Britain's Forgotten Wars

Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century

Ian Hernon

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780750931625
• eBook ISBN: 9780750980562
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For Britain the nineteenth century began, in military terms, with the global upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and ended with a 'modern' conflict in which machine-guns and a scorched-earth policy were deployed against the Boers. In between there was a supposed peace, marred only by glorious, if tragic, enterprises in the Crimea, Africa and Afghanistan, against the Zulus, the Boers, the Mahdi and Indian mutineers, providing the battles whose names remain proudly emblazoned on regimental banners: Balaclava, Sevastopol, Alma, Lucknow, Kabul, Khartoum, Omdurman. These are the campaigns, it seems, that forged an Empire unparalleled in size before or since, and built the careers of such military leaders as Garnet Wolseley and Lord Kitchener. They were the source of many Boy's Own stories and novels, as well as romantic cinema epics full of dramatic cavalry charges with sabres drawn against hordes of painted savages.

Part One
Massacre and Retribution

Introduction

For Britain the nineteenth century began, in military terms, with the global upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars and ended with a ‘modern’ conflict in which machine-guns and a scorched-earth policy were deployed against the Boers. In between there was a supposed peace, marred only by glorious, if tragic, enterprises in the Crimea, Africa and Afghanistan, against the Zulus, the Boers, the Mahdi and Indian mutineers, providing the battles whose names remain proudly emblazoned on regimental banners: Balaclava, Sevastopol, Alma, Lucknow, Kabul, Khartoum, Omdurman. These are the campaigns, it seems, that forged an Empire unparalleled in size before or since, and built the careers of such military leaders as Garnet Wolseley and Lord Kitchener. They were the source of many Boy’s Own stories and novels, as well as romantic cinema epics full of dramatic cavalry charges with sabres drawn against hordes of painted savages.

The long periods between such dashing conflicts have been dubbed the Pax Britannica, a time when the grip of the Empire was so strong and so benign that the simple presence of a few red tunics was enough to cow the natives. Yet this is misleading. In fact there was not one month in which British forces were not engaged somewhere across the world. Queen Victoria herself said that if Britain was to be truly ‘Great’ the nation had to be prepared for wars ‘somewhere or other’ at all times. They were what Rudyard Kipling called the ‘savage wars of peace’. Some involved a handful of British officers and native levies, others were major expeditions, the Victorian equivalent of the Falklands campaign of 1982. Most are now forgotten outside regimental museums.

These small wars often came about by accident, or as a result of misunderstandings, incomprehension between races, an insult real or imagined. They were blatantly about race, trade, religion and, above all, land, the root causes of all wars since recorded history began. All were the inevitable result of Britain’s ‘Forward Policy’ which saw more and more of the world map coloured pink. Existing frontiers could be better protected by extending them. Trade routes and influence had to be safeguarded. British citizens had to be guaranteed safety and privilege wherever they were. And, as historian Byron Farwell wrote, ‘Vigorous, self-confident, prideful, determined and opinionated people . . . will always provide themselves with armies and the temptation to use them to enforce national desires is seemingly irresistible.’

It is not the intention of this book to consider the rights and wrongs of colonial expansionism, but rather to celebrate the heroism, stamina and determination (and in some cases condemn the stupidity, cruelty and cowardice) of the participants in these forgotten wars. They came from all walks of life: gentlemen officers, foot soldiers from the Scottish Highlands, sappers from the Belfast docks, troopers from Northamptonshire estates, and brawny sergeant-majors born into the Army. Sent across the globe, they suffered dysentery, cholera, barbed arrows, gunshot, starvation, intense heat, freezing winds and the lash, all for a pittance during their service and, too often, the workhouse thereafter. They faced numerous adversaries: Maori warriors who swiftly overcame the terror of cannon and rocket attacks, the Riel rebels who fought for freedom and died on the gallows, the Ethiopian labourers who shifted mountains for their mad king.

The major wars of the era have remained in the collective folk memory. Most people know of Rorke’s Drift, but not of another incident when five members of the same regiment won Victoria Crosses on the same day. The fate of General Gordon at Khartoum is remembered, but not another massive expedition to rescue European hostages from a remote African mountain-top. The Indian Mutiny is still taught in schools but not the massacre of a British column in the Highlands of Ceylon. Such amazing stories have been largely erased from the national conscience, partly because they often involved inglorious defeats, partly because their adversaries did not fit the domestic stereotype of howling, unsophisticated ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ savages, slaughtered or cowed by British discipline and moral superiority. They were wars in which modern armies aimed to subdue the supposedly ignorant, wars in which well-disciplined and well-armed white men were meant to crush poorly equipped and ill-led heathens. It did not always go to plan.

* * *

The British Army saw superficial changes during that stormy century, such as the final transition from scarlet to khaki, but its regimental system remained essentially the same. It was based on class and caste distinctions. The staff officers were drawn from the aristocracy and squirearchy, the ruling classes and professions, from public schools and family estates. Farwell wrote: ‘An army – that least democratic of social institutions – is dominated by its officers: it is they who establish its moral and social codes, the standard of discipline, and the degree of inhumanity to be tolerated; they determine its organisation, its tactics and strategies, its weapons and clothes, and, most importantly, its attitudes and opinions. As has often been proved, armies can be constructed from the most unpromising of human materials and be successful on the field of battle if they are provided with excellent officers, from subalterns to generals, who have time to mould their men.’

For much of the century commissions were bought and officers were too often drawn from a small pool of families whose sons might have been born on a different planet to the men who served under them. Such class distinctions were actively encouraged by the very idea of the ‘officer-gentleman’, the hostility of the generals towards any reform, the traditions of Wellington, the self-interest of the officers themselves, and the bureaucracy by which Army affairs were divided between the War Office, the Colonial Office, the Home Office, the Treasury, the Horse Guards and Royal Ordnance.

Even the abolition of purchased commissions did little to change the balance. Poor pay, which did not even cover the cost of lavish uniforms, never mind mess bills, meant that a private income was vital for any officer. Most came from public schools which did not teach military subjects, although half were subsequently trained at Sandhurst or Woolwich. The ordinary soldier came from a despised underclass – thieves, beggars, vagrants, drunkards, convicts, the destitute unemployed and starving – whom Lord Palmerston’s biographer Jasper Ridley said joined the army ‘to escape from the village constable or the irate father of a pregnant girl’.

The Army could never get enough men under the system of voluntary enlistment. Among the labouring classes the Army, with its poor pay, unsavoury conditions, long service requirements and traditions of suppressing domestic revolt, was simply not considered an honourable or worthwhile alternative to poverty at home. During the 1840s the natural wastage among infantrymen who served twenty-one years and cavalrymen who served twenty-four required 12,000 new recruits a year.

As a result recruitment depended on conning recruits with drink and fraudulent promises of pay, booty and women, at least until the late 1860s when attitudes changed and the Empire became inextricably linked with patriotism. The military authorities, who held their men in contempt, urged their recruiters to pursue ‘the foolish, the drunken, the ungodly and the despairing’. The only requirements were a very basic physical fitness and a constantly fluctuating minimum height.

Such men were famously described by Wellington: ‘The scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth. It is only wonderful that we should be able to make so much of them afterwards. The English soldiers are fellows who have all enlisted for drink – that is the plain fact.’ He continued: ‘People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences . . . you can hardly conceive such a set brought together.’ Yet he could also say of them with justifiable pride: ‘There are no men in Europe who can fight like my infantry . . . my army and I know one another exactly.’ On an earlier occasion he said: ‘Bravery is the characteristic of the British Army in all quarters of the world.’ And those who have served in India ‘cannot be ordered upon any Service, however dangerous or arduous, that they will not effect, not only with bravery, but with a degree of skill not often witnessed in persons of their description in other parts of the world.’

