him was Lord Cardigan, composed and formal às ever. "Hullo! Lord Cardigan," said Paget, "weren't you there?" When the broken fragments of the squadrons were re-forming, Cardigan looked at them, and broke out, "Men, it's a mad-brained trick, but it's no fault of mine." And it tells the temper of the men that they answered him, "Never mind, my lord, we're ready to go again!"

Of that mad but heroic charge a hundred incidents are preserved—thrilling, humorous, shocking. A man of the 17th Lancers, for example, was heard to shout, just as they raced in upon the guns, a quotation from Shakespeare "Who is there here would ask more men from England?" The regimental butcher of the 17th Lancers was engaged in killing a sheep when he heard the trumpets sound for the charge. He leaped on a horse; in shirt-sleeves, with bare arms and pipe in mouth, rode through the whole charge, slew, it is said, six men with his own hand, and came back again, pipe still in mouth! A private of the 11th was under arrest for drunkenness when the charge began; but he broke out, followed his troop on a spare horse, picked up a sword as he rode, and shared in the rapture and perils of the charge. The charge lasted twenty minutes; and was ever before such daring or such suffering packed into a space so brief! The squadrons rode into the fight, numbering 673 horsemen; their mounted strength, when the fight was over, was exactly 195.

It was all a blunder; but it evoked a heroism which made the blunder itself magnificent. And long as brave deeds can thrill the imagination of men the story will be remembered of how

"Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of death,
Into the mouth of hell;
Noble Six Hundred."

Fate and the poets have been somewhat unkind to Scarlett's Three Hundred. Tennyson's lines on them have not the lilt which makes them live in the ear of a people, though there is an echo of trampling hoofs in some of the stanzas

"The trumpet, the gallop, the charge, and the might of the fight,

Four amid thousands! And up the hill, up the hill,

Galloped the gallant Three Hundred, the Heavy Brigade.”

But the stanzas which tell the story of Cardigan's men are as immortal as the deed itself:

"Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,
All in the valley of death

Rode the Six Hundred.
'Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said.
Into the valley of death

Rode the Six Hundred.

When can their glory fade?
Oh the wild charge they made,
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made,
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble Six Hundred !"

THE

THE MEN IN THE RANKS

HE story of a great fight, on one side at least, and as far as the commanders are concerned, is a contest, not of bullets, but of brains. Strategy is pitted against strategy, and the general wins who, in Wellington's phrase, guesses most successfully "what is happening on the other side of the hill." The fate of a campaign, indeed, may be decided before a shot is fired, and by purely intellectual forces; by a blunder in calculations on one side, or a failure of imagination, or an infinitesimal waste of time on the other. It is settled, that is, by the relative energy of brain-waves in two heads, adorned with cocked hats, perhaps a score of miles distant from each other! And literature reserves all its honours for what may, be called the intellectual side of battle-the wrestle of rival strategies. Even when the actual incidents of a battle have to be described, it is all lost in a vapour of generalities. The unit is nothing, the mass is everything. We are bidden to watch the march of the many-coloured, steel-edged columns, urged by the impulse of some solitary and planning brain; but history is too dignified to take notice of the men in the ranks, of the dusty faces, the stumbling feet, the gasping breath of the stragglers who limp, sore-footed, in the rear of the men who drop, as though

shot, killed with mere fatigue. A battle translated into literary terms is a haze of impersonal generalities. The batteries thunder along a front of miles; the attacking bodies are made up of "divisions"; the victory consists in driving back this or that "wing" of the opposing army, or in severing, as with the flourish of some unseen sword, its "communications." A fight treated in this fashion is a game of chess, with regiments for pawns, cavalry brigades for knights, and "corps d'armée" for castles. The personal element vanishes. The play of human passions in the long lines of fighting men- of terror and of valour, of despair or of triumph-is overlooked. The men in the ranks are treated as bloodless abstractions, mere symbols in a passionless arithmetic. The story of Waterloo itself, thus treated, becomes as colourless, as completely exhausted of human incident as, say, the demonstration of a theorem in Euclid.

But a battle has, as far as the men in the ranks are concerned, quite another side. It is a tussle of bayonets, a wager of life against life; a wrestle of hotblooded human beings in an atmosphere of passion, fought under the shadow of death, and with all human emotions at their highest pitch. And this, the human side of a battle, which historic literature usually treats as non-existent, is really that over which the average man is tempted to linger with wide-eyed and awesmitten curiosity. He hungers to know how the men in the battle-line feel; how they bear themselves; what aspect the faces of their opponents wear. What are the emotions and thoughts that race through the brain-cells of the ordinary private, as he stands a

panting - perhaps a swearing-unit in the swaying human line, transfigured by discipline into a chain of steel? What expression does his face wear as he loads and fires amid the drifting battle smoke? What thrill of passion kindles in him as, through the smoke-filled air, he sees the bent heads and sparkling bayonet-points of the hostile line coming on in fiercest charge? This is what every one wants to know, but which no one is able to tell. Literature contains no adequate picture of a great battle as seen through the eyes of the private in the ranks. The men who make history, unfortunately, cannot write it. Yet what human document would be more thrilling than one which gave us the landscape of a battle-field as De Foe painted the incidents of the Great Plague of London; or which did for the fighting line of the regiments at Albuera what Dana did for the forecastle-life of a merchant ship?

But no such "document" exists; probably none ever will exist. The average soldier belongs to the inarticulate class. It is not that, like the "needy knife-grinder of Canning's squib, he has "no story to tell"; he cannot tell it.

It is worth while, however, to try and give some account of the personal side of a battle, and one of the best examples of what may be called the literature of the private soldier is found in a book, long since gone out of print, entitled "Recollections of Rifleman Harris, of the old 95th." Harris was a soldier of the Peninsula days, a fair sample of the men who stormed Badajoz, who kept the hill of Busaco against Massena, and outmarched and out-fought Marmont at Salamanca. His experiences range from Vimieiro to the tragical Walcheren