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Afghanistan. It left a legacy of hatred and distrust destined to last for many years, and by the disastrous ill-success which tarnished the prestige of our arms it sowed for us, as Neville Chamberlain's biographer has well said, "the tares of the Indian Mutiny."

Chamberlain did not escape unscathed from a year of constant active hostilities against fanatical tribesmen. Six times he was wounded, and on more than one occasion his escape from death was by a hair's breadth. His own simple narratives of these adventures are more graphic than the most elaborate word-painting, and they bring home to the reader with singular force both the fierceness of the encounters described and the cool gallantry of the narrator. Thus on March 25, 1842, he writes of a fight outside Kandahar

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"You may suppose that it was no child's play when I tell you that both bridle-reins were cut through, the right stirrup cut off, and I also got a cut on my hand, a slight scratch above my ankle, and one on my game knee! I have no doubt they thought they had done for me, as three men jumped off their horses and made a rush at me, thinking, I suppose, they could do for me more easily on foot; however, I hope to be able to give them a twist for it yet. The cut on my left hand will, I believe, only cost me the loss of the use of my little finger, it being cut through the knuckle joint."

On another occasion, also in the fighting outside Kandahar, and on the ground afterwards made memorable by Sir Frederick Roberts's final defeat of Ayub Khan in 1880, Chamberlain had an equally

narrow escape in a personal encounter, of which the following graphic account has been told by his nephew, Sir N. F. F. Chamberlain :

"As he was riding up the very stony path [in pursuit of the retreating enemy] one of the Afghans jumped off the rocks on to his horse, and then stabbed him in the thigh. They both rolled off the horse, and to stab him in the stomach with his when on the ground the man tried dagger. My uncle flung his arms round him, and then seized the Afghan's biceps with his teeth, which caused him to drop the dagger. A trooper then came to his assistance and killed his assailant."

His last and most serious wound during the war was a shot through the leg, received on the very day on which the rear-guard of the retiring army issued from the Khyber Pass. It caused him intense pain, and he wrote in the diary which he kept at this time: "I hope I shall never again go through Morewhat I then suffered." over, it disabled him for many months, being the occasion of his not taking part in the First Sikh War three years later, and he narrowly escaped losing his leg.

But Chamberlain's memoirs are not made up entirely of stirring adventures, nor is the character which they disclose merely that of a fearless leader of horse. Mention has already been made of the influence of his experiences in Afghanistan in developing and strengthening his character, and it is interesting to trace this development in his correspondence. The light-hearted carelessness of his earlier letters becomes

more and more rare, and gives place to not infrequent reflections on the terrible accompaniments of war-"my cruel profession" as he calls it,often interspersed with descriptions of scenery, to the beauties of which he was ever susceptible, painted in singularly wellchosen words. After the sack of Istaliffe he writes on October 1, 1842

"As I looked from this scene of desolation into the beautiful valley beneath, I could not help comparing the work of man and his Creator, the one all peace, and harmony, and goodness, the other wickedness, and misery, and destruction. I wish it were possible for me to portray in words the sublimity of this spot which seemed made to shut out all the passions of our race."

Moreover, we learn from his biographer other testimony to the steadfastness of his nature, which he would have been the last person to dwell upon in his boyish letters, but of which the lesson to every young soldier is too valuable to be overlooked. The Chamberlains had no resources beyond their pay, and during the first year or so of their service in Afghanistan, when they were only ensigns of native infantry, they were often in

severe

straits for money, owing to the enormous prices even of the necessaries of life. But they seldom mentioned their difficulties, nor did they ever ask for money, yet at the same time by strict economy they avoided debt.

"I have not tasted a drop of wine or spirit since April, so as to reduce the amount of my mess bill," wrote Neville Chamberlain in October

1841. "I never accept an invitation to dine with another brother officer,

as I should have to ask in return. Were I able to live without servants or tents I would, but that I cannot do, or I should then lose the respect I have of the men of my company. got the name of the Hermit from never seeing any one, and of course I pretend that that is my natural character; but you all know what a different nature mine is!”

Such then were the conditions in which Chamberlain grew from boyhood to manhood. It was a hard school, but it was one which turned out men fit to bear the "white man's burden" of responsibility, with courage and resource to meet emergency, and nerve to face the heaviest odds without failing. It was well for Englishmen in India fifteen years later that so many of their leaders had undergone in their youth the trials of 1841 and 42, that the steel of their high spirit had been tempered in the hardships and perils of Afghanistan. Chamberlain, Outram, Havelock all were there, and not least among them John Nicholson, who at Ghazni had to endure the added bitterness of surrendering his sword as a prisoner to a victorious foe.

With the close of the Afghan War Neville Chamberlain found himself already famous in the military world of India. Lord Ellenborough hastened to appoint him to his Bodyguard, and he accompanied that corps when it took the field with the Governor-General against the Mahrattas at the end of 1843. The wound in his leg was still unhealed, and during the previous twelve months he had

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not been able to do any active duty; nevertheless when there a prospect of fighting nothing short of complete disablement could keep him from the scene. The restraints of medical examinations were not invented in those days, and there was no one to say him nay when he insisted on accompanying the army, borne in a dooly, while his horse was kept near at hand, ready for him to mount as soon as the moment for action should arrive. Few incidents in his career afford such striking testimony to Chamberlain's indomitable spirit and complete indifference to danger as the part which he played, in this crippled condition, in the battle of Maharajpore on December 29, 1843. When the action began he hurried to the front in his dooly, but on reaching his corps his horse was not to be found. In this dilemma, notwithstanding his wound and weakness, he did not hesitate to mount the first spare troop-horse that could be procured, which by ill-luck happened to be a determined runaway, and had thrown its own rider before Chamberlain mounted it. The Bodyguard and 16th Lancers were now ordered to charge a battery of the enemy's guns, and advanced to the attack, but were eventually compelled to abandon the attempt owing to the impassable nature of the ground.

"Being very weak from never using my arms, and from continued confinement," writes Chamberlain, "the little strength that I had was

soon exhausted by holding a hardmouthed horse with one hand and carrying a heavy sword in the other. Before we charged the battery the brute ran away with me twice; however I managed to bring him round to the regiment again, the third time; when the word 'About' was extreme right of our line of attack to given my horse took me from the the extreme left, carrying me through some of the enemy's infantry, who, as a matter of course, let fly at me en passant. Fortunately the crops were high, and I was not seen until among them; and natives are not good flying shots. By the horse running away with me I saw more of the action than I should otherwise have done, so everything was for the best. My leg did not suffer by the ride, but I was so exhausted that, to have saved my life, I could not have raised my sword to have guarded a

blow."

But the wounds from which he had suffered had impaired his strength too much to admit of his continuing on active service or of his regaining health in India. After several months of sick leave in the hills he was at length compelled to proceed to England. On his return about two years later he had a brief experience of employment on a personal staff, being appointed Military Secretary to the Governor of Bombay. Such a change from the active duties of his profession was, however, little to his taste. The retirement of his chief, owing to ill-health, gave him an opportunity of returning to combatant service which he was quick to embrace, and the outbreak of the Second Sikh War in 1848 saw him Major of Brigade in the 4th of Lord Cavalry Brigade Gough's army. Of his experiences in that stern struggle

we have not space here to write in detail, and it must suffice to say (in his own modest language) that neither he nor his brother Crawford "lost reputation from having been brought into the field." We must hasten on to the following years when he had the invaluable privilege of serving under Henry Lawrence, at first as a junior magistrate and afterwards as chief officer of police in the Punjab. Here began his official connection with the new province, for the for the administration of which Lord Dalhousie delighted to select the most brilliant officers in the civil and military services of the East India Company. Sir Henry Lawrence had already some acquaintance with Chamberlain when in the summer of 1849 the latter applied for employment in the Punjab, and he willingly supported the application; and when, a few months later, Chamberlain assumed the duties of Assistant Commissioner at Rawal Pindi, Lawrence wrote him a letter of advice which, as Mr George Forrest says, "should be read, marked, learnt, and inwardly digested by every Indian administrator." "Keep the peace and collect the revenues," he wrote, "and Utopia will be gained." To serve a military apprenticeship under Nott and to be trained in administration by Henry Lawrence was 8 combination of circumstances which would have produced good results even in an average man, and Neville Chamberlain was very far above the aver

age. The training which he received when in civil employment in the Punjab completed the education of a mind receptive of noble impulses, apt to learn the secrets of governing men, and peculiarly fitted, by reason of its generosity and humanity as much as its strength and boldness, to gain a commanding ascendancy over the wild tribesmen of the Indian frontier. Chamberlain's connection with the Punjab thus begun continued up to the very end of his active soldiering, for in 1854, when only thirty-four years of age and a brevetmajor in rank, he was offered by Lord Dalhousie the command of the Punjab Irregular Force, and this appointment he retained until he left India at the close of his last campaign in 1864.

When Lord Dalhousie's offer

of the Frontier command reached him he was on leave in South Africa. Thither he had gone to seek health once more, but his time there was not spent as an invalid. His thirst for stirring adventure led him, when he could not enjoy what he termed "the pleasurable emotions of active service," to turn for recreation to sport with the rifle, and he found in the dangers and excitements of lion-shooting a diversion after his own heart. "After meeting a lion I ceased to care to go after commoner game, and, speaking without much experience, my impression is that I should always prefer hunting lions to any other kind of game." "I never

felt a greater thrill of joy in my life, and cannot convey the impression of seeing the king of beasts bounding before one in his native covert." His long letters, in which he describes his experiences in the African bush, are among the most delightful pages of Mr Forrest's 'Life.' Again and again they belie Neville Chamberlain's far too modest estimate of his own powers of writing. One can only regret that they are too long to be quoted here, while to select extracts would not do justice to their vivid and picturesque charm. We must therefore refer our readers to the work itself.

But a position of responsibility, the command of men, and the stern but inspiring realities of war, were more attractive to Chamberlain than any sport however noble. He left South Africa filled with high hopes of further active service, and with the certainty of an appointment peculiarly congenial to a man of his tastes and training, as well as of unusual importance for one so comparatively junior in age and rank.

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noticeable in Neville Chamberlain's correspondence; indeed, he writes plainly to his mother in 1856: "Latterly God has given me wisdom." His was a nature as simple as it was strong, just such a nature as can realise the injunction to become "as a little child." Encouraged by the example of the men about him whom he most admired, he seems to have readily acquired their perfect and childlike faith in a Divine Providence, which to weaker natures must always be a source as much of wonder as of admiration, and of which the language is so assured and unwavering as to appear like fatalism. "Do not fear for me," he wrote in the first days of the Mutiny, "I shall be as safe at Delhi as here-unless it pleases God that my bones shall rest there, and if that is His will, why repine?" And again on another occasion, when he was in a position of considerable peril: "You need be under no apprehension on my account, for no one goes till God calls him, and then no one can remain." This absolute confidence in Divine assistance stood men in good stead during the summer months of 1857, when one blow followed on another, and when the odds against us sometimes seemed almost too strong to be overborne.

Of Neville Chamberlain's work during the Mutiny many pens have written. His command of the Punjab Movable Column, in which he was succeeded by Nicholson, and his gallantry before Delhi, where

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