The Making Of The British Army (34 page)

Nor was it just a matter of numbers. The whole system of divisional and brigade command, including the experienced staff, was dismantled. The army at home reverted to its earliest form – a loose association of regiments supervised in only the most elementary way by general officers in command of military districts designed to support the local civil power.
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The short-service enlistment brought in during the war was replaced by ‘enlistment for life’, or twenty-one years (in 1847 it was reduced to ten for cavalry and fourteen for infantry, with an option to serve to twenty-one for a pension). Barracks, usually overcrowded and insanitary, became the rule rather than the exception to the former system of billeting. And in the decades after Waterloo, four out of every ten men who lived in them were Irish.

The army became increasingly set apart – either overseas or behind barrack walls. Soldiers were seen less about the streets after Acts of Parliament founded the Metropolitan Police and the county forces. But while recruits were always hard to come by, officers were not. The sons of the aristocracy and gentry were still propelled towards the army by an aversion to trade only too often accompanied by an incapacity for the learned professions. Purchase returned with a vengeance – at vastly overinflated prices and, with peace, little free promotion. The regiments became not only increasingly autonomous once more, but increasingly closed, the officers ever smarter, the rank and file once again enlisted from the lowest order of men – Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’. Indeed, it is difficult not to recall Dr Johnson’s observation of an earlier age that no man would enlist who could get himself into prison, for A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better
company.’ The soldier had indeed less space than that to which a prisoner was entitled, and mortality in barracks was higher than in jail.
⁸⁸

Equally unhealthily, as the mirror image of the generally despised soldiery in their shunned barracks, the officers, in the words of one historian, ‘became ever more stiff-necked and haughty, rigid in social etiquette and distinctions, and dominated by a hierarchy of birth, wealth, kinship, connexion and fashion’.
⁸⁹
Even if this had been only half true – and the description was probably nearer to the half truth than to the whole – it would not have been a situation conducive to efficiency. Those who could not afford the exclusivity of life in regiments at home had little option but to seek a less expensive life in a regiment abroad: the purchase system and the long peace meant that money frequently drove out capability from the home-based regiments, for it was often the more impecunious officers who studied their profession more – even if only for want of the means of expensive recreation.

And so there developed, in effect, two armies: the one at home, wearing ever more elaborate and expensive uniform and turning out from time to time at the magistrates’ bidding; and the other far from home (and a long time away from home), doing the fighting. In India during the decade after Waterloo there was continuous skirmishing, culminating in one of the great set-piece sieges – at Bhurtpore, where Lord Combermere, who as Sir Stapleton Cotton had commanded Wellington’s cavalry throughout the Peninsular War, took the fortress that had defeated every attempt to storm it for fifty years (and in a fashion that his old chief at Badajoz would have approved). There was a bloody and sickly war with the Burmese; there was fighting with various tribes throughout the new Cape Colony in southern Africa. There was war in West Africa with the Ashanti; in Kandy (Ceylon) to suppress revolt; and in China in 1839 over control of the opium trade. Out of that last war Britain gained Hong Kong; and out of war with the
Gurkhas of Nepal it gained its quite extraordinary ‘mercenary’ regiments of tough natural soldiers who have since served alongside British regiments from the Far East to the Falklands – and on the same terms of soldierly respect that the King’s German Legion enjoyed during the Napoleonic Wars. There is a story, related by Field Marshal Lord Slim in his account of the 14th Army during the Second World War –
Defeat into Victory –
of troops being served food in a rest area in India by ‘memsahib’ volunteers, with serving points to cater for the various diets of the different regiments – Sikhs, Hindus and Mohammedans (as they then were called). Several Gurkha soldiers had joined the British queue by mistake, and when they came to be served the volunteer pointed out that this was not their queue: they wanted the one ‘over there’ – to which the British soldier behind protested: ‘No, Miss. Them’s Gurkhas. Them’s
us!
’

