A Soldier's Letters

THE LETTERS OF PRIVATE WHEELER--Edited by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart --Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Lieut. General Arthur Wellesley, one day in 1809, stood in Spain and surveyed the ragged levies sent him for his Peninsular campaign against the French. "I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy," said the man who was to go down in history as the Duke of Wellington, "but, by God, they frighten me."

As war would have it, they frightened the French too--right back across the Pyrenees, after one of the most brilliant campaigns of modern times. Not long afterward, Napoleon was sent packing for good. General Wellesley got his dukedom and his niche in history. The rank & file, according to a custom old when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, got their prize money-and a muster into oblivion. Yet destiny for once had preserved a rich archive of the forgotten men.

All during the Peninsular War, and later through a modest role at Waterloo and a quiet five years on garrison in the isles of Greece, Private William Wheeler of the 51st Regiment wrote long letters to his family back in Somerset. Such tales they told, and with such a wit and ardor, that the family kept and read them for a Sunday treat during more than a century after the old soldier's death (he contracted leprosy in Greece). In 1949 the letters came by chance to the eye of a British publisher, were printed, and promptly acclaimed as a historical find and fascinating reading.

Salts for Sore Eyes. Americans will enjoy The Letters of Private Wheeler too, whether or not they happen to know very much about Wellington's battles. Wheeler had the temperament of a first-class infantryman anywhere & any time, and a natural gift for telling a clear story.

Throughout his adventures, however, Private Wheeler kept a certain Somerset point of view. "What an ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, dirty, lousy set of poor Devils are the Portuguese," he snorts, after his first look at the people whose country he is fighting to save. "The filthiest pigs sty is a palace to the filthy houses in this dirty stinking City [Lisbon] ... In the middle of the day the sunny sides of the streets swarms with men and women picking the vermin from their bodies, and it is no uncommon sight to see two respectively [sic] dressed persons meet and do a friendly office for each other by picking a few crawlers from each others persons."

Wheeler was soon picking as fast as any Portuguese, and what time the lice left him in peace was spent in tussles with the army's standing operating procedure. Sometimes a man lost to S.O.P.--as when Wheeler showed up with sore eyes, and was rigorously dosed before the entire regiment with "three ounces and a half of the bitter gall Epsom salts, and two hours knapsack drill in double quick time [to] open my back door."

Wall for the Wind. All that year, and the next, and the next, and the next, Wheeler and h's comrades fought the French from end to end of the peninsula. They marched over incredibly bad roads, and ate and slept as best they could. After the battle of Salamanca, "having examined a few dead Frenchmen for money, etc., we collected what dead bodies were near and made a kind of wall with them. We did this to break the wind which was very cutting . . . Under this shelter we slept very sound until morning." Despite all the suffering it caused him, Private Wheeler liked the army. Not once, in fact, does he gripe about the hardtack it visited on his belly, and the pay it insulted him with (about a shilling a day), and only rarely about the officers.

(Once he records the "universal joy" when the brutal first lieutenant of a troopship broke both legs in a fall.) Wheeler was a sociable man, and especially loved the "many happy hours sitting by the fire smoking my pipe and listening to the marvelous tales of my comrades." Through out, he was proudly confident of his hawk-nosed commander in chief.

"If England should require the service of her army again," he writes, "and I should be with it, let me have 'Old Nosey' to command . . . There are two things we should be certain of. First, we should always be as well supplied with rations as the nature of the service would admit.

The second is we should be sure to give the enemy a d -- d good thrashing. What can a soldier desire more."

*After Waterloo, the grateful British government divided about -L-1,000,000 among the victorious veterans.

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