BOOKS OF THE DAY
Servant of the State
Wellington. By Richard -Alclington. (Heinemann. 18s.) THIS book is much better than might be expected. In general I am not much in favour of literary men presenting us with historical biographies ; they are apt not to know the background, the context in which the life has to be seen in order to be properly understood. But Wellington has clearly captured Mr. Ard.ngton's sympathies, and he has taken a great d .al of trouble to acquaint himself with the immense mass of sources and authorities. In the result, the first two-thirds of the book are distinctly good. Mr. Aldington is at his best with the Peninsular War and Waterloo ; no doubt his experience as a soldier in the " old war "—as Sir Charles Oman used to call the war of 1914-18—helped h:m here. And apropos of that, the way was made plain for him, as he very properly recognises, by Sir Charles Oman's History of the Peninsular War, one of the finest historical achievements of out time. In the last part of his book, with the Duke's political career, Mr. Aldington is rather more at sea. So, it might be said, was the Duke. But the Duke made rather a better job of it. It is here that we most feel the need of a proper historian. So, no doubt, did Mr. Aldington.
The book has a certain adventitious interest as illustrating the way in which people are often put off great figures of the past, or given even a twist against them, by what they read or are told, and have to wait until later in life they discover for themselves how truly remarkable these men were who have left such names. Common- sense would indeed tell one as much ; but there is always a jealousy of great men among the pretentious second-rate. In Wellington's case, in addition to the fact that he was a high Tory and therefore not very congenial to Liberals, there was the boundless and un- critical cult of Napoleon. " Tne strongest influence in disparaging Wellington was one which affected a great many other people besides myself, and it was simply the incessant stream of Napoleonic pro- paganda which continued from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. . . . I was influenced by this propaganda simply because I was too ignorant to know that it was propaganda, and had not the least idea even where to look to find the answers to it." So says Mr. Aldington, and he instances Emil Ludwig—he might have added the German historians Ludwig got it from—who makes the- Prussians beat off the final charge of the Old Guard at Waterloo, and Mr. Belloc, who managed " to write a chapter on the Peninsular War without. mentioning either the name of Wellington, the presence of an English army during six years, or any of the operations in Portugal which were so unpleasant for the Emperor's Marshals and their reputations." That, if true, is not surprising. Wellington was a Protestant and a Tory and belonged to the English Ascendancy ; Mr. Babe a Catholic, a Liberal and a Franco-Irishman It is nice that Mr. Aldington has emerged from all this to find that Wellington was a great man. Indeed, he sums him up well and judiciously : " Wellington was a master of the obvious and the immediate, and the most striking aspect of his intelligence is a
shrewd horse sense which in the long run amounted to genius, or at any rate sufficed to defeat genius. Strong commonsense, honesty, integrity, unceasing hard work, a resolution to make himself obeyed, and an unflagging belief in ultimate triumph—these were the main qualities which enabled him to persevere and at last triumph in his unequal duel with the tremendous military power of the French Empire." Pozzo di Borgo, who was no fool, has a shrewd observation on Wellington as " ne pour la guerre comme un cheval pour la course ou un chien pour la chasse." What is more remarkable, and more in the English tradition, is this great soldier's preference for peace. He had no illusions ;bout soldiering, and in India wrote: " I long for the return of civil government. Although a soldier myself, I am not an advocate for placing extensive civil powers in the hands of soldiers merely because they are of the military pro- fession, and I have always opposed the idea excepting in cases of necessity."
Most characteristic of the man's inner mind are his humanity and justice. After his great battles he was always dejected and miserable. The iron control broke down after Waterloo, when they found him in tears over the casualty lists. " Next to a battle lost," he said, " the greatest misery is a battle gained." Contrast the callousness of Napoleon: a great genius, but undeniably a cad. Quite early in his career Wellington gave as his farewell message on leaving India: " Let the prosperity of the country be your great object ; protect the ryots and traders, and allow no mart, whether invested with authority or otherwise, to oppress them with impunity ; do justice to every man."
It was such principles as these that made the diehard Tory—after all, he was a pre-Revolution aristocrat—so surprisingly moderate in action. In a position of supreme responsibility in France after the war, he exerted himself for moderation, for scaling down reparations, deploring the reactionary line of the French Ultras. It is most interesting to find him foretelling what the upshot of Charles X's sabotage of a liberal' monarchy would be, and fascinating to find that Wellington and Marlborough both thought a constitutional monarchy in France best both for her and Europe. (And wouldn't it have been?) Napoleon thought that after Waterloo Wellington would make hirnelf dictator. That showed how little Napoleon understood the nature of the English state and the strength of a political order that could command such services without question and assume the attachment of the servant. It accounts also for Wellington's accept- ance of the Reform Bill, which he strongly opposed, when the country had clearly expressed its will. He and his class made the best of it. (They certainly did—for themselves and the country !) For in the end the first and last thing about the Duke was that he was a great
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