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5 - On Wellington’s Watch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

Gavin Daly
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
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Summary

This chapter explores the British sack of stormed towns from the perspective of Wellington’s command. Throughout his career, Wellington was not always consistent in how he dealt with sacks. He learnt lessons in India, but seemingly those lessons had to be learnt again in Spain. From Wellington’s perspective, the challenge was to manage and contain sack rather than prevent it entirely, something that he considered nigh on impossible. Given the centuries long tradition of plundering stormed towns, the chaotic circumstances of storming operations, and the prevailing articles of war, Wellington had only a very limited capacity to control the behaviour of his troops once beyond the breaches. Still, during the Peninsular War, as had been the case in India, a clear trend emerges: Wellington made progressively greater efforts to prevent or minimise sack plunder, with the growing encroachment of the military justice system into the space of sack itself. Moreover, Wellington cared about the welfare of civilians within besieged and stormed towns: it was not the breakdown of troop discipline alone that concerned him about sack – there was a humanity at play, too, as guarded and infrequently expressed as it was, in this most demonstrably unsentimental of soldiers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Storm and Sack
British Sieges, Violence and the Laws of War in the Napoleonic Era, 1799–1815
, pp. 165 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • On Wellington’s Watch
  • Gavin Daly, University of Tasmania
  • Book: Storm and Sack
  • Online publication: 29 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108863971.007
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  • On Wellington’s Watch
  • Gavin Daly, University of Tasmania
  • Book: Storm and Sack
  • Online publication: 29 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108863971.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • On Wellington’s Watch
  • Gavin Daly, University of Tasmania
  • Book: Storm and Sack
  • Online publication: 29 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108863971.007
Available formats
×