Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 4).djvu/560



T may be fairly said that Dr. Russell is the accredited father of a professional family which, though necessarily limited in the number of its sons, possesses the world as its debtors. The dodging of bullets and shells, the cornering of ourselves in some haven of refuge from the ferocious charging of maddened horses and men—in short, the participation in all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious war," is not run after by the average man. Dr. Russell was the first of our known war correspondents. The remembrance of this—as I ascended in the lift which delivered me at the door of his flat in Victoria Street—was suggestive of the probable unfolding of a life of the deepest interest. Nor was I disappointed. I spent some hours with Dr. Russell, and when it came to "Good-bye," he asked "Have you got what you want?"

I was in earnest when I asked him if he could cut out ten or twenty years of his life, for my load of delightful information was so great that I feared the space at my disposal could not hold it all. His reply was: "Ah! willingly, willingly—if I could. The burden of my years is heavier than the load of incidents you are carrying away with you."

Dr. Russell is of medium height, strongly built, wearing a white moustache, and possessing a head of wavy, silver hair. He is now lame from injuries received by his horse falling on him in the Transvaal. He took me from room to room, and as he narrated the little incidents associated with his treasures, it was all done quietly, impressively free from any boastfulness. For he wished me to understand that though his life had often been in danger, in scenes where men won great names for heroic deeds and gave up their lives for their country, he was only a camp follower and nothing more in the nine campaigns which he has seen—he chronicled history, he did not make it. I hope this little article will prove a courteous contradiction to this.

You pass by many articles of rarity in the corridor on your way to the dining-room—cabinets of battlefield relics, jade bowls, Indian and Egyptian ware, a great Hindu deity, once the property of Bainee Mahdo, the Oude Tlookdar, an Indian chief; recreation and sport are represented by gun-cases and a huge bundle of fishing rods in the corner. Here on a table are half-a-dozen cigar cases, one of which, with silver clasps, is from the Prince of Wales, as a souvenir of the visit to India in 1875-6, in which Dr. Russell acted as Honorary Private Secretary to H.R.H.; some exquisite cups and bowls of bedree work from Lucknow; and over one of the doors is