The Making Of The British Army (39 page)
Read The Making Of The British Army Online
Authors: Allan Mallinson
Someone thought they saw redcoats in the distance coming their way, and as word spread among the defenders there was cheering, which Chard believed made the Zulus pause for a moment. In the film, the defenders begin singing ‘Men of Harlech’, but this is an anachronism. Although the 24th are portrayed as a Welsh regiment, they were in fact in a state of Cardwell–Childers transition: their depot had been formed five years earlier at Brecon, but it was not until 1881 that they were transformed into the South Wales Borderers, who took ‘Men of Harlech’ as their regimental march. Of the soldiers present, forty-nine were English, thirty-two Welsh,
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sixteen Irish and twenty-two others of various nationalities. But in any case, the redcoats on the road from Helpmekaar were a mirage, and as darkness came the defenders found themselves completely surrounded. For some hours the attacks continued, though more sporadically:
Although they [the Zulus] kept their positions behind the walls we had abandoned, and kept up a heavy fire from all sides until about 12 o’clock, they did not actually charge up in a body to get over our wall after about 9 or 10 o’clock. After this time it became very dark, although the hospital roof was still burning – it was impossible from below to see what was going on, and Bromhead and myself getting up on the mealy sack redoubt, kept an anxious watch on all sides …
About midnight or a little after the fire slackened and after that, although they kept us constantly on the alert, by feigning, as before, to come on at
different points, the fire was of a desultory character. Our men were careful, and only fired when they could see a fair chance. The flame of the burning hospital was now getting low, and as pieces of the roof fell, or hitherto unburnt parts of the thatch ignited, the flames would blaze up illuminating our helmets and faces. A few shots from the Zulus, replied to by our men – again silence, broken only by the same thing repeatedly happening. This sort of thing went on until about 4 a.m. and we were anxiously waiting for daybreak and the renewal of the attack, which their comparative, and at length complete silence, led us to expect. But at daybreak the enemy were out of sight, over the hill to our south west. One Zulu had remained in the kraal and fired a shot among us (without doing any damage) as we stood on the walls, and ran off in the direction of the river – although many shots were fired at him as he ran. I am glad to say the plucky fellow got off…
There is perhaps more in that last remark than mere admiration for individual pluck. The Zulus, for all their disembowelling of the best part of five companies of the first and second battalions of the 24th, and a good many others in the Isandhlwana column, were not demonized or written off as savages. Indeed, respect for the enemy among soldiers in the field, as opposed to underestimation of him at headquarters, was to become a feature of late Victorian colonial wars, and helped sharpen individual fighting skills. Kipling got the sense of this when he wrote:
I fired a shot at a Afghan,
The beggar ’e fired again,
An’ I lay on my bed with a ’ole in my ’ed;
An’ missed the next campaign!
I up with my gun at a Burman
Who carried a bloomin’ dah,
But the cartridge stuck and the bay’nit bruk,
An’ all I got was the scar.
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Back at Rorke’s Drift, the Zulus remained menacingly on the Oscarberg for some time, until the appearance of reinforcements from Helpmekaar and the realization of their already formidable losses persuaded them to turn and lope away. Chard was ‘glad to seize an
opportunity to wash my face in a muddy puddle, in company with Private Bush 24th, whose face was covered with blood from a wound in the nose caused by the bullet which had passed through and killed Private Cole 24th. With the politeness of a soldier, he lent me his towel, or, rather, a very dirty half of one, before using it himself, and I was very glad to accept it.’
Private Cole’s towel speaks eloquently of the easier relationship between officer and soldier that had developed in the small professional army of the mid-Victorian period. It would stand in sharp contrast with the rigidity required in the mass conscript armies of the Continent, which in the worst cases would lead to a cheapening of the worth of the private soldier in the minds of senior officers.
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And then, with the understatedness typical of the Victorian officer, when their deliverance was assured Chard and Bromhead, who would each receive the VC from the Queen-Empress, allowed themselves a little relaxation: ‘In wrecking the stores in my wagon, the Zulus had brought to light a forgotten bottle of beer, and Bromhead and I drank it with mutual congratulations on having come safely out of so much danger.’
Chard continues his report with brief summaries of the part played by those who received the VC and the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM),
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and finishes with an acknowledgement of the moral support of public opinion and the active interest of the Crown, which the army had increasingly enjoyed since the Crimean War:
As the Reverend George Smith [an army chaplain who had taken a very active part in the defence] said in a short account he wrote to a Natal paper – ‘Whatever signs of approval may be conferred upon the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, from the high quarters, they will never cease to remember the kind and heartfelt expressions of gratitude which have fallen both from the columns of the Colonial Press and from so many of the Natal Colonists themselves.’
And to this may I add that they will ever remember with heartfelt gratitude the signs of approval that have been conferred upon them by their Sovereign and by the People and the Press of England.
Chard’s references to individual marksmanship show how much the army of Wellington’s day was being transformed by both technology and the nature of the enemy. The Martini–Henry rifle had entered service in 1871, replacing the Snider – Enfield (a hybrid breech-loader which had itself replaced the muzzle-loading Minié). It used a fixed metal cartridge (in other words, there was no biting open the cartridge to get at the powder), could fire at the rate of ten rounds a minute and was accurate at 500 yards. When the defenders opened fire ‘between five and six hundred yards, at first a little wild’, it would have been volley-fire, the Zulus presenting a massed target. But as they closed, Bromhead
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would have ordered ‘rapid fire’ (shots at a mass target as fast as the bolts could be drawn back and new cartridges inserted) so that the Zulus faced a continuous hail of bullets until they were so close as to present individual targets, when each rifleman would fire deliberate aimed shots. At this point the battle would become one of ‘independent’ fighting, as opposed to the Wellingtonian system which for the most part saw the infantry shoulder-to-shoulder, musket levelled and firing on command as part of a machine.
