His peace principles contrasted oddly with his passion for military history, a passion which prompted many vacation journeys to battlefields all over Europe, from Salamanca to Austerlitz. He had followed the campaigns of Napoleon through Piedmont and Lombardy, through Germany and Austria, as well as those of Wellington in Spain and Southern France.[57] This taste is not uncommon in men of peace. Freeman had it; J. R. Green and S. R. Gardiner had it; and the historical works of Sir George Trevelyan and Dr. Thomas Hodgkin prove that it lives in those genial breasts also. It was a pleasure to be led over a battlefield by Bowen, for he had a good eye for ground, he knew the movements of the armies down to the smallest detail, and he could explain with perfect lucidity the positions of the combatants and the tactical moves in the game.
Twice only did he come across actual fighting, once at Düppel in 1864, during the Schleswig-Holstein war, and again in Paris during the siege of the Communards by the forces that obeyed Thiers and the Assembly sitting at Versailles. He maintained that the Commune had been unfairly judged by Englishmen, and wrote a singularly interesting description of what he saw while risking his life in the beleaguered city. There was in him a great spirit of adventure, though the circumstances of his life gave it little scope.
Travel was one of his chief pleasures, but it was, if possible, a still greater pleasure to his fellow-travellers, for he was the most agreeable of companions, fertile in suggestion, candid in discussion, swift in decision. He cared nothing for luxury and very little for comfort; he was absolutely unselfish and imperturbably good-humoured; he could get enjoyment out of the smallest incidents of travel, and his curiosity to see the surface of the earth as well as the cities of men was inexhaustible. He loved the unexpected, and if one had written proposing an expedition to explore Tibet, he would have telegraphed back, "Start to-night: do we meet Charing Cross or Victoria?"
I have dwelt on Bowen's gifts and methods as a teacher, because teaching was the joy and the business of his life, and because he showed a new way in which boys might be stimulated and guided. But he was a great deal besides a teacher, just as his brother Charles was a great deal besides a lawyer. Both had talents for literature of a very high order. Charles published a verse translation of Virgil's _Eclogues_ and the first six books of the _Æneid_, full of ingenuity and refinement, as well as of fine poetic taste. Edward's vein expressed itself in the writing of songs. His school songs, composed for the Harrow boys, became immensely popular with them, and their use at school celebrations of various kinds has passed from Harrow to the other great schools of England, even to some of the larger girls' schools. The songs are unique in their fanciful ingenuity and humorous extravagance, full of a boyish joy in life, in the exertion of physical strength, in the mimic strife of games, yet with an occasional touch of sadness, like the shadow of a passing cloud as it falls on the cricket field over which the shouts of the players are ringing. The metres are various: all show rhythmical skill, and in all the verse has a swing which makes it singularly effective when sung by a mass of voices. Most of the songs are dedicated to cricket or football, but a few are serious, and two or three of these have a beauty of thought and perfection of form which make the reader ask why a poetic gift so true and so delicate should have been rarely used. These songs were the work of his middle or later years, and he never wrote except when the impulse came upon him. The stream ran pure but it ran seldom. In early days he had been for a while, like many other brilliant young University men of his time, a contributor to the _Saturday Review_. (There surely never was a journal which enlisted so much and such varied literary talent as the _Saturday_ did between 1855 and 1863.) Bowen's articles were, like his elder brother's, extremely witty. In later life he could seldom be induced to write, having fallen out of the habit, and being, indeed, too busy to carry on any large piece of work; but the occasional papers on educational subjects he produced showed no decline in his vivacity or in the abundance of his humour. Those who knew the range and the resources of his mind sometimes regretted that he would do nothing to let the world know them. But he was, to a degree most unusual among men of real power, absolutely indifferent, not only to fame, but to opportunities for exercising power or influence.