The Making Of The British Army (87 page)

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The pairing also meant a saving in manpower, the overseas battalion no longer needing to maintain a depot company.

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‘“The tartan question” is one of the gravest character, far more important… than the maintenance of the Union with Ireland. All the thoughts of the War Office are concentrated on it, and patterns of tartans past, present, and future, fill our rooms. We are neglecting the Transvaal, and the Ashanti for the sake of well weighing the merits of a few more threads of red, green or white.’ Hugh Childers’ baleful remarks to the Commons in 1881 were repeated verbatim by one of his successors, Geoff Hoon, a century and a quarter later during the controversial amalgamation of all the Scottish regiments into one large regiment – the Royal Regiment of Scotland. But Hoon was no Childers, and his remarks were taken as both insensitive and dismissive at a time when the Scottish regiments were at full stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Cardwell’s reforms came out of serious inquiry and committee work, but not least from the application of Cardwell’s own considerable intellectual faculties, and his conscientiousness. Indeed, his health was said to have been broken by the work. Few secretaries of state since have committed such ability and integrity to the army’s cause.

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In fact, the two officers’ backgrounds were not dissimilar. Bromhead’s was perhaps more obviously gentry (his father owned Thurlby Hall in Lincolnshire), though he was educated at the grammar school in Newark. Chard’s father was a Devon GP, and he too was educated at the local grammar school, in Plymouth. And indeed it was Chard, not Bromhead, who was frequently entertained by Queen Victoria after his award and became a Royal favourite.

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The Xhosa were a less formidable tribe than the Zulu, lacking their leadership and discipline – but perpetually troublesome nevertheless.

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Stretching a point, for eighteen were from Monmouthshire which was not then a ‘Welsh’ county.

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‘Pte Ortheris’s Song’, from ‘The Courting of Dinah Shadd’, in
Life’s Handicap.

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The gulf between officer and man in the Tsar’s army of the First World War is well known, but it was by no means unique. When, for example, British officers found themselves in northern Italy in 1917 after the setbacks at Caporetto, they were dismayed by the indifference shown by many Italian officers towards their men, although there was no lack of technical skill in the former or courage in the latter.

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The Victoria Cross had been created in 1856 to recognize outstanding acts of bravery by British soldiers in the face of the enemy. Eleven VCs were awarded, seven to the 2nd Battalion, 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment, one to the Army Medical Department, one to the Royal Engineers (Chard’s), one to the Commissariat and Transport Department (Dalton’s), and one to the Natal Native Contingent (the splendid and aptly named Corporal Schiess, a Swiss aged 22).

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Bromhead was in command of the detachment of the 24th, so he gave the direct orders.

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The story of the battalion’s fighting in Helmand is told superbly by Patrick Bishop in
3 PARA.

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The Men Who Ruled India
is the title of his best-known work, a two-volume history. His much shorter
A Matter of Honour
(1974) is generally considered the best history of the Indian Army (i.e. the successor to that of the East India Company). Many an officer earned his spurs on the Frontier, and some a peerage, not least among them Lord Roberts of Kandahar – of whom more in chapter 19 – who commanded during the Second Afghan War of 1878–81. That war was fought principally by Indian troops, but Roberts’s methods and success were carefully noted at home.

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Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Napier’s troops in the 1868 campaign in Abyssinia had traversed arid, mountainous country, and Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley’s 1873–4 campaign against the Ashanti of the Gold Coast had also been in deep jungle.

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Valentine Baker (‘Baker Pasha’) had commanded the 10th Hussars, was a favourite of their colonel, the Prince of Wales, and had been marked out for advancement, but in 1875 he was convicted of indecent assault on a young woman in a railway carriage and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. On his release he sought his rehabilitation with the Turkish army. The Prince of Wales mounted a long campaign to restore him to the Army List, and eventually the Queen relented, though Baker died – on the Nile – before the news could reach him.

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The term ‘Dervish’ – which refers to mendicant Sufi Muslim ascetics of any nationality – was used at the time and later (wrongly, students of Islamic sects would claim) as well as ‘Mahdist’. ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ was the usual soldier’s term – a not unreasonable allusion to the distinctive way the warriors wore their hair, and a not unaffectionate one either.

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Written by Colonel (later Major-General Sir) Edward Colville. Authoritative accounts of campaigns began to be written at this time by the intelligence branch of the War Office.
The
‘Official History’, now the responsibility of the Cabinet Office, only began with the First World War. The MoD still continues to write campaign narratives, however.

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Though in the uSuthu Rebellion of 1888 (sometimes misleadingly called the Second Anglo-Zulu War) some troops took to the field in red; but it was not a true campaign.

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For details of the Gatling gun and other developments in small arms, see ‘Notes and Further Reading’.

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The NATO standard definition of fire plan’ is: ‘A presentation of planned targets giving data for engagement. Scheduled targets are fired in a definite time sequence. The starting time may be on call, [or] at a prearranged time, or at the occurrence of a specific event.’

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Lyddite was a much improved explosive named after the Lydd ranges in Kent (near Sir John Moore’s old training camp) where it was first tested.

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In fact the two Egyptian brigades, under command of British lieutenant-colonels, advanced a good deal more imaginatively than the British brigade under Brigadier-General Gatacre, a good trainer of men at the individual level (he was known as General Backacher) but with limited tactical sense despite his long years in India. Two years later, in South Africa, he was removed from command.

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Interestingly, Adam Smith in
Wealth of Nations
gives the noise of battle as one of the reasons why warriors had to be regimented.

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A cross-country fence like a hedge, which the horse jumps through rather than over.

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Churchill had been commissioned for barely four years (though he had seen a fair bit of service); nevertheless, the decidedness and authority with which he makes this statement is an indication of his confidence in his own military judgement.

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Macdonald – ‘Fighting Mac’ – blew his brains out in a Paris hotel in 1903 after an article appeared in the
International Herald Tribune
saying that he was to be court-martialled for buggery with boys in Ceylon, where he was commander-in-chief (with much speculation on the fact that at fifty he was still unmarried). To the astonishment of everyone, his wife appeared in Paris to claim the body: he had married secretly in 1884, Kitchener disapproving of marriage by his ‘Egyptian’ officers on the grounds that it would be distracting (a common view in all good regiments even today – though not beyond the age of 27). See ‘Notes and Further Reading’.

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That war was dismissed as irrelevant, a contest between militias, conducted by bumbling amateurs. It was the Franco–Prussian War, five years afterwards, in which they believed the lessons lay – and those principally in the area of improved small arms.

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Transvaal: literally ‘across/beyond the Vaal’, a tributary of the Orange River.

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Such as it was, for the two land-locked farming-based nations hardly seemed forces to be reckoned with. Indeed, they were scarcely able to defend themselves against the Zulu.

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The Royal Artillery had recently been divided into three entities: the Royal Garrison Artillery, manning coastal and fortress guns, and howitzers (‘siege guns’); the Royal Field Artillery, the largest of the three, with the field, mountain and medium batteries; and the Royal Horse Artillery – drawn from the cream of the RFA – to accompany the cavalry.

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The idea of infantry battalions able to move from one fighting position to another by horse – in the manner of dragoons of old – had developed among regiments stationed in South Africa and Burma, and in 1888 an MI school was set up at Aldershot to train a small cadre of instructors. The Natal Carbineers were also mounted infantry, as were the Boers themselves: they almost invariably dismounted to fight.

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In fact, at the Alma the battalions advanced in close order and maintained their dressing quite remarkably, whereas at Talana Hill they were in more open order. The difference was quite academic to a Boer sharpshooter, however.

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Major-General, later Field Marshal, White was educated at Bromsgrove, a school which can count five VCs won by Old Boys. The Victorian public schools were indeed strong on the ethos of imperial leadership and their medal tables showed it. From 1860 many had a cadet training corps, forerunner of the Combined Cadet Force (CCF), which to this day is a significant factor in officer recruiting. 2010 is also the 150th anniversary of the Army Cadet Force, from which comes a very high proportion of adult army recruits.

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Lieutenant Frederick Roberts of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, aged 27, was posthumously awarded the VC – one of only three sons of VCs ever to receive the medal.

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All infantry regiments were now equipped with the rifle, but the old distinction remained. It is one of the glorious anomalies of the regimental system that the obvious title of this brigade – the Rifles Brigade – could not be used because it would have been almost identical to the regiment of that name, one of whose battalions was in the brigade.

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Comprising the 2nd King’s Own (Royal Lancaster) Regiment, 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers, 1st South Lancashire Regiment and the 1st York and Lancaster Regiment.

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Afghan tribesmen would snipe from rocky crevices camouflaged and fortified with slabs of rock. The Afghan word for these ‘tiny forts’ is
sangar.

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Crofton had heliographed that Woodgate was dead, and requesting reinforcements. The message got changed slightly in transmission (the heliograph was shattered by a piece of shrapnel, and the rest of the message was sent by semaphore flags), and to Warren it sounded less than resolute. After the battle, Crofton was placed on half-pay and sent home. The senior major (Yeatherd) would take command, but he too was to be killed a month later. The King’s Own would lose 8 officers (4 dead, 4 wounded) at Spion Kop, with 56 other ranks killed and 90 wounded. In the fighting which followed Spion Kop, between 13 and 27 February, they would lose 2 officers and 28 men killed, and 8 officers and 145 men wounded – two-fifths of the battalion’s fighting strength, and a particularly heavy toll of officers. Yeatherd would be succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel John Moore Gawne, brought out from England; in December he too would be killed. Such was the price of good regimental leadership – and in the finest tradition of the regiment, seemingly, for at Sebastopol the commanding officer of the King’s Own had been killed in the thick of the action. The adjutant that day at Spion Kop, Captain Dykes, who would win the DSO in the ‘murderous acre’, would be killed while commanding the 1st Battalion in the opening moves of the First World War (see ch. 21).

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The word was consciously adopted by the army, and then the Royal Marines, for the raiding forces formed in 1940.

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Report of the War Office (Reconstitution) Committee, 1904.

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These arrangements endured until the centralization of the three separate service staffs, beginning in the mid-1980s, although their functions remain somewhere or other in the residual ‘one-army’ staff, as it is now called, or in the ‘purple’ (tri-service) staff – even the director of remounts.