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

It was not unusual for units to be posted to India, or elsewhere in the world, for ten or even twenty years. Once there, regimental pride kept the men from going mad or mutinous. Above them was a shadowy and unarticulated concept, ‘the Queen’s Army’. Below them and at their feet were the natives, the savages, the locals. For the officers, the ambience was part club, part country house. At night, dressed for dinner and with the mess silver reflecting back the candlelight, they found that India faded a little into the background and England – a certain old-fashioned and romantic image of England – was recreated. The talk, the food, the taking of wines were all carefully prescribed. Though some wives came out with their husbands – more and more since the introduction of the first steamer services – it was essentially a man’s world. At Kirkee the officers built themselves a racquets court and kept up a dusty and zealously rolled cricket pitch. Every cavalry regiment encouraged racing. Shooting and fishing were a common interest – a man would have his own guns and his favourite rod with him as a matter of course.

It was not all an idyll of knightly companionship. Sir Charles Napier had only recently quit India for the second time, such a hero to his age that The Dictionary of National Biography gives his occupation simply as ‘Conqueror of Sind’. Born in 1782, Napier had fought his way into the affections of the British army as a courageous soldier and a supreme strategist. Short-sighted and faintly querulous in appearance – with his silver spectacles and umbrella he resembled a country parson more than anything else – he was religious by temperament and radical in outlook. In a widely unpopular farewell address given in 1850, in place of the usual sentiments he castigated the officer class in India for its fondness for gambling, drinking and running up debts against the locals. Napier had the courage to point out that not every officer was a gentleman. His criticisms were directed against the Indian army but were deprecated by the entire officer caste. This was breaking a deeply cherished code of conduct: the army did not criticise its own. Napier died shortly after in 1853. As can be read on the plinth to the statue by George Canon Adams in Trafalgar Square, the greater part of the subscriptions to erect it came from private soldiers.

Val was twenty-three when he joined the 10th Hussars, a little old for such a junior officer. However, the pace of his life soon accelerated. After only a year with the 10th he sold his commission to a man called Carrington and exchanged without purchase to the 12th Lancers, a sister regiment. He went down to Bombay and sailed to join his new colleagues at the Cape. In so doing, he joined the greater, other, world at a time when Sam and John Baker were still living in a dream. Val came to realise years before his brothers that Ceylon – both the romantic landscape and the mess the administration was making of it – was a long way from the heart of the beast.

For what they had at the Cape was war.

Armchair strategists of the sort that shared their port with elderly generals had long seen the Cape as being the true gateway to India, an opinion derived from their fathers at the time of Nelson. In the years since, a sea-borne threat to the colony had disappeared, possibly for ever. All the trouble came from inland. What was more, the introduction of steam on the Suez – Bombay route had changed even the basic premise of the argument: Aden and its stocks of coal was now quite as important as Cape Town. The new metaphor was not of gateways but of hinges. Right at the other end of the continent, Egypt was gradually acquiring its significance as ‘the hinge of Asia’. The Cape was, like Ceylon, an example of a colony that could neither pay its way nor devise what was called in the language of the day a forward policy.

Val’s little war was against the Basuto and was counted the eighth ‘Kaffir War’ to be fought for possession and extension of the colony’s borders. The other seven had been against the implacably hostile Xhosa, who carried in their ranks the ancestors of Nelson Mandela. In April 1853 William Black, assistant surgeon to the forces in South Africa, commented on the nature of the adversary.

The Kaffirs evidence very few, if any, moral attributes; their minds are made up of strong animal passions, not under the control of, but ministered to by a stronger intellect than most native tribes in Africa possess. They inherit a national pride from this state of mind, which little adapts them for the reception of the benign influences of Christianity.

The Xhosa and the Basuto could be forgiven for taking that to be a description of the whites they had come across. The situation in the Cape was complicated by the Boers, whose Christianity was not exactly benign. The Boers liked the British not much better than the blacks and, in an attempt to find themselves new country, pushed the colony’s borders ever further northwards. The British found it all very exasperating. Another Napier, no relation to the general, had written his suggestions for policing the Cape borders in 1851. Lieutenant-Colonel Napier commanded the irregular cavalry which tried to fight fire with fire by adapting its tactics to those of the enemy. After pointing out how difficult a boundary the Fish river was, he proposed

that all Kaffir tribes be driven beyond the Kye [Kei]; that river to be then considered as the boundary of the Eastern Province; that after the expiration of a reasonable period, every male Kaffir above the age of 16, caught within this limit (whether armed or unarmed) be put to death like a beast of prey; or if taken alive that he be removed to the vicinity of Cape Town, there to work as a felon on the public roads.

This was the world in which Val and the Lancers found themselves. There were about 2000 troops already engaged in the war and the Lancers had come out with the Rifle Brigade to settle matters. Val was astonished and disgusted by what he found.

I remember at the Cape, during the Kaffir War, seeing a regiment march into King William’s town … They were without a vestige of the original uniforms. They had all been torn to pieces, and the men had made coats out of blankets and trousers out of anything they could get. A tight, well fitting jacket is all very well for a dragoon to wear whilst walking about a country town, or making love to nursery-maids, but this is not the purpose for which a soldier is intended …

Val’s own troopers wore cavalry overalls so fashionably tight that, once dismounted, they could not get back up into their saddles without help. Soon enough the wait-a-bit thorns and acacias made a mockery of their turnout as well. Campaigning in the Cape was a bad-tempered muddle, from which only a few things emerged as beyond dispute. The Boers were excellent shots, the Basuto incredibly brave. The British marched this way and that, pinched by economies imposed by home government and maddened by the heat, the flies and the heroic obstinacy of their enemy. Scapegoats were found. Sir Harry Smith, the governor-general, was sent home. The army seethed. In its own ranks, the readiest explanation of the trouble the Kaffirs were causing was that they were egged on by the hated missionaries, who would keep telling them they were as one with the white man in the sight of God. ‘We treat the Kaffirs as a power like ourselves to be treated with and to make war against as highly civilized and humane people,’ complained Major Wellesley of the 25th, who though (or perhaps because) he was an Etonian wrote an English all his own. ‘We are taught this by Exeter House and the Aborigines Protection Society, divine laws do not go to this length, and in return for our humanity the Enemy murder us in their old accustomed barbarous manner, and we spend several millions yearly.’

This was written in camp at the Little Caledon river in December 1852. A mile or so away was a mission house and, in the hills to Wellesley’s front, Chief Moshoeshoe’s kraal. It was in this tawny landscape that Val Baker took the first crucial step in his military career. It was the moment of which every subaltern dreamed. At this otherwise nondescript place, called Berea, the Lancers went into action. It was just before Christmas and the engagement was short and, on the Basuto side, bloody. Berea ended the war and was reported in the British papers as a great victory. It did not matter much that the Lancers had been ambushed when they were in the act of driving off 4000 head of cattle that did not belong to them: the black man one had in one’s sights at a moment like that was indisputably from an inferior race and needed to be taught a lesson.

Not for another twenty years would Sam Baker turn his rifle against a human being, and then only with the greatest reluctance. Yet as Val discovered, Africa was a far more powerful example of ‘the moral dark’ than Ceylon. The action at Berea, which ended the eighth ‘Kaffir War’, was an unequal contest between men with spears and men with rifles. It was war on the smallest scale – the casualties on the British side were no more than fifty-four killed and wounded – but it was war all the same.

Once Moshoeshoe had sued for peace, the 12th Lancers marched south and were placed under orders to proceed to Madras. Val left the Cape with the approbation of his senior commanders, a medal and a locally bred horse, Punch. Exchanging from the Hussars to the Lancers had done him no harm at all and he returned to the languors of barracks life in the green and beautiful city of Bangalore with a story to tell. Never particularly demonstrative, nor the most approachable of mess members, he had all the same made his mark.

Less than a year later the colonel himself raced into the officers’ lines waving a sheet of paper that announced a very much greater affair. Fate had dealt Val the high card. The 12th Lancers were ordered to the Crimea.

They were already three months behind the game. War was declared by Britain against Russia on 27 March 1854 but, because of the tardiness of communications and the chronic incompetence of military organisation, the regiment did not leave Bangalore until July, marching by slow stages across country to Bombay. Though they chafed at the delays, they were lucky. The regiment missed the horrors of the winter campaign and arrived at Balaclava in April 1855. No sooner had they landed than Val Baker, raised to a captain’s rank, was detached from general duty and sent to serve on Raglan’s staff.

The 12th Lancers arrived late at a military and diplomatic debacle that had been years, even decades, in the making. The arthritic deformation of the army that had begun before Val was born was now revealed in all its pathos. Very few general officers were under sixty – the British commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, was sixty-eight when he took the field. The men responsible for servicing the expeditionary force once it was in the Crimea had forgotten, if they ever knew, how to do their jobs. James Filder was brought unwillingly out of a lengthy retirement to be commissary-general, in charge of the civilian contractors to the war. Like Raglan he was in his late sixties. Assured that all that was being asked of him was to supply something akin to a small colonial engagement, Filder was drawn deeper and deeper into disaster. The clerks who worked under him had no grasp of the practical needs of an army. During the campaign an officer who went down to Balaclava to requisition a couple of sacks of vegetables for his squadron was turned away with the explanation they could only be issued by the ton. A more seasoned soldier who needed a handful of nails to roof a hut was issued with and accepted twenty barrels. Things like clothing, ammunition and, above all, medical supplies were harder to come by.

The effects of mismanagement and military incompetence were everywhere. Val could ride out on the ridge that looked down on Balaclava, past thousands of items of familiar kit lying scattered and half-buried, along with bones and the rags of uniforms. The one thing not to be found anywhere was a scrap of wood, or anything else that could be burned. In the winter of 1854 soldiers had stripped the dead of their boots to use as fuel: they even tried to cut their frozen meat ration into strips of kindling. It was said that because Lord Raglan refused to allow starving horses to be withdrawn from the line, the animals ate first their harness, then each other’s tails, until they perished. Men froze to death at their posts. Elizabeth Davis, who had been with Florence Nightingale at Scutari, came up to the General Hospital at Balaclava. The first case she attended was of frostbite – all the patient’s toes came off with the bandages. In a neighbouring bed a comrade’s hands fell off at the wrist.

For a cavalryman, the greatest of all the horrors was the destruction of the Light Brigade the previous October. Val’s brother James was a cornet in the 8th Hussars and was snatched from disaster at the very last minute. Just before the charge he was told to report to Raglan’s staff. The order saved his life. Tennyson’s sombre valediction was published only three weeks after the battle, and while the public swallowed whole the idea that something glorious had taken place, something that threw credit on the English character, military judgement differed. A huge blunder had occurred, one that immediately turned Raglan into a lame-duck commander. Though the Prince Consort sent out Roger Fenton to make a photographic record of the campaign, the results were painterly and anodyne group portraits that told people next to nothing. It was William Russell’s dispatches for The Times that satisfied the country’s taste for blood and, along with it, revenge on the senior commanders. The army despised Russell for having committed the gravest offence it knew – ‘croaking’ – yet many officers were not above doing the same thing. Responsible men, driven to it by despair, betrayed their commanders with anonymous press comments or the publication of their private correspondence.

The botched campaign led to the fall of a ministry. In January 1855 Lord Aberdeen went out and Palmerston came in. He offered Lord Panmure the post of Secretary at War and he lost no time in shifting the blame from the government to the army itself. Panmure’s society nickname was ‘the Bison’. He put his head down and charged Raglan full on. It brought forth this remarkable reply:

My Lord, I have passed a life of honour. I have served the crown for above fifty years; I have for the greater portion of that time been connected with the business of the Army. I have served under the greatest man of the age more than half of my life; have enjoyed his confidence and have, I am proud to say, been regarded by him as a man of truth and some judgement as to the qualification of officers; and yet, having been placed in the most difficult position in which an officer was ever called upon to serve, and having successfully carried out most difficult operations, with the entire approbation of the Queen, which is now my only solace, I am charged with every species of neglect.

So comprehensive was the criticism of Raglan and his senior officers, only the young could come out with any credit. Some of the names thrown up from the mud and ice of the Crimea were destined to become famous for as long as the century lasted. Garnet Wolseley was only twenty-one when he came out and had already been wounded and mentioned in dispatches while serving in Burma. He was twice wounded in the campaign and again mentioned in dispatches. The French gave him the Légion d’Honneur. He was promoted captain in the field and after the war became a colonel at the age of twenty-five. By the time he celebrated his fortieth birthday Wolseley was a major-general and the subject of Gilbert’s affectionate lyric in The Pirates of Penzance.

Another man who had an outstanding campaign was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant of Engineers, Charles George Gordon. In the end he, even more than Wolseley, was to personify the new soldier-patriot. Gordon’s background was impeccable. He came from four generations of officers and both his father and his brother Henry became generals. He was brought up within the walls of Woolwich barracks, where his father was Inspector of the Carriage Department of the Royal Military Academy. As a child Gordon was rumbustious and anti-authoritarian, and it was an uncomfortable surprise to his later admiring biographers to learn that at fourteen his dearest wish was to become an eunuch. The strange worm that ate away at Gordon all his life had made its first appearance.

He joined the RMA and proved to be a gifted cadet. Academically he could not be faulted. The problem lay with his temperament. Gordon was a quarrelsome young man, so much so that he lost a year’s seniority for striking a colleague. There was a greater punishment still. Instead of joining the Artillery as he wished, he was commissioned into the much less glamorous Engineers, of whom it was said that their officers ‘were either mad, Methodist, or married’. He served eighteen months at the depot in Chatham and then was posted to Pembroke, where the docks were being hastily fortified against the latest French invasion scare. There he met the mysterious Captain Drew, a fellow Engineer and devout evangelical Christian. Drew changed his life. After many fevered and prayerful conversations with this officer, Gordon went out to the Crimea in the simple but distressing hope of meeting his Maker.

To attract God’s attention, he showed the kind of bravery in the campaign that was almost obligatory for a subaltern but which he burnished in his own fashion. He would carry out hair-raising reconnaissance of the Russian positions alone and unarmed and give himself any duties that exposed him to the greater risk. He would not accept parcels of food or clothing from home and extended this contempt for personal privation to the men serving under him, who he thought had only their own stupidity to blame for any suffering they endured. He was at last wounded. Had he died, he would have been remembered only by the sappers in his unit as the most colossal prig. Unfortunately for them, ten days after receiving his wound he returned, ready with more of the same maddening self-righteousness.

The generals at last obliged Charlie Gordon with the sort of action that should have carried him off for good – the second assault on the Redan Redoubt of 18 June 1855. It was a sapper’s day out, for the plan called for ladder parties and scaling equipment. The abortive infantry attack was led by General Eyre, with whom Val Baker had served at the Cape; and there was another Cape hand in the main Engineers party, Colonel Richard Tylden. Garnet Wolseley also took part in the attack. Another lieutenant of Engineers and Gordon’s friend, in so far as he had any, the giant Gerald Graham, was awarded the VC for his part in this action. Lord Raglan, who had only ten more days to live, watched the assault from an exposed position, while earnestly entreating his staff officers to seek cover behind a battery wall.

The day provided one of those telling stories by which the nineteenth-century army is illuminated. Led away from the carnage by Garnet Wolseley, Raglan paused by a wounded officer on a stretcher. ‘My poor young gentleman,’ he murmured with his trademark courtesy, ‘I hope you are not badly hurt.’ He was inviting the wounded man to think in those detached terms with which a true Briton faced death and mutilation – after all, he himself had left his right arm at Waterloo, struck by a musket ball that could as easily have done for the great Wellington, who was standing next to him. Instead of giving a smile or a feeble hurrah, the poor devil craned up from his stretcher and blamed his commander-in-chief for every drop of blood shed that day. Wolseley was outraged. It would, he said, have given him satisfaction to run his sword through the ‘unmanly carcass’.

The adjective tells the story. It was not one Raglan himself would have bothered using. Like his chief, the Iron Duke, the Waterloo veteran required nothing more of his troops than that they stood their ground and took the consequences. They could be scoundrels or cowards, heroes or braggarts – it was all the same in the end. Of course he would have preferred the dying man to thank him for the courtesy of his enquiry, but if instead he screamed abuse, what had had been gained or lost? Hundreds were dying all around. It was Wolseley who thought enough of the moment to remember it later with such incandescent anger.

A week or so later Val was part of the huge funeral cortège that followed Raglan’s coffin down to the sea. All four of the allied commanders-in-chief marched in the parade. There were detachments from every British regiment and the way was lined two-deep with soldiers who had not been paraded but came anyway to pay their last respects. As the bands played the Dead March from Saul, and even the Russian guns fell silent, what was passing was the death of the old army and its sentimental connection to the distant and almost forgotten wars against Napoleon.

As a member of Raglan’s escort, Val had been placed above the battle with a highly privileged view of the conduct of the campaign. A more ambitious – or indiscreet – officer might have attempted something in print or, if not that, written letters to his family intended for posterity. That was not Val’s nature. In the three short years since leaving Ceylon, the principal military virtue Val had acquired happened to coincide with his private character. As he rode down the hill following Raglan’s coffin, he kept up that social mask which is the hardest of all to maintain, an implacable and chilling visage de bois. He was twenty-eight years old and not about to croak.

In the late summer of 1855, when the war had reached stalemate and no one could stomach the idea of a second winter campaign, the British ambassador to Constantinople came up to Balaclava with an embassy retinue. His purpose was to tour the battlefields and distribute medals. To Val’s complete surprise the ambassador’s private secretary was none other than his friend Laurence Oliphant, whom he had last seen heading for Kathmandu.

Val gave him dinner in the cavalry camp. Loquacious as ever, Oliphant swiftly took charge of the evening. Yes, he had been to Nepal, but then, three years ago, at the time Val was fighting at the Cape, he made a semi-secret journey from St Petersburg down the Volga and along the Black Sea littoral. This was a restricted military area, about which the Russians were (understandably, in the light of circumstance) very sensitive. It turned out that Oliphant was one of the few Englishman ever to have penetrated to Sebastopol itself, over which so much blood had been spilt. Disguised as a German farm-hand, he skulked round the streets with his eyes wide open, taking particular interest in the massive fortifications. He correctly identified the Malakhov redoubt as the key to the city’s defences. When he came home, he wrote a book about his travels, published a few months before war with Russia was declared. The point of the story was in its coda. Oliphant had been secretly summoned to the Horse Guards at the end of 1853 and quizzed by Raglan about what he had seen – and this, he declared complacently to Val, was why they were all where they were now.

Three years had changed these two men to a remarkable degree. The hare was dining with the tortoise. Oliphant had been presented at court in 1852 – the queen fixing him with a peculiarly intent stare, though why she should do so he left Val (and us) to guess at – and he also let fall offhandedly that literary London considered him one of the better young writers of the day. Only recently he had reviewed Eight Years in Ceylon for Blackwood’s Magazine. In fact, he remembered now an interesting and recent anecdote about Sam that his brother might like to hear.

It was a tale told with all of Oliphant’s penchant for mystery and intrigue, and it began on the boat taking him from Marseilles on his way to take up his post at the embassy in Constantinople. On the same ship was a fellow called James Hanning Speke, a captain in the 46th Bengal Infantry, a native regiment that Oliphant did not for a moment suppose Val had ever come across. Speke was something of an amateur explorer and towards the end of his service in the Punjab had taken the idea of shooting in Central Africa. In 1854 he was on his way home to England to volunteer for the Turkish contingent when he stopped off at Aden. There he met a Lieutenant Richard Burton of the 18th Bombay Native Infantry.

They met by chance in the only decent hotel at Steamer Point. The Baker connection to the story was apparently very slight: Sam was staying at the same hotel, on his way home with his family from Ceylon. The three men, very different in personality but all of them interested in the empty spaces on the map, fell to discussing Africa together. Burton, very much the more finished article as an explorer, let it be known in his languid, mocking way that he was thinking of setting up an expedition to Somalia. Had Sam Baker not just given up one romantic dream, it was exactly the sort of challenge he would have jumped at. Instead, Speke begged to go.

The expedition nearly killed him – he was stabbed eleven times by a fanatic’s spear – and he found he did not like Burton half as much as he supposed he would; but seeing Africa for the first time left him with an impossible dream, one which Oliphant winkled out on the ship from Marseilles. When the present war was over, he was determined to return to Africa with Burton and discover the source of the Nile, believed to be located in some as yet unknown inland sea. If the sea was there, as some ancients supposed, no white man had ever seen it. To find it was the Holy Grail of geography. If such a thing could be accomplished, and the discovery claimed for Britain, it would be the sensation of the century.