Books: The Genius of Common Sense

THE DUKE: BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE & ACHIEVEMENTS OF ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1st DUKE OF WELLINGTON —Richard Aldington—Viking ($3.75).

Among his other achievements the Duke of Wellington discovered the most astonishing thing in the world: its lack of common sense. Studying the battles of England from India to Copenhagen, and leading the armies in the ones that England won, he was all the more aware of that lack of common sense for a reason that neither his friends, his enemies, nor he himself observed: in the days of Napoleon he had almost a world monopoly of it.

The Duke is a tribute. The 29th book of Richard Aldington, 51, and his best, it is to the vast library of material on Wellington what Reader’s Digest is to the accumulation of writing in U.S. magazines — an expert job of condensation and synthesis, inspired when its source materials are inspired, slowgoing when the mass of detail is incorporated at the expense of color and warmth. The Duke is also salted with the Tory aphorisms of a simple man who did not know that what he said was wisdom.

A Living Force. Its double value to U.S. readers is that it simultaneously introduces them to the best British general and to a body of literature they have largely neglected: the spirited, emotional, uneven, intense and practically useful compositions of military men. Its distinction is that it makes common sense not a mere negative quality — the avoidance of mistakes — but a pulsing, living force, strange as genius and more understandable ; unbeatable, kindly, unexpected, confident, and as essential to the winning of a world war as it is to organizing a practical world peace.

The Duke of Wellington did both. When he returned to England after beating Napoleon’s marshals in Spain, Englishmen made the dusty turnpike road from Dover to London “one long roaring cheer.” He rode unmoved, and apparently unhearing, through 60 solid miles of praise. He believed that if you ignored the fickle crowd’s catcalls you should also ignore its plaudits, and as a commander in Spain he had had to ignore its criticisms. Not many years later he was the most unpopular man in England. Once a huge mob stormed his mansion and smashed every window while the Duke sat inside beside the dead body of his wife. Once he made his way home from the Tower of London through howling crowds. He remained almost as expressionless through five miles of hostility as he had been through 60 miles of cheers. The difference was that he touched his hat to a hero named Martin Tupper who shouted, “Waterloo! Waterloo!” It was the 17th anniversary of the day Wellington and Blücher led the armies that saved the Empire, Europe, and the civilization that flowered in the long Victorian peace.

Total Symmetry. There was an absolute symmetry in Wellington’s political, social and military theory. Author Aldington calls him a world policeman. This is Aldington’s way of acknowledging the fact that in Wellington, as in Napoleon, political theory and military strategy were inseparable. The clarity of the Duke’s political vision, his mere knowledge of what kind of a world he wanted to gain, preserve and extend determined his actions as directly as the hills and the forts, the number of his troops and his opponents’. The difference was that Napoleon’s achievements in both politics and warfare were hailed by most commentators, beginning with himself, while Wellington, who refused to have books written about his battles, was discredited. The incessant stream of Napoleonic propaganda that flowed in a torrent from the 19th into the 20th Century undermined Wellington’s military reputation: “There is something disquieting,” says Author Aldington, “about the almost fanatical boosting of the arch dictator throughout the period which was at least pretending to apply the principles of democracy.”

The real reason was different and deeper. At a moment when the French Revolution had led first to the Terror, next to Napoleon, and third to the edge of the abyss of world dictatorship, Wellington’s task was to prove to the people by his leadership that conservatism was in their interest, as he had proved to his army that his strategy was better than Napoleon’s. Wellington suffered from many things—fever and loneliness in India that turned his hair grey at 32, a botched marriage; disgrace and empty victory and the fanatical hatred of some of the keenest brains in the Empire. He suffered from the misuse and thwarting of his genius from his childhood to his old age, wounds and hazards in battle, casualty lists so long that, as the Surgeon General read them to him in his moods of frightful despair after fighting, Wellington’s will ebbed and sickened. He suffered when supplies were withheld from him, his dispatches were betrayed to the enemy, his promotion was “protracted so studiously” that it became a “scandal,” and from the intrigues against him so persistent that Aldington has no explanation for them beyond this—that “such intrigues succeed partly because the ordinary men and women fighting, suffering, and paying for a war cannot believe them possible.” He was superseded again & again—sensationally after Vimiero, when he was in the midst of a brilliant campaign at the very moment of victory.

