GENERAL SKOBELEFF.
THE fact which makes the Czars great powers in Europe, makes every Russian hero a formidable person. There is in the Russian character a quality not displayed in the
same degree in any other people, a capacity for self-devotion, for manifesting loyalty through implicit obedience, for believ-
ing, to use a grandiose but accurate illustration, an earthly religion, which of itself makes the object of worship an enor- mous power. Any one who can induce millions of men to die contentedly because he has ordered it is a great man, as the world reckons greatness ; and every Czar of Russia, and one or two military favourites of the Russian people, have been able to do that. Whether General Skobeleff was a great General in the ordinary sense will probably never be set- tled now. Many experts in war believe him to have been too audacious, too wasteful of the means at his disposal, too careless of the comparative magnitude of ends, to be fully entitled to such a description. They think he was rash, and that successful as he was against Orientals, he would, in a European war, have laid himself open, on some great day, to a crushing defeat from some cool German or Austrian strategist, to whom, in his audacious carelessness, he had given an opportunity. We do not so read him, seeing in the history of his boldest enterprises signs of cool forethought and strategic skill, and believing that awe of a scientific opponent evould have sobered him, but the matter is of comparatively slight importance. What is certain about Skobeleff is, that he so typified the Russian character, so fulfilled the Russian ideal, so inspired the common Russian, that the masses of the soldiery not only loved him, but held him the nobler man for sacrificing them in heaps. They distinctly reverenced him more after the awful slaughter at the Gravitza redoubt, when he lost 8,000 men, and failed after all, than they had done before. That is the Russian temper shown through all history towards all their mili- tary favourites,—towards Suwaroff, for instance, whose hold over his soldiery was riveted, not weakened, by the awful slaughter of the storm of Ismail, as well as towards Skobe- leff ; and that temper places in the hands of its object very terrible resources. He wields the authority not only of a General, but of a religious leader like Mahommed ; and, when he draws his recruits from a people like the Russians, can waste men with an indifference which paralyzes strategy. Such a man, so followed, can conquer in despite of science ; and we do not wonder that the dread of Skobeleff, among a people like the Germans, who are naturally kindly, but who understand war, suppressed the instinctive reverence for death, and that they received tidings of his fate with something of displeasing exultation. They re- member what Zorndorf was, the battle in which the Russians were beaten from the first, but died in such masses that Frederick's Army nearly perished in the huge killing ; and they knew that with Skobeleff in command, if war broke out,
Zorndorfs on a gigantic scale were more than possible. The Russian people would have formed column behind Skobeleff, till in defeating him, even if science had conquered in the end, Germany might have suffered as in the Thirty Years' War. A man with that potential force in him is great, and there was no chance of the force ending except with death. Defeat would probably not have destroyed Skobeleff's charm for Russians, and the dislike of the Czar for him would have been of little avail. The relation of the Army of Russia to the Czars is one of the problems of that vast system which outside observers fail to penetrate, but it is certain that impulses come from the Army which the Czars fail to resist, that Generals whom the soldiers distrust are removed by Sovereigns averse to the re- moval—witness the strangely impressive scene recorded by Sir Robert Wilson, the British Commissioner with Alexander I.
—and that the "general of the soldiers" is never long in the back- ground. General Skobeleff was an immense reserved force for Russia, and whatever his genius, he increased her strength by
providing against the hour of extremity a standard which the whole people in military order would follow to the death. Sixty
millions of brave men capable of dying when ordered believed him to be the man who would give the wisest order, and whether their judgment was well or ill founded was comparatively a detail. We cannot believe that the instinct of a nation on such a question and about a tried man can be inaccurate—how many of those who clamoured for Nelson knew a bowsprit from a stern-post ?—but grant that it was so, no one questions that Skobeleff would go forward ; and behind him might have come the rush of the most numerous, the poorest, and the most self-devoted of the peoples with white skins. We do not wonder that Europe should feel a dread of such a people, who can die so, though we do wonder that the dread should be so specially developed in England ; and the reason for dreading was un- doubtedly increased, so far as the mere strength of Russia is concerned, by the existence of such a popular hero.
Whether General Skobeleff would have used the strength he gave to his people unwisely, depends mainly upon a ques- tion to which, perhaps, five people in Europe could give a clear reply. How far would he have insisted on independence ? His personal politics, so far as they were known, were not ex- ceptionally dangerous,—not half so dangerous as those of Napoleon, who wanted to be Emperor of a Federated Europe. Skobeleff desired, as all his friends allege, to liberate all Slays everywhere from foreign domination, but not to merge them in Russia ; and that design, so limited, is not in itself a vicious one, or not more so than the design of uniting all who speak German, or English, or the Romance lan- guages, plans entertained by very competent statesmen. He desired the expulsion of the Turks from Europe ; but so does every good man who realises what their rule over Christ- ians actually means. He desired the subjugation of Central Asia ; but that project, offensive as it is to Englishmen, who
permanently mistake the Slav drift towards the Mediterranean for a drift towards Calcutta, is probably one which would benefit the world. The single hope for those vast regions, as evidenced by their history since the day of Jenghiz Khan, is that they should be held to order for a century or two by some civilised Power; and the work would overstrain Great Britain. We see nothing in the General's own politics to show that he was either foolish, or devoid of conscience, or devoted to any scheme of vast and general conquest, or filled with any insane ambition ; but, undoubtedly, there are two other considerations to be recollected. Every man who has studied Russians deeply or learnt to know them thoroughly attributes to them, amid many virtues and some great powers, a certain inconsequence of character, levity, devil-may-carishness, call it what you will, such as many Englishmen, on lighter grounds, attribute to the Irish. Russians yield to an impulse more than the Western peoples do, and, possibly because they have little happiness to lose—pessimism is the note of all Russian literature and oratory —reckon up consequences with much less forethought. Gene- ral Skobeleff was accused by his friends of this defect, and cer- tainly his utterances gave that impression to the world. It is difficult to confide implicitly in the judgment of a great General who warns a people like the German of his deadly enmity, or not feeling it, allows that impression to he diffused, or who sends through the Russian post such a letter as, according to the testimony of his friend in the Pall Mall Gazette, he recently forwarded to Paris,—a letter describing his Sovereign as abruti with fear, and incapable of reigning. He must have lacked something of the caution which can alone make power like his safe, and have had in him something of Garibaldi,
who was capable of almost as much silliness as heroism. And then he might have considered it his duty to suppress himself absolutely in face of an order from the Czar, a willingness which, of course, makes the personal qualities of a General of little avail. The friend to whom his rash letter was addressed, and who seems to have enjoyed his full confidence, distinctly states that this was the case ; and reverence for the autocracy, as absolutely indispensable to Russia, and so intertwined with the national life that otherwise Russia might perish, is so common among Russians otherwise liberal, that we see no reason for denial. In practice, we suppose, a great General, deriving most of his power from popular favour, would sway the policy of the Czars more than they would sway his ; but still, the belief that he would have obeyed any formal order, and cast his enormous weight on the side of his Sovereign's policy, right or wrong, must, in estimating the use of any General, be taken into serious account. On the whole, how- ever, and not forgetting these drawbacks, we think Europe has lost, as well as Russia, in the death of General Skobeleff. Nothing can much alter the mass of force within the Russian people, and to find an interpreter for the blind giant is a great help, even to those who dread him. The interpreter must be a great man, or we shall not see him ; a true Russian, or he will mislead us ; and formidable, or we shall not pay to his interpretations sufficient attention ; and those qualifications were, for this generation, united in General Skobeleff, who died at thirty-nine the second soldier in Europe.
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