The Making Of The British Army (35 page)

Lord Lucan, though utterly baffled by the order, turned to his brother-in-law Lord Cardigan, whom he detested even more than any Indiaman, and instructed him to charge with his Light Brigade.

Cardigan, who reciprocated Lucan’s loathing, icily pointed out the lethal futility of charging guns frontally while being enfiladed in the process. To which Lucan helplessly replied that he understood him full well, ‘But Lord Raglan will have it!’

Even now, a cool and experienced head could have averted disaster. Cardigan might have suggested a plan to use the Heavy Brigade, the French Chasseurs d’Afrique and the horse artillery to cover his flanks. He might have questioned Nolan to understand the purpose of the order and therefore what freedom of action he had. But both ideas eluded him. As he was later to protest, he had been given an order in front of his brigade, and he felt obliged to carry it out no matter what the consequences. Besides, speaking to Nolan would be beneath his dignity. Cardigan’s chestnut charger, Ronald, might as well have been standing at the head of the Light Brigade with an empty saddle for all the use Cardigan was at that moment.

What happened next was summarized by Cardigan himself in a speech at the Mansion House the following year:

And so passed the most infamous, but by no means the worst, display of muddle and incompetence – of sheer unprofessionalism – in a war that shook the growing complacency of Victorian England. A quarter of the British (and Irish) soldiers sent to the Crimea did not return, a casualty rate worse than in the Great War – although in the Crimea four-fifths of those died from disease.

Shook
the complacency, but evidently not violently enough; for although there were commissions of inquiry and a considerable reorganization of the government of the army, its worst aspects were to remain unreformed. Raglan himself died in the Crimea, but Lucan in time became a field marshal, and Cardigan, in a move that passes all understanding, was appointed Inspector-General of Cavalry.

One of the fundamental failures of the army in the Crimea had been the work of the staff – the officers responsible for administration and
for the realization of commanders’ decisions. Without a staff college (and arguably even with a staff college) staffwork can only be perfected by practice, and that means there have to be staffs in being, not improvised as occasions demand – in other words, permanent brigade, divisional and corps headquarters. In India there were in effect permanent establishments for the various field force headquarters, and some staff experience was therefore retained and passed on. But a permanent staff on the Prussian model, for example, would have been efficient in the writing and transmission of orders. A permanent staff on the French or even Italian model would have understood logistics better than to try to supply a whole army from the tiny harbour of Balaklava.
⁹⁴
As soon as the Crimean War ended, however, the various hastily assembled headquarters were once more disbanded. The army reverted to the ossified regimental structure of the status quo
ante bellum
, though there were a few younger officers who, like Wellington in Flanders, had learned how
not
to do things.

Other nations took fuller note, however. The French political philosopher and historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to an English friend:

Britain quietly resolved simply not to be drawn into battle on the Continent again. Nevertheless the Crimean War had been a loud wake-up call – a very public one, thanks to the innovations of war correspondents, photography, the electric telegraph and wide-circulation newspapers. Army reform would soon follow – surely? Yet less than three years after Balaklava there would come an even greater calamity to dent the nation’s prestige, one that would have much greater influence on the way the army was to be reshaped in the second half of Queen Victoria’s century – mutiny in India.

THE INDIAN MUTINY AND ITS CAUSES HAVE INSPIRED FICTIONAL AND NON-
fictional literature in probably equal measure. For the novelist especially, the cultural, religious, racial, economic, ‘nationalistic’ and even simply hysterical tensions that piled up tinder-like in Bengal, the largest of the three presidencies of the Honourable East India Company, towards the middle of the nineteenth century offer boundless possibilities for the pen. And that a spark so prosaic and at the same time so symbolic – the new greased cartridges – should have ignited such a raging conflagration is gift indeed to the writer. And it must have seemed ironic to Sir Colin Campbell, not long back from the Crimea and promoted lieutenant-general, that the technological advance which had allowed him to stop the Russian cavalry at Balaklava – the rifle – had now brought about the greatest shock to British confidence in its military superiority since the American Revolutionary War.

‘When will you be ready to set out?’ Lord Palmerston, the prime minister, had asked him anxiously (Lord Aberdeen had resigned early in 1855 after criticism of the muddle in the Crimea). And Palmerston had good reason to be anxious: the army of Bengal had mutinied, and its commander-in-chief was dead.

