Sir Charles Napier

Scinde subdued in the open field, there still remained great work to be done--work which tasks to a far larger degree the talent of man than any feat of arms in war can do. War...

When Sir John Moore, on January 10th, 1809, reached the summit of the last hill that overlooked the city and harbour of Corunna, he beheld a roadstead destitute of shipping. "I...

When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of age. More than forty years earlier h...

The desert--the world before it was born or after its death, the earth without water, no cloud above, no tree below--space, silence, solitude, all realised in one word--there is...

Exhausted by the prolonged strain of mind and body--"ready to drop," he tells us, "from the fatigue of one constant cheer"--Napier lay down in his cloak that night in the midst...

For two months Napier remained a prisoner with the French, and very nobly did his captors treat him, notwithstanding the intense bitterness of feeling caused in France by the wa...

To India again, sixty-seven years old, and frequently suffering physical pain such as few men can know. Only a month before sailing he had thus described his sensations. "The in...

In March, 1851, Napier reached England. Many times, returning from some scene of war or foreign service, had he seen the white cliffs rise out of the blue waves. This was to be...

From May, 1848, to March, 1849, Napier remained in England. During these ten months his life might fitly be described as a mixture of honour and insult--honour from the great ma...

The Hundred Days were over. Napoleon had played his last desperate stake for victory, and had lost. Charles Napier was not at Waterloo. He had quitted the Military College when...

Poor, proud, and panting for opportunity of action, Napier began his military career at this wonderful epoch, only to find his aspirations for fame doomed to disappointment. Mar...

Ten miles west of Dublin, on the north bank of the Liffey, stands a village of a single street, called Celbridge. In times so remote that their record only survives in a name, s...

In the spring of 1839 Napier assumed the command of the north of England. The first entry in his journal is significant. "Here I am," he writes on April 4th in Nottingham, "like...

Charles Napier in 1830 was to all human eyes a ruined man. He was close upon the fiftieth year of his age. He was miserably poor; he had a sick wife and two young children to ma...