Crossing the Kaitna on Rani emphasised the sheer difficulty of Wellesley’s plan. He had to bring most of his army parallel with the river, across the front of a superior force, and then swing from column into line and attack. He was in view of the Marathas for much of the time: an 18-pdr solid shot took off the head of one of his orderly dragoons near the river, and as his army crossed, Pohlmann was swinging his own thirteen regular battalions and approximately one hundred guns through 45 degrees to face the new threat. This would have been relatively simple for his infantry, but the move must have been difficult for the Maratha gunners, for it is heavy going even on tracks. The ground is now quite flat and featureless, with some scrub and trees between the fields. To the north the River Juah flows parallel with the Kaitna, and the mud-walled village of Assaye on the Juah, invisible from Wellesley’s crossing-point, anchored Pohlmann’s left flank. Maratha horse south of the Kaitna hovered round the rear of Wellesley’s army, kept off by his own irregular Indian cavalry.
Once he was across the Kaitna, Wellesley could see enough of the ground to realise that there was not much space for all his infantry, and recognised that the strongly held Assaye would be best left alone until the battle was won in open field. He first formed up with two lines of infantry just west of Waroor; the first, preceded by Lieutenant Colonel William Orrock, who commanded the pickets of the day, contained three battalions with guns in the gaps between them, and the second another three. His cavalry, four regiments under Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Maxwell, stood further back, out of range of Assaye. Wellesley briefed his commanding officers in person, starting with Orrock on the right of the line and then galloping southwards on his bay charger to speak to the remainder. Colin Campbell of the 78th testified to the importance of Wellesley’s personal leadership.
The General was in the thick of the action the whole time … I never saw a man so cool and collected as he was … though I can assure you that until our troops got the order to advance, the fate of the day seemed doubtful.37
An artillery duel was already in progress, and the Maratha guns had the better of it. Wellesley reported that: ‘Our bullocks, and the people who were employed to draw them, were shot, and they could not all be drawn on, but some were, and all continued to fire as long as the fire could be of any use.’38 An unknown cavalry officer described it as ‘a dreadful and destructive cannonade … never was artillery more destructively served or better defended’.39
The infantry went forward in good order, the second line moving up on the right of the first as it did so. The 78th Highlanders, down by the Kaitna, met the Marathas first, and the disciplined musketry of the attackers unsettled Pohlmann’s infantry, most of which did not stand to meet the charge. The Company’s battalions, their men elated by the victory, pushed too far in pursuit and might have fallen victim to the watchful Maratha horse, but the 78th quickly reformed and stood ready to beat them off.
Wellesley had lost his charger during this phase of the battle, and mounted the grey arab Diomed to ride fast up to the northern flank where the firing was intense. He found that Orrock had mistaken his orders, and instead of attacking parallel with the rest of the line, had gone straight for Assaye. HM’s 74th, the next battalion on his left, had taken the same line. Both marched steadily into the fire of infantry and guns acknowledged by seasoned veterans to be the most severe they had ever seen. ‘I do not wish to cast any reflection on the officer who led the pickets,’ wrote Wellesley. ‘I lament the consequences of his mistake, but I must acknowledge that it was not possible for a man to lead a body into a hotter fire than he did the pickets on that day against Assaye.’40 Pohlmann’s infantry and cavalry then attacked the pickets and the 74th, and although the latter formed a rough square behind the hastily piled bodies of enemy dead, the situation was desperate. An officer wrote that:
The pickets and the 74th regiment were charged by a wonderful fine body of cavalry and infantry. The pickets lost all their officers except Lt Colonel Orrock and had only about 75 men left. The 74th out of 400 men of whom only about 100 are likely to survive. Every officer of this corps except Major Swinton and Mr Grant the quartermaster were either killed or desperately wounded.41
This was the crisis of the battle, and Patrick Maxwell, with the cavalry behind the threatened flank, rose to meet it, charging with three of his regiments and making ‘dreadful slaughter’. They hurtled on, crashing into ‘an immense body that surrounded the elephants carrying some of the Maratha chiefs’. Some even crossed the Juah. With his cavalry victorious but scattered, Wellesley quickly regrouped, using the steady 78th and the one uncommitted cavalry regiment to deal with some Maratha horse, which had ridden down amongst his own guns, immobile and exposed once the infantry had advanced. As he led this attack, a Maratha piked Diomed in the chest, and Wellesley mounted his third charger of the day.
By now Pohlmann’s army had been pushed back into a semicircle with its left in Assaye and its right across the Juah. Maxwell had returned to the field, and Wellesley ordered him to charge the eastern end of Pohlmann’s line while he took the re-formed infantry against its centre and right. Maxwell was hit by canister as he led his men forward, and his death sapped their confidence. Most accounts suggest that they did not charge home and sheered off in front of the Maratha line. However, a cavalry officer maintained that ‘we succeeded however in getting possession of their cannon, retaining them till our line of infantry came up’. Perhaps he was referring to guns standing in Pohlmann’s second position, in which case his remark would make sense, for the attacking infantry would indeed have passed through these. But there is no doubting the impact of the infantry attack or the role the 78th played in it. Although its men had marched about 25 miles since dawn and fought a hard battle on a hot day, they marched on against the third Maratha position with as much confidence as they had against the first. Pohlmann’s men did not wait for them, but fled across the Juah. They left ‘the whole country strewn with the killed and wounded, both European and natives, ours as well as the enemy’s’.42 The cavalry, exhausted by its efforts, was in no condition to pursue.
Wellesley spent the night with some other officers in a farm near Assaye. The battle had cost him 1,584 killed, wounded and missing, and perhaps 6,000 Marathas had been killed or wounded. The Marathas had lost all their guns. Fifteen years later a cavalry officer told Wellesley that he remembered him congratulating a brave Indian sergeant at the day’s end, promoting him ‘with that eloquent and correct knowledge of the native language for which you were celebrated’. He may have had his tongue in his cheek, for Wellesley apparently said ‘Acha havildar: jemadar’, – ‘OK sergeant: lieutenant’ – scarcely the apogee of linguistic ability. The incident may in fact testify to Wellesley’s deep mental and physical exhaustion. He thought the battle ‘the bloodiest for the numbers that I ever saw’, and later told Stevenson that ‘I should not like to see again such loss as I sustained on the 23rd of September, even if attended by such a gain.’43 That night he had a recurring nightmare that ‘they were all killed’. Years later when he was asked what was the best thing he ever did in the way of fighting, he replied with the single word ‘Assaye’.
I finished my day on the battlefield near Assaye itself, surrounded by eager children selling canister shot and musket balls and pointing out the fragments of Maratha iron guns, some of them destroyed by the British after the battle. Patrick Maxwell lies beneath a huge peepul tree, and although words are no longer visible on his headstone, his name is well remembered. It could so easily have been Arthur Wellesley, for the price of leadership had been heavy that day and, not for the last time in his career, Wellesley felt the finger of God upon him.
Assaye did not end the war. Stevenson, who had marched on the sound of the guns, joined Wellesley shortly afterwards, and a hospital for the wounded was established within the fortifications of Ajanta. In the weeks that followed, Wellesley at first continued his ‘two army’ strategy, manoeuvring with Stevenson to take more of Scindia’s for
tresses and pushing the Rajah of Berar back towards his capital. On 29 November 1803, with his armies united, Wellesley attacked the combined forces of Scindia and Berar at Argaum. He launched a frontal assault into cannon fire ‘not to be compared with that of Assaye’. With the infantry only 500 yards from the Maratha line, his own guns came into action, shaking the opposing infantry badly before the measured volleys ended what cannonballs had begun. A short firefight ended with the rout of the Maratha infantry, while on each flank the Maratha horse was driven off by British and Indian cavalry. The battle cost Wellesley 361 casualties – only 46 of them fatal – while the Marathas lost at least 5,000 men and, again, all their guns. Elsewhere the war was going in favour of the British, and on the Delhi front Lieutenant General Gerard Lake (later Lord Lake) had beaten Scindia in a battle just as important as Assaye. On 15 December 1803, Wellesley stormed the powerful stronghold of Gawilghur, and this defeat induced Scindia and the Rajah of Berar to make peace, giving up territory and agreeing to disband their forces.
Holkar had not become involved in the war, but soon realised that its peace terms could only limit his influence, not least because his armies relied on plunder which could no longer be obtained if neighbouring states were under British protection. In April 1804 a new war broke out, this time with Holkar as its chief protagonist on the Maratha side. Mindful of the fate of Scindia’s regulars at the hands of better-trained troops, he relied on more traditional Maratha tactics, and south of Delhi he ran circles round Lake (who was not able to bring the war to a successful conclusion till the end of 1805), and roundly defeated Lieutenant Colonel William Monson in late August 1804. Lake told the governor-general that he did not want Wellesley’s help in the north, and that he should be sent to command in his old stamping-ground, the Deccan. But Wellesley, now back at Seringapatam, no longer felt equal to the challenge.
There were several reasons for this. First, he believed that his victories had been squandered by the governor-general and his council. He disapproved of the weakening of native princes, which could only result in increasing demands being placed upon the Company, as he described in April 1804.
I have always been of the opinion that we have weakened Scindia more than is politic; and that we shall repent of having established a number of these little independent powers in India, every one of whom will require the support of the British government, which will occasion a constant demand of employment of troops, a loss of officers and men, and a claim of money.44
He had predicted that war would break out again, and was ‘dispirited and disgusted’ at the way things had been handled. Next, his military appointment was ‘of an ambiguous nature’: he was still on the staff at Mysore, for although the Duke of York, commander-in-chief of the British army, had promised him an appointment, there was no sign of one. Worse, he felt tired, ill and desperately homesick, ‘anxious to a degree which I can’t express to see my friends again’. ‘I have served as long in India,’ he affirmed in June 1804, ‘as any man ought who can serve anywhere else.’45 He certainly bore the scars of India. Sir Jonah Barrington, a judge who described him as ‘ruddy faced and juvenile in appearance’ in 1793, thought that in 1805 he was ‘looking so sallow and wan, with every mark of what is called a worn out man’.46 And there was a political undercurrent. His brother’s days as governor-general were coming to an end – he was to be replaced by the aged Lord Cornwallis in mid-1805 – and without powerful support, it was not hard to see that the victor of Assaye might have his wings clipped by the senior and disappointed. On 8 June 1804, after obtaining Lake’s permission to depart, he formally applied for leave to return home, though matters were not finally settled till early the following year.
But as he prepared to go, there were consolations. He was appointed a Knight of the Bath on 1 September 1804. A pleasing story tells of the order’s star being quietly pinned to his coat by his old friend Sir John Cradock while he slept, though he himself wrote, in a tone reflecting the dejection of that phase of his life, that the insignia was ‘kicking about the Lord Keith which arrived about ten days ago and discovered by a passenger looking for his own baggage’.47 He was not only a knight, but rich, with a personal fortune of over £42,000. He told Major Merrick Shaw, his secretary, that ‘I am not rich in comparison with other people but very much so in comparison with my former situation, and quite sufficiently for my own wants’, admitting that he was now ‘independent of all office or employment’.48 His officers from the Maratha campaign gave him a silver dinner service worth £2,000, now in Apsley House, and the gentlemen of Calcutta, a sword worth half as much. The officers of the 33rd sent their thanks, and his reply characteristically enjoined them ‘to adhere to the system of discipline, subordination, and interior economy which you have found established in the regiment, and, above all, to cherish and encourage among yourselves the spirit of gentleman and of soldiers’.49 The inhabitants of Seringapatam had written fulsomely as soon as his departure was mooted.
