January/February, pages 65-70, Illustrated

If Posterity were to hold court and judge the great nations of the world based on how they treated their war heroes, then surely great Britain would finish last, just behind Rome, America and Macedonia. How anyone can read of the sailors who saved England from invasion by Napoleon, being cast adrift to starve and freeze to death on country lanes and in filthy alleys and not recoil from the ideals of such a national morality, is beyond me. What is even more astonishing is that my people, my nation, has inherited this hatred of the hero.

In the final installment of his excellent biography of Robert Rogers, whose military example of fortitude in the face of the enemy with minimal logistical support formed the basis for our own Army Rangers establishment, Tim J. Todish sketches a sad picture. After his outstanding military service he returned to England in hopes of being granted leadership of a scouting expedition across Canada to the Pacific and was both unsuccessful and prone to drinking. In England, at that time, debt and poverty were crimes which carried stiff prison terms. For the rest of his life Rogers would be in and out of debtor's prisons in England. In the end he just wanted to die around family and was not granted even this.

While in America attempting to win support for his exploration scheme the Revolution got underway and even as he sought to enlist in the rebel cause was captured and held as a spy. After gaining his release and swearing on his honor to Washington himself he was arrested again and then decided to fight for the British. After his war service and return to England he was imprisoned again for debt, dying in bondage. He was credited with a citizen's arrest of a highway man and still returned to prison. It is fascinating that our modern American prison system, where convicts are charged with staying "until they have paid their [moral] debt to society" is based on this savage system of internal predation by the hierarchy against all those who committed the sin of not turning a profit.

This also well explains why Christian missionaries out of England continuously held up the material benefits of civilization to the Indians as proof that the white man's God was superior to the native understanding. Now, as a Muslim directs affairs in the Christian city that once ruled the world, one can appreciate Robert Rogers' short, nasty and brutish life as a microcosm of the British Empire, which lasted barely 150 years, it's homeland being cannibalized by the descendants of those peoples that Britannia once condescended to rule.

Tim Todish has done a cleanly unbiased [unlike this review] job of charting a painfully interesting life.