The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two sons, described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching down the road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des Fontaines, they had insisted on being admitted by the door at which we entered. M. Magnard was in his bath-room, at the back of the house. He is believed to have appeared at the window, and a German soldier immediately shot him dead. They then set fire to the house, and they watched it till the half-calcined body of the composer fell through the rafters on to the floor of the room below. Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him, facing the scene of his father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in the garden, and prepared to shoot him. But three peasants out of the village of Baron swore that he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the gardener; and so, when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving the boy alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions under which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission of the crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer, some resistance to the aggressors.
M. Rostand’s verses suggest that, in the version of the event which reached him, Magnard was attempting ‘to preserve the honour of his art.’ Whether he obeyed an instinct of self-preservation, or whether he fell a passive victim, matters very little. The incident in any case illustrates that Teutonic spirit of anarchism which Viscount Grey has stigmatised as a menace to the future of civilisation.
TWO MONUMENTS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
BY SIR CHARLES P. LUCAS, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.
In Westminster Abbey, towards the western end of the nave, on the northern side, stands a monument of rather special interest at the present day, upon which there is this inscription:
‘The Province of Massachusets Bay in New England, by an order of the great and general Court bearing date Feb. 1st, 1759, caused this monument to be erected to the memory of George Augustus Lord Viscount Howe, Brigadier General of His Majesty’s forces in America, who was slain July the 6th, 1758, on the march to Ticonderoga, in the 34th year of his age: in testimony of the sense they had of his services and military virtues, and of the affection their officers and soldiers bore to his command. He lived respected and beloved, the public regretted his loss, to his family it is irreparable.’
Dean Stanley, in his ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’ (1869 ed.), makes the following reference to this monument, which apparently stood, at the date when he wrote, in the south aisle of the nave: ‘Massachusetts and Ticonderoga, not yet divided from us, appear on the monument in the South aisle of the Nave erected to Viscount Howe, the unsuccessful elder brother of the famous Admiral.’ It is difficult to understand why the Dean used the curiously infelicitous term ‘unsuccessful’ in this case. The word might have been applied with some accuracy to the younger soldier brother, Sir William Howe, most successful in his early military career, but not so in the War of American Independence, though even in that war he was a constant winner of battles; but unless to die young is, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, to be considered a mark of failure, no word could be more inappropriate to a man whose life, according to the notice of him in the Annual Register for 1758, presumably written by Edmund Burke, ‘was long enough for his honour, but not for his country.’
He was the eldest of three brothers. The second was the famous Admiral, ‘Black Dick,’ the hero of ‘The Glorious First of June,’ which we recalled on the occasion of the late great sea-fight in the North Sea. The third was the general already mentioned. They were a notable trio, but the eldest, the shortest lived, the ‘unsuccessful’ one of the three, had in him the promise of greatness of the rarest kind. It would be difficult to pick out any man whose death called forth such a consensus of eulogy. Possibly he was felix opportunitate mortis. Possibly the same might be said of his friend Wolfe, who was killed in his thirty-third year, as Howe in his thirty-fourth. But assuredly, had these two men lived on, there would have been a different story to tell of England and America.
Dean Stanley writes of Wolfe’s friendship for Lord Howe the Admiral, quoting Horace Walpole’s words, that they were ‘friends to each other as cannon to gunpowder’; but Wolfe’s friendship for the ‘unsuccessful’ brother must have been as great; his admiration for him at any rate was unbounded. Wolfe was no great respecter of persons; he was somewhat impatient and critical of other commanders, but—‘If my Lord Howe had lived, I should have been very happy to have received his orders.’ In Wolfe’s eyes Howe was ‘the very best officer in the King’s service,’ ‘the noblest Englishman that has appeared in my time.’ And so said they all: there was no dissentient voice, no whisper of criticism, no trace of jealousy. General Abercromby, to whom Howe was second in command, in reporting his death, wrote, ‘He was, very deservedly, universally beloved and respected throughout the whole army.’ Pitt’s testimony ran that ‘he was by the universal voice of army and people a character of ancient times, a complete model of military virtue in all its branches.’ Robert Rogers, the bold leader of the Rangers, in whose company Howe learnt the art of North American bush fighting, wrote of him as a ‘noble and brave officer,’ ‘universally beloved by both officers and soldiers of the army’; while the members of the Massachusetts House of Assembly, no great lovers of the redcoats from home, and close-fisted enough in ordinary dealings, voted £250 for a monument to the Englishman, whose character had impressed them all, and whose person their soldiers dearly loved.