The Passage to India

by Allan Mallinson

  Ten was impossible – or at least ill-advised. The advance party still had much to do. He would have Acton of course, and Johnson, and he could take a couple of rough-riders without greatly jeopardizing the RM’s carefully laid plans. Serjeant Stray had asked to go, but Hervey couldn’t risk leaving the household without a head (Mrs Stray and even Annie would be perfectly capable, he knew, but it was too much to expect them to know what an old soldier like Stray had acquired). St Alban, naturally, would come with him, although his work would have to be done by Collins. Collins himself would have been his choice, despite his one arm, but Collins was indispensible to the advance party. He wished that Fairbrother were here; and it went without saying that had Armstrong been, he wouldn’t have given it a second thought (the senior troop serjeant-major would have stood duty in Madras). So instead, all they would be was six dragoons and a half-troop of native lancers. He was sure it was enough. Indeed, if things went wrong, ten times the number would be to no avail.

  And the dragoons would wear blue, for Hervey was uneasy still about the ‘redbreast’. He’d have preferred the yellow-brown colour that the bazaar-wallahs called kani, and which Collins was having run up as service jackets, but kani wouldn’t impress the rajah. They’d wear them as far as Bangalore, therefore, then change into blue – the last time, in all probability, that he’d go to war (or at least, make reconnaissance for war) in that proud colour. It had been his for twenty-five years, from the Peninsula to the Low Countries, but it was the way of things, and the new king wished his soldiers to wear red, and his sailors blue.

  He dined alone with Kezia the evening before they left. It was St Agnes’ Eve, a Sunday – no parades, no calls, an altogether quiet day.

  Kezia was now much better of a morning, although he’d gone alone to church that day, for it would have been asking too much of her to sit at attention for an hour and a half, even in that great and beautiful place (which Somervile said would be elevated to a cathedral soon). He’d promised her, as far as he was able, that he’d return by St Valentine’s, when, he said with mock despair, he’d ‘be another year older’; whereupon she’d said they would therefore mark his birthday on the fourteenth, or whenever it was he came home, ‘for these things are, as you are fond of saying, subject to the exigencies of the service’.

  She said it with such equanimity as he’d never have imagined even six months ago.

  After dinner, he read aloud the Keats, as she asked. He’d not read it before, and was at once taken by the image of winter. So many times he’d shivered in the deadness it described – in Spain and Portugal, in France, in Canada, here in places; and not least, in England.

  St Agnes’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

  The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

  The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,

  And silent was the flock in woolly fold.

  She then played for him a little – gentle Schubert, Rosamunde – and afterwards they went early to bed, together, and slept a little. He’d said he would sleep in his room so as not to disturb her when it was time to go, but she’d insisted. So the Tamul bearer had brought them tea before dawn, and Kezia had been all of good cheer, and even teased him with the Keats – ‘Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be.’ – and rose and watched him dress.

  Never had he known it so hard to begin on adventure.

  They rode on unusually light scales, especially for India – just half a dozen bat-horses, bearers and syces, for he intended making Bangalore in all haste. He’d studied the new Madras Road Book which Fort St George was preparing: dak bungalows stood every dozen miles or so along the presidency’s principal highway, which was measured with bewildering precision at 229 miles and 3 furlongs, and in these staging-houses they would make their nightly refuge. What hazards and vexations they would encounter in between – or while at rest, even – he took no care of. This was India, not England; nothing but the monsoon was predictable. Indeed, when first they’d met, in the wake of the French wars, Somervile had said that in India one must expect the unexpected. And Hervey had found it sound advice – as well as the very delight of the country.

  In the event, however, the country proved both easy and fine, and the heat merely warming rather than oppressive, especially after Chittoor and into the hills. The horses bore it well too – as well as any English troop horse on a route march in the shires. Hervey had at first thought to take the Marwaris, but they were only lately come from Bangalore and he thought it best to allow them a little more time. So they’d taken the ‘walers’, which stood half a hand higher and covered the ground without tending to jog-trot, which he reckoned was one of the Marwari’s few vices.

