The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 78, April, 1864. Various
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Some of the best of the English second-class generals were old men. Lord Clyde began his memorable Indian campaigns at sixty-six, and certainly showed no want of talent and activity in their course. He restored, to all appearance, British supremacy in the East. Sir C.J. Napier was in his sixty-second year when he conquered Sinde, winning the great Battles of Meanee and Doobah; and six years later he was sent out to India, as Commander-in-chief, at the suggestion of Wellington, who said, that, if Napier would not go, he should go himself. He reached India too late to fight the Sikhs, but showed great vigor in governing the Indian army. He died in 1853; had he lived until the next spring, he would unquestionably have been placed at the head of that force which England sent first to Turkey and then to Southern Russia. Lord Raglan was almost sixty-six when he was appointed to his first command, and though his conduct has been severely criticized, and much misrepresented by many writers, the opinion is now becoming common that he discharged well the duties of a very difficult position. Mr. Kinglake's brilliant work is obtaining justice for the services and memory of his illustrious friend. Lord Hardinge and Lord Gough were old men when they carried on some of the fiercest hostilities ever known to the English in India. Sir Ralph Abercromby was sixty-three when he defeated the French in Egypt, in 1801. Lord Cornwallis was fifty-two when he broke the power of Tippoo Saib, and prepared the way for his ultimate overthrow. Lord Peterborough was forty-seven, and had never before held a command or seen much service, when he set out on that series of extraordinary campaigns which came so near replacing the Austrian house in possession of Spain and the Indies. Peterborough has been called the last of the knights-errant; but, in fact, no book on knight-errantry contains anything half so wonderful as his deeds in the country of Don Quixote. Sir Eyre Coote, who had so boldly supported that bold policy which led to the victory of Plassey, nearly a quarter of a century later supported Hastings in the field with almost as much vigor as he had supported Clive in council, and saved British India, when it was assailed by the ablest of all its foes. His last victories were gained in advanced life, and are ranked with the highest of those actions to which England owes her wonderful Oriental dominion. Lord Keane was verging upon sixty when he led the British forces into Afghanistan, and took Ghuznee. Against all her old and middle-aged generals, her kings and princes apart, England could place but very few young commanders of great worth. Clive's case was clearly exceptional; and Wolfe owed his victory on the Heights of Abraham as much to Montcalm's folly as to his own audacity. The Frenchman should have refused battle, when time and climate would soon have wrought his deliverance and his enemy's ruin.
It is generally held that the wars which grew out of the French Revolution, and which involved the world in their flames, were chiefly the work of young men, and that their history illustrates the superiority of youth over age in the ancient art of human destruction. But this belief is not well founded, and, indeed, bears a close resemblance to that other error in connection with the French Revolution, namely, that it proceeded from the advent of new opinions, which obtained ascendency,—whereas those opinions were older than France, and had more than once been aired in France, and there had struggled for supremacy. The opinions before the triumph of which the old monarchy went down were much older than that monarchy; but as they had never before been able definitely to influence the nation's action, it was not strange that they should be considered new, when there was nothing new about them save their application. Young opinions, as they are supposed to have been, are best championed by young men; and hence it is assumed that the French leaders in the field were youthful heroes, as were the civil leaders in many instances,—and a very nice mess the latter made of the business they engaged in, doing little that was well in it beyond getting their own heads cut off. There are some facts that greatly help to sustain the position that France was saved from partition by the exertions of young generals, the new men of the new time. Hoche, Moreau, Bonaparte, Desaix, Soult, Lannes, Ney, and others, who early rose to fame in the Revolutionary wars, were all young men, and their exploits were so great as to throw the deeds of others into the shade; but the salvation of France was effected before any one of their number became conspicuous as a leader. Napoleon once said that it was not the new levies that saved France, but the old soldiers of the Bourbons; and he was right; and he might have added, that they were led by old or elderly generals. Dumouriez was in his fifty-fourth year when, in 1792, he won the Battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; and at Valmy he was aided by the elder Kellermann, who was fifty-seven. Those two battles decided the fate of Europe, and laid the foundation of that French supremacy which endured for twenty years, until Napoleon himself overthrew it by his mad Moscow expedition. Custine, who also was successful in 1792, on the side of Germany, was fifty-two. Jourdan and Pichegru, though not old men, were old soldiers, when, in 1794 and 1795, they did so much to establish the power of the French Republic, the former winning the Battle of Fleurus. It was in the three years that followed the beginning of the war in 1792, that the French performed those deeds which subsequently enabled Napoleon and his Marshals to chain victory to their chariots, and to become so drunk from success that they fell through their own folly rather than because of the exertions of their enemies. Had the old French generals been beaten at Valmy, the Prussians would have entered Paris in a few days, the monarchy would have been restored, and the name of Bonaparte never would have been heard; and equally unknown would have been the names of a hundred other French leaders, who distinguished themselves in the three-and-twenty years that followed the first successes of Dumouriez and Kellermann. Let honor be given where it is due, and let the fogies have their just share of it. There can be nothing meaner than to insist upon stripping gray heads of green laurels.
After the old generals and old soldiers of France had secured standing-places for the new generation, the representatives