BOOKS.
NAPOLEON AND THE INVASION OF ENGLAND.* Tim title of this book may perhaps have given rise to expectations which will be disappointed. The joint authors have not achieved an English counterpart to the authori- tative treatise on Napoleon's attempts at a descent upon England which has just been brought to a conclusion by the French Captain Desbrieres. Probably they never aspired to do so. Nevertheless, though their lengthy and somewhat discursive volumes are lacking in arrangement and perspective, and show little or no critical insight, they are cram full of hitherto unpublished material—including, it must be confessed, much that is of very doubtful value—and will, if read with discrimination, provide an appetising if somewhat copious garnish to the more solid fare set before us by Captain Mahan from the naval, and Mr. Fortescue from the military, point of view.
At the present time particularly, when the possibility of invasion from another quarter is such a bone of contention among warring experts, and the reconstruction on a more solid basis of an effective Army for home defence has been commended to us by his Majesty the King, a real under- standing of the psychological effect of an imminent invasion upon the England of a hundred years ago, and of the precise form then taken by our measures for defence, would be of something more than mere historical interest. Strangely enough, the subject is one with the details of which most of us are quite unfamiliar. Mr. Fortescue, as the historian of the Regular Army, looks at the first Volunteer movement askance, and deals with it very briefly. Other wrifers have confined themselves to publishing the records of their own locality alone. But a comprehensive study of the popular attitude towards what was undoubtedly the nearest approach to a national Army that we have ever attained, and of the strategic dispositions, if any, made by the Headquarters Staff to meet the invader, should he succeed in effecting a landing in force, has never yet seen the light. Some of the most valuable of the original documents of the period have, indeed, only just been unearthed. Take, for instance, Dumouriez's famous plan of defence, for which he received a pension of £1,000 a year from the British Government, recently discovered in a second-hand bookshop in London, or the Fishguard despatches of Lords Milford and Cawdor, found in a Bristol curiosity-shop.
The present work succeeds in giving us in the compass of a single book a more convincing picture of a period of panic than we can recall in any library. It must indeed be confessed that the groundwork of the narra- tive is of little value, and might with advantage have been "taken as read." The chapters on the naval aspect of the Great War and on the Trafalgar Campaign, for instance, neither bring any new facts to light nor put forward any new view, and are, in short, unnecessary. But what is valuable is the immense mass of matter which their industry has collected and thrown together, rather than arranged, in their volumes,—sermons and addresses, and broadsheets urging patriotism; a whole Parnassus of verses by very minor poets, including many stanzas by Pye that might well have been omitted ; the playbills of patriotic nights at the theatres; and last, but not least, a very large number of copies of cartoons and caricatures. In fact, we have all the material for the history which still awaits its historian, but just not that history itself. From such a varied patchwork the discriminating reader will, with the aid of an admirable index, cull much that is novel and interesting, and the few extracts which we now propose to give will, if we mistake not, attract many students of the Napoleonic era to the volumes themselves for more, in spite of their very obvious faults.
• Napoleon and as Invasion of England: the Story of the Great Terror. By a P. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley. With numerous Illustrallons from OnatenpOrary Print., Caricatures, &cc. 2 vols. London: John Lane. Ms. oat)
Thus the ballad dealing with the invasion of Ireland in 1796 will delight the heart of the Military Correspondent of the Tines, especially the concluding stanza, which puts the case against the extreme "blue-water school" in a nutshell :— " Oh, where was Hood, and where was Howe, And where Cornwallis then ; Where Colpoys, Bridport, or Pellew, And all their gallant men ?"
In 1806 we have the following from the pen of Charles Dibdin, the real Laureate of the invasion scare :— " If the Frenchmen a landing should win In each County they'd find we're not slugs; Herts and Wiltshire would teach 'em to fight, In Bucks as sure game they'd be taken, In Berkshire they'd find we could bite, And in Hampshire they'd not save their bacon; In Middlesex would they be popping, Or Sussex, their ground•they'd not keep, In Bent, they'd soon send them a hopping, In Bedfordshire send them to sleep."
And so on through most of the counties ; "if they come sporting to Surrey, They'll find Surrey rangers sharpshooters" would have been as true in 1906 as it was in 1806 :—
" To the counties whose names I've left out I'll be d—d if the French will get in."
This is, in fact, the Ode of the County Associations, and as such may be recommended to Mr. Haldane, with the suggestion that he should order it to be sung at all future meetings of these bodies. There are also two versions of the same writer's "Tight Little Island," the most successful of all the patriotic songs of the day.
The copies of cartoons and caricatures with which these pages abound are of quite first-class interest, and the joint authors are to be congratulated on their richness and variety, and not least upon the admirable manner in which the reproductions have been made. The printing on the cartoons themselyes, and the words put into the mouths of the characters portrayed, which give point to the drawings, have come out quite clearly, and are easily legible, if not with the naked eye, at least with a magnifying-glass. Some of them
are, indeed, well known—Gillray's famous "King of Brob- dingnag " and Gulliver, for instance—but many more, whether by Gillray or Rowlandson, Cruikshank or Woodward, or others, are extremely rare and practically unknown. Such are " The Posse Comitatus to Resist Invasion," 1782 ; "Arming for the Fray," 1798; Sayer's " Devil's Own Volunteers," 1799 ; " Napoleon's Reception in London," 1803 ; " The British Parson and his Sexton in High Glee at the Prospect of Burying the Invaders," 1803; "Pitt Brings Fox and Sheridan into Line " ; "Resolutions in Case of an Invasion," &c. The cartoons, whether serious or caricature, representing the invasion raft, and Gillray's "French Telegraph Making Signals in the Dark," have a technical interest of their own. Special attention may also be called to the French caricature which appears on p. 38 of Vol. H. This not only shows the invaders crossing the Channel in balloons, and the English counter-attack with balloons to
which pilot kites are attached, but also a whole army of Frenchmen marching through a Channel tunnel!
The prevailing tone of these cartoons and of the numerous broadsheets collected in this volume is a bigness and boastfulness of talk which is unpleasantly reminiscent of Bob Acres. The abuse heaped upon Bonaparte and the loudly expressed confidence in the value of the Volunteers which they breathe are little short of hysterical, and give sure indications of a degree of fear, if not of panic, which, if we except the sailors, was almost universal. This panic was caused, however, not so much by fear of Bonaparte as by a very justifiable distrust of the com- petence of the military authorities. The great wave of patriotic feeling which swept over the country manifested itself in characteristic British fashion in the formation of Volunteer corps, which displayed laudable keenness, coupled with a distinct weakness for fine uniforms, huge reviews, and patriotie banquets. We all know of Pitt as a Colonel of Volunteers, but do we realise also that the last days of Burns were harassed by pressing applications for settlement of a debt of £7 4s. incurred for his Volunteer uniform, or that
when the poet was brought home to die he was dressed in this very uniform, a blue coat, with the undress nankeen pantaloons of the Volunteers P Burns was buried with military honours in spite of his request that the "awkward squad " should not be allowed to fire over him. But though warmly encouraged by the Crown, and supported by public subscriptions amounting to many millions in all, the Volunteer movement received but half-hearted support from the military authorities or the Government. While the people of England were thoroughly alarmed, and took their own measures, such as they were, for preparing as individuals to meet the invader, the Government and the military authorities were not only incompetent but apathetic. We read of limits being set to the number of Volunteers to be enrolled, of arms and accoutre- ments promised but never provided. Thus in 1803 the Duke of Gordon, Lieutenant for the County of Aberdeen, protests strongly that far more men are anxious to enrol than the Government will accept, that what corps they do allow are not embodied, and that only pikes are available for arming them. In the same year the second and notorious Lord Chatham, then Master-General of Ordnance, excuses himself for serving out an insufficient number of muskets, and those of obsolete pattern, by reflecting that "we have already one hundred thousand pikes, and can increase them rapidly," and seems to consider the general indisposition to take them as most unreasonable. Organisation appears to have been completely lacking, and it is left to the Association for protecting the Forth to take its own measures unassisted by the military authorities. As regards strategical plans, we have indeed Dumouriez's famous essay, which the authors of these volumes would have done well to print in extenso instead of merely giving extracts and promising the full text as a supplement at some later date. Beyond that there is little, save Marquis Cornwallis's opinion that "Essex is a most difficult county to defend with in- experienced troops," and Sir John Moore's selection of Clacton beach as a likely place for a hostile landing. In 1798 Pitt at least looked up the Elizabethan scheme for resisting the Spanish Armada, but no very definite action seems to have followed his researches, and practically nothing at all was done by Addington. Perhaps the soundest strategist of all was the King himself, who determined to make Worcester his headquarters in case of invasion. But the capacity of the Headquarters Staff itself may be measured by the only positive thing they actually effected besides the martello towers,—the cutting of the Grand Military Canal at Hythe,. as a second obstacle in case the invaders should successfully overpass the Channel!
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this long period of extreme agitation: if not of actual panic, upon which Messrs. Wheeler and Broadley's volumes shed so many interesting sidelights, is the fact that the peril in which we stood, and the warning which we ought to have received, passed almost unheeded. The slightest excuse was eagerly taken for disbanding the people's armies, and damping down a military enthusiasm which at one time practically embraced the whole population, men, women, and children. " We must not," wrote Lord Poulett from the Isle of Wight in 1798, " suffer again this spirit to cool" Yet even the Peace of Amiens, recognised by its own authors as a doubtful experiment, was made the occasion fox " scrapping " all that the public spirit had built up, while no sooner did the danger finally pass after Trafalgar than England was allowed to sink back again into a feeling of security, from which she has never really awakened since. Must we then await actual disaster before we take the simplest steps to provide for our own defence P Or is our salvation to be found once more in the pressure brought to bear upon the Government of the day, this time, we hope, with more lasting results, not by official soldiers and Headquarters Staffs, but by Lords-Lieutenant and County Associations ?
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