Читать книгу Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914 - Richard Holmes - Страница 12

IT WAS TRADE, not any abstract concept of empire, that took the British to India in the first place. In 1600 a royal charter was granted to ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East Indies’. Queen Elizabeth I signed the document at a time when the national economy was expanding rapidly, and was to be spared the worst aspects of decline that affected some of her commercial rivals like France, Spain and Holland. However, although there is a measure of truth in the image of the bold Elizabethan sea dog, it was actually the Portuguese and then the Dutch who made the running in the East, and the foundation of the East India Company marked a belated realisation that English merchants required the government’s backing if they were to succeed.

The Company had to gain the Mughal emperor’s permission to establish a trading base at Surat on the north-west coast. Its first negotiations with the court, then at Agra, were easily seen off by the Portuguese, long resident there. Although King James I’s representative, William Hawkins, apparently did better in 1609–11, when the Company’s fleet arrived off Surat it was rebuffed. In 1613, violence succeeded where diplomacy had failed, and two of the Company’s ships, moored downstream from Surat, drove off a Portuguese attack and traded successfully. The English went on to win a larger engagement two years later. This encouraged the emperor, who had relied on surrogate Portuguese sea power to defend his coasts, to grant the Company a firman allowing it to trade within his dominions.

The Company was still not on a smooth path to success. The Dutch remained dominant further east, and in 1623 they tortured and then murdered several traders at Amboina: compensation was not forthcoming until the 1650s after Oliver Cromwell’s military success against the Dutch. Nor was the state of English politics helpful. The early Stuarts, well aware of the contribution made by the Company to their straitened finances, did their best to support it, but the Company went through a very difficult period during and after the Civil War, emerging with a new charter in 1657. It made steady progress for the rest of the century, with Bombay replacing Surat as its main trading centre on the west coast in 1664, and the establishment of two other centres at Calcutta (1696) and Madras (1693) on the east coast, the basis of the three presidencies that were to form British India.

Yet the Company was still not secure. Unwise leadership took it to war with the Mughal empire, followed by a humiliating and costly climb-down. Domestic opposition to its monopoly saw changes which first created a new English India Company in 1698 and then, in 1709, saw the merger of the old and new into a United Company of Merchants Trading to the East Indies. It was now the Honourable East India Company, Jan Kampani, or ‘the Valiant Company’ to its Indian subjects, and thus ‘John Company’ to all and sundry. The Company became increasingly prosperous almost at once. Its armed merchantmen, with a broad buff stripe around their black hulls, were berthed at Howland Great Dock at Deptford, and underwent repair at the Company’s dockyard at Blackwall. They flew the Company’s distinctive red and white striped ensign, which first had the cross of St George in its upper canton and, from 1707, replaced this with the union flag.⁴⁴ John Company’s headquarters, India House, in Leadenhall Street in the City of London, had long boasted a facade with the Company’s arms and suitable nautical iconography. In the 1720s this was given a new facade in the very best of classical taste: the Company had come of age at last.

Between 1709 and 1748 lucrative trade with the three presidencies grew steadily, with Calcutta rapidly forging ahead, partly because its hinterland, securely under Mughal rule, was comparatively stable, and in 1717 the emperor had granted the Company a firman allowing it to trade in Bengal without paying customs, all for a small annual payment of 3,000 rupees.⁴⁵ Madras, in addition, sent Indian fabrics to Indonesia and received spices in return, and began to act as a staging post for trade in tea and porcelain from China. During the period the Company was not simply a reliable source of dividends to its shareholders. As a condition of its new charter it lent the government over £3 million, its annual sales of £2 million were a fifth of Britain’s imports, and taxes on this trade were an important source of national revenue.

Then, between 1748 and 1763, the picture changed dramatically. The Company had already raised its own military forces, though on a small scale, and during the War of Austrian Succession in the 1740s there had been battles between the Company’s troops and those maintained by its French rival, the Compagnie des Indes. A lasting relic of French recruitment of sepoys (itself stemming from sipahi, the Persian for soldier) was the word pultan, Indian for regiment, derived from the French peloton.46 But during the Seven Years’ War there was far more fighting. This was partly because, as in the previous conflict, rivalries initiated in Europe spilled overseas, and partly because the new Nawab of Bengal, Suraj-ud-Daula (ostensibly the emperor’s provincial governor, but in fact a quasi-independent ruler), had his own axe to grind and took on the Company, capturing Calcutta in June 1756. He had 146 of his European captives imprisoned in a cell in which 123 died overnight from heat and lack of oxygen. This episode, the infamous ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’, aroused a national revulsion exceeding even that inspired by the Amboina massacre over a century before.

Calcutta was recaptured by a force led by Admiral Watson and Colonel Robert Clive. But the crucial Red Bridge Fort was actually taken by:

… one Strahan, a common sailor belonging to [HMS] Kent, having just been served with a quantity of grog, had his spirits too much elevated to take any rest; he therefore strayed by himself towards the fort, and imperceptibly got under the walls; being advanced thus far without interruption, he took it into his head to scale at a breach that had been made by the cannon of the ships; and having luckily got upon the bastion, he discovered several men sitting on the platform, at whom he flourished his cutlass, and fired his pistol, and then, after having given three loud huzzas, cried out ‘the place is mine’.⁴⁷

An exasperated soldier, no doubt looking forward to a bloody storm or dignified surrender, complained that: ‘The place was taken without the least honour to any one.’

Like so many of the paladins of British India, Robert Clive himself was not without controversy. He had sailed for India in 1743 as a writer, the most junior species of the Company’s civil service, and tried to kill himself during a fit of depression, but his pistol missed fire (there were times when the flintlock’s unreliability could be an advantage). He transferred to the Company’s military arm and in 1751 did much to frustrate French attempts to seize Madras, holding the little town of Arcot in a fifty-day siege. He reverted to the Company’s civil service once again, and then returned to England, where his extravagant lifestyle and a botched attempt to buy his way into Parliament made him many enemies. He was back in India in 1755, intent on recovering both fortune and reputation.

