ashamed of; they seem to have fought right well. Harold was badly wounded at last, and unable to command, or surely he would not have let his Saxons leave their vantage ground, seduced by the stale and most ticklish manœuvre of a sham retreat, which perfectly succeeded in this instance. If the Saxons had been able to slip some Cavalry at the Normans, as soon as they turned their backs to execute the feint, and the Infantry had staid on their position, there might have been a different tale to tell. 9. We pass over to France. The English have at last got check-mated;-the battle of Orleans, 1429 A. D. Joan of Are, a true heroine, who has not had historical justice by any means done to her, having raised the spirits of the French army to fighting order again, managed to get through the besiegers into Orleans, beat the English under Talbot, Salisbury and Suffolk, in a pitched battle, and compelled them to raise the siege. There must have been gross negligence in the English lines to allow Joan to pass into Orleans with a re-inforcement, for which the subsequent trouncing served them right. Joan did not pretend to any tactics; leaving all the actual Generalship, with a woman's tact and sense, to Dunois. She said, "I used to tell them to go on boldly, and then I went before them boldly myself." Not a bad foundation for tactics, this. 10. Launch we now upon the sea. A. D. 1588, a glorious band of the old English species of heroes, Lord Howard of Effingham, Hawkes, Frobisher, Drake, Fenton, Southwell, and others, all good men and true, set sail from Plymouth to meet the gigantic Armada of Spain. They steered straight for the Spanish line, as it bore in sight in form of a long crescent, sailed through it, and then turned about, followed them up, and despite their superior size, took or destroyed all that did not run away. 11. Next on the "decisive" list comes the battle of Blenheim, A. D. 1704. The allies, under Marlborough and Eugene, completely beat the French under Tallard and Marsin. Cavalry decided the day. The famous Irish Brigade in the French service were carrying all before them, when Marlborough caught them in flank with his Cavalry, broke them, got his Cavalry together again, and finished by a general charge. (Here is the à-propos again). It was a complete victory. Twenty-four battalions and twelve squadrons were surrounded, and had to surrender, in the village of Blenheim. Tallard here was evidently no match for Marlborough; he was beaten off-hand before his reserves could move. The Ameers at Meanee seem to have made something of a similar mistake in Occupying a walled Shikargah which had only one opening, Sir Charles Napier posted a company of grenadiers at this opening, with orders to hold it till death; they did so, gloriously, and some 6,000 men of the Ameers' force were thus paralysed by this one company. 12. Next comes Pultowa, A. D. 1709. What a difference to the Russia of 1854, that is now bullying Europe! The Russians having invariably been beaten by the Swedes, at last learned to beat in turn. Peter the Great seems to have managed his countrymen admirably. The Swedes under Charles XII. attacked the Russians in their entrenchments, which they forced; but Peter got a body of Cavalry and Infantry in good order outside his lines, and caught the Swedes in flank and rear, and completely over-turned them. Beyond his indomitable chivalry of character,-a grand feature certainly to commence with in a Commander,-Charles XII. seems to have had little of the General in him. He was always too far ahead of his resources. 13. The New World now. Battle of Saratoga, A. D. 1777. General Burgoyne, at the head of the British army, after being well beaten, surrendered to the American Generals Gates and Arnold, who seem to have done their part with their raw troops right well. A great deal of bad management on our side all through this unfortunate war, and the affair under notice was a disgraceful one. The other English General, Sir Henry Clinton, was marching straight on Saratoga; on the day of the fight, the advance detachment of Clinton's division was only forty miles distant, and on the day Burgoyne capitulated, he got news from Sir Henry Clinton's head quarters, only fifty miles off, and all in high order and spirits; but this was just too late; the British army had surrendered. The two Generals, Clinton and Burgoyne, should have opened a communication with each other at all risks; their mutual ignorance of each other's movements was most disgraceful to them as Commanders, and on the part of Burgoyne, there was a great want of endurance and devotion added in surrendering, when there was the least possible hope of re-inforcement, and which he must have known was somewhere near at any rate. We are rather surprised at having come to Saratoga without any notice of Plassey in the Professor's "decisive" list. What Saratoga was against our dominion in America, Plassey was equally the crisis for our dominion in India. 14. The battle of Valmy, 1792 A. D. The French, after several defeats, beat, under the very able_generalship of Dumouriez, who succeeded La Fayette, the Prussian allied forces under the Duke of Brunswick. The Duke seems to have managed very badly. After he had taken Verdun, he was, with his fine army, actually between the two French corps, Dumouriez, and Kellerman's; whom he ought to have turned upon fiercely and singly, and either beat them one after the other, or, at any rate, destroyed one of them; but he let his opportunity pass; Dumouriez out-manoeuvred him, effected a junction with Kellerman, and the whole aspect of the war was changed. 15. As we have come to the mystic limit of fifteen, we need hardly say that it is Waterloo which crowns our list. In a notice like this, any thing more than naming the battle would be almost an impertinence. Siborne's we would refer the reader to as the best account; next best Sir Walter Scott's, in his Life of Napoleon; and all soldiers who have the opportunity, should consider it a duty to pay a visit to that famous field, and go over the ground carefully. We duly made our pilgrimage thither, and having of course read well up the accounts of the battle, the ground seemed quite familiar to us, and it was no great effort of imagination to people it with the respective Commanders, divisions, brigades, and regiments, whose names are so imperishably connected with that awful glory. After seeing the ground, it struck us that the French Cavalry should have done more. They faced the fire gallantly enough, but seem to have made the fatal mistake of pulling up, instead of going on. We read of their horsemen coolly sacrificing themselves, trying to back their horses into the squares, and so on; but on such ground they should have done more than trot up to the squares and back again, although the said squares were British. However melancholy for human nature the reflection, the fact is beyond question, that the chief events in the histories of nations have turned upon the issues of battles. Under Providence, soldiers have had the principal parts in the execution of the fates of nations and of people. Surely then the system of our armies is a subject for earnest and constant consideration. As we are in India, and would fain be practical in our generation, we will confine ourselves to the army serving in India; or, rather to the chief portion of it, the Company's army. As we said before, it is an age of re-action we are in. No doubt, things will come right in due time in the army, as in other parts of the body politic, but just at present the effects are injurious. The school-master just now is so intensely abroad, that instead of grafting mental accomplishment on the profession of arms in the bringing up of the young gene ration of soldiers,-the red coat, the sword," the circumstance of glorious war," seem entirely put on the shelf. It is openly put forth as a principle of Government, that the highest reward for an Officer is to remove him from the exercise of his profession; that no military zeal, achievements, or long service, is to be weighed in the selection of Officers for the Staff, in default of their having "passed" in the Hindustani language; and the appointment of a Bazar Master, or a subordinate situation in the Commissariat, is conceived an infinitely fitter object of ambition to our young Officers than the command of a company. And, truly, when on looking at the Army List, we find that, exclusive of the Commanding Officer, the average number of Officers present with their regiments is about one Captain and four Subalterns to each, and consider that of these the Captain and one Subaltern will probably be married, leaving their comrades to form the mess; that of these some will be often sick or on leave; and that all the while, Courts-martial, Courts of Inquiry, and all the various routine duties have to be carried out on precisely the same scale as though the regiments were complete; to say nothing of "examinations" and parades over "rough ground," (save the mark !) lately introduced into the Western Presidency; considering all this, as the Emperor of the French says, it is not surprising that youthful military ardour should subside into voting military duty a bore. It seems really coming to this; and when Officers are to be looked upon by the Government they serve as the " refuse," what are they to think of themselves? What are their men to think of them? What are their men likely to think of themselves? English blood is the life-blood of the Indian army; to keep that blood healthy and not stagnant, there must be the friction and comfort of association, not the sloth and despair engendered by isolation; and as a simple matter of common sense, putting military principles on one side, the duty of the army cannot be performed as it should be, unless, in the first place, this duty is looked on as a sphere of honour, not of degradation, a punishment for not having "passed in Hindustani"; and, secondly, without a proper proportion of Officers to be sharers and workers together in that duty. We are here at issue with an authority, to differ with whom we are very reluctant, and * *We must in our judicial capacity protest against Major Jacob's expression of "frivolous duties." A courtier may have frivolous duties to perform, but to a soldier nothing that is duty" can be frivolous;" every bit of pipe clay or blacking is an item in the grand sum required to win battles. We believe no man living can practically have a higher sense of what duty is than Major Jacob; we suspect him only to be somewhat wanting in άισθησις. for whom we have the very highest respect, Major John Jacob; but on this point, we must conquer our habitual respect, and boldly disagree. It did not need that distinguished and able Officer to tell us that quality is better than quantity, or that three or four first-rate men are worth an infinite number of ordinary and inferior ones. But even to this quantity standard there is a limit. One good horse may pull as much as two bad ones, but he cannot pull a load which it takes six bad ones to move. Major Jacob, indeed, would bodily do away with a great part of the load; Courts-martial, Committees, and so forth, he would do away with; to a great extent his ideas are no doubt right; but they go the length of an entire change of system in the British service; and there is no more chance of the whole army being organized on the model of the regiments of Scinde Horse, than there is of getting a Commandant for every regiment of the stamp of John Jacob. But conceive the whole system of the British army changed; Articles of war, Rules and Regulations, all issuing from, and centering in, the Commander of each regiment; these Commanders are to be selected from the entire body of Officers, who are to be borne on the strength of the European portion of the army. What will the European portion say to it? Select for the native branch, and leave the "refuse" for the command of our European soldiery! Surely, this is not an unfair resolution of Major Jacob's problem. A most noble example has Major Jacob set before the army, both in himself, his Officers and his men; but when he says from his eyrie at Khangur, where he has been working away for some ten years past, absolute commander of his fine body of 1,600 horsemen, and monarch of all he surveyed; that because his system has been tried and not found wanting; therefore it is manifest, that the same system is the true one for our Indian army; we can only say that the sequitur strikes us the other way, that the splendid success of his system for a portion of the army under exceptional circumstances, is no sufficient reason why it would answer for the army at large, under the usual concomitant circumstances. But let us start afresh. The fate of England's Empire in India may, in the course of events, hang, as it has before hung, on the issue of a battle; that is, under Providence, on the conduct of our armies. Can our armies in India afford to make light of such a consideration? No-they cannot-they dare not. No man in his senses dares. Clearly for our armies to be efficient; we |
