The Great Cat Massacre (8 page)

Soon after that, Erskine was declared insane and cashiered. He did manage one thing, though: he killed himself by jumping out of a window. His last words before dying on the ground were: ‘Now, why did I do that?’ – which makes one wonder if it was, indeed, his plan.

The War of 1812 between Britain and the United States erupted over a few issues, mostly to do with shipping. The Yanks didn’t like the fact that they were occasionally impressed into the Royal Navy, or that Britain was restricting America’s seaborne trade with other nations. America therefore declared war on 18 June 1812. If they had just waited a few weeks – the average length of a baseball game – they would have known that the war was completely unnecessary because Lord Liverpool had just become Prime Minister and had moved to end the conscription of Americans into the Navy. In fact, he ordered the policy to end the very day before the Americans
declared war, but news of it only reached America a few weeks later, by which time hostilities had begun, not to end for years.
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Equally pointless, and for just the same reason, was the final battle of the war; the Battle of New Orleans took place on 8 January 1815, even though a peace treaty between Britain and America had been signed three weeks beforehand. It was simply that the two armies hadn’t heard about it yet. About 400 men perished in the battle.

Britain’s war effort was aided by the service of General William Hull. Though nominally on the American side, Hull’s orders could well be taken as working to the distinct advantage of the Europeans. It wasn’t entirely his fault – when asked to become the Governor of Michigan and command the left flank of the US invasion of Canada, which was part of the American plan, he protested that, at 58, he was too old. President Madison talked him around, though, and Hull agreed to the jaunt. And he cannot be accused of going at it half-heartedly – he threw himself into it, even taking his daughter and grandchildren with him on the 200-mile march from Cincinnati to Detroit, through hostile Indian country, with 1,500 militia and no road. Averaging just three miles per day, it was very slow going.

Things took a turn for the worse when he reached the Maumee River, which meets Lake Erie, and spotted a boat.
With a stroke of genius, he requisitioned it to carry the officers’ luggage, which included the full muster rolls, containing details of his forces’ strength, and his battle plans and orders. To save time, he put all the luggage on the boat and sent it up to Detroit, where he planned to recover it. When the British forces stopped the boat a few miles upriver, they were therefore quite pleased to find everything they needed to defeat Hull.

It might be unfair to blame Hull entirely for this lack of guard, given the fact that at that point he didn’t know if America and Britain were actually at war (they were, but no one had told him that). Notification that war had been declared had been sent to him by the government but despatched through the normal postal service to the post office at Cleveland, with the request ‘please forward’ written upon the letter. Surprisingly, it did actually reach him, but just after his ship had – literally – sailed. No doubt he was left on the dock, frantically waving his hat at its retreating stern.

After the debacle he withdrew to Detroit, where he spent four days locked in his bedroom, not speaking to anyone.

Napoleon was a martyr to his haemorrhoids and it was only through frequent use of leeches that he managed to sit down with any comfort. But, two days before the Battle of Waterloo, the leeches staged a jailbreak and went on the run. With his piles hurting him as never before, the Emperor was unable to ride his horse, preventing the short
man from properly viewing the field of battle and directing his forces. As a substitute for the leeches, his physicians doped him up to the eyeballs with laudanum, the mixture of opium and brandy so popular with writers and other assorted oddballs of the time. So there was Napoleon, staggering around with his eyes swivelling and clutching his rear in a combination of pain and paranoid terror – just the sort of man to command a major military offensive. His distracted state could have been one reason – along with the weather – why he fatally delayed the opening assault by a few hours until the afternoon. The delay allowed the ground to dry out, which enabled the British Army to manoeuvre fully and defeat the French.

None of this would have taken place, however, if Napoleon had killed himself in 1814, as he had tried to do. Having been defeated by British and Austrian forces, he was to be exiled to the island of Elba but decided to cheat the victors of the satisfaction of seeing him live out the rest of his days on a barren rock, by swallowing poison. The result was to give him such violent hiccups that he vomited up the poison and survived.

In 1884 General Charles Gordon – known as ‘Chinese Gordon’ after a successful stint in the Far East – was sent to Khartoum in the Sudan to evacuate the British troops in the face of attack by a Muslim army led by the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. On arrival, however, Gordon started acting a bit strangely. Instead of organising an orderly
withdrawal, he made every appearance of digging in for the long haul. He hadn’t agreed with the government’s clear policy and orders; he was going to go it alone, aware that once the British public became aware of his men’s proud, brave defiance of the Islamic Army, Gladstone, the PM, would be forced to send another column of troops to aid the defence. As part of his strategy, he began sending vague and misleading reports of the situation back to London.

But, back home, Gladstone was not bending with the wind – even Queen Victoria was requesting he send troops to relieve Gordon, but he remained steadfast. And during this time the Mahdi’s army was on the move.

