Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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confidential assistants, holding his horse and helping him into the saddle, running errands for him in barracks and standing close by him in the field to relay his orders and interpret other drumbeats. They administered floggings, under the eyes of the drum-major, sergeant major and adjutant. The humiliating ritual of drumming a disgraced soldier out of barracks involved the man, his badges and buttons cut away, being marched through the camp to the tune of ‘The Rogue’s March’:
Twenty I got for selling my coat
Twenty for selling my blanket
If ever I ‘list for a soldier again
The devil shall be my sergeant
He was then kicked through the barrack gate by the most junior drummer – the whole ghastly process sometimes being known as ‘John Drum’s entertainment’. Useful though they were in barracks and the field, drummers had a reputation for being badly behaved. Captain Albert Hervey of the 41st Madras Native Infantry recalled that:
While passing through a village early one morning there were a number of ducks waddling along to a piece of water hard by. Our drummers came right amongst them, several were snatched up unobserved, and crammed into the drums. At another time, as we passed through a toddy-tope, some of them contrived to get away and imbibe plentifully of tempting beverage. They are strange rascals are our drummers, and up to all kinds of mischief.3
Darby Fulcher wears a waist-length red serge ‘shell jacket’ closed by ten pewter buttons, with blue standing collar and pointed cuffs. The change to blue is recent; the regiment’s facings were once black, accounting for its nickname ‘The Dirty Half-Hundred’. His grenadier comrades show their elite status by crescent-shaped red shoulder wings edged with white, and Fulcher, in addition, is liberally chevroned with white drummer’s lace. His flat-topped Kilmarnock cap has a white canvas cover and his regiment’s number in a brass Roman numeral ‘L’ above its peak. Dark blue woollen trousers with a narrow red stripe fall over square-toed black boots, issued on the assumption that they will fit either foot. Fulcher’s function means that he is spared the white pipe-clayed cross-belts, supporting an ammunition pouch on the left and bayonet on the right, worn by his comrades; but, like them, he carries a circular water-bottle on a leather strap across his left shoulder and a white canvas haversack slung across his right. A short sword with a brass hilt sits over his left hip, and it is entirely in character for him to have sharpened it.4
His side drum hangs, for the moment, over his right shoulder, skin flat against his bent back, and he holds it there by one of its pipe-clayed cords.5 When he needs to use it he will hook it onto the drum carriage, the broad white belt that crosses his right shoulder, but there is no sense in doing that too soon, for the drum will rub against his left thigh and gall his knee, where it balances when his leg is bent.
Fulcher’s musical training derives from Samuel Potter’s book The Art of Beating the Drum, first published in 1810, but still passed on, becoming greasier with age, to successive drum-majors in the 50th. Potter advises:
Before a boy starts practicing a drum place him perfectly upright and place his left heel in the hollow of the right foot. Put the drum sticks into his hands, the right stick to be grasped by the whole hand 2½ inches from the top, similar to grasping a sword or stick when going to play Back-sword. The left hand one to be held between the thumb and forefinger close in the hollow, leaving the top as much protruding resembling a pen when going to write.
Fulcher begins each beat with his elbows level with his ears and the drumsticks meeting in front of his nose. He has long learnt ‘to beat the drum with ease to himself, and it will appear slight those who see him as it ought to be, the pride of every drummer to beat his Duty with an Air and Spirit’. He began by learning the Long Roll, and then went on to a series of rolls, flams, drags, strokes and lastly the paradiddle, a roll beaten with alternate sticks.
The liturgy of his trade is now burnt into his young brain, and he can rap out all the calls of barrack life and field service, quickly telling his captain what call the commanding officer’s drummer has just begun. He knows that on a normal morning in the field, with no marching or fighting to be done, he will beat Camp Taps, ‘the First Signal on the Drum; it must be repeated from Right to Left of the Line by a drummer of each regiment and return back from Left to Right previous to the reveille’.6 On campaign, however, the jaunty drag and paradiddle of the General is usually appropriate, and its message is blunt: officers and men are to rise at once and prepare to fall in under arms, for there is business at hand.
But this morning of 10 February 1846, the officers and men of the 50th fall in silently, without beat of drum, before daybreak, and set off in column, on a front of four men, company following company with short gaps between them, across a flat countryside liberally dotted with scrub. The morning smells of spice, smoke, urine and dung, shot through with a tang of tobacco – for many officers, even at this early hour, cannot be parted from a cheroot.
Although the politics of the war mean little to Darby Fulcher and his comrades, nobody present that morning has any doubt that this conflict (later known as the First Sikh War) is a very serious contest between the armies of British India and the Sikhs, who had crossed the River Sutlej, which bordered their territory, in December 1845. They would be beaten, if that is quite the right word for such doggedly fought, bloody and inconclusive battles, at Mudki on 18 December and at Ferozeshah three days later. In these two actions the 50th lost a total of 244 of its officers and men killed and wounded, amongst them the grenadier company’s other drummer. The regiment fought in the altogether more successful battle of Aliwal on 28 January 1846, when another eighty-six men were hit.
The dull odour of bodies in clothes changed too rarely is now heavily overlaid with the sulphurous, bad-egg stink of black powder, for British infantrymen still ply their trade with a smooth-bore muzzle-loading musket, and in the process smear both unburned powder and its greasy residue all over themselves.
This is not quite the same musket carried at Waterloo, for in September 1841, earlier than most, the regiment received muskets with the new percussion lock. A man no longer has to tip powder into the musket’s priming pan, snap the steel shut over it, and hope that when he presses the trigger the flint will strike sufficient spark to ignite the priming and go on to fire the main charge. He now places a small copper cap filled with fulminate of mercury onto the nipple fitted to his musket-barrel, just where the touch-hole used to be. When the trigger is pressed the cock falls to burst the cap and, barring the most uncommon accident, fires the musket. The 50th, drawn up in line two ranks deep, can loose off four volleys a minute. Although a soldier has little chance of hitting an individual aimed at 200 yards away, volleys can do shocking damage at close range. However, any experienced officer trudging forward through the bushes in the half-light will tell you that battles are not won by endless volleying. Indeed, some harbour the conviction that firing actually defers a decision, and it is important to bring the bayonet – sixteen inches of fluted steel – into play as quickly as possible.
This view would certainly have found favour with Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Gough, the sixty-seven-year-old Irishman in command of the British army during the First and Second Sikh Wars. A couplet composed by an officer with a classical education, for Alexander the Great had been stopped by the Sutlej, caught the feel of the man.
Sabres drawn and bayonets fixed,
Fight where fought Alexander.
Old Paddy Gough’s a cross betwixt
Bulldog and Salamander.
At Mudki and Ferozeshah, Gough launched direct attacks on well-held Sikh positions, and before the day is out, when told that the ammunition for his heavy guns is running low, he will exclaim: ‘Thank God! Then I’ll be at them with the bayonet.’7 Yet nobody can say