The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (236 page)

However, Pakenham elected to make the two attacks at the same hour, and posterity does not perform a graceful office when it re-generals the battles of the past.

Boats were brought from the fleet, and with immense labour a canal was dug from Lake Borgne to the Mississippi. For use in fording the ditch in front of Jackson, the troops made fascines by binding together sheaves of sugar-cane, and for the breastwork on the far-side of the ditch they made scaling ladders.

On January 7, 1815, Jackson stood on the top of the tallest building within his lines and watched the British at work. At the same time Pakenham was in the top of a pine-tree regarding the American trenches. For the moment, and indefinitely, it was a question of eyesight. Jackson studied much of the force that was to assail him; Pakenham studied the position which he had decided to attack. Pakenham’s eyesight may not have been very good.

Colonel Thornton was in command of the troops which were to attack Patterson’s battery across the river, and a rocket was to be sent up to tell him when to begin his part of the general onslaught.

Pakenham advanced serenely against the Rodriguez Canal, the breastwork, and the American troops. One wishes to use here a phrase inimical to military phraseology. One wishes to make a distinction between disinterested troops and troops who are interested. The Americans were interested troops. They faced the enemy at the main gate of the United States. Behind them crouched frightened thousands. In reality they were defending a continent.

As the British advanced to the attack they made a gallant martial picture. The motley army of American planters, woodsmen, free negroes, ex-convicts, and pirates watched them in silence. Here tossed the bonnets of a fierce battalion of Highlanders; here marched a bottle - green regiment, the officers wearing furred cloaks and crimson sashes; here was a steady line of blazing red coats. Everywhere rode the general officers in their cocked hats, their short red coats with golden epaulettes and embroideries, their skin-tight white breeches, their high black boots. The ranks were kept locked in the manner of that day. It was like a grand review.

But the grandeur was extremely brief. The force was well within range of the American guns when Pakenham made the terrible discovery that his orders had been neglected: there was neither fascine nor ladder on the field. In a storm of rage and grief the British general turned to the guilty officer and bade him take his men back and fetch them. When, however, the ladders and fascines had been brought into the field, a hot infantry engagement had already begun, and the bearers, becoming wildly rattled, scattered them on the ground.

It was now that Sir George Pakenham displayed that quality of his nation which in another place I have called stern-lipped stupidity. It was an absolute certainty that Jackson’s position could not be carried without the help of fascines and ladders; it was doubtful if it could be carried in any case.

But Sir George Pakenham ordered a general charge. His troops responded desperately. They flung themselves forward in the face of a storm of bullets aimed usually with deadly precision. Back of their rampart, the Americans, at once furious and cool, shot with the quickness of aim and yet with the finished accuracy of life-long hunters. The British army was being mauled and mangled out of all resemblance to the force that had landed in December.

Sir George Pakenham, proud, heartbroken, frenzied man, rode full tilt at the head of rush after rush. And his men followed him to their death. On the right, a major and a lieutenant succeeded in crossing the ditch. The two officers mounted the breastwork, but the major fell immediately. The lieutenant imperiously demanded the swords of the American officers present. But they said, “Look behind you.” He looked behind him and saw that the men whom he had supposed were at his back had all vanished as if the earth had yawned for them.

The lieutenant was taken prisoner and so he does not count, but the dead body of the major as it fell and rolled within the American breastwork established the high-water mark of the British advance upon New Orleans.

Sir George Pakenham seemed to be asking for death, and presently it came to him. His body was carried from the field. General Gibbs was mortally wounded. General Keane was seriously wounded. Left without leaders, the British troops began a retreat. This retreat was soon a mad runaway, but General Lambert with a strong reserve stepped between the beaten battalions and their foes. The battle had lasted twenty-five minutes.

Jackson’s force, armed and unarmed, was four thousand two hundred afid sixty-four. During the whole campaign he lost three hundred and thirty-three. In the final action he lost four killed, thirteen wounded. The British force in action was about eight thousand men. The British lost some nine hundred killed, fourteen hundred wounded, and five hundred prisoners.

Thornton finally succeeded in reaching and capturing the battery on the other side of the river, but he was too late. Some of the British war-ships finally succeeded in crossing the bars, but they were too late. General Lambert, now in command, decided to withdraw, and the expedition sailed away.

Peace had been signed at Ghent on December 24, 1814. The real battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815.

THE
BATTLE
OF
SOLFERINO

“ITALY,” said Prince Metternich, “is merely a geographical expression.”

The sneer was justified; the storied peninsula was cut up into little principalities for little princes of the houses of Hapsburg and Bourbon. The millions who spoke a common tongue and cherished common traditions of a glorious past were ruled as cynically as if they were so many cattle. The map of Italy for 1859 is a crazy-quilt of many patches. How has it come about, then, that the map of Italy for 1863 is of one uniform colour from the Alps to the “toe of the boot,” including Sardinia and Sicily? We must except the Papal States, of course, still separate till 1870, and Venetia, Austrian till 1866, when the “Bride of the Sea” became finally one with the rest of Italy.

This was the last miracle that Europe had looked for. Unity in Italy! “Since the fall of the Roman Empire (if ever before it),” said an Englishman, “there has never been a time when Italy could be called a nation any more than a stack of timber can be called a ship.” This was true even in the days of the mediæval magnificence of the city-states, Venice, Genoa, Milan and Florence, Pisa and Rome. But in modern times Italy had become only a field for intriguing dynasties and the wars of jealous nations.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century Italy was strangely tranquil: Was she content at last with her slavery? Never that; the people had simply grown apathetic. Their spasmodic insurrections had always ended in a worse bondage than ever: their very religion was used to fasten their chains. Perhaps nothing could have served so well to wake them from this torpor of despair as the iron tread of the first Napoleon. The “Corsican tyrant” proved a beneficent counter-irritant — a wholesome, cleansing force throughout the land. It was good for Italy to be rid, if only for a little while, of Hapsburgs and Bourbons; to have the political divisions of the country reduced to three; to be amazed at the sight of justice administered fairly and taxation made equitable. But the most significant effect of the Napoleonic occupation was this, that the hearts of the Italians were stirred with a new consciousness: they had been shown the possibility of becoming a united race — of owning a nation which should not be a “mere geographical expression.”

And although 1815 brought the bad days of the Restoration, and the stupid, corrupt, or cruel princes climbed back again on their little thrones, and the map was made into pretty much the same old crazy-quilt, still it was not the same old Italy: all the diplomats at Vienna could not make things as they had been before. The new spirit of freedom came to life in the north, in the kingdom of Sardinia, that had made itself the most independent section of the country. In the beginning it was only Savoy, and the Dukes of Savoy, “owing,” as the Prince de Ligne said, “to their geographical position, which did not permit them to behave like honest men,” had swallowed, first, Piedmont; then, Sardinia; and then as many of the towns of Lombardy as they could. The restoration enriched the kingdom by the gift of Genoa, where, in 1806, Joseph Mazzini was born.

Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour — those names will be always thought of as one with the liberation of Italy.

Though frequently in open antagonism, yet the work of each of the three was necessary to the cause, and to each it was a holy cause, for which he was ready to make any sacrifice:

“Italia! when thy name was but a name,

When to desire thee was a vain desire,

When to achieve thee was impossible,

When to love thee was madness, when to live

For thee was the extravagance of fools,

When to die for thee was to fling away

Life for a shadow — in those darkest days

Were some who never swerved, who lived, and strove,

And suffered for thee, and attained their end.”

Of these devoted ones Mazzini was the prophet; his idealism undoubtedly made too great demands upon the human beings he worked for, but let us bear in mind that it needed a conception of absolute good to rouse the sluggish Italian mind from its materialism and Machiavellism. Mazzini wore black when a youth as “mourning for his country,” and when his university course was at an end he took up the profession of political agitator and joined the Carbonari.

But the greatest service he ever did his cause was the organisation of a new society — on a much higher plane than the Carbonari and its like. The movement was called “Young Italy,” famous for the spirit it raised from end to end of the peninsula. Among those attracted by Mazzini’s exalted utterance was the young Garibaldi, who, taking part in Mazzini’s rising of 1834, was condemned to death, and made his escape to South America. In constant service in the wars between the quarrelsome states he gained his masterly skill in guerilla warfare, which was afterwards to play so great a part in the liberation of his country. He did not return until it seemed as though the hour of Italy’s deliverance was at hand, in 1848, which only proved to be the “quite undress rehearsal” for the great events of 1859.

Garibaldi has been called “not a soldier but a saint.” Most great heroes, alas! have outlived their heroism, and their worshippers have outlived their worship; but Garibaldi has never been anything but the unselfish patriot who wanted everything for his country but nothing for himself. He has been described, on his return to Italy from South America, as “beautiful as a statue and riding like a centaur.”

“He was quite a show,” said the sculptor Gibson, “every one stopping to look at him.”

“Probably,” said another Englishman, “a human face so like a lion, and still retaining the ‘ humanity nearest the image of its Maker, was never seen.”

The third of the immortal Italian trio, Count Camillo de Cavour, was, like Mazzini and Garibaldi, a subject of the Sardinian kingdom. There was no prouder aristocracy in Europe than that of Piedmont, but Camillo seems to have drawn
his social theories from the all-pervading unrest that the great Revolution and Bonaparte had left in the air, rather than the assumed sources of heredity. In his tenth year he entered the military academy at Turin, and at the same time was appointed page to the Prince of Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert, father of Victor Emmanuel. This was esteemed a high honour, but it did not appeal to him in this light. When asked what was the costume of the pages, he replied, in a tone of disgust: “Parbleu! how would you have us dressed, except as lackeys, which we were? It made me blush with shame.”

His attitude of contempt for the place occasioned a prompt dismissal. At the academy he was so successful with mathematics that he left it at sixteen, having become sub-lieutenant in the engineers, although twenty years was the earliest age for this grade. He then joined the garrison at Genoa, but the military career had no allurements for him. Taking kindly to liberal ideas, he expressed himself so freely that the authorities transferred him to the little fortress of Bard, till, in 1831, he resigned his commission.

Having by nature a “diabolical activity” that demanded the widest scope for itself, he now took charge of a family estate at Leri, and went in for scientific farming.

“At the first blush,” he wrote, “agriculture has little attraction. The habitué of the salon feels a certain repugnance for works which begin by the analysis of dunghills and end in the middle of cattle-sheds. However, he will soon discover a growing interest, and that which most repelled him will not be long in having for him a charm which he never so much as expected.”

Although he began by not knowing a turnip from a potato, his invincible energy soon made him a capital farmer; his experiments were so daring that “the simple neighbours who came trembling to ask his advice stood aghast; he, always smiling, gay, affable, having for each a clear, concise counsel, an encouragement enveloped in a pleasantry.”

Besides agriculture, his interests extended to banks, railway companies, a manufactory for chemical fertilisers, steam mills for grinding corn, and a line of packets on the Lago Maggiore. During this time he visited England, and was to be seen night after night in the Strangers’ Gallery of the House of Commons, making himself master of the methods of parliamentary tactics, that were to be of such value to Italy in later years.

In 1847 Cavour started the
Risorgimento
, a journal whose programme was simply this: “Independence of Italy, union between the princes and peoples, progress in the path of reform, and a league between the Italian states.” As for Italian unity, “Let us,” Cavour would say, “do one thing at a time; let us get rid of the Austrians, and then — we shall see.” After returning from England in 1843 he wrote: “You may well talk to me of hell, for since I left you I live in a kind of intellectual hell, where intelligence and science are reputed infernal by him who has the goodness to govern us.”

The king, Charles Albert, had called him the most dangerous man in the kingdom, and he certainly was the most dangerous to the old systems of religious and political bigotry; but his work was educational; gradually he was enlightening the minds of the masses, and preventing a possible reign of terror. In 1848 he wrote: “What is it which has always wrecked the finest and justest of revolutions? The mania for revolutionary means; the men who have attempted to emancipate themselves from ordinary laws. Revolutionary means, producing the directory, the consulate, and the empire; Napoleon, bending all to his caprice, imagining that one can with a like facility conquer at the Bridge of Lodi and wipe out a law of nature. Wait but a little longer, and you will see the last consequence of your revolutionary means — Louis Napoleon on the throne!” Charles Albert, the king, who, as Prince Carignan, had been one of the Carbonari, and secretly hated Austria, has been accused of treachery and double dealing (he explained that he was “always between the dagger of the Carbonari and the chocolate of the Jesuits”); but the time came when he nobly redeemed his past. In 1845 he assured d’Azeglio that when Sardinia was ready to free herself from Austria, his life, his sons’ lives, his arms, his treasure, should all be freely spent in the Italian cause.

In February, 1848, he granted his people a constitution; a parliament was formed, Cavour becoming member for Turin.

In this month the Revolution broke out in Paris and penetrated to the heart of Vienna. Metternich was forced to fly his country; the Austrians left Milan; Venice threw off the yoke — all Italy revolted. The Pope, it is said, behaved badly, and left Rome free for Garibaldi to enter, with Mazzini enrolled as a volunteer.

Even the abominable Ferdinand of Sicily and the Grand Duke of Tuscany had been obliged to grant constitutions;
all the northern states had hastened to unite themselves to Sardinia by universal plebiscite. At the very beginning Charles Albert fulfilled his pledge; he placed himself at the head of his army and defied Austria.

But it was too soon: Austria was too strong. On the 23rd of March, 1849, Charles Albert was crushingly defeated by Radetsky at Novara. There, when night fell, he called his generals to him, and in their presence abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel, who knelt weeping before him. The pathos of despair was in his words: “Since I have not succeeded in finding death,” he said, “I must accomplish one last sacrifice for my country.”

He left the battle-field and his country without even visiting his home; six months later he was dead. “The magnanimous king,” his people called him.

The young Victor Emmanuel began his reign in a kingly fashion; pointing his sword towards the Austrian camp, he exclaimed: “Per Dio! d’Italia sarà.” It seemed at the time a mere empty boast — his little country was brought so close to the verge of ruin. The terms of peace imposed an Austrian occupation until the war indemnity of eighty million francs should be paid. Yet Cavour was heard to say that all their sacrifices were not too dear a price for the Italian tricolour in exchange for the flag of Savoy. It was not  until July that Rome fell — Rome, where Garibaldi had established a republic and Mazzini was a Triumvir!