Sahib (64 page)

The Ploughman settled the share

More deep in the sun-dried clod:-

‘Mogul, Mahratta, and
Mlech
from the North,

And the White Queen over the Seas –

God raises them up and driveth them forth

As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze;

But the wheat and the cattle are all my care,

And the rest is the will of God.’

K
IPLING
, ‘What the People Said’

I
F THE GREAT HEROES
of Empire have their statues and memorials, even if their names are no longer familiar, the tens of thousands of men, women and children who made the passage to India and left their bones there have, for the most part, gone as if they have never been. More than two million of them were buried in the subcontinent, in churchyards now imperilled or swamped by teeming cities, in cantonment cemeteries, roadside burial grounds or the great grave-pits on battlefields. Of the officers and men who fell in the four great battles of the Sikh War of 1845–46, Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon, most ‘lie in nameless and … in untraceable graves’.
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Colonel Patrick Maxwell, killed at Assaye in 1803 commanding the cavalry in the army commanded by Major General Arthur Wellesley, lies beneath a peepul tree on the
battlefield. A stone still marks his resting-place, but time and climate have effaced his name. And of the men who died with him in what was, proportionate to the numbers engaged, one of the Duke of Wellington’s bloodiest battles, there is no trace whatever.

Nor is there much enduring evidence of those killed by disease and the climate. A brick obelisk near the village of Jalozai, up on the North-West Frontier, once commemorated:

Major W. G. A. Middleton, Ensign J. St. G. Drysdale, Asst Surgeon S. Hope, 61 rank and file 13 Women, 15 children all of the 93rd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Who died of cholera at or near This spot during the month of October 1862,
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but it has long disappeared. The process of obliteration started long before the British left. Walter Lawrence remembered how:

sometimes one would come across waste and distant places, the solitary tomb of some gallant officer who had fallen fighting, but I never felt that this forlorn spot was British soil for ever; indeed, I always wished that the pyre rather than the grave had been our portion when the end came. The hot winds, the deluge of the rain and the relentless fig trees soon deal with these vain sepulchres. But even sadder was the sight of a moated and castellated hall, where once a soldier diplomat held high state, now desolate and ‘full of doleful creatures’. One night, driven by a pitiless rain and cold, I set my bed in such a hall, but the great bats and the black swarms of muskrats prevented sleep.
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A few of the great and the good who died in India had their bodies preserved for reburial in their homeland. Eyre Coote lies at Rockbourne on his West Park estate in Hampshire, but has a splendid memorial in Westminster Abbey, crowned by ‘a buxom young Victory, somewhat under-winged for her admirable plenitude’.
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Others returned home to find the long-awaited moment a curious anticlimax. Colonel and Mrs Muter sailed back after the Mutiny aboard the
Eastern Monarch,
which was carrying a cargo of 200 tons of saltpetre. The ship caught fire just off Portsmouth, and although all but seven of the passengers and crew were saved when she eventually
blew up, the last Mrs Muter saw ‘of the ship so long my home was in that tall, sulphurous column which had risen from the mine over which I had slept for many months’. The Muters headed straight for London,

where we found difficulty in obtaining a bed. It was Epsom Race week; the hotels were full, the metropolis thronged. The waiters looked suspiciously at our attire (though we had each bought a ready-made suit at Portsmouth), and I fear their suspicion was confirmed when they saw there was not an article of baggage on the cab. There was something dreary and disheartening beyond expression in such a return to our country … 
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Major Bayley was invited to a ball at Buckingham Palace and was presented to the Queen, ‘as was the case, I believe, with all field officers who had recently returned from the seat of war in India’. He enjoyed a long leave but then found himself posted to the depot at Chatham, ‘a most unsatisfactory piece of service; after two months of which, having received the offer of a civil appointment in London, I sent in my papers, and was gazetted out of the service on 18th April, 1859’
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Captain Griffiths discovered that the ‘Delhi heroes’ had become damned nuisances:

There was no marching past before Her Majesty at Windsor or elsewhere, no public distribution of medals and rewards, no banquets given to the leading officers of the force, and no record published of the arduous duties in which they had been engaged. Those times are changed, and the country has now rushed into the opposite extremes of fulsome adulation, making a laughing-stock of the army and covering with glory the conquerors in a ten days’ war waged against the wretched fellaheen soldiers of Egypt.
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The suave George Elers, who almost never put a foot wrong, was led astray by his Indian habits. In 1805 he was just back from India and visiting a family friend:

A bottle of Madeira was standing next to me at dinner, and I mechanically seized and poured about half a tumbler of it, according to custom, into water, as we do in India. Oh the
look of astonishment he gave! ‘Do you know, young gentleman, what you are doing? Why you might as well drink so much
gold.’
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Elers never rose above the rank of captain, and in an effort to secure the Duke of Wellington’s interest, offered him a present, only to be curtly informed that the duke ‘has no use for a Newfoundland dog’.

For NCOs and men the joy of return all too often chilled beneath dockside drizzle. John Ryder returned home to Leicester after the Sikh Wars, and was so changed that his parents did not recognise him. He bought his father a drink, and then another. But it was only when he said: ‘Well then, father, so you do not know me’ that his father actually knew who he was. The same thing happened with his mother, and it was not until Ryder said ‘Mother, you ought to know me’ that: ‘The poor old woman then knew me, and would have fallen to the floor, had she not been caught.’
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John Pearman came home with his regiment in 1853, and wrote how returning soldiers found themselves something of a raree show:

It was a fine day, but it seemed very cold to us. I thought I was never so cold with my cloak on. The pleasure steam boats from London came down with the roses of old England, dressed in white. They threw their pocket handkerchiefs to us, and some flowers, as the boats went round us, and kissed their hands, but they were not allowed very close.

After being quartered in the casemates at Chatham they were then

left to ourselves to be robbed, for on that night several men lost their medals and money. There was a continual scene of drinking, from seventy, eighty or ninety prisoners to be taken before the Colonel every morning for being absent and drunk.
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Frank Richards landed at Southampton, whence time-expired men were sent to nearby Fort Brockhurst to be issued with ‘a cheap ready-made suit … ’. But before setting off home to Wales:

we first said a lingering goodbye to one another over our mugs of neck-oil in the Canteen, and it was a queer experience being all in civilian clothes. When we first gathered around the bar we had a job to recognise one another: a man of my company
remarked to me that it was like a couple of caterpillars that have been bosom pals all their life, nibbling away at the same cabbage-leaf, day in, day out, and suddenly they begin to meet as moths or butterflies and begin to address each other as ‘Mr’ instead of Jack or Dick.
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Richards was called up as a reservist in 1914 and served with his regiment throughout the First World War, winning the DCM and MM, but scorning promotion.

In ‘Shilling a Day’ Kipling described the plight of ex-Troop Sergeant Major O’Kelly, waiting in the cold and wet by the door of the Metropole Hotel in Northumberland Avenue in London, in the hope that somebody might give him a letter to deliver. The poem concludes:

Think what ‘e’s been,

Think what ‘e’s seen.

Think of his pension an’ –

GAWD SAVE THE QUEEN.

Robert Waterfield, steadfast opponent of flogging, of drunken officers and unfeeling discipline, ended his own journal with just the same words, and Frank Richards, the eternal private soldier, admitted that when he heard of the death of King Edward VII he was as shocked as if he had lost a close family member. Few men who fought in India were sustained by any abstract concept of Empire, but they liked to feel that they were doing the monarch’s business. The men of the 93rd Highlanders often reflected, during the Mutiny, on how proud the Queen would be of their day’s work. They were usually monarchist in the same way that they were religious: by simple acceptance, without abstruse notions of politics or theology to get in the way.

