Dust and Steel
Page 39
Shave: a rumour
Shell: explosive ordnance
Shell jacket: waist-length scarlet coat used for undress duties and campaigning
Shukria: thank you
Solar-topee: cloth-covered, cork sun-helmet
Sowar: Indian cavalry private
Spike: soldiers’ slang for a bayonet
Stagging: soldiers’ slang for guard duty – probably a corruption of ‘staggered duty’
Subadar: a middle ranking, native officer in the Indian armies
Subadar-major: most senior, native officer in the Indian armies
Subaltern, or ‘subby’: the most junior, commissioned ranks in the army
Sutlej: the river in the Punjab around which most of the fighting revolved in the First Sikh War
Sutler: mobile canteen owner or merchant
Syce: a groom
Tatt: slang for a pony
Tape: soldiers’ slang for a chevron or badge of rank; also awarded for long service
Thanadar: a senior police officer
Theek hai, sahib: very good, sir
Tranter: a British make of revolving pistol
Tum lakhri, lakhri tum?: a typical British soldier’s reproach to an Indian, translated literally as ‘You wood, wood you?’ rather than ‘You would,’ etc. Not surprisingly, most Indians were deeply confused by this refrain
Turkish tinsel: awards from the Ottoman government to British troops involved in the Crimean campaign. Brigadier-General Michael Smith served with Turkish cavalry in that conflict, seeing little action, thus Private Beeston’s sneer
Whaler: a ship’s boat or the name given to re-mounts, most of which came either from Ireland or from New South Wales
Wing: a tactical unit of half a battalion, four companies strong, usually commanded by a major
Author’s Note
Every author likes to think that he has caught the essential attitudes of the characters about whom he is writing. I’m no different and I hope that Morgan, Pegg, McGucken and others express the doubts, horrors and plain ignorance of British troops plunged into the maelstrom of the Indian Mutiny. They knew war – although not civil war – but were bemused by the intricacies of Indian and Anglo-Indian society, especially the mores of the Honourable East India Company and its servants.
The events, and most of the people, are real. I’ve chosen to take some liberties with the timetable of Morgan’s arrival in Bombay and his move up country towards the heart of the Mutiny but, that aside, the battles and skirmishes are as true to life as I can make them.
The language of my characters is slightly different, though. The military slang of the 1850s sounds stilted today, so I’ve modelled the troops’ conversations and attitudes upon those of the men I commanded in the descendant of Morgan’s regiment in the twentieth century. I believe that soldiers’ needs and aspirations haven’t changed much over the years, so my characters talk in the same way as my men did, with a shading of Victorian patois. There is one important difference, though: contemporary letters and diaries speak with a casual racism that would be unpublishable today. For all the reasons that the reader will understand, I didn’t want to reproduce this as faithfully as I might.
Kemp is my own creation – he’s only loosely based on the commanding officer of the 12th BNI – but his enemy the Rhani of Jhansi certainly existed. Largely forgotten in Britain, this fighting queen was one of the most colourful and most admired figures of the tragic years of 1857–1859. She caught the imagination not just of her fellow Indians, but also Victorian England, with opinion being divided over her role in the second most bloody massacre of Europeans in the entire Mutiny. Whether you believe that she was essentially innocent (as Mary Keenan does) or damn her eyes as a Jezebel and a mass murderess, like Kemp, is up to you.
One place that the Rhani is not forgotten, though, is modern-day Uttar Pradesh, the area that Lance-Corporal Pegg would have called ‘’Rutter Country’. In Jhansi, Kotah and Gwalior, her statues still dominate the local scenery and, for a handful of rupees, you can buy highly coloured dolls in her likeness. They sit on scarlet chargers, ill-favoured blobs of cloth representing young Damodar tied to her saddle, sharp little curves of steel in either fabric hand. I bought such a doll in Jhansi when I was researching this book; as I packed her away in my suitcase, one of her miniature swords stabbed my finger. A drop of blood fell from my palm and when I looked closely into her beady eyes I swear she was smiling!
