New Spalding Club > House of Gordon > Gordons under arms

THE MAKING OF THE MUSTER.
One of the most striking pictures of our latter-day theatre discovers
the boy Napoleon, a lithe figure in a white uniform, standing intent on
the battle-field of Wagram, from the darkened vista of which rise the
uneasy voices of the unremembered dead. It is, of course, a purely
imaginary field, conjured up to gratify his pride : but it is as real for him
as if he had fought upon it side by side with his father. " The Battle-
field ! " he exclaims proudly ; " I have willed it ! It has risen ! "
This book, Gordons Under Arms, has also been willed, and
as with L'Aiglon, which was created by Mme. Bernhardt, it has been
willed by a woman. It has "risen," however, with none of the magic
quickness of M. Rostand's facile imagination and his stage carpenters'
ingenious interpretation. The will has meant work, hard, unremitting,
often fruitless and thankless work, pursued for eight years on the purely
Naval and Military side, and for a period a good deal longer in the genea-
logical setting.
The analogy to " L'Aiglon " does not end here. It was the veteran
Flambeau, symbolically named, who fed the flame of the young Eagle's
ambitions : and it was the well-tried guardian of the New Spalding Club
who fired Mrs. Skelton's ambition to produce the present book. When
he did so, in King's College Library, one grey September day in 1904,
neither Mr. P. J. Anderson nor Mrs. Skelton had any conception of the
extent of the battle-field, and of the immense difficulty of making it
" rise ". If they had, there might have been no Gordons Under Arms
to-day.
Yet the inspiration of the work was quite natural, even if it was
novel. The idea was to supplement the genealogical investigation in-
augurated by the New Spalding Club, in the House of Gordon, 1903, by
exchanging the process of reckoning through descent for the Galtonian
method of counting by achievement, thereby enabling us to catalogue
many individual Gordons who defy genealogical classification.
(xi)
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