Note 3 — Chapter I

In after years, at Aldershot, I knew the late General Lord C——, son of the above mentioned Lady C——, very well. Once, at a concert, I played a piece of music on the zither, for which I received an encore, but a string of the instrument having broken, had to be replaced before I could take it. Lord C—— was kind enough to make a short speech for me and explain to the large audience what had happened, as I did not feel equal to doing so myself. He was a most kind and affable man and a good general, though the War Office, with their usual manque de tact, blamed him in the Zulu War for the faults of others as well, whose errors they wished to conceal. But, as General von Goeben, the celebrated Prussian general of division in the Franco-German War of 1870, said to me at Seville, where I lived in the same casa de huespedes with him for some weeks, à propos of an affair of another kind: “What can you expect from a Secretary of State for War, who is a civilian. You might just as well have an old washerwoman (Wäscherin) at the head of your War Office. She might perhaps even be more useful.”