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 Eternity

ox for d phi losophica l concepts

 OX FOR D PH I LOSOPH IC A L CONCEP TS
Christia Mercer, Columbia University
Series Editor

Published

Efficient Causation Memory

Edited by Tad Schmaltz Edited by Dmitri Nikulin

Sympathy Eternity
Edited by Eric Schliesser Edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed

The Faculties
Edited by Dominik Perler

Forthcoming

Health Self-​Knowledge
Edited by Peter Adamson Edited by Ursula Renz

Evil Pleasure
Edited by Andrew Chignell Edited by Lisa Shapiro

Dignity Consciousness
Edited by Remy Debes Edited by Alison Simmons

Animals Moral Motivation

Edited by G. Fay Edwards Edited by Iakovos Vasiliou
and Peter Adamson

Space
Edited by Andrew Janiak
ox for d phi losophica l concepts

Eternity
A History

j
Edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed

1
 1
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by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: Melamed, Yitzhak Y., 1968– editor.
Title: Eternity: a history / edited by Yitzhak Y. Melamed.
Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. |
Series: Oxford philosophical concepts series |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037326 | ISBN 978–0–19–978186–7 (pbk.: alk. paper) |
ISBN 978–0–19–978187–4 (hardcover: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Infinite. | Eternity.
Classification: LCC BD411.E84 2016 |
DDC 115—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037326

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
 “The idea of eternity being the greatest, the most terrible and most frightening
of all those that astonish the mind and strike the imagination, it is necessarily
accompanied by a large following of ancillary ideas, which all have a considerable
effect upon the mind because of their relation to this great and terrible idea
of eternity.”
—​N icolas Malebranche, Search after Truth 327 (translated by Thomas
M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp)

“When the mid-​point of eternity comes, it can be said of God that half
of his life passed.”
—​G . W. Leibniz, De Summa Rerum 9 (translated by G.H.R. Parkinson )

‫”אדון עולם אשר מלך בטרם כל יציר נברא‬

‫לעת נעשה בחפצו כל אזי מלך שמו נקרא‬
“‫ואחרי ככלות הכל לבדו ימלוך נורא‬

—A medieval liturgical poem, commonly attributed to Salomon Ibn-Gabirol

For Alfa in eternal love
 Contents

acknowledgments x

CONTRIBUTORS xi

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWoRD xv

Introduction 1
YITZHAK Y. MELAMED

1 Eternity in Ancient Philosophy 14

JAMES G. WILBERDING

Reflection: Eternity and Astrology in the Work of Vettius Valens 56

DORIAN GIESELER GREENBAUM

Reflection: Eternity and World-​Cycles 64

GODEFROID DE CALLATAŸ

Reflection: The Eternality of Language in India 70

ANDREW OLLETT

2 Eternity in Medieval Philosophy 75

PETER ADAMSON

Reflection: “Eternalists” and “Materialists” in Islam: A Note on the

Dahriyya 117
HINRICH BIESTERFELDT
viii Contents

Reflection: Eternity and the Trinity 124

CHRISTOPHE ERISMANN

3 Eternity in Early Modern Philosophy 129

YITZHAK Y. MELAMED

Reflection: Out of Time: Dante and Eternity 168

AKASH KUMAR

Reflection: Perpetuum Mobiles and Eternity 173

MARIUS STAN

4 Eternity in Kant and Post-​Kantian European Thought 179

ALISTAIR WELCHMAN

Reflection: Eternity in Early German Romanticism 226

JUDITH NORMAN

Reflection: Eternity in Hasidism: Time and Presence 231

ARIEL EVAN MAYSE

Reflection: On White Eternity in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish 239

ABED AZZAM

5 Eternity in Twentieth-​Century Analytic Philosophy 245

KRIS MCDANIEL

Reflection: Borges on Eternity 277

WILLIAM EGGINTON

Reflection: Music and Eternity 283

WALTER FRISCH

Reflection: The Kaddish 290

ABRAHAM P. SOCHER
 Contents ix

GLOSSARY 297

BIBLIOGRAPHY 301

INDEX 323
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 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Christia Mercer, Peter Ohlin, Lucy Randall, and
Stephen Menn whose advise and support contributed tremendously to
the design of this book.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed
Pikesville, February 2016
 Contributors

Peter Adamson is professor of late ancient and Arabic philosophy at the

Ludwig-​Maximilians-​Universität in Munich. He has authored monographs
on the Arabic Plotinus and al-​K indi, whose philosophical works he has
translated (with P. E. Pormann). He has edited or coedited numerous books,
including The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy and Interpreting
Avicenna: Critical Essays. Two collections of his articles are now available from
Ashgate’s Variorum series.

Abed Azzam teaches philosophy at the University of Potsdam and the

University of Marburg. He is the author of Nietzsche versus Paul (Columbia
University Press, 2015).

Hinrich Biesterfeldt is a retired professor of Arabic and Islamic studies

at the Ruhr Universität, Bochum. He has published on classical Arabic litera-
ture and the history of medicine and philosophy in Islam.

Godefroid de Callataÿ is professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the

Oriental Institute of the University of Louvain. He has specialized in the his-
tory of Arabic sciences and philosophy and the role played by Islam in the
transmission of knowledge from Greek antiquity to the Latin west during the
Middle Ages. Among other subjects, he has published extensively on the ency-
clopedic corpus known as Rasā’ il Ikhwān al-​Ṣafā’ (Epistles of the Brethren of
Purity). Since 2012, he has directed Speculum Arabicum, a project on compara-
tive medieval encyclopedism at the University of Louvain.
xii Contributors

Christophe Erismann held positions at the Universities of Cambridge,

Helsinki, and Lausanne, where he taught medieval philosophy for several years
as Swiss National Science Foundation Professor. Since autumn 2015, he leads
the European Research Council project (CoG 648298) “Reassessing Ninth
Century Philosophy. A Syncronic Approach to the Logical Tradition” at the
Institute for Byzantine Studies, University of Vienna. His research focuses
on the reception of Greek logic (mainly Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s
Isagoge) in late ancient, Patristic, and early medieval philosophy. He has pub-
lished on the problem of universals, individuality, causality, and relation. He is
the author of L’ homme commun: la genèse du réalisme ontologique durant le haut
Moyen Âge (Paris 2011).

Walter Frisch is H. Harold Gumm/​Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor

of Music at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1982. He has pub-
lished on music of the Austro-​German sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, especially Brahms and Schoenberg. He is the author of Music in the
Nineteenth Century (Norton, 2012).

William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at

Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is The Man Who Invented
Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World.

Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum is a tutor at the University of Wales Trinity

St David. She received her Ph.D. from the Warburg Institute in 2009. Her areas
of interest are the history of astrology and the concept of the daimon in antiq-
uity. Her book The Daimon in Hellenistic Astrology: Origins and Influence has
just been published by Brill (November 2015).

Akash Kumar is a Core Lecturer in Italian at Columbia University. His

research focuses on the importing of science and philosophy in the early Italian
lyric and on the broad implications of intercultural mingling in the Italian Middle
Ages. He is currently working on his first book, Dante’s Elements: Translation
and Natural Philosophy from Giacomo da Lentini to the Commedia.

Ariel Evan Mayse holds a Ph.D. in Jewish studies from Harvard University.
In addition to having published a number of popular and scholarly articles on
Kabbalah and Hasidism, he is a coeditor of the two-​volume collection Speaking
Torah: Spiritual Teachings from Around the Maggid’s Table (Jewish Lights,
2013) and editor of the recent From the Depth of the Well: An Anthology of Jewish
 Contributors xiii

Mysticism (Paulist Press, 2014). He is currently a research fellow at the Frankel

Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Kris McDaniel is a professor at Syracuse University. He works in metaphys-

ics, history of philosophy, and ethics.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at

Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Spinoza’s Metaphysics: Substance
and Thought (Oxford UP 2013) and of numerous studies in Modern Philosophy
and German Idealism. He has been awarded the Fulbright, Mellon, and
American Academy for Jewish Research Fellowships. Recently, he has also won
the ACLS Burkhardt (2011), NEH (2010), and Humboldt (2011) fellowships for
his forthcoming book on Spinoza and German Idealism.

Judith Norman is a professor of philosophy at Trinity University in San

Antonio, Texas. She publishes on nineteenth-​century philosophy and has
translated works by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. She is currently coediting
(with Elizabeth Millán) A Companion to German Romantic Philosophy.

Andrew Ollett is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He

works on the literary and intellectual traditions of premodern India, with a
focus on theories, concepts, and practices of language.

Abraham Socher is a professor of religion and director of Jewish studies

at Oberlin College. He is the author of The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon
Maimon: Judaism, Heresy and Philosophy (Stanford, 2006) and the editor of
the Jewish Review of Books.

Marius Stan is an assistant professor of philosophy at Boston College. His

research is on the history of modern natural philosophy with a special interest
in Leibniz, Newton, and Kant.

Alistair Welchman is associate professor of philosophy at the University

of Texas at San Antonio. He has written widely on nineteenth-century German
philosophy and contemporary French thought and is currently working on a
book about Deleuze and German idealism.

James G. Wilberding is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at

the Ruhr Universität, Bochum. He has published widely on ancient philoso-
phy, especially on Plato and the Platonic tradition.
 Series Editor’s Foreword

Oxford Philosophical Concepts (OPC) offers an innovative approach to

philosophy’s past and its relation to other disciplines. As a series, it is
unique in exploring the transformations of central philosophical con-
cepts from their ancient sources to their modern use.
OPC has several goals: to make it easier for historians to contextu-
alize key concepts in the history of philosophy, to render that history
accessible to a wide audience, and to enliven contemporary discussions
by displaying the rich and varied sources of philosophical concepts
still in use today. The means to these goals are simple enough: eminent
scholars come together to rethink a central concept in philosophy’s
past. The point of this rethinking is not to offer a broad over-​view,
but to identify problems the concept was originally supposed to solve
and investigate how approaches to them shifted over time, sometimes
radically.
Recent scholarship has made evident the benefits of reexamining
the standard narratives about western philosophy. OPC’s editors look
beyond the canon and explore their concepts over a wide philosophical
landscape. Each volume traces a notion from its inception as a solution
to specific problems through its historical transformations to its modern
use, all the while acknowledging its historical context. Each OPC volume
is a history of its concept in that it tells a story about changing solutions
to specific problems. Many editors have found it appropriate to include
xvi Series Editor’s Foreword

long-​ignored writings drawn from the Islamic and Jewish traditions and
the philosophical contributions of women. Volumes also explore ideas
drawn from Buddhist, Chinese, Indian, and other philosophical cultures
when doing so adds an especially helpful new perspective. By combining
scholarly innovation with focused and astute analysis, OPC encourages a
deeper understanding of our philosophical past and present.
One of the most innovative features of Oxford Philosophical Concepts
is its recognition that philosophy bears a rich relation to art, music, lit-
erature, religion, science, and other cultural practices. The series speaks
to the need for informed interdisciplinary exchanges. Its editors assume
that the most difficult and profound philosophical ideas can be made
comprehensible to a large audience and that materials not strictly phil-
osophical often bear a significant relevance to philosophy. To this end,
each OPC volume includes Reflections. These are short [no comma here]
stand-​alone essays written by specialists in art, music, literature, theology,
science, or cultural studies that reflect on the concept from other disci-
plinary perspectives. The goal of these essays is to enliven, enrich, and
exemplify the volume’s concept and reconsider the boundary between
philosophical and extra-​philosophical materials. OPC’s Reflections dis-
play the benefits of using philosophical concepts and distinctions in areas
that are not strictly philosophical, and encourage philosophers to move
beyond the borders of their discipline as presently conceived.
The volumes of OPC arrive at an auspicious moment. Many phi-
losophers are keen to invigorate the discipline. OPC aims to provoke
philosophical imaginations by uncovering the brilliant twists and
unforeseen turns of philosophy’s past.

Christia Mercer
Gustave M. Berne, Professor of Philosophy
Columbia University in the City of New York
June 2015
 Eternity

ox for d phi losophica l concepts

 Introduction
Yitzhak Y. Melamed

1 Eternity

Eternity is a unique kind of existence that is supposed to belong to the

most real being or beings. It is an existence that is not shaken by the
common wear and tear of time. Over the two-​and-​a-​half-​millennia
history of western philosophy we find various conceptions of eternity,
yet one sharp distinction between two notions of eternity seems to
run throughout this long history: eternity as timeless existence, as
opposed to eternity as existence in all times. Both kinds of existence
stand in sharp contrast to the coming in and out of existence of ordi-
nary beings, like hippos, humans, and toothbrushes: were these eter-
nally timeless, for example, a hippo could not eat, a human could not
think or laugh, and a toothbrush would be of no use. Were a hippo
an eternal-​everlasting creature, it would not have to bother itself with
nutrition in order to extend its existence. Everlasting human beings
might appear similar to us, but their mental life and patterns of behav-
ior would most likely be very different from ours.

1
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2 Yitzhak Y. Melamed

The distinction between eternity as timelessness and eternity as

everlastingness goes back to ancient philosophy, to the works of Plato
and Aristotle, and even to the fragments of Parmenides’s philosophi-
cal poem. In the twentieth century the concept of eternity seemed to
go out of favor, though one could consider to be eternalists those pro-
ponents of realism in philosophy of mathematics, and those of time-
less propositions in philosophy of language (i.e., propositions that are
said to exist independently of the uttered sentences that convey their
thought-​content). However, recent developments in contemporary
physics and its philosophy have provided an impetus to revive notions
of eternity, due to the view that time and duration might have no place
in the most fundamental ontology.
The importance of eternity is not limited to strictly philosophical
discussions. It is a notion that also has an important role in traditional
biblical interpretation. The Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of
God considered to be most sacred, is derived from the Hebrew verb
for being, and as a result has been traditionally interpreted as denoting
eternal existence (in either one of the two senses of eternity). Hence,
Calvin translates the Tetragrammaton as l’Eternel, and Mendelssohn
as das ewige Wesen or der Ewige. Eternity also plays a central role in
contemporary South American fiction, especially in the works of J. L.
Borges. The representation of eternity poses a major challenge to both
literature and arts (just think about the difficulty of representing eter-
nity in music, a thoroughly temporal art). This book aims at provid-
ing a history of the philosophy of eternity surrounded by a series of
short essays, or reflections, on the role of eternity and its representa-
tion in literature, religion, language, liturgy, science, and music. Thus,
our aim is to provide a history of philosophy as a discipline that is in
constant commerce with various other domains of human inquisition
and exploration. Finally, we would like to stress our commitment to
expanding the horizons of the philosophical curriculum as taught in
Anglo-​A merican universities. Against the still widespread attitude
that identifies the history of (especially medieval) philosophy with the
 Introduction 3

history of Christian philosophy, we see no place for such an attitude,

which is not only immoral but also erroneous and deeply misleading.

2 A History of Eternity

The five chapters of this book attempt to trace the development of the
concept of eternity, explore the variety of philosophical problems lead-
ing to the development of the concept(s) of eternity, and investigate
the variety of philosophical problems resulting from it.
Chapter 1, by James Wilberding, studies the emergence of the con-
cept of eternity in ancient Greek philosophy and its close scrutiny in
late antiquity. The early history of the concept of eternity turns out
to be as slippery as the concept itself. It is generally agreed on that
by the end of late antiquity the concept of eternity had emerged, but
when exactly it developed and who developed it remains a matter of
controversy. Added to these problems are those concerned with the
content of the concept of eternity itself. In this chapter, Wilberding
investigates the evidence on the notion of eternity in antiquity. He
approaches the evidence by looking to see what philosophical prob-
lems the introduction of (some notion of) eternity is meant to solve.
The chapter is divided into four sections. In the brief first section,
Wilberding introduces and discusses the vocabulary the ancients used
to discuss eternity. Here he pays particular attention to the Greek
term aiôn, which by the end of late antiquity comes to refer to eter-
nity but which was originally used to denote “life,” with varying con-
notations. These connections to life become important in subsequent
sections. The second section is devoted to Parmenides, who is taken
by some to be the first thinker to have articulated some notion of
timeless eternity. The third section is devoted to Plato and Aristotle,
both of whom grapple with one of the central problems of eternity in
antiquity: determining how the sensible world, which is changing and
in time, can be caused by an eternal principle. Although both Plato
and Aristotle see eternity (aiôn) as an alternative to time and thus as
4 Yitzhak Y. Melamed

timeless, Wilberding argues that there is no pressing reason to assume

that they are working with a concept of durationless eternity. Here an
attempt is also made to unravel Plato’s enigmatic characterization of
time as a “moving image of eternity [aiôn]” in the Timaeus. The final
and longest section is devoted to later Platonic theories of eternity.
This section begins with an in-​depth examination of Plotinus’s under-
standing of eternity. After introducing some necessary background on
Plotinus’s metaphysics, Wilberding argues that on Plotinus’s view eter-
nity is the durationless manner of presence of the plurality of forms as
they are contemplated by the intellect. This discussion will show that
emanationist metaphysics provides a metaphysical background that
makes the notion of eternity as metaphysical life more comprehensible
by allowing for timeless activities that have a bearing on the temporal
goings-​on in the sensible world. The chapter concludes with a brief
look at a selection of post-​Plotinian Christian Platonists, Augustine,
Philoponus, and Boethius, who explore various puzzles that God’s
eternity poses for creation and divine omniscience.
The chapter dedicated to medieval discussions of eternity is by
Peter Adamson. The topic of this book as a whole provides an unusu-
ally good opportunity for tracing a philosophical concept from the
late ancient period through the Islamic philosophical tradition and
on into the Scholastic Latin west. This chapter looks at three distinct
but frequently interacting conceptions of eternity in the Islamic world
before moving on to look at the impact of this tradition on Christian
medieval philosophy. The look at eternity in the Islamic world will
include Jewish authors as well as Muslims: both Saʿādia Gaon and
Maimonides are prominent contributors to the debate over the eter-
nity of the world in Arabic philosophy.
Of the three conceptions of eternity considered in this chapter, two
derive from the ancient Greek tradition and will already have been
explored in the chapter by Wilberding (­chapter 1). These conceptions
are (1) eternity as timelessness, and (2) eternity as an infinite duration
supervening on an infinite motion. The former comes into the Islamic
 Introduction 5

world in late Platonic texts, especially translations of Plotinus and

Proclus produced in al-​K indi’s circle in the ninth century. Accordingly,
it is unsurprising to find al-​K indi saying: “God is above time, since He
is the cause of time.” Al-​K indi favors this idea of eternity over the more
Aristotelian idea of infinite duration supervening on motion: he is
unusual among Islamic philosophers in rejecting the eternity of the
created world. On the other hand al-​K indi is also influenced by a third
concept indigenous to the Islamic world (though certainly resonating
with the late Platonic conception): (3) eternity as a near-​synonym of
divinity. Al-​K indi, like other authors of his period more associated
with kalam (Islamic theology), assumes that “eternal” means “on an
ontological par with God.” This identification of eternity and divinity
was not broken decisively until the work of the Ash’arites in theology
and Avicenna in philosophy in the tenth to eleventh centuries.
Another figure who draws on these conceptions, negatively and
positively, is the ninth-​to tenth-​century philosopher al-​R azi. He
is another unusual case among Islamic philosophers in that he had
Plato’s Timaeus as his primary influence rather than the late Platonists
or Aristotle. Under this influence, he set forward a strikingly original
theory that departs from both the late Platonist and the Aristotelian
conceptions. For al-​R azi, eternity is an infinite extension that does not
supervene on motion. He calls this not only “eternity” but also “abso-
lute time.” Here eternity is not atemporal but is rather the “empty”
temporal extension within which God creates the world. (Thus al-​
Razi treats it as similar to void, which he calls “absolute place.”) Al-​
Razi is arguably the first philosopher to put forward a conception
of time as both infinitely extended and independent from motion
(though he draws here on Galen’s critique of Aristotle in the lost On
Demonstration).
These discussions provide the background for what may be the most
prominent single philosophical issue in Islamic philosophy (or at least
in western perceptions of that tradition): the eternity of the world.
I have already mentioned that al-​K indi rejected the world’s eternity,
6 Yitzhak Y. Melamed

apparently in order to avoid putting the world on a par with God.

