Pax Britannica (45 page)

T
HE Pax Britannica was not a boastful fraud. Thanks largely to British power, since the Napoleonic Wars the Western world had enjoyed one of its more tranquil periods. There had been the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, but there had been no general international conflict, such as had inflamed the nations on and off for 300 years before. With half the key fortresses of the world in British hands, with the communications of the world at Britain’s mercy, with a British naval tonnage greater than that of any likely combination of enemies, Queen Victoria really was the first arbiter of the world, and had imposed a British peace upon it.

It could scarcely be described, however, as a peaceful century for the British themselves. ‘If we are to
maintain
our position as a
first-
rate
Power,’ wrote the Queen herself, with sundry underlinings and sudden capitals, ‘we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be
Prepared
for
attacks
and
wars
,
somewhere
or
other
,
CONTINU
ALLY
.’ She was right. The cost of Empire was an almost ceaseless running battle against reluctant subject peoples, so that
a
professional soldier in the 1890s could have spent almost all his working life on active service. There was no discharge from the wars. As A. E. Housman wrote, in the saddest of Jubilee poems:

The New Imperialists were not ashamed of this record. ‘It is of course’, observed the Jubilee issue of the
Daily
Mail
,
‘the prerogative of the sovereign to wage war … the Victorian era is destined to go down to history as emphatically the period of small wars.’ The
paper listed as the Chief Campaigns of Victoria’s reign China 1837, Afghanistan 1838, the Crimea 1854, China 1856, Persia 1856, the Indian Mutiny 1857, Abyssinia 1867, the Ashanti Wars 1874, the Zulu Wars 1878, the Boer War 1879, Afghanistan again in 1879, Egypt 1882, the Sudan 1896. There were in fact many more. There were the Maori Wars in New Zealand, protracted and bitterly fought. There were two rebellions in Canada. There were wars in Burma and Rhodesia, and many obscure skirmishes in the Niger Basin, and interminable snipings, ambushes and punitive expeditions along the North-West Frontier of India. The Empire had not all been acquired by force, but it took constant force to hold it.

In support of it all a new militarism was popular in Britain. Kipling had touched up the Army’s shoddy image, and military similes and models were much in vogue.
Onward
Christian
Soldiers
was the hymn of the day. The Salvationists called their new movement an Army, and when they set up a mission in a new country were said to have ‘occupied’ the place. The boys were organized in Brigades, the Anglican Church was more than ever militant. Marches were all the rage, books about battle and bloodshed poured profitably off the presses, great full-throated anthems like soldiers’ choruses were sung by armies of singers at mass concerts in the Albert Hall—‘where 200 singers might suffice for art’, commented the
Illustrated
London
News
of a Handel festival, ‘twenty times 200 alone seems to reach the limits of our desires, when it comes to a question of homage from the great British nation’. The British were brassy with success. They seemed to win all their wars in the end, and they were acquiring an ear for trumpets. As Hilaire Belloc observed:

The land forces of the Empire were drawn, in effect, half from Britain, half from India. The white colonies had their own small militias, commanded by officers from Britain, and there were two coloured colonial regiments—the West India Regiment, with a
battalion normally in West Africa, and the Hong Kong Regiment. There was, though, no Imperial Army, and as the self-governing colonies had no say in the formulation of policy, so they had no formal obligations of imperial defence. It fell upon the British themselves and their Indian vassals to guarantee the land frontiers of the Empire, and it was said that the British Army was the hardest worked in the world. The battalions at home, when they had Supplied the needs of the overseas Empire, were, so Sir George Campbell wrote, ‘like spent fish, emaciated and exhausted: or at best their ranks were filled with immature and untaught boy recruits’. They were all volunteers, and by the standards of the Continental Powers the British Army was comically small: but it was scattered across the world, in every sort of country, and the range of its experience was unequalled. It had not fought a European enemy since the Crimean War, unless you counted the Boers: but for every British soldier at home one was always abroad, and the Army’s list of battle honours grew longer, more exotic and more obscure each year, until only the most dedicated old soldier could tell you where his regiment had achieved its lesser glories, or why.

About a third of the British Army was normally in India, where policy decreed that there should be one British soldier for every two sepoys. In 1897 there were some 212,000 men in the Regular Army, with 26,000 horses and 718 field guns. About 72,000 men were in India, 32,000 on colonial stations, the rest at home. Of the line infantry, fifty-two battalions were in India, twenty-three in Ireland, seven in Malta, six in South Africa, three at Gibraltar, three in Egypt, two at Mauritius, one each in Canada, the West Indies, Singapore, Bermuda, Ceylon and Hong Kong. There were Regular cavalry regiments in India, Ireland, South Africa and Egypt. There were military prisons in Barbados, Malta, Bermuda, Egypt, Gibraltar, Nova Scotia, Ceylon, South Africa and Ireland. There were Royal Engineers all over the Empire, building everything from slaughter-houses to cathedrals—in British Columbia they had laid out a mining town, New Westminster, complete with Victoria Gardens, Albert Crescent, and little squares named for royal princesses. As for individual officers of the British Army,
they might be almost anywhere, and the extra-regimental lists made curious reading. There were officers training local militia in Honduras. There were 108 officers with Kitchener in the Egyptian Army. One officer was physician to the Crown Prince of Siam, one was director of Persian Telegraphs, and one ran the Egyptian Slavery Department.

Everywhere the Army’s garrison buildings were descended from a common Indian pattern—even in Britain, where several particularly draughty barracks and military hospitals were reputedly designed for tropical stations, and erected in error at home. With their red-brick walls, their verandas, their big square windows, their long low silhouettes and their officers’ villas tucked fastidiously away among the trees, they were an inescapable part of the imperial landscape. Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a good example of a garrison town—still manned by British forces in those days, and very much a military society. Army headquarters was in the Citadel, a splendid fortress on a hill, surveying the sweep of the harbour below, and supplied with an elegant clock tower by Queen Victoria’s father. Up there the noon gun was fired with a puff of white smoke above the ramparts, and the Last Post sounded with exquisite melancholy every night. The garrison church of St Paul’s, a graceful frame building of pine and oak, was rich in regimental ensigns and military memorials, and on the Grand Parade outside its doors the garrison marched swankily about on ceremonial occasions, its drums and trumpets echoing among the old grey houses of the port. The Army had its cemetery and its military hospital, its favourite taverns and its familiar social courses, charted by generations of young officers through the drawing-rooms of the town. When a battalion went home, half Halifax went down to the quayside to see it off on the troopship, the soldiers filing up one gangway, their families up the other, while the bands played dear old sentimental tunes upon the quayside,
Will
Ye
No
Come
Back
Again,
or
The
Girl
I
Left
Behind
Me.
The soldiers flirted in the public gardens. The officers played polo, sailed their yachts in the harbour, and sometimes went to cockfights, abetted by local Irishmen with fingers along the sides of their noses.

This was the British military life as it might be lived, with
regional variations, in Singapore or Malta, Bengal or the Cape of Good Hope: and the Garrison Library at Halifax, housed in a cosy red-brick building in the Artillery Lines, had inherited the books from the Garrison Library at Corfu, one of the very few military stations the British had ever voluntarily abandoned.
1

The Army List of 1897 records only nine British military attachés in foreign countries. As an imperial police force it was efficient enough, but neither by temperament nor by training was it fitted for
la
grande
guerre.
Twenty years had passed since Edward Cardwell had undertaken the last thorough reform of the Army, and by now it was not only complacent, after so long a run of easy victories, but also sadly out of date. In the age of the machine-gun it had just emerged from the era of red coats and purchased commissions. It had only recently abolished the numerical Regiments of Foot, such as Wellington had commanded—the War Office was still holding 1s 4d, the estate of James Wells of the 57th Foot—and the social structure of the Army had hardly changed at all. Its different branches were highly stylized, like so many clubs, or theatre companies. Officers of the Royal Engineers, it was said, were all c mad, married or Methodist’. Officers of the Guards regiments were excruciatingly fashionable. The smarter cavalry and infantry regiments were still almost family concerns, so instinctively did son follow father, and their lists of mess members often read like extracts from some parody of a social register. The King’s Royal Rifle Corps had on its books in 1897 officers by the name of Buchanan-Riddell, Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, Milborne-Swinnerton-Pilkington, Blundell-Hollinshead-Blundell, Douglas-Pennant, Soltau-Symons, Pearce-Serocold, Sackville-West, Herbert-Stepney, Culme-Seymour,
Duckett-Steuart, Cooke-Collis, Brasier-Creagh, Thistlethwayte, Prendergast and Featherstonhaugh.

The exquisite sensibilities of the officer class had long been a joke among the ruder kind of imperialist. The cavalry regiment which went to Rhodesia to fight the Matabele was very welcome at the Administrator’s balls, but raised some horse-laughs in Pioneer Street, and Kipling records a soldier’s disrespectful nicknames for his own company commander—Collar and Cuffs, Squeaky Jim, Ho de Kolone. When the cavalry regiments raised a Heavy Camel Regiment to go up the Nile with Wolseley in 1884 they wore red serge jerseys, ochre cord breeches and blue puttees, and groomed their camels like horses: among the officers to be seen ineptly tangled in their bridlery were Captain Lord St Vincent, Captain Lord Cochrane, Lieutenant Lord Rodney, Lieutenant Lord Binning and Lieutenant Count Gleichen (who wrote a book about it, and grew rather fond of his camel Potiphar). A private income was essential for officers such as these, and nobody would have dreamt of joining the Guards without one. ‘Good God,’ one subaltern is supposed to have said, when told the War Office had deposited
£
100 in his bank account, ‘I didn’t know we were
paid
!’

And if the best regiments were officered entirely by the upper classes, the other ranks of the British Army were still all too often the scum. In many a respectable English home, bowered country cottage or scrubbed tenement of Nonconformists, to admit a son in the Army was like confessing a misdemeanour. The Army was where the bad lots and the Irish went, and soldiering as a trade, however glorious it was as a national principle, remained disreputable. It was an old barracks refrain that the hero of wartime became the outcast of the peace, and on an old stone sentry box at Prince Edward’s Gate, Gibraltar, some embittered sentry had long before inscribed the lines:

This was not a promising formula for modern war: an officer corps recruited from the moneyed gentry, a rank and file recruited from those who could get no other jobs. There was no General Staff, and the strategic ideas of British generals were generally based either upon the campaigns of the Crimea—themselves fought to Wellingtonian texts—or upon the experience of colonial wars against impotent enemies. ‘Field Officers entering captive balloons’, said a Queen’s Regulation of the day, ‘are not required to wear spurs.’ There was an active prejudice against cleverness in Army officers, against theorists, even against new ideas. Until 1895 the Duke of Cambridge had been Commander-in-Chief, and it was he who once remarked to an eminent British general: ‘Brains! I don’t believe in brains.
You
haven’t any, I know, sir!’