Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland

C. Kennedy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137316530
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

The volume explores how the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were experienced, perceived and narrated by contemporaries in Britain and Ireland, drawing on an extensive range of personal testimonies by soldiers, sailors and civilians to shed new light on the social and cultural history of the period and the history of warfare more broadly.

1

Narrating War

I feel half ashamed to intrude on your agreeable Pursuits with my Letters, but you live in the Country enough to know & feel one’s Avidity for News concerning the great Mart of Intelligence – London, whence I no longer expect to hear Talk of Impossible Descents of French Imperialists.

Hesther Piozzi, Brynbella to John Lloyd, London, 14 June 1804¹

I will now give you some account of our late expedition. Though you must not expect a minute detail of the operations, as that would be totally out of my power and entirely foreign to my present purpose. I will briefly relate what happened within my own knowledge, and should there be an error in my Orthography, I shall trust to you to make an excuse, provided you show this Epistle to any of your friends, as I am fully aware of my own inability in writing for public perusal.

Lieutenant John Christopher Harrison, Colchester Barracks, 20 November 1807²

What does it mean to privilege personal writings as a source for the study of warfare? What do letters, diaries and other first-person narratives reveal that other official or public documents – institutional records, newspaper reports, literary and visual representations – may not? Most obviously, their value can be understood to lie in the subjective, personal viewpoint which they appear to afford and their proximity, whether physical or temporal, to the events they describe. Yet, Lieutenant Harrison’s letter describing his recent involvement in the bombardment of Copenhagen, quoted above, suggests how even accounts of extreme experiences can be alert to style, audience and reception. Such texts can be viewed neither as repositories of raw, unmediated experience nor as the private outpourings of an authentic self. We therefore need to be attentive to the generic conventions that structured these documents, their envisaged audiences, the languages upon which they drew and the purposes for which they were written.

By the 1790s the post boy had been replaced by new high-speed mail coaches which connected together provincial and metropolitan cultures.³ While London remained the epicentre of a network of news and correspondence, the ‘great Mart of Intelligence’ as Hesther Thrale Piozzi described it, private letters as well as the public press allowed rural residents like Piozzi to keep abreast of the latest reports from the capital. The introduction of a military postal service, meanwhile, ensured that the letters of serving soldiers and sailors filled columns of newsprint and provided a vital source of information on the fortunes and experiences of those fighting overseas. As developments in the postal system expanded the circulation of personal accounts of the wars, the unparalleled scale and intensity of these conflicts combined with new modes of literary expression to foster an enhanced appreciation of the subjective impact of warfare. The soldier’s and sailor’s tale of war, it has recently been argued, changed in this period as combatants began to write with greater sensitivity about the ‘inner experience of war’ and to stress the uniqueness of that experience.⁴ According to Peter Fritzsche, the momentous events set in train by the French Revolution and the wars that followed meant that civilians too began to understand themselves ‘as taking part in historical struggles and accordingly put value on their contributions and testimonies’. The result was a proliferation of vernacular, unauthoritative narratives of public events described in memoirs, letters and diaries.⁵

Although discussions concerning the value of personal testimony have moved on from questions of ‘reliability’, the representativeness of this category of sources, which, after all, only represent the thoughts and experiences of a fraction of the literate population and which, by definition, provide a particularized, subjective window onto historical processes, remains open to debate.⁶ It may be impossible to construct a coherent picture of wartime subjectivity out of such ‘kaleidoscopic fragments’, but certain patterns can be traced.⁷ This chapter considers some of the distinctive features and literary contexts of three main categories of war writing – combatants’ letters and journals; prisoner of war narratives; and texts that record civilian experience – and suggests how the multiple influences that shape such texts add to rather than detract from their richness as a source for the study of wartime mentalities.

Writing and fighting

Since the publication of Paul Fussell’s seminal study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), both historians and literary scholars have paid increasing attention to the narrative construction of the ‘soldiers’ tale’ in the twentieth century: the elisions and distortions resulting from censorship and the translation of combat experience into language, their indebtedness to prevailing literary and cultural conventions, and their relationship to processes of personal and collective remembrance.⁸ Until recently, war narratives from earlier periods have not received the same degree of analysis.⁹ Yet in several respects our understanding of military experience can profit from such an approach, particularly when it comes to debates around the ‘communicability’ of war experience and the gulf in understanding that can open up between military and civilian realms during wartime.

The letter is in many ways emblematic of the separations occasioned by war, between the soldier and his friends or family and between the military and civilian worlds. It is perhaps for this reason that the letter from a soldier at the front to a woman at home has been viewed as the ‘classic war-text’.¹⁰ This close relationship between the letter form and the experience of war can itself be traced to the eighteenth century, often described as the ‘century of the letter’.¹¹ Throughout the period, the epistolary genre was the favoured form in novel writing. Works such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Heloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) presented the letter as a mode of expression especially suited to personal effusions of sentiment and sensibility. While the epistolary novel portrayed the letter as vehicle for natural, spontaneous and private communication, eighteenth-century letter-writing practice was in fact a highly crafted, rhetorical act, a social performance that staged the self for a particular audience.¹² The proliferation of letter-writing manuals offering models of epistolary composition attests to the highly stylized nature of the eighteenth-century letter. These manuals provided templates appropriate to a vast range of social and professional circumstances including, by the end of the century, letters from military personnel. The New Universal Letter Writer (1795), for instance, contained model letters specifically for military correspondents, including one ‘From a Young Officer in the Army to a Gentleman’s Daughter, with whom he is in love’ and another ‘From a Young Officer ordered to his Regiment in Minorca to a young Lady whom he had courted’.¹³ The latter offers a fairly typical example of the overwrought display of emotional anguish and suffering characteristic of the ‘culture of sensibility’, as the officer reflects upon the cruel separations caused by war:

What unhappiness to us, and devastation among the human race has the ambition of princes & the perfidiousness of ministers occasioned! Husbands obliged to leave their beloved wives and dear little children; every relation is broken ... Did you know my dear what a struggle I have between my love and duty, you would consider me an object of compassion.¹⁴

Articulating a residual understanding of war as the instrument of ambitious princes and scheming ministers rather than the concern of the nation, this model letter foregrounds the tension between the soldier’s civilian and military identities, between ‘love and duty’. There seems to have been little expectation that the soldier correspondent should adopt the heroic language of a national war effort; rather it was the language of intimacy and affection that was deemed appropriate to such epistolary communication.

The cultivation of seemingly unforced intimacy and emotion advocated in such manuals was an important aspect of wartime correspondence.¹⁵ Men serving with the military often had clear expectations of how contemporary letter-writing conventions should shape their own and their correspondents’ letters. Frustrated by the brevity of his wife’s letters, William Wilkson, master of a naval gunship, provided instructions on how to write more expressively. She might, he suggested, look to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, who excelled at intimate epistolarity, as a ‘caracter [sic] highly worthy of imitation’.¹⁶ ‘I should imagine you would feel a pleasure in excelling in that art’ he chided:

of communicating our Ideas to each other on paper, which I think is the greatest blessing we can possess when absent from each other, why should we not converse as if we were immediately together, the intent of letter writing is that the person writing should conceive the person that he writes to, to be by the side of him, and to write as familiar as if he were talking to him alone.¹⁷

Soldiers and sailors were often conscious of the need to make their letters interesting and amusing for their recipients. Whilst letters to male correspondents tended to go into some detail about military strategy and tactics, or opportunities for promotion, letters to female relatives and friends adopted a lighter, more intimate style that blended expressions of affection with regimental gossip and anecdotal observations on the character and landscape of the countries through which they travelled.¹⁸

In recognition of the importance of epistolary communication to soldiers and their families, the British army established the first field post office during the Duke of York’s expedition to the Helder in 1799. During the Peninsular campaign, a Sergeant Postmaster was appointed to manage army communications and intelligence. Soldiers and sailors understood the importance of letters home in assuring families and friends of their health and safety, particularly after a battle. If wounded, they were anxious to reassure their correspondents before the lists of casualties were publicly printed. During the siege of Toulon, Philip Hay wrote to his mother, ‘in the greatest distress imaginable for fear you sho’d see the Public papers before you receive this Letter, true I am wounded but not at all dangerously’.¹⁹

Despite the concessionary rates for the rank and file, relatively few letters from ordinary soldiers have survived. Although regimental and garrison schools for ordinary soldiers had been in existence since the seventeenth century, with a more extensive system of regimental education introduced by the Duke of York in 1811, signature literacy for private soldiers has been estimated at around 41 per cent and many members of the other ranks would have lacked the writing skills necessary to correspond with their families.²⁰ Those who could write seem to have done so infrequently and their letters tended to be brief, functional and fragmentary. The correspondence of Private James Reid shows the effort some soldiers made to communicate with their families. His first letters home after joining the 92nd regiment were not in his own hand, but his writing gained in confidence as his military service progressed. In 1804 he informed his sister that ‘I was practicing myself in reading and writing all times when I can get an opportunity of doying [sic] so and this is my own hand of writ [sic]’.²¹ The practical as well as emotional functions of the ordinary soldier’s letter home were underlined in Reid’s instructions that ‘when you do not recive [sic] letters from me you may know all is not well with me, if I should fall in the field & not return home you will keep this letter ... and go to the Pay Master of the District ... and collect my Copenhagen Prize money’.²²

While the letter played an important role in maintaining the intimate and affective bonds between combatants and those at home, they cannot be read as purely private or personal documents. The eighteenth-century letter writer was acutely aware that even if he or she did not write for publication, their letter could be circulated amongst a much broader group than those to whom it was addressed and might also find its way into print.²³ Though soldiers regularly complained that the British newspaper reading public knew more about the progress of a campaign than members of the army, their letters could still be seen as a key source of information from the front line. Sometimes soldiers asked their correspondents not to show their letters outside the family.²⁴ Others clearly wrote for a broader audience and saw themselves as supplementing public reports on the war. Following the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, John Christopher Harrison sent his father a detailed account of the expedition which included transcriptions of official documents, general orders and the articles of capitulation, as well as his personal diary of the campaign.²⁵ Writing from Spain in 1812, Lieutenant George Hennell expressed his gratification on learning that his description of the storming of Badajoz had given a ‘great deal of pleasure to many’ and ‘that many approved the style of writing’.²⁶

Throughout the wars, personal letters from members of the army and navy were published in the press. In the 1790s The Times established the first foreign news offices commissioning letters from abroad in order to publish ‘its own epistolary version of the war.’²⁷ While there was no official censorship in operation during this period, Wellington testily declared the British army ‘the most indefatigable writers of letters and news that existed in the world’ and issued a general order in 1810 urging his officers to be more discreet in their published correspondence. Eager to see how the war was represented to the British public, officers paid close attention to, and often commen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Narrating War
• 2  Becoming Soldiers and Sailors
• 3  Combat and Campaign
• 4  Travellers in Uniform
• 5  Prisoners of War
• 6  Citizen-Soldiers
• 7  Bringing the War Back Home
• Conclusion: A Waterloo Panorama
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index