Churchill the Young Warrior, page 9
Despite the modern misconception of Rudyard Kipling’s racist views, his 1892 ballad—which depicts the time at which the twenty-year-old Winston became a junior cavalry officer—is a testimony to the courage of a dark-skinned Indian who carried water to the dry-throated and thirsty British and Indian troops fighting on the front lines in the intense Indian heat. The water carrier he immortalized was named Gunga Din.2 The ballad depicts the adventurous age in the British Raj, when the young Winston grew up and became a hardened soldier under fire. These are things that the young Winston did not write about in Kipling’s way because, no doubt, he took them for granted as typical background to his early life.
In a tribute to India and the Indians, as well as the British “Tommies,” Kipling’s lines, written in the coarse slang and bigoted phrases of Britain’s imperial soldiery, describe with crude gallantry something of what the young Winston would have experienced as an officer serving in British India at that time.
You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.
He was ‘Din! Din! Din!
You limping lump o’ brick-dust, Gunga Din!
Hi! Slippery hitherao!
Water, get it!
Panee lao!
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din.’
’E would dot an’ carry one
Till the longest day was done;
An’ ’e didn’t seem to know the use o’ fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin’ nut,
’E’d be waitin’ fifty paces right flank rear.
With ’is mussick* on ’is back,
’E would skip with our attack,
An’ watch us till the bugles made ‘Retire,’
It was ‘Din! Din! Din!’
With the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green.
When the cartridges ran out,
You could hear the front-files shout,
‘Hi! Ammunition-mules an’ Gunga Din!’
I sha’n’t forgit the night
When I dropped be’ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should ’a’ been.
I was chokin’ mad with thirst,
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din.
’E lifted up my ’ead,
An’ he plugged me where I bled,
An’ ’e guv me ’arf-a-pint o’ water-green:
It was crawlin’ and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I’ve drunk,
I’m gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
It was ‘Din! Din! Din!’
’Ere’s a beggar with a bullet through ’is spleen;
’E’s chawin’ up the ground,
An’ ’e’s kickin’ all around:
For Gawd’s sake git the water, Gunga Din!
’E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
’E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ’e died:
‘I ’ope you liked your drink,’ sez Gunga Din.
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the living Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
Kipling was good at catching the rough, sentimental phrases of the common soldier of the times, despite the buttoned-up mouths of the British officers who were afraid to reveal their emotions except in cool camaraderie. His barroom ballads thrilled Victorians, but it was his novel Kim that revealed his deep love of India. This was the real earthy and sweaty, wounded and bleeding life and death of the semi-literate British soldier in the colonial empire that Winston came to know.3 He loved it because it was real—he abhorred insincerity and pretences.
Barroom Ballads
When we think of barroom ballads in the Victorian days of Empire, we usually think of Robert Service or Bret Harte and the pioneering days in the Wild West, of lonely cowboys plucking a stringed instrument and singing nostalgically, “I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair,” while recalling a sweetheart they’d brushed with for an instant who would never be forgotten. The pioneering days on the Indian frontier in the British Empire were little different from the Wild West. They drew similar people—soldiers, adventurers, prospectors or explorers, gamblers, thieves, killers, and gentlemen. Isolated in vast and lonely desert plains in the heat, they either drew together for company, or edged away from society if they had something to hide from the old country. Welcoming tearooms and barrooms were some of the first of the dreary little commercial establishments to open, set up by someone with a few greasy banknotes or a little pile of gold-dust.
Brothels came next, as female company trickled cautiously to the frontier from the slums of London, Glasgow, and Dublin, as a result of overcrowding and competition. The trickle turned into a stream as favorable reports crept back to relatives and girlfriends escaping from the new and squalid industrial cities of Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham, and Birmingham. But it was a brutal all-male society at the beginning, and they had to find ways to entertain themselves.
The harmonica of the lonely cowboy was one way, but not enough to relieve the emptiness and boredom of each and every day that stretched out into an unknown future. Nor was the ukulele. Emboldened by the drink, some sentimental character would inevitably get up in a tavern and bawl out an easy-to-remember song that brought back war and nostalgic memories of home and an imagined sweetheart. People would applaud and urge him on for another chorus. Or someone would explode at an imagined insult when on edge and ready to fight with bare fists. Bare-fisted fighting was a commonplace entertainment that thrilled Victorian senses, like bear-baiting or cockfighting, or watching dogs tear each other to pieces in a pit. It sent the adrenaline surging with primeval memories of the hunt and the chase and the kill. Men fought each other to a standstill, in and out of bars, and down the primitive streets, until they lay bloodied and senseless in the dust. There was often nothing else to do, and it invariably drew an audience of bored men.
Lonely men in bar rooms which became more and more familiar could imagine they were among friends, and perk up at the sound of a rich baritone voice singing “When Irish eyes are smiling” from a shadowy corner of a saloon. The singer would be urged on in the dearth of entertainment, since singing reminded audiences of home. Even a false memory was better than the strangeness and loneliness of a new life in a foreign and threatening country, as they’d wonder again and again if they’d done the right thing to come out here to this wilderness with dark-skinned tribesmen who might kill and rob you at any moment. But the fact that you could get up and stand on a chair or a table and bellow your heart out with “On the Road to Mandalay” was reassuring, since the laughter and applause came spontaneously. In reality, it was more likely that you’d be beaten over the head and robbed the moment you got outside.
“Gunga Din” would also be sung back home in the old country by Victorian ex-soldiers from the colonies, or older gentlemen with mutton-chop whiskers and fruity voices. It was still an age when you had to think up ways to entertain yourself and each other, since there were few entertainments available except for the music halls. But you could imitate them by dressing up in fancy clothes, or putting on a funny hat and getting up to sing. Alcohol helped. If you wanted to socialize, you had to learn to play a musical instrument or sing a parlor song in front of a crackling coal-fire. Then, with a glass of beer in one hand, it was “Din, Din, Din!/ with the bullets kickin’ dust-spots on the green/ When the cartridges ran out/ You could hear the front files shout/ Hi! Ammunition mules an’ Gunga Din!”
Life and Death
Gambling with life and death was a continuous challenge in Victorian England and its Empire, when men had no choice but to joke about it, as if it were a game. But it was no joke for women, since childbirth was the most common cause of death. The medical profession had no idea why, although one doctor named Semmelweis thought that bacteria were the cause of it. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician who realized that doctors and surgeons must be carrying germs to their patients on their hands, or from the bloodstains of previous patients on their clothing. But he had no proof to support his claims, which doctors took as an accusation and wouldn’t listen to him. He was sure that puerperal fever was contagious, and that deaths could be greatly reduced if doctors and caregivers would only wash their hands. But they shunned the idea that they were deadly carriers, and drove Semmelweis out of town into a lunatic asylum for harming their professional reputations.
Germs had first been seen through a microscope as early as 1675. Semmelweis had his revelation in 1847 in the maternity ward of a hospital in Vienna. But the medical profession still involved butchery, and the general run of doctors didn’t understand what he was saying, and didn’t take any initiative to investigate his claim. The truth took about 170 years to penetrate scientific minds, when Louis Pasteur came up with his theory of germs in 1872. Even then, the medical profession ridiculed him for another twenty-five years before attempting to do something about it.
Meanwhile, women and men died by the thousands. The average number of children in a family in those days was seven, but they were lucky if two were left alive after stillborn deaths, deaths at birth, and deaths in infancy. Men often remarried several times to maintain a family after their first or second wife died. It was a common sight to hear the hoof-beats of horses on cobblestones, and look out of an upstairs window to see another black hearse drawn by a another gleaming black horse with a black plume waving from between its ears, and a line of mourners in black following on from behind. The profession of undertaker was a busy one, and cemeteries were filled with gravestones standing like a theater audience reminding visitors that their turn was next.
Winston was thirteen before the Pasteur Institute was established, so he would have grown up knowing something about the dangers and treatment of germs. Even so, medicine had not advanced all that much to treat wounds at the battlefront and prevent soldiers from dying from infection. So it was probable that more soldiers were killed at the front line from bacterial infection than from lances, sabers, bullets, or shells. The hardiness and courage of British soldiers in those conditions in Victorian times was extraordinary. But they had no choice—they were caught between the uncertain authority of doctors and surgeons who didn’t know what they were doing, and generals who didn’t know much more.
It was not only at Omdurman with Winston that British soldiers were game for another charge at the enemy—something similar occurred earlier on, in the blundering Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854. That foolhardy charge in the Crimean War made history out of the stupidity of its commanding officers—particularly the wooden-headed Lord Raglan—and the courage of the British troops. Raglan gave the wrong order and they carried it out without a murmur. The British cavalry famously charged through a valley, straight towards the barrels of the waiting Russian guns, with other cannons lined up and ready, facing them from both sides. Out of the 600 men who made the charge, only 500 came back. And apparently they were game for all the excitement of another charge immediately afterwards.
Was it courage or stupidity on the part of the cavalry? Or did they—like Winston—really enjoy it as a death-defying game? If it was the excitement of adventure that drew them into the army, as it had done with Winston—or glory, which had also contributed to his enlistment in the cavalry—it must have set their adrenaline rushing. They were glorified in Tennyson’s popular poem, which describes what is now viewed as the greatest ever military blunder in British history.
The cavalrymen turned the disaster into a legend of bravery which was extolled by the popular English poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Flash’d all their sabres bare,
Flash’d as they turn’d in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder’d:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro’ the line they broke
Cossacks and Russian
Reel’d from the sabre stroke,
Shattered and sunder’d.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
The truth of the catastrophe had been hinted at for years after Raglan died, soon after, of dysentery and depression. Recently, in 2014, letters turned up which were written by some of the men who had charged on their horses with their comrades—some scribbled in pencil and sent home to their families only hours after they left the battlefield. They said they all knew that the order to charge was “perfect madness.” One referred to the action more cautiously as “some unfortunate mistake.” Some praised the gallantry displayed by the men in the carnage as “a scene … unparalleled in history.”
Private Thomas Dudley (17th Lancers): “When we received the order, not a man could seem to believe it … Oh! If you could have seen the faces of that doomed 600 men at that moment, every man’s features fixed, his teeth clenched, and as rigid as death, still it was on—on!” He felt as strong as six men. But he would not attempt to tell what they did to the enemy.
Private Thomas William (11th Hussars): “I could see what would be the result of it, and so could all of us; but of course, as we had got the order, it was our duty to obey. I do not wish to boast too much; but I can safely say that there was not a man in the Light Brigade that day but what did his duty to his Queen and Country.”
Captain William Morgan (17th Lancers): “Gallant, brilliant, and useless … On we went—astonished but unshaken in nerve—over half a mile of rough ground, losing dozens of men and horses at every stride, to attack horse artillery in our front, supported by three times our number of cavalry, heavy batteries on our right and left flanks, backed by infantry, riflemen &c.”
Anonymous Officer (17th Lancers): “We all knew the thing was desperate before we started, and it was even worse than we thought … However, there was no hesitation, down our fellows went at a gallop—through a fire in front and on both flanks, which emptied our saddles and knocked over horses by scores. I do not think that one man flinched in the whole Brigade … I never saw men behave as well as our men did. As we could not hold our ground, all our dead and badly wounded were left behind, and know not who are dead or are taken prisoner.”
Private William Pearson (4th Light Dragoons): “Dear Mother, every time I think of my poor comrades it makes my blood run cold, to think how we had to gallop over the poor wounded fellows lying on the field of battle with anxious looks for assistance—what a sickening scene!” He fell off his horse while charging, as it stumbled when another horse was shot in front of it. Seizing the mount of a dead comrade, he continued to charge.
Private William Henry Pennington (11th Hussars): On his return ride he had to pass Russian cavalry attempting to cut them off. “Of course, with our handful it was life or death; so we rushed at them to break through them … I galloped on, parrying with the determination of one who would not lose his life, breaking the lances of the cowards who attacked us in the proportion of three or four to one, occasionally catching one a slap with the sword across his teeth, and giving another the point in his arm or breast.”4
* mussick: a goatskin water bag slung across his back
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LADY WITH THE LAMP
HEROINES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE THAT Winston would have known about were Florence Nightingale and Nurse Edith Cavell. Their lives paralleled each other at some time in Winston’s earlier years. Florence Nightingale initiated and influenced the development of modern nursing, which was accelerated during the early years of the First World War. She was employed as a nurse in the Crimea at the time of the historic Charge of the Light Brigade into the trap set by the Russian gunners, with their cannons at the end of a valley and on both sides, which their victims had fallen into. The role of nursing badly injured soldiers, and its education, were first described and defined by her. Before that there was no hope for the badly wounded.
Nor was there even a clean uniform for nurses when she began—not surprising when even established professional medical doctors had no idea of sterilization of infection, or infection control. Most surgeons had not yet reached a stage of wearing clean overalls over their frock-coats, which were often stained with blood and pus from hospital surgery or their patients at home. For some it was even a badge of office. Nor did most wash their hands before or after attending to patients.
With filth and germs infecting battlefield injuries, it was evidently time for more fastidious women to take the lead in implementing cleaner and more sanitary surroundings and hospital clothing, and sterilization from regular, automatic hand-washing. So the training of new nurses was rigorous. It was a new vocation that required floors to be scrubbed regularly with disinfectant to prevent contamination by germs brought in from the street, and microorganisms from infected patients that spread throughout. It had come into use only very recently in 1854.
