Victoria's Cross Read online

  Stannus’s condemnation of the VC is logical, detailed and principled, and was the view of one of Britain’s most senior officers; yet his critique has been overlooked by the many books devoted to the VC that have appeared over the years. This neglect reveals the extent to which the received opinion of the VC quickly settled into place; most books on the Cross settle into the same format, the telling and retelling of tales of individual VC winners who all are deemed heroes, no matter what their individual circumstances might have been. Stannus was the first to apply a little bit of analysis, the first to look at the Cross more forensically. He disapproved not only of the VC but of all medals, decorations and military honours – although he received several himself – for the impeccably logical reason that to ‘reward a man, as is frequently the case, for doing what he would be ashamed not to do, and for neglecting to do which he would deserve to be tried by court-martial, is acknowledged even by the recipient of the honours to be perfectly ridiculous’.35 His acceptance of honours when they came his way may be thought hypocritical, but it was a necessary hypocrisy; to decline the CB he was awarded would have been to commit professional and social suicide. But once his career was finished and he was free of the yoke of silent obedience, Stannus returned to Horse Guards all his honours and medals.

  Up untill shortly before he left the army, Stannus had enjoyed a glittering career. He joined the 5th Bengal Cavalry in India as a cornet. In the First Afghan War, from 1839 to 1842, he so distinguished himself at the age of nineteen that he was made adjutant of his regiment. In 1848, when the Second Anglo-Sikh War broke out, Lord (Hugh) Gough, commander-in-chief of the British forces in India, appointed Stannus head of his personal bodyguard. Stannus again shone, at the Battle of Gujrat on 21 February 1849, when thirty chainmail-clad Afghan cavalry tried to capture Gough. Leading a small band against the Afghans, Lieutenant Stannus and his men found their swords useless against chainmail and used their pistols instead. He was badly wounded in this skirmish, for which – had it existed at the time – he almost certainly would have been recommended for the VC. He was immediately appointed captain and brevet major – he held three different ranks in three days – and in 1852 took command of the 1st Punjab Cavalry. In 1862 Stannus was given command of the newly raised 20th Hussars, formed from the East India Company’s European (i.e. non-Indian) cavalry regiments. Five years later, Sir William Mansfield, then commander-in-chief of the armed forces in India, appointed Stannus commander of a brigade based at Agra. By December 1871 Lieutenant Colonel Stannus was now a CB and in receipt of a good-service pension. A short while later the viceroy, Lord Napier, gave Major General Stannus command of the division based at the city of Umballa, today’s Ambala.

  In December 1872 the 20th Hussars were withdrawn from India and Stannus had no option but to leave too. By 1874 he was back in Ireland on the unattached army list, kicking his heels and wondering what his next appointment might be, when – to his bitter disappointment and anger – he learned that two more junior generals, Crawford Chamberlain and Donald Stewart, had been given commands of divisions in India. In an army where seniority was acquired by length of service, this could only be construed as a deliberate snub to Stannus, who complained to the commander-in-chief of the British army, the Duke of Cambridge, that he was a victim of injustice and possible nepotism. He drew attention to the fact that Sir John Lawrence, the viceroy of India from 1864 to 1869, loved to play croquet, and that a party comprising Lawrence, Chamberlain and Stewart (the latter two both then colonels) regularly met at Simla to indulge in a game. Digging deeper, Stannus discovered that his fate had probably been sealed in 1867, when he had been censured by Mansfield for an incident that was so trivial that Stannus had forgotten all about it.

