LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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

Скачать книгу