BOOKS.

SIDNEY HERBERT.* LORD STANMORE tells us, in the closing pages of his second volume, that Mr. Sidney Herbert—the subject of this Memoir —is already " well nigh forgotten. Of the thousands who daily pass his statue in Pall Mall, few know or ask whom it represents." Yet we are also told that " it cannot be doubted that, bad he lived a few years longer, he would have been Prime Minister of England." We should ourselves hesitate to adopt either of these conclusions. Many and great as were the qualifications which Mr. Sidney Herbert possessed for high political office, the services of Lord Russell in 1866, the personality of Mr. Gladstone in 1868, would have prevented his selection for the first place in the Ministry in either of those years. On the other hand, we cannot believe that the man who first swept out the Augean stable in Pall Mall, and to whom the private soldier still owes such comfort and health as he possesses, is forgotten. Few perhaps now survive who fell under the charm of his courtesy. Mr. Foley's statue in Pall Mall very imperfectly represents his bearing. But many, we hope, still remember with gratitude the reforms which he introduced into the British Army.

Sidney Herbert was born in the late summer of 1810 at

Sidney Herbert (Lord Harbert of Lea): a Memoir. By Lord Etat:more. 2 vols. With Portraits and Illustrations. London: John Murray. [24s. net,] Pembroke Lodge, Richmond, a house which had been granted to his grandmother—to whom it owes its name—which was closely associated in later years with Lord John Russell, and which was the scene of the famous Sleeping Cabinet, immortalised in Mr. Kinglake's pages, in which Mr. Herbert himself had a part. His mother, the daughter of Count Woronzow, was a Russian ; and the man who was destined to hold the office of Secretary at War during the first months of the Crimean War was therefore half Russian by birth. Sidney Herbert was a younger son ; but his elder brother —the child of his father's first wife—the victim of "an early and romantic marriage with a Sicilian lady," lived permanently abroad ; and the second son throughout his life was the practical master of Wilton, the magnificent seat of the Pembrokes, and enjoyed the advantages attaching to a great landowner, without the disqualifica- tion of the attendant peerage, which would have excluded him from the House of Commons. His birth, his estate, and, let us hasten to add, his character and capacity, commended him to his neighbours, and at the General Election of 1832, when be was 'only twenty-two, the electors of South Wiltshire chose him as their Member. He continued to represent them in Parliament till his elevation to the Peerage in 1861. The qualifications which recommended him to his friends in Wilt- shire ensured his advancement elsewhere. In Sir Robert Peel's short Administration of 1835 he was Secretary to the Board of Control ; in Sir Robert's more famous Ministry of 1841 he was successively Secretary at the Admiralty, and Secretary at War; he returned to this office under Lord Aberdeen at Christmas, 1852 ; he became Secretary of State for War under Lord Palmerston in 1859, and he held this appointment till within a few days of his death in 1861.

The central fact of Sidney Herbert's administration was, of course, the Crimean War. The sufferings of our army in the Crimea drew his attention to military reform, and he became thenceforward the most prominent of administrative reformers. His work in this respect must not be misunder- stood. He did not address himself to the problems which made Carnot famous in France and Stein in Prussia, and the solution of which marks out Lord Cardwell as the best of administrators in this country. In some respects, indeed, he was opposed to the conclusions at which most military reformers have arrived. He resisted the introduction of short service in 1847 on the singular ground that it was dangerous to pass a large proportion of the population through the ranks of the Army, and thus impart to them a knowledge of military discipline ; and though he preSided over the War Office in. 1859, and was responsible for the initial organisation of the Volunteer Force, he never appreciated the practical value of the Volunteers, and in the protracted discussion of our military strength in 1860 he simply ignored them. The work which Sidney Herbert did for the Army was of quite another character. He undertook to remedy, and he succeeded in remedying, some of the worst abuses which the Crimean War had revealed. The expedition to the Crimea was undertaken on the strength of some information which Lord Palmerston had succeeded in procuring,—that Sebastopol, except for its sea defences, was practically an open town. The military authorities were so convinced that the disembarkation of the army would be immediately followed by the occupation of the place, that the men, in three out of the four divisions, were not allowed to take their knapsacks with them. They entered upon the famous siege with merely the clothes in which they stood and without any possibility of obtaining either a change of clothing or adequate shelter. It is almost certain that the information which Lord Palmerston had received was correct. The evacuation of Sebastopol by Prince Menschikoff, after the Alma, shows that the Russians themselves thought it was indefensible. But the refusal of Sir John Burgoyne to sanction an assault changed the situation. • It appears from a Memorandum which Mr. Herbert wrote in 1855 that Lord Raglan's acceptance of Sir John Burgoyne's advice may have been due to a "general feeling " in the Army, after the slaughter at the Alma, that " flesh and blood must not again be led against batteries." We own to a wish that Lord Stan- more had suppressed this passage. The conduct of our troops at Balaclava and Inkerman is the sufficient and conclusive answer to such an allegation. The responsibility for not attacking the north side of Sebastopol after the Alma, or the south side after the completion of the famous flank march, must rest with Lord Raglan' and Sir John' Burgoyne, ' and not with the British troops. The hesitation to attack gave General Todleben the opportunity of raising the earthworks which were destined to detain theallied armies for the better part of a year.

