Pax Britannica (46 page)

The British Army was the only large volunteer force in Europe, and among Continental observers it was generally dismissed as negligible, for all its social glitter and immense regimental spirit. In 1882, for the Egyptian campaign, it had taken the British a month to mobilize a single Army Corps, and then only by summoning horses from cavalry and artillery units elsewhere: in 1870 the Germans had put fifteen Army Corps into action in two weeks, with three times as many horses as they needed. The British had been forced to draw upon reserves for Kitchener’s campaign in the Sudan, and it was said that in a general mobilization the British Army could put a force into the field rather smaller than Switzerland’s. Britain had no allies, and if it ever came to a sudden land war against a European enemy would appear to be doomed. ‘It appears’, wrote General J. F. Maurice, sadly, after fighting against Zulus, Ashantis and Arabi’s Egyptians, ‘that despite the historic past of the British Army on the Continent, the general impression among foreign officers [is] that literally we have no army at all.’ All the splendour of the Army’s tradition, the ancient uniforms of lancer and dragoon, the breastplated Horse Guards, the kilts and sporrans of the Highlanders, the tabs, or special buttons, or marching pace, or mascot, cherished by each regiment as a token of its special worth—all this meant little, set against the military machines of Russia or Germany. The British
Army, though unquestionably splendid, was small, scattered and cumbersome.

But also at the Queen’s command stood another Army, of different reputation. The Indian Army was not often accused of amateurism. Like most things the British organized in India, it was nothing if not well ordered, and distance heightened the enchantment of it all. Ballad, legend and travelogue had made it seem a paragon of armies, at once spare and romantic, an ideal army of fraternal interracial loyalties, where every man knew his place, and would willingly die for the honour of the regiment. India was certainly a very military country; 40 generals were stationed there. Bryce thought the whole place had ‘an atmosphere of gunpowder’—it was a military society, he said, and the English were in India primarily as soldiers. ‘India has been won by the sword,’ the Governor-General Lord Ellenborough had said in the days of the Company, ‘and must be kept by the sword.’ In every Indian town the military presence showed, in the smart new cantonments of the north-west, all whitewashed pebbles and orderly-room fire buckets, or old forts of the seacoast like Fort William in Calcutta, its grey peeling gateways and redoubts peering through the banyan trees, with moats and towers and flagstaffs everywhere, and goats cropping the grass-covered outerworks.

In many ways the Indian Army was the antithesis of the British. Its officers, all British, were mostly men of the upper middle classes, without private means, to whom soldiering was a job. When Churchill was sniffing at the bourgeois provincialism of the Anglo-Indians, the Indian Army officers at Bangalore were probably sneering at the fancy pretensions of his own regiment, the 4th Hussars. There were very few patricians in the Indian Army: socially much the grandest soldiers in India were the princely officers of the Imperial Service Corps. The other ranks, on the other hand, nearly all Indian, formed an
élite
of their own. They were all volunteers, but they mostly came from martial peoples to whom soldiering was the most honourable of callings—Muslims and Sikhs, Rajputs, Dogras, Mahrattas, and ferocious Gurkhas from the vassal-kingdom of Nepal. These splendid men were easily indoctrinated
into the British system of regimental soldiering, with its fierce small loyalties and its paternal unity. The Indian Army had begun life as the private army of the East India Company, and it really formed three separate armies, each self-contained—last relics of the forces run in the old days by the Presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay. It was essentially a territorial force, recruited tribe by tribe or race by race, and in the Indian Army list its units were listed ethnologically. The 6th Bombay Cavalry, for instance, whose officers wore dark green with primrose facings, gold lace, dark blue and white puggrees, red kullahs and primrose throat plumes—the 5th Bombay Cavalry (Jacob’s Horse), stationed then at Fort Sandeman in the Punjab, had a squadron of Jat Sikhs, a squadron of Pathans, and two squadrons of mixed Derajat Muslims and Baluchis. Such regiments had begun as volunteer companies of yeomen, whose Indian troopers provided their services, with horse and equipment, in return for a small wage and the prospect of loot. By 1897 a trooper’s monthly pay was still only about
£
2, and out of it he still paid for his own horse and gear, rifle and ammunition apart. Much of the regimental business was still conducted in durbar—a general assembly of all ranks, presided over by the colonel: the regiment thought of itself as a family concern, in the horse trade.

The Indian Army was absolutely at the disposal of the British Government—more absolutely, in a way, than the British Army itself. It was free, in that India paid for it, so that its size and equipment was not subject to the vagaries of a vote at Westminster. It had enormous reserves: there were at least 350,000 men in the armies of the Native States alone, all of which could at a pinch be summoned to the imperial service, and the northern provinces of India offered almost inexhaustible recruiting grounds. You could do things with Indian troops that you could not do with British: Indian soldiers were not subject to the Mutiny Act, and there was no Indian Parliament to raise awkward questions about welfare, rates of pay or family accommodation. The Indian Army was like a Praetorian Guard of Empire, set apart from the public control, and available always for the protection of the inner State.

It was probably not quite so formidable as it seemed. Its quality was patchy. Not all the regiments of the south, with their mixed
companies of Muslims, Tamils and Telingas, would have struck much chill into the Cossack heart. The legendary Indian cavalry regiments, in all their shimmer of plume and puggree, were often better at show and pigsticking than at slogging away on manoeuvres. Moreover the Indian Army was Indian. Devoted though its soldiers nearly always became to its traditions, and loyal though they had proved themselves since the Mutiny, still the British could not quite afford to trust it. They had not forgotten Lucknow and Cawnpore. Roberts, when he was Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, used to reckon that if ever he led it to war against a foreign Power only half its troops could be considered absolutely reliable. The British allowed the Indian Army no artillery, no arsenal, and no Indian commissioned officers. Every Indian brigade contained its British Army battalion, to stiffen the whole and keep an eye on the sepoys. Indian soldiers were not eligible for the Victoria Cross—they had their own equivalent, the Indian Order of Merit—and never far from any Indian Army barracks was a British Army garrison. British units in India always carried rifles and ammunition on church parade, in case another mutiny broke out during Matins.

Britain’s enemies naturally had high hopes of sepoy disaffection, but to the British public at home, nurtured on self-congratulatory soldiers’ memoirs, or panoramas of martial grandeur in the pages of the
Graphic
,
the Indian Army must have presented a blazing image of force and exotic experience. It was always in the news. In the very week of Jubilee four regiments of Sikhs and Punjabis were marching into the Tochi valley, wherever that was, to avenge the death of Mr Gee, Political Officer, murdered on his way to collect a fine imposed upon some dissident tribesmen. If there was one kind of adventure that appealed to the late Victorian British, it was the adventure of the North-West Frontier. The terrain was fierce. The immediate enemy was hospitable, soldierly and cruel. The names of the fields of skirmish rang splendidly: Swat and Malakaland, Gtral and Tirah, through whose passes the Orakzais, the Wazirs, the Afridis and the Mohmands flitted like menacing shadows, and upon whose crests men like Yeatman-Biggs, Lockhart, Blood and Maclean stood watchful in their topees, shading their
eyes against the setting sun. It had all the elements of folk-myth, and the British loved it: loved it in the idea, idealistically portrayed in Drawings by Our Special Artist; loved it in the reality, for there was excellent sport to be had out there, by a young man of spirit and no ties.

It was there, too, best of all, that the British Empire could be seen on guard. Fifty miles behind the Khyber flowed the Indus River, one of the grand facts of the Empire, and at the place where the Grand Trunk Road crossed it there stood the garrison town of Attock. Here Alexander had crossed the Indus, on his way to conquer India, and here the Emperor Akhbar had built a great fort of polished pink stone. At Attock the British had thrown a double-decker iron bridge across the Indus, a lumpish powerful structure, railway above, road below, with iron gates at each end to be closed at night with chains and huge bolts, and watchful sentries with fixed bayonets. Across it their armies moved, year after year, on their way to the forts, cantonments and entrenchments of the tribal country and the Afghan frontier. On the lower deck the infantry swung by, the commissariat carts, the cavalry with their lances and fluttering pennants: on the upper deck the troop trains clanked their way towards Peshawar, barehead soldiers lolling at their windows, or singing bawdy songs inside. There were block towers, gun emplacements, watchtowers along the ridge, and often the roads over the escarpment were cloudy with the dust of marching platoons. Trumpets blew at Attock, officers trotted up the hill to the artillery mess in the fort, the flag flew above the ramparts, and all the way along the Peshawar road were carved regimental crests, the dates of old campaigns, or simply the initials of British soldiers, scratched on a stone as the battalion rested on the march.

High above it all, blocking the northern horizon, were the white crests of the Hindu Kush, the last frontier of the Empire, separating this familiar world of pageantry and requisition order from whatever barbaric mysteries lay beyond.

It was in India that the martial heroism of Empire had found its
most sacred apotheosis. The battles of the Indian Mutiny were fought almost entirely in Hindustan and the Central Provinces, so that people in the south of India, for example, scarcely knew the war was happening: but it had profoundly impressed the imaginations of the British. We have seen how it affected their racial attitudes. More extraordinary was the epic allure which still lingered about its legend, forty years later. ‘We are indebted to India’, wrote Sir Charles Crosthwaite,
1
‘for the great Mutiny, which has well been called the Epic of the Race.’ It was also called ‘our Iliad’, and seen in awed retrospect the British heroes of the Mutiny did seem champions in a classical kind, clean-limbed and generous. In India their graves were lovingly tended, and their sometimes self-composed epitaphs were still freely quoted to impressionable adolescents—‘Here Lies Henry Lawrence, Who Tried to Do His Duty’, ‘Here Lies All That Could Die of William Stephen Raikes Hodson’, or the great manly inscription beneath which John Lawrence, General, aged 35, lay in the dusty cemetery beyond the walls of Delhi. Memorials to the British dead of the Mutiny, and their loyal Indian subjects, stood all over central India, some grandiose, like the tall Gothic spire on the ridge above Delhi, some movingly unobtrusive, flaked obelisks beside the highway, or faithfully polished brasses in the aisles of garrison churches. Of the ten pages
Murray
’
s
Handbook
gave to the city of Delhi, for nearly a thousand years one of the great capitals of Asia, five were devoted to the events of the Mutiny (‘… the enemy poured upon them a shower of shot and shell … the siege guns, drawn by elephants, with an immense number of ammunition waggons, appeared on the Ridge … his lofty stature rendered him conspicuous, and in a moment he was shot through the body, and in spite of his remonstrances was carried to the rear to die….’).
2

The great shrine of the epic, and perhaps the supreme temple of British imperialism, was the ruined Residency at Lucknow, in which a small garrison, with its women and children, had held out in appalling conditions against an overwhelming force of mutinous sepoys. The story of the siege and relief of Lucknow was familiar to every Victorian schoolboy, and had been immortalized by Tennyson in a stirring balad:

Everybody knew those lines, and the scene of the great siege became a place of pilgrimage. From Hill’s Imperial Hotel, the Civil and Military Hotel, the Royal or the Prince of Wales’s, the visitors in their hundreds were taken down the road by tonga to the old Residency compound: and there they found the battlefield preserved just as it was when Henry Havelock’s Highlanders fought their way in at last to relieve the garrison—