  Everywhere, it was abundantly green – tall grasses, shoots of corn, sugar cane (how Fairbrother would have been intrigued at that), mango and linseed. The road itself was for the most part reddish-brown, and the people of the road, and of the fields and the villages, moved with a purposeful ease, confident, content – the grass-cutters, the tenders of the crops that would keep alive both man and beast for another season, the keepers of those beasts, which provided milk or the occasional meat (and fuel for the fire, and daub for the shelter), the carriers of water, mainly female, the makers of this and that, whether to eat or wear; and children playing, as they did in every country he’d ever been, except here perhaps they played with even less care. He saw no sullenness, no great indigence, no oppression, no fear. Here indeed was a country prospering – as was a great deal of India prospering under the Company’s Pax. He took pride in that, and in the assurance that his mission in Coorg would extend the Company’s Pax even further.

  The dak bungalows were serviceable rather than affording true comfort, but, as the saying went in the regiment, a poor billet was better than a good bivouac. Each had a big dining room and verandah, and two or three bedrooms, with kitchen and servants’ go-downs outside, the better of the bungalows with a khansamah to arrange their food and comforts. In the poorer ones there was merely a durwan, little more than a caretaker, in which case the bearers were put to foraging. In one of them, all the usual appurtenances appearing to have been mislaid – and since they had arrived in the dark they had no great desire to try to trouble the baggage – they ate off plantain leaves and slept on the floor. Hervey professed to enjoying it; it minded him of simpler times. Only next morning did they find they’d shared their quarters with a python. Johnson delighted to bloody his sabre for the first time in many a year, knowing that in Bangalore he would get a good few rupees for the skin.

  The following night, however, they were able to make themselves comfortable in one of the larger bungalows, where the cook produced a fine dish of curried mutton, as they called most meat, which afterwards Johnson discovered was several parts crow. It didn’t trouble him too much, for as a boy he’d often eaten rook, and the dish had been tasty, but he was able to negotiate a discount next morning when the khansamah presented the bill. In the early hours, though, a travelling lady – the wife of one of the missionaries in Bangalore – arrived, and Hervey’s party, having spread themselves over all the rooms, and sleeping comfortably, had to rise and make way for her companions, after which, no doubt taking advantage of the minor confusion, two thieves made off with some of the bearers’ clothes, which set them howling for the rest of the night despite the sharp edge of Johnson’s tongue and a cuffing by one of the rough-riders.

  That, however, was the sum total of vexation in what otherwise felt like a furlough, so agreeable was everything about their progress – not least the air, full of the scent of hay and flowers, despite the month, and even the villages for the most part free of the stench of night soil. But, oh, how he wished Kezia had been with him, or Georgiana, for the number and variety of birds was prodigious. He’d always taken delight in observing them, no matter where the place, though he considered himself no ornithologist. Hoopoes he counted among his favourites, and they delighted him almost every morning as the party took their breakfast; and
orioles and blue jays, magpie-robins, barbets, koels and coucals – and all save the white egrets that speckled the fields seemingly more colourful, more active, more plentiful even than in Bengal.

  By dint of good and early starts, an hour’s rest in the early afternoon, and then marching until they reached the next-but-one bungalow before dusk, they made Bangalore on the Saturday morning – five days, six nights. Hervey soon saw why the city was so highly favoured by civil and military alike, for standing as it did at 3,000 feet on the Deccan Plain – though an ascent they’d scarcely noticed – it had more the feel of Malvern than Mysore. There were fireplaces in the houses, a very English-looking church, botanical gardens, ball-rooms, a dissenting meeting-house (not unlike that in Horningsham, only bigger), a circulating library, English shops – very English, and yet with Parsee merchants – but yet a Hindoo pagoda at the end of the main street; and elephants and horses walking together in pleasant company – English soldiers and sepoys likewise (and this despite the late trouble). Each evening, he learned, there was a promenade at a brisk English pace, and a sepoy band played ‘God save the King’ when the residency flag was hauled down.

