Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  I knew him well enough to realise that he was not the man to stand quietly by and look on in a critical situation . . . his self-selected task, into which he threw all his energy, was carried out with pluck and perseverance, and his example inspired the platelayers, the driver of the locomotive, and others to work under the fire which the Boers were directing on the train.65

  Churchill’s working party managed to clear the rocks from the rail, allowing the tender and engine, laden with the wounded, to chug laboriously back towards Estcourt. After a few hundred yards, when he knew the train would escape, Churchill dismounted to go back to the stranded Haldane. The remnants of the small force, including Churchill and Haldane, became prisoners. Private Walls, a soldier who had been aboard the train, wrote to his sister, who sent the letter to Churchill’s mother: ‘Churchill is a splendid fellow. He walked about in it all as coolly as if nothing was going on, & called for volunteers to give him a hand to get the truck out of the road. His presence and way of going on were as much good as fifty men would have been.’66

  The story of Churchill’s subsequent escape from captivity is well known; of greater significance here is the tangled tale of how he failed to win any decoration for his remarkable courage on that day. There was plentiful testimony of his exceptional bravery under fire; in London, the weekly Black & White reported on 23 December 1899 that it was ‘rumoured that both Mr Churchill and the engine driver [Charles Wagner] will be recommended for the Victoria Cross which they appear to richly deserve’. Not for the first time, the press rumour proved false. In his report of the action Haldane said that he had ‘formally placed’ Churchill under his command and he ‘could not speak too highly of his gallant conduct’.67 Despite the testimonies of Churchill’s conspicuous courage and the precedents already set for civilians to gain the award, he received neither decoration nor any official recognition for that day’s skirmish. Why not? He had made too many enemies in the preceding years; one in particular regarded him as an appalling whipper-snapper.

  Churchill’s skill with the pen, as well as the sword, was enviable – but not envied by all. When Churchill sought to join the Sudan forces in 1898, he ‘became conscious of the unconcealed disapproval and hostility of the Sirdar [commander] of the Egyptian Army, Sir [Horatio] Herbert Kitchener’.68 Kitchener refused his solicitations, but through connections Churchill persuaded Sir Evelyn Wood, himself a former Sirdar, and by then Adjutant General to the forces, Kitchener’s superior, to intercede on his behalf. Kitchener’s dislike of reporters and journalism was almost as profound as that for superiors who gave him instructions. A young and openly ambitious interloper such as Churchill was innately suspicious; that he also worked as a reporter was beneath contempt.69 In his account of the Sudan expedition, The River War, Churchill honestly – but unwisely – publicly condemned the Sirdar for desecrating the tomb of the Mahdi, the Dervish leader, and for carrying off the Mahdi’s head in a kerosene can:

  [I]t was an act of vandalism and folly to destroy the only fine building which might attract the traveller and interest the historian. It is a gloomy augury for the future of the Sudan that the first action of its civilised conquerors and present ruler [Kitchener] should have been to level the one pinnacle which rose above the mud houses . . . I shall not hesitate to declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy [to the Dervishes] was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.

  Churchill also referred to Kitchener’s brutality towards wounded Dervish troops: ‘The stern and unpitying spirit of the commander was communicated to his troops, and the victories which marked the progress of the River War were accompanied by acts of barbarity not always justified even by the harsh customs of savage conflicts of the fierce and treacherous nature of the Dervish.’ General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had himself been deprived of the VC in South Africa and was a gifted writer, considered that Kitchener had ‘magnificently primitive’ ideas, and ‘was never himself amidst the complexities of Western civilisation’.70 Much later, in his memoirs, Churchill returned to the incident: ‘the Mahdi’s head was just one of those trifles about which an immense body of rather gaseous feeling can be generated. All the Liberals were outraged by an act which seemed to them worthy of the Huns and Vandals. All the Tories thought it rather a lark.’71

  Thus humiliated by a mere writer, the perpetually dyspeptic Kitchener, who moved up from chief of staff to take overall command of the South African forces from Lord Roberts in November 1900, never forgave Churchill. The evidence is circumstantial, but Kitchener would have been required to pass on to London any VC recommendation for Churchill’s epic work on the railway line to Colenso; no such recommendation was ever made. Even Churchill’s mother, a formidable networker on behalf of her son, would have been unable to persuade Kitchener to consider decorating such a scoundrel as Winston.72

  If one valiant young officer who miraculously survived cannons and bullets in South Africa was automatically ruled out of the VC for having failed to ingratiate himself with influential officers, another, who futilely died, was granted his, because one senior officer felt guilty. The first commander of the forces in South Africa, General Sir Redvers Henry Buller VC, suffered a series of humiliating defeats during the ‘Black Week’ of 10–17 December 1899, during which Lord Roberts’s son, Frederick, a lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, was killed, for which Roberts senior never forgave Buller.

  Young ‘Freddy’ Roberts was on Buller’s staff during the Battle of Colenso on 15 December 1899. Buller incorrectly believed Colenso was only lightly defended by the Boers; when his mistake became clear, Buller lost control of the battle and became obsessed with saving the guns of the 14th and 66th Batteries, which had been abandoned by their commander, Colonel Chris Long, who had in any case positioned them where they were completely exposed. The Boer commandos, firing smokeless cartridges (which concealed their positions) from a mile distant, stalled the advance of the British infantry, and forced the artillery’s horses and limbers back to shelter about 800 yards behind the guns. The guns fired more than 1,000 shells but after an hour ran out of ammunition; Colonel Long, along with a quarter of the gunners, was injured and put out of action, whereupon Major A. C. Bauward took over command and ordered the crews back to shelter while they waited for resupply. Buller, by now on the scene with his staff, ordered Captain Harry Norton Schofield to take out some teams and drivers to recover the guns, but they were forced to turn back under a hail of bullets. Captain Walter Norris Congreve and others – including Freddy Roberts – then attempted the same, but were wounded or forced to turn back, Roberts managing to get only thirty yards before a shell exploded nearby, killing his horse and mortally wounding him. Another attempt succeeded in hauling back two of the guns, but the remaining ten were captured by the Boers after Buller ordered a withdrawal. Buller recommended Freddy for the VC, but VCs at that date were not for the dead.

  The awarding of VCs to men who had died before they could officially be gazetted had prompted a question in the House of Commons on 21 May 1897, when the MP for Pembroke and Haverfordwest, Lieutenant General John Wimburn Laurie, asked William Brodrick, Under-Secretary of State for War,

  whether the Secretary of State for War would reconsider his decision . . . with respect to Trooper Frank William Baxter, of the Buluwayo Field Force, in which it is stated that on account of the gallant conduct of this man in having, on 22nd April 1896, dismounted and given up his horse to a wounded comrade, Corporal Wiseman, who was being closely pursued by an overwhelming force of the enemy, would have been recommended to Her Majesty for the Victoria Cross had he survived; and, in consideration of the self-sacrificing act of devotion to his wounded comrade which cost Trooper Baxter his life, would he recommend to Her Majesty that the Victoria Cross should be conferred on the late trooper on the date of his gallant action, and that the decoration so heroically earned should be forwarded to his nearest relative?

  Brodrick stated the situation ac
cording to the prevailing VC statutes:

  I can assure my hon. and gallant Friend of the full sympathy of the Secretary of State in his wish to commemorate the noble deed of Trooper Baxter; but the statutes of the Victoria Cross do not contain any provision under which a man who is already dead can be recommended for the distinction. Many cases have occurred in which the Cross would have been awarded had the soldier or sailor survived, but no exception to the rule I have stated has ever been made.

