Sahib (39 page)

‘Come along, boys, and take a bit of something to eat and a glass of beer!’

‘No sar! No can eat, no drink!’ Replied a
havildar
of ours.

‘Arrah, honey!’ exclaimed an Irish grenadier, ‘we’ll take no excuses, ye shall have a raal drop of the crater, too! Come along!’

‘No, sir! I Hindoo mans! I neber drink! I lose caste ‘spose I take the rack!’

‘Well, thin, lave the drink! Come in and take something to eat; do that now, there’s a darlint, Jack Sapoy that ye are.’

‘No, sar!
salam,
sar!
Main Mussulman hoon: makin ki sukta.!’
(I am a Moslem: I cannot eat.)

‘But ye are all a queer set of fishes, that ye are!’ exclaimed the disappointed soldier. ‘By the butt-end of my Brown Bess, what is it that ye will do?’

‘We go whome!’ replied a Sepoy; ‘go to camp. Roll-call
feade
got, we go, sar,
salam,
sar,
salam.’
²⁶

Hervey believed that sepoys from Madras were not as strict in their religion as those from the other presidencies, and an old
subadar
once told him: ‘We put our religion into our knapsacks, sir, whenever our colours are unfurled, or where duty calls.’
²⁷
During the Mutiny, J. W. Sherer also found Madrassis a little more flexible:

The batteries in the entrenchment were very interesting, being worked by different races, one by Sikhs, one by Madrasees, and so on. I formed the acquaintance of one Madras artillery soldier. He was a little chap, but wiry and strong enough. He spoke English well, and was, I suppose, a Roman Catholic. He said: ‘You have never seen, I dare say, a native soldier like me. We are much nearer the English than the fellows up there. There is very little difference; we can eat any meat we choose, and drink wine.’ ‘And fight, I suppose?’ I said; ‘the English are thought to be very fond of fighting.’ ‘Oh fight,’ he cried, ‘I should think so. We are just like the English over again, only a different colour.’
²⁸

Sometimes such a warm relationship was forged between British and Indian units that even the requirements of caste and religion proved no barrier to comradeship. During the Second Sikh War the British 14th Light Dragoons and Indian 5th Light Cavalry became so close that when Gough presented the 5th with 500 rupees in approbation of their behaviour they spent it on giving a dinner to the 14th. Lord Dalhousie recorded in his diary that: ‘Their religion forbade their partaking of it themselves, but they stood by, superin-tending the feast, and literally dispensing their hospitality to their
guests. When such is the feeling, troops will do anything and everything.’
²⁹
In Afghanistan in 1842 some cattle were given to the 35th BNI to supplement their rations, but they at once declared that ‘meat was not as necessary for them as for their white brethren’ and begged that the animals should go instead to their comrades in Robert Sale’s brigade, HM’s 13th Light Infantry, ‘between whom and themselves there existed a romantic friendship which ought not to be forgotten’.
³⁰
At the siege of Lucknow, the 93rd Highlanders formed a strong bond with men of 4th Punjab, and the Gurkha Kumaon battalion became so fond of HM’s 60th Rifles that its men asked to wear some token of their brothers in the 60th, and it was said that ‘the 2nd Gurkhas are very proud of the little red line in their facings’.

There is nothing inherently puzzling in the contradictory views expressed by contemporaries on the fighting quality of Indian soldiers. Battlefield performance was in part circumstantial. Sepoy regiments were not at their best in the Sikh Wars, and the agonies of the Mutiny did not encourage measured judgements. Henry Lawrence uttered a general truth, as applicable to British as to Indian soldiers, when he affirmed that courage went very much by opinion, and men tended to behave, either as heroes or as cowards, as they were expected to behave. Pride and self-confidence –
izzat
in the Indian context – mattered a great deal. So too did good leadership. Garnet Wolseley thought that the British soldier was ‘a magnificent fighter when he is well led. But he must be well led … ’.
³¹
It is often easy, in the context of imperial soldiering, to suggest that this necessarily meant brave leadership, and to imply that this could not be obtained locally: that sepoys could be turned into good soldiers but required ‘men of an alien race’ to lead them.

But there was certainly no deficiency in the bravery of many Indian leaders. Nazir Khan, one of the leaders of the Mutiny, was treated by his captors with a savagery which the dreadful events of 1857 can explain but never excuse. A British officer told how:

that pukka scoundrel Nazir Khan was brought into camp bound hand and foot upon a charpoy. No wild beast could have attracted more attention. He was for ever being surrounded by soldiers who were stuffing him with pork and covering him with insults. He was well flogged and his person
exposed, which he fought against manfully, and then hung, but as usual the rope was too weak and down he fell and broke his nose; before he recovered his senses he was strung up again and made an end of. He died game, menacing a soldier who rubbed up his nose with, ‘If I had a tulwar in my hand you would not dare do so.’
³²

What did undermine the effectiveness of Indian armies was not the individual capacities or courage of the warrior but more the collective qualities of discipline and cohesion. During the Mutiny, whatever their feelings about enemy sepoys, British officers often remarked that although they often manoeuvred badly, they fought bravely as individuals: ‘many of the enemy stood to the last and received the charge with musket and sword,’ wrote Daly of one little action. ‘They were sabred or shot.’
³³
The fugitives from a broken force would often stand and fight to the last when the pursuit caught up with them. Lieutenant C. J. Griffiths fought at Delhi, and affirmed that:

It speaks well for the prowess of the mutineers, and proves that we had no contemptible foe to deal with, that so many sorties and attacks were made by them during the siege. They amounted in all to thirty-six – all of them being regularly organised actions and assaults – besides innumerable others on isolated pickets and advanced posts. They seldom came to close quarters with us, and then only when surprised, but nothing could exceed their persistent courage in fighting every day, and though beaten on every occasion with frightful loss, returning over and over again to renew the combat.
³⁴

The same was true on, and beyond, the North-West Frontier. At Charasia in Afghanistan in 1879, twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Ian Hamilton, who did not let the fact that he was actually an infantry officer, in the Gordon Highlanders, prevent him from leading a troop of 5th Punjab Cavalry, found that when the Afghan army was broken its survivors remained dangerous.

It was in ‘the cavalry pursuit’ … that I first learnt that the sword is no good against an Afghan lying on his back twirling a heavy knife. The dust clouds of the Chardeh Valley – the 5th Punjab Cavalry – red pugarees – blue swords flashing; the galloping line, and I also galloping with that sensation of speed
which the swiftest motor car can never impart … Afghans in little knots, or else lying on their backs whirling their big knives so as to cut off the legs of our horses, a hell of a scrimmage in fact, until the
sowars
got to work in couples, one with sword uplifted, the other pulling his carbine out of the bucket and making the enemy spring to their feet to be cut down or be shot as they lay.
³⁵

British officers and men on the frontier always ran the risk of assassination by men who were prepared to get close enough to make certain of their shot or knife-thrust. When Francis Yeats-Brown joined the 17th Cavalry at Bannu in 1905, one of the first things he was told was that:

a fanatic had murdered our Brigade Major … The
ghazi
hid in some crops by the roadside, waiting for the General, presumably, who was leading a new battalion into cantonments. The General dropped behind for a moment, so the Brigade Major, who was riding at the head of the troops, received the load of buckshot intended for his chief. It hit him in the kidneys and killed him instantly.
³⁶

Colonel Valentine Blacker, who fought the Marathas in the Deccan, believed that discipline and cohesion were the key factors that enabled small British armies to beat bigger Indian ones time and time again. His point is valid for much of military history, and is just as appropriate for Macedonian cavalry crashing into Persian foot soldiers as for a regiment of the Company’s cavalry charging a glittering cloud of Marathas.

The sheer size of a large body of Maratha horse prevents the attack of a small but compact corps from being otherwise than partially parried, and, as an equal front of an irregular body can never stand such a shock, the part menaced must give way. The body is then broken, and each part acts on the principle of avoiding exposure to the sole brunt of the action, while the part immediately attacked flies. Did the remainder fall on the rear of the pursuers the chase must invariably be abandoned, but this would imply a degree of combination, the absence of which is supposed; and to the facility with which the disciplined
squadrons divide, reassemble, charge and halt, by a single trumpet sound … 

It was, therefore, no want of individual courage which produced the misbehaviour of the enemy, but the apprehension, however paradoxical it may appear, of being obliged to contend against odds. Our cavalry were too few in number to attempt the experiment of loose skirmishing. If that had been tried it would soon be found that these horse, now so despicable a body, would be formidable in detail.
³⁷

In 1857 a native officer of the 4th Punjab Cavalry claimed that British officers were essential to his comrades, telling Fred Roberts: ‘Sir, we fight well but we do not understand military arrangements.’
³⁸
A recent reflection on the outcome of the Mutiny draws the same conclusions: ‘fighting morale was nine-tenths organisation and only one part courage. As such they were embodied in the British officer corps.”
³⁹

One of the things that made both the Marathas and the Sikhs so formidable as opponents was the fact that both had been taught ‘military arrangements’ by their foreign advisers, many of whom had formerly been in the Company’s or HM’s service. Some were not a great deal of use. Robert Dick, illegitimate son of Major General Sir Robert Dick, who was killed at Sobraon, had held a commission in the Gwalior forces, and then been a local lieutenant in Skinner’s Horse, which he left (or from which, perhaps, he was dismissed) in 1831. In 1834 he was commanding a small force for the amirs of Sind, but fell out with his second in command, a
subadar.

The
subadar,
Behari Lal, and Mr Dick are constantly fighting and abusing each other, and in consequence Mr Dick has been given orders to reside at Kutri, on the opposite bank of the river. He and the
subadar
constantly abuse each other, even in durbar, and sometimes fire guns across the river.
⁴⁰

Dick died of a combination of drink and fever in 1835.

Matthew Ford, paymaster of HM’s 16th Foot, fled across the Sutlej in 1837 when he got into a muddle with his accounts. Court-martialled in absentia, he was cashiered and sentenced to a term of
imprisonment, but Ranjit Singh, despite British protests, gave him a battalion to command. Alas, he was no luckier with soldiers than he had been with rupees. His battalion soon mutinied in Hazara, and he was mortally wounded.

Others proved far more valuable. Captain John Harvey Bellasis had been in the Company’s engineers, but was then ‘impelled by pecuniary embarrassments to retrieve his fortunes in the service of the native princes’ – in his case a Maratha chieftain – and died bravely commanding a band of troops – the ‘forlorn hope’ – in the storm of Sounda. ‘Thus fell poor Bellasis,’ lamented a brother officer, ‘an ornament to society and an honour to his nation.’
⁴¹

In about 1810 a traveller reported that:

At Sujanpur I was met by Mr O’Brien, an Irishman in the Raja’s service. Mr O’Brien is a strong, stout man, about 40 years of age, and was a dragoon in the 8th, or Royal Irish. It is said that, having gone on guard without some of his accoutrements, he was reprimanded by the officer, and on his replying insolently, the officer struck, or touched him with his cane. O’Brien knocked him down with the butt end of his carbine, and then put spurs to his horse and galloped off. Not daring to return to his regiment, he wandered about the country for some time, and at last found service with Sansor Chand, for who he has established a factory for small arms and raised and disciplined a force of 1,400 men.

There is also an Englishman named James in Sansor Chand’s service. He has been a soldier, but denies ever having been employed in either the king’s or the Company’s service in India. He is illiterate with some practical skill in gunnery. Both these men are of use to the Raja and might be more, but there means are limited, and their habits not of the most temperate description.
⁴²

James, who appears as ‘James Sahib, Feringhi’ in contemporary accounts, was almost certainly James Shepherd, who had jumped ship in Calcutta. After falling out with O’Brien, he entered Ranjit Singh’s service, where he commanded an artillery brigade. He died in 1825, and his brigade was taken over by another Englishman, William Leigh. A British soldier of fortune called Jones was instrumental in
enabling Ranjit to take the fort of Kharpur near Multan: ‘The defence was most obstinate and the attack threatened to end, like all former ones, in failure, when an adventurer named Jones, in the Sikh service, took charge of the guns, advanced them up to the citadel and breached it, enabling the Akalis to storm.’
⁴³