LORD GEORGE PAGET'S CRIMEAN JOURNAL.* THE Crimean War is becoming

ancient history so rapidly, and its most dramatic incidents have already been described so exhaustively, that we opened this book with a sense of impend- ing weariness. Not often have our presentiments been so com- pletely falsified. Lord George Paget's comments arc so fresh and shrewd, that they lend an interest to the topics which he handles however hackneyed. And some of these topics have an interest of their own which may fairly be called. imperish- able. An insignificant affair from a purely military point of view, and a deplorable blunder from any point of view, the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava retains its hold upon men's imaginations in a way which many a great and important battle has failed to do, and we can well understand why Mr. Kinglake told the writer of this Journal that he had learnt more from it, with regard to that fight, than from all other accounts put together. Lord George Paget led the second line in the cele- brated charge, and having been requested by Lord Cardigan, who led the first, to give him his best support, was much dis- contented with the way in which his loader brought, or rather failed to bring, his brigade out of action. Time, however, as he says, works wonders, and he has been brought to see Lord Cardigan's error in a more favourable light. We are unable to take so lenient a view of that undoubtedly brave officer's short- comings, and Lord. George studiously avoids suggesting any ex- planation of how his leader missed the 8th Hussars. But we shall not attempt to reopen any of the much-vexed questions which were raised by that incident and others in the mis- managed "Invasion of the Crimea." Suffice it to say that Lord George, on more than one occasion, fully confirms the unfavourable judgment which we had occasion recently to pass on the military capacity of Lord Raglan. His genuine admiration for the high and noble nature of his chief is unstinted, but it is easy to read between the lines of such a passage as this :—" The fact is, we can fight better than any

other nation, but we have no organisation. At the Alma, it was just the same bull-dog work, but no orders issued ; and so at the commencement of the Peninsular war, and so it will be at Sebas-

topol." These words were addressed to his wife, on the day after Balaclava, aud on the following day he writes :—

"Lord Raglan rode through our camp this afternoon, which caused some excitement amongst our fellows rushing to cheer him in their shirt-sleeves. But he did not say anything. How I longed for him to do so, as I walked by his horse's head ! One little word, Well, my boys, you have done well, or something of that sort, would have cheered us all up ; but then it would have entailed on him more cheers, which would have been distasteful to him ; more's the pity, though one cannot but admire such a nature. Yet these poor fellows in their shirt.sleeves were the relics of a blunder, the blame of which must, in the last resort, rest upon Lord Raglau's head."

How they had borne themselves in the conflict, which was the result of that blunder, has been often told, but will bear repetition in Lord George's words :—

"Oh, bow nobly the fellows behaved ! At one time we wore between four fires, or rather four attacks,—right and left, front and rear. That is, a heavy fire from right and left, and cavalry in front and rear ; and during all this time the fellows kept cheering ! Alas ! alas it was a sad business, and all without result, or rather with the result of the destruction of the Light Brigade."

And yet not so entirely without result as Lord George for the moment imagined. Such heroism as that is never entirely thrown away. After the terrible carnage of Albuera—a lost battle

• The Light Cavalry Brigade in the Crimea. From the Letters and Journal of the late Cl000ral Lord George Paget. London: John Murray. 1881.

practically, if Soult had not retreated as he did, unnecessarily— it was noticed that the French armies in Spain never met the English infantry with the confidence which they had previously shown ; and Lord George, writing from Eupatoria more than a year after the charge, says :—

"A curious anecdote to the credit of our cavalry, and chiefly, perhaps, the result of Balaclava, is the following, the common talk of all here :—In the affair that occurred a fortnight before wo got here, when the French took some Russian guns, a Russian officer ex- claimed, with surprise, 'Oh! you are French, are you P' We thought, seeing some of you in red, that you were English cavalry. Had we known the truth, a better resistance would have been made, &c. (One of the French Hussar regiments were all red.)"

The writer, with becoming modesty, adds, "Which is the most curious P—that the Russian officer should thus have acknow- ledged. a leichet6, or that the French should have repeated it to us ?" In a rather different spirit, we should ask whether a finer compliment was ever paid, by friend and foe alike, to the cavalry of Britain. Other amusing anecdotes are recorded in this book of the impression made upon the Russians by Bala-

clava. They were puzzled by the bear-skins of the Greys, and, with memories of the Alma in their minds, thought that we had mounted the Guards on horseback. Liprandi would. hardly believe that Parkes, Lord George's orderly, who was about six

feet two inches high, was a Light Dragoon. "If you are a Light Dragoon," said the Russian General, "what sort of men are your Heavy Dragoons P" He told his prisoner "that it was well known that all the Light Brigade were drunk that morning, and when Parkes assured him that neither he nor any of his comrades bad put a morsel of food or drop of drink in their mouths that day, he said, Well, my boy, you shall not remain in that state long,' and he called to an aide-de-camp, and told him to give the prisoners a plentiful allowance of food and drink." It is a pleasure to read such a story as this, and still more to hear how the prisoners taken at Balaclava were treated in Russia. Their imprisonment "resulted ultimately in every sort of kindness and attention from every one, Parkes winding up his description thus Ay, my

Lord, the officers were not ashamed of being seen walking about with us.'" On the other hand, it is almost painful to have to

record the bitter contempt which Lord George expresses, and we mast say justly, for the conduct of the Russian cavalry. Of the lancer regiments which tried to bar the retreat of the poor rem- nants of the 4th and 11th, he says : —Well, we got by them without, I believe, the loss of a single man. How, I know not. It is a mystery to me. Had that force been composed of English ladie8, I don't think one of us could have escaped." Mr. King- lake has given an explanation of the inaction and stupidity of the troops which are quizzed here so mercilessly, but it is a curious fact that while the Russian infantry is confessedly inferior to none in Europe, their regular cavalry has not yet won its spurs in any great pitched battle, and the last war with Turkey proved how thoroughly baseless and undeserved was the reputation which accident had given to their irregular horse.

We have marked so many passages in this book for quota- tion, that we are puzzled which to select. We take at random a little incident which, "as it affected me only," says Lord George, "will, I fear, be of small interest to the general reader :"—

" After we had mounted (for the famous charge), and jus', before we commenced our advance, Colonel Showell, commanding the 8th Hussars, happened to rest his eyes on one of his mon with a pipe in his mouth, which so excited his military ire, that he hollaed to him that he was disgracing his regiment by smoking in the presence of the enemy,' a grave view of the question which certainly I (his commanding officer) did not, or at least, up to that time had not reciprocated, inasmuch as I at this very moment was enjoying a remarkably good cigar. The question then rose in my mind, Am I to set this bad example ? (in the Colonel's opinion, at least,) or should I throw away a good cigar r—no such common article in those days, be it remembered. Well, the cigar carried the day, and it lasted me till we got to the guns. With shame do I say it."

This is a pretty good specimen of that "cheery stoicism" which Mr. Carlyle so admires in our aristocracy.

"For there was no ono, I believe, who, when he started on this advance, was insensible to the desperate undertaking in which he was about to be engaged So we wont on. Right flank keep up.

Close in to your centre The smoke, the noise, the cheers, the groans, the ping, ping' whizzing past one's head, the 'whirr' of the fragments of shells, the well-known ' slush ' of that unwelcome in- truder on one's ears,—what a sublime confusion it was ! One incident struck me forcibly about this time,—the bearing of riderless horses in such circumstances. I was, of course, riding by myself, and clear of the line, and for that reason was a marked object for the poor,

dumb brutes. They consequently made dashes at me, some advanc- ing with me a considerable distance ; at one time as many as five on my right and two on my left cringing in on me, and positively squeezing me as the round shot came bounding by them. I remarked their eyes, betokening as keen a sense of the perils around them as we human beings experienced (and that is saying a good deal). The bearing of the horse I was riding, in contrast to these, was remark- able. He had been struck, but showed no signs of fear, thus evincing the confidence of dumb animals in the superior being."

This passage will sound familiar enough to readers of King- lake, but touches of this kind seem more impressive from the lips of the eye-witness than from the most eloquent narrator at second hand. Lord George, although his English is occasion- ally of the Rawdon Crawley sort, says what he means and means what he says so unaffectedly, that it is a pleasure to retrace in his company scenes with which we are almost too familiar. We lie with him on the ground side by side with Cathcart, and gazing on Sebastopol through our telescopes, hear the latter say—a week after Alma, and just four weeks before the charge—" I could get in there to-night, with my division, if they would let me. I have tried hard, but am not allowed to make the attempt." Or we dine with him at Lord Raglan's head-quarters, two days after the charge, and hear the latter say, in reply to his remark that he had lost his trumpeter,

"'Never mind, George, you will never want another.' A little speech, but one to have lived for, coming from such a man !" The whole book, in fact, is studded with these little, graphic touches ; from the first page, where "we took in 600,000 rounds

of ball-cartridge,. left behind through neglect by the 20th Regi- ment, and which was stowed away under the main cabin, a pleasant mine for us," down to the last, when we find him turn- ing the tables upon Nelson by complaining, as a soldier, of the "dinner-hour," to which the Navy sacrifice the interests of the Service as to a sort of religion, and. our officers chaffing the Navy officers by asking them if it is true that the ships piped to dinner during the battle of Trafalgar."

We have not indicated a tithe of the interesting contents of this unassuming little book. We can only say that it strikes us as the best of its kind that we have ever met with. It is an indis- pensable companion to Kinglake's volumes, and an invaluable guide-book (among its other merits) to the big picture now exhibiting in Leicester Square. Critics differ about the claims of the pencil in the last case, about the claims of the pen they will, we venture to predict, be unanimous.