Sahib (27 page)

Nicholson inspired extraordinary loyalty amongst his Indian subordinates. When an assassin rushed into his garden with drawn sword, calling out his name, one of his orderlies replied: ‘All our names are
Nikal Seyn
here,’ and at once counter-attacked. Nicholson thought that the orderly would probably have got the better of the struggle, but snatched a musket and shot the assassin himself. Ensign Wilberforce described Nicholson’s followers:

A motley crew called the ‘Mooltanee Horse’; they came out of a personal devotion to Nicholson, they took no pay from the Government, they recognised no head but Nicholson, and him they obeyed with a blind devotion and a faithfulness who won the admiration of all who saw them. Their men were 250 in number, mounted on their wiry ponies, surrounding the column like a web; they rode in couples, each couple within signalling distance of the other, and so circled the column for many a mile. Nicholson’s personal assistant was a huge Pathan, black-whiskered and moustachioed; this man never left his side, he slept across the doorway of Nicholson’s tent, so that none could come in save over his body. When Nicholson dined at mess this Pathan stood behind his chair with a cocked revolver in one hand, and allowed no one to hand a dish to his master save himself.
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Part of the reason for Nicholson’s success at Bannu and then as assistant commissioner at Peshawar was his sheer blazing physical courage. In 1848 he jumped from his sickbed in Peshawar, set off with a troop of irregular cavalry and newly raised levies, and rode fifty miles to Attock, where he bluffed the fort into surrender, paraded the garrison and instantly dismissed the ringleaders. He had met only three of his cavalrymen before. Another reason was his instinctive grasp of
Pakhtunwali
– the tribal code of honour. Nicholson’s refusal to accept any slight showed that he knew how important
izzat
was. Walter Lawrence thought it ‘as dear to an Indian as life itself. It means honour, repute, and the world’s esteem.’
⁵⁰
There was something of the unforgiving Old Testament deity in John Nicholson, and his own profound religious belief shut out any notion of error. When
on his way to Delhi he stopped at Jullundur, where the commissioner, Major Edward Lake, held an audience for local notables. General Mehtab Singh, commander of the army of the little state of Kapurthala, entered with his shoes on. Nicholson saw at once that this was a calculated insult, and declared:

If I were the last Englishman left in Jullundur you should not come into my room with your shoes on. I hope the commissioner will allow me to order you to take off your shoes and carry them out in your own hands, so that your followers may witness your discomfiture.

Many years later, the Raja of Kapurthala told Roberts that Mehtab Singh was alive and well: ‘We often chaff him about that little affair, and tell him that he richly deserved the treatment that he received from the great Nicholson Sahib.’
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Some Sikhs came to regard him as little short of a prophet, and
Nikalseynism
assumed the status of a minor cult. Roberts wrote that Nicholson:

impressed me more profoundly than any man I have ever met before or any man I have ever met since … His appearance was distinguished and commanding, with a sense of power about him which to my mind was the result of his having passed so much of his life amongst the wild and lawless tribesmen, with whom his authority was supreme.
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Many other young officers were struck by his quite extraordinary presence. Lieutenant A. R. D. Mackenzie wrote that:

There are some men whose personal appearance harmonises so perfectly with their intellectual and moral characteristics that any one on seeing them for the first time would be almost certainly intuitively to guess their identity. Nicholson was one of these. Tall, dark and stern, he looked every inch what he was, a fearless, self-reliant, fierce and masterful man, born for stormy times and stirring events. It was impossible to associate him with anything commonplace, or otherwise than heroic or great. On me, as on every one else, he produced a vivid impression, which can never become dim. When I first saw him it was only for a moment. He said something in low tones to an acquaintance, and passed on, but instinctively I felt that
I had come into contact with one who stood apart from and overtopped other men. ‘That is Nicholson,’ I said, knowing that it could be no one else.
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R. G. Wilberforce recalled that he was:

of a commanding presence, some six feet two inches in height. With a long black beard, dark grey eyes with black pupils (under excitement of any sort these pupils would dilate like a tiger’s), a colourless face, over which no smile ever passed, laconic of speech … 
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When, hastily promoted brigadier general to command the Movable Column, Nicholson arrived on Delhi ridge there was a palpable change in morale. Lieutenant Henry Daly thought that he seemed ‘by the grace of God … a king coming into his own’, and William Hodson believed that he was ‘a host in himself’.
⁵⁵
Lieutenant Arthur Moffat Lang was having trouble with a new enemy battery, but the moment he saw Nicholson he declared: ‘I wish he were to have the command of a force to take that battery and that I were of the party.’
⁵⁶

Nicholson was mortally wounded in the storming of Delhi in 1857. Roberts found him lying in an unattended
doolie
(stretcher),

with death written on his face … On my enquiring a hope that he was simply wounded, he said: ‘I am dying; there is no hope for me.’ The sight of this great man lying helpless and at the point of death was almost more than I could bear … to lose Nicholson seemed to me at that moment to lose everything.

It took him nine days to die. Early on, when Archdale Wilson was considering pulling back from the city, he said: ‘Thank God I have the strength yet to shoot him, if necessary.’
⁵⁷
He would probably have been as good as his word: when his wild horsemen made a racket outside his tent, he shot at them through the canvas. His brother Charles, who had just lost an arm, was brought in to see him, and the trusty Muhammed Hayat Khan tended him as he sweated out his last days, with the pain somewhat dulled by morphia. He often thought of his mother, and of Herbert Edwardes, one of the few men with whom he was close, telling Neville Chamberlain, a frequent
visitor, that ‘if at this moment a good fairy were to grant me a wish, my wish would be to have him here, next to my mother’.
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If there was hard light and deep shade in John Nicholson, Herbert Edwardes himself was a more sympathetic character. Like Hodson, he was a clergyman’s son and a university graduate, and joined 1st Bengal European Fusiliers in 1841. But unlike Hodson he was no
beau sabreur,
and unlike Nicholson he was quiet and diplomatic. Henry Daly had reservations about Edwardes, although he thought him:

palpably a man above the mark in talent … He is subdued and somewhat grave; has somewhat the affectation of dignity … In his early youth he was frolicsome, gay and witty; he now seems to have a puritanical conviction that these things are unbecoming. He is friendly and polite to me, yet I do not
warm
to him. He is somewhat diplomatic and less straightforward than is pleasant. Unlike our noble, high-minded host [Henry Lawrence], whose heart is full of true religion, whose mind is cultivated and generous … a rare creature, made for love and honour.
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Edwardes served on Gough’s staff and, unsurprisingly, was wounded: he met Henry Lawrence after Sobraon, and was appointed his personal assistant after the British victory. Once he had accepted the post, Lawrence spoke to him in terms which show quite clearly why he was such a revered chief. ‘There’s only one thing I wish you to remember,’ he said. ‘If I say or do anything that hurts or vexes you, don’t brood over it. Just out with it, and we shall come to an understanding at once.’

In 1847 Henry Lawrence sent him to Bannu, up on the frontier around the confluence of the Kurram and Tochi rivers, which owed taxes to its Sikh overlords. Edwardes had a low regard for the inhabitants, a mixture of Pakhtun tribal groups, and, like many of his countrymen, he found them somehow less ‘manly’ than the fiercer but pure-bred tribesmen to the north and west. But he strove to ensure that the Sikh garrison stopped looting, and he eventually persuaded local leaders to pay up or risk losing their land, and demolished the hundreds of little forts which had helped make the
territory all but ungovernable. A year later, on Waterloo Day, 18 June 1848, he beat Mulraj, rebellious governor of Multan, in a hard-fought battle at Kineyri, killing 600 of his enemy and taking six guns, a remarkable achievement for a twenty-six-year-old subaltern at the head of a scratch force composed largely of irregulars: he was the only Company officer present.

Edwardes departed on home leave, finding that the publication of
A Year on the Punjab Frontier,
an account of the pacification of Bannu, had done him no harm at all. In October 1853, he succeeded the murdered Mackeson as commissioner of Peshawar, where he clashed with William Hodson, acting commissioner of Yusufzai and officer commanding the Corps of Guides. Hodson was in trouble on two counts, firstly for his arbitrary treatment of unconvicted tribal leaders, and secondly for alleged falsification of the regimental accounts. A court of inquiry threw Hodson back to 1st Bengal Fusiliers, shorn of his former pay and status. It is impossible for us now to see how much real fire there was within the abundant smoke generated by the impulsive Hodson. However, the fact that even Henry Lawrence had begun to lose faith in his young protégé suggests that there was more to Hodson’s fall from grace than the dislike of the strait-laced Edwardes for an over-age, self-willed subaltern who made no effort to be ingratiating.

When news of the Mutiny reached Peshawar, Edwardes convened a council of war which fortuitously included John Lawrence, who had been heading for the hills on leave. Lawrence urged that the Mutiny had to be crushed as quickly as possible, and the council (sweeping along poor old Major General Reed, commanding the Peshawar division) decided to form the Movable Column and send it to Delhi. Edwardes warmly supported Brigadier Cotton, who decided to disarm the native infantry regiments in the Peshawar garrison, and was on parade when they gave up their weapons, finding it ‘a painful and affecting thing’. But he thought that it was decisive, writing:

as we rode down to the disarming, a very few chiefs and yeo-men of the country attended us; I remember judging from their faces that they came to see which way the tide would
turn. As we rode back friends were as thick as summer flies, and the levies began from that moment to come in.
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Even Edwardes’s critics acknowledged that his policy of maintaining good relations with the Afghans now paid dividends, and when John Lawrence, uncharacteristically buckling under the weight of bad news from so much of Bengal, suggested that Peshawar should be given up, he wrote a strongly worded letter affirming that Peshawar was ‘the anchor of the Punjab’ which would drift to destruction if the city was relinquished. Although the decision was eventually passed up to the Governor-General Lord Canning, Peshawar was held. The strain of keeping the northern Punjab secure, and recruiting levies to send down to Bengal, left Edwardes close to collapse. He did not get back to England until 1859 and though he received a well-merited knighthood, when he returned to India he was made commissioner of Umballa, an undistinguished post in which he spend three miserable years. Edwardes was then offered the appointment of Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab, but, tired and ill, decided to take early retirement instead, and died in England in 1868 at the age of forty-nine.

The remaining member of Henry Lawrence’s young men to attain real eminence was Harry Lumsden. He had a great natural aptitude for languages, and went to Kabul with the Army of Retribution as an interpreter, and returned to tell his parents with delight that he was now the only officer in his regiment with a campaign medal. He was wounded commanding a company of 59th BNI at Sobraon, and, like several of his future colleagues, met Henry Lawrence after the battle. Lumsden led a successful reconnaissance mission through Hazara, and in 1847 was appointed George Lawrence’s deputy at Peshawar, where he also raised the Corps of Guides, a force of irregulars with a cavalry and an infantry contingent.

Lumsden was perhaps the most likeable of the whole group of what the historian Charles Allen has called the ‘soldier sahibs’, and the ideal man to raise an irregular regiment. He was bluff, brave, cheerful and gregarious, a fine shot, good swordsman and skilled horseman and, like Nicholson, he understood the hard rules of
Pakhtunwali.
His very ‘straightness’ made him attractive to men who
Henry Daly described as ‘notorious for desperate deeds, leaders in forays, who kept the passes into the hills … ’. There was soon a waiting list for his Guides, and the corps speedily grew into one of the most distinguished in the Indian army. They marched to Delhi, by now under the command of Henry Daly, covering 580 miles in twenty-two days at the most trying season of the year, and three hours after arriving on Delhi ridge they were in hand-to-hand battle with the enemy, and, as Daly himself put it, ‘every single British officer was more or less wounded’. No less than 350 of their 600 men were killed or wounded in the siege, and their three British officers had been replaced three times over.

The apotheosis of the Guides came in Kabul 1879, when Lieutenant Walter Hamilton VC commanded twenty-five troopers and fifty infantrymen of the Guides as escort to Major Sir Louis Cavagnari, envoy to Amir Yakub Khan. Cavagnari, son of a French army officer and an English mother, was himself a political officer. Commissioned into 1st Bengal European Fusiliers in 1858, he had transferred to the Political Department in 1861, and was knighted after serving as political officer to the Peshawar Valley Field Force in 1878–79. When the Residency was attacked, Cavagnari and all the British officers were killed: Hamilton fell beside a cannon which his men had sallied out to capture. The Afghans now shouted that the survivors should surrender: they had no quarrel with them. The surviving native officer, Jemadar Jewand Singh, had a short conversation with the dozen or so remaining Guides. Then they charged out with sword and bayonet, and perished to a man: Jewand Singh hewed down eight Afghans before he fell.