The Burma Wars: 1824-1886 (Conflicts of Empire)

by George Bruce

  Years before, in 1810, Campbell had won some distinction in the Peninsular Wars against the French, but he was under Wellington, a hard taskmaster. Now he was in command in this tropical land of rain, swamp and fever. Soon he would learn the full cost of allowing hopeful optimism to outweigh the kind of planning which leaves nothing to chance.

  3: THE ‘WILD FOREIGNERS’ INVADE

  A hot and humid Burmese morning. From the brassy sky the sun’s rays bounced off the flat brown waters of Rangoon river. Led by the 50-gun Liffey, Commodore Grant and General Campbell aboard, the fleet of British men-of-war and troop transports, with their pyramids of white sails, and their red ensigns flying high, sailed slowly with the tide up the broad expanse of water.

  Below decks in the warships, gunners stood at the ready beside loaded weapons already aimed at the shore, with its fringe of gilded pagodas and bamboo houses, awaiting the word to fire. Soldiers in thick red serge lined the bulwarks of the transports ready to repel the enemy’s swift war-boats, should they dare to attack.

  In the riverside rice fields, in the dense green jungle and in the bamboo huts clustered at the water’s edge, Burmese villagers gazed in awe at the rebel foreigners’ fleet, daring to sail up the river without acknowledging the supreme authority of the Lord of the White and all other Elephants.

  But knowing the Golden Majesty’s power and his much renowned victories, they had no doubts that the ‘white-faced barbarians’ would pay dearly for their impiety. King Bagyidaw, ‘who blessed the noble city of Ava with his presence, who excelled the kings of east and west in glory and honour, and against whose power no enemy could even draw an arrow,’ would command his general Maha Bandula to ‘cover the face of the earth with a great host, who would march in several divisions to seize, crush and kill the wild foreigners.’

  And crouched behind their stockades, gripping their spears and their eighteenth-century muskets the Burmese soldiers too foresaw an ignominious end to what they also were convinced was the white-faced barbarians’ foolhardiness.

  For their part, the British were preoccupied with getting ashore quickly, making friends with the inhabitants and buying their beef cattle and drinking water, of both of which they were now dangerously short. For it was their hope that the people would join them and rise against their tyrannical king in a bid for liberty, but nearing Rangoon now, the invaders hardly seem to have tried to make the friends they would need to succeed with such a policy.

  ‘Of course,’ wrote Ensign Doveton, nineteen, of the Madras European Fusiliers, ‘the enemy had no effectual means of opposing our progress to Rangoon, before which we safely anchored at noon, the men-of-war’s boats sinking, burning and destroying with most laudable zeal all that they could find combustible on either bank.’[21]

  They appear, thus, to have left behind a trail of havoc, almost as if they wanted a host of enemies.

  Rangoon, some twenty-eight miles from the sea, extended along the river bank for about 900 yards, a sequence of lofty brick pagodas with gilded pinnacles and bamboo houses with thatched roofs. Little could be seen of the interior of the town because it was surrounded by a stockade made of solid teak beams some twelve feet high. Behind it, no doubt, crouched the Burmese warriors.

  Outside the stockade upon a small landing stage several old ship guns served by Burmese artillerymen poked their black muzzles towards the river. The Liffey, having furled sails and beat to quarters, dropped anchor towering above this enemy battery, about 100 yards off. The other men-of-war and the troop transports anchored in line behind her. Silence, one feels safe to imagine, broken only by the creaking of the rigging and the shouts of the sailors then hung over the oil-brown waters during the pause of some minutes that followed.

  Who would be the first to fire? ‘Humanity forbade that we should be the first aggressors upon an almost defenceless town, containing as we supposed a large population of unarmed and inoffensive people,’ Major Snodgrass, Military Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief, noted, from the quarter deck of the mighty Liffey. ‘Besides, the proclamations and assurances of protection which had been sent on shore the preceding day, led us to hope that an offer of capitulation would still be made.’

  Capitulate, or else, was the burden of the British offer, and this General Sir Archibald Campbell believed the Burmese should do at once in face of overwhelming superiority. ‘Their presumption and folly,’ he noted reprovingly, ‘led them to pursue a different course…’

  Smoke and flame suddenly erupted from the Burmese battery and several heavy shots whistled high up through the Liffey’s rigging. Campbell called it ‘a feeble, ill-supported and worse directed fire…’ It did no damage, but it gave the invaders the excuse they needed. They had entered Burmese waters in force but with suitable surrender terms which, by all the usages of war, the enemy should at once have accepted. Instead, they themselves were fired upon. It was enough; war had begun at Rangoon.

  The smoke from the ancient guns had hardly cleared when the Liffey answered with a crashing broadside from twenty-five of her 18-pounders. The 42-pound shot toppled the Burmese guns and tore through the great teak doors in the stockade guarding the town. A moment later, the frigate Larne, twenty guns, commanded by Captain Frederick Marryat, which on her way up had run aground, sailed close in-shore and delivered another point-blank broadside. The other men-of-war joined in as well to hammer the stockade and shatter the houses behind it.

  ‘It was interesting,’ Doveton noted coolly, ‘to watch the effect of the shot from the men-of-war, the course of which could occasionally be traced by clouds of dust and fragments of tiles and brick as the iron missiles tore the roofs off some of the larger dwellings.’

  General Campbell, a burly Scot with thick red side-whiskers, now put his plan of attack into action. Detachments of the 38th, 41st and 13th regiments were rowed to the shore to cover the disembarkation of the rest. Shots whistled over their heads as fresh Burmese gunners again served the shore battery, but once more the guns were silenced by a broadside from the Liffey.

  Resistance then came to an end. In about half an hour two entire brigades were ashore, vivid masses of red against the pale green of the ubiquitous bamboo. ‘In less than twenty minutes,’ noted Campbell,[22] ‘I had the satisfaction of seeing the British flag flying in the town, without the troops having to discharge a single musket, and without my having occasion to regret the loss of one individual, killed or wounded, on our side.’

  It seemed solid success, for Campbell had seized this port of forty thousand people without so much as a single casualty.

  But where were the friendly population upon whom the British so much depended? Lord Amherst had cheerfully assumed that owing to the ruthless despotism of the King of Ava, British troops needed only to set foot in Rangoon to be greeted as liberators by the enslaved Burmans, who would without delay offer them all the food, cattle, boats and boatmen they needed, at bargain prices.

  There were many experiences in the British Army’s past to contradict such hopes. Perhaps the most recent was the landing of Sir Ralph Abercromby in Holland in 1799 in the belief that the Orange party would rise to aid them; but a foreign invader can generally be relied upon to bring about an end to local quarrels and form a united opposition. There was no support from the Orange party, no food and no transport; nothing except hostility.

  Nevertheless, forgetting such lessons of war, Campbell had fallen victim to the spirit of optimism that had grown around this expedition into a more or less unknown country. He had counted on a welcoming population, but instead he found a town totally deserted and swept bare. ‘It was soon evident that the show of resistance offered,’ noted Doveton, ‘was only to afford the population time to leave the town with their valuables under the Burman garrison, in spite of our proclamations… holding out hopes, if not promises (so report said) of liberation from Burman bondage in return for their co-operation.’[23]

  Two fears prompted the people of Rangoon, men, women and children, to quit their homes fo
r the hardships and privations of the surrounding jungle just when the rainy season was about to start. The first was the death that they would suffer were they to disobey the order to leave. The second was their own belief that the Golden Majesty’s forces would quickly destroy the wild foreigners and that they, the townspeople, would be killed as well were they to stay.

  To Major Snodgrass, General Campbell’s Military Secretary, it all seemed a bit unfair. ‘Deserted, as we found ourselves, by the people of the country, from whom alone we could expect supplies — unprovided with the means of moving either by land or water, and the rainy monsoon just setting in — no prospect remained to us but that of a long residence in the miserable and dirty hovels of Rangoon, trusting to the transports for provisions, with such partial supplies as our foraging parties might procure… by distant and fatiguing marches into the interior of the country.’[24]

  Campbell, whose fiery whiskers belied his serene temperament, only rarely allowed himself the luxury of complaining, but he must have cursed himself for disregarding his own custom of leaving nothing to chance and relying instead upon good luck and the supposed friendship of the invaded Burmese.

  He was almost without provisions with an army of eleven thousand, British and Indian, at the start of the rainy season, in a city of deserted pagodas and bamboo cottages. He was hemmed in by jungles which would soon be almost impassable and by swamps soon to be lakes which could stop him from making any move at all. Where the Burmese army was he had not the least idea.

  It was an alarming predicament, but as if to worsen it the British troops ashore, between three and four thousand men, got out of control that night and put the whole landing in danger. The word somehow went round that Rangoon was an Aladdin’s cave of gold, silver and precious stones, a belief that the great Shwedagon golden pagoda, towering like St Paul’s to a height of four hundred feet above the town, seemed to justify.

  The troops surged out in parties through the deserted streets in search of treasure. But the Burmese had taken everything of value away with them and no gold or rubies fell into their hands. Nevertheless, during their search they came upon a cellar below the brick building of a European merchant, heavy teak doors securely padlocked. A few musket balls fired at close range blew off the padlocks and the doors were opened to reveal in the torchlight row upon row of casks and the unmistakable aroma of French brandy.

  In a matter of minutes, the redcoats who made this discovery were gloriously drunk. There was more to drink than the whole army could possibly take. Comrades were called in, the news spread, brandy was tossed down by half pints, an orgy of drunkenness followed and soon hundreds of normally disciplined soldiers were lying flat drunk in the cellar or the nearby streets.

  A mob of those who could still stand persuaded themselves that there must be loot still in the town. Weaving drunkenly through the narrow streets with flaming torches they set off to pillage the houses, but someone, by accident or design, set the inflammable wood afire. The fire spread, and soon half the town was ablaze in great sheets of flame that engulfed street after street.

  The troops were soon in danger of being caught in the flames, but the navy came to the rescue. Commodore Grant, on board the Liffey, ordered ashore as many sailors as he could spare as a fire party. They stopped the blaze spreading, but only after half Rangoon had been gutted. Meanwhile, officers cleared the brandy cellar of drunken troops at pistol point and on Campbell’s orders set about the melancholy task of spilling the entire contents of two or three hundred hogsheads of brandy on to the ground.

  The whole expedition was now in jeopardy, for at any moment the Burmese might launch a counter-attack through the town and destroy the drunken soldiers, or drive them into the river. Upon the navy that night the salvation of the invasion depended. The Burmese failed to seize their chance and when daylight spread over Rangoon’s smoking ruins British sailors and a few Sepoys were holding the town for the regiments, who were too drunk even to hold their weapons.

  With daylight and a slow return to sobriety the worst was over. Campbell quickly landed the rest of his army. All he could do now was to obtain provisions somehow, learn something of this country and people he had been sent to invade in such woeful ignorance, and try to hold out against Burmese attacks in the impending rainy season, when his army would be more or less immobilised in Rangoon. Meanwhile, Maha Bandula was to make his first attack far away on the north-east frontier of India, and in an area where only small forces opposed him.

  4: SET-BACK IN ARAKAN

  General Sir Edward Paget, Commander-in-Chief India, had decided that the object of the eastern frontier operations should be to drive the Burmese from the adjacent territory of Assam — Cachar, to the south of it, having been already cleared of them. Arakan, south of the British-administered province of Chittagong, he did not propose to invade immediately. He was unaware that Bundula’s army would soon be on the march there with high hopes of conquering the province and advancing into Bengal.

  So the first hostilities after the British proclamation of war took place in Assam. A British-Indian force of some 2,000, commanded by Brigadier McMorine, moved off from its base of Goalpara on the Bramahputra river on 13 March 1824, made up of the 2nd Battalion of the 23rd (46th) Native Infantry, six companies of local troops, three batteries of six-pounder guns carried by elephants, and a small body of cavalry, supported on the river by a flotilla of diminutive gunboats.

  It was the hot season, leading up to the outbreak of the monsoon rains in May, which inevitably would limit this initial campaign to a few weeks. Haste was vital if the Burmese were to be dislodged in the time available from this territory overlooking India. But ignorance of the terrain at once proved a major pitfall. The route east towards the Burmese positions lay along both banks of the huge river, through thick yellow jungle and high grey elephant grass which slowed progress to a few miles a day. Frequent small rivulets and ravines which crossed the track, as well as deep black mangrove swamps, made the march for officers and troops alike one of the more heroic feats associated with the extension of the Empire in the east. Troops forced their way through the steamy swamps in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit and looked forward to their provisions arriving on elephants or by boat punctually at sundown.

  It was a heroic opening to the campaign, but the series of skirmishes that followed in the mosquito-ridden jungle hardly justified it. The Burmese fought the British-led troops behind stockades, retreated into the jungle when the artillery hit them and occasionally counter-attacked at night, always leading the British farther away from their base and extending their tenuous supply lines.

  Early in May, Brigadier McMorine died of cholera and Colonel Richards took over command, but by then heavy black clouds heralded the rains, the swamps turned into lakes and the river Brahmaputra into a great torrent. His supplies both by land and river endangered, Richards was forced to lead his sodden troops back to a base at Gohati. Thus the Burmese had been driven only from a relatively small part of the province, into which, with their skill at jungle movement, they could stalk back swiftly when the rains cleared. This outcome was discouraging for the British, because the Burmese force in Assam had been formidable neither in numbers nor equipment.

  In the south, along the Chittagong frontier, the British believed they had no reason to expect a Burmese attack. Colonel Shapland commanded a skeleton force of some 3,000 men comprising the 13th (27th) Regiment of Native Infantry, five companies of the 2nd Battalion of the 20th (40th) Native Infantry and the 1st Battalion of the 23rd (43th), all mainly Bengal Sepoys, aided by the Chittagong Provincial Battalion and local tribal troops known as the Mugh Levy.

  From this, Shapland detached a dangerously small force of 300 Sepoys with two 6-pounder guns, with 400 irregular troops from the Provincials and the Mughs, and ordered them south to hold the frontier with Arakan where the Naaf river crossed the boundary near Ramu. Captain Noton commanded this small force and he knew that his task, if attacked, was to ho
ld out whatever the cost until the arrival of reinforcements.

  But facing him in Arakan now was Maha Bandula, commanding an expanded army of some ten to twelve thousand men. A division of this army, about 8,000, led by the rajahs of Arakan, Sandaway, Ramree and Cheduba, Bundula had ordered north to attack the British in Chittagong, while he himself remained poised in Arakan ready to advance with the reserves. Early in May the advance division crossed the frontier into Assam silently by night and fortified their positions upon some hills.

  News of the advance was brought to Captain Noton on 10 May 1824 while he was sheltering in his tent from a tropical rainstorm. He determined to deploy the whole of his small force to reconnoitre the enemy’s strength and its position and he moved off at about 5 p.m., the 23th Native Infantry detachment leading.

  Upon some hills dominating the road to Ratnapulling the enemy had stockaded themselves, and it was clear to Noton that he was, to say the least, heavily outnumbered. ‘On our arriving near to the stockade (about half a mile) a heavy fire was opened upon us from the hills on the left of the road, which the enemy had taken possession of in numbers and fortified,’ he wrote in a report on 11 May to Colonel Shapland.[25] ‘Their larger guns were fired from the further hill and the smaller ones from the lower, thereby completely commanding the road.’

  Noton at first decided to stay and fight, and pushed on to a plain beyond the stockade, where he formed up his force. Then leaving Ensign Campbell, a boy of eighteen, in command, he went back with a few men to hurry on the guns, but misfortune now followed misfortune. Seemingly owing to deliberate mismanagement by the mahouts the elephants had thrown their loads, which blocked the road. ‘To extricate the gun, which was hanging to the elephant, we were obliged to cut the ropes, but from the inexperience of Lieutenant Scott (having never seen guns carried on elephants before)… after many trials and failing in all, I was obliged to leave it and take steps for carrying away the ammunition, which the other elephant had thrown off,’ Noton reported. ‘After this was effected, I then proceeded quietly with a party of Sepoys and an elephant and brought in the gun…(Noton was evidently the kind of man who believed that he had to do something himself if he wanted it done properly). He continued: