Queen Victoria's Bomb by Ronald Clark

Author:Ronald Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

8: 1870

For historians, the year 1870 signifies the defeat of France and the resurrection of the German Empire. For me, the significant events of that year marked a watershed in the history of the Indians; the first took place on the evening of Friday, July 15th.

As you will know, the Prince of Wales made a habit of conferring in private with many public men. The dinner party was the occasion, and on the evening of July 15th such a dinner party was held at Marlborough House. Among those present were the Duke of Cambridge, still Commander-in-Chief, although many wondered why; Sir Robert Morier, that able diplomat recently arrived from Darmstadt; and, among others, Delane, commander of The Times, the John Thadeus whose almost rustic figure I had seen on the beach of the Crimea sixteen years previously, a man of infinite resource whose network of information channels was even more closely dug than had been supposed.

It was late in the evening when a message was brought in to Delane. The news was grave. His message was from Paris and informed him of the declaration given by the French Government to the Corps Legislatif. Its accuracy was undoubted and its import undeniable. The French were marching to war.

His Royal Highness gave vent to an exclamation of mingled regret and anger. All bemoaned what was regarded as the failure of British attempts at mediation.

‘This war,’ said Sir Robert, ‘could have been prevented if for twenty-four hours the British people could have been furnished with a backbone. It is too late now.’1

Cambridge knew better.

By this time Cambridge always knew better. Little more than fifty years old, he appeared to have aged backwards, so that in each succeeding decade his military ideal seemed to be placed a further ten years in the past. If in the Crimea he had been wedded to the state of the art at Waterloo, he was now back to the turn of the 18th century, regretting the gradual abandonment of those traditional army usages which by the year 1870 had no relevance at all to contemporary problems.

It was natural, therefore, that Cambridge should now mutteringly complain. What, he asked, would have been the use of a backbone without an Army, something which the country no longer had?

Here the Prince of Wales intervened. More than once since the Chlorister affair of six years previously he had tentatively raised with the Commander-in-Chief – ‘Uncle George’, as he was affectionately known throughout their mutually long lives – the question of what he called ‘a superior weapon’. Yet the two men for ever spoke at cross-purposes. The Prince had perused the Prince Consort’s full-length Jubila Report only by accident, knew of no other, and believed that Cambridge relied on hearsay. On the other hand, Cambridge, ignorant of the Prince’s illicit knowledge, spoke with what he believed to be higher wisdom – although in fact his only written information came from my expurgated version. Here, of course, existed a fruitful source of misunderstanding –

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.