STEWART, HERBERT, AND CAMERON.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7145, 24 April 1885, Page 3

STEWART, HERBERT, AND CAMERON.

[By Archibald Foebes.] For two months in the beginning of the Zulu campaign, Herbert Stewart and I aliured the s<nne tent. Those days are not yet four years past, and then the man who is already the veteran of six campaigns, a X.C.8., and a full .MajorGeneral, was a somewhat forlorn captain of cavalry who might expect, with luck, such good fortune as his regimental majority in two or three years. It has been a piece of unexpected good fortunn for him that ho had received the staff appointment of biigade-m»jor to General Fred. Marshall's cavalry brigade ; and this simply because of his good record at tho Staff College and as a regimental officer, for he had no interest. I have . senn it stated that Wolseley had been acquainted with Stewart's merits long betoro the Zulu campain, and had been steadily keeping his eye upon him. This is an error. Stewart was clean outside of what has been called the "gang." I question, indeed, if he had ever exchanged words with Lord Wolseley. Of Stewart's efficiency as Marshall's brigademajor, every officer of that force must have a vivid recollection ; but the Zulu campaign, for reasons which need not be now dwelt upon, was not the regular cavalry's day. I remember well how Stewart chafed in his fetters. When in May the brigade rode up to where the dead lay on the slope at the foot of the Isandlwana mountain, curbed by orders that forbade them to go further, I remember Stewart's suppressed passion of fury. He in command, with the head loose, the sorry experience would not have occurred of the ignominious retirement of a brigade of British sabres, followed by taunts and dropping shots from a handful of Zulu tribesmen. Poor Carey and Stewart had been at the Staff College together, and when the former was preparing for his court martial Stewart confronted the feeling of the camp, and gave him valuable assistance in drawing up his defence. When the advance on Ulundi was made the regular cavalry wera relegated —save one squadron — to frontier work ; and so Stewart, with many another eager soldier, was hindered from the fight for which he had longed. He vvaa the first man I met at Landsmann's Drift when I rode in with the news of tho victory, and after the first flush of happiness at the good tidings he turned away and was silent for a brief space, wrestling momentarily with his sense of disappointment. I rode ou to Durban, and round by the sea to Port Durnford, to acquaint Sir Garnet Wolseley with the military situation inside Zululand. In the course of a long conversation, which travelled over an infinity of ground, I ventured to suggest to the new general in command that, if the opportunity should come in his way, it might repay him to take note what manner of man was the officer serving as Marshall's brigade major. From former experience I knew how earnest was Wolseley in recruiting to himself, without regard to interest or position, men of real worth in their profession. I have no " Army List " here to refer to, but it is my impression that the general brevet for the Zulu campaign did not include Stewart's name, and that he was not promoted till later. Be this as it may, no good billet fell to his lot when the force was broken up, and eager always for work, no matter how arduous or how obscure, he was content to accept from the late General Clifford the charge of a section of the line of the communication from Zuiuland to the Transvaal. It was while fagging at this laborious service, stimulating lazy transport-riders, flogging sluggish oxen, and throwing himself into his humdrum duty with as much energy as \f the work had been a campaign, in which every day might fnrnish a battle, that the turning-point of his career arrived. On his way to Pretoria, Wolseley rode the line of communication, studying its workings as he rode, with an eye that darts into the hearts of men and things. Stewart acoompanied him over his section, and the result of that day's ride was that for Stewart there was to be no more more fagging among lines of communication. In the quiet, modest, ready cavalryman the chief recognised a soldier after his own heart. Stewart rode on into Pretoria with Wolseley. He had taken that commander's shilling ; he had been recruited into the "gang." The complement of Wolseley's generosity in handing over to Baker Russell the conduct of the attack on Sekukuni's Mountain was the assignment to him of Stewart as hia staff officer. More dashing fighting man than the thrusting colonel of the 13th Hussars the British army does not contain ; but he is the first to confess the value to him of methodical assistance in the detail of organisation. Over and over again in his hearty blusterous mannor he has waxed eloquent in my hearing as to tho ' service which Herbert Stewart rendered in the elaborate setting in order of the particularly neat combination which made that operation a success bo clean and brilliant. Stewart has no right to be alive after his conduct at Majuba Hill. There is a time for everything under the sun, and it is the time for running away when every chance has gone to do any good by standing fast. Stewart may have done well to be angry at what he there saw around him and behind him, but it is a piece of culpable self-indul-gence for a man to be goaded by wrath, scorn, and shame into seeking death. Fortunately for others as well aB for himself, Stewart missed what poor Colley found, and not the least interesting episode of his life was the time spent among ths Boers as their prisoner of war. Just before he left Dongola for Korti he wrote me a long letter, which I receceived the other day. It thus concludes : " With 1800 aB good soldiers aa ever breathed (he then expected to have the Light Camel Corps) if I cannot do something creditable, should the chance offer, I give you full permission to invest in the heaviest available pair of boots to kick me wherewithal when I return to England." No bootmaker will prosper because of this permission. Poor St. Leget Herbert has scarcely had justice done to him, since he was rather an amateur than a professional journalist. I made his acquaintance first when he went to Cyprus as Sir Garnet Wolseley's private secretary. In those days he was rather a Sybarite, at least to casual seeming, and developed no aspirations after a career in which fighting was to be seen. But the letters he wrote from Cyprus to a contemporary were as faultless in style as they were brilliant in scholarship. Associating continually with aoldiera in Wolseley's camp, he caught the fighting fever, and 1 thenceforward there was no more ardent aspirant to participate in the Egyptian campaign. Aa he could get no appointment, either of an official or a journalistic character, he took service as a private in the Mounted Infantry, from whose ranks his gallantry raised him to the position of a sergeant. Herbert Stewart took him with him in i Sir Gerald Graham's expedition aa a kind

• of informal galloper, and he had as well a i commission from one of your contem- , poraries as an occasional correspondent, i His description of the doings of our i cavalry in the combat of El Teb was an ■ admirable bit of work. There is perhaps i nothing finer in the annals of war corresi pondence than poor Herbert's constancy i to duty — how rewarded I will not i here say— in writing his description of the cavalry fighting while on his back ere yet he had barely rallied from the first shock of a severe bullet wound in the thigh. A scholar, a gentleman, a man of a singularly sweet nature — to know St. Leger Herbert was to love him. My acquaintance with poor Cameron was confined to two dayß' close, although casual, communing three summers ago at Nairn, when we — he the active, enterprising proficient in full vigor, I the worn out " old hand " whom the strain of the life had superannuated— discussed without ceasing the principles and practice of the profession which we both loved so well. As manly as modeßt, as daring as dexterous, Cameron was bound to add to a reputation alreudy deservedly unique but for that fatal bullet. He was to my thinking unrivalled as a telegraphist. The mise en scene of the battle grew up before the reader's eye as he followed the curt yefc comprehensive sentences of a dispatch that Cameron had dashed on paper at a white heat. The phases of the combat unrolled themselves with photographic lucidity ! He was never turgid, and he was never weak. Then hi.i accuracy was like a vice, and his literary style — in so far as I enn venture judgment— was the perfection of military writing.