Hervey had paced enough. He sat down with a deep sigh. The answer was not unexpected, but no less dismaying for that.
There were just the two of them, only the governor’s khansamah and the sowars of the bodyguard within earshot. ‘Somervile, I must ask to be relieved of command if the order stands.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not solely the iniquity of deposing a sovereign – the unlawfulness I might say, though doubtless there’d be a jurist at Fort William who’d confound me with jus ad bellum and Lapse – but it’s the practicability. I can conceive of no strategy to defeat so great a force as the dewan can dispose unless the Ranee is with us. I’ve assured her that at the very least the Company will give asylum, and it’s my opinion that Fort William will be far better served by a subsidiary alliance with her than annexation. She is not without worth.’
‘I have conveyed those thoughts exactly.’
‘And the enormity of the task? So much artillery, so many horse; and his infantry – greatly more than that manifestly incompetent agent reported. You’ll recall that when this began, it was with the promise of the unstinting support of the army of Bombay; yet now you tell me they’re going north on some other errand instead. For what does Bentinck rightly wish? If he wishes the annexation of Chintal he must will the means.’
‘I cannot but share your dismay. I’ve asked Fort William for two battalions, and sent word to Vellore for the rest of their brigade. At present I can do no more.’
He didn’t add that, with but a few weeks before he took his leave of India, his lordship’s attention might be difficult to detain.
Hervey nodded, still weary from thirty-six hours in the saddle and not yet opportunity even to plunge in the pool, let alone take an easeful bath.
‘We’d lose five thousand, come what may.’
Somervile winced. ‘Surely no?’
‘I’m not a sorcerer.’
‘You must not resign, whatever happens. There’s no one who’d make so good a fist of it. There’d be many a man dead without need, and even more in despair.’
Hervey thought for a moment. ‘As the orders come ultimately from Fort William, I must exercise the right to represent my opinion in person.’
Somervile nodded. ‘Were I in your position, I should do likewise. And I’m perfectly willing to go along with it, but Fort William might overrule it, and then where’d you be? Let’s at least proceed on the assumption that sound sense will prevail, and make plans accordingly.’
Hervey sighed heavily. What indeed was the alternative? There might be one or two who’d likewise refuse the command if he did, but ultimately there’d be one for whom promotion would be too great a temptation. And such a one who’d commit to so unpromising a venture would doubtless be the one least likely to bring it off.
‘You are in the right.’
Somervile nodded again, but with a look of profound relief.
‘Qu’hai!’
His khansamah appeared at once, like a djinn from the lamp.
‘More coffee, please, Bulwunt.’
And thus the bargain was sealed. Hervey smiled. ‘I want to send two or three good men to Fairbrother. I’d have left a cornet and dozen, but it might have invited suspicion, so just two corporals.’
‘You did well to place him there. I still have no word who it is Fort William intends appointing. Indeed, I wonder that they’ll be disposed to appoint anyone to be agent, in the circumstances. Nor that anyone will be inclined to accept, given the intention to depose the Ranee. A more perilous plum to pull I can scarce imagine!’
‘We are greatly bounden to Fairbrother. Acharya accepted him readily enough, but as soon as he gets wind of our approach …’
‘The thought had not escaped me,’ said Somervile gravely. ‘He must have some honour when the time comes.’
In the afternoon, Hervey went to see the 13th Light Dragoons, arrived from Bangalore the previous day. He found them well set up in tents and billets near the fort, but with fewer men than expected, and their commanding officer distinctly embarrassed by it.
‘It’s the deucedest thing, Hervey. I have every able man save the quarter guard here, and my sabre strength’s barely three hundred. Fifteen years in India and its depredations.’
Hervey was sympathetic. He’d known their colonel since the Peninsula, Allan Maclean, scion of the Highland clan whose name he bore. He was but a couple of years his younger, yet had only lately come to command; but Hervey knew he wouldn’t shrink from the present unhappy odds if it came to it.
They walked the lines without formality beyond the usual compliments. ‘I would that you return the salutes, not I,’ said Hervey, ‘for I’m not dressed as a general, and it would only sow confusion if you failed to acknowledge them.’
All but the duty NCOs and picket officer were in watering order – white canvas overalls, looser cut than the parade dress worsted, and blue cotton-duck coatees. They too had been obliged to change to red when the new King had come to the throne (disliking, as he did, seeing soldiers in the colour he regarded as proper only for his sailors, among which, at heart, he remained).
After meeting the officers, who seemed to him a wholesome lot, Hervey took Maclean aside and told him confidentially what might be their predicament. They both wore the Waterloo Medal, and between men who’d been at Waterloo there could be extra trust.
Maclean listened in silence. He might only lately have been promoted, but long years’ soldiering, much of it in India, had formed his opinion. When Hervey was finished, Maclean inclined his head and said, ‘Well, for my own part, I am not dismayed. We were barely two hundred at Campo Maior and beat three times the number of French. These Pindaree horse, they won’t stand the charge. For that’s evidently what these Chintal devils are, fugitives of fugitives. If this Ashok intends using them to cover Chintalpore while he and his hoplites make a fortress of the city, then he’ll go the way of Bhurtpore.’
Hervey was heartened by the Highland resolution, but cautious yet. ‘We must hope he does, but if, as I say, his Swiss friends have trained his men to manoeuvre in the open, then we shall be sore pressed. That said, if they can be induced to attack …’
‘That would be to break with practice.’
‘But if they could be …’
‘Then we’ll drive them back.’
Maclean smiled, and Hervey knew why. The regiment still cherished Lord Hill’s order at Waterloo when the Imperial Guard tried to force the line: ‘Drive them back, Thirteenth!’, for it was punctually obeyed.
‘And so, we may take heart that whatever may be, you and I will do our duty.’
‘Just so, General. Shall you dine with us this evening? I’ve sent word already for your officers.’
‘I beg you would forgive me. I’ve despatches to attend to, which must go at dawn. Tomorrow, though, I’d be delighted.’
They parted with warm handshakes, Hervey much fortified. There was always comfort in Cromwell’s ‘A few honest men are better than numbers’, and the assurance of Ecclesiastes that the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (even if in practice it usually was).
He’d intended returning at once to quarters, but, spirits high, he thought instead to ride over to the camp of the other, if much bracketed, ‘Thirteenth’: the 13th (1st Somersetshire) Regiment (Light Infantry).
It was not, in truth, a prospect that pleased him as much as Maclean’s Thirteenth, for the Somersetshires had of late acquired a tempestuous reputation. He’d known them in Ava, where their colonel, Robert Sale, ‘Fighting Bob’, was grievously wounded. They’d been in garrison at Agra for the past three years. It wasn’t in the Madras presidency (nor soon would it be in Bengal when the fourth presidency, of Agra itself, was created), but news of ‘tempest’ always travelled post in India.
The trouble appeared to have begun in their previous station, Dinapore, where in four years they’d lost some four hundred men, women and children through sickness and the like – not a shot fired
– and too from the measures that ‘Fighting Bob’ had taken to improve discipline. Drink, evidently, and as ever, lay at the root of much of it, but inspecting officers had also made mention of the high number of courts martial and solitary confinements – if also of the attempts at reward for good conduct. The adjutant had even begun a temperance movement (with ‘Fighting Bob’ himself taking the pledge, so the stories went), getting himself made Baptist preacher, distributing bibles and even building a chapel. This, according to the hircarrahs of military gossip, had been all very well until the major succeeded to command, for Colonel Dennie made his priority not the flattering of soldiers into virtue, but bullying them out of vice. Not only had the courts martial increased, he’d authorized certain non-commissioned officers to administer corporal punishment – ‘summary justice’ as he called it – without informing the company commanders.
Hervey himself had been in two minds about the reports. There was many a vocal supporter in Madras of Colonel Sale’s methods – he himself had instituted many an encouragement to sobriety in the Sixth – but command of a battalion of infantry in which the mortality rate had run at ten per cent was not for the faint-hearted. Certainly, an adjutant who married a missionary and got himself ordained was something he found curious to contemplate. He reserved his judgement of the – reportedly – far-from-teetotal Colonel Dennie.
It was as well that he did, for he soon found him at office in a belltent in the middle of the Somersets’ camp. The picket had turned out and presented arms as fast as any he’d seen, and the picket officer and serjeant appeared before he was out of the saddle. Whatever was the regime of discipline, its first appearance was promising.
‘Good afternoon to you, General,’ said Dennie, rising. ‘We’re just come and you must take us as you find.’
It was not perhaps the most regular of beginnings, but there again, neither was his visit. A general arriving without ceremony could put a regiment in a spin.
Dennie was five or six years his senior in age and an inch or so shorter – wiry, bushy-browed, and with every appearance of a choleric disposition. Sleeman had told him he was fierce and fiery, irritably impatient of acts of injustice to which he himself would have been no party but which would scarcely have moved a less sensitive man. No doubt he perceived a slight where only courtesy was intended – and perhaps the reverse was true, that he intended only courtesy yet somehow managed to give offence. He, Hervey, reckoned he’d just have to see.
He shook his hand – uncommon custom that it was on meeting – and smiled unconcernedly. ‘It is good to see your regiment again. The stockade at Rangoon was it not?’
There’d been ‘trouble’ there too, but no want of fight either.
‘I do believe it was … And you’re come now without a staff?’
‘I’m come without a staff because I’m just returned from Chintalpore and thought to see how things stood with your quarters.’
‘Well, there’s too much canvas, but I’d rather have it that way, with the companies close to instead of boarded out, no matter how comfortable the billets.’
There was sense in that, for it was a good deal easier to keep out the hawkers of whatever it was the stills of Sthambadree brewed. ‘How many are you?’
‘Seven hundred and eighty-three all ranks.’
Hervey nodded. It wasn’t a thousand, but it was more than some of the battalions in Madras could muster. He didn’t suppose there was a single one in India save for the native regiments (nor anywhere else for that matter) that was up to strength.
‘May I offer a libation, General?’
‘A common drink will do.’
Dennie laughed and nodded to his orderly.
Hervey sat down. He’d let out the rope to see what he did with it. Dennie had been in regimentals seven years before he himself was made a cornet. Although that counted for nothing when it came to the Articles of War, it would count for much when it came to the realities of war. Dennie had been with Lake in the campaigns against the Marathas while he’d still been at Shrewsbury, and he’d come out of Ava with a brevet half-colonelcy and a CB. It couldn’t have been easy for such a man to play second fiddle to Sale for so long. Hervey expected he’d need a tight rein.
Meanwhile he would take the glass and raise it to his host with a ‘Your regiment, sir’, and drink a full measure. (Whisky, too; good whisky – he’d expected arrack – and excellent soda water.)
He was not long back in his quarters, now at the fort, with Corporal Johnson still directing the bhistis drawing his bath, when his brigade major came. Hervey had chosen a young field officer of the Madras Native Infantry who’d bloodied his sword in Ava, been aide-de-camp to the commander-in-chief and then on the staff at Fort St George. Captain Parry had one of the neatest hands in the headquarters, and Hervey was of the same opinion as his father in the matter, that a neat hand betokened a calm mind; but one day, too, he’d seen him bang his fist on the table by return when a colonel of artillery had persisted in an unreasonable demand. A fair hand and the courage to speak his mind – the makings of a good executive officer (and deserving the pay of acting major).
‘General, I intrude, but I’ve only just learned you’re back. I was laying out lines for the Nizam’s Horse.’
Hervey waved him to a chair. ‘When did you come?’
‘Three days ago. Major Sleeman’s told me of the suppressing measures, and what’s still to be done, and Sir Eyre of the change in the order of battle for Chintal.’
Hervey nodded. ‘We’re done with thug-hunting now, I trust. So Gordon’s sowars are here, then?’
‘Tomorrow. And a second of the Nizam’s follows.’
‘Well, that’s all to the good, no doubt, but not directly in Chintal.’
Somervile had applied to the Nizam under the terms of the subsidiary alliance for a regiment of cavalry to police the dak roads. None from the contingent could be employed outside the presidency without permission of the Nizam, but he’d kept his intentions towards Chintal secret anyway.
‘And their commandant is in the field.’
Hervey smiled. ‘Better and better.’ (The Nizam, evidently, wished to be helpful, since Gordon’s were reckoned the most efficient.) ‘I’ve not seen Sir John Gordon since France. You’ll give me word as soon as he comes?’
‘Of course, General.’
‘And what others?’
‘Three troops of horse artillery are at Guntoor, and the rest will follow within the fortnight, if there are no more mishaps on the Krishna. They lost two guns for a day embarking from Vellore. The Fifty-fifth will be here in three more days, and the Thirty-ninth a week, perhaps more, and their strength uncertain. Theirs was a short summons.’
‘Indeed.’ But he was pleased to hear of it; both they and the Fifty-fifth had been his comrades-in-arms in Coorg. ‘And the native infantry?’
‘The Third will be here tomorrow, the Fifth and Sixth in ten days. And the King’s battalions and Madras Europeans from Vellore in three weeks, perhaps four.’
Hervey nodded again. ‘It might be worse, I suppose. You’ll not know the outcome of my sojourn in Chintal, though.’
‘St Alban has told me all, General.’
Hervey looked glad of it, for where to begin? ‘If St Alban’s told you, then you may be assured there’s no more to tell.’ He got up again. ‘See here, Parry, I’m deuced weary, but nothing that a bath and a razor won’t amend. Join my family party in an hour, and we’ll talk the more. Tomorrow I’ll want to make plans – three plans, no less: in case we march in one week, in two or in three and more. You might in the meantime make up the march tables for each. Oh, and we’d better have the commissary come.’
‘Very good, General; I’ll begin at once. And thank you for the invitation to dine.’
‘Speaking of which, you’ve not yet met Colonel Dennie?’
‘Of the Somersetshires? No, I called on him this morning but was given my congé till tomorrow. He was at orderly room and not to be disturbed.
I judged it best on that occasion to make nothing of it.’
Hervey sighed. ‘No doubt it was for the best, but there can be no repetition.’
For a brigade major bore the brigadier’s authority, and he, Hervey, would not put up with the door being closed to it. (He did, though, rather admire the assurance it signified.)
‘No, indeed, General. By the bye, sir, I was given to understand Colonel Dennie is not enamoured of “Somersetshires” – that he insists instead on “Thirteenth Light Infantry”.’
Hervey sighed. ‘Yes, I too was given to understand it. Colonel Dennie said there weren’t a dozen men from Somersetshire in the regiment, and that he was damned if he even knew where the place was.’
Parry smiled sympathetically.
Hervey smiled too. ‘Oh, it served: I said I hoped that as light infantry I could count on their increase in celerity.’
XXI
Imperious Duty
Sthambadree, four days later
The Sixth, dismounted and in their red, were drawn up in hollow square on the maidan below the great fort, while the 55th (Westmoreland) and the 3rd Madras Native Infantry, likewise red-coated, provided the outer picket which would keep the spectators at precisely the distance Sleeman wanted – close enough to see the act, distant enough to threaten no part in it. They’d come from all quarters of the city and from the country miles about, for an execution was a pageant, and their lives anything but.
Sleeman had ordered the arrangements very exactly. The year before at Nagpore, the condemned men had turned the tables on their executioners, and to the watching crowd become the heroes. No sooner had they ascended the scaffold but they’d declaimed it was an everlasting disgrace to die by the hands of the common hangman, and each had taken hold of the rope, pushed his head into the noose, tightened the knot and then jumped off the beam into eternity.
But this time there’d be no opportunity for display, or for any declamation within earshot of the crowd. Nor would they, as at Nagpore, be able to receive gifts of money and clothes from the onlookers, useless as such gifts were – succour from the belief that a man about to meet his maker imparted a holiness to all he touched, thereby gaining reverence. No, Sleeman meant business. It was the Company that brought true peace to the people of this land, and he’d have the people know it.
The Tigress of Mysore Page 24