Читать книгу: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861», страница 16

Two of Marlborough's greatest victories were largely owing to the occurrence of panic among the veteran troops of France. At Ramillies, the French left, which was partially engaged in covering the retreat of the rest of their army, were struck with a panic, fled, and were pursued for five leagues. At Oudenarde, (July 11, 1708,) the French commander, Vendôme, "urged the Duke of Burgundy and a crowd of panic-struck generals to take advantage of the night, and restore order; but finding his arguments nugatory, he gave the word for a retreat, and generals and privates, horse and foot, instantly hurried in the utmost disorder toward Ghent." The retreat of this crowd, which was a complete flight, he covered by the aid of a few brave men whom he had rallied and formed, and whose firm countenance prevented the entire destruction of the French army. Yet the French soldiers of that time were men of experience, and were accustomed to all the phases of war.

At the Battle of Rossbach, (November 5, 1757,) the troops of France and of the German Empire fell into a panic, and were routed by half their number of Prussians. That defeat was the most disgraceful that ever befell the arms of a military nation. The panic was complete, and no body of terrified militia ever fled more rapidly than did the veteran troops of Germany and France on that eventful day. Napoleon, half a century later, said that Rossbach produced a permanent effect on the French military, and on France, and was one of the causes of the Revolution. The disgrace was laid to the account of the French commander, the Prince de Soubise, who was a profligate, a coward, and a booby, and who neither knew war nor was known by it.

The English army experienced whatever of pleasure there may be in a panic, or rather in a pair of panics, at the grand Battle of Fontenoy, (May 11, 1745,) on which field they were so unutterably thrashed by the French and the Irish. In the first part of the action, the Allies were successful, when suddenly the Dutch troops fell into a panic, and fled as fast as it is ever given to Dutchmen to fly. There is nothing so contagious as panic terror, and the rest of the army, exposed as it was to a tremendous fire, soon caught the disease, and was giving way under it, when their commander, the Duke of Cumberland, who was well seconded by his officers, succeeded in rallying them. They renewed the combat, and their enemy became so alarmed in their turn that even the French King, and his son the Dauphin, were in danger of being swept away in the rout. Again there came a turn in the battle, and, mostly because of the daring and dash of the famous Irish Brigade, the Allies were beaten and forced to retreat. It is stated that the whole body of heroic British Grenadiers who were engaged at Fontenoy gave a strong proof of the effect of the panic upon their minds—and bodies; thus establishing the fact that they had stomachs for something besides the fight. "Not to put too fine a point upon it," they, with a unity of place and time that speaks well for their discipline, did that which was done by the valiant General Sterling Price at the Battle of Boonville, and which has caused them to leave a deep impression on the historic page, though nothing can be said in support of the attractiveness of the illustration which those gallant men contributed to that page.

There was a partial exhibition of panic terror made by the English troops at the Battle of Bunker's Hill. They were twice made to run on that Seventeenth of June of which something has been said during the last six-and-eighty years; and they were brought up to the point of making a third attack only by the greatest exertions of their commanders, and after having been considerably reinforced. This third attack would have been as promptly repulsed as its predecessors had been, but that the American troops had used up all their powder, and few of them had bayonets. The firmness, and skill as marksmen, of a body of militia had caused a larger body of British veterans twice to retreat in great disorder, and under circumstances much resembling those that characterize what is known as a panic. Had a third repulse of the assailants occurred, nothing could have prevented their flight to their boats. But it was written that the Americans should retreat; and it is safe to say that they showed much more steadiness in the retreat than the enemy did alacrity in the pursuit.