Saʿādia Gaon does the same, using some of the same arguments drawn
from the late Platonist John Philoponus. More famous, though, is
the clash over this issue in al-​Ghazali and Averroes. The question
receives a more aporetic answer in both Maimonides and (following
him) Aquinas, both of whom try to show that because neither side has
compelling arguments, the issue can only be decided by recourse to
revealed truth. Thus, the debate over the eternity of the world becomes
largely a methodological one—​what sorts of argument could in prin-
ciple settle the question? This issue is closely linked to the different
conceptions of eternity canvassed above. The idea that the eternity of
the world can be proven physically is linked to the Aristotelian concep-
tion of eternity as infinite duration supervening on time, whereas the
idea that revelation or metaphysics has the last word on the subject
goes hand-​in-​hand with the late Platonic and Islamic theological con-
ceptions of eternity as timelessness and/​or divinity.
Modernity seemed to be the autumn of eternity. The secularization
of European culture provided little sustenance to the concept of eter-
nity with its heavy theological baggage. Yet our hero would not leave
the stage without an outstanding performance of its power and temp-
tation. Indeed, in the first three centuries of the modern period—​the
subject of the third chapter, by me—​the concept of eternity will play a
crucial role in the great philosophical systems of the period. The first
part of this chapter concentrates on the debate about the temporality
of God. While most of the great metaphysicians of the seventeenth
century—​Suárez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz—​ascribed to
God eternal, nontemporal existence, a growing number of philoso-
phers conceived God as existing in time. For Newton, God’s eternity
was simply the fact that “He was, he is, and is to come.” A similar view
of God as being essentially in time was endorsed by Pierre Gassendi,
Henry More, Samuel Clarke, Isaac Barrow, John Locke, and most
probably Descartes as well. In the second part of the chapter I exam-
ine the concept of eternal truth and its relation to the emerging notion
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Varreddes that the scheme of the battle, as it swept from west to
east, is most intelligible to a civilian. The intensity of the fighting is
proved by the profusion of graves, whose flags glitter and shimmer,
with their petals of red, white, and blue, in every direction. Farther
on, above Etrépilly, a large turfed reservoir, perched on a hillock,
forms a landmark, from which the eye explores in every direction the
rolling country, intersected by scarcely visible glens or trenches,
through which the rivers wind. On the summit of this commanding
height we found a curious monument, which called for an
explanation which no one seemed competent to give. It consists of a
metal shield of brilliant vermilion and azure, surmounted by seven
flags—one of them the American flag—and addressed in large
letters, ‘Les Prisonniers de Guerre aux Héros de la Marne.’ What
prisoners these were we asked one another in vain. But it made our
hearts, with a touch of added mystery, thrill in fresh response to
those myriads of memorial flowers that twinkled and sparkled on the
circle of brown fields around us. There is one object of horror that
attracts attention here. It was a great barn or hangar, in which the
bodies of the fallen Germans were heaped up after the battle, and
then burned by their comrades. It is now nothing but a huge skeleton
of twisted iron, grimacing at the sky.
Between Varreddes and Etrépilly, as we prepare to cross the
Ourcq, we pass a little tavern at the left-hand side of the road, which
carries on a newly painted sign the name ‘À l’Obus.’ The excuse for
this is that on its gable-end, close to a window, it displays an
unexploded German shell, rusty and red, which half penetrated the
wall and stuck there, without bursting. Similar bombs are already
pointed out as curiosities in tree-trunks, and will doubtless be much
exploited when tourists begin to be admitted. On the east from
Varreddes we had seen, through a screen of trees, the Marne below
us, and the great bridge at Germigny-l’Evêque, which the Germans
blew up behind them in their final retreat. We are now in the very
midst of the worst slaughter of September 6 and 7, 1914, but it is
very curious to see how little sign of it is left in the countryside.
Occasional remnants of barbed wire, and here and there the
trenches of defence, might easily be overlooked by a hasty traveller.
He will more readily notice that here are orchards, starred with the
rose-colour of ripening apples; there feathery boskage of acacias
delicately green; here we run between violently contrasted fields,
with the sulphur of mustard on one side, the purple of beetroot on
the other; there the oat-harvest descends to little copses of chestnut
and beech, that brood over some unseen rivulet. Everywhere the
peace of uniform rustic experience, unaltered through the sober
centuries, would seem stamped upon the landscape, if the little
occasional groups of flapping tricolors were not there to remind us
that only two brief years ago the question whether European liberty
should or should not be overwhelmed for ever was fought out here
with unsurpassable fury and tenacity.
The winding walled hamlet of Etrépilly is bright with the sunshine
on its new orange and velvet-brown roofs, by which the damage
done by the German shells is concealed. This is not the case with
the little village of Vincy-Manœuvres, through which we pass next on
our northward course. Vincy was heavily shelled on September 7,
and still presents an appearance of dismal dilapidation. Without
doubt, this is a matter which depends on the enterprise or wealth of
individual proprietors, and it will be curious to see what immediate
effect the decision of the Government to repair all private property at
the cost of the State will have in these remote communes. It was on
September 9, 1914, that the German army made a final stand on the
wooded height between Vincy-Manœuvres and Acy-en-Multien, from
which they were dislodged next day by the army of Manoury. This
was the third and conclusive stage of the great struggle, in the
course of which the sixth French army pushed back the half-
encircling corps of Kluck’s reinforcements, and here we felt it
necessary to bear in mind, as much as the peaceful uniformity of the
landscape would permit, the great double line of attack and retreat
which we had now twice traversed.
We sped on north, and were now no longer in the department of
the Seine-et-Marne, but in that of the Oise. No place was more
prominent in the battle than Acy-en-Multien, which we now
approached. This must have been, and indeed still is, much the most
attractive and picturesque of the villages which the battle of the
Ourcq has immortalised. Acy lies in a wooded dimple of the high
plateau, and it is scattered broadly over its site, more like an English
than a French township. When it is considered with what violence
the Germans were hunted out of Acy, it is surprising how few marks
of their presence are left. One large house, of château pretensions,
is a complete wreck, having been bombed out of existence by
German shells, but the beautiful and curious church, with its twelfth-
century octagonal tower and its rudiments of earliest Gothic
ornament, is, so far as the eye can judge, intact. At Acy a prodigious
number of French soldiers are buried in a vast cemetery, which
seems to have been improvised for the occasion. The piety of
relatives and friends keeps these graves so lavishly covered with
nosegays that the cemetery looks like a flower-garden. The epitaphs
and sentiments on the tombstones are poignant, and we lingered
long and with great emotion in this sacred melancholy place. I was
particularly struck by one inscription—that on the tombstone of a
certain Charles Schulz, who died as a corporal, leading on his men.
He had been, till the war broke out, a Protestant pastor, but in what
locality the epitaph does not say. The text chosen for his place of
burial—‘il tint ferme, parcequ’il voyait celui qui est invisible’—may
well have been the echo of his own sentiments when he exchanged
his ministry for the terrible duty of fighting for his fatherland. By his
name, he was doubtless an Alsatian, and curiosity was eager to
know more of this Protestant pastor-corporal who sleeps in the pretty
cemetery of Acy-en-Multien.
In leaving Acy, our motor lost its way up a lane that led only to a
farmyard. By this happy chance, in our descent or retreat, we
enjoyed an exquisite view of the village, nestled in its grove of
chestnuts around the spire of its rather fantastic church—a view
which in other conditions we should have missed, since these
villages, sunken in folds of the upland, have a strange faculty for
making themselves invisible at a little distance. Recovering our
route, we continued northward, over the high rounded plateau of the
Multien, which is the local name for this part of the department of the
Oise. The character of the landscape now changes, and becomes
very English. Proceeding from Acy to Nanteuil-le-Hardouin is like
traversing the high parts of Gloucestershire; the lie of the land
exactly resembles that of the Cotswolds, and I could easily have
persuaded myself that we were driving from Stow-in-the-Wold to
Burford. It is obvious that this rolling country, here entirely deprived
of streams and glens, offers an extraordinary opportunity for the
evolutions of troops, but remarkably little shelter for them.
Nanteuil, a gloomy village, almost a town, with winding narrow
streets, severely grey, and a great church which towers over the
wayfarer, marks the limit of the battle north-eastwards. Although
there was a good deal of fighting around Nanteuil, it shows, so far as
we could perceive, no trace of injury, even on the picturesque façade
of the church. We left it to enter a long avenue of oaks, and there
was no mark of any kind to indicate where the battle ended. My
companion humorously remarked that it was the duty of the
Government to put up a poteau with the inscription, ‘Ici finit le champ
de bataille de l’Ourcq’! But in the absence of such a guide-post to aid
the imagination of the traveller there was nothing in the rolling
agricultural landscape, from which the little flowery flags had now
disappeared, to indicate that here there had been any disturbance of
the peace of the world.
At this point, therefore, a picture of the battlefields of the Ourcq as
they now exist should end. But an impression was awaiting us at the
threshold of the very next village, Baron, which was perhaps the
most poignant and certainly the most extraordinary of our whole day.
As we motored along we noticed, just before reaching Baron, a high
wall on the left hand containing a marble plaque, with an inscription
in gold letters. Curiosity prompted us to stop and read this
inscription, which stated that in the house behind this wall the
musical composer, Albéric Magnard, was shot and burned on
Wednesday, September 3, 1914. A funereal poem by M. Edmond
Rostand described how

