Lord Wolseley, by Maj.-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice and Sir George Arthur.
Robert E. Lee the Soldier, by Sir Frederick Maurice.
The biographies of men who make history are as a rule more remarkable for the “action” they display than for the thought they invite. History is not made by thinking about it: it requires the combination of thought and deeds. When a man is endowed with the capacity for both; when he lives at a time in which his country needs the intelligent effort of its children to carry on its traditions, and when fate has been kind enough to call one of them to service at such a time, the story of that man’s life must be inviting, instructive and inspiring. All this is true of Lord Wolseley. Early in his career, at the time of the Civil War, Wolseley was sent to Canada to prepare for a possible war with the United States, which Abraham Lincoln, in his wisdom, prevented. Garnet Wolseley, from the time of his ensign’s commission in 1852 a diligent student of warfare, availed himself of the opportunity to study it first hand which a visit to General Lee offered him. He rated Lee’s military ability very high and from this meeting dated a friendship between the two, founded on admiration, which lasted until Lee’s death. The biographer of Lord Wolseley is also the biographer of Robert Lee and some of the unqualified praise of Lee with which Sir Maurice sprinkled his book had its origin in Wolseley’s admiration of the Southern leader.
But Sir Maurice is not alone responsible for this biography of Lord Wolseley; he collaborated with Sir George Arthur, and the combination of a military man with a literary student seems to have been a happy one.
It is perhaps unjust that the present generation should know Kitchener better than it does Wolseley; that it should place the one on a high altar of martyrdom and sacrifice, and practically ignore the other. Kitchener had all the odds in his favour; he was the man when the World War started; his death or disappearance reacted on popular imagination in extraordinary fashion, and the mystery of his end appealed to our taste for the fantastic and the incredible. But what Lord Kitchener did for the British Army, was started by Lord Wolseley; Kitchener put together the stones that his predecessor in the highest military rank in Great Britain, had assembled, and he built on the foundations which Lord Wolseley dug and prepared. At least, this is the statement of his biographers who surveyed the subject with apparent impartiality and integrity. Some authoritative authors have already passed judgment on the quality of the British Army during the days of the Boer War, and it may not be in all points favourable to the memory of their Chief; but if the courage and efficiency of the Army as these qualities were displayed in the Great War, were the result of Lord Wolseley’s love for, and intelligent attention to, the needs and ethics of the Army which fought under the Union Jack, all our gratitude, our admiration and our praise should go to the man whose influence was still felt in 1914. Never could an Army, got together with the rapidity with which the British Army was formed in those days, as untrained as it was, and as large as it grew, have done what it did, in the way it did it, if some great heart and illumined mind had not been present at its early formation and at its origin. Lord Wolseley reorganised the British Army, he fought with all his power the “wicked” practice of buying commissions in the Army, he prepared a real system of mobilisation; he remodelled the machinery for supplying the Army with food and munitions; he gave a stirring impulse to military education and practical training, and he directed the attention of statesmen to the problems of national defence and made them, as well as the soldiers and sailors, concentrate on it. His activities were incessant; his public life was long in years and rich in deeds.
Lord Wolseley was the typical example of the velvet glove covering a hand of steel. His outward appearance was that of a dandy, of a man more occupied with the cut of his clothes than with the fate of the world. Judged by his photographs he was precious and self-conscious, outwardly complaisant, inwardly arrogant; but his actions belied his appearance, although he harboured within himself a sort of dual personality. He had a keen inward sense of world-strangeness with a great desire to be in communion with the world; he had the tenderness of a woman, a devotion to and dependency upon his wife that was balanced by his happiness when he was at war; he had the strength of a lion in a frail body; the tenacity and obstinacy of a bull-dog and an indomitable courage; and withal he possessed the qualities of the thinker. He was neither boastful nor honour-seeking, yet he had taken his own measure early in life and without humility; he knew what he was worth to his country and to history, but he could not find it in him to push himself save by his own merit. He had one of the most important offices in the British Government, when he was still a very young man, and he did not attempt to use power or influence to raise himself to any undeserved honours.
