In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most awful
scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds of
human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly unknown
to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by no man
with the gift of expression who could record for after time, in adequate
language, the majestic spectacle.
In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet appeared
who was personally in touch as a living witness of the countless deeds
of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance that were everywhere
displayed upon that immense far-stretched front.
But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be witnessed from
its beginning to its end by a single commander, and no scenes in
human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring than the awful ebb
and flow of a great combat in which the victory of armies and the fate
of nations hung in the balance.
The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this date
have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier been as
puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and the British
were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, and over
four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy had fallen in the
57th alone; not a third were left standing in the other regiments that
had been closely engaged throughout the day. Then Cole was ordered
up with his fourth division as a last hope, and this is how Sir William
Napier records their advance:--
"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
majesty the British soldier fights.
"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up,
and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and
foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to
charge the advancing line.
"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.
"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread
shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of
every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant
cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly,
and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour
of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
triumphant on the fatal hill!
* * * * *
"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
places it on his bleeding front.
"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
dying men."
Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of
the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the
end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall
upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--
"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
of the Veterans' services.
"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
plains and mountains of the Peninsula."
Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased
modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and
honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe
that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer
at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.
Your loving old
G.P.
22