Celui-là, qui, rebelle à toute trahison,

had lived there, died to preserve the honour of his art. We were
therefore close to the scene of a horrible crime, which the magnitude
of the events that closely followed it has somewhat obscured in
memory. Albéric Magnard, the author of ‘Guercœur’ and other
operas, born on June 9, 1865, was one of the most eminent and
successful musicians of France. He had for many years possessed a
country-seat at Baron, where he had built a little château, Le Manoir
des Fontaines, in which he had brought together a collection of
musical instruments and books which was famous.
We were reading the inscription on the wall, when a door in the
latter opened and a sad woman appeared, asking us if we would like
to see the place where Monsieur Magnard died. She led us through
a pergola of climbing plants to a point where we suddenly saw
before us what resembled a scene in some opera—a garden blazing
with begonias and African marigolds, surrounded on three sides by a
graceful balustrade, and velvety with green sward. Below the
balustrade a little park, beautifully kept, testified to the elegant taste
of the proprietor. But in the midst of this brilliance and neatness the
livid shell of the house itself stood untouched since the disaster,
producing in the midst of the bright parterres and trim lawns an
extraordinary effect of sinister and ironic horror. It was like seeing a
skeleton in a ball-dress, or a wreath of roses round a skull.
The good woman, who herself had lost in the fighting her two
sons, described to us the murder. A troop of Germans was marching
down the road and, attracted by something in the Manoir des
Fontaines, they had insisted on being admitted by the door at which
we entered. M. Magnard was in his bath-room, at the back of the
house. He is believed to have appeared at the window, and a
German soldier immediately shot him dead. They then set fire to the
house, and they watched it till the half-calcined body of the
composer fell through the rafters on to the floor of the room below.
Meanwhile, they took his son and tied him, facing the scene of his
father’s murder, to the trunk of a tree in the garden, and prepared to
shoot him. But three peasants out of the village of Baron swore that
he was not the son of M. Magnard, but of the gardener; and so,
when their work was done, the Germans went off, leaving the boy
alive, to be released by the villagers. The exact conditions under
which the famous composer was killed are mysterious, and are likely
to remain so, since no French eye witnessed the actual commission
of the crime. It is possible that he offered, or appeared likely to offer,
some resistance to the aggressors.
M. Rostand’s verses suggest that, in the version of the event
which reached him, Magnard was attempting ‘to preserve the honour
of his art.’ Whether he obeyed an instinct of self-preservation, or
whether he fell a passive victim, matters very little. The incident in
any case illustrates that Teutonic spirit of anarchism which Viscount
Grey has stigmatised as a menace to the future of civilisation.
TWO MONUMENTS IN WESTMINSTER
ABBEY.
by sir charles p. lucas, k.c.b., k.c.m.g.
In Westminster Abbey, towards the western end of the nave, on
the northern side, stands a monument of rather special interest at
the present day, upon which there is this inscription:

‘The Province of Massachusets Bay in New England, by an

order of the great and general Court bearing date Feb. 1st,
1759, caused this monument to be erected to the memory of
George Augustus Lord Viscount Howe, Brigadier General of
His Majesty’s forces in America, who was slain July the 6th,
1758, on the march to Ticonderoga, in the 34th year of his
age: in testimony of the sense they had of his services and
military virtues, and of the affection their officers and soldiers
bore to his command. He lived respected and beloved, the
public regretted his loss, to his family it is irreparable.’

Dean Stanley, in his ‘Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey’

(1869 ed.), makes the following reference to this monument, which
apparently stood, at the date when he wrote, in the south aisle of the
nave: ‘Massachusetts and Ticonderoga, not yet divided from us,
appear on the monument in the South aisle of the Nave erected to
Viscount Howe, the unsuccessful elder brother of the famous
Admiral.’ It is difficult to understand why the Dean used the curiously
infelicitous term ‘unsuccessful’ in this case. The word might have
been applied with some accuracy to the younger soldier brother, Sir
William Howe, most successful in his early military career, but not so
in the War of American Independence, though even in that war he
was a constant winner of battles; but unless to die young is, on the
principle of the survival of the fittest, to be considered a mark of
failure, no word could be more inappropriate to a man whose life,
according to the notice of him in the Annual Register for 1758,
presumably written by Edmund Burke, ‘was long enough for his
honour, but not for his country.’
He was the eldest of three brothers. The second was the famous
Admiral, ‘Black Dick,’ the hero of ‘The Glorious First of June,’ which
we recalled on the occasion of the late great sea-fight in the North
Sea. The third was the general already mentioned. They were a
notable trio, but the eldest, the shortest lived, the ‘unsuccessful’ one
of the three, had in him the promise of greatness of the rarest kind. It
would be difficult to pick out any man whose death called forth such
a consensus of eulogy. Possibly he was felix opportunitate mortis.
Possibly the same might be said of his friend Wolfe, who was killed
in his thirty-third year, as Howe in his thirty-fourth. But assuredly, had
these two men lived on, there would have been a different story to
tell of England and America.
Dean Stanley writes of Wolfe’s friendship for Lord Howe the
Admiral, quoting Horace Walpole’s words, that they were ‘friends to
each other as cannon to gunpowder’; but Wolfe’s friendship for the
‘unsuccessful’ brother must have been as great; his admiration for
him at any rate was unbounded. Wolfe was no great respecter of
persons; he was somewhat impatient and critical of other
commanders, but—‘If my Lord Howe had lived, I should have been
very happy to have received his orders.’ In Wolfe’s eyes Howe was
‘the very best officer in the King’s service,’ ‘the noblest Englishman
that has appeared in my time.’ And so said they all: there was no
dissentient voice, no whisper of criticism, no trace of jealousy.
General Abercromby, to whom Howe was second in command, in
reporting his death, wrote, ‘He was, very deservedly, universally
beloved and respected throughout the whole army.’ Pitt’s testimony
ran that ‘he was by the universal voice of army and people a
character of ancient times, a complete model of military virtue in all
its branches.’ Robert Rogers, the bold leader of the Rangers, in
whose company Howe learnt the art of North American bush fighting,
wrote of him as a ‘noble and brave officer,’ ‘universally beloved by
both officers and soldiers of the army’; while the members of the
Massachusetts House of Assembly, no great lovers of the redcoats
from home, and close-fisted enough in ordinary dealings, voted £250
for a monument to the Englishman, whose character had impressed
them all, and whose person their soldiers dearly loved.
Howe had been made colonel of the lately raised Royal
Americans, the ancestors of the 60th Rifles, the famous King’s Royal
Rifle Corps. Shortly afterwards he was transferred to the command
of the 55th Regiment. Pitt then appointed him to be brigadier to
General Abercromby, who, in 1758, was placed in chief command of
the Central Advance on Canada, along the line of Lake George and
Lake Champlain. Abercromby neither was, nor had the reputation of
being, a first-rate general, and Lord Chesterfield was no doubt
roughly accurate when he wrote, ‘Abercromby is to be the sedentary
and not the acting commander.’ The inspiration and the motive force
were to come from Howe. Early in July 1758 the army, consisting of
over 6000 regulars and some 9000 provincials, was carried on
bateaux and whaleboats to the northern end of Lake George, where,
near the outlet of that lake into Lake Champlain, stood the immediate
objective, the French fort of Ticonderoga. The force was landed, an
advance was made through dense forest and scrub, Lord Howe with
a party of Rangers was leading the principal column, they stumbled
across a French reconnoitring party, there was a skirmish, and Howe
was killed. ‘The French lost above three hundred men, and we,
though successful, lost as much as it was possible to lose in one.’
That is one of the many comments made upon the incident, all on
the same note. Here is another: ‘In Lord Howe the soul of General
Abercromby’s army seemed to expire.’ Two days later Abercromby
ordered a headlong, blundering assault upon the works of the fort,
which ended in terrible losses and complete repulse.
In his dispatch of August 26, 1915, reporting upon the operations
at the Dardanelles up to that date, Sir Ian Hamilton wrote:

‘Lieutenant-General Sir W. R. Birdwood has been the soul

of Anzac. Not for one single day has he ever quitted his post.
Cheery and full of human sympathy, he has spent many hours
 of each twenty-four inspiring the defenders of the front
trenches, and if he does not know every soldier in his force, at
least every soldier in the force believes he is known to his
chief.’

Here we have something like a modern counterpart, happily still with

us, of Lord Howe.
It is at once the glory of the British Empire, and its chief source of
strength, that it contains within it so many diverse elements, all co-
operating for the common weal, all owing free and willing allegiance
to one sovereign. Many races combine to make the great community
which we call by the strangely inaccurate term of Empire; and the
British race itself, in the process of transplantation, has developed
different types in differing lands, climates, and surroundings. The
home Briton, born and bred within the four seas of the United
Kingdom, necessarily differs somewhat in character and physique
from the Briton of the Canadian prairies or the Australian backblocks.
The Canadian Briton again differs from the Australasian or South
African, while among Australasians the Australian is of one type, the
New Zealander of another. All supplement each other; all contribute
to the common stock some ingredient which the others have not, and
the sum total is greater and richer than if the units of which it is
composed were all alike and uniform. On the other hand, diversities
demand wise handling, or they may become a source not of
strength, but of weakness. It is as easy to drift farther apart as to
come closer, to exaggerate differences as to minimise them. Every
citizen of the Empire is a missionary of the Empire, for by the
individual citizens the types are judged. The home Briton who visits
Australia leaves behind him a good or bad taste for England among
the Australians with whom he has been brought into contact. The
Australian who comes to the Old Country gives to Australia among
the people of the Old Country a better or a worse name. But of
necessity the leaders are most potent in mission work, and among
the leaders those who lead armed men on active service; who are in
touch with them day by day in the camp, on the march, in the
trenches or on the open battlefield; on whom it devolves to enforce
discipline, and with whom it rests whether or not discipline means
friction. It is impossible to measure the amount of lasting good which
is wrought when overseas soldiers associate tact and sympathy with
home leadership or, on the other hand, the mischief which results
from want of personal assimilation. It is not by any means military
capacity alone that makes the soul of an Empire army. We are all
beginning to know each other, to value each other, to make
allowances for each other, to an extent which was impossible before
steamers multiplied the coming and going of men, and turned
uncertain and spasmodic into regular and assured communication.
Doubts can be at once set at rest and misapprehensions promptly
removed by the use of the submarine cable. Moreover, this
familiarising process, and the annihilation of distance, is a
progressive matter. Every year leaves us rather closer to one
another than we were the year before. If, even under these
favourable modern conditions, the personal element still plays a
most important part, it was all-important in the middle years of the
eighteenth century.
In the Seven Years’ War, when, in the words of Frederick the
Great, England, having been long in labour, had at length brought
forth a man, that man, William Pitt, set himself to fight France in
America, and sent out what were for the time comparatively large
armies to conquer Canada. He called upon the British North
American colonies to co-operate and raise their levies; and
inasmuch as his appeal was made in wise and tactful terms, and the
colonies realised that for once England would not leave them in the
lurch, they, or some of them, answered to the call with patriotism and
goodwill. Thus regular soldiers from England, in greater numbers
than ever before, came among the colonists, and provincial
regiments were raised to march and fight side by side with the troops
of the line. Then was seen and felt in its fullest extent the difference
between the home Briton and his brother beyond the seas, at a time
when the divergence was most pronounced. The regulars were very
regular, the Provincials were very provincial; from a military point of
view the two bodies of men were at opposite poles. The Provincials
knew nothing of training or discipline; they were nondescript,
temporary soldiers of small democracies; they were farmers enlisted
for the campaign, their term of service in any case not exceeding
one year: few had uniforms, some brought guns with them, some
had none to bring: the officers were in effect chosen by the men. The
troops of the line, on the other hand, imported into the backwoods of
North America the stiffness and rigidity of European dress, discipline,
and tactics in the eighteenth century, and between the officers and
soldiers there was a great gulf fixed, as between the ranks of society
in Europe.
It was but natural that these officers should regard the provincial
soldiery with disdain, and that a corresponding resentment should be
felt in the provincial ranks. Some of the greatest soldiers of the day
were not exempt from this partisan feeling. After the disaster to
Braddock’s force in 1755, Washington, who had been present on the
field and who contrasted the conduct of the Virginians in the fight
with that of the regulars, wrote in the bitterest terms of the latter.
Wolfe, on the other hand, had, in 1758, no words strong enough to
express his disgust at the shortcomings of the American soldiers.
‘The Americans are in general the dirtiest, most contemptible
cowardly dogs that you can conceive.’ If these were the views of the
foremost men of the day in the colonial levies and in the regular
army respectively, it must be presumed that the lesser men felt at
least as strongly. Mrs. Grant, the authoress of ‘Memoirs of an
American Lady,’ a book which was published at New York, in 1809,
speaks of the ‘secret contempt’ with which ‘many officers justly
esteemed, possessed of capacity, learning, and much knowledge,
both of the usages of the world and the art of war ... regarded the
blunt simplicity and plain appearance of the settlers’; and among the
officers who came out from England there must have been a large
proportion whose contempt was not unspoken or unnoticed.
It was not merely a case of friction between the professional
soldier and the amateur, the one looking down upon the other, and
the other resenting the airs of the superior person. The mischief was
deeper seated. The northern colonies of British America were
cradled in centrifugal traditions: a large proportion of the first
colonists had come out to be rid of the Home Government, its
discipline and its control. Puritanism was the dominant religious and
political creed; and the surroundings, except at a few town centres,
were of a stern and simple kind. Among men and women born and
reared on these lines, and into their family circles, came regimental
officers from England, many, if not most, of whom had been bred in
the ways of fashionable English Society, which, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, was not, to say the least of it, characterised by
high tone or scrupulous refinement. The settlers in the New World,
by the mere fact of their removal out of the Old World into the
wilderness, had preserved for themselves and their descendants the
old-time feeling and modes of thought in the Old World, and to them
the new leaven from an up-to-date Old World was a leaven of
unrighteousness. Mrs. Grant was the daughter of an officer in the
55th Regiment, Howe’s own regiment, but she had spent her
childhood in the American atmosphere, and had been mainly
brought up in a Dutch family. Consequently she tells us that she was
‘a little ashamed of having a military father,’ and writes of ‘the scarlet
coat, which I had been taught to consider as the symbol of
wickedness.’ It was to some extent as though Cavaliers and
Roundheads had come to life again, and were jostling one another,
while fighting under the same flag and for the same cause, as a
prelude to once more springing at each other’s throats.
At this time and place a man of the type of Lord Howe was an
almost priceless asset to the cause of Imperial Unity—a cause which
can never stand still, but either declines or goes forward, and goes
forward only through intelligent appreciation of existing conditions
and active sympathy with living men. Of high social standing in
England, and acknowledged military reputation, he set himself, by
precept and still more by personal example, to the work of
assimilation.

‘This gallant man,’ says the Annual Register for 1758, ‘from
the moment he landed in America, had wisely conformed and
made his regiment conform to the kind of service which the
country required. He did not suffer any under him to
encumber themselves with superfluous baggage; he himself
set the example and fared like a common soldier. The first to
 encounter danger, to endure hunger, to support fatigue; rigid
in his discipline but easy in his manners, his officers and
soldiers readily obeyed the commander, because they loved
the man.’

Wolfe wrote of him as a man ‘whom nature has formed for the war
of this country,’ and Mrs. Grant, that he was ‘above the pedantry of
holding up standards of military rules, where it was impossible to
enforce them, and the narrow spirit of preferring the modes of his
own country to those proved by experience to suit that in which he
was to act.’ She christens him ‘This young Lycurgus of the camp.’
Under Howe everything was literally cut down to meet the
exigencies of American warfare. Gold and scarlet was laid aside:
baggage was reduced to a minimum: the muskets were shortened:
their barrels were darkened: the skirts of the long regimental coats
were cut off: Indian leggings were brought into use. Wolfe writes in
May 1758, ‘Our clothes, our arms, our accoutrements, nay even our
shoes and stockings are all improper for this country. Lord Howe is
so well convinced of it that he has taken away all the men’s
breeches.’ A French writer tells us that the officers and men were
only allowed one shirt apiece. ‘Lord H. set the example, by himself
washing his own dirty shirt, and drying it in the sun, while he in the
meantime wore nothing but his coat.’ And here is the unkindest cut
of all—in Mrs. Grant’s words:

‘The greatest privation to the young and vain yet remained.

Hair well dressed, and in great quantity, was then considered
as the greatest possible ornament, which those who had it
took the utmost care to display to advantage, and to wear in a
bag or queue, whichever they fancied. Lord Howe’s was fine
and very abundant; he, however, cropped it and ordered
every one else to do the same.’

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, the gentleman and the bully, though
both may be efficient fighting men. Returning to his friends on one
occasion, Howe found to his great indignation that in his absence
Captain Charles Lee had come through and, ‘as if he were in a
conquered country,’ commandeered the loyal old lady’s stock and
property, without having the necessary warrants for his high-handed
proceedings. Lee’s next visit was after the fight at Ticonderoga,
when he was brought back a wounded man to be nursed by those
whom he had browbeaten and robbed. He was a king’s officer; but it
is difficult to deduce from his case the moral that conduct such as his
brought on the Revolution, seeing that he became a general in the
Revolutionary army, of great though somewhat dubious reputation.
In 1757 and 1758 Lord Howe was winning the love and esteem of
all who came into contact with him in America. In 1759 the Assembly
of Massachusetts voted the monument to his memory. In 1765 the
men of Boston were rioting against the Stamp Act, and in 1773
throwing cargoes of tea into Boston harbour. In 1775 came open war
with the Mother Country and the fight of Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill
hardest of hard fighters among the Americans was Israel Putnam: he
had been by Howe’s side when the latter was killed. The night before
his death Howe had been in company with John Stark, noted among
the New Hampshire Rangers who followed Robert Rogers. It was
Stark who, in 1777, planned and won the fight at Bennington, which
was the beginning of the end of Burgoyne’s army. A young member
of the Schuyler group, who had taken Howe to their hearts, was
Philip Schuyler, afterwards one of the best known and most trusted
of the Revolutionary leaders. Probably England and America had
drifted too far apart at the time of the Seven Years’ War for any
human influence to bring them wholly into line again. Yet, had Howes
been multiplied and English statesmen and commanders been
modelled on his lines, the parting might well have been postponed
and been less bitter when it came. He stands out in history as one
who in his day did all that man could do to bring the Colonies and the
Mother Country closer together; and he is a type of the Englishmen
who are still wanted to-day, and who happily are not wanting, as
shown by the love and confidence borne towards Sir William
Birdwood by the splendid fighting men from the Southern Seas,
whom he led to less and yet to more than victory.
Just over a year from the date of Lord Howe’s death and
Abercromby’s repulse at Ticonderoga, a much abler general than
Abercromby, Jeffrey Amherst, marched once more against the fort.
The French abandoned their entrenchments in front of it, of which
Amherst promptly took possession; and a rearguard, left to hold the
fort itself, after two or three days’ artillery fire, blew it up and left the
ruins to be occupied by Amherst’s army. As the death of Lord Howe
had immediately preceded Abercromby’s attack, so a day before the
second enterprise ended successfully, another officer, well known in
the army and in English Society, though not comparable with Lord
Howe, was killed. An entry in Knox’s Historical Journal runs: ‘The
Honourable Colonel Townshend was picked off to-day in the
trenches by a cannon shot; he is very deservedly lamented by the
General and the army’; a later entry mentions that his body was
taken to Albany for burial. On the south side of the nave of
Westminster Abbey, much farther up towards the Chancel than the
place where the monument to Lord Howe stands, will be found a
monument—

‘erected by a disconsolate parent, The Lady Viscountess

Townshend, to the memory of her fifth son, The Honble. Lt.-
Colonel Roger Townshend, who was killed by a cannon ball
on the 25th of July 1759 in the 28th year of his age, as he
was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderagoe in North
America ... tho’ premature his death, his life was glorious,
enrolling him with the names of those immortal statesmen and
commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity in the cause of
this comprehensive and successful war have extended the
commerce, enlarged the Dominion, and upheld the Majesty of
these Kingdoms beyond the idea of any former age.’
The monument is an elaborate one, and the eulogy is obviously
exaggerated. Horace Walpole would evidently have had it otherwise.
In his ‘Short Notes of My Life’ he tells us, ‘I gave my Lady
Townshend an epitaph and design for a tomb for her youngest son,
killed at Ticonderoga; neither was used.’ He also gives us to
understand that the mother was not so disconsolate as the
monument asserts:

‘My Lady Townshend, who has not learning enough to copy

a Spartan mother, has lost her youngest son. I saw her this
morning—her affectation is on t’other side; she affects grief—
but not so much for the son she has lost, as for t’other that
she may lose.’

And again, ‘Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given
her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too.’ Whatever may
have been the mother’s preferences, the two brothers loved each
other dearly. A few weeks before he was killed, Roger Townshend
wrote to George Townshend’s wife to tell her of her husband’s safe
arrival at Halifax from England in the best of health, and how he had
sent him supplies of fresh vegetables to make up for the long sea-
voyage. The letter continues:

‘My opinion of General Amherst as an honest good man,

and my attachment to him as a soldier I thought would never
allow me to wish that I might serve under any other person in
America, but the tie of brother and friend united is too
powerful, and I confess nothing ever gave me more real
concern than not being employed on the same expedition.’

In turn we have George Townshend writing sadly before the fall of

Quebec of the news of his brother’s death; and after Quebec had
fallen, on the eve of his return to England, he writes to Amherst:

‘I hear I have got Barrington’s regiment. Alas, what a

Bouquet this had been a year or two hence for poor Roger. I
 assure you I return thoroughly wounded from America. I loved
him sincerely.’

George Townshend, the eldest son, whom Walpole clearly did not
love, was Wolfe’s well-known brigadier, to whom Quebec capitulated,
and around whom so much controversy gathered. He ended as a
Marquess and a Field-Marshal, and there is no reason to doubt that
he was a competent soldier. So also evidently was the younger
brother. Amherst appointed him to be one of the two Deputy
Adjutant-Generals of his army, his own brother, Colonel Amherst,
being the other. We read of him in connection with the training of the
Provincial regiments, and as commanding a detachment of Rangers
sent to reconnoitre along Lake George. Amherst wrote to Wolfe that
he had intended to send him home with dispatches after the fall of
Ticonderoga, that his loss ‘marred the enjoyment I should otherwise
have had in the reduction of the place.’ We may set him down as
one of the might-have-beens, and Dean Stanley would presumably
have classed him as the unsuccessful brother. If he had marked
military ability, it has assuredly remained in the family; for those who
read the epitaph upon his monument in Westminster Abbey, with its
reference to a comprehensive war and upholding the majesty of
these kingdoms, will carry their thoughts across the seas from North
America to Mesopotamia, from Ticonderoga to Kut.[1]

FOOTNOTES
[1] All who are interested in the personalities of the Seven
Years’ War, as far as North America was concerned, owe a deep
debt of gratitude to Dr. Doughty, the Government Archivist of the
Dominion of Canada, for the immense amount of material which
he has collected and made accessible in ‘The Siege of Quebec’
(Doughty and Parmelee), and in his edition, for the Champlain
Society, of Knox’s Historical Journal.
 THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE
FIRST CHRISTMAS.
by boyd cable.
The Divisional Ammunition and Supply Column had done a long
march on the Christmas Eve. It was not so much that the distance
was long in measured kilometres, but from a point of time, of
dragging weariness, of bad roads, of cold and wet and discomfort it
was prolonged to a heart-breaking length.
The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that
the men had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn
out of their uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a
half before the time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits
(a quick enough and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots,
water and feed their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast,
scramble for a ‘lick and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their
teams, pack picketing gear and odd stores on the wagons and sheet
them over, have themselves and everything belonging to them
packed and harnessed and standing ready to turn out promptly to
the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and with a nicely-timed
handful of seconds to spare, when the word came, because the
practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine for a good
many months past, and there had been plenty of times when they
had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this
present leisured hour and a half.
It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road,
and, dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march.
The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course,
as indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past.
There were a good many even by then who had wondered where all
the rain could come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease