Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

“On January 17, in the afternoon, Dr. Birchmore, my first mate,
came to me on deck, and reported Kemble to be dead. I directed him
to see that his messmates did what was usual on such occasions
preparatory to committing his remains to the deep. About two
hours after this, Dr. Birchmore again called on me. He said that
Kemble had come to life, and was holding forth to the sailors in
a strange way. I directly went down, where I witnessed one of the
most remarkable and unaccountable transactions that perhaps had
ever fallen to the lot of man to behold. Kemble had awakened as it
were from sleep, raised himself up, and called for his messmates
in particular, and those men who were not on duty, to attend to
his words. He told them he had experienced death, but was allowed
a short space of time to return and give them, as well as the
officers, some directions for their future conduct in life. In
this situation I found him, surrounded by the crew, all mute with
astonishment, and paying the most serious attention to every word
that escaped from his lips. The oldest men were in tears, not a
dry eye was to be seen or a whisper heard; all was as solemn and
as silent as the grave. His whole body was as cold as death could
make it. There was no pulsation perceptible at the wrists, the
temples, or the chest. His voice was clear and powerful, his eyes
uncommonly brilliant and animated. After a short and pertinent
address to the medical gentlemen, he told me in a peremptory manner
to bring Commodore Rodgers to him, as he had something to say to
him before he finally left us. The Commodore consented to go with
me, when a scene was presented, truly novel and indescribable,
and calculated to fill with awe the stoutest heart. The sick bay
(or berth) in which he lay is entirely set apart to the use of
those who are confined to their beds by illness. Supported by the
surgeons, surrounded by his weeping and astonished comrades, a
crowd of spectators looking through the lattice-work which enclosed
the room, a common japanned lamp throwing out a sickly light, and
a candle held opposite his face by an attendant, such was the
situation of things when our worthy Commander made his appearance;
and well does he remember the effect produced by so uncommon a
spectacle, especially when followed by the utterance of these words
from the mouth of one long supposed to have been dead: ‘Commodore
Rodgers, I have sent for you, sir; being commissioned by a higher
power to address you for a short time, and to deliver the message
entrusted to me when I was permitted to revisit the earth. Once I
trembled in your presence, and was eager to obey your commands;
but now I am your superior, being no longer an inhabitant of the
earth. I have seen the glories of the world of spirits. I am not
permitted to make known what I have beheld; indeed, were I not
forbidden, language would be inadequate to the task; ’tis enough
for you and the crew to know that I have been sent back to earth
to reanimate for a few hours my lifeless body, commissioned by God
to perform the work I am now engaged in.’ He then, in language so
chaste and appropriate as would not have disgraced the lips or the
pen of a divine, took a hasty view of the moral and religious
duties incumbent on the commander of a ship of war. He reviewed
the vices prevalent on ship-board, pointed out the relative duties
of officers and men, and concluded by urging the necessity of
reformation and repentance. He did not, as was feared by our brave
commander, attempt to prove the sinfulness of fighting and wars,
but, on the contrary, warmly recommended to the men the performance
of their duty to their country with courage and fidelity. His
speeches occupied about three-quarters of an hour, and if the
whole could have been taken down at the time, they would have made
a considerable pamphlet, which would no doubt have been in great
demand. Dr. Birchmore, now at Boston, heard all the addresses, I
only the last.

When he finished with the Commodore, his head dropped upon his
breast, his eyes closed, and he appeared to have passed through a
second death. No pulsation nor the least degree of warmth could
be perceived during the time that he was speaking. I ordered him
to be laid aside, and left him. I was soon sent for into the
cabin, where the Commodore required from me an explanation of the
case on rational and philosophical principles. This I endeavoured
to give. I but in part succeeded. It would swell this narrative
too much to repeat all I said in endeavouring to elucidate the
subject. At best it proved a lame attempt, for when asked how this
man, without education, reading, or mixing in other society than
that of common sailors, should acquire the command of the purest
language, properly arranged, and delivered clearly, distinctly,
with much animation and great effect?--to this question I gave
no reply, as it was, and ever will remain, inexplicable, without
admitting supernatural agency. The days of miracles are past, and
I know I shall be laughed at by many for dwelling on, or even
repeating, this story. But never, since I arrived at the years of
discretion, has anything taken a stronger hold upon my mind, and
that man must have been made of strange materials who could have
been an indifferent spectator. Was he divinely illuminated? was he
inspired? or was the whole the effect of natural causes? These are
questions which must have arisen in the minds of many, and which
must be left for the learned of two professions to answer.

“I retired to bed, deeply reflecting upon the past, unable to
sleep, when about nine o’clock P.M., many hours after Kemble had
been laid by, I was called out of bed to visit a man taken suddenly
ill in his hammock, hanging near Kemble’s apartment. It was an
hour when all but the watch on deck had turned in; general silence
reigned, and all the lights below put out, with the exception of a
single lamp in the sick apartment, where lay the remains of Kemble.
I had bled the sick man--he was relieved. I entered the sick-room
before I retired to replace something, and was turning round to
leave it, being alone, when suddenly I was almost petrified upon
beholding Kemble sitting up in his berth, with his eyes (which had
regained their former brilliancy and intelligence) fixed intently
upon mine. I became, for a moment, speechless and motionless.
Thinks I to myself, what have I done, or left undone, in this man’s
case, that should cause him thus to stare at me, at this late hour,
and I alone? I waited a long time in painful suspense, dreading
some horrid disclosure, when I was relieved by his commanding me
to fetch him some water. With what alacrity I obeyed can easily be
imagined. I gave him a tin mug containing water, which he put to
his mouth, drank off the contents, and returned to me; then laid
himself quietly down for the last time. His situation was precisely
the same in every respect as before described. The time was now
expired which, he had said, was given him to remain in the body.
The next day by noon, all hands attended as usual to hear the
funeral service read, and see his remains consigned to a watery
grave. It was an unusually solemn period. Seamen are naturally
superstitious, and on this occasion their minds had been wrought
upon in a singular manner. Decorum is always observed by sailors
at such times; but now they were all affected to tears, and when
the body was slid from the plank into the sea, every one rushed
instinctively to the ship’s side to take a last look. The usual
weights had been attached to the feet, yet, as if in compliance
with his comrades’ anxiety to see more of him, the body rose
perpendicularly from the water breast-high two or three times.
This incident added greatly to the astonishment already created in
the minds of the men. I beg leave to remark that it was not thought
proper to keep the body longer in the warm latitude we were in.

“I have now given a short and very imperfect sketch of the
important events attending the last illness and death of William
Kemble. It is submitted to the ladies in this state, begging they
will excuse haste and inaccuracy. The change produced upon the crew
was for a time very remarkable. It appeared as if they would never
smile or swear again. The effect wore off by degrees, except when
the subject was renewed.

W. TURK.”

Apart altogether from the weirdness of it, worthy Dr. Turk’s simply-told story is full of interest, by reason of the side-light it throws on the nautical character of his time. No maker of phrases is the honest naval surgeon. A fight the good man curtly accepts as in the day’s work; and as all “prepare to do their duty,” he “descends into the cockpit” to do his, in the serene assurance of victory, since “defeat never entered our thoughts,” and the mere reference thereto is contemptuously relegated to a parenthesis. So matter-of-fact is he, so doggedly does he stick to the topic he has in hand, that he has not a word to spare to describe the fight, or to tell of its issue. That is outside his task. He has stayed on deck, indeed, to hear the Commodore’s “short and animated address,” and then his place is in the cockpit, with his instruments out, his coat off, and his shirt-sleeves turned up, waiting for what contributions the effort to attain the “glory of the victory” may send down the ladder to him.

But as he goes he thinks of his patient. Quite an ordinary sea-dog, this patient, clearly, in the surgeon’s estimation. “The rough, profane, illiterate sailor” of the period--proved by his conversation to be “ignorant and abandoned”; destitute utterly of talents and learning. No word of approval for this waif from out the “tops” has the laconic surgeon; yet, although seemingly because it was so commonplace an attribute that he does not care to go out of his way to apply the term, he has discerned in him the spirit of heroism. So he condemns William Kemble to death, should he stir; and further, he bethinks himself of the force of discipline, and so adds to his representations as a surgeon his order as an officer. William Kemble, as well he might, has promised obedience; but the “sound of the first gun” overcomes at once the assurance of death and the bonds of discipline. Little good can “the glory of the victory” work for this “rough, profane, and illiterate sailor.” It is the fighting impulse in him, the ardour of the fray, as Kinglake has it, that conquers death and discipline, whistles down the wind “my admonitions and his own danger.” And so, by and by, after he has survived to characteristically damn the surgeon’s mates “in true sailor fashion” for starving him, William Kemble removed to the “sick berth, commonly called bay,” finds that there is no more fight left in him, and Dr. Birchmore comes on deck and reports him dead.

The present writer considers himself specially fortunate in that no commodore requires from him an explanation “on rational and philosophical principles” of the question, which worthy Dr. Turk leaves “for the learned of two professions to answer.” Certain theories might be diffidently put forward, and Kemble, spite of Dr. Turk’s adverse diagnosis, might have been a gentleman before his conversation sank to the level of “that of the most ignorant and abandoned of his associates,” while the dramatic instincts belonging to others of his name may have kindled in him in the interval of a syncope that simulated actual dissolution. Dr. Turk, with naïve frankness, confesses that his effort to elucidate the subject was but “a lame attempt”; and why need one who is not of the “learned of two professions” wantonly risk a like judgment?

FIRE-DISCIPLINE

The compound word which I have taken as the title for this paper is the non-technical expression for that conduct of the soldier under the stress of actual battle which is expected from him as the crowning result of assiduous moral and professional training. It is fire-discipline that is the grand test of true soldierhood, not dapper marching on the parade, not smartness in picking up dressing, not ramrod-like setting up, polished buttons, and spotless accoutrements. These all have their value, not, however, as results, but as contributories; they are among the means that help to the all-important end, that when the bullets are humming and the shells are crashing the soldier shall be a composed, alert, disciplined unit of a mighty whole whose purpose is victory. The soldier of the great Frederick’s era was a machine. Moltke’s man is trained with this distinction between his predecessor and himself, that he shall be a machine endowed with, and expected to exercise, the faculty of intelligence. But his intelligence must help toward, not interfere with, that discipline which must be to him a second nature.

In certain criticisms that have appeared in our newspapers from time to time on the German military manœuvres, severe strictures have been pronounced on the freedom with which the soldiers were allowed, and indeed occasionally forced, to expose themselves to the enemy’s fire. There were allegations of resultant “annihilation” if the sham foe had been a real one, and contrasts were instituted between the German “recklessness” of cover and the carefulness with which in our own drills the duty of availing himself of cover is impressed on the British soldier. That a live man, whose life has been protected by his carefulness of cover, is a more useful weapon of war than is a dead man whose life has been sacrificed by his neglect of cover, would seem a matter beyond controversy. And yet there are conditions in which a dead soldier may be of incalculably greater value than a living soldier. The Germans recognise the force of this apparent paradox. Our critics of their manœuvres do not. The latter seem to regard a battle as an affair the ruling principle of which is, that the participants should have for their single aim the non-exposure to hostile fire of their more or less valuable persons. The Germans, on the other hand, in their practical, blunt way, have asked themselves, what is the business aim of a battle--to save men’s skins, or to win it, and so have done with it? and they have answered the question in every battle they have fought since that terrible massacre of their Guards on the smooth glacis of St. Privat, thus: This battle has got to be won. We will not squander men’s lives needlessly as we did then, but we will not put its issue in jeopardy by over-assiduous cover-seeking. Striking and dodging are not easily compatible, and it is by hard striking that the battle is to be finally won.

The ideal soldier--well, what is the need of describing him, seeing that, because of fallen human nature, he is all but an impossibility? But as the marauding “Yank” philosophically remarked to General Sherman, “You can’t expect all the cardinal virtues, uncle, for thirteen dollars a month!” No, but you can get a good many of the simpler martial virtues for less money. There is not much subtlety about the ordinary run of martial virtues. My own belief, founded on some experience of divers nationalities in war-time, is that most men are naturally cowards. I have the fullest belief in the force of the colonel’s retort on his major. “Colonel,” said the major, in a hot fire, “you are afraid; I see you tremble!” “Yes, sir,” replied the colonel, “and if you were as afraid as I am, you would run away!” I do think three out of four men would run away if they dared. There are doubtless some men whom nature has constituted so obtuse as not to know fear, and who therefore deserve no credit for their courage; and there are others with nerves so strong as to crush down the rising “funk.” The madness of blood does get into men’s heads, no doubt. I have the firmest conviction that in cold blood the mass of us would prefer the air quiet rather than whistling with bullets. Most men are like the colonel of the dialogue--they display bravery because in the presence of their comrades and of the danger they are too great cowards to evince poltroonery. Thus the average man made a capital soldier in the old shoulder-to-shoulder days. British yokels, British jail-birds, German handicraftsmen, German bauers, French peasants, and French artisans, were all pretty much alike made creditable “cannon-fodder.” They would all march into fire and brave its sting, each man’s right and left comrade reacting on him and his rear file supporting at once and blocking him. Once in the fire the national idiosyncrasies developed themselves. The “funk” zone, so to speak, had been traversed, and the Briton marched on steadfastly, the German advanced with resolute step, the Russian stood still doggedly, and the Frenchman spurted into a run with a yell. When the blood began to flow and the struck men went down, the passion of the battle became the all-absorbing question. And so, whether by greater or less steadfastness, by greater or less dash, the battle was won or lost. Till the culminating-point, no man ever was thrown wholly upon his own individuality, or ever lost the consciousness of public opinion as represented by his comrades.

“Shoulder-to-shoulder” is long dead, and its influences have mostly died with it, but in the present days of the “swarm attack” human nature remains unchanged. The soldier of to-day has to wrestle with or respond to his own individuality; public opinion no longer touches him on each of his elbows. He is tried by a much higher test than in the old close-formation days. And I know, because I have seen, that he often fails in the higher _moral_ which his wider scope of individuality exacts of him if he is to be efficient. Herein lies the weak point of the loose order of fighting. Cover is enforced, and while physical contact is lost, the moral touch is impaired. The officer gives the forward signal, but the consequences of not obeying it do not come home with so swift vividness to the reluctant individual man. He is behind cover, having obeyed the imperative instructions of his drill master. How dear is that cover! he thinks, and what a fiendish air-torture that is into which he must uprear himself! So he lies still, at least awhile, and his own particular wave goes on and leaves him behind. He may join the next, or he may continue to lie still. It is a great temptation; human nature is weak, and life is sweet.

I have seen six nations essay the attack in loose order, and there is no doubt in my mind that the German soldier is the most conscientious in carrying it out. His qualifications for it are unique. He was a man of some character when he came to the army. In the home circle out of which he stepped into the ranks he was no black sheep; he has a local public opinion to live up to; his comrades around him are of his neighbourhood, and will speak of him there either to his credit or the reverse. He is a sober fellow, who knows nothing of dissipation; his nerves have their tone unimpaired by any excesses; he has a man’s education, yet something of the simplicity of a child; he glows with a belief in the Fatherland; his military instruction has been moral as well as mechanical. In fine, he is a soldier-citizen and a citizen-soldier. But nevertheless he is human--very human indeed; and his first experience of the advance in loose order under fire is a severe strain upon him. He has never yet seen death plying his shafts all around him. He still thrills with a shudder as he thinks of real warm blood. He has not learned to be indifferent when he hears that dull thud that tells where a bullet has found its billet.

The German military authorities understand their people, and they know the process which men undergo in being inured to war. Therefore it is that they do not enforce resort to “cover” with so much solicitude as I have noticed our officers do. They know that in every company there are men who will “lie” if allowed too great independence of individual action; and “cover at all risks” impairs every link in the chain of supervision. Again, they know that it is good for soldiers to die a little occasionally. The dead, of course, are “out of it”; but their death does not discourage, but hardens their comrades. It seems brutal to write in this tone, but is not war all brutal? And it is the solid truth. It may be written down as an axiom that fire-discipline unaccompanied with casualties is weak. I remember standing with a German general before Metz watching a skirmish. The German battalion engaged happened to consist chiefly of young soldiers, and they were not very steady. The old General shrugged his shoulders and observed, “Dey vant to be a little shooted; dey vill do better next time.” All young soldiers want to be a “little shooted”; and it is only by exposing them somewhat, instead of coddling them for ever behind cover, as if cover, not victory, were the aim of the day’s work, that this experience can befall them. All soldiers are the better of being “blooded”; they never attain purposeful coolness till they have acquired a personal familiarity with blood and death.

After the experience of St. Privat, which stimulated the Germans to the unprecedented feat of fundamentally altering their fighting tactics in the very middle of a campaign, no man would be foolish enough or homicidal enough to advocate a return to close-formation in these days of swift-shooting firearms. As little would one argue in favour of frequent war for the mere object of inuring soldiers to fire-discipline. But the later tactics unquestionably tell against the efficiency of young soldiers in their first experience of battle, when contrasted with the old. Most of Wellington’s men at Waterloo were green troops, yet they stood up manfully under the brunt of that long terrible day, and after the long endurance there was heart left in them for the final advance in line. They were thus steadfast because such training as they possessed had habituated them to no other prospect than the prospect, when they should be summoned to the real business, of standing squarely up and looking in the face an equally upstanding enemy. Now all our preliminary training is directed to forbidding men standing up at all, and inculcating upon them, with emphatic language, the paramount duty of dodging and sneaking. They must be good men indeed whom a course of such tuition will not demoralise. That it does demoralise, our recent military history goes clearly to show. Our catastrophe at Isandlwana was due partly to the error of employing loose formation against great masses of bold men, whom a biting fire would deter no whit from advancing; but resulted in the end, from the scared inability to redeem this error by a rapid, purposeful resort to close-formation in square or squares. Once the loose fringe of men dodging for cover was impinged on, all was over save the massacre. The test of fire-discipline failed whenever the strain on it became severe. The men had worked up to their skirmishing lessons to the best of their ability; when masterful men brushed aside the result of those lessons, there was no moral stamina to fall back upon, no consuetude of resource to be as a second nature. A resolute square formed round an ammunition-waggon might have made a defence that would have lasted at least until Lord Chelmsford came back from his straggling excursion; but no man who saw how the dead lay on that ghastly field could persuade himself into the belief that there had been any vigorous attempt at a rally. The only fragment of good that came out of the Isandlwana catastrophe was the resolution, in any and every subsequent encounter, to show the Zulus a solid front; and the retrospect of Isandlwana infused a melancholy into the success of Ulundi, where the most furious onslaughts recoiled from the firm face of the British square.

The Majuba Hill affair was simply a worse copy of Isandlwana. There was no methodised fire-discipline. It has been urged as the lesson of Majuba Hill that the British soldier should have more careful instruction in marksmanship. Probably enough, that would do him good--it could not do him harm; but it was not because he was a bad marksman that Majuba Hill was so discreditable a reverse. It was because he is so much a creature of cover and of dodging that he went all abroad when he saw a real live enemy standing up in front of him at point-blank range. It may be contended that there were fire-seasoned soldiers who participated in this unfortunate business. Yes; but these, with no strong _moral_ to begin with, because of their early training in assiduous “cover” tactics, had suffered in what _moral_ they might have possessed because of previous reverses. One regiment was represented on that hill-top which had not participated in those reverses, and was indeed fresh from successes in Afghanistan. But Afghan fighting is not a very good school in which to acquire prompt, serene self-command when, in old Havelock’s phrase, the colour of the enemy’s moustaches is visible. It was but rarely that the Afghan did not play the dodging game. He mostly does not care to look his enemy full in the face, and he tries all he knows to prevent his enemy from having the opportunity of looking him in the face. When the adventurous Boer breasted the crest of the Majuba he and the British soldier confronted each other at close quarters. It was no time for long-range shooting, it was simply the time for fire-discipline of the readiest practical order to make its effect felt. I imagine Briton and Boer staring one at the other in a perturbed moment of mutual disquietude. Who should the sooner pull himself together and take action on returning presence of mind? The Boer had the better nerve; to use the American expression, he was quicker on the draw. And then, for lack of fire-discipline, for want of training to be cool, and to keep their heads within close view of a hostile muzzle, the British went to pieces in uncontrollable scare, and the sad issue was swift to be consummated.

The influence of the “get to cover” tactics has made itself apparent, if we care to read between the lines, in numberless pettier instances during our recent little wars. The indiscriminate bolt of a picket may seem a small thing, and it will happen now and then in all armies, but when it occurs frequently it is the surest evidence of a feeble _moral_. It has happened too often of late in British armies, and I trace its prevalence, which I do not regard as too strong a word, to the lack of fire-discipline brought about by the “cover at any price” training. A man of tufts and hillocks, and bushes and molehills, from the day he is dismissed the manual exercise, a being who has never been let realise in peace-time the possibility that in war-time he may find himself uncovered in the face of an enemy; when that crisis impends suddenly, or seems to do so, the young soldier shrinks and breaks. He is unfamiliarised in advance with his obligation to die serenely at his post. He does not make a bolt of it because he is a coward, or rather a greater than average coward, but simply because his training has not furnished him with a reserve of purposeful presence of mind. Men who remember Ginghilovo, “Fort Funk,” and the nights on the white Umvaloosi, cannot but own to the force of this reasoning. Several experiences of the Eastern Soudan expeditions go to strengthen it; and if the conduct of the desert column seems to weaken it, there is the answer that the desert column consisted wholly of picked men.

Tel-el-Kebir furnished an incidental illustration of our shortcoming in fire-discipline, which, as I contend, has its main cause in the effects of too stringent urgency to cover. Lord Wolseley showed that discernment which is one of his most valuable characteristics, in refraining from submitting his soldiers to the strain of a “swarm attack” up to the Egyptian position in fair daylight; and in choosing instead, as a minor risk, a night advance, spite of all its contingencies of hazard, with the hoped-for culmination of a surprise at daybreak. The issue proved his wisdom; and a phase of that combat, described with soldierly frankness by Sir Edward Hamley, must have given the commanding general a thrill of relief that he had conserved the spirit of his troops for the final dash, without exposing them to a previous ordeal of fire. That dash, made while yet the gloom of the dying night lay on the sand, General Hamley tells us, was 150 yards long, and it cost the brigade that carried it out 200 casualties ere the Egyptian entrenchment was crowned. It was done with the first impulse; no check was let stop the onward impetus of the _élan_; fire-discipline was not called into exercise at all. The whole of Hamley’s first line pressed on into the interior of the enemy’s position. The second line followed, but Hamley, with a wise prescience, “stopped the parts of it that were nearest to him as they came up, wishing to keep a support in hand which should be more readily available than such as the brigade in rear could supply.” It was well he did this thing; but for his doing of it, the shadow of a far other issue to Tel-el-Kebir lies athwart the following quotation. “The light was increasing every moment; our own men had begun to shoot immediately after entering the entrenched position, and aim could now be taken. The fight was at its hottest, and how it might end was still doubtful, for many of our advanced troops had recoiled even to the edge of the entrenchment” (beyond which they had penetrated 200 or 300 yards into the interior); “but there I was able to stop them, and reinforcing them with a small body I had kept in hand (who had remained, I think, in the ditch) I sent in all together, and henceforth they maintained their ground.” They recoiled, and they recoiled by reason of their weakness in fire-discipline. It is a fair query--How severe was the strain? As regards its duration, but a few moments’ fighting sufficed to bring about the recoil; that is made clear by the circumstance that the supporting brigade, following close as it did, yet was not up in time to redress the dangerous situation. In regard to its severity, General Hamley permits himself to use language of the most vivid character. “A hotter fire it is impossible to imagine.” The brigade was “enclosed in a triangle of fire.” “The enemy’s breechloaders were good, his ammunition abundant, and the air was a hurricane of bullets, through which shells from the valley tore their way.” “The whole area was swept by a storm of bullets.” Stronger words could not have been used by an enthusiastic war correspondent gushing his level best about his first skirmish; General Hamley’s expressions are fuller-volumed than those used by the compilers of the German staff chronicle in describing that Titanic paroxysm the climax of Gravelotte. What stupendous damage, then, did this hottest of all hot fires, this hurricane of bullets, effect? The casualties of the whole division reached a total of 258 killed and wounded. Of these, “nearly 200,” General Hamley distinctly states, occurred exclusively in the first brigade in the rush up to the entrenchment. If we assume that the second brigade had no losses at all, and that the whole balance of casualties occurred to the first brigade when in “the triangle of fire,” the fall of some 60 men out of 2800 was hardly a loss to justify the “recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment” of troops possessed even of a moderate amount of fire-discipline. General Hamley explains that but for the darkness and the too high aim of the enemy, “the losses would have been tremendous.” In other words, if an actual loss of 2 per cent, and the turmoil of the hottest fire imaginable, yet fortunately aimed over their heads, caused the troops “to recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment,” the “tremendous losses” that a better-aimed fire would have produced, it seems pretty evident, would have caused them to “recoil” so much farther that Tel-el-Kebir would have been a defeat instead of a victory. The Egyptians did not shoot straight because they were flurried, that is, were deficient in fire-discipline; our men “recoiled” after a very brief experience of a devilish but comparatively harmless battle-din, because the ardour of the first rush having died out of them, fire-discipline was not strong enough in them to keep them braced to hold the ground the rush had won them. It was fortunate that in Hamley they had a chief who had prescience of their feebleness of constancy, and had taken measures to remedy its evil effects.

During the afternoon and evening of August 18, 1870, six regiments of the Prussian guard corps made repeated and ultimately successful efforts to storm the French position of St. Privat. What that position was like, the following authentic description sets forth. “In front of St. Privat were several parallel walls of knee-high masonry and shelter trenches. Those lines, successively commanding each other, were filled with compact rows of skirmishers, and in their rear upon the commanding height lay like a natural bastion, and girt by an almost continuous wall, the town-like village, the stone houses of which were occupied up to the roofs.” There was no shelter on the three-quarters of a mile of smooth natural glacis, over which the regiments moved steadfastly to the attack; every fold of it was searched by the dominant musketry fire. They tried and failed, but they kept on trying till they succeeded. And what did the success cost them? The six regiments (each three battalions strong) numbered roughly 18,000 men; of these, 6000 had gone down before Canrobert quitted his grip of the “town-like village.” One-third of their whole number! It was the cost of this sacrifice that caused the Germans to adopt the unprecedented step of altering their attacking tactics in the middle of a campaign. But the change was made, not because the troops had proved unequal to the task set them, but because the cost of the accomplishment of that task, in the face of the Chassepot fire, had been so terrible. Now I am not concerned to exalt the horn of the Prussian fighting men at the cost of the British soldier. I will assume, and there is full evidence in favour of the assumption, that the British soldier of the pre-dodging era could take his punishment and come through it victoriously, as stoutly as any German that ever digested _Erbswürst_ and smelt of sour rye-bread. Of the 10,000 British fellows whom Wellington sent at Badajos, 3000 were down before the torn old rag waved over the place. Ligonier’s column was 14,000 strong when the Duke of Cumberland gave it the word to make that astounding march through the chance gap, a bare 900 paces wide, between the cannon before the village of Vezon and those in the Redoubt d’Eu, right into and behind the heart of the French centre on the bloody day of Fontenoy. There is some doubt whether those quixotic courtesies passed between Lord Charles Hay and the Count d’Auteroche, but there is no doubt whatever that when the column, thwarted of the reward of valour by deficiency of support, had sturdily marched back through the appalling cross-fire in the cramped hollow-way, and had methodically fronted into its old position, it was found that at least 4000 out of the 14,000 had been shot down. Carlyle, indeed, makes the loss much heavier. Yet a notabler example of the British soldier’s gluttony for punishment is furnished in the statistics of the Inkermann losses. The total force that kept Mount Inkermann against the Russians amounted to 7464 officers and men. Of these, when the long fierce day was done, no fewer than 2487 had fallen, just one-third of the whole number. The manner in which our soldiers successfully contended against fearful odds in this battle is a phenomenal example of fire-discipline of the grand old dogged type. It is but one, however, of the many proofs that the world has no stauncher fighting-man than is the British soldier intrinsically.

But I think it would be difficult to convince the mind of an impartial man that the British soldiers who, at Tel-el-Kebir, “recoiled even to the edge of the entrenchment” under the stress of a “hurricane of bullets” fired high and of a loss of 2 per cent, could have borne up and conquered under such a strain of sustained and terrible punishment as that through which the Prussian Guard struggled to the goal of victory at St. Privat. And if not, why not? There was a larger proportion of veterans among the Prussians at St. Privat than in the Highland Brigade at Tel-el-Kebir, and that gave a certain advantage, doubtless, to the former. Some would lean on the superior “citizenhood” of the Prussian over the British soldier; but our Highland regiments are exceptionally respectably recruited. Yet I venture to set down as the main distinction that, while the Prussian soldier of 1870 was a soldier of the “shoulder-to-shoulder” era, the British soldier of 1882 was a creature of the “get-to-cover” period. Then, it may be urged, the Prussian soldier of to-day--creature, nay, creator as he is of this new order of things--is as incapable of repeating St. Privat as the British soldier of to-day is of rivalling that stupendous feat. No. It is true the German is no longer a “shoulder-to-shoulder” man, but he is not drilled with so single an eye to cover-taking (and, I might add, cover-keeping) as is our British Thomas Atkins. He is trained to expect to be “a little shooted” as he goes forward; he has better-experienced non-commissioned officers to supervise the details of that advance than our soldier has; his individuality is more sedulously brought out. In a word, everything with him makes toward the development in him of a higher character of fire-discipline even in his first initiation into bullet-music.

It may be said that the Germans, because of the magnitude of their forces, have not so urgent need to be careful of their men as is requisite in regard to an army of scant numbers and feeble resources. They can afford, it may be said, to be a little wasteful; whereas a weaker military power must practise assiduous economy of its live material. But if the seeming wastefulness contributes to win the battle, and the economy endangers that result, the wastefulness is surely sound wisdom, the economy penny-wise. The object before either army is identical--to win the battle. If an army shall come short of success because of its reluctance to buy success at the price success exacts, the wise course for it is to refrain altogether from serious fighting. It is the old story--that there is no making of omelettes without the breaking of eggs. You may break so many eggs as to spoil the omelette; but the Germans have realised how much easier it is to spoil the omelette by not breaking eggs enough. And so they break their eggs, not lavishly, but with a discreet hand, in which there is no undue chariness. They lay their account with taking a certain amount of loss by exposure in the “swarm-advance” as preferable, for a variety of reasons, to the disadvantages of painful cover-dodging. They can afford to dig a few more graves after the battle is won, if, indeed, taking all things into consideration, that work should be among the results of the day’s doings.

Than “annihilation” there is no more favourite word with the critics of manœuvres and sham-fights. In truth it is as hard a thing to “annihilate” a body of troops as it is to kill a scandal. In a literal sense there are very few records of such a catastrophe; if used in a figurative sense to signify a loss so great as to put the force suffering it _hors de combat_, there is amazing testimony to the quantity of “annihilation” good troops have accepted without any such hapless result. Here are four instances taken almost at random. The Confederates, out of 68,000 men engaged at Gettysburg, lost 18,000, but Meade held his hand from interfering with their orderly retreat. Of that battle the climax was the assault of Pickett’s division, “the flower of Virginia,” against Webb’s front on the left of Cemetery Hill. Before the heroic Armistead called for the “cold steel” and carried Gibbon’s battery with a rush, the division had met with a variety of experiences during its mile-and-a-half advance over the smooth ground up to the crest. “When it first came into sight it had been plied with solid shot; then half-way across it had been vigorously shelled, and the double canisters had been reserved for its nearer approach. An enfilading fire tore through its ranks; the musketry blazed forth against it with deadly effect.” This is the evidence of an eye-witness on the opposite side, who adds, “but it came on magnificently.” Yes, it came on to cold steel and clubbed muskets, and after a desperate struggle it went back foiled, to the accompaniments which had marked its advance. But, heavy as were its losses, it was not “annihilated.” Pickett’s division survived to be once and again a thorn in the Federal side before the final day of fate came to it at Appomatox Court-House. At Mars-la-Tour, Alvensleben’s two infantry divisions, numbering certainly not over 18,000 men (for they had already lost heavily at the Spicheren Berg), sacrificed within a few of 7000 during the long summer hours while they stood all but unsupported athwart the course of the French army retreating from Metz. But so far were they from being annihilated, that forty-eight hours later they made their presence acutely felt on the afternoon of Gravelotte. In the July attack on Plevna, of the 28,000 men with whom Krüdener and Schahofskoy went in, they took out under 21,000. One regiment of the latter’s command lost 725 killed and 1200 wounded--about 75 per cent of its whole number--yet the Russian retirement was not disorderly; and next day the troops were in resolute cohesion awaiting what might befall them. In the September attack on Plevna, of 74,000 Russo-Roumanian infantry engaged, the losses reached 18,000. Skobeleff commanded 18,000 men, and at the end of his two days’ desperate fighting, not 10,000 of these were left standing. But there was no annihilation, either literally or conventionally, if one may use the term. The survivors who had fought on the 11th and 12th September were ready at the word to go in again on the 13th; and how they marched across the Balkans later is one of the marvels of modern military history.

Those examples of stoicism, of fire-discipline strained to a terrible tension, but not breaking under the strain, were exhibited by soldiers who did not carry into practice the tactics of non-exposure. The Russo-Turkish war, it is true, was within the “cover” era, but the Russians in this respect, as in a good many others--such, for instance, as in their lack of a propensity to “recoil”--were behind the times. But with a strange callousness to the effect of breechloading fire against infantry, the Russians were singularly chary of exposing their cavalry to it. Indeed, cavalry may be said to have gone out of fashion with many professors of modern war. With the most tempting opportunities we made the scantiest use of our brigade of regular cavalry in the Zulu war, and the best-known occasion on which the cavalry arm was prominently called into action in Afghanistan was the reverse of a signal success. But although the critics oracularly pronounce that the day of cavalry charges has gone by, and blame the Germans for exposing their cavalry to the breechloader in their manœuvres, the Germans adhere to the conviction that in the teeth of the breechloader a cavalry charge is not only not an impossibility, but an offensive that may still be resorted to with splendid effect. They can point back to an actual experience. I think there is no more effective yet restrained description of fighting in all the range of war literature than the official narrative of Bredow’s charge with the 7th Cuirassiers and the 16th Lancers on the afternoon of Mars-la-Tour.

“It was only 2 P.M., the day yet young; no infantry, no reserves, and the nearest support a long way off.... Now was the time to see what a self-sacrificing cavalry could do.... Bredow saw at a glance that the crisis demanded an energetic attack in which the cavalry must charge home, and, if necessary, should and must sacrifice itself. The first French line” (breechloaders and all) “is ridden over; the line of guns is broken through; teams and gunners put to the sword. The second line is powerless to check the vigorous charge of horse. The batteries on the heights farther to rear limber up and seek safety in flight. Eager to engage and thirsting for victory, the Prussian squadrons charge even through the succeeding valley, until, after a career of 3000 paces, they are met on all sides by French cavalry. Bredow sounds the recall. Breathless from the long ride, thinned by enemy’s bullets, without reserves, and hemmed in by hostile cavalry, they have to fight their way back. After some hot _mêlées_ with the enemy’s horsemen, they once more cut their way through the previously overridden lines of artillery and cavalry, and harassed by a thick rain of bullets, and with the foe in rear, the remnant hastens back to Flavigny.... The bold attack had cost the regiments half their strength.”

They had gone in under 800 strong; the charge cost them 363 of their number, including sixteen officers. But that charge in effect wrecked France. It arrested the French advance till supports came up to Alvensleben, and to its timely effect is traceable the current of events that ended in the surrender of Metz. It was a second Balaclava charge, and a bloodier one; and there was this distinction, that it had a purpose, and that that purpose was achieved. It succeeded because of the noble valour and constancy of the troopers who made it. Balaclava proved that our troopers possessed those virtues in no feebler degree. Till the millennium comes there will be emergencies when cavalry that will “charge home” and “sacrifice itself” may be employed purposefully; and cavalry should never be allowed to forget that this is its ultimate _raison d’être_. There is the risk that it may do so, if it is kept always skulking around the fringes of operations, and not given any opportunity of being “a little shooted.”

A CHRISTMAS DINNER DE PROFUNDIS

I have eaten a good many Christmas dinners in strange places, and have gone without the great feast of our nation in yet stranger. I have lost my Christmas dinner in a wholly unexpected manner, and have achieved that meal by a not less unexpected stroke of good fortune. At noon on Christmas Day, just thirty years ago, the outlook for our Christmas dinner consisted of a scrap of raw rusty pork and a ship-biscuit sodden in sea-water; and the prospect of even that poor fare was precarious, in face of the momentary danger of a watery grave. Four hours later I was the guest at a board groaning with the good cheer appropriate to the “festive season.”

Just of age, I had been spending the summer of 1859 in travelling through Canada, and in the late autumn found myself in Quebec, intending to be back in England in time for the Christmastide with my relatives at home. One evening I took stock of my financial resources, and found I had only a very small sum to the fore--barely enough to clear me in Quebec and pay my fare to England either as steerage passenger in a steamer or as cabin passenger in a sailing-vessel.

I had made the passage out very pleasantly in an emigrant sailing-ship. It had been a summer voyage, and I did not reflect that on the Atlantic summer does not last the year round. My pride rather revolted at a steerage passage, and I determined on the cabin of a sailing-ship. I know now, but I did not know then, that the sailing-ship trading between the United Kingdom and Quebec is of the genus “timber-drogher,” species ancient tub, good for no other trade, and good for this only, because, no matter how leaky the timber-laden ship may be, owing to the buoyancy of her cargo she cannot sink, and (unless the working of her cargo break her up) the worst fate that can befall her is that she becomes water-logged.

Of course there are bad timber ships and worse timber ships, but I had left myself no selection. I had dallied on in the pleasantness of Quebec until the close of navigation was imminent, and Hobson’s choice offered in the shape of the last lingering drogher. Her brokers advertised a cabin passage at a low fare; I engaged it without taking the trouble to look at the ship, and on the morning named for sailing went on board. My arrival occasioned the profoundest surprise. The skipper had received no intimation to expect a cabin passenger, and there were no appliances aboard for his accommodation. I took possession of an empty bunk, into which by way of mattress I threw the horsehair cushion of the cabin locker. My bedclothes consisted of my travelling rug and a rough old boat-cloak I had brought from England.

We were on salt tack from the second day out, and I could not have believed that there was a ship that sailed so badly found as was this battered, rotten, dilapidated _Emma Morrison_--that was the jade’s name. I should have been more savage at the egregious swindle, but that I was too sorry to leave Quebec to have thought to spare for material concerns. By and by that sentiment became less poignant, and was soon supplanted by utter disgust at my surroundings. The skipper of the _Emma Morrison_ was a sullen gloomy dog--a fellow of that breed which has all the evil attributes of the Scot and the Irishman, and none of the virtues of either. He hardly made a pretext of being civil to me. He helped readily but gloomily to drink the few bottles of Canadian whisky I had brought aboard, and, when that supply was finished, produced a single flask of the most atrocious gin that ever was concocted in the vilest illicit still of the Lower Town of Quebec, and swore it constituted his entire alcoholic supply for the voyage.