Such men, drawn from stinking gutters and gin houses, from gaols and poorhouses, from pit villages and dockyards, from behind ploughs and lowly desks, forged an Empire through their grit, endurance and courage. Why? An escape from poverty or prison at home was one factor, certainly. So, too, was the lure of booty and a chance to exercise naked aggression. But the overriding reason lay with the nature of the regimental system itself. The Regiment was home, family, provider, past and future all wrapped in one. To let down your comrades, and through them your regiment, was unthinkable – more serious even than letting down Queen and Country. It was a narrow form of patriotism, and one that in its fully developed form saw men march slowly towards the guns across the bloody fields of Flanders and the Somme. The love of regiment united officers and men. Sons followed fathers into the same regiment, whatever their rank. Identity with regiment was strengthened by its original regional roots. Highland regiments are said to take Scotland with them wherever they go. They did not get on with the Welsh regiments. Regimental pride was strengthened with the roll of battle honours, and the nicknames they accrued. The Middlesex Regiment became known as the ‘Diehards’ because of the valour they displayed at Albuera in 1811; the men of the Northamptonshire Regiment, however, were known as the ‘Steelbacks’ as they never flinched at a flogging.

Throughout the century the pattern of recruitment shifted away from rural areas and towards the new, rootless and increasingly destitute unemployed in the mushrooming cities. In 1830 more than 42 per cent of NCOs and men were Irish, most of them Roman Catholics; a decade later that figure was 24.5 per cent. Even the famous Scottish regiments relied more and more on attracting men from the slums of Manchester, London, Leeds and Cardiff.

Soldiers and NCOs hardly ever moved from their company, much less their regiment, during their entire service careers. In The Mask of Command John Keegan wrote: ‘The effect was to produce a high degree of what today is called “Small unit cohesion”. The men knew each other well, their strengths and weaknesses were known by their leaders and vice versa, and all strove to avoid the taint of cowardice that would attach instantly to shirkers in such intimate societies. Motivation was reinforced by drill. Both infantry and cavalry fought in close order . . . under strict supervision and to the rhythm of endlessly rehearsed commands.’ James Morris wrote: ‘The Army lived ritualistically. Flags, guns and traditions were holy to it, and loyalty to one’s regiment was the emotional keynote of the service.’

Such men would wade through malarial swamps, hack through jungles, clamber over mountain crags, to get at the enemy for the sake of their regiment. They would also beef and grumble and dodge duties, and drink and steal and pick fist-fights; they would abuse natives and women, they would loot and occasionally slaughter the defenceless. But the savage little wars of the nineteenth century bear witness to their courage. Without them no Empire would have been won, whatever the genius of generals and strategists, whatever the ambitions of monarchs and politicians.

‘But for this a price must be paid,’ wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘and the price is a grievous one. As the beast of old must have one young human life as a tribute every year, so to our Empire we throw from day to day the pick and flower of our youth. The engine is worldwide and strong, but the only fuel that will drive it is the lives of British men. Thus it is that in the gray old cathedrals, as we look upon the brasses on the walls, we see strange names, such names as those who reared those walls had never heard, for it is in Peshawar, and Umballah, and Korti, and Fort Pearson that the youngsters die, leaving only a precedent and a brass behind them. But if every man had his obelisk, even where he lay, then no frontier line need be drawn, for a cordon of British graves would ever show how high the Anglo-Saxon tide had lapped.’

General Sir Garnet Wolseley, in his general orders for the 1873 Ashanti expedition wrote: ‘English soldiers and sailors are accustomed to fight against immense odds in all parts of the world; it is scarcely necessary to remind them that when in our battles across the Pra (River) they find themselves surrounded on all sides by hordes of howling enemies, they must rely on their own British courage and discipline, and upon the courage of their comrades.’

The men themselves were rather more laconic, in an era which prided modesty, when describing their own acts. Sergeant Luke O’Connor of the Welch Fusiliers described a charge at the Russian guns at Alma: ‘Getting near the Redoubt, about 30 yards, Lieutenant Anstruther was shot dead and I was badly wounded in the breast with two ribs broken. I jumped up and took the Colour from Corporal Luby, rushed to the Redoubt and planted it there.’ O’Connor was awarded one of the first Victoria Crosses. Another old soldier, G. Bell, recorded the storming of the French defences at Badajoz: ‘Hundreds fell, dropping at every discharge which maddened the living; the cheer was ever on, on, with screams of vengeance and a fury determined to win the town; the rear pushed the foremost into the sword-blades to make a bridge of their bodies rather than be frustrated. Slaughter, tumult and disorder continued; no command could be heard, the wounded struggling to free themselves from under the bleeding bodies of their dead comrades; the enemy’s guns within a few yards at every fire opening a bloody lane amongst our people, who closed up and, with shouts of terror as the lava burned them up, pressed on to destruction. . . .’

By 1814 the British Army had been trained and tested against the might of Napoleon. Its men were hardened, disciplined and experienced in warfare anywhere from hot arid plains to steaming jungles. They were its muscle, sinews and blood. Its NCOs, risen from the ranks, were, in Kipling’s words, its backbone. The officers had been blooded too and were beginning to display the talents of a professional elite; men who, as Wellington put it, ‘have something more at stake than a reputation for military smartness’. At last, after years of bought commissions and talentless amateurism, they were beginning to provide some brains.

General Sir John Moore’s reforms of the Light Brigade had an impact throughout the Army. There was less emphasis on ceremony and drill and more on training which reflected actual battle and campaign conditions. Riflemen were taught to support each other as they moved into the best positions to slay the enemy. As Arthur Bryant wrote: ‘At the back of every rifleman’s mind Moore instilled the principle that the enemy were always at hand ready to strike. Whether on reconnaissance or protective duty, he was taught to be wary and on guard . . . It was the pride of the light infantryman never to be caught napping . . . each one an alert and intelligent individual acting in close but invisible concert with his comrades.’

The ordinary soldier’s firepower, however, was inadequate in an age of quickly changing technology. Too often British forces, as in the Maori Wars, found themselves facing ‘savages’ armed with more modern weapons than they carried themselves. From Waterloo until the 1850s the standard infantry weapon was the flintlock musket which weighed 10.5 lb and was accurate to 80 yards. It was cumbersome and slow to load. Lieutenant John Mitchell wrote: ‘In nine cases out of ten the difficulty of pulling the trigger makes the soldier open the whole of the right hand in order to aid the action of the forefinger; this gives full scope to the recoil: the prospect of the blow makes him throw back his head and body at the very moment of giving fire; and as no aim is ever required he shuts his eyes, from the flash of the pan, at the same instant, so that the very direction of the shot becomes a matter of mere accident.’ Small wonder that Charles Napier wrote: ‘The short range and very uncertain flight of shot from the musket begets the necessity of closing with the enemy, which the British soldier’s confidence in superior bodily strength, due to climate, pushes him to do.’ He added: ‘No troops in the world will stand the assault of British troops, if made with the bayonet and without firing. Firing is a weapon . . . of defence, not of attack.’ The British soldier’s affection for the bayonet as a trustworthy weapon outlived the century. Its reputation in retrospect seems misplaced: various types either bent or fell off, and they were all unwieldy. The bayonet was no match against pikes or the long Chinese spears at Canton. At Merthyr in 1888 the 93rd Highlanders with bayonets fixed confronted Welsh dissidents with staves – and were defeated. And bayonets had bent at the battle of Abu Klea in 1885, causing a public outcry over the quality of British weaponry.

Gradually firepower improved. In 1830 muskets were converted to percussion cap ignition, which reduced misfirings. From 1851 the foot soldiers were rearmed with the Minie rifle, although initially in an unrifled model so that massive stockpiles of musket balls would not go to waste. The Minie was sighted to 1,000 yards and was accurate to 800. At that range 77 out of 100 hits were registered on a target 8 ft square. At ranges between 300 and 600 yards the experts calculated that 150 men armed with Minies could equal the slaughter achieved by 525 equipped with the musket. It was a muzzle-loader, so still slow, but its effective rang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part One – Massacre and Retribution
• Part Two – The Savage Empire
• Part Three – Blood in the Sand
• Picture Section