Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (51 page)

The black men did not hold them in superstitious awe. On the contrary, it was an old Ashanti dictum that the bush was stronger than the white man’s cannon: also they had plenty of firearms themselves, thoughtfully supplied by British traders through French West African ports. The Asantahene was confident in his cause, his traditional tactics, his knowledge of terrain, his jujus and his Golden Stool, and when Wolseley sent him an ultimatum he took no notice. This was a sad rebuff to the Empire and the nineteenth century, for the ultimatum was lordly in its style and was sent by traction engine.
1
The Queen of England had heard with profound concern, it declared, of the Asantahene’s recent conduct, but she had sent Sir Garnet to Africa to arrange a lasting peace. Before negotiations could open the Ashanti must withdraw from British protected territories, release all captives, and guarantee compensation. If these terms were satisfied Sir Garnet was ready to meet the Asantahene in a friendly spirit. If not, ‘I hereby warn you to expect the full punishment your deeds had merited…. Rest assured that power will not be wanting to that end’.

By November, 1873, the power was on the spot: 4,000 first-class British regulars, from the Black Watch and the Rifle Brigade, with a detachment of native artillery, and reserve companies from the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the West India Regiment, fresh from Jamaica. They wore specially-made uniforms of grey homespun, and they were equipped with all the latest devices for tropical warfare—respirators against the heat, veils against the insects, cholera belts and quinine. Three hospital ships lay off Cape Coast Castle, waiting to receive the wounded, and a second army of some 8,500 porters was recruited in support. Diversionary attacks were mounted north and south, but the main force was to advance across the Prah direct to Kumasi, building its own road as it went, and accompanied by a corps of war correspondents that included Henry Stanley the
explorer. Sir Garnet was quite certain of victory, but was resigned to the possibility of casualties, soldiers being made to die in action—‘and oh! how fortunate they are who do so!’
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It went like clockwork. The Ashanti fought courageously, using their traditional tactics of envelopment, and sometimes halting the action to make a propitiatory sacrifice: but the shots of their muzzle-loaders as often as not bounced harmlessly off the British, their effective range being about forty yards, and all their magic spells and incantations proved ineffective. Over the wide and soupy Prah the British steadily advanced, into the unmapped forests of Ashanti, with their engineers, their seven-pounders, their rocket projectors, their eager newspapermen and their apprehensive army of porters. They laid their own telegraph as they went, built 237 bridges, and literally cut a path through the monotonous and suffocating foliage of the rain-forest, frondy, brambly, tangled and dense, squelchy underfoot and pendulous overhead. There were frequent skirmishes along the way, as the Highlanders of the advance guard swore and sweated through, and the light-footed Ashanti fell upon them out of the shadows, but the one decisive action of the advance occurred at Ejinasi, a village about half-way to the capital.

There the main body of the Ashanti army lay in wait, deployed along a ridge in horse-shoe formation. There were scouts on each wing, and assembled behind the central force were the stately chiefs with their ceremonial umbrellas, their gold-headed knobkerries and their stools of state. The British were attacked on both flanks as they approached Ejinasi, and there ensued the first major engagement between the British Army and an organized army of Africans. It was a theatrical kind of battle, made vivid for us by the drawings of the war artists. The Ashanti were mostly invisible, being hidden in the thick forest, so that only the flash and smoke of their muskets showed, with an occasional glimpse of shining black, or nodding finery among the foliage. The British, on the other hand, in their
pith-helmets and grey cotton, made little attempt at concealment, and within the hollow square of their formation, look in the pictures as though they are fighting some kind of demonstration battle.

There stands the bugler, blowing his commands. There are the orderlies, standing by for messages. There the quartermaster keeps his ammunition tally, the doctors bandage their wounded in the shade of the great mahoganies, the prisoners squat huddled in their corral. All around the perimeter the moustachioed soldiers crouch watchfully at their rifles, sometimes firing through the scrub, and in the very centre of the scene a war correspondent interviews Sir Garnet Wolseley himself, KCMG, chain-smoking cigars as he paces between his soldiers, his staff officers at his heels, receiving messages from the firing line and coolly commenting upon the course of the action. To complete the exhibition effect, through the crash of the rifles and the hiss of the rockets two mysterious sounds answer each other through the forest: from the Ashanti the unnerving howl of a war-cry, from the British the swirl of the Black Watch pipes.

In the end the Ashanti broke, faced by vastly superior fire-power, unshakeable discipline and a confidence equal to their own. On February 3, 1874, the Black Watch, sweeping aside successive Ashanti pickets and ambushes, and once interrupting the act of a human sacrifice, entered the city of Kumasi. For the first time the Ashanti saw a foreign force within the walls of their sacred city: for the first time the British, so used to storming the citadels of Asia, marched as conquerors into a black African capital. It proved a curious denouement. Kofi had abandoned his palace, retreating into the bush beyond, but the people of Kumasi poured unafraid into the streets, shaking hands with the soldiers, and murmuring ‘Thank you’, the only English words they knew.

Nevertheless the British wandered through Kumasi in a horrified frisson, up and down the wide streets, in and out of the palace, and spending longest of all in the purlieus of Death Grove, where they inspected the remains of the 120,000 victims supposedly sacrificed there. The whole area stank, we are told, from the human blood that saturated the ground, and Wolseley himself did not venture into it, ‘hating all horrors’, and feeling sickened indeed by the descriptions he could not prevent his colleagues passing on. He did
examine however, with indescribable loathing of course, the great Death Drum, ornamented with human bones, and the sacred stool kept permanently wet with the blood of victims.

He had his own ideas about the fate of Kumasi. ‘In my heart,’ he later wrote, ‘I believed that the absolute destruction of Koomassie with its great palace, the wonder of Western Africa, would be a much more striking and effective end to the war than any paper treaty.’ He had been at Peking in 1861, when the incomparable Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperors had been burnt by Lord Elgin’s British force: ‘a well-placed blow to Tartar pride’, he had thought it, as the smoke from the great fire drifted over Peking, and he evidently believed the destruction of the Asantahene’s elegant compound, with its steep thatched roofs and its gilded ornaments, would be equally salutary to the Ashanti. He wanted to be out of Kumasi as soon as possible, to save his soldiers from fever, but he sent a last ultimatum to the Asantahene advising him to come to terms at once. When no reply came, on February 6, 1874 the old city of Kumasi was destroyed. Its houses were stacked with tinder, its Death Grove was cleared for burning, and the engineers placed mines all around the walls of the royal palace. At seven in the morning the main body of troops marched out of the city; at eight the fuses were lit by the rearguard; at nine the last men of the Black Watch, hastening away through the forest to the coast and the waiting troopships, looked back to see the sacred city disintegrating into rubble.

Kofi took the point, and sent his messengers of peace hurrying after the British. At a village called Fomena they submitted, agreeing to pay an indemnity of impossible value, to release their hostages, to renounce their claim to Elmina, to recognize the independence of several vassal tribes, and to do their best to end human sacrifice. They remembered the war ever after as the Sagrenti War, after its British commander, and Sir Garnet went home once more in glory. He was nicknamed ‘Britain’s Only General’, and when people wanted to describe something supremely well done, neatly wrapped up like the Ashanti War, they called it ‘All Sir Garnet’.

The soldiers left Ashanti thoughtfully. It had been their first experience of modern war in Africa, and it had been full of surprises. Wolseley himself thought it a horrible experience, but was impressed by the discipline, courage and high morale of the Ashanti, under their tyrannical militarism, compared with the feckless depravity of the coastal tribes under British suzerainty. He was not, he hastily added in his memoirs, an apostle of military despotism, but the Ashantis had taught him that national pride and contentment came naturally to a people which placed the greatness of the State above the interest of the individual. William Butler, a more subtle observer, found the war a lesson in historical determinism: Africa was the ‘real bed-rock school of human nature’. The poor black savages of west Africa had many good traits—patience, honesty, fidelity—and much of what was bad in them was the fault of the British Empire. ‘It was our drink, our trade, our greed which had hopelessly demoralized the native African. We had drugged him with our drink; we shot him with our guns; we sold him powder and lead, so that he might shoot and enslave his fellow-black. Those castles along his coast were the monuments of our savage injustice to him.’

Reactions at home were simpler. There the Ashanti War powerfully stoked the fires of imperialism, and excited the public imagination with visions of African glory. At least eight books were written about the campaign: it was the first of the colonial wars to take the popular fancy, and gave to the imperial idea a new aspect of boyish adventure. Wolseley was made a Grand Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, and given
£
20,000 by a grateful Parliament, and the Queen herself reviewed his little army on its return, assembled in hollow square in Windsor Great Park. Even Gladstone spoke warmly of the Ashanti triumph in the House of Commons, and the Press was ecstatic.

Yet it was a triumph of ignorance. The causes of the war remained obscure to the British public, its purposes were cloudy, and nobody made any attempt to understand the Ashanti case, to master the baffling Ashanti culture or explore the national history. The real
meaning of the campaign, its underlying emotions, its catalytic quality as a clash of convictions—all went unremarked, and it seemed that the war was an end in itself, and that Sir Garnet’s masterly little campaign had, like successful surgery, simply cut out a canker once and for all.

This was to be characteristic of the imperial activities in Africa, where the British armies, returning time and again to the attack against the scattered black kingdoms of the continent, seldom understood the nature of their opponents, or reasoned out the significance of their actions. Africa was a brutalizing influence upon the Empire: not because the black peoples were more brutal than others, but because the British thought them so, and behaved accordingly. It was not long before the imperial armies were obliged to return to Kumasi, this time to annexe the Ashanti kingdom to the British Empire: but by then war in Africa was a commonplace, and the Golden Stool of the Ashanti no longer seemed even a mystery to the British, only a tiresome childish geegaw.

T
HE Ashanti War was a popular success partly because it was a reassurance. The British had been taken aback by the spectacle of the Prussian armies sweeping so brilliantly into Paris three years before, and they needed to know that British armies too could move with swift decision and efficiency. It was a militarist age in Europe, as the vast standing armies of the continental Powers girded themselves for new struggles, and the British were infected too. A new note of belligerence entered the imperial oratory. What was won by the sword must be kept by the sword. Seldom a martial people, as the century proceeded the British acquired a new, flushed pride in their fleets and armies, now seen not simply as bulwarks against the plots of hostile autocrats, but as instruments of world supremacy. The Indian Mutiny had clearly demonstrated that a sizeable number of Victoria’s subjects detested the presence of the Raj, but the British were neither depressed nor disillusioned by this disclosure. It merely confirmed a growing national suspicion that they had been called to terrible but noble duties. They were not made to be loved: they were made to rule the world for its own good.

For the rest of the century this sense of vocation, backed by commercial opportunism and patriotic fervour, was to be based frankly upon military power, and the record of the Empire’s progress is all too largely a record of war. The British fleets and armies emerged everywhere as true imperial forces, geared to the requirements and convictions of Empire, and they bore themselves uninhibited. This is how a British subaltern once put down an incipient mutiny among a force of Sikhs and Gurkhas under his command. He knocked down the first mutineer with a blow on the head from his pistol.
He broke his pistol-butt on the head of the second, flooring him with a blow from a second pistol when he tried to resist. He seized a third and gave him 500 lashes there and then. The mutiny failed.

The British Army was the striking force of the imperial mission. Though in the second half of the century Indian forces were often used in campaigns overseas, still the Queen’s regiments provided the strategic reserve, and it is said that there were only two years during Victoria’s reign when the British Army was not somewhere fighting a skirmish—‘what in our little army’, as Wolseley mock-modestly said, ‘we call a battle’. It was all done by volunteers—there was no conscription in Victoria’s Empire—and casualties were a running drain upon the nation’s young manhood, as though some great catastrophe were to strike the British every year. The cost was enormous too. In the 1860s the Imperial Government withdrew many garrisons from self-governing possessions overseas—‘the withdrawal of the legions’, as imperial romantics called the process—in the hope of inducing the colonists to assume more of the burden themselves, but the price of imperial defence was still overwhelmingly borne by the British at home, and their soldiers remained scattered in garrisons, fortresses and islands across the world. The army’s range of experience was unrivalled. When the Queen elevated to the peerage General Sir Hugh Gough, who had commanded in more general actions than any British officer except Wellington, he adopted, to commemorate highlights of his career, the title Baron Gough of Chingkeang-foo, Maharajpore and the Sutlej.
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In some ways the Army had not much changed since we last inspected it, forty years before on the Afghan passes. Socially it was still rigidly caste-ridden. The purchase of commissions had been ended, regimental patrons being bought out at black market prices (
£
14,000, for example, for the owner of a cavalry regiment), but officers were still for the most part men of means and family, and
the smart regiments remained excruciatingly smart. Most of the private soldiers still joined because they could find nothing better to do, or coveted the anonymity of the military life, and about a quarter of them were still Irish—when the British Army charged with the bayonet, it released a warcry defined by Queen Victoria herself as ‘a terrible cry, half British cheer, half Irish hurrah’. Their basic pay was still a shilling a day, and by the time they had paid their dues for rations, rum and cleaning gear, most of them had no money at all, and lived absolutely within the ordered family of their regiment. The gulf between officers and men remained profound, and the one emotion that bound them was not patriotism, nor even loyalty to the queen, but
esprit
de
corps
.

The temper of the Army was eighteenth century, and its outlook had not been softened by the experience of empire. The drinking was terrific, the whoring insatiable, the looting endemic: ‘Mud Wallah Caste’, is what the Indians called the worst of the soldiery, and the military memoirists are frank enough about the brutality of the campaigning life. Here an army surgeon in China, finding a Chinese girl who had committed suicide rather than face the barbarians, coolly cuts off her little bound feet for his collection. Here a private soldier discovers a Pathan boy cutting the head off a dead British colour-sergeant, and picking the child up on the point of his bayonet, throws him over a cliff. Here an officer recalls the day when some hostile Sikhs climbed into trees to hide from the British—‘great sport for our men, who were firing up at them as at so many rooks … down they would come like a bird, head downward, and bleeding most profusely’.

But technically the British Army was much improved. It had been scoured by the traumatic experiences of the Crimean War, and steeled by the Mutiny, and in the 1860s it had been drastically modernized by the reforming zeal of Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War in Gladstone’s first administration. Privates no longer enlisted for life, so that the average age of soldiers was now much lower. The old numbered infantry regiments had been reorganized on a county basis, a reserve army was formed, flogging was abandoned except in times of war. It was a more professional service now, and it was freed of its last stultifying vestiges of royal control—except
one, the immovable Duke of Cambridge still occupying the office of Commander-in-Chief.

It was still essentially an army of Empire, different in kind as in purpose from the great conscript armies of the Continent. Its strength lay in the tight small loyalties of the regimental spirit, in improvization, in the resource and prestige of individual generals. Its speciality had become the small campaign in distant parts against a primitive enemy (though not always
so
primitive—the Sikh armies, for instance, had better artillery than their British opponents). In 1854 Wolseley had likened the army’s organization to a steam engine with its boiler in Halifax, its cylinder in China, its other machinery distributed wherever the map was coloured red, and no water, coal, oil or tools. Thirty years later, when the army was preparing an invasion of Egypt, in a few weeks the commissariat had assembled a fleet of seventy-four transports to convey to the Mediterranean a railway from England, mules from the United States, South America, Italy, Greece, wood fuel from Cyprus and troops from Britain, Malta, Gibraltar and India. Some of the army’s anachronisms survived because of its imperial role: the hollow square, volley firing, the frontal cavalry charge—all these would be disastrous in a European war, though they were still effective against primitives. On the other hand the imperial commitment tautened the army’s organization, gave it an unrivalled expertise in combined operations, and battle-hardened its soldiers.

There was still no general staff, and the War Office remained a warren of interconnecting houses in Pall Mall, all on different levels, and ranging from the backrooms of a draper’s shop to a baroque-decorated mansion. In 1871, though, manoeuvres were held for the first time on Salisbury Plain: many of the older generals thought them childish, theatrical and foreign,
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and so many horses and wagons had to be hired from civilian contractors that the transport was nicknamed Pickford’s Irregulars, but even so the event was an earnest of modernity. Since 1854, too, Aldershot, the army headquarters in Hampshire, had been developed as a centre for the whole
of British military life. With direct railway lines from London, and good connections to the south coast port, the little town had become in effect the rear base of all the imperial campaigns. When, at one o’clock precisely each day, the Aldershot time gun was fired electrically from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, it was like a time-check for the entire Raj—a reminder to all the scattered garrisons of Empire that the price of dominion was spit and polish.

At first no more than a huge collection of huts and tents upon the sombre heath, Aldershot had grown into a complete garrison town—‘The Home’ as it was ever afterwards to be called, ‘of the British Army’. Some of its barracks were immense and gloomy redbrick structures, with first-floor balconies in the Indian manner, and royal crests over ceremonial gateways. Others were tents on permanent foundations, lined in interminable rows across the heath. There was a garrison church rich in monuments of Empire, and blessed with an Ethiopian chalice looted by Lord Napier’s expedition to Magdala in 1868. There was an officer’s library of books about war. There were five military hospitals. There was a soldiers’ newspaper,
Sheldrake’s
Military
Gazette
, founded by a former colour-sergeant of the Coldstream Guards. The town was full of pubs (‘Where’s the Duke of Cambridge?’ asks a staff officer in an old Aldershot joke. ‘I don’t know, sir. I’m teetotal’), and was famous for its rat-pit, one of the best in the provinces, where the well-known rat-catcher, Mr Jack Black, often showed off his terriers. An act of Parliament had decreed that three members of the local council should be nominated for ever by the Army, giving the little town a municipal status analogous only to the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge.

Aldershot demonstrated the new status of arms in British life—a status that rose with the rise of imperial pride. Prince Albert himself was credited with the idea of it—‘if the Army had never had any other good reason to revere his memory’, said Wolseley, ‘the creation of that camp of instruction should render it dear to us’. Many of the local tradesmen were by Royal Appointment, including it was claimed Mr Black the rat-catcher, who habitually wore a sash emblazoned with a crown, a pair of rats and the letters VR: for since 1855 the royal family had maintained a modest wooden villa,
called the Royal Pavilion, on a ridge above the heath, where Her Majesty stayed when she came down for a review (she wore a military habit with a Field-Marshal’s insignia, and a plume in her hat). By now her soldiers were more familiar with war than most, and perhaps enjoyed it more. Wolseley, surveying his brother officers as they embarked for a war against the Chinese, said they seemed to think ‘the world was specially created for their own wild pleasures, of which, to most of us, war … with its maddening excitement was the greatest’. At the Prussian manoeuvres of 1874 a party of British officer-observers, reminiscing jauntily about the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny, found themselves rebuked by the Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm himself, who felt obliged to remind them how dreadful war was.

When Hyde Park Corner in London was replanned later in the century, a colossal bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington, by the sculptor Matthew Wyatt, was removed from the top of Constitution Arch and brought by the Queen’s command to Aldershot. It was re-erected on a mound behind the garrison church, and there the Iron Duke superbly sat his charger above the Tented Encampment, surveying the busy military scene below, but seeming to extend his gaze much farther too—across the distant Channel to fields of operation far away, to the deserts and velds where the redcoats, sweating, cursing, womanizing and making merry, carried the imperial message to a not always unanimously grateful world.
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Behind the Army stood the Royal Navy. Everyone knew that
au
fond
this was a sea-empire. Maritime supremacy alone enabled the British to throw their armies into action upon the colonial frontiers,
or warn off the predations of rival Powers. In the years since Trafalgar the Navy had enjoyed a prestige so mystic that its power was taken for granted. It was the genius of the Pax Britannica: its reputation was towering, its size was unequalled, and its complacency was immense.

The Royal Navy had a Nelson fixation. It talked in Nelsonic terms, it practised Nelsonic tactics, it examined every situation through Lord Nelson’s blind eye—until 1869 Nelson’s
Victory
was still afloat as flagship of the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth. Its elderly commanders still lived the spirit of Nelsonic derring-do—like the truculent Sir James Scott, who had joined the service in 1803, was on the active list for sixty-three years, and liked to claim that he had taken part in two general actions and five sieges, had assisted at the capture or storming of one capital city, twenty-three towns, thirty-two batteries and twenty-two forts, and had been present at the capture or cutting out of one line of battleship, five frigates, six sloops of war, twenty-one gunboats, 300 merchant vessels and several privateers.
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Most of the Navy’s battleships were still heavy wooden three-deckers, full-rigged and rated by the number of their muzzle-loading guns. The accepted naval manoeuvres were still those made classic by Trafalgar. The last great naval expedition, an abortive Baltic enterprise during the Crimean War, had been essentially a sailing-ship affair, and when in 1860 the Navy was required to take an invading army to China, it did so in a fleet of 173 sailing-ships, carrying in their creaking hulls, at five knots through the China Sea, 20,000 soldiers with all their horses, guns, food and
mat
é
riel
.
2
All the admirals had grown up in sail, and many of them viewed the arrival of steam with undisguised dislike—for they regarded a warship less as a weapon of war than a floating pageant, or perhaps
a work of art, not to be risked in battle or even dirtied with gunsmoke.
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