Those lively tales of adventure—Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, Sir Harry Smith’s Autobiography, and Blakeney’s memoir (which its editor called A Boy in the Peninsular War)[31]—were all written at a much later date, from twenty to thirty years after Waterloo, and show their remoteness from the time that they describe not so much by want of detail, nor of picturesque power of description,—all three authors were good wielders of the pen—as by the selection of the facts that they record. Much of the every-day life of the regiment has been forgotten or grown dim, and only the great days, or the most striking personal experiences, or quaint and grotesque incidents, are recorded. This very fact makes them all very good reading—they contain (so to speak) all the plums of the cake and comparatively little of the less appetizing crust. Harry Smith’s chapters are practically the tale of his Odyssey in the campaigns of 1812–13 along with the heroic little Spanish wife whom he had picked up and married at the storm of Badajoz. Kincaid is a humourist—he remembers all the grotesque incidents, ludicrous situations, practical jokes, and misadventures, in which he and his comrades were concerned, and pours them out in a string of anecdotes, loosely connected by a narrative of which he says that he refuses to be responsible for the exact sequence or dating. It is very amusing, and some of the more striking stories can be verified from other and better authorities. But the general effect is often as if we were reading a chapter out of Lever’s Charles O’Malley, or some such old-fashioned Peninsular romance. Blakeney’s book gives a better impression for solidity, and he fills up many an incident, otherwise known to us only in outline, with picturesque detail which bears every appearance of truth. But I have once or twice found his narrative refusing to square in with contemporary documents, and when this is the case the story written twenty-five years after the event must go to the wall.[32] He must be used with caution, though he is giving a genuine record to the best of his ability.
Reminiscences from the Ranks
Nearly all the reminiscences from the ranks are subject to these same disabilities. With hardly an exception they were written down long years after the events recorded. Usually the narrator had no books or notes to help him, and we get a genuine tale, uninfluenced by outer sources, but blurred and foreshortened by the lapse of time. The details of personal adventure are perfectly authentic to the best of the veteran’s memory; incidents of battle, of camp hardships, of some famous court-martial and subsequent punishment-parade, come out in a clear-cut fashion. But there are long gaps of forgotten months, frequent errors of dating, and often mistakes in the persons to whom an exploit, an epigram, or a misadventure are attributed. Yet these little volumes give the spirit of the rank and file in the most admirable fashion, and enable us to realize the inner life of the battalion as no official document can do. There are a few cases where the author has got hold of a book, generally Napier’s great history, and to a great extent spoils his work by letting in passages of incongruous eloquence, or strategical disquisition, into the homely stuff of his real reminiscences.[33]
One soldier’s little volume stands out from all the rest for its literary merit—it is the work of a man of superior education, who had enlisted in a moment of pique and humiliation to avoid facing at home the consequences of his own conceit and folly. This short story of 150 pages called Journal of T. S., a Soldier of the 71st Highland Light Infantry, 1806–15, was written down as early as 1818,[34] when memory was still fresh. Its value lies in the fact that the author wrote from the ranks, yet was so different in education and mental equipment from his comrades, that he does not take their views and habits for granted, but proceeds to explain and comment on them. “I could get,” as he notes, “no pleasure from their amusements, but found it necessary to humour them in many things, and to be obliging to all. I was thought saucy, and little courted by them, they not liking my dry manner as they called it.” His narrative is that of an intelligent observer of the behaviour of the regiment, in whose psychology he is deeply interested, rather than that of a typical soldier. Having a ready pen and a keen observant eye, he produced a little book of extraordinary interest. The chronicle of his marches, and the details of the actions which he relates, seem very accurate when compared with official documents.
