Howard laughed, put down his cup and clapped a hand to Hervey’s shoulder. ‘My dear old friend, I mean that I’m sure you shan’t have an eternity to enjoy it. I’ll wager it won’t be long before the Gazette is printing someone else’s name “vice Hervey, who is promoted Major-General!”’
HISTORICAL AFTERNOTE
Although the action of On His Majesty’s Service takes place largely in the Balkan mountains and Roumelia, the war of 1828–9 ranged wider: there was fighting in Asiatic Turkey, and a deal of ‘tidying up’ in the Caucasus in the aftermath of Russia’s war with Persia (1826–8). The Treaty of Adrianople (the city is now called Edirne) was eventually signed on Russia’s behalf on 2/14 September 1829 by Count Aleksey Orlov, who, incidentally, would also be the Russian plenipotentiary at the Treaty of Paris in 1856, which brought an end to the Crimean War. By the treaty, Russia gained the Danube delta and virtually the whole of the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and the Porte acknowledged the annexation of Georgia and the principal Transcaucasian khanates which Persia had ceded by the Treaty of Turkmanchay the year before. Russian subjects were granted free trade throughout Turkish territory, and passage of the Bosporus and Dardanelles was conceded to Russian and other foreign trading vessels. The Porte granted autonomy to Moldavia and Wallachia, with Russia as guarantor, and confirmed the obligation under the Akkerman Treaty of 1826 to observe the autonomy of Serbia. Tsar Nicholas elevated General Diebitsch to the title Count Diebitsch-Zabalkansky.
But this was a complicated region, as of course it remains. There is no shortage of books that promise to enlighten, but one of the most recent and thought-provoking is from the pen of that most entertaining of contrarians, Norman Stone, whose Turkey, A Short History (Thames and Hudson, 2011) is a corrective to the attitude of Hervey’s time, that, in Professor Stone’s words, ‘Being anti-Turkish [was] “tone”’. In large measure this anti-Turk sentiment was on account of philhellenism, of which Lord Byron was leader among the European Romantics until his death at Messolonghi in 1824. Cooler heads, such as the Duke of Wellington, were more concerned about the growth of Russian power in the Levant1 as the Ottoman Empire weakened (Turkey would soon be referred to as the ‘sick man of Europe’). Within two years of the treaty, Mehmet Ali of Egypt, an Ottoman vassal, with French backing invaded Syria. The Sultan’s army failed once again, and Egyptian troops were soon threatening Constantinople itself. This presented the Tsar with a problem: Turkey, the hereditary enemy, risked falling into the hands of an ally of France, and this he could not afford. Russian troops therefore camped outside Constantinople as allies of the Porte (‘A drowning man will cling to a serpent,’ said the Sultan). In May 1833 the Egyptians withdrew from Turkish soil, but kept control of Syria, Palestine and Arabia. In July a further Russo-Turkish treaty was concluded, that of Unkiar Skelessi – as once every schoolboy spelled it, but which now must be rendered as Hünkâr skelesi (in the same unpoetic way that Bombay is now rendered unhistorically and ultra-nationally as Mumbai, and, worse, Madras as Chennai). The treaty was one of mutual assistance in the event of attack by a foreign power, which in the case of the Porte was limited to closing the Dardanelles to all non-Russian ships.
Britain (and France) was suspicious, even alarmed, that the treaty gave Russian warships passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and her efforts to clarify the status of these two narrow stretches of strategic water culminated in the (London) Straits Convention of 1841, which closed them to warships of any nation except those of the allies of the Porte in wartime.
War between Russia and Turkey broke out again in 1853 for reasons that Professor Stone calls ‘surreal’ (these, he writes, ‘lay ostensibly in Jerusalem, and concerned the guardianship of the Holy Places of Christianity’). In 1854 Britain and France, and later Italy (Sardinia), joined the war on the side of the Porte. The Russians occupied Moldavia and Wallachia, and in the spring of 1854 invested Silistria once again and crossed the Danube into the Dobrudscha. An Anglo-French force (an astonishing innovation) landed at Varna in June, and the Light Brigade, under the command of Lord Cardigan, made a three-hundred-mile reconnaissance of the Danube and its environs, including Silistria and Shumla, in seventeen days (the ‘Sore Back Reconnaissance’). It found no Russians – they had evacuated the Dobrudscha – but killed a hundred of the two hundred horses taking part.2 So within a mere twenty-five years of the Spectator article quoted in the foreword, British troops were operating in that ‘very obscure portion of Europe … [where] there is very little reason why we should trouble our heads with its geography’. And, strange to relate, the cavalry, consisting of Cardigan’s Light Brigade and Sir James Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade, were under the command of no less a man than Lord Bingham – by then 3rd Earl of Lucan – who had preceded Hervey in the mission to the Russians in 1828.
* * *
There are two principal sources in English for the war of 1828–9. First is Russo-Turkish Campaigns 1828–1829 (London, 1854) by Francis Rawdon Chesney, a colonel of the Royal Artillery who had carried out surveys of Mesopotamia, and would later be involved in the survey of the Suez Canal. The second, The Russians in Bulgaria and Rumelia in 1828 and 1829 is by Baron von Moltke – the same Moltke whom Hervey met at Iskender. It was published in German in 1845 after his several years’ secondment to the Turkish army. It was then published in English by John Murray, in the same year as Chesney’s volume, 1854 (war then, as now, was evidently a good publishing opportunity). The translator was Lady Lucie Duff Gordon, although Moltke could undoubtedly have made his own translation, for his English was fluent; he had translated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into German, for which he received very little money (nor, it seems, did Die beiden Freunde make him much), and he had married an English woman – girl, indeed, for Mary Burt, his step-niece, was only sixteen when they wed. He rose to be field marshal and chief of the Prussian general staff (for thirty years), the architect of Bismarck’s victories. There is, however, a question as to whether he did in fact witness the campaigns. Certainly Lucie Duff Gordon believed he did: he ‘was despatched to the Turkish army by his own sovereign’, she writes in her preface, ‘at the express request of Sultan Mahmoud [sic], and served with it through the campaigns here described.’ But then she also states that he was dead at the time of her writing.3 It is, nevertheless, a very fine work, with superlative maps and diagrams.
Of Lord Bingham’s time with the Russians there is no written trace. Neither the Public Record Office nor the National Army Museum has any account or reference to an account. Nor does the family. Or rather, it must be supposed they do not; following the disappearance of the 7th Earl of Lucan in 1974 after the murder of the family’s nanny, access became difficult. But when Cecil Woodham-Smith was researching for her celebrated work on the charge of the Light Brigade, The Reason Why (London, 1953), she made a full inventory of the Lucan archive at the family seat in Castlebar, Co. Mayo. There is nothing in that inventory relating to Bingham’s time with the Russians. Princess Lieven’s remarks in the letters to her brother are in fact the best contemporary references.
There is a footnote, so to speak, to the action at Pravadi, which Hervey and Fairbrother witness from a prone position in the forest, as ‘through a glass darkly’ – the horseman’s throwing his cloak at the feet of the Vizier. Moltke relates the story. The Turk batteries had pounded the Russian defences for hours, and the Vizier sent a dehli, a fanatic, to examine the effect of the fire. The dehli galloped to within fifty yards of the walls, and although hundreds of rounds were apparently fired at him he returned unhurt to report that ‘everything was as it was’ (bir schei yok). The Vizier, who had expected a report of several breaches at least – indeed that the walls had been entirely battered down – would not believe that the garrison was still within and resisting, and accused the dehli of not having ridden close enough. The dehli answered by throwing down his bullet-riddled cloak as proof that he had.
Finally, to obviate letters of enquiry or complaint to
the publishers: Rule’s serves very fine steak and oyster puddings still, but at number thirty-five, not, as in Hervey’s day, at number thirty-eight.
1 Although now applied almost exclusively to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean – Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan – the term ‘Levant’ referred originally (as here) to all Mediterranean lands east of Italy. It derives from Middle French (‘rising’) – ‘the land where the sun rises’ – and could be qualified by ‘near’ and ‘far’.
2 The second of the two regiments of the brigade, the 13th Light Dragoons, was one of the antecedent regiments of that which the author had the honour to command.
3 He died in 1891, aged ninety.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allan Mallinson is a former infantry and cavalry officer of thirty-five years' service worldwide.
As well as the Matthew Hervey series of novels, he is the author of Light Dragoons, a history of four regiments of British Cavalry, one of which he commanded, and The Making of the British Army, a history of the Army's origins from the battle of Edgehill to the current conflict in Afghanistan.
He also writes on defence matters for The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and is a regular reviewer for The Times, the Spectator and the Literary Review.
Also by Allan Mallinson
Fiction featuring Matthew Hervey
A CLOSE RUN THING
THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS1
A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR
A CALL TO ARMS
THE SABRE’S EDGE
RUMOURS OF WAR
AN ACT OF COURAGE
COMPANY OF SPEARS
MAN OF WAR
WARRIOR
Non-fiction
THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH ARMY
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On His Majesty's Service mh-11 Page 30