Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol 7.djvu/105

 A RKTROSPECTIVE ENQUIRY. 61 the business of war. Whilst the country fought CHA.P under his guidance, and indeed during several L_ years afterwards, its utmost land-service efforts were in general so weak, so ill fitted for putting hard stress on the enemy that, apparently, until otherwise accounted for, they implied in the ruler conceiving them a want of strong sense or fixed purpose ; but what thus at first sight hardly differed from a strangely persistent fri- volity was rather in truth the stumbling — the inevitable, continuous stumbling — of a Minister vainly trying to conduct modern war without the light and guidance afforded by modern appli- ances — without, in a word, that resource of a sound War Department from which, as we saw, his country had been debarred by the always clashing exigencies of its ' personal ' and its proper ' State ' kings. Whilst thus keeping our people in want of any fit warlike machinery, their ' personal king,' we shall see, could also prevent them from find- ing, or even trying to find, a competent general ; and it was under the twofold weight of condi- tions thus visibly apt for almost ensuring mis- carriage that England — eager, careless, unarmed — staggered into the great war with France. The beginning was characteristic, and so ex- travagantly feeble that the gravest account of what happened has an air of caricature. In conformity with the — quite legal, quite grotesque — doctrine that our army, like the ' perquisite ' of a cook, was a thing coarsely