FOOTNOTE:

FOOTNOTE:[1]Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke.

[1]Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke.

When Sir John Moore, on January 10th, 1809, reached the summit of the last hill that overlooked the city and harbour of Corunna, he beheld a roadstead destitute of shipping. "I have often heard it said that I was unlucky," he remarked to his aide-de-camp, George Napier, as they climbed the land side of this eminence; "if the ships are not in the harbour, I shall believe in my evil fortune." There were no ships in sight, and the heart of the gallant soldier must have known a pang such as can come to few men in life. Yet fate, though seemingly so cruel at this moment, was, as she often is, kind and merciful even when striking hardest. Had the winds blown that would have permitted the fleet to move from Vigo to Corunna, the whole English army would have embarked on January 11th and 12th before Soult had concentrated his pursuing columns; there would have been no battle of Corunna, and the memory of Moore would not have been a deathless pride to his countrymen. When the ships hove in sight on the evening of the 14th the French divisions were lining the heights in front of the British position; and on the morning of January 16th the British army, now reducedto fifteen thousand men, drew up in line of battle on the crest of the sloping ridge which covered Corunna to the south. The sick and wounded had been already embarked, the magazines blown up, the cavalry and artillery horses killed, and nothing remained but to strike with the infantry a last blow for honour. Three weeks earlier, when the first retrograde movement from Sahagun to Benevente had become imperative, Moore issued an order to his army which contained words of very significant import. The disorder of the troops had already commenced, and the officers, some of them of high rank but completely ignorant of the real state of affairs, had begun those murmurs and criticisms to which more than to any other cause the disasters of the retreat were to be traced. After telling his soldiers that they must obey and not expect him to tell them the reason of the orders he gave them, the General went on: "When it is proper to fight a battle he will do it, and he will choose the time and place he thinks most fit; in the meantime, he begs the officers and soldiers of the army to attend diligently, to discharge their parts, and to leave to him and to the general officers the decision of measures which belong to them alone." Now the time and place had come. Nothing but Moore's knowledge of the situation had saved his army from falling at Benevente into the grasp of the giant who had seemingly annihilated time, space, and mountains in order to crush him; but matters were now different. Napoleon was already in Paris, and not more than twenty thousand tired Frenchmen stood over yonder on the parallel heights beyond Elvina, with scant supply of food and ammunition; while he was here at Corunna, with well-stockedmagazines, his soldiers recruited by a three days' rest, new muskets in their hands replacing the battered and broken weapons of the retreat, and themoraleand discipline of his army restored by the magic touch of battle.

The forenoon of the 16th passed without any hostile movement. Both armies faced each other on the opposing ridges—so near, indeed, that the unassisted eye could trace the slightest stir on either side across the intervening valley. Such things are not possible now. The zone of fight has been pushed back by modern weapons to distance that has taken from war all the pomp and pageantry that used to attend rival armies drawn up for battle. The narrow valley that lay between the armies was dotted with villages set amid vineyards. Three of these villages were held by the English pickets, and the right village of the three, Elvina, marked the front of that part of the British line where it curved back towards Corunna, forming a kind of salient to the more extended French line of battle which overlapped our right flank. At this critical point in the English position stood the brigade to which Napier's regiment, the Fiftieth, belonged, the Fourth and the Forty-Second being the other battalions completing this brigade. Opposite, on the French side, Mermet's division was drawn up; but more formidable still were the muzzles of eleven guns—eight and twelve-pounders—which from a commanding height, and only six hundred yards from the village of Elvina, threatened to obliquely rake the English line.

As the morning wore on without hostile movement on the part of the French, Moore, believing that his enemy did not intend to accept the battle he had offered since the preceding day, made preparations to embarkhis army during the coming night. His reserve, being nearest the roadstead, was to leave the shore as soon as dusk set in, and one by one the brigades opposite the French were to fall back under cover of darkness to the town, and there enter the boats which were to carry them to the ships. These arrangements having been made, the General mounted his charger in Corunna about one o'clockP.M.to visit his army and give the necessary directions for the movement to the shore. He moved slowly out with a heavy heart. Fate seemed steadily set against him. The enemy in front would not attack, and beyond the sea—there, where these vessels were so soon to carry him and his army—he knew but too well that there was another enemy waiting to write him down and vote him down, and to heap sneer and censure upon his actions. All at once there came the sound of a heavy cannon. Another and another shot rolled round the echoing hills. The fine face flushed with the light of hope, spurs were driven deep into the charger's flanks, and, galloping at full speed along the rocky causeway, Moore was soon upon the field—the battle of Corunna had begun.

