Clive

by Robert Harvey

  In reply to this threat he received at last what seemed like a definite commitment: ‘The sooner you march to fall upon him the better, before his design can take place. As yet you are now only designing, but it is not now proper to be indolent. When you come near I shall then be able to join you. If you could send two or three hundred good fighting men [along] the upper road towards Kasimbazar, the Nabob’s army would of themselves retreat. Then the battle will have no difficulty. When I am arrived near the army I will send you privately all the intelligence. Let me have previous notice of the time you intend to fight.’

  Again, it could all be a trick. Clive had no way of knowing. But he replied without hesitation.

  I am determined to risk everything on your account, though you will not exert yourself. I shall be on the other side of the river this evening. If you will join me at Plassey, I will march halfway to meet you, then the whole Nabob’s army will I know fight for you. Give me to call to your mind how much your own glory and safety depends upon it.

  Be assured if you do this you will be Subah of these provinces, but if you cannot go even this length to assist us I call God to witness the fault is not mine, and I must desire your consent for concluding a peace with the Nabob, and what has passed between us will never be known. What can I say more than that I am as desirous of your success and welfare as my own.

  That same evening, Clive crossed over himself with the last of his troops. It must have been a painfully lonely journey. This was his Rubicon, his burning of the boats. Like Caesar and Cortés, he had made his decision and there would be no going back. In the sultry evening, he gazed upon the slow-moving waters of the tributary of the Upper Hugli as he committed his small force to the chance that a Bengali general might be telling the truth.

  * * *

  Typically, once the decision was made, furious energy replaced hesitation; he pushed his troops forward in a precipitate night march. The rain was torrential as darkness fell, and the progress was slow and dismal through rapidly flooding fields. Drenched and determined, he spurred his men on through the sodden gloom, sparing none, until they reached a substantial building, the Nawab’s hunting lodge at Plassey, an elegant country house which Clive immediately chose as his headquarters.

  The British labelled this Plassey House: it overlooked the river from behind a fine Moorish colonnade. The place was a delightful country estate. Steps led down to the water where the Nawab’s royal barge would take him downstream for his parties; around it was a large garden within a substantial wall. To the south, behind it, was a splendid mango grove for the Nawab’s delectation, nearly half a mile long and 300 yards wide. It was laid out in carefully symmetrical lines and was surrounded by a mudbank and ditch.

  The hunting lodge had been well chosen. As a British visitor, James Forbes, was later to comment in 1781:

  The country surrounding Plassey abounds with best of prey, and game of every description. A gentleman lately engaged on a shooting party gave us an account of their success in one month … in which space they killed one royal tiger, six wild buffaloes, 186 hog deer, 25 wild hogs, 11 antelopes, 3 foxes, 35 hares, 15 brace of partridges and floricans, with quails, ducks, snipes and smaller birds in abundance.

  Clive instantly appreciated the use of the Nawab’s shangri-la as a defensive position. His scouts informed him they were only three miles from the Nawab’s approaching army and one mile from the camp of the standing army, under Rai Durlabh. The grove was known, poetically, as the Orchard of the Hundred Thousand Trees, and the name Plassey itself was taken from the palas trees present – the Flame of the Forest. It was a name that was to resonate throughout history.

  Clive dried out and quartered comfortably in the Nawab’s small country house. Macaulay sets the scene:

  Clive was unable to sleep; he heard, through the whole night, the sound of drums and cymbals from the vast camp of the Nabob. It is not strange that even his stout heart should now and then have sunk, when he reflected against what odds, and for what a prize, he was in a few hours to contend.

  Nor was the rest of Surajah Dowlah more peaceful. His mind, at once weak and stormy, was distracted by wild and horrible apprehensions. Appalled by the greatness and nearness of the crisis, distrusting his captains, dreading every one who approached him, dreading to be left alone, he sat gloomily in his tent, haunted, a Greek poet would have said, by the furies of those who had cursed him with their last breath in the Black Hole.

  Clive had seized a defensible position. But his small force was desperately isolated and any determined show of resistance by the enemy the following day would overwhelm or surround the British.

  When dawn broke, Clive was on the roof of the lodge, telescope in hand. What he saw must have shaken him. He had heard reports that the Nawab’s army was only 8,000 strong, because his treasury had failed to pay the rest of his men. Others believed the number to be much greater; but the evidence suggests Clive was reasonably confident the numbers were on the low side.

  Instead, in the clear light of the morning, while the sun cast its early cold light as the monsoon clouds began to gather, there lay before him an extensive green plain as far as the river. A rolling sea of enemy troops – the standing army of Rai Durlabh reinforced by the whole might of Murshidabad, including Mir Jafar – was fanning out towards and around the British position.

  Scrafton, for one, was in awe. ‘What with the number of elephants, all covered with scarlet cloth and embroidery; their horse, with their drawn swords glittering in the sun; their heavy cannon drawn by vast trains of oxen; and their standards flying, they made a most pompous and formidable appearance.’ Pennants were aloft, bands with trumpets and cymbals were playing. Elephants with exotically tailored, clanking, suffocating armour bore the major commanders.

  A large and well-trained cavalry was among them, their swords at the ready. A large number of cannon were in their midst, heavily outnumbering the English; they were on mobile wooden platforms, each pulled by some 50 oxen; behind, elephants pushed them forward. The odds were the worst that Clive had ever faced. The forces against him were relatively well disciplined. He had fewer than a tenth of their cannon and no cavalry; he had no native supporting armies as he had had at Trichinopoly.

  His position, although a good defensive one, was hardly a fort. He had only 3,000 men. Against him was an army of at least 50,000 – 35,000 disciplined infantry, admittedly often mutinous, but just sweetened by large sums of back pay; there were 15,000 of the best cavalry available – Pathans from the north-west border, fine fighters and riders. The Nawab also had more than 50 cannon; the most advanced of these had sophisticated screw devices to raise and lower their barrels and, more threatening still, were maintained and fired by 50 Frenchmen under the control of M. de St Frais, bent on avenging the defeat at Chandernagore.

  There had been no reply, in the night or early morning, from Mir Jafar. As the forces before Clive began to outflank the British to the south, he wondered whether he would soon be entirely surrounded and cut off with his back to the river. He had never been in such dire straits; he feared that he had lost his gamble. He remarked grimly, ‘We must make the best fight we can during the day and at night sling our muskets over our shoulders and march back to Calcutta.’

  * * *

  The night before, the youthful adventurer, the boy who had climbed the church steeple, the guerrilla leader who had outfoxed such huge armies, had prevailed at the last minute over the general. The dreamer who believed in founding a great Bengali empire had triumphed over a man beginning to grow mature and cautious as the stakes had escalated dizzyingly. Clive had invested everything in the belief that Siraj-ud-Daula was on his last legs – and now it seemed certain that the British commander had guessed wrong. The force before him was not the ramshackle army of a tottering despot, symbolic and demoralised. It was a huge and well-equipped military machine that made his own tiny army look ludicrous.

  Although he comforted himself with hopes of retreat at nightfall, there
was every prospect of his tiny force being cut off, surrounded, and left to the mercies of the butcher of Calcutta; he had stumbled into a trap. There is no doubt he was bitterly dismayed. Yet, with no hope of orderly retreat, he now had no alternative to pursuing his bluff.

  Clive was a man who had reached the zenith of his career. If he failed now, with the council at Calcutta having disowned him, Watson having urged him to show caution and his own council of war having insisted that he should not cross the river, the responsibility would be his alone. The defeat of his men would be accompanied by the wholesale destruction of his reputation. His every youthful triumph would be annulled. He would have little choice but to die on the battlefield amid the cries and carnage of his own misjudgement.

  As the Bengali campaign had proceeded, from its shambolic and quarrelsome beginnings, he had recovered his old verve, and had earned the respect even of the naval officers surrounding Watson, if not of the prickly Coote – who, however, had at last submitted to his authority. But Clive seemed to have overreached himself once again; his self-confidence had got the better of his sound military judgement. He was finished, unless one of two improbabilities occurred: either that the conspiracy should succeed and Mir Jafar at last join him; or that the Nawab’s forces after all should prove to be merely a paper threat.

  He feared that neither was likely as he watched the well-disciplined armies moving to outflank him; and in this he would have been right. For contrary to what some historians, notably the usually perspicacious Bence-Jones, argue, Plassey was to be no ‘walkover’ nor, pace Macaulay, was it ‘over in an hour’. It was to be a close-run thing, lasting a whole day of shifting fortunes in spite of the remarkably low British casualties suffered. Clive, for one, believed he stood little chance that chilly early morning as the first of the monsoon clouds scudded over and the swarms of men below moved to encircle his small force. The pistol was loaded at his head once more, the trigger about to be pulled.

  * * *

  His adversary, Siraj-ud-Daula, was also facing his moment of destiny. He had been in a desperate political corner, and he knew it. His treasury was almost exhausted as a result of his unwise decision to take on the British and throttle his main source of revenue, the trade through Calcutta. He had lost the support of both his Moslem aristocracy and his Hindu bankers and middle class. His soldiers had been verging on rebellion but had been brought together for one last fight.

  Giggling, indecisive, sadistic, sexually self-indulgent, yet quick-witted and intelligent, he had done what no Indian prince had before or since – attacked a major European power and won a great victory. He was now rallying his forces for a magnificent fight against the revenge expedition on his own ground. He had seen off a succession of domestic opponents. Like Clive, his main enemy had been his own rashness and overambition. His enemies would close in on him, if he failed, just as those of Clive would.

  In spite of all his weaknesses and failings, he had lured Clive into battle on his own terms. If he defeated the English at Plassey, he was set to rule for decades, and become the foremost prince in India. If he was beaten, he would lose everything. Watching from his headquarters a mile away, he cannot have been able to guess the precise English strength violating his hunting lodge; but he must have regarded what he could see with satisfied contempt as his great army encircled it. This tiny force was being led into a slaughterhouse.

  Clive watched as St Frais, his Frenchmen and their guns entrenched themselves behind earthworks near a pond only 200 yards from the British, deliberately provoking them. Between the Frenchmen and the river two more guns were set up to give cover to 5,000 cavalry and 7,000 infantry. This force was commanded by Mir Madan, the loyal favourite of the Nawab.

  In response, Clive ordered his men well beyond the shelter of the grove, to a position directly in front of the enemy line. He placed three of his small guns on either side, and hundreds of his soldiers in between. Sepoys guarded his flanks. A little further back he placed his two remaining six-pound guns and howitzers protected by brick kilns. Not until Gordon’s stand at Khartoum a hundred years later can a more hopeless position have been defended by the British, and so few have faced such overwhelming odds to so little apparent purpose. They faced a wipeout; it looked like the last stand of a defeated army. To the south the Nawab’s huge armies continued relentlessly to encircle him.

  * * *

  At 8 a.m. the first cannonade from the French guns began, and the British replied. The British fire ripped through Mir Madan’s men; but the French had killed 10 British soldiers and 20 Indians within half an hour. Clive’s boldness in venturing beyond the mango grove had been an absurd mistake in the face of overwhelming enemy firepower, directed by the accurate French.

  He was quick-witted enough to realise the consequences and gave his men the order to pull the guns back to the grove; the cannon were moved behind the mudbank, where they could fire through holes while being protected. Only the howitzers remained in a forward position. One, by an incredibly lucky shot, seriously wounded Mir Madan.

  Not knowing this, the position appeared quite desperate to Clive. The enemy cavalry were moving forward to attack, and he decided to pull back his remaining guns. The enemy cannon were blasting huge holes in the Nawab’s beloved mango trees, but inflicting few casualties as the British were sheltering beneath the mudbank. The two sides continued exchanging relentless fire in this way for three hours.

  Clive summoned his commanders to suggest that they concentrate on holding out until midnight, and then resort to his old tactic of a surprise night attack as a last desperate measure. Clive believed he could hold his position to the front, provided the forces moving to encircle him did not attack from the flank or the rear.

  Significantly these, although he did not know it, were commanded by the three main conspirators – Mir Jafar, Yar Latuf Khan and Rai Durlabh. They were waiting and circling like vultures to see which side would prevail. While they would not attack until the battle moved decisively to one side or another, as soon as it did they would join the victors. All the intense plotting and negotiating of the past month had at least entombed a large part of the Nawab’s army in a kind of neutrality – but no more than that. The rebels would not go over to Clive, but they would stay aloof from the battle.

  Clive knew nothing of this. The cannonade continued on both sides. In the shelter of the mango grove, his hope was that a direct frontal attack could be repulsed. Then, suddenly, the monsoon clouds, which had been building up for hours, broke; the rain, although lasting only half an hour, was torrential, soaking all, including Clive, to the skin. The British had hastily pulled tarpaulins over the ammunition as soon as the downpour started; the Bengali ammunition was soaked. Throughout the downpour the British guns continued to fire, while the enemy ones fell silent.

  The sound of thunder mixed with that of cannon. As one of Clive’s officers wrote, ‘We had some apprehension that the enemy would take advantage of this opportunity and make a push with their horse, but our guns continuing to play very briskly prevented any such motion. The enemy’s guns during the rain, which lasted half an hour, did not fire a shot.’

  Unknown to Clive, Mir Madan, the Nawab’s best commander, was taken to the latter’s camp, where he died of his wounds. Another loyal commander, Bahadur Ali Khan, was also killed in the British cannonade. This left only his favourite, the foppish Mohan Lal, who fought with remarkable bravery at the head of the troops attacking the English line.

  * * *

  Siraj-ud-Daula was now beginning to panic: Mir Jafar and the other senior commanders had so far taken no part in the fighting, although their flanking move had continued and they were now in a position to attack from the side, and very nearly from the back, cutting Clive off. The Nawab sent repeatedly for Mir Jafar, who came at last on horseback with a huge and magnificent escort, in case there was an attempt to assassinate him.

  The contemporary Indian historian Ghulam Husain describes what followed:

  Sir
aj-ud-Daula spoke to him [Mir Jafar] in the humblest terms, and at last descended to the lowest supplication; he even took his turban from off his head (at least this was the report) and placed it before the general; to whom he addressed these very words, ‘I now repent of what I have done; and availing myself of those ties of consanguinity which subsist between us, as well as of those rights which my grandfather, Aliverdi Khan, has doubtless acquired upon your gratitude I look up to you, as the only representative of that venerable personage; and hope therefore, that, forgetting my past trespasses, you shall henceforth behave as becomes a Seyd, a man united in blood to me, and a man of sentiments, who conserves a grateful remembrance of all the benefits he has received from my family; I recommend myself to you; take care of the conservation of my honour and life.’ Siraj-ud-Daula was pleading for his throne and his life before his unsupportive senior general.

  Mir Jafar coldly replied that the day was now drawing to its end; and that there remained no time for an attack; ‘send a counter order to the troops that are advancing,’ said he; ‘recall those engaged; and tomorrow, with the blessing of God, I will join all the troops together, and provide for the engagement.’ Siraj-ud-Daula observed, that they might be attacked by the enemy in the night; this also the general took upon himself to provide against, and he surmised that the enemy would not form a night attack.

  Siraj-ud-Daula promptly called for Rai Durlabh to give his opinion; this second of the Nawab’s generals also in on the conspiracy advised just as Mir Jafar had. The turning point had been reached. The conspirators, it seemed, had decided that the Nawab would not prevail and were now prepared to tilt the scales against him.

  There remains a possibility that the advice was given in good faith, and that Mir Jafar and Rai Durlabh were indeed preparing to join forces with the Nawab the following morning. But events were to overtake them all – and the probability is that Mir Jafar, who hated his vicious young nephew, intended this, and was going in for the kill.