by Jan Morris
It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn’s dead.
The New Imperialists were not ashamed of this record. ‘It is of course’, observed the Jubilee issue of the Daily Mail, ‘the prerogative of the sovereign to wage war … the Victorian era is destined to go down to history as emphatically the period of small wars.’ The paper listed as the Chief Campaigns of Victoria’s reign China 1837, Afghanistan 1838, the Crimea 1854, China 1856, Persia 1856, the Indian Mutiny 1857, Abyssinia 1867, the Ashanti Wars 1874, the Zulu Wars 1878, the Boer War 1879, Afghanistan again in 1879, Egypt 1882, the Sudan 1896. There were in fact many more. There were the Maori Wars in New Zealand, protracted and bitterly fought. There were two rebellions in Canada. There were wars in Burma and Rhodesia, and many obscure skirmishes in the Niger Basin, and interminable snipings, ambushes and punitive expeditions along the North-West Frontier of India. The Empire had not all been acquired by force, but it took constant force to hold it.
In support of it all a new militarism was popular in Britain. Kipling had touched up the Army’s shoddy image, and military similes and models were much in vogue. Onward Christian Soldiers was the hymn of the day. The Salvationists called their new movement an Army, and when they set up a mission in a new country were said to have ‘occupied’ the place. The boys were organized in Brigades, the Anglican Church was more than ever militant. Marches were all the rage, books about battle and bloodshed poured profitably off the presses, great full-throated anthems like soldiers’ choruses were sung by armies of singers at mass concerts in the Albert Hall—‘where 200 singers might suffice for art’, commented the Illustrated London News of a Handel festival, ‘twenty times 200 alone seems to reach the limits of our desires, when it comes to a question of homage from the great British nation’. The British were brassy with success. They seemed to win all their wars in the end, and they were acquiring an ear for trumpets. As Hilaire Belloc observed:
Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
2
The land forces of the Empire were drawn, in effect, half from Britain, half from India. The white colonies had their own small militias, commanded by officers from Britain, and there were two coloured colonial regiments—the West India Regiment, with a battalion normally in West Africa, and the Hong Kong Regiment. There was, though, no Imperial Army, and as the self-governing colonies had no say in the formulation of policy, so they had no formal obligations of imperial defence. It fell upon the British themselves and their Indian vassals to guarantee the land frontiers of the Empire, and it was said that the British Army was the hardest worked in the world. The battalions at home, when they had Supplied the needs of the overseas Empire, were, so Sir George Campbell wrote, ‘like spent fish, emaciated and exhausted: or at best their ranks were filled with immature and untaught boy recruits’. They were all volunteers, and by the standards of the Continental Powers the British Army was comically small: but it was scattered across the world, in every sort of country, and the range of its experience was unequalled. It had not fought a European enemy since the Crimean War, unless you counted the Boers: but for every British soldier at home one was always abroad, and the Army’s list of battle honours grew longer, more exotic and more obscure each year, until only the most dedicated old soldier could tell you where his regiment had achieved its lesser glories, or why.
About a third of the British Army was normally in India, where policy decreed that there should be one British soldier for every two sepoys. In 1897 there were some 212,000 men in the Regular Army, with 26,000 horses and 718 field guns. About 72,000 men were in India, 32,000 on colonial stations, the rest at home. Of the line infantry, fifty-two battalions were in India, twenty-three in Ireland, seven in Malta, six in South Africa, three at Gibraltar, three in Egypt, two at Mauritius, one each in Canada, the West Indies, Singapore, Bermuda, Ceylon and Hong Kong. There were Regular cavalry regiments in India, Ireland, South Africa and Egypt. There were military prisons in Barbados, Malta, Bermuda, Egypt, Gibraltar, Nova Scotia, Ceylon, South Africa and Ireland. There were Royal Engineers all over the Empire, building everything from slaughter-houses to cathedrals—in British Columbia they had laid out a mining town, New Westminster, complete with Victoria Gardens, Albert Crescent, and little squares named for royal princesses. As for individual officers of the British Army, they might be almost anywhere, and the extra-regimental lists made curious reading. There were officers training local militia in Honduras. There were 108 officers with Kitchener in the Egyptian Army. One officer was physician to the Crown Prince of Siam, one was director of Persian Telegraphs, and one ran the Egyptian Slavery Department.
