted, and not only acquitted but applauded, by the decision of every competent authority. SouSt, Napoleon, and Wellington, all concur in awarding him the highest meed of piaiae. He was one of our " unsuccessful great men."

But the most instructive portion of the annals of the Peninsular War is that which relates to the period after the Duke of Wellington had been promoted to the chief command. His energy, his vigilance, his foresight, his wonderful and unrivalled capacity both for conquest and for organization, none will now deny. And if we find the

same complaints nude by him as are msdt or insinuated now— if we find tbe same sufferings endured by his army as by Lord Raglan's— if we find that be, like Lord Raglan, admitted the ex. wt «|j M oi "insuperable" difficulties— sorely, we shall be disposed to pause before we condtmn as incapable, one who is apparently no worse off than a commander whose capacity has long been our admiration, and was once our safety. If, further, we find that he experienced and bitterly complained of that very evil which it is now beginning to be universally believed lies at the bottom of oar disasters, viz., the incompetency and inexperience of our young officers of family, tn d the want of education and organization in the civil department of the service, we shall be more disposed to attack ths enduriog system rather than the transitory men. And finally, if we find tbat the opposition of that day, losing sight of sense, justice, and patriotism, in their virulent criticisms npt only on ministers, but on the army itself, and on the- great general who led it out to glory and trained it by degrees to victory— if we find that the speakers of that day, as of this, played the game of the enemy, exaggerated his successes and palliated bis misdeeds, encouraged bie tenacity and poured despondency and dismay over the hearts of men at home, and behaved in a manner which all the noble-minded among them afterwards bitterly repented, surely we shall disdain to act over again a course of conduct as unrighteous as it is unpatriotic and suicidal.

Yet all these things were so. At the commencement of the Talavera campaign, says Napier— "4,000 men (out of 27,000) were in hospital} the commissariat was without sufficient insane of transport; the soldiers nearly barefooted, and totally without pay. The military chest was empty, and the hospitals were full. The Battle of Talavera was fought and won by men who for twenty-four hours had tasted nothing but a ftw grains of corn in the ear." The want of shoet actually prevented some military movements. "During a month wbich followed the junction of the two armies on the 22nd of July, the troops were literally starving i they had not received ten days* bread ; on many days they only got a little meat without salt, on others nothing at all. The cavalry and artillery horses had not received at the same time three deliveries of forage, and, in consequence, 1,000 horses had died, and 700 were on the aick list." After this description, we are not surprised to learn tbat a month later, in the valley of the Guadina, 7.000 men were in hospital— one-third of the effective force.

The disorganization of our army during the re* treat from. Burgos, while under Wellington's .own command, called from him his celebrated and severe, but unjust and indiscriminate, rebuke. He was angry, and described it as " surpassing what he bad ever witnessed or read of." This was an exaggeration, but no doubt the disorders were bad enough. Here is Alison's explanation, whieb bears a startling resemblance to much that we bear now :— " Wellington was not aware that bis own well-conceived arrangements for (he supply of provisions to his troops had been in many .case* rendered totally nugatory from the impossibility of getting means of transport for the stores, or from the negligence of inferior functionaries in carrying his orders into execution. In some casas, when he supposed the men were receiving tbeir three rations a day regularly served out, they were, in fact, living on acorns which they had picked up, «r swine which they shot in the woods."

Once more. We are shocked, and naturally »o, at the reports which reach us from the Crimes of the deaths by disease, and the number of tick in the hospital. Well, precisely the same facts add to the gloom of our last wars. In 1811, we read of " 20,000 sick in the hospital at one moment ;" and of " an army 30.000 strong, which could only bring 14,000 bayonets into the field «" and the returns of the Inspector-General show that, in the six years immediately preceding the peace, "not leas than 360,000 men passed through the military hospitals in Portugal." Finally. In nearly every page of the Peninsular War, we meet with instances of incapacity, ignorance, extraordinary blunders, ineoQceivabie mismanagement, under the very eyes.oflhe Dake himself, and even where his brother was a leading 1 cabinet minister at home, which equal, if they, do not cast into shade, those charged, upon the officials here, at Scutari, and before Sebastopol. We find a wholly inefficient and ignorant commissariat department, which only learned its dutits by slow degrees, and at the cost of the starved and suffering troops. We hear just the same complaint of want of horses, mules, and waggons for transport— a want only remedied two years before tbe termination of the war; of the new recruits falling sick aa soon as they went out; of tattered uniforms and soleless shoes ; of inadequate battering ordnance, so tbat towns bad to be taken by storm wbich ought to have been regularly besieged; and, lastly, of mining and intrenching tools sent out so abominably bad that our troops were dependent on those they captured from the enemy* and of scaling-ladders so short they would not reach the walls they were to surmount. In a word, ws find all the same official delays, negligences, stupidities, ignorances, baffling the Iron Duke himself, which harass and perplex us now.

It is one thing to have a large army; it is another thing to have a small army in the most perfect state of efficiency. The one is ec travagance, the other is economy. To maintain during peace an army of 200.000 men, would be neediest, foolish, and wasteful; and the House of Commons never would, and never ought, to sanction inch a thing. To maintain an army of 100,000 men, of which every department should be in the highest and most complete organization, in which every officer should know his business, and every soldier be trained to the use of his arms ; with a transport service that needed nothing but augmentation} with a commissariat department that nesded nothing but expansion; with engineers, artillery, and sapper and miner corps, all efficient and requiring no change beyond an addition to their numbers; furnished With the newest weapons, the best ordnance, the most scientific improvements; to a machine, in short, Of which every wheel should be well oiled, every beam tested, every screw and nail in its place; to maintain sucb a force in the most perfect efficiency, and in readiness for instant service, is what the country has never refused to pay for, what it always has paid for (without ever getting it), what the Parliament will always sanction, and what no minister should retain office for one hour if he does not possess or caqnot obtain. Had we the nucleus of such an efficient army, its numbers would be a matter of comparatively small moment. The addition of a company or two, or a troop or two, to every regiment—the placing of lew officers upon full pay— the purchase of a certain number of additional horses, to the waggon service and the artillery — the engaging a few supplementary clerks of competent ability to the commissariat-- would suffice to place, our forces on a war footing.. One vote of the House of Commons wonld do it all. As it is, wben hostilitiea break out, we have not to increase our army, bat to create it. teach it, train it— not to augment its numbers merely, but to organise its every department. It is not a larger but a wiser expenditure that we require— not a larger but a better army. The parsimonious disposition of the country, then, is not to blame.