ADVERTISEMENT.

The measure is regular with an irregular aspect,—four accents in a verse,—like that of Christabel, or some of the poems of Sir Walter Scott:

[x]

[1]

I.

How Captain Sword marched to War.

[5]

II.

How Captain Sword won a Great Victory.

[13]

III.

Of the Ball that was given to Captain Sword.

[17]

IV.

On What took place on the Field of Battle the Night after the Victory.

[29]

V.

How Captain Sword, in Consequence of his Great Victories, became infirm in his Wits.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The American War.

[B] The French War.

[C] Napoleon.

[D] The Duke of Wellington, or existing Military Toryism.

[E] The Glorious Three Days.

[37]

VI.

Of Captain Pen, and how he fought with Captain Sword.

[47]

POSTSCRIPT;

CONTAINING SOME REMARKS ON WAR AND MILITARY STATESMEN.

[49]

POSTSCRIPT;

CONTAINING SOME REMARKS ON WAR AND MILITARY STATESMEN.

The author intends no more offence to any one than can be helped: he feels due admiration for that courage and energy, the supposed[50] misdirection of which it deplores; he heartily acknowledges the probability, that that supposed misdirection has been hitherto no misdirection, but a necessity—but he believes that the time is come when, by encouraging the disposition to question it, its services and its sufferings may be no longer required, and he would fain tear asunder the veil from the sore places of war,—would show what has been hitherto kept concealed, or not shown earnestly, and for the purpose,—would prove, at all events, that the time has come for putting an end to those phrases in the narratives of warfare, by which a suspicious delicacy is palmed upon the reader, who is told, after everything has been done to excite his admiration of war, that his feelings are "spared" a recital of its miseries—that "a veil" is drawn over them—a "truce" given to descriptions which only "harrow up the soul," [51]&c.

Suppose it be necessary to "harrow up the soul," in order that the soul be no longer harrowed? Moralists and preachers do not deal after this tender fashion with moral, or even physical consequences, resulting from other evils. Why should they spare these? Why refuse to look their own effeminacy in the face,—their own gaudy and overweening encouragement of what they dare not contemplate in its results? Is a murder in the streets worth attending to,—a single wounded man worth carrying to the hospital,—and are all the murders, and massacres, and fields of wounded, and the madness, the conflagrations, the famines, the miseries of families, and the rickety frames and melancholy bloods of posterity, only fit to have an embroidered handkerchief thrown over them? Must "ladies and gentlemen" be called off, that they may not "look that way," the "sight is so shocking"? Does it become[52] us to let others endure, what we cannot bear even to think of?

Even if nothing else were to come of inquiries into the horrors of war, surely they would cry aloud for some better provision against their extremity after battle,—for some regulated and certain assistance to the wounded and agonized,—so that we might hear no longer of men left in cold and misery all night, writhing with torture,—of bodies stripped by prowlers, perhaps murderers,—and of frenzied men, the other day the darlings of their friends, dying, two and even several days after the battle, of famine! The field of Waterloo was not completely cleared of its dead and dying till nearly a week! Surely large companies of men should be organized for the sole purpose of assisting and clearing away the field after battle. They should be steady men,[53] not lightly admitted, nor unpossessed of some knowledge of surgery, and they should be attached to the surgeon's staff. Both sides would respect them for their office, and keep them sacred from violence. Their duties would be too painful and useful to get them disrespected for not joining in the fight—and possibly, before long,

they would help to do away their own necessity, by detailing what they beheld. Is that the reason why there is no such establishment? The question is asked, not in bitterness, but to suggest a self-interrogation to the instincts of war.

I have not thought proper to put notes to the poem, detailing the horrors which I have touched upon; nor even to quote my authorities, which are unfortunately too numerous, and contain worse horrors still. They are furnished by almost every history of a campaign, in all quarters of the world. Circumstances so painful, in a first attempt to[54] render them public for their own sakes, would, I thought, even meet with less attention in prose than in verse, however less fitted they may appear for it at first sight. Verse, if it has any enthusiasm, at once demands and conciliates attention; it proposes to say much in little; and it associates with it the idea of something consolatory, or otherwise sustaining. But there is one prose specimen of these details, which I will give, because it made so great an impression on me in my youth, that I never afterwards could help calling it to mind when war was spoken of; and as I had a good deal to say on that subject, having been a public journalist during one of the most interesting periods of modern history, and

never having been blinded into an admiration of war by the dazzle of victory, the circumstance may help to show how salutary a record of this kind may be, and what an impression the subject might be brought to make on[55] society. The passage is in a note to one of Mr Southey's poems, the "Ode to Horror," and is introduced by another frightful record, less horrible, because there is not such agony implied in it, nor is it alive.

"I extract" (says Mr Southey) "the following picture of consummate horror from notes to a poem written in twelve-syllable verse, upon the campaign of 1794 and 1795: it was during the retreat to Deventer. 'We could not proceed a hundred yards without perceiving the dead bodies of men, women, children, and horses, in every direction. One scene made an impression upon my memory which time will never be able to efface. Near another cart we perceived a stout-looking man and a beautiful young woman, with an infant, about seven months old, at the breast, all three frozen and dead. The mother had most[56] certainly expired in the act of suckling her child; as with one breast exposed she lay upon the drifted snow, the milk to all appearance in a stream drawn from the nipple by the babe, and instantly congealed. The infant seemed as if its lips had but just then been disengaged, and it reposed its little head upon the mother's bosom, with an overflow of milk, frozen as it trickled from the mouth. Their countenances were perfectly composed and fresh, resembling those of persons

in a sound and tranquil slumber.'"

"The following description (he continues) of a field of battle is in the words of one who passed over the field of Jemappe, after Doumourier's victory: 'It was on the third day after the victory obtained by general Doumourier over the Austrians, that I rode across the field of battle. The scene lies on a waste common, rendered then more dreary[57] by the desertion of the miserable hovels before occupied by peasants. Everything that resembled a human habitation was desolated, and for the most part they had been burnt or pulled down, to prevent their affording shelter to the posts of the contending armies. The ground was ploughed up by the wheels of the artillery and waggons; everything like herbage was trodden into mire; broken carriages, arms, accoutrements, dead horses and men, were strewed over the heath. This was the third day after the battle: it was the beginning of November, and for three days a bleak wind and heavy rain had continued incessantly. There were still remaining alive several hundreds of horses, and of the human victims of that dreadful

fight. I can speak with certainty of having seen more than four hundred men still living, unsheltered, without food, and without any human assistance, most of them confined to the spot where they had fallen by broken limbs. The two[58] armies had proceeded, and abandoned these miserable wretches to their fate. Some of the dead persons appeared to have expired in the act of embracing each other. Two young French officers, who were brothers, had crawled under the side of a dead horse, where they had contrived a kind of shelter by means of a cloak: they were both mortally wounded, and groaning for each other. One very fine young man had just strength enough to drag himself out of a hollow partly filled with water, and was laid upon a little hillock groaning with agony; a grape-shot had cut across the upper part of his belly, and he was keeping in his bowels with a handkerchief and hat. He begged of me to end his misery! He complained of dreadful thirst. I filled him the hat of a dead soldier with water, which he nearly drank off at once, and left him to that

end of his wretchedness which could not be far distant.'"[59]

"I hope (concludes Mr Southey), I have always felt and expressed an honest and Christian abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them; but my ideas of their immediate horrors fell infinitely short of this authentic picture."

Mr Southey, in his subsequent lives of conquerors, and his other writings, will hardly be thought to have acted up to this "abhorrence of wars, and of the systems that produce them." Nor is he to be blamed for qualifying his view of the subject, equally blameless (surely) as they are to be held who have retained their old views, especially by him who helped to impress them. His friend Mr Wordsworth, in the vivacity of his admonitions to hasty complaints of evil, has gone so far as to say that "Carnage is God's daughter," and thereby subjected himself to the[60] scoffs of a late noble wit. He is addressing the Deity himself:—

Did war appear to me an inevitable evil, I should be one of the last men to shew it in any other than its holiday clothes. I can appeal to writings before the public, to testify whether I am in the habit of making the worst of anything, or of not making it yield its utmost amount of good. My inclinations, as well as my reason, lie all that way. I am a passionate and grateful lover of all the beauties of the universe, moral and material; and the chief business of my life is to endeavour to give others the like fortunate affection. But, on the same principle, I feel it my duty to look evil in the face, in order to discover if it be capable of amendment; and I do not see why the miseries of war are to be spared this interrogation, simply because they are frightful and enormous. Men[63] get rid of smaller evils which lie in their way—nay, of great ones; and there appears to be no reason why they should not get rid of the greatest, if they will but have the courage. We have abolished inquisitions and the rack, burnings for religion, burnings for witchcraft, hangings for forgery

(a great triumph in a commercial country), much of the punishment of death in some countries, all of it in others. Why not abolish war? Mr Wordsworth writes no odes to tell us that the Inquisition was God's daughter; though Lope de Vega, who was one of its officers, might have done so—and Mr Wordsworth too, had he lived under its dispensation. Lope de Vega, like Mr Wordsworth and Mr Southey, was a good man, as well as a celebrated poet: and we will concede to his memory what the English poets will, perhaps, not be equally disposed to grant (for they are severe on the Romish faith) that even the Inquisition, like War, might possibly have had some utility in its evil, were it[64] no other than a hastening of Christianity by its startling contradictions of it. Yet it has gone. The Inquisition, as War may be hereafter, is no more. Daughter if it was of the Supreme Good, it was no immortal daughter. Why should "Carnage" be,—especially as God has put it in our heads to get rid of it?

I am aware of what may be said on these occasions, to "puzzle the will;" and I concede of course, that mankind may entertain false views of their power to change anything for the better. I concede, that all change may be only in appearance, and not make any real difference in the general amount of good and evil; that evil, to a certain invariable amount, may be necessary to the amount of good (the overbalance of which, with a most hearty and loving sincerity, I ever acknowledge); and finally, that all which the wisest of men could utter on any such subject, might possibly be[65] nothing but a jargon,—the witless and puny voice of what we take to be a mighty orb, but which, after all, is only a particle in the starry dust of the universe.

On the other hand, all this may be something very different from what we take it to be, setting aside even the opinions which consider mind as everything, and time and space themselves as only modifications of it, or breathing-room in which it exists, weaving the thoughts which it calls life, death, and materiality.

But be his metaphysical opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves against the uneasier chances of vicissitude, even if[66] Providence ordains them to do so for no other end than the preservation of vicissitude itself, and not in order to help them out of the husks and thorns of action into the flowers of it, and into the air of heaven? Certain it is, at all events, that the human being is incited to increase his amount of good: and that when he is endeavouring to do so, he is at least not fulfilling the worst part of his necessity. Nobody tells us, when we attempt to put out a fire and to save the lives of our neighbours, that Conflagration is God's daughter, or Murder God's daughter. On the contrary, these are things which Christendom is taught to think ill off, and to wish to put down; and therefore we should put down war, which is murder and conflagration by millions.

To those who tell us that nations would grow cowardly and effeminate without war, we answer,[67] "Try a reasonable condition of peace first, and then prove it. Try a state of things which mankind have never yet attained, because they had no press, and no universal comparison of notes; and consider, in the meanwhile, whether so cheerful, and intelligent, and just a state, seeing fair play between body and mind, and educated into habits of activity, would be likely to uneducate itself into what was neither respected nor customary. Prove, in the meanwhile, that nations are cowardly and effeminate, that have been long unaccustomed to war; that the South Americans are so; or that all our robust countrymen, who do not "go for soldiers," are timid agriculturists and manufacturers, with not a quoit to throw on the green, or a saucy word to give to an insult. Moral courage is in self-respect and the sense of duty; physical courage is a matter of health or organization. Are these predispositions likely to fail in a community of instructed freemen?[68]

Doubters of advancement are always arguing from a limited past to an unlimited future; that is to say, from a past of which they know but a point, to a future of which they know nothing. They stand on the bridge "between two eternities," seeing a little bit of it behind them, and nothing at all of what is before; and uttering those words unfit for mortal tongue, "man ever was" and "man ever will be." They might as well say what is beyond the stars. It appears to be a part of the necessity of things, from what we see of the improvements they make, that all human improvement should proceed by the co-operation of human means. But what blinker into the night of next week,—what luckless prophet of the impossibilities of steam-boats and steam-carriages,—shall presume to say how far those improvements are to extend? Let no man faint in the co-operation with which God has honoured him.[69]

As to those superabundances of population which wars and other evils are supposed to be necessary in order to keep down, there are questions which have a right to be put, long before any such necessity is assumed: and till those questions be answered, and the experiments dependent upon them tried, the interrogators have a right to assume that no such necessity exists. I do not enter upon them—for I am not bound to do so; but I have touched upon them in the poem; and the "too rich," and other disingenuous half-reasoners, know well what they are. All passionate remedies for evil are themselves evil, and tend to re-produce what they remedy. It is high time for the world to show that it has come to man's estate, and can put down what is wrong without violence. Should the wrong still return, we should have a right to say with the Apostle, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof;" for meanwhile we should "not have done evil that[70] good may come." That "good" may come! nay, that evil may be perpetuated; for what good, superior to the alternatives denounced, is achieved

by this eternal round of war and its causes? Let us do good in a good and kind manner, and trust to the co-operation of Providence for the result. It seems the only real way of attaining to the very best of which our earth is capable; and at the very worst, necessity, like the waters, will find its level, and the equity of things be justified.

I firmly believe, that war, or the sending thousands of our fellow-creatures to cut one another to bits, often for what they have no concern in, nor understand, will one day be reckoned far more absurd than if people were to settle an argument over the dinner-table with their knives,—a logic indeed, which was once fashionable in some places during the "good old times." The[71] world has seen the absurdity of that practice: why should it not come to years of discretion, with respect to violence on a larger scale? The other day, our own country and the United States agreed to refer a point in dispute to the arbitration of the king of Holland; a compliment (if we are to believe the newspapers) of which his majesty was justly proud. He struck a medal on the strength of it, which history will show as a set-off against his less creditable attempts to force his opinions upon the Belgians. Why should not every national dispute be referred, in like manner, to a third party? There is reason to suppose, that the judgment would stand a good chance of being impartial; and it would benefit

the character of the judge, and dispose him to receive judgments of the same kind; till at length the custom would prevail, like any other custom; and men be astonished at the customs that preceded it. In private life, none but school-boys[72] and the vulgar settle disputes by blows; even duelling is losing its dignity.

Two nations, or most likely two governments, have a dispute; they reason the point backwards and forwards; they cannot determine it; perhaps they do not wish to determine; so, like two carmen in the street, they fight it out; first, however, dressing themselves up to look fine, and pluming themselves on their absurdity; just as if the two carmen were to go and put on their Sunday clothes, and stick a feather in their hat besides, in order to be as dignified and fantastic as possible. They then "go at it," and cover themselves with mud, blood, and glory. Can anything be more ridiculous? Yet, apart from the habit of thinking otherwise, and being drummed into the notion by the very toys of infancy, the similitude is not one atom too ludicrous; no, nor a thousandth part enough so. I am aware that a sarcasm is but a[73] sarcasm, and need not imply any argument; never includes all;—but it acquires a more respectable character when so much is done to keep it out of sight,—when so many questions are begged against it by "pride, pomp, and circumstance," and allegations