  But if parts of Bangalore brought to mind Malvern, the greater part remained as it had been in Tippoo’s day. His old fort, though dilapidated, still stood square by the native town – the Pettah – which was crowded with the humanity of low caste, who bustled about and hummed like bees in a hive. Monkeys ran in all directions, jumping, chattering, climbing, scrambling – stealing. Children likewise ran – playing, laughing, quarrelling, rolling in the dust in imitation of the monkeys; and stealing too. The men stood smoking, chatting, spitting and bargaining, or else darting here and there as if life or fortune depended on it, while the women sold what they could – their labour, their talents, the produce of their skill, or else themselves. And the endless native music withal.

  Here in the mud-walled Pettah was Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore still. Hervey thought to write home of it, but also that words would fail him. He wished he had his paint box. St Alban was already sketching.

  The hircarrahs that carried the official mails between Fort St George and the second garrison of the presidency had served them well. Although the commissioner was still travelling, his secretary kept the code book at Bangalore and had deciphered Somervile’s instructions, which were to provide all necessary support for the collection of the tributary elephant, and to furnish a half-troop under command of a British officer. Somervile had been quite particular in this: they were to be from the 2nd Lancers, Wellesley’s old Hyderabad Contingent, and provisioned for seven days in rice, salt mutton and flour.

  Hervey inspected them that same afternoon in his best blue, and he liked what he saw – Deccani Mussulmans, straight-backed but quick to smile, especially the rissaldar, the native captain. They wore green kurtas well cut, black turbans tied tight, and loose trousers strapped beneath the boot – the image of serviceability as well as show. It was the lances, however, eight feet of bamboo tipped with gleaming steel, and pennants, red and white, that truly made of them a corps that impressed by appearance. Exactly as he’d hoped, for to overawe was better than to overcome.

  He liked their officer too, Neale, a youngish man who spoke four native languages as well as French and Persian, the best sort of Addiscombe seminarian, whom he’d have been glad to see in the Sixth. He asked no questions save the practical, and when Hervey told him he wished to leave at seven next morning, he conveyed his orders to the rissaldar with a fluency Hervey had rarely heard.

  They dined that evening with the commander of the Mysore division, General Hawker. Hervey had met him in the Peninsula when he’d been a major in the 20th Light Dragoons, and he himself a cornet. By his enquiring smile, the general was evidently doubtful of the ostensible purpose of the mission, and Hervey thought it was as well that the Coorg resident was not here, or the commissioner, for between the three of them they might have been able to keep up an irresistible quest for information. Somervile had not exactly ordered him to withhold information, merely to use his discretion, but he had no intention of sharing confidences, for his experience was that senior officers were ever jealous of secret intelligence, and being jealous of it, once acquired, wished to share it further in order to demonstrate their standing. His march on Madkerry, when the time came, would be infinitely easier for giving the rajah no notice of it. Only St Alban knew their real purpose here, for as he’d told him when he became adjutant, he was of no use if he didn’t know the commanding officer’s mind on every matter touching the regiment. Besides, if anything ill should befall him, St Alban could at least take back the intelligence they’d gained to Madras.

  In any case, General Hawker was evidently content to oblige him, if perhaps more out of fellow-feeling for a dragoon than professional judgement; or else in sympathy for what he said would not be a very agreeable visitation, for the most lurid reports of the rajah’s depredations on the female sex reached Bangalore weekly.

  Coorg itself, though, he assured them, they would find the most delightful of places – a green and pleasant land, the forests barely jungled, the finest of trees, ‘hills as paintable as ever you’d wish for’, rivers full of fish, tumbling streams, waterfalls, and game aplenty. ‘It might be Argyleshire.’

  But, he said, the country between Bangalore and Kushalnagar they’d find tedious. ‘See a little of Seringapatam, though.’

  Hervey certainly intended to. He fancied he’d never be able to speak to the Duke of Wellington again – if opportunity ever came his way – if he passed through that great scene of siege and slaughter without giving it thorough consideration. Besides, he wanted to see how it compared with Bhurtpore, the last siege he supposed he’d ever witness.

  XVIII

  Tigers of Mysore

  Kushalnagar, Friday, 1 February

  GENERAL HAWKER WASN’T wrong: their march to Coorg was tedious, the country unvarying and their progress altogether slower, for, there being no dak bungalows, they had to make and break camp each day and allow the sowars, the native cavalrymen, and camp followers (as many again) time to cook. Kushalnagar was not much more than half the distance that Bangalore was from Madras, but the march took them just as long.

  They did, however, spend more time at Seringapatam than strictly necessary, though all were glad of it, since a good deal of the tentage had been drenched on fording the Cauvery. The river was higher than usual, for the south-west monsoon had continued into November.

  They made camp inside the walls of the old fort, and Hervey explored the breach in the west curtain, a little to the right of the flank of the north-west bastion, which the Nizam’s artillery had made, and through which General Baird’s men had stormed. He’d been eight at the time, learning the rudiments of his trade – at least, to ride – on Salisbury Plain under the instruction of an old dragoon, but at Shrewsbury they’d had a porter who’d been a corporal with the Seventy-fourth, a Shropshire lad who’d found himself in a regiment of Glasgow men and who’d been with Baird’s columns when they hacked their way in.

  There’d been no quarter, the old corporal told them, especially after they’d found the English prisoners and how they’d been tortured. And there’d been no sparing the riches of the place either. He’d spent his prize money long before coming home, but he had a jewel still which he’d dashed from the hilt of a jambya, and which those he favoured were allowed to hold occasionally. And he’d seen ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ – the real one, not the dolls made up afterwards. Life-size, it was (Hervey could remember the description clearly), mauling a British soldier in his red coat, from whose mouth came a wailing noise made by bellows as his arm rose and fell in distress, and the tiger grunting. It was, he’d said, supposed to be Tippoo himself, ‘The Tiger of Mysore’ as once he’d been before the British began to get the better of him. ‘An’ us dashed it in pieces, an’ us then shot ’is real tigers, which ’e ’ad in cages thick wi’ jewels.’

  Except that when one day years later Herve
y had gone to Leadenhall Street to see Somervile, to his surprise he’d found the beast displayed in the little museum of curiosities there. Not only was it entirely without sign of once being dashed in pieces, it was much smaller than in the corporal’s tales. By that time, though, he’d formed his own judgement in things, in particular old soldiers’ memoirs; yet in these there was often, if not the perfect detail, then the essence of an affair – and here, now, it was just so. There were the dungeons where Tippoo had kept his prisoners – just as pictured in the corporal’s telling – and the water gate, the place where Tippoo had fallen, sword in hand: ‘Better to live two days like a tiger, than two hundred years like a sheep.’

  But, he’d wondered, did the sowars think it a place of homage? Their lieutenant had reassured him that their loyalty was in no doubt, however – that their conduct in the late mutiny had been beyond reproach. And, in fact, they’d appeared to show no curiosity in the fort beyond what the hawkers at the gates could offer by way of fresh meat – preferably alive so they could slaughter it themselves in accordance with the rules of their religion.

  In truth, the whole native people of Seringapatam, within and without the Pettah, showed them not the least interest beyond the commercial. As Somervile had often said, he supposed it mattered not a great deal to them who exacted the tolls and taxes, as long as they were exacted fairly – and in this the Company’s collectors had a reasonable reputation. Besides, the storming and sack of Seringapatam was hardly in the lifetime of many of them. He came to the conclusion that if they were indeed to mount an offensive against Coorg, having Seringapatam to his rear, astride his communications with Bangalore, need not trouble him.

  Thus he satisfied himself that they’d not tarried unduly in examining its walls. Time spent in reconnaissance was seldom wasted.