382 
SUBALTERN OEFICERS. 
orderly officer, while lie is on duty, undertaking work which is not 
strictly his own. Instead of each officer being present daily with his 
division, attending all parades of the division, training the men of the 
division, and acting as their immediate commander, the orderly officer 
as a rule performs these duties for all the other officers of the battery. 
Provided they are present at the commanding officers parades, they 
may spend the rest of their time pretty much as they please until their 
tour of duty comes round. Is it possible for this orderly officer, vested 
with a kind of general, undetermined responsibility, to feel the same 
interest in his work which he would feel if he had only a special charge 
to answer for ? We subaltern officers who do the work know that it is 
not. We know that this system encourages us to do only what we are 
absolutely obliged to do, to conform to the letter rather than to fulfil 
the spirit of our commissions. It is often said “ There is a certain 
amount of work to be done. It does not matter very much who does 
the work, so long’ as it is got through.” I respectfully but most 
emphatically submit that it does matter very much. This is in fact 
precisely the point at issue. In future the men who do the work are 
those who will have the power. The day has passed away when all 
that was required of a British officer was, that he should be able to stand 
up as the officers of the Royal Welch Fusiliers stood on the banks of the 
Alma, and were all shot down because they were too proud to stoop for 
shelter from the Russian bullets. War has now become one of the 
most highly developed of modern sciences. The power of officers to 
lead no longer depends upon their birth, nor upon their manly and 
gentleman-like conduct, nor even upon their bravery and physical 
powers alone; but upon their moral and mental superiority, upon their 
capacity to make men follow where they wish to lead them, upon their 
ability to perform themselves all that they demand from their followers. 
The ainhof every officer should be to get his men to look to him intuitively 
for leadership, and to believe implicitly in his ability to guide them in 
danger. But confidence is a plant of slow growth. An officer who 
only gives a spasmodic attention to his duties may be able to satisfy his 
own conscience, but he will never gain the confidence of his men. He 
who now seeks to be the leader of his men must lead in fact as well as 
in name, by placing himself at their head as their commander, their 
instructor, and their “roaster.” He must consent during these long 
years of peace to share with them the dull, dry drudgery of 
the daily routine of military life. Every time he goes away and 
delegates his authority to the orderly officer he breaks the bond of 
union between himself and his men, he widens that “ gulf of etiquette,” 
which Prince Frederick Charles in his “ Military Memorial” pointed 
out as existing at that time so unhappily between the Prussian officer 
and the Prussian soldier. No one was more keenly alive to the short¬ 
comings of our regimental system in so far as it affected the junior 
officers of the Army than the Duke of Wellington. His despatches 
are full of earnest words of exhortation to the young officers of his army, 
and are sometimes marked with the bitter sense of disappointment 
which he felt when they would not follow the high example which he 
ever set them. In his famous minute upon the discipline of the army, 
which he wrote in 1829 for the consideration of government, he alluded 