  Other VCs Buller recommended that day – Captain Congreve and Captain Hamilton Lyster Reed (7th Battery, Royal Field Artillery), who had brought three teams from his own battery to attempt to rescue the guns – received theirs. The guns themselves were deserted; a cardinal military sin. Buller was acutely aware that he had not only disgraced himself at Colenso, but had also managed to oversee the pointless death of the son of the man who was shortly to replace him as commander-in-chief.73 The wording of Buller’s recommendation, published in the London Gazette on 26 January 1900, carefully avoided revealing that Roberts had been fatally wounded:

  Captain Congreve, Rifle Brigade, who was in the donga, assisted to hook a team into a limber, went out and assisted to limber up a gun; being wounded he took shelter, but seeing Lieutenant Roberts fall badly wounded he went out again and brought him in. Some idea of the nature of the fire may be gathered from the fact that Captain Congreve was shot through the leg, through the toe of his boot, grazed on the elbow and the shoulder, and his horse shot in three places. Lieutenant the Honourable F. Roberts, King’s Royal Rifles, assisted Captain Congreve. He was wounded in three places. Corporal Nurse, Royal Field Artillery, 66th Battery, also assisted. I recommend the above three for the Victoria Cross.74

  Frederick Roberts was not gazetted with the VC until the London Gazette of 2 February 1900 – where it was acknowledged that he was ‘since deceased’. Timing was everything: a dead Roberts was ineligible for the VC, but a ‘since deceased’ Roberts was a different matter. The most that gallant but dead officers and men, who might otherwise have been granted the VC, might expect to receive was an official note in the London Gazette that they would have been recommended for the VC, had they survived. Buller may have felt the VC for Freddy Roberts was the least gesture he could make to a heartbroken Lord Roberts, but it was yet another example of a senior officer using sleight of hand to bestow an illegitimate VC. Nor should Roberts’s corpse have been so honoured; all he did was die, perhaps fearlessly but certainly pointlessly.

  On 14 November 1900, with more than two years of the Boer War to run, Lieutenant General Sir Charles Warren, the hapless commander of British soldiers slaughtered by Boer commandos at Spion Kop, gave a rousingly patriotic speech in the town hall of Chatham, in Kent.75 According to The Times, Warren praised the unknown and unrecognized heroes who had fought the Boers and helped preserve the empire. He thanked those ‘men who had performed heroic deeds – men whose names had never been mentioned, and never would be mentioned. He had seen men do heroic deeds in bringing in the wounded, and he could not get the names of them . . . It was that modest and retiring spirit among so many Englishmen that made this nation what it was. (Cheers.)’76 Warren’s speech prompted a thoughtful response published in The Times on 26 November 1900, in which ‘Old Soldier’ referred to what he called ‘the unpopularity of the Victoria Cross’:

  There are dozens, I might almost say hundreds, of officers and men now in the service quite as worthy of reward as those which under luckier circumstances have earned the V.C, and these very naturally look with disfavour on a decoration in the earning of which luck has to be combined with merit . . . the standard of valour required varies enormously, for whilst one general will recommend anybody and everybody, another will recommend no one.77

  The Boer War established beyond all doubt the truth of ‘Old Soldier’s’ assertion. Without luck, all the courage in the world could not win the VC. The VC is at heart a roulette wheel. If you had the bad luck to be in a regiment or ship whose commanding officer – either from laziness or on principle – did not put names forward, or put them forward to the wrong person, then you could be a Hercules and still go unnoticed.

  Before Lady Roberts sailed to Cape Town to join her husband in South Africa, Queen Victoria handed her a small parcel, saying: ‘Here is something that I have tied up with my own hands, and that I beg you will not open until you get home.’ The parcel contained the VC awarded to her dead son.78 Lord Roberts had glided into legend in Afghanistan and India, been lionized as ‘Bobs’ by Kipling in an 1893 ballad, and, by the time he took command in South Africa at the advanced age of sixty-eight, was a national military hero; but his involvement with the VC was less than glorious.

