The history of the Victoria Cross has been told so often that it is only
necessary to say that the Order was created by Queen Victoria on January
29th, 1856, in the year of the peace with Russia, when the new racing
Cunard paddle-steamer _Persia_ of three thousand tons was making
thirteen knots an hour between England and America, and all the world
wondered at the advance of civilization and progress.
Any officer of the English Army, Navy, Reserve or Volunteer forces, from
a duke to a negro, can wear on his left breast the little ugly bronze
Maltese cross with the crowned lion atop and the inscription “For
Valour” below, if he has only “performed some signal act of valour” or
devotion to his country “in the presence of the enemy.” Nothing else
makes any difference; for it is explicitly laid down in the warrant that
“neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance
whatsoever, save the merit of conspicuous bravery, shall be held to
establish a sufficient claim to this Order.”
There are many kinds of bravery, and if one looks through the records of
the four hundred and eleven men, living and dead, that have held the
Victoria Cross before the Great War, one finds instances of every
imaginable variety of heroism.
There is bravery in the early morning, when it takes great courage even
to leave warm blankets, let alone walk into dirt, cold and death; on
foot and on horse; empty or fed; sick or well; coolness of brain, that
thinks out a plan at dawn and holds to it all through the long,
murderous day; bravery of the mind that makes the jerking nerves hold
still and do nothing except show a good example; sheer reckless strength
that hacks through a crowd of amazed men and comes out grinning on the
other side; enduring spirit that wears through a long siege, never
losing heart or manners or temper; quick, flashing bravery that heaves a
lighted shell overboard or rushes the stockade while others are gaping
at it, and the calculated craftsmanship that camps alone before the
angry rifle-pit or shell-hole, and cleanly and methodically wipes out
every soul in it.
Before the Great War, England dealt with many different peoples, and,
generally speaking, all of them, Zulu, Malay, Maori, Burman, Boer, the
little hillsman of the Northeast Indian Frontier, Afreedi, Pathan,
Biluch, the Arab of East Africa and the Sudanese of the North of Africa
and the rest, played a thoroughly good game. For this we owe them many
thanks; since they showed us every variety of climate and almost every
variety of attack, from long-range fire to hand-to-hand scrimmage;
except, of course, the ordered movements of Continental armies and the
scientific ruin of towns.... That came later and on the largest scale.
It is rather the fashion to look down on these little wars and to call
them “military promenades” and so forth, but in reality no enemy can do
much more than poison your wells, rush your camp, ambuscade you, kill
you with his climate, fight you body to body, make you build your own
means of communication under his fire, and horribly cut up your wounded.
He may do this on a large or small scale, but the value of the teaching
is the same.
It is in these rough-and-tumble affairs that many of the first Crosses
were won; and some of the records for the far-away Crimea and the Indian
Mutiny are well worth remembering, if only to show that valour never
varies.
The Crimea was clean fighting as far as the enemy were concerned,—for
the very old men say that no one could wish for better troops than the
Russians of Inkerman and Alma,—but our own War Office then, as two
generations later, helped the enemy with ignorant mismanagement and
neglect. In the Mutiny of 1857 all India, Bengal and the North West
Provinces, seemed to be crumbling like sand-bag walls in flood, and
wherever there were three or four Englishmen left, they had to kill or
be killed till help came. Hundreds of Crosses must have been won then,
had anybody had time to notice; for the average of work allowing for the
improvements in man-killing machinery was as high as in the Great War.
For instance—this is a rather extensive and varied record—one man shut
up in the Residency at Lucknow stole out three times at the risk of his
life to get cattle for the besieged to eat. Later, he extinguished a
fire near a powder-magazine and a month afterwards put out another fire.
Then he led twelve men to capture two guns which were wrecking the
Residency at close range. Next day he captured an out-lying position
full of mutineers; three days later he captured another gun, and
finished up by capturing a fourth. So he got his Cross.
Another young man was a lieutenant in the Southern Mahratta Horse, and a
full regiment of mutineers broke into his part of the world, upsetting
the minds of the people. He collected some loyal troopers, chased the
regiment eighty miles, stormed the fort they had taken refuge in, and
killed, captured or wounded every soul there.
Then there was a lance corporal who afterwards rose to be
Lieutenant-Colonel. He was the enduring type of man, for he won his
Cross merely for taking a hand in every fight that came along through
nearly seventy consecutive days.
There were also two brothers who earned the Cross about six times
between them for leading forlorn hopes and such-like. Likewise there was
a private of “persuasive powers and cheerful disposition,” so the record
says, who was cut off with nine companions in a burning house while the
mutineers were firing in at the windows. He, however, cheerfully
persuaded the enemy to retire and in the end all his party were saved
through his practical “cheerfulness.” He must have been a man worth
knowing.
And there was a little man in the Sutherland Highlanders—a private who
eventually became a Major-General. In one attack near Lucknow he killed
eleven men with his claymore, which is a heating sort of weapon to
handle.
Even he was not more thorough than two troopers who rode to the rescue
of their Colonel, cut off and knocked down by mutineers. They helped him
to rise, and they must have been annoyed, for the three of them killed
all the mutineers—about fifty.
Then there was a negro captain of the foretop, William Hall, R. N., who
with two other negroes, Samuel Hodge and W. J. Gordon of the 4th and 1st
West Indian Infantry, came up the river with the Naval Brigade from
Calcutta to work big guns. They worked them so thoroughly that each got
a Cross. They must have done a good deal, for no one is quite so crazy
reckless as a West Indian negro when he is really excited.
There was a man in the Mounted Police who with sixty horsemen charged
one thousand mutineers and broke them up. And so the tale runs on.
Three Bengal Civilian Government officers were, I believe, the only
strict non-combatants who ever received the Cross. As a matter of fact
they had to fight with the rest, but the story of “Lucknow” Kavanagh’s
adventures in disguise, of Ross Mangle’s heroism after the first attempt
to relieve the Little House at Arrah had failed (Arrah was a place where
ten white men and fifty-six loyal natives barricaded themselves in a
billiard-room in a garden and stood the siege of three regiments of
mutineers for three weeks), and of McDonnel’s cool-headedness in the
retreat down the river, are things that ought to be told by themselves.
Almost any one can fight well on the winning side, but those men who can
patch up a thoroughly bad business and pull it off in some sort of
shape, are most to be respected.
Army chaplains and doctors are officially supposed to be
non-combatants—they are not really so—but about twenty years after the
Mutiny a chaplain was decorated under circumstances that made it
impossible to overlook his bravery. Still, I do not think he quite cared
for the publicity. He was a regimental chaplain—in action a chaplain is
generally supposed to stay with or near the doctor—and he seems to have
drifted up close to a cavalry charge, for he helped a wounded officer of
the Ninth Lancers into an ambulance. He was then going about his
business when he found two troopers who had tumbled into a water-course
all mixed with their horses, and a knot of Afghans were hurrying to
attend to them. The record says that he rescued both men, but the tale,
as I heard it unofficially, declares that he found a revolver somewhere
with which he did excellent work while the troopers were struggling out
of the ditch. This seems very possible, for the Afghans do not leave
disabled men without the strongest hint, and I know that in nine cases
out of ten if you want a coherent account of what happened in an action
you had better ask the chaplain or the Roman Catholic priest of a
battalion.
But it is difficult to get details. I have met perhaps a dozen or so of
V. C.’s, and in every case they explained that they did the first thing
that came to their hand without worrying about alternatives. One man
headed a charge into a mass of Afghans, who are very good fighters so
long as they stay interested in their work, and cut down five of them.
All he said was: “Well, they were there, and they couldn’t go away. What
was a man to do? Write ’em a note and ask ’em to shift?”
Another man I questioned was a doctor. Army doctors, by the way, have
special opportunities for getting Crosses. Their duty compels them to
stay somewhere within touch of the firing line, and most of them run
right up and lie down, keeping an eye on the wounded.
It is a heart-breaking thing for a doctor who has pulled a likely young
private of twenty-three through typhoid fever and set him on his feet
and watched him develop, to see the youngster wasted with a casual
bullet. It must have been this feeling that made my friend do the old,
splendid thing that never grows stale—rescue a wounded man under fire.
He won this Cross, but all he said was: “_I_ didn’t want any
unauthorized consultations—or amputations—while I was Medical Officer in
charge. ’Tisn’t etiquette.”
His own head was very nearly blown off as he was tying up an artery—for
it was blind, bad bushfighting, with puffs of smoke popping in and out
among the high grass and never a man visible—but he only grunted when
his helmet was cracked across by a bullet, and went on tightening the
tourniquet.
As I have hinted, in most of our little affairs before the war, the
enemy knew nothing about the Geneva Convention or the treatment of
wounded, but fired at a doctor on his face value as a white man. One
cannot blame them—it was their custom, but it was exceedingly awkward
when our doctors took care of their wounded who did not understand these
things and tried to go on fighting in hospital.
There is an interesting tale of a wounded Sudanese—what our soldiers
used to call a “fuzzy”—who was carefully attended to in a hospital after
a fight. As soon as he had any strength again, he proposed to a native
orderly that they two should massacre all the infidel wounded in the
other beds. The orderly did not see it; so, when the doctor came in he
found the “Fuzzy” was trying to work out his plan single-handed. The
doctor had a very unpleasant scuffle with that simple-minded man, but,
at last, he slipped the chloroform-bag over his nose. The man understood
bullets and was not afraid of them; but this magic smelly stuff that
sent him to sleep, cowed him altogether, and he gave no more trouble in
the ward.
So a doctor’s life is always a little hazardous and, besides his
professional duties, he may find himself senior officer in charge of
what is left of the command, if the others have been shot down. As
doctors are always full of theories, I believe they rather like this
chance of testing them. Sometimes doctors have run out to help a
mortally wounded man of their battalion, because they know that he may
have last messages to give, and it eases him to die with some human
being holding his hand. This is a most noble thing to do under fire,
because it means sitting still among bullets. Chaplains have done it
also, but it is part of what they reckon as their regular duty.
Another V. C. of my acquaintance—he was anything but a doctor or a
chaplain—once saved a trooper whose horse had been killed. His method
was rather original. The man was on foot and the enemy—Zulus this
time—was coming down at a run, and the trooper said, very decently, that
he did not see his way to perilling his officer’s life by
double-weighting the only available horse.
To this his officer replied: “If you don’t get up behind me, I’ll get
off and give you such a licking as you’ve never had in your life.” The
man was more afraid of fists than of assagais, and the good horse pulled
them both out of the scrape. Now by our Regulations an officer who
insults or “threatens with violence” a subordinate in the Service is
liable to lose his commission and to be declared “incapable of serving
the King in any capacity,” but for some reason or other the trooper
never reported his superior.
The humour and the honour of fighting are by no means all on one side. A
good many years ago there was a war in New Zealand against the Maoris,
who, though they tortured prisoners and occasionally ate a man, liked
fighting for its own sake. One of their chiefs cut off a detachment of
our men in a stockade where he might have starved them out, and eaten
them at leisure later. But word reached him that they were short of
provisions, and so he sent in a canoeful of pig and potatoes with the
message that it was no fun to play that game with weak men, and he would
be happy to meet them after rest and a full meal. There are many cases
in which men, very young as a rule, have forced their way through a
stockade of thorns that hook or bamboos that cut and held on in the face
of heavy fire or just so long as served to bring up their comrades.
Those who have done this say that getting in is exciting enough, but the
bad time, when the minutes drag like hours, lies between the first
scuffle with the angry faces in the smoke, and the “Hi, get out o’
this!” that shows that the others of our side are tumbling up behind.
They say it is as bad as foot-ball when you get off the ball just as
slowly as you dare, so that your own side may have time to come up.
Most men, after they have been shot over a little, only want a lead to
do good work; so the result of a young man’s daring is often out of all
proportion to his actual performances.
Here is a case which never won notice because very few people talked
about it—a case of the courage of Ulysses, one might say.
A column of troops, heavily weighted with sick and wounded, had drifted
into a bad place—a pass where an enemy, hidden behind rocks, were
picking them off at known ranges, as they retreated. Half a battalion
was acting as rear-guard—company after company facing about on the
narrow road and trying to keep down the wicked, flickering fire from the
hillsides. And it was twilight; and it was cold and raining; and it was
altogether horrible for everyone.
Presently, the rear-guard began to fire a little too quickly and to
hurry back to the main body a little too soon, and the bearers put down
the ambulances a little too often, and looked on each side of the road
for possible cover. Altogether, there were the makings of a nasty little
breakdown—and after that would come primitive slaughter.
A boy whom I knew was acting command of one company that was specially
bored and sulky, and there were shouts from the column of “Hurry up!
Hurry there!” neither necessary nor soothing. He kept his men in hand as
well as he could, hitting down rifles when they fired wild, till someone
along the line shouted: “What on earth are you fellows waiting so long
for?”
Then my friend—I am rather proud that he was my friend—hunted for his
pipe and tobacco, filled the bowl _in_ his pocket because, he said
afterwards, he didn’t want any one to see how his hand shook, lit a
fuzee, and shouted back between very short puffs: “Hold on a minute. I’m
lighting my pipe.”
There was a roar of rather crackly laughter and the company joker said:
“Since you _are_ so pressin’, I think I’ll ’ave a draw meself.”
I don’t believe either pipe was smoked out, but—and this is a very big
but—the little bit of acting steadied the company, and the news of it
ran down the line, and even the wounded in the doolies laughed, and
everyone felt better. Whether the enemy heard the laughing, or was
impressed by the even “one-two-three-four” firing that followed it, will
never be known, but the column came to camp at the regulation step and
not at a run, with very few casualties. That is what one may call the
courage of the much-enduring Ulysses, but the only comment that I ever
heard on the affair was the boy’s own, and all _he_ said was: “It was
transpontine (which means theatrical), but necessary.”
Of course he must have been a good boy from the beginning, for little
bits of pure inspiration seldom come to or are acted upon by slovens,
self-indulgent or undisciplined people. I have not yet met one V. C. who
had not strict notions about washing and shaving and keeping himself
decent on his way through the civilized world, whatever he may have done
outside it.
Indeed, it is very curious, after one has known hundreds of young men
and young officers, to sit still at a distance and watch them come
forward to success in their profession. Somehow, the clean and
considerate man mostly seems to take hold of circumstances at the right
end.
One of the youngest of the V. C.’s of his time I used to know distantly
as a beautiful being whom they called Aide-de-Camp to a big official in
India. So far as strangers could judge, his duties consisted in wearing
a uniform faced with blue satin, and in seeing that everyone was looked
after at the dances and dinners. He would wander about smiling, with
eyes at the back of his head, introducing men who were strangers and a
little uncomfortable, to girls whose dance-cards were rather empty;
taking old and uninteresting women into supper, and tucking them into
their carriages afterwards; or pleasantly steering white-whiskered
native officers all covered with medals and half-blind with confusion
through the maze of a big levee into the presence of the Viceroy or
Commander-in-Chief, or whoever it was they were being presented to.
After a few years of this work, his chance came, and he made the most of
it. We were then smoking out a nest of caravan-raiders, slave-dealers,
and general thieves who lived somewhere under the Karakoram Mountains
among glaciers about sixteen thousand feet above sea level. The mere
road to the place was too much for many mules, for it ran by precipices
and round rock-curves and over roaring, snow-fed rivers.
The enemy—they were called Kanjuts—had fortified themselves in a place
nearly as impregnable as nature and man could make it. One position was
on the top of a cliff about twelve hundred feet high, whence they could
roll stones directly on the head of any attacking force. Our men
objected to the stones much more than to the rifle-fire. They were
camped in a river-bed at the bottom of an icy pass with some three tiers
of these cliff-like defences above them, and the Kanjuts on each tier
were very well armed. To make all specially pleasant, it was December.
This ex-aide-de-camp happened to be a good mountaineer, and he was told
off with a hundred native troops, Goorkhas and Dogra Sikhs, to climb up
into the top tier of the fortifications. The only way of arriving was to
follow a sort of shoot in the cliff-face which the enemy had worn smooth
by throwing rocks down. Even in daylight, in peace, and with good
guides, it would have been fair mountaineering.
He went up in the dark, by eye and guess, against some two thousand
Kanjuts very much at war with him. When he had climbed eight hundred
feet almost perpendicular he found he had to come back, because even he
and his Goorkha cragsmen could find no way.
He returned to the river-bed and tried again in a new place, working his
men up between avalanches of stones that slid along and knocked people
over. When he struggled to the top he had to take his men into the forts
with the bayonet and the _kukri_, the little Goorkha knife. The attack
was so utterly bold and unexpected that it broke the hearts of the enemy
and practically ended the campaign; and if you could see the photograph
of the place you would understand why.
It was hard toenail and fingernail crag-climbing under fire, and the men
behind him were not regulars, but what are called Imperial Service
troops—men raised by the semi-independent kings and used to defend the
frontier. They enjoyed themselves immensely, and the little aide-de-camp
got a deserved Victoria Cross. The courage of Ulysses again; for he had
to think as he climbed, and until he was directly underneath the
fortifications, one chance-hopping boulder might just have planed his
men off all along the line.
But there is a heroism beyond all, for which no Victoria Cross is ever
given, because there is no official enemy nor any sort of firing, except
one volley in the early morning at some spot where the noise does not
echo into the newspapers.
It is necessary from time to time to send unarmed men into No Man’s Land
and the Back of Beyond across the Khudajantakhan (The Lord-knows-where)
Mountains, just to find out what is going on there among people who some
day or other may become dangerous enemies.
The understanding is that if the men return with their reports so much
the better for them. They may then receive some sort of decoration,
given, so far as the public can make out, for no real reason. If they do
not come back, and people disappear very mysteriously at the Back of
Beyond, that is their own concern and no questions will be asked, and no
enquiries made.
They tell a tale of one man who, some years ago, strayed into No Man’s
Land to see how things were, and met a very amiable set of people, who
asked him to a round of dinners and lunches and dances. And all that
time he knew, and they knew that he knew, that his hosts were debating
between themselves whether they should suffer him to live till next
morning, and if they decided not to let him live, in what way they
should wipe him out most quietly.
The only consideration that made them hesitate was that they could not
tell from his manner whether there were five hundred Englishmen within a
few miles of him or no Englishmen at all within five hundred miles of
him; and, as matters stood at that moment, they could not very well go
out to look and make sure.
So he danced and dined with those pleasant, merry folk,—all good
friends,—and talked about hunting and shooting and so forth, never
knowing when the polite servants behind his chair would turn into the
firing-party. At last his hosts decided, without rude words said, to let
him go; and when they made up their minds they did it very handsomely;
for, you must remember, there is no malice borne on either side of that
game.
They gave him a farewell banquet and drank his health, and he thanked
them for his delightful visit, and they said: “_So_ glad you’re glad—_au
revoir_,” and he came away looking a little bored.
Later on, so the tale runs, his hosts discovered that their guest had
been given up for lost by his friends in England where no one ever
expected to see him again. Then they were sorry that they had not put
him against a wall and shot him.
That is a case of the cold-blooded courage worked up to after years of
training—courage of mind forcing the body through an unpleasant
situation for the sake of the game.
When all is said and done, courage of mind is the finest thing any one
can hope to attain to. A weak or undisciplined soul is apt to become
reckless under strain (which is only being afraid the wrong way about),
or to act for its own immediate advantage. For this reason the Victoria
Cross is jealously guarded, and if there be suspicion that the man is
playing to the gallery or out pot-hunting for medals, as they call it,
he is often left to head his charges and rescue his wounded all over
again as a guarantee of good faith.
In the Great War there was very little suspicion, or chance, of
gallery-play for the V. C., because there was ample opportunity and,
very often, strong necessity, for a man to repeat his performances
several times over. Moreover, he was generally facing much deadlier
weapons than mere single rifles or edged tools, and the rescue of
wounded under fire was, by so much, a more serious business. But one or
two War V. C.’s of my acquaintance have told me that if you can manage
the little matter of keeping your head, it is not as difficult as it
sounds to get on the blind side of a machine gun, or to lie out under
its lowest line of fire where, they say, you are “quite comfortable if
you don’t fuss.” Also, every V. C. of the Great War I have spoken to has
been rather careful to explain that he won his Cross because what he did
happened to be done when and where someone could notice it. Thousands of
men they said did just the same, but in places where there were no
observers. And that is true; for the real spirit of the Army changes
very little through the years.
Men are taught to volunteer for anything and everything; going out
quietly after, not before, the authorities have filled their place. They
are also instructed that it is cowardly, it is childish, and it is
cheating to neglect or scamp the plain work immediately in front of
them, the duties they are trusted to do, for the sake of stepping aside
to snatch at what to an outsider may resemble fame or distinction. Above
all, their own hard equals, whose opinion is the sole opinion worth
having, are always sitting unofficially in judgment on them.
The Order itself is a personal decoration, and the honour and glory of
it belongs to the wearer; but he can only win it by forgetting himself,
his own honour and glory, and by working for something beyond and
outside and apart from his own self. And there seems to be no other way
in which you get anything in this world worth the keeping.