The foreign author has written that "marvellous personal courage is not the striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs." He makes an exception to this quasi-indictment in favour of the Emperor Nicholas, who, he admits, "was absolutely ignorant of fear, and could face a band of insurgents with the calm self-possession of a shepherd surveying his bleating sheep." The monarch who at the moment of his accession illustrated the dominant force of his character by confronting amid the bullet fire the ferocious mutiny of half an army corps, and who crushed the bloodthirsty émeute with dauntless resolution and iron hand; the man who, facing the populace of St. Petersburg crazed with terror of the cholera and red with the blood of slaughtered physicians, quelled its panic-fury by commanding the people in the sternest tones of his sonorous voice to kneel in the dust and propitiate by prayers the wrath of the Almighty—such a man is scarcely, perhaps, adequately characterised by the expressions which have been quoted. But setting aside this instance of the fearlessness of Nicholas, facts appear to refute pretty conclusively reflections on the personal courage of the Romanoffs. No purpose can be served by cumbering the record by going back into the period of Russia's semi-civilisation; illustrations from three generations may reasonably suffice. At Austerlitz Alexander I. was close up to the fighting line in the Pratzen section of that great battle, and so recklessly did he expose himself that the report spread rearward that he had fallen. He was riding with Moreau in the heart of the bloody turmoil before Dresden when a French cannon-ball mortally wounded the renegade French general, and he was splashed by the latter's blood. Moreau had insisted on riding on the outside, else the ball which caused his death would certainly have struck Alexander. That monarch participated actively and forwardly in most of the battles of the campaign of 1814 which culminated in the allied occupation of Paris. Marmont's bullets were still flying when he rode on to the hill of Belleville and looked down through the smoke of battle on the French capital. The captious foreign writer has admitted that Nicholas, the successor of Alexander, was "absolutely ignorant of fear," and I have cited a convincing instance of his "marvellous personal courage." Two of his sons—the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael—were under fire in the battle of Inkerman and shared for some time the perils of the siege of Sevastopol. Alexander II. was certainly a man of real, although quiet and undemonstrative, personal courage. But for his disregard of the precautions by which the police sought to surround him he probably would have been alive to-day. The Third Section was wholly unrepresented in Bulgaria and His Majesty's protection on campaign consisted merely of a handful of Cossacks. No cordon of sentries surrounded his simple camp; his tent at Pavlo and the dilapidated Turkish house which for weeks was his residence at Gorni Studen were alike destitute of any guards. The imperial Court of Russia is said to be the most punctiliously ceremonious of all courts; in the field the Tzar absolutely dispensed with any sort of ceremony. He dined with his suite and staff at a frugal table in a spare hospital marquee; his guests, the foreign attachés and any passing officers or strangers who happened to be in camp. When he drove out his escort consisted of a couple of Cossacks. In the woods about Biela at the beginning of the war there still remained some forlorn bivouacs of Turkish families; he would alight and visit those, his sole companion the aide-de-camp on duty; and would fearlessly venture among the sullen Turks all of whom were armed with deadly weapons, try to persuade them to return to their homes, and, unmoved by their refusal, promise to send them food and medicine. Dispensing with all etiquette he would see without delay any one coming in with tidings from fighting points, were he officer, civilian, or war correspondent. During the September attack on Plevna he was continually in the field while daylight lasted, looking out on the slaughter from an eminence within range of the Turkish cannon-fire, and manifestly enduring keen anguish at the spectacle of the losses sustained by his brave, patient troops. Later, during the investment of Plevna, his point of observation was a redoubt on the Radischevo ridge still closer to the Turkish front of fire, and it was thence he witnessed the surrender of Osman's army on the memorable 10th December 1877. If Alexander was fearless alike in camp and in the field on campaign, he was certainly not less so in St. Petersburg, when he returned thither after the fall of Plevna.
Alexander II. literally sacrificed his life to his self-regardless concern for the suffering. After the first bomb had burst on the Alexandra Canal Road, striking down civilians and Cossacks of the following escort but leaving the Emperor unhurt, his coachman begged to be allowed to dash forward and get clear of danger. But Alexander forbade him with the words, "No, no! I must alight and see to the wounded;" and as he was carrying out his heroic and benign intention, the second bomb exploded and wrought his death.
As did the men of the Hohenzollern house in 1870, so in 1877 the adult male Romanoffs went to the war with scarce an exception. The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Emperor and Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies in Europe, was neither a great general nor an honest man; but there could be no question as to his personal courage. That attribute he evinced with utter recklessness when arriving, as was his wont, too late for a deliberate and careful survey, he galloped round the Turkish positions on the morning on which began the September bombardment of Plevna, in proximity to Turkish cannon-fire so dangerous that his staff remonstrated, and that even the sedate American historian of the war speaks of him as having "exposed himself imprudently to the Turkish pickets." His son, the Grand Duke Nicholas, jun., in 1877 scarcely of age, was nevertheless a keen practical soldier, imbued with the wisdom of getting to close quarters and staying there. He was among the first to cross the Danube at Sistova under the Turkish fire, and he fought with great gallantry under Mirsky in the Schipka Pass. The brothers, Prince Nicholas and Prince Eugene of Leuchtenberg, members of the imperial house, commanded each a cavalry brigade in Gourko's dashing raid across the Balkans at the beginning of the campaign, and both were conspicuous for soldierly skill and personal gallantry in the desperate fighting in the Tundja Valley. The Grand Duke Vladimir, the second brother of Alexander III., headed the infantry advance in the direction of Rustchuk, and served with marked distinction in command of one of the corps in the army of the Lom. A younger brother, the Grand Duke Alexis, the nautical member of the imperial family, had charge of the torpedo and subaqueous mining operations on the Danube, and was held to have shown practical skill, assiduity, and vigour. Prince Serge of Leuchtenberg, younger brother of the Leuchtenbergs previously mentioned, was shot dead by a bullet through the head in the course of his duty as a staff officer at the front of a reconnaissance in force made against the Turkish force in Jovan-Tchiflik in October of the war. He was a soldier of great promise and had frequently distinguished himself. No unworthy record, it is submitted, earned in war by the members of a family of which, according to the foreign author, "personal courage is not the striking characteristic."
That writer may be warranted in stating that the late Tzar had been frequently accused of cowardice—an indictment to which, it must be admitted, many undeniable facts lent a strong colouring of probability; and he further tells of "the Emperor's aversion to ride on horseback, and of his dread of a horse even when the animal was harnessed to a vehicle." There is something, however, of inconsistency in his observation that Alexander III. might well have been a contrast to his grandfather without deserving the epithet craven-hearted. The melancholy explanation of the strange apparent change between the Tzarewitch of 1877 and the Tzar of 1894 may lie in the statement that "Alexander's nerves had been undoubtedly shaken by the terrible events in which he had been a spectator or actor." In 1877, when in campaign in Bulgaria, Alexander did not know what "nerves" meant. He was then a man of strong, if slow, mental force, stolid, peremptory, reactionary; the possessor of dull but firm resolution. He had a strong though clumsy seat on horseback and was no infrequent rider. He had two ruling dislikes: one was war, the other was officers of German extraction. The latter he got rid of; the former he regarded as a necessary evil of the hour; he longed for its ending, but while it lasted he did his sturdy and loyal best to wage it to the advantage of the Russian arms. And in this he succeeded, stanchly fulfilling the particular duty which was laid upon him, that of protecting the Russian left flank from the Danube to the foothills of the Balkans. He had good troops, the subordinate commands were fairly well filled, and his headquarter staff was efficient—General Dochtouroff, its sous-chef, was certainly the ablest staff-officer in the Russian army. But Alexander was no puppet of his staff; he understood his business as the commander of the army of the Lom, performed his functions in a firm, quiet fashion, and withal was the trusty and successful warden of the eastern marches. His force never amounted to 50,000 men, and his enemy was in considerably greater strength. He had successes and he sustained reverses, but he was equal to either fortune; always resolute in his steadfast, dogged manner, and never whining for reinforcements when things went against him, but doing his best with the means to his hand. They used to speak of him in the principal headquarter as the only commander who never gave them any bother. So highly was he thought of there that when, after the unsuccessful attempt on Plevna in the September of the war, the Guard Corps was arriving from Russia and there was the temporary intention to use it with other troops in an immediate offensive movement across the Balkans, he was named to take the command of the enterprise. But this intention having been presently departed from, and the reinforcements being ordered instead to the Plevna section of the theatre of war, the Tzarewitch retained his command on the left flank, and thus in mid-December had the opportunity of inflicting a severe defeat on Suleiman Pasha, just as in September he had worsted Mehemet Ali in the battle of Carkova. It is sad to be told that a man once so resolute and masterful should later have been the victim of shattered nerves; it is sadder still to learn that he was a mark for accusations of cowardice. He never was a gracious, far less a lovable man; but, as I can testify from personal knowledge, he was a cool and brave soldier in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.
PARADE OF THE COMMISSIONAIRES
1875
On a Sunday morning in early June, just before the church bells begin to ring, there is wont to be held the annual general parade and inspection of the Corps of Commissionaires, on the enclosed grass plot by the margin of the ornamental water in St. James's Park. On the ground, and accompanying the inspecting officer on his tour through the opened ranks, there are always not a few veteran officers, glad by their presence on such an occasion to countenance and recognise their humbler comrades in arms in bygone war-dramas enacted elsewhere than within hearing of London Sunday bells. No scene could be imagined presenting a more practical confutation of the ignorant calumny that the British army is composed of the froth and the dregs of the British nation, and that there exists no cordial feeling between British soldiers and British officers. It is good to see how the face kindles of the veteran guardsman at the sight and the kindly greeting of Sir Charles Russell. Doubtless the honest private's thoughts go back to that misty morning on the slopes of Inkerman, when officer and private stood shoulder to shoulder in the fierce press, and there rang again in his ears the cheer with which the Guards greeted the act of valour by the performance of which the baronet won the Victoria Cross. There is a feeling deeper than a mere formality in the half-dozen words that pass between Sir William Codrington and the old soldier of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, to whom the gallant general showed the way up to the Russian front, through the shot-torn vineyards on the slopes of the Alma. When one feeble old ex-warrior is smitten suddenly on parade with a palsied faintness, it is on the yet stalwart arm of his old chief that he totters out of the ranks, and the twain do not part till the superior has exacted a pledge that his humble ex-subordinate shall call upon him on the morrow, with a view to medical advice and strengthening comforts.
Notwithstanding that in the true old martial spirit it shows what in the Service is known as a good front, it is not a very athletic or puissant cohort this, that stands on parade here on the grass within hearing of the church bells. The grizzled old soldiers, sooth to say, look rather the worse for wear. There is a decided shortcoming among them of the proper complement of limbs, and one at least, in speaking of the battlefields he had seen, might with truth echo the old soldier in Burns's Jolly Beggars—
And there I left for witness a leg and an arm.
They carry no weapons; to some may belong the knowledge only of the obsolete "Brown Bess" manual exercise; and not many have been so recently on active service as to have learnt the handling of the modern breech-loader. On the whole, a battered, fossil, maimed army of superannuated fighting men, scarcely fitted to shine in the new tactics of the "swarm-attack" by which the battles of the future are to be won or lost. But you cannot jibe at the worn old soldiers as "lean and slippered pantaloons." Look how truly, with what instinctive intuition, the dressing is taken up at the word of command; note how the old martial carriage comes back to the most dilapidated when the adjutant calls his command to "attention." Age and wounds have not quenched the fighting spirit of the old soldiers; there is not a man of them but would, did the need arise, "clatter on his stumps to the sound of the drum." There are few breasts in those ranks that are not decorated with medals. In very truth the parade is a record of British campaigns for the last thirty years. Among the thicket of medals on the bosom of this broken old light dragoon note the one bearing the legend, "Cabul 1842" within the laurel wreath. Its wearer was a trooper in the famous "rescue" column. The skeletons of Elphinstone's hapless force littered the slopes of the Tezeen Valley, up which the squadron in which he rode charged straight for the tent of the splendid demon Akbar Khan. He rode behind Campbell at the battle of Punniar, and won there that star of silver and bronze which hangs from the famous "rainbow" ribbon. "Sutlej" is the legend on another of his medals, and he could recount to you the memorable story of Thackwell's cavalry operations against the Sikh field works, and how that division of seasoned horsemen reduced outpost duty to a methodical science. "Punjab" medals for Gough's campaign of 1848-49 are scattered up and down in the ranks. The sword-cut athwart this wiry old trooper's cheek he got in the hot mêlée of Ramhuggur, where a certain Brigadier Colin Campbell whom men knew afterwards as Lord Clyde, found it hard work to hold his own, and where gallant Cureton and the veteran William Havelock fell at the head of their light horsemen as they crashed into the heart of 4000 Sikhs. His neighbour took part in the storm of Mooltan, and saw stout, calm-pulsed Sergeant John Bennet of the 1st Bombay Fusiliers plant the British ensign on the crest of the breach and quietly stand by it there, supporting it in the tempest of shot and shell till the storming party had made the breach their own. This old soldier of the 24th can tell you of the butchery of his regiment at Chillianwallah; how Brooks went down between the Sikh guns, how Brigadier Pennycuick was killed out to the front, and how his son, a beardless ensign, maddened at the sight of the mangling of his father's body, rushed out and fought against all comers over the corpse till the lad fell dead on his dead father; how on that terrible day the loss of the 24th was 13 officers killed, 10 wounded, and 497 men killed and wounded; and how the issue of the bloody combat might have been very different but for the display, on the part of Colin Campbell, of "that steady coolness and military decision for which he was so remarkable." Scarcely a great show on a troop-horse would this bent and gnarled old 12th Lancer make to-day, but he and his fellows rode right well on the day for which he wears this "Cape" medal, with the blue and orange ribbon and the lion and mimosa bush on the reverse. Because of its prickles the Boers call the mimosa the "wait-a-bit" thorn, but there was no thought of waiting a bit among the 12th Lancers at the Berea, when they charged the savage Basutos and captured their chief Moshesh. This one-armed veteran of the Royal Fusiliers was left lying wounded in the Great Redoubt on the Russian slope of the Alma, when the terrible fire of grape and musketry forced Codrington's brigade of the Light Division temporarily to give ground after it had struggled so valiantly up the rugged broken banks, and through the hailstorm of fire that swept through the vineyards. This still stalwart man was one of the nineteen sergeants of the 33rd—the Duke of Wellington's Own—who were either killed or wounded in defence of the colours on the same bloody but glorious day. A few files farther down the line stands an old 93rd man. The veteran Sutherland Highlander was one of that "thin red line" which disdained to form square when the Russian squadrons rode with seeming heart at the kilted men on Balaclava day. He heard Colin Campbell's stern repressive rebuke—"Ninety-third, ninety-third, damn all that eagerness!" when the hotter spirits of the regiment would fain have broken ranks and met the Russians half-way with the cold steel; he saw the Scotch wife chastise the fugitive Turks with her tongue and her frying-pan. Speak to his tall, shaggy neighbour of the "bonny Jocks," and you will call up a flush of pleasure on the harsh-featured Scottish face; for he was a trooper in the Greys on that self-same Balaclava day when the avalanche of Russian horsemen thundered down upon the heavy brigade. He was among those who heard, and with sternly rapturous anticipation obeyed Scarlet's calm-pitched, far-sounding order, "Left wheel into line!" He was among those who, when the trumpets had sounded the charge, strove in vain by dint of spur to overtake the gallant old chief with the long white moustache, as he rode foremost on the foe with the dashing Elliot and the burly Shegog on either flank of him; he was among those who, as they hewed and hacked their way through the press, heard already from the far side of the mêlée the stentorian adjuration of big Adjutant Miller, as standing up in his stirrups the burly Scot shouted, "Rally, rally on me, ye muckle ——!" Mightily knocked about has been this man with the empty sleeve, but he does not belie the familiar sobriquet of his old regiment; he was one of the "Diehards," a title well earned by the 57th on the bloody height of Albuera, and it was under their colours that he lost his arm on Inkerman morning. There is quite a little regiment of men who were wounded in the "trenches" or about the Redan. There is no "19" now on the buttons of this scarred veteran, but the number was there when he followed Massy and Molesworth over the parapet of the Redan on the day when so much good English blood was wasted. Shoulder to shoulder now, as oft of yore, stand two old soldiers of the Buffs both of whom went down in the same assault; and an umwhile bugler of the Perthshire Grey-breeks "minds the day" well also by reason of the wound that has crippled him for life. As he stands on parade this calm Sabbath morning, that maimed man of the 60th Rifles can remember another and a very different Sabbath—the 10th of May 1857 in Meerut—day and place of the first outburst of the Mutiny; a fell Sabbath of burning, slaughter, and dismay, of disregard of sex, age, and rank, of fierce brutality and of nameless agony. He was one of the rifles whose fire in the assault of Delhi covered the desperate duty of blowing open the Cashmere Gate, performed with so methodical calmness by Home, Salkeld, and Burgess; and his comrade hero with the maimed limb, when the hour had come for a rush to close quarters, followed Reid and Muter over the breastwork at the end of the serai of Kissengunge. Proud, yet their pride dashed by sadness, must be the soldiering memories of this stout northman, erstwhile a front rank man in the old Ross-shire Buffs, a regiment ever true to its noble Celtic motto of Cuidichn Rhi. At Kooshab, in the short, but brilliant Persian War, he fought in the same field where Malcolmson earned the Victoria Cross by one of the most gallant acts for which that guerdon of valour ever has been accorded. He was in Mackenzie's company at Cawnpore when the Highlanders, stirred by the wild strains of the war-pibroch, rushed upon the Nana's battery at the angle of the mango tope with the irresistible fury of one of their own mountain torrents in spate. And next day he was among those who, with drawn ghastly faces and scared eyes, looked into that fearful well, filled to the lip with the mangled corpses of British women and children. He was one of those who, standing by that well, pledged the oath administered by the bareheaded Ross-shire sergeant over the long, heavy tress of auburn hair which a demon's tulwar had severed from the head of an Englishwoman, that while strong arm and trusty steel lasted to no living thing of the accursed race should quarter be accorded. And he was one of those who, having battled their way over the Charbagh Bridge, having threaded the bullet-torn path to the Kaiser-bagh, and having forced for themselves a passage up to the embrasures by the Baileyguard Gate, melted from the stern fierceness of the fray when the siege-worn women and children in the residency of Lucknow sobbed out upon their necks blessings for the deliverance. His rear-rank man is an ex-Bengal Fusilier, wounded once at Sabraon, again at Pegu, and a third time at Delhi. He will not be offended if you hail him as one of the "old Dirty-shirts;" for it was in honourable disregard of appearances as they toiled night and day in the trenches of Delhi that the regiment, which now in the Queen's service is numbered 101, gained the nickname. Time and space fail one to tell a tithe of the stories of valour and hardship linked in the medals and wounds borne by men on this unostentatious parade—a parade the members of which have shed their blood on the soil of every quarter of the globe. The minutest military annals scarcely name some of the obscure combats in which men here to-day have fought and bled. This man desperately wounded at Najou, near Shanghai; that one wounded in two places at Owna, in Persia; this one with a sleeve emptied at Aroga, in Abyssinia—who among us remember aught, if, indeed, we have ever heard, of Najou, Owna, or Aroga? On the breast of this bent, hoary old man, note these strange emblems, the Cross of San Fernando and the Order of the Tower and Sword. Their wearer is a relic of the British Legion in the Carlist War of 1837, and they were won under brave old De Lacy Evans at the siege of Bilbao.