Note 115 — Chapter IV

Only those who remember any of the generation which lived through the long and anxious years of the terrible war with France can form an adequate idea of the veneration—adoration even—felt by the nation for the great Duke—the Duke as he was generally called. My father, at no time addicted to the “scarlet fever,” was nevertheless one of the heartiest devotees; and one day during our three years' sojourn at Brighton he took some of us children to the railway station to see the veteran, then about to return to town after a visit to the seaside. There he sat alone under the sheltering hood of his open carriage which, with its back turned towards the locomotive, was mounted on an ordinary truck at the rear end of the train. He wore a dark, military cloak and close-fitting cloth cap, and with his thin face, hooked nose, and piercing eyes looked like an ancient eagle. His unwandering gaze was bent sea-wards as though he descried a foreign fleet making with hostile intentions for our shores. He was so used to being stared at that but for his at once giving the military salute in acknowledgment of our father's respectful bow and bared head, we might have thought him unconscious of the presence of strangers. He seemed so to be even when our father took us close to the train, and bade us look well at the greatest of living Englishmen because he was so old that we might not see him again. It would, however, have been difficult to forget a face so striking. After all, that was not our only sight of him. We often afterwards saw him riding in Hyde Park, where the crowd saluted him as if he were Royalty itself; and, later still, we looked on at his never-to-be-forgotten funeral. Mention of the “Iron Duke” and of the Brighton railway brings back to memory another old soldier who figured in the same wars and, as Earl of March, achieved distinction. This was the then Duke of Richmond, on whom we children looked with awesome curiosity, because rumour, for once a truth-teller, declared that ever since 1815 he had carried somewhere within his corporeal frame a bullet which defied all attempts at extraction, and, indeed, did not prevent his attaining to a hale old age. While my father was on the directorate of the London and Brighton railway, and lived at that seaside resort, he often travelled to town with some distinguished man whom he invited to share his coupé. (Why, I wonder, is this pleasant sort of compartment rarely or never seen nowadays?) More than once the Duke of Richmond was his companion. The time was the mid 'forties, when railway locomotives were far less powerfully built than they are now, and when, London Bridge Terminus being up a rather long incline, it was customary, on the departure of a train from the ticket-taking platform, to employ a second engine to aid the one in front by pushing from behind. The travellers were seated in an end coupé, and opposite their seats were, of course, only the usual glass windows. When, therefore, the Duke for the first time saw the auxiliary engine coming close up against the carriage, he did not know what it meant, turned pale, and showed considerable uneasiness. My father soon assured him that all was right, and then asked why he, a veteran campaigner, was unnerved by a mere railway engine. Whereupon the old soldier laughingly replied that he would far sooner face the foe on the battlefield than sit quietly right in face of the “iron horse.”