Raj
Page 18
Above all, the sepoy was always conscious of his elevated position within Indian society and, as a professional soldier, of the contractual obligations between himself and his employer. He was not easily put upon and had a tradition of collective bargaining. Between 1837 and 1846 there were seventeen mutinies among sepoys of the Madras army.65 For the most part these were demonstrations about alleged maltreatment by officers and shortfalls in pay and allowances, always preoccupations among men who had wives and families to support. Underlying these outbreaks was a deep-rooted sense of fair play and a belief that it was shared by their officers. On hearing that their batta (campaign allowance) had been withdrawn in 1849, sowars of the 6th Madras light cavalry refused to mount, hurled themselves to the ground, scattered dust on their heads and cursed their colonel and his family. He had, as their behaviour indicated, driven them to break their oaths as soldiers and dishonour themselves. Some of their European officers were sympathetic, paying a Eurasian lawyer to represent the accused at the subsequent court martial.66 The incident caught the eye of the commander-in-chief, the Duke of Wellington. Following the sound maxim that there was no such thing as bad men, only bad officers, he ordered the Madras commander-in-chief, the Marquess of Tweeddale, back to London to explain himself. He was not re-appointed to an Indian command.
Blame in such cases usually passed, directly or indirectly, to officers who had neglected their responsibilities or lost touch with their men. They had also succumbed to ‘those feelings of repulsiveness’ towards Indian customs and religious observances which the tolerant Major Beaven of the Madras army detected among his colleagues in the 1810s and 1820s.67 There was also a new coldness and arrogance among younger British officers which was sensed by the jemadar who listed his and his colleagues’ grievances after Vellore.68 Two handbooks produced for junior Company officers in 1820 and 1833 confirm this impression of frosty hauteur, with pages crammed with hints as to how an officer ought to behave among his peers in the isolation of the mess and next to nothing on how to handle the sepoy. Unless he was ambitious and seeking a political post, an officer did not feel impelled to master the language of his men, and early-Victorian, schoolroom evangelical bigotry made him increasingly hostile towards India’s religions. Under pressure from missionaries, religious cranks and busybodies in Britain, the Company was forced to ban officers from attending Hindu festivals and withdraw permission for the use of its flags and cannon in these celebrations. This trend towards the segregation of officers and sepoys was regretted by General Sir George Pollock, whose service record stretched from the 1803–05 Maratha war to the 1842 Afghan campaign. In 1853 he told a Commons select committee that the modern officer appeared indifferent to the welfare and customs of the sepoys and, in consequence, enjoyed far less affection than his predecessors.69
No one seemed to mind too much, for no remedies were suggested. After all, the sepoy, despite occasional obstreperous outbursts, appeared a docile enough creature, glad to hazard his life for comparatively good wages and a Company pension. And he would continue to do so as long as British soldiers showed him the way to win battles.
IV
Conditions of service were far less agreeable for the British ranker. Whether in the Company’s or the government’s army, he came from the British or Irish working class. Unskilled men predominated; nearly all the 389 men of the 4th Bombay European battalion in 1786 gave their previous occupation as labourer, although there was a sprinkling of craftsmen, including cordwainers and butchers. Most were small by today’s standards, with heights of between 5' 2" and 5' 5", which makes it hard to understand why they had such a presence on a battlefield.70 Sixty years later, Captain Fane noticed that six-foot sepoy grenadiers dwarfed most British soldiers.71
Unlike his officer, the ranker seldom saw soldiering as a vocation. It was a last resort, grasped in moments of economic desperation and in the knowledge that respectable society still saw a red coat as a mark of those without moral backbone. Many recruits were men who dipped in and out of the margins of delinquency. To make sure he did not slip back into his old ways and to keep him biddable and sober, the British soldier was disciplined by the lash. Lieutenant Blackwell was dismayed when confronted with a party of newly-enlisted men from the 47th Regiment, just arrived from England in 1828. ‘There is scarcely a sober man at present in the Corps, and drunkenness under every stage and form presents itself to view wherever you turn. Some are crying drunk, some laughing drunk, and some roaring drunk.’ These future defenders of the Raj were swearing foully and demanding their 25-rupee allowance, presumably to buy more liquor.72 Private Ryder of the 32nd, the son of the Waterloo veteran and member of the respectable working class, was appalled by his fellow rookies when they assembled at the Bull Inn in Nottingham in the summer of 1845. ‘I was ashamed of being among them, for they were a dirty, ragged lot of blackguards – some of them nearly drunk.’ Many would rue having taken the Queen’s shilling and, when in India, Ryder ‘heard men curse the country and everything in it’.73
There was much for Ryder’s companions to execrate. During the monsoon season their Chinsurah barrack walls ran with water and cholera was about. The hot season in Meerut brought fresh torments: ‘Thousands upon thousands of flies would be continually buzzing about us, so that one has sufficient to do to keep them off, and if one’s mouth was open, they would soon fill it, with a great many other insects.’ Not everyone was uncomfortable and disgruntled. In 1838, Private Jonathan Cottrill of the 39th told his parents in Birmingham that India was a healthy country where food was cheap and Agra was ‘the noblest place in the East’. For all its marvels, soldiering in India was not a perfect life and he was saving up to buy himself out; he died in 1844, having accumulated £8.74 Another Midlander, George Tookey of the 14th Light Dragoons, was delighted by life in the cavalry barracks at Chinsurah, where native servants were plentiful and duties few. ‘We are leading a very easy life here, we take no drill and the blacks clean our boots and spurs and everything else, in short we are gentlemen.’ And well-fed gentlemen too, for on Christmas Day 1846 they dined on roast beef, duck and fowl, and were allowed a bottle of wine each.75
The coincidence of abundant spare time and the free availability of cheap liquor was a permanent threat to the stamina and, in many cases, the lives of British soldiers. With drill limited to nine hours a week, the soldier was free to roam about his cantonment and its adjacent town. He usually gravitated towards one of his regimental bazaar’s three toddy sellers and got drunk. To judge by the court martial statistics, he might steal to raise more cash, quarrel with Indian shopkeepers and brawl with anyone who crossed his path. The drinking soldier’s capacity was gargantuan. The 710 men of the 26th Regiment, stationed at Fort William, Calcutta, consumed 5,320 gallons of arrack (a locally distilled rice liquor), 220 gallons of brandy and 249 of gin together with 207 hogsheads (each containing fifty-two and a half gallons) of beer during 1833. In 1835, the 674 customers of 49th Regiment’s canteen drank 7,216 gallons of arrack, 177 of brandy and 144 of gin. There were eighteen deaths from alcoholism, but the total may have been higher, for cirrhosis and hepatitis were also the price of gross intemperance.76 The treatment for delirium tremens may also have added to its victims; in 1841 an infantry officer admitted to the Calcutta European Hospital died after thirteen hours during which he was successively prescribed measures of brandy, camphor, tartar emetic, opium and an enema.77 The pattern of heavy drinking was identical among the Company’s European troops. Out of the 357 offences committed by men from the Madras European battalion, two-thirds involved drunkenness and half were committed by men who were officially classified as habitual drunkards.78
The military authorities were at their wits’ end to cope with an addiction which led to a continual haemorrhage of the very soldiers upon whom the security of the Raj depended. Largely through the efforts of regimental doctors and the slow spread of army temperance societies, the average annual wastage rate was held down to 4 per cent during the 1830s and 1
840s. Better could not be hoped for, as it was understood that the army’s raw material contained a large share of chronically incontinent men who, like the rest of the class they sprang from, were insensible to reasoned persuasion. Some blame was placed on the cheap rum sold on board India-bound ships which, as it were, converted to spirits men who hitherto had been satisfied by beer. One answer in the 1820s was the substitution of Cape wine for liquor, but this scheme made little headway in spite of Wellington’s blessing.79 Marriage or regular cohabitation with an Indian or Eurasian girl was seen as a sobering influence, but it created new problems in the form of children who, with their mothers, would have to be shipped back to Britain when a regiment’s Indian tour of duty ended.80
Monogamy in some form was also a means of preventing another consquence of the common soldier’s refusal to moderate his appetites, venereal diseases. Between 1827 and 1833 the infection rate among British soldiers in Bengal fluctuated between 16 and 31 per cent as a consequence of what one official called ‘promiscuous and hazardous intercourse with profligate women of the bazaar’.81 Nearly all infected recovered, but treatment and convalescence took a man out of the ranks for several weeks, which meant that at any given time nearly every British regiment was under-strength by as much as a quarter.
