BOOKS.
THE PENINSULAR WAR.* IT was the opinion of one of the minor contemporary writers on the Peninsular Campaign that" a man must, like Xenophon, march with an army before he ventures to become the historian of its exploits." Mr. Oman has never, as far as we are aware, marched in the flesh with any army, though his grasp of military and strategical problems is founded on something more than theory. "The Captain of the Hamp- shire G-renadiers " was acknowledged not to have been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire, and the protagonist of the Oxford Kriegspiel Club has clearly been of service to Mr. Oman.
We know of no contemporary chronicler, even of military events, whose work, putting aside its value as an original document, is quite secure of that sober weighing of evidence and judicial impartiality which is the hall-mark of the real historian. Napier himself admits to "feelings which must warp the judgment of a contemporary historian," and that he did not overstate the case in this particular is well known. Mr. Oman devotes a good deal of attention to redressing the balance. He brings out to the full the distorted views which Napier's blind admiration for Napoleon led him so often to expreas,—his casual treatment, for instance, of the treachery of Bayonne, with its scientific mixture of force and fraud ; or "the prejudice in favour of the Emperor, which goes so far that he even endeavours to justify obvious political and military mistakes in the conduct of the war by throwing all the blame on the way in which his marshals executed his orders, and neglecting to point out that the orders themselves were impracticable." Above all, Mr. Oman protests with great force against the injustice ersending to the extreme of cruelty which tinges all Napier's dealings with the Spaniards. "Napier always accepts the French rather than the Spanish version of a story, exaggerates Spanish defeats and minimises Spanish successes. He is reckless in the statements which he gives as to their numbers in battle or their losses in defeat,—his figures are borrowed from the haphazard guesses of the French marshals ; the Spanish version is ignored. No good act done by a Spanish Junta or a Tory Minister is ever acknowledged." Napier in his best oratorical manner declares that he cared not "to swell his work with apocryphal matter, and neglected the thousand narrow bubbling currents of Spanish warfare to follow that mighty English stream of battles which burst the barriers of the Pyrenees and left deep traces of its fury in the soil of France." Mr. Oman, on the other hand, devotes more than half of the pages that lie before us to the labours of that nation, "animated with one spirit," against the invader which, as Sheridan and Canning saw, alone made the Spanish ulcer possible. He is not blind to their faults, but, as he justly observes, after an exhaustive and elaborate account of Spain, her geography, her people, and her Army, if she "had been a first-rate military power, there would have been comparatively little merit in the six years' struggle which she waged against Buonaparte. When we consider her weakness and her disorganisation, we find ourselves more inclined to wonder at her persistence than to sneer at her mishaps." The light which his untiring research has been able to throw upon the Spanish side of the story in these opening volumes is, indeed, Mr. Oman's most notable contribution to history.
At the same time, the British element in the struggle is by no means neglected. The chapters, for instance, which deal with the Corunna campaign merit very careful reading. The main contention is summed up in the striking assertion that
• TI'. History of ths Peninsular War. By Charles Oman, MA.. Fellow of All Souls* College and Deputy Michele Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. With M. Plans, and Portraits. Vol. I., 1807-1809; Vol. II., January-September, 1839. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. [14s. net per vol..] "if Moore had died or been superseded on December 4th, 1808, he would have been written down as well-nigh the worst failure in all the long list of incompetent British commanders since the commencement of the Revolutionary War." We are unable within the limits of this notice to deal fully with all the arguments ; but the case against Moore is admirably put, the main evidence being indeed supplied from the General's own correspondence, and bears favourable com- parison with what is not unjustly designated as "the ingenious and eloquent casuistry" of Napier's arguments on the other side. Owing to Moore's unhappy decision that the direct road to Almeida was not practicable for artillery and transport, a decision all the more remark- able when we remember that only four months previously Loison had taken his guns by this very route, his army was unable to intervene at a most critical moment, and during the whole time that the fate of Madrid hung in the balance the forces which had been despatched to the succour of Spain were entirely out of the campaign. What was even more serious from the political point of view is the charge that when the long-delayed concentration was on the point of being effected, the fractions of the British army were within an ace of tamely retreating as they had come. Moore had, of course, been grossly deceived as to the amount of Spanish co-operation that he might expect; and he was but too conscious that the forces entrusted to him formed not a British army, but the British army, and must not, therefore, be exposed to the risk of annihilation. But we agree with Mr. Oman in thinking such considerations were not enough to justify Moore in washing his bands of the whole business and marching out of Spain without firing a shot. "He had not been sent to help the patriots if they were powerful and victorious, to desert them if they proved weak and unlucky. If these had been the orders issued to him by Castlereagh, all Buonaparte's taunts about the selfishness and timidity of the British Government would have been justified."
Of the bold and skilful operations which altered circum- stances, and the consequent reconciliation of Moore's judgment with his wishes, inspired that General to undertake, Mr. Oman gives an account which is alike lucid and enthusiastic. To the permanent political and military effects of the daring raid upon the Emperor's communications, and to the general soundness of the enterprise, he pays ample tribute. It is probable that at the best Moore would never have been able to save Madrid. The fight that would have ensued against the overwhelming odds which Napoleon would have brought against him at Burgos in November would probably have astonished the Emperor not a little, but it could only have entailed the ruin of Moore's army. As it was, "his tardy intervention wrecked Napoleon's original plans and saved Lisbon and Seville." But though satisfied that the campaign as a whole was favourable to Moore and justified the high reputation he enjoyed, Mr. Oman is unable to regard even the latter part of the campaign as free from avoidable mistakes. It is, of course, true that the contemporary charges brought against Moore, and founded chiefly on the bad impression caused by the return of his ragged, pest-stricken troops with the grime and sweat of war fresh upon them, were manifestly unjust, and had curiously little to do with the real faults of the campaign. But to absolve him from them is not, as Mr. Oman points out, to assert that the whole conduct of the campaign had been abso- lutely blameless. In his review of that General's character he surely strikes the right note when he states that self-consciousness was his weak point. Moore's constant inquiry as to what they would say at home led him, as it has led more modern generals, to an indecision and an over-caution which were entirely wanting in Wellington, who never asked the question, or in Nelson, to whom the obvious response lay in heroic enterprise.
It had been the settled conviction of Sir John Moore that the frontier of Portugal was not defensible against a superior force. "If the French succeed in Spain," he wrote to Castlereagh in 1808, "it will be vain to attempt to resist them in Portugal." It was left to a man who had once been con- temptuously designated "the Sepoy General" to give the lie to such gloomy conclusions, and to vindicate in so signal a fashion our political and military reputation. Sir Arthur Wellesley would guarantee with thirty thousand British troops and the Portuguese levies to hold his own in Portugal against any force of less than a hundred thousand Frenchmen. Furthermore, he believed that he and his army "might be highly useful to the Spaniards, and might eventually decide the contest." He was able to see both the strength of his own position in Portugal and the value of its geographical situation as flanking the Spanish operations of the French. "He had grasped," writes Mr. Oman, "the fundamental truth that the more ground the French held down the weaker would they become at any given point, and that Napoleon's military power, vast as it was, had its limits." "If the French dispersed their divisions and kept down the vast tracts of conquered territory, they had no force left with which to take the offensive against Portugal: if they massed their armies, they had to give up broad regions which immediately relapsed into insurrection and required to be subdued again." It is to the immortal credit of Castlereagh that he was able to stake his faith on the bolder of these two opinions, and, by risking the experi- ment of a second expedition to Portugal, to lay the foundation for that long series of victories which eventually brought the throne of a greater than the "intrusive monarch" to the dust. His daring departure from the policy of filching sugar islands, and the implicit faith which he showed in Wellington, go far indeed to absolve the author of the "glaring im- providence of Wakheren."
We are unable to follow Mr. Oman through his illuminating account of the struggle down to the end of the Talavera campaign, with which his second volume concludes. He is able to throw a great deal of fresh light upon Beresford's re- organisation of the Portuguese Army, and, from personal observations on the spot, upon the passage of the Douro. We are glad, too, to find that he is able to do justice to the astound- ing feats of the brilliant but intractable commander of the Lusitanian Legion. The whole treatment is admirable, and though full of the minutest detail, the narrative stands out with striking clearness.
• Wellesley might well have been supposed at the conclusion of the Talavera campaign to have justified himself as a general. Even Napoleon, who generally betrayed a rancour against him which was little short of scandalous, on receiving Joseph's garbled version of that battle, was bound to admit, "Ii parait que c' est unh,omne ce Wellesley." But the firm support of Castlereagh was gone. The starved and fever-stricken army in Spain, and the jealous experts at home, saw nothing but the immediate fruitlessness of a battle which was to prove, after .Albuera, the bloodiest of the whole war. The Emperor had made peace with Austria, and was preparing to lead down another hundred thousand veterans. England's entire abandonment of the campaign hung in the balance. It was at this moment that Wellesley wrote one of those despatches which show the contrast between his character and Moore's, and vindicate him so completely from the charge of being a mere child of fortune. "I may fail," he writes to his brother. "I shall be most confoundedly abused. I may lose the little character I have gained. But I should not act fairly by the Government if I did not tell them my real opinion, which is that they will betray the honour and interests of the country if they do not continue their efforts in the Peninsula."
We await with interest Mr. Oman's version in his succeeding volumes of the continuance of those efforts. The instalment that lies before us is, like Wellesley's iron determination, a guirantee of vigorous performance.
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