wars of 1848-9, he, it is admitted, displayed the most talent and energy. So well was his work done, that it required the united forces of France and Sardinia to undo it, shortly after his death; and he died in the conviction that it could not be undone. Haynau, who certainly displayed eminent ability in 1848-9, was in his sixty-second year when the war began, and stands next to Radetzky as the preserver of the Austrian monarchy; and we should not allow detestation of his cruelties to detract from his military merits. The Devil is entitled to justice, and by consequence so are his imps. Austria has often seen her armies beaten when led by old men, but other old men have won victories for her. Even those of her

generals who were so rapidly beaten by young Bonaparte had been good soldiers elsewhere; and when the Archduke Charles, who was two years the junior of Bonaparte, was sent to meet the Frenchman, he had no better luck than had been found by Beaulieu and Wurmser, though his reverses were not on the same extraordinary scale that had marked the fall of his predecessors. Twelve years later, in 1809, Napoleon again met the Archduke Charles, and defeated him repeatedly; and though the Archduke was victorious at Essling, he, the younger commander, had not sufficient boldness so to improve his success as should have given to Austria the credit of the deliverance of Germany, which was to come from Russia. Those who dwell so pertinaciously on the failures of old Austrian generals should in justice to age remember that it was a young Austrian general, and a good soldier too, who showed a most extraordinary want of energy in 1809, immediately after the French under Napoleon had met with the greatest reverse which their arms had then experienced since Bonaparte had been spoiled into a despot. Prince Schwartzenberg, who had nominal command of the Allied Armies in 1813-14, was of the same age as the Archduke Charles, but it would be absurd to call him a great soldier. He was

a brave man, and he had seen considerable service; but as a general he did not rank even as second-rate. His appointment to command in 1813 was a political proceeding, meant to conciliate Austria; but though it was a useful appointment in some respects, it was injurious to the Allies in the field; and had the Prince's plan at Leipsic been adhered to, Napoleon would have won decided successes there. The Czar wished for the command, and his zeal might have enabled him to do something; but the entire absence of military talent from the list of his accomplishments would have greatly endangered the Allies' cause. Schwartzenberg's merit consisted in this, that he had sufficient influence and tact to "keep things straight" in the councils of a jarring confederacy, until others had gained such victories as placed the final defeat of Napoleon beyond all doubt. His first battle was Dresden, and there Napoleon gave him a drubbing of the severest character; and the loss of that battle would have carried with it the loss of the cause for which it was fought by the Allies, had it not been that at the very same time were fought and won a series of battles, at the Katzbach and elsewhere, which were due to the boldness of Blücher, who was old enough to be Schwartzenberg's father, with more than a dozen years to spare. Blücher was also the real hero at Leipsic, where he gained brilliant successes; while on that part of the field where Schwartzenberg commanded, the Allies did but little beyond holding their original ground. Had Blucher failed, Leipsic would have been a French victory.

England's best generals mostly have been old men, or men well advanced in life, the chief exceptions being found among her kings and princes.* The Eng

*Henry V. was present, as Prince of Wales, at the Battle of Shrewsbury, before he was sixteen; and there is some reason for supposing that he commanded the royal forces in the Battle of Grosmont, fought and won in his eighteenth year. He was but twenty-eight at Agincourt. Splendid as was his military ca

lishmen who have exhibited the greatest genius for war, in what may be called their country's modern history, are Oliver Cromwell, Marlborough, and Wellington. Cromwell was in his forty-fourth year when he received the baptism of fire at Edgehill, as a captain; and he was in his fifty-third year when he fought, as lordgeneral, his last battle, at Worcester, which closed a campaign, as well as an active military career, that had been conducted with great energy. It was as a military man that he subsequently ruled the British islands, and to the day of his death there was no abatement in ability. Marlborough had a good military education, served under Turenne when he was but twenty-two, and attracted his commander's admiration; but he never had an independent command until he was forty, when he led an expedition to Ireland, and captured Cork and Kinsale. He was fifty-two when he assumed command of the armies of the Grand Alliance against Louis XIV., and in his fifty-fifth year when he won the Battle of Blenheim. At fifty-six he gained the victory of Ramillies, and at fifty-eight that of Oudenarde. His last great battle, Malplaquet, was fought when he was in his sixtieth year; and after that the French never durst meet him in the field. He never knew what defeat meant, from experience, and was the most successful even of those commanders who have never failed. He left his command at sixtytwo, with no one to dispute his title of the first of living soldiers; and with him victory left the Alliance. Subsereer, it was all over before he had reached to thirty-six years. The Black Prince was but sixteen at Crécy, and in his twenty-seventh year at Poitiers. Edward IV. was not nineteen when he won the great Battle of Towton, and that was not his first battle and victory. He was always successful. Richard III., as Duke of Gloucester, was not nineteen when he showed himself to be an able soldier, at Barnet; and he proved his generalship on other fields. William I., Henry I., Stephen, Henry II., Richard I., Edward I., Edward III., Henry IV., and William III. were all distinguished soldiers. The last English sovereign who took part in a battle was George II., at Dettingen.

quently he was employed by George I., and to his measures the defeat of the rebels of 1715 was due, he having predicted that they would be overthrown precisely where they were overthrown. The story that he survived his mental powers is without foundation, and he continued to perform his official duties to the last, the King having refused to accept his proffered resignation. Wellington had a thorough military training, received his first commission at eighteen, and was a lieutenant-colonel in his twenty-fifth year. After showing that he was a good soldier in 1794-5, against the French, he went to India, where he distinguished himself in subordinate campaigns, and was made a major-general in 1802. Assaye, the first battle in which he commanded, was won when he was in his thirty-fifth year. He had just entered on his fortieth year

when he took command of that force with which he first defeated the French in Portugal. He was in his forty-seventh year when he fought at Waterloo. If he cannot be classed with old generals, neither can he be placed in the list of youthful soldiers; and so little confidence had he in his military talents, that at twenty-six he petitioned to be transferred to the civil service. His powers were developed by events and time. Some of his Peninsular lieutenants were older than himself. Craufurd was five years his senior, and was a capital soldier. Picton, who had some of the highest military qualities, was almost eleven years older than his chief, and was little short of fifty-seven when he fell at Waterloo. Lord Hopetoun was six years older than Wellington. Lord Lynedoch (General Sir Thomas Graham) was in his sixty-first year when he defeated Maréchal Victor at Barrosa, and in his sixty-third when he led the left wing of the Allies at Vittoria, which was the turning battle of the long contest between England and France. A few months later he took St. Sebastian, after one of the most terrible sieges known to modern warfare. He continued to serve

under Wellington until France was invaded. Returning to England, he was sent to Holland, with an independent command; and though his forces were few, so little had his fire been dulled by time, that he carried the great fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom by storm, but only to lose it again, with more than two thousand men, because of the sense and gallantry of the French General Bezanet, who, like our Rosecrans at Murfreesboro', would not accept defeat under any circumstances. When Wellington afterward saw the place, he remarked that it was very strong, and must have been extremely difficult to enter; "but when once in," he added, "I wonder how the Devil they suffered themselves to be beaten out again!" Though the old Scotchman failed on this particular occasion, his boldness and daring are to be cited in support of the position that energy in war is not the exclusive property of youth.

Some of the best of the English secondclass generals were old men. Lord Clyde began his memorable Indian campaigns at sixty-six, and certainly showed no want of talent and activity in their course. He restored, to all appearance, British supremacy in the East. Sir C. J. Napier was in his sixty-second year when he conquered Sinde, winning the great Battles of Meanee and Doobah; and six years later he was sent out to India, as commander-in-chief, at the suggestion of Wellington, who said, that, if Napier would not go, he should go himself. He reached India too late to fight the Sikhs, but showed great vigor in governing the Indian army. He died in 1853; had he lived until the next spring, he would unquestionably have been placed at the head of that force which England sent first to Turkey and then to Southern Russia. Lord Raglan was almost sixty-six when he was appointed to his first command, and though his conduct has been severely criticized, and much misrepresented by many writers, the opinion is now becoming common that he discharged well the duties

of a very difficult position. Mr. Kinglake's brilliant work is obtaining justice for the services and memory of his illustrious friend. Lord Hardinge and Lord Gough were old men when they carried on some of the fiercest hostilities ever known to the English in India. Sir Ralph Abercromby was sixty-three when he defeated the French in Egypt, in 1801. Lord Cornwallis was fifty-two when he broke the power of Tippoo Saib, and prepared the way for his ultimate overthrow. Lord Peterborough was fortyseven, and had never before held a command or seen much service, when he set out on that series of extraordinary campaigns which came so near replacing the Austrian house in possession of Spain and the Indies. Peterborough has been called the last of the knights-errant; but, in fact, no book on knight-errantry contains anything half so wonderful as his deeds in the country of Don Quixote. Sir Eyre Coote, who had so boldly supported that bold policy which led to the victory of Plassey, nearly a quarter of a century later supported Hastings in the field with almost as much vigor as he had supported Clive in council, and saved British India, when it was assailed by the ablest of all its foes. His last victories were gained in advanced life, and are ranked with the highest of those actions to which England owes her wonderful Oriental dominion. Lord Keane was verging upon sixty when he led the British forces into Afghanistan, and took Ghuznee. Against all her old and middle-aged generals, her kings and princes apart, England could place but very few young commanders of great worth. Clive's case was clearly exceptional; and Wolfe owed his victory on the Heights of Abraham as much to Montealm's folly as to his own audacity. The Frenchman should have refused battle, when time and climate would soon have wrought his deliverance and his enemy's ruin.

It is generally held that the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, and which involved the world in their flames, were chiefly the work of young men, and

that their history illustrates the superiority of youth over age in the ancient art of human destruction. But this belief is not well founded, and, indeed, bears a close resemblance to that other error in connection with the French Revolution, namely, that it proceeded from the advent of new opinions, which obtained ascendency, whereas those opinions were older than France, and had more than once been aired in France, and there had struggled for supremacy. The opinions before the triumph of which the old monarchy went down were much older than that monarchy; but as they had never before been able definitely to influence the nation's action, it was not strange that they should be considered new, when there was nothing new about them save their application. Young opinions, as they are supposed to have been, are best championed by young men; and hence it is assumed that the French leaders in the field were youthful heroes, as were the civil leaders in many instances, — and a very nice mess the latter made of the business they engaged in, doing little that was well in it beyond getting their own heads cut off. There are some facts that greatly help to sustain the position that France was saved from partition by the exertions of young generals, the new men of the new time. Hoche, Moreau, Bonaparte, Desaix, Soult, Lannes, Ney, and others, who early rose to fame in the Revolutionary wars, were all young men, and their exploits were so great as to throw the deeds of others into the shade; but the salvation of France was effected before any one of their number became conspicuous as a leader. Napoleon once said that it was not the new levies that saved France, but the old soldiers of the Bourbons; and he was right; and he might have added, that they were led by old or elderly generals. Dumouriez was in his fifty-fourth year when, in 1792, he won the Battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; and at Valmy he was aided by the elder Kellermann, who was fifty-seven. Those two battles decided the fate of Europe,

and laid the foundation of that French. supremacy which endured for twenty years, until Napoleon himself overthrew it by his mad Moscow expedition. Custine, who also was successful in 1792, on the side of Germany, was fifty-two. Jourdan and Pichegru, though not old men, were old soldiers, when, in 1794 and 1795, they did so much to establish the power of the French Republic, the former winning the Battle of Fleurus. It was in the three years that followed the beginning of the war in 1792, that the French performed those deeds which subsequently enabled Napoleon and his Marshals to chain victory to their chariots, and to become so drunk from success that they fell through their own folly rather than because of the exertions of their enemies. Had the old French generals been beaten at Valmy, the Prussians would have entered Paris in a few days, the monarchy would have been restored, and the name of Bonaparte never would have been heard; and equally unknown would have been the names of a hundred other French leaders, who distinguished themselves in the three-andtwenty years that followed the first successes of Dumouriez and Kellermann. Let honor be given where it is due, and let the fogies have their just share of it. There can be nothing meaner than to insist upon stripping gray heads of green laurels.

