Sir Charles Napier

by Sir William Francis Butler

CHAPTER XIV HOME—LAST ILLNESS—DEATH

In March, 1851, Napier reached England. Many times, returning from some scene of war or foreign service, had he seen the white cliffs rise out of the blue waves. This was to be his last arrival, and perhaps it was the saddest in all his life. "I retire with a reprimand," he had said a few months earlier; and although he tried hard to keep in view the fact that in circumstances of sudden and grave danger to the State he had acted firmly, courageously, honestly, and with absolute sense and wisdom in every step he had taken, still all that only served to drive deeper into his injustice-hating heart the sting of unmerited and unjust censure.

He came home to die. Not all at once, indeed, did the end come. Such gnarled old oaks do not wither of a sudden, no matter how rude may be the shock; but the iron had entered into his soul, and the months of life that still remained were to be chiefly passed in pain and suffering. At first, after his arrival, business took him to London, and the long-dreamt-of happy gardening-ground in Hampshire was denied him. All through life he had hated the great city. "To be in London is to be a beast—a harnessed and driven beast—and nothing more," he writes. Neither its dinners nor its compliments nor its "pompous insolence" had ever given him the least concern. Like another great soldier who, in this year, 1851, was about to begin that military career which was to render his name so famous, Charles Napier had a contempt for the capital of his country. When the Directors of the East India Company had been on their knees to him, and the Lord Mayor and the rest of the great dining dignitaries had been begging his attendance at their banquets during the Punjaub disasters, he had not been in the least elated; and neither now was he depressed by their studied neglect of him when danger had passed by. "I never was in spirits at a London party," he writes, "since I came out of my teens."

In April he gets away to Oaklands, and prepares to settle down to the repose of a country life. "At last a house of mine own," he says. "All my life I have longed for this." But scarcely is he at home ere the disease, contracted in Scinde, increased in India, and aggravated by the ill-usage of the past year, brings him to the verge of death. He rallies again, but his thoughts are now set upon the great leave-taking. In his journal we seem to see him all the clearer as the end approaches. "When I die may the poor regret me," he writes; "if they do, their judgment will be more in my favour than anything else. My pride and happiness through life has been that the soldiers loved me.... I treated every soldier as my friend and comrade, whatever his rank was." What a contempt he has for the upstart in uniform, the martinet, the thing with the drawl and eyeglass! "As military knowledge decays, aristocratic, or rather upstart arrogance, increases," he writes. "A man of high breeding is hand and glove with his men, while the son of your millionaire hardly speaks to a soldier." Then he turns to the "coming world and all those I hope to meet there—Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, and my father." But the long-looked-for peace of life in the country—the garden, the pets, and the rest of it—is not to be. He has a beautiful Pyrenean dog, Pastor by name. A neighbouring farmer wantonly shoots this noble animal. Napier tries to punish the man at law. The case is clear against the dog-killer, but the local jury acquits him in spite of judge and evidence. "Trial by jury is a farce," we read in the journal. "Why, if Goslin [the dog-killer] had murdered his wife and child, they [the jury] could not have treated him more gently!"

Then come other worries of a more serious character. The East India Directors are doing all that wealth and power can do to take from him his Scinde prize-money. He was not the Commander-in-Chief of the army, they say, with a monstrous effrontery; and of course they have anonymous scribblers everywhere at work to blacken and defame their enemy. So, between the local numskull murdering his pet dogs and the cosmopolitan master-shop-keeper vilifying his character, the last months of the old soldier's life are vexed and unhappy.

Still, as the end draws nearer many bright gleams of sunshine come to gladden the old man's heart. Not only is the great heart of the nation with him, but all the kings of thought are on his side too. When the great Duke passes to his rest no figure in the throng of war-worn veterans around the coffin was so eagerly sought for as that of the man who, forty-two years earlier, had waved his hat to Lord Wellington when, unable to speak as he was carried desperately wounded from the fierce fight at Busaco, he thought this mute farewell was to be a last adieu. Men noted too with inward sense of satisfaction at the scene in St. Paul's that "the eagle face and bold strong eye" of the veteran who stood by the dead Duke's bier gave promise that England had a great war-leader still left to her.

