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REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
Ian Knight has gained a deserved reputation as an expert on the Anglo-Zulu War. In Warriors in Scarlet, he turns his attention to a broader canvas. His subject is the British army in the first half of Queen Victoria’s reign – a period that saw troops in action across the globe, fighting imperial wars from southern Africa to Afghanistan, India, China, and New Zealand. The Crimean War apart, Knight’s period will surely be less well known to most readers than the Napoleonic Wars which preceded it, or the conflict with the Boers at the end of the century. Warriors in Scarlet begins with an extraordinary episode in 1838: the use of soldiers to suppress a Kentish labourers’ protest led by the unstable, self-styled Sir William Courtenay, in the Battle of Bossenden Wood. The book ends with the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858, which led to British domination of the subcontinent for the next 90 years.
Knight’s gift for narrative is demonstrated in his depiction of the main campaigns of the period. There were disasters such as the 1842 retreat from Kabul or the slaughter of British cavalry by Sikh forces at Chillianwala in 1849. Most of the time, however, the British were in the ascendant. Tactics were transformed on the battlefields of empire, as tight infantry formations, relying on massed volley-firing, gave way to more flexible fighting methods. By the 1850s, weaponry was changing, with rifled barrels increasing the range and accuracy of firepower. Knight also charts the gradual adaptation of uniforms, as the traditional red coatee gave way to more practical and less conspicuous khaki on the dusty plains of South Africa and India. This was, as he explains, a slow process – despite the book’s subtitle, the last redcoats did not in fact make their final appearance in combat until the 1880s.
Knight uses his sources effectively to evoke the nature of battle and its often equally brutal aftermath. Readers will not easily forget the unflinching descriptions of mid-19th-century military surgery, nor the blowing of Indian mutineer prisoners from the mouths of cannon. Although leavened by instances of humanity, we are never allowed to forget the harshness of army life. Knight describes the coarse reality of soldiers’ day-to-day experience – the meagre food and pay, the lack of basic comfort and privacy in barrack accommodation, the persistence of savage physical punishment. Yet, as he notes, for a force composed largely of working-class men, many of whom were escaping the grinding poverty of urban slums or the hard toil of Victorian farms, such conditions were not exceptionally bad. We are reminded, too, of the divide between the soldiers and their officers in a rigidly hierarchical, class-based society. This was a world in which infantry and cavalry officers, drawn mainly from gentry backgrounds, still bought their commissions rather than being appointed on merit.
There are one or two areas where one could have wished for more. After Bossenden Wood, Knight does not return to the army’s role in supporting the civil power in Britain – for example, there is no coverage of the deployment of troops against the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s. As the author acknowledges, low levels of literacy among soldiers, until near the end of the century, mean that few written accounts have come down to us from the ranks. This may explain why a chapter headed ‘The British Army in 1837’ makes use of sources relating to the 1870s or even later. And it seems strange to end a book on the early and mid-Victorian period by quoting Kipling’s 1890 poem ‘Tommy’ in full.
Nonetheless, this is a highly readable and informative study, which locates its subject firmly in the wider context of 19th-century society and imperial expansion. Anyone with an interest in the evolution of the British army will gain from reading it.
Warriors in Scarlet: The Life and Times of the Last Redcoats Ian Knight Pan Macmillan, hbk (£30) ISBN 978-0230767300
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