He did both by beating Suraj-ud-Daula at Plassey on 23 June 1757. On the face of it Clive was hopelessly outnumbered. The Nawab of Bengal had perhaps 35,000 infantry and 15,000 cavalry, with fifty guns and as many French gunners, and Clive had some 3,000 men, just one-third of them British, and ten guns. One of his men watched the enemy deploy:

what with the number of elephants all covered with scarlet cloth and embroidery; their horse with their drawn swords glittering in the sun; their heavy cannon drawn by vast trains of oxen; and their standards flying, they made a most pompous and formidable appearance.⁴⁸

Formidable in appearance, but, like many big Indian armies, less so in effect. Clive had suborned the nawab’s subordinates, and the battle became an artillery duel, in which Clive’s men had the advantage by keeping their powder dry during a sudden rainstorm. Surajud-Daula’s most reliable general, Mir Madan, was killed by a shell, and his army broke: Clive lost four Europeans and fourteen sepoys and little over twice as many wounded. The battle showed the formidable impact of a small body of troops, well led and disciplined, and underlined the fact that in India war and politics were indeed closely related in the sense that most Indian rulers usually had disaffected relatives or ministers who might be bribed. And as Penderel Moon trenchantly observed:

The men who comprised Indian armies did not fight for Bengal, Oudh, the Carnatic or other area with some linguistic or ethnic character, much less for larger abstractions such as the Mogul empire or Hindustan. They fought for the rulers or commanders who paid them to do so, generally at this time Muslims, but also Hindus, and the French and English; and such loyalty as they felt to their employers, all the greater to those who paid them promptly and led them to victory.⁴⁹

The notion of iqbal, or good fortune, was also important: men were attracted by an individual or an agency which seemed to be enjoying a run of good luck. In 1757 the Company’s iqbal shone, and Mir Jafar, the new nawab, was suitably grateful, and gave it the zamindari of twenty-four tax districts covering 800 square miles – its first substantial landholding.

Scarcely less significant, although a good deal less well known, is Colonel Eyre Coote’s victory over the French at Wandiwash in January 1760. Here again the lessons were clear: there was little virtue in retiring before a superior force, and once battle was joined cohesion was all. ‘The cannonading now began to be smart on both sides,’ wrote Coote, ‘and upon seeing the enemy come boldly up, I ordered the army to move forward.’ ‘When we came within 60 yards of them,’ remembered Major Graham of HM’s 84th, a regiment raised in 1759 specifically for service in India,

our platoons began to fire. I had the honour to lead the 84th against the Lorraine Regiment on their right, which were resolved to break us, being as they said a raw young regiment, but we had not fired above four rounds before they went to the right about in the utmost confusion.⁵⁰

Coote went on to capture the French enclave of Pondicherry the following year, and the war ended with French hopes for India dashed for ever.

Clive returned to England with a substantial fortune and in 1762 was given a peerage by the grateful government. But he had also been made a mansabdar with the rank of 6,000 foot and 5,000 horse by the emperor, and received a jagir worth £28,000 a year from Mir Jafar, for which the Company was to act as zamindar, remitting the money to Clive once it had been collected. The episode highlighted the ambivalence of Clive’s position: at once the Company’s servant and yet an entrepreneur in his own right, and a spectacular example of what was euphemistically called ‘the taking of presents’ might produce.

Clive had been involved in a furious dispute with the Company when the marked deterioration of its position in Bengal encouraged the directors to appoint him Commander in Chief and send him back to India in 1765, allowing him sweeping civil and military powers. The Company had come into conflict with Shujah-ud-Daulah, ruler of Oudh, a semi-independent province of the empire adjacent to its own Bengal emporium. In 1763 Shujah-ud-Daulah allied himself with Mir Kasim, the new (and, until recently, British-backed) Nawab of Bengal. Forced out of Bengal by Major Hector Munro, a tough disciplinarian who had stamped hard on indiscipline amongst the Company’s forces in Bengal, the nawabs fell back and joined the emperor who was abroad with a good-sized army on a tax-gathering expedition. On 23 October 1764, Munro, with 900 Europeans and 7,000 sepoys beat the allies, with 50,000 men at Buxar, a battle which ‘marked more truly than Plassey the beginning of British dominion in India’.⁵¹ When he arrived, Clive pressed his advantage, raising fresh troops, ensuring the succession of a pro-British Nawab of Bengal, and then coercing the emperor into making the Company revenue collector for his provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

Like it or not, the Company was now a territorial authority in its own right. It was painfully evident that the Company’s directors in London, under pressure from politicians and shareholders, could not really control what went on in India, all the more because, as the diarist Horace Walpole observed, they were now trying to rule ‘nations to whom it takes a year to send out orders’. It was not even easy for officials on the spot to understand the complexities of tax-gathering, and in 1772 the Company auctioned off tax-gathering rights to local men who were often the former zamindars themselves.

There were nest-feathering opportunities on a breathtaking scale. In his two years as Governor of Madras, 1778–80, Sir Thomas Rumbold amassed a fortune of £750,000, a third of which came in bribes and pay-offs from the local ruler, the Nawab of Arcot. Although he was the subject of both parliamentary and Company inquiries, Rumbold blithely shrugged off attempts to make him disgorge the loot and died a rich man. More junior officials who behaved in a similar way, however, might not be so lucky. Lieutenant John Corneille described how in 1755, Lieutenant Colonel Heron of the Company’s service was tasked with collecting revenue for the Nawab of Arcot only to be convicted by court martial of siphoning off part of the proceeds. He was stripped of his commission ‘and thereby rendered incapable of further service’. ‘I cannot but look upon Colonel Heron as guilty,’ wrote Corneille,

and I am confirmed in that opinion by the fact that the gentleman in the space of a few months found means to accumulate about twelve thousand pounds. It may be said, and it has been said by many, that as in most points he acted in a manner agreeable to custom his sentence was severe. But can that general ruling power [i.e. custom] subvert the rule of justice and make the fault less?⁵²

As a junior King’s officer, Corneille’s own chances of shaking the pagoda tree were somewhat limited; but King’s officers were not entirely immune from greed. Clive, who did not like Eyre Coote, complained acidly that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and privileges of a Royal officer, not least his own emoluments and allowances’. When Coote returned home to England in 1763 (having stopped en route at St Helena to marry the Governor’s daughter), he had enough money to purchase a substantial country estate in Hampshire, and was further gratified by the presentation of a handsome sword worth £700.