When Gladstone finally relented, the British government was forced into an unusual move. Instead of relying on Britain’s military and diplomatic contacts to ensure safe passage to the Sudan, it paid Thomas Cook, a former cabinet-maker who had begun organising day trips for temperance groups, to use the foreign contacts he had built up with Egyptian tribal chiefs to facilitate the movement of 18,000 British soldiers to the Sudan. The bill for this came to a whopping £500,000 – around £45m today – and made Thomas Cook the biggest tour operator to this day.

The going was not so quick, though, and the troops arrived two days too late. Meanwhile, the Mahdi and 50,000 men had overrun Khartoum, killing and enslaving the population. Gordon had been killed in action and had his head cut off. The Mahdi ordered that the head be suspended in a tree ‘where all who passed it could look in
disdain, children could throw stones at it and the hawks of the desert could sweep and circle above’.
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Gordon’s decision to hold out also managed to bring down Gladstone’s government. Previously known as the ‘GOM’ – Grand Old Man – he gained the new name of ‘MOG’ – Murderer Of Gordon. Queen Victoria sent an uncoded telegram openly criticising her government’s failure to support the Empire and its heroes, and Gladstone was duly forced to resign four months later.

James Brudenell, Seventh Earl of Cardigan, liked to be smart. And as Commanding Officer of the 11th Light Dragoons he wanted to instil a bit of discipline. Yet this was a man who was so ‘relaxed’ about his unit that in the two years following his appointment he spent a total of four weeks with the regiment. Still, Brudenell was a stickler for correct uniform and custom; those were the main things.

For one thing he outlawed the drinking of porter, a dark beer enjoyed by a number of the regiment’s professional officers who had served in India. So, when Captain John
Reynolds, one of the Indian officers, ordered a bottle of Moselle wine, which, like porter, was served in a black bottle, Cardigan mistook it for the contraband drink and had Reynolds arrested. Even when his error was pointed out to him, Cardigan stubbornly refused to relent.

The strange case made its way into the newspapers of the day, infuriated at the snobbery of Cardigan, who refused to accept that he was in the wrong. (For months wherever he went, people in the street would shout ‘Black Bottle!’ at him.) Cardigan was especially enraged by an article by one Captain Harvey Tuckett and challenged him to a duel. The challenge was, of course, accepted. Unfortunately for Tuckett, Cardigan seems to have been a better shot than he was an officer, and hit the captain in the stomach.

Duelling was illegal by that time and Cardigan was tried for the crime. But one legal anomaly was on his side – the historical law that as a peer of the realm Cardigan could choose to be tried by his friends in the House of Lords. This he did and the result was one of the most corrupt verdicts of the nineteenth century: although the prosecution had shown that Cardigan had used a special type of pistol, giving him a secret advantage over Tuckett, he was acquitted on the grounds that the official written indictment had accused him of shooting ‘Harvey Garnet Phipps Tuckett’, whereas throughout the case Cardigan’s victim had been named only as Captain Harvey Tuckett and there was not a shred of evidence to say these two people were the same man.

The obvious manipulation of the law by those who wrote it led
The Times
to state: ‘in England there is one law for the rich and another for the poor’. It added fuel to the
political fire at a time when the privileges of the aristocracy were under assault from the burgeoning middle classes who were demanding greater legal equality. Eventually, they achieved it.
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And they did know, on that cold morning in the Crimea where the allied British and French forces faced down the Russian enemy, that someone had blundered. Because it was patently clear that someone had given an order that crossed from ‘reckless’ into ‘suicidal’.

The cavalry charge for which the Battle of Balaclava would go down in military history was the product of a rivalry between two British officers and a message that was too vague. As a result, the 600 cavalry charged through a heavily defended ravine, chasing after an impossible goal, under deadly fire.

Among the contributing problems was the confusing topography, which meant that the overall commanding officer, Lord Raglan, was positioned on top of the ridge and had full sight over the battlefield. But in charge of the cavalry – which was divided into the Light Brigade and the Heavy Brigade – was Lord Lucan, who was down in the valley and had a restricted view. Commanding the Light Brigade was Lord Cardigan. Cardigan and Lucan, brothers-in-law, utterly loathed each other.

The Heavy Brigade had been in action that day and had done well against the enemy. Raglan therefore sent a messenger to Lucan telling him to send his forces to capture a number of guns, which the Russians were attempting to withdraw. Raglan was referring to the guns he could see on the upper redoubts that the British were capturing, but from his position Lucan couldn’t see those guns. The only ones he could see were at the end of the valley, about a mile away. He queried the order, but the messenger, Captain Nolan (another man who hated Lucan), presumed Lucan was just being difficult and angrily repeated the order before riding off.