Ian Knight - Marching to the Drums

For much of the nineteenth century, the voice of the ordinary British soldier, who served in the ranks on the far-flung boundaries of the Empire on which the sun never set, was seldom heard, even by his own countrymen.

This was ironic, since it might be argued that more than just the military muscle of the Empire rested on the broad and often-bloodied back of the red-coat. The Empire expanded slowly and inevitably along lines of world-wide trade, and the profits from mercantile expansion fuelled the emerging industrial revolution and the rise of the middle classes at home. It was not strictly true, as the old staying had it, that trade followed the flag; often, the flag followed trade. As King Cetshwayo of the Zulu ruefully observed, first comes the trader, then the missionary, then the red soldier. Traditionally, British geographers liked to colour red on the globe those new areas added to British influence; and red could scarcely be a more appropriate colour, for seldom was imperial expansion executed without bloodshed. Thousands of indigenous inhabitants died resisting the imposition of what the British liked to consider progress and civilisation; and thousands of British soldiers died, too, executing policies which originated in the far-off centres of Imperial administration. The world may have moved on today, and come to regard the ideology and politics of Empire in a jaundiced light, but that does not detract from the sacrifice of generations of soldiers and administrators who paid the ultimate price for what they believed to be their duty. From the rain forests of West Africa to the heady mountains of Tibet, from the gold-fields of Australia to the Balkans, there were few parts of the world which did not produce their sad crop of forlorn crosses that were forever England.

Yet only late in the history of the British Empire did the public at home come to express any sense of appreciation for what their army had achieved and endured on their behalf. Queen Victoria was on the throne for so long that her realm underwent huge social changes during her reign alone. When she came to power in 1837, Wellington was still Commander-in-Chief, and the young officers who had served under him against Napoleon in the Peninsula, or in Belgium at Waterloo, had grown to become conservative and cliquish generate under his patronage. The Iron Duke had firm views on the natural order of the society; officers were drawn from the gentry, who were born to exercise authority, while the ordinary soldiers recruited from the impoverished, illiterate, usually unemployed and often desperate labouring class were still widely regarded as the scum of the earth. For at least the first half of the nineteenth century, the standing of the army in civilian society was so low that many families considered it a greater shame to lose a son into the army than to see him sent to prison. And indeed, the lot of the ordinary soldier in the early Victorian period has little to commend it to modern eyes. Soldiers enlisted for long periods twenty-five years, which often so exhausted them that they were fit for nothing else upon their discharge and could expect to spend years at a stretch in remote imperial garrisons, a prey to all manner of strange diseases which thrived in crowded and insanitary barracks. The daily routine was one of repetitious drill, and soul-destroying boredom, which many soldiers sought to escape in the cheap drink supplied within the barracks by licensed contractors. Any lapse of discipline was liable to be punished by rigorous use of the infamous cat onine tails. Active service offered at least the chance of excitement, adventure, and possibly prize money, but it was paid for with the physical hardship of long marches over inhospitable terrain and often in appalling weather, and punctuated with bouts of ferocious violence, often conducted, in the days before rifled muskets, at brutally close range. Medical facilities were limited, surgery savage, and disease inevitable.