Coote, in short, had become a nabob – a man who had made his fortune in India and then invested it, as any successful London merchant might have done, in land: the word originated in English mispronunciation of the title nawab. Coote was the sixth son of an Irish clergyman, whose military career surmounted a setback in 1745 when, as an ensign in Blakeney’s regiment, he appeared in Edinburgh after the defeat at Prestonpans, happily still with his colour but, less wisely, well in advance of his regiment’s survivors. A court martial stopped short of cashiering him, as a lot of people had run away that day, but a furious George II thought ‘the crime so infamous in nature’ that he had ‘no further occasion’ for the services of the officers involved.⁵³ Coote, with his refurbished military reputation and wellbred wife, could at least claim gentility. But many other nabobs could not, and the homeward rush of merchants desiring not simply landed property but the titles, prestige and social distinction that went with it exasperated not only the gentry who dominated Georgian England, but also merchants and tradesmen who found it harder to scrub the ink from their fingers. The nabobs tinkled into Parliament in force in the 1768 election, and in 1771 the play The Nabobs sent up the whole gang, turning the word into one of envious abuse.

Clive’s gains had already involved the Company in costly wars, and more followed as senior officials supported local rulers against their rivals for their own and the Company’s benefit, though it was sometimes hard to see where the two joined. The First Mysore War (1767–69) saw the Company ally itself with the Nawab of Arcot in an inconclusive campaign against the formidable Hyder Ali, a capable adventurer who had risen to become sultan of the southern state of Mysore. The episode caused widespread criticism, and – with the volatility of the Company’s stock, the apparent inability of its directors to control their employees, widespread resentment of nabobbery, and something of a genuine sense of moral outrage – fuelled public and parliamentary demands for reform. William Pitt the elder lamented that:

The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no hereditary fortune could resist.⁵⁴

Edmund Burke struck even harder, telling the House of Commons that: ‘The office given to a young man going out to India is of trifling consequence. But he that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great Nabob.’⁵⁵ Indian society, he declaimed, was being corrupted by the money-grabbing activities of the Company’s servants, in a clear breach of the sacred trust that one powerful nation held towards another.

This agitation produced the Regulating Act of 1773. Although each presidency retained its own governor, a governor-general based in Calcutta would rule the whole of British India, with a council of four members appointed by the Cabinet and the Company’s directors. A supreme court, its judges appointed by the Crown, could hear pleas and appeals from both British and Indians. Day-to-day control of the Company lay in the hands of its twenty-four directors, only six of whom could stand for re-election each year. The government lent the Company sufficient money to deal with its immediate debts, and limited dividend payments on its stock.⁵⁶ The Regulating Act, however, failed to remedy the Company’s ills, and the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general appointed under its provisions and seen by his many critics as the arch-nabob, highlighted its deficiencies. It took Pitt’s India Act of 1784 to establish a government-appointed Board of Control, based in London, and to strengthen the powers of the governor-general, appointed and replaced by the government of the day, over the three presidencies.

This system had only three significant modifications. When its charter was renewed in 1833, the Company was compelled to give up commercial transactions in return for an annuity of £630,000, taken from the territorial revenue of India. The Governor-General of Bengal was renamed the Governor-General of India, and a governor of Bengal was created, on a par with the governors of Madras and Bombay. In 1835 the lieutenant-governorship of the North-West Provinces was introduced. Lastly, the Company’s charter was renewed in 1853, the Governor of Bengal was reduced to the status of lieutenant governor and a legislative council was established.

In the short term the 1784 mechanism worked well enough. Lord Cornwallis, the first of the new governors-general from 1786 to 1793, went far to stamping out nabobbery amongst the Company’s servants, establishing a well-paid civil service, the root of the ‘covenanted’ Indian Civil Service whose members undertook not to involve themselves in commerce. The Company’s college at Haileybury in Hertfordshire, with a syllabus that included oriental languages, was not set up till 1809, but it was clearly rooted in the impartial bureaucracy established under Cornwallis. He defended the Sultan of Travancore, a Company ally, against Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, in the Third Mysore War (1790–92). And in 1793 he concluded the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, delegating tax-collection rights to zamindars – much as the Mughal emperor had done.

Sir John Shore, Cornwallis’s successor, ran into difficulties because none of the previous reforms had really addressed the Company’s armed forces. These had risen from 18,000 in 1763; 6,580 of them in Bengal, 9,000 in Madras and 2,550 in Bombay. By 1805 there were no less than 64,000 in Bengal, 64,000 in Madras and 26,500 in Bombay. The officers of this army, as we shall see, were subtly different from those of HM’s regiments serving in India. They were often significantly less well off, did not purchase their commissions and, long after their civilian brothers had become properly regulated, they retained a keen interest in making extra money, usually through the scam of batta, allowances over and above their pay, which once reflected genuine campaign expenses but in many cases had come to be a lucrative allowance given for no clearly defined purpose. But their promotion prospects were far poorer than those of officers in HM’s regiments: of the thousand or so officers in Bengal in 1780, there were only fifty-two posts for majors and above, and battalions, commanded by lieutenant colonels in the British service, were only captain’s commands. On three major occasions between 1766 and 1808, officers mutinied to retain their batta, and the government gave way. A rueful Shore wrote:

