Agustina Raimunda María Saragossa Domènech was just 18 years old when she found herself besieged in the northern Spanish city of Zaragoza in the summer of 1808. Though the city had not seen war for 450 years, the population rose up with much of the rest of the country as part of the Dos de Mayo (2 May) uprising against the French who had seized power in Spain and replaced the rightful monarch with Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte. The rising was mostly quickly and brutally suppressed but Zaragoza held out and Marshal Bessieres, in command of French forces in north east Spain, detached General Lefebvre-Desnouettes with 6000 troops to take the city.
Their first assault was bloodily repulsed but the French were reinforced by 3000 more troops under General Verdier who, being senior to Lefebvre, took command. The second assault on 2 July was more determined and breached the Portillo, an ancient gateway into the city defended by a hodgepodge battery of old cannons and a heavily outnumbered volunteer unit. Agustina’s lover was an artillery sergeant in this unit and she was delivering food to him when she was caught up in the attack.
The story then merges into myth. The Spanish defenders were wavering under the onslaught. Agustina’s lover and his gun crew had been killed before they could fire off their last round. It is said that the young woman ran forward, snatched the lighted match from her dead lover’s hand and fired the cannon. The leading French attackers, hit by grapeshot at point blank range were mown down, the Spanish defenders rallied and the attack was thrown back.
Fierce fighting continued for a few days then dragged on inconclusively for three more weeks before the French abandoned the siege. Though they would be back.
In December of the same year the French returned. Initially under the command of General Junot, the French progressed slowly but in January 1809 command was taken over by Marshal Lannes, one Napoleon’s most competent marshals. He accelerated the attack. The walls were breached at the end of January but rather than surrender, the defenders set about defending the city street by street.
Pestilence broke out in the city and by the 19 February the Spanish commander, José de Palafox, sued for surrender. The defence had cost the lives of approximately 20000 soldiers and 35000 civilians. The French lost close on 10000 men, more than half to sickness. The city was a devastated wreck.
Agustina was captured, her baby child killed. But subsequently she mounted a daring escape from captivity and became the leader of a guerrilla band organising harassing raids and attacks on the French occupying army. As the strategic situation deteriorated for the French Army, her role became increasingly orthodox as supplies and training were covertly provided by the Duke of Wellington.
By now the legend of Agustina of Aragón was folklore.
After the war, she married a doctor and, late in life, she became a familiar sight in Zaragoza as a respectable old lady, wearing medals, who used to go for walks around the Portillo. Agustina died at the age of 71 in Ceuta.
Agustina’s heroism became a popular subject for artists both contemporary and later. The only truly identifiable person in Goya’s “The Disasters of War” is Agustina firing her cannon. Modern culture too wouldn’t let go of the legend. Her story was one of the first subject of silent film in Spain when the epic “Agustina of Aragon” was released in 1929. It was followed by a remake in 1950.
Category history
Twenty thousand leagues (ok, 20 feet) under the sea…
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world’s first commercially successful steamboat in 1807 that plied a route between New York City and Albany. However, it is his earlier adventures with prototype submarine warfare that I am making the subject of this post.
In the mid 1790s he went to Paris where his reputation as an inventor was already known and petitioned the French government to support his design for “a machine which flatters me with much hope of being able to annihilate their [England’s] Navy.” That machine was a submarine.
In Fulton’s design the submarine would tow an underwater bomb (which he called a torpedo) to be planted under enemy vessels. The initial response was positive and after some negotiations, the American inventor delivered a detailed plan for a vessel he baptized the “Nautilus”. However, before construction began, the Minister of Marine cancelled the project. A year later, after a change of minister, Fulton pressed again and a specially appointed commission examined his designs and recommended proceeding with the construction of the submarine. However, the government still prevaricated.
After the coup of 18 Brumaire, which elevated Napoleon to power, Fulton decided to insist one more time. In 1800, he sent a letter to the Minister of Marine with a proposal to build the Nautilus. The American inventor was convinced that his submarine would bring to an end the supremacy of the Royal Navy. Napoleon learned about the project and appointed a commission to study its feasibility. Fulton subsequently built and launched the Nautilus and conducted several successful trials first in Paris and then at Le Havre.
“Navigation under water is an operation whose possibility is proved,” he confidently wrote to the members of the commission in November 1800. In February 1801, the Minister of Marine wrote to Fulton saying that Napoleon had approved his proposals and that he would be paid 10,000 francs to improve and test the Nautilus at Brest. Fulton moved there for a few months and conducted several successful experiments.
“I conceived every experiment of importance to be proved in the most satisfactory manner,” he wrote to the commissioners in September 1801. He also wrote again to Napoleon but received no response and with the signing of the Treaty of Luneville and the subsequent Peace of Amiens, Napoleon’s interest in Fulton’s proposals waned completely.
But the British authorities had taken note of Fulton’s experiments and disappointed as he was at the lack of enthusiasm for his projects in France he was quick to switch sides and move to the potential financial rewards on offer on the other side of the Channel. By the spring of 1804 Fulton had moved to London where he submitted both innovations (submarine and torpedo) to the Admiralty. At that time the British government feared Napoleon’s invasion and it was thought Fulton’s innovations could help derail it. After some negotiations Fulton signed a contract with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, for the use of his plan “of attacking fleets by submarine bombs.”
The initial trials for the torpedo were not successful. There was lack of enthusiasm from the Admiralty but Pitt continued to give his support. Finally, on October 1805 the American inventor succeeded in blowing up a brig with his torpedo. However, this success, which showed the power of submarine explosions, alarmed the British naval establishment. In an interview with Fulton the Earl St. Vincent, now First Lord of the Admiralty, said that in his view “Pitt was the greatest fool that ever existed, to encourage a mode of war which they who commanded the seas did not want, and which, if successful, would deprive them of it.”
Unfortunately for Fulton, Nelson had just destroyed French and Spanish naval power at the battle of Trafalgar rendering torpedoes unnecessary in the eyes of the Admiraly. And to make matters worse for Fulton, Pitt, who had been one of his most important supporters, died in early 1806. During the rest of that year, the American inventor became embroiled in a bitter negotiation with the British government to get paid what he believed were his fees. With no success, at the end of 1806 Fulton left for New York. There, though Fulton continued to experiment with torpedoes and submarines, his focus shifted to the development of a steamboat.
Captain Nemo’s Nautilus
Submarines would have to wait and they were still notions of fancy when Jules Verne commandeered the name of Fulton’s submarine for his own creation in 1870; Captain Nemo’s vessel in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Painter of battles and fantasy myths…
Gros as a young man
On the 26th of June 1835 a body washed up on the banks of the Seine at Meudon, near Sèvres. The artist Antoine-Jean Gros’ longstanding sense of personal failure compounded by his abiding melancholic nature had finally become too much for him to bear and he had committed suicide.
But his career had always been one of emotional conflict, his naturally romantic flair often at odds with the coolly cerebral neo-classical style in favour with his closest contemporaries. In the end he could not arrive at a balance between the styles that satisfied himself and his critics and ultimately that exacerbated his own sense of failure. In hindsight though, it can be seen that Gros’ style was a major influence on the likes of Gericault and Delacroix who followed him. It is a tragedy that he could not see that for himself.
Perhaps though it is as Napoleon’s official “painter of battles” that Gros is best remembered and in a few short years after Napoleon’s coronation he became famous for his grand representations of Napoleon at his most dashing and heroic all of which were aimed at enhancing the myth of the Emperor; in the end, closer to fantasy than fact.
Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole
It was on a visit to Genoa that Gros met Josephine de Beauharnais who, in turn, introduced him to Napoleon. In 1796 Gros was with the French army at the Battle of Arcole and saw Napoleon famously lead the attack on the bridge. This incident he immortalized in his first major work, Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole.
A succession of grand tableaux followed:– Napoleon Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa, the Battle of Aboukir, Napoleon on the Battlefield at Eylau.
But after the fall of Napoleon, the principal subject of his grand, mythologizing propaganda paintings, Gros’ star rapidly waned. None of his later works were received with the same enthusiasm as his earlier pictures and his melancholy, stoked by constant sniping from the exiled Jacques Louis David, gradually became all consuming.
A pact with the devil…?
