Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  There are many moments in Campbell’s career which seem like the clichés of cheap fiction. Chillianwala was the supreme example. That morning Campbell’s staff had placed a small, double-barrelled pocket pistol – a gift from a fellow officer – in his waistcoat pocket ‘as a joke’.*** The Sikh gunner’s matchlock round pierced Campbell’s waistcoat but was deflected by the pistol’s ivory handle, smashing it and part of his pocket watch, but leaving him with just a nasty bruise.

  As the 61st now began enfilading those Sikhs pursuing the 36th, the enemy threw forward more infantry and two more guns. Bleeding from his sword arm, Campbell willed his men forward in another desperate attack, once again overawing the Sikh gunners, while to the left the 46th Native Infantry repulsed cavalry bearing down upon the flank. ‘In these two successful attacks under difficult circumstances, I had gained the complete confidence and liking of the corps,’ wrote Campbell. ‘With them I could undertake, with perfect certainty of success, anything that could be accomplished by men.’141 There then followed an annihilating advance as Campbell led his men right down the Sikh line, routing the enemy as he charged in on their flank. ‘Brigadier-General Campbell, with that steady coolness and military decision for which he is so remarkable … carried everything before him’, reported Lord Gough.142 He was harried by Sikh cavalry all the way and when, in Campbell’s words, ‘the annoyance became too galling’, he would form up the men to repel them with a few volleys. Aside from these interruptions he was unstoppable. He captured thirteen guns, eventually overrunning the same Sikh batteries that had confounded Pennycuick. ‘There was a hand-to-hand contest at the successive captures of these guns’, explained Campbell. ‘They were disputed at the point of the bayonet, the enemy devoting himself to death rather than surrender them.’143 Unfortunately, lacking the horses to move more than three guns from the field, he had to spike the rest, most of which were retaken in short order by the Sikhs.

  Meanwhile to the east, Brigadier Mountain, expecting, as he reached open ground, to see Pennycuick on his left, instead found the Sikhs who had slaughtered the 24th. Colonel Congreve of the 29th Foot charged the cannon facing him, striking it with his sword and crying ‘My gun!’ before turning his men leftwards to fire into the enemy as they chased after the remnants of Pennycuick’s brigade.144 ‘The Sikhs fought like devils. They charged down on us, singly, sword in hand, and strove to break through our line’, wrote one officer. ‘But it was no go, and after a short struggle we swept them before us, and remained masters of the field.’145

  Gilbert’s other brigadier, Godby, stormed the batteries in front of him, only to find himself almost encircled by Sikhs. Helped by the third brigade under Penny (who had got so lost in the jungle he debouched behind Gilbert’s division rather than, as planned, behind Campbell’s), Godby fought his way free. By now, some approximation of order had been restored to Pope’s cavalry, and the remainder of the 24th had re-formed and rejoined the battle. Over such a wide field, with divisions broken by the terrain, command became ad hoc. Finding one of Mountain’s battalions, plus the 31st Native Infantry from Godby’s brigade, waiting around uselessly for further orders, Campbell took charge of both. A little further on, he met up with the rest of Mountain’s troops so he now wheeled Hoggan’s brigade left, to front the same direction, and then halted. At this point Gough rode up with his staff to find out what had been going on. ‘Can you hold your ground?’ he asked. ‘My Lord, I have been performing the duties of a brigadier, and know nothing about the rest of the army, but I have two regiments which can do anything, and another which is getting into order. Nothing can hurt me here’, Campbell replied. ‘Well, then, we will hold the position we have taken,’ said Gough.

  The men were tired and above all thirsty. Gilbert’s division had already returned to Chillianwala, and Major Lugard (Acting Adjutant-General of HM Forces) urged Gough to concentrate his army near the village wells for the night. Campbell advised that wherever Gough chose, the scattered troops must be collected before nightfall, so the commander-in-chief ordered them back to Chillianwala.146 ‘Night closed the sad sight,’ recalled one dragoon, ‘and the rain came down as if to cleanse us from our past sin’.147 The downpour continued for three days. When at last it slackened and the British could explore the battlefield, they discovered that:

  the enemy had come down in the night, after we left the ground, and murdered every wounded man … Many of them had evidently only been hit in the legs, and they were gashed about in a fearful manner. Every man had his throat cut and many their heads clean cut off.148

  Chillianwala cost the British 2,357 casualties from a force of around 13,000. It was not ‘till the evening of the third day after the battle that the whole of the amputations were completed’.149 Although Gough could not recall ‘seeing so many of an enemy’s slain upon the same space’,150 the Sikhs, unbowed, retrieved the majority of their artillery and left to rendezvous with Chuttur Singh. The Indian press was livid. ‘We sacrificed our troops and risked our honour by permitting the Seikhs [sic] to draw us into an engagement when our proper course was to encamp and remained tranquil until next day,’ barked the Bombay Times, ‘compelling us to fight at an unsuitable time, and under every disadvantage of circumstances and situation, on ground as favourable for them as for us it was the reverse.’151 ‘This battle was not managed with the usual splendid arrangement of the Sirkar,’ wrote one native officer, ‘but was fought in a hurry, and before proper orders could have been explained to our whole force; besides which, the ground was not known at all by the English officers.’152 ‘The brigades were all fighting independently, were surrounded and had to face about and charge to the rear. There was no second line, no reserve, no orders, nothing but folly on the part of the Chief,’ complained Lieutenant Yule. ‘I hope the Governor-General will have the sense to order Gough from the Army. We risk everything with such a man. In fact I hear doubts expressed of his being in sane mind.’153

  The loss of four guns and the colours of three regiments impugned the very izzat of the empire. A frenzied President of the Indian Board of Control, Sir John Hobhouse, claimed ‘the impression made upon the public mind is stronger than that caused by the Caubul massacre’.154 ‘The British army, though not actually defeated, was not actually victorious’, complained the Illustrated London News. ‘In our position in India a drawn battle is equivalent to a defeat.’155 Queen Victoria expressed her disapproval in the approved monarchical fashion by abstaining from ‘remarking upon the conduct of the commander-in-chief’.156 Gough was unrepentant. ‘The victory was complete as to the total overthrow of the enemy’, he assured Dalhousie.157 The governor-general was not fooled: ‘We have gained a victory … another such would ruin us.’ The reaction of the rank and file in particular worried him. ‘They have totally lost confidence in him’, wrote Dalhousie, ‘and I do not know what would be the result of his taking them into another action at present’.158 ‘In public I make, of course the best of things; I treat it as a great victory,’ he told the Duke of Wellington, ‘but writing confidentially to you I do not hesitate to say that I consider my position grave.’159

  The knives were out for the commander-in-chief. ‘Wherever Lord Gough has had his hand in martial achievement, we have had nothing but blunder after blunder’, snorted the Bombay Times on 27 January. ‘At no period within our history has so sad a want of Generalship or Statesmanship ever been manifested by the British Authorities in India.’ ‘The clamour throughout India against him is universal’, wrote Dalhousie. ‘The croaking and down-heartedness in the press, and over all India, especially at Calcutta, is disgusting and contemptible.’160 Back in London, ‘the news from India of Gough’s disastrous and stupid battle filled everybody with indignation and dismay’, recorded diarist Charles Greville. ‘An universal cry arose for Sir Charles Napier.’161

  Campbell was equally vulnerable. His response was to lay the blame foursquare at Gough’s door, for too short a barrage. ‘We had too much slaughter of human life at Chillian
wala, without due precaution having been taken to prevent it by the employment of our magnificent artillery’, he maintained. ‘I determined to employ this weapon against the enemy to the fullest extent, whenever we should again come in contact with them.’162 But, as Fortescue wrote, ‘The truth seems to be that Colin Campbell, who had only for a short time commanded a division, had not yet risen quite to the height of his new duties.’

  The great infantry debacle had been the attack of the 24th, conducted according to his instructions. Campbell could argue mitigating circumstances; the 24th was packed with inexperienced recruits and when posted to India many of the older officers had exchanged. Furthermore, the supporting sepoy regiments had been too slow. ‘The real cause of their not keeping up with the 24th was the enemy’s fire’, claimed Campbell, ‘and a want of sufficient inclination to approach it closely.’163 Gough helped by reporting that Pennycuick’s men had made a ‘too hasty and consequently disorderly advance’, urged on by officers waving their swords and advancing at double time.164

  But if Pennycuick had got carried away and charged off too fast, wasn’t that Campbell’s responsibility? For Fortescue it was Campbell’s preoccupation with Hoggan’s brigade, rather than Pennycuick’s, that had been the problem: ‘If he had bestowed the same supervision over Pennycuick’s brigade and looked to the careful support of its advance by the guns attached to the division, matters would no doubt have fallen out very differently.’ But Campbell could not chaperone both brigades, and in any case brigadiers could be expected to keep their men in order on their own. As it was, the presence or absence of a divisional commander made little difference. Fortescue claimed Gilbert had managed to ‘set his division in motion, keeping the whole of it well in hand and under his personal control’,165 but in fact both his brigades had had the same problem. ‘The formation proved most inconvenient’, recalled one of Godby’s officers, ‘… and all the efforts of the company officers and of the two mounted officers, Lieutenant Hopper and myself, failed to maintain the proper distances, and to keep the heads of subdivisions in a line with each other.’166 ‘I had not gone 100 yards before I lost sight of any superior officer as well as of any support’, added Brigadier Mountain. ‘In such a jungle each brigade, and in some cases each regiment, had to act for itself.’167 ‘The jungle was so thick that nobody knew what they doing’, confirmed Lieutenant Yule.168 ‘All a commanding officer can do is to dash on with those about him, cheering and trusting that all those of his regiment out of his sight will close up to him as the jungle clears’, explained Napier. ‘The commander could only address himself to those files immediately around him. On this subject no man who has ever led a regiment against an enemy in fire and through broken ground, as I have done and therefore speak now from experience, can doubt what I say.’169

  Campbell’s crime was not an absence of supervision but an over-reliance on the bayonet. ‘The dreadful loss which the 24th sustained was chiefly owing to their implicit obedience of the order to Reserve Your Fire’, confirmed Private O’Callaghan. ‘They were told that many Batteries were captured in the Peninsula by Cold Steel. The “point of the bayonet” persuasion was so indoctrinated into the 24th before the attack that the “Cold Steel” theory was fatally adopted as the ultimo ratio of the strategy.’170 Colonel Smith, who took command of the regiment after the battle, wrote, ‘The 24th advanced with loaded firelocks, but the greatest pains were taken by Campbell to inculcate upon them the merit of taking the Enemy’s Guns without firing a shot. He told me so himself, and blamed himself for it.’ Reliance on cold steel was a Charles Napier philosophy. ‘No troops can stand a charge of bayonets, and whoever charges first has the victory. Firing is a weapon … of defence, not of attack,’171 he asserted.

  There were sound reasons for hanging fire. Russian general Alexander Suvarov wrote, ‘The bullet misses, the bayonet doesn’t … Keep a bullet in the barrel. If three should run at you, bayonet the first, shoot the second and lay out the third with your bayonet. This isn’t common, but you haven’t time to reload.’172 Campbell’s infantry carried muzzle-loading muskets. Once fired, reloading took about twenty seconds but, as John Keegan points out, a man can run 150 yards (the effective range of a musket) in twenty seconds, and is far more lethal with a bayonet at close quarters than with a musket at 150 yards.173 Moreover, reloading ruined a brigade’s momentum. ‘The conventional view … was that nothing should interrupt the flow and unity of the final assault’, explained Strachan. Frederick the Great was so anxious to stop his men firing while advancing that he would order them to shoulder arms. Campbell had already seen an assault fail because men stopped to fire, losing formation and momentum, at San Sebastian in 1813. In thick jungle, faced with withering Sikh cannon fire, the temptation to take cover would have been even stronger.

  Unfortunately, as a defence of Campbell’s tactics, these arguments fall flat given that he himself ordered the 61st Foot to fire as they advanced, while ‘the 24th were told to march up, under a storm of fire, in front of the muzzles of the guns, for several hundred yards, without attempting to stagger or dismay the enemy by making use of their arms’.174 Campbell admitted that it would have been better to ‘have sent in a volley or two before storming the guns’.175

  As the Indian press energetically piled on the ordure like a brawny stable hand, Campbell, ‘the most sensitive of men in all matters affecting his professional reputation’, smouldered. ‘I have been misrepresented, not only in the public prints, but in the highest and most influential quarters’, he complained. What stung him was the accusation that he sent Pennycuick’s brigade into battle with unloaded muskets (a charge Campbell dismissed as ‘almost too puerile to require contradiction’), together with the complaint that he did not use his artillery to good effect, especially the guns of Brind and Robertson. But Brind’s horse artillery had been under Thackwell’s command, not his, while Campbell claimed that the three guns under Robertson had been requisitioned by a staff officer. This last excuse sounded particularly feeble since no one could remember the officer’s name, not even Robertson. ‘I had my guns and you had yours, nor did I hear of such an order having been given by anybody’, replied Thackwell when Campbell wrote asking him to confirm his version of events. There followed a ‘robust exchange of views’ between the two.176

  To clear his name, Campbell wrote his own apologia – his one foray into print – for distribution among senior officers and politicians. It proved very effective. Patrick Grant, adjutant-general of the Indian Army, validated Campbell’s story in a letter to Gough, agreeing that Robertson’s guns had been misappropriated, and that Campbell’s only other artillery, under Mowatt, had been overtaken in the jungle by the 24th and was therefore unable to fire without killing British infantry.177 The Indian press still had its doubts.

  What really saved Campbell from disgrace was pulling off the decisive tactical manoeuvre which limited Chillianwala to a draw. ‘The way General Campbell handled Hoggan’s brigade is described as being first rate’, wrote Lieutenant Yule.178 His troops had ‘behaved admirably and successfully’,179 according to Dalhousie. ‘It is quite clear’, wrote Campbell’s old commander Lord Saltoun, ‘that but for Campbell’s brilliant conduct and the gallantry of his division, most likely the army would have had much the worst of it at Chillianwala’,180 and Charles Napier concurred. Wellington was unequivocal: ‘Nothing in the whole history of the British army ever was more distinguished, than the conduct of the 61st Regiment throughout the late campaign, but more particularly at the Battle of Chillianwala.’181 The press was not about to gainsay the Iron Duke and so instead turned on Pope’s cavalry with vicious glee. The more Chillianwala became a byword for cavalry rather than infantry incompetence, the more it deflected attention away from Campbell. Even so, as one lieutenant wrote after meeting Campbell in October 1849, ‘whatever he may say (and he talks well) at Chillian [sic] he committed a frightful blunder’.182

  Chuttur’s and Shere Singh’s armies were now one, so Gough dug
in at Chillianwala. He needed more troops but the governor-general had already stripped India of soldiers. ‘From the Jumna to the frontier of Burmah, and from the Himalaya to the borders of the Deccan, there were but two battalions of European troops’, reported Dalhousie. ‘Happily the native powers of India seem to be incapable of combination for a common purpose.’183 Fortunately, the fort at Mooltan surrendered on 22 January,184 releasing Whish’s besieging army. Wellington estimated that ‘if it had been necessary to take the citadel of Mooltan by storm after opening breaches in its walls’, it would have cost twice the casualties of Chillianwala.185 The city which Lawrence, Currie and Edwardes believed would bow down once its garrison glimpsed Victoria’s battalions on the horizon, in the event absorbed 42,153 artillery rounds*186 before yielding.

  Five days later Whish left Mooltan to join Gough. The 98th, the 53rd and Wheeler’s division from Jullundur were now converging to reinforce the commander-in-chief.187 As Gough’s army mustered, so peripheral threats conveniently receded. When the Nepalese ruler Jung Bahadoor had marched thirteen regiments and forty-one guns along his border, ostensibly on a shooting trip, it seemed to presage mischief, but the danger from that quarter was neutralised by a fever epidemic. And, in Cashmere, Gholab Singh seemed more likely than ever to side with the British, after Dost Mohammed claimed the province as his own. With matters moving in his favour, Dalhousie now insisted that Gough keep fighting until he secured total victory. ‘Any compromise would, in the eyes of all India, now be confession of inability to conquer, or compel. I give one reply: “Unconditional submission to British power.”’188