This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  Secondary and unloved, the army was also small. In 1715, the British army—spread between Britain, Ireland, North America, India, the West Indies and the Mediterranean—was about the same size as the king of Sardinia’s. By the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain’s empire was by far the largest the world had ever seen, the country’s army was about the same size as Switzerland’s. Outside Britain and India, the army numbered just 41,000 men. The Roman army had deployed more legionnaires than that in England alone.

  Sharply restricted in terms of its European capabilities, the British army’s psyche was deeply shaped by that restriction. With the huge success of German conscript armies in 1866 and 1870, all leading European states, barring Britain, followed suit: conscripting men, training them, drilling them. ‘The effect’, wrote leading military historian John Keegan, ‘was to maintain inside European civil society a second, submerged and normally invisible military society, millions strong, of men who had shouldered a rifle, marched in step, borne the lash of a sergeant’s tongue and learnt to obey orders.’ Such armies militarized society, their status endowing them with a strut, a martial arrogance, not given to their humbler British cousins.

  It’s this lack of strut, of ‘histrionics’, which is most genuinely remarkable about the British army. We should bear in mind that armies are seeking to do something almost impossible. They are there to dispense extreme violence to other human beings when called upon to do so, yet are asked to form an orderly part of normal civilized society at all other times. This is a big ask. In most places, most of the time, the warrior class has taken great care to distinguish itself, to call attention to its exalted status, all clashing boot-heels and swooshing testosterone. The British army has some of this, of course,* but on the whole its army affects something almost self-deprecatory. Officer cadets at Sandhurst are expected to change into ‘civvies’ when not on active duty; officers in the mess call each other by their first names, as the mess dissolves all rank below the level of colonel. That civilian aspiration has even been visible in the uniforms worn: according to John Keegan again, British field marshals of the First World War ‘in their whipcord breeches and glittering riding boots’ resembled nothing so much as ‘masters of foxhounds’. Rather than the army lending its character to the society, the British army has emphatically been moulded by the society that formed it.

  This curious reticence is reflected in our national literature. The Napoleonic Wars were celebrated by Frenchman Victor Hugo in Les Misérables; the Russian contribution was famously honoured by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Yet in victorious Britain, the most famous literary monument is Thackeray’s comic and bathetic rendition of Waterloo in Vanity Fair. Two generations later comes the next major British war, and its most famous literary landmark would be Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, which celebrated martial valour for sure, but only in the context of a major-league and costly balls-up. The First World War would in turn generate a huge literature, and often a deeply patriotic one, yet that literature was again almost entirely devoid of bloodlust.

  In short, British ambivalence about the army’s very nature and existence has bred a military culture with less arrogance than most, more humanity than many. Of course, a successful army is not usually a pretty sight, and Britain’s has had its share of ugly episodes. Yet even in its moments of brutality, the British army has often not been without some kind of countervailing pressure too: a revulsion against that brutalilty; a protest, even. An ancedote related by Niall Ferguson makes the point. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, British reprisals were savage: war crimes, as we’d rightly call them today. Following the relief of Lucknow, a young boy, supporting an elderly man, threw himself on the mercy and protection of a British officer. That officer put a gun to the child’s head. He pulled the trigger once. The gun misfired. He tried again. The gun misfired. He tried a third time, with the same result. Then he had one further go. This time the weapon worked. The boy fell down dead. To quote Niall Ferguson:

  To read this story is to be reminded of the way SS officers behaved towards Jews during the Second World War. Yet there is one difference. The British soldiers who witnessed this murder loudly condemned the officer’s action, at first crying ‘shame’ and giving vent to ‘indignation and outcries’ when the gun went off. It was seldom, if ever, that German soldiers in a similar situation openly criticized a superior.

  There perhaps is the point. Armies aren’t humane organizations, in any normal sense of the term. They can’t be. Violence is their purpose. But, in the extraordinary and desperate circumstances of war, we can at least ask that the army’s culture uphold the better values of the culture that surrounds it. The British army—small, professional, underloved, unhistrionic—has managed that challenge better than most.

  * We’re not the most bellicose nation, however. According to Niall Ferguson’s reworking of statistics first compiled by Jack Levy, of 125 major wars since 1495, France fought 50, Austria 47 and Spain 44. England/Britain lies just outside the medal positions with 43.

  * No country has a greater degree of regimentalism than the UK. Elsewhere regiments are often not much more than a way to organize troop numbers. British regiments, by contrast, jealously guard their own culture and traditions, busbies, bearskins and all. The importance of such traditions is exactly what you’d expect, given the context. After all, if the society doesn’t properly honour its army, then the army had better find ways to honour itself.

  PRESIDENT MONROE’S TROUSERS

  At Trafalgar in 1805, the British fleet defeated not one navy but two. The French fleet was battered, the Spanish one all but destroyed.

  For Spain, that was only the start of the bad news. Three years later, in 1808, Napoleon invaded the country, deposed the king and placed his own brother on the throne. Spain’s colonial possessions in Latin America were immediately under threat. Not only had they been weakened by the unfavourable contrast between Spain’s authoritarian colonialism and Britain’s own more liberal version, it was now pretty clear that the ruling regime in Madrid lacked any real legitimacy of its own. A slew of independence movements sprang up all across the region. Argentina declared its allegiance to the deposed king in 1810. Chile declared independence the same year. Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia all followed soon after. Without a fleet to convey an army or threaten action, Spain had no way of responding.

  Time passed. Napoleon was defeated. A restored monarchy in Spain did what it could to recover the lost territory. The other principal powers of the age, including Britain and the United States, didn’t approve of Spanish action, but did nothing decisive to prevent it.

  Then, in 1823, President Monroe of the United States waded in. On 2 December, in a message to Congress, he declared:

  that we should consider any attempt on [the part of Spain or Portugal] to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it…we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

  By the standards of the age, this was blunt speaking indeed. President Monroe was telling Spain and Portugal to butt out of the Americas or face the armed wrath of the USA. History recalls this declaration as the Monroe Doctrine. It’s a phrase that most of us will have heard. The confidently threatening declaration seems to foreshadow the mighty impact that the USA would come to have on world history in the twentieth century.

  Only—and here’s the thing—President Monroe was all mouth and no trouser. Monroe’s United States had no navy to speak of and not much of an army either. If Spain had chosen to stamp her control over her former colonies, there wasn’t a whole bunch the United States would have been able
to do about it, short of building up some armed forces pretty much from scratch.

  If the US was toothless, Britain was anything but. British liberals strongly sympathized with the Latin American nationalists, while British capitalists welcomed the commercial opportunities that would flow from a more open trading environment. Ideology and commerce being thus neatly aligned, Britain warned Spain against re-establishing her rule. The warning, backed by overwhelming naval force, proved decisive. Without access to the sea, Spain was powerless to act and her Latin American possessions became ex-colonies, colonies that had ceased to be.

  So much for Spain. With Portugal, long a British ally, things were not vastly more subtle. In 1825, with the Portuguese wavering about their future colonial policy, the British issued a stern warning—and, just in case the warning wasn’t clear enough, they parked a substantial war fleet outside Lisbon to back it up. The Portuguese got the message and Brazil too got its independence.

  The history here is interesting enough, but the really intriguing bit is this. Britain liberated half a continent from colonial rule, and virtually nobody knows it. It’s an episode almost expunged from our collective memory. Even historians neglect the fact. The (generally outstanding) Oxford History of the Royal Navy, for example, doesn’t give the entire business so much as a sentence. Indeed, the one element of the entire story that’s percolated through to the national consciousness is President Monroe’s ringing—but trouserless—declaration.

  What’s going on? Two things, I think, one specific to this story, one not. The non-specific part is simply that we are wonderfully forgetful about our own past. It was a Briton who invented the electronic computer—but not one in fifty of us could put a name to the inventor. We believe that Britain has suffered no successful foreign invasion since 1066—and somehow we manage to blot the torrent of other invasions, successful and unsuccessful, from our consciousness. Compared with forgetting about a dozen or more invasions of our own country, forgetting about our role in Latin America seems rather simple.

  At the risk of (temporarily) diminishing our capacity for happy oblivion, there’s one specific issue from the Latin American episode that seems worth highlighting. These days, we tend to view the British Empire as a simple tale of land-grab, exploitation and hopelessly asymmetric warfare. Our armed forces, including the navy, can come to seem simply like the jackboot on the end of the violent, imperial foot. There’s plenty of truth in this picture, of course, but the story of empire contains much else besides, and it would be quite wrong of us simply to retain in our memory all the elements that fit our simple picture (the massacre at Amritsar, for example) and to expunge all those that don’t. Our role in freeing Latin America would be one such example, but there are plenty of others too. Would you care to speculate as to which major naval power did much to secure Greek victory in their war of independence? Or hazard a guess as to whose ships cleared Borneo of slavery and piracy? Or conjecture who might have made their extraordinarily accurate naval charts available free of charge to the shipping of the entire world? Yep, that’s right. President Monroe it wasn’t.

  SCIENCE

  THE FIRST SCIENTIST

  Who was the first ever scientist?

  There are some ancient Greek claimants to the title, also perhaps some Indian and Arab ones, but on the whole early advances in scientific knowledge were either mathematical in nature or mixed observation and wild theory in a way that could hardly be described as scientific. And in Europe, at least, for more than a thousand years after the decline of Greece, nothing even vaguely resembling science was being pursued: the Dark Ages, indeed.

  Then came the annus mirabilis of 1543. In that same year, two of the most important documents in scientific history were published. The first was De Humani Corporis Fabrica (‘On the Structure of the Human Body’), written by one Andreas Vesalius.* The book was closely based on the teachings of the Greek physician Galen. It’s hard to overemphasize how influential Galen had been. Lectures in anatomy were often based less on the dissection of human or animal corpses, and more on a close textual analysis of what Galen had written. Anatomy professors tended to stand at a good distance from the corpse, while a barber-surgeon did the messy stuff.

  Vesalius changed all that. In part, he did it by correcting some of Galen’s errors, and making a big song and dance about so doing. Often enough, though, Vesalius simply repeated Galen’s mistakes, propagating them for a whole new generation. Yet his book was revolutionary. New printing technology made it affordable to reproduce beautifully engraved woodcuts to illustrate the text. In a sense, it didn’t matter too much what Vesalius said, when his pictures spoke so much louder than any words. No one who had turned the wonderfully illustrated pages could any longer think that anatomy was something to be studied with a dictionary. The new anatomy was all about seeing: observing nature, not reading about it.

  It was a huge change, a revolutionary change, a change that marked the start of the scientific revolution, but Vesalius couldn’t truly be considered the first complete scientist. He began the process of correcting flawed observations, but no new theory was born. No experiments had been conducted, no new laws identified. Perhaps a better claimant for the title was Copernicus. In 1543, the same year that the young Vesalius launched into print, Copernicus—old and close to death—published the book that would immortalize his name. His work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’), postulated that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa. Although similar ideas had been formulated in ancient Greece, India and the Arab world, Copernicus’s ideas were certainly the most comprehensive and detailed. He didn’t simply figure out that the earth revolved round the sun, he worked out the motion of other planets, the order of those planets, and he understood that the earth’s axis must be tilted, thus creating seasons. What Copernicus produced, in fact, was a comprehensive new theory of celestial motion—systematic, comprehensive and mathematically elegant.

  If Vesalius lacked the theoretical scope to be called the first complete scientist, then Copernicus was lacking on the empirical side. He made no observations to prove his theory. Indeed, the first preface to the book (which Copernicus himself had nothing to do with) said, in effect, ‘this book contains a convenient mathematical shortcut for working out the movement of the planets, but don’t for a moment think that this model is actually intended to be true.’ The preface was a travesty of what Copernicus himself actually thought. (Indeed, as if in protest, the old man died of a cerebral haemorrhage shortly after receiving the first printed copy of his work.) But the fact that the preface could even have been written points up the limitations of what Copernicus had done. It was a vast achievement—a turning point in intellectual history—but its essence was theoretical, not empirical.

  Modern science still has its Copernicuses. Stephen Hawking is a modern-day example: a theoretician who has never needed to mess around in a laboratory or squint starwards through giant telescopes. Contemporary science also has its Vesaliuses: field biologists who go out collecting, anatomizing and categorizing, but without aiming to prove any great new general theories of anything. In between these two ends of the spectrum, however, there are countless scientists who observe nature, perform experiments and build theories. It is this activity, performed in a systematic, disciplined way, which is the heart and soul of the scientific enterprise.

  And the first man to understand that enterprise—and not just understand it, but actually do it? Enter the Englishman William Gilbert. Born in 1544, Gilbert went to Cambridge and trained as a doctor. Then, most likely in the early 1570s, he began the series of experiments that were the first truly modern example of scientific endeavour.

  Back in those days, there was a lot of interest in electrical charge and magnetism, which were thought to be manifestations of the same thing. Amber rubbed with fur would attract small bits of straw and suchlike. A magnet would attract iron and might attract or repel other magnets, depending on whi
ch face was presented. But none of these observations had been put into any coherent theoretical order, and even the observations were liable to be ludicrously exaggerated.

  Gilbert sorted through all this. His first task was to tackle electric charge. Amber was thought to gain its charge from the warming effect of rubbing. Gilbert exposed this as nonsense, warming the amber by other means and demonstrating the lack of attraction. He found that electric charge could be carried in a number of other materials, not only amber. He showed that whereas magnetic attraction seemed to carry effortlessly through solid objects, electrical charge did not. He theorized that when a body was electrified through friction, a ‘humour’ was removed, leaving an ‘effluvium’ or atmosphere around the body. If we update the language and substitute ‘charge’ for ‘humour’ and ‘electric field’ for ‘effluvium’, then Gilbert’s theory is essentially identical with modern concepts. It was Gilbert who coined the Latin word electricum, from which electricity is derived.

  Turning his attention to magnets, Gilbert performed the same work of detailed experimentation and cautious, accurate theorization. He understood that the earth was a giant magnet. He understood that a magnet needle dips below the horizontal, and that the angle of the dip was dependent on latitude. He worked out the directions of internal magnetic fields, the polarity of a cut magnet, and explored the processes of magnetization and demagnetization. His work on what we’d now call magnetostatics was so complete that in 1859 the physicist William Whewell would write, ‘Gilbert’s work contains all the fundamental facts of the science, so fully examined, indeed, that even at this day we have little to add to them.’