Field Marshal Lord Wolseley

( Originally Published 1912 )

WHEN I met him twenty-three years ago, Lord Wolseley was the hero of the hour in England. He had gathered laurels everywhere in India, the Crimea, China, and Egypt. Where others had failed he had succeeded, and in the rapture of its appreciation the public exalted him as "England's only general." His promotion had been rapid. Three years after intering the army he had risen to be captain, and six years after that lieutenant-colonel. In the first eight years of his service he had been continuously in the field, always at war, always at the front. A peerage had been conferred on him; the field-marshal's baton had become more than a vision or a symbol of prophecy. Much had he seen and suffered much, like Ulysses. His escapes had been as miraculous as his victories had been brilliant. Buttons had been shot off his coat and seams out of his collar; bullets had knocked the cap off his head and grazed his skull without fulfilling their mission. Not that he was scathless. A deep, purplish furrow crossed his left cheek, and close observation discovered an artificial substitute for his right eye.

"Over and over again I ought to have been ended, and perhaps I was indecent in refusing to die when others in similar circumstances always did so," he said.

As an evidence of what the British Army had been in his youth, he told me how his first engagement was fought in Burma.

"I was at Rangoon at the time, and the news arrived there of the rout of a company commanded by Captain Lock. Every soldier who could be spared was to go up the river, push through the jungle and punish his enemy. Two hundred of the Eightieth Regiment went under command of Sir John Cheape. We fought for nineteen days, until at last we worked our way up to the final position one afternoon and began making arrangements for attacking the next morning. At daybreak, when the fog cleared, I was sent with four men to a certain point to skirmish. I had never been drilled! My four men, or rather boys, had neither been drilled nor had even fired off a musket ! "

The boys were killed almost at once; Wolseley himself pushed forward and fell into a pit dug by the enemy, and just missed being impaled on a spike they had erected in it. When he lifted himself out he was so dazed that he crawled into the enemy's lines, and perceiving his mistake, had to dash back under their fire. Again advancing with a fresh support he saw his fellow officers drop dead, and soon afterward he himself was shot through the leg.

"Go on," he cried to the men who, were lingering over him; "Go on!" and soon after that the enemy bolted.

His own unpreparedness and the inefficiency of the young soldiers were not the only evidence of the almost unbelievable incapacity of the war office and the admiralty of those days. He had sailed for China with part of his regiment from Portsmouth in a notoriously unseaworthy troop-ship called the Transit, and she had got no farther than Hurst Castle in the Solent, almost within sight of her port of departure, when heaving to for fog she sank with the receding tide on her own anchor and made a hole in her bottom. The pumps were started, but the water gained, and the captain turned back for Portsmouth.

Lord Wolseley grimaced as he told the story. "As a precaution against dangerous explosions near the dock-yards, from time immemorial the positive rule at Ports-mouth has been that no ship shall enter the harbour until she has discharged all her powder at Spithead into lighters provided for that purpose. All that the Transit had on board was already well under water, for the leak was in the magazine. No danger from the mixture of powder and water was therefore possible, but there was the order signed by 'my lords' of the admiralty, and the captain did not dare to infringe it.

"He could not anchor, for his steam pumps only worked in connection with the engines which drove the screw, so, if the ship stopped, the pumps would stop also, and she would have sunk in a few minutes.

"I can never forget the absurdity of the position," he continued. "One of her majesty's ships, crowded with soldiers and half-full of water, in a sinking condition, steaming at full speed in a circle at Spithead, whilst the naval authorities were striving to decipher the signals of distress displayed at our mast-head. At last the signals were made out by those on shore, and formal per-mission was given for us to enter the harbour.

"After a great deal of manoeuvring we came alongside a dockyard pier. To it we were lashed with chains and stout hawsers, to prevent the ship from moving, whilst the screw turned at full speed, its movement being, as I have said, a necessary accompaniment of the steam pumps, whose action was necessary to keep the ship afloat."

She was patched up, but while she was crossing the Bay of Biscay she was obliged to put into Corunna for more repairs. As often as the wind blew strong she leaked again, and during a cyclone in the Indian Ocean she threatened to founder. All hands, sailors and soldiers, officers and men, were kept at the pumps for several days with little sleep and less food. Then the weather moderated, but her misfortunes were not ended. Steaming through the Strait of Banca to Singapore she struck a spike of coral reef, and stayed there till she sank forever. The crew and the troops were landed by the boats on an adjacent island, and when they were rescued the ships that brought relief also brought news of the out-break of the Indian Mutiny and orders to proceed to Calcutta instead of China.

What happened to him there is a matter of history, a thrilling chapter, written by others than himself. If he refers to it at all his own part in it is disguised or slighted, and his manner is that of a detached recorder of the events described rather than that of a participant in them. His evasions reminded me of another general, who at a club I belong to was urged after dinner to tell us how he won his Victoria Cross. He hummed and hawed, backed and filled, meandered for an hour or more, provoked our interest, hovered over the point, balked at it, and furtively came back to it only to shirk it again. "How'ver how 'ver. What does it matter? Ah er, I was shot through both arms.

"He, the beggar how'ver, what does it matter? What does it matter?" As he sat down he coughed and blushed like a school girl, leaving the supreme moment of the adventure for our future discovery through other sources.

Lord Wolseley does not hum and haw. There is no embarrassment or trepidation in his manner; he is composed and perspicuous, but if he approached it he never arrived at the revelation of his own exploits. Historical he might be, but not autobiographical. All I drew out of him about the relief of Lucknow was an incident that occurred on the way there.

"About forty miles from Cawnpore is the station of Futteepore. Upon reaching it we received orders from General Havelock, in front, to halt there for the present. This was, of course, very disheartening to men who had marched, I may say night and day, to get to Cawnpore in time to join the column there being collected for the relief of Lucknow. The first thing we did upon reaching Futteepore was to search for the remains of the gentleman who had been commissioner of the district, and who had been murdered there.

"Ile had been well known to all the natives in the region as a good and just man, devoted to their interests and to their welfare. He was religious, and had erected on the main road a stone tablet with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it in three languages.

"When the news of the mutiny at Cawnpore had reached his station, all the Englishmen there but he had gone back to Allahabad. He would not budge, as he stoutly maintained the natives would not molest him. He was wrong; they attacked him in his house, to the flat top of which he retreated, and there he sold his life, killing, as the natives told us, thirteen mutineers before he ceased to breathe.

" We found his skull, and collected as many of his bones as we could. The only coffin we could obtain was an empty brandy case, in which we buried him with military honours. The sole inscription upon the box that contained his bones was 'Old Cognac'."

The scar on Lord Wolseley 's left cheek had to be ac-counted for. All he would say of it was "in the trenches before Sevastopol," as he switched readily enough to less personal incidents of that memorable campaign. He visualized the scene: the bleak hills, gray under snow and sleet and rain; the drenched and half-starved troops hiding from the Russian batteries; the bursting of shells and the whistling of rifle balls among them.

"I remember," he said, "some curious things. I was sitting some few yards in the rear of our first parallel, alongside Captain Stanton, who was giving me instructions for the coming night. Two sergeants stood together facing ús, listening to the orders which I wrote in my pocketbook. Whilst so occupied in what we conceived to be a very safe spot, down tumbled both the sergeants in front of us, as a shell rushed past so close that we felt its wind. One man's head had disappeared, and the other's face was horribly mangled; what we supposed to be his jawbone obtruded from a ghastly wound.

"The next morning I inquired in camp how the man was, and learned he had not been touched by the shell, but that his terrible wound had been made by the jaw-bone of the other sergeant, which was driven into his face. Indeed, a little reflection ought to have told us that no man could be seriously wounded in the head by the blow of a shell and still live."

The hospital was full, and many a sick and wounded man had to be turned back to the slush and mud of the trenches for a bed. Wolseley himself was thrice wounded, once dangerously. He and two sappers were filling a breach when a round shot scattered the loose stones with such force that while one of the men was beheaded the other was disembowelled. Wolseley also fell, smothered in blood. He was supposed to be dead, and it was one of the wounds he received then that split his cheek open and cost him an eye.

It was in 1888, when he was adjutant-general of the army, that he asked me to spend a few days with him at the country house he had taken at Farnham — that pleasant little Surrey town where William Cobbett was born in the "Jolly Farmer," and where at Moor Park, Swift, serving as secretary to Sir William Temple, became entangled with Stella, and where the Bishop of Winchester has his seat.

We went down from Waterloo on one of those June days in which the English climate repents its sulks and takes on the quality of Paradise under a sky of the purest blue, holding Alps of fleecy, silvery, slow-moving clouds which diffuse the light and soften the landscape till it seems to be not of earth at all, but a heavenly mirage, exquisitely intangible.

The carriage that met us at the station swept with us, my wife and me, into the flowery and secluded grounds of Fir Grove House. Lord Wolseley, with his wife and daughter, were in another part of the garden, to which we were led by the butler through one of those airy, fragrant English sitting rooms, its tables laden with flowers and its French windows reaching to the level of the velvet lawn, and there we found him with one arm linked in that of the elder lady, and the other in that of the younger, vivaciously humming a tune and kicking his heels with all the liveliness of my old friend Grossmith in the part of the major-general in Gilbert and Sullivan 's nonsensical play. I had caught him quite unawares in the bosom of his family, and unhampered by the least formality or consciousness of observation. A trying situation, hazardous to dignity, upsetting to decorum, it might have been, but instead of that it made our reception facile through our mutual appreciation of the humour of it. Strangeness and the hesitating preliminaries of introduction were cancelled by the little surprise. We were established by that first peal of laughter.

In Lady Wolseley we saw a very handsome woman with a strong resemblance to the Empress Eugènie, and a high-born manner of much sweetness and grace. Frances, the only child, who will become a peeress in her own right, was but a wholesome slip of a girl with a passion for horsemanship and gardening, and since then she has made gardening the vocation of her life. Lord Wolseley himself was spruce, dapper, debonair; a man of the world as well as a soldier; alert but composed; dressed in the latest fashion — that morning in a gray lounge suit and a Homburg hat; not unconventional, nor, on the other hand, impeded by the inflexibilities of unreasonable usages or tradition; a man of various interests and strong opinions, constant in friendship, and, one could safely infer, resolute in opposition.

One could not have asked for a blither companion, and he made our visit a round of delight. His knowledge of books and authors seemed encyclopaedic. When he took us through Moor Park I was convinced that he knew every word Swift had ever written, and every word written about him.

Moor Park was the retreat of Sir William Temple when, after the death of his son in 1686, he withdrew from public life. Ile died here in 1699 ; and near the east end of his house is the sundial under which, according to his own request, his heart was buried in a silver box, "in the garden where he used to contemplate the works of nature with his beloved sister, the Lady Giffard." There were, however, other inmates of Moor Park, "to whom," writes Macaulay, " a far higher interest belongs. An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who had narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as amanuensis, for board and twenty pounds a year; dined at the second table, wrote bad verse in praise of his employer, and made love to a very pretty dark-eyed young girl who waited on Lady Giffard. Little did Temple imagine that the coarse exterior of his dependent concealed a genius equally suited to politics and to letters; a genius destined to shake great kingdoms, to stir the laughter and the rage of millions, and to leave to posterity memorials which can perish only with the English. language. Little did he think that the flirtations in his servants' hall, which he perhaps scarcely deigned to make the subject of a jest, was the beginning of a long, unprosperous love, which was to be as widely famed as the passion of Petrarch or of Abelard. Sir William's secretary was Jonathan Swift; Lady Giffard 's waiting maid was poor Stella."

With him (Lord Wolseley) literature was more than a recreation, and every day, generous as he was with his time, he shut himself for some hours in his library to advance that standard "Life of John Churchill," the famous Duke of Marlborough, upon which he was then engaged. He was one of those enviable persons who can do almost without sleep. You could part with him late at night, yet find him up with the dawn before the rest of the household had stirred. One night he went to London to dine with Lord Randolph Churchill, and as there was no train to Farnham at the hour of his return, he chose to alight at Aldershot, and to walk thence home, a distance of twelve miles or more, long after midnight.

"Couldn't you have had a carriage?" Lady Wolseley demanded in ,the morning.

"Yes, my dear, but I wanted the exercise."

"You might have met footpads," she protested.

"Lucky for them that I didn't," he laughed, throwing himself into a sparring posture which gave assurance of as good a defence as ever brought down the curtain on a three-to-one encounter in a melodrama. Despite the sapping of all those wounds of his, he at fifty-five stood like a man whose vigour had never met with drains.

He had suffered much during his career from the maladministration of the war office, and once he exclaimed impatiently : ''Statesmen! They are vestrymen. One good soldier is worth more than a score of the best of them." He it was who, to his everlasting sorrow, and through no fault of his own, failed to reach "Chinese" Gordon in time to save him at Khartoum. Gordon was a close friend of his, and had started on that last expedition from Wolseley's house in London. "Have you any money in your pocket?" Wolseley asked at the last moment, knowing well how in his exaltation Gordon lost sight of trifles of that kind. Ile could not keep money; it was no sooner in his hands than he gave it to the first object of charity that claimed it. Gordon confessed that he had not thought of money, and Wolseley raised among fellow officers a purse of several hundred pounds for him. Gordon kept it till he reached Port Said, when a needy sheik to whom he was very much attached wheedled it out of him.

Wolseley preserves the last two letters ever received from Gordon, one saying, "Khartoum all right. Can hold forever," and the other, "Khartoum all right. 14.12.84." He could not hide his emotion; his eyes glistened as he spoke of him.

Gorden was not the only one of whom he spoke with enthusiasm. One day we had at luncheon Colonel Maurice (now general), son of the great preacher invoked by Tennyson in the familiar lines: "Come, Maurice, come — "

"Where, far from noise and smoke of town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All round a careless order'd garden
Close to the ridge of a noble down.

"You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine,
And only hear the magpie gossip,
Garrulous under a roof of pine."

A tall, slender, handsome man, suave and modest, Colonel Maurice was so absorbed in relating what he had seen at some recent naval manoeuvres that dish after dish passed him untouched. "You are not eating a thing, Maurice," Wolseley anxiously protested, and then, leaning over to me, he whispered, "Isn't he splendid? And as brave as a lion!" Maurice, too, had been in the trenches before Sevastopol.

There were many literary people among the guests, but we missed Henry James, who was another of the host's intimates.

His tenancy of Fir Grove House, at Farnham, was coming to an end. The queen had just made him Ranger of Greenwich Park, a position which has privileges with-out any exhausting responsibilities. Ranger's Lodge was built by Anne of Denmark, Queen of James I, and enlarged by Henrietta Maria, Queen of Charles I. Later on it became the residence of the Earl of Chester-field, who wrote those letters to his son which Johnson said inculcated the manners of a dancing master and the morals of a courtesan. Chesterfield himself was described as a, wit among lords and a lord among wits.

"She's the dearest old lady, the queen!" exclaimed Lord Wolseley, speaking of her majesty's gift. "She's always thinking that a fellow's hard up."

I suppose that in any modern appraisement he would be put down as old-fashioned and undemocratic, not-withstanding his courtesy and affability to those he meets. "When I was a child," he said, "it was impressed upon me that a long line of forefathers was something to be proud of, and placed me under an obligation never to be forgotten that ancient lineage conferred great benefits upon one, and required one to be all the more careful of one's character and one's mode of dealing with others. This had a very strong influence on my thoughts and aspirations. Born in Ireland, but of an English family, I had an intense love of England and a desire to serve her. That I should join the army was natural, for that was the profession of my father, grandfather, and forefathers for many generations. I always gloried in being a soldier; the very hardships of a soldier's life in the field had a charm for me; the thought of it fired my blood. Another thing that underlay and influenced all my early career was an intense belief in God — in an active God who took the greatest interest in my welfare, and who would, I was sure, grant those things that were for my eternal good. I was taught to rely on His mercy at all times. I do not take the accident of birth nearly so seriously now; but, after all, a well-born man is fortunate in having through his ancestors an incentive to an honourable life."