Читать книгу: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844», страница 16

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

PART XII

 
Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"
 

SHAKSPEARE

Elnathan was a man of many cares, and every kind of wisdom, but one—the wisdom of knowing when he had wealth enough. He evidently loved accumulation; and the result was, that every hour of his existence was one of terror. Half the brokers and chief traders in France were already in prison; and yet he carried on the perilous game of commerce. He was known to be immensely opulent; and he must have regarded the day which passed over his head, without seeing his strong boxes put under the government seal, and himself thrown into some oubliette, as a sort of miracle. But he was now assailed by a new alarm. War with England began to be rumoured among the bearded brethren of the synagogue; and Elnathan had ships on every sea, from Peru to Japan. Like Shakspeare's princely merchant—

 
"His mind was tossing on the ocean,
There where his argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors, and rich burghers of the flood.
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Did overpower the petty traffickers,
As they flew by them with their woven wings."
 

The first shot fired would inevitably pour out the whole naval force of England, and his argosies would put their helms about, and steer for Portsmouth, Plymouth, and every port but a French one. If this formidable intelligence had awakened the haughtiness of the French government to a sense of public peril, what effect must it not have in the counting-house of a man whose existence was trade? While I was on my pillow, luxuriating in dreams of French fêtes, Paul and Virginia carried off to the clouds, and Parisian belles dancing cotillons in the bowers and pavilions of a Mahometan paradise, Elnathan spent the night at his desk, surrounded by his bustling generation of clerks, writing to correspondents at every point of the compass, and preparing insurances with the great London establishments; which I was to carry with me, though unacquainted with the transaction on which so many millions of francs hung trembling.

His morning face showed me, that whatever had been his occupation before I met him at the breakfast-table, it had been a most uneasy one. His powerful and rather handsome physiognomy had shrunk to half the size; his lips were livid, and his hand shook to a degree which made me ask, whether the news from Robespierre was unfavourable. But his assurance that all still went on well in that delicate quarter, restored my tranquility, which was beginning to give way; and my only stipulation now was, that I should have an hour or two to spend at Vincennes before I took my final departure. The Jew was all astonishment; his long visage elongated at the very sound; he shook his locks, lifted up his large hands, and fixed his wide eyes on me with a look of mingled alarm and wonder, which would have been ludicrous if it had not been perfectly sincere.

"In the name of common sense, do you remember in what a country, and in what times, we live? Oh, those Englishmen! always thinking that they are in England. My young friend, you are clearly not fit for France, and the sooner you get out of it the better."

I still remonstrated. "Do you forget yesterday?" he exclaimed. "Can you forget the man before whom we both stood? A moment's hesitation on your part to set out, would breed suspicion in that most suspicious brain of all mankind. Life is here as uncertain as in a field of battle. Begone the instant your passports arrive, and never behind you.—For my part, I constantly feel as if my head were in the lion's jaws. Rejoice in your escape."

But I was still unconvinced, and explained "that my only motive was, to relieve my friends in the fortress from the alarm which they had evidently felt for my fate, and to relieve myself from the charge of ingratitude, which would inevitably attach to me if I left Paris without seeing them."

Never was man more perplexed with a stubborn subject. He represented to me the imminent hazard of straying a hair's-breadth to the right or left of the orders of Robespierre! "I was actually under surveillance, and he was responsible for me. To leave his roof; even for five minutes, until I left it for my journey, might forfeit the lives of both before evening."

I still remonstrated; and pronounced the opinion, perhaps too flattering a one, of the dictator, that "he could not condescend to forbid a mere matter of civility, which still left me entirely at his service." The Jew at last, in despair, rushed from the room, leaving me to the unpleasing consciousness that I had distressed an honest and even a friendly man.

Two hours thus elapsed, when a chaise de poste drew up at the door, with an officer of the police in front, and from it came Varnhorst and the doctor, both probably expecting a summons to the scaffold; but the Prussian bearing his lot with the composure of a man accustomed to face death, and the doctor evidently in measureless consternation, colourless and convulsed with fear. His rapture was equally unbounded when Elnathan, ushering them both into the apartment where I sat—

 
Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter
thought"—
 

explained, that finding me determined on my point, he had adopted the old proverb—of bringing Mahomet to the mountain, if he could not bring the mountain to Mahomet; had procured an order for their attendance in Paris, through his influence with the chief of the police, and now hoped to have the honour of their company at dinner. This was, certainly, a desirable exchange for the Place de Grève; and we sat down to a sumptuous table, where we enjoyed ourselves with the zest which danger escaped gives to luxurious security.

All went on well. The doctor was surprised to find in the frowning banker, who had repulsed him so sternly from his desk, the hospitable entertainer; and Varhorst's honest and manly friendship was gratified by the approach of my release from a scene of perpetual danger.

I had some remembrances to give to my friends in Prussia; and at length, sending away the doctor to display his connoisseurship on Elnathan's costly collection of pictures, Varnhorst was left to my questioning. My first question naturally was, "What had involved him in the ill-luck of the Austrians."

"The soldier's temptation every where," was the answer; "having nothing to do at home, and expecting something to do abroad. When the Prussian army once crossed the Rhine, I should have had no better employment than to mount guard, escort the court dowagers to the balls, and finish the year and my life together, by dying of ennui. In this critical moment, when I was in doubt whether I should turn Tartar, or monk of La Trappe, Clairfait sent to offer me the command of a division. I closed with it at once, went to the king, obtained his leave, put spurs to my horse, and reached the Austrian camp before the courier."

I could not help expressing my envy at a profession in which all the honours of earth lay at the feet of a successful soldier! He smiled, and pointed to the police-officer, who was then sulkily pacing in front of the house.

"You see," said he, "the first specimen of my honours. Yet, from the moment of my arrival within the Austrian lines, I could have predicted our misfortune. Clairfait was, at least, as long-sighted as myself; and nothing could exceed his despondency but his indignation. His noble heart was half broken by the narrowness of his resources for defending the country, and the boundless folly by which the war council of Vienna expected to make up for the weakness of their battalions by the absurdity of their plans. 'I write for regiments,' the gallant fellow used to say; 'and they send me regulations! I tell them that we have not troops enough for an advanced guard; and they send me the plan of a pitched battle! I tell then that the French have raised their army in front of me to a hundred thousand strong; and they promise me reinforcements next year.' After all, his chief perplexity arose from their orders—every despatch regularly contradicting the one that came before.

"Something in the style," said I, "of Voltaire's caricature of the Austrian courier in the Turkish war, with three packs strapped on his shoulders, inscribed, 'Orders'—'Counter-orders'—and 'Disorders.'

"Just a case in point. Voltaire would have been exactly the historian for our campaign. What an incomparable tale he would have made of it! Every thing that was done was preposterous. We were actually beaten before we fought; we were ruined at Vienna before a shot was fired at Jemappes. The Netherlands were lost, not by powder and ball, but by pen and ink; and the consequence of our "march to Paris" is, that one half of the army is now scattered from Holland to the Rhine, and the other half is, like myself, within French walls."

I enquired how Clairfait bore his change of fortune.

"Like a man superior to fortune. I never saw him exhibit higher ability than in his dispositions for our last battle. He has become a magnificent tactician. But Alexander the Great himself could not fight without troops: and such was our exact condition.

"Dumourier, at the head of a hundred thousand men, had turned short from the Prussian retreat, and flung himself upon the Netherlands. How many troops do you think the wisdom of the Aulic Council had provided to protect the provinces? Scarcely more than a third of the number, and those scattered over a frontier of a hundred miles; in a country, too, where every Man spoke French, where every man was half Republican already, where the people had actually begun a revolution, and where we had scarcely a friend, a fortress in repair, or ammunition enough for feu de joie. The French, of course, burst in like an inundation, sweeping every thing before them. I was at dinner with Clairfait and his staff on the day when the intelligence arrived. The map was laid upon the table, and we had a kind of debate on the course which the Frenchman would take. That evening completed my opinion of him as a general. He took the clearest view among all our conjectures, as the event proved, so far as the enemy's movements were concerned; though I still retain my own idea of an original error in the choice of our field of battle. Before the twilight fell, we mounted our horses, and rode to the spot where Clairfait had already made up his mind to meet the French. It was certainly a capital position for defence—a range of heights not too high for guns, surmounted by a central plateau; the very position for a battery and a brigade; but the very worst that could be taken against the new enemy whom we had to oppose."

"Yet, what could an army of French recruits be expected to do against a disciplined force so strongly posted?" was my question.

"My answer to that point," said Varnhorst, "must be a quotation from my old master of tactics. If the purpose of a general is simply to defend himself, let him keep his troops on heights; if his purpose is simply to make an artillery fight, let him keep behind his guns; but if it is his purpose to beat the enemy, he must leave himself able to follow them—and this he can do only on a plain. In the end, after beating the enemy in a dozen attempts to carry our batteries, but without the power of striking a blow in retaliation, we saw them carried all at once, and were totally driven from the field."

"So much for bravery and discipline against bravery and enthusiasm," said I. "Yet the enemy's loss must have been tremendous. Every assault must have torn their columns to pieces." Even this attempt at reconciling him to his ill fortune failed.

"Yes," was the cool reply; "but they could afford it, which was more than we could do. Remember the maxim, my young friend, when you shall come to be a general, that the only security for gaining battles is, to have good troops, and a good many of them.—The French recruits fought like recruits, without knowing whether the enemy were before or behind them; but they fought, and when they were beaten they fought again. While we were fixed on our heights, they were formed into column once more, and marched gallantly up to the mouth of our guns. Then, we had but 18,000 men to the Frenchman's 60,000. Such odds are too great. Whether our great king would have fought at all with such odds against him, may be a question; but there can be none, whether he would have fixed himself where he could not manoeuvre. The Frenchman attacked us on flanks and centre, just when and where he pleased; there stood we, mowing down his masses from our fourteen redoubts, and waiting to be attacked again. To do him justice, he fought stoutly; and to do us justice, we fought sturdily. But still we were losing men; the affair looked unpromising from the first half hour; and I pronounced that, if Dumourier had but perseverance enough, he must carry the field."

I made some passing remark on the singular hazard of bringing untried troops against the proverbial discipline of a German army, and the probability that the age of the wild armies of peasantry in Europe would be renewed, by the evidence of its success.

"Right," said Varnhorst. "The thing that struck me most was, the new character of the whole engagement. It was Republicanism in the field; a bold riot, a mob battle. Nor will it be the last of its kind. Our whole line was once attacked by the French demi-brigades, coming to the charge, with a general chorus of the Marseillaise hymn. The effect was magnificent, as we heard it pealing over the field through all the roar of cannon and musketry. The attack was defeated. It was renewed, under a chorus in honour of their general, and 'Vive Dumourier' was chanted by 50,000 voices, as they advanced against our batteries. This charge broke in upon our position, and took five of our fourteen redoubts. Even Clairfait now acknowledged that all was lost; two-thirds of our men were hors de combat, and orders were given for a retreat. My turn now came to act, and I moved forward with my small brigade of cavalry—but I was not more lucky than the rest."

