Chapter 2

Laugh'd after him loudly that land so fair,[E] "The king thou set'st over us, by a free air Is swept away, senseless." And old Sword then First knew the might of great Captain Pen. So strangely it bow'd him, so wilder'd his brain, That now he stood, hatless, renouncing his reign; Now mutter'd of dust laid in blood; and now 'Twixt wonder and patience went lifting his brow. Then suddenly came he, with gowned men, And said, "Now observe me--_I'm_ Captain Pen: _I'll_ lead all your changes--I'll write all your books-- I'm every thing--all things--I'm clergymen, cooks, Clerks, carpenters, hosiers--I'm Pitt--I'm Lord Grey."

'Twas painful to see his extravagant way; But heart ne'er so bold, and hand ne'er so strong, What are they, when truth and the wits go wrong?

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The American War.

[B] The French War.

[C] Napoleon.

[D] The Duke of Wellington, or existing Military Toryism.

[E] The Glorious Three Days.

VI.

OF CAPTAIN PEN, AND HOW HE FOUGHT WITH CAPTAIN SWORD.

Now tidings of Captain Sword and his state Were brought to the ears of Pen the Great, Who rose and said, "His time is come." And he sent him, but not by sound of drum, Nor trumpet, nor other hasty breath, Hot with questions of life and death, But only a letter calm and mild; And Captain Sword he read it, and smil'd, And said, half in scorn, and nothing in fear, (Though his wits seem'd restor'd by a danger near, For brave was he ever) "Let Captain Pen Bring at his back a million men, And I'll talk with his wisdom, and not till then." Then replied to his messenger Captain Pen, "I'll bring at my back a _world_ of men."

Out laugh'd the captains of Captain Sword, But their chief look'd vex'd, and said not a word, For thought and trouble had touch'd his ears Beyond the bullet-like sense of theirs, And wherever he went, he was 'ware of a sound Now heard in the distance, now gathering round, Which irk'd him to know what the issue might be; But the soul of the cause of it well guess'd he.

Indestructible souls among men Were the souls of the line of Captain Pen; Sages, patriots, martyrs mild, Going to the stake, as child Goeth with his prayer to bed; Dungeon-beams, from quenchless head; Poets, making earth aware Of its wealth in good and fair; And the benders to their intent, Of metal and of element; Of flame the enlightener, beauteous, And steam, that bursteth his iron house; And adamantine giants blind, That, without master, have no mind.

Heir to these, and all their store, Was Pen, the power unknown of yore; And as their might still created might, And each work'd for him by day and by night, In wealth and wondrous means he grew, Fit to move the earth anew; Till his fame began to speak Pause, as when the thunders wake, Muttering, in the beds of heaven: Then, to set the globe more even, Water he call'd, and Fire, and Haste, Which hath left old Time displac'd-- And Iron, mightiest now for Pen, Each of his steps like an army of men-- (Sword little knew what was leaving him then) And out of the witchcraft of their skill, A creature he call'd, to wait on his will-- Half iron, half vapour, a dread to behold-- Which evermore panted and evermore roll'd, And uttered his words a million fold. Forth sprang they in air, down raining like dew, And men fed upon them, and mighty they grew.

Ears giddy with custom that sound might not hear, But it woke up the rest, like an earthquake near; And that same night of the letter, some strange Compulsion of soul brought a sense of change; And at midnight the sound grew into a roll As the sound of all gath'rings from pole to pole, From pole unto pole, and from clime to clime, Like the roll of the wheels of the coming of time;-- A sound as of cities, and sound as of swords Sharpening, and solemn and terrible words, And laughter as solemn, and thunderous drumming, A tread as if all the world were coming. And then was a lull, and soft voices sweet Call'd into music those terrible feet, Which rising on wings, lo! the earth went round To the burn of their speed with a golden sound; With a golden sound, and a swift repose, Such as the blood in the young heart knows; Such as Love knows, when his tumults cease; When all is quick, and yet all is at peace.

And when Captain Sword got up next morn, Lo! a new-fac'd world was born; For not an anger nor pride would it shew, Nor aught of the loftiness now found low, Nor would his own men strike a single blow: Not a blow for their old, unconsidering lord Would strike the good soldiers of Captain Sword; But weaponless all, and wise they stood, In the level dawn, and calm brotherly good; Yet bowed to him they, and kiss'd his hands, For such were their new lord's commands, Lessons rather, and brotherly plea; Reverence the past, quoth he; Reverence the struggle and mystery, And faces human in their pain; Nor his the least, that could sustain Cares of mighty wars, and guide Calmly where the red deaths ride.

"But how! what now?" cried Captain Sword; "Not a blow for your gen'ral? not even a word? What! traitors? deserters?"

"Ah no!" cried they; "But the 'game's' at an end; the 'wise' wont play."

"And where's your old spirit?"

"The same, though another; Man may be strong without maiming his brother."

"But enemies?"

"Enemies! Whence should they come, When all interchange what was known but to some?"

"But famine? but plague? worse evils by far."

"O last mighty rhet'ric to charm us to war! Look round--what has earth, now it equably speeds, To do with these foul and calamitous needs? Now it equably speeds, and thoughtfully glows, And its heart is open, never to close?

"Still I can govern," said Captain Sword; "Fate I respect; and I stick to my word." And in truth so he did; but the word was one He had sworn to all vanities under the sun, To do, for their conq'rors, the least could be done. Besides, what had _he_ with his worn-out story, To do with the cause he had wrong'd, and the glory?

No: Captain Sword a sword was still, He could not unteach his lordly will; He could not attemper his single thought; It might not be bent, nor newly wrought: And so, like the tool of a disus'd art, He stood at his wall, and rusted apart.

'Twas only for many-soul'd Captain Pen To make a world of swordless men.

POSTSCRIPT;

CONTAINING SOME REMARKS ON WAR AND MILITARY STATESMEN.

POSTSCRIPT;

CONTAINING SOME REMARKS ON WAR AND MILITARY STATESMEN.

The object of this poem is to show the horrors of war, the false ideas of power produced in the minds of its leaders, and, by inference, the unfitness of those leaders for the government of the world.

The author intends no more offence to any one than can be helped: he feels due admiration for that courage and energy, the supposed misdirection of which it deplores; he heartily acknowledges the probability, that that supposed misdirection has been hitherto no misdirection, but a necessity--but he believes that the time is come when, by encouraging the disposition to question it, its services and its sufferings may be no longer required, and he would fain tear asunder the veil from the sore places of war,--would show what has been hitherto kept concealed, or not shown earnestly, and for the purpose,--would prove, at all events, that the time has come for putting an end to those phrases in the narratives of warfare, by which a suspicious delicacy is palmed upon the reader, who is told, after everything has been done to excite his admiration of war, that his feelings are "spared" a recital of its miseries--that "a veil" is drawn over them--a "truce" given to descriptions which only "harrow up the soul," &c.

Suppose it be necessary to "harrow up the soul," in order that the soul be no longer harrowed? Moralists and preachers do not deal after this tender fashion with moral, or even physical consequences, resulting from other evils. Why should they spare these? Why refuse to look their own effeminacy in the face,--their own gaudy and overweening encouragement of what they dare not contemplate in its results? Is a murder in the streets worth attending to,--a single wounded man worth carrying to the hospital,--and are all the murders, and massacres, and fields of wounded, and the madness, the conflagrations, the famines, the miseries of families, and the rickety frames and melancholy bloods of posterity, only fit to have an embroidered handkerchief thrown over them? Must "ladies and gentlemen" be called off, that they may not "look that way," the "sight is so shocking"? Does it become us to let others endure, what we cannot bear even to think of?

Even if nothing else were to come of inquiries into the horrors of war, surely they would cry aloud for some better provision against their extremity _after_ battle,--for some regulated and certain assistance to the wounded and agonized,--so that we might hear no longer of men left in cold and misery all night, writhing with torture,--of bodies stripped by prowlers, perhaps murderers,--and of frenzied men, the other day the darlings of their friends, dying, two and even several days after the battle, of famine! The field of Waterloo was not completely cleared of its dead and dying till nearly a week! Surely large companies of men should be organized for the sole purpose of assisting and clearing away the field after battle. They should be steady men, not lightly admitted, nor unpossessed of some knowledge of surgery, and they should be attached to the surgeon's staff. Both sides would respect them for their office, and keep them sacred from violence. Their duties would be too painful and useful to get them disrespected for not joining in the fight--and possibly, before long, they would help to do away their own necessity, by detailing what they beheld. Is that the reason why there is no such establishment? The question is asked, not in bitterness, but to suggest a self-interrogation to the instincts of war.

I have not thought proper to put notes to the poem, detailing the horrors which I have touched upon; nor even to quote my authorities, which are unfortunately too numerous, and contain worse horrors still. They are furnished by almost every history of a campaign, in all quarters of the world. Circumstances so painful, in a first attempt to render them public for their own sakes, would, I thought, even meet with less attention in prose than in verse, however less fitted they may appear for it at first sight. Verse, if it has any enthusiasm, at once demands and conciliates attention; it proposes to say much in little; and it associates with it the idea of something consolatory, or otherwise sustaining. But there is one prose specimen of these details, which I will give, because it made so great an impression on me in my youth, that I never afterwards could help calling it to mind when war was spoken of; and as I had a good deal to say on that subject, having been a public journalist during one of the most interesting periods of modern history, and never having been blinded into an admiration of war by the dazzle of victory, the circumstance may help to show how salutary a record of this kind may be, and what an impression the subject might be brought to make on society. The passage is in a note to one of Mr Southey's poems, the "Ode to Horror," and is introduced by another frightful record, less horrible, because there is not such agony implied in it, nor is it alive.

"I extract" (says Mr Southey) "the following picture of consummate horror from notes to a poem written in twelve-syllable verse, upon the campaign of 1794 and 1795: it was during the retreat to Deventer. 'We could not proceed a hundred yards without perceiving the dead bodies of men, women, children, and horses, in every direction. One scene made an impression upon my memory which time will never be able to efface. Near another cart we perceived a stout-looking man and a beautiful young woman, with an infant, about seven months old, at the breast, all three frozen and dead. The mother had most certainly expired in the act of suckling her child; as with one breast exposed she lay upon the drifted snow, the milk to all appearance in a stream drawn from the nipple by the babe, and instantly congealed. The infant seemed as if its lips had but just then been disengaged, and it reposed its little head upon the mother's bosom, with an overflow of milk, frozen as it trickled from the mouth. Their countenances were perfectly composed and fresh, resembling those of persons in a sound and tranquil slumber.'"

"The following description (he continues) of a field of battle is in the words of one who passed over the field of Jemappe, after Doumourier's victory: 'It was on the third day after the victory obtained by general Doumourier over the Austrians, that I rode across the field of battle. The scene lies on a waste common, rendered then more dreary by the desertion of the miserable hovels before occupied by peasants. Everything that resembled a human habitation was desolated, and for the most part they had been burnt or pulled down, to prevent their affording shelter to the posts of the contending armies. The ground was ploughed up by the wheels of the artillery and waggons; everything like herbage was trodden into mire; broken carriages, arms, accoutrements, dead horses and men, were strewed over the heath. _This was the third day after the battle: it was the beginning of November, and for three days a bleak wind and heavy rain had continued incessantly._ There were still remaining alive several hundreds of horses, and of the human victims of that dreadful fight. I can speak with certainty of having seen more than four hundred men _still living_, unsheltered, _without food_, and without any human assistance, most of them confined to the spot where they had fallen _by broken limbs_. The two armies had proceeded, and abandoned these miserable wretches to their fate. _Some of the dead persons appeared to have expired in the act of embracing each other._ Two young French officers, who were brothers, had crawled under the side of a dead horse, where they had contrived a kind of shelter by means of a cloak: they were both mortally wounded, and groaning _for each other_. One very fine young man had just strength enough to drag himself out of a hollow partly filled with water, and was laid upon a little hillock groaning with agony; A GRAPE-SHOT HAD CUT ACROSS THE UPPER PART OF HIS BELLY, AND HE WAS KEEPING IN HIS BOWELS WITH A HANDKERCHIEF AND HAT. He begged of me to end his misery! He complained of dreadful thirst. I filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank off at once, and left him to that end of his wretchedness which could not be far distant.'"

"I hope (concludes Mr Southey), I have always felt and expressed an honest and Christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of this authentic picture."

Mr Southey, in his subsequent lives of conquerors, and his other writings, will hardly be thought to have acted up to this "abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them." Nor is he to be blamed for qualifying his view of the subject, equally blameless (surely) as they are to be held who have retained their old views, especially by him who helped to impress them. His friend Mr Wordsworth, in the vivacity of his admonitions to hasty complaints of evil, has gone so far as to say that "Carnage is God's daughter," and thereby subjected himself to the scoffs of a late noble wit. He is addressing the Deity himself:--

"But thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is man, array'd for mutual slaughter: Yea, Carnage is thy daughter."

Mr Wordsworth is a great poet and a philosophical thinker, in spite of his having here paid a tremendous compliment to a rhyme (for unquestionably the word "slaughter" provoked him into that imperative "Yea," and its subsequent venturous affiliation); but the judgment, to say no more of it, is rash. Whatever the Divine Being intends, by his permission or use of evil, it becomes us to think the best of it; but not to affirm the appropriation of the particulars to him under their worst appellation, seeing that he has implanted in us a horror of them, and a wish to do them away. What it is right in him to do, is one thing; what it is proper in us to affirm that he actually does, is another. And, above all, it is idle to affirm what he intends to do for ever, and to have us eternally venerate and abstain from questioning an evil. All good and evil, and vice and virtue themselves, might become confounded in the human mind by a like daring; and humanity sit down under every buffet of misfortune, without attempting to resist it: which, fortunately, is impossible. Plato cut this knotty point better, by regarding evil as a thing senseless and unmalignant (indeed no philosopher regards anything as malignant, or malignant for malignity's sake); out of which, or notwithstanding it, good is worked, and to be worked, perhaps, finally to the abolition of evil. But whether this consummation be possible or not, and even if the dark horrors of evil be necessary towards the enjoyment of the light of good, still the horror must be maintained, where the object is really horrible; otherwise, we but the more idly resist the contrast, if necessary--and, what is worse, endanger the chance of melioration, if possible.

Did war appear to me an inevitable evil, I should be one of the last men to shew it in any other than its holiday clothes. I can appeal to writings before the public, to testify whether I am in the habit of making the worst of anything, or of not making it yield its utmost amount of good. My inclinations, as well as my reason, lie all that way. I am a passionate and grateful lover of all the beauties of the universe, moral and material; and the chief business of my life is to endeavour to give others the like fortunate affection. But, on the same principle, I feel it my duty to look evil in the face, in order to discover if it be capable of amendment; and I do not see why the miseries of war are to be spared this interrogation, simply because they are frightful and enormous. Men get rid of smaller evils which lie in their way--nay, of great ones; and there appears to be no reason why they should not get rid of the greatest, if they will but have the courage. We have abolished inquisitions and the rack, burnings for religion, burnings for witchcraft, hangings for forgery (a great triumph in a commercial country), much of the punishment of death in some countries, all of it in others. Why not abolish war? Mr Wordsworth writes no odes to tell us that the Inquisition was God's daughter; though Lope de Vega, who was one of its officers, might have done so--and Mr Wordsworth too, had he lived under its dispensation. Lope de Vega, like Mr Wordsworth and Mr Southey, was a good man, as well as a celebrated poet: and we will concede to his memory what the English poets will, perhaps, not be equally disposed to grant (for they are severe on the Romish faith) that even the Inquisition, _like War_, might possibly have had some utility in its evil, were it no other than a hastening of Christianity by its startling contradictions of it. Yet it has gone. The Inquisition, as War may be hereafter, is no more. Daughter if it was of the Supreme Good, it was no immortal daughter. Why should "Carnage" be,--especially as God has put it in our heads to get rid of it?

I am aware of what may be said on these occasions, to "puzzle the will;" and I concede of course, that mankind may entertain false views of their power to change anything for the better. I concede, that all change may be only in appearance, and not make any real difference in the general amount of good and evil; that evil, to a certain invariable amount, may be necessary to the amount of good (the overbalance of which, with a most hearty and loving sincerity, I ever acknowledge); and finally, that all which the wisest of men could utter on any such subject, might possibly be nothing but a jargon,--the witless and puny voice of what we take to be a mighty orb, but which, after all, is only a particle in the starry dust of the universe.

On the other hand, all this may be something very different from what we take it to be, setting aside even the opinions which consider mind as everything, and time and space themselves as only modifications of it, or breathing-room in which it exists, weaving the thoughts which it calls life, death, and materiality.

But be his metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves against the uneasier chances of vicissitude, even if Providence ordains them to do so for no other end than the preservation of vicissitude itself, and not in order to help them out of the husks and thorns of action into the flowers of it, and into the air of heaven? Certain it is, at all events, that the human being is incited to increase his amount of good: and that when he is endeavouring to do so, he is at least not fulfilling the worst part of his necessity. Nobody tells us, when we attempt to put out a fire and to save the lives of our neighbours, that Conflagration is God's daughter, or Murder God's daughter. On the contrary, these are things which Christendom is taught to think ill off, and to wish to put down; and therefore we should put down war, which is murder and conflagration by millions.