Authors: Richard Holmes
Sahib (6 page)
Robert Cust, also on Hardinge’s staff, wrote that:
The stream was choked with the dead and dying – the sandbags were covered with bodies floating leisurely down. It was an awful scene, fearful carnage. The dead Sikh lay inside his trenches – the dead European marked too distinctively the line each regiment had taken, the advance. The living Europeans remarked that nought could resist the bayonet … Our loss was heavy and the ground was here and there strewn with the slain, among whom I recognised a fine and handsome lad whom I had well known, young Hamilton, brother of Alistair Stewart. There he lay, his auburn hair weltering in his blood, his forehead fearfully gashed, fingers cut off. Still warm, but quite dead.
29
Subadar Sita Ram, attacking with his regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, recalled that ‘not one’ of the Sikhs asked for quarter. But as he approached the bridge he saw:
an English soldier about to bayonet a wounded Sikh. To my surprise, the man begged for mercy, a thing no Sikh had ever been known to do during the war. The soldier then pulled off the man’s turban and jacket, and after this I saw him kick the prostrate man and then run him through several times with his bayonet. Several other soldiers kicked the body with great contempt and ran their bayonets through it. I was told later that this was a deserter from some European regiment who had been fighting with the Sikhs against his comrades.
30
The fighting was over by midday. The Sikhs had lost around 8–10,000 men, many of them drowned in the Sutlej, lashed into ‘bloody foam’ by British grapeshot, and all the guns they had taken south of the river. Gough’s little army suffered 2,283 killed and wounded. Private Richard Perkes of the Bengal Europeans, who maintained an irregular correspondence with his brother in England, announced:
I have been in the two greatest battles that ever were fought in India that is Frosheshaw and Saboon. I have gone through
the whole of it without receiving one scar which I am very sorry to say that a great many of my comrades his laid low. It was a miracle how any off us escaped for the balls had yoused to come as thick as a shower of hail the same I wish never to see again.
31
The burden had fallen most heavily on the British infantry, although there was widespread agreement that the Indian troops, heartened by Harry Smith’s neat little victory at Aliwal, had fought much better than at Mudki or Ferozeshah. Sita Ram admitted that: ‘It is well known that the sepoys dreaded the Sikhs as they were very strong men, but in spite of everything their officers led them on.’
32
And amongst the native troops it was the newly raised Gurkhas of the Naisiri and Simoor Battalions that attracted most interest. Bombardier Bancroft wrote that: ‘Our two battalions of Goorkhas, active and ferocious Nepalese armed with the short weapon of their native mountains, were a source of great terror to the Sikhs throughout the conflict and the subsequent fight.’
33
The survivors of the 50th formed up just outside the Sikh entrenchment under the command of Lieutenant Wiley, the senior surviving officer. Although the regiment was no stranger to loss, this had been a terrible battle, on a par with Ferozeshah. One lieutenant, the sergeant major, a sergeant and forty-three men lay dead; eleven officers, eight sergeants, a drummer and 177 men lay wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Petit survived his wound to be appointed a Companion of the Bath for this day’s work.
Gough’s victory at Sobraon brought the war to an immediate end. He was rewarded with a peerage, becoming Baron Gough of Chinkiangfoo in China and of Maharajpore and the Sutlej in the East Indies, with a pension of £2,000 a year from the government and another £2,000 from the East India Company. The Governor-General became Viscount Hardinge of Lahore and Durham, with an even more generous pension. Juanita Smith became doubly a lady, for Harry was created a baronet with ‘of Aliwal’ added as special distinction, but sadly there was no son to inherit the title.
Drummer Fulcher would rank rather lower in the list of rewards. He had jettisoned his drum after it was stove in by a piece of canister-shot and defended himself during the worst of the fighting with a
discarded musket (using techniques more appropriate to alleys behind Portsmouth’s Commercial Road than to anything taught on the drill-square), received a nasty sword-cut behind the ear and ran his bayonet clean through the Sikh that inflicted it. More than a century later we might expect a young man to be indelibly marked by what he has seen and done, but Bandicoot Fulcher is showing little sign of it. Rum-and-water grog is being served out as the men are forming up, and it is clear that the quartermaster has overestimated the requirement: today almost half the 50th is taking its dram elsewhere. Fulcher receives a double ration of grog, and has already pocketed 30 Sikh
nanaukshaee
rupees and an assortment of lesser coins, the result of a little light pillaging amongst the dead up on the rampart. He will later receive a medal with the ribbon colours of Waterloo reversed, ‘which we all got. We also got twelve months
batta
[extra pay] and prize money, £7 12s 6d.’
34
It might take Fulcher’s mother six months of hasty couplings to make as much. There are worse things, he thinks, than to be eighteen – pockets full of cash and head full of rum – and alive in a landscape so thickly populated by the dead.
IN INDIA’S SUNNY CLIME
Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin of ‘Er Majesty the Queen …
R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
, ‘Gunga Din’
O
N THE MAP
the subcontinent seems like the head of an enormous elephant looking quizzically at the viewer. To our right, one of its great ears hangs down to give us Burma, while to the left the other flaps up towards Persia and the Gulf. The creature’s stern brow is wrinkled by the mountain ranges of the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush. The island of Sri Lanka hangs just below its trunk, almost like a pineapple about to be devoured. Rivers furrow its great face. The Ganges flows from the Himalayas, eastwards across the great Indo-Gangetic plain, joined by the Jumna in the Doab (‘two rivers’) and going on to its many-mouthed estuary in the Bay of Bengal. It almost mirrors the Brahmaputra, which rises on the Tibetan Plateau to flow east before jinking south and west to the Bay of Bengal. On the other side of the elephant, the Indus, its waters fed by the Jelum, Chenab, Sutlej and Ravi, flows through the Punjab (‘land of the five rivers’) into the Arabian Sea. Other rivers crease the elephant’s upper trunk: the Mahanadi, the Godavari and the Cauvery flowing towards the Coromandel coast, and the Narmada and Tapti running into the Gulf of Cambay.
Although the mountains of central and southern India cannot rival the Himalayas, they are anything but derisory. The Western and Eastern Ghats march parallel with the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, the Vindhya and Satpura ranges strike inland from the Gulf of Cambay, and the delightful Nilgiri Hills rise more gently in the
south-west. It is a land of contrasts, with areas of impenetrable rain forest in Assam and Kerala, huge tracts of wooded plains, and the Thar or Indian Desert sprawling south of the Indus. But such is the sheer scale of the place that the traveller is often more aware of sameness than of change. A month’s ride on horseback across the North-West Frontier brings no relief from mountains and valleys, and a passenger aircraft travelling from Aurungabad, some 250 miles north-west of Bombay, down to Bangalore, as far inland from Madras, flies over a landscape of interminable red earth, speckled with jungle. The road journey from Mysore to Bangalore, not much more than a hundred white-knuckle miles, offers endless paddy fields and plantations, plantations and paddy fields, with each roadside village exactly like the last.
It is a thousand miles from Delhi to Calcutta as the crow flies, about 1,300 from Calcutta to Bombay, and over two thousand from Delhi to Cape Comorin, India’s southernmost extremity. Until the development of railways from the 1850s, mass communications were poor, although Mughal officials and then British officers could avail themselves of a well-organised system which enabled individuals or small parties to cover the ground relatively quickly. The Mughals had built roads, some of which still have brick or stone watch towers at regular intervals, linking the major provincial centres of their empire to the great cities of Agra, Delhi and Lahore. Many of these had survived into British times, as Captain Albert Hervey discovered when travelling from Madras to Vellore in 1836:
I travelled … by posting, or
running dawk,
as it is termed; which means travelling by relays of bearers, stationed at certain stages, where they change. When anyone wishes to travel in this way, an application is made to the Post-office authorities for relays of bearers being posted along the route he intends going: but before this arrangement can be made the traveller is obliged to pay a deposit of a certain sum, according to distance. The requisite sum being paid down, a day is fixed upon by the ‘Jack-in-office’ for the traveller’s starting, a certain time being absolutely required for the posting of the bearers, which done, the bearers for the first stage are sent to his residence, and these men prepare the
palankeen
in their own
manner, by lashing and binding, and a variety of other preliminaries, too numerous for me to detail …A set of bearers consists of twelve men, including the
puddabhuee
or head-bearer; there is also a fellow for carrying the
massaul,
or torch, as also another for the cavary baskets, or
pettarahs,
which are a couple of baskets, or light tin boxes, generally painted green, slung on a bamboo, containing eating and drinking requisites for the journey. The whole set have a man of their own to convey their food and cooking utensils.These poor fellows can run for upwards of thirty miles, with scarcely any rest, at the rate of four miles an hour, taking little or no sustenance at the time! When arrived at the end of their stage, they put down their load, and walk off, though some of them are apt to be troublesome, by begging a present, and it is generally customary to give them a rupee or two.
The new set are not long in making their appearance. They lift up the
palkee
and trudge off never say a word to the traveller; but they can never make a start without a great noise and wrangling among themselves, which it is almost useless to attempt to check; and in this manner they proceed, running along till they come to the end of their stage, quitting the
palankeen
like their predecessors.
1
Railways developed rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. The first twenty miles of track, between Thana and Bombay, were opened in 1853. There were 4,000 miles of railway in India by 1869 and 31,500 miles forty years later. By then, ‘throughout the great band of flat country that runs from Calcutta to Peshawar it would have been hard to find a village that was not fifty miles from the railway, and there were not many that were twenty-five’.
2
The first main line followed the Grand Trunk Road up the Ganges valley. Thereafter trunk lines were built to link Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, with ‘a myriad feeder tracks, from rack-railways winding precariously to hill-stations to infinitesimal narrow-gauge lines serving the Native States’.
3
The last main line, through the Khyber Pass, was completed in 1926, local tribesmen having been encouraged not to oppose it on the grounds that it would make looting easier.
Yet for the bulk of the period railways were of limited military
value. In October 1858, W. H. Russell, moving up the Ganges valley, wrote that:
The railroad is as yet in a very incomplete state. One of the most disagreeable incidents of travelling by it is, the liability to be set on fire by sparks from the engine – wood being used instead of coal. The other day a detachment of Sikh soldiers were going up country, one of them had his clothes set on fire by the embers. All his comrades were dressed in cotton-quilted tunics, with their pouches full of ammunition; and in their alarm, they adopted the notable device of pitching the man out of the window in order to get rid of the danger to which they were exposed.
4
Despite British preoccupation with the threat posed by the Russians to the North-West Frontier, as late as 1879 Charles Callwell, travelling from Dinapur to Rawalpindi, found that:
The railway did not at this time run beyond Jhelum, although its extension to Rawal Pindi was being hurried on. I found on arrival at the terminus that there were already a number of officers and others awaiting their turn for transport forward by
dâk-ghari
(posting four-wheelers, with relays of ponies every ten miles or so). The staff officers intimated that I should be kept at the place for several days; but gave me the option of going by bullock cart, an offer which I jumped at without realising what it involved.
5
The bridge across the Indus at Attock eventually enabled the Punjab Northern State Railway to reach Peshawar, one of the most important bases on the frontier. Designed by the engineer Guilford Molesworth and completed in 1883, it was built on two decks, the railway crossing above, the Grand Trunk Road below, and it was approached through great iron gates, sentry boxes and gunposts.
Slowly and carefully the trains eased their way across its exposed upper deck, high above the river; below the bullock carts, the camels, the marching soldiers, the pedestrian thousands made their way, and this remarkable iron corridor – always full of movement, the clanking trains above, the jostle below – provided a focus for a dun and treeless prospect of
Sind, out of which, from high ridges all around, forts, guns and embrasures looked watchfully down.
6
The Khojak tunnel, opened in 1891 and at 12,780 feet the longest in India, took the Chaman Extension Railway to the Afghan frontier, and had heavily fortified towers at both ends. After the Mutiny, stations were often built near military cantonments, outside the towns themselves. In 1864 Lahore station was designed to be, as its architect put it, ‘perfectly defensible in every aspect’, with loopholed towers which were proof against the mortar bombs of the day.
Even before the arrival of the railway, the Ganges, navigable to upstream of Allahabad, permitted something approaching large-scale troop movement. This was not always comfortable, as Surgeon A. D. Home of HM’s 40th discovered when travelling from Calcutta deep into Bengal in 1857:
The transport provided for the voyage up the river consisted of two river steamers each towing a ‘flat’ carrying a section of soldiers; and further a hulk, a new sea-going ship, dismantled and fitted for the urgent particular service, was provided. Very ample and good of its kind as this provision seemed, the heat was so great that it was insufficient, and the men, particularly those in the hulk, suffered on the very slow passage upstream on a river in flood.
7
And even river boats were a bonus. Until well on in the 1870s, most British soldiers in India would have understood Sergeant George Carter’s journal only too well:
3rd March 1842.
This day made our first march towards Cawnpore. We marched in the old fashioned broad-topped heavy shako. They are very distressing to the head. About five miles after leaving cantonments crossed the Ganghes over a pukka bridge. The road is in well kept condition and very level. Norogunge 10 miles 4 furlongs.4th.
To day the road is excellent. Crossed the Goomty by a bridge of boats. Sidepore 12 miles.5th.
Road as yesterday. Crossed the Burwa by a pukka bridge. Chobeepore 12 miles.6th.
Splendid roads. Crossed 5 Bridges by a large one at Benares. Benares 12 miles.7th.
This morning the regiment was received by Major General Cox who gave us a deal of praise when the evolutions were finished. Our Rifle Company skirmished much to his satisfaction.8th.
Marched this morning to Mow-ke-serai 7 miles 2 furlongs …
8
… and so it went on, Kipling’s ‘eight ‘undred fighting Englishmen, the colonel and the band’ pounding their way up the Grand Trunk Road.
As any infantryman might have told us, there is ground aplenty: but water, not land, is India’s most crucial resource. It was no accident that Indian civilisation began on the banks of the great rivers of the north some four millennia ago, and that the first of India’s ruling dynasties were established in the Punjab and the Doab. But most of India relies for water on the south-west and south-east monsoons, which sweep across much of the land between June and September. More than nine-tenths of the rainfall comes during these months, but there are years when the monsoons fail. Civil servant and historian Philip Woodruff describes what happens then:
If there is no rain, there is no harvest of rice and millet in September and the ground is too hard to sow the wheat and barley that ought to be cut in March. The peasant seldom has enough grain in hand to carry him more than a month or two beyond harvest-time. The grain-dealer of course has stocks, but prices rise and the peasant cannot buy without running into debt. There is scarcity, debt, hunger and something near starvation. Then perhaps next year there is a poor crop and a partial recovery, then another failure; the dealer’s stocks are exhausted and there is no food in the area. This is famine.
9
Without water, agriculture cannot prosper, and civilisation itself is imperilled. The great Mughal city of Fatehpur Sikri, just west of Agra, was begun by the Emperor Akbar in 1591. Shortly after it was completed, fifteen years later, it was realised that the water supply was inadequate, and the whole complex, two square miles of elaborately
crafted red sandstone, was abandoned. And without water armies cannot take the field: the logistic lessons learned in India by Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) in 1796–1805 stood him in good stead when he was later campaigning in Spain.
Water is conserved in a variety of ways, from the omnipresent ‘tanks’ of north and central India, which range in size from large wells to small reservoirs, to the paddy fields of East Bengal and the south. Not least amongst the achievements of British India were reservoirs, like that created when Colonel John Pennycuick of the Royal Engineers built the Periyar Dam, opened in 1895. It was 173 feet high and 1,240 feet across at the top, creating a canal 35 miles long and 216 miles of lesser waterways. By 1909, India’s canal system was the most extensive in the world: 13,000 miles of primary and secondary canals with 42,000 miles of distributaries irrigated 23 million acres of land, half the total acreage of Great Britain.
10
Yet there are times when, perversely, there can be too much water. East Bengal remains prone to cyclones and floods. Both snow-melt in the mountains and the sudden arrival of the monsoon can convert the dry watercourses – the
nullahs,
such a common feature of the Indian landscape – into raging torrents. Rivers, fordable one day before, become – like the Sutlej on the fateful day of Sobraon – almost impassable to military movement the next. Familiar fords become death-traps. In 1878 a squadron of the 10th Hussars forded the Kabul River two miles east of Jelalabad: forty-seven out of seventy-five were drowned or kicked to death by maddened horses, and only nineteen bodies were found. Surgeon-Major T. H. Evatt tells us how: