HISTORY:Under Every Leaf: How Britain Played the Greater Game from Afghanistan to Africa By William Beaver Biteback, 341pp. £20
EVEN CLOSE TO THE apogee of its power and influence, late in the 19th century, the British Empire was remarkably fragile and its administrators apprehensive, threatened by international colonial rivalry and weakened by the internal disagreements of ill-co-ordinated government departments.
This is an exhaustively researched history of the British intelligence department – called the intelligence division from 1888 and known as the ID of the British war office – between the Crimean War and the establishment of the modern military intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 (or the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, as they are offically known). The author, William Beaver, tells how the gathering and interpretation of information at home and abroad were gradually recognised as more vitally important than soldiers’ courage on the battlefield.
Beaver is well qualified for his formidable task, as Beit senior scholar at the University of Oxford and a decorated intelligence officer. Biteback Publishing calls the book “a rollicking good read of brains over brawn”. As The Oxford English Dictionary defines rollicking as “exuberantly lively and amusing”, there appears to have been some sort of communications breakdown among Biteback’s editors and blurb writers. Archival mustiness evidently debilitated Beaver’s prose style, alleviated only a little by his efforts to colour it with occasional informalities. The colours are the grey of parliamentary rhetoric and the khaki of army communiques. He writes “whilst” instead of “while” and “amongst” instead of “among”. There is a danger of yawns.
That caveat having been sounded, it must be emphasised that the subject matter is of such great intrinsic interest, and presented with such dogged perseverance, that for earnest amateurs of Victoriana and beyond the book is eminently worthwhile.
There have always been spies, no doubt, in fact as well as fiction. It is recorded elsewhere, for example, that Sir Francis Walsingham founded a secret service in England in 1569, before becoming secretary of state. But Beaver begins the story when it became obvious that England’s government and military leaders early in the country’s supreme ascendancy didn’t really know what they were doing before sending troops into action.
“The British were content to commit their small army to a campaign in the Crimea of which they knew little,” he relates. “They knew no more about Russian capability or intentions beyond that of conquest, and relied for battlefield success on the British army’s reputation for individual and collective pluck and gallantry rather than planning and organisation.”
The more resolutely blimpish senior officers at Horse Guards, the generic term for the conservative military establishment, could have regarded a suicidal cavalry charge as heroic, fit for epic poetry. According to Beaver’s ample documentation, generals and politicians alike were reluctant to admit to the need for systematic innovation, but after the Crimean embarrassment and public indignation they had to.
There was no cloak-and-dagger melodrama or James Bond fantasy in the work of the ID intelligencers, as they used to be called. The marquess of Salisbury, when he was Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s foreign secretary, wrote: “You should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense.”
However, as Beaver points out, all the agents were experts. They were recruited from the technological elite of the army, bright young men from the top of their class at Sandhurst, who had proved their reliability in units such as the royal engineers and royal artillery. There were only about 100 officers in the ID at first, but the strength at headquarters was greatly augmented by diplomats and other British civilians all over the world.
Agents were so widespread and numerous that they inspired the Farsi (Persian) expression that “anywhere in the world, where a leaf moves, underneath you will find an Englishman”.
The top priority was to assess the strength or vulnerability of coastlines and inland frontiers, and the suitability of routes that might be used by invaders and defenders. Assessment depended fundamentally on cartography, as well as on knowledge of military resources and their logistical support.
ID surveyors laboured unostentatiously on the ground to produce strategic and tactical maps, surpassed now only by satellite photographs. Beaver uses an 1882 “General Plan of the Defences of Alexandria” as his book’s frontispiece, in which every building in the city and its approaches is delineated in exquisite detail.
Navy and army commanders were able to deploy their limited forces just where they were most likely to be needed.
The bigger and richer the British empire became, of course, the more covetously it was appraised by ambitious neighbours, near and far. Of these, the most threatening rival expansionists were Russia and France. Beaver’s most revealing passages are about Russia’s suspected intention to attack India by way of Afghanistan and France’s grandiose plan to establish a cordon all the way across Africa from west to east, culminating in occupation of the upper Nile and, from there, control of Egypt.
The British government of India was strangely isolated in its paranoid fear of Russian invasion. Like some present-day strategists, there were militants in Calcutta who believed in the defensive benefits of pre-emptive attack. It took all of the ID’s growing persuasiveness to soothe India and its sympathisers in London. Intelligence reports showed that Russia had made no adequate provision to feed a large, slow-moving army through the rugged terrain of Afghanistan, and, as British invaders had found earlier in the 19th century, Afghanistan’s autonomous armed tribes in the mountains were practically unconquerable.
One wonders why the Soviet Union tried to overcome Afghanistan in the 20th century, and why the US and Britain are so slow to withdraw from Afghanistan today. Beaver’s book implicitly offers lessons for the CIA and MI6, and it made me wonder whether Queen Elizabeth II should update the honours she confers. The CBE, for instance, signifying a commander of the British Empire, might be renamed the CBN, a conservator of British nostalgia.
Patrick Skene Catling has written novels, and books for children
