Part 16

The French author divides his history into three periods--the first, that of the battles of Howe and Hood, of Hotham and Bridport; the second, that of Jervis; the third, (from 1798 to 1805) belonging to Nelson, without an equal, without even a competitor--the most glorious series of successes ever won on the ocean.

The true definition of these volumes is, in fact, a "Life of Nelson"--a hurried, but clear and animated memoir, on a subject which can never be too often repeated to the ear or the heart of Englishmen; but a subject which is here coloured with the inevitable, and yet not unamusing, prejudices of a Frenchman and an enemy. He admits Nelson to have been a naval hero, while he labours to show that his chief successes arose from a lofty disregard of circumstances, a native contempt of rule, a transcendental rashness, which, continually exposing him to the chance of utter ruin, strangely always issued in victory. But those views are wholly imaginary. It is the foreign habit, to be perpetually in pursuit of _astonishment_; to think nothing meritorious which is not _magical_; and to carry into the greatest and gravest operations of public life the passion for the harlequinades of the theatre. The supremacy of Nelson arose from the more substantial grounds, of a thorough knowledge of his profession, of a strict deference for discipline, and a sort of instinctive and unhesitating determination to do the work set before him, with all the powers of his mind and frame. He, of course, possessed personal intrepidity in the most complete degree; but this amounted simply to the exposure of his life on all occasions where duty was to be done. Nelson was no fire-eater--no man of quarrel. We are not aware that he ever fought a duel. But he knew what was due to himself as much as any man--a fact shown by his answer to the Governor of Jamaica, who, having, on some remonstrances to him, rather haughtily observed, "that old generals were not accustomed to take advice from young captains." Nelson retorted by letter--"That he was of the same age as the prime minister of England, (Pitt), and that he thought himself as capable of commanding one of his Majesty's ships, as the premier was of governing the state."

But Nelson could not have gained his glories alone: he made his captains like himself; and every sailor in his fleet was ready to die along with him. His art in this was the simple one of justice. He acknowledged every man's merit. The officer who distinguished himself, was sure of receiving due honour from Nelson; promotion was regulated by service, and every brave man was confident in the recommendation of the admiral. He was also a kind man by nature: he hated punishment on board; he spoke good-naturedly to the sailors; he even gave way to any peculiarity which was not injurious to discipline. Some of his crew had become Methodists, and, offended with the general coarse conversation of the ship, desired to have their mess separate. Nelson immediately gave the required permission. The hearts of men naturally follow such a leader.

He had also the powerful sagacity which insures confidence; and no man doubted that, when Nelson commanded, he was leading to victory. He was, besides, a master of his profession--all his battles were the finest lessons of the tactician. He was never outmanoeuvred; he was never surprised; he was never even thrown into any difficulty, for which he had not a ready resource. The "Nelson touch" became proverbial; and the variety, completeness, and brilliancy of his plans for action sometimes excited the most extraordinary emotion, even to tears, among his officers. Something of this kind is said to have occurred on the final summoning of his captains into the cabin of the Victory, and laying before them his plan for the battle of Trafalgar.

Nelson had also the power, perhaps the most characteristic of genius, of throwing his thought into those shapes of vividness which penetrate at once to the understanding. When, on steering down for the French line at Aboukir, some one observed to him that the enemy were anchored too near the shore, for the British to pass within them;--"Where a French ship can swing, a British ship can anchor," was his decisive reply; and he instantly rushed in, and placed the French line between two fires. Another of those noble maxims was--"The captain cannot be wrong, who lays his ship alongside the enemy." It contains the whole theory of British battle. His "I can see no signal," when he was told that Admiral Parker had made the signal for retiring at Copenhagen, would have been immortalised, with the act which accompanied it, among the most brilliant "sayings and doings" of ancient Greece. But his last and well-known signal at Trafalgar surpassed all the rest, as much as the triumph surpassed these triumphs. The addresses of Napoleon to his armies were unquestionably fine performances. They spoke to the Frenchman by his feelings, his recollections, his personal pride, and his national renown. But, with the animation of the trumpet, they had its sternness and harshness. They were invocations to the French idol, that was to be worshipped only with perpetual blood. But the signal at Trafalgar recalled the Englishman only to the feelings of home. The voice of war never spoke a language more capable of being combined with all the purposes of peace. "England expects every man to do his duty" was fitted to bring before the Englishman the memory of his country, his home, his wife and children, all who might feel concerned in his conduct and character in the proud transactions of that great day. We think it the noblest appeal to national feeling ever made by a warrior to warriors.

Yet, what was the especial secret of that supreme rank which Nelson held over all the naval leaders of his time? Others may have been as intelligent, and indefatigable, and, it is to be hoped, all were as brave. The secret was--that Nelson was never satisfied with what he had done, and that he never _half did_ anything. There was no "drawn battle," among _his_ recollections. This is the more remarkable, as, for fifty years before, nearly all our naval battles had been drawn battles. Rodney's defeat of de Grasse was the great exception. British admirals, who were afraid of nothing else, were afraid of losing their masts! and were content with knocking down those of the enemy. Great fleets met each other, passed in parallel lines, fired their broadsides as they passed, one to the north and the other to the south. They might as well have been firing salutes. The wind soon carried them out of sight of each other; the admirals sat down in their cabins to write their respective histories of "the battle," which would have been only too much honoured by being called a _brush_; and the fleets went by mutual consent into harbour. In this sort of _War_! the French were as clever as we; and the Suffreins, di Guichens, d'Estaings, and Villeneuves, made their fame on this system of cannonading a mile off, and getting out of the way as quickly as possible.

Rodney first spoiled the etiquette of those affairs, by driving straight forward through the enemy's line, changing the easy parallel for the fighting perpendicular, and compelling at least one-half of the Frenchmen to come to close quarters. This was the method of Jervis, when his captain told him, that the fleet on which he was bearing down in the morning twilight were at least twenty. "If they were fifty," said the brave sailor, "I'll _drive through them_." He drove through them accordingly, and beat the Spaniards, with half their numbers.

Wellington observed, in the Peninsula, that the generals commanding under him were afraid of nothing but responsibility. This fear arose from the ignorant insolence, with which the loungers of the legislature were in the habit of fighting campaigns over their coffee-cups. It is to be hoped that the fashion has since changed. But Wellington demurred to the authority, and Nelson seemed not to have thought of its existence. They both supplied the sufficient answer to the _home_ campaigners, by beating the enemy wherever they met him.

We find a striking evidence of the hatred of "doing well enough" in one of Nelson's letters to his wife, on Hotham's battle with the French, under Martin, off Genoa, in 1795. Hotham was one of the old school, and though, in two awkward engagements, he had taken two of the French line, while a third had been burned, Nelson was indignant that the whole French fleet had not been captured. He had urged the admiral to leave the disabled ships in charge of the frigates, and chase the French.

"But," says the letter, "he, much cooler than myself, said, 'we must be contented--_we had done very well_.'" Nelson's evidently disgusted remark on this species of contentment is--"Had we taken ten sail, and suffered the eleventh to escape, when we could have got at her, I could _never_ have called it _well done_." In another part he says, "I wish to be an admiral, and in command of the British fleet. I should very soon do much, or be ruined. My disposition cannot bear tame and slow measures. _Sure I am_, that, had I commanded our fleet on the 14th, the whole French fleet would have graced our triumph, or I should have been in a confounded scrape." This was the language which, like the impulse of a powerful instinct, predicted the days of Aboukir, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar.

But the drag-chain on the progress of British intrepidity was at length to be taken of. Hotham was succeeded by Jervis. This eminent officer instantly reformed the whole condition of the Mediterranean fleet. He had evidently adopted the same conception of naval merit, which Nelson had so long kept before his eye. In selecting him for the command of the squadron sent to the Nile, Jervis wrote to the admiralty: "Nelson is an officer, who, whatever you bid him do, is sure _to do more_." And, in this spirit, Nelson was not content with running to Alexandria, and returning to say, that he found no one there; his resolve was, to find the French wherever they were, and fight them wherever they were found.

One word still for gallant old Jervis, the man who first confirmed the discipline of the navy. His firmness was the secret. When the Irish conspirators on board the Channel fleet had spread the spirit of mutiny in 1797, Jervis was warned from the admiralty that his fleet was in danger. It was suggested to him by some of his officers, to stop the letters from home: "No," said he, "the precaution is useless: I will answer for it that the commander-in-chief of _this_ fleet will know how to maintain his authority, if it is threatened."

But he left nothing to chance: he prohibited communication between the ships--he sent for the captains of marines, and ordered that their men should mess and sleep separately from the sailors; that the sailors should not be suffered to converse in Irish, and that the officers should be on the alert. He hanged the detected mutineers without delay. Forgiveness was out of the question. To Captain Pellew, who had interceded in favour of a mutineer, whose conduct had previously been irreproachable, he replied, "We have, we think, punished only the worthless. It is time, that our men should learn, that no past conduct can redeem an act of treason."

