Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

Valenciennes was now captured. The sagacity of my friend, the French engineer, had not been deceived. The explosion of the three great mines, an operation from its magnitude almost new to war, and in its effects irresistible, had thrown open the fortress. The garrison had done their work gallantly, and the result was a capitulation, hastened by the outcry of the famishing inhabitants. I hastened to the quarters of my regiment, was received with all cordiality, had the honour of an interview with the royal duke, who, at all times affable, was now in peculiar good-humour, and who led me into a long detail of such public opinions as might be gathered from my intercourse with the garrison. At the close of our interview he gave me a note, which was to be forwarded to the adjutant-general. I made my bow, and retired.

All in the camp was festivity. A great achievement had been accomplished, and the barriers of France were broken down. But in the midst of national triumph, I felt a depression which rendered me wholly incapable of sharing it. The wounds of the spirit are not to be healed like those of the frame; and with the recollection of the noble creature whom I had lost, bitterness mingled in every sound, and sight, and exultation. My first request would have been for leave of absence, that I might follow her, if she were still in France, or in the world. But the bustle at headquarters told me that some movement was about to take place; and, under those circumstances, to ask for leave was impossible. Still I continued making every imaginable enquiry, dispatching letters, and seeing postmasters, to obtain intelligence of the route which Clotilde had taken. After tracing her for the first few leagues, all tidings were lost; and I had only to trust to that hope which was a part of my sanguine nature, and which was sustained by a kind of consciousness that a being so superior could not be flung away in the chances which visit the multitude.

While I was thus pondering and perplexed, I was summoned to attend one of the principal officers of his royal highness's staff. "We are sending despatches of some importance to London," said he, "and it is the wish of the commander-in-chief that you should take them. I have the pleasure to tell you, that he feels an interest in you from the opportunities which you have had of distinguishing yourself in the campaign, and that he has appointed you an extra aide-de-camp. Your service begins soon," added my informant with a smile, "for you must set off to-night. The despatch mentioning the capitulation of the fortress was, of course, sent off at once; but as the commission, in those cases, is given by routine, it is desirable to have some one in London capable of explaining the 'explanation,' or perhaps taking the place of the 'honourable,' or 'right honourable' personage who has been made the official bearer of the despatch. His royal highness is satisfied, from his conversation with you, that you will be perfectly fit for this purpose; and here is the despatch, with which you are to make all expedition to the Horse-Guards."

After giving my orders for the journey, I hastened to take leave of the man whom I most honoured and esteemed, my unfailing friend Guiscard. To my surprise, he received the intelligence of my appointment with scarcely a word of congratulation. Little as I myself was now excitable by any thing in the shape of human fortune, I was chagrined by his obstinate gravity. He observed it, and started from his seat. "Come," said he, "let us take a walk, and get out of the sight of mankind, if we can." He took my arm, and we strayed along the banks of the Scheldt, where, however, his purpose was unobtainable, for the whole breadth of the river was covered with the provision barges of the troops. The bargemen were enjoying the fine July evening in the national style — swilling the worst beer that ever punished the taste for that barbarian beverage, and filling the fresh breeze with the fumes of tobacco, worthy of the beer. Guiscard stopped to gaze at them.

"I envy those fellows," said he. "Not merely for their escaping all care, and being able to extract enjoyment out of their execrable drink and pipes, but from their being exempt from all contact with portfolios."

"But such enjoyment is only that of the swine."

"Well, and is not that of the swine perfect? — and what would you have more than perfection?"

A huge herd of those creatures, basking along the miry edge of the river, helped his illustration. "Mr Marston, you have not been for the last month on the staff of the commander-in-chief of the allied armies, or you would not look so incredulous. Sir, man's senses may be as suitable for his purposes, as those of the animals which we see wallowing there." I stared, waiting for the conclusion. He proceeded. "But man has drawbacks on his natural faculties, which they have not. Possibly nature intended that we should be as happy as they. But make nine-tenths of them hewers of wood and drawers of water — send some of them to dungeons — enforce a conscription among the rest, and send them to use their tusks upon each other, and the most complacent of them would rebel: or, as the last trial of temper, put the meekest of the race into a cabinet of princes and general-officers, themselves controlled by a cabinet five hundred miles off; and if they do not growl as I do now, I shall give up all my knowledge of quadruped nature."

"Why, Guiscard, what is the matter with you to-night? Have we not gained our point? You are like the Thracians, who always mourned at the birth of a child."

"And the Thracians were perfectly right, if the child were to be reared a diplomatist. You talk of success!" Our path had led to where a view of Valenciennes opened on us through the trees; and its shattered ramparts and curtains, the trees felled along its glacis, and its bastions stripped and broken by our cannon-balls, certainly presented a rueful spectacle. The Austrian flag was flying on the citadel.

"There," said he, "is our prize. It is not worth the loading of a single gun; but it has cost us more millions to ruin than it took francs to build it — it has cost us the conquest of France; and will cost Europe the war, which we might have extinguished three months ago if we had but left it behind. I acknowledge that I speak in the bitterness of my heart; delay has ruined every thing. Our march to Paris, and our march to Georgium Sidus, will now be finished on the same day."

I attempted to laugh off his predictions, but he was intractable. "The business," said he, "is all over. That flag is the signal of European jealousy — the apple of discord. Yon are going to England; and, if you have any regard for my opinion, tell your friends there to withdraw their troops as soon as they can. That flag, which pretends to partition France, will unite it as one man. Our sages here are actually about to play its game. Orders have come to divide the army. What folly! What inconceivable infatuation! In the very face of the most fantastic and furious population of mankind, whom the most trivial success inflames into enthusiasts; they are going to break up their force, and seek adventures by brigades and battalions."

He stamped the ground with indignation; but, suddenly recovering his calmness, he turned to me with his grave smile. "I am ashamed, Marston, of thus betraying a temper which time ought to have cooled. But, after all, what is public life but a burlesque; a thing of ludicrous disappointment; a tragedy, with a farce always at hand to relieve the tedium and the tinsel; the fall of kingdoms made laughable by the copper lace of the stage wardrobe?"

"Do you object to our duke?"

"Not in the least. He is personally a gallant fellow; and if he wants experience, so must every man at one time or other. His only error, hitherto, has been his condescending to come at all with so small a force under his command. No English army should ever plant its foot upon the Continent with less than fifty thousand men on its muster-roll. The duke's being put at the head of your troops — only a division after all — seems to me the only wise thing that has been done. It was a declaration of the heartiness of your alliance; and I honour your country for the distinctness of the avowal. Your king gives his son, as your country gives her soldiers, and your people give their money. The whole was manly, magnanimous, or, as the highest panegyric, it was English all over."

This language at once put an end to all my reserve. I shook his hand in the spirit of old friendship; and, on our parting, extracted a promise of keeping up our communication on all possible opportunities. We had already separated, when I heard my name called again, and Guiscard returned. "I had forgotten," said he, "to tell you what I was most anxious to say. If I had seen no other prospect for you, I should be the last man to make you discontented with your profession. My only request is, that when you once more tread on English ground, you will seriously consider whether you will continue in the army. If know you at all, I think that you would not be altogether satisfied with wearing your epaulettes at reviews and parades. And, if I am not entirely mistaken, you will have nothing else for the next dozen years. Your army are moving homewards already. You are now in the secret."

"But is the campaign absolutely coming to an end? Are the hopes of attacking the French so suddenly given up? Is France always to baffle us?" was my vexed question.

"As to the fate of France, you should consult a prophet, not a Prussian engineer — and one terribly tired of his trade besides," was the reply. We parted; but the conversation was not lost upon me.

By midnight I was on my journey. My route lay through the Flemish provinces, which had now recovered all their luxuriance, if not derived additional animation from the activity which every where follows the movements of a successful army. Troops marching to join the general advance frequently and strikingly diversified the scene. Huge trains of the commissariat were continually on the road. The little civic authorities were doubly conscious of the dignity of functions which brought them into contact with soldiership, from the quartermaster up to the general. But the contrast of the tumult which I left behind with the quietness of the scenes around me — the haste, the anxiety, and the restlessness of a huge camp, with the calm of the fields, with the regularity which seemed to govern all the operations of farming life, and with the grave opulence of the old mansions, which seemed to be formed for the natural receptacles of the wealth of Flemish fields — at once refreshed me after the mental fever in which I had tossed so long, and perhaps impressed on me more deeply the parting advice of my friend the philosopher.

But, from the moment when I touched British ground, the whole sleepy tranquillity which gathers over every man in the quietude of Flanders, where man seems to have followed the same plough from the deluge, had utterly vanished. I was in the midst of a nation in a ferment. The war was the universal topic; party was in full life. From the inn at Dover up to the waiting-room at the Horse-Guards, I heard nothing but politics. The conduct of our army — the absurdity of every thing that had been done, or left undone — the failures of the Allies — the fanaticism of the French — the hopes of popular liberty on one side, and the indignation of established power on the other — came rushing round me in a chaos of discordant conceptions, that for the time bewildered me. How simple was the gossip of the camp to this heterogeneous mass of struggling topics! How straightforward was even the wild haranguing of the Palais Royal to the thousand reports and protests, remonstrances and replications, of the whole ringing and raging, public mind of England! This was the age of pamphleteering. Every sage who could, or could not, write, flung his pamphlet in the teeth of the party whose existence he conceived to be ruinous to his country, or perhaps prejudicial to his own prospect of a sinecure. The journals printed their columns in gall; the satirists dipped their pens in concentrated acid; the popular haranguers dashed the oil of vitriol of contempt in each other's faces. The confusion, the collision, the uproar, was indescribable.