The right wing of the English army, standing in line on the ridge above the village of Elvina, was exposed to the full force of the eleven-gun battery, whose cannonade had thus opened the battle. Napier's regiment, the Fiftieth, stood just over Elvina, his pickets occupying that village. As each shot gave the enemy a better distance for the succeeding ones, the range was soon found, and the round shot, falling with accuracy upon the line, tore gaps through it and ploughed the surface of the surrounding ground. For a time the men stood silent andmotionless under this trying ordeal, but as increasing accuracy caused more frequent casualties in the ranks, a murmur arose from the soldiers, and the cry of "Where is the General?" was audible along the line. Of all the work of war, that of standing steady doing nothing under fire tries the nerves most sorely, and as at this moment in the opening scene at Corunna the forward movement of the French columns became visible, it was no wonder that anxiety for the presence of the chief in whom they so implicitly believed should find vent in words. They had not long to wait the answer to their question. We have seen how the first sound of cannon had roused Moore from his transient gloom, and made him spur forward along the road from Corunna. The picture of his arrival at the scene of action has been given us by Charles Napier, and there are few more striking bits of battle-painting. Napier is standing in front of his line, his pickets are falling back from Elvina before the advancing French skirmishers; behind the enemy's light troops Mermet's heavy column of infantry is coming on rapidly to the attack, their shouts ofEn avant!rising above the crack of musketry or the boom of the battery whose shot is tearing fast through the line.

Suddenly (says Napier) I heard the gallop of horses, and turning saw Moore. He came at speed, and pulled up so sharp and close to me that he seemed to have alighted from the air, man and horse looking at the approaching foe with an intenseness that seemed to concentrate all feeling in their eyes. The sudden stop of the animal, a cream-coloured one with black tail and mane, had cast the latter streaming forward, its ears were pushed out like horns, while its eyes flashed fire, and it snorted loudly with expanded nostrils, expressing terror, astonishment, and muscular exertion. Myfirst thought was, it will be away like the wind; but then I looked at the rider and the horse was forgotten. Thrown on its haunches, the animal came sliding and dashing the dirt up with its forefeet, thus bending the General forward almost to its neck; but his head was thrown back, and his look more keenly piercing than I ever before saw it. He glanced to the right and left, and then fixed his eyes intently on the enemy's advancing column, at the same time grasping the reins with both hands, and pressing the horse firmly with his knees; his body seemed thus to deal with the animal, while his mind was intent on the enemy, and his aspect was one of searching intentness beyond the power of words to describe. For awhile he looked, and then galloped to the left without uttering a word.

Shortly after, Moore came back to the Fiftieth again. The fight had thickened, Elvina had been carried by the French column, and the enemy's light troops had begun to ascend the foot of the British position. Napier asks if he may send his grenadier company down the slope? Moore thinks they may fire upon our own pickets; but Napier tells him that the pickets have already fallen back. "Then send out your grenadiers," replies the General, and away he gallops again to another part of the field. Once more he comes back to where Napier is standing. The round shot are falling thickly about, the enemy's attack is now fully developed, and it is evident he means to try his best at this salient of the position to turn the English right and cut the army from its base; but he has not infantry for such a movement. A large proportion of his total force is cavalry, and they are of little use in the enclosures and high fenced lanes that cover the ground. While Moore stands talking this third time to Napier a round shot from the French battery strikes full between the two men.Moore's horse wheels on his haunches, but the rider forces him to front again, while he asks Napier if he has been hit. "No, sir." Then comes a second shot plump into the right of the Forty-Second, which is next in line to the left. A Highland grenadier has had his leg torn off, and in the agony of the wound he cries out. A wave of agitation begins to pass through the men nearest the sufferer; the gap in the ranks is slower to fill up than when men had fallen who were silent. Moore rides to the spot. "This is nothing, my lads," he says; "keep your ranks; take the man to the rear." Then addressing the wounded man, he says: "My good fellow, don't cry out so, we must bear these things quietly." Then he rode to another part of the field; but soon returning again to the ridge above Elvina, he directed the Forty-Second to descend the slope and attack that place. A fierce struggle ensued amid the enclosures and houses of the village. Napier, seeing the Forty-Second pass his flank, ordered his regiment to advance in line upon the village. He made this movement entirely upon his own responsibility; for except when Moore was present the initiative of command appeared to be wholly wanting among the English generals at Corunna. Passing the Forty-Second, Napier carried his regiment through Elvina, until at the side of the village nearest to the enemy his advance was checked by an overwhelming fire. So deadly was the storm of cannon and musketry at this point that both the colours went down almost together, as the ensigns who carried them were shot. Napier's sword-belt was shot off, and the Fiftieth being the advanced regiment in the battle found itself encircled on three sides by a sheet of fire. Looking to his front,Napier saw the heavy battery now close above him. The idea at once occurred to him to assault it; and gathering by great personal exertions about thirty of his men and three or four officers together, he led them straight upon the battery. But his efforts were useless. The companies had become broken and disordered in carrying the village: the Forty-Second had not continued its advance to Elvina; and no supporting corps was sent to strengthen and secure the success which the Fiftieth had achieved. This forlorn hope leading straight upon the battery went down between a fire which smote them almost as much from their friends in rear as from their enemies in front, and by the time the foot of the steep ascent was gained, Charles Napier found himself almost alone before the enemy. The reason why this bold onslaught upon the battery, which was the key of the French position, was thus allowed to run out into a useless sacrifice of life was easily explained later on, although at the moment Napier, knowing nothing of what was happening in his rear, angrily cursed at the supposed hesitation of his men to follow him. To explain the unfortunate result of this attack we must go back to the original position on the ridge. Scarcely had Napier led the Fiftieth upon Elvina than Moore rode up again to the point where he had before stood, and casting his eye upon the tide of battle flowing below him took in at once the situation. Riding forward in the wake of the Fiftieth, he cheered on that regiment to the attack. "Well done, Fiftieth; well done,mymajors," he cried; for Napier's promotion to field-rank had been due to his influence, and Stanhope the other major was endeared to him by stronger ties. Charles Stanhope was thebrother of the woman to whom Moore a few hours later was to send his last message. When thirty years later men criticised with idle censure the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, they forgot how much she had suffered before they had been born. Austerlitz had broken the heart of her illustrious uncle; her lover and her brother slept on the battle-field of Corunna.

The advance of the Fiftieth and Forty-Second from the ridge had left a gap in that part of the line of battle. Turning to one of his staff, Moore directed him to ride back to the reserve and bring up a battalion of Guards to fill the vacant place; then noticing that some companies of the Forty-Second had got into confusion and were falling back, he called out to that regiment to "remember Egypt," and reminded "his brave Highlanders" that they had "still their bayonets left." It was at this moment that a round shot from the battery on the height struck him. The hurtle and crash of the ball made the cream-coloured charger plunge into the air, and the rider fell backward to the ground, but so firm had been his seat that those who were looking on did not believe the shot had struck, so quietly did he seem to fall. This impression was further strengthened when they saw the tall figure half rise from the ground, while his look sought the enemy's ranks with the same calm and intent expression which his face had before worn. But though no sound or sign of suffering seemed to come between the General's mental consciousness and the battle before him, all the worst hurt that shot can do to poor humanity had been done. The left shoulder had been shattered, the arm hung by a shred, and the flesh and muscles of breast and side hadbeen terribly lacerated. When those who were near became aware of the dreadful nature of the wound they tried to disengage the sword from the mangled side. Who can ever forget the dying man's words as he noticed the kindly attempt: "Let it be. I had rather it should leave the field with me." Then he is placed in a blanket and carried to the rear by some Highlanders of the Forty-Second. By this time a couple of surgeons have come up; but he knows the wound is past human cure, and he tells them to go to the soldiers to whom they can still be of use. As they carry him farther back from the fight he makes the bearers often pause and turn him round again to the front, so that he may see for a little longer how nobly his soldiers hold their ground. When they bring him to his quarters his French servant François is overcome with tears at the sight, but Moore says quietly to him, "My friend, this is nothing." And so the day closes, and darkness brings news that the attack of the enemy has failed, and that the ridge from Elvina to the sea is still held by the British. Then, with the honour of his soldiers safe, he turns to his friends. He forgets no one; the interests of aides-de-camp and of the members of his staff are remembered; he sends messages to many friends—one in particular to Lady Hester Stanhope—and once only his voice fails; it is when he mentions the name of his mother. Then, as the shades of rapidly-approaching death gathered closer, it seemed that the images of the cowardly men at home, who, he felt, were certain

Lightly to speak of the spirit that's gone,And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him,

Lightly to speak of the spirit that's gone,

And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him,

arose before his fading vision, for with a great effort heappealed from those "posthumous calumniators" to "the people," suddenly exclaiming, "I hope the people of England will be satisfied. I hope my country will do me justice." That dying hope has been realised. Few names stand in purer lustre than that of Sir John Moore. Fortunately immortality is not always measured by success. The chiefs and people of England, who know so little of real war themselves, are perhaps the hardest censors upon military misfortune. Moore's memory was vehemently assailed by the Ministers and Government officials of the day, who tried to screen their own flagrant shortcomings by calumniating the name of the heroic soldier who was no longer there to answer them, and all the paid scribblers and talkers of the time were busy at their truculent work. But justice came at last, earlier and more conspicuously from the enemies who had fought against Moore than from the nation for whose honour and in whose service he had died. Soult and Ney raised a monument to his memory at Corunna almost at the time when Southey, finding out what the world had long known, viz. that although the King might make him a laureate, nature had not made him a poet, began to attempt to write history and to criticise military genius. But a greater soldier than Soult or Ney had still earlier placed the military fame of Moore beyond the reach of little minds. When Napoleon heard of Moore's march from Salamanca to Sahagun, in December, 1808, he exclaimed, "I shall advance against Sir John Moore in person. He is now the only general fit to contend with me." "Where shall we find such a king?" asks William Napier in a letter written from the battle-fields of Portugal two years afterCorunna. Fifteen years later the first volume of thePeninsular Warappeared, and if the spirits of the illustrious dead can read the books that record their actions on earth, that of Moore might well exclaim, "Where has king found such a chronicler?"

We must go back to Charles Napier, fighting fiercely in the enclosures between Elvina and the great battery, and raging because the supports which might have turned his withered effort into success were denied him. We have seen the reason of this denial. The fall of Moore paralysed the thinking power of those who succeeded to the command. Instead of supporting the attack of the Fiftieth, orders were sent to recall that regiment, and Napier and the few men who were still with him were left alone in the extreme front. This withdrawal from Elvina allowed the French light troops to surround Napier's party. Finding himself thus enclosed in a net, he gathered the few survivors around him and made a dash to cut his way through to the English line, but it was too late. He was surrounded and made prisoner. Both sides would appear to have exhausted their ammunition at this point, and the fight was now entirely of cold steel. It is so full of graphic detail, and gives so many glimpses of national characteristics under stress of battle, that it had best be told in Napier's own words.

I said to the four soldiers [Irish privates of the Fiftieth and Forty-Second] "Follow me and we will cut through them." Then with a shout I rushed forward. The Frenchmen had halted, but now ran on to us, and just as my spring was made the wounded leg failed, and I felt a stab inthe back; it gave me no pain, but felt cold, and threw me on my face. Turning to rise, I saw the man who had stabbed me making a second thrust. Whereupon, letting go my sabre, I caught his bayonet by the socket, turned the thrust, and raising myself by the exertion, grasped his firelock with both hands, thus in mortal struggle regaining my feet. His companions had now come up, and I heard the dying cries of the four men with me, who were all instantly bayoneted. We had been attacked from behind by men not before seen, as we stood with our backs to a doorway, out of which must have rushed several men, for we were all stabbed in an instant, before the two parties coming up the road reached us. They did so, however, just as my struggle with the man who had wounded me was begun. That was a contest for life, and being the strongest I forced him between myself and his comrades, who appeared to be the men whose lives I had saved when they pretended to be dead on our advance through the village. They struck me with their muskets, clubbed and bruised me much, whereupon, seeing no help near, and being overpowered by numbers and in great pain from my wounded leg, I called outJe me rend, remembering the expression correctly from an old story of a fat officer whose name being James called outJemmy round. Finding they had no disposition to spare me, I kept hold of the musket, vigorously defending myself with the body of the little Italian who had first wounded me; but I soon grew faint, or rather tired. At that moment a tall dark man came up, seized the end of the musket with his left hand, whirled his brass-hilted sabre round, and struck me a powerful blow on the head, which was bare, for my cocked hat had fallen off. Expecting the blow would finish me, I had stooped my head in hopes it might fall on my back, or at least on the thickest part of the head, and not on the left temple. So far I succeeded, for it fell exactly on the top, cutting me to the bone but not through it. Fire sparkled from my eyes. I fell on my knees, blinded but not quite losing my senses, and holding still on to the musket. Recovering in a moment I saw a florid, handsome young French drummer holding the arm of the dark Italian, who was in the act of repeating the blow. Quarter was then given;but they tore my pantaloons in tearing my watch and purse from my pocket and a little locket of hair which hung round my neck. But while this went on two of them were wounded, and the drummer, Guibert, ordered the dark man who had sabred me to take me to the rear. When we began to move, I resting on him because hardly able to walk, I saw him look back over his shoulder to see if Guibert was gone; and so did I, for his rascally face made me suspect him. Guibert's back was towards us; he was walking off, and the Italian again drew his sword, which he had before sheathed. I called out to the drummer, "This rascal is going to kill me; brave Frenchmen don't kill prisoners." Guibert ran back, swore furiously at the Italian, shoved him away, almost down, and putting his arms round my waist supported me himself. Thus this generous Frenchman saved me twice, for the Italian was bent upon slaying.

Thus was Napier taken prisoner. From this narrative we get many side-lights upon many subjects. Firstly, the composite character of Napoleon's army in Spain, and the fact that the Frank fights with the chivalry of the true soldier; it is the Italian who is all for murder. Secondly, we find all through this narrative of Napier's that our own soldiers were almost wholly Irish. This Fiftieth Regiment which he commands is called the West Kent, but its soldiers are almost to a man Irish.[2]The Forty-Second man who appears on the scene, although nominally a Highlander, is in reality an Irishman. Now, as we proceed further in the narrative, we come to one of the most singular pictures of a Celtic soldier ever put upon paper.

We had not proceeded far up the lane (continues Napier), when we met a soldier of the Fiftieth walking at a rapidpace. He instantly halted, recovered his arms, and cocked his piece, looking fiercely at us to make out how it was. My recollection is that he levelled at Guibert, and that I threw up his musket, calling out, "For God's sake, don't fire. I am a prisoner, badly wounded, and can't help you; surrender."—"For why would I surrender?" he cried aloud, with the deepest of Irish brogues. "Because there are at least twenty men upon you."—"Well, if I must surrender—there," said he, dashing down his firelock across their legs and making them jump, "there's my firelock for yez." Then coming close up he threw his arm round me, and giving Guibert a push that sent him and one or two more reeling against a wall, he shouted out, "Stand back, ye bloody spalpeens, I'll carry him myself; bad luck to the whole of yez." My expectation was to see them fall upon him, but John Hennessey was a strong and fierce man, and he now looked bigger than he was, for he stood upon higher ground. Apparently they thought him an awkward fellow to deal with. He seemed willing to go with me, and they let him have his own way.

They are soon delivered over to a responsible officer. Napier is kindly treated by all the officers he meets; but the exigencies of war call them away, and he remains for two nights and a day exposed to cold and misery on the hill where the English magazine had been exploded a couple of days before the action. On the second day after the battle he is brought into Corunna and made comfortable in Marshal Soult's quarters. Hennessey had disappeared. It was only long months afterwards that Napier knew what had become of this extraordinary soldier; and his ultimate fate and that of the generous drummer Guibert deserve to be recorded.

On the night following the battle Hennessey disappeared. Before going he had unbuckled Napier's silver spurs, whispering at the same time that it was ameasure of safety, as "the spalpeens" would be likely to murder the owner for the sake of the metal. Next morning he was marched off to the Pyrenees, but at Pampeluna he got away from his captors and made back across the whole breadth of the Peninsula for Oporto. On the road he sold one of the spurs, which he had managed to conceal all that weary way by hiding them under his arm. When Soult took Oporto three months after Corunna, Hennessey was again taken prisoner; but when the English crossed the Douro he again escaped by rushing at the sentry upon the prison and killing him with his own musket. When the first British battalion entered Oporto he joined them, marched with them to Talavera, and fought in that battle, where a cannon-ball carried off his cap. Hearing that George Napier was with the army, Hennessey found him out and told him the whole story of his brother's capture, and produced the remaining spur, which he still held on to. Then he returned to England to rejoin the Fiftieth—the regiment was at Hastings at the time. Garrison life did not suit Corporal Hennessey—as he had now become—so, remembering that he had a wife and child in Cork, he obtained a furlough to visit them, and walking across England, appeared in his native town in due time. Napier had meanwhile set out again for the Peninsula. On reaching Cork Hennessey heard this, and at once exclaiming, "Is it gone back and the regiment not with him? Thin, be my sowl, I'll niver stop behind, but it's off I'll be too!" he started back without waiting to see wife or child. On his first arrival in England from the Peninsula he walked to York, where Miss Napier was then living. Charles Napier had charged him on the night of Corunna to givethe spurs to her if he succeeded in escaping. Hennessey never forgot the injunction; and at York, more than a year after the battle, he delivered the remaining spur to Miss Napier. They had been originally her gift to her brother when he obtained the rank of major before going to Spain in 1808.

Hennessey went back to the Peninsula and began again the old life of reckless daring, mixed with insubordination, drunkenness, and robbery. At last, in one of the battles of the Pyrenees, a cannon-ball carried off his head—a relief alike to his friends and foes, for the former were ever in fear that death at the hands of the provost-marshal would be his fate. The end of the brave Guibert is not less sad. Napoleon, upon hearing of his humane and gallant conduct, bestowed the Cross of the Legion upon him. Some man with better interest disputed the drummer's right to the distinction, and obtained the cherished decoration for himself. Guibert, enraged at his well-earned honour being robbed from him, forgot his higher honour, tried to desert, was taken and shot. What strange episodes of individual heroism dashed with human nature's weakest traits does war hold in its vast tragedy! What extremes of pathos and absurdity jostle each other daily along the road of conflict! In the fight at Elvina Napier's bosom friend and comrade, Charles Stanhope, was shot dead while leading on his men to support his senior officer then under the French guns. The two men thus fighting so valiantly had each a brother on Moore's staff—George Napier and Edward Stanhope. Both these aides-de-camp long searched for their brothers amid the dead and wounded. Stanhope's body alone was found, for Napier's capturewas not known for months after the battle, and he was reckoned among the missing dead. The body of Stanhope was brought back to the bivouac and buried there. His surviving brother was passionately attached to him, and when the moment came to fill in the hastily-made grave he leant over it to take a last look at the dead man's face. At that moment a ball from the enemy struck him, but the thick folds of his cloak, which was worn rolled across his chest, stopped the bullet, and prevented Death from joining together in the same grave the brothers he had shortly before separated.

The army of Corunna reached England in a terrible condition. The men had embarked on the night of the 16th in great confusion, portions of regiments and corps getting on board any vessel they could reach in the darkness, without regard to order or number. No account of killed or wounded was ever obtained; but the total loss from the time the army quitted Portugal in October, 1808, until it arrived in England in the end of January, 1809, was not short of twelve thousand men and five thousand horses, and all its material had also been lost. A wild and impossible enterprise, pushed on against the advice of all trained and capable military opinion by the ignorance of the English Cabinet and its representative Mr. Frere. These people spoke of the genius of Napoleon and his generals as a gigantic bubble which had only to be pricked to vanish. The defeat of a brave but indifferent leader like the Duke of Abrantes at Vimieiro, where all the odds of numbers and surroundings were against him, made them believe that they had only to throw another army into the Peninsula and that it would at once combine with the Spaniards and march to Paris.They mistook Junot, in fact, for that extraordinary combination of Jupiter and Mars whom men called Napoleon Bonaparte, and Moore and his gallant troops paid the penalty of the mistake. Nor did the misfortunes of the soldiers end with the campaign. For months after their arrival in England the hospitals were filled with the fever-stricken victims; and many a soldier who had escaped the horrors of the retreat and the battle of Corunna laid his bones in the military graveyards of the south of England. But the authors of the misfortune did not suffer. Secure in a majority returned by a flagrant system of corruption, they laughed at the Opposition; and society, finding a great military scandal soon to divert it, quickly forgot all about the suffering, the misfortunes, and the glory of the campaign of Corunna.

FOOTNOTE:[2]"The Fiftieth Regiment, although called the West Kent, was chiefly formed of Irishmen."—Napier'sMilitary Law.

[2]"The Fiftieth Regiment, although called the West Kent, was chiefly formed of Irishmen."—Napier'sMilitary Law.

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 fromHudibras:

I have been in battle slain,And I live to fight again.

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 afew 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 theHistory of the Peninsular Warnone 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 uponmiddle 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 officercommanding 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 struckdown 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 ofsaying 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 andfunny 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 threeA.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 promotiongiven 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 thatthe 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 theAmerican 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 willfail. 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 oftyranny, 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, wouldagain 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.

The Hundred Days were over. Napoleon had played his last desperate stake for victory, and had lost. Charles Napier was not at Waterloo. He had quitted the Military College when the campaign opened, but he arrived too late for the great battle. He joined the army before Cambray, and went with it to Paris, but remained there only a few days. His journals and correspondence for this time are not forthcoming, and consequently we are without his own account of a most interesting period; but his brother's reminiscences of the occupation indicate plainly enough that once the fighting was over, regret for the fall of his idol would have made residence in Paris after Waterloo anything but pleasant to him. He went back to the Military College and bit again at his books. By and by he would make cartridges of them to fire into the rascals who are now robbing and trampling on England. Through the five years that follow the fall of Napoleon, he is at a white heat of rage and indignation with the Government. In 1816 he writes to his mother: "There are two millions of people in England and Ireland starving to enable Lord Camden to receive thirty-eight thousand a year, and toexpend it on game and other amusements. It is hard, therefore, to say how long poor rascals who think their children's lives of as much consequence as partridges' eggs may choose to be quiet, or how soon, actuated by an 'ignorant impatience of taxation,' they may proceed to borrow from Lord Camden." And in truth there was sufficient at this time to make his blood boil at what was going on in England. It was the apotheosis of the Tory squire. The game-laws were worthy of the feudal ages; taxation was terrible; the representation of the people in Parliament was a farce. When retrenchment was forced upon the Ministry they began by cutting down the miserable pensions for wounds and service of soldiers, but they kept intact their own gigantic sinecures. "If I have not a right to my pension," writes Napier to his mother in this year 1816, "I have no wish to keep it; the income must be slender that will not enable me to live in content. Nevertheless, this shows what our Ministers are, who begin by retrenching the incomes of those who have nothing else to live on, and who have fought and worked hard for years on almost nothing to gain that provision; retrenching these but refusing to curtail the thousands they enjoy in the shape of sinecures, besides their large salaries and immense private fortunes; and for those profits doing nothing, unless it be telling men with starving children that they are 'ignorantly impatient of taxation' when they demand that their wives and children may not famish." As the year closes we see the hope of better government grow stronger in Napier's letters. "The people are in motion," he says; "reformation advances at thepas de charge, and no earthly power can arrest the progress offreedom." "If reform comes," he says, "the glory of England will be brighter than the battles of the last twenty years have made it." Then comes a very remarkable sentence showing how accurately this fighting student had read the lesson of the time. "The freedom of England being rendered complete, Louis the Eighteenth and his brood will be lost, for our example will be followed all over Europe." Only in context of time did this prophecy err. English reform followed instead of preceded the hunting away from France of the Bourbons. France, despite the terrible cloud she lay under in 1816, was still destined to lead the march of modern progress.

During the two years that he remained at Farnham his letters and journals show how earnestly he entered into the political strife. Cobbett and Burdett are his chiefs; emancipation and reform his watchwords; representation of the people, free food, free press, abolition of privilege, his aims. He thinks the redress of grievances must come quickly, and that "a reform will be effected, though to resist it Castlereagh would risk civil war, I believe; but I do not think he has the power." Should it be civil war, however, his mother need not fear, "for with three sons soldiers, one a sailor, and another a lawyer, it will be hard if you don't swim, for these are the finest trades in such cases." Of course, holding such opinions, promotion for Charles Napier was out of the question. In 1819 he addressed the Commander-in-Chief, again soliciting that he might have his commission as lieutenant-colonel antedated to the period of Corunna. He quoted the cases of Sir Hugh Gough and Sir Colin Campbell, both his juniors, who had received this favour. He mentioned his long and arduous services and his manywounds, but all to no effect. Clearly the man who held that rotten boroughs were not the perfection of representative government, that a Roman Catholic ought to be allowed to make a will and have a horse worth more than five pounds, was fit only for foreign service or active warfare, and quite unsuited to hold a military appointment at home. A foreign post was therefore soon found for him. The Ionian Isles seemed a safe place, and accordingly he is gazetted as Inspecting Field Officer of those islands. He sets out in May, 1819, for this new sphere of action, and passing through France, crosses the Alps and journeys down the length of Italy, everywhere watching and noting as he goes.

In July he reaches Corfu. As Inspecting Field Officer he has nothing to do, but the governor, Maitland, quickly finding out that he has no ordinary officer to deal with, sends him on a mission to Ali Pacha at Yannina, who has already sounded the keynote of rebellion against the Porte, so soon to be followed by the general rising of Greece. In reading the notes and reports made by Napier on this mission one is struck by the rapidity with which he grasps the heart of a very complicated question—a question which is still a vital one to Europe. He sees that the keynote of resistance to Russian dominion on the Mediterranean must lie in fostering the rise and growth of a strong Greek kingdom, and he urges this view upon Maitland as early as 1820, summing up his advice in very remarkable words, which later events fully justified. "The Greeks look to England for their emancipation; but if ever England engages in war with Russia to support the Turks, the Greeks will considerher as trying to rivet their chains, and will support the Russians." Again, in 1821, Napier went to Greece and travelled extensively through the country. As he wanders by the battle-fields whose names will never die he is busy fighting them again with modern armies. On the plain of Chæronea he thinks the marsh in front impassable for guns, and sees how Pindus and Parnassus secure a flank; and at Thermopylæ he notes how the sea has receded from the mountain, but thinks three thousand men instead of three hundred might still hold the position against an army. He visits Corinth, Athens, Argos, sees Thebes, Platea, and Delphos, and on March 20th, 1821, reaches the coast at Lepanto. For two months he has been feeding upon the memories of bygone battle and dreaming dreams of fights to come. A few days after he leaves Greece the insurrection breaks out. Then he gets a short leave of absence to England, and returning to Corfu early in 1822 is appointed Military President in Cephalonia—an island where it is hoped that "the impetuosity and violence of Colonel Napier's character and politics" might find room for action without danger to the State. The island of Cephalonia was at this period a terrible puzzle to the orthodox British official. Violence and robbery reigned unchecked; factions, when not preying upon each other, spoiled the neutral husbandman. Everything was neglected. There were no roads through the island, and the steep mountain ranges cut off the inhabitants of one portion from the other. It was an earthly paradise turned by misgovernment into a hell. How Napier took to the work of regenerating this garden of Eden run to weeds can best be told in his own words. "Do not," he writes tohis mother, "expect long letters from one who has scarcely time to eat or take exercise. My predecessor is going home, half dead from the labour, but to me it is health, spirit, everything. I live for some use now."

Here then he sets to work in March, 1822, in his kingdom of sixty thousand souls. He sits in court for six hours daily hearing law-cases, for the ordinary courts of justice have long been closed and martial law reigns; he reforms the prisons, he builds quays and a lazaretto, he drains the marshes, and he lays out two great main roads which are to zig-zag up the mountains and bring the ends of his island together. June comes, but he thrives more and more on this variety of labour. "Health besets me," he writes; "up early and writing till eight, then feed and work in office till twelve—sometimes till three o'clock,—swim, dine, and then on horseback visiting the roads. I take no rest myself and give nobody else any; they were all getting too fat." No wonder under such a governor the island begins to bloom. But he is clearing away the weeds too fast, so at least thinks the new Lord High Commissioner and Governor-General of all the Islands, one Adam by name, who grows jealous of this Cephalonian success. He cannot well attack such palpable improvements as drainage of marshes and road-making, but he has seen that Napier wears mustachios, and he will have them off at any rate, so the order comes to shave—"obeyed to a hair" is the response. Whenever dull and pompous authority attacks this keen Damascus-blade bit of humanity called Napier, authority gets a retort that sends it back laughed at, but brooding over some fresh plan of revenge. Adam with dull persistent enmity nursed his dislike for latertime. Men like Napier, prodigal of blow in battle, are ever ready to forget the feud when the fight is over, but the ordinary sons of Adam are not thus generously gifted, and this particular Adam had a long memory for revenge.

As the Greek insurrection develops, the Ionian Islands become a centre of interest. Napier, whose recent travels had made him acquainted with both the people and the theatre of operations, keenly watched the struggle. In August, 1823, Lord Byron arrived at the island on his way to Greece. The intercourse between him and Napier became very intimate. At this period the great poet was almost as unpopular with his countrymen as Napier was with their rulers. Byron's quick wit was not slow to see a leader of men in the Resident. "He is our man," he writes to the Greek Committee in London; "he is our man to lead a regular force or to organise a national one for the Greeks; ask the army, ask anybody; in short, a braver or a better man could not easily be found." Napier was at this time very anxious to get command of a legion to aid the Greeks, but he had been told that if he accepted this position he would probably forfeit his commission in the army, and it was hoped that through the action of the Greek Committee in London his retention in the service might be found compatible with command in Greece. This hope was not to be realised. Napier went to London early in 1824 and had many interviews with the Greek Committee collectively and individually, nor was he much impressed by their wisdom. One member asks him to "make out a list of a proper battering-train to be sent out to reduce Patras." He endorses the request thus: "Square the list of gunsand stores needed for a siege with my opinion of spending money so foolishly; men are prone to buy fiddles before they know music." Now all at once he has to answer a serious charge made in high quarters. Mr. Canning, the Prime Minister, has been listening to the stories of German adventurers from the Levant—he has heard that Napier had used his official position in Cephalonia to negotiate with the Greek chiefs. The story was absolutely false, and in straightforward and manly words he told the Prime Minister that it was so. Indeed one can read between the lines of this reply that he was not sorry to have an opportunity of letting Mr. Canning see his sentiments. "For my part," he writes to Lord Bathurst, "I scorn to deprecate the wrath of any man who suspects my integrity. If, however, your lordship's colleagues either doubt my conduct, or wish for my place to give to a better man, in God's name let them use their acknowledged power to employ men they think best calculated for the King's service." These were strong and daring words to come from a lieutenant-colonel now in his forty-second year, and with nothing but his commission to give him bread, to a Cabinet Minister—the eye of the head of the Government; and what a glimpse they give us of the foundation upon which all this energy and resource and genius for action rested.

In the winter of 1825 he returns again to Cephalonia, this time travelling by Inspruck and the Tyrol to Venice. Blood will tell; he cannot make friends with the Germans. "As to the people of every part of Germany," he writes, "honour to Cæsar for killing so many of them; stupid, slow, hard animals, they have noteven so much tact as to cheat well. We always detected their awkward attempts. Out of these regions we descended into Italy, where we found civilised beings, warm weather, and the human face instead of the German visage." This is of course three parts chaff, but it serves to show how the nature of the man blows. And how could it blow otherwise? A soldier who had in his veins the blood of the victor of Ivry, of Mary Stuart, of Scottish chief and Norman noble, and whose whole nature had imbibed in Ireland, in childhood, boyhood, and youth, that "Celtic spell" to whose potent influence our most unemotional historian has borne witness, could no more make friends of the Teutonic type of humanity than an Arab horse in the deserts of the Nile could gambol with a rhinoceros lying on a mud-bank in mid river.

He reaches Corfu in February, after a terrible passage of twenty days from Venice, and here there occurs an entry in the journal which is of interest: "March 24th.—Sir Hudson Lowe's colonel, Gorrequer, is here. He called on me, but got not his visit returned. It is not my intent to consort with gaolers, though I have brought out the model of a gaol." Then he goes on to his island kingdom and sets to work at his roads, harbours, and buildings. He is delighted to get back to his Greeks again, and they are equally glad to have their king once more among them. "Now," he writes on arrival, "I am once more amongst my merry Greeks, who are worth all other nations put together. I like to see, to hear them. I like their fun, their good humour, their Paddy ways, for they are very like Irishmen." His intense love of animals is constantly coming out in letter and diary.Blanco, the charger of Peninsula days, he will never abandon. He has brought this old friend out from England, despite his years, paying high for the passage. "My bill for him and baggage isonlyone hundred pounds. HowhonestJohn Bull in the city touches one's pocket. Thirty of this is for Blanco, twenty for King, seven for insurance, the rest is cheat and devilment. However, anything is better than cutting Blanco's throat after sixteen years' comradeship. I may go to perdition, but not for Blanco anyways. My poor, good old beast!" Again, as he draws near Cephalonia, he pictures to himself his first visit to his two famous roads, and wishes that, in case of death, he may be buried in the old chapel on the summit of St. Liberale's Mountain, so as to "lie on the top of the road. Many a poor mule's soul will say a good word for me at the last day, when they remember the old road."

Back to Index Next