Iberia Won; A poem descriptive of the Peninsular War: With impressions from recent visits to the battle-grounds, and copious historical and illustrative notesHughes, T. M. (Terence McMahon)
History
Iberia Won; A poem descriptive of the Peninsular War: With impressions from recent visits to the battle-grounds, and copious historical and illustrative notes
Hughes, T. M. (Terence McMahon)
Peninsular War, 1807-1814 -- Poetry
A battery on the eastern side of Monte Orgullo. The name signifies
“a look out,” the use to which it was formerly applied. It reminded
me very much of the Signal House at Gibraltar, only that I missed
those sapphire and chrysolite tints of the Mediterranean, which
struck me so much when I saw the moon rise from that elevated
ground under the auspices of the stalwart Sergeant MacDonald.
XIII. “And totter to their base Tirynthian walls.”
--Τίρυνθά τε τειχιόεσσαν.--Hom. _Il._ ii. 559.
Tiryns is the first walled city upon record. Its walls were
supposed to have been erected by the Cyclops, and the stones of
which they were composed were of such prodigious size, that the
least of them could not be moved by a pair of oxen. (Pausanias,
_lib._ ii.) The ruins subsist to the present day, and the traces
are still gigantic. Pindar mentions Tiryns in his Olympionics,
Nemeonics, and Isthmionics. These shattered remains present the
earliest specimen of the Cyclopean architecture.
“The deadly sappers’ stroke that like an earthquake stuns.”
This was the first time that sappers were employed by us in the
Peninsular sieges, or that a corps of sappers formed any regular
portion of the British army. It was likewise the first time that
Shrapnell shells were used.
XIV. “But what can like the British bayonet mar
Thy prowess, France?”
The bayonet, originally a French invention (deriving, as is well
known, its name from the town of Bayonne), became ultimately the
very instrument of French defeat--for by the universal testimony
of military men, when wielded by British hands, the French have
invariably fled before it:--
--Neque enim lex æquior ulla,
Quàm necis artifices arte perire suâ.
Ovid. _de Arte Amandi._
But it would be as grossly unjust as ungenerous to dispute the
ardour and frequent brilliancy of French courage. Upon this subject
the discriminating testimony of Napier is as follows: “Place an
attainable object of war before the French soldier and he will
make supernatural efforts to gain it, but failing he becomes
proportionally discouraged. Let some new chance be opened, some
fresh stimulus applied to his ardent, sensitive temper, and he will
rush forward again with unbounded energy: the fear of death never
checks him, he will attempt any thing. But the unrelenting vigour
of the British infantry in resistance wears his fury out.”--_Hist.
War in the Penins._ book xxiv. chap. 6.
XV. “With glancing steel upon the trenches’ edge.”
Wie glänzt im sonnenstrahl
So bräutlich hell der stahl--
Hurrah!
Körner, _Schwertlied_.
How glances bride-like bright
The steel which sunbeams strike,--
Hurrah!
XVII. “See many a bark that swan-like floats the tide.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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