Raj

by Lawrence, James

  Throughout this period the Company had the largest fighting force in India. In 1830 India was garrisoned by 36,400 white soldiers, two-thirds of them government troops, one-third Company officers, infantry and gunners, and 187,000 Company sepoys and cavalry. Fourteen years later, there were 33,000 British regulars, 17,000 Company Europeans and 201,300 Indians, including 30,000 irregulars and auxiliary units from the princely states. This preponderance of manpower was never apparent on individual battlefields. Logistics and the demands of internal security dictated that only a limited proportion of the Company’s forces could ever be concentrated on one front. British armies were, therefore, always outnumbered, but not always greatly so. During the 1803–05 Maratha war the Company deployed 37,000 British and Indian troops against 56,000 Maratha regulars and an untold number of irregulars, mostly light horse. Aware of the mishaps that had occurred towards the end of that campaign, Hastings preferred shorter odds when he fought its successor. In 1817 he took the field with 87,000 white and Indian troops and 20,000 irregulars against enemies whose combined strength was calculated at 137,000 men, a large number of whom were Pindaris.4 And yet, when it came to pitched battles, the Marathas had the advantage in numbers because the nature of operations compelled Hastings to divide his forces and deploy large detachments to protect his lines of communication. Against the infinitely more formidable Khalsa, the British never committed more than a fifth of the regulars available and were outgunned in every engagement before Gujrat.

  By this time, the British high command had become mesmerised by its own military mythology, a combination of racial arrogance and past experience. At its heart was the belief that resolutely led white soldiers would always sweep all before them, regardless of the odds. Quality always mattered far more than quantity, for, since the time of Clive, Indians had developed a terror of white troops and were unnerved whenever they faced them. ‘A body of mounted Europeans will produce an excellent effect,’ suggested Captain James Carnac, the resident in Baroda, after he had uncovered evidence of local unrest in 1812.5 The mere appearance of a hundred or so light dragoons would overawe a city of many thousands. According to Cornwallis, British troops were the ‘pith and essence’ of his army and his adversary, Tipu Sultan, agreed. When he used his few white mercenaries, Tipu had them carried to the battlefield in palanquins, the better to preserve their vitality.6 He was copying his enemies, who shifted British soldiers to the front in palanquins and bullock carts or on the backs of camels and elephants. When the fighting started, these men had automatic priority at dressing stations and convalescent hospitals.7

  Every general cherished his white soldiers, whether British rank and file, or the officers who commanded the sepoys. ‘It is impossible to do things in a gallant style without Europeans,’ Lake told the Marquess Wellesley after the fall of Agra in 1803. His judgement was upheld in the subsequent battle of Laswari and, after casting his eye down the casualty sheets, he warned that his army would lose its punch if European reinforcements were not sent immediately.8 In this and other campaigns, white troops delivered the hammer blows which won battles.

  Sepoys provided the ballast of an army. They provided the weight of an attacking force, but the vanguard were always British soldiers, who were, quite literally, the cutting edge of empire.9 This was how they were regarded by Lieutenant-Colonel Blacker in his analysis of the 1817–18 Maratha war. British courage, he concluded, had been the key to victories in a countryside where there had been no room for tactical flourishes. This prognosis was illustrated by his account of the battle of Kirki in November 1817, when a Company force of 2,800 attacked a Maratha army believed to contain 10,000 infantry and 25,000 horse. The turning point came when the Bombay European Regiment advanced unflinching into Maratha fire and set an example of steadiness and aggression which inspired the supporting sepoy battalions.10 The Indians may also have been itching to avenge themselves against an enemy which had recently killed their officers and maltreated their wives after the seizure of the Poona residency.11

  As described by Blacker, history and legend merged at Kirki. A few hundred British soldiers marched forward, shoulder to shoulder with fixed bayonets. Their officers walked calmly ahead of them, setting the tone of the fight by their jaunty coolness. Close behind came the battalions of sepoys, eager to match the resolve of their British counterparts and, like them, encouraged by officers who seemed impervious to fear. It was an exercise in willpower, an assertion of moral superiority; and it worked. The Maratha sword and spear men shrank from the close-range musket volley and did not stand to face the bayonet charge which came moments later. The Maratha horsemen followed suit, having already suffered from infantry fire when they had made an ill-judged charge. For Indian professional cavalrymen, their horses, harness, armour and weapons were the source of their livelihood and they were reluctant to hazard them in any do-or-die exploits.12 This understandable prudence was recognised by the British; whenever the Company hired an irregular horse sowar (trooper), he was promised compensation if he lost his horse in battle.13 To judge from the eighty-six British casualties, the Maratha army at Kirki had had little stomach for the fight. Perhaps, like the Company’s generals, the Marathas were conditioned to believe that a British advance was irresistible.

  Generalship played a limited part in this sort of engagement. This was just as well, for, with the exception of Arthur Wellesley, British commanders in India at this time were not imaginative tacticians. The command ‘Level well my lads and then come to the bayonet’ was the key to victory. Everything depended upon the peculiar virtues of the British soldier, which were commonly acknowledged as discipline and perseverance in the face of adversity. How far these qualities were revealed in the battlefield depended upon leadership; fearlessness flowed downwards from officers to men. Whatever they lacked in military science, commanders like Combermere, Napier and Gough made up for in gallantry. When battle was under way, they placed themselves at the head of their troops, cheering them on or rallying them when the going got tough. During the street fighting in Multan, Napier led a body of men and, when the way was blocked by two Sikhs who were cutting down all assailants, he drew his pistol (presumably one of the new Colt revolvers) and shot both dead.14 Sir Colin Campbell rode among the Sikh gunners at Chillianwala and sabred at least one.15

  With limited tactical control from above, the quick thinking and intrepidity of junior officers could change the course of a battle. At Sitalbi in November 1817, a small force entirely made up of sepoys was in danger of being routed by a larger army of Marathas, supported by cannon and swivel guns mounted on camels. As the tide turned against the British, and in defiance of his commanding officer’s orders, Captain Fitzgerald led three troops of his Bengal cavalry against the Maratha horse who were protecting the artillery batteries. It was a desperate manoeuvre, but audacity paid off. The heavily outnumbered sowars sliced through their astonished opponents and captured the guns. Fitzgerald and his brother officers had led the way and suffered accordingly; out of the 318 men who charged, 22 were killed, 5 of them officers, and 22 wounded, 3 of them officers.16

  This piece of derring-do was a golden example of how every officer should behave. A few years later, the following description of the qualities expected from an officer under fire appeared in a military journal. ‘Disregarding death, without despising it’, he ‘looks cheerfully around, orders and directs everything within his charge, and electrifies his subordinates in that noble spirit that animates him.’17 This was the spirit which sent Lieutenant Torrens Metje ‘dancing on’ in front of his company, contemptuously picking up spent shot and throwing it aside, as the 29th advanced on the Sikh batteries at Chillianwala.18 He was mortally wounded in the groin by grape shot, an example of the sacrifice which was the inevitable price of this type of leadership. Sepoys drawn from warrior castes were instinctively drawn to officers who revealed their courage in hand-to-hand combat. During a tight moment in a fight in the Deccan in 1803, Lieutenant Bryant, outnumbered by Arab mer
cenaries, saved the life of a brother officer and cut down a standard bearer. His sepoys wavered, so he harangued them and pitched into the fray, breaking his sword on an Arab’s skull. He then seized a musket, and using butt and bayonet, knocked down two more adversaries, by which time his sepoys were at his side. In another engagement, an Arab hurled a spear at Lieutenant Langlands of the 74th Highlanders, who plucked it out and threw it back, splitting the thrower through the body. A sepoy grenadier rushed from the ranks and patted him on the back with the words ‘Atchah sahib! Bahut atchah Keeah’ (Well done, sir! Very well done!).19 This kind of exploit, performed at the right moment, injected fresh heart into men whose will to fight on was flagging.

