Word: wellingtons
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...