The Glory of English Prose Part 10

"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.

"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly, and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French reserve, mixing with the struggling mult.i.tude, endeavoured to restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder, and the mighty ma.s.s, giving way like a loosened cliff, went headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood triumphant on the fatal hill!

"The laurel is n.o.bly won when the exhausted victor reels as he places it on his bleeding front.

"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of dying men."

Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of the grat.i.tude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the end of his n.o.ble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--

"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance of the Veterans' services.

"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the plains and mountains of the Peninsula."

Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.

Your loving old G.P.

22

MY DEAR ANTONY,

This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.

Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in defence of

"This precious stone set in the silver sea,"

"This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"

being without doubt or cavil one of the n.o.blest emotions of the human heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own great war has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to a contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the n.o.blest outbursts of eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism that has ever been poured forth.

Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising in the House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an impa.s.sioned flight of generous eloquence.

Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo, happened to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him Sheil appealed with the deepest emotion to support him in his vindication of his country's valour. None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible as our own:--

"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has pa.s.sed ought to have brought back upon him, that from the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern warfare, down to that last and surpa.s.sing combat which has made his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.

"Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France, levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!

"And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated herself upon the foe?

"The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon their union in the grave.

"Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted to partic.i.p.ate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are aliens, and estranged from the n.o.ble country for whose salvation our life-blood was poured out?"

A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe through which we may pa.s.s to the farther sh.o.r.e of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the future?

That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.

Your loving old G.P.

23

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous pa.s.sage on the fate of Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great pa.s.sage from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.

Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar with Burke's n.o.ble e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, to challenge it with emulation; but in the result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.

The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming product.

The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.

Nothing he wrote in all his mult.i.tudinous volumes surpa.s.ses this astonishing outburst:--

"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!

"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties, came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?

"Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as of one living in death.

"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless, which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee there. Far as the eye reaches, a mult.i.tudinous sea of maniac heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!

"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face, which she hides with her hands.

"There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'G.o.d pity thee'?

"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!

"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children shall not dwell.

"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world; that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."

There is a pa.s.sage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last consummate touch of greatness.

Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over peaceful France, and he exclaims:--

"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on b.a.l.l.s at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also on this roaring h.e.l.l-porch of a Hotel de Ville."

And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--

"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.