The decision to refrain from immediate attack ought to have impressed on the leaders of the army the necessities of the situation. Winter was approaching. The army, which was to have occupied the barracks in Sebastopol, bad • no shelter and no change of clothing. Balaclava—the imme- diate source of supplies—was connected with the army by no adequate roads. The soldiers, fully occupied at the front, could not be spared for road-making ; and it does not seem to have occurred to any one that roads might be made by civilians, and that thousands of labourers might have been recruited in Turkey and brought to the Crimea for the purpose. In consequence, nothing was done to supply the army with the tents and stores which it needed. • The great storm of November aggravated the difficulty.' The road, bad enough before, was made almost impassable.' The munitions and stores intended for, the army were sunk in the waves of the Euxine. The heavy roads required more transport, and the horses, unable to procure forage, died in numbers.

Cholera attacked the troops ; no comforts were obtainable for sick or wounded; and the army melted away in the presence of accumulated misfortunes.

If, however, the elements had declared war against the Allies, the weather had only aggravated the difficulties which the men who were in command might have anticipated and avoided. But the leaders in the field were not solely responsible for the disorganisation. The Army at the commencement of the Crimean War was the sport of bad administration. The Secretary of State for War was mainly occupied with the government of the Colonies ; the Secretary at War was only responsible for Army finance. The ordnance was under a separate chief; the commissariat' under the Treasury; the Militia under the Home Office ; the transport under the Admiralty. The responsibility for success or failure could not be brought home to any one man or any one Department. And the confusion was almost indescribable. When the horses were dying for want of food in the Crimea, "a ship came back to the Bosphorus without discharging her cargo of forage" (Vol. I., p. 305).

When sick and wounded were lying in the hospital at Scutari on the floor, iron beds arrived there, but it was found that their legs had been packed in another ship and sent to

Balaclava (ibid., p. 303). The stores which were wanted at Scutari were lying at Varna (ibid., p. 362). The men in responsible stations, swathed in red-tape, were wholly

incapable of dealing with the emergency. The Purveyor at Scutari—a veteran who had seen service in the Peninsula— could not be made to "understand that it was the business of

a'Purveyor to purvey" (ibid., p. 403). Even Lord Stratford

de Redcliffe, who was on the spot, was so little aware of the wants of the hospitals that he coolly proposed that the money

subscribed for the relief of the patients should be "applied to the erection of an Anglican church at Constantinople" (ibid., p. 348).

It is bare justice to say that Sidney Herbert laboured, as few men have ever laboured, to remedy these gross evils. He insisted on responsibility being brought home to every one ; he refused to allow any motives of either economy or routine to interfere with the immediate purchase of everything which was obtainable. He sent out Miss Nightingale to organise the hospitals. He reinforced her—not to her own liking—with Miss Mary Stanley and another devoted band of workers. And he contrived to infuse some of his own energy and common-sense into the heads of those who had been largely responsible_ for a confusion and neglect which are 'almost incredible. His efforts did not cease with the close of the war. Afterwards, at Lord Panmure's request, he presided over the Commission. which inquired into the sanitary adminis- tration of the Army. He was simply appalled by the dis- covery that the mortality of the Army was double the rate of mortality in civil life among men of the same age, and that this mortality was largely due to ignorance and neglect of the commonest laws of hygiene. " When an immense sum was voted to create a general hospital, with all England to choose from, our selection fell' on three acres of clay standing over ten miles of mudbank, with a soft damp climate,. in a district ito which–there is no ,record of any man having. been, sent for his health by any physician that ever lived" (VoL II., p. 144). " At Woolwidb during the Russian War, a ward was added to the. General Hospital which is the largest room with the smallest window space which can be found in all England built to be inhabited by human beings "

p. 145).

It is due to Sidney Herbert's exertions on this Commission, and to his subsequent services at the War Office, that a more• satisfactory state of things was introduced. In so writing we do not overlook the fact that much still remains to-.be done. We fear that, in military organisation and in hospital management we have not yet attained the standard of our Japanese allies. But the contrast between the sanitary condition of the Army now and its condition as Sidney Herbert found it can hardly 'be expressed in words. The improvement which has taken place is due almost entirely to Mr. Herbert's initiative, and, if gratitude has not degene- rated into a mere sense of favours to come, we trust that, not- withstanding Lord St amore's. opinion, it may secure him for a long future an enduring place in the heart of the British soldier and in the memory of the British public.