HOME--LAST ILLNESS--DEATH
In March, 1851, Napier reached England. Many times, returning from some
scene of war or foreign service, had he seen the white cliffs rise out
of the blue waves. This was to be his last arrival, and perhaps it was
the saddest in all his life. "I retire with a reprimand," he had said a
few months earlier; and although he tried hard to keep in view the fact
that in circumstances of sudden and grave danger to the State he had
acted firmly, courageously, honestly, and with absolute sense and wisdom
in every step he had taken, still all that only served to drive deeper
into his injustice-hating heart the sting of unmerited and unjust
censure.
He came home to die. Not all at once, indeed, did the end come. Such
gnarled old oaks do not wither of a sudden, no matter how rude may be
the shock; but the iron had entered into his soul, and the months of
life that still remained were to be chiefly passed in pain and
suffering. At first, after his arrival, business took him to London, and
the long-dreamt-of happy gardening-ground in Hampshire was denied him.
All through life he had hated the great city. "To be in London is to be
a beast--a harnessed and driven beast--and nothing more," he writes.
Neither its dinners nor its compliments nor its "pompous insolence" had
ever given him the least concern. Like another great soldier who, in
this year, 1851, was about to begin that military career which was to
render his name so famous, Charles Napier had a contempt for the capital
of his country. When the Directors of the East India Company had been on
their knees to him, and the Lord Mayor and the rest of the great dining
dignitaries had been begging his attendance at their banquets during the
Punjaub disasters, he had not been in the least elated; and neither now
was he depressed by their studied neglect of him when danger had passed
by. "I never was in spirits at a London party," he writes, "since I came
out of my teens."
In April he gets away to Oaklands, and prepares to settle down to the
repose of a country life. "At last a house of mine own," he says. "All
my life I have longed for this." But scarcely is he at home ere the
disease, contracted in Scinde, increased in India, and aggravated by the
ill-usage of the past year, brings him to the verge of death. He rallies
again, but his thoughts are now set upon the great leave-taking. In his
journal we seem to see him all the clearer as the end approaches. "When
I die may the poor regret me," he writes; "if they do, their judgment
will be more in my favour than anything else. My pride and happiness
through life has been that the soldiers loved me.... I treated every
soldier as my friend and comrade, whatever his rank was." What a
contempt he has for the upstart in uniform, the martinet, the thing with
the drawl and eyeglass! "As military knowledge decays, aristocratic, or
rather upstart arrogance, increases," he writes. "A man of high breeding
is hand and glove with his men, while the son of your millionaire hardly
speaks to a soldier." Then he turns to the "coming world and all those I
hope to meet there--Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, and my
father." But the long-looked-for peace of life in the country--the
garden, the pets, and the rest of it--is not to be. He has a beautiful
Pyrenean dog, Pastor by name. A neighbouring farmer wantonly shoots this
noble animal. Napier tries to punish the man at law. The case is clear
against the dog-killer, but the local jury acquits him in spite of judge
and evidence. "Trial by jury is a farce," we read in the journal. "Why,
if Goslin [the dog-killer] had murdered his wife and child, they [the
jury] could not have treated him more gently!"
Then come other worries of a more serious character. The East India
Directors are doing all that wealth and power can do to take from him
his Scinde prize-money. He was not the Commander-in-Chief of the army,
they say, with a monstrous effrontery; and of course they have anonymous
scribblers everywhere at work to blacken and defame their enemy. So,
between the local numskull murdering his pet dogs and the cosmopolitan
master-shop-keeper vilifying his character, the last months of the old
soldier's life are vexed and unhappy.
Still, as the end draws nearer many bright gleams of sunshine come to
gladden the old man's heart. Not only is the great heart of the nation
with him, but all the kings of thought are on his side too. When the
great Duke passes to his rest no figure in the throng of war-worn
veterans around the coffin was so eagerly sought for as that of the man
who, forty-two years earlier, had waved his hat to Lord Wellington when,
unable to speak as he was carried desperately wounded from the fierce
fight at Busaco, he thought this mute farewell was to be a last adieu.
Men noted too with inward sense of satisfaction at the scene in St.
Paul's that "the eagle face and bold strong eye" of the veteran who
stood by the dead Duke's bier gave promise that England had a great
war-leader still left to her.
But the "eagle face and the bold strong eye" were only those echoes of
bygone life which are said to be strong as the shadows gather. And the
shadows were gathering fast now. In June, 1853, the illness that was to
prove mortal began. Still, we find him writing letters to help some old
soldier who had served him in Scinde, and in the very last letter that
he seems ever to have written, the names of Sergeant Power and Privates
Burke and Maloney stand witness to the love for the private soldier
which this heroic heart carried to the very verge of the grave. In July
he was brought to Oaklands, as he wished that the end should come to him
in his own home. There, stretched upon a little camp-bed in a room on
the ground-floor of the house, he waited for death. It came with those
slow hours of pain and suffering which so frequently mark the passing
away of those in whom the spirit of life has been strong, and who have
fought death so often that he seems afraid to approach and seize such
tough antagonists. Frequently during the weeks of illness the old
instincts would assert themselves in the sufferer. He would ask his
veteran brother to defend his memory when he was gone, from the attacks
of his enemies; or he would send messages through his son-in-law to the
"poor soldiers," to tell them how he had loved them; and once he asked
that his favourite charger, Red Rover--the horse that had carried him
through the storm of battle at Meanee--might be brought to the bedside,
so that for a last time he might speak a word to and caress the animal;
but the poor beast seemed to realise the mortal danger of his old
master, and shrank startled from the sick couch. As the month of August
drew to a close it was evident to those who lovingly watched beside the
sufferer that the end was close at hand. It came on the early morning of
the 29th. The full light of the summer morning was streaming into the
room, lighting up the shields, swords, and standards of Eastern fight
which hung upon the walls; the old colours of the Twenty-Second, rent
and torn by shot, moved gently in the air, fresh with the perfume of the
ripened summer; wife, children, brothers, servants, and two veteran
soldiers who had stood behind him in battle, watched--some praying, some
weeping, some immovable and fixed in their sorrow--the final
dissolution; and just as the heroic spirit passed to Him who had sent it
upon earth, filled with so many noble aspirations and generous
sympathies, a brave man who stood near caught the flags of the
Twenty-Second Regiment from their resting-place and waved these
shattered emblems of battle above the dying soldier. So closed the life
of Charles Napier. When a great soldier who had carried the arms of Rome
into remotest regions lay dying in the imperial city, the historian
Tacitus tells us that "in the last glimpse of light" the hero "looked
with an asking eye for something that was absent." Not so with Napier.
Those he had loved so devotedly, those who had fought around him so
bravely, those who had shielded his name in life from the malice of
enemies, and who were still to do battle for him when he was in the
grave--all these loving, true, and faithful figures met his last look on
earth.
They laid Charles Napier beneath the grass of the old garrison graveyard
in Portsmouth, for the dull resentment of oligarchic faction is
strongest in the death of heroes, and a studied silence closed the doors
of the two great cathedrals of the capital against ashes which would
have honoured even the roll of the mighty dead who sleep within these
hallowed precincts. Faction, for the moment dressed in power, forgot
that by neglecting to place the body of Charles Napier with his peers,
it was only insulting the dust of ten centuries of English heroism; and
yet even in this neglect the animosity of power misplaced was but able
to effect its own discomfiture, for Napier sleeps in death as he lived
in life--among the brave and humble soldiers he had loved to lead; and
neither lofty dome nor glory of Gothic cathedral could fitter hold his
ashes than the narrow grave beside the shore where the foot of Nelson
last touched the soil of England.
It was on September 8th, 1853, that the funeral took place at
Portsmouth. Sixty thousand people--and all the soldiers who could come
from miles around, not marching as a matter of duty, but flocking of
their own accord and at their own expense to do honour to their dead
comrade--followed the procession in reverent silence. Well might the
soldiers of England mourn, not indeed for the leader but for themselves.
Little more than one year had to pass ere these Linesmen, these
Highlanders, these Riflemen, and twenty thousand of their brethren,
lions though they were, would be dying like sheep on the plateau before
Sebastopol--dying for the want of some real leader of men to think for
them, to strive for them, to lead them. Two years later to a day, on
September 8th, 1855, men looking gloomily at the Russian Redan and its
baffled assailants might well remember "the eagle face and bold strong
eye" and vainly long for one hour of Meanee's leading.
Nations, no matter how powerful, cannot afford to ill-use or neglect
their heroes, for punishment follows swiftly such neglect, and falls
where least expected. In an old Irish manuscript that has but lately
seen the light, there is given in a few terse words a definition of the
attributes of character which go to form a leader of men. "Five things,"
says this quaint chronicle, "are required in a general. Knowledge,
Valour, Foresight, Authoritie, and Fortune. He that is not endowed for
all or for most of these virtues is not to be reputed fit for his
charge. Nor can this glory be purchased but by practice and proof; for
the greatest fencer is not always the best fighter, nor the fairest
tilter the ablest soldier, nor the primest favourite in court the
fittest commander in camp." How aptly this description of a leader fits
Charles Napier the reader can best judge. Knowledge, Valour, and
Foresight he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Authority, so
pertinaciously denied him by his chiefs, he asserted over men without
the smallest difficulty. Fortune in the field was also largely his. How
hard he practised to perfect all these gifts, and how repeated was
their proof, no one who has read his life will venture to deny. But
Charles Napier was many other things besides a great general. He had a
hundred gifts and graces of character that must have made him famous in
any sphere of life he had selected, and made him famous, not by the
passive assent given by his fellows to his possession of some local
eminence of character showing large amid the level of their own
mediocrity, but by the sheer force of the genius that was in him, the
flame of which was certain to force its way to the surface, despite all
the efforts of envy to keep it down. Never lived there soldier who had
so little greatness thrust upon him. From the day he began his military
career to the moment he hung up his father's sword at Oaklands he had to
win every grade and every honour three times over. He seemed, indeed, to
delight in the consciousness that he possessed this triple power of
conquest. Do what they would to deny him, he would go out again and
force them to acknowledge him. And it was this inward consciousness of
power that made him despise the trappings of rank or position which
other men held so high. Like his great ancestor, Henry of Navarre, he
laughed at pomp and parade. "Pomp, parade, and severe gravity of
expression," said the great Bourbon, "belong to those who feel that
without them they would have nothing that would impress respect. By the
grace of God I have in myself that which makes me think I am worthy of
being a king." So, too, like the Béarnois, Napier grounded his greatness
deep down in the welfare of the peasant, in his love for them, and in
the first prerogative of true leadership, the right of thinking and
toiling for the benefit of the poor and humble. "My predecessors
thought themselves dishonoured by knowing the value of a teston," Henry
used to say. "I am anxious to know the value of half a denier, and what
difficulty the poor have to get it. For I want all my subjects to have a
fowl in the pot every Sunday." So was it with this soldier who was sixth
in descent from the first Bourbon, and who fought so hard to keep the
last on a throne his race would never have forfeited had they but
remembered this golden rule of all true kingship.
Two things Napier carried through life of infinite importance--memory of
home and hero-worship. He moved through life between these two
lode-stones. The noble independence of mind possessed by his father, the
ocean of love and tenderness of his mother, the associations of his
early home, these were ever present through the wildest and roughest
scenes of life--hallowed memories, green spots that deserts could not
wither, nor fiercest fighting destroy. And in front lay the lofty ideal,
the noble aspiration. Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon--from early
manhood these names were magnets to lift his mind above low desires and
sordid cares, and when the shadows of death were gathering they still
stood as lofty lights above the insults and the injustice of his
enemies.
Carious too is it to watch in the career of Charles Napier how, out of
the garden of memory which he kept green in his heart, many flowers
sprang up as time went on, how his faith in an all-wise Providence
strengthened and increased, how life beyond the grave became a positive
necessity to him, how he looked forward to the time when men will think
only of "acting right in the eyes of God, for then Christ will rule the
world. What result will follow this utter defeat of the evil spirit, the
God in heaven only knows, but the work will be Christ's work, and He
will perhaps come to rule us with eternal life and happiness for those
who have adhered to the Good Spirit--the God, who will then direct all
things to His will." So must it ever be with the truly great minds which
are based on what Mr. Ruskin calls "an infinitude of tenderness." They
no more can live without religion than an oak-tree can grow without the
sun. The mushroom, and the fungi, and the orchid of the human species
may indeed flourish in the night of denial, but the hero is as certain
to believe in God as the eagle is to seek the mountain-top.
Great lives have two lessons--one for the class to which the life
belonged, the other to the nation which gave it birth. The latter is the
lesson of paramount importance; for as the past is ever a mirror held up
to the present in which to read the future, so the life of a dead hero
may be said to mark for statesmen and rulers the rocks and shallows of
their system of government. Never perhaps did a nation pay more swiftly
and to the full the penalty of being blind to the real nature of the son
which had been born to her than did England in her neglect of Napier.
There are those who, writing and speaking of him since his death, have
regretted his "utterances of passion," his "combativeness," his want of
"serenity." "They [Charles Napier and his brother William] lived in
storm instead of above the clouds," wrote one of their greatest admirers
when both brothers had passed away; and if this has been said since they
have left us, a hundredfold stronger was the censure of the world when
they still moved among their fellow-men. But the passion and the
vehemence of the Napiers was only the ocean wave of their hatred of
oppression thundering against the bulwarks of tyranny. They should have
dwelt above the clouds, forsooth, made less noise, toned down the
vehemence of their denunciation. How easy all this is after the battle
is over, and when we are sitting in a cushioned chair with our feet to
the fire! But find me anything overthrown without noise, my friend--any
citadel of human wrong captured, any battle ever won by the
above-the-cloud method,--and I'll say you are right about these Napiers.
Summer lightning is a very pretty thing, but lightning that has thunder
behind it is something more than pretty. But perhaps I am wrong. They
tell us now that battles are in future to be silent affairs--powder is
to make no smoke, rifles and artillery are to go off without noise;
there is to be no "vehemence" or "passion" about anything; you are to
turn a noiseless wheel and the whole thing will be quietly done. All
this is very nice, but I have an idea that when our sapient scientific
soldier has arrived at all this noiseless excellence he will be inclined
to follow the example of his rifle, and go off himself, making as little
noise as possible in the operation, but in a direction opposite to his
gun. So, being doubtful as to this question of noise, I turn to Charles
Napier once more, and strangely enough this is what I read: "The rifle
perfected will ring the knell of British superiority. The _charging
shouts_ of England's athletic soldiers will no longer be heard. Who will
gain by this new order of fighting? Certainly the most numerous
infantry. The soldier will think how he can hide himself from his enemy
instead of how to drive a bayonet into that enemy's body."[5]
One other point ere my task is done. The present is pre-eminently the
age when men long most to ring the coin of success, and hear it jingle
during life. People will say of Napier that he stood in his own light.
It is true he told the truth, but look what it cost him. Had he kept
silence he would have been made a peer; they would have buried him in
St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, and put a grand monument over his
grave. Hearing which and thinking upon it one comes to ask a simple
question,--What is success? As the world translates the phrase, Napier
was perhaps not a successful man. Yet he lived to see the principles he
had struggled for through life, and suffered for in his struggles,
everywhere triumphant. The great circle of human sympathy growing wider
with every hour, and some new tribe among the toiling outcasts of men
taken within its long-closed limits. He lived to see a Greater Britain
and a larger Ireland growing beyond the seas--fulfilling, in regions
never dreamt of by Canning, the work of liberty and progress which that
Minister had vainly imagined was to be the mission of the South American
Republics.
And, coming from the great field of human justice and human liberty, in
which he had ever been a manful fighter, to the narrower battle-ground
of his own personal strifes and contentions, he lived, not indeed to see
the truth of his opinions and the justice of his conduct fully
vindicated by the unerring hand of Time, but near enough to the hour of
that vindication to behold its dawn already reddening the horizon. When
the light was made manifest to the world four years after the hero's
death, the man who had stood faithful sentinel through so many years
over his brother's fame--William Napier--was still left to hail the
full-risen beam, and to show to a careless world the length and breadth
of that signal vindication. And long before the lower crowd could see
the light, it had flashed upon the great solitary summits. "A lynx-eyed,
fiery man, with the spirit of an old knight in him," wrote Carlyle, one
year before the Indian Mutiny. "More of a hero than any modern I have
seen for a long time; a singular veracity one finds in him, not in his
words alone, but in his actions, judgments, aims, in all that he thinks,
and does, and says, which indeed I have observed is the root of all
greatness or real worth in human creatures, and properly the first, and
also the earliest, attribute of what we call _genius_ among men." And
then comes a bit which it would be well to write very high and very
large in all the schools and examination rooms in the land. "The path of
such a man through the foul jungle of this world, the struggle of
Heaven's inspiration against the terrestrial fooleries, cupidities, and
cowardices, cannot be other than tragical, but the man does tear out a
bit of way for himself too; strives towards the good goal, inflexibly
persistent, till his long rest come. The man does leave his mark behind
him, ineffaceable, beneficent to all; maleficent to none. Anarchic
stupidity is wide as the night; victorious wisdom is but as a lamp in
it, shining here and there."
So wrote of Charles Napier the greatest thinker of our age--that is the
mountain-top. If you want to find the other extreme of estimate, you
will go to Trafalgar Square, and on the pedestal of Napier's statue
there read--"Erected by Public Subscription, the most numerous
Contributors being Private Soldiers." Between these two grades of
admiration lies the life of Charles James Napier.
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] _Defects of Indian Government._