Sir Charles Napier

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William Butler. Sir Charles Napier

CHAPTER I. THE HOME AT CELBRIDGE – FIRST COMMISSION

CHAPTER II. EARLY SERVICE – THE PENINSULA

CHAPTER III. CORUNNA

CHAPTER IV. THE PENINSULA IN 1810-11 – BERMUDA – AMERICA – ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE

CHAPTER V. CEPHALONIA

CHAPTER VI. OUT OF HARNESS

CHAPTER VII. COMMAND OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT

CHAPTER VIII. INDIA – THE WAR IN SCINDE

CHAPTER IX. THE BATTLE OF MEANEE

CHAPTER X. THE MORROW OF MEANEE – THE ACTION AT DUBBA

CHAPTER XI. THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCINDE

CHAPTER XII. ENGLAND – 1848 TO 1849

CHAPTER XIII. COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA

CHAPTER XIV. HOME – LAST ILLNESS – DEATH

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Poor, proud, and panting for opportunity of action, Napier began his military career at this wonderful epoch, only to find his aspirations for fame doomed to disappointment. Marengo came to scatter the slowly built combinations of Europe. The victor held out the olive branch to his enemies; his offer of peace, which had been so insultingly refused one year earlier, was now accepted, and the Treaty of Amiens put an end to hostilities which had lasted for nearly ten years. All Charles Napier's hopes of service were destroyed. For six years he was to wander aimlessly about the south of England in that most soul-rusting of all idlenesses – garrison life at home. "What can one do?" he wrote to his mother upon hearing of the peace. "My plan is to wait for a few months and then get into some foreign service. Sometimes my thought is to sell my commission and purchase one in Germany or elsewhere; but then my secret wish could not be fulfilled, which is to have high command with British soldiers – rather let me command Esquimaux than be a subaltern of Rifles forty years old." Meanwhile he set vigorously to work at his books and studies. Already at Celbridge he had read every hero-book or war-history he could lay his hands on; now he applies himself incessantly to study. "I quit the mess," he writes in November, 1801, "at five o'clock, and from that to ten o'clock gives me five hours more reading. There is a billiard-table; but feeling a growing fondness for it, and fearing to be drawn into play for money, I have not touched a cue lately." Yet with all this longing for fame, the heart of the boy is full of his home memories. "Nobody but myself," he writes to his sister, "had ever such a longing for home. I shall go mad if you don't come to England or I go to Ireland; my heart jumps when thinking of you all merry in the old way. This wishing for home makes me gad about in a wild way; for melancholy seizes me when alone in a cold barrack-room, and I cannot read with thoughts busy in Kildare Street. I should like to go to London and stay with Emily [another sister], but I am too poor. I have no coloured clothes, and they are expensive to buy. My horse also is costly and must be sold; very sorry, for he is the dearest little wicked black devil you ever saw, and so pretty." But though this poor hard-up subaltern cannot afford to purchase plain clothes, and has to sell his dearly prized horse, he can find money to do a kind act to a friend. He is writing to his mother, that ever-ready listener to all his troubles and his joys.

A very beautiful letter for all concerned – father, mother, son, and friend – and worth many long pages of description. Then he falls in love, is very miserable, goes to London, sees several of his rich relations, finds out he cannot afford fine life, and comes back again to his books and his dreams. The regiment is now at Shorncliffe. The colonel, a type of warrior at that time and for years later peculiar to our service, lived much at Carlton House and seldom saw his soldiers, who, groaning under a well-nigh intolerable discipline, were left to the mercy of the second in command. The picture we get of the result is a curious one. "Shorncliffe, December, 1802.– We are going on here as badly as need be. Two or three men desert every night, and not recruits either. The hospital is full of rheumatic patients and men with colds and coughs, caught from standing long on damp ground and being kept in mizzling rains for hours without moving."

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In this long and eventful march the three brothers Napier, Charles, George, and William, all young soldiers thirsting for military distinction, came together for the first time since they had quitted the Eagle's Nest at Celbridge. We must glance for a moment at the field of combat which was now opening before these young soldiers. In the month of October, 1808, when Moore began his march from Lisbon, the Spanish armies, some seven in number, formed a great curved line of which the Somo Sierra between Madrid and the Pyrenees was the centre, while the flanks touched the Mediterranean on one side and the Bay of Biscay on the other. Within this curve, with its back to the Pyrenees and its face to the Ebro, lay the French army. Napoleon was still engaged far away in France with his harbours, canals, roads, and codes of law; but his soldiers were already moving from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, and a storm little dreamt of by either the English or the Spaniards was about to burst from the defiles of these snow-capped mountains. The objective of Sir John Moore's march was the north of Spain. So vague was the knowledge possessed by the British Government of the actual condition of affairs in the Peninsula and of the power of the French Emperor that the wildest anticipations of speedy success were indulged in by the English Government at this time, and it was confidently expected that Moore's junction with the Spanish armies would be the prelude to the passage of the Pyrenees by the combined forces and the conquest of France. We have already indicated the position of these Spanish armies in this month of October, 1808. At the close of the month Moore was well on his march into Spain. Napoleon was still in Paris; but all was now ready for the swoop. Early in November he passed the Pyrenees, struck right and left with resistless force upon the Spanish armies on his flanks – first annihilating Blake and Romana at Gamoual and Espinosa, then destroying Palafox and Castanos at Tudela; and finally, breaking with his cavalry the Spanish centre, he forced the gorges of the Somo Sierra, and appeared before the gates of Madrid before the English army had time to concentrate at Salamanca. Never was victory so complete. To fall back upon Lisbon was now the duty and the desire of Sir John Moore, but he was not permitted to follow this course which was so clearly the right one. Yielding to the importunities of Mr. Frere, the English minister to the Junta, Moore abandoned his communications with Lisbon, and directed his march to the north with the intention of attacking the right of the French army now in Leon. It was Christmas when Napoleon heard in Madrid of this unexpected movement of the English army almost across his front. Divining at once the object of the English general, he quitted Madrid, crossed with his guard and a chosen corps the snow-choked passes of the Guadarrama, and, descending into Leon, was in the rear of the English army before Moore had even heard of the movement. It was no wonder that Napoleon should have been almost the bearer of the tidings of his own march; for in ten days, in the depth of winter and in a season of terrific snow and storm, he had marched two hundred miles, through some of the worst mountain roads in Spain. The bird that would forestall the eagle in his flight must be quick of wing. Then began the race from Sahagun, first to Benevente and then to the sea at Corunna. No space now to dwell upon that terrible march – more terrible in its loss of discipline and failure of the subordinate officers to hold their men in command than in stress of fatigue or severity of weather. What would have been its fate if Napoleon had continued to direct the pursuit can scarcely admit of sober doubt; but other and more pressing needs than the pursuit of the English army had called him away to distant and vaster fields of war.

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.

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