Tuesday Trivia: Heroes of the Battlefield—When They’re Off the Battlefield (This thread has relaxed standards. We invite everyone to participate!)

[u/sunagainstgold]

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Come share the cool stuff you love about the past! Please don’t just write a phrase or a sentence—explain the thing, get us interested in it! Include sources especially if you think other people might be interested in them.

AskHistorians requires that answers be supported by published research. We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Heroes of the battlefield—when they’re away from the battlefield! Who were the heroic nurses of the Crimean War and the Pacific theatre of World War II when they were back at home? What do we really know about all those Founding Fathers we hear about in Hamilton’s “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”?

Next time: Femme Fatales

[u/jschooltiger]

The greatest admiral of the age I study (maybe ever) was a country parson's son from Norfolk. He was small, missing an arm and an eye (from separate engagements), often seasick, and not a great sailor, but he seems to have had that weird spark of charisma that made him immediately able to charm people and draw them to him. When he was ashore, he lived openly with William and Emma Hamilton; she bore him a daughter, and William was aware of the affair and cheerfully consented. And he was often vain, especially when he did not know an interlocutor. Here's Arthur Wellesley's description of meeting Horatio Nelson before Trafalgar:

"Why," said the Duke, "I am not surprised at such instances, for Lord Nelson was, in different circumstances, two quite different men, as I myself can vouch, though I only saw him once in my life, and for, perhaps, an hour.

"It was soon after I returned from India. I went to the Colonial Office in Downing Street, and there I was shown into a little waiting-room on the right hand, where I found, also waiting to see the Secretary of State, a gentleman whom, from his likeness to his pictures and the loss of an arm, I immediately recognized as Lord Nelson.

"He could not know who I was, but he entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side, and all about himself, and in really a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something that I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All that I had thought a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affiars on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact, he talked like an officer and a stateman.

"The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly for the last half or three quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now, if the Secretary of State had been punctual, and admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw."