The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

Lucknow was practically the closing scene of the great struggle. There were still insurgent bands, no longer armies, to suppress; notorious rebel leaders to seek for and oftentimes never find; disturbed districts to settle down; all these things had to be done before peace passed over the land. Peace that was problematical then, even after the war of vengeance that was only righteous because of the hideous cruelties which caused it; peace that must always be superficial and doubtful. Youths yet unborn, if patriotic Indians, as were many of their ancestors at this time, however misguided in the course of action they adopted, may yet turn back to the burning history of the past, and may rise to avenge past conquest, and what may seem then, as earlier, present wrong.

The Romans governed England well, and raised it from savagery to civilisation. They introduced the higher arts of peace, founded our system of municipal government, created the first lighthouse on an English coast. But they came as aliens and left as strangers yet. Within but a few years, all traces of their holding of Magna Britannia had ceased to be, save in ruined homes, wrecked villas, grass-grown, unused roads, and abandoned towns. They conquered Britain by the sword and held it by the sword, so long as their military hand was strong enough to use and grasp the weapon. When their military power ceased, other and stronger and possibly less scrupulous nations took the lead in this our land. So it may be in India yet. Justice may be admired, but is rarely loved, so long as it is administered by foreign hands. Herein lies the strength and power and possibly the future hope of Russia. The Anglo-Saxon colonises and replaces peoples, the Slav absorbs. He has absorbed Central Asian khanates as we never have Indian native states; and yet his rule anywhere will not compare in any one degree with ours as regards justice, development, and care. None of these things matter when the human ego has to be taken into account. That personal equation, the man himself, is left out of the question with the dominant Saxon. The less dominant, because more receptive and absorbing, Russian, whose blood runs in many a branch of the races that go to make up India, acts otherwise, and his chance of ultimate success, when the trouble of the future comes, is greater than that of the Saxon, who now rules with every good intent in the place of Mogul emperors and Hindu kings.

The Mutiny was one of those rare wars which were based on pure political reasons, that is, reasons based on conditions other than mere military considerations or those of conquest. It was unlike many of our other struggles, in the past, and recently, which were begun for reasons of policy. Policy and politics are not synonymous terms, though they are spelt much the same way. This serious contest grew up internally, from internal disagreement and disease which might have been diagnosed. Many of our other campaigns were based on a desire for conquest, a dread of the possible action of neighbouring powers which it might be to our interest to forestall, or to that natural expansion of empire which all colonising nations are subject to; and which means the subjection or destruction, for purely colonial or commercial reasons, of the races who stand in the way of what enterprising colonial empires think their national right. Whether their antagonists recognise it is “another story.”

One great result of the troubled time through which the nation passed during 1858 was that it led to a further and considerable increase to the army. In March of that year second battalions were added to the twenty-four regiments of the line after the 1st Royals, whose second battalion, created earlier, had remained in existence, and a fresh regiment, the 100th, or “Royal Canadians,” was raised in Canada and added to the Army List. The 5th Dragoons were restored as Lancers, and the 18th Hussars were raised at Leeds; while, when the Indian army was incorporated with the national forces, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd European Bengal Cavalry became the 19th, 20th, and 21st Hussars; and the European fusilier battalions of the Bengal, Madras, and Bombay armies were placed on the Army List as the 101st, 102nd, 103rd, 104th, 105th, 106th, 107th, 108th, and 109th Regiments of the line, dating their seniority from 1861. To this increase, a permanent one, not one man raised an objection, a marked contrast to the times that had been. The dread of the standing army was at last as “dead as Queen Anne.”

The half-civil, half-military instruction of the army aspirant, the Sandhurst cadet, began to partake more of the latter character than the former; and was to be changed still more in another decade or thereabout. The utter failure of the staff in the Crimea had pointed out, what all foreign nations had already recognised, that a special training for some, if not all, of the staff officers of the future was advisable. So the Staff College came into being in 1858, and first established, more fully than the old “Senior Department” of the Royal Military College of Sandhurst, the principle that the work of the staff in the future can only be learned by studying the mistakes and successes of the past; that the art of war is by no means conjectural, but that he who knows what has been done can learn from that teaching how to do it again and do it better. The age of the “heaven-born soldier,” a rarity even greater than the black swan, was a thing of the past. To pitchfork unknown or untried men into the most difficult of all duties, that of working the machinery that makes or mars an army—its staff work—belonged to an earlier age than now.

But another great movement arose, the end of which no man can foresee, save that it has saved the nation from the dire evils of conscription. No really free nation ever has or ever will accept the fetters of compulsory service unless it feels there is a real reason for it. Nothing but actual invasion would ever make free Englishmen accept conscription as a principle, though they accepted in the long war what was almost worse. The pressgang, compulsory service in its worst, most one-sided, and most cruel form, was endured, but hated. But when, however, our late ally, France, irritated by the fact that our free political institutions did not admit of our handing over to her tender mercies men who, however ruffianly, had threatened the life of the Emperor Napoleon on political grounds only, and when the colonels of her army asked in the intensity of their sycophancy (for, as after events proved, the third Napoleon had no great hold on the affections of his people) to be led against “la perfide Albion,” the old spirit rose.

The spirit of individual help towards the national defence had been clearly shown as that of boyhood when the century was yet in its teens; in 1853 it had its second stage of youth; and finally in our time was to grow into first adolescence, and then vigorous manhood.

With all her pride, and its consequent self-sufficiency, with all her natural self-respect and self-belief, there is no nation really less military, at the heart of her, than Great Britain. Always a fighting race, it may be that this is why she is reluctant to fight, and is therefore always unready. She began the Crimean War with her usual curious sort of half-reluctant enthusiasm, and with an army of about the Peninsular type. She finished the war, the only nation then prepared and anxious to fight on, and, stronger than before, to push it to a successful termination when her allies were somewhat more than half-exhausted. But this very reluctance makes her serious when roused. And the uncalled for insult that she, of all nations in the world, was open to invasion at the call of French colonels called out all that curious innate fearlessness of battle which has helped British soldiers in many a hard-fought field to victory. Never were the English people more at peace, and more anxious to be. Never did they more willingly throw that feeling to the winds than when a body of French colonels insulted the whole English race.

So for a third time the civilian laid aside his mufti and clutched the uniform and rifle. By the middle of 1859 there were six thousand men armed and willing to fight. It is not necessary here to enter into the controversy of the merits or demerits of this force. It began one way, it has finished another. It began, helped by a fulsome praise that can only be called hysteric; for the first idea it had was to reduce or abolish the army for the sake of a force of not soldiers, but merely men in arms, and which was for a time the laughing-stock of all Europe! Anything more ludicrous, and from a military point of view contemptible, than the early days of these willing and patriotic enthusiasts cannot be imagined. They played at soldiers in the most absolute way, and though much improved, they are very far from perfect now.

At first they were designed merely as local corps of varying strength, and were to have merely a company organisation. A separate manual even, the “Drill and Rifle Instruction for Corps of Rifle Volunteers,” was compiled with the specific purpose of minimising the amount of instructions to be given. This could, it was considered, be imparted in six lessons, and Sir Charles Napier in his “Letter on the Defence of England” strongly advises the new soldiery not to “let anyone persuade you to learn more.” Of course all this has long changed, and now the volunteer undergoes the same training as the soldier or the militiaman, but without that continuity that alone can make it of first value. Discipline and drill, if not synonymous terms, run hand in hand. The former naturally follows on the latter if it be continuous and sustained.