Few things in private conversation are more winning than lack of discretion. I cannot pretend that Lord Wolseley was a cautious speaker, and I think his company would have been much less entertaining than it was if he had minced his words or hedged his opinions. He had spent twenty years or more of his life in a prodigious enterprise, no less than the entire remodelling of the British Army. He had seen with Napoleonic clearness what sweeping reforms were needed, and he had not felt the smallest hesitation in setting about their introduction. But he had originally been quite alone in this perilous enterprise. Hercules had come to the cattle-yard of Augeas and had found it clogged with the mire of generations. He set about turning the course of Alpheus and Peneus, rivers of Whitehall, and he sent their waters rushing through the stable. With his besom he began to scrub the refuse out of every corner. But the old-fashioned stablemen were not pleased to be disturbed, and Augeas, in consternation, refused to give Hercules his reward. Thereupon there arose loud and lasting clamours, in the midst of which the work, frustrated as far as mediocrity found possible, went forward steadily, but in a wind of exasperation. There was rage on both sides, recrimination, injury; and even the monarch of Elis was not disengaged from the struggle. If these things are an allegory, it is a very transparent one, and it need not be translated. It suffices to say that he would have little insight into human character who should express surprise at any vehemence of expression, with regard to those who opposed his cleansing activities, which the Nemean hero might give way to in private conversation. He was tired with fighting those of his own household and he was sick from the stupidity of persons clothed with brief authority.

If, however, Lord Wolseley expended the treasures of what could at call be a very lively vocabulary on the men who had hindered his life's work, nothing could exceed his loyal memory of the few who had found courage to support him. Among the latter, Mr. Cardwell and Lord Northbrook stood pre-eminent, particularly the former, of whom I remember many tributes of the warmest appreciation. I have often heard Wolseley say that he came back from the Crimea with a sense of horror at all the shortcomings of our military system, and that his criticisms met with none but the most languid attention except from Cardwell. It was a highly fortunate circumstance that these two came together, for Cardwell at home in England had come to the same conclusions as Wolseley had in the four quarters of the globe. He was able, as Secretary for War from 1868 to 1874, to put into practical shape the ideas which Wolseley had, by his high gift of imagination, seen in the field itself to be necessary. Wolseley believed that, but for Cardwell's unflinching support, his enemies would have contrived to have him honourably deported to some command at the Antipodes where his tiresome brain would have ceased to worry the War Office. The fiercest of the fight gathered about the year 1872, when "the old school" would hardly believe that anyone calling himself a gentleman could make himself so intolerably objectionable as did this horrible Sir Garnet Wolseley. At this time Cardwell, in the face of every species of intrigue and resistance, shielded his assistant from his opponents. Later on he helped him to collect around him the ablest soldiers of promise on whom the army of the future depended. I never heard Wolseley speak of anyone with so much regret as of Cardwell, cut off, by failing health, in the midst of his labours.

It was Lord Northbrook who chiefly aided and abetted Wolseley in his scheme for sending General Gordon off up the Nile. When the tragedy was complete, Lord Northbrook inclined to think that their action had been "a terrible mistake." But Wolseley never would admit that it had been a mistake. He persisted that it was the only thing to do, and that the responsibility for failure rested on Mr. Gladstone and his Government. There was nothing that Wolseley loved better than to recount the adventure of his seeing Gordon off to the Soudan on November 18th, 1883, and his dramatic conversation at the London railway station. Gordon was settled in the train when Wolseley asked: "By the way, General, I suppose you have plenty of money?" "Not a penny!" And Wolseley would recount how he dashed in a hansom to his bank, and brought back the bank-notes just in time for the perfectly indifferent Gordon to slip them into his pocket as the train went off.

Before he left town in 1900 Lord Wolseley had begun, at the suggestion of some of his friends who regretted that so much high experience of life should be wasted, to prepare his own autobiography. As I took a special interest in this project, I was told (December 1st, 1900), that he had "written, at odd moments, many pages for the Memoirs, but, of course, they have still to be pumice-stoned down and put into shape." The sudden cessation from all administrative activity had threatened to be rather disastrous, but, as I have said, he took his retirement to Glynde very serenely, and this business of the autobiography promised to be the best antidote to languor. When one saw him in the next years, it stood always in the background; its progress was reported like the growth of a slow fruit, which stuck on the bough, but was not swelling as it should. At last, in his seventy-first year, I received, not without surprise, the announcement that it was ripe and ready for the market. A little further delay, and there appeared, in two fat volumes, The Story of a Soldier's Life. The copy which reached me from the author generously acknowledged the "valuable advice" that I had "so often kindly given." But I dare not take this tribute to my soul, for, as a matter of fact, the book bears no trace of external advice. It is a very strange production, and may be succinctly described as an editing from earlier records by himself of fragments of a story the details of which the author had forgotten.

There is no question that, as an autobiography, The Story of a Soldier's Life is disappointing. It was undertaken too late, and it could never have been written at all, save for the fact that Wolseley had, in earlier years, kept copious journals and written long letters when he was abroad on his various campaigns. These letters and journals were collected and typed, and a secretary helped to put them together and give a certain amount of cohesion to the narrative. The book was strangely edited; the preface appears in the second volume, the dedication is repeated twice, there is no account whatever of the circumstances in which the Memoir was compiled. What is more serious is that the personal and intimate life of the author is entirely neglected. When he had not before him letters from the Crimea or the Red River, from China or Ashantee, he had nothing to go upon but the newspapers.

The sad cause of all this cannot be concealed. Although his physical health, and indeed in essentials his mental health, were unimpaired, he had begun to suffer from a radical decay of memory. This was already becoming obvious before he left the War Office, and it grew rapidly in intensity. It was a very curious infirmity, for it dealt chiefly with what I may call immediate memory. For instance, in these later years, if an old friend came to see him on a carefully prepared visit, he would recognize him instantly, with the old ardour, but would say: "I'm delighted to see you, no one told me you were coming!" If a little later on the same occasion he was called away for a few minutes, he would return with a repeated welcome: "Oh! how nice to see you—nobody told me you were coming!" This painful affliction has to be mentioned, if only because it explains the strange construction of The Story of a Soldier's Life. It grew upon him, until it wove a curtain which concealed him from all intercourse with the world. In perfect physical health, but needing and receiving the most assiduous attention, he lived on, mainly at Mentone, until he completed his eightieth year. But his wonderful and beneficent life had really come to an end ten years earlier.

1921.

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