He now stood on the lowest of the gentlemanly rungs of the military ladder and his upward progress was for a time somewhat bewildering. Those were the days when money and social and political influence, which came to about the same thing, did everything in the Army, the Navy, the Church, and everywhere else, and, curiously enough, this apparently absurd system produced the finest array of soldiers and sailors that has ever adorned the annals of our empire. There are, indeed, certain blasphemers who venture to suggest that it worked quite as well as our much-boasted compound of mechanical cramming and competitive examination does now. But, be this as it may, Arthur Wesley’s first steps up the ladder were distinctly erratic. First he became a lieutenant of the 76th and 41st, then a sub. in the 12th Light Dragoons, then a captain in the 58th Foot, then captain of the 18th Light Dragoons, and so on till by the autumn of 1793, when he had reached the mature age of twenty-four, he was gazetted lieutenant-colonel of the 33rd Foot. There were two reasons for this rapid promotion. The first undoubtedly is the fact that his elder brother Richard was now Earl of Mornington and a wealthy man and a social power to boot. The second, as Mr. George Hooper in his excellent biography suggests, is probably the perception by his brother of qualities which so far nobody else had discovered. How far his Lordship was justified was speedily shown when in 1793--which the historical reader will note was the date of the driving out of the English and Royalists from Toulon by the well-directed guns of Citizen Buonaparte--he was given the command of the 33rd Foot. A few months later the 33rd was officially recognised as the most effective regiment on the Irish establishment. The next year Lieutenant-Colonel Wesley saw his first active service. It was not an encouraging experience, but it was sufficient to show the sort of stuff that the future Iron Duke was made of. The allied armies in the Netherlands, with the English under the Duke of York among them, were retreating after a series of disasters before the triumphant onrush of the French legions. Near the town of Boxtell the retreat began to get uncomfortably like a rout. Horse and foot were getting mixed up in a narrow lane and the French, seeing this, were getting ready to charge into them; whereupon Colonel Wesley planted his men skilfully across the mouth of the lane and, when the French charged, the well-drilled 33rd stood so steadily and used their muskets with such deadly precision that the French thought better of it and the pursuit stopped there and then. That was the young Colonel’s first experience of actual war. It was also the first check the French had so far received in the Netherlands, which is also significant in the light of after events.