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Of all the great achievements which make up the sum of British glory, the Peninsular War and its results form one of the grandest, brightest, and most unimpeachable. These gigantic efforts were made in the holy cause of Freedom; they were disinterested in a high and unparalleled degree; their success was uniform, brilliant, and startling; and their guerdon was the liberation and advancement of mankind.

For six years England had constantly employed in the Spanish Peninsula from thirty to seventy thousand of her troops, who besides sustaining combats innumerable, took four great fortresses, attacked or defended in ten important sieges, and were decisively victorious in nineteen pitched battles, killing, wounding, or making prisoners, two hundred thousand of the enemy. She liberally subsidized Spain and Portugal, and maintained the troops of both countries, regular and irregular, with supplies of ammunition, clothing, and arms, while upon her own military operations she expended upwards of one hundred millions sterling. Twice she expelled the French from Portugal, and finally drove them from Spain besides, surmounting and winning step by step the terrific bulwark of the Pyrenees. With her naval squadrons she repeatedly harassed the Invader by well-combined descents upon the coasts, and rescued or preserved Lisbon and Cadiz, Alicante and Carthagena. Her land forces tracked the enemy from Vimieiro to Busaco, from Busaco to Navarre, over some of the most frightfully broken ground in Europe, signally defeating them wherever they came in collision, and sweeping them at times like a wreck before the ocean-wave; and forty thousand of her children fell in the Peninsula to attest her devotion to the cause of Freedom.

In this most memorable liberation of Spain from the French invader, it is the glory of England to have realized with singular exactness the splendid encomium of Livy: “Esse aliquam in terris gentem quæ suâ impensâ, suo labore ac periculo, bella gerat pro libertate aliorum. Nec hoc finitimis, aut propinquæ vicinitatis hominibus, aut terris continenti junctis præstet. Maria trajiciat: ne quod toto orbe terrarum injustum imperium sit, et ubique jus, fas, lex, potentissima sint.”—Hist. lib. xxxiii.

The pre-eminent importance of the War of Independence in Spain, and of the part which England took in that struggle, has been acknowledged by rival French writers, whose love of historic truth was too strong for the countervailing influences of prejudice, passion, and professional jealousy. M. Thiers, in his Histoire du Consulat et de l’Empire, speaks of it as “that long and terrible struggle, that great Peninsular war, which lasted more than six years, which exhausted more treasure and drained off a greater tide of human blood than the murderous campaign of Russia, and in which all the most renowned generals and marshals of France were severally defeated, to the surprise of Napoléon, and to the astonishment of the world, by an English general, newly returned from India, whose name was as yet almost a stranger to every mouth.”

“Elle était à juste titre désignée comme la cause première et principale de la chute de Napoléon,” is the remark of General Foy, Histoire de la Guerre de la Péninsule. Avant-propos. And in one of his private letters he says, “Moscow brought Alexander, Spain brought Wellington, into the walls of our sacred city!”

I am therefore sure of the intrinsic interest of my subject, and am tremulous only about its treatment. Of this much I at least am certain—that no one will exclaim, as Horace did 2,000 years ago:

——“Quis feræ

Bellum curet Iberiæ?”

or be indifferent to the exploits of Englishmen in a country, with whose people the same Horace coupled a most flattering epithet—“peritus Iber.” The splendour and the decadence, the glory and misfortunes, the ancient grandeur and the existing distresses of Spain, the great historic parts which we have played either in unison or in rivalry,—above all, the terrible struggle which we maintained together against a Power with which it was at first despair to cope, and yet brought to a triumphant issue, make it impossible that any record of that struggle can be received with indifference; and the customary fate of rashness and incompetency is the only one that I have to apprehend.

