BOOKS.

ASSAYE TO CORURA.* THE new volumes of A History of the British Army are of the same high quality as those which have gone before. We can give no higher praise, for Mr. Fortescue can only be compared with himself. He has no rivals as a student of military history, and we question whether he has any living superior as an historian. Certainly his work is the most nobly planned and the most brilliantly executed of the histories written within the last ten years. He is a laborious student and an earnest seeker after truth ; but a multitude of details is never allowed to impede the fine sweep of his narrative. It is history in the grand manner that he gives ne,:but there is not a weak or bombastic sentence in his work. There are few men to-day who write such pure and manly English. The book demands a serious interest in military affairs, for it is no sketch to idle away an hour over; but there is an increasing number of Englishmen to whom the publication of a new volume of Mr. Fortescue's History is the chief literary event of the year.

In the present volumes he has to deal with that part of the

• A History of the British drew. By the Hon. J. W. Fortescue. Vol. V. (1803-1507) and Vol. VI. (1807-1809). London: Macmillan and Co. [18e. net each.]

opposition to Napoleon 'which was most critical and least capably handled. He has no brilliant British successes to chronicle. The Mahratta campaigns of Lake and Wellesley, Stuart's creditable little victory of Maida, and the Pyrrhic war in the Peninsula in 1807-1809 are all that stand to our credit, though we must add the well-conceived and quite successful Danish Expedition of 1807. The chief battles are Assaye, Laswaree, Vimeire, and Comilla. To set against these we have Whitelock's disaster at Buenos Ayres;

fiascos in Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean, and an immense amount of bungling on the part of the Home. Government. We have the scare of the French invasion, and the preparations to meet it, which as a whole did more- credit to British hearts than to British brains. On this subject Mr. Fortescue is very instructive :— " Upon the whole, if the French army had managed to get into. England, it would never have got out again. The capture of- London would not have been such a death-blow as it would now be; and, though the loss and suffering to England would have been enormous, it is probable that an army of Russians and_ Austrians would have made France suffer even more. Thus a. successful disembarkation of a French army in England might well have abridged the -troubles of Europe by ten years, for it is hardly possible that the rule of Napoleon could have survived it."

Mr. Fortescue is not afraid to vary his main narrative with delightful episodes, plucking out of oblivion gallant deeds and fantastic situations. Such is the splendid story of Gillespie's doings at Vellore, which reads like a fragment from

a saga of the heroic age ; such is the story of Cole's brigade after Maida, who were surprised while bathing by some

buffaloes and mistook them for the French, and promptly formed up on the beach with ordered arms but without a shred of clothing. Nor is his criticism less admirable than his narrative. Nothing in Mr. Fortescue shows more clearly that he possesses the dignity and reasonableness of the great historian than his judgments of the protagonists. What could be better than his estimates of that magnificent old fire- eater, Lord Lake, of Sir Harry Burrard, of the unfortunate Whitelock, and the egregious Sir Home Popham ? With con- vincing fairness he presents the virtues and defects alike of a

great soldier like Wellesley and a great Minister like Pitt.

On the Ministers, indeed, he is as good as on the Generals. He does not mince matters in criticism, but he is never captious. He does much to dispose of two historic pieces of injustice,—the exaltation of Canning and the decrying of the far abler Castlereagh. But his chief portrait is that of Sir John Moore, and it is not too much to say that Mr. Fortescue'a study of that great soldier is worthy to rank with the best. work of Napier and Henderson.

The chief interest of the volumes for most people will lie in the accounts of the Mahratta Wars of Lake and Wellesley and of the first campaign in the Peninsula. In the former Mr. Fortescue reminds us of several forgotten exploits,—the capture of the fort of Ahmednuggur, for instance, and the wonderful march of fifty-eight miles in a day and a night which culminated in the destruction of Holkar's army at Furruckabad. No two generals could have been more different in genius and temperament than Lake and Wellesley. The one was a desperate fighter who missed no chance of taking the offen- sive and trusted most valiantly to his star ; the other laboured to provide for every possible contingency and to leave as little as be could to the caprices of fate. But in this campaign fortune was kind to the less careful leader. Laswaree was a crushing victory won without a bitch; Assaye, Wellington's first great battle, was a long, confused, and not very decisive fight, where every kind of bad luck befell the General. The story of the siege of Bhurtpore is one of the grimmest in Indian annals, and it is well to be reminded of it. Britisb troops never showed a more reckless eourage in a more gruesome situation. It is well, too, to be reminded of the moral of the campaign :—

" The war therefore ended, as have so many British wars, with the concession of all that had been gained by great expenditure of blood and treasure, in order that more blood and treasure might be expended in fighting another war for the same object in the near future. British Governments—perhaps it would hardly be- fair to say the British nation—are seized from time to time with these revulsions of feeling, which they call remorse and ascribe to. conscience, but which should be called weariness and ascribed to timidity."

The Peninsular chapters are, we think, se far the finest part of Mr. Forteseue's work. He holds a brief for no general and no army, and no historian has admitted mote

generously the achievement of the Spaniards in 1808 when they repulsed the French without foreign assistance. But the fount of all the British mistakes was that it was not recognised in time that this resistance of Spain could not be 'depended upon to continue. The Home Government were kept badly informed by their agents, like Frere, and in turn they misled their generals. Transport and co-operation were 'expected from the Spanish authorities, and neither was forthcoming. On the question of the effect of Moore's three months' campaign, Mr. Fortescue holds that it achieved important results. It made the defence of Saragoza possible, and it prevented a French army from entering Portugal. On Moore's actual generalship, he thinks that the one serious mistake—a mistake of which Moore was perfectly cognisant at the time—was that after the news of Tndela he did not retreat to Portugal, where he could have shipped to Cadiz, but advanced against Napoleon's communications. It was a mistake into which he was compelled by political considera- tions, so often the snare of a good soldier. Is for the actual conduct of the retreat, Mr. Fortescue defends Moore, to our mind convincingly, against the criticisms of Professor Oman and the most recent French writer on the subject, Com- mandant Balagny. Moore may have erred in small details; but he alone knew the moral of his army, and we do not possess the data to criticise him intelligently. When all is said, it remains a wonderful feat, for in three months he mobilised an army of forty thousand men, marched them three hundred miles into the heart of Spain, and retreated two hundred more to the coast in mid-winter and with inexperienced Staff officers. Mr. Fortescue thinks that Moore was beyond question the best trainer of troops that England ever possessed. He had a statesman's perception of large issues, and at the same time a grasp of every detail. Of his personal charm and nobility of character let Mr. Fortescue speak :—

" Singularly handsome in feature, tall and powerful but graceful in body, nimble and active on foot, an excellent horseman in the saddle, Moore had the most striking appearance of any officer in the Army. Nor was this outward seeming belied by the nobility of the mind within ; for he was perfectly pure, perfectly gentle, perfectly honest, perfectly fearless, perfectly true. To impostors and charlatans his keen glance was terrible; but no man possessed a more irresistible faculty of winning hearts. All ranks of the

army adored him, from the private to the general Colborne to the end of his life could not speak of him without a break in his voice ; and Lord Lynedoch, describing him twenty-five years after Coruna to a schoolboy, who had asked to be told about Sir John Moore, stopped suddenly in the midst of his narrative and burst into tears. Soult, with generous admiration, ordered a monument to be set over Moore's grave at Coruila* ; and the Spanish Government has recently raised another with a laudatory inscription in his honour ; but his memory is more safely enshrined in the verses of Charles Wolfe and in the eloquent prose of William Napier. Nevertheless, if not a stone had been raised nor a line -written, his work would still remain with us ; for no man, not Cromwell, nor Marlborough, nor Wellington, has set so strong a mark for good upon the British Army as John Moore."