Victoria's Generals Read online

  In loving memory of Elizabeth Blinkhorn Corvi

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Pen & Sword Military

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Steven J Corvi & Ian F W Beckett, 2009

  ISBN 978 1 84415 918 5

  eISBN 9781844688364

  The right of Steven J Corvi and Ian F W Beckett to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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  Contents

  List of Maps

  List of Plates

  Acknowledgements

  List of Contributors

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Garnet Wolseley – by Steven J Corvi

  Chapter 2 Evelyn Wood – by Stephen Manning

  Chapter 3 Redvers Buller – by Stephen M Miller

  Chapter 4 George Colley – by Ian F W Beckett

  Chapter 5 Lord Chelmsford – by John Laband

  Chapter 6 Charles Gordon – by Gerald Herman

  Chapter 7 Frederick Roberts – by André Wessels

  Chapter 8 Herbert Kitchener – by Keith Surridge

  Appendix Chronology of Victorian Wars

  List of Maps

  1. Plan of the battles of Tel-el-Kebir and Kassassin, 1882. (From Sir Evelyn Wood, British Battles on Land and Sea, London: Cassell & Co., 1915)

  2. Plan of the battle of Khambula, 1879. (From Sir Evelyn Wood, British Battles on Land and Sea, London: Cassell & Co., 1915)

  3. Plan of the battle of Colenso, 1899. (From W Baring Pemberton, Battles of the Boer War, London: Batsford, 1964)

  4. Plan of the battle of Majuba, 27 February 1881.

  5. Plan of the battles of Laing’s Nek, Schuinshootge and Majuba, 1881.

  6. Plan of the Isandlwana campaign, 1879. (With permission of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)

  7. Map to illustrate General Gordon’s Journals. (From A Egmont Hake, The Journals of Major-General C G Gordon CB, at Khartoum, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885)

  8. Khartoum and environs.

  9. Plan of the north-west frontier and Afghanistan. (From G Forrest, The Life of Lord Roberts, KG, VC, London: Cassell & Co., 1914)

  10. Plan of the battle of Paardeberg, 1900. (From David James, Lord Roberts, London: Hollis & Carter, 1954)

  11. Plan of the north-west frontier of India. (From David James, Lord Roberts, London: Hollis & Carter, 1954)

  12. The South African War, 1899–1902.

  13. The battle of Omdurman, phase one, 2 September 1898.

  14. The battle of Omdurman, phase two, 2 September 1898.

  15. The battle of Omdurman, phase three, 2 September 1898.

  List of Plates

  1. Garnet Wolseley. (Taylor Library)

  2. Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. (Library of Congress)

  3. Redvers Buller. (Taylor Library)

  4. Charles Gordon. (Taylor Library)

  5. George Colley. (The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II)

  6. Caricature of Lord Chelmsford. (Private collection)

  7. Lord Chelmsford. (Private collection of Kim Thesiger, 4th Viscount ….. Chelmsford)

  8. Frederick Roberts, General the Hon. Sir Arthur Hardinge and General Sir Donald Stewart. (Taylor Library)

  9. Frederick Roberts. (Library of Congress)

  10. Herbert Kitchener. (Taylor Library)

  11. Herbert Kitchener. (The National Army Museum)

  Acknowledgements

  Quotations from the Royal Archives appear by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. Quotations from Crown copyright material in The National Archives appear by permission of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. The editors and authors also give their thanks to the following for allowing them to consult and quote from archives in their possession and/or copyright: The Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London; The Trustees of the British Library Board; The Trustees of the Imperial War Museum; The National Army Museum; The Royal Pavilion Libraries and Museums (Hove Reference Library); The National Library of Scotland; The Sudan Archive of the University of Durham; The Killie Campbell Library of the University of KwaZulu-Natal; The KwaZulu-Natal Archives; South Lanarkshire Council Museum; and The William Perkins Library of the University of Durham, North Carolina.

  List of Contributors

  Professor Ian Beckett was formerly Professor of History at the University of Northampton. He is Chairman of the Army Records Society. His publications include The Victorians at War (2003) and the forthcoming Wolseley and Ashanti: The Asante War Journal and Correspondence of Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1873–74 for the Army Records Society.

  Dr Steven Corvi is Assistant Professor at the American Military University and is Northeast Chairman for Military History in the Popular Culture Association. His PhD was on Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien and he has contributed an article on the Royal Army Veterinary Corps to JSAHR. He has previously co-edited Haig’s Generals (2006) with Ian Beckett.

  Gerald H Herman is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University, Boston. His publications include The Pivotal Conflict: Comprehensive Chronology of the First World War (1992) and a multi-media exploration of that war’s cultural impacts called World War I: the Destroying Fathers Confirmed. He also co-edited The Media, the Academy and the Law: Assessing the Truth from the Protocols of Zion to Holocaust Denial (2005).

  Professor John Laband is Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, and an Associate of the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies. His many publications include The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War (2005), Lord Chelmsford’s Zululand Campaign, 1878–79 (1994), The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation (1997) and Kingdom in Crisis: The Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879 (1992).

