Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield. Max Hastings
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Though he had always deplored the horrors of war, he took deep pride in what he and the soldiers of the Union had accomplished. ‘Fighting and destruction are terrible,’ he wrote later, ‘but are sometimes agencies of heavenly rather than hellish powers. In the privations and sufferings endured as well as in the strenuous action of battle, some of the highest qualities of manhood are called forth – courage, self-command, sacrifice of self for the sake of something held higher – wherein we take it chivalry finds its value.’
It is remarkable that a man as humane and intelligent as Joshua Chamberlain emerged from such an experience as the American Civil War with a romantic enthusiasm for the nobility of conflict, despite his uncertainty about the divine view: ‘Was it God’s command we heard, or His forgiveness we must forever implore?’ he mused. His own writing about his experiences may jar a modern reader by its unashamed lyricism. Yet it is unsurprising that such a man in such an era perceived his experience in these terms, for he had discovered personal fulfilment as a soldier. Many of the people described in this book possessed courage, charm and professional skill, yet lacked intellect. Chamberlain, by contrast, became celebrated as a hero of the United States whose intelligence and nobility matched his courage.
The Civil War represented a technological and tactical midpoint between the campaigns of Bonaparte and those of the early twentieth century. Railways had transformed mobility, and the telegraph strategic communications. The improved technology of rifled weapons had increased their killing power, but the decisive change wrought by breech-loading and repeating weapons had not yet come. The battles of Grant and Lee were among the last in which formation commanders led from the front, and thus where the personal example of a general officer could exercise a decisive influence ‘at the sharp end’, as did Chamberlain again and again.
The general thoroughly enjoyed his postwar celebrity. He served four terms as Republican governor of Maine, and became president of his old college, Bowdoin. His performance in the latter role was controversial. He introduced military science to the curriculum, including compulsory drilling. This provoked a student revolt which ended in the abandonment of uniformed training. Though Chamberlain’s military career spanned less than four years of a long life, he continued to think of himself as a warrior through the decades that followed. Almost seventy when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, and suffering recurring pain from his old wounds, he pleaded in vain for a field command. Even in his own family he was always called ‘General’, affectionately abbreviated by his grandchildren to ‘Gennie’. His marriage was tempestuous – in 1868 Fannie demanded a divorce – but somehow survived until her death in 1905. The surgeons who predicted that the terrible wounds Chamberlain received in 1864 would kill him were right – they did so when he was eighty-five, in February 1914. He remains the pattern of American military virtues, one of the most admirable men to wear the uniform of any army, in war or peace.
MOST OF THE CHARACTERS portrayed in this book distinguished themselves through months or years of active service. Yet there is another kind of warrior, who stumbles upon a single moment of glory. Lieutenant John Chard was considered by most of his peers to be one of the least impressive soldiers in the British army. Indeed, there could scarcely be a greater contrast with Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Until a January afternoon in 1879, Chard was esteemed only for his good nature and was notorious for his professional indolence. Then, wholly unexpectedly, he found himself thrust onto the centre of a stage where he gave a performance that won the applause of Victorian England. In a few hours of violent action, Chard achieved a celebrity which persisted to his death, though he never again did anything of military worth. Today, Chard would be relegated to the musty archives of imperial history but for the fact that in 1964 his exploit was embroidered into the epic film Zulu, which almost everyone susceptible to cinema adventure must at some time have seen and delighted in, and in which he was played by Stanley Baker. Modern readers must judge for themselves how far, in reality, its principal player deserved the status conferred upon him when he became one of the more honoured officers of the nineteenth-century British army.
John Rouse Merriott Chard was born into a family of minor Devon gentlefolk on 21 December 1847. He was educated partly at Plymouth New Grammar School, partly by tutors. He followed his elder brother William into the army, entering the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich aged eighteen for the usual thirty-month course of gunnery, fortification and bridging, mathematics, natural and experimental philosophy, landscape drawing, mechanics, French and Hindustani. After passing out of Woolwich eighteenth in a batch of nineteen, he was gazetted lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in July 1868. A subaltern he stubbornly remained through the next eleven years. Until December 1878 he served in a dreary succession of home and foreign garrison postings – Chatham, Bermuda, Malta, Aldershot, Devonport and Chatham again. ‘A partir de trente ans, on commence à être moins propre à faire la guerre,’ Napoleon observed incontrovertibly. Even after passing thirty Chard did not marry: in those days his humble rank discouraged family responsibilities. Not merely did he fail to distinguish himself professionally, he irked superior officers by his laziness. The only memory Woolwich contemporaries retained of Chard was that he was always late for breakfast. His chief merit, in the eyes of his peers, was that his West Country affability rendered him an easy companion in the mess, an important consideration when one had to meet a man there for three meals a day, month in and month out, amid a routine of irksome monotony. When Sir Garnet Wolseley, supreme British field commander of his generation, met Chard later he was unimpressed, dismissing him as ‘a slow, heavy fellow’. The engineer, with his big black beard and a manner diffident to the point of ineffectuality, left youth behind without making any mark upon his chosen profession.
It will never be known why Chard was posted to South Africa as war with the Zulus loomed, nor whether he welcomed the opportunity for active service. Most likely, and as usual in these matters, some engineers had to go, and Chard’s name chanced to be on a list. His nature was to accept, oxlike, whatever duty the army in its wisdom decreed for him. On 11 January 1879 Chard found himself accompanying Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford’s army into Zululand, following the expiry of a British ultimatum to King Cete-wayo to which that monarch had deigned no reply. Chelmsford’s expedition was characteristic of its time and kind. The Zulus displayed less deference and more truculence than the conceit of the neighbouring imperial power would tolerate. The British resolved to impose their will, and despatched four columns to pre-empt the threat of a Zulu incursion into Natal. The only thing unusual about this venture was that those who knew Cetewayo’s people warned that they ranked among the most formidable and disciplined warriors in the continent.
Chelmsford’s No. 3 Column reached its intended base at Isandlwana, some ten miles inside Cetewayo’s territory, on 20 January, after a single desultory skirmish with the inhabitants. His lordship left a battalion of the 24th Foot to garrison the camp, while he led out his remaining force in search of the enemy. Ten miles south of Isandlwana stood the little mission station of Rorke’s Drift, a few hundred yards on the near side of the Buffalo River border from Zululand, and thus inside British Natal. Amid a cluster of stone and wooden kraals stood two single-storey thatched buildings, in one of which the British had established a hospital. The other was stacked almost to the roof with biscuit, mealies and ammunition. In command of the post was Chelmsford’s deputy assistant quartermaster-general, Major Henry Spalding.
This officer had been given a company of the 24th Foot and a detachment of Natal Native Levies to guard the supplies, and was also left responsible for thirty-six sick and injured men. The 24th was mostly composed of Englishmen, but around a quarter of its strength was Welsh. Among the ranks of B Company were five men named Jones and another five named Williams. The riflemen at Rorke’s Drift were commanded by Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead. He, like Chard, was an unimpressive officer, who had served more than a decade without attaining a captaincy, despite being the product of a line of distinguished soldiers. One of his brothers was a rising star of the ‘Wolseley ring’. ‘Gonny’, however, was something of a disappointment. Though two years older than Chard, his lieutenancy was three years younger. His professional career was hampered by the fact that he was deaf, and deemed by his superiors almost as lazy as the engineer. Indeed,