Eerie^v of Beviews, l/i/lS. 



CHARACTER SKETCH. 



133 



the country as to the necessity for 

 action. With that exception, everything 

 which he touched prospered. It is 

 careers like his which lead men to be- 

 fieve in a lucky star. 



Curiously enough, his luck in the 

 field was coupled by a persistent ill- 

 luck in other matters. Some men go 

 through the hottest battles without a 

 scratch. Lord Wolseley was wounded — 

 sometimes very seriously — in almost 

 every action in which he fought. Still 

 more curious and persistent has been 

 the misfortune which dogged him in 

 the minor matter of the loss of his kit. 

 In this matter some fatality seemed to 

 attend him. A similar malign influence 

 seemed to dog his footsteps whenever 

 he made a voyage. His first journey to 

 China was one long series of disasters, 

 culminating in the foundering of the 

 transport in the Straits of Malacca. 

 When he went to Ashantee the steamer 

 behaved so infamously that the war cor- 

 respondents on board declared the 

 voyage out was enough to account for 

 all the mortality of the West Coast ; 

 and wlien he was hurried out to Can- 

 ada, during the Trent affair, his ship 

 took thirty days in crossing the Atlan- 

 tic. 



AGAINST THE JOTUNS. 



Lord Wolseley's career as a soldier is 

 the more intc-esting because his warfare 

 was waged more against the brute forces 

 of nature than against his fellow-men. 

 Excepting when a mere stripling, he 

 was never engaged against a civilised 

 foe. He has done plenty of slaughter, 

 no doubt, in his time, but that was in- 

 cidental. The triumph was gained be- 

 fore the slaughter began— in some cases 

 it was so complete that there was no 

 need of slaughter at all. 



When he went forth to war it was 

 like Thor of th® Thunder Hammer 

 sallying forth from Asgard to do battle 

 with the mud giants, those vast, huge, 

 amorphous incarnations of the forces 

 of nature. In the Crimea the chief 

 enemy was not the Russian — it was 

 Cold ; in India, Heat ; in China, Mud ; 

 in Ashantee, it was Pestilence ; in the 

 Red River it was the Forest ; and in the 

 Soudan, the Desert. With all of these 

 he closed in death battle, and came 



off victorious. He defied the Cold, 

 ignored the Heat, baffled the Pestilence, 

 pierced the Forest, and crossed the 

 Desert. But perhaps none of these 

 enemies was so formidable, so invulner- 

 able and so invincible, as the Stupidity 

 entrenched in high places, against 

 which, as Schiller reminds us, even the 

 gods contend in vain. 



HAIRBREADTH 'SCAPES. 



Of hairbreadth escapes he had 

 enough to furnish even a hero of one of 

 Ouida's novels. In his first serious 

 action in Burmah nothing but the acci- 

 dent of falling into a covered pit as he 

 was leading a storming party against 

 the Burmese position saved him from 

 destruction. In the second attempt, he 

 and his brother-officer, who were the 

 first to enter the enemy's works, were 

 both shot clown together. Both were 

 struck in the left thigh, each by a large 

 iron iinkall ball. His companion bled 

 to death in a few minutes. Wolseley, 

 although for months he hovered be- 

 tween life and death, recovered, thanks 

 to a magnificent constitution, which 

 stood him in good stead at every turn 

 in his career. But it was in the Crimea, 

 that charnel-house of death, that he was 

 most severely mauled. Mr. Lowe says 

 of his escape from the perils of the 

 siege : — 



Durine; its progress Captain Wolseley was 

 wounded severely on the 30th August, and 

 slightly on the lOt'h of April, and the 7th 

 of June. On the 15th of Fehruary his coat 

 was pierced by a ball ; on the l(1th of April 

 a round shot struck the embrasure at which 

 he was working and his trousers were cut; 

 and on the 7th of June a ball passed through 

 his forage cap from the peak to the back, 

 knocking it off his head. It may be said, 

 without exaggeration, that he bore a 

 charmed life, for at the termination of the 

 siege, of three messes of four nionibers each 

 he was the only remaining oflicer in the 

 Crimea, all the others having been killed or 

 forced to leave through wounds. 



ADVENTURES AT SEBASTOPOL. 



Men were killed all round him. On 

 one occasion when he was giving orders 

 to two sappers in the trenches, " sud- 

 denly a roundshot took off one man's 

 head and drove his jawbone into the 

 other man's face, to which it adhered, 

 bespattering the party with blood." 



