Chapter XXXIV (3)

Cary, to whom the wonderful Clyde was as familiar as the river near his own home, found the second trip almost as wearisome as the first. But not quite. He was now able to recognise Hagan, who again appeared as a brass-bounder, and did not affect to conceal his deep interest in the Naval panorama offered by the river. Nothing of real importance can, of course, be learned from a casual steamer trip, but Hagan seemed to think otherwise, for he was always either watching through his glasses or asking apparently artless questions of passengers or passing deckhands. Again a sailor seemed disposed to be communicative; he pointed out more than one monster in steel, red raw with surface rust, and gave particulars of a completed power which would have surprised the Admiralty Superintendent. They would not, however, have surprised Mr. Cary, in whose ingenious brain they had been conceived. This second trip, like the first, was declared by Dawson to have been a great success. ‘Did you know me?’ he asked. ‘I was a clean-shaven Naval doctor, about as unlike the Army colonel of the first trip as a pigeon is unlike a gamecock. Hagan is off to London to-night by the North-Western. There are three copies of your Notes. One is going by Edinburgh and the east coast, and another by the Midland. Hagan has the original masterpiece. I will look after him and leave the two other messengers to my men. I have been on to the Yard by ’phone and have arranged that all three shall have passports for Holland. The two copies shall reach the Kaiser, bless him, but I really must have Hagan’s set of Notes for my Museum.’

‘And what will become of Hagan?’ asked Cary.

‘Come and see,’ said Mr. Dawson.

Dawson entertained Cary at dinner in a private room at the Station Hotel, waited upon by one of his own confidential men. ‘Nobody ever sees me,’ he observed with much satisfaction, ‘though I am everywhere.’ (I suspect that Dawson is not without his little vanities.) ‘Except in my office and with people whom I know well, I am always someone else. The first time I came to your house I wore a beard, and the second time looked like a gas inspector. You saw only the real Dawson. When one has got the passion for the chase in one’s blood, one cannot bide for long in a stuffy office. As I have a jewel of an assistant, I can always escape and follow up my own victims. This man Hagan is a black heartless devil. Don’t waste your sympathy on him, Mr. Cary. He took money from us quite lately to betray the silly asses of Sinn Feiners, and now, thinking us hoodwinked, is after more money from the Kaiser. He is of the type that would sell his own mother and buy a mistress with the money. He’s not worth your pity. We use him and his like for just so long as they can be useful, and then the jaws of the trap close. By letting him take those faked Notes we have done a fine stroke for the Navy, for the Yard, and for Bill Dawson. We have got into close touch with four new German agents here and two more down south. We shan’t seize them yet; just keep them hanging on and use them. That’s the game. I am never anxious about an agent when I know him and can keep him watched. Anxious, bless you; I love him like a cat loves a mouse. I’ve had some spies on my string ever since the war began; I wouldn’t have them touched or worried for the world. Their correspondence tells me everything, and if a letter to Holland which they haven’t written slips in sometimes it’s useful, very useful, as useful almost as your faked Notes.’

Half an hour before the night train was due to leave for the South, Dawson, very simply but effectively changed in appearance--for Hagan knew by sight the real Dawson,--led Cary to the middle sleeping-coach on the train. ‘I have had Hagan put in No. 5,’ he said, ‘and you and I will take Nos. 4 and 6. No. 5 is an observation berth; there is one fixed up for us on this sleeping-coach. Come in here.’ He pulled Cary into No. 4, shut the door, and pointed to a small wooden knob set a few inches below the luggage rack. ‘If one unscrews that knob one can see into the next berth, No. 5. No. 6 is fitted in the same way, so that we can rake No. 5 from both sides. But, mind you, on no account touch those knobs until the train is moving fast and until you have switched out the lights. If No. 5 was dark when you opened the peep-hole, a ray of light from your side would give the show away. And unless there was a good deal of vibration and rattle in the train you might be heard. Now cut away to No. 6, fasten the door, and go to bed. I shall sit up and watch, but there is nothing for you to do.’

Hagan appeared in due course, was shown into No. 5 berth, and the train started. Cary asked himself whether he should go to bed as advised or sit up reading. He decided to obey Dawson’s orders, but to take a look in upon Hagan before settling down for the journey. He switched off his lights, climbed upon the bed, and carefully unscrewed the little knob which was like the one shown to him by Dawson. A beam of light stabbed the darkness of his berth, and putting his eye with some difficulty to the hole--one’s nose gets so confoundedly in the way--he saw Hagan comfortably arranging himself for the night. The spy had no suspicion of his watchers on both sides, for, after settling himself in bed, he unwrapped a flat parcel, and took out a bundle of blue papers which Cary at once recognised as the originals of his stolen Notes. Hagan went through them--he had put his suit-case across his knees to form a desk--and carefully made marginal jottings. Cary, who had often tried to write in trains, could not but admire the man’s laborious patience. He painted his letters and figures over and over again, in order to secure distinctness, in spite of the swaying of the train, and frequently stopped to suck the point of his pencil.

‘I suppose,’ thought Cary, ‘that Dawson yonder is just gloating over his prey, but for my part I feel an utterly contemptible beast. Never again will I set a trap for even the worst of my fellow-creatures.’ He put back the knob, went to bed, and passed half the night in extreme mental discomfort and the other half in snatching brief intervals of sleep. It was not a pleasant journey.

Dawson did not come out of his berth at Euston until after Hagan had left the station in a taxicab, much to Cary’s surprise, and then was quite ready, even anxious, to remain for breakfast at the hotel. He explained his strange conduct. ‘Two of my men,’ said he, as he wallowed in tea and fried soles--one cannot get Dover soles in the weary North--‘who travelled in ordinary compartments, are after Hagan in two taxis, so that if one is delayed the other will keep touch. Hagan’s driver also has had a police warning, so that our spy is in a barbed-wire net. I shall hear before very long all about him.’

Cary and Dawson spent the morning at the hotel with a telephone beside them; every few minutes the bell would ring, and a whisper of Hagan’s movements steal over the wires into the ears of the spider Dawson. He reported progress to Cary with ever-increasing satisfaction.

‘Hagan has applied for and been granted a passport to Holland, and has booked a passage in the boat which leaves Harwich to-night for the Hook. We will go with him. The other two spies, with the copies, haven’t turned up yet, but they are all right. My men will see them safe across into Dutch territory, and make sure that no blundering Customs officer interferes with their papers. This time the way of transgressors shall be very soft. As for Hagan, he is not going to arrive.’

‘I don’t quite understand why you carry on so long with him,’ said Cary, who, though tired, could not but feel intense interest in the perfection of the police system and in the serene confidence of Dawson. The Yard could, it appeared, do unto the spies precisely what Dawson chose to direct.

‘Hagan is an American citizen,’ explained Dawson. ‘If he had been a British subject I would have taken him at Euston--we have full evidence of the burglary, and of the stolen papers in his suit-case. But as he is a damned unbenevolent neutral, and the American Government is very touchy, we must prove his intention to sell the papers to Germany. Then we can deal with him by secret court-martial, and President Wilson can go to blazes. The journey to Holland will prove this intention. Hagan has been most useful to us in Ireland, and now in the North of England and in Scotland, but he is too enterprising and too daring to be left any longer on the string. I will draw the ends together at the Hook.’

‘I did not want to go to Holland,’ said Cary to me, when telling his story. ‘I was utterly sick and disgusted with the whole cold-blooded game of cat and mouse, but the police needed my evidence about the Notes and the burglary, and did not intend to let me slip out of their clutches. Dawson was very civil and pleasant, but I was in fact as tightly held upon his string as was the wretched Hagan. So I went on to Holland with that quick-change artist, and watched him come on board the steamer at Parkeston Quay, dressed as a rather German-looking commercial traveller, eager for war commissions upon smuggled goods. This sounds absurd, but his get-up seemed somehow to suggest the idea. Then I went below. Dawson always kept away from me whenever Hagan might have seen us together.’

The passage across to Holland was free from incident; there was no sign that we were at war, and Continental traffic was being carried serenely on, within easy striking distance of the German submarine base at Zeebrugge. The steamer had drawn in to the Hook beside the train, and Hagan was approaching the gangway, suit-case in hand. The man was on the edge of safety; once upon Dutch soil, Dawson could not have laid hands upon him. He would have been a neutral citizen in a neutral country, and no English warrant would run against him. But between Hagan and the gangway suddenly interposed the tall form of the ship’s captain; instantly the man was ringed about by officers, and before he could say a word or move a hand he was gripped hard and led across the deck to the steamer’s chart-house. Therein sat Dawson, the real, undisguised Dawson, and beside him sat Richard Cary. Hagan’s face, which two minutes earlier had been glowing with triumph and with the anticipation of German gold beyond the dreams of avarice, went white as chalk. He staggered and gasped as one stabbed to the heart, and dropped into a chair. His suit-case fell from his relaxed fingers to the floor.

‘Give him a stiff brandy-and-soda,’ directed Dawson, almost kindly, and when the victim’s colour had ebbed back a little from his overcharged heart, and he had drunk deep of the friendly cordial, the detective put him out of pain. The game of cat and mouse was over.

‘It is all up, Hagan,’ said the detective gently. ‘Face the music and make the best of it, my poor friend. This is Mr. Richard Cary, and you have not for a moment been out of our sight since you left London for the north four days ago.’

When I had completed the writing of his story I showed the MS. to Richard Cary, who was pleased to express a general approval. ‘Not at all bad, Copplestone,’ said he, ‘not at all bad. You have clothed my dry bones in real flesh and blood. But you have missed what to me is the outstanding feature of the whole affair, that which justifies to my mind the whole rather grubby business. Let me give you two dates. On May 25 two copies of my faked Notes were shepherded through to Holland and reached the Germans; on May 31 was fought the Battle of Jutland. Can the brief space between these dates have been merely an accident? I cannot believe it. No, I prefer to believe that in my humble way I induced the German Fleet to issue forth and to risk an action which, under more favourable conditions for us, would have resulted in their utter destruction. I may be wrong, but I am happy in retaining my faith.’

‘What became of Hagan?’ I asked, for I wished to bring the narrative to a clean artistic finish.

‘I am not sure,’ answered Cary, ‘though I gave evidence as ordered by the court-martial. But I rather think that I have here Hagan’s epitaph.’ He took out his pocket-book, and drew forth a slip of paper upon which was gummed a brief newspaper cutting. This he handed to me, and I read as follows:

The War Office announces that a
prisoner who was charged with espionage
and recently tried by court-martial at
the Westminster Guildhall was found
guilty and sentenced to death. The
sentence was duly confirmed and carried
out yesterday morning.

_THREE GENERATIONS._

Out in the quiet paddock, with the mellow brick walls screening them from the common life in Bushey Park, they are browsing gently through the last days of their existence. It is not so many years since, gay with trappings, led by a groom apiece to restrain their Hanoverian tempers, these old cream-coloured horses drew the wonderful glass coach through the streets of London, haughtily accepting for themselves the acclamations of the people. At how many pageants, could they but tell us, have they not assisted? Are they old enough to have drawn Queen Victoria to her Diamond Jubilee, and did they drag that heavy gun-carriage with its pathetically small burden through the mourning streets on a Queen’s last journey? Certainly in their own estimation they were the central figures on the chilly August day when they at last carried King Edward to Westminster Abbey amid the joyous thanksgiving of a whole Empire. Their reminiscences would not probably take them very far into the present reign. It must be some little time since the next generation callously ousted them from between the royal shafts, stripped them once for all of their gay trappings, and set them on a back shelf of history.

So now they browse and slumber among the buttercups, and perhaps wonder vaguely at their unshorn and generally disordered condition, and at their prolonged days of idleness. They know and care nothing about the war. They are aliens who have no need to be registered, naturalised as they have been by long generations of royal service. For it is just two hundred years since the first George, in a spirit of arrogance which, as a race, they appear to have assimilated, brought their ancestors from Hanover to draw his royal coach in his adopted country.

They came with those ill-featured ladies who, according to tradition, gave the name to the _Frog Walk_ outside the Palace walls--yes, _outside_--and the creams had nothing to do with them. Never, in the course of their aristocratic history, have they drawn anything but crowned heads and their most legitimate spouses, and for this the British nation reveres and respects them. And now these, their descendants in the paddock, have done with streets and crowds and uniforms--and even with sovereigns. Sometimes one old fellow will lift his head at the sound of the children’s cries on the swings in the Park, and wonder if he is once more being cheered by the populace, but his dim eyes can only see the chestnuts hanging out their red and white candles, and a crow laughs at him from the wall. By his side his comrades, wholly unmoved, with hanging heads and slowly switching tails, are busy cropping the sweet grass, with no thought beyond it. Old age does sometimes, in spite of evidence to the contrary, broaden and mellow the sympathies, and the Cream Colours, who have been above all things exclusive, have developed a very soft spot in their hearts for the old bay horse who shares their paddock. Possibly he, who, whatever he has done in private life, in royal processions has never aspired beyond princesses, knows how to keep his place. At all events, when a sudden spurt of renewed activity will carry him at a gallant pace across the paddock, the august Three will follow him at a feeble canter and with anxious whinnies, until at last, finding him on the other side, they will happily nuzzle their noses into his neck, with every sign of equine affection, which he must accept with mingled pride and resignation. Is he not the _enfant gâté de la maison_?

Well, their great days are over, but they could have found no more dignified place of retirement than under the royal shadow of Hampton Court Palace, the accepted home of retirement and dignity.

Meantime, out in the road, could they but know it, their successors on these summer mornings are taking part in a strange, rather pathetic mimicry of those greater pageants which have no place in war-time. For the Cream Colours of to-day cannot be allowed to idle like their parents. Much may yet, we hope, be expected of them, and they must not forget the manner of that service to which alone they owe their existence. So in the early morning, when trams are few and other traffic is non-existent, they may be met, eight of them, stepping proudly along, with arched necks and haughty expressions, quite unaware that the grooms holding to their bridles are in mufti, that their trappings are of plain wood, and that the royal coach they imagine to be rumbling behind them resembles nothing so much as an empty jail van! The King in the fairy tale was not better pleased with his imaginary fine raiment than the Cream Colours with their phantom state. But nobody troubles to undeceive them; the rooks flap cawing overhead in pursuit of their breakfasts, and the cuckoo monotonously calling from the Home Park is entirely absorbed in his own business. All is vanity, and in another few years they also will be cropping buttercups, with no higher aspiration.

For the next generation is already knocking at the door. On the further side of the road from his forebears, a little dusky foal who will some day be of a correct highly polished cream colour is kicking up his heels in a paddock, a truly royal nursery with a golden floor. He is separated even at this early age from his black and bay contemporaries, whose lot, however, will certainly be more varied and interesting than any which he can look for. Let us hope that he may still be in the nursery when his sleek elders, now disappearing in their own dust along the road, will draw their sovereign in state to return thanks for the greatest of all victories, and the establishment of a righteous peace throughout the world.

ROSE M. BRADLEY.

_ARMY UNIFORMS, PAST AND PRESENT._

BY THE RT. HON. SIR HERBERT MAXWELL, BT.

In the early ’seventies of last century there was staged in London a very amusing musical comedy called _The Happy Land_, the scene being laid in Paradise. Among the principal characters were extremely skilful and poignant burlesques of Mr. Gladstone, Prime Minister at the time, Mr. Lowe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Ayrton, First Commissioner of Works. The piece had but a short, though brilliant, run in the metropolis; for the Lord Chamberlain ordered it off the stage, not on the grounds of what is usually implied by immorality, but because it brought Her Majesty’s Ministers into contempt by mordant caricature of their features and action.[3] It is not known--to me, at least--which of the three victims set the censorship in motion. Certainly it was not ‘Bob’ Lowe, who was gifted with a fine strain of humour. Probably it was done at Mr. Ayrton’s instance, he being destitute of that saving grace, and, besides, having been more mercilessly satirised in the play than his colleagues. He had outraged public feeling, if not public taste, by some acts of his administration as ædile, notably by painting grey some of the fine stone-work in the lobbies of the Houses of Parliament. I forget the libretto of _The Happy Land_; but this much I remember, that, whereas in the first act the scenery of Paradise appeared glowing with rainbow radiance and shimmering with gems, in the second act it represented the effect of Ayrton’s régime--everything had been painted ‘government grey.’

All this was brought to mind by the change wrought upon the appearance of the British Army after the outbreak of the South African war in 1899. By a wave of his wand or a scratch of his quill the Secretary of State for War, Mr. St. John Brodrick (now Viscount Midleton) quenched all gaiety of colour in the fighting dress of our troops; the historic thin red line was to be seen no more; the glittering squadrons were doomed to ride in raiment as sombre as the dust of their own raising; henceforward standards and regimental colours were to be returned to store before the troops went on active service.

Had that been all, it would have sufficed to mark a notable era in the operations of war--a wise measure, imposed upon the Army Council by the vast improvement in the range, trajectory, and precision of artillery and small arms. Hitherto it had been the object of the military authorities of all nations to make their fighting men as conspicuous as possible, exaggerating their stature by fantastic headgear and setting them in strong relief to every variety of natural background by means of bright colours and pipeclay. The Brigade of Guards landed in the Crimea without their knapsacks, which followed in another ship. The men had to do without them for some weeks; but the cumbrous bearskin caps were considered indispensable, and offered a fine target for the Russian defenders of the slopes of the Alma. The hint was thrown away upon our military authorities. It required a sharper lesson to convince them of the cruel absurdity of figging out men for battle in a dress that hampered the limbs and obscured the eyesight. The Guards were not more absurdly dressed on that occasion than the rest of the British troops. The late Sir William Flower described to me his feelings when, as surgeon of an infantry regiment, he stepped out from a boat on the wet sands at the mouth of the Alma, dressed in a skin-tight scarlet coatee with swallow tails, a high collar enclosing a black stock, close-fitting trousers tightly strapped over Wellington boots, and a cocked hat!

Two years before that--in 1852--Colonel Luard published his _History of the Dress of the British Soldier_. Having served as a heavy dragoon in the Peninsula, as a light dragoon at Waterloo, as a lancer in India, and as a staff officer both in India and at home, he had practical experience of the variety of torment inflicted by different kinds of uniform. He advocated many reforms in the soldier’s dress, tending as much to increased efficiency as to comfort, and he supported his argument by extracts from his correspondence with regimental officers. One of these wrote--‘If an infantry soldier has to step over a drain two feet broad, he has to put one hand to his cap to keep it on his head, and his other to his pouch, and what becomes of his musket?’ And this, be it remembered, was the fighting-kit; for no general in those days ever dreamed of taking troops into action except in full review order.

James I. was not a warlike king, but he was a pretty shrewd observer of men and matters. He was not far wrong when he observed that plate armour was a fine thing, for it not only protected the life of the wearer, but hindered him from hurting anybody else! The remark might have been applied with equal justice to the costume of British soldiers in the Crimean campaign, except that it afforded no protection to the wearer’s life or limb. It required nearly one hundred years of painful experience to convince the War Office that it was cruel stupidity to put men in the field in clothing so tight as to fetter the limbs and compress the chest. That was the legacy of George IV. to the British Army.

Although, to one looking back over the history of what is now the United Kingdom, the most salient features seem to be campaigns and battles, invasion and counter-invasion, it was not until the Civil War that any attempt was made towards a uniform dress for any army. It is true that both the English and Scottish Parliaments from time to time prescribed with the utmost care the offensive and defensive armour with which every able-bodied subject was to provide himself or be provided by his feudal chief, and if that chief were a wealthy baron his following would be clothed in his liveries. Thus, in describing the famous scene at Lauder when Archibald Douglas, fifth Earl of Angus, won his sobriquet of Bell-the-Cat, Pitscottie tells us in deliciously quaint phrase how luckless Thomas Cochrane, newly created Earl of Mar, rode down to the kirk where the disaffected lords were in conference, at the head of three hundred men all dressed in his liveries of white doublets with black bands. Cromwell was the first ruler of England who succeeded in what several of his predecessors had failed--in maintaining a standing army. At one time he had 80,000 men under arms. There was a degree of uniformity in the dress of his cavalry and infantry. It consisted mainly of buff coats, with the addition of breast and back pieces, iron caps, and other defensive armour. But that army was disbanded after the Restoration, and it was not until the reign of William III. that a standing army was finally constituted, and colonels commanding regiments, being allowed a sufficient sum for clothing the men, were required to do so according to sealed pattern.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the British soldier’s dress was, on the whole, both picturesque and comfortable. In cut, it conformed pretty faithfully to the fashion prevailing in civilian attire, though there occurred an interval when George II. inflicted upon his Guards regiments the preposterous conical head-dress, copied from the Prussian Guards of Frederick the Great. This disfiguring headgear did not last very long, and gave place before the end of the century to the three-cocked hat of the style called, I believe, Nivernois or Kevenhüller.