  Casualty returns were a yardstick which measured the importance of European officers. At Delhi in 1803, where a third of those engaged were British, the total European casualties were 208, of whom 11 were officers. Indian losses were proportionally less, with 288 dead and wounded, of whom 35 were white officers and sepoy NCOs. It is worth noting that in each sepoy regiment of 1,840 men there were 45 British officers and 120 Indian NCOs. At Laswari, when 5,500 Company troops were present, 33 officers were among the 824 men killed or wounded. This pattern of losses recurred throughout the Sikh wars: at Ferozeshah, where one in seven of the units was British, Europeans made up half the 2,415 casualties. Of the 700 dead, 115 were officers. ‘The British infantry, as usual, carried the day,’ concluded one of Gough’s staff officers, which was hardly unexpected since the commander had placed them in the vanguard of his advance.20

  The lists of dead and wounded did not indicate how men died or were injured. There is, however, plenty of anecdotal eyewitness evidence about the effectiveness of Maratha and Sikh musketry and artillery fire. Arthur Wellesley had been forewarned about Maratha fire before Assaye, but even so he was amazed by its accuracy and intensity. He lost a third of his army and, to judge by his and others’ recollections, nearly all the casualties were the result of the enemy’s bombardment and fusillades. During the assault on Deeg at the end of 1804, Maratha artillery fire was well directed and ‘snipe men’ (i.e. marksmen) continually picked off men in the siege lines.21 Maratha artillerymen were always a disciplined, well-trained and brave élite; at Maharajapur (1843) they poured grape and canister into advancing British infantry, pelted them with horse shoes and scrap iron when their ammunition ran out, and died defending their pieces.22 Sikh gunners displayed the same professionalism and grit.

  When an attack was pressed home, a battle was transformed into a mass of individual conflicts between men with bladed weapons. Justifying their often crude offensive tactics, British generals liked to imagine that this was the pivotal moment upon which victory hung. To an extent they were right, in that the defending infantrymen often preferred to fly rather than tackle a line of supermen who had just survived and seemed undaunted by intense artillery and musket fire. This was what happened when storming parties surged through breaches made in small hill forts during the 1791–92 Mysore war. No quarter was given to those who fought back.23

  And yet, the few first-hand accounts of hand-to-hand contests suggest that British soldiers tended to use firearms rather than bladed weapons. A soldier of the 29th who had lost an arm at Chillianwala boasted to his regimental surgeon that he had shot six Sikhs and bayoneted a seventh, presumably the antagonist who had crippled him.24 A private of the 11th Light Dragoons, harrying fugitives after the taking of Bharatpur in 1826, remembered how his sergeant had fired his pistol at a Rajput horseman but missed at six yards. The Rajput then raised his carbine, but before he could fire the private had ridden forward and shot him dead with his carbine. Shortly after, the private attacked another mounted Rajput who had refused to surrender, and knocked him out of his saddle with a single sabre stroke. But the turban broke the blow and the Rajput remounted, spat at his assailant (a common gesture of contempt which was also used by Sikh horsemen) and cantered off. The dragoon also rode away to look for the rest of his unit.25 British cavalrymen at Chillianwala preferred to use pistols rather than sabres because they usually came off worse against Sikh horsemen armed with tulwars. The trouble was that the troopers found it difficult to control their Indian chargers using the traditional British cavalry seat, while the Sikhs were able to turn their horses quickly and deliver a cut to their assailant’s skull as he rode past.26

  Indian armies usually possessed a disproportionate amount of horsemen. Blacker interpreted this as evidence of ‘immature civilisation’ and, given that a substantial number of the cavalrymen were mercenaries, ‘a love of uncontrolled license’. By contrast, the British, whom he revealingly likened to two earlier empire-builders, the Greeks and the Romans, placed their faith in the infantryman, for, ‘Infantry best succeeds among a people with robust bodies and obstinate minds.’ Indians, he imagined, lacked both. They preferred the outward trappings of power to its substance, which was why they set so much store by masses of horsemen:

