Complete Fictional Works of John Buchan (Illustrated)

by John Buchan

  CHAPTER 13. CONCLUSION

  IT has always been the fashion for a British proconsul on his return home to give a public account of his stewardship, and in this case the occasion selected was the presentation of the freedom of the City of London. On February 23, 1911, the ceremony took place in the presence of many friends and colleagues, such as Lord Crewe, Lord Morley, Lord Midleton, Lord Cromer, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Strathcona, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Austen Chamberlain. Minto in his speech carefully avoided matters of contention, but in his sketch of his years of office he reiterated the principles which he had followed — the need in India of “separating the sheep from the goats,” of following a dual policy of administrative reform and the enforcement of disciplinary law. He thought it right to emphasize the necessity for an elastic administration on the part of Britain in the new era which was beginning.

  “It is an era in which I firmly believe the Government of India — in India — will continue to grow in strength, in response to Indian sympathy and support. But it is an era also in which its relations with the central Government of the Empire will require to be directed with a very light hand. The Government of India is, of course, entirely subservient to the Secretary of State, and must be so in respect to the recognition of political principles and the inauguration of broad lines of policy. But the daily administration of the Government of the country can only be carried on efficiently and safely by those to whom long and anxious experience has given some insight into the complex and mysterious surroundings of the people committed to their charge. India cannot be safely governed from home. Any attempt so to govern it in these days of rapid communication, when collusion between political parties in India and political parties in England is not difficult, and when consequently the Government of India may be harassed by political influences to which it should never be exposed, can only end in disaster. No one admires more than I do the generous impulses of the people of England in respect to the just government of their fellow-subjects, of whatever race, in every part of the Empire; but Western modes of treatment are not necessarily applicable to Eastern grievances. No Viceroy, however eloquent he may be with his pen, can portray to the Secretary of State thousands of miles away the picture which lies before him. He can, perhaps, describe its rugged outlines, but the ever-changing lights and shades, which must so often influence his instant action, he cannot reproduce. He and his Council can alone be safely entrusted with the daily conduct of affairs in the vast territories they are appointed to administer.”

  At the luncheon which followed Lord Morley paid a final tribute to his colleague. “Lord Minto could reflect with confidence that he had left behind him in India high esteem, large general regard, and warm good-will. The great feudatories and native princes had found in him a genial, sincere, and unaffected good-will. The Mohammedans respected and liked him. The Hindus respected and liked him. The political leaders, though neither Lord Minto nor the Secretary of State agreed in all they desired, had perfect confidence in his constancy and good faith. The Civil Service, not always averse from criticism, admired his courage, patience, and unruffled equanimity. He really got on consummately well with everybody with whom he had commerce, from the Amir in the fastnesses of Afghanistan down to the imperious autocrat who for the moment was Secretary of State in the fastnesses of Whitehall. Having come back from the banks of the Ganges, he found on the banks of the Thames a cordial appreciation and generous recognition of his fulfilment of a great national duty. His predecessor, Lord Curzon, a man of powerful mind and eloquent tongue, had said that a man who could bring together the hearts of sundered peoples was a greater benefactor than the conqueror of kingdoms. Lord Minto was entitled to that praise.” The same evening he wrote to his friend: “I cannot go to rest to-night without a word of congratulation. It ends a chapter in the day’s fine ceremony that is infinitely to your honour and credit, and I have a right to use language of this sort, because I do really know all the difficulties with which you have had to contend, and which you have so manfully overcome. I shall always be proud of your kind words about me. We have had a great campaign together, and I believe more than ever to-day, when you have been in my visual eye, that we have been good comrades and shall remain good friends. May you and Lady Minto have long and unclouded days.”