The easy grace of the full-dress uniform of an officer of the Guards towards the close of the eighteenth century is admirably shown in Romney’s portrait of John, tenth Earl of Westmorland, now at Osterley Park. It shows a long-skirted scarlet frock, lined with white, faced with blue, with ruffles at the wrists, and without any ornament save a pair of gilt epaulets of moderate size and soft material, very different from the cumbrous, unyielding things now prescribed for naval officers and lords-lieutenant. The frock is worn open over a Ramillies cravat and waistcoat and breeches of white kersey. It would be difficult to devise a dress for a soldier so well combining comfort and dignified distinction. To one feature only can objection be taken. The powdered and curled hair, clubbed in a pigtail, looks charming on Romney’s canvas, but must have proved an intolerable nuisance both to officers and men.

‘During the command of the late Duke of Kent at Gibraltar
[1802-3], when a field-day was ordered, there not being
sufficient barbers in the town to attend to all the
officers in the morning, the seniors claimed the privilege
of their rank; the juniors consequently were obliged to
have their heads dressed the night before; and to preserve
the beauty of this artistic arrangement--pomatumed,
powdered, curled and clubbed--these poor fellows were
obliged to sleep on their faces! It is said that in the
adjutant’s office of each regiment there was kept a pattern
of the correct curls, to which the barbers could refer.’[4]

The men wore tunics of a cut similar to those of the officers, but of coarser cloth. They were buttoned up on duty, the skirts being looped back. It was a thoroughly sensible and workmanlike dress, giving perfect freedom to breathing and circulation, together with protection to loins and thighs. The Chelsea pensioners wear a coat of the old infantry pattern to this day.

With the Regency came a vicious change. The Prince Regent paid incessant attention to dress--both to his own and that of others. He was proud of his figure, which, indeed, was a fine one till it was ruined by excess, and he loved to display it in closely fitting dress. Nor was he content until he got his father’s army buttoned up to the limit of endurance and disfigured by headgear of appalling dimensions. The easy open collar and Ramillies tie were replaced by an upright fence of buckram and a leather stock. It would be hardly credible, were there not abundant evidence in the correspondence of the Horse Guards to prove it, that while Wellington was absorbed in manœuvring against immensely superior forces in Spain, he had to give attention to correspondence about changes in the dress of the army, not with a view to making it more comfortable and workmanlike, but in order to gratify the caprice of the Prince Regent. No man ever gave less thought to niceties of tailoring than Lord Wellington (as he was at that time). His views are set forth in a letter to the Military Secretary who had consulted him about the uniform to be prescribed for those regiments of Light Dragoons which the Prince Regent had desired the Duke of York (recently reinstated as Commander-in-Chief) to convert into Hussars.

‘FRENEDA, _6th November, 1811_.

‘... There is no subject of which I understand so little
[as military uniforms], and, abstractedly speaking, I think
it indifferent how a soldier is clothed, provided it is in
an uniform manner, and that he is forced to keep himself
clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be. But there is one
thing I deprecate, and that is any imitation of the French
in any manner. It is impossible to form an idea of the
inconvenience and injury which result from having anything
like them, either on horseback or on foot.[5] Lutyens and
his piquet were taken in June because the 3rd Hussars had
the same caps as the French _Chasseurs-à-cheval_ and some
of their Hussars, and I was near being taken on September
25 from the same cause. At a distance or in action colours
are nothing; the profile and shape of a man’s cap, and his
general appearance, are what guide us; and why should we
make our people look like the French?... I only beg that
we may be as different as possible from the French in
everything. The narrow tops of our infantry, as opposed to
their broad top caps, are a great advantage to those who
are to look at long lines of posts opposed to each other.’

Two years later, at the battle of Vitoria, the justice of Wellington’s views about the soldier’s uniform received apt illustration. Wellington on that day kept the Light Division and 4th Division under his immediate command. The 3rd and 7th Divisions, under Picton and Lord Dalhousie, were to join him in order to complete the centre of the line, but they had difficult ground to traverse, and were late. The Zadora flowed swift and deep in front of the French position. A countryman having informed Wellington that the bridge of Tres Puentes was unguarded, Kempt’s riflemen were sent forward to seize it, which they did, and went so far up the heights on the farther side that they were able to establish themselves in shelter of a crest well in rear of a French advanced post. There they lay, until Wellington’s line was completed by the arrival of ‘old Picton, riding at the head of the 3rd Division, dressed in a blue coat and a round hat, swearing as loudly all the way as if he wore two cocked ones.’[6] The 7th Division came up at the same time, and while they were deploying the enemy opened fire upon them. Kempt immediately drew his riflemen from their shelter and took the French batteries in flank, thereby enabling the 3rd Division to cross the bridge of Mendoza without loss. But the dark uniforms of the Rifles deceived the British on the other side of the river into the belief that they were French. A battery opened upon them and continued pounding them with round shot and shrapnel till the advance of Picton’s Division revealed the blunder.

Wellington’s warning against copying the uniforms of other nations received little attention. After 1815, when he was in command of the Army of Occupation in Paris, it was decided to arm four regiments of cavalry with lances, a most effective weapon which had not been carried by British troops since the seventeenth century. One would have supposed that the lance might be wielded as effectively by a man dressed as a light dragoon or a hussar as in any other rig; but the Prince Regent hailed the innovation as an opportunity for an entirely new costume. Consequently the 9th, 12th, 16th and 23rd Light Dragoons were put into a Polish dress, modified in such manner as to agree with his Royal Highness’s sartorial taste.

‘An officer of rank commanding one of the Lancer regiments
was ordered to attend the Prince Regent to fit the new
jacket on him. The tailor, with a pair of scissors, was
ordered to cut smooth every wrinkle and fine-draw the
seams. The consequence was that the coats of the private
soldiers, as well as those of the officers, were made so
tight they could hardly get into them; the freedom of
action was so restricted that the infantry with difficulty
handled their muskets, and the cavalry could scarcely do
the sword exercise.’

The cuirass had been discontinued in the British cavalry since 1794, when it had been found most unsuitable for active service in the Netherlands. But it was far too showy a piece of goods to escape the Prince Regent’s attention. Accordingly the three regiments of Household Cavalry were made to appear at his coronation in 1820 in steel cuirasses and burnished helmets, with enormous combs of bearskin; the latter, as Colonel Luard caustically observes, rendering it impossible for a man to deliver the sixth cut in the sword exercise of that day. The cuirass and helmet remain, with the unwieldy jack-boots and leather breeches, an effective, if archaic, part of a theatrical pageant which Londoners have learnt to love; but as the equipment of a modern soldier the costume is ludicrously inapt and very costly. In an era when war has become more terrible and more intensely destructive than in any previous age, and at a time when the whole resources of the nation are strained for the country to hold its own, it may well be asked whether money might not be more profitably employed than in causing the splendid men of the Household Cavalry to masquerade in such attire as would be grotesque to imagine them wearing in modern warfare.

About the same time that the cuirass was inflicted upon the Household Cavalry, the sentry boxes in London and at Windsor Castle had to be increased in height in order to accommodate a new pattern of bearskin cap which had been approved for the Foot Guards. The old pattern, which had superseded the three-cocked hat at the end of the previous century, was a sensible affair of reasonable dimensions; but the army tailors, encouraged by the new King, were indefatigable in devising extravagance in uniforms, and the bearskin was made to shoot up several inches in height. ‘Ridicule,’ observed Colonel Luard, ‘subsides when the eye is no longer a stranger to the object of excitement; otherwise the little boys would run after the guardsmen when they appear in the streets of London, and shout at the overwhelming, preposterous, hideous bearskin caps.’ It is rumoured that the supply of the right sort of bear is now running short. It may not be too much to hope that, when our armies return victorious at the end of the war, the occasion may be marked by the invention of some uniform for the Brigade of Guards more comfortable and workmanlike than a skin-tight tunic and a grossly exaggerated fur-cap. Londoners, laudably conservative in what they have become used with, would be the less likely to murmur at the change, inasmuch as they have grown accustomed to see guard-mounting performed in forage-caps.

Among all the variety of uniforms of the British infantry, none has undergone so little change in the last hundred and fifty years as that of the Highland regiments. Well that it is so, for there is none other that so admirably sets off a soldier-like figure, none that stirs so much enthusiasm among the spectators at a field-day. So fully has this been recognised that a society has recently been formed to protest against and endeavour to remedy what is deemed the unmerited neglect of Lowland Scottish regiments, whereof the records certainly are no whit inferior in lustre to those of the Highland corps. It is complained that the Lowland regiments are always kept in the background; that Edinburgh, though a Lowland city, is invariably garrisoned by a Highland regiment, and that facilities for recruiting in Edinburgh and Glasgow are accorded to Highland regiments and refused to Lowland regiments. Much of this is unfortunately true; but the real reason for it exists in the greater popularity of the Highland uniform. No amount of protest or persuasion will prevail to make the general public take the same interest in a trousered regiment as in a kilted one. Might not the surest remedy be to put the Lowland regiments also into kilts? Purists will object that Lowlanders have no business to don the philabeg; but, for that matter, neither have they any business to wear tartan trews, _which all the Lowland regiments do at the present time, besides being furnished with kilted pipers_.[7] Then all Scottish regiments would be on an equal footing, and no material would remain for the present irritation. It is difficult to understand, impossible to explain, the emotion--involuntary, as all true emotion must be--roused, even in Saisneach breasts, by the sight of a Highland regiment marching to the skirl of the pipes. In order to illustrate it, let me lapse for a moment into the first person singular.

During Queen Victoria’s memorable progress through her metropolis in the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, I was seated with two ladies of my family in the stand set up for members of Parliament in Palace Yard. The long hours of waiting on that shining summer forenoon were enlivened by the march of many regiments, headed by their bands, passing to their appointed places in the route. It was a shifting pageant of stirring sight and sound. Presently, over Westminster Bridge came the Seaforth Highlanders stepping to the lively strains of _The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre_.[8] The effect was indescribable--the swing of kilts and sporrans, the dark waving plumes, the gallant but simple melody, thrilled all spectators. As for myself, I felt a big lump in my throat, and I was ashamed to feel something trickle down both cheeks. Yet am I a Lowland Scot, if anybody is; so far as I am aware, I can lay no claim to any strain of Celtic blood. If such an one was so deeply moved by the passing of a single Highland regiment, why should not all the Scottish regiments be clothed in the romantic garb of Old Gaul, with the desirable result of rendering the Lowland corps as well-beloved by the people as the Highlanders? If this were carried out, it would be esteemed a privilege by the former and a compliment by the latter. Objection on the score of economy would be raised because of the cost of the full-dress feather-bonnet, which, though picturesque, is but a tailor’s parody of the bonnet of the _duine uasail_. Let the Lowland regiments be content, then, with the Glengarry. Nobody who has seen a battalion of the London Scottish marching through Pall Mall, and listened to the comments of those who crowd to the club windows at the sound of the pibroch, will tell you that that fine corps would gain anything in soldierly appearance by wearing feather-bonnets. That head-dress was condemned in 1882, but in deference to Queen Victoria’s wishes it was restored. Its abolition had previously been hotly challenged in the House of Commons by certain perfervid Scots, one of whom volunteered a quaint explanation to an honourable member who had ventured to express some doubt about ostrich feathers being an appropriate ornament for a Scottish soldier. He gravely assured the House that the costume had its origin in Sir Ralph Abercromby’s Egyptian campaign in 1801, when the Highland soldiers picked up ostrich feathers in the desert and stuck them in their bonnets as a protection from the sun!

The fact is that the feather-bonnet, and all other exaggerated and expensive head-dresses, should be as resolutely relegated to limbo as the hideous masks worn by the fighting men of Old Japan. Both were designed to overawe the enemy; but, as modern fighting is done in forage-caps, that naïve purpose cannot be carried into effect, and the object should be to provide such clothing as will best enable a man to keep himself, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, ‘clean and smart, as a soldier ought to be.’ And no headgear is smarter, none more easily kept clean, than the Glengarry bonnet.

While it is hardly possible to imagine any dress better calculated to impede a soldier’s movements than the uniforms inflicted upon all arms in the service during the early years of the nineteenth century, one should not overlook the relief that was ordained in a detail that was a source of constant unnecessary trouble to the soldier. Clubbed pigtails had been transmitted as an irksome legacy from Marlborough’s army, until in 1808 the Horse Guards decreed their abolition. When Sir Arthur Wellesley landed in Mondego Bay on August 1-5 in that year, one of his first orders was that these senseless, dirty appendages were to be cut off. Never, one may believe, was an order more cheerfully obeyed. A counter-order was issued shortly after from the Horse Guards, requiring the retention of pigtails, but it was beyond the power of man to comply with it. It was easy to cut off pigtails, but they could not be replaced; and now the only vestige of a barbarous fashion in the army remains in the bow of black ribbon worn by the Welsh Fusiliers at the back of the collar of the tunic.

Unfortunately, the irrational fashion of tight clothing for the army instituted by the Prince Regent endures to this day. It is true that a sensible field-dress of khaki was devised and worn during the South African War, and is now the service dress of the army; but the full dress for officers and the ‘walking-out’ uniform for men is still cut and fitted on the old excruciating lines. I think it took three weeks to fit a young friend of mine, joining a battalion of Guards a few years ago, before the adjutant of that _corps d’élite_ passed the tunic as satisfactory. Every crease and wrinkle had to be obliterated, at such cost to freedom of limbs and lungs as may be imagined. It may not be an extravagant hope that, when our army returns once more to a peace footing, the full dress may be designed with more regard to health and comfort than hitherto. Our eyes have grown accustomed during the present war to seeing soldiers in a costume, far from beautiful, indeed, but easy and respectable. There is no reason why a scarlet coat should be less comfortable than a dust-coloured one, and it will be a sad thing if the historic red of the English infantry is not preserved for full dress. But even if it were not, the khaki uniform might be rendered very becoming by the addition of a little modest ornament, especially by the restoration of the old regimental facings. These would not make troops one whit more conspicuous in the field; on the contrary, it is a commonplace of optics that parti-coloured objects are less easily detected in a landscape than those of one uniform colour.

One desirable result of making uniform more comfortable wear might be expected to follow; officers might not be so scrupulous to exchange it for mufti the moment they are released from duty. Alone among the nationalities of Europe has the British officer hitherto treated his uniform as if it were something to be ashamed of in private life. It is an unseemly, even an unhandsome practice, seeing that non-commissioned officers and privates are not allowed to disport themselves in what they call ‘private clothes.’ Nor was it the custom among officers in the eighteenth century, when uniform was as easy and becoming as any other dress. The usual dress of an officer, even when on leave, was then his undress uniform, just as it is now in Continental armies. The change in the British Army was the direct outcome of the Prince Regent’s tyranny in buttoning up soldiers to the throat in clothes which it was a torment to wear.

It must be owned that the Duke of Wellington was in large measure responsible, inasmuch as he set the example of preferring easy clothes to uneasy ones. A plain blue frock opening at the throat to a white cravat was his invariable dress throughout his campaigns. He had for his own wear a cocked hat one third the size of the huge one prescribed for general officers. There was a famous occasion in 1814, after the restoration of Louis XVIII., when the King and the Royal Princes, with a brilliant suite, attended a state performance in the Odéon Theatre. The house was ablaze with uniforms of many nations and the gay dresses of ladies of the Court. In a box immediately opposite the royal one sat the Duke--in plain clothes! ‘The pride that apes humility’? Not a bit. _Le vainqueur des vainqueurs_ could scarcely be suspected of that. Simply, as he had to sit through a long performance, he chose to do so in clothes that enabled him to sit in comfort.

Much praiseworthy attention is now given to the equipment and clothing of British troops serving in hot climates, but it was otherwise throughout most of the nineteenth century, and it is incalculable how much suffering, disease, and death was caused by neglect of any such provision. When Colonel Luard was preparing his book in 1850-52 he received letters from many officers calling his attention to this matter. One of these writes:

‘I shall be very glad if you dedicate a portion of your
work to the dress of our soldiers in the colonies.... I
have myself seen the Spanish, French, and Danish troops in
the West Indies much more healthy than our own, from great
attention to their comfort in their dress.... The whole
body of civilians in the tropics appear in loose white
jackets and trousers and a skull-cap ... the shakoes and
red coats of our troops were not altered in our West India
colonies.’

* * * * *

A cavalry officer remarks: ‘I hope you will dwell on the madness of our soldiers wearing leather caps under a tropical sun’; while another observes that ‘a brass helmet was not found serviceable in Africa by the 7th Dragoon Guards when that regiment was at the Cape.’

Our troops suffered horribly during the first Kaffir war, 1846-48, from being clothed exactly as they had been at home--leather stocks, tight coatees, heavy shakoes, and all the rest of it. Some consideration was shown for the soldier in the second Kaffir war, 1851-52. Captain King, of the 74th Highlanders, describes how his regiment landed at Cape Town (after a voyage from England of two months!) wearing their ordinary clothing, and it was not until they had marched far into the interior that ‘our bonnets and plaids were replaced by a costume more suitable for the bush--viz., a short dark canvas blouse; in addition to which feldt-schoen and lighter pouches, made of untanned leather, were issued to the men, and broad leather peaks affixed to their forage-caps.’[9]

Captain King’s narrative is illustrated by lithographs from his own excellent drawings, which show his men, heavily accoutred with pack and pouch, and with no protection against the sun except the aforesaid peak to the forage-cap, severely handicapped in fighting nearly naked blacks armed with rifles. No wonder the 74th lost heavily, their commander, Colonel Fordyce, falling at their head in a bush fight, together with some of his best officers.

It is not only in matters of dress and equipment that we have learnt consideration for our troops on foreign service. The splendid organisation of the Royal Army Medical Corps has been severely tested in coping with the requirements of such a force as it was never contemplated Great Britain would or could put in the field; but the test has been nobly met; the latest discoveries in science have been employed to avert disease and mortality from wounds, thereby saving soldiers and their families and friends from an incalculable amount of misery. The Transport Service has not only met the extraordinary demand upon its resources in the conveyance of necessary supplies--food, munitions, &c.--but has proved equal to the punctual deliverance of the vast stores of comforts and even luxuries consigned from voluntary sources at home.

Among the said luxuries is one whereon the Iron Duke would have turned no favouring eye. The tobacco which has been supplied to our troops at the front--aye, and in hospital at home--must amount to a prodigious figure. When the Duke was Commander-in-Chief in 1845 he issued the following counterblast:

‘G.O. No. 577.--The Commander-in-Chief has been informed
that the practice of smoking, by the use of pipes, cigars
and cheroots, has become prevalent among the Officers
of the Army, which is not only in itself a species of
intoxication occasioned by the fumes of tobacco, but,
undoubtedly, occasions drinking and tippling by those who
acquire the habit; and he intreats the Officers commanding
Regiments to prevent smoking in the Mess Rooms of their
several Regiments, and in the adjoining apartments, and to
discourage the practice among the Officers of Junior Rank
in their Regiments.’

There was no Press Censor in those days, and _Punch_, which was then a vigorous stripling in its fourth year, was allowed to make merry over this fulmination, declaring that officers of the Army were greatly perturbed, ‘dreading the possibility of being thrown upon their conversational resources, which must have a most dreary effect.’ Tobacconists drove a brisk trade in pipe-stoppers carved in the likeness of the Duke’s head. These might now be a fitting object of pursuit on the part of collectors.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] The piece continued to be given in the provinces, where
the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship does not take effect.

[4] _A History of the Dress of the British Soldier_, by
Lieut.-Col. John Luard, 1852, p. 99.

[5] Of course because the French were the enemy in that
campaign.

[6] Kincaid’s _Adventures in the Rifle Brigade_, 2nd
edition, 1838, p. 222.

[7] See report of meeting of the Lowland Scots Society,
held in Edinburgh on November 25, 1915.

[8] An old air, subsequently set to the song _My Tocher’s
the Jewel_.

[9] _Campaigning in Kaffirland_, by Capt. W. R. King, 1853,
p. 27.

_THE NEW UBIQUE: SPIT AND POLISH._

BY JEFFERY E. JEFFERY.

‘Per_son_ally myself,’ said the Child, tilting back his chair until his head touched the wall behind him, and stretching out a lazy arm towards the cigarette-box--‘per_son_ally myself, I’ve enjoyed this trip no end--haven’t you?’

‘I have,’ I answered; ‘so much so, Child, that the thought of going back to gun-pits and trenches and O.P.s again fills me with gloom.’

It was our last night in a most comfortable billet near ----, where, on and off, we had spent rather more than a month of ease: on the morrow we were going into the line again. The trip to which the Child was referring, however, was an eight days’ course at a place vaguely known as ‘the --th Army Mobile Artillery Training School,’ from which our battery had but lately returned.