Sergeant Donaldson of the 94th was another notable Scot whose book, The Eventful Life of a Soldier, is well worth reading. He was not so well educated as T. S., nor had he the same vivid literary style. But he was an intelligent man, and possessed a wider set of interests than was common in the ranks, so that it is always worth while to look up his notes and observations. His description of the horrors of Masséna’s retreat from Portugal in 1811 is a very striking piece of lurid writing. After him may be mentioned a quartermaster and a sergeant—Surtees and Costello—both of the Rifle Brigade,—whose reminiscences are full of typical stories reflecting the virtues and failings of the famous Light Division. For the views and ways of thought of the ordinary private of the better sort, the little books of “Rifleman Harris,” already cited above, Lawrence of the 40th, and Cooper of the 7th Fusiliers,[35] are valuable authority. They are admirable evidence for the way in which the rank and file looked on a battle, a forced march, or a prolonged shortage of rations. But we must not trust them overmuch as authorities on the greater matter of war.
Memoirs of French Veterans
There is a considerable bulk of French reminiscences dealing with the purely British side of the Peninsular War. Beside Marbot’s and Thiébault’s memoirs, of which I have already made mention, three or four more must not be neglected by any one who wishes to see Wellington’s army from the outside. By far the most vivid and lively of them is Lemonnier-Delafosse of the 31st Léger, whose Souvenirs Militaires were published at Havre in 1850. He is a bitter enemy, and wants to prove that Wellington was a mediocre general, and ought always to have been beaten. But he does his best to tell a true tale, and acknowledges his defeats handsomely—though he thinks that with better luck they might have been victories. Failing memory can be detected in one or two places, where he makes an officer fall at the wrong battle, or misnames a village. Fantin des Odoards, also (oddly enough) of the 31st Léger, kept a journal, so that his reminiscences of 1808–11 are very accurate. He is specially valuable for Moore’s retreat and Soult’s Oporto campaign. A far more fair-minded man than Delafosse, he is full of acknowledgments of the merit of his British adversaries, and makes no secret of his disgust for the Spanish war,—a nightmare of plunder and military executions naturally resulting from an unjust aggression. A third valuable author is Colonel St. Chamans, an aide-de-camp of Soult, whom he cordially detested, and whose meanness and spirit of intrigue he is fond of exposing. He is of a light and humorous spirit—very different from another aide-de-camp, Ney’s Swiss follower, Sprünglin, whose journal[36] is a most solid and heavy production, of value for minute facts and figures but not lively. Unlike St. Chamans in another respect, he is devoted to his chief, the Marshal, of whom he was the most loyal admirer. But I imagine that Ney was a much more generous and loveable master than the wily Soult.
Other useful French volumes of reminiscences are those of Guingret of the 6th corps, full of horrible details of Masséna’s Portuguese misfortunes; of D’Illens, a cavalry officer who served against Moore and Wellesley in 1808–09; and of Vigo-Roussillon, of the 8th Line, who gives the only good French narrative of Barrosa. Parquin is a mere sabreur, who wrote his memoir too late, and whose anecdotes cannot be trusted. He survived to be one of the followers of Napoleon III. in his early and unhappy adventures at Boulogne and elsewhere. Other French writers, such as Rocca and Gonneville, were long in Spain, but little in contact with the British, being employed on the Catalan coast, or with the army of the South on the Granada side. So much for the works of actors in the Great War, who relate what they have themselves seen. We need spend but a much smaller space on the books of the later generations, which are but second-hand information, however carefully they may have been compiled.
The British regimental histories ought to be of great value, since the series compiled by the order of the Horse Guards, under the general editorship of Richard Cannon, in the 1830’s, might have been enriched by the information obtainable from hundreds of Peninsular veterans, who were still surviving. Unfortunately nearly every volume of it is no more than bad hack-work. In the majority of the volumes we find nothing more than copious extracts from Napier, eked out with reprints of the formal reports taken from the London Gazette. It is quite exceptional to find even regimental statistics, such as might have been obtained with ease from the pay-lists and other documents in possession of the battalion, or stored at the Record Office. Details obtained through enquiry from veteran officers who had served through the war are quite exceptional. Some of his volumes are less arid and jejune than others—and this is about all that can be said in favour of even the best of them.
Regimental Histories