LITMIR.BIZ

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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’.

      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

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