Sir William Francis Butler

“ And they knew that though this small, spare, eagle-beaked and falcon-eyed leader worked them till they dropped beneath the fierce sun of Scinde, there was no heat of sun or fatigue of march or press of battle which he did not take his lion's share of. Even when now, in this autumn of 1843, an enemy more formidable to soldiers attacked them, when the deadliest fever stalked through the rough camps along the Indus, and the graveyards grew as the ranks thinned, no murmur rose from the rank and file, but silently the fate was accepted which sent hundreds of them to an inglorious death. ”

“ From him Charles Napier learned a thousand lessons of truth and justice, of honour in arms, of simplicity in life, of steady purpose, of hatred for pomp and show and empty-headed pride, of pity for the poor, of sympathy with the oppressed, of fearless independence of character, which those who care to follow us through these pages will find growing in profusion along the pathway of his life, plants none of which ever withered from the moment they were planted in these youthful days, but many of which were only to blossom into full luxuriance in the autumn of existence. ”

“ Never lived there soldier who had so little greatness thrust upon him. From the day he began his military career to the moment he hung up his father's sword at Oaklands he had to win every grade and every honour three times over. He seemed, indeed, to delight in the consciousness that he possessed this triple power of conquest. Do what they would to deny him, he would go out again and force them to acknowledge him. And it was this inward consciousness of power that made him despise the trappings of rank or position which other men held so high. ”

“ And, coming from the great field of human justice and human liberty, in which he had ever been a manful fighter, to the narrower battle-ground of his own personal strifes and contentions, he lived, not indeed to see the truth of his opinions and the justice of his conduct fully vindicated by the unerring hand of Time, but near enough to the hour of that vindication to behold its dawn already reddening the horizon. ”

“ Between them stood Napier, determined upon using to the utmost the immense power which the Viceroy had placed in his hands, and seeing far beyond the present dispute a time when this valley of the Indus must all become British territory; seeing it in imagination, too, a happy valley waving with grain, peopled by a peaceful and contented population free from the exactions of semi barbarian chiefs, and enjoying the blessings of a government which would rule them with patriarchal justice—a picture the reality of which no human eye has ever looked on. ”

“ The man who leads an army cannot succeed unless his whole mind is thrown into his work, any more than an actor can act unless he feels his part as if he was the man he represents. It is not saying 'Come and go' that wins battles; you must make the men you lead come and go with a will to their work of death. The man who either cannot or will not do this, but goes to war snivelling about virtue and unrighteousness, will be left on the field of battle to fight for himself. ”

“ More than once the pressure of the foremost swordsmen and the appearance of the dense dark mass behind them cause the line of the Twenty-Second to recoil from the edge of the bank; but wherever the dinted front of fight is visible there too is quickly seen the leader, absolutely unconscious of danger, his eagle eye fixed upon the strife, his hand waving his soldiers on, his shrill clear voice ringing above shot and steel and shout of combatants—the clarion call of victory. The men behind him see in this figure of their chief something that hides from sight the whole host of Beloochee foemen. ”

“ The enemy in front would not attack, and beyond the sea—there, where these vessels were so soon to carry him and his army—he knew but too well that there was another enemy waiting to write him down and vote him down, and to heap sneer and censure upon his actions. All at once there came the sound of a heavy cannon. Another and another shot rolled round the echoing hills. The fine face flushed with the light of hope, spurs were driven deep into the charger's flanks, and, galloping at full speed along the rocky causeway, Moore was soon upon the field—the battle of Corunna had begun. ”

“ The talent of the people, and their warlike qualities, excited my admiration, for a Greek seems a born soldier, and has no thought but war. Their vanity and love of glory equal those feelings with the French, but the Greeks are more like the Irish than any other people; so like even to the oppression they suffer that, as I could not do good to Ireland, the next pleasure was to serve men groaning under similar tyranny. ”

“ The course pursued by Napier was long the subject of fierce controversy. Volumes were written upon it. It was angrily debated in Parliament, angrily commented upon in the Press, and as angrily defended and applauded on the other side. All this is long over; the heat, the fury, and the bitter words have passed with the generation that saw and read in the flesh of the doings on the Indus. The conquest of Scinde has taken its place in history, and we can now quietly estimate the difficulties, the rights, the wrongs, and what perhaps was stranger than all, the temptations of the time. ”

“ He was thwarted in his labours, ridiculed for his fears, censured for his measures of reform. The men who opposed him became the petted favourites of his enemies. His own friends were marked out for enmity or neglect. He resigned. Time passed. The old soldier sank into his grave, and the hatred of his detractors did not ease its slander even when the tomb had closed upon the hero. Seven years went by, and suddenly the storm he had so vainly foretold broke upon India and upon England. The native army of Bengal mutinied. India ran with blood. Men, women, and children perished in thousands. ”

“ Bad though that law most certainly was, and vehemently though he had opposed it by voice and pen and labour of mind and body, William Napier was still the last man in England to pass the boundary which separates moral from physical antagonism. It is alike the misfortune of thrones and of peoples that around the former there will ever crowd those selfish and self-seeking men whose loyalty is only a cover to hide their own greed of power or possession. ”

“ But if it was unpleasant in England to find the lesson of victory taught so well by one who had ever opposed privilege, whether it called itself Whig or Tory, still more disagreeable was it to certain classes in India to find the man who had already, during his brief sojourn in the East, vehemently assailed the most cherished abuses of Indian misgovernment all at once the victor of a desperate battle. ”

“ There were no ships in sight, and the heart of the gallant soldier must have known a pang such as can come to few men in life. Yet fate, though seemingly so cruel at this moment, was, as she often is, kind and merciful even when striking hardest. Had the winds blown that would have permitted the fleet to move from Vigo to Corunna, the whole English army would have embarked on January 11th and 12th before Soult had concentrated his pursuing columns; there would have been no battle of Corunna, and the memory of Moore would not have been a deathless pride to his countrymen. ”

“ Hitherto I had life and light, but now all is a dream, and I am in darkness, the darkness of death, the loneliness of the desert. I see life and movement and affection around me, but I am as marble. O God, defend me, for the spirit of evil has struck a terrible blow. I too, can die ”

“ In the autumn of 1850 Charles Napier set out on the homeward journey. The last scenes in India were pleasant to the old soldier about to close his long and eventful career. He reviews once more his own favourite Twenty-Second Regiment and presents them with new colours. The soldiers of Meanee and Hyderabad received their chief with a frantic enthusiasm and delight that more than made amends for the neglect of the great and powerful; and the entire army too, whose deep heart the follies and the fashions of the moment cannot reach, bent its head as the old hero passed ”

“ Prosperity and power and self-indulgence had taken the old Beloochee steel out of their natures. They drank, they feasted, they hunted, and they loved after the fashion of the East. That they were not so weak or so vicious as a thousand rulers of India lying farther south is clear, but it was only because they were nearer to the mountains from whose flinty rocks they had come three generations earlier. Everything that has ever descended from these grim northern hills has degenerated in India. The Arab fares no better than does his horse when once he passes those arid portals. ”

“ If to the Beloochee foeman the sight and sound of a British charge had been strange, not less terrible was the aspect of the field, as all at once it opened upon the Twenty-Second. Below them, in the huge bed of the Fullalee, a dense dark mass of warriors stood ready for the shock. With flashing swords and shields held high over turbaned heads, twenty thousand men shouting their war-cries and clashing sword and shield together seemed to wave fierce welcome to their enemies. ”

“ They too will grow old, but will they have the memory of battles when like us they hurry towards the grave?" Fifty years have gone by, and Time has answered the last query. The fledglings of that day are now white and bent and broken, and when their old eyes gaze into the winter firelight, the Alma's height, the long valley of Balaklava, the slope of Inkermann, or the snow-clad mounds of the great siege rise before them, even as Corunna and Busaco and Fuentes d'Onoro and the breach at Badajos came back to the older veterans. ”

“ No other word can so fitly express the mental calibre of the men whose censure drove Charles Napier from the Indian command, and it is here used in a sense quite different from the usual caste acceptation of the term. The soldier and the shop-keeper must ever remain at opposite poles of thought. At their best, one goes out to fight for his country, and if necessary to die for it; the other remains at home to live, and to live well by it. At their worst, one acquires by force from the enemy, the other absorbs by fraud from his friends. ”

“ And now as the line of échelon gets closer to the hollow the fire from matchlock and gun hits harder into the ranks of men moving in the old fighting formation, the red line of battle—thin, men have called it, but very thick for all that, with the memories of many triumphs. The leading line—the Twenty-Second Regiment—is only one hundred yards from the enemy. The moment had come for the skirmishers to fall back and give place to the chief combatants now so near each other. ”

“ We lost many men by heat; but all must die some time, and no time better than when giving an enemy a lesson."
They brought him back to Hyderabad, and the wonderful constitution, tempered and twisted into birdcage wire by years of temperance and labour, again asserted itself, and within a fortnight of the blow of the sun he comes up smiling to the hundred cares of war and government, and to the still more wearing worries of assault from open and concealed enemies in England and India. For a long time he is very weak. ”

“ At the head of a confederacy of clans stood Beja Khan Doomkee, an old and redoubtable warrior, strong in the inaccessible nature of his mountains, strong, too, in being able to throw the glamour of Islam over his raids and ravages, and stronger still in the bravery and determination of the men whose creed of plunder was strangely coupled with the old heroic virtues of that great Arab race from which they sprang. ”

“ Despite the contrast between the real warfare he has just quitted and the dull life on this prison rock of Bermuda, he still sets to work to drill his regiment, to improve its discipline, and to check drunkenness among his troops, as energetically as though barrack-square and orderly-room service had always been his aim. He detests the islands and their people; he cannot make friends with the governor, a pompous old fogey, who has the natural dislike which the official owl has ever entertained towards genius in a subordinate ”

“ Some man with better interest disputed the drummer's right to the distinction, and obtained the cherished decoration for himself. Guibert, enraged at his well-earned honour being robbed from him, forgot his higher honour, tried to desert, was taken and shot. What strange episodes of individual heroism dashed with human nature's weakest traits does war hold in its vast tragedy! What extremes of pathos and absurdity jostle each other daily along the road of conflict! ”

“ Two years later to a day, on September 8th, 1855, men looking gloomily at the Russian Redan and its baffled assailants might well remember "the eagle face and bold strong eye" and vainly long for one hour of Meanee's leading.
Nations, no matter how powerful, cannot afford to ill-use or neglect their heroes, for punishment follows swiftly such neglect, and falls where least expected. In an old Irish manuscript that has but lately seen the light, there is given in a few terse words a definition of the attributes of character which go to form a leader of men. ”