FROM '59 TO '22.
IN his day Lord Grenfell played many parts. He was an artist of talent and had a very genuine interest in archaeology. He was once nearly becoming famous as an excavator in North Africa, a generation before Lord Carnarvon. But he was first a man of action, a soldier with a gift of quick observation and prompt decision. He was certainly not a man of letters, or of words, and the diaries, which he kept punctiliously, and of
which this biography is chiefly composed, are generally matter- of-fact enough. Nevertheless, on reading his record, the sense of :
" Old unhappy far-off things And battles long ago " settles on the mind, almost as if the writer were a mystic. The chief reason perhaps is that the Great War, which befell when Lord Grenfell's active life was nearly over, has set up a barrier that lends a strange remoteness to the little
dwarfed events preceding it. Lord Grenfell's notes restore to their old vividness memories of many events that stirred the nation to its depths in that distant age before the War, indeed before the more immediate causes of the War. He was in Ireland during the Fenian conspiracy of 1865, in Canada in 1867, in India in 1870, in Paris during the Communist riots of 1871. He rode with the Prince Imperial almost to the spot where he was killed, and was the first to hear the news from Carey, who narrowly escaped the same 'assegais that killed and rekilled the Prince, and he rode out to find the body.
Later he had the task of telling the whole story to the Empress Eugenie at the instance of Queen Victoria. The notes on all this period of African history, associated much with the half-forgotten name of that very gallant Zulu, King Cetewayo, throw new light on many of our failures and successes, and on the chief actors. The headlong rashness of the Prince Imperial himself has never been so distinctly por- trayed ; and though the criticism is always kind and
generous, Lord Grenfell saw with great clarity the nature of the qualities which led to such catastrophes as Isandhlwana, where but for a lame horse Lord Grenfell himself would have
perished, and the temporary loss of Khartum. Many of the portraits are admirable : of Kitchener, for example, of Lord Cromer, of Sir Redvers Buller, of Lord Wolseley—all of whom he admired—and of Gordon, whose faults and oddities he saw with almost cruel distinctness.
" He was a strange and interesting man, who, once seen could never be forgotten—short and spare, his hair tinged into grey, with a curious detached look in his blue eyes. His appearance was not ' of the earth earthy,' but that of a communer with the unseen, as indeed he was. He lived in a world of his own, and practical business with him was almost impossible. The only orders he implicitly obeyed were those evolved by himself after consultation with his Bible."
After this sketch he gives a half humorous, half bitter account of the leave-taking of Gordon :- "Before dinner he went up to the nursery and kissed Sir Evelvn's
Lord Grenfell is specially severe on Mr._ Gladstone's' Government :—" Two courses were open ; to recall Gordon,? or to give him a free hand. They did neither, and fourteen? years' anarchy in the Sudan were the result." Many of they accounts, even when briefest, are made vivid and human by the artist in the soldier. His eye retained the picture of the details. Of the end of the battle, in 1885, that first restored? the situation in the Sudan, he wrote :—
" When we got to the village, it Was empty, except for de and dying Dervishes and some of our own wounded. It was curious sight—Highlanders and Sudanese, fraternizing and turnip out the few remaining Dervishes who were still occupying the loopholed mud houses ; captured slaves and Basingers under guard ; dead camels and horses, and all the litter of an Orien camp. Dervish spears, swords, prayer-carpets, drums, banners, leather water-bottles, pottery worth bags of dollars, the Relies correspondence-papers with the state of the troops, pages of thei Koran and the Khalifa's prayers, were all scattered on the sand."
Lord Grenfell was in turn Sirdar in Egypt and Governor of Malta, and at one period was at the War Office. But an active. command was always what he liked best. The War Office seems both to have bored and angered him, and he has nothing to say in favour of its later developments. His criticism, though confessedly from one of the old regime, is worth attention " The present system under which the Army is administered by an Army Council has, I think, proved a failure. Business is retarded. The Civil side is predominant even in*purely military questions, and it is swayed by politics. The caprice of political Fiascoes,' such as the supposed indiscipline of the officers at the Curragh in 1914, takes place and will take place in the future."
Some very fine work, especially in connexion with the Church? Lads' Brigade, was to the credit of Lord Grenfell during the Great War, but the chief value and interest of his life lies in his experiences in Africa, Egypt and the Sudan. He was now an old man, though very vigorous and full of life, and a little out of touch. But he can still give occasional side- lights on at least the opinions of the chief actors. Kitchener on August 14th, 1914, was " full of plans and had confidence in the result." He thought the French would be exhausted after the end of a year, but that by that date the Germans would be back on the Rhine. " He said that the stores and ammunition were still in a disgraceful state and that he had to send the Expeditionary Force off with only one coat and one pair of boots for each man. He had begged Joffre for the present to act on the defensive."
The diaries end in 1922, more than two years before Lord Grenfell's death. It is a pity that some fuller sketch was not added of Lord Grenfell himself. His character was full of charm. The modesty of the diary conceals rather than reveals some of his finest qualities ; and the preface by Major-General Lane, who served with him in the Boer War of 1881, at Tel-el-Kebir and later in Egypt and Malta, does little more than indicate how much that was best in Lord Grenfell's life is omitted.
children who were in bed. On leaving for the station, he somewhat astonished us by taking off his evening coat and waistcoat and presenting them to General Wood's butler, and putting on anotherl coat and waistcoat that he had brought in a bag. He told the. butler that he could keep the evening clothes, as he would not' require them again."
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