XXIX. 1825 he went with the Duke of Wellington to St CHAP. Petersburg as secretary of embassy. In 1827 he was appointed military secretary to the Commanderin-Chief at the Horse Guards, and there he remained until the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. After that event he was made Master-General of the Ordnance, was appointed a Privy Councillor, and raised to the peerage. In February 1854 he became a full General. Thus, from his very boyhood until the autumn of 1852, Lord Fitzroy Somerset had passed his life under the immediate guidance of the Duke of Wellington. The gain was not without its drawback; for in proportion as the great Duke's comprehensive grasp and prodigious power of work made him independent and self-sufficing, his subordinates were of course relieved from the necessity, and even shut out from the opportunity, of thinking for themselves; but still, to have been in the close presence and intimacy of Wellington from the very rising of his fame in Europe to have toiled at the desk where the immortal despatches were penned to have ridden at his side and carried his orders in all the great campaigns - and then, when peace returned, to have engaged in the labours of diplomacy and military administration under the auspices of the same commanding mind, all this was to have a wealth of experience which common times cannot give. But for more than thirty years of his life Lord Invasion of the Crimea. III. 2 XXIX. CHAP. Raglan had been administering the current business of military offices in peace-time, and this is a kind of experience which, if it be very long protracted, is far from being a good preparative for the command of an army in the field; because a military office in time of peace is impelled by its very constitution to aim at uniformity; and, on the other hand, the genius of war abhors uniformity, and tramples upon forms. and regulations. An armed force is a means to an end the end is victory over enemies; and this is to be achieved, partly indeed by a due use of discipline and method, but partly also by keeping alive, in those who may come to have command, a knowledge and love of war, and by cherishing that unlabelled, undocketed state of mind which shall enable a man to encounter the unknown. In England, however, and in all the great States of Europe except France, the end had been so much forgotten in pursuit of the means, and the industry exerted in the regulation of troops in peacetime had become so foreign to the business of that the more a man was military in the narrowed sense of the term, the less he was likely to be fitted for the perturbing exigencies of a campaign. In one country this singular perversity of busy, "cold, "formal man," had been carried so far, that an army and a war had been actually treated as things antagonistic the one to the other; for the late Grand Duke Constantine of Russia once declared that he dreaded a war, because he was sure it would spoil war, the troops, which, with ceaseless care and labour, he CHAP. had striven to bring to perfection. It is to be observed also, that partly from the way in which our military system was framed, and partly from political causes, the sympathy which England ought ever to have with her troops had been materially lessened after the first few years of the peace. The Duke of Wellington, dreading lest our forces should be dangerously reduced by the House of Commons, made it his policy to withdraw the army as much as possible from public observation. This method had tended still further to dissociate the country from its armed defenders: but naturally the Duke of Wellington's view was law; and it became the duty of those who were employed in the military administration, not to cause the country to practise itself heartily for the eventuality of another war, but simply to maintain, as far as they could, a monotonous quiet in the army. For half a lifetime Lord Fitzroy Somerset was engaged in preventing and allaying discussion, and making the wheels of office run smooth. Against the baneful effect of this sort of experience, and against the habit of mind which it tended to generate, Lord Raglan had to combat with all the fire and strength of his nature. When Lord Raglan was appointed to the command he was sixty-six years old. But although there were intervals when a sudden relaxation of the muscles of the face used to show the impress of time, those moments were few; and in general, his well-braced XXIX. XXIX. CHAP. features, his wakeful attention, his uncommon swiftness of thought, his upright, manly carriage, and his easy seat on horseback, made him look the same as a man in the strong mid-season of life. He had one peculiarity which, although it went near to being a foible, was likely to give smoothness to his relations with the French. Beyond and apart from a just contempt for mere display, he had a strange hatred of the outward signs and tokens of military energy. Versed of old in real war, he knew that the clatter of a General briskly galloping hither and thither with staff and orderlies did not of necessity imply any momentous resolve, that the aidesde-camp, swiftly shot off by a word like arrows from a bow, were no sure signs of despatch or decisive action; and because such outward signs might mean little, he shrank from them more than was right. He would have liked, if it had been possible, that he and his army should have glided unnoticed from the banks of the Thames to their position in the battlefield. It was certain, therefore, that although a French General would be sure to find himself checked in any really hurtful attempt to encroach upon the just station of the British army, yet that if, as was not unnatural, he should evince a desire for personal prominence, he would find no rival in Lord Raglan until he reached the enemy's presence. He was gifted with a diction very apt for public business, and of a kind rarely found in Englishmen; for though it was so easy as to be just what men like in the intercourse of private friendship, it was still so constructed as to be fit for the ear of all the world; and whether he spoke or whether he wrote whether he used the French tongue or his own clear, graceful English - it seemed that there had come from him the very words which were the best and no more. It was so natural to him to be prudent in speech, that he avoided dangerous utterance without seeming cautious or reserved. He had the subtle power to draw men along with him. To say that he was persuasive might mean that he could adduce reasons which tended to bring men to his views. His was a power of another sort, for without pressure of argument, his mind by its mere impact broke down resistance for the moment; and although the easy graciousness of his manner quickly set people free from all awkward constraint, it did not so liberate men's minds that, whilst they were still in his presence, they at all liked the duty of trying to uphold their own opinions against him. This dominion, however, was in a great degree dependent upon his actual personal presence; for, with all the power and grace of his pen, he could not, at a distance, work effects proportioned to those which he wrought when he dealt with men face to face. It is plain that, in one respect, his empire over those who were in his presence was of a kind likely to become dangerous to him in the command of an army, because it prevented men from differing from him, and even made them shrink from conveying to CHAP. XXIX. |