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on works in India), and it seldom results in serious waste. The home authorities, on the other hand, while treating their technical advisers with a greater measure of confidence, so far as plans and estimates are concerned, retain under central control the principal machinery for execution. No doubt in the complex condition of trade in England it is necessary that all Army contracts, whether for barracks or blankets, beef or boots, should be under some central office of control whose relations with the civil market, and with the Treasury, should be continuous. Yet it unquestionably means less personal initiative for the officer on the spot, it weakens his selfreliance, and is pro tanto less valuable experience. As a result of the Indian system, many engineers who had been occupied in time of peace in building roads, bridges, fortified posts, &c., in our Frontier highlands, attracted round them contractors who knew and trusted the Englishmen, and who in their turn could be trusted to meet any emergency. Then in time of war the same contractors followed the officers into the field, as a matter of course, and the works went on as smoothly in war as in peace. It was thus, to take one instance out of many, that the road, nearly 200 miles long, from Peshawar to Kabul was made through difficult Afghan passes in the winter of 1879-80, a work to which nothing in the Crimea presents any parallel.

Such a course would admittedly be difficult with our home organisation, centred as this is in the hands of the civil staff at the War Office, and whose functions and duties are probably a necessary corollary of the British Constitution, and therefore beyond criticism.

To criticise the Constitution would be as preposterous as to speak disrespectfully of the equator. But it may perhaps be permitted, with deference and humility, to express an opinion with regard to the actions of some of the statesmen who administer the trust imposed on them by the rules of the Constitution. All the mistakes associated with the policy of the Army Works Corps were repeated thirty years afterwards in connection with the Suakin-Berber railway when the late Duke of Devonshire was War Minister. We learn from the recently published life of Lord Haliburton that it was in spite of the advice of the chief technical officer at the War Office that a broad gauge railway, complete even to the guards' watches, was sent out to Suakin. The work was entrusted to a firm of British railway contractors, and British navvies at exorbitant rates of pay were sent out to make it. The work was a colossal failure. The materials were eventually brought back to England and were stored at Woolwich Arsenal. Yet, from what the writer knows of the countries between the Nile and the Red Sea, and also on the North-West Frontier of India,

there was no difficulty in the former comparable with some of those presented by the latter, and at that time there were Indian engineers of Frontier railway experience who were only too eager to tackle the work, and who, from their success elsewhere, would probably have succeeded.

This failure may be contrasted with the brilliant success of Lord Kitchener's railway from Halfa to Abu Hamed, and with the equally successful railway work done in South Africa and China, where all the arrangements were worked out by capable men on the spot.

Ne sutor ultra crepidam. The more talented and brilliant a statesman is, able by the majestic power of his oratory to sway an audience, and conscious of his own lofty patriotism and integrity of purpose, the more apt is he to suppose that his judgment in all matters pertaining to national defence is beyond the reach of question. No one, not even his bitterest political opponent, would deny to Mr Gladstone the possession of the above qualities, but in some most important questions of Army policy his ideas were fundamentally at fault, as will be seen from the following extract from a letter written by him to Lord Herbert in November 1859 :

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me, that we have any idea of the predisposing power which an imhave in begetting war. They conmense series of preparations for war stantly familiarise ideas which, when familiar, lose their horror, and they light an inward flame of excitement of which, when it is habitually fed,

we lose the consciousness."

The "shame and scandal" here alluded to are the distrust of France, and the imputation to her in 1859, especially in her naval policy, of making arrangements to invade Great Britain. Mr Herbert thought, as most of us think to-day, though not with reference to France, that the best way to avoid such a catastrophe was "to make the attempt so dangerous as to be almost impossible." Mr Gladstone regarded such an attitude as shameful and scandalous. Posterity has now forgotten that there was any such danger to be apprehended, and it would hardly agree to-day that shame and scandal were to be attributed to the Minister who prepared for the worst. But posterity does remember the shame and scandal of sending an Army to the Crimea utterly unprovided with the necessaries of winter warfare, and, without "minutely apportioning the blame," holds the Ministry of which Mr Gladstone was a distinguished member responsible.

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As regards the argument about familiarity with the ideas of war begetting war, we may say that it is at least wanting in originality. same argument a century before was used in the earlier years of George II., though we hear little of it after Pitt came into power. It was cer

tainly not a nation familiarised by war that clamoured for the conflict with Russia in 1853. If the nation had realised the gravity of war, the serious necessity for administration, and the bitter lessons of battle, would it have urged a reluctant Ministry to enter into a campaign which now most Englishmen believe to have been a huge mistake?

A great deal of water has flowed under Westminster Bridge since the days when Lord Panmure and Mr Herbert were Secretaries of State. The Volunteer movement was then in its infancy. For long it remained, as the regular Army was in the Crimean epoch, "a mere aggregate of battalions," to use the Prince Consort's true description. To day this force has been merged into a Territorial force, which, with all its limitations and imperfections, is at least a properly constituted and organised host, animated by the right spirit and moving in the right direction.

It is true that the cost of the Army has doubled in the last half century. But, as the military correspondent of 'The Times' has pointed out in the able series of essays published by him under the title of 'Foundations of Reform,' the national wealth has increased in a far greater ratio, and thus the bill for national insurance to-day is less, relatively, than it was then.

Further, and perhaps most important change of all, the administration for our Citizen Army is now confided to local authority in the County Associations. This system which in the days of Cromwell produced the finest fighting army of Englishmen that ever existed-higher praise cannot be given-is one suited to the genius of the nation, and brings the subject of national defence into the closest rela tion with the busy working world of the country. It is for these local bodies to see that land for training1 is adequate, that buildings are forthcoming as may be requisite, that food and transport, medical aid, and munitions of war shall not be wanting to the force whose sacred duty it is to defend the homeland.

And, if the lessons of the Crimean War are not forgotten, if the people of this country realise that war is not a matter of prancing steeds, parade glitter, bands and banners, but a deadly struggle in cold and heat, dust and dirt, where human lives are as nothing when national honour is at stake, when the moral qualities of the race are even more valuable than physical strength to fight; then, whatever may have been the political gain or loss, the lives of the thousands of our countrymen who died on the heights above Balaclava will not have been laid down in vain.

1 See 'Maga' for August 1906, "Land for Military Training: An Appeal and a Suggestion" an appeal which the author ventures to think has not been

quite in vain.

A MAN'S MAN.

BY IAN HAY, AUTHOR OF 'THE RIGHT STUFF.'

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.—VARIUM ET MUTABILE.

HUGHIE continued during the next few weeks to study the character of the female sex as exemplified by his ward Miss Joan Gaymer, and some facts in natural history were brought to his notice which had not hitherto occurred to him.

In her relations with her male belongings a woman does not expect much. Certainly not justice, nor reason, reason, nor common - sense. That which she chiefly desires so those who know inform us-is admiration and, if possible, kindness, though the latter is not essential. The one thing she cannot brook is neglect. Attention of some kind she must have. Satisfy her soul with this, and she will remain all you desire her to remaintoute femme-something for lonely mankind to thank God for. Stint her, and there is a danger that she will drift into the ranks of that rather pathetic third sex, born of higher education and feminine superfluity, which today stands apart from its fellow - creatures and loudly proclaims its loathing for the masculinity of man and its contempt for the effeminacy of woman, but which seems so far only to have cast away the rapier of the one without being able to lift or

handle the bludgeon of the other.

Not that Miss Joan Gaymer ran any such risk. She was indeed toute femme, and stood secure from the prospect of being cut off from her natural provender. Her chief danger was that of a surfeit. She possessed a more than usually healthy appetite for admiration, and there was never wanting a supply of personschiefly of her own sex, be it said to proclaim the fact that said-to in her case the line between appetite and gluttony was very finely drawn indeed. There was some truth, it is to be feared, in the accusation, for Joan was undoubtedly exhibiting symptoms at this time of a species of mental indigestion- what the French call téte montée and the Americans "swelled head"-induced by an undiluted diet of worship and homage. Appetite for this sort of thing grows with eating, and Joan, like her mother before her, was beginning to think too much of those who supplied her with the meat her soul loved and too little of those who did not. And as those who did not were chiefly those who had her welfare most nearly at heart, she was deprived for the time being of a good deal of the solid sustenance of real friendship.

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She was a curious mixture her vagaries were of worldly wisdom and naïveté, and was frankly interested in herself. She was undisguisedly anxious to know what people thought of her, and made no attempt to conceal her pleasure when she found herself "a success. On the other hand, she presumed a great deal too much on the patience and loyalty of her following. She was always captious, frequently inconsiderate, and, like most young persons who have been respectably brought up, was desperately anxious to be considered rather wicked.

more frequently due to the influence of the moment than any desire to pose. She would disappoint a young man of a long-promised tête-à-tête on the river to go and play at shop in a plantation with the under-keeper's children. She would shed tears over harrowing but unconvinoing narratives of destitution at the back door. She was kind to plain girls-which attractive girls sometimes are notand servants adored her, which is a good sign of anybody.

These facts the slow-moving brain of of Hughie Marrable absorbed one by one, and he felt vaguely unhappy on the girl's account, though he could not find it in his heart to blame her. Joey, he felt, was merely making full use of her opportunities. Within her small kingdom, and for her brief term, she held authority as absolute as that, say, of a Secretary of State, nor was she fettered by any pedantic scruples, such as might have hampered the official in question, about exercising exercising the same; and Hughie, who was something of an autoorat himself, could not but admit that his ward was acting very much, mutatis mutandis, as he would have done under similar circumstances.

But as time went on and his sense of perspective adjusted itself, he began to discover signs that beneath all her airs and graces and foam and froth, the old Joey endured. She was a creature of impulse, and

She was lavishly generous; indeed, it was never safe for her girl friends to express admiration, however discreet, for anything belonging to her, for she had an embarrassing habit of tearing off articles of attire or adornment and saying “I'll give it to you!" with the eagerness and sincerity of a child.

And her code of honour was as strict as a schoolboy'sthan which no more can be

said.

her.

A secret was safe with She had once promptly and permanently renounced the friendship of a particular crony of her own, who boasted to her, giving names and details, of a proposal of marriage which she had recently refused.

In short, Miss Joan Gaymer strongly resembled the young lady who in times long past was a certain poetical gentleman's Only Joy. She was sometimes forward, sometimes coy-sometimes, be it added, detestable-but she never failed to please-or rather, to attract, which is better still.

Mrs Jack Leroy spared

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