Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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was reinforced after Ferozeshah, and while he paused to regroup he sent Harry Smith off to deal with a large Sikh detachment. Smith found them at Aliwal, where he won what he called a ‘stand-up, gentlemanlike battle, a mixing of all arms and laying-on, carrying everything before us by weight of attack and combination, all hands at work from one end of the field to the other’.84 The Sikh force included some of Avitabile’s best-trained battalions, who formed equilateral triangles – their equivalent of squares – when charged by HM’s 16th Lancers. Corporal F. B. Cowtan wrote that his troop of lancers
moved on like a flash of lightning, clearing everything before us, guns, cavalry and infantry. As for myself, I went through cavalry and infantry squares repeatedly. At the first charge I dismounted two cavalry men, and on retiring we passed through a square of infantry, and I left three on the ground killed or wounded … My comrade on my left, just as we cheered before charging, had his heart torn from his side by a cannon-ball, but my heart sickens at the recollection of what I witnessed that day. The killed and wounded in my squadron alone was 42.
After the first charge self-preservation was a grand thing, and the love of life made us look sharp, and their great numbers required all our vigilance. Our lances seemed to paralyse them altogether, and you may be sure we did not give them time to recover themselves. There was no quarter given or taken. We did spare a good many at first, but the rascals afterwards took their preservers’ lives, so we received orders to finish everyone with arms.85
When he heard of Smith’s victory, which did so much to restore sepoy confidence, Gough fell on his knees to thank God, and then moved on to attack the Sikh camp at Sobraon. He took it, as we have seen, on 10 February 1846, and the Sikhs asked for terms. By now the European portion of Gough’s force had been reduced, by battle casualties and sickness, and Hardinge’s terms were relatively generous: the Sikhs lost some territory, including Kashmir, and agreed to reduce the size of their army. This would avoid outright annexation, or running the Punjab as a ‘subsidiary state’ with the Company’s troops helping local landlords extract taxes from their peasants. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lawrence was appointed resident at the court of Dalip Singh (whose mother was regent), and British agents were established in other major towns. There was an air of genuine optimism. Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes, one of the great soldier-administrators of the era, recalled:
What days those were! How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances: Edwardes to Bannu, Nicholson to Peshawar, Abbot to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else, etc, giving us a tract of country as big as most of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these, ‘Settle the country, make the people happy, and take care there are no rows’.86
But there were rows aplenty. The Company sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh for £3 million, but its Sikh governor refused to give it up until British troops arrived. It was discovered that the regent and her adviser, Lal Singh, were involved in the plot, and both were removed from power and replaced by a Council of Regency. Hardinge, meanwhile, had reduced the native army by 50,000 men to save money, despite furious protests from Gough, and then returned to England, being replaced by the Earl of Dalhousie. No sooner was Dalhousie installed in Calcutta than war once more flared up in the Punjab. Two British officials were sent as resident magistrates to the fortress city of Multan, accompanied by Khan Singh, the city’s new governor. Mulraj, the outgoing governor, a man with a reputation for honesty, received them courteously. But both were attacked and badly wounded by the garrison, and were then butchered the following day, showing, at the last, a courage that was to inflame their countrymen.
It is impossible to be certain of Mulraj’s role: he was probably a decent but weak man overtaken by events. However, over the months that followed Multan became a magnet for disaffected Sikh zamindars and dismissed officials, out-of-work soldiers, and adventurers like the Baluchis and Pathans encountered by Major James Abbot, ‘who, at all times, prefer military service to agriculture’. In September an attack on Multan by Major General Whish failed, and there was a general rising across much of the Punjab. Dalhousie’s nerve did not fail him, and his directive to Gough, written on 8 October 1848, deserved quoting as an example of one of the clearest statements of intent that a military commander could receive:
As long as there is a shot or shell in Indian arsenals, or a finger left that can pull a trigger, I will never desist from operations at Mooltan, until the place is taken and the leader and his force ground if possible into powder … I have therefore to request that Your Lordship will put forth all your energies, and have recourse to all the resources which the Government of India has at their command, to accomplish this object promptly, fully and finally.
Gough was permitted to fight the Sikhs elsewhere if he thought it necessary, but he was reminded that Multan and its defenders ‘are the first and prime objects of our attention now’.87
Multan was taken by storm in January 1849, its capture accompanied by a spree of looting and killing which so often disfigured the aftermath of an assault. Captain John Clark Kennedy of HM’s 18th Foot, serving on Major General Whish’s staff, described how bloody retribution was followed by ritual commemoration:
The bodies of the two political officers, [Mr Patrick Alexander Vans] Agnew and [Lieutenant William] Anderson, who had been murdered by Mulraj’s men, were now disinterred from their graves outside the city and carried back into it, not through the gate by which they had entered and through which they had been driven out in ignominy and contempt but over the ruins of massive works which had crumbled into dust under the guns of their fellow countrymen. Their brother officers stood round their graves. An English chaplain performed the last rites. The British flag was flying over the highest bastion and the farewell volleys, echoing through the ruins of the citadel, must have reached the ears of Mulraj himself, a prisoner in our camp.
Mulraj was taken to Lahore, court-martialled, found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged but, seen as ‘the victim of circumstances’, was banished for life.88
While operations against Multan were ongoing, Gough fought a scrambling cavalry battle at Ramnagar, and crossed the Chenab. But an attempt to engage the Sikh army on favourable terms miscarried, probably because of poor staff-work. On 13 January 1849 he went head-on at a strong Sikh position in close country at Chillianwalla, where one of his battalions, HM’s 24th, took the battery to its front ‘without a shot being fired by the Regiment or a musquet taken from the shoulder’, which even Gough described as ‘an act of madness’.89 It could not hold the ground that it had captured, and was driven back with the appalling loss of fourteen officers killed and nine severely wounded; 231 men killed and 266 wounded.90 To make matters worse, a cavalry brigade, with two experienced regiments in it, fell victim to an almost inexplicable panic. At the end of a difficult and depressing day Gough had to fall back to Chillianwalla for water, abandoning not only the captured Sikh guns but also four of his own.
Gough’s bulldog approach had already aroused criticism, and the losses of Chillianwalla, over 2,300 in all, provoked a storm of protest in both India and Britain. Dalhousie wrote that Gough’s conduct was beneath the criticism of even a militia officer like himself, and the British government decided to replace Gough with Napier. ‘If you won’t go, I must,’ declared the Duke of Wellington. But Gough had settled matters before Napier arrived. On 21 February he attacked the Sikhs at Gujarat, and this time he did not send his infantry in until his gunners had done their work properly. The Sikhs were decisively beaten for a loss of only 800 British casualties. The pursuit rolled on to Rawalpindi on 14 March and Peshawar on the 21st. Gough left the country accorded his old honours as commander in chief, promoted to a viscountcy and given the thanks of Parliament. Even the satirical magazine Punch managed an apology:
Having violently abused Lord Gough for losing the day at Chilianwalla, Punch unhesitatingly glorifies him for winning the fight at Gujerat. When