Technical language, military pidgin and foreign phrases I have attempted to explain or translate in the glossary. The idiom is, I hope, self-explanatory but anything that isn’t clear or is inaccurate is entirely my own fault and flies in the face of advice that I have received.
Historical Note
The Indian Mutiny of 1857–1859 came as a bitter surprise to Queen Victoria’s Empire and shook it more fundamentally than any other conflict of her reign. The independence of the HEIC was matched only by its dependence upon Britain (or ‘England’ as the Victorians might say), and her acquiescence in its expansion. Yet it’s a mistake to think that all of Britain’s possessions in India rose against their colonial masters. Of the three presidencies into which India was divided by the British, only Bengal turned – and then not all of it. Bombay and Madras, after some shaky moments, remained largely loyal.
So, mutinous Bengal was restored to the Raj mainly by other Indian troops, including Sikhs (whom the British had only recently subdued) and the Gurkhas. The internecine fighting between tribes, castes and religions had more of a feel of a civil war rather than an insurrection against an oppressor. No wonder, then, that Morgan and the 95th found it all so confusing! The relatively small number of Queen’s regiments who found themselves in India when the trouble started, or who were sent there to suppress it, were usually profoundly impressed by the skill at arms of their Indian comrades and, indeed, the mutineers.
I suspect that service in the HEIC for a young British officer was considered distinctly second-rate in comparison to the Queen’s Service. An HEIC commission cost a fraction of a British one; indeed, an HEIC officer was an employee of a private company and not the Crown – so transfers between the two regimes was impossible. Many Queen’s officers sneered at HEIC officers and the troops they commanded, until they experienced their fighting qualities.
But what of the mutineers – or Pandies, as the British preferred? Those who fought at the great pitched battles of Delhi, Lucknow and Cawnpore were easily recognised by the British as products of the same system and, from time to time, bested their teachers. The 95th’s foes, though, were rather more mixed. By the time that central Bengal had risen, regiments such as Kemp’s 12th BNI were in the minority; irregulars, maharajahs and maharanis’ local forces predominated. Whilst their quality was uncertain, the weaponry they used was distinctly exotic, giving a medieval feel to the fighting that dismays McGucken so much.
Post-Mutiny reorganisations saw the disappearance of ‘John Company’, amalgamations and changes in the Indian regiments with absorption into the British regular Army of such units as the 3rd Bombay Europeans (who became the 109th Foot). The proportion of British regiments in India’s garrison was increased, but the ‘new’ armies weren’t to be tested seriously until the Second Afghan War of 1878–1880.
Perhaps the saddest legacy of the Mutiny was the erosion of trust between native and British soldiers that it caused. Some Indian units, such as the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, were exempted but for the majority a friction – most notable, I suspect, amongst the junior ranks – sprang up that hadn’t existed before. The mutual respect borne in wars such as those in Persia and China before the Mutiny seems to have disappeared. It’s interesting to note, for instance, that British soldiers in India were still being tattooed with images of the well at Cawnpore (down which so many Europeans were thrown) as late as the 1940s.
Morgan, his sons, McGucken and Pegg all go on to witness the reformed Indian Army in action in Afghanistan in 1880. Without stealing any of the thun
der of the next novel, the comparisons to today’s campaign on the Helmand River are quite remarkable. The battles are fought over almost exactly the same patches of desert, over similar issues and against a political backdrop that is depressingly familiar. As Hegel said, ‘Nations and governments have never learnt anything from history.’
Acknowledgements
A second book requires those who have to tolerate the author to be even more forbearing than the first book, as everything needs to be tested against earlier efforts. Accordingly, I must thank my family, the real Richard Kemp, Sue Gray, Heather Millican and a host of others who have read and read these pages. I must also thank my agent, Natasha Fairweather of APWatt and my indefatigable editor, Susan Watt.
Skegby
February, 2010
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Copyright © Patrick Mercer 2010
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