Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  Yet although Victoria felt genuine sympathy for the men who stood before her that day (and the thousands more, alive and dead, who could not), this deliberately public gesture also helped shore up the crumbling edifice of the royal prerogative – the ‘residue of discretionary or arbitrary authority’, according to the constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey, ‘which at any given time is legally left in the hands of the Crown’,35 in this case authority over Britain’s military forces.36 Over the course of Victoria’s reign, the royal prerogative gradually shrank in significance, while Victoria fought every step of the way to defend against Parliamentary encroaches her vestigial control over the army. For her, the creation of the VC was primarily a deeply conservative step, a reassertion of her dwindling personal authority in military matters; that it paradoxically also represented a radical departure from tradition by dissolving the ‘them and us’ officers-and-men distinction was welcomed by her as enlarging her status as the people’s monarch.

  The warrant establishing the Victoria Cross was promulgated on 29 January 1856. The War Office then instructed Horse Guards, the army’s headquarters in London, to circulate a letter to all Crimean war commanders, asking for nominations of suitable candidates for the new medal. The response was extremely varied. Some commanding officers returned lengthy lists of names, with colourful descriptions of events, while others listed a few names and brief accounts. Still others asserted that their subordinates required no medal to encourage them to do their duty. Indeed, the COs of the 42nd, 50th, 56th, 62nd, 71st and 79th regiments, most of which had seen action in the Crimea,37 declined to nominate anyone, which meant their officers and men missed the chance of a possible VC. Some COs were astonishingly importunate on their own behalf. Lieutenant Colonel Daubeney of the 55th Foot nominated himself, staking his claim over six densely written pages and obtaining endorsements from six privates and one sergeant. His ink was wasted; he failed to get the VC he so obviously coveted.38

  The first 111 Victoria Cross winners were therefore doubly fortunate: they had survived – no posthumous VCs were permitted – and their commanding officer had bothered to write a recommendation. In fact, they were trebly fortunate: in the Crimea, as in all wars, certainty of what actually happened amid the shot and shell, the smoky confusion, the cacophony of voices struggling to be heard above dying men and horses, was shaky to say the least. A contemporary account from a British officer reveals the kind of confusing disinformation that was standard on the Crimea’s battlefields:

  [I]t is almost impossible to get at the truth of things that take place out here. We hear one day that ‘A. behaved very well in the Sortie last night’. Next day it appears that ‘A. couldn’t be found on that occasion’ & that B. was the man, & perhaps next day we find that B. was not there at all! Just conceive of the difficulty of ‘an authority’ getting at the truth of anything. I could give you 50 illustrations of this . . . To this day I don’t know, & cannot find out, who was the Officer of Artillery who at ‘Inkerman’ brought up two large guns that helped materially to gain the day. I ought to know for they fired away within 20 yards of me for some hours, & I positively cannot say who it was. 4 or 5 Officers all claim the honour of it. Where is the truth there?39

  The genesis of the Crimean War was little understood even at the time, steeped in the treacherous waters that always swirled around the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman Empire was usually described in contemporary diplomatic language. In Britain, the Crimean War’s enduring legacies are a national reverence for Florence Nightingale, feted as the saviour of forlorn British wounded, and the Victoria Cross.40 The events of October 1853 to February 1856 in which Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia were victorious in their struggle to contain, temporarily, the political and territorial ambitions of Russia, saw the VC blossom from the corpse heaps at Sebastopol, Alma and Inkerman. For Britain the political and military humiliations were grievous, the death toll unnecessarily high.

  Prior to actual hostilities Britain was engulfed by war fever and anti-Russian sentiment, stoked by newspaper depictions of Russia as an uncivilized despotism opposed to liberty and free trade. Russian troops invaded the Turkish-ruled principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia; Turkey declared war on Russia on 23 October 1853. Britain and France followed suit at the end of March 1854, after Russia initially ignored an ultimatum to withdraw its troops, although it eventually did so in July 1854. The immediate casus belli had therefore disappeared; but resentment against Russia in Paris and London had reached such a pitch that neither capital was in a mood for compromise. In Britain Lord Lyndhurst made an inflammatory anti-Russian speech in the House of Lords on 19 June 1854:

  If this semi-barbarous people with a Government of the same character, disguised under the thin cover of a showy but spurious refinement . . . a despotism the most coarse and degrading that ever afflicted mankind – if this Power with such attributes should ever establish itself in the heart of Europe (which Heaven in its mercy avert!) it would be the heaviest and most fatal calamity that could fall on a civilized world.41

  Lyndhurst wanted to see Sebastopol, the Russian Black Sea port on the Crimean peninsula, ‘razed to the ground’. Queen Victoria enthusiastically endorsed the war, as did many others with radically different views, including Marx and Engels; unlike them, Victoria frequently stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to wave farewell to her troops. At the start of the war the British monarch’s only regret was that none of her four sons was old enough to fight. The chauvinist British public had its hatred of Russia fed by an intoxicated press that was just becoming aware of its power to influence public opinion. The Queen, the press, public opinion – all pushed the irresolute and instinctively non-interventionist prime minister Lord Aberdeen into declaring war, even as he informed Victoria that he had ‘such a terrible repugnance for it, in all its forms’. To which she retorted: ‘This will never do.’42

  On 24 February 1854, a month before war was declared, Victoria wrote to Aberdeen that ‘we are going to make war upon Russia!’ and that ‘the country is eager for War at this moment, and ready to grant men and money’.43 If Victoria was ready for war, her army was not. It embarked with no maps of the Crimea, instead relying on outdated travellers’ memoirs. The assumption was that the war would be short, so no winter clothing or hut-building equipment was shipped out. Army commanders had no idea how many Russian troops were stationed on the peninsula, nor where they were situated. General Sir Ian Hamilton, a professional soldier who in 1921 reviewed the British army’s history, considered that the men who went to the Crimea were impressive:

  England has never sent forth a more splendid body of troops than those she embarked for the Crimea . . . but its indomitable spirit had been broken . . . Not the skill of Todleben, not the fighting qualities of the Russian soldiers, not General January or February, not pestilence, not superior armament, but just the good old British national Generalissimo, Sir Muddle T. Somehow, K.G, O.M, G.C.B, marched our poor fellows off by battalions into another and, let us hope, better organised world.44

  Cholera, scurvy and dysentery swept through the army’s ranks in the first few months. As early as mid-November 1854, two-thirds of the British army’s pack animals were dead, mostly through starvation or disease. George Frederick Dallas, a lieutenant with the 46th Regiment, wrote on 11 December 1854: ‘The horses have all been so starving that they have eaten each other’s tails! & it is a fact that not one horse in ten of the Artillery has any hair at all left on that ornamental part of their persons, which adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.’45 The casualty rate was astonishingly high. Out of the total British contingent of almost 83,000, around 19,000 died, mostly from disease, and a further 11,374 were disabled. The Commissariat Department in London was responsible for supplying the army, but was controlled by the Treasury and rapidly became a byword for corruption and mismanagement. Among its achievements was the shipping of left and right boots for the army on different vessels, one of which sank in a severe gale off the sho
re of Balaclava on 14 November 1854. On 14 January 1855, at the height of a bitterly cold Crimean winter and less than a month after Captain Scobell stood up in the House of Commons to call for a new Order of Merit for the British armed forces, Lieutenant Dallas gave his family joyful news – boots had arrived:

  We got up at last about 20 pairs of boots per company [around 100 men], a great want as the men were all in a wretched state. Would you believe that they are all too small! & except for a very few men useless! . . . With endless wealth, great popular enthusiasm, numberless ships, the best material for Soldiers in the World, we are certainly the worst clad, worst fed, worst housed Army that ever was read of.46

  Eleven days later The Times scathingly denounced those responsible for the unfolding disaster: ‘If Government . . . choose to sell themselves to the aristocracy, and through the aristocracy to their enemies, it is their own affair; we wipe our hands of the national suicide.’47

  Abortive efforts were made to investigate the origin of the Crimean shambles and to allocate responsibility. Two commissioners, Colonel Alex Tulloch and Sir John McNeill, were sent by Parliament to the Crimea in February 1855. Tulloch knew the army’s ways intimately, having spent twenty years at the War Office; McNeill was a Scottish surgeon and Poor Law commissioner. Their report was devastating:

  Out of about 10,000 men who died during these seven months [the winter of 1854–5], belonging to the Crimean Army, only 1,200 were cut off by that epidemic [cholera], the remainder perished by no foeman’s hand – no blast of pestilence, but from the slow, though sure, operation of disease, produced by causes, most of which appeared capable at least of mitigation.48

  To Queen Victoria’s consternation, their report was presented to Parliament in January 1856.49 For the army’s senior ranks, the report was an affront to their authority and their dignity. Victoria admonished Palmerston, then prime minister, that if ‘military officers of the Queen’s Army are to be judged as to the manner in which they have discharged their military duties before an enemy by a Committee of the House of Commons, the command of the Army is at once transferred from the Crown to that Assembly’.

  The government responded by announcing on 17 February 1856 a Commission of Inquiry consisting of seven senior military officers, none of whom had either served in or visited the Crimea; this commission exonerated all the officers censured by Tulloch and McNeill. Detailed daily newspaper reports presented the British breakfast table with a grotesque contrast between the valiant struggle of the rank and file and the appalling conditions in which they lived and died, and the managerial blunders of the Commissariat in London and the ineptitude of the military commanders. Readers of The Times enjoying their morning coffee discovered that even this small luxury was beyond the troops:

  The cruellest farce now performing in the Crimea is that of giving the soldiers their coffee in the berry. One has hardly patience to read the detail of its preparation – it has to be roasted over a few twigs in the lid of a can, and then pounded between stones! . . . I would ask if the authorities have yet sent out ground coffee packed in tin, or – which might be as convenient – coffee in the berry already roasted, and to grind it some thousand or two of coffee-mills, which may be readily purchased at about 3s each? Our bigwigs are certainly contemptible blunderers.50

  Lord Raglan, the commander of the British expeditionary force, despite his complete lack of experience of commanding troops in the field, finally caught up with the coffee chaos, complaining in a letter to Queen Victoria on 20 January 1855 about the Commissariat’s delivery of unroasted coffee beans to the front.51

  To the chagrin of Raglan, target of much of the newspapers’ bile, British reporters were allowed to roam the battlefield freely, reporting what they saw without official interference. According to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘everybody knows that Lord Raglan commands in the Crimea because he is the son of a duke’, a malicious quip that nevertheless rang true for many readers.52 Raglan was sixty-five years old, tired and frequently ill; had he the stamina of someone half his age, he would still have struggled with the muddle he faced. On 28 November 1854 Raglan sent an urgent request to London for 3,000 tents, 100 hospital marquees, 6,000 nosebags, and large numbers of spades, shovels, pickaxes and other essential items. At the end of April 1855 no ship had been allotted to carry these stores. On 5 May 1854, The Times referred to the Crimean conflict as ‘the people’s war’, signalling a slightly alarming drift in the direction of republicanism. The Times’s chief of foreign affairs, Henry Reeve, applauded the fact that the press was no longer the servant of lords and masters but had become instead ‘the instrument by means of which the aggregate intelligence of the nation criticises and controls them all’.53 Even Punch, always lagging behind the zeitgeist, published in April 1855 a Leech cartoon showing the Queen confronting a medicine bottle, representing the army medical service, with the inscription ‘ought to be well shaken’; an empty larder, representing the Commissariat; and a pig, intended to depict the military bureaucracy. The caption, an ironic reference to Victoria’s hospital visits to the injured, ran: ‘The Queen Visiting the Imbeciles of the Crimea.’54

  Such forthright press hostility made life in Whitehall, Horse Guards and Buckingham Palace deeply uncomfortable. Inevitably, the establishment saw the accusers as the villains and shrugged aside responsibility. Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, wrote to the British ambassador at Constantinople in September 1854: ‘The press and the telegraph are enemies we had not taken into account but as they are invincible there is no use complaining to them.’55 Sympathy for the men who defended the realm was easily evoked; in previous times, when the other ranks had been largely absent from public attention, it had been relatively simple to dismiss them as ‘brutes’, but now, under such intense scrutiny, the ordinary soldier and sailor became recognizable as fellow human beings. As the historian Orlando Figes writes: ‘If the British military hero had previously been a gentleman all “plumed and laced”, now he was a trooper, the “Private Smith” or “Tommy” (“Tommy Atkins”) of folklore, who fought courageously and won Britain’s wars in spite of the blunders of his generals.’56 Without the British press, the VC might not have come into being – and the British press has feasted on the VC ever since.57 But the British press did not simply reveal the scandals; it also delighted in identifying heroic acts. As the Aberdeen Journal commented:

  We have heard many complaints of the evils of the presence of newspaper correspondents at the seat of war, but we humbly think that this at least is one advantage which they have conferred on the army, for it is not to any chance of system, but to the fact that every gallant action was chronicled and known at home, that the army owes this acknowledgement of individual services.58

  All army officers owed their appointments and allegiance to the monarch. The failure to bring the conflict to a swift, smooth and satisfactory conclusion therefore reflected poorly on the monarchy.59 The revelation that senior officers were not just inept on the battlefield – the ambiguity of the order leading to the hopeless but magnificent charge of the Light Brigade was just one example – but also careless of the men’s welfare away from the battlefield, threatened to damn the aristocratic regime that governed the military, including Victoria’s husband. Much of the British press openly loathed Prince Albert; that he was born in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld gave rise to xenophobic suspicions.60 At the height of the Crimean conflict, the monarchy seemed unable to repair its broken public reputation, instead lending its name to a series of blunders. In his memoir of the war, Douglas Reid, assistant surgeon with the 90th Light Infantry, found it particularly galling that, in the name of the Queen, a nationwide day of ‘solemn fast, humiliation and prayer’ was declared for 21 March 1855. He quoted The Examiner of 18 March 1855: ‘We have starved the army – therefore let us fast; we have found our vaunted system worthless – therefore, let us humble ourselves; we have taken all measures to ensure disaster, disaster has attended our efforts – therefore let
us pray!’61 Victoria felt betrayed, and felt her army had been betrayed too. She began to insist that every message from Lord Raglan to Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, and every instruction of any significance sent by Panmure to Raglan, should be shown to her – ‘if possible before they are sent.’62

  Threats to the monarchy’s assumed right to control the army; appalling examples of maladministration in the army’s supply; terrible battlefield and front-line conditions for the troops; plentiful examples of individual courage daily served up by an eager national press; generous distribution of individual medals by the French – all these factors called for a dramatic response by Britain’s governing class and, more particularly, the Crown. That response was the creation of the VC.

  Just how radical a step this was has been rather lost sight of today. The common soldiery prior to the Crimean War had little incentive to exceed their duties. What military honours that existed were ad hoc affairs, dependent on the whimsicalities of political influence, and usually (the Bath, for example) for officers only. Campaign medals, such as the Military General Service Medal (MGSM), which was distributed retroactively to all officers and men who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, were notable precisely because they were so unusual. The MGSM was indiscriminate; all that was required was merely to have been present on one of the battlefields.63 After the final victory over Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Prince Regent, the future George IV, had struck a silver medal in celebration. From the humblest drummer boy to the Duke of Wellington, all were eligible for the first medal since 1650 to be authorized by the government for general distribution.64 Wellington considered the Prince Regent ‘the worst man he ever fell in with his whole life, the most selfish, the most false, the most ill-natured, the most entirely without one redeeming quality’ and suffered the royal hijacking of his glory.65 The prince, safely tucked up in London during Waterloo, commanded that the medal’s entire obverse should be occupied by his own profile; the reverse grudgingly acknowledged the true victor with a single word – ‘Wellington’ – above the seated figure of Victory.