Quitting the Residency I drive westward by the river side, over the site of the Captan Bazaar, past also that huge fortified heap the Muchee Bawn, till I reach the beautiful enclosure in which the great Imambara stands. This majestic structure—part temple, part convent, part palace, and now part fortress—dominates the whole terrain, and from its lofty flat roof one looks down on the plain where the weekly hat or market is being held, on the gardens and mansions across the river, and southward upon the dense mass of houses which constitute the native city. Sentries promenade the battlements of the Muchee Bawn, and the Imambara—an apartment to which for space and height I know none in Europe comparable—is now used as an arsenal, where are stored the great siege guns which William Peel plied with so great skill and gallantry. Just outside the Imambara, on the edge of the maidan between it and the Moosabagh, I come on a little railed churchyard where rest a few British soldiers who fell during Lord Clyde's final operations in this direction. Then, with a sweep across the plain to the south and by a slight ascent, I reach the gate of the city which opens into the Chowk or principal street—the street traversed in disguise by the dauntless Kavanagh when he went out from the garrison to convey information and afford guidance to Sir Colin Campbell on his first advance. The gatehouse is held by a strong force of native policemen, armed as if they were soldiers; and as I pass the guard I stand in the Chowk itself, in the midst of a throng of gaily clad male pedestrians, women in chintz trousers, laden donkeys, multitudinous children, and still more multitudinous stinks. All down both sides the fronts of the lower stories are open, and in the recesses sit merchants displaying paltry jewelry, slippers, pipes, turban cloths, and Manchester stuffs of the gaudiest patterns. The main street of Lucknow has been called "The Street of Silver," but I could find little among its jewelry either of silver or of gold. The first floors all have balconies, and on these sit draped, barefooted women of Rahab's profession. The women of Lucknow are fairer and handsomer, and the men bolder and more stalwart, than those in Bengal, and it takes no great penetration to discern that Lucknow is still ruled by fear and not by love.

It remained for me still to investigate the scenes of the route by which Lord Clyde came in on both his advances; but to do justice to these would demand separate articles. Let me begin the hasty sketch at the Dilkoosha Palace, two miles and more away to the east of the Residency; for on both occasions the Dilkoosha was Clyde's base. Wajid Ali's twenty-foot wall has now given place to an earthen embankment surrounding a beautiful pleasure park, and there are now smooth green slopes instead of the dense forest through which Clyde's soldiers marched on their turning movement. On a swell in the midst of the park, commanding a view of the fantastic architecture of the Martiniere down by the tank, stands the gaunt ruin of the once trim and dainty Dilkoosha Palace or rather garden-house. From one of the pepper-box turrets up there Lord Clyde directed the attack on the Martiniere on his ultimate operation; and here it was that, as Dr. Russell tells us, a round shot dispersed his staff on the adjacent leads. After quietude was restored the Dilkoosha was the headquarters for a time of Sir Hope Grant, but now it has been allowed to fall into decay although the garden in the rear of it is prettily kept up. On the reverse slope behind the Dilkoosha was the camp in one of the tents of which Havelock died. We drive down the gentle slope once traversed at a rushing double by the Black Watch on their way to carry the Martiniere, past the great tank out of the centre of which rises the tall column to the memory of Claude Martine, and reach the entrance of the fantastic building which he built, in which he was buried, and which bears his name. We see at the angle of the northern wing the slope up which the gun was run which played so heavily on the Dilkoosha up on the wooded knoll there. The Martiniere is now, as it was before the Mutiny, a college for European boys, and the young fellows are playing on the terraces. Grotesque stone statues are in niches and along the tops of the balconies; you may see on them the marks of the bullets which the honest fellows of the Black Watch fired at them, taking them for Pandies. I go down into a vault and see the tomb of Claude Martine; but it is empty, for the mutineers desecrated his grave and scattered his bones to the winds of heaven. Then I make for the roof, through the dormitories of the boys and past fantastic stone griffins and lions and Gorgons, till I reach the top of the tower and touch the flagstaff from which, during the relief time, was given the answering signal to that hoisted on the tower of the Residency. I stand in the niches where the mutineer marksmen used to sit with their hookahs and take pot shots at the Dilkoosha. I look down to the eastward on the Goomtee, and note the spot where Outram crossed on that flank movement which would have been very much more successful than it was had he been permitted to drive it home. To the north-east beyond the topes is the battle-ground of Chinhut, where Lawrence received so terrible a reverse at the beginning of the siege. Due north is the Kookrail viaduct which Outram cleared with the Rifles and the 79th, and in whose vicinity Jung Bahadour, the crafty and bloodthirsty generalissimo of Nepaul, "co-operated" by a demonstration which never became anything more. And to the west there lie stretched out before me the domes, minarets, and spires of Lucknow, rising above the foliage in which their bases are hidden, and the routes of Clyde in the relief and capture. The rays of the afternoon sun are stirring into colour the dusky gray of the Secunderbagh and of the Nuddun Rusool, or "Grave of the Prophet," used as a powder magazine by the rebels. Below me, on the lawn of the Martiniere, is the big gun—one of Claude Martine's casting— which did the rebels so much service at the other angle of the Martiniere and which was spiked at last by two men of Peel's naval brigade, who swam the Goomtee for the purpose. That little enclosure slightly to the left surrounds "all that can die" of that strange mixture of high spirit, cool daring, and weak principle, the famous chief of Hodson's Horse. By Hodson's side lies Captain da Costa of the 56th N.I., attached to Brazier's Sikhs. Of this officer is told that, having lost many relatives in the butchery of Cawnpore, he joined the regiment likeliest to be in the front of the Lucknow fighting, and fell by one of the first shots fired in the assault on the Kaiser-bagh.

Descending from the Martiniere tower I traverse the park to the westward passing the grave of Captain Otway Mayne, cross the dry canal along which are still visible the heaps of earth which mark the stupendous first line of the rebels' defences, and bending to the left reach the Secunderbagh. This famous place was a pleasure garden surrounded with a lofty wall with turrets at the angles and a castellated gateway. The interior garden is now waste and forlorn, the rank grass growing breast-high in the corners where the slaughter was heaviest. Here in this little enclosure, not half the size of the garden of Bedford Square, 2000 Sepoys died the death at the hands of the 93rd, the 53rd, and the 4th Punjaubees. Their common grave is under the low mound on the other side of the road. The loopholes stand as they were left by the mutineers when our fellows came bursting in through the ragged breach made in the reverse side from the main entrance by Peel's guns. Farther on—that is, nearer to the Residency—I come to the Shah Nujeef, with its strong exterior wall enclosing the domed temple in its centre. It is still easy to trace the marks of the breach made in the angle in the wall by Peel's battering guns, and the tree is still standing up which Salmon, Southwell, and Harrison climbed in response to his proffer of the Victoria Cross. Opposite the Shah Nujeef white girls are playing on the lawn of that castellated building, for the Koorsheyd Munzil, on the top of which there was hoisted the British flag in the face of a feu d'enfer, is now a seminary for the daughters of Europeans. A little beyond, on the plain in front of the Motee Mahal, is the spot where Campbell met Outram and Havelock—a spot which, methinks, might well be marked by a monument; and after this I lose my reckoning by reason of the extent of the demolition, and am forced to resort to guesswork as to the precise localities.



THE MILITARY COURAGE OF ROYALTY

Writing of the late Alexander III. of Russia, a foreign author has recently permitted himself to observe: "Marvellous personal courage is not a striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs as it was of the English Tudors." It will be conceded that periods materially govern the conditions under which sovereigns and their royal relatives have found opportunities for proving their personal courage. The Tudor dynasty had ended before the Romanoff dynasty began. It is true, indeed, that the ending of the former with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 occurred only a few years before the foundation of the latter by the election to the Tzarship of Michael Feodorovitz Romanoff in 1612. But of the five sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty it happened that only one, Henry VII., the first monarch of that dynasty, found or made an opportunity for the display of marked—scarcely perhaps of "marvellous"—personal courage; and thus the selection of the Tudor dynasty by the writer referred to as furnishing a contrasting illustration in the matter of personal courage to that of the Romanoffs was not particularly fortunate. Henry VIII. was only once in action; he shared in the skirmish known as the "Battle of the Spurs," because of the precipitate flight of the French horse. Edward VI. died at the age of sixteen, and the two remaining sovereigns of the dynasty were women, of whom it is true that Elizabeth was a strong and vigorous ruler, but in the nature of things had no opportunity for showing "marvellous personal courage." Henry VII. literally found his crown in the heart of the melee on Bosworth field, it matters not which of the alternative stories is correct, that he himself killed Richard, or that Richard was killed in the act of striking him a desperate blow. But Henry at Bosworth in 1485 still belonged to the days of chivalry—to an era in which monarchs were also armour-clad knights, who headed charges in person and gave and took with spear, sword, and battle-axe. Long before Peter the Great, more than two centuries after Bosworth, foamed at the mouth with rage and hacked with his sword at his panicstricken troops fleeing from the field of Narva on that winter day of 1700, the face of warfare had altered and the metier of the commander, were he sovereign or were he subject, had undergone a radical change.

Of a family of the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but, save as regards one exception, there is no assurance of a continuous inheritance of mental attributes. What a contrast is there between Frederick the Great and his father; between George III. and his successor; between the present Emperor of Austria and his hapless son; between the genial, wistful, and well-intentioned Alexander II. of Russia and the not less well-intentioned but narrow-minded and despotic sovereign who succeeded him! But there may be reserved one exception to the absence of assurance of inherited mental attributes—one mental feature in which identity takes the place of dissimilarity, and even of actual contrast. And that feature—that inherited characteristic of a race whose progenitors happily possessed it—is personal courage.

Take, for example, the Hohenzollerns. One need not hark back to Carlyle's original Conrad, the seeker of his fortune who tramped down from the ancestral cliff-castle on his way to take service under Barbarossa. Before and since the "Grosse Kurfurst" there has been no Hohenzollern who has not been a brave man. He himself was the hero of Fehrbellin. His son, the first king of the line, Carlyle's "Expensive Herr," was "valiant in action" during the third war of Louis XIV. The rugged Frederick William, father of Frederick the Great, had his own tough piece of war against the volcanic Charles XII. of Sweden and did a stout stroke of hard fighting at Malplaquet. Of Fritz himself the world has full note. Bad, sensual, debauched Hohenzollern as was his successor, Frederick the Fat, he had fought stoutly in his youth-time under his illustrious uncle. His son, Frederick William III., overthrown by Napoleon who called him a "corporal," did good soldierly work in the "War of Liberation" and fought his way to Paris in 1814. His eldest son, Frederick William IV., the vague, benevolent dreamer whom Punch used to call "King Clicquot" and who died of softening of the brain, even he, too, as a lad had distinguished himself in the "War of Liberation" and in the fighting during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the real maker of the German Empire on the quid facit per alium facit per se axiom, he died a veteran of many wars. He was not seventeen when he won the Iron Cross by a service of conspicuous gallantry under heavy fire. He took his chances in the bullet and shell fire at Koeniggraetz, and again on the afternoon of Gravelotte. Not a Hohenzollern of them all but shared as became their race in the dangers of the great war of 1870-71; even Prince George, the music composer, the only non-soldier of the family, took the field. William's noble son, whose premature death neither Germany nor England has yet ceased to deplore, took the lead of one army; his nephew Prince Frederick Charles, a great commander and a brilliant soldier, was the leader of another. One of his brothers, Prince Albert the elder, made the campaign as cavalry chief; whose son, Prince Albert junior, now a veteran Field-Marshal, commanded a brigade of guard-cavalry with a skill and daring not wholly devoid of recklessness. Another brother, Prince Charles, the father of the "Red Prince," made the campaign with the royal headquarters; Prince Adalbert, a cousin of the sovereign and head of the Prussian Navy, had his horse shot under him on the battlefield of Gravelotte.

The trait of personal courage has markedly characterised the House of Hanover. As King of England George I. did no fighting, but before he reached that position he had distinguished himself in war not a little; against the Danes and Swedes in 1700 and in high command in the war of the Spanish succession from 1701 to 1709. His successor, while yet young, had displayed conspicuous valour in the battle of Oudenarde, and later in life at Dettingen; and he was the last British monarch who took part in actual warfare. Cumberland had no meritorious attribute save that of personal courage, but that virtue in him was undeniable. At Dettingen he was wounded in the forefront of the battle; at Fontenoy the "martial boy" was ever in the heart of the fiercest fire, fighting at "a spiritual white heat." His grand-nephew the Duke of York was an unfortunate soldier, but his personal courage was unquestioned. In the present reign a cousin and a son of the sovereign have done good service in the field; and that venerable lady herself in situations of personal danger has consistently maintained the calm courage of her race.

The foreign author has written that "marvellous personal courage is not the striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs." He makes an exception to this quasi-indictment in favour of the Emperor Nicholas, who, he admits, "was absolutely ignorant of fear, and could face a band of insurgents with the calm self-possession of a shepherd surveying his bleating sheep." The monarch who at the moment of his accession illustrated the dominant force of his character by confronting amid the bullet fire the ferocious mutiny of half an army corps, and who crushed the bloodthirsty emeute with dauntless resolution and iron hand; the man who, facing the populace of St. Petersburg crazed with terror of the cholera and red with the blood of slaughtered physicians, quelled its panic-fury by commanding the people in the sternest tones of his sonorous voice to kneel in the dust and propitiate by prayers the wrath of the Almighty—such a man is scarcely, perhaps, adequately characterised by the expressions which have been quoted. But setting aside this instance of the fearlessness of Nicholas, facts appear to refute pretty conclusively reflections on the personal courage of the Romanoffs. No purpose can be served by cumbering the record by going back into the period of Russia's semi-civilisation; illustrations from three generations may reasonably suffice. At Austerlitz Alexander I. was close up to the fighting line in the Pratzen section of that great battle, and so recklessly did he expose himself that the report spread rearward that he had fallen. He was riding with Moreau in the heart of the bloody turmoil before Dresden when a French cannon-ball mortally wounded the renegade French general, and he was splashed by the latter's blood. Moreau had insisted on riding on the outside, else the ball which caused his death would certainly have struck Alexander. That monarch participated actively and forwardly in most of the battles of the campaign of 1814 which culminated in the allied occupation of Paris. Marmont's bullets were still flying when he rode on to the hill of Belleville and looked down through the smoke of battle on the French capital. The captious foreign writer has admitted that Nicholas, the successor of Alexander, was "absolutely ignorant of fear," and I have cited a convincing instance of his "marvellous personal courage." Two of his sons—the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael—were under fire in the battle of Inkerman and shared for some time the perils of the siege of Sevastopol. Alexander II. was certainly a man of real, although quiet and undemonstrative, personal courage. But for his disregard of the precautions by which the police sought to surround him he probably would have been alive to-day. The Third Section was wholly unrepresented in Bulgaria and His Majesty's protection on campaign consisted merely of a handful of Cossacks. No cordon of sentries surrounded his simple camp; his tent at Pavlo and the dilapidated Turkish house which for weeks was his residence at Gorni Studen were alike destitute of any guards. The imperial Court of Russia is said to be the most punctiliously ceremonious of all courts; in the field the Tzar absolutely dispensed with any sort of ceremony. He dined with his suite and staff at a frugal table in a spare hospital marquee; his guests, the foreign attaches and any passing officers or strangers who happened to be in camp. When he drove out his escort consisted of a couple of Cossacks. In the woods about Biela at the beginning of the war there still remained some forlorn bivouacs of Turkish families; he would alight and visit those, his sole companion the aide-de-camp on duty; and would fearlessly venture among the sullen Turks all of whom were armed with deadly weapons, try to persuade them to return to their homes, and, unmoved by their refusal, promise to send them food and medicine. Dispensing with all etiquette he would see without delay any one coming in with tidings from fighting points, were he officer, civilian, or war correspondent. During the September attack on Plevna he was continually in the field while daylight lasted, looking out on the slaughter from an eminence within range of the Turkish cannon-fire, and manifestly enduring keen anguish at the spectacle of the losses sustained by his brave, patient troops. Later, during the investment of Plevna, his point of observation was a redoubt on the Radischevo ridge still closer to the Turkish front of fire, and it was thence he witnessed the surrender of Osman's army on the memorable 10th December 1877. If Alexander was fearless alike in camp and in the field on campaign, he was certainly not less so in St. Petersburg, when he returned thither after the fall of Plevna.

Alexander II. literally sacrificed his life to his self-regardless concern for the suffering. After the first bomb had burst on the Alexandra Canal Road, striking down civilians and Cossacks of the following escort but leaving the Emperor unhurt, his coachman begged to be allowed to dash forward and get clear of danger. But Alexander forbade him with the words, "No, no! I must alight and see to the wounded;" and as he was carrying out his heroic and benign intention, the second bomb exploded and wrought his death.

As did the men of the Hohenzollern house in 1870, so in 1877 the adult male Romanoffs went to the war with scarce an exception. The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Emperor and Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies in Europe, was neither a great general nor an honest man; but there could be no question as to his personal courage. That attribute he evinced with utter recklessness when arriving, as was his wont, too late for a deliberate and careful survey, he galloped round the Turkish positions on the morning on which began the September bombardment of Plevna, in proximity to Turkish cannon-fire so dangerous that his staff remonstrated, and that even the sedate American historian of the war speaks of him as having "exposed himself imprudently to the Turkish pickets." His son, the Grand Duke Nicholas, jun., in 1877 scarcely of age, was nevertheless a keen practical soldier, imbued with the wisdom of getting to close quarters and staying there. He was among the first to cross the Danube at Sistova under the Turkish fire, and he fought with great gallantry under Mirsky in the Schipka Pass. The brothers, Prince Nicholas and Prince Eugene of Leuchtenberg, members of the imperial house, commanded each a cavalry brigade in Gourko's dashing raid across the Balkans at the beginning of the campaign, and both were conspicuous for soldierly skill and personal gallantry in the desperate fighting in the Tundja Valley. The Grand Duke Vladimir, the second brother of Alexander III., headed the infantry advance in the direction of Rustchuk, and served with marked distinction in command of one of the corps in the army of the Lom. A younger brother, the Grand Duke Alexis, the nautical member of the imperial family, had charge of the torpedo and subaqueous mining operations on the Danube, and was held to have shown practical skill, assiduity, and vigour. Prince Serge of Leuchtenberg, younger brother of the Leuchtenbergs previously mentioned, was shot dead by a bullet through the head in the course of his duty as a staff officer at the front of a reconnaissance in force made against the Turkish force in Jovan-Tchiflik in October of the war. He was a soldier of great promise and had frequently distinguished himself. No unworthy record, it is submitted, earned in war by the members of a family of which, according to the foreign author, "personal courage is not the striking characteristic."

That writer may be warranted in stating that the late Tzar had been frequently accused of cowardice—an indictment to which, it must be admitted, many undeniable facts lent a strong colouring of probability; and he further tells of "the Emperor's aversion to ride on horseback, and of his dread of a horse even when the animal was harnessed to a vehicle." There is something, however, of inconsistency in his observation that Alexander III. might well have been a contrast to his grandfather without deserving the epithet craven-hearted. The melancholy explanation of the strange apparent change between the Tzarewitch of 1877 and the Tzar of 1894 may lie in the statement that "Alexander's nerves had been undoubtedly shaken by the terrible events in which he had been a spectator or actor." In 1877, when in campaign in Bulgaria, Alexander did not know what "nerves" meant. He was then a man of strong, if slow, mental force, stolid, peremptory, reactionary; the possessor of dull but firm resolution. He had a strong though clumsy seat on horseback and was no infrequent rider. He had two ruling dislikes: one was war, the other was officers of German extraction. The latter he got rid of; the former he regarded as a necessary evil of the hour; he longed for its ending, but while it lasted he did his sturdy and loyal best to wage it to the advantage of the Russian arms. And in this he succeeded, stanchly fulfilling the particular duty which was laid upon him, that of protecting the Russian left flank from the Danube to the foothills of the Balkans. He had good troops, the subordinate commands were fairly well filled, and his headquarter staff was efficient—General Dochtouroff, its sous-chef, was certainly the ablest staff-officer in the Russian army. But Alexander was no puppet of his staff; he understood his business as the commander of the army of the Lom, performed his functions in a firm, quiet fashion, and withal was the trusty and successful warden of the eastern marches. His force never amounted to 50,000 men, and his enemy was in considerably greater strength. He had successes and he sustained reverses, but he was equal to either fortune; always resolute in his steadfast, dogged manner, and never whining for reinforcements when things went against him, but doing his best with the means to his hand. They used to speak of him in the principal headquarter as the only commander who never gave them any bother. So highly was he thought of there that when, after the unsuccessful attempt on Plevna in the September of the war, the Guard Corps was arriving from Russia and there was the temporary intention to use it with other troops in an immediate offensive movement across the Balkans, he was named to take the command of the enterprise. But this intention having been presently departed from, and the reinforcements being ordered instead to the Plevna section of the theatre of war, the Tzarewitch retained his command on the left flank, and thus in mid-December had the opportunity of inflicting a severe defeat on Suleiman Pasha, just as in September he had worsted Mehemet Ali in the battle of Carkova. It is sad to be told that a man once so resolute and masterful should later have been the victim of shattered nerves; it is sadder still to learn that he was a mark for accusations of cowardice. He never was a gracious, far less a lovable man; but, as I can testify from personal knowledge, he was a cool and brave soldier in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.



PARADE OF THE COMMISSIONAIRES

1875

On a Sunday morning in early June, just before the church bells begin to ring, there is wont to be held the annual general parade and inspection of the Corps of Commissionaires, on the enclosed grass plot by the margin of the ornamental water in St. James's Park. On the ground, and accompanying the inspecting officer on his tour through the opened ranks, there are always not a few veteran officers, glad by their presence on such an occasion to countenance and recognise their humbler comrades in arms in bygone war-dramas enacted elsewhere than within hearing of London Sunday bells. No scene could be imagined presenting a more practical confutation of the ignorant calumny that the British army is composed of the froth and the dregs of the British nation, and that there exists no cordial feeling between British soldiers and British officers. It is good to see how the face kindles of the veteran guardsman at the sight and the kindly greeting of Sir Charles Russell. Doubtless the honest private's thoughts go back to that misty morning on the slopes of Inkerman, when officer and private stood shoulder to shoulder in the fierce press, and there rang again in his ears the cheer with which the Guards greeted the act of valour by the performance of which the baronet won the Victoria Cross. There is a feeling deeper than a mere formality in the half-dozen words that pass between Sir William Codrington and the old soldier of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, to whom the gallant general showed the way up to the Russian front, through the shot-torn vineyards on the slopes of the Alma. When one feeble old ex-warrior is smitten suddenly on parade with a palsied faintness, it is on the yet stalwart arm of his old chief that he totters out of the ranks, and the twain do not part till the superior has exacted a pledge that his humble ex-subordinate shall call upon him on the morrow, with a view to medical advice and strengthening comforts.

Notwithstanding that in the true old martial spirit it shows what in the Service is known as a good front, it is not a very athletic or puissant cohort this, that stands on parade here on the grass within hearing of the church bells. The grizzled old soldiers, sooth to say, look rather the worse for wear. There is a decided shortcoming among them of the proper complement of limbs, and one at least, in speaking of the battlefields he had seen, might with truth echo the old soldier in Burns's Jolly Beggars—

And there I left for witness a leg and an arm.

