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26 June, 2013
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The Glory Of English Prose
21. Sir William Napier
by Coleridge, Stephen
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My Dear Antony,
In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most
awful scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds
of human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly
unknown to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by
no man with the gift of expression who could record for after time,
in adequate language, the majestic spectacle.
In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet
appeared who was personally in touch as a living witness of the
countless deeds of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance
that were everywhere displayed upon that immense far-stretched
front.
But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be
witnessed from its beginning to its end by a single commander, and
no scenes in human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring
than the awful ebb and flow of a great combat in which the victory
of armies and the fate of nations hung in the balance.
The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this
date have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier
been as puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and
the British were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty
officers, and over four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy
had fallen in the 57th alone; not a third were left standing in the
other regiments that had been closely engaged throughout the day.
Then Cole was ordered up with his fourth division as a last hope,
and this is how Sir William Napier records their
advance:—
"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
majesty the British soldier fights.
"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and,
fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes,
while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the
advancing line.
"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.
"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook
the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every
formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries
that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly, and
with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the
attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
triumphant on the fatal hill!
* * * * * *
"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
places it on his bleeding front.
"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the
hills and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
dying men."
Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience
of the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for
them. At the end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets
the curtain fall upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single
sentence, thus:—
"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America,
some for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took
shipping at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all
remembrance of the Veterans' services.
"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal,
once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or
captured two hundred thousand enemies—leaving of their own
number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the plains and
mountains of the Peninsula."
Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have
debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity
and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult
to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and
the petty officer at sea that nation can produce a single
gentleman.
Your loving old
G.P.
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