Victoria’s Scottish Lion
Page 33
** Actually, Peshawur fever had been a constant of life for the British long before Campbell’s changes (Lumsden, 74).
* Napier’s despatch, which was very open about Lawrence’s part in destroying villages, was buried for six months and only finally published in the Bath Chronicle, much to the surprise of the national papers (Standard, 22 August 1850).
** The details of the dispute were as follows: the old regulation insured that the ‘soldier received compensation in money on each article of his ration, calculated separately, when these provisions exceeded the regulated price. By the new Regulation the aggregate of the bazaar cost of the whole ration is calculated, and from this the Government rate also aggregated is deducted.’ The commissariat officer in Wuzeerabad calculated that this left each sepoy one anna and six pie a month out of pocket (Anon., Papers Relating to the Resignation of Sir Charles Napier, 1).
* Such as the idea that British officers should learn the language of the native soldiers they commanded, that new barracks should be built with high ceilings for good air circulation and in locations chosen for health not just defence, and that the weight of a soldier’s pack in India should be reduced from 65 to 25lb. Most importantly of all, Napier wished to close the gap between native soldier and European. ‘The Eastern intellect is great, and supported by amiable feelings’, he wrote, ‘and the Native officers have a full share of Eastern daring, genius and ambition; but to nourish these qualities they must be placed on a par with European officers’ (Napier, C., Defects, 255). He also recommended the appointment of native officers as ADCs and Companions of the Bath.
1 Shadwell, I, 228.
2 Diver, 357.
3 Greville, VI, 164.
4 Hardinge, 65.
5 Napier, P., 19; Lawrence, R., 184.
6 Shadwell, I, 228–9.
7 Napier, C., Defects, 14.
8 Shadwell, I, 230.
9 Shadwell, I, 231; Napier, C., Defects, 22–5.
10 Times of India, 15 August 1849 and 1 September 1849.
11 Shadwell, I, 234, 237–9.
12 Shadwell, I, 239.
13 Lawrence, G., 273.
14 Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis, I, 320.
15 Napier, C., Defects, 48.
16 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 194.
17 Knollys, I, 159.
18 Lumsden and Elsmie, 89–90.
19 Roberts, F., Forty-One Years in India, I, 22.
20 Hodson-Pressinger, 341.
21 Anon., Frontier and Overseas Expeditions, I, 334.
22 Lumsden and Elsmie, 78.
23 Napier, C., Defects, 114.
24 Brooks, J., 26.
25 Shadwell, I, 240.
26 Lawrence, G., 273; BOD/MS.Eng.Lett.c. 241/fol.229–232); Anon., Frontier and Overseas Expeditions, II, 131.
27 BOD/MS.Eng.Hist.c.488, Napier’s despatch.
28 Napier, C., Defects, 91.
29 Anon., Frontier and Overseas Expeditions, II, 134.
30 Napier, C., Defects, 98.
31 Delhi Gazette, 27 February 1850.
32 Lawrence, G., 274.
33 BOD/MS.Eng.Lett.c. 241/fol. 229–232.
34 Napier, C., Defects, 124.
35 Napier, C., Defects, 120–5.
36 Dalhousie, 115.
37 Napier, C., Defects, 126.
38 Thorburn, 154.
39 Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis, I, 333.
40 Anon., Papers Relating to the Resignation of Sir Charles Napier, 37.
41 Shadwell, I, 251.
42 Dalhousie, 131.
43 Diver, 392.
44 NAM/1987-11-116, 3 March 1851.
45 Shadwell, I, 253.
46 Shadwell, I, 256.
47 Shadwell, I, 258.
48 Shadwell, I, 266.
49 Shadwell, I, 266–7.
50 Shadwell, I, 273–4.
51 The Times, 3 February 1852.
52 Shadwell, I, 278–80; Lumsden, 25–6; Dalhousie, 200.
53 Anon., Frontier and Overseas Expeditions, I, 348.
54 Shadwell, I, 307.
55 Waterfield, R., 134.
56 Lumsden, 31–3.
57 Shadwell, I, 305.
58 Dalhousie, 203.
59 Shadwell, I, 307.
60 Dalhousie, 203–4.
61 Illustrated London News, 4 September 1852.
62 Shadwell, I, 300.
63 Bombay Times, 17 July 1852.
64 Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis, I, 121.
65 Dalhousie, 231.
66 RNRM.44.2.1.
67 PP.H/C.General Report Punjab. Vol. LXIX.494.
68 Shadwell, I, 236, 314.
69 RNRM/44.2.1.
70 RNRM/44.2.1.
71 Anon., Papers Relating to the Resignation of Sir Charles Napier, iii.
72 Thorburn, 155.
7
Highlander
* * *
‘It is a remarkable expedition, and [we] will have many historians to record our exploits, and recount our success or failure. The latter I think scarcely possible; but there is always a chance of it; and if that chance should turn against us, the memory of the defeat will be stamped in such characters of blood as will put half of England in mourning’
Major Sterling, brigade major to Sir Colin Campbell
* * *
‘We went to war not so much to keep the Sultan and the Muslims in Turkey, as to keep the Russians out of it’,1 claimed Palmerston – or, as Sellar and Yeatman put it, because the British had yet to fight the Russians and because Russia was too big and pointing in the direction of India. Or perhaps it had simply been too long since the last war. As Fortescue wrote, ‘a generation had sprung up in England, as in France, which knew nothing of war and desired to try its mettle by experience’.2
War had been sparked by a dispute over who protected the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, situated in Islamic, Ottoman territory: the French on behalf of the Roman Catholics or Tsar Nicholas for the Russian Orthodox Church. Catholic attempts in June 1853 to fix their own star over the manger resulted in a riot and the murder of several Orthodox priests, giving the tsar the excuse he needed to pounce. That July, Russia invaded Turkey’s Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. After vacillating for months, Britain and France finally declared war on 28 March 1854, by which time preparations to despatch troops eastwards were well in hand.
The British traditionally launch major wars half-furnished. This was doubly true in 1854. Four decades of peace in Europe had left the army pared to the bone. The commander-in-chief struggled with a staff of eleven. The Woolwich arsenal was so stretched it had been unable to provide the seventeen guns requested for the Duke of Wellington’s state funeral in 1852. Since Waterloo, military methodology had likewise atrophied. For the war with Russia, the quartermaster-general’s department simply reprinted Sir George Murray’s instructions used in the Peninsular War. Responsibilities were still split between competing beadledoms. Political control was divided between the Home Secretary (troops in the UK) and the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies (troops abroad), while the Secretary of State at War did the bookkeeping. The commander-in-chief only commanded those soldiers in Britain, yet was liable for the distribution and deployment of the army throughout the empire. A separate Board of Ordnance organised ammunition, guns, muskets, fortifications and barracks, and directed the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers. The Commissariat, a civil authority answerable to the Treasury, provided rations and supplies. Although the Commissariat provided the load, responsibility for the vehicle lay with the Quartermaster’s Department. To complicate things further, there was the Army Medical Department, the Audit Office, the Paymaster-General’s Office, the Commissioners of the Chelsea Hospital, a board for the inspection of clothing, and the Admiralty’s Transport Office (providing passage for troops and supplies overseas), all acting as independent bodies.
The troops were in just as parlous a state as the administration. Despite the vogue for do-goodery
, the rank and file were still neglected. Although barracks had slowly improved, accommodation was still more cramped than for a convict and mortality rates for soldiers outstripped those of the general population. Above all, the men lacked experience in the field. Even experience on exercise was slight. Until 1852 guardsmen were allowed just thirty musket rounds each, every three years, for target practice.3 ‘Our soldiers were magnificent fighting material: no better have ever pulled a trigger in any war’, claimed Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, but:
it was not a ‘going military machine’ any more than a steam engine is whose boiler is in Halifax, its cylinder in China, and its other machinery distributed in bits wherever the map of the world is coloured red, and for which machine neither water nor coals nor oil nor repairing tools are kept at hand.4
‘The campaign was thus being commenced with a frivolity excusable only by the novelty of a great war’, sniffed Count von Eckstaedt, Saxony’s ambassador in London.5
Directing the campaign was Wellington’s erstwhile ADC and long-time military secretary at Horse Guards, Lord Raglan (formerly Lord Fitzroy Somerset; see Plate 13). No one could claim more experience of army bureaucracy, but the 65-year-old Raglan, in Woodham Smith’s words an ‘extraordinary blend of suavity, charm, aristocratic prejudice and marble indifference’,6 had never commanded troops in the field. ‘He was dignified, brave, courteous, gentle and honourable to the point of saintliness’, added Barnett. ‘Unfortunately these virtues do not make for success or survival in a tough world.’7
Commander-in-Chief Lord Hardinge offered Campbell a brigade command in the expedition, subject to Raglan’s approval. A rector’s son, Hardinge endorsed promotion by merit, and had been impressed by Campbell’s conduct in Ireland and India. Resignation in Peshawur might have branded Campbell a troublemaker, but for the men in Whitehall there was no especial danger in granting him a brigade. The war would be over before he progressed far enough up the ranks to do any real harm.
