Sahib (47 page)

The same regiment was briskly engaged in the First Sikh War, earning its nickname ‘the Mookeewallaks’ on 18 December 1845. Lieutenant George Denham-Cookes describes how:

We watered and picketed our horses, & our messman having by some luck laid hold of a little grub, which we stood much in need of, having had scarcely anything to eat for the previous 6 days, we got under a Tree and commenced operations. We had made a little progress when a native trooper came up to us as hard as he could lick, & just managed to stammer out ‘Seik’, ‘Seik’. At the same time the infantry bugles and drums sounded a beat to arms. We luckily had not unsaddled, and were formed in close column in 5 minutes … 

We advanced in close column of troops, the Comdr. in Chief & his staff taking off their cocked hats & cheering us. This was a fine inspiring sight, but it did a great deal of mischief, as it maddened our men & prevented the officers from keeping them back … 

We kept advancing at a gallop – the dust was so thick that I could not see my horse’s head but every now and then I felt him bound into the air & found that he had jumped a bush.

The enemy had now discovered us & the round shot
came tearing through our ranks. The first shot took off a Trumpeter’s head just behind me … 

Our pace now increased, and the leading Troops (the only ones who could see the way as they had no dust) came upon the Enemy. From that moment, owing to thick dust & the quantities of bushes and trees, the Regt. was dispersed.

I went on by myself, my Troop having gone, I know not wither, & the first object I saw was an Akali who let fly & missed me. I then came upon two more rascals, who did the same, one of whom tasted my sabre, which I found would not cut thro’ him as he was enveloped in cotton clothes. I soon after found a couple of my own men, & at the same time an elephant came by us, with 4 Seik Chiefs making the best of their way off. If I had had a few more men we could have taken them.

At this time I was in rear of the enemy, & having gone far enough I turned back & met Hale, Fisher, Swinton (who was wounded) and a few Dragoons. About this time we met two Seiks under a tree, & Martin of the Native Cavalry attacked one of them, but in so stupid a way that the Seik sent his spear clean through Martin’s breast & out at his back … I saw it was no use attacking these rascals with a sword, so I bethought me of my pistol; the right barrel missed fire, but the left did its duty well & doubled the rascal up. Hale shot the other fellow.
¹⁶⁹

But perhaps the most classic cavalry charge on the subcontinent was the attack of the 16th Lancers at Aliwal on 28 January 1846, described here by Sergeant William Gould:

We had a splendid man for commanding officer, Major Rowland Smyth. He was six feet in height and of most commanding appearance. At the trumpet note to trot, off we went.

‘Now’, said Major Smyth, ‘I am going to give the word to charge, three cheers for the Queen.’ There was a terrific burst of cheering in reply, and down we swept upon the guns. Very soon they were in our possession. A more exciting job followed. We had to charge a square of infantry. At them we went, the bullets flying round like a hailstorm. Right in front of us was a big sergeant, Harry Newsome. He was mounted on a grey charger, and with a shout of ‘Hullo, boys, here goes for death or a commission,’ forced his horse right over the front rank
of kneeling men, bristling with bayonets. As Newsome dashed forward he leant over and grasped one of the enemy’s standards, but fell from his horse pierced by 19 bayonet wounds.

Into the gap made by Newsome we dashed, but they made fearful havoc among us. When we got to the other side of the square our troop had lost both lieutenants, the cornet, troop sergeant-major and two sergeants. I was the only sergeant left. Some of the men shouted ‘Bill, you’ve got command, they’re all down.’ Back we went through the disorganised square, the Sikhs peppering us in all directions … We retired to our own line. As we passed the General [Sir Harry Smith] he shouted ‘Well done, 16th. You have covered yourselves with glory.’ Then noticing that no officers were with C Troop, Sir H. Smith enquired, ‘Where are your officers?’ ‘All down,’ I replied. ‘Then,’ said the general, ‘go and join the left wing, under Major Bere.’
¹⁷⁰

However, there was a great deal that might go wrong: a badly reconnoitred charge could meet serious obstacles, for instance. Will Havelock was in command of the 14th Light Dragoons at Ramnagar in 1848 (where, as we have seen, his brother Henry would later find his decapitated body). Will had made his name young. In 1813, at the age of twenty, as a junior staff officer, he had encouraged a Spanish unit to assault the French by jumping his horse over an
abbatis
of felled trees with French infantry on the far side. The Spaniards cheered him as
‘el chico blanco’
, for he was very fair and pale. Henry Havelock wrote that:

Old Will was a fox-hunter before he was a soldier, and has been a hog-hunter since, and would lightly esteem a ditch or
nullah,
manned by a few irregulars, which would make others pause.

It was natural that an old Peninsular officer, who had not seen a shot fired since Waterloo, should desire to blood the noses of his young dragoons … ,
¹⁷¹

In confusing circumstances, Will Havelock, who had already been ordered by Gough to attack if the opportunity presented itself, asked his brigadier, the admirable Robert Cureton, for permission to charge a body of Sikh cavalry. Cureton agreed, and then, as Hugh Gough observed: ‘Havelock took his regiment, with a portion of the
5th Light Cavalry, in Column of Troop, right down to the river, when he wheeled into line, and charged along the whole face of the Sikh batteries on the opposite side.’ In fact Havelock took his regiment across a
nullah
containing quicksands which had already got some horses of the 3rd Light Dragoons ‘set fast up to the belly’. Lieutenant Colonel Michael White of the 3rd had pointed to the
nullah
and shouted ‘Havelock, Havelock!’, but on he went. And then, instead of simply driving off Sikh irregular horse, he rode slap into infantry as well.

Havelock and fourteen of his men were killed, and five officers and twenty-three men were wounded. The general consensus was that Havelock had been overcome by excitement. His brother later declared that:

I may well grieve for the loss of a brother who was brought up with me in the nursery … But though it be decided in the Bengal army that the same acts which would be lauded in Anglesey, or Joachim Murat, or Auguste Caulaincourt, are mere rashness in Will Havelock … [I] would scarcely give my dead brother for any living soldier in the three Presidencies.
¹⁷²

Will Havelock certainly died as a light dragoon might have wished. His adjutant saw him set off as ‘happy as a lover’, and John Pearman watched the regiment go on ‘in pretty style, so steady and straight’.
¹⁷³
Sadly, Brigadier Robert Cureton was killed when he rushed forward, with a small escort, to try to stop Havelock: he was widely regarded as the best cavalry officer in India, and his death was much lamented.

If the setback at Ramnagar was caused by over-confidence and inadequate reconnaissance, that at Chillianwalla on 13 January the following year was more troubling. Gough’s infantry, after the customary inadequate artillery preparation, attacked a superior Sikh force in jungle so thick that a regiment could not see its neighbours. On Gough’s right flank, Brigadier Pope launched an irresolute cavalry attack which rapidly turned into a debacle. Captain Thompson, of the 14th Light Dragoons, wrote how:

Having previously drawn swords, the brigade was now ordered to advance at a trot, without a skirmisher or ‘scout’ in front,
or a man in support or reserve in rear, through broken, jungly ground, where some of the enemy’s horsemen were seen to loiter, watching our movements. Brigadier Pope himself led the line in front of the native cavalry, forming the centre by which we had been ordered to dress and regulate our pace, when insensibly our ‘trot’ dwindled to a ‘walk’, and then came to a dead halt at the sight of a few Sikh horsemen peering over the bushes. Of course the flanks of the brigade had to do the same, being guided by the fluctuations of the centre, which were not always visible in the thick jungle, but were conformed to more by sound than sight.

I then saw Colonel King, commanding the 14th Light Dragoons, gallop to the Brigadier in front, energetically pointing with his sword towards the enemy opposition and evidently urging an attack, which the other seemed unable to make up his mind to order. The Sikhs seeing the hesitation, a handful of their horsemen, some forty or fifty in a lump, charged boldly into the thick of the native cavalry, who instantly turned with the cry ‘threes about’. And disappeared for the rest of the day – at least I saw none of them.
¹⁷⁴

James Hope Grant, commanding the 9th Lancers on the right flank of Pope’s brigade, recalled that:

The squadrons were going along with the line steadily, and no hesitation was evinced; on the contrary, the flank-men were engaged with some of the enemy, and doing their duty, when the whole line checked and went about from the left, and my squadrons, certainly without a word from me, turned round too; but the jungle and the dust might make some excuse for the men, as it was difficult to hear, and in many cases to see. The dust upon this movement became very great, and the men of my regiment got mixed up with the [native] regiments; and though I did all in my power to stop them, ordering them to halt and front, and many of the officers in the regiment did the same, it was useless. They would not turn round; they appeared, having turned about, to have got panic-struck.
¹⁷⁵

As the Sikhs followed up they overran the horse artillery, capturing four guns and silencing the remaining six.

In the recriminations that followed it was agreed that Pope, a
relatively junior lieutenant colonel of Indian cavalry who had been brave in his youth (thirty-two years before he had captured some Maratha guns in a desperate charge), was too ill and enfeebled to command a brigade in the field. Pope was mortally wounded in the retreat. When Sir Charles Napier, who had succeeded Gough, reviewed the 3rd and 13th Light Dragoons he gave unstinted praise to the former and said to the latter that ‘if you had been properly handled on 13th January the disgrace that now hangs over this regiment would not have taken place’. At this, a young trumpeter publicly accused Lieutenant Colonel King, the commanding officer, of cowardice. Napier at once ordered the man’s arrest, but King shot himself the same afternoon. The accusation was almost certainly unfair – Henry Havelock thought that King ‘did all that the bravest of men could do to rally his panic-stricken men’ – but the calumny had turned his mind.

When the cavalry charged at Gujrat in February 1849 they had a stain to blot out. This time Gough’s artillery had pounded the Sikhs before the infantry attacked, and as the Sikhs broke the cavalry was let loose. Captain Delmar of the 9th Lancers recounts how they:

overtook numbers of their infantry who were running for their lives – every man of course was shot … We pass’d over acres of wheat crops, which were two feet in height, and we detected three or four Sikhs scattered in every field, who had thrown themselves down for the purpose of hiding themselves, until we had passed them – their object being to escape altogether or to shoot at us
as we passed … 
They jumped up and prayed for mercy, but none was granted them … I never saw such butchery and murder! It is almost too horrible to commit to paper – there were our own men sticking their lances into them like so much
butter,
but the way in which this sticking business took place was truly shocking … 

Besides all this
ground
shooting, there was an immense deal of
tree
shooting … Every tree that was standing was well searched, and two or three Sikhs were found concealed in every tree we p[assed] – this afforded great
sport
for our men, who were firing up at them, like so many rooks … Down they would come like a bird, head downward, bleeding most profusely.
¹⁷⁶

The principles of cavalry charges changed little throughout the period: those launched with determination often succeeded, even if the balance of forces suggested otherwise; hesitation, however, was generally fatal. During the Mutiny a serious counter-attack obliged Garnet Wolseley to draw his own sword, which was ‘an unusual necessity with a staff officer’ and a practice of which Sir Colin Campbell deeply disapproved. A newly raised irregular regiment, ‘by no means a brilliant lot in any way upon any occasion … stood the charge and met the enemy hand to hand’. But Wolseley could not persuade a squadron of the 8th Hussars to charge, for its commander ‘did not think it advisable to leave the guns unattended’. When another squadron of the 8th charged, the opposition were so confident that neither side flinched: ‘both sides met at full tilt, and we lost a few men’. The Indian enemy then ‘charged well home’, even pressing the Bengal Fusiliers who were guarding the baggage, but who stood their ground and ‘received them with a well delivered volley that emptied many saddles’. Even so one
sowar
galloped on and was killed deep amongst the
doolies
carrying the wounded.
¹⁷⁷

Charles MacGregor witnessed a rare lapse by the 9th Lancers in Afghanistan in December 1879. They were, he thought,

quite out of hand, and would not face … [the Afghans] and went back … I went, got a squadron together, and told them to get out to the enemy’s right flank and charge, but they would not; they then began bolting; I went after them, shouted and swore at them but to no purpose.
¹⁷⁸

In 1857 an infantry brigadier sharply told his men that ‘the more you look at it, the less you will like it’, before adding conclusively: ‘the brigade will advance, left battalion leading.’ Indeed, it was not always helpful for cavalry to be able to see just how badly outnumbered they were. In November 1857, Lieutenant Hugh Gough was ordered by Hope Grant to attack 2,000 infantry and two guns with his squadron of Hodson’s Horse. Gough at once realised that a covered approach could make all the difference: