Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum

He was drunk when the accident happened. One horse had to be destroyed and another died the next day. They had been sent from Australia expressly to weather the climate. Perkes then excelled himself. Sent down the mountain to the accident site with an elephant, he overcame the protests of the mahout and took him off at a fine gallop. Refreshed by brandy and water, and finding his offers of help declined, the groom took off again back up the pass. In his own words, he ‘tooled the old elephant along until he came to a standstill’. Shortly afterwards, the beast keeled over and died. Perkes was, as Baker grimly observed, ‘one of the few men in the world who had ridden an elephant to death’. When he finally caught up with him, the groom was being pushed round the nascent plantation in a wheelbarrow, his mate as drunk as he.

There is a clue to Baker’s unique temperament in a couple of lines of Eight Years in Ceylon. Apart from the damage done by Perkes (whom he quixotically describes as ‘honest and industrious’) there was an early mini-revolt of his tiny colony against the authority of the bailiff, Mr Fowler. It reached a climax when the white men refused to obey orders in front of the 150 natives Baker had hired to uproot the trees. ‘I was obliged to send two of them to jail as an example to the others,’ Baker remarks. ‘This produced the desired effect and we soon got regularly to work.’ One can make too much of this incident but it demonstrates Baker’s supreme self-possession.

Most of Eight Years in Ceylon was written by palm-oil lamp at the end of Sam Baker’s stay on the island. It is not a blueprint for how to set up and manage a model farm – as with the earlier partnership on Mauritius, John, the older brother, assumed most of the day-today responsibilities. Nevertheless, it was Sam’s energy that transformed the plateau. The soil was bad, the rats ate all his first crops; and his two rams, on which he depended for a flock, fought a bad-tempered duel to the death. The bull, cheated of his Durham mate, was put to serve the puny local cattle and produced a strange hybrid, easily outstripped in strength by the elephants Baker trained to drag a plough or trundle not one but three harrows. However, the crossbred cattle showed some surprising qualities. A leopard got into Fowler’s byre through the thatched roof and the poor man went out by lantern light to evict it armed only with a pistol, to be chased out of the place by an enraged cow well up to the challenge from a mere big cat.

Both John and Elizabeth Baker were, years later, buried at Newera Eliya and the Baker family did not sell the prosperous tea estate the original farm finally became until 1947. Even then, the head of the family retained the freehold on the ruined old houses which his grandparents had built. If there is a spirit of the hearth that still dwells there it is assuredly that of Sam Baker. He would not have been human if he had not preened himself a little on his sang-froid. What gave him the calm to face down beasts intent on killing him was indivisible from his general manner.

There cannot be a more beautiful sight than the view of the sunrise from the summit of Pedrotallagalla, the highest mountain in Ceylon, which, rising to the height of 8,300 feet, looks down on Newera Ellya some two thousand feet below on one side, and upon the interminable depths of countless ravines and valleys at its base.

This is the language of the proprietor, which Baker certainly was. The passage places him alone on his eminence, for though he loved his family, he was still a young man and in the whole of his narrative his wife Henrietta scarcely merits a mention. It continues:

There is a feeling approaching the sublime when a solitary man thus stands upon the highest point of earth, before the dawn of day, and waits for the first rising of the sun. Nothing above him but the dusky arch of heaven. Nothing on his level but empty space – all beneath, deep beneath his feet. From childhood he has looked to heaven as the dwelling place of the Almighty, and he now stands upon that lofty summit in the silence of utter solitude: his hand, as he raises it above his head, the highest mark upon the sea-girt land: his form above all mortals upon this land the nearest to his God.

The greater part of Eight Years in Ceylon concerns the sport he had set out to find there, but it does include this lyrical passage:

Comparatively but a few years ago, Newera Ellia was undiscovered – a secluded plain among the mountain tops, tenanted by the elk and the boar. The wind swept over it, and the mists hung around the mountains, and the bright summer with its spotless sky succeeded, but still it was unknown and unseen except by the native bee-hunter in his rambles for wild honey. How changed! The road encircles the plain, and the carts are busy in removing the produce of the land. Here, where wild forest stood, are gardens teeming with English flowers: rosy faced children and ruddy countrymen are about the cottage doors; equestrians of both sexes are galloping round the plain and the cry of hounds is ringing on the mountain-side.

A little over thirty years after his father gazed out on his cane fields in Jamaica, the young Sam Baker had performed a double trick, of creating an Arcadia equal to Saint-Pierre’s in Paul et Virginie, but almost wholly independent of the colony in which it stood. Towards colonial government in general Baker exhibited a fine contempt. Its dilatoriness was exhibited, Baker thought, in such obvious matters as the Botanical Gardens in Colombo, which had been set up as a cultural attraction – the jungle tamed – and which also doubled as a handy site for flirtation and intrigue. Baker pointed out that since most settlers came out to make their fortunes and had no capital to spare for experiment, the government would do much better by using its gardens as a base for scientific investigations. (He was proved right: the introduction of tea to Ceylon eventually came about from crop trials made there.)

Very few men inside or out of any of the colonial governments of the day had gathered so comprehensive an understanding of a land, its indigenous inhabitants and its potential. Eight Years in Ceylon is teasingly short on domestic detail but cannot be faulted otherwise. Sam Baker took as his canvas not just his own estate, nor the game he found, but the whole island. He saw everything with an explorer’s eye.

Then, in 1854, something truly unexpected happened. Racked with fever, Sam staggered down from the mountains without his horse and having buried his gun-bearer. With as much suddenness as he had shown in his original impulse to buy his thousand acres, he now quit. The little community was astonished to learn that all four of the Bakers, with Sam and Henrietta’s four surviving children, had decided to return to England, leaving Mr Fowler in place as manager. Poor Fowler. His wife had died on the plain and was one of the first tenants in the graveyard of the new church. She joined Sam’s own baby son.

There is an old tree standing upon a hill whose gnarled trunk has been twisted by the winter’s wind for many an age, and so screwed is its old stem that the axe has spared it, out of pity, when its companions were all swept away, and the forest felled … The eagle has roosted in its top, the monkeys have gambolled in its branches; and the elephants have rubbed their tough flanks against its stem in times gone by; but it now throws its shade upon a Christian’s grave.

This is the only passage in the book when he comes anywhere close to admitting the full price for his adventures in Ceylon. Ill though he was, his wife was being dragged down with him. They had lost two sons and a daughter to the enterprise and the long monsoon months from June to November were hard to bear. Without light – without sun – the transition that took place in Newera just at a time when a distant Gloucestershire was bathed in plenty was hard to bear. Baker concluded his paragraph on the churchyard with this unexpectedly pietistic sentence: ‘The sunbeam has penetrated where the forest threw its dreary shade, and a ray of light has shone through the moral darkness of the spot.’

They took their leave of Fowler and the others and sailed home together. Old Sam Baker had remarried after the death of his first wife and had given up Lypiatt Park: there was nothing left for them in Gloucestershire. John and Elizabeth settled for the time being in Rugby; Valentine and the youngest brother James were in the army encamped before Sebastopol. Sam took his family to a rented house on the Atholl estate in Scotland. Towards Christmas, the weak and listless Henrietta allowed herself to be carted off to the French Pyrenees to get well again. Her husband also had it in mind to hunt the black bear he had heard roamed the winter slopes. The couple took their four children with them.

Henrietta Baker died at Bagnères-de-Bigorre on 29 December 1855. Since her marriage to Sam she had lived almost a third of her life in the tropics. She died in a room where deep snow lay outside the window and melted into the icy black waters of the Adour. One of the unmarried Martin sisters, Charlotte, who was only twenty-two, came out to France to rescue the children.

She found her brother-in-law stunned and almost completely helpless. He had arrived at Bagnères with the utter confidence that being a Baker was of itself a cure against ill. Henrietta would buck up, the children would scratch out a few words of French and in some snowy ravine behind the town the black bear would present a perfect shot. His own animal high spirits would act as tonic and emollient – things would soon be as they should be. But the maire of Bagnères was also a crack shot and had been into the mountains before him. One of the sights Charlotte Martin winced at seeing was Sam’s gun cases in the hotel bedroom, still buckled, still with the protective tampons of lint tucked into the weapons’ muzzles. Couldn’t it be said that he had dragged the family south to Bagnères simply to satisfy himself? No doctor would have prescribed such a trip to an out-of-season spa. C’était tragique, la mort de cette pauvre Anglaise, mais vous savez …

The widower who ate alone at his restaurant table was thirty-four years old and a casual eye might have added another ten to that. Something had happened to this man that was as unexpected and humiliating as flinching in the face of danger. The sheer ordinariness of death, its artless sprawl, had tripped him up. Henrietta had died not from the exhaustion that had brought her to this Christmas card spa town, but from typhus, caught from bed lice somewhere along the road. It was an awful outcome and might have ended another man’s career there and then.

TWO (#ulink_fa8ba0d7-dbec-5391-b916-cf5a3a0ad107)

Valentine Baker, always called Val in the family, was named for his naval grandfather. There is a photograph of him as a young man in Ceylon: he wears a high collar and stock, his hair is long, his arms are folded composedly across his chest. His moustache is in the experimental stage and has yet to find its voluptuous curves. It is the eyes that tell the story. What is most striking about Val’s expression is its calm. If the camera represents the outer, public world, then he is looking into it with an eerie self-possession. That same look in the eye of a wild animal would have sent an instant warning signal to Sam Baker, tightening his finger on the trigger.

A boy among men, Val came out to Ceylon on the Earl of Hardwicke with the rest of Sam’s party in 1845. From the beginning he was only ever a lukewarm farm colonist. For example: after a season or two on the plateau Sam Baker invented for himself a sort of woollen suit for his jungle explorations, the fabric dyed a muddy and streaky green by the juice of plants. It was cinched at the waist by the belt that carried the killer knife. He wore this kit without embarrassment and was always eager to press its advantages on others. It is not possible to picture Val ever wearing anything like it, even if it stood between him and sudden death.

He was at school in Gloucester during the Mauritius years and still only nineteen when he came to Newera. A windswept plateau halfway up a mountain was never going to satisfy his curiosity about life in the tropics. In any case, Val was only in Ceylon under licence – his father had long wished that he and his youngest brother James should enter the army. The family was rich and had worked its way into becoming part of the landed interest in Gloucestershire; and so, to old Sam Baker, the way forward for his youngest sons pointed to service in the Guards or, better still, a good cavalry regiment. Looked at in this light, Val’s journey to Ceylon was no more than a jaunt. Unfortunately, as his photograph shows, there was very little of the jaunty about him.

To have a soldier in the family was a fatherly ambition that could turn out, under the wrong circumstances, to be ruinously expensive. The army offered its officer elite the opportunity of a plural life such as some parsons had enjoyed in the eighteenth century – they were gentlemen first and soldiers only afterwards. In the fashionable regiments no officer, however cautious in his habits, could subsist on his pay alone. His path to senior rank was choked by elderly and often grievously incompetent men who saw the purchase system, by which everything from a cornetcy to a colonelship could be bought and sold, as a guarantee of their pension. The first step in a military career – the right regiment – was the most important one. Thereafter, deep pockets helped – Lord Brudenell raised himself by reckless purchase from cornet to command of his own regiment in just eight years. As Earl of Cardigan he is reputed to have spent a further £10,000 annually to ensure the 11th Hussars remained among the most fashionable (and reactionary) of British cavalry regiments. Cardigan’s manic personal vanity made him a particularly vivid example of what was, in a dozen or so regiments, the norm. The Guards, the Household Cavalry and certain favoured Hussar regiments had become, in effect, the junior branches of the aristocracy in uniform.

If this was old Sam Baker’s ambition for his son Val, it must have caused consternation when news came that he had ridden back down the mountain only a few months after arriving at Newera and purchased an ensignship in that very undistinguished foot regiment, the Ceylon Rifles.

Touching the role of a young officer in times of peace, Thackeray wrote woundingly: ‘The professional duties of a footman are quite as difficult and various.’ He had this further to say in his Book of Snobs, published in 1846, the year Val joined the Rifles:

When epaulets are not sold; when corporal punishments are abolished and Corporal Smith has a chance to have his gallantry rewarded as well as that of Lieutenant Grig; when there is no such rank as ensign and lieutenant (the existence of which rank is an absurd anomaly, and an insult upon all the rest of the army), and should there be no war, I should not be disinclined to be a major-general myself.

Val had joined as modest a regiment as could be found, tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the Army List. His decision may have seemed inexplicable in Gloucestershire but a motive based on local conditions suggests itself. Up in Newera Sam, in his blustery and good-humoured way, was developing his role as the social outsider, a reputation he enjoyed and did his best to burnish. By joining the Rifles Val indicated an alternative. An ensign’s duties might be mostly comprised of smoking and lounging but what they also offered was the pleasure of belonging. The elements of obedience and submission implied by regimental life were handsomely offset by the sense of fraternity engendered. A man who purchased the queen’s commission anywhere was joining a select, if embattled, club. This desire to conform would become Val’s tragedy.

The immediate consequence of his move to the coast was to open a window on to the part of Ceylon his brother had made such a point of ignoring – conventional Colombo society. As Val soon discovered, while the island might be a paradise for big-game hunters, its administration was a mare’s nest. As with every other outpost of Empire, social recognition hung upon favourable notice by the governor or his commander-in-chief. To be invited to this or that ball; there to be presented to a general on his way to a more distant posting, or to a savant of the Royal Society being carried to the ends of the earth – all this gave the appearance of upholding a civility whose wellspring was in London.

The spirit of empire was not so sturdy that it did not need continuous reinforcement. When HMS Beagle came to Sydney in 1836, Charles Darwin found it ‘a most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America.’ Such generous sentiments were received with gratitude by his hosts, as was the conclusion he drew from them, a desire ‘to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman’. He had not been so kind towards New Zealand, describing the English there as ‘the very refuse of society’, but in Australia, young though he was, he had done the right thing.

The colonial enthusiasm that greeted the arrival of every ship flying the British flag and honoured its passenger list down to the least of its officers was demonstrated by people a long way from home, it was true; but that was not the only reason to feast strangers. The governor’s residence, which was always the distinguished visitor’s first port of call – in Colombo it was called, archaically, the King’s House – was the amplification chamber of a distant murmur. What were they saying in London? The home country’s desires and wishes were not always clear and congratulation was a rare commodity. As a consequence there was no such thing as stale news. Rumour and gossip were quite as closely attended as official dispatches.

Such was early Victorian society that well-bred strangers in conversation with each other were seldom at more than two or three degrees of separation from common acquaintances, by marriage, by regiment or by country seat. For the governor and his entourage, this was a second and more anxious reason to flatter the latest new arrival. By indirection, they were trying to find out how they stood personally. Colonial appointments, far from being sinecures, were very much movable feasts. Since 1840 five governors had packed their bags and quit Colombo. Sam Baker pointed out in Eight Years in Ceylon how this constant shifting around of administrators, their secretaries and military advisers did nothing but harm to emerging colonies, denying continuity and cohesion to their governing class.

Val was lucky – or circumspect – in his choice of Colombo friends, striking up acquaintance with a young man not entirely unlike himself. The chief justice of Ceylon was a man called Sir Anthony Oliphant, none too happily married to a powerful but neurasthenic woman who spent most of her summer months in a cottage by the lake at Newera. The couple were notorious evangelicals. Their only son Laurence was two years younger than Val and had been raised on the island as something of a wild child. In 1846 Sir Anthony and his family went home to England on a two-year leave, with the intention of leaving Laurence to study at university. Instead, the boy threw over his place at Cambridge to follow his father and mother back out to Ceylon.

Ceylon as it was in Skinner’s day.

When he and his mother pitched up at Newera, he found the Bakers in the full flood of setting up the model farm. Sam, in his breezy and open-handed way, took Laurence shooting. They camped together deep in the forest and the older man taught Oliphant, among other things, how to catch and dispatch a crocodile: you tied a live puppy to a wooden crucifix and, when the predator’s jaws were jammed wide open by the indigestible element of the bait, you hauled him in and took a sporting shot through the eye.

Oliphant was completely sanguine about butchery of this kind; nor was he fazed by the other privations of a Baker jungle expedition. Courageous and resourceful, very quick-witted, he would later be one of the most enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century. His mother, whose address at Newera was ‘The Turtle Dovery’, was twenty years younger than her husband and liked nothing more than to be congratulated on her youthful appearance – and, on occasion, to be mistaken for her son’s sister. She clung to Laurence with almost a lover’s tenacity.

The two young men – Oliphant and Val Baker – were at first glance very alike. They were good looking, athletic, perhaps a little too sketchily educated, but obedient to the usual conventions of society. Each had an interesting background. Strangers who had heard something of the Oliphant family and came looking for a mummy’s boy in Laurence were surprised to meet a blond but already balding giant, energetic and voluble. Those Colombo planters who felt themselves snubbed by the maverick Bakers up in Newera discovered in Val not an unhappy deserter, but a family member with the same trademark self-possession.

An astute observer might have found more intriguing shadows in Laurence Oliphant. He was one of those men made to be a secret agent – spontaneous and effusive on the outside, but inwardly tortured. Born at the Cape in 1829, brought up haphazardly in Ceylon by a succession of private tutors, he nevertheless – to the surprise of his father’s distinguished dinner guests – spoke five languages. Dissembling his feelings in order to accommodate the war between his parents had made him a master of disguise. Never the milksop his mother seemed to want to cherish, and certainly not the evangelical saint of his father’s imagination, Oliphant was a complicated young man. On his way out to Ceylon in 1848 to join his family, he found himself in Naples in the middle of the Italian uprising.

I shall never forget joining a roaring mob one evening, bent upon I knew not what errand, and getting forward by the pressure of the crowd and my own eagerness into the front rank just as we reached the Austrian Legation, and seeing ladders passed to the front and placed against the wall, and the arms torn down.

He helped drag the hated emblem of foreign occupation to the Piazza del Populo and assisted in its burning. This is worthy of Byron or Shelley. At Messina his hotel was bombarded by the king of Naples’s fleet and when he came back up to Naples he was in the square in front of the palace when King Bomba ordered his troops to fire into the crowd. Laurence escaped injury by crouching behind an arch. He was nineteen years old.

Val Baker’s life to date had been a great deal less exciting. He had manners, he was dutiful, yet he was to others merely an officer in an undistinguished rifle regiment, a young infantry subaltern who knew a great deal about horses. His military duties were almost ludicrously undemanding. The faintly effeminate nature of the indigenous population that made it so difficult to recruit also made the island easy to govern. There was, as it happened, an outburst of civil unrest just at the time Val came down to the coast. Everyone knew that, in the event of a serious threat, the place would be flooded with troops from India. In the ordinary course of things, soldiering in Ceylon was about as taxing as taking up watercolours, or butterfly-hunting; and it had been this way since the brief Kandyan wars of 1817–18.

There was one Ceylon Rifle officer known by name at least to everyone on the island. Thomas Skinner joined as an ensign in 1819 when he was fifteen years old. To great amusement, he attended his first parade in civilian clothes, no uniform being found small enough to fit him. Skinner proved to have a genius for road-building and, by teaching himself the use of the theodolite, went on to produce the first accurate survey of the island’s interior. (Little monuments to him are scattered along the roads of Ceylon to the present day.) His career is an example of how the purchase system worked.

After he had spent some years as a lieutenant, Skinner’s fellow officers clubbed together to provide the purchase price of a vacant captaincy, an exceptional mark of respect for his talents. Out of pride (both his father and father-in-law were colonels) Skinner declined the money and so lost eleven long years of seniority. His promotion eventually came about in a particularly grotesque way. There was in the Rifles a Captain Fretz. One afternoon Fretz levelled his musket at an elephant and had the block blow back in his face. A chunk of metal over three inches long and weighing nearly four ounces entered his nasal cavity and lodged against his palate. Incredibly, Fretz survived another eight years of service with this horrific alteration to his appearance, astonishing his colleagues when drunk by absently twiddling a screw that poked from what was left of his nostril.

This was the captaincy Skinner waited for so patiently, while at the same time receiving fulsome commendations from the governor’s office for his industry and ingenuity as road-builder and surveyor. They were getting him on the cheap. In the end he gave the island fifty years of service without ever rising beyond the rank of major. The man who benefited from Lieutenant Skinner’s original fit of pride and made captain in his place was called Rogers. He was struck by lightning at Badulla, on the road to Newera, shortly after Val joined the Rifles. Skinner observes without comment that Captain Rogers was credited with killing 1500 elephants during his military service on the island.

Since 1840 members of the administration had been encouraged to purchase land and take up coffee-farming, as an inducement to remain in post. This was soon extended to the public at large – Sam Baker was a beneficiary of the policy when buying his thousand acres at Newera. The short-lived land-boom attracted every kind of investor and speculator. For as long as Ceylon coffee was protected by tariff all went well. However, when the tariff was abolished by Whitehall, the price of coffee beans fell from 100 shillings a hundredweight to 45 shillings, or the cost of growing the crop in the first place. Many of the investors were ruined.

It became clear the government had raised huge sums on the sale of land that could not be easily cultivated and for which there was no crop. At the same time the land-grab had brought into the colony men of a very different stamp to Sam Baker. A scramble started for permits to produce arrack, the fiery liquor made from palm-sap. The so-called ‘arrack farms’ provided a quick return on capital: those who could not afford them bought government licences to open taverns, which soon proliferated in their hundreds. The government derived £60,000 a year from the sale of such permits and licences but it was revenue disastrously acquired. Arrack turned a peaceable, if indolent, native population into a society of drunks. The old trust between the governors and the governed began to collapse. What Skinner identified as ‘the native gentleman’, that is the native of high caste on whose loyalty and respect for the white man everything depended, now began to be sidelined. There was no question who would win in such a situation. Native Sinhalese society began to disintegrate.

It is a story of greed and opportunism that Val witnessed at first hand, one that goes unreported in Eight Years in Ceylon. Skinner, who should have been a hero to Sam Baker, is never mentioned by him – any more than is Val himself. In 1849 there was a tax revolt that led to the arrest and summary execution of hundreds of native protestors. Oliphant’s father was kept busy trying some defendants by legal process while others were shot out of hand in batches of four. Colombo panicked. The bishop of Ceylon fell out with his clergy. The governor, Lord Torrington, was hastily recalled and replaced, not by another soldier but by a senior Indian civil servant brought out of retirement and given the sweetener of a KCB to clean up the mess. Laurence Oliphant could not be held by the island: in 1851, though he had been admitted to the colonial Bar, he went to Kathmandu on the sort of sudden whim to which Sam Baker was prone.

In April 1852 Val too made his break with Ceylon. He sold his commission and purchased one in the 10th Hussars, then stationed in Kirkee (Poona) on the plains above Bombay. The army, with which he had toyed in the Ceylon Rifles, now claimed him completely. Belonging, which was the choice Val made in life, was given a sudden and even brutal codification. He began to follow a path that diverged from all others in the nineteenth century; and if as a consequence his portrait seems to us unfocused, to his age he was a familiar type. That belligerent stare, the capacity to stay silent when nothing needed to be said, a quasi-aristocratic contempt for outsiders, was the mark of a Victorian army officer. He already had the temperament. The cavalry turned it into a style.

The 10th Hussars had something of a royal connection. The Prince Regent had taken a strong personal interest in the regiment named for him and had once tried to persuade Wellington that he had commanded it at Waterloo. He certainly designed its uniform and bullied Beau Brummell to join. (The Beau resigned after three years when the regiment was posted to Manchester, giving as his reason his unwillingness to go on foreign service.) Money got Val into the 10th. His cornetcy cost £800 to purchase at the official rate, though he probably paid considerably over the odds to acquire it; now only money or war would advance him higher. At Kirkee, high up on the basalt plains of the Deccan, he could covertly study middle-aged captains who, socially eligible though they might be, were too poor to purchase their way and, like the long-suffering Lieutenant Skinner, waited on luck or seniority to bring them to the top of the pile. The posts they were after could quite as easily be snatched from them by an outsider, a system of arbitrary cruelty but one fiercely defended by the only authority that really mattered. In 1833 the Duke of Wellington had advised the House of Commons:

It is the promotion by purchase which brings into the service men of fortune and education, men who have some connection with the interests and fortunes of the country, besides the Commissions which they hold from His Majesty. It is this circumstance which exempts the British Army from the character of being a ‘mercenary army’, and has rendered its employment for nearly a century and a half not only inconsistent with the constitutional privileges of the country, but safe and beneficial.

The 10th Hussars had already been in India for nine years when Val joined them. The officers and men of a European regiment posted abroad were the lords of creation to those around them. With nothing very onerous to do, regiments like the 10th Hussars developed to a fine point the esprit de corps on which their identity depended. The regiment was everything. In England it had no particular loyalty to a town or county. At this time there was no fixed brigade or divisional structure. Of the several hundred officers holding general’s rank, only a fraction were on the active list. Those who were in the field considered it none of their business to administer a central policy, even had one existed. They were not managers, nor were they strategists. They were simply senior soldiers, whose job was to bring the troops to battle. The affairs of the army as a whole were conducted between harassed scribblers in thirteen separate departments – there was no general staff and no War Office. The British army, as Prince Albert concluded sourly, was ‘a mere aggregation of regiments’.