Sahib (43 page)

T
HE PRINCIPLE OF ATTACKING
first was not simply intended to enable a small, swiftly-moving British force to impose its will on an opponent and, using its superior cohesion, to act consistently faster than he could react. It also recognised the fact that it was not until the Mutiny that the British generally enjoyed superiority in firepower. Eyre Coote, fighting the wily Hyder Ali of Mysore, admitted that the odds were stacked against him because his opponent outmatched him in guns, making an artillery duel unwise, and always took steps to guard himself against a quick infantry assault.

His twenty-four and eighteen pounders commanding much more considerable distance than our light sixes and twelves give him an opportunity of attempting these distant cannonades with some idea of success, and Hyder always takes care that there is impeding or impassable ground between his army and ours; thus he is always sure of its being optional with him to draw off his guns in safety before our army can act offensively to advantage.
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If the British enjoyed an advantage in artillery on the coast, the further they got inland the greater the risk that, at the end of their long line of communications, they would encounter an adversary with heavier guns than they had been able to haul forward. Although neither Hyder nor Tipu were able to manufacture cannon using the Maritz principle (in which a cast barrel was precision lathed to drill
out the bore), their older ‘cast-on’ construction method (with the barrel cast around an inner mould that produced the bore) nonetheless made some excellent guns. Both sultans also imported French and Dutch guns, and when Seringapatam fell in 1799, 927 cannon were captured, ten times as many as were possessed by the attacking force. Maratha guns were even better, and included both heavy field guns and howitzers, beautifully made according to the latest techniques. A British officer who survived Assaye wrote of ‘a most dreadful and destructive cannonade from a hundred pieces of cannon’.
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Some of these were so good that they were taken into British service. Sikh artillery was formidable, its accurate and unremitting fire was a grim feature of both Sikh Wars.

There were times when enemy gunners opened fire too soon – at an impossible 3,000 yards at Arguam and a very optimistic 1,600 yards at Maharajpore – causing the gunners to become exhausted from sponging, loading and ramming, and the guns themselves to be very hot by the time the advancing British were within their most effective range. The barrels of brass and bronze guns, so popular in India, drooped and sometimes burst when they reached high temperatures. At Gujrat the Sikhs opened fire before Gough’s infantry was within their effective range, enabling Gough to halt them at a safe distance and then send for his own gunners: ‘the Sikh fire became feebler as gun after gun was dismounted and group after group of the gunners was destroyed’.
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Indian guns were often very well sited. At Maharajpore Harry Smith, who had seen more fighting than most men, thought that the Maratha guns were ‘most ably posted, every battery flanking and supporting the other by as heavy a cross-fire as I ever saw’. They fired roundshot, then canister as the range closed, and finally old horseshoes and scrap iron in the last minutes before the attacking infantry came up to handstrokes.
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John Shipp complained that the defenders of Bhurtpore put similar rubbish in their cannon to fire at his storming party. ‘Pieces of copper coins, as well as bits of stone, iron and glass,’ he wrote, ‘were dug out of the wounds of those lucky enough to escape.’
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So badly made was some of the ammunition fired by the Marathas that ‘the guns labour and bellow most dreadfully, and the rough surface of the balls tears the muzzle to pieces’.
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Nevertheless, some Indian guns were remarkably accurate. Henry Daly was at Multan, where:

I stood under my first fire of being shot. Brown and I had walked out to look at a battery the Sikhs were busy erecting, and a sound indescribable was heard over our head, and about ten feet in our rear near a bank, a cross between an 18 and 24-pounder fell slap between the horses of an artillery wagon; the shock floored one, but killed none. The distance from which this came could not have been less than 1¾ miles. It is a gun which, from his constant visits since, has attained great celebrity in camp, under the name ‘Long Tom’.
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The quality of Indian artillery meant that, in pitched battles against serious adversaries, it was rarely wise for the British to play at long bowls. True, they could generally count on moving light guns much faster than their adversaries. Brigadier ‘Bully’ Brooke, commanding the Bengal Horse Artillery at Mudki, briefed his men before the battle:

Now, my men, when at the gallop, you see me drop the point of my sword, so, go as if the devil were after you: when I raise it so, pull up: and when I give the flourish, so (and he gave a tremendous one indeed) come about and unlimber.
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When horse gunners were on the move they were not easy to stop. Bancroft describes how, when his detachment was clipping along at a gallop under fire:

a ball struck the pole horse of the wagon in which the writer was seated in the stomach, and in an instant the poor animal’s intestines were hanging about his legs. The writer called to the rider to inform him of his mishap … by saying ‘Tom, Tom, Snarleyow has turned inside out and his insides are hanging about.’ Tom shouted to the corporal leading the team: ‘Joe, Joe, pull up; Snarly’s guts are hanging about his legs.’ To which the corporal coolly made the answer, ‘Begorra, Tom, I wouldn’t pull up at such a time as this if your guts were hanging out.’
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Captain Lumsden of the Bengal Horse Artillery recalled that it took his battery just over two minutes to gallop half a mile, come into action, and fire a shot.

Horse gunners could still get about sharpish even when they were down on their luck. Young Garnet Wolseley saw his fellow Irishman, the legendary Captain Billy Olpherts, leading his battery into action at Lucknow. They were:

going as fast as their wretched equipment would admit of. First came dear old Billy himself, clad in the garments he had worn in the Crimean war, a fez cap and a Turkish grégo, the latter tied round his waist with a piece of rope. About fifty yards behind came his well known battery sergeant major in a sort of shooting coat made from the green baize of a billiard table; then a gun, every driver flogging as hard as he could; and another a long distance in the rear.

In the attack on Lucknow the horse artillery was used for close-range breaching of walls. Wolseley saw how Olpherts’s guns hurtled past the Sikanderbagh ‘unlimbered, and came into action against the Shah Najaf. I never saw anything prettier or more gallantly done in my life.’ The very memory was almost too much for him as he wrote. ‘Would that he were alive to read these pages,’ lamented Wolseley. ‘I wonder if there is a lending library in heaven?’
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In fact, although Olpherts’s gallantry won him the brevets of major and lieutenant colonel, as well as the VC (not to mention the nickname ‘Hell-Fire Jack’), he died in his bed, a full general and a knight, in 1902. Charles MacGregor met him in the 1860s, and wrote admiringly: ‘He is the bravest of the brave, incredibly daring, up with his guns to within grape-distance before he fired.’
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British gunners often had the advantage in point of accuracy. John Shipp, advancing with Lake’s army against the Marathas, saw how:

A most impudent fellow, on a fine horse, beautifully caparisoned, came within a hundred yards of our column shouting abuse, and now and then firing off his matchlock. At last he wounded one of the Native Cavalry, which so annoyed me that I begged his Lordship to let me deal with the fellow. ‘Oh, never mind him, Shipp,’ said his Lordship, ‘we will catch him before he is a week older.’ … An officer commanding one of the six pounders came up just then, and told his Lordship that if he gave him leave he would knock the boaster over first shot,
or lose his commission. ‘Well try,’ answered his Lordship. The man fired his matchlock at that moment and started to reload. The six pounder was unlimbered, laid, fired and the shot stuck the horse’s rump, passed through the man’s back and out through the poor animal’s neck and we said: ‘So much for the Pin.’
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When Havelock’s little army was making for Cawnpore it was confronted by the Nana Sahib’s army, apparently commanded by an individual who was gesticulating vigorously from the back of a richly caparisoned elephant. Captain Francis Maude, commanding the eight British guns, was urged to shoot at him.

Accordingly, I dismounted and laid the gun myself, a nine-pounder at ‘line of metal’ (700 yards range), and, as luck would have it, my first round went in under the beast’s tail and came out of his chest, of course rolling it over, and giving the rider a bad fall … It was said at the time that the man on the elephant was Tantia Tope, who afterwards showed some courage and a great deal of military aptitude, giving us a lot of trouble. But his fall that day certainly completed the panic of the enemy.
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The combination of mobility and accuracy often enabled British guns to shoot in the counter-battery role, concentrating their fire on the enemy guns which, if left unchecked, would do so much damage to the infantry. At Mudki this worked well, and Gough reported that: ‘The rapid and well-directed fire of our artillery appeared soon to paralyse that of the enemy.’
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Much the same happened at Gujrat, where Gough had almost a hundred guns (perhaps twice as many as the Sikhs), and was content to let them do their work before he sent the infantry forward. But at Ferozeshah even Bully Brooke had to admit that he had lost the artillery duel, and could only make effective use of his light pieces by getting closer. ‘Your Excellency,’ he yelled at Gough above the din, ‘I must either advance or be blown out of the field.’ At Sobraon it was Gough’s realisation that the artillery battle was lost that impelled him to order his infantry to assault. Arthur Wellesley attacked the Marathas at Assaye by swinging round to fall on their left flank, but they redeployed to meet him,
and he admitted that his own guns were badly mauled as they came forward: ‘Our bullocks, and the people employed to draw them, were shot, and they could not all be drawn on, but some were, and all continued to fire as long as they could be any use.’
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The ‘strike first’ principle committed the British to attacking, and the quality of Indian artillery generally meant that a sustained firefight was not in their interests. Accordingly, their infantry, both British and sepoy, usually advanced in column, to make it easier to move cross-country, then shook out into line within a few hundred yards of the enemy, and then pushed forward, perhaps stopping to fire a volley or two but, increasingly, being encouraged to ‘come at them with the bayonet’. At Buxar in 1764: ‘Major Champion ordered the right wing to advance, but not to give their fire until they could push bayonets: and they accordingly moved in with recovered arms … ’.
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The advance under fire with fixed bayonets was the hallmark of British infantrymen fighting in India: the ultimate pay-off for hauling him halfway across the world, and arriving on the enemy position, sweaty, powder-grimed and murderous; but it often decided matters.

However, before he put bayonet and butt to their ghastly work he had much to endure. During an advance of a mile in the 1840s, the average infantry battalion would be exposed to nineteen rounds of spherical case (air-burst ‘shrapnel’), seven round shot and ten rounds of canister fired by each of the enemy’s guns: this was certainly the rate of fire which the Bengal Horse Artillery expected to achieve.

Shrapnel, named after its inventor Lieutenant Henry Shrapnel, was first used in action against the Dutch at Surinam in 1794, and was not effectively copied by any European country for another twenty-five years. It consisted of a round cast-iron shell filled with black powder and musket balls. A wooden fuse filled with tightly packed gunpowder, lit by the flash of the explosion when the shell was fired, ignited the powder in the shell, scattering the balls it contained.
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The time of burst was regulated by cutting a piece off the shell so as to reduce the length of the fuse and thus the burning time. Shaving too much off would result in the missile exploding too close to friendly troops: the gunners were ‘cutting it a bit fine’. At Badli ke Serai Lieutenant Richard Barter, of HM’s 75th,

saw a Shrapnel shell burst exactly in the face of one of the companies of the right wing. It tore a wide gap and the men near it involuntarily turned away from the fire and smoke. I called out, ‘Don’t turn, men, don’t turn,’ and was at once answered ‘Never fear Mister Barter, Sir, we ain’t agoing to turn.’ And on they went, quietly closing up the gap made by their fallen comrades.
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Barter’s men were unlucky to receive such an effective hit. The unreliability of fuses meant that up to a quarter of shrapnel shells failed to burst as intended, and that even when they did, only an average of 10 per cent of their bullets hit target screens set up at ranges between 700–1,500 yards, the maximum effective range of shrapnel. At Lucknow the fuses of Captain Blount’s battery were often faulty, and one of the many that burst short mortally wounded Garnet Wolseley’s commanding officer, Major Banston.

An enemy who lacked shrapnel would simply fire more roundshot, or, instead of shrapnel, use ‘common shell’, a cast-iron globe filled with powder and ignited by the same fuse used for shrapnel. Common shell was, however, generally only fired by howitzers, which threw their projectiles with a lower velocity and higher trajectory than field guns. Shells were often visible in flight. Private Metcalfe tells us that: