“Elle était à juste titre désignée comme la cause première et principale de la chute de Napoléon,” is the remark of General Foy, Histoire de la Guerre de la Péninsule. Avant-propos. And in one of his private letters he says, “Moscow brought Alexander, Spain brought Wellington, into the walls of our sacred city!”
I am therefore sure of the intrinsic interest of my subject, and am tremulous only about its treatment. Of this much I at least am certain—that no one will exclaim, as Horace did 2,000 years ago:
——“Quis feræ
Bellum curet Iberiæ?”
or be indifferent to the exploits of Englishmen in a country, with whose people the same Horace coupled a most flattering epithet—“peritus Iber.” The splendour and the decadence, the glory and misfortunes, the ancient grandeur and the existing distresses of Spain, the great historic parts which we have played either in unison or in rivalry,—above all, the terrible struggle which we maintained together against a Power with which it was at first despair to cope, and yet brought to a triumphant issue, make it impossible that any record of that struggle can be received with indifference; and the customary fate of rashness and incompetency is the only one that I have to apprehend.
That these great and glorious exploits should not have hitherto formed the subject of any extended poem may at first appear surprising. But the reason is obvious—the time had not yet arrived. The glare of contemporary fame is unfavourable to poetic celebration, except in the form of Pindar’s Olympionics, in dithyrambic odes imbued with the intoxication of victory, or otherwise in such short reflective sonnets as embodied a Wordsworth’s calm and philosophic spirit. The mists of time must be interposed before the hero rises to the Demigod, an entirely new generation must have succeeded, and the poet must himself belong to that generation. The halo of Imagination must invest what was before Reality, the subject must have attained the dignity of the myth, or heroic legend, and Ideal Art must be unencumbered by the pressure of the Actual. That time appears to have arrived. Forty years have elapsed since the commencement of this mighty struggle; those of our Peninsular heroes whom the shock of battle spared, have nearly all been gathered to their fathers, and those who remain are like late surviving Nestors whose heads are crowned with the snowy tonsure of Time.
Into the construction of this poem it is unfit that I should enter further than to state, that the action, which is in some degree formed on the purest ancient model, comprises a period of about two months, commencing a month before and ending a month after the taking of San Sebastian by storm. The besieged city forms the central point, and the events there, with superadded imaginative incidents, are combined with the fighting round San Sebastian, of which the object was on one side to relieve, and on the other to prevent the relief of that fortress. These are what are usually known by the name of the Battles of the Pyrenees, and commenced with the first battle of Sauroren, which was fought on the 28th July, 1813; the storming of San Sebastian occurred on the 31st of August; and the action of the poem concludes with the passage of the Bidassoa, and the advance of the Allied Army to the Greater Rhune, by which the Spanish soil was freed from the presence of the Invader—events which occurred on the 7th and 8th of October. The second siege of San Sebastian commenced contemporaneously with the first battle of Sauroren, on the 28th July.[A] The actual time therefore employed in the action is precisely two months and twelve days. The battles of the Pyrenees introduced are essentially interwoven with the main subject, which is the capture of the great fortress of San Sebastian, the principal event of the latter part of the War while it was confined to the Spanish soil. All the characters are grouped by the story round the central figure of the besieged city, the incidents of the peripeteia or plot are interwoven with that event and with each other, and—if it be not presumption to use such a word—the Epos is complete. The critics, I have no doubt, will find abundant faults; and the rest I commit to their tender mercies.
Though the time, as essential to such compositions, is in comparison with the duration of the War extremely limited, all its leading incidents are introduced in the permitted shapes of narrative, episode, allusion, and apostrophe. The historical part of the work invites the closest examination, as well as the local colouring, to which a six years’ constant residence in the Peninsula has enabled me, I trust, to impart some truth and vivacity. I have lived in the midst of revolts, revolutions, and military movements; my experience almost equals that of an actual campaigner; and I have witnessed even portions of three sieges—those of Seville and Barcelona in 1843, and that of Almeida in Portugal in 1844. Copious historical and explanatory notes are annexed to each canto, and the description of the battle grounds is made accurate by personal observation of many of them, which I have embodied in the notes. The theatre of that portion of the War which enters into the action of the poem itself presents very felicitous subjects for description, the ground being the gigantic Pyrenees, and the combats there sustained being more like those of Titans than of men. In addition to much oral testimony, the authorities I have consulted are very numerous, and as fidelity has been my constant aim their language will be found frequently cited in the notes. The principal of these are Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Southey’s History of the Peninsular War, Foy’s Histoire de la Guerre de la Péninsule, Gurwood’s Despatches of the Duke of Wellington, Jones’s Journals of the Sieges in Spain, Belmas’s Journals of Sieges, compiled from official documents by order of the French government, Captain Cooke’s Memoirs, Captain Pringle’s Ditto, Captain Batty’s Campaign of the left Wing of the Allied Army in the Western Pyrenees, Gleig’s Subaltern, Annals of the Peninsular War, De la Pène’s Campagnes de 1813 et 1814, and Pellot’s Mémoires des Campagnes des Pyrénées.
A difficulty inseparable from this subject is its great historical and political interest, which although in one respect an advantage in another is a considerable drawback. With events so well known and comparatively so recent it is impossible to take liberties; invention is restrained, and the imagination is confined within limits more strict than the poetical faculty might desire for its operations. If this objection has been felt with regard to Tasso’s Gerusalemme, the personages of which were French and Italian counts and princes familiar to the reader of general history, and whose acts and characters were well known though they lived four centuries before he wrote, it is clearly far more applicable in the present instance. The answer at once is that an entirely different treatment must be resorted to, that celestial machinery, witchcraft, and all analogous means must be excluded, and that actual truth must be made the basis of the whole composition. To truth I have accordingly adhered, and invite the strictest historical criticism, consistent with poetical diction and imagery, of my account of these campaigns. The events were fortunately of that brilliant description, and their theatre, the Pyrenees, so essentially romantic, that the true and the marvellous are here one and the same. Historical accuracy is here an element of beauty; and my minor plot is alone invented, yet is meant to be strictly probable.
Nearly the entire of our modern military system dates from the commencement of the Peninsular War. The cumbrous old system which fought a whole campaign for a comfortable place for winter quarters (a great aim with Turenne) was broken up rapidly by the vigour of Napoléon, and our first débût under the Duke of York had taught us that we must change our plan. In 1808, the very year of our first victories in the Peninsula (Roriça and Vimieiro) the use of hair-powder was for the first time discontinued in the British army. Rifle corps were then first formed—in the first instance as rather a hopeless experiment, our soldiers having been deemed too slow and heavy for this practice; but, as the result proved, with perfect success. From the Polish lancers whom we first saw at Albuera we borrowed the idea of our corps of lancers, as we afterwards took from the French cuirassiers the modern equipment of our lifeguards. The brilliant appearance of our light dragoons astonished the French on their first appearance in the Peninsula. “Nos soldats, frappés de l’élégance de l’habit des dragons légers, de leurs casques brillants, de la tournure svelte des hommes et des chevaux, leur avaient donné le nom de lindors.”—Foy, Hist. Guerre Pénins. liv. 2. For this rather theatrical display we substituted with better taste in 1813 an uniform similar to that worn by the German light cavalry. The Shrapnell shell, or spherical case shot, (the invention of an English Colonel of that name) was used for the first time during the Peninsular War with great effect.