Everywhere the Army’s garrison buildings were descended from a common Indian pattern—even in Britain, where several particularly draughty barracks and military hospitals were reputedly designed for tropical stations, and erected in error at home. With their red-brick walls, their verandas, their big square windows, their long low silhouettes and their officers’ villas tucked fastidiously away among the trees, they were an inescapable part of the imperial landscape. Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a good example of a garrison town—still manned by British forces in those days, and very much a military society. Army headquarters was in the Citadel, a splendid fortress on a hill, surveying the sweep of the harbour below, and supplied with an elegant clock tower by Queen Victoria’s father. Up there the noon gun was fired with a puff of white smoke above the ramparts, and the Last Post sounded with exquisite melancholy every night. The garrison church of St Paul’s, a graceful frame building of pine and oak, was rich in regimental ensigns and military memorials, and on the Grand Parade outside its doors the garrison marched swankily about on ceremonial occasions, its drums and trumpets echoing among the old grey houses of the port. The Army had its cemetery and its military hospital, its favourite taverns and its familiar social courses, charted by generations of young officers through the drawing-rooms of the town. When a battalion went home, half Halifax went down to the quayside to see it off on the troopship, the soldiers filing up one gangway, their families up the other, while the bands played dear old sentimental tunes upon the quayside, Will Ye No Come Back Again, or The Girl I Left Behind Me. The soldiers flirted in the public gardens. The officers played polo, sailed their yachts in the harbour, and sometimes went to cockfights, abetted by local Irishmen with fingers along the sides of their noses.
This was the British military life as it might be lived, with regional variations, in Singapore or Malta, Bengal or the Cape of Good Hope: and the Garrison Library at Halifax, housed in a cosy red-brick building in the Artillery Lines, had inherited the books from the Garrison Library at Corfu, one of the very few military stations the British had ever voluntarily abandoned.1
3
The Army List of 1897 records only nine British military attachés in foreign countries. As an imperial police force it was efficient enough, but neither by temperament nor by training was it fitted for la grande guerre. Twenty years had passed since Edward Cardwell had undertaken the last thorough reform of the Army, and by now it was not only complacent, after so long a run of easy victories, but also sadly out of date. In the age of the machine-gun it had just emerged from the era of red coats and purchased commissions. It had only recently abolished the numerical Regiments of Foot, such as Wellington had commanded—the War Office was still holding 1s 4d, the estate of James Wells of the 57th Foot—and the social structure of the Army had hardly changed at all. Its different branches were highly stylized, like so many clubs, or theatre companies. Officers of the Royal Engineers, it was said, were all c mad, married or Methodist’. Officers of the Guards regiments were excruciatingly fashionable. The smarter cavalry and infantry regiments were still almost family concerns, so instinctively did son follow father, and their lists of mess members often read like extracts from some parody of a social register.
The King’s Royal Rifle Corps had on its books in 1897 officers by the name of Buchanan-Riddell, Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, Milborne-Swinnerton-Pilkington, Blundell-Hollinshead-Blundell, Douglas-Pennant, Soltau-Symons, Pearce-Serocold, Sackville-West, Herbert-Stepney, Culme-Seymour, Duckett-Steuart, Cooke-Collis, Brasier-Creagh, Thistlethwayte, Prendergast and Featherstonhaugh.
