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BOOK: THE CROSS IN THE SKY
FEATURED
Posted on May 26, 2021 by MSW
THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF CHARLES ‘MOTH’ EATON
SOLDIER – PIONEER AVIATOR – PATHFINDER FOR GLOBAL PEACEKEEPING.
BY CHARLES STUART EATON
FOREWORD BY DICK SMITH AO
IN RETROSPECT AIR COMMODORE DR MARK LAX OAM, CSM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cross in the Sky is the remarkable story of Charles ‘Moth’ Eaton. As a
soldier, pioneer aviator and pathfinder for global peacekeeping, Charles emerges
as a trail-blazer in many realms. His story is intertwined with tectonic world
events and a 65-year romance with Beatrice Rose Godfrey.
Eaton served every day of both world wars, starting with the Royal West Surreys
and finishing with the Royal Australian Air Force. He was a prisoner of war and
twice court-martialled by the German Army. After the Armistice, he ferried
delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. In 1920 he flew in the first aerial
survey of India, after which he lived amongst the Khond people of Orissa.
In Central Australia, following the disappearances of Kingsford Smith’s Southern
Cross and Lasseter’s Golden Quest, he led rescue missions into the Tanami and
Great Sandy deserts before establishing and then participating in the air
defences of north-west Australia and West Papua during World War Two. As the
Australian Consul in East Timor, he assisted the post-war reconstruction of that
war-torn land.
In the midst of the Indonesian War of Independence, his life-long experience
culminated in initiatives that led to the first United Nations venture to
monitor conflict resolution. As Australia’s first diplomatic representative to
the new nation of Indonesia, Charles Eaton laid the foundations of
Australian–Indonesian bi-lateral relations.
The Cross in the Sky is the story of an extraordinary man, told by his younger
son—and witness to some of these events—Charles Stuart Eaton.
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Posted in ANZAC, Biography
ELIZABETH TOWARDS WAR I
Posted on December 22, 2021 by MSW
European matchlock musketeers of the Elizabethan period.
By the early 1570s the Puritans had grown significantly in numbers and in
economic and political clout. They were not only unsatisfied, however, but
increasingly discontented. At the same time that they were trying and failing to
pressure the government into killing Mary Stuart, some of the more adventurous
among them surreptitiously printed and distributed a First and then a Second
Admonition to Parliament. These were bold, even treasonous complaints about how
far the church had, under the Elizabethan settlement, departed from the gospel
and from true religion. They reflected John Calvin’s absolute rejection of
everything that the English reformers had retained from the time before Luther’s
revolt, and they expressed the conviction that even the office of bishop was an
abomination little less repulsive than the papacy itself. The authors of the
Admonitions declared that in the pure first years of the Christian era the
communities of the faithful had been led by deacons and elders, not by bishops,
and that fidelity to Scripture and to Christ himself required a return to that
aboriginal system. This was, in England, the genesis of Presbyterianism. Because
it challenged the legitimacy of the church that Elizabeth had established upon
becoming queen, it was taken as a challenge to Elizabeth herself. Her reaction
should have surprised no one. Those responsible for publication of the
Admonitions became hunted men, finally having to flee to the continent. They
continued, from exile, to produce pamphlets condemning the Rome-ish corruptions
of the Elizabethan church. That church became a dangerous environment for clergy
of Calvinist-Presbyterian inclination, but their beliefs continued to spread.
Meanwhile the government’s program of killing Roman Catholicism through a slow
process of discouragement, through harassment and disdain rather than murderous
persecution, was not working out as hoped. The lifeblood of Catholic practice
was the sacraments, and that loftiest of sacraments, the Eucharist, was not
possible in the absence of a priest empowered to consecrate the bread and wine.
Elizabeth and Cecil were not being foolish in expecting that, deprived of its
priests, the Catholic community would atrophy, especially if at the same time it
were punished in large ways and small and repeatedly accused of being disloyal
to England and the queen. But eliminating the priesthood turned out to be
considerably more difficult than it must at first have seemed. Among the
Catholics purged from the English universities after Elizabeth ascended the
throne was Oxford’s proctor William Allen, already well known as a scholar and
administrator though not yet quite thirty years old. Like many of his academic
coreligionists Allen drifted back and forth between England and the continent in
the early 1560s, eventually deciding to become a priest and fixing his attention
on the large numbers of onetime Oxford and Cambridge teachers and students who
were now as adrift as he was. Many of these men had been drawn to the Catholic
Low Countries, particularly to the universities at Louvain and Douai. It was at
the latter that, in 1568, Allen found the financial support to start Douai
College, a seminary where the faculty and all the candidates for the priesthood
were English.
It is not clear that Allen began with the idea of developing a cadre of
missionary priests to be sent back into England. His goal, rather, seems to have
been to keep the intellectual life of the English Catholic community intact in
preparation for a time when it would once again be welcome at home, and to
engage the Protestant establishment in disputation while preparing a Catholic
translation of the Bible. His college, in any case, attracted so many exiles
that soon it was filled beyond capacity, and other seminaries were established
elsewhere, most notably in Rome. As the students completed their studies and
were ordained, some naturally yearned to return home and minister to the
priest-starved Catholics of England. Such requests were granted, and the first
of the young “seminary priests” slipped quietly across the Channel in 1574. As
soon as the authorities became aware of their presence, the hunt was on.
Inevitably the likes of Cecil and Dudley and Walsingham saw the products of
Allen’s school as spies and instruments of subversion and wanted the queen to
see them in the same way. Certainly the priests were a threat to the policy of
trying to bleed English Catholicism dry with a thousand tiny cuts; almost from
the moment of their arrival they infused fresh vitality into a community that
was supposed to be dying. The first to be caught, Cuthbert Mayne, was a Devon
farmer’s son who had taken two degrees at Oxford and become a Church of England
chaplain before converting to Rome. He had then departed for Douai, where, in
his early thirties, he enrolled in Allen’s seminary. Within months of his
ordination he was back in the west of England and, under the patronage of a
wealthy Catholic landowner, taking on the public role of steward in order to
travel the countryside and deliver the sacraments. Captured inside his patron’s
house by a posse of more than a hundred men, he was charged with six counts of
treason, convicted, and offered a pardon in return for acknowledging the queen’s
supremacy. Upon refusing, he was made an object lesson in how religion was once
again a matter of life and death in England. He was hanged, cut down alive, and
thrown to the ground so violently that one of his eyes was put out. He was then
disemboweled, castrated, and quartered. By hanging him as a traitor rather than
burning him as a heretic, the government was able to deny that it was returning
to the Marian persecutions. In Mayne’s case as with the hundreds of priests who
would follow him to the scaffold, the queen and her council maintained the
fiction that they were killing Englishmen not for their beliefs but for seeking
to deliver their homeland into the hands of foreign enemies.
As the suppression of Catholics entered a new, more desperate phase, so, too,
and almost simultaneously, did the conflict with the Puritans. By the mid-1570s
the queen had run out of patience with the practice known as “prophesying,”
which was not a matter of making predictions but simply of preaching with a
pronouncedly evangelical slant rather than staying within the boundaries
prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer. Somewhat oddly for a Protestant of her
time, Elizabeth throughout her reign displayed a strong distaste for preaching
and a determination to retain many of the trappings—clerical vestments, for
example, and crucifixes—that growing numbers of her subjects were coming to
regard as insufferable carryovers from the age of superstition. Such issues
generated more and more heat as the 1570s advanced, until finally Edmund
Grindal, the archbishop of Canterbury, was suspended for refusing to suppress
prophesyings as the queen ordered. Canterbury remained an unoccupied see for
years, and at times it must have appeared that Elizabeth was the head of a
church of which she herself was almost the sole completely faithful member. It
was her good fortune to have two sets of adversaries, the Puritans on one side
and the Catholics on the other, who feared and despised each other far too much
ever to combine against her. (Grindal, for example, had pleaded with the queen
to stiffen the penalties for attending mass.) It also continued to be her good
fortune to have the Queen of Scots as her most likely successor. So long as Mary
Stuart drew breath, not even the most radical Protestant could possibly wish
Elizabeth harm. The church that had taken shape under her direction was a
peculiar and even improbable concoction of rather uncertain identity, no more
Lutheran than Calvinist or Catholic. For the time being it was able to hang in a
state of suspension easily mistaken for stability between the other contending
parties.
In order to sell the story that the priests coming into England were the agents
of a foreign enemy, England needed to have such an enemy. Though the pope would
always be the ideal all-purpose bogeyman, no one could take him seriously as a
military threat. The same was true of the Holy Roman Empire now that it was
detached from Spain, run by a separate branch of the Hapsburgs, and fully
occupied by intractable internal problems and external enemies as potent as the
Turks. That left France and Spain, and so many factors made Spain the more
compelling choice that not even the memory of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre
could neutralize them for long. After the massacre, the Valois regime nominally
headed by Charles IX made an effort to capture the Huguenot stronghold of La
Rochelle and, upon failing, sensibly gave up on anti-Protestantism as the
cornerstone of its domestic policy. Like England, it turned its attention to the
most significant thing then happening in northern Europe: the ongoing revolt of
the Dutch against Spanish rule, and Spain’s difficulty in bringing that revolt
to an end. England and France alike were eager to contribute what they could to
exacerbating Spain’s troubles. And England had a good story to tell in
explaining its involvement: it could claim to be protecting the Dutch from the
Roman Church (the Spanish Roman Church, specifically) and its Inquisition.
England and France were also drawn together by the simple realization that it
could be disastrous for either of them if the other became an ally of Spain’s.
The 1574 death of King Charles at twenty-four did nothing to change the dynamics
of the situation. He was succeeded by his nearest brother, the flamboyant Duke
of Anjou, who as Henry II became the third of Catherine de’ Medici’s sons to
inherit the throne. There remained one more brother, the young Duke of Alençon,
who now assumed the Anjou title but is usually referred to as Alençon to keep
him distinct from his brother. There was resumed talk, not particularly serious
on either side, of marrying the young duke, disfigured by smallpox and bent by a
spinal deformation but nearly twenty years old now, to the forty-one-year-old
Elizabeth. Each side played the game in the faint hope that the other might
attach more importance to it than it deserved.
Philip, meanwhile, was sinking deeper into the quagmire created by his
rebellious Dutch subjects, and England and France were being drawn in with him.
Philip had received from his father Charles V, thanks to the fifteenth-century
marriage of Charles’s Hapsburg grandfather to the only daughter of the last Duke
of Burgundy, a region of seventeen provinces, much of it reclaimed tidal plain,
known for obvious topographical reasons as the Low Countries or—what means the
same thing—the Netherlands. The rebellion had started in response to Philip’s
efforts to impose a Spanish-style autocracy on the northernmost provinces, an
almost fantastically prosperous center of trade and manufacturing where the
Reformation had taken a strong hold and provided particular reason for
resentment of Spanish interference. It had then spread southward as a newly
appointed governor, the Duke of Alba, clamped down not only with harsh new taxes
but with a reign of terror in which thousands of people, Protestants and
Catholics alike, were brutally put to death. Militarily Alba was successful,
bringing all but two of the provinces under control in years of hard fighting,
but the savagery of his methods made reconciliation impossible. His successor
Requesens tried to negotiate with the leader of the rebels, William of Orange,
but resumed military operations after his overtures were spurned. In spite of
crippling financial problems—Philip’s government was essentially
bankrupt—Requesens, too, began to have some success, but he died in 1576 with
the job of reconquest still incomplete. Much of what he had achieved was
thereupon undone when his troops, finding themselves unpaid, went on a rampage
of looting and vandalism. Their targets, necessarily, were the only provinces
accessible to them: the ones still loyal to, or at least under the control of,
Spain. Thus even the most Catholic sectors of the Netherlands were given good
reason to hate the outsiders.
At this juncture, with his position in the Low Countries seemingly almost lost,
Philip was rescued by the fact that his father, the emperor, had, in the course
of his long career, produced illegitimate branches of the Hapsburg family tree
on which grew a pair of genuinely brilliant figures. First among them was
Philip’s younger (and illegitimate) half-brother Juan, known to history as Don
John of Austria, a charismatic, even heroic character who in his youth had run
off to pursue a military career in spite of being steered toward the church by
both Charles and Philip. When he became governor-general of the Netherlands in
1576, Don John was almost thirty and not only a seasoned veteran of the Turkish
conflict but the victor of the great Battle of Lepanto. He didn’t want the Dutch
assignment but accepted it with the thought that it might give rise to an
opportunity to fulfill an old romantic fantasy: that of invading England and
liberating Mary, Queen of Scots. The situation he found himself in was very
nearly unmanageable, but after two years he was making such good progress that
William of Orange, in desperate straits and without hope of getting assistance
from England, invited the Duke of Alençon, still under consideration as a
possible spouse for Elizabeth, to become leader of the rebellion and, by
implication, ruler of the Netherlands. Alençon was utterly unqualified to take
command of anything, but he was eager to make a place for himself in the world
and attracted by the possibility of carving a kingdom out of the Netherlands.
The Dutch of course had no real wish to accept such an unprepossessing specimen
as their chief but as brother and heir to the king of France he carried with him
the implicit promise of substantial help. He eagerly accepted Orange’s
invitation, discovered that there was no serious chance of getting meaningful
assistance from his brother the king, and leaped to the conclusion that nothing
could satisfy his needs more quickly and completely than a successful courtship
of the English queen. Discussion soon resumed through diplomatic channels, and
when word came from England that Elizabeth would never consent to marry a man
she had not seen, Alençon made preparations to cross the Channel.
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Posted in British, France, History, Ottoman, Spain
ELIZABETH TOWARDS WAR II
Posted on December 22, 2021 by MSW
What is often depicted as the apotheosis of the Elizabethan Age, the turning
point at which the wisdom of everything the queen had done was made manifest and
the way was cleared for England’s emergence as the greatest of world powers,
came in the third week of July 1588. It was then that Philip’s mighty Armada
came plowing up the Channel into England’s home waters, found Drake and
Elizabeth’s other sea dogs waiting, and was put to flight. It was indeed an
escape for England, even a victory, though it was accomplished as much by
weather and Spanish mistakes as by weapons.
Don John, though continuing to progress inch by painful inch closer toward the
defeat of the rebellion, was physically and mentally exhausted by the struggle
and chronically short of essential resources. When in October he contracted
typhus and died, his loss must have seemed another lethal setback for the
Spanish cause. But before expiring he had nominated as his successor yet another
product of Charles V’s extramarital adventures. This was Alessandro Farnese, a
son of Charles’s bastard daughter, great-grandson of his namesake Pope Paul III.
Farnese was almost exactly Don John’s age, had been raised and educated with him
as well as with King Philip’s son Don Carlos, and had been second in command
both at Lepanto and in the Netherlands. Usually remembered as the Duke of Parma,
a title he would not inherit from his father until ten years after becoming
governor-general in the Netherlands, he was no less gifted a soldier than Don
John and a canny diplomat as well. Building on what Don John had accomplished,
he began to coax the southern and central provinces (which would remain Catholic
and evolve long afterward into Belgium, Luxembourg, and France’s
Nord-Pas-deCalais) back into the Spanish camp. The seven northern provinces—the
future Holland—proved however to be too strong and too determined for Farnese to
overpower them. And so the war went bitterly on, poisoning northern Europe.
Influential members of Elizabeth’s council, Robert Dudley among them, were not
satisfied with merely assisting the Dutch rebels financially and leaving the
military glory to Orange and his countrymen. Elizabeth, however, was still as
wary of continental wars as she had been since the Le Havre debacle of a decade
and a half before. She was sensitive to the costs of such wars and the
unpredictability of the results. She had learned how difficult it was to manage
seekers after glory, men convinced that where war was concerned it was absurd to
take orders from any woman, even a queen. She sent money to Orange, but only in
amounts calculated to keep him from putting himself completely under French
domination. A strong French presence in the Low Countries, with their proximity
to England across the narrowest part of the Channel, was less unattractive than
Spanish dominance there, but not by a wide margin.
From this point forward the Dutch revolt, the religious divisions of France and
England, and nagging uncertainty about the English succession all became
impenetrably intertwined. The elfin little Duke of Alençon arrived in England,
and to the amazement of her court, Elizabeth gave every appearance of being
smitten with him. She was easily old enough to be his mother, and there was
something pathetic in her infatuation with this youth whom she playfully called
her “frog.” As it dawned on people that marriage was not out of the question,
council and court separated into factions. Elizabeth meanwhile made clear that
this time she regarded her choice of a husband as no one’s business but her own.
When a loyal subject named John Stubbs published a statement of opposition to
the much-talked-of marriage, both he and his printer had their right hands
chopped off.
Robert Dudley was opposed, too, and probably for a multitude of reasons. He
wanted to make war in the Netherlands, but he was sure that he and not the
absurd Alençon should be the commander. To this wish were added his evangelical
leanings, and a consequent dislike of the idea of a Catholic consort for the
queen. But Dudley had kept his antipathy for Catholics within bounds when other
possible husbands were under discussion, and this time more personal factors
undoubtedly were in play. In 1578, after years of widowhood during which he had
lived at the queen’s beck and call and lamented the fact that because neither he
nor his brother Ambrose had children the Dudley line seemed doomed to end with
them, he had impregnated the beautiful Lettice Knollys, daughter of the veteran
privy councilor Sir Francis Knollys and widow of the Earl of Essex. The two were
secretly married—secretly because Dudley knew what the queen’s reaction would
be—and when Elizabeth learned she was angry and hurt. She arranged to complicate
Dudley’s life financially by withdrawing certain remunerative favors, but he was
allowed to remain at court and soon was restored to his old place as favorite.
His bride, already the mother of several children by her first husband, gave
birth to a son who was christened Robert. But she was forbidden to appear at
court. (The boy, Lord Denbigh, would be the last child born legitimately into
the Dudley family and would die at age three.) All this could well have injected
an element of spite into Dudley’s reaction to the queen’s marriage plans.
By the early 1580s Elizabeth’s uncertainties, hesitations, and ambiguous
policies had enmeshed her in a tangle of political, military, and religious
conflict. In 1585 it all finally blossomed into a war that would consume the
last eighteen years of what increasingly looked like an overlong reign. Much of
the trouble grew out of the determination of the government’s most influential
and militant Protestants—Cecil certainly, but even more his protégé Francis
Walsingham—to make the queen believe that the survival of Catholicism in England
posed a threat not only to domestic peace but to her very life. As early as 1581
Walsingham was asking Lord Hunsdon, Elizabeth’s cousin and one of the men to
whom she had entrusted the management of the north after the revolt of the
earls, to amend his reports so as to give a darker—and to the queen more
alarming—appraisal of the loyalty of the region’s still-numerous Catholics. In
that same year Parliament, with Cecil ennobled as Baron Burghley and dominating
the House of Lords while continuing to control the Commons through his agents,
passed bills making it high treason for a priest to say mass and condemning
anyone attending mass to life imprisonment and confiscation of property.
This was more than Elizabeth was prepared to approve, and the penalty for
“recusancy” was reduced to a fine of £20 per month—a sum so impossible for most
subjects as to be no different from confiscation. The queen’s efforts to find a
middle ground, to avoid being so soft on the old religion as to outrage the
evangelicals or persecuting the Catholics so savagely as to leave them with
nothing to lose, resulted in a policy that sometimes seemed incoherent. An
innovation called “compounding,” which permitted Catholics to elude the
statutory penalties by purchasing what amounted to a license to practice their
faith, was soon followed by a royal proclamation declaring all the priests
entering England to be traitors regardless of what they did or refrained from
doing. Life became increasingly difficult for Catholics, but the Puritans
complained that it was not being made nearly difficult enough. As the queen
refused to approve the most draconian of Parliament’s anti-Catholic measures,
the conflict between her church and her growing numbers of Puritan subjects
became chronic and deeply bitter. When the archbishop of Canterbury whom she had
suspended years earlier died in 1583, Elizabeth was able at last to appoint a
primate, John Whitgift, whose views accorded with her own. He soon began a
program aimed at purging the clergy of Puritans and suppressing Puritan
practices. The Elizabethan church, therefore, was soon waging religious war in
one direction while Elizabeth’s government did so in another.
And the fighting in the Netherlands dragged wearily on. Philip II’s financial
problems had eased in 1580 when the king of Portugal died without an heir and
he, as the son and onetime husband of Portuguese princesses, successfully laid
claim to that crown. This gave him control of the Portuguese fleet and the vast
overseas empire that went with it. The following year, when the so-called United
Provinces under William of Orange formally repudiated Spanish rule, Philip had
the wherewithal to respond by putting more resources into the capable hands of
his governor-general and nephew Farnese. The result was a sequence of successes
for the Spanish army and calamities for the rebellion, all of it deepening the
difficulties of the English. The little Duke of Alençon, whose dalliance with
England’s queen had advanced to the point where a betrothal was announced by
both parties only to founder on the old religious obstacles (how could even the
queen’s husband be allowed to hear mass at the Elizabethan court?), went off to
try his hand as leader of the rebellion. He showed himself to be even more inept
than his worst critics had expected, and died of a lung ailment not long after
returning to France a thoroughly discredited figure.
In that same year, 1584, William of Orange was assassinated by an apprentice
cabinetmaker eager to strike a blow for the Catholic faith, the Guises allied
their Catholic League with Spain, Farnese took the city of Antwerp from the
rebels, and English policy lay in ruins. Philip meanwhile was repeatedly being
goaded by the raids of Francis Drake and other English pirates—if pirates is the
right word for thieves who found financing at the English court and were
welcomed as heroes when they returned from their raids—on ports and treasure
fleets from the coast of Spain to the New World. Now he appeared to be near
victory in the Low Countries, and if he achieved his aims there the English had
given him an abundance of reasons to turn his army and navy on them. When Drake,
on a 1585 West Indies voyage financed by Elizabeth and Robert Dudley and others,
burned and looted Cartagena and Santo Domingo and other Spanish ports and
brought his ships home loaded with booty, it was the last straw for Philip. He
ordered work to begin on the assembly of a great fleet and the planning of an
invasion of England.
For Elizabeth and her council it was a nightmare scenario, though undeniably
they had brought it on themselves. They had provoked the Spanish king’s open
enmity at last, and had done so in such a penny-pinching way as to leave their
rebel clients virtually at his mercy. The prospect that Philip might soon subdue
the Low Countries was, under these circumstances, vastly more frightening than
it had been when the revolt began. And so at last there seemed no alternative
except to do exactly what Elizabeth had never wanted to do: send troops. Robert
Dudley was delighted, especially when he was ordered to take command. He was
well into his fifties by now, however, and his experience of war was decades in
the past and not really extensive. But his enthusiasm was such that he took on a
ruinous load of personal debt to cover his expenses—Elizabeth was not going to
pay a penny more than she was forced to—and once in the field he found that he
was neither receiving satisfactory support from home nor able to outwit or
outfight his seasoned Spanish adversaries. The arrival of English troops was
sufficient to avert the collapse of the rebellion but not sufficient to produce
victory; the result was the further prolongation, at greatly increased cost, of
a conflict that offered vanishingly little hope of a truly satisfactory outcome.
England’s intervention had persuaded Philip, meanwhile, that he could never
recover his lost provinces—might never again know peace within his own
domains—unless England was humbled. The invasion that he had in preparation
began to seem not just feasible but imperative.
Overt war with Spain provided a new basis for portraying England’s Catholics as
agents of a foreign enemy and therefore as traitors. Suppression, along with the
hunting down and execution of missionary priests, intensified. Inevitably,
persecution further eroded the number of practicing Catholics, but at the same
time, it gave rise to a cadre of young fanatics desperate enough to plot against
the queen’s life. This development—like Philip’s anger a direct outgrowth of the
government’s actions—was the best possible news for Francis Walsingham with his
network of spies, torturers, and agents provocateurs. It gave him new evidence
to draw on in making Elizabeth believe that it was necessary to do more to
exterminate the old religion. None of the most notorious and supposedly
dangerous plots against Elizabeth had the slimmest chance of success, and
Walsingham himself probably actively encouraged at least one of them in order to
entrap gullible young true believers. He may even have concocted the last of the
conspiracies (the so-called Babington Plot, which led to Mary Stuart’s
confessing to planning an escape and being accused, but not really proved
guilty, of assenting to Elizabeth’s assassination) in order to get a deeply
reluctant Elizabeth to approve Mary’s execution. Historians have often argued
that the need to eliminate the Queen of Scots is demonstrated by the fact that
after she was beheaded in February 1587 there were no more plots against the
queen’s life. But it is possible that, once Mary was dead, Cecil and Walsingham
no longer saw any need to put such plots in motion, nurse along the ones that
they discovered, or exploit their propaganda value when the time was ripe for
exposure.
What is often depicted as the apotheosis of the Elizabethan Age, the turning
point at which the wisdom of everything the queen had done was made manifest and
the way was cleared for England’s emergence as the greatest of world powers,
came in the third week of July 1588. It was then that Philip’s mighty Armada
came plowing up the Channel into England’s home waters, found Drake and
Elizabeth’s other sea dogs waiting, and was put to flight. It was indeed an
escape for England, even a victory, though it was accomplished as much by
weather and Spanish mistakes as by weapons. But it changed very little and
settled nothing. It was less a culmination than a bright interlude, and it led
only to the fifteen years of trouble and decline that would be the long final
third of Elizabeth’s reign.
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Posted in British, France, History, Spain
POLAND EARLY 18TH CENTURY – THE REIGN OF ANARCHY I
Posted on December 21, 2021 by MSW
Augustus II of Poland.
17th Centruy Polish Dragoons
By the last quarter of the seventeenth century it was becoming obvious to all
that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a very different kind of political
unit from all the surrounding states, and that it did not lend itself to the
conduct of the kind of policies they were pursuing. Commentators referred to it
as ‘the Polish Anarchy’. It was also evident that this curious polity was an
expression of a culture which was growing increasingly alien to that of the rest
of Europe.
At one level, Polish society differed little from that of other countries, and
fed on the same literary and cultural canon. There was nothing particularly
exotic about magnates such as the Treasurer of the Crown Jan Andrzej Morsztyn
(1620-93). A gifted writer, he effortlessly wrote short erotic poems and
aphorisms, religious and lyrical verse, and made fine translations of Corneille
and Tasso. Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski (1642-1702), son of the rebellious
Marshal Jerzy Lubomirski, spent two years on a grand tour before starting on a
political career which was to culminate in his appointment to the office of
Marshal by Jan III in 1676. He was a brave soldier and a discriminating patron
of the arts, and in 1668 he married Zofia Opalińska, a bluestocking with a
passion for music and mathematics: together they covered every conceivable
interest from engineering to astrology. He wrote Italianate comedies as well as
some of the best seventeenth-century religious verse in Polish, dissertations on
current affairs and a treatise on literary taste, and translated a number of
foreign works.