That these great and glorious exploits should not have hitherto formed the subject of any extended poem may at first appear surprising. But the reason is obvious—the time had not yet arrived. The glare of contemporary fame is unfavourable to poetic celebration, except in the form of Pindar’s Olympionics, in dithyrambic odes imbued with the intoxication of victory, or otherwise in such short reflective sonnets as embodied a Wordsworth’s calm and philosophic spirit. The mists of time must be interposed before the hero rises to the Demigod, an entirely new generation must have succeeded, and the poet must himself belong to that generation. The halo of Imagination must invest what was before Reality, the subject must have attained the dignity of the myth, or heroic legend, and Ideal Art must be unencumbered by the pressure of the Actual. That time appears to have arrived. Forty years have elapsed since the commencement of this mighty struggle; those of our Peninsular heroes whom the shock of battle spared, have nearly all been gathered to their fathers, and those who remain are like late surviving Nestors whose heads are crowned with the snowy tonsure of Time.

Into the construction of this poem it is unfit that I should enter further than to state, that the action, which is in some degree formed on the purest ancient model, comprises a period of about two months, commencing a month before and ending a month after the taking of San Sebastian by storm. The besieged city forms the central point, and the events there, with superadded imaginative incidents, are combined with the fighting round San Sebastian, of which the object was on one side to relieve, and on the other to prevent the relief of that fortress. These are what are usually known by the name of the Battles of the Pyrenees, and commenced with the first battle of Sauroren, which was fought on the 28th July, 1813; the storming of San Sebastian occurred on the 31st of August; and the action of the poem concludes with the passage of the Bidassoa, and the advance of the Allied Army to the Greater Rhune, by which the Spanish soil was freed from the presence of the Invader—events which occurred on the 7th and 8th of October. The second siege of San Sebastian commenced contemporaneously with the first battle of Sauroren, on the 28th July.[A] The actual time therefore employed in the action is precisely two months and twelve days. The battles of the Pyrenees introduced are essentially interwoven with the main subject, which is the capture of the great fortress of San Sebastian, the principal event of the latter part of the War while it was confined to the Spanish soil. All the characters are grouped by the story round the central figure of the besieged city, the incidents of the peripeteia or plot are interwoven with that event and with each other, and—if it be not presumption to use such a word—the Epos is complete. The critics, I have no doubt, will find abundant faults; and the rest I commit to their tender mercies.

Though the time, as essential to such compositions, is in comparison with the duration of the War extremely limited, all its leading incidents are introduced in the permitted shapes of narrative, episode, allusion, and apostrophe. The historical part of the work invites the closest examination, as well as the local colouring, to which a six years’ constant residence in the Peninsula has enabled me, I trust, to impart some truth and vivacity. I have lived in the midst of revolts, revolutions, and military movements; my experience almost equals that of an actual campaigner; and I have witnessed even portions of three sieges—those of Seville and Barcelona in 1843, and that of Almeida in Portugal in 1844. Copious historical and explanatory notes are annexed to each canto, and the description of the battle grounds is made accurate by personal observation of many of them, which I have embodied in the notes. The theatre of that portion of the War which enters into the action of the poem itself presents very felicitous subjects for description, the ground being the gigantic Pyrenees, and the combats there sustained being more like those of Titans than of men. In addition to much oral testimony, the authorities I have consulted are very numerous, and as fidelity has been my constant aim their language will be found frequently cited in the notes. The principal of these are Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Southey’s History of the Peninsular War, Foy’s Histoire de la Guerre de la Péninsule, Gurwood’s Despatches of the Duke of Wellington, Jones’s Journals of the Sieges in Spain, Belmas’s Journals of Sieges, compiled from official documents by order of the French government, Captain Cooke’s Memoirs, Captain Pringle’s Ditto, Captain Batty’s Campaign of the left Wing of the Allied Army in the Western Pyrenees, Gleig’s Subaltern, Annals of the Peninsular War, De la Pène’s Campagnes de 1813 et 1814, and Pellot’s Mémoires des Campagnes des Pyrénées.

A difficulty inseparable from this subject is its great historical and political interest, which although in one respect an advantage in another is a considerable drawback. With events so well known and comparatively so recent it is impossible to take liberties; invention is restrained, and the imagination is confined within limits more strict than the poetical faculty might desire for its operations. If this objection has been felt with regard to Tasso’s Gerusalemme, the personages of which were French and Italian counts and princes familiar to the reader of general history, and whose acts and characters were well known though they lived four centuries before he wrote, it is clearly far more applicable in the present instance. The answer at once is that an entirely different treatment must be resorted to, that celestial machinery, witchcraft, and all analogous means must be excluded, and that actual truth must be made the basis of the whole composition. To truth I have accordingly adhered, and invite the strictest historical criticism, consistent with poetical diction and imagery, of my account of these campaigns. The events were fortunately of that brilliant description, and their theatre, the Pyrenees, so essentially romantic, that the true and the marvellous are here one and the same. Historical accuracy is here an element of beauty; and my minor plot is alone invented, yet is meant to be strictly probable.

Nearly the entire of our modern military system dates from the commencement of the Peninsular War. The cumbrous old system which fought a whole campaign for a comfortable place for winter quarters (a great aim with Turenne) was broken up rapidly by the vigour of Napoléon, and our first débût under the Duke of York had taught us that we must change our plan. In 1808, the very year of our first victories in the Peninsula (Roriça and Vimieiro) the use of hair-powder was for the first time discontinued in the British army. Rifle corps were then first formed—in the first instance as rather a hopeless experiment, our soldiers having been deemed too slow and heavy for this practice; but, as the result proved, with perfect success. From the Polish lancers whom we first saw at Albuera we borrowed the idea of our corps of lancers, as we afterwards took from the French cuirassiers the modern equipment of our lifeguards. The brilliant appearance of our light dragoons astonished the French on their first appearance in the Peninsula. “Nos soldats, frappés de l’élégance de l’habit des dragons légers, de leurs casques brillants, de la tournure svelte des hommes et des chevaux, leur avaient donné le nom de lindors.”—Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. 2. For this rather theatrical display we substituted with better taste in 1813 an uniform similar to that worn by the German light cavalry. The Shrapnell shell, or spherical case shot, (the invention of an English Colonel of that name) was used for the first time during the Peninsular War with great effect.

Amongst the many great services performed by the Peninsular War was raising the character of the British soldier from a very low to a very high standard in the national estimation. The plays of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Mrs. Centlivre, the tales of Fielding, Smollett, and Defoe, and the graver essays of Dr. Johnson, sufficiently demonstrate that in the time of those writers military men were held in the lowest esteem. The conquerors of Blenheim and of the Heights of Abraham were currently regarded as debauchees, cutthroats, and dishonest adventurers, and where a more gentlemanly exterior was exhibited, it was commonly united to the silliest foppery. Such from the Restoration to the end of the last century was the common character even of the officers of our army, and the ruffianly brutality of Ensign Northerton towards Tom Jones was perfectly characteristic in an age when undoubtedly it was too true that pimping too often obtained commissions, and it was an accurate general description to say of any chance-met couple of officers that “one had been bred under an attorney, and the other was son to the wife of a nobleman’s butler.” (History of a Foundling, book vii. c. 12). Though there were undoubtedly many officers then of a far superior class, still the high tone of chivalrous honour in our army, and the general refinement and accomplishment of character, belong to the present century. It is the great praise of the British private soldier that his stubborn will and indomitable energy, his cheerful discipline and unflinching valour, carry him through the most brilliant exploits to a success almost miraculously uniform, without any of those tangible hopes of promotion which inspire the continental soldier. Such noble and manful discharge of duty appears to merit some more adequate reward than the possible working of a miracle which may raise him from the ranks.

Wellington, in his admirable Despatches, says of the army with which he won these Pyrenean victories: “I think I could do any thing with them.” The resemblance of many portions of these remarkable compositions to those of Cæsar has been more than once pointed out; but the striking coincidence in the present instance has never, I believe, before been noticed: “Non animadvertebatis,” says Cæsar, likewise speaking of the exploits of his Peninsular veterans, “decem habere legiones populum Romanum, quæ non solùm vobis obsistere, sed etiam cœlum diruere possent.” De Bello Hispanico, § ult. Even the number of veterans under the command of the ancient and the modern General was nearly the same.

Indomitable energy and hearty courage are an old strain in the English blood. They are thus attested by Cromwell:—“Indeed we never find our men so cheerful as when there is work to do.” Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Supplement. That no specific decoration has yet been accorded to our Peninsular veterans appears a most amazing oversight.

The courage displayed in our Peninsular sieges was of the highest order. There can be no question that, since the commencement of the world, no military daring, no dauntless valour, has been witnessed, Greek or Roman, Saracenic or Chivalrous, to exceed—perhaps none to equal, that of our storming parties at Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, and San Sebastian. But it is very doubtful whether human life was not unnecessarily squandered, and whether the fire of the besieged should not have been silenced, and their defences in the first instance destroyed. This opinion seems now to be generally maintained both by engineer officers and by experienced officers of the army. The dictum of the great master of the art of fortification is in one respect vindicated, though in another it has been broken down by British heroism: “La précipitation dans les sièges ne hâte point la prise des places, la retarde souvent, et ensanglante toujours la scène.” Vauban, Maximes. General Foy, who sometimes emancipates himself from his prejudices against England, and is often candid, while he praises the courage of our men, says that it was needlessly expended, and that the taking of fortified places by the rules of art is reduced to a mathematical problem. But the bravery of our troops is still unquestionable. “On eût dit que les ingénieurs étaient là seulement pour construire les places d’armes desquelles s’élanceraient les troupes destinées a l’assaut ou à l’escalade; et encore eût-on pu à la rigueur, avec des soldats si déterminés, se passer de leur ministère.” Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. ii. I must transcribe his testimony as to the conduct of our officers: “L’officier anglais conduisait les troupes au feu sans effort, et avec une bravoure admirable. * * La gloire de l’armée britannique lui vient avant tout de son excellente discipline et de la bravoure calme et franche de la nation.” But Foy adds a stigma which these sieges affixed to our army, and these sieges alone in all our Peninsular campaigns, and the impartiality which I am determined to preserve, and from which in some years to come I am convinced not the slightest departure will be tolerated, requires that it be rigorously unveiled for the reprobation of a more enlightened age:—“Une fois sortis de la discipline, les soldats anglais se livrent à des excès qui étonneraient les Cosaques; ils s’enivrent dès qu’ils le peuvent, et leur ivresse est froide, apathique, anéantissante.” Humanity shudders at the brutalities perpetrated by our soldiers at Badajoz and San Sebastian.

It was not without much reason that the general opinion throughout Europe attributed the extraordinary successes of the revolutionary armies of France to the admirable arrangement of the light infantry service. Napoléon may be said to have created the corps of voltigeurs and tirailleurs, upon which model were subsequently formed the Carabineers and Rifles of the British service, and the Caçadores of Spain and Portugal. The Prussian General Bulow in 1795, stated his opinion that “l’emploi de l’infanterie légère est le dernier perfectionnement de la guerre, et qu’à la rigueur on pourrait désormais se passer d’infanterie de ligne dans les armées!” Esprit du Système de Guerre moderne, par un ancien officier prussien. We may laugh at the extravagant absurdity of the latter part of this statement, but it shows the effect which Napoléon’s new system had produced. An opinion nearly similar prevailed about the same time in England. “The continent has been subdued by the French tirailleurs, and battles are sought to be won by killing one after another the officers of the enemy’s army.” Letter to a General-Officer on the Establishment of Rifle Corps in the British Army. By Col. Robinson. These rifle corps were established, and became eminently successful, being detached in companies to the different infantry brigades. The coolness, however, of our ordinary infantry skirmishers in the Peninsula rendered an extensive introduction of rifle corps unnecessary.

The rifle, as used in modern warfare, is the most terrible because most treacherous of weapons. It would have fallen especially under the ban of the Bayards and Montlucs of the sixteenth century, who chivalrously deprecated the use even of the common firelock, and formed vows worthy of Don Quixote, “pour qu’on abandonnât l’usage de ces armes traîtresses au moyen desquelles un lâche, tapi derrière un buisson, donne la mort au brave qu’il n’aurait pas regardé en face!”

Colonel H. A. Dillon says that for what the French call le moral d’une armée he can find no equivalent in the English language, and must explain his thought by paraphrase. He defines this moral to be the liveliest courage produced by the purest patriotism. Commentary on the Military Establishments and Defences of the British Empire, vol. i. This moral the French lost by their repeated defeats in the Peninsula, and by the conviction forced on them that even the Pyrenees were no longer a barrier. Napoléon placed in le moral three fourths of the power of an army. Celerity of movement was the principal secret of the early French successes, and of this the rapid marching of the French soldier and his wonderful power of sustaining fatigue were the main elements. The French soldier is small of stature, as General Foy himself confesses, but he marches quick and long, and this the General in great part attributes to the French eating much more bread than any other European troops: “Les soldats qui mangent le plus de pain et le moins de viande sont en général plus musculeux, et marchent plus vite et plus long temps que les autres. * * Le Français a besoin en campagne de deux livres de pain par jour.”—Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. i.

The astonishing developement which Napoléon gave to the infantry service has been dwelt on by more than one writer. “L’infanterie française, cette nation des camps,” says De Barante, Des Communes et de l’Aristocratie. Napoléon gave to this arm a power and vigour to which it was before a stranger. “Napoléon augmenta le bataillon d’infanterie d’une autre compagnie d’élite, les voltigeurs. Ce fut une idée heureuse que de rehausser dans l’estime publique les hommes de petite taille, qui en général sont les plus intelligens et les plus alertes.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins.) The consummation of the Emperor’s gigantic views was found in the Imperial Guard. “La garde impériale représentait la gloire de l’armée et la majesté de l’empire. On choisissait les officiers et les soldats parmi ceux que les braves avaient signalés comme les plus braves: tous étaient couverts de cicatrices.”—(Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. i.) Napoléon after the battle of Marengo called them his “granite column.” At the height of his power his Imperial Guard consisted of 68 battalions, 31 squadrons, and 80 pieces of artillery—in itself a powerful army. Never will the exclamation of these devoted men on the field of Waterloo be forgotten: “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas!”

The peculiar constitution of the French grenadier corps is likewise to be remarked. These bodies were the combined excerpts of all the best men from every regiment. “L’éclat et la prééminence des grenadiers Français * * l’usage de réunir tous ceux d’une ou de plusieurs brigades pour tenter des actions de vigueur.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins., liv. ii.) To these we never opposed more than our average regimental forces, and their picked men were for the most part overcome by our rank and file. What this rank and file was composed of let the following passage attest. “Les Anglais n’escaladent pas la montagne et n’effleurent pas la plaine, lestes et rapides comme les Français; mais ils sont plus silencieux, plus calmes, plus obéissants; pour ce motif leurs feux sont plus assurés et plus meurtriers.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins., liv. ii.) Such is the brilliant testimony to the merits of the British soldier by one of Napoléon’s own Generals. Our footmen are still the sturdy yeomen who accomplished such marvels at Crecy. If in a state little removed from brute ignorance they have done such wonders, what may be expected from them in the not far distant day, when they shall become elevated by education to a more fitting standard? Splendid as our horses are, and our dragoons both heavy and light, the strength of our army will be always in its powerful infantry, in their steady fire, indomitable endurance, and incomparable use of the bayonet. These are the robur peditum, like the triarii of the Roman legions, who were chosen from the strongest men, and ever fought on foot. It was remarked that in moments of peril they set their limbs so strongly, that their knees were somewhat bowed (precisely like our modern pugilists), as if they would rather die than remove from their places; and it passed into a proverb, when a thing came to extremity: “ad triarios res venit.”

