Fry A New Race of Men

Scotland 1815-1914
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-85790-659-5
Verlag: Birlinn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 636 Seiten

War opened and closed Scotland's greatest century: a pitiless part in the defeat of Naploeon in 1815, a huge blood-sacrifice for the sake of victory from 1914. In between came the greatest contributions to the progress and happiness of the rest of mankind that the Scots have ever made - in everything from the combine harvester to the mackintosh to anaesthesia. It was a supremely successful achieving society yet one not without deep flaws, in its urban poverty, its destruction of the environment, its religious intolerance, its moral hypocrisy, its crushing of Highland culture. Michael Fry shows, with an emphasis always on the human story, how a succession of deep crises undermined the usually tranquil and prosperous surface of life in Victorian Scotland to leave a legacy of paradox that the modern nation has even today yet to overcome.

Michael Fry was educated at Oxford and Hamburg Universities. He has held academic positions in Scotland at Strathclyde and Edinburgh Universities, in the US at Brown University, and in Germany at Leipzig University and the Max Franck Institute, Frankfurt. He is the author of ten books on modern Scottish history, including The Dundas Despotism (1993), The Scottish Empire (2001), Wild Scots, Four Hundred Years of Highland History (2005) and Edinburgh, a History of the City (2009). He has contributed to most major Scottish and British newspapers, and has been a regular columnist for The Scotsman, the Herald and The Sunday Times.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fry, Michael

Leseproben

Prologue: ‘Scotland for ever’

The Battle of Waterloo was fought over two low ridges running athwart the high road which led up from the French frontier towards Brussels, about 15 miles further off. The British and their allies held the more northerly of the ridges, while the French attacked from the more southerly of them. In between, but to the west of the high road, lay the chateau and estate of Hougoumont. Here was one of the places where Scots soldiers won glory on 18 June 1815.1

Hours before either side opened fire that day, the British commander, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, and the Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte, had both identified Hougoumont as a key to their coming clash. If the chateau should be left unguarded, Napoleon’s legions might move along the shallow depression between the two ridges and round the flank of the allied position. This would then become indefensible. So Wellington had not just to occupy Hougoumont but also to find for its defence a force steadfast enough to hold out against the relentless assaults sure to be launched on it. He chose Scots for the task. In command of the chateau he placed Colonel James MacDonell of Glengarry, sprung from a fierce race of Highland warriors who had never surrendered to anybody. To him were assigned the Scots Guards and the Coldstream Guards, the latter Englishmen as like to Scotsmen as any ever could be, coming as they did from the lower valley of the River Tweed where it formed the border between the two nations.2

While the rest of the allied army snatched a little sleep during the night before the battle, these troops went to work under a heavy downpour of rain to fortify Hougoumont. They hacked loopholes through its walls. They erected firing platforms inside them. They blocked every passage between the buildings round the courtyard except for the main gate on the northern side, which they kept open for supplies and communications. In the nearby orchards and woods they felled trees to clear firing lines, then built the timber into their breastworks. Some of these men themselves came under fire, so close did their labours take them to the enemy’s forward positions. Early in the morning Wellington rode out to inspect the preparations with one of his officers, who said the place still looked to him untenable. The duke replied: ‘Ah, but you do not know MacDonell.’3

About half an hour later the French bombardment of Hougoumont began. It was not long before the assault followed, never slackening despite the fire MacDonell’s men kept up in reply. They started to suffer casualties and soon all hands were summoned to the defence. While wounded men crawled into barns, sheds and cellars, their officers dismounted, sheathed their swords and picked up the rifles dropped by the casualties. Skulking through the clouds of gunsmoke, the French managed to surround the chateau and penetrate the grounds, orchard and garden. They reached the northern side of the courtyard where the gate stood open. The men guarding it were taken by surprise, exchanged shots but pulled back inside. About 100 Frenchmen pursued them. Was Hougoumont about to fall?

At this point MacDonell was directing the defence of the garden. He heard triumphant cries in French from behind him, where none of the enemy should have been. He rushed back into the courtyard and found men fighting with whatever came to hand, rifle butts, swords, axes. Some Scots had retreated up the steps to hold the door of the chateau while others were firing down from the windows. MacDonell shouted to three of his officers and a sergeant to follow him and force their way to the gate. The five of them put their shoulders to it and pushed it shut against Frenchmen still trying to enter; the sergeant dropped the stout wooden bar that locked it. They heaped up flagstones and debris to make it secure. Now the defenders could hunt down the enemy within, till just one remained alive or unwounded, a drummer boy who had lost his drum. Hougoumont was saved. ‘The success of the Battle of Waterloo depended on the closing of the gates,’ Wellington later wrote.4

The fighting at Hougoumont went on for an hour and a half before anything happened across the rest of the battlefield. To the east, next to the high road to Brussels, amid the fields and hedgerows of the undulating farmland, stood a concentration of Scottish regiments, the Cameron Highlanders, Black Watch, Gordons and Royal Scots. With them was a force of cavalry, 1,200 men of the Union Brigade, so called because it contained one regiment from each of the three kingdoms of the British Isles, Scots Greys, Inniskillings and Royal Dragoons. This position could not be outflanked so long as Hougoumont was held, so the French had to make a frontal assault on it. They softened it up with another bombardment. They prepared to deploy over terrain that right in front of them seemed undefended, for the Scottish regiments had taken what shelter they could from the barrage. Now the Scots were ordered up to a hedgerow. When they peered through, they saw the enemy’s front rank 40 paces away. The order was given to fire, and 3,000 muskets spat out a volley. ‘Charge! Charge! Hurrah!’ bawled the officers. The soldiers scrambled through the hedge and got to work with their bayonets on the French, who fell back in confusion.5

Behind the line of battle the Scots Greys were waiting, mounted on a double rank of their huge horses so close to one another that the stirrups touched. The command came, ‘Scots Greys, charge!’ They rode at the hedge and cleared it. Everybody cheered. Down the slope of the ridge they galloped, the horses with heads lowered, picking up speed and tearing the earth with their hooves: the immortal scene depicted in the painting Scotland Forever by Lady Butler. And ‘Scotland for ever!’ was what the cavalry shouted as they headed into the smoke and din before them, where they could hear the bagpipes and make out the Highlanders’ feathered bonnets. Officers of the infantry sought to wheel troops back by sections to let the horsemen through, but too late. Foot soldiers were knocked over and trodden underfoot. Even so their mates shouted, ‘Go at them the Greys!’ And again, ‘Scotland for ever!’ Some tried to grasp the stirrups and run with the horses, to get in among the crumbling French formations. Soon the enemy were throwing down their weapons, crying out for quarter.

Charles Ewart was an ensign of the Greys. A giant of a man and an expert swordsman, he now had in his eye the glint of a berserker as he slashed his way towards half a dozen Frenchmen defending a standard with a golden eagle on top. It was the standard of the 45th Invincibles, on which Napoleon’s victories of Austerlitz and Jena stood inscribed. Ewart recalled: ‘One made a thrust at my groin. I parried it off and cut him down through the head. A lancer came at me. I threw the lance off by my right side and cut him through the chin and upwards through the teeth. Next, a foot-soldier fired at me and then charged me with his bayonet, which I also had the good luck to parry, and then I cut him down through the head.’ Ewart seized the standard. An officer behind him said, ‘My brave fellow, take that to the rear.’ And off the field Ensign Ewart rode in triumph. His eagle remains on display in Edinburgh Castle, and his name is still remembered in Scotland.6

Scenes like these offer mere details of the vast canvas of Waterloo. But they helped to fix an image of Scotland and Scotsmen that endured right through the nineteenth century and beyond – indeed, it has not faded yet. This martial image was at bottom perhaps one of the noble savage whose qualities had been harnessed to causes greater than the feuds of earlier ages. Placed at the service of Union and Empire, those qualities emerged in renewed strength or even purity. This image of Scotland and Scotsmen endured not only by overawing others but also by proving useful to themselves, inspiring them at home or advertising their qualities to the world. The nation had been changing ever since the Union of 1707, of course, but during the nineteenth century the rate of change would unmistakably speed up. Earlier it had seemed on the whole a benign process, hallowed alike by religion and philosophy: anyway one purpose of the Union had been to generate change. Even war failed to halt such salutary progress. More and more Scots were doing more and more things to their own and their nation’s profit, just as the architects of the Union had hoped. But they did so increasingly in a Scotland that would have appeared unrecognisable to former generations, where by the year old ways were erased and new ways were impressed on the nation. Could anything worthy of being called Scottish survive all this?

The nature of the nation started coming under open question as soon as its tremendous martial exertions shuddered to a halt in 1815. With the peace, economic differences and social problems earlier taken for granted suddenly appeared intolerable. The body politic, by and large quiescent ever since the last Jacobite rebellion of 1745, jerked into spasm. Strident voices called for reform, and radical reform at that. The first response from the ruling class was often panic and repression. Yet some also felt their way towards a more positive response. They decided the task of leadership lay in looking to the character of the people and to the mutual obligations within their society: this was how to deal with the radicals.

For example, after the Scots’ triumph in a long struggle all could pride themselves on the values of their nation’s past. These were, or were supposed to be, values of morality and order, of religion and patriotism. They had been fostered...