Nothing could be more rational, or even more necessary, than this determination; for treason is the most comprehensive of all crimes. The mere robber, or murderer, commits his single act of guilt--but the guilt of the traitor may cost the lives of thousands. The traitor is never to be regarded as a solitary criminal, and this maxim was never more necessary than at this moment. If laws are to be turned into sentimentality, and conspiracy is to be dealt with like the tricks of children, there must be an end of all security to _honest men_. If the villains who have been lately inflaming the Irish mind into madness, had been hanged by the sentence of the drum-head, within half an hour after their seizure, there would have been no necessity, at this moment, for keeping up a garrison of 45,000 men in Ireland. Martial law is the _only_ law fit for the ruffians of the torch and pike, and the gibbet is the only moral which they will ever comprehend. To suppose that the Irish conspirators had even entertained the expectation of forming an established government, or of being suffered by England to raise a republic--or that any man out of Bedlam could have dreamt of the possibility of waging a successful war against England, while her fleets might starve Ireland in a week, and nothing but English alms even now enables her to live--would be absolute folly. The true object of Irish conspiracy was, and is, and will always be, robbery and revenge; a short burst of rapine and blood, followed by again running away, again begging pardon, again living on alms, and again laughing at the weak indulgence and insulted clemency of England.

Jervis, instead of listening to the cant of men of blood whining about their wives and children, hanged them; and, by thus ridding his fleet of a nest of villains, saved it from destruction, and perhaps, with it, saved not merely the lives of thousands of brave men, whom their impunity might have debauched into conspiracy, but saved the honour of our naval name, and restored the enfeebled hopes of his country.

We here quote with pleasure from the Frenchman:--"Jervis, in the face of those symptoms, which threatened the British navy with disaffection, sternly devoted himself to the establishment of _implicit obedience_. The efficient organisation of the fleet was the labour of his life, and occupied his latest thoughts. Never rash himself, he nevertheless opened the way for the most daring deeds. Nelson rushed into the arena, and, with the rapidity of lightning, showed the latent results of the change. The governing principle witnessed, rather than decreed the change. Its source, in fact, was _not_ in the Admiralty, but in those floating camps, wherein the triumphs which astonish us are gradually elaborated. Official power is but the inert _crucible_ which transmutes the subsidies of Parliament into ships. But a quickening principle is wanting to those immense fleets, and the admirals supply it. Jervis and Nelson rapidly transmitted the creative spark, and bequeathed a certain sort of sovereignty under the distrustful eye of the English Admiralty--a kind of dynasty arose--'the mayors of the palace took the sceptre from the do-nothing kings.'"

All this is comparatively just. But the Frenchman peeps out under the panegyrist, after all. Can it be conceived that any other human being, at the end of nearly half a century, would quote, with the slightest degree of approval, the report of Decrès, the French minister of the marine to Napoleon, in 1805, after all Nelson's victories, and just preceding the most illustrious of them all--Trafalgar?

"The boasting of Nelson," writes Decrès, "equals his silliness, (_ineptie_)--I use the proper word. But he has one eminent quality--namely, that of aiming among his captains _only_ at a character for bravery and good fortune. This makes him _accessible to counsel_, and consequently, in difficult circumstances, if he commands nominally, _others direct really_."

We have no doubt that, after scribbling this supreme _ineptie_, Decrès considered himself to have settled the whole question, and to have convicted Nelson of being simply a bold blockhead--Nelson, the man of the hundred fights--the prince of tacticians--the admiral who had never been beaten, and from whom, at the battle of Aboukir, Decrès himself was rejoiced to make his escape, after having seen the ruin of the French fleet.

We find a good deal of the same sort of petulant perversion, in the narrative of Nelson's conduct at Naples. M. Gravière suddenly becomes moral, and tells us the ten-times-told story of Lady Hamilton. But what is all this to the naval war? Englishmen are not bound to defend the character of Lady Hamilton; and if Nelson was actually culpable in their intercourse, (a matter which actually has never yet been _proved_,) Englishmen, who have some morality,--not Frenchmen, who make a point of laughing at all morality--may upbraid his conduct. But a French stoic is simply ridiculous. There are perhaps not fifty men in all France, who would not have done, and are not doing every day, where they have the opportunity, all that this moralist charges Nelson with having done. Even if he were criminal in his private life, so much the worse for himself in that solemn account which all must render; but he was not the less the conqueror of Copenhagen, Aboukir, and Trafalgar.

The hanging of Caraccioli also figures among the charges. We regret that this traitor was not left to die of remorse, or by the course of nature, at the age of eighty. We regret, too, that he could allege even the shadow of a capitulation for his security. We equally regret the execution of Ney under a similar shadow. But Caraccioli had been an _admiral_ in the Neapolitan service, had joined the rebellion by which rapine and slaughter overspread the country, and had driven the King into exile. No man more deserved to be hanged, by the order of his insulted, and apparently ruined King;--he _was_ hanged, and _all_ rebels ought thus to suffer. They are made for the scaffold.

The men who plunge a kingdom in blood, whose success must be purchased by havoc, and whose triumph makes the misery of thousands or millions, ought to make the small expiation which can be made by their public punishment; and no country _can_ be safe in which it is not the custom to hang traitors. Still, those acts, even if they were of an order which might shock the sensibility of a Frenchman to breach of treaty, or the sight of blood, have no reference to the talents and the triumphs of Nelson.

