Edward Pakenham

Edward Pakenham (1778–1815), later famed (and felled) at New Orleans, was in 1812 the hard-driving commander of Wellington’s 3rd Division, a formation whose élan at Salamanca became the stuff of Peninsular legend. When Marmont overextended his left, Wellington’s laconic “Mon cher, les Français sont perdus” set Pakenham loose; he advanced with a speed and cohesion that contemporaries compared to a Roman manipular charge, smashing Thomieres’s division and rolling up the French flank in a manoeuvre as clean as a blade drawn across silk. A brother-in-law of Wellington and a veteran of Ireland and the West Indies, Pakenham combined personal bravery with a taste for decisive action — audacia fortuna iuvat — though his later American command would show the limits of courage when yoked to faulty intelligence. At Salamanca, however, he was the perfect instrument at the perfect moment, the hammer that struck exactly where the line would break.