( 242 ) 



ON THE FALSE ESTIMATE OF THE MILITARY 

 CHARACTER. 



PEOPLE judge very inaccurately of the mental endowments of 

 soldiers, especially of those belonging to the highest class, whom 

 the world in general agree to call heroes. By parsons, squires, the 

 less thinking part of shopkeepers, and some poets, they are regarded 

 as huge mental colossi, who bestride the world by dint of genius 

 almost super-human ; whilst by philosophers, and moral poets, they 

 are stripped not only of the adventitious glory reflected from their 

 mighty deeds, but of the ordinary mental attributes of humanity, arid 

 are held up to scorn as mere brainless asses, fit only to crack skulls 

 arid having skulls fit only to be cracked. In the opinion of an indi- 

 vidual who is neither parson, squire, shopkeeper, poet, nor philo- 

 sopher, but one who has had much experience of war and the men 

 who wage it myself, the worshipful company of heroes deserve 

 " ni tout d'honneur, ni tout d'indignite ; " but the opposite errors into 

 which different classes of persons have fallen respecting them admit, 

 as it appears to me, a ready explanation. 



Alexander subverts the Persian monarchy at Arbela ; Hannibal 

 scales the Alps and makes the mistress of the world tremble on her 

 seven hills ; Caesar crosses the Rubicon, and this same mistress must 

 bow her neck to the yoke of a master ; Napoleon subjugates Europe 

 at Austerlitz ; Wellington wrenches this immense empire from his 

 grasp at Waterloo. Such is the game at which warriors play ; all is 

 rapid, sweeping, and magnificent ; and realms and nations are the 

 stakes played for. Can we wonder, that those who look at the war- 

 rior only through the prisms of gazettes and histories should see 

 him invested with a halo of glory, and that even with those who 

 regard him, from a conscientious conviction of the sinfulness of his 

 trade, as a sort of Satan, he is Milton's Satan ? Observe, that from 

 what ordinary readers know of war, all that is sordid is excluded. 

 The doubts and hesitations of leaders; the fears of subordinates, the 

 famine, the murmur, and the wretchedness are not there. 'Tis a 

 picture by Newton, wherein we are astounded by the mountain, 

 the torrent, the lightning, the pyramid, and the palace ; but where 

 we see not the furze-bush, the cabbage-garden, the pig-sty, the 

 hosel, and its wretched inmate. It is forgotten, too, that war, if 

 correctly represented, must show weakness as well as power, for if 

 there is a victor there is necessarily a vanquished ; and we know not 

 how much of the appearance of power is owing to the opposing 

 weakness : the strife may in truth be but a conflict of two weaknesses, 

 in which the less weakness triumphs. " You committed but a hun- 

 dred faults, we committed a hundred and one, and you are the 

 conquerors," said the Frenchman to the Englishman after the battle 

 of Hochstet. Even of the power employed, if we consider how much 