But these volumes suddenly deviate from the history of the great admiral, into remarks on the great living soldier of England. There, too, we must follow them; and our task is no reluctant one; for it enables us at once to enlighten intelligent inquiry, and to offer our tribute to pre-eminent fame. But, in this instance, we argue with our accomplished neighbours on different principles. The Frenchman loves glory--the Englishman its fruits. The Frenchman loves the excitement of war; the Englishman hates it, as mischievous and miserable, and to be palliated only by the stern necessity of self-defence. He honours intrepidity, but it only when displayed in a cause worthy of human feeling. No man more exults in the talent of the field; but it is only when it brings back security to the fireside. The noblest trophy of Wellington, in the eyes of his country, is the thirty years of peace won by his sword!

It has become the fashion of the French to speak of this illustrious personage with something of a sneer at what they pronounce his "want of enterprise." Every thing that he has done is by "_phlegm_!" Phlegm must be a most valuable quality, in that case, for it enabled him to defeat every officer to whom he had been opposed; and there was scarcely any man of repute in the French army to whom he had not been opposed. It is in no spirit of rational taunt, or of that hostility which, we will hope, has died away between England and France, that we give the list of the French marshals whom Wellington has fought, and _always_ beaten, and several of them _several times_:--Junot at Vimeira, Soult at Oporto and the Pyrenees, Victor and Sebastiani at Talavera, Massena at Busaco, Marmont at Salamanca, Jourdan at Vitoria, and a whole group of the chief generals of France, with Ney, Soult, and Napoleon himself, at their head, at Waterloo.

But have the British military authors ever doubted the talent, or disparaged the gallantry, of those distinguished soldiers? Certainly not; they have given them every acknowledgment which ability and bravery could demand. Let the French nation read the eloquent pages of Alison, and see the character given by the historian to the leaders in the Italian, German, and Spanish campaigns. Let them read the spirited pages of Napier, and see them decorated almost with the colours of romance. Does either of these popular and powerful authors stigmatise the French generals with "_ineptie_," or characterise their victories, as the mere results of inability either to attack or to run away? Let them be the example of the future French military writers, and let those writers learn that there is a European tribunal, as well as a Parisian one.

But the French altogether mistake the question. Men like Wellington are not the growth of any military school, of any especial army, or of any peculiar nation. Without offering this great soldier any personal panegyric, he was a military _genius_. Since Marlborough, England had produced no such commander of an army, and may not produce another such for a century to come. Nelson was similarly a _genius_: he sprang at once to the first rank of sea-officers; and England, fertile as she is in first-rate sailors and brave men, may never produce another Nelson. Napoleon was a _genius_, and almost as palpably superior to the crowd of brave and intelligent generals round him, as if he had been of another species. The conduct of men of this exclusive capacity is no more a rule for other men, than their successes are to be depreciated to the common scale of military good fortune. The campaigns of Napoleon in Italy; the sea campaign in which Nelson pursued the French fleet half-round the globe, to extinguish it at Trafalgar; the seven years' continued campaign of Wellington in the Peninsula, finished by the most splendid march in European history, from the frontier of Portugal into the heart of France, have had no example in the past, and can be no example to the future. The principle, the power, and the success, lie equally beyond the limits of ordinary calculation. The evident fact is, that there is an occasional rank of faculty, which puts all calculation out of sight, which is found to produce effects of a new magnitude, and which overpasses all difficulties, by the use of an intellectual element, but occasionally, and but for especial purpose, communicated to man.

We have no doubt whatever of the truth of this solution, and are consequently convinced, that it would have been much wiser in M. Gravière to have attempted to describe the career of Wellington, than to pronounce on the principles of his science; and, above all, than to account for his victories by the very last means of victory--the mere brutishness of standing still, the simple immobility of passive force, the mere unintelligent and insensate working of a machine.

"What a contrast," exclaims the Frenchman, "between these passionate traits (of Nelson) and the _impassive bearing_ of Wellington, that _cool and methodical_ leader, who _maintained_ his ground in the Peninsula by the _sheer force of order and prudence_! Do they belong to the same nation? Did they command the same men? The admiral, full of enthusiasm, and devoured by the love of distinction, and the general, so _phlegmatic_ and _immovable_, who, intrenched behind his lines at Torres Vedras, or re-forming, without _emotion_, his _broken_ squares on the field of Waterloo--(where not a single British square was broken)--seems rather to aim at _wearying out his enemy_ than at _conquering him_, and triumphs _only_ by his patient and unconquerable firmness."

Must it not be asked, Why did the French suffer him to exhibit this _firmness_? why did they not beat him at once? Do generals win battles merely by waiting, until their antagonists are tired of crushing them?