THE THE BATTLE OF MINDEN AUGUST 1, 1759 HE battle of Minden might almost be described as having been won by a blunder, and a blunder about so insignificant a thing as a mere preposition! Prince Ferdinand, who commanded the allied army, had placed the six regiments of British infantry, who formed the flower of his force, in his centre, and had given orders that they were to move forward in attack" on sound of drum." The British read the order, "with sound of drum." The seventy-five splendid squadrons of horse who formed the French centre were in their immediate front. The British saw their foes before them, line on line of tossing horse-heads and gleaming helmets, of scarlet and steel, and wind-blown crests. What other "signal of battle” was needed? Obeying the warlike impulse in their blood, they at once moved forward "with sound of drum' every drummer-boy in the regiments, in fact, plying his drum-sticks with furious energy, and those waves of warlike sound stirred the dogged valour of the British to a yet fiercer daring! Prince Ferdinand never contemplated such a movement; it violated all the rules of war. What sane general would have launched 6000 infantry in line to attack 10,000 of the finest cavalry in Europe in ranked squadrons? It is on record that the Hanoverian troops placed in support of the British regiments watched with dumb and amazed alarm the 'stupid" British moving serenely forward to a contest so lunatic. But to the confusion of all critics, and to the mingled wrath and shame of the French generals, these astonishing British regiments tumbled Contades' splendid cavalry into mere distracted ruin, and left his wings disconnected military fragments, and won, in the most irregular manner, the great battle of Minden! Minden is, for Englishmen, not the least glorious fight in that long procession of battles we call the Seven Years' War-a war which, from the English standpoint, has much better moral justification than most people suppose. The Seven Years' War itself was but a sort of bloody postscript to the war of the Austrian Succession; this, in turn, was merely the second act in the great struggle labelled picturesquely from "Jenkins's ear." This, again, was but the final syllable in that long dispute, argued with the iron lips of guns and the glittering edges of swords, which runs back to the days of Drake and of Hawkins, and of "the singeing of the King of Spain's beard." Spain claimed, as the gift of the Pope, the exclusive lordship of the New World. One-half the planet, in brief, was shut, with a bit of ecclesiastical sealing-wax, against everybody but Spaniards! A British ship found trading in the Spanish Main was treated as a smuggler or a pirate, or as a combination of both. So it came to pass there was no peace south of the Line." But the situation at last grew intolerable. Captain Jenkins, of the good ship Rebecca, sailing innocently, as he declared, from Jamaica to London, was boarded by a guarda costa off Havanna; his ear was slashed or torn off, and thrown in his face, and he was bidden "C carry it home to his king and tell him how British traders in Spanish waters were treated." Jenkins did so, quite literally; and that little bit of amputated sea-going flesh turned out to be the picturesque and concrete symbol about which the slow-beating British imagination kindled to a white fire of wrath. The statesmen of England were against war; the people were for war; and no one doubts to-day that the people were wiser than the statesmen. The inarticulate common-sense of the masses divined more truly the real questions at stake than did the wit of politicians. The commercial supremacy of England, its colonial empire, the question whether America was to be developed on the British or on the Spanish type, were amongst the issues involved. There might, indeed, have been no United States but for that slash at Captain Jenkins's ear! The northern half of the great American continent to-day might have been, like the southern half, a cluster of shrewishly wrangling, half Indian, half Latin republics. But another dispute poured its gall into the quarrel. The two branches of the Bourbon House in Paris and Madrid were linked together by the secret and infamous Family Compact, a compact described by Burke as "the most odious and formidable conspiracy against the liberties of Europe" which history records. It was practically a secret alliance for the partition of Europe in the interests of the Bourbons, and it was certainly fraught with deadly peril to England, whose commercial freedom-whose very right to exist—it menaced. The Family Compact brought France into the war, first as a tributary, then as a principal: the war of "Jenkins's ear" expanded into the war of the Austrian Succession; and England, fighting on the Main or the Weser, was really fighting for her colonies, her trade, her very existence. She was contending, indeed, for the whole future of civilisation, though probably her statesmen very imperfectly understood the real scale of the great drama in which they were taking part. George II. certainly saw Hanover rather than America. The Treasury benches bounded the intellectual horizon of such politicians as Newcastle or Pulteney. Only Pitt, with his kingly brain and piercing vision for the remoter causes and ultimate issues of events, understood the real scale of the great contest in which England was engaged. On the French side the contest was planned on great lines, and fought over a very wide area. Belleisle was the French minister of war, and his strategy was almost as spacious and magnificent as that of Napoleon himself. He fed the war in India and America; he menaced England herself with invasion by the mighty armament he assembled at Brest; and with 50,000 choice French troops on the Weser, under Contades and Broglie, he threatened to overrun Hanover. Clive in India, Wolfe at Quebec, Hawke off Quiberon, shattered the armies and fleets and hopes of France. On the Continent, however, England had brave troops, but no general. Pitt, who had a great statesman's gift for choosing fit instruments, determined to borrow a commander for the allied forces. He found his man in Prince Ferdinanda fine soldier, trained in the school of Frederick the Great. Ferdinand had something of Marlborough's miraculous tact in dealing with men, and much, too, of A tough, Prince Eugene's gallant fighting quality. swift-visioned, cool, and high-minded soldier, of unconquerable patience and exhaustless resource, and with a true genius for war. Wellington said a general's business consisted chiefly in guessing "what was happening on the other side of the hill"; and few soldiers have ever surpassed Ferdinand in the faculty for reading the thoughts and plans of the generals with whom he was contending. How serene and invincible must have been the quality of Ferdinand's patience may be judged by the fact that he achieved the feat of successfully commanding a miscellaneous host of Austrians, Prussians, Hanoverians, and British. And if the British soldier of 1759 had all the fighting qualities of his breed-the headlong daring of the men who swept up the great breach at Badajos, the iron valour of the unconquerable infantry who held the squares at Waterloo-yet he had, in addition, a good many of the troublesome qualities of his race. The British soldier is not very docile to a commander who has the bad taste not to be an Englishman himself, and who delivers his orders with a foreign accent. Carlyle quotes a description, given by Mauvillon, of the British soldier of the last century, as seen through the spectacles of German officers, which shows how enduring are the characteristics of the type. "Braver troops when on the field of battle, and under arms against the enemy," wrote Mauvillon, "you will nowhere find in the world-that is the truth; and with that the sum of their military merits ends." The British infantryman, Mauvillon says, in effect, is sulky and stubborn; the cavalry private has "such a foolish love for |