I pressed to hear the particulars, but his mind was still overwhelmed with a sense of military calamity, always the most reluctant topic to a brave and honest soldier; and he simply said—"the whole was a mêlée. Our rear was threatened in force by a column which had stormed the heights under a young brave, whom I had observed, during the day, exposing himself gallantly to all the risks of the field. To stop the progress of the enemy on this point was essential; for the safety of the whole army was compromised. We charged them, checked them, but found the brigade involved in a force of ten times our number; fought our way out again with heavy loss; and after all, a shot, which brought my charger to the ground, left me wounded and bruised in the hands of the French. I was taken up insensible, was carried to the tent of the young commander of the column, whom I found to be a Duc de Chartres, the son of the late Duke of Orleans. His kindness to his prisoner was equal to his gallantry in the field. Few and hurried as our interviews were, while his army remained in its position he gave me the idea of a mind of great promise, and destined for great things, unless the chances of war should stop his career. But, though a Republican soldier, to my surprise he was no Republican. His enquiries into the state of popular opinion in Europe, showed at once his sagacity, and the turn which his thoughts, young as he was, were already taking.—But the diadem is trampled under foot in France for ever; and with cannon-shot in his front every day of his life, and the guillotine in his rear, who can answer for the history of any man for twenty-four hours together?"

My time in Paris had now come to a close. All my enquiries for the fate of Lafontaine had been fruitless; and I dreaded the still more anxious enquiries to which I should be subjected on my arrival; but I had at least the intelligence to give, that I had not left him in the fangs of the jailers of St Lazare. I took leave of my bold and open-hearted Prussian friend with a regret, which I had scarcely expected to feel for one with whom I had been thrown into contact simply by the rough chances of campaigning; but I had the gratification of procuring for him, through the mysterious interest of Elnathan, an order for his transmission to Berlin in the first exchange of prisoners. This promise seemed to compensate all the services which he had rendered to me. "I shall see the Rhine again," said he, "which is much more than I ever expected since the day of our misfortune. "I shall see the Rhine again!—and thanks to you for it." He pressed my hand with honest gratitude.

The carriage which was to convey me to Calais was now at the door. Still, one thought as uppermost in his mind; it was, that I should give due credit to the bravery of the Austrian general and his army. "If I have spoken of the engagement at all," said he, "it was merely to put you in possession of the facts. You return to England; you will of course hear the battle which lost the Netherlands discussed in various versions. The opinion of England decides the opinion of Europe. Tell, then, your countrymen, in vindication of Clairfait and his troops, that after holding his ground for nine hours against three times his force, he retreated with the steadiness of a movement on parade, without leaving behind him a single gun, colour, or prisoner. Tell them, too, that he was defeated only through the marvellous negligence of a government which left him to fight battles without brigades, defend fortresses without guns, and protect insurgent provinces with a fugitive army."

My answer was—"You may rely upon my fighting your battles over the London dinner-tables, as perseveringly, if not as much against odds, as you fought it in the field. But the fortune of war is proverbial, and I hope yet to pour out a libation to you as Generalissimo Varnsdorf, the restorer of the Austrian laurels."

"Well, Marston, may you be a true prophet! But read that letter from Guiscard; our long-headed friend not merely crops our German laurels, but threatens to root up the tree." He handed me a letter from the Prussian philosopher: it was a curious catalogue raisonné of the improbabilities of success in the general war of Europe against the Republic; concluding with the words, so characteristic of his solemn and reflective views of man and the affairs of man—

"War is the original propensity of human nature, and civilization is the great promoter of war. The more civilized all nations become, the more they fight. The most civilized continent of the world has spent the fourth of its modern existence in war. Every man of common sense, of course, abhors its waste of life, of treasure, and of time. Still the propensity is so strong, that it continues the most prodigal sacrifice of them all. I think that we are entering on a period, when war, more than ever, will be the business of nations. I should not be surprised if the mania of turning nations into beggars, and the population into the dust of the field, should last for half a century; until the whole existing generation are in their graves, and a new generation shall take their places, astonished at the fondness of their fathers for bankruptcy and bloodshed." After some sharp censures of the unpurposed conduct of the German cabinets, he finished by saying—"If the French continue to fight as they have just fought, Jemappes will be the beginning of a new era. In the history of the world, every great change of human supremacy has been the result of a change in the principles of war; and the nation which has been the first to adopt that change, has led the triumph for its time. France has now found out a new element in war—the force of multitude, the charge of the masses; and she will conquer, until the kings of Europe follow her example, and call their nations to the field. Till then she will be invincible, but then her conquests will vanish; and the world, exhausted by carnage, will be quiet for a while. But the wolfish spirit of human nature will again hunger for prey; some new system of havoc will be discovered by some great genius, who ought to be cursed to the lowest depths of human memory; but who will be exalted to the most rapturous heights of human praise. Then again, when one half of the earth is turned into a field of battle, and the other into a cemetery, mankind will cry out for peace; and again, when refreshed, will rush into still more ruinous war:—thus all things run in a circle. But France has found out the secret for this age, and—vae victis!—the pestilence will be tame to the triumph of her frenzy, her rapine, and her revenge."

"Exactly what I should have expected from Guiscard," was my remark; "he is always making bold attempts to tear up the surface of the time, and look into what is growing below."

"Well, well," replied my honest fellow soldier, "I never perplex my brain with those things. I dare say your philosophers may be right; at least once in a hundred years. But take my word for it, that musket and bayonet will be useful matters still; and that discipline and my old master Frederick, will be as good as Dumourier and desperation, when we shall have brigade for brigade."

The postillions cracked their whips, the little Norman horses tore their way over the rough pavement; the sovereign people scattered off on every side, to save their lives and limbs; and the plan of St Denis, rich with golden corn, and tracked by lines of stately trees, opened far and wide before me. From the first ascent I gave a parting glance at Paris—it was mingled of rejoicing and regret. What hours of interest, of novelty, and of terror, had I not passed within the circuit of those walls! Yet, how the eye cheats reality!—that city of imprisonment and frantic liberty, of royal sorrow and of popular exultation, now looked a vast circle of calm and stately beauty. How delusive is distance in every thing! Across that plain, luxuriant with harvest, surrounded with those soft hills, and glittering in the purple of this glorious evening, it looked a paradise. I knew it—a pendemonium!

I speeded on—every thing was animated and animating in my journey. It was the finest season of the year; the roads were good; the prospects—as I swept down valley and rushed round hill, with the insolent speed of a government employé, leaving all meaner vehicles, travellers, and the whole workday world behind—seemed to be to redeem the character of French landscape. But how much of its colouring was my own! Was I not free? was I not returning to England? was I not approaching scenes, and forms, and the realities of those recollections, which, even in the field of battle, and at the foot of the scaffold, had alternately cheered and pained, delighted and distressed me?—yet which, even with all their anxieties, were dearer than the most gilded hopes of ambition. Was I not about to meet the gay smile and poignant vivacity of Mariamne? was I not about to wander in the shades of my paternal castle? to see those relatives who were to shape so large a share of my future happiness; to meet in public life the eminent public men, with whose renown the courts and even the camps of Europe were already ringing: and last, proudest, and most profound feeling of all—was I not to venture near the shrine on which I had placed my idol; to offer her the solemn and distant homage of the heart; perhaps to hear of her from day to day; perhaps to see her noble beauty; perhaps even to hear that voice, of which the simplest accents sank to my soul.—But I must not attempt to describe sensations which are in their nature indescribable; which dispose the spirit of man to silence; and which, in their true intensity, suffer but one faculty to exist, absorbing all the rest in deep sleep and delicious reverie.

I drove with the haste of a courier to London; and after having deposited my despatches with one of the under-secretaries of the Foreign office, I flew to Mordecai's den in the city. London appeared to me more crowded than ever; the streets longer, and buildings dingier; and the whole, seen after the smokeless and light-coloured towns of the Continent, looked an enormous manufactory, where men wore themselves out in perpetual blackness and bustle, to make their bread, and die. But my heart beat quickly as I reached the door of that dingiest of all its dwellings, where the lord of hundreds of thousands of pounds burrowed himself on the eyes of mankind.

