From The Quarterly Review. "The sword," observed Don Quixote, Of late was largely the creation of Scharn- 1 The Life of General Sir Edward Bruce Hamley K.C.B., K.C.M.G. By Alexander Innes Shand. Second edition. Edinburgh and London. 1896. two centuries, the growth, since the disasters of 1870, of thoughtful publications dealing with every branch of the science of war, has been phenomenal. In England, the soldier who is known to possess literary gifts is still regarded with a certain measure of suspicion, and the astute aspirant to high position will restrain or severely regulate his pen until his rank is assured. Time will, however, change all this and it will come to be understood here as elsewhere, that power of expression and of analysis, together with originality of opinion, even when forthcoming in the comparatively junior ranks, are not incompatible with military efficiency. The life of Sir Edward Hamley derives peculiar interest from its dual aspect. On the one hand, Hamley was unquestionably the most brilliant writer that the British army has produced. On the other hand, he was a keen soldier, whose record in the field, both as a young staff-officer and as a general of division, clearly showed that he possessed in a marked degree the qualities of a military commander. The literary and the military instincts existing side by side, with points of contact yet sometimes mutually repellent, supply the clue to the right understanding of a complex nature and a notable career. Of the four sons of Vice-Admiral Hamley, the three who entered the service all gave evidence of great literary gifts. All became valued contributors to Blackwood's Magazine in its prime; and at the very time when Edward, the youngest, was writing the masterly letters from the Crimea, Charles was forwarding admirable papers from the Baltic. "Their mother," states Mr. Shand, "was a woman of intellectual ability as well as of high education; and . . . they always considered they derived their literary faculty from her." The Hamley family, on the other hand, had produced a succession of soldiers and sailors. Admiral Hamley rendered excellent service during the French war, and distinguished himself on several occasions by great personal gallantry. Thus the twofold bias of the genius of the brothers seems to have been directly inherited. Edward Bruce Hamley, born in 1824, entered the Royal Artillery before he was nineteen. Joining his first battery in Ireland, he accompanied it a year later to Canada, where he served for nearly four years, returning home to be quartered successively at Tynemouth and Carlisle. Promoted to be captain in 1851, he was ordered to Gibraltar, where he remained till the outbreak of the Crimean war. For twelve years, therefore, he carried on the duties of a young regimental officer-duties eminently uninspiring in times of peace, but the performance of which is nevertheless essential to a real understanding of the inner working of an army. To unfamiliarity, in high quarters, with the conditions of regimental life are largely due the many mistakes which have retarded the progress of military organization in this country. observation and to foster that sympathy with nature which afterwards lent charm to his writing. Returning to England, he was quartered at Tynemouth, when he broke ground in Fraser's Magazine with an article entitled "Snow Pictures," effectively describing a shooting excursion in the State of Maine. "The Peace Campaigns of Ensign Faunce" quickly followed; and although these first efforts showed the crudeness inseparable from inexperience, both held out bright promise. The young subaltern had found a vocation which was to bring him lifelong interests and lasting fame. The change to Gibraltar in 1851 was perhaps a turning point in Hamley's career. The worn grey Rock, rising sheer out of the Mediterranean and rich in memories of the past; the scarred relics of the Moor and the Spaniard; the wonderful panorama of sea and mountain in which two conTo Hamley these years, if uneventful, tinents share; the color and the were of the highest importance. They crowded life of the narrow streets-all sufficed to establish his literary reputa- combine to invest the historic fortress tion, and brought enduring friendships with indescribable fascination. Thus which lightened the burdens and dis- the new surroundings appealed powerappointments of his after-life. In some fully to the young writer's imaginarespects the conditions were favorable tion. On the other hand, he suddenly to the young writer. Until 1851, he found himself in the midst of a large served continuously in small country sta- and closely packed military society tions where military formalism was not whose ways were unfamiliar and someoppressive. Always a great reader, be what uncongenial. The intellectual found ample leisure and few distrac- level of the British army to-day differs tions, while the happy associations widely from that of forty-five years with Dr. Bent in Canada and the ago and no one has done more than occasional visits of his brother subHamley to bring about the change. altern Gleig, the friend of his cadet "I have no literary friend here," he days, supplied an intellectual stimulus wrote, "with whom to discuss, my at the period of life when character projects:" and while mingling freely takes form. During a hot summer the with the social life of the garrison, he three devoted themselves to reading seems yet to have been apart. "Most and discussion. "They were all more people stood in awe of him, owing to his or less argumentative and critical," | silent ways and stiff manner," states writes Mr. Shand, "and it is easy to a lady who knew him well at this peconceive how these appreciative studies riod; adding, with true insight, "He of 'the best masters' must have helped had a most tender heart behind his stiff to develop Hamley's tastes." Thus manner." These were years of study the years spent in Canada were wholly and of thought. Hamley's mind was beneficial; and while acquiring the full of literary projects which there habits of the student. his many expe- were none to share. It was perhaps ditions served to quicken his power of the sense of intellectual isolation, A striving wrestler or a sleeping nymph, But drop to earth rough-hewed; our share o' the task Is to dispose them so as they shall cast Their shadows on the world's disc faithfully. Viewed as the work of an artillery captain of twenty-seven, the poem is remarkable, and the spirit of lofty and untainted ambition which it breathes throughout supplied the ruling motive of the life of the author. "Michael Angelo" was followed by the "Legend of Gibraltar" and "Lazaro's Legacy," in which vivid pictures of Gibraltar in the eighteenth century are interwoven with the adventures of an imaginary grandfather of the writer. The realism and the humor of these light sketches won for them marked success, and Hamley immediately set about his one novel. It is easy to criticise "Lady Lee's Widowhood," and impossible not to feel the charm of the young author's touch. A vein of cheery kindliness runs through the story, extending to the ill-doing Bagot Lee, who, like Rawdon Crawley, is not made to appear irredeemable. Few novelists, prior to 1852, had sought to depict the British officer as a scholar. When not vicious or merely foppish, he was usually presented as a chivalrous person of dull intellect. Hamley, however, in defence of his cloth, gives us a captain of Dragoons who is able to quote Dante and enjoy Gilbert White without thereby suffering any loss of manliness. The type, probably suggested by the dual life of the writer, has since become wellestablished in fiction. During the Gibraltar period Hamley's studies seem to have taken a purely literary range, and there are no signs of any leaning towards the higher branches of the science of war. He was, however, no mere student; and his selection by Colonel Dacres for the adjutancy of a division of artillery proceeding to the Crimea, proves that he was regarded as a specially capable and energetic officer. The Campaign of Sebastopol gave a new turn to Hamley's thoughts, and the admirable series of letters contributed to Blackwood's Magazine marked a fresh intellectual departure, which he thus eloquently describes: Hitherto I, and doubtless most others of my contemporaries, had viewed in a kind of epic light the men of Wellington's campaigns, beside whose rich and stirring youth ours seemed pale and empty. Now we, too, had passed behind the scenes; we, too, had been initiated into that jumble of glory and calamity, war, and had been acting history. . We, too, knew of the marshalling of hosts, the licensed devastation, the ghastly burden of the battlefield and the sensation of fronting death; and, henceforth, the pages of military history, hitherto somewhat dim and oracular, were for us illuminated by the red light of experi ence. In these letters, Hamley's literary and military instincts for the first time found joint expression. The one gave charm and inspired the many descrip- | the hut before Sebastopol; but the tive touches in which not a word seems essay on "North and the Noctes," writsuperfluous or misplaced. The other ten under the distracting conditions of appears in a uniformly wise and calm the siege, was certainly a unique tribjudgment of the operations and of the ute to the memory of John Wilson. causes which nearly led to disaster. Much of the writing of this period was characterized by wild exaggeration, indiscriminate condemnation of individuals, and ill-regulated criticism. The loud outcry raised by the press was in the main misdirected and often injurious to the interests of the army. In marked contrast to the prevailing flood of declamation, stand Hamley's thoughtful and soldierly comments. In "The War of the Crimea," published in 1891, the ruling conditions of the painful campaign are thus admirably summed: The army once before Sebastopol and dependent on a military system so deficient in much that is essential, no arrangement or forethought within the scope of human intelligence could have averted the disasters which followed. No summary could be more just; but it had been anticipated in the letters from the Camp on the Upland, and, as Mr. Shand points out, when the later book came to be deliberately written, there was no opinion to retract. Only a soldier with an intuitive grasp of military principles could have penned the "Letters from the Crimea;" while, from the purely literary point of view, these letters, produced under many difficulties in the intervals of harassing duty, can fearlessly challenge comparison with the memorable dispatches of Dr. Russell or the polished pages of Kinglake. Hamley was present at every battle in the Crimea, and at Inkerman he displayed sound military judgment and marked initiative; but throughout the letters a rare restraint is placed upon the use of the personal pronoun. With true modesty the writer describes what he sees, and, unlike some later historians of operations relatively trivial, he never alludes to his individual actions. A review of a small volume of "Poetry of the War" was an appropriate contribution from In January, 1854, Hamley returned from the Crimea with the brevet of lieutenant-colonel and a Companionship of the Bath. He was not yet thirty-two; he had established his reputation as a practical soldier, while as a writer he had conquered a new domain. Henceforth the wide field of military history lay open to him, illumined, as he tells us, by "the red light of experience." Long neglected, almost despised, by the British army, the science of war was to find in Hamley a powerful exponent. "Jusqu'à ces dernières années, pas un auteur national n'avait écrit ex professo sur les parties savantes de la guerre." Such was the just comment of General Foy in the first quarter of the century; and until the publication of Napier's brilliant history, the reproach remained. English writers had been content with mere narrative. Of original thought or military insight, there were few signs. For a scientific analysis of the Campaign of Waterloo, it was necessary to turn to the pages of Jomini or Clausewitz. England had no school of military criticism, and, judged by the poverty of its literary output, the British army was intellectually far behind those of France, Prussia, or Austria. It is Hamley's greatest distinction to have redressed the unequal balance and to have ushered in the dawn of a new era. Quartered at Leith Fort, Hamley for the first time met Mr. Blackwood, and his circle of friends now rapidly widened. It was natural that he should be attracted to the society of writers whose aims and modes of thought he shared, and by whom he could count on being understood. Into literary rather than military circles, therefore, he was inevitably drawn; and although he formed friendships in the service which outlasted trial, a great part of his life lay outside of and apart from the army. There can be little doubt that this circumstance was, in some measure, detrimental to his professional advancement in a country where personal influence plays a dominant part in selection for military preferment. The period of three and a half years passed at Leith, Woolwich, and Dover, produced a large number of contributions to "Maga," and Hamley also undertook the task of selecting and editing the first series of the "Tales from Blackwood," upon which he beHis stowed much careful thought. extraordinary versatility showed itself in such widely different papers as the striking review of Bazancourt's "Narrative of the Campaign" and "Mr. Dusky's Opinions on Art." The latter is a good example of the powers of satire, trenchant but not unkindly, which the writer had at command. The affectations of art-criticism have never been more effectively exposed, and such a passage as the following is an apt parody of a manner by no means extinct: The first thing that strikes me, in the work of the past year, is, that though all other seasons and times of the day are reproduced in landscape (except the pitch-dark of a winter's night, which it would be difficult for any one in the present state of art to place satisfactorily on canvas), yet that particular state of atmosphere which exists in the month of August, from about five minutes before two to about twenty minutes after, when the sun's sultry and lavish splendor is tinged with some foreboding of his decline, and when nature is, as it were, taking her siesta, is nowhere sought to be conveyed. I thought, on first looking at a small picture in the East room of the Academy, that this hiatus had been filled up; but on further study I perceived that the picture in question had been painted rather earlier (about five-andtwenty minutes before two is the time I should assign to it), and is therefore deficient in many of the chief characteristics of the remarkable period I allude to. How delightfully Hamley could reproduce mannerisms is shown in the "Recent Confessions of an Opium Eater," and in "Sir Tray, an Arthurian Idyl," where the familiar doggerel line: but when she came back the poor dog is thus happily rendered:- thought, A dolorous cry arose, as if Elaine A world of merry meaning in his eye, The Crimean war had drawn attention to the prevailing inadequacy of military education in the British army. Enquiries were instituted as to the systems of other powers, and the prejudices of the Duke of Wellington were at length set aside in favor of the systematic training of staff-officers. A separate staff college was established, and the professorship of military history-the first instituted in this We have country-was offered to Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Hamley. As seen, in later years, how the happy chance of the appointment of Capt. A. T. Mahan to the War College at Newport, and the wisdom of the United States' authorities in keeping him there, gave opportunities to a writer who has powerfully stimulated the neglected study of naval history. powerful was the impulse applied to military science by the Sandhurst professor. The every-day duties of the new post and the trained literary faculty of its holder went hand in hand. Hamley could bring his undivided energies to bear in one direction, and the admirable series of lectures, fol |