Lord Wolseley on Courage.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 870, 2 November 1888, Page 10

Lord Wolseley on Courage.

Lord Wolseley has written a paper on • Courage, ’ that seems to have attracted much attention in England. It is pnt in very readable form, and from it we take a few extracts that will prove interesting to our readers. * Cowardice,’ he says, 1 is the most subtle of mental diseases, the existence of which may never be known to any but the man whose heart it gnaws at. When the day arrives on which all hearts Bhall be open, We shall, I am sore, be astonished to find that many of those who have passed muster in our ranks as brave men, will plead in extenuation of sins committed, the astounding fact that they were oowards by nature. As an example bearing more or less directly upon this, Lord Wolseley later on tells a oarious story. lie once, he says, knew well » man whom he had often seen under fare, and who never showed himself anything but a fearless soldier. —lt happened to this officer to be ordered to sake part in a dangerons assault. The operation failed, an cl with heavy loss, and among those supposed to have been killed was the aforesaid officer. When, however, Lord Wolseley went next morning to attend the funeral of those who bad died in the assault, he, to his delight, found his friend quite unharmed and looking especially cheerful, while he gave a perfectly, reasonable account 1 of his escape. aI L 3 after, however, Lord Wolseley learnt that, as a matter of fact, the man had behaved badly upon this occasion, ‘ ani had taken shelter under cover, allowing his men to go forward whilst he skulked in the rear. Strangest of all, on the very morning when he appeared so cheerful, he had just come from confessing his cowardice to his commanding officer. ‘ The secret was too much for him to bear ;'he could not keep it, so he made a clean breast of it, telling the tortures he had so long endured in striving to keep a bold face before the world, while craven fear gnawed at his heart.’ . . * In writing of courage,' it is impossible to omit a reference to my friend and comrade Charley Gordon. His courage was an instinct, fortified by faith in God and m a future life. This life had no intense pleasures for him, and he shrank frqm the applause qf men. He did whatever came to his hand with all the loyalty qf an English gentleman, and especially with the earnestness and zeal of a servant of Christ. The world was to him a sort of prison, beyond the precincts of which lay that New Jerusalem from which hia waking thoughts, and very dreams even, never wandered. Whilst in this mundane prison, he tried to do God s bidding with that unbounded sympathy for the sulferings of all animal creation, that waa one of his moat remarkable characteristics. And yet, he had absolutely no regard for human life. To die, to be killed, or to kill, was as natural, as much a matter of oourae to him, as to be born. He cared nothing for his own life, and could not understand why others should set any value on theirs. It always struok me when convers- ’ ing with him that he was, more than any man I ever knew well, made up of opposite qualities. The God whom he worshipped

was at one time the sternly just God described in the Old Testament; at another He was the God of love revealed to us by Christ. Not that these two conceptions contradict each other, rather is each the complement of the other ; but yet the union of such widely different qualities which seems to us natural, necessary even, in boa, strikes us as strange in a man. so , e union in Gordon of stern severity and exceeding gentleness always seemed to me to De extraordinary. It was not that Gordon was simply brave in action, but that danger had actually and positively for him nothing terrible about it. There is a curious page in his Khartoum diary where he discussos the question of whether he should, or should not, allow the Mahdi to take him alive. Death to him was leally the open door to a new life and whether he passed through it in action or under any other circumstances was all the same. Death to lmn was merely a release from all the paltriness of human life. When shall we see his like again ? Here is an instance of that absolute insensibility to danger which some men show. One story is of an officer who, when relieved from duty in the lines before Sebastopol, would never take the trouble to go home through the trenches, but preferred to take ‘ a beeline for camp, exposed for many hundred yards to a heavy rifle-fire from the advanced works of the Russians.’ That man was Sir Gerald Graham. Another delightful story is of a sea-captain in command of a _ battery, also at Sebastopol, who made it his invariable practice to walk about with his telescope under his arm, quarter-deck fashion, ‘ behind his battery, on the natural plateau of the ground, where he had little or no protection from the enemy’s fire.’ ‘Hs 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, “b- y polite,” he became.’ advancing over the open to the attack. One of the most trying things for the captain and subaltern is to make their men who have found some temporary haven of shelter from the enemy's fire, leave it, and advance over the open upon the position to be attacked. *To some men the horror of hearing bullets plump into the bodies of their comrades with a horrible thud seems to drive the blood from their hearts and to completely demoralise them. We are all inclined to make fun of death ; but when he keeps jostling you in a crowd, taking away those on your right and left; when jiour eye can scarcely rest upon a comrade for a minute without seeing him fall, death on these close and intimate terms appears _ in very different guise to wbat we have imagined when laughing at him over a good dinner at home. Many years ago, immediately after the Battle of Bulls Run, in which raw undisciplined armies of untrained men received their baptism of lb o, I heard the following story ; —The road in rear of the position was full of fugitives. Many had not only lost their heads but their breath also, from the .long distances they had run. A little fat sergeant perspiring at every pore, thoroughly blown, had reached a point of safety and was about to rest a while. He perceived a private of his own company, securely esconced in a cave above him. ‘ Comedown out of that cave at once !’said the sergeant, with all the air of the commanding officer ordering his men to ‘ fall in.’ The private, from his position of advantage, cocking a snook at his less fortunate noncommissioned officer, answered, ‘No. sergeant, you’re not going to have this hole, not if I know it.’ INDIAN DAN ING. The different sorts of courage possessed by the various races from which we enlist men for our Indian army are very remarkable. * When we burst open the gates of the Sekunder-Bagh at Lucknow in 1857, not only the garden, but the upper stories of thegatehouse itself, swarmed with the enemy. On each side as you entered there was a little winding staircase leading to the first floor, from whence a heavy fire was kept up on our men below. The stairs were so very narrow that even one man at a time found it no easy matter to mount them. To be the first man to go up seemed to mean certain death. Our men, who had behaved with the most dashing energy and pluck up to that moment, hung back for a second ; but the Sikhs who were in the crowd sprang at once up the stairs, and in a few moments every man in the upper story . had been thrown out of the windows. The Sikhs knew their enemy, whereas our men did not, and knew that, the affair being considered over when we forced the entrance, the defenders would fight no longer. And yet the Sikhs who swarmed up that winding staircase would have shrunk from facing the British soldier who hesitated to mount it, and the latter would have laaghed consumedly had you asked him if he would tackle every Sikh in the Punjaub. My company, on its march to Cawnpore, bivouacked one evening near a Sikh detachment, some of whose men amused themselves by exercising with very large and extremely heavy clubs after din • ner. I raised the clubs and found that they were out of all proportion to my strength, so, turning to my pioneer, who waß standing by, I asked him if he could twist them about as the Sikh soldiers had done. He was a tall and veiy powerful man ; but upon lifting the clubs he found that, not knowing the knack or trick which their use demands, he could do nothing with them. He laid them down quietly, and in answer to my question said, vNo, sir; but I don’t mind fighting any two of these ’ere fellows with my fists.” ’

THE COURAGE OF ENGLISH SOLDIERS. While prepared to recognise all that is grand and noble in the courage of other nations. Lord Wolseley recurs with intense satisfaction to the remembrance of our own soldiers, whose courage and endurance he has seen tried under desperate circumstances. ‘ One marked peculiarity about it is the contempt with which they regard all foreigners. The manners and customs, and even the very food of other nations, are the common topics of ridicule in our ranks. I shall conclude this article with the Btory of the English general who, before he attaoked Cadiz, thus addressed his men:— “ You Englishmen, who are fed upon_ beef, don’t surely mean to be beaten by a a -d lot of Spaniards who live upon oranges The French author, from whom I take this aneo-

dote, holds it up as an instance of how incapable our race is to appreciate any appeal to honour, or to those noble qualities which, according to his notions, distinguish the French soldier. Ho ridicules thejbnghsh officer’s appoal to the appetites, to the stomachs of his men; but, in doing so, he shows his ignorance of one of our strongest characteristics namely, our unconcealed contempt for all foreigners and their ways. That English general was really a wise man who knew how to excite the enthusiasm or the men whose prejudices ho thoroughly understood.’