I knocked, but was long unanswered; at last a meagre clerk, evidently of the "fallen people," and who seemed dug up from the depths of the dungeon, gave me the intelligence that "his master and family had left England." The answer was like an icebolt through my frame. This was the moment to which I had looked forward with, I shall not say what emotions. I could scarcely define them; but they had a share of every strong, every faithful, and every touching remembrance of my nature. My disappointment was a pang. My head grey dizzy, I reeled; and asked leave to enter the gloomy door, and rest for a moment. But this the guardian of the den was too cautious to allow, and I should have probably fainted in the street, but for the appearance of an ancient Rebecca, the wife of the clerk, who, feeling the compassion which belongs to the sex in all instances, and exerting the authority which is so generally claimed by the better-halves of men, pushed her husband back, and led the way into the old cobwebbed parlour where I had so often been. A glass of water, the sole hospitality of the house, revived me; and after some enquiries alike fruitless with the past, I was about to take my leave, when the clerk, in his removal of some papers, not to be trusted within reach of a stranger, dropped a letter from the bundle, on which was my name. From the variety of addresses it had evidently travelled far, and had been returned from half the post-offices of the Continent. It was two months' old, but its news was to me most interesting. It was from Mordecai; and after alluding to some pecuniary transactions with his foreign brethren, always the first topic, he hurried on in his usual abrupt strain:—"Mariamne has insisted on my leaving England for a while. This is perplexing; as the war must produce a new loan, and London is, after all, the only place where those affairs can be transacted without trouble.—My child is well, and yet she looks pallid from time to time, and sheds tears when she thinks herself unobserved. All this may pass away, but it makes me uneasy; and, as she has evidently made up her mind to travel, I have only to give way—for, with all her caprices, she is my child, my only child, and my beloved child!

"I have heard a good deal of your proceedings from my correspondent and kinsman in Paris. You have acquitted yourself well, and it shall not be unknown in the quarter where it may be of most service to you.—I have been stopped by Mariamne's singing in the next room, and her voice has almost unmanned me; she is melancholy of late, and her only music now is taken from those ancestral hymns which our nation regard as the songs of the Captivity. Her tones at this moment are singularly touching, and I have been forced to lay down my pen, for she has melted me to tears. Yet her colour has not altogether faded lately, and I think sometimes that her eyes look brighter than ever! Heaven help me, if I should lose her. I should then be alone in the world.

"You may rely on my intelligence—a war is inevitable. You may also rely on my conjecture—that it will be the most desperate war which Europe has yet seen. One that will break up foundations, as well as break down superstructures; not a war of politics but of principles; not a war for conquest but for ruin. All the treasuries of Europe will be bankrupt within a twelvemonth of its commencement; unless England shall become their banker. This will be the harvest of the men of money.—It is unfortunate that your money is all lodged for your commission; otherwise, in the course of a few operations, you might make cent per cent, which I propose to do. Apropos of commissions. I had nearly omitted, in my own family anxieties, to mention the object for which I began my letter. I have failed in arranging the affair of your commission! This was not for want of zeal. But the prospect of a war has deranged and inflamed every thing. The young nobility have actually besieged the Horse-guards. All the weight of the aristocracy has pressed upon the minister, and minor influence has been driven from the field. The spirit is too gallant a one to be blamed;—and yet—are there not a hundred other pursuits, in which an intelligent and active mind, like your own, might follow on the way to fortune? You have seen enough of campaigning to know, that it is not all a flourish of trumpets. Has the world but one gate, and that the Horse-guards? If my personal judgment were to be asked, I should feel no regret for a disappointment which may have come only to turn your knowledge and ability to purposes not less suitable to an ambitious spirit, nor less likely to produce a powerful impression on the world—the only thing, after all, worth living for! You may laugh at this language from a man of my country and my trade. But even I have my ambition; and you may yet discover it to be not less bold than if I carried the lamp of Gideon, or wielded the sword of the Maccabee.—I must stop again; my poor restless child is coming into the room at this moment, complaining of the chill, in one of the finest days of summer. She says that this villa has grown sunless, airless, and comfortless. Finding that I am writing to you, she sends her best wishes; and bids me ask, what is the fashionable colour for mantles in Paris, and also what is become of that 'wandering creature,' Lafontaine, if you should happen to recollect such a personage."