Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

ARTHUR BRYANT

YEARS
OF

VICTORY

1802-181
2

COLLINS
48
PALL
MALL
LONDON
1944

For . BERNARD PAGET who like John Moore trained a British Army for Victory.

"If we are true to ourselves we need not mind Bonaparte." .

Nelson.

copyright printed in great britain

collins clear-type press : london and glasgow
1944

CONTENTS

I wrote
The Years of Endurance
—the story of how England survived a flood which overwhelmed Europe—when she was again alone, withstanding a worse and greater flood. I wrote it for the ordinary man who in this, as in other things, has been robbed of his heritage. The sequel tells how the British people—triumphing in turn over appeasement, attempted invasion, Napoleon's grand design to break their power at sea, the long enslavement of Europe and their own commercial isolation—put a ring of salt-water round the tyrant's dominion, slowly tightened it, and then, greatly daring, sent in their armies to assail his inner fortress. The events of the past four years have made this story, too, strangely familiar.

More familiar, perhaps, than to our fathers. Those who grew up in the long Victorian peace tended to see the Napoleonic Wars as a picturesque contest needlessly prolonged by reactionaries, who used it as a pretext to stifle reforms and persecute reformers. Long immunity from organised violence had a little blinded good men to the harsh realities of this world. They were not familiar as we with the tyrant's bludgeon and the triumph of his blood-stained symbols; the victory of their forebears had given them a peace and security till then unknown. Their historic vision was bounded by the sight of Pitt suspending Habeas Corpus and a Home Secretary hounding the pioneers of progressive movements. They could not see the stormy horizon beyond, the waves of invasion lapping our shores, the shadow of Giant Despair over an enslaved Europe.

Because we forgot our history we have had to re-live it. We, too, have stood where our ancestors stood in Napoleon's day. Like them I have therefore concentrated on the external struggle rather than on the grim internal revolution that accompanied it. With its attendant agrarian revolution the Industrial Revolution involved millions in misery and degradation. Yet though its products— abundant arms, munitions and manufactured goods—were one of the chief causes of Napoleon's defeat, the social calamities to which it gave rise never weakened the British people's will to resist. Then as now it was their strength and weakness to concentrate on immediate essentials and avert their gaze as long as possible from impending evils. From 1793 till 1815 they grappled with the greatest military power known on earth and slowly wore it down. The magnitude of that achievemen
t may explain, though it cannot
excuse, the stubborn reverse of John Bull's qualities: the blind bigotry and mental rigidity of petty jacks-in-office which a generation earlier had alienated the American colonies and which turned a gallant soldier like Despard into a traitor and a great patriot like Cobbett into a rebel.

"They died to save their country, and they only saved the world!" I have left the aftermath of forgetfulness, disillusionment and wasted opportunity to a sequel in which the high-light will pass from the distant fleets and armies to England herself, labouring in the toils of a new and terrible birth. To that volume, as a glorious prelude, belong the final triumphs—Salamanca, Vittoria, Waterloo—when Britain was fighting in a grand coalition of European liberation. The victories recorded in these pages were won when she was alone, contending not against a failing foe but one in the plenitude of his strength. Their appropriate conclusion seems not the Prince Regent hiccoughing over his brandy with the Allied sovereigns in the peace-summer of 1814, but the hour when Wellington, after four years of struggle on his European beachhead, broke through the frontier fortresses and poured into a resurgent Spain. At that moment, driven to it by British persistence and blockade, Napoleon, in a last desperate attempt to break out of England's grip, signed the fatal orders for his own death-march on Moscow. Russian heroism and cold, the unsuspected speed and striking-power of Wellington on the offensive, and the fury of the German War of Liberation had still to complete his downfall. Yet ahead, on the stony tracks of Spain and the plains of Europe, lay victory after victory, till the French, gripped in a contracting circle of ocean, sierra and steppe, rolled back from Moscow and Madrid, from Dresden and Burgos, from the Rhine and the Pyrenees, into the streets of Paris and the shades of Fontainebleau.

I have made no attempt to minimise the horrors and miseries of war. I am writing for a generation that knows it
’
s ugly face too well. The road to Victory and the human future passes, as Turner's great picture on the jacket suggests, between the bodies of those who die to win it. But I have tried, without underlining them, to draw war's lessons: the unchanging truths of human character and geography, of success and failure in battle, and of the underlying moral forces which govern Man's nature in action. Every phase of our own struggle has made these clearer. We too have had to contend, before we understood its nature, with untrammelled passion in great place; have had to wrestle with it single-handed until the world was ready to fight b
y our side; have faced imminent
invasion and seen its peril pass; have fought remote battles in desert and mountain whose pur
pose was hidden at the time but
whose instinctive object was to hold the en
emy in at
all costs until the power of his lawless energy was expended.

The strategy of Britain is always dictated by her geographical position. She has to hold, then to contract, and finally to penetrate, a ring. She has to operate from exterior lines against a foe with the advantage of interior: a foe, moreover, who at first enjoys by virtue of superior arms the asset of the initiative. She has, therefore, by valour and endurance to hold his attacks until she has gained the strength to strike back: like a man with bare and bleeding feet fighting a booted adversary for time to get his own boots on. That pause England gains by sea-power and the defence of the land-bases that enable her to exercise such power. The native stubbornness of her people—the reverse of their initial complacency and unpreparedness—here stand her in good stead; it is your Briton's virtue that, when heels have to be dug in, he digs his in as deep as any man in the world. Later, because three-quarters of the world's surface is sea—and this is as true in the days of the aeroplane and carrier as in those of the sailing-ship—Britain and her allies are able to turn the strategic tables of interior lines. For, once she has gained—whether by Trafalgar or by victory over Condor and U-boat—complete command of the world's sea-lanes, she can move her forces on interior salt-lines more quickly than he can do along the water-broken land surfaces of the globe. In her Salamancas and Alameins Britain appears to be striking from the outside of a circumference: to be operating from long lines, of communication against an enemy with short. But in reality her own supply-lines, being water-borne, are swifter and more economical than those of her earth-bound foe. She is Ariel to his Caliban.

The further Britain fights from the centre of her enemy's position the truer this becomes. In the early stages of her wars, when her adversary is very powerful and therefore territorially extended— for a Napoleon or a Hitler will always march as far as he can—it is surprising with what numerically weak forces England can still contain him because of the elasticity o
f her sea communications. Wavell’
s campaign in the winter of 1940 was a classic example of this. So was Moore's before · Corunna. Fighting from the sea's edge at the direct termini of interior ocean-lines, we are able to make a little go a long way.

For this reason our attack has usually been aimed at first at the remotest point of the enemy's circumference. By using the option of sea-power to choose our terrain, we have been able to make our

formidable foe fight at the point where his communications were most strained. This is not the first conflict in which the farthest shore of a Mediterranean peninsula has afforded us an initial foothold in Europe; it adds to the parallel that, in the war against Napoleon as in that against Hitler, the opportunity came when a southern ally of our principal enemy, worn out by prolonged defeat and misgovernment, broke with its contemptuous senior partner and appealed to England for liberation. Then, too, as now, Russian resistance and recoil, thousands of miles away, transformed a comparatively minor military operation in the Mediterranean into a major factor in the foe's collapse.

To the public it has always been hard to justify assault at so distant a point. The clamour for a direct second-front across the Channel was voiced, not only in 1941, but in 1799 and 1809. It seems so much easier to attack across twenty miles of water than across two thousand. Such critics forget that the land-bound defender gains more by shortening his land-lines than the amphibious attacker by shortening his sea-lines. It was not till a new strategic weapon—that of aerial bombardment—had pushed the Ruhr into Silesia and Czechoslovakia, that we were able to progress from a Dieppe—or a Walcheren—to a Calvados. Air-power has not diminished the range of sea-power; it has extended it. In 1940 it enabled the Navy to keep us an island, and in 1944 to win with our allies such an unchallenged command of the oceans that our foe, not knowing where our blow would fall, was forced to relinquish all advantage of interior lines and keep the bulk of his forces uselessly deployed along a three thousand miles circumference. By driving back his centres of war production and crippling his communications, it has enabled us to strike direct at his heart. It has shortened the long road from Syracuse to Berlin—or, in Napoleonic terms, from Lisbon to Paris—not in miles alone but in years.

In other ways, too, we have travelled the same way as our forbears. We have seen a despised British Army driven from the Continent by a new and apparently irresistible technique of war, and witnessed, in the patient years that followed, its answer. We have seen our military leaders go back to Nature to harness the initiative and intelligence of a free people to the needs of battle, and make out of the raw material of their native land an Infantry able to fight its way back to a conquered Europe and, against the worst the foe could do, beat him at his own tactics and on his own ground. We have seen the derided "Blimps" and "old women in red coats" of our Regular Army thro
w up leaders who, in toughness,
patience, and resilience, have proved themselves the equals—or masters—of the first Continental soldiers of their day. And we have watched a man, whose evil invincibility had become a legend in almost every land but our own, wear out his nation's strength in futile attempts to achieve the impossible and, maddened by Britain's resistance, fall into blunders so puerile that they appear in retrospect like those of a maniac.

For in the last resort, tested by any moral touchstone, men like Napoleon and Hitler are maniacs.- And it was the British people, with all their imperfections, who first afforded that touchstone. Within his fatal moral limitations Napoleon was a very great man. Of immensely higher mental stature than his latter-day successor, he derived, like him, power from external sources which, though aided by, were independent of, his intellectual gifts. He identified himself for his own ends with certain powerful popular needs and impulses of his age and adopted country. And he was a fanatic, or, as men called it then, a Jacobin. Like all the French Revolutionary leaders he believed that the secret of life was to have an object, to surrender oneself absolutely to its pursuit and to stop at nothing to achieve it. This temporarily gave them immense strength, for it eliminated the usual mortal handicaps of fear, inertia, hesitation and doubt. It unloosed a great torrent of energy which they were able to ride and direct to particular purposes. One of these—and from Mahomet to Hitler the story has been the same—was conquest.