^■si^,~f- ■'■■ 3. :v/ J ,c,^* ,-ii1 i SIR WILLIAM BUTLER ''Si Photogravure by Annan iSono. Glasgow SIR WILLIAM BUTLER AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY LIEUT. -GENERAL THE RT. HON, SIR W. F. BUTLER G. G. B. WITH FOUR PORTRAITS IN PHOTOGRAVURE LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 10 ORANGE STREET LEICESTER SQUARE W.C. ^ ^ 1911 CONTENTS PAGE Foreword .......... xi CHAPTER I Earliest Recollections. The Irish Famine. ' Butler's Country.' School. Gazetted Ensign to the 69th Regiment .... 1 CHAPTER II Old soldiers and young. Orders for India. A four months' voyage. Burmah ........... 15 CHAPTER III From Rangoon to Madras. A hurricane at sea. The Nilgherry Mountains. The Carnatic Plain. The lives and thoughts of Eastern peoples. Leave spent on the western coast ... 34 CHAPTER IV Down to Cape Comorin, and back to Madras. The scene of a bygone massacre. Starting for England. St. Helena .... 52 CHAPTER V Aldershot. Visit to the Belgian battlefields. Afterthoughts on Waterloo 68 CHAPTER VI The Channel Isles. Victor Hugo. The Curragh. To Canada. Leave in the West. Bufialo hunt ....... 83 CHAPTER VII A new conception of life. In charge of the ' Look Outs.' Montreal and Quebec. Home. Father's death. A hopeless outlook in the Army .......... 98 ft2 vi SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHAPTER VIII PAGE The Red River Expedition. Under Colonel Wolseley. Fenians. The purchase system. No step after twelve years' service. Paris. The end of the Commune . . . . . . . .112 CHAPTER IX Paris in her agony. Writing The Cheat Lone Land. On half-pay. Bound for the Saskatchewan. The lonely journey. Home. Ashanti. With Sir Garnet Wolseley again . . . .130 CHAPTER X West Coast of Africa. ' The Wolseley Gang.' Beating up the natives. Recalcitrant kings. Fever. The forest. Invading Ashanti . 147 CHAPTER XI An excuse for the craven native. End of the Expedition. Near'death from fever. Queen Victoria's visit to Netley. Companion of the Bath. Start for Natal. With Sir Garnet Wolseley again. Pro- tector of Indian immigrants. The Tugela. Through the Orange Free State 164 CHAPTER XII The state of South Africa in 1875. On the Staff at the War Office. MiUtary administration. First meeting with Gordon. Marriage. War in Eastern Europe. Annexation of the Transvaal. Visit to Cyprus. The Zulu War. Isandula. Departure for South Africa 183 CHAPTER XIII Assistant Adjutant-General in Natal. Death of the Prince Imperial. Advance into Zululand. Ulundi. Transports for England. Im- prisonment of Cetewayo. St. Helena again . . . .198 CHAPTER XIV War in South Africa. Majuba. Adjutant-General in the Western District. The Egyptian question. Bombardment of Alexandria. Arabi. Service in Egypt. On Sir Garnet Wolseley's Staff. EI Magfar. Tel-el-Mahouta. Kassassin. The night march. Tel- el-Kebir 216 CONTENTS vii CHAPTER XV PAGE Cairo. The fate of Arabi in the balance. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. Leaving Egypt. To the Saskatchewan again. The Red Man . . . 238 CHAPTER XVI The Hudson Bay forts. Winnipeg. Back to London. Trouble on the Upper Nile. Revolt of the Mahdi. Destruction of the forces of Hicks Pasha and Baker Pasha. General Gordon sent to the Soudan. Gordon and the garrisons in danger. Delay and vacilla- tion at home. Bmldingof Nile ' whalers.' Ascent of the Nile . 26(J CHAPTER XVII Delays on the Nile. Success of the ' whalers.' Letters. Korti. The Desert column. Fall of Khartoum. The River column. Kir- bekan. News of Gordon's death ...... 281 CHAPTER XVIII Meroe. Wady Haifa. Kosheh. Advance of the Dervishes. Ginniss 307 CHAPTER XIX « Back to Wady Haifa. Letters. Sickness among the troops. Leav- ing the Soudan. Assouan. Home on sick leave. Half-pay in Brittanj'. K.C.B 329 CHAPTER XX In Delgany, Ireland. Parnell. Army Ordnance Enquiry : Report. * Proposed fortifications for London. Command at Alexandria. Death of Khedive Tewfik. Palestine. . . . . .351 CHAPTER XXI End of Alexandria command. Aldershot. The Jameson Raid. Com- mand of the South-Eastern District, Dover. Offer of command at the Cape. Arrival in South Africa, Acting High Commissioner. Initial difficulties. Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Grahamstown. ' Cape Boys.' The ' Edgar Case ' 376 t viii SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHAPTER XXII PAGE The South African League. The true life of the land. Apparent public opinion. Warnings to the Government of real position. Return of Sir Alfred Milner. Tour of inspection. Scheme of defence. Uncertainty at Headquarters in London. Interviews and correspondence with the High Commissioner. Absence of m instructions from England ....... 404 CHAPTER XXIII The Bloemfontein Conference. Two interesting letters. Further interviews and correspondence. Proposed raid from Tuli. De- spatch of 22nd June to the Secretary of State. Some cablegrams from and to the War Office. Increased difficulty of the position. Resignation of the Command. Departure from South Africa . 431 Afterword .......... 456 Index .....'...... 461 ILLUSTRATIONS LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR W. F. BUTLER, K.C.B. Frontispiece From a sketch by Lady Butleb, made at the Cape in Juue 1899. ENSIGN W. F. BUTLER Facing page 14 At the age of twenty, on joining the Service in 1858. LIEUTENANT-COLONEL W. F. BUTLER, C.B. . „ 250 Taken in 1883 as Queen's A.D.C. MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W. F. BUTLER, K.C.B. . „ 392 Taken in 1898, commanding the South-Eastern Distinct. MAPS— Map of the West Coast of Africa .... .. 150 Map of the Nile „ 240 • i ' FOREWORD My father began this Autobiography in March 1909, and worked leisurely at it up to within a few days of his un- expected death on 7th June 1910. The manuscript breaks off in the middle of the last chapter, which deals with the end of his command in South Africa ; and though, on his deathbed, he entrusted the task of com- pleting this chapter to me, I was unable to learn his wishes as to the sources of information among his papers to which I should apply. On finding the detailed ' Narrative of Events,' which he wrote shortly after his return from the Cape, I thought I could not do better than adhere solely to this record. The reader will understand the onerous nature of my task, for, while keeping closely to the 'Narrative,' I have realised the necessity for abbreviation and condensation, without omitting what appeared to be essentials. Whether my father would have wished for more or for fewer omissions, I cannot say ; but I have inclined towards few, for fear of losing anything he would have wished retained. EILEEN BUTLER. • • SIR WILLIAM BUTLER AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHAPTER I Earliest recollections. The Irish famine. ' Butler's country.' School. Gazetted ensign to the 69th Regiment. Had it been possible for any one child to tell us exactly what he saw when he first opened his eyes, that earliest impression of the world would probably have proved the most interesting brain-picture ever given by an individual to the general public. Nothing like it could ever have been told by him in later life. ' We awake at our birth,' somebody says, ' staring at a very funny place. After serious examination of it we receive two fairly definite impressions — delight and fear." He puts the sensation of delight first, that of fear second. That is right ; but do they keep these places always ? I think the verdict of humanity would be that Life was a longer or shorter process of the change of place between these two predominant powers. Our delight at the first sight of earth we are able to recall only dimly in after time. The fear is bound to grow. Once at St. Helena there came a huge avalanche of rock, loosened from an overhanging mountain, in the dead of night, crashing down upon the poor straggling smgle street of Jamestown. It crushed to powder two houses, killing instantly sixteen men and women. When daylight came, the frightened neighbours, climbing through the rums, found a three-months-old baby lying on its back close by the mountain boulder, alive, kicking and crowing — every other thing was dead. To the baby the rock was only a new possession. That is the whole point. Anyway, our child-world was a happy one. Everything was ours — the green foreground where the spotted pet rabbits nibbled and nuzzled together ; beyond these, long glimpses of green grass seen between lime and beech trees ; then a glisten- A • 2 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ing river, with shimmering shallows and bending sallows ; beyond that, more green fields ; and then a long blue mountain range, which grew bolder and loftier as it stretched westward, where it ended in two peaked summits, behind which the sun went down only to come up again next morning at the east end of the range — our sole unquestioned property still. Such are my earliest recollections of the home of ' the little sallow ' — Bally slat een, where I first saw the light on the 31st of October 1838, the seventh child of Richard and Ellen Butler. The world, as the young child saw it, was a very different place from the world which the older child was to hear and realise a few years later. The early "forties gave no warning word of what the decade would do in Ireland before it closed. I was about eight years old when the crash came. The country about where we lived in Tipperary was swarming with people. Along the road were cabins or little thatched mud-cottages at every hundred or hundred and fifty paces. I had been taken at the age of four years to live with a maternal aunt and uncle at Artane, near Dublin, a charming spot three miles from the city ; and in this second home, with the kindest relations that child could have, I spent the years from 1842 to 1846. These years are, of course, only a bright hour in memory now, but one or two events stand out in clearest light. I stiU retain the recollection of being taken into a large building, the name of which I knew only in after years. Richmond Penitentiary it was caUed. We passed through big gates and doors, and came out mto a garden which had a very high wall around it. Following a walk to a spot where another walk crossed ours, we found a group of strange men, with one very big burly man among them. I remember the scene particu- larly, for the reason that there were a good many apple-trees growing on either side of the walks, and the fruit was suffi- ciently large upon them to rivet my attention while the older members of the party were conversing with the burly man and his companions. All at once the big figure moved forward, and, taking me in his arms, lifted me above his head, while he shouted in a great strong voice, ' Hurrah for Tipperary ! ' The big man was Daniel O'Connell, and the time must have been in the June of 1844 ; for he was in Richmond Prison from May to September of that year. ' THE BLACK FORTY-SEVEN ' 3 Early in 1846 I was taken from these loving relations at Artane back to the Tipperary home. It was a two days' coach journey, of which I remember Httle beyond the grief of the first day at parting from these beloved ones ; and the grey monotony of the second day passing slowly through long stretches of bog until at last, as evening was closing, the great towers and battlements of the Rock of Cashel rose before the post-chaise in the gloaming ; but another weary hour had to pass before home was reached. When we were quite near home, my sister, who knew the road thoroughly, began to name the persons whose cottages we should have to pass before our gate was reached. She repeated about a dozen names, I being terribly tired, the list gave me the idea that we had still a long road to travel, and I heard it with dismay ; but my alarm was needless, the distance was only a few hundred yards. I passed along that same road a few days ago : not one house, not even the site of a house, can now be discerned there. In that month of March 1846 the famine which was to sweep four millions of Irish peasants out of Ireland was about to begin its worst slaughter. The following winter brought ' the black forty-seven.' It was a terrible time. Everywhere the unfor- tunate people sickened, died, or fled. There was no prepara- tion, no warning ; the blow fell straight. The halting and creaking machinery of the State could not cope with this sudden onslaught. A second or third rate despot could have at least parried the blow ; but a constitutional government face to face with a sudden crisis is as helpless as a stranded whale m an ebb-tide. My father and the better-endowed neighbours flung them- selves bravely against the advancing plagues of famine and fever. Their purses were none too flush ; but they gave liberally. They bought meal in the nearest town where it could be got, carried it fourteen miles by cart, and, under escort of pohce, gave it to the famishing people. I have some of the old books still which hold the record and keep the accounts of these weekly distributions. They are pitiful reading. They range from early February to the end of July 1847. The Uttle entries opposite the names of rehef recipients are more striking in their briefness than elaborate descriptions of misery could be. Here are some of them. 4 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY * Kitty Marony and three children. Her husband has gone from her and she doesn't know where he went." ' The widow and five children, two and a half stone weekly.' * Nicholas Murphy and four children ; has an old cow/ ' Edward Mockler of " the Idiot " is receiving.' ' The cost of the Indian meal varies between 1/4 and 1/10 the stone.' Sometimes a name disappears from the list, and the entry column knows it no more. The records end in July 1847, perhaps because the Govern- ment machinery had then got into working order, or because the earth had begun to yield some stray bits of nutriment again. In September 1847, things looking somewhat brighter I suppose, I was sent with two older brothers to a school in the King's County called Tullabeg. This estabhshment was con- ducted by the Jesuit Fathers. It was situated m the midst of a great region of bog-land, as the name implies — Tullabeg, the little bog — in contradistinction, I suppose, to the great many big bogs which surrounded it. My recollections of this school are not happy ones. I was nine years old, and thin and delicate ; and the cold of the winter, in that elevated marsh-land which lies to the north of the Slieve Bloom Hills and almost in the centre of the island, seemed to strike into the heart and soul of a frame such as mine. All the more did the climatic conditions tell against a small boy because the majority of the other boys were strong. Many of them were rough, and, it is needless to say, were as merciless to their smaller and weaker fry as though the school had been of pilchards. My mother's death in the summer of 1849 caused us to be taken from school. Things had grown worse over the land. If actual famine had lessened, its after effects had spread and deepened. Sickness of many kinds prevailed everywhere, and contagion carried death into homes of rich and poor alike. The winter of 1848-49 dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow. I was only ten years old ; two children still younger than I was were both stricken with the long wasting fever which was ravaging the country. It was at this time that my mind began to take impressions THE OLD HOME 5 which time has not been able to impair, and to form thoughts which experience of hfe has only tended to deepen. In what manner my father was able to weather the storm which had so suddenly broken, in which so many stronger craft had gone down, I do not know, but he was a brave man. The strange part of it was that it was all new work to him. He had not fought these foes before, and he was at this time not far off his sixtieth year. This is where religion comes in. Gradu- ally things grew better. Youth soon rallied ; and even when things were at their worst, we youngsters had the fields, the river, and the mountain still with us — the country of which Spenser had said that it was ' the richest Champain that may else be rid ' ; and the mountain that he speaks of as ' the best and fairest hill that was in all this Holy Island's heights," Nor had he forgotten the river : he calls it ' the gentle Shure.' But that was saying little : gentle it was, no doubt ; but many things besides — ^grass-banked, wiUowj', winding, pebbly, with deep limpid pools and silvery shallows — ' the fishful Swire/ another old writer caUs it. Our old home lay at the other side of the river, and its name told the sylvan story of the beautiful stream, ' the town-land of the winding river ' — Ballycarron. My father had been bom there, as had some eight or nine generations of our family, since the time Black Tom of Carrick^ had settled his brothers and a lot of his followers west of the Suir after the destruction of the Desmonds in 1584. The family traditions were almost as extensive as the family purse was limited. I think that there was a somewhat similar antithesis of thought with us between purse and pride, not uncommon in cases of the kind — as though nature had put into old blood some antitoxin to neutralise the effect of the bacteria of poverty*. Be that as it may, the river, the moun- tains, and the family history were aU interwoven together. The old peasants stiU called the great plain that stretched from Slieve-na-Man to the Galtees, ' Butler's country.' The name alone survived. The possession had long since shrunken to narrow limits. CromweU had ridden over it, and WiUiam had crossed it agam forty years later, harrowing where the other had ploughed. A century of penal law had bitten out ^ Thomas Butler, tenth Earl of Ormond. 6 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY many a broad acre from it as the devil was said to have bitten out the big gap in the ' Devil's Bit ' Mountain, that bounded our range of sight to the north as the Galtees stopped it to the south. What ups and downs of life had all these ups and downs of land surface seen ! Some very old men had survived the famine and fever years, and they were always ready to spin a story of ' the good old times ' for us young people. Cromwell's war was not such a far-away event in 1850 to men or women who could reckon eighty or ninety years of existence. They had heard, as children, old men and women of fourscore years telling their tales by the winter's fireside — 1850, 1770, 1700, 1630— when Oliver Cromwell was farming and brewing in Huntingdon. A hears a story from B who had heard from C what D was told ten years before the time when forty of the Butlers feU at Kilrush fighting under Mountgarret in Wexford — that time when a riderless horse belonging to one of the forty, with broken bridle and saddle topsy-turvy, came galloping into the castle ' bawn ' on Kilmoyler HiU, a short mile across the fields to the south of our river. The church- yard lore, too, seemed to have survived the wreck of Ufe and estate longer than other traditions. Our famUy burial-place was by the old ruined church of Killardrigh, half a mile beyond the hill of Kilmoyler. A fragment of an old headstone, lying among debris near the east window of the Uttle ruin, said that in this place several generations of the Butlers of Kilmoyler, descendants of the ninth Earl of Ormond, were interred. Before KiUardrigh, the old people said we had buried in Lough Kent, four miles to the east ; and before that at Clerihan, about the same distance to the south-east. This showed the steps which the course of incessant tribal fighting between the Butlers and Desmonds had caused the family outposts to foUow, as the Desmonds were being slowly pushed back towards the west. If Desmond had ' wine from the royal Pope ' and guns from the King of Spain, ' Black Tom,' in his great house at Carrick, had had many a boat-load of arms, powder, and bullets from his ' cousin ' the Queen of England. Her likeness and royal cipher are still to be seen in Italian stucco work in a dozen medallions round the ruined banqueting-hall of the castle at Carrick. In the old times neither chief nor clansman went far to marry FATHER'S EARLY DAYS 7 or to bury. Wherever you jfind one of those lonely, lofty, square stone towers, called ' castles ' in Ireland, you will also find, close by, the ruined church, with mounds and mouldering headstones around it — MuUaghnoney, Woodenstown, Kilna- cask. Cromwell's soldiers smashed them all to bits, but the dead steal back to the ruined churches still. Looking back now at the early days of my boyhood, I often think with keen regret of all the opportunities lost for ever of hearing more and still more of what those grand old people had heard or read of in their day. My father had been edu- cated at Ulverston in Lancashire, at a school kept by Bishop Everard, a refugee from France in the time of the Revolution. This remarkable ecclesiastic, afterwards Archbishop of Cashel, had, with the aid of some of the old highest Catholic families, started a private school in the little Lancashire village in the last decade of the eighteenth century. We were related through marriage with the family of Everard, and thus had arisen the connection between teacher and student at Ulver- ston. What mines of historic interest here lay entombed ! An Irish-French bishop getting away from the south of France before Napoleon had taken Toulon. My father used to tell us of dehghtful evenings spent at the house of a Catholic lady who had hved at Ulverston at this time — Barbara, Lady Mostyn. She had early separated from her husband, Sir Piers Mostyn, for some incompatibihties, one of which I remem- ber. Sir Piers was sitting late with his foxhunting friends one night shortly after the marriage. My lady was in her own apartments. It was proposed that she should be ' blooded ' — this ceremony consisted in drinking a cup of claret in which the brush of the fox last killed was put. My lady was sent for. Seated at the table, the rite was explained to her, and the noxious draught placed before her. She refused to drink it. ' By G , madam,' thundered Sir Piers, ' you will have to drink it ; you must be " blooded." ' Lady Mostyn drank the cup, and left the castle, to which she never returned. Another Ulverston story I also remember. One of the young men at the school (they were aU of university age) came in from the garden one evening showing signs of great mental distress. A strange form, he said, had appeared to him on a garden walk. It tried to utter some words : the light was 8 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY good, he could not have been deceived. Next day he adhered to his sto^3^ He was advised to go back again to the spot. He did so. The form again appeared at the same place. It spoke. It was the form of a relation who was abroad in some distant place. A ship had gone down at sea ; he (the relation) had been lost. There was a sum of money owing to some person : the form had come to ask that this money might be paid ; that was all. Months later came the news of shipwreck. My father had lived too in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, and of that still more successful warrior, King George the Fourth, whose charge at Waterloo, when Prince Regent, as is well known, had smashed the French army to pieces. Of this last hero he (my father) had seen something : he saw the First Gentleman of Europe standing up in his carriage, either in College Green or at the Curragh — a cap of green velvet with a long gold tassel on his rojaA head, and a tumbler of hot whisky punch in his roj^al hand, pledging the health of his true and loving Irish subjects with whom he had determined to spend the remaining days of his Ufe. I will not here indulge in anj^ speculations as to what the course of history might have been had this royal intention been carried out. I was never told, nor do I know to this day, how it had happened that our family had been able to hold on to Bally- carron through all the vicissitudes of the Penal times. So long as a Stuart was on the throne they had friends of some sort at Court ; but after the accession of the House of Hanover the family anxieties must have been considerable. Among the fourteen main clauses of confiscation and persecution in the penal code, there were at least three which must have made the life of a Catholic gentleman in the eighteenth century a very doubtful blessing, and a most precarious possession. 11. Any Protestant seeing a Catholic tenant at will on a farm, which in his opinion yielded one-third more than the annual rent, might enter on that farm, and by simply swearing to the fact, take possession of it. 14. Any Catholic gentleman's child who became a Protestant could at once take possession of and assume title to his father's property. 7. Any two justices of the peace could caU any man over sixteen years of age before them, and if he refused to abjure CROMWELLIAN ANECDOTE 9 the Catholic religion, they could bestow his property on the Protestant next of kin. With provisions of spoliation such as these, and there were many more of similar impact, making, every morning, poverty a ' possible contingency ' before evening, the lives of some of my progenitors in Ballycarron must have been somewhat Damoclesian ; but Nature has many ways of correcting the errors of the law-maker, and no doubt she used them at this period along the winding river. The habit of seeking wives near at hand had caused a very numerous cousinship to spring up in the valley of the Suir. One mile down the river there resided, sometime about the year 1750, a certain ' Mosh ' or Tom Butler, of desperate fighting tenacity. Tradition said that he was always ready to fight anybod}^ ; but the descendant of a Cromwellian settler had ever first claim on him, and the great duel between him and one Sadler at a place called Ock- na-Gore (the ford of the goat), close by where I am now writing, was a favourite subject for spirited recital by elderly black- smith folk and old fishermen along the river when I was a boy. Large crowds had assembled to see the fight. The point of the story was that Sadler was reputed to wear under his clothes a suit of chain mail, impervious to the bullet of that time. In loading the pistols, ' Mosh's ' second contrived to insert a silver coin as the wad between the powder and the bullet. The word was given ; the combatants fired. Sadler was seen to wince ; * Mosh ' was untouched : the seconds declared themselves satisfied. Both combatants mounted their horses to return to their respective homes, but when Sadler reached the ford at the little stream of the Fidogtha, and his horse bent its head to drink, somebody observed blood running down the leg of Sadler and into his boot. Examina- tion could no longer be deferred ; but while preparations were being made for it the Cromwellian champion fell from his horse, and then there was found outside his net of steel a flattened bullet, and inside the mailed shirt a small incised wound, through which the silver coin had found its way into a vital spot. The old blacksmith, who used to love to relate this story and many others of a similar kind, was a philosopher of no mean contemplative power ; and often when pursuing some train of thought he would sum up the lost Cause by carrying 10 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY it into the other world, and he would suddenly ask me such a question as, * Wliere 's Cromwell now ? ' or, ' Where 's Ireton to-day ? ' I was always careful not to anticipate the supreme point by giving direct answer to his question ; but I would just say, ' Where ? ' Then his eyes would flash like the sparks from his own anvil. ' I '11 tell ye,' he would cry. ' He 's where he could kindle his pipe with his elbow/ Then there was nothing more to be said. By means of a cousinship of the kind exemplified by ' Mosh,' and a numerous famUy of the O'Doherty clan, a member of which had moved into Tipperary from Innistown towards the close of the seventeenth century (whose son married a Butler of Ballycarron early in the eighteenth century), the eleven hundred acres that lay within the town- lands of the winding river had remained tolerably secure throughout three hundred years of penal confiscation. It was about 1778 that Catholics were given the legal right to hold estates. Through the same relaxation of the penal codes during the American War a large number of these fighting cousins found their way into the army. Some half-dozen of those family feudatories appear in the Army List of the end of the eighteenth century — one of them Colonel Richard O'Dogherty in the 69th Regiment of Foot, which regiment he saved from capture by the French in 1795. A nephew of this man, another Richard, got a commission about ten years later ; but his name appears as * Doherty ' — the ' 0' ' and the ' g ' omitted. What 's in a name ? A good deal, sometimes. Richard had a brother Theobald, who also got a commission in the 40th Regiment after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens. Theobald had a wellnigh unequalled fighting record : he fought at Roleia, Vimeira, Talavera, Busaco, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria, Pyrenees, Orthes, and Toulouse. He only attained the rank of captain ; and he was compelled to leave the army years later because, under cir- cumstances of very gross provocation on the score of his religion, he had challenged a senior officer to fight a duel. The elder brother, Richard, saw active service only at Guadaloupe and Martinique : he had those two bars to his war medal against his younger brother's ten ; but he gave up his faith as weU as the obnoxious ' 0' ' before his name. AN EVICTION SCENE 11 Nevertheless, to Richard I owe the fact that X was a soldier, and that I was posted to the 69th Regiment. I remember well a visit which I paid to this old kinsman in 1856 or 1857. I was under inspection. It was an anxious moment. He was reserved, graciously solemn, and of the type of veteran not uncommon at that time, but now rarely to be seen — the type of Gough, Napier, Harry Smith, and a dozen others. He wore a high black silk stock, behind the stiff shelter of which he seemed to be able at times to withdraw a good deal of the lower part of his face in order to regard me to greater advant- age from the upper portion. ;3ut I anticipate by a few years, and I must go back to the years succeeding the great famine. When things became financially safer, we boys were sent to school again — this time to Diiblin, where, in a large house in Harcourt Street, once the residence of the notorious John Scott, first Earl of Clonmel, a Doctor James Quinn had estab- lished himself as president, assisted by a staff of teachers, nearly all of whom, like their chief, attained celebrity as bishops in the colonial ecclesiastical world. I often wondered in after Ufe how the balance of the account lay, between the loss of school education caused by those famine years, and the gain of that other lesson of Ufe — its necessities, its sorrows, its hard bed-rock facts which that terrible time had implanted in my mind. In particular there was one scene in the theatre of that time which did more, I think, to shape the course of thought than years of study could have done. One day I was taken by my father to the scene of an eviction on that road of which I have already spoken as being so full of the cottages and cabins of the people who were called cottiers — peasants with three or four acre plots of land. I have never forgotten the pity of that day. On one side of the road was a ruined church, the mounds of an old graveyard, and a few of those trees which never seemed to grow any larger but remained stunted and ragged deformities, nibbled at by goats below and warped by storms above, and left to find voice for the wind as it whistled through them ; on the other side, and beyond the old church, stood some dozen houses which were to be pulled down on this day, and their denizens evicted. At this time the weakening effects of the famine were still painfully evident in the people, and the spirit of 12 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY opposition which, m after years was to become so strong was not in being. The sheriff, a strong force of pohce, and above aU the crowbar brigade — a body composed of the lowest and most debauched ruffians — were present. At a signal from the sheriff the work began. The miserable inmates of the cabins were dragged out upon the road ; the thatched roofs were torn down and the earthen waUs battered in by crowbars (practice had made these scoundrels adepts in their trade) ; the screaming women, the half-naked children, the paralysed grandmother, and the tottering grandfather were hauled out. It was a sight I have never forgotten. I was twelve years old at the time ; but I think if a loaded gun had been put into my hands I would have fired into that crowd of villains, as they plied their horrible trade by the ruined church of Tampul-da-voun (the church of the east window). Singularly enough, it feU out that, after twenty-five years, I should meet at Highclere an ex-colonial governor who had fiUed many positions of trust and authority in his day — Sir Arthur Kennedy, He had been in early life one of the Famine Commissioners in the County Clare, and not the least tragi- cally interesting in the gloomy Blue Book which has collected the reports of these officers throughout Ireland are the reports sent in by the then Captain Arthur Kennedy of his experiences in Western Clare during the famine years. One day the conversation turned upon Ireland and the Irish famine. Something was said which caused the old veteran's face to flush. Turnmg full towards his host he said, ' I can teU you, my lord, that there were days in that western county when I came back from some scene of eviction so maddened by the sights of hunger and misery I had seen in the day's work that I felt disposed to take the gun from behind my door and shoot the first landlord I met.' ' Strong words. Sir Arthur,' was all that the then Colonial Secretary could say. ' Not stronger, my lord, than were my feelings at that time,' answered the old soldier. While I was at school in Dublm the Crimean War began ; and as the regiments in garrison were all sent to the East, their departure for the seat of war was an event of great interest to the schoolboys. Daily we used to accompany some regiment of horse or foot, cheering them as they marched SCHOOLDAYS ENDED • 13 through the streets. In one of these mfantry regiments there marched a subaltern officer who was afterwards destined to rise to great distinction, and with whose career I was in after life to have the honour of being associated on many occasions. In the Story of a Soldier's Life, Lord Wolseley has graphically described the departure of his regiment, the 90th, from Dublin ; the scenes of the streets ; and the sympathy of the men and women with the eight or nine prisoners who were under his charge as subaltern officer of the day. ' Many purses were handed to them, and they had a real ovation. I found myself the centT-e of a crowd that regarded me as a jailer. " Poor boys ! " I heard on every side, whilst men and women scowled upon me. They (the prisoners) were assumed to be England's enemies because thus guarded, so of course they became the heroes, the dear friends of the Dublin rabble,' For my part, I have found this feeling of sjTnpathy with prisoners a very general one tlirough the world, and I do not think that human nature has any reason to be ashamed of it. Nor is the senti- ment of sympathy, even when it is misdirected, peculiar to the people of Ireland. I remember once seeing a naval picket in Plymouth carrying, or endeavouring to carry, a very turbulent sailor to his ship. A crowd of women were follo\ving the cortege, and cries of ' Ah ! don't hurt the pore sailor ! ' were frequent. As the picket passed, I noticed that the * pore sailor ' had got the petty officer's thumb into his mouth and was vigorously engaged in the attempt to chew it off ; but the greatly suffering petty officer had no pity expressed for him. Here undoubtedly was a case of sympathy so mis- directed that there was not even a rule of thumb about it. The Crimean War was over before I left school. A short interval of aimless expectation followed it. My father was not keen that his son should enter a profession in which the dis- advantage of the absence of money could only be overcome by the surrender of one's rehgion — for that at least was the lesson which the cases of his relatives in the army had taught him. In June 1857 came the news of the Indian Mutiny. I have already spoken of a visit paid to the old kinsman. Sir Richard Doherty, and of ' the inspection ' then undergone. It appears to have been tolerably satisfactory, because not long after- 14 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY wards a letter arrived from him to my father enclosing a communication from the Military Secretary, nominating me to a direct commission without purchase. In July 1858 I passed the qualifying examination at Old Burlington House, and on the 17th of the following September was gazetted ensign in the 69th Regiment, the corps which had been saved from capture by the French through the instrumentality of another Richard O'Doglierty some sixty-three years earlier. My new corps was stationed in Burmah, and its depot was at Fermoy, in the County Cork, some forty miles at the other side of the Gal tee Mountains. At that time there was no railway to this military station, so I proceeded thither by a roundabout journey on a long-car which ran from Kilmallock to it through a wild hilly country dividing the valley of the Blackwater River from the waters flowing into the Shannon and the Suir. It was a dull November evening, the 17th, as we reached Fermoy. I carried a letter from Sir Richard Doherty to the commandant of the depot battalion — a Colonel Egerton, who had once been my venerable cousin's adjutant. There is a certain aspect of awe about the interior of a barracks when it is entered by a young officer for the first time ; and the square of the old barracks at Fermoy made no exhilarating-looking picture as it appeared to me in the gloom of a damp November evening when I made my way across it to the house of the colonel commanding. But how kind and bright was mj'' reception at the hands of Colonel Egerton and his wife ! I was to come and lunch with them the next day. I was to dine at the mess that evening just as I was. The colonel took me himseK to the officer commanding my depot, and then I went back to the httle hotel to get ready for the mess dinner. JP CHAPTER II Old soldiers and young. Orders for India. A four months' voyacre. Bunnah. I HAD had but little acquaintance with the world up to this time. Fifty years ago boys were very far removed from the intercourse with older persons which is now so common among them. The thing, therefore, that struck me most strongly was the kind and familiar manner with which I was treated from the first moment of joining at Fermoy. Nearly all the older officers had seen service in the Crimean War, which was then only a recent event. The majority of them were splendid fellows ; that long siege had been a wonderful school for the forming of manly characters. They had a type and manner of their own. Their hair was not cut short, as in the present day, but was worn long over the ears ; and they had large fuzzy whiskers, with moustaches that went straight into them. They smoked much, and some of them drank a good deal ; but they carried their liquor well, as it used to be said. There were the depots of six different regiments in the battalion — two companies from each regiment (twelve in all on parade), with a colonel, two majors, an adjutant, and quartermaster specially attached as battalion officers. Some of the captains had been promoted from the ranks for distinguished conduct on the field. The colonel, Isaac Moore, had risen from the ranks. He was an old officer, with the profile of an eagle, the voice of a Stentor, and a heart of great goodness. He was exceedingly strict on all matters of duty, a splendid drill after the manner of the time, and he rarely left the barracks except to take the battaUon out to the drill field. His pronunciation of some military words was peculiar. Qp was warned not to exert his voice too much on pairade, but he persisted in giving the long-drawn-out cautionary commands of the old Peninsular drill days, such as, ' The battalion will change front by the wheel and countermarch of subdivisions round the centre ' ; 18 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY shallow where I was standing, expecting every moment to smash rod, line, and wheel ; but luck was on my side. Nothing broke, and in ten minutes or so my fish was boring quietly in some deeper water nearer shore. Then I waded back to the bank, and getting his head down stream, took him down to where an eddying backwater, close under the bank, had collected on the surface of the water a lot of white foam. Into this little circular pool I steered mj^ salmon. I had no gaS, and he lay just beneath the surface. I could see that he was no smaU fish, but a salmon of ten or eleven pounds. What was to be done ? No one was near to help. I had a pocket- knife of ordinary size with me. I opened its larger blade, got down to the lower ledge of turf close by the pool, and as the now tired fish came slowly round in the eddy and the foam, close against the bank, I struck the Uttle knife with my right full into his shoulder, holding the rod in my left hand bent in towards the shore. The fish gave one great plunge ; but the blow was straight and sure, and I found that my stroke had pinned him against the bank. Then, dropping the rod from my left hand, I got my fingers under the gills and lifted the salmon safelj^ in to the shore. He was a beautiful fresh-run fish. I got back to the mess as the long June evening was closing — wet, tired, but very proud of my feat ; and as the depot battaUon had many good anglers among its numbers, I had to go through the scene in the ante-room with all the original paraphernalia of the performance shown in action. There was an old captain of the 95th Regiment in the battalion who had his quarters on the opposite side of the passage where I Uved — Captain Robert Weild — * Old Bob Weild,' as he was popularly called amongst us youngsters. He was a very quaint specimen of a soldier now quite extinct. He drank a good deal, and smoked pipes of many kinds and colours. He spoke the broadest Lowland Scotch. He took a fancy to me, and would often come into my room with his long cherry-stick pipe and sit smoking at the fire and telling me of his early life and former service. He was a native of the town of Wigtown, where his father had been the principal baker, and young Bob's business had been to deliver the bread through the town. He preferred to try his fortune as a soldier, and enlisted in the 95th Regiment. He went to the SAILING FOR INDIA 19 Crimea as a colour-sergeant, was at Abna and Inkermann, and did his full share of trench service. One day a round-shot hopped over the parapet and struck Colour-Sergeant Weild in the chest. Fortunately a wave of wind which came a little in front of the ball had turned the man shghtly on one side, so that the mass of iron only carried away two or three ribs, laying bare the heart below them. To all appearances he was killed ; but there was a spark of life still left m him : the heart had not been actually touched. * As they were carrying me back through the trenches/ he used to say, ' we met a surgeon who had a well-filled box of medical comforts, and the first thing this good fellow did was to empty a pint of strong brandy down my throat ; that kept the heart going and saved my life.' It must be said that old Bob never forgot the hquid to which he owed his salvation. Sometimes he would stay late in the little club at the foot of the barracks hill ; and as I would be crossing the square to the mess, I would encounter mj'' old friend making the best of his way from the gate to his quarters, walking straight to the front, but gazing at the ground with a fixed stare and an expression in his e3'e that told me it would not be safe to speak a single word to him. He had taken his line from the gate, and he was steering for his door upon a mental compass bearing so fine that the smallest whisper might have deranged it. On other occasions we passed each other like ships in the night. Orders for India came m the early summer of 1860, and we went our several wa3'3 — old Weild to India, I to Burmah. Six months later I heard of his death in Central India. I was very active in those days. A month before we started for the East there were foot races in Limerick, where I won the two hundred and fifty yards hurdle race against the south of Ireland garrison. Our 69th draft — three ofl&cers and one hundred' and twenty men — embarked at Queenstown in the ship Coldstream for Madras in July 1860. There were also in this Uttle vessel of eight hundred tons sixty men of the Royal Irish Regiment and three ofiicers. After a delay of three days in Queenstown Harbour, for laying in provision for a long voyage, we were towed out beyond the mouth of the harbour and cast off. It blew a btiff gale that night, and we kept plunging into a heavy 20 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY head sea, for land was on the lea and there was no sea room. It was the 11th of July, a Wednesday ; I remember the day of the week because from the midday of that Wednesday to the evenmg of the foUowmg Sunday no food passed my lips. I was then nearly dead of starvation. For one hundred and twenty-four days we continued to crawl over the ocean, and in those four months saw but two specks of land — Madeira, and St. Paul's Island in the Southern Indian Ocean. We lay becalmed in the vicinity of the equator for three weeks. The drinking water was horrible — the colour of weak tea and with a taste that was nauseating. It had first rotted in the barrels, then fermented, and after it had gone through that cleansing process it was declared to be wholesome. Bad as it was, the men became mutinous because they could not get enough of it to satisfy their thirst when we were lying becalmed in the tropics. After some forty days we caught the south-east trade winds and shaped a course towards the coast of South America ; then by Tristan da Cunha, which was hidden in dense masses of clouds ; and round the Cape of Good Hope, but some four hundred miles to the south of it. Here, towards the end of September, we entered upon a vast ocean of gigantic roUers, a grey limitless waste of waters that came surging after us in stupendous billows as though they would overwhelm the little speck of ship that carried us. Vast flocks of sea-birds circled high above our masts. The captain was a most excellent man ; the crew of twenty- nine hands were strong and fearless fellows. It was often a splendid sight to see them aloft, double reefing topsails on a night of storm and lightning in the Southern Indian Ocean — black darkness everywhere, then a flash lighting up the deck, masts, and spars, and showmg the black specks aloft in the rocking rigging, clewing in the flapping canvas to the topsail yards. We kept night-watch like the crew, and wretched work it was ; the ship leaked badly from the beginning, but it was only when the stormy southern latitudes were reached that the leakage became really serious. The ship was then making several inches of water every hour. We had one pump near the mainmast on the quarter-deck ; and it used to take the A DANGEROUS CARGO 21 men of the watch, with the pump handles fully manned, a full hour's hard work before the water was got out of the vessel. Three times in the night this work went on. The soldiers hated it so much that it was no easy matter to get them up from the lower deck out of their hammocks to the wet and slippery quarter-deck. With the sergeant of the watch one had to creep along the odour-reeking deck under the hammocks, shouting, and often unslinging the hammock lines before the men would turn out. Then, when the handles were manned, they would vent their ill-humour upon the wretched pump by working it lil^e demons up and down — until the captain, hearing the banging, would rush out from his cabin behind the little ' cuddy ' vociferating to the men that if they broke the pumps the ship would smk in thirty hours. This miserable work went on until the ship's course was turned northwards from the Uttle island of St. Paul's, and as smoother latitudes were gained the leakage lessened. We did not know then, but it was afterwards dis- covered, what was the cause of the leakage. The ship was carrying a very dangerous cargo, and one that should have made it impossible for her owners to obtain a commission for the carriage of troops — railroad iron. She had six hundred tons of iron rails down below the other ordinary cargo. It was this dead soUd weight that had caused her timbers to open in the gale and heavy seas into which we plunged the night after leaving Ireland. Fortunately the rent was just at or above the water-line, so when the sea was fairly smooth the intake of water was small ; but whenever bad weather came, and the vessel's bows went down mto the waves, the water came in in quantities, and for six hours in the twenty- four the men were at the pumps. There was no Plimsoll in those days : the shipowners could do as they pleased ; and a five-pound note placed in the palm of an inspector between decks by the agent from the office in Leadenhall Street could lighten the duties of inspection and remove many doubts and difficulties. My kit was a small one, but I had managed to include in it one box of books, and I was able to borrow other works from brother officers on board. I read a great deal in the long weary months, sailing the great circle to India. 22 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY In a little book wliich I wrote more than forty years ago, subsequent to that voyage, I was comparmg the sailing ship of the old bygone times with the steamers of to-day, and I wrote that it was then ' the great circle, but now it was the short cut/ A London literar}- review, with the well-known infallibility of the editorial armchair, which embraces every- thing m knowledge from a needle to an anchor, pointed out that I was in error, inasmuch as ' the great circle ' and ' the short cut ' were sjiionymous expressions. But he forgot that we were dealing with sailing ships, and that the trade wind was the chief factor concerned in the question. From England to India by the short cut via the Cape is about ten thousand miles ; but no sailing ship attempting that passage in the teeth of the trade wind could get to its destination under a term of years. The great circle, which the sailing vessels still follow en route to India — makmg a fair wind of the south- east trade by running towards the coast of South America from the Line and thence, before the powerful western winds, by Tristan da Cunha to St. Paul's and Amsterdam Islands, where they turn north for India — is some eight or nine thousand miles longer in distance, although it saves many months in time. Now and again on that long voyage we had some incidents that gave us, at least, a subject for conversation at the little ' cuddy ' table where we gathered for meals. One morning, in the earlj)- watch, strange sounds were heard as of some one singing under the bottom of the ship. No one could locate the sound. It was fitful and indistinct, hilarious and despondent by turns. Men looked at each other. At last the morning roU was called, and it was found that there was a man missing. AU the decks were searched, the cook's galley, the long-boat, where the six or eight sheep and the dozen pigs were, and the forecastle wherein the crew had their bunks — ^no man could be found ; but stiU the mj^sterious sounds rose at intervals. At length it was discovered that a person looking down the square hole through which the long chain cable was passed into its box below, could hear the strange noise with greater distinctness than elsewhere in the ship. This discovery soon solved the mystery : the missing man was far down in the chain locker. Some one descended the shaft. A very fat INDIA SIGHTED 23 soldier was found near the bottom of the aperture, stretched upon some cargo in the hold. Fresh discoveries followed. The captain and the mate descended. From where the fat man was found a track led over piles of general cargo to a bulk- head, which was directly under the stem part of the ship. This bulkhead had had a hole cut through it into the spirit- room. This hole passed through, a still stranger sight was revealed : many cases of gin and other strong spirits, which had been destined for the consumption of Asiatic committees in general, were found opened and rifled ; a comfortable straw- lined tap-room was next found among the cases, and many small candle ends, some of which, in Ueu of candlesticks, had been stuck on to the ship's side, the timbers of which the lighted candles had in many places charred. Here had been the chosen meeting-place of a select few among the crew and soldiers. Night after night those faithful fellows had descended the chain locker and sought the seclusion of this spirituous paradise. At last, in a happy moment for the remainder of the uninitiated, the fat soldier was bidden to the feast. He had descended easily ; but when the hour came for reascending to the cold upper world, either his size or the quantity of liquor he had swallowed prevented the ascension. His companions could not drag him up the locker, and he had to be left at its base : elation or terror did the rest. The fatness of this particular male siren had probably saved the good ship Coldstream from a fate worse than any shipwreck ; and the hardest part of the thing was that he was the sole man of the wrong-doers whom it was possible to punish. Instead of being the recipient of many Humane Society's medals for savmg the lives of about two hundred and fifty human beings, he spent the greater portion of the remainder of the voyage in leg-irons. At daybreak on 2nd November land was in sight. We had been heading for it a day or two before, and there it was at last — a low coast beaten by a white surf, fringes of palm-trees, some white houses, and a range of hills beyond the Coromandel coast. Some forty miles north of Madras we anchored in the open roadstead of that town about noon. A high surf was running, and only a naked Catamaran man on his three logs lashed together could come out to us with letters and orders carried in his skull cap of oiled wicker work. After three or 24 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY four days' rolling and pitching at anchor we were allowed to land, and when evening came we all marched to a place called Poonamallee, about twelve miles west of Madras. Every- thing was new and strange to us — the people, the trees, the fire- flies in the bamboo hedges, the cicadas in the feathery palm- trees, the bull-frogs in the grassy fields, the endless multi- plication of life human and animal everywhere to be seen, heard, or felt. Poonamallee was a delightful old cantonment, built in the days of Clive or earlier — an old semicircular mess- house with mango-trees surrounding it, and a broad verandah raised two feet above the ground, supported along its outer edge by pillars of snow-white ' chunam ' ; three hundred yards away a Moorish fort with a broad ditch around it full of bull- frogs; and beyond it the village or town of Poonamallee, a very extraordinary assemblage of Hindoo temples and houses, the former representing, with an effrontery not to be abashed, the lower and most disreputable fines of the Hindoo worship. This old depot station was commanded by one of the most mteresting veterans it was ever my good fortune to meet in life — Colonel Impett, formerly of the 71st Foot, in which regiment he had fought at Waterloo. He was now in his sixtieth year, taU and spare, the most lovable old soldier who ever drew to him the heart of man or woman. What days I had fistening to this man ! After Waterloo he had marched to Paris, when he was not yet fifteen ; then later he went to Canada. He had been at Fermoy in the 'twenties, and now for thirty years his service had been wholly in India. Before I was a week at Poonamallee he had taken me out to shoot snipe with him in the paddy fields, five miles from the station. In the gharry going to and coming from the ground, and in drives to and from Madras, he often used to speak about his early experiences — particularly of the day at Waterloo. He was given a commission at either Eton or Harrow, and had been hurried out to Belgium in the spring of 1815 to join his regiment there cantoned — part of that vast force of about a million men which those brave feUows, the kings and emperors of Europe, had gathered round the French frontiers to fight the single soldier whose army two months earUer had numbered a bare five hundred all told. He described the repeated charges of the French cavalry upon his regiment in square on the windy ON TO BURMAH 25 slope of the ridge behind the hollow road that ran from La Haye Sainte. When night fell the wearied men, already half asleep, lay down where they stood. Impett caught a black horse which passed by without a rider ; he tied the rein to his wrist, and then sank into a deep sleep. When he awoke in the early June dawn, the horse was gone. * It was a lump and a line all day,' he said : * a lump to resist the cavalry, a line to avoid the havoc wrought by the round-shot.' That was certainly a baptism of fire for a boy of fourteen. Many incidents of lesser interest in his Hfe he used to speak about in those httle shooting excursions — of days camped on an island in Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, fishing and deer hunting ; of long walks in the mountains I had lately left near Fermoy. One day, in a glen somewhere in those hills, he and his companion, Captain Markham, a noted shot, came upon a still in full work. No information was given to the excise ofiicers in the town, and a couple of weeks later Markham and Impett found a small keg of poteen whisky laid outside the door of their rooms in the old barracks. After two or three months in Poonamallee the draft moved on to Burmah by steamer from Madras. We touched at several ports on the east side of the Bay of Bengal. Boats carrying fruits and lunka cheroots surrounded the vessel at one of these places. After a time many men were found to be drunk on board ; this was strange, because care had been taken to prevent the bringing of spirits on board. But the attack usually beats the defence. We found on close examination that the oranges in many cases had a small round hole drilled in the rind, through which the juice of the fruits had been extracted and the vacuum filled in with arrack, the rind plug being again inserted. In due time we reached Rangoon, and shortly afterwards we embarked in Burmese boats for the Pegu River, and marched thence across the twenty miles of low-lying jungle and high, grass-covered waste which divided the Pegu River from the larger Sittang. A very perfect pagoda, one of the loftiest and most grace- fully tapering structures of the kind in Burmah, Hfts its ' thay ' of many bells- three hundred feet and more above this wilderness of grass. Our camp was at the base of this beautiful object. 26 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY now the sole survivor of everything that had made Pegu one of the greatest cities of the East in the early days of Portuguese commercial enterprise. It was not easy to look up at this glittering musical spire in the hot glare of daylight ; but when evening was closing over the landscape, which everywhere showed evidences of ruin and retrogression, the eyes were instinctively drawn upwards to this triple tiaraed crown of tinkling bells, whose lark-like music feU soft as dew through the cooling air. Gone was everything else of that once proud kingdom of Pegu ; this, the work of some old Buddhist saint or hero, was left alone with its own music in the wilderness. We marched at night across the twenty miles of grass and jungle, and at a spot called Khyatsoo, on the Sittang, found a flotilla of boats ready to embark us for a long journey of twenty days up that river. The wide river was here still subject to the tide, which at times forms a ' bore ' of a very dangerous character, A few years earUer the entire half-battahon of a native infantry regiment, with all its o£&cers, baggage, etc., had been swamped near this place by the tidal wave — the ' CaUgima Yeh,' the bad water of the Burmese. We soon passed the wide, tidal part of the river, and entered the narrower stream, which was still high and turbid after the monsoon rains. At first the strangeness of the scene, and above all the boats and boatmen, gave occupation to the mind. The boats were of a shape and structure unlike any other craft in the world : about twelve feet of the stern end of the boat was thatched with strong reeds, the remainder of the boat was open, the stem sloped high above the water, and at its extreme end a high wooden chair gave the steersman a lofty seat, from which he was able to move a big spoon-shaped oar, by a simple turn of his hand, to the right or left. He thus looked over the thatched cabin and weU beyond the bows and the bamboo platform from which the crew worked the boat. The crew of four men took it in turns to propel the boat with long poles, which they worked by going forward to the bow, placing the pole against the hollow of the shoulder, and in this bending position walliing down the narrow bamboo platform to the thatched cabin ; then, releasing the poles from the bottom, they went back again to the bow to repeat the toilsome journey. The current, swollen by the rains, ran strong, and during quite UP THE SITTANG RIVER 27 half of the clay the boat was brushing against the tall reeds that covered the banks, sometimes on one side of the river, some- times on the other. One would have thought that after their long work at this laborious poling, the men would have been glad to lie down to rest when we tied up at night against the bank ; but that they seldom or never did. When the rice was boiled and eaten play of some sort began, and often in the grey morning hght I have looked out from under the thatched roof of the boat and seen the crew still hard at work at cards, or stones, or some queer game of chequers. In the damp fog which then hung over shore and river, they would get up from the little fire by which they had squatted all night, unfasten their ' loongies,' and take a plunge in the yellow waters of the river, diving about like ducks, and coming up wet and glisten- ing to resume the long bamboo poles for the day. Our average rate of progress was about ten mUes a day. Now and again the boat would tie up a little earUer than usual, or the pace would be arranged so as to arrive at some village where a ' pooay ' or play was going on in celebration of a local marriage or funeral. At some of the larger villages a pecuhar smeU would manifest itself when the cooking hour arrived : this was caused by the preparation or consumption of the celebrated Burmese deUcacy known as ' Napee." As the river was now falling quickly, these napee nights became more frequent, because the time had come to unearth the deposits of fish, buried in the sand- banks of the river before the torrential rains of the monsoon began to fill its wide bed. A deep pit is dug in the sand and filled with fish of many kinds ; the sand is pressed down upon the mass of fish ; a long pole is driven into the bar to mark the spot. The river rises, and water overflows the cache for six months ; then, when the waters subside, the cache is dug up, a terribly pungent efiiuvium is evolved from the opened pit, and the napee is carried off by the villagers to be eaten as a special delicacy during the next twelve months. The traveller is conscious of a napee night while he is yet at a considerable distance from the place of entertainment. But, after aU, has not man, even in his most civilised state, some bonne-bouche of this kind — a venerable Stilton, a mite-riddled Roquefort, a semi-liquefied Camembert ? 28 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY After three long weeks of this slow travel our boats reached the bank of the river at the top of which stood Tonghoo. We had been twenty-one days doing these two hundred miles ; but at the end of these three weeks one had gained a knowledge of Burmese life, labours, and manners which was an asset of much use to one in many ways. At this station of Tonghoo I foimd my regiment, the 69th. They had been here more than three years — one might say buried in the Burman forest, for communication was at that time so tedious that a letter took two and a half months to come from London, and a voyage by the long sea route was, as we have just seen, a matter ot about six months' actual travel. Under conditions of life such as these, rust of mind and body must be the prevailing features of European life. The seasons, too, helped the distance and environment. Tonghoo led to no place ; it was the end of the track : beyond and on every side was forest. This month of February was the middle of the dry season. In three months the clouds would sweep up over the tree-tops from the sea, and in terrific thunder and lightning the ball of the monsoon would open. Then for nearly six months it would not be possible to stir beyond the roads of the cantonment. All the forest would be a swamp ; the river, which was now thirty feet down in its channel, would be running level with the tops of the banks ; the bull- frogs would croak outside every compound ; and all the creep- ing things that love heat and damp — scorpions, centipedes, huge spiders, strange lizards, beetles, cobras, and pythons — would hold general carnival. With these climatic conditions in view, it became necessary to do something in the way of exploring the surrounding country in the next couple of months, while the forest tracks could still be travelled by a pony. Once the monsoon began, only the elephant could manage to plough through the deep black mud. Daily rides were therefore taken in many directions. Tonghoo, like all Burmah, has had better days. A huge waUed city had been once here ; the rectangular wall, measuring one mile on each face, alone remained with its enormous ditch, now a jungle-grown swamp. Inside this great brick waU, which was thirty feet thick, a little wicker town of bamboo LIFE IN THE FOREST 29 and rushes occupied about a twelfth part of the origmal city site. The pagoda again remained the sole remnant of the old glory, and a beautiful pagoda it was, though not equal to its Pegu rival. Beyond this great city wall spread mingled spaces of low jungle and paddy fields, all of which were now quite dry. As one galloped along the sandy jungle tracks there would open out at sudden intervals some Uttle village scene — a dozen bamboo huts ; a small pagoda with its ghstening spire ; a teak-wood rest-house for travellers ; a little Poongee monastery, the cocoa palms and mango-trees about it, and its shrine piled with httle figures of Buddha, cross-legged and long- armed, with long pendent ears, and big dreamy eyes looking out upon a big dreamy world. It would be impossible not to like the Burmese people — good-natured, nice-mannered, pleasant people. They never scowled at one nor shouted some unknown word of abuse ; they were glad to render any little service of the wayside without thought of * backsheesh ' ; everj^body smoked big cheroots made up in a large green leaf; everybody seemed happy. But the life of the forest was the one I was most anxious to see ; and late in May I managed, in company with a brother officer, to induce the official in charge of the Forest Department to lend us three elephants (their purchase was quite beyond the reach of our subaltern purses), and loading these animals with our supplies, we sent them to a place some sixty miles south, there to await our arrival by boat. This time the craft selected was a long ' dug-out ' canoe of teak wood. With ten or a dozen men paddling, we travelled by the hght of a full moon, and went gaily down-stream, expecting to reach our landing-place by dayhght, and to find the elephants awaiting us with our supphes, and breakfast ready. But it was noon before our destination was reached : there were no elephants, no food, no anything. We sat all day in a Burman bamboo hut, expecting that every hour would bring us refreshment. Evening came, still no food. Next day it was the same ; then hunger began to assert itself, for rice and napee were not encouraging, so my companion, who spoke a Uttle Burmese, essayed to get a fowl in the village ; but the people were aU good Buddhists, and no one would sell us a fowl, much less kill one. The day wore on, and we were becoming ravenous. 30 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY My friend sallied out again with his gun. There was an old cock on the outskirts of the town, and this antiquated bird he was allowed to shoot. The woman of the house where we had taken up our abode plucked the bird in some form, and boiled it in an earthen vessel. It was then served up half hot, but very tough. I tried it, but had to forbear at the third bit ; my companion, with a braver digestion, performed an unhappy despatch upon his victim, while I looked on. Just as the melancholy meal ended, I heard what seemed to be the solemn sound of the elephant beU in the neighbouring forest. Yes, it was our belated beasts coming slowly into harbour with all our good things on board. That evening we went on about twelve miles into the forest to a place called Banloung, and camped there in absolute freedom — neither house nor village was near. Some previous hunting party had put up a rude shelter of bamboos. A lake close by had water ; round the lake there were large spaces free of forest. We began to beat for big game next morning. It was a hunter's paradise : bits of high grass almost level with the shoulders of the elephants alternated with stretches of splendid forest ; there was low jungle, high jungle, and no jungle. To these varied covers aU sorts of animals had come — sambhur, bison, themming, and jumping deer. It was often like rabbit shooting in bracken, only the rabbits were sometimes sixteen hands high, and the bracken six feet. The themming were in grand herds in the open spaces, the old stags with heavy brow antlers always keeping on the outskirts of the herd. We saw the tracks of many tigers, but the bodies of none — the cover was too dense. The monsoon broke while we were yet in the forest, and when we moved back the elephants had to swim across a dozen nullahs, which had been dry as dust a fortnight earlier. The monsoon ran its dreary course during the next few months. The rain pattered in big straight drops all night long upon the broad leaves of toddy palm and plantain, and the whole land was streaming and steaming with water. Everybody went to mess with lanterns carried in front, for snakes were very numerous, and they had a disagreeable habit of gettmg up from the wet lower ground on to the little raised tracks of brickwork which led from the bungalows to the mess-house. DOWN THE SITTANG 31 Among the senior officers in the station there were some strange and interesting survivals of an earlier generation. At times, when the Madras troops paraded with our regiment, one occasionally heard strange words of command given to the brigade, such as, ' The brigade will prime and load/ All the drill formations were those which old Davy Dundas had designed in the days before the Peninsular War ; and although the flint-lock musket had disappeared twenty years earlier, the recollection of its cumbersome processes of combustion still lingered among our seniors. All the same, they were fine old gentlemen, and it was to one of them that I am indebted for my first quasi-staff appointment. The regiment was inspected in December 1861 by a medical officer of high degree, whose official report declared it to be suffering from a too prolonged sojourn in the enfeebling forests of Burmah, and who recommended its early removal to the drier climate of India. Orders were received in January 1862 for our removal to Madras. The battalion was to descend the river in two separate bodies each of five companies. The old colonel who was to command the last of these detachments appointed me as the staff officer of the wing, and aU at once I found myself adjutant, paymaster, and quartermaster of some four or five hundred men. A month later we moved in a great fleet of boats down the Sittang River. The water was now very low, and at one or two places elephants were used to shove with their heads the flat-bottomed boats over the sand-bars in the stream. Where the river ended and the estuary began we had some exciting experiences of the dreaded ' bore.' Our boatmen were fully prepared for it, and the boats were all taken out from the banks and anchored in mid-channel ; bow- men, crew, and steersman were all at their posts ; the ' Caligima Yeh ' was constantly uttered among them. After we had been some time thus moored a low noise became audible far down stream ; this sound gradually grew in depth and volume, but neither the water around our boats nor the reach of the river below us showed any sign of motion. The sound increased rapidly ; it was now coming to us across the neck of reed- covered land round which the river disappeared at the end of the last reach which our sight commanded. All at once a great white billow of water appeared, sweeping round this 32 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY neck of land. At the banks the splash of this white wave rose several feet in the air ; but when the entire wave had rounded the turn, one could see that in the central part of the river the wave was comparatively low, yet all of it was curling forward almost in a straight line up-stream. It struck our boats fuU on the bows ; all of them rose well to the impact ; but some were torn from their moormgs, making confusion as they ran amuck among the others. It was a fine sight — the ' bore ' itself, and the manner in which the boatmen bore themselves. The next night we marched across the low ground to Pegu. At the moment of starting from Khyatsoo an incident occurred which fortunatelj^ ended happily. A man of recalcitrant character m the regiment, who had been a prisoner for some time, refused to march. As I was acting as paymaster as well as adjutant, the prisoners and the cash chest of the regiment were in my charge, I had come to the guard to see the cash chest safely put into a Burmese buffalo waggon, and the guard and prisoners moved with it after the column. As the first battalion was moving off, the prisoner in question suddenly refused to budge. What was to be done ? The only course possible was to tie him to the rear of the waggon ; he would then have to march perforce. But in this arrangement the buffaloes had not been reckoned with. These curious animals have never taken to the English invaders. You will see a small native boy leading or driving a pair of enormous blue beasts with perfect command over them, but they will shy from, and sometimes charge at, any European who may approach them. On this occasion, no sooner was the word to march given, than the buffaloes attached to our treasure waggon, seeing that the other end of the waggon had an English soldier attached to it, began to behave in a very excited manner ; and to make matters worse, our prisoner still refused to march. The only thing then to be done was to lift the man bodily into the waggon, and put him in company with the cash chest. This was done in a twinkling ; but now the buffaloes, growing quite beyond control, started off across country over dry paddy * bunds,' deep ruts, and many other obstacles. The guard was quickly left behind ; the infuriated buffaloes, with their driver, the waggon, the cash chest, the prisoner in tow, were careering EMBARKATION FOR MADRAS 33 madly over the plain, making the most horrible noise possible to imagine. Being on horseback I was able to keep up with this tornado ; and I could see that in the stampede the prisoner and the regimental cash chest seemed to be having a tremen- dous boxing match in the interior of the conveyance, as they were shot up and down and about by the incessant joltings of this primitive vehicle. The prisoner, as a light weight in the contest, got a good deal the worst of it. There was a hole in the wicker bottom of the waggon, and at last the prisoner's legs got into this opening, and the unequal fight was terminated by his whole body following its legs through the aperture, leaving the regimental cash chest alone in its glory. The rope which tied the prisoner to the waggon quickly ran its length, and then he was dragged along the ground after the waggon in a very alarming manner. AU I could do was to hack at the ropes with my sword as I galloped along, and between the cutting at the line and the strain upon it the man was soon set free. He was black, and bruised, and bleeding, but the first words he uttered when the guard had overtaken us soon re- assured me of his safety. ' I '11 march now,' he said. About the beginning of spring the wing embarked at Rangoon for Madras. CHAPTER III From Rangoon to Madras. A hurricane at sea. The Nilgherry Mountains. The Carnatic Plain. The lives and thoughts of Eastern peoples. Leave spent on the western coast. We were carried in two vessels — a steamer and a sailing ship, the first towing the second. As my lot fell to the sailing vessel, I will deal with it only. For two days all went well with us, but on the morning of the third day a change began to show itself in the aspects of sea and sky. A curious grey gloom spread itself quickly over the circle of the ocean ; everything became the same colour ; there was little or no wind, but the still, unbroken surface heaved a little. This undulation grew more perceptible as the morning passed, until it began to lift our ship uneasily, and made her rise and fall upon the tow-line. The barometer began to fall. Whatever it was, we appeared to be going to meet it, and it seemed that it was coming to meet us also. Our captain was a rather elderly man of the Indian Marine Service, and he appeared to be suffering from marked depression of spirits, which one of the junior officers explained was the result of the death of a brother, who had been drowned a couple of weeks earlier in the Rangoon River through the upsetting of his boat as he was proceeding from the shore to his ship lying in the river. During the two days we had been on board he had kept to his cabin, and had not taken his meals with us in the saloon. The second officer, a gentleman named Salmon, impressed us all as being the moving and governing spirit of the ship's company. These latter were all Lascars from the Chittagong side of the Bay of Bengal. They were a poor lot, but, so far, there was little or no occasion for their services on the deck or aloft, nor did it seem likely that there would be any ; all the sails were furled. The chain cable had been left in great coils along the deck, for the run across the Bay of Madras in the wake of the steamer 34 IN THE JAWS OF A HURRICANE 36 even at the slow rate of towing was not expected to occupy more than five or six days. The Tubalcain, as our ship was named, was an old and cranky craft, half transport, half warship. She mounted a couple of guns on the main-deck. The strong suns of the Bay of Bengal and the Persian Gulf had not improved the seaworthiness of her timbers. At the head of the native crew there was a powerful and masterful-looking * Syrang,' or mate of Lascars, in whom both European officers and Indian crew seemed to have complete confidence. We passed the Cocos Channel between Burmah and the Andaman Islands, and were now well into the centre of the Bay of Bengal. Suddenly the gloomy murkiness of the sea and sky became lit to the westward with vivid lightnings, and the rumbles of an incessant thunder struck the ear ; there was still hardly any wind, but hot puffs of storm came at in- tervals from ahead, ceasing as quickly as they arose. Then all at once a storm began, and a vast commotion manifested itself among the crew on deck. The motion of the ship on the tow- line had become more and more uneasy as the sea rose. AU at once a big wave sprang like a panther upon the bows of the Tvhalcain, scattered the Lascars that were on the forecastle, and jumped again into the sea, carrying with it our splendid Syrang. The Syrang swam bravely, and as he passed beneath the stern of the ship he caught at the log-line that was hanging from it, trailing in the wake of the vessel ; but the rate at which we were being towed, slow though it was, was too fast for the man to let him get a firm grip on the thin line, and it ran through his fingers to the end where the patent brass log was twirling like a fishing minnow ; that, of course, was impossible to hold, and we saw the poor fellow still swimming bravely on the tops of the waves behind us. There was a shout to cut the tow-line, but that could not be done without orders from the steamer, which all this time had been tugging us into the jaws of a hurricane, for that was what all this strange turmoil, and thunder, and gloom of the afternoon had really meant. The captain of the steamer seemed now to realise what he was in for, for he shouted through a trumpet, ' I am throwing off the hawser,' and in a couple of mLuutes more we were separated from him. I shall never forget the look of things 36 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY that evening when we found ourselves left alone in that deepen- ing light and rising hurricane, as we saw our hitherto guide and leader steaming off into the black gloom of the coming night. There was a great deal of confusion for a moment, but the best men stepped instinctively to the front, and dis- cipline soon reasserted itself. It had all happened so suddenly that it was inevitable the parting of the ways should have found us unprepared. The second officer, whose name I have given, sho"W''ed himself master of the situation in a moment. The first thing he had to do was to restore spirit and confidence among the Lascars, shaken as they were by the recent loss of their leader. Fortunately, we were as yet only on the outer edge of the main whirlwind, that stiU lay to the westward, and the lightnmg and thunder were all ahead of us. Four of the strongest of the Lascars were now lashed to the tiller, a few sails were set on the lower yards and booms, the decks were cleared of some of the loose rubbish that encumbered them, and a course was laid which gave the ship greater ease in the now boiling cross-seas that were showing themselves. When night closed we were running towards the north-west, amid a rapid alternation of blinding flashes of lightnmg and inky darkness. The hatches of the lower decks had aU been battened down upon the soldiers and the women and children, the dead- lights fastened, and only the reefed foresail and some other light fore-and-aft canvas set. The barometer was still falling. A couple of hours later the full crash of the hurricane came. No one can ever describe such a scene accurately. There are things in it that when put into words are bound to appear exaggerations. There is no sea and no sky, and no air. They have all become one vast, black, solid, gigantic animal, com- pared to which the lion is a lamb, the whale a minnow, the biggest cannon a child's popgun. There is no sea running as in an ordinary storm ; beneath this awful wind the sea crouches for a time like a lashed hound, and that is exactly what it is. It cannot get up and run before that vast wall of wind. It lies down at first and the wind mows it like grass, shaves it off in swathes of white foam which are caught up into the rushing wind itself, so that no eye can open against it, and no face can face its saltness. But the roar is the thmg that lives longest in memory ; it seems to swallow even the SUBSIDENCE OF THE STORM 37 thunder, as though that too, like the sea, had been brayed into it. As the night wore on the damage grew ; there was no attempt made to take in sail, and one by one they were blown away into the night. The ship then was put before the wind, and we ran as the hurricane listed. Fortunately, there was sea room on every side. At times we seemed to get thrown into the trough of the seas. No man could stand on the poop-deck, and on the quarter-deck the rolling of the vessel set the guns free from their lashings, and caused them to go rolling from one side of the deck to the other, until they broke through the bulwarks and shot out into the sea. The chain cable also got adrift on the deck, and began to roll its immense links from side to side as the ship lurched to and fro. The watch could not live on the deck ; they were brought into the saloon, where they lay on the floor so beaten that one could walk over their bodies. Our boats, too, were torn from their davits, one wave carrying away the long-boat and some live-stock that were penned within it. Towards morning the upper foremast went with a great crash, and the wreck of it could not be cleared. Just before daybreak some one discovered that the barometer had lifted a shade above the extraordinary depth to which it had fallen. This news infused life and vigour into many, who amid these long-continued crashes and disasters had begun to give up hope, and had made up their minds that the ship must founder. The unfortunate captain had shut himself up m his cabm, the Lascar crew were com- pletely demoralised, half of us landsmen were lying in the most exhausting pangs of sea-sickness, and the ship herself was only a floating wreck — boats, yards, gone ; booms broken, guns disappeared. When daylight came it was seen that the hurricane was going down as quickly as it had arisen. There was one man who had fought the elements undauntedly throughout that long night, Salmon, the second officer. He had lashed himself securely to the mizzen-mast before the worst came, and from there he called his orders to the steersmen. Undoubtedly, he saved the ship. A dead calm succeeded the rage of storm, the sun came up bright in the east. Away to the north-west a vast bank of hurricane was driving towards the Orissa coast. We were 38 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY about one hundred and iBity miles out of our true course, a dismantled wreck upon the heaving ocean. By the afternoon things were got into some shipshape, and we were able to bend some sails and rig up a little canvas again. Then, when observations had been taken, a course was set for Madras. Meanwhile the women and children had been brought up and laid out on the deck ; they had suffered much. The seams of the deck had opened, the strained timbers had let floods of water into decks and holds — everything was water-soaked. A week later we crept into Madras ; the steamer had got in four days earlier. She gave a bad report of the chances of the Tuhalcain ; we were given up as lost, poor chaps ! The Army List page of the 69th Regiment had to be revised, and then it had to be revised again ! We were quartered in Fort St. George, a four-company detachment being sent to Wellington in the Nilgherry HOls. A new colonel and several officers joined, and fresh drafts were awaiting us. I closed my accomits with the paymaster and the quartermaster, handed over the wing documents to the adjutant, and started for the hills with a wonderful little Pegu pony, which had escaped injury on the deck of the steamer. He had been thrown out of his crib and rolled about the deck, but had picked himself together again and again, and escaped with a few cuts and bruises. Some other horses had to be cast into the sea. I know no change so satisfying to body, soul, and sense as that which a man experiences when in the month of May he passes from the Indian plains to the Indian hills. No trans- formation scene can equal that change. Every wearied sense, exhausted in the intense heat of the lower lands, sprmgs at once into Hfe. The air of India, when it is breathed at an elevation of six thousand to eight thousand feet, is purity and freshness and life itself, and nowhere does it combine all those attributes in a higher degree than in the Nilgherry Mountains, the Blue Hills. Blue they are when seen from a distance, but green when reached, and what is more, green with all the verdure and scent of the grasses and flowers of Europe. That is the touch which makes us at once at home in these beautiful hills. Through the rose hedges at Coonoor flits the smaU brown wren ; blackbirds and thrushes build their nests in the SOME CONTRASTS 39 gardens at Ootacamund, and the lark singa high and clear in the radiant atmosphere over Dodabetta. All our rare shrubs are there, too, in tree form — the heliotrope, azalea, myrtle, magnoha, gardenia grow to forest heights. From fifty to sixty inches of rain fall annually on this lofty tableland, from which innumerable streams and watercourses wind their opposite ways to rivers which fall into the Bay of Bengal on one side and the Arabian Sea on the other. Once the level of the upper hills is gained the ground is practicable for riding almost in any direction, and from the ramparts which look down on the plains of the Camatic on the east to those which overhang the coast of Malabar on the west some six hundred or seven hundred square miles of rolling tableland lie open to the traveller. If the Garden of Eden was not here, it might well have been. There are points on the eastern ramparts of this paradise from which, in gardens hung with roses and jessamine, one can sit and look down from a clear and bracing atmosphere upon a hundred miles of the fevered, quivering plains of Southern India seven thousand feet below. In this delightful spot I spent a couple of months, the Bur- mese pony enabling explorations to be made in many directions through the hills. The change back to Madras in the hottest time of the year was, however, very trying, and unfortunately the heat disabled so many of our officers that those who were not on the sick list found themselves almost incessantly detailed for garrison or regimental duty. Many of the men fell sick too, and cholera appeared among them. The ground upon which Fort St. George stood was a very hotbed of disease. In October came a welcome change, for the musketry training began, and I moved to a place called Palaveram, about twelve miles to the south-west of Fort St. George, for that practice. It was here possible to see a good deal of the lives of the people of Southern India — the outdoor people, they who bend and toil in the paddy-fields ; who dwell in mud huts without the commonest articles of household furniture ; who have scarcely any clothes ; who are lean of leg, and shrunken in body, and hollow of stomach ; whose women work at water wheels all day long ; who are patient beyond any limit of patience known to white men ; who live and die scratching the hot soil and pouring water upon it ; the poor, starved race, the 40 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY feeble foundation of aU the wealth, splendour, and magnifi- cence the very name of which has made the hungry mouth of the rapacious West water for the last four hundred years. How long will it go on ? Looking back on thef lives of the toiling millions of the Carnatic plain through fifty years, one can see many thmgs which were not then visible. In the fulness of his animal life the British subaltern in a marching regiment is not overmuch given to philosophic inquiry. He drops easily into the belief that he represents the highest form of civilisation, and that he has only to snipe-shoot or pig-stick his way through the world, while at the same time in some mysterious manner he is bearing aloft the banner of British freedom and Western culture. It would be better, perhaps, for the contmuance of the ' Raj ' which he represents if the British oificer could by inclination, or even through com- pulsion, put himself m closer touch and sympathy with the lives and thoughts of the masses of the Eastern peoples with whom the greater portion of his service has to be spent under the conditions of army life now existing in the Empire. I will not pretend that I was different from my fellows in this respect, but even at that time I think I had an instinctive knowledge that the work we were engaged upon in India lacked the greatest element of stability — sympathy with the people of India. I find myself writing at this time, ' It has yet to be proved ... in our rapid development of intellectual power among the people of India . . . whether it be possible to graft upon the decaying trunk of an old civilisation the young offshoot of a newer and more vigorous one. For my part, I am mclined to think that the edifice we are uprearing in India has its foundation resting upon sand. We give the native of India our laws and our scientific discoveries ; he sees that they are good, and he adopts them and uses them as some counterbalance to the misfortune of our presence in his land. . . . He knows that the white man came as a suppliant trader to his shores and begged humbly for the crumbs of his riches. He believes our religion to be a thing of yesterday compared to the antiquity of his own. He knows that by violence and bribery, often- times by treachery and fraud, we obtained possession of his lands. He knows that by force of arms and strength of disci- THE ARMY OLD AND NEW 41 pline we hold our possessions ; nevertheless, he hates and fears us, and while he adopts and uses the discoveries of our civilisa- tion, he still holds that civiUsation in contempt. We pull down the barriers within which his mind has hitherto moved, but the flood of his inquiry being set flowing, we cannot stay or confine it to our own limits. I can see signs that this great structure wo are building will be a ruin before it is completed. I can find no instance m history of a nation which has possessed an old and completed civilisation of its own being able to fuse it, imperfect though it may be, into a newer and a foreign one.' When I re-read these words now I see better what was wantmg in the edifice. There was another subject, and one which appears to have reached a crucial stage in the political outlook of our present day, but which my old notebooks show was very evident to my subaltern comprehension just fifty years ago. Notwith- standing all I have heard and read about the superiority of voluntary enlistment over conscription, it is still, I think, an open question. In a few years the old British army will be extinct — the rocks of the Crimea and the sands of India have covered all but the last of it. How will voluntary enlist- ment work then ? While the army remained small and select, as it was prior to the Crimean War, all went well ; strong men were easily obtained, and no soldiers equalled ours in strength, courage, and endurance. That day is gone. We have now to garrison India with three times the number of men that used to suffice there, and our home army has to be considerably increased. Already the result is visible : the standard has to be reduced ; men are now taken who would have been rejected with scorn a few years ago ; we get recruits no longer from the rural districts, but from the slums of the big cities, and even from these sources we find it difficult to obtain them in sufficient numbers. I believe that a serious war to-morrow would prove to our cost that the army is not of the old stamp. At present enough is still left of the old stufiE to counterbalance the admixture of the new element, but that wUl soon cease, and then England will have to elect between a bad army and conscription. I shall never forget the sorry contrast that presented itself on the bank of the Sittang River at Tonghoo, where one draft of a hundred and 42 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY twenty men of the new model formed up on the high shore from the boats. The old soldiers had come down from the big teak huts a couple of hundred yards away to see the new arrivals. The contrast between the two sets of men was not flattering to the newcomers. The 69th Regiment had been in the West Indies during the Crimean War. The men were thus of the old type, the men of Meeanee and Sobraon, men of splendid physique and well-chiselled feature. The flank companies were still in being, the Grenadier and Light Infantry Com- panies. I often look now as soldiers pass and marvel what has become of those old Greek gods, for not only are the figures gone, but the faces have also vanished — those straight, clean- cut foreheads, the straight or aquiline noses, the keen, steady eyes, the resolute lower jaws and shapely turned chins. What subtle change has come upon the race ? Is it the work of railroads ? Free Trade ? the Penny Press ? Democracy ? Education ? All I know is that they are gone as the buffalo are gone from the prairies, or the Red Man from the American continent. I sometimes think that if these men were bred amongst us to-day there need have been no suffragettes. In 1861 and 1862 little was occurring in India to make resi- dence there interesting to a soldier . Profound peace had followed the close of the Mutiny. A great conflict had broken out in North America ; but ocean telegraph cables were stiU unknown, and the news of aU the desperate fighting upon the shores of the Rappahannock and the Potomac and in the Shenandoah Valley took a long while to get to Madras. Only in one sense, and that a strange one, was this gigantic conflict brought immediately home to us on the Carnatic coast. One hot season, when Madras lay gasping for breath, there were no cooling drinks to be had — the ice-ship from Boston to Madras had not arrived. The Alabama was known to be out, and to her account the fact of the ice-ship's being missing was at once laid. The Southern cause had many supporters among us at the time, but this supposed interference with our thirst by the celebrated Confederate cruiser was a thing which had not been reckoned with when the balance between the rival com- batants had been struck in our community. Had not our Mess rights just as pressing to us as those of Alabama or the Carolinas to the Southerners, and had they not been violated in THE CHOLERA 43 this matter ? So for a time, at least, there was pause in debate among us, imtil one day the ice-ship was seen in the oflfing, and the Federal cause went down again to zero like the temperature in our tumblers. We were seldom quite free from cholera at this time in the fort at Madras. It seemed to strike at random among us. Although the disease had been the scourge of India for more than thirty years, little was known about its treatment, and still less about the science of its cause. Certainly the con- dition of the fort was at this time so bad as to make it un- necessary to look for other sources of disease anywhere else. At about 2 A.M. the outlet of the terrible main drain of Black Town was opened, some five hundred yards to the north of the fort, and a frightful flood of pent sewage was discharged into the sea. The current set down shore, and thus this horrible black mass was carried slowly dowTi along the shingle in front of the quarters, filling the entire air of night with a stench so penetrating that it caused the wretched inmates of our barracks to start instantly into wakefulness, no matter how sound might be the sleep into which nature, wearied by the excessive heat of the day and early night, had at that hour faUen. Our colonel, a most estimable man and an excellent ofl&cer, was one of the first to fall a victim to this scourge ; his own child was also taken on the same day. Several of the finest men went too. The blow fell without any warning. A strong man went down all at once ; he was carried in a dhooley to the hospital ; and aU was over in six or eight hours. Certainly the ' finest appanage of the British Crown ' levies heavy toll upon the Crown's subjects. ' The Pagoda Tree ' has its roots in the graveyards of India's military cantonments. In May 1863 I set out with two other officers to spend our sixty days' ' privilege leave ' in visiting the western coast of the peninsula. We were to cross by railway to Beypore, and there, taking bullock bandies, proceed northward to the falls of Gairsoppa, near Honore, a journey of two hundred miles by road. The falls are said to be the most remarkable in India, the River Sheranditty precipitating itself down the face of the Western Ghauts in leaps of eight hundred and a thousand feet. As the south-west monsoon would break in 44 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY June, the river was likely to be in full flood by the time we reached Gairsoppa. Such was my plan, but when one travels in a trio there is always a chance that you will have two to one against you. We reached Salem in the evening, and, as the train stopped there for the night, we made our beds on the station platform. It was not a lively experience, as a cooHe died of cholera close by us during the night. The heat was excessive, and, bad as the fort at Madras had been, this was worse. Next morning our train continued its western pro- gress, and the evening found us at Palghaut. We got into the travellers' bungalow at that place. Palghaut hes in the bottom of a great rent or fissure in the Western Ghauts, which gives easy and level access to the Malabar shore from the Carnatic. On either side of a very long defile the mountains rise steeply. Great forests of teak, blackwood, and green undergrowths take the places of the burnt, cindery hiUs and arid plains of Salem and Coimbatore. A magnificent storm, the prelude to the opening of the monsoon, burst upon Palghaut that night, and the forest dripped rain for many hours ; but the morning broke bright, and again our train resumed its slow march for Be3rpore, the terminus on the Malabar coast. We got to Cahcut that even- ing. This old town, the first spot in India reached by Vasco da Gama, and described as being then a place of great magni- ficence, is now poor and decayed, a straggling town hidden in cocoa-nut palms, its old harbour silted up, a big sea breaking ceaselessly upon its straight sandy shore. Here preparations were to be made for the journey of two hundred miles along the coast to Honore, but, alas for the permanence of our projects, things fell out badly for us. The senior member of our httle party was an old colonel whose mihtary career of close upon thirty years had been spent in India. He had an old native servant, ' Sam ' by name. Sam liked his ease as much as did his master. That night on the railway platform at Salem had checked the travelling ardour of both master and man. Under date 10th May I find this entry in my notebook, ' Calicut. Sam lost.' What really happened I don't know. Sam turned up in the night, but his master's spirits did not rise with the return of this ancient native. I find the following entry in my notebook : — ' Calicut. Various CONFLICTING PLANS 45 and conflicting plans,' and then : ' Scene, the Bungalow in Calicut, time 10 p.m. ' H. Well, out of this infernal hole we must get, so let us decide at once. ' M. (from his bed). Go anywhere. I don't care where. ' B. Why not Gairsoppa ? Mangalore is only one hundred miles from here. ' H. I vote for Palghaut. ' M. I think Palghaut a capital place. ' H. We can stay there and eat our stores. ' B. Well, we can never show our faces again in the Mess if we do that, that 's all I say. ' M. Oh, d the Mess ! ' B. (anxious at all costs to save the ignominy of Palghaut). What about Sissapara ? ' H. Of course, Sissapara. 'B. Or Cochin? ' H. Cochin. I always thought it an excellent place. ' M. (very sleepy). Palghaut, Palghaut. * B. Let 's try to get bandies for Cannanore. ' After a short discussion this proposal is agreed to, and Sam and other servants are despatched for bandy-wallahs. Silence until arrival of bandy-wallahs. ]\L sleeps. Enter the wallahs and servants. ' B. (through interpreter). How much charge to Cannanore ? * Servant. Twelve rupees each band3\ (General consternation, during which M. wakes.) ' H. We will give him ten rupees. (Animated dialogue ensues in Telugu between servants and wallahs. Offer refused. Exit wallahs. M. falls asleep murmuring " Palghaut.") ' Arrival of a second batch of wallahs, who after a protracted discussion agree to take three masters to Caimanore for ten rupees eight annas each master. An advance of eight rupees on each bandy is now made, and general harmony appears to prevail. This is shortly broken by fresh outbreak of Telugu tongue. 'Servant (interpreting). He says '•Bridges," Sa. ' Travellers, What bridges ? ' S. Five bridges, Sa, Master must pay five bridges, * M. (from bed). It 's all rot, ' Exit second batch of bandy men. Debate adjourned until next morning, when a last effort is to be made for Mangalore and Honore en route to Gairsoppa, failing which all agree to turn south for Cochin and Travancore. 46 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY * N.B. — The rocks I have to guard against are first a return to Palghaut, there to consume our stores. Second, a retreat to PuUcat, a place on the coast south of Madras, said to be famous for fish, but not otherwise of any interest.' The next entry is made at a place called Trichoor on the 15th May, so I had succeeded in getting my companions south of the railway line which led back to Madras, and their heads were now turned towards Cape Comorin. Trichoor was a quaint old place; the Portuguese had been there, and the Dutch; then had come Hyder Ali and Tippoo Sultan. Like aU the other towns and villages on this coast, it lay deep in palm trees. Here began that remarkable series of backwaters which run south for nearly two hundred miles. Three lakes of salt water are separated from the Arabian Sea by a thin ridge of the cleanest and finest sand, sand such as might be put into an hour-glass without further refinement. Upon these sands which the sea has cast up grow beautiful groups of palm trees and many flowering shrubs. The lakes widen out at intervals into large expanses of open water, and at other places narrow to channels of canal width, fringed with mango trees and spice plants. Large water-lilies spread themselves from the shores, and water-fowl of many kinds and plumage float or fly over the sparkling waters. Our boat carried ten oars, and under their strokes, and often with a sail to aid the rowers, we sped along, and, travelling through the night, reached Cochin at sunrise next morning. Cochin was in its way the most mixed and variegated-looking spot I saw in the East. Once everything in commerce, it had now shrunken to next to nothing in the world of barter. The Portuguese had had it, and the Dutch had taken it from them, and made much of it in their peculiar ways of business. It used to be said of old that the Portuguese began their colonial settlements by building a church, that the Dutch ina.ugurated theirs by building a fort, and that we commenced ours with a public-house. In Cochin this triple transition can stiU be seen. The old cathedral of da Gama or Albuquerque is turned into a fort, and the public-house has been superimposed upon both, but not even these several transitions had kept trade true to its old centre. It had fled from Cochin. Eighty years earlier the town had 'a harbour filled with ships, streets crowded TO QUILLON 47 with merchants, and warehouses stored with goods from every part of Europe and Asia ' ; now the cocoa palms hid the desolation that followed the destruction of the fortifications and public buildings by order of the British authorities in 1806. One curious survival remained : there were still to be seen here representatives of the old pol^^glot population which had once made it famous. St. Thomas the Apostle is supposed to have come here in the earliest days of Christianity, and two distinct races of Jews are still here, the black and the red Jews. It is strange, too, to find in this place two distinct bodies of Christians, the descendants of the early Syrian proselytes of St. Thomas, and those who acknowledge the jurisdiction of Rome. These do not worship together, no more than do the black and the red Jews. But however desirous I might have been to make longer stay in this museum of almost extinct Eastern races, one dominating factor forced me forward. Another wild night of rain and storm broke upon us as we sat in the verandah of the travellers' bungalow. It was a grand sight to watch the thunder-breeding clouds come whirling in from the Indian Ocean, giving out rain deluges, lightnings, and storm gusts as thej' swept over the roaring beach across the great lagoon and up into the rocks and forests of the range of the Ghauts, which rose immediately above the inland waters. But those displays of fire and water had a fatal influence upon the spirits of my companions. Again they proposed a retreat to Madras. Fortunately, in a moment of exuberant expectation, when the weather had been fine a day or two earlier, I had been made the paymaster and treasurer of the expedition. I held the common purse. There was no use in any further expostulation or pronouncement as to what the Mess would say about the ignoble polic}- of retirement to Palghaut, so I waited my opportunity to answer, and remarked quietly that ' I would crack on alone for Quillon at twelve o'clock next day, and had engaged a large boat for the journey.' There was another pause, several looks at the weather to windward, and then came the final plunge. ' WeU, we won't break up the party. Let 's all go together to Quillon.' So at noon next daj^ we embarked in a fine boat with fourteen rowers, and favoured by»a fair breeze we sped bravely through the water. The 48 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY day was glorious with sunshine, the water clear and smooth. At first our course was through the middle of the great blue lake, the shores of which in some places were not visible, and in others just marked by a fringe of trees which seemed to be growing out of water. After sunset the shores closed in towards us again, and we pulled all night under a brilliant moon, arriving at Quillon at nine next morning. A mile before making the landing-place, we came on one of the many mimic promon- tories rising from the water which has a stone monument built upon it. It has a history. Many years ago a certain Colonel Gordon was resident at Quillon. He was the owner of a large Newfoundland dog. One morning Gordon was bathing in the lake off this promontory ; the dog lay by his master's clothes on the shore. Suddenly he began to bark in a most violent manner. Gordon, unable to see any cause for the animal's excitement, continued to swim in the deep water. The dog became more violently excited, running down to the water's edge at one particular point. Looking in the direction to which the animal's attention was drawn, the swimmer thought that he could perceive a circular ripple moving the otherwise smooth surface of the lake. Making for the shore, he soon perceived that the ripple was caused by some large body moving stealthily under the water. He guessed at once the whole situation : a very large crocodile was swimming well below the surface, and making in liis direction. The huge reptile was already partly between him and the shore. The dog knew it all. Suddenly he ceased barking, plunged into the water, and headed in an obUque line so as to intercept the moving ripple. All at once he disappeared from the surface, dragged down by the huge beast beneath. When the dog found that all his efiforts to alarm his master were useless, he determined to give his own life to save the man's, and so Colonel Gordon built the monument on the rock above the scene, and planted the casarina tree to shadow it. We spent a couple of days in this remote but beautiful cantonment of Quillon. Here under date 23rd May 1863 I find the following entry : — ' Dined with the officers 23rd Madras Native Infantry in their delightful Mess. Heard rumour of war with America.' What particular rumour of war this referred to in the long civil strife I cannot now identify, TRAVANCORE 49 but undoubtedly during those years of the early 'sixties there were many times when the question of peace and war with the Northern States hung in very delicate balance. Our southward course now led to Trivandrum, the capital of Travancore. This small native state, the most southern in the peninsula of India, probably combined within its five thousand square miles a larger diversity of scenery and race, and a more extraordinary variety of social manners and customs, than any other part of the world known to me. It is a long and narrow strip of territory lying between an impassable mountain range and a sea upon whose shore huge breakers are almost always beating. The mountain barrier rises to heights of seven thousand and eight thousand feet, and, with the exception of two gaps or ghats, one at the north end, Palghaut, the other at the south end near Cape Comorin, it is unbroken and untrodden by man. Every animal from the tiger to the tmiest monkey is in the forests of these mountains ; the rivers and the backwaters are fuU of fish, birds are here in vast varieties and of rainbow colours, and reptile Ufe is as plentiful as heat, moisture, and underbush can make it ; but above aU other life that of man is the most varied and interest- ing. The Nairs and Tiers of old Hindoo origin are generally of fine figure and handsome face, graceful in carriage, and of a rich, light oUve complexion. A limited but very fierce race of Mohammedans are found in the towns along the coast, Moplahs by name ; these are descendants of old Arab traders settled on the coast long before da Gama appeared from Europe. High up in the wild glens and secluded ' sholahs ' of the moun- tains are an extremely rude race, who dwell in little round bee- hive-shaped huts and live upon wild animals, and cultivate a few patches of the castor-oil plant. Of these people I shall have occasion to speak later. Out of a total population of more than one million souls Travancore numbers some one hundred and fifty thousand Christians of Syrian and Portuguese descent. Here, as elsewhere in India, the dominating note of the land is life. This great fervid sun, these sweeps of rain, this rich soil, these limpid waters, have all combined to call forth in forest, plain, island, lake, and shore an all-pervading sense of human, animal, bird, fish, and insect existence. In these countries you cannot D 50 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY get away from this fact of life ; it jostles you in the towns, it roars at you in the forest, it flies and hums about you in the air, it swims around jt^ou in the waters. These graceful Nair and Tier women with their rich golden skins and black, silky tresses, wading in the warm inland waters, or working in their island gardens amid all the spice plants of the earth, are, no doubt, the descendants of the people whom Camoens saw on this coast, and sighed after, and wrote about in the dread days of misfortune and captivity. Continuing our southern course from Quillon, we reached the end of the greater or northern backwater, and crossed on foot a low range of hills separating it from a shorter lake which runs to Trivandrum, the capital. At sunset we were on the height of land between the two long reaches of water ; to the right as we marched was a magnificent ocean prospect. The sun had burst forth from masses of cloud on the horizon, and in rich folds of hiU and forest the land lay green and golden in the level rays, backed by the glorious Ghauts, tree-covered to their summits. Looking back we saw for many a winding mile the water track we had followed from Trichoor. A little distance to the westward of our road lay the old city of Anjengo, once a place of importance in the early Portuguese trade. Some forty years after this evening of glorious sunset views, I read in St. Helena the following entry in the old island records : — 'June 21th, 1757. — I, Mr. Scott, Your Honour's Resident at Anjengo, transported to this island in the Clintoji and Hector ten Malabar men who it seems were officers to the King of Travancore, to serve you as slaves here, one of which died on the passage. The other nine were landed and clothed. A few days after they were sent into the country five of them hanged themselves, and one of the remaining four has since died. The other three threaten to destroy themselves if they are put to any kind of work.' Well done the British trader as a missionary of civilisation ! This sample of his pecuHar methods occurred a hundred years prior to my visit to Travancore, but in the fifty years which have since elapsed I have seen enough of our missionary trader to make me think that he might be still at his old methods of civilisation, if there had been no French Revolution to give him pause in his calculations. The ' Records ' from which A BIT OF FORGOTTEN HISTORY 51 the above extract is taken contain many reverential observa- tions on humanity in general and the Bible in particular. The lake which lay south of this ridge between the two backwaters carried us into Trivandrum, the capital. Here, after a couple of days' delay, we quitted this delightful mode of water transport, and held our way by road towards Cape Comorin. The monsoon had not yet broken, the sun was straight over our heads, and the heat sufficiently great to make night or early morning travel preferable to the march by day. The country was rich and undulating, mountains grand and bold to our left, and to our right the sounding Indian Ocean. ' How,' I find myself asking in my notebook, ' has it happened that the All-grasping Company kept their hands from this fertile pro- vince ? True, they got eight lakhs out of it, and they kept in their hands the civil and mihtary power. I suppose the reason was that Hyder Ali never conquered Travancore, for we seem to have usurped aU his usurpations as a matter of course.' On the second day from Trivandrum we reached a quaint old place called Oodagherry. A crumbling fort built round the base of a steep rocky hill, and half covered with jungle growth, gave us shelter in one of its bastions, upon which the travellers' bungalow (that last remnant of the old regal hospitality of India) had been built. A few miles south-east of this spot began the Aroombooli Pass in the mountains, the southern gate- way through the Ghauts. It was through this gate that the British column marched in 1809 to the conquest of Travancore, and here at Oodagherry the last effort of resistance was made by the Travancoreans. My own corps, the 69th Regiment, had formed the principal European portion of this force. We found the tradition of the old conflict still living, and some old natives, having scraped away the tangled foliage below our bastion-bungalow, showed us the graves of Europeans who had fallen in fight or died of disease at this place ; but the rains of fifty years had rendered the names upon the grave- stones quite illegible. Here, close to Cape Comorin, and one thousand five hundred miles northward and east and west, from Orissa to the Arabian Sea, they lie in countless graves, these old, forgotten, heroic soldiers, unthanked and unthought of by the millions to whom their deaths gave untold riches and unequalled empire. CHAPTER IV Down to Cape Comorin, and back to Madras. The scene of a bygone massacre. Starting for England. St. Helena. Before continuing our journey to Cape Comorin our little party broke up, and two of us turned aside into the Ghauts to seek for sambhur and bison in these wonderful forests which had so long flanked our line of march on the eastward, revealmg, when the sunset Hght struck fuU mto their countless glens and ' sholahs,' innumerable parks and game preserves. The spot selected for our incursion was caUed the Ashamboo Vallej^ at the extreme southern end of the range of Ghauts and only a few miles north of Cape Comorm. In this glen a couple of gentlemen of the London Missionary Society had built themselves two small bungalows for retreat in the hot season at a height of between five and six thousand feet above sea-level. Very steep and rough, a narrow pathway wound among rocks and jungle from the lower level, and after two or three hours of heavy toil we gained the entrance to the valley. It was a wild and picturesque spot, looking right down upon the southern pomt of India. Higher mountains enclosed the glen on three sides, but to the south the eye ranged over the immense expanse of ocean which surrounds the cape. Two little thatched cottages stood on a rising ground some three or four hundied yards from the entrance gap in the hills ; through this gap the gathered waters of the glen plunged down the mountain-side. The lower slopes of the valley were free of forest and grass-covered ; the higher ridges were seamed with belts of deep green forest — ' sholahs,' as they were called. A missionary in Nagracoil, at the foot of the mountain, had kindly given us the key of his mountain cottage, so we marched straight to it. The house had not been occupied for many months, and the lock was rusty and difficult to open ; but at . 52 ON THE TRACK OF THE BISON 53 last entrance was effected, and then a strange sight met the first man that went m. Underneath a charpoy, or coir bed- stead, in one corner of the little room, a large brown mass was seen, like a piece of old bedding folded and put away. The man came running out, exclaiming that there was a very big serpent lying coiled under the empty bedstead. We now got a side window open to give us more light, and then it could be easily perceived that the bundle was a huge snake lying in a semi-comatose state. It was not easy to make out where his head was and where his tail, but I took the bulkiest part of the coil for aim, and gave him a bullet, at ten feet distance, full mto the middle of it. Then a great upheaval and dis- entanglement began, during which I retreated to the door to await developments, for with the smoke and the rumpus one could not tell what the next move of the reptile would be. When the thick smoke cleared out of the little room our sleeping python was quiet ; the ball had broken his body in halves at its thickest part. He was about twelve feet in length, and thick as a man's leg. A big figure 8 repeated itself along his back m a sort of purple tint upon a brown back- ground. He had done us one signal service : there was not a rat in the bungalow. Next morning we were out before sunrise. We first crossed a steep ridge called ' Bison Point,' and descended into another valley ; again we climbed a hiU, and, crossing another glen, reached at noon a place called by our guide ' The Hillmen's Valley.' Here some half a dozen httle black men were collected out of about the same number of little beehive huts. These strange dwarf-like people were the first and last of their kind I met in India. They were all much under five feet in height, very black in colour, and almost naked. Their instinctive knowledge of the habits of wild animals, and their power of following a trail across all kinds and conditions of ground, were equalled by their noiseless and yet rapid methods of moving through dense jungle. W^ith these men we now plunged into some very thick forests, and soon separated. I was following my particular little man through this jungle, when suddenly he stopped his rapid steps and pointed to some object in advance and slightly to the left of where he stood. A step brought me beside him. 54 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Following his ' point/ I could discern, at a distance of about twenty or thirty paces, a huge head that was looking at us over and through some lower jungle. It was a bison. I carried a short rifle which loaded at the breech in some strange fashion long ago obsolete. I aimed at the big head that was looking at us, but before I could puU the trigger the beast threw himself half round from us. Dropping the muzzle below where I thought must be the level of his shoulder, I fired. There was a great crash, and I heard and saw no more. Fearing the beast was off down the slope, I rushed forward, my black friend remaining where he was. On his side lay the bison, struggling hard to get on his legs again. I fired at twelve feet from him two more shots into his huge carcass, neither of which seemed to have any effect ; but the first wound was mortal, and after a last struggle he laj'' still. AU the hill- men now came together, and with their keen knives the big head was severed from the body, poles were cut, and we all marched back, bringing the head in triumph to the hut. The bison was one of the largest the little hunters had ever seen. He measured eighteen hands at the shoulder, and his girth was ten feet. We slept that night in a sort of porch belonging to the largest of the beehives, and the little men, and the little women, and their yet smaller children, were soon inside their hives. After nine days of this wild life, but with no sport to equal that first day's, we said farewell to our good friend Mr. Cox, who was about to attempt coffee-planting in Ashamboo ; and descending again to the low country pursued our route to Cape Comorin. The heat was now great, and felt particularly trying to us after the cool days and really cold nights of the upper mountains. The country was now covered with old forts and ruined temples. At night, when it became too dark for the buUocks to make their way, we would tie up beside some old temple and sleep until day came, lulled by the sea winds whistling through the broken masonry and dilapidated figures of Vishnu or Parasu Rama. The last-named Brahminical deity was the favourite god of the Travancoreans ; for they say that it was he who created this country by hurling his axe from the summit of the Ghauts into the ocean, which then came to the foot of the mountains, and that the waters, receding from TO TUTICORIN 55 the space over which the weapon sped, left bare the rich region of this province. Early on the morning of 16th June we reached the cape. Here India slanted quietly into the sea, in gently sloping shores upon which the waves had washed up three distinct kinds and colours of sand — puce, garnet, and black. An old bungalow stood at the extreme point, facing south, and three big rounded granite rocks marked the southmost bit of land. The bunga- low was very large ; it had been built by a former resident at Trivandrum, and even at this hot time of the year was cooled and freshened by winds that were always from the waves. From this point our bullocks had their heads turned north- east to Tuticorin, a port on the coast of Tinnavellj^ facing Ceylon. Slowly they dragged us through the Aroomboli Pass, and out once more into the blinding levels eastward of the Ghauts. I look over the old notebook, and read : — ' At length we are turned towards Madras. I liked Comorin much ; wild, secluded, and scarcely ever visited. What a place for study ! The quaint old house with the roar of the surf echoing through its lofty rooms, and the sea winds whistling round the gables, making even noonday, dreamy. Halted for the night six miles from the cape, on the frontier.' Then we pushed on through Tinnavellj% by Palamcottah, and a dozen other places ending with ' ary ' or ' gully,' and late on the 24th reached Tuticorin, after having covered in the last stage thirty- three miles in twenty-six hours. The heat was very great during those seven days' travel, and the country scorched and sandy, and with many salt marshes. The day following our arrival at Tuticorin is marked, ' Sick and seedy all day.' It was really a day of intense illness. The Carnatic climate had begun to tell upon me, and for some time past a recurring day of horrible sickness came upon me at intervals of about a month. The doctors could not make out what it was, and as it usually happened that there was a fuU moon when these violent night attacks occurred, I had begun to think the moon was in some way answerable for them. At Tuticorin we hired a native boat called a ' dhoney,' and set sail through the Gulf of Manaar for Madras, following the 56 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY general line of the coast northward, anchormg at sunset, and gomg on at sunrise next day. It was a new experience of Indian life, and therefore of great interest, despite the general condition of discomfort that necessarily pervaded it. The ' dhoney ' was of about twenty tons burden ; the crew — a whole family and a couple of followers — was Mohammedan. My companion and myself had a small after-hold for our mattresses, and an equally small space on deck to sit in during the day. A big lateen sail towered above and gave us shelter from the sun ; forward of the sail the crew, of all ages, was huddled together on jute bales. The craft itself was old, and its planks were simply held together by coir ropes and stitches. On the 28th June we passed through Adam's Bridge and anchored at Paambaun. Many islands were scattered about these narrow seas between India and Ceylon. The coasting trade was large, and native craft were numerous. Passing through Palk's Straits on the 29th, our ' dhoney ' was aU but run down by a two-masted native vessel of ten times our tonnage. I had seen under the lateen sail this big craft coming towards us more than a mile away, and had pointed her out to our ' Ries,' for the courses on which we were both running must bring us close together. Then the sail had intervened, and I ceased to watch. All at once there was wild shouting from our crew before the mast, and a more distant bellowing from the people on the brig. How we scraped by each other I don't know ; but amid aU the bellowing and gesticulation the big craft brushed past us a few feet distant on the starboard side, our jomt speeds giving a rate of perhaps twenty mUes an hour. On the 30th we passed the tall lighthouse on Point Calymere at noon, were off Negapatam at three, and anchored at Carrical at sunset just as the tricolor was being hauled down from the French flagstaff. Then to Pondicherry for one day on shore, and to Madras on the evening of 4th Jul3^ It had been well timed. Our sixty days' leave would expire next morning. We had travelled some twelve hundred miles by rail, boat, bullock, bandy, dhoney, and on foot in these fifty-nine days. At Madras we found the orders for home had arrived ; we were to sail in the following February. A VISIT TO VELLORE 57 But there was one spot in the Camatio which I had not yet seen, although it had been of particular interest to me since I had read the early records of my regiment as they were told in a large folio MS. volume in our Orderly Room. This spot was Vellore, a fortress and town lying some eighty miles to the west of Madras. Not even in the cindery plains of the Carnatic is there to be found a place of more intense heat ; red rocky hills surround it, the radiation from which makes the night almost as fevered as the day. In the splendid fort built by early Mohammedan conquerors of the Carnatic four companies of the 69th Regiment, together with nearly all their officers and families, were shot down one hot night in July 1806 by the native troops who were in garrison with them. The mutiny of Vellore had been a very notable occurrence in its day ; it was now entirely forgotten. AU the greater reason for going to Vellore, I arrived there in the end of Jul}-, when it was about as hot as the sun and the hills could bake or make it. The fort, a magnificent structure of early Moslem work, stands intact and entire, as sound as the day it was buUt, and it will pro- bably remain in that condition for another thousand years. The immense ditch is hewn out of soUd rock, and the walls and bastions are of great square stones quarried from the ditch. Almost in the centre of the large square which is enclosed by these massive walls, a very lofty Hindoo pagoda, covered with sculptures and carvmgs of Khrislma and Rama and his monkey armies, lifts its head. The object of my visit was to see this scene of a bygone massacre, and the graveyard where the bones of so many old soldiers of my regiment had been laid at rest. Strangely enough, I found in the fort a depot of old European pensioners of the Indian army, and to their little huts within the fort I first went. Men were there whose service dated back to earlier years than even 1806, and among them there was a survivor of the battle of the Nile, the only one I ever met. He had been a boy on board a ship in Nelson's fleet in that celebrated fight, and had afterwards served in the Company's service for many years. He was very old and very deaf ; but his brain was still going. * What was it like ? ' I roared into his better ear. ' What was it like ? ' he answered, gaining a 58 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY little time for his reply before he uttered it. * Well, it was like the sound of the water-wheel of a big mill/ That was aU I could get from him. Other old pensioners were tried as to the mutiny with greater success. Two or three of them knew from hearsay all the sights of that memorable night and morning at VeUore in July 1806. The old barracks through the windows of which the mutineers had fired on our men as they were lying asleep in their cots ; the rampart and bastion to which the survivors had escaped, and which they held until the arrival of the gallant Gillespie from Arcot at the head of his avenging cavalry; the flagstaff, from the summit of which the green flag of Mysore was torn down, under a murderous fire, by two splendid soldiers of the 69th ; the spot on the ramparts over the great gateway from which Sergeant Brady first descried the hero GUlespie riding far in advance of his leading squadron ; the gate blown in by the fire of ten galloper guns of the King's 19th Dragoons — aU these places we visited ; and finally we reached the graveyard where, shaded by an old decaying tree, stood the square mound of brick and mortar, without date or inscription, and broken with rents, through which wild plants grew luxuriantly, marking the ground where so many of the old regiment rested. It was late at night when I got back to Madras. A sub- scription was soon set on foot, the Government of Madras helped with a grant, and six months later, when the regiment embarked for England, they left a fitting monument in the graveyard at Vellore to the memory of the gallant men who lay there. I was sorry then to leave India, and I am sorry stiU that I did not labour more when I was there to know better its people and their history. India is a bad school for the young soldier in many of its aspects. There are some of our race to whom contact with the native spells retrogression ; there are others to whom this old civilisation, these vast edifices of power decayed, and wealth squandered, and religion degenerated, teach lessons which are not to be found in the school-books. Cradle of aU things ! Tomb of aU things ! Gorgeous, starved, degraded, defiled, debauched, mysterious East ! I wish that I had studied you more deeply when I dwelt with you. And yet SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 59 I can well believe that we of the old army, snipe shooting, and bison hunting, and serving and even romping with the people, knew more of them and their ways than did our rich cousins of the Civil Service. The gulf between the European fighting man and the Indian is shallower than that which divides the ruling man from the ruled man. I used to meet in my wander- ings man}' highly paid civilians — commissioners, collectors, judges, and all their deputies of so many degrees ; but now, looking back upon it all, I think that the men who impressed me most favourably in the Civil Service were those who had begun their careers in the army, and had subsequently passed from military life to civil administration. Wherever the Mohammedan is found, the love of arms inherent in his nature will make him regard the man who carries them in a sense different from that in which he regards a purely civiUan superior. The Asiatic fighting man quickly sees through the * superior person ' of our time. It is Colonel Newcome and the Collector of Boggly WaUah over again ; and it will remain so to the end of the chapter, even though the colonel should always die in a Cliarterhouse Hospital. I am not quite sure that our new superior person, governor or collector, is a better ruler than the old-type civilian who was still to be found in the out-stations in my time in India. Bungay Smith was a type. He possessed one marked social accomplishment, and to this it was said that he owed his fortune in the Civil Service. He could buzz like a bumble-bee. One evening at a reception in Government House somebody mentioned to the governor-general the fact of Bungay's accomplishment. By special desire he was requested to give a performance in the role of the bumble- bee, a screen being provided to render the performance less arduous. From behind that screen Bungay poured forth such variations of buzzing that the company were delighted beyond the measure of words. He buzzed as the bee approaching the flower ; he buzzed as the bee leaving the flower ; he buzzed as the bee who has struck against your hat and become violently irritated and enraged at his own stupidity ; and he buzzed as the bee dreamily dozing amid the scents of linden trees. From that moment his success was assured. He went up country to a collectorship, which unfortunately was in a part 60 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of India where tigers were numerous. From a love of nature in the humbler lives of the striped bumble, he passed to the higher levels of striped animal life. He would hunt the tiger. A collector finds many willing hands to aid him in compassing his wishes. It was soon arranged that a ' machan,' or stage, should be erected at some spot frequented by the lord of the Indian jungle. Upon this stage Bungay was to take his seat, a bait or lure for the tiger was to be fastened underneath, and the remainder of the proceeding would, it was said, be almost automatic : the tiger would come to eat the bait, Bungay had only to discharge bullets down upon him from his ' machan,' and the desired end would be achieved. The whole arrange- ment fulfilled all the conditions known as * a dead certainty.' The ' machan ' consisted of a sort of strong double step- ladder, having a stage at top upon which Bungay with his head shikaree was to be seated. Everything promised well. Before darkness closed over the forest Bungay and his shi- karee were in position ; a small buffalo calf was tied to a stake underneath the structure. Night and silence followed. The tiger was now the only actor wanting in the piece, and he had to appear under the staging, and not on it. It was here that the hitch came in. It was late when he appeared, with the stealth and caution common to his kind. There was something suspicious about this buffalo calf, and what was the meaning of this curious wooden pyramidal thing placed straddling its legs over the jungle pathway ? It required examination. He approached the scene. His back had been giving him trouble in the matter of mange ; this sloping arrangement of wood offered a con- venient means of getting on even terms with some parts of his own person which had previously defied his attempts to scratch them. AU at once a thing never calculated upon by tiger or collector happened ; there was a crash, a roar, a going off of firearms, the thud of falling weights ; full upon the tiger's back fell Bungay straddle-legs. Away went the tiger, scared as he had never been scared before ; tight to the tiger clung Bungay, roaring for all he was worth ; shikarees descended from neighbouring trees, firing promiscuously in all directions ; a spring from the tiger, wilder than anything he had yet achieved, flung Bungaj'^ into the jungle, from whence his roars served START FOR HOME 61 to guide his followers to the rescue of their chief. He was taken back to his palace practically unhurt, but with nerves so shaken that severe mental complications ensued. He imagined himself a tiger, and, as before he had hummed as a bee, he now broke forth in the roars of a tiger. After a period of prolonged treatment these fits of imagination lessened in severity, and the intervals between them grew longer. But they never quite left him, and a powerful native servant always accompanied him carrying some yards of strong light rope, which, upon a warning note sounded by Bungay, he had orders to tie quickly round his master's arms and legs, for unfortunately, under the stress of the delusions, he felt impelled at times to act the part, as weU as to utter it. There was a favourite story told in the club at Madras of how upon one occasion when Bungay was proceeding at night in his gharry along the Mount Road, the tiger delusion sud- denly came upon him as they approached the long bridge over the Adyar River. Something had gone wrong with the rope, and before the servant could reach his master the fit was fully developed. The servant turned and fled ; the master pursued ; down they went into the dry bed of the wide river ; from arch to arch the chase went on ; the servant hid himself behind a buttress ; Bungay growled on aU-fours till he found him ; then the sohtudes rang with the roar of the king of the forest, as in and out of the arches the master followed the man. I have forgotten how this strange rendermg of the poet's ' Hound of Heaven ' ended. In the month of February 1864 the 69th Regiment, or what was left of it, embarked for England in two vessels of the famous line of ' cHpper ' ships owned by Messrs. Green of London. The right wing of the regiment sailed on the 10th February. There were ten days between the sailing of the two vessels, the Trafalgar and the Lord Warden. Both were noted sailers, and there was much excitement as to which of them would do the thirteen or fourteen thousand miles in the quickest time. Both were to caU at St. Helena, and then to make for Ply- mouth. I was with the left wing of the regiment in the Lord Warden. It is interesting to compare these old logs of sailing ships 62 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY with the ' runs ' made by liners to-day. We kept a journal on board — the Homeward Bound by name — and in its pages I find the record : — * In the first fortnight after leaving India we averaged only 80 miles a day ; in the second fortnight the average was 124 miles ; the third fortnight saw us out of the tropics and into the latitudes of strong winds, and our average increased to 184 miles ; then when the stormy seas of the Cape of Good Hope were entered we ran up to 197 miles in twenty-four hours ; finally we attained in the run from St. Helena northwards an average of 212 miles, and covered in one day 320 miles between the Azores and the Lizard.' The only event in the long three months that is worth remembering is a short stay of two days at St. Helena — 15th and 16th April ; but they were days so steeped in thoughts of glory and of grief that if I lived for a thousand years they would live with me. Our ship had been standing off the island in the late night, and long before dawn I was on deck to catch the first glimpse of the rock. It came in the west as the stars were going out in the east. Nothing like this black berg is elsewhere in the world. Nothing so lonely, so gaunt, so steep, so age-riven, so thunderous with the sound of seas, so sorrowful in the wail of the winds, so filled with the sense of blank distance, so sombre in desolation. Beranger said that where some older earth had been ruined in the great conflict which the powers of Good and Evil had waged, the rock of St. Helena had been left at the special prayer of the vanquished spirits of Evil as a memento of their having been once supreme upon earth. And he makes the Almighty ask the reason for the request thus made. ' I ask this boon," answers the spirit, ' in order that one day in a far-distant age of this new world there may be brought to that dark ocean rock a mortal all but godlike in his genius, who shall undergo there upon that black altar a lingering death at the hands of evil men.' I got on shore at the earliest possible hour, and was soon riding up the steep road that led from Jamestown to the tomb and to Longwood. At St. Helena one quickly masters the chapter of St. Helena. These gigantic rock walls, these im- AT LONGWOOD 63 passable precipices, and all this environment of charred deso- lation in the midst of which the miserable farmhouse is perched, gamit and alone, tell in the space of a three-mile ride the entire story of the captivity. When the summit level above the tomb is reached at Hutt's Gate, the ' altar ' craved of the Demon lies outspread before the traveller, and the word ' prison ' is read in gigantic characters on sea and sky, on peak and precipice of that grey, gloomy circumference, in the centre of which is Longwood. Here all the names known in the history of these five or six years of suffering cease to have a,ny individual meaning, ' Rupert's,' ' Deadwood,' ' Longwood,' * the Flagstaff,' ' the Bam,' ' the Valley of Silence,' disappear, and there only remains the all-pervading sense of an inner prison, surrounded by even more impassable boundaries of lava, chasm, and rock wall than the ocean and the outer sea face of the island had already provided. I had stood by the tomb, had seen the house, and looked long on the features of the marble bust within the black-railed space which marks the spot where the Mttle camp death- bedstead stood on the 5th May 1821 ; and now it was time to leave Longwood. Perhaps it was because one had asked the French sergeant who was in charge questions which he was not able to answer, or perhaps from some other reason, but as I was about to depart he volunteered the mformation that there was still living, at only a little distance from Longwood House, an old soldier who had been on the island during the captivity. ' Monsieur might care to see him ? ' ' Yes, very much.' ' He lives close by, monsieur, in a little hut, there below the dip of the ridge between us and the gate of Longwood.' Five minutes later I was at the hut. An old man was at spade-work in a little garden. ' Well, old friend, they tell me you were here in Bonaparte's time,' I say, speaking very loud, for he is deaf. ' Can you tell me anything about him ? ' He looks up from his work, leans on his spade handle, and says nothing, I put the question again in a louder voice. ' Is it Bony ye mane ? ' he says, in an accent which, not- withstanding a lapse of forty or fifty years, still tells of Ireland, * To be shurc I remember him, and so I ought, for manj' the 64 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY day and the night I mounted guard over him, and stood sentry beyond the gum trees there by the house/ * How long have you been here ? ' I ask. ' Fifty years come October next,' he says. ' I came out with the 53rd Regiment, and when it left to go to India I exchanged into the 66th, and I married and settled here. Did ye ever hear tell of SUgo ? ' he went on. ' Yes, often." ' WeU, that was my country. I wonder now how it 's getting on, and if there 's any of my people living.' So anxious was I to follow the thread of the guard and sentry memory that I could at the moment have consigned Sligo to the deepest bottom of its own bogs ; but it was wiser to dissemble a little, so after a few words about Sligo I got the old fellow's memory back again to Longwood, the guards, the sentries, and the old times of the captivity ; and as a starting-point I asked him where the line of sentries used to be placed by day and by night. ' The sintries is it ? ' he says. ' There 's the field over where the sheep are grazing ; that 's where the big camp stood. By day the sintries were kept below the ridge, along the far side of the valley ' (pointing across the depths of Fisher's Ravine), ' and by night they were drawn in, and they closed up around the house.' ' Did you ever see the Emperor ? ' ' Who ? ' ' Bonaparte.' ' Yes, often. I used to see him of times working m the garden at the house, or throwing crumbs to the fish in the pond near the door. When he got too bad to walk out in the garden, I used to see him sometimes in the house ; for I was told off to look after the Chinamen that were employed there, and to see that they fetched up the water every day from the spring down by Torbutts, where the tomb is now.' Then we spoke of the house and the dwarf gum trees that grew on the level ground just above his cabin. ' There were more of them there in them days,' he said, ' but the storm that blew the night before he died — the awfullest wind that was ever on the island — ^knocked most of them down.' Then, after some other talk about St. Helena, his mind WARS AND RUMOURS OF WARS 65 wandered ofE again to Sligo ; and he soon ceased speaking. The old man's brain was tired. I could have remained a long while there, but it would not have been of any use. This curious, old, time-rusted link in the chain between past and present, dressed in a soldier's tattered coat, had said his say ; and the well of his memory had run dry. What things had these old eyes looked at ! Old friend, good-bye. I mounted and rode away, thinking over the words, ' closed up around the house.' All these vast precipices, from the edges of which the passer-by recoils in instinctive horror ; these gloomy rampart rocks ; all these camps of soldiers — one there at Deadwood, one hundred j^ards in front of the farmhouse ; another at Hutt's Gate, where the sawback ridge begins which just suffices in its width at the top to carry the road on to Longwood between the prodigious rents in the earth plunging down, one thousand feet in depth, below the narrow roadway ; these were not wards and guards and barriers sufficient, placed though they were with thousands of leagues between them and the nearest land, but the Une of sentries must ' close up at sunset ' around the walls of the miserable house itself. The news that reached us at St. Helena was full of interest. The Civil War in America seemed to be drawing to a close ; but a Kttle speck of conflict was showing in Northern Europe. Two great Powers had invaded little Denmark. To us poor homeward-bound soldiers, anxious for service, it seemed that this wanton and cowardly proceeding must produce the general war which some of us, at least, wished for. I find in the pages of our little sea journal some lines entitled ' War's Whisper,' the concluding verse of which ran thus : — 'Ho ! babblers of "peace," ye who boasted in pride That the sword in its scabbard for ever was tied ! Did ye hear that low murmur waft over the main Its tidings of battle in the land of the Dane 1 ' But alas for poetic flight and bellicose imaginations ! No sword leaped from scabbard either in France or England, and the massacre of Diippel passed unnoticed by either of the Powers whose one great chance in modem history it was. These things do not happen twice. Louis Napoleon might £ 66 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY easily have saved Sedan and Paris had he then struck for the Dane, and there would, in all human probability, have been no ' Dreadnought ' scare to-day had there been a single soldier- statesman m England in that year 1864. There was no Suez Canal in 1864, and the roadstead at St. Helena had always plenty of shipping in it, vessels taking in food and water on their homeward route from India and China. At the time of our visit it held other craft — American whalers from the Antarctic hiding from the Alabama, which was still at work of destruction in various seas. I went on board one of these whalers. She was three months out from Maine ; her captain and crew in beards and clothes like so many Robinson Crusoes. It was early morning. The captain insisted upon my having breakfast with him — a black bottle of terrible spirit and a plate of hard-tack biscuits, on a table that had been lubricated with blubber. It was sufficient. Our sister ship, the Trafalgar, conveying the right wing of the regiment, had gained a week upon us in the run from Madras to St. Helena. She had left the island with a clear seventeen days' start. The race home now seemed hopeless for us. We left St. Helena with the south-east trade blowmg strong, and it bowled us along before it durmg the next sixteen days. No halt from calms on the Line ; the northern tropic proved equally propitious, and the ' roaring forties ' sent us flying along from stormy Corvo to the Cornish coast in glorious style. On 21st May we anchored at Plymouth, ninety days out from Madras. An hour later a full-rigged ship was visible on the horizon from beyond the Eddystone Lighthouse. Our captain, who had only one eye (but, like Nelson's, it was a very good one) laid his glass upon the distant vessel. ' It 's the Trafalgar,' he said ; and so it was. That three hundred and twenty mile day on the 17th had done its work ; we had gained some seventeen days upon our sister ship in the run from St. Helena. When we entered the Channel a thing foretold by the ship's officers happened. We carried some seventy or eighty invalid soldiers from India, the wrecks of the Carnatic climate. ' You wiU see many of these men die when we get near the English coast,' the officers and doctor used to say. So it fell out. We buried several of these poor feUows almost in sight ENGLAND AGAIN 67 of the Lizard. For them the ' chops of the Channel ' had a sinister meaning. On 22nd May the two sisters, now in companj'^, sailed before a delightful westerly breeze along the coasts of Devon, Dorset, and Hampshire to Portsmouth. Very fresh and beautiful it all looked ; hawthorn blossom holding out welcome to us ; scents of spring from the shores, and May-green on the hills for the rest and refreshment of our sun-seared eyes. To understand all the loveliness of an English spring you should spend a few summers in the Camatic. CHAPTER V Aldershot. Visit to the Belgian battlefields. Afterthoughts on Waterloo. We were stationed at Gosport after arrival, and then we went to Aldershot. These south of England town garrisons made bad stations for soldiers lately arrived from abroad ; that harpy the Jew jeweller, and the betting or gambling man have there a wide field for the exercise of their various greeds, wiles, and villanies. Before we were a year at home half of our officers were in debt, and many of them had to exchange or leave the service. After a short leave of absence at home, I was sent with a party of men to Hythe to learn out of books that theory of musketry in the practice of which I was already no mean proficient. But Hythe was no exception to the rule which I have found existmg in every part of the world — namely, that a man will find something of interest, something that is worth knowmg or seeing, no matter what the spot may be on the earth's surface where fortune has cast him. Visiting Dover one day, I turned into the Ship Hotel for lunch. At a table in one corner of the public room four men were sitting. The waiter informed me that they were officers of the American Federal cruiser Kearsarge, which was then lying in the harbour. Over at Calais lay also in harbour, and afraid to stir from it, the Confederate cruiser Alabama. The Federal agent in Calais kept the captam of the Kearsarge constantly informed of the doings of his rival. The Kearsarge lay in Dover with steam always up. The truth was, the Alabama's game was up, unless some extraordinary freak of fortune should again befriend her, for the Kearsarge had ' the legs of her,' and whether the brave Semmes headed out into the North Sea, or went down Channel, he must be overhauled by his enemy. 68 ALDERSHOT IN 1865 69 Suddenly the door of the coffee-room opened, and four gentlemen, dressed in rather peculiar suits of ' mufti,' entered the room. They stopped short, stared hard at the occupants of the table in the corner, turned abruptly round, and left the room. They were officers of the Alahama, who had crossed from Calais by the mail-boat that mornmg, probably to have a look at their enemy from the pier. A couple of weeks later the Confederate slipped out from Calais at night, and with something of a start made her way down Channel ; but the Kearsarge was soon upon her tracks. Cherbourg afforded a last refuge for the little warship whose career in all the oceans, and even in the comers of seas, had cost the Northern States such enormous loss. When the time limit was up she had to put to sea. A few miles off Cherbourg the two cruisers met for the first and last time. It was all over with the Alabama in an hour. Semmes and his crew were picked up by an English steam yacht — I have forgotten her name — but curiously enough she had steamed close alongside for many miles, a month or two earlier, when the two clipper ships were racing each other along the south coast of England from Plymouth to Dartmouth. Early in 1865 we moved to Aldershot, then in a very different condition from what it is to-day. Great expanses of sand stretched from beyond the Long Valley up to the doors of the wretched huts in which we were housed. All the verdure and foliage which chiefly owe their origin to the labours of Colonel Laffan of the Engineers were then unknown, and when a south- west wind blew one might have imagined that Caesar's Camp was a koppje m the Sahara. But the thing that made the Aldershot of 1865 a place of delight for memory to recall was the individuality of the military characters one met there. Not one solitary vestige of these old vanished heroes can now be found in our army. Truly can it be said that the entire military type and bearing of that time is gone, ' lock, stock, and barrel.' The stock still clung to the soldier's neck, the lock and barrel were of the old percussion muzzle-loading model ; ' fire-lock ' it was still called by the older drill sergeants. Our regiment ' lay,' as the expression used to be, in the North Camp, and very imcomfortable ' lying ' it was for all 70 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY concerned. When I marched the company to which I belonged to the group of huts assigned to us, I heard one of the old twenty-one-j'ear men mutter as he entered the hut, ' Twenty years all round the worruld, and in a cowshed at the end of it/ All the drills, movements, and manoeuvres were exactly what they had been fifty years before. There might just as well have been no Crimean War, no Mutiny, no anything. Most of the old officers swore as their ancestors had sworn on the fields of Flanders one hundred years earlier. I think the men liked them all the better on that account. The general in command was a splendid veteran. It was he who, a quarter of a century earlier, had told his men at Meeanee to ' turn the fire-locks ' as they drove their bayonets into the enemy when these brave Belooch swordsmen were hacking at the Twenty- Second over the levelled bayonets. He had borne at Inker- mann the worst pressure of the Russian attack in the early hours of the fight. When the first reinforcement — Cathcart's Division — came up, that general had ridden forward to ask to what part of the field he should direct his troops. ' Anywhere you like, my dear sir ; you '11 find plenty of fighting all round.' And indeed he found it, for within a couple of hours Cathcart and about half of his division were dead on the slopes that lay to the right rear of the famous Sand-bag Redoubt. I can still see this old hero sitting his charger on the top of a knoU over the Basingstoke Canal, across which the engineers had, in manoeuvre language, ' thrown a pontoon bridge ' (two pontoons and twenty planks). Over this structure our brigade had to go, and the great point was that they should not keep step as they crossed, but the poor feUows had been so mercilessly trained to keep step that they couldn't break it to save their lives ; and as the canal was only about four feet deep in the centre of its twenty or thirty feet width, it didn't matter a pin whether they fell in or not. But from the general's excitement you might have thought that the operation was quite on a par with that of the Russians retreating over their bridge of boats from the south to the north side of Sebastopol. Up we came to the canal in solid, serried ranks. The more he swore at us, the more his staff roared at us shouting ' break step,' the more our men stepped ' as one ARMY ANECDOTES 71 man/ as they had been taught and drilled and bullied into doing for years : tramp, tramp, tramp. I can never forget the sight of that fine old soldier ; the reins dropped on his charger's neck, his hands uplifted as far as they could go, and a whole torrent of imprecations pouring from under his snow- white moustache. Two ladies who had ridden out with the staff thought it prudent to retire from the scene. The two pontoons stood it all. Among the old ofl&cers of lesser rank the one who gave us youngsters the most unvarying entertainment was the colonel of a distinguished Fusilier battalion, a North Briton. All the manoeuvre formations were then in close order ; a modern dynamite shell bursting in a brigade would inevitably have ended the collective life and entire martial capacity of that military unit. This view of the question, however, had not occurred to any of our superiors ; and to us subalterns in the ranks these close formations had, at least, the merit of enabling us to get all the mounted officers of three or four battalions within easy range of our ears and eyes. We knew, in fact, everything that was going on in the brigade. Old Colonel R. S. was our central pomt of interest. He had a profound contempt and dislike for a staff officer, and in this feeling we were with him to a man. An A.D.C. or a Deputy A.D.C. would ride up to the brigade, salute, dehver his orders, wheel his horse round, and gallop away. Colonel R. S., being a very senior officer, was fre- quently in command of the brigade. He would never move a muscle as the staff officer went through his message. He would then gravely turn to one of the old ' fizzer men,' as they were called (pensioners who had the privilege of hawking ginger-beer among the troops), and ask him, ' What did the d f ule say ? ' * He said, yer honour, that the brigade was to move to the right.' ' Did he ? Third brigade, fours left.' Or, again, he would on occasion, when he had had words with the messenger of movement, take all the men into his confidence by turning in his saddle, and remarking with a most comical expression of face, ' He '11 nae puzzle the Fusihers, I can tell ye.' And indeed, I am quite sure that nothing which 72 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the most conceited young staff oflSicer could do would ever have ' puzzled ' that splendid body of men. They would have died to a man with that old Scotsman. I had one resource at Aldershot of inestimable value to me. It was the Prince Consort's library. Many an hour I spent in that cool retreat reading of the wars on land and sea, and of the men who fought them. By hook or crook I must go to Belgium, and see some of the scenes themselves. The few pounds I had put together in India were now gone. Aldershot was an expensive station at that time, for regiments and battalions were constantly arriving, and the reputation of the ' Old 69th ' for hospitality had to be kept up, literally at all costs. But I managed to get together about twenty pounds, and one fine evening I was off, knapsack on shoulder, for Lille, intending to leave the train at Tournay, and begin to work the ground on foot from that place. I reached Tournay early on the second morning, picked up a guide on the steps of the cathedral, and was soon on the road to Fontenoy. The guide was a ghastly failure. He professed to know the battlefields around Tournay, but I soon found he knew only the public-houses. ' You know the field of Fontenoy ? ' I said as we cleared the old town. Certainly he knew Fontenoy, he answered ; was not his father in that battle, and did not the Emperor decorate him when it was over ? Astonished by this information I merely said, ' Go ahead." It was a very hot afternoon, the road was deep in dust, and the knapsack still a new burden to my shoulders. Whenever we passed a beer shop he looked longmgly at it ; but I held steadily on, taking a most malicious satisfaction in the situation that was now developing, for I soon saw that the feUow was soft as butter. At last he craved a halt and a drink. These I gave him, even though he still adhered to the story of the decoration of his father on the field of Fontenoy by the Emperor himself. Then I thought, ' Are we not now in the Cockpit of Europe ? ' There were so many battles fought here that this man ras^j well have got a bit mixed among them, and perhaps in this matter of the decoration he had only inherited an ancestral antipathy to the truth. So we went again along the dusty road. IN THE 'COCKPIT OF EUROPE' 73 It was getting towards sunset when we approached Fontenoy. I had a map of the ground, and was on the lookout for the wood of Barri. Passing that, we entered the scene of the battle. A large country waggon, full of women and girls returning from work, came along. ' Fontenoy ? ' I asked inquiringly. They laughed, and pointed away to my left front, where the ridge bent dowTi into lower ground, and over the curve could be seen a church spire, some white houses, and trees. They asked me to join them, and made room for me in the waggon, laughing and talking, under large lace or fringe- bordered caps, all the while. I was clearly a puzzle to them ; but all the same they seemed disposed to accept my presence as that of an old friend. Another time I might have accepted the seat offered in their midst, but as there was less than an hour's Ught in the sky I thought it wiser to keep my feet, and made straight for Fontenoy. The ground was all familiar to me, for I had studied the map of it well. I paid off my guide. He had brought me to Fontenoy, even though he had failed to convince me of the decoration bestowed upon his father in the battle. On every side where the land was clear of wood the ground lay open and unfenced : stubble interspersed with grass. Three miles away on the right, Antoiag showed its church top above the valley of the Scheldt ; then the higher ground upon which the French army had stood curved round towards Fontenoj^ about two miles, and then ran in on the same easy circle to Barri, the semicircle making altogether about four miles along its circumference from the wood of Barri on the left to Antoing on the right. In front of the village of Fontenoy the ground dropped quickly into the valley of Voyon. Never was there easier field upon which to identify the events which took place there on the 11th May 1745. Save that the French redoubts have long ago been levelled by the ploughshare, everything is un- changed. Between the village of Fontenoy and the wood of Barri all the fighting took place. There Ligonier led on his column of fourteen thousand English and Hanoverian troops and twenty guns into the left centre of the French position. Shot at by cannon, charged by cavalry, fired mto by infantry, they go slowly forward, until meeting the French Guards the 74 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY two columns exchange first compliments and then volleys, until half of the whole are down in the young corn. The battle began at five in the morning, and it was all over by one o'clock. At noon the aUies were in full retreat on Ath. Some fifteen thousand dead and wounded covered this gently rolling ground. History has given half a dozen versions of this once famous fight ; but what is assured as fact is that Cumberland's column under Ligonier had all but won victory when it was wrested from their grasp by the terrible onslaught of Saxe's reserve troops, among which six regiments of Irish infantry, under Count Lally, formed the most potent body and struck the most decisive blows. I made my way across the field of Antoing as the dusk was gathering over Fontenoy, and a white mist was coming up from the Voyon Valley, creeping like a great ghost of battle across the ridge where this wild slaughter had been wrought. The partridges were calling briskly to each other in the cool twihght ; the smoke of supper was going up from many cottage chimneys. How was I to fare in that way at Antoing ? I struck straight for that Uttle old Flemish town, and at the inn kept by Monsieur and Madame Roger Dubois the question was most satisfactorily solved. After a little preparatory delay, a fillet, a partridge, a salad, an omelette, a bottle of Bordeaux, grapes, coffee, and a petit verre — what more could mortal ask on the evening of a hot day ? Heroes of Fontenoy, old, forgotten, long- waist- coated grenadiers of England, France, and Ireland — Saxe, Cumberland, Ligonier, d'Auteroche, Richelieu, and LaUy — I pledge aU your memories in silence as the clock in the old church tower outside strikes the hour of nine ! To you in particular, Madame Roger Dubois, I hft my glass and take off my hat ! If history tells truth, your husband's very remarkable namesake, the Archbishop of Cambray, received a cardinal's hat through the friendly intervention of George the First, whose son was to lose this fight at Fontenoy some few years later. Well, if the first George was to get a cardinal's hat for anj^body, it was perhaps meet that it should have been for that ' httle thin meagre man with the pole-cat visage, in whom all the vices . . . contend for mastery ' ; but perhaps the royal victor of Fontenoy would have had a better place in history to- day had he hanged him. FIELDS OF MALPLAQUET AND JEMAPPES 75 The following day came oppressively warm, and I had a long march before me. I was to sleep at Mons, for I wished to see the field of Jcraappes, that opening scene of the conquering revolution, and another great field of former fight which lay near Mons — Malplaquet. The sun was beating down on the narrow paved streets of Antoing almost with the fervour of the Camatic as I cleared the town and took the road Mons-ward. It lay along the vaUey of the Scheldt, sometimes hot and dusty, sometimes under shade of rustling poplars, cool and refreshing after the glare. It took me long to get out of sight of the spire of Antoing and the tall tower of the old chateau, but at last I reached Jemappes very tired. No ' field ' here for thought or study ; nothing but a dry cinder-heaped hill, with smoking chimneys above it and coal-mines below. Nothing to show where Dumouriez placed his troops for the attack, where Clarefait's fourteen heavy batteries were ranged, where young De Charteris led his blue-coated volunteers up the hill of Cuesnes to assault the Austrian batteries ; no chance, even, of identifying the three particular coalpits down which the victorious French put their own and their enemy's twelve thousand dead men and horses. The black country in Stafford is scarcely more cinder-heaped and smoke-grimed than is this spot where the first act of the greatest drama ever plaj-ed in human history began. At INIons next day I had better luck. From the top of the high tower of St. Wadru, that old towTi of neither toil nor traffic, the eye could range far over this south end of the great ' cock- pit,' over Malplaquet, over Frameries, over Bavay, over Jemappes. There yonder, between Sars and Tenniers, on the 11th September 1709, fell some thirty-five thousand French, English, Dutch, Danes, Germans, and Italians. ' Those who were not killed,' wrote Eugene, * died of fatigue. I gave some rest to the remains of my troops, buried aU I could, and then marched to Mons.' Of all the battles of Queen Anne's wars, this of ^lalplaquet was the most deadly. Although the AUies won the honours, the French got the tricks. ' The plunder of France was the general discourse in Germany, England, and HoUand at the opening of the campaign of 1709 ' ; but the loss of the twenty-five thousand of the best of the Allied troops 76 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY saved France from serious invasion, and so crippled the attack- ing power of the Allies that it practically led to the conclusion of the war. ' If it pleases God/ wrote Marshal Villars after the fight, ' to favour j'our Majesty with the loss of another such battle, your enemies wiU be destroyed.' That was about the truth. I rambled along for another few daj^s, and finally found my- self on the road which led north from Fleurus to Ligny. The hot weather still continued, but notwithstanding the heat and foot-travel, the days were pleasant in themselves and delightful now to look back upon. I kept a notebook, and I find in it little bits of the life in town and country that read freshly now : — ' Stopped to rest in a clump of trees crossing a little mound on the right of the road, where there was an image of the Crucifixion, and underneath the inscription which poor Tom Hood wove so well into the ode that made Rae Wilson famous and ridiculous lq his generation : — The pious choice had fixed upon the verge of a delicious slope, Giving the eye such variegated scope. " Look round," it whispered, " oil that prospect rare, Those vales so verdant and those hills so blue : Enjoy the sunny world so fresh and fair : But" (how the simple legend pierced me through), " Priez, pour les malheureux." ' Yes, it was a fair world, and a delightful thing to wander over it. No anxiety for the morrow, no care for to-day, no regret for yesterday ; eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, reading the leaves of the trees, seeing the sunny half of the great round peach which we call the world. When I repine at poverty and wish for money, it is not for love of the gold thing itself, but for the love of all the golden scenes which the want of it hides from me. And then so little would suffice for what I long to do. The money which thousands waste without anything to show for it would carry me through the length of this glorious world. Men talk of knowledge of the world, meaning only knowledge of the human town mites that are on it, but of the true world they know nothing. ' Evening. — Halting in a sheepfold. The sheep have gathered in for the night. They stare at the strange intruder, first with awe, then with surprise, then with indifference or contempt. One, older or bolder than the others, presumes upon his ten minutes' FIELD OF LIGNY 77 acquaintance to approach close, look straight into my face, and stamp his foot at me. " Be off out of that," he says. ' Sunday morniiig. — The chimes in the old church tower have been busy for some time, and the inhabitants of the village are going past my open window in their best bib and tucker. I looked into the billiard-room of the inn last night, and now I can scarcely recognise in the black-coated churchgoers the players of last even- ing. I begin to be ashamed of my single tweed suit, now looking dusty and travel-stained ; but when a man has to carry his own baggage he cuts his clothing, not to his cloth, but to his knapsack.' This day at Ligny was the longest and hottest of any in my rambles. All the names on the milestones were like the faces of old dead friends seen in a dream — Ligny, St. Amand, Som- brefife, Bry, Quatre Bras, ' To Genappe,' ' To Namur,' ' To Waterloo.' I had been reading of these places, great hinges of history, graveyards of human glory, for years in all sorts of places, trying so hard to transfer their printed names into brain pictures, that now when I came upon them, not in the flesh but in corn ridge and pasture slope and cottage plot, it seemed impossible they could be what the milestones and fingerposts said they were — themselves. I passed through the little village of Lign}', and got to the higher ridges of Bry immediately behind it. The old windmill at Bussy, where Bliicher had seen his centre broken in the twUight of the June evening, was there still, and near it stood a single old walnut-tree, offering most grateful shade under its branches. From this point, the events of the 16th June 1815 could be seen in a single sweep of vision. It was another of these Fontenoy fields, readable from a single centre, a thing never to be possible again. One hundred years ago men stood six hundred yards from their enemies ; now thej^ stand six thousand yards away. Below where I sat ran the little streamlet of Ligny, its valley forming an almost continuous line of hamlets from St. Amand on the right to Sombre ffe on the left. All along this valley, for a distance of some four miles, a terrible combat was waged on the afternoon of 16th June 1815. Villages, hamlets, and farmhouses were taken and retaken again and again ; while above, on the parallel ridges which front each other before either side of the rivulet of 78 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Ligny, some four hundred and fifty guns thundered over the combatants. I had to sleep somewhere near Quatre Bras that night, so after a rest of about an hour I struck the main line of paved road between Namur and Nivelles, near Sombreffe, and held westward towards Quatre Bras. About liaKway between the two places there is some high ground on the right of the Chaussee which commands an extensive prospect upon either side. You can see Fleurus and Charleroi to the south, a.nd the half-dozen white houses of Quatre Bras to the west, while where you turn north-west the top of the cone of the lion-mound on the field of Waterloo is visible in this direction. You can see, too, a little to the east of north, the smoke of Wavre. At Marbais you stand nearly in the centre of the square which has for its corners the four battle-points of Ligny, Quatre Bras, Waterloo, and Wavre, and all the grand but simple strategy of Napoleon's campaign of 1815, planned in Paris, is apparent, magnificent in con- ception, simple when it is once understood. The armies of his adversaries, Wellington and Bliicher, were cantoned facing the northern frontier of France from Namur to Ath, along a distance of some fifty miles. They numbered a total of about two hundred and thirty thousand men, with more than five hundred guns. The Emperor Napoleon could strike at this great array with a total of only one hundred and eleven thousand men and three hundred and fifty cannon. It was an enormous, almost a hopeless, disparity of force, but it had to be faced, because at least another four hundred thousand men were moving from all Europe against the French frontiers. From east to west, and through the centre of the Allied canton- ments, ran a great paved highway (the same we are now on at Marbais), affording the easiest means of concentrating both armies, either separately or together. This great road was bisected at Quatre Bras by another main road leading from Charleroi to Brussels, running nearly north and south. If Napoleon could seize Charleroi, he would be within striking distance of the great central road from Namur to Quatre Bras and Nivelles. Here at Marbais we are at the spot which marked the point where the left of the army under Wellington NAPOLEON'S STRATEGY 79 touched the right of Bliicher's army. Napoleon's plan was to strike this road at two places — one Sombreffe, which we have just quitted ; the other Quatre Bras, to which we are going. If he could gain these two places on the main road, he had cut in two the direct line between his powerful enemies, and as neither of them had as yet concentrated their armies, he might hope to engage them separately and beat them in detail. At daybreak on the 15th June he launched some seventy thousand men in three columns upon Charleroi. They were all to meet at or near that city. By noon the heads of these three columns had crossed the Sambre, carried Charleroi, and were pursuing the Prussian corps of Ziethen back to the great road at Sombreffe. On the same evening the French left column under Ney, following the bisecting road from Charleroi to Quatre Bras, had reached Frasne, less than three miles from Quatre Bras, driving the Allied troops of the Prince of Orange back to Quatre Bras. When night closed on the 15th the position of the three armies was as follows : the French head- quarters were at Charleroi, the centre concentrated round that place, the Prussians at Namur, the English at Brussels. Not until midnight on that day (the 15th), did the Duke of Welling- ton know that his enemy, whom he believed to be still in Paris, was in reality at Charleroi, thirty miles south of Brussels. Bliicher, seventeen miles east of Namur, was in equal ignorance of Napoleon's movements, and of the concentration of his army on the frontier, one march distant from Charleroi, until the night of the 14th June. It was a master-stroke of strategy, among the most brilliant in the records of war. One incident had alone interfered with its complete success — it was the desertion of the traitors, Bourmont and Cluet, on the 14th June, to the Prussians at Namur. Bourmont was the chief of the stafif of Gerard's Corps forming the right wing of the French army. Cluet was an officer of Engineers, and there was a third officer of lesser rank. These three traitors carried to Bliicher, on the night of the 14th at Namur, the first news he had received of the French move- ment ; and Bourmont, from his high position on the staff, was able to impart secret information of the highest moment. It is now certain that if it had not been for this traitorous act the whole Prussian arm}" would have been quiet in its 80 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY cantonments on the morning of the 15th June, and it would then have required a clear fort3'^-eight hours to assemble even three corps of the Prussian army in front of Charleroi. With the information given him by Bourmont, Bliicher was able to beat the ' Generale ' in his various cantonments on the night of the 14th Jmie, and to get his scattered corps in movement in the direction of Fleurus at daybreak on the 15th. Bour- mont 's treachery had robbed Napoleon of about twelve precious hours. Nevertheless, the chances were all in his favour at midnight on the 15th. Ney had actually reported his occupation of Quatre Bras. Napoleon himself was within striking distance of Sombreffe. Thus the main road commanding the two Allied armies would probably be in his possession on the 16th, and the two armies would be cut asunder. The next day's work was to be this : With his centre and right massed together, Napoleon would attack the Prussians at or near SombreSe. Nej'' was to attack Quatre Bras eight miles west of Sombreffe, whatever might be in his front. The result of the 16th June" is easil}^ told. Napoleon performed his part of the programme by smashing the Prussians at Ligny ; Ney failed in his much easier task at Quatre Bras. On that morning of the 16th he had more than forty thousand men, and over a hundred guns under his command, between Gossehes and Quatre Bras. Only a weak, mixed brigade of the enemy held that important post. Nevertheless, Ney let the precious morning hours slip away in total inaction at Frasnes, and it was past two o'clock in the afternoon when he moved on Quatre Bras. That position had then been heavily rein- forced, and every hour of daj^'hght that remained saw fresh accessions of force arriving from the English reserve at Brussels, and the scattered cantonments to the west. Here occurred the first loss of the campaign of 1815 for Napoleon. The essence of this tremendous problem he had set himself to solve was time. In war, time must inevitablj' be often lost ; but for this loss of at least eight hours before Quatre Bras there was neither reason nor excuse. It was the most gratuitous waste of opportunity that the history of war affords, unless, indeed, it be found two days later in another inexplicable loss of ten hours on the part of a French marshal on the other FIELD OF QUATRE BRAS 81 side of this great square, of which the four corners held the campaigning ground of 1815. Grouchy, on the 18th, will repeat, with still more disastrous results to his master, this terrible inaction at Gembloux, at Tabaraque, and at Wavre, which Ney is here practising at Gosselies, Frasnes, and Quatre JBras. I must resume my own march upon Quatre Bras, and see the ground for myself. So, taking up the knapsack again, I trudged westward along the high road. I reached the little hamlet at the cross-roads as the sun was getting low towards the horizon. There was the field untouched : the wood of Boissu, the farm of Gemioncourt, rising into the higher ground behind which lay the village of Frasnes, the half a dozen white houses standing bare about the point of intersection of the two great highways. The stubble was crisp under foot as I held on by Gemion- court and Frasnes. A few ploughmen were unyoking their teams and turning homewards. Of all the fields of Flanders this of Quatre Bras had the strongest personal interest for me. Just there below the ridge of Gemioncourt the 69th Regiment had fared badly at the hands of Kellermann's Cuirassiers on the afternoon of that 16th June. It was not their fault, poor fellows. The Prince of Orange had insisted upon line being formed from the square into which a careful colonel (who was killed two days later at Waterloo) had put them; the Cuirassiers had simpl}^ rolled up the line from right to left, killed and wounded a hundred and fifty officers and men, and taken the regimental colour back with them to Ney on the ridge of Frasnes. Before I left Aldershot, one of those excellent men who have leamt to laugh at everything out of England asked me why I was going abroad to look at a lot of turnip fields ; ' You know that here in England they say you can't get blood out of a turnip.' I answered : ' But in Belgium you can get plenty of turnips out of blood ; that 's why I 'm going there.' I reached Frasnes very tired after sunset. The day had been hot and hard, and I was badly in need of supper and rest. I found both in a clean little cottage here at Frasnes. When the homely supper was served on a snow-white cloth, I found another guest at table. He was the head of the village com- mune, an excellent specimen of the Flemish peasant. There F 82 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY was a dessert of grapes and two or three peaches, one of the latter bemg redder and riper than the others. My companion had the plate of fruit in front of him ; he turned it carefully round until the big peach was facing where I sat, and then courteously offered the plate to me. It was a simple thing, but I have never forgotten it. Civility goes a long way, they say ; in the case of my peasant friend at Frasnes it has gone more than forty years. Liberty, equality, fraternity, and the greatest of these is fraternity ; and perhaps if people practised it more frequently they need not have troubled themselves so much about the other two. I walked from Frasnes to Waterloo on the following day. It was quite as hot and hard as any of the other days ; but by this time I was hard too. I have said enough about these old Flemish fields of fight. We are not yet one hundred years from Waterloo. It is quite possible that there are thoughtful people in England to-day who are not quite so keen as their fathers were upon the ' leg up ' on the high horse of Europe which we gave Germany in that memorable campaign ; and neither am I sure that there may not be ' a good few ' in other parts of Europe who rather regret that flank march from Wavre to Waterloo, which saved Wellington from defeat, and made the rock of St. Helena famous. CHAPTER VI The Channel Isles. Victor Hugo. The Curragh. To Canada. Leave in the West. Buffalo hunt. The 69th went from Aldershot to the Channel Isles in the summer of 1866, and my lot fell to the beautiful little island of Guernsey, where two companies were quartered in Fort George on the crest of the hill above St. Peter's Port. The view from the rampart of this old fort was very striking — islands near and far on what was usually a blue and sparklmg sea, and beyond the islands the coast of Normandj^ from Cape La Hogue to Coutance. It was a verj^ happy spot, this island: no very rich people and no very poor people in it ; moderate comfort everywhere ; fruits and flowers everj'where ; the land and the sea giving a two-handed harvest to the inhabitants. It had, however, one serious drawback : intoxicating drink was as plentiful as it was cheap. The island had a copper currency of its own ; unfortunate^, a depreciated one. If a man tendered an English shilling in pajTnent for a glass of brandy, he received twelve Guernsey pennies back. This was too much for old soldiers, particularly for the men who had served in tropical countries — a glass of French brandy and twelve Guernsey pennies given in return for one English shilling ! No soldier in his senses could understand a rate of exchange based on such principles, even before he had drunk his glass of brandy, and after that event the problem became still more abstruse. It was impossible not to love these old soldiers, for, notwithstanding this failing, they had so many splendid qualities. I call these men old ; in reality they were all under forty years, but they were old in every other sense of the word. If you asked any of these men when they were in hospital what was wrong with them, they would usually answer, ' Only them pains, sir ' ; and if you asked again what had given them those ' pains,' they would invariably say it 84 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY was the heavy belts and cumbersome pouches they had to wear for twentj^'-four hours on guard. It was true. Our stupid regulations broke down those fine soldiers long before their time. Men said that there were other causes, but I don't think there were. There was not a regimental band in the service in which you could not have found some old bassoon or trombone player, who had sampled in his time every in- toxicating fluid from cocoanut toddy to methylated spirits, but who, nevertheless, was still going and blowing strong, simply because he had not done a night's guard duty in his twenty years. A short road led to St. Peter's Port from our fort on the hill. Half-way down the slope one passed a rather gloomy-looking, soUd, square house, standing on the right of the road. This was Hauteville House, in which Victor Hugo had lived for several years. He was absent from Guernsey at this time, on a visit to Belgium. I had but recently finished reading his Les Miserables. I thought his description of Waterloo the finest piece of writing I had ever read. It had been constantly in my mind during the recent visit to Waterloo, and I had felt all that time the want of a practical acquaintance with the French language. The first thing I now thought of doing in this French-speaking island was to learn it. A chance inquiry about a tutor gave me the name of a M. Hannett de Kesler, who lived in a smaU house at a little distance below Hauteville. It was thus that I made the ac- quaintance of one of the most delightful human beings I have met in life. He lived in very straitened circumstances with only an old woman servant to keep house for him. He had had a remarkable career. Editor of a Republican news- paper in Paris in 1848, he had all the courage of his convictions, and had stood beside Baudin on the barricade in the Faubourg St. Antoine on the memorable morning in December 1851. Then he had gone into exile with Victor Hugo and others. When an amnesty was offered later he refused to acpept it. ' Never,' said Victor Hugo, at poor Kesler's grave two years after the time I am writing of — ' Never was there more pro- found and tenacious devotion than his. He was a champion and a sufferer. He possessed all forms of courage, from the lively courage of the combat to the slow courage of endurance ; 1 ACQUAINTANCE WITH VICTOR HUGO 85 from the braver}- which faces the cannon, to the heroism which accepts the loss of home/ He was a deep and sincere Re- pubUcan, and his love and devotion to Victor Hugo were an extraordinary thing to see. He literally worshipped the poet. But above all that anybody could say of him, stood his honesty and his simplicity of life. I look upon the hours spent in the society of this dear old man with unalloyed pleasure. He was broken in health, and was already showing symptoms of the slow form of paralysis of which he died two years later. He wrote poetry, simple and touching little verses, inspired, I think, b}^ the antics of a minx of some sixteen summers who lived opposite, and who used to make eyes at him across the street. He used to read these verses to me. I remember one that began ' Elle a le charme, elle a la grace.' He was, as I have said, in very straitened circumstances ; but he kept it all to himself, and would not even let Victor Hugo know of his wants. A month or two after I had begun to take lessons from him, in August I think it was, I had to go away for a few weeks. I was settling his modest fee for tuition, and I wanted to pay in advance up to the end of the j-ear. I put the gold pieces on the table, but he would only take what was due to him at the moment, and insisted upon returning the rest of the money to me. It was some time after my return that I discovered the cause of this refusal. He had determined to go on board the Jersey steamer, and drop quietly overboard in front of the paddle-box on the voyage. He did not want to be a burden upon anybody. That was the reason he had returned the few sovereigns I had wished to give him in advance ! Meanwhile, somebody told Victor Hugo of the pecuniary straits of his devoted follower, and provision was at once made to meet his simple wants. Shortly after the return of Victor Hugo to the island, I received a very courteous invitation to Hauteville House. ' n a ajout6, " J'aurais le plus grand plaisir a voir Monsieur Butler, et j'espere qu'il ne tardera pas a me faire cet honneur." ' There was a District Court-martial that forenoon, which I was obliged to attend, and I went to it with feelings not easy 86 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY to describe. Something went very wrong with the pro- ceedings shortly after we assembled, and I took advantage of the adjournment to fly to Hauteville House. I found there a party of some eight or ten persons assembled in a room which had many curious conceits in its furniture and decorations. Four carved seats were let into the wainscoting, with paint- ings done on their high straight backs in the old Dutch style. Three of these stiff chairs were for the living, and one, which had a chain across its arms, was marked ' For the dead.' The paintings represented ' The End of the Soldier,' ' The End of the Law^'^er,' and ' The End of the Priest.' I have forgotten how the two first were supposed to come by their ends, but in the last picture a woman was laj^ing a birch broom across the shoulders of a French cleric who was in the act of disappearing through a doorway. During the dejeuner Victor Hugo spoke a great deal. I was able to follow what he said with difficulty. What struck me most was the extraordinary sonorous tone of his voice, its modulations, and, if I might use the word, its ramifica- tions. It seemed to run up and down through words as the fingers of a great musician might range through notes of music. He frequently repeated the invitation to me to attend these little weekly parties, and I used to meet him also in his walks to Fermain Bay, a beautiful little secluded sea cove between very high rocks, not far from our fort. At times he used to be full of fun and raillery, but the general tone of his mind was grave and serious. I kept no regular diary at this time, but I find in an intermittent little notebook some references to these meetings, ' 22nd Octr. (1866).— At breakfast with Victor Hugo. After looking at me for some time, he suddenly said : " I have examined your face, and if I was ever to be tried I would wish to have you for a judge." ' 2&h Nov. — To-day at Victor Hugo's. He said : " I also am an Irishman. I love Ireland because she is to me a Poland and a Hungary, because she suffers. . . ." Later he asked me if I would accompany him the following year through Ireland. " I want to see that island and its i^eople. You shall be my guide there. The only stipulation I will make is that we shall drive everywhere, and that you will not ask me to travel in a train." ' VICTOR HUGO AT HOME 87 But the next year I was far away in Canada ! * 4th Dec. — Dined this evening in company with Victor Hugo at Monsieur Le Bers'. He was full of fun. " Take care of him ! " he said, pointing at me ; " he is an enfant terrible." ' 10th Dec. — Breakfasted at Victor Hugo's. He said that there were two English words which he hated : one was " Respectable," and the other " Ragged." " Ragged School ! think of that," he went on ; " does it not make you shiver ? " ' Of the many curious things to be seen in Haute ville House, the master's sleeping-room was the strangest. He had built it on the roof between two great blocks of chimneys. You ascended to his workshop bedroom by stairs which somewhat resembled a ladder : quite half of the room was glass, and the view from it was magnificent ; the isles of Jethou and Sark were in the middle distance, and beyond lay many a mile of the Norman coast. Alderney lay to the north, and beyond it one saw the glistening windows of the triple lighthouses on the Casquet rocks, and still more to the right the high ridges overlooking Cherbourg. The bed was a small camp bedstead, with a table on one side of it, and a small desk chest of drawers on the other, with pens, ink and paper always within reach. Near the bed stood a small stove, which he lighted himself every morning, and on which he prepared his cafe.-au-lait ; then work began at the large table which stood in the glass alcove a few feet from the foot of the bed. This work went on till it was time to dress and descend to the dejeuner in the room on the ground floor already described. As the sheets of writing-paper were finished, they were numbered and dropped on the floor, to be picked up, arranged, and put away in the drawer-desk at the end of the morning's labour. He called the writing-table his ' carpenter's bench,' and the leaves which fell from it his ' shavings.' It was at this table and in this airy attic that most of the great work of his later life was done. Here were written Les Miserahles, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and many volumes of poetry. Among the few things which have survived the tossings and travails of life I have still managed to retain in my possession some of the ' shavings ' from that ' carpenter's bench,' which he gave me as souvenirs of his friendship. Nowhere in these islands is the sea more delightful than at 88 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Guernsey. Victor Hugo has told us that when he and his son found themselves exiles in the Channel Isles, the son asked him what he proposed to do. ' I shall look at the sea/ replied the father ; ' and you ? ' 'I will translate Shakespeare/ answered the son. In this little conversation we get the key to two of the poet's works, Les Travailleurs de la Mer and William Shakespeare — the last httle known, but nevertheless the work of which its author was proudest. It is a wonderful sea that laves the feet of these beautiful island rocks. I bathed m it through the winter months of 1866-67. Suddenly, at the end of the winter, ' the route,' as it used to be called, came. The 69th was ordered to Ireland. So, in March 1867, we sailed away from Guernsej^, leaving with many regrets its kind, gentle, and generous people. The soldier is but a ' toiler of the sea ' and the land, and that means many partings in his life. But this life of changing scene has several sides to it. I have sometimes thought that a marching regiment filled in our social system the place taken by a comet in the solar system when it comes along and the people run to the window and look out. We spent the early summer of 1867 at the Curragh ; but in August ' the route ' came again suddenly, and we embarked for Canada on the 19th of that month in the transport Serapis, then making her first voyage. It was a very uncomfortable experience ; the vessel had little or no baUast, and she bobbed about among the Atlantic rollers for thirteen days before getting to Quebec. After a delay of one day we were trans- ferred to boats plying between Quebec and Montreal, and again transferred to other river craft bound for Hamilton, at the western end of Lake Ontario ; finally getting to a little town in Western Canada called Brantford, about midway between Lakes Ontario and Erie. This district had been the scene of some recent incursions at the hands of armed bodies of Fenians who had formerlj^ served in the Northern armies of the now once more L^nited States, and who, finding their occupation gone on the Potomac and the Rapahannock, had elected to carry on war on their own account on the St. Law- rence and the Welland Canal. Hence our rapid movement to Canada. CANADIAN LIFE 89 The whole character of the new scene of service was so novel to me, and so fuU of the virility of a youthful people, that it would be impossible to give expression to the sense of the freshness of life that went with it to us who now beheld it for the first time. The approach by the mighty estuary of the St. Lawrence River, the gradual drawing in of these great shores, the immense width of the stream when it is still six hundred miles from the open sea, the varied scenery of lake and rapid along the upward course to Ontario, and then that beautiful expanse of water itself, all combined to strike the mind of the newcomer with the sense of size and majesty which is the dominant note of the American continent. In boyhood I had read the novels of Fenimore Cooper with an intensity of interest never to be known again in reading. ' Leather Stocking,' Lucas, Chingaghook, the Mohicans, the Hurons, the scenery of the Thousand Islands — aU these had been things quite as real to- me in imagination as the actual scenes through which we were now passing. Only the Indians and the wild animals were wanting. \Miere were they ? Gone from this West Canada, but still to be found west of the Mississippi and the Missouri, I was told. It was now the middle of September. I got three months' leave of absence and, in company with another old friend of the Indian forest days, started out for the great West. Three days after leaving Brantford we were at Omaha, west of the Mississippi. Fortune had favoured us. We knew nobody, nobody knew us, and yet it was simple truth to say that everybody be- friended us. You met a man on board the train going to Chicago : he couldn't do enough for you ; he passed you on to some other good fellow who knew somebody else five hundred or a thousand miles nearer to the setting sun ; and when you alighted at the longitude of that particular location, you found that man as friendly as though he had been expecting you for years. This was exactly what happened to us. We struck upon a general going west in the Chicago hotel, and he at once offered his good services to and at Omaha on the Missouri, where he was then stationed. At that period the soldiers of the armies of Sherman and Grant seemed to be all either in the West, or going there. The new railway to California was just opened 90 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY to Omaha ; and it was said that a train ran as far over the Nebraska prairies as Fort Kearney on the North Platte River, three hundred miles west of the Missouri, where the garrison of the fort was largely rationed, so far as fresh beef went, upon buflfalo-meat. This was indeed news to us, and we set off from Chicago in high spirits. When the next evening came we crossed the Missouri over a very crank-looking temporary wooden bridge to Omaha. We found that city a very lively place ; railway navvies, gold-diggers, speculators abounded. Shooting went on pretty briskly in the gambling rooms and drinking saloons, of which there appeared to be an unlimited number. Every man policed himself with a sort of murderous solemnity that was most impressive. At one of the principal saloons, a day or two before our arrival, a miner had quietly drawn a bead upon a man who had just entered and was walking up towards the bar. ' WTiat did you shoot him for ? ' asked his mate. ' Wall, I just guess that if I hadn't done that he might have hurt somebody,' was the plea of justifiable homicide entered by this voluntary preserver of the peace. Our friend, the Chicago general, called early next day at our hotel, and asked us to go with him to the headquarters of the command. We went, and were introduced to General Augur, a very distmguished officer of the regular army who had held high command in the Civil War. Augur was of that splendid type of gentleman which West Point has so long given to America, and I will venture to hazard the opinion that if America keeps her military school at West Point m the future as she has kept it in the past, she need not fear that either foreign or domestic enemies wiU do her serious harm. West Point will give her captains for many wars ; and the class to which that ' peace preserver ' belonged, whose peculiar methods of disciplme I have already described, will give her the rank and file of fighting men. The general had already been informed of the object of our journey to the West, and he entered warmly into our plans. He would telegraph at once to the commandant at Fort Kearney as to the whereabouts of buffalo on the Platte prairies, and if the answer proved favourable to our hopes he would send his aide-de-camp. Captain RusseU, with us to the Fort, to smooth difficulties and facilitate our progress. The reply A MERRY PARTY GOING WEST 91 came quickly. Yes ; there were several herds on the prairies near Kearney. So the next morning, in company with Captain Russell, we took the train for Fort Kearney Station on the new Union Pacific Railway. Some other officers and soldiers were proceeding west to join garrisons in the Indian districts of the Platte and RepubUcan Rivers. We were a very merry party. All the officers had served in the Civil War — some with Sherman, others with Grant. We had the end of the Pullman car to ourselves. There was no want of refreshment, and nobody thought of retiring to the sleeping compartment until the night was more than half over. Storj' followed story. A major of the United States Infantry named Burt told the best ; but the general's A.D.C. was a good second. I remember one of these stories which had a touch of historical interest in it. General Grant was carrj^ing out on the Mississippi, previous to the battle of Shiloh, one of the most hazardous operations known in war — crossing his army from one shore to the other, within striking distance of his enemy on the farther shore. He had only three river steamers to ferry his troops over. On the third day the operation was almost completed, and the general and his staff were on horseback on the enemy's side of the Mississippi, watching the passage of the rearmost battalions in the three steamboats. Grant sat his horse, silently smok- ing a large cigar, which he rolled a good deal between his lips. A staff officer in the group happened to observe that if they were licked in the next day or two they would want more transport to take the army back to where it had come from than those three httle boats could give them. Rumour said that the general had consumed a good deal of Bourbon whisky that day, as was his wont at the time, I have heard ; but be that as it may, it did not unlock his lips ; he continued to roll and bite the big cigar in grim silence. The staff officer repeated his observation about the scantiness of transport. After a bit the general seemed to have become aware that somebody had spoken, and that he was himself expected to say something in reply. Then the big cigar rolled quicker than before, and from the compressed lips the remark issued, ' Guess them three boats wiU be enough to take back what 's left if I 'm hcked to-morrow ! ' 92 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY We reached Kearney Station as day was breaking, and found a six-team army mule- waggon awaiting us. The fort was still some six miles from the railway, and on the other side of the Platte River. Things were soon fixed up, and away we went across a prairie as level as a billiard- table, just as the light was making the surrounding scene visible. Here was the mystic word ' prairie ' at last a veritable reality. Since my early boyhood that word had meant to me everything that was possible in the breathing, seeing, and grasping of freedom. We came suddenly to the Platte River, a huge, sandy bed more than a mile in width, wdth several streams running through portions of it. A mile from the south bank stood Fort Kearney. The sun was now on the horizon, and the mists were lifting. As we approached the wooden palisades of the fort, we saw two big black objects standing on the prairie about a thousand yards on one side of the buildings. Buffalo ? Yes, there they were. Another mmute, and we were drawn up at the door of the commandant's house m Fort Kearney. He was at the door to give us welcome, in full uniform, and with a broad- brimmed, steeple-crowned hat on his head ; and a very cheery welcome it was. ' Colonel,' he said to me, * these early Fall mornings have chills in them ; we have some medicme here which we find very effective against Platte fever.' A large bowl of hot Bourbon whisky egg-flip was on the table, and he ladled us tumblers of this fever-kiher all round. The commandant was one of the most typical American figures possible to imagine — tall, thin, gaunt, wrinkled many years in advance of his age, he might have stood as the model for a picture of a primitive New England Puritan in the second generation from the Mayflower. Every now and then there came some word into his speech giving at first rather a shock to any ideas of complete Puritanic perfection, which his outward semblance and strong nasal utterance might have occasioned. He belonged to the 18th Regiment of Infantry. He had been many things in his time. He had run a newspaper in Pitts- burg, made three sections of the Indiana and Memphis Railway, had kept a store in Lake Street, Chicago, had fought the Confederates for three years as a volunteer colonel, had been in as many general actions as the Duke of WeUington, and SIGHTING THE BUFFALO HERD 93 when the Northern army was reduced at the end of the war, he contentedly accepted a lieutenancy in the regular service of the United States. England must have seen many men of his type in the army that was drawn up on Blackheath as Charles the Second rode past to London in 1660. The sight of the two big buffalo bulls within a mile of the fort was so strong in our minds, that we proposed to proceed at once in pursuit of them. This proposal for immediate action before breakfast seemed to tickle his fancy. He at once abandoned Salem mannerisms, and descended into congre- gational colloquialisms. ' Boys,' he said, bringing us down with a run to our proper levels from previous field rank, ' Boys, don't you trouble about them darned two bull-buffaloes. We '11 have breakfast in half an hour, the horses will be ready at nine o'clock, the shooting irons all fixed up, and we '11 have the hull day for the buffalo.' He was right. There was plenty of time and plenty of buffalo before us. We set out shortly after nine — the old commandant leading — six or seven men on ragged-looking but very serviceable American army horses. The course taken led across the dead level prairie which surrounded the fort towards a low line of sandy ridges due south. Our two bulls had vanished. Nothing but our own seven or eight horses moved within the wide circle of our vision. We were now at the foot of the sandy ridge, and five or six miles from the fort. The commandant stopped. ' Colonel,' he said, again revertmg to service form, ' Colonel, ride up that slope ; before you get quite to the top of it take some place where grass is growing, so as to let you look over without showing your heads ; get the shooting irons ready, and then I give the word "go." ' We did as he directed, approached the top of the hill cauti- ously, and looked over. Before or since I never saw the equal of that sight, and, what is more, no man can ever see it again. The ridge on which we rode dropped down at the far side into a prairie that quite dwarfed that over which we had come ; but the sight that struck us with astonishment was not the vastness of the scene, but the immensity of the animal life that covered it. From a spot three or four hundred yards from where we stood, far off to a remote horizon where sky 94 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY and prairie came together on a line that was visible to us only by the small black specks of life that were on it, a vast herd of grazing buffaloes stretched away to the south ; huge animals in the foreground, gradually lessening in size as the middle distance was reached, and then dwindling down into the faint specks I have spoken of. A rifle bullet might have reached the nearest of the herd ; two hours' hard riding would not have carried you to the farthest animal where the earth limit was a line of buffalo backs. The commandant gave the word, and over the top of the hill we went spreading out to right and left, as we rode down the other side. The mass of animals was so vast that there was no picking or choosing of group or ground. It was strange to see the wave of alarm pass from the edge of the vast herd that was nearest to us, on through the mass itself. The buffalo has (or we should say had, for he is now practically an extinct animal) a way of throwing himself away to the right or left from the heavy forepart of his body, pivoting as it were on his fore legs, and swinging the remainder of his body to either side. In an incredibly short space of time the part of the herd we could see was in motion straight away from our advance, ploughing at full gallop over the prairie. It was now a case of each man for himself. I was soon at the heels of a very big old bull, tearing at full gallop after him. The commandant had given us each a short and handy Spencer carbine, the then cavalry arm in the United States Army. It loaded through the butt, by an action of the trigger guard ; the magazine held seven cartridges ; and as the process of reloading was easily effected in the saddle, it formed a very handy weapon in attack, pursuit, or retreat. All these a buffalo hunt afforded. When my particular bull found that he was outpaced, he began to swing from side to side in his gallop, so as to eye his pursuer first from one eye and then from the other. I took advantage of one of these side surges to give him a shot, the only effect of which was that he planted his forefeet well in the hght soil of the prairie, and pivoting as I have said, swung round upon me in a second. It was now my turn to fly and his to pursue ; but again finding I had ' the legs of him,' he swerved again and made off after the still flj'ing herd. It was some little time before I caught him up again and got a second THE AMERICAN TYPE 95 shot at him, and again came the same tactics and the same result. At last, after a couple of miles had been run, and some four or five shots fired, he turned for the last time, pawed the ground, bellowed, and fell on his knees to the ground. I had now time to look around ; a change had come upon the scene in that two-mile gallop. ^ly companions were not visible on any side. The great herd was still careering south, and from out its dust came the sounds of a few distant shots. I continued the pursuit, and soon came up again with the nearest animals. They were all bulls — some old, some young. The same firing, charge, and pursuit were again enacted, and another big buU was on the ground. The tail and the tongue were taken, one as a trophy, the other for the table, and again the chase went on southwards ; then fatigue of horse and man called a halt, and after a rest one turned back towards the north to look for the ridge from which the fort would be visible. Some of our party came together at the ridge, others turned up singly, and in the evening we were all united at the fort. At this time Nebraska was still a Territory of the United States. Settlement had not yet penetrated into these great wilds. Indians and buffalo were still numerous ; and the line of forts from the Missouri westward was maintained for the protection of the line of real conquest, the railwaj^ which had now reached this central spot of the United States on its progress to the Pacific. The four years' Civil War had arrested for a time the opening up of this vast region, and now the wave of settlement was in motion again, with a force, a directness, an energy, and, I might add, a sense of empire, to aU of which the long and costly war seemed only to have added strength and power. What impressed me most strangely about the men I now came in contact with was the uniformity of the type which America was producing — ^northern, southern, eastern, western, miner, hotel-keeper, steamboat-man, raihoad-man, soldier, officer, general, — the mould was the same. ' There has got to be ' seemed to be the favourite formula of speech among them all, whether it was the setting up of a saloon, the bridging of a river, or the creation of a new State. ' There has got to be ' this railway, this drinking bar, this city, this State of the Union. Nobody dreamt, except when he slept ; everybody 96 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY acted while he was awake. They drank a good deal, but you seldom saw a man drunk, and you never saw anybody dead drunk. They sometunes shot each other, they never abused each other ; they were generous, open-hearted, full of a dry humour, as manly as men could be ; rough, but not rude ; civil, but never servile ; proud of their country and boastful of it and of themselves. That day and evening, and all the other days and evenings I spent at Fort Kearney, were the same — good fellowship, good stories round the festive board at night, hard riding and hunting aU day over the glorious prairies. The accommodation of the fort was limited, and we four visitors had one room for sleeping in. At about six o'clock every mornmg the fort doctor used to enter this room with a demijohn of Bourbon whisky on his shoulder, from which he poured four doses of ' medicine ' for the guests. ' It will wake you, boys,' he would say ; and sometimes when his gait was not quite as steady as it had been previous to the dinner-hour of the evening before, he would lurch forward a little while he was preparing to pour the prescription into a tumbler, and send a liberal dose of it over the bed-clothes. ' It will do you no harm, boys,' he would then say ; ' it 's good outside and inside.' Later in the day he compounded several other draughts from his demijohns, the secrets of which he told us he had discovered when he served on the Upper Mississippi ; but I do not remember to have ever detected the flavour of that or of any other water in any of these many compounds. Before returning to the Missouri we visited North Platte, the extreme point to which the Pacific Railway then ran. Civilisation, as it moves west, is compelled to halt at intervals, rest itself, and collect its stragglers before it moves on again. The construction of the line was proceedmg at the rate of four miles a day, so the termmal station was constantly moving on, and the strangest part of this condition of movement was the effect it had upon the motley crowd of saloon society which had congregated to supply the wants of the army of navvies, constructors, engineers, etc., at work at this point. These people moved like the baggage carriers of an Indian column, carrying on their own backs, in waggons, or on the backs of animals the household gods (or demons) of their various trades. THE COMING CHANGE 97 At North Platte we found a distinguished officer of the army in command, Colonel Dodge, one of the foremost frontier men of his time, and the descendant of officers who had prepared the road for the army of settlement in the West. He was a mighty hunter too, and had killed every variety of big game from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri. We told him of the week's hunting we had had on the Platte prairies. More than thirty buffalo bulls had been shot by us, and I could not but feel some qualms of conscience at the thought of the destruction of so much animal life ; but Colonel Dodge held different views. * Kill every buffalo you can,' he said ; ' every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.' It sounded hard then, and it seems hard now ; but seven years after this time I crossed by railway from California to New York, and looking out at this same Platte valley I saw it a smilmg plain of farms, waving crops, and neat homesteads. The hungry crowd from overcharged Europe had surged into settlement over the old buffalo pastures of the Platte. ' Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.' It was right. These Crows, Cheyennes, Sioux, and Blackfeet Indians were no doubt splendid hunters, and fierce raiders, and crafty foemen, but no man could say they were meek. CHAPTER VII A new conception of life. In charge of the ' Look Outs.' Montreal and Quebec. Home. Father's death. A hopeless outlook in the army. We were back in Omaha again. I was the paymaster of the party, and carried the purse. It was Hterally a bag bulky and weighty with greenbacks and a depreciated silver currency at that time used in the States. To avoid the dual dangers of carrying it with one in this rowdiest of Western cities, and of leaving it in one's trunk in the hotel, I tried a middle course one evening by concealing the bag inside a large shooting boot placed casually in the trunk. Then we went out with our United States Army friends to do the sights of Omaha. It was late when we got back to the hotel, and I was tired and sleepy. Before getting into bed, I bethought me of having my boots cleaned, and never thinking of the bag of money hidden in one of them, I took the boots from the trunk and put them outside ray door in the passage. Next morning I awoke to an instant consciousness of what I had done. To make certain, I sprang out of bed and went to the trunk : there were no boots in it. ' Molloj^' I said to my room com- panion, ' we are ruined ; we have no money, I have lost the purse.' Then I opened the door and looked out : there stood the boots cleaned. It was not always a certainty that you would find them thus poHshed ; but unfortunately, as it seemed to me, on this occasion the negro boot-boy had come along in the night and done his duty. I stooped down ; the bag was in the boot ; but was there anything in the bag ? That was the question. ' Molloy,' I said to my friend, ' the bag is still in the boot ' ; but here I stopped, because the poor fellow was leaning on his elbow, just awake, and regarding me with an expression of face that plainlj'-; told me he thought I was quite mad. I opened the bag. Out came the bundle of greenbacks, out came the depreciated dollars and other 98 THE MAINE LIQUOR LAW 99 currency ; all there untouched to the last ' red cent.' I had scarcely finished countmg the money when the door opened and a wooUy-headed black appeared. ' Boots ! ' he ejaculated in a frightened manner, and then vanished. That much elucidation of the mystery I got, and no more. The only explanation I could arrive at afterwards was that some youth- ful understudy in the blacking business of the hotel had got the boots in the first instance, and finding the bag of dollars in the boot when he was cleaning it, had been frightened at the discovery, and thought it better to replace them at the room door as if nothing unusual had been discovered ; that, later on in the morning, he had related his strange experience to the head boss black bootblack ; and that that functionary had rushed at once to the door of the room where we were, only to find the boots inside the door instead of outside, hence his wild ejaculation and rapid exit. Returning by the route we had come, we had a few days' excellent wild-bird shooting in Iowa, and got further experience of the settlement of the West in what might be called the second line of the army of invasion. Iowa was one of the States which had adopted the law known far and wide as the Maine Liquor Law. No intoxicating hquors could be bought or served within the Hmits of the State except by order of a doctor. On the evening of our arrival at the Kttle town of Boone, a leading citizen came to visit us. He was friendly and familiar from the first, and he made no secret of the object of his visit. The prohibition law was a shameful interference with the Uberty of the American citizen ; tea was not a beverage upon which the hunter could successfully pursue his vocation, and there- fore he had come to show us an easy means by which this in- justice could be set right, and a door through which access might be obtained to the hunter's proper paradise — that door being the apothecary's. If we would enter the apothecary's shop that evening, ask for a small bottle of Perry's pain-killer, he, our visitor, would be in an inner room behind the shop ; a prescription would be duly prepared by him, for ' he was a member of the medical profession,' and the apothecary would do the rest. We would only have to sit round and swallow the draughts thus prescribed for us. We did as we were told, and soon found ourselves in an inner 100 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY apartment of the apothecary's residence, in which some eight or ten persons were abeady assembled, excellent patients all of them ; they took their physic without a wrj'- face. Instead of the bottle's being shaken before it was taken, it was the patient who underwent the shaking process, in repeated con- vulsions of laughter, after he had swallowed the compound. As at Omaha, we found that the high rank with which we had been invested upon our arrival soon underwent reduction. We were all colonels, some of us even generals, at the commence- ment of the examination and when the prescription was being written ; but when we had paid our fees and were about to quit the professional room, our medical adviser whispered, ' To-morrow evening at the same hour, boys ! ' But we were far away to the north after the duck, the wavies, and prairie fowl when the next evening came. These men were largely ex-soldiers who had served under Grant or Sherman, and who had come out West when the war was over. They were very fine fellows, despite the little idiosyncrasies and failings to which I have aUuded. Youth does not concern itself much with tracing back facts to causes : it accepts the facts it sees ; the causes can keep. \Vhen I look back now upon that tremendous struggle through which America passed in the early 'sixties, I can see in it many things which were not then visible. It seems to me that the back of human nature must always be ridden by some- body. Victor Hugo in his breakfast-room thought that these riders would eventually be dismounted and driven out : I cannot think that hope wDl ever be fulfilled. Meanwhile I have come to believe that the soldier is not always the worst rider that human society can put into its saddle. When we returned to Western Canada, the beautiful season known as ' the Fall ' was still in being, and the woods were glorious in all the colours of their dying foliage. But that was soon over, and November brought fogs and chills from the great lakes by which the peninsula of Upper Canada is almost surrounded. It would be difficult to picture a more desolate scene than the aspect presented by a Canadian half-cleared forest landscape when the leaves are gone and the snow has not yet come. Gloom has followed close upon the heels of glory ; the wreck of the forest lies on every side in fallen A CANADIAN FOREST 101 trunks and blackened remnants ; the remaining squares of uncut forest trees stand bare and leafless, flinging out great ragged branches into the cleared spaces, as though they were stretching arms of sorrow over the graves of their fallen com- rades. The settler has here fought this forest giant for forty years ; the battle is now over ; the newcomer is the victor ; but the dead still lie unburied, and the twilight of the coming winter is closing upon the battlefield. Here and there, at long intervals, the log-shanties of lately arrived immigrants are seen interspersed with the more comfortable frame-homesteads of the older inhabitants. The fight which has cumbered the ground with the dead giants of the forest has at least given to these homesteads a spoil of the finest firewood for defence against the rigours of a Canadian winter. At the time I speak of, practicable roads were few in this region. They were of three kinds — ' gravel,' ' corduroy,' and ' concession ' roads, the latter being only the surface of the ground cleared of wood. The corduroy roads were of rough trees laid together over swamps and boggy places. The gravel roads were alone possible for travel at all seasons. One of these gravel roads led from Brantford south-east towards Lake Erie, following the high left bank of the Grand River to the little port of Maitland. During my absence on the prairies an old veteran. Colonel Cotter, who had been in the 69th Regiment sixty-five years earher, visited the regiment in Brantford. He lived now on the shore of Lake Erie, some forty miles from Brantford. He had fought as a captain at Quatre Bras and at Waterloo, and had even served in the short war in Travancore (of which I have spoken in Chapter iv.) in 1809. I was now engaged in completing a history of my regiment, begun at Aldershot two years earlier, so I was very anxious to meet this old veteran with as little delay as possible. At eighty years of age the sand is running out of Life's hour-glass very quickly. I set out for Port Maitland. Twenty miles from Brantford a little wooden town stood on the north side of the Grand River, called Caledonia. At this village settlement a long wooden bridge crossed the Grand River, and at the farthest side an Indian reserve had been marked off in the forest for the remnants of the once powerful Six Nation Tribes, I have described at some length the aspect of that particular 102 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY spot in Western Canada as I saw it in the early winter of 1867. I was at that time full of energy, of a boundless desire to do something. Nothing tired me, nor damped the ardour that was in me ; but a distinct and single purpose of life I had not. To go seemed enough ; it did not matter where. Here amid the desolate scener}" on the Grand River a new conception of life seemed all at once to open before me. I must achieve a definite thing. When that resolve is once fixed deep and solid in the mind, the opportunity is certain to come. I found the old veteran 69th officer in a very dreary domicile at Lake Erie. Although he had been so long away from home, and was so far removed from those early years of service in India and Belgium, his mind was clear and his memory of the campaign of Waterloo was most retentive. As we sat that night over the fire, he told me of many episodes in those famous distant days. He described the rush of the Cuirassiers in the rye-field at Quatre Bras, the retreat next day upon Waterloo, and the night of rain and mud. * It was so cold,' he said, ' and as the ground was ankle-deep in mud, I preferred to stand and walk about rather than to lie down. Soon after daybreak I was ordered to take my company to the village of Waterloo, to mount guard at the inn occupied by the Duke of Wellington. As we marched along the front of our line, the soldiers were busy drying, cleaning, and snapping off their firelocks which had rusted during the night. Arrived at the inn I drew up in front, and stood at ease. Presently an A.D.C. came out and told me to return to the regiment, as the Duke was about to leave his quarters for the field. Shortly after I got back the first gun was fired from the French position.' Many other little episodes he spoke of, the following among them. When the 69th had formed up in column, a commissariat waggon drove up with a supply of rum for issue to the men ; and with it came the quartermaster, Matthew Stevens, the same man who at St. Vincent, eighteen years earher, had broken the stern gallery of the San Nicholas and led the way for Nelson to the quarter-deck of the Spanish vessel. When the rum was serving out, a round shot struck the waggon and carried off the head of a pioneer employed at it. ' Weel noo/ said the LIEUTENANT REDVERS BULLER 103 quartermaster gravely, ' it "s aboot time for a peaceable non- combatant like myself to gang awa/ It was strange to hear on the shore of Lake Erie in Canada, from the lips of this veteran, these old stories of the great battle fought on the plains of Belgium fifty-two years earlier. But the stories were not all of Waterloo. He described at length an encounter forced upon him on his return to his native County Cork after Waterloo. Some local hero of duelling celebritj- determined to try his mettle at twenty paces, near MaUow. The challenge was, of course, accepted, the whole countryside flocked to witness the fight, and a field of a couple of thousand spectators was ranged in two long lines, extending far on either side of the combatants. Shots were exchanged, no one was hit, honour was satisfied, and shouts and shillelaghs rent the air. Cotter had entered the 69th in 1804. Like many other officers, he settled in Western Canada after the close of the war, and had remained there ever since. But the strangest part had to come. Six months after this interview, on the 18th June 1868, the old gentleman came to see his former regiment, then in London, Canada West ; and we put him standing between the colours in the front rank, exactly fifty-three years after he had stood in square with them at Waterloo. He died a few months later. These military settlers had not been happy or fortunate in their new homes. The glamour of the forest life, as it appeared in the pages of a romance, was a very different thing from its actual reahty in the backwoods of the West. The greater number of these old soldiers drifted into the towns or came back to Europe. Some of them perished miserably in the backwoods. In the spring of 1868 I was appointed officer in charge of the ' Look Out ' on the Canadian frontier, in succession to Lieutenant Redvers BuUer of the 60th Rifles, who had held the billet for more than a year. Thus began an acquaintance which lasted upwards of forty years, and which was destined to run through many distant lands and strange scenes. At this time Redvers Buller was the best type of the regimental officer possible to be found. Young, active, daring, as keen for service as he was ready to take the fullest advantage of it, 104 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY he stood even then in the front rank of those young and ardent spirits who might be described as the ruck of army Ufe which is waiting to get through. We had met at Brantford during one of his monthly visits to the * Look Outs.' These were small, detached parties of old and reUable soldiers, selected from the regiments in Western Canada, and placed at certain points along the frontier for the purpose of intercepting deserters to the United States. Early in May 1868 I relieved Buller of this frontier duty. Needless to say that the work was congenial to me in every respect. I had to visit the various posts along the frontier once in every month. They were about fifteen in number, some in places that could be reached only by road, and in the circuit of the whole entailing a round of about fifteen hundred miles each month. The circle, which had London as its centre, embraced forts on Lake Huron, Lake St. Clair, and Lake Erie, thence inland to Caledonia, and northward to Paris, Stratford, and Adelaide. Summer was now over the land, and the forest country was as beautiful m June as before in November it had been dreary. To the west of London great tracts were still in forest, and through these the railway ran in a vast avenue, cut deep and straight through woods of beech and maple. South of the line at a place named Watford, a region known as the Brooke Swamp extended for miles. It had the reputation of holding deer, and it was said that even a few bears were stiU to be found in it. I determined to explore it. In the inn at Watford I was directed to the house of an inhabitant who was said to be the village sportsman. Yes, he knew the swamp, and he had heard of that bear. So we started together next morning. In the evening we had reached a log-hut in which a couple of lumbermen were at work. We slept there, and spent all the next day from morning to night seeking anything we could get, and finding neither deer nor bears. In the afternoon we happened to meet a soUtary Indian hunter ; my friend the village sportsman shook his fist at the lone stranger and cursed him. ' What has he done to injure you ? ' I asked. ' Injure me ! ' he answered, ' the devil will never stop until he has killed that bear.' ' But the bear is as much his as it is ours,' I said ; ' probably that poor devil's ancestors have A PROPOSED SPECULATION 105 hunted bears in this forest ever since it has been a forest.' ' Wall, I wouldn't leave a red-skin alive in the land if I had my way,' he answered. Here in this Canadian backwood as in the prairies of the Platte, twelve hundred miles farther west, the sentiment was precisely the same. I got back to Watford very tired after this fruitless chase of three days, and was glad to find in the little wooden inn supper ready. At the table with me there sat a curious- looking man of that peculiar type of American known as the ' down-Easter ' — sharp, determined, of restless eye, straight upper lip, and firm-set lower jaw. ' Stranger,' he said, after a bit, * you 'ave bin to the Brooke Swamp ; now don't tell me 'twas arter bars j^'ou were for three days in that darned hole. No, sirree, 'twas arter lumber, or petroleum oil, or some other fixen, I guess you were. I don't want to go into that thar swamp myself, for I 've got a wife and family ; but as sure as my name is Horatio Nelson Case, thar 's money in that swamp, and you 've bin arter it those three days.' It was with con- siderable difficulty that I could persuade my chance companion that it was a real live ' bar,' and not a bar of gold I had been after ; and then I think the very absurdity of the idea seemed to strike him as so original that he quite ' cottoned to me,' as being entirely out of his own line in thought and action. He first told me every detail of his own life and family — who his wife was, the number of children they had, the various occu- pations he had filled, and he finally wound up by asking if I was disposed to join him in a speculation which would have for the theatre of its effort this same swamp of Brooke ? He had been told that, back in the swamp, there were fine ridges of higher ground which bore heavy timber ; and he was very desirous of getting some trustworthy information upon these tracts of higher ground. I told him that what he had been told was correct ; there were many such ridges well- timbered, where the land was as dry as that on which the village stood. This seemed to banish the last shred of doubt from his mind. If I had had speculative outlooks regarding the swamp, I should have kept this knowledge to myseK : I might be a fool, but it was clear I was not a knave. He ended by proposing a joint partnership in the purchase of some thousand acres in the so-caUed swamp. I was to find the money ; he would 106 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY furnish the brains. I told him I didn't like the arrangement ; that it was liable to end in his getting all my money, and in my having only a portion of his brains. This seemed to tickle his fancy. We exchanged names and addresses, and I left Watford at midnight with a large card in my pocket on which was printed Horatio Nelson Case, Postmaster, City, Ont. A few weeks later I received a letter from Horatio, proposing another scheme for my consideration. It was the purchase of a square block of forest lying further to the west in the neighbourhood of a place called Petrolia, where oil in some quantity had already been discovered. Horatio had visited this new oil field, and had fixed up in his mind some distinct theories about it. The forest was so dense that it was not at all easy to determine the general set and direction of the sub- terranean oil stream which had been tapped here and there ; but his observations had led him to think that the trend of the oil was in the direction of this square of forest -land, which he proposed to acquire at a cost of eight hundred pounds. Had I that sum of money ? No. Not in the least disconcerted by this negative, he asked how much I could command. Perhaps four hundred. Was there any other officer in the regiment who would be willing to put down a similar sum ? I went to the ground and saw for myself the correctness of the general idea upon which he was working. The well in which oil had been struck did seem to follow a rough sort of line through the trees. If you stood at one end of the hideous line of scaffolding, which marked the mouth of a well, you saw that while to the right or left of that line wells were doing little, the general continuation of the line had along it more pros- perous borings. Our proposed block of two hundred acres lay on that line of continuation about a mile deeper in the forest. The end of the matter was that another officer joined me in this oil venture ; and Horatio Nelson Case, Lieut. W. F. Butler, and Ensign Albert P. Wodehouse became the joint owners of two hundred acres of forest in the vicinity of Petrolia, Ontario, sometime in the early part of 1869, Before the purchase could be effected, however, the regiment had moved from London to Montreal. My delightful roving occupation at the ' Look Out ' was over, and I was once more ' cribbed, cabined, and confined ' within the limits of a big WIDER HORIZONS 107 city in the depth of a Lower Canadian winter. As soon as I could obtain leave, I was back again in Western Canada. Horatio was more sanguine than ever. The line of wells in which oil had been struck was slowly but steadily drawing nearer to our dark block in the forest. Only two other blocks of forest-land now intervened between our possession and the latest find in the new oil field. The money must be got at once, or all our anticipations would be dashed to pieces. The tendency to change the stations of our regiment still clung to us, and in the spring of 1869, while I was still in the West, we were moved from Montreal to Quebec. I rejoined at the latter place in June. Two years had not elapsed since I had landed there for the first time ; but what a change had these few months wrought in the aspect of life to my mind ! This America was a great mind-stretcher. All these lakes, these immense prairies, these deep forests, these rivers of which the single lengths are greater than the width of the ocean be- tween Canada and Europe ; all the throbbing of the life that one saw everywhere, on road and river, in the cities, on the plains ; this great march that was ever going on — all seemed to call with irresistible voice to throw one's little lot into the movement. It all seemed the exact opposite of the profession to which at this time I had given ten years of my life. There one seemed to be going round in a circle ; here the line of march was straight to the west. I had seen a sunset over the prairies of Nebraska, and the dream of it was ever in my mind — a great golden mist, a big river flowing from it, a dark herd of buffaloes slowly moving across the prairie distance to drink at the river, and the sun himself seeming to linger above the horizon as though he wanted to have a longer look at the glory he had made below. In my ' Look Out ' wanderings I had frequently to visit a little lake — the Blue Lake — which lay in the forest a few miles north-west of Brantford. I had a cotton-wood canoe and a tent, and with these in possession youth has a * free pass ' wherever water flows, or trees grow. The Blue Lake was a very beautiful spot ; no one had built above its shores or bored beneath them ; the larger forest trees were mostly gone, but another growth had sprung up, and the sheet of clear blue 108 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY winding water lay in as perfect repose and reflection of shore and foliage as though no white man had ever placed his burden upon the land of Canada. I determined to cross the Atlantic ; raise the four hundred pounds necessary to begin a partnership with Horatio Nelson Case ; and, even if we failed to strike oil, to strike out some line in life other than that military one which, so far, seemed to lead to nothing. I sailed from Quebec early in September in the Moravian. We took the northern channel between Newfoundland and Labrador, saw lots of icebergs after passing Belleisle, and reached Ireland after the usual rough passage. I have sailed in many good and bad vessels in my time, but I can truthfully declare that I never sailed with a bad sea-captain. I do not mean only in the mere sense of his profession ; I mean the man himself. He is the very best man this Empire pro- duces ; the salt of the sea and the soul of the land are in him. He is as superior to the men by whom he is employed as the army ofi&cer is better than his departmental chief, and the naval officer is above his official admmistrator. These three classes of captains stand for the honour of English commerce, the fame of England's arms by land, and her naval superiority at sea. Men may cozen in the counting-house, be witless at the War Office, and play Dreadnoughts or Donnybrook in Whitehall ; but if England holds on to her captains by sea and land she will pull through in the end. In the Services the servants have ever been better than the masters. After my arrival at home, I made every effort I could think of to prevent what was then looked upon as the worst of pro- fessional disasters from happening to me — namely, being pur- chased over by junior subalterns for the rank of captain. It was useless. At that time I had neither friends at the Horse Guards, nor money at the bankers'. My father was in very bad health ; my colonel was a complete military nonentity ; my captain, once a very able man, was getting softening of the brain, and had been obliged to retire from the service. Altogether, the outlook was about as hopeless as it could weU be ; and to crown the catalogue of misfortune, a long space of regimental stagnation in promotion had just broken, and many purchase steps in rank were going. PARIS IN HER GLORY 109 With some difficulty I was able, through the kindness of relations, to raise the four hundred pounds required by Horatio Nelson Case for the purchase of the block of forest-land at Petrolia ; but whether that venture was destined to pour oil upon the troubled waters of my fortune, or to add yet another item to the already long list of professional calamities, had still to be proved. In the midst of those disappointments I received an urgent message from my old captain, then residing in England, to go to him. I found him in a deplorable condition of mental illness. He who had been a model of all the military virtues, a strict disciplinarian, and a most high-minded gentleman, was now filled with the wildest delusions. His friends could do notliing with him. To relieve the strain upon his family, and to try what change of scene would do in his case, it was proposed that he and I should go to Paris. We proceeded thither. At first everything went well. It was my first visit to the French capital, and my poor friend appeared to take pleasure in showing the sights to me. In December 1869 Paris W£is in the meridian hour of her glory ; Baron Haussmann had put the finishing touches to the great streets and edifices of the Second Empire. I shall never forget the effect of the blaze of light which the Place de la Concorde presented as we turned mto it on a clear frosty December night, the last of the year, an hour after our arrival from dull, grimy, leaden London. All the long lines of sparkling streets radiated from this brilliant centre ; the Imperial Court was in residence at the Tuileries, and the windows of that famous palace shone through the leafless trees. We turned into the Place Vendome, and stood at last at the foot of the Roman column, with all the bronze of Austerlitz wreathed round it, and the figure of the great captain dimly discernible in the starHght above. To-morrow the first visit of daylight would be made to his tomb beyond the river. It all seemed so real on that closing night of the old year ; and yet aU this panorama of pride and power, seemingly fixed and soHd as the earth upon which it stood, had at that moment little more than six months' lease of life. Less than a year and a half later I was destined to stand in this Place de la Concorde again, and to see the palaces in no SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY smouldering ashes, the statues rent with cannon-shot, and the great column and its mighty figure lying prone in the dust of the Place Vendome. But that is anticipating. The mental affliction, which seemed at first to have calmed down in my poor friend, soon began to show itself again. One night we had come back to our hotel in the Rue St. Honore from the Porte St. Martin theatre, and had retired to our rooms. I occupied a room inside that in which my old captain slept. We were speaking to each other through the doorway, and some trifling difference of opinion had arisen in our con- versation. Suddenly he raised his voice and shouted, ' Now I '11 have it out with you for bringing my brother over from Cork.' (When his iUness had reached an acute stage a fort- night earlier in England, I had thought it necessary to telegraph for his only brother, who was in garrison in Ireland.) Then 1 heard a thud on the floor of the outer room, the door was flung open, and in came my old commander, mad with rage, and shouting, ' I '11 throw you out of the wmdow.' I was a much younger as well as a stronger man, and quickly as he had come I was out of bed and on the floor ready for him. He came to within a few feet of where I stood, then stopped short, rushed to the window, flung it open, crying, ' I '11 throw myself out.' The drop looked ugly, for we were two or three floors up, and the courtyard below was hardly visible in dim lamplight. Then he rushed back to his room. Next morning he met me as though nothing had happened. But I had had enough of the undertaking now : we squared up accounts, and I left Paris. A few days later the poor fellow got into an altercation with a Frenchman, whom he accused of having pushed against him as they were leaving the door of some theatre. My friend drew a sword from a cane which he carried, and lunged at the Frenchman, who fortunately received the blade through his gibus-hat. That matter was settled in some way or other ; but a night or two later he joined a demon- stration got up by the partisans of the then celebrated Victor Noir, and he was promptly arrested by the police and lodged in Mazas Prison. He never recovered his right reason. Nearly forty years later I had a curious confirmation of the character borne by my old commander in his early days. Lord Roberts said to me one day, ' You were in the 69th Regiment. You FATHER'S DEATH 111 must have known my old schoolfellow .' ' Yes, sir ; he was my captain for ten years.' ' When I went to school at Clifton,' continued the commander-in-chief, ' he was the best boy in the school. The headmaster said to me when I went there, " Follow the example set by . I might talk a long time to you, but I could not say more. Do as he does." ' When I returned to Ireland I found that my father's health had grown worse. Two months later he passed quietly away, and we laid him in the old churchyard of Killardrigh, by the banks of the river and at the foot of the Galtee mountain, both of which he had lived beside and had loved all his long life. The ruined church at Killardrigh was said to have been named after a high king of Ireland, an ' Ard High,' who met his death in the seventh century while bathing in the waters of the Suir. If the story be true, then a second king among men was laid in that lone graveyard in March 1870. I had now to return to my regiment in Canada. No '. Look- outs ' there, and no outlooks anywhere else. Regimental promotion had begun, but it was not for me : the steps were all by purchase. I made a last attempt on the Horse Guards, and was kindly informed by a very choleric old Peninsular MiUtary Secretary, who had a terrible reputation for vocabular vehemence to old officers (but whom on this and other occasions I found particularly gracious to young ones), that I had not a ghost of a chance. Then I sailed for America. CHAPTER Vin The Red River Expedition. Under Colonel Wolseley. Fenians. The purchase system. No step after twelre years' service. Paris. The end of the Commune. It was not quite correct to say that I had no mihtary outlook at this time. There was a remote chance that a disturbance which had arisen on the banks of the Red River, in Manitoba, might develop into some occasion of active service. The news- papers had already announced that regular troops would be sent from Canada to Winnipeg in the coming summer. The commander of the Uttle expedition, Colonel Wolseley, had been named. I had met him once or twice in Montreal, but only in the sense in which a subaltern without any record can meet a colonel who has a very distinguished one. I sat next him at an inspection dinner one evening, and when, in his capacity as Chief of the Quartermaster-General's Department in Canada, he had called for specimen sketches from regimental ofl&cers in order to select men for the Survey Service in Upper Canada, I had sent in two drawings, the very indifferent artistic quality of which I had endeavoured to compensate for by the geo- graphical and historical associations I had connected with them. One was a plan of the cantonment in Tonghoo in Burmah, the other of the field of Waterloo ; neither had suc- ceeded. I was not among the selected surveyors. This, however, did not prevent my sending a cable message from Ireland when I saw that Colonel Wolseley was named com- mander of the expedition to the Red River. Among the many vices which the ocean cable has introduced into the world, it has at least one virtue — the absent can sometimes be almost right. On this occasion my long shot hit its mark, and although I did not know that I had struck the target at Ottawa, I fol- lowed the shot as soon as possible. The longer the range the more likely is it that somebody may rub out the hit before 112 COLONEL WOLSELEY 113 you can get to the marking butt. This, indeed, had ahnost happened. Everybody wanted to get on this expedition, which, small as it was in numbers, had such an immense * beyond ' in it, a beyond into which steam power did not enter, where there were no roads, where there were still real live Indians and great silent lakes, vast woods and rushing rivers, and, more than these, boats and canoes in which brams would be at the helm, skill at the prow, and youth and muscle working at the oars. Travelling via New York, I reached Torontv") just in time to find Colonel Wolseley still there. He was to start for Lake Superior the following day ; all the staff officers had been ap- pointed ; there was ' no berth vacant,' he said. I suggested one : that of an Intelligence officer who, travelling through the United States, might perhaps be able to get to the column in some part of the last three hundred of the six hundred miles lying between Lake Superior and the Red River. He caught at the idea, directed me to proceed to Montreal at once, and see General Lindsay there, adding that he would write that night to him. At this time Colonel Wolseley was in the prime of manhood, somewhat under middle height, of weU-knit, well-proportioned figure ; handsome, clean-cut features, a broad and loity fore- head over which brown chestnut hair closely curled ; exceed- ingly sharp, penetratmg blue eyes, from one of which the bursting of a shell in the trenches at Sebastopol had extin- guished sight without in the least lessening the fire that shot through it from what was the best and most briUiant brain I ever met in the British army. He was possessed of a courage equal to his brain power. It could be neither daunted nor subdued. His body had been mauled and smashed many times. In Burmah a gingall bullet fired within thirty yards of him had torn his thigh into shreds ; in the Crimea a shell had smashed his face, and blinded an eye ; but no man who rode beside Wolseley in the thirty years of active life in which I afterwards knew him could ever have imagined that either in his grip of a horse or his glance at a man on a battlefield, he had only half the strength and the sight with which he had started in life. I never knew him tired, no matter what might be the fatigue he underwent. I never knew his eye deceived. H in SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY no matter how short might be the look it gave at a man or a plan. I went at once to Montreal, saw that fine soldier, General Lindsay, then commanding in Canada, and found him favour- able to my proposed appointment, the final sanction for which rested with the civil authorities at Ottawa. Meanwhile I was to await the answer at Montreal. But before it came a strange Uttle event happened. While we were all looking out fifteen hundred miles away to the north-west, a httle flame of service sprang up, close at our doors, fift}^ miles south from Montreal. All through the 24th May telegrams were arriving at the headquarters office from places on the Canadian frontier, and over the boundary line, from Huntingdon and Hinchinbrook on our side, and from Malone and Potsdam Junction on the other side, announcing the arrival of bodies of armed men at, or near, the frontier. Of course, the numbers given varied, but the fact of the gather- ings could not be doubted. The news came from our own people near the frontier, and from men in the Fenian ranks on the other side, among the latter being a man who years later, under the name of Major le Caron, became weU known in London at the time of the Pigott Conspiracy. The INIiHtary Secretary, Colonel Earle (afterwards killed at Kirbekan in the Soudan), sent for me. ' We have ordered your regiment up from Quebec. It will arrive here by train to- morrow ; you will join it at the railway station, and proceed with it to the frontier near Huntingdon." He showed me the telegraphic messages received from that quarter. I wired at once to my colonel in Quebec that I would meet him at the railway next day with a horse ; then I went to a well-known keeper of a hvery stable. He had a good saddle-horse — ' the Doctor ' by name, a big chestnut animal. I secured this war- horse for as many daj^s as might be needed, and was then ready for any eventuahty. Later in the day I received a telegram from the colonel appointing me Intelligence officer to the column, which was to consist of the 69th Regiment, and a corps of Canadian mihtia, whose headquarters were in the town of Huntingdon, in the neighbourhood of the menaced jDoints. When the train carrymg the 69th Regiment arrived at the AFTER THE FENIANS 115 Montreal station, I was there to meet it. It was pleasant to meet old friends again, for I had been nine months away in Europe, and there was much news to hear and to tell. I got * the Doctor ' into a waggon ; and the train moved on, after a short delay, for Lake St. Francis, on the north shore of which it deposited us, bag and baggage. A couple of steamboats were here in waiting to ferry us across to the south shore of that beautiful lake, and from there the march to Huntingdon began. I got ' the Doctor ' off the boat at once, and rode on in advance to Huntingdon to gather the latest information at that place. The distance was about eight miles, the last two before Huntingdon was reached being over a ' corduroy ' road through a bad swamp. It was dusk when I got to Hunt- ingdon. In the Uttle square of the town I found the militia regiment drawn up, ready to march back to Lake St. Francis. The staff officer attached to the regiment and the colonel of militia had decided upon this retrograde movement in conse- quence of reports which had reached them of the enemy's movements at Hinchinbrook on the Trout River some six or eight miles south, and adjacent to the American frontier. 1 had arrived at an opportune moment, for a few minutes later the regiment would have abandoned Huntmgdon and begun its retreat on Lake St. Francis. I had known the staff officer at Hythe six years earUer. He was very much my senior in rank and service ; but I knew that to give up the town of Huntingdon would be a fatal mistake, even had there been no regular troops advancing to support that position. However, I had to proceed cautiously. I was only a subaltern ; the staff officer was a major, and he had already seen service. I asked him to come with me a httle distance from the parade where we could not be overheard. I first got from him the information which had decided him to retii'e. It was generally a continuation of the news I had heard from the Military Secretary in Montreal on the previous day. I find ui an old notebook some of these messages : — ' To MacEachern, Huntingdon. ' " Fenians got large reinforcements last night, field-guns and ammunition, provisions plentiful, expect fight Wednesday." Another message reported : "Seven hundred well-armed men are at hand." 116 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Another from Malone reported : "150 Fenians here, they leave for Trout River." Another from Potsdam stated that " two companies Cavahy and three ear-loads of men had arrived there from Rome, no fight before Saturday." Another from South Hinchinbrook said : " Telegraph operator just said ' good-b3^e.' Fenians close at hand, expect to cross frontier to-day." ' These reports from different places on the frontier showed that Huntingdon was the point aimed at whenever the concen- tration near the frontier was sufficient to justify a movement over the line ; but it was easy to see also that there was not likely to be anj" advance in force for some hours ; and in any case it was now night, the 69th would be up in a few hours, and here MacEachern and his merry men must remain. It was urged that the position at Huntingdon was not a good one, that the Seafield swamp, with onlj^ one practicable ' corduroy ' road through it, lay immediately in rear of the little town, and that the supply of provisions at hand would only suffice for a few hours' consumption. These facts were all true, so far as rule ran ; but when you put 3^our foot into that ready-made boot it is well to have elastic sides to it. The regiment was dismissed to their tents, and an hour or two later the 69th marched into Huntingdon. Before I turned in for the night a big bearded man came to me. ' I have two or three chaps here,' he said, ' and we have horses ; we would like to ride with you to-morrow to the line, if you 're gwyne that way.' I liked the look of the man and his chums, and without telling him where I was ' gwyne ' to, I said I would meet them there in the market-place at daybreak, three hours later. A cold mist lay on the land as we rode out of Huntingdon at four next morning, taking the main road south. I had the old scout and four younger men as companions. After a couple of miles we lessened the pace, and began to examine roads that led to right or left. It was about six o'clock when we got to Hinchinbrook. It was only a cross-roads with three or four frame houses ; the mist had lifted, the sun was out, and one could see well on either side. The post-office and telegraph were closed ; a man came out of one of the houses, and for a moment eyed us suspiciously ; but the scout soon made matters straight, and we got the news, such as it was. There was a ENCOUNTER AT TROUT RIVER 117 camp of Americans just over the border ; a few of their scouts had been here the evening before. The border line was a mile and a half farther ou. I sent one of the men back with this information, sent two more along the right and left roads, and then rode on with the old scout to the front. We trotted, but kept on the grass border of the road. The country was as green and fresh as the end of May could make it ; apple-trees were in blossom, and a strip of deep forest on the right was all in leaf. Trout River lay at a little distance to the left ; about three-quarters of a mile farther on a large hop field crossed the road ; the hops were already well up the poles, affording good cover the height of a man. We went cautiously through this cover, and still more quietly as we approached the boundary line. There was a bend in the road before it got to the frontier, and a skirting of wood at the bend, then a straight bit which ran direct to the line. The road was quite empty for five or six hundred yards forward. We rode on to the line. It was marked by a square stone set in the earth ; two or three houses stood in trees just beyond the boundary on the American side. An early-rising inhabitant or two were on foot here, but uoinformation was to be gleaned from them. Of course, I would not cross the line, and stiU I did not like to go back from it without any news, so I waited with the scout, looking up the road which ran straight on American territory for nearly a mile. Suddenly a body of men marching in columns of fours began to wheel out from a cross-road about five hundred yards forward, on the right side. They came straight for the line, arms at the slope, and the sun bright on the ' unbrowned ' barrels of their rifles. I made them out roughly to be about two or three hundred. Their appearance seemed to put thought and tongue into one of the early in- habitants. ' Them 's the boys,' he said. ' I guess you chaps had better go back now/ The head of the column was coming along at a brisk pace. We took the hint and cantered back along the road we had come until we got to the bend I have mentioned ; there we pulled up imder cover of the trees and waited. Thinking that the advancmg ' boys ' might have halted on the line and not entered our territory, I turned my horse and walked him round the bend whence I could see 118 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the road to the frontier. There was no mistake. The ' bo3's ' had come along, and were within three hundred yards of me, well within our ground. Thej' shouted something, and I saw the rifles of the leading fours coming down to the ' ready/ I Wheeled ' the Doctor ' on his tracks and galloped round the bend, a few bullets going wide through the trees as I went. We rode back to Hinchinbrook, and awaited there the arrival of our column. It soon arrived. I showed the colonel the ground ; there were no men on the near side of the hop field, but as I had seen them almost up to that cover, they must be there. The river would be on their right, the forest on their left ; a front of half a mile lay between the two flanks. We went forward as soon as this was explained, the 69th along the road and in the fields on either side of it, the militia battalion in support, some in the wood. My old compan5% No. 10, led the advance. A new captain had it : he had purchased his company over mj' head, but we were old and tried friends ; besides, I was a free-lance now. and could ride where I liked, BO I liked the old soldiers of No. 10, nearlj'- every man of whom I knew intimately. As we turned into the straight road leading to the hop field, I could see that the ' snake ' fences on either side near the hops had been taken down and the timbers made into an obstacle across the road ; behind this fence a picket of about a dozen men stood with rifles in their hands, and to the right and left one could catch the glint of barrels here and there in the green leaves of the hops. We on the road were about the same number as the picket behind the obstacle. It was an interesting situation. The road ran quite straight between the two parties. We were without cover on it ; the other side had partial cover behind the thick timber fence. All the would- be combatants, save myself, were on foot ; the chestnut ' Doctor ' offered a good target in the bright sunshine, which was in our faces, I wondered, indeed, why the enemy did not give us a volley at three hundred j'^ards, low down the straight road ; they must have hit something. ' Mansfield,' I said to my friend, ' don't stand on ceremony, but give these fellows a voUey at once.' The Sniders were already loaded, and off they went in six seconds. There was a lot of powder smoke ui those days, and plenty of scattered shooting followed JOURNEY INTO THE WEST 119 this opening, and we all ran forward, loading and fixing bayonets as we went. When we reached the wooden obstacle not a man was behind it, and we raced through it, firing and cheering. In a few minutes we were again at the boundary line : the battle (!) of Trout River was over. We had no one killed or wounded ; the enemy lost one man, it was said, and Colonel MacEachern's braves had come upon an old Fenian lying in a hole in the forest. Some United States troops appeared next day to pohce their frontier, and send the scattered bands of raiders back to their several cities. I had some long rides with the scout to the west of Trout River, where other bands of raiders had been reported, but they, too, had vanished ; and then we marched back to Montreal. I said good-bj^e to the scout with real regret ; he was a splendid fellow. A short time afterwards he sent me a letter with his photograph, which I still have. He signed the letter, ' Yours until Death, The Scout.' In the photograph he is depicted in baggy civilian Canadian clothes, with many pockets ; he has a large bushy beard and a big, broad-brimmed, brown straw hat. In his right hand he holds a large cavalry sword, m his left a pipe ; the butt of a revolver is visible out of one of his many pockets. I hope I may meet him in the next world. What splendid men I have met along the thin track of my path in life ! I should have liked to listen to the scout telling of these three or four days' rough-riding in after years. Once only did I meet any one who knew of Trout River. It was in a haircutter's shop near the Haymarket. After the manner of his profession the barber was extremely communicative. He had had a brother in the 69th Regiment, but he had suffered so much in Canada in the war there that he was never any good again. ' ^Vhat war was it ? ' I asked. * The war of Trout River,' he answered ; and then the details followed. ' The men had no food, they lay for days and days in the forest, until they had to eat their blankets.' I laughed so much that he suspended his operations to stare at my reflection in the glass. There are manj^ wslyf- of writing history. I went to Quebec with my regiment, and waited for the reply to the letter sent to Ottawa. It came on 7th June, and on the 8th I began a long journey into the West. There was one old friend to whom I had to wish good-bye. 120 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY however, before starting — Private Henry Connors of the 69th Regiment. Before leaving Fermoy ten years earUer, Recruit Henry Connors had been confided specially to my care by an old couple who had come from Cork to see their son ere the draft sailed for Burmah. From that time forward Private Connors had been my servant. No more faithful heart ever beat in body of man or master. He had always been dehcate with lung trouble, and he was now d3'^ing in the regimental hospital in Quebec. He died while I was in the West, and when I came back I put a small stone over his nameless grave in the military graveyard which was then outside the walls on the historic Plains of x^ibraham. The dust of many other good soldiers must have been there. I had cut on the stone his name and regiment, and underneath : — HIS master's friend HIS friend's servant It wasn't much, but it was true, and the meaning of the words had memories in them that went through many distant lands. It would be blasphemy to doubt of heaven while such souls are found on earth. I have told the story of the next ten months of my life in another book,^ and I shall pass over that interval now, though there were many things omitted from the old narrative which might be of interest to readers of to-day, for the things seen then, or their kind, are no more to be looked at by the eye of man. We know that the old dodo wasn't thought much of when he was found flopping and flapping about, four himdred years ago ; in fact, his early discoverers called him the ' Silly.' How people would flock to see him if he were on view in the Zoological Gardens to-day ! Every egg would be worth a thousand guineas. But I have a long road in front, and I must get along it before the Hght fails. At the time of the Red River Expedition it took three months to get from Quebec to the Rocky Moimtains. It took me more than two months to return by dog-sled over the snow from the Rocky Mountain House of the Hudson Bay Com- pany to Winnipeg alone. You can do the distance from ^ Tht Great Lone Land. (E. B.) THE NORTH-WEST AS IT WAS 121 Quebec to the mountains now in three days. I left Quebec in Jime, and reached the mountains in December, but there were many side journeys made by canoe and horse and stage-coach in the interval. On the return journey to Canada it required a whole fort- night to get from Winnipeg to St. Paul's, Minnesota. You can do it now in fifteen hours. And yet that is the least part of the change which these fort}' years have wrought. Winni- peg, now a huge city, was then a village of thirty houses and perhaps a hundred and fifty inhabitants. A dozen cities have sprung into existence where buffalo roamed and Indians warred in that day. Railways traverse the land in all directions, and the output of grain to Europe is enormous. I open the report which I wrote when I got back to Fort Garrj% by desire of that admirable man, Mr. Adams Archibald, Manitoba's first governor, and this is what I find in the concluding paragraph of that lengthy document : — ' These, Sir, are the' views which I have formed upon the whole question of the existing state of affairs in the Saskatchewan. They result from the thought and experience of many long days of travel through a large portion of the region to which they have reference. If I were asked from what point of view I have looked upon the question, I would answer : From that point which sees a vast country lying, as it were, silently awaiting the approach of the immense wave of human life which rolls unceasingly from Europe to America. Far off as lie the regions of the Saskatchewan from the Atlantic seaboard on which that wave is thrown, remote as are the fertile glades which fringe the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, still that wave of human life is destined to reach these beautiful solitudes and to convert the wild luxuriance of their no\N' useless vegetation into all the requirements of civiHsed existence. ' And if it be matter of desire that across this immense continent — resting upon the two greatest oceans of the world — a powerful nation should arise, with the strength and the manhood which race, climate, and tradition would assign to it ; a nation which would look with no evil eye upon the old Mother-land from whence it sprang ; a nation which, having no bitter memories to recall, would have no idle prejudices to perpetuate, then surely it is worthy of all toil of hand and brain on the part of those who to-day rule, that this great link in the chain of such a future nationality should no longer remain undeveloped, a prey to the conflicts of savage 122 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY races, afe once the garden and the wilderness of the Central Continent. •W. F. Butler, ' Lieutenant, 69th Regt. ' Manitoba, lOth March 1871.' This report handed in, I started for Canada in horse-sleds over the snow. It was slow work, not more than twenty miles each day. I had as feUow-travellers a gentleman and his secretary, who had been sent from the Colonial Office in London to Winnipeg to report upon matters there, and an archdeacon, on his way to England to collect funds for the Church Mission in the new province of Manitoba. We slept each night in the cabin of some Red River half-breed settler, laying our blankets on the floor in a row, the archdeacon usually having the centre. One night, near Pembina, the archdeacon sprang from his couch shouting, ' They are putting guns through the window ; they are going to fire ! ' A crash of breaking glass seemed to confirm his alarm. I caught at the supposed gun barrel. It was the tail of a cow. The animal had been rubbing the hind part of her person against the small window frame, and her tail had broken the window and our sleep together. I reached Ottawa, travelling via the United States, in about three weeks. My report had been received. It was the wish of Governor Archibald that I should return to the North-West, officially charged to take in hand the opening up of that vast region, carrying into practical effect the principles of Indian settlement, the establishment of a police, and the foundation of Government stations which I had advocated in mj'^ report. I saw the Canadian ministers, Sir John MacDonald, Sir George Cartier, Mr. Joseph Howe, Sir Francis Hincks. They were highly complimentary, said nice things about the three thousand miles' travel in the wilderness, most of it through snow and ice, and with the thermometer hovering somewhere about the zero of Fahrenheit ; hemmed and hawed when it came to Governor Archibald's recommendation as to the commandantship of the North- West, and laid particular stress upon the letter they were writing to the Colonial and the War Offices in London on the subject of my services to Canada generally. At that time I took the world very much without question- BLANK PROFESSIONAL OUTLOOK 123 Lag its men or motives. Each of these excellent colonial ministers had wives, sons, and daughters. An arm}" ofl&cer who married a minister's daughter might perchance have been a fit and proper person to introduce the benefits of civilisation to the Blackfeet Indians on the Western prairies, but if he elected to remain in single cussedness in Canada he was pretty certain to find himself a black sheep among the ministerial flock of aspirants for place, no matter what might have been the value of his individual services. I found myself almost alone in Canada : the army, with the exception of one battalion, had been withdrawn ; my own 69th were in Bermuda. The military leave, which had been granted to me for the purpose of going out to the Rocky Mountains on a civil expedition when the Red River Expedition was over, had not yet expired. I determined to go to England. Three weeks later I was in London. I received a similar charming reception at the Colonial Office from the minister of the day. Another letter expressive of ofl&cial approbation was written, this time to the Secretary of State for War, in relation to my services in North America ; and feeling certain that I had now run the elusive quarry, Success, to his last haunt, I presented myself once again at the door of the institu- tion in Pall Mall, which, perhaps more than any other of its kind in the capital of the Empire, might fitly inscribe over its portals the best known words of the Inferno. The moment was not propitious. The union under the same roof of the office of the Commander-in-Chief with that of the Secretary of State had just been effected. The dual wheels of administration were not numing smoothly, and my unfortunate case seemed to be a little bit of grit between them. I must pay the memory of His Royal Highness the Commander-in- Chief the justice of saying that he did his best with Mr. Cardwell to obtain for me an unattached company. I had now twelve years' service. I had been five or six times purchased over by officers, most of whom were many years junior to me. I was told by all those heads of departments, mihtary and civil, that I had done the State some service. The reward asked for, a half-pay company, did not seem to be a very large act of recognition ; nevertheless, the reply came curt and chilling, ' Mr. Cardwell could not sanction the promotion of Lieutenant 124 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Butler to an unattached company, an appointment which, if now given, would confer purchase rights/ Truly, reason is sometimes a two-edged weapon. I who, had there been no purchase system, must have been a captain two years ago, must now, because they were abolishing the system, suffer a further loss of two years before the coveted and acknow- ledged step in rank could be given to me. I had, in fact, fallen between two stools. The book of the Red River reward was closed six months earUer ; the other book could not be opened untU purcliase was abolished ! Suddenly one morning the Times announced that Paris was in flames. The news of war between France and Germany first reached us on the Winnipeg River in the preceding August, and at intervals the remote theatre of our little expedition had caught the echoes of these colossal combats in North-Eastern France and the investment of Paris. Then as I got farther away from all sources of information, and the winter deepened over the wilderness, complete silence had ensued ; but on 20th February, when I returned to Fort Garry, I find one entry, ' Heard Capitulation of Paris.' From that day interest seemed gone. Now it woke again. The gentleman who had been my recent companion from Fort Garry to Ottawa was at the Foreign OflBce. I went at once there and told him what I wanted — a, passport for Paris as soon as possible. ' You know Voltaire's saying,' he an- swered, ' " Tigers and Monkeys " ? You wiU fuid the " tiger " fit on now. I would not go if I were you.' I pressed my request, got the passport, and that evening took the mail-train from Charing Cross to Dover. Dayhght comes early in the end of May. The opening of the carriage door at Abbeville roused me from sleep ; a soldier with a pickelhmibe on his head was in the carriage ; a Prussian guard was on the station platform ; passports were scrutinised, and passengers compared with them, and then we went on again. It was j^et quite early when we reached St. Denis, the extreme point to which the train ran. More Prussian guards and soldiers everywhere. No use in asking ; there we must remain. The ifitat-Major would not be open until eight o'clock. Another man who had come from London for- PARIS SEEN IN FLAMES 125 gathered with me at the station, and we sought breakfast together. Then came the ]Stat-Major. My companion spoke French with facility ; he was of the Law, and the ways of the Army were utterly unknown to him. Between us we made an excellent unit for dealing with a state of siege. We were ushered in before a big bearded man, a Bavarian staff officer of high rank. My companion spoke ; I prompted. The commandant was very civil and very firm. Into Paris we could not go, but we were free to ascend to the top of the abbej'^ tower of St. Denis, and see Paris from that lofty standpoint. We got passes for the abbey, and went to it. From the place in front we could hear the boom of heavy guns in the direction of Paris, but the church hid the view to the south. We were soon at the top of the tower. One scarcely noticed eight or ten officers who were already on the leads, so wonderful was the panorama that burst upon us. All Paris lay there, from Mont Valerien on the west to Vincennes on the east, and all Paris apparently burning. A great pall of black smoke hung high over the centre of the city, fed and supported by eight tall pillars of flame and smoke, which rose straight through the calm sunlit atmosphere of a May morning. From the rounded summit of Montmartre on our right front a battery of heavy guns was firing steadily across the middle distance in the direction of the Buttes de Chaumont, Belleville, and Pere la Chaise on our left as we looked due south. From another point on that left front, apparently the Pare des Buttes de Chaumont, a battery of the Communist army was replying to the guns on Montmartre. The shells were making great arcs, the trail of their flight made visible by the smoke of the fuses. Under the curves of this cannonade the domes and towers of the northern half of Paris were visible, and some even to the south of the river. The fires seemed to be in the centre of the city, in the region of St. Eustache, the Tuileries and Louvre, and the Hotel de Ville. From the Prussian officers on the tower we could get but little information. The Versaillais troops had entered Paris on its western side three or four days earlier ; there had been heavy firing all that time, and the progress from west to east had been slow but steady. They were now at Montmartre on one side, 126 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY and beyond the Pantheon on the other. The * Reds ' had retired to the north-east extremities of the city, and they appeared to be making a last stand from La Villette to Pere la Chaise. Fires had been raging for three days and nights ; many great monuments had been destroyed. What a strange sight this was ! Assuredly St. Denis in all its history from the days of Dagobert had never seen its equal. German officers watching the bombardment of Paris by France, smoking, spitting, and laughing as they watched ! One had now time to look to other points of the great circle that lay around this lofty tower. There underneath to the north was the battered fort of La Briche, which had suffered so much from the Prussian batteries beyond ; two or three miles to the east was the village of Le Bourget, the scene of terrible fighting a couple of months earlier. The old abbey where we stood had many scars and wounds to show. Shells fired high over La Briche from two Prussian siege batteries had met here before they went to earth ; the roof was pierced in several places ; the tower on which we stood had been hit ; and a shell had taken the head from the big stone statue of St. Denis on the centre of the high roof. We descended the long flights of steps to the great square beneath the pavement of which lie in a common grave all the dust of old royal France. Were the Germans on the tower above, and the scene upon which they stolidly looked, the punishments for that outrage of seventy-eight years earlier ? It seemed to us that we had been looking at the death of France. There was nothing more to be done in St. Denis. Could we get by any means to Versailles ? Yes, an omnibus ran there daily, but one must have a pass to go by it. We went again to the fitat-Major, got the pass after another inspection of passports, mounted the roof of the omnibus, and waited for the start. It was not yet midday. All that long afternoon we trundled along a roundabout way to Versailles, keeping between two great loops of the Seine, and finally crossing that river on a ferry-boat near Bougival. At this place we passed from the German to the French lines. All the bridges had been broken ; the fields looked dishevelled and the houses tattered, for the big guns on Valerien had often reached them during the winter just over. ATTEMPT TO ENTER PARIS 127 It was interesting to note, along the twelve or fifteen miles of our journey, the facility which this river of many windings had given the Germans for investing Paris on her western side. Break the bridges, watch well, and sit tight on the farther bank of the river — ^nothing more was necessary there, from St. Denis on the north to Bougival on the south. We reached Versailles at dusk. My companion knew a compatriot, the correspondent of a leading London journal. We made out his inn and found him playing at billiards. ' You have not the smallest chance,' he said, ' of getting into Paris : awful work is going on there. The strictest watch is kept to prevent strangers entering at the Point du Jour, the only gate now open ; a special pass signed by the general is necessary. Half Paris is burning, and news has just come that the Arch- bishop and some forty priests have been shot by the Com- munists.' He directed us to where we could find sofas for the night, and with that we had to be satisfied. Nevertheless, I determined to have a try for Paris next morning. The Versailles omnibus was like an ant whose road is cut ; the ant runs as far as the cut and back again. The bus was doing this at Versailles, running to the Point du Jour, and then coming back again. I got on the top of this conveyance next morning. My quondam companion did not come. We reached the Versailles end of the Point du Jour in the forenoon ; the bus stopped ; I took up my knapsack and began to cross the bridge. There was a guard at the farther end. The sentinels stopped me. An officer appeared ; I presented my passport. He read it, turned it upside down, shook his head, and went back to his room. I put my knapsack down, and sat upon it with my back to the battlement. I thought that by this show of resigned acceptation to military authority I might thaw the military mind, but it had no effect. Presently a portly person came from the other, or Paris, side of the bridge. His passes were examined ; the omnibus was pre- paring to start back for Versailles, and he was going there. I took up my bag and ascended the vehicle with reluctance. Presently I addressed the portly man in the worst French. He replied in the best English. We forgathered. We found a link in a mutual knowledge of a distinguished Frenchman of that time who had resided m Ireland for many years — 128 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Monsieur le Comte de Jarnac. M. D'Arcy (for that was my companion's name) was an Orleanist whose normal residence was in London. He possessed many sources of information, and seemed to be able to go where he pleased. He had now been in Paris for some days, and he was going to Versailles for one night. One confidence led to another. He thought he would be able to obtain a pass for me to enter Paris the followmg day ; meanwhile there was no place in Versailles where he could get a lodging for the night. I thought my landlady of the previous evening could manage this for him. We dined together in a cafe at Versailles, and then we walked out to see the great avenue leading to Paris. The evening was as glorious as May in its last week could make it. The three great avenues which lead from the open space in front of the palace were thronged with people. All kinds of rumours were afloat. The ' Reds ' still held Villette and the Buttes de Chaumont, but the cordon of the Versailles army was being dra^vn closer around them ; great numbers of Communist prisoners and many cannon and mitrailleuses had been taken ; the loss of life was enormous ; the destruction of property was stiU greater. Presentlj'' we could see movement and commotion going on far down the broad avenue towards Paris. Troops were advancing up the roadway between the elm-trees ; a wave of shouting and gesticulation accompanied them. The head of the column was soon abreast of where we stood — cavalry horses and men lean and hungry-] ooking ; faces grimed and greasy ; luiiforms dust-covered and worn. Behind these came a great straggling band of Communist prisoners, men, women, and children, ragged, fierce, powder-marked, streaming with perspiration ; such people as I had never seen before, and have never seen since ; faces at the last gasp of exhaustion ; faces that looked scornfully at the howling mob of bourgeois, that shouting, racing crowd which ran under the elms on either side and ran out of the cafes, throwing vile epithets over the heads of the soldiers. At the end of this dismal column came the carts with the wounded. In one of these there sat, bolt upright, a woman in the prime of life ; her black hair hung loose upon her shoulders, her olive face had a gash across one cheek from which the blood was still flowing, her hands were AT VERSAILLES 129 tied behind her back ; two or three wounded men lay at her feet helplessly stricken, but had there been a thousand dead or dying around her it would not have mattered. It was her face that held the eye. I have never forgotten the face and figure of that proud, defiant, handsome woman. The cart passed with the rest, but I followed it with my eyes while it was in sight, and ere it passed into distance I saw the figure against the background of the great chateau as the terrible cortege filed away into the open space before the palace. There it all was, grouped, set, framed, and told as never pen could write it, nor picture paint it. Two hundred years of French history were there : the great King, the shameless Court, the wreck of France. And so, until after sunset, the stream flowed on : the dirtj^ ill-horsed dragoons, the cowardly crowd along the side-walks, the struggling, shambling masses marching in the roadway. Every phase of human age and misery was there : white-haired men of seventy, desperado boys of sixteen, old battered women, young girls clinging on the arms of wild-looking j'ouths — ^all tired, hungry, blood- stained — this time the defeated ones in the everlasting strife between rich and poor, marching into the twilight. In a pocket- book of that time I find these scenes outlined in a few short sentences which end with the words : ' What hope ? What hope ? ' Then overleaf I read this : ' Everywhere around this scene was the beauty of the summer, the scent of leaf and flower ; the horse chestnuts and elms were rippling with the music of May, the air was filled with the song and chirp of birds.' That was the eternal answer to my question. If I did not hear it then, I know it now. CHAPTER IX Paris in her agony. Writing The Cheat Lone Land. On half-pay. Bound for the Saskatchewan. The lonely journey. Home. Ashanti. With Sir Garnet Wolseley again. My new-found friend, M. D'Arcy, was as good as his word. Next day I attended with him at the ^fitat-Major in the palace and passed the scrutmy. We set out again on the onmibus for the Point du Jour. One incident occurred on the road, besides the passage of captured guns and prisoners, now familiar to me since the preceding evening. It was the coming of a strong body of cavalry, escorting a carriage in which sat a short man with round, owl-eyed spectacles and a general officer in undress uniform. We drew up to let this cavalcade go by, and I had a good look at the two men in the carriage. They were Mon- sieur Thiers and Marshal MacMahon — the chief of the newly formed Republic and the commander-in-chief of the French armj^ The fighting phase of the war of France against the Commune was clearly over. When we passed the barrier at the enceinte of Paris, a long road lay before us to our destination in the Rue Vivienne. I carried my knapsack. My companion was already domiciled in the Hotel des ^fitrangers, for which we were bound. There were no horses or carriages and very few pedestrians to be seen ; patrols, mounted and on foot, were about. We struck the Seine somewhere near Auteuil, and followed the right bank of the stream for a long distance. Looking up the river towards the north of Paris one still saw a bank of smoke, but it was nothing Hke what it had been two days before from St. Denis. It was dusk when we reached the Place de la Concorde ; a long May twUight had light still left to show at least some of the devastation that had here been wrought by fire and shell. The great offices of State that flanked the Place on its north side were all in ruins, roofless, and black with smoke ; masses 130 ASPECT OF PARIS IN MAY '71 131 of charred and burnt papers covered the paved floor of the Place, and were blowing in the breeze ; a strong smell of burnt stuff filled the air ; the palace of the Corps L6gislatif and the buildings on the Quai d'Orsay were black and roofless. Looking to the left up the Rue Castighone one saw no column above the Place Vendome. But the strangest sight was the Tuileries. Nothing remained of that great historic pile but the bare, gaunt walls, through the glassless windows of which the glow of floors and rafters still burning below cast a deep red glare ; the effect in the twihght was like that of lighted candles set within a colossal skull. I do not remember having seen a single human being in that huge scene of destruction around the Place de la Concorde. At every entrance along the Rue de Rivoli great barricades of stone and timber were standing. The silence of death was here. Not a single lamp was lighted. Twilight seemed to be closing over an enormous graveyard in which even the tombs were ruined. Just seventeen months earUer I had looked at this scene ghttering in myriad jets of gas. A turn of the thumb and forefinger can put out a good deal of gas. We turned into the gardens of the Palais Royal, and here at last there was life. It was now quite dark, but two bat- taHons of regular soldiers were encamped in the gardens, and their supper fires were stOl smouldering. There was one old woman in the Hotel des iStrangers, who let us in after some debate, and got us some cold salt beef for supper. I could not enter into the details of the next week, although it was a very wonderful week. The days were gloriously fine ; I was quick of foot and could go for manj^ hours together without tiring. I explored the great city in every direction, and I saw many scenes that are not likely to be seen again in our time. Morning after morning I started out early, ate and drank somewhere, and got back at nightfall to the Rue Vivienne. Troops were pourmg into Paris, and the hunt for Communists was in full swing ; the barricades were disappear- ing ; horses began to show in the thoroughfares again. One could follow the routes of the Versailles troops along both sides of the river up to Belleville, and tell by the shell marks and bullet holes the places where the fiercest resistance had 132 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY been made. A great stand had taken place in front of the Hotel de Ville and along the Une of the Boulevard Sebastopol. Great numbers of dead had been hastily buried in the square near the tower of St. Jacques, and the warm May sun was making the air smell badly. Another stand had been made at the Place de la Bastille. Ammunition seemed literally to have been poured along the streets in the vicinity of this spot : a tin hat suspended over the door of a hatter's shop had six bullets in it. At the corner of the Rue Castex and the Rue St. Antoine every wall, door, and window was pitted. The column of July had a dozen cannon-shots through its base. The Hotel de Ville was a scene of the greatest destruction I had ever beheld ; everything in it or near it was smashed to atoms — the great clock, the wonderful staircase, the statues, the bronze railings, the equestrian figures of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite — all was broken, charred, and brayed into bits. I went on to Pere Lachaise. Here the last stand had been made among the tombs, and it was here that the heavy shell fire I had watched from the tower of St. Denis had wrought the greatest havoc. Of the great and noble soldiers whose graves or monuments are in Pere Lachaise — Ney, MacDonald, Suchet, Massena, Kellermann, Foy, Lavalette, and Labedoyere — nothing was stirred or injured ; but some at least of the stock-jobber and capitalist fraternity — that dynasty which seems to have succeeded to the thrones vacated by the old despots — had not been so fortunate. The gorgeously vulgar mausoleum of Casimir Perrier had been shot into with bullets, and the tomb of the Due de Momy had apparently served as an eating- table for the ' Red ' soldiers, for there were broken loaves of bread and ends of wine bottles on it. In the Place de la Concorde the Egyptian obelisk had escaped a rain of shells fired from a Versailles battery at the Arc de Triomphe, but the statue of Lille was shattered to pieces, its head and bust lying on the ground. The winged horses at the main entrance to the Tuileries Gardens were wingless, the' marble balustrades were knocked about, and the trees and asphalt paths and floorings rent and torn with shells. To me the pity of it all centred in the column of Austerlitz, and its statue lying prone in the dust and litter of the Place THE PRISON OF LA ROQUETTE 133 Vendome. The Prussian shot from the siege batteries of Chatillon and Meudon had spared the dome of the Invahdes, but Frenchmen had been found base enough to pull down in cold blood the bronze pillar made from the cannon of Austerlitz, with the statue of the Great Conqueror on its summit. That sight hardened my heart to the scenes I was now to witness. These were the hunting out of those wretched people, all through the north and north-east of Paris. By this time the prisoners taken by the Prussians in the war had all returned to France, and it was easy for the new Government to obtain soldiers ; but they were soldiers upon whose faces it was not difficult to read the story of the defeat and demoralisation of that war. They had been prisoners, they had been marched away from disastrous fields of defeat and surrender, huddled together in tens of thousands, just as they were now huddling their own brothers and cousins into the camps at Satory and Versailles. One saw soldiers everywhere — idle, undisciplined, dirty. Few among them seemed to care for themselves, or for any one else. There was no pride about them, no apparent sense or knowledge of the things they were looking at on every side. The moral rivets of their individual bodies and souls seemed to be as loose as were the social and pohtical screws of the body politic in the collective fabric of the State. The marines and sailors were of quite a dififerent type : one saw in them a look and demeanour alert and serious : they seemed to know what had happened. Paris was now locked up more securely than ever. People returning to their homes from the country were allowed to enter ; people wanting to leave Paris for the country could not go out. The prisons were all full, and over and over again one saw repeated in smaller groups the scenes I had witnessed at Versailles on that second evening there. I went one day to the prison of La Roquette. It was there that the Archbishop of Paris and some forty priests had been shot in cold blood by the Communists. M. D'Arcy was with me on this occasion, and we were passed in at once. We were shown into a small courtyard of the prison by a young naval lieutenant, who coolly explained to us the processes of the trial and execution of Communists. ' We strip their right shoulders,' 134 SIR WILLIMI BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY he said. * If the skin of the neck and shoulder shows the dark mark produced by the kick of the chassepot rifle the court pro- nounces the single word " classe " ; if there is no mark of discoloration on the shoulder tlie president says " passe,'" and the man is released. Those to whom " classe " is said are shot. One hundred and fifty were shot at daybreak this morning in this courtyard.' There was ghastly proof around that the man spoke truly. The courtyard wae paved with round stones, and one had to step from stone to stone to avoid the blood that fiUed the interstices between them. A horrible smell, as of a shambles, filled the yard. Along the waU where the condemned men had stood the high-growing dock and marsh- mallow weeds had their heads aU cut off, and the waU was pitted with innumerable holes by buUets. It was a battalion of Breton sailors who were emploj^ed on this duty. In a room of the prison the officer showed us the hand and ring of the murdered archbishop. Probably these ghastly reUcs were kept there in order to nerve the Breton sailors to their terrible work. In another courtyard stood a great pile of rifles, knapsacks, and accoutrements, all made for fighting the Prussians. This was the end. I had seen enough of Paris in her agony, and would have been glad to shut my eyes upon her sufferings ; but to leave the city was now much more difficult than to enter it had been a week ago. The thought that had been growing in my mind above every other thought in those days and amid those scenes was the hopelessness of all this social world of our so-called civilisation. Was this all that we had been able to do for the people, for the men who had nothing, for those poor whom we were always to have with us ? Nations fought themselves into victory on one side and the other, dynasties rose and dis- appeared, rehgions ebbed and flowed ; but in this war there was no cessation, no equilibrium, no end. The have's and the have- not's were always face to face, ready to shoot down or to rush in. Often before my mind at this time came that scene in the Elysee on the morning of the 22nd June 1815, four days after Waterloo, when Napoleon, hearing the shouts of the populace of the faubourgs calling upon him to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies and proclaim himself Dictator, exclaimed FROM PARIS TO IRELAND 135 bitterly, ' Poor people ! they alone stand by me in the hour of my reverses, yet I have not loaded them with riches or honours, I leave them poor, as I found them/ How many since that day have had their chance of doing something for these submerged millions, and have done nothing ! And yet now, when I look back upon it aU, over the almost forty years gone since I saw the faU of the Commune, it seems that only on one road, humanly speaking, lies the hope of redemp- tion for them. It is outlined in another utterance of the Great Conqueror, recorded as spoken on that same day of his abdication, * You come from the village of Gonesse ? ' said Napoleon to the boy page who had brought him a cup of coffee, ' No, sire, from Pierrefitte,' ' Where your parents have a cottage and some acres of land ? ' ' Yes, sire.' ' That is the only true happiness,' Yes, and it is the only true wealth, of men and of nations. Man under modern dispensations has been graciously permitted by his masters to go back to the land only after he is dead : I think if they would permit him to do so during his Ufe, and allow him that ' cottage and some acres of land,' things would not be so bad in our world. Did not a son of Cain build the first city ? I got permission to leave Paris, Trains ran from the Gare du Nord again. In the carriage with me were two English surgeons who had been doing ambulance work in those final days of the Commune, One, afterwards a weU-known man, related some incidents which had come under his notice in these last fights. An old woman was found crouching under an upturned cart behind a barricade ; the troops advanced thinking the barricade had been abandoned by everybody ; the old woman shot with a revolver the first soldier who approached her, ' I have had three sons kiUed in this fighting,' she said, ' and I swore that I would kiU one enemy. You may shoot me now.' They did so, I went to Ireland, and began at once to write a book on those great lone spaces of the earth which I had quitted only a few weeks earher. It seemed so strange that there should be these vast, vacant lands, while here the city-pent millions were murdering each other with such ferocity, and I longed, too, to get back to the wilds again. In the army there seemed to be 136 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY no chance for me. When my leave of absence expired, I was ordered to join the depot of my regiment, then at Chatham. I went there in the end of 1871. The men in authority were exceedingly kind, work was hght, and I was able to devote several hours every day to my manuscript. It grew rapidly. In that Uttle dingy red-brick subaltern's quarter on the old terrace in the ' Phonghee ' barracks at Chatham I Uved again in the wilds. What an infinite blessing is the mystery of memory ! No possession or instinct belonging to man can touch that single gift — to look back, to remember, to be young when you are old, to see the dead, to paint a picture upon a prison wall, to have ways to escape, to be free — aU this out of Memory. Surely this was ' the breath of life ' breathed into the brain of man when God gave him ' a living soul.' And yet there are people who say they cannot see the soul ! While I was thus far away in memory in the lone spaces an unexpected piece of good fortune happened. Horatio Nelson Case had ' struck oil.' A syndicate had been formed in Canada for the development of Petrolia, and our plot of forest-land was wanted by it. Case was adamantine. He would only take six thousand pounds for our lot. He got it. I tele- graphed to my officer-partner in Bermuda to proceed at once on leave to Canada to be present at the division of profits. He could not, or would not go. The profit available appeared to be a simple sum — five thousand two hundred pounds to be halved, and halved again. But in business of this kind there is nothing simple ; it is always compound. I had calculated my share of one thousand three hundred pounds, but somehow or other it worked out a good deal less. It always does. Any- how the conclusion of the ' bear ' transaction, begun in the Brooke Swamp three years earlier, left me with a clear thou- sand pounds. Had it come a year or two earlier I would undoubtedly have purchased a company in the 69th Regiment, and might have eventually blossomed into a retired major. So, my dear yoimg friend, if you meet with a check in life or a disappointment in your profession, as in three cases out of four you are bound to do, remember an old soldier's advice, ' Go on again.' Repack your knapsack if necessary, but whatever articles you throw out of it, don't unload that imagin- ary baton of field-marshal. It costs nothing to carry, it has TO THE WILDS AGAIN 137 no value to anybody except yourself ; but neither has the apple of your eye. In the middle of April 1872 I was gazetted to an unattached (half-pay) company in the army. I had finished my book, and sent the MS. to a publisher, and was immensely pleased when he was good enough to accept it. I was now free to go where I chose, and I chose the wilds again. I left my postal address at the War Office, ' Carlton House, Saskatchewan.' I have an idea that the name ' Carlton ' in the address induced the clerk in the War Office who had to deal with the postal addresses of officers to refrain from raising any objection to the remainder of the domiciliary location ; or it may have been that the head of his department, with a wider geographical knowledge, had said to his subordinate when the pap^ was presented to him, ' Not far off enough.' In any case, no objection was raised. Carlton House was at that time nine hundred miles from the nearest railway station, but it was the point of distribution for the winter packet dog-post, which left Fort Garry just before Christmas ; and wherever I might be in the territories of the Hudson Ba}" Company, letters would find me some time. Then I started for New York. I set out with no fixed plan of travel. I wanted to go beyond where I had been before, and the ' beyond ' that lay to the north of the Saskatchewan Vallej^ was a very big place. You could get a round two thousand miles in it in almost any direction north of an east and west line running through Fort Carlton. I had a general idea of getting into the basin of the Mackenzie River, descending that great stream nearly to its mouth, then going into the valley of the Yukon, ' and so on and so on,' as my Levantine interpreter used to say on the Nile, twelve years later, when he had exhausted the one hundred and twenty-five English one-syllable words which were his entire linguistic stock-in-trade, and the possession of which enabled him to draw the pay and allowances of a major in the British army. In the few months I had spent in Chatham I was in the habit of visiting the library of the Royal Geographical Society. It was the time when Livingstone had not been heard of for 138 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY years ; an expedition was being organised by the Society to look for him. I ofiFered my services, was not accepted, and, true to the old habit of ' going on again,' I set out shortly after in the opposite direction to Lake Bangweolo (where the great missionary-explorer had been last heard of), with the result that, just one year later, I found myself at Lake Atha- basca, twelve hundred miles north-west of Fort Garry, with the prospect of another twelve hundred miles up the valley of the Peace River to the Pacific coast at Vancouver. The narrative of that journey has been written long ago.^ Before striking north from Fort Carlton I had spent three months in a hut at the ' forks ' of the Saskatchewan, in com- pany with a brother officer of my regiment, and trusted friend. Captain Mansfield. Mansfield had left the 69th Regiment, tired of serving without seeing service. We had a plan that, after tasting again the wild life of the prairies, we would settle in some part of the Saskatchewan Valley, and begin ranching life there with a herd of cattle driven from the States. Had we carried this intention into efiEect, our ranch would have been the first of its kind in the Canadian North- West. At that time I think I may say with truth that I stood almost alone in my belief that this vast region had a great future before it. Among all the officers of the Hudson Bay Com- pany I did not know one who believed in the potentialities of the land in which they had spent their lives. Furs it had, and minerals it might have, but for the grain or food products of the earth, they did not think anything of it. Even at Winnipeg at this time so slight were the expectations that the place would become the site of a large city that I was offered, in the month of August 1872, sixteen hundred acres of land, where the town stands to-day, for sixteen hundred pounds. This offer was pressed upon me by an old army pensioner. Mulligan by name, who had gradually bought up for a mere trifle the grants of land given to private soldiers in the 6th Regiment some twenty years earlier. Dissatisfied with the trend of public opinion after the Riel Rebellion of 1870, he was desirous of leaving the place for ever. For myself, I am not sorry that I stuck to the army ship. The best and the worst that can be said of it is that it is a poor profession : I 1 The Wild North Land. (E. B.) THE ARMY :MAN— A DIGRESSION 139 hope it wiU long remain so. 'I look around on every side/ wrote Carlyle, ' and I see one honest man in the community. He is the drill sergeant/ WeU, I will not go so far as that ; but this I can say, that if the soldier be honest it is because he is poor, and if he is poor it is because he is honest. He is unfit for business, they teU me, and I agree with those who say so. You will usually find that when the soldier has tried his hajid at business he has made a fool of himself, and has lost his httle money. He believes in others, that is the mistake he makes in business ; he thinks that a man's word spoken should have as much weight as when it is written across a penny postage stamp, and he finds out, generally too late, that it hasn't. Even when the soldier tries to be a rogue, he usually makes a mess of it. He is like a trooper in the 11th Hussars at Canterbury, who once complained to his general that whenever there was a row in the town he was invariably caught by the police, because of the cherry-coloured breeches he was com- pelled to wear : * them darker-coloured overall chaps get off,' but he, the red-breeched one, was sure to be nailed in the end, no matter how many comers he got round in the run home to barracks. In no part of the Empire does the soldier make such a fool of himself as inside of Temple Bar, East of that historic boundary he is a child ; there was no necessity for the City Fathers to stipulate that soldiers should unfix bayonets when- ever they came within the city precincts : they disarm them- selves when they go there. There were only two soldiers in history who did well in the city of London : one was Oliver Cromwell, the other was George Monk. They both plundered it. I think I may add to this digression by putting down a httle incident which happened in the Crimean War, but of which I only became aware two years ago. On the night preceding the attack on the Redan on the 18th June 1855, a party of officers of the Fourth Division, who were detailed for the assault, were playing cards in a tent on the heights before Sebastopol. The ' fall in ' was to go at 2 a.m., and there was no use in lying down that night. Before the card-party broke up accounts were settled. A cousin of mine — a captain in the 57th Regiment — received from a captain in the 17th Foot, named Croker, an I O U for a considerable sum of money, 140 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY which he, Croker, had lost to my relative. A few hours later Croker was killed at the Redan. There had only been a half- hour s interval between the ' fall out ' for the game of cards and the ' faU in ' for the great game of war, so of course my cousin tore up the I U, and thought no more about the trans- action. A couple of months later he received a letter from the army agents, Cox & Co., in London, informing him that they had received on the day of his death an advice from the late Captain Croker directing the sum of £ to be placed to the account of Captain Butler in their hands. So much has been said and written in recent years against the old army and the old regimental system that I give this little incident as a trifling tribute to both. During the autumn and winter of 1872, and the first half of 1873, I had movement, sport, travel, and adventure suffi- cient to satisfy the longings of anybody. I was at that time boiling with the spirit of movement, and distance alone sufficed to lend enchantment to my prospect of travel. The scene could not be too remote, nor the theatre too lonely. The things I did not want to see or know of were trains and steam- boats ; the canoe or the prairie pony in summer, the snow- shoe and dog-sled in winter, one's own feet and legs at all times — these were good enough for passing over the surface of God's wonderful world. I was a fair shot, and even where the Hudson Bay Companj^'s posts were some hundred miles apart, and Indian camps were few and far between, the gun and the baited fish-hook could still provide dinner and supper; and for bed, old Mother Earth gave it, and the pine brush made mattress and pillow. I have often thought that the reply of the once potent Indian chief. Black Hawk, to the American commissioner who offered him a chair to sit on at a conference on the Upper Mississippi eighty years ago, held in it the whole secret and soul of the wilderness. ' Thank you,' said the Indian chief, as he seated himself on the ground, ' the Earth is my mother, and on her bosom I can rest myself.' You can never know that mother until you go and live with her in the wilderness ; it is only there that she takes you on her lap and whispers to you her secret things. It is only when you join the ranks of the wild things that they will accept you as one of themselves and will cease to look at you as a stranger. BACK TO CIVILISED TRAVEL 141 Fancy a place where there are no drains, no coal smoke, no factory chimneys ; where you cannot speak ill of your neigh- bour, nor envy him, nor tell him the simplest form of He, nor be bored by him — that last, the greatest of all the earthly beatitudes ! And the strange part of it is that if you have once tasted well of the wild fruit, you have got an antidote for ever against being bored. INIy friends sometimes say to me, * How can you listen so patiently to that terrible old bore, General Pounce ? ' or, 'I saw you to-day in the morning- room with that stupid old Major de Trop, and you seemed to be hanging on every word he said/ At which I smile, but say nothing, for it would destroy my happiness if the secret were known. As he ripples along, I launch my canoe on the stream of his story, merely on the sound of it, and I sail away into the lone spaces. It is the Athabasca, the river of the meadows, the Souris River, the river that echoes, that I am on again. He, poor fellow, hasn't the sUghtest suspicion of what I am doing. He never asks me a question. He wants none of my thoughts, and he gets none. He only wants some- thing to speak at, and I give him that generously. Then, when he is quite tired, he goes away, and I go to the writing- table and scribble down some doggerel such as this : — ' If a bore had seen what one swallow saw Or could read from a rook his Mayday caw Or could riddle aright one wild-bee's hum, No bore he would be — but he might be dumb.' But then we would have changed places, and I might have been the bore. At last, in the middle of 1873, I got out through that great tangle of mountains, lake, and rushing river which forms the northern portion of British Columbia, and with one dog, the untiring ' Cerf volant,' for companion, reached the ways of civilised travel and the Pacific Ocean. In the very centre of this tangle of mountains and rapids I had struck a small camp of gold-miners at a place called Germanson, on the Ominica River, a large tributary stream which joins the Peace River west of the Rocky Mountains. To get to this spot we had been working for twenty days in a ' dug-out ' canoe against the flooded stream of the Ominica, We were a party 142 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of four. The steersman was a little Frenchman from Belfort, Jacques Pardonnet by name, a man of extraordinary know- ledge and pluck, qualities to which was mainly due under Providence our escape from many perUs of rock and rapid, whirlpool and ice-floe, for we had launched our ' dug-out ' on the Upper Peace River before the ice had been cleared from the current. As we drew near Germanson, Jacques began to speak at the camp fire in the evening of an English captain who was at the mining camp the previous year. He called him by a name that had been familiar to me at Fermoy fourteen years earlier : if he had known the officer's Christian name identification would have been assured, for the first name had been Napoleon ; but he knew only the captain's surname. On entering German- son the first person I came upon was the very man. It was the end of August when I got back to Canada proper, the Canada of the St. Lawrence River. I was fairly puzzled what next to do. The long traU through the north and west by the Athabasca and Peace River to the Pacific had eaten a big hole iuto the round thousand won out of the day in Brooke Swamp three years earlier. To tell the truth, it is a very wide step from the real wilderness to that state of semi-civilised savagery which is the life of the frontier settler, those first and second stages in the evolution of the ranch and the wheat- field from the primaeval prairie and the pme forest. When the wild man and the buffalo disappear from the stage, the next comer, whether man or beast, doesn't show to advantage. Even the old white hunter, the trapper, the ' Leather-Stocking ' of the immortal Fenimore Cooper, has to fold up his camping- kit, shoulder his rifle, and move off into lonelier lands or deeper forests. He cannot stand it. As it was in ' the old Colonial days ' of America, so was it forty years ago. When I first went to the Platte River in 1867 a few ' Leather-Stockings ' were stni to be found at the forts of the United States troops ; and foremost among that small, lessening band was the celebrated Bridger, the grizzled veteran of the great days of Captain Bonneville, Fitzpatrick, and Sublette. One day a newcomer from the east, seeing this old veteran Bridger standing silent at Laramie, thought to open conversation by asking if it was not a long time since he had come out west. The old hunter OFFER OF SERVICE FOR THE GOLD COAST 143 did not seem to have heard his questioner, and the remark was repeated. Then Bridger took his pipe from his mouth, and gravely answered as he pointed towards Pike's Peak in the west : ' Young man, do you see that thar peak ? ' * Yes/ ' Well, when I came out to these prairies that thar peak was a hole in the ground.' He then went on smoking again. One evening when I was in this undecided frame of mind as to where I would go and what I would next do, I opened a paper in an hotel at Ottawa, and read in the cablegram from England the announcement that an expedition was being prepared for the West Coast of Africa. Sir Garnet Wolseley was to command. His stafif would consist of many officers who had served under him on the Red River expedition. No troops were to be sent until after the general and his officers had reached the West Coast. It was expected that this cam- paign would be over by March. Sir Garnet and his friends were to sail from England on the 8th September. That was all. It was now the 30th August. I read the message carefully a second time, took in the situation, went to the telegraph- office, and sent a message to Sir Garnet Wolseley in London that I was coming. Then looking up the steamer sailings I found that there was a steamer leaving New York on the 3rd September. The telegrams of the next day brought further particulars. The well-known unhealthiness of the West Coast of Africa generally, and of the Gold Coast in particular, was the reason assigned for the extraordinary fact that no troops were being sent with the general and his staff to the new seat of war. It was hoped that the native negro levies would suffice. If, after the general had arrived at Cape Coast Castle, it was found that the natives would not fight the soldiers of the King of Ashanti, then white troops would be sent from England, and an advance made upon Coomassie. It is the most precious privilege of youth not to question anything. ^\'liat did it matter if the Gold Coast had been the White Man's Grave ever since Columbus had been there ? One never dreamt of asking whether a climate was good or bad. A missionary who would stop to inquire if his pre- decessor had disagreed with the caimibal king who had eaten him would be as ridiculous as the young soldier who troubled 144 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY his head as to the precise points of disagreement between his constitution and the climate of the country to which he was bound. It is the business of the young soldier to agree with his climate even when it disagrees with him. Even the quickest of steamships went slowly in those days compared with the ocean fliers of to-day. The Russia took ten days to get to Liverpool, and I missed the start of Sir Garnet and his staff from the same port by eight hours. I remember little of the voyage save a small personal in- cident in it which was a pleasant surprise to me. I had left England seventeen months earlier, while my Mttle book of travel was still in the printer's hands. Its subsequent fortunes were therefore scarcely known to me, for I had been buried in the wilds during the greater part of the interval. One evening, when I was sitting in the smoking-room of the steamer, a man observed to another passenger, ' I hear the author of The Great Lone Land is on board the steamer." As I had the manuscript of another book of northern travel in my bag, nearly completed, the chance remark was doubly pleasant to me. Perhaps I should find some balance in the Army bankers' hands to my credit, and perhaps, too, the publishers of my first literary venture would be favourably disposed to try a second one. When I reached London from America, I found a message from Sir Garnet Wolseley directing me to follow him to the Gold Coast, and I received official information from the War Office that my passage would be provided in a West African steamer, sailing on the 30th September. So on the last day of September I left England again in the steamer Benin bound for Cape Coast Castle. A terrible-smeUing craft was the old Benin. Fever seemed to have established itself securely amid her close, Ul-kept decks. A couple of voyages earlier, eleven men had died out of her small crew, a steward and two cabin servants being among them. On this voyage of ours the captain and some half-dozen others were to go. Like every other sea-captain I had ever sailed with, this commander of the Benin, Captain Stone, was a splendid fellow. ' I hope to be back again by Christmas,' he said, * and to spend the holidays with my wife at home in Dublin.' He never came back. A ARRIVAL AT CAPE COAST CASTLE 145 month later he was in a hammock-shroud mider the waters somewhere m the steaming Bight of Benin. ' Remember, remember the Bight of Benin ; Few come out, though many go in.' So ran the old sailor's song of our grandfathers' days, when Tom Cringle kept his log and Captain Marryat wrote his sea- stories. They tell me things are better there to-day. Perhaps. The Benin touched at many places on the coast — Sierra Leone, Palmas, Liberia, Jack- Jack, and Monrovia. A little while before, a strange thing had happened at the last-named place. All these ships trading to West Africa carried in round holes near the scuppers on the deck two rows of roundshot, six or nine pounders ; these were not for hostile use, they were kept for a funereal purpose — that of sinking the poor dead men deep in the Bight of Benin, by being fastened to the foot of the hammock-shroud. But one day when the vessel was steaming into Monrovia, and the signal gun had been duly loaded with powder for the blank shot which was to wake up the government and postal officials of that place, a wag on board quietly dropped one of these roundshots into the carron- ade on the top of the powder. Presently, bang ! went the alarm gun, and then a round black object was observed hurling itself through the air in the direction of the wooden pier whereon the sable officials were already drawn up in state to greet the English steamer. The shot struck the pier, sending woodwork flying in all directions ; the officials fled, the President of the RepubUc of Liberia leading, the Postmaster-General, a very old negro, bringing up the rear. I never heard how the matter ended. The Benin reached Cape Coast Castle early on the 22nd October. A surf-boat came out with an officer for mails. He ofifered to put me on shore. As we paddled in through the heavy surf, which is ever rolling in three great lines of foam against the shores of tropical Africa, I asked the officer his name. It was the same as that of ' the captain,' formerly of Fermoy, whom I had left at the Ominica gold-mine in British Columbia four months earlier. ' Any relation in America ? ' ' A brother somewhere in the wilds of whom I have not heard for years, if he is stiU alive,' he answered. ' He was alive four K 146 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY months ago,' I replied ; ' and what is more, he gave me a message for his brother in the service, should I chance to fall in with him.' I had come almost straight from that distant spot. The first man I met at the end of the fifteen thousand miles was the brother of the last man I had seen in Ominica. CHAPTER X West Coast of Africa. ' The Wolseley Gang.' Beating up the natives. Recalcitrant kings. Fever. The forest. Invading Ashanti. As steam bends the stoutest blackthorn wood, so the hot, moist climate of the Gold Coast bends and makes limp the stoutest human body. This melting work begins even before the coast is reached. No sooner has the ship turned eastward from the Atlantic into the ' Bights ' than an immediate change becomes perceptible in the atmosphere ; an oppressive, damp, steamy air is breathed ; the body streams with perspiration of a clammy, weakening kind ; the very sap of strength is bleeding at every pore. There is no fury about the heat. Compared with the range of the thermometer in the Soudan, or even in India, the heat on the coast or in the forest behind it is nothing ; but it is incessant, unvarying, and its quality of excessive dampness is the killing factor in it. The sapping process goes on night and day : a peculiar damp, leaden look is on the skin. As poor Prince Henry of Battenberg wrote of the climate twenty years later, ' the damp heat is indescribable, so also is the effect it produces. Even if you sit quiet without moving, perspiration streams off your body day and night. The air reeks with malaria and poison. . . . What would not one give for a few whiffs of pure air without these dreadful miasmas that hang about one like ghosts ! ' But on the day of arrival all this had yet to be learnt ; and I stepped ashore from the surf-boat, and went up the wretched street that led from the old Slave Castle to Government House with as light a step as though I were still in the Black Caiion of the far-away Ominica. The general and his staff were assembling for breakfast. It was pleasant to meet old friends of Red River days again — Redvers Buller, Huyshe, McCalmont. Baker Russell was U7 148 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY down with fever, and McNeill with wounds. New men were there too : Brackenbury, Maurice, Lanyon. Evelyn Wood was at Elmina. Hume was making a road towards Coomassie. It was the habit in later years to call these men, and a few others, ' The Wolseley Gang/ I see in the dictionary that the word is derived from the Danish, and that it means, in its primitive sense, ' to go,' but I don't think that was the meanmg its users attached to it. I see, too, that its modem signification is sometimes ' a number of persons associated for a certain purpose, usually a bad one.' I look back now over nigh forty years, and I don't think there was any bad purpose individually or collectively in that httle group of men. I accept with pleasure the Danish definition of the word, ' to go.' We, for I was a humble member, certainly did go : some dropped on the road early, and others fell out later ; a few struggled on to the end. They rest in many places : one at Prah-su, another under Majuba, another in the middle of the Desert of Bajaida, another at Spion Kop, another under the sea near St. Helena, another in the sands at Tel-el-Kebir, another in the veldt at Magersfontein. Poor old ' Gang ' ! They kept going as long as they could go, and now they are nearly aU gone. May they rest in peace ! It would have been difficult to match the military situa- tion which was now existing in and around Cape Coast Castle. A general and some thirty or forty officers of various abihties had landed on the most pestilential shore in the world for the avowed object of driving back a horde of forty thousand splendidlj^ disciplined African savages, who had invaded British territory. AU the hopes founded upon the idea that the native races who lived under our protection in the forest lying between the sea and the River Prah — Fantis, Assims, Abras, and others — would rally under English leader- ship to do battle against their hereditary enemies, the Ashantis, had proved entirely fallacious. Palaver had followed palaver, the chiefs and kinglets were profuse in promise, feeble in performance, and cowardly in action. Nothing could induce them to tackle the Ashanti enemy. If men wanted to study the ejffect, good and evil, upon man brought up with discipline and without it, here on this coast was to be found the best field for such an inquiry. On one side of the Prah River lived a THE SLAVE TRADE 149 people possessing to an extraordinary degree a high military spirit, on the other a people as cowardly as could be found anywhere on earth. Both were of the same race : in ancestry, colour, size, language, and feature they were identical. A hundred years earUer they had been one kingdom : what had happened to make this extraordinary change in character and habit ? I think it would be correct to say that beyond the Prah the old African idea of a cruel but effective system of despotic authority had been maintained ; and that to the south of that little river of forty yards span the blessings of trade and com- merce had steadily sapped the moral strength and physical courage of the ' protected ' tribes. An American writer has said that if you put a chain round the neck of a slave, the other end of the chain will fasten itself round your own neck. Perhaps that was what had happened here. This coast had been for two hundred and more years the greatest slave preserve in the world. All these castles dotted along the surf-beaten shore at ten or twelve mile intervals were the prisons where, in the days of the slave-trade, milhons of wretched negroes had been immured, waiting the arrival of slave-ships from Bristol or Liverpool to load the human cargo for West Indian or American ports. It would not be too much to say that from each of these prison- castles to some West Indian port, a cable of slave skeletons must be lying at the bottom of the ocean. In that terrible trade the protected tribes of the coast were the prime brokers. They bought from the black interior kingdoms of Dahomey and Ashanti, and they sold to the white merchant traders of Europe ; slaves, rum, and gunpowder were the cliief items in the bills of lading. The gunpowder went to the interior, the rum was drunk on the coast, the slaves, or those who survived among them, went to America. If two in ten lived through the horrors of the middle passage the trade paid. John Wesley knew what he was talking about when he said of that heUish traffic that it was ' the sum of all human villanies ' ; and yet there never was one man in the world to whom it was possible to know even half of the villanies concentrated in that single phrase — the slave-trade. After a week on the coast, one began to know the way of 160 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY things fairly well. This coast had ways of its own that no other coast known to me possessed. Our forty special-service oflScers and their motley groups of natives were distributed between the seaports of Elmina and Cape Coast Castle, and in certain positions a few miles inland, chiefly along the forest track leading towards the River Prah. The great forest did not come right down to the seashore ; there was an interval of bush some six or eight miles deep before the real trees began. In this deep real forest lay the Ashanti army spread out along a circle of crooms or villages distant from the sea about twelve miles. Little was known about the numbers of this army : it had originally been forty or fifty thousand men, but many forms of disease were said to have thinned its ranks since it had crossed the Prah six months earUer. StOl less was known as to the intentions of its commander, Amonquatier by name. The spies sent out by us brought back no trustworthy information ; they were as cautious and as cowardly as were their chiefs and kinglets. At last some tangible news reached us from this mysterious Ashanti camp at Mampon. It was brought by a fugitive slave woman direct from the Ashanti headquarters ; and the story told by the runaway had so many little bits of domestic detaU and family intrigue woven into it that the more important facts of Ashanti movement and intentions seemed to derive confirmation from the lighter parts of the woman's tale. The Ashanti army in the forest around Mampon was break- ing up, and was falling back to the Prah River under orders from the King of Ashanti. The sick and wounded had already moved ; the main army would soon follow, but first it would take Abra Crampa, a tOMTi lying some twelve miles from Cape Coast Castle, near the forest track to the River Prah. This news, confirmed by reports from this road of Ashanti scouting parties having appeared in the vicinity, put us aU in action at Cape Coast Castle. If we only had the soldiers, what an opportunity was now offered of destroying the retreating army of Ashantis ! It was moving across our front at the slow rate of progression which alone was possible in this dense forest ; but we had only a few West Indian soldiers with which to strike it ; arms, ammunition, forty officers brimming over with energy and action, and no men. During the foUow- SirETCH MAP OF English Miles Authors Route Other Roads C) A TYPICAL DAY 151 ing week some of this band of forty officers started off in as many directions. As for myself, I had in me all the power and go of the frozen lands I had quitted a few months earlier. It seemed impossible that one could not still cover the old American distances. Of course the conditions were as opposite as those which He between the coldest ice and the hottest sun ; but youth takes small heed of such differences or measure- ments. Between the night of 25th October and that of the 29th, I covered some seventy miles of forest and swamps, in a temperature a good deal higher than that of the tropical hothouse at Kew. In these four or five days I had seen and sampled the forest, the crooms, the kings, their armies, and their method of fighting. A page description ^ of the 29th October will suffice to tell the story of many days and places : * At daybreak the whole force was to move to Dunguah from Abra Crampa to attack the wing of the Ashanti army near that place. The King of Abra's warriors led. A lieutenant of the Royal Navy was attached to this tribe : by dint of extraordinary exertions he got his crowd into some order, and cleared the village two hours after the appointed time. They were supposed to number five hundred men : I stood by the pathway and counted them as they passed ; they numbered one hundred and forty of all ranks. The procession moved in this order : six scouts, the king, two blunderbus-men, one carr\'ing a very large horse-pistol, fifty men with long flint-gims, two drummers with skull drums, two men with powder barrels, a standard-bearer with an old flag, Pollard, R.N., sixty or seventy more men, a large negro with an entirely flat nose, and a small crimson smoking-cap for uniform (he was called the Field-Marshal, and the title was not given in any derisive .sense). We got to Assanchi by noon. The day was fearfully hot ; the sun streamed down upon the forest, drawing from the darkest depths of tangled creeper and massive tree-trunk a steam of dense, exhausting atmosphere. As we emerged into the overgrown plantain-gardens around the village of Assanchi, a couple of shots were fired on the left, and an Abra scout limped in with his legs cut by " slugs." The wildest confusion now ensued among the Abras, and it was only by actually laying hands upon them and by placing them in the required positions facing the enemy that any order or plan could be evolved. While we were at this work another volley announced a new foe in the bush on our left. Then came shots and shouts from the thick plantain- 1 From Akim-foo, the History of a Failurt. (E. B. ) 162 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY leaves, and runniiig thither I came upon six or eight men struggling in the dense brushwood, some on the ground and some on their legs. In the centre of the mass there was a short, stout savage with his hair twisted into spiral spikes which stood straight out from his head. He was fighting for his life ; and so strong was he that he was able in his twistings to move the three or four men who had him down. A couple of other Abras were striking him on the back of his head wth the butts of their long " Dane " guns ; but they were unable to stop his wri things. At the edge of the group stood a tall Houssa soldier with a long knife in hand, ready for an opening which would enable him to draw it across the throat of the Ashanti. He was so intent on watching his opportunity that he did not see me. Just as I came up the unfortunate underdog man heaved himself up a bit from the ground, and the movement seemed to give the Houssa the chance he was looking for. He leant forward to get a better draw for his knife across the man's neck ; but as he did so I caught him full on the ear with my fist, and over he went, knife and all, into the bushes. At the same instant the Ashanti rose, and seeing a white man close to him he threw himself forward, caught hold of my hand, and -s^as safe. He was the first full-blooded Ashanti taken, and I was very glad to have him because I was doing Intelligence work at this time for Redvers Buller, who was down with fever, and we badly wanted sohd information from our enemies. But what was of more importance was that Sir Garnet Wolseley was in need of some trusty messenger to send to the King of Ashanti in Coomassie, and this prisoner would be just the emissary to send there. But before I could get him safe from the crush, we were all very near coming to grief, for a fresh body of Houssas, belonging to Baker Russell's regiment, came upon the scene, and hearing a row going on in the bushes, they levelled half a dozen rifles upon us, intent upon observing the great rule of African warfare, which is to fire first and then look to see what was fired at aftei-wards. Fortunately for us Baker Russell was near this party : he saw the situation, and the muzzles of the Houssa Sniders were thrown up at his terrific word of command. By this time the marines and sailors in rear were thoroughly exhausted ; the day was swelteringly hot, the path was deep in mud and water, and the narrow track was only wide enough to allow men in single file to move along it. Many strong men went down that day, some of them did not get up again. The record of the day's work would be incomplete if it did not finish as it began -nith the army of the King of Abra under the command of SPECIAL COmilSSION TO WEST AKTM 153 Lieutenant Pollard, R.N. It was directed to feel its way to the main road at Donguah. It fell in towards evening with an Ashanti camp : panic immediately ensued ; the one hundred and forty Abras, the Field-Marshal, the drums, and the horse-pistol man ran in various directions through the forest. Pollard dis- charged the six barrels of his revolver at his vanishing army, and found himself alone in the great forest. He was thoroughly ex- hausted, and night was coming on. After a time six or eight of his army crept back through the bush, got him on their shoulders and carried him by a by-path to Akroful on the main road.' I have dwelt upon this day's work because it grouped into it many incidents and experiences peculiar to West African warfare. One saw then the utter hopelessness of the original idea upon which the expedition had been based — that our debased and degenerate protected tribes could be able to fight the army of the King of Ashanti. One understood, too, something at least of what this coast climate meant to a Euro- pean, in the waste of strength and the deadly sap of health and energy. Even without exertion, the strength of the body seemed to be hourly melting out of the system. It was now the end of October. Two entire months must elapse before white troops could arrive on the coast from England. Would we last over that interval ? Of all the strange things in life human hope is the strangest. No matter how dark it may be on this side of the hiU, the other side generally gets the credit of sunshine. If life is reaUy a vale of tears, there are bursts of laughter coming through the sobs from some imaginary upper glen. Work in a new region now opened for me. In a kingdom called Akim, some hundred or hundred and fifty miles north- east from Cape Coast Castle, there reigned two kings — Cobina Fuah and Coffee Ahencora, both of whom were supposed to be of better fighting quality than the sable monarchs dwelling near the coast. A commission to these Akim sovereigns was duly given to me, and I was directed to proceed ' in one of Her Majesty's men-of-war to Accra, as a special Commissioner to the king and queen and chiefs of that district, in order to raise the whole of the fighting men in Western Akim for the purpose of closing in Amonquatier's army as it is endeavouring to re-cross 154 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the river Prah into Ashanti. ... It is impossible/ went on the words of the Commission, ' to give jou more precise instruc- tions, and there is nothing to add further than that the major- general relies upon your zeal and discretion, and on your know- ledge of barbarous people, to carry out quickly the objects of this most important mission which has been confided to you.' My Commission bore date 2nd November, and by the evening of the 3rd I had got together a dozen Snyder rifles, two Union Jacks, a few servants, ammunition, a bag of a hundred gold pieces, some AustraUan turned meats, and a lot of proclama- tions and addresses to black kings and queens in general, but particularly to the potentates reigning in the regions lying behind the coast at Accra. By dint of hard labour everything was ready for embarkation, and I got on board the gunboat Decoy late in the afternoon. Steam was already up, and we were soon rolling along to the eastward, pitching and tossing from one side to the other m those gigantic waves which never cease to roll, night and day, against the shores of tropic Africa. We rocked all night in the cradle of the deep, and at daybreak were off Accra. Another big slave castle was here, and the huge bastions of yet another prison could be seen three miles deeper in the Bight, at Christianburg. The last ghmpse seen of the shore after sunset on the previous evening had been of slave castles ; the first sight in the morning was of slave castles ; and round that fatal coast-line, between the feverish forest and the yellow sand, they stand, now lonely and mitenanted, with rusty gates and empty vaults, the mouldering monuments of two centuries of a gigantic mjustice. I got on shore as quickly as possible, for the night had been one of sleepless torment. Here at Accra the debasement of the negro seemed to be even greater than at Cape Coast Castle. A great ' Custom ' was going on to celebrate the movement of Captain Glover's native force from Accra to Addah, at the mouth of the Volta. ' Dashes ' of rum and gunpowder had been plentiful for days earlier, and the result was to be seen in men lying on their backs along the foul sea-front, firing guns into the air, turning head over heels, and firing as they turned, and uttering a strange mixture of Coast- Enghsh curses and invocations to some forest fetich for fortune in their coming campaign. THE MARCH TO ASHANTI BEGINS 155 All that day and the next day I spent m Accra, endeavouring to evolve out of this hideous scene of naked and unabashed negro animalism the semblance of a sober convoy for my inland journey to Akim. Night came, but no convoy. The gun-firing might have been less than on the first day ; but the drunk- enness did not appear to have diminished. I had, however, the satisfaction on the first day of making the acquaintance of one of the most remarkable among the many remarkable persons to whose efforts are due the estabUshment of our Empire in Africa — Captain Glover, R.N. He had spent many years on the shores of the Bight of Benm. To him more than to any other man belongs by right the merit of being the first to discover the value of the trade which lay at the back of this equatorial coast forest, behind the kingdoms of Ashanti, Dahomey, and Benin. Forty years from the present time. Glover, as governor and maker of Lagos, had alreadj^ foreseen the possibilities of forming a British possession which would embrace the countries of the Niger from its source to the sea. He was before his time. That great region has now many claimants for its possession, and it is still a matter of doubt in what direction its trade will eventually seek its outlet. On the evening of the 5th November I got away from Accra with a very motley crowd of carriers, the greater part of whom were still under the influence of the ' Custom.' I have not space to tell in any detail of the march from Accra to the Akim Prah. On the second day I had marched my men into a state of semi-sobriety ; but new difficulties arose. My kings, Fuah and Ahencora, had heard of the largesse distributed by Captain Glover at Accra, and they had both set out from Akim to share in these wonderful ' dashes,' which, no doubt, rumour had magnified to them. Two days from Accra I met King Fuah moving in all the pomp of negro buffoonery towards the coast. It was a repetition of Pollard's army, with variations — sword and pipe bearers, horn blowers, umbrella men, skull mace-bearers, litter-carriers, three of the king's wives, bodyguards, and at last King Fuah himself. We had been exchanging messengers for three days : he beseeching me to await his arrival at Accra ; I sending emissaries to tell him that he must return to his own country, whither I was coming ; that he was turning his back upon the Ashanti enemy ; 156 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY that there were only old women left at Accra, and that it was m his own kingdom of Akim that I would bestow upon him the gifts, arms, and ' dashes,' which I was commissioned to give him by the general-in-chief at Cape Coast Castle. AU to no pur- pose. So now we met at a place called Edoocfoo, three marches from Accra. I was in no frame of mind to brook delay in opening this palaver. I told King Fuah exactly the state of afifairs : Captain Glover was not the commander of this expedi- tion, neither was he the head dispenser or ' dash '-giver of all the good things of negro life ; I read and explained Sir Garnet Wolseley's letter ; I told Cobina of Akim the exact position of affairs, now that the Ashantis, broken and disheartened, were retreating on the Prah, offering to him the precious opportunity of striking them in flank and destroying them, if he would now return with me to his kingdom, get out his fighting men, and move with me against his ancient enemy, at whose hands he had suffered so many injuries in this and other wars. All was useless. To Accra he must go, for it was there that fetish should be done, and ' Custom ' carried out. I tried manj'' things with this obstinate Akim. I ' dashed ' him six Snyder rifles, ammunition, wine, as an earnest of what things would be his if he did as the English general wished him to do. I tried first to work on his greed, then on his greedmess, and finally upon his sense of shame. He had had a good name in Cape Coast Castle, would he add to it by coming back with me, or destroy it by running away to Accra where there were only women and cowards left ? ' TeU him,' I said to the interpreter, ' that I can never go back : I must go forward. If he returns with me now he will become the greatest king that ever reigned in Akim ; if he goes on to the coast he will cover himself with disgrace and his name wiU be a byword.' No use. To Accra he must go. So we parted. Weary beyond words, I set my face to the north, and plodded on to the next miserable croom. This was West Coast war ; these were the poor, down-trodden people we had come to give our lives for. I positively laughed as the full absurdity of the position forced itself upon me. In the evening I reached a town called Koniako, where dwelt an old chief named Quassiquadaddie, in whose house I stopped the night. It was clean and comfortable, with walls neatly plastered, and a HALTED 157 good four-posted bed in an inner room — the best habitation I saw on the coast outside the towns. Quassiquadaddie did the honours admirably, and, what was of more importance, he was full of valuable information of route and distance. Another day's march brought me to Eniacroom, where my second long, Coffee Ahencora, was awaiting me. He too was bound for ' Custom ' to Accra, but my messengers had stopped him. After another long palaver I succeeded in effecting a change of purpose, largely due to my being able to pit his prospects if he went back to the Prah with me against those of his rival monarch Fuah who had disregarded mj wishes and continued his course to the coast. But he would do nothing in a hurry, and in this matter of getting a slap at the Ashantis before they crossed the Prah, hurry was the whole essence of the problem. I was marching two, perhaps three, miles to their one. Here at Eniacroom I had to wait two whole days while this second king was making up his mind, with the aid of a score of counsellors, as to what he would do. The heat was intense all this time. The women of the town came to stare at me in great numbers : all day while light lasted they flocked round my hut, looked through windows, round comers, and along the tops of mud walls. Although the feeling of being constantly stared at is not a pleasant one, there were circum- stances in this case which made it less irksome than it might have been. With the exception of the very young girls and the old women, the majority of the ladies had babies with them ; these they carried seated astride on a sort of bustle held to the small of the back by a thin piece of cotton cloth. The manner in which these little black babies kept looking round their mothers' backs, and groping with tiny fingers for the maternal bosom in front, was very comical ; and one marvelled at the exceeding patience with which the mother bore the constant importunities of her offspring. But patience is the everlasting lesson of Africa. ' What patience is required in this African travel ! ' I find myself writing on this day, 1 1th November. The king came to see me frequently. He would return with me to his town, Akim-Swaidroo ; but he had to settle a dispute with a neighbouring chief on the waj'^ : would I act as arbitrator in the matter ? WTiat was it about ? 158 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY About a goat. The oath of friendship which this chief had sworn to him had not been sealed by the killing of a goat : the omission of this sacrificial rite was the cause of the dispute. What was my opinion ? I replied that the matter was of such importance as to render its postponement until after the ter- mination of the war imperative. This view did not seem to suit the king or his comicil ; and they aU began a laboured exposition of the question at issue, ending by again urging that I would use my influence to bring the recalcitrant chief to a sense of his transgression. WTiile still adhering to the necessity of postponing the case, I indulged in some observa- tions upon goats in general ; I further remarked that they were perfectly distinct and different from sheep, and this being the case, I thought that mutual concessions would best advance the interest of all parties. When the interpreter had got these profound opinions into their Akim equivalents, I was astonished to observe an expression of agreement on the faces of the king and his counsellors. They uttered a kind of prolonged * Hah,' which I read as a sort of * I told you so.' They would start, they said, to-morrow. Night came at last to end the visits and the begging, and to hide the black faces at windows and doorways, corners and chinks ; and I lay down to sleep with the prospect of a start next morning. But there was one thing the night could not hide : that these past twenty days of toil had told terribly on my health and strength. The desire for food had grown less and less ; a lassitude never felt before had come upon me ; sleep brought with it no sense of rest or refreshment. At last I got away from Eniacroom. The king and his retainers were also on the road. The march was only one of eight miles, but it taxed all my strength to accomplish it. The path was deep in mud, and the hammock could not make way among the crowded and tangled trees, so I went on on foot. A raging thirst consumed me, and whenever we reached running water I had to drink deeply. What, I asked myself, was this strange, dry feeling ? Only some passing ailment, I thought : I will walk faster and shake it off. We were now in a forest of prodigiously large trees, matted imdemeath with tendrils and creeping plants. Those giant trees seemed as endless pillars on an endless road. I reached another croom, SPLENDID BEARING OF OUR OFFICERS 159 and sat down in a porch while a hut was being prepared. The dry heat of the skin grew drier ; the thirst became more incessant ; then came a pain that seemed to be everywhere at once — the dull, dead, sick pain of African fever. Hitherto I have written in detail of the Ashanti War of 1873 through the first three or four weeks of my personal experience of it. I have done so because I wished to put before the reader a picture of life with the real negro at home. I thought also that the narrative might be of use as showing these little wars, which have been so frequent in our history during the past fifty or sixty years, in comparison with the big wars of earUer days, the wars which OtheUo thought ' made ambition virtue.' These old wars seem to me to bear the same relation to our modern wars — opium wars, colonial wars, which might fitly be called ' sutlers' ' wars — as the glory of an old EngUsh cathedral of Plantagenet times compares with the meanness of houses and shops that are grouped around its base. This Ashanti War of 1873-74^ has been forgotten long ago. Pestilence kiUed ten men for every one knocked over by a bullet. Now, when more than thirty years have passed, I look back on all the toil and sweat and sickness of that time, and the picture I see is a sad but splendid one — men, the best I ever met with in my long service, toiling on, despite of fever and dysenter}^ over narrow forest paths ; some of them worn to skeletons, all with drawn, haggard features ; down with fever one day, staggering along the dark path the next day ; eating wretched food ; fighting, urging, wrestling with recalci- trant carriers ; streaming with perspiration at aU times ; yet always putting a good face upon the worst ills that fortune sent them. And, fixed as that picture of the human factor, I see another memory — that great, gloomy forest ; these endless arches of colossal cotton trees, under which two other growths of forest flourish, the lower one a mass of tangled and twisted ever- greens, the middle one hung with spiral creepers hke huge serpents hundreds of feet in length. Below aU there is the hot, wet earth emitting foul odours from its black mud-holes, and many pools of slime-covered water. There is dense fog in the early mornings — a ' thick smoke ' the natives caUed it — fierce sun on the lofty tree-tops at midday ; but only in fretted 160 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY patches can the hot rays reach the ground through these great trees, of which the trunks run up one hundred feet without a branch, and then spread forth for another hundred feet into massive limbs, every one sulBficient to make a forest tree. Evening. A splash of water upon aU the land ; rain pours upon the big leaves m ceaseless torrents, and the roll of thunder crashes loud and long over the echomg forest depths. So closely does the forest hem in the crooms that if one could walk along its upper surface, one would look right down into the little clusters of mud and wattle huts which form the village homes. In this forest and in these crooms I now spent three very long months, the longest I ever remember. During November, December, and January I marched about nine hundred miles — every day with a little more difficulty. Not a week went by but my bout of fever came. Sometimes it would last two days, sometimes only a night ; but always one rose from the wretched bed on the earthen floor a little weaker and thinner, until at last the bones seemed all that was left of the body. Long before the campaign was over I was able to join the ends of thumb and forefinger and run the loop thus made from wrist to elbow, and from elbow to shoulder, without having to open the circlet. The body wasted in a similar proportion. How I was able to walk was often a subject of wonder to me. A year earlier I had been doing twenty and thirty mile marches daily on snow-shoes, with dogs, along the frozen Peace River ; and as then I had attributed hardiness m the cold largely to the fact that I had bathed in the open sea during a previous winter, so now I believed I was able to walk this tropic forest, not- withstanding a state of extreme emaciation, because that fifteen hundred mile tramp in the snow had habituated my legs to marching. Of this fever, which began, as I have said, on the march from Eniacroom to Dobbin, I must say something. I can never forget that first attack. For three days and nights I lay in the corner of a very small hut on a door with two logs of wood under it and a blanket spread over it. I drank in- cessantly, and was always thirsty. The fingers seemed to be lighted candle ends ; the throat was parched ; the mouth was fiUed with an odious taste ; every bone and joint ached ; the IN THE GRIP OF THE FEVER 161 head reeled with a sickness worse than that of a rough sea ; when sleep came, it brought terrible visions, so that one would say on waking, ' I must not go to sleep again/ I had, of course, no doctor, and but one or two medicines. I swallowed large doses of quinine — twenty grains at a time. WTien the night grew still, and the incessant noises of the negroes' daily village life ceased, loathsome things came out from the mud walls and thatched roof and prowled about my room. A large black rat ran several times across my door-bed as I lay tossing upon it in sleepless pain. On the morning succeeding the third night of this misery some lightening of the fever must have come : I was in a pro- fuse perspiration, terribly weak, but could breathe more freely. The idea of escape from this foul sick-room came to me. If I could only get out of this horrible place I should be better ; and if I did not get better, the big forest would be a fitter place to die in than this hateful hole. There was not a soul to speak to ; the candle, stuck in a bottle, had died out ; the night was wearing towards daybreak ; that strange little animal of the sloth species, which gives out a series of terrible shrieks as the dawn is drawing near on the Coast, was already sending his dismal howls through the forest. I got off the bed and staggered to the hut window. Day was breaking ; the croom and the forest were wrapped in fog, but, above, the stars could be seen. I was horriblj'' weak, for no food had passed my lips during three days. The cool air seemed to revive me, and I felt that I must tear myself out of the grasp of this fever. I called my servant ; he roused the hammock men ; for the first time they were ready, and I was carried out of the still sleeping village before daylight had fully come. For ten days following this day the routine was the same : night usually brought a return of the fever — more quinine, more perspiration; in the morning less fever and less strength. King Ahencora, finding that I had left Dobbin and was making for his capital of Swaidroo, set out at once after me. AATien I reached Swaidroo I was scarcely able to stand ; but my brain was clear enough to reahse that this so-called city of a strong king was just like a score of other crooms through which I had passed ; that the Akims were exactly as all the other tribes — Assins, Denkeras, Arbias, L 162 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Accras, and Agoouahs had been — a hopeless lot of craven beggars. I must run quickly through the crowded events of the next three months. After twenty days of travel, palavers, toil, and fever I reached the Prah at Prahsu with a following of one chief, three scouts, and twenty-six Akim soldiers. This was the total muster which had rallied to my call ! My first king was still doing fetish at Accra ; my second monarch had reported himself very lame that morning from a place twenty miles to the rear. The last six miles of the paths to the Prah presented a very gruesome appearance ; dead bodies lay along it in advanced stages of decomposition ; the stench was horrible ; and every- thing betokened the stricken state in which the Ashanti army had crossed the sacred river, the banks of which I was the first white man to reach. The first phase of the war was now over ; the next would open with the invasion of Ashanti when the British tro®ps had arrived at the Coast. The plan of invasion was as follows : — the entire English force was to move along the main road to Prahsu, cross the river, and advance straight upon Coomassie. I was again instructed to visit Akim, collect as many men as I could gather in that kingdom, cross the Prah at a place some thirty miles higher up stream, and invade Ashanti on my own account. Thirty miles still farther to my right. Captain Glover was to lead all the Volta natives he could collect together, with nine hundred or a thousand disciplined Houssas, into Ashanti. The date for this simultaneous crossmg of the frontier was fixed for the 15th January. I did not get back to West Akim until the 23rd December, so that I had three weeks in which to prepare, collect, organise, arm, and equip this new expedition. It would be impossible now to go over again these three weeks' work. It will suffice to say that I reached the Prah at a place called Beronassie on 13th January, to find a following of about one hundred Akims, and with a pulse beating at about the same figure. A bad night of fever fol- lowed the long, hot march over a rugged track, filled in many places with stagnant water, and crossed by roots of trees laid bare by rain torrents. Again came the old routine of the THE FRONTIER CROSSED 163 night, now so familiar — the wakeful hours, the sickness, the wet fog, the dayhght, the lightening of the fever. As I lay- in the languor of the next day, messages came from Fuah and Ahencora, from Darco and other chiefs, all secretly de- hghted that the white man was down again ; and that three other English officers, who had just arrived from the main road to assist in this new expedition, were also lying, some ten miles back on the road I had come, prostrate with fever. ' Surely I will delay the crossing of the Prah,' they urge. ' No, the orders are the 15th.' On the 15th I was able to move again, and I set out for the Prah — three miles. I found an advanced guard of some fifty Akims on the near bank of the river. ' Move your men across,' I said to the chief in com- mand, ' and make camp on the Ashanti shore.' ' They could not cross,' he said, ' they were too few ; the Ashanti fetish held the river ; they must wait until more men had come up.' * Then we shall cross alone,' I said. ' It is the day named by the English general : his orders must be obeyed.' Two of the three sick officers had arrived that morning. We rested a while in the Akim camp ; then I told the policemen to carry a few loads down to the edge of the ford. There was a ridge of sand in the centre of the river, and beyond it the current ran deep and strong. We waded to the sand island ; then divesting ourselves of clothes, we took the deeper water. In the centre it rose to our lips ; then we just touched bottom, caught the outlying branches of a fallen tree, and climbing through them, got to the farther shore. It was midday. Not a sound stirred in the great forest. The Akims stood in groups on the south shore gazing at the white man's doings. The sight was certainly a curious one : three white men and six native policemen carrying baggage had invaded Ashanti. CHAPTER XI An excuse for the craven native. End of the expedition. Near death from fever. Queen Victoria's visit to Netley. Companion of the Bath. Start for Natal. With Sir Garnet Wolseley again. Protector of Indian immigrants. The Tugela. Through the Orange Free State. As these days now come back iii recollection, I could easily write a volume about them. Their strangeness has grown stranger to me. It is all thirty-five years ago, and a thousand other scenes have crossed the looking-glass since then, and yet in that infinite wonder, the mirror of memory, I seem to see it all to-day perhaps even in truer perspective than I was able to see it in then. Looking back now upon that big forest, with its days of disappointment, its nights of sickness, its toilings under those gloomy green arches, the endless vistas of that gigantic laby- rinth of trees, the horrible brain-pictures that grew in the long, dark hours when the brain still saw after the eyes closed, I can perceive things that I did not discern then. I see much that was good and human in these poor black savages — true and faithful service, patience, honesty, strange childlike accepta- tion, doglike fidelity. These traits were common among them, the lower ranks possessing a hundred times more of them than the upper ones. After all, we were expecting too much from these Coast negroes. Firstly, we expected they would accept as truth everything we told them ; but why should they ? For three or four hundred years the white man had robbed, tricked, and enslaved them ; had dragged them m hundreds of thousands from their homes, crowded them into foul ships, lied to them, lashed them, cheated them in trade. What reason was there now that they should thmk honest, truthful men had all at once come amongst them, whose words they were to believe at the first sound ? I once asked the best and most truthful negro I met on the Coast this question, * When a white man speaks to a black one, what does the black man 164 OUR DEALINGS WITH THE NATIVE 165 think of what he is told ? Does he believe it ? ' ' No,' was the prompt reply, ' he thinks every word the white man says is a lie.' Secondl}', we expected to find among them the habits of punctuality, obedience to command, order, and even discipline, which wc had been accustomed to find at home ; but surely this was wrong. It was our drink, our trade, our greed, which had hopelessly demoraHsed the native African. We wrung our wealth out of his sweat ; we drugged him with our drink ; we shot him with our guns ; we sold him powder and lead, so that he might shoot and enslave his fellow-black. These castles along his Coast were the monuments of our savage injustice to him. Thirdly, we were wrathful with the tribes of the Coast because they did not at once turn out and fight the Ashanti at our bidding. In this, too, we were looking for more than we had a right to expect. WTien the Ashantis had come down upon the tribes six months earlier, the help we had been able to give these tribes against their enemies was of the feeblest sort. In that invasion they had suffered almost everything that they could suffer ; thousands had been killed, all the villages had been destroyed, the fetish trees cut down. ' The way- side,' says one very accurate writer,^ ' was littered with corpses, with the dj^ing, with women bringing forth children.' AU the tribes knew this, even those whom the tide of devastation had not reached. Why then should they have rushed at our bid- ding again into a fray which had already proved so disastrous to them ? It is a peculiarity with many of our people that they do not know how much they do not know. There is nothing in a land before thej^ came there. History began when the first Enghsh traders arrived. Before that event there was a blank. The erection of Smith's shop marks the year one. This method of thinking is not confijied to traders. I remember a very- high civil authority at the War Office once remarking to a military officer whose business it was to take daily to him a map showing the progress of our troops in war against the Zulus, * Dear me ! what a lot of geography these wars teach one.' It is a little late to begin the acquisition of that know- ledge when the fighting has begun. But we must finish our story. ^ Winwood Reailc. 166 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Little by little, in the days following our unique passage of the Prah, I succeeded in getting an increasing number of Akims over the river and inducing them to go forward with me into Ashanti. By 22nd January we were at Yancoma, a place about twenty miles across the frontier. No enemy had been seen, but traces of scouts were here met with. From this place two paths led towards Coomassie : we followed that which went by Ennoonsu to Akim and Cocofoo. It seems a marvel to me now how we got the Akims along. Their numbers had increased to over one thousand, and more men were coming in. Many of the men and a few of the chiefs were of good stuff and spirit, but the kings and leading men were in a state of fear that was often comical to look at. It was this element of comicality in the black man which was the saving clause in all the long chapter of fever, fiasco, and apparently fruitless effort which had bj^ this time reduced my body to the condition of a walking skeleton. I was certainly the one officer on the Coast who had dwelt wholly and entirely among the natives. For three months I had literally lived alone with them ; the ways of their daily lives had become familiar to me. As the body of the African is almost destitute of clothing, so is his mmd an open one ; he has few concealments, physical or mental. You think, perhaps, that only in civilised communi- ties is the study of human nature possible, but it is not so. Africa is the real bed-rock school of that stud3^ CiviUsation, even at its best, has often to curb itself in order to keep its clothes on. The African has not to write a novel when he wants to take them off. The negroes say that Adam and Eve and their children were aU black, and that Cain only turned white through fear after he had killed Abel and when he found that he could not hide the dead body of his brother. I do not pretend to decide the question, but it is significant that the black man to-day does not build cities, nor, if he can help it, does he like to live in them. I have an idea that he will exist on the earth a very long time. We got to the Ennoon River, had a skirmish there on 25th January, in which the enemj'' was routed and some heads taken by the Akims. After another delay there of two dsuys I managed to get the kings, lords, and commons of Akim, now numbering fourteen hundred men, forward on another day's IN TOUCH WITH THE ENEMY 167 march in the direction of the city of Cocofoo, one of the sacred spots of Ashanti situated near the Lake Boosumaque, from the waters of which the King of Ashanti obtained fish for his palace. We were now well mto the old kingdom of Ashanti. Only one among the four officers (Brabazon), who had joined me three weeks earlier, was fit for service on this day ; two of the others were prostrate with fever ; the fourth, MacGregor, was just able to stagger along the track. Two hours' march brought the advanced guard under Brabazon in contact with the enemy at a village called Akina, situated on the top of a steep hiU and more than one thousand feet above sea-level. Here there was another skirmish ; we had two Akims killed, but their heads were not taken. The Ashantis retreated, and the village was ours. It really seemed that Fortune had at last declared for us. I had now to close up the ranks of my extra- ordinary army, fortify this commanding position, and boil up the spirits of my kings for a further advance upon the enem3\ On the early morning of the 28th January a party of Ashantis stole into our camp along a bypath, fired at and wounded some Akims who were lymg asleep near a fire, and got away un- molested. We had taken in Akina a very sacred fetish stool belonging to the chief of the town ; the night raid was said to have had for its object the recovery of this venerated relic. I spent the 30th January urging upon the kings the necessity of making another forward move. We must now be very near to the main line of advance, probably only a few miles from it. On the preceding day one of our scouting parties had entered the town of i\Iansuah at Lake Boosumaque, which they found deserted. They brought back news that the Ashantis were in a camp at Cocofoo, a few miles to the north of Mansuah, and that the King of Ashanti, Coffee Kerrikerri, was with them. They added that there was another large camp of the enemy at Amoaful, on the main road west of Akina. This news of the scouts filled my kings with fear. One of them, Darco of Accassee, chattered with terror as he urged in palaver the dangers they were in. I had just received a despatch from Sir Garnet Wolseley, dated Fommanah, 25th January, a hurried postscript to which aimounced that the King of Ashanti had acceded to all the demands of the major-general, and that in view of his submission a speedy termination of hostilities 168 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY was probable. When I communicated this news to my kings they one and aU declared that the King of Ashanti was a liar, that he meant to fight, and that his people were determined to do so. In this view they were right. The acceptation of Sir Garnet's terms of peace was only a pretence to gain time. Subsequent events proved that the news brought by my scouts from Mansuah was quite correct. Ten thousand Ashantis were at Cocofoo between Akina and Coomassie. On the afternoon of the 30th January the entire force of Akims on and around the hiU at Akina suddenly began to move out of their camps back along the road we had come from the Ennoon River. The kings had given me no warning of this intention : my campaign in Ashanti was at an end. A fortnight later I reached the Coast. On the march down I met the then Captain Redvers BuUer, Head of the Intelligence Department, and from him I heard the other side of the story. During the two daj^^s spent in Coomassie he had collected a mass of Ashanti information. ' Ten thousand Ashantis were gathered at Cocofoo in front of you,' he said ; ' they were not at Amoaful. The presence of your force at Akina until the evening of the 30th kept them from being on our flank the next day.' So, after all, my Akim venture had been of some service to the campaign. There would be Uttle gained by attempting to after-cast either what might have been if this Cocofoo army of ten thousand had been present with the other ten thousand which fought so stiffly at Amoaful on 31st January ; or again, what might have happened if they had fallen upon my fifteen hundred or two thousand Akims at Akina ; or again, what would have come to pass if I had succeeded m inducing my kings to make another forward move on that Slst. Of aU the might-have-beens, those in war are the most futile. In Sir Garnet Wolseley's despatch to the Secretary of State, written on the evening of the day upon which he left Coomassie, this sentence occurs : — ' So far as the interests of the expedition under my orders are concerned, Captain Butler has not failed, but most successfully achieved the very object which I had in view in detaching him for the work he so cheerfully and skilfully undertook. He has effected a most important diversion in favour of the main body, and has NEAR DEATH 169 detained before him all the forces of one of the most powerful Ashanti Chiefs.' Although I got down to the sea the wreck of a wreck, I imagined that all my troubles were past, and that I should only have to get on the deck of a transport and lie down to rest for twenty days. That was not to be. Three or four days after I reached Cape Coast Castle a virulent fever, compared to which the other intermittent fever I had suffered had been as nothmg, suddenly burst upon me like a thief in the night, and the pent-up poison of the long toil broke out in overwhelming illness. I possess no record of the next two or three months, and only a very dim recollection of the earlier half of that period. I was embarked on board an old and indifferent steamship which was told off for the conveyance of sick and wounded from the Coast. Twenty-six officers, mostly suffering from fever and dysentery, had to be put in hammocks below the main-deck. The accommodation for sick people was very bad. The heat was intense ; most of the attendants were themselves either sick or convalescent. Some- thing happened on the third or fourth night after sailing, the exact particulars of which I cannot recall ; but I remember leaving my swinging cot below, climbmg to the open deck, and being there in the night air with very scanty covering for some time. Then there was a crash, and I remember striliing some hard substance with mj* head as I fell upon the deck. How long I remained lying unconscious on that wet deck I do not know ; but aU at once consciousness returned, and with it a numbed sort of fear. I remember getting down the steps of the ladder as best I could, and regaining my cot. Next morning the doctor found me in the highest fever. It would not be possible to speak or write of the next ten days' suffering. Sleep left me — nothing was able to bring it back. At last death was supposed to have come one morning. I dimly remember people gathered about the cot, and one good comrade asking in my ear for my last wishes. I remember, too, suddenly declaring that I died a Catholic. Then there is a blank, but not altogether, for I can recoUect that after the usual final settlings of face and Umbs had been made — the eyes closed, and the sheet drawn over the laid-out figure — there was a 170 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY curious indistinct idea in my brain that it was not as people supposed ; that I was still conscious, and even that I was being carried by invisible hands, or being floated on towards a great cloud-veil, the passing through which it seemed was to be the final passage out of life. There was no sensation of bodily pain. How long I lay in this condition I don't know, but I remember men coming agam about the cot, lifting the sheet, and touching me and talking to each other. Then I thought, ' These men are about to prepare my body for the sea ' ; and as in these hot latitudes the time between death and burial in the ocean was a very short one, I felt the extreme horror of the situation, and longed to be able to make some sign or movement by which they might know that I was not really dead. Next I heard one of the men who was moving my limbs suddenly say to his comrade, ' I don't think he 's dead.' It was ' Bill,' or ' Tom,' or ' Jack,' but I have forgotten which name it was. The other man replied, ' Dead ? you something or other, why, I saw him die at eight o'clock this morning.' Then there was some more arm lifting or moving, and the man who had first spoken went on, ' Well, I don't think he 's dead ; anyway, I '11 go for the doctor.' Then more people came about the swinging cot ; something was done, and I awoke or became actively conscious again. For many days after this coming back I lay hovering on the brink — a shuttlecock between life and death. One day I had a narrow escape. I jumped from the cot suddenly in raging delirium, and rushed along the mam-deck, looking for any exit that might promise escape. I sprang mto the first open door ; it was the cook's galley. Men caught hold of me ; the skeleton had the strength of six sound men. I could not be got out of the place until an old acquaintance came. Then I went quietly back with him. After that I was put into a closed cabin, and special men were told off to watch day and night. As we slowly sailed into cooler latitudes the fever of the brain grew less ; and at Madeira a Portuguese clergyman came off to the tossmg ship, bad sailor though he was, to bring to the ' ruckle of bones ' the final ministrations of that Faith, the tinkle of whose Mass-bell — more continuous and far-reaching even than the loud drum beat of England which the American imagined circling the earth and keeping company NETLEY HOSPITAI^-PROMOTION 171 with the hours — carries its morning message of mercy to the sinners of the world. I lay for two months m Netley Hospital, and at last, when the summer was half over, was declared fit for the outer world again. Of course, I missed all the rejoicings, the feastings, and the field days that followed the return to England of the victorious general and his little army, but I was not forgotten at Netley by queen or country. Her Majesty came to my bedside and spoke some very gracious words to me, among them being a message of peculiar thought and kindliness. ' When Sir Garnet Wolseley rode up to my carriage at the Wmdsor Review, the Duke of Cambridge whispered to me, " If you wish to please Sir Garnet, the first question should be an inquiry for Captain Butler." ' In the Ashanti Gazette I was promoted to a majority in the army, and made a Companion of the Bath. It now only remained to get into the Bath-chair to which I had also been appointed, by the excellent doctor at Netley. And here I desire to say a word about a body of gentlemen-servants of the State with whom a long active life made me familiar — the medical officers of the army, I have known them m many lands, and mider the varying conditions inevitable to military life. I never knew them to fail. There is no finer sight in war than the figure of a military surgeon kneelmg beside a wounded man just behind the fighting line. Shots may come, and shots may go, but the surgeon goes on at his work, quietly, coolly, and with hand as steady and dexterous, and gaze as concentrated on his business, as though the scene were the operating-room in a London hospital. Until the close of my work in Akim I had no doctor with me ; then one was sent at the time the three officers, Brabazon, Paget, and MacGregor, joined my column. The doctor, Lowe, was a big breezy sort of man, who on his arrival laughed at malaria. ' It is only a convenient professional expression,' he said. A day or two later he was ' down with fever ' at Yancoraa, and for the rest of my short campaign I had him carried in a hammock. At long last I got away from Netley. I made for the west coast of Ireland, to regain, if possible, the health and strength which seemed to have been hopelessly lost on the west coast 172 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Africa. I was stiU able to move only a few yards on my feet, so I drove as much as I could. The outside car, the great cliffs of Clare, and the heatherj^ glens of Kerry — ^these were now my doctors. In three weeks I was feeling a different man, though still very weak. At last I came to a little seaside hotel where a few fisher and shootmg folk formed the company. One day in late September some of them asked me to go into a neighbouring bog to look for somethmg. I went with them. A snipe got up in front of me ; the effort to get the gun to the shoulder caused me to stagger, but there was a bank close by, and I leant against it while aiming. Bang ! the snipe was down. I was well. I was loth to leave these wonderful scenes which had given me back hfe's most precious gift, and, learnmg to walk, I tarried off and on among the Kerrj^ hills, shooting and writing. One da}^ in February 1875 a telegram came from Sir Garnet Wolseley in London : — ' Come at once, and be ready to start with me for South Africa on Thursday.' My book on Akim-land ^ was all but finished. I put up the MS., packed my things, and was in London the next day. Then I heard what the telegram meant. Sir Garnet Wolseley was going to Natal in a joint civil and military capacity — Governor and High Commissioner. He had asked four of his old Ashanti staff to go with him. I was one of them. Five days later we sailed from Dartmouth for Cape Town and Durban. The voyage was then of nearly twice the duration that it is to-day, and we had full time to study the work to be done, as our vessel steamed slowly southwards, skirting these same jaws of Benin, which, just a year ago, had all but closed their bite upon me. One day, while steammg through this steaming sea, something went wrong with the machinery, and we stopped for a few hours to set it right. A large number of sharks gathered about the ship. The water was very clear, and with the sun straight overhead it was possible to see down through its unruffled surface to a great depth. The sailing voyage to India fifteen years before had taught me something of a shark's ways in these waters, for we had lain becalmed in ^ Akim-J'oo, the Hiiitory of a Failure. (E. B. ) SAILING FOR NATAL 173 thera for many days. I crumpled a newspaper together and dropped it over the stern. A huge shark came swimming upward towards the white floating object. I had a rifle laid on it ; as he snapped, I fired. The bullet hit him fair in the head ; he turned a complete somersault out of the water aijd lay dead as a stone on the surface ; then the great body began to sink slowly, belly upwards. It was curious to watch it fathoms and fathoms below, the glare of the tropic sun striking on the snow-white body as on a looking-glass. ' I have sailed the sea for thirty years,' said our captain, ' but that is the first shark I ever saw shot dead.' All the members of this new mission had been former comrades on the Coast with me. Colonel Pomeroy Colley, whose extra- ordinary' vigour and energj^ a few months earlier had saved the transport service from collapse on the Gold Coast, was the only ofiicer among our group who had had previous service in South Africa. Major Henry Brackenbury ^ had also distin- guished himself in the late campaign as military secretary to Sir Garnet Wolseley ; and Captain Lord Gifford, V.C, had a name which was then a household word in the service and out of it for the cool and determined courage with which he explored with a small band of native scouts the labyrinths of the forest in front of the Ashanti enemy, A new colonial secretary for Natal, ]\Ir. Napier Broome, was also of our party. He had been a recent leader-writer on the staff of the Times. We made a merry party. Our chief was of that rare make of men in whom the thing we caU ' command ' in the army is so much an essential item of their nature that one has no more thought of questionmg it than one would think of asking a bird why he flew, or a river why it flowed. Wolseley was the only man I met in the army on whom command sat so easily and fitly that neither he nor the men he commanded had ever to think about it. And it was this fact of command by right that made his companionship as easy to others as his leadership was easy to himself. It was such a delight to meet a general of a type entirely different from an\i:hing of the kind I had ever seen before in our army, that the chief regret I had, on this my third turn of service with him, was that I was less ^ Now Sir Henry. 174 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY likely to be of use to him now than I had been in Canada or Ashanti. The poison of the bite of the Gold Coast was not yet all out of my veins, and Natal in March was said to have still a fervid sun above it. We reached Cape Town on 17th March, had a few days there, and then went on in a splendid frigate, the Raleigh, to Durban. This vessel had just been launched, the first and last of her type, meant for steam and wind, with great engines and large masts — a combination which our own experience was shortly to prove useless. Sir Garnet carried a letter from the Admiralty directing the admiral at Simon's Town to detach a ship from the flying squadron for his transport to Natal, and the Raleigh was placed at his service. After a dinner on board Admiral Randolph's flagship we rowed to the Raleigh, and were received by Captain Try on on his quarter-deck. His name will be long associated with one of the most tragic chapters in modern naval histor3^ In weighing anchor immediate^ afterwards something went wrong in the operation of catting the anchor, and, as the sea was rising before a south-easterly wind, the huge mass of the anchor swinging just at the water-line was considered dangerous, and there was a good deal of hauhng work before it could be secured. Captain Tryon came into the deck cabin where we were assembled, to explain what had happened. The trouble was complicated because a rock known as ' the Roman ' was only a short distance off, on the lee side, so that if the ship went ahead the anchor would swing against her bows, and if she didn't go ahead the wind might take us on ' the Roman ' rock. Wolseley was seated on the table. ' My dear captain,' he said, ' on the deck of a British ship-of- war I always feel that I am on the safest spot in the world.' When morning came we had cleared False Ba,y and were steer- ing in the teeth of a violent south-easter. Trj-on was a veritable Triton, a powerfully built man, with a large strong face and a deep voice. He spared nothmg on this occasion to make the few days we were on his ship pleasant to us. The Raleigh burned nearly three hundred tons of coal in twenty-four hours ; but in the face of the south-easter she made slow progress, and her captain and officers were not a little put out when, in the middle of the driving mist of the first day's storm, we NEW DUTIES 175 saw our old friend the W aimer Castle steaming slowly past us, burning some thirty tons in the same period. But the gale went down the next day, and then canvas had its chance, and took it splendidly. With every stitch set on the huge masts, the ship sped along the coasts of Kaffraria for four hundred miles, and on 29th ]March the sight of a canvas- clouded frigate coming up to the roadstead at Durban was the first intimation the people of Natal had of Sir Garnet's advent among them. Then began some six months of most varied and interesting work. The central object of the mission was to mduce the Government and people of Natal to alter their Constitution, giving to the Crown larger powers in the nomination of members to the Legislative Council, the object being to prevent the recurrence of certain repressive measures against the natives which the Secretary of State considered had been hostile to the spirit as weU as to the letter of English law. The part which fell to my lot in the programme of work was a varied one. I was nominated Protector of Indian Immigrants, a position which gave me a seat on the Council and also in the Legislative Assembly of the colony. I had to report on the land system existing in Natal, with a view to the introduction of British colonists, to study native questions, and take part in the debates when the Legislative Council was in session. Meanwhile a season of social hospitali- ties was begun on the most lavish scale. Dinner parties at Government House were of nightly occurrence. Dances were constantly taking place. Within a fortnight the ladies were aU on the new governor's side. It could not well have been other- wise. Who could resist the fascination of this young general, in whom an extraordinary capacity for labour of the most serious kind was combined with a buoyancy of spirit and natural kindness of character seldom found united in the same individual ? Of course, ' the attempt to tamper with the Constitution,' as it was called by a section of Natal societj% gave rise to considerable opposition ; and when the Legislative CouncU met, very hvely discussions took place in that small assembly at which ambitious Hampdens and journalistic Vanes were present. But the whole thing was in truth a teacup tempest. 176 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY The eternal African native was the sole reality in it, and all the talking, and the travelling that was to follow the talking, got Natal no nearer to the solution of that immense human problem. The longer I have watched the workings of the great and the little representative and deliberative assemblies of the world, the more I have been disposed to think of the dog on the deck of a canal boat, who imagines he is pulling the load because he stands barking at the old horse that is dragging it. But perhaps if that dog did not think he was doing all this work, he might be biting some of the people at the other end of the boat. The Natal Constitution Bill passed by a very small majority, and then came a time of intense interest to me personally. We started up country to visit, first, the locations from which the tribes of Langalabalele and Putili Zulus had been recently ejected, at the foot of the Drakensberg Mountains ; then the line of the Tugela River and the Ladysmith and Newcastle districts ; and, finally, I was to be detached on a mission to President Brand in Bloemfontein, the Kimberley Diamond Fields, and Basutoland. If, a quarter of a century later, it was to fall to my lot to hold a high civil and military position in South Africa on my own account and to endeavour to tell the governing powers of England of the size, weight, and sub- stance of certain forces and quantities in the problem with which they would then have to deal, I owe it largely, if not wholly, to the mission I was now about to undertake, that many warning words written and spoken by me under circumstances of no little difficulty and complexity in that later time, were at least found fairly accurate when all the account was closed. We set out in mid- June for the Drakensberg, with saddle- horses and waggons. The weather was perfect, the scenery not to be surpassed. Tower-topped moimtaius, ten and twelve thousand feet in height, snow-crowned and purple, rose as Natal's western boundary wall. Along the feet of these we travelled, each night camp measured from the last night's one by the ' trek ' of the oxen — sometimes ten miles, sometimes five, for there were many drifts to be crossed and hours were often lost at some of them. But with our horses to let us rove in front or on the flanks of the transport waggons, the shortest IN THE ORANGE FREE STATE 177 day's trek often gave us the longest day of sport or rambling. June is South Africa's mid-wmter, a season of brilliant sunshine and clear frosty nights ; sunrises of great silent beauty, with snow-white mists rising from unseen river beds, and climbing slowly up the mountain's eastern face, thinning and dissolving as they ascend ; evenings of still more perfect lustre when the sun has gone down behind the many domes and turrets of the Drakensberg, and the western sky above the serrated snow is one vast green and saffron afterglow. These were pleasant days. We struck the Tugela in the centre of the great angle which half encloses it for some miles after it has come down in three great jumps from the top of the Drakensberg ; then we jour- neyed past scenes which, twenty-five years later, were to loom large m our history : to Ladysmith, and up to Newcastle, a tiny village of a dozen houses. From this place Sir Garnet Wolseley followed the Tugela Valley, and I began my journey through the Orange Free State to Kimberley. At that time no land on earth seemed to lie in greater peace and surer prospect of its continuance ; but, strangely enough, I find in a pocket notebook I then carried a quotation which must have expressed some foreboding in my mmd, other- wise it would scarcely have found entry there : — ' Thus far their (the white men's) course has been marked with blood, and with blood must it be traced to its termination either in their own destruction or in that of thousands of the population of Southern Africa.' From Newcastle in a long day's ride I ascended the Drakens- berg by the Ingogo Valley and Botha Pass, thence by post-cart from Harrismith and Bethlehem and Winburg to Bloemfontem. This was a five daj-s' journey. xA.bove the berg the land was all a great rolling plain of veldt, unmarked, unfenced, with enormous herds of blesbok, springbok, and other antelopes grazing or galloping over it, the cart path a thin ribbon of lighter colour winding away through a brown waste, over which blew a wind of the keenest and most invigorating freshness. At intervals, on either side of the road-ribbon, table-topped hills rose near and far, breaking the dull monotony of the lower level, until the straight lines of their summits became merged into a distant horizon. M 178 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY At Bloemfontein I presented my letters of introduction to President Brand, and during the following days I had many interviews with that remarkable man. Bloemfontein was then onty a large village, but on market-day the place was crowded with men in well-horsed Cape carts, or large waggons drawn by many oxen — a fine, manly, heavy-bearded, and broad- shouldered race of men, and with women with large fair faces, big figures, and light brown hair. Babies were very numerous. I passed on to Kimberley, travelling in a four-horsed post- cart which left Bloemfontein shortly before sunset. A little Bushman driver and two half-Hottentot, half-Bushman girls were the only other occupants of the vehicle. A strange green porcelain-coloured sunset tinged half the western sky and presaged some weather turmoil from the west, into which we were rapidly driving, and a wild storm broke upon us before we were manj^ hours out. First, blinding dust, then a deluge of rain, which soon turned into blinding snow, and thunder and lightning such as I had not seen even on the Gold Coast. The lightning was everywhere at once, so rapidly did the vivid flashes follow one another, and simultaneously with them came the burst and crash of the discharges. We were moving through an atmosphere so charged with electric currents that, looking up, I saw for the first and last time in my life a curious phenomenon — a bluish light like that of a tall thin candle flame extending some inches from the top of the long whip handle which the driver had m his hand. The post- cart owner in Bloemfontein had provided a large sheepskin ' karrosse ' for my use, but I could not allow the two wretched Bushman girls in the back of the cart to lie cowering in the wet snow, and the karrosse made them less miserable. At four in the morning we reached the village of Boshoff, the rain still falling in torrents. Next day Kimberley was reached in baking sunshine. At that time Kimberley (or Colesberg) was a strange place. It had just concluded a small rebellion on its own account — had risen against its English governor and his colonial secretary, established a provisional government, rescued a recalcitrant storekeeper from the hands of three constables, and done several other free and independent things. No Dutchmen or Boers took part in this movement, which had its origin in some Government order permitting the A GLIMPSE OF KIMBERLEY 179 black men to work as diamond diggers for themselves. The approach of six companies of British soldiers marching from Cape Town had caused a general stampede of the four chief standard-bearers of liberty — an Englishman, a German, an Irishman, and a Natal colonist — across the border, and things had resumed their normal condition of good-fellowship. I found the British battalion (the 24th Regiment) encamped at Barkle}^ on the Vaal River, north of Kimberley. It was this battalion, with nearly all the officers who were now present at Barkley, which was totally destroyed by the Zulus at Isandula four years later. Manj?^ interestmg characters had gathered in Kimberley at this time. Eton and Harrow men ; old army officers ; young adventurous spirits from the Cape Colony ; East End and German Jews in great abundance — all these were to be found. The late Mr. Rhodes was there, but I did not meet him. The town consisted of corrugated iron and canvas, the streets were deep in mud and empty bottles, and ten or twelve thousand negroes were at work in Colesberg pit, which was twelve acres in size and two hundred feet in depth. Every grade and shade m life was represented here. There was a university man who gave readings in the Town Hall, and his rendering of Tennyson's * May Queen ' so deeply affected a huge Cornish miner at the back of the audience that he ejaculated in a deep voice at the end of the words ' For I 'm to be Queen of the May, Mother ' : ' And so am I ! ' He w^as a large, bearded man, and he appeared so thoroughly' in earnest in the matter that the reading could not be continued. I got back to Bloemfontein on 23rd July, through a country where thousands of sheep had been killed by the snow-storm ; and after many more conversations with President Brand, in which twenty-five years of the previous history of that part of vSouth Africa were reviewed, I set out for Basutoland, intending to enter Natal by a pass over the Drakensberg near the great Tugela Waterfall, We camped at Thabanchu the first night, where the old chief of the Barralongs, Moroko, ninety years of age, still dwelt, and reached Maseru early the next day. The commissioner here, Colonel Griffiths, had seen much colonial service ; and, like Colonel Southey at Kimberley, he had gone through campaigns in Kaffraria under Sir Harry 180 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Smith. We rode together over the remarkable table mountain called the Berea, where the paramount Cliief Moshesh had defeated a column of British troops in the war of 1852 ; then, having bought a couple of Basuto ponies for the ride to Natal, I set out on the 4th August for the head of the Calcdon River. Unfortunately, one of the ponies came down under me on some flat rocks as we were nearing a French Protestant mission station at the advanced posts. The cap of my knee was deeply cut ; but the excellent wife of the missionary dressed the wounds, and I went on the next mornmg towards Leribe, a ride of over forty miles, where dwelt the Basuto chief Moloppo, the son of Moshesh, the owner of fifty wives, and reputed to be full of craft and cunning. The agent at Leribe was Major Bell, an old Cape Corps soldier, who had fought under Harry Smith at Boomplatz in 1849. The next day's ride from Leribe was through scenery of a very wild and striking character. We were bound for the kraal of Letsika, still higher up the Caledon. I had with me two Basuto policemen, with whom I could not exchange a word ; but we got on well by signs, and when one has been in the habit of living with any one African race, it is easy to be at home with another. The root ideas and tokens are the same everywhere ; so is the food. Our path lay through a gorge in the mountains, at the bottom of which the river ran in deep curves. The sun could not reach the bottom of this glen, which was bounded on either side by steep precipitous cliffs of sandstone rock, ending above in turrets and spires. The path wound in zigzags up to a ledge, upon which stood the kraal of Letsika. Lower down on the level ground we had met a Basuto, gallop- ing for all he knew on a grey pony, coming towards us. The policemen called to him to stop, but as he had no bit, and only a rope at one side of the pony's mouth, he could only pull up by circling his steed round and round us until the animal came to a stand for want of a smaller circle space. They had heard I was coming, and he was riding to the nearest store, ten miles, for some English food, coffee, sugar, etc. They had killed a kid in the kraal. How like all these people were to old Bible folk ! It was we who were different. We got to the kraal with tired horses. Letsika was a good-looking young man, and his yo-ang wife did her household work well. They had OVER MOUNTAIN PASSES 181 evacuated their circular Basuto hut, which was swept and ready. The kid was cooked and eaten ; then Letsika and his wife came and sat on the clay bench that ran round the wall. They had a Basuto Bible, printed in English letters ; t had a story of Bret Harte's. To Letsika's astonishment, I read, letter by letter, his Bible, my pronunciation evoking frequent laughter ; and to my own astonishment Madame Letsika spelt out Bret Harte in the same manner, the French clergyman's wife having taught her at the mission school. As night closed, the literary entertainment was continued by the light of a fibre wick floating in the grease of the fatted kid. Next day we continued the ascent, along dizzy ledges round which the ponies crept with wonderful sure-footedness, ascend- ing often by steps cut in the rock. I should have been glad to dismount at these places, but as the native guides kept their saddles, I did the same. No horse in the world can beat a Basuto pony in mountain cUmbing. On our left we had the Roode Berg, and on our right the Mont Aux Sources began to show its turret tops. This is the highest mountain south of the Zambesi, and from its sides the largest rivers of the Transvaal, Natal, and the Cape Colony shed their waters. In the afternoon a violent storm came sweeping after us up the Caledon ; its coming was preceded by a loud howling noise lower down the valley. I was riding in front, the two Basutos some distance behind ; they called out something to me, but I did not imderstand, and before there was time to do anything the wind was on us. It struck so hard that my pony was blown off the path, fortunately landing on a slope two or three feet lower down. After this experience we all dis- mounted at the bad places. We reached the source of the Caledon, then mounted the steep divide on which snow was lying, but the gale was sweeping the ridge so furiously that we could not stand before it. Below, on the farther side, lay Witzic's Hoek, where dwelt Paulus Moperi, a cousin of old Moshesh's. Paulus had been to London in early 3'ears, and he did not appear to have been unduly astonished at anything he had seen there. I once asked an educated negro on the 182 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Gold Coast what his people thought of Englishmen. ' Half a fetish, half a fool,' was the answer ; ' a fetish because they do things we can't do, and a fool because they come out here to do them.' From Moperi's kraal I crossed the Drakensberg by a rough bridle path into Natal, and in a long day's ride reached the Tugela presidency, where my damaged knee was again dressed. Another ride of fifty miles took me from the presidency to the valley of Colenso, by reaches of river and spurs of mountain to which another quarter of a century would bring celebrity. On I2th August I reached Maritzburg. CHAPTER XII The state of South Africa in 1875. On the Staff at the War Office. Military administration. First meeting with Gordon. Marriage. War in Eastern Europe. Annexation of the TranaviiaL Visit to Cyprus. The Zulu War. Isandula. Departure for South Africa. I FOUND all the members of our mission reassembled in Government House, Maritzburg, after their various travels. Reports had now to be written embodying the impressions formed upon the different subjects of reference — native affairs, land tenures. Crown lands, and the possible trend of affairs in the Dutch states beyond our borders. A notable visitor had joined Sir Garnet Wolseley's party in the person of Mr. James Anthony Froude. My friend, General Sir Henry Brackenbury, in a recent volume of recollec- tions, referring to Mr. Froude's presence at this time, has said that ' Butler got more into his (Mr. Froude's) confidence and intimacy in a day than he (Colonel Brackenbury) had done in six months ; in the woes of Ireland they had a subject of deep common interest to both.' My recollections of that pleasant intercourse and of those social gatherings round the general's table in old Government House, at the foot of the slope that led up to Fort Napier and the Zwart Kop, are not quite General Brackenbury 's. He is not fair to himself. I think that if Mr. Froude honoured me with a larger share of liis conversation than that which he gave to my com- panions, it was because being Irish and Catholic I presented, perhaps, a wider target for his shots than they did. In his own way he had a deep and fervid affection for Ireland. His heart was set in Kerry, and I have an idea that it was by the lessons he had learned in the study of Tudor and Stuart times in that part of Ireland that his views of the Dutch question in South Africa had been coloured and even moulded. He liked, too, to try Uttle bits of religious or political badinage upon me. I remember his asking me in a large company if I 183 184 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY had gone when at Madeira to see the Portuguese statue of the * Winking Virgin,' which was said to be there. I said that I had not, and gave as my reason that I had seen so many winking ladies in England that the sight had ceased to have novelty for me. It was afterwards that we became friends. At this time Mr. Froude was terminating a quasi-political mission to South Africa, undertaken at the request of Lord Carnarvon, in the interests of the Confederation of all the States and Colonies. What a strange retrospect those thirty- four years present to-day ! How eager we were at our writings, our proposals, our plans for colonisation, for native government, better land division and tenures, extensions of railways and telegraphs, and half a dozen other matters — so hopeful about it all. And how exceedingly droll it must all have seemed to the little cherub up aloft, who, no doubt, saw the thirty years then coming as we saw the thirty years that had gone. At the time of this mission of ours South Africa had enjoyed profound peace for a quarter of a century. Two weak battalions of infantry sufficed to give it garrison. Old racial issues were disappearing ; that best form of race-amalgamation was steadily progressing — intermarriage. Then began, first at Kimberley, and later in the other mining centres, the intro- duction of the new element, the preaching of the religion of ' the top Dog and the under Dog ' ; the bounder suddenly let loose in the ' Ilhmitable,' to be followed by a quarter century of strife and bloodshed, until to-day we are arrived at the precise spot — Confederation — which Mr. Froude and a few other people then strove for, and which was just as possible and as attainable at that time as it has been found to be to-da5^ In the eye of the very young child and in that of the old man there is the same strange look of surprise, the wonder of what it is all about, and the question of ' What it was all for.' And doubtless so it wiU be to the end, until we can aU sit with the cherub and see both sides of the Bwing. Not the least interesting among the personahties met with in this visit to South Africa was the then Mr. (Sir) Theophilus Shepstone. In the earlier days of my journey, while we were Btill in that beautiful region in Natal lying at the foot of the MR. SHEPSTONE AND DR. COLENSO 185 Drakensberg Mountains, that quiet land of the Putili and Langalabeleli tribes, I enjoyed many a day's companionship with Mr. Shepstone. He had begun to study human philosophy at the bed-rock. He had lived among the Zulus from his child- hood. HaK the philosophers of the world have to go dowTi from the class before they can go up to the clouds. They are like plants nurtured in a hot-house, unable to stand in the open. Shepstone had been alwaj's in the open. With him the years had drawn out the telescope of hfe to its full focus ; he saw long distances, and, moreover, the hills on the horizon had other sides for him. He had the native habit of long silences ; then something would occur — the sight of a blesbok on a hill-top, a flower by the wayside, an outcrop of some coloured rock in a landslide — and the silent spring of thought would begin to flow in words. He would repeat some anecdote heard from an old Zulu chief a generation earher, told in those quaint conceits of language which the wild men fashion so easilj^ out of the winds, the waters, and wilderness in which they live. People wonder how men whom we call barbarous have so often in their hves a natural level of right and wrong, a sense of good and evil which we imagine belongs to our- selves and our civilisation only. They forget that in nature every^thing has a right and a wrong side, and that it is only in art you have to teach people on which side the shadow falls. I think that a day's ride in the company of that old white Zulu chief and statesman was worth a whole term in a University. Shepstone made one mistake in his life ; but of that later. Another friend met at that time in Natal was Dr. Colenso, a brave and devoted soldier fighting an uphill battle against the greeds and cruelties of man. He was not in touch with the majority of his fellow-colonists in those days, for causes which will be famihar to readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne fifty years ago, or of Olive Schreiner in our own time. When you cut down the forest or clear the brushwood in a new colony, the first crop that springs from the soil has many weeds in it. It is inevitable that it should be so ; perhaps it is even neces- spiTj. The man who doesn't know how much he doesn't know may have his uses in a new land, where there is plenty of space. 186 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY We left Natal early in September, and reached London a month later. It was an interesting moment, the close of the j^-ear 1875. Mr. Disraeli, having then fairly settled his account with home poUtics in the previous eighteen months of office, was free to launch forth into foreign enterprises. Some great specialist of the brain had said that until his sixtieth year a man was himself, that from sixty to seventy he belonged to his family, and that from seventy onwards he was merged in his tribe. Disraeli was now in his seventy-first year. The Eastern in- stinct glowed strongly within him — how strongly only the Memoirs will teU ; but, looking back now, it is not difficult to see that signs were showing above the surface in November 1875 plainly indicating the whitherwards of coming events. Shortly after our arrival in England I attended a levee held in the old Horse Guards by the Duke of Cambridge. His Royal Highness was kind and gracious, said some nice things about bygone service, and a week or two later I was agree- ably surprised to receive a letter from his military secretary asking if I would accept the position of deputy assistant quartermaster-general at headquarters. I replied in the affirmative ; and before I could be gazetted to the appoint- ment another letter came from another high official asking if I felt disposed to proceed first on a mission to trans-Caspian Persia for the purpose of reporting upon the Russian move- ments along the Attrek Valley in the direction of Merv, after- wards taking up the post at headquarters. All my natural inclinations lay in the direction of Persia as against Pall Mail, and I replied accepting the mission to Merv ; but the proposal fell through owmg to the refusal of the Foreign Office to sanction the necessary expenditure, and shortly before the year closed I joined the staff at the War Office. It was a marked change of scene, from the extremity of the circumference where my service had hitherto led me, to the exact centre of the system. And a highly centred system it was at that time, far more than it is at present. A corporal and a file of men could not move from Glasgow to Edinburgh except with the sanction and under the sign-manual of the headquarters in London. ' I am glad to hear that you are going to the War Office,' wrote THE WAR OFFICE 187 a general of the widest experience to me. ' Yon will at least see there the extraordinary system under which our army is administered, and you will also be able to form a judgment upon the stability of the human pillars which support the edifice of administration/ The thing that soon became clear to me, holding even a subordinate position in that great congeries of confusion then known as the War Office, was the hopelessness of any attempt to simplify or improve matters in any way. A vast wheel was going round, and all men, big and little, were pinned upon it, each one bound to eat a certain set ration of paper every day of his hfe. It was not the subject so much as the paper that mattered. In the months following my appointment I saw a great deal of Major Redvers BuUer, who held an appointment similar to mine in the adjutant- general's office, then presided over by Sir Richard Airey. My own office had for its head Sir Charles Ellice, and later on Sir Daniel Lysons. Many other officers whose names became known to army fame in subsequent years held positions at this time on the headquarters sta£F — Colonel T. D. Baker, Colonel Robert Hume, Colonel, afterwards Sir, Charles Wilson, Sir Patrick MacDougall, Captain Herbert Stuart, Sir John Ardagh, and others. I would speak in particular of Colonel Robert Hume, R.E. He was an exceptionally brilliant officer, mixing wit and work in a rare combination. Like most of the young and ambitious soldiers of the time, his economic resources were not large, and he had a hard struggle, as the real head of the Intelligence Department, to work his official position and maintain a large family. When the long-expected war between Russia and Turkey began, the work that fell to his lot in briefing or coaching the ministers responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs was very great. He died of a slow fever about the time of the occupation of Cyprus. He had distinguished himself during the Ashanti War as the engineer-m-chief of the expedition, and no doubt his constitution had suffered on the Coast. But I knew something of his family affairs at the time, and I believe that a life of the largest value to the State was lost, not because of the labour it was doing in the public service, but because of financial anxieties and worries at home. At the moment when Colonel Hume was finding brains 188 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY and knowledge, geographical and other, for ministers and statesmen whose names figured large in the European con- gresses that preceded and followed the Russo-Turkish War, he frequentlj^ sat late into the night at home workmg a sewing- machine to keep his children in clothes ! What a lot of splendid human steel I have seen cast on the scrap-heap in my time, in the fulness of its strength and usefulness, through the selfish stupidity of a system which never seemed to know the worth of any human material it had to deal with ! The mass of old and confused buildings in Pall Mall in which the administration of the army was then carried on was quite typical of the confused work itself. Six or seven houses had been selected, and thrown into intercommunication by means of three-step doorways and devious stairways. All grades of London houses had thus been brought together — from the fine rooms of a ducal residence, where one saw walls and ceilings with medaUions by Angelica Kauffmann and Italian mantelpieces of the finest sculpture, to the mean-looking lobbies and by-rooms of what had been once a silk-mercer's establishment. The old sailor proverb about the island of St. Helena — ^that you had the choice of breaking your heart going up, or your neck coming down — had in a small way its parallel in the Pall Mall makeshift building with its many stairs ; and it was typical also of the misfortunes attending upon the house that is divided against itself that for fully forty j^^ears the department of State which most vitally affected the existence of the Empire was attempted to be carried on in a hole-and-corner collection of buildings, most of the rooms of which were as unhealthy to the administrators as they were unsuitable for the administra- tion. The division existing between the civil and military sides in the War Office was as lasting a source of trouble to the men who went into the houses as it was an active agent in pro- ducing faults in the work that came out from it. Men spent the greater part of their time in official hours in writing ' minutes ' from one duigy room to another across these dusty passages and dark corridors. The clerk who could write the sharpest minute in the most illegible handwriting was a valuable reinforcement to his particular side, and he had never to be at THE SYSTEM 189 a loss in finding opportunity for discharging his ' minute ' guns into the ranks of some opponent. Plenty of fighting could be had all round. The strangest part of it was that nobody ever seemed to think why it was wrong, or to question the foundation upon which the system rested — a foundation which was entirely wrong m prmciple, and was therefore as certain to work out as wrong in practice as though it had been a piece of architecture set on false foundations and built upon faulty measurements. In my time I knew m that old building half a score of Secretaries of State. It was almost pathetic to see each of these men in turn begin in hope and end in failure. Those among them who made the fewest mistakes were those who tried the fewest changes : bad as the old machine was, it went better with oil and leisure than it did with grit and energy. It was like a man whose constitution is thoroughly unsound, but who, neverthe- less, can sometimes reach old age, if he does not play pranks, or imagme himself either a young man or a strong man. To understand the truth about our military administration you must go a long way back m history — in fact, to Oliver Cromwell. One fact alone in the history of the last seventy years should give pause to all military reformers. It is this, that at the end of every war waged by us in that period we have come to a unanimous agreement that we were totally unprepared for the war when we entered upon it ; and yet if you go back to the beginning of each of these wars you will also find that when we began them we were perfectly certain we were ready, down to the traditional last button. London in the middle 'seventies was a gay place of residence. Much of the gold which the Franco-German War had poured into it four years earlier v/as still there ; men and women, horses and dogs, even the sparrows, looked fat, sleek, and jolly ; only the poor were stiU thin. I look back to a host of friends, kind, hospitable souls, chief among them on the army side being Sir Garnet Wolseley, Redvers Buller, Evelyn Wood, R. Owen Jones, Robert Hume, Henry Brackenbury, T. D. Baker, Lord Gifford, John Ardagh, Cecil Russell, Baker Russell. Everybody was eagerly watching the war-cloud in the Near East, speculating where the cloud would burst ; little un- noticed parties of selected officers were going out to look at the scenerj^ of islands in the Levant, or seek for snipe along the 190 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Suez Canal, or ride through Asia Minor for the sport of the thing. Everybody knew that something was coming. The names of places well known in old war days — Gallipoli, Sebastopol, Constantmople, Varna, the Dardanelles — came again into constant conversation. More distant names also entered into the imaginary map of the theatre of coming war which we were so frequently constructing — -Kizil, Arvat, Cabul, Candahar, the Oxus, Merv. It is all thirty years ago, and two-thirds of the map-makers are dead. The world has known many wars since then, and, as usual, it was the utterly unexpected thing that happened in the end. Wherever you went in London in the later 'seven- ties, you saw numbers of little yellow-faced men, with dark, shifty eyes, and a peculiar expression of half pain and half pleasure upon their Mongolian features. No one took them at all seriously as a possible factor in war or statesmanship. It was true that they wore hats and trousers, but did not thej^ also eat rice ? If any one at those pleasant club dinners had even hinted at the possibility of these little yellow men meetmg and beating the armies and navies of the great white Czar, he would have been treated as an undiluted lunatic. These little men were then busy learning in London the lesson of how Asia was to whip Europe. Nothing so fraught with momentous results to the world had happened for thirteen hundred years. There was one little club dinner at this time which was by far the most interesting I had ever sat clown to, and which left on lay memory recollections not to be effaced in life. In the winter of 1876 Major Robert Owen Jones asked me to meet an old friend and brother officer of his. Colonel Charles Gordon, at the time a passing visitor in London from the Egyptian Soudan. Of course, the name of Chinese Gordon was familiar to every soldier in the service, but, as usual, men accepted the sobriquet without troubling themselves much about the deeds that had won it ; indeed, some years later, I met an officer who believed that ' Chinese Gordon ' was a Chinaman born and bred. The day of the dinner came ; there were only mine host, Gordon, and myself. We met in the hall of the club, and I was introduced to a man of middle age, rather under middle height, of figure lithe, active, and well-knit, and with a face A CLUB DINNER WITH GORDON 191 which still lives in my memory, not because it had any marked peculiarity in its profile or full-face, but because of something indefinable in the expression of the eyes. On the ocean one is able at a glance to discern the difference between the surface that has the depth of the Atlantic under it, and that other surface which has the mud of the English Channel only a few fathoms below it. A depth like that of ocean was within Gordon's eyes. I never saw thought expressed so clearly in any other man's. Above these windows of his soul rose a fine broad brow, over which a mass of curly brown hair was now beginning to show streaks of grey. We sat down to dinner ; there was the little restraint natural to men meeting for the first time, but that soon wore off, and before the dinner was half over conversation was in full flow. It was the best and cheeriest talk I ever listened to. Gordon's voice was as clear and vibrant as the note of an old Burmese bell, which has a great deal of gold in its metal. We adjourned to the smoking-room, and there the stream of thought and anecdote flowed on even better than before. In turn came the Nile, the desert, the Khedive Ismail (from whom Gordon had that day received a letter begging him to return to Egypt), the fever of the lake regions, and how there was a new prophy- lactic for it called Werburgh's tincture, the efficacy of which was such that ' it would make a sack of sawdust sweat.' Then he would change to the Lower Danube and its races ; the Russian, the Bulgarian, the old Turk, Sebastopol. He spoke in low but very distinct tones, and his voice, varying with its subject, carried to the ear a sense of pleasure in the sound similar to that which the sight of his features, lit with the light of a very ardent soul, gave to the listener's eye. I never heard human voice nor looked into any man's eye and found similar tone and glance there, nor did I ever meet a man who had equal facility for putting into words the thoughts tliat were in his brain. You had never to ask an explanation ; the thing, whatever it might be, was at once said and done. That night was the only one in my club life in which I saw the man with the bull's-eye lantern come to say the hour of closing had come and gone. We were alone in the big smoking-room, but I had not been aware of it. I met two men m my life who possessed this charm of conversation, Sir Garnet 192 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Wolseley and Charles Gordon, but in Gordon the gift was the greater, A few months after this time the war-cloud broke along the Lower Danube and in Asia Minor, and the spring and summer of 1877 — ^the year that saw my marriage — were full of rumours and preparations. At first it seemed that the Russian march upon Constantinople would meet with feeble opposition ; then came Plevna, the fierce fighting in the Balkans, the taking of Adrianople, and the forward march of the Russians upon the Bosphorus. The excitement reached its highest pomt in London, but it was of a very frothy nature, the music-hall god ' Jmgo ' playing a very conspicuous part in it. AU these wars and rumours of wars kept the staff in Pall MaU chained to their desks, but as the great war seemed to draw nearer to us, or we to it, the lesser war of which I have already spoken between the rival sides in the War Office grew less. The reserves were called out, and, despite of aU the vaticinations and prophecies of failure and desertion, the reservists turned up almost to a man. Notwithstanding the journalists and the Jingoes, an impres- sion began early to pervade the War Office that there would be no war. The letters of that time which have since seen the light show that this idea was also prevalent in India. Lord Lytton gauged the position very accurately when he wrote to a friend, upon hearing that a mob had broken Mr. Gladstone's windows, ' I don't think the great heart of the English people is likely to do more than break wmdows just at present.' Had he known, however, as I came to know later, the personalities and the means employed to smash these few panes of glass in Harley Street, he would not have confused the breakers even with a London mob, still less with the mass of the English people. By a strange coincidence, I happened to meet Mr. Gladstone in the Opera Arcade on the day his windows were broken by a few blackguards who had been specially hired for the business. The dark, piercing eyes had an unusual flash in them. A shower of rain was falling at the time, and the great leader had stopped a moment in the shelter of the arcade. He had no umbrella. I had one, and as I was at the door of my club, I offered it to THE ARIMY CONTRACTOR 193 him. The expression of his face softened instantly, and he thanked me in most courteous terms, but said the shower was a passing one and that he did not need any protection from it. The pretence of a war was kept up until the Congress met in Berlin in the middle of 1878, and then the bubble burst. The whole business had been quietly arranged weeks earlier between the high contracting parties. Amidst the knowledge of facts gathered in these years at the War Office few impressed me more strongly than the power possessed by the civil side of stultifying any attempt which military officers might make to better the position, or improve the efficiency, of the men in the ranks. An officer in the GOth Rifles, whom I had known in Canada, had invented a very complete and highly sensible set of military equipment, belts, knapsack, and other accoutrements, which was very much lighter and easier to put on, take off, or carry than the exist- ing equipment. This officer had spent his little all in bringing the new patterns to perfection. Committees and Boards had reported most favourably upon them. Soldiers upon whom they were tried, on guard and on the march, had declared them to be lighter, easier to manipulate and to wear than the old heavy, hard things our infantry soldiers had so long been condemned to carry. Nevertheless, no progress could be made in getting this new equipment taken into general use, and time after time the unfortunate designer and patentee used to appear at the War Office, only to meet with the same negative opposition. On one occasion his feelings of disappointment so overcame him that he quite broke down. I then found where lay the source of this dead-weight opposition. It was in the man who held the contract for the old man-killing stuff. I use the term ' man-kiUing ' with reason. Many a time, when going the round of some mUitary hospital, as I have already related, I have asked an old soldier what he was suffering from. ' Them pains, sir,' would be the answer ; and ' them pains ' were ascribed, nine times out of ten, to the wearing for twenty-four consecu- tive hours of ' them belts.' In the knowledge that I was thus able to gain of the power possessed by the army contractor began a lifelong effort to expose the evils of the contract system as it was practised and 194 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY sustained by our army administrators ; but it was only towards the close of a long military career that I was able to deal it one good crushing blow, and though my own knuckles suffered, through the action of a few men in high positions who suddenly stood up on the side of the contractors, I never grudged the temporary annoyance their interference caused me. In the sudden mania for acquisition which Lord Beaconsfield inaugurated in 1875-76, certain measures were begun m. South Africa and in India which soon produced their various fruits of friction and strife. In September 1876 it was decided that the Transvaal was to be annexed. I don't think the fuU story of that event is known to many people now living, and it is sometimes of mterest and always useful that events from which very great issues came should be traced to their fountain- heads. I had returned from a flying visit to America in September 1876 to find my old friend and companion, Mr. Theophilus Shepstone, in London. He had been summoned home from Natal for the purpose of conferring with Lord Carnarvon, for whom the recent failure to bring about the confederation of the South African States had produced new conceptions of policy and new advisers of procedure. When I met Mr. Shepstone he entertamed no thought of a speedy return to South Africa, and I looked forward to the opportunity of meeting him frequently in London during the autumn, and having many more of those conversations and discussions upon South African questions the interest of which I have already alluded to in this chapter. He had arranged to dine with me on a certain evening, but on the day of the evening on which we were to meet I received a telegram from him teUmg me that it had been suddenly decided he was to return immediately to Natal, and that, as he was sailing next day, our dinner could not come off. A day or two later a battalion of infantr}'', then in Ireland, was ordered to prepare for early embarkation for the Cape of Good Hope. Knowing what I knew of the drift of things generally at this time, I put both these sudden orders together without any difficultj^ The next question that arose was as to the port to which the transport taking out the infantry battalion should proceed in South Africa. There were four ports possible — Cape Town, SIGNIFICANT EVENTS 195 Port Elizabeth, East London, and Durban. No decision would be given on this point. Meantime the troops were on board, and the ship was ready to sail. I went to the Colonial Office to point out the necessity of a speedy decision, in order to save demurrage, etc. Still no decision could be arrived at. I then suggested that the transport should sail, and call for orders at St. Vincent, and the thing that struck me as strangest in the matter was that the officials with whom I was dealing were at that time unaware that there was a cable to St. Vincent by means of which it would be possible to leave the matter of destination still an open one for nine or ten more days. My proposal was finally sanctioned, and the transport sailed about a fortnight or three weeks after the departure of Mr. Shepstone for Natal. A curious thing now happened. Both the mail steamer carrying 'Mr. Shepstone and the transport steamer carrying the reinforcements were wrecked on the South African coast, forty or filty miles from Cape Town. Thus the annexation of the Transvaal, decided upon early in September 1876, was delayed by untoward events some months. Mr. Shepstone was finally able to proceed to the Transvaal in December 1876. Sir Bartle Frere went out as High Commissioner in March 1877, and the annexation of the Transvaal was a declared and accomplished fact on the 12th April in the same year. These httle movements, unknown and unnoticed at the moment of their occurrence, were in reahty the spring-heads of the stream of events destined to plunge South Africa into a state of intermittent war for twenty-six years, and to cost Great Britain a sum of not less than three hundred millions of money ; and to-day, after all the blood spUt and the treasure spent, we are pretty much ' as we were ' in South Africa. The new pohcy soon began to bear fruit. KafFraria had been annexed by stroke of pen, and the Kaffirs responded by stroke of assegai. Troops were sent from England ; the recalcitrant natives were soon hunted out of their patches of bush and forest near King William's Town, and the troops were then sent northwards to Natal for purposes the scope of which the Government at home knew very little about. It soon transpired that it was the intention of Sir Bartle Frere to break the power of the Zulus beyond the northern boundary 196 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Natal. The time seemed to him to be opportmie. Natal, which up to this period had only seven companies of mfantry to its garrison, had now seven battalions within its Hmits. The Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, a man of exceptional sense and foresight, did not want war, but his views were set aside. A ' Bill of Indictment,' as it was called, was prepared against the Zulu king, Cetewayo. The usual toll of cattle was de- manded from him, and, before time was allowed for the collec- tion of the animals, four separate columns of invasion entered Zululand. From the right column to the left there was a distance of about two hundred miles. It was to be the usual picnic expedition. ' There wiU be no fighting," people said in Natal. ' The Zulus are too good-natured. It wiU only be a walk over.' It was in the month of November 1878 that a staff officer of high position at the Cape came to my office in Pall Mall, and in a few words sketched the situation then existing in South Africa. ' There was absolute peace in Zululand,' he said. ' The difficulty was to poke Cetewayo up to the fighting point.' When I heard of the movement in four separate and far-apart columns, I said to my friend : ' It may fare roughly for one of the pokers ; we are giving Cetewayo the tongs.' In the last days of the year I left England to spend a few weeks with Sir Garnet Wolseley in Cyprus. We had occupied the island five months earlier : the newspapers were still full of the recent acquisition, the visit promised many points of interest, and it gave more than the promise. During three or four weeks I traversed the island in every direction, from Nicosia to Kyrenia on the north coast to the top of snow-clad Troados in the west, and to Famagusta in the extreme east. I had been a stranger to the East since leaving Burmah and India fifteen years earher. All the young life of America and the black life of Africa had since been my companions, but here in Cyprus it was the East again, the East with the Turk added on : the ragged squalor, the breast of the earth dried up and desolate, the old glory of Greek, Roman, Norman, and Venetian civilisation lymg in dust and ashes under a thing that was itself a dying force in the world. On 23rd January I set out with Sir Garnet Wolseley and three of his staff from Nicosia to Mount Olympus, to find a site TO THE ZULU WAR 197 for a summer camping-ground in the pine woods on the south shoulder of the mountain, five thousand feet above sea-level. Day had just broken. As we rode along the track leading to Peristerona, the conversation ran entirely upon the war which was then opening in Afghanistan. What bad fortune it was that the chief and so many of his staff officers should be hidden away in this dead island of the Levant, when so much of stirring moment in the outer military world was about to open. ' I have put my hand to the Cypriote plough and must hold it until the furrow is finished,' was the chief's summing up. But, at the moment when we were cantermg along the track that early morning, the remnants of Lord Chelmsford's main column of invasion were moving out of the wrecked camps at Isandula in Zululand, and the commotion which was to follow this disaster was destined to move us all to South Africa a few months later. For mj^self I was to go there almost at once. I returned to England via Trieste, where the news of the massacre at Isandula reached me. I tele- graphed the quartermaster-general offering my services for South Africa, and two days later, loth February, was in London. Two regiments of cavalrj', several batteries of artiUery, and eight battalions of infantry were immediately put in orders for Natal, and on the 28th February I sailed from Southampton in the ss. Egypt, bound for the same destination. CHAPTER XIII Assistant Adjutant-General in Natal. Death of the Prince Imperial. Advance into Zululand, Ulundi. Transports for England. Imprison- ment of Cetewayo. St. Helena again. I WAS again in Natal. Three and a half years had passed since I had left the colony in profound peace : it was now seething in strife. Of the four original columns of invasion, the principal one had been cut in pieces at Isandula ; the action of the remainder had been paralysed. That next the coast had entrenched itself at Etchowe ; all its transport had been taken by the Zulus. The northern column, under Colonel Wood and Major Redvers BuUer, had been alone able to move out of its fortified position at Kambula ; but the mounted portion of the force had just suffered very severely at a place named Zlobane in Northern Zululand, and, although the columns had been able to defeat the attack of a Zulu ' impi ' on the day following the disaster at Zlobane, it was no longer a mobile entity. News of these events reached us at Cape Town, and when we got to Durban Lord Chelmsford had just succeeded in effecting the relief of the garrison at Etchowe which had been brought back within Natal. So that, of the original plan of campaign, there only remamed Colonel Wood's column upon the soil of Zululand. The state of confusion existing within Natal could scarcely be exaggerated. To the extreme of over-confidence which had, indeed, been the primary factor in the disaster of Isandula, had succeeded the dread of a Zulu invasion. You will usually find that the term ' picnic ' at the rising of the curtain upon one of these little wars is readily changed to ' panic ' before the conclusion of the first act. The reinforcements now pouring into Natal reassured public opinion, which had grown over- excited at the report of a native Natal woman living in Zulu- land, who had come down to the Musinga Drift to tell her father what the Zulu soldiers were saying to Cetewayo : ' The 198 WITH SIR HENRY CLIFFORD, V.C. 199 English are now afraid to meet us in the open ; they are lying behind stone walls. Let us raid into Natal/ No doubt it would have been possible for detached parties of Zulus to carry into effect this idea, had their king been inclined to accede to the wishes of his soldiers ; but he would not sanction it. All through this time he never abandoned his old belief that he was the friend of the English, and their ally against the Dutch ; and he clung to the promises made him by the Government of Natal through Mr. Shepstone at the time of his coronation, all of which were now forgotten. ' Ah, Shep- stone ! ' he is said to have frequently exclaimed at this time, ' why have you grown tired of carrying me on your back ? ' The staff billet to which I was appointed was that of assistant adjutant-general under the general commanding the base and lines of communication — Major-General Sir Henry Clifford, V.C. Of him I shall say at once that among all the generals I have been brought into contact with, none possessed a per- Bonality more lovable, none had a higher courage, a larger sense of public duty, or a greater aptitude for untiring toil. The endless labours of his office during the ten months in Natal that were now beginning broke down the health and sapped the great physical strength of an exceptionally strong man ; and he returned from South Africa, a year later, only to die. For some weeks after landing, he and I worked together in a stifling little office in Durban, the corrugated iron roof of which in the semi-tropical climate of the coast made the temperature almost insupportable in the afternoons. After a while. General Clifford moved to Maritzburg, and I was alone in the Durban office. It was a strange life at first. I lived, worked, ate, and slept in that office. For weeks there was no respite from work. Troops were pouring in and moving on up country ; demands for every article in the long catalogue of modern war equipment for transport — remounts, medical stores, camp equipment, clothing, ammunition, and fifty other things — were incessant. War brings all the fantastic idiosyncrasies of human nature to the surface. Men will rob and pillage and rape and burn in war who would have lived very passable and decent lives in peace. Many of them think that it is part of the business ; 200 SIR WILLIMI BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY and, of course, the meaner and more sordid the war is, the more that part of the programme becomes possible. I have seen, even at a peaceful railway station in England, a plethoric captain of Volunteers, proceeding to his summer camp in uniform, begin to leer and ogle at the passing female sex generally, who, had he been in his usual dress and at his daily business vocations, would have been the picture of decorous provincial family respectability. Our work at the base of operations was largely added to by the shipwreck at Cape Agulhas of a transport carrying a vast amount of army stores — saddles, boots, harness, and other things. These had to be replaced, as far as they possibly could, by local purchase ; and the merchants of Durban and Maritz- burg soon amassed fortunes by selling their indifferent wares at fancy prices. Part of my work was to sanction those purchases : they covered everything from anchors to needles. Of course we were robbed right and left, despite our work of day and night. Sometimes I caught the thief ; but oftener he escaped scot-free. Nature blessed me with a good memory, and I could recollect fairly weU the description, at least, of the articles the purchase of which I had previously sanctioned : so, when the passing of the bills came, I was able, generally speaking, to remember whether I had approved the purchase in the first instance, or not. One night I was going through these monotonous files, when my eye fell upon an entry — ' One water-cart, £25.' I was morally certain that I had not given sanction for the buying of this article. The official was ordered to produce it. It was not to be found in any of our numerous storehouses ; and at last, after searching inquiries, it was discovered that no such article had been bought ; that the nearest approach to it had been a water-can, price 5s., and that an ingenious under- strapper in the Ordnance Office had changed the words * water- can ' into ' water-cart,' and made the 5s. in the figure column into £25. This, however, was the merest trifle in the account of our losses. We had sent men out to buy horses in every direction. One unfortunate man was purchasing animals in the Orange Free State : he had forded a ' drift ' easily in the mornmg, made many purchases in the day, and came to the drift again in the evening. Rain was falling ; the water was AN HISTORIC TRAGEDY 201 running breast deep ; his horse missed his footing ; rider and horse were carried into deep water, and the man was drowned. When his body was recovered, it was found to have on it a leather belt full of gold pieces, more than three hundred in number. These represented exactly ten per cent, on the pur- chases of horseflesh made that day. It was their weight that had caused him to sink like a stone. Shortly after landing, I visited Maritzburg on business. The troops were now moving up country. Lord Chelmsford was also going forward. I met, in the Httle Government House in Maritzburg so well known to me three years earUer, the Prince Imperial, at this time a visitor with the Governor, Sir Henry Bulwer. We had a long conversation : he had many questions to ask about the Zulus, the up country for which he was about to start, the climate, horses, arms, equip- ment, everything. ' Although he was an artillery officer," he said, ' he preferred to be as he was now, attached to the staff. He might thus be able to get in closer touch of the Zulu enemy than if he remained with a battery of artUlery.' Within one month of the day upon which we thus spoke, this splendid young soldier — handsome, active, brave to a fault, the very soul of chivalrous honour, and yet withal of a singular grace and gentleness — fell fighting, deserted and left alone by his escort, one against twenty of this same Zulu enemy. The manner in which this news came to us in Durban was singular. I had a single Zulu to look after my few wants in the office which was now my home. Every morning he entered the room, set the bath on the floor, and went out as silently as he had come in ; but on the morning of 3rd June he spoke a few words : ' A big " inkoos " had been kiUed.' Later that day or the next came the details of that wretched tragedy in which so many things besides Hfe had been lost. Ten days later, the body of the Prince Imperial was brought to Durban to be embarked on board a ship-of-war for England. I think that the scene as the funeral cortege wound down the Berea Hill towards Durban was the saddest but the most impressive sight I had ever witnessed. It was the sunset hour ; the eastern slope of the Berea was in shadow, but the town beneath, the ships in the roadstead, and the deep blue Indian Ocean beyond the white line of shore were aU in dazzhng hght. 202 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY The regiments that had gone up countrj^ had left their bands on the coast, and, one after the other, these took up the great March of the Dead, until the twilight, moving eastward towards the sea, seemed to be marching with us as we went. Night had all but closed when we carried the coffin into the little Catholic church at the base of the Berea HiU. I could not get any money from the State or from the Colony, but the people of Durban readily answered my appeal ; and, though we had only twenty-four hours' notice, the church was entirely hung in black cloth, violets were in profusion, and many wax lights stood around the violet-covered bier upon which the coffin lay. A few French nuns prayed by the dead, relievmg each other at intervals through the night. As the cortege, followed by the mourners, came slowly down the hill, I heard from the groom who led the prince's charger the particulars of the final scene — so far as it had been possible to put them together at that time, for none save the Zulu enemy had witnessed the last desperate struggle. But the servant had seen his master's body, and that bore a tribute to the dead man's courage more eloquent than had thousands acclaimed the last struggle, not for life — that was hopeless — but for honour. There were twenty-six assegai wounds, all in front of the body ; the high riding-boots were found filled with blood — so long and so firmly had the boy stood under the rain of spears ; for though there were eighteen or twenty Zulus facing that single figure, they dared not close with him while he stood. The scene of the fight was a long, shallow, sloping valley between hills ; a Zulu kraal was close at hand, with patches of mealies around it ; then came a donga, with grass growing high in places near it, and a spot of bare ground by the edge of the donga (a dry watercourse) where the body was found lying. Some of the Zulus carried guns : they had stolen up through the mealie gardens and fired a volley at the party, who were in the act of mounting their horses. The captain of the escort galloped away, followed by his men in a general stampede. The prince must have been still dis- mounted when they ran, for his grey charger was found with the holster cover torn off, as though the prince had caught it in the act of mounting. The horse was restive at mounting at all times ; and in the confusion of the shots and the galloping THE CLOSING SCENE 203 away of the escort, it would have been more difficult than ever to gain the saddle. But the groom was certain that if the holster flap had been of good leather the prince would have been able to mount, for he was of extraordinary activity in all matters of the riding-school, and could vault from the ground on to the back of any horse. The man's statement of opinion found corroboration in an incident which occurred a month before this time. It was thus described in one of the Natal newspapers : — ' As time rolls on, the death of the Prince Imperial loses none of its melancholy significance, and no doubt many an iacident of his brief stay here will, sooner or later, come to light. One in particular may be mentioned. When at the Royal Hotel, the prince asked Mr. Doig to show him his horses. At the Crown stables there was a wild young horse which had just thrown one of the stable hands. The prince, without the aid of stirrups, vaulted into the saddle, and although the horse bolted away and made every endeavour to throw him, he brought him safely back to the stable, and dropped from the saddle with a most extreme nonchalance. The horse has since thrown another rider and broken his leg.' The next morning we all assembled again at the little church, where an old French priest said a requiem Mass. Then we carried the coffin to the hearse, and the long procession passed through the town to the wharf at the Point, two miles distant, with the same solemn parade as on the previous evening. At the wharf the coffin was handed over to the naval authorities, and taken to the flagship in the outer roadstead. In her strangely sad history South Africa has seen many sad sights, but none so sad as this one. I am writing to-day thirty years after that terrible tragedy occurred. Three years ago I visited the scene where it happened ; walked the ground by the fatal dongas, and stood by the cross which Queen Victoria caused to be erected on the spot where the body was found the day following the death of the prince. Nothing has changed in the valley of the Ityotyozi. A few Zulu kraals are there still ; the dry dongas may have worn a little deeper ; but the long yellow grass is waving there, and the mealie patches ; and the big dark slate- coloured hills slope up on west and south, and the deep dry 204 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY channel of the Ityotyozi curves away toward the north-east, the highest tributary of the White Umvolosi River. No man wiU ever pierce the * Might have been ' of history. Fourteen years after the death of the Prmce Imperial, I met in the Mediterranean a distinguished admiral in the French navj^ and we spoke of that day in Zululand. ' If the Prince were alive to-day/ he said, ' he would without any doubt be Emperor of the French, The French people would have hailed him as their chief.' I have spoken of the chaos which reigned in Natal following up the disaster at Isandula. To that chaos, to that general scramble of direction, to the absence of any real thmking or governing power running through aU the army staff machinery of the time must, in the first and leading sense, be attributed the death of the Prince Imperial. As usual in our history, the men who were first at fault got off, and the unhappy subordinate actor m the tragedy was immolated. There was no excuse for the conduct of the captain of the escort and his miserable scratch following of six makeshift troopers ; but neither was there any excuse for the general in command of the army, nor the staff officers whose duty it was to see that this young French prince, a volunteer to us in this war and engaged in doing our duty for the moment, should not be allowed to go out into an enemj^'s countrj'' without full and proper escort, and under the eye and command of an old and experienced mounted officer. ^Vhat were these people thinking of when they allowed that wretched party to go nine or ten miles from camp straight into a land full of armed and lurking enemies ? Four months before this time, an entire British regiment and four or five hundred other troops, artillery and cavalry, had been assegaied to a man at a place within a day's easy ridhig distance of, and twenty miles nearer to our frontier than, this valley of the Prince Imperial's death. It was afterwards said by way of excuse that the prince was brave to rashness, and that it was his reckless daring which led to his death. What an excuse ! making the fault of those who were responsible for the escort and its leadership only more glaringly apparent. It is all a horrible black night of disaster, with a solitary star of one man's glorious courage shining through it. A SOLDIER'S PRAYER 205 When they came to look over the poor boy's papers, they found among them a written prayer ; these sentences were in it : — ' My God, I give Thee my heart ; but give me faith. To pray is the longing of my soul. I pray not that Thou shouldst take away the obstacles on my path ; but that Thou mayst permit me to overcome them. I pray not that Thou shouldst disarm my enemies ; but that Thou shouldst aid me to conquer myself. . . . If Thou only givest on this earth a certain sum of joy, take, God, my share and bestow it on the most worthy. ... If thou seekest vengeance upon man, strike me. Misfortune is converted into happiuess by the sweet thought that those whom we love are happy ; and happiness is poisoned by the bitter thought that, while I rejoice, those whom I love a thousand times better than myself are suffering. For me, God, no more happiness : take it from my path. If I forget those who are no more I shall be forgotten in my turn ; and how sad is the thought which makes one say, " Time effaces all " ! . . . O my God, show me ever where my duty Hes, and give me strength to accomphsh it. . . . Grant, God, that my heart may be penetrated with the conviction that those whom I love, and who are dead, shall see all my actions ; that my hfe shall be worthy of their -witness, and my innermost thoughts siiall never make them blush.' Reading these sentences, one seems to lift a corner of the veil that hangs between man and the Face of the Inscrutable. Happily for those who have to work in war, there is stiU time left for thinking. A few days after the close of this sad chapter, the telegrams from England via St. Vincent announced that Sir Garnet Wolseley was coming out to reheve Lord Chelmsford of his command. ' The cloud of misfortune seems ever to overhang this miserable and luckless war,' thus wrote Archibald Forbes, from Camp Itelezi Hill on the night of Whitsunday. It was true. But there was more than misfortune in all that had happened : things were done that read to-day as beyond possibiUty of credence. The advance into Zululand was made in two columns — one entering by Landmarm's Drift over the Bufifalo River ; the other by the coast -road from Durban over the Tugela to Port Durnford. This latter force, consisting of two brigades of British infantry and cavalry and artillery, 206 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY had now been creeping slowly forward, with many halts between the creeps, for about six weeks. It was now halted at Port Durnford. Of certain officers many stories were current, and numerous were the epigrams and lampoons which the Natal newspapers indulged m at the time. A letter written by a staff officer of high place early in July speaks of a general ' moving, at a time when transport is above all things precious, with a waggon fitted as a movable hen-house, with coops and places for hens to lay so that he may always be sure of his fresh eggs for breakfast. He dresses or did dress (I fancy Sir Garnet has altered matters) in the most absurd costume, with a sombrero hat and a long pheasant's feather, and an imitation puggaree tied in what he considers a pic- turesque and artistic carelessness on one side. He telegraphed to for six milch cows among other supplies ; but , while meeting all his other demands, telegraphed back, " Must draw the line at milch cows." ' Describing the appearance of the streets in Durban, the same writer says : ' The streets are full of all sorts of military and naval types ; the wonderful number of straps and dodges that some of them have about them is a sight, and every one seems to try how many odds and ends he can carry about him. Y is said to beat every one ; a man describing him to me said, " He only wanted a few candles stuck about him to make a Christmas tree \ " ' These descriptions are in no way exaggerated. They might, indeed, be amphfied and yet be within the truth. What is there in the air or soil of Africa which seems to unlevel the heads of so many newcomers in that part of the world ? Truly, a master-spirit was wanted here. Sir Garnet Wolseley reached Durban on the 28th June. He landed early ; rode round the camps, hospitals, and store- houses ; had breakfast, and started by train for Botha's Hill and Maritzburg, where he was sworn in. He was back in Durban the next day ; went on board a man-of-war, and sailed for Port Durnford — intending to land there, pick up the Coast Column, and move with it at once towards the King's Kraal at Ulundi. But now South Africa came into play. The violence of the surf made landing impossible at Durnford ; Sir Garnet and his staff were obliged to return to Durban. I had horses and waggonettes ready for them, and they left for ABSENCE OF THINKING FACULTY IN ARIVIY 207 Port Durnford by land. Through these various contretemps six days had been lost. Meanwhile, on 4th July the action at Ulundi was fought, and the Zulu War was practically over. It was fuU time ; it had lasted eight months, and was costing one million pounds each month. A war with the Zulus, if properly planned and carried out, meant from its beginning what it was found to mean at its end — just thirty minutes' fighting. The arms of an enemy, and his methods of using them, are the chief factors which should dictate to a general the disposal of his forces, and his fighting tactics. The Zulus were armed with assegais ; they did not fight at night ; they charged home in dense masses in open daylight ; they had neither artillery nor cavalry. Eight good infantry battahons, two regiments of hght cavalry, three field batteries, and three hundred native Basuto scouts would have been amply sufficient to do in seven weeks what at least twice that number of men, guns, and horses succeeded in accomplishing, after defeats and disasters, m the same number of months. As I look back over forty-seven years of service, the thing that astonishes me most is the entire absence of the think- ing faculty in nine out of ten of the higher-grade officers with whom I was associated. AVhat obtained at Aldershot was made the rule throughout the world — from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand. It was not Caesar, most imaginative of tacticians, who was the teacher : it was his so-called camp over the Long Valley, with the Basingstoke Canal at the end of it, and the site for the luncheon bej^ond that again, which set the lesson of the tactical apphcation of the three arms, and often gave the key to victory. I knew of one very successful leader at Aldershot who regulated the move- ments of his brigade by the direction which the refreshment carts took in the commencement of the fray. They were supposed to be under a sort of h}^notic inspiration from the mind of the garrison sergeant-major as to the point at which victory would declare itself, and the battle would terminate at 1.30 P.M. While the new commander-in-chief in Zululand had now to proceed with the final phases of the capture of Cetewayo, and the settlement of Zululand, we at the Base and on the Line of Communications had to prepare and carry out the embarkation 208 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of more than half the army, and quite two-thirds of its late generals and their staff. Some of the battahons and batteries had been a long time up country, and very large arrears of pay were due to them, as well as to the very numerous irregular corps which had been recruited for service after the disaster at Isandula. It would be difficult to imagine anythmg more irregular than the majority of the rank and file of these latter bodies : the Turkish title, Bashibazouk, seems alone suited in its sound adequately to describe them. Their regimental titles were also suggestive in many instances of the general trend and direction of their disciplme and methods — Sham-buckers' Horse, Raafs' Rangers, the Buffalo Border Guards, etc., etc. To pay off, disarm, and embark those worthies was a work requiring some little tact and method on the part of the officers who had to deal with them under their respective heads. These various units of raffish swashbucklers now came to the port of embarkation to be paid their reckonings and to pay them again into innumerable pubhc-houses of Durban. I devised many plans by which the evil might be lessened. Sometimes I put a pay officer and his paysheet, with a good guard of regulars, on board a transport in the outer anchorage, and informed the men that they would onl}?- be paid on board ship. Another plan was to encamp the corps six or eight miles out of Durban, in the vicinity of a railway station, by means of which they could be fed and supplied from the port. The scenes which were daily taking place were often of a very ludicrous description. A battalion of infantry, to whom some five or six thousand pounds had to be paid, would reach the wharf for embarkation, having been made the recipients on the march through Durban of a public luncheon and innumerable quantities of large water melons — the latter a most innocuous fruit on any ordinary occasion, but somewhat embarrassing when presented to a man after a hearty meal and many libations en route. I had prepared, however, for the dangers of the embarkation from the wharf in the large flat boats, and a dozen steady men with boathooks stood ready to gaff the men who feU into the water — a pre- caution which bore fruit in more senses than one, for many of the men deemed it a point of honour to hold on by their LUNATICS AT LARGE 209 water melons even when they were in the sea. The acme of confusion was, however, reached on the occasion when some eighteen hundred ' details,' prisoners, ' insanes,' sick, and absentees from previous embarkations had to be put upon a troopship in the outer anchorage. At the last moment a train had arrived from Maritzburg with six ' insanes ' for shipment to England. The transport was still m the roadstead, so a boat was sent out to her. The corporal in charge had just time to run up the gangway with his charge ; the anchor was already up. On reaching the quarterdeck, crowded with eighteen hundred men, the six ' insanes ' saw their chance, and while the corporal was handing his papers to the staff officer on board they adroitly dispersed themselves among the miscellaneous crowd of men thronging the decks. Identification was entirely impossible in that mixed crowd : the corporal had to get back to his escort in the boat as quickly as possible, and the big troopship moved off to shake her motley collection of men into that subsidence which only grows more complete as the sea grows more restless. But the hour came when the staff officer asked the sergeant of the guard, ' Where are the six insanes ? ' No man on board could say where ; and soon the rumour passed from deck to deck that there were six madmen at large among the troops. Every man began to take a strange interest in his neighbour. ' And who is thy neighbour ? ' asks the catechism. ' Mankind of every description ' is the answer, so far as I can recollect it over the lapse of years. But surely that reverend and estimable namesake of mine, when he penned that question and answer, can never have contemplated a contingency^ such as this crowded troopship, with twenty different corps repre- sented in its human freight, and at least two unknown madmen at large upon every deck ! And yet never could there have been a time when men regarded their neighbour with more lively interest. A council of the leading authorities on ship- board was rapidly assembled, and a course of action decided upon. Practically it came to this, that the whole mass of military was placed under observation ; a select corps of observers was organised, and the work began. Any man who was sitting apart in the anticipatory stages, or after effects, of sea-sickness found himself walked round and suspiciously o 210 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY regarded ; at frequent intervals a man would be tapped on the shoulder and told to come before the doctor. When the vessel reached Cape Town there were twenty-six men under observation, and it was afterwards found that not one of the six ' insanes ' was among them. A curious thing now hap- pened : after a while, some sergeant or corporal, more observant than his comrades, remarked that there were certain men in the crowd who were ready on all occasions to lend a hand in running in the suspected ones, first to the doctor and after- wards to the ' observation ' hold. The eagerness and alacrity of these few men attracted first praise and then suspicion. There was an expression of self-satisfaction on their features which was peculiar to them alone among those whose duty it was to discover the missing madmen. Then their off moments were watched, with the result that when the ship reached St. Helena the ' observation ' hold was cleared of its former inmates and the six insanes were duly installed therein. At last the weary work of sweeping up the wreckage of a war which was unusually fertile in shipwrecks drew to an end. A crowd of contractors flocked to the base to batten upon the expected spoil when the time for selling surplus stores came. Enormous accumulations of food, forage, and all the other paraphernalia of war had to be got rid of. At first high prices were obtained ; then the usual rings were formed. We had some thousands of tons of food-stuffs to sell, and the dealers saw their chance : they would only give first one shilling, and then sixpence, for a heavy sack of Indian corn. I had two large transports sailing with troops, the cargo decks of which were empty. ' All right, gentlemen ; we will put these two thousand odd tons of excellent food-stuffs on board these empty vessels and send them to London.' Then the counter-attack began. The dealers worked hard to prevent this move ; the depart- ments were also hostile to my proposal. It had not been done before ; it would comphcate departmental accounts ; it was a new departure, etc., etc. ' But is it not common-sense ? ' I said. ' These innumerable sacks of food, for which we can get sixpence here, will sell in London for ten or twenty times that figure. We are already paying enormous prices for the freightage of these ships ; it wiU cost us nothing to send all this food to England.' This and a lot more I urged. At last THE OLD STORY 211 sanction was given, and I saw the enormous stacks of supplies vanish into the empty ships, the cargoes to fetch in London even more than I had anticipated. This war against the Zulus in 1879 was, in fact, a small undress rehearsal for that other war which was to be fought in South Africa twenty years later. But new men had in the interval come upon the scene ; the older ones who still remained above ground were set aside ; and every error made in 1879- 1880 — in strategy, tactics, foresight, administration, transport, remounts, supplies, multiplied by the power of twenty or per- haps thirty — was repeated in 1899 and 1900. Four million pounds were thrown away in the war of 1879 ; at least one hundred millions were flung to the winds in that of 1899 and the two following years. ' It 's a way we have in our Army, It 's a way we have in our Navy, It 's a way we have in Pall Mall.' How often in my small sphere I have laboured hard to save fifty or a hundred thousand pounds, making thereby enemies for myself in every direction among contractors, clerks, and officials in general, only to find in the end that there was some colossal noodle above me whose signature had the power of flinging ten times my savings into the melting-pot of waste, inefficiency, and ineptitude. 'I go to Paris to find my enemies there,' said Marshal Vendome to Prince Eugene, as they parted somewhere in the ' Cockpit ' during the War of the Spanish Succession. * And I to Vienna, where mine await me," replied the prince. It is a very old story ; it is certain to grow older. While Durban was the scene of the closing phases of the Zulu campaign, robberies and burglaries became unusually prevalent, as many of the Government stores had to be kept in large marquees, into which ingress was easily obtained at night. To check these robberies, a non-commissioned officer of the Ordnance Department was put in the large marquee at nightfall, with orders to fire at any interloper he might chance to find there. Unfortunately for the plan, a drunken old conductor, who had come down from the front, had gone quietly into the marquee earlier in the afternoon for the purpose 212 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of sleeping off his potations among the piles of blankets within. He was in a profound slumber when the watch was set, and he remained m it for hours after ; but at length, towards midnight, he awoke and began to stir himself. Bang ! went a revolver some little distance from his resting-place ; then another shot, and another. ' Holy Moses ! ' he shouted, ' are the Zulus on us agam ? ' This was, I think, the very last of the scares in the Zulu War. They had lasted without intermission from January to July. The shadow of a cloud in the moonlight moving over the side of a hill was sometimes enough to set the rifles going in one of the laagers of the invading force, or even to cause fire to be opened from the ramparts of one of the forts on the line of communication. It was always the advance of a Zulu ' Impi ' that was conjured up in somebody's excited imagination. On one occasion, when many thousand rounds of ammunition were fired off, the ' Impi ' came on again and again, only to wither away before this jeu d'enfer, which went on for many hours. When day dawned, a single dead cow was discovered lying upon the field of battle. Early in January 1880 all the work was over, and I was able to leave Durban for England. I had an interview with Sir Bartle Frere at Cape Town. He seemed feeble and broken, but his eye had still the old look in it. He spoke much about the war, and I gathered from his conversation that matters had not been going well between him and the Home Government. * But,' he said, ' what other course could I have pursued ? My military advisers told me that they had an ample force for the invasion of Zululand ; that they were ready and pre- pared in every respect. I was bound to believe their reports. I had no means of knowing otherwise, nor had I any right to thmk they did not know what they were speaking about.' Of course, that was quite true ; but it was a dangerous time to begin a war in South Africa when already there was war beyond the Indian frontier in Afghanistan. At the time Sir Bartle Frere was speaking thus, Sir Frederick Roberts had been sent up near Kabul. That city was again in the hands of the enemy, and the reUef of the English garrison had still to be effected. That Afghanistan had been in Sir Bartle Frere's mind at the time he was urging on the destruction of A HOME-SICK MONARCH 213 the Zulu power is extremely probable, for I find in my notebook this reference : — 'At the begioniag of the Zulu War (Lord Chelmsford's chief adviser) is said to have remarked that they would march through Zululand and then go on to Afghanistan.' But more interesting even than my visit to Sir Bartle Frere was a visit to Cetewayo in the castle at Cape Town. Previous to my leaving Natal I had received a letter from Major Ruscombe Poole (the officer who had charge of Cetewayo) asking me, if possible, to bring some few bundles of green rushes from Zululand when I was coming to Cape Town, in order that one of the king's wives might make some mats, on which the king could sleep. (He was unable to sleep in an English bed.) I sent into Zululand, through Mr. Grant, a true friend of the Zulus, and I soon had three large bundles of green rushes to take with me to Cape Town. The first thing I did on arrival was to get the bundles on to the top of a four-wheeled cab and drive to the castle. Everything leavmg the docks was subject to duty ; but as rushes were not in the taxable cata- logue, the gatekeeper had to let me through free. I was soon in the room wherein the unfortunate Cetewayo was kept. He was delighted to get this little bit of his beloved Zululand in his dreary four-waUed prison. It was the same as putting a bit of green sod into the cage of a lark ; only the unfortunate Zulu king wept when he saw these reminders of his old home, and he said to the interpreter as he shook my hand, ' Say to him that he has brought sleep to me : now I can rest at night.' I reached England in the middle of February 1880. The Government of Lord Beaconsfield was on its last legs : every thing had gone wrong with it ; all the castles in the East had crumbled, and in the South things were no better. Shore Ali, it is true, was dead beyond the Oxus River ; Cetewayo was a prisoner in the castle at Cape Town ; but other spectres were rising above the frontiers of both countries. Sir Bartle Frere had asked me to see Ministers when I got home, but they were already in the throes of dissolution. Thmking that some one in colonial authority might wish to see me, I put down a few recent impressions upon the general trend of affairs in South Africa which read fairly accurate to-day : — 214 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY • The state of Dutch feeling in the old Colony (Cape Colony) is being affected by the condition of the affairs in the New (the Transvaal). The one-sidedness of whites and natives is increasing ; emigration is the only cure.' On the voyage from the Cape the steamer touched at St. Helena. It was close to sunset when the anchor was down. ' How long can you give me, captain ? ' I asked. ' Two hours,' he replied. I was off to shore at once. I found a small black boy with a small pony at the landing-place. Away we went through the single-streeted town, and up the steep mountain path — ^the black imp holding on by his pony's tail as the ascent steepened. I knew the road, for I had been over it sixteen years earlier. It was dusk when we gained the zigzags on the track above the ' Briars ' ; then came the bit of level curving track by the alarm post, and then the well-remembered /side path to the left dipping down steeply to the head of Rupert's Valley. There in the dusk was the silent tomb again ; the dark cypress trees, the old Norfolk Island pines, the broken wiUow, the iron railings, the big white flagstone in the centre of the railed space — all the lonely encompassing lava hills merging into the gathering gloom of night ; and only a yellow streak of afterglow, still lying above the western rocks, to make the profound depths of this vaUey seem more measureless. I was back on board the Nubian ere the two hours had expired. The time at the grave had been short ; but it did not matter : twenty-six years later I was to be there again, a dweller for days together on the ridge of Longwood above the tomb. CHAPTER XIV War in South Africa. Majuba. Adjutant-General in the Western District. The Egyptian question. Bombardment of Alexandria. Arabi. Service in Egypt. On Sir Garnet Wolseley's Staff. El Magfar. Tel-el-Mahouta. Kassassin. The night march. Tel-el-Kebir. Lord Beaconsfield resigned office after the General Election of March, and Mr. Gladstone came into power in April 1880. In the new administration the Marquis of Ripon was appointed Viceroy of India, Colonel Charles Gordon going with him as private secretary. Lord Ripon had, quite unknown to me, proposed my name for that position, but Mr. Gladstone had not approved the selection. He considered that a Catholic viceroy in India was sufficiently experimental without further endangering the position by the appointment of another of the same creed to a subordinate but still influential post. So, in place of proceeding to our great Eastern dependency ' in a position of considerable power and influence and fuU of very interesting though very hard work,' as its last holder, Colonel CoUey, had described it, I was sent as chief staff officer to Devonport, having been previously promoted heutenant- colonel in the army for services in Natal. Mihtary life in England can never be * magnificent,' stiU less, of course, is it likely to be ' war.' In India it can be both. As private secretary to the viceroy I should have received between three and four thousand pounds a year ; as assistant adjutant-general of the Western District I received six hundred pounds. Service in England, however, possesses the saving grace of having a large measure of humour attached to it ; nothing makes for humour more than make-believe. An army, the officers of which are dressed for the benefit of the London tailor, and the soldiers of which are administered largely in the interests of the War Office clerk, must of necessity afford situations replete with humour ; but the laughter they evoke has to be paid for by somebody in the end. 216 216 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Before the year 1880 closed, war had broken out again in South Africa and Afghanistan. Up to the middle of the year the prospect, people said, was entirely peaceful. The leading authority in Eastern affairs — Sir Henry Rawlinson — had publicly declared that the outlook on the side of Candahar was eminently tranquil. The Transvaal administrator — Sir Owen Lanyon — repeatedly asserted that no apprehension need be entertained in that country. Suddenly, as though he had come in a balloon, Ayub Khan descended into the valley of the Helmund. With equal rapidity the Boers concentrated at Heidelberg, and declared the Transvaal a Republic. In midsummer Burrowes was ' annihilated ' at Maiwand. In December, Anstruther, movmg with the head- quarters of the 94th Regiment from Heidelberg to Pretoria, was destroyed at Brunker's Spruit. Then in rapid succession came disasters at Laing's Nek, Igogo, and finally at Majuba, where poor CoUey fell. Before the defeat of the late Govern- ment he had been transferred from the private secretaryship in India to the position of lieutenant-governor of Natal. In the months following my return from Natal to England I had seen a good deal of him in London, and I was present at the banquet given to him by the Colonial Office in May on the eve of his departure for Natal. How fuU of felicitations and of hope were the speeches of everybody that evening ! Par- ticularly optimistic was the speech of Lord Kimberley, the Secretary of State. A new South Africa was about to arise out of the mists and vapours of the past, they said, as indeed we shall find them saying seventeen years later when another ' Proconsul ' was about to depart for the same destination. AU make-believe again. When will our governors realise that, of all the foundations possible for building empire upon, this of make-believe is the very worst 1 I was in London when the news of Majuba arrived there. On the evening of Sunday, 26th February, a telegram had been received at the War Office from CoUey announcing the occupation by him that morning of a commanding position overlooking the Boer camp, and completely commanding the ridge of Laing's Nek. The Boers were preparing to trek from their camp. I had seen a copy of this message late on Sunday evening. At breakfast next morning the fuU report of the A LULL # 217 disaster, which had followed immediately upon the despatch of this message, was in all the London papers. I went to the War Office. None of the higher officials were there. Sir Garnet Wolseley was then residing some twenty miles from London. I knew that he would pass through Trafalgar Square, and I waited there until he came. Then I walked to the War Office with him. Colley was, I think, the dearest friend he had in the army ; certainly he was the one in whom he trusted the most thoroughly. He felt his loss deeply. It was a very busy day in the Office ; reinforcements were under orders immediately ; the Duke arrived early. There were councils and consultations. Before the afternoon had come everything was arranged. Sir Frederick Roberts was to go out in command. Sir Garnet Wolseley must remain at the War Office as quartermaster-general. The command of the line of communications had been offered to Colonel T. D. Baker, who was abroad at the moment. In the event of his re- fusal. Sir F. Roberts asked if I would accept the position. Of course I said ' Yes," but Baker took the post ; and, as is known to everybody, the Peace of O'Neill's Farm was made before the commander, his staff, or the reinforcements arrived in South Africa. For more than a year now the work in the Western District was of the usual staff type common to home service. I have spoken of the humorous contrasts by which it was sometimes enlivened. An Easter Monday Volunteer Review at Ports- mouth or Dover, or a Grand Field Day at Aldershot, not un- frequently provided the incidents which caused these pleasant interludes in what must have been otherwise a period of a somewhat monotonous character. The army in its higher ranks still swore, not perhaps as lustily as it did of old in Flanders, but stiU a good deal more than was good for it, or for those who had to listen to it. There was once a general commanding at Aldershot whose reply to a royal personage, on an occasion when the display of forcible language was more than usually emphatic, struck me as being exceptionally neat and appropriate. He had been the recipient during the operations of a good deal of strong language, and at the final ' pow-wow ' some allusion was made to those fireworks of the tongue. ' I don't mind being called 218 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY a d fool/ he said, * if it pleases your Royal Highness to call me so ; but I do mind being called a d fool before your Royal Highness's other d fools/ and he swept his hand towards the large and brilliant staff grouped behind the commander-in-chief. The troubles in South Africa and Afghanistan had scarcely subsided ere things began to threaten in the valley of the Nile. When a ' question/ as it is called, suddenly seems to approach solution, or to demand some active treatment, the general public (who up to this pomt have been kept entirely in the dark in relation to it) are suddenly deluged with information about it, but it is always information of a single type and pattern. The Egyptian question, which began to assume light in 1881, was a striking example of this rule. It had been slowly maturing in the minds of certain politicians for several years. As early as the winter of 1875-76, three military officers had been sent to Egypt to report upon frontiers and possibilities. The movement of Russian armies in Bulgaria and Asia Minor two years later postponed action ; then came the deposition of Ismail Pasha in 1879 ; the succession of Tewfik as Khedive ; the budding of a National party in Egypt in 1880-81, and the subsequent intrigues of Jews and Gentiles, Turks, Arabs, Greeks, and Syrians ; of aU those extraordinary, astute human units grouped under the name of Levantines, whose greeds, lusts, and various financial activities have played such a promi- nent part in shaping the flow of the history of the last forty years. In such watching of the world's forces as I have been able to give through thirty of those years, I have been struck by a general course of action which has pervaded most, if not all, of those various movements. I would describe it thus. The faddist appears first upon the scene. He is, generally speaking, an honest and sincere man, quick to catch impressions, eager to teU about them, of an overweening vanity, an un- balanced ambition, and a facility for putting thought into speech or writing far beyond his power of putting thought into sense or action. This man is consumed by a wish to do something. He would canalise the plain of Esdraelon, flood the valley of the Jordan with the waters of the Mediterranean, run a railway from the Euphrates to the Himalayas, repeople THE FINANCIER IN WAR 219 Palestine with the children of Israel, supplant Christianity by Buddhism, or Buddhism by Confucianism ; in a word, he is a little of a genius and a good deal of a madman with a pur- pose ; the mass of madmen have no purpose. The second man to appear on the scene is the politician. He sees in this idea something which he may be able to turn to his own pur- pose — a new frontier, an outlet for trade ; a bigger vote at the polls, a higher place in a cabinet. Then comes the great financier, the man of many millions, the controller of vast enterprises. He is reaUy the final factor in all this business. When he takes sides, throws his weight into the scale, the matter has passed into the region of practical politics, and the old nebulous proposition has become the supremely important question of the hour, I know of no more iUuminating work published in recent times than the Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, by Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. In the pages of that book the devious ways of diplomacy are made clear : the genius, the politician, the young diplomatic attache, the Foreign Office official move to and fro before our eyes ; and, at last, we find the financier whipping the whole pack together and letting loose the dogs of war. It is not a very high or ennobling level from which to begin the business of war. Compared with most of the old causes of conflict which our fathers knew of, it is decidedly below the average standard of dynastic jealousies, the rivalries of States, the great social or political questions, such as underlay the Civil War in America — even of the old loves of men and women. These were aU subjects likely to caU from war the thing which Shakespeare considered made ambition virtue. But the soldier of to-day has to be content with what he can get, and the gift war-horse which the Stock Exchange is now able to bestow upon him must not be examined too severely in the mouth. On 11th July the forts at Alexandria were bombarded by the British fleet, with the result that the forts were destroj-ed and a large portion of the town was reduced to ruins. The huge shells flew wide and high, some of them reaching Lake Mariout, two miles inland. The Egyptian army retreated from the city during the night following the bombardment, and the rear- \ 220 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY guard, with numerous bands of Arabs, fired and plundered a large portion of the European and Levantine quarters of the city. The bombardment of Alexandria was a strategic and tactical error of the first magnitude. It was known in London that Alexandria could not be made a base for the conquest of the Delta in August. Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, was always recognised as the true base from which to deliver a rapid blow, the object of which would be the capture of Cairo. The possession of Alexandria was no more essential to the campaign than the possession of Smyrna or the Piraeus would have been. The longer the Egyptian army could have been induced to remain at Alexandria, the better it would have been for us. By forcing Arabi Pasha to withdraw his troops behind Kafr-Dowr, we enabled him to mask Alexandria with a small force and use the bulk of his troops m the desert at Tel-el- Kebir. But space forbids that I should delay over the political and strategic aspects of the war in Egypt, and I must pass to the relation of my own personal experience in that short campaign of 1882. It is not impossible that the English Cabinet believed, when they gave a half-reluctant consent to the bombardment of Alexandria, that the destruction of the forts would be followed bj'' the coUapse of the National movement, but, as has hap- pened so often in our military history, the exact opposite of the expected occurred. The determination of the Egyptians to resist intervention in their internal affairs received fresh strength and purpose from the spectacle of destruction wrought by the British fleet in what was an entirely one-sided conflict, and in the month following the bombardment it became abundantly clear that if the National movement in Egypt was to be overturned, an army of invasion must be sent into the Delta. This army was hastily got together in the latter part of July, and it left the United Kingdom in the first half of August. It had not undergone any prehminary organisation or pre- paratory training in brigade or division ; the regimental battalion had sufficed for all preparatory work, and the larger units of military command, together with their generals, staffs, and transport, were to be put together at the port or place of THE DESERT CAIMPAIGN OPENS 221 disembarkation, after the expeditionary force had landed in Egypt. Of these generals and their staffs there was an extraordinarily large number, a number out of all proportion to the strength of the fighting men. There were, I thuik, some eighteen general officers to twelve thousand bayonets. On taking the three arms — infantry, cavalry, and artillery — together, there was a general to every nine hundred men. At first sight this plethora of the highest rank might seem of small account, but in reality in war it was certain to prove a serious injur5^ Even in a campaign of exceptional activity, the days of actual fighting must bear smaU relation to the daj^s when there is no external fighting. \Vhen there is no external fighting going on, internal squabbles are apt to show themselves in camp or on the march. Staffs are also belligerently disposed on these occasions. The feathers of the domestic cock have for many years been used to distinguish general and staff officers in the British army. ' Fine feathers make fine birds ' is an old saying ; and why should not the plumage of the rooster, fluttering gaily in the cocked hat of generals and staff officers, have some effect upon the heads of the men who are called ' the brains of the army ' ? I cannot delay over these domestic differences. In spite of them the flow of action, under the inspiring touch of the commander-in-chief, moved steadily forward from the base at Ismaiha to the big grey, gravelly desert that lay in front of the Egyptian lines of Tel-el-Kebir. There were minor actions fought at El Magfar and Kassassin before this point had been gained on the Sweet Water Canal, which ran from the Delta to the Suez Canal at Lake Timsah, and of these minor actions, that which took place at El Magfar on 24th August was the most important. Three days earher the advanced portion of the army began to land at Ismailia. All through the 22nd and 23rd, horse, foot, and artillery were got on shore, and an hour before daybreak on the 24th they pushed out into the desert along the Sweet Water Canal, the waters of which had been shrinking with ominous rapidity throughout the previous day and night. The canal had, in fact, been dammed at Magfar, ten miles forward in the direction of Cairo, and the railway had been broken at the same place. Sir Garnet Wolseley, dissatisfied with the reports he received 222 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY from his InteUigence Department, had determined to ride for- ward with a few mounted troops, in order to see for himself what was in his front. He took a few staff officers with him, of whom I was one. Two Horse Artillery guns and a couple of infantr}^ battalions were to follow the mounted men. I have never forgotten that first morning out from Ismailia. Here, as day broke, was the desert at last, the first sight I had ever had of it. There is nothing like it in all the world — only sand, the sand of the hour-glass, but made infinite by space, just as a tumbler of sea water becomes infinite in the ocean. Sand, drifted into motionless waves, heaped in ridges, scooped into valleys, flattened, blown up into curious cones and long yellow banks, the tops of which the winds have cut into fretted patterns as it blew over them. And aU so silent, so withered, and yet so fresh ; so soft, so beautiful, and yet so terrible. The reconnaissance was to be a morning ride ten or twelve miles forward, then back ; haversack food, and water from the canal, the bank of which the left of the advancing column was to keep in touch with. This canal, which made life possible at Ismailia, Suez, and Port Said, made a sharp angle in its course not far from Ismailia. The advancing troops followed the two sides of this angle. I and another officer of the staff struck straight from Ismailia into the desert, so as to cut the angle on a shorter line than that on which the troops moved. We were some three or four miles out when the sound of cannon shot came booming over the desert from the direction of our left front. The sun was now high above the horizon, and the mirage was showing distorted water patches and inverted bushes on many sides, but it was easy to steer towards the cannon sound. We had cleared the soft sand hillocks that surrounded Ismailia, and the surface of the desert was now good going. In twenty minutes we were in the little oasis of Abu Suez, close to the railway and canal, where the hard desert was mixed with patches of soft clay, on which mimosa scrub and weeds grew. Here we found the commander-in-chief, a squadron or two of Household Cavalry, and a company of mounted infantry. A mile or two in rear a battalion of infantry, one of Marine Artillery, and two Horse Artillery guns were coming in clouds of dust along the railway track from THE FIRST SHOT 223 NefisM. From where we stood, the desert for three thousand yards rose gradually to Tel-el-Mahouta, where some lofty mounds of sand and broken pottery still marked what is supposed to have been the spot at which Pharaoh decreed that the Israelites should make bricks without straw. These mounds ended the forward view ; they were now black with figures, while to the right and left of them a long, open line of Arab camel-men and horsemen stretched along the skyline far into the desert on either flank. It was a very striking scene : the morning sun shone fuU in their faces ; musket barrel and spear head flashed and glittered along the desert ridge, while behind it the heads of many more men and camels showed above the ridge ; and beyond them again straight columns of black railway smoke were rising into the still, clear air of the desert, showing that the resources of civilisation had also been called into request by the Egyptian enemy, and that his infantry were being hurried up from the direction where lay Tel-el-Kebir to make head against our further advance. These smoke columns really changed the plan and purpose of the morning's work. The reconnaissance became a fixed movement. The commander-in-chief was here, and here he would stay. He had in the ground immediately around him a favourable position for fighting an advance-guard action which would give six or eight hours for bringing up reinforcements. Away went an A.D.C. back to Ismailia to hurry up the Guards Brigade and what odds and ends of the three arms had disembarked. It was now nine o'clock, and the sun was rapidly making his presence felt. Kot a breath of wind stirred. Adye would take an hour and a half to reach Ismailia, the troops another hour and a half to turn out. The march through the sand in this burning sun would take three, four, or five hours ; say seven hours must elapse before any- thing of consequence could arrive. The opening moves on the Egyptian side were well done. A single gun placed at the Mahouta mounds opened the ball with a shell so well aimed that after it had passed a couple of feet exactly over the commander-in-chief's head, as he stood with his staff on the top of a sand hillock, it burst among the leaders of an artillery team just arrived upon the field. Half an hour later five additional Egyptian 224 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY guns are in action on this ridge, their shells falling freely among the sand hiUocks and ground folds where our nine hundred foot soldiers are partially concealed from Egyptian sight. The mounted men are out nearly a mile to the north on the gravel ridges, keeping in check a flanking movement which the Egyptian is making in that direction threatening to overlap our right. Altogether, it makes a very interesting little battle picture, to the scenic effect of which are added other quahties of doubt, expectation, chance, and calculation, the presence of which makes a battle by far the most exciting and enthralling of all hfe's possibilities to its mortals. WTiat has Arabi got behind the desert ridge ? That is the first point. By ten o'clock he has shown six guns on the ridge ; their practice is now so good that between ten and ten-fifteen o'clock he has burst eight shells on and close around the hiUock where our two Horse xArtillery guns are hard at work trying to reply to these heavy odds. At twelve o'clock six more guns are pushed over the ridge crest on our extreme right, enfilading our first position and partly taking it in reverse. Behind those new guns we can see at times men moving in formed bodies to our right. About noon A.D.C. Adj^'e is back from Ismailia : the Guards Brigade was to move at one o'clock. The Duke of Cornwall's Regiment from Nefishi was a mile or two m rear ; two Gatltngs and a party of sailors from the Orion wore at hand. MeanwhUe, the heat had become simply outrageous, the sun stood straight overhead, the j^eUow sand glowed like hot coals ; not a breath of air stirred over these hot hillocks. It was a curious situation. What if the Egyptian puts another ten or twelve thousand men and a couple of brisk batteries on our flank ? He has a railway to the foot of this ridge ; our rail- way line has been broken in two or three places between us and Ismaiha. It is all soft, hot sand for our men, who are just off ship board. But the Egj^Dtian would not come on ; he kept playing at long bowls with his twelve guns, and as the afternoon wore on his chances grew less. The Duke of Cornwall's Regiment arrived at one o'clock. At four came some squadrons of dragoons, and at six the Guards and four Horse Artillery guns reached the field. Better than any or all of these came the sunset hour, the cool breeze from the north, and a few carts with food of some sort. Speaking for myseK, the last reinforce- OUR CHIEF 225 ment was the most welcome. I had started from Ismailia at 5 A.M., with a cup of coffee and a biscuit in the inner man, and a tiny tin of ' Liebig ' on the outer one, for we were to have been back in Ismailia for breakfast. These, -wdth a shce of water- melon, had kept me going for thirteen hours under a sun and in an atmosphere the strength and fervour of which it would not be easy to describe. The thing that struck me most throughout that long day and dwelt longest in mj' memory was the bearing of our chief. The enemj-'s guns might multiply from over the ridge in front and to our right flank, the shells drop faster and closer upon our ten or fifteen hundred men, the sun might glow stronger overhead — it didn't matter ; cool and cheery, with a kind word for everj' one who approached him, an eye for everything that happened on front or flank, or amongst us, he personified more than any man I had ever seen the best type of the soldier. I remember a Httle incident that happened during that afternoon when the Egyptians were pushing their left attack with greater ardour, and their fixe had compelled our cavalry on the right to retire from the position they had first occu- pied directly on our right flank. Ordering his horse to be brought up, the commander-in-chief mounted, and telling me to accompany him, he rode in the direction of the cavalry, who were then about a mile distant in the desert, where they were drawing a good many of the enemy's shells upon them. When we had got about half-way across the intervening space, and the Egyptians, spotting us, had begun to favour us ^ith some shots, the commander-in-chief pulled up.sa^-ing, 'I cannot stand the pain of this leg of mine any longer, the London boot- maker has made the leg of my right boot so tight that when I was dragging it on in the dark this morning the riding breeches got so wedged and crumpled upon the calf of the leg that its pressure has been intolerable for some time past. Can you get it right for me ? ' We dismounted, I made him sit on the sand, got the boot off, cut a sUt in the leather, and we went on again. I thought it strange at first that he had not required this little service of me while we were still among the troops in the sand hillocks, instead of waiting until we were out in the barest part of the desert and quite visible to the enemy on two sides ; but then it occurred to me that had this boot pulling-off p 226 SIR \\1LLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY been performed in the midst of the men, who were bj^ no means too happily situated imder the conditions then existing, there might easily have spread the idea that the commander-in-chief was down, and that the surgeons were preparing to cut his leg off ; and so he had kept the pain to himself for hours rather than ease it under the eyes of his soldiers. We soon reached the cavalry. The two squadrons were kept moving slowly on the desert in open column in order to distract the aim of the enemy's gun-layers. A sheU had just dropped into them and killed a horse. Its rider was on his feet in a moment, calling out, ' Three cheers for the first charger in the Life Guards killed since \Yaterloo ! ' An hour later the first of the reinforcements arrived upon the field. The relay was specially welcome to the two Horse Artillery guns, which had fired off two hundred and thirty rounds that day. There were other targets now for the dozen Egyptian guns to fire at ; but the army of Arabi had lost its chance, one that was not likely to occur again in this short campaign. ' The Chief ' ^ returned to Ismaiha at sunset. I was left to see the reinforcements in and the bivouac arranged, then I rode back along the canal under a brilliant moon. It was nine o'clock when I reached Ismaiha. It had been a long day, more than sixteen hours of saddle, sun, and sand, fourteen of them on little except canal water. In six hours we were to be off again to Magfar. It was not likely that the twelve Egyptian guns which had kept fixing at us until after sundown would have got far away from Magfar at daylight next morning ; there would, therefore, be every chance of getting some of them by a rapid advance of aU our mounted troops at daybreak. I got a shakedown on the ofi&ce floor for a few hours ; and we were again clear of Ismailia at 3.30 a.m. on the 25th August, floundering through the deep sand in the dark. We reached the scene of yesterday's fight as day broke. The troops, now swoUen to a division, had left their bivouac, and were formed up on the desert facing Mahouta, the cavahy and artillery on the right, the infantry near the canal, the whole in attack formation. We were soon on the top of the ridge from which the Egyptian 1 The name thev called Sir Garnet bv.— E. B. GENERAL DRURY LOWE'S CAVALRY 227 guns had pounded us on the previous day. A long stretch of desert opened at the farther side towards Kassassin, ten miles forward. The sun was now well up and the mists were drawing off from the desert ; several trains were moving along the rail- way in the valley to our left front ; clouds of dust forward showed that artillery was retiring before us, A rapid survey of the scene sufficed. The Chief called me to him. ' Gallop to Drury Lowe/ he said ; ' tell him to take all his cavalry and Horse Artillery forward, and coute que coute capture one or more of those trains. An engine would be worth a lot of money to me now.' I galloped off without waiting for the order to be written, and soon overhauled the cavalry, which were moving along the gravelly desert in advance, under a dropping shell fire from some Egyptian guns on lower ground near the railway. I delivered my order to General Drurj?- Lowe ; the cavalry went forward at the best pace they could ; but the horses, all just off shipboard, were already showing the severe strain of the last twenty-four hours in sand and sun. Five hours later the rail- way station at Mahsamah was captured by General Lowe ; the Egyptian camp, with seven guns and large stock of ammunition and rifles , was taken ; many railwaj^ trucks with camp equipment and provision also fell into our hands, but the engines got away. I cannot delay over the next fifteen days' work. It was hot and hard on all ranks, for the very success which had attended these opening moves in the campaign had imposed upon men and animals exceptional difficulties. Twenty miles of the canal were in our possession up to the lock at Kassassin, its weakest spot, but it required no small strain upon troops and transport to keep the force necessary to hold that important point supplied with food and forage over these twenty miles of shifting sands, when the canal was dammed and the railway interrupted. When these obstacles and interruptions had been surmounted, and two or three engmes were at length running on the railway, the concentration of troops was swiftly accom- plished, and on the evening of 12th September the Army Corps was in position at Kassassin, six miles distant from the Egyptian lines at Tel-el-Kebir. One had been kept so busy during these preparatory days that there was little time to give to matters of policy or politics outside the actual labour. It was only on an occasional evening 228 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY that one could get away for a ride in the twilight over the sand hills outside Ismaiha. It was a strange sight to see on those occasions more than one hundred large ocean-going steamers lying packed together within the compass of Lake Timsah, their lights at night being visible over the desert for long distances. It often occurred to me to wonder why no attempt was made by the Egyptians to move a light column with a few guns from Salahiyeh, only eighteen miles distant to the north- west, over a good hard desert, and fire twenty or thirty shells among those steamers packed like herrmgs in a barrel. There was a Pasha with some eighteen thousand men and ten or twenty guns lying at the end of the railway at Salahiyeh. AVhat was that Pasha about all this time ? One evening in the first week of September I happened to be out along the Sweet Water Canal at the north end of Ismailia. At a point where the desert approached the canal a small group of Arabs and camels were squatting on the ground under the trees ; there was no mistake about these men and their animals — children of the desert, all of them. The sheik was a tall and handsome man of the Howawak tribe. Presently a few men of rank in tarbooshes came along in the twilight and passed out into the desert mounted on those camels. The centre of that little group of Egyptian officials was Sultan Pasha. They disappeared m the direction of Salahiyeh. I need not have troubled my head about the general, the eighteen thousand men, and the ten or twenty guns at that place, nor did I after that night. We wiU go on to Tel-el-Kebir. The night of 12th September fell dark upon the desert ; there was no moon. Stars were bright overhead, but when one looked along the desert surface all things were wrapped in a deep grey gloom impossible for the eye to pierce. All through the afternoon the staff had been busy writing copies of the orders of the commander-in-chief, and striking off smaU plans showing roughly the formation in which the troops were to move from the positions they were to occupy ia the desert lying north-west of the lock at Kassassin and about one and a half miles distant from it. Things went on as usual in the camp during the day and evening, but when darkness had fuUy closed in the troops moved out from their camps into the desert, leaving their fires burning. The foint d'appui was a mound known as the MARSHALLING THE FORCES 229 * Ninth Hill ' on the level, gravelly ridges north of the canal and railway. At this spot a line of Engineer telegraph posts had been erected, runnmg due west for a thousand yards. This line was designed to give a marching point for the directing column to move along when it first started. When the end of that line of posts was reached, the direction would be by the stars alone. The formation adopted for the movement of the Army Corps across the six miles of open desert extending from Ninth Hill to the lines of Tel-el-Kebir was at once simple and yet closely calculated — simple, in order to meet the conditions imposed by a moonless night ; thoroughlj^ thought out, because the formation in which the Armj^ Corps started must be that in which it would engage the enemy when he was found, as it was hoped. There could be no manoeuvring, no afterthought, no rectification after these seventeen thousand five hundred officers and men with their sixty or seventy guns had been launched out into the night from the plateau of Ninth Hill, a gigantic bolt of flesh, steel, and iron shot westward into the darkness. The march and the attack were made in two lines. The first line, of eight infantrj' battalions, moved in two distinct bodies, separated from each other by an interval of twelve hundred yards. Both of these bodies marched in lines of half-battalion columns. The second line, moving a thousand yards behind the first, was in a similar formation to the first line, but con- tinuity between its brigades was maintained b}' a line of forty- two field guns, which filled the twelve hundred yards from the right of one brigade to the left of the other. On the extreme right of this infantry and artillery formation marched General Drurj'- Lowe's Cavalry Division, with two batteries of Horse Artillery — twelve guns ; while on the extreme left, and m the lower ground of the canal and railway, moved the Naval Brigade and the Indian Division. The entire front of the formation measured from north to south seventy-four hundred yards ; its depth from east to west was about two thousand yards. From the desert at Ninth Hill to the lines of Tel-el- Kebir was all but four miles in a direct line. The surface undulated sHghtly, but maintained a general uniform level of from a hundred and ten feet to a hundred and thirty feet above the sea. It was throughout hard enough to make 230 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY movement easy, and yet sufficiently soft to make it almost noiseless. We were aU in position by eleven o'clock, lying in the desert near Ninth HiU as silent as the stars that seemed the only living things in view. About half-past one the march began due west. We went slowly forward for less than an hour, then halted and lay down. It was a sort of trial mile to test the working of the scheme, the steering of the great mass, and its discipline. All had worked smoothly, there was no noise, no confusion, everything had gone mysteriously well, as a clock works as regularly in the night as in the daylight. During this halt I was lying on the sand near the commander- m-chief (he had told me to ride beside him that night) ; the staff were scattered on the desert close by. I held the reins of my horse twisted round my arm, for the drowsy hours had come. We had been at work aU day, and it was easy to drop off to sleep on this cool, dusky sand bed. I had a second charger, ridden by a groom, following in rear. I had told the man to keep a tight hold of this horse at any halt on the march, for the animal had a nasty temper, and a way of his own on all occasions. I tried aU I could to keep awake during the halt, but could not succeed ; the blmking stars above, the vast, dusky desert around, which already seemed as though it had swaUowed our host, the deep silence that prevailed, all tended to produce a state of semi-consciousness or partial oblivion. AU at once I felt something moving close to me. I was wide awake in- stantly. Two horses were there beside me, the one fastened to my arm, the other standing beside him, saddled, and with the reins trailing on the ground. It was my second horse. The servant who was in charge of him, sleeping a hundred j^ards behind, had let my horse go, and the animal, more intelligent than the man, had picked his way through sleeping men and horses until he got to his old stable companion, with whom he stood quietly — aU his temper tamed, and his rough manners softened by the strange desert night-world in which he found himself. About three o'clock we began to move forward again. (My groom had come up to seek me m consternation.) The night was now darker than ever ; the stars by which we had heretofore moved had gone below the western desert, but the Pole-star was always there. By it we were able to find new MARCH GUIDED BY THE STARS 231 lights on which to steer west. For more than an hour now the march went on in absolute silence, except for one strange occurrence. Suddenly to our right front a peal of wild and hilarious laughter rang out in this deep stillness. It ceased almost as abruptly as it had arisen. One expected that some alarm might have followed this weird, unwonted outburst, but the void was all still again. It afterwards transpired that a man in one of the Highland regiments of the leading brigade of the Second Division had carried a bottle of very strong rum with him, and his repeated application to this source for sustaiu- ment during the march had ended in a hysterical paroxysm. Fortunately, we were at the time more than a mile away from the enemy's position. During the next hour the strain of things grew. I rode on the left of the commander-in-chief. He had given the leading of the staff group to me. As one by one some guide-star dropped into the mists that lay deep upon the horizon, another star higher in the heavens had to be taken for direction, and that at times became obscured or dimmed by some passing cloud ; but at no time was the Pole-star, over my right shoulder, and the star in front, upon which I had laid my horse's ears, hidden at the same moment. Sir Garnet Wolseley had in his possession a very fine repeater watch given to him by the late Lord Airey. By striking this watch he knew the exact moment of the night, and as the minutes between four and five o'clock began to strike longer numbers, they seemed to draw into tighter twist aU the strands of our expectations. And yet, as I can see it now, what did it matter to this old desert and to these older stars ? ' Our guides,' we thought them. Ours ! Had not Moses led his Israelites here three thousand years ago ? Had not Napoleon marched the best soldiers known to the world over these sands and under the same stars ? Countless Pharaohs had driven their chariots across these brown ridges ; and one day did there not come along this route into Egypt a man leading an ass on which a woman rode, bearing in her arms a Babe, who was to be a wider conqueror than they all ? What did our little night-march matter in that catalogue or context ? Perhaps the poor hysterical Scottish soldier, whose weird laugh broke so rudely upon the desert silence an hour before, knew as much about it as the best of us ! 232 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY It was about half-past four when the commander-in-chief told me to ride in the direction of Sir Archibald Alison's High- land Brigade and teU him to move forward as rapidly as possible, as the entrenchments must now be close before us, and the daylight could not be far off behind us. I took ground towards the right front, and soon struck full upon the Highland Brigade. It was a moment of very considerable danger and confusion to that body of men. An order to halt for a few moments had been given by the brigadier a little while earher. This order passmg from the centre to the flanks did not reach the outer companies for some moments ; thus, when the centre companies halted, the outer ones still continued moving, though keeping the touch, as it was caUed, inwards. The result was that the flank battalions wheeled inwards and lay down m a kind of half -circle. When the word to advance was again given in a low voice, they moved to their respective fronts and came nearly face to face with each other. A terrible catastrophe might easil}'- have happened in the case of raw and inexperienced troops ; but discipline was good, and the brigade was reformed in line by the efforts of the brigadier and his officers. I stayed with Sir A. Alison until everything was straight, gave him the message to push on with all possible despatch, and then turned to find my chief. I had counted my horse's steps in coming to the Highland Brigade, and calculating that the commander-in- chief would have continued to move to his former front, I steered a course south-west, as I had before come north-west. Captain Maurice had accompanied me to the Highland Brigade. WTien we got to a spot which I reckoned to be in the track of the commander-in-chief's route I pulled up, and dismounted in order to see better towards the east. Presently a few heads appeared against the horizon. We were straight on the staff track. I reported what had happened, but that the brigade was now in full march forward. There could be little doubt that we were now not far from the enemy's works, but, so far as sight and sound went, they might as well have been a hundred miles away. At no time during this dark night had the stillness of the desert space been more profound or the darkness deeper. This desert seemed still to have kept embalmed in its sands one of the old plagues of Egypt. FIRE OPENS 233 The commander-in-cliief decided to dismount at this spot and await developments. In the next twentj^ minutes I could hear the repeater repeating its minutes frequently, ' Four, forty, forty-five, fifty ' ; all was stiU dead silence. Looking eastward, I thought that the dawn was already showing in the horizon, but it was a dawn such as I had never noticed in the eastern heavens before. A large shaft of pale Ught, shaped like a sheaf of corn, and of the colour of pale gold, was visible, shot straight up from the horizon some twenty degrees into the heavens. It appeared to be rising from where the sun would be, due east. I called the attention of the commander- in-chief to this strange foreglow of the coming day, and he too believed it to be the approaching dawn. It was in reality the Great Comet of 1882, which had not been visible before, as the comet was actually going round the sun at that time, and was lost in the sun's raj's. It had got round now, and its long tail, whisked before it, had become suddenly visible to the naked eye, while the head was still lost in the solar raj's. We mounted and rode on. We had only proceeded a short distance when the all-pervading silence was broken hj a single shot to our right front ; then came two or three more shots, and then a thunderous roU of musketry, mixed with heavy- gun fire, swelling from our right front far along the western desert on either side. When this great volume of fire first broke out all was stiU dark ; five minutes later, in that short dawn, the eye was able to distinguish objects on the desert within a quarter of a mile ; in ten minutes the landscape and the line were aU revealed to us. To our left front a large earthwork was sending shells on three sides. We were at first too close to it for damage ; but it soon found our range — about a thou- sand yards — and shells began to fall about us. This earthwork, the largest of any in the enemy's defences, was an isolated redoubt standing at least a thousand yards m front of the main Ime of entrenchments. The record of the night-march, with particular reference to this isolated and advanced sentinel battery, is a very curious one. Had the march of the Highland Brigade of the Eleventh Division been made along a due east and west line from Ninth Hill, some portion of the left of the brigade must midoubtedly have struck the work. I am not sure that the centre of the line would not have come fuU against 234 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY it. It would be impossible to say what the ultimate effect upon the fortunes of the day would have been, but it is safe to say that the loss to the assailants must have been out of all proportion larger than it actually was. I shall not here discuss this question, but press on to the end. As daj^ight broadened things took better shape. We could see that the large work immediately on our left front stood at a considerable distance in advance of the main line of works : from this main line a body of cavalry was coming out in rear of the advanced redoubt. Our big group of staff had been ordered to scatter at this time, so as not to draw too con- centrated a fire from this redoubt. The commander-in-chief still kept me by him. I called his attention to the movement of the enemy's cavalry. ' Order the squadron of the 19th Hussars to meet them,' he said. It was not in sight. I galloped back to meet it, and they went forward at a canter in column of troops, passing within three hundred yards of the eight-gun redoubt, and offering a splendid target to it. The redoubt fired four or five shots as the squadron passed it, but neither man nor horse was hit. When I rejoined the com- mander-m-chief the firing of musketry and artillery was in full swing, but the flashes from the big guns were dying out in the increasmg daylight. We galloped to the right front, and soon struck the main line of works. The desert was here dotted over with wounded men, chiefly of the Highland Light Infantry ; the old colonel of the Duke of Cornwall's was down with a bullet through his jaws. Farther to our right, our line of forty- two guns had broken into columns, and the leading batteries had already entered the enemy's line. Galloping through the gaps they had made in the parapet, we were soon inside the works. The detached fort had continued to follow our course with shells ; it was now the only unsilenced redoubt in the enemy's line. Inside the works, the desert was strewn with dead Egyptians, dead horses and camels. The sun was now well above the horizon. To the right one could see the First Division moving quickly in regular formation across the desert. Portions of the Second Division were still in our front, descend- ing the slopes towards the railway station of Tel-el-Kebir, and to our left, where the desert sloped to the railway and canal, the wrecks of i\.rabi's late army were strewn in all AFTER THE BATTLE 235 directions. Down the slopes, through the camps, over the railway, and across the canal, the white-clad fugitives were flying south and west in dots, in dozens, in hundreds. Desultory firing was going on everywhere, but actual fighting had ceased thirty-five minutes after the first gun was fired. It was about 6.20 a.m. when we reached the canal bridge at Tel-el-Kebir. Beyond the canal lay the Wady Tumilat, a narrow sheet of green lying between two glaring deserts. Two or three hundred Highlanders, a squadron of cavalry, and some odds and ends of moimted corps had just arrived. The first thing to be done was to stop the shooting which was going on at everything and often at nothing. The seamy side of a battle was here painfully apparent ; anything seemed to be good enough to let o£E a rifle at. Dead and wounded men, horses, and camels were on all sides. Some of the wounded had got down to the edge of the water to quench their thirst ; others were on the higher banks, imable to get down. Many of our ofl&cers dismounted and carried water to these unfortunates, but the men were not all similarly disposed. I heard an officer ask a man who was filling his canteen at the canal to give a drink of water to a gasping Egyptian cavalry soldier who was lying supporting himself against the battlement of the bridge. ' I wadna wet his lips,' was the indignant reply. Close by, in the midst of her dead and dying fellow-countrymen, a woman attached to the Egyptian camp was washing her infant at the canal, concentrating her attention on the child as though to steady her thoughts ; and many of the wounded Egyptians had managed, as they lay, to cover their heads with pieces of paper to try and keep off the flies and the scorching sun. When the orders for the movement of the cavalry and Indian Division to Cairo and Zagazig were issued by the commander-in-chief on the bridge at Tel-el-Kebir, and these two bodies had started on their respective roads, I took up my quarters at the lock-keeper's hut on the south side of the bridge, had something to eat, and then started on a fresh horse to go back over the battlefield. The saying that ' dead men tell no tales ' has the he given to it on every battlefield ; this one was no exception. I directed my course to the part of the field and the entrench- ments across which the Second Division had come. Vast 236 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY numbers of Egyptian dead cumbered the ground from im- mediately behind the parapet where the Highland Brigade entered to quite a mile within the works in the direction of the bridge. This portion of the position had an mner double line of works extending obliquely along it, facing north, and it was among these lines and gun emplacements that the dead lay thickest. They were often in groups of fifteen and twent}^ heaped together within the angles of smaU works into which they appeared to have crowded ; the main line of entrench- ments had also great numbers of dead behind it. The ground showed everywhere the complete nature of the surprise which had overtaken the enemy. Arms, accoutrements, uniforms, the cotton clothes of the fellaheen, boxes of cartridges and food — a general debris of everything lay exposed upon the desert. Of wounded there were very few to be seen ; too many suc- cessive waves of armed men had crossed this portion of the jfield. The sun was now a flaming fireball overhead. I had been at work for fully twenty consecutive hours. When I returned to the lock-keeper's hut at the bridge, things had not improved in the Wady Tumilat. Several men had managed to get across the canal, and the people in the hamlets had been robbed and ill-treated by these blackguards. This is part of the performance of the lower sort of the soldier-mind : to them war means plunder. It has always done so, and it wiU always do so. Indeed, it may be truly said that the instinct of plunder in some shape or form is the strongest passion among men. That it comes out in war is only justifying the old proverb that the ruling passion grows strong in death ; death had been very plentifully exhibited that morning over these three miles of desert from the Egyptian lines to the bridge at Tel-el-Kebir. In this respect I do not imagine that the instincts of man have changed much since Moses marched this way three or four thousand years ago. If anybody should be disposed to doubt this opinion, I would ask him to read the Life of Sir Neville Chamberlain at pages 143-150 of that remarkable work. Sir Neville Chamberlain knew the realities of war as few men knew them in our time, and when he raised his voice in a vain protest against the whole horde of financial civilian- warriors who were howling to let loose hell upon the women and children SONS OF THE SOIL 237 of the Dutch republics some ten years ago, he knew what he was speaking about. Somebody said of the Egj^tian War of 1882 that it was ' the Counter-march of Moses/ Since that time poor Moses has had rather a surfeit of wars, and perhaps to-day he is not so ready to embark upon them in a general ' damn the conse- quences ' sort of spirit. There is one thing which I should like to put on record regarding this battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Complete surprise though it was to the Egyptian soldiers behind their entrenchments, thej'' nevertheless fought with the greatest determination against over- whelming odds. Not a moment was given them to awake, form up, prepare, or move into position. The assault fell upon them as a thunderbolt might fall upon a man asleep. The leaders in whom they could trust were, lilie themselves, fellaheen ; few among them knew anything of war, its arts, manoeuvres, or necessities ; they were betrayed on every side, yet they fought stoutly wherever ten or twenty or fifty of them could get together in the works, m the angles of the hnes, and in the open desert between the lines. The heaps of dead lying with and across their rifles facing the up-coming sim bore eloquent testimony to that final resolve of these poor fellows. Peace be to them, lying under these big mounds on the lone desert — ten thousand, it is said. No word should soldier utter against them ; let that be left to the money-changers. They died the good death. Dust to dust. They did not desert the desert, and Egypt will not forget them. CHAPTER XV Cairo. The fate of Arabi in the balance. Mr. WUfrid Blunt. Leaving Egypt. To the Saskatchewan again. The Red Man. All resistance in Egypt ceased at Tel-el-Kebir on 13th Septem- ber. Cairo was surrendered on the 14th to a small force of cavalry, and on the 15th Sir Garnet Wolseley, His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught, the staff, and a battalion of the Guards reached the capital at 10 a.m. Redvers BuUer and a sapper private drove the engine of the train that carried us to Benha. The scene in the streets near the railway station was a curious one. Several Pashas and officials were on the platform, and we waited some time at the station for some formality or other. BuUer said to me, ' Let 's get a cab and drive to the Abdin Palace, where we are to live : I am very hungry.' We did so, and in a quarter of an hour we were at the palace. There was only an old Nubian ' bowab ■" in the place. Not many Arabs were to be seen in the streets, and most of them took little notice of us, though some scowled, and the irrepressible Arab boy hissed vigorously at us as we passed. The Abdin Palace looked the most enchanting place of rest and coolness I had ever seen. What a change to those lofty halls and broad staircases, cool corridors, gilded ceilings, and crystal chandeliers from the blinding heat, the foul dust, and the innumerable flies of the desert ! But all such things without food are of little use to hungrjT- men, so we got into our cab again and told the driver to go to an hotel. The first two or three we tried were barred and bolted, and silent as the grave. At last we struck one in which there was a ' bowab,' and after a good deal of talk between him and the interpreter he con- sented to open the door. Yes, there was food in the house, he said, and he would cook some breakfast for us. In half an hour he had an excellent omelette and a bit of meat served up, and he confided to the interpreter that he knew where the key 23S CAIRO IN '82 239 of the cellar was, though that door was also sealed. Most excellent Nubian ! Down we went to the cellar, took one bottle of claret from an old dusty, cobwebby bin, resealed and locked the door, put up a paper over the lock saying what had been done, and, having duly signed it, sat down to breakfast. We were in a hurry, as there was plenty of work to be done at the palace, so we ate our food and drank our wme without delay, and went out again to the cab. So far, aU had gone weU in the cool house, but once in the sun things went very differentl5^ My head had begun to swim ; the carriage seemed to be always turning a very sharp corner ; my companion was looking at me with a strange look on his face. ' Old chap,' he said, ' I think we had better take a turn through the city before we go back to the palace.' I quite agreed. At that moment I would not have met the commander-in-chief for a good deal. We drove about the half-deserted streets for half an hour, and the effects of this wonderful old heady wine, suddenly swallowed, went off almost as quickly as they had come. Cairo was at this time a wonderful place. It can never be again as it then was. Moses in Levantine form had not yet come back. What pictures they were, those streets of old Cairo ! It was my duty to hunt out all the tents I could find in the storehouses of the citadel for the use of our troops, as all the camp equipage was still at Kassassin. Arabi's late officials, although they were all coffee, cigarette, and obsequious courtesy, were in no hurry to show me the extent of their stores and camp equipage, but I kept at them for two days, until I had dug out sufficient for our immediate wants. The filth and vermin in the permanent barracks everywhere made it perfectly impossible to put European troops into them. At this work I managed to see a great deal of the outer side of Cairene life, and to get several glimpses into the inner scenes too. I had to take over, with Herbert Stewart, the old palace at Abbas- siyeh, and as the harem of the late Pasha of the blood was still located in that building, the work was a protracted one ; for the ladies had to be removed from room to room before we were allowed to enter the apartments, and thus we were playing a sort of hide-and-seek with them through the palace. In a short time our men were comfortably provided for, chiefly in tents on Gezireh Island, and then we had time to 240 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY do a little sightseeing in Cairo and its vicinity. Wonderful sights some of them were. I got up one morning very early in order to see the comet, which had now become visible at that early hour. From the roof of the Abdin Palace one could see the whole city and the land from Mokattim to the Pyramids. Before day came, the Great Comet stood above where the sun would rise. It resembled a vast wheat-sheaf of light, or a flaming broom sent to sweep the stars out from the threshold of the sun. The city slept in the shadows. Then, one by one, from a hundred minarets rose the cry of the muezzin — the weirdest wail of man to God that can be heard over the world. Then as the light grew stronger the old domes of forgotten sultans and Mameluke chiefs could be distinguished rising above the city buildings to the east and south, and looking westward across the palm groves that fringed the great river one saw the Pyramids changing from grey to rose-pink in the growing light — vast and clear-carved as though they had been finished yesterday, and had not saluted the sunrise over Mokattim for twice three thousand years. ' If you make the canal from Suez to the Mediterranean you will bring the English into Egypt," said Mehemet Ali in his old age, as he sat in the window of his little palace in the citadel looking out upon that wondrous scene below. Well, they made the Suez Canal, and the English came into Egypt by it, and their bugles were now sounding reveille from camp and quarters in the city ; nevertheless, somehow these giant sentinels standing erect in the desert, who began their watch six thousand years ago, seemed as they reddened in the sunrise to be even smiling at the thought that this new invader of the Nile Valley was to be the last they were to look at. Nothing in the world has lasted as Egj'-pt has lasted. They wiU tell you that the tombs and temples of the Nile have defied the tooth of time because of the air, the sand, and the sun of Egypt ; but far more wonderful has been the lasting of the Egyptian people amid the mud, the yellow water, and the lentil gardens of the land. A thousand invaders have swept this Delta. Egypt has rubbed them all out one after the other. What was the secret ? A Turkish officer gave me the only clue to it I ever got. ' When a man of my regiment,' he said, ' comes and asks me to be allowed to marry, I ask him, " Whom §\ ARABI BROUGHT TO THE ABDIN 241 do you want to marry ? " and he generally replies, " I want to marry a Nubian or a negro " ; and when I ask the reason, he says, " Because then my children will be Turks ; whereas, if I marr}^ an Egyptian girl, the children will be Egyptians." ' You look in vain in Egypt to-day for any distinctive feature or figure of Turk, Circassian, Mameluke, or Greek ; all are Egyptian, and, strangest part of it all, are Egyptian in the face and form of the type which you find graven on tombs and temples that were built many thousand years ago. How has this result been arrived at ? I thmk it can only be explained by the simplicity and the uniformity of the elements out of which the bodies of the children of Egypt have been built — Nile mud and Nile water, fashioned and fertilised into Nile food, through the agency of the Nile sun. On the 18th September it was thought necessary to move Arabi Pasha from Abbassiyeh to the Abdin. The most truculent among the old Circassian and Syrian officers in the service of the Khedive soon after this entered Cairo, and their enmity to Arabi was so bitter that his life was in danger at their hands. A very base and cowardly attack and outrage was made upon him one night in his prison. There were circumstances connected with the secret history of the con- stitutional party in relation to the ex -Khedive Ismail and the present one, Tewfik, which made the assassination of Arabi Pasha quite a possible contingency. ' Dead men tell no tales ' — nor would even a dead ' Pasha of three tails.' The next plan was to get Arabi tried by a court-martial composed of Circassian and other officers of this class, and sentenced to death as an Egyptian in rebellion against his country and its ruler. There was a very real danger that this course might be followed. The bondholder would not be strenuously opposed to it, and his representatives, who were then in the ascendant in Cairo, made no pretence that this course would not have been thoroughly in keeping with their wishes. A number of our own officers were also in favour of it, but there were others who thought otherwise. I remember being at the Abdin when Arabi was removed thither from Abbassiyeh. A large group of officers had gathered in the verandah of the building to see Arabi arrive. He was brought under escort in a carriage. He alighted, and began to ascend the steps as one tired and Q 242 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY weary. When he saw the group of officers he pulled himself together, drew himself up, and saluted us with dignity. I noticed that only one officer besides myself returned the prisoner's salute ; that one was General Drury Lowe. I was in good company. A we3k later Khedive Tewfik was brought into Cairo under the protection of our troops, and for several days after his arrival the fate of Arabi hung in the balance. It is now made pretty clear, by the publication of papers and private correspondence of that day, not only that the putting to death of Arabi under the shelter of Khedivial authority was an idea perfectly agreeable to persons in very high ministerial positions in England, but that its frustration was largely due to the devoted efforts made by Mr. Blunt and a few other friends of justice at the time in London. Of course, I could know nothmg of aU this in Cairo. I was immersed at the time m the details of my official work with the troops. Sickness of a grave character had broken out among the army, and changes of camp sites, hospital arrange- ments, etc.; occupied all my time. But m the evening at our mess I heard the fate of Arabi frequently discussed, and it was easy to see that the tide of opmion was flowing strongly against the prisoner. It was announced one evening that the chief of the staff. Sir John Adye, would leave for England next mornhig to resume his duties at the War Office. A thought struck me. I had known Sir John many years ; I knew him to be a straight and honourable soldier, and a personal friend of Mr. Gladstone. It had become quite clear to me by this time that the larger part of the information which had been transmitted to England from Egypt during the past six months bearing upon this National movement had been either grossly exaggerated or was absolutelj^ false and misleading. Many of the men who were engaged in transmitting this information were profound haters of the ministry then in power, and particularly of their chief, Mr. Gladstone, and to some of them the idea of making that statesman an accessory before the fact to the judicial assassination of Arabi was possessed of a sort of subtle and refined satisfaction. It is curious to mark now in the pages of Mr. Blunt's extraordinarj^ book the accuracy with which, A LETTER 243 in my own small sphere, I had gauged the situation. When I got to my room in the Abdin Palace that night I sat down and wrote a letter to Sir John Adye, which I intended to hand to him next morning at the Cairo railway station when he was starting for England. I began : — • ' Nothing but a very strong belief in the necessity of doing what I can to avert what I beheve would be a national crime makes me now write to you upon a subject far removed from the sphere of military duty which has hitherto given me a claim as an officer of your staff to communicate with you. I write to urge you to tele- graph from Alexandria to England to stop the execution of Arabi Pasha (should the Court which is sitting, or about to sit, condemn bim to death) until you have arrived in England and are in a position to place before the Government a full view of the Egjrptian question as it will then have taken its place in your mind, in just and true proportion. ' You may ask why I, holding a subordinate position on the staff of this expedition, should thus take up a question removed from the class of work I have hitherto done in this campaign. I would, in the first place, point out that leniency toward men who have been in rebellion has seldom been thrown away in history : the wounds inflicted in war, no matter how deep they may be, soon heal compared to those which are left in the memory of a people by the work of the scaffold.' Then I instanced the great war of the South against the North in America, where, after four years of tremendous fighting, only one hfe had been taken on the scaffold, and that one the hfe of a man who had starved to death and cruelly maltreated thousands of Northern soldiers. ' If we go further back in history, can any one say that the execution of Ney and Labedoyere made the Bourbon throne more secure, or gave the Settlement of Vienna a longer lease of exist- ence ? Did St. Helena ensure the continuance of the restored dynasty ? Had there been no St. Helena, there might have been no Second Empire. But let us look at this matter from another point of view. In what light wUl history regard the execution of Arabi ? It will be written that we, a great and po^^•erful Empire, vanquished this man and then surrendered our prisoner to the vengeance of weak, and therefore cruel, rulers. The voice of the civilised world \vill be against us. Legal technicahties and petty quibbles will be forgotten, and history will record a strong verdict 244 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of condemnation against us. It is the same all along the line. It will be useless to say the act was not ours, we cannot get rid of our responsibility that way : the world will not accept the transfer. ' There is another point and I have done. It is perhaps a selfish point. Will the execution, as a traitor, of the man against whom all our immense preparations have recently been made — the seas covered with our ships, the desert with our men — will the execution of the object of all this preparation, effort, power, as a felon, redound to our own proper pride, or to " the pomp and circumstance " of our profession ? It strikes me that in condemning Arabi to the scaSold we cut down the measure of our own achievement to a very low point. Another thing I can foresee. If Arabi's execution should be carried out, many of the men who are now foremost in calling for it will be the first to turn round and fling the stone of reproach at the English statesman whom they hate with far greater intensity of feeling than that Avhich they bear to their Egyptian prisoner, and they will not fail to pursue Mr. Gladstone to his grave with the cry of blood-guiltiness. ' I must apologise for the length to which this letter has run. I can only excuse it by pleading the never-failing kindness and courtesy I have received from you whenever my duties as your staff officer brought me into contact with you.' I have taken this letter from a rough draft in an old pocket- book in which I find it most indifferently pencilled. I sat up all night writing and copying it out, and when all was finished it was time to go to the railway station to see the old chief of the staff off on his journey. I handed the letter to him on the platform. I thought there was a look in his eye as I gave him the document as though he imagined it was some matter of personal promotion or reward about which I was troubling him, and I just said, * Not about myself, sir.' I never heard again what happened, but the trend of events soon satisfied me that the executioners were not to have it all their own quick way at once. At the time my letter was written (at the end of September), the execution of Arabi by order of the Khedivial court-martial had been virtually settled, as we now know. On 27th September it was announced that the court was to be named instanter. The correspondent of the Times in Egypt reported that ' the Khedive, Sherif and Riaz Pashas all insist strongly on the absolute necessity of the capital punishment of the prime AN OPEN TRIAL FOR ARABI 245 offenders, an opinion from which there are few, if any, dissen- tients.' That this court would then have been a packed tribunal of the very worst description was just as certain as that the sun would rise on the Mokattim side of Cairo the next morning. All the passions were now in entire possession of the Egyptian vantage points : the Levantine jackal, the Khedivial eunuch, the bloodthirsty Circassian, the Greek money-lender, the many representatives of Dame Quickly 's old and highly endowed profession — these were now flocking into Egypt in thousands. With them were coming the former advisers of the EngHsh Foreign Office, whose persistently erroneous counsels had, as we now know, produced the crisis which had just been closed by the slaughter at Tel-el-Kebir. Behind these various persons and professions this unfortunate fellah, Arabi, had ranged against him the entire tribe of the Levites and High Priests of Finance, foreign and Egyptian, from the heads of the great Jewish banking-houses in Europe to the humble ' schroff ' money-changers at the street comers of Alexandria. With all these powerful interests, schemes, monopolies, policies, and professions in league against his life, the chances of the late leader of the National party might well seem hope- less ; and so they would have been had not breathing time been given. Whatever may have been Mr. Gladstone's earlier pre- possessions against Arabi and the National part}', his better angel prevailed, and it was decreed that a full and open trial should be accorded him. That was sufficient to ensure his ultimate safety. Neither Turk, Jew, Infidel, nor imaginary Christian could face the publication in court of the secret papers of which Arabics counsel were now in possession. These papers, cleverly hidden from the Khedive's pohce by the wife of the prisoner, saved the situation. Arabi owed his life, under Providence, to the splendid pluck and generous purse of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt ; and, looking back upon it all to-day, I am not sure that the memory of Mr. Gladstone is not still more deeply indebted to the same gentleman. Many days of that time live in my memory, but one has particular place in it. The commander-in-chief gave a huge picnic at the Pyramids of Sakkara, the site of ancient Memphis. We went by steamer to Beddreshin on the top of the Nile flood. More than one hundred Arab donkeys were collected under 246 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the palms on the west shore. These were quickly mounted, and away we went for Sakkara. Nearly all the higher officers of the expedition were there — Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Duke of Connaught, Generals Willis, Graham, Alison, and some nmety others of various degrees and qualities, several civilians being among them. To most of the party the Egyptian donkey was still a strange riding animal. If you tried to ride as in an English saddle, discomfort was inevitable ; the stirrups were not fixed, and if j^ou leaned more to one side than the other the shding stirrup leather went in the same direction, and a fall in the sand was the result. If you sat well back, almost over the donkey's tail, and threw your legs well out in front, you soon found a balance which seemed to fit into the animal's short gallop. Prominent among our uniformed party rode Colonel Valentine Baker Pasha, who, for some reason known only to himself, had come to the picnic in a fashionable London frock- coat, a tall black silk hat, and the rest of his costume in due keeping. AU went calmly and quietly on the outward journey. We saw aU the wonderful sights ; the house of Tei, that mar- vellous interior wherein all the industries, the duties, the domestic life, and the amusements of the oldest civilisation in the world are graven and coloured in characters as clear and vivid as though they had been done yesterday. Then we dived down through the sand of the desert into that vast rock warren of the Serapeum, which the genius of the great French Eg5^tologist first revealed to our modern world. The wonder of it all was endless as one looked at these vast sarcophagi of polished syenite. How did these old people get aU the seventy solid single-stoned tons of granite or porphyry into huge side niches which open from the vast rock gallery under the desert ? Greater even than the wonder was the prodigious foolishness of the whole thing. AU for dead bulls ! Stifled with the heat, the candle smoke, and the smell of bats of this subterranean bull warren, we got up at last into the desert air, and were soon at work upon the scores of good things which Cook had provided for our refreshment by order of the commander-in-chief. More tombs, more pyramids, more stone carvings, more hieroglyphics, more sarcophagi, and at last we were off again on donkey-back for the Nile. Then the fun began. The donkey boys prodded the animals behind, some THE FELLAH IN HIS HOMELAND 247 of the younger guests raced their donkeys at full speed in front, the burly j&gure of Baker Pasha seemed to become the central point in the human stream that poured over the desert sand, and then along the top of a great embankment built to retain the waters of the inundation. \^Tiat with the heat of the sun and the stifling atmosphere of the many sepulchral chambers and galleries visited, aU our clothing had become bedraggled and saturated ; but if this was the case with khaki and dust-coloured homespun, how fared it with the black frock- coat, tall silk hat, and fashionable nether gear of our Piccadilly- clad Pasha ? Words could not paint that picture : the silk hat was bent and broken by frequent contact with the roof of rock cavern and tomb chamber ; the frock-coat looked as though several policemen had been tussling with its owner ; the legs of the fashionably cut trousers had worked up under the exigencies of the donkey saddle until the ankles were where the knees ought to have been. There was no stopping : — ' With hark and whoop and wild halloo No rest Ben Bam'se's echoes knew.' And thus we reached the steamer at Beddreshin satiated with sarcophagi, and with a thirst for tea such as only the dust of six thousand years of mummy powder could give us. I left Eg3rpt at the end of October with feelings of keen regret. There was nothing to make one imagine at that moment that events would soon arise in the vaUey of the Nile which would call one back to that region. The Egyptian chapter seemed closed, and I was sorry to quit a land in which the ends of time seemed to be always touching each other ; the oldest reHcs of man's pride and power lying prone in the dust, the latest efiforts of his endless husbandry blooming fresh and fair over aU the garden of the Delta. More interesting to me than the tomb or temple of the dead past m the desert was the endless picture of the life of the fellah in the soft green level of his homeland ; his fields of grain m their many stages between seed and stubble, his plots of onions, sweet-smeUing beans, deep green clover, cotton, and flowering flax ; the brown canal banks, where the cattle, goats, donkeys, and camels stood in the shade of the acacia-trees in the hot hours, munching the stalk of sugar-canes, or nibbhng the golden ' tibbin ' ; the big 248 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY blue buffaloes, with their horns and noses just showing above the yellow water ; and the date palms rustling in the cool north wind round some old marabout's tomb, whose little dome shows very white over the green fields ; and under the glorious sunshine the great flocks of white pigeons skimming over villages, the strange ' paddy ' birds standing in the inundated fields ; above all, man, woman, and child at work everywhere, sowing, reaping, weeding, working the water wheel in winter, and in summer, when the Nile is pouring down its flooded waters, opening the little watercourses from one field to another with their feet to let the saving flood flow on its way. To-day it is the same as it was in that far-off time of the Exodus, when Moses told his people that ' The land whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the land of Egypt from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst the seed, and wateredst it with thy foot as a garden of herbs ; But the land whither ye go to possess it is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven.' This short war had at least been the means of teaching me a few great lessons which were of use later on. I saw and learnt a good deal of the machinery by which the thing can be done to-day, the turn given to the wheel which sets ' public opinion,' as it is called, into one channel or the other. I thought the war was ended, but I was wrong. Doubtless the Great Comet, as I saw it that morning flaming over Mokattim, knew more about what was coming than any of us : — ' Comets importing change of times and states, Brandish your fiery tresses in the sky, And with them scourge the bad revolting stars.' Quite so ; but which had been the bad, revolting star in this Egyptian business ? That one, ' Canopus,' famous night- jewel of the southern desert ; or that other one of the northern heavens, ' Arcturus,' which had guided us to overwhelm the sleeping fellaheen host at Tel-el-Kebir ? The Egyptian peasant in revolt against his plunderers, or an English Liberal Govern- ment in revolt against Liberalism ? Some day, perhaps, Egypt will help us to answer the ques- tion. She has ever played a strange part in the destiny of ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN 249 empires. The late Lord Salisbury came to the conclusion towards the close of his life that we had an unfortunate facility for ' backing the wrong horse/ I think we have had an equal knack of generally hanging the wrong man. When the army of Egypt returned to England it was the recipient of a good deal of public and private adulation and reward, which lasted through the winter and into the summer of the next year.i Then things assumed their old shapes again. One day, in the late summer of 1883, 1 received a letter from a syndicate of company promoters in the city of London asking me if I would undertake a journey to the north of the Saskatchewan River, in order to investigate and report upon a large tract of land in that region, about the agricultural capabilities of which thej^ were desirous of obtaining trust- worthy information previous to the formation of a joint-stock company for its future development. It was added that Lord Dunraven had been also approached in the matter, and that he was willing to undertake the journey provided I was also agreeable to it. Of course, I accepted. I forget what the emolument was to be — one hundred pounds, and out-of-pocket expenses, I think ; but that didn't matter. I would have given more than I could then afford to give merely to see again the great prairies and the pine forests of my earlier days. The season of the year, the autumn, didn't much matter. Indeed, nothing matters when your heart is in a matter. After several delays I left Liverpool on the 6th October in a brand-new steamer, the Oregon. She was the latest vessel then off the stocks, and she was expected to break the record of that time, which she did, gettmg into New York on the evening of the 14th. Ship, ship's company, passengers, and ocean were at their best. Every human item seemed to be represented in the two hundred passengers. Beauty and the Beast could be studied close at hand. The charm of the one lies in its great contrast to the ughness of the other ; but we ought not to say the ' Beast,' for there are very few beasts that are ugly ; it is the mass of ugly people m the world that makes us worship beauty when we see it. It was interesting to look at America again after an absence ^ I was honoured by being appointed extra A.D.C. to the Queen. 250 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of ten or a dozen years. The sharpening process seemed to be stiU going on among the population. Is it destined to continue until the original Caucasian has been fined down to vanishing point ? At the moment it seemed to me that the Irish and the German stock were having the reproduction business all to themselves, but the African black was beating them both. I got away up the Hudson Valley the next day. Commercial enterprise was so far unable to spoil the glories of the sunset skies and their reflection on the broad river, but it had seized on every rock and headland on the shores to defile and deface them with hideous advertisements of pills, purgatives, and pick-me-ups ; even the moonlight was sought as an illuminator for these horrible concoctions. One asked oneself who were the men and women who swallowed these things ; and were the ' Castoria Bitters ' and the various Capsicums, the names of which were written in five-feet letters on the grand old rocks, the real grindstones upon which the sharpening or attenuating process of the American human family was going on ? Dawn found us in Vermont. A great round moon, now safe from the desecration of the city advertisement, was going down in fleecy folds of vapour bej^ond Lake Champlain ; the big woods were glowing in their autumn tints as the sun came up, mixing his bright, new golden coinage with the molten moon- beams in the west. Wliite frost was on the ground, and there was ice on the little pools already. There was no time to lose if the Saskatchewan River was to be crossed free of ice. I hurried on north, for the objective point was a station called Troy, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, from whence a stage waggon ran once a week to Prince Albert, on the North Sas- katchewan. If I missed that weekly stage, then there could be no chance of getting to my destination before the winter had shut up the land from human observation. How easily can our best-laid plans be jeopardised ! At Milwaukee, on the 19th October, the train stopped for dinner. After the meal, by a stupid mistake I got into what seemed to be the last car- riage in the St. Paul's train. A moment later I saw the carriage in front move slowly away from the one in which I sat. The northern train was moving so very slowly that I thought I could catch it running, for we were still in Milwaukee city. I -Annan & Sons Glascow fr^rn: a liotocrnajiibf Heath.Plymcr-ith ^ A FRIEND IN NEED 251 was out and after the train in a second, going aU I could, and neither gaining on it nor losing. I had a large overcoat on, and but for that I think I should have caught it up. All at once there came a break in the track on which I was runnuit^. caused by a switch block in the rails ; over that I jumped, and as I lighted at the far side of the obstacle, bang went something in the calf of my leg. I stopped, dead lame ; away steamed the express, with aU my baggage, and all my hopes of getting to the Saskatchewan for another fortnight. Suddenly I heard behind me the roar and whistle of an engine. I looked back and saw a single locomotive coming on my line of raUs at a rapid pace. As it approached I noticed that the driver was leaning out to one side of his engine and shouting at me, but as I had already hobbled out of his track I didn't know wha.t he wanted of me. Then I saw him slowing down, and I guessed what he was at. He pulled up suddenly. * Jump on, stranger ! ' he shouted. I caught hold of the rail of his engine, and lifted myself by it to the driver's platform. He gave one glance to see that I was safely on, then he seemed to let her head go, and away we went forward. By this time the St. Paul's express, stUl going slowly, for there were numerous street crossings on the line, was a quarter of a mile ahead. Holding on all I knew, for I was now quite out of breath, I gave one look at my good friend. He was a big strong man, with a great round face and a lot of hair round it. His eyes were steadily fixed on the rails ahead, the train in front, and the crossing- places ; both his hands were on the stops and goes of his engine, and he was able to check his speed or let go as he pleased. When we got clear of the streets he let out fuU speed, and was soon within a hundred yards of the express, which so far had seemed to take no notice of us, and I began to fear that my good friend would give up the stem chase in disgust. But I heard him growling something about * going to St. Paul before he 'd stop ' ; and I was completely reassured, for there was a light in the big eye that was nearest to me that told me it had now become altogether a personal question between him and the express. As though to bring matters to a climax, he now let out his engine to a full gallop, and I thought he was going to ram the train in front, for he would run up quite close to it, and then 252 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY suddenly rein in his charger. AU the time he was making a wonderful amount of steam whistling. At last the express caved in and pulled up ; then only did my friend relax his stern silence. He helped me to get down from his engine. I flung a five-doUar note on to the floor of his loco- motive, told him he was the best friend I had ever met in the world, and then hobbled to the last carriage of the express, and scrambled on its platform. As I did so I saw that the driver had quitted his engine and followed me. He piit the five-dollar bill on the platform, saying, * Thank you, stranger, but it wasn't for that I did it,' and went straight back to his engine. In another second we were steaming north. I then saw that the number of his engine was 218. When we got to St. Paul next morning I wired to the stationmaster, Milwaukee, asking the name of the driver of 218 engine ; the reply came that the name was Bill Macauley. It was worth a sprung leg just to have met such a man. The passengers were very kind. They had been watching the race with interest, and one of them, seeing me so lame, brought out a bottle of ' Pond's Extract.' According to its label this compound cured every pain and ailment of man, woman, and child ; that it relieved the great pain I was then in is certain, and, though lameness lasted for many days, it gradu- ally wore wa5^ Of my good friend I shall have more to say later. I got to Troy station, three hundred miles west of Winnipeg, and found there an old friend waiting for me — another Mr. Macauley, this one an old officer of the Hudson Bay Company, with whom I had spent some days at Dun vegan, on the Peace River, thirteen years earlier. The stage was not to leave" Troy for a few hours, and my friend had his two-horse buggy at the station to drive me some two miles to his fort at Qu'appelle, which the stage would pass some time later in the day. I have not forgotten the beauty of that drive across the rolling prairies from the railway to Qu'appelle, in which one was brought all at once face to face with the old-remembered glories of space, silence, and sunset ; with the extraordinary clearness of the prairie atmosphere, through which the blue line of horizon lay clear-cut fifty miles away ; the intense blue of the long, winding lakes ; the copses of yeUow cotton-wood ; the oak thickets, now crimson in the Fall; and the curious, white sand- THE 'CIVILISERS' 253 stone cliSs to the north of the lakes, the echo at the foot of which had made the early French fur hunters give its sweet- sounding name to the place two hundred years earHer. My joy at finding myself once more in a lone land of silent beauty was, unfortunately, of short duration, for when, three or four hours later, the stage stopped at the Hudson Bay fort, I saw at a glance that I should have as companions through the three hundred miles to Prince Albert three or four of as rough specimens of the first-fruits of Canadian settlement as could possibly be met with in the Great West. That evening the stage stopped at a lone hut named O'Brien's. The stage manager or owner was of the party, as the trip was a sort of pioneer imdertaking to bring the Saskatchewan into touch with the new civilisation of the Pacific railroad. This new civilisation appeared to be terribly anxious to begin its labours ; and of its apostles it might be said that they were hard at work swearing themselves into office through the whole three hundi-ed miles that still intervened between the railway and the savagery of the Saskatchewan. As there were no Indians or half-breeds or wild animals in this region, the inanimate things of hill, wood, water, and plain received their full baptism of fire at the hands or tongues of the new- comers ; the driver scattered imprecations on everj'thing ; the lumberman smoked so incessantly that his benedictions could only take form in occasional words jerked out between whiffs of tobacco smoke, but they were strong words when they did come. Of wit, even of a coarse kind, of humour of any kind, there was none among these men ; it was all the dull, heavy, cursing, spitting, eructating, and smoking kind of savagery. In O'Brien's hut that evening I thought with regret of the old days in some Indian or half-breed camp, where, if the floor- space and the head-room were no larger, the study of human character and habit was infinitely more interesting. When the time for lying down came I took my roll of bedding outside, and had a capital night's rest in the open prairie in a tempera- ture of only twelve degrees below freezing-point. I was up at 6 A.M., and had the satisfaction of making the lazy civiHsers get up too. The driver was inclined to be aggressively impre- catory, but I effectively silenced him by saying that if he would kindly show me where he kept his oats, I should be glad to feed 254 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY his horses for him every morning at five o'clock. This offer seemed completely to change his mental attitude towards me, and I found, too, that whatever might be the prevailing tone of his conversation with men, he was uniformly kind and thoughtful about his animals. On the 28th October we reached the South Saskatchewan, at the same spot where I had lost my little black riding horse through the ice just thirteen years earlier. It was strange to look again at this and at other old scenes of camp and adventure in those times of former travel. Many of the old things of that time had gone for ever into the Silences. There was not a buffalo to be seen from Wmnipeg to the Mountains ; most of the Indian prairie tribes were broken up, and the wild men who had followed the great herds and lived on them were now scattered into a few isolated and remote reserves, destined soon to disappear altogether from the land. One thing was still here unchanged : it was the twihght. Before that hour came the stage had reached its stopping- place, and I was able to get away from its atmosphere to some neighbouring hill, or by the edge of some lakelet, where one could look again at some of the old sights, the great red sun going slowly down over the immense landscape, and leaving the western sky a vast half dome of rose-tipped wavelets from horizon to zenith. Scarce a sound but the splash of a wild duck on the placid lake, scarce a movement but the motion of a musquash swimming in the rainbow-coloured water, his head forming the beak of a bird-of-paradise, whose gorgeous wings and body plumage were the widening ripples that followed after. In the last days of October I reached the land north of the North Saskatchewan, which it was the object of my journey to see, and at a point fifty miles north of the river I turned back again to the south. I found that the million acres, which were to become the property of the syndicate destined to exploit them, foi-med an oblong block of territory tying to the south and west of the sub-Arctic forest which roughly bordered it on two sides. The Saskatchewan made the southern boundary, and a range of low hills, called the ' Thickwood HiUs,' the western. The land was of good quality, suitable for cultivation or grazing. It had water and timber, and it lay between two AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE 256 thousand to two thousand five hundred feet above sea-level. The trail of the fur traders to the north lay directly through it. In favourable years good wheat was grown on it, but summer frosts as early as the 20th August had often injured the grain. On the whole, looking to the great distance which intervened between this region and the railwaj^s, I could not recommend that it should be made the basis of a joint-stock company, the capital of which was to be one to two million doUars. That was the nature of the report which I submitted when I returned to London. But of this more anon ; I have stiU to get back there in this narrative. In the Indian reservation I found my old acquaintance, Mistawassis, the Cree chief of my former visit. Once a man of fame and influence over the prairies, he was now reduced to a very miserable condition. His story, told m his own way, put the whole question, as Indian story always did, in short and true language. * In the old daj's,' he said, ' before the Canadians came, we had food and clothes. At times, it is true, the snow caught our people on the plains and we froze, or at times the buffalo were few out on the prairies and we wanted food, but that was only at times ; now we are always in want of food, our clothes are fuU of holes, and the winter winds come through them, to find our bodies thin for want of food. I can go back for fifty years, but no time Like this time can I find. Our men and women put on rags over rags, but it is only hole over hole ; we cannot get warm. I once had plenty of horses, but they are gone one by one to buy food. Most of the men who came to this reserve with me are already dead, and only six j-ears have gone since we came here. They (the Government) were to have put glass windows in our huts, but only the frames without glass came. Our oxen have died dragging flour here from Prince Albert.' Times had indeed changed with poor old Mistawassis since I had seen him in 1870. He was then the owner of seven tj^ horses ; his buffalo robes were numerous ; he had hundreds of bags of pemmican wherewith to trade with the Company for tea and sugar. Alas for the Red Man ! it was the same here on this North Saskatchewan as it had been on the Assineboine, the Red River, the IMississippi, the Missouri, and a hundred 256 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY other rivers big and little over this Great West ; and yet it was not one hundred years since the ' Blackbird,' chief of the Minatarries, five hundred miles south, had asked that he might be buried on the top of a hill overlooking the Missouri, so that he might be able to see his white brother the trader passing in his trading boats up and down the river. I got back to the North Saskatchewan on 2nd November. The ice was now forming rapidly, and it would soon set in the broad channel, but we got over in the ' scow ' to Carlton with only a wetting. The question was now how to get back to the railwa3^ I hated the idea of the stage again. The pro- spect of another five days' ' boarding and bunking ' with the * civilisers ' was too much for me. The land north of the Saskatchewan was still safe ; I would keep to it, follow the old trail by Fort Pitt to Edmonton, and then make my way to Calgary, which at this time was the end of the railway east of the Rocky Mountains. It was a good six hundred miles, and the winter was fast setting in ; but I had been over the road thirteen years before, and some old friends in the Hudson Bay Company were still alive along it. Preliminaries were soon arranged through another old companion in travel,^ and on the same afternoon I recrossed the river to the north shore, saw the ' scow ' hauled up for the last time that year, and with old Dreever, a cousin of the man who had been my guide in the early part of the night, thirteen years ago, when we eluded the search of Riel and Company at old Fort Garry, I turned my head westward for Edmonton. We had an American buck- board and three horses, all Dreever's property. We camped that night by some large willows between two frozen ponds. Wlien twilight came, and the wind blew in gusts through the willows from far off, and I saw the horses feeding on the ridge against the afterglow, I felt a silent joy such as I had not known this time in its fulness. Here at last was the lonely land still untouched. ' When we drew up the scow,' I wrote that night, ' we cut the painter of " civilisation," but the savagery lies at the south side of the river.' For ten or twelve days we drove at a trot through a rolling land of mixed wood and grass, the latter now yellow like ripe corn, and growing in places three and four feet high. The 1 Mr. Clarke, Hudson Bay Company. CAMPING OUT 257 camping-places were good, with ample store of dry timber for fuel. ' What a delight it is to be making a camp once more with an honest man/ I find myself writing on the second even- ing out. On the 3rd and 4th November there were beautiful displays of the aurora before daybreak : veils of radiance flung across the stars ; great showers of red and yellow light pulsating and quivering from the northern horizon to the zenith. The dawn would sometimes break in the east in strange, deceptive mixings of earth and clouds. I would have forgotten where earth and sky had met in the east when day closed on the previous evening, and throwing back the blankets next morning, I would see what seemed to be an immense lake stretching far south-east to north-east, having its farther shore clearly defined with bays, inlets, and islands in it, the nearer shore only a short distance from our camp. The distant shore seemed to rise mto mountains, with snow on their summits, and stars above them. As dawn brightened the reflections in the lake began to change in colour from grey silver to molten copper, and then as the sun drew nearer the horizon the whole phantasm of lake, mountain, and stars melted into the realities of the daylight. Dreever, the driver, like all the good men of mixed parentage in the North- West, had in his nature the best instincts of the wilderness. He possessed the power also of telling its stories with a quaint choice of words which, though few and simple, showed his genius for reproducing the scene he wished to describe, with great and touching fidelity. One morning we sighted the ' Swan Lake,' a sheet of blue open water lying to the right. In the previous summer a French priest had come there with six or seven Cree Indians to hunt moulting geese and ducks, for the lake was a great haunt of wild birds. They made a small ' dug-out ' bateau, and went out into the lake ; a gale came on, the bateau overturned. The priest swam well, and, one by one, he brought the Indians to the overturned boat, to which they clung ; but they were not able to retain their holds, and, one after the other, they were washed off by the high-running waves. A child, his especial favourite, was thus washed away three times, and was as often rescued and brought to the drifting boat again. At last he too was swept off and lost. Then the priest said, ' Why should I live 1 ' All those R 258 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY who had come out with him in the boat were gone, and he it was who had made them come, so he went too. There, where the white strip of sand showed between the two lakes, the boat and the bodies were drifted in by the winds, and the priest and the Indians were buried there. We reached Fort Pitt long after dark on the evening of the 6th, We found here a strange mixture of the old and the new peoples ; the new represented by a Canadian police officer who was a son of Charles Dickens, and the old having as its champion the chief. Big Bear, who was supposed to be kept in awe by some ten or twelve of Mr. Dickens's police stationed at Fort Pitt. Mr. Dickens bore a striking resemblance to his illustrious father. He struck me as having a keen sense of humour. He had a habit of laughing, a soft, musical, thought- inspired laughter, which was quite peculiar to him, and which I think he may have contracted from the Indians, in whom I had occasionally noticed it, the result, perhaps, of long- continued silent watching and thinking upon animals, birds, and the ways of men and women in the wilderness. Ruskin has somewhere said that he didn't want to hear theological discussions or sermons about the possibihty of miracles as long as he could see the sun rise and set. The Red Indian and the white sick man represent, perhaps, the two classes of men who most frequently see the sun rise, and the other world is not far off to many of these people. Big Bear, who was supposed to be under the peculiar supervision of Mr. Dickens's poUce, had persistently refused to go upon a reservation. ' Why should I go into one place ? ' he used to ask the Hudson Bay officer and Mr. Dickens. ' Do I not see all the Indians who go into one place die off faster than ever they died by the guns and knives of the Blackfeet ! Are they not all starving ? ' They would tell him then that he was old, and that that was the reason why the Canadian Government wished him to be easy and comfortable on a reserve. To which Big Bear would reply, ' It is true that I am old, but I have fed myself for seventy j^ears. I can stUl hunt and feed myself, and I will stay in the open country tiU I die ; then, when I am dead, you can put me into some one place if you like.' I heard here the same story I had been told aU along the trail from the Touchwood Hills to Fort Pitt, a THE END OF THE OLD LIFE 259 distance of seven hundred miles as I had travelled. ' The Canadian newcomers were so rude and overbearing in their attitude to the older people of those regions that there was every prospect the latter would rise in rebellion and try to clear the new people out.' Hudson Bay men and old residents were unanimous in holding this opinion. They were right. Within two years from that time the rebellion occurred. It was easily suppressed. It was the last flicker of the old life. Henceforth there would be no prairies, no Indians, no moccasins, no old stories told by camp fires ; only barbed wire, the grain ' elevator,' the machine-made boot, and the two-cent newspaper. We reached Edmonton late on the night of the 12th Novem- ber in a driving snow-storm. The winter was now well in, and for the last three mornings the thermometer had been below zero at daybreak. CHAPTER XVI The Hudson Bay forts. Winnipeg. Back to London. Trouble on the Upper Nile. Revolt of the Mahdi. Destruction of the forces of Hicks Pasha and Baker Pasha. General Gordon sent to the Soudan. Gordon and the garrisons in danger. Delay and vacillation at home. Building of Nile 'whalers.' Ascent of the Nile. Throughout the five hundred miles covered since I had crossed to the north shore of the Saskatchewan at Carlton, the land, with the exception of the establishment of Mr. Dickens's small police party at Fort Pitt, was exactly as I had left it thirteen years before. At the Hudson Bay forts some ' old-timers ' had gathered — old French Canadian or Scottish servants of the Company, who had lived all their lives in the great wilderness, and now wished to die in it. These old people had their memories for company, and wonderful memories they were. Most, if not all of them, had seen ghosts at some time in their lives. It might have been when they were lying in camp, storm-bound, by the shores of the distant Lake Athabasca ; it might have been during some awful tramp of forty days and nights from Engewa to Esqui- maux Bay in Labrador ; it might have been during a stay, all alone, of a month in midwinter at La Pierre House on the Upper Yukon, when the other white man had died, and there had been no means of communicating the news of his death to the next nearest white man, who lived three hundred miles away on the Mackenzie River ; but ghosts the old men had seen some time or other m those long years. If the younger men hadn't themselves seen ghosts, they had heard their fathers or grandfathers talk of them often enough over the log fire in the winter evening. Years before in Red River I had heard a quaint story of old Prudens and the wild goose — a goose story, not a ghost story. One day in early spring, when the wild geese were passing high over the prairies to their breeding grounds in the Arctic, old Prudens in his farmyard on the Red River saw THE OLD AND THE NEW 261 a ' wavy ' detach itself from the flock overhead, and, flying downwards, ahght in the middle of his own domestic geese in the yard. Orders were given that the newcomer was not to be disturbed in any way. The ' wavy ' dwelt with his domestic brethren in plenty aU that summer ; but when autumn came the wail of the wild geese was heard again descending from the V-shaped flocks that now were passing south to the swamp- lands of the Mississippi. The call was more than the visitor could resist ; for one morning he spread his wings and, soaring aloft, rejoined his wild friends flying southwards. But, when spring returned, so too came the ' wavy ' to take up his summer station once more with the domestic cousins in the farmyard. For half a dozen autumns and springs this curious visit was repeated, until at last a springtime came but no ' wavy ' came with it to gladden the eyes of old Prudens. When the last flock had passed over, the old man said sorrowfully : ' He hasn't come back : I shall die this winter.' And die he did, said the story. At Fort Victoria on this journey I met a young Mr. Prudens. I asked him about his grandfather and the wild goose. Yes, he had heard the story often told by the old people, he said, perhaps it was only foolish talk ; but Dreever, my driver, didn't think so. He liked these old stories better than the new ones which had already come into the Saskatchewan in the form of the ten-cent American novel — the Dime Illustrated. ' These novels,' he once said to me, ' they don't do a man any good ; he only loses his sleep by them.' I didn't know about that, but I do know that I have learned more of the secret of life from the stories of the Red Man, the old French fur-hunter, and the old soldier, than ever I gathered from the pages of all the up-to-date and sitting-up-at-night novels that were ever written. Despite the snowstorm and a temperature below zero at Edmonton, I found that ' a boom ' had just passed over that old Indian trading station ; and in this boom my recent acquaintance, Johnny Prudens, had had a part. Prudens had a farm near the fort. The Edmonton ' boom ' had been started several hundreds of miles away, at Winnipeg, and Edmonton knew nothing about it. Suddenly a telegram arrived offering thirty thousand dollars for Prudens' farm. 262 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Prudens was away fur-trading at Lac La Biche. What is to be done ? A messenger cannot be got at less than two hundred dollars who will go in search of Prudens. Meanwhile, the telegraph operator sees his way to a deal on his own account. He and another partner start out to meet Prudens, and offer him six thousand doUars for his farm. Prudens sells, knowing nothing of the thirty thousand dollar limit. Then there is a long delay before the deeds of sale can be prepared and the money raised. At last this is effected, and all the parties concerned go to Winnipeg to settle matters and pay the pur- chase money. But by this time spring has come, and the boom has subsided, the necessary dollars cannot be obtained ; the operator has to put his recently acquired farm up for sale by auction — the reserve price being fifteen thousand dollars ; the audience burst into guffaws of laughter. Then twelve thousand dollars are tried ; no answer. Finally a purchaser is found at eight thousand dollars, less expenses. Wliat Prudens eventually got out of the transaction was not stated ; but the operator was glad to get back to his telegraph station the owner of a new buckboard. At Edmonton I was on the borderland again. Calgary, my rail destination, was only two hundred miles to the south ; and boom and counter boom would hence- forth form the staples of all conversation. How often I was to hear the boom story repeated ; the first fixing of the new city site ; the plans made out of square, corner lots, and market- places ; the names given : ' Rapid City," ' Humboldt City,' ' Manchester City,' ' White Mud City,' etc., etc. Then I would hear the story of the man who went in a buckboard to see for himself the destined centre of civiHsation and progress which had already arisen, it was said, in the wilderness ; how this man got on the stump of a tree in the centre of ' Manchester City,' and by springing on the stump had shaken the ' muskeg ' and quag- mire swamp for two hundred yards all round his footing ; how another man had taken his old German wife with him to prospect ' Rapid City,' a site somewhere on the South Sas- katchewan ; and how, when daylight had revealed the whole sad spectacle to the old lady, she had burst into a torrent of reproaches against her spouse, finishing up with imprecations upon the head of Horace Greely, whose well-known advice to the young men to ' go West ' had been the origin of aU her losses SOUTHWARD 263 and disappointments. ' If I meet that old , I '11 give him hell/ she would say. I left Edmonton on the 14th November, travelling by horse- sled due south. The snow was about eight inches deep, and we sped along at a good pace over the same traU as that which I had followed when going to the Rocky Mountain House in 1870. Curiously enough, I had as driver the same excellent half-breed who had been then my companion — Johnny Rowland — and, to make the coincidence stranger, we met on the trail Paul Foyale, who had also been with me on that occasion. On the night of the 15th we reached the crossing place at Battle River, where a Cree Indian, responding to the incoming civihsation, had built himself a tiny hut of wood and mud on the bank above the river. Coyote, the owner of the hut, was away hunting, but his famUy, represented by a very old grandmother, a wife and some children, were present. There was also a baby, four days old, who, the old lady informed me, was her sixtieth descendant then living. Except in the Egyptian Mummy Museum at Boulak I had not seen a human face so deeply wrinkled, nor hands so scraggy, nor nose so prominent ; yet the hair was still jet black as it hung down in wisps on either side of the gaunt cheeks. The baby's mother was at household work ; and the old grandmother was alternately engaged in holding the baby, and expelling a small black puppy dog, whose work in the world was to roll over everji^hing on the floor — threatening even to precipitate himself into the frying-pan wherein our supper was being prepared. We started from Coyote's at dayUght,and soon ran into lighter snow, for a ' Chinnook wind ' was blowing, and when we reached the Wolf creek the ground was so bare that the sleigh made bad progress. Next morning, the snow being quite gone, we packed our things on a loose horse, hid the sleigh in a thicket, himg up the harness in a tree, and set out riding the other two horses for the Red Deer River. Rowland rode bareback ; I had a saddle borrowed from the Coyote family. It proved an instrument of surpassing discomfort. Of Mexican origin, it had undergone many changes at the Coyotes' hands. What- ever had been capable of decay in it had gone, and only the hard bone framework remained. It was so small that one had to sit as much on the cantle as in the saddle. It was only a 264 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY question of time as to how long the agony could be borne. After three hours of inexpressible pain, we reached the banks of the Blindman's River, found a cart there, and with its aid got on to the Red Deer River at dusk. ' I have found a new instrument of human torture,' I wrote that night in my diary, ' in case civilisation reverts to the ancient practice — the Coyote saddle.' Two days later I reached the railway at Calgary, having passed on the second day from the mixed wooded and plain country into a region entirely devoid of tree or bush — a region which was one vast sea of short gray grass. These last two daj^s were of easy locomotion, thanks to the kindness of a Canadian gentleman named Beattie, who had recently settled within the wooded region lying north of the treeless waste. Crossmg the Bow River at sunset, Mr, Beattie's waggon narrowly escaped an accident. Ice was running in the river, making it difficult for the four horses to keep their footing in the strong current. One of the leaders fell and could not get his legs again ; so it was necessary to cut him clear of the harness. This was done by a smart J^oung fellow going out over the backs of the wheelers, but he too had to get into the water, and he was chilled to the marrow when we hauled him again into the waggon. It was dusk by the time we got across the Bow River, and drew up at the Calgary House in what was then a small village. The first thing was to get a drink of spirits for the half-drowned man ; but, unfortunately, in Calgary the sale of aU intoxicants was a crime punishable with heavy penalties. I took the hotel- keeper aside and told him the case was an extreme one, and the youth might easily die of cold and wet. We arranged a compromise ; the hotel man would serve up tea all round for our party, but in one cup he would put surreptitiously a glass of the forbidden liquor. Not a word was to be said, for there were police spies about, and discovery would be fatal to the hotel. Half a dozen cups of tea soon came in on a tray. No one said anything ; there was a profound silence as the tray went round. I never knew exactly what happened, but the only certain thing about the transaction was that the slip between the cup that held the whisky and the lip for which it was intended was complete. The half -drowned youth got only ' WITHIN SIGHT OF THE ROCKIES 265 the drink that cheered ; but who among our party received the inebriating part of the beverage never transpired. I left Calgary next morning by train for Winnipeg. For three hours before sunset on the previous evening the Rocky Moim- tains had been in sight to the west, and to the south one could see over the level waste the smoke of railway locomotives rising in tall, black columns above the clear prairie horizon. That the difficulty in the case of the stimulant for the half- frozen youth the previous evening had not been imaginary, a look into the next carriage in our train showed. Two men of the mounted police were there in irons on their way to prison. Except for the irons, no one could have imagined that they were prisoners ; the freest and easiest famiharity prevailed between them, their escort, and the other passengers. They were ' in ' for having given information to certain liquor-sellers that a police raid was being organised against them, and that fact may have been accountable for the exhilarating effect which the handcuffs appeared to exercise upon them. Anyway they were jollity itself, and it was only the escorting constables who looked sad and depressed. At midnight the train reached Medicine Hat. While da}"- light lasted not a tree or twig had broken the long monotony of the waste ; even the grass had disappeared, and great dunes of sand showed at intervals along the railway line, wind-blown ridges mixed with patches of snow. But all day long the wonderful snowy peaks showed weU above the prairie rim, and when I looked my last towards the west over a vast expanse of snow-covered plain, they still rose in an orange gloammg as grand and lonely as when I had first set eyes upon them in the days when the red man and the buffalo were almost the sole denizens of this mightj^ waste. As there was a delay of a couple of hours at Medicine Hat, I entered a small wooden saloon oyster bar in search of food and warmth, for it was miserably cold. A man came in shortly after. I have heard a good deal of hard swearing in my day, but never anything that approached the prodigious blasphemy'' of that Medicine Hat man. He particularly swore against some place near Medicine Hat which he had left that day, where the temperature was, he averred, with many impreca- tions directed against anj^thing from a thermometer to an 266 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY oyster tin, exactly one hundred and ten degrees below zero. If you were disposed to doubt or question the accuracy of that reading of the thermometer, the alternative was like that which Cromwell gave his Irish prisoners, only that Connaught was left out. I got to Winnipeg on 22nd November, and left it on the 25th. Our passage from a prohibition country into one of free drinks was curiously coincident with what at first appeared to me to betoken a tendency towards tooth-washing in the travelling community such as I had not before met with in the west. The tumbler on the washstand of the sleeping car was in constant requisition. After a time, when at last I found it in its proper place in the dressing-room, there was a strong spirituous aroma about it which suggested the possibility of its having been put to other uses than tooth-washing. At Milwaukee I took advantage of a halt to look up my good friend Bill Macauley at the station depot. I soon found engine 218. Bill was burnishing his steed. I introduced myself to him. ' Was you the man," he said, ' that telegraphed the superintendent to ask my name ? ' ' Yes. What hap- pened ? ' ' Wall, he came along one morning, and ses he : " Bill, what game have you been up to ? " " Why, Boss ? " ses I. " Cause," ses he, " there 's a chap up in St. Paul's wiring down to know the name of the driver of your engine, and saying he 's mightily obliged to you. What for ? " I told him it must be the man I found lame on the track, and that I just picked him up on my engine and caught the express for him. " Well, Bill," ses he, " you mustn't do that again, Bill." ' Then Bill told me that he was from Belfast ; came out as a boy, was doing well, liked to give a hand to anybody that needed it, and never gave a thought to it again. So we parted. I reached London shortly before Christmas. Serious news had been received from the Soudan. The profound stupor which had fallen upon the peoples of the Nile valley one year earlier had suddenly been broken by an ominous occurrence. Hicks Pasha, an Anglo-Indian ofiicer, with some six or eight English officers and ten thousand native soldiers and followers (chiefly men of Arabi's old army, who had been sent in chains to the Soudan in the winter of 1882) had been destroyed on the march from the Upper Nile to Kordofan by a Nubian SURPRISING NEWS FROM THE SOUDAN 267 Mohammedan Mahdi at the head of revolting tribes who had flocked to his standard from all parts of the Soudan. This was probably the last portion of the Empire from which news of trouble was anticipated. Everybody had been talking so much of the love borne to us by the peoples of the Nile valley that we reaUy had come to think that Tel-el-Kebir had closed the Egyptian question once and for all, and there was nothing more to be done but to send half a dozen Englishmen into the heart of the Soudan to ensure its easy occupation. The conquest of Arabi had given the god Jingo a new start, and some among his votaries were even disposed to regard John BuU as his prophet — a profitable prophet, grateful and comforting to everybody ; London, a modern Memphis, erecting statues to its specially selected BuUs, and setting up the Golden Calf for universal worship. Nevertheless, at this particular moment, Christmas 1883, the inner councils of London presented a strange picture of weakness and indecision. The question of what had to be done in the Soudan could have been decided in six hours by the same number of experi- enced officers assembled at a round table. Whether the Soudan was to be abandoned or retained required action in either case. If the garrisons were to be withdrawn, the roads for retreat must be kept open at any cost. If the revolt of the Mahdi was to be suppressed, an army must be sent to do it, and which- ever course was to be followed, no time must be lost. The tide of revolt was rapidly rising in the Soudan, and the main lines of retreat or of advance were certain to have their com- munications interrupted by the increasing volume of the revolt. But if there was indecision in the governing mind in London, the perplexity and weakness of the administrative powers in Cairo were ten times more pronounced. At this very moment, the 19th December, they were sending from Cairo to Suakim on the Red Sea a wretched force of three thousand six hundred nondescript men with six guns, under Baker Pasha (whom we last met at the tombs of the Bulls). The composition of this absurd expedition, and the commission given to its commander, are to-day accurate measures by which judgment can be formed upon the foresight and ability of the English administration then in power in Cairo. 268 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Baker Pasha was ' to have supreme civil and mihtary com- mand in all parts of the Soudan which might be reached by his forces/ He was commissioned ' to pacify the country between Suakim and Berber (two hundred and forty miles) ; but was only to resort to force after all other means of con- ciliation had failed/ It wiU be sufficient to say that, three days after landing, he advanced three miles from the shore with his three thousand men ; met a body of ' about twelve hundred ' Arabs, armed with swords and spears ; his forces were almost entirely annihilated in a few minutes, leavmg in the hands of the Henandoa Arabs three thousand rifles, six cannon, all their baggage, ammunition, and clothing. An eye- witness thus described the scene : ' Cavalry, infantry, mules, camels, falling baggage and dying men, crushed into astruggling, surging mass. The Egyptians were shrieking madly, hardly attempting to run away, but trying to shelter themselves one behind another.' Baker Pasha and his officers did what they could to stay the rout ; then they galloped for the shore. Even this disaster does not appear to have awakened the governing minds in Cairo and London to a sense of the real situation in the Soudan. That is the curse which invariably attends upon the fool's paradise of ' Make-believe.' I went frequently to London in these days, but saw nowhere any sign of preparation nor heard any rumours showing that there was the shghtest realisation of the true state of matters existing in the Soudan. On 18th January 1884, General Gordon, as everybody knows, was despatched at one day's notice to Khartoum, with one other officer, his mission being to bring away the garrisons and to establish settled government in the Soudan. Seven weeks had then passed since the news of Hicks' disaster had been received. Could human fatuity have reached a deeper point ? A week after Gordon's departure, I received at Devonport a summons to attend the War Office. I made sure the order meant something for the Nile, and I was never more disappointed than when I found it was only a confidential civU mission to the Government of Canada, the land I had just returned from. I made it a rule of life to take any service that was offered, and never to ask for anything except active service. In the present instance, it happened that the mission CONFUSION AT HEADQUARTERS 269 to Canada which I was now asked to undertake had been accepted by Colonel Stewart of the 11th Hussars, but his sudden departure with General Gordon for Khartoum made it neces- sary to get another officer for Canada, and I had been selected for the service. I sailed from Liverpool the first week in February, had a fifteen day voj^age of exceptional severity even for that season of the year, and in the course of the following six weeks saw a good deal of the Canadian administra- tion. Lord Lansdowne was then the governor-general, newly arrived, and the veteran Sir John Macdonald the premier of the Dominion. Early in April I was back in London, and it was possible to take up Soudan affairs again. There was little change in the situation. Unparalleled vacillation of purpose had continued to mark the whole conduct of affairs ; telegrams were flying between Cairo and London ; expeditions were sent to the Red Sea littoral, only to be recalled after a lot of useless slaughter had occurred. It is difficult to go back now after these twenty-five long years are gone, and to read again the official records and diaries of that time, the real truth of which still remains untold and unacknowledged. What was the meaning of all this beating of the air, these masses of useless verbiage, these opinions and counter-opinions, these short marchings out and marchings back again, in which eight long months were wholly wasted at a time when every hour of every day was precious to us ? Let us see whether now, with the experience of the intervening years, and the recollec- tions of my personal share in the work of the months following my return from Canada, I can put together some tangible theory of that fatal interval. Three salient factors have to be dealt with in the matter — the man Gordon, the men who held in their hands his fate, and the physical, military, and economic situation of Khartoum at the time. Readers of General Gordon's life will remember that he spent the greater part of the year 1883 in Palestine, where he was engaged in visiting the sites identified with the history of the Old and New Testaments. How Httle his mind con- cerned itself with the affairs of Egypt those who have read the voluminous letters written by him from Palestme, and pub- lished by his sister. Miss Gordon, will not need to be reminded ; but to the agents and servants of the Egyptian bondholders 270 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the presence in Palestine of their great antagonist could only appear as a menace to their designs upon Egypt. So far for the man Gordon. Let us turn to the actual position at Khartoum immediately after Gordon arrived there. From the first day of his arrival, the strategic position was almost a hopeless one. From one end of the Soudan to the other the Mahdi was triumphant. All the garrisons, which it was the particular mission of Gordon to relieve and withdraw, were sealed up within their dozen towns, hundreds of miles apart, unable to hold any communication with each other or with Khartoum : even this place was menaced. Weeks before Gordon reached Khartoum, despairing messages had been received from it in Cairo along the thin thread of the telegraph, which was now the sole frail link that remained between Egypt and the Soudan, Dongola was doubtful ; Suakim on the Red Sea was menaced. The line Khartoum — Berber — Abu Hamad — Korosko — Assouan formed the only route by which com- munication was possible, and formed a route, too, along which it was easy to maintain communication. It would not have cost England or Egypt twenty thousand pounds to make that road as secure against the Mahdi as was the remainder of the line from Assouan to Cairo. Only two places on the six hundred miles between Korosko and Khartoum required looking to : Berber, two hundred miles north of Khartoum, and Abu Hamad, three hundred and thirty-seven miles from it. From Abu Hamad to Korosko the desert was Egypt's. I do not think that in the whole range of modern military history another such example of stupidity can be found to equal the omission on the part of the governing authorities in Cairo to secure the route Korosko to Khartoum after General Gordon had passed along it to his destination. At whose door that responsibility should rest I have still no means of deciding ; but when I read again, after the lapse of more than twenty years, the voluminous despatches and telegrams which cover the momentous months between January and May 1884, all the old wonder I used to experience at that terrible omission comes back, and I ask myself afresh what were all these ministers, agents, generals, sirdars, and high functionaries in Cairo dreaming of when they allowed that single door of relief and communication to be closed upon the man we had sent so glibly to his fate ? It CONFLICTING COUNSELS 271 was so easy to keep the door open ; two thousand men sent to Berber via Korosko and Abu Hamad would have sufficed. Berber was only a three- weeks' journey from Cairo via Korosko ; it would have cost twenty thousand pounds. From the day Gordon passed Abu Hamad on his way to Khartoum, until the fall of Berber sealed his fate, there elapsed a period of about sixty days. During that interval the various military and civil authorities in Cairo were exercising their minds in planning costly expeditions to Suakim, which were as remote from the possibility of reaching Berber, under the conditions then existing between that place and Suakim, as they were from effecting the occupation of Timbuctoo. Nay, they were even rendering the problem of communicating with Khartoum by any road increasingly difficult on every side. Writing in his celebrated Khartoum journal on 22nd Sep- tember 1884, Gordon has entered remarkable words. He quotes the Mudir of Dongola's observation to him in March that the authorities in Cairo seemed desirous of ' riveting the tomb- stone over Khartoum." And again, four days later, he writes on 26th September : ' It is a curious fact that any effort to relieve the garrisons is contemporaneous with the expiration of the period stated in March regarding the time they could hold out, viz. six months. There are some ugly suspicious circumstances all the way through.' Undoubtedly there were, but I have never been able, then or now, when five-and-twenty years have gone, to say where the ugly suspicious circumstances ended, and the dense stupidities began. My own personal reading now of the events of the time is, that there was only one man then in authority to whom the fate of Charles Gordon in Khartoum was a real, tangible, ever-present anxiety — that man was Lord Wolseley, With him I had many interviews after my return in April 1884 from my second visit to Canada, and we discussed at length the various routes by which Khar- toum could be reached by troops. By men who knew what had been done on the Red River Expedition in 1870, the practicability of ascending the Nile in boats such as those used to reach Fort Garry could not be doubted ; but we were only a small band against the many military competitors in Cairo who now came forward with proposals for expeditions on their own account to the Soudan. 272 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY What struck one most about these proposals was the fact that the mam point in the problem was almost invariably left out of the calculation — time. It would have been possible to get into the Soudan from any part of the coast of Africa if time had been of no importance ; but how was the relief of Gordon to be accomplished by an English force in the interval of the few months still remaining to the garrison of Khartoum before starvation would compel it to surrender ? The cruel part of the proceeding was that this war of the ways enabled the Government of the day to postpone the means by which alone relief could be effected. Through May, June, and July the talk of relief went on, but not one effort was made to give money. At last, late on the 4th August, I received a telegram from Lord Wolseley, who was then the adjutant-general of the War Office. It merely said : ' I want to see you here to-morrow.' Of course, I guessed what it meant. The Nile route had been selected for the attempt to reach Khartoum. Next morning I was in PaU Mall, but only to find that the final word had not been spoken by the Government. Even at this eleventh hour aU that could be said was : ' We have it in contemplation to despatch a strong brigade of British troops to or towards Dongola by the Nile route. Proceed at once to find four hundred boats similar to those used in the Red River Expedi- tion. If you cannot find such boats, you will have to build them.' Another officer, a comrade of the Red River, Colonel AUej-ne, R.A., was joined with me in this belated search. A bundle of papers was handed to us, but the purport of these we knew only too well, and a hansom cab was more to our purpose than aU the tons of writing at the moment on the tables of the War Office. We laid our plans on the 5th, and by the evening of the 6th August two things were clear : not in England could be found four hundred new, sound boats fit for the work they would have to do ; build them we must. In the bundle of War Office papers handed to us was one in which the Admiralty had declared that the construction of four hundred boats would take from two to three months. I had been too long as a fly on the great wheel of English officiaUsm not to know something about the limits of time or cost given by our great A TRIAL NILE BOAT 273 spending departments in cases such as this. The difference between private and public enterprise in England in all these matters can be measured by the difference between an express train and a parliamentary one. With only the aid of a hansom cab, we found that some Lambeth boatbuilders would build boats for us within four weeks from the date on which they got the order. If there was one boatbuilder on the Lambeth wharves who would give us five boats in four weeks, surely aU England could supply the remaining three hundred and ninety- five in the same period. The next things to decide were the shape, size, and weight of the boat. This we did at Portsmouth on the 7th August. We got together in the dockyard the load the boat would have to carry — biscuit, preserved meat, groceries, tent, arms, ammunition sufficient for twelve men during one hundred days. We put the load with twelve men into a man-of-war gig in the basin, found that load was too heavy for the boat, and the boat too heavy for the work we wanted ; and then and there we laid the luies of our new, ideal Nile ' whaler.' She was to be thirty feet in length, six feet six inches in beam, two feet three inches in depth ; to weigh, with fittings complete, about one thousand pounds. I have told the story of these boats in the Campaign of the Cataracts, and must now press on to the long road we have before us. It will be enough to saj^ that, before any official sanction could be given to spend a five- pound note on this work, we had designs, specifications, dimensions, all finished ; a trial boat actually being built at Portsmouth in one week ; cargo ' found,' as the Official History of the Soudan Caynpaign says, ' to answer admirabl}' ' ; and, by the evening of the 11th August, we were satisfied that, once the Government sanction was given, we could, by ' touch- ing the button,' set forty-seven boatbuilding firms at work from Peterhead round the English coast to Liverpool. At last, late in the afternoon of 12th August, a war official came to the temporary office in which I was working to summon me to the office of a high parliamentary Government official. I found there several heads of the contract and finance depart- ments. The parliamentary official began by observing that he under- stood I had been charged with inquiries and arrangements as s 274 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY to boatbuilding on an extensive scale. I answered that that was so ; that our work of design, preparation, and inquiries had for some days been finished ; and that we only awaited the word ' go ' to proceed to immediate action. Then there came a shght pause, broken by the high ofl&cial asking in a doubtful tone if I really thought those four hundred boats could be buUt and shipped from England in the time he had seen stated in a paper of mine — one month ? I answered that I had not much doubt of the general correctness of that esti- mate. Then came another Uttle pause, followed by the official's writing a few words upon a half-sheet of notepaper, which he handed to me. I read, ' Colonel Butler, you may proceed with the construction of four hundred boats.' That was good, but his next spoken words were better : * Gentle- men,' he said, turning to the representatives of the depart- ments of finance, contracts, and control, ' I have assembled you here to tell you that Colonel Butler has a blank cheque for the building and equipment of these boats, and his decisions as to expenditure are not to be questioned.' I bowed and retired. That evening forty-seven telegrams to forty-seven boatbuilders went out. The Nile Expedition had begun. But what a cloud hung over it ! Turn it in one's mind in any way, the problem came back to the same point — the 12th of August ! How easy it would all have been had this decision been given two months earlier ! The whole tone and temper of the Government came out in the despatch which was sent at this time to Egypt by the Secretary of State for War. There are passages in that docu- ment which literally take one's breath away when we read them to-day. This : ' Her Majesty's Government are not at present convinced that it will be impossible for General Gordon, acting on the instructions he has received, to secure the withdrawal from Khartoum, either by the employment of force or of pacific means, of the Egyptian garrison, and of such of the inhabitants as may desire to leave.' And this : ' Her Majesty's Government are of opinion that the time has arrived when some further measures for obtaining accurate informa- tion as to his (Gordon's) position, and, if necessary, for rendering him assistance, should be adopted.' OBSTRUCTION 275 And this : ' Her Majesty's Government have therefore come to the con- clusion that the best mode in which they can place themselves in a position to undertake the relief of General Gordon, should the necessity arise, would be by the provision of means by which such an expedition could be despatched to Dongola, and, as circumstances at the time may render expedient, to Berber and Khartoum.' And this : ' This movement could, in the opinion of the Government, scarcely fail in the first instance to afford the means of obtaining full and accurate information as to the position and intentions of General Gordon, and it is probable that such a demonstration would in itself be sufiicient to strengthen his position, and to secure the co-operation of the tribes which have not joined the movement of the Mahdi, to such an extent as to enable General Gordon to secure the principal object of his mission.' I think the despatch from which these passages are taken stands absolutely without a parallel in history ; the force of fiction, make-believe, and pretence could go no further. One can realise, too, from this despatch the forces that were against us in the expedition now beginning. The permanent Govern- ment, that is to say, the vast army of under-secretaries, assistant imder-secretaries, chief clerks and their assistants, were opposed to us. The temporary Government, i.e. the ministers of the time, were at best lukewarm in support of this half still-bom child of theirs. Perhaps of both it might have been said that they were more passive than active in their attitude towards us, but even that means much where the balance between failure and success is in even pause of poise. The London press were strongly against us, but, worse than all, British Cairo, civil and military, were to a man against us. Every general who had his own pet plan for going to Khartoum had the same reasons for not liking our methods of going there as the French marshals in Spain had for look- ing with no friendly eye upon each other's operations in the Peninsula. As for the attitude of the civil Government, the point need not be laboured ; the telegrams exchanged between Khartoum and Cairo tell their own story. 276 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY From the 12th August, when official sanction was given, the work of boat preparation went on night and day ; and so well did the contractors keep their appointed times that, within the time specified in my original promise, the whole four hundred boats were dehvered, put on board of eleven ships, and the ships had actually sailed for Egypt. Nearly one hundred boats were clear out of England twenty-seven days after the orders to build them had gone out. Four thousand tons of food had gone forward to Egypt in the same time. I reached Cairo early on 25th September, and went straight to the Boulak railway station to see some sixty of our boats pass by on the railway waggons to Assiout. That morning one hundred of them passed the station, not a boat damaged or a plank stirred. They were due to arrive at Assiout next night. So far we were a full week ahead of our estimate of time, but now came a check from a quarter least expected. On the 'preceding night the Egyptian army officials had sent eighty waggons loaded with beans, lentils, and butter from Cairo along this route to Assiout, thereby blocking all access of our boats to the Nile for three whole days. When I reached Assiout on 1st October the_..;block had just ceased. I had been hoarding the days gained as a miser hoards gold, and now half my gains had gone through this action of the Egyptian army. I went to the telegraph office and wired the chief of the staff at Wady Haifa :— ' Three days lost through action of E.A. officials. Would it not be better to send the Egyptian army back to the beans and lentils, than to send the beans and lentils forward to the Egyptian army ? ' I got to Assouan at daylight on 7th October. At noon thirty-two of our boats arrived there ; that evening we anchored them at the foot of the First Cataract, and next morning the ascent of the cataract began. It was to be the first important test of the planks of the boats to overcome a Nile rapid. The prophecies of failure had been many. It will suffice to say that, when evening came, thirty-two boats were at the head of the cataract anchored opposite Philae, not one having suffered the smallest injury m the ascent. Then on to Wadi Haifa. The boats were now arriving hand over hand, and on 18th October one hundred and thirty of them WASTE OF PRECIOUS TIME 277 were at the foot of the Second Cataract. Here, again, the plan was marred by that worst of all combinations — the men who won't see and the men who don't see. They were in high place, and I was powerless against their ruling. At this point that ruling was destined eventually to kiU the expedi- tion. The order was given that the EngUsh boats, now numbering one hundred and thirty, were to remain idly at anchor at the foot of the Second Cataract, while some sixty or seventy heavy native craft were to have the right-of-way through the Bab-el-Kebir (the Big Gate of the Cataract). This decision cost us a loss of ten darjs. We had, in fact, been doing too well up to this point. It was but seven weeks since these boats had their keels laid in Ensr- land, and here we had over one hundred of them one thousand miles up the Nile, and the remainder were coming on in quick succession. The Second Cataract of the Xile has lived in my memorj' since October 1884 as a spot in the world where I suffered mental torture of the acutest kind — that which results from seeing terrible disaster ahead and being powerless to prevent it. The essence of the problem which this expedition had to solve was a simple one. We cannot afford to lose one hour ; we are two months too late at this work ; it is a race against famine ; there is still a certain margin of time left ; in what manner can that narrow balance be best used ? What is the earliest date at which a brigade of British infantrj- can be assembled at Korti on the Nile, readj^ to march across the two hundred miles of Bayuda desert to the Nile again at Metemmeh, a place within one hundred miles of Khartoum ? Korti was distant from the Second Cataract three hundred and thirty miles. The first hundred of these miles held eight cataracts or rapids, aU of them combined forming, in the opinion of Commander Hamill, the same amount of obstruction to naviga- tion as the Second Cataract offered in its total of nine miles. There were thus three hundred and ten to three hundred and twenty miles of good water, and nearly twenty of cataract and rapid between the two places. Now there was no difficulty whatever in taking our boats, light, in fifteen days from the head of the Second Cataract to Korti. I did the journey myself in that time travelling light. If we allowed double time, or, say, even thirty -five days, for boats carrying their full loads 278 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of one hundred days' food for the men, it was quite possible to have placed at Korti a daily average of two hundred British soldiers in twenty boats, each boat having on arrival at Korti sixty-five days' food and three hundred rounds of ammunition per man. To replace at Korti the thirty-five days' food eaten out on the upward journey, it was only necessary to have added four extra boats to every unit of twenty boats. These four extras would have returned empty from Korti, their surplus cargoes enabling the two hundred men to have their food com- pleted for one himdred days onward. This simple plan would have resulted in assembling at Korti, by a date which I shall presently deal with, five thousand men ready to march across the one hundred and eight miles to Metemmeh. Now, remember that we had one hundred and thirty of our ' whalers ' at Wady Haifa, below the Second Cataract, on 18th October, fifty of them on 14th October. It took three days to pass boats to the head of the Cataract. Had we been allowed to begin passing them up on the 18th October at the rate of even thirty a day (we did fifty a day easily later), we should undoubtedly have been able to have the first batch of twenty-four ready to embark their crews and supplies on the 23rd October. Thirty-five days later, viz, on the 27th Novem- ber, this unit of twenty-four boats would have been at Korti ; every day after the 27th November would have seen two hundred men landed there, with one hundred days' food, ammunition, tents, etc., etc., complete. To collect five thousand men at Korti would have required twenty-five days from the 27th November, so that on the 22nd December the last of the force could have started from Korti to Metemmeh, the advanced portion of it, say three thousand men, having left that place fourteen days earlier, on the 8th December. Fifteen days later, viz. on the 23rd December, these three thousand men could have been at Metemmeh, within one hundred miles of Khartoum ; they would have met at Met- emmeh Gordon's four steamers ; and the same journey which Sir Charles Wilson made one month later would have been accomplished with the advantages of a higher Nile level, Khartoum still held by Gordon, and the fact that another two thousand troops were marching from Korti to their aid. Let us turn now to what this march across the desert would A LOST OPPORTUNITY 279 have needed. That too was a simple matter. It would have required five thousand camels carrying the kits, food, water, blankets and ammunition for these five thousand men. Water for seven days only need have been carried, as at Gakdul the tanks and water-skins would have been refilled. Water, 100 lbs. ; food for thirty days, 90 lbs. ; ammunition (200 rounds), 10 lbs. ; kit, 20 lbs., leaving a good 150 lbs. available on each camel for reserves of food, hospital comforts, ammuni- tion, etc. One camel-driver to every three camels. This plan would have enabled some six hundred thousand pounds of food-stuffs to have been carried across with the infantry to the Nile at Metemmeh ; more than half the camels would have then been available to return to Gakdul and Korti to assist the carrying over of other supplies and the accumula- tion of reserves of all kinds at Metemmeh, which would be the new base for the forward movement on Khartoum by the left bank of the Nile. This final advance would have had Gordon's four steamers to accompany it on the Nile. Omdurman was held by Gordon until the 15th January. Allowing ten days for this final advance upon Kiiartoum, and a halt of three to five days at Metemmeh for the arrival of the two thousand infantry there, the united column of five thousand men would have been before Omdurman on or about the 6th of January. Of course it can never be known if the arrival of that force would have stiU saved Khartoum on that date. It fell to the Mahdi twenty days later, as we know ; but famine was then the chief if not the only cause of the disaster, and it had only become acute during the week previous to the faU. A word as to this march across the desert. The Bayuda is not a desert in the sense of the deserts of Nubia and Egypt ; it has vegetation, and its surface is hard and, generally speaking, good for marching. The season of the year was most favour- able, and, above all, in physique and strength the men were perfect ; the six weeks' pulHng at the oar, tugging at the track-lmes, and ' portaging ' had made them hard as nails and fit for any work. The passage of the Bayuda, with kits and baggage, etc., carried on camels, would have been child's play to such men. If the papers of that anxious time, between the 18th October and the 20th December 1884, are still preserved 280 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY in the records of the War Office, there will be found in them many telegrams and memos from me urging those who had then the executive management of the expedition in their hands to the adoption of methods of loading, movement, and progress of our boats very different from those which had then been ordained and accepted. Nevertheless, although we had lost by the end of October a full fortnight out of these precious days hitherto saved in the estimate of time given in London on 10th August, there was still time, as subsequent events proved, to have reached the Nile at Metemmeh as sketched above, if even on this first day of November other counsels had prevailed at Wady Haifa, and our boats had not had imposed upon them a load of over half a ton in weight more than that which they had been designed to carry. These extra twelve hundred pounds were destined to lose us another ten or a dozen days on the passage to Korti. I must pass on from the thought of that horrible time. It was one long, unbroken nightmare to me. CHAPTER XVII Delays on the Nile. Success of the ' whalers.' Letters. Korti. The Desert column. Fall of Khartoum. The River column. Kirbekan. News of Gordon's death. Lord Wolseley left Wady Haifa for Dongola in the end of October, in the hope, I think, that the confusion existing at the former place would tend to diminish, through its com- ponent parts being drawn off up the river after him, but this result did not follow. Things became more congested and confused at Wady Haifa. No dominant mind, no far-seeing eye remained there. The rival interests and ambitions in staff and in command which had done so much harm in Cairo during the six preceding months had now again an opportunity of showing themselves, and I think that I am well within the truth when I say that to this cause must be ascribed the loss of another week, or perhaps ten days, in the steady and con- tinuous flow of the troops up the river. Our boats came on up the Second Cataract in ever-increasing numbers ; by the middle of November we had despatched one hundred and thirty of them with thirteen hundred troops, and seventy more with food and ammunition, for Dongola, and we had another two hundred boats, fitted and made ready to the last pin, waiting to embark at Gemai, at the head of the Second Cataract, their two thousand more men. But these two thousand men were still far down the river at and below Assouan. During the seventeen days following the 6th November, only fifteen weak companies of infantry were ready for embarkation at Gemai. On 16th November Lord Wolseley came tearing down from Dongola, doing his fifty miles a day on a camel. I met him at two in the 'morning at Gemai. What had happened ? Why were not the troops moving up in greater numbers ? Whj;' were the companies that had already embarked not doing 281 282 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY quicker work in the ascent of the river ? These and other questions he asked me while the train at Gemai was halting, taking water. I could only speak of my own part in this great work. He was bound for Wady Haifa and would there see for himself. We had sent off two hundred boats ; we had two hundred more lying idle waiting for troops sixty yards from where we were talking. As for their progress, it was no wonder their work had been slow in the rapids ; they were carrying twenty-one days* more food than the load they had been designed and buUt to carry. I had protested that this load was excessi-ve, but I could do no more. I found at Haifa I had ceased to stand where I did from the first inception of the enterprise in London up to the day — the fatal day — that Lord Wolseley had left Haifa for Dongola. Next morning, the 17th November, I started up river to hasten the boats in their ascent. In five days, working from dawn to dark, I reached Sarkamatto, at the head of the great Dal Cataract, over ninety miles of the worst water on the Nile, including the cataracts of Semneh, Ambigole, Tanjour, Akasha and Dal. These five days had revealed to me the physical causes of the slow ascent of our boats over these river obstacles, and in addition had laid bare a good deal of the moral obstruc- tions to our progress. At all the stations on the banks where garrisons of the Egyptian army had been placed, with the ex- ception of Semneh, the favourable or friendly mind was con- spicuous by its absence. In the ranks of the Egyptian army our boat expedition had few friends, nor was this matter for much wonder when the history of the previous six months was taken into account. The Egyptian army of that time was, in its English officers, as strong in ambition as its rank and file were weak in striking power. From Sirdar to junior English subaltern, its officers were as the dogs of war straining on the leash. In the conflict of routes, the one by the Nile had been the peculiar perquisite of the Egyptian army, and portions of that force had been gradually moving up the Nile since December 1883. These units were now — November 1884 — echeloned along the river at various points between the Second and Third Cataracts to the number of about three thousand men, and they had to be fed, camped, and generally supplied by the river route. It was for this supply service MORE OBSTRUCTION 283 that the heavy native craft had been passed through the Second Cataract in the end of October, keeping back our English boats, and losing us, as I have said, a full fortnight of our precious time ; and all for nothing, as the event proved, for almost the whole of this native craft to which right-of-way had been given became wrecks, either in the Second Cataract or in the succeeding rapids through which I had just passed. The shores of the Nile below Semneh were literally lined with these wrecks. The course that was pursued with regard to the Egyptian army seemed to me to be the worst of three possible alternatives : first, they might have been withdrawn altogether to Lower Egypt, thereby relieving the strain of transport by thirty per cent, and leaving our road clear ; second, they might have been pushed on to Dongola, marching by the right bank of the Nile, and at Dongola they could have lived on that province ; and, third, they might be left, as they were left, between the Second and Third Cataracts, to lessen our supplies, block our way, and be all but useless to us in any way. The first course would have left the Egyptian army officers with a grievance, but it would have meant for us a clear road to our destination. The second course would have had the great advantage of making the Egyptian officers willing rivals in this enterprise ; the third and adopted course not only kept the grievance intact, but it added fully twenty per cent. to the innumerable difficulties which we had to face and over- come. There was yet another alternative possible : it was to have sent the Egj'ptian army to Suakim, and with three or four battahons of British troops from India, let it hammer away at the Dervishes under Osman Digna from that side, and endeavour to open the road to Berber, If it failed, no great harm would have been done ; if it succeeded, the gain to the general stock of the effort to save Gordon and Khartoum would have been very great. At Dal on the 21st November I had realised that, under the existing conditions of affairs, the prospects of reaching Gordon in time had already become terribly doubtful. I wired back to Haifa a list of the things that seemed to me to demand the quickest measures of reform, and then I pushed on for the head of the Third Cataract, with the intention of getting into direct touch with Lord Wolseley, and laying my accumulated 284 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY knowledge before him. Working, as before, from early light to dusk, I reached the head of the Third Cataract on the 27th November, having averaged twenty miles a day, cataracts, rapids, and aU included. But the telegraph had beaten me, notwithstanding all my haste. I was about to experience at the head of the Third Cataract what was perhaps the cruellest check of all my life. I knew the whole thing now. It was the last hour in the chances still left to us of saving Gordon. This was the 28th November. No boat save mine had yet passed this Third Cataract. Why ? Because three weeks had been thrown away in the starting of the boats ; because, even at this eleventh hour, our boats were loaded up to their gunwales and down to the water's edge with cargo largely in excess of their rightful loads ; because, as yet, the work was being done under the benumbing influence of aU the doubt and distrust in the possibility of our EngHsh boats overcoming the diffi- culties of this long river ascent, which the six months' fight between the Army Councillors in Cairo had long since made the common property of the officers and men of the rival armies in Egy]pt. Instead of being taken at once as the sole means of reaching in time, and with sufficient force, the destination for which we were bound, our boats had been grudgingly accepted by the various chiefs, staffs, and departments as things which had to prove their fitness for the task before any one would believe in them. Hence there had grown up the thousand queries and the querulousness which, in an enterprise such as this we were engaged upon, meant a lot of lost power in every day's work and in most men's individual efforts ; the horrible ' What is the use ? ' and * Why is this last hour asked of us ? ' which knock off from every hour some moments and from the day's work a few miles. Oh, how I gnashed my teeth at this apathy, as in that upward journey of ten days, through cataract, whirlpool, and rapid, I saw it, heard it, and felt it in heart and soul ; at military station, on sandbank ; in the lifting of a biscuit-box ; in the halt or the start ; until at last, by the sheer dumb proof which the boats were themselves giving of their capacity to their captains and their crews, belief in them grew stronger, and many ceased at length to doubt, ' crab,' and grumble. But the moment of their admitted triumph A REBUFF AT HAFIR 285 had not yet arrived, and already the sands in the hour-glass of possible success were running very, very low. I have said that I was beaten by the telegraph. It was in this way. I firmly believed that if I could get to Lord Wolseley for even one hour, I should have little difficulty m showing him the exact state of matters over all the two hundred and twentj'' miles between Dongola and Wady Haifa. I was not at that moment aware of the contents of the letter he had received at Wady Haifa on the 18th November from Gordon, dated Khartoum, 4th November, but I knew that Khartoum was hard pressed by foes without and want of food within, and I was as certain as man can be that with our boats, and in the food they carried, lay the only chance we had of arriving in time to save the town. There was no use ui deploring the time already lost, but to get the last mile of distance for our boats out of every remaining day, and save the first and last glint of daylight for our work m the time that yet remained to us, did seem to me an object worth every risk that could be run to win it. It was in this effort that the telegraph beat me. It had been at work from Wady Haifa to Dongola. It was decreed that I was not to pass beyond the head of the Third Cataract ! I was not to see the commander-in-chief ! I must go back to Dal ! What I wrote that afternoon in m}^ boat in the middle of the Nile, somewhere in the broad water below the isle of Argo, I could not now recall, but I remember that my pencil flew over the blank backs of some nine or ten large Egj^tian telegraph forms, as no pen or pencil of mine ever went before or since. I handed the packet of tissue sheets to the messenger to give to Lord Wolseley in Dongola, and then turned down-stream with, I think, the heaviest heart and saddest brain I had ever known in my life. When evening came, I put into the village of Mochi and began to write again : — ' You have knc^Ti me long enough to know that disregard of orders, much less disregard of your orders, is not my line of conduct, but I would have thought that there was enough in the past to show that when you set me a task it was best to let me work it in my own way. Had you tied me do^vn six years ago on the Red River you would not have known at Fort Francis that the Winnipeg River was only a week's work for the expedition, and the men would 286 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY have been committed to the swamps of the north-west angle of the Lake of the Woods as all the experts and others, save myself, counselled and advised. Again, if 3'^ou had not given me my own head in Ashanti eleven years ago, you would have had ten thousand more fighting men arrayed against you at a very critical moment in the battle of Amoaful ; and, coming down to our work of yester- day and to-day, was it not through your letting me work this boat idea from the beginning on my own lines that you have at the present moment six hundred boats ready above the Second Cataract, that I have one above the Third Cataract, and that there might have been fifty above it to-day had the old order of time and despatch of troops been adhered to ? and that all this had been done within the hmit of time, please remember, which the highest naval authori- ties in England had declared would be required for only building the boats in England. I go back over the past and speak of the present work now only because your words and actions to-day have forced these recollections upon me. It had never entered my head for a moment to remain more than a few hours in Dongola. I should have gone down the river again in a very diflPerent position and armed with a very different authority from that which I shall now do ; not that I shall not use every effort, sparing myself in no way to effect the more rapid movement up river ; but my words will not be heard in the noise of the slap in the face I have been given to-day, the sound of which will be grateful to many to whom I am distasteful because I have been identified with this expedition by ceaselessly furthering its interests. I freely admit that the ortho- dox EngHsh staff officer would have stopped at Hafir to-day, to- morrow, and the day after, eyeglass in eye and cigarette in mouth ; but, on the other hand, he would have taken sixteen to eighteen days to ascend the river from Sarras to Hafir, and when acting on your orders to go back on the seventeenth or nineteenth day to try and galvanise the slow moving mass of boats into quicker work, his words would have had about as much effect upon Tommy Atkins as his cigarette smoke would have had in dulling the Egyptian sky. Unfortunately perhaps for me, these were not my methods of work ; and I fear they never a\ ill be. I realised from the first that w^e were dealing with a lot of unwilliug horses at these Nile fences, and that the only chance of getting them quickly over the water-jumps was to give them a lead over.' Then I set down again the many things that had tended and were tending to delay us — the loads, greater than those first intended, and double those carried on the Red River ; Ul^VILLING HANDS 287 the mistake of having increased the boat-loads and decreased the number of men per boat, thereby reducing the Hve motive- power and adding to the dead weight in every boat, and all this following upon a clear loss of ten to fifteen days in starting from the Second Cataract. But above all these things com- bined I put the moral factor, the impression engendered originally in the minds of the men by the long-continued abuse of the boat scheme, that they (the boats) were not able for the work. The men of these earlier days of boat- work were not keen at it. My notebooks of the time were full of instances of laziness : — ' The work,' I wrote, ' at its best was mechanically done : in its normal state it was lethargic ; at its worst it was unwilling, careless, and even worse. Heart there was none in it. There was neither insolence nor refusal, no positive insubordination ; simply a clogged, lethargic " hands-down " attitude that was even more hopeless than the most iasubordiaate refusal ; the word " alacrity " had no place in the day's business.' I might multiply that extract by many others of a similar kind. This enterprise of ours was the grandest and the noblest work in war tried in my time. I felt all the enthusiasm of its splendid purpose, its colossal difficulties, its grand theatre, this wondrous old river, in every fibre of my being ; and in all the length of the chain at which we tugged from Cairo to Dongola, I knew there was only one man to whom I could appeal with the hope of being listened to at this last moment possible to our success. Well, it is all long buried in the dead past now. But for the last few days as I write I have been looking again into the old notebooks, wherein I find some of the letters and telegraph messages and orders blurred and blotted with the sweat and dust of many a bygone bivouac, and it comes back again with something of the sweet and the bitter which I then knew — for, despite failure and dashed hope, that old wonderful river, in the various phases of its own mysterious Ufe, had become to me a strange solace, despite the savagery of its wild rocks and the whirling waters of its cataracts. During the thirty days following the rebuff at Hafir, I went up and down the cataracts, hustling lagging boats, giving a lead through a rapid, getting an extra half-hour out of a bevy 288 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY of boats, distributing copies of a general order to commanding officers, and often taking a hand on the tug-line to shame some loitering boat's-crew into better work. In the dangerous reaches above the Second Cataract I had a few quiet spots selected, on island or mainland, into which we steered at dusk, tied up, lighted a fire of driftwood, had supper, and laid down blankets for the night. These are the memories of the Nile that still live with me, and it was these scenes that soon made me see, through the foredoom of our failure, how smaU it all was in comparison with this mighty desert of death and the stream of life that flowed through it. Mixed up with messages to Wady Haifa, boat orders, and letters to Dongola, I find bits such as this : — ' 14ih Dec. Kaibar. — Sent camel with letters to Dongola. Got away 8.30. Three hours' writing. Late sleepers and starters, the modern soldier and officer. The breed is falling off. Another rasping letter from . Fine breeze up long reach of river to the two big rocks. Freshness of wind off desert and fragrance of aromatic sand plants. Officers lose touch of their men as they rise in rank. It is the penalty they pay for promotion. Napoleon in 1815 was not the General Bonaparte of 1796. Camped near " sent " trees, beside old graves. Petrffied wood. Granite boulders. Sadness of these Nubian Nile evenings — the waihng sounds of the water-wheel all through the night, the low moan of the wind through ragged thorn bushes and dry grass stalks. There is more true philosophy, as it is called, in the Lord's Prayer than in all the books ever written by man ; take it slowly word by word and weigh the words. With regard to this expedition, ask M , or any other independent man who has worked this line of communications, as to what the feeling of the Naval and Egyptian (Army) officers is. Ambigol, Dal, latterly Absaret, Kaibar — aU alike. Shot a wild goose. Camped on island in middle of Third Cataract. Stars. Roar of river. ' \4ih Dec. — Up to top of Cataract. Hard pulling in rapids, but did it all by oars and sails. No tracking. To Abu Fatmeh at 8.30 A.M. Earle there. Here all the swells are passing up to Korti. All going by camel, too precious to trust themselves in boats, apparently. I am to be the Moses of the expedition, not to enter the promised land. ' 15^^ Dec. — Off down the Third Cataract again. These rapids are my treadmill. Big fish killed in shallow water ; Krooboys forced him on rock and Tom Williams stunned him with blow of axe on NOTEBOOK JOTTINGS 289 head — five feet in length and a hundred and twelve pounda in weight. Good eating to-night. Camped island below Cataract. Found my camel and Farag the driver on mainland. He had been up to Dongola, down to Dal, and up again here in last ten days. Splendid fellow, black as night. Cold night. Crew tired. ' 16th Dec. — Off to Kaibar on camel. Farag finds a donkey and comes as guide across desert. Donkey collapses, shutting up hke a closing telescope. Go on alone, through desert of rocks, four hours, then sight Nile and two big rocks. Three hours more to Kaibar. Many sails of boats visible on reach below Cataract. Thirty have passed Kaibar in last four days. Camel tired. Sleep on ground very soundly after long ride. Wallets for pillow. Camel near me, ' llth Dec. — In steam pinnace No. 102 from Kaibar towards Hanneck through twenty or more boats all doing well. Poor boats ! Some of them look worn, pitched, patched, and tin-plated, yet going gaily in light wind and able to do more in the long run than any steam pinnace. Passed poor old Colonel , wounded at Tel-el-Kebir, full of pluck, teeth all gone, and helmet too. Got wood for pinnace on Isle Adwin. What work ! Recalls West Coast days eleven years ago. Ran aground on sandbank going up west channel, in water up to middles, trying to shove her off. No go, sand silts up round us in strong current. After an hour boat still fast in mid-river. Natives come out. Watching play of sand in current, I see only chance is to get head of pinnace up-stream ; sand has then no lee side to silt up on. We get head up-stream. I take helm, crew in water stamping on sand. Go ahead full speed. Shove bow, keep sand shifting with feet. Scrape over bank into deep water. All jump in. Away up river to Zimmet Island, which we reach after dark. My boat comes down to meet me at Wood Station, and I get to Gibbs' Camp lat«. Gibbs wrecked five times in thirty-nine days in nuggers between Sarras and Fatineh. Greeks at Dongola buy Hicks Pasha's treasure from Dervishes at four shillings the sovereign ! This Greek is the man we are really fighting for. He will outstay us aU. ' 2&h Dec. — Down river again to Kaibar. Struck rock in Shaban rapid, damaged, repair. Passed seventy-five boats going well, good wind. Foimd two Colonels on portage. ' 22n^ Dec. — Passed forty-six boats over Cataract. All day on portagt: Arrived, Colonel of Gordon Highlanders and two boats ; seventeen days from Gemai. That is what should be ! ' 23rd Dec. — Passed twenty boats over Cataract. Hot day. Old sheik of Cataract and his men and boys on rocks. Sheik gives them 290 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY one piastre a day. I keep his pay in arrear. He says he will strike. I tell the interpreter to sa.y to him my stick -will do the same : three shillings a boat too much to give the old rascal. Gesticulations, shoutings, rocks. Work weU done. ' 24:th. — Writing telegrams. Peel, Wortley pass to Korti. All the others gone there. I am out in the cold with a vengeance. Wrote letter in reply to BuUer, who has gone on to Korti a week ago on camel. Curious Christmas Eve. ' 25th. — And stranger Christmas Hay. Naval Brigade passes Kaibar fifteen days out from Sarras. At 2.30 I start up river again, get a goose with a long-shot bullet at dusk, and have him for dinner — a welcome change from Chicago " bully " beef. MoonUght in the desert rocks. Stars, intense silence, no sound to-night of water- wheel, man or beast, from the surrounding desert. Are the shep- herds keeping "heir night-watches, as of old, on the Judean hills ? Outlines of those hills the same as these. Stars, Canopus, Sirius all here too. How the scene is brought before one ! ' ' It was at this time that an express reached me from Kaibar reporting that a box of treasure, carried in a cartridge-box, had been missed from a camel ammunition convoy four days earlier farther down the river — eleven thousand pounds in gold. The convoy was then at Kaibar. I sent back an order directing the convoj'', about one hundred and forty camels, to proceed on its march next day across the desert to Abu Fatmeh as usual, and I wrote privately to the officer in charge telling him to halt his convoy some four miles out in the open desert and to await my arrival ; then I rode out to the spot indicated. I found the convoy halted as directed. I formed the men, soldiers and natives, in two lots, and told them that a box of treasure was missing ; that it could not have been lost ; that it must either have been stolen or be still with the column ; and I offered twenty -five pounds reward to any man who would step out and say where the box was. I told them further that if no one would reveal the whereabouts of the treasure, I would be obliged to institute a close search in saddles, bags, etc., and even to strip everybody to their skins. I gave five minutes for reflection, and then began the search. Everything was opened out ; the place was as bare as the palm of one's hand ; the sun was brilliant above ; nothing was found — ^not^'one golden sovereign could be seen in package, pocket, or saddle. There was nothing more to be done, and after an hour spent THE HAZARDS OF THE RTVER 291 in this fruitless examination, I ordered the convoy to load up and proceed south. I reported the loss, the box of golden sovereigns was ' written off ' in the official phraseology, and in due time the convoy reached Dongola, and proceeded with the other camel transport across the Bayuda towards Metem- meh. The day of Abu Klea came ; the square, inside of which were the baggage and riding camels, was broken by the wild rush of the Arab spearmen, and a desperate fight ensued within the broken square itself, a fight in which the wedged mass of camels alone saved the day. In the midst of the fiercest fighting a cry arose for more cartridges ; boxes were hastily opened, and out from one of these boxes rolled a mass of golden sovereigns. The fighting was forgotten by the men who were nearest to the scene, a wild scramble ensued, and in half a minute the last piece of gold had been fobbed up. \Vhat had originally happened was that the cartridge-box containing the gold had got mixed up with the cases of ammunition, and as the boxes had only some small private mark to indicate them, the mistake was onlj^ discovered in the square at Abu Klea. I spent the 26th December forcing up the rapids which extend for several miles below the Third Cataract, and giving help to the many boats T^hich were now labouring over a particularly difficult piece of water called Shaban. This cataract was not marked upon our maps, but it had proved the most dangerous of any in the whole river. Of the dozen soldiers and voyageurs lost in the length of the five hundred miles from Wady Haifa to Hebbeh, Shabah cost us three lives. I had no^^■ run it up and down half a dozen times without accident, but in this last trip on 26th December it aU but caught us, and in a way most unexpected. We were forcing up a very bad ' gate ' between rocks, and were doing well in very swift and apparently deep water, when the stem-post suddenly touched a sunken rock, stopping the way on the boat. Instantly the bow feU off to one side, and the boat swung roiuid at a tremendous pace, pivoting upon the held steni-post. The passage was extremeh^ narrow be- tween the rocks ; if the bows touched the rock ever so shghtly, we were over in water running faster than any mill-race. The bows whirled round clear, I don't think there were four inches to spare. A week earlier we had run this passage, but 292 SIR WILLIAM BUTLER : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY the river had fallen a foot in the interval, and that sunken tooth had got within biting distance of our kelson. It is such an incident as this which makes the cataract reaches of the Nile so difficult and dangerous. I got to my island haven in the Third Cataract early on the 27th, and found there the following note from Colonel Frederick Maurice of Abu Fatmeh, addressed to me ' At top of Shaban Gate,' 25th December : — ' Received last night following telegram from Genl. Buller, Korti : " If you can get at Butler, ask him to come here as soon as can." I have your camel ready for you, and if you decide to go by camel will make up a party for you somehow, but wait for you to decide numbers, etc. Christmas and New Year best wishes.' I rode the camel to Fatmeh, the boat arrived later ; we filled in with a hundred days' rations, and at 9.30 next morning we were off for Korti. By the evening of the 30th we had covered eighty miles of river ; then the north wind fell, and the oar and track-line had to be used. On New Year's Day Debbeh was passed, and at sunrise on 4th January I reached Korti. I have already told in detail the story of the Nile Expedition as it had impressed me as a subordinate actor in its strangely varied scenes.^ I regarded it then, and I still think of it, as the most remarkable attempt made in modern times to conquer in four months the difficulties of great distance, the absence of food supplies, and the opposition of a very brave and determined enemy, flushed by a long career of victory, and filled with a fanaticism as fierce as that which had carried the Arabian soldiers of the Prophet over half the Eastern and Western world twelve centuries earlier. The Nubian village of Korti was a strange place in the first half of January 1885. One saw there on the high bank of the Nile an extraordinary mixture of the masses and the classes of EngHsh social life. The English boats were arriving in crowds daily, all carrying their five months' food supplies — three months for their own crews, and two months for the camel column which was to cross the Bayuda desert to Metemmeh. Truly had these wonderful little ' whalers ' ^ The Campaign oftht Cataracts. LETTERS HOME 293 brought their own revenges along with them. Here, in the face of guardsmen and journahsts, and officers and men of twenty different regimental corps, was written large in the vast verity of victuals — the only truth that appeals to all classes and creeds — ^the fact that by the means of these long- derided and abused boats, and by them alone, had this concentration of men, horses, and camels been possible at this Bayuda village fourteen hundred miles from Alexandria — all done within four and a half months from the date on which the long-delayed permission to build and equip these same boats had been grudgingly given to me in London. I shall enter here extracts from two letters I had written from London to my wife in August 1884 : — '9