FOREIGN LEADERS IN RUSSIA AND TURKEY.
There is an old regimental tradition, which meets the Eastern traveller at times in Egyptian hotels and Indian mess-rooms, that an English interpreter in the Turkish service, being present at a conference between his pasha and a Russian general, was just commending the two as "admirable specimens of their respective races," when suddenly General Kormiloff and Selim Pasha, after staring at each other for a moment, broke out simultaneously, "Eh, Donald Campbell, are ye here?"—"Gude keep us, Sandy Robertson! can this be you?"
This is merely a grotesque version of an actual and very significant fact—viz. that both the Russian and his hereditary enemy have achieved many of their greatest triumphs under the command of foreigners. The prominence of the latter in the military history of both nations is of considerable antiquity. As early as 1397, Sultan Bajazet formed the Christian captives of Nikopolis into the formidable brigade whose title of Yengi Scheri ("new soldiers") gave rise to the terrible name of Janissary; while several of the earlier czars in like manner surrounded themselves with a foreign body-guard. Coming down to later times, we find the Tartar Skuratoff acting as the right-hand man of Ivan the Terrible (1531-84). In the ensuing century the Russian centre at Smolensk was commanded by the terrible Sir Thomas Dalziel of Binns, afterward the fiercest persecutor of the Scottish Covenanters. Peter the Great's best officer was General Gordon, a cadet of the Huntley family, and his best engineer was M. Lefort, a native of Geneva. The Turkish service, too, contained at this time several Swiss and Frenchmen (mostly refugees from the religious persecutions of Louis XIV.), some of whom attained high rank.
In the earlier part of the eighteenth century the fame of the new military system established by Frederick William of Prussia and his son, Frederick the Great, led the sovereigns of Russia to give the most liberal encouragement to any German officers who could be persuaded to undertake the training of their ill-disciplined levies. Among these imported generals[D] the most distinguished was the celebrated Marshal Münnich, commander-in-chief of the Russian army under the empresses Anne and Elizabeth, the latter of whom at length banished him to Siberia, whence he was not recalled till the accession of Peter III. in 1762. His Russian successor, Apraxin, was speedily superseded by an Englishman named William Fermor, a distant relation of the beautiful heroine of Pope's Rape of the Lock; but the total defeat of this new leader by Frederick the Great at Zorndorf in 1758 ousted him in his turn, and the imperial troops were commanded by native Russians up to the end of the Seven Years' War. But under the far-sighted rule of Catherine II., who ascended the throne in 1763, the German element began to predominate once more, and speedily attained such prominence that toward the middle of her reign, before Suvaroff's formidable renown had raised the prestige of the native stock, the proportion of foreign officers (chiefly Germans) in the Russian service was estimated at not less than eighty-five per cent. It was in allusion to this circumstance that the grim old marshal, himself a Russian pur sang, answered Catherine's gracious inquiry how she could best reward his services by saying, with characteristic bluntness, "Mother Katrina, make me a German!"
About the same period several Irish soldiers of fortune, driven from home by political troubles, appeared in the Turkish ranks, as well as not a few Poles, dispossessed by the "second partition" of their country, and longing for a chance of avenging the wrong. Several of these adventurers adopted the Mohammedan faith, and, gaining the entire confidence of their adopted countrymen, were enabled to inflict considerable injury upon the invading armies of Russia. But the greatest service rendered to the Crescent by a foreigner at that time (we might almost say the greatest which it ever received) was achieved in 1802 by the French envoy, Colonel (afterward General) Sebastiani. When a British squadron lay off Prinkipos Island, within easy reach of Constantinople, threatening it with instant bombardment, the undaunted ambassador, defying alike the hostile guns and the fury of the fanatical mob, calmly set himself to achieve the same task which General Todleben accomplished in the Crimea half a century later. Under his vigorous superintendence the city was impregnably fortified by the incessant labor of a single week, while a show of negotiation diverted the attention of the English admiral; and the hostile squadron, suddenly confronted by twelve hundred heavy guns, was forced to retire with considerable loss.
The enlightened rule of Alexander I., whose zeal for the improvement of Russia quickened instead of keeping down his appreciation of foreign talent, filled the Russian camp with officers from Western Europe. Benningsen, the most formidable antagonist of Napoleon in 1807; Pfuhl, who constructed the fortified camp of Drissa in 1812; Barclay de Tolly, the Russian commander-in-chief in the early part of that memorable campaign; Wittgenstein, who bore the palm of valor during the invasion of France in 1814; the great strategist Jomini, who was Alexander's aide-de-camp; and Langeron, whose storming of Montmartre sealed the fate of Paris,—were all men of foreign blood. Even after the accession of the Russomaniac Nicholas in 1825, the "over-the-frontier men," as the natives emphatically call them, continued to hold the same prominent place. The Russian navy, indeed, which in the time of Catherine II. owed to Western Europe the only three competent seamen whom it possessed—Greig, Elphinstone and Dugdale—was by this time officered chiefly by native Russians, though still manned by Finns, Greeks and Livonians; but in the army Count Diebitsch himself, the hero of 1828-29, and his two principal subordinates, Generals Roth and Rüdiger, were of German descent. In the Crimean war the array of foreign names on either side was still more striking. Omar Pasha, perhaps the greatest general whom Turkey has ever possessed, was a Hungarian deserter from the Austrian army, his true name being Theodore Lattos. The defence of Silistria was the work of two English subalterns, Lieutenant Nasmyth and Captain Butler. Ibrahim Aga, the veteran of Sultan Mahmoud's Egyptian wars, was originally Thomas Keith, a gunsmith from the "Old Town" of Edinburgh. Omar Pasha's best cavalry officer in 1853, Iskander Bey, was a Polish refugee, by name Michael Tchaikovski, whose stirring war-songs are still affectionately preserved by his countrymen. Bairam Pasha was merely the Turkish alias of General Cannon. Among the Russians, again, General Todleben, incomparably the greatest name of the war on their side, was a Courlander from Mitau. Prince Paskievitch, the conqueror of Erivan and besieger of Silistria, sprang from a Slavonian family in Transylvania. Generals von Schilders, Aurep and von Lüders, though Russian subjects, were all of foreign extraction, as were also Count Osten-Sacken and General Dannenberg.
But it is in the present war that the foreign element has asserted itself most conspicuously. Whether on the Russian or the Turkish side, almost every leader of note is a foreigner. The Turkish fleet is commanded by an Englishman, who still retains his own name of Augustus Hobart. Another Englishman—the notorious Colonel Valentine Baker, called, like his brother, Sir Samuel, "Baker Pasha"—heads the cavalry of the army of the Danube. The sultan's two best engineers, under whose guidance Shumla has been refortified, though now known to fame as Reschid Pasha and Blum Pasha, were serving not many years since in the German army as Captains Strecker and Blume. Mehemet Ali Pasha himself, the late commander-in-chief, is a Prussian, born in Berlin. Suleiman Pasha's chief of staff is Bielowski, a Pole, known in the Turkish army as General Nihad, and General Mina, recently appointed to the command of a cavalry division at Rasgrad, is a Belgian. On the Russian side, again, Generals Loris-Melikoff and Tergukassoff are Armenians, the former having made his first step to renown by attracting Count Mouravieff's notice as an active young dragoon officer in the Kars campaign of 1855. General Oklobschio, who commanded before Batoum last summer, though for many years in the Russian service, is by birth a Montenegrin, and has the rashness as well as the valor of his warlike countrymen. Baron Krudener, of Plevna notoriety, comes of a German family which settled in Russia toward the close of the last century. The gallant Scobeleff is said to belong to the Ayrshire family of Scobie. General Nepokoitchitski is a Pole. Prince Tcherkasski has a tinge of Tartar, Prince Mirski of Polish, blood. General Gourko springs from a Cossack family of formidable renown in the Turkish and Polish wars of the seventeenth century; and the family name of General Zimmermann, the leader of the Dobrudscha army, speaks for itself.
Nor is all this to be wondered at. The Turk and the Russian, closely alike in many points, are more especially so in this—that both can follow and neither can lead. In steadfast obedience and endurance of every extreme of hardship they have no superior on the face of the earth, but the prompt energy of the man who is accustomed to think and act for himself in every emergency is wanting to both. Under the command of a skilful general both Russian and Turkish troops will advance unflinchingly against the strongest position, or hold their ground with that stubborn tenacity which Frederick the Great aptly illustrated by saying that "when you fight with a Russian you must kill him first and knock him down afterward." But let them once be deprived of their leader or lose their solid formation, and their helplessness becomes instantly manifest.
D. K.