  During the heat of the Indian summer, Brigadier General Stannus and his staff at Agra usually donned white linen uniforms, following widespread practice. Major General Troup, a notorious bully who liked to boast of his rudeness to subordinates, commanded the Meerut Division of the Bengal army and was thus Stannus’s immediate superior. When Troup turned up at Agra to inspect Stannus’s command, he expressed surprise at being greeted by a cool but – for Troup – peculiarly dressed Stannus, who immediately offered to conform to Troup’s more regular style of uniform. Troup dismissed the matter and led Stannus to understand he had no objection; Stannus mistook this for approval and he and his staff appeared at all inspection parades and official dinners in white linen uniforms. Throughout his stay at Agra, Troup gave no hint of displeasure; but once back at his own base Troup issued orders banning the white uniform throughout his command. Troup then left the division for a period and, as the next most senior officer, Stannus took over command. As he was entitled to, Stannus issued his own orders as to what to wear during the heat – white linen. Stannus may have lacked tact or political sense, but he had done nothing wrong. Nevertheless, Stannus was formally reprimanded by Mansfield for his infringement of official regulations regarding uniform.

  In his plea to the Duke of Cambridge, Stannus dug his own grave deeper by, among other things, bluntly accusing Napier, the viceroy, of being surrounded by sycophants. He called Napier ‘the greatest jobber the Indian Army ever had at its head . . . A long residence in India had given Lord Napier a host of personal acquaintances to provide for.’ After a lengthy, private and – for Stannus – frustrating correspondence with the deeply unpopular Military Secretary at the time, General Sir Alfred Horsford, who was the Duke of Cambridge’s gatekeeper, Stannus made public his grievances in the forlorn hope that the establishment would be embarrassed into giving him justice. He published in 1881 his lengthy letter to the Duke of Cambridge, and much else besides, in My Reasons for Leaving the British Army – a book that momentarily ruffled feathers and then disappeared, leaving his career in tatters. Clearly, Stannus was never going to win this struggle with the great beasts of the army and Raj politics, but he was driven to distraction by the financial difficulties resulting from his unsought retirement: he was left with an income of £456 a year (equivalent to about £37,000 in 2013 terms) to support five eligible daughters and a household in Dublin, while less distinguished juniors now commanding divisions in India were earning several times more. The Examiner of 21 August 1880 commented on his case, which Stannus quoted:

  It is a sorry tale that an officer who can show a Companionship of the Bath, a good-service pension, a wound pension for life, and nine medals and clasps, should find himself superseded, and obliged, in regard to his own honour, to retire from the service of a country which could furnish him neither employment nor adequate provision.36

  Stannus was a victim of . . . what? Jealousy? Rivalry? His own bloody-mindedness? We will probably never know. His story, that of an angry and bitter senior British officer allegedly brought low by sycophancy and nepotism, is obviously partial, but nonetheless illustrative of how an exceptional career in the military could be humbled by trivia.37 But we should be grateful, for his humiliation unlocked an absorbing critique of the VC, one that is all the more powerful because of its source. His brochure (as he called it) on the Victoria Cross aimed at demolishing the public mystique that had by the 1880s enveloped the VC: ‘it is incontestable that by a great majority of the community outside the service the decoration of the Victoria Cross has an extraordinarily fictitious value, and one which it would no longer retain, but that the public generally cares so very little to dive below the surface.’38 In 1881 Stannus plunged below the surface and pinpointed a major flaw endemic to the Cross – that the encouragement of ambition for individual recognition on the basis of exceptional courage also promotes distortion, hyperbole and heartache:

  The mischief the system entails throughout the Army can hardly be exaggerated; it induces to put the whole machinery of the service out of gear. Inflated despatch-writing is one of its most prominent evils, and the most niggardly economy of truth is its result . . . From the cradle to the grave of their military service a large proportion of the Officers of the Army are struggling
for the possession of these baubles and shams, and in their acquisition all sense of modesty and decency is set aside and effaced.39

  As we shall see, ‘inflated despatch-writing’ remains today a necessary sine qua non to stand a chance of winning a VC. For Stannus, it was axiomatic that professional soldiers clearly understood their duty, and that to offer inducements to go beyond that – to go off on a frolic of one’s own – was folly:

  A man ‘going on by himself,’ or separating himself from his men should be severely censured, likewise an officer who exposes himself ‘to the full fire of the enemy,’ instead of keeping out of it, are not fit recipients of the decoration. Such hair-brained [sic] folly if encouraged as a virtue would be fatal to success and ensure wholesale slaughter where an enemy was in any way enterprising. But . . . the authorities consider these deviations from the fundamental principles of all warfare deserving of special favourable recognition.40

  Stannus also condemned the creation of ‘new’ acts of courage that resulted from the invention of the VC:

  Who can unravel the mysterious fact that these acts of heroism for which the Victoria Crosses are now given were never heard of before the institution of the order, and that ever since there have been periodical and spasmodic attacks of valour, and these epidemics are now coincident with the commencement of every petty campaign . . . All these marvels we now hear of have occurred since the institution of the Victoria Cross, a sufficient proof what a degenerate set we were in the good old days when Victoria was first Queen.41

  The ‘marvels’ Stannus referred to could often easily be mistaken for simple acts of duty. Lieutenant Colonel F. C. Elton, for instance, of the 55th Regiment in the Crimea, gained his VC on 4 August 1855, for showing a splendid example to his men by continuing to lead the regiment while under fire at night; in other words, for doing what would generally be assumed to be nothing more than his duty. For Stannus, the VC set a dangerous precedent; the identification of individuals to be placed on a pedestal was, by definition, a subjective business, heavily dependent on luck, and this, he asserted, fostered wide disgruntlement. Worse, it bred mendacity:

  No-one, moreover, contests the received opinion of the service, that the element of merit is in no way mixed up with their distribution, and the shifts resorted to make the bestowal of the Victoria Cross appear plausible on paper, are extremely entertaining . . . I have known men who could hardly write their own names . . . men whose brains were severely taxed to remember the proper side of the horse on which to mount . . . I have known such men get honours and rewards, and been thrust into exalted staff positions, solely because they brazed it out with those in power, and had back-stairs influence to assist them.42

  No doubt Stannus had in mind the example of Charles Heaphy.

  If Stannus was a lone voice, we might simply disregard his views as motivated by bitter prejudice. But there were others – less outspoken perhaps, because they had positions to protect – who worried that the VC caused more harm than good. As early as 1859, Sir William Fraser, MP for Barnstaple and a former captain in the Life Guards who idolized Wellington, spoke for many officers. Fraser feared the VC would encourage soldiers to seek individual glory, to the detriment of broader interests:

  Of all the despatches written by that great man [Wellington] there was not one in which the word ‘glory’ did occur, nor one in which the word ‘duty’ did not occur. Such was the mode of modern warfare that it was next to impossible for an officer of any rank to attain the honour of the Victoria Cross, and he doubted whether its being attainable by subalterns, corporals, and men of the line would not lead them to neglect duty in the pursuit of glory.43

  Henry Hardinge, commander-in-chief of the army, spoke in the same Commons debate. Remarkably, given his close proximity to the Crown, Hardinge asserted that the British army owed its historic success to its discipline, conformity and uniformity, and that the VC undermined these virtues:

  the great object in the English army should be to preserve the correct formation of regiments and brigades in line, and not to encourage officers to step out of the line and mar its completeness for the purpose of signalizing themselves by some special action of gallantry; and an order of this sort which was given for such actions might have its disadvantages.

  Unlike Hardinge and Fraser, Stannus had nothing to lose by the time he published his Curiosities of the Victoria Cross. In this he considered seven VC citations from the recently concluded Afghan War, unravelling some of the nonsense of early VC citations. His second case was that of Gunner James Colliss of the Royal Horse Artillery.44 Recommended for the VC by General Roberts for his bravery on 28 July 1880, the citation for Collis read in part: ‘For conspicuous bravery during the retreat from Maiwand to Kandahar . . . when the officer commanding the battery was endeavouring to bring in a limber, with wounded men, under a cross-fire, in running forward and drawing the enemy’s fire on himself, thus taking off their attention from the limber.’ Stannus found this ‘childish twaddle . . . the idea of any one isolated man drawing off the fire from a limber of wounded men whom it is reasonable to suppose had some escort or protection!’45 Discounting Stannus’s satirical stabs, his point is valid: why would the enemy fire on Collis rather than the bigger and better target – the loaded limber?46

  Stannus’s fourth case concerned Reverend James William Adams of the Bengal Ecclesiastical Service. The Adams VC is a perfect illustration of how powerful and influential figures could obtain the Cross for favourites. Stannus was incredulous at the following 1881 citation of the VC for Adams:

  During the action at Killa Kazi, on the 11th December, 1879, some men of the 9th Lancers having fallen, with their horses, into a wide and deep ‘nullah’ or ditch, and the enemy being close upon them, the Reverend J. W. Adams rushed into the water (which filled the ditch), dragged the horses from off the men upon whom they were lying, and extricated them, he being at the time under a heavy fire, and up to his waist in water. At this time the Afghans were pressing on very rapidly, the leading men getting within a few yards of Mr. Adams, who having let go his horse in order to render more effectual assistance, had eventually to escape on foot.47

  A hasty reading of this citation might conclude that Reverend Adams was clearly tough and courageous on that December day in 1879; why not give him a VC? Does it matter? If we buy into the mythology of an unbroken line of heroes who represent Britain at its finest, then it matters, as the Adams VC is dubious in the extreme; once one citation is doubted, all risk being tainted with suspicion. Stannus inserted his scalpel into the pugnacious parson:

  Having had the misfortune during my career to have more than once had a horse lying on the top of me, I am some authority in this matter. Why forty parson-power could not have accomplished what is attributed to this enterprising ecclesiastic! Has the reader ever seen a London cab horse in difficulties? Try even to assist in moving him when on the ground. The physical labour required to alter his position even by a dozen men is surprising. I have never seen the Reverend gentleman who accomplished the marvel above described, and neither know nor have heard anything of his physical proportions, but I should not care to meet him in a lone alley on a dark night.48

  The idea of a forty-year-old man pulling several struggling horses off other men, who are trying to get out of a water-filled ditch, is rather difficult to swallow. Under the terms of the 1856 VC warrant, Adams’s eligibility for the VC was in any case a grey area. Formally, he was a civilian attached to the Bengal Establishment and, although three VCs had been bestowed on civilians of the Bengal Civil Service during the Indian Mutiny, forcing an extension of the VC warrant on 13 December 1858 to embrace ‘non-military persons’ who had performed ‘deeds of gallantry’, that extension was regarded by the War Office in London as being specifically limited to the Mutiny. So what may have lain behind Adams’s VC?

  The word ‘Reverend’ conjures up images of a meek-and-mild dog-collared individual. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Adams,
a tough, stern, Irish-born ‘muscular’ Christian who, at the age of sixty, managed to supervise five services and preach three sermons every Sunday. Adams was an excellent horseman and athlete, and according to contemporaries, he was considered to be the strongest man in Ireland while at Trinity College, Dublin. Ordained in the Church of England in 1863, three years later Adams went to Calcutta, where he joined the East India Company’s Bengal Establishment. In December 1876 Adams was placed in charge of the cavalry and artillery camp for the 1877 Delhi Durbar, attended by the Prince of Wales. He was clearly a successful organizer, for in November 1878 General Roberts selected Adams to accompany him as part of the Kabul Field Force. Adams, along with the Presbyterian chaplain, the Reverend J. Manson and Father G. Brown, the Roman Catholic priest, were Mentioned in Despatches by the deeply religious Roberts for being ‘unremitting in their attention to the spiritual wants of the troops’. By the time of his action at Killa Kazi in December 1879, Adams had a firm ally in General Roberts.