But if a ready respect, affection and affiliation came out of the Nepali War of 1816, a more grudging, wary respect and alienation came out of war with the Afghans between 1839 and 1842 – in the opinion of Field Marshal Lord Carver ‘probably the worst conceived and executed of all Britain’s politico-military ventures’ (which after the disastrous reverses of the Burmese War was indeed saying something). The First Afghan War, sparked by the not irrational but grossly inflated fear of Russian designs on India, was an affair of evasions, compromises and groundless optimism that precipitated a shocking series of massacres of British and East India Company troops, including – almost unbelievably – 4,500 men and 12,000 camp followers en route to the Khyber Pass in January 1842.

At their head was the 60-year-old Major-General William Elphinstone, who though an unquestionably brave man (he had commanded the 33rd Foot, the duke of Wellington’s old regiment, at Waterloo) had not seen action since that day on the ridge at Mont St Jean. Gouty and terminally indecisive, he made the error of trusting to an assurance of safe passage from Kabul, surrendering his artillery and taking few tactical precautions. Within a week the Ghilzai tribesmen and the snow and bitter cold had done their worst. Harassed for 30 miles of treacherous gorges and passes along the Kabul River, his only King’s (British) regiment, the 44th (Essex), and the few others that remained made a heroic last stand at the Gandamak Pass.
⁹⁰
The only Briton to escape was Dr William Brydon, who staggered to the besieged garrison at Jellalabad on his starving horse, which promptly dropped
dead. There could have been no more dramatic a signal that Afghans were not men to be subdued as easily as their neighbours to the south – and were cunning too, for why allow Brydon to escape when he could easily have been cut down by a Ghilzai’s
tulwar
, or sniped with
a jezail
? Perhaps even then the Afghans had an understanding of propaganda and psychological warfare: better one survivor to keep the tale alive than every last man slaughtered with no witness – as Lady (Elizabeth) Butler’s powerful painting of Brydon’s arrival at Jellalabad,
The Remnants of an Army
(1879), showed only too painfully.

Elphinstone’s disaster was an example of the extremes of ‘honour’ that had grown distorted in the post-Waterloo army. It was as if the army of 1815 had been reduced and then preserved in aspic in the belief that what had beaten the French could beat anyone. The duke of Wellington’s resistance to change took a powerful hold on too many senior officers, and even as late as the 1850s he was still wary of innovation: when asked to approve the introduction of the new Minié rifle, he did so with the warning ‘but don’t call it a rifle or they’ll all want to be riflemen!’ But the difference was that in 1815 the army had been commanded by a general of experience and instinctive sound judgement: it is inconceivable that even in his most reactionary old age the duke would have undertaken a retreat from Kabul without precautions, and trusting in the word of anyone but a Prince Blücher.

The three generals at Balaklava in whose hands the fate of the Light Brigade rested that day in October 1854 were not in Wellington’s division, or even league. Their paths to the top – Lord Raglan as commander-in-chief of the army in the Crimea, Lord Lucan as commander of the cavalry division, and Lord Cardigan as commander of the Light Brigade – are as ever instructive, and in these cases more improbable even than in the most inventive work of fiction. Raglan had not heard a shot fired since Waterloo, when as Lord FitzRoy Somerset he had been ADC to the duke – in fact, for most of the subsequent forty years he had been the duke’s military secretary. His manners were perfect, his distaste for anything ungentlemanlike was profound, and his unsuitability for anything but the most courtly exchange with the French was remarkable.
⁹¹
His approach to any problem was to try to
imagine what the duke would have done – that is, what the duke would have done had the Russians been the French and had the Crimea been the Peninsula. Indeed, more than once he absently referred to the French as the enemy.

A Colonel Beatson of the East India Company’s army had offered to raise a troop of
bashi bazouks –
irregular Ottoman cavalry – to supplement the Heavy and Light Brigades. Beatson had been a soldier from the age of 16, had spent most of his life fighting in India, and had commanded
bashi bazouks
in Bulgaria in 1854. Raglan turned him down rather sniffily and then dismissed his offer to serve on his staff. Beatson then offered his services to Lucan, who had been on half-pay (not at active duty) for so long that he did not know the new words of command for manœuvring cavalry. Lucan dismissed him with equal contempt; and Cardigan did likewise. India was simply not a place where a gentleman practised war, and it was unthinkable that anyone but a gentleman could have anything to say on the matter to another gentleman. Such was the
reductio ad absurdum
of the Wellington code. Scarlett of the Heavy Brigade, on the other hand, had seen at once the advantage of having Beatson at his side, and so took him on as an additional ADC – for which the whole of the Heavy Brigade would have cause to be grateful, since it was Beatson’s advice that helped steer Scarlett to charge.

Later that day, sitting with the Light Brigade at the head of Tennyson’s ‘valley of death’, Lucan received the written order: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns.’ This he failed to relate to the previous order from Raglan.
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Had he done so he might have put two and two together and realized that the guns at the end of the valley – the only ones he could see – were not the guns to which Raglan referred. Had he also had the presence of mind to challenge an order that made no tactical sense whatever (the guns he could see were unlimbered ready for action: they were clearly not being carried off, nor were they any threat to Balaklava port itself or its
defenders), and whose outcome could only be the destruction of one half of his command, he could have been forgiven for disdaining the services of an ‘Indian’ officer like Beatson. And had he conceived of some tactical plan more subtle than the frontal charge that he believed he was being ordered to execute (Raglan’s order included the useful information that ‘Horse artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left’) then the laurels would rightly have been his. Afterwards, with the Light Brigade all but destroyed as a fighting force, Raglan strongly reprimanded him: ‘Lord Lucan, you were a lieutenant-general and should therefore have exercised your discretion, and, not approving of the charge, should not have caused it to be made.’

Raglan’s reprimand was in fact a fundamental statement of generalship. And there was a famously instructive reversal of Lucan’s dereliction in this regard a century and a half later in the altercation between the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the US General Wesley Clark, and the then Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson commanding the NATO force preparing to evict the Serbs from Kosovo. The Russians had sent a flying column to seize Pristina airport, and Clark wanted Jackson to stop them. Jackson, who considered the order futile and likely to end in serious bloodshed, protested, but Clark repeated the order baldly, to which the lieutenant-general (the rank is colloquially known as ‘three-star’
⁹³
) replied, ‘Sir, I’m a three-star general, you can’t give me orders like this. I have my own judgement of the situation …’

Lucan had no such judgement, and his all-round incapability – the troops called him ‘Lord Look-on’ – was made worse not only by his disdaining the services of the likes of Colonel Beatson but also by his despising another ‘Indian’ officer, Captain Louis Nolan of the 15th Hussars. Nolan was one of Raglan’s ADCs, and the man who had carried the order down from the Causeway Heights on which the commander-in-chief and his staff sat with a perfect but wholly different view of the battlefield from Lucan’s.

‘Lord Raglan wishes you to attack immediately!’ was Nolan’s verbal addition to the written order, accurately relaying the last words that Raglan had spoken to him.

‘Attack? Attack what, sir? What guns?’ spluttered Lucan to the
despised Nolan, who was not only an Indiaman but a man who had had the impertinence and bad taste to write a book about cavalry.

But surprisingly – and as a reminder that in war only the unexpected should be expected – what should have been the Indiaman’s faithful
coup d’œil
now failed Nolan. Instead of at once comprehending the differences of perspective (Raglan sat high on a hill: he could see much more, and the guns he meant were on the heights, being pulled away by Russian cavalry with lassos) he exploded in contempt for the man he saw as the antithesis of cavalry dash. Flinging out an arm without looking, in the direction of the guns that no one could see from that end of the valley, he almost yelled the fatal words, ‘There, my lord! There are your guns!’