While the French had never less than 200,000, sometimes as many as 260,000 effective troops at their disposal, after providing for all their garrisons and communications, the English general had never more than 30,000 effective British and 20,000 Portuguese around his standard. The French were directed by the Emperor, who, intent on the subjugation of the Peninsula, and wielding the inexhaustible powers of the conscription for the supply of his armies, cared not though he lost 100,000 men, so as he purchased success by their sacrifice in every campaign. Wellington was supported at home by a government, which, raising its soldiers by voluntary enrolment, could with difficulty supply a drain of 15,000 men a-year from their ranks, and watched by a party which decried every advantage, and magnified every disaster, in order to induce the entire withdrawal of the troops from the Peninsula. Napoleon sent into Spain a host of veterans trained in fifteen years’ combats, who had carried the French standards into every capital of Europe. Wellington led to this encounter troops admirably disciplined, indeed, but almost all unacquainted with actual war, and who had often to learn the rudiments even of the most necessary field operations in presence of the enemy. Marlborough’s troops, though heterogeneous and dissimilar, had been trained to their practical duties in the preceding wars under William III., and brought into the field a degree of experience noways inferior to that of their opponents. Whoever weighs with impartiality those different circumstances, cannot avoid arriving at the conclusion that as Wellington’s difficulties were incomparably more formidable than Marlborough’s, so his merit, in surmounting them, was proportionally greater.
Though similar in many respects, so far as the general conduct of their campaigns is concerned, from the necessity under which both laboured of husbanding the blood of their soldiers, the military qualities of England’s two chiefs were essentially different, and each possessed some points in which he was superior to the other. By nature Wellington was more daring than Marlborough, and though soon constrained, by necessity, to adopt a cautious system, he continued, throughout all his career, to incline more to a hazardous policy. The intrepid advance and fight at Assaye; the crossing of the Douro and movement on Talavera in 1809; the advance to Madrid and Burgos in 1812; the actions before Bayonne in 1813; the desperate stand made at Waterloo in 1815—place this beyond a doubt. Marlborough never hazarded so much on the success of a single enterprise: he ever aimed at compassing his objects by skill and combination, rather than risking them on the chance of arms. Wellington was a mixture of Turenne and Eugene: Marlborough was the perfection of the Turenne school alone. No man could fight more ably and gallantly than Marlborough: his talent and rapidity of eye in tactics were, at least, equal to his skill in strategy and previous combination. But he was not partial to such desperate passages at arms, and never resorted to them, but from necessity or the emergency of a happy opportunity for striking a blow. The proof of this is decisive. Marlborough, during ten campaigns, fought only five pitched battles. Wellington in seven fought fifteen, in every one of which he proved victorious.[5]
Marlborough’s consummate generalship, throughout his whole career, kept him out of disaster. It was said, with justice, that he never fought a battle which he did not gain, nor laid siege to a town which he did not take. He took above twenty fortified places of the first order, generally in presence of an enemy’s army superior to his own. Wellington’s bolder disposition, more frequently involved him in peril, and on some occasions caused serious losses to his army; but they were the price at which he purchased his transcendent successes. But Wellington’s bolder strategy gained for him advantages which the more circumspect measures of his predecessor never could have attained. Marlborough would never, with scarcely any artillery, have hazarded the attack on Burgos, nor incurred the perilous chances of the retreat from that town; but he never would have delivered the South of the Peninsula in a single campaign, by throwing himself, with 40,000 men, upon the communications, in the North, of 200,000. It is hard to say which was the greater general, if their merits in the field alone are considered; but Wellington’s successes were the more vital to his country, for they delivered it from the greater peril; and they were more honourable to himself, for they were achieved against greater odds. And his fame, in future times, will be proportionally brighter; for the final overthrow of Napoleon, and destruction of the revolutionary power, in a single battle, present an object of surpassing interest, to which there is nothing in history, perhaps, parallel, and which, to the latest generation, will fascinate the minds of men.
The examination of the comparative merits of these two illustrious generals, and the enumeration of the names of their glorious triumphs, suggests one reflection of a very peculiar kind. That England is a maritime power, that the spirit of her inhabitants is essentially nautical, and that the sea is the element on which her power has chiefly been developed, need be told to none who reflect on the magnitude of her present colonial empire, and how long she has wielded the empire of the waves. The French are the first to tell us that her strength is confined to that element; that she is, at land, only a third-rate power; and that the military career does not suit the genius of her people. How, then, has it happened that England, the nautical power, and little inured to land operations, has inflicted greater wounds upon France by military success, than any other power, and that in almost all the pitched battles which the two nations have fought, during five centuries, the English have proved victorious? That England’s military force is absorbed in the defence of a colonial empire which encircles the earth, is indeed certain, and, in every age, the impatience of taxation in her people has starved down her establishment, during peace, to so low a point, as rendered the occurrence of disaster, in the first years consequent on the breaking out of war, a matter of certainty; while the military spirit of its neighbours has kept theirs at the level which ensures early success. Yet with all these disadvantages, and with a population which, down to the close of the last war, was little more than half that of France, she has inflicted far greater land disasters on her redoubtable neighbour than all the military monarchies of Europe put together.
English armies, for 120 years, ravaged France: they have twice taken its capital; an English king was crowned at Paris; a French king rode captive through London; a French emperor died in English captivity, and his remains were surrendered by English generosity. Twice the English horse marched from Calais to the Pyrenees; the monuments of Napoleon in the French capital at this moment, owe their preservation from German revenge to an English general. All the great disasters and days of mourning for France, since the battle of Hastings,—Tenchebray, Cressy, Poitiers, Azincour, Verneuil, Blenheim, Oudenarde, Ramilies, Malplaquet, Minden, Quebec, Egypt, Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Orthes, the Pyrenees, Waterloo,—were all gained by English generals, and won, for the most part, by English soldiers. Even at Fontenoy, the greatest victory over England of which France can boast since Hastings, every regiment in the French army was, on their own admission, routed by the terrible English column, and victory was snatched from its grasp solely by want of support on the part of the Dutch and Austrians. No coalition against France has ever been successful, in which England did not take a prominent part; none, in the end, failed of gaining its objects, in which she stood foremost in the fight. This fact is so apparent on the surface of history, that it is admitted by the ablest French historians, though they profess themselves unable to explain it.
Is it that there is a degree of hardihood and courage in the Anglo-Saxon race which renders them, without the benefit of previous experience in war, adequate to the conquest, on land, even of the most warlike Continental military nations? Is it that the quality of dogged resolution, determination not to be conquered, is of such value in war, that it compensates almost any degree of inferiority in the practical acquaintance with war? Is it that the North brings forth a bolder race of men than the South, and that, other things being equal, the people in a more rigorous climate will vanquish those in a more genial? Is it that the free spirit which, in every age, has distinguished the English people, has communicated a degree of vigour and resolution to their warlike operations, which has rendered them so often victorious in land fights, albeit nautical and commercial in their ideas, over their military neighbours? Or is it, that this courage in war, and this vigour in peace, and this passion for freedom at all times, arise from and are but symptoms of an ardent and aspiring disposition, imprinted by Nature on the races to whom was destined the dominion of half the globe? Experience has not yet determined to which of these causes this most extraordinary fact has been owing; but it is one upon which our military neighbours, and especially the French, would do well to ponder, now that the population of the British isles will, on the next census, be thirty millions. If England has done such things in Continental warfare, with an army which never brought fifty thousand native British sabres and bayonets into the field, what would be the result if national distress or necessities, or a change in the objects of general desire, were to send two hundred thousand?
LAYS AND LEGENDS OF THE THAMES.
Part II.
——Rushing along, leaving innumerable chimneys behind pouring out sempiternal smoke; the air filled with a perpetual clank of hammers, the crashing of enormous wheels, and jangling of colossal chains; every human being within sight being as black as a negro, and the gust from the shore giving the closest resemblance to a blast between the tropics. Our steamer played her part handsomely in this general effort to stifle the population, and threw columns of smoke, right and left, as she moved through the bends of the river, thick enough to have choked an army of coal-heavers. I am as little of a sentimentalist as any man; I have always pronounced Rousseau an impostor. I regretted that the pillory has been abolished in the days of the modern novelists of France; but I was nearly in a state of suffocation, and some allowance must be made for the wrath of asphyxia. As I looked on the fuliginous sky, and the cineritious earth, on the ember-coloured trees, and half vitrified villas, the whole calcined landscape, I involuntarily asked myself, what is the good of all this hammering, forging, and roasting alive? Is man to be made perfect in the manner of a Westphalia ham? or is it to be the crowning glory of a nation, that she is the great nail-maker to the civilized globe? Is her whole soul to be absorbed in the making of chain-cables and cotton-twist? Are all her aspirations to breathe only linsey-woolsey, Yorkshire broadcloth, and Birmingham buttons? Are the cheeks of her maids to grow pallid, for the sake of clothing the lower portion of a Hindoo mountaineer in flannel, and the forehead of an African savage in book-muslin? Or are our men, by nature the finest race in the world, to be crippled into the physiognomy and faculties of baboons, merely to make shawls for the Queen of Madagascar, or slippers for the great Mogul?
I was startled, by an universal run towards the head of the steamer. Men, women, children, lap-dogs, and all rushed forward, followed by an avalanche of bandboxes, which, heaped half chimney high, had heaved with a sudden lurch of the helm, and over-spread the deck with a chaos of caps, bonnets, and inferior appendages to the toilet. In the cloud of smoke above, around, and below, we had as nearly as possible run ashore upon the Isle of Dogs. The captain, as all the regular reports on occasions of disaster say, behaved in this extremity “with a coolness, a firmness, and a sagacity worthy of all admiration.” He had made nine hundred and ninety-nine voyages, to Margate before; it was therefore wholly impossible that he could have shot the head of his ship into the mud of the left bank of the Thames on his thousandth transit. The fact, however, seemed rather against the theory. But as I was not drowned, was not a shareholder in the vessel, and have an antipathy to courts-martial, I turned from the brawling of the present, to the bulletins of the past, and thought of Dog-land in its glory.