The effects of mismanagement and military incompetence were everywhere. Val could ride out on the ridge that looked down on Balaclava, past thousands of items of familiar kit lying scattered and half-buried, along with bones and the rags of uniforms. The one thing not to be found anywhere was a scrap of wood, or anything else that could be burned. In the winter of 1854 soldiers had stripped the dead of their boots to use as fuel: they even tried to cut their frozen meat ration into strips of kindling. It was said that because Lord Raglan refused to allow starving horses to be withdrawn from the line, the animals ate first their harness, then each other’s tails, until they perished. Men froze to death at their posts. Elizabeth Davis, who had been with Florence Nightingale at Scutari, came up to the General Hospital at Balaclava. The first case she attended was of frostbite – all the patient’s toes came off with the bandages. In a neighbouring bed a comrade’s hands fell off at the wrist.
For a cavalryman, the greatest of all the horrors was the destruction of the Light Brigade the previous October. Val’s brother James was a cornet in the 8th Hussars and was snatched from disaster at the very last minute. Just before the charge he was told to report to Raglan’s staff. The order saved his life. Tennyson’s sombre valediction was published only three weeks after the battle, and while the public swallowed whole the idea that something glorious had taken place, something that threw credit on the English character, military judgement differed. A huge blunder had occurred, one that immediately turned Raglan into a lame-duck commander. Though the Prince Consort sent out Roger Fenton to make a photographic record of the campaign, the results were painterly and anodyne group portraits that told people next to nothing. It was William Russell’s dispatches for The Times that satisfied the country’s taste for blood and, along with it, revenge on the senior commanders. The army despised Russell for having committed the gravest offence it knew – ‘croaking’ – yet many officers were not above doing the same thing. Responsible men, driven to it by despair, betrayed their commanders with anonymous press comments or the publication of their private correspondence.
The botched campaign led to the fall of a ministry. In January 1855 Lord Aberdeen went out and Palmerston came in. He offered Lord Panmure the post of Secretary at War and he lost no time in shifting the blame from the government to the army itself. Panmure’s society nickname was ‘the Bison’. He put his head down and charged Raglan full on. It brought forth this remarkable reply:
My Lord, I have passed a life of honour. I have served the crown for above fifty years; I have for the greater portion of that time been connected with the business of the Army. I have served under the greatest man of the age more than half of my life; have enjoyed his confidence and have, I am proud to say, been regarded by him as a man of truth and some judgement as to the qualification of officers; and yet, having been placed in the most difficult position in which an officer was ever called upon to serve, and having successfully carried out most difficult operations, with the entire approbation of the Queen, which is now my only solace, I am charged with every species of neglect.
So comprehensive was the criticism of Raglan and his senior officers, only the young could come out with any credit. Some of the names thrown up from the mud and ice of the Crimea were destined to become famous for as long as the century lasted. Garnet Wolseley was only twenty-one when he came out and had already been wounded and mentioned in dispatches while serving in Burma. He was twice wounded in the campaign and again mentioned in dispatches. The French gave him the Légion d’Honneur. He was promoted captain in the field and after the war became a colonel at the age of twenty-five. By the time he celebrated his fortieth birthday Wolseley was a major-general and the subject of Gilbert’s affectionate lyric in The Pirates of Penzance.
Another man who had an outstanding campaign was a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant of Engineers, Charles George Gordon. In the end he, even more than Wolseley, was to personify the new soldier-patriot. Gordon’s background was impeccable. He came from four generations of officers and both his father and his brother Henry became generals. He was brought up within the walls of Woolwich barracks, where his father was Inspector of the Carriage Department of the Royal Military Academy. As a child Gordon was rumbustious and anti-authoritarian, and it was an uncomfortable surprise to his later admiring biographers to learn that at fourteen his dearest wish was to become an eunuch. The strange worm that ate away at Gordon all his life had made its first appearance.
He joined the RMA and proved to be a gifted cadet. Academically he could not be faulted. The problem lay with his temperament. Gordon was a quarrelsome young man, so much so that he lost a year’s seniority for striking a colleague. There was a greater punishment still. Instead of joining the Artillery as he wished, he was commissioned into the much less glamorous Engineers, of whom it was said that their officers ‘were either mad, Methodist, or married’. He served eighteen months at the depot in Chatham and then was posted to Pembroke, where the docks were being hastily fortified against the latest French invasion scare. There he met the mysterious Captain Drew, a fellow Engineer and devout evangelical Christian. Drew changed his life. After many fevered and prayerful conversations with this officer, Gordon went out to the Crimea in the simple but distressing hope of meeting his Maker.
To attract God’s attention, he showed the kind of bravery in the campaign that was almost obligatory for a subaltern but which he burnished in his own fashion. He would carry out hair-raising reconnaissance of the Russian positions alone and unarmed and give himself any duties that exposed him to the greater risk. He would not accept parcels of food or clothing from home and extended this contempt for personal privation to the men serving under him, who he thought had only their own stupidity to blame for any suffering they endured. He was at last wounded. Had he died, he would have been remembered only by the sappers in his unit as the most colossal prig. Unfortunately for them, ten days after receiving his wound he returned, ready with more of the same maddening self-righteousness.
The generals at last obliged Charlie Gordon with the sort of action that should have carried him off for good – the second assault on the Redan Redoubt of 18 June 1855. It was a sapper’s day out, for the plan called for ladder parties and scaling equipment. The abortive infantry attack was led by General Eyre, with whom Val Baker had served at the Cape; and there was another Cape hand in the main Engineers party, Colonel Richard Tylden. Garnet Wolseley also took part in the attack. Another lieutenant of Engineers and Gordon’s friend, in so far as he had any, the giant Gerald Graham, was awarded the VC for his part in this action. Lord Raglan, who had only ten more days to live, watched the assault from an exposed position, while earnestly entreating his staff officers to seek cover behind a battery wall.
The day provided one of those telling stories by which the nineteenth-century army is illuminated. Led away from the carnage by Garnet Wolseley, Raglan paused by a wounded officer on a stretcher. ‘My poor young gentleman,’ he murmured with his trademark courtesy, ‘I hope you are not badly hurt.’ He was inviting the wounded man to think in those detached terms with which a true Briton faced death and mutilation – after all, he himself had left his right arm at Waterloo, struck by a musket ball that could as easily have done for the great Wellington, who was standing next to him. Instead of giving a smile or a feeble hurrah, the poor devil craned up from his stretcher and blamed his commander-in-chief for every drop of blood shed that day. Wolseley was outraged. It would, he said, have given him satisfaction to run his sword through the ‘unmanly carcass’.
The adjective tells the story. It was not one Raglan himself would have bothered using. Like his chief, the Iron Duke, the Waterloo veteran required nothing more of his troops than that they stood their ground and took the consequences. They could be scoundrels or cowards, heroes or braggarts – it was all the same in the end. Of course he would have preferred the dying man to thank him for the courtesy of his enquiry, but if instead he screamed abuse, what had had been gained or lost? Hundreds were dying all around. It was Wolseley who thought enough of the moment to remember it later with such incandescent anger.
A week or so