The Subaltern ... Library edition revised and corrected, with a new preface

Preface

" Hæc olim meminisse Juvabit." " Oh memory, fond memory, When all things fail we turn to thee." WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXII

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TO THE NEW EDITION OF •THE SUBALTERN.' Fokty-six years have run their course since the con cluding pages of the following narrative were written — not far short of sixty since the latest of the events recorded therein were to a living and breathing gene ration present realities. A large space this latter in the life of the individual man — a not inconsiderable one in the existence even of nations. Of the influence which it has exercised over the destinies of the four Powers which, at the opening of the interval, were at deadly strife one with another, this is scarcely the occasion on which to speak. The general results are indeed before us, not to be misapprehended ; but the multiplicity of causes which combined to bring them about, the most painstaking and well-instructed of a VI

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. chroniclers would find it difficult to put in order within the limits of a volume, much more of a preface. France, which in 1813 bled at every pore in the vain attempt to sustain the First Empire, has since accepted and driven away again, one after another, the Restoration, the Orleanist rule, the Republic, and the Second Empire ; and now, humiliated and maimed, is striving, under a second republic, to recruit her energies for whatever the future may present to her. From Spain, the Bourbons, whom the arms of England replaced upon the throne, are to all human appearance permanently expelled, after a long succession of plots and civil wars, which the selfish policy of the last king of the race had bequeathed to his country as a parting legacy. Portugal, likewise, though less severely tried than her neighbours, has had her troubles too, in the internecine contests of brother against brother, and uncle against niece.

And if at length she may have found a way of escape from anarchy, she owes it mainly to the good sense of the two last of her sovereigns, themselves the offshoots of a family remarkable for its prudence, and more fortunate than any other royal house in Europe in giving to constitutional monarchies their existing dynasties. As to Eng land, what shall we say of her ? No foot of foreign

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. VII enemy has polluted her soil, no secret conspiracy nor open revolt has set her people in array one against another. Yet the constitution which was settled for her two centuries ago, and which, in 1813, her wisest sons held to be perfect, has been left far behind. The doors of her Parliament are open now to men of all religious opinions and of none. She has determined the point, for the first time in her history, that there is no necessary con nection between Church and State ; and recent legislation seems to declare that the honour and interests of a great country are safer in the keeping of the uneducated and impulsive, than of the culti vated and reflecting classes. All this is true ; yet let us be thankful that, in an age of revolutions, our own downward progress has not been more rapid.

AVe have still a throne, which is assumed to be hereditary, and to which loyalty is professed. AVe have still in England and in Scotland established churches. We have a House of Lords also, which the wise among us reverence and look up to ; and laws which, when rightly administered, are equal to any strain that can be put upon them. How long these, or any other of the institutions which we owe to "the wisdom of our ancestors," are likely to endure, is a question more easily asked

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. than answered. This much, however, is at least probable, that if they go to the wall, they will go gradually, and that the generations which inherit the change will learn to adapt themselves to it, and to make the most of it. The greatest attainable amount of happiness to the greatest possible num ber of persons — that is, or ought to be, the end of all governments ; and the government which most effectually achieves that end will be the best gov ernment, call it by what name you may. The particular tract of country wherein the scene of the following narrative is laid has undergone fewer changes, whether physical or social, than might perhaps have been anticipated in the course of six long and very busy decades. All the great natural features of the district, — the hill, the vale, the river, the mountain, and the sea, — remain, of course, precisely what they were.

The Gironde, as the confluence of the Garonne and the Dordogne is called, still rolls its waters, after passing through Bourdeaux, in a turbid volume towards the Bay of Biscay. The Landes, succeeding to the rich culture of vine, corn-field, and orchard, receive you now, as they did of old, into a melancholy expanse of dark forests and sandy plains. Along either bank, at the mouth of the Adour, two scrubby pine-woods take

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. IX you into their shelter; while in the far distance beyond, the bold outline of the Pyrenees towers up into the horizon. Nor on the whole can it be said that man has done much to modify in any per ceptible degree the general character either of places or of persons. Towns may grow larger and more populous from year to year ; villages have a ten dency to stretch themselves out ; — and one in parti cular, which in 1813 was little better than a seaside hamlet, has expanded into a gay and luxurious wa tering-place. But the bulk of the people seem to be exactly what they were sixty years ago — frugal, hard-working, honest, not over-cleanly perhaps in their domestic habits, and, though far from melan choly, a graver race than the peasants of France are usually believed to be. In fact, considering the tendency of railway communication to break down, wherever it is established, local customs altogether, the matter to be wondered at is, that we should find so much of their primitive simplicity still surviving among these Gascons ; for the rail it is which has wrought most surely whatever innovation is per ceptible among them.

The rail has put the old chaussie out of date, and brought the Spanish frontier within eighteen hours of Paris, and to him who shall use his opportunities aright, within thirty X

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. hours of London. Hence that which used to be regarded as an out-of-the-way corner of Europe, worth notice only because it witnessed the closing operations of the Peninsular War, is visited now by strangers from all parts of the world — some hurry ing by without a pause, intent on business or pleasure elsewhere ; others finding in the district itself a temporary home, which the climate, especially in winter and spring, renders as salubrious as the mag nificent scenery in which it abounds makes it agreeable. The Gascons cannot, of course, fail more or less to be acted upon by this tide of immigration. As yet, however, it seems but slightly to have affected their characters and manners, which, in all essential points, continue to be what they were when the great Duke led his victorious columns through the passes of their mountains, not to plunder or harass, but to deliver their 'fathers from the out rages which they suffered at the hands of their own countrymen in arms.

The railroad from Bourdeaux to the frontier runs parallel, or nearly so, with the old cliaussie as far as Labenne, a little village with a station, about eight miles from Bayonne. There the two lines separate. The old road enters Bayonne, as it did long ago, to the left of the citadel, descending the steep hill on

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. XI which the fortress stands, and passing through the suburb of St Esprit, in which, during the sortie on the 14th April 1814, most of the fighting took place. The railway, on the contrary, sweeps seaward, and, touching the Adour at Boucaut, runs up-stream by the brink of the river, and so passes through the lower outworks of the citadel to the station. There the traveller who desires to rest for an hour or two will alight close to a church in which General Hay was killed, and round which that desperate struggle took place of which mention is made in chapter xxiv. of the Subaltern's story. Tbe alterations effected in Bayonne since the siege are neither numerous nor important. The intrenched camp, of which Marshal Soult made it the key, has indeed disappeared, while the permanent works are strengthened and enlarged, so as to adapt them, in some degree at least, to those modifi cations in the art of attack and defence which the increased power of artillery and the resources of modern engineering skill have brought about.

The town itself, however, remains very nearly such as it was. In the Eue de Gouvernment and the adjacent streets some handsome modern houses have indeed been built, but the main portion of the city retains nearly all its old landmarks. We have the same tall

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. XII houses looking into each other's eyes across the narrow streets ; the same narrow trottoirs beneath the houses, so completely sheltered from the sun's rays as to produce in him who walks along them some such sensation as he might experience were he at the bottom of a well. Now also, as formerly, all these narrow streets converge towards the cathedral, which stands upon the highest point of a gently-rising eminence, and forms, so to speak, the centre of a star, whence multitudinous rays are thrown out. The effect is singular, and, when looked at from the cathedral tower, is really very striking. The cathedral itself, which in 1814 had suffered grievously from years of neglect, has had of late a good deal of attention paid to it. Indeed it was one of the most praiseworthy characteristics of the era of the Second Empire, that considerable efforts were made in it, both by the Government and private persons, to blot out the traces of the Vandalism which had prevailed under the First Empire and during the First Eepublic, especially with regard to churches.

Here a capital sum, producing not less than fifteen hundred a-year of interest, was bequeathed by a pious indi vidual for the purpose of restoration ; and the will of the testator having been carefully attended to, the edifice stands forth again in something Eke its

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. XIII original splendour. The cathedral of Bayonne is about as large as one of our own cathedrals of the second order— to which, indeed, in its proportions and general style of architecture, it bears a close resemblance. Of the works thrown up by the English during the last siege, not a vestige remains. The Blue House, as we used to call a chateau standing in the suburb of St Pierre, and in the garden of which we established our most formidable mortar-battery, retains no traces of the fire to which it was then exposed. Tbe shot-holes are all filled up, the walls are whitewashed, and the avenue by which it is approached has been replanted. Nobody could tell that our axes cut down trees as umbrageous as those which now flank the roadway on either side, that their stems might be converted into platforms, and their tops and stouter branches into stockades and abattis.

In one particular, however, commendable care has been taken to save from obliteration a memorial of the siege. The graves of the British officers who fell in the sortie are well kept up, each English consul as he came into office having received the charge from his predecessor, and all religiously attending to it. The railway from Bayonne to the frontier passes

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. XIV over the Adour and the Nive upon a new bridge, higher up the stream than the old stone bridge. It then runs along the valley in which lie the small lakes or large ponds referred to in this narrative. These it leaves to the right, aud crossing the chausse'e, enters a tunnel driven beneath the ridge on which the mayor's house stands. By-and-by the train rushes through another valley, sighting the villages of Bidart and Gauthory, and so on to St Jean de Luz. The station for St Jean de Luz is at a point just outside the town, where the road to Ascaen branches off. Leaving it behind, we hurry through a succession of tortuous glens, and by-and-by, having traversed a deep cutting, we find ourselves at Handaye, the last town on the French frontier. We are now on the right of the great Spanish road, which crosses the Bidassoa at the same point where, in 1813, we found the bridge broken down, and its ruins blocked by a tete-de-pont.

Here some delay takes place, national jealousies having con trived that the gauges on either side of the stream should be different, and the Customs regulations stringent. The traveller is not, however, put there by to very serious inconvenience. If he be disposed to eat, he will find both at Handaye and at Irun excellent buffets ; if he prefer spending an hour

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. XV among the outward forms of nature, the views that meet his gaze on every side will well repay the time lent to survey them. Leaving him there, I will ask my reader to return with me to the point where we last rested, and to visit in my company certain spots of which he will find mention made in the course of the Subaltern's narrative ; and among these, one in particular will naturally attract his attention. It was but the other day the favourite summer haunt of an im perial household: it is still a place much resorted to by fashionable seekers after health. Sixty years ago it was nothing more than the quiet village of Biaritz, occupied in perpetuity by fishermen and lodging-house keepers, and visited in the autumn for sea-bathing purposes by the wealthier citizens of Bayonne. This latter phase of its existence is represented by a few old-fashioned houses which stretch vaguely along the southern ridge towards the church, and thence dip down again in the direc tion of the sea, till they reach Porte Vieux.

Even these, however, are rapidly making way for more stately mansions, though enough of them still re main to present a striking contrast to the eastern or modern section of the town. This latter, facing the sea, extends from Porte Vieux well-nigh to the light-

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. house. There the Villa Eugenie comes in, planted at the foot of the lighthouse hill, and occupying, with its pleasure-grounds and well-kept alleys, a space which, sixty years ago, was nothing more than a tract of barren sand. You can reach Biaritz from Bayonne by rail, arriving at the station at Nigresse ; or you may travel from Bayonne by a new road, which, turning off from the Spanish road at the fifth kilometre, avoids the village of Anglete, through which the old road ran. This latter, which, after crowning the heights of the Phare, led over an interesting country, is now quite deserted. At the point where it joins the great Spanish road used to stand a post house, with a vast range of stables and out-buildings. The post-house, stables, and out-buildings are still there, but the business has gone from the place, and it is falling fast into decay.

It was along that old road that the Subaltern and his two friends rode for their lives when chased by French cavalry out of Biaritz. Neglect has rendered the greater portion of it impassable, which indeed it would have become throughout, had not the Emperor caused it to be repaired where it abuts upon Biaritz, and carried it on a new line round the lake, and through the woods that surround the mayor's house. This

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. XVII promenade or drive, to which he gave the name of Bois de Boulogne, is extremely pretty in itself, and commands from various points glimpses of very interesting scenery. But the point of most interest to the English traveller is undoubtedly the mayor's house itself, which, with the grounds about it, the present proprietor, Monsieur la Bride, has had the good taste to preserve in all their leading features very much as they were when the four days' battle was fought. The landscape, as seen from the top of the house, is magnificent. From it the traveller commands now, as Sir John Hope did sixty years ago, a full view of the entire battle-field, including Arcanques and Ustaritz, with all the country eastward as far as the Cambo Hills, and southwards to the Ebrun Mountains and the Spanish Pyrenees.

The more minute features of the scene of action are likewise taken in. The hollow road in which the French formed for their last rush at the house, remains as it was on the 11th of December 1813. Between it and the house lies the triangular field, just outside the wood, where the carnage was fiercest, and of which the proprietor says, that, well manured by the dead, it still produces such crops as to command thrice the amount of rent that is given for any other

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. XVIII similar extent of ground in the district. Beyond it, over the hill, and sloping towards Bayonne, extends the scraggy copse or belt of wood through which the fighting was close and desperate ; and just below the railway lies the lake into which many of the French, horse and man, were driven. They were driven not without great promptitude of action on our part; for there the French cavalry fell upon us with such rapidity and determination, that, being scattered in loose order, we had just time, favoured by the swampy nature of the ground, to throw ourselves into circles and receive them. All these objects Monsieur la Bride points out with unwearied politeness to the English who visit him, not forgetting the graves of British officers whom their comrades buried in his garden, and of which he generously and religiously keeps the outlines sacred.

Leaving the mayor's house, and returning to the great road, we enter upon the common or broken plain where, on the 10th December 1813, the other corps of the left column of the army came up in support of the hard-pressed and hard-fighting fifth division. It was a wild bleak spot in winter, sixty years ago ; it is little changed now. The redoubt which we threw up, and named after one of the mayor's daughters, has indeed disappeared ; but

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. XIX the belt of wood round which the squadrons of the 12th and 16th Light Dragoons made their charge keeps its place exactly as it did then; and the hollow in which the brigade to which the Subaltern was attached bivouacked that night lacks only the embers of their watch-fires to make it precisely what it was when they left it. The same may be said of Bidart and Gauthory, two villages which we reach in succession — the former lying at the farther base of the eminence or plateau where the operations just referred to took place — the latter scattered on either side of the highway, some two or three miles nearer to St Jean de Luz. In both, the clusters of houses, which afforded winter quarters to the 85th Light Infantry, appear as if they had been evacuated but yesterday. In St Jean de Luz few changes have been effected.

The one great novelty is a sort of breakwater or digue which Napoleon III. began to construct, with a view to develop the capacities of the port as a harbour of refuge and an entrcpdt of commerce. But the work is incomplete, and is not likely to be carried further till a more stable government than the present be set up in France. As to the bridge over the Nivelle, it is exactly in the state in which we left it ; the piers of the arches which the French XX

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. blew up stand where they did, as well as the beams and planks with which we replaced the broken roadway. It is pointed out to all who are curious in such matters as the AVellington Bridge. In other respects the town retains all its original characteris tics. The quays, the churches, the hotel de ville, the very shops themselves, the house which was Lord AVellington's headquarters, are precisely what they were ; while, as if to preserve unbroken the associations of the past, the railway station itself has been constructed outside the town, and is not in any conspicuous manner connected with it. Our next point of interest is TJrogne. There it lies as it lay sixty years ago, in the low ground, overlooked by the heights which Soult had fortified, and which, he flattered himself, would stop our further progress.

There, too, before descending the hillside on the right of the old carriage-road, stands the chateau, in the library of which we found, on the 11th of November 1813, a captured English mail. It seems to be, as far as outward appearances can be trusted, precisely what it was on that day when I carried off from it two bits of plunder — a Spanish grammar, which I still retain, and a small and prettily-enamelled pair of bellows. Alas ! this latter, of which the value could not be over-

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. XXI rated in bivouac, has long ago disappeared. Sic transit gloria mundi. Gone, too, is the three-gun battery, the fire from which swept the main street of the town, and struck against the old church wall without passing through it. My blessing be upon that sacred pile ! It gave me shelter in the night between the 10th and the 11th, and some hundreds of brave men besides, all of them wearied with long hours of watching and battle. They had not failed before lying down to cover with the consecrated earth of the churchyard such of their comrades as had fallen. AVhere now are they themselves ? " Their swords are rust, Their bodies are dust, Their souls are with the Lord, we trust." The little town or village of TJrogne has lost all traces of the struggle which went on, first to carry, and afterwards to keep it.

Its four straight streets, its " place " or square, the central point of which is the church just referred to, are all as if the sound of war had never been heard among them. So appear to be the hedgerows and deep shady lanes that give to the surrounding district an aspect sin gularly English. As we approach the frontier, how ever, and in a still more remarkable degree after we pass it, a great change becomes perceptible. If we b

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. XXII put our trust in outward appearances, Handaye, on the French side of the Bidassoa, might have been the scene of a battle last year or last month. Almost every house in the town, with the exception of a few recently constructed, are more or less in ruins. It seems never to have recovered the first shock of the invasion on the 8th October 1813. All the inhabitants fled that day, leaving their dwellings to their fate, and few ever returned to reclaim and restore them. In Eke manner Font arabia, of which the view from Handaye is very fine, is still as it was sixty years ago — a ruinous city. The town stands within a circle of stone walls, the church being especially perceptible over them ; but the walls still exhibit their an cient breaches, never in all human probability to be repaired.

So likewise, as you pursue your journey, leaving the heights of San Marcial on your left hand, and bearing down towards Irun, the spec tacle which meets your gaze is that of a country not long delivered from the miseries of war. The narrow glen through which the river runs waves indeed with Indian corn, as it did sixty years ago ; and the slopes of the hills on the French side, below the bridge, are covered with vines, which, as in Lom bardy, festoon themselves over tall poles, or from

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. XXIII the boughs of poplars. But the houses, wherever you encounter them — the chateau equally with the cottage and farmhouse — seem to be in a state of dilapidation. To be sure, this district bore the brunt of the Cariist rising five-and-thirty years ago ; yet the practised eye can detect here and there relics of the great Duke's army, especially in the mounds which mark the spots where, before advancing into France, he took the precaution to block the gorges of passes with a succession of redoubts. Passages is as quiet and beautiful now as it ever was. Along the south side of the land-locked bay the railroad winds, from above which, and indeed on every hand, cork woods look down upon a harbour Httle frequented, yet capable of affording shelter to no inconsiderable navy. Passages seems to be not only unchanged but unchangeable.

It is not so with St Sebastian. There all things are new. The fortifications have disappeared ; and where bas tion and curtain once stood, long boulevards - are drawn out. The town has been rebuilt with great regularity ; and along the banks of the Urumea, where our storming-parties crossed, the process of construction is still going on. St Sebastian, in fact, has ceased to be one of the keys of Spain towards France. The citadel alone remains to tell that such

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. it once was. The town is now a fashionable water ing-place, with its promenades running seaward, and its umbrageous walks commanding one of the finest views in the world, both inland and over the broad Atlantic. Such is the general aspect of a tract of country which, peaceful, almost somnolent, as it has become, is, and must be to the end, associated in the memory of the writer of these pages with scenes of great en joyment, though they be of warfare. For the aged live most fondly upon the past, as the young do upon the future, till both alike lose themselves in that vast present, which, for aught he knows to the contrary, may be as near to the latter as to the former. And now a word or two respecting the volume which is again submitted for public consideration, after passing through many editions, and reaching to the forty-sixth year of its separate existence.

Whence it came to pass that it was written at all, from what materials it was compiled, and how it made its way into popular favour, are points which naturally keep their hold upon the memory of the

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. XXV author, and may not, perhaps, be without some in terest to his readers. Though a mere boy, barely seventeen years of age, when I embarked for the seat of war in the summer of 1813, I was so fortunate as to have formed a close friendship with a man of more matured years and experience than myself — Charles Grey, the younger of Morwick, in Northumberland, the cap tain of the company to which I was attached, and as good a soldier, in the best sense of that term, as the British army has ever produced. To him I was indebted for many useful customs ; and, among others, for the habit of noting down, at the close of every day, brief notices of the most memorable of the events that might have distinguished it while passing. A small blank-paper volume — a Uttle memorandum-book — with a pencil attached, was his constant companion and mine ; and regularly as the night closed in we drew them from our bosoms, and, often by the light of our bivouac fire, registered in a couple of lines the materials of much thought in after-years.

The characters thus loosely sketched, we filled in with ink on the first con venient opportunity ; and so contrived, amid the bustle and excitement of a campaign, each to keep his journal with a degree of accuracy which cannot

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. XXVI always be predicated of the diaries of men better furnished with all the appliances of authorship. I can hardly teE how it happened that these records of a young soldier's Efe during the progress of the war, both in the Peninsula and America, were not lost. No care whatever was taken of them by me after my return home ; indeed I gave them, unless my memory be at fault, to my sister, and for some years never thought of inquiring whether they were in existence. But an occasional paper or two contributed to ' Blackwood's Magazine,' descriptive of detached adventures in the Peninsula, having been well received, it was suggested to me — I think by the late Mr Blackwood himself — that a personal narrative of my military service, in a connected form, would be popular. I took up the idea, and worked it out with aU my heart ; for it would be sheer affectation to deny even now, when time has wrought its accustomed changes on me, and a long dedication of my best energies to different pursuits has greatly modified my tastes, that the years which were spent amid the toils and dangers of active warfare, are those on which I continue to look back as the happiest in my life. And if this be the case now, it is hardly necessary to acknowledge, that the feeling was stronger in the year 1825, when the first