Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  On the morning of 16 April Campbell heard from Captain James that the Momunds, strengthened by 20,000 Bajourees, were to mount a big new offensive that very afternoon. Sheer bravado would not work twice against such an overwhelming enemy so Lieutenant Travers was despatched the 20 miles to Peshawur for reinforcements. By 4 p.m. that same day the 53rd Foot and the four guns of Major Waller’s troop of horse artillery had arrived to reinforce Campbell. As it turned out, contrary to James’s information, the Momunds showed no sign of coming out to fight and instead seemed rather winded. ‘The whole gathering, which has cost friend Sadut a month to collect from far and near, broke up and dispersed the next day’, Campbell told his former ADC, Haythorne. ‘Campbell has given the Momunds a good licking this time’, gloated Dalhousie, and with a loss of just two men killed and eight wounded. By July the Momunds agreed to the cessation of hostilities and a revenue tribute. For Campbell, the engagement proved that to beat hill tribes, the British had to coax them into country where artillery could turn the scales.52

  But, like jackals round a geriatric lion, as one tribe snapped at Campbell and monopolised his attention, another sank its teeth into his hindquarters. With Campbell engrossed in slapping down the Momunds, the Ranizai saw no need to honour the fine agreed in March 1852, and seemed indifferent to the fate of the hostages taken as surety. As an olive branch, Campbell sent an emissary to the Swat leader Sayid Akbar to suggest talks. The messenger returned empty-handed, except to say that Akbar had been tempted to murder him as a warning.53

  On 20 April, Ranizai tribesmen ransacked the treasury at Charsada, killing several local officials, including the revenue collector, before seeking refuge in the Utman Khel villages of Prangurh and Nowadun. Suspicion fell on Ajoon Khan, the old ruler of Tangi, now hiding in the hills of Swat. Once again it seemed Swat was providing a haven for troublemakers, so this time the Lawrences ordered Campbell to mount a wholesale invasion. As Campbell explained to Napier, ‘as the stream gathers volume in its progress, so did the desire of the Board of Administration for more punishment increase’.54

  Campbell organised a force of 2,450 men, including horse artillery, a field battery, sappers, cavalry, infantry, Gurkhas and Guides, ready to leave by 28 April 1852. He had already instructed Captain James to investigate Swati complicity in the Charsada raid, and before Campbell left, James reported that the evidence was insubstantial. Concerned, Campbell referred the Lawrences’ invasion plan to Gomm. The commander-in-chief came down in favour of a punitive expedition to Swat instead.

  Campbell reached Nowadun on 11 May. Mackeson ordered it destroyed. Having confirmed it was deserted, the men ‘went with blazing torches from hut to hut, firing them as they went along, and soon this neat little village was enveloped in flames’, recalled one soldier.55 ‘No opposition was offered by the enemy during the burning of the village,’ wrote Lumsden, ‘beyond a few shots fired as a sort of bravado from the distant hills, but as the Guides and Goorkhas advanced to destroy the three smaller villages of Babi, Suppuray and Turrikai, all belonging to the Utmankhails, the enemy commenced a sharp matchlock fire from all directions.’ The Guides under Lieutenant Miller soon drove them back, so the work of desolation could continue in safety.

  Having been reinforced by 500 men of the 1st Punjab Infantry and two squadrons of 1st Punjab Cavalry, on 13 May it was on to the village of Prangurh, the home of Ajoon Khan. ‘The distance to Prangurh from the camp was found to be about eight or nine miles,’ explained Lumsden:

  the last 3½ of which was through broken, raviny, undulating country, and which, if properly defended, could have given us a good deal of bother on our advance; but not a soul was seen or a shot fired until we came in view of the village …

  Sir Colin ordered the troops to halt, sending the Guide infantry out in skirmishing order with orders to lay down about 100 yards in front; the troop of Horse artillery and the heavy guns were brought up and placed in position; Coke’s Corps were ordered to take ground to the right, to be prepared to advance, when the orders should be given, in line with the Guides. But the men, seeing the enemy in front of them, and being jealous lest the Guides should get into Prangurh the first, could not be restrained … With a scream and a yell these green boys, the instant they were put in motion to take ground to their right, went straight to their front. They were off, and that too in the right direction, and the devil himself could not have got them back! Coke did his best: there he was, on the top of a wall, screaming at some to halt and pelting stones at others, who would go on in spite of him! But it was of no use.

  Fuming, Campbell ordered an artillery barrage of the village, so that if these hot-headed troops insisted on pressing ahead, it would be under fire from their own guns, but Coke’s men pushed on oblivious, right through the village, at which point, his hand forced, Campbell stopped the bombardment and began a general advance. The British suffered three killed and fifteen wounded. With the enemy driven out, the village and its grain stores were consigned to the flames. Amid the detritus, a Guide sepoy found some letters which, contrary to Captain James’s enquiry, proved Swati involvement in the raid on Charsada, thus handing the Board of Administration a cast-iron casus belli for the subjugation of Swat. It would, however, be a while before this new evidence reached the Lawrences. In the meantime, Campbell could restrict his operations to punishment rather than conquest.

  His next target was Iskakote, with around 600 houses the largest village in the Ranizai valley, wedged at the foot of the mountains, with a deep, broad nullah protecting its front. As Campbell launched his assault on 18 May, 6,000 Ranizai and assorted Swatis formed up in a long line with the nullah behind them, but when he drew near, they dissolved into the natural crenellations of the landscape, leaving only one small detachment in a graveyard. Campbell sent a troop of horse artillery forward to dislodge this remainder, which they managed with a few rounds. Campbell, his staff and twenty Guide sowars then rode forward into the graveyard, but ‘all of a sudden a dark blue mass arose as if it were out of the earth’, reported Lumsden, ‘and gave the reconnoitring party a volley which wounded many of the Guides and their horses’.

  Campbell now ordered in his infantry. ‘With a dash, a scream and a yell, the Guides and Gurkhas rushed to the front, drove the enemy through the village of Iskakote and up over the heights beyond’, wrote Lumsden, while the horse artillery enfiladed the nullah.

  In the meantime, Coke’s men, driving everything before them, came across bodies of the enemy who, retreating from the right attack along a raviny country to which they were perfect strangers, were regularly caught in a net … Many, too proud to yield, there found a soldier’s and a martyr’s grave.56

  British casualties amounted to eleven killed and twenty-nine wounded. Iskakote, Dargai and eight other villages were subsequently torched. Campbell’s men returned to Peshawur on 2 June, leaving fifteen villages in the Ranizai valley in ashes. Within a month the Ranizai accepted a new British treaty, but Campbell was uncomfortable with the victory. ‘In point of fact, we were the aggressors, and punished to starvation a very populous tribe for the deeds of a few individuals’,57 he told Napier.

  The man who had praised him for licking the Momunds at the start of May was underwhelmed. ‘We were great friends – he was, till a year ago, most remarkable for getting on cordially with civil officers – and all was satisfactory’, wrote Dalhousie:

  Whether Sir Charles Napier’s intimacy produced the effect or not, I can’t tell you, but for the last year he has been wholly changed. Personally brave as a lion, he has become timid and temporising, and has lowered the spirit of his force thereby most objectionably. Always making difficulties, always going out and doing little; our foes got cocky, and our friends got cocktail.58

  As the governor-general became more bellicose, so the difference of opinion between his agent Colonel Mackeson and Campbell became more unbridgeable. Though the Ranizai seemed contrite, Mackeson wanted Campbell to settle the issue of Swat with an invasion through the Ma
lakand Pass. The thought of another campaign into the hills appalled Campbell: ‘I considered the whole plan based on the most cruel justice.’59

  By the early summer of 1852, Campbell’s financial security and that of his family was assured. He had stayed in India far longer than his own material well-being required. That autumn he would be 60, and colonial service, and the illness that was its inevitable corollary, had aged him prematurely. All the while, colonial rule based on racial superiority was elbowing aside more sympathetic credos. Cultural tolerance was dying. India was in the grip of men sure of the rightness of their cause, the cause of spreading British civilisation to the last crevice. It was never a crusade in which Campbell invested much faith. Whether it was the lingering pangs of conscience from Demerara still gnawing at him, or whether he had just spent too much time in Napier’s company, all these strands entwined to pull him up short. Faced with a commissioner, a board of administration and a governor-general all straining to wreak bloody vengeance and conquer Swat, Campbell sided with his conscience and bluntly refused.

