Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers

by J. Walker McSpadden

Once in Calcutta, the young subaltern lost no time in proving that he was not a mollycoddle. He began by riding every horse in the battery, or "troop," as it was called in those days.

"Thus," he tells us, "I learned to understand the amount of nerve, patience and skill necessary to the making of a good Horse Artillery driver, with the additional advantage that I was brought into constant contact with the men."

Roberts was early learning the secret of more than one great general's success—to know his men. In later life he could call many a man by name, and knew just what each could do. While they responded with a close affection and the nickname by which he will be known to history—"Bobs."

It is said that Napoleon expected his officers to know the names and personal histories of every man in their command. As another result of Roberts' fellowship with the rank and file he became a crack shot and expert horseman. During the fighting in the mutiny of Indian sepoys, he proved himself a good swordsman as well; and even when he became Commander-in-chief, he would ride with a tent-pegging team of his own staff.

It was a long and thorough service that he was destined to receive. He joined the Quartermaster-General's office before the mutiny broke out, and remained in it for more than twenty years. During this period he gradually worked his way up from one post of responsibility to another, doing it so gradually that even he himself hardly noticed the advance. On one occasion, for example, he superintended all the arrangements for embarking the Bengal Division, which sailed from Calcutta to take part in an expedition against Abyssinia.

But how he must have chafed at the long delay in getting into the field. He asked his father more than once to get him transferred to Burma, where war had broken out and there was a chance for active service. The transfer was not granted.

The only thing that came to break up the humdrum of those first years was a cyclone. It was actually welcomed; anything for a change! Roberts gives a detailed account of it in his autobiography. He and a native servant were caught out in the open, when the storm descended with little warning.

"I shouted to him (the servant) as loudly as I could," he relates, "but the uproar was so terrific that he could not hear a word, and there was nothing for it but to try and make my own way home. The darkness was profound. As I was walking carefully along, I suddenly came in contact with an object, which a timely flash of lightning showed me was a column, standing in exactly the opposite direction from my own house. I could now locate myself correctly, and the lightning becoming every moment more vivid, I was enabled to grope my way by slow degrees to the mess, where I expected to find some one to show me my way home; but the servants, who knew from experience the probable effects of a cyclone, had already closed the outside Venetian shutters and barred all the doors. In vain I banged at the door and called at the top of my voice—they heard nothing."

In desperation he had to make his way as best he could back to his own bungalow, about half a mile away, only to find that also barred against him. "I had to continue hammering for a long time before they heard and admitted me, thankful to be comparatively safe inside a house."

Another disappointment to Roberts lay in the fact that he was still away from his father, who seemed destined all his life to remain a stranger to him. The junior officer was stationed at Dum Dum, famous as the birthplace of the soft-nosed bullets, now proscribed in civilized warfare. His father had been appointed to the command of the troops at Peshawar, and now wrote him a welcome note bidding him come to join him.