Small, Brown, And Wrinkled, With Puckered Eyes And Alert Manner,
Lord Roberts In Spite Of His Sixty-Seven Years Preserves The Figure
And Energy Of Youth.
The active open-air life of India keeps men
fit for the saddle when in England they would only
Sit their club
armchairs, and it is hard for any one who sees the wiry figure and
brisk step of Lord Roberts to realise that he has spent forty-one
years of soldiering in what used to be regarded as an unhealthy
climate. He had carried into late life the habit of martial
exercise, and a Russian traveller has left it on record that the
sight which surprised him most in India was to see the veteran
commander of the army ride forth with his spear and carry off the
peg with the skill of a practised trooper. In his early youth he
had shown in the Mutiny that he possessed the fighting energy of
the soldier to a remarkable degree, but it was only in the Afghan
War of 1880 that he had an opportunity of proving that he had rarer
and more valuable gifts, the power of swift resolution and
determined execution. At the crisis of the war he and his army
disappeared entirely from the public ken only to emerge
dramatically as victors at a point three hundred miles distant from
where they had vanished.
It is not only as a soldier, but as a man, that Lord Roberts
possesses some remarkable characteristics.
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