a battle there. That is all, and not enough for the book which I wanted to write.
My own stories are confined, therefore, to modern times, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They concern characters about whom we know enough to construct credible and, I hope, entertaining portraits. The selection is whimsical. The range of personalities is designed to illustrate different aspects of the experience of war on land, at sea and in the air over the past two centuries. Several are national icons, while others have lost their lustre, and fallen into an obscurity from which 1 hope this book will help to rescue them. Some may seem unsympathetic, and some were failures. The characters and fates of warriors are as diverse as those of people who follow any other calling.
Most of these tales concern soldiers, but I have included one remarkable sailor, and two airmen who seem archetypes of the twentieth-century warrior. My collection – which of course is only a modest assay of a seam overflowing with riches – also favours those who left behind autobiographies, diaries or other writings, that provide insights into their thoughts as well as their deeds. The balance is thus unjustly loaded towards officers at the expense of those whom they commanded, and towards the articulate at the expense of the illiterate, not all of the latter members of the Brigade of Guards. Aficionados of naval history may justly complain that seamen are under-represented, but this is a portrait of human behaviour rather than a historical narrative balanced between the three dimensions of modern warfare.
If successful warriors have often been vain and uncultured men, their nations in hours of need have had cause to be profoundly grateful for their virtues, even if they have sometimes been injured by their excesses. Today, we recognise that other forms of courage are as worthy of respect as that which is shown on the battlefield. But this should not cause us to steal from the legends of former times their due as pillars of history. How far have we come, how sadly has Britain changed, when the Mayor of London proposes the removal from their plinths in Trafalgar Square of statues of British military commanders! He declares that prowess in war, especially colonial war, is no longer a fitting object for admiration. True, it is a strange quirk of fate that causes bronze images of two of the less admirable military leaders in British history, Earl Haig and the Duke of Cambridge, to dominate Whitehall. Yet it seems grotesque to seek to erase from our consciousness, in a shamelessly Stalinist spirit, a great military heritage.
This book is designed to amuse as much as to inform. I hope it will divert readers with its tales of the gallant and the picaresque. For all his social limitations and professional follies, the warrior is willing to risk everything on the field of battle, and sometimes to lose it, for purposes sometimes selfish or mistaken, but often noble.
MAX HASTINGS
Hungerford, England and Il Pinquan, Kenya
November 2004
THE WARS OF NAPOLEON produced a flowering of memoirs, both English and French, of extraordinary quality. Each writer’s work reflects in full measure his national characteristics. None but a Frenchman, surely, could have written the following lines about his experience of conflict: ‘I may, I think, say without boasting that nature has allotted to me a fair share of courage; I will add that there was a time when I enjoyed being in danger, as my thirteen wounds and some distinguished services prove, I think, sufficiently.’ Baron Marcellin de Marbot was the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional Brigadier Gerard: brave, swashbuckling, incapable of introspection, glorying without inhibition in the experience of campaigning from Portugal to Russia in the service of his emperor. Marbot was the most eager of warriors, who shared with many of his French contemporaries a belief that there could be no higher calling than to follow Bonaparte to glory. Few modern readers could fail to respect the courage of a soldier who so often faced the fire of the enemy, through an active service career spanning more than forty years. And no Anglo-Saxon could withhold laughter at the peacock vanity and chauvinism of the hussar’s account of the experience, rich in anecdotage and comedy, the latter often unintended.
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot was born in 1782 at Beaulieu in the Corrèze, son of a country gentleman of liberal inclinations who became a general in France’s revolutionary army. With his round face and snub nose, the child Marcellin was known to his family as ‘the kitten’, and for some years during the nation’s revolutionary disorders attended a local girls’ school. He was originally destined for a naval career, but a friend urged his father that life aboard a warship mouldering in some seaport under British blockade was no prospect for an ambitious youth. Instead, in 1799 a vacancy was procured for him in the hussars. The seventeen-year-old boy was delighted, and from the outset gloried in his new uniform. His father, however, was uneasy about his shyness, and for some time was prone to refer to his son in company as ‘Mademoiselle Marcellin’ – rich pickings there for a modern psychologist. In those days when every hussar was expected to display a moustache as part of his service dress, the beardless teenager at first painted whiskers on his face.
Marbot met Bonaparte for the first time when accompanying his father to take up a posting with the army in Italy. They were amazed to encounter the hero of the Pyramids at Lyons, on his way back to Paris from Egypt, having abandoned his army to seek a throne, a quest to which General Marbot, a committed republican, declined to give his assistance. In Italy, young Marcellin won his spurs. Despatched with a patrol to seize Austrian prisoners, the sergeant in command professed sudden illness. The boy seized the opportunity and assumed leadership of the troop: ‘When…I took command of the fifty men who had come under my orders in such unusual circumstances, a mere trooper as I was and seventeen years old, I resolved to show my comrades that if I had not yet much experience or military talent, I at least possessed pluck. So I resolutely put myself at their head and marched on in what we knew was the direction of the enemy.’
Marbot’s patrol surprised an Austrian unit, took the necessary prisoners, and returned in triumph to the French lines where their self-appointed commander was rewarded with promotion to sergeant, followed soon afterwards by a commission. He survived the terrible siege of Genoa, where his father died in his arms following a wound received on the battlefield. Soon afterwards the young man was posted to the 25th Chasseurs. In 1801 he was appointed an aide-de-camp to that hoary old hero Marshal Augereau, with whom he travelled for the first time to the Iberian Peninsula.
By 1805, already a veteran, Marbot was an eager young officer with Bonaparte’s Grand Army, ready for a summer of campaigning against the Austrians and Russians. ‘I had three excellent horses,’ he enthused, adding bathetically, ‘and a servant of moderate quality.’ The duties of aides-de-camp were among the most perilous in any army of the time. It was their business to convey their masters’ wishes and tidings not only across the battlefield, but from end to end of Europe, often in the teeth of the enemy. In the period that followed, writes Marbot, ‘constantly sent from north to south, and from south to north, wherever there was fighting going on, I did not pass one of these ten years without coming under fire, or without shedding my blood on the soil of some part of Europe.’ It is striking to notice that, until the twentieth century, every enthusiastic warrior regarded it as a mark of virility to have been wounded in action, if possible frequently. A soldier who avoided shedding his own blood, far from being congratulated on luck and skill, was more likely to be suspected of shyness.
Marbot began the 1805 campaigning season by carrying despatches from the emperor to Marshal Masséna in Italy, through the Alpine passes. Then he took his place beside Augereau for what became the Austerlitz campaign. ‘Never had France possessed an army so well-trained,’ he exulted, ‘of such good material, so eager for fighting and fame…Bonaparte…accepted the war with joy, so certain was he of victory…He knew how the chivalrous spirit of Frenchmen has in all ages been influenced by the enthusiasm of military glory.’ Seldom has there been an era of warfare