  Coming so soon after Napier’s insubordination, it left Dalhousie mad as a bull elephant in must. In the governor-general’s words, Campbell based his refusal:

  on no military grounds whatever, but on the avowed ground that whatever the civil officer, the representative of the Government might think, he, the military Brigadier was not himself convinced of the justice of the movement and therefore he would not move!! … Once more we revert to the simple proposition, ‘There can’t be two masters’. I have told him that I have, with difficulty, abstained from forthwith removing him from his command, and that, unless he eats his word, I will do so now.

  The governor-general now revisited the doubts he still harboured over Campbell’s previous actions. Campbell’s postponement of reprisals to await the results of James’s inquiry into the raid at Charsada, he condemned as ‘over-cautious reluctance’. As for Campbell’s policy of negotiating with the Pundiali Momunds in 1851, ‘A year ago I surrendered my own judgment to his and the C-in-C’s about an attack,’ lamented Dalhousie, ‘and I have ever since regretted it.’60

  On 26 May 1852, Campbell told Gomm he was no longer prepared to sacrifice his finer instincts and had made up his mind to resign. ‘There is a limit at which a man’s forbearance ought to stop. That limit has in my case been reached’, he declared. For a professional soldier of over forty years’ service, with a record unblemished by disobedience, who had invested so much in his career, emotionally, financially and corporeally, this was a grave and fateful step, one which placed him firmly in that rarefied cadre of army ‘characters’ who provided so much mileage for the habitués of the United Service Club, but so few senior generals.

  Gomm tried his best to persuade him to reconsider, but to no avail. He assured Campbell that he would explain the nuances of the dispute to Lord Fitzroy Somerset. Even the emollient Gomm had come to resent Dalhousie’s dogmatism, and warned Campbell that the governor-general’s outbursts were only the initial volleys from a man who enjoyed a war of attrition.

  On 3 June Campbell tendered his resignation, ostensibly on medical grounds. The excuse fooled no one. The Illustrated London News correctly, but rather vaguely, reported that he was leaving due to ‘differences with the local political authorities’.61 Meanwhile, to avoid any repetition of Campbell’s intransigence, Dalhousie gave the Punjab Board of Administration the power to demand requisitions from the commander-in-chief, strengthening its autonomy in martial adventures. Turning back to Campbell, Dalhousie now let rip the full force of his invective. Campbell had ‘transgressed the bounds of his proper province’, and ‘placed himself in an attitude of direct and proclaimed insubordination to the authority of the Governor-General in Council’. Inwardly seething, Campbell complained to Gomm that he was ‘precluded from answering, except with the utmost submission’.62 The press, irked at being denied their war coverage, heaped reproaches on Campbell. The Bombay Times advised that ‘if the Civil Power deserves the name, the soldier who declines bowing to its authority ought to be saved the trouble of resignation, by being immediately relieved’.63

  Dalhousie, in Kaye’s words a man who ‘could not see with other men’s eyes, or think with other men’s brains, or feel with other men’s hearts’,64 was now amassing enemies at an alarming rate. Early in his tenure, with regard to Mooltan at least, he had deferred to Gough’s and Campbell’s judgement, but four years on his confidence and sense of mission was too bloated to brook dissent. Those who stood in his way – Napier, Campbell and soon Henry Lawrence – were squashed. The otherwise harmless William Gomm now came under suspicion as his thinly concealed sympathy for Campbell tarred him in Dalhousie’s estimation. ‘Sir Colin Campbell has been his evil influence in the matter’,65 complained the governor-general.

  Contrary to Dalhousie’s assessment, Campbell’s gentle approach on the north-west frontier was in fact reaping dividends. As Campbell noted:

  I have the satisfaction to know that all my orders and arrangements for the defence of that frontier have been followed since my departure, and that not a single Hillman has crossed the frontier since their overthrow by me on the several occasions they ventured to assemble on the border, shortly before I gave up the Command.66

  Heedless of the evidence on the ground, Dalhousie imposed a new hard-line policy. As the official report on the Punjab stated in 1854:

  If the hill tribes commit aggressions they must be punished in their own homes … all must be made to feel that their persons are never secure from our vengeance, and that no retreat can protect them from the skill and courage of our troops. It may be occasionally advisable to compromise a collision with aggressive tribes by overtures and concessions, but this policy must be tempered by the consideration that such examples may incite other tribes to attack in the hope of being bought off also.

  Dalhousie asserted that:

  In the course of time, the fear of retribution, which experience will have shown to be certain, and a direct sense of their own interests, will combine with other causes, and will lead, I do not doubt, to the establishment of uninterrupted tranquillity along the western frontier of the British possessions.67

  Campbell formally relinquished command in Peshawur on 25 July 1852. The officers of the garrison invited him to a banquet in his honour but he felt that such an overt show of loyalty would rile Dalhousie, and so he respectfully declined. He left for the hill station of Murree for three months’ rest. In October he travelled to Dugshai to inspect the 98th, before catching a steamer from Bombay for England. Back in 1849 Campbell had told Hope Grant, ‘The day I leave this country will terminate my military career.’ It certainly seemed so. Having resigned as brigadier, and having handed command of the 98th to Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Rainier, Campbell left India an unattached, half-pay colonel. ‘We should be very sorry if you left India without shaking hands’, Henry Lawrence told him on 19 December, but though he passed through Lahore, Campbell did not call on him.68

  He was back in England by the first week of March 1853. Here his optimism began to reassert itself. ‘There is an opinion prevailing amongst the men at the Club that Government will give a Brevet promotion before the end of the year, and if so, it is supposed will include men junior to me in the list’, Campbell remarked wistfully to his friend Seward. ‘I should be glad to receive the additional income which is given to the rank of major-general.’69 Rekindled professional ambition seems to hide behind his claims of financial interest. After all, he had watched Napier bounce back from worse.

  On 6 April he called on his fellow rebel.70 ‘Sir Colin has been with me here for a few days’, Napier informed Lord Ellenborough:

  and his accounts of the unprovoked attacks and cruelties on the tribes around Peshawur are almost beyond belief; his efforts to prevent such injustice was the cause of his resignation … Beautiful villages burnt without any apparent reason but the desire of the politicals to appear ‘vigorous’ in the eyes of Dalhousie!

&nbs
p; But beneath this bombast, Napier was gravely ill. He lasted just another four months. Campbell was one of the pall-bearers at the funeral in Portsmouth. Shortly afterwards, Napier’s views were aired in the posthumously published Defects, Civil and Military of the Indian Government. Much of it was point scoring off Dalhousie, who dismissed it as ‘injurious misrepresentation’,71 but shorn of vitriol, many of Napier’s suggestions were eminently sensible.* ‘Had he made his representations with sober moderation, eschewing all offensive exaggeration, his warnings and suggestions would have commanded attention’, observed Thorburn. ‘Instead they were pooh-poohed as the emanations of a distempered mind.’72

  Campbell had been away for eleven years. By now he had cleared his debts and had enough money set aside to provide for himself, his sister and his father, who was still alive, in great old age, on the Isle of Mull. He no longer had any need to go on fighting. Veterans of the Peninsular War were a dying breed. Napier had died just a year after carrying the Duke of Wellington’s coffin. In any case, in the era of Pax Britannica there was no call for them.

  Then, suddenly, the war Campbell had been waiting forty years for, a war fought in Europe by a British army, erupted in the Balkans.

  Notes

  * Edwardes had been promoted and made Companion of the Bath.

  * Predominantly native soldiers, e.g. the 1st Punjab Cavalry had 588 natives and just four British officers (Daly, 63). It was known from 1851 as the Punjab Irregular Force or ‘Piffers’.