Panic terror was no uncommon thing during the Reign of Terror in France, in the armies of the French Republic. The early efforts of the French Republicans in the field sometimes failed because of panics occurring in their armies; and they were not unknown to any of the armies that took part in the long series of wars that began in 1792 and lasted, with brief intervals of peace, down to the summer of 1815. At Marengo, both armies suffered from panics. As early as ten o'clock in the forenoon, a portion of Victor's corps retired in disorder, crying out, "All is lost!" There were, in fact, three Battles of Marengo, the Austrians winning the first and second, and losing the third, which was losing all,—war not exactly resembling whist. When Desaix said, at three o'clock in the afternoon, that the battle was lost, but there was time enough to win another, he spoke the truth, and like a good soldier. The new movements that followed his arrival and advice caused surprise to the Austrians, and surprise soon passed into panic. The panic extended to a portion of the cavalry, no one has ever been able to say why; and it galloped off the field toward the Bormida, shouting, "To the bridges!" The panic then reached to men of all arms, and cavalry, artillery, and infantry were soon crowded together on the banks of the stream which they had crossed in high hopes but a few hours before. The artillery sought to cross by a ford, but failed, and the French made prisoners, and seized guns, horses, baggage, and all the rest of the trophies of victory. Thus a battle which confirmed the Consular government of Bonaparte, which prepared the way for the creation of the French Empire, and which settled the fate of Europe for years, was decided by the panic cries of a few horse-soldiers. The Austrian cavalry has long and justly been reputed second to no other in the world, and in 1800 it was a veteran body, and had been steadily engaged in war, with small interruption, for eight years; but neither its experience, nor its valor, nor regard for the character which it had to maintain, could save it from the common lot of armies. It became terrified, and senselessly fled, and its evil example was swiftly communicated to the other troops: for there is nothing so contagious as a panic, every man that runs thinking, that, while he is himself ignorant of the existence of any peculiar danger, all the others must know of it, and are acting upon their knowledge. That Austrian panic made the conqueror master of Italy, and with France and Italy at his command he could aspire to the dominion of Europe. The man who began the panic at Marengo really opened the way to Vienna to the legions of France, and to Berlin, and (but that brought compensation) to Moscow also.

There were panics in most of the great battles of the French Empire, or those battles were followed by panics. At Austerlitz the Austrians suffered from them; and though the Russian soldiers are among the steadiest of men, and keep up discipline under very extraordinary difficulties, they fared no better than their associates on that terrible field. They had more than one panic, and the confusion was prodigious. It was while flying in terror, that the dense, yet disorderly crowds sought to escape over some ponds, the ice of which broke, and two thousand of them were ingulfed. One of their generals, writing of that day, said,—"I had previously seen some lost battles, but I had no conception of such a defeat." Jena was followed by panics which extended throughout the army and over the monarchy, so that the Prussian army and the Prussian kingdom disappeared in a month, though Napoleon had anticipated a long, difficult, and doubtful contest with so renowned a military organization as that which had been created by the immortal Frederick; and he had remarked, at the beginning of the war, that there would be much use for the spade in the course of it. In the Austrian campaign of 1809, there was the beginning of a panic that might have produced serious consequences. The Archduke John, the Patterson of those days, was at the head of an Austrian army which was expected to take part in the Battle of Wagram; but it was not until after that battle had been gained by the French that that prince arrived near the Marchfeld, in the rear of the victors. A panic broke out among the persons who saw the heads of his columns,—camp-followers, vivandières, long lines of soldiers bearing off wounded men, and others. The young soldiers, who were exhausted by their labors and the heat, were conspicuous among the runaways, and there was a general race to "the banks of the dark-rolling Danube." Nay, it is said that the panic was taken up on the other side of the river, and that quite a number of individuals did not stop till they had reached Vienna. Terror prevailed, and the confusion was fast spreading, when Napoleon, who had been roused from an attempt to obtain some rest under a shelter formed of drums, fit materials for a house for him, arrived on the scene. In reply to his questions, Charles Lebrun, one of his officers, answered, "It is nothing, Sire,—merely a few marauders." "What do you call nothing?" exclaimed the Emperor. "Know, Sir, that there are no trifling events in war: nothing endangers an army like an imprudent security. Return and see what is the matter, and come back quickly and render me an account." The Emperor succeeded in restoring order, but not without difficulty, and the Archduke withdrew his forces without molestation. The circumstances of the panic show, that, if he had arrived at his intended place a few hours earlier, the French would have been beaten, and probably the French Empire have fallen at Vienna in 1809, instead of falling at Paris in 1814; and then the House of Austria would have achieved one of those extraordinary triumphs over its most powerful enemies that are so common in its extraordinary history. The incident bears some resemblance to the singular panic that happened the day after the Battle of Solferino, and which was brought on by the appearance of a few Austrian hussars, who came out of their hiding-place to surrender, many thousand men running for miles, and showing that the most successful army of modern days could be converted into a mob by— nothing.

Seldom has the world seen such a panic as followed the Battle of Vittoria, in which Wellington dealt the French Empire the deadly blow under which it reeled and fell; for, if that battle had not been fought and won, the Allies would probably have made peace with Napoleon, following up the armistice into which they had already entered with him; but Vittoria encouraged them to hope for victory, and not in vain. The French King of Spain there lost his crown and his carriage; the Marshal of France commanding lost his bâton, and the honorable fame which he had won nineteen years before at Fleurus; and the French army lost its artillery, all but one piece, and, what was of more consequence, its honor. It was the completest rout ever seen in that age of routs and balls. And yet the defeated army was a veteran army, and most of its officers were men whose skill was as little to be doubted as their bravery.

There were panics at Waterloo, not a few; and, what is remarkable, they happened principally on the side of the victors, the French suffering nothing from them till after the battle was lost, when the pressure of circumstances threw their beaten army into much confusion, and it was not possible that it should be otherwise. Bylandt's Dutch-Belgian brigade ran away from the French about two o'clock in the afternoon, and swept others with them in their rush, much to the rage of the British, some of whom hissed, hooted, and cursed, forgetting that quite as discreditable incidents had occurred in the course of the military history of their own country. One portion of the British troops that desired to fire upon those exhibitors of "Dutch courage" actually belonged to the most conspicuous of the regiments that ran away at Falkirk, seventy years before. At a later hour Trip's Dutch-Belgian cavalry-brigade ran away in such haste and disorder that some squadrons of German hussars experienced great difficulty in maintaining their ground against the dense crowd of fugitives. The Cumberland regiment of Hanoverian hussars was deliberately taken out of the field by its colonel when the shot began to fall about it, and neither orders nor entreaties nor arguments nor execrations could induce it to form under fire. Nay, it refused to form across the high-road, out of fire, but "went altogether to the rear, spreading alarm and confusion all the way to Brussels." Nothing but the coming up of the cavalry-brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur, at a late hour, prevented large numbers of Wellington's infantry from leaving the field. The troops of Nassau fell "back en masse against the horses' heads of the Tenth Hussars, who, keeping their files closed, prevented further retreat." The Tenth belonged to Vivian's command. D'Aubremé's Dutch-Belgian infantry-brigade was prevented from running off when the Imperial Guard began their charge, only because Vandeleur's cavalry-brigade was in their rear, with even the squadron-intervals closed, so that they had to elect between the French bayonet and the English sabre. There was something resembling a temporary panic among Maitland's British Guards, after the repulse of the first column of the Imperial Guard, but order was very promptly restored. It is impossible to read any extended account of the Battle of Waterloo without seeing that it was a desperate business on the part of the Allies, and that, if the Prussians could have been kept out of the action, their English friends would have had an excellent chance to keep the field—as the killed and wounded. Wellington never had the ghost of a chance without the aid of Bülow, Zieten, and Blücher.⁸

The Russian War was not of a nature to afford room for the occurrence of any panic on an extensive scale, but between that contest and ours there is one point of resemblance that may be noted. The failures and losses of the Allies, who had at their command unlimited means, and the bravest of soldiers in the greatest numbers, were all owing to bad management; and our reverses in every instance are owing to the same cause. The disaster at Bull Run, and the inability of our men to keep the ground they had won at Wilson's Creek, in Missouri, (August 10,) were the legitimate consequences of action over which the mass of the soldiers could have no control. It is due to the soldiers to say this, for it is the truth, as every man knows who has observed the course of the contest, and who has seen it proceed from a political squabble to the dimensions of a mighty war, the end of which mortal vision cannot foresee.

It would be no difficult task to add a hundred instances to those we have mentioned of the occurrence of panics in European armies; but it is not necessary to pursue the subject farther. Nothing is better known than that almost every eminent commander has suffered from panic terror having taken control of the minds of his men, and nothing is more unjust than to speak of the American panic of the 21st of July as if it were something quite out of the common way of war. True, its origin has never been fully explained; but in this point it only resembles most other panics, the causes of which never have been explained and never will be. It is characteristic of a panic that its occurrence cannot be accounted for; and therefore it was that the ancients attributed it to the direct interposition of a god, as arising from some cause quite beyond human comprehension. If panics could be clearly explained, some device might be hit upon, perhaps, for their prevention. But we see that they occurred at the very dawn of history, that they have happened repeatedly for five-and-twenty centuries, and that they are as common now in the nineteenth Christian century as they were in those days when Pan was a god. "Great Pan is not dead," but sends armies to pot now as readily as he did when there were hoplites and peltasts on earth. We can console ourselves, though the consolation be but a poor one, with the reflection that all military peoples have suffered from the same cause that has brought so much mortification and so great loss immediately home to us. Our panic is the greatest that ever was known only because it is the latest one that has happened, and because it has happened to ourselves. It is idle, and even laughable, to attempt to argue it out of sight. We should admit its occurrence as freely as it is asserted by the bitterest and most unfair of our critics; and we should recognize the truth of what has been well said on the subject, that the only possible answer to the attacks that have been made on the national character for military capacity and courage is victory. If we shall succeed in this war, the rout of Bull Run will no more destroy our character for manliness than the rout of Landen destroyed the character of Englishmen for the same virtue. If we fail, we must submit to be considered cowards: and we shall deserve to be so held, if, with our superior numbers, and still more superior means, we cannot maintain the Republic against the rebels.

OUR COUNTRY

 
  On primal rocks she wrote her name;
    Her towers were reared on holy graves;
  The golden seed that bore her came
    Swift-winged with prayer o'er ocean waves.
 
 
  The Forest bowed his solemn crest,
    And open flung his sylvan doors;
  Meek Rivers led the appointed Guest
    To clasp the wide-embracing shores;
 
 
  Till, fold by fold, the broidered land
    To swell her virgin vestments grew,
  While Sages, strong in heart and hand,
    Her virtue's fiery girdle drew.
 
 
  O Exile of the wrath of kings!
    O Pilgrim Ark of Liberty!
  The refuge of divinest things,
    Their record must abide in thee!
 
 
  First in the glories of thy front
    Let the crown-jewel, Truth, be found;
  Thy right hand fling, with generous wont,
    Love's happy chain to farthest bound!
 
 
  Let Justice, with the faultless scales,
    Hold fast the worship of thy sons;
  Thy Commerce spread her shining sails
    Where no dark tide of rapine runs!
 
 
  So link thy ways to those of God,
    So follow firm the heavenly laws,
  That stars may greet thee, warrior-browed,
    And storm-sped Angels hail thy cause!
 
 
  O Land, the measure of our prayers,
    Hope of the world in grief and wrong,
  Be thine the tribute of the years,
    The gift of Faith, the crown of Song!
 

THE WORMWOOD CORDIAL OF HISTORY

WITH A FABLE

The great war which is upon us is shaking us down into solidity as corn is shaken down in the measure. We were heaped up in our own opinion, and sometimes running over in expressions of it. This rude jostling is showing us the difference between bulk and weight, space and substance.

In one point of view we have a right to be proud of our inexperience, and hardly need to blush for our shortcomings. These are the tributes we are paying to our own past innocence and tranquillity. We have lived a peaceful life so long that the traditional cunning and cruelty of a state of warfare have become almost obsolete among us. No wonder that hard men, bred in foreign camps, find us too good-natured, wanting in hatred towards our enemies. We can readily believe that it is a special Providence which has suffered us to meet with a reverse or two, just enough to sting, without crippling us, only to wake up the slumbering passion which is the legitimate and chosen instrument of the higher powers for working out the ends of justice and the good of man.

There are a few far-seeing persons to whom our present sudden mighty conflict may not have come as a surprise; but to all except these it is a prodigy as startling as it would be, if the farmers of the North should find a ripened harvest of blood-red ears of maize upon the succulent stalks of midsummer. We have lived for peace: as individuals, to get food, comfort, luxuries for ourselves and others; as communities, to insure the best conditions we could for each human being, so that he might become what God meant him to be. The verdict of the world was, that we were succeeding. Many came to us from the old civilizations; few went away from us, and most of these such as we could spare without public loss.

We had almost forgotten the meaning and use of the machinery of destruction. We had come to look upon our fortresses as the ornaments, rather than as the defences of our harbors. Our war-ships were the Government's yacht-squadron, our arsenals museums for the entertainment of peaceful visitors. The roar of cannon has roused us from this Arcadian dream. A ship of the line, we said, reproachfully, costs as much as a college; but we are finding out that its masts are a part of the fence round the college. The Springfield Arsenal inspired a noble poem; but that, as we are learning, was not all it was meant for. What poets would be born to us in the future without the "placida quies" which "sub libertate" the sword alone can secure for our children?

It is all plain, but it has been an astonishment to us, as our war-comet was to the astronomers. The comet, as some of them say, brushed us with its tail as it passed; yet nobody finds us the worse for it. So, too, we have been brushed lightly by mishap, as we ought to have been, and as we ought to have prayed to be, no doubt, if we had known what was good for us; yet at this very moment we stand stronger, more hopeful, more united than ever before in our history.

Misfortunes are no new things; yet a man suffering from furuncles will often speak as if Job had never known anything about them. We will take up a book lying by us, and find all the evils, or most of those we have been complaining of, described in detail, as they happened eight or ten generations before our time.

It was in "a struggle for NATIONAL independence, liberty of conscience, freedom of the seas, against sacerdotal and world-absorbing tyranny." A plotting despot is at the bottom of it. "While the riches of the Indies continue, he thinketh he will be able to weary out all other princes." But England had soldiers and statesmen ready to fight, even though "Indies"—the King Cotton of that day—were declared arbiter of the contest. "I pray God," said one of them, "that I live not to see this enterprise quail, and with it the utter subversion of religion throughout Christendom."—"The war doth defend England. Who is he that will refuse to spend his life and living in it? If her Majesty consume twenty thousand men in the cause, the experimented men that will remain will double that strength to the realm."—"The freehold of England will be worth but little, if this action quail; and therefore I wish no subject to spare his purse towards it."—"God hath stirred up this action to be a school to breed up soldiers to defend the freedom of England, which through these long times of peace and quietness is brought into a most dangerous estate, if it should be attempted. Our delicacy is such that we are already weary; yet this journey is nought in respect to the misery and hardship that soldiers must and do endure."

"There can be no doubt," the historian remarks, "that the organization and discipline of English troops were in anything but a satisfactory state at that period."—"The soldiers required shoes and stockings, bread and meat, and for those articles there were not the necessary funds."—"There came no penny of treasure over."—"There is much still due. They cannot get a penny, their credit is spent, they perish for want of victuals and clothing in great numbers. The whole are ready to mutiny."—"There was no soldier yet able to buy himself a pair of hose, and it is too, too great shame to see how they go, and it kills their hearts to show themselves among men."—These "poor subjects were no better than abjects," said the Lieutenant-General. "There is but a small number of the first bands left," said another,—"and those so pitiful and unable to serve again as I leave to speak further of them, to avoid grief to your heart. A monstrous fault there hath been somewhere." Of what nature the "monstrous fault" was we may conjecture from the language of the Commander-in-Chief. "There can be no doubt of our driving the enemy out of the country through famine and excessive charges, if every one of us will put our minds to forward, without making a miserable gain by the wars." (We give the Italics as we find them in the text.) He believed that much of the work might be speedily done; for he "would undertake to furnish from hence, upon two months' warning, a navy for strong and tall ships, with their furniture and mariners."

In the mean time "there was a whisper of peace-overtures," "rumors which, whether true or false, were most pernicious in their effects"; for "it was war, not peace," that the despot "intended," and the "most trusty counsellors [of England] knew to be inevitable." Worse than this, there was treachery of the most dangerous kind. "Take heed whom you trust," said the brother of the Commander-in-Chief to him; "for that you have some false boys about you." In fact, "many of those nearest his person and of highest credit out of England were his deadly foes, sworn to compass his dishonor, his confusion, and eventually his death, and in correspondence with his most powerful adversaries at home and abroad."

It was a sad state of things. The General "was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops." "Swaggering ruffians from the disreputable haunts of London" "were not the men to be intrusted with the honor of England at a momentous crisis." "Our simplest men in show have been our best men, and your gallant blood and ruffian men the worst of all others." (The Italics again are the author's.) Yet, said the muster-master, "there is good hope that his Excellency will shortly establish such good order for the government and training of our nation, that these weak, badly furnished, ill-armed, and worse trained bands, thus rawly left unto him, shall within a few months prove as well armed, complete, gallant companies as shall be found elsewhere in Europe."

Very pleasant it must have been to the Commander-in-Chief to report to his Government that in one of the first actions "five hundred Englishmen of the best Flemish training had flatly and shamefully run away." Yet this was the commencement of the struggle which ended with the dispersion and defeat of the great Armada, and destroyed the projects of the Spanish tyrant for introducing religious and political slavery into England! It seems as if Mr. Motley's Seventh Chapter were a prophecy, rather than a history.

* * * * *

An invasion and a conspiracy may always be expected to make head at first. The men who plan such enterprises are not fools, but cunning, managing people. They always have, or think they have, a primâ facie case to start with. They have been preparing just as the highwayman has been preparing for his aggressive movement. They expect to find, and they commonly do find, their victims only half ready, if at all forewarned, and to take them at a disadvantage. If conspirators and invaders do not strike heavy blows at once, their cause is desperate; if they do, it proves very little, because that is the least they expected to do.

It is very easy to run up a score behind the door of a tavern; credit is good, and chalk is cheap. But these little marks have all got to be crossed out by-and-by, and the time will surely come for turning all empty pockets wrong side out. The aggressors begin in a great passion, and are violent and dangerous at first; the nation or community assailed are surprised, dismayed, perhaps, like the good people in the coach, when they see Dick Turpin's pistol thrust in at the window.

The Romans were certainly a genuine fighting people. They kept the state on a perpetual military footing. They were never without veterans, men and leaders bred in camp and experienced in warfare. Yet what a piece of work their African invader cut out for them! It seemed they had to learn everything over again. Thousands upon thousands killed and driven into Lake Trasimenus,—fifteen thousand prisoners taken; total rout again at Cannae,—rings picked from slain gentlemen's fingers by the peck or bushel,—everything lost in battle, and a great revolt through the Southern provinces as a natural consequence. What then? Rome was not to be Africanized as yet. The great leader who had threatened the capital, and scored these portentous victories, had at last to pay for them all in defeat and humiliation on his own soil.

Even the robber Spartacus beat the Roman armies at first, with their consuls at their head, and laid waste a large part of the peninsula. These violent uprisings and incursions are always dangerous at their onset; they are just like new diseases, which the doctors tell us must be studied by themselves, and which are rarely treated with great success until near the period of their natural cessation. After a time Fabius learns how to handle the hot Southern invaders, and Crassus the way of fighting the fierce gladiators with their classical bowie-knives.

Remember, Rome never is beaten,—Romans may be. It is inherent in the very idea of a republic that its peaceful servants shall be liable to be taken at fault. The counsels of the many, which are meant to secure all men's rights in tranquil times, cannot in the nature of things adapt themselves all at once to the sudden exigencies of war. Consequently, a republic must expect to be beaten at first by any concentrated power of nearly equal strength. After a time the commander-in-chief emerges from the confused mass of counsellors, and substitutes the action of one mind and will for the conflict of many. The Romans recognized the Dictatorship as the necessary complement of the Republic; and it is worthy of remark that that high office was never abused so long as the people were worthy to be free. "Ne quid detrimenti respublica capiat" was the formula according to which they surrendered their liberty for the sake of their liberty. A great danger, doubtless, for a people not leavened through and through with the spirit of freedom; but not so where the army is only the representative of a self-governing community. This army is not like to enslave itself or the families it comes from, to please the leader whom it trusts for an emergency. The pilot is absolute while the vessel is coming into harbor, but the crew are not afraid of his remaining master of the ship. Washington's reply to Nicola's letter, proposing to make him King, was written at a time when the republican system under the shadow of which three generations have been bred up to manhood was but as a grain of mustard-seed compared to this mighty growth which now spreads over our land. It is not likely that another man will make out so good a claim to supremacy as he; it is pretty certain, that, if he does, he will not have the opportunity of rejecting the insignia of royalty, and if this should happen, he can hardly forget the great example before him.