The Making of a Soldier
‘I understand your father to say that in going into the Army you do so with the intention of becoming a real soldier and not a drone which is content to plod on and see himself passed by men of more pluck and energy than himself. If so, the sooner you take to work the better.’—Guy Russell’s grandfather, ‘the Colonel’, writes to him on his entry to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in September 1886.
When Guy Russell entered Harrow, he carried with him his family’s ambitions for a career in law, science or the civil service. However, there was the management of family properties in Hawke’s Bay to be considered, as well as grandmother Eliza Tinsley’s business interests in England. In the event, the reports from Harrow destroyed any hopes of Guy’s entrance into Oxford to study for a law or science degree, and he opted—like his father and grandfather before him—for a military career.
It was an inspired, if not unpredictable choice. After spending several months in Germany sharpening his command of the language, Guy sat the entry examination for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He passed with the second-to-top marks in his intake, unlike Douglas Haig, the man destined to command all British and Dominion forces on the Western Front in World War I. Haig scraped into Sandhurst a few years before Russell with the greatest difficulty; and Henry Wilson, who would eventually rise to be chief of imperial general staff, failed the entrance exam three times before being finally admitted.
At that time, physique and prowess at games rather than intellectual ability tended to be the standard by which officer cadets of the time were selected and later promoted. Russell, at 5 feet 7 inches in height (1.72 metres) and not particularly good at games, would seem to have been disadvantaged, but a family tradition of service to the military, proficiency in French and German, and high marks in the entrance examination would have been hard to ignore.
Given the emotional turmoil of his life that year, however, Guy showed considerable mental toughness in passing at all. He was besotted with his tennis partner, Violet Brooke, who was allegedly playing him off against her other male friends, and the ‘devil of jealousy’ had raised its ugly head. More seriously, he had for several months watched the slow decline of his mother’s health and was compelled to sit the examination just two days after her death from tuberculosis at the age of 43.
In September 1886, Guy took his place at Sandhurst and at last found his niche. With his interest now fully engaged, the young New Zealander relished the college routines and disciplines, the company of his fellow cadet officers, and his courses, both academic and practical. Among these were military history and tactics and Russell excelled in both. His overall performance was rated by his examiners as ‘exemplary’.
Sandhurst in the 1880s, however, was an unpromising environment for young officers soon to face the grim realities of twentieth-century warfare. Training still focused on solid line formations, mechanical precision, a rigid dependence on order, and firing strictly in volleys on the word of command. Artillery doctrine had not moved forward since the Crimean War 30 years before, and machine guns could be written off as ‘suitable only for the destruction of savages and hardly suitable for use against white men’.7 Russell’s near contemporary, Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, remembered being taught a lot of obsolete tactics and doing ‘a tremendous lot of useless drill’.8
Although a staff college had been established to remedy the deficiencies exposed by the Crimean War, officer training had a distinctly anti-intellectual cast. Polo and pig-sticking (in India) were the occupations of choice, and any sort of book work ‘quite beyond the pale’.9 As for leadership at unit level, ‘Officers were still so busy being gentlemen, in or out of gorgeous uniforms, that they had little time for their men and a total lack of concern for the latter’s welfare.’10
Arrayed in such uniforms, Russell and his fellow cadets paraded at Buckingham Palace in June 1887 as an honour guard during ceremonies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s reign. It was all too much. After standing in the sun for five hours without food, Guy and several other young soldiers collapsed and had to be revived with the help of ‘two bottles of brandy and smelling salts, a camp stool and two umbrellas, all the gifts of a sympathetic crowd’.
Guy Russell emerged from Sandhurst in August 1887 with the Sword of Honour, awarded as the best cadet of his course—the first New Zealand-born officer to achieve that distinction. In January 1888, as a freshly commissioned subaltern, he was posted to the 1st Battalion of the Border Regiment, in which two generations of Russells had already served, then stationed at Sialkot some 350 kilometres from India’s volatile North-West Frontier.
Thirty years earlier, the Indian Mutiny, involving mainly Hindu troops of the British Indian Army, had plunged much of north and central India into rebellion against British rule. The uprising was eventually defeated, but Russell’s intended regiment was now part of the network of garrisons that would underpin imperial control of India. They would remain until Britain’s most prized overseas territory (‘the Jewel in the Crown’) was finally granted independence in 1947.
Russell sailed from Portsmouth bound for Bombay via Suez where he spent an uneventful two hours ashore seeing nothing but ‘dirt a la Orient’. Back aboard ship he relieved his boredom by pelting the Arab boatmen with oranges. Subsequent visits to Suez would not be so mundane. In 1915, Russell returned in command of a mounted rifles brigade defending the Suez Canal against an attack by Turkish troops, and went on to command the brigade at the debacle that was Gallipoli. A year later, he went back to Suez to form and train his country’s first infantry division for service on the Western Front.
The regiment that Russell joined in northern India would have been typical of the British Army in the 1880s—officered by the sons of gentlemen who had attended élite public schools, its soldiers drawn mostly from the industrial and rural working classes. ‘A rough lot,’ Fuller put it, ‘simple, tough, illiterate, largely recruited from down-and-outs, men who had got into trouble, vagabonds, and a sprinkling of the sons and grandsons of NCOs and private soldiers.’11
The reality of service with the British Army, however, did not match its early promise. In 1888, there were no major rebellions in India to suppress, or border wars to fight. For the troops there was little to fill their off-duty hours except drinking and sports; for the officers, polo, race-riding, and leave back in England for those who could afford it. Russell found the company of his fellow officers tedious and there was no socialising to be had with ‘the natives’ who were ‘not of gentlemen standard anyway’. The dull routines of peacetime soldiering were broken only by regular pig-hunting expeditions and polo tournaments.
The young subaltern took both very seriously, relishing the thrill of the chase and the hard riding in rough country. He bought a wild, hill-bred pony—‘a splendid pig-sticker but an awful man-eater’—from a fellow officer who had found him too unruly to ride. It repaid him by ripping off his little finger while he was feeding it, but it could have been worse: ‘He might have got me down and trampled on me,’ Guy wrote to his family,’ which might have been an awkward business as these country hill-bred ponies are like the natives, regular savages.’ Of his growing fondness for polo, Russell observed: ‘I think the game keeps one up to the mark . . . there is more risk and [it] requires more nerve and dash than any other game.’
As in his schooldays, Russell’s leave was spent mostly with the family at the Château de Perroy overlooking Lake Geneva, where his father Ham now lived with his new French wife, Stephanie Lagier. Here Guy met Lili de Saugy, a wealthy and well-connected young Frenchwoman, and embarked on the first serious relationship of his life. Details of the courtship are scarce, but Lili remembered him as ‘a serious young man, at the same time gay, lively, and likeable . . . probably the best tennis player of our set, and the best dancer’. Guy attended church every Sunday, rode regularly and participated in bathing parties at the lake, where, Lili recalled, the women were kept 50 metres away from the men ‘for decency’s sake’.
In May 1888 came a demonstration of the self-sufficiency and independence of mind that would mark Russell’s later years in senior command. He passed up the chance of leave with his fellow officers at Murree or Dalhousie, where there was female company aplenty but little else to do to pass the time. Instead, he went hunting red and black bear, musk deer and chamois in the mountains of Kashmir, accompanied only by his Indian shikari (guide) and two ‘coolies’ to carry essential food and gear. The all-day hunting delivered not only several trophies but a considerable boost to his self-confidence. Camped in the snow at 3000 metres, he wrote to his sister: ‘I have enjoyed the whole thing immensely, and feel as if I was worth twice as much as before I came.’
However agreeable in parts, the life of a peacetime soldier did not suit the ambitious young New Zealander. From the start, he itched to be on active service—preferably on the volatile North-West Frontier—and away from the tedious garrison life of drills, company inspections, the issuing of rations and checking of accounts. He wrote to his grandfather: ‘I am bound to say that all I care about is service. I don’t care a straw for the sword at my side, I only care for it in the hand.’ Guy’s frustrations were not helped by low army rates of pay, and what he considered to be slack standards of discipline and turnout in his regiment. ‘For those who want soldiering pure and simple,’ he complained to his father, ‘this service is no good.’
For intellectual stimulus and emotional relief, Guy turned to a study of the Hindustani and Persian languages, and to his beloved cello. There was even the promise of another romance, for accompanying him on the piano was Miss Warburton, a young woman of mixed English/Afghani origins—‘her father being the son of an Afghan princess who ran away with a Colonel Warburton during our last occupation’.
The racism and snobbery prevalent amongst the British ruling élite in India at the time was no deterrent to Guy’s pursuit of Miss Warburton; nor, it seemed, was his ongoing engagement to Lili de Saugy. In a letter to a sister, he hinted that he expected soon to announce a new engagement, but for reasons unknown the promised liaison did not come to pass.
In December 1888, the Border Regiment left India for garrison duty at Mandalay in Burma, which had been declared a province of British India in 1886. Here at last was the promise of real soldiering against elusive bandit gangs called ‘dacoits’, which had begun a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the country’s colonial rulers. Again it was not to be. Another unit was preferred over the Borders for service on the subsequent Chin Hills expedition, and Russell now expected the regiment to be confined permanently to ‘chowkidar’ (watchman) duty, as it had been for the last 15 years in India.
When a column of the regiment was finally deployed against the dacoits, his colonel refused to let him go because the young lieutenant was now responsible for training its mounted infantry and could not be spared. In a minor skirmish, however, Russell’s company attacked a jungle village and took some prisoners, but achieved little more. The so-called ‘shadows in the forest’ would go on fighting the British until 1890, when they finally gave up the unequal struggle.
In May 1889, Russell was sent to join five other British officers commanding a regiment of Indian troops at Miajuri in the ruby mines district of Bernardmyo, some 200 kilometres northwest of Mandalay. He remembered it as ‘a small wretchedly built little village of bamboo huts and wooden shanties perched 6,000 feet [about 2000 metres] high in a hollow surrounded by fern hills . . . of the most uninteresting and ugly description’.
The region thoroughly depressed him with its eternal rain, fever and atrocious food. The situation was not improved by his feelings towards the native troops (sepoys) of his regiment, whom he described as ‘a miserable apology for soldiers’. The compensations were cheap living and card games at night with his fellow officers, but he also made time to grow a rose garden and press on with his language studies. The damage, however, had been done. By March 1890 Guy was writing to his sister Milly: ‘My ambition, never a strong feature, is dead, though I manage to get through a certain amount of work, more because I hate being left behind than from any wish to be in front.’
Seeing no hope of active service unless he got into one of the best regiments, Guy was tempted to leave the army. In June 1890, a bout of malaria gave him a temporary escape: too sick to continue duty at Miajuri, he was sent home to New Zealand for six months to recuperate. Returning to the country of his birth was a deliberate choice because he knew it would give him a chance to compare his present life in the army with career options in New Zealand.
Money appears to have been a major concern, although as a beneficiary of his grandmother Tinsley’s will, Guy was now receiving an extra 1500 pounds a year. Even so he considered his pay as a serving officer insufficient; and the pension he would receive on retirement from service would also be inadequate if he had to depend on it to support a family.
There was the worry, too, that he would never accumulate enough capital to later take up farming in New Zealand, or anywhere else. He rated his prospects for promotion to senior rank, and therefore better pay, as poor—‘nearly 20:1 against commanding a battalion’. The only way to get ahead in the army, he concluded, was being on active service or ‘having friends at the War Office’.
But if the peacetime British Army offered Guy Russell few financial rewards and outlets for his energies and talents, he still preferred the military life to any other. Also, by this time other qualities that would help shape the future battlefield commander were beginning to surface—among them a passion for efficiency and good discipline. From India, he had written criticising the slovenly discipline in his battalion; and from Burma, of his determination to have the smartest company in the regiment. A sense of his fitness for higher command was also emerging: ‘I am sure I have more ability to command than the average fellow, and that I am more practical,’ he wrote to his father. These qualities, he felt, had been largely dormant until now.
Meanwhile, sick leave in New Zealand was beginning to pall and the prospect of staff college in England held no attractions (‘this eternal theory without practice’). Guy Russell wanted to be where there was some prospect of real soldiering, possibly in South Africa: ‘I see the makings of a squabble with the Boers by today’s telegrams and wish I was at home [England], for it would have been a good opportunity should anything turn up, as my health is now quite right.’
In December 1890, Guy’s sick leave came to an end and he was ordered to rejoin his regiment, now home from Burma, at Dover. As expected, he found life as a barracks soldier in England unbearable, and over the next few months applied, unsuccessfully, to join the British East Africa Company, the British South Africa Company, and the Bechuanaland Border Police. Finally, seeing no hope of action abroad unless he was posted to one of the ‘best’ regiments, Russell decided to resign his commission in the British Army and return to farming in New Zealand.
His grandfather, who had done so much to shape his character and ambitions, tried to dissuade him. He doubted whether Guy, accustomed to a privileged life in the army, would be mentally and physically tough enough to endure the primitive and lonely life of a colonial small farmer ‘living on sour, heavy bread and often ill-cooked mutton’. His grandson would do better, he wrote, investing whatever capital he had in mortgages and ‘living the life of a gentleman’. Better still, he should stay in the army, where he would at least have ‘a clean shirt every day, his boots blacked, and the prospect of one day commanding a regiment’. In similar vein, Guy’s Uncle Arthur warned him that ‘the bush on the West Coast abounds with young gentlemen, chiefly “Army failures”, who get small sections, do their own cooking, and whom no one sees or wants to see’.
In June that year Guy Russell was appointed to the Indian staff corps and sent, as he had asked, back to Burma. What he had not asked for was garrison duty with the 25th Madras Infantry—clearly not one of the best regiments. Again, he felt cheated of the chance of active service and had nothing but contempt for the sepoys with whom he now had to serve. ‘If I did not care overmuch for a British regiment,’ he complained to his sister, ‘this is 50 times worse.’
The end came in August the following year. Ordered to cut short his three months of leave with his family in Switzerland and rejoin his old regiment in Dover—effectively a return to barracks soldiering in England—Guy Russell resigned his commission ‘in a diabolical fit of the blues’ and sailed for home.