On 12 January 2010 an earthquake devastated the Caribbean nation of Haiti resulting in the death of over a quarter of a million people. The following day, on his TV show, sitting comfortably in his armchair, the conservative US evangelist, Pat Robertson, pronounced that the tragedy could be blamed on something that “happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it.” This abject apology for a human being then went on to describe how the Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever [sic]. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ ”
Apart from knowing nothing about history, assuming anyone called Napoleon must be the same guy, this half-wit chose glibly to ignore the fact that the Haitian revolution led to the creation of Haiti as an independent country as a result of the only successful slave revolt in history. For the purpose of my post I will choose to ignore the Old Testament story of the Israelites being delivered from slavery in Egypt by Yahweh under the leadership of Moses – no doubt Pat Robertson wouldn’t be happy.
At the end of the 18th century Saint Domingue, as Haiti was then known, was France’s most profitable colony and half a million enslaved Africans were forced to toil on spectacularly bountiful plantations, which produced 60 per cent of all coffee and 40 per cent of all sugar consumed in Europe, more than all of Britain’s Caribbean colonies combined.
Historically, conditions for the slaves in Saint Domingue had been the harshest in the Caribbean. They were worked so hard by French plantation owners that half died within a few years; it was cheaper to import new slaves than to improve working conditions enough to increase survival and to sustain the slave workforce 30,000 slaves a year were being transported from Africa. The rate of death of slaves in Saint Domingue was higher than anywhere else in the western hemisphere. It was legal for a slaveholder to kill a slave. Torture of slaves was routine; they were whipped, mutilated and raped. The favoured form of execution was burning at the stake.
The Catholic Church condoned slavery and the practices used in the French colony, viewing the institution as a way to convert Africans to Christianity! (Pat wouldn’t be appreciative of that either.)
With the coming of the French Revolution, and the promotion of universal ideals of liberty and equality, the status quo became increasingly difficult to maintain in Saint Domingue. Plantation owners in Haiti tried to block the “dangerous” ideas coming from Paris, but the ideas spread among the slaves through smuggled pamphlets and by word of mouth.
The tinderbox ignited on the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint Domingue rose in revolt. Within weeks, the number of slaves who joined the revolt reached some 100,000. Within the next two months, as the violence escalated, the slaves killed 4,000 whites and destroyed hundreds plantations.
By 1792, slave rebels controlled a third of the island and the following year events took a dramatic turn when the new French Republic found itself at war with Britain and Spain. Britain sent an expeditionary force to Hispaniola and, with Spain, who controlled the rest of the island, invaded Saint Domingue and were joined by the slave forces. To prevent military disaster, and secure the colony for republican France, the French political commissioners freed the slaves in Saint Domingue.
Toussaint L’Ouverture
The promise of emancipation persuaded the leader of the slave forces, Toussaint L’Ouverture, to switch sides and stop collaborating with the Spanish who refused to take steps to end slavery.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, a self-educated former domestic slave, was very intelligent, organized and articulate. A charismatic military leader, he essentially restored control of Saint-Domingue to France. Having made himself master of the island, however, Toussaint did not wish to surrender too much power to France. He began to rule the country as an effectively autonomous entity. Toussaint defeated a British expeditionary force in 1798. In addition, he led an invasion of neighbouring Santo Domingo (December 1800), and freed the slaves there in January, 1801.
In 1801, L’Ouverture issued a constitution for Saint Domingue which provided for autonomy and decreed that he would be governor-for-life, calling for black autonomy and a sovereign black state.
Charles LeClerc
This was a step too far for Napoleon Bonaparte. Lobbied by plantation owning interests and craving the tax wealth brought in from the colony Napoleon dispatched a force of 80,000 French troops to the island, led by his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. They were under secret instructions to restore slavery, at least in the formerly Spanish-held part of the island. L’Ouverture, deceived, was seized by the French and shipped to France. He died months later in prison at Fort-de-Joux.
For a few months, the island was quiet under Napoleonic rule. But when it became apparent that the French intended to re-establish slavery, black forces revolted in the summer of 1802.
Jean Jacques Dessalines
Jean Jacques Dessalines, a former lieutenant of L’Ouverture, led the fresh rebellion. In November, Leclerc died of yellow fever, like much of his army. His successor, the Vicomte de Rochambeau, fought an even more brutal campaign. His atrocities helped rally many former French loyalists to the rebel cause. The French were further weakened by a British naval blockade, and by Napoleon’s inability to send the requested massive reinforcements after war with England resumed in the spring of 1803. Having sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in April 1803, Napoleon began to lose interest in his failing ventures in the Western Hemisphere. He was more concerned about France’s European mainland enemies. Consequently, he withdrew a majority of the French forces in Haiti to counter the possibility of an attack from Prussia, Britain, and Spain. Dessalines led the rebellion until its completion, when the French forces were finally defeated in November 1803.
On 1 January 1804, Dessalines officially declared the former colony’s independence, renaming it “Haiti” after the indigenous Arawak name. Haiti was the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion.
It has been estimated that the brutal Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804 resulted in the deaths of 350,000 black and mulatto Haitians and over 50,000 European troops. To cement his control Dessalines ordered one final massacre; the virtual eradication of the remaining white population of Haiti. Between February and April of 1804 almost 5000 remaining white French Creole inhabitants were murdered. The 1804 massacre had a long-lasting effect on the view of the Haitian Revolution and helped to create a legacy of racial hostility in Haitian society.
Hanging the Monkey Man….
Fact, fiction, folklore legend or urban myth – who knows the truth of the story now?
What is undoubted is that the Napoleonic Wars were as driven by propaganda as any war of the modern age. The likes of Gilray and Cruikshank represented the pinnacle of satirical caricature of the enemy but they were just the best known of a myriad of propagandists publishing in broadsheets and pamphlets and a common representation of their French targets was as apes or monkeys.
The example here is called “The GENIUS of FRANCE EXPOUNDING HER LAWS”.
It is a common ploy even now to denigrate your adversary, to represent them as subhuman and in the Napoleonic era things were no different.
So, with this cultural backdrop, when a French ship was wrecked on a stormy December night at the beginning of the 19th century on the remote Northumberland coast, the scene was set for a bizarre sequence of events.
The fishermen of Hartlepool watched as the ship was blown ashore and dashed on the rocks but later they found the sole survivor, a monkey, dressed in a sailor’s uniform. It would have been the ship’s mascot but in the thinking of the locals this was something different. This must be one of those subhuman Frenchmen they had seen in the papers.
It didn’t help the monkey’s case that it refused to answer any of the questions put to it. So its fate was sealed – it must be a French spy.
After an impromptu trial staged on the beach the ‘court’ found the monkey guilty of espionage and sentenced it to death. The sentence was carried out immediately and the poor creature was hanged on a makeshift gallows made from the mast of a small fishing vessel.
So the tale is told to this day.
Hartlepudlians are still known as “monkey hangers” and their football team mascot is H’Angus the Monkey. In 2002, Stuart Drummond campaigned for the office of Mayor of Hartlepool in the costume of H’Angus the Monkey and won; he used the election slogan “free bananas for schoolchildren”, a promise he was unable to keep.
Perhaps more interesting though, and definitely more sinister, is the suggestion that the story has a much darker origin. On warships of the time, young boys served below decks, charged with delivering gunpowder from the ship’s magazine to the gun crews. These boys were known as Powder Monkeys or just Monkeys. Might the hanging on the beach at Hartlepool have been an altogether different affair?
Whatever the truth, the story of the Hartlepool monkey has endured over two centuries, and is still as strong as ever.
What I can guarantee however, is that it has nothing to do with the song Monkey Man. Here is Amy Winehouse’s version J
Swashbuckling stories from the descendant of a slave…
Not much is known of Marie-Cessette Dumas; even her name is the subject of contention. One of only two primary sources mentioning her has her first names spelled two different ways in the same document and her surname has variously been claimed to be derived from the fang (west African language) word “dûma”, meaning “dignity” or merely from the French “du mas” meaning “of the farm”, a descriptive addition to her first names meant to signify that she belonged to the property.
Either way, she was a black slave, likely captured in West Africa and shipped to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, where she was bought by Marquis Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie some time before 1762. They resided on the plantation of La Guinaudée where Marie-Cessette became his concubine and together they had three children.
It is unclear what fate befell Marie-Cessete. One source suggests she died in 1772 of dysentery. However, a more compelling theory, backed up by a 1776 letter from a retired official on the island, is that the Marquis sold her together with their two youngest children, and the daughter she had with another man prior to their relationship, to a nobleman from Nantes.
This occurred just prior to the Marquis arranging for the other child, the then 14-year old Thomas-Alexandre, to accompany him on his return to France whereupon he was freed. Thereafter, the Marquis spent lavishly on his son, ensuring his education and providing him, in 1784, with a swanky apartment near the Louvre Palace.
Alexandre Dumas – soldier
Two years later though relations between Thomas-Alexandre and his father broke down following the Marquis’ marriage to a domestic servant on his estate. Thomas-Alexandre joined the army as a private, his mixed race making it difficult for him to claim noble privilege and join as a commissioned officer, and from this time on he began calling himself Alexandre Dumas.
With the outbreak of Revolution, promotion came fast; lieutenant colonel in 1792, brigadier general by July 1793 and general of division just a month later. By the end of that year he was commander of the Army of the Alps and captured the strategic stronghold of Mount Cenis from the Piedmontese.
Somehow though he fell victim to the mad world of the politics of the day, was denounced and called to appear before the Committee of Public Safety during the Terror. However, he managed to delay his journey to Paris long enough so that Robespierre fell before he was seen.
Service with the Army of the Rhine and the Army of Italy under Bonaparte then followed but relations between Dumas and Bonaparte were strained as Dumas resisted the policy to expropriate local property indiscriminately. However, following Dumas’ heroic effort to single-handedly drive back an entire squadron of Austrian troops at a bridge over the Eisack River, Napoleon rewarded him by making him commander of all cavalry in the Tyrol and the following year giving him command of the cavalry he took to Egypt.
Within a few months the relationship between Napoleon and Dumas had collapsed with Dumas being accused of sedition and being removed from command. Things went from bad to worse for Dumas as his ship sank on the return journey to France and he was imprisoned in Taranto by the forces allied to the Kingdom of Naples.
During two years of captivity his health was broken and he never saw active service again.
In 1802, he and his wife Marie-Louise had their third child, a son, who they inevitably name Alexandre but they were struggling to make ends meet and when Thomas-Alexandre died of cancer in 1806 his widow and her children were plunged into poverty.
Alexandre Dumas – author
The next few years were hard but the family still had their father’s distinguished reputation and finally, after the restoration of the monarchy one of Marie-Louise’s letters to her late husband’s comrades finally paid off. General Maximilien Foy, impressed with Alexandre’s elegant handwriting, secured him a position as a clerk to the Duc d’Orleans, later King Louis Phillippe.
With the security of a steady income behind him he began to devote more energy to his own writing and by 1829 he was beginning to see success. That success would grow and grow. And alongside his publishing success he was to lead a life that was almost as exciting as the characters he wrote about.
He took part in the Revolution of 1830. He built a fantastic chateau on the outskirts of Paris and had to sell up two years later because acquaintances had taken such advantage of his generosity. He travelled widely to Belgium, to Russia and to Italy where he participated in the movement for the unification of Italy.
He wrote in a wide variety of genres and published a total of 100,000 pages in his lifetime. His works, including some all-time classics like The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo have since been translated into a hundred languages and have sold more than any other French author.
And he also has a Paris Metro station named after him!
EA 24; the code of the code-breaker…
On the 15th July 1799 soldiers under the command of a lieutenant of engineers, Pierre-François Bouchard, were digging foundations for an extension to Fort St. Julien at El Rashid in Egypt when their pick axes and shovels uncovered a slab of black rock with one side covered in masses of engraved text.
Luckily for history, Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt was accompanied by a large body of experts from a variety of disciplines from the Commission des Sciences et des Arts and Bouchard immediately recognised that the stone he had found at El Rashid, then known as Rosetta, would be of interest to the scholars.
Bonaparte in Egypt
The first report of the find, just a few days later, by Michel Ange Lancret noted that it contained three inscriptions, the first in hieroglyphs, the second being a language as then unknown and the third in Greek. Lancret rightly surmised that the three inscriptions would be versions of the same text so hopes were raised of it perhaps being able to unlock the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs that had completely defeated scholars.
By the time Napoleon himself inspected the find on its arrival in Cairo shortly before his return to France in August 1799, it had already begun to be called la Pierre de Rosette, the Rosetta Stone.
A few months later, in 1800, a gifted linguist attached to the French army in Egypt recognised that the middle text was written in the Egyptian demotic script, rarely used for stone inscriptions and, therefore, seldom seen by scholars at that time.
For the next 18 months, following the departure of Napoleon back to France, the remaining French forces were gradually worn down and ultimately surrendered to the British at the end of August 1801 whereupon the Rosetta Stone passed into the possession of the British Army. The grandly named, Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner escorted the stone back to England where it was presented to King George III in February 1802.
Report of the arrival of the Rosetta Stone in the English press
The King decreed that it should be placed in the British Museum where it was assigned the inventory code EA 24, EA standing for Egyptian Antiquities. It has been on display there ever since except for two years during World War 1 when it was removed due to fears of German bombing and housed in a station of the Postal Tube Railway 50 feet below Holborn.
Over the next twenty years scholars worked on the tablet and after initial breakthroughs by Silvestre de Sacy and the key discovery by Thomas Young that the cartouches contained phonetic characters. This led to Jean-François Champollion being able to construct an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters which was published in 1822.
Champollion
It is perhaps fitting that the crucial break in deciphering the hieroglyphs should have been made by a French scholar.
Hierarchy, Seduction and Utility – the uniforms of the Napoleonic period…
When you look at any text dealing with the armies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one of the features which immediately stands out is the elaborate uniforms worn by the armies of every combating nation. My particular interest is in the Napoleonic period and the armies of that era excelled themselves in the splendour of their attire. Contemporary observers regarded the French uniforms with unreserved astonishment. The luxury of the French uniforms was overwhelming and veterans of the period, writing their memoirs in their old age, mourned the passage of such magnificence. They consoled themselves with the conviction that no greater military splendour, bound up as it was with the charisma of their Emperor, had ever been seen in Europe, or would ever be seen again.
But how did such colour and vibrancy come into common usage among the army rank and file?
Prior to the age of gunpowder, recognition on the battlefield of friendly versus unfriendly units could be achieved by a display of badges and flags – hence, men-at-arms sporting the heraldic emblems of their feudal lords on their shields and massing under the banner of their captain.
However, in the late sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century a revolution swept the battlefield. With the advent of reliable gunpowder-charged muskets and the musket fire from massed formations becoming the decisive factor on the battlefield this led to the crystallization of military organization into professional armies consisting of trained soldiers arranged in permanent organizations. Gunpowder also meant that as soon as the first volley was fired, the battlefield would be shrouded in thick smoke.
At this time, units were still raised by wealthy individuals much as they had been in feudal times but two factors led to the donning of standardised military uniform. As unit sizes grew the interests of economy and the building of an esprit de corps led commanders to the provision of uniformity of clothing within their units. Also, large units all wearing the same bright colour helped in identification when the battlefield was choked with smoke.
The development of military uniforms then followed three principles:
The Hierarchical Principle – essentially the differentiation of rank within an organisation and the differentiation of types of units both in terms of branches of the army and within a smaller unit – e.g. the designation of elite troops such as grenadiers.
The Seduction Principle – the innate desire for soldiers and their commanders to want to look smart and attractive – as Jane Austen commented in Pride and Prejudice regarding Mr Wickham “the young man wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming”. This goes hand in hand with the idea of parades – the grandeur of the parade is in no small part due to the splendour of the appearance of the units taking part.
The Utility Principle – compromises made on campaign for the practicalities of warfare – e.g. the wearing of plain greatcoats in bad weather and the stowing of gaudy badges that might draw enemy fire.
On top of this there was a tendency for all armies to copy the appearance of particular units that were deemed the “best” – hence, hussars in almost every army copied the appearance of the original Hungarian hussars drafted into the Austrian Army in the eighteenth century. The dolman and pelisse, festooned with lace, and the shako and sabretache became ubiquitous.
But whatever the principle, the outcome on the battlefields of Europe was spectacular.
All that having been said, I’m not quite sure what principle still drives the uniforms of senior officers in the army of North Korea – perhaps there is a Pearly King and Queen principle I have overlooked.
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won…
Written late in the night after the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington’s words have gone into the annals of military history as one of the most poignant descriptions of the aftermath of battle. In his letter he added, “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers.”
Now Wellington was no bleeding heart liberal. Just the opposite, he was known as the Iron Duke, and he never hesitated to flog or hang the soldiers he commanded who he often described as the “scum of the earth”. But as a diligent commander he was sparing with their lives. He knew he had limited resources and was always strapped for cash and men. Throughout his career he had sought to limit casualties where possible and never shied away from retreat if that was the most prudent course despite one of his other well-known quotes being “The hardest thing of all for a soldier is to retreat.”
At Waterloo he famously ordered the bulk of his force to withdraw beyond the brow of the hill on which they were drawn up and to lie down to minimise the target made by their massed formations. It is said this movement misled Marshal Ney into believing the Allies were retreating and precipitated his disastrous mass cavalry charges that broke helplessly on the formed squares of the redcoats.
The effect of small calibre roundshot on metal plate
Yet despite his prudence there was little he could do to protect especially the infantry from the merciless bombardment of the French artillery. More than anything else it was the artillery that was the real killer on the battlefield. With roundshot at distance and case or canister at close range, the guns could destroy whole swathes of men and horses and there were over 500 cannon on the field of Waterloo.
The carnage must have beggared belief. With some 200,000 men and 60,000 horses in action on a battlefield measuring only five square miles it meant the resulting concentration of death and destruction has rarely been equalled in the history of warfare. The average number of casualties per square mile suffered by Wellington’s army during that single day was nearly 2,300, a higher concentration than the British Army suffered at the Battle of the Somme.
Afterwards Wellington said, “I hope to God that I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing to be always fighting.” And so it turned out. After Waterloo, aged just 46, he never fought another action. Promoted Field Marshal, he became commander in chief of the British Army and Prime Minister.
But there was another side to the stern Iron Duke. Later in life, the Duke once met a little boy, crying by the road. “Come now, that’s no way for a young gentleman to behave. What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I have to go away to school tomorrow,” sobbed the child, “And I’m worried about my pet toad. There’s no-one else to care for it and I shan’t know how it is.”
Keen to ease the little chap’s discomfort, the Duke promised to attend to the matter personally. After the boy had been at school for just over a week, he received a note: “Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington presents his compliments to Master —- and has the pleasure to inform him that his toad is well.”
Let them eat cake…
Okay, the quote is attributed to Marie Antoinette but it was the original “celebrity chef”, Marie-Antoine (known as Antonin) Carême, the culinary genius named in honour of the Queen, who turned the words into reality for Parisian high society. Acknowledged as the father of classical French cuisine, Carême rose literally from the gutters of Paris to be the most celebrated chef of his, or perhaps any, age.
He was born in 1784 to a poor family, perhaps the sixteenth of up to twenty-four children and he was abandoned by his parents on the streets of Paris to fend for himself when he was eight or nine years old. Luckily for him he was taken in to skivvy at a Paris chophouse and there he began to learn the trade of cooking. At 14 he was apprenticed to Sylvain Bailly, a famous patissier and from there he never looked back.
In his two years under Bailly he began to work with the head chef of one of Paris’s most renowned society figures, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord and when Talleyrand bought a large country estate in 1804 he hired Carême as his head chef. It is said that Talleyrand set Carême a test, to concoct a year’s worth of menus without repeating a dish and using solely seasonal produce. Carême passed the test easily and was hired.
Some of Carême’s creations
While working for Talleyrand, Carême also ran his own specialist pastry shop, Patisserie de la Rue de la Paix, which became famous for his beautifully crafted decorative centrepieces made out of nougat, marzipan, sugar and pastry. Even Napoleon commissioned Carême and the master chef created the Emperor’s wedding cake.
After the fall of Napoleon, Carême moved to England for three years where he was the principal chef to the Prince Regent. But the climate in London did not suite him so Carême moved back to Paris where he was hired by Baron Rothschild with whom he remained until he retired in1829. By that time he was paid an annual retainer by the Baron of 8,000 francs (equivalent to about £125,000 today) to cook at a handful of setpiece dinners.
More of Carême’s creations, inspired by his interest in architecture
From 1829 until his death in 1833, brought on early due to the years of poisoning he had been subjected to cooking over charcoal, he dedicated himself to writing and became one of the most prolific and influential cookery writers.
Not bad for a boy from the gutter.
David Swatton 