The book takes in most of the great historical events of the fifty years that saw Wolseley active in his career, and as a survey of British history, no achievement could be at once more entertaining and more instructive. But what his biographers did not do was to explain some of the contradictions that Wolseley’s personality displayed. They leave the reader with the impression that he had great powers, but also great limitations. The latter may have been a puzzle to those who were intimate with him, but his biographers should have studied and explained them if they could. He may have inherited his “prettiness” from the grandmother “whose face was her only fortune” and his strength not only from the Wolseley side of his family which boasted of many a good officer, but also from his mother who had never been ill in her life and whose death left a gap in Wolseley’s heart that nothing could fill. She was strong, but she was pious too, and she brought up her son in such fervour of the Church that his biographers say he never spent a day without reading the Psalms. He found a second mother in his wife, Louisa Erskine, to whom he was profoundly beholden. “When they were parted the hours were carefully counted until he should hold her hand again.” All these made for manifold contradictions in his nature. Deeply religious, he thirsted for blood and war; adoring his wife, he accepted long periods of separation in the name of service; pre-eminently a man of action, he was capable of deep thought and vision.
Years before the War, he foresaw the power of Germany and he warned against it; he advocated the adoption by his country of some of Germany’s methods which, interpreted with the common sense of his people, would have minimised fear of the growing Teutonic power and enabled them successfully to deal with it. But his voice was not always heard and his perception of the future not often heeded.
The biographers of Lord Wolseley have mixed a good dose of hero-worship in their book; but they have done it with a sure hand, and with so much discrimination and taste that it is never offensive. Sir Frederick Maurice was his companion for several years, his alter ego during the campaign of Africa, and his devoted friend when sickness and trouble came to Lord Wolseley. Thus, Sir Frederick’s information was obtained directly, went through no deforming, exaggerating or reshaping process. Despite the gaps that occur now and then in the mental and moral formation of the hero, the book is invaluable to the student of modern English history. It should prove illuminating to military men and diverting to the general reader. But the story is of a soldier not of a man. There must have been something particularly interesting to say about him as a man; there is about all childless husbands. And the foundations of his admiration for the novels of Rhoda Broughton might have been unearthed and re-pointed.
Some day we shall have a book on the religiosity of great warriors. Lee, Wolseley, Gordon, Cadorna, de Castelnau, will figure in it conspicuously.
Major General Sir Frederick Maurice has given a firm grip to the hands across the sea. His book does not purport to be a life of Lee but an appreciation of his generalship. Regrettably, however, he paints a picture of him as son, husband, parent and citizen, which his kin will perhaps not recognise, and which I believe is not a good likeness.
General Maurice has been studying for more than twenty years the military life of Lee, the campaigns he conducted and the battles he fought. Therefore it can not be said that he has indulged in hasty conclusions or snap judgments. For a soldier of his distinction, a student of military science of his information to say that the name of Robert E. Lee must be added to the roster on which are inscribed the names of those who guessed the secret of the art of war: Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugène and Frederick is praise indeed. A British soldier who places Lee above Wellington as a commander must be sure of himself and of his facts. Appreciation and estimation of this sort is food that nourishes the Entente Cordiale. It is so much more palatable and assimilable than the “one blood, common language” variety.
After a brief chapter on the Lees of Virginia, the burden of which is that the family had all the virtues save humour and the immortal descendant all save the one that Hermes had to a superlative degree, he takes up at once Lee’s training as a soldier, stressing his experience in the war of 1845. “No matter how sure a man may be of his nerves, he is the better soldier when those nerves have been tested under fire and found reliable and the better leader from the confidence in himself which such experience provides.” Lee’s nerves were tested and found perfect at Chapultepec. He returned from Mexico at the age of 42 with a reputation established. “And it was not confined to his own country. Representatives of the Cuban junta offered him the command of an expedition to overthrow the Spanish control of the island. Instead of accepting, he hastened to inform the Secretary of War of the proposal and his reasons for declining it.”
Commenting on trained and untrained commanders, General Maurice writes, “Courage, physical and moral, common sense, readiness to accept responsibility, the power to grasp quickly the essential of a situation, and to form speedy decisions, these are not gifts which are confined to regular soldiers nor have many regular soldiers possessed all or even most of these gifts. The possession of them will make any man a leader whether in peace or in war.” He quotes with fullest approbation General Forrest’s explanation of his successes: “I get there fustest with the mostest men,” and adds, “We have in those eight words the gist of many volumes of Jomini and Clausewitz.”
Discussing John G. Nicolay’s explanation of Lee’s action in April, 1861, in resigning from the army and accepting command of the Virginia troops, an action which, according to Nicolay, came from selfish motives, General Maurice comments, “It would be difficult to compress into a similar number of words a greater misrepresentation of fact.” His latest biographer says of Lee’s decision and conduct, “He had but one thought, 'What is my duty?’ No motive of self-interest entered his mind. He was prepared to make any and every sacrifice.”
He takes up briefly the problems of the Confederacy. In the author’s opinion the Civil War throws valuable light on what should be the nature of the relation between the statesman and the soldier in a modern democracy at war. The claim that the soldier should be left in free and complete control is ridiculous. The general direction of a war should be in the hands of one man, and in democratic countries that man must be a statesman and his supreme qualification should be the ability not only to co-ordinate military, naval and air forces but to develop and co-ordinate all the physical and moral resources of his country. Lincoln, after he had been taught by experience, was the model of such a statesman. Lee was the model of the perfect soldier. General Maurice then proceeds to prove the latter statement by describing the Defence of Richmond, the first offensive, the first Maryland campaign, the battle of Chancellorsville and the second invasion of Maryland.
Before recounting Lee’s catastrophe, General Maurice interpolates a most interesting chapter on Delay as a Weapon of War. After Lee had given up hope that the defeat of the Army of the Potomac on Northern soil was possible, his strategy sought new aim. He no longer attempted to thrust battle on the enemy, on the contrary he sought delay that he might exhaust their patience: “If the campaign of 1862, from Richmond to the Potomac, is a model of what an army inferior in numbers may achieve in offence, the campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbour is equally a model of defensive strategy and tactics. Some commanders have excelled in the one method, some in the other; few in both and amongst these few must be remembered Robert E. Lee.”
Pleasant reading for an American, this book by Britain’s foremost military writer. Some will shrug their shoulders and say: “The English were always sympathisers with the South,” but this book is not the product of a biased mind. It was not conceived in emotion, generated by bitterness, or prompted by prejudice. It is the deliberate judgment of a man temperamentally adapted to the task he set himself and intellectually fitted for it by his training and experience. So long as he sticks to the field in which he is expert he is persuasive and convincing, but when he goes into history or psychology he is neither.
General Maurice would have been wisely counselled had he confined himself to Lee, the Soldier, as the title of the book intimates was his intention. He may have taken his measure correctly as a warrior, but I am sure there is little justification for “Lee was never what is called a man’s man. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he had no taste for the ordinary amusements and weaknesses of the male sex.” If he were that sort of a man, the less said of it the better. It is a man’s human side that testifies his godship. Some one should enumerate the “weaknesses of the male sex” that there may be no doubt in readers’ minds what they are.
General Maurice would have us believe that Lee was a studious, serious, silent, solitary, superman who devoted his nights to study and contemplation, his days to action and prayer. He was probably not so playful as Osler and more of an anchorite than Anatole France; it is likely that he was more abstemious than Grant and that he had less humour than Lincoln; but he had some of all their qualities in miniature and it is a pity he was not more liberally endowed for then he would have had imagination or vision. That was the great hiatus in the personality of Robert E. Lee; he lacked vision. He could run a complicated machine, he could get great efficiency out of it, he could keep it going even when it seemed to be worn out, but he could neither design nor assemble it.
Many will seek to fathom the process of reasoning, or find the source of information that led General Maurice to write: “He not only espoused but was the main prop of a cause history has proved to have been wrong. That is the tragedy of his life, and his conduct after the war makes it clear that he realised that it was tragedy ... the whole tenor of his life from the surrender of Appomattox to his death is evidence that he believed in his heart of hearts that his State was wrong in seceding.” This is neither evidence nor testimony. It is merely rhetoric.
His country has already selected Lee for its greatest military executive and it is pleasant to witness a General of another great nation laying the oaken crown on his tomb, and it is gratifying that he can write: “Distinguished as was Lee’s conduct while an officer of the Army of the U.S.A., splendid as was his career in the field, nothing in his life became him more than its end.” He heard Lincoln’s charge to bind up the Nation’s wounds and he hearkened to it.