by Jan Morris
Britain’s enemies naturally had high hopes of sepoy disaffection, but to the British public at home, nurtured on self-congratulatory soldiers’ memoirs, or panoramas of martial grandeur in the pages of the Graphic, the Indian Army must have presented a blazing image of force and exotic experience. It was always in the news. In the very week of Jubilee four regiments of Sikhs and Punjabis were marching into the Tochi valley, wherever that was, to avenge the death of Mr Gee, Political Officer, murdered on his way to collect a fine imposed upon some dissident tribesmen. If there was one kind of adventure that appealed to the late Victorian British, it was the adventure of the North-West Frontier. The terrain was fierce. The immediate enemy was hospitable, soldierly and cruel. The names of the fields of skirmish rang splendidly: Swat and Malakaland, Gtral and Tirah, through whose passes the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Afridis and the Mohmands flitted like menacing shadows, and upon whose crests men like Yeatman-Biggs, Lockhart, Blood and Maclean stood watchful in their topees, shading their eyes against the setting sun. It had all the elements of folk-myth, and the British loved it: loved it in the idea, idealistically portrayed in Drawings by Our Special Artist; loved it in the reality, for there was excellent sport to be had out there, by a young man of spirit and no ties.
It was there, too, best of all, that the British Empire could be seen on guard. Fifty miles behind the Khyber flowed the Indus River, one of the grand facts of the Empire, and at the place where the Grand Trunk Road crossed it there stood the garrison town of Attock. Here Alexander had crossed the Indus, on his way to conquer India, and here the Emperor Akhbar had built a great fort of polished pink stone. At Attock the British had thrown a double-decker iron bridge across the Indus, a lumpish powerful structure, railway above, road below, with iron gates at each end to be closed at night with chains and huge bolts, and watchful sentries with fixed bayonets. Across it their armies moved, year after year, on their way to the forts, cantonments and entrenchments of the tribal country and the Afghan frontier. On the lower deck the infantry swung by, the commissariat carts, the cavalry with their lances and fluttering pennants: on the upper deck the troop trains clanked their way towards Peshawar, barehead soldiers lolling at their windows, or singing bawdy songs inside. There were block towers, gun emplacements, watchtowers along the ridge, and often the roads over the escarpment were cloudy with the dust of marching platoons. Trumpets blew at Attock, officers trotted up the hill to the artillery mess in the fort, the flag flew above the ramparts, and all the way along the Peshawar road were carved regimental crests, the dates of old campaigns, or simply the initials of British soldiers, scratched on a stone as the battalion rested on the march.
High above it all, blocking the northern horizon, were the white crests of the Hindu Kush, the last frontier of the Empire, separating this familiar world of pageantry and requisition order from whatever barbaric mysteries lay beyond.
6
It was in India that the martial heroism of Empire had found its most sacred apotheosis. The battles of the Indian Mutiny were fought almost entirely in Hindustan and the Central Provinces, so that people in the south of India, for example, scarcely knew the war was happening: but it had profoundly impressed the imaginations of the British. We have seen how it affected their racial attitudes. More extraordinary was the epic allure which still lingered about its legend, forty years later. ‘We are indebted to India’, wrote Sir Charles Crosthwaite,1 ‘for the great Mutiny, which has well been called the Epic of the Race.’ It was also called ‘our Iliad’, and seen in awed retrospect the British heroes of the Mutiny did seem champions in a classical kind, clean-limbed and generous. In India their graves were lovingly tended, and their sometimes self-composed epitaphs were still freely quoted to impressionable adolescents—‘Here Lies Henry Lawrence, Who Tried to Do His Duty’, ‘Here Lies All That Could Die of William Stephen Raikes Hodson’, or the great manly inscription beneath which John Lawrence, General, aged 35, lay in the dusty cemetery beyond the walls of Delhi. Memorials to the British dead of the Mutiny, and their loyal Indian subjects, stood all over central India, some grandiose, like the tall Gothic spire on the ridge above Delhi, some movingly unobtrusive, flaked obelisks beside the highway, or faithfully polished brasses in the aisles of garrison churches. Of the ten pages Murray’s Handbook gave to the city of Delhi, for nearly a thousand years one of the great capitals of Asia, five were devoted to the events of the Mutiny (‘… the enemy poured upon them a shower of shot and shell … the siege guns, drawn by elephants, with an immense number of ammunition waggons, appeared on the Ridge … his lofty stature rendered him conspicuous, and in a moment he was shot through the body, and in spite of his remonstrances was carried to the rear to die….’).2
The great shrine of the epic, and perhaps the supreme temple of British imperialism, was the ruined Residency at Lucknow, in which a small garrison, with its women and children, had held out in appalling conditions against an overwhelming force of mutinous sepoys. The story of the siege and relief of Lucknow was familiar to every Victorian schoolboy, and had been immortalized by Tennyson in a stirring balad:
Banner of England, not for a season, O banner of Britain, bast thou
Floated in conquering battle or flapt to the battle-cry!
Never with mightier glory than when we had rear’d thee on high
Flying at top of the roofs in the ghastly siege of Lucknow—
Shot thro’ the staff or the halyard, but ever we raised thee anew,
And ever upon the topmost roof our banner of England blew.
Everybody knew those lines, and the scene of the great siege became a place of pilgrimage. From Hill’s Imperial Hotel, the Civil and Military Hotel, the Royal or the Prince of Wales’s, the visitors in their hundreds were taken down the road by tonga to the old Residency compound: and there they found the battlefield preserved just as it was when Henry Havelock’s Highlanders fought their way in at last to relieve the garrison—
Saved by the valour of Havelock, saved by the blessing of Heaven!
‘Hold it for fifteen days!’ We have held it for eighty-seven!
There were sweet English flowers everywhere (phlox, sweet peas, antirrhinums), but the buildings had been left in their shattered ruins, and the visiting parties, holding their long skirts above the dust, and shaded by pink parasols, could walk from one scene of heroism to the next—imagine the murderous line of fire from beyond the Baillie Gate, see just where Captain Fulton set up his eighteen-pounders at the Redan, thrill to the memory of Lieutenant Macabe, sallying out beyond Sago’s garrison to spike two enemy guns, or shudder in the cellar where the women and children had huddled through nearly three months of bombardment—
Heat like the mouth of a hell, or a deluge of cataract skies,
Stench of old offal decaying, and infinite torment of flies.
Thoughts of the breezes of May blowing over an English field,
Cholera, scurvy, and fever, the wound that would not be heal’d …
On the highest point of the compound stood the Residency itself, half-destroyed but still imposing, with the remains of a tower and an air of proud authority—fine and fearless in the sunshine, rubble all around. A few guns still stood sentinel over the lawn: and night and day down the years, as it had throughout the siege, from the broken battlements of the Queen’s House the banner of England flew.1
7
No other imperial war had left memories so hallowed, and sometimes the British public scarcely noticed that some hard-fought campaign was being fought at all—so remote were the battlefields, so uncertain was the average Englishman’s command of imperial geography, and so common an occurrence was what the Army called a ‘subaltern’s war’. Dimly out of the past, though, they might see the victors of Empire parading: Roberts riding through Afghanistan, in an astrakhan hat on Vonolel; Wolseley and his soldiers paddling canoes up the Red River to put down Riel’s rebellion in the Canadian West; Napier with his scholars and elephants labouring along the mountain tr
acks of Ethiopia; 12,000 British soldiers dashing up the Irrawaddy in flotillas of river boats; the White Rajah at the head of his private army, helter-skelter in pursuit of Dyaks; the eighty undefeated stalwarts of Rorke’s Drift, who earned ten Victoria Crosses in a single night.
Possibly they also remembered Gordon’s forlorn bugle-signals to his outposts across the river—‘Come to us, Come to us’; or Dr Jameson and his policemen, humiliated on the veldt at Krugersdorp; or the Boer War of 1881, the only British war against white men since the Crimea, when General Colley’s troops were driven panic-stricken from Majuba Hill; or Colonel William Hicks and his 10,000 Egyptian soldiers, obliterated by the Mahdi in 1883; or the terrible first war against the Afghans, in 1838, when the solitary Dr Brydon, the only man to escape the slaughter of the British in Kabul, rode exhausted into Jellalabad upon his pony.
But for most people, one supposes, all these triumphs and reverses were confused in the historical memory, stirred up with flags and patriotic colours, and blended into a general impression of glory.1
8
Between them the two armies of the British Empire could muster, in peacetime, perhaps 400,000 men (the Roman Empire at the time of Trajan was said to have had armies of 300,000 men). It was a small force for its duties, and fortunately it had never been tested in open war. This was not because the British disregarded war as an instrument of policy. They had cool nerves, and in fact they repeatedly gambled with the possibility of a great war, and juggled dexterously with casus belli in the pursuit of their imperial ends. Salisbury was generally conciliatory towards the Germans, wary of the Russians, smoothly diplomatic to the French, but there were times when war against any of them seemed quite likely. It was only against the Americans that the British were, at root, unwilling to contemplate war at all, fiercely though the two nations sometimes confronted one another. Whenever it came to the point, in a conflict with Washington, the British gracefully withdrew, for it was already becoming apparent to them that one day the survival of the Empire might depend upon a special relationship with the United States: besides, one potent strain of the New Imperialism was the idea of Anglo-Saxon supremacy—a joint destiny, as Rhodes hazily conceived it, towards the mastery of the earth.
Generally the British peacefully won their case, and that string of imperial campaigns bore little resemblance to the kind of wars Great Powers conceived for diplomatic purposes. Colonial wars demanded special techniques—the War Office published a book called Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice—and the swift transfer of troops and supplies from continent to continent became a speciality of British military men. They may not have frightened the Germans and Russians much, but they were adept at semi-irregular warfare in difficult country, and at confronting adverse primitive odds with disciplined calm—holding their fire, keeping their nerve, against the frenzies of painted impis or subtle Afridi sniping. Many British troopers with experience of war in India and in South Africa joined the United States Army for service in the Indian wars. The Americans indeed assiduously studied British methods of colonial war, and at one time considered forming irregular regiments of friendly Sioux, as the British enlisted the warrior peoples of India. For the British armies fought their little wars with a calculated ferocity inconceivable to most patriots at home. During the Afghan frontier campaigns of 1897 no holds were barred: all prisoners were killed (on both sides), many villages were burnt to the ground, nobody who resisted the Raj could expect mercy. ‘There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people’, Churchill wrote home from the frontier.
The Roman Empire was never at peace, from the beginning of its history to the rule of Augustus, and as Victoria foresaw, war became part of the everyday British experience, too; war of a small and distant kind, it is true, but none the less real for that—none the less noble for those who saw it as an instrument of greater ends, none the less exhilarating for those who loved the smell of the gunsmoke, nor the less tragic for those, friend or foe, who had not yet learnt to ask the reason why.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose.
But young men think it is, and we were young.
1 The British Army left Halifax in 1906, after 157 years, but its shades remain. The Citadel, now a museum, retains traces of the old spit and polish, many of the barracks buildings survive, and in the Cambridge Library may still be seen the books from the Ionian Islands, with the Corfu garrison stamp on them. Mr Thomas Randall, whose book on Halifax led me to them, suggests that they may have been used by the young Lafcadio Hearne, whose father was a surgeon with the British Army in Corfu.
1 Who was among the first to enter the I.C.S. after the Mutiny, going on to be Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Frontier Province before his death in 1915. How vivid the scenes of the Mutiny must have seemed to him, when he arrived in India, aged 22, in August 1857, and now astonishing that they seem to have inspired in him feelings of gratitude!
2 The proportion was successively reduced, as the book was revised, until by the eighteenth edition (1959) the Mutiny got less than half a page, its events being of interest, as a footnote says, ‘mainly to those of British birth’.
1 It flew until August 15,1947, when British rule came to an end in India: but the Residency ruins are still preserved as a museum, and its Indian curators have left everything as it was, down to the phlox and the sweet peas.
1 One stumbles across some unexpected monuments of these forgotten conflicts. A touching British military cemetery survives in Kabul, with graves from three Afghan wars—also a solitary British gun, high and toppled on a ridge above the city. There used to be a memorial to the men of the Jameson Raid, at the place where they briefly fought and surrendered; but I could find no sign of it in 1966—only the bare and bitter veldt, its horizons punctuated by monuments no less relevant: the pyramidical dumps of the gold-mines, and the endless little white houses, mile after mile in the distance, of the black locations.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
At Sea
Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag vlyin’
They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago!
Henry Newbolt
22
TO every right-thinking Englishman the Army was only a second shield. The Pax was primarily a peace of the sea, and the little land wars of the Empire were only picturesque asides. As Lord St Vincent had observed, long before his descendant had taken to riding camels up the Nile, ‘I only say they cannot come by sea.’ The Royal Navy was the very heart and pride of the Empire. Upon it, as everybody knew, the security of the realm rested, and around it there flew, like a cloud of reassuring signals, an accretion of legends and victorious memories, mellowed by age, gunsmoke, rum and saltspray. In the nineties the Nelson touch was more than just a romatic tradition: it was, at least in theory, a professional outlook.
The Navy had never seemed more magnificent than it did in 1897. Its 92,000 sailors manned a fleet of 330 ships, with 53 modern ironclads, 80 cruisers, 96 destroyers and torpedo boats, splendidly dubbed with the names that Kipling loved—Cyclop and Hecate, Badger, Bouncer and Bustard, Pickle and Snap, Rattlesnake, Ajax, Colossus, Basilisk and Cockatrice, Jupiter, Hamibal and Mars, Thunderer and Devastation, the torpedo gunboats Boomerang and Gossamer, the destroyers Dasher, Lynx, Wizard and Boxer. This was beyond cavil the supreme Navy of the world. Jane’s that year reported that the French Navy was numerically its nearest rival, with 95 ships, followed by Russia (86), Germany (68), the United States (56) and Italy (53). The fleets
of lesser Powers candidly copied the uniforms, the style, and the equipment of the Royal Navy—thirteen foreign navies used British guns. At home its name was almost as sacred as the Crown itself, and just as popular. Sailor costume was the fashionable dress for boys and girls alike, with the name of the latest British battleship proudly on the cap-ribbon, and it was with something approaching reverence that the Daily Mail’s reporter watched the naval contingent swinging up Ludgate Hill on Jubilee day—they marched, he said, with ‘the steadfast calm of men who have been left alone with God’s wonders at sea’. Naval questions could be guaranteed to spark heated debates at Westminster, and the progress of the Navy, its construction plans, its relative size, was followed with a kind of sporting interest by the public—every year the Government published a White Paper listing the naval strengths of all the Powers, like a form book. Everybody knew about the Two-Power Standard, the practice of maintaining the fleet on a scale ‘at least equal to the naval strength of any other two countries’, which had been official policy since 1889. ‘There are two factors in the celebrations’, The Times wrote of the Jubilee, ‘which transcend all others in their significance as symbols of the Imperial unity. One is the revered personality of the Queen, the other the superb condition of Her Majesty’s Fleet.’ The true bond of Empire, the paper said, was naval supremacy: without a dominant Navy the Empire would be ‘merely a loose aggregate of States which derive some commercial advantage from each other’.