Britain’s First World Wars

‘Why do we call it World War Two? Because, a few years earlier, there was a World War One.’ This is how one teacher – only half joking – described to me the desperate state to which the level of British schoolchildren’s historical knowledge has descended.

The removal of compulsory history at GCSE level and the obsession with modules has killed the excitement and relevance of history for many children. Studying the sweep of interrelated events that give history drive and cogency has been abandoned; it is no longer regarded as a serious part of a young person’s mental equipment as he or she leaves school. That is a dangerous mistake. Whatever we do in life, we need an understanding of the past.

I have just spent three years researching and writing the remarkable story of how the Duke of Wellington and his men fought their way from the Iberian Peninsular to Waterloo, from 1808 to 1815. It has been a revealing experience – full of lessons for today – but most of all it has been spellbinding history. The vast majority of those students who do study history at school know what our fathers and grandfathers did in the last century, but they know little about the events of 200 years ago.

In the early 19th century our great-great-grandfathers fought a war against Napoleon Bonaparte ‘s France that was no less vital to our national survival than the two world wars of the 20th century. What has been a revelation to me is the abundance of eye-witness material that makes this the first war in history to have been recorded in such detail by so many of those who fought it.

Hundreds of men, from ordinary private soldiers to generals, wrote journals, letters and books in profusion. One young Rifles officer, George Simmonds, kept three notebooks in his hat throughout the campaigns. Others wrote or dictated their memoirs in the years after the war was over. All tell their stories in vivid and remarkably familiar style, revealing the horrors of battle, the primitive nature of medicine and sanitation in the camps and the mischief they got up to away from the battlefield.

Thomas Todd, who at the age of 15 had struggled but failed to be taken seriously as an actor in Edinburgh, joined the army and fought his first battle in 1808. He had no idea how he would meet the challenge of facing enemy fire. He felt a ‘breathless sensation’ come over him, but one look along the British line was enough to strengthen him: ‘The steady determined scowl of my companions assured my heart and gave me determination.’ William Grattan, an Irish soldier in the Connaught Rangers, came across a makeshift British hospital full of dreadfully wounded men. ‘Their limbs were swollen to enormous size ... Their ghastly countenances presented a dismal sight ... They sat, silent and statue-like, waiting for their turn to be carried to the amputating tables.’ All round the tables were piles of ‘arms and legs flung here and there without distinction’.  

The bloodiest night of the Peninsular war was April 6th, 1812. One of the abiding images I am left with is of Wellington watching the growing carnage in the breaches in the walls of Badajoz as his men failed to break through the stalwart French defenders. The army’s medical chief, James McGrigor, says he saw Wellington’s face lit up by the glare of a torch: ‘I shall never forget it ... The jaw had fallen, and the face was of unusual length, while the torchlight gave his countenance a lurid aspect.’ Nearly 5,000 men were lost before Wellington’s forces managed to storm Badajoz. Wellington stood in the main breach the next morning unable to contain his distress. It was a rare moment when this normally cold and aloof man showed he was capable of deep emotion.   

All these images bring alive the story of one of the greatest enterprises in British military history. Wellington‘s string of successful campaigns have a resonance for today’s military commanders. Wellington was obsessed with the army’s logistics. He was meticulous about the need to supply and feed his men and recognised that they would only be supported if they won the hearts and minds of the local people. He was ruthless in punishing any looting or other abuse of civilians. Like army commanders in Afghanistan today, he believed in exhaustive intelligence and intimate knowledge of the terrain. Above all, he delivered his orders with confidence and clarity and was constantly seen to be in control at the critical points on the battlefront.

Wellington’s men didn’t love him, but they deeply respected and admired him. One called him ‘that long-nosed beggar wot licks the French’. He never lost a battle and his final victory over France at Waterloo left Britain the dominant world power for the best part of a century.   

To many people the history of what happened as long as two centuries ago seems somehow remote and inaccessible. Students arriving at universities these days opt too often for the familiarity of the 20th century. It is time to revive memories of an earlier age that is just as relevant to our knowledge of Britain’s past.

Peter Snow's latest book is To War with Wellington (John Murray, 2010).