The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLII, no. 247 new series, January 1917) — John Shaqi
The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLII, no. 247 new series, January 1917)Various
History
The Cornhill Magazine (vol. XLII, no. 247 new series, January 1917)
Various
England -- Periodicals; English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
In all things the commander set the example: he never asked his officers
or men to do anything or to give up anything which he did not do or give
up himself. Thus his regiment of regulars was set in order for backwood
fighting and, what was more, it was attuned to the ways of the land and
of the people of the land. ‘They were ever after considered as an example
to the whole American Army.’
Mrs. Grant tells a story, which Francis Parkman has repeated in his
delightful ‘Montcalm and Wolfe,’ of Lord Howe giving a dinner to his
officers in his tent. The furniture consisted of logs of wood and
bearskins, ‘and presently the servants set down a large dish of pork
and pease.’ Howe pulled a sheath with a knife and fork in it out of his
pocket, and proceeded to carve the meat. The officers ‘sat in a kind
of awkward suspense’ for want of knives and forks, until Howe, after
expressing surprise that they did not possess ‘portable implements’
of the kind, ‘finally relieved them from their embarrassment, by
distributing to each a case the same as his own, which he had provided
for that purpose.’ The real point of the story is that, if Howe had been
an ordinary man, his dinner would probably have been resented by the
officers as an impertinent practical joke. But he was not an ordinary
man; among his officers and soldiers he was like King David: ‘Whatsoever
the king did pleased all the people.’
Albany in New York State was always the base for expeditions against
Canada, by the central route, which lay along the line of water
communication. In war time through Albany regiments came and went, and
in and around it they congregated and encamped. Albany was pre-eminently
a centre for the old New York families of Dutch descent. On the upper
waters of the Hudson and the lower reaches of the Mohawk River, which
joins the Hudson a little above Albany, were the estates of the
‘patroons’ of the Dutch régime, and here their descendants lived and
thrived. Mrs. Grant, in her Memoirs, tells of the lives and surroundings
of one of the foremost of these families, the Schuylers, whose homes were
in Albany and to the north of it in the district known as ‘The Flats.’ In
her book an old Mrs. Schuyler (‘Aunt Schuyler’) is the central figure,
as she was in the year 1758 the central figure of the Schuyler clan.
The book tells of Lord Howe’s intimacy with the family, though he never
took up his quarters with them, for he ‘always lay in his tent with the
regiment which he commanded’; how the old lady loved him almost as a son,
how sadly and affectionately she sped him on his last advance, and her
grief when the news came that he was killed. ‘Aunt Schuyler ... had the
utmost esteem for him, and the greatest hope that he would at some future
period redress all those evils that had formerly impeded the service;
and perhaps plant the British standard on the walls of Quebec.’ We have
drawn for us the contrast between the good and bad type of officer,
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