nearly forty years. 1 have fought in every quarter of the globe, I have driven four-in-hand in every quarter, I have never had a sick certificate, and only once received leave of absence, which I did for eight months to study mathematics. I have filled every staff situation of a regiment and of the General Staff. I have commanded a regiment in peace, and have often had a great voice in war. I entered the army perfectly unknown to the world, and in ten years by force of circumstances I was lieutenant-colonel, and I have been present in as many battles and sieges as any officer of my standing in the army. I never fought a duel, and only once made a man an apology, although I am as hot a fellow as the world produces; and I may without vanity say, the friendship I have experienced equals the love I bear my comrade, officer or soldier. My wife has accompanied me throughout the world; she has ever met with kind friends and never has had controversy or dispute with man or woman. HARRY SMITH.
If his words were not lacking in conceit, they were nothing less than the truth. Here indeed was the happy warrior, who enjoyed the rare good fortune to share his many campaigns with a perfect companion. For years, the old man celebrated the anniversary of his greatest battlefield triumph with a dinner, at which he caused his charger Aliwal to be led into the hall to share the feast. When the old horse was finally ailing, with many tears Sir Harry led him out to be shot.
Smith wrote in his autobiography of the soldier’s lot: ‘Fear for himself he never knows, though the loss of his comrade pierces his heart.’ In this, he spoke only for himself. He was indeed personally fearless, but many soldiers even of that era were made of softer metal. The record suggests that, like Marbot, Smith carried courage to the point of foolhardiness. Yet unlike some of his brother officers, he was prudent and humane in his stewardship of the lives of others under his command. He was not the stuff of which great captains are made, but he was the kind of British soldier who wins affection and respect as a great comrade. At a glittering soirée in London, he was once asked with wonderful naivety whether he had often faced great risk. ‘My horse did, sometimes,’ he answered lightly. Consider the answer Marcellin Marbot would have made to such a question! Sir Harry Smith Bart., KCB, died at the age of seventy-three in his London home, 1 Eaton Place West, on 12 October 1860. Juana survived for a further twelve years, almost to the day, living quietly in Cadogan Place, her existence devoted to keeping bright the flame of her husband’s memory and reputation. She was buried beside him at Whittlesey. Few couples have achieved such harmony and understanding in times of peace; perhaps none amid the thunder of war.
THROUGHOUT THE REIGN of Queen Victoria, Europe remained the focus of the civilised world. The memory of the wars of Bonaparte dominated the culture of warriors. This was a folly. If British and Continental soldiers of the later nineteenth century had paid less attention to the memories of 1815, and rather more to the experience of the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the New World’s decisive conflict, it would have profited them greatly. The American Civil War taught dramatic and important lessons about the nature of future confrontations in arms between industrial societies, for anyone willing to heed them. Yet many European soldiers were foolish enough to suppose that nothing that happened within the mongrel, adolescent society of the United States could be relevant to their own affairs. They paid the price for their lack of interest in the American experience again and again between 1862 and 1914.
For the inhabitants of the North American continent, the Civil War was the most important event in their domestic experience, and produced the greatest soldiers in their history. No American general of the Second World War matched the gifts of Lee, nor perhaps even of Grant; few subordinate commanders showed the brilliance of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Philip Sheridan, James Longstreet and some of their peers. It is sometimes forgotten, even by Americans, that the nation lost twice as many dead in the conflict between 1861 and 1865 as it did in that between 1941 and 1945, when the US population was vastly larger.
While the rival armies were manned first by citizen volunteers and later by conscripts, most higher commands were held by professional soldiers, many of them West Pointers or graduates of the Virginia Military Institute. Some two thousand alumni of these institutions provided the senior leadership of both sides during a conflict which at one time or another involved four million men. Necessity placed many regiments in the hands of amateurs – in the early days, elected by their men – often with tragic consequences for those they led. Yet a few of those thrust into uniform by circumstance proved uncommonly talented leaders. None more so than Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, at the outbreak of war a thirty-two-year-old professor of modern languages at Bowdoin College in Maine. The conflict ended before Chamberlain was tested in higher commands, but he had already shown himself one of the Union’s finest officers, a model of courage, intelligence and inspirational leadership. When to these qualities were added charity, humanity and generosity of spirit, a knight emerges who might be deemed worthy of a place at an Arthurian Round Table. There have been more distinguished commanders in American history than Professor Chamberlain, but few seem so deserving of admiration as a human being.
He was born in 1828, into a family of stern Maine farmers. His father proposed an army career for Joshua as a teenager, and sent him to be schooled at a local military academy. Yet Chamberlain’s ambitions were at that time scholarly and artistic. He was devoted to music, and played the bass viol. While still a schoolboy he gained a little experience of teaching, and liked the work. He crammed assiduously for a college place with a view to entering the ministry and becoming a missionary overseas. He was finally admitted to Bowdoin College in 1848, after a struggle to learn the necessary classical Greek. His college record was exemplary. He emerged garlanded with prizes and honours, led the choir at the local Congregational church, and fell deeply in love with Fannie Adams, the ward of its minister, a girl two years older than himself. It was often later remarked that Chamberlain could well have been singing in the choir on the day the wife of a Bowdoin professor experienced her vision of the death of Uncle Tom while sitting in Pew 23, which caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), vastly influential in mobilising Northern opinion against slavery.
Still anticipating a career as a missionary, and too poor to marry Fannie Adams, whose family anyway opposed the match, Chamberlain enrolled at Bangor Theological Seminary. He spent the next three years studying – Hebrew, German, Arabic and Latin as well as theology – and preaching, to growing local acclaim. In 1855 he became an instructor in logic and natural theology at Bowdoin, and was soon promoted to professor of rhetoric and oratory. Having at last achieved some financial security, he was able to marry Fannie, evidently a moody and sometimes irascible girl, whose enthusiasm for her husband later waned, as his for her never seemed to do. They began to raise a family. By 1861 Joshua Chamberlain had become a significant local figure, respected for his cleverness, integrity and commitment to everything he undertook. Though he had abandoned ideas of a career in the ministry, in a God-fearing age he was a sombrely upright, God-fearing man, not much given to jesting, direct to the edge of naivety. His deep-set eyes reflected remarkable powers of concentration. By a notable feat of will he had overcome an early liability to stammer, to such effect that he gained a reputation as a formidable speaker, as well as a writer. On his salary of $1,100 a year, he and Fannie were able to acquire for $2,500 a pleasant house just off the college campus in which to rear their two surviving children. He found himself increasingly impatient with what he considered the restrictive regime of Bowdoin, with its emphasis on the ancient languages and its unwillingness to give students freedoms he thought they deserved. In 1862 he was granted a two-year leave of absence from the college to travel and study in Europe. This was partly, no doubt, to assuage the restlessness of a teacher whom the college admired and wanted to keep.
Yet already the Civil War was a year old. At the outset it had been perceived as the business of soldiers, no concern of such as Joshua Chamberlain. Now, however, every citizen was conscious of both sides’ desperate need for men. The Bowdoin professor was hostile to slavery, and wholly unsympathetic to secession. In August 1862 he travelled to the state capital, Augusta, to meet the