The use of tents, like many another classic incumbrance, has been swept away from campaigning by our modern tactics, which originated at the commencement of the Peninsular War, and, arrived at the bivouac, the “lodging is on the cold ground” and sub Jove frigido. “L’usage des tentes préservait les troupes des maladies pernicieuses. Tout cela est vrai, et cependant on ne reviendra ni aux petites armées, ni aux sièges de convention ni aux maisons de toile.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. i.) The commander who makes a campaign with tents is fettered with embarrassments as to means of transport, which must always place him in a state of inferiority to an adversary not thus encumbered. This is one of the great changes wrought by the wonderful genius of Napoléon, which even amidst the new hardships which he imposed, secured almost the adoration of his soldiers. “Ils frémissent encore d’alégresse en exprimant le transport dont on fut saisi, quand l’empereur, qu’on croyait bien loin, apparut tout-à-coup devant le front des grenadiers, monté sur son cheval blanc et suivi de son mamelouck.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. ii.) At the close of the War, the person of Wellington commanded almost equal admiration.

I am a great admirer of General Napier, whom I regard as the counterpart of Thucydides, the soldier-historian of Athens, and to whom may be not infelicitously applied the character assigned to Xenophon (another Athenian narrator of military exploits in which he himself participated) by our earliest Latin lexicographer, Thomas Thomas, the contemporary of Shakspeare: “Xenophon was a noble and wyse captaine, and of a delectable style in wrytynge.” Napier’s style is enchanting and stirs like the sound of a trumpet. My obligations to him are unbounded. But Heaven forbid that his enthusiasm for War should become general, for it is of a truly rabid character:—“War is the condition of this world. From man to the smallest insect all are at strife!” (Hist. War in the Penins., book xxiv. chap. 6.) This is a mere reproduction of Hobbes: “The state of nature is a state of war.” I trust that peace will ere long be the enduring condition of this world; and there are happily indications of that approaching consummation. If I sing the glories of the Peninsular War, it is because it was of a defensive character and we struck for Freedom. We may surely now repose on our laurels (as it is phrased), and never hereafter engage in a war which shall not be in the strictest sense inevitable.

I am happy to record upon this subject the enlightened sentiments of a French General: “L’esprit de liberté tuera l’esprit militaire. Il ne sera plus permis aux princes de faire entr’égorger les peuples pour des intérêts de dynastie, ou pour des lubies d’ambition. Les gouvernants, quels que soient leur titre et l’origine de leur pouvoir, ne pourront subsister qu’en s’effaçant personnellement devant la volonté générale. Les nations, comparant les désastres de la bataille au mince profit de la victoire, ne pousseront plus le cri de guerre, hormis dans les circonstances très rares où il s’agira de vivre libre ou mourir.” (Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. i.) Elsewhere he makes this acute criticism on the audacious designs of Napoléon. “Le despotisme avait été organisé pour faire la guerre; on continua la guerre pour conserver le despotisme. Le sort en était jeté; la France devait conquérir l’Europe, ou l’Europe subjuguer la France. * * La nature a marqué un terme au-delà duquel les enterprises folles ne peuvent pas être conduites avec sagesse. Ce terme l’empereur l’atteignit en Espagne, et le dépassa en Russie. S’il eût échappé alors à sa ruine, son inflexible outrecuidance (presumption) lui eût fait trouver ailleurs Baylen et Moscou.” Such is the impartial testimony of one of his own generals.

The French “playing at soldiers” is an old vice, older than the days of Sir Thomas More, who thus pleasantly hits it off: “In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people, for the whole country is full of soldiers, that are still kept up in time of peace, if such a state of a nation can be called a peace: and these are kept in pay upon the same account, it being a maxim of those pretended statesmen, that it is necessary for the public safety, to have a good body of veteran soldiers ever in readiness. But France has learned to its cost, how dangerous it is to feed such beasts.” Louis XIV. kept up a standing army of 440,000 men, and Napoléon had frequently more.

The Gauls in modern times seem to have very much changed their nature, for so far from invading other countries, their reputation amongst the ancients was for remaining to fight at home, according to the obvious interpretation of a line in Pindar: