The Age of Elegance (25 page)

CHAPTER
SIX

The Peacemakers

"The victories of mind Are won for all mankind; But war wastes what it wins, Ends worse than it begins, And is a game of woes Which nations also lose; Though tyrant tyrant kill The slayer liveth still."

Ebenezer Elliott

"It would have been to be wished . . . that at the end of so long a struggle the several Powers might have enjoyed some repose, without forming calculations that always augment the risks of war; but the tone and conduct of Russia have disappointed this hope and forced upon us fresh considerations."

Castlereagh to the Duke of Wellington,
25
October,
1814

T

he
summer of 1814, that saw a rich and secure Britain celebrating the peace, saw Europe licking her scars. For twenty years the nations of Christendom had been trying to destroy one another, invading and ravaging, and jettisoning the system of exchange which had rendered their separate assets common to all. By doing so they had forced one another back towards poverty and barbarism, driving husbandmen, craftsmen and miners from creative callings into those of war, and forcing the capital which employed them into the same destructive channels. A battalion of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Poles captured at Cadiz were found to have been nearly all master craftsmen before they had been conscripted; men—many of them with a wonderful facility for languages—who when off duty, avoiding drunkenness and idleness, occupied themselves in every kind of skilled work, carving bone, plaiting hair-chains, repairing watches and making busts.
¹
In their crusade for an abstract brother-

¹
Leslie, 232-3.

hood of man the French Revolutionary leaders had damaged the mechanism on which real brotherhood and civilisation depended.

The devastation of the Continent, however, had not been wholesale. In the absence of machine power, man's capacity to destroy had been limited. He could fire no farther than the range of his cannon and muskets, could ravage only within his immediate reach, could travel no faster than his own legs or those of his horse. But wherever the warring armies had been they had left behind them a slime of ruin, privation and disease. It stretched from Moscow to Antwerp, from Lisbon to Toulouse, from Leipzig to the heights of Montmartre. Outside Britain and the remote corners of Europe which her sea-power had protected there was scarcely a town of any size that had not seen the French cavalry enter, "wiping," in Campbell's phrase, "their bloody hands on their horses' manes." When Lady Burghersh in the month after Leipzig travelled from Berlin to Frankfort to join her husband at Allied headquarters, she passed through every sort of horror, the ground emitting a sickening stench while flocks of crows fed on corpses along the ditches. Behind the sacrifices and romance of war lay a dreary landscape of decay and sadness: of dead horses and shattered homes, churches converted into stables and hospitals, deserted bivouacs covered with ordure, ashes, rags and broken crockery. The sick and wounded lay on heaps of straw in village streets or dragged their mangled limbs along the highways; the filthy and reeking inns were filled with troops, the doors and window-frames were torn from the houses, the furniture burnt or smashed.
¹

The final stage of the war had been the worst. While the French army was on its outward march of conquest, it had ravaged and passed on. When it was forced to halt or retreat, as happened successively in Portugal, Spain, Russia, Germany and finally France itself, the Revolutionary principle of making war support war entailed a fearful devastation. On such occasions its only resource was its leader's laconic order, "Cause the commissary to be shot and you will want for nothing!" In the country round Dresden the houses were pulled down in search of buried food, the coffins dug up for firewood, and the rifled fields raked over again and again for roots. A few weeks after the French retreat Cam Hobhouse counted forty villages in ruins.

¹
See Stanley, 159-61; Brownlow, 66-75; Bury, II, 41.

Behind the armies were the hospitals. The garrison towns of Europe in the spring of 1814 were crowded with sick and wounded; at Metz alone there were more than seventy thousand. Multitudes died in the streets, the air was poisoned, pestilence spread through the countryside. The horror of the hospitals, without sanitation, dressings, chloroform or antiseptics, continued long after victory. An English traveller that autumn, passing through Champagne, was summoned to a church where, among hundreds of mutilated Prussians with gangrenous wounds, he found a dying British soldier captured at St.-Jean-de-Luz, seated on a wooden cot with his legs shattered and his head suspended from a sling on the wall. There in the dark, amid the groans and ghastly countenances of the dying, he took down, by the light of tapers held by black-robed nuns, his countryman's last messages.
¹

The extremes of horror and suffering were reached in the fortresses of eastern and central Europe where Napoleon, refusing to relinquish what he had won, had ordered his garrisons to resist to the last man. Here, while the
Grande Armee
of which they were the farthest foam was swept backwards, the ramparts were manned by the dying and the streets piled with corpses; in starving Dresden living skeletons were thrown with the dead into the Elbe. At Torgau typhus raged with such fury that, when the survivors surrendered, the victors dared not enter. At Mayence the disease slew more than five hundred a day. During the next three years it spread westward into every country of Europe, stopping only at the Atlantic edge among the hovels of Connemara.

The misery entailed defied description. The most terrible trait in Napoleon and the reckless, uprooted race of Revolutionary warriors with whom he scourged Europe, was their complete indifference to human life and suffering. They considered them no more than the watching fishwives of St. Antoine had done in front of the guillotine. When after losing his entire army in Russia Bonaparte was reminded by Metternich that his new levies were conscripted from the schoolroom, he shouted back in rage that a man who had grown up on the field of battle cared nothing for the lives of a million men.

The war had led to an immense displacement of human creatures. By introducing the principle of national service the Revolution had

¹
Stanley, 166-8. See
idem,
174; J. B. A. Hapde,
Tableau des
hopitaux pendant la dermkre campagn
e de Napolion,
Paris, 1815; St.-Cyr, IV, 178; Odeleben,
Te
moin oculaire,
II, 278;
cit.
Alison, XII, 184-5.

made every able-bodied male liable to fight against his will in any part of the earth. In the closing stages of the war, as Napoleon's demands for man-power grew, the whole of his empire became a prison, with guards, inspectors, informers, closed roads and armed searches. The fields were left to women and old men. No youth was safe: not even those whose fathers had compounded a dozen times to avoid the levies. Larpent's story of the Peyrehorade attorney's eldest son who had been seized as a conscript, wounded at Leipzig and never heard of again, was a universal one. So was the spectacle of droves of deserters with shaven heads and pale faces, their thumbs tied together and their legs in chains, clanking their way towards some distant fortress.

Now, in the summer of 1814, the mournful procession was flowing the other way. Even in England the roads to the southern ports were thronged with released prisoners begging from door to door.
¹
Many of those now returning to their homes bore ineradicable marks of suffering. They were of every European race and calling, and most took back to their native place a tale of inhumanities suffered at the hands of strangers. Those who had the farthest to go were those who, at the conqueror's command, had marched the farthest: typhus-stricken cripples—the remnants of the
Grande Armee
—begging and plundering their way home from Russian prisons. An English clergyman, travelling through eastern France, saw thousands of them, with death-pale faces, matted beards, ragged uniforms and bleeding feet. Their banditti-like expressions often belied their natures: among those who begged a ride on the back of his
barouche
was a poor trembling fellow wrapped in a bivouac cloak who turned out to be a Trappist monk. This man, dragged with his fellow novitiates to the wars, had fought at Liitzen, lost an eye at Leipzig and been taken prisoner by the Swedes. He was now limping back to his monastery at Freiburg.

Before the end the universal tide of destruction had lapped the walls of Paris itself. For months after the morning when the Russians stormed the city, the valley between Belleville and Montmartre stank with half-buried corpses. During the last weeks of the war

¹
"All had their hunger satisfied," wrote kindly Elizabeth Ham of Blandford, "at least
if
t
hey stopped a minute before the door." Ham, 188. See
3lso
Haydon, I, 243, 258; Stanley, 98-9.

nearly three-quarters of a million Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Germans, Swedes, Britons, Spaniards and Portuguese had invaded France. Nothing could have been loftier than the declarations of the Allied Sovereigns. In their immediate entourage the strictest discipline was maintained and neither civilian nor property was injured. But those who marched under their banners had bitter wrongs to avenge. The most vindictive, apart from the savage Spaniards whom Wellington was forced to hurry back to their country, were the Prussian regulars and the Russian irregulars. At Chateau-Thierry the Prussians pillaged every house, violated the women and put the men to the sword. Everywhere they lived riotously on the country. Their worst crimes usually took place not in the towns, where under the eye of their commanders they preserved an appearance of discipline, but in the villages where they left little standing but chimney-stacks. They deliberately destroyed and defiled everything, tore down embankments and historical monuments, and scattered the streets with torn bedding and broken glass. An Englishman, visiting a chateau in Prussian occupation, found the doors and windows wrenched from their frames, the furniture thrown in a heap into the courtyard, the tapestries and pictures riddled with bullets, the walls defaced with filth and crude inscriptions of hate, the floors ankle-deep in fragments of porcelain, and the noble trees of the avenue felled.
¹
Nor was such barbarism confined to the rank and file—those fearful hinds from the wind-swept eastern backlands with animal faces and matted hair who made even Napoleon shudder. In Paris a young Prussian officer of good family, quartered on an old French couple who had loaded him with kindness, before leaving smashed all the furniture in his room and tore the bedding to shreds. When asked the reason, he replied that he wished his hosts to see in one room what their son had done in every part of his father's Berlin home.

The Russians varied. Their troops were of three kinds: the
corps
a"
elite
—magnificent, wasp-waisted giants to whom instantaneous obedience, enforced by a ferocious discipline, was second nature; Cossack irregulars whose business was to scour the countryside ahead of the armies; and the stolid peasant masses who could only

¹
Mercer, II, 75-8, 82-6. "Shouts and laughter resounded through the building. The hussars were busy completing the work of destruction; and as we passed the magnificent stairs leading up from the hall, we narrowly escaped being crushed under a huge mirror which these gentlemen at that very moment launched over the bannisters with loud cheers." See Mercer, II, 43-4, 56-7, 84; Gronow, I, 93-4. 130-1, 201-3, 206-7; II, 18-19;
Two Duchesses,
391
; Bromlow, 159; Lady Shelley,
1,
108,160; Colchester, II, 551; Croker, I, 61; Creevey,
Life and Times,
93;
Festing, 197-8; Simpson, 98-9, 100-1, in, 159.

stand still in the place assigned them and be killed. Many of their officers were men of education who spoke good French and spent their time in Paris admiring statues and pictures. "So far from looking brutal," an English visitor wrote, "they seemed the most refined of all the foreign
officers
in Paris, with fair complexions, soft hair and expressive features."
¹
But the Russians whom the ordinary villager encountered were the Cossacks. They were not in the least interested in art, and cared only for drink, fighting and trinkets—which had for them a childlike fascination—and, when drunk, women, whom they raped with a barbaric disregard of age. These savage horsemen from the East, with their uncouth beards and long lances, their filthy, ragged ponies, their belts full of pistols and stolen bijouterie, were for a year the terror of Europe. Better the French as enemies, the German peasants on their line of march used to say, than the Russians as. friends. The most expressive phrase a Frenchman could use after the invasion was to say that his house had been
cossaqui.
In one Seine valley town Cossack officers, after blowing up a woman on a pile of gunpowder, tried to roast the housekeeper of the chateau in which they were billeted for refusing to bring girls to amuse them.
¹
Yet at times these fearful barbarians could show a touching simplicity and kindness. A Frenchwoman who had had an old Cossack billeted in her house,
told a traveller that he was "
un
b
on vieillard, un bon papa."
To their British allies they were nearly always friendly: tapping them on the shoulders, showing off their weapons and declaring with grins of approbation: "You Inglis, moi Russe, we brothers!"

Strangely enough, the most unpopular invaders were the Austrians, whose discipline was almost as good as that of the British. Unlike the British, however, they did not pay for what they consumed. They damaged neither man nor house, but wherever they went they established a regimen of dull, legalised robbery. The French never laughed at the Austrians as, for all their fears, they did at the Cossacks. The cold, ineradicable detestation felt by the conquered for these tall, heavily-built, solemn-looking troops in their ill-fitting white uniforms transcended reason. Perhaps it was due to their forester's habit of decking their caps with green boughs which the

¹
See a remarkable first-hand account written by a French girl living at Montmirail in 1814, of her own and her friends' experiences, and published in the
Comhill Magazine,
July, 1906. See
also Stanley, 105, 120, 154-5. 158, 161-5, 179, 209, 218; Wansey, 22; Lord Coleridge, 226; Larpent, III, 84-5; Haydon, I, 249-50, 256-7; Londonderry, 289.

French, who had so often beaten them, took for symbols of triumph.
¹

Of all the armies that ravaged France none was more cruel and rapacious than its own. In defeat this terrible host had degenerated into a band of
condottieri.
It burnt, ravished and plundered indiscriminately. On the march from the Seine to the Marne it even sacked the chateau of the Emperor's mother. From the Imperial Marshal to the humblest
moustache,
pillage had become an ineradicable habit. Almost every English traveller's account of France in the summer of 1814 contains expressions of horror at the ferocious appearance of Napoleon's veterans: the swarthy, whiskered sentries in the streets and theatres, the gangs of braggart officers who clattered into the restaurants puffing enormous cigars and salving their wounded vanity by picking quarrels, the fierce swordsmen of the Imperial Guard who, if contradicted, stamped and pirouetted on their heels with the velocity of dervishes.
²

Such was the crucible from which the statesmen of Europe had to distil the alembic of peace. Their first problem was with the country that had caused all this misery, unrest and insecurity. For a quarter of a century the great amorphous mass of Revolutionary France, its components formerly quiet peasants and industrious artisans, had spread like a destroying lava across the patina of civilisation. The business of the peacemakers was to restore quiet to the Continent, and enable habits of peace and productive industry to return to the most civilised and fruitful part of the earth's surface. To do so it was essential to clip France's wings.

Yet those who had defeated Napoleon were just and moderate men. Like their dead prophet, Burke, they did not wish to indict a whole people for the crimes of their leaders nor to impose punishments which would provoke worse iniquities. In the peace treaty, which less than a month after Napoleon's abdication they signed with the new government of France, they contented themselves with reducing her to the historic frontiers she had enjoyed before her armies had begun their career of conquest. Asked only to renounce

¹
Stanley, 180; Simpson, III; Lord Coleridge, 226-7; Mercer, 231-2.

2
Stanley, 107,147-8, 153-4, 157.164,196, 287; Mercer, II, 38, 215; Simpson, 86-7,156; Lady Shelley, I, 94; Danilewsky, 242-3; Kausler, 408-9; Koch, I, 419, 423; Fain, 164-5;
cit.
Alison,