Читать книгу Gentlemen Rovers - E. Alexander Powell - Страница 5

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The pitiless Indian sun had poured down upon the Hyderabad maidan until its sandy surface glowed like a stove at white heat. Drawn up in motionless ranks, which stretched from end to end of the great parade-ground, was a division of cavalry: squadron after squadron of scarlet-coated troopers on sleek and shining horses; row after row of brown and bearded faces peering stolidly from under the white turbans. The rays of the sun danced and sparkled upon ten thousand lance-points; the feeble breeze picked up ten thousand pennons and fluttered them into a white-and-scarlet cloud. Now and then the silence would be broken by a clash of steel as a horse tossed its head or a sowar stirred uneasily in his saddle. Sitting a white Arab, a score of paces in advance of the foremost rank, very stiff and soldierly in his gorgeous uniform, was a tall young man whose ruddy cheeks and pleasant eyes looked strangely out of place in so Oriental a setting.

From somewhere within the city walls a bugle spoke shrilly and was answered by another and then another, each nearer than the one preceding. The young man in the splendid uniform barked an order, and men and horses stiffened into rigidity as sharply as though an electric current had gone through them. Through the twin-towered gateway of the city advanced a procession, colorful as a circus, dazzling as a durbar. The two figures who rode at the head of the glittering cortege formed an almost startling contrast. One of them answered in every detail the popular conception of an Asiatic potentate: haughty of manner, portly of person, with a clear, dark skin and wonderfully piercing eyes and a great black beard, spreading fan-wise upon his breast. An aigret of diamonds flashed and scintillated in his flame-colored turban; rubies, large as robin's eggs, gleamed in his ears, and hanging from his neck over his pale blue surtout was a rope of pearls which would have roused the envy of an empress. His companion, to whom he paid marked attention, was equally noticeable, though in quite a different fashion: a lean, smooth-shaven, lantern-jawed man, still in the middle thirties, very cold and reserved of manner, with a great beak of a nose and a jaw like a granite crag. It did not need the cocked hat and gold epaulets of a British general to mark him as a soldier.

As the cortege cantered onto the maidan the massed bands of the cavalry burst into a wild, barbaric march, brass and kettle-drums crashing together in stirring discord. The strains ceased as abruptly as they began, and the youthful commander, rising in his stirrups, shot his blade into the air and called in a voice like a trumpet:

"Cheers for his Highness!"

And back came a guttural roar from ten thousand throats:

"Long live the Nizam!"

Obviously gratified at the warmth of his greeting, the ruler of the Deccan wheeled his horse and came cantering up to the cavalryman, whose sword flashed in salute.

"Boyd Sahib," he said, "you are a veritable magician. You turn ryots into soldiers as readily as a fakir turns a stone into bread. Your men are admirable. I congratulate you on their appearance."

Then, turning to his taciturn companion:

"Sir Arthur Wellesley, permit me to present to you Boyd Sahib, commander of my cavalry and my trusted friend. General Boyd," he added, glancing at the Englishman with a malicious smile, "is a very brilliant soldier—and an American."

Thus met, when the nineteenth century was still in its swaddling-clothes, two extraordinary men: Sir Arthur Wellesley, who in later years, as the Duke of Wellington, was to gain undying fame by conquering Napoleon; and General John Parker Boyd, an American soldier of fortune, who rendered most gallant service to his own people, but whose very name has been forgotten by them.

Jack Boyd, as his boyhood companions in Newburyport used to call him, was born with the spirit of adventure strong within him. Almost before he had graduated from dresses to knee-trousers he would linger about the wharfs of the quaint old town, drinking in the stories of strange places and stranger doings told him by the seafarers who were wont to congregate along the water-front, or staring wistfully at the big, black merchantmen about to sail for foreign parts. He was wont to say that it was a perverse and unkind fate which caused him to be born in so inauspicious a year as 1764, for, though there was no more ardent youngster in all New England, his youth caused the recruiting sergeants of the Continental Army to whom he applied for enlistment to pat him on the shoulder and remark encouragingly: "Come again, son, when you're a few years older."

Thus it was that he saw unroll before him that marvellous moving-picture of the birth of a nation, which began on the greensward at Lexington and ended before the British lines at Yorktown, without being able to play any greater part in those stirring events than does a spectator in the thrilling scenes which he pays his five cents to see depicted on a screen. Indeed, a twelve-month passed after the last British soldier left our shores before young Boyd achieved the ambition of his life by obtaining an ensign's commission in the 2d Regiment of Foot and donned the blue coat and buff breeches of an officer in the American army. Although within a year he had been promoted to lieutenant, his was not the temperament which could long endure the monotony of garrison life, with its unending round of guard-mounting and small-arms practice and company drill. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that before the gold braid on his lieutenant's uniform had time to tarnish he had handed in his papers and had booked passage on an East Indiaman sailing out of Boston for Madras. The year 1788, then, saw this youngster of four-and-twenty landed on the coast of Coromandel, poor in acquaintances and pocket but rich in adventurousness and pluck.

He could have taken his military talents to no better market, for at this period of India's troubled history a brilliant career awaited a man whose wits were as sharp as his sword. The last quarter of the eighteenth century found all India ablaze with racial and religious hatred. Wars were as frequent as strikes are in the United States. Though the French were still supreme in the south of the peninsula, the English power was steadily rising in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. There were really two distinct struggles in progress: the English were fighting the French and the Hindus were fighting the Mohammedans. The most powerful of the native princes at this time were the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Peishwa, as the ruler of the Mahratta tribes was called—both of whom had, for reasons of policy, espoused the English cause—and Tippoo Sahib, the son of a Mohammedan military adventurer who had made himself Sultan of Mysore, who was an ally of the French. Ranged on the one side, then, were the British, with their allies, the Nizam and the Peishwa, while opposed to them were the French and Tippoo of Mysore. All of the reigning princes of India maintained extensive military establishments, and soldiers of fortune found at their courts rapid promotion and lavish pay. When Boyd landed in India he was confronted with the problem which of the rival causes he should make his own, and it speaks well for his sagacity and foresight that he promptly decided to offer his services to the allies of the English, for at that time most students of politics, in India and out of it, believed that the future of the peninsula was to be Gallic rather than Anglo-Saxon.

From Madras Boyd made his way on horseback to the Mahratta country, where his attractive personality and soldierly appearance so impressed the Peishwa that he gave the young American the command of a cavalry brigade of fifteen hundred men. Boyd was now in possession of the raw material for which he had hankered, and he forthwith proceeded to show his extraordinary skill in welding, tempering, and sharpening it. From daybreak until dark his camp resounded to the call of bugles, the words of command, and the clatter of galloping hoofs. He hammered his men into shape as a blacksmith hammers a bar of iron, until they combined the inflexible discipline of Prussian foot-guards with the mobility and endurance of Texas rangers. His chance to test the quality of his handiwork came in 1790, when Tippoo Sultan, failing in his attempt to bring on a renewal of the war between England and France, turned loose his hordes and overran the land. In the three years' war which followed, the British, under Lord Cornwallis, who was striving to regain in India the reputation he had lost at Yorktown, were aided by the Mahrattas and the Nizam, who were induced by fear and jealousy to join in the struggle against their powerful neighbor. Thus Opportunity knocked sharply on Boyd's door. Commanding a body of as fine horsemen as ever threw leg across saddle, his name quickly became a synonym for audacity and daring. Riding, wholly without support, into the very heart of Tippoo's dominions, he would strike a series of paralyzing blows, burn a dozen towns, capture or destroy immense stores of ammunition, exact a huge indemnity, and be back in his own territory again before any troops could be brought up to oppose him. Boyd's flying columns played no small part, indeed, in the campaign which ended in 1792 with the defeat of Tippoo—a defeat for which the Sultan had to pay by ceding half his dominions, paying an indemnity of three thousand lacs of rupees (one hundred million dollars), and giving his two sons as hostages for his future good behavior.

Boyd, meanwhile, had never let slip an opportunity for improving his knowledge of Hindustani and its kindred dialects or familiarizing himself with the complex conditions, racial, religious, and political, which prevailed in Hindustan. Realizing that the Mahratta power was on the wane, he resigned from the service of the Peishwa, and, bearing letters of the highest commendation from that ruler to the British envoy at the court of the Nizam, he turned his horse's head toward Hyderabad. In a letter to his father, written at this time, he says: "On my arrival I was presented to his Highness in form by the English consul. My reception was as favorable as my most sanguine wishes had anticipated. After the usual ceremony was over he presented me with the command of two kansolars of infantry, each of which consists of five hundred men." Continuing, he described in detail the army of the Nizam, which at that time consisted of one hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thousand cavalry, and five hundred elephants, each of which bore a "castle" containing a nabob and his attendants. Can't you picture the scene when that letter, with its strange foreign postmarks, reached the old brick house in the quaint New England town; how the parents read and re-read that message from the son who was adventuring in foreign parts, and how the neighbors dropped in of evenings to hear the latest news of the boy they all knew, who was carving out a career with his sword half the world away? Success is, after all, a rather tasteless thing if there are no home folks to rejoice in it.

Fortuna, that capricious beauty whose favor so many brave men have sought in vain, seemed to have lost her heart to the stalwart American, for in 1799, when Tippoo and his savage soldiery once more broke loose and swept across the peninsula, leaving a trail of corpses and burning villages behind them, the Nizam, recalling the tales he had heard of Boyd's exploits as a cavalry leader, gave him the command of a division of ten thousand turbaned troopers. Nor did the fair goddess desert him even when he was captured by a body of Mysore horsemen, taken before Tippoo Sahib himself, and, upon his stoutly refusing to turn traitor to the Nizam, condemned to death by torture. And the torturers of the tyrant of Mysore bore a most evil reputation. Overpowering the sentries who were set to guard him, he succeeded in making his way, thanks to his fluency in Hindustani, through the enemy's lines, rejoining the Nizam's forces in time to take part in the storming of the Sultan's capital of Seringapatam, Tippoo being killed in a hand-to-hand struggle after a last stand at the city gates. Thus died, as he would have wished—with his boots on—the most dangerous adversary with whom Britain had to contend in the winning of her Eastern empire.

The death of Tippo-Sahib at the storming of Seringapatam. From a painting by R. de Moraine.

Early in the nineteenth century Boyd, who, as the result of the generous rewards he had received from his royal employers, had by this time become possessed of considerable means, left the service of the Nizam, much against the wishes of that monarch, and organized an army of his own. Numerically, it wasn't much of an army, as armies go, having at no time exceeded two thousand men, but it was as businesslike a force as ever responded to a bugle. Boyd, whose reputation as a cavalry leader extended from Bengal to Malabar, had the horsemen of all India to draw from, and he recruited nothing but the best, the men with whom he filled his ranks being as hard as nails and as keen as razors. His second in command was an Irish soldier of fortune named William Tone, a brother of Wolf Tone, the famous rebel patriot.

As Boyd reckoned on counterbalancing the smallness of his force by its extreme mobility, he adopted the novel expedient of transporting his artillery on the backs of elephants, thus making it possible for the guns to keep pace with the cavalry even on his whirlwind raids, for an elephant, though burdened with a field-piece and half a dozen soldiers, can put mile after mile behind it at a swinging, ungainly gait which it will tax any horse to maintain. Military history presents no more fantastic picture than that of this sun-tanned Yankee adventurer spurring across an Indian countryside with a brigade of beturbaned lancers and a score or so of lumbering elephants, the muzzles of brass field-guns frowning from their howdahs, tearing along behind him. What a pity that the folk in Newburyport could not have seen him!

The entire outfit—elephants, horses, cannon, and weapons—was Boyd's personal property, and he rented it to those princes who had need of and were able to pay for its service precisely as a garage rents an automobile. The prices he obtained for it were enormous, and ere long he became a wealthy man. From one end of the country to the other he led his scarlet-coated mercenaries, selling their services in turn to his former employers, the Nizam and the Peishwa, and to the rulers of Gwalior and Indore. When a force was needed for a particularly desperate service or for a hopeless hope they sent for Boyd. And he always delivered the goods. Fighting was going on everywhere, and he never lacked employment. But he was far too discerning not to recognize the fact that the power of England was steadily, if slowly, increasing, and that her complete domination of India, which could not much longer be delayed, must inevitably put an end to independent soldiering as a profitable profession. In 1808, therefore, he sold his army, elephants and all, to Colonel Felose, a Neapolitan who had seen service under many flags, and with misted eyes and a choking throat for the last time rode along the lines of his faithful troopers. A few days later he set sail for Paris, for, with the Corsican's star high in the heavens, there seemed no better place for such a man to seek adventure and advancement. Disappointed in his hope of obtaining a commission under the Napoleonic eagles, he turned his face toward home, and in 1810, after an absence of more than twenty years, he felt the cobblestones of his native Newburyport beneath his feet once more.

Boyd's adventurous career under his own flag and in the service of his own people forms quite another though a scarcely less thrilling story. Trained and experienced officers being in those days few and far between, the government offered him the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of Infantry, which he promptly accepted, displaying such energy in drilling his men that when his regiment marched through the streets of Boston on its way to Pittsburg the local papers commented editorially on the smartness of its appearance. When William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Territory of Indiana (which included the present States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), realizing the imperative necessity of smashing the great Indian confederation which Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior-statesman, was so painstakingly building to oppose the white man's further progress westward, called for troops to do the business, Boyd put his men on flat-boats, floated them down to the falls of the Ohio, and marched them overland to Vincennes, his dusty, footsore column tramping into Harrison's stockaded headquarters almost before that veteran frontiersman had realized that they had started. Boyd was in direct command, under Harrison, of the little expeditionary force of nine hundred men throughout the whirlwind campaign which culminated on a drizzling November morning in 1811 on the banks of the Tippecanoe River. Tippecanoe was, I suppose, the only battle which our army ever fought in high hats, for the absurd uniform of the American infantry, discarded a few months later, consisted of blue, brass-buttoned tail-coats, skin-tight pantaloons, and "stovepipe" hats with red, white, and blue cockades. Though taken by surprise and outnumbered six to one, Boyd's soldiery showed the result of their training by standing like a stone wall against the onset of the whooping redskins, pouring in a volley of buckshot at close range which left the hordes of warriors wavering, undecided whether to come on or to retreat. At this psychological moment Boyd ordered up the squadron of dragoons which he had been holding in reserve for just such an opportunity. "Right into line!" he roared in the voice which had resounded over so many fields in far-off Hindustan. "Trot! Gallop! Charge! Hip, hip, here we go!" It was the charge of the cavalry, delivered with all the smashing suddenness with which a boxer delivers a solar-plexus blow, which did the business. The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets and streaming plumes of horsehair, broke and ran. Tippecanoe was won; Harrison was started on the road which was to end in the White House; the peril of Tecumseh's Indian confederation was ended forever, and the civilization of the West was advanced a quarter of a century.

The battle of Tippecanoe. From a print in the New York Public Library.

In the following year, upon the outbreak of our second war with England, Boyd, who had been commissioned a brigadier-general, commanded a division of Wilkinson's army in the abortive American invasion of Upper Canada, and, on November 11, 1813, fought the drawn battle of Chrysler's Field. "Taps" were sounded to his picturesque career on October 4, 1830. He died, not as he would have wished, sword in hand at the head of charging squadrons, but quite peacefully in his bed, holding the prosaic position of port officer of Boston, to which post he had been appointed by that other gallant fighter, President Andrew Jackson. As the end approached I doubt not that in mind he was far away from the brick and plaster of the New England city, and that his thoughts harked back to those mad, glad days when he and his lancers rode across the plains of Hindustan and his elephants rocked and rolled behind him.