His raid on Madras had turned the tables on them, reviving the morale of his troops after the defeat of Arcot. Now he had surprised the British once again, showing flexibility and skill by suddenly making for poorly defended Arcot just as Clive’s forces arrived to reinforce Madras. If Raza Sahib had indeed planned the trap and ambush that followed – and there is no reason to think he didn’t – Clive certainly fell headlong into it.
The young captain’s force hurried northwards at sunset on the night of 28 February, with the intention of resting at the village of Kaveripak. The roar of cannon suddenly engulfed them in the dark. Raza Sahib’s army was all about them: they had been ambushed. It was Clive’s worst misjudgement. One of the most extraordinary battles in the history of the British in India had begun.
As shells exploded about them and bodies were sent flying, Clive showed his legendary calm in a crisis. He ordered his men to shelter in a ditch by the side of the road on the left. The British cannon were dragged over to the opposite side along with the baggage, and began to fire back as Raza Sahib’s force staged a frontal assault down the road. It was dark, but a nearly full moon provided some visibility. The flash of gunfire in the gloom was relentless.
Neither side gave an inch, but the British position was much the more precarious. They had no idea of the size of the enemy force, or their whereabouts, and could only hope that they would not be overcome by a major attack. Clive’s most prudent course of action at this moment was to retreat, seeking to save his guns and baggage. But he had been stung by Saunders’s criticism of his failure to attack the French camp outside Madras, and one of his major objectives in this war was to replace the myth of French with English invincibility.
If he were once defeated or forced to retreat, the concept of Clive as victor would be lost. His predicament was dire. No fewer than nine French cannon were firing upon him. The enemy cavalry were preparing to charge from a point further up the ditch.
Then luck and treachery intervened on his side. Clive had sent one of the commanders of his sepoys, a Portuguese half-caste called Shawlum, to scout out to the right, to find a possible avenue of escape in the darkness. Shawlum seems to have run into the commander of the Indian force behind the French guns and negotiated with him, through bribery or other means, to withdraw his men from the one flank behind the French position that was not defended by an embankment or a ditch.
When Shawlum returned, Clive at once grasped the opportunity and himself accompanied 200 British soldiers – the bulk of his force – and 700 sepoys across the flat but uneven ground and the mango grove. Almost certainly Clive went in order to give his personal seal of approval to the deal arranged between Shawlum and the local commander – a first example of the double-dealing essential to winning or avoiding battle in India, for which he was to be so unjustly pilloried later in life.
The scene, under a nearly full moon, with the French cannon blasting away in the darkness, the few British pieces attempting to fire back, and the two sides exchanging rapid rifle fire, can only be imagined. After Clive gave his agreement to the Indian commander, he returned. The defector led Shawlum and the British force around the back of the French position.
When Clive got back, the desperate soldiers in the ditch were already preparing to flee: the relentless French gunfire had unnerved them, and had found its range. Clive berated them furiously, forcing them to stand their ground; his very presence was enough to reassure them. Any normal commander forced to fight on the enemy’s ground and terms by such an ambush would have called a retreat. Instead he had gambled desperately on a flank attack behind enemy lines at night.
The flanking party was commanded by a young ensign, William Keene. They stumbled over the rough ground in the dark, guided by their Indian deserter, until they came within 300 yards of the back of the French position.
Another young ensign, Symmonds, was sent forward to scout and fell into a trench of enemy sepoys. He pretended at once to be a French officer and strutted about. They behaved submissively: their French was not good enough to see through the deception. He was fortunate in that there was no actual French officer present. After checking that they were still pointing their weapons away from the ambushers, towards where the bulk of Clive’s forces were pinned down in the darkness, guns flashing, he returned to Keene.
The British force then crept up on the French-led forces from behind, and let fire at them from a distance of just 50 yards with a volley. The effect was devastating. The French commander shouted immediately ‘Sauve qui peut’ and most of his soldiers surrendered. The French guns fell silent. Clive and his men were still under intense fire from the forces before them, although the ones to the side had fallen silent. But when news of the débâcle reached the enemy in front, the whole of Raza Sahib’s force began to melt away. The moon had gone down, and Clive did not dare give chase.
As the sun rose the following morning, Clive was disconsolate: forty of his best European soldiers had been killed, as well as thirty of his Indian sepoys. Yet huge numbers of the enemy lay strewn about the field, including the commander of Raza Sahib’s cavalry, which had been stationed nearby but not actually used in the fighting. Victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat.
Through guile, quick thinking and sheer determination, Clive had turned the tables after, through foolhardiness, leading his men into a trap. It was one of the most brilliantly and daringly executed turnarounds in military history. But it had been a close thing, the nearest Clive had yet come to a serious defeat.
To the victor the spoils. Raza Shah now had been decisively beaten. The remainder of his army dispersed before Clive ‘the invincible’, who was able to win even when caught in a finely executed ambush. Dupleix’s comments reveal the depth of bitterness he felt after Kaveripak. ‘A few shots more and all would have been over with the English … Their commander, Mr Clive, hid throughout the combat,’ he spat, presumably a reference to the mission away from the front.
Clive himself was in bitter mood. The nearly successful French ambush and the loss of so many of his men made him grim and determined. Moving southwards towards Fort St David, they reached an extraordinary folly constructed by Dupleix to mark the spot where Nasir Jang had been murdered a year and a half before. It was called Dupleixfatahabad – the City of the Victory of Dupleix. A great base had been laid on which a column was to be erected; around this a large native settlement had sprung up.
Clive destroyed ‘this monument of villainy’ and, in an uncharacteristic act of savagery, burnt the village to the ground. This act was to be laid against him in later life; he was to defend himself as having tried to break the French stranglehold over India, which was based as much on such displays of pomp and grandeur as anything else.
But the truth was that he was angry, aggressive and petty. He had been fighting too long, he had faced too many desperate situations, he had been coping with the stupidity of his military superiors again and again. He wanted now to march on Trichinopoly and chase the French from southern India. His biggest problem was that he was loathed by his nominal bosses, who were senior to him in the army and despised him as a non-soldier and a protégé of Saunders. For his part, Clive had nothing but contempt for the senior commander, de Guingens, who had never dared to venture out of Trichinopoly to attack his besiegers.
CHAPTER 8
The Siege of Trichinopoly
The command problem was resolved by the return of Stringer Lawrence to India, this time properly paid. He was placed in charge as the undisputed commander of the force to relieve Trichinopoly. Now the young ‘invincible’ could be given his head under the benevolent eye of the Old Cock.
The two set off at the head of their army along the by now familiar 150-mile road from Fort St David to Trichinopoly, the portly, diminutive, bluff old soldier alongside his tall, determined second-in-command. This time they went unmolested. When they reached Trichinopoly it was hard for them to comprehend how de Guingens could not have staged an attack against his besie
gers. Muhammad Ali’s forces had been joined by the forces of the Prince of Mysore and the Regent of Tanjori, convinced by Clive’s victories that the British would now be the winning side; Morari Rao and his Marathas had also ridden in. Altogether the pro-British forces camped outside Trichinopoly amounted to some 40,000 men, outnumbering the besieging army of around 30,000.
The truth was that de Guingens still distrusted these princes and the Marathas, and feared that in any sally he would have to bear the brunt of the fighting while the Indians watched and waited to see which way the wind blew. Yet a show of bravery and leadership by the British commander would probably have rallied them. Instead, he compounded their uncertainty by skulking inside the fort, quarrelling bitterly with Muhammad Ali, who openly taunted the British with being cowards.
Dupleix at Pondicherry was well aware of the danger posed by Lawrence’s and Clive’s arrival and knew that the final great showdown between British and French in India was imminent. As soon as news of the approaching British army was relayed to him, he despatched reinforcements to the French commander, Jacques Law, a half-Scot, ordering him ‘to neglect nothing in the effort to succeed’. Dupleix was now left with only a skeleton garrison at Pondicherry.
