by Neil Oliver
Although he never actually used the words “Women and children first,” Seton made it clear to everyone aboard just who would be taking up the first places in the available boats. The officers’ families had been safely rounded up and were now ushered aboard one of the cutters. Wives cried out for husbands and children for their fathers, but there was nothing else for it. Nothing like this had ever been done before, aboard a naval vessel or any other. Previously, when all hope was lost, it had been every man for himself. But here aboard the Birkenhead the past was erased and the future shaped. The young officers and men of the 74th and the other regiments were about to set a new standard.
Seton selected a young ensign of the 74th, 19-year-old Alexander Cumming Russell, to take charge of the women and children’s cutter and see it to safety. Fearing the worst, Seton then positioned himself at the foot of the gangplank leading aboard the little boat and drew his sword. He was ready to repel any would-be boarders—but not one man stepped out of line.
Instead they remained where their officers had told them to be. Some in night clothes, some half-dressed in their uniforms and some naked, they had come to order. Shoulders back, eyes front and chins up, they looked into the starry southern sky while the women and children were rowed away from the Birkenhead.
The places in the remaining serviceable lifeboats were filled using the system the Army has always called “Funeral Order”—youngest first—and these too were lowered into the sea and rowed clear of the ship.
Thinking he might move his vessel off the rocks that had holed her, Salmond ordered the engines to be put into reverse. If they could get out into open water, he thought, perhaps the buoyancy trapped in other parts of the ship would keep her afloat. As it turned out, the effect of his plan was catastrophic. A second rip was torn through the iron plates of the hull and now seawater gushed into the engine room as well. The fires heating the boilers were immediately extinguished by the deluge, and smoke and steam billowed up on to the deck from below. With that final hope dashed, Salmond issued an order to have all the horses led into the sea. The terrified animals were blindfolded before being manhandled out of their stalls and into the water. But although it had been thought they might strike out for land, most were quickly drowned or taken by sharks, their whinnies and screams serving as a foretaste of what might be to come.
Some time later the Birkenhead broke her back upon the reef. She started to lean crazily, but still Seton called for order from his officers and men, willing them to hold their places. And there they stayed, neatly in their lines as the deck bucked and slid beneath them. The ship’s funnel finally gave in to the forces of gravity and snapped off at its base. It tumbled down on to the deck, killing or maiming a group of soldiers and sailors as they worked to try to free another of the lifeboats.
Captain Salmond had climbed up into the rigging—either to try to stay clear of the water or to find a better place from which to address the soldiers. From his perch he shouted at them to get into the water now and swim towards the lifeboats.
“Save yourselves while you still can,” he called. “Those of you who can swim—jump overboard and swim towards the boats. It is your only hope of salvation.”
Hearing him, Seton raised his sword above his head and shouted out to his soldiers. He knew what must be done, what must be endured, and his voice cracked with the emotion of it all: “You will swamp the cutter containing the women and children,” he cried. “I implore you not to do this thing and I ask you all to stand fast!”
Not a man broke ranks, though the deck rose beneath them and only the sea and the sharks awaited. The officers took up the call too—urging their men to hold the line. And so they did. Green youngsters they might have been when they boarded the Birkenhead, but they were men now. Their last remaining duty was to preserve the lives of the women and children and that was what they were going to do.
As the water rose around them, and while the women, children and youngest of the soldiers looked on from the little boats, the officers and soldiers shook hands with one another and said goodbye. One man’s voice rose above the din of the ship’s dying: “God bless you all,” he said. “God bless you all!”
Captain Wright of the 91st Regiment, who made it away from the wreck and lived to fight another day, said later:
The order and regularity that prevailed on board, from the moment the ship struck till she totally disappeared, far exceeded anything that I had thought could be affected by the best discipline; and it is the more to be wondered at, seeing that most of the soldiers were but a short time in the service.
Every man did as he was directed and there was not a cry or a murmur among them until the vessel made her final plunge. All received their orders and had them carried out as if the men were embarking instead of going to the bottom of the sea; there was only one difference, that I never saw any embarkation conducted with so little noise or confusion.
Quickly now the ship began to slip beneath the waves. Soon only the top parts of her masts and rigging were visible and pockets of men clung there before their strength failed them and they disappeared. For many of those in the water, time was short. Sharks circled for a while and then, emboldened by numbers, began to move in for the kill. Men cried out as the great fish closed on them and plucked away one after another. Who could have imagined such a thing? Hundreds of impoverished young men, who had left behind a country blighted by famine in hope of a better life, ending up as food for sharks. In spite of all that irony and agony, not one made a move for the three lifeboats standing off many yards distant but still within reach.
Driven beyond endurance by what they were witnessing, however, the women in the cutter commanded by Ensign Russell eventually insisted it be rowed back toward the struggling men. None of the soldiers would reach out to accept the help being offered to them, none would disobey his orders. One family spotted their father and called out to him. He too refused to approach, but Ensign Russell jumped into the water and helped the man to take his place in the cutter. Seeing the husband and father reunited with his family, the teenager struck out for shore. He was taken by sharks before he had made 20 strokes, and disappeared from sight.
He was not alone. In all more than 430 men died that morning. Captain Salmond was killed when one of the ship’s masts fell on top of him. Lieutenant Colonel Seton was last seen among his men, but perished along with most of them.
Every single woman and child was saved.
There were other miracles too: one young officer managed to swim the three miles to the shore and, when he clambered gratefully out of the surf, found his horse standing there waiting for him. Some hours later, the schooner Lioness came across one of the lifeboats and took the survivors aboard. She carried on until she reached the scene of the tragedy and her crewmen managed to pull some more survivors out of the water. Fewer than 200 had lived to tell the tale of the Birkenhead.
News of the loss did not reach Britain until April—but the reports from the survivors ensured a place in legend for the officers and soldiers who had given their lives for the sake of the few. When the king of Prussia, Frederick Wilhelm, later the first German emperor, was told of the event, he ordered that an account of it be posted in every barracks of his army. This, he said, was the standard of behavior he expected from his men.
By their actions, Seton and his men changed maritime protocol forever. The cry of “Women and children first” is more properly described as “the Birkenhead Drill.” This, then, is their memorial and their greatest monument.
Half a century later, Kipling immortalized the greatness of it all in his poem “Soldier an’ Sailor Too,” which he dedicated to the Royal Marines:
To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you’ve cover to ’and, an’ leave an’ likin’ to shout;
But to stand an’ be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,
An’ they done it, the Jollies—’Er Majes
ty’s Jollies—soldier an’ sailor too!
Their work was done when it ’adn’t begun; they was younger nor me an’ you;
Their choice it was plain between drownin’ in ’eaps an’ bein’ mopped by the screw,
So they stood an’ was still to the Birken’ead drill, soldier an’ sailor too!
The last word on the matter comes from a history of the 74th. The action taken by the men during the Birkenhead tragedy, it said:
…sheds more glory upon those who took part in it than a hundred well-fought battles.
For England’s sake and duty
I first read about the Birkenhead Drill in one of my mom and dad’s copies of Reader’s Digest. The story was featured in one of the magazine’s regular sections under the heading “Drama in Real Life”—1,500 words usually given over to accounts of hapless kids falling down wells on their parents’ farms in the Australian outback, or hunters in Africa cornered by rogue elephants or man-eating lions. But this story about a Victorian shipwreck was different. For a start, there was no happy ending—which was unusual from the pages of “Drama in Real Life”—and furthermore, the way those soldiers had behaved in their final moments was no accident.
I’d recently seen the film Jaws for the first time as well, so treading water in a shark-infested sea was particularly easy for me to visualize that year. In particular, I remembered the monologue by Robert Shaw, Captain Quint of the Orca, about most of the crew of the USS Indianapolis being eaten alive by sharks after they delivered the Hiroshima bomb in 1945.
That was another true story, but those American sailors had been lost in the open sea beyond sight of land and with no hope of rescue. The soldiers from the Birkenhead, on the other hand, were within swimming distance of three lifeboats, albeit lifeboats packed with women and children. Most of them were just young—teenagers some of them, probably. They didn’t know those women and children personally, didn’t owe them anything—so why had they sacrificed themselves to save them? Why had they chosen grisly death over a chance at life? How had they found the strength to do such a thing? I thought about it for weeks.
Scott might well have imagined it was a quiet life he was after—but events conspired to shape his destiny in a different way. As part of the quest for normality—and the resumption of his Navy career—he’d joined HMS Victorious as flag-captain in August 1906. Soon afterward, while on duty in the Mediterranean, fate ensured his path crossed again with that of Sir Clements Markham. The old man made it quite clear to Captain Scott that the further exploration of Antarctica was the patriotic duty of Englishmen—if any flag were to be raised over the South Pole it must be the Union Jack.
Duty is an old-fashioned concept now, as outmoded as the wearing of caps and standing up when a lady enters the room. Boys and men hardly ever talk about it—and when they do it’s only to describe the allocated time spent by soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan: a tour of duty. But there was a time when duty was an unavoidable responsibility. If you were born male, you had a duty to live up to that birthright and not let the side down. Nobody chose duty. It just arrived along with an Adam’s apple, a deeper voice and the need to shave.
For Captain Robert Falcon Scott, duty was everything. When an elder of the tribe like Sir Clements Markham had to remind you of your duty, you were already perilously close to resigning as a male, let alone as a manly man. There was no choice in the matter of duty—no opt-out clause and no alternative. It wasn’t like choosing home economics instead of physics, or a letter from your mom instead of cross-country running. When those soldiers of the Birkenhead went into the water, and as the big fish circled ever closer, they knew it was right and proper that the women and children were safe in the boats. By staying put and accepting their fate they weren’t just obeying orders. They were doing their duty.
In Scott’s world, examples of duty—and of duty done—were all around. If you needed reminding, you only had to look back into the recent past.
The Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade
As World War II in Europe entered its closing stages in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met in the town of Yalta, in the Crimea, to discuss the coming spoils. During a break in the talks Churchill asked Stalin if he might be allowed to visit a nearby battlefield. Stalin gave his permission and Churchill was taken to a valley near the harbor town of Balaclava on the Black Sea.
As recently as the previous year the area had been the scene of savage fighting, when the last of as many as 100,000 Soviet troops had died fighting uphill against heavily fortified German positions. The whole place was peppered with ordnance—both spent and unexploded. Between 1942 and 1944 something like 10 tons of high explosive were detonated for every square meter of ground there. Today the place is given over to vineyards that produce a good-quality sparkling white wine—and still the soil is thick with shell fragments, bullet cases and pulverized human bones.
It wasn’t the latest horror that interested Churchill, however. Instead he wanted to cast his historian’s eye over the site of a cavalry charge that had taken place over some of the same ground nearly a century before. Churchill was no stranger to the tactics of cavalrymen—as a 24-year-old he had taken part in the British Army’s last ever cavalry charge at a place called Omdurman, during the Sudan campaign of 1898—and believed he had conducted himself with all the sangfroid required of an Englishman. “I never felt the slightest nervousness,” young Winston told his mother afterward. “I felt as cool as I do now.”
With such experience under his belt, he wanted to look over terrain described by the poet Tennyson as “The Valley of Death.” For here near Balaclava were the scenes of two moments immortal in all the history of war—performed during the most famous few hours of chaos ever deliberately unleashed by fighting men. Madness and heroism, futility and flair, quixotic dash and monumental stupidity—all of that and everything else besides was there, in the Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade.
During the middle years of the 19th century, great European powers circled like vultures around the ailing Ottoman Empire. Left behind by the industrialization of Russia and the nations of the West, it had long since ceased to wield the power and influence of its glory days. Under the reign of Suleiman I, or Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), its territory had stretched from Persia to Morocco and from the Austrian border to Yemen. But during the 18th century its control and influence had begun slowly and steadily to evaporate in the heat of industrial revolution elsewhere.
Already picking at the living flesh was Tsar Nicholas, who saw in the “sick man” an opportunity too tempting to resist. Russia’s southward expansion via the Bosphorus had always been blocked at Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. By swallowing the right parts of the Ottoman Empire, he knew, his Black Sea Fleet could make its way through that narrow waterway, past the Dardanelles and out into the rich pickings of the Mediterranean. For as long as the old empire was in its weakened state, Europe’s back door was effectively open.
Britain and France had other ideas, however. The prospect of Russia making uncontested land-grabs on Europe’s eastern extreme—and then sending her ships south and west—was hardly one they relished. Subtle (some might say underhand) diplomacy by all parties eventually ran its course. The Russian Black Sea fleet surprised and destroyed the Turkish fleet at its base at Sinope and her troops were sent across the Danube. The time for talking had apparently passed, and Britain, France and Russia, together with their various allies, stumbled into what some historians have described as the first “world” war.
Of all the protagonists, Britain had the least business making war on a modern adversary. Since the final crushing of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, Britain had exercised her aggressive side only on tribal peoples in territories like India and southern Africa. The British Empire had begun to grow during this time—but as a by-product of trade. Not because Britain wanted to conquer, but out of a desire to harvest the riches of the wider world.
Fighting
and conquest were really the least of it. As a result, in the years following the Napoleonic era Britain’s Army sank into the decline of neglect. In India the necessary fighting was conducted not by the British Army as such but by the privately maintained forces of the East India Company. In southern Africa, Britain’s adversaries came armed only with spears and shields. The British Army had a more clearly defined role as a police force than as a weapon for extending frontiers, and by the 1820s it numbered no more than 80,000 men. By the end of the 1840s the strength was up to 100,000, but when the need arose for a force capable of tackling Tsarist Russia, in 1854, it wasn’t just a question of numbers.
The six British divisions that boarded ships for transport to the Crimea—five of infantry and one of cavalry—were handicapped first and foremost by a lack of back-room organization. Since 1815 the whole infrastructure of the British Army had either been allowed to atrophy or been cut away altogether. Gone was the wagon train, the means of supplying an army fighting in far-off places. Gone too was the staff office, that part of the Army whose job it is to keep abreast of the whole nature of warfare—most crucially, what the other guys are doing. What was left of the organizational framework was hopelessly muddled. Control was spread across more than a dozen different government departments, whose various duties overlapped.
Just as bad was the perpetuation of the tradition that favored class over training and ability when it came to career advancement. The British Army of 1854 was one that still looked down its nose at the “intellectual” soldier who had bothered to study his craft and learn the lore of tactics and intelligent command. During the Napoleonic Wars, Sir John Moore and his ilk had begun the process of modernizing the Army to take account of ability, but during the peaceful years that followed Waterloo the momentum of change was lost. In the 1850s, therefore, rank was still something you bought and the upper classes knew, without having to think about it, that the ability to lead men to victory was a product of breeding, nothing more and nothing less.