Raj
Page 32
Much, therefore, hung on leadership. Neill and Havelock were not master strategists, but they possessed in abundance the qualities that were vital: stamina, tenacity and steadiness. Both men might easily have stepped from the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides; they read their Bibles regularly and saw themselves as agents of a stern Providence, chosen by God to chastise, avenge and pacify. Neither flinched from the use of terror in a cause which they believed had Divine approval and against an enemy who were, in Havelock’s words, ‘devils incarnate’. Lucifer was loose in India and he had to be checked with fire and sword. Both were applied ruthlessly and promiscuously by Neill. ‘I trust for forgiveness,’ he wrote, ‘I have done all for the good of my country, to re-establish its prestige and power, and put down this most barbarous, inhuman insurrection.’ If his conscience quivered, he stiffened it by the knowledge that his victims had raped and tortured women at Delhi.47 Havelock too saw himself as an avenging angel. He was sixty-two years of age, just over five feet tall, proud, austere, as brave as a lion and loved by his men. For his countrymen in India and Britain, he was the ideal Christian warrior, a perfect hero for his times.
Neill led the advance on Benares, which he entered on 9 June, just in time to impose order. Two days later he was pressing on towards Allahabad, all too aware that with less than 2,000 men he had to restore the authority of the Raj in a region where it had been dramatically overthrown. Unable to intimidate with weight of numbers, he fell back on systematic terror, backed by the mandate of martial law. During the next five weeks, small parties fanned out from his column with instructions to inflict condign punishment on all suspected of insurrection. The laws of evidence were suspended, age and sex ignored, and those who carried out the killings were proud of their deeds, which they justified as revenge for the atrocities at Meerut and Delhi. In one grotesque incident, an officer arranged to have prisoners hanged from trees so that their swinging corpses formed a figure of eight, something he found rather droll.48 Looking back with distaste on this episode, Sir William Kaye wrote:
. . . in Native histories, or, history being wanting, in Native legends and traditions, it may be recorded against our people, that mothers and wives and children . . . fell miserable victims to the first swoop of English vengeance; and these stories may have as deep a pathos as any that rend our own hearts.49
Neill did not invent the concept of ruthless, indiscriminate revenge. At the end of May, British forces burned Gujar villages between Delhi and Meerut and suspected rebels were massacred wherever they were found.50 In one village, where it was feared that three fugitives from Delhi, a doctor, his wife and child, had been murdered, eleven suspects were rounded up. One boasted that he had raped the woman and killed the child; each was coated with pork fat and had pork thrust down his throat before being hanged.51
Both sides adopted mass murder as an instrument of policy. It was used most infamously by Nana Sahib after General Wheeler had abandoned the unequal struggle to defend the lines at Cawnpore. He had accepted terms under which the British would be allowed passage by boat down river to Allahabad. On 27 June, at Nana Sahib’s orders, a detachments of sepoys ambushed the refugees as they embarked from the Sati Chaura ghat and many were shot down or drowned. There were a handful of miraculous escapes and 125 women and children were seized and incarcerated in the bibighar, which was, significantly, a small bungalow where a British officer had once housed his Indian mistress. Many of the captives were suffering from dysentery and cholera and, as if to symbolise the reversal of fortune brought about by the rebellion, British women were forced to grind corn. Nana Sahib proclaimed the massacre by the ghat a victory and celebrated it accordingly, inviting ‘all the peasants and landed proprietors of every district to rejoice at the thought that the Christians have been sent to hell, and both the Hindu and Mahomedan religions have been confirmed’.52
This was empty bravado, for his forces had been unable to deflect Neill. On 30 June, the day Havelock assumed command, an advance guard of 820 hurried forward from Allahabad, and, by 14 July, the main army was within striking distance of Cawnpore. Havelock commanded just under 2,000 men, of whom nearly 1,300 were British, and in every engagement got the better of his opponents, largely thanks to the superior range of the new Enfield rifle. Nana Sahib had about 5,000 effective troops whose morale was drooping in the face of constant setbacks. Faced with the collapse of his power and beset by panic, Nana ordered the slaughter of the surviving women and children, which was undertaken by local butchers on the night of 15–16 July. Their bodies were then thrown down a well. There is no direct evidence to suggest that Nana Sahib ordered this or the earlier massacre as deliberate retaliation for Neill’s terror. Rather, they appear to have been atrocities contrived to demonstrate that the power of the British had been destroyed for good and that a new era had dawned. In all likelihood, this had also been the motive behind the horrific public massacre of Europeans in Jhansi by sepoys and townspeople. Interestingly, when fugitives from villages close to Delhi arrived in the city early in July with claims that women had been raped by British troops, there was no call for tit-for-tat retaliation. According to the spy who reported this news, the mutineers pledged to fight to the death to avenge these wrongs.53
Killing white women and children had not made Nana’s soldiers any braver. On the morning of the 16th, they fled from their defensive positions outside Cawnpore and Nana abandoned the city. It was occupied by Havelock the following morning, native spies having informed him that the women and children had been slain. The sight of the place of slaughter, blood-stained and littered with ladies’ dresses, children’s clothing and locks of hair, provoked an explosion of anguished rage among the soldiers. Havelock pressed on to Lucknow, leaving Neill to exact retribution on the inhabitants of a city who, for him and his soldiers, were all guilty by association. He did so with a characteristic thoroughness and a refinement designed simultaneously to satisfy the craving for vengeance and spread fear. Condemned men were made to lick the blood from the floors under threat of a lashing and then Muslims were forced to swallow pork and Hindus beef. After defilement and often more dead than alive, they were hanged before parties of jeering soldiers.
The bibighar became a sort of shrine, to which soldiers were taken as they passed through Cawnpore on their way to the front and where, as it were, they consecrated themselves to the task of retribution. A Pathan guide, who claimed to have been a veteran of the 1838–42 Afghan war, showed visitors the detritus of mass murder and retold the harrowing story. What the fighting men heard and saw transformed them into Furies, determined to pursue and kill without pity any Indians tainted with disloyalty. ‘I felt as if my heart was stone and my brain fire,’ Lieutenant Arthur Lang told his family.54 He had killed a dozen during the fighting in Delhi and, after Cawnpore, looked forward to killing more. Highlanders swore the ancient oaths of vengeance of their race which pledged a hundred deaths for one. ‘Remember Cawnpore!’ became a battle-cry, and soldiers with a taste for gallows humour renamed the regulation, twelve-inch spike bayonet a ‘Cawnpore Dinner’, a deadly repast which went straight to the stomach. By an act which was as pointless as it was cruel, Nana Sahib had made every Indian rebel an accessory to his crime and condemned many who were innocent to humiliation and death. The opportunities for immediate vengeance were not great in mid-July. Lucknow still held out, and would have to for some time to come, for Havelock’s force, reduced by sickness and exhaustion to less than 700 effectives, was compelled to fall back on Cawnpore. The invasion of Awadh had to be postponed until fresh troops arrived from Calcutta. No decision was yet possible at Delhi where the besiegers had no difficulty in holding their lines, but lacked the manpower and siege guns for an assault.
There were, however, plenty of grounds for optimism. Whenever they had fought mutineers in open battle, the British triumphed, although hitherto the engagements had been on a small scale. Moreover, their opponents showed a marked and, as it turned out, fatal preference for immobile warfare,
whether inside one stronghold or besieging others. Large areas of north-western and northern central India had slipped from Britain’s grasp, but their inhabitants were, by and large, distracted by the pursuit of private vendettas or internecine squabbles. During the crucial first two months of the uprising, no co-ordinated, concerted anti-British front emerged. Despite encouraging signs of mass rural and urban antipathy to the Raj, the rebel leadership failed to devise and implement any sort of guerrilla campaign against the British. This mistake had lost them the numbers game; from the first days of the crisis, British reinforcements and supplies were free to pass to the front from Calcutta without hindrance. In time, the government would be able to concentrate their growing armies where the mutineers were strongest, confident that their lines of communication were safe. The Raj would be revived.
2
Very Harrowing Work:
The Raj Resurgent,
August 1857
– January 1859
I
It took eighteen months of hard fighting to restore the British Raj. There were two, loosely connected wars. The largest was a contest between the British and their Indian auxiliaries, chiefly Punjabis and Gurkhas, and the Bengal sepoys who, at various times, were augmented by units from the princely armies and civilian rebels. The other war comprised subsidiary counter-insurgency operations undertaken by comparatively small detachments against bodies of fugitives and rural rebels.
The problem of numbers, which had constrained commanders during the early months of the war, had disappeared by the end of 1857. In the following year, British commanders in Bengal had at their disposal 46,400 British troops and 58,000 Indian, including 10,000 Punjabis. Overall losses from enemy action were small, at least by the standards of the later Franco-Austrian and American Civil Wars: 2,600 British other ranks were killed in battle, 2.7 per cent of those engaged, and 157 officers, 4 per cent of their total.1 Even regiments involved in the hardest fighting came off relatively lightly. The 93rd Highlanders, engaged in nearly every action on the Lucknow front between September 1857 and March 1858, lost 49 from enemy action and 129 from wounds and sickness out of 1,392. The Highlanders’ experience was repeated throughout British units. Over 8,000 British soldiers died from sunstroke and diseases, and a further 3,000 had to be discharged and sent home as invalids.2
Intense heat, fatigue, boils, smallpox, dysentery and recurrent outbreaks of cholera wiped out more men than the rebels. The severely undermanned medical department used chloroform for amputations whenever it was available, but large numbers died from trauma and infection.3 By far the greatest number of wounds were the consequence of enemy fire, rather than hand-to-hand fighting in which quarter was seldom given by either side.4 Doctors argued that many lives could have been saved if the army had provided more suitable light cotton clothing during the hot season, when some regiments advanced to the front in red serge tunics with leather stocks around the mens’ necks and stiff, felt shakos on their heads. During a three-day march near Jaipur in July 1858 twenty-two British soldiers collapsed and died from sunstroke.5 An oversight sent the 1st Dragoon Guards into battle at Lucknow in heavy brass helmets which, in temperatures of over 100 degrees, became so hot that they seared flesh, and troopers claimed that they could toast bread inside them.6
Precious British lives could be saved if soldiers were spared the debilitating exertion of cross-country marches. Troops who disembarked at Calcutta travelled by train to the railhead at Raniganj, where they were transferred to convoys of carts pulled by teams of bullocks which were changed at regular intervals. These wagon trains covered between thirty and thirty-six miles a day and were supplemented by elephants, camels with panniers and Ganges river steamers hauling barges. Much of this transport had to be commandeered or borrowed from friendly princes and landowners, for the department normally responsible had been run down in the interests of economy and was poorly managed. A makeshift system inevitably suffered breakdowns and then soldiers marched, rising before dawn to avoid the midday and afternoon heat, but still enduring what one officer described as the ‘furnace wind’ of the Indian plains which was ‘as pungent as dry snuff’.7 In favourable conditions and moving by night, regiments could make up to twenty-four miles a day, but it was always ‘very harrowing work’.8
Men pushed to the limits of endurance in extremes of climate needed iron willpower and a sense of purpose to sustain them. Morale underpinned stamina and for most of the war it was very high. There had been a few pockets of paralysis and panic during the first phases. Old colonels refused to entertain the possibility that men they had commanded for years might be disloyal and delayed their disarmament, sometimes fatally. There were a few outbreaks of funk. Bachelor officers galloped out of Gwalior the moment trouble seemed imminent and, in the Punjab, Brigadier-General Halifax proposed a mass evacuation of British forces down the Indus to Karachi, where they would take ship for home.9 These spasms of premature despair were exceptional, and even when it faltered, morale was quickly rekindled as tales of sepoy atrocities spread through camps and cantonments.
Outrage at the horrifying and invariably exaggerated stories of women raped, children tortured and, in one persistent tale, roasted alive and fed to their parents roused the British soldier to a pitch of fury. Few armies have ever been infected with such a powerful urge to beat its enemies. ‘The Lion hearts of our soldiers yearned for revenge upon these blood-thirsty villains,’ wrote Private Potiphar of the 9th Lancers.10 Such passions helped fighting men survive the overpowering heat, flies, fevers, thin rations, thirst, and the stench from unburied corpses which comprised the common experience of soldiering during 1857 and 1858.
Interior impulses, largely vindictive, made the British fight with a demonic energy and contempt for the odds which were often stacked against them. It mattered little that the more gruesome details of the atrocities were inventions; those shocked by them went into battle in the belief they were fighting a foe who had forfeited his humanity and was capable of unlimited evil. For this reason, many officers and men were convinced that God was truly on their side and, when the war had ended, regarded victory as a manifestation of Divine justice.11 Similar emotions similarly animated the allies of the Raj, although their antipathy towards the rebels was ancestral and sectarian. Sikh hatred for Muslims mirrored that of British soldiers towards the sepoys.12 In one incident during the capture of Lucknow in March 1858, a band of Muslim fanatics, wearing green scarves, defended a bungalow to the last man, killing a British officer from a Sikh unit. The Sikhs snatched the survivor and stabbed and burned him to death as British officers and men stood by, untouched by his screams for mercy.13 Elsewhere, Sikhs protested that their co-religionists had been tortured and murdered whenever they had fallen into the mutineers’ hands.
One bonus was the shambling rebel leadership, which was largely drawn from sepoy NCOs and junior officers. It seldom showed imagination or initiative, and failed to evolve either an effective command structure or a grand strategy. One capable general did emerge, Tanti Topi, who, revealingly, had had no previous military experience. He learned the arts of war in the field and, by the midsummer of 1858, had appreciated his adversaries’ weakness. The result was a fast-moving guerrilla campaign in Gwalior and Nagpur which kept the British on their toes. But this display of tactical brilliance was too late to influence the outcome of a war which had already been decided by British victories in Delhi and Awadh. Given the nature of the uprisings and the diversity of the rebels’ interests and objectives, it would have been well-nigh impossible to pull together all the participants and co-ordinate them through a master plan.
British generals were, therefore, free to exploit their opponents’ errors, which was just as well for none was an outstanding strategist, although all were good at improvisation. The deaths from cholera in June and early July of the commander-in-chief, Anson, and General Sir Harry Barnard were a stroke of luck, for neither enjoyed the confidence of their officers and men and the former made no effort t
o hide his dislike for Indian soldiers.14 The new commander-in-chief, Sir Colin Campbell, who took over the Lucknow front in October 1857, proved to be just what the circumstances required. He was a cautious but stout-hearted 65-year-old who had fought in the Peninsula, against the Sikhs and in the Crimea. Above all, he had the knack of getting the best from his men, particularly his fellow Scots of the Highland regiments, whom he cherished – some said too much.
Perhaps the most telling advantage which the armies of the Raj possessed was a cadre of younger, energetic and dashing career officers who embodied that peculiar British ‘pluck’ which was widely accepted as the key to winning battles. The most celebrated was Brigadier-General John Nicholson, commander of the Punjab contingent at Delhi, a 36-year-old Dubliner who had made his reputation in the Afghan and Sikh wars. Untouched by his colleagues’ religious zeal, he was a pugnacious professional whom the soldiers loved for his fearlessness. At Delhi, Nicholson was ‘their general’ and his ardour was contagious; he was mortally wounded leading the assault on the city, but characteristically refused to accept treatment until he knew the attack had succeeded.15 Another darling of the rank and file was William Hodson, a devil-may-care ex-infantry officer who ran field intelligence for the Delhi Field Force and commanded a regiment of irregular horse, whose 300 Punjabi and Pathan troopers were known as ‘Plungers’. Hodson was one of those instinctive warriors whose life found its highest expression in facing danger and who believed that wars were won by getting to grips with the enemy and killing him. During a skirmish near Delhi he burned twenty-three sepoys alive after they had fled to a building, and he was rumoured to be a consummate looter, but in the eyes of those who fought alongside him he was exactly the sort of officer the times demanded.16 At the middle and junior levels of command, men of Nicholson’s and Hodson’s stamp were worth their weight in gold, and there were plenty of them. They played the usual price for leading from the front; of the 122 men killed during Campbell’s entry into Lucknow, 10 were officers, and they amounted to 35 of the 414 wounded.