REAL SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
Real Soldiers of Fortune. By Richard Harding Davis. (W. Heinemann. 6s.)—Mr. R. H. Davis's "real soldiers" are a curious selection. We wonder what Mr. Winston Churchill, now that he has "ranged " himself in Downing Street, thinks of being included in the number, with Baron James Harden-Hickey, for instance, sometime Prince of Trinidad, or with the " Wonderful Walker,"—not Wordsworth's hero, we hasten to say, but a certain filibustering hero who half-a-century ago made a great stir in
Central America. Walker was a Cortes out of luck. He had an amazing power of ruling the very strangest of adventurers, and if he had had a little more balance might have been a really great man. Mr. Davis makes a hero of Walker, but he does not defend conduct which the man himself acknowledged to be wrong. He held, or professed to hold, that he was the legal President of Nicaragua, and in order to make good his position there took sides in an internal quarrel of the State of Honduras. He was taken prisoner and shot. Mr. Davis is, to say the least, no Anglophil, and he is very hard on a certain Captain Salmon who commanded H.M.S. `Icarus.' Walker in the Honduras affair had captured the town of Trujillo. Captain Salmon notified to him that the British Government held a mortgage on the revenues of the town. Walker replied that " he had made Trujillo a free port, and that Britain's claims no longer existed." Allowing—a consider- able concession—that Walker was lawfully President of Nicaragua, what right had he to make a free port of a town of Honduras ? In the same spirit we find a certain " Captain Fred Townsend Ward, a native of Salem, Mass.," credited with having performed the many feats of martial glory "for which Chinese Gordon received the credit." Had not Captain Ward two uncles—on the mother's side and of the name of Harris, to be precise—ono of whom really won the battle of Trafalgar, the other that of Waterloo ? The best sketch in the book is that of " Major Burnham, Chief of Scouts."
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