by George Bruce
The road to Kemmendine now being open, the force pushed forward as fast as the tiring troops could haul the heavy guns — a few hundred yards an hour at most. It was late afternoon when behind a belt of jungle appeared a shoulder of the stockade, stretching down to the river on one side and on the other towards the higher, jungle-covered ground above. Efforts were made to surround it, but this was not carried out completely, a gap of some 150 yards being left between the end of the British line and the river on the far side of the fortification. It was an omission that cost Campbell dear.
By then it was too late to attack, in any case. The unfortunate troops spent the night digging trenches and forming batteries for the guns in more or less continual rainfall, thunder and lightning while the Burmese for very good reasons cheered or shouted and from time to time fired their muskets throughout the hours of darkness. Monkeys, birds and insects added all the noises of the jungle night to the hubbub.
Directly the outlines of the stockade emerged in the first grey light, Campbell for two hours directed a heavy fire upon it from the 18-pounders and the mortars. Feeling sure of victory he then sent in the storming parties. Not a shot was fired at them during their advance or when, in the eerie silence, they burst through the small holes in it, or climbed over by scaling ladders. The fort was deserted. ‘It appeared that the enemy had evacuated it long before the batteries had opened, by means of the unguarded space,’ noted Doveton.
‘I heard that the first man who entered the place was an Irishman, who, after looking about him from the top of the stockade, exclaimed to his disappointed comrades, “There is nobody here at all, at all!” This was, however, not strictly the case, as we certainly had the honour of capturing an old woman; but not a man was there, either dead, wounded or alive.’[34]
Thus was Kemmendine taken and the British could at last claim to have broken out of Rangoon, but it is doubtful whether the hard labour of hauling the 18-pounders and spending a night out in the saturating jungle was worthwhile from the standpoint of the men’s health. Round-shot had little effect upon the bamboo, the wood fibres merely expanding on the passage of it and springing back into position afterwards. Henceforward round-shot were seldom used to bombard bamboo stockades; scaling, and the bayonet were more certain, after shellfire.
Kemmendine could probably have been easily carried by assault on the same evening if the attack had been ordered when the troops were full of confidence and flushed with the conquest of the morning, for in this instance there was no lack of scaling ladders; whereas 185 shells, besides numerous round-shot, were fired at an empty stockade, leaving the troops with the feeling of having been tricked or outwitted by a clever foe. A garrison of four companies of the 102nd Regiment and a battalion of Sepoys was left to hold Kemmendine.
Several days of quiet now followed its capture, for the Burmese, strongly impressed by British military and naval power and shocked by their own losses, stayed at a respectful distance from the invader’s lines, the troops for the first time having undisturbed nightly rest. This was of some value because exhaustion, combined with a diet of mouldy biscuit and salt pork, had already greatly lowered resistance to sickness. Dysentery, cholera and malaria had claimed more victims than enemy action, so that until the start of drier weather worse was likely to follow. Malaria would continue to be a killer, for it was of course not then known that the ‘fever’ was caused by the anopheles mosquito, so no defences were mounted against it. Mosquito bites were looked on as a mere irritation, while breathing the vapour rising off swampy ground was believed to be fatal.
Nobody therefore escaped malaria. During the month of June both General Campbell and Captain Marryat went down with it and on 14 June Marryat wrote to Commodore Grant, whom sickness had earlier forced to leave Burma, that he had not a commissioned or warrant officer capable of doing duty; that seven of the Larne’s crew had already died from cholera or dysentery, and that twenty-six more were in hospital dangerously ill, besides many others slightly attacked or remaining convalescent. ‘I am afraid,’ he added, ‘that we shall lose many men before we leave this place. The heavy and incessant rains, the unwholesomeness of the water and the impossibility of procuring fresh provisions to restore the strength of the convalescent, forcibly point it out as the grave of a large part of the expedition.’[35]
HMS Sophie was therefore ordered to Calcutta and directed to return as soon as possible with provisions for both sloops and with as many additional seamen as she could procure, either by entering or impressment. It was a portent of the appalling losses through disease that were to hit officers and men ashore and afloat.
While the British were now lamenting the day that they ever set foot in Burma, their enemies were slowly recovering from the shock of unaccustomed defeat. The night attacks on sentries and picquets that had ceased after Kemmendine began again and on 23 June they floated down a huge fire-raft about a hundred yards long, consisting of 30 or 40 canoes tied together and piled high with barrels of crude oil and wood. Only by rowing out to meet it before it reached the flotilla and risking being burnt by forcing it away from the anchorage did the sailors save their ships. Captain Marryat ordered beams of timber to be chained together and anchored across the river as a safeguard against fire-rafts.
Sooner or later, the Burmese were bound to launch the attack against the invaders which their king had ordered. On 21 July unusual bustle and commotion in the jungle fronting the British positions between Rangoon and the Shwedagon Pagoda foretold the expected clash. British observers computed that eight thousand men had crossed to the Rangoon side of the river above Kemmendine in one day. The Burmese made no attempt at concealment. Clouds of smoke marked their encampments in the jungle and at about mid-day on 1 July they emerged in large bodies to the right and front of the great pagoda, moving towards Rangoon.
Half a mile from the town they attacked, but with so little resolution that it was beaten off easily by three companies of Sepoys and two guns firing grape shot and shrapnel, without the loss of a single man. This defeat still more taught the Burmese to avoid regular actions in the field against the British. They for the time being changed to a policy of stockading their troops in the most inaccessible parts of the jungle, from where they could carry out hit-and-run attacks under cover of night and in this way eventually destroy the ‘rebel foreigners’.
Harassing night attacks and evidence that the Burmese force was growing numerically stronger, while sickness weakened and decreased his own forces, made Campbell restless to achieve some victory that would help to raise falling morale and make his situation less galling and unpleasant. He decided to attack a strongly fortified Burmese stockade at Pagoda Point, where the Rangoon river met the Hlaing river. It was placed on a spit of land between the two rivers and protected by two stockades, one on each bank of the Rangoon river about half a mile downstream.
He formed two columns of attack, he himself with 800 men sailing early on 8 July with the naval flotilla, while Brigadier-General Macbean with 1,200 men marched upon Kamaroot, one and a half miles above Pagoda Point, to cut off the enemy retreat. Campbell observed that tor the enemy the post was an important one, for the protective stockades along the river bank on the approaches to it were carefully built to give mutual support, and hard to storm without heavy losses. He therefore requested Captain Marryat to detail gunboats to shell the defences. Four of them were given the task and under the command of Lieutenant Fraser they pounded the stockades one after the other for an hour.
The enemy’s guns were soon silenced and a flag signal ‘breach practicable’ fluttered from the mainmast-head of Fraser’s ship. Assault troops of HM’s 41st and the 17th Madras Native Infantry, under Colonel Godwin and Major Wahab, pulled across the river in boats, and despite the stakes and other obstacles which obstructed their landing made the assault ‘in the best order and handsomest style’. The Burmese kept up a sharp but ill-directed fire, but ran off when the British entered. Many were killed, others were drowned trying to escape.
The second stockade was stormed and carried in the same style, while the third was found to be abandoned.
Brigadier-General Macbean meanwhile was bogged down by his artillery in the jungle and eventually was forced to leave it behind under guard and march on to Kamaroot without it. Emerging from the jungle on to an open plain, Macbean’s force was faced by a series of seven manned stockades. The two nearest were quickly taken by storm. The Burmese then fell back to a fortification made up of three strong stockades one within the other. Here a Burmese general tried to rally his disorganised troops and lead them against the British by his personal example, but he fell in the first wave of the British charge. Soon this fort too was taken.
Thus within a few hours the Burmese were dislodged from seven stockades. Eight hundred of them fell facing the steady volleys and the subsequent bayonet charges, while the British loss was less than fifty. And true to plan, a column of fugitives from the riverside stockades were intercepted, many of whom were also put to the sword. These defeats were to lower Burmese morale and will to fight decisively, for henceforward they felt themselves liable to defeat both in the field and behind the strongest stockade.
In the purely military field Campbell now seemed assured of eventual victory, for he had clearly demonstrated his supremacy, but the other enemy, disease, had grown worse and was decimating his troops, so that he saw the possibility of soon being unable to put an effective force in the field. Ensign Doveton returned to Rangoon from detachment at Kemmendine to find it ‘one vast hospital with British and Indian troops alike crawling about in their hospital clothing as ghastly as ghosts’ all in the grip of the ‘fever’, which was, of course, malaria.
Not many of them actually died from this, but it so weakened them that they more easily caught cholera or dysentery, which killed hundreds. ‘Few of the poor fellows that had once entered hospital ever left it alive,’ Doveton noted.
To be on the doctor’s list was almost certain death. The wounded men too, died in an unusual proportion, a mere scratch, from the aforesaid cause, often ending in mortification and death. The total want moreover of fish, fresh meat, milk, bread or vegetables rendered the dieting of the sick a most difficult task. Funerals were now of daily occurrence; in our own regiment three, four, five, sometimes six men were carried out at a time. On one occasion I remember ten men of the regiment being buried in one day…
No less dangerous was the navy’s situation. Captain Marryat wrote again to Commodore Grant to say that HMS Larne by 11 July could no longer be counted an efficient ship. There had been no less than 170 cases of cholera and dysentery on board since 9 May, when it had dropped anchor in the shadow of the great pagoda. Thirteen had died of these diseases, another fifty were then suffering from them. ‘Our convalescents are as ineffective as if they were in their hammocks,’ Captain Marryat said in his report. ‘They relapse daily and the surgeon reports that unless the vessel can be sent to cruise for a month, there is little chance of their ultimate recovery.’ Marryat added that he could only muster three officers and twelve men fit for duty on board during the recent river-borne action under Lieutenant Fraser.
Uncertain and gloomy, in mid-July, was the prospect of a victorious end to the campaign in these conditions. Campbell still cherished a hope that the defeats they had suffered might encourage the Burmese to open peace talks, but it was learned later that the court astrologers continued to predict victory, so encouraging King Bagyidaw to more vigorous measures, levying and equipping men in every part of the country.
Intelligence reports made this clear to Campbell, yet at that time, when the rains were at their height and the swamps had grown into lakes, while so many of his men were out of action, he could do little to press on with the war. He therefore decided to do the only thing he could do, which was to launch maritime forces against various objectives. On 4 August a naval flotilla transported 600 troops to Syriam and again drove the Burmese from the old Portuguese fort there, which they had re-occupied. Four days later another small force of 400 men stormed stockades at Dalla, on the western bank of the Rangoon river, where it had been learned that the inhabitants were somewhat hostile to the king’s order for general conscription. The British suffered severe losses when exposed to enemy fire as they floundered through mud banks after they had landed, but the enemy forces failed to follow up their advantage and were driven off.
On 20 August an expedition made up of several hundred men of HM’s 89th and 7th Madras Native Infantry sailed with several naval cruisers and gun brigs to seize the district of Tenasserim, to the south, both because of its long stretch of coast and for the grain and meat likely to be available there. During the three months this expedition lasted the towns of Mergui and Tavoy were captured. The people soon returned to their homes and showed themselves unworried by the change of authority from Burmese emperor to British raj.
Time hung heavily for the troops while the rains splashed down from the leaden sky day after day. Doveton and his brother officers were comfortably accommodated but passed the time in curious ways. ‘The first house I inhabited in Rangoon… consisted only of one long room… My chums, however, being both married men, had better ideas of comfort than I had, and accordingly had partitioned off their allotments by a temporary screen, leaving me the middle space,’ he wrote.
Here I arranged my bullock trunk, cot, camp chair, table, etc., according to my limited notions of comfort; whilst sword, sash, pistols, belts and red jackets, hung suspended from the wall, ready for action. A rug served me for a mattress, and my boat-cloak for a coverlet, and, underneath the cot, the trusty fowling-piece was ever near at hand. Such was the general disposition of my goods and chattels.
Our residence was raised seven or eight feet from the ground, and approached by a most awkward pair of steps. At the summit of these, and serving as a sort of ante-room to our sleeping apartment, was a spacious platform, roofed over, if I remember rightly, but very imperfectly floored, the boards having been here and there made free with as fire-wood. This was also our banqueting hall, for here we feasted on commissariat rations, and enjoyed a cigar in the cool of the evening.
Books being a scarce commodity, and shooting in the neighbourhood of the camp being interdicted (though there was no resisting a sly shot at a dove or paddy-bird when an opportunity offered), the subs, of the army, when off duty, found the time hang very heavily on their hands. I was no exception to the generality, being quite as idle as my neighbours. My favourite resource pour passer le temps was in throwing a spear, at which exercise, by dint of practice upon the numerous pariah dogs with which our lines were infested, I had become very expert, in common, doubtless, with many others.
‘Dog-spearing’ may sound in English ears as a strange and somewhat ignoble pastime, for more cruel it certainly was not than spearing a wild hog or shooting a partridge; but, in truth, like most other sports and recreations, it was the natural result of circumstances. Spears were found in abundance at every stockade that was captured, of every variety of size and shape, so that all hands, camp-followers included, were soon well supplied with them, and hurling the javelin became quite a fashionable amusement. The dogs I have alluded to were most numerous, and soon proved a serious nuisance.
At the Court of Ava meanwhile, in the gilded treasure-laden rooms of the royal palace and beneath the crimson lacquered roofs of the Hall of Audience, the joyful confidence of king and courtiers had given way to gloom and anxiety as the carefully phrased reports from the viceroys and generals with the armies in the south failed to conceal defeat. Soon fugitives from the forces arrived in Ava with terrible stories of the strange invincibility of the ‘white-faced barbarians’.
They swore that the British advanced even after their hands and legs had been shot away or cut off, and that their surgeons carefully collected these limbs and replaced them. Nor were they discouraged from advancing even by wounds and when one of them was killed another at once took his place. But apart from the ordinary soldiers’ stories of the magical
powers of the ‘wild foreigners’, which were not necessarily believed, the first circumstance of the war which earlier had deeply affected the Burmese court was the sudden and complete destruction, in its own phrase, of about a thousand men in a stockade near Rangoon by an enemy force of only about 300.
The American missionary, Adoniram Judson, who later reported these facts,[36] stated that the fugitives swore that the gate of the stockade was choked up by runaways and almost every man in it was put to death by the bayonet. ‘This mode of attack was totally contrary to all that the Burmese knew of war and struck them with consternation,’ Judson said.
Morale among the riverside and country peasantry fell disastrously as the news of the high losses spread throughout the country. Evasion of the conscription decrees became widespread. A sharp warning from a high official, the Kengee Awengee Bomein, to the absentee commander and men of the Yamhugangee Gold Boat fell into British hands, evidence of the enemy problem: ‘In pursuance of the orders we had given, you were to collect your men, and be stationed at the mouth of the Moroon Pagoda River in the Syriam country, where there is a fort and an army,’ the letter stated.
But you, Penen, and ye principal men of the war-boat, do not consider this as the king’s service; and, regardless of the dreadful punishment that awaits you, you do not attend to the orders sent, not a man having as yet arrived from your quarter. I have therefore despatched the Chief Keezee Koiznah to conduct you, together with your men, to Moroon, in order that the orders above alluded to may be carried into effect. On arriving there, let no man say he is at liberty, or in the service of such and such a chief: he that can wield a sword let him take a sword; and he that can use a spear let him take one.[37]
The king and his councillors knew, however, that the nation’s confidence was far from being destroyed. They discussed ways of retrieving the situation and agreed that all would be well when Maha Bandula arrived from Arakan to inspire the troops with the will to triumph over the invaders and command them effectively against this foe whom they had so disastrously under-rated.