Victoria's Cross (12 page)

In his plea to the Duke of Cambridge, Stannus dug his own grave deeper by, among other things, bluntly accusing Napier, the viceroy, of being surrounded by sycophants. He called Napier ‘the greatest jobber the Indian Army ever had at its head . . . A long residence in India had given Lord Napier a host of personal acquaintances to provide for.' After a lengthy, private and – for Stannus – frustrating correspondence with the deeply unpopular Military Secretary at the time, General Sir Alfred Horsford, who was the Duke of Cambridge's gatekeeper, Stannus made public his grievances in the forlorn hope that the establishment would be embarrassed into giving him justice. He published in 1881 his lengthy letter to the Duke of Cambridge, and much else besides, in
My Reasons for Leaving the British Army
– a book that momentarily ruffled feathers and then disappeared, leaving his career in tatters. Clearly, Stannus was never going to win this struggle with the great beasts of the army and Raj politics, but he was driven to distraction by the financial difficulties resulting from his unsought retirement: he was left with an income of £456 a year (equivalent to about £37,000 in 2013 terms) to support five eligible daughters and a household in Dublin, while less distinguished juniors now commanding divisions in India were earning several times more.
The Examiner
of 21 August 1880 commented on his case, which Stannus quoted:

It is a sorry tale that an officer who can show a Companionship of the Bath, a good-service pension, a wound pension for life, and nine medals and clasps, should find himself superseded, and obliged, in regard to his own honour, to retire from the service of a country which could furnish him neither employment nor adequate provision.
³⁶

Stannus was a victim of . . . what? Jealousy? Rivalry? His own bloody-mindedness? We will probably never know. His story, that of an angry and bitter senior British officer allegedly brought low by sycophancy and nepotism, is obviously partial, but nonetheless illustrative of how
an exceptional career in the military could be humbled by trivia.
³⁷
But we should be grateful, for his humiliation unlocked an absorbing critique of the VC, one that is all the more powerful because of its source. His brochure (as he called it) on the Victoria Cross aimed at demolishing the public mystique that had by the 1880s enveloped the VC: ‘it is incontestable that by a great majority of the community outside the service the decoration of the Victoria Cross has an extraordinarily fictitious value, and one which it would no longer retain, but that the public generally cares so very little to dive below the surface.'
³⁸
In 1881 Stannus plunged below the surface and pinpointed a major flaw endemic to the Cross – that the encouragement of ambition for individual recognition on the basis of exceptional courage also promotes distortion, hyperbole and heartache:

The mischief the system entails throughout the Army can hardly be exaggerated; it induces to put the whole machinery of the service out of gear. Inflated despatch-writing is one of its most prominent evils, and the most niggardly economy of truth is its result . . . From the cradle to the grave of their military service a large proportion of the Officers of the Army are struggling for the possession of these baubles and shams, and in their acquisition all sense of modesty and decency is set aside and effaced.
³⁹

As we shall see, ‘inflated despatch-writing' remains today a necessary
sine qua non
to stand a chance of winning a VC. For Stannus, it was axiomatic that professional soldiers clearly understood their duty, and that to offer inducements to go beyond that – to go off on a frolic of one's own – was folly:

A man ‘going on by himself,' or separating himself from his men should be severely censured, likewise an officer who exposes himself ‘to the full fire of the enemy,' instead of keeping out of it, are not fit
recipients of the decoration. Such hair-brained [sic] folly if encouraged as a virtue would be fatal to success and ensure wholesale slaughter where an enemy was in any way enterprising. But . . . the authorities consider these deviations from the fundamental principles of all warfare deserving of special favourable recognition.
⁴⁰

Stannus also condemned the creation of ‘new' acts of courage that resulted from the invention of the VC:

Who can unravel the mysterious fact that these acts of heroism for which the Victoria Crosses are now given were never heard of
before
the institution of the order, and that ever since there have been periodical and spasmodic attacks of valour, and these epidemics are now coincident with the commencement of every petty campaign . . . All these marvels we now hear of have occurred since the institution of the Victoria Cross, a sufficient proof what a degenerate set we were in the good old days when Victoria was first Queen.
⁴¹

The ‘marvels' Stannus referred to could often easily be mistaken for simple acts of duty. Lieutenant Colonel F. C. Elton, for instance, of the 55th Regiment in the Crimea, gained his VC on 4 August 1855, for showing a splendid example to his men by continuing to lead the regiment while under fire at night; in other words, for doing what would generally be assumed to be nothing more than his duty. For Stannus, the VC set a dangerous precedent; the identification of individuals to be placed on a pedestal was, by definition, a subjective business, heavily dependent on luck, and this, he asserted, fostered wide disgruntlement. Worse, it bred mendacity:

No-one, moreover, contests the received opinion of the service, that the element of merit is in no way mixed up with their distribution, and the shifts resorted to make the bestowal of the Victoria Cross appear plausible on paper, are extremely entertaining . . . I have known
men who could hardly write their own names . . . men whose brains were severely taxed to remember the proper side of the horse on which to mount . . . I have known such men get honours and rewards, and been thrust into exalted staff positions, solely because they brazed it out with those in power, and had back-stairs influence to assist them.
⁴²

No doubt Stannus had in mind the example of Charles Heaphy.

If Stannus was a lone voice, we might simply disregard his views as motivated by bitter prejudice. But there were others – less outspoken perhaps, because they had positions to protect – who worried that the VC caused more harm than good. As early as 1859, Sir William Fraser, MP for Barnstaple and a former captain in the Life Guards who idolized Wellington, spoke for many officers. Fraser feared the VC would encourage soldiers to seek individual glory, to the detriment of broader interests:

Of all the despatches written by that great man [Wellington] there was not one in which the word ‘glory' did occur, nor one in which the word ‘duty' did not occur. Such was the mode of modern warfare that it was next to impossible for an officer of any rank to attain the honour of the Victoria Cross, and he doubted whether its being attainable by subalterns, corporals, and men of the line would not lead them to neglect duty in the pursuit of glory.
⁴³

Henry Hardinge, commander-in-chief of the army, spoke in the same Commons debate. Remarkably, given his close proximity to the Crown, Hardinge asserted that the British army owed its historic success to its discipline, conformity and uniformity, and that the VC undermined these virtues:

the great object in the English army should be to preserve the correct formation of regiments and brigades in line, and not to encourage
officers to step out of the line and mar its completeness for the purpose of signalizing themselves by some special action of gallantry; and an order of this sort which was given for such actions might have its disadvantages.

Unlike Hardinge and Fraser, Stannus had nothing to lose by the time he published his
Curiosities of the Victoria Cross
. In this he considered seven VC citations from the recently concluded Afghan War, unravelling some of the nonsense of early VC citations. His second case was that of Gunner James Colliss of the Royal Horse Artillery.
⁴⁴
Recommended for the VC by General Roberts for his bravery on 28 July 1880, the citation for Collis read in part: ‘For conspicuous bravery during the retreat from Maiwand to Kandahar . . . when the officer commanding the battery was endeavouring to bring in a limber, with wounded men, under a cross-fire, in running forward and drawing the enemy's fire on himself, thus taking off their attention from the limber.' Stannus found this ‘childish twaddle . . . the idea of any one isolated man drawing off the fire from a limber of wounded men whom it is reasonable to suppose had some escort or protection!'
⁴⁵
Discounting Stannus's satirical stabs, his point is valid: why would the enemy fire on Collis rather than the bigger and better target – the loaded limber?
⁴⁶

Stannus's fourth case concerned Reverend James William Adams of the Bengal Ecclesiastical Service. The Adams VC is a perfect illustration of how powerful and influential figures could obtain the Cross for favourites. Stannus was incredulous at the following 1881 citation of the VC for Adams:

During the action at Killa Kazi, on the 11th December, 1879, some men of the 9th Lancers having fallen, with their horses, into a wide and deep ‘nullah' or ditch, and the enemy being close upon them, the Reverend J. W. Adams rushed into the water (which filled the ditch), dragged the horses from off the men upon whom they were lying, and
extricated them, he being at the time under a heavy fire, and up to his waist in water. At this time the Afghans were pressing on very rapidly, the leading men getting within a few yards of Mr. Adams, who having let go his horse in order to render more effectual assistance, had eventually to escape on foot.
⁴⁷

A hasty reading of this citation might conclude that Reverend Adams was clearly tough and courageous on that December day in 1879; why not give him a VC? Does it matter? If we buy into the mythology of an unbroken line of heroes who represent Britain at its finest, then it matters, as the Adams VC is dubious in the extreme; once one citation is doubted, all risk being tainted with suspicion. Stannus inserted his scalpel into the pugnacious parson:

Having had the misfortune during my career to have more than once had a horse lying on the top of me, I am some authority in this matter. Why forty parson-power could not have accomplished what is attributed to this enterprising ecclesiastic! Has the reader ever seen a London cab horse in difficulties? Try even to assist in moving him when on the ground. The physical labour required to alter his position even by a dozen men is surprising. I have never seen the Reverend gentleman who accomplished the marvel above described, and neither know nor have heard anything of his physical proportions, but I should not care to meet him in a lone alley on a dark night.
⁴⁸

The idea of a forty-year-old man pulling several struggling horses off other men, who are trying to get out of a water-filled ditch, is rather difficult to swallow. Under the terms of the 1856 VC warrant, Adams's eligibility for the VC was in any case a grey area. Formally, he was a civilian attached to the Bengal Establishment and, although three VCs had been bestowed on civilians of the Bengal Civil Service during the Indian Mutiny, forcing an extension of the VC warrant on 13 December
1858 to embrace ‘non-military persons' who had performed ‘deeds of gallantry', that extension was regarded by the War Office in London as being specifically limited to the Mutiny. So what may have lain behind Adams's VC?

The word ‘Reverend' conjures up images of a meek-and-mild dog-collared individual. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Adams, a tough, stern, Irish-born ‘muscular' Christian who, at the age of sixty, managed to supervise five services and preach three sermons every Sunday. Adams was an excellent horseman and athlete, and according to contemporaries, he was considered to be the strongest man in Ireland while at Trinity College, Dublin. Ordained in the Church of England in 1863, three years later Adams went to Calcutta, where he joined the East India Company's Bengal Establishment. In December 1876 Adams was placed in charge of the cavalry and artillery camp for the 1877 Delhi Durbar, attended by the Prince of Wales. He was clearly a successful organizer, for in November 1878 General Roberts selected Adams to accompany him as part of the Kabul Field Force. Adams, along with the Presbyterian chaplain, the Reverend J. Manson and Father G. Brown, the Roman Catholic priest, were Mentioned in Despatches by the deeply religious Roberts for being ‘unremitting in their attention to the spiritual wants of the troops'. By the time of his action at Killa Kazi in December 1879, Adams had a firm ally in General Roberts.

Whitehall resisted giving the VC to Adams, not because of the possible absurdity of the citation but because he was strictly speaking a civilian. In the view of the Military Secretary of the time, Lieutenant General Sir Edmund Augustus Whitmore, the 1858 extension of the warrant was to be strictly interpreted. But by 1879 General Roberts was Britain's most successful soldier; he brooked no opposition from War Office desk wallahs. His imperial military success – avenging the murder of Sir Louis Cavagnari, British envoy in Kabul, and his victory
at the Battle of Kandahar on 1 September 1880 – made him a darling at court; the Queen created him Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) on 21 September 1880. He was lionized as a national hero, and his own VC status suggested he knew what courage was. Roberts could, more or less, do what he wanted. Against this the pen-pushing Whitmore was powerless.

Roberts wrote to Whitmore and suggested that, as had happened after the Indian Mutiny, an amended warrant should be drawn up, specifically to accommodate Adams. The Duke of Cambridge – as impatient with bureaucracy as Roberts – saw no real need for a new warrant but inevitably backed Roberts. Whitmore was correct in his strict interpretation of the VC rules; but the rules had stacked against them the two most important military officers in the land. The result was inevitable – just rewrite the rules to accommodate all concerned. Thus on 24 August 1881 the
London Gazette
notified that the Queen had altered the VC warrant to include ‘members of the Indian Ecclesiastical Establishments'; just two days later, and almost two years after the event took place for which he was being decorated, Adams's VC was gazetted.