The Making Of The British Army (40 page)

Philip Mason, one of the best historians of the Raj, who had himself been an officer of the Indian Civil Service, explains part of that tempering process in
The Men Who Ruled India:
‘The routine of the Frontier accustomed men to bullets and to taking cover, to guards and sentry duty which had real purpose, to night marches and sniping … it was infinitely superior to a field day at Aldershot.’

In exactly the same process a century later, three decades of fighting the IRA would prepare the army for its coming tests in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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A hundred years before the term was used, Kipling wrote a poem about ‘asymmetric warfare’, which with considerable prescience he called ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ (1886):

‘Asymmetric warfare’ describes conflict between conventionally equipped, ‘high-tech’ regular troops and an enemy who takes them on, deliberately or through no choice, at a lower level of military technology. The low-tech force relies on patience, aiming at the exhaustion of the opponent’s political will to continue the fight in the face of steady – if comparatively quite small – losses. The conventional force must either bring the other to battle ‘in the open’ – tempting them to believe that ‘one big push’ will finish the job, and that they have the strength to do so – or else adapt the enemy’s own tactics to fight at the ‘low-tech’ level even better than he does. The latter requires a great deal of ‘humint’ (human intelligence, as opposed to that gathered by technical means) because the enemy’s methods of communicating and operating will not be easily susceptible to non-human penetration.

In the later nineteenth century British army officers began developing subtle humint and low-tech skills, mastering tribal languages and acquiring considerable ethnographic techniques – in India especially, sometimes on secondment to the Indian Political Service as district administrators or as advisers to the princely states (which were independent of the British Raj). They became players in ‘the Great Game’, the rivalry with Russia for control of Central Asia. Through this route, especially of secondments in administrative capacities, with the politically nuanced officer able to punch above his weight in dealing with feudal rulers, the notion of understanding and respecting the ways of native peoples entered the collective mind of the army. It remains there today, although in recent years professional jealousy in some of the agencies primarily concerned with civil affairs has curtailed this sort of activity, so that it has become increasingly a function of Special Forces.

It was on the North-West Frontier that the army learned, often in the brutal fashion that Kipling described, how to fight the ‘low-tech’ enemy. Soldiers could not rely on superior firepower – especially not on artillery – since the tribesmen would not oblige the gunners by
presenting a suitable target, and the proximity of the civil population had to be taken into account, even if they were hostile. And so the idea of fire discipline developed further, with emphasis on the use of ground and marksmanship to outmanœuvre and outshoot the enemy. Stricter fire discipline has characterized the army’s involvement in ‘operations other than war’ (peacekeeping and counter-insurgency), and with it has come the principle of ‘minimum force’. This approach has often stood in marked contrast to, for example, that of the Americans, for the US army’s formative experience was almost entirely that of ‘warfighting’, in which the dominating principle is ‘overwhelming force’.

But when there was real war, instead of punitive expeditions or ‘police actions’, there was no lack of will to apply overwhelming force; the problem usually lay in bringing to bear men and materiel in overwhelming quantity in what was often the most difficult terrain. Before the US army was drawn into the Balkans in the late 1990s its generals would sometimes say, ‘We don’t do mountains.’ When the Italian army was asked if it might help with the intervention in Sierra Leone in 1999, its generals replied, ‘We do mountains and deserts, not jungles.’ But in the last two decades of Victoria’s reign the British army was doing mountains (Afghanistan), deserts (Egypt and the Sudan) and jungles (Burma).
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This operational ‘range’ extended throughout the next century, with fighting in both world wars in all types of terrain, and has continued in conflicts of lesser intensity since.

Although British troops had been getting sand between their toes since the days of the Tangier garrison, the first major test of operating in real sand seas came with the invasion of the Sudan in 1896. The story began with the opening in 1869 of the Suez Canal, an Anglo-French investment venture. Eight years later, Egypt’s finances were in such a state that the Khedive (‘Lord’) Ismail, the monarch-governor, was forced to accept an Anglo-French condominium, and was deposed soon afterwards in favour of his son Tewfik. This stirred resentment in the Egyptian army, not least because of Tewfik’s economies (as well as his corruption), and in 1882 there was a coup. Gladstone resolved to intervene, though the French demurred. The ‘Ashanti Ring’ (Lieutenant-General
Sir Garnet Wolseley and the favoured band of staff officers who had performed so well in the Ashanti campaign in West Africa the decade before) was assembled once more, and ‘our only general’ was sent with 40,000 troops to retrieve the situation. It was the largest expeditionary force the nation had assembled since Waterloo: 16,000 men were sent from Britain, testimony to the effectiveness of the Cardwell–Childers reforms, and the rest gathered up from the Mediterranean garrisons and India.

Egyptian army rebels held the approaches to Cairo from the port of Alexandria, and when these defences proved too strong Wolseley gave up attempts to break through and instead steamed down the canal and landed at Ismailia, 90 miles from the capital. Here he moved quickly and decisively, seizing control of the Sweet Water Canal (to give him a ready supply of drinking water) and railway rolling stock (to move his guns and supplies) before pressing 25 miles inland towards the rebel camp at Tel-el-Kebir. After a long and ambitious night march, Wolseley’s two divisions attacked at dawn: the battle lasted barely half an hour, and the campaign was all but over before breakfast. The army had been moving by night since Marlborough’s day, but at Tel-el-Kebir it learned the real psychological advantage of night operations, and ever since has favoured night approach marches and attacks.

Two days later Wolseley was in Cairo, and a month after that he was back in London, with a peerage. The army was to stay in Egypt for more than half a century, however, and learn to love the desert. Wolseley himself, as the saying went, having once drunk the water of the Nile, was bound to return. In the Sudan (with Egypt, a political entity since 1821) an Islamic fundamentalist ‘warlord’ styling himself ‘Mahdi’ or guide, Muhammad ibn Abdalla, led a revolt against Egyptian rule. In November 1883 he defeated a Turkish–Egyptian army under a British officer, William Hicks (‘Hicks Pasha’ – ‘Lord Hicks’ – whose head was presented to the Mahdi), and a relief column led by another former British officer, Valentine Baker.
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The Egyptian government appealed to Gladstone for the help of General Charles Gordon.

‘Chinese’ Gordon had made his name during the Taiping rebellion of 1860 following the Second Opium War between Britain and China, and subsequently in the Sudan suppressing the slave trade. Gordon was an unconventional officer, to say the least. It used to be said of sappers – Gordon had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers – that they were either mad, married or Methodist. Gordon never married, and his mystical–evangelical Christianity would have been too extreme for many a Methodist. But he was entirely without fear – some thought, indeed, to the point of madness. Nor did he have much time for political direction, although he was said to be Queen Victoria’s favourite general.

Gordon left London in January 1884 to take up his new appointment as governor-general of the Sudan, calling briefly in Cairo before going on by train and Nile steamer to the capital, Khartoum. But in the inevitable fate of a politically inspired venture not backed by adequate military resources (Gladstone had ordered the evacuation of the remaining British garrisons in the Sudan), by May Khartoum was cut off, with Gordon inside, and most of the country to the north, through which the Nile flowed, was in the hands of the Mahdi’s followers – or the dervishes, as they were sometimes known.
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Sir Evelyn Baring, the government’s representative in Cairo, had opposed the venture from the outset, arguing that if a British governor-general found himself in trouble in the Sudan there would be a British public clamour to send troops to extricate him – and adding that Gordon was just the man to get himself into trouble. And so it proved, though Gladstone at first refused to send help. It was not until August that, in part at the Queen’s urging, he sent for Wolseley. A month later Wolseley was in Cairo with as many of the Ashanti Ring as he could muster, preparing to take an Anglo-Egyptian force of 6,000 men and 8,000 horses and camels 1,700 miles up the Nile – the most demanding logistical operation yet to be undertaken by the army.

But the Nile above Wadi Halfa proved agonizingly slow to navigate, despite the help of Canadian
voyageurs
, some of them from the native tribes, with whose help Wolseley had worked miracles in the similar if altogether less ambitious Red River expedition of 1870 against the
Metis rebels in Manitoba. The official history puts the problem archly: ‘Had British soldiers and Egyptian camels been able to subsist on sand and occasional water, or had the desert produced beef and biscuit, the army might, in spite of its late start, have reached Khartoum in November. But as things were, the rate of progress of the army was dependent on the rate of progress of its supplies.’
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