After the old generals and old soldiers of France had secured standing-places for the new generation, the representatives of the latter certainly did make their way brilliantly and rapidly. The school was a good one, and the scholars were apt to learn, and did credit to their masters. They carried the tricolor over Europe and into Egypt, and saw it flying over the capital of almost every member of those coalitions which had purpos ed its degradation at Paris. It was the flag to which men bowed at Madrid and Seville, at Milan and Rome, at Paris and at the Hague, at Warsaw and Wilna, at Dantzic and in Dalmatia, at the same time that it was fast approaching

'Moscow; and it was thought of with as much fear as hatred at Vienna and Berlin. No wonder that the world forgot or overlooked the earlier and fewer triumphs of the first Republican commanders, when dazzled by the glories that shone from Arcola, the Pyramids, Zürich, Marengo, Hohenlinden, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eckmühl, Wagram, Borodino, Lützen, Bautzen, and Dresden. But those young generals of the Republic and the Empire were sometimes found unequal to the work of contending against the old generals of the Coalitionists. Suvaroff was in his seventieth year when he defeated Macdonald at the Battle of the Trebbia, the Frenchman being but thirty-four; and a few months later he defeated Joubert, who was thirty, at Novi. Joubert was one of Bonaparte's generals in his first Italian wars, and was so conspicuous and popular that he had been selected to command the Army of Italy by the moderate reactionists, in the hope that he might there win such glory as should enable him to play the part which Bonaparte played but a few months later, Bonaparte being then in the East, with the English fleets between him and France, so that he was considered a lost man. "The striking similarity of situation between Joubert and Bonaparte," says Madame d'Abrantes, "is most remarkable. They were of equal age, and both, in their early career, suffered a sort of disgrace; they were finally appointed to command, first, the seventeenth military division, and afterward the Army of Italy. There is in all this a curious parity of events; but death soon ended the career of one of the young heroes. That which ought to have constituted the happiness of his life was the cause of Joubert's death, his marriage. But how could he refrain from loving the woman he espoused? Who can have forgotten Zaphirine de Montholon, her enchanting grace, her playful wit, her good humor, and her beauty?" Like another famous soldier, Joubert loved too well to love wisely. Bonaparte, who never was young, had

received the command of the Army of Italy as the portion of the ex-mistress of Barras, who was seven years his senior, and, being a matter-of-fact man, he reduced his lune de miel to three days, and posted off to his work. He knew the value of time in those days, and not Cleopatra herself could have kept him from his men. Joubert, more of a man, but an inferior soldier, took his honeymoon in full measure, passing a month with his bride; and the loss of that month, if so sweet a thirty days could be called a loss, ruined him, and perhaps prevented him from becoming Emperor of the French. The enemy received reinforcements while he was so lovingly employed, and when he at length arrived on the scene of action he found that the Allies had obtained mastery of the situation. It was no longer in the power of the French to say whether they would fight or not. They had to give battle at Novi, where the tough old Russian of seventy years asserted his superiority over the héros de roman who had posted from Paris to retrieve the fortune of France, and to make his own. When he left Paris, he said to his wife, "You will see me again, dead or victorious,”— and dead he was, in less than a month. He fell early in the action, on the fifteenth of August, 1799, the very day on which Bonaparte completed his thirtieth year. Moreau took the command, but failed to turn the tide of disaster. The French are unanimous in ascribing their defeat to Joubert's delay at Paris, and it is certain that the enemy did take Alexandria and Mantua during that month's delay, and thus were enabled to add the besieging forces to their main army, so that Joubert was about to retreat to the Apennines, and to assume a defensive position, when Suvaroff forced him to accept battle. But something should be allowed for the genius of the Russian general, who was one of the great master-spirits of war, and who seldom fought without being completely victorious. He had mostly been employed against the Turks, whose military reputation was