Chapter 15: The Last Campaign
In 1857, the Sepoy Rebellion, which many Englishmen may better know as the Indian Mutiny, began on the subcontinent. Against the numbers of the Indians, the British Colonial Army and the forces of the East India Company found themselves trapped and surrounded, a handful against a large and well-organized army that they themselves had trained. It was India’s first true gasp for freedom. The Punjabis and the West Indian Coalition under them declared their support for the rebels only days later and China, seeking to curb British influence in the region, also sent some support to the Sepoys. As Britain scrambled to reassert herself, sending thousands of soldiers and hundreds of ships to India, Halen saw a chance.
As early as April, 1857, Halen traveled to the French Court to petition Emperor Napoleon III for his immediate support of the rebellion. French influence, said Halen, would be vital to the success of the Sepoy Rebellion. As in the American Revolution some eighty years earlier, the Imperial Navy would hinder or stop the free flow of troops between the mainland and the colony, leaving the handful of East India Company soldiers and loyalists badly outnumbered against hundreds of thousand of mutineers and foreign troops. France, flush from her recent victories in Prussia, the Crimean, and Lombardia was eager to prove her strength against the old enemies.
While Halen’s voice held considerable sway in French courts and a word from the Emperor might have been enough to start a war, a word from Halen was not. France, nominally a constitutional government under the Emperor, dallied too long. The British parliament was faster to react. Seeking to put pressure on Halen himself, the UK declared my friend a criminal and a pirate in May, citing his breech of the St. Helena’s quarantine almost 40 years ago. We received this message while we were in Paris and in fact a courier delivered it to us in the presence of the Emperor. The crown’s influence was such that it effectively meant Halen could not travel by ship anywhere in the world and our finances might be impaired (though we had no assets in British banks). Britain hinted that they would rescind this declaration if Halen were to apologize for his past transgressions and “cease [his] agitation regarding India.”
I read this letter aloud to Halen as we met with the Emperor and his court in Louvre shortly after its receipt. I must say that I have never seen a plan backfire more thoroughly than this. At the mere mention of his uncle, Emperor Napoleon III flew into a rage, ranting that to refer to his imperial progenitor and his distinguished in such a flippant way and as nothing more than a bargaining block in negotiations - and to have sent the letter to his court - was nothing less than an insult against French honor. (I privately agreed, but did not interrupt him to say so.) I think that my good Emperor’s courtiers had rarely seen him so passionate about a single point before in his life and began agreeing with his ravings.
At the end of it, he told Halen that any place Napoleon had called home was sacred French soil (and indeed, France had purchased Longwood House from England some years earlier) and that this letter was a terrible provocation against both their honors. Even were India not an issue, he said, this alone would be enough to drive him to war. He asked Halen to take command of the French army, as he had done twice in the past, with the hopes of finally humbling Britain. On the 4th of May, 1857, France declared war against Great Britain with the intent of “restoring French honor” and supporting a rebellion in a country none of us had ever even seen.
Halen was placed in command of the French Army, about 300,000 men standing. I told Halen that I failed to see what good a land war against Britain would serve. In their fight against Germany, the UK had refused to so much as land a single company in the Netherlands, electing to remain in their preferred domain of the sea rather than confront Germany on land. Clearly, I said, Britain would not dare to land a force against the much more powerful France and against so dread a general as himself, particularly when the bulk of their forces were needed in India. He returned that he did not expect an invasion of France.
When I asked if he intended to allow the navy to fight the war for us, he said no. He intended to attack.
We consulted with the French Admiralty within the hour. As most of Britain’s fleet had been called away, they admitted that if action was taken quickly, they could plausibly hold the English Channel for a few hours or perhaps as long as a day before the Royal Navy was able to recall enough ships to the Channel to prevent such. However, they reported that the number of transport vessels available would not reasonably allow them to move the entire army - or even a large portion - across the Channel within that time period.
The admiralty estimated that Britain would immediately begin heavily patrolling the channel the moment the declaration of war was received and any infiltration attempt by sea was likely to be suicidal. We were forced to defer to their judgment. Halen devised a separate plan, and luckily mother nature obliged him, though we scrambled to do the same. That very evening, shortly after nightfall, a small number of handpicked corpsmen from HO Rifles crossed the English channel by balloon. We had been informed by the balloonist that this was an incredibly risky strategy, as the wind typically blew towards France and any number of things could easily go wrong. However, we also discovered that France had been considering exactly such a proposition since the Napoleonic Wars and the stormy seas made a crossing by small ship impossible.
The wind was willing, Our commandos launched from Cherbourg that evening and landed somewhere near Southamptom. From there, they executed Halen’s mission: proceeded to Portsmouth and burned every ship in the royal dockyards. When the French reconaissance spotted the flames, Halen ordered a much larger crossing. Though the bulk the French army had not yet prepared for a channel crossing, HO Rifles were accustomed to being ready to move at a moment’s notice, by sea or land, at Halen’s word. Our 18,000 soldiers were quickly shuttled across the channel, covered by the French Navy against a much diminished English one. Halen traveled with us, and we arrived in Dover on the evening of the 6th, just after nightfall with the guns still blazing all across the channel.
The war had only been on for two days and there was no force to meet us in Dover. I was aware that we had made the crossing fantastically quickly and that some combination of French organization and Halen’s ingenuity had moved into England at incredible speed. Even so, we had not a moment to lose. Halen’s plans, I knew, depended on speed. He had subscribed to the idea of a “fast war” -- that we would have to move so fast the English would not have time to hear the news before. Still, I did not see how we could possibly move faster than England’s messengers, as I was sure that the Royal Navy must have seen us crossing the channel and even assuming that England had no semaphores or light signals to speak of, I did not see how we could move faster than a courier on horseback.
To my shock, Halen ordered us not to march for London (as I had assumed we were going to London) but instead bid us march for the city of Dover. To my amazement, we found a half-dozen 2-2-2 Firefly locomotives with passenger cars waiting for us, with the group of commandos we had sent into the country two days earlier standing around them in plain clothes, grinning and welcoming us. I learned that Halen had deliberately chosen import men from our host who could masquerade as native English speakers and sent them over with suits and a large sum of money. After they had successfully executed their raid on the Portsmouth docks - to this day I don’t know how much damage their arson did. Afterwards, they had traveled east as quickly as they could. Apparently, Halen had previously instructed them in a story they would use to obtain locomotives: they were acting on behalf of an import/export company that worked in foodstuffs and produce, but the war had forced a small fleet of their ships back to the docks at Dover. To prevent the cargo from rotting on the docks, they needed to enlist several trains to meet them and ship it away as fast as possible. They hired several trains under this premise.
Of course, the English engineers quickly realized that we were not in fact here to transport foodstuffs, but overpowering them was no object and our own engineers (who Halen had the foresight to transport across the channel with us) assumed control of the trains while we restrained their proper crews. From there, we steamed straight to London. The trip took well under four hours by the speedy Fireflies and we arrived at King’s Cross Station a little after midnight, unchallenged and unopposed. We had reorganized on the trains and disembarked with our plans and objectives fresh in our minds and our maps close at hand.
We marched south from King’s Cross for about half an hour, perhaps a little less, along nearly deserted nighttime streets. Twice, we were challenged by patrolling bobbies, who seemed not to understand that we were an invading army and not some sort of riot. After we reached the Thames, we split into two forces: half of our unit would go with Halen to secure centers of the legislature and high government while the other half would neutralize centers of bureaucracy and the various ministry buildings.
I marched with Halen and the 1st HO’s Rifles to seize Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria’s residence, Westminister, the home of parliament, and 10 Downing Street, where then-Prime Minister Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston and the Chancellor of the Exechequer, and the Chief Whip resided. At Halen’s command, we first took Parliament (it was the middle of the night and the building was poorly guarded - we cleared the structure before posting sentries outside - there wasn’t much to do.) From there, Halen had us take Downing Street, but oddly he was more concerned with the 12th than the 10th. He entered 12 Downing Street with a contingent of his Own Rifles and emerged a few minutes later, apparently deep in thought. As we stormed 10 Downing Street and captured Temple, Halen seemed thoughtful and bid me send runners to rest of HO Rifles, which I did, though he did not tell me the message they bore.
From there, we at last marched to Buckingham Palace where we would fight our first battle in England - the first of many, as it happened. However, Halen kept his distance from the building and bid us not to engage the guards that surrounded it. Instead, he had us quietly encircle Wellington Barracks, concealing ourselves in nearby buildings, and told me he would not attack the Palace until at least 8 AM the following day - I had known Halen long enough not to ask why.
At 8 AM sharp, Halen ordered the attack to begin. To their credit, the Grenadier Guards billeted around the Palace did not surrender even as we vastly outnumbered them. We had positioned artillery around the palace as best we could in the night without alerting the guards and opened up shortly before the offensive, quickly destroying Wellington Barracks in its entirety -- I do not know how many of the Guards died when we brought that barracks down. I imagine it was many.
We finally overwhelmed the remaining Grenadier Guards at around 9 AM and stormed the Palace. Queen Victoria was not in residence, Halen told us as we took the building. She was in Edinborough. However, he said, the seizure of her residence would be a tremendous blow to British pride. After posting our own guard units (including heavy artillery in the palace proper), Halen departed for Westminister with the rest of our unit.
During the half-mile march there, we passed through now crowded and busy streets that had been totally vacant only hours ago. Halen had decided to fly the French flag and the gray-striped banner - the standard of HO Rifles. I know passersbys could not quite seem to understand what they were seeing. Some stared in loose-jawed awe. The idea of us marching through London unopposed seemed impossible to them. Impossible? No more impossible than us marching through Paris, or Brussels, or Amsterdam, or Berlin, or Rome, or Athens, or Vienna, or Krakow, or St. Petersburg, or any other city that was once thought invulnerable.
When we reached Westminster, I finally asked Halen why he had chosen to wait until 8 AM to begin the attack. He explained as we entered the building of Parliament that the chief whip had told him a vote was scheduled for 7 AM that morning - early for strategy reasons. As London had not appeared to be in any danger at 7 AM and the British army had not yet realized we were in London, it had been a simple matter to capture the MPs as they had entered the building. Ironically, the vote had been on the India Act, designed to commit more troops abroad.
Indeed, as we entered we found that HO Rifles had taken hundreds prisoner in their own capitol. However, Halen did not seem happy. He called for various officers (who arrived promptly) and, in a commandeered boardroom, explained that our situation was dire. The British home army, he said, was sixty thousand men including the Queen’s Guard (some of whom we had smashed that very morning), but Britain could easily mobilize as many as a hundred thousand soldiers in the home islands without trouble. Though most would not arrive in London for some time, some of these units could easily constitute inside the city itself, which we did not have the manpower to fully occupy. We would be fighting partisans immediately, he told us.
Moreover, local supply would not last us more than a few weeks and we had no secure supply lines from France. We had arrived here by Dover, he said, but the eighty miles from Dover to Westminister were not secure. Last, we could expect no reinforcements. If we stayed in London, we would be attempting to occupy and fortify a hostile city against the steepest odds we had ever faced, my friend said gravely, the enemy being one of the finest armies in the world. 18,000 against 168,000, I had to admit, were worse even than our battles at Ganja.
Halen concluded that the city was indefensible in the long run (and if Halen said that a city was indefensible, it was indefensible). He ordered to us to prepare to withdraw from the city, scorching as went, because otherwise we would be forced from. Sure enough, no sooner had the local populace realized that we were trying to occupy the city than partisans began to engage us. Angry rioters congregated outside of our hardpoints and formed a handful of small milita cells that we managed to suppress as we executed our general’s orders.
By Halen’s orders, we were to scorch the city as we went. We gathered all the fuel and incindiaries we could commandeer on short order and set fire to Westminster, Buckingham Palace, and the other various centers of government and bureaucracy including the houses on Downing Street, as well as several garrisons and armories. The buildings had burned to their frames by midday and we evacuated the city and began a frantic march south, having destroyed the centers of the British empire and staggered the nation. I knew that from the moment forward, the Empire would never cease to hunt us.
I remember picking up a newspaper dropped in the street as we fled London. The headline, dated today, read “France Declares War,” a headline two days out of date even at the time. The evening editions of the papers would have a very different title.
We marched south, back to Dover, over the course of a day where we seized the city and the beach with ease and rested for the first time in almost three days - France was able to get a small group of supply ships through to us on the 9th and we rearmed and took on what rations we could. We also received a letter for Halen from Emperor Louis-Napoleon, who congratulated him on the burning of London. We sent back a number of prisoners we had taken in London (including the Prime Minister Henry Temple), Halen corresponded with a message to the French forces on the continent and told us we were to march west along the coast with all available speed, burning as many dockyards as we could and denying their use to the Royal Navy.
Our campaign along the English coast would take us as far west as Cornwall, and our efforts on the land combined with those of the Imperial Navy at sea succeeded in establishing French dominance in the channel by early June, and brought us as far west as Cornwall. This significantly improved our supply situation, as French supply ships could now regularly make the crossing, but it also brought us the dire news that the French army would not be able to join us in England for at least another month. Unlike our haphazard piling into every ship we could find in France, the French army would need proper transports and supplies and all that that they insisted on, and while the French Navy (now joined by the Belgian, Spanish, and Italian navies) was confident they could hold the channel, time was not on our side.
The wait might not have been terrible had it not been for dire news from our reconaissance teams. Britains’ home army had been joined with newly mobilized troops. Though we had overestimated their ability to draft new conscripts, particularly after we had burned the London armories and captured the Prime Minister, more than a hundred thousand British soldiers were bearing down on us in Cornwall. I told Halen that we might consider retreat from England, crossing back across the channel and returning when it suited us, but he rejected the idea. Every available element of the French navy had to be devoted to the channel crossing, he said, rather than rescuing a force of our size or else they might not managed the true invasion by the time the bulk of the royal navy (which had been called away to India and China for the Sepoy Rebellion and the Opium conflict) returned.
That left the question of where to make our stand. I had suggested that with our greater maneuverability we could outrun the British army, but Halen soon told me that they had encircled us in a broad loop and were closing, making escape impossible without a breakout.
Halen chose the place to make our stand as Bude, a place between Devon and Cornwall where I saw we could take up defensive positions behind the nearby Tamar River and neighboring canal system. We had more than a week to dig in (which involved some raids into nearby Wales for specific supplies that Halen requested). Then, we waited.
The British army crossed the Tamar River further south than our lines and advanced north to our positions near Red Post. Halen had anticipated this. When the British force had neared to just two days away from us, he called a conference among all HO Rifles.
He said the following: “I need a thousand men willing to die by my side.”
Practically every man in the field raised his hand. In the end, a mix of veterans from the first and second HO Rifles marched with Halen down towards the enemy, down Holsworthy road towards Littlebridge Wharf. He said that they would meet the enemy tomorrow, while we took positions in the hills to the west, overlooking the road. I pleaded with Halen not to go, telling him that even if he lured the British forces into this ambush we could not possibly destroy them as we did not have enough ammunition - he said that he would go, because he knew he could lure them into the trap. I then begged him to let me come with him; he said no to this as well, saying that HO Rifles would still need a general, and gave me both general’s stars and custody of Belli. Then he gave me a very specific set of orders.
The British Home army marched north up the road to Red Post, where they believed our emplacements to be, only to find a small encampment of our soldiers apparently unawares in the road. They quickly surrounded the emplacement and the rifles Halen had taken with him sprang up, as if they had no idea they would be attacked, and hastily formed into a makeshift defensive line. Halen himself took to the center of the circle and raised a flag of truce, shouting that he wished to speak to the British commanding officer under terms of parley. This much I could see from my secret position in the hills above the road.
What happened next I know only from the account of a survivor.
The British army, marching nearly a kilometer long, collapsed into this small region wishing to see Halen - the man who had burned London, their ultimate enemy - as their commander rode up from the rear to speak to him. The British general was Lester Gough, a brash young man and a hopeless incompetent - but the only general in the home islands who they had been able to recall on such short notice. Gough rode forward on a white stallion, mustache flopping ridiculously in the wind, to gawk at Halen himself. He met Halen at the makeshift line under the principles of a truce and gloated.
Gough said that he was surprised to have found such a valuable criminal and pirate so easily. Halen replied that he had been found only because he wanted to be found. Gough laughed and returned that this was mere posturing on Halen’s part, and that the latter had been caught because he had not known the British had crossed the river to the south and believed that they had the run of the western bank. Halen said that this was not the case, and this was, in fact, a trap and his own army was not far. Gough laughed again and said that this was the worst bluff he had ever heard and that there would be no peace negotiation.
Halen said there would be. Gough replied that Halen had two choices: he and his men would surrender or they would execute Halen on the spot. Halen returned that they could not execute a general who had approached them under flag of truce, Gough shot back that Halen was not a general but a rat; Halen replied the truce could then be considered broken.
The last words my source quoted exactly:
“Will you surrender then?” asked Gough.
Halen then turned away from Gough. He stared up at the trees, exactly at where I was then concealed. Where Halen knew I would.
“No,” Halen said.
I could read his lips through my binoculars. That had been the signal. With a tick of my finger, I gave an order - our signal corps sent a flare a second later and a moment after that, our engineering team station inside Littlebridge Wharf, the largest reservoir in the southern UK, detonated more than a ton of nitroglycerin we had confiscated from Welsh coal mines over the last week. The boom was loud enough to hear in Devon, I’m told. A tidal wave of water, high as a mountain, crashed down over the entire home army of Britain, more than a hundred and fifty thousand men swept away. I saw Halen at the moment before that wave hit. His face was one of absolute calm, and he was simply staring at the sky.
The water tossed soldiers like toys, and it took more than half an hour for the current to fall low enough for men to wade through. It was then I ordered the dragoons out to search for survivors, who were scattered all along the river for miles down. The British were still there, in their tens of thousands, but they were no longer an army. Those few with the will left to fight us could not: their gunpowder had been soaked useless by the flood, and they were forced to surrender or die with a knife in hand. We captured more than a hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that day, the rest having died or scattered. The Dragoons found General Lester Gough, alive but battered. There was no sign of Halen.
They brought Gough to me, for Halen had left me in command of Halen’s rifles. I was disgusted at the sight of him - this foul creature who had insulted Halen, for whom Halen had traded his own life. I, sitting on Halen’s own horse wearing the general’s stars that Halen had given me, felt the anger of it all come crashing down and I ordered Gough hanged. The HO Rifles were about to do as I ordered when a very familiar voice said, “Don’t.”
I whipped around and I saw Halen standing there, haggered and bruised, his hair soaked and perhaps whiter than it had been when we had set out, but he was alive. He turned to Gough and asked, “Will you surrender then?”
Gough was speechless.
Halen looked out over the valley, where we had rounded up a hundred thousand surrendered troops that we didn’t know what to do with. He then turned to me and said,
“I can fix this, but I will need a horse.”
Smiling, I dismounted from Belli and handed the reins to Halen, who climbed on and rode out. With the dragoons at his back, he went out into the British lines and spoke to the prisoners, to my amazement, and when he returned any idea they might have ever had of additional rebellion seemed to be gone. That was one of Halen’s many powers. When I asked him what he had told them, he simply said:
“I said that we are not here for their Queen or their country or their liberty. We are here on behalf of millions half a world away who merely want to be free, as they are. I have fought many men on many fields, many times in their own countries, but it has never been for the cause of tyranny.”
Before our victory was complete, there was one final hurdle to overcome.
Little more than a week later, an emissary arrived from the provisional British goverment (which had returned to London) with a message for Halen. He did not bring a surrender, as we had hoped, or even terms of peace. Instead he said to Halen that the British government was prepared to make Halen an offer: if he agreed to switch sides in the conflict and join the British, the crown would drop all charges against him and recompense him with one million pounds sterling -- a staggering figure. It is one of the few times I have seen Halen scowl. He told the emissary, “You cannot purchase my loyalty, only my interest.” With that, he sent the man away.
Strangely, it was not the last time I saw him. The man was caught by our sentries trying to sneak into the camp that same night. As Halen was asleep, he was brought to me. The man, once he could see me said that he understood Halen was a madman and would not see reason, but if I could sway the opinion of HO Rifles, Britain would compensate each man in the company with 100 pounds Sterling and give me a consideration of 100,000 pounds.
It is one of the few times in my life that I have literally seen red, my vision turning the color of my rage.
I yelled at him that we were not mercenaries. “Halen did not buy our loyalty!” I screamed. “He won it! In Denmark and Switzerland and Belgium and Finland and Poland and Germany and Greece, at Ganja and at St. Petersburg and at Dusseldorf and Kiel and Chancha Rayada and a hundred other fields I can hardly name!” With that, I ordered the man hanged as a spy and this time, there was no Halen to intervene. When my friend found out the following morning, he said nothing, but he smiled ever so slightly when I told him what I had said.
When the French Army arrived in July, we occupied much of the British Home Islands before the crown (the functions of government had defaulted heavily to the queen with the loss of the democratically elected representatives) finally agreed to a peace treaty. Without the support of the home islands and the Royal Navy, the British Army in India was overrun by the Sepoys and their Chinese and Punjabi confederates. The British general in India, one David Hamilton, was one of the few that Halen said he respected. I am told that Hamilton’s last words before his surrender were, “Out of ammunition. God Save the Queen.” India was recognized as independent nation shortly thereafter and the princely states agreed to annexation by a single unified government in the subcontinent.
Halen was not kind to the UK at the bargaining table in the Treaty of London. After our second capture of the British Capital, he insisted that Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Ireland be released from British rule. The British had no choice but to agree.
We were welcomed back to France as heroes, and we dined with Emperor Napoleon III in the Louvre Palace. It was only during our dinner with the Emperor that I noticed Halen was coughing. He fell seriously ill two weeks later - pneumonia, the doctors said, likely from his time in the flood. We returned to Switerland where he drafted his will in my presence.
Halen died on September 2nd, 1857.
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Halen's Personal Information:
Followers: ~18,000 (2 brigades of guards, 2 brigades of artillery, 2 brigades of dragoons)
Title and Honors: Protector of Denmark and Switzerland, Liberator of Belgium, Finland, Poland, Ukraine, and India, Grand Croix Legion of Honor (France), Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer (Greece), Grand Cross of the Order of Leopold (Austria), Knight of the Royal Order of the Seraphim (Scandavia), Defender of Christendom (Papacy), Order of the White Eagle (Poland), Royal Order of Saint George (Bavaria), Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold (Belgium), Order of St. Hubertus (Germany), Peacemaker (Various)
Notable Campaigns:
Danish-Holstein Campaign (1836-1839)
Belgian Campaign (1839-1840)
Greek Campaign (1841-1843)
Finnish Campaign (1844-1845)
Second Carlist War (1847)
Italian Campaign (1848)
Polish Campaign (1849)
Magdeburg Campaign (1850)
Partition Campaign (1851-1852)
German Campaign (1853-1854)
Second Crimean War (1855-1856)
British Campaign (1857)
So I posted this very shortly before midnight PST. That counts as today, right?
By the way, I’m not British, in case you couldn’t tell. I’m American.
There will be one more post - an epilogue. Also, I wrote about 8,000 words today between Ambition and Shadow of the Andes. Remind me never to do that again. I hope the quality of this work didn't decline with the quantity.
