The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1880-08-21 00:00:00

THE STOURBRIDGE OBSERVER.

A REMINISCENCE OF THE FRANCO.

PRUSSIAN WAR.
Writing from Berlin on the 16th, the Correspondent of The
Times says :

There were festive doings to-day in the barracks
of the let Dragon Guards, that bold and blue-
coated regiment of horse which did such heroic
service at Mars-la-Tour on this day ten years ago.
Having hurried by ahnost superhuman effort round
to the west of Metz, the 3rd and part of the 10th
Corps, it may be remembered, forming part of the
army under Prince Frederick Charles, managed,
with grim and dogged tenacity, to hold fast until
reinforcements came up towards evening the whole
Grand Army of the Rhine under Marshal Bazaine,
which was trying to escape to Verdun. The hand-
ful of Germans was frightfully cut up and their
outflanking and annihilation were only prevented
by the self-sacrificing and repeated charges of
several masses of cavalry which were launched
against the enemy. Prominent among these daunt-
less death rides was the combined onset on the
French right of three squadrons of the 7th, or Bis-
marck Cuirassiers, with as many of the 16th Lancers
—a charge immortalized by Freiligrath's stirring
" Trumpeter of Gravelotte "—the doubling up of
ten French cavalry regiments by Von Barby and six
regiments of horse, and the charge of the Ist
Dragoons of the Prussian Guard who emerged from
the murderous melee with the loss of 15 officers
and 126 men, not to speak of the numerous
wounded, among whom were the two only sons of
Prince Bismarck. To celebrate, therefore, the anni-
versary of this glorious day, the officers of this regi-
ment gave a grand luncheon, which was honoured by
the presence of the 'Emperor, the Crown Prince,
Princes Charles Frederick and Charles Albert,
and other high military personages. The regi-
ment, reinforced by the 2nd Dragoon Guards,
was drawn up to receive the Emperor on the
Barrack Quadrangle, and, after inspecting the men
and exchanging a few familiar words with most
of the officers, His Majesty addressed his "children,"
hoping that the example set them by their predecessors
might always remain before them, and that if ever
serious claims were made upon them they would show
themselves worthy inheritors of their name. The oc-
casion has also been signalized by the publication of a,
laborious and splendidly got up history of the regi-
ment by Rittmeister Hans von Rohr, of the same.

was already a nonagenarian. His last poetical com-
position consisted of some spirited verses on the
disaster of Isandlana, which appeared in our columns.

The Times, in a leader remarks :—"Lord Stratford de
itedcliffe is in one respect fortunate in the period of his
death. It is the fate of many public men, especially when
they attain an advanced age, to outlive the circumstances
and the interests amid which they became famous, until the
world feels only a dim historic sympathy with their careers.
Most men who have reached the age of ninety find them-
selves, during the closing decade or two of their life, the
last survivors of an old world amid a new one, sur-
rounded by a generation whose thoughts are all occupied
with new problems who arhittle able to enter into political
movements and excitements thirty or forty years old,
and who consequently can but imperfectly appreciate the
part played in them by a surviving veteran. This was, in
fact, the case with a great part of Lord Stratford de Red-
cliffe's career; and had his fame depended upon the part he
took, however creditable, in such transactions as those
which preoeded and followed the Treaty of Vienna,
or accompanied the liberation of Greece, he might
have passed away amid the comparatively silent honours
accorded to a venerable representative of an obsolete
world. But it is his singular fortune that the great
political problem in connexion with which he attained
distinction is as fresh and urgent now as it was in the days
of his youth and manhood; and a longer and renewed ex-
perience of it has rendered the contemporaries of his old
age even more capable of appreciating the qualities he
formerly displayed than were those amid whom his work
was done. The Eastern Question, which really began four
centuries ago, has been more or less urgent for a century.
It has revived in generation after generation with perennial
vitality, and for a long time past it has always involved the
same substantial problem under varying forms. Lord
Stratford de Itedcliffe was the leading character in one of its
most acute crises a generation ago, and nis achievement
consisted in conducting it through that crisisto a settlement
which afforded Europe and Turkey a respite of some twenty
years. When he resigned his post at Constantinople, having
reached the full age of man, he might have thought that his
greatest success would have consisted in having done his work
as s ell that the world could be content to forget it, and to
occupy itself with other interests. But he lived on for
another twenty years in order to see the same old difficulty
revived—the same helplessness on the part of Turkey, the
same ambition on the part of Russia, the same jealousies
among the great Powers. and the same interposition, how-
ever tardy, on the part of England, to defeat a dangerous
Russian scheme which was on the very point of success.
The consequence was that he had the satisfaction of living
again, as it were, through the achievements and the honours
of his active career, an 4 of hearing the wish often uttered by
his countrymen that his successors at Constantinople might
be able to emulate the character won by Sir Stratford
Canning". . . .