Wellington suffered at the hands of the Duke of York, King George III, King George IV, King William IV, Sir Harry Burrard, the Horse Guards, his brilliant brother Richard, Lord Wellesley, Sir Hew Dalrymple, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Melbourne, his friend Lord Castlereagh, the Hindoos, the Portuguese, the Spanish generals. But in this long catalogue of enemies and enmity the most merciless, damaging and unrelenting were the English poets and prose writers, and the spirit of sardonic mockery they expressed, not only against the Duke but against the conservative principles for which he was the ablest warrior.

The Poison on the Pen. Author Aldington inherited that spirit: his bitter anti-war autobiographical novels (Death of a Hero, Roads to Glory) were contributions to it. And though he condemns it in The Duke its lingering traces poison his biography with a wit which seems studied and dutiful, a shamefacedness before an unequivocal salute to a great man, and a hesitancy in striking out the dull gossip and malice. Only in his last chapters does Richard Aldington drop the irrelevancies of sophisticated comment and let himself go in praise of the “distant but steady beacon of common sense” whose simple words and direct actions glow through his book as they did through the anguished Europe of Wellington’s day.

Precise Vision. The Duke who emerges when the bars of modernity are down is a deep and thoughtful man. A tall, awkward, lonely, violin-playing boy whose father died when he was twelve, he did not want to be a soldier. He wanted to work in a bank. He learned the effectiveness of the armies of revolutionary France when he commanded the rear guard in the Duke of York’s disastrous expedition to The Netherlands in 1794, from which 6,000 of 25,000 recruits returned. With the clear-sightedness of innocent sanity he knew thereafter that England could be invaded.

He won the confidence of his troops by defending them. When the Duke of York’s beaten 6,000 who got back to England were ridiculed, Wellington made his first speech in two years: “They were not objects of contempt to the enemies of their country.” In his camps in India he read constantly, kept on the move, ate frugally, drank little.* His officers, up at 4:30, drank a cup of tea before daylight, breakfasted in their overcoats on a table before Wellington’s tent, and then set out on the day’s march, the Duke riding on the dusty flank.

Scorched Earth. In the Peninsular War Wellington reestablished the ancient Portuguese military law of Ordenanza. Under this, at the approach of the enemy, all civilian men became militia, all the people left their houses, destroying all food stocks. In this dress rehearsal for the scorched earth policy which, two years later, Napoleon met in Russia, the French troops discovered “with surprise at first, then with anger, and finally with something like dismay, that they were entering a devastated country whose inhabitants had vanished. Towns and villages and hamlets were empty and ominously silent; no obsequious mayors came forward to placate the victors; crops had been reaped and removed; valuables and furniture had disappeared; even the grain mills were dismantled.”

The discipline of Wellington’s army was internal; if the officers brought their men to the field well appointed and with 60 good rounds of ammunition each, he did not harass them with unnecessary drill. At each crisis in his career, just as in each crisis in each of his battles he appeared on the scene where he was needed, the officers and men came forward with testimonials too impressive to permit his enemies to order him away.

The iron figure presented to modern England as “a professional soldier with a laugh like a horse with whooping-cough” dismounted from his horse after Waterloo after 18 hours in the saddle, was nearly killed when the horse kicked, and was cheered by his wounded men as he passed them in the ghostly moonlight. Later, at his headquarters, whenever the door opened he looked up quickly, thinking it might be one of his missing officers. After Waterloo he said, “The hand of God has been over me this day,” and went to bed.

After the war he was the most powerful influence in making the post-Napoleonic peace because “he saw, perhaps more clearly than anyone else, that a policy which is a half-hearted compromise between revenge and appeasement is fatal. … He and he alone, after months of hard work succeeded in hammering out a solution of the reparations problem, ruthlessly scaling down the demands … to be sure that France could pay without undue strain what he ordered. . . . Europe owed to this dual functioning of common sense the longest peace it has known for centuries, and that is surely a greater claim to glory than all the Duke’s victories from Assaye to Waterloo.”

* His reading: books on India, Bishop Butler, Adam Smith, Hume, Gibbon, the Bible, anti-slavery pamphlets, reports.