Excerpt from The Subaltern
As his Life of Wellington, already published in this series, shows, Gleig had the advantage of drawing on his own experience in his military tales and records, or in those of them that count to-day. In The Subaltern this was more marked than in the later books, for it is his autobiography slightly recoloured, - the story of his own Spanish and other adventures in the Wellington campaigns, before he was turned from a soldier into an army-chaplain. It is accordingly the most real of all his tales, and although it is written for the most part in the demure sententious style of the market novelists of that day, the touch of reality and the effect of the things seen and remembered save it and give it life. We find the saving touch in the last passages of the deadly assault on St. Sebastian and the street-scenes after the capture, where the orgy and debauch of the English soldiery were of a kind to satisfy the new Huns themselves. When Gleig in his cartoon calls up the tall houses in the Old Town of Edinburgh, he makes you believe in his personal share in the episodes, just as his portrait of "Duro" in the following chapter makes you feel that his dedication to the Great Duke and its reference to "a few bloody fields" had some grit in it. The fact is when Gleig is using the palaver of the ordinary annalist and telling you that some scene or another was such as to defy all the powers of language to describe it, he is merely a literary puppet. When he tells how his thirst led him to the blue slimy stream in the valley of the Bidassoa, and he saw a man"s arm stick out, black and putrid, from the water, he is telling us what he had actually gone through, and the page has the virtue that every human document, genuinely set down, has in its evidence. There indeed Gleig justifies his existence as a man with a pen who had something to tell.
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