BOOKS.
HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE.*
Ma. FITCHETT continues to show the same power of giving a clear and comprehensive view of a campaign or a battle, and the same felicitous choice of characteristic details. This, his concluding volume, though deriving its title from the decisive struggle of Waterloo, takes in the conclusion of the Peninsular War, Elba, the Hundred Days up to the Belgian campaign, and St. Helena. The opening of the volume finds Wellington preparing to cross the French frontier. His army was ill-equipped and weary, but it had an overpowering prestige. When Soult demanded reinforcements, he stipulated that they must never have met the British. The French troops who were holding a fort on the Bayonette Hill plucked up courage to turn on the Rifles, whom, misled by the green uniforms, they took for Portuguese, but they fell back on seeing the scarlet of the 52nd. Again, a single Englishman moved a whole Spanish division to follow him. It was hanging back in view of a line of abattis held by two French regiments. He put his horse at the abattis and cleared it, and the Spaniards followed him with a shout of "El chico blanco," and drove the French headlong before them. It was, indeed, a glory to lead such troops, though Wellington used at times very hard words about them. But the position was anything but enviable. Spain was already beginning to show what sort of gratitude England might expect from the Europe she was saving. Her great commander had always to be on his guard lest his friends should stab him in the back, and actually prepared his plans for embarking his troops if the Spanish and French should combine against him. Altogether, these six months of fighting from October 6th, when Wellington forced the passage of the Bidassoa, to April 14th, when Thouvenot at Bayonne sallied out against the British outposts, tried his powers both as a general and as a statesman to the utmost. The last five days (April 10th-14th) cost ten thousand men, and yet the Empire had ceased to be on April 6th ! If Soult did not know it at Toulouse, Thouvenot certainly knew it at Bayonne. But he thought that he saw a chance of glory, and he would have been false to the Napoleonic faith if he had suffered any scruple of conscience to hinder him. Here, as elsewhere, we are reminded of Boer proceedings. Cronje played the same part at Potchefstroom, only without even Thonvenot's poor pretext that the news had come to him through the enemy.
The course of events on the eastern side of France from the Moscow retreat to the abdication at Fontainebleau is sketched in outline as not immediately concerning the purpose of the book. But though there were no British troops at Leipsic or in the army that occupied Paris, English example and English supplies were important factors in the success. Another chapter describes the foolish farce of the Empire of Elba, and then we reach the story of the Waterloo campaign, beginning with a review of "The Strategy of the Four Days." The conditions of the problem are simple enough. Napoleon, with an army of one hundred and twenty-eight thousand, had to deal with two armies which together outnumbered his own in the proportion of about nine to five. He reckoned on being able to attack and crush them separately. His theory )f how this was to be done was subtle in the highest degree ; ais execution of the plan was marred by some mistakes of judgment and by a strange inertness which was largely due to physical causes. His opponents also made mistakes, and both he and they were but ill-served by their Staffs. But in the end the great scheme went wrong. The two armies were not separately crushed. On the contrary, Napoleon was crushed between them. The details of how this came about are uncertain. Wellington himself was anything but consis- tent in his statements, and if he, eminently a truth-teller, fails us, whom are we to trust ? Mr. Fitchett reviews the whole case, it seems to us, intelligently and fairly. His capacity for clear sight and lucid statement serves him well. That he has said the last word on the subject can hardly be supposed. But the reader who follows him will not Bine „England Eared Europe: the .Story of the Croat War. By W. H. Fitchett, LT. B. Vol. "Waterloo and St.. Helena." London: Smith, Lider, and Co.
be led far wrong. One thing is abundantly plain. It was England—we use the word as Mr. Fitchett uses it—that saved Europe. Wellington had less than twenty-four thousand British troops under his command. Add to them the German legion of six thousand, and we have the sum total of the army which he could trust. The rest—the Nassauers, the Hanoverians, and the Dutch-Belgians—oould not, to say the least, be relied on. They could not be trusted to fight the enemy, or even to be passively loyal. " During the battle his aide.de-camp only once persuaded Wellington to draw his bridle. It was when he was about to pass in front of a square of Nassauers. There was real fear that they might fire upon him instead of upon the French." Hougou- mont was held by British troops, — the Nassauers and Hanoverians had to be withdrawn as untrustworthy ; in the infantry attack on the left centre it was Picton's men, helped just in time by the Union Brigade of Cavalry (Royale, Greys, and Inniskillings), that held, and more than held, their ground; it was the British squares, again, that stood firm under the tremendous charge of ten thousand French horse- men,—" the Hanoverian squares by no means reached the iron coolness of the British regiments," were continually starting off, and had to be driven back by their officers; La Haye Sainte, the one French success of the day, was lost by the Prince of Orange. It was the British who broke the Old Guard, and the British who led the final advance, when the "long tormented lines, sadly wasted indeed, but mad with the joy of being at last permitted to strike back," moved forward and sent the foe flying headlong before them. No Englishman wishes to minimise the import- ance of the arrival of the Prussians. Without them there would have been no victory. But without the British there would have been no battle. It is easy enough to imagine what would have happened to an army made up of Hanoveriane, Nassaners, and Belgians. The roads in the rear of the army were crowded with fugitives. When Ziethen's Prussians first caught sight of the scene they turned back, believing that the whole army was routed. Ziethen himself had to be assured that the British line was unbroken before he consented to advance.
After reading this story, for here we may take leave of Mr. Fitchett, with the heartiest thanks for his ad- mirable work, one cannot but think of the present attitude of Europe. Against France we have no complaint. She has, indeed, a quite inexplicable power of forgetting history. Though her own capital has been entered three times in the space of three generations, though hei armies have capitulated on a scale without precedent oi parallel, she remembers nothing, but goes into paroxysms of delight if we lose a village in Natal, or if one of our battalions has to surrender. But she owes us no gratitude. It was from her that we saved Europe. But it is a different case with Russia, Austria, and Germany. We fed their armies, gave them hope instead of despair, and victory in the place of incessant defeat. Yet in every capital there is carried on a campaign of calumny and spite. This is Ira an ill return for all our services, but the height of ingratithde ib reached at the capital where the slanderers of England have appropriately fixed their headquarters,—the city which we saved in spite of her own treacherous or cowardly sons, and by our last and costliest sacrifice.
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