Following a decorated stint as a smoke-screen artist in the trenches of the First World War, he’s in command of a gendarmerie, nicknamed Tudor’s Toughs, that opens fire in a Dublin stadium in 1920-an assault during a search for I.R.A. As the century turns, Tudor is battling Boers on the veldt then it’s back to India, and on to occupied Egypt.
He’s Churchill’s garrison-mate in Bangalore in 1895-a time of “messes and barbarism,” the future Prime Minister complained in a note to his mum. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways-child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass.
