Sahib (40 page)

Another adventurer, Gordon or Carron by name, commanded a brigade of cavalry in Ranjit’s service.

The men were dressed in red jackets and pantaloons and had red puggeries. They were good looking men and well mounted. The horses were also in good order. The first regiment had sabres and carbines slung in the usual manner along the right side and thigh. The 2nd Regiment was dressed and accoutred in the same manner but with matchlocks instead of carbines. The two regiments were commanded by Mr Gordon, a half-caste in the Raja’s service. After the review he came up and saluted the Raja and said something about the long arrears due to his men. He was told that pay would be issued soon.
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Gordon was dismissed after a row with Ranjit in 1832 (we may surmise that pay lay at the bottom of the dispute) but was soon reinstated, and was killed at Jumrood, at the foot of the Khyber Pass, in 1833.

Without doubt, however, the most important foreigners in the Sikh service were not British, but were Jean François Allard, Claude Auguste Court, Jean Baptiste Ventura and the inimitable Paolo di Avitabile, who had left the Neapolitan militia in 1815 and become first a trader and then a soldier of fortune. Avitabile was a hard man, though he possessed what passed for a sense of humour. Ranjit sent him six well-connected thieves to whom he felt obliged to show forbearance, and told Avitabile to be sure that they did not escape. They were hanged within the hour.

The Maharajah sent for Avitabile in high wrath; all his friends trembled for him, and when he appeared before Ranjit, he was asked how he had dared to hang six Sikhs who had been given into his safe keeping. Avitabile answered that he thought it was the surest means of preventing their escape, and obeying the Maharaja’s command. The king laughed at this answer; the event was not further taken notice of.

The Sikh who told us the story seemed to think it a good joke, and all the people regard him with reverence.
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Appointed Governor of Peshawar, Avitabile immediately set up gallows. He hanged ‘fifty of the worst characters in Peshawar’ overnight, and, he wrote, ‘I repeated the exhibition every day till I had made a scarcity of brigands and murderers.’

Although some foreign adventurers sought to sever all connections with the land of their birth, others regarded their national origin as important as their current military obligation. In 1800, Major General Wellesley was trying to corner that vexatious free-booter Dhoondiah Waugh, self-styled ‘Lord of the Two Worlds’. The river separating Mysore from Maratha territory provided a potential refuge, and so Wellesley wrote to the local Maratha commander:

Doondiah Waugh is now on the south bank of the river; his object is evidently to cross it and avoid the troops under my command. It is in your power to prevent this … As I understand you are an Englishman, I address you in English, and I shall be obliged if you will let me know what steps you intend to take with a view to compliance with the wish when I have an opportunity of mentioning your services to the British government and to that of Poona.

Colonel Robert Sutherland (actually a Scot cashiered from HM’s 74th Foot) replied that ‘though circumstances have placed me under the direction of a native prince, I still consider myself bound by every principle of honour … to watch for every opportunity of rendering service to my fellow-countrymen … ’. He had told his subordinate, Captain Brownrigg, to arrange matters so as ‘to render most service to the common cause’.
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On 10 September, Arthur Wellesley caught Dhoondiah, who could not now cross the river, and charged him with two regiments of British and two of Indian cavalry. ‘Many, amongst others, Dhoondiah, were killed,’ reported Wellesley, ‘and the whole body dispersed, and were scattered in small bodies all over the face of the country.’
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In August 1803, a British colonel noted that Brownrigg, by then a major, ‘is attached to Colonel Dudrenc’s brigade and in fact commands it, he being a very active good soldier whereas the colonel
has not a military idea’.
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Brownrigg entered the Company’s service that year, and was killed in 1818 at the siege of Sirsa. Robert Sutherland had already left Maratha service. Another Maratha officer was Colonel William Henry Tone, brother of the Irish patriot Theobald Wolf Tone. He had served in the Company’s army and then spent some time in Europe before his father was ruined by a law suit and he took service with the Marathas, where he was reported to be ‘as brave as Caesar and devoted to soldiering’. He was killed in 1802.

Majors Vickers, Dodd and Ryan flatly refused to serve against their fellow countrymen in the Second Maratha War. They were beheaded, and their heads were stuck on pikes outside Jaswant Rao Holkar of Indore’s tent. Most other British officers serving the Marathas accepted the government’s offer of compensation if they left Maratha service: Captain Hyder Hearsey, one of George Thomas’s former officers, accepted 800 rupees for doing so. Major Louis Ferdinand Smith claimed that by leaving the Marathas:

I have lost the hopes of an independent fortune, which I would have acquired from my rank, the result of my long service … We should have been wanting in principle, and in duty to our country, had we continued to serve its enemies.

He acknowledged, however, ‘the liberal provisions’ made to British officers who had quitted Maratha service. But he might have spared a rueful thought for his brother, Captain Emilius Felix Smith, who had left HM’s 36th Foot to serve with him, only to fall mortally wounded in 1801. He died after asking: ‘Ah, why did I not fall on the plains of Egypt with my regiment. I should then have died without regret.’
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John Roach and George Blake, each of whom had commanded a field gun in the Maratha armies (they would have been sergeants had they been in the British service), told Arthur Wellesley that:

We, on the first instance of our being employed against the English, protested against our employment. We were hurried on by many marches latterly by night, and it was not until the period specified above that we knew against whom we were being sent. When we knew it, we determined on throwing
ourselves on the clemency of our countrymen encamped, as we were told, at Aurangabad.
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But some of their countrymen apparently remained with the Marathas, for on 3 October 1803, Wellesley wrote:

I have some reason to complain of Scindia’s English officers, and I shall bring the matter forward more publicly as soon as I can ascertain the matter more completely … My soldiers say … that they heard one English officer with a battalion say to another: ‘You understand the language better than I do. Desire the
jemadar
of that body of horse to go and cut up those wounded European soldiers.’ The other did as he was desired, and the horse obeyed the orders they received.

It is bad enough that these gentlemen should serve the enemies of their country, particularly after the British government offered them a provision, but it is too bad that they should make themselves the instruments, or rather that they should excite the savage ferocity of the natives against their brave and wounded countrymen.
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In practice, though, most British officers had actually left the Marathas by this time. Amongst them was James Skinner, who was promptly asked to raise an irregular regiment, the nucleus of his famous ‘Yellow Boys’.

The ‘soldierly and efficient’ John Howell was more circumspect, nether quitting his service nor harming his countrymen. Captured at the battle of Miani in 1843, he was

brought before the Assistant Quartermaster General, Lieut MacMurdo, and, on being asked from where and whence he came, he replied: ‘My name is John Howell; I am a Welshman, and formerly served in the Royal Artillery, and am now in command of the artillery of the Amirs of Sindh.’ On being told that he would be shot as a traitor to his country, he said: ‘That is not so; I have not fired upon my countrymen, and you must admit that our shots went over your heads’ (which was quite true).

He was duly released, and MacMurdo later saw him comfortably installed as
wazir
(principal minister) of the state of Bahawalpur.
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Henry Charles Van Courtlandt, son of Colonel Van Courtlandt of the 19th Dragoons and an Indian woman, had served Ranjit Singh, who made him a colonel. However, he fought with the British at Multan, where he was awarded the medal for the siege but got no field allowances because he was not formally in the British army: he was ‘rather sore about it’. He served in the Second Sikh War and joined the Provincial Civil Service after it: he eventually retired ‘with the pay and allowances of a colonel of British Infantry’ and died in London in 1888.

John Holmes was of mixed race and had been a trumpeter in the Bengal Horse Artillery before joining the Sikh service where he too became a colonel. Herbert Edwardes testified to his ‘energy and ability’, and Reynell Taylor called him ‘a most active, and intelligent assistant, whose heart and soul are in our interests’. He was murdered when his troops mutinied at Bannu in 1848. O’Brien was so helpful to the British, leaving his raja’s service to join them with a thousand ‘good hill men’, that he was given a free pardon for desertion. However, he was soon back in Sansor Chand’s service, where it was reported that he was ‘frequently under the influence of excessive intoxication for nearly a fortnight, when the fit usually terminated as on the present occasion, by a severe illness, after which he would continue well and sober for a short time’.
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James Lucan went even further. He had been a captain in Maratha service, but left it in 1803 and joined Lord Lake’s army as a volunteer. When the fort of Aligargh, which he knew well, was attacked: ‘He gallantly undertook to lead Colonel Monson’s storming party to the gate, and point out the road through the fort, which he effected in the most gallant manner, and Colonel Monson has received infinite benefit from his services.’ He received a lieutenancy in HM’s 74th Foot and 24,000 rupees for his services. But, appointed to command a corps of irregular horse, he was captured by his former employers and died in prison.
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European military specialists serving local rulers were an odd mixture, like the sixty or so British and Eurasian officers in the Maratha armies in 1800, a blend, it was claimed, of ‘men of inferior moral calibre’ and ‘men of recognised character and ability’. Perhaps the oddest examples of these specialists were Bombardier Herbert
and Gunners Hennessy and O’Brian of the Bengal Foot Artillery who deserted to the enemy during the 1825 siege of Bhurtpore. The bombardier had fought at Waterloo, and it was unclear why he ventured on such a hazardous step, although a contemporary said that the trio were ‘slaves to drink, they knew no other master’. When the city fell Herbert was hanged from a gallows high upon one of the bastions, and his comrades were transported to the Andaman Islands for fourteen years apiece.

There were some British officers, Wellesley amongst them, who argued that the part-Europeanising of Indian armies actually did them a disservice, because it deprived them of some of their martial qualities without making them comprehensively modern. But we may doubt whether the traditional hordes of Maratha horse would have been capable of checking Wellesley. As it was, when, much later in life, he was asked what was the most difficult thing he ever did in the way of soldiering, he thought for a minute, and then replied: ‘Assaye’ – his great victory over the Marathas in 1803. Similarly, it was precisely because the Sikhs combined natural bravery with European-style training and tactics that they proved such redoubtable adversaries. Indeed, had their leaders not been suborned by British political officers they may actually have won. But the problem with what we might now call ‘contract officers’ is that their relationship with their employer was often based on money and rarely on a deeper sense of trust and duty. They could seldom be relied upon to fight against their fellow countrymen, and, as the nineteenth century wore on, even other European officers grew reluctant to fight the British unless their own countries were at war.

While we must be cautious at accepting all British assertions about their army in India at face value, it is clear that, in the words of one sceptical analyst, they:

carefully fostered the structures of military collaboration on which their power depended. Every effort was made to bind the peasant-soldier communities to the Raj by the strong ties of self-interest … The bonds between the sepoy and the Raj were more complex than this. Had they not been so, Indian soldiers would not have risked their lives to fight the wars of empire.
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There are many examples of Indian soldiers fighting for the British when it was clearly not in their interest to do so. Brigadier James Hope Grant, commanding officer of the 9th Lancers when the Mutiny began, and a major general and a knight when it ended, found himself in what a brother officer called ‘a fearful scrape’ on 19 June 1857. The British launched two cavalry charges to save their guns from a determined force of mutineers, and in one of them Hope Grant was:

unhorsed, surrounded by the enemy. My orderly, a native Sowar of the 4th Irrregulars … rode up to me and said, ‘Take my horse – it is your only chance of safety’ … He was a Hindostanee Mussulman, belonging to a regiment the greater part of which had mutinied; and it would have been easy for him to have killed me and gone over to the enemy; but he behaved nobly, and was ready to save my life at the risk of his own. I refused his offer, but, taking a firm grip of his horse’s tail, I told [him] to drag me out of the crowd.
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Demonstrative courage mattered much to men who valued their own
izzat
so greatly. Arab mercenaries were amongst the Marathas’ best troops: in August 1803, Major General Wellesley told his brother, the Governor-General, Lord Mornington, that they had held Ahmednagar against him ‘with the utmost obstinacy’.
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In a brisk action against them that year Lieutenant Bryant saved the life of a brother officer and then cut down an enemy standard bearer. When his sepoys wavered, he harangued them and then returned to the fray, first snapping his sword across an opponent’s skull and then picking up a musket and bayonet to kill two more. His men were inspired by the example. In another action an Arab hurled a spear at Lieutenant Langlands of HM’s 74th Highlanders. Langlands pulled it out and threw it back, skewering the man. A big Indian grenadier rushed forward and patted him on the back, saying:
‘Atchah sahib! Bhota atchah Keeah!’
(Well done, sir! Very well done!)
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At Mudki: ‘Lieutenant Newton, 16th BNI, fell under five wounds, the first a sword-cut across the stomach (from a man who feigned dead) while trying to save the life of a wounded Mahratta. After this he still advanced with his corps, and marched along holding up his
intestines with his hands.’
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Lieutenant Torrens Metje ‘danced on’ ahead of his company of 29th BNI at Chillianwallah, derisively throwing spent shot aside. Colonel Armine Mountain felt his loss very keenly.