It is clearly from the domestic annals of the 88th that Charles Lever drew the greater part of the good stories which made the fortune of Charles O’Malley. The reader will find many of the characters of that excellent romance appearing as actual historical personages in Grattan, notably the eccentric surgeon Maurice Quill, whose fame was so great throughout the British army that the novelist did not even take the trouble to change his name. His colleague Dr. O’Reily was almost as great an original. Many of the humours of Mickey Free seem to be drawn directly from the doings of Grattan’s servant Dan Carsons. Comparing the “real thing” with the work of fiction, one is driven to conclude that much of what was regarded as rollicking invention on Lever’s part, was only a photographic reproduction of anecdotes that he had heard from old soldiers of the Connaught Rangers.
Military diaries are often disappointing from one of two causes. Either the author slips into second-hand and second-rate narratives of parts of the campaign which he did not himself witness—things which he had better have left to the professed historian—or he fails to give us those small traits of the daily life of the regiment which are needed to make us realise the actualities of war. Grattan sometimes falls into the first-named fault, but never into the latter. He seems to have had an instinctive knowledge of what future generations would want to know concerning the old Peninsular army—its trials in the matter of pay, food, and clothing, its shifts and devices, its views of life and death. If any one wishes to know why Sir Thomas Picton was unpopular, or what the private and the subaltern thought about Lord Wellington, they will find what they seek in these pages. Nowhere else have I seen the psychology of the stormers of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz dealt with in such a convincing fashion; let the reader note in particular pages 144–5 and 193–4.
I have to confess that in various parts of this reprint I have used the Editor’s license to delete a certain amount of the author’s original manuscript. Grattan had two besetting sins considered as a literary man. The first was one to which I have already made allusion. Not unfrequently he quitted his autobiographical narrative, and inserted long paragraphs concerning parts of the war of which he had no personal knowledge, e.g. about the movements of Hill’s corps in Estremadura, or of the Spaniards in remote corners of the Peninsula. These, as is natural, are often full of inaccuracies: sometimes (and this is a worse fault) they turn out to be taken almost verbatim from formal histories, such as those of Colonel Jones and Lord Londonderry. In one place I found thirty lines which were practically identical with a passage in Napier. In all cases these relate to parts of the war which did not come under Grattan’s own eyes: I have therefore ventured to omit them.
Grattan’s other weakness was a tendency to fly off at a tangent in the middle of a piece of interesting narrative, in order to controvert the statements of writers with whom he disagreed. He had one special foe—Robinson, the biographer of Sir Thomas Picton, on whom he wasted many an objurgatory paragraph. These small controversial points, on which he turns aside, break the thread of his discourse in the most hopeless fashion, and are now of little interest. I have often, though not always, thought it well to leave out such divagations. At the end of the work, in a similar fashion, a long criticism on a certain speech of the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords has been omitted. It deals with the story of the long-delayed issue of the war-medal for the Peninsula. The whole point of Grattan’s remarks (caustic but well justified in most respects) was removed when the medal was at last actually distributed, a few months after he had made his complaint.
The present volume stops short at the end of the Peninsular war. Grattan’s pen travelled farther. Encouraged by the success of his first book, he issued two supplementary volumes: these are of very inferior interest, being mainly concerned with the doings of the 88th in their early campaigns, before the author had joined them. There is much about Buenos Ayres, the Low Countries, and Talavera. The rest is composed of amusing but very rambling reminiscences of garrison life in Canada in 1814, and in France in 1815–1816, and of character sketches of some of Grattan’s contemporaries, such as the unfortunate Simon Fairfield, concerning whom the reader will find certain information on pages 130–1 and 324 of this reprint. The whole of these two volumes consists of mere disjecta membra, much inferior in interest to the first two which the author had produced.
Grattan’s military service, which had begun in 1808, ended in 1817, in consequence of the enormous reductions in the effective of the army which were carried out after the evacuation of France began. His name last appears among combatant officers in the army list for March 1817, the month in which the 88th was reduced from two battalions to one, and many of its officers placed upon half pay. But he lived for thirty years longer, frequently descending into print in the United Service Journal, to controvert those who seemed to him to undervalue the services of the 88th or the old 3rd Division. In 1836 we find him residing at New Abbey, Kilcullen, and issuing a Vindication of the Connaught Rangers, which seemed so convincing to the officers of his old regiment, that they presented him with a present of plate to the value of 200 guineas “as a mark of their personal esteem and regard, and also in token of their warm admiration of his triumphant vindication of his gallant regiment from the attacks of the biographer [Robinson] of the late Sir Thomas Picton.” In 1847 he published the two volumes from which the present reprint is taken. In the following year he received his long-deserved Peninsular Medal. His last appearance in print was the publication of the two supplementary volumes of Anecdotes and Reminiscences, mentioned above, in the spring of 1853.
C. OMAN.
Oxford, November 1902.
THE OFFICERS OF THE 88TH
1809–14
Grattan’s Memoirs cannot be fully understood without a list of the comrades whom he is perpetually mentioning in the narrative. I therefore append the names of the officers of the 88th from the Army List of 1809–10. I have added to each of those who were killed or wounded during the war a note specifying the casualty. No less than 49 of the 103 names bear this addition!