A fortunate handful found their lives governed by ‘God above and duty below’. But for most men there was an unshakable, often edgily jingoistic, belief in the superiority of all things British laced into the conviction that his own regiment (even if down on its luck at the moment) was the best in the army (inter-regimental rivalry always being an important factor in combat motivation). In the claustrophobic world of the barrack room, as Nathaniel Bancroft
affirmed: ‘A soldier was nobody unless he had a comrade.’ Mates were comrades and brothers, accomplices and advocates, and the infantry section or gun detachment often fought as much for their comrades as against the enemy.

Many returning warriors – officers and men alike – never forgot India. When Richard Purvis died in 1885, doctor of divinity, justice of the peace for Hampshire and for forty-four years ‘rector of this parish’, his memorial plaque also remembered that he had once been a captain in the 30th Bengal Native Infantry. Major General Henry Daly received his knighthood in 1875 but told his old friend Sir George Lawrence that it ‘came with a deep shadow. The three to whom it would have been pride and joy knew it not’: over a short period he had lost his only brother, his mother-in-law and his wife. ‘My life in India seems a thing of yesterday,’ he told Lawrence, ‘and when I call up the incidents and
time,
it is passing strange, for until this dark blow came I felt no older or colder than when I landed a boy of seventeen.’
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The dog Bobby, veteran of Maiwand, came home to the 66th’s depot at Brock Barracks on Reading’s Oxford Road. Sadly, a cab wheel succeeded where
jezails
and Khyber knives had failed, and the terrier was run over. Harry Smith’s black Arab charger Aliwal (renamed from Jim Crow after the battle) carried him stylishly when he commanded the Northern and Midland Districts in the 1850s: he enjoyed galloping up to lines of infantry and stopping suddenly when he reached them. Smith was briefly considered for the post of commander in chief in the Crimea, but ‘impaired health and liability to excitement’ ruled him out. Fred Roberts’s little grey charger, Vonolel, died peacefully in 1899 at the age of twenty-seven and is buried in the grounds of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham in Ireland. Roberts himself died of pneumonia in France in 1914 while visiting Indian troops. His father, Major General Sir Abraham Roberts, of the Company’s service, had been born in 1784. Their two long lives arc out across most of the period described in this book.

Harry, the eldest son of Henry Havelock, would eventually die on Indian soil, as his father and uncle had. He received a VC for Lucknow on his father’s recommendation. It was resented by some,
not for this fact in itself, but because, as a staff officer, he had rallied troops and therefore cast an implied slur on their regimental officers. His baronetcy and VC were both gazetted in 1858, and he was also granted £1,000 a year for life. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1873, and then sat in Parliament as a Liberal Unionist MP. In 1897 he was visiting the North-West Frontier with a parliamentary commission, but had never acquired the habits of caution: he was sniped by an Afridi and bled to death.

For most officers and administrators coming home was a case of readmission into the middle classes: ‘one of ten millions plus a CSI [Companion of the Order of the Star of India]’, as Kipling was to put it.
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Their houses had Benares-ware brass trays and rugs made in Agra jail: there were
tulwars
in the hall stand, prodigiously tusked boars’ heads on the dining-room wall, and hog-spears rusting gently under the stairs. Generations of India hands knew that it would eventually happen to them, and speculated, in those sporting days and banjo evenings out on the
kadir
of Meerut, on what must come.

After years as you sit, perchance, in some less happy spot smoking your pipe before the fire, the old scenes shall rise again before you. You shall, it may be, take the dull grey road and cross the river in the dawn. You shall hear the piteous whine of the beggars, and the terrible cry of the lepers at the tollgate … You shall see the women washing in their red saris, the horses slipping on the creaking boats … You shall face rising sun, while before you stretches the dead white sand with purple line of grass and blacker sky above … 

You shall, in fancy, return once more when evening shadows fall, past streams of carts laden with sleepy contented people drawn by still more peaceful mild-eyed oxen. The
raiyet
at his plough, the well man singing to his cattle, as they labour at the well, ‘Ram Ram, my children, turn again, for the
chursa
is now full’ – they shall live in your thoughts again.
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