TOPICS OF THE DAY.
SIR ROBERT NAPIER.
IT is fortunate for Sir Robert Napier that he likes his work, for he is certainly not encouraged to do it by any breath of popular applause. There has as yet been no " butcher's bill " to receive from Abyssinia, and the British public, true to the character given it by the Duke of Wellington, is less interested in the expedition than in an Easter Monday Review. Society looks on the whole affair as a military promenade, important only because it may add twopence to a year's income- tax, and the general community scarcely condescends to read the letters of the special correspondents, which, we admit, are with two occasional exceptions, unusually and unintelligibly poor. The gentlemen who write them seem mainly occupied with themselves, their tents, their mules, and their visits to little churches, and lack the descriptive power which would bring a country like Abyssinia—a plateau with a broken planet tossed on it to make variety—home to the British imagination. There is more real knowledge of Abyssinia to be gained from hall-a-dozen badly executed pictures in the Illustrated London News than from all their letters. Yet Englishmen are students of geography, and either feel or pretend an interest in military organization ; and might, therefore, one would think, feel some faint excitement about an expedition in which a " passage of the Alps " is a daily incident, in which the organization of their army, though not its courage, has been tested to the utmost ; in which they are employing and harmonizing the military systems of two empires and two ages, of the East and the West, of Count von Moltke and of Pyrrhus, laying down railways with the help of camels, carrying the newest devices in scientific gunnery upon elephants, using theo- dolites to clear the way for bearded old Mussulman sabreurs, and compelling a lofty African desert to yield water by an American device not yet a twelvemonth old. Surely there is something to excite a race with mechanical proclivities in the last scene described or hinted at by Sir Robert Napier. Three regiments, two white, one dusky, with miles of artillery, baggage waggons, mules, and followers crawling after them, have passed mountains as high as Mount Cenis, to halt at a point 7,500 feet above the sea, three hundred miles in the interior of Africa, with mountains before, behind, and around, mountains all conical, looking as if they belonged to another world, and only one wretched spring to be found, its water loaded, as such water always is loaded, with the seeds of dysentery. Did none of our readers ever see a scene of that kind, the rush to the spring, the frantic confusion, the tramping through the water, the angry craving of soldiers, and followers, and worn-out beasts ? In the midst of it %II half-a-dozen mules are driven up loaded with thin steel tubes. Tap, tap, tap, goes a hammer, rigged up in five minutes, and in ten the curse of Africa has been conquered as if a new Moses had smitten the rock, and pure water for an army is spouting among the stones. If men would but open their eyes they would see that the whole Expedition is a romance such as in a nation with a history less full than ours, a life less choked with detail, would excite a transport of enthu- siasm. Since when has Europe marched a scientifically organized army into an unknown mountain region in the tropics, and urged it forward over chain after chain of Alps, amid scenes so terribly grand that trained writers avoid de- scription as beyond their powers, three hundred miles into the interior to punish a dark King, of whom we only know that he is probably mad, possibly a genius, certainly a monster by whose side Domitian or Ivan the Terrible would have seemed civilized and humane ? That England should care little about an affair costing only some six millions is con- ceivable ; but that her people should not have caught its picturesque side, is, we must repeat, somewhat strange. To us, we confess, this army of Bruces, half explorers, half soldiers, marching into Abyssinia with Enfields and elephants, Beloochees and Highlanders, camel-drivers and photographers, humped bullocks and locomotives, goatskin buckets and portable artesian wells, with sappers for its advance guard and an Engineer for Commander-in-Chief, with Indian ports emptied of ships for transport, Egypt drained of mules for carriage, and four languages spoken in its ranks, moving forward, unhasting, unresting, into regions from which even the successors of Mahomet shrunk back appalled by their wild dreariness, to rescue a Ninevite, a few Germans, and an Englishman or two, because the national honour is pledged to their safety, is irresistibly fascinating. Think of the storm
of power latent in that little dust-cloud floating so slowly up. and over the Abyssinian hills, of the capacity of destruction— capacity which it has taxed the intellect of mankind for cen- turies to produce and to concentrate—which that dust con- ceals ! It is a little army, say critics at home, while- correspondents on the spot, bewildered by the masses of materiel, flurried by the orderly confusion, hampered by their own half-knowledge, declare that the resources alike of India and England are " strained." Strained! Does any human being in either Empire remember for five consecutive minutes that. we are at war, feel any injury, dread any loss—realize in any way whatever that he is called on by his country to endure ? Both Empires would feel the non-delivery of a mail more acutely than this " strain yet, add five Queen's regiments to this army—a matter of a telegraphic message—and there does not exist throughout Asia an empire which could stand. its shock. It would reach Pekin, or Lhassa, or Jeddo as inevitably as it will reach Magdala. It is civilization at war which that expedition represents, and the smallness of the force is due to the terrible concentration, not to the minute- ness of its effective power. The little steel gun carried on se mule, and daintily fashioned as a watch,—which is the more effective, that, or Theodore's brass monster, which a thousand men are lugging month after month up the hill, to oppose it ?
Sir Robert Napier has done nothing, say critics in Africa, impatient for the killing to begin ; though at home they are never tired of affirming that campaigns are won by organi- zation rather than by fighting. Let us look at that a little. We are all apt to think Sherman's march into space a rather wonderful thing. Plant three Alleghanies straight across his path ; destroy all roads, dry up most springs ; change his com- pact army of educated soldiers into a collection of men of three colours, five creeds, and four languages ; strip the- country till every loaf has to be carried from his base ; falsify all his maps, and make his cavalry useless as pioneers, and Sherman will have the work to do which Sir Robert Napier- has so far successfully accomplished. He is followed every day, and almost every hour, by a dozen restless, watchful, and, in part at least, hostile eyes, eager to criticize, paid to. investigate, often, we fancy, not unwilling to condemn
what have they, in the way of blunders, to report ? 3 alit ro-as Quartermaster-General reported the wrong route to bee Ahe- ticable, that somebody else found the right one, aau Sir Robert thenceforward became his own Quartermaster- General. Disorder enough there was to begin with ; though we wish our readers could realize what sort of a scene an assembly of 12,000 mules, camels, and bullocks, with insufficient water, Egyptian drivers, and no officers who could speak their language, really presents ; but from the day the cool old Engineer landed, all that disorder dis- appeared. He was not responsible for Sir Seymour Fitz- gerald's blunder—a blunder committed solely because the- Governor of Bombay was afraid of the British taxpayer—but he remedied it, then carried an army of thirty thousand men —for every follower is as much a burden on the General as every soldier—away from the pestilent coast on to the healthy highland—we hear of no crowded hospitals—then marched_ forward 200 miles,—as far as from London to Leeds, estab- lishing camps as he went, till his communications are guarded as by a line of fortresses ; then stripped a brigade for action, ordering off all superfluous impedimenta, till the Indians were loud in wrath and remonstrance ; and then never hurry- ing, never stopping, losing no men, abandoning no needful appliance, over passes 2,000 feet higher than Mount Cenis, through ravines where ten men ought to have stopped an. army, drawing water from the rocks, turning the population he has invaded into eager carriers and suttlers, making no. rushes, but also making no failures, the calm old man has carried the most composite army which ever fought straight to its goal, a mountain fortress in Africa further from his base than Turin is from France, and with three ranges of Alps instead of one between them. The gentlemen who muddled Monday's march to Portsmouth do not, we believe, think the feat a great one ; but we should, we confess, prefer to hear the opinion of Marshal Bazaine, who knows what marching Europeans through a tierra caliente means, or of any officer who ever entered Afghanistan, or aided in a march over the Suleiman. The Indians know what mountains are and deserts too, and are not reputed to lack self-confidence, yet the boldest of them would pause if ordered to take thirty thousand men by land from end to end of Beloochistan, and Abyssinia is as much worse than Beloochistan as Africa is than Asia. We do not believe any General ever accomplished a greater feat
in military organization than this invasion of Abyssinia, ever displayed more of the best qualities of a Commander than Sir Robert Napier has done. He has no dash ? Dashing on boulders is brainless work ; but when Sir Robert Napier, with a handful of wearied men, flung himself right across Tantia Topee's path, and turned a march which would have raised all Central India in insurrection, want of dash was not the precise foible attributed to him. There are no incidents ? Incidents in a campaign like this—a campaign of explorers—mean blunders, and the expedition is eventless only because the 'General has committed none. He has risked nothing, forgotten nothing, hurried nothing, but has tramped on straight to his end, and will, we firmly believe, after accomplishing his object and rescuing the prisoners, carry back his army to Bombay as per- fect in discipline and organization as when he left it, ready on a telegram from Sir S. Northcote to invade Egypt, or Japan, or Thibet. It is but poor encouragement to English Generals that service like that, the exact and punctual performance of an immense task, a task at which two British Governments craned for four years, should be received in silence, or even seem to require apologetic explanation.
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