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Chapter 2 – Peshawar and Rawalpindi

Peshawar

May, 1857

But the place to which, of all the military stations in the Panjab, the thoughts of men were turned at this time with the deepest interest, was the frontier-post of Peshawar. There, in May, 1857, was a strong defensive force of all arms – the Native troops greatly outnumbering the Europeans. There were two regiments of Queen’s troops, with Artillery, horse and foot, the whole, perhaps, amounting to little more than two thousand men, whilst the Native troops might be counted up at nearly four times the number. In the neighbourhood, at Naushahra and Hoti-Mardan, were other components of the brigade, planted in the Peshawar Valley. At the former place were the 27th Foot, nearly a thousand strong, and at the latter was the famous Guide Corps, under Captain Daly, which, though recruited in the country, was believed to be as staunch as if every soldier were an English yeoman. Counting up all the components of the brigade in the valley, it may be said, in round numbers, that there were two thousand five hundred Europeans and ten thousand Natives, and that only a tithe of the latter could be trusted by their English officers.

External dangers

These were heavy odds against us; but they did not constitute the main sources of danger. If the British troops were free. to act against the mutinous Sipahis, there could be little doubt that, well handled, they could dispose of all comers. But beyond the frontier, as I have already briefly said336, were other great and imminent perils. If the Afghan tribes occupying the passes beyond Peshawar – the Afridis, the Yusufzais, the Mahmands,

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and other wild clans, whom we had been endeavouring to reclaim from their lawless habits, and not wholly without success – had been incited, partly in the interests of the faith and partly in the interests of plunder, to pour down upon us a great mass of humanity, predatory and fanatic, we might have been simply overwhelmed by the irruption. Our English manhood could not have sustained the burden of the double calamity, if the internal and external enemy had risen against us at the same time.

And the external enemy, which might in such a crisis have risen against us, was not merely a gathering of these barbarous mountain tribes. Beyond the passes were the Afghans of Kabul and Kandahar. The friendship of Dost Muhammad had been purchased by our British gold, but he had never ceased to deplore the dismemberment of his empire by the Sikhs; he had never ceased to hanker after the recovery of the Peshawar Valley, now part of a British province by the intelligible right of conquest. For this he had already risked much – for this he might risk much more. This eager longing after Peshawar has been described as the madness of a life. It might, at such a time as this, be stronger than the teachings of experience – stronger than the dictates of sagacity – stronger even than the great national avarice which was burning within him. It was difficult to feel any confidence in his forbearance at such a time. A well-developed mutiny of the Sipahi troops in the Peshawar Valley would afford such an opportunity as might never arise again in the history of the nation. The formidable British. force which guarded the frontier would then be as a chained giant, powerless to resist a foreign invasion. If then the Amir were to raise the green standard and to call upon the chiefs and people of Afghanistan, in the name of the great prophet, to pour down upon the Faringhis, who in days past had so humiliated them – who had rooted up their vines and destroyed their orchards, and set their mark upon the capital city of their empire – the great chiefs and the leading tribes would have gathered around him, and a great flood of Muhammadanism would have poured upon us, swollen, perhaps, by more distant streams. It was difficult to say, at such a time, what might not be written down in the great Book of the Future. A very little thing might turn the tide against us and overwhelm us. The natural feeling, therefore, amongst our people was one of perilous insecurity; and the Natives of India asked each other,

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then and afterwards, with significant earnestness of inquiry, “What news from Peshawar337?”

Political charge at Peshawar

At this time the political charge of Peshawar was in the hands of two of the most remarkable men to be found among the younger officers of the Indian Army. Both had been reared under the Lawrences; and in that mixed service known in India as “political employment,” which at one time demands the exercise of the highest energies of the military officer, and, at another, of the finest qualities of the civil administrator, had ripened into soldier-statesmen of the best kind. Of Herbert Edwardes I have already spoken338. He was a Commissioner at Peshawar. John Nicholson was his lieutenant, or deputy-commissioner. They were close friends, full of love and admiration of each other. If either had greater love or admiration for another friend at a distance, that other friend was Henry Lawrence, whom both revered and strove to imitate, walking not unworthily in the footsteps of their great exemplar.

John Nicholson

The son of a physician in Dublin, who died at the commencement of a professional career in which were the germs of a great success, John Nicholson had entered the Company’s service as a cadet of Infantry on the Bengal establishment at the age of sixteen. He was still a boy when the chances of service sent him with his regiment – the 27th – into Afghanistan; and when in that dreary, sorrow-laden winter of 1841 the national spirit of the tribes rose against the intrusion of the English, young Nicholson, after much good promise of the finest soldierly qualities, became a prisoner at Ghazni, and afterwards a captive in the hands of Akbar Khan. Rescued by General Pollock, he returned to the

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provinces of India, and when again the peace of India was broken by the incursion of the Sikh army, John Nicholson, after a brief period of service in the Commissariat Department, was, on the recommendation of Henry Lawrence, who had taken note of his fine soldierly qualities, appointed by Lord Hardinge to instruct and discipline the Infantry regiments of Gulab Singh, the new ruler of Kashmir. He was afterwards appointed an assistant to Lawrence, who was then Resident at Lahor, and became permanently attached to the Political Service. From that time John Nicholson, independent of military rank, was released from the trammels of his youth. He saw his opportunity before him, and he bided his time. His desires were towards military action, and in due course that which he had longed for came; the Sikh chiefs were rising against the military occupation and political interference of the English, and John Nicholson soon found that he had work to do in the field. He did it with a cool head and a stout heart, and, although his freedom of speech sometimes gave offence to his seniors, he made it clear to those under whom he served that he was a man to be trusted. The great conflict for the supremacy of the Panjab came; Nicholson was in the midst of it – at Chilianwala, at Gujrat, and in the front of Gilbert’s pursuit of the Afghan auxiliaries. And when the country became a British province Sir Henry Lawrence enlisted his services into the commission, and, toiling on. for years on the outskirts of civilisation, he manifested an extraordinary aptitude for the coercion and the government of barbarous tribes. After this service in Bannu, where the wild people defied him, he had for a little space thought of leaving the Panjab and serving under his old master in Oudh, or of taking part in the Persian war as commander of Irregulars. But the cloud which seemed. to overshadow his prospects soon. passed away, and in the spring of 1857 he was, as I have before said, at Peshawar as the lieutenant of his friend Herbert Edwardes, or in other and more official words, Deputy Commissioner of the division. Only a little time before, Edwardes, being on a brief visit to Calcutta, had said to Lord Canning, “You may rely upon. this – that if ever there is a desperate deed to be done in India, John Nicholson is the man. to do it.” And now the truth of these friendly but prophetic words was about to be realised. The hour had come and the man was present.

At this time John Nicholson was in his thirty-sixth year. Of

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lofty statue, of a handsome open countenance, with strong decision of character stamped upon it, be carried with him a noble presence, which commanded general observation, and among the Natives excited awe. His manner was not genial. Some said it was cold; it was certainly reserved; and the first impressions which he made on men’s minds were often. unfavourable. His words were few; and there was a directness and authoritativeness about them which made strangers think that he was dogmatical: perhaps overbearing. But those manifestations were not the growth of an arrogant self-conceit, but of great conscientiousness and self-reliance. For he thought much before he spoke, and what he said was but the utterance of a strong conviction which had taken shape, not hastily, in his mind; and he was not one to suppress what he felt to be the truth, or to mince nice phrases of expression. Still it would be flattery to deny, or to obscure the fact, that he had at one time little control over a naturally fiery temper, and that, as he grew older, he brought it with difficulty under subjection. There could have been nothing better for one of Nicholson’s temperament than constant intercourse with such a man as Herbert Edwardes; and he now gratefully acknowledged in his heart that his character was ripening under these good influences, and that, please God, much that was crude and imperfect in it might soon disappear339.

Sydney Cotton

It was another happy circumstance at that time that the Brigade was commanded by an officer altogether of the right stamp. Brigadier Sydney Cotton – a true soldier, and one of a family of soldiers – commanded the troops in the Peshawar Valley. He had seen service in many parts of the world. Owing no extraneous advantages to his family connections, he had ever been one of those hardworking, unshrinking, conscientious military officers, who do not serve the State less ungrudgingly because it has been ungrateful to them, but who, rising by slow gradation,

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never have an opportunity of going to the front and showing of what stuff they are made, until age has enfeebled their powers. Of his forty-seven years of service in the Royal Army the greater number had been passed in India. But he was of a constitution well adapted to sustain the assaults of the climate, and his threescore years had taken from him little of the vigour and activity of his prime. Of good stature, but of a spare, light frame, he had all the external attributes of a good soldier, and there were few men in the whole range of the service who were more familiar with the duties of his profession in all its grades. Constant intercourse with the British soldier, in the Barrack and in the Camp, had not only made him thoroughly acquainted with his habits and feelings, but had developed within him a tender and tolerant affection for, a generous sympathy with, all who worked under him. Pew commanding officers had been more careful of the common soldier than Sydney Cotton, or had more thoroughly earned his confidence. He was known and acknowledged to be one of the best regimental officers in the Army. No opportunity until now had been afforded to him of testing the higher qualities which enable a man to face large responsibilities, and to combat great difficulties and dangers with a serene front. But the latent power was in him; the opportunity had now come, and he was equal to it. Edwardes and Nicholson had confidence in the Brigadier; and although, like many of his class, he had an habitual con-tempt for civilians and soldier civilians, he could not help thanking God, in the depths of his heart, that circumstances had now rendered him the fellow-labourer, in a great cause, of two soldiers, of whom any army in the world might be proud – two soldiers, though vested with civil authority, as eager to take the field and to share its dangers, as though they had never left the camp.

First tidings of the outbreak

May 12

These three men were at Peshawar, when, on the 12th of May, news reached them to the effect that one of the greatest military stations in Upper India was in a blaze, and that the European regiments were on the defensive. Edwardes, who had an assured faith in the good results of the Afghan policy, which he had so successfully advocated, had little apprehension that Peshawar would be lost to the Empire. “As to this place,” he wrote to Sir John Lawrence, “it will be the last to go; and not go at all, if the intermediate country be occupied

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by a good field-force engaged in making stern examples. The celebrated 64th Native Infantry is here340; and the report in the station is, that the Native regiments here are prepared to follow whatever lead is set them by the 21st Native Infantry, which, caeteris paribus, is a good one.” But he did not, although Dot fearing for Peshawar, underestimate the magnitude of the crisis. He knew that a great struggle was approaching, and that the energies of the British nation must be strained to the utmost. He knew that, in the Panjab, there would be much strife and contention, and that every Englishman in the province would have to put forth all his strength. He was a man ever ripe for action, and he had in John Nicholson a meet companion. “I have not heard yet,” he wrote in the letter above quoted to the Chief Commissioner, “whether you are at Pindi or Marri; but as we have received here telegraphic news of the 10th of May from Mirath that the Native troops were in open mutiny, and the Europeans on the defensive only, I write a line to tell you that Nicholson and I are of opinion that a strong movable column of reliable troops (Europeans and Irregulars) should take the field in the Panjab at once – perhaps at Lahor would be best, so as to get between the stations which have mutinied and those that have not; and move on the first station that stirs next; and bring the matter, without further delay, to the bayonet.

May 12

This disaffection will never be talked down now. It must be put down – and the sooner blood be let the less of it will suffice. Nicholson desires me to tell you that he would be ready to take command of them, and I need not add the pleasure it would give me to do the same. We are both at your disposal, remember; and if this business goes, as it soon will, to a question of personal influence and exertion, either of us could raise a serviceable body out of the Derajat in a short time.” And he added in a postscript, “Whatever you do about a movable force, do it at once. There is no time to be lost in getting to the struggle which is to settle the matter.”

Neville Chamberlain

There was then at no great distance from Peshawar another man, whose counsel and assistance were eagerly desired in this conjuncture. It was felt that the presence of Neville Chamberlain was needed to complete that little confederacy of heroes, on the wisdom and

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courage of whom the safety of the frontier, under Providence, mainly depended. Brigadier Chamberlain at this time commanded the Panjab Irregular Force. He was in the prime of his life and the fulness of his active manhood. Of a fair stature, of a light but sinewy frame, he had every physical qualification that could make a dashing leader of Irregular Horse. And in early youth, he had acquired a reputation as an intrepid and eager soldier, who was ever in the front where danger was to be faced and glory was to be gained. On the battle-fields of Afghanistan and the Panjab, He had shown what was the temper of his steel, and he had carried off more honourable wounds in hand-to-hand encounter with the enemy than any of his contemporaries in the service. It was said, indeed, that his great fault as soldier was, that he exposed himself too recklessly to danger. But with this irrepressible military enthusiasm, which had well-nigh cost him his life, he had a large fund of sound common sense, was wise in council, and had military knowledge far beyond that of the bold swordsman who heads against heavy odds a charge of Horse. And with all these fine qualities he combined a charming modesty of demeanour – a general quietude and simplicity of character, which not only forbade all kinds of self-assertion, but even shrunk from the commendations of others. He had been selected, as the fittest man in the Army, to command the Panjab Irregular Force, of which I have before spoken341, and which had already won immense confidence in the Panjab, and no little reputation in more distant parts of India. Next to the European regiments, this was the most reliable portion of the military force in the Panjab – indeed, the only other reliable part of the great Army planted. there for the defence of the frontier. It was of extreme importance at this time that Chamberlain and Cotton. should be in communication as to the best means of co-operating, especially with respect to the proposed Movable Column; and so Edwardes wrote to him, asking him to ride over to Peshawar and to take counsel with him and the chief military authorities – a measure of which they entirely approved. Chamberlain at once responded to the summons, and hastened over to Peshawar.

So, on the 13th of May, an hour or two after his arrival, a

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Council of War was held at the house of General Reed.

The Peshawar Council

May 13

The members present were the General, the Brigadier, Edwardes, Chamberlain, and Nicholson. Half an hour before their assembling, Edwardes had received a telegraphic message from John Lawrence approving the formation of the Movable Column, and announcing that the Native troops at Mian-Mir had that morning been disarmed. There was no division in the Council. The military and political authorities at Peshawar were moved by a common spirit, and acted as one man. It was agreed that in the conjuncture which had arisen, all civil and military power in the Panjab should be concentrated on one spot; that to this effect General Reed should assume the command of all the troops in the province, that he should join the Chief Commissioner at Rawalpindi, or at such place as might be the seat of the local government at the time, in order that he might be in constant intercourse with the Chief Commissioner, and harmonious action might thus be secured between the civil and military authorities. The real object of this did not lie on the surface. There was an occult meaning in it, which caused Edwardes and Nicholson to smile complacently at the Council-table, and to exchange many a joke in private. This concentration of the military authority of the Panjab in the person of General Reed – a worthy old officer, without very strong opinions of any kind – really transferred it to the hands of the political officers. It was a great thing not to be checked – not to be thwarted – not to be interfered with – not to have regulation, and routine, and all sorts of nervous fears and anxieties thrust upon them from a distance. It was desirable, however, that the semblance of military authority should be maintained throughout the land – that the rights of seniority should be outwardly respected – that every man should be in his own place, as upon parade, and that a General should at all times be a General, even though for purposes of action he should be merely a stock or a stone. The Natives of India watch these things shrewdly and observingly, and estimate, with rare sagacity, every indication of a failure of the wondrous union and discipline, which they look upon as the very root of our supremacy342. But, though it was at all times and in all places,

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desirable to keep up this show of a wonderful machinery, working wheel by wheel with perfect regularity of action, it was not always expedient to maintain the reality of it. There were times and conjunctures when the practical recognition of the authority of rank, which in the Indian army was only another name for age, might wisely be foregone; and such a crisis had now to be confronted. On the whole, it was a fortunate circumstance that just such a man as General Reed – a man not obstinate, not wedded to any opinions or foregone conclusions of his own, and yet not more cautious, irresolute, or fearful of responsibility than the majority of old soldiers who had never been called upon to face a momentous crisis – was then the senior officer in that part of the country; indeed, under the Commander-in-Chief, the senior officer of the Bengal Presidency. He had good sense of the most serviceable kind – the good sense to understand his own deficiencies, and to appreciate the fact that there were abler men than himself about him. So, whilst he was rising to the honourable position of military dictator of the Panjab, he wisely ceased to dictate. The time had come for the universal domination of Brains – John Lawrence, with Herbert Edwardes for his Wazir, then took the supreme direction of affairs, always consulting the chief military authorities, but quietly educating them, and flattering them with the belief that they dictated when they only obeyed.

The Movable Column

The next resolution was that a Movable Column of reliable troops, as before suggested, should be organised, to take the field at once, under a competent commander, and to operate upon any point where rebellion might bristle up, or danger might threaten us in the Panjab. A suspected Sipahi garrison was to be removed from the Fort of Atak – an important position, which it was of

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immense moment to secure; and our communications were to be placed beyond the reach of danger by posting at the Atak ferry a Pathan guard under a tried and trusty Pathan leader. At the same time other changes in the disposition of the troops were to be made; the Native regiments being drawn into the posts at which they might least readily co-operate with each other, and most easily be overawed by the Europeans. At the same time, it was determined that Brigadier Chamberlain should proceed at once to Rawalpindi to take counsel with the Chief Commissioner; and that John Nicholson, if his services were not called for in a military capacity, should accompany the Movable Column as its political officer. These proposals were telegraphed to Sir John Lawrence, and all but the last were cordially accepted. The Chief Commissioner thought that Nicholson’s services were required at Peshawar, and in that particular juncture it was believed that the public service would suffer by his departure. Moreover, he had a faith, that had been bravely earned, in the general efficiency of his assistants all over the country. And he knew that it would not be wise to supersede local authority by a delegate from Head-Quarters. And never, perhaps, did John Lawrence exhibit his instinctive sagacity more clearly than in this first resolution to place every officer in the Panjab on his own particular stand-point of responsibility, and thus to evoke to the utmost all the power within him.

The details of the Movable Column. were soon jotted down, but it was not so easy to settle the question of command. Cotton and Edwardes, Chamberlain and Nicholson, were all equally eager to place themselves at its head. It was to be determined only by superior authority; so General Reed made a reference to the Commander-in-Chief. Edwardes could not be spared from the frontier, where he was a tower of strength: the names of Cotton, Chamberlain and Nicholson, were submitted to Head-Quarters. And the telegraph wires brought back the intimation that General Anson had selected Neville Chamberlain as the leader of the column.

The Rawalpindi Council

May 16

On the 16th, General Reed and Brigadier Chamberlain joined the Chief Commissioner at Rawalpindi, and on that evening Colonel Edwardes received a telegraphic message summoning him to join the Head-Quarters Council. Making over his own particular charge to Nicholson, he proceeded at once to

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Pindi, and was soon in eager but confident discussion alike of the present and the future. The stern resolution and unflinching courage of John Lawrence were then lighted up by the radiant aspect of Herbert Edwardes, whose cheerfulness was so unfailing, and whose political wisdom so often glinted out in bright flashes of wit, that the Councils of War which were held during that gathering at Rawalpindi were said to be “great fun343.” Never, perhaps, in the face of such enormous difficulty and danger, shaking the very foundations of a great empire, did men meet each other with brighter faces or more cheering words. It was an occasion on which the eventual success of our resistance depended, more than all else, upon the heart and hope of our great chiefs, on whose words all men hung, and in whose faces they looked for the assurance and encouragement which inspired and animated all beneath them. It was said of John Lawrence, at that time, that he was as calm and confident as if he had been contemplating only the most common-place events, and that Herbert Edwardes was in higher spirits, more natural and more unrestrained, than he had ever been known to be by men who had served with him in more quiet times. A great and ennobling faith was settling down in the breasts of our Panjabi chiefs. It had dawned upon them that it would be their work, not merely to save the Province, but to save the Empire.

History will take the measure of men’s minds in accordance with the extent to which they looked. upon this crisis, as a local or an imperial one, and directed their efforts to the suppression

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of the one or the other. Physically, it is known rarely to happen that men, who have a clear, steady sight to discern distinctly near objects have that wide range of vision which enables them to comprehend what is observable in the distance; and the faculty which, either on a large or a small scale, enables a man to grasp moral objects, both immediate and remote, is equally rare. General Hewitt’s small mind took in nothing beyond the idea that, as he lived at Mirath, it was his duty to save Mirath. But the great intellect of Sir John Lawrence grasped all the circumstances of the imperial danger, and held them in a vice. He had his own particular province in hand – carefully and minutely; no single post overlooked, no single point neglected. He knew what every man under him was doing, what every man was expected to do; there was nothing that happened, or that might happen, in the Panjab over which he did not exercise the closest vigilance; but the struggle for supremacy at his own doors never obscured the distant vision of the great imperial danger. He never domesticated his policy; he never localised his efforts. He never said to himself, “The Panjab is my especial charge. I will defend the Panjab. I have no responsibility beyond it.” He would have weakened the Panjab to strengthen the Empire. He would, perhaps, have sacrificed the Panjab to save the Empire. In this, indeed, the strength of his character – his capacity for government on a grand scale – was evinced at the outset, and, as time advanced, it manifested itself in every stage of the great struggle more signally than before344.

It was felt in the Pindi Council that, “whatever gave rise to the mutiny, it had settled down into a struggle for empire, under Muhammadan guidance, with the Mughul capital for its centre345. From that time, this great centre of the Mughul capital was never beyond the range of John Lawrence’s thoughts – never beyond the reach of his endeavours. Seen, as it were, through the telescope of long years of political experience, sweeping all intervening time and space, the great city of Dehli, which he knew so well, was brought close to his

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eyes; and he felt that he had a double duty. Much as he might. think of Lahor, Amritsar, or Peshawar, he thought still more of Dehli. He felt as lesser men would not have felt, that it was his duty in that emergency to give back to the Empire, in time of intestine war, all that he could give from that abundance of military strength which had been planted in the province at a time when the defence of the frontier against external aggressions was held to be the first object of imperial importance. Knowing well the terrible scarcity of reliable troops in all the country below the Punjab, and the encouraging effect of the occupation of Dehli by the rebel troops, he resolved to pour down upon the imperial city every regiment that he could send to its relief. From that time his was the directing mind which influenced for good all that was done from Upper India, working downwards to rescue our people from the toils of the enemy, and to assert our dominion under the walls of Dehli, where the great battle of supremacy was to be fought.

The march of the Guide Corps

And the first succour which he sent was the famous Guide Corps, which Henry Lawrence had designed ever to be ready for service – ever to be the first for action. It was at that time stationed at Hoti-Mardan, under the command of Captain Henry Daly. On the morning of the 13th, two officers, who had gone over to Naushahra to attend a ball which had been given at that station, brought to Hoti-Mardan tidings that the 55th Regiment at the former place had received orders to relieve the Guide Corps at the latter. All was then excitement and conjecture. No man knew the reason of the movement; no man. knew what had happened or what was coming. “No uproar,” it was said, “along the line of frontier. No incursion to repress. No expedition to join.” The story told, at six in the morning, was true; and two hours afterwards its truth was confirmed by the sight of the approaching regiment in the distance. About the same time an express came in from Peshawar, bringing orders for the Guide Corps to march at once to Naushahra. With the official orders came a private letter from Edwardes to Daly, which cast a terrible glare of light upon all that had before been obscure. “That you may better know how to act on the enclosed instruction to move to Naushahra, I write privately to tell you that telegraphic news of open mutiny among the Native troops at Mirath having reached us here to-day, we think a movable column should be assembled

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in the Panjab, and get between the stations that have gone wrong and those that have not, and put down further disaffection by force. It is obviously necessary to constitute such a column of reliable troops, and therefore it has been proposed to get the Guides and Her Majesty’s 27th Regiment together without delay as a part of the scheme.” So Daly at once mustered his Guides, and before midnight they were at Naushahra. He had not long laid himself down to rest, when he was awakened by an express from Cotton ordering the Guides to move upon Atak. At gun-fire they recommenced their journey, and before noon, after a trying march, under a fierce sun, they reached their destination, scorched and dried, but full of spirit and ripe for action. “The Panjab,” wrote the gallant leader of the Guides on. that day, “is paying back India all she cost her, by sending back troops stout and firm to her aid.”

From Atak, after securing the Fort, and holding it until the arrival of a detachment sent from Kohat, Daly marched, two hours after midnight, on the morning of the 16th, in the light of the rising moon, which soon was obscured by a blinding dust-storm. When it cleared away, the air was fresh and pleasant, and the corps marched on, a distance of more than twenty miles, until, at eight o’clock, it bivouacked in a grove of peach and apricot trees, which enabled them to dispense with tents. At midnight, after a few hours of early slumber, the trumpet-call was again heard, and they resumed their march in the cool morning air, through a beautiful country skirted by a range of verdant hills; and on the morning of the 18th they were at Rawalpindi.

May 18

There was nothing needed to stimulate a man of Daly’s high enthusiasm, but it was refreshing and invigorating to be, even for a little while, in close and familiar intercom se with such men as Lawrence, Chamberlain, and Edwardes – and a fourth, Hugh James, then acting as secretary to the Chief Commissioner, who had a noble spirit and a high intelligence worthy of the confidence of his great master. There is nothing more delightful than this attrition of ardent natures. Great men become greater by such sympathetic contact. It was a source of infinite rejoicing to Daly to learn that the Guides, which might have done great service as a part of the Movable Column in the Panjab, were honoured by being the first regiment selected to move down to the relief of Dehli. “The Guides, I believe,” wrote Daly in his journal

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on the 18th of May, “are to march down and to show to the people Native troops willing and loyal. I shall rejoice at this, and march down with all my heart.” And so they marched down – with a great enthusiasm stirring their gallant leader, and through him, all who followed; officers and men, moved by one common heroism. of the best kind. “I am making, and mean to make,” wrote Daly on the 1st of June, “the best march that has been heard of in the land!” And nobly he fulfilled his promise.

June 1–4

At this time he had reached Lodiana. In the early morning of the 4th the Guides were at Ambalah, and on the 6th they were at Karnal. There they found Mr. Le Bas and Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, who had escaped from Dehli, and were eager to punish some neighbouring villages, which were believed to have harboured insurgents, and to be full of people bent upon the plunder of the Faringhis. Eager as Daly was to push on to Dehli, and reluctant to destroy wholesale, in retaliation for what might only be an offence of the few, he for some time resisted the retributory eagerness of the civilians, but at length yielded to their wishes, and sent the Guides forward to the attack. The villagers fled in dismay; some were killed on the retreat; others were made prisoners; and soon the blaze of their burning houses could be seen for many a distant mile. But the mercy of the Christian officer was shown towards the helpless and unoffending; Daly saved the women and the children, and helped them to remove the little property they possessed.

The delay was unfortunate. The unwelcome duty thus forced upon the Guide Corps deprived it of the coveted honour of taking part in the first attack upon the Dehli mutineers. Had not the civilians, in that great zeal for the desolation of villages, which distinguished many, perhaps too many of them, before the year was at an end, arrested Daly’s onward march, he would have been present with his corps at the battle of Badli-ki-sarai. As it was, he marched into camp a day too late346.

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June 9

The Guide Corps at Dehli

The battle had been fought, but the corps, by the march alone, had covered itself with glory, and it was received on its arrival by the Dehli Field Force with ringing cheers. There were now two Native regiments in the British camp whom all men trusted – the Gurkahs under Reid, and the Panjabi Guide Corps under Daly. And soon it will be seen how gallantly they proved the fidelity that was in them. Indeed, on the very day of their arrival, the Guides went out, fresh as if they had slept a long sleep, and loitered through a cool morning, to give the Dehli mutineers a taste of their temper. The enemy were not prepared, on the day after the battle, to risk another great engagement; but, intent on not suffering us to rest, they sent out parties of Horse and Foot to attack our advanced position. The Guides went gallantly to the front. The sabres of their horsemen were crossed with those of the troopers of the 3rd Cavalry; but not long could the rebels stand the onslaught. The failure of the attack would have been complete, if it had not cost us the life of one of our finest officers. Daly was unharmed, though struck by a spent shot, and his horse killed in the encounter; but his second in command, young Quintin Battye, who had charged at the head of the Guides’ Cavalry, was carried mortally wounded from the field. The gallantry of his bearing throughout this fierce encounter had attracted the admiration of his chief; and Daly, when last he saw his lieutenant in action, had cried out with the irrepressible enthusiasm with which one brave man regards the bravery of another, “Gallant Battye! well done, brave Battye!” and soon afterwards a rebel came up within two yards of the English officer, and, after vainly endeavouring to bayonet him, discharged his piece into Battye’s body. The deed was amply revenged. A Subahdar of the Guide Corps cut the Sipahi down as he fired347.

Page 353

Death of Quintin Battye

And as the young hero lay dying, in grievous pain, on that night which was to be his last, a remembrance of the pleasant Argos of his school days mingling with the pride of the soldier and the great love of country which sustained our people, he said, with a smile on his handsome face, to the chaplain who was ministering to him, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori;” and so ended his brief and honourable career348.

Footnotes

336. Ante, p. 317, with reference to Lord Canning’s previsions.

337. Mr. Cave-Browne gives the following suggestive anecdote in his narrative. The incident occurred when he was at Amritsar, in the middle of June: “One of the most influential of the Sikh Sirdars was paying his usual visit of courtesy to the head civilian of the station. In the course. of conversation, the latest news from camp (Dehli) was exultingly mentioned, when the Sikh, seeming to pay little heed to what was generally received with so much joy, asked: ‘What news from Peshawar?’ ‘Excellent; all quiet there,’ he was told. ‘That,’ said he, ‘is the best news you can give me!’ ‘Why do you always ask so anxiously about Peshawar?’ the civilian said. The Sirdar did not at once reply, but, with much significance of manner, took up the end of his scarf and began rolling it up from the corner between his finger and thumb. ‘If Peshawar goes, the whole Panjab will be rolled up in rebellion like this.’ ”

338. Vol i., p. 19, et seq.

339. In 1849, Sir Henry Lawrence wrote to him: “Let me advise you as a friend to curb your temper, and bear and forbear with Natives and Europeans, and you will soon be as distinguished a civilian as you are a soldier. Don’t think it is necessary to say all you think to everyone. The world would be one mass of tumult if we all gave candid opinions of each other. I admire you sincerely as much as any man can do, but say thus much as a general warning.” In writing this, Lawrence wrote as one conscious of the same natural infirmity in himself. He had manfully struggled against, and in a great measure overcome it.

340. See, for an account of a previous mutiny of this regiment, ante, vol. i., pp. 203–12.

341. Ante, p. 317.

342. In the first volume of this History I observed, with immediate reference to the dissensions between Lord Dalhousie and Sir Charles Napier, that these conflicts of authority were generally regarded, by the more intelligent Natives of India, as proofs of weakness in the British Government, and that some regarded them as precursors of our downfall. I have since read the following confirmation of this opinion in the Correspondence of the Duke of Wellington: “Of this I am certain,” wrote the Duke to Lord Combermere, “that any public and confirmed difference between the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief is prejudicial to the public interests, and cannot be allowed to exist. It is prejudicial for this reason. It shakes the authority of Government to its very foundation; and while such differences continue, every little man, who takes part with either one or the other, becomes of importance. The interests of the party are the great object. Those of the public are laid aside and forgotten, and even injured with impunity.”

343. It may be mentioned here that the capital story, repeated in so many contemporary memoirs, to the effect that Sir John Lawrence, being at the whist-table, answered a telegraphic message from General Anson with the words, “Clubs are trumps – not spades; when in doubt play a big one” – originated in a joke of Herbert Edwardes. The story always was one of doubtful authenticity, as it was less likely that Sir John Lawrence than that General Anson would be caught at the whist-table. The fact is, that Lawrence, Edwardes, Charles Nicholson, and one or two others were together, when a telegram from Mr. Barnes was received, stating that there was some talk at Ambalah of intrenching, and not marching. Edwardes humorously suggested that a telegram should be despatched to “Major A. wherever he may be found,” saying, “When in doubt play a trump – act up to your own principles” – the belief being that General Anson had written the well-known work on whist by “Major A.” Charles Nicholson then suggested as an amendment the words, “Clubs are trumps, not spades.” Lawrence consented, and the pregnant sentence was despatched to Mr. Barnes, who, doubtless, communicated it to General Anson.

344. A fuller account of Sir John Lawrence’s internal policy is reserved for another chapter.

345. These are the words of Colonel Edwardes his Peshawar Military Report – a document of great interest and ability, and one most serviceable to the historian.

346. “The morning after the battle the Guides entered camp under the command of Captain Daly. They were already well known as one of the finest regiments in India. They were almost all of Afghan or Persian race, and consisted of three troops of cavalry, perhaps the best riders in our pay, and six companies of infantry armed with the rifle. They had marched in this, the hottest time of the ear, from near Peshawar to Dehli, a distance of five hundred and eighty miles in twenty-two days. Their stately height and military bearing made all who saw them proud to have such aid. They came in as firm and light as if they had marched only a mile.” – History of the Siege of Dehli, by One who Served there.

347. Subahdar Marban Singh. This gallant soldier was a Gurkah, “one of those sent down by Sir Henry Lawrence” to join the Guide Corps. He fell in action, some days afterwards, at the head of the first company, which he commanded. “The men,” wrote Daly to John Lawrence, “speak of him with teals and sobs.” He had two brothers also killed in action.

348. See Chaplain’s “Narrative of the Siege of Dehli.” [Quintin Battye was the second of ten brothers, all soldiers. In later years two of them gave likewise their lives for their country; one, Wigram, at Fathabad, in Afghanistan, charging at the head of the Guides, the 2nd April, 1879; the other, Richmond on the crests of the Black Mountain, 18 June, 1888. – G.B.M.]

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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