  The exterior of cavalry service bears an imposing appearance of grandeur and power, which in the vain, flatters self-love, while it inspires terror among the ignorant. These are particularly moved by whatever affects the eye, as are savages, by brilliant colours.27

  This sweeping generalisation reduced the conquest of India to a racial conflict, a collision between national stereotypes in which the British were bound to triumph because of their peculiar virtues. A unique distillation of fortitude, individualism and discipline made the British soldier more than a match for a race who were superficial and inconstant. Furthermore, Blacker and other observers believed that, by and large, Indians had no patriotism.28 No explanation was offered for this, perhaps because it would have been hard to defend in the light of experience. Such attachments made Indians fight courageously, even when the tide of battle was flowing against them. India did not then exist as a nation. The Indian fighting man’s loyalty was focused elsewhere: to his religion, his commander, his locality or to whoever fed him and paid his wages.

  II

  As many British soldiers testified, their Indian opponents often matched them man for man in vigour and skill in handling their weapons. In these circumstances, morale was vital. The Company’s army was the sum of its many individual parts and ultimately its success depended on their collective will to win, or, as was commonly the case, refusal to accept defeat. This interior strength was the product of training, discipline, self-confidence, mutual reliance and devotion to officers. These were the ingredients of the regimental spirit of which the British army was proud and which Company officers endeavoured to cultivate among their sepoys.

  There were two kinds of British officer in India. The first served in the royal army; he purchased his commission and lived as a gentleman should with the support of a private income. The second served in the Company’s army, owed his commission solely to patronage, and endeavoured to live as a gentleman with the help of more generous pay and campaign allowances. Although bound together by the common tastes, outlook and codes of honour of gentlemen, there was always tension between the King’s (or the Queen’s) officers and the Company’s. Indian warfare was very different from European. The gibe ‘sepoy general’, once levelled at Wellington, was a reminder that experience and reputation gained on the European battlefield counted for more in the eyes of the world than that gained defeating what were commonly regarded as ‘savage’ armies. This prejudice died hard, despite the Duke’s insistence that all he had ever known about war had been learned in India.

  Promotion jealousies added to the friction, with Company officers often feeling affronted when senior and highly-paid Indian posts were given to officers from the government’s army who had political leverage in Britain. In 1807, Colonel Brunton of the Madras army grumbled about ‘young lords’ coming out to assume commands and, if they could pull strings in London, shin up the promotion ladder ahead of more experienced men.29 After a brisk exchange with his commanding officer, Major-General Sir John Keane, during the early phase of the Afghan campaign, the testy
Nott wrote: ‘The truth is, he is a Queen’s officer and I am a Company’s; I am decidedly of the opinion that a Queen’s officer, be he ever so talented, is totally unfit to command the Company’s Army.’30 Among a caste which set a high store by the recognition of honour, even the smallest slight, real or imaginary, could rankle. For instance, men who had fought at Waterloo were given an official medal, a token denied to the veterans of Indian battles until 1842 and a source of irritation to Company officers. In Sir Charles D’Oyly’s verse satire Tom Raw, the Griffin, a ‘dandy warrior’, a lancer officer arouses the envy of a Company veteran:

  The Colonel looks on the well-dressed Lieutenant

  With wonder, and the badge of Waterloo,

  On his young beast conspicuously pendant,

  And sighs that all the battles he’d gone through,

  Should not have gained him some distinction too.

  But there were compensations for the colonel: the Company paid well, gave generous campaign allowances, and there was always prize money. These rewards made Company service an attractive proposition for the younger sons of the professional and upper-middle classes, the more so since they did not have to pay for a commission. This was why James Young, the son of a professor of Greek at Glasgow, found himself disconsolate in the siege lines at Deeg at the close of 1804, when he wrote:

  My Father, the most sensible and the best of men – has, like most of the Fathers of Families in Europe – a great prepossession in favour of India – founded on the splendour of the very few who return, from peculiar circumstances with great fortunes to Englands – and strengthened, if I may use the expression, by the Ignorance of the far greater number, who perish miserably here.31