  On the evening of 30 March 1900, a British column of about 1,800 soldiers, commanded by Brigadier General Robert George Broadwood, bivouacked close to Sanna’s Post, near Bloemfontein in South Africa, unaware that a Boer commando was close by. Next morning the British were shelled and, amid the chaos, formed up and tried to move off. The Boers, under the command of Christian de Wet, captured the British supply wagons. Broadwood ordered U and Q Batteries of the Royal Horse Artillery to follow the supply train and cover the retirement of the force. U Battery was ambushed and captured, but one of its officers managed to signal the impending disaster to Q Battery. There was pandemonium, with panicking artillerymen and soldiers trying to flee while others tried to regroup to fight. The survivors of Q Battery lost one gun and two ammunition wagons before establishing themselves in buildings at Sanna’s Post, where they unlimbered the guns and tried to fire on the Boers at a range of some 1,000 yards. The gunners immediately came under intense accurate fire from the Boers who occupied well-concealed positions. Under the order of Major Edmund Phipps-Hornby, Q Battery withdrew to behind the buildings to avoid being picked off and left behind a further gun, taking four back by hand. The British that day lost seven guns and suffered 570 casualties. Astonishingly, Lord Roberts exercised his right as a commander in the field to confer a provisional VC on Major Phipps-Hornby, and instructed the battery to elect three members to receive the same.79 He also forwarded to the War Office three more recommendations for VCs.80 Brave the troops may have been, but this was yet another humiliation and to give away four VCs, albeit provisionally, in such circumstances was unheard of. The words of the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of War at the time of the Crimean conflict – that ‘great care would be required to prevent abuse’ – were but a faint echo. But for London to deny them so soon after Roberts had taken over command in South Africa would have undermined his authority; the most that could be done was to refuse the three further recommendations. The provisional ‘conferment in the field’ clause was quietly dropped in the 1920 redrafting of the VC warrant.81

  Victoria ended her reign as she had begun it, a staunch and sentimental supporter of ‘her’ soldiers. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Acting Private Secretary to Victoria at the time of the Second Boer War, recalled: ‘In 1899 the Queen had started an album for photographs of all the officers killed in the war . . . After a year, the Queen came to the conclusion that the book was too sad to look at.’82 In the photograph album was her favourite grandson, Prince Christian Victor – a gifted amateur cricketer who played a match at first-class level, and the first member of the royal family to attend school (Wellington College) rather than be tutored at home – who died in Pretoria of enteric fever. A few days before her death on 22 January 1901 Victoria received the final visitor from outside her immediate family circle. It was, appropriately enough, Field Marshal, now Earl, Frederick Roberts VC.

  4

  Big War

  ‘There’s no good having decorations unless they are given the right way!’

  BRIGADIER FRANK CROZIER1

  ‘Few countries muddle along without an honours system of some sort, for it is quite simply the cheapest method of rewarding and encouraging those the state holds in esteem or to whom it may even consider it owes its survival.’

  MICHAEL DE-LA-NOY2 />
  At the start of the twentieth century old soldiers were still fighting the battles of the nineteenth century – at least, when it came to deciding who, and what, deserved the Victoria Cross. Pseudonymous correspondents – obviously serving or former officers – skirmished back and forth across the letters’ page of The Times in 1902, clashing over whether or not the recent South African war had seen a subtle alteration of the standards required for gaining a VC. ‘Pretoria’ was annoyed that senior officers, colonels and above, had apparently been excluded from the Cross:

  In The Times History of the South African War it is stated that General French recommended Colonel Ian Hamilton for the Victoria Cross, but . . . it was not considered wise to grant this decoration to so senior an officer for a purely personal act of bravery . . . If it has been decided that senior officers are not eligible for the decoration, the Victoria Cross warrant should certainly be at once amended.3

  Field Marshal Sir Charles Brownlow sternly reminded readers that the gallantry of senior officers was usually regarded as no more than their duty:

  Nearly forty years ago . . . Lord Straithnairn, then Commander-in-Chief in India, decided that personal gallantry on several occasions during a hard-fought campaign, on the part of certain majors in command of regiments was no more than their duty, and should be recognized by other rewards than the V.C., for which they had been recommended in his published despatches by the general under whom they had served [Sir Neville Chamberlain];4 they received instead a step of rank and the C.B., as more conducive to their future promotion and usefulness . . . In a profession, the members of which are all supposed to be brave, a badge of superior courage, in addition to the usual rewards of a successful Commander, is more or less an invidious distinction.5