LORD WOLSELEY ON COURAGE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9172, 29 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

LORD WOLSELEY ON COURAGE.

The Fortnightly Review for August contains a singularly attractive and instructive article by Lord Wolseley on "Courage.'' lie regards courage as the mental correlative and equivalent of perfect physical health, and his experience has been that high courage is generally accompanied by bodily soundness. He goes 0:1 to say : — The fiery spirit who will volunteer for all services of danger, and go straight to the point to which he is ordered, is often worth a king's ransom to an army and to the nation whose cause it is fighting. It is impossible to put down arithmetically the value of such an officer, and next to the sensations which vibrate through evennerve and muscle of the man himself, 1 know of nothing that stirs the whole mental and bodily fibre more completely than to watch such a hero as he bounds forward in front of his men into some deadly breach. When the affair is over, anil he has cooled down from the white heat which the electrical currents running through him have engendered, ask him about his sensations. They are difficult to analyse, still more difficult to describe in words. I am, however, tolerably certain that almost every man who has ever led a storming party across the open in full view of the enemy, will acknowledge that his prominent and all-absorbing anxiety from first to last was, "Will my men follow me?" He lias no shadow of misgiving as to his own courage and determination to lead the way, but | that horrid question, and the doubt it en- | genders, robs him of much of that frenzied enjoyment which is past the understanding of all who have not taken part in such an enterprise. Lord Wolseley speaks in enthusiastic terms of Sir Gerald Graham, one of the coolest men he has ever known in action, and one of the most reckless. He gives an altogether unique character in this respect to another comrade in arms :—

"It would be impossible forme to point to any one man and say he was the bravest man 1 ever knew. But I think that Captain Sir William Peel, of the Royal Navy, possessed courage of an order that I have never seen so strongly marked in any other man. During all our bombardments at Sebastopol it was his invariable practice to walk about behind his battery on the natural plateau of the ground where he had little or no protection from Ihe enemy's fire. This he did from no swagger, but to set an example to his men of cool contempt for danger. I can see him now with his telescope under his arm in quarterdeck fashion, halting from time to time to watch the effect of his battery upon the enemy's works, or to direct the attention of his men in charge of guns to some particular spot or object in the Redan or Malakoff. He was thus always in view ; his men could always see him, and as they were down in the trench before him, and so, in comparative safety, all felt that his eye was upon them, and that if he in that exposed position made so light of his great danger, they could not presume to wince under the sheU ter which the battery afforded them. He was not only always cool, but most particularly courteous, and there was this wellknown peculiarity about his grace of manner, that the hotter the fire and the greater the danger, the more suave, or as his men used to say, ' by polite' he became."