friend Charles Gordon off to Khartoum (January 1884), and as soon as the extent of the Mahdi's rising became evident, urged upon a reluctant government the necessity for a relief expedition. He did not prevail in time, and in the Nile campaign he led what was from the first a forlorn hope. It has been said that Wolseley in his choice of the route for the advance to Khartoum was prejudiced by his experiences on the Red River, and he certainly used that experience to the fullest extent, for he had 800 special boats built and employed some 400 Canadian voyageurs in their navigation. Whether the rival school which advocated the Suakin-Berber route across the desert was right can never now be determined, but it is certain that (Lord) Kitchener [q.v.], who served under Wolseley in the Nile campaign, chose in different circumstances to follow the Nile, and that Gordon himself strongly advocated the same route. As it was, Wolseley's steamers, after the Mahdi's followers had been defeated in a number of engagements, reached Khartoum (28 January 1885) just too late, but it is at least probable that a somewhat earlier arrival would merely have hastened Gordon's death. With this expedition, for which he was created viscount, and knight of Saint Patrick, Wolseley's long series of campaigns ended, and he returned to complete his work as an army reformer.
In October 1890 he was made commander-in-chief in Ireland, an appointment which gave him opportunity for experiment in modernizing the system of military training, and at the same time left him more leisure to indulge his tastes. Though he disliked society functions, he was a delightful host and greatly enjoyed the conversation of men and women of wit, with whom he was well able to hold his own. In furnishing Kilmainham Hospital he was able to give scope to his ardour as a collector of bric-à-brac, and there too he found time both for reading and writing. He again became a fairly constant contributor to the magazines, and in 1894 wrote for the Pall Mall Magazine a series of articles on The Decline and Fall of Napoleon, which were republished in book form (1895). He also began to write a work for which he had long been collecting material—the Life of Marlborough. Of this he only completed two volumes (published 1894), for in 1895, on the resignation of the Duke of Cambridge, he was appointed commander-in-chief. His struggles for reform now entered upon a new phase. He had won his battle within the army, and he now became engaged in an almost continuous effort to get ministers to give him the means to make the army efficient in war. He found his powers more cramped than he had expected. One of the Duke of Cambridge's chief efforts had been to preserve the prerogative of the Crown, particularly as regards army patronage, and in this he had received the full support of Queen Victoria. Ministers, on the other hand, were anxious to make their control complete, and they had the political sagacity to see that this would be best achieved by curbing the power of the commander-in-chief and giving the secretary of state for war a number of military advisers. Thus, Wolseley found himself not supreme but primus inter pares, a position which added to his difficulties in preparing for the South African War, which he foresaw, and for the great European struggle which he anticipated. In those days it was difficult to get the government to spend money upon stores and preparations which made no show in time of peace. But Wolseley so far won his way that, when the South African War broke out, for the first time in our military history brigades and divisions, which had been trained as such in time of peace, were swiftly mobilized and dispatched with adequate equipment to the theatre of war. It had taken Wolseley forty years to get the lessons of the Crimean War applied. The struggle with the Boers taught the army the defects in its training, and the truth of all that Wolseley had been preaching for years. Thereafter the training and preparation which enabled Great Britain in 1914 to place in the field an incomparable expeditionary force went forward without controversy.
But the long struggle for efficiency had worn out the protagonist. Wolseley retired in 1899. In 1903 he published The Story of a Soldier's Life, an interesting but not very adequate account of his life down to the Ashanti expedition. Thereafter his brain began to fail rapidly, and he died at Mentone 25 March 1913, to be buried with fitting pomp in St. Paul's Cathedral. Lady Wolseley survived her husband seven years, and the title devolved by special remainder upon their only daughter.
As a commander in the field, Wolseley never endured the supreme test of war against an equal adversary, and of his generalship it is only possible to say that everything he was asked to do he did well. His real title to fame is that he recreated the British army, which had fallen into inanition and inefficiency after
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