The exquisite sensibilities of the officer class had long been a joke among the ruder kind of imperialist. The cavalry regiment which went to Rhodesia to fight the Matabele was very welcome at the Administrator’s balls, but raised some horse-laughs in Pioneer Street, and Kipling records a soldier’s disrespectful nicknames for his own company commander—Collar and Cuffs, Squeaky Jim, Ho de Kolone. When the cavalry regiments raised a Heavy Camel Regiment to go up the Nile with Wolseley in 1884 they wore red serge jerseys, ochre cord breeches and blue puttees, and groomed their camels like horses: among the officers to be seen ineptly tangled in their bridlery were Captain Lord St Vincent, Captain Lord Cochrane, Lieutenant Lord Rodney, Lieutenant Lord Binning and Lieutenant Count Gleichen (who wrote a book about it, and grew rather fond of his camel Potiphar). A private income was essential for officers such as these, and nobody would have dreamt of joining the Guards without one. ‘Good God,’ one subaltern is supposed to have said, when told the War Office had deposited £100 in his bank account, ‘I didn’t know we were paid!’
And if the best regiments were officered entirely by the upper classes, the other ranks of the British Army were still all too often the scum. In many a respectable English home, bowered country cottage or scrubbed tenement of Nonconformists, to admit a son in the Army was like confessing a misdemeanour. The Army was where the bad lots and the Irish went, and soldiering as a trade, however glorious it was as a national principle, remained disreputable. It was an old barracks refrain that the hero of wartime became the outcast of the peace, and on an old stone sentry box at Prince Edward’s Gate, Gibraltar, some embittered sentry had long before inscribed the lines:
God and the Soldier all men adore,
In time of trouble and no more,
For when war is over
And all thing righted,
God is neglected,
And the Old Soldier slighted.
4
This was not a promising formula for modern war: an officer corps recruited from the moneyed gentry, a rank and file recruited from those who could get no other jobs. There was no General Staff, and the strategic ideas of British generals were generally based either upon the campaigns of the Crimea—themselves fought to Wellingtonian texts—or upon the experience of colonial wars against impotent enemies. ‘Field Officers entering captive balloons’, said a Queen’s Regulation of the day, ‘are not required to wear spurs.’ There was an active prejudice against cleverness in Army officers, against theorists, even against new ideas. Until 1895 the Duke of Cambridge had been Commander-in-Chief, and it was he who once remarked to an eminent British general: ‘Brains! I don’t believe in brains. You haven’t any, I know, sir!’
The British Army was the only large volunteer force in Europe, and among Continental observers it was generally dismissed as negligible, for all its social glitter and immense regimental spirit. In 1882, for the Egyptian campaign, it had taken the British a month to mobilize a single Army Corps, and then only by summoning horses from cavalry and artillery units elsewhere: in 1870 the Germans had put fifteen Army Corps into action in two weeks, with three times as many horses as they needed. The British had been forced to draw upon reserves for Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan, and it was said that in a general mobilization the British Army could put a force into the field rather smaller than Switzerland’s. Britain had no allies, and if it ever came to a sudden land war against a European enemy would appear to be doomed. ‘It appears’, wrote General J. F. Maurice, sadly, after fighting against Zulus, Ashantis and Arabi’s Egyptians, ‘that despite the historic past of the British Army on the Continent, the general impression among foreign officers [is] that literally we have no army at all.’ All the splendour of the Army’s tradition, the ancient uniforms of lancer and dragoon, the breastplated Horse Guards, the kilts and sporrans of the Highlanders, the tabs, or special buttons, or marching pace, or mascot, cherished by each regiment as a token of its special worth—all this meant little, set against the military machines of Russia or Germany. The British Army, though unquestionably splendid, was small, scattered and cumbersome.
5
But also at the Queen’s command stood another Army, of different reputation. The Indian Army was not often accused of amateurism. Like most things the British organized in India, it was nothing if not well ordered, and distance heightened the enchantment of it all. Ballad, legend and travelogue had made it seem a paragon of armies, at once spare and romantic, an ideal army of fraternal interracial loyalties, where every man knew his place, and would willingly die for the honour of the regiment. India was certainly a very military country; 40 generals were stationed there. Bryce thought the whole place had ‘an atmosphere of gunpowder’—it was a military society, he said, and the English were in India primarily as soldiers. ‘India has been won by the sword,’ the Governor-General Lord Ellenborough had said in the days of the Company, ‘and must be kept by the sword.’ In every Indian town the military presence showed, in the smart new cantonments of the north-west, all whitewashed pebbles and orderly-room fire buckets, or old forts of the seacoast like Fort William in Calcutta, its grey peeling gateways and redoubts peering through the banyan trees, with moats and towers and flagstaffs everywhere, and goats cropping the grass-covered outerworks.