The great besieging armies of Law and Chanda Sahib, the colourful old warhorse who had so long been the French protégé, were camped to the east of Trichinopoly, which was protected to the north by two rivers, the Cauvery and Coleroon. To the south lay a great plain. It provided one of the most magnificent spectacles in southern India. On the riverside there were two striking pagodas. Behind, a rambling four-mile wall enclosed a bustling city at the heart of which was the rock fortress itself.
The rock was orange in colour: fortifications and battlements were built precipitously up its flanks, which divided to form two tiers. One, the lower, was a massive and ingeniously built fortress, clinging to the sheer rock; on the other were built two picturesque temples. Below lay the squalor and bustle of Indian urban life.
* * *
To comprehend the campaign at Trichinopoly, and indeed later in Bengal, it is necessary to understand the nature of the colourful, shambling circuses that were the Indian armies of the time. Those besieging the rock fortress-town were entirely typical. The forces of an Indian prince much more nearly resembled a travelling township than an army. Anything between 10,000 and 100,000 in strength, they consisted of a fighting force composed of four elements: commanders mounted on elephants; the élite cavalry; the artillery; and the infantry. The other three-quarters of the army were non-combatants.
The commanders on the elephants were deliberately conspicuous, so that they could provide rallying points for the men: if they were shot, Indian armies were usually demoralised and turned tail. But this made them an easy target for the enemy. As an English observer wrote, ‘these enormous beasts (elephants) now seemed to be brought into the field for no other end but to be a mark for our artillery’. The commanders were accompanied by a train of wives, dancers, female family members, concubines and prostitutes, who in turn had their own maidservants, their male servants and farashes, who pitched their tents.
The élite, well-trained cavalrymen were also each accompanied by two servants – one paid to look after the horse, the other to forage for grass – as well as their families. The pride of Indian armies were the heavy artillery pieces, dragged by huge teams of bullocks; light English field-pieces were to enjoy manoeuvring around these and firing at the cattle, stampeding them. The Indians were eventually to retaliate by getting Europeans to man the artillery. Finally, the infantry were usually an ill-organised rabble without an internal command structure, armed with swords, lances and some matchlocks. As Chaudhury puts it, ‘the fighting among the princes themselves is like rioting on a vast scale’.
The Indian armies were burdened by a number of disadvantages, apart from sheer size and unwieldiness: their men were press-ganged or induced to fight by the prospect of plunder (which was true, though to a lesser extent, of European armies of the time). Their tactics were often dictated by astrologers and omens – as happened in the siege of Trichinopoly. The men were usually induced to attack with a heavy dose of opium, intoxicating them to forget their terrors in a burst of courage and energy, but also muddling their judgements and reactions.
They also made easy targets for night attacks, as Clive was to show to devastating effect. As a contemporary English writer put it: ‘At the close of the evening, every man eats an inconceivable quantity of rice, and many take after it some kind of soporific drugs; so that about midnight, the whole army is in a dead sleep: the consequence of these habits is obvious; and yet it would appear a strange proposition to an Eastern monarch, to endeavour to persuade him, that the security of his throne depended upon the regulation of the meals of a common soldier: much less would he be prevailed on to restrain him in the use of that opium, which is to warm his blood for action, and animate his soul with heroism. It must fill the mind of an European soldier at once with compassion and contempt, to see a heap of these poor creatures, solely animated by a momentary intoxication, crowded into a breach, and both in their garb and impotent fury, resembling a mob of frantic women.’
* * *
On the morning of 29 March Lawrence’s and Clive’s forces approached the city, seeking to make for the gap between it and the enemy camp. To Clive’s delight, a force of 200 British soldiers and 400 Indians emerged from the fortress to meet them, and were not intercepted by the besiegers. They were commanded by Clive’s swashbuckling old comrade, John Dalton.
The two friends embraced each other under the eyes of the tubby, self-important, genial Lawrence, and both forces were ordered to stop for breakfast under the intense sun. No doubt Dalton and Clive exchanged rude comments about the maddeningly cautious de Guingens: such an active man as Dalton could not but have been deeply frustrated at being cooped up in the fortress while the enemy went unmolested outside.
Scouts suddenly galloped into camp to warn that the enemy were approaching. A massive cannonade rang out. The British had been caught with their trousers down. As the British forces regrouped, a huge body of men approached in desperate flight: they were from the armies of Mysore and Tanjori as well as the Maratha forces.
Lawrence quickly rallied the Indian armies behind him, stopping their flight, and ordered his forces forward with drums beating, at a measured pace, to restore the battered confidence of the princely allies. As the army advanced, the whole horizon of that flat plain was suddenly blocked as far as the eye could see by an opposing force of elephants, camels, horsemen and infantry bearing pennants, flags, umbrellas, standards, pikes, spears and long trumpets in a riotous display of colour. The plain had become a great tournament ground, divided only by the narrow gulf between the two armies.
The British-led forces maintained their steady pace, under intense bombardment from Chanda Sahib’s guns. Clive galloped off to reconnoitre, and found an ideal place to make a stand: a village with a choultry, providing plenty of cover. He returned and led a force, under heavy cannonade, to seize the choultry, positioning his guns behind it, returning the French fire and giving cover to the main British force, which now moved to the shelter of the village.
The two sides had almost matching firepower, and ‘the hottest cannonade that was ever seen in the East Indies’ now broke out. The French and Chanda Sahib’s forces were unprotected and, after a spell of fierce artillery exchanges, withdrew their guns. Chanda Sahib’s infantry stood their ground a long time, before retreating, leaving only his cavalry behind. When a cannonshot decapitated their commander, they too withdrew. Only around twenty of Lawrence’s men had been killed, a third dying of the heat.
* * *
This first battle had been but a prelude, although the British had won on points: both armies were still virtually intact. Clive must be given the credit for finding his forces a defensible position. However, elephants and tributes were showered upon the three British commanders as they made their way into Trichino
poly.
At last all of the allies were united. These were: the formidable Muhammad Ali; the Prince of Mysore and the Regent of Tanjori; Morari Rao, the greatest Maratha commander; and on the English side, Lawrence, de Guingens, Clive and Dalton. The claustrophobia of Trichinopoly’s siege had been lifted after nearly a year.
The feasting and celebrations that night were genuine, but the resentment that the relieving commanders felt towards the cautious and inert de Guingens was intense. Within a couple of days Lawrence was pressing for an attack to take the enemy off balance. The Indian commanders refused to move until their astrologers had chosen a suitable day.
Frustrated, Lawrence resorted to sending a raiding party at night to attack Chanda Sahib’s army to the east, which was unprotected by fortified positions – Lawrence and Clive’s favourite tactic in a siege. However the raiding party missed the enemy camp altogether in the dark, and was spotted by the French as it hastily returned to Trichinopoly at dawn.
Law now made what most consider to be his most disastrous mistake: he sought a place of shelter for his armies where they could not be attacked, as they nearly were that night. It is easy to be hard on Law. But he himself was in a cruel dilemma. He was outnumbered, by both European and Indian soldiers. He believed he could not win a set-piece battle.
At the same time, Dupleix had given him firm orders not to give up Trichinopoly. Later Law was to lament bitterly to Lawrence that ‘Mr Dupleix is a good man, a generous man, and it is not to him that we owe our misfortunes but to his wife whose violent spirit leads him to do things against his nature and will always involve us in endless difficulties.’
But even Dupleix was in a genuine dilemma. Although often plagued by folie de grandeur and his constitutional optimism that things were better than they were, if he had ordered a French retreat, there was no guarantee that the huge army of Chanda Sahib would have stayed loyal. Almost certainly a French withdrawal would have led to the rapid disintegration of the French-led alliance in southern India. Dupleix may have believed he had no choice but to fight – even if it resulted in the defeat of his army. Not being on the spot, he may have overestimated the strength of the French-led forces.
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