Having spent some years in Paris, where he worked as an agent for that now-extinct old worthy, John Arthur, earning a living which enabled him to present a highly respectable figure, he clearly felt a call, he tells us, to join the North in 1861, when the kindling American Civil War made the States a kind of promised land for all sorts of adventurous spirits, most of whom, it may be supposed, were still feeling the influences of the comparatively fresh Napoleonic legend. Taking out a passport in the name of Henri Le Caron, young Beach shipped on the _Great Eastern_, then about to take her maiden trip across the Atlantic, and landed duly in New York, where the military authorities enlisted him as a private in the Pennsylvania Reserves. Le Caron—he was never after 1861 known by the name of Beach—passes over his military career with unexpected haste in his autobiography, it must be said. He was present, he tells, at important engagements during the course of the war, first as an infantry soldier, subsequently as a cavalryman, receiving promotion and being especially detailed for scouting operations. In 1864 he was gazetted second lieutenant and by 1865 had attained the rank of regimental adjutant with the title of Major—a rank which became, it may be said in passing, at the close of the war, so common throughout the States, that humorists were wont to tell how in 1866 it was impossible to throw a brick in any given direction where men happened to assemble without hitting an officer of that standing.
Le Caron, it is interesting to note, records his act of religious faith in the following words:—"We are impelled by some unknown force to carry out, not of our own volition or possible design, the work of this life, indicated by a combination of circumstances to which unconsciously we adapt ourselves." This, it may be remembered, was the religion of the late Prince Bismarck, and it must be allowed that it is a highly convenient and elastic hypothesis of life. It goes far to explain how he came to be associated with Fenianism. Le Caron declares, however, that he was far from having gone in search of the Fenians; on the contrary, he insists, the Fenians came in search of Le Caron. The Major disappoints us rather badly, nevertheless, by failing to show how it was that the Irish in America, even in those days a powerful community, should have sought out the psalmodical soldier who abhorred alcohol in all its forms and possible quantities, and why he, a Briton, of all men, should have been singled out to put life into the Irish-American movement for the emancipation of the Sister Isle. At the head of that movement in 1865 was James Stephens, who directed the organisation both in Ireland and America, while his agents on American soil included some of the shrewdest Irishmen of that age and, indeed, some of the most prosperous. Le Caron explains briefly how he first entered the movement as a spy. A fellow-officer had informed him quite casually that the main object of the Irish-American agitation of that date was the invasion of Canada. This startling bit of news proved more than sufficient to call out the fires of the old puritanical moralist dormant in the Major, who proceeds to inform us in the language of tragic passion which one applies to a tailor who has omitted a minor detail, that he "felt quite indignant at learning what was being done against the interests of my native country." Accordingly, and in order to unload his chest of the perilous secret, he addressed a letter to his father, a local tradesman, at Colchester, informing the sire that an attack was contemplated on the Dominion by a group of bold bad Irishmen. Evidently there was in the Beach tribe a congenital incapacity for holding a secret, for no sooner had the old man read his son's letter than, "startled and dismayed at the tidings it conveyed, he, true Briton that he was," made over the letter to the then sitting member for Colchester, a Mr Rebow. It was this gentleman who was instrumental in procuring Le Caron his salaried commission to act in America as a spy for the British police authorities.