The Making Of The British Army (36 page)

At this point the garrison commander, General Hearsey, arrived with his two sons, and with both the prudence and the boldness acquired from long service in Bengal ordered the guard to do its duty and threatened to shoot the first man who disobeyed. The sepoys promptly did their duty and arrested Pandey, and a few days later he was hanged. This much was predictable and fair, and understandable to the rank and file; but the decision then to disband the 34th Native Infantry and dismiss all its sepoys with disgrace was exemplary punishment that would backfire. The regiment’s adjutant had acted precipitately, an Indian officer, the jemadar, had hesitated and the sepoys had wavered, though an Indian serjeant had done his duty (Havildar Paltu would indeed be promoted to jemadar). But when Hearsey used the normal chain of command to deal with a
bhang
-crazed hot-head the situation had been defused; it was hardly the stuff of a violent or deep-seated rebellion. Disbanding the regiment, on the other hand, provoked many hundred grievances.

A month later in Meerut, one of the principal garrisons 40 miles or so north-east of Delhi astride the lines of communication with the Punjab, the general disquiet which the disbanding of the Bengal Native Infantry had increased became violent hostility. Hitherto the trouble had been confined to the infantry, but at Meerut the 3rd Bengal Cavalry were the main instigators. And with the cavalry came speed, range and galloper guns – light artillery pieces which could keep up with the sowars, as Indian cavalrymen were known. Even the presence of two
British regiments – the 6th Dragoon Guards and the 60th Rifles – and heavier artillery could not check the disorder, and both the brigade and district commanders dithered. Soon the mutineers had swarmed down to Delhi where they murdered every European they could find – men, women and children – and placed the pensioned-off old king, Bahadur Shah, back on the throne that he had been only too happy to quit many years before. With the old Mughal capital in rebel hands and an Indian back on the old Mughal throne, the mutiny now had wings and apparent legitimacy. The intelligence soon reached London by galloper and the telegraph from Constantinople, and with it the news that the commander-in-chief, General George Anson, had died of cholera while assembling a force to relieve Delhi.

Sir Colin Campbell lost no time therefore in taking the fight to the mutineers, for all that his reputation was one for caution.
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By March the following year he had relieved all the besieged garrisons – notably Lucknow and Cawnpore – and by the autumn, with the Mutiny broken, the last of its leaders were hunted down. Although Queen’s regiments had been in the van of the counter-offensive, some of the Bengal native infantry had remained loyal, as had the Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans and most of the Punjab Irregular Force, together with many of the older irregular ‘silladar’ cavalry such as Skinner’s Horse
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(though all the light cavalry had mutinied) and, of course, the Company’s four infantry regiments recruited from Europeans in Bengal. Critically too, the independent states – Hyderabad and Mysore much the largest – had either remained aloof or sent troops to support the British, and the Aga Khan had declared his support for the Company, which did much to neutralize calls to the Mohammedan sepoys for
jihad
, ‘holy war’.

But after the Mutiny India could never be the same again. The fragility of the system had been exposed, and the danger in leaving the government of a great part of the subcontinent in the hands of a company of merchants was all too apparent. Parliament enacted several measures which effectively wound up the Company, and the government of India became the responsibility of the Crown through a viceroy, first in Calcutta and later in Delhi. The composition of the army in India was altered radically too. An ‘Indian Army’ was established incorporating the reformed armies of the three
presidencies. It was still an army apart from that of the Crown, and its officers, both British and Indian, were still commissioned on different terms of service, but it was no longer to be treated as second rate and a thing entirely apart. Furthermore, there was to be a much higher proportion of Queen’s regiments in India, with all artillery except some mountain batteries in British hands. The Indian Army establishment was to be 125,000, and that of British troops in India 62,000, in striking contrast with the ratio of nearly 10:1 before the Mutiny. This meant, of course, more than doubling the number of British troops permanently stationed in India. To achieve this there was to be a wholesale hollowing out of the colonial garrisons, together with an increase in the army’s establishment of both infantry and cavalry by re-raising regiments which had been disbanded after Waterloo and by bringing the Company’s European infantry regiments into the line. In consequence, half the British army would soon be either serving in India or not long returned, and its character – its language, indeed – would be increasingly ‘Indian’, typified by, on the one hand, even greater regimental introversion, with regiments spending up to twelve years in one station, and on the other by the habit of frequent and pragmatic campaigning. The pattern thus established would persist in India almost until Partition in 1947.

Both the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had exposed deep-rooted flaws in the army’s system, not least in the selection of senior officers. The presumption of aristocratic merit did not disappear as a result – as the promotion of Lucan and Cardigan bore witness – but the nation had been sharply reminded of the imperative (and possibility) of competence. Whatever his first instincts had been, Palmerston had sent the Glasgow carpenter’s son to quell the Mutiny, not a belted earl or the royal duke of Cambridge.

The duke, however – who had by no means disgraced himself commanding a division in the Crimea – was now made commander-in-chief at the Horse Guards, and in his first flush of youthful energy was something of an innovator. The Staff College at Camberley, previously the senior department of the Royal Military College – later ‘Academy’ (‘Sandhurst’) – was his creation, and its influence in developing military doctrine and a network of officers whose character and capabilities were known to each other would be increasingly important. For since there would be no permanent operational
headquarters for half a century and more, this network was the only practicable means of mounting a military campaign with any promptness and efficiency. Long after the establishment of permanent headquarters, in fact, the Staff College continued to produce a corps of like-minded officers, linked by the letters ‘psc’ (‘passed staff college’) after their names, who unconsciously operated a ring – albeit a large one – with a common understanding of ends, ways and means, and in a more flexible way than, say, the Prussian ‘Great General Staff (Grosser Generalstab). It still does, albeit rather less exclusively (and at Shrivenham now, not Camberley) since the advent of universal staff training for regular officers replaced selection by examination.

But other reforms in the wake of the Crimean War were hardly sweeping. The appointment of secretary
at
war was incorporated in the portfolio of the secretary
for
war, the latter losing his responsibility for the colonies to a new colonial secretary. The artillery and engineers were at last brought under the control of the commander-in-chief (rather than the Master General of the Ordnance) and a permanent military transport organization was authorized, the Army Service Corps. This rapidly gained a reputation for efficiency and was in fact the only part of the army to escape criticism in the inquiries that would follow the Boer War at the turn of the century. But for all the popular Crimea outrage, military reform soon slowed to a very pedestrian pace, stifled by what has been described as ‘a resuscitated complacency and conservatism’. Indeed, the duke of Cambridge was to become as obdurate an opponent of innovation as ever the duke of Wellington had been. Dukery controlled the Horse Guards for all but a handful of years in the nineteenth century; and, but for York’s brief tenure, its record was a sorry one.

Perhaps the biggest effect of the Crimean War, however, lay in the change in public perception of the army. For the war was the first to be reported to the British public in ‘real time’, courtesy of William Howard Russell of
The Times
and the electric telegraph. Russell’s reports, highly critical of both the organization of logistics and the conduct of operations (though on the whole he steered clear of directly criticizing Raglan) almost single-handedly stirred the public as well as the government into ameliorative action. Florence Nightingale recruited nurses and took them to the base hospital at Scutari in Turkey; Mary Seacole went out to the Crimea with her soldiers’ comforts; Sir Morton Peto built a light railway to move supplies from Balaklava to the siege-works at Sebastopol; the great society chef Alexis Soyer took his patent stove
to the army’s tented camps and personally advised on field cooking. To these and countless thousands of well-wishers at home knitting winter woollens for the troops, Russell’s reports brought a sense of ‘Our Boys’, a powerfully sustaining moral force which has continued, if sometimes with more sentimentality than action, ever since. Indeed, it was the apparent absence of this moral force that in 2007 drove the chief of the general staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, to call for public shows of support with homecoming parades for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The success of this call, together with that of charities such as Help for Heroes, set up specifically to raise money to improve conditions at the Services’ Rehabilitation Centre at Headley Court, proved a huge boost to morale in two conflicts about which public opinion was at best uncertain and at worst hostile.

Public support for the army in the mid-nineteenth century was a mixed cocktail in which compassion and social concern blended with a residual and wounded pride in the Wellingtonian period and a nascent ‘jingoism’ – the aggressive nationalism that was seeded by Palmerston and flowered under Disraeli. The term ‘jingoism’ itself was coined during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8 on the back of a popular music-hall song whose chorus ran:

And the cocktail was fortified by the increasingly personal interest of Queen Victoria herself, actively and substantially informed by Prince Albert. Any political tendency to insult the military – the army especially – by neglect was now checked by this watchful team. And royal watchfulness, although nowadays inevitably diminished in effect, remains a distinct check on army affairs – most strongly and obviously, but by no means exclusively, in the Household Division.
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Most of the army’s regiments and corps have a royal colonel-in-chief, and this can be a useful focus of loyalty when all else is going badly.

But the man who was to change the army most in the half-century after the Crimea and the Mutiny was a politician – Edward Cardwell, secretary of state for war in Gladstone’s first ministry of 1868–74. In recent years scholars have rather tempered the importance of the ‘Cardwell Reforms’, but in three highly significant areas they were profound. First, Cardwell abolished purchase – and not without a considerable fight. He did so not entirely on the grounds that purchase in itself was detrimental to efficiency, but because it impeded more thorough reform of the organization of the infantry, and of recruiting. The substitution of merit rather than means as the primary criterion for commissioning and promotion did not suddenly open the doors to a great press of poor but capable officers, for the expenses of uniform and mess living remained an obstacle to the deserving officer who had only his pay to live on; but it laid the foundations of the meritocratic system that slowly but surely established itself in the century that followed.

The major question that Cardwell had to address was manpower, for the army was chronically under-strength as well as under-established. The demands of empire could not be ignored; nor could the growing power and belligerence of Prussia, which the congress system could not wholly check. For now was the time of Bismarck. Brought to Berlin in September 1862 by the Prussian king to form a government during a crisis over the military estimates, the newly appointed prime minister made a speech to the budget committee of the house of deputies which set sabres rattling across Europe in a resurgent militarism that would continue for the best part of a century:

Eighteen months later Prussia was at war with Denmark over possession of Schleswig-Holstein. Britain had tried to head the Prussians off diplomatically, but Crimea had exposed weakness in the army for which even the Royal Navy’s strength could not
compensate, so that any threats could only be hollow. Indeed, when asked by a nervous official what he would do if a British army were to land on the German coast (in support of the Danes), Bismarck famously replied, ‘I shall send a policeman to arrest it!’
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