Victoria's Generals Read online

  The slow, over-methodical advance of the 1st Division up the coast bore out the criticisms of those officers who had opposed the independent operations of a second column, but it was effective in securing the surrender of most of the coastal region even before the battle of Ulundi.126 Cetshwayo made increasingly desperate efforts to negotiate with Chelmsford, but the General demanded crushing and impossible terms to ensure that Zulu resistance would have to continue until he had achieved the total victory in the field he was so determined upon to vindicate his reputation.127 Bedevilled after 24 June by a stream of orders and suggestions from a frustrated Wolseley, who had arrived in Cape Town on 24 June but was not able to reach the front until 7 July,128 Chelmsford cautiously advanced on Ulundi, his cavalry carefully reconnoitering the route ahead, while the troops laagered every night and regularly halted to establish fortified supply depots along the line of communications.129

  On 4 July Chelmsford drew up his force in an infantry square in the Mahlabathini plain in the very heart of the Zulu kingdom where the amakhanda were clustered. The Zulu attack wilted before the concentrated British fire and the amabutho fled from a devastating mounted counter-attack. Decisively defeated in the open field, the Zulu knew further resistance was pointless, and the warriors immediately dispersed to their homes. With his army routed, his amakhanda burned and his chiefs hastily submitting, King Cetshwayo himself fled to the north.130 Yet nothing Chelmsford ever did now went unquestioned. Immediately after the battle he withdrew his forces south to his base on Mthonjaneni instead of advancing north to consolidate his victory, as his critics later said he ought to have done. His decision was influenced by his shortage of supplies and the need to get his men under cover in bitter winter weather, as well as by his knowledge that organised Zulu resistance was no longer likely. Still, it cannot be ignored that a desire to leave South Africa as soon as possible was also playing its part now that Wolseley would imminently be in a position to assert his new authority. Chelmsford accordingly resigned his command on 5 July.131 And four days later he wrote to Colonel Stanley informing him that he intended to make his way to England with ‘as little delay as possible’ in order (as he bitingly put it) to ‘extricate myself from a false position’.132 Cambridge subsequently considered the decision to return home only wise, because his position would have proven ‘difficult, not to say embarrassing’ if he had remained in South Africa.133

  Nevertheless, as Clery wrote on 12 July: ‘There is one universal feeling of extreme satisfaction that Lord C. fought the battle of Ulundi before his successor arrived. However one’s opinion of him as a general may be shaken, everybody’s regard and sympathy for him is as strong is it can be.’134 Colonists in Pietermaritzburg and Durban received Chelmsford with rapturous acclaim, all previous criticism of his blunders erased by final victory over the Zulu. With their plaudits ringing in his ears, Chelmsford took ship at Cape Town on 27 July.135 Wolseley, in a sly letter of farewell, assured Chelmsford that ‘with the halo of success’ he would be cordially received at the Horse Guards and the War Office, though he could not answer for those outside the Duke’s circle.136 But there Wolseley was wrong. On 11 August 1879 Ellice wrote to Chelmsford on behalf of the Duke making abundantly clear the latter’s dissatisfaction with Chelmsford’s responses to his enquiry of 6 March concerning Isandlwana, and spelling out the damning conclusions on his generalship. Chelmsford was found guilty of generally underestimating the Zulu, of adopting a poor invasion strategy that did not sufficiently concentrate his forces, of unwisely dividing the column on 22 January, of not reconnoitering sufficiently and of leaving the camp without proper defences.137 Chelmsford could be left in no doubt where he now stood with his erstwhile patron.

  His reception in England was otherwise mixed. Beaconsfield refused to accord the general who had brought such discredit upon his ministry anything but the coldest formal interview, and did not mince his words in itemising in damning detail to the Queen his reasons. But the Queen was determined to invite Chelmsford to Balmoral because she believed it showed ‘a want of generosity’ to condemn him unheard.138 The Queen was favourably impressed when she received Chelmsford, and in August 1879 he was made GCB. As Wolseley snarled in his journal with perceptive paranoia: ‘Because he is my Lord, society will back him up, the court included, & because all the Horse Guards clique, the Duke and all his old fashioned set included … hate me most bitterly, every endeavour will be made by them to cry him up hoping thereby to keep me down’.139

  In the event, although Chelmsford maintained a dignified reticence in the face of his critics, and although Ulundi had gone some way to restoring his honour and reputation, he found rehabilitation difficult. Isandlwana in particular continued to haunt him. On 19 August and 2 September 1880 he was faced with the ordeal of having to defend his own conduct of the Zululand campaign in the House of Lords before his peers. The opposition peer, Lord Strathnairn, led the extremely well-informed and acute assault on Chelmsford’s generalship, focussing on his part in the Isandlwana disaster. Chelmsford replied with eloquence and at length, supported by government peers, but Strathnairn remained as unconvinced as Cambridge the previous year. His were the last and telling (if inelegant) words in the debate: ‘Whatever might be said, there were not the necessary precautions taken to protect a camp in which most of our stores were.’140

  In the course of his defence Chelmsford had again attempted to shift the blame to Durnford, blaming him for his impulsive disregard of orders. This provoked a determined response from Durnford’s brother Edward and from Frances Colenso (the daughter of the controversially heretical and pro-Zulu Anglican Bishop of Natal), who had been romantically attached to Durnford. Their crusade took the form of letters to the newspapers, a pamphlet and two books,141 and culminated in 1886 at a court of inquiry in Natal. To Chelmsford’s relief, the court exonerated Captain Theophilus Shepstone from Frances Colenso’s bizarre charge that he had removed papers from Durnford’s body and suppressed them to protect Chelmsford’s reputation.142

  The Durnford issue caused Chelmsford much private vexation and embarrassment.143 As far as his military career went, his reputation at the Horse Guards had been too badly tarnished for him ever again to be offered an active command, although the Queen conspicuously favoured him with honours. In April 1882 he was promoted to the permanent rank of lieutenant general. The Queen exerted her influence to have him appointed Lieutenant of the Tower, a position he held from June 1884 to March 1889. He became a full general in December 1888, evaded compulsory retirement in 1889 and was finally placed on the retired list only on 7 June 1893. In January 1898 he was appointed colonel of his old regiment, the Sherwood Foresters (Derbyshire Regiment), as the 95th was now called, and in September 1900 was transferred to the 2nd Life Guards. The Queen then appointed him Gold Stick, a ceremonial office open to Colonels of the Life Guards that required personal attendance on the sovereign at all state occasions. On his accession in January 1901, King Edward VII retained Chelmsford as Gold Stick and in 1902 made him GCVO. Gilded with honours, Chelmsford died in London on 9 April 1905 following a sudden seizure while playing billiards at the magnificent but ponderous United Service Club (‘the Senior’) in Pall Mall. Appropriately, the club stood across the road from the Crimean War memorial cast from the bronze of Russian guns captured at Sebastopol where Chelmsford had been present fifty years before.144 Chelmsford was buried in a simple granite tomb carved with a plain cross behind his father’s heraldically ornate resting place in London’s Brompton Cemetery.145

  In its accompanying commentary on ‘Spy’s’ caricature of a gawky, ill-at-ease Chelmsford published a year after Chelmsford had been humiliatingly compelled to defend his generalship before his peers in the House of Lords, Vanity Fair condescendingly but not unfairly concluded: ‘Lord Chelmsford is not a bad man; … But nature has refused to him the qualities of a great captain.’146 The perceptive Clery had come to much the same opinion soon after the Isandlwana debacle when he wrote: ‘I feel greatly fo
r the poor general, for nothing could exceed his energy about everything, but I fear there have been some sad miscalculations about the whole business and that the enemy has been altogether underestimated.’147

  Certainly, there is no doubting Chelmsford’s professionalism, dedication to duty and care for the men under his command. Nor did he prove unwilling to learn from his mistakes, for he successfully adjusted his tactics during the latter stages of the Zululand campaign. His plodding, over-methodical strategy, on the other hand, distinctly lacked flair or dash. Inadequate staff support compounded his reluctance to delegate, and he consequently allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the pettifogging administrative work of managing a campaign. While Chelmsford would undoubtedly have found the routines of military administration comfortingly familiar, he was far less at home with the novel experience of an independent command in the field. Paradoxically, the relative ease of his ultimate success in the Ninth Frontier War (after an unpromising beginning) led directly to disaster in the Zululand campaign. He and his staff shared a perilous contempt for the military sophistication of the Zulu army, which was a product both of previous experience in the Eastern Cape and of an assured confidence in their decisive military edge based on their professional experience and on their ingrained sense of racial and class superiority. Thus, while Chelmsford was himself a captive of his aristocratic upbringing and its accompanying values, and of the culture of the army milieu in which he had spent his adult life, he shared his outlook and assumptions with his officers. Clery was surely right, therefore, when he reflected that Chelmsford had been singularly ‘unlucky’, for if the main Zulu army had gone against either of the two other columns invading Zululand in January 1879 instead of No. 3 Column, ‘the same thing would have happened to them’.148 Pearson or Wood, instead of Chelmsford, would have become the pilloried victim of the misplaced confidence that in early 1879 was initially common to all British officers in Zululand.

  Bibliography

  The only published biography of Chelmsford is Gerald French’s Lord Chelmsford and the Zulu War (London: John Lane at the Bodley Head, 1939), a sustained refutation of the condemnation of Chelmsford’s generalship in W H Clements’s pioneering, if anecdotal, study, The Glamour and Tragedy of the Zulu War (London: Bodley Head, 1936). Both works are in the partisan tradition of contemporary commentary with the aggressive and spiteful Daily News war correspondent Archibald Forbes (whom Chelmsford had alienated by refusing his request for the Zulu War medal) and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Durnford (the aggrieved brother of the officer on whom Chelmsford attempted to pin the blame for Isandlwana) ranged against the able and informed defence of Chelmsford’s generalship by Arthur Harness, who, as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery, had been away skirmishing with Chelmsford on the day of the battle. Recent years have seen the appearance of a number of annotated collections of contemporary letters, newspaper reports and diaries connected to the Anglo-Zulu War (though none has surpassed Frank Emery’s pioneering The Red Soldier (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977) in verve or quality). Those that cast the most light on Chelmsford’s day-to-day conduct of the campaign are the Harness Letters in Sonia Clarke’s Invasion of Zululand 1879: Anglo-Zulu War Experiences of Arthur Harness; John Jervis, 4th Viscount St Vincent; and Sir Henry Bulwer (Houghton: Brenthurst Press, 1979) and the Alison Letters in her Zululand at War, 1879: The Conduct of the Anglo-Zulu War (Houghton: Brenthurst Press, 1984). The Alison Letters were solicited from various officers in the field by Major General Sir Archibald Alison, the DQMG for Intelligence at the War Office, in order to gain confidential and sensitive information on the conduct of the campaign. These letters are complemented by a selection from Chelmsford’s own military correspondence and private papers in John Laband’s Lord Chelmsford’s Zululand Campaign 1878–1879 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing for the Army Records Society, 1994).

  As for the infamous battle of Isandlwana itself, conflicting interpretations continue to swirl about it. The starting point for any investigation is Major J S Rothwell of the Intelligence Branch of the War Office’s compilation of reports from the field into an official history called the Narrative of the Field Operations Connected with the Zulu War (London: HMSO, 1881). Chapter IV is devoted to the battle of Isandlwana and sticks firmly to Chelmsford’s view of events. The first modern critique of Isandlwana was Sir Reginald Coupland’s carefully measured Zulu Battle Piece: Isandhlwana (London: Collins, 1949). Then in 1965 David Jackson brought out a series of articles in the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, in which he subjected the evidence to the most meticulous scrutiny. His revisionist interpretation has, as a consequence, become the orthodoxy followed by most subsequent historians. And these have not been lacking. Over two dozen books dealing wholly or in part with Isandlwana have been published since 1965. One of the most significant is R W F Drooglever’s close examination in The Road to Isandhlwana (London: Greenhill Books, 1992) of the part played by Colonel Durnford (the official scapegoat) in the Isandlwana debacle. Of the many accounts aimed at a more popular market the best by far have been by Ian Knight, including Zulu: Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift (London: Windrow & Greene, 1992), which compare favourably with more lightweight treatments that revert to sensationalist derring-do typical of Donald Morris’s classic The Washing of the Spears (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). The most stimulating recent analysis of Isandlwana, Zulu Victory (London: Greenhill, 2002), is by Ron Lock and Peter Quantrill. Critics have been concerned by its questionable conclusions based upon unreliable evidence, but the book does have the merit of opening up debate afresh. Part Three that examines how the post-battle spin was managed is particularly revealing. The best short account available of the battle of Isandlwana, and one that presents a balanced synthesis of the various controversies that surround it, is Ian Beckett’s Isandlwana 1879 (London: Brassey’s/Chrysalis, 2003). Chelmsford’s role in the Isandlwana disaster is also analysed in the present author’s own research and fieldwork published in three works in particular: John Laband and Jeff Mathews, Isandlwana (Pietermaritzburg: Centaur, 1992); John Laband and Paul Thompson, The Illustrated Guide to the Anglo-Zulu War (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000) and John Laband, Kingdom in Crisis: the Zulu Response to the British Invasion of 1879, 2nd edn (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007).

  Chapter 6

  Charles Gordon

  Gerald Herman

  Charles George Gordon was born on 28 January 1833 near the Woolwich arsenal, where his father, Major (later Lieutenant General) Henry William Gordon served as Inspector of the Carriage Department. Gordon’s mother, Elizabeth, was the evangelical and fundamentalist daughter of a prominent whaling-ship-owning family. He was one of their five sons and six daughters. Gordon himself gave up on church-going, later writing ‘What husks the Evangelical religion is’,1 and committing himself to the Bible itself as the source of his faith. Because of a disciplinary proceeding in his senior year at Woolwich, Gordon’s graduation was delayed by six months. He thus missed selection into the Royal Artillery and was instead commissioned into the Royal Engineers on 23 June 1852.

  After training at Chatham, Gordon served at Pembroke Dock, where he experienced a spiritual awakening through the influence of a fellow officer, Captain Drew. Arriving at Balaclava in January 1855 and being assigned to the siege works before Sebastopol his first experience of being under (as it turned out, friendly) fire for the first time led him to embrace fully evangelical beliefs. There he also befriended the young Captain Garnet Wolseley, who, despite his superior rank, served under Gordon on engineering projects, and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Charles Staveley, under whom he would serve in China and who would become his brother Henry’s father-in-law. After Sebastopol’s capture in September 1855, Gordon was assigned to blow up its fortifications and docks. He also met for the first time the Piedmontese Bersaglieri, Captain Romolo Gessi, who would later play a significant role in his life.

  Now an acting Captain, Gordon was assigned to the Rumanian principalities of Mo
ldavia and Wallachia and the border territory of Bessarabia in May 1856 to help to draw their boundary line with Russia under the terms of the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War. For the next year he trundled (often with Gessi acting as interpreter) back and forth between the Danube, the Ottoman Kurdish and Armenian provinces, and Constantinople, developing an idea to map the world of Judaism and Christianity. After a spell back in England, during which he was elected a member of the Royal Geographical Society, Gordon continued with to his duties as boundary commissioner and, in early December 1859 he returned to England to find he had been promoted to Captain and second Adjutant at Chatham.

  Chronology

  28 January 1833

  Charles George Gordon born at Woolwich Educated at Fullards School, Taunton, and Royal Military Academy, Woolwich