  Dr Stephen Manning is a visiting Professor of History at the University of Exeter, where he occasionally lectures on colonial warfare. He is the author of Evelyn Wood VC: Pillar of Empire (2007) and the forthcoming Soldiers of the Queen.

  Dr Stephen Miller is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maine. His publications include Volunteers on the Veld: Britain’s Citizen Soldiers and the South African War (2007) and Lord Methuen and the British Army (1999). He is the editor of the forthcoming Soldiers and Settlers in South Africa, 1850-1918 and is now working on discipline and punishment in the late Victorian army.

  Dr Keith Surridge teaches on various American university programmes in London. His publications include Managing the South African War, 1899–1902: Politicians versus Generals (1998) and (with Denis Judd) The Boer War (2002). He has also contributed articles on Kitchener and on the South Af
rican War to academic journals.

  Professor André Wessels is Professor of History at the University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. His publications include two volumes for the Army Records Society, Lord Roberts and the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (2000) and Lord Kitchener and the War in South Africa, 1899–1902 (2006), as well as more than fifty articles in academic journals and several chapters in books.

  Introduction

  The senior British generals of the Victorian era – men like Garnet Wolseley, Frederick Roberts, Charles Gordon and Herbert Kitchener – were heroes of their time. As soldiers, administrators and battlefield commanders they represented the empire at the height of its power. But they were a disparate, sometimes fractious group of men. They exhibited many of the failings as well as the strengths of the British army of the nineteenth century. Now, when the Victorian period is being looked at more critically than before, the moment is right to reassess them as individuals and as military leaders. For this study, a group of military historians has come together to explore the personalities and the careers of a number of leading commanders. The contributors consider how they met the challenges created by the low-intensity colonial conflicts they faced. They assess how they coped with the emerging industrial military technologies of their age, such as smokeless powder, magazine breech-loading rifles, breech-loading rifled artillery and the machine-gun that heralded a new age in the history of warfare and required considerations of new doctrinal application.

  Throughout the emphasis is on the leadership skills these men exhibited, and on their style of command. Key campaigns in their careers are analysed in detail, to show clearly the personal qualities that brought them to prominence and to illustrate the range of colonial wars in which they took part. This balanced reconsideration of these eminent military men gives a fascinating insight into their careers, into the British army of their day and into a now-remote period when Britain was a world power and the army the effective spade that ploughed the fertile field of imperial expansion.

  The goal of this study is to illustrate each personality within the broader spectrum of the social and political environment of the late Victorian period, utilising the chronological parameters of the reforms of Edward Cardwell as Secretary State for War between 1868 and 1874 and the Second South African (Anglo-Boer) War of 1899 to 1902. Apart from Wolseley, Roberts, Kitchener and Gordon, therefore, the other generals considered are three of Wolseley’s associates – Redvers Buller, George Colley and Evelyn Wood – and the unfortunate Lord Chelmsford. By continental standards, the British army was a small one, the largest number of men put into the field between the end of the Crimean War in 1856 and the opening of the South African War in 1899 being the 35,000 men directed by Wolseley in the occupation of Egypt in 1882. Even at the height of the South African War, Britain fielded only 450,000 men. This did not mean that considerable professional demands were not being made upon them. For one thing, as the military theorist of ‘small wars’, Charles Callwell, suggested, such campaigns required the conquest of nature as much as the conquest of indigenous opponents.1 Having needed to cross 600 miles of Canadian wilderness before the lakes froze during his Red River expedition in 1870, it was understandable that, confronted with the need to complete operations in Asante in 1873–74 before the climate took its toll of his European troops, Wolseley wrote ‘I always seem to be condemned to command in expeditions which must be accomplished before a certain season of the year begins.’2 These considerations of terrain and climate are clear in Steven Corvi’s account of Wolseley’s campaigns. In advancing over 400 miles from the Red Sea coast to Magdala in Abyssinia in 1867–68 Sir Robert Napier’s expeditionary force of 13,000 men required the logistic support of 14,500 followers and 36,000 draught animals. Even the small Duffla expedition on the heavily forested north-eastern frontier of India in 1874–75 needed 1,200 coolies while, in Zululand in 1879, it was painfully difficult for Lord Chelmsford to assemble the 977 wagons, 10,023 oxen, 803 horses and 398 mules he utilised to support his columns and all but impossible to make more than 10 miles a day. Indeed, Wolseley was to note that, when fully deployed on the march, Chelmsford’s baggage train was 3 or 4 miles longer than it could actually travel in a day.3

  Railways could help in certain circumstances, as at Suakin in 1885 and in the reconquest of the Sudan in 1896–98. Indeed, as Keith Surridge reminds us, G W Steevens, the military correspondent of the Daily Mail aptly described the Sudan Military Railway as ‘the deadliest weapon … ever used against Mahdism’,4 the 230 miles of single track across the desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed shortening the journey time from 24 hours by camel and steamer to but 18 hours. On the other hand, as in the South African War, dependence upon the relatively few railways could limit strategic options and, in advancing upon the capital of the Orange Free State at Bloemfontein, Lord Roberts was forced to leave the highly vulnerable line of the railway to fall back upon oxen, horses and mules, only for the Boers to almost wreck his efforts by stampeding over 3,000 of his oxen at Waterval Drift in February 1900.

  In terms of the indigenous opponents, however, the sheer variety encountered was itself extraordinary, ranging from European-trained opponents such as the Egyptian army in 1882 to disciplined native armies such as the Zulu, fanatics like the Dervishes of the Sudan, or, almost in a category of their own, mounted Boers armed with modern weapons. Of course, even primitive native opponents could defeat a trained modern army, as the Zulu proved at Isandlwana in 1879, but in many respects, of course, it must be acknowledged that none of the leading Victorian commanders faced a truly modern opponent with the exception of the Boers and it was against the Boers that Buller and Colley failed, and Roberts and Kitchener faced their greatest challenge. As Major General the Hon Neville Lyttelton observed of commanding the 4th (Light) Brigade at Colenso in December 1899, following his experience as a brigade commander in the Sudan a year earlier: ‘In the first [Omdurman] 50,000 fanatics streamed across the open regardless of cover to certain death, while at Colenso I never saw a Boer all day till the battle was over, and it was our men who were the victims.’5 Indeed, whereas the army had lost over 100 men killed or died of wounds in a single action only twice between 1857 and 1899 – at Isandlwana in January 1879 and at Maiwand in Afghanistan in July 1880 – those killed or died of wounds between 28 November 1899 and 24 January 1900 totalled 102 at the Modder River, 205 at Magersfontein, 171 at Colenso, 348 (over two days) at Paardeburg and 383 at Spion Kop. As John Laband indicates, Chelmsford was resistant to changing orthodox military methods in Zululand, when they had appeared to work satisfactorily in the Ninth Kaffir (Cape Frontier) War of 1877–78 but, as both André Wessels and Keith Surridge show, Roberts and Kitchener were prepared to adapt new methods to defeat the Boers, albeit what became known as ‘methods of barbarism’. In a sense, however, these were not so different from the ‘total war’ that both Stephen Manning and Stephen Miller suggest Wood and Buller waged against the Zulu while neither Roberts nor Kitchener had displayed any squeamishness in Afghanistan or the Sudan. As Ian Beckett indicates, Colley, too, had little regard for his opponents, be they Afghans or Boers, and Wolseley was as prejudiced as any of his contemporaries when it came to native opponents. Indeed, as Gerald Herman suggests, perhaps only Gordon truly had any real feeling for indigenous peoples.

  Apart from nature and indigenous opponents, British commanders certainly had to contend with politicians with the increasing extension of the submarine telegraph cable through the 1870s and 1880s rendering them liable to the vagaries of political indecision in London, one general officer noting of Wolseley’s failure to save Gordon in 1884–85 that ‘it is ungenerous to forget that nowadays military methods are too often the slaves of political expediency’.6 In any case, commanders increasingly needed to exercise both military and political judgement, Wolseley playing the game astutely while, as Wessels notes, Frederick Roberts learned the hard way, erring in issuing a proclamation in December 1878 suggesting the ann
exation of the Kurram valley and then mishandling the summary executions in Kabul in January 1880 of those suspected of complicity in the massacre of the British mission of Louis Cavagnari. By the time of the South African War, however, Roberts was a practised exponent of political skills to the extent that he and Kitchener, as Surridge shows, seized effective control of policy, the debt the government owed them in securing its political survival after the exigencies of ‘Black Week’ also enabling them to dictate the eventual political settlement. As Beckett and Manning demonstrate, Colley and Wood were both bedevilled by the contradictory and uncertain policy of the Gladstone administration during the Anglo-Transvaal War of 1880–81. Equally, the culpability of Gladstone’s government in the failure to reach Khartoum in time to save Gordon is clear from Corvi’s account of Wolseley, albeit that, as Herman shows, throughout his career, Gordon was a dangerously loose cannon so far as politicians and even his fellow soldiers were concerned. Furthermore, Laband shows the poor civil-military relationship to which Chelmsford contributed in the conduct of policy in Zululand and Miller the difficulties under which Buller laboured as the Conservative Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, undermined his command in the South African War.

  Political considerations intruded largely due to the growing recognition that there was a need to take account of public opinion in an age of popular journalism. Thus, when Lieutenant General Sir Edward Selby Smyth, who had previously served at the Cape, offered his services in the Zulu War, the Secretary of State for War immediately rejected the appointment of a soldier who was ‘hardly well enough known’ to take on the job of reversing Isandlwana.7 Similarly, the feeble Lieutenant General the Hon Sir Leicester Smyth, sent to command at the Cape after the Zulu War was safely over and no new crises were anticipated, was pointedly instructed not to interfere with George Colley in Natal in 1880; ignored when Evelyn Wood was sent out to be Colley’s deputy in February 1881; passed over when Colley was killed at Majuba later that month, at which time the public’s new hero, Roberts, was sent out to take command; and again overlooked when Sir Charles Warren was appointed to command the expedition to Bechuanaland in October 1884.