"URGENT PRIVATE AFFAIRS." 307 who was most unjustly suspected in those days of a desire to interfere in the administration of our military matters-it would be moonshine to term it military system, as we had none. The New Game of Follow my Leader is a palpable hit at a practice common enough too in those days. Applications were frequently made by officers for leave to return home on the plea of "urgent privateaffairs," and you were astonished to see gentlemen walking about whose duty it was to be with their regiments in the Crimea. In the cartoon referred to, a long line of soldiers is drawn up in front of the general's tent; a little drummer boy steps out of the ranks, and making the usual salute inquires, "Please, general, may me and these other chaps have leave to go home on urgent private affairs?" A more unsatisfactory state of things for the belligerents all round than this miserable Crimean conflict can scarcely well be imagined. Lord Raglan, who had learned war by practical experience under the eye of the great Duke himself, speedily realized the fact that he had been made the victim of French military jealousy and imbecility, the leaders having been selected not on account of their military efficiency, but solely for attachment to the cause of the Emperor. The battle of the Alma had been won without the assistance of the French, who for all practical purposes might just as well have been away.* Marshal St. Arnaud, who, todo him simple justice, was at this time dying literally by inches, had refused to follow up the defeated Russians,† whose retreat a competent French general must have converted into an absolute rout; whilst, had he followed the advice and wishes of Lord Raglan, we should probably have entered Sebastopol in a fortnight, instead of having to wait three years for an event which was afterwards accom Figures will conclusively prove who bore the burden and heat of the day. The English loss was killed, 25 officers, 19 sergeants, 318 rank and file; 81 officers, 102 sergeants, and 1,438 rank and file wounded. The French loss was simply 60 killed and 500 wounded. The Russian loss in killed and wounded. was 5,709. Kinglake's "Invasion of the Crimea," 6th edition, 1877, vol. iii. p. 305. 1856 We plished at a ruinous waste of time, men, materiel, and money.' Just complaints were made in the papers of 1857 of the arrangements, or rather want of arrangements, at the Royal levées. The space was circumscribed and the crush frightful, and ladies returned from the ceremony with torn dresses and dishevelled hair, just as if they had been engaged in some feminine battle-royal. To accustom them to this uncomfortable but apparently inevitable ordeal, John Leech, in one of the very best of his sketches (vol. xxxii.), suggested Kinglake's "Invasion of the Crimea," 6th edition, 1877, vol. iii. p. 349. * At 8.30 a.m. the Russians had 17,000 infantry and 100 guns opposed to 3,600 English with 36 guns and 1,600 French infantry and 12 guns [Ibid. vol. vi. P. 321]. Three hours later on, Canrobert had under his orders 9,000 fresh men, who remained inactive: "So far as concerned any active exertion of infantry power, our people were now left to fight on without any aid from the French" -Ibid. pp. 416, 417. Ibid. vol. vi. pp. 439, 440. § A more telling commentary on our useless waste of blood and treasure could scarcely be found. Truly they manage these things better in Germany. THE VALUE OF A FRENCH ALLIANCE (?) 399 a Training School for Ladies about to Appear at Court, where we see charming women in court dresses leaping over forms, crowding beneath barriers, and going through a vigorous course of saltatory exercises, to prepare them for what they might expect at the ceremony; the floor is strewn with broken fans, gloves, feathers, watches, and jewellery; while one fat old lady, who, in attempting to scramble beneath the barrier has become a permanent fixture, presents a truly comical appearance. The war was at an end; the "Eastern Question," as it was called in the political jargon of that day, had been settled for the next twenty years, and John Bull had now leisure to sit down to count the cost, and consider the value of the French alliance, and the quality of the assistance he had derived from French generalship and the French army. The result of John's calculation was eminently unsatisfactory to himself, for he felt that while he had done all the hard work and nearly all the fighting, the French, as might have been expected, had arrogated to themselves all the praise. John in his secret heart was angry; he felt he had been drawn into a contest from which he personally derived little advantage, and from which he emerged nominally triumphant at a ruinous waste of men and money; the Frenchman, on his part, was doubtful of the reality of the gloire he claimed for himself, and distinctly conscious, moreover, that the English soldiers looked coldly on the French army and its achievements.* * The result was a feeling of secret dissatisfaction on both sides, which found, however, no actual expression until an unexpected circumstance afforded opportunity for its manifestation. The war had been succeeded by a period of inaction, a state of things always dreaded by Louis, who was now harassed by plots and conspiracies, and a certain foreigner connected, or supposed to be connected, with one of these had sought and found an asylum on our shores. Certain valorous French colonels, desirous of displaying See the remarkable expressions of dissatisfaction wrung from the placid Lord Raglan on various occasions, and the very free manner in which the English officers expressed themselves when the 7th French leger regiment ran away from the Russians at Inkerman for the second time.-Kinglake's "Invasion of the Crimea," 6th edition, 1877, vol. vi. pp. 327-8, 344-5. their loyalty at a cheap cost, presented an address to his Majesty, pursue them even to their places of security." French military com- 5 with Leech's celebrated cartoon (in vol. xxxiv.) of Cock-a-doodle-do! wherein the French cock, habited in the uniform of a French colonel, crows most lustily on his own dunghill. This remarkable caricature possesses a singular historical interest, as it exactly expresses the feeling which pervaded England for some time after the close of the Crimean war. The hostile spirit towards Frenchmen which formed a part of John Leech's nature, once aroused was not easily allayed, and in the same volume he gives us specimens of Some Foreign Produce that Mr. Bull can very well Spare, in which he angrily includes French conspirators, vile French women, organ grinders (the artist's peculiar abomination), and other foreign refuse of an objectionable character. Further on, he follows up the subject in A Discussion Forum (!) as Imagined by our Volatile Friends, which represents a party of English conspirators from a French point of view. They wear the peaked hats, long cravats, long hair, boots, and inexpressibles peculiar to the Reign of Terror, and carry knives, revolvers, axes, and other weapons of destruction; a speaker occupies the rostrum, and below him sits the registrar with a bowl. of blood, in which sanguinary fluid the proceedings are supposed to "CONFESSION OR CREMORNE ?” 311 be recorded. The opposite picture, A Discussion Forum (1) as it is in Reality, shows us a number of foolish, ignorant, harmless youths, smoking pipes, drinking brandy and water, and discussing politics (so far as they are capable of understanding them) in a tavern club-room. Returning once more to his attacks on what he justly deemed the Romanizing tendency of the practices of certain members of the English Church, he gives us the cartoon of Religion à la Mode, in which a handsome woman is about to "confess" to a truculent and knavish looking ritualist. In the distance appears John Bull with his horsewhip, "No, no, Mr. Jack Priest," says he; "after all I have gone through, I am not such a fool as to stand any of this disgusting nonsense." Some sensation was created this year by a private fête which was given by a member of the aristocracy at Cremorne Gardens. It occasioned considerable talk at the time, and as Ritualism was then in the ascendant amongst certain female leaders of fashion, Leech gives us (in vol. xxxv.) a powerful picture, entitled Aristocratic Amusements, in which John Thomas asks his mistress (a magnificent specimen of the artist's handsome women) as he puts up the steps of her carriage, whither she would wish to be driven, "Confession or Cremorne, my lady?". Misfortune, the proverb tells us, makes us acquainted with strange associates. The Emperor Louis, during his early exile, had picked up certain undesirable acquaintances, who were in the habit in after life of forcing themselves on his notice after a peculiarly disagreeable and dangerous fashion. His unfaithfulness to the principles of the brotherhood of which he and they had been members, had seriously exercised the minds of certain of these quondam acquaintances, who had given forcible expression to their feelings by attempting his assassination. The pear-shaped hand grenades of Orsini and his fellow-conspirator were the fruit of Louis's early connection with the secret societies of the Carbonari. They indicate the forces which controlled the policy of the Third Napoleon, and obliged him constantly to pick quarrels with his neighbours for the double purpose of employing his army and of keeping the attention of his restless subjects and quondam acquaintances distracted from CC 1858 |