And already, amid the constellation of command which the seven years' aggression of Europe against France had called forth from the great Revolution, one name shone with surpassing lustre. Beyond the Alps, amid scenes whose names seemed to concentrate and combine the traditions of Roman dominion with the most desperate struggles of medieval history, there had arisen a leader in the first flush of youthful manhood, before whom courage had been unavailing, discipline had become a reed, numbers had been brought to ruin, combination had been scattered, the strength of fortress had been pulled down, until the great empire whose name had been accepted as the symbol of military power in Europe, and whose history went back through one thousand years of martial glory, lay prostrate and vanquished at his feet.
CHAPTER II
EARLY SERVICE – THE PENINSULA
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. Marengo came to scatter the slowly built combinations of Europe. The victor held out the olive branch to his enemies; his offer of peace, which had been so insultingly refused one year earlier, was now accepted, and the Treaty of Amiens put an end to hostilities which had lasted for nearly ten years. All Charles Napier's hopes of service were destroyed. For six years he was to wander aimlessly about the south of England in that most soul-rusting of all idlenesses – garrison life at home. "What can one do?" he wrote to his mother upon hearing of the peace. "My plan is to wait for a few months and then get into some foreign service. Sometimes my thought is to sell my commission and purchase one in Germany or elsewhere; but then my secret wish could not be fulfilled, which is to have high command with British soldiers – rather let me command Esquimaux than be a subaltern of Rifles forty years old." Meanwhile he set vigorously to work at his books and studies. Already at Celbridge he had read every hero-book or war-history he could lay his hands on; now he applies himself incessantly to study. "I quit the mess," he writes in November, 1801, "at five o'clock, and from that to ten o'clock gives me five hours more reading. There is a billiard-table; but feeling a growing fondness for it, and fearing to be drawn into play for money, I have not touched a cue lately." Yet with all this longing for fame, the heart of the boy is full of his home memories. "Nobody but myself," he writes to his sister, "had ever such a longing for home. I shall go mad if you don't come to England or I go to Ireland; my heart jumps when thinking of you all merry in the old way. This wishing for home makes me gad about in a wild way; for melancholy seizes me when alone in a cold barrack-room, and I cannot read with thoughts busy in Kildare Street. I should like to go to London and stay with Emily [another sister], but I am too poor. I have no coloured clothes, and they are expensive to buy. My horse also is costly and must be sold; very sorry, for he is the dearest little wicked black devil you ever saw, and so pretty." But though this poor hard-up subaltern cannot afford to purchase plain clothes, and has to sell his dearly prized horse, he can find money to do a kind act to a friend. He is writing to his mother, that ever-ready listener to all his troubles and his joys.
January 1st, 1801.– Happy New Year and many of them to my dearest mother. Now to ask a favour not to be told to dad unless you think there will be no inconvenience to him. Cameron [a brother officer] has been in a very disagreeable situation for some time about family affairs. Several things have happened to put him to enormous expense, and he intends borrowing money from the Jews, which must do him much mischief in the end, though he will have a very good property when of age. Now if my father has not drawn the £100 of forage money belonging to me which Armitt has had these eight months, to repay the money you advanced, can he spare it for Cameron? You know the Comptroller [his father] as well as I do, and if you showed him the letter at once he would do the thing to oblige me, when perhaps it was troublesome. Cameron has not the least idea of this matter.
A very beautiful letter for all concerned – father, mother, son, and friend – and worth many long pages of description. Then he falls in love, is very miserable, goes to London, sees several of his rich relations, finds out he cannot afford fine life, and comes back again to his books and his dreams. The regiment is now at Shorncliffe. The colonel, a type of warrior at that time and for years later peculiar to our service, lived much at Carlton House and seldom saw his soldiers, who, groaning under a well-nigh intolerable discipline, were left to the mercy of the second in command. The picture we get of the result is a curious one. "Shorncliffe, December, 1802.– We are going on here as badly as need be. Two or three men desert every night, and not recruits either. The hospital is full of rheumatic patients and men with colds and coughs, caught from standing long on damp ground and being kept in mizzling rains for hours without moving."
Enough to damp a less ardent spirit must have been this barrack-room warfare, so delightful to so many excellent persons who imagine that a uniform coat makes a soldier. At last a slight change for the better came to Napier. A relation, General Fox, was made Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, and to Dublin went Charles as aide-de-camp. Through this move we get an inventory of his kit, which is suggestive of many things. He is writing to his mother: "You talk of magazines of clothes," he says; "why, I have no clothes but those on my back. I have indeed too many books – above thirty volumes; but books and clothes all go into two trunks." How the modern staff-man would shudder at the list of uniform which follows. "Nothing of mine, except linen, will do for an aide-de-camp. My pantaloons are green, and I have only one pair; my jacket, twice turned; a green waistcoat, useless; one pair of boots, without soles or heels; a green feather; and a helmet not worth sixpence." A meagre outfit, certainly, to cover the little fever-worn frame; for the mizzling rains and the damp ground and the wretched inaction already spoken of have brought on sickness, and he is now thinner and paler than ever. The service on the staff in Ireland was short. The Commander-in-Chief had that sense of humanity without which a soldier is only a butcher, and, like Moore and Abercromby, he quarrelled with the Irish Executive of the day, whose idea of government was the scaffold and the triangles. It was the period following the wild revolt of Emmett. The hangman was busy at his work. "We passed the gibbet in Thomas Street," wrote the Commander-in-Chief's wife in her diary, "which is now fixed there with a rope suspended, and two sentries to guard it, for so many of the rebels are now executed it is in daily use. What a horrible state for a country to be in!" This was in the year 1803, and in 1804 Charles Napier is back in England again. A great sorrow has fallen upon him. His father has just died. "Sarah, take my watch, I have done with time," Colonel Napier said to the beautiful woman who had loved him so well, handing his watch to her as she stood beside his death-bed. Yet Time had not done with him, and no man who reads of George Napier's sons can ever forget the father to whom they owed so much of their glory.
The short peace is over. War with France has been declared. Pitt is again in Downing Street, busy at fresh coalitions, borrowing his half hundred millions a year and scattering them broadcast over Europe, chafing and raging when he looks at the Horse Guards close by, and longing to be able to infuse something of his own spirit into that establishment, yet all the while obliged to put a good face on it and pretend that he thinks the King's generals are as good as any in Europe. When he gets back to his house at Putney he