General Gatacre Part 4

"Ah, yes," they said, "but we shall never have another like Gatacre; we shall miss him dreadfully. Why, what can the 77th be made of!"

"Gatacres and Bengoughs," was the proud reply. General Kent affirms, moreover, that {34} His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught was present on this occasion.

[Sidenote: 1873-4]

During these two years Captain Leir[1] was Master of the Staff College Drag-hounds. He speaks of Gatacre, who acted as his Whip, as "the best who ever turned them for me"; and tells us that he was quite the most accomplished horseman of his day--that he used to ride all sorts of horses, made and unmade, that he had wonderful patience and nerve, and was always in the front.

[1] Now Major-General Leir-Carleton.

Captain Leir writes that the only fuss he ever had with his colleague was over a hound, called Bellman, who had been given to him by the late Lord Cork when master of the Queen's Buckhounds. Bellman was a great favourite, being very companionable, which is unusual with fox-hounds.

Gatacre begged leave to take him home and summer him in Shrops.h.i.+re, but having got him there the Squire took such a fancy to Bellman that his return was delayed till the following January. On another occasion, however, the Master had every reason to be grateful to his friend, as he tells us in the following story.

[Sidenote: Indefatigable]

For drag-hounds the scent is laid by a man who runs with aniseed half an hour before the hounds start; but as it is imperative that he should thoroughly know his line, he must walk it first, carefully selecting a track which avoids risk of damage to growing crops and affords suitable fences for the field. On one occasion when {35} Captain Leir's runner (or fox as he was familiarly termed) was _hors de combat_ from a fall, he sent for a noted runner from Reading to take his place. But when the Master had shown this man half the course, he suddenly threw up the job, and after that no bribe would induce him to go a yard farther.

The meet was advertised for the following day, but there was no fox, and Leir, vexed and despairing, now turned to his Whip, who was noted for his resource in all difficulties.

At 6 a.m. the next morning Gatacre started to walk the line by the aid of a map, drove back, did his morning's work on the heath with his cla.s.s, and ran the line again in the afternoon. The runs varied from four to six miles, according to the season and the condition of hounds and horses, with a ten minutes' check in the middle. The fox on this occasion, however, was a long-winded one; he ran a bit farther than his instructions warranted, in order to enjoy the sight of half the field struggling on the banks of a big brook.

At the final examination in December 1874 Gatacre pa.s.sed out of the Staff College with special honours in military drawing and surveying, and was at once offered the post of Professor in these subjects at the Royal Military College; he took up this appointment early in 1875.

In the following year, being then thirty-two, he was married to a charming and beautiful girl of Irish descent. Early in the year 1878 their {36} eldest son, William Edward, who is now a Captain in the Yorks.h.i.+re Light Infantry, was born at Yorktown.

[Sidenote: 1875-9]

A few months later Gatacre was to know the first great grief of his life in the loss of his mother. Willie had always proved intensely lovable, and had also his own graceful and attentive ways of returning the love which he received from his parents. There was, moreover, a strong vein of sentiment in him which led him throughout his life to cling to souvenirs and relics of the past.

[Sidenote: As professor]

It is evidence of the strength and the simplicity of Gatacre's character that his charm of manner was felt equally by men older and younger than himself. "Manners impress as they indicate real power.

And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression.

Nature ever puts a premium on reality."

The cadets in his cla.s.s were fascinated by this singular and brilliant personality, and loved him with a "schoolboy heat." One of them tells how he seemed more one of themselves than the other professors; another remembers how he treated them as gentlemen, instead of regarding them as schoolboys; another that he was full of sympathy when anything needed explanation; another that if he found out and fell upon some little meanness with the weight of his own uprightness, he would gave the culprit from official correction {37} thus win him as a disciple; another, writing at the time of his death, speaks of Gatacre's influence for good throughout his career. Another, who has afforded me very real a.s.sistance in this narrative, tells us that he felt such a genuine hero-wors.h.i.+p for Captain Gatacre that he applied for the 77th Regiment in order to serve under him. This cadet not only pa.s.sed well, but, being a protege of General William Napier, who was then Governor of the College, might have got himself gazetted into any regiment that he liked to name.

After serving four years as a military instructor, Gatacre was appointed temporarily to the post of Deputy a.s.sistant Quarter-Master-General on the Headquarters Staff at Aldershot. This was his first experience of staff work. The following winter a new field-service equipment was engaging much attention; this was, of course, worked out in the office in which Gatacre was employed. He writes with some satisfaction of the "mess-tin invented by me" being approved and adopted.

{38}

CHAPTER III

1880-1883

RANGOON

[Sidenote: 1880]

At the expiration of his term of office at Aldershot, in May 1880, Captain Gatacre took short leave home, and then rejoined the 77th at Dover. The regiment had been already warned for India in the next trooping season, but the news of our misfortune at Maiwand hastened their departure, and in August 1880 they were hurriedly embarked at only a fortnight's notice. To Gatacre the hope of seeing active service must have more than compensated for a disappointment he had expressed at not getting another staff billet. This hope, however, vanished on their arrival at Bombay, where the regiment learnt that the defeat of Ayub Khan outside Khandahar on September 2 had brought the campaign to a conclusion. The battalion was landed at Bombay on September 10, and made its way by road to Madras.

[Sidenote: On the staff]

It is evident that Gatacre's reputation as a {39} zealous and efficient officer had preceded him, for within one month of his arrival in India he was seconded for service on the staff of the Hyderabad Subsidiary Force, which had its headquarters at Secunderabad. All keen soldiers are pleased to be in India, for there is more chance of active service there than at home, and it was in the hope of getting this opportunity that Gatacre lived and worked. In the meantime his selection for staff work, although the post was only "temporary," was sufficiently complimentary to satisfy all his aspirations. His qualities and temperament had greater scope to expand in such a post than in the more rigid routine of a regiment; his previous experience of India added discernment to his enthusiasm in dealing with all the manifold interests with which he came in contact.

But there was a cloud on the horizon which rapidly grew until the whole sky was for the moment overcast. Early in the New Year his little son, born at Aldershot and aged only fifteen months, fell sick with cholera, and died on January 18. Both parents felt the blow terribly: the mother took fright for the elder boy, and decided to carry him off home. Several touching relics, in the way of a lock of hair, etc., that Gatacre, in spite of his many changes of residence, never afterwards cared to destroy, show how deeply he was moved by this loss.

He had a spontaneous fondness for children that led him all his life to accost them; and his attentions to them invariably met with that {40} quick response which is in itself a sign of grace in the recipient.

A manhood fused with female grace, In such a sort, a child would twine A trustful hand, unasked, in thine, And find his comfort in thy face.

He looked forward with pleasure to getting a change when he should be relieved in June by the officer whose post he was holding, and soon had the satisfaction of accepting an offer from General the Honourable Arthur Hardinge, Commander-in-Chief of the Bombay Army, to take the place of his Military Secretary, who was for the moment employed elsewhere.

[Sidenote: 1881]

This appointment was even more congenial than the last: for to be on the personal staff of the Commander-in-Chief of a province meant accompanying him on all his tours of inspection. Like the former, this appointment was an eight months' business, for staff officers in India get sixty days' short leave every year, and eight months' long leave occasionally; for the latter period it was usual to appoint some officer to carry on, and it was Gatacre's good fortune throughout his career to be constantly selected for such temporary tenure of office.

In this way he gained an acquaintance with all the provinces of India, and with all arms, British and Native, such as rarely falls to the lot of one man. When he left India, seventeen years later, there was hardly a station in all the four provinces which he had not visited.

[Sidenote: Military Secretary]

In the course of the winter, 1881-2, General {41} Hardinge paid an official visit to Sir Robert Phayre, at Mhow. One of his daughters well remembers Major Gatacre on this occasion. His handsome bronzed face, his slight athletic figure, and keen but kindly blue eyes arrested the attention; and then on further acquaintance, his indefinable charm of manner, his courtly way of devoting himself to his companion for the moment, his curious mixture of modesty and power left an impression which later years exaggerated as his name became identified with all the soldierly qualities and achievements which built up his fame.

