Queen Victoria came to the throne of Great Britain on 20 June 1837, in one of those rare periods during her reign when her soldiers were not fighting on foreign soil – within three months Sir John Colborne was busily quelling rebellious Canadians.

The Queen gave her name to an era of sixty-four years when the wide spread of British rule brought Western-style civilization to an increasingly growing Empire. Chauvinism and nostalgia indicate it to be a great and glorious period of British history, when hardly a year passed without the Army being engaged in some far-flung corner of all five continents, fighting more than four hundred pitched battles in over sixty wars and campaigns, winning yet more territory for the Empire and embellishing the Crown in a manner so colourful as to conceal the purchasing price in human lives.

It was an age when, as Lord Elton wrote – “…it almost seemed any stray detachment of the British Army could be relied on, should occasion demand and almost as a matter of routine, to produce a junior officer capable of pacifying a frontier, quelling a rebellion, or improvising and administering an Empire.” Occasionally the British public’s emotions were aroused by news of a hard-pressed garrison being relieved; otherwise there was precious little stimulation in the bare details of small-scale and hard-fought affrays against fierce native foes and harsh tropical climates. Casualties were often relatively light, because the soldier was better-armed and disciplined, but up against a primitive and barbarous enemy unafraid of death, losses could be painfully heavy.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these ‘Small Wars’ were the men who fought them for Queen Victoria – the common soldier, the man-in-the-ranks, labeled by their champion Rudyard Kipling, as Ortheris, Mulvaney and Learoyd, to serve as an epitaph for them all. For much of the era they were reviled and scorned by the British public, gloating over the war correspondents colourful accounts which completely obscured the human purchasing-price when hastily-formed expeditions, unsuitably equipped, were sent to fight superior numbers of often fanatical warrior-races, fighting on their own familiar terrain.

Typical yet unique, each campaign was made notable by the men who fought them – the British Regular Soldier, grumblingly obeying orders and doing his duty against militant tribesmen on the rugged North West Frontier of India; subduing stubborn Boers, brave Maoris, wily Afghans or fierce and fanatical Dervishes; or battling against the organized military formations of Sikhs, Zulus, Russians and rebellious Indian Sepoys. None of this great variety of opponents fought in the same fashion and rarely was there any prior knowledge of their strength, weapons, fighting-ability, or methods of warfare.

In red coats or dusty khaki, men from every British shire and county marched in slow moving columns, where elephants jostled camels and bullocks plodded with donkeys and yaks, to a background clatter and jingle on the mule-carried mountain guns. Sometimes parties of boisterous straw-hatted sailors and Marines were landed from men-of-war, and under dashing leaders such as Lord Charles Beresford, dragged Gatling and Gardner guns through the sand of the Sudan and, treating camels like boats, caulked their huge sores with pitch.

In mitigation, perhaps the Regular forces had brutality, prejudice and ruthlessness thrust upon them by the imperative need to survive through sheer domination of the enemy under conditions of being grossly outnumbered, often physically inferior, affected detrimentally by alien climate and terrain, inadequately equipped for the prevailing conditions, and occasionally led by bad commanders. Sometimes it was engendered by British indignation and revulsion at the opponent’s natural barbarity and savagery, such as the Zulus’ ritual disemboweling of dead foes.