European resistance to indigenous diseases was less than Indian. Sixty-one per cent of the Madras army European soldiers suffered from what was called ‘intermittent fever’ (i.e. malaria) during the 1840s compared to 28 per cent of sepoys.82 Cholera did not discriminate and probably accounted for the most fatalities among European troops during this period. They called it Jack Morbus, and in the summer of 1819 it killed sixteen men from the 26th Regiment and forty-four from the 14th. Perhaps the worst outbreak was in Karachi in 1846 when 385 men, women and children attached to the 86th Regiment died in ten days.83
No one then knew how cholera was caused or transmitted. As with fevers, it was imagined that contagion was carried in the air, which was why contact with Indian villagers along its route of march was blamed for the epidemic in the 49th Regiment in 1839.84 The same fiction made army doctors ensure that Indian hospitals were well ventilated, and this was seen as one explanation for the relatively high recovery rate among soldiers.85 During the 1830s it was between 30 and 40 per cent, which compared well with the 50 per cent achieved by London and provincial hospitals during the 1853–54 epidemic.86 This success rate owed something to soldiers usually being treated during the first phases of their infection. Among the survivors were a boatload of the 21st Light Dragoons whom an unknown trooper of the 11th Light Dragoons encountered on his way to Cawnpore in 1819. ‘They were yellow and fleshless,’ he noted. He also heard the latrine rumour which alleged that men who contracted the disease and went on drinking as heavily as before had the best chance of recovery. This self-medication proved as efficacious as any of the hospital remedies, for he later survived an attack by drinking three bottles of Cape wine.87
Fevers and excessive drinking sapped a soldier’s strength. They made him vulnerable to fatigue and the harsh vagaries of the Indian climate. Temperatures of 110 degrees in the summer of 1804 brought down sepoys as well as British soldiers and, combined with dust storms and typhoons, forced Lake to pull his army back to Cawnpore. Casualties during this march totalled 300, as many as might have been suffered storming a fort or forcing a Maratha position.88 ‘You can form no idea of the misery there is attached to a soldier’s life in this country,’ Henry Plumb of the 39th told his parents as he trudged across the Punjab in March 1849. Even a night of heavy drinking with comrades of the 29th could not compensate for the cold nights, the dust and makeshift meals of chappatis and raw turnips.89
Plumb kept going because he hoped to save enough to buy himself out of the army, a prospect which may have sustained many others. There was also hatred of the enemy and, with it, a sense of racial superiority. There was ‘bitter Animosity, or rather Antipathy, at all times, and especially in war times’ felt by white troops against the natives, thought James Young during the siege of Deeg.90 Nonetheless, the British soldier always treated the sepoy as a brother-in-arms and the feeling was warmly reciprocated. Indian soldiers helped drunken British comrades evade provost-marshals’ patrols. When a sepoy collapsed with the first stages of cholera during the 1817–18 Maratha war, a private of the 87th, also infected, gave him his palanquin. Both men later died.91 There was also patriotism. Before an engagement near Multan, Private Ryder thought of England and said the prayers his mother had taught him. He also felt fear, but it evaporated as he went into battle and when it was over he recalled: ‘Nothing can be a grander sight than to see a field of victory carried by the point of a British bayonet.’92 The regimental band of the 52nd Regiment played ‘Britons Strike Home’ during the assault on a Mysorean fort in 1792 to encourage the storming party to think of their nation and glory.93
In all likelihood their minds were probably on what lay in store for them. For most rankers the prospect of prize money meant more than the glory which was the prerogative of their officers. Often with the help of amanuenses, for many were illiterate, veterans tenaciously pursued their rights. Corporal Richard Tolney of the 8th Light Dragoons, a veteran of the 1803–05 Maratha war, was badgering the Company in 1817 for his share:
I ham a poor man and Got a Large family I should Be Glad to have itt if is ever so little which tis well known by my officers that I fought hard for itt.94
Others forewarded the claims of dead kinsmen. ‘I am a blind woman of 74 years of age’ declared ‘the Widow Hamilton’ of Glasgow, who asked for what was due to her son, who had fought with the 74th Highlanders under Wellesley in the Deccan. She signed with a cross and her application was endorsed by her minister. James Allen, ‘a poor man and present in the workhouse’, wrote from Birmingham for the share of his son, a Company gunner who had been drowned in 1813. The amounts involved were tiny by comparison with those allocated to officers, but nonetheless they were welcome windfalls for poor men and women. An infantryman got £4 from the taking of Bharatpur (the equivalent of eight weeks’ wages for a labourer), but only five shillings (25p) from the spoils of Ghazni, which had been thoroughly looted before the prize agents got to work.95 It did, however, take time for the cash to be delivered. The widow and son of Private Bennett of the 39th had to wait twenty years to receive his portion (£4 9 shillings [£4.45p]) of the prize money from the 1834 Coorg campaign.96
The wealth of India fell slowly and in droplets to the poor. Many did not bother to wait and snatched every opportunity to loot. After the capture of Bharatpur, British soldiers surged into the town, grabbing whatever they could. It had been a hard-drinking campaign, despite frequent floggings of men found drunk on duty, and plunderers were happy to exchange gold coins worth £2 each for a glass of brandy.97
V
For all his moral infirmities, the British soldier was an efficient fighting machine. His officers, NCOs and the flogging triangles saw to that. Against him were Indian armies which ranged from well-disciplined, European-trained units with modern arms to the equivalent of a mediaeval host. Major Birom was struck by the exotic magnificence of the Maratha army which appeared, as allies, during the march on Seringapatam in 1792. Chiefs rode on elephants preceded by musicians and poets who recited the marvellous exploits of their masters. There were cavalrymen (some in mail), pikemen, banners and a continual barrage of feux de joie from matchlockmen and musketeers. ‘A spectacle so wild and irregular, yet so grand and interesting, resembled more the visions of romance than any assemblage that can have supposed to have existence in real life.’98 This fairy-tale assembly of fighting men was, in fact, an army in a state of transition from the mediaeval to the modern, a phase which European forces had passed through in the sixteenth century.
Indian military thought in this period wavered between modernism and conservatism. The modernists were the Maratha princes and Ranjit Singh, who endeavoured to transform their armies into forces which relied wholly on firepower. But
they did not jettison the old; the Marathas and Sikhs still fielded the sort of troops which so struck the imagination of Major Birom. The result was a sort of military hybrid, with ‘modern’ infantrymen and gunners placed alongside traditional mounted and foot units. It was as if Wellington’s forces at Waterloo had been substantially filled out with billmen and armoured knights from Henry V’s army. What might be called the ‘mediaeval’ elements of the Indian princely armies proved little more than a liability on the battlefield.
More importantly, the partial adoption of European military technology was not accompanied by a revolution in tactics or the creation of a professional officer corps. Indian princes preferred to direct battles in person rather than place overall command in the hands of their hired European professionals, who understood modern tactics. Time and time again, Indian commanders chose static warfare rather than use their superiority in numbers for offensives. Elaborate and precise battlefield manoeuvres required disciplined troops, and officers who knew their business and were willing to gamble. Only the Sikhs possessed the first two, but they were hamstrung by generals who refused to take risks. Sitting tight and trusting in a numerical superiority of artillery and men made for good morale, up to a point. But once the British, undeterred by the odds and the weight of shot, were on the verge of breaking through their enemy’s line, Indian confidence usually dissolved.
In purely technical terms, the Company had two advantages. All its infantrymen were armed with smoothbore, muzzle-loading, flintlock ‘Brown Bess’ muskets and were trained to fire synchronised volleys at close range at a rate of between three and four rounds per minute. Intensity of fire rather than accuracy was what counted. Tests undertaken in 1838 revealed that only three-quarters of rounds fired from a range of 150 yards hit a target roughly thirty-three feet square. Within the next four years the flintlock mechanism was replaced by the percussion cap, which reduced the numbers of misfires, but the new musket was introduced slowly in India. With all its defects, the musket was always a better firearm than the traditional Indian matchlock, a cumbersome weapon which had a lower rate of fire and required its user to carry a slow-burning match. It fired slugs and was only effective at close range. Nevertheless, it remained in use for want of anything better throughout this period; some Sikh auxiliary units were still armed with matchlocks in 1848–49. The Company’s other advantage was its nimble and adroitly handled six- and nine-pounder horse batteries. Their mobility enabled them to get to within grape-shot range (200–300 yards) and open fire with the quilt-wrapped bundles of shot which were probably the most lethal projectile on the battlefield.