THE BURDEN AND HEAT.1 66 IF the writer were asked which, in his opinion, is the capital British vice of the age, he would not say apathy, though that spiritual sleepingsickness is endemic from mansion to alley; he would not say frivolity, though much of the world's froth appears to have been blown across the sea to these shores; he would not say conceit, though the national proboscis may well seem the only item of our equipment which looks to heaven; he would not say vulgarity, though it is hard to find a general habit, aspiration, cult, and above all point of view, which is not a scarlet, tawdry solecism. But he would adduce as the master sin one of which most of the foregoing are merely the children-namely, ignorance of the things which matter; not pardonable and therefore pitiable ignorance, but wilful, slothful, and remediable lack of knowledge of the things which alone have saved mankind from being the least admirable of the beasts of the field. Such ignorance may at any moment be proved to be so endless that, like the round O-the "flat nothing," which typifies it, it may also be said to have no beginning. Let the experimenter, in an ordinary drawing-room, smoking-room, office, or railway-carriage-anywhere, in short, where two or three are gathered together,let him spring a query or two, not about any recondite affairs of a specialist or any abstractions, not even about the most striking landmarks of existence the peaks which still and will for ever glow amongst the "pallid volcanoes" of the past, but about simple workaday things, especially of those which have directly affected the life of to-day. Avoiding, therefore, such vastly important, interesting, but universally unknown matters as what is the Rosetta Stone; where, by whom erected, and in the name of goodness what are the mighty Dagabas of Anuradjhapura and Polonnaruwa; let him ask how it comes that India belongs to us, Italy to herself, and England to the Manchester School; when the Habeas Corpus or Catholic Emancipation Acts were passed, the Bill of Rights presented, "Lillibullero" sung, or the Income Tax invented, - let him inquire about these or twenty thousand other equally standard matters, and I warrant that scarcely once in a thousand times will he receive a correct answer-seldom enough any answer at all. The majority of the quotations in this paper are from 'Napier,' and from Walter Richard's 'Her Majesty's Army.' you may come upon the phrase So insupportable an examiner would not, of course, deserve to; nor need any one resort to such measures to prove the first of the evils attributable to the ignorance of modern society-namely, the utter impossibility nowadays of anything like allusive conversation; or, in other words, any real conversation at all. The truth is that the world does not read. When books were scarce it hungered for them; but now, like the attendant in a sweetstuff shop, it moves untempted, bewildered into abstention amongst the piled-up accumulation of good things on every side. And a world which does not read can neither talk nor understand talk. It either babbles or is dumb; and that which it is necessary to say to it must be said plainly and directly, as to a child or an imbecile. Hence the parrotcry for "simplicity" from a society conscious of its inability to grasp anything beyond the elementary; not, be it noted, for simplicity as the ancients achieved it—with infinity of learning of language in literature and of line in art, but the simplicity of the yokel who calls a spade a spade, or if he desire accent, a shovel! Any less naked allusion to the implement would inevitably send his hearers to the dictionary or encyclopædia, and would therefore be promptly condemned "obscure Journalists, ignorant of everything but their audience, are the fond of prating about "the the complexity of modern life"-eased In nothing does this prevailing lack of information more abound, and appear more heartless, than in the people's abysmal ignorance of the identities of those who serve and have served them. If mighty measures have fared ill in the public memory, mighty names have as often as not been never within it. Beneath piledup temples of achievement of the most glorious kind, the benefactors lie buried; their work is accepted almost as the gift of Nature, as naturally national property as Beachy Head or the Trossachs. Ask in vain what Brunel did or "involved." for the traveller, Bentham for the lawyer, Liebig for farmer, Wedgwood for breakfast - table; who man's awfullest agony, physical and mental, in the operating-room; who perfected the loom, and who the telegraph, the electric light, or even the four-cycle motor engine; who gave us tea, potatoes, tobacco, policemen, photographs, mezzotints, oil-painting, umbrellas, the Bible; who built Salisbury Cathedral or Somerset House; who wrote 'Areopagitica,' 'The Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 'Religio Medici.' Finally, ask most of all in vain about the fighting men, the real bricks, pillars, and foundations of every sublunary state, they who, not addicted to "laws and learning, arts and commerce," yet alone preserve from destruction these, the only "old nobilities " of civilisation. Here must the questioner expect not only ignorance of heroes, but even of their deeds. "Their bones are dust, their swords are rust, their souls are with the Lord, we trust," and their memories with the Lord knows who. But here, though the lack of knowledge seems most of all ungrateful, since what can a man do more than lay down his life, there is much excuse for it. History, the recorder and critic of results rather than means, passes over in silence ninety-nine per cent of the men who do most to make her. On the vast canvas of the past their deeds are unremarked, even though they be as vital as the single small touch of colour with which Sir Joshua Reynolds is related to have retrieved the failure of a rival's picture, when begged by its painter to show him why it looked so ill. Only in Regimental Histories are the real stories of war and warriors to be found, and they are commonly so dull and inaccessible that the riches within them lie like the treasure in the vaults of a bank, heaped up but invisible. Welcome indeed, therefore, is such a volume as a History of the Royal Irish Regiment,' which inaugurates by its literary skill, its research, and its complete readableness, a new era in the history of war. That its author has immeasurably exceeded his commission is only to say that he has artistically executed it. If his book is almost a history of British War rather than of a British Regiment, he has been the first to see that only thus can the amazing deeds which crowd his pages be saved from the isolated relief which renders the majority of such works as uninteresting and uninforming as a silhouette of black paper. How the old stories set us thinking, thinking of unknown men to whom the desperate courage, the sublime endurance, the awful suffering, the humdrum life of to-day owes its very orderliness and safety. Certain gross "heathen" set apart a day in the year for recalling their honoured dead. It is as worthy of imitation as many another "heathen" practice I could name, and I propose to follow it, picking at random some jewels from the treasure-house of British mili 1 By Lieut.-Colonel G. le M. Gretton. tary valour. I ask no pardon Redoubt?6 Again, who was for threading them together it, staggering bleeding across on the tiresome string of ques- the waters of the Buffalo, comtion it is the mode adopted mitted the spear-rent flag to by the aforesaid heathen for the flood, which a day or two rebuking ignorance or forget- later loyally yielded it up fulness of national heroes, to again to its proper guardians, which the reader need in no- the 24th Foot? But death for wise plead guilty, save in his the sake of the consecrated silk own conscience, since the an- was no new thing in the swers will be found handy, like 24th. After Chillianwalla the vocabulary in that too their standard, thought to be trustful edition of Sallust lost, had been found "wrapped which, surreptitiously consulted round the dead body of the even in open court, used to Ensign who had borne it into save us boys at Harrow many action." Was the pale youth, a fall as we stood 66 up to con- we wonder, laid out thus strue" our unprepared slice of splendidly apparelled, with the "Catiline." rest of the dead, on the long ebony table which, wondrous shining, now bears nightly good cheer for the living? If so, Rembrandt himself never thrilled to so sombre a marriage of great thought with great colour. Another sacrifice to the soldiers' silken god was he who leapt with the colours upon the bristling parapet of Seringapatam, shouting with his last breath, "Hang 'em! I'll show 'em the British flag!"8 More fortunate was the lad who, long before at Dettingen, had received no fewer than thirty sword cuts in a successful effort to preserve from capture the rags fluttering from the pole of the regimental standard.9 Youth Who, then, was he than whom at Badajoz "none died with more glory, though many died, and there was much glory "?1 Who wrenched his battery from the grip of doom at Fuentes d'Onor, "sword in hand, at the head of his troop, his horses, breathing fire, stretched like greyhounds along the plain"? Who blew in the gates of Delhi; 3 who held Rorke's Drift? Whose breast was it which, wrapped in the most glorious of martial cloaks, the Colours, "expanded to the ball" at Albuera?5 and around whose droop ing form did the same "glorious pall" drape itself on the crest of the great Alma 1 Colonel Ridge of the 5th (Northumberland) Fusiliers. 3 Lieutenants Home and Salkeld, R.E. 4 Lieutenants Chard, R. E., and Bromhead, 24th Foot. 5 Ensign Thomas, The Buffs. 6 Lieutenant Anstruther, Royal Welsh Fusiliers. 7 Lieutenants Melvill and Coghill, 24th Foot. 8 Sergeant Graham, 103rd Foot. 9 Cornet Richardson, 7th Dragoon Guards. will be served, whether the rations be blood or pleasure. Who were the brace of children who, burning not only "to build works but to storm them," were the first to fall on the parapet of Jhansi ?1 What other boy was it, of the 43rd Light Infantry, nineteen years old, "slight in person, of such surprising and delicate beauty that the Spaniards thought him a girl disguised," yet impelled the most daring and experienced veterans "to watch his looks on the field of battle," and to "weep even in the middle of the fight when they heard of his fate" ? 2 The 43rd, one of Crawford's leash of trained panthers, had indeed a noble litter of cubs in those days. Was not their commander himself 3 66 'a young man endowed with a natural genius for war"? In the Mess also were the "fair boy" whose "fiery temper" hurled him at Vera alone across an erupting abattis and "headlong amongst the enemy "; also that Lieutenant Steele, an assured triumph. And had Ensign Neale less valour who, when the transport which held his battalion was sinking, routed a flute out of his kit, and either in deadly earnest or zenith of jest, it matters not which, proceeded to wail forth the "Dead March in Saul" to his imperilled comrades? His grim tunefulness should recall the trumpeter of the Household Cavalry who, at a critical moment at Dettingen, when "dapper little George" himself, on dismounting from a restive charger, rejoiced that he was on his own legs, and therefore in no danger of running away, struck up the air, "Britons, strike home!" Scarcely less timely was the blast of that other trumpeter of the Carabineers who, when his troop was surrounded by the Boyne, hid himself and sounded the "Charge!" to an imaginary force of rescuers, whereupon the enemy dispersed in alarm. Nor can we leave the musicians without recalling the bugler 5 who, seeing a black trumpeter about to sound the "Charge!" outside Delhi, "fired perhaps with professional jealousy," rushed forward and slew his rival "before he could produce a note." 66 a bold athletic person," who felled the wouldbe assassin, a minion of the vile Junta, who sprang at the Prince of Orange. Then at Arcangues appears Ensign Campbell, aged eighteen, in command of a handful in the midst of an overwhelming press of French, whom "with shout and waving sword" he dashed asunder, and robbed of them. At the retreat over 1 Returning for a moment to the 43rd, the ranks glowed with young legionaries worthy of the glorious youths who led Lieutenants Meiklejohn and Dick, R.E. 2 Ensign Edward Freer, 43rd (Oxfordshire) Light Infantry. 3 Major M'Leod. 5 Sutton, of the King's Royal Rifles. Ensign Havelock. |