Eloquence at Arms
The Destruction of Lord Raglan. By Christopher Hibbert. (Longmans, 30s.)
The Civil War in America. By Alan Barker. (A. and C. Black, 18s.) TIIERE is a tradition of good writing among sol- diers, as old as Xenophon and Caesar, of which President de Gaulle is the present-day custodian. In the British Army it is now stone dead, with the Montgomery memoirs for its tombstone, but it was still very much alive when Ian Hamilton was writing his despatches from Gallipoli, and it flickered for a while during the Second World War, in occasional felicities from Wavell, and in the superb final phrase of Alexander's cable to Churchill after the German surrender in Tunisia : 'We are masters of the North African shore.'
Wellington was not a great stylist, but he was well within the tradition. .He wrote clearly be- cause he thought clearly; he wrote honestly because he had no humbug; and he wrote with authority because no man had more, or used it better. Witness his letter to Castlereagh from Spain, on the British Army's indiscipline and addiction to loot :
We are an excellent army on parade, an ex-
cellent one to fight; but we are worse than an enemy in a country; and take my word for it,
that either defeat or success would dissolve us. The whole letter is in Antony Brett-James's selection (largely from the twenty-seven volumes of letters and despatches) of letters written by the Duke in India, the Peninsula and Flanders to friends, relatives, Ministers of the Crown and fellow-soldiers about battle, about Indian life, about himself and about other people, about high politics, his allies, his enemies, and the trivi- alities of campaigning. Mr. Brett-James has linked, annotated and indexed the letters admir- ably to produce a fine, fat piece of Wellington- iana as fascinating as Stanhope's Conversations.
To any admirer of Wellington's dignified bear- ing and commonsensible prose style, the attitu- dinising and rodomontade of Nelson must be distasteful. On his way to Aboukir Bay, victory, and a place in the heart of a nation and in that of Lady Hamilton, he wrote to Sir William Hamilton, Minister at Naples, where the Fleet had replenished:
Thanks to your exertions, we have victualled and watered; and surely, watering at the Foun- tain of Arethusa, we must have victory. We shall sail with the first breeze, and be assured I will return either crowned with laurel, or covered with cypress.
The letter is quoted in Oliver Warner's account of the purpose, conduct and disappointing strate- gic consequences of the Battle of the Nile—a notable accession to Batsford's handsome British Battles Series. Mr. Warner has always been an admirer not only of Nelson's tactical genius, bril- liantly displayed in Aboukir Bay, but of his character and personality; others must find it hard to forgive the flaunted cuckolding of a generous friend and the cruel treachery at Naples, both so soon to follow the splendid victory.
Almost the last of the Wellington letters in Mr. Brett-James's book is one that tells the Duke of Beaufort, after Waterloo, that 'your brother Fitz- roy is very severely wounded, and has lost his right arm. . . .' This was his Military Secretary who, forty years later, as Lord Raglan, com- manded the British Army in the Crimea, having never before in his life commanded so much as a battalion. Lord Raglan was a brave man who
was devoted to his family and beloved by his friends: he was also completely unfitted to com- mand in the field an army that in forty years at the Horse Guards he had failed adequately to equip. Yet he is not merely the central figure but the hero of Christopher Hibbert's lucid and read- able account of the Crimean War, which is excellent in its descriptions of the muddle at Inkerman, the blunder at Balaclava, the doubt- ful conduct of British troops at the Alma, the sickness, the unsuitable clothing and equipment, the quarrels between generals and between allies, the flat refusal to gather intelligence about the enemy; yet it can dismiss William Howard Russell's criticisms of the high command, and the Times's attacks on the Government that had set it up, as a 'private war' against Raglan. It is sad, of course, that the good, kind, brave, shy, well-born Raglan should have died worn-out, harassed and lonely, conscious of failure and of his friends' disappointment in him. But his ineptitude had made many a widow, and the bounding, ill-bred Russell was right to expose it. Had British reporters in later wars been as, free from censorship, from the 'good taste' of sycophantic newspaper proprietors, and from the public-relations techniques of flash-Alf field- marshals, we might have seen fewer headstones for privates and written fewer headlines for generals.
Less than seven years after having seen the Light Brigade gallop into the guns at Balaclava, Russell watched the Federal Army stampede back into Washington after First Bull Run. Yet, both shrewder and more liberal than Gladstone, he knew already that the North would win, and that its cause was just. He did not stay long enough to observe the classic operations of
Sher- man in Georgia, Jackson in the Valley, and Lee into Pennsylvania, that were long studied at Staff College, and perhaps still are, where Raglan's fumblings of a few years before could only be regarded as an awful warning. They are touched on in Alan Barker's brief, brilliant appraisal of the Civil War, but this is rather more a political than a military study, providing what has long been needed—a short, comprehensive and comprehensible story, specifically for English readers, from John Brown's raid and the Dred Scott decision to carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux. Klan. And, towering above them all, Lincoln, a nobler figure than Wellington; and Lee, as be- loved as Nelson, and twice as dignified, refusing to blame the disobedient Longstreet after Gettys- burg, but saying simply, 'Tell them it is all my fault.'
CYRIL RAY
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