Maternal Martyrdom Unmasked: British Fatherhood and the Masculinization of War in Napoleonic Veterans’ Tales of Infant Suffering

Patterns of Representation

There was a great increase in martial life writing in the first half of the nineteenth century. While each of these treatises undoubtedly bears the imprint of its author, it is possible to discern stylistic threads and common stories that tie many of them together. ¹⁷ Scholarship on these memoirists has pointed out the way in which Gothic and Romantic literature influenced their writing, causing them to favor the macabre. ¹⁸ Stories of dead and dying nurslings are just such an example. Rather than speaking of the mothers with the contempt often reserved for camp-following “trulls” and “brats,” military witnesses described their agonies with great sympathy, using the romantic language that was popular at the time. This section will highlight the way that the single incident in 1795 was appropriated by civilian poets and will trace its origins to the officer class.

It will then go on to show the lower ranks’ beginning to participate in these narratives in the years that followed. General Sir John Moore’s 200-mile retreat to Corunna in the Peninsular campaign was the theater for many more accounts of struggling nurslings by veterans of all ranks. The 1809 retreat was, according to Susan Walton, the Napoleonic War veteran’s “Dunkirk, a defeat transformed by exemplary heroism into a moment of national pride.” ¹⁹ Under provisioned and pursued closely by the French, 5,000 British soldiers died in the frenzied march through mountain roads. Like the 1795 retreat to Westphalia, however, infant suffering overshadowed these thousands of other deaths in defining its hardships. Where the earlier retreat saw a single anecdote from an officer repeated (and co-opted) in a variety of other publications over many years, the later retreat generated a whole host of accounts of desperate nurslings from soldiers of all ranks who claimed to be direct witnesses. These later tales, as the rest of this article shows, were employed more exclusively for army interests.

The infant and mother who had frozen to death on the 1795 retreat to Westphalia captured the sympathetic imagination. In the years that followed, several other anti-war poets drew upon this tragic anecdote. Robert Southey quoted the description in the notes to his ode “To Horror,” which came out in 1797. ²⁰ His usage, in turn, “made so great an impression on” the young Leigh Hunt that he also included it in the postscript to his anti-war poem “Captain Sword and Captain Pen,” published in 1835. After first reading the account of the dead nursling, Hunt averred, he “never afterwards could help calling it to mind when war was spoken of.” ²¹ Hunt may have inspired The Advocate of Peace periodical to pick up the story in an entry entitled “Two Scenes after Battle” in its second issue of 1837. ²² Like Coleridge and Southey, Hunt had a pacifist message, vowing to “tear asunder the veil from the sore places of war” and “show what has been hitherto kept concealed.” ²³

Hunt was wrong; this particular horror of war had not, in fact, been “kept concealed” by the military. It actually came into print directly from the army. The August issue of The Lady’s Magazine carried the tale verbatim and correctly attributed it to “an Officer of the Guards.” ²⁴ It was again printed in The New Annual Register for 1796. ²⁵ In the following year, another officer added it to his personal account of the retreat, claiming to have taken it from “a copy of a letter from an officer of the guards to his friend,” and pro-war historian James Ogden repeated the story, paraphrasing it slightly. ²⁶ In the words of the author of The New Annual Register, the story originated with an officer whose “attachment to government, and even to the war, cannot be suspected.” ²⁷ Although it may have been used by pacifist poets to show the horrors of war, it had been brought to their attention by the warriors themselves.

This trend began with officers and was only visible among rankers in the Peninsular memoirs published after 1819. Corporal Robert Brown’s An Impartial Journal of a Detachment from the Brigade of Foot Guards was published in October 1795 and was one of the rare accounts of the Westphalia retreat to come from the ranks. The corporal claimed to write “at the insistence of a number of my friends” and to present “a plain, simple narrative of facts” from a journal he wrote each evening of the campaign. ²⁸ Philip Shaw has mistakenly attributed the origin of the oft-repeated tale of the frozen infant to him. ²⁹ Corporal Brown did, indeed, mention similar events on this date, but his account was entirely stripped of the drama and emotion of the version that became so popular. In contrast to his superior’s decision to concentrate solely on the “scene” of the dead nursling, Brown gave a detached catalogue, simply listing four dead women, each with one or two children. Instead of a vivid portrait of a beautiful mother and of the frozen milk dripping from the baby’s lips, the corporal’s only mention of a baby was to note “an unhappy woman being taken in labour,” who, “with her husband and infant,” was “found lifeless.” ³⁰ Although not devoid of sorrow, this account lacked the romantic language of the officer’s version and its emphasis on the breast and nursling.

By the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, however, macabre tales of futile infant suckling were described with similar pathos by men of all ranks. Neil Ramsey has pinpointed 1819 as the time from which private soldiers began to present themselves as men of sensibility. ³¹ This was the year that the Journal of a Soldier of the Seventy-first first appeared in print, authored by a private known only as “Thomas.” His account of the Peninsular war included “scenes of horror” that bore as much pathos as that of any officer. One, in particular, described a sight witnessed on the descent from Monte del Castro in the Spanish winter of 1809. Thomas was attracted by a cluster of soldiers, and he broke into the group to discover what had drawn their attention. “In the center lay a woman, young and lovely, though cold in death,” he reported, adding, significantly, that “a child, apparently about six or seven months old, [was] attempting to draw support from the breast of its dead mother.” Thomas particularly intended his tale as a tribute to the humanity of his fellow soldiers. Although “no common occurrence could attract their sympathy,” this nursling clearly could, and “tears filled every eye,” according to Thomas. ³²

In a style that echoed the secondhand retelling of the frozen baby of the Westphalia retreat of 1795, an anonymous sergeant purported to give an account from a dragoons surgeon of the winter of 1808–1809. The medical officer had dismounted to find a dead woman with “an infant,” who “nestled his head close to the cold bosom of his hapless mother, and was endeavoring to suck as heretofore.” He described this “melancholy spectacle” in print in 1835 and saw it as a sign of a just and humane providence, since it ended with the baby’s rescue. ³³ A decade later, a sergeant of the Seventy-third Regiment included the guards officer’s description of the nursling on the Westphalia retreat as background to his memoir of his Peninsular War experiences. ³⁴ Even when they had not witnessed it directly, men of the rank and file began to exhibit more sympathy for infant suffering in their memoirs.

The main difference between the Corunna and the Westphalia accounts was the baby’s survival. In almost all of the tragedies described in the former, the child survived while the mother perished. ³⁵ The Corunna reporting also presented numerous different incidents of maternal martyrdom, while the Westphalia tale was very clearly the same scene repeated verbatim. ³⁶ Thus, it was that, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, military men of all ranks were writing similar heart-wrenchingly vivid accounts of martyred mothers and nurslings. They were invoked by pro-army policy advocates rather than by anti-war poets. The paragraphs that follow look for the commonalities between these narratives and explore the connections between war and fatherhood.

War and Breastfeeding

Focusing on the British army nursling was not an accident; it was rooted solidly in the discourse on the importance of maternal breastfeeding prevalent at the time. This was an era that emphasized the need to foster a strong generation of Britons to expand and preserve the empire. By the second half of the eighteenth century, women’s role was increasingly confined to motherhood and domesticity. Although there has been much interest in how demographic anxieties in the Boer and the First World Wars enabled the state to exert greater control over mothering, little has been said about similar pressures on women in the Napoleonic Wars. ³⁷ Ruth Perry argued that British mothers were co-opted into unpaid imperial service through lactation. Suckling their children was women’s primary function because it produced healthy Britons to “man the factories, sail the ships, defend the seas, and populate the colonies.” ³⁸ Army writers fueled this movement by poignantly depicting camp-following women who martyred themselves by putting their infant’s survival before their own. Peninsular War authors chose to highlight the breastfeeding tableaux despite an abundance of other death scenes.

Many of these examples came from officers, but all focused on the infant’s persistent and futile suckling. One army surgeon remarked upon a Highlander’s wife who had died with two young children in her arms, noting that as he “passed [her] corpse, one of the little innocents was still endeavouring to extract that nourishment from its parent’s bosom which nature no longer supplied.” ³⁹ Another officer gave a similar account of a different soldier’s wife: “a little infant, yet living, was hanging at the breast of its inanimate mother, vainly endeavouring to find that warmth and nourishment which fate had for ever withdrawn.” ⁴⁰ In another memoir, a commissary found a soldier’s wife’s corpse under a cart in the baggage train. “The tragic part of it was,” he marveled, “that her child, who was still alive, was whimpering and trying to find nourishment at her frozen breasts!” ⁴¹ Although the details differed slightly, martyred mothers and nurslings appeared in multiple officers’ accounts of the retreat to Corunna. ⁴²

In emphasizing the infant’s almost animalistic focus on the breast, these descriptions reflect popular beliefs in the role of nature in suckling. Memoirists published these accounts in the aftermath of a late eighteenth-century advice literature debate over the appropriateness of scheduled versus on-demand feeding. The latter won out, ideally giving infants control over the feeding process. ⁴³ The extensive historiography outlining the promotion of maternal nursing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century concentrates on women. ⁴⁴ There has been no work analyzing primary source depictions of infant behavior. ⁴⁵ Similarly, while historians recognize that portions of the prescriptive literature were directed at men, no one has acknowledged the role played by military men in furthering the cause of maternal breastfeeding. These dramatic scenes of infants’ persistent struggle to suckle dry breasts emphasize early nineteenth-century commentators’ interest in babies’ behavior as a window into “natural” processes.

Soldier memoirists enjoyed a broad readership, and their observations on breastfeeding entered mainstream consciousness. ⁴⁶ Poets’ use of the dead nursling scene from the Westphalia retreat is just one sign of the interest this type of account could elicit. On his return to Britain from the Peninsular War, Private Thomas realized that the scene of the child endeavouring to suckle at a frozen teat on the Corunna retreat had been “much talked of” in Britain. ⁴⁷ It was no coincidence that many soldiers and officers chose to repeat these tales of suffering nurslings in their memoirs. Popular support for maternal breastfeeding probably not only inspired these men to publish such accounts but had also caused them to concentrate on those scenes in the first place.

In their vivid recreations of these tableaux, military witnesses were playing an important paternal role outlined in the breastfeeding literature of the time. Fathers were encouraged to direct their wife to breastfeed and to gaze with love upon her as she did. ⁴⁸ By emphasizing the fatherly sympathy with which they viewed the infant casualties of the Napoleonic wars, men in uniform revealed their sensibility. They reconciled the fact that responsible army fathers could exhibit paternal ideals despite being separated from their own children. In doing so, they showed the connections between military and civilian worlds.

Infant Death Vigils

In vividly describing infant suffering, soldiers scrupulously avoided any reference to their own role—or even the war’s role—in causing it. In most accounts, the author cast himself as a passive viewer of babies’ death. In the act of recreating such scenes for other hearers, however, he was actually co-opting these tiny casualties of war for his own ends. This was another form of the “exploitative spectatorship” that Ian Haywood identified as characteristic of Romantic literature. Rather than voyeurs, exploitative spectators were writers and readers who were able to understand and deeply respond to vivid descriptions of violence. Unlike Haywood, however, this article does not see frozen nursling accounts as anti-war. ⁴⁹ Instead, they are better understood as an earlier example of the “ameliorative narratives” of war that, according to Holly Furneaux, appeared in the Crimean literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. ⁵⁰ By including the epistolary account of the frozen mother–baby tableau from the guards officer at the retreat into Westphalia in 1795, Captain Lewis Jones could note that each of the battalions who processed past the site “were witnesses, in their turns, to this melancholy scene.” ⁵¹ More than a decade after the Peninsular war, a low-ranking soldier published an autobiography where he recalled the hardships of the Portuguese children that he passed as the army retreated through Lieria in 1810. “Sympathy was all we had to bestow,” he lamented, “for we ourselves were retreating in front of an overwhelming and victorious enemy.” ⁵² Such language reinforced the sensibility of men in uniform, while acknowledging their inaction in the face of infant misery.

It was brave to pause and look upon dead nurslings. “Were I to enumerate every afflicting object…. I should unman your heart,” one witness told his readers. ⁵³ Only his great strength allowed him to survive the emotional pain of viewing war’s most innocent victims. In refusing to look away, warriors put themselves at actual, physical risk. A commissary reported that he “halted” on the retreat to Corunna “to contemplate” a frozen mother and her vainly suckling twins. His temporary pause in this hostile climate, with food and safety still far in advance and the French all too close behind, was imparted as a sign of his sympathy and reverence for this horrific tableau. That he also sat down and attempted to sketch the scene, including it on a neighboring page of his memoir under the title “An Incident on the Retreat,” was further testament to his written statement that “it was a most harrowing spectacle.” ⁵⁴ The act of pausing to bear witness was evidence of the memoirist’s bravery.

There were far fewer memoir accounts of nurslings who had died from British ordnance than of those who died from starvation and exposure. The military authors of the former managed to be condemnatory of the destruction while indemnifying themselves as perpetrators. A subaltern officer in the Twenty-eighth Regiment of Foot surveyed the aftermath of the successful siege of Copenhagen in September of 1807. “In several instances, the murderous shells had forced their way into the very cellars and destroyed mothers with their offspring at their breasts,” he lamented. He immediately added, however, that “many…brave hearts in the British army…deeply sympathized” and would have done more to help, if the Dane’s pride would have allowed it. ⁵⁵ Army memoirists thus cast themselves as heroes in trying to help mothers and babies, ignoring the fact that the harm originated from their own weapons.

The horrors of the British retreat to Corunna in 1809 provided the backdrop for other absolution stories of harshness toward women and children. “It was really heartbreaking to look upon the squalid appearance of the children,” a colonel recalled of his passage through a village that had lost all of its resources after quartering both French and English troops. “Childhood is the season of careless and playful joy,” he continued, noting his higher level of distress at the sight of “the roses on their young cheeks blighted by the icy touch of famine.” ⁵⁶ An anonymous Scottish soldier witnessed his fellow men-at-arms robbing a Spanish mother of her last morsel, despite her protests “in the most piteous manner, that she had nothing else to give her starving children.” He recognized this as “cruelty and injustice” but went on to point out the soldiers’ desperate hunger as an extenuating circumstance. He also noted his own willingness to help, “had not my debilitated state, and the number of my antagonists, prevented me.” ⁵⁷ This pattern of describing, condemning, yet simultaneously excusing atrocities against children was repeated by many Peninsular War memoirists. ⁵⁸

Soldiers bore witness to maternal-infant suffering at their hands in battles outside Europe as well. Again, they remained blind to their own role in causing it. A journal entry for October of 1803 of a private involved in an attack on a fort in Orissa, India, recorded the terror British forces inflicted on the locals. “One poor woman was so frightened that she jumped into a well, with her child in her arms,” he wrote, “but we got them both out alive.” ⁵⁹ Artilleryman Alexander Alexander described an accidental explosion in 1808, in what is now Sri Lanka, where a Sinhalese woman “had the infant blown out of her womb.” ⁶⁰ He laid the responsibility for these deaths both on two corrupt fellow soldiers who had tried to sell their cartridges to the natives and on the Sinhalese themselves for wanting to profit from this ill-gotten ordnance.

As this suggests, foreign infant deaths could be described with just as much pathos as British baby corpses, but they differed from the latter in their clear allocation of blame for these deaths. Lieutenant John Shipp was appalled by the sight of a nursing Hindu mother who had perished in the siege of Hathras in 1817. He later described, in disturbing detail, the scene:

A female was lying on a bed of green silk; under her head was a pillow of the same material; her right arm had, no doubt, cradled her babe…. A large shell had perforated the tiled roof…. A piece of this shell had gone through the woman’s forehead, carrying away a great part of the head; so that her death, according to the opinion of a medical man who saw her, must have been instantaneous. The lower part of the child’s body…was entirely gone; but, strange to say, its mother’s nipple still hung in the left corner of its mouth, and its little right hand still held…its mother’s close, which probably it had grasped at the first noise of the shell…. Such, reader, are the…sights which soldiers, in the course of service, are called upon to witness! ⁶¹

As in Copenhagen, British memoirists cited the enemy’s resistance as the cause of infant death and suffering. The Indians persisted in “false hopes of victory,” Shipp said, “thus imbruing their hands in the blood of their children.” ⁶² Although British weapons had killed these mothers and babies, the guilt for their suffering was transferred back on their Indian husbands and fathers. In criticizing Indian men for putting their offspring at risk, men like Shipp showed their own superiority as fathers and upheld the legitimacy of the imperial conquest of India. When memoirists allocated blame in accounts of British infants’ suffering, they maintained this sense of paternal superiority by shifting their condemnation to mothers. The next section illustrates how officers continued to absolve themselves of responsibility in these tales as well.

Assigning Blame

On the surface, the frozen mother and nursling could have been seen as evidence of the army’s failure to protect its most vulnerable members. In such circumstances, the obvious response from military chroniclers should have been to hide the incidents. The continued choice of officers and rankers to highlight these tragic tales is worthy of note, as is their desire to identify these women as wives rather than as whores, mistresses, or Iberian camp followers. ⁶³ Memoirists’ focus on infants rather than boy soldiers is of further significance, since the latter would have been at least as prominent among the casualties of the retreat, but they were even more clearly the army’s responsibility. ⁶⁴ Moreover, the child soldier made a more complicated victim than an innocent baby. ⁶⁵ In explaining Wellington’s strict rules toward regimental women, Lieutenant Colonel John Gurwood, the editor of his published dispatches, explicitly cited “the starving babe still striving at the breast of its frozen mother.” Any officer who witnessed such horrors, Gurwood vowed, would understand the need “to ascertain every defined precedent relating to the women of the army” and enforce it, though “it requires no small nerve” to do so. ⁶⁶ Military writers used these stories to implicitly place responsibility for babies’ hardships squarely upon the mothers.

Many of the accounts included a subtle reproach to mothers for refusing to part from their husbands. Roused at the sight of a “misery-doomed babe” clasped in the arms of a feeble soldier’s wife outside Salamanca in 1808, army artist Sir Robert Ker Porter railed against the “indulgence” that had allowed her to remain with the regiment. ⁶⁷ Before his death in 1861, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Steevens recorded his vivid recollections of having seen corpses of mothers and babies lying by the roadside in the winter of 1809 but added that they could have been spared. “Our women received a liberal allowance to pay their way back to Lisbon”; he continued, “but, after being absent a few days, they again made their appearance, and many of them, poor things, perished.” ⁶⁸

Praise and censure often shared the page in these accounts of camp-following women. One Peninsular veteran spoke of “the unconquerable energy of maternal love” on display that Spanish winter, yet at the same time blamed the women for being there in the first place. ⁶⁹ Another used the exact same phrasing to describe army women’s maternal devotion but simultaneously lamented their “moral degradation,” profanity, and intoxication. ⁷⁰ A rifleman was impressed by a woman’s persistence in keeping her dying son with her despite her own flagging strength, but he was unsurprised to see her eventually succumb to the hostile conditions. He snidely remarked that she and the other women “must have bitterly regretted not having accepted the offer which was made for them to embark at Lisbon for England, instead of accompanying their husbands into Spain.” ⁷¹ Encoded within these powerful memoir accounts of infant suffering on the retreat to Corunna was a rebuke to soldiers’ wives for having unnecessarily risked their babies’ lives by refusing to leave the regiment.

Memoirists made no acknowledgment of the army’s role in their suffering. Manuscript sources from late October 1808 indicate that army headquarters knew a retreat was imminent and would be deadly to camp-following women and children. Orders were issued that “every discouragement” be made to prevent them from remaining with the regiment. This included stopping them from hiring carts to ease the hardships of the journey. “Young children” and new mothers were singled out as especially burdensome to the army. These orders were issued repeatedly at autumn and winter, indicating women’s lack of compliance. ⁷² On Christmas Day, Mary Ball (married to a sergeant in the Twenty-eighth Foot), was told that she must remove her sick daughter from the baggage cart because “everything, save luggage, (my child included) should be taken from the waggons [sic], that nothing might impede their progress.” They removed her “pale dying child” from the cart and laid her in the snow. ⁷³ Already carrying an infant, Mary knew that it was almost impossible to elude the approaching French army with her sickly daughter added to the burden. She stayed with her two children nonetheless, but both perished within a few days. Mary Ball’s account is extremely rare in recognizing the army’s willingness to jettison children from the baggage carts. The women who refused to abandon their infants and toddlers risked their own lives, yet military memoirists declined to present the story on these terms.

They blamed maternal martyrdom and infant sufferings squarely upon the women themselves. In the words of a rifleman, these “persevering” women “are not to be persuaded that their presence is often a source of anxiety to the corps they belong to.” ⁷⁴ Memoirists presented them as rejecting the safe haven provided by the army and blindly choosing to stay with their husbands. This assumption was the product of a long-standing failure to understand many of the realities that regimental wives faced. Military commanders marveled at women’s persistent desire to be with husbands on campaign.

They attributed it to romantic naivete, where, in fact, these choices emerged from very practical survival concerns. The poor relief system to which the War Office referred army families offered insufficient or no assistance to those who remained behind in Britain. ⁷⁵ Those who parted from their husbands and regiments abroad (as wives were encouraged to do before the retreat to Corunna) faced even greater risks. Sergeant’s wife Mary Ball left a rare account of this perspective. No less than General Sir John Moore had offered her passage away from the battlefield in his own baggage train. “I did not like to do this,” she confessed, pointing out that both she and the sergeant were worried that she would not find Moore’s entourage among the many different groups following the army. The prospect of becoming permanently cut off from the regiment in Spain, with two toddlers in tow, was terrifying to both Mary and her husband. ⁷⁶ For mothers nursing infants, proximity to husbands in a foreign land meant not only his help and protection but also access to half-rations and the support of the regimental “family.”

Military husbands like Mary Ball’s had clearly encouraged their wives to follow the drum out of a desire to protect and provide for them, yet their stories were rarely told. Most memoirists who wrote of infant deaths in Corunna were officers or unmarried common soldiers. There are many accounts of loving, attentive husbands who did their utmost to have their wives with them on campaign in this period, but their voices were not heard by those recounting the Corunna retreat. ⁷⁷ One of the most poignant examples was the question raised by an East Indies veteran: “Why am I obliged to leave the dear object of my early affection in a land of poverty, exposed to the ensnarement of vicious and designing villains, who are ever on the watch for the forlorn and unprotected?” ⁷⁸ Rather than highlighting such soldiers’ error in wanting their wives with them on the retreat, however, these memoirists instead exclusively emphasized wives’ desire to remain with the regiment. Where both parents could have been the target of this admiring condemnation, only mothers received any attention. This allowed veterans’ war writing to maintain an untarnished ideal of fatherhood—both real and figurative—among the British soldiery in the Napoleonic wars, particularly the officer class.

Warrior Fathers

Instead of presenting themselves as the perpetrators of this hardship in having failed to prevent a winter retreat, soldiers told of their own and others’ heroism as rescuers. A commissary “had the pleasure of witnessing the rescue” of twin babies by officers who “offered a substantial reward” to a regimental wife to take them into her care. ⁷⁹ Another soldier attributed “kindness which none but a great and gallant heart possesses” to the officer who gave his own mount to a newly delivered mother and her baby in the march to Corunna. ⁸⁰ Occasionally, memoirists cast the infant’s father as the hero, such as the soldier who insisted on keeping his son after his wife’s demise, “although he might have got one of the women to take care of it.” Placing the babe atop his knapsack, the warrior struggled along with his comrades, until forced from the march by fatigue and sickness. ⁸¹ This fit the image of “everyday heroism” that was coming into vogue at the time, reflecting gendered ideals of devoted fatherhood and unquestioned professional loyalty. ⁸² Memoirists vividly recalled the generosity of war-hardened men toward suffering babies.

Many tributes stressed the long-term commitment of the men to their helpless new charges. A private watched one of General Moore’s staff officers wrap a tiny orphan in his cloak amid the silent sympathy of the rankers who had gathered around its mother’s corpse. “Never shall I efface the benevolence of his look from my heart, when he said, ‘Unfortunate infant, you will be my future care’,” the private reminisced. ⁸³ A suicidal officer apparently went into a stable to shoot himself but found a martyred mother and crying nursling. ⁸⁴ From thenceforward, he abandoned thoughts of suicide and kept the youngster safe. Another officer’s infant rescue in the snowy mountains of Spain resulted in the reunion of the boy with his father three years later. His chronicler made a point to mention that the dragoon had visited and provided for the orphan regularly over the intervening years. ⁸⁵ Military life writing celebrated these Samaritans in uniform.

Instead of highlighting depravity and inhumanity, war provided the backdrop to great acts of paternity and chivalry. “When virtue is in distress, none can show sympathy with greater delicacy” than the English soldier, averred one infantry sergeant. ⁸⁶ Another later recalled “a drunken dog of a Norfolk man in our regiment” whose every fault was forgiven by his wife for his loving attentions to their offspring. ⁸⁷ A captain made special mention of rankers’ propensity to be “kind to children.” ⁸⁸ The rifleman who stood guard at the command compound near Portugal’s border with Spain recalled how the Duke of Wellington himself had a soft spot for youngsters. “I used to observe him walking through the Market-place, leading by the hand a little Spanish girl some five or six years old, and humming a short tune, or dry whistle and occasionally purchasing little sweets, at the child’s request, from the paysannes of the stalls,” he wrote. ⁸⁹ Soldiers emphasized fellow warriors’ interactions with the very young in order to show them fitting contemporary ideals of masculine sensibility.

Military authors also noted the respect accorded regimental women, even the lowest-ranking brides, in the hardships of the Peninsular retreat. Although Michèle Cohen has found the military uniquely devoid of the chivalric masculinity present elsewhere at the time, these memoirs suggest otherwise. ⁹⁰ A surgeon spoke of a newly delivered mother and her struggling offspring as having “powerfully awakened [his] sensibility” and desire to come to their aid. ⁹¹ Despite the woeful lack of provisions, one private observed that “an old tattered blanket, or some other piece of garment” was donated as a shroud for women’s burial, while “the soldiers who perished lay uncovered.” ⁹² Others, including Sir John Moore’s war artist, made a point to note that feminine corpses received the dignity of a blanket. ⁹³ Another infantryman remembered that each of his comrades “parted with some article of their own linen, much as they needed it, for the purpose of contributing to the warmth and comfort” of a newly delivered mother they encountered on the retreat to Corunna. ⁹⁴ Soldiers braved further privations in order to alleviate women’s and babies’ suffering.

In presenting their comrades in arms as sympathetic rescuers of helpless dependents, these memoirists echoed a type of warrior masculinity that went at least as far back as General Amherst and the Marquis of Granby. Paintings from the 1760s showed the former kindly reaching out to the ragged women and children of a vanquished foe and the latter offering alms to an ailing soldier’s wife. ⁹⁵ Such flattering representations did not entirely stifle depictions of officers and soldiers as irresponsible womanizers in contemporary songs and stories, however. ⁹⁶ The memoirists writing in the post–Napoleonic era helped to build on Granby and Amherst’s fatherly image to counter these negative portrayals of soldiers. Their sympathetic descriptions of men assisting struggling nurslings was another way to “use…fatherhood…to render the public figure of the martial man safer and more reliable,” as Joanne Bailey has observed for this period. ⁹⁷

Their duty in saving these orphans was part of officers’ broader service to the nation. As a military memoirist wrote of one such rescue: “Let us hope that a life so remarkably preserved was well spent.” ⁹⁸ This rhetoric was not dissimilar to that surrounding the decision of the Foundling Hospital governors to take in soldiers’ orphans in addition to those of respectable unwed mothers in the late eighteenth century. The institution, significantly, was charged with “preserving the lives of, and training up in the habits of industry, virtue, and religion, infants in the inferior classes of society.” ⁹⁹ As rescuers of rankers’ orphans, officers shared a similar role with other men of their class in helping to maintain the empire by ensuring the survival and “improvement” of the next generation of workers.

In drawing attention to officers’ role as infant rescuers, these memoirists were also rewriting the narrative of war. It is possible that the popularity of these tales inspired the recurrent theme of the child-protecting soldier that Holly Furneaux has observed in late nineteenth-century literature. ¹⁰⁰ Artists and poets had previously highlighted war as a site of orphanhood by placing the naive (and often nursing) infant at the center of a tableau involving a dead soldier and his grieving widow. Where such a portrayal, as Philip Shaw argued, “resists appropriation by the dominant discourse of national salvation,” the memoirists managed to overcome that resistance. ¹⁰¹ They did so very cleverly, however, couching the tale in the same romantic imagery favored by the anti-war poets and artists but concluding it with the orphan’s rescue. In these scenes of infant survival, the war became again a theater for heroism and rejuvenation, hope instead of sorrow.

Conclusion

Great care needed to be taken in the telling of suffering nursling accounts to make them an effective pro-army message. Images of infant suffering in war zones have had long-standing power in demands for peace and demonstrations against the military. At the same time, however, their success in mobilizing nations to engage in armed conflict has been noted in Britain from at least the seventeenth century. ¹⁰² From the sinking of the Lusitania to the My Lai massacre, the idea of innocent women and children falling victim to war has been a powerful narrative trope in Western media.

That stories of maternal martyrdom were potent tools of anti-war poets as well as soldiers in the Napoleonic age reflect their complexity. The multiple interpretations available in these stories reflect observations made by scholars studying the cultural production of many different wars. In summarizing this work, Holly Furneaux has argued that “readings of war literature can be stymied by a perspective that seeks to establish whether a text’s stance is predominantly pro- or anti-war.” ¹⁰³ When it comes to stories of a soldier rescuing a child, however, Furneaux concludes that “nurturing responses to this typically adorable figure [of the child], in both fiction and fact, can…obscure the willingness to cut and slash that sat at the centre of the soldier’s job description, working both personally and politically to make war more acceptable.” ¹⁰⁴ This article has shown that portrayals of dead or struggling infants in the Napoleonic campaigns inspired more supporters than detractors of the army. The clear messaging of this potentially unstable trope can be attributed to the fatherly and sympathetic voice with which it was told.

In reflecting back on their wartime service in the decades after Waterloo, these military authors imparted ideals of fatherhood through storytelling, itself a paternal act. ¹⁰⁵ In a way, veterans writing in the 1830s and 1840s were acting as metaphorical fathers to their readers. They recalled the trials and triumphs of war and attempted to imprint their values on a society whose memory of the victory of Waterloo was fading, at a time when the great General was now a beleaguered statesman. At such a time, it had become more necessary than ever to highlight the sensibility and chivalry of warriors. Sympathetic descriptions of suffering nurslings were a great way to do that.

The martyred mother was a more complex figure, and this article has emphasized veterans’ subtle condemnation of her persistence in following the troops. It must be recognized, however, that memoirists’ tributes to mothers’ bravery and fortitude in continuing to nurture their babies at the cost of their own lives were genuine, inspired by real women. These women had their own esprit de corps and their own sense of duty the regiment. ¹⁰⁶ They had already swayed public opinion against commanders who prevented them from accompanying their husbands abroad by their desperate appeals for philanthropy and their heroic attempts to remain with the regiment. In the summer of 1799, for example, bystanders observing the embarkation of troops from Margate remarked upon a wife who jumped—with her baby in her arms—from the pier to her husband on a moving transport. Far from condemning her for encumbering the army and endangering her own life and that of her offspring, viewers applauded her bravery and wifely loyalty. ¹⁰⁷

Women like her gained a significant amount of attention because they drew upon contemporary ideals that upheld maternity as women’s key role. ¹⁰⁸ While the autobiographies of Napoleonic war veterans questioned the wisdom of regimental wives’ decision to remain with the troops, they could not question their maternal devotion. The subtlety of the memoirs’ rebuke to wives for following the troops underscores the delicacy with which the army had to deal with these camp-following women.

Such women also cast men as their companions and protectors. Military memoirists courted popular audiences by enacting affectionate fatherhood. As sympathetic witnesses to—and sometimes rescuers of—struggling nurslings, military writers supported contemporary medical opinion on the value of infant-directed maternal breastfeeding and father’s role in supervising it. Although firsthand accounts of the Napoleonic wars varied according to many factors, including the rank, religion, origins, and regiment of their authors, these vignettes of vainly suckling infants surfaced with remarkable frequency and bore many consistent features. In tracing them, it is possible to see that this particular shared narrative allowed memoirists of diverse backgrounds to present the British soldiery as affectionate fathers. Using similar romantic imagery to those who praised wives’ fortitude in accompanying the regiment, these tales allowed military men to subtly question it and reinforce the growing masculinization of the army.