They carry no weapons; to some may belong the knowledge only of the obsolete "Brown Bess" manual exercise; and not many have been so recently on active service as to have learnt the handling of the modern breech-loader. On the whole, a battered, fossil, maimed army of superannuated fighting men, scarcely fitted to shine in the new tactics of the "swarm-attack" by which the battles of the future are to be won or lost. But you cannot jibe at the worn old soldiers as "lean and slippered pantaloons." Look how truly, with what instinctive intuition, the dressing is taken up at the word of command; note how the old martial carriage comes back to the most dilapidated when the adjutant calls his command to "attention." Age and wounds have not quenched the fighting spirit of the old soldiers; there is not a man of them but would, did the need arise, "clatter on his stumps to the sound of the drum." There are few breasts in those ranks that are not decorated with medals. In very truth the parade is a record of British campaigns for the last thirty years. Among the thicket of medals on the bosom of this broken old light dragoon note the one bearing the legend, "Cabul 1842" within the laurel wreath. Its wearer was a trooper in the famous "rescue" column. The skeletons of Elphinstone's hapless force littered the slopes of the Tezeen Valley, up which the squadron in which he rode charged straight for the tent of the splendid demon Akbar Khan. He rode behind Campbell at the battle of Punniar, and won there that star of silver and bronze which hangs from the famous "rainbow" ribbon. "Sutlej" is the legend on another of his medals, and he could recount to you the memorable story of Thackwell's cavalry operations against the Sikh field works, and how that division of seasoned horsemen reduced outpost duty to a methodical science. "Punjab" medals for Gough's campaign of 1848-49 are scattered up and down in the ranks. The sword-cut athwart this wiry old trooper's cheek he got in the hot melee of Ramhuggur, where a certain Brigadier Colin Campbell whom men knew afterwards as Lord Clyde, found it hard work to hold his own, and where gallant Cureton and the veteran William Havelock fell at the head of their light horsemen as they crashed into the heart of 4000 Sikhs. His neighbour took part in the storm of Mooltan, and saw stout, calm-pulsed Sergeant John Bennet of the 1st Bombay Fusiliers plant the British ensign on the crest of the breach and quietly stand by it there, supporting it in the tempest of shot and shell till the storming party had made the breach their own. This old soldier of the 24th can tell you of the butchery of his regiment at Chillianwallah; how Brooks went down between the Sikh guns, how Brigadier Pennycuick was killed out to the front, and how his son, a beardless ensign, maddened at the sight of the mangling of his father's body, rushed out and fought against all comers over the corpse till the lad fell dead on his dead father; how on that terrible day the loss of the 24th was 13 officers killed, 10 wounded, and 497 men killed and wounded; and how the issue of the bloody combat might have been very different but for the display, on the part of Colin Campbell, of "that steady coolness and military decision for which he was so remarkable." Scarcely a great show on a troop-horse would this bent and gnarled old 12th Lancer make to-day, but he and his fellows rode right well on the day for which he wears this "Cape" medal, with the blue and orange ribbon and the lion and mimosa bush on the reverse. Because of its prickles the Boers call the mimosa the "wait-a-bit" thorn, but there was no thought of waiting a bit among the 12th Lancers at the Berea, when they charged the savage Basutos and captured their chief Moshesh. This one-armed veteran of the Royal Fusiliers was left lying wounded in the Great Redoubt on the Russian slope of the Alma, when the terrible fire of grape and musketry forced Codrington's brigade of the Light Division temporarily to give ground after it had struggled so valiantly up the rugged broken banks, and through the hailstorm of fire that swept through the vineyards. This still stalwart man was one of the nineteen sergeants of the 33rd—the Duke of Wellington's Own—who were either killed or wounded in defence of the colours on the same bloody but glorious day. A few files farther down the line stands an old 93rd man. The veteran Sutherland Highlander was one of that "thin red line" which disdained to form square when the Russian squadrons rode with seeming heart at the kilted men on Balaclava day. He heard Colin Campbell's stern repressive rebuke—"Ninety-third, ninety-third, damn all that eagerness!" when the hotter spirits of the regiment would fain have broken ranks and met the Russians half-way with the cold steel; he saw the Scotch wife chastise the fugitive Turks with her tongue and her frying-pan. Speak to his tall, shaggy neighbour of the "bonny Jocks," and you will call up a flush of pleasure on the harsh-featured Scottish face; for he was a trooper in the Greys on that self-same Balaclava day when the avalanche of Russian horsemen thundered down upon the heavy brigade. He was among those who heard, and with sternly rapturous anticipation obeyed Scarlet's calm-pitched, far-sounding order, "Left wheel into line!" He was among those who, when the trumpets had sounded the charge, strove in vain by dint of spur to overtake the gallant old chief with the long white moustache, as he rode foremost on the foe with the dashing Elliot and the burly Shegog on either flank of him; he was among those who, as they hewed and hacked their way through the press, heard already from the far side of the melee the stentorian adjuration of big Adjutant Miller, as standing up in his stirrups the burly Scot shouted, "Rally, rally on me, ye muckle ——!" Mightily knocked about has been this man with the empty sleeve, but he does not belie the familiar sobriquet of his old regiment; he was one of the "Diehards," a title well earned by the 57th on the bloody height of Albuera, and it was under their colours that he lost his arm on Inkerman morning. There is quite a little regiment of men who were wounded in the "trenches" or about the Redan. There is no "19" now on the buttons of this scarred veteran, but the number was there when he followed Massy and Molesworth over the parapet of the Redan on the day when so much good English blood was wasted. Shoulder to shoulder now, as oft of yore, stand two old soldiers of the Buffs both of whom went down in the same assault; and an umwhile bugler of the Perthshire Grey-breeks "minds the day" well also by reason of the wound that has crippled him for life. As he stands on parade this calm Sabbath morning, that maimed man of the 60th Rifles can remember another and a very different Sabbath—the 10th of May 1857 in Meerut—day and place of the first outburst of the Mutiny; a fell Sabbath of burning, slaughter, and dismay, of disregard of sex, age, and rank, of fierce brutality and of nameless agony. He was one of the rifles whose fire in the assault of Delhi covered the desperate duty of blowing open the Cashmere Gate, performed with so methodical calmness by Home, Salkeld, and Burgess; and his comrade hero with the maimed limb, when the hour had come for a rush to close quarters, followed Reid and Muter over the breastwork at the end of the serai of Kissengunge. Proud, yet their pride dashed by sadness, must be the soldiering memories of this stout northman, erstwhile a front rank man in the old Ross-shire Buffs, a regiment ever true to its noble Celtic motto of Cuidichn Rhi. At Kooshab, in the short, but brilliant Persian War, he fought in the same field where Malcolmson earned the Victoria Cross by one of the most gallant acts for which that guerdon of valour ever has been accorded. He was in Mackenzie's company at Cawnpore when the Highlanders, stirred by the wild strains of the war-pibroch, rushed upon the Nana's battery at the angle of the mango tope with the irresistible fury of one of their own mountain torrents in spate. And next day he was among those who, with drawn ghastly faces and scared eyes, looked into that fearful well, filled to the lip with the mangled corpses of British women and children. He was one of those who, standing by that well, pledged the oath administered by the bareheaded Ross-shire sergeant over the long, heavy tress of auburn hair which a demon's tulwar had severed from the head of an Englishwoman, that while strong arm and trusty steel lasted to no living thing of the accursed race should quarter be accorded. And he was one of those who, having battled their way over the Charbagh Bridge, having threaded the bullet-torn path to the Kaiser-bagh, and having forced for themselves a passage up to the embrasures by the Baileyguard Gate, melted from the stern fierceness of the fray when the siege-worn women and children in the residency of Lucknow sobbed out upon their necks blessings for the deliverance. His rear-rank man is an ex-Bengal Fusilier, wounded once at Sabraon, again at Pegu, and a third time at Delhi. He will not be offended if you hail him as one of the "old Dirty-shirts;" for it was in honourable disregard of appearances as they toiled night and day in the trenches of Delhi that the regiment, which now in the Queen's service is numbered 101, gained the nickname. Time and space fail one to tell a tithe of the stories of valour and hardship linked in the medals and wounds borne by men on this unostentatious parade—a parade the members of which have shed their blood on the soil of every quarter of the globe. The minutest military annals scarcely name some of the obscure combats in which men here to-day have fought and bled. This man desperately wounded at Najou, near Shanghai; that one wounded in two places at Owna, in Persia; this one with a sleeve emptied at Aroga, in Abyssinia—who among us remember aught, if, indeed, we have ever heard, of Najou, Owna, or Aroga? On the breast of this bent, hoary old man, note these strange emblems, the Cross of San Fernando and the Order of the Tower and Sword. Their wearer is a relic of the British Legion in the Carlist War of 1837, and they were won under brave old De Lacy Evans at the siege of Bilbao.

Over the modest portals of the Commissionaire Barracks in the Strand might well be inscribed the legend, "To all the military glories of Britain." But just as we have not long ago seen the pride of a palace in another land on whose facade is a kindred inscription, abased by the occupation of a foreign conqueror, so there was a time when the living emblems of Britain's military glory were wont to undergo much humiliation and adversity when their career of soldiering had come to an end. Germany recompenses her veterans by according them, as a right, reputable civil employ when they have served their time as soldiers; the custom of Britain, on the contrary, has been too commonly to leave her scarred and war-worn soldiers to their own resources, or to a pension on which to live is impossible. We were always ready enough to feel a glow at the achievements of our arms; but till lately we were prone to reckon the individual soldier as a social pariah, and to regard the fact of a man's having served in the ranks as a brand of discredit. To this estimate, it must be allowed, the ex-soldier himself very often contributed not a little. Destitute of a future, and often debarred by wounds or by broken health from any laborious industrial employment, he made the most of the present; and his idea of making the most of the future not unfrequently took the form of beer and shiftlessness. Recognising the disadvantages that bore so hard on the deserving old soldier, recognising too, in the words of the late Sir John Burgoyne, that "there are many qualities peculiar to the soldier and sailor, and imbibed by him in the ordinary course of his service, which, added to good character and conduct, may render such men more eligible than others for various services in civil life," Captain Edward Walter founded the Corps of Commissionaires. That organisation, beginning with seven men, has now a strength of several hundreds, and its ranks are still open to all the eligible recruits who choose to come forward. The Commissionaire is no recipient of charity; what Captain Walter has done is simply to show him how he may earn an honest and comfortable livelihood, and to provide him, if he desires it, with a home of a kind which the ex-militaire naturally most appreciates. The advantages are open to him of a savings-bank and of a sick and burial fund, and when the evil days come when he can no longer earn his own bread, the "Retiring Fund" guarantees the thrifty and steady Commissionaire against the prospect of ending his days in the workhouse. Among the fruits of Captain Walter's devoted and gratuitous services in this cause has been a wholesome change in the bias of popular opinion as to the worth of old soldiers. No longer are they regarded as the mere chaff and debris of the cannon fodder—"no account men," as Bret Harte has it; he has furnished them with opportunity to prove, and they have proved, that they can so live and so work as to win the respect and trust of their brethren of the civilian world. The man who has done this thing deserves well, not alone of the British army, but of the British nation. He has brought it about that the time has come when most men think with Sir Roger de Coverley. "You must know," says Sir Roger, "I never make use of anybody to row me that has not lost either a leg or an arm. I would rather bate him a few strokes of his oar than not employ an honest man that has been wounded in the Queen's service. If I was a lord or a bishop ... I would not put a fellow in my livery that had not a wooden leg."



THE INNER HISTORY OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN

The actual fighting phase of this memorable campaign was confined to the four days from the 15th to the 18th of June, both days inclusive. The literature concerning itself with that period would make a library of itself. Scarcely a military writer of any European nation but has delivered himself on the subject, from Clausewitz to General Maurice, from Berton to Brialmont. Thiers, Alison, and Hooper may be cited of the host of civilian writers whom the theme has enticed to description and criticism. There is scarcely a point in the brief vivid drama that has not furnished a topic for warm and sustained controversy; and the cult of the Waterloo campaign is more assiduous to-day than when the participators in the great strife were testifying to their own experiences.

Quite recently an important work dealing chiefly with the inner history of the campaign has come to us from the other side of the Atlantic. [Footnote: The Campaign of Waterloo: a Military History. By John Codman Ropes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. February 1893.] Its author, Mr. John Ropes, is a civilian gentleman of Boston, who has devoted his life to military study. He has given years to the elucidation of the problems of the Waterloo campaign, has trodden every foot of its ground, and has burrowed for recondite matter in the military archives of divers nations. A citizen of the American Republic, he is free alike from national prejudices and national prepossessions; if he is perhaps not uniformly correct in his inferences, his rigorous impartiality is always conspicuous. By his research and acute perception he has let light in upon not a few obscurities; and it may be pertinent briefly to summarise the inner history of the campaign, giving what may seem their due weight to the arguments and representations of the American writer.

The following were the respective positions on the 14th of June:— Wellington's heterogeneous army, about 94,000 strong with 196 guns, lay widely dispersed in cantonments from the Scheldt to the Charleroi-Brussels chaussee, its front extending from Tournay through Mons and Binche to Nivelles and Quatre Bras. Of the Prussian army under Bluecher, about 121,000 strong with 312 guns, one corps was at Liege, another near the Meuse above Namur, a third at Namur, and Ziethen's in advance holding the line of the Sambre. The mass of Bluecher's command had already seen service and, with the exception of the Saxons, was full of zeal; the corps were well commanded, and their chief, although he had his limits, was a thorough soldier. The French army, consisting of five corps d'armee, the Guard, four cavalry corps and 344 guns—total fighting strength 124,500— Napoleon had succeeded in assembling with wonderful celerity and secrecy south of the Sambre within an easy march of Charleroi. Its officers and soldiers were alike veterans but its organisation was somewhat defective. Napoleon scarcely preserved the phenomenal force of earlier years; but, in Mr. Ropes's words, he disclosed "no conspicuous lack of energy and activity." Soult was far from being an ideal chief of staff. Ney, to whom was assigned the command of the left wing, only reached the army on the 15th, and without a staff; Grouchy, to whom on the 16th was suddenly given the command of the right wing, was not a man of high military capacity.

Napoleon's plan of campaign was founded on the circumstance that the bases of the allied armies lay in opposite directions—the English base on the German Ocean, the Prussian through Liege and Maestricht to the Rhine. The military probability was that if either army was forced to retreat, it would retreat towards its base; and to do this would be to march away from its ally. Napoleon was in no situation to manoeuvre leisurely, with all Europe on the march against him. His engrossing aim was to gain immediate victory over his adversaries in Belgium before the Russians and Austrians should close in around him. His expectation was that Bluecher would offer battle about Fleurus and be overwhelmed before the Anglo-Dutch army could come to the support of its Prussian ally. To make sure of preventing that junction the Emperor's intention was to detail Ney with the left wing to reach and hold Quatre Bras. The Prussians thoroughly beaten, drifting rearward toward their base, and reduced to a condition of comparative inoffensiveness, he would then turn on Wellington and force him to give battle.

Mr. Ropes refutes the contention maintained by a great array of authorities, that Napoleon's design was to "wedge himself into the interval between the allied armies" by seizing simultaneously Sombreffe and Quatre Bras, in order to cut the communication between the two armies and then defeat them in succession. Against this view he successfully marshals Napoleon himself, Wellington by the mouth of Lord Ellesmere, and the great German strategist Clausewitz. It will suffice to quote Napoleon:—

The Emperor's intention was that his advance should occupy Fleurus, the mass concealed behind this town; he took good care ... above all things not to occupy Sombreffe. To have done so would have caused the failure of all his dispositions, for then the battle of Ligny would not have been fought, and Bluecher would have had to make Wavre the concentration-point for his army.

Wellington alludes pointedly to the obvious danger to the French army of the suggested wedge position in what the Germans call die taktische Mitte, where, instead of being able to defeat the allies in succession, it would itself be liable to be crushed between the upper and the nether millstone.

At daybreak of the 15th Napoleon took the offensive, driving in Ziethen on and through Charleroi although not without sharp fighting. On that evening three French corps, the Guard, and most of the cavalry, were concentrated about Charleroi and forward toward Fleurus, ready to attack Bluecher next day. Controversy has been very keen on the question whether or not on the afternoon of the 15th Napoleon gave Ney verbal orders to occupy Quatre Bras the same evening. Mr. Ropes holds it "almost certain" that the order was given. From Napoleon's bulletin despatched on the evening of the 15th, which is the only piece of strictly contemporary evidence, he quotes: "Le Prince de la Moskowa (Ney) a eu le soir son quartier general aux Quatres-Chemins;" and he remarks that this must have been the belief in the headquarter "unless we gratuitously invent an intention to deceive the public." There is no need for Mr. Ropes to put that strain on himself, since the main purport of Napoleon's bulletins notoriously was to deceive the public. But if Napoleon had not intended that Ney should occupy Quatre Bras on the night of the 15th, the statement that this had been done would have been a purposeless futility; and if he had intended that Ney should do so it is unlikely that he should have omitted to give him instructions to that effect. Grouchy claims to have heard Napoleon censure Ney for his omission to occupy Quatre Bras; an omission which had its importance, for the reason, among others, that it was ominous of the Marshal's infinitely more harmful disobedience of orders next day.

All writers agree that Bluecher ordered the concentration of his army in the fighting position previously chosen in the event of the French advancing by Charleroi, "without," in Mr. Ropes's words, "any definite agreement or undertaking with Wellington that he was to have English aid in the impending battle." He was content to take his risk of the English general's possible inability for sundry obvious reasons, to come to his support. And while the Prussian army with the unfortunate exception of Buelow's corps, was on the 15th moving toward the chosen position of Ligny, where its right was to be on St. Amand, its centre on and behind Ligny, and its left about Balatre, what was happening in the Anglo-Dutch army lying spread out westward of the Charleroi—Brussels chaussee?

Wellington was at Brussels expecting the French invasion by or west of the Mons-Brussels road, to meet which he considered his army very well placed, but could expect no Prussian cooperation. His courier service, with his forces so dispersed, should have been well organised and alert, but it was neither; and Napoleon's secrecy and suddenness in taking the offensive were worthy of his best days. It has been freely imputed to Wellington that he was thereby in a measure surprised. There is the strange and probably mythical story in the work professing to be Fouche's Memoirs to the effect that Wellington was relying on him for information of Napoleon's plans, and that he—Fouche—played the English commander false. "On the very day of Napoleon's departure from Paris," say the Memoirs, "I despatched Madame D——, furnished with notes in cipher, narrating the whole plan of the campaign. But at the same time I privately sent orders for such obstacles at the frontier, where she was to pass, that she could not reach Wellington's headquarters till after the event. This was the real explanation of the inactivity of the British generalissimo which excited such universal astonishment." Readers of the Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury will remember the apparently authentic statement of Captain Bowles, that Wellington, rising from the supper-table at the famous ball,

whispered to ask the Duke of Richmond if he had a good map. The Duke of Richmond said he had, and took Wellington into his dressing-room. Wellington shut the door and said, "Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me.... I have ordered the army to concentrate at Quatre Bras; but we shall not stop him there, and if so I must fight him there" (passing his thumb-nail over the position of Waterloo). The conversation was repeated to me by the Duke of Richmond two minutes after it occurred.

Facts, however, are stronger evidence than words; and this confession on Wellington's part is inconsistent with the circumstance that he had not hurried to retrieve the time he is represented as having owned that Napoleon had gained on him—that he had, on the contrary, allowed his adversary to gain several hours more. Wellington's combination of caution and decision throughout this momentous period is a very interesting study. It was not until 3 P.M. (of the 15th) that there reached him tidings almost simultaneously of firing between the outposts about Thuin and that Ziethen had been attacked before Charleroi, the two places ten miles apart and both occurrences in the early morning. Those affairs might have been casual outpost skirmishes; and the Duke, in anticipation of further information, took no measures for some hours. At length, in default of later tidings he determined on the precautionary step of assembling his divisions at their respective rendezvous points in readiness to march; further specifically directing a concentration of 25,000 men at Nivelles on his then left flank, when it should have been ascertained for certain that the enemy's line of attack was by Charleroi. These orders were sent out early in the evening—"between 5 and 7." Later in the evening came a letter from Bluecher announcing the concentration of the Prussian army to occupy the Ligny fighting position, in which disposition Wellington acquiesced; but, still uncertain of Napoleon's true line of attack—his conviction being, as is well known, that Napoleon should have moved on the British right—he would not definitely fix the point of ultimate concentration of his army until he should receive intelligence from Mons. But Bluecher's tidings caused him to issue about 10 P.M. a second set of orders, commanding a general movement of the army, not as yet to any specific point of concentration but in prescribed directions towards its left (eastward). At length, when the news came from Mons that he need have no further serious solicitude about his right since the whole French army was advancing by Charleroi, he saw his way clear. Towards midnight, writes Mueffling the Prussian Commissioner at his headquarters, Wellington informed him of the tidings from Mons, and added: "The orders for the concentration of my army at Nivelles and Quatre Bras are already despatched. Let us, therefore, go to the ball."

There are three definite evidences that before midnight of the 15th Wellington had resolved to concentrate about Quatre Bras, and had issued final orders accordingly—his statement to the Duke of Richmond, his statement to Mueffling, and his statement in his official report to Lord Bathurst. Yet Mr. Ropes believes that his decision to that effect "could not have been arrived at very long before he left Brussels" on the morning of the 16th, which he did "probably about half-past seven." He founds this belief on two orders dated "16th June" sent to Lord Hill in the early morning of that day, in which there is no allusion to a concentration at Quatre Bras. But those were merely supplementary instructions as to points of detail; for example, one of them enjoined that a division ordered earlier to Enghien should move instead by way of Braine le Comte, that being a nearer route toward the final general destination of Quatre Bras specified in the earlier (the "towards midnight") orders. The latter orders are not extant, having been lost according to Gurwood, with De Lancey's papers when he fell at Waterloo; but that they must have been issued is proved by the fact that they were acted upon by the troops; and that they were issued before midnight of the 15th is made clear by Wellington's three specific statements to that effect.

When the Duke left Brussels for the front on the morning of the 16th he took with him a singularly optimistic paper styled "Disposition of the British Army at 7 A.M., 16th June," which was "written out for the information of the Commander of the Forces by Colonel Sir W. de Lancey," his Quartermaster-General. In the nature of things for the most part guess-work, the wish as regarded almost every particular set out in this document was father to the thought. Wellington was no doubt reasonably justified in accepting and relying on this flattering "Disposition;" but its terms, as Mr. Ropes conclusively shows, simply misled him and caused him also unconsciously to mislead Bluecher, both by the expressions of the letter written by him to that chief on his arrival at Quatre Bras and later when he met the Prussian commander at the mill of Brye. Wellington was indeed trebly fortunate in finding the Quatre Bras position still available to him—fortunate that Ney on the previous evening had defaulted from his orders in refraining from occupying it; fortunate that Ney still on this morning was remaining passive; and more fortunate still that it had been occupied, defended, and reinforced by Dutch-Belgian troops not only without orders from him but in bold and happy violation of his orders. Perponcher's division was scarcely a potent representative of the Anglo-Dutch army, but there was nothing more at hand; and pending the coming up of reinforcements Wellington, with rather a sanguine reliance on Ney's maintenance of inactivity, rode over to Brye and had a conversation with Bluecher. There are contradictory accounts of its tenor, and Gneisenau certainly seems to have formed the impression that the Duke gave a positive pledge of support. Mr. Ropes considers that, misled by the erroneous "Disposition," Wellington honestly believed he would be able to co-operate with Bluecher, and that he "certainly did give that commander some assurance of support by the Anglo-Dutch army in the impending battle." Mueffling, who was present, states that the Duke's last words were: "Well, I will come, provided I am not attacked myself;" and this probably was the final undertaking. Wellington's words were in accordance with the caution of his character; and it is certain that Bluecher had decided to fight at Ligny whether assured or not of his brother-commander's support. That Wellington regarded Bluecher's dispositions for battle as objectionable is proved by his blunt comment to Hardinge—"If they fight here they will be damnably licked!"

It would have been possible for Napoleon to have crushed the Prussian army in the early hours of the 16th when it was in the throes of formation for battle; and this he would probably have done if Ney had occupied Quatre Bras on the previous evening. But in Ney's default of accomplishing this Napoleon, in his solicitude that Wellington should be hindered from supporting Bluecher, determined to delay his own stroke against the latter until Ney should be in possession of Quatre Bras with the left wing, where, in Soult's words, "he ought to be able to destroy any force of the enemy that might present itself," and then come to the support of the Emperor by getting on the Prussian rear behind St. Amand. Napoleon's instructions were explicit that Ney was to march on Quatre Bras, take position there, and then send an infantry division and Kellerman's cavalry to points eastward, whence the Emperor might summon them to participate in his own operations. If Ney had fulfilled his orders by utilising the whole force at his disposal, in all human probability he would have defeated Wellington at Quatre Bras, whose troops, arriving in detail, would have been crushed by greatly superior numbers as they came up. As it was, although at the beginning of the battle he was in superior strength, Ney never utilised more than 22,000 men; whereas by its close Wellington had 31,000, and, thanks to the stanchness of the British infantry, was the victor in a very hard-fought contest. But Mr. Ropes has reason in holding it humanly certain that he would have been beaten—in which case the battle of Waterloo would never have been fought—had not D'Erlon's corps of Ney's command while marching towards Quatre Bras, been turned aside in the direction of the Prussian right.

In the justifiable belief that Ney was duly carrying out his orders Napoleon at half-past one opened the battle of Ligny. He had expected to have to deal with but a single Prussian corps, but the actual fact was that, while he had 74,000 men on the field, Bluecher had 87,000 with a superior strength of artillery. The fighting was long and severe. From the first, recognising the defects of his adversary's position, Napoleon was satisfied that he could defeat the Prussian army. But he needed to do more—to crush, to rout it, so that he need give himself no further concern regarding it. This he saw his way to accomplish if Ney were to strike in presently on the Prussian right; and so, with intent to stir that chief to vigorous enterprise, the message was sent him that "the fate of France was in his hands." The battle proceeded, Bluecher throwing in his reserves freely, Napoleon chary of his and playing the waiting game pending Ney's expected co-operation. About half-past five he was preparing to put in the Guard and strike the decisive blow, when information reached him from his right that a column, presumably hostile, was visible some two miles distant marching toward Fleurus. Napoleon sent an aide to ascertain the facts and until his return postponed the decisive moment. Two hours later the information was brought back that the approaching column was D'Erlon's from Ney's wing. This intelligence dispelled all anxiety. Strangely enough, no instructions were sent to the approaching reinforcement, and the suspended stroke was promptly dealt. The Prussians, after desperate fighting, were everywhere driven back. Napoleon with part of the Imperial Guard broke Bluecher's centre, and the French army deployed on the heights beyond the stream. In a word, Napoleon had defeated the Prussians, but had neither crushed nor routed them. There was no pursuit.

D'Erlon's corps on this afternoon had achieved the doubly sinister distinction of having prevented Ney from gaining a probable victory at Quatre Bras, and of detracting from the thoroughness of Napoleon's actual victory at Ligny. While it was leisurely marching towards Frasnes in support of Ney, it was diverted eastward towards the Prussian right flank in consequence of an order given (whether authorised or not is uncertain) by an aide-de-camp of the Emperor. It was about to deploy for action, when, on receiving from Ney a peremptory order to rejoin his command; and in absence of a command from Napoleon to strike the Prussian flank, it went about and tramped back towards Frasnes. D'Erlon's promenade was as futile as the famous march of the King of France up the hill and then down again.

Mr. Ropes considers that on the morning of the 17th Napoleon had thus far in the main fulfilled his programme. This view may be questioned. He had merely defeated two of the four Prussian corps; he had not wrecked Bluecher. He had failed to occupy Quatre Bras; the Anglo-Dutch army had succeeded in effecting a partial concentration and in repulsing his left wing there. Still it must be admitted that with two corps absolutely intact and with no serious losses in the Guard and cavalry, Napoleon was in good shape for carrying out his plan. If Ney had sent him word overnight that Wellington's army was bivouacking about Quatre Bras in ignorance, as it turned out, of the result of Ligny, he might have attacked it to good purpose in conjunction with Ney in the early morning of the 17th. But Ney was silent and sulky; Napoleon himself was greatly fatigued, and Soult was of no service to him.

During the night the Prussians "had folded their tents like the Arabs, and as silently stolen away." They had neither been watched nor followed up, all touch of them had been lost, and there was nothing to indicate their line of retreat. This slovenliness on the part of the French would not have occurred in Napoleon's earlier days; nor in those days of greater vigour would he have delayed until after midday of the 17th to follow up an army which he had defeated on the previous evening, and which had disappeared from before him in the course of the night. The reports which had been sent in from a cavalry reconnaissance despatched in the morning indicated that the Prussians were retiring on Namur. No reconnaissance had been made in the direction of Tilly and Wavre. This was a strange error, since Bluecher had two corps still untouched, and as above everything a fighting man, was not likely to throw up his hands and forsake his ally after one partial discomfiture. Napoleon tardily determined to despatch Grouchy on the errand of following up the Prussians with a force consisting of about 33,000 men with ninety-six guns. Thus far all authorities are agreed; but as regards the character of the orders given to Grouchy for his guidance in an obviously somewhat complicated enterprise, there is an extraordinary contrariety of evidence. It is stated in the St. Helena Memoirs that Grouchy received positive orders to keep himself always between the main French army and Bluecher; to maintain constant communication with the former and in a position easily to rejoin it; that since it was possible that Bluecher might retreat on Wavre, he (Grouchy) was to be there simultaneously; if the Prussians should continue their march on Brussels and should pass the night in the forest of Soignies, he was to follow to the edge of the forest; should they retire on the Meuse, he was to watch them with part of his cavalry and himself occupy Wavre with the mass of his force, where he should be in position for easy communication with Napoleon's headquarters. Those orders are certainly specific enough, but there is no record of them; and they may be assumed to represent rather what Napoleon at St. Helena considered Grouchy should have done, than what he was actually ordered to do.

Grouchy's version, again—and it is adequately corroborated—is to the effect that about midday of the 17th on the field of Ligny, the Emperor gave him the verbal order to take the 3rd and 4th Corps and certain cavalry and "go in pursuit of the Prussians." Grouchy raised sundry objections which the Emperor overruled and repeated his commands, adding that "it was for me (Grouchy) to discover the route taken by Bluecher; that he himself was going to fight the English, and that it was for me to complete the defeat of the Prussians by attacking them as soon as I should have caught up with them." So much for Grouchy for the moment.

Soon after the Emperor had given Grouchy this verbal order, tidings came in from a scouting party that a body of Prussian troops had been seen about 9 A.M. at Gembloux, considerably northward of the Namur road. The abstract probability no doubt was that the Prussians would retire towards their base. But that Napoleon kept an open mind on the subject is evidenced by his instruction to Grouchy to "go and discover the route taken by Bluecher," and this later intelligence, it may be assumed, opened his mind yet further. He thought it well, then, to send to Grouchy a supplementary written order which in the temporary absence of Marshal Soult he dictated to General Bertrand. This order enjoined on Grouchy to proceed with his force to Gembloux; to explore in the directions of Namur and Maestricht; to pursue the enemy; explore his march; and report upon his manoeuvres, so that "I (Napoleon) may be able to penetrate what the enemy is intending to do; whether he is separating himself from the English, or whether they are intending still to unite in trying the fate of another battle to cover Brussels or Liege." To me I confess—and the view is also that of Chesney and Maurice—this written order is simply an amplification in detail of the previous verbal order, which by instructing Grouchy "to discover the route taken by Bluecher" clearly evinced doubt in Napoleon's mind as to the Prussian line of retreat. Mr. Ropes, on the other hand, bases an indictment on Grouchy's conduct on the argument that not only was the tone of the written order altogether different from that of the verbal order, but that the duty assigned to Grouchy by the former was wholly different from that specified in the latter.

He adds that Grouchy constantly and persistently denied having received any other than the verbal order, that in this denial Grouchy lied, and that "the mischievous influence of this deliberate concealment of his orders by Grouchy caused for nearly thirty years after the battle of Waterloo to be prevalent a wholly false notion as to the task assigned by Napoleon to the Marshal." Certainly Grouchy's conduct is inexplicable to any one holding the belief, as I do, that there is nothing in the written order to account for Grouchy's denial of having received it. It is more inexplicable than Mr. Ropes appears to be aware of. It is true, as Mr. Ropes proves, that Grouchy vehemently denied receiving the written order in all his works printed from 1818 to 1829. But he had actually acknowledged its receipt almost immediately after Waterloo. In his son's little book, Le Marechal de Grouchy du 16me au 19me Juin, 1815, is printed among the Documents Historiques Inedits a paper styled "Allocution du Marechal Grouchy a quelques-uns des officiers generaux sous les ordres, lorsqu'il eut appris les desastres de Waterloo." From this document I make the following extract: "A few hours later the Emperor modified his first order, and caused to be written to me by the Grand Marshal Bertrand the order to betake myself to Gembloux, and to send reconnaissances towards Namur. 'It is important,' continued the order, 'to discover the intentions of the Prussians—whether they are separating from the English, or have the design to take the chance of a new battle.'" It is strange that this acknowledgment should never have been cited against Grouchy; stranger still that in the face of it he should have maintained his denials; yet more strange that those denials were never exposed; and most strange of all, that finally the "written order" should have appeared for the first time in a casual article published in 1842, without evoking any explanation from Grouchy, or any strictures on his persistent mendacity.

It may be questioned whether the force of 33,000 men entrusted to Grouchy was not either too large or too small. The main French army, in the possible contingencies before it, could not safely spare so large a detachment, as events showed. Grouchy's command was not sufficiently strong to oppose the whole Prussian army; two corps of which could certainly have "held" it, while the other two were free to support Wellington. Mr. Ropes thinks it might have been diminished by one-half, but then a single Prussian corps could have dealt with it. It is difficult to discern in what respect the 6000 cavalry assigned to Grouchy should have been inadequate to such service as could reasonably have been expected of his whole command.

The British force about Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th amounted to about 45,000 men. Early on that morning Wellington was in conversation with the Captain Bowles previously mentioned, when an officer galloped up and, to quote Captain Bowles,

whispered to the Duke, who then turned to me and said, "Old Bluecher has had a d——d good licking and has gone back to Wavre. As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked—I can't help that."

He quietly withdrew his troops from their positions, an operation which Ney, with 40,000 men at his disposal, did not attempt to molest, notwithstanding repeated orders from Napoleon to move on Quatre Bras. Early in the afternoon Napoleon reached that vicinity with the Guard, 6th Corps, and Milhaud's Cuirassiers, picked up Ney's command, and mounting his horse led the French army, following up Wellington's retreat. His energy and activity throughout the march is described as intense. Those characteristics he continued to evince during the following night and in the morning of the eventful 18th. In the dead of night he spent two hours on the picquet line, and about seven he was out again on the foreposts in the mud and rain. His anxiety was not as to the issue of a battle with Wellington, but lest Wellington should not stand and fight. That apprehension was dispelled when, as he rode along his front about 8 A.M., he saw the Anglo-Dutch army taking up its ground. He was aware that at least one "pretty strong Prussian column"—which actually consisted of the two corps beaten at Ligny—had retired on Wavre. But notwithstanding the disquieting vagueness and ineptitude of Grouchy's letter of 10 P.M. of the 17th from Gembloux, and that up to the morning of the battle he had sent no suggestions or instructions to that officer, he yet trusted implicitly to him to fend off the Prussians; and it did not seem to occur to him that Wellington's calm expectant attitude indicated his assurance of Bluecher's cooperation.

In one of the cavalry charges toward the close of the battle of Ligny, Bluecher had been overthrown, ridden over, almost taken prisoner, and severely bruised; but the gallant old hussar was almost himself again next morning, thanks to copious doses of gin and rhubarb, for the effluvium of which restorative he apologised to Hardinge as he embraced that wounded officer, in the extremely plain expression, "Ich stinke etwas." Gneisenau, his Chief of Staff, rather distrusted Wellington's good faith, and doubted whether it was not the safer policy for the Prussian army to fall back toward Liege. But Bluecher prevailed over his lieutenants; and on the evening of the 17th all four Prussian corps in a strength of about 90,000 men, were concentrated about Wavre, some nine miles east of the Waterloo position, full of ardour and confident of success. That same night Mueffling informed Bluecher by letter that the Anglo-Dutch army had occupied the position named, wherein to fight next day; and Bluecher's loyal answer was that Buelow's corps at daybreak should march by way of St. Lambert to strike the French right; that Pirch's would follow in support; and that the other two would stand in readiness. This communication, which reached Wellington at headquarters at 2 A.M. of the 18th, has been held to have been the first actually definite assurance of Prussian support. The story to the effect that on the evening of the 17th the Duke rode over to Wavre to make sure from Bluecher's own mouth that he could rely on Prussian support next day, to the truth of which not a little of vague testimony has been adduced, may be now definitely disregarded. The evidence against the legend is conclusive. An authoritative contradiction was given to it in an article in the Quarterly Review of 1842, from the pen of Lord Francis Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, who confessedly wrote under the inspiration of the Duke, and in this instance directly from a memorandum drawn up by his Grace. Quite recently there have been found and are now in the possession of the Rev. Frederick Gurney, the grandson of the late Sir John Gurney, the notes of a "conversation with the Duke of Wellington and Baron Gurney and Mr. Justice Williams, Judges on Circuit, at Strath-fieldsaye House, on 24th February 1837." The annotator was Baron Gurney, to the following effect:—"The conversation had been commenced by my inquiring of him (the Duke) whether a story which I had heard was true of his having ridden over to Bluecher on the night before the battle of Waterloo, and returned on the same horse. He said—'No, that was not so. I did not see Bluecher on the day before Waterloo. I saw him the day before, on the day of Quatre Bras. I saw him after Waterloo, and he kissed me. He embraced me on horseback. I had communicated with him the day before Waterloo.'" The rest of the conversation made no further reference to the topic of the ride to Wavre.

It is not proposed to give here any account of the memorable battle, the main incidents of which are familiar to all. It was of course Wellington's policy to take up a defensive attitude; both because of the incapacity of his raw soldiers for manoeuvring, and since every minute before Napoleon should begin the offensive was of value to the English commander, as it diminished the length of punishment he would have to endure single-handed. Further, he was numerically weaker than his adversary, while his troops were at once of divers nationalities and divers character; his main reliance was on his British troops and those of the King's German Legion. Napoleon for his part deliberately delayed to attack when celerity of action was all-important to him, disregarding the obvious probability of Prussian assistance to Wellington, and sanguinely expecting that Grouchy would either avert that support or reach him in time to neutralise it. Mr. Ropes has written an admirable criticism of the errors of the French in their contest with the Anglo-Dutch army, for which Ney was for the most part responsible, since from before 3 P.M. Napoleon was engrossed in preparing his right flank for defence against the Prussians. The issue of the great battle all men know. The badness of the roads retarded the Prussians greatly, and, save in Buelow's corps, there was no doubt considerable delay in starting; but the proverb that "All's well that ends well" might have been coined with special application to the battle of Waterloo.

It only remains briefly to refer to Mr. Ropes's elaborate resume of the melancholy adventures of Grouchy, on whom he may be regarded as too severe. Sent out too late on a species of roving commission, more was expected from him by Napoleon than could have been accomplished by any but a leader of the highest order, whereas Grouchy had never given evidence of being more than respectable. He received from his master neither instructions nor information from the time he left the field of Ligny until 4 P.M. of the 18th, nor until at Walhain he heard the cannonade of Waterloo had he any knowledge of the whereabouts of the French main army. On the morning of the 18th he was late in leaving Gembloux, on not the most direct route towards Wavre; instead of moving on which, when he heard the noise of the battle, he should no doubt have marched straight for the Dyle bridges at Ottignies and Moustier. Had he done so, spite of all delays he could have been across the Dyle by 4 P.M. But when Mr. Ropes claims that thus Grouchy would have been able to arrest the march toward the battlefield of the two leading Prussian corps, one of which was four miles distant from him and the other still farther away, he is too exacting. Had Grouchy made the vain attempt, the two nearer Prussian corps would have taken him in flank and headed him off, while Buelow and Ziethen pressed on to the battlefield. If he had marched straight and swiftly on the cannon-thunder of Waterloo, he might perhaps have been in time to effect something in the nature of a diversion, although it is extremely improbable that he could have materially changed the fortune of the day; but instead, acting on the letter of Napoleon's instructions despatched to him on the morning of the battle, he moved on Wavre and engaged in a futile action with the Prussian 3rd Corps there. A shrewd and enterprising man would have at least seen into the spirit of his orders; Grouchy could not do this, and he is to be pitied rather than blamed.

THE END