The Military Courage of Royalty
Writing of the late Alexander III. of Russia, a foreign author has recently permitted himself to observe: “Marvellous personal courage is not a striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs as it was of the English Tudors.” It will be conceded that periods materially govern the conditions under which sovereigns and their royal relatives have found opportunities for proving their personal courage. The Tudor dynasty had ended before the Romanoff dynasty began. It is true, indeed, that the ending of the former with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 occurred only a few years before the foundation of the latter by the election to the Tzarship of Michael Feodorovitz Romanoff in 1612. But of the five sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty it happened that only one, Henry VII., the first monarch of that dynasty, found or made an opportunity for the display of marked—scarcely perhaps of “marvellous”—personal courage; and thus the selection of the Tudor dynasty by the writer referred to as furnishing a contrasting illustration in the matter of personal courage to that of the Romanoffs was not particularly fortunate. Henry VIII. was only once in action; he shared in the skirmish known as the “Battle of the Spurs,” because of the precipitate flight of the French horse. Edward VI. died at the age of sixteen, and the two remaining sovereigns of the dynasty were women, of whom it is true that Elizabeth was a strong and vigorous ruler, but in the nature of things had no opportunity for showing “marvellous personal courage.” Henry VII. literally found his crown in the heart of the mêlée on Bosworth field, it matters not which of the alternative stories is correct, that he himself killed Richard, or that Richard was killed in the act of striking him a desperate blow. But Henry at Bosworth in 1485 still belonged to the days of chivalry—to an era in which monarchs were also armour-clad knights, who headed charges in person and gave and took with spear, sword, and battle-axe. Long before Peter the Great, more than two centuries after Bosworth, foamed at the mouth with rage and hacked with his sword at his panicstricken troops fleeing from the field of Narva on that winter day of 1700, the face of warfare had altered and the métier of the commander, were he sovereign or were he subject, had undergone a radical change.
Of a family of the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but, save as regards one exception, there is no assurance of a continuous inheritance of mental attributes. What a contrast is there between Frederick the Great and his father; between George III. and his successor; between the present Emperor of Austria and his hapless son; between the genial, wistful, and well-intentioned Alexander II. of Russia and the not less well-intentioned but narrow-minded and despotic sovereign who succeeded him! But there may be reserved one exception to the absence of assurance of inherited mental attributes—one mental feature in which identity takes the place of dissimilarity, and even of actual contrast. And that feature—that inherited characteristic of a race whose progenitors happily possessed it—is personal courage.
Take, for example, the Hohenzollerns. One need not hark back to Carlyle’s original Conrad, the seeker of his fortune who tramped down from the ancestral cliff-castle on his way to take service under Barbarossa. Before and since the “Grosse Kurfurst” there has been no Hohenzollern who has not been a brave man. He himself was the hero of Fehrbellin. His son, the first king of the line, Carlyle’s “Expensive Herr,” was “valiant in action” during the third war of Louis XIV. The rugged Frederick William, father of Frederick the Great, had his own tough piece of war against the volcanic Charles XII. of Sweden and did a stout stroke of hard fighting at Malplaquet. Of Fritz himself the world has full note. Bad, sensual, debauched Hohenzollern as was his successor, Frederick the Fat, he had fought stoutly in his youth-time under his illustrious uncle. His son, Frederick William III., overthrown by Napoleon who called him a “corporal,” did good soldierly work in the “War of Liberation” and fought his way to Paris in 1814. His eldest son, Frederick William IV., the vague, benevolent dreamer whom Punch used to call “King Clicquot” and who died of softening of the brain, even he, too, as a lad had distinguished himself in the “War of Liberation” and in the fighting during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the real maker of the German Empire on the quid facit per alium facit per se axiom, he died a veteran of many wars. He was not seventeen when he won the Iron Cross by a service of conspicuous gallantry under heavy fire. He took his chances in the bullet and shell fire at Königgrätz, and again on the afternoon of Gravelotte. Not a Hohenzollern of them all but shared as became their race in the dangers of the great war of 1870-71; even Prince George, the music composer, the only non-soldier of the family, took the field. William’s noble son, whose premature death neither Germany nor England has yet ceased to deplore, took the lead of one army; his nephew Prince Frederick Charles, a great commander and a brilliant soldier, was the leader of another. One of his brothers, Prince Albert the elder, made the campaign as cavalry chief; whose son, Prince Albert junior, now a veteran Field-Marshal, commanded a brigade of guard-cavalry with a skill and daring not wholly devoid of recklessness. Another brother, Prince Charles, the father of the “Red Prince,” made the campaign with the royal headquarters; Prince Adalbert, a cousin of the sovereign and head of the Prussian Navy, had his horse shot under him on the battlefield of Gravelotte.
The trait of personal courage has markedly characterised the House of Hanover. As King of England George I. did no fighting, but before he reached that position he had distinguished himself in war not a little; against the Danes and Swedes in 1700 and in high command in the war of the Spanish succession from 1701 to 1709. His successor, while yet young, had displayed conspicuous valour in the battle of Oudenarde, and later in life at Dettingen; and he was the last British monarch who took part in actual warfare. Cumberland had no meritorious attribute save that of personal courage, but that virtue in him was undeniable. At Dettingen he was wounded in the forefront of the battle; at Fontenoy the “martial boy” was ever in the heart of the fiercest fire, fighting at “a spiritual white heat.” His grand-nephew the Duke of York was an unfortunate soldier, but his personal courage was unquestioned. In the present reign a cousin and a son of the sovereign have done good service in the field; and that venerable lady herself in situations of personal danger has consistently maintained the calm courage of her race.
The foreign author has written that “marvellous personal courage is not the striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs.” He makes an exception to this quasi-indictment in favour of the Emperor Nicholas, who, he admits, “was absolutely ignorant of fear, and could face a band of insurgents with the calm self-possession of a shepherd surveying his bleating sheep.” The monarch who at the moment of his accession illustrated the dominant force of his character by confronting amid the bullet fire the ferocious mutiny of half an army corps, and who crushed the bloodthirsty émeute with dauntless resolution and iron hand; the man who, facing the populace of St. Petersburg crazed with terror of the cholera and red with the blood of slaughtered physicians, quelled its panic-fury by commanding the people in the sternest tones of his sonorous voice to kneel in the dust and propitiate by prayers the wrath of the Almighty—such a man is scarcely, perhaps, adequately characterised by the expressions which have been quoted. But setting aside this instance of the fearlessness of Nicholas, facts appear to refute pretty conclusively reflections on the personal courage of the Romanoffs. No purpose can be served by cumbering the record by going back into the period of Russia’s semi-civilisation; illustrations from three generations may reasonably suffice. At Austerlitz Alexander I. was close up to the fighting line in the Pratzen section of that great battle, and so recklessly did he expose himself that the report spread rearward that he had fallen. He was riding with Moreau in the heart of the bloody turmoil before Dresden when a French cannon-ball mortally wounded the renegade French general, and he was splashed by the latter’s blood. Moreau had insisted on riding on the outside, else the ball which caused his death would certainly have struck Alexander. That monarch participated actively and forwardly in most of the battles of the campaign of 1814 which culminated in the allied occupation of Paris. Marmont’s bullets were still flying when he rode on to the hill of Belleville and looked down through the smoke of battle on the French capital. The captious foreign writer has admitted that Nicholas, the successor of Alexander, was “absolutely ignorant of fear,” and I have cited a convincing instance of his “marvellous personal courage.” Two of his sons—the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael—were under fire in the battle of Inkerman and shared for some time the perils of the siege of Sevastopol. Alexander II. was certainly a man of real, although quiet and undemonstrative, personal courage. But for his disregard of the precautions by which the police sought to surround him he probably would have been alive to-day. The Third Section was wholly unrepresented in Bulgaria and His Majesty’s protection on campaign consisted merely of a handful of Cossacks. No cordon of sentries surrounded his simple camp; his tent at Pavlo and the dilapidated Turkish house which for weeks was his residence at Gorni Studen were alike destitute of any guards. The imperial Court of Russia is said to be the most punctiliously ceremonious of all courts; in the field the Tzar absolutely dispensed with any sort of ceremony. He dined with his suite and staff at a frugal table in a spare hospital marquee; his guests, the foreign attachés and any passing officers or strangers who happened to be in camp. When he drove out his escort consisted of a couple of Cossacks. In the woods about Biela at the beginning of the war there still remained some forlorn bivouacs of Turkish families; he would alight and visit those, his sole companion the aide-de-camp on duty; and would fearlessly venture among the sullen Turks all of whom were armed with deadly weapons, try to persuade them to return to their homes, and, unmoved by their refusal, promise to send them food and medicine. Dispensing with all etiquette he would see without delay any one coming in with tidings from fighting points, were he officer, civilian, or war correspondent. During the September attack on Plevna he was continually in the field while daylight lasted, looking out on the slaughter from an eminence within range of the Turkish cannon-fire, and manifestly enduring keen anguish at the spectacle of the losses sustained by his brave, patient troops. Later, during the investment of Plevna, his point of observation was a redoubt on the Radischevo ridge still closer to the Turkish front of fire, and it was thence he witnessed the surrender of Osman’s army on the memorable 10th December 1877. If Alexander was fearless alike in camp and in the field on campaign, he was certainly not less so in St. Petersburg, when he returned thither after the fall of Plevna.
Alexander II. literally sacrificed his life to his self-regardless concern for the suffering. After the first bomb had burst on the Alexandra Canal Road, striking down civilians and Cossacks of the following escort but leaving the Emperor unhurt, his coachman begged to be allowed to dash forward and get clear of danger. But Alexander forbade him with the words, “No, no! I must alight and see to the wounded;” and as he was carrying out his heroic and benign intention, the second bomb exploded and wrought his death.
As did the men of the Hohenzollern house in 1870, so in 1877 the adult male Romanoffs went to the war with scarce an exception. The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of the Emperor and Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies in Europe, was neither a great general nor an honest man; but there could be no question as to his personal courage. That attribute he evinced with utter recklessness when arriving, as was his wont, too late for a deliberate and careful survey, he galloped round the Turkish positions on the morning on which began the September bombardment of Plevna, in proximity to Turkish cannon-fire so dangerous that his staff remonstrated, and that even the sedate American historian of the war speaks of him as having “exposed himself imprudently to the Turkish pickets.” His son, the Grand Duke Nicholas, jun., in 1877 scarcely of age, was nevertheless a keen practical soldier, imbued with the wisdom of getting to close quarters and staying there. He was among the first to cross the Danube at Sistova under the Turkish fire, and he fought with great gallantry under Mirsky in the Schipka Pass. The brothers, Prince Nicholas and Prince Eugene of Leuchtenberg, members of the imperial house, commanded each a cavalry brigade in Gourko’s dashing raid across the Balkans at the beginning of the campaign, and both were conspicuous for soldierly skill and personal gallantry in the desperate fighting in the Tundja Valley. The Grand Duke Vladimir, the second brother of Alexander III., headed the infantry advance in the direction of Rustchuk, and served with marked distinction in command of one of the corps in the army of the Lom. A younger brother, the Grand Duke Alexis, the nautical member of the imperial family, had charge of the torpedo and subaqueous mining operations on the Danube, and was held to have shown practical skill, assiduity, and vigour. Prince Serge of Leuchtenberg, younger brother of the Leuchtenbergs previously mentioned, was shot dead by a bullet through the head in the course of his duty as a staff officer at the front of a reconnaissance in force made against the Turkish force in Jovan-Tchiflik in October of the war. He was a soldier of great promise and had frequently distinguished himself. No unworthy record, it is submitted, earned in war by the members of a family of which, according to the foreign author, “personal courage is not the striking characteristic.”
That writer may be warranted in stating that the late Tzar had been frequently accused of cowardice—an indictment to which, it must be admitted, many undeniable facts lent a strong colouring of probability; and he further tells of “the Emperor’s aversion to ride on horseback, and of his dread of a horse even when the animal was harnessed to a vehicle.” There is something, however, of inconsistency in his observation that Alexander III. might well have been a contrast to his grandfather without deserving the epithet craven-hearted. The melancholy explanation of the strange apparent change between the Tzarewitch of 1877 and the Tzar of 1894 may lie in the statement that “Alexander’s nerves had been undoubtedly shaken by the terrible events in which he had been a spectator or actor.” In 1877, when in campaign in Bulgaria, Alexander did not know what “nerves” meant. He was then a man of strong, if slow, mental force, stolid, peremptory, reactionary; the possessor of dull but firm resolution. He had a strong though clumsy seat on horseback and was no infrequent rider. He had two ruling dislikes: one was war, the other was officers of German extraction. The latter he got rid of; the former he regarded as a necessary evil of the hour; he longed for its ending, but while it lasted he did his sturdy and loyal best to wage it to the advantage of the Russian arms. And in this he succeeded, stanchly fulfilling the particular duty which was laid upon him, that of protecting the Russian left flank from the Danube to the foothills of the Balkans. He had good troops, the subordinate commands were fairly well filled, and his headquarter staff was efficient—General Dochtouroff, its sous-chef, was certainly the ablest staff-officer in the Russian army. But Alexander was no puppet of his staff; he understood his business as the commander of the army of the Lom, performed his functions in a firm, quiet fashion, and withal was the trusty and successful warden of the eastern marches. His force never amounted to 50,000 men, and his enemy was in considerably greater strength. He had successes and he sustained reverses, but he was equal to either fortune; always resolute in his steadfast, dogged manner, and never whining for reinforcements when things went against him, but doing his best with the means to his hand. They used to speak of him in the principal headquarter as the only commander who never gave them any bother. So highly was he thought of there that when, after the unsuccessful attempt on Plevna in the September of the war, the Guard Corps was arriving from Russia and there was the temporary intention to use it with other troops in an immediate offensive movement across the Balkans, he was named to take the command of the enterprise. But this intention having been presently departed from, and the reinforcements being ordered instead to the Plevna section of the theatre of war, the Tzarewitch retained his command on the left flank, and thus in mid-December had the opportunity of inflicting a severe defeat on Suleiman Pasha, just as in September he had worsted Mehemet Ali in the battle of Carkova. It is sad to be told that a man once so resolute and masterful should later have been the victim of shattered nerves; it is sadder still to learn that he was a mark for accusations of cowardice. He never was a gracious, far less a lovable man; but, as I can testify from personal knowledge, he was a cool and brave soldier in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877.