THE PENINSULA IN 1810-11--BERMUDA--AMERICA--ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE
For two months Napier remained a prisoner with the French, and very
nobly did his captors treat him, notwithstanding the intense bitterness
of feeling caused in France by the way in which prisoners of war were
treated in England. Ney, who succeeded Soult when the latter marched
from Corunna for Oporto, allowed his captive to live with the French
Consul, supplied him liberally with money, and when an English frigate
bearing a flag of truce entered Corunna, permitted him to proceed to
England on parole not to serve until exchanged. His death had been
officially reported, and when he reached England he was to his family
and friends as one risen from the grave. A curious figure he must have
presented when his brother George and sisters met him at Exeter on the
top of the Plymouth coach, still in the old thread-bare red coat that he
had worn at Corunna, out at elbows, patched, and covered with the stains
of blood and time. On arrival in England he had sent a scrap of paper to
his mother with these lines from _Hudibras_:
I have been in battle slain,
And I live to fight again.
What joy to the poor mother, now a widow and with sight failing, to
hear her eldest born was not gone from her, but had come back,
notwithstanding his fatigues and many wounds, more determined than ever;
for he had now seen war, knew the ins and outs of fighting, and he no
longer hoped but was absolutely certain that he could command in battle.
After Corunna, they tell us, his whole manner changed. The earnest look
of his face assumed a more vehement expression. The eagle had in truth
tested his wings and felt his beak and talons, and he knew they were
more than equal to the fight of life.
In January, 1810, one year after Corunna, Charles Napier rejoined the
Fiftieth Regiment, again in the south of England. Meanwhile another
expedition had gone to Portugal, and great events had taken place in the
Peninsula. Sir Arthur Wellesley, having driven Soult from Oporto, urged
by the Ministry at home and by their representatives in the Peninsula to
repeat the movement into Spain which had so nearly ended in the
destruction of Sir John Moore's army, advanced along the Tagus, joined
Cuesta, fought the French at Talavera de la Reyna, held his position
during the battle but fell back from it two days later, leaving his
wounded to be captured by the enemy, and narrowly escaping by a forced
march Soult's advancing army, retreated back to Portugal with the loss
in killed, wounded, prisoners, and by death from disease of fully
one-third of his entire army. The British Government, now feeling
certain that the last hour of Napoleon had arrived, all at once resorted
to the old idea of foreign expeditions; and two of the largest
expeditions that had ever left the British Islands had been despatched
to the Continent, one to Italy, the other to Holland. In all the long
history of abortive military enterprise there is nothing so sad as this
Walcheren expedition. It numbered in its naval and military total eighty
thousand fighting men. Its fate has been told with vehement truth by
Charles Napier's brother. "Delivered over," writes William Napier, "to
the leading of a man whose military incapacity has caused the glorious
title of Chatham to be scorned, this ill-fated army, with spirit and
strength and zeal to have spread the fame of England to the extremities
of the earth, perished without a blow in the pestilent marshes of
Walcheren." Thus this year 1809, which had opened upon Charles Napier in
the gloom of the retreat to Corunna, ran its course of conflict to find
him at its close an impatient spectator of these three mighty efforts in
Spain, southern Italy, and on the Scheldt, which, though not unattended
by brilliant feats of arms in at least one theatre of hostility, had
all, so far as their ultimate object was concerned, left matters
precisely where they had found them. For it was not at the extremities
of his vast empire that the power of Napoleon was to be successfully
encountered. When on the first day of the new year he turned back from
the distant Galician frontier to take up the burthen of continental war
which Austria, subsidised by England, had so suddenly cast upon him, he
realised that in the heart of Europe lay the life or death of his power.
The march in the summer of 1809 to Vienna is all old history. Despite
the duplicity of Austria, which had succeeded in springing upon him a
mine while he was yet unconscious of the impending danger, Napoleon's
presence on the Danube was sufficient in a few hours to retrieve the
errors of his lieutenants, and to neutralise all the advantages which
the selection of their time and attack had already given his enemies. In
all the brilliant passages of the _History of the Peninsular War_ none
record great results in fewer or firmer words than this campaign of 1809
on the Danube. "Then indeed," writes the historian, "was seen the
supernatural force of Napoleon's genius. In a few hours he changed the
aspect of affairs. In a few days, despite their immense number, his
enemies, baffled and flying in all directions, proclaimed his mastery in
an art which up to that moment was imperfect; for never since troops
first trod a field of battle was such a display of military skill made
by man."
Wagram was the result of these brilliant combinations. Once again, as at
Austerlitz and Friedland, the decisive blow struck in the centre
paralysed all minor successes gained at the extremities; and before the
year which had opened with such vast preparation and such glowing
anticipation closed, the army of Walcheren had perished, that of Italy
had retreated to Sicily, and that of the Peninsula, despite its
brilliant achievement on the Douro and its valour at Talavera, had
fallen back into the pestilent marshes of the Guadiana, where a third of
its force was destroyed by fever.
During the winter of 1809-10 great efforts were made to reinforce the
army under Wellington, and in May, 1810, Charles Napier found himself
once more in the Peninsula. The campaign in north-eastern Portugal had
begun. Ney and Massena, advancing from Leon, took Ciudad Rodrigo and
forced Wellington back upon middle Portugal. The marches were long and
arduous, the fighting frequent and fierce. The famous Light Division,
with its still more famous first brigade, covered the retirement. In
this brigade the three brothers came again together. In July Crawford
fought his ill-judged action on the Coa, and the Napiers were all in the
thick of that hard-contested fray. It was Charles who carried the order
to his brother George's regiment, the Fifty-Second, to fall back across
the bridge when the French cavalry were swarming through the Val de
Mula. William Napier's company of the Forty-Third was the last to pass
the river, and it was here that he was wounded. This fight at the Coa
was the first battle fought by this famous brigade, Moore's chosen
corps. Four years earlier he had shaped them into soldier form at
Shorncliffe Camp, for his quick perception had early caught the fact
that it was only by a most thorough system of field-drill the power of
the French arms could be successfully resisted; and truly did William
Napier realise on the Coa the debt his brigade owed to Sir John Moore.
"The fight on the Coa," he writes, "was a fierce and obstinate combat
for existence with the Light Division, and only Moore's regiments could,
with so little experience, have extricated themselves from the danger
into which they were so recklessly cast, for Crawford's demon of folly
was strong that day. Their matchless discipline was their protection; a
phantom hero from Corunna saved them!"
In the heat of this action Charles Napier performed a very gallant
action which finds only briefest record in his journal, while whole
pages are given to noting "for my own teaching" the errors of the
general officer commanding the division. Napier had ridden back to the
Forty-Third Regiment--still fighting on the enemy's side of the
bridge--after delivering an order upon another part of the field. He
finds Captain Campbell wounded. He at once gives the wounded man his
horse, and then fights on foot with the Forty-Third through the
vineyards to the bridge. Still falling back towards Lisbon, Wellington
halted at Busaco and gave battle to Massena. This time only two of the
three brothers were in the field, for William was down with the wound
received at the Coa. Charles is riding as orderly officer to Lord
Wellington. He is in red, the only mounted officer in that colour, as
the staff are of course in blue. When Regnier's corps reached the crest
of the position a furious fire was opened upon the British line. The
staff dismounts. Napier remains on horseback. "If he will not dismount,
won't he at least put a cloak over his flaring scarlet uniform?"--"No,
he won't. It is the dress of his regiment, the Fiftieth, and he will
show it or fall in it." Then a bullet hits him full in the face, passing
from the right of his nose to his left ear, and shattering all before
it, and he is down at last. They carry him away, but as he passes
Wellington he has strength to wave his hat to his chief; and when they
lay him in a cell in the convent behind the ridge of Busaco he is more
concerned at hearing the voices of officers who are eating in an
adjoining room, and who should be on the ridge under fire, than he is
with the torment of his own wound. On the morning of the battle he had
received a letter from his mother announcing the death of his sister,
and now, while lying wounded in the convent, they come to tell him his
brother George has been struck down while leading on his men to charge
the French assaulting column.
He was carried away over the rough roads of Portugal, and at length
reached rest at Lisbon; for the army on the second day following Busaco
resumed its retreat, and Massena was again in full pursuit. The
confusion was very great, and the wounded had a dreadful time of it.
Wellington was laying waste the country as he retreated, and the army
was falling back upon the Lines of Torres Vedras amid a scene of
destruction almost unparalleled in the horrors of war. Nevertheless
neither the severity of his wound nor the exigencies of the retreat
prevented Charles Napier from writing to his mother to assure her of his
safety, and to make light of his wounds for her sake. There is something
inexpressibly touching in the constant solicitude of this danger-loving
soldier towards the poor old mother at home. "I am wounded, dear
mother," he writes four days after the battle, and while the confusion
of the retreat is at its height; "you never saw so ugly a thief as I am,
but melancholy subjects must be avoided, the wound is not dangerous." At
last he reaches Lisbon and has more time for writing, and the letters
become long and constant.
Never (he writes) had I a petty dispute with you or heard others
have one without thanking God for giving me a mother and not a
tyrant. Such as your children are, they are your work. The Almighty
has taken much from you, but has left much. Would that our
profession allowed us to be more with you. Yet even that may
happen, for peace, blessed peace, may be given to the world sooner
than we think. It is war now, and you must have fortitude in common
with thirty thousand English mothers, whose anxious hearts are
fixed on Portugal, and who have not the pride of saying their
three sons had been wounded and were all alive! How this would have
repaid my father for all anxieties!... The scars on my face will be
as good as medals--better, for they were not gained by simply being
a lieutenant-colonel and hiding behind a wall.
The winter of 1810-11 passed away, and in the spring of 1811 Massena
retreated from Torres Vedras, first to Santerem, and later to the
frontiers of Portugal. Hard marching, harder fighting, and hardest
living became the order of the day; for middle Portugal had now been
made a desert, and provisions of the rudest description were at famine
prices. When the spring campaign opened, Charles, though still suffering
from his wound, was off to join the army. In a single twenty-four hours
he covers ninety miles on horseback on his little Arab horse Blanco, for
news of battle is coming back along the line of communications, spurring
him on through night and day over the rough roads that lie between the
head waters of the Mondego and the Coa. On the morning of March 14th he
is close to the front. Suddenly an ambulance-litter borne by soldiers is
seen ahead. "Who is it?" he asks. "Captain Napier, Fifty-Second
Regiment, arm broken." Another litter follows. "Who is that?" "Captain
Napier, Forty-Third, severely wounded." They halt under the shade of a
tree. Charles says a word to each, and then mounts his tired horse and
presses on to the front. A few weeks later came the action at Fuentes
d'Onoro, and all the desultory fighting until Brennier broke out of
Almeida, having first blown it up. Amid these scenes of war Charles
maintains the same light-hearted gaiety, and his letters and journals
are full of details of action mixed with jokes and funny stories; and
yet through all this rugged service he is suffering much from the
effects of his wound at Busaco; but his sufferings and privations are a
constant source of joking with him, and the hardships of the campaign
are borne in the same light-hearted spirit. So hard up are they for food
that he envies his wounded brothers over at the depôt of Coimbra, who
"are living well," he writes, "while we are on biscuits full of
maggots--and though not a bad soldier, hang me if I relish maggots; the
hard biscuit bothers my wounded jaw when there is not time to soak it."
A month after joining the army he thus describes the daily routine of
work: "Up at three A.M., marching at four, and halting at seven o'clock
at night, when we eat whatever we can get, from shoe-soles to bread and
butter." But physical annoyances are not the only ones he suffers from
at this time. Ever since Corunna he has had a grievance with the Horse
Guards. Neither with the Duke of York nor with his temporary successor,
old Sir David Dundas, is he a favourite; and promotion, although given
to every other officer in command of a battalion on the day of Corunna,
has been persistently denied to him. His letters and journals contain
many allusions to this unmerited treatment, and "old Pivot," as Dundas
was named in the army, gets small quarter at his hands. In 1811 the Duke
of York again became Commander-in-Chief. Napier is delighted, although
he sees little reason to hope for better luck. "The Duke of York's
advent will do Napiers no good," he writes, "but indeed old Davy going
to pot is luck enough for ten years." At last the tide turns; these
Napiers, whose names were in every gazette in the list of wounded, could
not well be denied the promotion given freely to men who were idling at
home in London, and in the middle of 1811 Charles is nominated to the
command of the Hundred-and-Second Regiment--a corps then just returned
from Botany Bay, where it had been guilty of grave acts of mutiny and
insubordination. It was indeed a change for this ardent soldier to quit
the stirring scenes of Peninsular strife and take up the thread of
military work in an English station, restoring discipline to a regiment
demoralised by a long sojourn in a convict settlement at the very end of
the globe. At first he hopes that his new corps will be sent to the
