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Authors: Allan Mallinson

A Call To Arms

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A CALL TO ARMS

ALLAN MALLINSON

 

Contents
 

Cover

 

Title

 

Copyright

 

Also by John Cheever

 

Foreword

 

Part One: England

 

Chapter One: Conduct Unbecoming

 

Chapter Two: Paradise of Exiles

 

Chapter Three: Hearts of Oak

 

Chapter Four: The Fellowship of Black Powder

 

Chapter Five: Quo Vadis?

 

Chapter Six: Happy Returns

 

Chapter Seven: The Serjeant-Major

 

Chapter Eight: Home Truths

 

Chapter Nine: The Recruiting Party

 

Chapter Ten: The Scum of The Earth

 

Chapter Eleven: Rough-Riders

 

Chapter Twelve: Number One, London

 

Part Two: India

 

Chapter Thirteen: The Bay of Bengal

 

Chapter Fourteen: A Great Tamasha

 

Chapter Fifteen: Extra Drill

 

Chapter Sixteen: The Edge of the Sword

 

Chapter Seventeen: Rumours of War

 

Chapter Eighteen: Casus Belli

 

Chapter Nineteen: Fully Trained

 

Chapter Twenty: Column of Route

 

Chapter Twenty-One: The Leafy Labyrinth

 

Chapter Twenty-Two: Immediate Action

 

Chapter Twenty-Three: Nemesis

 

Chapter Twenty-Four: Under Authority

 

Historical Afternote

 

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781407067650

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TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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RANDOM HOUSE SOUTH AFRICA (PTY) LTD Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

Published 2002 by Bantam Press a division of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Allan Mallinson 2002

The right of Allan Mallinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0593 047273

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Typeset in 11/13 Times Falcon Oast Grphic Art Ltd

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc, Bungay, Suffolk

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

 

 

Also by Allan Mallinson

A CLOSE RUN THING
THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS
*

A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR

*
Published outside the UK under the title HONORABLE COMPANY

FOREWORD
 

In 1819 some 64,000 officers and men – all regulars – were stationed in Britain for domestic security, which meant, since the possibility of invasion had receded beyond imagination, for law and order. But after 1819 the threat of major disorder – of revolution, even – receded too, and by 1825 the number of troops in Britain had fallen to 44,000. Financial retrenchment generally was the order of the day. The army estimates in 1815 had been £43 million; in 1829 they were less than a quarter of that, and by the end of the decade they had fallen even further, for by then the army was less than half the size of its high point at the time of Waterloo. And yet, as today, the army found itself called on to do more, not less, as imperial commitments began to mount.

I have been surprised by remarks by otherwise kind reviewers on the question of what Captain Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons would find to do after Waterloo, the inference being that the world was at peace. The answer, then as today, is that the British army is never at peace. Not one year has gone by since that great battle without a British soldier dying by hostile hand. No
other army in the world, save perhaps that of India, can claim such a testimony. The army of today has been shaped over a long age, and some of the most important shapers have been small wars in distant places. They gave British officers and NCOs the habit – the
unrivalled
habit – of decision-making and responsibility at junior level; in other words, of
command
.

But the lessons were sometimes learned hard. The memory of victory over the French was like a dead hand at the Horse Guards as far as reform and innovation were concerned. In the colonial engagements of the three decades after Waterloo, superior British discipline and firepower – the same musket volleys as at Waterloo – were enough to see off the enemy. In the one arena that might have tested the army’s readiness for large-scale war – India – jealousies and assumptions of innate superiority led to a general despising of Indian experience, for which the army was to pay dearly in the Crimea, and, indeed, in India itself at times.

So where did Hervey and his brother officers of the post-Waterloo army blood their swords, or at least draw them? In
A Regimental Affair
we saw the Sixth at police work in the Midlands to counter Luddite and nascent Chartist violence, and then in British North America in the wake of the War of 1812, where fear of territorial aggrandizement by the United States tied down 5,000 troops for years to come and saw a costly programme of fortifications and canals. And although Anglo-American relations developed harmoniously for the most part, there were periodic disputes and indeed the occasional rebellion in Canada itself. The settlements in Africa, at the Cape and the Gold Coast, drew the army into action in the 1820s and 30s; there were flare-ups throughout the Caribbean; expanding trade led to conflict with China; the troubles between settlers and Maoris in New Zealand were to occupy 18,000 troops at one point. Small wars in distant places. The sun never set on the British army.

And throughout, there was India, where an increasing number of King’s (and later Queen’s) regiments was needed to supplement the largely native army of the Honourable East India Company. And if it is true that, for the most part, all these distant imperial commitments were those of, in the Duke of Wellington’s words, ‘the best of all instruments, British infantry’ (in the 1820s and 30s up to seventy-five per cent of the British infantry were stationed
abroad or were in transit), nowhere was the mounted arm more valuable than in the presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal, where speed of response could pay dividends out of all proportion. I commend the essay on soldiery in this period by Professor Peter Burroughs, co-editor of the
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
, in the
Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army
. It gives a sobering picture of the conditions of service for the men whom, later, Kipling would call ‘beggars in red’.

I am as usual indebted to several people in this, the fourth of my cavalry tales, and I am very fortunate that they remain the same people as before. I record here my continuing and sincere appreciation of their enthusiasm, patience and wisdom. I would make particular mention, this time, of Anthony Turner, who has worked on each of the manuscripts in the series. I am especially grateful for his keen and questioning eye.

And so, after the simple certainties of the Napoleonic Wars, and the year or two that it took for the Congress of Vienna to establish the new world order, we begin to observe how officers young and old had to settle to the new reality, just as they had to do in the decade that followed the end of the Cold War. Prospects for promotion were blighted, they knew; the army was not the place it was. Yet somehow these men carried the day in battles around the globe. But then, as in the aftermath of the Cold War, it was not so much the army that pulled them through as that ‘accidental act of genius’,
the regiment
: in 1817, Captain Matthew Hervey had left the army not by submitting his resignation to the Horse Guards, but by writing to the colonel of the 6th Light Dragoons, and then by sending his regimental commission to the Sixth’s agents to be sold on. That was the regimental system.

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