These and other magnates patronised the arts and studded the towns and the
countryside with palaces and churches in a synthesis of the Baroque style that
owed much not only to Italy and Austria but also to France and the Netherlands.
If Renaissance architecture suited the style and thought of the Poles of the
sixteenth century, the Baroque might have been invented for those of the
seventeenth. It awakened a degree of sensual appreciation of form, ornament and
luxury which found immediate satisfaction in and complemented the increasing
contact with the East. This fed on war just as well as on peacetime trade.
Ottoman armies believed in comfort and splendour, and as a result the booty
could be spectacular. ‘The tents and all the wagons have fallen into my hands,
et mille autres galanteries fort jolies et fort riches, mais fort riches, and I
haven’t looked through all of it yet,’ wrote a triumphant Jan III to his wife
from the Turkish camp outside Vienna a few hours after the battle.
By the early 1600s the Polish cavalry had adopted most of the weapons used by
the Turks as well as many of their tactics. The hetmans used the Turkish baton
of command, and the horse-tails which denoted rank among the Turks were borne
aloft behind them too. The Poles also dressed more and more like their foe, and
even the Tatar habit of shaving the head was widely practised on campaign. So
much so that on the eve of the Battle of Vienna the King had to order all Polish
troops to wear a straw cockade so that their European allies should not take
them for Turks, from whom they were all but indistinguishable. With Sobieski’s
accession to the throne, military fashion invaded the court and became
institutionalised. This ‘Sarmatian’ costume became a symbol of healthy,
straightforward patriotic Polishness, while French or German clothes were
equated with foreign intrigue.
The Poles also had a feeling for the beauty of Islamic art, which was not
generally appreciated in western Europe. Eastern hangings replaced Flemish
tapestries and arms joined pictures on the walls of manor houses. At the Battle
of Chocim, Jan Sobieski captured a silk embroidery studded with ‘two thousand
emeralds and rubies’ from Hussein Pasha which he thought so beautiful that he
wore it as a horsecloth for his coronation. A few years later he gave it as the
richest gift he could think of to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who put it away and
wrote it down in his inventory as ‘una cosa del barbaro lusso’.
Turkish clothes suited Baroque architecture, and servants were dressed up
accordingly. Wealthy szlachta often kept captive Tatars or janissaries at their
courts, but they also dressed their Polish pages as Arabs and their bodyguards
as Circassian warriors. This taste was carried so far that religious music was
provided in Karol Radziwiłł’s Baroque chapel at NieświeŻ by a Jewish orchestra
dressed as janissaries.
There had never been any sumptuary laws in Poland and the tendency to show off
was unrestrained. Money still had no investment role in the minds of most Poles,
and all surplus went into movable property of the most demonstrable kind.
Inventories made on the death of members of the szlachta are illuminating. A
poor gentleman would be found to possess a horse or two, fine caparisons and
horsecloths, saddles, arms and armour, a small number of rich clothes,
jewellery, perhaps some personal table-silver, a few furs and lengths of cloth,
and little in the way of money. Inventories of country houses and castles reveal
the same pattern. Jewellery, clothes, silver, saddlery, arms and armour, cannon,
uniforms for the castle guard, furs, lengths of cloth, Turkish, Persian and
Chinese hangings, banners, tents, horsecloths and rugs, Flemish tapestries and
pictures are listed. Furniture hardly figures, except where it is made of
silver.
The Polish magnate’s coat was a tradable item, so stiff was it with gold thread.
Every button was a jewel, the clasp at his throat and the aigrette on his fur
cap were works of art. The French traveller Verdum noted that Jan III wore
200,000 thalers’ worth of jewels on a normal day, and that on a great occasion
his attire would be worth a considerable proportion of his (by no means
negligible) weight in gold. Urszula Sieniawska, whose inheritance was being
disputed by a number of relatives in 1640, left no fewer than 5,000 diamonds,
rubies, emeralds and sapphires in her jewel case. Maryanna Stadnicka, wife of
the Palatine of BeŁz, left 8,760 pearls. In 1655, when they looted the
Lubomirskis’ Wiśnicz, the Swedes required no fewer than 150 carts to carry away
the booty. Many collections were so vast that the looting made only a slight
impression. The inventory of żółkiew, one of the Sobieski family seats, drawn up
after Peter the Great had personally looted it in 1707, still lists upwards of
seven hundred oil paintings in the castle.
These castles were also full of people, on the principle that the more there
were surrounding a man, the more important he was. Poor relatives and landless
friends, the sons of less wealthy henchmen and clients of one sort or another
would form a court around a magnate. On top of this, he would employ teachers
for his children, musicians, whole corps de ballet, jesters and dwarfs,
chaplains, secretaries, managers and other officers. After that came servants,
stable staff, kitchen staff, falconers, huntsmen, organists, castrati,
trumpeters, units of cavalry, infantry and artillery. The fashion for show
attendants meant that there were dozens of hajduks, wearing Hungarian dress,
pajuks, in Turkish janissary costume, and laufers in what looked like something
out of Italian opera, covered in ostrich feathers. These attendants had no
purpose beyond standing about or running before the master when he rode out. The
numbers were impressive. When Rafał Leszczyński’s wife died in 1635, he had to
provide mourning dress for just over 2,000 servants—and neither cooks nor
kitchenmaids were included, as they were not seen. Karol Radziwiłł’s army alone
amounted to 6,000 regular troops.
The heads of great houses took themselves seriously, and much of this splendour
was dictated by a feeling of self-importance. When Karol Radziwiłł’s intendant
commented that he lived better than the King, the characteristic reply was: ‘I
live like a Radziwiłł—the King can do as he likes.’ Every major event in the
life of the family was treated with pomp, and ceremonies were constructed round
it. When a child was born, the artillery fired salutes and occasional operas
were staged. When the master returned from the wars, triumphal arches were
erected and fireworks let off.
It was more than mere show—it was a style of behaviour which introduced ritual
into every action and translated its significance into visible activity. Nowhere
is this more obvious than in the practice of religion as it developed in the
seventeenth century, partly under the influence of the taste of the faithful,
partly as a result of the Church’s continuing policy of bringing every aspect of
the life of the Commonwealth within its own ambit, if not actually under its
control.
Control was not something that could be effectively exerted over the likes of
Karol Radziwiłł, who summed up his attitude in a letter to Anna Jabłonowska in
1764: ‘I praise the Lord, believe not in the Devil, respect the law, know no
king, because I am a nobleman with a free voice.’ A man whose ideal was the cult
of unbounded liberty did not take easily to having, for instance, his sexual
freedom restricted by laws even more nebulous than those of the Commonwealth.
The hold on society which the Church did have was based on a juxtaposition of
life and ritual which succeeded in making religion into an integral part of
every person’s regular activities. The leaders of the Counter-Reformation
insisted on the inseparability of the Church as an institution from the
Commonwealth as an institution, of piety from patriotism. They were largely
successful in that they bred the notion in the average Pole that the Catholic
Church ‘belonged’ to him in much the same way as the Commonwealth did. Churches
were used for sejmiks and for the sessions of local tribunals. National
commemorations and holidays were fused with religious feasts. The priesthood
became for the poorer nobility much what the civil service or army were in other
countries—the only noble profession and a refuge for upper-class mediocrity.
Outward signs of the faith were encouraged in every way. The cult of the Virgin
and of the saints, which had died away during the Reformation, made a triumphant
comeback. Every town, village, institution, guild and confraternity was provided
with a patron. Pictures of the Virgin before which miracles allegedly took place
were ‘crowned’ and declared to be miraculous. The solemn coronation of the Black
Madonna of Częstochowa took place on 8 September 1717 before 150,000 faithful.
By 1772 there were a staggering four hundred officially designated miraculous
pictures of the Virgin, each one a centre of pilgrimage and a recipient of
votive offerings of jewellery, money, tablets and symbolic limbs.
From the purely religious sphere, the ritual spread into every other. When a man
of substance died, a huge architectural folly, a castrum doloris, would be
erected in the church as a canopy for his coffin, and this would be decorated
with symbols of his office and wealth, his portrait and coat of arms, and with
elaborate inscriptions in his honour. The ritual included the old Polish custom
of breaking up the dead man’s symbols of office and, if he were the last of his
family, shattering his coat of arms. Neighbours, friends, family, servants and
soldiers would pay their last respects in more or less theatrical ways, while
congregations of monks and nuns sang dirges and recited litanies. The funeral of
Hetman Józef Potocki in 1751 took two weeks, for six days of which 120 pieces of
cannon saluted continuously (using up a total of 4,700 measures of powder). Over
a dozen senators, hundreds of relatives and entire regiments congregated in
Stanisławów to pay their last respects in the church which was entirely draped
in black damask, before a huge catafalque of crimson velvet dripping with gold
tassels, decorated with lamps, candelabra, Potocki’s portrait, captured
standards, pyramids of weapons and other symbols of his office and achievements.
This Sarmatian lifestyle was a unique growth, produced by cross-pollenation
between Catholic high Baroque and Ottoman culture. Everything about it was
theatrical, declamatory and buxom. It was inimical to the bourgeois ethic of
thrift, investment, self-improvement and discipline which was beginning to
dominate western Europe, and as a result it was condemned, even by Poles of
later centuries. At its worst, sarmatism was absurd and destructive, encouraging
as it did outrageous behaviour and an attitude that bred delusion. But it did
permit what was possibly an irreconcilable collection of people to reach a kind
of harmony. As Jan III’s English physician Bernard Connor commented: ‘It is
certain had we in England but the third part of their liberty, we could not live
together without cutting one another’s throats.’
And it helps explain how the Commonwealth was able to go on functioning, in a
kind of parallel world, along lines that defied logic. The delusional condition
it created was an essential ingredient in the survival of a polity whose
constitution had broken down and which should have imploded or been conquered by
one of its increasingly powerful neighbours.
The election that followed the death of Jan III in 1696 was a fiasco. The
principal candidates were the King’s son Jakub; François Louis de Bourbon,
Prince de Conti; and Frederick Augustus Wettin, Elector of Saxony. Jakub
Sobieski was rapidly eliminated from the contest by the intervention of Saxon
troops. On 27 June 1697 the szlachta assembled on the election field voted
overwhelmingly for the Prince de Conti, and the Primate proclaimed him king. On
the same evening a small group of malcontents elected Frederick Augustus, who
marched into Poland at the head of a Saxon army. On 15 September, while the
Prince de Conti was sailing into the Baltic, Frederick Augustus was crowned in
Kraków by the Bishop of Kujavia, as Augustus II of Poland. At the end of the
month the Prince de Conti came ashore only to discover that he had been pipped
at the post. His supporters were not keen to start a civil war, so he
re-embarked and sailed back to France. It was the first time that a deceased
monarch’s son had not been elected to succeed him; that the successful candidate
had been debarred from the throne by military force; and that the new incumbent
was also the ruler of another state.
The twenty-seven-year-old Augustus was nothing if not picturesque. Universally
known as Augustus the Strong and described by one of his subjects as ‘half bull,
half cock’, he could break horseshoes with one hand, shoot with astonishing
accuracy, drink almost anyone under the table, and fornicate on a scale which
would be unbelievable if he had not left platoons of bastards to prove it. He
was not a stupid man, and he intended to turn the Commonwealth into a
centralised monarchical state. Like Jan III, he saw war as the surest way to
gain prestige and a free hand to carry out his plans.
In 1698 the Livonian nobleman Johann Patkul, who had been forced to flee his
province by the occupying Swedes, turned up at the court of Augustus II with an
appeal for help from the Livonian nobility. Although they wished to rejoin the
Commonwealth, Augustus saw an opportunity of acquiring the province for himself.
Soon after, he met Tsar Peter I (later known as Peter the Great), who was on his
way back to Russia from western Europe, and in the course of an all-night
drinking bout the two men planned a joint war against Sweden. Augustus suggested
to his uncle King Christian V of Denmark that he join them and take Bremen and
Werden from Sweden as a reward. In 1699 an agreement was signed between Peter I,
Frederick IV of Denmark (who had succeeded his father Christian V) and Augustus
II. Augustus was not allowed to enter into such treaties as King of Poland. It
was therefore an alliance of Muscovy, Saxony and Denmark that went to war on
Sweden the following year.
The allies had made a mistake in thinking that they could easily defeat the
eighteen-year-old Swedish king, Charles XII. This callow youth was endowed with
inhuman energy, reckless bravery and a faith in his own destiny that was soon
echoed in the popular myth that he was invulnerable. He made short shrift of the
Danes, beat off the Saxon army attempting to take Riga, and then turned on the
Russians, whom he drubbed at the Battle of Narva. Augustus decided it was time
to sue for peace.
Charles XII would have none of it and demanded that the Poles dethrone Augustus
if they did not wish to be invaded. The Commonwealth was not technically at war
with anyone, and the problem of how to deal with the situation was aggravated by
profound internal divisions. In 1702 the Sapieha family placed Lithuania under
Swedish protection, and in April Charles XII entered Wilno. The Lithuanian
rivals of the Sapieha appealed to the Tsar, and Muscovite troops moved into the
Grand Duchy in support. But Charles XII had already moved into Poland in pursuit
of Augustus. Incensed by this invasion, the szlachta who assembled in a rump
Sejm at Lublin in 1703 called for war with Sweden. The following year those
loyal to Augustus II voted to ally with Muscovy against Sweden. At this point
Charles XII met Stanisław Leszczyński, Palatine of Poznań, an intelligent man of
twenty-seven for whom he developed a great esteem, and arranged for him to be
elected king by some eight hundred szlachta assembled for the purpose. There
were now two kings of Poland, neither of them with much of a following or an
army, and they were being swept along by Peter I and Charles XII respectively in
a contredanse which took them twin-stepping around the Commonwealth, until
Charles had the idea of invading Saxony. There he finally pinned down Augustus
and extorted his abdication of the Polish throne. Stanisław I was king.
