Word: wellington
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...Catholic version of the landmass theory. They even tried to climb onto the Continent by attempting to conquer and rule France in the Hundred Years' War. But ever since Christendom split into Protestant and Catholic wings, Britons have been opposed to European unification. Marlborough, Pitt and Wellington have all fought to keep a balance of power on the European continent, and the small trading nations-The Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries-have usually welcomed British intercession. When madmen like the French Bourbons, Napoleon and Hitler have tried to reconstitute the fabric of a united Europe by force, they have gone...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...