Sahib (42 page)

The real importance of promotion to captain – which, in the Company’s forces, could generally be accomplished only by seniority – was that it made an officer eligible for brevets. An enterprising subaltern might have so many recommendations behind him that on the day his captaincy materialised the promised brevet would at once kick in. Henry Daly wrote of the brave and popular Lieutenant Henry Norman that: ‘On the day of his captaincy he will be Major,
Lieut-Colonel, CB, perhaps full Colonel. He deserves it all and more.’
⁸¹
Fred Roberts at last gained his captaincy in 1860, when the Company’s army was absorbed by the British, and his long-promised brevet majority was gazetted that very day, with a lieutenant-colonelcy not far behind it. Charles MacGregor was also ‘promised my majority on getting my company [i.e. being made a captain] … directly I am a captain I shall be a major also, and cannot possibly get anything lower than a “second in command” [of an irregular regiment] on 700 rupees [a month]’.
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As a very young captain Garnet Wolseley kept being recommended for brevet promotion, but the military secretary regretted that he did not yet have the minimum of six years’ service that the rank required:

as Captain Wolseley has only been about three years and six months in the service, he is ineligible under the regulations to be promoted to the rank of Major, for which otherwise, in consideration of the service described by Sir Harry Jones, he would have been happy to have recommended him.
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A captaincy, brevet or substantive, also made an officer eligible to become a Companion of the Order of the Bath if properly recommended. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that a wide range of honours and awards became available for British and Indian troops. For most of the period the Bath, reorganised into three grades, Companions (CB), Knights Commander (KCB) and Knights Grand Cross (GCB), was the only honour generally available to British officers, although there were occasional baronetcies (like Harry Smith’s for Aliwal) and peerages (like Hugh Gough’s for the First Sikh War) for the very senior.

Henry Havelock, for so long languishing in under-promoted piety, strode out to glory at the very end of his life. He was knighted on 16 September 1857, still in his substantive rank of colonel, and wrote to his wife in uneasy anticipation that: ‘I do not … see my elevation in the
Gazette,
but Sir Colin addresses me as Sir Henry Havelock.’ He was promoted major general by seniority three days later, and on 26 November it was announced that he would be made a baronet. News of his death reached London before the letters
patent for his baronetcy had been made out, but the government at once granted Lady Havelock the rank of a baronet’s widow, and quickly conferred a baronetcy on his eldest son. Moreover, ‘it was resolved to erect a statue of Havelock, on the site most cheerfully granted by the Government in Trafalgar Square, side by side with that of our greatest naval hero’.
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There was a far less close association between rank and reward during the period than would be the case by the mid-twentieth century. On the one hand General James Stewart Fraser of Ardachy, a Madras cadet of 1799, major general in 1838 and a full general in 1862, had a long and distinguished career, largely on the political side (he was Resident at Hyderabad from 1839–52). But he retired with only one campaign medal and no decoration: the CB which might eventually have materialised for Hyderabad evaporated after a row with Dalhousie. On the other, though, Louis Cavagnari was knighted as a major, and Robert Sale made a GCB as a colonel.

Most spectacularly of all, as a reward for rescuing prisoners from deepest Khiva in 1842, Lieutenant R. C. Shakespear became a knight bachelor (a knight, but of no specific order, and thus with no breast star to wear) and thus Sir Richmond Shakespear, a name so sonorous that his parents must have shown rare perception. He then rescued yet more prisoners in Afghanistan, but a grateful government did not quite keep up with his achievements, and General Pollock told him that:

It may be that the value of your services on the last mentioned occasion has not been understood, otherwise it is possible that you would have received some honorary distinction at the close of the campaign, but I still hope that on promotion to a company you will receive a Brevet-Majority & the decoration of the Bath.
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In fact his brevet majority did not appear until 1848 as a reward for his services in the Second Sikh War, and the CB clattered in many years later.

Regiments might strike unofficial medals for brave soldiers, British or Indian. In 1837 two orders – the Order of British India and the Indian Order of Merit – were created for Indian troops only:
the former awarded to officers, and the latter a bravery decoration available to all ranks. Both brought pay increments, underlying the way in which honour and material reward were so closely linked. There was no all-ranks award for the British until the institution of the Victoria Cross in 1856; and in 1912 this was made accessible to Indian troops as well. It, too, brought an annual gratuity of the (then worthwhile) sum of £10. The Distinguished Conduct Medal, a bravery award for non-commissioned British personnel, and also conferring a gratuity and pension increment, appeared in 1854, and the Distinguished Service Order for officers, with no money but the most handsome gilt and enamel cross, arrived in 1886.

In the years that the VC was the only all-ranks gallantry award it was given more liberally than would later be the case. In 1867 Assistant Surgeon Campbell Douglas and four men of HM’s 24th Foot were awarded the VC for making three perilous trips through the surf of the Andaman Islands in a successful effort to rescue a party of soldiers landed in search of some sailors who had presumably been killed by hostile natives. They were not ‘in the presence of the enemy’ and men have recently been denied the VC for that very reason. However, in 1860, Hospital Apprentice Thomas Fitzgibbon gained his cross in a way that would become familiar a generation later. When HM’s 67th assaulted one of the Taku forts at the mouth of the Pei-Ho River in China, he dashed out to tend a wounded Indian stretcher bearer, and then crossed the fire-swept glacis to help another man although he himself was hit. He was just fifteen years and three months old.

Campaign medals or, in the case of lesser operations, bars worn on the ribbon of India General Service medals, were awarded to all ranks who qualified for them. Bancroft proudly logged his haul: four medals and eight bars: two medals for the Sikh Wars, one for the Mutiny, and an India General Service Medal. John Pearman was pleased to find that the medal for the First Sikh War was suspended from a ribbon with the colours of the Waterloo medal reversed, and came, in his case, ‘with twelve months’
batta
and prize money, £112 shillings and sixpence’.
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It was a telling quirk that while British and Indian troops generally received campaign medals in silver, camp followers had them in bronze.

The rules about appropriate qualifying service were rigorously, and sometimes insensitively, applied, and could often cause unhappiness. Private Henry Metcalfe’s 32nd Foot had been part of the original garrison of Lucknow, and thus the coveted ‘Defence of Lucknow’ clasp was secure. But then his comrades:

had the mortification to hear that we were not to participate in the final capture of Lucknow, us that defended British honour there and when we nearly lost the best part of our regiment. Yes, it was hard. It deprived us of six month’s
batta
or field pay and another slide on our medal. If we had been a Highland regiment we would be allowed to remain and partake in the attack. Yes, little band, it was hard that you should be deprived of this honour … For the defence of Lucknow my regiment was made Light Infantry and a small brass ornament to wear in our caps. We go one years service without pay and the Black Sepoys who remained faithful to us all got promotion and three years service with the order of merit and pay. Mark the distinction.
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There was also great resentment that it often took unreasonably long to award campaign medals. Captain Charles Griffiths and the survivors of HM’s 64th Foot received their Mutiny medals at Plymouth citadel in 1861, exactly four years after the storm of Delhi. ‘There was no fuss or ceremony,’ he recalled, ‘but I recollect that those present could not help contrasting the scene with the grand parade and the presence of the Queen when some Crimean officers and men received the numerous distinctions so lavishly bestowed for that campaign.’
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Decorations and medals did more than reward an achievement or mark participation in a dangerous venture. Throughout the period the full-size awards, or more rarely their miniatures or ribbons, were worn for everyday duties, and were part of a man’s tribal markings. There was also a clear understanding that gallantry awards did not simply reward past deeds: they helped ensure a brighter future. Fred Roberts’s gallant attack on the sepoy colour-party conferred no tactical advantage, but the VC it earned him did him no harm at all.

Charles MacGregor was wholly open about the connection
between medals and promotion. ‘I have made up my mind to get the Victoria Cross,’ he wrote in 1857. ‘When I go out to reconnoitre the camp or position of the enemy I never feel a bit afraid of death itself, but I do feel afraid of what may come after death.’ At the end of the Mutiny, although he had been recommended for the award twice, he regretted that his ‘greatest ambition was yet unaccomplished – namely the Cross … I know many men who have got it for doing less than I would not mind doing half-a-dozen times.’ Posted to China for the 1860 campaign, he perked up at once: ‘I shall have another chance of the Victoria Cross.’ ‘Medals are a great nonsense,’ he wrote during the campaign itself, ‘but they do tell in your favour.’ He was badly wounded leading another flat-out charge on his twentieth birthday, and hoped that this might clinch his VC: but he was unlucky again. He fluttered like a stormy petrel through the smoke of campaign after campaign, repeatedly wounded, but with the VC always eluding him. In 1869, with campaigns in Abyssinia and Bhutan just under his belt, he wrote:

I hope either to get a CB or a C[ommander of the Order of the] S[tar of] I[India] for Bhutan, as I was specially recommended eight times, thanked by the Commander-in-Chief and Governor-General, and twice wounded in that campaign. I mean to find out whether they mean to include Bhutan in the frontier medal every one says they are going to give, and if not, I shall invite Lord Strathnairn [formerly General Sir Hugh Rose, the commander in chief] and General Tombs to use their influence to get it for us. If they give this, and one for Abyssinia, and I get CB or CSI, I shall have five medals, which will be pretty good for twelve years service.

He died a knight, but still without a gallantry award.
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T
HE SECOND BROAD PRINCIPLE
affecting warfare in the subcontinent was that it was not until the Mutiny that British triumphs stemmed directly from technological superiority. The first century of British success came neither from superior weaponry which allowed them (as was the case in some colonial clashes elsewhere) to mow down the enemy from a safe distance, nor from skilled generalship, which featured an array of cunning turning movements or surprise attacks. There was an early recognition that in all but the most absurd numerical inferiority, the British ought to attack without delay and get to close quarters as soon as was practicable.

Captain Eyre Coote was a member of Clive’s council of war before Plassey, and his words might have been graven in stone over the gates of Addiscombe. ‘I give it as my opinion,’ he declared, ‘that we should come to an immediate action, and if that is thought entirely impossible, then we should return to Calcutta, the consequence of which will be our own disgrace and the inevitable destruction of the Company’s affairs.’
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Arthur Wellesley took much the same view, telling Colonel James Stevenson during the Assaye campaign that ‘the best thing you can do is to move forward yourself with the Company’s cavalry and all the Nizam’s and dash at the first party that comes into your neighbourhood … A long defensive war would ruin us and answer no purpose whatever.’
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A century later, Fred Roberts argued that:

It is comparatively easy for a small body of well-trained soldiers … to act on the offensive against Asiatics, however powerful they may be in point of numbers. There is something in the determined advance of a compact, disciplined body of troops which they can seldom resist. But a retirement is a different matter. They become full of confidence and valour the moment they see any signs of their opponents being unable to resist them, and if there is the smallest symptom of unsteadiness, weariness or confusion, a disaster is certain to occur.
⁹²

When Captain G. J. Younghusband wrote
Indian Frontier Warfare
in 1898, he declared that:

It has become an axiom sanctified by time, and justified by a hundred victories, for a British force, however small, always to take upon itself the role of the attacking party. From the battle of Plassey downwards has almost invariably brought success.
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And in his influential book
Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice,
Charles Callwell agreed, writing that: ‘Asiatics do not understand such vigour and are cowed by it.’
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It was in fact a serious error to attribute the success of prompt British attacks to the enemy’s race, rather than his culture. Indeed, in 1942 the British lost Malaya to an Asiatic enemy who did precisely what they themselves had regarded as the guarantee of their success in India: the Japanese attacked whenever possible and pressed to close quarters. But against an opponent who lacked a single, determined commander, and whose force was often composed of heterogeneous parts, the instant offensive had much to recommend it.

However, it did not always work. In June 1857, Henry Lawrence was told that a large party of mutineers had reached Chinhut, about eight miles east of his Residency at Lucknow. He was well aware of the ‘strike first’ principle, and on the 30th he took part of HM’s 32nd Foot, two companies of sepoys, some Indian Irregular Horse and a few European volunteer cavalry, together with a battery of British-manned guns, a battery and a half of Indian-manned guns and an elephant-drawn 8-inch howitzer – about 700 men in all – to meet them. The little column came under accurate artillery fire as it approached Chinhut, and although Lawrence’s guns replied, with
the 8-inch howitzer making very good practice, they could not check a force that outnumbered them perhaps ten to one. John Lawrence, riding with the volunteer cavalry that day, saw how:

It was one moving mass of men, regiment after regiment of the insurgents poured steadily towards us, the flanks covered with a foam of skirmishers, the light puffs of smoke from their muskets floating from every ravine and bunch of grass to our front. As to the mass of troops, they came on in quarter-distance columns, their standards waving in our faces, and everything performed as steadily as possible. A field day or parade could not have been better.
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The mutineers were doing exactly what would have been expected of them if their officers had still been British, coming on quickly in column and not getting bogged down in a firefight. Lawrence’s Indian-manned guns overturned (by design or accident) trying to get across the road embankment; the 32nd lost its commanding officer and about a third of its men, and many of the loyal sepoys made off. The howitzer had to be abandoned, and the column straggled back towards Lucknow: had it not been for a brave charge by the volunteer horse most would have been killed.

The retreat was illuminated by some flashes of bravery. Private Henry Metcalfe of HM’s 32nd heard one of his mates, badly wounded in the leg, announce: ‘I shan’t last long, and I know I would never be able to reach Lucknow.’ He told his comrades to leave him, and stayed behind, loading and firing steadily until he was overwhelmed.
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The action at Chinhut cost Lawrence 365 casualties, almost half of them British: as no quarter was given, the number of dead, including 118 Europeans, was depressingly high. Henry Lawrence never forgave himself for risking the battle, and at the point of death he begged Brigadier James Inglis, who succeeded him in military command, to ‘ask the poor fellows I exposed at Chinhut to forgive me’.

‘In principle Lawrence was no doubt right to take the offensive,’ thought Sir John Fortescue, ‘but he should have left the business of commanding in the field to his officers.’ The troops did not leave Lucknow until the sun was up; they were ‘fidgeted backwards and
forwards to no purpose’; and many muskets had been left loaded too long and did not fire when the time came. In contrast, the Indian commander, ‘whoever he may have been, knew his business’.
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