Charles decided that the time had now come to take on Peter I. He laid his plans
with Stanisław and with Ivan Mazepa (originally Jan Kolodyński), a former page
to Jan Kazimierz who had served Peter I loyally as Ataman of the Cossacks on the
Russian side of the Dnieper. Their independence was being eroded by Muscovite
rule and they dreamt of reuniting Ukraine. An alliance against Russia was
formed, on the basis of an independent future for Ukraine in alliance with
Poland. But on 8 July 1709 Charles XII and Mazepa were routed by Peter at
Poltava.
The war was over, and Augustus II re-ascended the Polish throne, a little wiser
but incomparably worse off for the events of the last ten years. When he and
Peter had planned the Northern War on that night in 1698, he had been the
stronger partner. After ten years of bungling he was little more than the Tsar’s
client, dependent on his support and protection. There was no clear way out of
the predicament for him or for the Commonwealth, as the power balance in eastern
Europe had altered dramatically during those ten years.
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Posted in History, Poland
POLAND EARLY 18TH CENTURY – THE REIGN OF ANARCHY II
Posted on December 21, 2021 by MSW
Polish army throughout the 18th century, by Karol Linder.
Sweden had been wiped out as a significant power by the débâcle of Poltava.
Turkey was decisively defeated (Hetman Feliks Potocki’s victory at Podhajce in
1697 was the last Polish-Tatar battle), and by the Treaty of Karlowitz in
January 1699 the Commonwealth regained Kamieniec and the whole of left-bank
Ukraine. France, despairing of its potential allies in the east—Turkey, Sweden
and Poland—shifted its theatre of confrontation with the Habsburgs to Spain and
Italy. Distracted by the War of the Spanish Succession, the Habsburgs had failed
to take advantage of the recent Northern War.
Prussia on the other hand had taken full advantage of the opportunities on offer
to strengthen its military and diplomatic standing. On 18 January 1701 Frederick
III, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, had dubbed himself ‘Frederick
I, King in Prussia’: he could not call himself King of Prussia, since Prussia
was not a kingdom, or King of Brandenburg, since that was part of the Holy Roman
Empire. The subterfuge caused much mirth in the courts of Europe.
In similar vein, in 1721 Peter I of Muscovy took the title of Emperor of All the
Russias. Nobody laughed at this. The recent wars had shown that Russia was not
only a growing power, but also that it was strategically unassailable. And Peter
had made it clear that he would be playing an active part in the affairs of
Europe by extending his sphere of influence westward, into Poland.
The Sejm of 1712 had reached deadlock on reforms proposed by Augustus II,
whereupon he brought in troops from Saxony. This rallied the opposition, which
in 1715 formed a confederation to resist him. Peter I offered to mediate. With
some reluctance, the offer was accepted, and a Russian envoy arrived in
Warsaw—accompanied by 18,000 troops who were to keep order. The ensuing Sejm of
1717 was known as the Dumb Sejm. It sat in a chamber surrounded by Russian
soldiers, the deputies were forbidden to speak, and the Russian mediator forced
his solution on it, couched in the Treaty of Warsaw.
This laid down, amongst other things, that Augustus II could keep no more than
1,200 Saxon Guards in Poland. The Polish army was fixed at a maximum of 18,000
men and the Lithuanian at 6,000, which was deemed sufficient since Moscow
arrogated to itself the role of protector, and promised to leave a Russian force
in the Commonwealth. Augustus II, who wanted these troops out at any cost,
secretly offered to cede Peter some border provinces in exchange for a
withdrawal. A lesser man might have accepted, but Peter refused and went on to
publish Augustus’s proposals with the degree of indignation befitting the
protector of the Commonwealth’s territorial integrity.
On 1 February 1733 Augustus II died of alcohol poisoning in Warsaw. His last
words were: ‘My whole life has been one un—interrupted sin. God have mercy on
me.’ He had hoped to ensure the succession of his son Augustus to the Polish
throne, but this seemed unlikely since Stanisław Leszczyński, whose daughter had
married Louis XV of France, was expected to stand for election and to win
easily. Russia, Prussia and Austria signed an agreement to throw their combined
strength behind the young Saxon, who had already promised to cede Livonia to
Russia if elected.
The 13,000 who assembled for the election voted unanimously for Leszczyński, who
had travelled to Warsaw incognito. In Paris Voltaire composed an ode of joy, but
Russian troops were already on the move. On 5 October 20,000 of them assembled
1,000 szlachta outside Warsaw and forced them to elect Augustus of Saxony. Five
days later France declared war on Austria and started the War of the Polish
Succession. King Stanisław’s supporters gathered in confederations all over the
country and the city of Gdańsk raised a sizeable army on his behalf. Two years
of sporadic fighting ensued, but France made peace, having got what she wanted
from Austria in Italy. Stanisław was given the Duchy of Lorraine as a
consolation prize by his son-in-law, and Augustus III ascended the Polish
throne.
The Commonwealth had effectively ceased being a sovereign state in 1718 with the
imposition of the Russian ‘protectorate’. It had also virtually ceased to
function as a political organism. The Sejm was not summoned between 1703 and
1710, the years of the Northern War, which meant that no legislation was passed
and no state taxes could be levied. When the Sejm did sit again, it was hardly
more effective. Of the eighteen sessions called under Augustus II, ten were
broken up by the use of the veto. The King had tried to impose stronger
government, but his policies were poorly thought out. He had an unfortunate
conviction that a show of strength by the Saxon army was a necessary prelude to
any change, and this had the effect of provoking resistance even in those who
would otherwise have agreed with him. In the last years of his reign he did
manage to gain the support of a group of magnates and szlachta, but their
programme for reform was cut short by his death in 1733.
His son Augustus, Poland’s new monarch, was obese and indolent: he would spend
his days cutting out bits of paper with a pair of scissors or else sitting by
the window taking potshots at stray dogs with a pistol. He also drank like a
fish. Augustus III reigned for thirty years. He spent only twenty-four months of
that time in Poland, feeling more at home in Saxony. Yet he was not as unpopular
with the szlachta as might have been expected—he never made the slightest
attempt to curtail their prerogatives and increase his own. Only one Sejm
completed its session under his rule, the army dwindled to half its theoretical
size, and all visible signs of nationwide administration disappeared.
This state of affairs favoured the magnates, or rather the dozen or so men who
stood at the pinnacle of wealth and power, who had turned into something
approaching sovereign princes. It was to the courts of the leading families and
not to the royal court at Warsaw or Dresden that foreign powers sent envoys and
money. The Potocki, Radziwiłł and similar families involved half of Europe in
their affairs and their activities were monitored at Versailles and Potsdam, at
Petersburg and Caserta. The marital intentions of the young Zofia Sieniawska
were a case in point.
The only daughter of Adam Mikołaj Sieniawski, Hetman and Castellan of Kraków,
and of ElŻbieta Lubomirska, Zofia was a formidable heiress. In 1724 she married
Stanisław Doenhoff, Palatine of Polotsk, no pauper and also the last of his
line, who died four years later. Every family in Poland produced a suitor in the
hope of coffering her fortune. Louis XV was quick to realise what was at stake,
and the young widow was invited to Versailles, where she might be married to the
Comte de Charolais, a Bourbon in search of a throne; Augustus II tried to
monitor her suitors; the Duke of Holstein wanted her for himself; the Habsburgs
threw their influence behind the Duke of Braganza, for whom they had royal
ambitions; and St Petersburg sent ambassadors and money to influence her choice.
The interest in the widow was well-founded. In 1731 she settled for the poorest
of all her suitors, Prince August Czartoryski, turning his family into the most
powerful in Poland over the next hundred years.
The power of these families rested on a combination of wealth and control of
their lesser peers, and reflected a growing disparity between rich and poor. The
figures for the Palatinate of Lublin provide an example of the dramatic change
in the distribution of land over the previous two hundred years. In the 1550s,
54 per cent of all land owned by the szlachta was in holdings of under 1,500
hectares, but by the 1750s only 10 per cent was in such medium holdings. In the
1550s only 16 per cent was in estates of over 7,500 hectares, but by the 1750s
over 50 per cent was accounted for by these. The large estates grew larger, the
small ones smaller, with the result that by the mid-eighteenth century about a
dozen families owned huge tracts of land, another three hundred or so possessed
lands equivalent to those of the greatest English or German landlords, and as
many as 120,000 szlachta families owned no land at all. The remainder owned
small estates which provided little more than subsistence for the family and its
dependants.
The ravages of war, outdated methods, lack of investment and the continuous
downward trend in agricultural prices condemned these to a vicious circle.
Between 1500 and 1800 average yields increased by 200 per cent in England and
the Netherlands, by 100 per cent in France, and by only 25 per cent in Poland.
Inventories dating from this period show that even in such well-ordered areas as
Wielkopolska small estates were in a condition of decrepitude, with buildings
falling down, implements worn out and livestock depleted.
The underlying problem was not limited to Poland, and affected the whole of
Central Europe, where the old property relationship between landowning lords and
tenant peasants proved a formidable obstacle to the adoption of more profitable
capitalist solutions. This would have entailed emancipating and at the same time
expropriating the peasants, who would then have been in a position to enter into
regular contractual relations with the landowners. But the upheaval involved
would have been ruinous to both parties. As a result, the only means open to the
landowner of intensifying production was to exploit his tenants to the limit,
and their only option was a passive participation in this process of their own
enserfment.
There was technically no such thing as a serf in the Commonwealth. No peasant
belonged to anyone; he was his master’s subject only insofar as he had
contracted to be in return for a house and/or rent-free land. Every peasant,
however abject, was an independent entity enjoying the right to enter into any
legal transaction. Since, however, the relevant organs of justice were
controlled by the land—owners, his rights often turned out to be academic. By
the seventeenth century the landowners in effect exercised almost unlimited
power over their tenantry. How far they were inclined or able to abuse this
power varied greatly from area to area, depending on the morality of the master
rather less than on the level of education and determination of the peasant.
Unlike in Germany, Hungary and almost everywhere else in Europe, let alone
Russia, there were no peasant revolts in Poland after the Middle Ages, and no
organis—ation to track fugitives. Confrontation with the landlord took place in
the courts, such as they were. But the peasant of the 1700s was caught in a
poverty trap which impaired his ability to stand up for whatever theoretical
rights he had, and he was a poor successor to his forebears.
The most pauperised segment of the population were the Jews, who had been
profoundly traumatised by the massacres perpetrated by the Cossacks in 1648 and
the Russians in the 1650s. Jewish communities found it difficult to revive
economically in a climate of mercantile stagnation which also exacerbated
conflicts with Christian merchants, while their institutions ceased to function
properly. The palatines who supervised the finances of the kahals in their
provinces had done so only sporadically during the decades of war and unrest,
with the result that venality and nepotism became characteristic features of
their affairs. When a royal commission did eventually look into the kahal
finances, it was discovered that most of the communities were on the verge of
bankruptcy as a result of massive embezzlement and eccentric banking operations
with the Jesuits. The whole Jewish state within the state had to be wound up in
1764 as a result.
The overwhelmingly destitute masses of Polish Jewry lived in an increasingly
hostile environment, and it was out of this that Hasidism was born. This was a
mystical ecstatic cult, rejecting painful realities and offering a spiritual
palliative that attracted vast numbers of the poorest Jews in the teeming
provincial shtetls of the Commonwealth. It was founded in Podolia by Izrael ben
Eliezer (1700-60), also known as Baal Shem Tov, a charismatic who preached that
since God was everywhere He should be worshipped in every thing and every
action, even in eating, drinking and dancing. The joyful ceremonies he
encouraged appealed to the poorest Jews but drew the ire of orthodox rabbis.
They had also had to contend with the heresy of Shabbetai Zevi, who had
proclaimed himself Messiah in the 1660s, and acquired a sizeable following. It
was the son of one of his disciples who caused the greatest ructions in the
Jewish community. Jakub Frank (1726-91) in turn proclaimed himself Messiah and
decreed that Poland was the Promised Land. His following grew rapidly. Orthodox
rabbis invoked the law to curb the heresy, which turned it into a public issue.
The Bishop of Lwów staged a public debate between Talmudic experts and the
Frankists, with the Jesuits as adjudicators. To the delight of the Jesuits,
Frank succeeded in confounding his accusers and then announced that he and his
sect would convert to Catholicism. Frank was baptised in 1759 with the King
himself standing godfather, and all the converts were ennobled.
These outbursts of fervour stemmed from the psychological and material Babylon
from which there seemed to be no possibility of escape. The depressed shtetls
and the stinking Jewish slums of the larger towns were an eyesore which struck
all foreign travellers. Yet they were only the darkest spots on a grim landscape
of decrepitude and poverty, a poverty made all the more stark by the occasional
evidence of fabulous wealth, and by the quantity of new building on a
spectacular scale.
A new kind of grand country residence came into existence, no longer defensive
but outward-looking and palatial, often modelled on Versailles or one of the
great residences of minor German sovereigns. Craftsmen such as Boule,
Meissonier, Caffiéri and Riesener in Paris were flooded with orders from Poland.
But this magnificence and patronage did not correspond to any deeper artistic or
intellectual revival. These buildings were an incidental excrescence, not
connected to any informed taste or vision. The Branicki Palace at Białystok
contained a theatre with four hundred seats, equipped with one Polish and one
French troupe of actors and a corps de ballet, but while the stables held two
hundred horses, the library boasted no more than 170 books. Hetman Branicki was
not the man to repair the constitution.
The szlachta still believed wholeheartedly in the principles on which the Polish
constitution had been founded: personal freedom, representation, accountability,
independence of the judiciary, and so on. They knew that the constitution was
malfunctioning, but believed that, with some justification, to be the fault of
the magnates and of high-handed behaviour by successive kings, who naturally
tended to try to turn the Commonwealth into a centralised monarchy. All attempts
at reform which issued from the crown or the Senatus Consulta included some
measure that would strengthen the central authority, and that ensured their
rejection by the szlachta. They had developed an almost obsessive fear of
absolutism and an attendant defensiveness with respect to their gloried
prerogatives. In the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first of the
eighteenth, they had mooted the idea of holding a ‘mounted Sejm’, that is to say
appearing at Warsaw in the ranks of the levée en masse in order to challenge the
magnates of the Senate on a more equal footing, but this proved too difficult to
arrange. Faced with even the slimmest threat to their rights and immunities,
they wielded their weapon of last resort, the veto.
The single deputy’s power to block the will of the Sejm by registering his
objection derived from the principle that consensus must be reached for
legislation to have real force. Its use to invalidate decisions reached by a
majority was technically legal though contrary to the spirit of the law. It was
first used in 1652, but was not invoked again for seventeen years, and not for
another ten after that. It was not until the period between 1696 and 1733 that
it became endemic to parliamentary life, and that was a feature of the level to
which this had sunk.
Those who made use of the veto tended to be obscure deputies from Lithuania or
Ukraine, usually acting on behalf of a local magnate or a foreign power. The
device was so convenient to these that in 1667 Brandenburg and Sweden agreed to
go to war if necessary ‘in defence of Polish freedoms’ (i.e. to stop the Poles
from abolishing the veto), and over the next hundred years the same clause was
contained in virtually every treaty made between the Commonwealth’s neighbours.
While many lamented the abuse of the right of veto, they stood by the right of
their fellows to exercise it, just as during the Reformation ardent Catholics
had refused to allow the persecution of people guilty of sacrilege. It was first
and foremost a question of liberty. The phenomenon of the veto, normally viewed
as a baffling aberration and the ultimate symbol of the Commonwealth’s political
impotence, did serve a specific purpose, that of preventing it from becoming an
absolutist monarchy, which it could easily have done in the period of
instability and war at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth centuries. As far as the szlachta was concerned, absence of
government was preferable to arbitrary government. And many had come to see
government as unnecessary anyway.
When the Commonwealth had imploded under the combined assault of the Cossacks,
Tatars, Swedes, Brandenburgers and Muscovites in the 1650s, the szlachta had
held regional sejmiks to deal with essential local issues. This form of
administration turned out to be not only more efficient, but also more
accountable and less costly than central government. As a result, local land
sejmiks, sejmiki ziemskie, and law and order sejmiks, sejmiki boni ordinis,
became favoured instruments of local administration, responsible for electing
judges, officers of the law and commanders of the militia; collecting taxes,
raising troops and nominating functionaries.
Since life could go on normally without a national Sejm, the szlachta felt
justified in proclaiming its dispensability. People began to believe that
anarchy, in its literal sense of ‘no government’, was something of an ideal
state, particularly as it denied the crown and the magnates the instruments
through which to pursue their sinister aim of curtailing the szlachta’s
liberties. This was particularly relevant in times of war and instability such
as the first decades of the eighteenth century, when a central Sejm might invoke
national emergency to bring in pernicious legislation.
The Commonwealth therefore continued in a state of suspended animation, with no
central administration beyond that which could be paid for from the king’s
personal revenue, and no organ of government other than the Senatus Consulta,
which had no writ. Its internal and external affairs were as much the business
of Russia, and to a lesser extent of Prussia and Austria, as its own. The three
powers looked on its territory more and more as a sort of noman’s-land. Russia
moved her troops about it as though it were a training ground, while Prussian
and Austrian armies took short cuts through it, in times of war even setting up
depots and garrisons in convenient Polish towns.
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Posted in History, Poland
DARGAI, 20 OCTOBER 1897 PART I
Posted on December 1, 2021 by MSW
The Gordon Highlanders storming Dargai Heights during the Tirah campaign in
1897. It was here that Piper Findlater won his VC. He was wounded and unable to
walk and exposed to enemy fire. Despite this and his exposed position he
continued playing, to encourage the Highlanders in their assault on the heights.
For a century the tangled mountains of the North-West Frontier of India provided
the British and Indian Armies with a school for soldiers, a hard, unforgiving
school in which mistakes cost lives and, above all, a school in which the only
certainly was the unexpected. Prominent among the frontier tribes were the
Afridi, of whom it was said that robbery, murder, treachery and merciless blood
feuds were the very breath of life. The same, to varying degrees, might have
been said of all the tribes along the frontier, the Wazirs, Mahsuds, Orakzai,
Mohmands and Yusufzai. Masters of the ambush and guerrilla war, they fought
constantly among themselves and regularly against the British, who could provide
much dangerous sport when there was nothing more pressing to occupy their minds.
Sometimes a serious incident would require the despatch of a punitive expedition
which would fight its way into the tribal territory and destroy the offending
villages. In due course, after they had had enough of fighting, the tribesmen
would let it be known that they were willing to submit. A ‘jirga’ or council
would be held, attended by the tribal headmen and the senior British military
and political officers. A fine would be imposed, the troops would leave and all
would remain quiet for a while. Then, in a few years’ time, the whole process
would be repeated. Such events, however, tended to be local in character and it
was unusual for large areas of the Frontier to be affected simultaneously.
Yet, the frontier tribes had another side to their character. Hospitality, for
example, was regarded as a sacred trust. Devious with each other, they would
react honestly if dealt with the same way. It could take years to win their
trust, but once earned it could result in friendship for life. Many enlisted in
regiments of the Indian Army and, having served their time loyally, would return
home with their pensions and a mellower impression of the British Raj. Against
this, the tribes were to a man devout Muslims to whom the killing of infidel
Christians and Hindus was entirely impersonal and certainly no matter for
conscience searching.
At the beginning of 1897, while those at home were preparing to celebrate Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the Frontier was quiet, although the term was
relative, and seemed likely to remain so. In July, however, it suddenly exploded
in revolt along its entire length, presenting the authorities with the most
formidable challenge they had ever faced, or were likely to again.
There was only one cause capable of uniting tribes normally at each other’s
throats, and that was militant Islamic fundamentalism. Fanatical clergy were at
work, notably the Mullah of Haddah among the Mohmands, the Mullah Powindah in
Waziristan, the Mullah Sayid Akhbar in the Khyber region, and especially the
Mullah Sadullah of Swat, known to the British as the Mad Fakir. Eyes blazing
with fervour, Sadullah travelled from village to village preaching ‘jihad’ (holy
war) against the infidel, accompanied by a thirteen-year-old boy whom he claimed
was the last surviving heir of the Great Moghuls and would soon ascend the
throne of his ancestors in Delhi. The situation was aggravated by Abdur Rahman,
King of Afghanistan, who had recently produced a tract praising the concept of
jihad and, displeased with the results of a recent frontier demarkation, urged
the mullahs to drive the infidels from their land, although he had no intention
of taking the field himself. Perhaps these factors would not on their own have
been sufficient to provoke a general rising, but also present on the Frontier
were agents of Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Turkey, determined to make trouble for
the British in revenge for a humiliating diplomatic snub he had received at
their hands. The line taken by these agents was to hint that Great Britain had
been seriously weakened by its quarrel with the Sultan, and since the truth of
this would not suffice, lies would do just as well. The Suez Canal and Aden were
now in Turkish hands, they claimed, so that whereas reinforcements from the
United Kingdom would normally take three weeks to reach India, they would now
take six months; and, that being the case, the jihad would be over long before
they could arrive. Being simple people with a limited knowledge of geography and
no means of verifying the truth, the tribesmen accepted what they were told and
were much encouraged.
The fuze which actually detonated the explosion had been in place since the
previous year when a government clerk, a Hindu, was murdered in northern
Waziristan. As the culprit was never brought to justice a fine of 2,000 rupees
was imposed on the area. One village, Maizar, refused to pay its share and on 10
May 1897 the political agent, Mr Gee, arrived there to settle the dispute,
accompanied by a military escort of some 300 men. The troops were offered
hospitality to lull them into a false sense of security, then were treacherously
attacked by over 1,000 tribesmen. After all three British officers had received
mortal wounds the Indian officers took charge and embarked on a difficult
fighting withdrawal from the village, despatching several cavalrymen to summon
reinforcements. These reached the force during the evening, having covered nine
miles in 90 minutes, and enabled it to break contact. Losses among the Indian
soldiers amounted to 23 officers and men killed, and a large number of wounded;
it was estimated that about 100 of their attackers were killed.
During the weeks that followed the rising spread like wildfire along the
Frontier, the garrisons of fortified posts having to fight desperately for their
lives against an enemy who, inflamed with religious fervour, launched repeated
attacks regardless of losses. At the end of August disaster struck. The forts
guarding the Khyber Pass were held by an irregular and locally raised unit known
as the Khyber Rifles, officered entirely by Afridis. Raised after the Second
Afghan War, they had given good service in the past but had become seriously
unsettled by the mullahs’ propaganda. On 23 August the rebels closed in around
the forts. That at Ali Musjid was simply abandoned, while the garrison at Fort
Maude offered only a token resistance before falling back on a relief column
from Fort Jamrud. Next day it was the turn of Landi Kotal, which resisted
successfully for 24 hours before treacherous elements opened the gates; some of
the garrison joined the rebels, some were allowed to leave after handing over
their weapons, but others, remaining true to their salt, managed to fight their
way through to Jamrud. Control of the pass, the vital communications route
between India and Afghanistan, was not regained until December. Such was the
fury of the tribal assault that those holding the smaller posts stood little or
no chance of survival.
On 12 September the heliograph station at Saragarhi, midway between Forts
Gulistan and Lockhart, covering the important Samana Ridge to the south of the
Khyber and held by the 36th Sikhs, was attacked overwhelming strength. The
garrison, consisting of twenty men under Havildar Ishan Singh, beat off two
frenzied attacks during the morning, strewing the surrounding rocks with bodies.
However, some of the Afridis, taking advantage of an area of dead ground, began
picking away at the brick wall until part of it collapsed, creating a breach.
The Sikhs ran from their fire positions to repel the renewed assault but were
too few in number and in ferocious hand to hand fighting were forced back into
their barrack block, where they fought to the last man. One sepoy, barricading
himself in the guard room, shot down or bayoneted twenty of his assailants
before perishing in the flames of the burning building; another, one of the
post’s signallers, remained in heliograph contact with Fort Lockhart until the
end. Jubilant, the Afridis swarmed to join their comrades who had invested Fort
Gulistan that morning. Held in much greater strength, this proved to be a
tougher nut to crack and, despite casualties, was still holding three days later
when the tribesmen, flayed by the shellfire of a relief column advancing from
Fort Lockhart, abandoned the siege and dispersed into the hills. Thanks to the
36th Sikhs, the Samana Ridge forts remained in British hands and in recognition
of the fact the regiment was awarded the unique battle honour ‘Samana’.
Such desperate actions as these marked the high water mark of the rising,
although months of fierce fighting lay ahead before the Frontier was pacified.
The government of India had been taken aback by the sheer scale and ferocity of
the revolt but reacted by despatching strong punitive columns to Malakand and
against the Wazirs, Mohmands, Afridis and Orakzais. Considerations of space
inhibit describing even the more important actions save one, that fought by the
1st Gordon Highlanders at Dargai, which has passed into the legends of Frontier
warfare.
A contemporary general inspection report describes the battalion as being ‘A
particularly fine one. The officers as a body are an exceptionally nice set; the
warrant officers and NCOs seem to be very efficient, and the privates have an
admirable physique.’ Like every good unit, the Gordons reflected the personality
of their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Mathias, whose bullet
head, determined jaw, bristling moustache and level blue eyes indicated a
no-nonsense, instinctive fighter. In many ways Mathias was a commander well
ahead of his time, paying attention not only to the more obvious aspects of his
profession but also to the physical condition of his men and their morale. In
1896 the battalion won the Queen’s Cup for shooting and it was regarded as
having the best signallers of any British regiment in India. Field exercises
took place regularly, one advanced feature being the instruction of NCOs in
military sketching, in those days an essential element in reconnaissance,
usually taught only to officers. Mathias kept his men fit with a programme of
athletics, hill-racing and football, contests being held between companies and
against neighbouring units. There were also regimental concert parties and other
activities to combat the boredom of cantonment life. The impression given is
that the 1st Gordon Highlanders was a highly trained, efficient battalion,
entirely at ease with itself and held in high regard; it was, too, an
experienced battalion, having taken part in the Chitral Expedition of 1895.
In April 1897 the Gordons, based at Rawalpindi on the Punjab side of the
North-West Frontier Province boundary, moved up to their hot weather station in
the Murree Hills, expecting to remain there throughout the summer. At the
beginning of August, however, in response to the rapidly deteriorating situation
on the Frontier, it returned to Rawalpindi whence it was immediately despatched
to Jamrud. Here it formed part of a force that prevented the rebels advancing
further along the Khyber.
By October the British counter-measures had begun to take effect. Nevertheless,
it was appreciated that the tribes would not submit until the war was carried
onto their own territory and it was decided to advance deep into the Tirah
region. In this area it was estimated that together the Afridis and Orakzais
could field between 40-50,000 men and for this reason the Tirah Field Force,
commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir William Lockhart, was the largest punitive
expedition ever assembled on the Frontier. It consisted of two divisions (the
1st under Major-General W. P. Symons and the 2nd under Major-General A. G.
Yeatman-Biggs), two flanking columns, a strong lines of communication element
and a reserve brigade. Altogether, 11,892 British and 22,614 Indian troops were
involved, accompanied by almost 20,000 followers who performed menial but
essential tasks; there were also 8,000 horses, 1,440 ponies for the sick and
wounded, over 18,000 mules and an enormous number of camels, carts and baggage
ponies. Lockhart’s plan was to concentrate at Kohat and enter Tirah from the
south by crossing the Samana Ridge at a pass west of Fort Gulistan. He would
then force two more passes which would bring him to his ultimate objective, the
Tirah Maidan, a wide fertile valley upon which the surrounding tribes relied for
subsistence, rarely if ever visited by Europeans before.
Together with the 1st Dorsetshire Regiment, the 15th Sikhs and the lst/2nd
Gurkhas, the Gordons constituted Brigadier-General F. J. Kempster’s 3rd Brigade,
which formed part of the 2nd Division. The Tirah Field Force left Kohat on 7
October, its route taking it past the now deserted ruins of Saragarhi signal
station. By 15 October, marching by easy stages, it had reached Shinawari, but
beyond this point progress across the Samana Ridge was blocked by a substantial
force of tribesmen holding the village of Dargai, located at the summit of a
towering spur that dominated the only road. The crest was lined with sangars,
while the rocks themselves contained numerous fissures that provided natural
rifle pits. Immediately below the village were precipitous cliffs, broken here
and there by goat paths, and below these was a steeply sloping open space
several hundred yards wide, forming a glacis that could be swept by fire from
above. An attacker who succeeded in crossing this would then find his further
upward progress restricted to goat paths or funnelled into the narrowing
approach to the village itself, where he could be picked off with ease. Nature,
therefore, had endowed Dargai with better defences than many a purpose-built
fortress.
Lockhart had only the 2nd Division in hand, the 1st Division still being on the
march some sixteen miles short of Shinawari. He nonetheless decided that the
former would take Dargai at once, conduct of the operation being entrusted to
Lieutenant-General Sir Power Palmer, normally responsible for the force’s lines
of communication, as Yeatman-Biggs was ill. Palmer’s plan was for Brigadier R.
Westmacott’s 4th Brigade to mount a frontal attack on the village, covered by
two mountain batteries, while Kempster’s 3rd Brigade made a wide detour to the
west, threatening the defenders’ right flank and rear.
The troops moved off during the early hours of 18 October. The route of
Kempster’s brigade, which Palmer accompanied, took it up a dry watercourse that
had its source near the western summit of the spur. The higher they climbed, the
rougher became the going, the narrower the stream bed, the larger the boulders
and the steeper the slope. After five miles had been covered the Gurkhas, in the
lead, gave the appearance of flies walking up a wall. A point had now been
reached at which the mules were unable to cope with the precipitous going and
Palmer decided to send back his guns and the field hospital, escorted by the
Dorsets and part of the 15th Sikhs. The Gordons, bringing up the rear, had
perforce to halt and let them through. From about 09:00 onwards the steady
thumping of guns indicated that the mountain batteries were engaged in their
preliminary bombardment of Dargai.
At about 11:00 heliograph contact was established with Westmacott’s brigade,
which was making slow but steady progress, often in single file, up the direct
route towards the village. By noon the Gordons, after a stiff two-hour scramble,
had joined lst/2nd Gurkhas and 15th Sikhs on the slopes above the source of the
watercourse, attracting sporadic long range fire. The coordination between the
two brigades had been excellent, for Westmacott’s battalions were now in
position to launch their assault. Under a hail of fire from above, the 2nd
King’s Own Scottish Borderers and lst/3rd Gurkhas swarmed across the open slope
and up the goat tracks to the village. The tribesmen hastily abandoned their
positions and fled, sped on their way by a few long range volleys from
Kempster’s men. The capture of Dargai had been a model operation, costing the
Borderers only six casualties and the Gurkhas thirteen. Undoubtedly, the enemy’s
resistance would have been far stiffer had not Kempster’s brigade threatened
their rear, always a sensitive area in tribal warfare.
By mid-afternoon both brigades had been concentrated at Dargai. For the reasons
quoted below, Palmer decided to abandon the position, despite the fact that two
large groups of tribesmen, one estimated to be over 4,000 strong, could be seen
converging on the spur from their camps in the Khanki Valley. Westmacott’s
brigade, less two companies of Borderers, led off first. Between 16:00 and
17:00, with the sun falling towards the western skyline, Kempster’s brigade
prepared to follow, covered initially by the 15th Sikhs. They, in turn, were
covered by the Gordons and the two Borderer companies as they disengaged and
passed through. By now the tribesmen, having reoccupied the sangars along the
crest, were directing an increasingly heavy fire at those on the open slope
below the cliffs, making the officers their special target. Major Jennings
Bramly was killed and Lieutenant Pears was wounded; Second Lieutenant Young had
his helmet shot off; and Lieutenant Dalrymple Hay, feeling blood running down
his cheek, discovered that it had been grazed by a bullet.
When the moment came, Colonel Mathias released the Borderers then ordered three
of his own five companies back into fresh fire positions from which they could
support the withdrawal of the remaining two. One of the latter had succeeded in
disengaging, as had half of Captain F. W. Kerr’s company, when a body of the
enemy broke cover some 30 yards distant, fired a ragged volley and charged the
small group remaining. Six of them were dropped almost at bayonet point, four of
them falling to Private W. Rennie, and the rest made off when they were engaged
by Captain Miller Wallnutt’s company from its new fire position. While this was
taking place Lieutenant Young, Surgeon-Captain Gerrard and Colour Sergeant
Craib, went out and rescued a wounded man who was in immediate danger of being
hacked to death.
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Posted in Battle, British
DARGAI, 20 OCTOBER 1897 PART II
Posted on December 1, 2021 by MSW
Storming the Dargai Heights.
Darkness put an end to the fighting. In addition to the casualties mentioned
above, the Gordons had sustained another man killed and seven wounded. Dead and
wounded alike were carried down the rough two-mile track to the road, on
reaching which the battalion formed up and marched the six miles back to the
camp at Shinawari.
The reasons given by Palmer for abandoning Dargai include the following:
1. The 2nd Division was not strong enough to hold the position, guard Shinawari
camp and maintain communications between the two.
2. There was no water supply between Dargai and Shinawari, and no supply of
firewood at Dargai.
3. The continued occupation of Dargai would have revealed the proposed axis of
advance into tribal territory, which was not desirable.
4. The 1st Division was still a day’s march short of Shinawari.
The reader might agree that some of these look extremely thin, while others
might be regarded as excellent reasons for not having mounted the operation in
the first place. As it was, the Orakzais could claim to have repulsed a British
attempt to capture the position, and at this stage of the revolt the mere
suggestion of a tribal victory was the last thing that was wanted. Nevertheless,
for the better part of the next day Lockhart, lulled into a false sense of
security by the arrival of the 1st Division, refused to accept the reality of
the situation, expressing the opinion that the continued work of improvement on
the road, protected as it was by strong covering parties, would in itself deter
the enemy from re-occupying Dargai. However, when he was informed that evening
that Dargai Heights were now held by an estimated 12,000 Afridi and Orakzai, he
reacted with commendable speed. Because it knew the ground, the 2nd Division,
reinforced by elements of the 1st Division, would again clear the spur. This
time, there would be no subtlety of manoeuvre against the enemy’s flank and
rear; what he intended was a straightforward frontal attack in strength,
supported by the fire of the divisional artillery, supplemented by an additional
battery. At this point personalities began to have a bearing on subsequent
events. Lockhart detested Westmacott, and decided that Kempster, whom he merely
disliked, would deliver the assault, under the control of Yeatman-Biggs, who had
returned to duty.
When the troops, having been briefed on the operation, marched out of camp at
04:30 on 20 October, their muttered opinion of the generals was ripe, to say the
least. No doubt Kempster,1 whom they loathed, received the lion’s share of the
blame, which in this case was a little unfair as the decisions had not been his.
By 10:00 the guns were pounding the summit, which the Gordons also brought under
long range rifle fire. The enemy, secure in their sangars and rocky clefts, were
little affected by this; they had, moreover, strengthened their defences and
from one point they were also able to direct a crossfire across the
all-important open slope below the cliff. Thus, when the lst/2nd Gurkhas rose to
attack, the entire summit erupted in a wild storm of fire. Under the impact of
thousands of bullets the dusty surface of the slope was churned into a dust
cloud in which it seemed nothing could live. Gurkhas could be seen falling and
their casualties strewed the ground. Despite this, three companies reached the
cover of a rocky shelf approximately halfway across, but further progress was
impossible. Worse still, every attempt by their comrades to reach them resulted
in more men shot down. Jubilant, the tribesmen began waving their flags, beating
drums and shouting defiance.
Kempster ordered the 1st Dorsets to make the attempt. A few managed to sprint
across the fatal 150 yards to the safety of the ledge, but as a whole the
battalion was stopped in its tracks. It was then the turn of the 2nd Derbyshire
Regiment,2 but they fared no better. As each attack failed the frenzy of the
tribesmen reached higher levels of exultation.
It was now mid-afternoon and, despite the carpet of dead, dying and wounded
covering the lower half of the slope, Dargai Heights still remained firmly in
enemy hands. The crisis of the battle having been reached, Yeatman-Biggs ordered
Kempster to commit the Gordons and the 3rd Sikhs, his last reserves. The latter
were providing an escort for the guns on a lower spur and had to await relief by
a Jhind state infantry battalion, but the Gordons moved off at once.
As they clambered up the narrow path they were not encouraged by the steady
stream of dead and wounded being carried past in the opposite direction. At
length they formed up in dead ground screened by some low scrub at the lower
edge of the slope. Nearby, grim-faced Derbys, Dorsets and Gurkhas lay firing at
the enemy, now capering among the rocks and yelling derisive insults.
It is a matter of record that Highland infantry, heirs to a long and violent
history in which the carrying of arms and settlement of disputes by force was
usual, have always launched their attacks with a unique speed and a berserk
ferocity that was very difficult and often impossible to stop. Colonel Mathias
knew how best to awaken these qualities in his men and, having been told that
his assault would be preceded by three minutes’
concentrated artillery fire on the summit, he used the interval to address them
very briefly, his voice cutting like a whiplash through the sounds of gunfire,
musketry, savage drumming and yells:
The General says this hill must be taken at all costs – the Gordon Highlanders
will take it!’
There was a moment’s silence. The men knew the terrible risks involved, but the
Colonel had given his word on their behalf and not one of them would let him
down.
‘Aye!’ It was a spontaneous roar from 600 throats.
‘Officers and pipers to the fore!’
It was now, as the sun glinted on the officers’ drawn broadswords and the Pipe
Major took his place, throwing his plaid and drones across his shoulder with
infinite swagger, that the inherited instincts of countless bloody if
long-forgotten clan battles began to surface, causing the scalp to crawl and the
hackles to rise. Like their forebears of old, they, led by their chief men and
pipers, were going out to meet the enemy, steel to steel. Suddenly, the
supporting gunfire ceased.
‘Bugler – sound Advance!’
Like a tidal wave the Gordons poured out of cover and onto the deadly open
slopes. The pipers struck up the regimental march, The Cock o’ the North,3 a
fine ranting tune that skirled across the hillside, evoking a response from
every man present. Yelling, the entire battalion swept upwards. Mathias, still
up with the leaders, had unleashed the full fury of his Gordons and knew that
they would give the shortest shrift to anyone who got in their way.
Perhaps the sudden appearance of the battalion caught the enemy unawares. If so,
the respite was only of seconds’ duration. Once again, the crest blazed with
fire and, once again, the dust was stirred into a fine mist by the pelting hail
of bullets. And now the Gordons began to go down. Lieutenant Lamont was killed
outright at the head of his men. Major Macbean, shot through the thigh, crawled
to a boulder and continued to cheer on the assault. Lieutenant Dingwall, hit in
four places and unable to move, was carried to safety by Private Lawson, who
then returned to bring in the wounded Private Macmillan, being hit twice while
doing so. The pipers, who could neither run nor take cover and still play,
continued to walk upright and thus became a special target for the enemy.
Lance-Corporal Milne, among the first to set foot on the slope, continued to
march upwards until shot through the chest. Piper George Findlater suddenly felt
his feet knocked from under him by a sharp blow. Sitting up, he discovered that
he had been shot through both ankles but, disregarding alike the enemy’s fire,
the pain and the fear that he might never walk normally again, he continued to
play his comrades into action. Mathias was hit but kept moving. Major Downman
got a bullet through his helmet. Other men felt rounds twitching at their kilts
and tunics. Major Macbean, reaching for his water bottle after the assault had
passed by, found it empty save for the bullet responsible for draining the
contents.
It took less than two minutes for the leading companies to reach the ledge where
the Gurkhas were sheltering, although it seemed far longer. There they paused
briefly to get their breath back while the others closed up. Then, with a wave
of the broadsword and a sharp shout of ‘Come!’ the officers led a second rush
across the ledge to the foot of the escarpment. This time the Gordons were
accompanied by kukri-wielding Gurkhas, keen to exact payment for the long hours
they had spent pinned down. Another pause, and then the Gordons were scrambling
up the goat paths towards the summit. Already the enemy’s triumphant drumming
had stopped and his firing become ragged. Instinctively the tribesmen understood
that the green-kilted soldiers could not be stopped and, recognising the murder
in their attackers’ eyes, they began shredding away. Those with a mind to stay
quickly changed it when, far below, they saw the 3rd Sikhs crossing the open
slope, big, bearded, turbaned men coming steadily on behind a line of levelled
bayonets. There were, too, large numbers of Dorsets, Derbys and Gurkhas who,
inspired by the Gordons’ assault, were rushing forward to join in the attack.
Thus, when the Gordons finally reached the summit, they found the sangars
contained only a handful of dead and wounded. The reverse slopes of the spur,
however, were black with the running figures of thousands of tribesmen, into
whom a rapid fire was opened, sending many tumbling among the rocks.
Mathias, out of breath and bleeding, reached the summit alongside Colour
Sergeant Mackie.
‘Stiff climb, eh, Mackie?’ he remarked. ‘I’m not quite so young as I was, you
know.’
‘Och, never you mind, sir,’ replied the colour sergeant, slapping his commanding
officer on the back with a familiarity justified by events, ‘Ye were goin’ verra
strong for an auld man!’ If the compliment was unintentionally back-handed, the
admiration was genuine, as Mathias found when his Gordons, now laughing and
joking, gathered round to give him three cheers.
Yeatman-Biggs was determined that the tribesmen would not be given a second
chance to reoccupy the heights and detailed the Gurkhas and the Dorsets to hold
them. The Gordons volunteered to carry down their wounded, an act of kindness
that was greatly appreciated. Afterwards, as they marched to their own bivouac,
each regiment they passed broke into spontaneous cheering, officers and men
pressing forward to shake their hands and offer their water bottles, a small
gesture but a very generous one considering that no further supplies could be
obtained until the following day.
As the Widow of Windsor’s parties went, the second capture of Dargai Heights was
small in scale but it was as bitterly contested as any. The cost was three
officers and 33 other ranks killed and twelve officers and 147 other ranks
wounded, the majority of these casualties being incurred on the lowest 150 yards
of the open slope. The Gordons’ share amounted to one officer and six other
ranks killed and six officers and 31 other ranks wounded. In the circumstances
this was little short of astonishing but can be attributed to the speed with
which the attack was delivered across the most exposed portion of the open
slope, this being cited in later tactical manuals.
Mathias was to receive many congratulatory telegrams on behalf of his battalion;
from the Queen and from the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal
Lord Wolseley, from the Gordons’ 2nd Battalion, from the regiment’s friendly
rivals the Black Watch, and from Caledonian societies all over the world,
including the United States.
Yeatman-Biggs recommended that the Victoria Cross be awarded to
Lieutenant-Colonel Mathias, Piper Findlater and Private Lawson. In Mathias’ case
the supreme award was denied, thanks to an incredibly priggish decision by the
War Office that neither general officers nor battalion commanders were eligible
for the Cross, presumably because they were doing nothing less than their duty.4
Queen Victoria made her own feelings known in no uncertain manner by promptly
appointing him as one of her aides de camp with the rank of colonel, although he
continued to command the battalion until its return to Scotland the following
year. Piper Findlater5 and Private Lawson received the award in the field. In
addition, Colour Sergeants J. Mackie and T. Craib, Sergeants F. Ritchie, D.
Mathers, J. Donaldson and J. Mackay, and Lance-Corporal (Piper) G. Milne were
awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the last mentioned being decorated
personally by the Queen when he was invalided home.6
The Tirah Field Force fought many more battles as it penetrated deeper into
tribal territory, but none was as fiercely contested or as critical as Dargai.
Early in November it reached its objective, the Tirah Maidan, a beautiful,
fertile valley one hundred square miles in extent, flanked by pine-clad slopes
and dotted with copses. There were numerous houses, each of which,
significantly, was fortified against its neighbours. In the storerooms were
piled high the fruits of the recent harvest – Indian corn, beans, barley, honey,
potatoes, walnuts and onions. The entire valley was deserted, the inhabitants
having taken their families with them into the hills. Lockhart despatched
columns into every corner of the Tirah, where the resistance encountered clearly
indicated that the tribes had no intention of submitting. Reluctantly, he
decided that if they would not talk he would begin laying waste the valley. The
troops, many of whom came from farming stock, did not enjoy the work, but the
sight of groves being felled and columns of smoke rising from burning buildings
produced the desired result. With the exception of the ungovernable Zakha Khel,
who did not submit until the following April, the tribes sent in their leaders
to a jirga where they accepted their punishment: they would give up 800
serviceable rifles, pay a fine of 50,000 rupees and return all the property they
had stolen during the rising. On 7 December, with the worst of the winter snows
approaching, the evacuation of the Tirah Maidan began. The withdrawal of the 1st
Division was comparatively uneventful, but that of the 2nd Division was subject
to constant ambushes and attacks that inflicted 164 casualties and were
obviously not the work of the Zakha Khel alone. Nevertheless, so thoroughly had
the rising been put down that during the next twenty years only five major
punitive expeditions were required to police troublesome areas, and never again
was fighting so widespread along the Frontier.
It would be absurd to suggest that any love was lost between the British and the
tribes, but there was a great deal of mutual respect and during both World Wars
thousands of the latter volunteered for service with the Crown. There was even a
sense of loss when the British left India, for now no one remained for their
young men to prove themselves against, even their hereditary Hindu enemies
having been removed far to the south of them by the creation of the Islamic
state of Pakistan. Yet the world was to hear of them again, for when the Soviet
Union launched its disastrous occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 the Frontier
again became an arsenal and huge numbers crossed to fight alongside their
co-religious kindred in the Mujahideen. For all its size, the Soviet Army was
unable to cope. In the end, therefore, the mullahs’ promise of a successful
jihad had been fulfilled, albeit a century after it was made and against a very
different kind of infidel.
Notes
1. Kempster had an unfortunate personality and was so unpopular throughout the
Tirah Field Force that its members coined the verb ‘to be kempstered,’ that
is, generally mucked about. For all that, he was a capable enough officer in
action.
2. Later the Sherwoood Foresters.
3. The Cock o’ the North was the nickname of the Duke of Gordon who had raised
the regiment 104 years earlier.
4. At the time the Victoria Cross warrant also incorporated a clause to the
effect that in the event of subsequent ‘scandalous conduct’ the award would
be forfeit. This rarely happened but when it did there was an understandable
public outcry in protest. King Edward VII put an end to this sort of
sanctimonious humbug.
5. To quote from a footnote in Chapter 26 of the Gordon Highlanders’ regimental
history, The Life of a Regiment: The incident of the wounded piper
continuing to play, being telegraphed home, took the British public by
storm, and when Findlater arrived in England he found himself famous.
Reporters rushed to interview him; managers offered him fabulous sums to
play at their theatres; the streets of London and all the country towns were
placarded with his portrait; when, after his discharge, he was brought to
play at the Military Tournament, royal personages and distinguished generals
shook him by the hand; his photograph was sold by thousands; the Scotsmen in
London would have let him swim in champagne, and the daily cheers of the
multitude were enough to turn an older head than that of this young soldier.
A handsome pension enabled Findlater to rest on his laurels and turn his
sword into a ploughshare on a farm near Turriff. He re-enlisted for the
Great War, though not fit for foreign service.’
6. Throughout their subsequent history the Gordon Highlanders celebrated the
anniversary of Dargai wherever they were stationed. Thanks to government
economies that have reduced the Army’s strength to the lowest level for 300
years, the regiment no longer has an independent existence, having merged
with the Queen’s Own Highlanders to form a new regiment, The Highlanders
(Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons). This will, however, continue to celebrate
the anniversary of the action.
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Posted in Battle, British
DEMETRIUS I, KING OF MACEDON
Posted on November 18, 2021 by MSW
Marble bust of Demetrius I Poliorcetes. Roman copy from 1st century AD of a
Greek original from 3rd century BC.
The grail was his: Demetrius was king of Macedon. Immediately after the murder
of Alexander V, the nobles present—members of Alexander’s court, now surrounded
by Demetrius’s forces—agreed to his kingship, and he was duly acclaimed by the
assembled army. But there were still hearts and minds to be won in Macedon
itself, and Demetrius went about this by the traditional combination of action
and words. He quelled an uprising in Thessaly and took steps to improve the
security of central Greece, where the alliance between the Boeotians and
Aetolians had been renewed in response to Demetrius’s and his son’s conquests in
the south. In the Peloponnese, only the Spartans now held out against him, and
they were no more than a nuisance.
At home, he played all the cards that supported his claim to the throne. He
stressed his father’s loyal service to the Argeads and the illegitimacy of the
Antipatrid regime, and missed no opportunity to recall Cassander’s murder of
Alexander IV. His long marriage to Phila helped as well; as Cassander’s sister,
she provided an appearance of continuity, now that Cassander had no surviving
descendants. Ironically, through Phila, Demetrius was the heir of those to whose
ruin he and his father had devoted so much time and energy.
In order to help secure Thessaly, and to give himself another port, one of
Demetrius’s early acts as king was to found the city of Demetrias. The site, at
the head of the Gulf of Pagasae (near modern Volos), was well chosen. The city
was hard to assault, and served successive Macedonian kings for decades as one
of the “Fetters of Greece”: as long as they controlled the heavily fortified
ports of Demetrias, Chalcis, and Corinth (Piraeus was desirable too), they could
move troops at will around the Greek mainland and restrict other shipping. And
most commercial traffic in those days was seaborne.
A sign of how critical all this was for him was that he ignored what was going
on elsewhere in the world—or maybe he just did not have the forces to cope. He
had already, I think, effectively ceded the Asiatic Greek cities, and Lysimachus
completed his takeover there by the end of 294. In the same year, Ptolemy, to
his huge relief, regained Cyprus. The defense of the island had been in the
hands of Phila, but in the end she was pinned in Salamis and forced to
surrender. Ptolemy courteously allowed all members of Demetrius’s family safe
conduct off the island and back to Macedon, laden with gifts and honors. The
Ptolemies would now retain Cyprus until the Roman conquest of the island two
hundred and fifty years later.
Lysimachus, as already mentioned, was chiefly occupied with a war against the
Getae in northern Thrace, around the Danube. In 297 the warlike Getae had taken
advantage of the fact that Lysimachus’s attention was focused on Asia Minor to
go to war. Lysimachus sent his son Agathocles to deal with the Getae, but it had
not gone well: Agathocles had been captured, and Lysimachus had been forced to
come to terms, which included marrying one of his daughters to the Getan king
and returning territory he had occupied. But in 293, once he had more or less
settled his affairs in Asia Minor, Lysimachus took to the field to recover the
territory he had been forced to give up. Again, the war went badly; we know no
details, but it is surely to the credit of the Getan king Dromichaetes that he
was able twice to defeat as brilliant a general as Lysimachus. This time, it was
Lysimachus himself who was taken prisoner. He was held at their capital, Helis
(perhaps modern Sveshtari, where a tomb has been discovered which might be that
of Dromichaetes and Lysimachus’s nameless daughter). It was the best part of a
year before his captors were induced to let him go, and again Lysimachus lost
territory to them, and had to leave hostages to ensure that he would not attack
again. It was the last of his attempts to gain control of inner Thrace.
In 292, while Lysimachus was tied up, Demetrius, short on gratitude to the man
who had so rapidly recognized his rulership of Macedon, took an expeditionary
force into Asia Minor and Thrace. It was a sign of his future intentions, a
declaration of war. Fortunately for Lysimachus, a united uprising by the central
Greek leagues, backed by his friends Pyrrhus and Ptolemy, recalled Demetrius to
Greece. As it happened, before he got back his son Antigonus Gonatas had
succeeded in defeating the Boeotians and putting Thebes under siege (it fell the
following year). But Demetrius was unable to return to his abandoned campaign,
because Pyrrhus chose this moment to invade Thessaly. Demetrius advanced against
him in strength; Pyrrhus, his work done, withdrew.
Pyrrhus’s retreat was tactical; he had no intention of giving up his attempt to
expand the frontiers of Epirus at Demetrius’s expense. Two years later, in 290,
he inflicted a serious defeat on Demetrius’s forces in Aetolia (the victory was
so spectacular that he was hailed as a second Alexander), but lost the island of
Corcyra (Corfu). The island was betrayed to Demetrius by Pyrrhus’s ex-wife
Lanassa (whose domain it was), allegedly because she was irritated at being
ignored by her husband. She married Demetrius instead. In 288, while Demetrius
was laid low by illness, Pyrrhus seized the opportunity to invade Thessaly and
Macedon. Demetrius hauled himself out of bed and drove Pyrrhus out.
The two kings had pummeled each other to exhaustion, and they made a peace which
recognized the status quo in respect of Demetrius’s possession of Corcyra and
Pyrrhus’s of the Macedonian dependencies given him by Alexander V in his hour of
desperation. Demetrius was left in a powerful position. Macedon, though slimmer,
was united under his rule; there was a treaty in place with his most formidable
enemy; in central Greece, only the perennial hostility of the Aetolians
remained; and he had done enough to secure the Peloponnese for the time being.
He had the best fleet, and could call up a massive army. It was quite a
turnaround for the Besieger, and he began to dream his father’s dreams. Perhaps
Demetrius was his own worst enemy.
DEMETRIUS’S PRIDE
The style of Demetrius’s kingship was typically flamboyant, and he demanded
obsequiousness from his subjects. An incident from 290 is particularly
revealing. It was the year of the Pythian Games—the quadrennial festival and
athletic games held at Delphi, second only to the Olympics in prestige. But the
Aetolians controlled Delphi, and restricted access to the festival to their
friends. A few weeks later, then, Demetrius came south to host alternate games
in Athens.
He and Lanassa entered the city in a style that reminded many of Demetrius’s
outrageous behavior a dozen or so years earlier, when he had made the Parthenon
his home and that of his concubines. They came, bringing grain for ever-hungry
Athens, as Demetrius, the aptly named savior god, and his consort Demeter, the
grain goddess. They were welcomed not only with incense and garlands and
libations, but with an astonishing hymn that included the words: “While other
gods are far away, or lack ears, or do not exist, or pay no attention to us, we
see you present here, not in wood or stone, but in reality.” Obsequiousness
indeed, but the point became clearer as the hymn went on to request of the king
that he crush the Aetolian menace.
Many Athenians regretted such excesses, and all over the Greek world resentment
built up against the new ruler. It was impossible for Demetrius to present
himself as the leader the Greeks had been waiting for when he had to crack down
hard on incipient rebellion and tax his subjects hard to pay for yet more war.
Talk of the freedom of the Greek cities faded away, and between 291 and 285
Ptolemy deprived Demetrius of the Cycladic islands and the rest of his Aegean
possessions, thus regaining the control over the entrance to the Aegean that he
had lost in 306 and furthering his aim to control as much of the Aegean seaboard
as he could. The promise of relief from taxes and a measure of respect for local
councils was just as important in this enterprise as military muscle. Dominance
in the Aegean was to serve successive Ptolemies well, both strategically and
commercially.
Ptolemy also confirmed his control of Phoenicia by finally evicting Demetrius’s
garrisons from Sidon and Tyre. But these were pretty much Ptolemy’s last
actions; in 285, feeling the burden of his seventy-plus years, he stood down
from the Egyptian throne in favor of Ptolemy II. Maybe he had a terminal
illness, because only two years later he died—in his bed, remarkably enough for
a Successor. But then “safety first” had been his motto, for most of his time as
ruler of Egypt.
Despite these losses, Demetrius might have hung on in Macedon. But he was a
natural autocrat, and that was not the Macedonian way. Demetrius never managed
the kingly art of finding a balance between being loved and being hated, or at
least feared. His subjects came to resent his luxurious ways and his
unapproachability. Macedonian kings were supposed to make themselves available
to petitions from their subjects, yet Demetrius was rumored on one occasion to
have thrown a whole bundle of them into a river—or at least to be the sort of
person who might. This kind of talk, charging him with eastern-style monarchy,
did his reputation no good. Nor did the fact that he wore a double crown,
indicating rulership of Asia as well as Europe.
Ignoring the rumbles of discontent, Demetrius began to prepare for a massive
invasion of Asia. But the proud Macedonian barons resented their country’s being
thought of as no more than a launching point for eastern invasion; they did not
want to be on the periphery of some vast Asian kingdom. It was all right when
Philip and Alexander had done it, because that was for the greater glory of
Macedon. But this war would be fought against fellow Macedonians, for the
greater glory of an unpopular king. The idea of taking thousands more
Macedonians east, following the tens of thousands who had already gone, did not
go down well either, since the country was already somewhat depopulated.
But Demetrius was no Cassander, content with Macedon alone; he was as addicted
to warfare as Alexander the Great. Just as Alexander had set out from Macedon
and seized all Asia from the Persian king, so Demetrius intended at least to
deprive Lysimachus of Asia Minor. But whereas Alexander had invaded Asia with
about thirty-seven thousand men and no fleet to speak of, Demetrius was amassing
a vast army, over a hundred thousand strong, while a fleet of five hundred
warships was being prepared in the shipyards of Macedon and Greece. In typical
Besieger style, some of these ships were larger than any vessel that had ever
been built before, and he used the best naval architects available. The precise
design of these ships is a matter of intelligent guesswork, but it will give
some idea of their scale to say that, whereas a normal warship had three banks
of rowers in some arrangement (hence its name, “trireme”), Demetrius was having
a “ fifteen” and a “sixteen” built.
Naturally, Demetrius’s preparations involved propaganda as well. Above all, he
wielded the old, potent slogan of Greek freedom against Lysimachus. At a local
level, a prominent public building in Pella displayed symbolic paintings, copies
of which formed the wall paintings of a later Roman villa.10 One of the panels
of the painting depicted Demetrius’s parents as king and queen of Asia, the idea
being that he had inherited a natural claim, while other panels showed Macedon
as the ruler of Asia by right of conquest. But history is littered with failed
promises of manifest destiny.
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Posted in Ancient Warfare, Biography
THE WESTERN FRONT: LIONS LED BY DONKEYS?
Posted on November 18, 2021 by MSW
Blackadder Goes Forth is the fourth and final series of the BBC sitcom
Blackadder, written by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, which aired from 28
September to 2 November 1989 on BBC One. The series placed the recurring
characters of Blackadder, Baldrick and George in a trench in Flanders during
World War I, and followed their various doomed attempts to escape from the
trenches to avoid certain death under the misguided command of General Melchett.
The series is particularly noted for its criticism of the British Army
leadership during the campaign, and also refers to a number of famous figures of
the age. In addition, the series is remembered for the poignant ending of the
final episode.
By Dr Gary Sheffield
The scale of human devastation during World War One has often been blamed on
incompetent leadership. Dr Gary Sheffield offers an alternative view.
The generals
Douglas Haig was ‘brilliant to the top of his Army boots’. David Lloyd George’s
view sums up the attitude of many people towards Haig and other British generals
of World War One. They were, supposedly, ‘donkeys’: moustachioed incompetents
who sent the ‘lions’ of the Poor Bloody Infantry to their deaths in futile
battles. Many popular books, films and television programmes echo this belief.
The casualty list – one million British Empire dead – and the bloody stalemate
of the Western Front seem to add credence to this version of events. But there
is another interpretation. One undeniable fact is that Britain and its allies,
not Germany, won the First World War. Moreover, Haig’s army played the leading
role in defeating the German forces in the crucial battles of 1918. In terms of
the numbers of German divisions engaged, the numbers of prisoners and guns
captured, the importance of the stakes and the toughness of the enemy, the 1918
‘Hundred Days’ campaign rates as the greatest series of victories in British
history.
Even the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917), battles that have become
by-words for murderous futility, not only had sensible strategic rationales but
qualified as British strategic successes, not least in the amount of attritional
damage they inflicted on the Germans. No one denies that the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) had a bloody learning curve, or that generals made
mistakes that had catastrophic consequences. However, before dismissing the
generals as mere incompetent buffoons, we must establish the context.
Haig and the Allies
From 1915 to 1918 the BEF learned, in the hardest possible way, how to fight a
modern high-intensity war against an extremely tough opponent. Before 1914, the
British army had been primarily a colonial police force, small but efficient. By
1916 it had expanded enormously, taking in a mass of inexperienced civilian
volunteers. Later still, it relied on conscripts. Either way, it was a citizen
army rather than a professional force.
The generals, used to handling small-scale forces in colonial warfare, had just
as much to learn about a type of war for which they were almost entirely
unprepared. It is not surprising that in the course of its apprenticeship the
BEF had a number of bloody setbacks. What was extraordinary was that, despite
this unpromising beginning, by 1918 this army of bank clerks and shop
assistants, businessmen and miners should have emerged as a formidable fighting
force.
An inescapable fact of life for Haig and his predecessor as commander-in-chief,
Sir John French, was that Britain was the junior partner in a coalition with
France. Naturally, the French tended to call the shots, even though the British
C-in-C was an independent commander. Thus in July 1916 Haig fought on the Somme
largely at the behest of the French, although he would have preferred to attack,
somewhat later, in the Ypres salient where there were more important strategic
objectives. At this time the French army was under heavy pressure from German
attacks at Verdun. This reality of coalition warfare also helps to explain why
Haig never contemplated halting the Battle of the Somme after the disastrous
first day.
The one real achievement of the Anglo-French armies on 1 July 1916 was to
relieve pressure on Verdun, as the Germans rushed troops and guns north to the
Somme to counter the new threat. If Haig had called off the offensive on 2 July,
he would have thrown away this advantage. Sitting back and letting Britain’s
principal ally’s army be mauled was simply not an option for Haig. The alliance
between France and Britain was always a somewhat uneasy one. Lack of
co-operation, let alone British inaction in 1916, might well have caused the
coalition to fall apart.
Techniques and strategies
In 1914-17 the defensive had a temporary dominance over the offensive. A
combination of ‘high tech’ weapons (quick-firing artillery and machine guns) and
‘low tech’ defences (trenches and barbed wire) made the attacker’s job
formidably difficult. Communications were poor. Armies were too big and
dispersed to be commanded by a general in person, as Wellington had at Waterloo
a century before, and radio was in its infancy. Even if the infantry and
artillery did manage to punch a hole in the enemy position, generals lacked a
fast-moving force to exploit the situation, to get among the enemy and turn a
retreat into a rout.
In previous wars, horsed cavalry had performed such a role, but cavalry were
generally of little use in the trenches of the Western Front. In World War Two,
armoured vehicles were used for this purpose, but the tanks of Great War vintage
were simply not up to the job. With commanders mute and an instrument of
exploitation lacking, World War One generals were faced with a tactical dilemma
unique in military history.
It is not true, as some think, that British generals and troops simply stared
uncomprehendingly at the barbed wire and trenches, incapable of anything more
imaginative than repeating the failed formula of frontal assaults by infantry.
In reality, the Western Front was a hotbed of innovation as the British and
their allies and enemies experimented with new approaches. Even on the notorious
first day on the Somme, the French and 13th British Corps succeeded in capturing
all of their objectives through the use of effective artillery and infantry
tactics; the absence of such methods helps to explain the disaster along much of
the rest of the British position.
Breakthrough battle
The problem was that in 1914 tactics had yet to catch up with the range and
effectiveness of modern artillery and machine guns. Warfare still looked back to
the age of Napoleon. By 1918, much had changed. At the Battle of Amiens on 8
August 1918, the BEF put into practice the lessons learned, so painfully and at
such a heavy cost, over the previous four years. In a surprise attack, massed
artillery opened up in a brief but devastating bombardment, targeting German gun
batteries and other key positions. The accuracy of the shelling, and the fact
that the guns had not had to give the game away by firing some preliminary shots
to test the range, was testimony to the startling advances in technique which
had turned gunnery from a rule of thumb affair into a highly scientific
business.
Then, behind a ‘creeping barrage’ of shells, perfected since its introduction in
late 1915, British, French, Canadian and Australian infantry advanced in support
of 552 tanks. The tank was a British invention which had made its debut on the
Somme in September 1916. Overhead flew the aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force,
created in April 1918 from the old Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air
Service. The aeroplane had come a long way from its 1914 incarnation as an
extremely primitive assemblage of struts and canvas, its task confined to
reconnaissance.
By Amiens, aeroplanes were considerably more sophisticated than their
predecessors of 1914. The RAF carried out virtually every role fulfilled by
modern aircraft: ground attack, artillery spotting, interdiction of enemy lines
of communication, strategic bombing. This air-land ‘weapons system’ was bound
together by wireless (radio) communications. These were primitive, but still a
significant advance on those available two years earlier on the Somme.
Military revolution
The German defenders at Amiens had no response to the Allied onslaught. By the
end of the battle, the attackers had advanced 13km (eight miles) – a phenomenal
distance by Great War standards. The Germans lost 27,000 men, including 15,000
prisoners and 400 guns. It was, the German commander Ludendorff admitted, the
‘Black Day of the German Army’. From this point onward, the result of the war
was never in doubt. Amiens demonstrated the extent of the military revolution
that occurred on the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. It was a modern
battle, the prototype of combats familiar to armies of our own times.
One cannot ignore the appalling waste of human life in World War One. Some of
these losses were undoubtedly caused by incompetence. Many more were the result
of decisions made by men who, although not incompetent, were like any other
human being prone to making mistakes. Haig’s decision to continue with the
fighting at Passchendaele in 1917 after the opportunity for real gains had
passed comes into this category. In some ways the British and other armies might
have grasped the potential of technology earlier than they did. During the
Somme, Haig and Rawlinson failed to understand the best way of using artillery.
Haig, however, was no technophobe. He encouraged the development of advanced
weaponry such as tanks, machine guns and aircraft. He, like Rawlinson and a host
of other commanders at all levels in the BEF, learned from experience. The
result was that by 1918 the British army was second to none in its modernity and
military ability. It was led by men who, if not military geniuses, were at least
thoroughly competent commanders. The victory in 1918 was the payoff. The ‘lions
led by donkeys’ tag should be dismissed for what it is – a misleading
caricature.
Books
Forgotten Victory: The First World War – Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield
(Headline, 2001)
British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One by John Laffin (Sutton, 1988)
Western Front by Richard Holmes (BBC, 1999)
The Evolution of Victory by Andy Simpson (Tom Donovan, 1995)
About the author Dr Gary Sheffield is Senior Lecturer in the War Studies Group
at King’s College London, and Land Warfare Historian at the Joint Services
Command and Staff College, Shrivenham.
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