Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum. Brian Thompson

As the bands played the Dead March from Saul, and even the Russian guns fell silent, what was passing was the death of the old army and its sentimental connection to the distant and almost forgotten wars against Napoleon.

      As a member of Raglan’s escort, Val had been placed above the battle with a highly privileged view of the conduct of the campaign. A more ambitious – or indiscreet – officer might have attempted something in print or, if not that, written letters to his family intended for posterity. That was not Val’s nature. In the three short years since leaving Ceylon, the principal military virtue Val had acquired happened to coincide with his private character. As he rode down the hill following Raglan’s coffin, he kept up that social mask which is the hardest of all to maintain, an implacable and chilling visage de bois. He was twenty-eight years old and not about to croak.

      In the late summer of 1855, when the war had reached stalemate and no one could stomach the idea of a second winter campaign, the British ambassador to Constantinople came up to Balaclava with an embassy retinue. His purpose was to tour the battlefields and distribute medals. To Val’s complete surprise the ambassador’s private secretary was none other than his friend Laurence Oliphant, whom he had last seen heading for Kathmandu.

      Val gave him dinner in the cavalry camp. Loquacious as ever, Oliphant swiftly took charge of the evening. Yes, he had been to Nepal, but then, three years ago, at the time Val was fighting at the Cape, he made a semi-secret journey from St Petersburg down the Volga and along the Black Sea littoral. This was a restricted military area, about which the Russians were (understandably, in the light of circumstance) very sensitive. It turned out that Oliphant was one of the few Englishman ever to have penetrated to Sebastopol itself, over which so much blood had been spilt. Disguised as a German farm-hand, he skulked round the streets with his eyes wide open, taking particular interest in the massive fortifications. He correctly identified the Malakhov redoubt as the key to the city’s defences. When he came home, he wrote a book about his travels, published a few months before war with Russia was declared. The point of the story was in its coda. Oliphant had been secretly summoned to the Horse Guards at the end of 1853 and quizzed by Raglan about what he had seen – and this, he declared complacently to Val, was why they were all where they were now.

      Three years had changed these two men to a remarkable degree. The hare was dining with the tortoise. Oliphant had been presented at court in 1852 – the queen fixing him with a peculiarly intent stare, though why she should do so he left Val (and us) to guess at – and he also let fall offhandedly that literary London considered him one of the better young writers of the day. Only recently he had reviewed Eight Years in Ceylon for Blackwood’s Magazine. In fact, he remembered now an interesting and recent anecdote about Sam that his brother might like to hear.

      It was a tale told with all of Oliphant’s penchant for mystery and intrigue, and it began on the boat taking him from Marseilles on his way to take up his post at the embassy in Constantinople. On the same ship was a fellow called James Hanning Speke, a captain in the 46th Bengal Infantry, a native regiment that Oliphant did not for a moment suppose Val had ever come across. Speke was something of an amateur explorer and towards the end of his service in the Punjab had taken the idea of shooting in Central Africa. In 1854 he was on his way home to England to volunteer for the Turkish contingent when he stopped off at Aden. There he met a Lieutenant Richard Burton of the 18th Bombay Native Infantry.

      They met by chance in the only decent hotel at Steamer Point. The Baker connection to the story was apparently very slight: Sam was staying at the same hotel, on his way home with his family from Ceylon. The three men, very different in personality but all of them interested in the empty spaces on the map, fell to discussing Africa together. Burton, very much the more finished article as an explorer, let it be known in his languid, mocking way that he was thinking of setting up an expedition to Somalia. Had Sam Baker not just given up one romantic dream, it was exactly the sort of challenge he would have jumped at. Instead, Speke begged to go.

      The expedition nearly killed him – he was stabbed eleven times by a fanatic’s spear – and he found he did not like Burton half as much as he supposed he would; but seeing Africa for the first time left him with an impossible dream, one which Oliphant winkled out on the ship from Marseilles. When the present war was over, he was determined to return to Africa with Burton and discover the source of the Nile, believed to be located in some as yet unknown inland sea. If the sea was there, as some ancients supposed, no white man had ever seen it. To find it was the Holy Grail of geography. If such a thing could be accomplished, and the discovery claimed for Britain, it would be the sensation of the century.