"Oh! with me," I said to him, "there is no danger. I have lived a long while in England, and I am pretty businesslike by this time. I never throw money out of windows or in people's faces ... I put it in my pocket."
My practical ideas won me his esteem. We laughed heartily over the adventure, and parted the best of friends.
⁂
After having beaten the Ashantees, in 1874, brought home the umbrella of their king, and burnt their capital, a feat not requiring much talent, the dwellings being built of wood and straw, General Wolseley, on his return to England, had a grant of £25,000 made to him. Eight years later, on his return from Egypt, this same general received a peerage and £28,000. Lord Alcester, his companion in arms, who had operated on the walls of Alexandria, while he was operating on the backs of the Egyptians, also obtained a peerage and £30,000. When I consider that, during the siege of Alexandria, the English had only three men put hors de combat, it occurs to me that doubtless these rewards were granted to Lord Alcester at the suggestion of the British Royal Humane Society.
And yet General Roberts, the history of whose celebrated march to Candahar will remain written in letters of gold among the records of the great military feats of the present century, had to content himself with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath.
General Wolseley, now Baron of Cairo, a name so grotesque that he has never yet cared to assume it in public, was one day sent back to the Soudan to deliver Gordon, that modern chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. The perspective was tempting; there was every prospect of an ample harvest of honors and banknotes. Unfortunately, the Mahdi cut the grass under the general's feet, and he arrived too late. Poor Gordon had to die, not to save his country, but to become, and forever remain, a specter at England's feast, the victim of her vacillations, a standing reproach to her indifference.
Gordon and Wolseley! to think that, by the irony of fate, these two names should have been associated in the same campaign! The soldier saint, and the noble millionaire, whose victories are sounded with the clink of guineas.
"Look, here, upon this picture, and on this."
And you, O heroes of antiquity, arise from your long sleep, and see the progress that military art has made! Veil your faces, O Fabricius, Cincinnatus, and all you Romans, who, after you had subdued your country's foes, and drawn fettered kings behind your triumphal chariots, returned to cultivate your fields, and died so poor that you had to be buried at the public expense.
It has long been England's practice to reward with money those who had rendered services to the country.