But the "eagle face and the bold strong eye" were only those echoes of bygone life which are said to be strong as the shadows gather. And the shadows were gathering fast now. In June, 1853, the illness that was to prove mortal began. Still, we find him writing letters to help some old soldier who had served him in Scinde, and in the very last letter that he seems ever to have written, the names of Sergeant Power and Privates Burke and Maloney stand witness to the love for the private soldier which this heroic heart carried to the very verge of the grave. In July he was brought to Oaklands, as he wished that the end should come to him in his own home. There, stretched upon a little camp-bed in a room on the ground-floor of the house, he waited for death. It came with those slow hours of pain and suffering which so frequently mark the passing away of those in whom the spirit of life has been strong, and who have fought death so often that he seems afraid to approach and seize such tough antagonists. Frequently during the weeks of illness the old instincts would assert themselves in the sufferer. He would ask his veteran brother to defend his memory when he was gone, from the attacks of his enemies; or he would send messages through his son-in-law to the "poor soldiers," to tell them how he had loved them; and once he asked that his favourite charger, Red Rover—the horse that had carried him through the storm of battle at Meanee—might be brought to the bedside, so that for a last time he might speak a word to and caress the animal; but the poor beast seemed to realise the mortal danger of his old master, and shrank startled from the sick couch. As the month of August drew to a close it was evident to those who lovingly watched beside the sufferer that the end was close at hand. It came on the early morning of the 29th. The full light of the summer morning was streaming into the room, lighting up the shields, swords, and standards of Eastern fight which hung upon the walls; the old colours of the Twenty-Second, rent and torn by shot, moved gently in the air, fresh with the perfume of the ripened summer; wife, children, brothers, servants, and two veteran soldiers who had stood behind him in battle, watched—some praying, some weeping, some immovable and fixed in their sorrow—the final dissolution; and just as the heroic spirit passed to Him who had sent it upon earth, filled with so many noble aspirations and generous sympathies, a brave man who stood near caught the flags of the Twenty-Second Regiment from their resting-place and waved these shattered emblems of battle above the dying soldier. So closed the life of Charles Napier. When a great soldier who had carried the arms of Rome into remotest regions lay dying in the imperial city, the historian Tacitus tells us that "in the last glimpse of light" the hero "looked with an asking eye for something that was absent." Not so with Napier. Those he had loved so devotedly, those who had fought around him so bravely, those who had shielded his name in life from the malice of enemies, and who were still to do battle for him when he was in the grave—all these loving, true, and faithful figures met his last look on earth.

They laid Charles Napier beneath the grass of the old garrison graveyard in Portsmouth, for the dull resentment of oligarchic faction is strongest in the death of heroes, and a studied silence closed the doors of the two great cathedrals of the capital against ashes which would have honoured even the roll of the mighty dead who sleep within these hallowed precincts. Faction, for the moment dressed in power, forgot that by neglecting to place the body of Charles Napier with his peers, it was only insulting the dust of ten centuries of English heroism; and yet even in this neglect the animosity of power misplaced was but able to effect its own discomfiture, for Napier sleeps in death as he lived in life—among the brave and humble soldiers he had loved to lead; and neither lofty dome nor glory of Gothic cathedral could fitter hold his ashes than the narrow grave beside the shore where the foot of Nelson last touched the soil of England.

It was on September 8th, 1853, that the funeral took place at Portsmouth. Sixty thousand people—and all the soldiers who could come from miles around, not marching as a matter of duty, but flocking of their own accord and at their own expense to do honour to their dead comrade—followed the procession in reverent silence. Well might the soldiers of England mourn, not indeed for the leader but for themselves. Little more than one year had to pass ere these Linesmen, these Highlanders, these Riflemen, and twenty thousand of their brethren, lions though they were, would be dying like sheep on the plateau before Sebastopol—dying for the want of some real leader of men to think for them, to strive for them, to lead them. Two years later to a day, on September 8th, 1855, men looking gloomily at the Russian Redan and its baffled assailants might well remember "the eagle face and bold strong eye" and vainly long for one hour of Meanee's leading.