Abstract
The morning on which his regiment departed for the Peninsula was one Lt Sullivan would never forget. The troops marched out of Hyde Barracks to crowds of spectators cheering and huzzaing, waving their handkerchiefs and hats in an effusion of patriotic enthusiasm.‘Every man’, he wrote,‘seemed inspired to pluck a laurel for his rising country … the thunders of applause and the blessings of the multitude bestowed upon us - surpassed everything I ever witnessed’. Yet, he continued ‘I can scarcely bring myself to write the last few lines - oh how differently did my hopes & thoughts turn out to what I had anticipated’.1 In Sullivan’s account written after two years campaigning, the jubilant scenes and buoyant expectations that preceded his first expedition acquire an air of unreality: the youthful soldier filled with optimism is barely recognizable to the Peninsular veteran, the two selves separated by the experience of war. In this narrative arc from innocence to experience we can find several seemingly familiar elements of the soldier’s tale: the sense of estrangement from the pre-war self; the move from optimism to disillusionment; and the ironic clash between the expectation and the reality of war.
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Notes
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975), 8.
Samuel Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale. Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Pimlico, 1998), 103–5.
Philip J. Haythornthwaite, The Armies of Wellington (London: Brockhampton, 1998), 236.
Kevin Foster, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (London: Pluto, 1999), 12.
Mary Favret has pointed to the metaphorics of weather in Romantic literature’s treatments of these wars. While she sees this as a method of bringing a distant war home, this example suggests how it also shaped combatants’ more immediate experience of war. Mary Favret, ‘War in the Air’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65, 4 (2004), 57–77.
Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998), 6.
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James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical: On Memory and Imagination. On Dreaming. The Theory of Language. On Fable and Romance (London, 1783), 610, 615.
Sir Walter Scott quoted in Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003), 124.
According to Major-General Blayney ‘instead of mere automatons put in motion by a power of whose principles they are ignorant, every French soldier reasons on the movements of the army he belongs to, and says what he would have done in such a case. I have been often surprised at the shrewd observations and theoretical knowledge of some of the private men’. Lord Blayney, Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France as a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814 (London, 1814), 113.
See, for example, William Freer’s account of the battle of Almeida in Norman Scarfe, ‘Letters from the Peninsula: The Freer Family Correspondence, 1807–1814’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society, 29 (1953), 18.
John Mills, Quintana del Puente, 14 September 1812. Ian Fletcher (ed.), For King and Country: The Letters and Diaries of John Mills, Coldstream Guards, 1811–1814 (Staplehurst: Spellmount 1995), 223.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985).
Kathleen Canning, ‘The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History’, Gender & History, 11, 3 (1999), 499–513.
Nelson’s wounded body, as Kate Williams argues, was also key to his popularity amongst British women. Kate Williams, ‘Nelson and Women: Marketing, Representations and the Female Consumer’, in David Cannadine (ed.), Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 67–91, 80.
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Louise P. Carter, ‘British Women during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815: Responses, Roles and Representations’ (Unpublished DPhil, Cambridge, 2005), 175.
Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (London: Penguin, 1990 [1753]), 52. Keep, HMS Hero, 8 October 1812. Fletcher (ed.), In the Service of the King, 102; ‘Copy of an Account of Colonel Ponsonby’s Sufferings at the Battle of Waterloo, February 1822’, NLI, MS 15555.
Sarah Knott, ‘Sensibility and the American War of Independence’, American Historical Review, 109, 1 (2004), 19–40.
In 1802 Charles James’ Military Dictionary defined ‘Le Moral’ as a term ‘frequently used by the French’ to express the prepossession or assurance which we feel in conscious superiority. Charles James, A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary, or, Alphabetical Explanation of Technical Terms (1802), n.p.
Ian F.W. Beckett, Discovering English County Regiments (Risborough: Shire, 2003), 87, 90.
For a detailed analysis of Highland soldiers’ responses to and absorption of ‘martial race’ ideology in the later nineteenth century see Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), 190–224.
Alexander MacKinnon, ‘The Battle of Holland’ (Blàr na h-Òlaind), in Donald Black (ed.), An Lasair. Anthology of 18th century Scottish Gaelic Verse (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 355.
On military service and Highland identity see Andrew MacKillop, ‘More Fruitful Than the Soil’: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–1815 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 204–33.
Katherine Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 18.
On French soldiers’ attitudes towards the Peninsula see Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2002), 124–6.
Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New York and London: Yale UP, 2006).
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John Rous, 16 April 1814. Ian Fletcher (ed.), A Guards Officer in the Peninsula (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1992), 111.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Combat and Campaign. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_4
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