OUR IMPERIAL ARMY.

Evening Star, Issue 10398, 20 August 1897, Page 4

OUR IMPERIAL ARMY.

THE REVIEW AT ALDERSHOT. The famous war correspondent of the ‘Daily Mail,’ G. W-. Steevens, supplies his paper with a graphic account of the Aidershot Review. Here are some extracts ; Yesterday’s review was in three acts, of which the first consisted in a march-past. You all know .what troops look like when they are marching past you in the street; well, when they are marching past the Queen they look very much the same. You know what one battalion looks like; well, thirty are very like it, only thirty times as much. It occurred to the profane spectator, as rank on rank of scarlet or blue rolled steadily past, that it would have been just as good a review if they had sent samples like the artillery of the Crown colonies, one of whose artillery detachments seems to consist of one man and no guns. It would be easy to march a private of the line past the saluting base with a sandwich-board and “Five hundred more like this,” or “ One thousand of this sort.” Certainly there was a degree of pleasure in the sight itself—the succeeding waves of brilliant color, the glitter of level bayonets, the majestic pacing of many horses. There was an interest in comparing the dressing of the various lines.

IT WAS AMUSING TO MARK that none of the cavalry were in more perfect line than the Victorians and New Zealanders ; that the poor little Dyaks are too small to keep step with the striding Sikhs beside them ; that the guns went past as level as if they were all tied together by invisible bands ; that the Engineers had the most perfect dressing of any corps on the ground. Then even to the eye which the Jubilee has sated with soldiers there was still a touch of freshness—a whiff of real business-like war—in the Engineers marching past with entrenching tools and pontoons perched on waggons, and telegraph and wires, and the captive balloon bobbing disconsolately behind the scenes while its owners marched past without it. The waggons of the Army Service Corps and the ambulances of the Medical Staff were a useful reminder that war is a business by itself, which requires a plant of its own. But when all this was thought and said, it came back to a great many thousand soldiers all doing the same thing. But that, after all, was the essence of it. As you watched and watched the endless marching and wheeling aud shifting of formations, what began by being a bore ended by coming very near the sublime. You saw it better in the second part of the programme. The infantry then marched past, a brigade at a time—the front of each extending from the ropes almost to the firs and birches that shut out the horizon. An advancing wall of scarlet, an orderly herd of sporrans, a black tidal wave of rifles, always gleaming lines on lines of bayonets—the host moved slowly past, but irresistibly. It slowly swallowed up the whole plain. One screaming band took up the last, and the troops seemed less to march to the music than the music to be forced into rhythm by the rhythmical tramp of the troops. Tbe whole impression was that of a vast force animated by some UNSEEN RUT TREMENDOUS FORCE. It was still so when the cavalry and horse artillery went by at a gallop. The horses were alive ; no doubt of that. Out of one rushing mass a black dot leapt into the air, and when the mass passed a horpe and man were rolling over each other behind it. But the horses were not being visibly ridden ; something you could not see was driving them along, and it was almost a surprise to find an ordinary horse and ordinary man disentangling themselves behind it. And if the horses and men seemed almost mechanical, the guns seemed almost alive. Holding themselves very stiff and rigid, no creaking or swaying apart, but gliding all in one piece oyer the slightly uneven ground, they had still a buoyant spring that seemed scarcely less than human. Men and horses, guns and waggons, it was hard to say whether they were independent beings or part of a vast macnine. But it was indisputable, and it was vastly impressible, almost terrible* that all these thousands of units, at the will of somebody you could not see, were all doing the same thing. So at the end of all things, when the infantry advanced towards us in review order. That is to say, that the whole plain got up in the shape of men, and began to move down upon us. Nearer and nearer, sweeping on, no end to left or right, no gap, no dajdight through them, no hast? or excitement—simply the approach of Laffan’s Plain turned into armed men, and armed men welded into an army. Nearer, till the mass became individual men—but the men were all coming the same way, stepping the same step, holding the same rifle at the same angle. Nearer, till you could see the whites of tne men’s eyes, but the whites were an unbroken line, and the eyes all looked the same way. All the relentless power of a force of nature, and all the unswerving precision of a machine. Then you knew what an army is—the living embodiment of discipline, one will divided among thousands, and thousands multiplied into one. About 200 yards from us, just as it seemed we must be swept oil the earth, they stopped. Massed binds thundered out ‘ God save the Queen.’ More massed bands repeated it. The phonograph from somewhere or other gave an order. And then the army suddenly became soldiers. The soldiers were cheering the Queen. Opposite me were the Royal Irish and the Dublin Fusileers, and from them there rose a tossing waveofbearskins. Theyleapedupontobayonets and quivered in mid-air with furious joy. The roar swelled along the whole line, dropped, only to swell up again and again. And then between us and them came driving tho Queen. There was more white about her dress than there had been on Jubilee Day, her bearing was more sprightly and elastic, but there was still the same quiet, unperturbed, self-confident, wise old face. She had put on her glasses to look at her soldiers ; she was smiling like a woman and bowing like a Queen. Who else can do it ? When you saw the Queen you saw, not indeed the military commander, but all the same the one being that made all these thousands one.