French was soon promoted to captain. An impulsive early marriage came to a quick end and was omitted from his official biography, for Victorian society looked on divorce with stern disapproval. At 28, French married again, this time with much fanfare. Eleanora Selby-Lowndes was the daughter of a hunt-loving country squire, the perfect mate for a rising, well-liked cavalryman. He seemed genuinely fond of his new wife, although this would not stop him from embarking on an endless string of love affairs.
In the army in which French was making his career, an important military virtue was sportsmanship. On his death, one officer left more than £70,000 to his regiment, in part for the encouragement of "manly sports." Some regiments kept their own packs of foxhounds, so officers did not need to take a day's leave to hunt. A book from the era, Modern Warfare by Frederick Guggisberg, who was later to become a brigadier general, likened war to soccer, which the British call football: "An army tries to work together in battle ... in much the same way as a football team plays together in a match.... The army fights for the good of its country as the team plays for the honour of its school. Regiments assist each other as players do when they... pass the ball from one to another; exceptionally gallant charges and heroic defences correspond to brilliant runs and fine tackling." War's resemblance to another sport, cricket, was the theme of one of the most famous poems of the day, Sir Henry Newbolt's "Vitaï Lampada" (The Torch of Life):
There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night—
Ten to make and the match to win—
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote—
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
The poem would last; when Lieutenant George Brooke of the Irish Guards was mortally wounded by German shrapnel at Soupir, France, in 1914, his dying words to his men were "Play the game."
To the young John French, that desert red with blood long seemed out of reach. Except for the sickle-wielding Irish farmhand, he passed the age of 30 without seeing battle. Then, to his delight, in 1884 he was ordered to an outpost that promised action: a colonial war in the Sudan. At last French experienced the combat he had long dreamed of when troops he led successfully repulsed a surprise attack by an enemy force that surged out of a ravine, armed mainly with swords and spears. This was the real thing: hand-to-hand fighting, rebellious "natives" vanquished in textbook fashion by disciplined cavalry and British martial spirit. He returned to England with praise from his superiors, medals, and a promotion, at the unusually young age of 32, to lieutenant colonel. Only a few years later, a bit bowlegged from more than a decade on horseback, he took command of the 19th Hussars. Through the wall of the commanding officer's quarters, John and Eleanora French and their children could hear the growls and roars of the regimental mascot, a black bear.
For an ambitious young officer, it could be a career advantage to get your ticket punched on several continents. And so French was pleased when, in 1891, the 19th Hussars were ordered to India. In this grandest and richest of Britain's colonies many officers spent the defining years of their careers, convinced that they were carrying out a sacred, altruistic mission.
Enjoying a peacetime routine of polo field, officers' mess, and turbaned servants, French saw no military action. He busied himself instead training his horsemen to a high pitch in close-order drill, sending them trotting, galloping, and wheeling across the spacious Indian maidans, or parade grounds, raising clouds of dust behind them. With his family left behind in England, he spent his spare time in pursuit of another officer's wife, with whom he slipped away to one of the hill stations where the British fled the summer heat of the plains. The angry officer then sued for divorce, citing French as a co-respondent. There were rumors that he had also been involved with the daughter of a railway official, and with his commander's wife.
When French returned to England in 1893, word of these episodes slowed his career. On half pay, as officers often were between assignments, he, Eleanora, and their three children were forced to move in with a forgiving older sister. Far more humiliating, the cavalryman tried to resort to a bicycle as a less expensive alternative to a horse, a substitute steed he never fully mastered. Fellow officers observed French hopping down the road beside it, unable to mount. And yet his free-spending ways continued, and he had to pawn the family silver. In disgrace, he waited restlessly for a new posting, or, better yet, a war.
In John French's England, the boulevards along which Victoria's Jubilee parade marched were splendid indeed, but large stretches of London and other cities were less glorious, for little of the wealth the country drew from its colonies ever reached the poor. In a cramped row house near a coal mine, a hungry family might occupy a single room, and the dwellings of an entire unpaved street might use a single hand-pumped water faucet; in the vast slums of London's East End, one boarding house bed might be shared by two or three impoverished workers sleeping in eight-hour shifts. Children's growth was stunted by malnutrition; their teeth already rotting, they might eat meat or fish only once a week. The poorest of the poor ended up in the workhouse, where they were given jobs and shelter but made to feel like prisoners. Barefoot workhouse children shivered through the winter in thin, ragged cotton clothes, often with only backless benches to sit on. In the worst slums, with some 20 of every 100 babies failing to survive their first year, infant mortality was nearly three times that for children of the wealthy. Just as combating the empire's enemies in distant corners of the world would shape the likes of John French, so combating injustice at home and wars abroad would shape other Britons of this generation—even, in some cases, those who sprang from French's own class.
