who was old enough to have much experience. Age might be venerable, but
it was necessarily weak; and the last place in which it should show
itself was the field.

It was not strange that the English should have come to the conclusion
that the fogies were unfit to lead armies. They were in want of an
excuse for their apparent failure in the war, and they took the part
that was suggested to them,--therein behaving no worse than ourselves,
who have accounted for our many reverses in many foolish and
contradictory ways. But it was strange that their view was accepted by
others, whose minds were undisturbed, because unmistified,--and
accepted, too, in face of the self-evident fact that almost every man
who figured in the war was old. Maréchal Pelissier,[A] to whom the chief
honor of the contest has been conceded, was but six years the junior of
Lord Raglan; and if the Englishman's sixty-six years are to count
against age in war, why should not the Frenchman's sixty years count for
it? Prince Gortschakoff, who defended Sebastopol so heroically, was but
four years younger than Lord Raglan; and Prince Paskevitch was more than
six years his senior. Muravieff, Menschikoff, Luders, and other Russian
commanders opposed to the Allies, were all old men, all past sixty years
when the war began. Prince Menschikoff was sixty-four when he went on
his famous mission to Constantinople, and he did not grow younger in the
eighteen months that followed, and at the end of which he fought and
lost the Battle of the Alma. The Russian war was an old man's war, and
the stubbornness with which it was waged had in it much of that ugliness
which belongs to age.

"The young man's wrath is like light straw on fire.
But like red-hot steel is the old man's ire."