‘Within twenty-four hours,’ Campbell replied. And how he must
have relished the prime minister’s summons; for when Raglan had died two years before, Palmerston had ignored the clamour in the press for Campbell to replace him. Now, at the moment of greater danger, the Glasgow carpenter’s son was recalled from virtual retirement. And, true to his word, the new Commander-in-Chief Bengal (and therefore in effect India) was aboard a Channel packet the following evening, travelling south to Marseilles by train, then east across the Mediterranean by steamship, and then overland by any means he could find to reach Calcutta, his headquarters, on 13 August 1857.

It had all begun the previous year when the sepoys – the soldiers of the East India Company’s army – in Bengal were issued with the Enfield rifled musket, the same rifle that had replaced the shortlived Minié in the Crimea. Rumour had spread, incorrectly, that the cartridges (the card-wrapped powder and shot) were greased with either pig fat or beef tallow to permit easier ramming – one grease being obviously abhorrent to Mohammedan sepoys, the other equally to the Hindu, for the new drill still required the man to bite open the cartridge. When the sepoys were told they could grease the cartridges with beeswax or vegetable oil instead, this was taken merely as ‘proof’ that the issued cartridges were unclean. The facts were anyway soon irrelevant; and the indifference of many British commanding officers who failed to recognize the degree of alienation only exacerbated the discontent. When mutiny broke out with the murder of British officers and their families in Barrackpore – a thing which the authorities supposed wholly impossible, for the sepoys’ loyalty to the sahibs and memsahibs was taken as absolute – the shock was so profound that they responded either too weakly or in so draconian a fashion as to encourage the wavering regiments to throw their lot in with the mutineers. There was no pattern to which regiments mutinied initially, nor much correlation between benign command and loyalty: even those regiments in which the officers were well liked were not immune, although there were instances of individual officers or their wives being warned of what was to happen, or helped to escape.

The army of ‘John Company’, as the Honourable East India Company was affectionately known by its Indian as well as British employees, was a sort of gigantic confidence trick in the best sense: for there were nearly 300,000 native troops in India, and fewer than
one-tenth that number European.
⁹⁵
The Company’s officers, moreover, were a breed entirely apart from those of the Crown regiments. Recruited separately and without purchase, trained separately at Addiscombe rather than Sandhurst, and with very different (and more favourable) terms of service, a Company officer had no authority over a Queen’s officer unless he was a general (a rank that could be conferred only by the Crown). But India was garrisoned by the Company’s army, and the few British regiments were an insurance policy – almost literally, for they were paid for by the Company’s court of directors, not the British taxpayer. And in 1857 the Company was badly underinsured.

To the ordinary sepoy, the reverses in Afghanistan a decade and a half before, and more recently in the Crimea, while not suggesting that British power was on the point of collapse signalled nevertheless that the British were not gods. And to those more elevated Indians, like the Rani of Jhansi and Nana Sahib of Cawnpore, whose own particular grievances were turning into political ambition, the British setbacks seemed to suggest an opportunity in which the sepoys’ unrest could be used to advantage.

Trouble had begun in Barrackpore just north of Calcutta in January 1857, but it was not until the end of March that the real line was crossed. There, in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, Lieutenant Baugh, the adjutant of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry, heard that several of the regiment’s sepoys were ‘in an excited state’, and that one of them, Mangal Pandey, was armed with a loaded musket and threatening to shoot the first European he set his eyes on (it later emerged that Pandey was high on
bhang –
cannabis).

In a British regiment, the adjutant or the orderly (duty) officer would at once have summoned an NCO, preferably a serjeant-major, to deal with a soldier who was out of his mind with drink, but the 34th had only one British NCO – Serjeant-major Hewson. Having been told that Hewson had been called, Lieutenant Baugh immediately buckled on his sword and pistol and galloped from the European cantonments
to the sepoy lines, where he found Pandey behind the signal gun in front of the quarter-guard of a dozen men. True to his doubtless braggart word, Pandey took aim with his musket, which he had somehow loaded without defiling himself with the unclean grease, and fired as Baugh rode on to the parade ground. The bullet struck Baugh’s horse in the flank, bringing it and its rider down. Baugh at once sprang up and ran at Pandey firing his single-shot pistol, but missed. Before he could draw his sword, Pandey attacked him with a
tulwar –
the heavy, curved Mughal sword – felling him with slashing cuts to the shoulder and neck. As another sepoy, Havildar (Serjeant) Shaikh Paltu, tried to restrain Pandey, Serjeant-major Hewson arrived and weighed in, but he too was soon in trouble. For the quarter-guard, now under arms and joined by the orderly jemadar (sub-lieutenant), began to waver. And then some of them freed Pandey and chased off the adjutant, the serjeant-major and the loyal havildar.