self-opinionated, as "a free Frisian" may be excused for being; or, a gay Brabanter, social and vivacious-the French Dutchman; or, the shrewd, sturdy, kindly Hollander of North or South Holland. He takes a couple of chambers at the top of a rather steep staircase, and furnishes his sittingroom not without taste and elegance. He usually has a piano there; a shelf of books, among which one is glad to recognize a Shakspeare; and some good engravings, generally of scenes from Netherlands' history. In the morning, he attends classes at the university,-a venerable edifice of pale red, with a row of five arched and five square windows on its chief portion, which is shaped like a tower. The university stands on a canal bordered by trees, right opposite the house once occupied by the Elzevirs, and has a charming botanic garden at the back. A room full of portraits of the old professors, among which one soon distinguishes the hoary beard of Scaliger, gives to the building a pleasant human and genial antiquity, -in harmony with which is the employment of the Latin language for all the teaching of literature and law. Here, the student attends in different class-rooms, presenting nothing but very plain interior arrangements, the lectiones of his various professors. He dines in a mess of his own, with other selected comrades, or perhaps at the students' club, the "Minerva," about four o'clock, and devotes the evening to country rambles, to study, or to one of the two favourite cafés in the Breed-straat. It was vacation-time when I was in Leyden; but a happy accident gave me the acquaintance of a knot of Dutch gentlemen, who had finished their studies for the learned professions, and were winding-up their university life. With a hospitality which I shall never forget, they received me into the bosom of their set; made me an honorary member of their mess; and, during a jolly week of lovely summer weather, laid open to me the pleasantest recesses of Leyden student life. It was a revival of the old days when Maxwells, and M'Dowalls, and Gordons met, at many a festive compotation amidst the same scenes, the descendants of the Batavi, and cheered with song and laughter the last hours of the quietly-dying Rhine. In the forenoons we visited St. Peter's Church, which holds the monuments of Scaliger* and of Boerhave; or strolled round the promenade-cool with wood and water-which encircles the town like a rural nymph's zone; or inspected the noble museums, rich with the spoil of the ancient life of the Indies-the ancient worlds of Etruria, Greece, and Egypt, and the curious civilization of Japan. Weeks of study might be bestowed on any of these collections; and that of Japan is so uniquely endowed that the Leyden authorities dare not show it the other day to the Japanese ambassadors. It contains many objects-quietly brought awaythe exportation of which is forbidden by the Japanese Government. At four o'clock the most comfortable-looking of Dutchwomen (a comely race * It was removed there, on the church (a Walloon one) where he was buried falling into decay. His bones actually lie in an almost unapproachable situation, surrounded by the lowest female population of the town. on the whole, and commendably given to well-plaited caps, and stockings of a piquant whiteness) had our dinner ready in the cool ground-floor room in a retired street. The veal of Holland was washed down by the beer of Bavaria, and its melons were moistened gratefully with the white wine of the Rhine, and the red wine of Burgundy,-the last the favourite tipple of Erasmus. Some old impressions of mine regarding the probable liquors of Dutch students were disturbed-nay, exploded-by this week at Leyden. I had expected to find their national "Hollands" occupying a similar position to our Scottish whisky. I thought that it would have played a part in the Dutch civilization, like that great gulf-stream of toddy which flows through my native land-softening our natural severity, tempering our old fanaticism, and modifying our rugged climate. But no class above the lowest drinks Hollands in Holland; and what seems stranger, even their pleasant Curaçoa with us a refreshment rather distinguished than otherwise-ranks among them as a peasant's drink. Dinner over, we drove out to the country, to enjoy the coolness of the evening air-sometimes seaward, till the long range of the dunes came in view-the barrier of the coast-and we saw a string of distant wild ducks, like a kite's tail, in the air; sometimes to the villages through which Oliver Goldsmith trudged with his flute-villages surrounded by orchards and gardens, and where the presence of a foreigner brought peasants in wooden shoes, and women with foreheads ornamented with metallic plates, to the doors. On other occasions, we visited the environs of the Hague. But perhaps the pleasantest fun of all was to embark from a tavern garden on some canal, and take a quiet row past the country houses and windmills. Returning from such a trip during the stillness of sunset, we would call on one of the party for the national air-the "Netherlands Blood"-all hats going off while the performance lasted. And this would be followed by one of the old student-songs of the country -running in the following fashion : Io vivat! Io vivat! Nostrorum sanitas ! Io vivat! etc. Nos jungit amicitia, Et vinum præbet gaudia! Io vivat! etc. There was, of course, much interchange of international good feeling on these occasions, and no little curious speechifying in a somewhat piebald diction. May I hope that there lingers at Leyden some remembrance of a comfortably-built Scotus, who, at the second cognac-grogue, addressed the company, in the Latin language, on the propriety of a league between. the Teutonic nations, for general purposes of politics and conviviality? 556 The Story of the Mhow Court-Martial. THE passionate interpellations of Mr. William Coningham, and the more moderate and practical statements of Mr. Dudley Fortescue, towards the end of last session, respecting certain facts arising out of a courtmartial held at Mhow, in Central India, in the spring of 1862, upon Captain Smales, the late Paymaster of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, have familiarized the public with the name of that now notorious tribunal, without either acquainting them with the nature of the case submitted to it, or of the evidence by which it was induced to arrive at a verdict entirely approved of by his Excellency the Commander-in-Chief in India, severely criticized by H.R.H. the Commander-in-Chief at home, and since condemned as illegal and quashed by the advice of the law officers of the Crown. Were it not that a second court-martial, directed to inquire into a deplorable incident which is alleged to have resulted from certain proceedings connected with the trial of Captain Smales, is shortly about to assemble, it would be scarcely worth while to attempt to disentangle the strange skein of conflicting evidence recorded in the Parliamentary Blue Book containing the proceedings of the court-martial which cashiered Captain Smales. But, in order to understand the case which is now about to be inquired into, it is absolutely necessary to understand the merits of the case which was inquired into and adjudicated upon at Mhow in 1862; and I believe I shall be discharging a useful public duty if I endeavour to draw up a more complete and intelligible narrative of that complicated and painful affair than can be collected from the proceedings of the court as published by order of the House of Commons. mess. On the 25th of April, 1861, about 9.30 A.M., Lieutenant-Colonel T. R. Crawley, an officer who had recently exchanged from the 15th Hussars into the 6th Dragoons, arrived at Ahmednugger, in the Deccan, where his new regiment then lay. Colonel Crawley had had a hot and fatiguing night journey from Poona, and was, as was natural, ready for his breakfast, which he directed his servant to order from the regimental But when the food was prepared, a momentary difficulty arose. The colonel had no travelling canteen, and the quarters at which he had alighted were unprovided with plate and crockery. His servant, however, soon borrowed the necessary articles from the house of a married officer who lived hard by, and by 11 A.M., exactly an hour and a half after he had driven into the cantonment, the hungry and tired traveller and his party sat down to as comfortable a meal as men could desire. But the new commanding officer of the 6th Dragoons was not satisfied. He considered that a vexatious delay had occurred in providing him with refreshment, and moodily decided in his own mind that it must have been intentionally caused by the insubordinate malice of the president of the mess. This trumpery anecdote, which is extracted from Colonel Crawley's reply to Captain Smales' defence before the court at Mhow, was actually cited by the former as the first of a long series of deliberate insults which the colonel stated himself to have received at the hands of the officers of the 6th Dragoons, to almost all of whom he was an entire stranger when he joined, and who consequently could have had-at that time at least-no conceivable motive for the strange perversity of which they were thus accused by their angry commanding officer. Colonel Crawley adduced no evidence of any kind before the court-martial to prove that any delay in ministering to his appetite on the occasion of his first breakfast at Mhow had really occurred; still less did he attempt to show that he had any reasonable grounds for attributing such delay, if it did occur, to the president of the mess; indeed he deferred telling the story at all to anybody until a year after its alleged occurrence; and when he did tell it, he told it in his reply, when he well knew that the party inculpated by it could not defend himself against the absurd imputation. On the evening of the day on which this curious misunderstanding took place, a general meeting of the officers of the 6th Dragoons was convened at their new colonel's quarters, when Colonel Crawley, passing over in silence the slight which he supposed himself to have received, shook hands with them all, and explained to them that he meant to be very particular in all matters connected with the duties of the regiment; but that "off parade" it would be his wish to meet them and treat them " as officers and gentlemen." Not many days elapsed, however, before Colonel Crawley discovered, by his own account, that the very great majority of his new comrades were neither officers nor gentlemen; and that in exchanging from the 15th Hussars into the 6th Dragoons he had fallen into a hornets', or, rather, into a drones', nest. With the morale of the non-commissioned officers and men of the Inniskillings he admitted that he had no fault to find; they were generally on good terms with each other, their conduct was excellent, and a very small amount of crime was recorded against them; they were well set up, too, and admirable on foot-parade; but as to the riding of the regiment, its internal economy, the condition of its horses, and the behaviour and temper of its commissioned officers, Colonel Crawley protested to the court at Mhow that "it was quite another story." The commissioned officers of the 6th Dragoons Colonel Crawley represented as having been long "in a state of chronic insubordination;" he could find amongst them no single gentleman of standing position and education with whom he could take counsel in the overwhelming difficulties which soon beset him; the regimental adjutant was disgracefully incompetent, and an organized system of resistance to authority was in existence, which "almost terrified" the late colonel of the 15th Hussars. This fearful state of things Colonel Crawley attributed to the weakness and incapacity of his predecessor in command, Colonel Shute, an officer of very high character, who was subsequently selected by H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge to reorganize the 4th Dragoon Guards, after the Bentinck-Robertson difficulty. Colonel Crawley readily admitted that Colonel Shute's rule over the non-commissioned officers and men of the 6th Dragoons might have been "good and beneficent;" but he did not hesitate to express his conviction that Colonel Shute had been quite unequal to deal with "the turbulent spirits" by whom his regiment was officered, and that he (Col. C.) was the first commanding officer they had met with "who would not submit to their dictation, or bend his neck to their sway." Colonel Crawley's painful convictions as to the professional shortcomings of his insubordinates were speedily made known to them by numerous General Orders of unusual vigour which he felt it his duty to issue. He informed them that neither the officers nor men of the regiment knew how to ride; that the captains of troops looked much more sharply after their perquisites than after the efficiency of their horses and men;" and he reproached them in language to which they had hitherto been unaccustomed with their slovenly and unsoldierlike ways, and with the parsimony and indifference they displayed in the performance of their various duties. Demoralized as was the official condition of the Inniskillings when Colonel Crawley assumed the command of that corps, its social state, according to the same authority, was, if possible, worse. Its officers were incessantly engaged in discreditable squabbles with each other; their language was habitually violent and low; and a "moral and social" difficulty, which baffled all Colonel Crawley's calm and judicious efforts at arrangement, soon deprived him of the support of the married members of the mess, and laid the foundation of the ill-feeling between himself and his paymaster, which ended, as will be seen, in the professional ruin of Captain Smales. The nature of this "moral and social" difficulty has been entirely kept out of sight by the president and members of the court-martial at Mhow. It is, however, absolutely necessary, in order to understand the merits of the story which the Blue Book professes to relate, that it should be distinctly indicated; and I will do no more than indicate it, referring those who may be anxious for further particulars to the Proceedings of the Court of Divorce in May, 1858. When the 6th Dragoons proceeded to India in that year, several changes occurred amongst its officers, and about a year before Colonel Crawley took command of it, a captain and The Regimental State of the 6th Dragoons, on the 1st of March, 1861, showed only 13 sick and lame horses out of between 600 and 700. |