Read the book: «The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864»

FIGHTING FACTS FOR FOGIES

Young people are often charged with caring little for the past. The charge is just; and the young are right. If they care little for the past, then it is certain that it is in debt to them,—as for them the past cared nothing. It is wonderful, considering how children used to be treated, that the human race ever succeeded in getting established on earth. Humanity should have died out, there was so little that was humane in its bringing up. Because they had contrived to bring a helpless creature into a world that every one wishes he had never known at least twenty-four times a day, a father and mother of the very old school indeed assumed that they had the right to make that creature a slave, and to hold it in everlasting chains. They had much to say about the duty of children, and very little about the love of parents. The sacrificing of children to idols, a not uncommon practice in some renowned countries of antiquity, the highest-born children being the favorite victims,—for Moloch's appetite was delicate,—could never have taken place in any country where the voice of Nature was heeded; and yet those sacrifices were but so many proofs of the existence of a spirit of pride, which caused men to offer up their offspring on the domestic altar. Son and slave were almost the same word with the Romans; and your genuine old Roman made little ado about cutting off the head of one of his boys, perhaps for doing something of a praiseworthy nature. Old Junius Brutus was doubly favored by Fortune, for he was enabled to kill two of his sons in the name of Patriotism, and thereby to gain a reputation for virtue that endures to this day,—though, after all, he was but the first of the brutes. The Romans kept up the paternal rule for many ages, and theoretically it long survived the Republic. It had existed in the Kingdom, and it was not unknown to the Empire. We have an anecdote that shows how strong was the supremacy of paterfamilias at the beginning of the eighth century, when Young Rome had already made more than one audacious display of contempt for the Conscript Fathers. When Pompeius was asked what he would do, if Cæsar should resist the requirements of the Senate, he answered,—"What if my son should raise his stick against me?"—meaning to imply, that, in his opinion, resistance from Cæsar was something too absurd to be thought of. Yet Cæsar did resist, and triumphed; and, judging from their after-lives, we should say that the Young Pompeys would have had small hesitation in raising their sticks against their august governor, had he proved too disobedient. A few years earlier, according to Sallust, a Roman, one Fulvius, had caused his son to be put to death, because he had sought to join Catiline. The old gentleman heard what his son was about, and when Young Hopeful was arrested and brought before him, he availed himself of his fatherly privilege, and had him strangled, or disposed of after some other of those charming fashions which were so common in the model republic of antiquity. "This imitation of the discipline of the ancient republic," says Merivale, "excited neither applause nor indignation among the languid voluptuaries of the Senate." They probably voted Fulvius a brute, but they no more thought of questioning the legality of his conduct than they did of imitating it. Law was one thing, opinion another. If he liked to play Lucius Junius, well and good; but they had no taste for the part. They felt much as we used to feel in Fugitive-Slave-Law times: we did not question the law, but we would have nothing to do with its execution.

Modern fathers have had no such powers as were held by those of Rome, and if an Englishman of Red-Rose views had killed his son for setting off to join Edward IV. when he had landed at Ravenspur, no one would think of praising the act. What was all right in a Roman of the year 1 of the Republic would be considered shocking in a Christian of the fifteenth century, a time when Christianity had become much diluted from the inter-mixture of blood. In the next century, poor Lady Jane Grey spoke of the torments which she had endured at the hands of her parents, who were of the noblest blood of Europe, in terms that ought to make every young woman thankful that her lot was not cast in the good old times. Roger Ascham was her confidant. He had gone to Brodegate, to take leave of her, and "found her in her chamber alone, reading Phædo Platonis in Greek, and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale of Boccace"; and as all the rest of the Greys were hunting in the park, the schoolmaster inquired why she should lose such pastime. The lady answered, that the pleasure they were having in the park was but the shadow of that pleasure she found in Plato. The conversation proceeding, Ascham inquired how it was that she had come to know such true pleasure, and she answered,—"I will tell you, and tell you a truth which perchance ye may marvel at. One of the greatest benefits God ever gave me is that he sent me so sharp and severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it as it were in such weight, number, and measure, even so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yea, presently, sometimes with pinches, nips, and bobs, and other ways, (which I will not name for the honor I bear them,) so without measure misordered, that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teacheth me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him. And when I am called from him, I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do else beside learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole misliking unto me. And thus my book hath been so much my pleasure, and bringeth daily more pleasure and more, that in respect of it all other pleasures, in very deed, be but trifles and troubles to me." The Duke and Duchess of Suffolk were neither better nor worse than other parents who tormented and tyrannized over their children temp. Edward VI., and nothing but the prominence of the most unfortunate of their unfortunate daughters has preserved the memory of their domestic despotism. Throughout all England it was the same, from palace to castle, and from castle to hovel; and father and tyrant were convertible terms. Youth must have been but a dreary time in those old days. Scott's Sir Henry Lee, according to his son, kept strict rule over his children, and he was a type of the antique knight, not of the debauched cavalier, and would be obeyed, with or without reason. The letters and the literature of the seventeenth century show, that, how loose soever became other ties, parents maintained their hold on their children with iron hands. Even the license of the Restoration left fatherly rule largely triumphant and undisputed. When even "husbands, of decent station, were not ashamed to beat their wives," sons and daughters were not spoiled by a sparing of the rod. Harshness was the rule in every grade of life, and harsh indeed was parental rule, until the reader wonders that there was not a general rebellion of women, children, scholars, and apprentices against the savage ascendency of husbands, fathers, pedagogues, and masters.

But the fashions of this world, whether good or evil, pass away. In the eighteenth century we find parents becoming more humane, though still keeping their offspring pretty stiffly bitted. They shared in the general melioration of the age. The father was "honored sir," and was not too familiar with his boys. The great outbreak at the close of the century did much for the emancipation of the young; and by the time that the present century had advanced to a third of its years, youth had so far got the best of the conflict, and treated their elders with so little consideration, that it was thought the latter were rather presumptuous in remaining on earth after fifty. Youth began to organize itself. Young Germany, Young France, and Young England became powers in the world. Young Germany was revolutionary and metaphysical, and nourished itself on bad beer and worse tobacco. Young France was full-bearded and decidedly dirty, and so far deferred to the past as to look for models in '93; and it had a strong reverence for that antique sentiment which exhibited itself in the assassination of kings. Young England was gentlemanly and cleanly, its leaders being of the patrician order; and it looked to the Middle Ages for patterns of conduct. Its chiefs wore white waistcoats, gave red cloaks and broken meat to old women, and would have lopped off three hundred years from Old England's life, by pushing her back to the early days of Henry VIII., when the religious houses flourished, and when the gallows was a perennial plant, bearing fruit that was not for the healing of the nations. Some of the cleverest of the younger members of the aristocracy belonged to the new organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in grappling with the grand social questions of the age. In "Coningsby" they sing canticles and carry about the boar's head; in "Sibyl" they sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from their immediate object; and in "Tancred" they go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, by way of reviving their faith. All this is so well done, that Young England will survive in literature, and be the source of edification, long after there shall be no more left of the dust of its chiefs than there is of the dust of Cheops or Cæsar. For all these youths are already vanished, leaving no more traces than you would find of the flowers that bloomed in the days of their lives. Young Germany went out immediately after the failure of the revolutionists of 1848-9. Young France thought it had triumphed in the fall of the Orléans monarchy, but had only taken the first long step toward making its own fall complete; and now some of its early members are of the firmest supporters of the new phase of imperialism, the only result of the Revolution of February that has given signs of endurance. Young England went out as soberly and steadily as it had lived. The select few who composed it died like gentlemen, and were as polite as Lord Chesterfield in the article of death. Some of them turned Whigs, and have held office under Lord Palmerston; and others are Tories, and expect to hold office under Lord Derby, when he shall form his third ministry. Young America, the worst of these youths, and the latest born, was never above an assassin in courage, or in energy equal to more than the plundering of a hen-roost. The fruits of his exertions are to be seen in some of the incidents of the Secession War, and they were not worth the gathering.

The world had settled down into the belief, that, after all, a man was not much to be blamed for growing old, and liberal-minded people were fast coming to the conclusion, that years, on the whole, were not dishonorable, when the breaking out of a great war led to the return of youth to consideration. The English found themselves at war with Russia, much to their surprise; and, still more to their surprise, their part in that war was made subordinate to that of the French, who acted with them, in the world's estimate of the deeds of the members of the new Grand Alliance. This is not the place to discuss the question whether that estimate was a just one. We have to do only with the facts that England was made to stand in the background and that she seemed at first disposed to accept the general verdict. There was, too, much mismanagement in the conduct of the war, some of which might easily have been avoided; and there was not a little suffering, as the consequence of that mismanagement. John Bull must have his scape-goat, like the rest of us; and, looking over the field, he discovered that all his leaders were old men, and forthwith, though the oldest of old fellows himself, he laid all his mishaps to the account of the years of his upper servants. Sir Charles Napier, who never got into St. Petersburg, was old, and had been a dashing sailor forty years before. Admiral Dundas, who did not destroy Sweaborg, but only burned a lot of corded wood there in summer time, was another old sailor. Lord Raglan, who never saw the inside of Sebastopol, was well stricken in years, having served in Wellington's military family during the Peninsular War. General Simpson, Sir C. Campbell, General Codrington, Sir G. Brown, Sir G. Cathcart, and others of the leaders of the English army in the Crimea, were of the class of gentlemen who might, upon meeting, furnish matter for a paragraph on "united ages." What more natural than to attribute all that was unpleasant in the war to the stagnated blood of men who had heard the music of that musketry before which Napoleon I.'s empire had gone down? The world went mad on the subject, and it was voted that old generals were nuisances, and that no man had any business in active war who was old enough to have much experience. Age might be venerable, but it was necessarily weak; and the last place in which it should show itself was the field.

It was not strange that the English should have come to the conclusion that the fogies were unfit to lead armies. They were in want of an excuse for their apparent failure in the war, and they took the part that was suggested to them,—therein behaving no worse than ourselves, who have accounted for our many reverses in many foolish and contradictory ways. But it was strange that their view was accepted by others, whose minds were undisturbed, because unmistified,—and accepted, too, in face of the self-evident fact that almost every man who figured in the war was old. Maréchal Pelissier,¹ to whom the chief honor of the contest has been conceded, was but six years the junior of Lord Raglan; and if the Englishman's sixty-six years are to count against age in war, why should not the Frenchman's sixty years count for it? Prince Gortschakoff, who defended Sebastopol so heroically, was but four years younger than Lord Raglan; and Prince Paskevitch was more than six years his senior. Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years when the war began. Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and lost the Battle of the Alma. The Russian war was an old man's war, and the stubbornness with which it was waged had in it much of that ugliness which belongs to age.

 
"The young man's wrath is like light straw on fire.
But like red-hot steel is the old man's ire."
 

What rendered the attacks that were made on old generals in 1854-6 the more absurd was the fact, that the English called upon an old man to relieve them from bad government, and were backed by other nations. Lord Palmerston, upon whom all thoughts and all eyes were directed, was older than any one of those generals to whose years Englishmen attributed their country's failure. When, with the all but universal approbation of Great Britain and her friends, he became Prime-Minister, he was in his seventy-first year, and his action showed that his natural force was not abated. He was called to play the part of the elder Pitt at a greater age than Pitt reached; and he did not disappoint expectation. It is strange indeed, considering that the Premiership was a more difficult post to fill than that held by any English general, that the English should rely upon the oldest of their active statesmen to retrieve their fortunes, while they were condemning as unfit for service men who were his juniors by several years.

In truth, the position that youth is necessary to success in war is not sustained by military history. It may he no drawback to a soldier's excellence that he is young, but it is equally true that an old man may possess every quality that is necessary in a soldier who would serve his country well and win immortal fame for himself. The best of the Greek commanders were men in advanced life, with a few exceptions. The precise age of Miltiades at Marathon is unproven; but as he had become a noted character almost thirty years before the date of that most memorable of battles, he must have been old when he fought and won it. Even Alcibiades, with whom is associated the idea of youth through his whole career, as if Time had stood still in his behalf, did not have a great command until he was approaching to middle age; and it was not until some years more had expired that he won victories for the Athenians. The date of the birth of Epaminondas—the best public man of all antiquity, and the best soldier of Greece—cannot be fixed; but we find him a middle-aged man when first he appears on that stage on which he performed so pure and brilliant a part through seventeen eventful years. Eight years after he first came forward he won the Battle of Leuctra, which shattered the Spartan supremacy forever, and was the most perfect specimen of scientific fighting that is to be found in classical history, and which some of the greatest of modern commanders have been proud merely to imitate. After that action, but not immediately after it, he invaded the Peloponnesus, and led his forces to the vicinity of Sparta, and then effected a revolution that bridled that power perpetually. Nine years after Leuctra he won the Battle of Mantinea, dying on the field. He must then have been an old man, but the last of his campaigns was a miracle of military skill in all respects; and the effect of his death was the greatest that ever followed the fall of a general on a victorious field, actually turning victory into defeat. The Spartan king, Agesilaus II., who was a not unworthy antagonist of the great Theban, was an old man, and was over seventy when he saved Sparta solely through his skill as a soldier and his energy as a statesman. As a rule, the Greeks, the most intellectual of all races, were averse to the employment of young men in high offices. The Spartan Brasidas, if it be true that he fell in the flower of his age, as the historian asserts, may have been a young man at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in which he was eminently distinguished; but it was his good fortune to be singularly favored by circumstances on more than one occasion, and his whole career was eminently exceptional to the general current of Hellenic life.

The Romans, though not braver than the Greeks, were more fortunate in their military career than the stayers of the march of Persia. Like the Greeks, they had but few young generals of much reputation. Most of their conquests, and, indeed, the salvation of their country, were the work of old leaders. The grand crisis of Rome was in the years that followed the arrival of Hannibal in Italy; and the two men who did most to baffle the invader were Fabius and Marcellus, who were called, respectively, Rome's shield and sword. They were both old men, though Marcellus may have been looked upon as young in comparison with Fabius, who was upward of seventy, and who, eight years after his memorable pro-dictatorship, retook Tarentum and baffled Hannibal. The old Lingerer was, at eighty, too clever, slow as they thought him at Rome, to be "taken in" by Hannibal, who had prepared a nice trap for him, into which he would not walk. Marcellus was about fifty-two when he was pitted against the victor of Cannæ, and he met him on various occasions, and sometimes with striking success. At the age of fifty-six he took Syracuse, after one of the most memorable of sieges, in which he had Archimedes for an opponent. At sixty he was killed in a skirmish, leaving the most brilliant military name of the republican times, so highly are valor and energy rated, though in the higher qualities of generalship he was inferior to men whose names are hardly known. Undoubtedly, Mommsen is right when he says that Rome was saved by the Roman system, and not by the labors of this man or that; but it is something for a country to have men who know how to work under its system, and in accordance with its requirements; and such men were Fabius and Marcellus, the latter old enough to be Hannibal's father, while the former was the contemporary of his grandfather.

The turning point in the Second Punic War was the siege of Capua by the Romans. That siege Hannibal sought by all means in his power to raise, well knowing, that, if the Campanian city should fall, he could never hope to become master of Italy. He marched to Rome in the expectation of compelling the besiegers to hasten to its defence; but without effect. Two old Romans commanded the beleaguering army, and while one of them, Q. Fulvius, hastened home with a small force, the other, Appius Claudius, carried on the siege. Hannibal had to retreat, and Capua fell, the effect of the tenacity with which ancient generals held on to their prey. Had they been less firm, the course of history would have been changed. At a later period of the war, Rome was saved from great danger, if not from destruction, by the victory of the Metaurus, won by M. Livius Salinator and C. Claudius Nero. Nero was an elderly man, having been conspicuous for some years, and the consular age being forty. His colleague was a very old man, having been consul before the war began, and having long lived in retirement, because he had been unjustly treated. The Romans now forced him to take office, against his wish, though his actions and his language were of the most insulting character. A great union of parties had taken place, for Hasdrubal was marching to Italy, for the purpose of effecting a junction with his brother Hannibal, and it was felt that nothing short of perfect union could save the State. The State was saved, the two old consuls acting together, and defeating and slaying Hasdrubal in the last great battle of the war that was fought in Italy. The old fogies were too much for their foe, a much younger man than either of them, and a soldier of high reputation.

It must be admitted, however, that the Second Punic War is fairly quotable by those who insist upon the superiority of youthful generals over old ones, for the two greatest men who appeared in it were young leaders,—Hannibal, and Publius Cornelius Scipio, the first Africanus. No man has ever exceeded Hannibal in genius for war. He was one of the greatest statesmen that ever lived, and he was so because he was the greatest of soldiers. He might have won pitched battles as a mere general, but it was his statesmanship that enabled him to contend for sixteen years against Rome, in Italy, though Rome was aided by Carthaginian copperheads. But, though a young general, Hannibal was an old soldier when he led his army from the Ebro to the Trebia, as the avenging agent of his country's gods. His military as well as his moral training began in childhood; and when his father, Hamilcar Barcas,² was killed, Hannibal, though but eighteen, was of established reputation in the Carthaginian service. Eight years later he took the place which his father and brother-in-law had held, called to it by the voice of the army. During those eight years he had been constantly employed, and he brought to the command an amount and variety of experience such as it has seldom been the lot of even old generals to acquire. Years brought no decay to his faculties, and we have the word of his successful foe, that at Zama, when he was forty-five, he showed as much skill as he had displayed at Cannæ, when he was but thirty-one. Long afterward, when an exile in the East, his powers of mind shine as brightly as they did when he crossed the Pyrenees and the Alps to fulfil his oath. Scipio, too, though in a far less degree than Hannibal, was an old soldier. He had been often employed, and was present at Cannæ, before he obtained that proconsular command in Spain which was the worthy foundation of his fortunes. The four years that he served in that country, and his subsequent services in Africa, qualified him to meet Hannibal, whose junior he was by thirteen years. That he was Hannibal's superior, because he defeated him at Zama, with the aid of Masinissa, no more follows than that Wellington was Napoleon's superior, because, with the aid of Blücher, he defeated him at Waterloo. It would not be more difficult to account for the loss of the African field than it is to account for the loss of the Flemish field, by the superior genius. The elder Africanus is the most exceptional character in all history, and it is impossible to place him. He seems never to have been young, and we cannot associate the idea of age with him, even when he is dying at Liternum at upwards of fifty. He was a man at seventeen, when first he steps boldly out on the historic page, and there is no apparent change in him when we find him leading great armies, and creating a new policy for the redemption of Italy from the evils of war. He was intended to be a king, but he was born two centuries too early to be of any use to his country in accordance with his genius, out of the field. Such a man is not to be judged as a mere soldier, and we were inclined not to range him on the side of youthful generals; but we will be generous, and, in consideration of his years, permit him to be claimed by those who insist that war is the business of youth.

At later periods, Rome's greatest generals were men who were old. The younger Africanus was fifty-one at Numantia, Marius did not obtain the consulship until he was fifty; and he was fifty-five when he won his first great victory over the Northern barbarians, and a year older when he completed their destruction. Sulla was past fifty when he set out to meet the armies of Mithridates, which he conquered; and he was fifty-six when he made himself master of his country, after one of the fiercest campaigns on record. Pompeius distinguished himself when very young, but it is thought that the title of "the Great" was conferred upon him by Sulla in a spirit of irony. The late Sir William Napier, who ought to have been a good judge, said that he was a very great general, and in a purely military sense perhaps greater than Cæsar. He was fifty-eight in the campaign of Pharsalia, and if he then failed, his failure must be attributed to the circumstances of his position, which was rather that of a party leader than of a general; and a party leader, it has been truly said, must sometimes obey, in order that at other times he may command. Pompeius delivered battle at Pharsalia against his own judgment. The "Onward to Rome!" cry of the fierce aristocrats was too strong to be resisted; and "their general yielded with a sigh to the importunities of his followers, declaring that he could no longer command, and must submit to obey." Not long before he had beaten Cæsar at Dyrrachium, with much loss to the vanquished, completely spoiling his plans; and the great contest might have had a very different result, had not political and personal considerations been permitted to outweigh those of a military character. Politicians are pests in a camp. Cæsar was in his fifty-first year when he crossed the Rubicon and began his wonderful series of campaigns in the Civil War,—campaigns characterized by an almost superhuman energy. The most remarkable of his efforts was that which led to his last appearance in the field, at the Battle of Munda, where he fought for existence; he was then approaching fifty-five, and he could not have been more active and energetic, had he been as young as Alexander at Arbela.

In modern days, the number of old generals who have gained great battles is large, far larger than the number of young generals of the highest class. The French claim to be the first of military peoples, and though no other nation has been so badly beaten in battles, or so completely crushed in campaigns, there is a general disposition to admit their claim; and many of their best commanders were old men. Bertrand du Gueselin performed his best deeds against the English after he was fifty, and he was upward of sixty years when the commandant of Randon laid the keys of his fortress on his body, surrendering, not to the living, but to the dead. Turenne was ever great, but it is admitted that his three last campaigns, begun when he was sixty-two, were his greatest performances. Condé's victory at Rocroi was a most brilliant deed, he being then but twenty-two; but it does not so strikingly illustrate his genius as do those operations by which, at fifty-four, he baffled Montecuculi, and prevented him from profiting from the fall of Turenne. Said Condé to one of his officers, "How much I wish that I could have conversed only two hours with the ghost of Monsieur de Turenne, so as to be able to follow the scope of his ideas!" In these days, generals can have as much ghostly talk as they please, but the privilege would not seem to be much used, or it is not useful, for they do nothing that is of consequence sufficient to be attributed to supernatural power. Luxembourg was sixty-two when he defeated Prince Waldeck at Fleurus; and at sixty-four and sixty-five he defeated William III. at Steinkirk and Landen. Vendôme was fifty-one when he defeated Eugène at Cassano; and at fifty-six he won the eventful Battle of Villaviciosa, to which the Spanish Bourbons owe their throne. Villars, who fought the terrible Battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugène, was then fifty-six years old; and he had more than once baffled those commanders. At sixty he defeated Eugène, and by his successes enabled France to conclude honorably a most disastrous war. The Comte de Saxe was in his forty-ninth year when he gained the Battle of Fontenoy;³ and later he won other successes. Rochambeau was in his fifty-seventh year when he acted with Washington at Yorktown, in a campaign that established our existence as a nation.