Note 557 — Chapter XX

“To the regular trained officers, such an army as he commanded was as unstable and capricious as a giddy mob. If he did not study the peculiarities of the race, and of each individual clan, some untoward accident was ever occurring to vex his disciplinarian spirit, and make him suspect that the cause was ruined; and if he did not at once recognise and yield to the peculiarities as they occurred, a trifle might readily sacrifice the army or the cause,—for the Highland soldier’s immediate cause was his leader or his clan. The succession to the crown of Britain, or the preservation of the constitution were distant and secondary objects, to be sacrificed without hesitation to any question of precedence or etiquette.”—Burton’s Scotland from the Revolution, vol. i. pp. 101–103.—“If anything good was brought him (Dundee) to eat, he sent it to a faint or sick soldier. If a soldier was weary, he offered to carry his arms. He kept those who were with him from sinking under their fatigues, not so much by exhortation, as by preventing them from attending to their sufferings. For this reason he walked on foot with the men; now by the side of one clan, and anon by that of another. He amused them with jokes. He flattered them with his knowledge of their genealogies. He animated them by a recital of the deeds of their ancestors, and of the verses of their bards. It was one of his maxims, that no general should fight with an irregular army, unless he was acquainted with every man he commanded. Yet, with these habits of familiarity, the severity of his discipline was dreadful. The only punishment he inflicted was death. ‘All other punishments,’ he said, ‘disgraced a gentleman, and all who were with him were of that rank; but that death was a relief from the consciousness of crime.’ It is reported of him, that, having seen a youth fly in his first action, he pretended he had sent him to the rear on a message. The youth fled a second time. He brought him to the front of the army, and saying, ‘That a gentleman’s son ought not to fall by the hands of a common executioner,’ shot him with his own pistol.”—Dalrymple’s Memoirs, part ii. p. 47.