“’Twas a little drummer boy, with his side
Torn terribly with shot;
But still he feebly beat his drum,
As though the wound were not.
But when the Mameluke’s wild horse
Burst with a scream and cry,
He said, ‘O men of the Forty-third,
Teach me the way to die.’”
And so the story goes on to tell how the wounded grenadier, with a bullet in his hip, pressed on into the fight, to fall himself later. The story is, of course, probably mythical, but there is a certain ring in it that shows the spirit of those old fighting days.
Equally mythical is that of the drummer boy and Sergeant Matcham in the Ingoldsby “Legend of Salisbury Plain,” where “one Mr. Jones,” hearing certain groans, states—
“That he followed the moans, and, led by their tones,
Found a raven a-picking a drummer boy’s bones!
Then the Colonel wrote word,
From the King’s Forty-third,
That the story was certainly true that they heard.”
It must not be imagined that the final result of the war on the French side was other than creditable in the highest degree to Soult. No one recognises this more than Napier, and his eulogy is worth quoting.
“Vast combinations, inexhaustible personal resources, a clear judgment, unshaken firmness and patience under difficulties, unwavering fidelity to his sovereign and his country, are what no man can justly deny him. In this celebrated campaign of nine months, although counteracted by the treacherous hostility of many of his countrymen, he repaired and enlarged the works of five strong places, and entrenched five great camps with such works as Marius himself would not have disdained; once he changed his line of operations, and, either attacking or defending, delivered twenty-four battles and combats. Defeated in all, he fought the last as fiercely as the first; remaining unconquered in mind, and still intent upon renewing the struggle, when peace came to put a stop to his prodigious efforts. These efforts were fruitless, because Suchet renounced him; because the people of the south were apathetic, and fortune was adverse; because he was opposed to one of the greatest generals of the world at the head of unconquerable troops.”
Wellington, patient under difficulties, had fully succeeded in his task of freeing the Peninsula from French domination. And if at Salamanca he showed a tactical skill which stands out in contrast to some of his other victories, the final campaign of Vittoria shows a strategical grasp which is not, in the opinion of foreign experts in the art of war, so brilliantly apparent in the years before 1813–14. But one thing may be mentioned, of which many are now ignorant. A common cry among the French throughout the prolonged war was the cruelty with which their prisoners in England were treated. The charge embittered the already bitter contest, and though foreign nations were little better than ourselves, if at all, there was more than a sub-stratum of truth in what was openly proclaimed in France.
However much abuse may have been lavished on France in the time past, and which lives to our shame and sorrow below the surface even now, this is one of the evil heritages of that war-stricken time. This is the recorded story of how the prisoners were treated: “They were consigned in huge batches, like so many convicts, to the hulks at Chatham and Portsmouth, and to inland prisons at Dartmoor and in some rural districts of Scotland. The history of the hulks is one simple tissue of horrors. The Government had no active wish to maltreat its prisoners, but the officials placed in authority over them were often rude, and oftener drunken, and did not understand the character of their guests. Worse than that, they did not care about such understanding; and at the time it was rather patriotic than otherwise to detest a Frenchman. The prisoners were not systematically starved, but they were fed as men-of-war’s men were then victualled—on weevilly biscuit, salt junk, and jury rum. They had no means of cooking their food in their own fashion; they were pent-up between the decks of old vessels, all but deprived of exercise, and denied the commonest appliances of cleanliness. So they had the scurvy, dysentery, typhus, and a host of other ailments; now and then an epidemic would break out among them, and they would die like sheep afflicted by the rot. The most horrible profligacy was rampant on board those floating pandemoniums. The prisoners had nothing whatever to do, and vast numbers of them belonged to the lowest and most ignorant classes. So they swore and gambled, they quarrelled and fought; scarcely a week passed in which some fatal duel did not take place among them. Such were the hulks,—the dreaded pontons,—descriptions of which, not much overcharged, were drawn up by the order of Napoleon, and distributed among the French peasantry, in order to inflame their minds against the English.”
Can one wonder at the revengeful feeling that lived afterwards? So Thackeray thought, in telling with marvellous brilliancy the fictional story of that 17th of June in Brussels, when “the cannon of Waterloo began to roar,” when “from morning until past sunset” the sound never ceased, and “it was dark when the cannonading stopped all of a sudden.