the tents on the following day a few hours down the valley. Peyto and I started ahead of the others to hunt sheep up a valley leading to the headwaters of the Brazeau river. On the way we found a considerable tract of forest on fire, the charred tree-trunks and half-burned foliage presenting a curious patchwork of green and black, while the peaty earth was still smouldering and emitting volumes of smoke. Two of our men, who had left the caravan to go hunting on the way up, had lit a fire to cook a fool-hen, and had carelessly omitted to perform what is every backwoodsman's first duty -namely, to thoroughly extinguish it. Had the weather been finer the previous week we should probably have found the whole valley ablaze and our retreat down the Saskatchewan cut off a cheerful prospect for a party with next to nothing to eat! Leaving the fire, we pushed our horses on to the summit of the pass, where we tethered them and descended on foot some distance down the stream of the Brazeau. It was a pleasant valley, with low rounded hills, prettily wooded, on either side, that reminded me of Wales. We saw plenty of tracks, but no sheep, and returned to camp empty-handed, and for the third time soaked to the skin with rain. The morning was gloriously fine, and we made a forced march down the North Fork, so as to reach our cache of provisions at Bear Creek as soon as possible. The camp was pitched in a grove of burned trees, some of them so rickety that a push of the hand sent them over. We were now on very short commons, having no meat and very little bread, and the poor dogs were absolutely starving; but it rained all next day, and we had to remain in camp. We ate our last sardine that evening, reserving three crusts of bread for breakfast on the morrow, when we pushed on as hard as we could down the left bank of the river. Arriving at the main stream of the Saskatchewan, we managed to ford it below the mouth of the North Fork, the cold weather having greatly reduced the volume of water. Bear Creek offered no difficulty. As we neared the cache, Collie tried to inflame our imaginations by drawing lurid pictures of a band of Indians gorged with our bacon and roaring drunk on our whisky; but we found everything just as we had left it. Meat was still very scanty, so I spent most of the next day wandering about the woods of Bear Creek in search of fool-hen. One wants to be perfectly alone to fully appreciate the mystery and the utter solitude of these great forests. The scarcity of bird and animal life serves to heighten the impression of loneliness, and you may walk for hours without hearing a sound except the roar of some distant torrent or avalanche, and the soughing of the wind in the tall pines and the creaking of their gigantic limbs. Only the play of light and shade between the swaying branches causes the imagination at times to people their recesses with moving shapes and figures, that are curiously lifelike and distinct. The forests of the Selkirks are less desolate, as one sees more birds and beasts, and the vegetation and timber are far more picturesque. The weather steadily got worse, so Collie carefully photographed the petrified trees, and we returned to camp. Sunday, 4th Sept.-Pushed on up Bear Creek towards the Bow Pass. Violent hailstorms, followed by heavy snow, in which we hopelessly lost the trail through the wood. Camped in slush on the edge of a muskeag. Bitterly cold night, with hard frost. The morning was bril'iantly fine, and the sun shone in a cloudless sky. Ice crystals sparkled on every leaf and twig, the pails and buckets were all frozen hard, and Byers asked for time to thaw his socks before he could put them on and give us our breakfast. At the summit of the Bow Pass (6700) we left the trail, and, ascending a hill to the right, had a glorious view of Murchison and the Waputehk Mountains. The most striking of these is the Pyramid (about 11,200), whose eastern face descends in an almost sheer cliff 6000 feet high to the valley. Our camp was pitched on the shore of the Bow Lake, a beautiful sheet of water embosomed in high mountains. It is full of big Next morning we tried to climb one of the spurs of Mount Murchison. We had a very bad hour with the logs in the wood, and when we got out into the open above the trees, the weather gave us little encouragement. A tedious shaleslope led up to steep rocks which afforded some interesting scrambles, Woolley manipulating a big jammed stone in a rock-chimney with much skill. We halted for lunch on an arête at a height of about 9000 feet. As the mountains were enveloped in mist and it was snowing steadily, we had no view to speak of, but two remarkable phenomena attracted our attention. The first was a tall column of rock that had become detached from the cliff and formed a slender pillar 400 feet high and tapering towards the summit and base. Much more extraordinary, however, was a group of rocks, formed, as it seemed, of petrified tree-trunks with numerous fossilised remains at their base. In his paper read before the Royal Geographical Society on February 13, Dr Collie presses the opinion that these were really gigantic petrified seaweed. What a tremendous upheaval must have occurred to throw them up here! Nor am I aware of any similar remains having been previously found at so great an elevation. Glacier, which descends from ex trout, and the whole district, which is well described in Mr Wilcox's book, can be recommended to people with a taste for camp-life. On Wednesday, 7th September, we had our last climb. Following the northern shore of the lake, we passed the mouth of a remarkable gorge, with a big jammed stone forming a natural bridge, and reached the foot of the Bow Having next to no meat, we had been living practically on bread and porridge; but next evening we caught some fine trout in the Bow river, which took a fly readily, in spite of all we had been told to the contrary. Friday the 9th was our last morning in camp, and it afforded us a little mild excitement in the shape of a bear which was sighted on a hill above the camp. Peyto and I went after him; the great Waputehk ice-field. smaller summits; while over The upper ice fall proved all was a cloudless sky of more troublesome, and four or five than Italian blue. razor-edged ridges, connected by rickety ice-bridges, and with deep crevasses on either side, gave us the most ticklish piece of mountaineering work which I had during the whole trip. It did not last long, however, and soon we were on the névé of the Waputehk, which, though Mr Wilcox errs greatly when he says that it is much the biggest ice-field in the Rockies, is still a very fine glacier. The surrounding peaks do not exceed 11,000 feet, and are not particularly striking in form. The upper slopes of our peak were covered with fresh snow, and we had a terrible grind before we reached the top. Its height was 10,100 feet, and our view was one of the most remarkable I have ever seen, in respect of the multitude of mountains visible. Beginning southwards in this wonderful panorama, the first peak to catch my eye was Mount Assiniboine, the finest and highest south of the railway; next on the right rose Mount Temple and the Laggan group; the Ottertail mountains, and a group of unknown peaks; the Selkirks, with Mount Sir Donald, seventy miles distant, standing up quite clear; the Gold Range; next, and much nearer, the Freshfield group; Mount Forbes, towering above all competitors; the doublepeaked Mount Lyell, partially obscuring Mounts Bryce and Columbia; Peak Wilson and the Murchison group; then the Slate Range, with innumerable but he got our wind, and was seen by the party in camp to gallop over a range of hills 8000 feet high into the valley of the Blaeberry Creek. Our troubles were not yet over, as the burned timber in the woods above Laggan were worse than anything we had hitherto seen, the fallen trunks piled one upon another presenting a most extraordinary tangle. There were places where we walked on tree-trunks for some hundreds of yards without ever touching the ground. I cannot help thinking that it would repay the C.P.R. authorities to cut a good trail as far as Bow lake, as the district offers many attractions to sportsmen and fishermen as well as to mountain climbers. How the horses got through it all I don't know, as Collie and I dismounted and walked on ahead of the caravan. The distant scream of a C.P.R. locomotive warned us that we were approaching the haunts of men, and at five o'clock we found ourselves once more at Laggan railway station. The outfit He fying amount of marks. also explained to me that in allotting marks for the answers to the questions in which he asked for views and opinions, he was not influenced by the agreement or non-agreement of the opinions stated with his own views, but judged them entirely by the clearness and ability with which they were stated and reasoned out. He entirely believed that the object of teaching military history, strategy, and tactics was not to cram the minds of our future officers with facts and theories, but to enable them from facts to deduce principles, which would help them when in time to come they would have to think for themselves in situations of difficulty. I soon learnt that I was in presence of no ordinary mind, but of one which used facts in order to arrive at principles; and in 1869, having undertaken to lecture at the United Service Institution on the Last Campaign of Hanover, I wrote to him for his opinion on certain points, and received in reply that masterly sketch of the spirit of the new Prussian tactics, which is given by Sir William Butler at pages 81-84 of the Life, and of which he says, "It will be allowed that the man who had thus early caught the principles and objects of modern battle tactics possessed a rare power of insight into questions upon which may depend the existence of nations." In May 1873, at the request of the Council of the United Service Institution, I lectured on "The Tactics of the Three Arms as modified to meet the requirements of the present day." In the discussion which followed, many of our ablest soldiers and deepest military thinkers took part: Sir Edward Hamley, Sir Patrick M'Dougall, Sir Lintorn Simmons, and some of the finest of the older school, Sir William Codrington, Sir Percy Herbert, and Lord de Ros. Reading the speeches again now, I have no hesitation in saying that by far the ablest and most far-seeing was that by Colonel Colley, which opened the discussion. It is a masterpiece of close and analytical argument. Commencing by showing that only a small part of a force can attempt flank-attacks, and that the great bulk of it must be prepared to attack to its front, or remain inoperative, he proved how superior the new formations must be to the old for such frontal attack. After distinguishing between the formations required for bringing troops into position for the final rush, and those needed for carrying out that rush, he spoke of attack with the bayonet, said that every nation in Europe believed the bayonet to be its special weapon, and continued, in words the truth of which must in the last days and hours of his life have been terribly present in his mind : "This is merely the expression of the fact that whenever two forces had arrived within a certain distance sufficient morale, sufficient go left in of one another, that one which had it really to wish and try to close, was ipso facto victorious; and that every SIR GEORGE POMEROY-COLLEY. SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS. SIR WILLIAM BUTLER's remarkable book1 has brought to my mind many rcollections, both sad and stirring. It seems to me a masterly presentment of a life of no ordinary kind. It seems to me to state with calmness and to prove with clearness the beauty of a noble character, and to set forth impartially and dispassionately the historical events in which Sir George Colley was a chief actor-events around which political and party strife has stormed and raged. I shall not attempt to review the book, for I could not pretend to be an impartial critic. It is the work of a personal friend and old comrade, about one who in his life was also my comrade and friend, and all that I propose is to add a brief humble tribute, drawn from my personal recollections, to the memory of one whom to know was to love and honour. It was my lot to be associated with Sir George Colley or to follow after him on many occasions. We were colleagues as instructors in military history at home; we were comrades in the Ashanti war of 1873-74; we served together on Sir Garnet Wolseley's staff in Natal in 1875; we again served together in Zululand and the Transvaal in 1879. I succeeded him in the duties of chief of the staff in South Africa in the latter year; and again, only a few months later, in 1880, I succeeded him as private secretary to the Viceroy of India, so that I had ample opportunities of knowing him and his work under many and varied conditions. We first became acquainted in 1868, when I was appointed Professor of Military History at Woolwich, and he was examiner in that subject for the Council of Military Education.2 I was at once struck with the clearness and fairness of the questions set by him in his examination papers. Nearly all of them were directed to exercise the thinking powers of the students, but not all: some were simply directed to bring out their knowledge and memory of historical facts. And he explained to me that while the former class of question aimed at stimulating to the fullest the abilities of the ablest and most original thinkers, the latter class of question was given to enable the students who had not original ability, but who had worked conscientiously and well according to their lights, to reap the reward of their efforts, and obtain the quali 1 The Life of Sir George Pomeroy-Colley, K.C.S.I., C.B., C.M.G., by Lieut.General Sir William F. Butler, K. C. B. London: John Murray, 1899. 2 See page 80 of the Life. |