Sahib (46 page)

Their artillery was extremely well served. Their guns took us in the flank as well as directly, and their fire was continual. We were completely outmatched, and although we continued to fire steadily, our guns seemed completely unable to silence theirs. Their Armstrong guns threw heavier shot than ours, and their smoothbore guns had great range and accuracy, and caused great damage, especially among our horses and limbers.
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When the smoothbore battery ran short of ammunition it was withdrawn to collect more, and the ghazis seized the opportunity to charge. Both Indian battalions had now been in action for some time, and their Sniders were now hot and hard to load. Some of Jacob’s Rifles broke, and the grenadiers were soon swamped by ghazis. The 66th, which had been firing steadily, was eventually forced back, and a few survivors made a last stand. An Afghan artillery officer saw what happened next:

Surrounded by the whole of the Afghan army, they fought on until only eleven men were left, inflicting enormous losses on their enemy. These men charged out of the garden, and died with their faces to the foe, fighting to the death. Such was the nature of their charge, and the grandeur of their being, that although the whole of the ghazis were assembled round them, no one dared approach to cut them down. Thus, standing in the open, back to back, firing steadily and truly, every shot telling, surrounded by thousands, these officers and men died; and it was not until the last man was shot down that the ghazis dared advance upon them. The conduct of these men was the admiration of all that witnessed it.
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Burrows had gone into action with a little under 2,500 officers and men, and had lost twenty-one British officers, almost 300 British soldiers and 650 Indian troops killed. There were just 168 wounded, for most of the seriously hurt were butchered on the field or cut down during the agonising retreat to Kandahar. There were some parallels with the battle of Isandlwana, fought the year before, when a British army had been almost annihilated by the Zulus. Even the Martini-Henry could not be relied upon to stop determined attackers, whose sheer numbers meant that provided the survivors pressed on they would eventually swamp the defenders. Intelligence was poor, and a ‘savage’ enemy was gravely underestimated.

Yet the result was by no means a foregone conclusion: relatively small things tipped the balance. Had the smoothbore battery not been extemporised it would have had its own ammunition wagons, and so would not have had to pull back to collect ammunition. The British officer commanding the left-hand two companies of Jacob’s Rifles, which were the first to break, had been with the regiment for only a month, and there was no potent chemistry linking him to his men. The Afghan regular infantry had been shaken by the firefight, and had the withdrawal of the smoothbores not encouraged the ghazis to charge, it might have been the Afghans who flinched first. And had the Indian troops enjoyed the same firepower as their British comrades in arms, then the ghazis might well have been checked. The military ‘lessons’ of the Mutiny had cast a long and deadly shadow.

Both the Snider and Martini-Henry used at Maiwand fired heavy lead bullets with sufficient stopping power to check even the most determined ghazi. In December 1888 a new rifle, the bolt-action Lee-Metford, with the (then) small calibre of .303 inch was approved for use: it was the parent of the Lee-Enfield family, which remained in British service through both world wars and beyond. (Lee-Enfields, often skilfully made local copies, are still widely used on the frontier and in Afghanistan today. While younger men tend to favour assault rifles of the Russian-designed AK family, men of, shall we say, my generation, have a hankering for the range and reliability of the Lee-Enfield.)

Whatever the advantages in terms of range, accuracy and rate of
fire, complaints soon surfaced that the Lee-Metford’s ballistically efficient, fast-moving bullet, made of lead covered with a thin cupronickel jacket, could pass right through an adversary and, unless it hit a vital organ or shattered a main bone, it might not prevent him doing serious damage before he succumbed to the wound. The arsenal at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, produced a bullet that differed from the standard British version by having its nose left uncovered by the metal jacket. On impact the bullet mushroomed, ‘and inflicted a more serious wound than the normal bullet’. The bullet was known, from its place of manufacture, as a dum-dum (although the term is now generally misapplied to bullets which have been deliberately mistreated by having their noses cut off or flattened).

The heavy .455-inch bullets fired from officers’ revolvers on the frontier during this period were also generally made of unjacketed lead. Neither the dum-dum bullet nor the lead pistol bullet were designed to amplify the suffering caused by a hit, or to make it more difficult for wounds to be treated: both were intended to ensure that the impact of a bullet on a ‘savage’ adversary was optimised. Significantly, though, neither dum-dums nor unjacketed pistol bullets were used on the Western Front in the First World War. Indeed, at least one Indian army officer who found himself facing capture with unjacketed bullets in his revolver took pains to drop them inconspicuously, as he feared reprisals if caught with such an ‘uncivilised’ weapon.

In 1898 British troops on the North-West Frontier were asked to report on their Lee-Metfords, and there was widespread approval for the combination of the Lee-Metford and its dum-dum bullet. However, there was doubt as to whether the bullet’s soft nose really performed as expected. The 2nd Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment reported that one of its men had been killed by a dum-dum bullet, which had been captured from the British and fired from about a thousand yards away. It had passed right through the soldier’s body and lodged in the ‘D’ of his waist-belt, after previously passing through his mess-tin and thirteen folds of the rolled greatcoat of the man in front of him: the bullet was not distorted in any way.
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Finally, although the Mutiny had indeed encouraged the British to rely on firepower where they could, there were times, even at the
end of the nineteenth century, when the infantryman found himself doing business the hard old way and taking the bayonet to his Queen’s enemies. During the Tirah campaign of 1897–98, the British advance was checked at Dargai, where the steep heights, lined with sangars (stone breastworks), commanded a crucial pass. The Gurkhas fought part of the way forward, but the determined attempts by British battalions to get further were checked by fierce and accurate fire. Early on the afternoon of 20 October 1897, the 3rd Sikhs and 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders were ordered up. Lieutenant Colonel Matthias simply announced that ‘the Gordons
will
take the heights’ and his battalion went forward in the old style, pipes shrieking, officers wielding claymores and men with fixed bayonets. Piper George Findlater, born near Turriff in Aberdeenshire in 1892, was shot through both ankles about 150 yards in front of the enemy position, but continued to pipe his comrades forward with ‘Cock o’ the North’ and the ‘Haughs o’ Cromdale’. It took the Gordons about forty minutes, and a climb of about 1,000 feet, to take the heights. Findlater was awarded the Victoria Cross in the same investiture as Lance-Corporal Vickery of the Dorsets. He fought in the First World War, and died in 1942.

A
MONGST THE CHASTENING
failures at Maiwand was the cavalry’s disinclination to charge when ordered to do so. From Plassey onwards the principal function of British and the Company’s regular cavalry was to charge with the cold steel. Tasks like screening and reconnaissance, so important in Europe, were often left to auxiliaries or irregular horse. British cavalry were a comparative rarity on the subcontinent until after the Mutiny, and it was rare to see more than three regiments on campaign.

In dealing with enemy Indian cavalry, British troopers often found themselves at the same disadvantage as their comrades plying sword against
tulwar
on foot. Their opponents were generally expert horsemen and skilled swordsmen, and the razor-sharp
tulwar
usually out-performed the issue sabre. Sergeant William Forbes-Mitchell describes a regiment of British cavalry charging a regiment of Sikh cavalry:

The latter wore voluminous thick puggries round their heads, which our blunt swords were powerless to cut through, and each horseman had a buffalo-hide shield slung on his back. They evidently knew that the British swords were blunt and useless, so they kept their horses still and met the British charge by lying flat on their horses’ necks, with their heads protected by thick turbans and their backs by the shields; and immediately the British soldiers passed through their ranks the Sikhs swooped round on them and struck them
back-handed with their sharp-curved swords, in several instances cutting our cavalry men in two. In one case a British officer, who was killed in the charge I describe, was hewn in two by a back-handed stroke which cut through an ammunition pouch, cleaving the pistol-bullets right through the pouch and belt, severing the officer’s backbone and cutting his heart in two from behind.
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Surgeon John Henry Sylvester, then with the irregular Beatson’s Horse, thought that it was difficult to do much damage with a regulation sword. He saw one bounce off a sepoy’s skull, and another hit a man across the face with sufficient force to cut the top of his head off, yet it scarcely cut the cheek bone. But a sergeant had his bridle arm completely severed above the elbow, and a single sword-cut went right through the crupper of a trooper’s saddle to sever the creature’s spine.
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In the action at Ramnagar, ‘Captain Gall, while grasping a standard, had his right hand cut through by the stroke of a Sikh, which he delivered with the hissing sound of an English pavior driving home a stone.’ And when Henry Havelock found his brother, Will, killed at the head of HM’s 14th Light Dragoons in the same action, he had: ‘deep cuts on one leg, both arms, and the fingers of his right hand’. His head had also been lopped off, but, thought Havelock, he was already dead when this happened.
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In the same battle Sergeant Clifton, 14th Light Dragoons, ordered to advance while he and his comrades were dismounted and eating turnips in a field, slipped a turnip into his shako for later consumption: ‘his horse was shot under him, he was surrounded and the top of his shako cut to shreds and the turnip to slices without touching his head, and he escaped with a few slight scratches on his shoulders’.
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There was probably nothing intrinsically inferior in most of the British sword blades: the problem often lay in the way they were treated. Hodson’s Horse, as a
silladar
regiment responsible for procuring its own swords, used: ‘Sabres of light cavalry pattern … obtained from government stores at half price, and wooden scabbards covered with black leather and with metal shoes made regimentally.’
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As late as 1911,
Cavalry Training: Indian Supplement
showed sword drill being carried out by a viceroy’s commissioned officer
using what is evidently the British 1796 pattern cavalry sword with a locally made
tulwar
hilt. The problem was partly British affection for metal scabbards, and partly the tendency for regular troops to blunt their weapons by drawing and returning them in repetitious drill movements.

Some knowing officers procured Indian swords. John Nicholson was given a sword by the Sikhs and:

such a vast number were sent that selection was difficult. At length … the number was reduced to three, all of which appeared to be equally excellent. Nicholson was invited to take his choice of the three, and chose a straight one. Native swords are very seldom straight – they are generally curved. It was generally supposed that this sword was grooved inside and contained quick-silver, so as to increase the force of a direct blow.
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Arthur Wellesley usually carried a plain but well-proportioned Indian sword, and similar swords became so popular that in 1831 the regulation sword for British generals (still in use today) was an ivory-hilted pattern based on an Indian design. Other officers carried non-regulation swords of British manufacture. Charles MacGregor chose a sword for his birthday. ‘I want you to make me a birthday present, ie to give me a sword, for I have not got a good one,’ he told his parents. ‘So you must inaugurate my twenty-first birthday with a real “Wilkinson”. He has got the pattern I want.’ Not long afterwards he reported that: ‘My sword has just arrived, and is a beautiful blade, and well balanced. I like it very much; it is just what I wanted … ’.
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When Captain J. V. Lendrum of the 72nd Highlanders set off for the Second Afghan War he should have carried the regulation claymore, but had instead got Messrs Wilkinson to run him up a sword with a stout steel bowl guard and a stout, lightly curved blade: he was clearly a man who knew his business.
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In the Indian Army Memorial Room at Sandhurst is the sword of Lieutenant J. B. Edwards, made for him by the London sword-cutler Edward Thurkle in 1881. It has the three-bar steel hilt of the regulation light cavalry sword, but a mighty meat-cleaver blade.

However, Lieutenant William McBean, adjutant of the 93rd
Highlanders at Lucknow, stuck to his regulation claymore. When the courtyard walls of the Begumbagh palace were breached he rushed in and cut down eleven men. The general who presented him with the Victoria Cross congratulated him on the achievement, but the laconic McBean replied: ‘Tuts, it did’na take me twenty minutes.’ Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander also retained his claymore, and tells us that ‘I was always able to improvise a most comfortable pillow … by thrusting the hilt of my claymore inside my feather bonnet.’
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But there was dandyism as well as good sense in the selection of non-regulation weapons. The sword knot, in leather or braid, was attached to the hilt of the sword and intended to be looped round the wrist so that the user could deliberately drop the sword to use both hands on his reins, or could recover the weapon after a blow on the knuckles had made him drop it. During the Mutiny, dashing young officers (continuing a fad begun in the Napoleonic French army) preferred to use silk handkerchiefs. ‘One great sign of fighting with us is the production of pocket handkerchiefs on the part of the aides-de-camp and young officers on the Staff,’ wrote William Russell. ‘Not to dry their eyes with, but to fasten to the hilts of their swords in lieu of their sword knots, so that the trusty weapon may be lightly held and well, nor evade the valiant grasp … ’.
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For much of the period cavalry troopers carried a pair of pistols (flintlock until the 1840s and percussion thereafter) in holsters on either side of their pommel, and generally a carbine hanging from a shoulder belt or, latterly, in a leather bucket attached to the saddle. Carbines were usually used by dismounted cavalry, but were not terribly effective: their short barrels reduced range and accuracy, and one trooper in four had to hold the horses. At Delhi, Richard Barter’s men charged right on through the carbine fire of dismounted native cavalry to meet them hand to hand. Charles MacGregor saw the mutinous 10th Light Cavalry brusquely dealt with by the skirmishers of HM’s 61st Foot at Ferozepore.

You know how they say a dismounted dragon is about as effective as a goose on the turnpike road. The Europeans came down in skirmishing order and cleared the station of the beggars, not before they had murdered the veterinary surgeon. They cut at everybody they saw. The brigadier had a fight with
three sowars – of course he did for them, as he is an immense man and this is not his first scrimmage.
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Officers bought their own pistols. In October 1857 Fred Roberts told his parents that: ‘I should very much like a brace of pistols, what they call “over and under”, not too large … I don’t care how unfinished as long as the locks are good. These revolvers, I am convinced, are of little use. Mine always fails me.’ The following month he reported that ‘I have succeeded in getting a very nice one, sold at Mayne’s auction, so don’t send me any, as I am suited exactly.’
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Within a few years revolvers had become far more reliable, and officers of all arms carried sword and revolver as their personal weapons. Officers were still not issued with revolvers, and could purchase whatever pattern they chose provided it took the service issue .455-inch round, itself chosen because its phenomenal stopping-power would give even the most determined ghazi pause for thought.

Useful though they were as a last-ditch defence, pistols were always something of a liability. The rueful Colonel Armine Mountain, commanding a brigade in the Second Sikh War, admitted that:

On March 2nd we slept on the great island [on the River Jhelum] and I went down with my staff at daybreak to complete the operation [of crossing]. After about four hours we came back to breakfast. Then we called for our horses again and I was in the act of mounting when my bearer ran up with a double-barrelled pistol, I put it in my holster. One bang and I was a hopeless cripple. The ball went through the palm of my hand, passed slanting through, and came out under the wrist, breaking a metacarpal bone.
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He never recovered the use of his hand, but became adjutant general in India in 1849.

One of Ensign Wilberforce’s chums had a long struggle with ‘an arrangement he had designed to enable him to fire a double-barrelled pistol … with one hand’. No sooner was it ‘declared perfect’ than he tried it out, but ‘shot one of our own men through the foot, and had to pay compensation to the man for the accident’.
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During a false alarm in a camp near the frontier a furious lieutenant colonel awoke to see a raider at the foot of his bed, and immediately
pistolled the fellow, only to find that he had shot himself through the foot. The sword may have been more primitive, but it was undoubtedly far safer to the user.

Start to finish, British cavalrymen in India knew that their main function was to press home with their swords, be it against fellow cavalrymen, infantry or artillery, and they learnt that shock action on the battlefield was their prime
raison d’être.
Listen to a cavalry officer describing the performance of his arm at Assaye in 1803:

At this awful moment, when the enemy had succeeded in their attack on our right, which was so hard pressed as possibly to have been little longer able to sustain so unequal a conflict, the cavalry charged and made a dreadful slaughter. They also attached an immense body that surrounded the elephants of the principal chiefs who were posted in a
nullah.
However, owing to the difficulties of getting at them, all were killed and wounded, both Europeans and natives on our side, that attempted it … 

We then made another charge upon a body of infantry and guns. The enemy’s infantry faced us and received us with a severe [?] file firing as did their artillery with a terrible discharge of grape which killed numbers. We succeeded however in getting possession of their cannon, 70 field pieces and 4 howitzers and retaining them till our line of infantry came up.
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Just as the infantry charge depended on good leadership and iron discipline, so cavalry required real impulsion if they were to charge home, accelerating to ‘the utmost speed of the slowest horse’ before impact. With anything less than absolute determination on the rider’s part, horses lost impetus, the whole body slowed up, and one side (or perhaps both) flinched before contact. During the Mutiny, John Sylvester saw fifty of the 17th Lancers charge a body of cavalry ‘who, dreading the clash, hesitated, slackened their pace, halted, opened out, and fled. Some fell speared at once, the remainder were pursued seven miles.’
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An officer of 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry, reflecting on his regiment’s 1840 mishap, affirmed that:

Hesitation with cavalry verges on, and soon produces, fear, and then all is lost, for the charge to be effective, requires the
energy of body and soul of each individual trooper, to be conveyed again, by some occult influence, to his charger, so as to animate and inspire the animal with confidence while rushing into the battle. At such a moment, to be checked by even trivial causes is often disastrous, producing hesitation, ending in panic, amongst men who were the instant before full of high courage, ready and eager to ‘do or die’ in discharge of their duty.
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Captain Walter Unett of the 3rd Light Dragoons got so carried away by the excitement of the charge that he never really knew how he got across the river separating his squadron from the Afghans in an action near Tezin in 1842:

My squadron was ordered to support the Irregular Horse. So away we went, drew swords, and formed on their right. In our front was the bed of a river, about 15 or 20 yards broad with steep banks. Fisher and Bowles were my troop leaders. On the opposite bank were two of the enemy’s horse, with numbers in rear of them. When close to the bank, one of the men on the opposite side presented his matchlock to me. I could see along the barrel. It flashed in the pan. I turned to Fisher and said, ‘Misfired by Jove’. I never took my eyes off the rascal. I pushed my horse over the bank, charged across, and the only thing I did not recollect is how I got up the opposite bank, as my grey Arab cannot jump at all.

On seeing me charge, the enemy went about, and had got about 20 yards start on me. In an instant, however, I was beside the fellow, and at the pace I was going – about 20 miles an hour – without the slightest exertion passed my sword through his body.

I then made a thrust at his friend. The place where I overtook them was a steep slippery bank with a ditch full of water; and when pressing my sword to thrust at the fellow, [his horse’s] hind legs sunk in the ditch and he fell backwards upon me. The dead man lay upon my right and his horse in the ditch. The other man and his horse were scrambling up the bank, with his sword flashing in my face. I could touch his horse, and had he tumbled back he would have fallen on the point of my sword. He was killed within a few yards. I saw him
rolling on the ground, while one of my men was cutting at him.

Having had much the start of my squadron, I was now in danger of being ridden over by my own men, as they were rushing on; but my horse was active and strong and with little to carry, and after a few struggles he got up on his legs again. I never lost the reins, and was on his back again in an instant, and in about 200 yards regained my place again in the front and found my men cutting up the enemy in small parties … 

All the officers and men of our regiment distinguished themselves. Fisher and Bowes killed several men with their own hands, and Yerbury had a narrow escape of being killed. His clothes were cut and his horse received a deep sabre wound on the neck. We captured a few of their horses. One of our men sold one … to our Colonel for £30. My Sgt. Major caught one and I could have taken another, but I had something else to do just then.
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