May you long continue to dispense to us that full stream of security and happiness, which we first received with wonder … and, when greater affairs shall call you from us, may the God of all castes and all nations deign to hear with favour our humble and constant prayers for your health, your glory, and your happiness.50
Wellesley embarked on Admiral Rainier’s flagship HMS Trident on 10 March 1805. The first leg of the voyage took him, portentously, to the little island of St Helena, where he stayed in the Briars, which was briefly to house Napoleon while Longwood was being prepared for him. He had found the voyage enormously restoring to his health, and suggested that he would have become seriously ill had he remained in India. At St Helena he heard the sad news that Stevenson, his tireless collaborator, had died on the way home, probably without hearing that he had been promoted to major general. Trident dropped anchor off Dover on 10 September, and Wellesley was home at last.
‘I understood as much about military matters when I came back from India as I have done ever since,’ remarked Wellesley ten years later.51 Although, like so many of his aphorisms, this contains a whiff of exaggeration, it is still hard to understate India’s influence on him. First, it had shaped his habits. He advised Henry ‘to live moderately, to drink little or no wine, to use exercise, to keep the mind employed, and, if possible, to keep in good humour with the world’.52 Despite bouts of a variety of diseases, ranging from tropical fevers to the Malabar itch, he tried to keep fit, and always walked ‘40 paces back and forth in front of his tent’ soon after rising. He was a fine practical horseman, covering 45 miles a day on the way to Gawilghur. His attention to detail was as remarkable as it was remorseless. He did not believe in lingering in bed – ‘when it is time to turn over, it is time to turn out’ – and as soon as he was up, he would be in the saddle or at his desk. He made a rule of doing ‘the business of the day in the day’, and kept all his books and papers in a single cart.
His dress was already taking a familiar shape: white pantaloons tucked into Hessian boots, scarlet tunic, and black cocked hat. He was fond of silver-hilted curved swords with Indian or Persian blades; slightly flashy, to be sure, but infinitely more practical in a brawl – he probably fought hand-to-hand at both Sultanpettah and Assaye – than the slim straight-bladed sword decreed by regulations.
There was an early warning of trouble to come. Wellesley had a healthy sexual appetite, and Captain Elers thought that he ‘had a very susceptible heart, particularly towards, I am sorry to say, married ladies’. Elizabeth Longford believed that he was ‘more likely to make aphorisms than to make love’, but acknowledges that there might have been something more serious between Wellesley and the wife of Captain John William Freese of the Madras Artillery. His conduct ‘shocked his censorious aide-de-camp, Captain West, not to mention an officious married lady, the natural daughter of an earl, a situation guaranteed to make anyone starchy’.53
India had also formed his views on tactics. A shaky opponent was best dealt with by a sudden attack, before
he had time to collect himself. ‘Dash at the first fellows that make their appearance and the campaign will be ours’ was his watchword for the Assaye campaign.54 In September 1804 he told Colonel Murray that he should attack the Maratha infantry ‘before you think of doing anything else.’ But he should avoid allowing the Marathas to mount a formal attack of their own, because their powerful artillery would do so much damage. Defensive operations settled nothing, and although a commander might have to withdraw if faced by impossible odds or because he had outrun his supplies, it ought always to be with a view to striking again. Drill and discipline underpinned tactics. Wellesley had believed this when he came to India, and his views had been reinforced by his experience there: Assaye and Argaum were both won as much by discipline and cohesion as by courage. In June 1804 he ordered a parade of all his native infantry at six in the morning, and listed points of detail for the attention of commanding officers, pointing out that alignment on the colours was easiest if the sergeant between the colours followed his commanding officer’s footsteps precisely, and substantial changes of direction were to be achieved by ‘echelon march of divisions’ rather than by wheeling. This was not drill as an end in itself, but the precise adjustment of the machinery of war.
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