Aspects and Impressions

by Edmund Gosse

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF LORD WOLSELEY

THERE is at present no record of Lord Wolseley, who died just too recently to be included in the latest Supplement of the Dictionary of National Biography. His memory loiters in the limbo which always surrounds the famous dead for a few years after their decease. Then follow, in due course, the official Life and the selected correspondence; and so finally the monument is unveiled for the pigeons of the Press to perch upon. To my friends, Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir George Arthur, have been entrusted the duty of arranging the memoirs of our greatest modern soldier, and their work will be formidable, for the Great War, of which Wolseley, in flashes of genius, had prescience, has swept over us, and has confused the landmarks of our memories. I feel sure that they will bring judgment and discretion to their task, which is a noble one. But they will certainly, and properly, be inclined to concentrate their effort on the military aspects of their subject, since Lord Wolseley was a soldier before everything else, and so completely a soldier that other aspects must be dwarfed in contemplation of his military glory. These may easily, indeed, be excluded altogether, and I therefore venture to recall, before it is too late, certain scenes which I observed during a prolonged and delighted acquaintanceship, in which the sword ceased to be "vambrashed," as the Elizabethans used to say, and in which the great general was simply an amateur of letters, eager to talk about books and even ambitious to write them. I shall not fall into the error of describing him as a great author, but I think that it may be amusing to preserve some intellectual sketch of a character essentially imposing in very different surroundings.

Lord Wolseley was not prominent before the world as a man of letters, and I shall not pretend that he could claim that particular distinction, though he wrote easily and well. Of his best books I shall have something presently to say. But I think it is known to only a very few survivors that he had a predilection and even a passion for literature, which he shared, I should think, with no man of action of his time. He was an insatiate reader, and his reading covered a surprising range. For a man to whom life offered excitement and animation in almost every direction, it was notable how much time he found to spare for intellectual amusement. He attributed his love of reading to the influence of his Irish mother. He said once to me, "I would sooner live upon porridge in a bookroom than upon venison and truffles where books were not," and this meant much from one who was by no means indifferent to the truffles and the venison of life. The curious thing is that this obsession with literature nowhere peeps out in his published works, and is notably absent in his autobiography, The Story of a Soldier's Life, where we should particularly expect to find traces of it. For this defect in the general portraiture of that book there are reasons, upon which I may touch later on. It is a useful chain of military records, but it is a portrait of its author in full uniform, with cocked hat and sword. It was my good fortune to see him always in mufti, and if I essay a snapshot of him I am bound to show him with a book in his hand.

My acquaintance with Lord Wolseley began in 1888, and I owed it to a common friend whom I never cease to deplore, the ever-ingenious Andrew Lang. I have forgotten how these two came together, but they had a great appreciation of each other's company. Wolseley was now just fifty-five, but he looked much younger, and he flashed about as though the spirit of April still laughed at him. The first thing which struck an observer on meeting him was that he had the gestures of a boy; the elastic footstep, the abruptly vivid movements, one would almost say were those of a happy child. In 1888 Lord and Lady Wolseley were still inhabiting a small house in Hill Street, but immediately after I first knew them they moved to the Ranger's House in Greenwich Park, the scene for me of delightful memories during the next two years. Wolseley was at that time Adjutant-General of the Forces, under Stanhope, and afterwards Commander-in-Chief in Ireland under Campbell-Bannerman. He worked hard every day at the War Office, and came down to Greenwich in the afternoon like any civil servant or bank clerk. His life at that time was marked by the serene and unaffected simplicity which always seemed to me the cardinal feature of his personal character. Much in Wolseley had an appearance of inconsistency. For instance, it cannot be questioned that he demanded a great deal from those who worked under him professionally, nor that he was careful of his own prestige. But when he was released from his military work, he became the least assuming of mankind. Moreover—and this makes the attempt to paint him particularly difficult—he was not, to the public eye, conspicuous, as other great generals have been, through demeanour or appearance. I used often to be surprised, when we were walking together in the street, to notice how few people recognized him, although he was then at the height of his celebrity.

In September, 1889, when my wife and I were going over to the Continent, we observed a shortish gentleman, in tourist dress, pacing the deck of the steamer, and we said to each other: "Does not that man remind you of somebody?" Presently he stopped before us, smiling, and it was Wolseley. He was going alone to Metz, from which point he proposed to make a tour of personal observation round all the battlefields of 1870. He said that there were inconsistencies in the published accounts, and that he had meditated over them till it was impossible for him to rest until he had settled his difficulties by independent inspection. He told us not to say we had met him, and it was an example of that want of conspicuousness, which I have noted, that, although it was broad daylight, and he then one of the most famous figures in England, no one else did seem to recognize him. He had theories about the Franco-German campaign for which he sought confirmation. I begged him to let me know what the result might be, and so he wrote to me, from Brunswick, on October 4th:

I postponed writing to you until my tour round the battle-fields should have finished, as I could not tell what to write upon the subject until I had studied the ground. I need scarcely tell you that I knew the chief episodes of each great fight very well before I came abroad. The German account of the events is so full and truthful that no student of war has any excuse for ignorance. With that book, and maps and plans, I have carefully studied every phase of every battle-field from Sedan in the North to Strasburg in the South, and I find I could not write upon the subject without expressions of opinion that would be very unpleasant to many men now alive. The Germans outnumbered the French in nearly all those battles to a large extent, and though the French allowed themselves to be surprised, and their leaders committed every possible mistake, the errors of the Germans were very glaring upon many occasions. Almost all their battles were not only fought in a manner entirely different from what was intended, but, in nearly every case, they were brought on without, and on some occasions contrary to, the positive orders and intentions of the Generals.

When I saw him at Greenwich soon after his return he spoke more plainly still. He said that he had found, to his great surprise, that the Germans, whose luck, he declared, had been incredible, had been very nearly defeated more than once or twice. He had been particularly excited by his inspection of the battlefield of Gravelotte. If that battle had not, he said, been won by what was really "a fluke," the day would have closed upon the German Army in about the most unfortunate position an army could possibly be placed in. All this struck me, ignorant of tactics as I am, as so very interesting that I entreated him to change his mind and write a complete record of his observations on the battlefields. But he said that the praise of German strategy had reached such a pitch of infatuation in England that he should be "accused of all sorts of things." Nevertheless, I pressed him to write down his experience, even if he kept it private. He finally promised that he would do so that winter, but I never heard any more about it. His last words were "I dare not publish my views," and presently he had to go off to Newcastle on military business, which quite diverted his thoughts. It must be observed that we trusted in those days wholly to German historians, and that the French account, which confirmed Lord Wolseley to the letter, was not published until ten years later.

It was while I was walking with him in Greenwich Park one afternoon about this time that I first realized that he had any literary ambition. He acknowledged a constant temptation to use his pen. I had thought of him as a reader, but hardly as a writer, although he had published his soldiers' Pocket-Book for Field Service some twenty years before. I learned afterwards, from Andrew Lang, that Lord Wolseley had produced a novel, under a feigned name; this I had never seen, and Lang did not encourage me to hunt for it. But now, with considerable leisure, he was ready to be encouraged to write on matters at the fringe of his daily occupation. He did not, however, see any particular theme lying in wait for him. During a visit I had lately paid to the United States I had enjoyed a good deal of conversation with two of the leading generals of the Civil War, with Philip Henry Sheridan and with William Tecumseh Sherman. It was Sherman who made the celebrated march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah at the end of 1864; his tenacity and clairvoyance delighted Wolseley, who was nevertheless inclined to blame Sherman for an excess of ruthlessness in his methods. He laughed when I told him that I had heard Sherman, when teased at a supper-party for destroying some town, first deny the charge, and then, when it was daringly repeated, turn round on the railer like an old snow-leopard, and cry: "Next time I'll burn the whole darned city to the ground."

With Sheridan, Wolseley was in much more complete sympathy. He set him on the very summit as a fighting general, and he said that he had contrived a mobility of cavalry in action which was unprecedented. I think he had known Sheridan personally in his early days on the frontier. I remember his saying that, if he himself were conducting a great battle, he should like nothing better than to have the victor of Opequam on a camp-stool by his side. His memory took fire at what I was able to recall of the conversation of the two great American generals. His chief hero, however, was Lee, and I remember that he put the Confederate general by the side of Marlborough and far above Wellington. I used the occasion to suggest to him that he should write down his ideas regarding the strategic careers of these Americans. He liked the notion, and Mr. Rice, who was then editing the North American Review, having been communicated with, an invitation came to Wolseley which he accepted, and wrote, in 1889, one or perhaps several articles, which have never, I think, been reprinted. The life at Ranger's House was very quiet; the Wolseleys rarely dined in town, and the General's existence was almost that of a recluse. I remember we were all very much amused when his valet, a dashing character, suddenly gave warning, his sole cause of complaint being that he was losing caste by remaining in the service of "so very quiet a nobleman, who does not even go to the races!"