The Unpopular Commissary
If these were the experiences of a Commissariat official who had been three years in Spain, and knew the language well, it is easy to guess how inefficient a newly landed clerk or assistant must have been, when he was sent to sweep the countryside for what he could discover. It was a thankless task—often the seeker came back empty, to be frowned upon by his departmental chief and the brigadier. When he did discover food, it was taken for granted, and he was little thanked. The fighting men seem to have had a general prejudice against their providers—they were accused of being timid, arrogant, and selfish, and the embezzlements of certain black sheep were made to cover a general charge of dishonesty against the whole tribe, which was far from being justified. Misfeasance there certainly was, when an unscrupulous commissary credited a peasant with more fanegas than he had received, and divided the balance of cash with the seller. But on the whole the work was well done, despite of the many complaints of the military—from Wellington himself downwards. That the Peninsular War was successfully maintained in 1810–11–12 was surely, at bottom, the work of the much-maligned commissaries, and the motley band of ill-paid and sometimes ruffianly muleteers and waggoners, who, through a thousand difficulties,[321] generally got the biscuit and the rum-barrels, the droves of bullocks, and the packs of clothing and shoes, to their appointed destination.
CHAPTER XX
A NOTE ON THINGS SPIRITUAL
In the first chapter of this volume I had occasion to remark that Wellington’s army had in its ranks a considerable sprinkling of men of religion, and that three or four of the better Peninsular memoirs were written by them. Some were Methodists, some Churchmen, so that both sides of the great spiritual movement which had started about the middle of the eighteenth century were represented in their diaries. The spiritual side of the soldier’s life during the great war has had so little written about it, that a few illustrative pages on this topic must not be omitted.
We may trace the existence of the admirable class of men who have left us these memoirs to two separate causes. The one, of course, was the way in which the movement started by the Wesleys had influenced all ranks of life, from the lowest upward. Its effects had not been confined to avowed Methodists, but had led to the rise of the Evangelical party within the Church of England, which was developing very rapidly all through the days of the Great War. But I think that even if the Wesleys had never lived, there would yet have been a strong reaction in favour of godly living and the open profession of Christianity, in consequence of the blasphemous antics of the French Revolution. Nothing in that movement so disgusted Englishmen (even those of them who were not much given to practical religion) as the story of the “Goddess of Reason,” enthroned on the high-altar of Notre Dame, at the time when an orgy of bloodshed was making odious the flatulent talk about humanitarianism and liberty which was the staple of Revolutionary oratory. The peculiar combination of insult to Christianity, open evil living, and wholesale judicial murder, which distinguished the time of the Terror, had an effect on observers comparable to nothing else that has been seen in modern times. Even men who had not hitherto taken their religion very seriously, began to think that a hell was logically necessary in the scheme of creation for beings like Chaumette or Hébert, Fouquier Tinville or Carrier of the Noyades. And, we may add, a personal devil was surely required, to account for the promptings of insane wickedness which led to the actions of such people. A tightening up of religious observances, such as the use of family prayer and regular attendance at Church, was a marked feature of the time. It required some time for the movement to spread, but its effect was soon observable. It naturally took shape in adhesion to Evangelical societies within the Church of England, or Methodist societies without it; since these were the already existing nuclei round which those whose souls had been stirred by the horrors in France and the imminent peril of Great Britain would group themselves.
Effects of the French Revolution
Very soon the day was over in which “enthusiasm” was the dread of all normal easy-going men. Something more than the eighteenth century religious sentimentalism, and vague spiritual philosophy, was needed for a nation which had to fight for life and empire against the French Republic and all its works. Those methods of thought were sufficiently discredited by the fact that there was a touch of Rousseau in them: it was easy to look over the Channel, and see to what a belief in some nebulous Supreme Being, and in the perfectibility and essential righteousness of mankind at large, might lead. The God of the Old Testament was a much more satisfactory object of worship to the men who had to face the Jacobin, and Calvinism has always proved a good fighting creed. If ever there was a justification for a belief that the enemy were in a condition of complete reprobation, and that to smite them was the duty of every Christian man, it was surely at this time. The conviction of the universality of sin and the natural wickedness of the human heart was the exact opposite and antidote to the optimistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, and to its belief that man is essentially a benevolent being, and that if he sometimes breaks out into deplorable violence “tout comprendre est tout pardonner.” As a working hypothesis for an enemy of the French Revolution the Calvinistic theory had everything in its favour.
The army, like English society in general, contained an appreciable proportion of those whom the stress and terror of the times had made anxious about their souls. Some took their religious experience quietly, and found sufficient edification in accepted forms. Many, however, filled with a fervent belief in original sin and in the blackness of their own hearts, only got comfort by “conversion” in the prevalent form of the day, and in subsequent reliance on complete Justification by Faith.
“Conversion” was frequently a matter of dire spiritual agony and wrestling, often accompanied by fits of horrible depression, which were generally fought down, but sometimes ended in religious mania. Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th, whom I have often had to quote in other chapters, tells a terrible tale from his own regiment of a man whose weak point had been a violent temper, and a tendency to use his fists. Being under strong religious emotion, and having determined never again to offend in this way, he had the misfortune to break out once more in unjustifiable blows, administered to his peasant landlord in the village of Ustaritz. Ashamed of his backsliding he fell into a fit of despair, and brooding over the text “if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off,” he resolved that this was the only cure for his irascibility. Whereupon he went, and without any display of emotion or eccentricity, very quietly borrowed a felling-axe from one of the regimental pioneers, placed his right hand upon a window-sill, and cut it off with a single blow delivered very dexterously with his left. He then went and reported his act and its reason to the regimental surgeon, with great calmness and lucidity.[322]