In many ways the Indian Army was the antithesis of the British. Its officers, all British, were mostly men of the upper middle classes, without private means, to whom soldiering was a job. When Churchill was sniffing at the bourgeois provincialism of the Anglo-Indians, the Indian Army officers at Bangalore were probably sneering at the fancy pretensions of his own regiment, the 4th Hussars. There were very few patricians in the Indian Army: socially much the grandest soldiers in India were the princely officers of the Imperial Service Corps. The other ranks, on the other hand, nearly all Indian, formed an élite of their own. They were all volunteers, but they mostly came from martial peoples to whom soldiering was the most honourable of callings—Muslims and Sikhs, Rajputs, Dogras, Mahrattas, and ferocious Gurkhas from the vassal-kingdom of Nepal. These splendid men were easily indoctrinated into the British system of regimental soldiering, with its fierce small loyalties and its paternal unity. The Indian Army had begun life as the private army of the East India Company, and it really formed three separate armies, each self-contained—last relics of the forces run in the old days by the Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay. It was essentially a territorial force, recruited tribe by tribe or race by race, and in the Indian Army list its units were listed ethnologically. The 6th Bombay Cavalry, for instance, whose officers wore dark green with primrose facings, gold lace, dark blue and white puggrees, red kullahs and primrose throat plumes—the 5th Bombay Cavalry (Jacob’s Horse), stationed then at Fort Sandeman in the Punjab, had a squadron of Jat Sikhs, a squadron of Pathans, and two squadrons of mixed Derajat Muslims and Baluchis. Such regiments had begun as volunteer companies of yeomen, whose Indian troopers provided their services, with horse and equipment, in return for a small wage and the prospect of loot. By 1897 a trooper’s monthly pay was still only about £2, and out of it he still paid for his own horse and gear, rifle and ammunition apart. Much of the regimental business was still conducted in durbar—a general assembly of all ranks, presided over by the colonel: the regiment thought of itself as a family concern, in the horse trade.
The Indian Army was absolutely at the disposal of the British Government—more absolutely, in a way, than the British Army itself. It was free, in that India paid for it, so that its size and equipment was not subject to the vagaries of a vote at Westminster. It had enormous reserves: there were at least 350,000 men in the armies of the Native St
ates alone, all of which could at a pinch be summoned to the imperial service, and the northern provinces of India offered almost inexhaustible recruiting grounds. You could do things with Indian troops that you could not do with British: Indian soldiers were not subject to the Mutiny Act, and there was no Indian Parliament to raise awkward questions about welfare, rates of pay or family accommodation. The Indian Army was like a Praetorian Guard of Empire, set apart from the public control, and available always for the protection of the inner State.
It was probably not quite so formidable as it seemed. Its quality was patchy. Not all the regiments of the south, with their mixed companies of Muslims, Tamils and Telingas, would have struck much chill into the Cossack heart. The legendary Indian cavalry regiments, in all their shimmer of plume and puggree, were often better at show and pigsticking than at slogging away on manoeuvres. Moreover the Indian Army was Indian. Devoted though its soldiers nearly always became to its traditions, and loyal though they had proved themselves since the Mutiny, still the British could not quite afford to trust it. They had not forgotten Lucknow and Cawnpore. Roberts, when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, used to reckon that if ever he led it to war against a foreign Power only half its troops could be considered absolutely reliable. The British allowed the Indian Army no artillery, no arsenal, and no Indian commissioned officers. Every Indian brigade contained its British Army battalion, to stiffen the whole and keep an eye on the sepoys. Indian soldiers were not eligible for the Victoria Cross—they had their own equivalent, the Indian Order of Merit—and never far from any Indian Army barracks was a British Army garrison. British units in India always carried rifles and ammunition on church parade, in case another mutiny broke out during Matins.