The Press. — London, England, 1855-12-22 00:00:00

DECEMBER 22,1855. iittraturt. Histoire du Comtat et de r Empire. Vol. XII. By M. Thiers. Paris : Paulin. (Last Notice.) OFTEN as the lines of Torres Vedras have been described, both in our own and other coun tries, we remember no account of them equal to that which M Thiers gives in the volume before us. In brevity, in lucidity, and in the art with which the vast extent and the stupen dous magnitude of the works are presented to the mind's eye of the reader, that account must, we think, be considered the best that has yet appeared ; and at the same time it possesses the additional merit in English estimation of making the most careless reader feel that the genius which could conceive and the energy which could execute such gigantic works of defence, could only have been found in one of the greatest military commanders of any age or country. We translate the passage, partly to show the literary skill of M. Tillers, and partly to pay new homage to the fame of Wellington : We must now make known the fatuous lines of Torres Vedras. It was towards the month of October, 1809, that Lord Wellington thought of assuring for himself, at the ex• tremity of the Peninsula, an intrenched, and as far as possible an impregnable, position, in which he could resist tle accumulated force of the French, and await the decline of the Imperial system, which in his opinion was near at hand. The promontory formed by the extremity of the Estrella, advancing between the ocean and the Tagus, seemed to him the site beat adapted to his purpose. In the first place, the different lines of works by which he determined to bar in this promontory being at some leagues in advance of Lisbon, and the roads which united them not passing by Lisbon itself, he would be perfectly independent of the population of that capital,—the most numerous and most agitated of the Peninsula, desiring some times one thing and sometimes another, but rarely what the English 'general wanted. V. The plan of the works was this :—At nine or ten leagues in advance of Lisbon, between Alhandra on the Tagus, and Torres Vedras on the ocean, he erected a first line of in trenchments to cut the promontory at twelve leagues at least from its extremity in the sea. This first line con sisted of these works :—On the side of the Tagus the heights of Alhandra, presenting steep declivities towards the Tagus on one side, and on the other ascending towards Sobral, formed four or five leagues of almost inaccessible declivities, which were protected throughout their entire length by the little river of Arruda. The road which passed between the foot of these heights and the Tagus, and which led to Lisbon by the side of the river, was cut by barricades armed with cannon. From this point.ascend ing to Sobral, all the hills which were not of sufficiently difficult access were cut straight down by the hand of man. In the passes formed by ravines, and presenting little hills capable of being reached, redoubts and abattis were estab lished which entirely closed the passages. Moreover, on the principal summits forts armed with heavy guns, and flanking one another, were raised, and they commanded to a great distance the avenues by which the enemy might have presented himself. At Sobral, where there was a plateau which presented less relief, a multitude of works of the greatest strength were constructed to make tip for the weakness of the tion, and on an eminence called Mont Agraca was built a veritable citadel, which could only have been taken by a regular siege. Beyond was a new chain cf heights which extended to the sea, and which was bathed by the Zizambro. This little river passes by Torres Vedras, the place from which the lines we are speaking of received the name heaceforth immortal of lines of Torres Vedras. There, as on the side of Alhandra, the English general in some places made, with the pickaxe, steep slopes of the flanks of the heights, and in others closed the gorges by abattis or redoubts, crowned and united the summits by means of forts, and in particular rendered the Zizambro almost im possible to cross, by constructing passages in the bed of it which caused its waters to overflow and form marshes. The fortifications were some open in the gorge (they were the fewest in number) and the others closed. All had glacis in earth, fosses, erectments in stone, and magazines in wood for provisions and ammunition. Some were armed with six guns; some contained fifty, from the calibre of six and eight to those of sixteen and twenty-four. All these guns were fixed in such a manner as to be of no use to the enemy in the event of a retrograde movement from one line to the other. The rich arsenal of Lisbon was emptied in order to supply this artillery, and it. The all the oxen of the country were employed to convey garrisons were permanent, and some of them amounted to a thousand men. Large and excellent roads were formed between the different works, so as to enable reinforcements to be taken up with extreme rapidity. A system of sig.nals, borrowed from the navy (the telegraph wis then in its infancy), enabled a knowledge of what was passing at the extremities of the lines to be transmitted, in a few minutes, to the centre. At the very entra nce—that is to say, oppo site Sobral--WAS a sort of battle-field, prepared in advance, to enable all the English army to hasten towards the most accessible parts, and to join its strength to the thousand fires of the surrounding works. Naturally the Portuguese were placed in the fortifications, and three thousand gun ners, Portuguese also, long practised in the manoeuvring of cannon and f i ring well, were joined to them. The E n g lish army, with that portion of the Portngnese army which was THE PRESS. most easily manoeuvred, was destined to occupy the principal encampments, which were ably placed near the expected points of attack. Everything was carefully pre pared to cause it to be well sheltered and well fed, and to enable it to divide its time between repose and manoeuvring. Three or four leagues in the rear was a second line of works, equally barring the promontory from the Tagus to the ocean, seven or eight leagues in extent, dominated by the summits of Magra and Nlontachique, and accessible in one sole spot, the defile of Bucellas, which was transformed into a thorough coup-gorge. Lastly, behind this second and formidable line, at the very extremity of the promon tory, was another place of shelter, consisting of a semi circle of steep heights bristling with cannon, unapproach able by land, and presenting towards the sea a safe place of anchorage for all the English fleet. This last position, supposing the first two lines of works to have been carried, would have held out several days—that is to say, the time necessary to embark the troops and to remove them from the pursuit of a victorious enemy. Such was this colossal system of defensive lines, worthy of the nation who conceived it, and of the enemy whose power it was destined to check. And what were almost as wonderful as these tremendous works themselves, was the secrecy and the rapidity with which they were con structed. The time occupied in them was less than a year—the secrecy such that neither Massena, nor Ney, nor any of the French generals in Portugal or Spain, nor the French Government at Madrid, nor Napoleon himself at Paris, though he had spies everywhere, and knew almost everything, had the slightest idea that they existed. And so, when the French, after the battle of Busaco, arrived before them, and saw them bristling with cannon, they were literally astounded. At first they hoped to be able to take them, but " several days " reconnoitring convinced Massena and his lieutenants that they were impregnable ; and accordingly, after fretting for a month before them, the French deemed it prudent to decamp, without making the slightest attack on them. Were ever such works planned and executed before ? Will the like of them ever be seen again ? Compared with them, how Todtleben's defences of Sebastopol, remarkable though they were, sink into insignificance ! But, vast as is the military glory of these lines of Torres Vedras, they are even more glorious in a political point of view ; for it was from them that was proclaimed in a voice of thunder to Napoleon, then at the height of his power, with all the continent of Europe lying abject at his feet, " Thus far shalt thou go, and no " farther !'! It was at them that he met with his first real repulse, and from them that he was driven back step by step until he fell at Waterloo. Taking down the "Wellington Despatches," Napier's " History," and other English au thorities, it would be easy for us to convict M. Thiers of gross partiality for his own coun trymen in the accounts which he gives of every combat in which they were engaged against the English; and we might make serious ob jections to his technical details of those engagements, and of the share which particular generals had in them. We might also prove from the same and other authorities, and especially from the " great fact " that the English expelled the French from Spain, that he is guilty both of unfairness and presump tion in representing, as he constantly does, either in direct terms or by implication, that the army of Wellington was in no respect equal to that of Massena—that it, in fact, had no military qualities except a sort of clumsy courage, and not always that. Bt the task wo uld occupy more space and time than we can afford, and, besides, the execution of it would simply amount to the demonstration of a fact which is as well known as that. two and two make four—namely, that Frenchmen of M. Thiers cast of mind think that in any battle, competition, or comparison with fo reigners, all the advantage, all the honour. and all the glory, must be on their side. The increase of international relations, and the prolongation of the existing war, may perhaps have the effect of diminishing somewhat the perhaps exaggerated vanity of our good allies. But in the meanwhile the indulgence of it may be tolerated, even in history, especially as it affords them the highest pleasure, and does no great harm to anybody. We must pass over many topics touched on by M. Thiers to which )ve could have wished to have drawn the attention of our readers, but we may draw attention to the evidence we find here of the utter want of 1219 political sagacity and patriotism, and the unprincipled tergiversationa, which have always characterised the Whig part.). M. Thiers does not, it is true, tell us anything ill of this party which we did not know alreally ; but it is pleasant to honest men to see it shown up in foreign history in the same in famous light as that in which it is represented in our own. Here is the way in which, am ' curling to M. 'Driers, the Whigs spoke in April, 1810—that is, when the British army in the field had some checks to redeem and mighty difficulties to encounter : The Opposition in Parliament, headed by two eminent personages, Lord Grenville and Lord they, maintained that the war was continued beyond all reason, that every year's prolongation of it had aggraudised the Colossus whose destruction was sought for, that, if not Portugal, at least Spain and Naples had been lust by that prolonga tion, that in continuing the war all the shores of the north up to the mouths of the Oder would be lost also ; that the war in the Peninsula in particular was very dangerous, for that if Napoleon went with 100,000 men to attack the lingl7sh army not a soldier of it would escape, and the sole force capable of defending the country at home would he destroyed ; that every day some new ally was lost, that re• cently Sweden had been lust, and that the country •s as menaced with the loss of America ; that the finances were overwhelmed by an enormous burden, that the paper. money became more deteriorated every day, that the rate of exchange followed the fate of paper; that the moment was approaching at which the relations with foreign court tries were becoming ruinous ; and that to persist iu such a policy was neither safe nor prudent. We must now close this twelfth volume of M. Thiers' famous history. In so doing we once again express admiration, hearty and unbounded, at the brilliant literary qualities which distinguish it—qualities so high and so splendid as, we are forced to admit, to cast into the shade the errors of detail and the in justice of appreciation which we have pointed out But we cannot honestly say that this volume is calculated to change in tl a slightest degree the opinion which the ma jority of the people of this country have been accustomed to entertain on the cha racter of the great Napoleon. For it makes the heart sicken to think on the deso lation and the woe which he carried into Spain and Portugal, and tho frightful loss of human life which he caused there ; it fills the mind with astonishment to reflect how a man of such stupendous genius in war could have supposed it possible, as he did, to establish his domination over the greatest part of Europe, and to subject millions on millions of men of different races, religions, manners, and languages, to his tyranny ; and it makes one stand aghast at the blindness and fatuity of ambition to see him, when carrying on war, which for him was dis astrous, with England, Spain, and Portugal, rush wantonly into war with Russia also, though knowing that oppressed Germany was only waiting for an opportunity to rise against him. The conclusion of all is that this great soldier was no statesman—no benefactor to mankind ; and, notwithstanding the alliance which now happily unites this country to France under Napoleon 111., we can look back without regret to the share which England, under the guidance of Tory statesmen, had in his overthrow and chastisement. TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE. THE publishing season of 1855.6, so far as we can judge by present appearances, will be remarkable for the number and weight of the books issued. They crowd upon us faster than we can notice them. Of histories, we have the thhd u:►.l fenrth volumes of Macaulay, containing together 1,600 pages ; Dean Milman has issued the fourth, fifth, and sixth of his "Latin Christianity,"—most conscientious volumes as regards bulk and quantity of matter; then we have Dean Liddell's new " History of Rome," and other works of less pretension. Of a biographical nature are the "Life and Works of Goethe," by Mr. Lewes "Napoleon's Correspondence with King Joseph," and the third and fourth volumes of Montgomery's " Memoirs." Theso.works, all demanding some critical inquiry, we are obliged to put aside for s time, as well as " Zaidee "—the novel of the day—and some other works demanding more than running comment. But to clear our table we put together here several books on travel and adventure, which in a less busy time we should have noticed iu Mr. Woods• has taken great pains with these volumes, and the pains will not be lost. As the • The Past Campaign. By N. A. Woods. 2 vole. Lesion Longman*. ~: I