Among them was a woman now remembered by her married name, Charlotte Despard. As girls, she and her five sisters would slip through the fence around their estate's formal garden to play with children in the closest village, until their parents discovered and put a stop to it. This—in Charlotte's memory at least—ignited a rebellious spark, and at the age of ten she ran away from home. At a nearby railway station, she later wrote, "I took a ticket to London where I intended to earn my living as a servant." Although caught after one night away, she was "not tamed." Her father died the same year, and her mother, for reasons we don't know, was confined to an insane asylum a few years later. Charlotte, her sisters, and a younger brother were then raised by relatives and a governess, with Charlotte lending a hand in caring for the younger children. The governess taught them a hymn:
I thank the Goodness and the Grace
That on my birth hath smiled,
And made me in these happy days
A happy English child.
I was not born a little slave
To labour in the sun,
And wish that I were in the grave,
And all my labor done.
"That hymn was the turning-point," Charlotte would claim. "I demanded why God had made slaves, and I was promptly sent to bed."
When she was a little older, she visited a Yorkshire factory and was horrified to see ill-paid women and children picking apart piles of old cloth to make rope from its threads. In her early twenties, she saw the slums of the East End: "How bitterly ashamed I was of it all! How ardently I longed to speak to these people in their misery, to say, 'Why do you bear it? Rise.... Smite your oppressors. Be true and strong!' Of course I was much too shy to say anything of the sort."
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In 1870, at the age of 26, Charlotte married. Maximilian Despard was a well-to-do businessman, but like his new wife he favored home rule for Ireland, rights and careers for women, and many other progressive causes of the day. Throughout their married life, he suffered from a kidney disease of which he eventually died, and there are hints that his relationship with his wife remained unconsummated. The two traveled widely together for 20 years, however, several times going to India, and for decades afterward she spoke of how happy a time it had been. Whatever the frustrations of a marriage without children and possibly without sex, Charlotte Despard enjoyed something rare for her time and class: a husband who respected her work. And this meant being a novelist. Modern readers should not feel deprived that Despard's seven enormous novels (publishers made more money on multivolume works) have long been out of print. Abounding in noble heroines, mysterious ancestors, Gothic castles, deathbed reunions, and happy endings, they were the Victorian equivalent of today's formula romances.
If the country gentleman's role in life was to be on horseback, the upper-class Victorian woman's was to be mistress of a grand house, and so the Despards bought a country home, Courtlands, standing amid fifteen rolling acres of woods, lawn, stream, and formal gardens overlooking a valley in Surrey. A dozen servants handled the indoors alone. Living on an even grander estate nearby, the Duchess of Albany recruited Charlotte for her Nine Elms Flower Mission, a project in which wealthy women brought baskets of flowers from their gardens (also tended by servants) to Nine Elms, the poorest corner of London's overcrowded Battersea district. This was as far as a proper upper-class woman of the era was expected to go in response to poverty.
After her husband died in 1890, however, Despard startled everyone by making Battersea the center of her life. Using money she had inherited from him as well as from her parents, she opened two community centers in the slum, grandly called Despard Clubs, complete with youth programs, a drop-in health clinic, nutrition classes, subsidized food for new mothers, and a collection of layettes and other baby supplies that could be loaned out as women gave birth. Most shockingly to her family, she moved into the upper floor of one of her clubs, although for a time still retreating to Courtlands on weekends. Despite her background, Despard evidently had a knack for dealing with the children of Battersea. "She does not find them unmanageable," reported one observer, the social reformer Charles Booth. "They submit readily to her gentle force. 'You hurt me,' cried a big, strong fellow, but he did not resist when she took him by the arm in the cause of order."
It was said that you could smell Battersea long before you reached it, for its air was thick with smoke and fumes from a large gasworks, an iron foundry, and coal-burning railway locomotives on their way to Victoria and Waterloo stations. Coal dust coated everything, including the residents' lungs. Many women took in washing from the wealthier parts of the city. Dilapidated houses and apartments swarmed with rats, cockroaches, fleas, and bedbugs. Urban manufacturing areas like Battersea lay at the heart of Britain's Industrial Revolution, and in the great war to come their factories would mass-produce the weapons, and their crowded tenements the manpower, for the trenches.
Battersea was then a battlefield of a different sort, Despard quickly discovered, a center for radical politics and the growing trade union movement. Its gas workers had gone on strike to win an eight-hour day; later the borough council would refuse to accept a donation for the local library from the Scottish-American magnate Andrew Carnegie because his money was "tainted with the blood" of striking U.S. steelworkers. The part of Battersea where Despard worked reflected the empire's ethnic hierarchy, for like many of England's poorest neighborhoods, it was largely Irish, filled with evicted tenant farmers or families who had fled even more impoverished parts of Dublin in search of a better life in London.
In identification with Battersea's Irish poor, thumbing her nose at the upper-crust Protestant world of her birth, Despard converted to Roman Catholicism. She also developed a passion for theosophy, a woolly, mystical faith that includes elements of Buddhism, Hinduism, and the occult. Nor was this all: "I determined to study for myself the great problems of society," she would later write. "My study landed me in uncompromising socialism." She befriended Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor, and in 1896, representing a British Marxist group, was a delegate to a meeting of the federation of socialist parties and trade unions from around the world known as the Second International. An oddly assorted bouquet of belief systems this might have been, but one thing shone through clearly: a desire to identify with those at the bottom of Britain's class ladder and to offer them something more than baskets of flowers.
Just as she left behind the life she had been expected to lead, so Despard left behind its dress. She now clothed herself in black, and instead of the elaborate upper-class women's hats of the day that clearly telegraphed leisure, she covered her graying hair with a black lace mantilla. In place of shoes she wore open-toed sandals. She dressed this way at all times, whether on a lecture platform or cooking a meal for a group of slum children at one of her community centers. Eventually she would also wear these clothes to jail.
Before long she was elected to a Poor Law Board, whose job was to supervise the running of the local workhouse. Among the first socialists on one of these boards, she protested valiantly against the rotten potatoes given to inmates and fought to expose a corrupt manager whom she caught selling food from the kitchen while the workhouse women were on a bread and water diet. Despard was now devoting her copious energy to the women she called "those who slave all their lives long ... earning barely a subsistence, and thrown aside to death or the parish when they are no longer profitable."
In every way, the lives of Charlotte Despard and John French form the greatest possible contrast. He was destined to lead the largest army Britain had ever put in the field; she came to vigorously oppose every war her country fought, above all the one in which he would be commander in chief. He went to Ireland to suppress restive tenant farmers; she ministered to the Irish poor of Battersea, whom she called "my sister women" (although they might not have spoken of her quite the same way). They both went to India, but he drilled cavalrymen whose job was to keep India British; she returned committed to Indian self-rule. At a time when a powerful empire faced colonial rebellions abroad and seething discontent at home, he would remain a staunch defender of the established order, she a defiant revolutionary. And yet, despite all this, something bound them together.
John French and Charlotte Despard were brother and sister.
More than that, for almost all of their lives they remained close. She was eight years senior to "Jack," as she called him, and he was the beloved little brother whom she taught his ABCs after their parents had disappeared from their lives. His sexual adventuring and reckless spending, which dismayed other family members, never seemed to bother her. When he went off to soldier in India, it was she who welcomed his wife Eleanora and the children to Courtlands, turning her house over to them while she lived in gritty Battersea. And when French returned from India under a cloud of debt and scandal, Despard took him in as well, lending him money long after his exasperated other sisters ceased to do so.
Their two very different worlds met when Despard periodically loaded some of Battersea's poor into a horse-drawn omnibus for a Saturday or Sunday at Courtlands, away from the grime and coal smoke of the city. French's son, Gerald, who would later follow his father into the army, remembered one such group of Battersea visitors, and his tone hints at what the rest of the family must have felt about Despard:
It certainly was amusing to some extent, but it had its trying side. For instance, they came equipped with several barrel-organs, which, of course, they never ceased playing from the time of their arrival until their departure. Their womenfolk accompanied them, and dancing went on during the greater part of the day, on the lawns and on the drive.
My father ... threw himself nobly into the breach, and helped to organize sports for the men.... I th
ink he was more amused than anyone at the extraordinary antics of the invaders of our peace and quietness. They swarmed all over the place, and when the evening came and they set off on the return journey to London, we, at any rate, were not sorry that the entertainment had at last come to an end.
John French's family might have resented the "invaders of our peace and quietness," but Courtlands was, after all, Despard's estate, although she now occupied only a small cottage on the grounds for her weekend visits. French remained fond of the sister who had helped raise him. When as a Poor Law Board member she gave her first public speech at Wandsworth town hall, he accompanied her. And when she was overcome at the door by stage fright, he encouraged her with the comment: "Only nervous people are ever of any real use."
Despite their disparate views of the world, the warmth and loyalty between this brother and sister would continue for several decades, through a grim, divisive colonial conflict about to break out, and then a global war that would leave more than 700,000 of their countrymen dead. Only events after that great watershed would finally break the bond between them.
2. A MAN OF NO ILLUSIONS
JUST AS SOME of the major commanders and protesters of the First World War came onstage well before it began, so too did one of the war's key weapons. It made a spectacular early appearance the year after Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.
The site was Omdurman, in the Sudan, the vast African territory whose inhabitants, in London's eyes, did not understand their proper role, which was to be loyal subjects of the British Empire. Under a militant Muslim leader, Sudanese Arabs had overrun an occupation force and beheaded the British general who led it. Thirteen years later, in 1898, Britain sent a large body of troops up the Nile to the Sudan under the command of legendary Major General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, who had served in various corners of the empire, from Palestine to Cyprus to Zanzibar, and whose mission now was to teach the Sudanese their place, once and for all.