BOOKS.

MARSHAL BITGEAITD.*

Mrss YONGE has done well to " edit " for the English public M. d'Ideville's life of the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader, the mili- tary coloniser and administrator of Algeria, and the skilful strategist who when in 1844 he gained the battle of Isly over the Emperor of Morocco, perhaps took without knowing it the first step towards adding another important territory to the Mnssulman empire of France in North Africa. Marshal Bugeaud was worth knowing as a man even more than as a soldier. M. d'Ideville is both an enthusiastic and a veracious chronicler, and has succeeded in clearing his hero of the charges of cruelty—at least of " unnecessary cruelty "—so freely brought against him both in France and in England at the time of his campaigns against the North-African Arabs. We are not quite satisfied with Miss Yonge's "editing," however.

The work of translating, not Marshal Bugeand's letters, the majority of which are written in such simple French that an in- telligent school-girl could find no difficulty with them, but M. d'Ideville's somewhat discursive narrative, has not been so care- fully done as it should have been. Then, the original work ought, for the sake of an English public, to have been better condensed, although Miss Yonge must have had considerable difficulty in " reducing" a book consisting of three large volumes. Still, she might have spared us a number of M. d'Ideville's reflections and other digressions. M. d'Ideville is both a political and a military partisan. He has his lost causes to sigh over, like every third Frenchman one meets ; and he is so enamoured of his hero, that he looks at several of Bugeand's comrades and rivals in arms with a jaundiced eye. There is no harm in M. d'Ideville disporting himself in this fashion before his own country- men ; but we fail to see how English readers can be interested in. such a passage as this :—" Happy are the soldiers led by such a chief ! What melancholy thoughts assail the mind at the idea of the grand results that our brave army of Metz might have produced in the fatal war of 1870, if at its head there had been a man of such energetic mould, who would have been able• to make the grand idea of patriotism overpower the rains of a • Memoirs of Marshal Bugeaud ; from his Private Correspondence and Original Document'. By the Count H. d'Ideville. ]ate Prefect of Algiers. Edited, from, the French, by Charlotte M. YE,nge. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blaekett. 1884.

crumbling government !" This passage is also notable, by the way, as a sample of the slipshod translation and editing we have objected to. A man of "energetic mould" making a "grand idea" overpower "ruins," is what could hardly be tolerated, even from Shakespeare. Then M. d'Ideville institutes a comparison between Bugeand and Lamorciere on the one hand, and Marina and Sylla, on the other, which is far-fetched in any case, but which is quite out of place in a work intended for the British public. Happily, this is a biography of such a kind that the reader forgets both author and translator, and thinks only of the subject.

Thomas Bugeand de la Piconnerie was born at Limoges on October 15th, 1784, and died of cholera at Paris, June 10th, 1849. In many respects Providence favoured him at crises in the history of his country. Almost alone amongst French com- manders he covered himself with glory, and with glory alone, during the Hundred Days. Nine out of ten Orleanist writers believe that had his advice been taken in 1848, the throne of Louis Philippe would not have fallen. He died, too, in time to escape the humiliation of being the victim, or the disgrace of being the tool, of the ambition of Louis Napoleon. His life falls naturally into two periods,—his professional struggle, and his career as commander and administrator in North Africa. Thomas Bugeaud's father, the Marquis de la Piconnerie, a selfish aristocrat of Perigord, who was ruined, and narrowly escaped the guillotine in the Revolutionary period, treated him with indifference, and sometimes with cruelty. His mother, whose family was of Irish extraction, died while he was an inroad. But an elder sister, Phillis, watched over him with almost maternal solicitude; and his correspondence with her, which extended over practically the whole of his active life, testifies in a truly touching manner to the warmth of his heart. In 1804, at the age of nineteen, and after try- ing to obtain a clerk's stool in the office of a Perigord ironmaster,

he volunteered into the Mites of the Foot Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard. Although " the corps of Mites was composed of young soldiers of a little more education than the rest, and the First Consul intended that it should be a nursery of sub- officers," Bugeaud found his lot hard, and sometimes depressing

and miserable. He entered the military profession simply for a career; and be was so disgusted with what he saw when cam- paigning in Spain, that he would have abandoned it but for his sisters. Nor was he ever much of a partisan. He had a keen military, but almost no political, conscience ; he admired the First Napoleon as a soldier only. Indeed, Bngeaud seems to have thought his promotion very slow. He fought hard, and denied himself the pleasures, and some even of the necessaries of life, to make himself familiar, by reading, with the science of his profession. Austerlitz itself saw him only a corporal; and although he bore the burden and heat of the day in Spain, he

was but a major in 1814, when the Allies crushed the Emperor by weight of numbers,—and the growing feeling of asses de Bonaparte. It is due to Bugeaud to say that the French war against genuine patriotism in Spain disgusted him. Some of the best

letters to his sister Phillis are written at the time of Palafox's gallant struggle. He was engaged at the siege of Saragossa, and thus speaks his mind :—

