Wellington and Napoleon
Wellington and His Army. By Godfrey Davies. (Blackwell. 18s.) Napoleon and the Awakening of Europe. By F. M. H. Markham, (English Universities Press. 7s. 6d.) THE characters of Wellington and Napoleon are of perennial interest. They are described in very different ways in these two volumes. Mr. Godfrey Davies, celebrated for his learned knowledge of seventeenth-century England, has turned his attention to the question of Wellington's character and personality as revealed by his conduct in the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. Mr. Davies has been impressed by the estimate of Wellington as a hard and unfeeling man which many writers and notably the late Sir Charles Oman have encouraged. He considers that Wellington's personality has not been properly appreciated. The picture of him as a hard man and contemptuous of his soldiers is shown to be based on selecting certain remarks such as the famous "scum of the earth" passage in which he refers to the human material out of which his army was recruited. Drawing widely on a great variety of sources, citing his references with great care, Mr. Davies maintains that Wellington was very much a man of feeling and in general considerate to his officers and men. Some of his harshest remarks about his troops were aroused by lamentable conduct on the terrible retreat &oils Burgos and too much has been made of them. In general the picture presented is one which fits in very well with the picture given of Wellington in Lord Mahon's Conversations. We are often tempted to think that young Lord Mahon's record of conversations with the old Wellington then in benign retirement was too favourable. Here Mr. Davies shows us with extracts from contemporary diaries and other sources how he impressed men at the time of his most critical campaigns and exacting responsibilities. The last two chapters. 'Amusements and Recreations' and 'Wives and Children' give an interesting picture of the day-to-day life of the Peninsular army and the heroic sufferings of the women who were permitted to follow it. Future biographers of Wellington will always have to take respectful account of Mr. Davies's findings.
If Mr. Davies has been engaged in filling in the detail of one section of a portrait of Wellington, Mr. Markham has taken the hard task of painting with the broadest of brushes on the largest of canvases. His book,.which is one of Mr. A. L. Rowse's Teach Yourself History series, compresses the life of Napoleon into 175 short pages. Only those who have themselves essayed the task of writing a short book on a large subject can fully appreciate the remarkable balance and economy which Mr. Markham has displayed. The story is told clearly and with sympathetic understanding of the historical problems involved. As the author reveals, Napoleonic historiography does not stand still and in the last twenty-five years such sources as the memoirs of Queen Hortense and the memoirs of Caulaincourt and additional evidence about St. Helena have been made public. Mr., Markham uses this new evidence skilfully and brings the story 01 Napoleon up to date for the general reader. He cannot completely succeed in making the tale clear to those readers who are ignorant of the subject beforehand. A reader who was 'teaching himself history by means of this book would have to do quite a lot of additional reading to understand it all. For example, such characters as Carnot and Schwarzenburg appear suddenly without explanation as to who they might be. But the author would have required some scores of additional pages to remedy this. To select one or two points from this well rounded and yet critical survey, we may note that Mr. Markham I's atpains to show the extraordinary power to please that Napoleon could exercise on friend and foe, on high and low. This is always a necessary point to labour when dealing with English readers. brutality he does not fully develop the other side, the harshness and ,?Futality of which he was equally capable. Mr. Markham warns `,1s readers against over-estimating the force of 'nationalism' as a factor in Napoleon's defeat. He speaks perhaps with excessive disrespect of the Tugenbund and other German manifestations but e is on firm ground when he shows how far the forces of Spanish `nationalism' were really clericalism and a hatred of Napoleon as a !on of the enlightenment. But it is a chronic disease of historians find 'a rising spirit of nationalism' as a new and revealing force in history. Nationalism is a much older and more constant force in history than is generally admitted by historians who write about it. Al.a use as the universal joker in the game of historical cards is to be uscouraged. One of many excellent qualities in this book is the choice Mr. Markham has made of Napoleon's own sayings. It !lust have been an exquisite agony of selection to choose so little from so much, but many of the most important and characteristic are there.
R. B. MCCALLUM
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