Peninsula where the storm of war thickens, as once again the great
Emperor is engaged with Russia, and all Europe watches with bated breath
the gigantic struggle; but he is to see no more of the Peninsula and its
war. After a short stay in the island of Guernsey he sails with his
regiment to Bermuda in July 1812, turning away from the great field of
European conflict and all those stupendous events which marked the
campaign of Moscow. His letters at this period are a curious indication
of his inexhaustible energy. Despite the contrast between the real
warfare he has just quitted and the dull life on this prison rock of
Bermuda, he still sets to work to drill his regiment, to improve its
discipline, and to check drunkenness among his troops, as energetically
as though barrack-square and orderly-room service had always been his
aim. He detests the islands and their people; he cannot make friends
with the governor, a pompous old fogey, who has the natural dislike
which the official owl has ever entertained towards genius in a
subordinate; he is still suffering from his fevers and wounds, but all
the same he works away at his regiment, sees that the men get all the
ration of bread they are entitled to (although it is usual in this
island to dock 25 per cent of the flour for some mysterious fund), and
drills officers and men into soldiers. In the midst of all this humdrum
work comes the news of the battle of Salamanca, to make the contrast of
life still more painful. "These glorious deeds in Spain," he writes,
"make me turn with disgust to the dullness of drill, and it is hard to
rouse myself to work--_yet duty must be done_." And all through this
Bermudian prison period we find the same devotion to his mother shown in
a hundred letters--a devotion which even makes that other love of his
life, military glory, lose its fascination for him. On New Year's Day,
1813, he thus writes: "A happy New Year to you, most precious mother,
and, old as you are, a great many of them. Oh, may I have the delight of
being within reach of you next New Year's Day. I would take another shot
through the head to be as near you as I was in Lisbon last year. My
broken jaw did not give me half the pain the life we lead here does, and
being so far from you." When his brother George marries at this time, he
writes: "Blessed mother, George's marriage delights me; you may now in
time have a dear animal of some kind with you instead of being left in
your old age by a pack of vagabond itinerant sons, getting wounded
abroad while you are grinding at home. The interest you have had about
us has never been of much pleasure, and the little links of a chain to
tie you to life may come--your lost great ones can only thus be
supplied."
War between the United States and England had now been declared, and
Napier quitted Bermuda in May, 1813, with joy to take his part in a
desultory campaign on the American coast. This campaign ended in
nothing, and it was little wonder it should have proved abortive. It was
three parts naval, two parts military; the men were made up of many
nations. There were three commanders, and, as Charles Napier remarks in
his journal, "It was a Council of War, and what Council of War ever
achieved a great exploit?" Several landings were attempted on the
American coast; the town of Little Hampton was taken and sacked, and
terrible atrocities committed by the foreign scum of which the
expedition was largely composed. The regular troops under Napier and the
Marines were guiltless of these atrocities--the Marine Artillery being
conspicuous by their discipline. "Never in my life," writes Napier,
"have I met soldiers like the Marine Artillery; they had it in their
power to join in the sack and refused. Should my life extend to
antediluvian years, their conduct will never be forgotten by me."
These fruitless operations on the shores of Chesapeake Bay continued for
five months. As usual we find Napier ever busy with his note-book
setting down his reflections, tracing from the rocks and shoals of the
wrecked expedition valuable charts of guidance for his own future. There
are bits scattered through these reflections which should be in the
text-books of every soldier. Here is one true to the letter to-day as
when it was written seventy years ago.
Our good admirals are such bad generals that there is little hope
of doing more than being made prisoners on the best terms. We shall
form three plans, or as many as there are admirals, and to these
mine will be added. From all--perhaps all bad--a worse will be
concocted, and of course will fail. We failed at Craney Island
because two admirals and a general commanded; and a republic of
commanders means defeat. I have seen enough to refuse a joint
command if it is offered to me; it is certain disgrace and failure
from the nature of things; the two services are incompatible. A
navy officer steps on shore and his zeal, his courage, and his
ignorance of troops make him think you are timid. A general in a
blue coat, or an admiral in a red one is mischief. Cockburn thinks
himself a Wellington, and Beckwith is sure the navy never produced
such an admiral as himself--between them we got beaten at Craney.
When to this divided command it is added that the plan of operations had
been in a great measure conceived by the sapient wisdom of Mr. John
Wilson Croker, the Secretary of the Admiralty, and embraced a proposal
from that authority to send a frigate to act on the Canadian lakes above
the Falls of Niagara, any surprise at ultimate failure will be lessened.
From the Chesapeake Napier moved in September, 1813, to Halifax, and
shortly after he arranged an exchange into his old regiment, the
Fiftieth, then engaged in the Pyrenees. He had now been on active
service for nearly five years. He had seen war in almost every phase.
Though a young man he was an old soldier; several times wounded, once a
prisoner, struck at by disease, weakened by the fevers of the Guadiana,
he was here in his thirty-second year as keen for active service as
when, fifteen years earlier, he had set out from Celbridge to begin a
soldier's career. It is curious to note in his writings how little the
nature of the man had changed through all this rough lesson of life. The
kings of his childhood still wear their crowns; the love of mother and
home are still fresh and bright in his heart; his hatred of tyranny,
and contempt of fools are as strong as ever; the thirst for military
glory is unquenched; but one feeling has steadily grown and increased
during all these years of toil and war and travel--it is his admiration
for the man he was fighting against. "From first to last," says William
Napier, "the great Napoleon was a wonder to him. Early in life, deceived
by the systematic vilification of that astounding genius, he felt
personal hatred ... but his sagacity soon pierced through prejudice, and
the Emperor's capacity created astonishment, which increased when his
own experience as a commander and ruler enabled him to estimate the
difficulties besetting those stations, and then also he could better
appreciate the frantic vituperation of enemies." We find this feeling of
admiration increasing with him as time goes on, and through all his
writings we see it constantly breaking out. In 1809 we find him entering
in his journal a note on the necessity of making war with energy, ending
thus: "If war is to be made, make it with energy. Cato the elder said
war should nourish war. Cato was a wise and energetic man. Cæsar agreed
with him and Cæsar was a cleverer man than Cato. Bonaparte, greater than
either, does the same." Napier was no taciturn holder of opinion; on the
contrary, he was ever ready to speak the thought that was in his mind,
and to back it up too with the sword that was at his side. Holding such
opinions at such a time, it is not difficult for us to conjecture what
their effect must have been on the circle of his friends and associates,
or how powerfully their expression must have fostered or kept alive the
prejudices of power and authority against him. That such prejudice
existed against him is very clear. For years he seemed to accept it as
the inevitable accompaniment of his liberal opinions, his relationship
with Mr. Fox, and his thorough independence of character. He seemed
ready to win his grade twice over, to pay double rates of blood and toil
for the recognition of reward; but as the years go on we find a change
coming over him in this respect, and though to the end of his life he
never ceases to laugh at the frowns of favour in high place, the laugh
gets harder as age increases, and the almost boisterous ridicule of
imbecility in power deepens into cynical contempt. Despite all his
anxiety to gain once more the field of European warfare, he was doomed
to disappointment. When he reached England from Nova Scotia the long war
against Napoleon was over, the Emperor was in Elba, the allies were busy
at Vienna, and mediocrity was everywhere in the ascendant. In December,
1814, Charles, finding himself on half-pay, entered the Military College
at Farnham; not that it had much to teach which he did not already know,
for war is the only school in which war can be learned, but his passion
for reading could be better indulged at the college than in any other
sphere of existence, and as the making of new history seemed stopped to
him by the fall of Napoleon, the next best thing was the reading of old
history. Here, then, we find him setting to work in 1814 at the study of
history, politics, the principles of civil government, questions of
political economy, commerce, poor-law, civil engineering, and
international law. He seemed to realise that a time was approaching when
the minds of Englishmen, so long diverted from their own affairs by the
red herring of foreign politics so adroitly drawn across the trail,
would again be bent upon reforming the terrible abuses which had grown
up in almost every department of the nation, and that the will of the
people and not the opinion of a faction would once more be made the helm
of the vessel of state. All at once, in the middle of these studies, the
news of "the most astounding exploit that ever established one man's
mastery over the rest of his species shook the world"--Napoleon had left
Elba and was again in France. As a house built of cards goes down before
a breath, so the political edifice which Metternich and Castlereagh and
their kind were laboriously building at Vienna fell to pieces at the
news. The poor parrot who had been placed in the Tuilleries, caged by
foreign bayonets, fled as the eagle winged its nearer flight to Notre
Dame, and France prepared once more to shed her blood against the men
who sought to force upon her a race of monarchs she despised.