" Oh, my dear, what a life, what an existence ! It is now five months that we have been between life and death, corpses and ruins. If we get all the advantage from this war that is expected, it will be bought very dear. But the most fearful thing is to think that our blood may not be of use to our country. I always remember these

lines of Voltaire :—

'Encore, si pour votre patrie Vons saviez vous eacrifier ; Mais non, vons vendez votre vie A ceux gni veulent is payer.'

Who can foresee the glimpse of so many ills ? Happy they who may catch a glimpse of them !"

When the Bourbons were restored, Louis XVIII. gave Bugeand his long-desired colonelcy. He went over, with the bulk of the army, to Napoleon during the Hundred Days, and showed such generalship in an unequal con- test with Sardinian and Austrian soldiers, that he proved himself clearly one of the coming Generals of France. The Bourbons could not forgive him for his desertion, however; and during the reigns of Louis XVIII. and Charles X. he was on half-pay and in retirement. He had, however, acquired fame and a modest fortune. He retired to Perigord, where he married, and for fifteen years devoted himself with as much energy to agriculture as he had previously done to soldiering, He must have been confident that, if he lived, his time would once more come.

Immediately after the revolution of July, in 1830, Colonel Bugeaud offered his services to Louis Philippe. They were accepted, and he was appointed to the command of the 56th Regiment of the Line. Subsequently he received the rank of General, was elected Deputy for his own district of Excideuil, and remained such till his death. As a politician and orator he did not distinguish himself, although he was a fair speaker of the bluff military type. He had an extraordinary hatred of newspapers, and felt their attacks most keenly. In 1832 he had the invidious part to play of acting gaoler to the Duchene de Berry. The Duchesse, attempting to arouse a Legitimist insurrection against "the Citizen King," had been arrested and thrown into the castle of Blaye. To the Governorship of this castle Bugeaud was appointed; and it was while he held it that the Duchesse gave birth to a child, and acknowledged her second and secret marriage to the Neapolitan Count Hector Lucchese Palli,—facts which, when made known, blasted the hopes of the Legitimists, while they also permitted her to be released as no longer a source of political danger. On account of his position, Bugeand was violently assailed by the Legitimists, who attempted to deny the marriage of the Duchesse as " an invention of the enemy," and was even accused of personal harshness to his prisoner. M. d'Ideville brings forward adequate evidence, including the testimony of the Duchesse herself, to prove that Bugeand was as gentle and acted as considerately as be could under diffionit circumstances.

Two years afterwards he gave more congenial help to the Orlean- ist cause by putting down street-fighting in Paris, when be was accused—M. d'Ideville proves altogether unjustly—of ordering the massacre of innocent citizens in the Rue Trans- nonnain. In 1836 he found his true function : he was sent to command a brigade in Algeria. With that country he was more or less closely connected almost to the fall of the Orleans

dynasty ; for, although between his first brilliant term of military service and his Governor-Generalship (1841-1847) of the new French province there intervened a period of years during which he was at home, he was always regarded as a leading, and ultimately as the leading, authority on French interests in North Africa. He was

called on his arrival to confront Abd-el-Kader, then at the• zenith of his fame. He at once detected the weak point in the tactics employed against the Arabs, and, calling together the colonels and other chiefs of his corps the day after his arrival at the scene of action, announced his intentions thus :-

" Gentlemen, I am fresh to Africa; but, in my opinion, the method of pursuing the Arabs hitherto employed is defective. I was long campaigning in Spain ; now, the war that you are carrying on here presents a great deal of analogy with that we undertook in 1812 against the guerillas. You will allow me to utilise the ex- perience that I then acquired. I am, therefore, of opinion that strong columns should be absolutely broken up, and we should disencumber ourselves of the artillery and heavy baggage that impede our march and hinder us in pursuing or surprising the enemy. Our soldiers, like the soldiers of Rome, should be free in their movements and unencumbered ; at any cost the weight that burdens them must be lightened. Our mules and horses must carry the food and ammuni- tion, and the tents answer the purpose of pack-saddles and bags. Then we shall be in a condition to cross mountains and torrents with- out leaving our baggage behind us."

Bugeaud's hearers listened with amazed incredulity to him, and soon afterwards raised objections to his strategy. But he stood to his purpose, and he was right. " Thus," said M. Guizot, afterwards, " did he immediately give the war a character of bold initiative, unforeseen mobility, and swift and indefatigable activity." In Bugeaud Alxl-el-Kader found, in fact, an opponent as nimble as himself. Abd-el-Kader was defeated in 1836 in the important engagement of the Sickack, and in 1837 consented to what is known as the Treaty of Tafna. On this occasion Marshal Bugeaud had a personal interview with Abd-el-Kader, of which he gave an amusing account in his place in the Chamber of Deputies :—

" I reached Abd-el-Bader, who was himself advancing to the ap- pointed place. We met, and I proposed to him to dismount. He did so, and sat down upon the grass ; I sat by his side. I can declare to you here it was I who always played the first part in the conversa- tion. I interrogated him. I asked him questions ; he answered me in monosyllables, for the Arabs are small speakers, and have not the French fault. This conversation lasted about forty minutes. When I had said to Abd-el-Kader all I had to say, I rose. Abd-el-Kader remained seated. I fancied I saw in this a certain notion of superi- ority, and so I made my interpreter tell him' when a French General rises before you, you should also rise ; and while my interpreter was translating my words, I took Abd-el-Kader by the hand, and lifted him up ; he is not very heavy."

This peace was, of course, not a lasting one ; and when General Bugeaud became Governor-General of Algeria, he had to recom- Imence his work of subjugating Abd-el-Kader. M. d'Ideville gives, perhaps, the most interesting account that has yet appeared of this period in his hero's life,—in the course of which occurred the war with Morocco and the great battle of Isly, which led to General Bugeand being created Due d'Isly. Failing health compelled Bageaud to retire from Africa before Abd-el-Kader surrendered, which he did to General Lamorciere, during the Algerian Governorship of the Due d'Aumale. But it was really Bugeand who was the conqueror of Abd-el-Kader. When the Revolution of 1848 came, Bugeand, now Marshal, was found by the side of his master, and vehemently opposed his abdication. After the proclamation of the Republic, he was suggested for the Presi- dency. From Prince-President Louis Napoleon he accepted the office of Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Alps, and died, as we have already noticed, of cholera in 1849. Marshal Bugeand figures in M. d'Ideville's pages not only as a master of the arts of war and of military administration, but as a likeable and even loveable man. He was a devoted brother, husband, and father. His letters to his relatives are full of tenderness. Shortly before his death he was thrown into an agony of distress by discovering that by an unguarded word he had brought tears to the eyes of his favourite sister Phillis. His soldiers, when they came to understand his character, called him "Father Bugeaud." He wept when he was accused of having shot down his fellow-citizens in the Rue Transnonnain. He did some rough work, no doubt, in North Africa,—" military colonisa- tion" cannot be anything else. But M. d'Ideville brings for- ward a great number of facts to prove that Bugeaud did his best to prevent and punish cruelty to Arabs. Bugeaud had been foe -fifteen years a farmer, and he wisely introduced his ideas as an agriculturist into his schemes of colonisation.

When towards the close of his Governorship of Algeria he was about to pay a visit to France to attend the marriage of his daughter, a number of chiefs sent him an address, in which they testified,—" We know that you protect religion and watch over the poor, that you have caused mosques to be built, repeopled the schools of the marabouts, tried to- do good everywhere."

Bugeand had no illusions about the true meaning of French colonisation in Algeria ; he had, indeed, few illusions of any kind. In 1840, he spoke thus candidly in the Chamber of Deputies :-

" I think that great nations, like great men, ought to make their mistakes with greatness. Yes, in my opinion, the possession of Algiers is a mistake ; but, as you choose to commit it, you must commit it grandly, for that is the only means of getting any profit out of it. Therefore, the country must be conquered, and Abd-el-Kader's power

• destroyed."