Читать книгу Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum - Brian Thompson, Brian Thompson - Страница 11

Valentine Baker, always called Val in the family, was named for his naval grandfather. There is a photograph of him as a young man in Ceylon: he wears a high collar and stock, his hair is long, his arms are folded composedly across his chest. His moustache is in the experimental stage and has yet to find its voluptuous curves. It is the eyes that tell the story. What is most striking about Val’s expression is its calm. If the camera represents the outer, public world, then he is looking into it with an eerie self-possession. That same look in the eye of a wild animal would have sent an instant warning signal to Sam Baker, tightening his finger on the trigger.

A boy among men, Val came out to Ceylon on the Earl of Hardwicke with the rest of Sam’s party in 1845. From the beginning he was only ever a lukewarm farm colonist. For example: after a season or two on the plateau Sam Baker invented for himself a sort of woollen suit for his jungle explorations, the fabric dyed a muddy and streaky green by the juice of plants. It was cinched at the waist by the belt that carried the killer knife. He wore this kit without embarrassment and was always eager to press its advantages on others. It is not possible to picture Val ever wearing anything like it, even if it stood between him and sudden death.

He was at school in Gloucester during the Mauritius years and still only nineteen when he came to Newera. A windswept plateau halfway up a mountain was never going to satisfy his curiosity about life in the tropics. In any case, Val was only in Ceylon under licence – his father had long wished that he and his youngest brother James should enter the army. The family was rich and had worked its way into becoming part of the landed interest in Gloucestershire; and so, to old Sam Baker, the way forward for his youngest sons pointed to service in the Guards or, better still, a good cavalry regiment. Looked at in this light, Val’s journey to Ceylon was no more than a jaunt. Unfortunately, as his photograph shows, there was very little of the jaunty about him.

To have a soldier in the family was a fatherly ambition that could turn out, under the wrong circumstances, to be ruinously expensive. The army offered its officer elite the opportunity of a plural life such as some parsons had enjoyed in the eighteenth century – they were gentlemen first and soldiers only afterwards. In the fashionable regiments no officer, however cautious in his habits, could subsist on his pay alone. His path to senior rank was choked by elderly and often grievously incompetent men who saw the purchase system, by which everything from a cornetcy to a colonelship could be bought and sold, as a guarantee of their pension. The first step in a military career – the right regiment – was the most important one. Thereafter, deep pockets helped – Lord Brudenell raised himself by reckless purchase from cornet to command of his own regiment in just eight years. As Earl of Cardigan he is reputed to have spent a further £10,000 annually to ensure the 11th Hussars remained among the most fashionable (and reactionary) of British cavalry regiments. Cardigan’s manic personal vanity made him a particularly vivid example of what was, in a dozen or so regiments, the norm. The Guards, the Household Cavalry and certain favoured Hussar regiments had become, in effect, the junior branches of the aristocracy in uniform.

If this was old Sam Baker’s ambition for his son Val, it must have caused consternation when news came that he had ridden back down the mountain only a few months after arriving at Newera and purchased an ensignship in that very undistinguished foot regiment, the Ceylon Rifles.

Touching the role of a young officer in times of peace, Thackeray wrote woundingly: ‘The professional duties of a footman are quite as difficult and various.’ He had this further to say in his Book of Snobs, published in 1846, the year Val joined the Rifles:

When epaulets are not sold; when corporal punishments are abolished and Corporal Smith has a chance to have his gallantry rewarded as well as that of Lieutenant Grig; when there is no such rank as ensign and lieutenant (the existence of which rank is an absurd anomaly, and an insult upon all the rest of the army), and should there be no war, I should not be disinclined to be a major-general myself.

Val had joined as modest a regiment as could be found, tucked almost out of sight at the bottom of the Army List. His decision may have seemed inexplicable in Gloucestershire but a motive based on local conditions suggests itself. Up in Newera Sam, in his blustery and good-humoured way, was developing his role as the social outsider, a reputation he enjoyed and did his best to burnish. By joining the Rifles Val indicated an alternative. An ensign’s duties might be mostly comprised of smoking and lounging but what they also offered was the pleasure of belonging. The elements of obedience and submission implied by regimental life were handsomely offset by the sense of fraternity engendered. A man who purchased the queen’s commission anywhere was joining a select, if embattled, club. This desire to conform would become Val’s tragedy.

The immediate consequence of his move to the coast was to open a window on to the part of Ceylon his brother had made such a point of ignoring – conventional Colombo society. As Val soon discovered, while the island might be a paradise for big-game hunters, its administration was a mare’s nest. As with every other outpost of Empire, social recognition hung upon favourable notice by the governor or his commander-in-chief. To be invited to this or that ball; there to be presented to a general on his way to a more distant posting, or to a savant of the Royal Society being carried to the ends of the earth – all this gave the appearance of upholding a civility whose wellspring was in London.

The spirit of empire was not so sturdy that it did not need continuous reinforcement. When HMS Beagle came to Sydney in 1836, Charles Darwin found it ‘a most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America.’ Such generous sentiments were received with gratitude by his hosts, as was the conclusion he drew from them, a desire ‘to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman’. He had not been so kind towards New Zealand, describing the English there as ‘the very refuse of society’, but in Australia, young though he was, he had done the right thing.

The colonial enthusiasm that greeted the arrival of every ship flying the British flag and honoured its passenger list down to the least of its officers was demonstrated by people a long way from home, it was true; but that was not the only reason to feast strangers. The governor’s residence, which was always the distinguished visitor’s first port of call – in Colombo it was called, archaically, the King’s House – was the amplification chamber of a distant murmur. What were they saying in London? The home country’s desires and wishes were not always clear and congratulation was a rare commodity. As a consequence there was no such thing as stale news. Rumour and gossip were quite as closely attended as official dispatches.

Such was early Victorian society that well-bred strangers in conversation with each other were seldom at more than two or three degrees of separation from common acquaintances, by marriage, by regiment or by country seat. For the governor and his entourage, this was a second and more anxious reason to flatter the latest new arrival. By indirection, they were trying to find out how they stood personally. Colonial appointments, far from being sinecures, were very much movable feasts. Since 1840 five governors had packed their bags and quit Colombo. Sam Baker pointed out in Eight Years in Ceylon how this constant shifting around of administrators, their secretaries and military advisers did nothing but harm to emerging colonies, denying continuity and cohesion to their governing class.

Val was lucky – or circumspect – in his choice of Colombo friends, striking up acquaintance with a young man not entirely unlike himself. The chief justice of Ceylon was a man called Sir Anthony Oliphant, none too happily married to a powerful but neurasthenic woman who spent most of her summer months in a cottage by the lake at Newera. The couple were notorious evangelicals. Their only son Laurence was two years younger than Val and had been raised on the island as something of a wild child. In 1846 Sir Anthony and his family went home to England on a two-year leave, with the intention of leaving Laurence to study at university. Instead, the boy threw over his place at Cambridge to follow his father and mother back out to Ceylon.

Ceylon as it was in Skinner’s day.

When he and his mother pitched up at Newera, he found the Bakers in the full flood of setting up the model farm. Sam, in his breezy and open-handed way, took Laurence shooting. They camped together deep in the forest and the older man taught Oliphant, among other things, how to catch and dispatch a crocodile: you tied a live puppy to a wooden crucifix and, when the predator’s jaws were jammed wide open by the indigestible element of the bait, you hauled him in and took a sporting shot through the eye.

Oliphant was completely sanguine about butchery of this kind; nor was he fazed by the other privations of a Baker jungle expedition. Courageous and resourceful, very quick-witted, he would later be one of the most enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century. His mother, whose address at Newera was ‘The Turtle Dovery’, was twenty years younger than her husband and liked nothing more than to be congratulated on her youthful appearance – and, on occasion, to be mistaken for her son’s sister. She clung to Laurence with almost a lover’s tenacity.

The two young men – Oliphant and Val Baker – were at first glance very alike. They were good looking, athletic, perhaps a little too sketchily educated, but obedient to the usual conventions of society. Each had an interesting background. Strangers who had heard something of the Oliphant family and came looking for a mummy’s boy in Laurence were surprised to meet a blond but already balding giant, energetic and voluble. Those Colombo planters who felt themselves snubbed by the maverick Bakers up in Newera discovered in Val not an unhappy deserter, but a family member with the same trademark self-possession.

An astute observer might have found more intriguing shadows in Laurence Oliphant. He was one of those men made to be a secret agent – spontaneous and effusive on the outside, but inwardly tortured. Born at the Cape in 1829, brought up haphazardly in Ceylon by a succession of private tutors, he nevertheless – to the surprise of his father’s distinguished dinner guests – spoke five languages. Dissembling his feelings in order to accommodate the war between his parents had made him a master of disguise. Never the milksop his mother seemed to want to cherish, and certainly not the evangelical saint of his father’s imagination, Oliphant was a complicated young man. On his way out to Ceylon in 1848 to join his family, he found himself in Naples in the middle of the Italian uprising.

I shall never forget joining a roaring mob one evening, bent upon I knew not what errand, and getting forward by the pressure of the crowd and my own eagerness into the front rank just as we reached the Austrian Legation, and seeing ladders passed to the front and placed against the wall, and the arms torn down.

He helped drag the hated emblem of foreign occupation to the Piazza del Populo and assisted in its burning. This is worthy of Byron or Shelley. At Messina his hotel was bombarded by the king of Naples’s fleet and when he came back up to Naples he was in the square in front of the palace when King Bomba ordered his troops to fire into the crowd. Laurence escaped injury by crouching behind an arch. He was nineteen years old.

Val Baker’s life to date had been a great deal less exciting. He had manners, he was dutiful, yet he was to others merely an officer in an undistinguished rifle regiment, a young infantry subaltern who knew a great deal about horses. His military duties were almost ludicrously undemanding. The faintly effeminate nature of the indigenous population that made it so difficult to recruit also made the island easy to govern. There was, as it happened, an outburst of civil unrest just at the time Val came down to the coast. Everyone knew that, in the event of a serious threat, the place would be flooded with troops from India. In the ordinary course of things, soldiering in Ceylon was about as taxing as taking up watercolours, or butterfly-hunting; and it had been this way since the brief Kandyan wars of 1817–18.

There was one Ceylon Rifle officer known by name at least to everyone on the island. Thomas Skinner joined as an ensign in 1819 when he was fifteen years old. To great amusement, he attended his first parade in civilian clothes, no uniform being found small enough to fit him. Skinner proved to have a genius for road-building and, by teaching himself the use of the theodolite, went on to produce the first accurate survey of the island’s interior. (Little monuments to him are scattered along the roads of Ceylon to the present day.) His career is an example of how the purchase system worked.

After he had spent some years as a lieutenant, Skinner’s fellow officers clubbed together to provide the purchase price of a vacant captaincy, an exceptional mark of respect for his talents. Out of pride (both his father and father-in-law were colonels) Skinner declined the money and so lost eleven long years of seniority. His promotion eventually came about in a particularly grotesque way. There was in the Rifles a Captain Fretz. One afternoon Fretz levelled his musket at an elephant and had the block blow back in his face. A chunk of metal over three inches long and weighing nearly four ounces entered his nasal cavity and lodged against his palate. Incredibly, Fretz survived another eight years 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 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.