Whether I have pursued the most eligible plan of alleviating anarchy and confusion by temperance and moderation, or whether I should have adopted coercion, is a question on which opinion will be various. I think the wisest mode has been followed; and that severity might have occasioned the absolute disorganisation of the army, whose expectations have been too much trifled with.⁵⁷

There were few similarities between Shore, a long-time servant of the Company, and his successor as governor-general, Richard Wellesley, 2nd Earl of Mornington. A scion of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy with close friends in the government, Mornington knew little of administration or of India, but had a vision that went well beyond commercial advantage. In 1799 he beat Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore, who was killed when Seringapatam was stormed, and his brother, Arthur Wellesley, was installed to supervise the new British-supported ruler. While Arthur pocketed £10,000, Richard declined the proffered £100,000, but helpfully told the Prime Minister:

You will gain credit by conferring some high and brilliant title upon me immediately. The Garter would be much more acceptable to me than an additional title, nor would any title be an object which did not raise me to the same rank which was given Lord Cornwallis.

He was shocked to be created Marquess Wellesley because it was an Irish title. He quipped acidly that it was a double-gilt potato, and told the Prime Minister that:

I cannot conceal my anguish of mind … at the reception the King has given my services. I will confess openly that there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or its results, I felt in equal confidence that I should find nothing Irish or pinchbeck in its reward.⁵⁸

With Mysore now under the Company’s tutelage, Wellesley went on to secure Tanjore and the Carnatic, and in 1801 about half Oudh came under the Company’s control. This left the Marathas as the principal rivals of the East India Company; a powerful confederation of Hindu princes (including Holkar, Scindia, and the Bhonsla of Berar) grouped under the Peshwa of Poona, they had proved a serious challenge to the Mughals. Their wings had been clipped by the Afghan ruler of Kabul, Ahmed Shah Durrani, at the fourth battle of Panipat in 1761, which fortuitously prevented a clash between the British and the Marathas at time when the Company was not well placed to face it. The First Maratha War (1777–82), initiated by Governor-General Warren Hastings, ended in a compromise peace. The Second (1803–05) was a more extensive affair, in which Arthur Wellesley beat the Marathas at Assaye and Argaum while the Commander in Chief, Lord Lake, enjoyed victories at Delhi and Laswaree. There were peace treaties with Scindia and the Bhonsla but Holkar was not included, and the Company suffered two significant reverses, the first when Colonel Monson’s force was roughly handled, and the second when Lake’s attempt to take Bhurtpore by storm met with a bloody repulse. Mornington, his conduct the subject of increasing criticism in Britain, was replaced in 1805 by Lord Cornwallis, who had been Governor-General from 1786–93 and was now an old and dying man. It was not until the Third Maratha War (1816–19) that the Marathas were at last overcome: the Peshwa at Kirkee in November 1817; the Bhonsla at Sitabaldi later the same month; and Holkar at Mahdipore that December. These victories secured the borders of British India along the frontiers of Sind and the Punjab. In 1814–16 the Gurkhas were defeated, though with some difficulty, in the Nepal War, and while Nepal remained independent it proved a fruitful recruiting-ground for tough and martial soldiers.

But now the British suffered a major reverse that would profoundly damage their iqbal and overshadow the next decade. The steady Russian advance across Central Asia mirrored British gains in India, and by the 1830s the prospect of a Russian descent into India through Afghanistan loomed increasingly large in the minds of successive governors-general. In 1837 Alexander Burnes, a British envoy, was sent to Kabul to negotiate with the Amir Dost Mohammed. But when the amir demanded the restitution of Peshawar, seized by the Sikhs in 1834, as the price for his support, the British drew back, as they were anxious to preserve good relations with the formidable Sikh ruler, Ranjit Singh. This induced Dost Mohammed to approach the Russians in the hope of securing a better offer; in response the Governor-General, George Eden, 1st Earl of Auckland, replaced the amir with Shah Shujah, a former ruler.

The Sikhs were persuaded to give the British free passage across the Punjab. A combined army of British and Indian forces, the Army of the Indus, concentrated at Ferozepur, marched down the Indus, crossed into Afghanistan by the Bolan Pass and reached Kandahar, where it was joined by a force from Bombay. The combined army set off for Kabul – storming the strong fortress of Ghazni on the way – and duly installed Shah Shujah on the throne. But it was clear that the new amir did not enjoy widespread support; it was equally clear that the army could not stay in Afghanistan indefinitely and much of it was sent back to India. The remainder might have been saved by firm command, but Major General William Elphinstone, sent up by Auckland, was not the man for sudden and decisive action. Emily Eden, the Governor-General’s sister, recorded that he was: ‘In a shocking state of gout, poor man – one arm in a sling and very lame but he is otherwise a young-looking general for India.’⁵⁹ In November, Burnes was killed by a mob in Kabul, and Sir William Macnaghten, chief secretary to the government of India and political adviser to the force, was murdered when he went to negotiate with Akbar Khan, Dost Mohammed’s son. When the British force, numbering some 4,500 troops (amongst them only one British battalion, HM’s 44th) and 12,000 camp followers, including women and children, began to retreat on 6 January 1842 it was repeatedly attacked by the Afghans.

What followed was nothing short of a disaster. Order broke down almost immediately, and Lieutenant Vincent Eyre described ‘a mingled mob of soldiers, camp-followers and baggage-cattle, preserving not even the faintest semblance of that regularity and discipline on which depended our only chance of escape from the dangers which threatened us’.⁶⁰ That ‘grenadier in petticoats’, Florentia Sale, travelling with her daughter and her son-in-law, now mortally wounded, wrote in her journal for 9 January:

Before sunrise, the same confusion as yesterday. Without any orders given, or bugle sounded, three fourths of our fighting men had pushed on in advance of the camp followers. As many as could had appropriated to themselves all public yaboos [Afghan ponies] and camels, on which they mounted. A portion of the troops had also regularly moved off, the only order appearing to be: ‘Come along; we are all going, and half the men are off, with the camp followers in advance!’.

Mrs Trevor kindly rode a pony and gave up her place in the kajara [camel pannier] to [the mortally wounded Lieutenant] Sturt. Who must otherwise have been left to die on the ground. The rough motion increased his suffering and accelerated his death: but he was still conscious that his wife and I were with him: and we had the sorrowful satisfaction of giving him Christian burial.⁶¹

On 9 January many women and children were handed over to the safe-keeping of Akbar Khan, who maintained that the tribesmen were beyond his control, but there was no relief for the rest of the army. HM’s 44th, with some cavalry and horse artillery, held together well, but the native infantry were too tired, cold and hungry to care. On the 10th they were attacked where the road passed through a gorge, as Eyre related:

Fresh numbers fell with every volley, and the gorge was soon choked with the dead and the dying; the unfortunate sepoys, seeing no means of escape, and driven to utter desperation, cast away their arms and accoutrements … and along with the camp-followers, fled for their lives.⁶²

There were further ambushes, and more fruitless negotiations with Akbar Khan. By the 13th only a handful of soldiers were left, and the last of HM’s 44th made their final stand at Gandamack, twenty-nine miles from Jalalabad and safety. There was a brief parley, and then:

The enemy, taking up their post on an opposite hill, marked off man after man, officer after officer, with unerring aim. Parties of Afghans rushed in at intervals to complete the work of extermination, but were as often driven back by that handful of invincibles. At length, nearly all being wounded more or less, a final onset on the enemy sword in hand terminated the unequal struggle … Captain Soutar alone with three or four privates were spared, and carried off captive.⁶³

Six mounted officers rode for Jelalabad, but only one of them, Dr William Bryden, arrived there. The brave and pious Captain Henry Havelock was a staff officer to Brigadier Robert Sale, whose own regiment, HM’s 13th Light Infantry, formed the bulk of the garrison. At about 2.00 p.m. on Sunday 13 January one of his comrades saw a single horseman approaching:

As he got nearer, it was distinctly seen that he wore European clothes and was mounted on a travel-stained yaboo, which he was urging on with all the speed of which it yet remained master … He was covered with slight cuts and contusions, and dreadfully exhausted … the recital of Dr Brydon filled all hearers with horror, grief and indignation.⁶⁴

The government’s hesitant response to the catastrophe exasperated Havelock and his comrades. ‘The indignation against the Governor-General and the Government, including the Commander in Chief, but chiefly the Governor-General,’ he wrote, ‘went beyond all bounds.’⁶⁵ Auckland had already been scheduled for replacement, and it was not until Lord Ellenborough arrived as governor-general at the end of February that much was done. Lieutenant General Pollock, who had been appointed to replace Elphinstone even before the news of the disaster reached Calcutta, assembled an ‘Army of Retribution’ in Peshawar and pushed up through the Khyber Pass, relieving Jelalabad on 16 April. Another force marched up through the Khojak Pass to relieve Major General Nott’s garrison of Kandahar. But Pollock was hamstrung by lack of clear orders. The Commander in Chief thought it best that he should retreat, and the new governor-general was ‘scattering military orders broadcast’ without telling the Commander in Chief what he was doing. Pollock, subjected to a near fatal combination of loose direction laced with detailed interference, wrote crossly of ‘the little points that are overlooked by men who direct operations from a comfortable office hundreds of miles away’.⁶⁶

It was not until 15 September that Pollock reached Kabul after beating Akbar Khan, and Nott joined him there two days later. Pollock inflicted summary public punishment by blowing up the city’s Grand Bazaar, where the body of Macnaghten had been dragged and exposed to insult. One officer observed that collective penalties like this hurt the innocent as well as the guilty, writing that: ‘To punish the unfortunate householders of the bazaar (many a guiltless and friendly Hindu) was not distinguished retaliation for our losses.’⁶⁷ The captives taken during the retreat were recovered. Young Ensign C. G. C. Stapylton of HM’s 13th wrote that the men were ‘all in Afghan costume with long beards and moustaches and it was with some difficulty that one could recognise one’s friends’. The army then withdrew through the Khyber Pass to receive a triumphal reception. A delighted Stapylton reported that:

Every regiment in Hindustan shall, on our march down, turn out and present arms to us in review order. They have also granted us six months batta, which, however, will hardly cover the losses of the officers.⁶⁸

This display of gratitude was partly intended to divert attention from the fact that Auckland’s policy had foundered dismally. Shah Shujah had already been murdered by his helpful subjects, a putative replacement had wisely decided to come back with Pollock, and eventually Dost Mohammed – whose deposition had triggered the war in the first place – was allowed to return. Ellenborough announced that: ‘The Governor-General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.’ The campaign sharply underlined the difficulties inherent in the existing system. Sir John Hobhouse, chairman of the East India Company, maintained, with some truth, that intervention in Afghanistan was the policy of the British government, and there is little doubt that Auckland saw it as a means of crowning his time in India with a resonant success. When the matter was discussed in Parliament in 1843 Benjamin Disraeli opined that Afghanistan, if left alone, would of itself form an admirable barrier against Russian expansion.

The soil is barren and unproductive. The country is interspersed by stupendous mountains … where an army must be exposed to absolute annihilation. The people are proverbially faithless … Here then are all the elements that can render the country absolutely impassable as a barrier, if we abstain from interference.⁶⁹

These were wise words. But the linked problems of an unstable Afghanistan and an expansionist Russia were to cause more difficulties in the years to come.

Before the saga of the First Afghan War had reached its untidy end, Major General Sir Charles Napier was sent from Bombay to Karachi, without clear instructions but with the general task of ensuring that the local amirs did not take advantage of British misfortunes. Napier was a hard and abstemious sixty-year-old Peninsula veteran, a political radical and ‘a curious compound of modesty with strange alternations of self-exaltation and self-abasement’. But he was zealous, energetic, and tolerated no dawdling. A subordinate who reported that a mutiny had broken out was told: ‘I expect to hear that you have put down the mutiny within two hours after the receipt of this letter.’ ‘We have no right to seize Sind,’ he mused, ‘yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, humane and useful piece of rascality it will be.’

And so it was. Napier fought the amirs at Meani on 16 February 1843, and when HM’s 22nd preferred to carry on an indecisive firefight rather than charge home:

Napier himself rode slowly up and down between the two arrays, pouring out torrents of blasphemous exhortation, so close to both sides that he was actually singed by powder, and yet by some miracle unscathed by either. His appearance was so strange that the Baluchis might well have mistaken him for a demon. Beneath a huge helmet of his own contrivance there issued a fringe of long hair at the back, and in front a pair of round spectacles, an immense hooked nose, and a mane of moustache and whisker reaching to the waist. But though the opposing arrays were not ten yards apart, neither he nor his horse were touched.⁷⁰

He beat them again at Hyderabad in March; when they asked what terms they might be offered, he replied curtly: ‘Life and nothing more. And I want your decision before twelve o’clock, as I shall by that time have buried my dead, and given my soldiers their breakfasts. ’⁷¹ Punch magazine, in one of the two great Latin jokes of British India, maintained that he reported his success in the one-word punning telegram ‘peccavi – I have Sin[ne]d’. Like some muscular Victorian headmaster, Napier believed that the best recipe for ruling a country was ‘a good thrashing first and kindness afterwards’. When one local nobleman killed his wife and was duly condemned to death, a deputation came to protest that: ‘She was his wife, and he was angry with her.’ Napier replied: ‘Well, I am angry with him, and mean to hang him.’ He did so, and the practice of wife-murdering fell off sharply.⁷²

With Sind duly secured, the Gwalior campaign of 1843–44 Fsaw two victories at Maharajpore and Punniar, both distinguished by brisk British attacks on larger forces. This left the Sikhs as the only rival to the Company in the whole of the subcontinent. Originally simply a religious grouping, the Sikhs had become a powerful state under Ranjit Singh, who brought together the twelve Misls, Sikh confederacies, established his capital at Lahore and annexed both Kashmir (1819) and Peshawar (1834). Auckland and his advisers recognised that on Ranjit’s death:

The whole country between the [Rivers] Sutlege and the Indus must become the scene of protracted and bloody civil war, only to be terminated by the interference of a third and stronger power, with an army and resource sufficiently strong to bid defiance to all hope of resistance, and that that army must be the British army and that power the British government, there can be little doubt.

In the wake of the annexation of Sind it was unlikely that the Company would let legal quibble stand in its way: ‘The East India Company has swallowed too many camels,’ wrote Auckland’s military secretary, ‘to strain at this gnat.’⁷³

Ranjit ruled in the best tradition of oriental despots. He bore the insults offered him by his Akali regiments of religious extremists with indifference, ‘until they are involved in any great crime, such as robbery or murder, when he shows no mercy, and they are immediately deprived of either their noses, ears, arms or legs, according to the degree of their offence’. One man thought that it would be amusing to look into Ranjit’s zenana – the women’s quarters – from a mango tree, and was ‘in a few minutes dismissed without either ears or nose, and died in a few hours’.⁷⁴ Already old and unwell, Ranjit did not improve matters by drinking ‘wine extracted from raisins, with a quantity of pearls ground to powder mixed with it … ’. This brew was:

as strong as aquafortis, and as at his parties he always helps you himself, it is no easy matter to avoid excess. He generally, on these occasions, has two or three Hebes in the shape of the prettiest of his Cachemiri girls to attend upon himself and his guests, and gives way to every species of licentious debauchery.⁷⁵

When Ranjit died in 1839, to be accompanied to the funeral-pyre by four of his wives and seven slave girls, his eldest son took over, only to be poisoned in 1840: his own son was ‘accidentally’ killed when his elephant collided with a gateway on his way home from the funeral. Sher Singh, the army’s nominee, was head of state until his assassination in September 1843. Dalip Singh, Ranjit’s youngest son, then ascended the throne, though power lay in the hands of his mother, the Maharani Jandin. She was described by Sir Henry Hardinge, who replaced Ellenborough as governor-general, as ‘a handsome debauched woman of thirty-three, very indiscriminate in her affections, an eater of opium’.⁷⁶

But it is more true to say that, while this lethal dynastic merry-go-round spun on, the real power was the Khalsa, the Sikh army. Ranjit had created the most powerful native force in India by welding together disparate elements, including Sikhs, Hindus and Moslems, and using foreign military experts to train them. In 1822 two Napoleonic veterans, Jean François Allard and Jean Baptiste Ventura, brought infantry and cavalry training manuals with them, and Henri Court, another Frenchmen, cast guns at Lahore arsenal and trained some of Ranjit’s gunners. Although many foreigners left, or were dismissed, in the disturbances following Ranjit’s death, as late as 1844 there were twelve Frenchmen, four Italians, one Prussian, two Greeks, seven Eurasians, one Scotsman, three Englishmen, three Germans, two Spaniards and a solitary Russian attached to his forces.

Perhaps the most spectacular of the whole polyglot crew was Paolo di Avitabile, a tough Italian soldier of fortune who went up to govern Peshawar. Captain Osborne, who breakfasted with some of them, thought that ‘they do not seem very fond of his [Ranjit’s] service, which is not to be wondered at, for they are both badly and irregularly paid, and treated with little respect or confidence’.⁷⁷ By the time Ranjit died his regular army numbered some 70,000 horse and foot, supported by over 300 cannon, cast in six arsenals. Some of these were good copies of Mughal pieces, and others were modelled on cannon presented to Ranjit by the East India Company.⁷⁸ In addition to its regular troops, the Khalsa had irregular gorchurra cavalry and perhaps 3,000 Akali religious zealots.

But if the Khalsa, with its smart uniforms and well-drilled infantry, looked like a European army, it did not behave like one. Regiments had all-ranks committees called panchaychats, which met to form an army council most concerned with that thing so dear to soldiers’ hearts: substantial and regular pay. Hardinge, a high-minded and paternalistic Tory, would have avoided involvement in the Punjab if he could, for he had ambitious social and economic projects and was anxious to avoid another ‘Sind scrape’. However, some Sikhs favoured a plundering raid across the Sutlej, and were encouraged by the Maharani Jandin, because this would at least get the Khalsa out of Lahore. When a Sikh emissary tried to persuade some of the sepoy garrison of Ferozepur to desert, Hardinge did not rise to the bait, but he moved more troops to the frontier and travelled there himself. He reached Ambala on 3 December 1845 to hear that the Sikhs had crossed the Sutlej, violating the provisions of their 1809 treaty with the British: he declared war at once.

The short but bloody campaign that followed was complicated not only by the stormy relationship between Hardinge and his commander in chief, Sir Hugh Gough, but by the fact that Tej Singh and Lal Singh, the two chief Sikh commanders, appointed by the army council on the outbreak of war, believed that the British would triumph and were anxious to emerge on the winning side. Hardinge’s political agent at Lahore, the energetic Major George Broadfoot, supplied intelligence that was often contradictory, but was secretly and independently in touch with both Tej and Lal Singh. Because of Hardinge’s reluctance to be seen to provoke the Sikhs the British were weak in numbers; and they were not helped by Gough’s conviction that the Sikhs, what Hardinge had called ‘the bravest and most warlike and most disruptive enemy in Asia’, could be viewed as a traditional Indian army, strong in numbers but weak in cohesion.

On 18 December the Khalsa pushed hesitantly forward to catch Gough on the march at Mudki. Gough rallied, formed up on difficult ground and attacked the Sikhs, but the battle ended inconclusively, with the Sikhs falling back on their main position at Ferozeshah. Gough attacked them there on the 21st, and after a terrible day’s fighting, spent a cold night on the field. Things looked so bleak that Hardinge had his state papers burnt, sent Napoleon’s sword (a present from Wellington) for safe-keeping and ordered Prince Waldemar of Prussia, ‘who had accompanied the army as an amateur’, to a place of safety. Gough was reinforced by Harry Smith’s division before dawn on the 22nd, but it took another day’s fighting to make the Sikhs draw off.

Even then they might have won, for fresh Sikh troops appeared when the British were at their last gasp. Gough later said that while he had no doubt about offering battle on the 22nd – ‘my determination is taken rather to leave my bones to bleach honourably at Ferozeshah than they should rot dishonourably at Ferozepore’ – the appearance of this new force briefly dismayed him:

We had not a shot with our guns, and our Cavalry Horses were thoroughly done up. For a moment I felt a regret (and I deeply deplore my want of confidence in Him who never failed me nor forsook me) as each passing shot left me on horseback. But it was only for a moment, and Hugh Gough was himself again.⁷⁹

Gough’s forces suffered 2,415 casualties, and it was a striking fact that although his native regiments easily outnumbered his British, 1,207 of those hit were Europeans. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lawrence believed that this was in part a legacy of Afghanistan, where ‘by far our worse loss was the confidence of our native soldiery’.⁸⁰ Sita Ram – using the word Sirkar, for ‘state, government, supreme authority’ – would have concurred:

It was well known during the Afghan War the Sirkar itself had been afraid. It had ordered the artillery to fire more that year to remind the people of Delhi of its power. But the disasters in Kabul went a long way towards showing that the Sirkar was not so invincible as had always been supposed.⁸¹

Hardinge himself thought that: ‘The British infantry as usual carried the day. I can’t say I admire sepoy fighting.’⁸² When his men cheered Hardinge and Gough after the battle, one honest commanding officer said: ‘Sir, these cheers of my men are not worth having; only a few of the regiment were with me during the night.’⁸³ And perhaps Indian reluctance was caused by more than the Company’s bruised iqbal or their awareness of the fighting quality of the Sikhs. There was a feeling that the Sikhs were the last independent power in India: if the Company beat them, then it would have the whole of the subcontinent.

Gough was reinforced after Ferozeshah, and while he paused to regroup he sent Harry Smith off to deal with a large Sikh detachment. Smith found them at Aliwal, where he won what he called a ‘stand-up, gentlemanlike battle, a mixing of all arms and laying-on, carrying everything before us by weight of attack and combination, all hands at work from one end of the field to the other’.⁸⁴ The Sikh force included some of Avitabile’s best-trained battalions, who formed equilateral triangles – their equivalent of squares – when charged by HM’s 16th Lancers. Corporal F. B. Cowtan wrote that his troop of lancers

moved on like a flash of lightning, clearing everything before us, guns, cavalry and infantry. As for myself, I went through cavalry and infantry squares repeatedly. At the first charge I dismounted two cavalry men, and on retiring we passed through a square of infantry, and I left three on the ground killed or wounded … My comrade on my left, just as we cheered before charging, had his heart torn from his side by a cannon-ball, but my heart sickens at the recollection of what I witnessed that day. The killed and wounded in my squadron alone was 42.

After the first charge self-preservation was a grand thing, and the love of life made us look sharp, and their great numbers required all our vigilance. Our lances seemed to paralyse them altogether, and you may be sure we did not give them time to recover themselves. There was no quarter given or taken. We did spare a good many at first, but the rascals afterwards took their preservers’ lives, so we received orders to finish everyone with arms.⁸⁵

When he heard of Smith’s victory, which did so much to restore sepoy confidence, Gough fell on his knees to thank God, and then moved on to attack the Sikh camp at Sobraon. He took it, as we have seen, on 10 February 1846, and the Sikhs asked for terms. By now the European portion of Gough’s force had been reduced, by battle casualties and sickness, and Hardinge’s terms were relatively generous: the Sikhs lost some territory, including Kashmir, and agreed to reduce the size of their army. This would avoid outright annexation, or running the Punjab as a ‘subsidiary state’ with the Company’s troops helping local landlords extract taxes from their peasants. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lawrence was appointed resident at the court of Dalip Singh (whose mother was regent), and British agents were established in other major towns. There was an air of genuine optimism. Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes, one of the great soldier-administrators of the era, recalled:

What days those were! How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances: Edwardes to Bannu, Nicholson to Peshawar, Abbot to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else, etc, giving us a tract of country as big as most of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these, ‘Settle the country, make the people happy, and take care there are no rows’.⁸⁶

But there were rows aplenty. The Company sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh for £3 million, but its Sikh governor refused to give it up until British troops arrived. It was discovered that the regent and her adviser, Lal Singh, were involved in the plot, and both were removed from power and replaced by a Council of Regency. Hardinge, meanwhile, had reduced the native army by 50,000 men to save money, despite furious protests from Gough, and then returned to England, being replaced by the Earl of Dalhousie. No sooner was Dalhousie installed in Calcutta than war once more flared up in the Punjab. Two British officials were sent as resident magistrates to the fortress city of Multan, accompanied by Khan Singh, the city’s new governor. Mulraj, the outgoing governor, a man with a reputation for honesty, received them courteously. But both were attacked and badly wounded by the garrison, and were then butchered the following day, showing, at the last, a courage that was to inflame their countrymen.

It is impossible to be certain of Mulraj’s role: he was probably a decent but weak man overtaken by events. However, over the months that followed Multan became a magnet for disaffected Sikh zamindars and dismissed officials, out-of-work soldiers, and adventurers like the Baluchis and Pathans encountered by Major James Abbot, ‘who, at all times, prefer military service to agriculture’. In September an attack on Multan by Major General Whish failed, and there was a general rising across much of the Punjab. Dalhousie’s nerve did not fail him, and his directive to Gough, written on 8 October 1848, deserved quoting as an example of one of the clearest statements of intent that a military commander could receive:

As long as there is a shot or shell in Indian arsenals, or a finger left that can pull a trigger, I will never desist from operations at Mooltan, until the place is taken and the leader and his force ground if possible into powder … I have therefore to request that Your Lordship will put forth all your energies, and have recourse to all the resources which the Government of India has at their command, to accomplish this object promptly, fully and finally.

Gough was permitted to fight the Sikhs elsewhere if he thought it necessary, but he was reminded that Multan and its defenders ‘are the first and prime objects of our attention now’.⁸⁷

Multan was taken by storm in January 1849, its capture accompanied by a spree of looting and killing which so often disfigured the aftermath of an assault. Captain John Clark Kennedy of HM’s 18th Foot, serving on Major General Whish’s staff, described how bloody retribution was followed by ritual commemoration:

The bodies of the two political officers, [Mr Patrick Alexander Vans] Agnew and [Lieutenant William] Anderson, who had been murdered by Mulraj’s men, were now disinterred from their graves outside the city and carried back into it, not through the gate by which they had entered and through which they had been driven out in ignominy and contempt but over the ruins of massive works which had crumbled into dust under the guns of their fellow countrymen. Their brother officers stood round their graves. An English chaplain performed the last rites. The British flag was flying over the highest bastion and the farewell volleys, echoing through the ruins of the citadel, must have reached the ears of Mulraj himself, a prisoner in our camp.

Mulraj was taken to Lahore, court-martialled, found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged but, seen as ‘the victim of circumstances’, was banished for life.⁸⁸

While operations against Multan were ongoing, Gough fought a scrambling cavalry battle at Ramnagar, and crossed the Chenab. But an attempt to engage the Sikh army on favourable terms miscarried, probably because of poor staff-work. On 13 January 1849 he went head-on at a strong Sikh position in close country at Chillianwalla, where one of his battalions, HM’s 24th, took the battery to its front ‘without a shot being fired by the Regiment or a musquet taken from the shoulder’, which even Gough described as ‘an act of madness’.⁸⁹ It could not hold the ground that it had captured, and was driven back with the appalling loss of fourteen officers killed and nine severely wounded; 231 men killed and 266 wounded.⁹⁰ To make matters worse, a cavalry brigade, with two experienced regiments in it, fell victim to an almost inexplicable panic. At the end of a difficult and depressing day Gough had to fall back to Chillianwalla for water, abandoning not only the captured Sikh guns but also four of his own.

Gough’s bulldog approach had already aroused criticism, and the losses of Chillianwalla, over 2,300 in all, provoked a storm of protest in both India and Britain. Dalhousie wrote that Gough’s conduct was beneath the criticism of even a militia officer like himself, and the British government decided to replace Gough with Napier. ‘If you won’t go, I must,’ declared the Duke of Wellington. But Gough had settled matters before Napier arrived. On 21 February he attacked the Sikhs at Gujarat, and this time he did not send his infantry in until his gunners had done their work properly. The Sikhs were decisively beaten for a loss of only 800 British casualties. The pursuit rolled on to Rawalpindi on 14 March and Peshawar on the 21st. Gough left the country accorded his old honours as commander in chief, promoted to a viscountcy and given the thanks of Parliament. Even the satirical magazine Punch managed an apology:

Having violently abused Lord Gough for losing the day at Chilianwalla, Punch unhesitatingly glorifies him for winning the fight at Gujerat. When Lord Gough met with a reverse, Punch set him down as an incompetent octogenarian; now that he has been fortunate, Punch believes him to be a gallant veteran; for Mr Punch, like many other people, of course looks merely to results; and rates as his only criterion of merit, success.

Dalhousie formally annexed the Punjab that very month, and Gough proudly told his men: ‘That which Alexander attempted, the British army have accomplished.’⁹¹