Every moment of these inspection tours was full of interest for Gatacre; who, being a good son, writes fully and simply about everything to the Squire at home.

CAMP HAMURGHURI,

_December_ 18, 1881.

"We are having a very pleasant march from Nusserabad to Neemuch; good shooting all the way--duck, snipe, and deer; also some capital pig-sticking. The wild boars here are very difficult to get out of the jungle and gra.s.s, but when one does get them out across the open ground they run like greyhounds. I have two ponies a little under fourteen hands, both fast, and I have sometimes galloped a mile and a half before I could catch one; this was allowing him about a quarter of a mile start, otherwise if pressed they turn into the jungle. When you get up to them on the open ground, they turn round and run back a pace or two, and then come straight at you, rising on their hind legs to cut your horse if they get the chance, but {42} this of course they can't do if you use your spear properly. I have got some capital tushes.

The best run we have had as yet was at a place called Roopauli, two marches back; two boars broke covert together and went away over capital ground to another place two miles off. The Commander-in-Chief and I took one and had a capital run after him. I had the luck to get the first spear. I was pleased, because I was riding a horse of the Chief's that could never be got up to a pig before. To-morrow we are coming to a place celebrated for cheetul, a kind of spotted deer, antlers like a stag and skin like a fallow deer. I am in hopes of getting one or two. This is a beautiful country to march through, very long gra.s.s and jungle all round; nearly all the hills are of white marble; and spotted marbles of sorts, and an enormous number of old forts and temples beautifully ornamented with carvings in marble and stone. Some of them are extraordinarily beautiful in form and design of carving, far superior to anything we see now--and these are thousands, not hundreds, of years old."

[Sidenote: 1882]

It is difficult to say when Gatacre "found" himself--to use an expression that Mr. Rudyard Kipling has for ever endowed with psychological meaning; but there can be no doubt that the s.h.i.+fting scenes in which he played his part from the time he landed in India, in August 1880, till he commanded his regiment in June 1884, must have widened his outlook on life, must have quickened his sense of the opportunities before him, and have enabled him to gauge his own powers.

India encourages individuality to {43} a very high degree; men live in small groups in stations that are hundreds of miles apart; in any one place there is (in a sense) only one man of any one grade, so that the labourers do not jostle one another, but each has enough elbow-room to play freely with his tools.

[Sidenote: To Burma]

At the conclusion of his time with General Hardinge in February 1882, Gatacre was sent to act as a.s.sistant Quarter-Master-General to the Burmese Division, with headquarters at Rangoon, then under the command of General H. Prendergast. The British connection with this picturesque river-port dates from 1824, when Sir Archibald Campbell captured it after a feeble resistance. In the following year, owing to continued outrages on British subjects and the refusal of the King of Ava to enter into any treaty obligations with us, a British force advanced up the Irrawaddy to Prome, and stayed there throughout the rainy season. In October the Burmese Army made an organised attempt to recover the place; but the British forces repulsed the attack, and followed up the enemy to within four days' march of their capital at Ava. At this point the Burmese sued for peace: their apologies were accepted, and the country was evacuated, except for the sea-board provinces of Arakan and Tena.s.serim. The Province of Pegu was restored to the Burmese and remained in their hands till 1852, when fresh outrages and insolence on the part of another Burmese sovereign again gave rise to hostilities. At the conclusion of peace Pegu {44} was formally annexed by Proclamation, while Lord Dalhousie was Viceroy, under the name of Lower Burma, and Rangoon was made the seat of government.

Upper Burma was at that time in a deplorable condition; the excesses of the ruler, who was called Pagan-min, are described as recalling the worst years of the later Roman Empire. With a change of dynasty in the person of Mindon-min, matters improved somewhat. The new ruler realised the value of European enterprise and capital; he allowed strangers of all nations to settle in the country, and protected travellers and explorers. A few years later a commercial treaty was negotiated with Great Britain, a Resident was received, and for his protection he was allowed a small guard and an armoured boat on the river. To commemorate his flouris.h.i.+ng reign Mindon founded a new capital at Mandalay, and in 1874 had himself crowned there to fulfil a prophecy.

[Sidenote: King Theebaw]