While the French and German armies would gain a little of this experience in their own more limited colonial ventures, this sense of individual marksmanship took deeper root in the British infantry, not least through the parallel experience in India. The Martini – Henry had not performed perfectly at Isandhlwana, to some extent because of the excessive heat – rifles had jammed because of powder-fouling and the failure of the working parts – but it had taken a terrible toll nevertheless. Before entering Zululand Lord Chelmsford had written, ‘I am inclined to think that the first experience of the Martini-Henrys will be such a surprise to the Zulus that they will not be formidable after the first effort.’ And although that first effort was the disaster of Isandhlwana, he had not been far wrong.
From this time, therefore, the Board of Ordnance applied itself with a new clarity of purpose: the requirement was for a robust breech-loading
rifle, accurate – or at least effective – to half a mile, and capable of rapid fire. Black powder (and therefore white smoke) would for some years mean that the rifleman gave his position away when he fired, so that concealment remained academic, and the infantry’s instinct for tight formation, even in open order, would sometimes nullify the advantage of range and accuracy. But from now on the infantry could expect to engage the enemy at a distance instead of having to stand their ground under artillery fire as the enemy closed in, firing a couple of volleys at less than a hundred yards and then relying on the bayonet.
Many a battle of Victoria’s expanding empire had proved that the army did not want for courage, but Rorke’s Drift now set the gold standard for resolute defence. No officer could quit a position in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds when Chard and Bromhead had not done so – not, at least, without inviting critical comparison. Indeed, Rorke’s Drift still resonates today. When in the summer of 2006 the Taleban launched their offensive in Helmand, throwing themselves in huge numbers at the scattered platoon posts held by 3rd Battalion the Parachute Regiment, senior officers spoke of ‘dozens of Rorke’s Drifts’ every day.
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And if the Paras themselves thought first of Arnhem rather than Rorke’s Drift, there were nevertheless plenty of Chards and Bromheads in those platoon posts, and plenty of equally resolute NCOs and riflemen.
What stands out from the Zulu Wars, and from the Crimea and the Mutiny, is the army’s ‘operational resilience’ – a certain strength and tenacity that has become one of its defining characteristics. The defeat at Isandhlwana shocked the nation when the news reached London in mid-February (by ship, and then by cable from Madeira). Sir Garnet Wolseley, the model for the ‘modern major-general’ in
The Pirates of Penzance
(1879) and referred to in the press at the time as ‘our only general’, was at once despatched to relieve Chelmsford. But before he could arrive with reinforcements Chelmsford and his army had pulled themselves together, regrouped, adjusted tactics and made a methodical advance against the Zulu capital at Ulundi, where at the beginning of July they completely crushed Cetewayo’s
impis.
There is nothing to be proud of in losing the opening battle of a
campaign, no matter how hard fought, if it is lost through faulty intelligence, poor tactics, bad planning, the wrong equipment, inadequate logistics or any other avoidable reason – as the army has done many times since Isandhlwana – but the ability to absorb the shock of tactical defeat, to adjust plans in the light of experience, to take the fight back to the enemy early and regain the initiative, winning the key battles of the campaign and in the end strategic victory, is the mark of maturity and true greatness in an army. The fact that Chelmsford and his forces did so from within their own resources is also significant. The distance from London to most of the seats of Victoria’s small wars, despite steamships and the electric telegraph, fostered self-reliance in both commanders and field forces. And in these circumstances the regimental system came into its own, for the Victorian regiment, in which officers and other ranks served together for long enough to know each other’s strengths and how to adjust after a setback, became a remarkably self-healing organization.
The British army’s operational resilience would soon stand out all the more strongly by comparison with the armies of continental powers. The French, demoralized by the early miscalculations of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), saw Paris fall to the enemy. Again in 1914 the failure of their much-vaunted offensive plans resulted in widespread dismay (although Marshal Joffre showed a certain
élan
at the Marne), and in 1940 the complete defeat of their defensive strategy brought catastrophic collapse. And while German armies have been rightly praised for their intense resilience at the tactical level, again and again at the campaign level their generals and staffs have shown an inability to adapt to operational realities, being often too restrictively wedded to control from Berlin through their Grosser Generalstab system. Too often German armies have merely endured, and as a result have been ground down by the very elements that had inflicted the first tactical defeat.
Although initial tactical failures could have profound strategic consequences – such as those of the Crimean War in exposing the nation’s military weakness – in Victoria’s time they also had the benefit of ‘tempering’ the army, making both generals and rank and file able to withstand the sort of impact that would have destroyed many another nation’s army. The tempering would be a slow process, occurring largely out of sight (and all the better for it), for as the military correspondent of
The Times
, Colonel Charles Repington, wrote in an article
entitled ‘Death and Resurrection’ after the annihilating battles on the Somme in 1916:
Nobody in particular noticed that between 1878 and 1902 the British Army added to the Empire an area of territory equal to that of the United States, but the British soldier naturally noticed it because he did it. In the mountains that girdle the North-West Frontier, amidst the rocks of Afghanistan, through the swamps and forests of Burma and Africa, on the Veldt, in Egypt and in the deserts of the Sudan, an Empire was being carved out by the old Army in a quiet, unostentatious but methodical sort of way … overcoming inconceivable difficulties with small means.