  The days were not destined to be long. Minto was now a man of sixty-five, and with his marvellous constitution and his vigorous habits might well have looked forward to a hale old age. But his labours in India had worn down even his iron strength, and taken a score of years from his life. After the Mansion House ceremony he went for three weeks to Corsica, and visited the house in Bastia where the first Lord Minto had lived in 1794. Lady Minto describes in her letters the high rooms and windows overlooking the sea, and the garden full of orange blossom. “The whole place to our imagination seemed peopled with Sir Gilbert, Lady Elliot, Nelson, Hood, and Jervis. It was wonderful to feel that after all these years Lord Minto’s descendant should have discovered this remote house and should be gazing at the same objects that had been so familiar to his great-grandfather. . . . We called on the descendant of Pozzo di Borgo, Sir Gilbert’s old friend, and saw the full-length picture of his ancestor, a smaller replica of which hangs at Minto. The present Pozzo told us that the name of Elliot was still remembered in Corsica.” After that came spring in the Borders, a happy and peaceful season, in which the only noteworthy event was the presentation of the freedom of the City of Edinburgh in April.

  The season in London was a succession of dinners, private and official. At the dinner of the Central Asian Society Minto declared his belief that Indian industries were entitled to a reasonable protection, a speech which alarmed both Lord Morley and Mr. Austen Chamberlain. “Morley afraid for free trade,” the journal notes, “Austen apprehensive for Manchester — yet both admitting that I had spoken the truth.” At the Asquiths’ he met Louis Botha, whom he described as “most manly and attractive.” The Mounted Infantry dinner gave him the keenest pleasure, for his old hobby was still close to his heart. “The toast of my health was enthusiastically welcomed, and things were said which I treasure more than I can say, and shall never forget. It took me back to the old days, and I longed to have them over again.” He presided at the Newspaper Fund dinner, when Lord Kitchener, who was not prone to the dithyrambic, gave eloquent expression to his affection: —

  “Lord Minto needs no words of praise from me to strengthen his position in the hearts of his countrymen, for I venture to say that there are few living men whose services to the Empire have been greater and more valuable than those of the subject of my toast. Two great countries can bear testimony to his administrative genius, his modesty, his industry, and, above all, to his knowledge of human nature and his warm sympathy with all those various races it has fallen to his lot to rule. It is to these qualities that the great success of his government in such different surroundings as Canada and India has been mainly due. But if I was asked what quality above all others I would ascribe to Lord Minto, it is that of pluck; not mere physical pluck, although of that he has shown innumerable proofs, but the greater quality of moral pluck. There comes always to a public man a time when the right course is not the most popular course; in such cases I have never known or heard of Lord Minto weighing popularity in the scale against what he has considered right and just: and I venture to say that this quality is one without which no man can achieve true greatness as an administrator. . . .

  “I can speak with perhaps more intimate knowledge of his career as a soldier, as we more than once served in the same campaign. I feel sure that, had he stuck to military life, he would have attained the highest honours my profession could give him, though perhaps not such a distinguished position as he now holds. Lord Minto in his military career was thorough and no medal hunter or seeker after a soldier’s bubble reputation; and the medals he wears were always won in the hardest and most arduous services in each campaign. . . .

  “During his tenure of office as Governor-Gen
eral of Canada and Viceroy of India the world closely followed his policy, and as one who was nearly associated with him in India, and perhaps to a certain extent behind the veil, I can only say that my admiration of his able statesmanship in somewhat difficult times was unbounded. Few Viceroys have been able to impress so favourably the Princes of India, and in his sympathetic treatment of the natives, as well as of the officers and men of the Indian Army, he obtained and retained the affectionate regard and esteem of the whole country.”

  In June Minto received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at Cambridge, his first visit to those precincts since he had taken his bachelor’s degree in racing kit forty-five years before. At the Coronation in that month he was one of the four peers who held the panoply over the King. In July he saw Eton win the Ladies’ Plate at Henley in record time, with his younger son Esmond as cox, and a week later was in command of the veterans in the review at Holyrood during the Royal visit. It was the year of the acrimonious debates on the Parliament Bill, and in August the measure reached the House of Lords, when Lord Crewe announced that, should it be defeated, the King had given the Prime Minister his promise to create as many new peers as might be necessary to pass it into law. Minto, little as he liked the bill, liked the alternative still less, and having no taste for melodramatic intransigence, voted with the Government — a proceeding which brought him a deluge of letters, half of which described him as a traitor and half as a patriot.

  The autumn and winter were spent at Minto, broken by a visit to Eton in December to unveil a portrait of Lord Roberts. He was settling down into the routine of a country gentleman — shooting, an occasional day with hounds, dinners at the Jed Forest Club, the management of his estates — and was induced to accept the convenership of the county of Roxburgh. But the peace of Minto was impaired by an enormous correspondence with friends in India, for an ex-Viceroy cannot divest himself of matters which for five years have monopolized his life. With the vagaries of home politics he was not greatly troubled, but Indian policy deeply concerned him. He was alarmed at the proposal to reverse the partition of Bengal, he distrusted the wisdom of moving the capital to Delhi, and, above all, he felt that the association of these steps with the coming visit of the King-Emperor to India was to put upon the Sovereign the direct responsibility for a dubious scheme. In February 1912 he went to London for the Indian debate in the House of Lords, where he supported Lord Curzon in his criticism of the Delhi move. His speech was in a high degree tactful and wise, and earned general commendation as that of a man who spoke only from a sense of duty and with none of the vanity which has sometimes made ex-Viceroys critical of the doings of their successors.

  Minto had been elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, defeating Lord Crewe, and in January 1912 he was the guest of honour at a University dinner. The election gave him peculiar pleasure, for if the Borders were the cradle, Edinburgh had been the nursery of his forbears. In March he was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule II. “I don’t think,” his brother Arthur wrote, “I have ever seen so much unanimity at an election.” Meantime, in February, “Cat” Richardson had died. Minto saw him just before the end, and his journal records his sense of loss.

  “My oldest friend gone. I cannot say what a wrench it is — the link with so many recollections, and with a life which seems now to have belonged to another world. We had been friends ever since we went to Cambridge. A change seems to have come over my world, and it is not the same now he has gone out of it. He was a splendid fellow, by far the best and most polished rider I ever saw, and not only very excellent at all games, but possessed of brilliant natural ability. . . . In any line of life he might have taken up he would have held a foremost place among his fellow-men.”

  In the summer he was much in London, and a good deal at a house he had taken on the river near Windsor. The autumn at Minto was restful — parties of Indian and military friends, much shooting and hunting, and the modest cares of the estate. No man who has been blessed with a sound body will admit readily that its forces can fail, and as late as March 1913 we find hunting notes in the diary like this: “I got a most abominable toss. I hope I am not losing my power of gripping. Certainly it was a detestable place, and I was at the top of the hunt. . . .” But presently it became clear that his ill-health was no trivial thing, that his strenuous Indian years were inexorably demanding their price. The journal grows scrappier, and it is only the passing of a friend that moves him to an entry. Such was Lord Wolseley’s death in March—”By far our greatest soldier; and perhaps the greatest service which he has rendered to this country has been the example of his own personality.” The last sentence would be a not inappropriate epitaph for the writer himself.

  We need not linger over the year during which his body was dying of its wounds, for to those who knew his eager vitality it is hard to think of Minto on a sick-bed.* From April 1913 he was continuously unwell. He recovered to some extent, and in the autumn was able to welcome a few friends at Minto. But with the opening of 1914 he became gravely ill, and on the first day of March the end came. Since a death in battle was denied him, it was the passing that he would have chosen, for he drew his last breath in his ancient home with his family around him. When he received his last Communion he said, “I have tried to be loyal to my God and my King,” and his dying words were faltered messages of love to the wife and children who had so warmed and lit his house of life. * Footnote: Minto in his illness often referred to some lines by Professor Blaokie, which he declared contained his confession of faith: —

  “Creeds and Confessions! High Church or the Low I cannot say; but you would vastly please us, If with some pointed Scripture you could show To which of these belonged the Saviour Jesus? I think to all or none: not curious creeds Or ordered forms of churchly rule He taught, But soul of love that blossomed into deeds With human good and human blessing fraught. On me nor Priest, nor Presbyter, nor Pope, Bishop nor Dean may stamp a party name; But Jesus, with His largely human scope, The service of my human life may claim. Let prideful priests do battle about creeds, The Church is mine that does most Christlike deeds.

  He was buried in the little churchyard of Minto, which looks towards the blue hills of Teviotdale. The press proclaimed the achievements of his public life, but it is by the simple, homely, often broken messages of condolence received by his wife that the magnitude of the affection he inspired may be judged. Lord Kitchener, always chary of superlatives, called him simply “the best, most gallant, and able administrator that England ever produced,” and a brother-officer wrote: “I do not believe that any man ever passed away, or ever will do so, leaving more behind him who will from the very bottom of their hearts say ‘Dear Minto.’” That is not how men commonly write of the esteemed and the successful; it is more like the lament of youth for youth.

  Minto died on the very eve of the Great War. He was by training and taste a soldier, and that profession was always dearer to his heart than any other, but fate had sent him nothing but minor campaigns. It is sometimes given to a son to realize the ambition of the father, and the little boy whom we have seen in a great sun-helmet touching the proffered sword-hilt of the old Raja of Nabha and promising when he grew up to protect that state, was destined to a part in the sternest test of manhood which the world has known. Once, at Agra, the Begum of Bhopal took Esmond’s hands in hers and told him that he would be a great lord sahib one day and do much for the British Empire. The prophecy came true, for he gave his all for his country, and in a brief time fulfilled the ends of life. At Eton he had coxed the Eight for three years, and had lived in the sunshine of that affection which young men give to one who combines infinite humour and high spirits with modesty and kindliness. On the outbreak of war he joined the Lothians and Border Horse, and presently, a boy scarcely out of his teens, he was in France as A.D.C. to General Geoffrey Fielding, then commanding the Guards Division. He could not endure to remain a staff officer, so in June 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, he joined the Scots
Guards, and in October was gazetted to the second battalion.

  There never was a happier soldier or one more clearly born to the trade of arms. His gallantry was remarkable even among gallant men, he was supremely competent in his work, and in the darkest days his debonair and gentle spirit made a light around him. Alike over his men and his brother-officers he cast a spell, which was far more than a mere infection of cheerfulness, for, as one wrote, he made other people ashamed of all that was ignoble. He was given some of the roughest material for his platoon, because the most troublesome old soldier became docile under his influence. His men made an idol of him, and would have followed him blindly to any hazard. When one of them went on leave his comrades used to commission him to bring back some little present for Esmond. Once, when volunteers were called for a raid, only a few came forward, till it became known that Esmond was to be in command, when the whole platoon volunteered and most of the company. “When the war is over and these Scotsmen return to their homes,” an officer wrote, “they will tell their people of the wonderful boy who came to them in France, and who showed them what could be achieved by goodness.”

  Courage and devotion such as his could scarcely escape the nemesis which in those years overtook the flower of youth. The end came during the Third Battle of Ypres, when he was selected to command his company in the trenches. Shortly after midnight on August 6, 1917, there was an engagement between pickets, and while reconnoitring the situation Esmond was shot through the chest by a chance bullet. A little later he died in the clearing-station, peacefully and without pain. In a short space he had lived greatly, and had left an influence which will fructify in the lives of those who knew him long after the memory of the war is dim. The noble monument which commemorates him at Minto stands near the tall cross which marks his father’s grave. It is the memorial of two soldiers fallen in arms that meets the dawn coming over Cheviot from the eastern seas.