Campbell met Raglan to confirm the appointment, but Raglan was evasive, saying he had yet to be confirmed as leader of the expeditionary force. ‘His manner, though civil, was far more serious than usual’, remarked Campbell. ‘He did not say whether he would accept the command or not.’8 For two days Campbell waited. The government was divided: the Secretary for War, the Duke of Newcastle, questioned Raglan’s abilities, but once the queen expressed her support, the cabinet concurred. Raglan was confirmed as commander-in-chief for the campaign and so, on 21 February 1854, Campbell was gazetted with the local rank of brigadier-general. A few days later an invitation arrived for dinner with the queen.
‘I am very much pleased with my appointment to the Command of a Brigade in this expedition. It is to consist of the 28th, 33rd and 50th Regts., all good Corps’, he told Seward:
The impression in the public mind is that this combined force is to occupy some position between Adrianople and Constantinople for the protection of the latter. While its presence there would give moral support to the Turkish Army on the Danube, I cannot myself believe that the services of a force of between 60 and 70,000 French and English troops, are to be confined to an object so limited.
He was sure Raglan’s ambitions would broaden:
The weak points of Russia in that part of the world are the ports she holds on the Black Sea, and these I should think we shall attempt to destroy … But these are mere rumours, for no one really knows in what manner it is intended to employ us.9
Campbell chose Captain Shadwell, who had served with him in India, as aide-de-camp, and Captain Anthony Sterling as his brigade major. The son of Edward Sterling, leader writer for The Times, Anthony had grown up in the company of journalists and liberals. In this, the first British war fought under the unblinking gaze of the media,* he would be acting as public relations officer long before the term had been invented.
Sterling shared Campbell’s conception of the officer ideal. ‘It is not flaunting about in a red coat which makes the officer’, he asserted. ‘It is the earnest attention to every minute and tiresome detail connected with the soldiers’ welfare.’ A broad vein of radicalism ran through his politics. ‘The miserable way in which the aristocracy have managed matters shows that they have no particular right to govern’, wrote Sterling. ‘I hate a Republic, yet cannot feel contented under the rule of foolish lords.’ By the standards of the times, his views were extreme; he was even in favour of a woman prime minister or commander-in-chief.10 More significantly, Sterling was more than just a sympathetic, liberally-minded officer. He was Campbell’s cousin.11
Campbell took family loyalty very seriously. Edward Sterling had become embroiled in a feud with choleric Bath MP John Roebuck after one of the latter’s 1835 Pamphlets for the People was rubbished by a Times editorial that labelled its author ‘as ill-informed as he is ill-bred’, a ‘rabid little reviler’ who should ‘sink into the mud of his own insignificance’. Roebuck hit back by devoting his next pamphlet, The Stamped Press of London and its Morality, to the vices of newsmen. Hackles up, he then challenged Edward to a duel.
‘It was with aversion and dislike that I mixed myself up with disputes and quarrels in my position as commanding officer of a corps,’ wrote Campbell, ‘and still more so with persons hotly engaged in political controversies, from which a soldier ought to keep as far aloof as he would from treason’,12 but nevertheless he agreed to act as Sterling’s second. Underneath an infinitely more measured leader article about Roebuck on 29 June 1835, The Times, at Campbell’s request, reprinted Roebuck’s accusations of Sterling’s cowardice, baseness, skulking, dishonesty, charlatanism in society, selling himself to the Tory party and ‘a degree of depravity worse than that of an assassin’. At the same time, Sterling denied that the barbed editorials were his work, brazenly claiming that he had ‘never been technically and morally connected with the editorship of The Times’. In fact, he had been a staff writer since 1813 and his work as a leader writer was an open secret, especially among his fellow club members at Brooks.13
Somehow Campbell soothed Roebuck into accepting Sterling’s denial, withdrawing his accusations completely and apologising publicly, all with a magnanimity which elevated him in Campbell’s estimation considerably. It was one of those strange quirks of fate that on the sole occasion Campbell had a brush with a backbencher, it was with a man who went on to bring down the government over its direction of the Crimean War and became inquisitor-in-chief in the ensuing enquiry.
‘I am to embark today at Woolwich at 12 o’clock on board the Touring steamer which is to convey officers of the staff and their horses to Gallipolli, touching at Gibraltar and Malta for coal and water’, Campbell told Seward on 3 April. ‘The final organisation of the force into Brigades and Divisions will not take place until the arrival of Lord Raglan … when the whole of the troops will have reached Turkey.’14
Having disembarked on 2 May, as expected Raglan restructured his army, giving Campbell the Highland Brigade of the 1st Division: the 42nd (Black Watch), 79th (Cameron Highlanders) and 93rd Foot (Sutherland Highlanders). In truth, Campbell’s ‘Highlanders’ were more often plucked from the streets of Glasgow than from the glens.15 By 1854 the Highland clearances and the Scottish potato famine of the late 1840s had left an embittered community, thinned by evictions and mass migration and reluctant to fight for the queen. When the Duke of Sutherland arrived in Golspie to recruit men for the 93rd, one local told his Grace, ‘should the Tsar of Russia take possession of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House … we couldn’t expect worse treatment at his hands than we have experienced at the hands of your family for the last fifty years’.16 That said, whether from town or countryside, the men still maintained a distinctly Highland esprit de corps.
Campbell ranked with brigade commanders in every instance younger than him. To say he had fought more battles than all the others put together is no exaggeration.* The 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards and 1st Battalion Scots Fusilier Guards formed the senior
brigade in the 1st Division, under the command of Henry Bentinck – like so many generals in the Crimea, a man with no experience of war. ‘In any other division I should have been the senior brigadier-general’, complained Campbell.17 Guards officers still enjoyed the privilege of double rank,** so although Bentinck had only been a lieutenant-colonel in the regiment since 22 August 1851 (by which time Campbell had been a lieutenant-colonel for eighteen years), he had been a colonel in the army from 28 November 1841 (a year and a month before Campbell), putting him ten places ahead on the Army List.18
The extent to which birth still counted in the British army was made abundantly clear by Raglan’s choice of the Duke of Cambridge (grandson of George III and first cousin of Queen Victoria) as Campbell’s immediate senior and commander of the 1st Division. Colonel aged 9 and major-general at 26, Cambridge had already commanded the 17th Lancers and been Inspector-General of Cavalry, but he had never seen action. He was undeniably likeable and good-natured, but his sensitive side militated against battlefield command. At 35, he was the youngest divisional general by a quarter of a century, though baldness, gout, corpulence and a luxuriant beard left him looking older than his years.
The background of the generals was almost universally grand,* even though the supremacy of pedigree over talent was no longer axiomatic. ‘It seemed either that Lord Raglan did not expect war, and so gave places to anyone who had influence,’ wrote the iconoclastic Sterling, ‘or, if he did expect war, he intended to do all the work himself.’19 One colonel complained, ‘We suffer from two varieties [of general], principally the one I may call the Gentlemanly helpless variety; the other variety are given up to leathern “stocks” and foul language, and tho’ I personally prefer the former, I really think the latter do more work & good.’20
By 25 April, Campbell had reached Constantinople and set up headquarters in the imposing Turkish barracks at Scutari. The first of his battalions, the 93rd, arrived on 9 May, followed by the 79th on 20 May, and on 7 June, the 42nd. Campbell imposed a strict training regimen: