Talking of books
Thin red lines
henny Green
The masochistic delight of the British in tonding their own blimpish past may make a liday for publishers and historians, but it sornetimes begs the question as to whether anYone else could have done much better. The Most fruitful area for this kind of operation is the Military, because the mistakes of armies !!"_e Usually too spectacular and too vast to be 'wept under even the most accommodating FarPet. During Victoria's reign, sometimes t;iugningly described as the Pax Britannica, e British army engaged in ninety-seven exPeSlitions, thirty-five wars, seventeen camtalgns, thirteen operations and eight bom
rdments, besides assorted occupations, 'aids, captures, suppressions, sieges, actions
stormings, inspired by various insurrecit°ns, rebellions, uprisings, riots, mutinies, teldents, troubles and disturbances (see rittq.ron Farwell's Queen Victoria's Little ars). Faced with such a glut of colour-rals
g and rallying round the flag, the researcher n always count on a plentiful supply of debacle, fiasco, blunder, and foozle,
'eh brings us to Denis Judd's Someone Has "indered (Arthur Barker £3), which deals
with the better-known Victorian military miscalculations.
The causes usually ascribed to the disasters of the era are as varied as they are numerous as they are plausible, and range from purchase of commission to brutal length of service, from scarlet tunics against drab backdrops to frightful disciplinary practices, from lack of staff co-ordination to too much theorising, from bedchamber commanders like Haig to megalomaniac lushes like Cardigan. But although a modicum of truth attaches to all these, it is often conveniently brushed aside for the sake of a thesis that the Cardwell reforms readjusted a great many of these im, balances; there were no purchased commissions on the Somme, and yet the British strategic achievement on the first day of that battle was not exactly profound.
The subtitle of Mr Judd's book, 'Calamities of the British Army in the Victorian Age' seems to hint at the dark truth that the Victorian generals were somehow more culpable that the generals of other eras or other nations. The corollary to this commonplace of the writing of military history is that the harsh realities of a fight to a finish were always incompatible with the dotty chivalry of an officer class which believed in concepts like Fair Play, Not Done, It Isn't Cricket and After You Old Chap, and that a more resilient social structure would have saved the British a great many sore embarrassments on the field of conflict. It would be interesting to hear this theory discussed by, say, Stonewall Jackson, who got shot down accidentally by his own side, or by Ney, who forgot to occupy Quatre Bras on the eve of Waterloo. As the eventual outcome of the American Civil War was profoundly influenced by the first of those incidents, and the very genesis of the Pax Britannica by the second, it might be said that the long arm of chance has a great deal more to do with the outcome of a battle than the carpet knights are prepared to admit.
Although I am always a captivated reader of chronicles like Mr Judd's, my own conviction is that the wonderful consistency of British military blunders in the nineteenth century was due, not to any national shortcoming, but to the very nature of war, which is too imprecise and confused, even nebulous an activity to be described as a science. Tolstoy may have been coming it a bit too strong when he suggested in War and Peace that there is no such thing as strategic virtue in war at all, but at least Tolstoy had seen active service and knew a thing or two about how orders filter down from commander to soldier. (In The Hedgehog and the Fox Isiah Berlin quietly observes that although Tolstoy
withheld all military virtue from Napoleon, a Frenchman, he was willing to make an exception in the case of Kutitzov, a Russian).
The period covered by Mr Judd's six *chapters is bridged by a vast arc of military ineptitude reaching from that vacillating valetudinarian Elphinstone at one end to that blundering blockhead Redvers Buller at the other; indeed, with the dubious exception of Wolseley, it is impossible to think of a single British general between Wellington and the second world war in whom one would be inclined to invest very heavily. And the sheer hopelessness of reaching any final conclusions about the nature of military efficiency is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that, taking two of the most successful generals in our history, Wellington and Montgomery, the first believed in purchase of commissions and the aloofness of a commander from his men; the second did not believe in the purchase of commissions and was convinced that the secret of morale lay in the mingling of a general. with his soldiers.
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