This etext was prepared by Les Bowler.
a soldier inthe war with buonaparte
and
ROBERT HIS BROTHER
first mate in the merchant service
A TALE
by
THOMAS HARDY
with a map ofwessex
macmillan andco., limited
st. martin’s street, london
1920
copyright
First Edition (3vols.) 1880. New Edition (1 vol.)and reprints 1881-1893
New Edition and reprints 1896-1900
First published by Macmillan and Co., Crown8vo, 1903. Reprinted 1906, 1910, 1914
Pocket Edition 1907. Reprinted 1909, 1912,1915, 1917, 1919, 1920
The present tale is founded more largely ontestimony—oral and written—than any other in thisseries. The external incidents which direct its course aremostly an unexaggerated reproduction of the recollections of oldpersons well known to the author in childhood, but now long dead,who were eye-witnesses of those scenes. If whollytranscribed their recollections would have filled a volume thricethe length of ‘The Trumpet-Major.’
Down to the middle of this century, and later, there were notwanting, in the neighbourhood of the places more or less clearlyindicated herein, casual relics of the circumstances amid whichthe action moves—our preparations for defence against thethreatened invasion of England by Buonaparte. An outhousedoor riddled with bullet-holes, which had been extemporized by asolitary man as a target for firelock practice when the landingwas hourly expected, a heap of bricks and clods on a beacon-hill,which had formed the chimney and walls of the hut occupied by thebeacon-keeper, worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes for theuse of those who had no better weapons, ridges on the down thrownup during the encampment, fragments of volunteer uniform, andother such lingering remains, brought to my imagination in earlychildhood the state of affairs at the date of the war morevividly than volumes of history could have done.
Those who have attempted to construct a coherent narrative ofpast times from the fragmentary information furnished bysurvivors, are aware of the difficulty of ascertaining the truesequence of events indiscriminately recalled. For thispurpose the newspapers of the date were indispensable. Ofother documents consulted I may mention, for the satisfaction ofthose who love a true story, that the ‘Address to all Ranksand Descriptions of Englishmen’ was transcribed from anoriginal copy in a local museum; that the hieroglyphic portraitof Napoleon existed as a print down to the present day in an oldwoman’s cottage near ‘Overcombe;’ that theparticulars of the King’s doings at his favouritewatering-place were augmented by details from records of thetime. The drilling scene of the local militia received someadditions from an account given in so grave a work asGifford’s ‘History of the Wars of the FrenchRevolution’ (London, 1817). But on reference to theHistory I find I was mistaken in supposing the account to beadvanced as authentic, or to refer to rural England. However, it does in a large degree accord with the localtraditions of such scenes that I have heard recounted, timeswithout number, and the system of drill was tested by referenceto the Army Regul