Heaven’s Command

by Jan Morris

  In some ways the Army had not much changed since we last inspected it, forty years before on the Afghan passes. Socially it was still rigidly caste-ridden. The purchase of commissions had been ended, regimental patrons being bought out at black market prices (£14,000, for example, for the owner of a cavalry regiment), but officers were still for the most part men of means and family, and the smart regiments remained excruciatingly smart. Most of the private soldiers still joined because they could find nothing better to do, or coveted the anonymity of the military life, and about a quarter of them were still Irish—when the British Army charged with the bayonet, it released a warcry defined by Queen Victoria herself as ‘a terrible cry, half British cheer, half Irish hurrah’. Their basic pay was still a shilling a day, and by the time they had paid their dues for rations, rum and cleaning gear, most of them had no money at all, and lived absolutely within the ordered family of their regiment. The gulf between officers and men remained profound, and the one emotion that bound them was not patriotism, nor even loyalty to the queen, but esprit de corps.

  The temper of the Army was eighteenth century, and its outlook had not been softened by the experience of empire. The drinking was terrific, the whoring insatiable, the looting endemic: ‘Mud Wallah Caste’, is what the Indians called the worst of the soldiery, and the military memoirists are frank enough about the brutality of the campaigning life. Here an army surgeon in China, finding a Chinese girl who had committed suicide rather than face the barbarians, coolly cuts off her little bound feet for his collection. Here a private soldier discovers a Pathan boy cutting the head off a dead British colour-sergeant, and picking the child up on the point of his bayonet, throws him over a cliff. Here an officer recalls the day when some hostile Sikhs climbed into trees to hide from the British—‘great sport for our men, who were firing up at them as at so many rooks … down they would come like a bird, head downward, and bleeding most profusely’.

  But technically the British Army was much improved. It had been scoured by the traumatic experiences of the Crimean War, and steeled by the Mutiny, and in the 1860s it had been drastically modernized by the reforming zeal of Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War in Gladstone’s first administration. Privates no longer enlisted for life, so that the average age of soldiers was now much lower. The old numbered infantry regiments had been reorganized on a county basis, a reserve army was formed, flogging was abandoned except in times of war. It was a more professional service now, and it was freed of its last stultifying vestiges of royal control—except one, the immovable Duke of Cambridge still occupying the office of Commander-in-Chief.

  It was still essentially an army of Empire, different in kind as in purpose from the great conscript armies of the Continent. Its strength lay in the tight small loyalties of the regimental spirit, in improvization, in the resource and prestige of individual generals. Its speciality had become the small campaign in distant parts against a primitive enemy (though not always so primitive—the Sikh armies, for instance, had better artillery than their British opponents). In 1854 Wolseley had likened the army’s organization to a steam engine with its boiler in Halifax, its cylinder in China, its other machinery distributed wherever the map was coloured red, and no water, coal, oil or tools. Thirty years later, when the army was preparing an invasion of Egypt, in a few weeks the commissariat had assembled a fleet of seventy-four transports to convey to the Mediterranean a railway from England, mules from the United States, South America, Italy, Greece, wood fuel from Cyprus and troops from Britain, Malta, Gibraltar and India. Some of the army’s anachronisms survived because of its imperial role: the hollow square, volley firing, the frontal cavalry charge—all these would be disastrous in a European war, though they were still effective against primitives. On the other hand the imperial commitment tautened the army’s organization, gave it an unrivalled expertise in combined operations, and battle-hardened its soldiers.

  There was still no general staff, and the War Office remained a warren of interconnecting houses in Pall Mall, all on different levels, and ranging from the backrooms of a draper’s shop to a baroque-decorated mansion. In 1871, though, manoeuvres were held for the first time on Salisbury Plain: many of the older generals thought them childish, theatrical and foreign,1 and so many horses and wagons had to be hired from civilian contractors that the transport was nicknamed Pickford’s Irregulars, but even so the event was an earnest of modernity. Since 1854, too, Aldershot, the army headquarters in Hampshire, had been developed as a centre for the whole of British military life. With direct railway lines from London, and good connections to the south coast port, the little town had become in effect the rear base of all the imperial campaigns. When, at one o’clock precisely each day, the Aldershot time gun was fired electrically from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, it was like a time-check for the entire Raj—a reminder to all the scattered garrisons of Empire that the price of dominion was spit and polish.

  At first no more than a huge collection of huts and tents upon the sombre heath, Aldershot had grown into a complete garrison town—‘The Home’ as it was ever afterwards to be called, ‘of the British Army’. Some of its barracks were immense and gloomy redbrick structures, with first-floor balconies in the Indian manner, and royal crests over ceremonial gateways. Others were tents on permanent foundations, lined in interminable rows across the heath. There was a garrison church rich in monuments of Empire, and blessed with an Ethiopian chalice looted by Lord Napier’s expedition to Magdala in 1868. There was an officer’s library of books about war. There were five military hospitals. There was a soldiers’ newspaper, Sheldrake’s Military Gazette, founded by a former colour-sergeant of the Coldstream Guards. The town was full of pubs (‘Where’s the Duke of Cambridge?’ asks a staff officer in an old Aldershot joke. ‘I don’t know, sir. I’m teetotal’), and was famous for its rat-pit, one of the best in the provinces, where the well-known rat-catcher, Mr Jack Black, often showed off his terriers. An act of Parliament had decreed that three members of the local council should be nominated for ever by the Army, giving the little town a municipal status analogous only to the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge.

  Aldershot demonstrated the new status of arms in British life—a status that rose with the rise of imperial pride. Prince Albert himself was credited with the idea of it—‘if the Army had never had any other good reason to revere his memory’, said Wolseley, ‘the creation of that camp of instruction should render it dear to us’. Many of the local tradesmen were by Royal Appointment, including it was claimed Mr Black the rat-catcher, who habitually wore a sash emblazoned with a crown, a pair of rats and the letters VR: for since 1855 the royal family had maintained a modest wooden villa, called the Royal Pavilion, on a ridge above the heath, where Her Majesty stayed when she came down for a review (she wore a military habit with a Field-Marshal’s insignia, and a plume in her hat). By now her soldiers were more familiar with war than most, and perhaps enjoyed it more. Wolseley, surveying his brother officers as they embarked for a war against the Chinese, said they seemed to think ‘the world was specially created for their own wild pleasures, of which, to most of us, war … with its maddening excitement was the greatest’. At the Prussian manoeuvres of 1874 a party of British officer-observers, reminiscing jauntily about the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny, found themselves rebuked by the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm himself, who felt obliged to remind them how dreadful war was.

  When Hyde Park Corner in London was replanned later in the century, a colossal bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington, by the sculptor Matthew Wyatt, was removed from the top of Constitution Arch and brought by the Queen’s command to Aldershot. It was re-erected on a mound behind the garrison church, and there the Iron Duke superbly sat his charger above the Tented Encampment, surveying the busy military scene below, but seeming to extend his gaze much farther too—across the distant Channel to fields of operation far away, to the deserts and velds where the redcoats, sweating, cursing, woman
izing and making merry, carried the imperial message to a not always unanimously grateful world.1

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  Behind the Army stood the Royal Navy. Everyone knew that au fond this was a sea-empire. Maritime supremacy alone enabled the British to throw their armies into action upon the colonial frontiers, or warn off the predations of rival Powers. In the years since Trafalgar the Navy had enjoyed a prestige so mystic that its power was taken for granted. It was the genius of the Pax Britannica: its reputation was towering, its size was unequalled, and its complacency was immense.

  The Royal Navy had a Nelson fixation. It talked in Nelsonic terms, it practised Nelsonic tactics, it examined every situation through Lord Nelson’s blind eye—until 1869 Nelson’s Victory was still afloat as flagship of the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth. Its elderly commanders still lived the spirit of Nelsonic derring-do—like the truculent Sir James Scott, who had joined the service in 1803, was on the active list for sixty-three years, and liked to claim that he had taken part in two general actions and five sieges, had assisted at the capture or storming of one capital city, twenty-three towns, thirty-two batteries and twenty-two forts, and had been present at the capture or cutting out of one line of battleship, five frigates, six sloops of war, twenty-one gunboats, 300 merchant vessels and several privateers.1

  Most of the Navy’s battleships were still heavy wooden three-deckers, full-rigged and rated by the number of their muzzle-loading guns. The accepted naval manoeuvres were still those made classic by Trafalgar. The last great naval expedition, an abortive Baltic enterprise during the Crimean War, had been essentially a sailing-ship affair, and when in 1860 the Navy was required to take an invading army to China, it did so in a fleet of 173 sailing-ships, carrying in their creaking hulls, at five knots through the China Sea, 20,000 soldiers with all their horses, guns, food and matériel.2 All the admirals had grown up in sail, and many of them viewed the arrival of steam with undisguised dislike—for they regarded a warship less as a weapon of war than a floating pageant, or perhaps a work of art, not to be risked in battle or even dirtied with gunsmoke.1

  On board little had greatly changed since Trafalgar. Even in the new ironclads life was tough, stuffy and fearfully noisy, with the primitive reciprocating engines thumping and rattling the entire ship, and the living quarters, encased in metal on the waterline, lit only by smelly tallow candles. Food was generally meagre, water was strictly rationed, pleasures were homespun and often bestial. The young officers, whose professional education had generally consisted of a few months on the old three-decker Britannia, moored in the River Dart, went in for practical jokes and horseplay. The ratings loved games like Sling the Monkey, in which a man swinging on a long rope was attacked with rope-ends, or Baste the Bear, in which the victim crawled about the deck on all fours. The bluejackets drank enormously, and nearly all chewed tobacco: when approached by an officer they simultaneously removed the hats from their heads and the wads from their mouths, returning both in a single movement when the officer had passed.

  The Navy was full of odd characters, upper and lower deck—eccentrics, runaways, wild younger sons, Irishmen from Cork or Galway, lower-deck inventors, religious fanatics. The sailors were terrific dandies: with their heavily oiled hair, their meticulously trimmed side-whiskers (beards were not allowed before 1870), their wide-brimmed sennet hats of straw or canvas, and the knife-edge creases to their bell-bottoms, they went ashore in Bombay or Singapore cockily ready for anything, and returned in the evening liberty boats, as likely as not, insensible in the stern sheets or sitting on the thwarts singing bawdy songs. Until the 1860s they made most of their own clothes, even to boots, and they still danced hornpipes, as they had since the Middle Ages, when the boatswain’s mate piped all hands to ‘dance and skylark’.

  Socially the Royal Navy had gone up in the world during Victoria’s reign. Its officers, once drawn chiefly from the middle classes, now included many men of title and means, so that even the Queen, who used in her younger days to wonder if it were proper to invite naval officers to the same table as her Guards officers, was now quite taken with the senior service. Naval ratings, too, were men of higher standing now. They were volunteers, pursuing a regular and relatively well-paid career, in a service which became more popular with the public every year. Impressment, though never legally abolished, was in abeyance—the Navy was only half its size in Nelson’s day, and there was no shortage of recruits—and flogging too, though it was never formally abolished, petered out in the 1870s.

  Now this whole elaborate structure was threatened by the new technology. Steam threatened all—threatened the Navy’s status in the world, for now all navies could start from scratch, threatened the style of the service and the well-being of the admirals. Tenaciously the Navy clung to its heritage. In 1859 the last of the wooden three-decker battleships was launched—Victoria, the first warship to be named for the Queen.1 But for her size and armament she was little more than an improved Victory, with auxiliary steam engines. Her sides were marked out in the traditional checker of black and white, her great masts were fully-rigged, her bowsprit rose above a splendid gilded figurehead, and from her big square ports protruded the barrels of 120 muzzle-loading guns, with an enormous 68-pounder mounted in the bows for the better pursuit of the French. In such a ship the Royal Navy still felt at home, and Sir James Scott could cheerfully have grappled with the most vicious of privateers.

  But she was the last of the old kind, and even as she sailed with a dowager dignity to become flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, the keel was laid of the first of the new—the original sea-going steam iron-clad, Warrior, specifically designed to ‘overtake and overwhelm any other warship in existence’.2 Throughout the 1860s and 1870s ideas fell upon the Navy thick and fast, and slowly, creakily, not without magnificence, the Royal Navy adapted to modernity. Sometimes its trust in new methods was severely shaken—by the loss of the battleship Captain, for example, a revolutionary new turret ship which capsized on her maiden cruise in 1870, confirming the worst forebodings of the reactionaries. Sometimes it was beset by Navy scares, alarmist reports of French rearmament or American inventiveness. It progressed in a welter of argument, admiral against admiral, newspaper critics against naval spokesman, and if its professional ideas changed slowly, its gnarled, stubborn and ornate style was more resistant still.

  Like the Army, it became more and more an imperial force. It was increasingly concerned with the protection of the imperial sea-routes, the suppression of subversion, showing the flag and overawing the natives. Much of its energy was invested in gunboat diplomacy, that ubiquitous instrument of imperial prestige, which required the dispersal of innumerable small vessels in every corner of the world. In 1875, for instance, the Royal Navy had 16 ships on the North American and West Indies station, five on the South American, nine on the South African, 11 on the East Indies, 10 on the Pacific, 11 on the Australian and 20 on the China station. They might be required at any moment for the most diverse duties: shelling recalcitrant tribespeople, embellishing consular fetes, scaring off pirates, rescuing earthquake victims, transporting friendly potentates—tasks which, though not always directly imperialist, contributed to the mosaic of imperial pride, and strengthened the illusion of inescapable British strength.

  It was partly illusion. The Navy had no war plans, no staff college, very little tactical training, and its attitude to war, as to life, remained incorrigibly conservative—nostalgic even, for the longer ago Trafalgar was, the more romantic Nelson’s navy seemed. Its power was none the less real, though, for its element of bluff. As C. J. Napier once observed, ‘an English admiral is difficult to reckon up. He may be wise, or he may be otherwise, no man knows, for he dwells not upon the hearth, but away upon the waters: however, all men know that he has a strength of cannon at his back….’ Even the Navy’s worst enemies admitted the splendour of its traditions and its style, and at home, as the century passed, its legend became almost sanctified. Powerful lobbies arose to
press for its well-being and expansion. The Navy League was one of the most insistent pressure groups of the late nineteenth century, and Parliament was seldom without its political admirals. The Empire and the Navy went together, and the very first statue ever erected of Lord Nelson stood not in Trafalgar Square, but in the cobbled New Place in Montreal.1

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  And behind the Navy were the bases. Steam power, though it increased the mobility of British power, made the Empire dependent upon coaling stations, and the Royal Navy was tied more than ever to its bases overseas. Fortunately these were everywhere. Almost every strategic island had been acquired by the British at one time or another, and as the distant imperial stakes grew more valuable, so the safety of the shipping routes became the chief preoccupation of the strategists in London, and largely dictated the policies of the Empire. Almost any imperial possession could be justified, it seemed, by naval necessity. When the Ionians were abandoned it became absolutely essential to acquire Cyprus as a substitute, and the British Empire could scarcely survive without Bermuda, covering as it so obviously did the entrance to the Caribbean and the Gulf of New Orleans.2 Ascension Island, originally acquired as a protective outpost of St Helena, where Napoleon was imprisoned, was now irreplaceable as a coaling station, and St Helena itself, though Napoleon lay harmless in Les Invalides, turned out to be indispensable as a source of watercress for the Fleet.