Sahib (78 page)

From dumdum bullets to the word ‘loot’,
Sahib
makes plain that the cultural exchange between India and Britain went both ways, though I couldn’t help feeling that you took rather a benign view of the latter – particularly where a slice of the spoils might ensure a greater commitment from the soldiers to any given campaign.

Nowadays, perhaps through the novels of Patrick O’Brian, we tend to think of prize money as being an exclusively naval phenomenon, but of course it wasn’t. Throughout history there always was a substantial financial element to soldiering, which you can’t get away from. Armies were seldom held together by a belief in their cause alone. There was almost always a financial interest. These days we would hope that the soldiers get well paid and well looked after,
but then it was in part because men could make their fortunes. You could go off on a campaign as a private soldier and emerge with some legitimate prize money that would buck your life up – you could come back to England and have raised yourself, respectably, by a whole social class. And many soldiers, mistrustful of bureaucracy and delays, simply short-circuited the prize money system by looting.

And, finally, while you were researching this book what most surprised or interested you about soldiering in India?

The thing that surprised me and interested me – and given time I’d like to examine further – were the Company’s Europeans. These were the people who decided to spend twenty-five, thirty years in India, who became professional soldiers in the most professional sense. They didn’t fit comfortably into many of those clichés about the British in India. Here were people who, in terms of social background, tended to be better educated than those who joined the British army. They were, at the risk of dying young and getting ghastly diseases, likely to get a better life in India. Often they simply slipped sideways into one of those administrative jobs in the ordnance department. I’d love to do more work on them because they are the category of ‘military artisan’ that historians don’t usually spend much time on because they are not officers or soldiers of the classic sort, and mercenaries isn’t quite right, but they are military specialists, and fascinating ones at that.

By Richard Holmes

I
T IS ALWAYS DANGEROUS
, I think, to have grand ideas about being an author. After all, writing is work, and hard work too. It is compulsive drudgery, domestic isolation and fevered dreams laced with occasional (and often delusive) satisfaction at a phrase well turned or a chapter neatly concluded. The sheer, mind-blowing euphoria of finishing a book is replaced almost immediately by an uneasy feeling of emptiness, and the arrival of the first finished copy of any book always reveals the infelicitous phrase or inexcusable error that somehow slipped past you in the proofs. Yet (and here an analogy with port is painfully appropriate) however much I know how much the process will hurt I can never resist the opportunity of embarking upon it again.

In my case it is not about money – or perhaps, more honestly, not
mainly
about money. Nor is it about the bubble reputation, for an approving letter from a reader always pleases me more than a good notice from a reviewer who has evidently not understood the book or, as is all too often the case, has not had time to read it properly. In part it is because, however little we like to admit it, many of us have one eye fixed on immortality, and when the Grim Reaper comes to my door (and I hope he will leave the visit as long as he decently can) I will at least know that I have done something which may transcend my Biblical three score years and ten. But it is really because I have a
passion for my subject which age has not wearied nor the years condemned. I seldom slide the lid off a box of documents without my heart beating faster, and even now, sitting in a reading room with earnest scholars heads-down around me, I sometimes look up, savour the moment, and thank God for the privilege.

The process of deciding what to write next is rarely simple. You are going to be stuck with the subject for a year or three, and so you ought to love it, for bald obligation is a hard taskmaster when the muse has flown, the deadline looms, and family life and the day job justly clamour for attention. I decided to write
Redcoat, Tommy
and
Sahib
not because of any complex intellectual process or careful search for those gaps in the literature which authors often seek to fill, but because (and I can almost seize the moment when it happened) I simply knew that I wanted to write about the British soldier and three distinct aspects of his evolution.

‘The process of deciding what to write next is rarely simple. You are going to be stuck with the subject for a year or three, and so you ought to love it, for bald obligation is a hard taskmaster when the muse has flown, the deadline looms, and family life and the day job justly clamour for attention.’

As the idea hardened in my mind, long before I teased it out into synopses, I knew that the books would be different in flavour even if they were similar in terms of approach and source material.
Redcoat
would be easiest, for it was easy to become fond of that army of red serge and pipeclayed crossbelts. I would be revisiting battlefields that I had first known as a young man, and again meeting old friends like Kincaid and Costello, Harris and Wheeler, those busy diarists of the Napoleonic Wars.
Tommy
would unquestionably be the hardest. Indeed, had I known when I began the book just how
painful I would find the process I am not sure that I would ever have had the courage to start. The subject of the First World War still polarises not simply professional historians but the reading public too, and cataloguing the life of the British soldier on the Western Front constantly presented me with cases when my heart tugged me one way and my head another. I do not think that I will be able to re-examine that terrible war in the near future, and there are times when I think that I have written something out of myself; that part of me is a hungry ghost howling on the chalk uplands east of Longueval.

‘I decided to write
Redcoat, Tommy
and
Sahib
not because of any complex intellectual process or careful search for those gaps in the literature which authors often seek to fill, but because I simply knew that I wanted to write about the British soldier and three distinct aspects of his evolution.’

Sahib
was never going to be as painful as
Tommy
nor as familiar as
Redcoat.
I knew the Indian subcontinent relatively well, from a first visit in 1976 to recent trips in the footsteps of the future Duke of Wellington, and I had ridden a curmudgeonly grey Afghan pony across a great tract of the North-West Frontier. There were several familiar friends from
Redcoat,
most notably John Shipp, twice commissioned from the ranks, earning his own immortality before the ramparts of Bhurtpore. There were occasions that found Mr Atkins at his sweaty, foul-mouthed, dark-humoured and powder-grimed best, going steadily forward to the tuck of drum at Wandiwash and Buxar, and carrying the Sikh entrenchments by the blind fury of his assault at Sobraon. It was hard not to admire some of those soldier sahibs, political officers acting as baby proconsuls, keeping whole provinces safe by the strength of their wills and the force of their personalities. True, there were moments
when their uncompromising rectitude gave me pause for thought, and although I am more for than against John Nicholson, those grey eyes still make me feel profoundly uneasy.

‘The sands of time have choked these men and the women who followed them, and the erosion of the decades has often effaced their memorials. But they live on in their words, and, or so I hope, through my pen.’

Yet there were times when it was hard to like Atkins, perhaps when he had a head full of arrack and was intent on mischief in the bazaar, or perhaps when, after a hard-fought battle or bloody storm, he was looting what he could carry, smashing what he could not, and killing anyone who tried to stop him. I had not realised when I began just how difficult it would be to write about the Mutiny, which showed neither side at its best and often revealed the British at their most vengeful and embittered. Nor had I thought that I would resent the way that the openness of Georgian India, with its British gentlemen dressing in Mughal style and its easy recognition that love was no respecter of colour or creed, was elbowed aside by the sniffiness of Victorian India with its missionaries and memsahibs and its whispered asides about sable beauties and dark ladies. I cannot imagine how India could have been won and held without the memsahibs, those indomitable women who travelled the roads of India with their broods, in summer’s heat or pelting monsoon. But I do wish that they had not defined their own caste system quite so sharply in a land which already had castes enough.

Lastly, it is hard not to feel pride tinged with sorrow when I consider the whole imperial achievement. Pride because, when all is said and done, this was an empire
honestly ruled, which laid foundations that still sustain the most populous democracy in the world. Sorrow because, just as the Indian climate scorches, rots and corrodes, so the visible traces of the men who stood sentry-go at Fort Jamrud, marched with grim desperation from one cholera camp to another, and scampered amongst the bullet-puffs in a busy skirmish-line have disappeared. This was the army of the Victorian print and the Kipling poem, gone as if it had never been. And that, I suppose, is the big idea I was so cautious about at the very beginning, and the link between the books of my trilogy. The sands of time have choked these men and the women who followed them, and the erosion of the decades has often effaced their memorials. But they live on in their words, and, or so I hope, through my pen.

Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

Holmes’s immaculate history of the First World War puts the British soldier in the trenches centre-stage, compellingly telling the story of this epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it.

Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket

The bestselling history of the British soldier from 1700 to 1900, a period in which methods of warfare and the social make-up of the British army changed little, and in which the Empire was forged.

Wellington: The Iron Duke

The exhilarating story of Britain’s greatest ever soldier. The Duke of Wellington’s remarkable life and audacious campaigns are vividly recreated in this book.

The First World War in Photographs

An astonishing and moving collection of images from the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

The Western Front

Richard Holmes captures the scale and intensity of the Great War in this heartfelt and gripping account of the bloodiest days of the First World War.

War Walks: From Agincourt to Normandy

For centuries, battles have raged over the area of Belgium and northern France known as the ‘fatal avenue’. In
War Walks
Richard Holmes explores six of the region’s most intriguing battlefields, vividly recreating the atmosphere of their bloody history.

Acts of War

A gripping attempt to find the very nature of war. It takes us through the soldier’s experience in its entirety, including personal recollections of veterans of a dozen conflicts. This is a powerful portrait of what motivates the soldier and enables him to maintain the struggle in conditions of extreme degradation and danger.

Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

A magisterial history of the British soldier. From battlefield to barrack-room, it is filled with anecdotes and stories of soldiers from the army of Charles II, through Empire and two World Wars to modern times.

•
Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India
James Lawrence

•
White Mughals
William Dalrymple

•
Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier
Charles Allen

•
Our Bones Are Scattered: The Cawnpore Massacres and the Indian Mutiny of 1857
Andrew Ward

•
Begums, Thugs and White Mughals
Fanny Parkes

•
Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian
John Beames

•
The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company
John Keay

•
Plain Tales from the Raj
Charles Allen

•
Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Religion
Mike Dash

•
The Khyber Rifles: From British Raj to Al Qaeda
Jules Stewart

•
Generals
Mark Urban

•
The Indian Mutiny
Saul David

Richard Holmes was one of Britain’s most distinguished and eminent military historians and broadcasters. For many years Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University and the Royal Military College of Science, he was the author of many books including the best-selling and widely acclaimed
Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket; Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front; Marlborough: England’s Fragile Genius; Wellington: The Iron Duke
and most recently,
Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors.
His other books include
The Western Front
and
Dusty Warriors
. He was general editor of the
Oxford Companion to Military History
and taught military history at Sandhurst for many years. As well as his work as an academic and writer, Richard Holmes joined the Territorial Army in 1964, and served for over 35 years, retiring as a brigadier and Britain’s most senior reservist. He was also Colonel of the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment from 1999 until 2007. Famous for his BBC series such as
War Walks, In the Footsteps of Churchill
and
Wellington
, Richard Holmes died suddenly in April 2011 from pneumonia. He had been suffering from non-Hodgkins’ Lymphoma.