He too must be a soldier: the Churchill half of him would have scorned
any peaceful course of life; so his father sent him to France to study
the art of war in the same school where his uncle John had graduated.
When he was nineteen, western Europe being at peace, he got leave of
his father to offer his services to the emperor who was fighting the
Turks, and was sore pressed by those misbelievers. James gave him a
letter to an Irishman in the imperial service, named Taft who had
held the rank of colonel, and had just been made a general. Taft had
influence enough with the commander-in-chief, the duke of Lorraine, to
give to Berwick the regiment he had left.
The Turks lay encamped on the spot where a hundred years before, they
had won the first battle of Mohacs, and what still added to their
self-confidence, was that the duke of Lorraine, in obedience to the
emperor’s orders, had attacked their position and been repulsed; and
now scorning to act longer on the defensive, they marched upon the
Christians. A bloody struggle followed in which victory was wrested
from the hand of the Moslem. Berwick in his memoirs says that the
Imperialists lost only ten thousand men--only ten thousand men! How
many Turks fell in that dreadful day, he does not report. Perhaps
like a good Catholic he thought that misbelievers, especially dead
misbelievers were not worth the counting. He says next to nothing about
his own share in the battle; but from the fact that he was immediately
promoted, it may be inferred that the boy did not belie the blood of
Churchill in all that carnage.
He did not remain long in the Emperor’s service. His father now needed
the aid of every one of the few friends that were left him; and
Berwick returned to England. We all know that James lost his crown by
undertaking to reëstablish the Roman Catholic religion in England; but
he was by no means the natural fool for thinking of such a thing that
Macaulay represents him to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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