The Sun.
London, England, 1865-08-29 00:00:00

GENERAL SIR GEORGE BROWN.

Eleven years ago there was a British camp, far
away on a hill-side in Bulgaria where at nights
might be heard ' a refrain ere the days of sorrow
fell upon the army—
Come pipe-clay your jackets and buckle your stocks,
Away with mustachios and dirt-breeding locks ;
Such dombded ennovations I'll surely put down ;
It's me up the shakos, cries General Brown !
But there is not a survivor of the storms of pesti-
lence and battle which smote that gallant Light
Division who will not read with sincere regret of
the death of their iron old chief. He drilled them,
pipe-clayed them, shaved and stocked, them within
an inch of their lives. The Queen's regulations were
before him, and he dared not disobey that which
was written there as in the chronicles of the law.
But he fed them well in camp and led them nobly
in the field, and never succeeded in drilling and
stocking his heart into complete rigidity and impas-
siveness to their wants and wishes. No one bad a
keener appreciation of the folly of choking Men with
a leather garotte machine at 80 deg. in the shade,
and perhaps no one felt more keenly the pains and
penalties of the early and close-shaving movement
than himself. It may be doubted if Sir G. Brown
quite approved the shako, but no suspicion can be
thrown on his belief in pipeclay. But what could he
do ? Was he, a subordinate General, to take upon
himself to set aside the orders of the British army ?
Would it be any justification to his official con-
science for disobedience to the orders to receive the
praise of writers in newspapers or commendations
from independent members of Parliament ? There
was law, practice, order, custom, for divisional
drills in the field, and Sir George knew well that
with some of the regiments in his division it was
not supererogatory to drill them in order to get a
division ready for its duties. And so he drilled
them in the heat of the early Bulgarian morn-
ings. There was a strict regulation that every
soldier should wear a stiff stock of black patent
leather, with a brass buckle behind it. And so he
made them wear it, and wore one himself ; not only
that, but liked it. There was also a strict regula-
tion that every officer and man in her Maj csty's
infantry should keep his face shaved, and that his
whiskers should be cut in a line extending from the
tip of his ear to the angle of his mouth. And so
it was that if a British travelling gent or a Turkish
Bashi-Bazouk happened to be passing by the camp
at Devna some time after daybreak any morning of
June, 1854, he would see the stiff, well-knit figure
of an old man, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted,
tightly strapped, dressed in a well-fitting un-
dress blue frock coat, with velvet collar and
cuffs, regulation swordsash, belt, spurs, and
horse trappings of a British general officer, well
mounted and well seated on a regulation height
charger, with his handsome face well set in its
stock, and his chin and cheek glistening from the
recent razor, careering in front of his Staff, in the
midst of solid, well stocked battalions,who were un-
dergoing the pains and penalties attached to the
honour of being the Light Division. " Let them
alter the regulations if they please, and then I will
follow the regulations," was his remark to all insi-
nuated remonstrances. It was principally the doctors
who spoke, and the General had imbibed a good deal
of the old Peninsular sentiment respecting medical
officers, and regarded them as the most troublesome
of the impedimenta of an army. At that time the
new theory of camp-pitching was coming into vogue,
and Sir George heard with horror the first mutter-
ings of the heresy that the doctors were to regulate
the choice of military positions by sanitary con-
siderations. He disliked baggage trains, and he
therefore regarded with disgust the newfangled
carriages which were to serve as ambulances.
He set up his back against the doctors, and if
there had been any one less firm than Alexander
to deal with he would probably have had all
things his own way, for he had sympathetic snpport
at head-quarters, and, indeed, ourlong delay in mov-
ing the wounded on board the ships after Alma was
mainly due to the fact that all ambulances were left
on shore at Varna. But when cholera broke out
who more prompt in action, more energetic in com-
mand, more constant in care and attention to his
men than Sir George Brown ? In one thing he was
quite right—in insisting on the military cleanliness,
of which to him the outer and visible sign was Pipe-
clay. But the great fault, overborne, as it was, by
many very great virtues, of Sir George Brown was
that he could not understand the changes whichhad
taken place in society, in the world, and in the army
recruited in these isles since be put up his sword on
the peace of 1815 and sat down at the desk, "where
himh s lengthened
too
farin
nat o l
narrows says
path," Mr.
so Kinth
,gal
that
h,
e"
over-
plied ee
rw-
plied the idea of discipline." In 1854 he was 66
years old, but if we are to believe the historian just
ys
quoted he was accustomed in any difficultyhimself how " the Duke" would have acted under
to ask
similar circumstances, and so had gathered no wis-
dom from his own experience. When there was no
answer to that question he must have been quite in
the dark.

"Sir George Brown was an officer whose career had
begun, and begun with glory, in the great days under Wel-
lington, but while he was still in his early manhood wars had
ceased, and thenceforth for nearly 40 years ho had brought
his strong energies to bear upon the kind of military busi-
ness which used to be practised by the English in peace
time. A long immersion in the Adjutant-General's de-
partment had led him to go even beyond other men in
laying stress upon the value of discipline ; but the practice
of this sort of industry had not at all helped to school
him for the command of a division in war time ; for in
labouring after that mechanic perfection, which, after
all, is only one of many means towards an end, the end
itself had been much forgotten by those who controlled our
military system,' and the business of war (as, for
instance, the art of carrying a brigade in line through
enclosures and thick grounds) had been little or never prac-
tised in England.* To a military system which omits to

* Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde, used to
press the importance of practising troops in this way, but
without mom.