INDIA--THE WAR IN SCINDE
When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was,
in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of
age. More than forty years earlier he had begun his military career.
Thirty-two years had passed since he had fought at Corunna; and since
then what a life of action had been his! And yet this little thin
figure, with eagle eye and beaked nose, and long hair streaked with
white, which for more than forty years seemed to have been a volcano
ever in action, had not yet spent the vast stock of vital energy which
it started with. Very far from it. After all his wounds and wanderings,
his shipwrecks and disasters, his sorrows and sicknesses, his blows and
buffetings, here he was starting out for India, far more full of energy
than ten out of a dozen ensigns going out from college to begin life.
On December 13th, 1841, Napier first set foot in India. He had come out
by the overland route in two months, and looked upon the journey as a
marvel of rapidity. It had cost him very dear; and when he landed in
Bombay he had exactly two pounds in his pocket, and his bank-account was
_nil_. "Had I then died," he writes, "there was not a farthing left for
my children," and he was sixty years of age!
When Napier assumed command of the Poonah Division in the end of 1841,
our dominion in India had entered upon a very critical stage of its
history. Two years before this date we had sent an army into
Afghanistan, ostensibly to seat a rival Ameer on the throne of Cabul--in
reality to gain a footing in that mountain land. It was an Asiatic copy
of Napoleon's invasion of Spain; and although the Afghans had no outside
power to help them, the result was much the same as it had been in the
Peninsula. There was at first an apparently easy conquest of the
country, then a rising of the people, a retreat and surrender of the
invaders, followed by fresh invasions carried on with the savage
accessories usual where conquest endeavours to legalise its position by
calling a people who are rightly struggling in the cause of their
freedom "rebels." At this particular moment--the mid-winter of 1841--a
great disaster had befallen our arms. The garrison of Cabul, retreating
from that place towards the Kyber Pass, had been annihilated in the
defiles of Jugdulluck; the general, a few officers, and their wives
having alone been saved by surrender. The two civil organisers of the
invasion, M'Naughten and Burnes, had been killed, one in Cabul, the
other at a conference with Akbar Khan. Sale still held Jellalabad with
an Irish battalion; but the Kyber Pass was between him and India, and
that defile was in possession of the Afghans. On the western side of
Afghanistan our army held Ghuznee, Candahar, and Quetta; but again the
Bolan Pass lay between our forces and Upper Scinde, where a small
British army was cantoned on the Indus. When the news of these
disasters, always magnified by native rumour, reached the countries
which still intervened between our real Indian frontier and
Afghanistan--Scinde and the Punjaub--signs of ill-concealed satisfaction
began to manifest themselves among the princes and peoples of these
still semi-independent States. This Afghan expedition had indeed been a
wild and foolish venture, and the first blast of misfortune showed at
once the full length and breadth of its absurdity. As each succeeding
mail from the northern frontier brought to Bombay some fresh development
of this critical situation, Napier bent his mind to master the
complicated position of affairs; for daily it became more clear to his
practised eye that the forces available on the Indian frontier were not
adequate to retrieve the military situation, and that sooner or later he
would be sent to the theatre of operations. When the crisis becomes
really acute, favouritism lowers its front, and genius sees the road
clear for action.
And now at last the chance came--the chance of leading an army of his
countrymen in battle, the opportunity which he had longed for through
all these weary years since that distant day when, writing to his mother
from Hythe, he told her that his highest ambition was to live to command
British soldiers in the field. That was just forty years ago, and here
at last came the long-wished-for boon; but under what changed
conditions! "Oh for forty as at Cephalonia," he writes, "when I laughed
at eighteen hours' work under a burning sun; now at sixty how far will
my carcass carry me? No great distance! Well, to try is glorious! I am
hurrying fast towards the end; it will be fortunate to reach it in the
hour of victory. Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather
than by an army in the hour of victory?"
In March, 1842, Lord Ellenborough arrived in India as Governor-General.
From Madras he wrote to Napier asking the latter to send him a statement
of his views with respect to the manner in which the honour of our arms
may be most effectually re-established in Afghanistan. The request found
Napier prepared. At once a clear and precise plan was forwarded to meet
the new Governor-General on his arrival at Calcutta. We must avenge the
disasters to our arms, but how? By "a noble, generous, not a vindictive
warfare," after which "it might be very practicable to retire from
Afghanistan, leaving a friendly people behind us." What a grand type of
soldier this! No military executions, no hanging of men whose only fault
was a splendid and heroic love of their own land! Truly the dominion
based on such old-world chivalry could laugh at the advance of the
Russian--it would not need "a scientific frontier" to defend it.
As the year 1842 progressed, the state of Afghanistan still remained
critical. In July Candahar and Jellalabad were still our advanced posts,
and all the intervening valleys and defiles were in the hands of the
Afghans. Behind, in the Punjaub and in Scinde, the spectacle of delay
and indecision on the part of our generals was spreading wider the area
of disturbance. Clearly some real chief was wanted to hold together all
this wavering discontent which was seething from the sources of the
Sutlej to the sea at Kurachee. At last the order came to move to
Scinde. Napier received it on the anniversary of the battle of the Coa,
fought thirty-two years earlier. At first the recollection that he is
now in his sixty-first year, and that he has to leave behind him all he
holds dear in life to go out to incessant action in a terrible climate,
damps his spirit, but he quickly rallies. He will not even depend upon
the advice of the "politicals," as he calls the Civil Servants in
Scinde, who for once are to be subject to his orders. These men may be
useful, he thinks, but that usefulness "cannot be as councillors to a
general officer who should have none but his pillow and his courage."
And so with these sentiments and a thousand others equally
characteristic of indomitable resolution, courage, and self-dependency,
he sets out for Scinde on September 3rd, 1842. "Old Oliver's day," he
writes; "the day he won Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died; and a
very good day to die on, as good as the second or the fourth--'_a
crowning victory_,' strange."
On the evening of the 3rd the _Zenobia_ steamed out of Bombay harbour
bound for Kurachee. Never did soldier proceed to the scene of action
under more terrible conditions. The vessel carried a detachment of two
hundred European troops. Scarcely had she put to sea before cholera of
the most fatal type broke out among these soldiers. There was but one
doctor on board, few medicines, no preparations to meet such a
catastrophe. In an hour after the first case appeared many more had been
attacked. Night fell. Drenching rain added to the horror. Scarcely were
men attacked ere they died in contortions and agony impossible to
describe. The beds of the stricken soldiers were laid on deck; and as
they died the bodies were instantly cast overboard. All night long this
terrible scene went on. When morning dawned twenty-six bodies had been
thrown into the sea. For three days this awful scene continued.
One-fourth of the entire troops had perished; eighty more men were down
on the reeking, filthy deck. It was a time to try the sternest nerve.
The worst scene of carnage on the battle-field could be nothing to this
awful visitation. At last the port of Kurachee was gained; the flame of
the fell disease seemed to have burned itself out; the survivors were
got on shore, but a dozen more unfortunates were doomed to perish on
land. In eight days sixty-four soldiers--just a third of the entire
number embarked--had died; a few sailors, women, and children also
perished.
Bad as was this beginning, it did not seem to damp the spirit or dull
the energy of the commander. On September 10th he got on shore with his
sick and dying. On the 12th he reviews the garrison of Kurachee, and
looks to his ammunition and supplies. Before leaving Bombay he had
visited the arsenal there, and had discovered some rockets lying in a
corner. He had always a fondness for these somewhat erratic engines of
war, and he brought them on with him to Scinde. Now at this review he
determines to try one or two of them in front of the troops. An
artillery officer, an engineer officer, and the General formed a kind of
committee for letting off the missile, no one knowing apparently much
about it. The second rocket would not go off when lighted; the committee
incautiously approached, the rocket exploded, and the General's leg was
cut clean across the calf by a sharp splinter of the iron case. This
wound laid him up for a few days; but in a week, unable to stand the
confinement any longer, he is carried on board a river steamer and
proceeds up the Indus. Certainly a bad continuation to a bad beginning
this accident. Yet Napier had good reason to hope that whatever else
might stop his career it would not be his legs, for in the past, though
sorely tried, they had stood to him well. As a boy at Celbridge he had,
while leaping a fence, cut the flesh from his leg in a terrible manner;
a few years later at Limerick he had smashed the bone while jumping a
ditch to secure a dead snipe. Again, at Corunna, a bullet had damaged
this unfortunate leg; and here now at Kurachee, thirty-three years
later, this rocket has another gash at it. No use; he "will get the
snipe" up this great Indus river, as forty-four years ago he got it on
the banks of the Shannon.
And now, leaving this old veteran, but ever-young soldier, steaming up
the great river by whose shores he is soon to become the central figure
in a long series of great events, we will pause a moment to review the
chapter of Scindian history which had led up to this moment.
In the year 1836 Afghanistan lay many hundred miles beyond our nearest
frontier, and it is almost needless to say that Russia then lay many
thousand miles beyond the farthest extreme of Afghanistan. Nevertheless
it was determined by the Viceroy of India and his Council to invade
Afghanistan across the intervening Sikh and Scindian territory, in order
to upset the ruler of the first-named State, and to seat upon the throne
of Cabul a king who had long been our puppet and our pensionary. It is
of course unnecessary to add that our puppet and our pensionary was, in
return for this service, to hand over to us the legs of his throne, the
keys of his kingdom, and a good deal of the contents of his treasury.
Between our frontier and that of Afghanistan lay the Punjaub and Scinde,
through which States we were to invade the territory of Dost Mahomed by
the passes of the Khyber and the Bolan. With the ruler of the Punjaub,
Runjeet Singh, we were upon terms of closest offensive and defensive
amity. He was, in fact, our ally in the invasion. With the rulers of
Scinde, on the other hand, our relations were strained. Runjeet was
rich, had a large army, and was a single despotic ruler. The Ameers of
Scinde were rich too, but they had no regular army. They were fighting
among themselves, filled with mutual jealousies, weak rulers of a
separated State. The line of policy pursued towards these States by the
Calcutta Government was a very obvious if a very flagrant one. Runjeet
Singh, the Lion of Lahore, was to be bribed into acquiescence in our
Afghan policy, by slices of territory taken from Afghanistan and Scinde,
by large promises of plunder to be given him by Shah Soojah, our puppet
king, and by subsidies from our own treasury. But with the Ameers of
Scinde the process was to be altogether one of force. Pressed by an army
on the middle Indus, by the Sikhs from the Punjaub, and by a flotilla on
the coast, they were to be squeezed into compliance with our demands,
which included cession of territory, fortresses, and seaports, payment
of treasure to Shah Soojah, annual subsidies to ourselves, and rights of
passage for troops and supplies. All these matters having been arranged
to the complete dissatisfaction of the weak but indignant Ameers, our
armies pressed on into the Khyber on one hand and the Bolan on the
other. This was in 1838. We have already seen the final outcome of this
forward Afghan policy in the early months of 1842. That the events in
the Koord-Cabul and Jugdulluck Passes, when a single surviving horseman
bore to Jellalabad the tidings of a disaster almost unparalleled in the
annals of retreating armies, should have been received by the Ameers of
Scinde without regret is not to be wondered at, and that they should see
in it some opportunity of loosening the grasp of our power upon a
territory which we still continued to speak of as independent is equally
no subject of astonishment.
When Lord Ellenborough arrived in India in the spring of 1842 he was
face to face with immense difficulties. The forward Afghan policy had
collapsed. To an ignorant and presumptuous confidence paralysis and fear
had succeeded. What was to be done? To reverse the engines and go full
speed astern would only run the vessel of Indian policy upon the shoals
and quicksands which the former mistaken and most unjust statecraft had
produced. Napier knew all this nefarious history when he went to Scinde,
but he knew too the utter impossibility of getting again into deep water
by a recurrence to an absolutely just policy with the rulers of Scinde.
He and his master, Lord Ellenborough, were the inheritors of this
trouble. They had not made it, but assuredly they would be measured by
it. In India, to go forward has often been to go wrong, but to go back
in that country has always been to admit the wrong; and once to do that
is to admit the truth of an argument which, if prolonged to its fullest
consequences, must lead us to the sea-coast. What then was to be done?
Reconquer Afghanistan; give it up to its old ruler again, and then fix
the frontier of India at the frontier of Afghanistan. That was
practically the policy determined upon by Lord Ellenborough, and when he
made Charles Napier the right arm of its accomplishment he had secured
the best pilot then navigating the troubled sea of English dominion in
the East.
But when this policy had been once decided on, it would have been better
to have openly admitted the necessity, and to have told the Ameers of
Scinde plainly our intentions; let them then fight us if they liked.
That course would have probably saved a vast effusion of blood. It
certainly would have prevented the long and unhappy years of quarrel and
recrimination that followed the conquest of Scinde, and the spectacle of
two gallant and noble soldiers waging a lifelong war between each other
upon the methods by which that conquest had been effected. Of this last
phase, however, of the Scindian question we will speak later on.
Steaming up the Indus, Napier reached Hyderabad on September 25th, and
had an interview with the Ameers of Scinde. They received him with
extraordinary state and honour, for already the tide of war in
Afghanistan had turned. Two armies marching from Jellalabad and Candahar
had retaken Cabul, and another retiring from the Bolan would soon be on
the middle Indus; while a general, of whom fame spoke highly, had just
arrived with fresh troops at Kurachee.
Napier passed on from this reception, and early in October arrived at
Sukkur, where important letters from Lord Ellenborough reached him; at
the same time he received news that the English army had safely passed
the Bolan, and that the war in Afghanistan was therefore closed. And
now, for the first time in the life of this extraordinary soldier, we
arrive at a point where the path is not clear. The situation which at
this moment confronted him was perhaps as difficult a one as ever
presented itself to a soldier-ruler in our time. The course pursued by
Napier was long the subject of fierce controversy. Volumes were written
upon it. It was angrily debated in Parliament, angrily commented upon in
the Press, and as angrily defended and applauded on the other side. All
this is long over; the heat, the fury, and the bitter words have passed
with the generation that saw and read in the flesh of the doings on the
Indus. The conquest of Scinde has taken its place in history, and we can
now quietly estimate the difficulties, the rights, the wrongs, and what
perhaps was stranger than all, the temptations of the time. We will
lightly touch upon them all, remembering that our path lies upon the
ashes of dead heroes. First for the situation. It was this. A great
shock had just been given to the sagacity of British government in
India, and what was more important, to the prestige of British arms in
Asia. We had retreated from Afghanistan, after avenging our defeat it is
true, but still by the fact of that retreat acknowledging that our
policy had been wrong, and that our power of enforcing that policy had
not been equal to its ambition. That was a very serious position for a
power whose dominion in the East rested solely on the sword, and nowhere
was it so serious as in the neutral borderlands through which we had
passed in order to invade Afghanistan--the lands whose natural rights we
had trenched upon, and whose sentiments of independence we had
repeatedly outraged during the five years of this unfortunate
enterprise. Now one fact was very clear to the Viceroy in Calcutta and
to his lieutenant in Scinde--either we must withdraw altogether from the
Indus, or we must strengthen our position there. The first course was
altogether out of the question, the second became a necessity. Lord
Ellenborough directed Napier to draft a new treaty, told him to present
it to the Ameers, and if necessary to enforce its acceptance by arms. So
far all was clear. In November, 1842, the new treaty was ready for
presentation to the Ameers. Its provisions were indeed formidable. It
took from the rulers of Scinde, towns, territory, rights of coinage,
etc., and it especially dealt severely with the northern or Khyrpoor
Ameers, who were rightly or wrongly suspected of having been desirous of
profiting by the Afghan disasters in the preceding year. Two men of a
widely different character appear at this moment upon the scene--Major
James Outram of the Indian army, now political agent in Scinde, and His
Highness Ali Moorad, one of the Ameers of Khyrpoor. No braver soldier
ever bore the arms of England in the East than James Outram. No baser
intriguer ever schemed and plotted for his own advancement than Ali
Moorad of northern Scinde. Napier presented his treaty to the Ameers,
and at the same time moved his troops into the territory the cession of
which was claimed by the document. The Ameers accepted the treaty, but
protested against its severity. The leading Ameer was a very old man,
over eighty years of age, named Meer Roostum. Between him and his
younger half-brother, Ali Moorad, lay a great gap of years--perhaps
forty--and a still greater gap of hatred, for Ali longed to possess his
elder brother's lands, rights, and _puggaree_, as the turban, or
insignia of paramount power, was called. Outram was anxious to save the
Ameers from the total destruction which he knew must await them if arms
were made the arbitrament of the dispute. Ali Moorad saw that only by a
recourse to war could his scheme of ambition be gratified. Between them
stood Napier, determined upon using to the utmost the immense power
which the Viceroy had placed in his hands, and seeing far beyond the
present dispute a time when this valley of the Indus must all become
British territory; seeing it in imagination, too, a happy valley waving
with grain, peopled by a peaceful and contented population free from the
exactions of semi barbarian chiefs, and enjoying the blessings of a
government which would rule them with patriarchal justice--a picture the
reality of which no human eye has ever looked on.
But above and beyond all this there was another spring in Charles
Napier's mind, more potent than any picture, more powerful than any
prompting. Above everything else he was a soldier. The clash of arms was
dear to him as music to the ear of an Italian. No lover ever longed for
mistress more than did this man long for fighting. Was he bloodthirsty?
Not in the least. His heart was tender as a child's, his sympathies were
far-reaching as a woman's; but for all that every fibre of his nature
vibrated to the magic touch of military glory, and his earthly paradise
was the front rank of battle.
That his soldier nature was all this time in a state of antagonism with
the other nature of pity and love of abstract justice cannot be doubted
for a moment. The conflict peeps out through hundreds of pages of his
journals. How glad he would be if these Ameers would boldly reject the
treaty and defy him! "I almost wish," he writes on December 5th, "that
they proudly defied us and fought, for they are so weak, so humble, that
punishing them goes against the grain." Most men who read his life
to-day will echo that regret. All this while the unfortunate Ameers,
divided by conflicting counsels, and distracted by the rumours of coming
war which Ali Moorad industriously circulated among them, were drifting
rapidly to ruin. The older men were for complete submission, the younger
hands were advising resistance. The wild Beloochee matchlock men and the
fierce horsemen of Scinde were clamorous not to allow the old fame of
the Talpoors to die out in shameful surrender. The Feringhee, even when
the treaty had been signed, would move on Hyderabad. The treasure of the
Ameers was great, their harems were numerous. If they were doomed to
lose all, better lose all with arms in their hands facing the invader.
Such was the state of affairs during the month of December, 1842. The
Ameers are irresolute and distracted by a thousand reports; Ali Moorad
is deeply scheming to make Napier believe his relatives mean fighting;
Outram, the Ameers' best friend, has been sent by Lord Ellenborough away
from Scinde, and at Napier's request is about to return from Bombay; and
Napier himself, dazzled with the realisation of his life-long dream of
military glory, is about "to cut with the sword the Gordian knot" of
Scindian politics. In the middle of the month of December he crossed his
army from the right to the left bank of the Indus at Sukkur, and put his
troops in column of route. The state of his mind at this moment is laid
bare to us in his journal; on December 21st he writes thus:
Ten thousand fighting men and their followers are camped here at
Alore, a town built by Alexander the Great. My tent overlooks this
most beautiful encampment. The various sounds, the multitude of
followers, the many costumes and languages, and the many religions,
produce a strange scene which makes a man think, Why is all this?
Why am I supreme? A little experience in the art of killing, of
disobedience to Heaven's behests, is all the superiority that I,
their commander, can boast of! How humbled thinking makes me feel!
Still, I exult when beholding this force. I have worked my way to
this great command, and am gratified at having it, yet despise
myself for being so gratified! Yes, I despise myself, not as
feeling unworthy to lead, for I am conscious of knowing how to
lead, and my moral and physical courage are equal to the task; my
contempt is for my worldliness. Am I not past sixty? Must I not
soon be on the bed of death? And yet so weak as to care for these
things. No, I do not. I pray to do what is right and just, and to
have strength to say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Alas, I have not
the strength! Well, this comfort remains--with a secret and strong
desire to guide in war, I have avoided it studiously!
At four o'clock in the morning following Christmas Day he put his troops
in motion for the south. On the last night of the year he is encamped
near Khyrpoor; to his right lies the level alluvial valley of the Indus,
to his left the great desert of Scinde rolls away in measureless
sand-waves. Walking in front of his tent and looking at the long line of
camp fires, while the hum of his host floats up through the glorious
Eastern night, he begins as it were to speak his thoughts aloud. All his
plans are formed. "One night," he says, "I drank strong coffee and had a
capital _think_ for an hour. I got many matters decided in that hour."
He will march first into the desert on his left and take the fort of
Emanghur, a stronghold of the northern Ameers of high repute because it
is an island in a waterless sea; then will come back to the Indus and
direct his march upon Hyderabad. The Ameers will fly, he thinks, across
the Indus, and the entire left bank of the river from the Punjaub to the
sea will become British territory. If the Ameers elect to fight, well,
he will be glad to give them every opportunity. "Peace and civilisation
will then replace war and barbarism. My conscience will be light, for I
see no wrong in so regulating a set of tyrants who are themselves
invaders, and have in sixty years nearly destroyed the country. The
people hate them. I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience
will not be troubled. I sleep well while trying to do this, and shall
sleep sound when it is done." Here in these few words we have the
picture of the invasion of Scinde as he then saw it. Nevertheless it was
not the picture which India saw, which Outram saw, and which calm and
impartial history must see to-day. And here let us look for a moment on
the field of war, for war it was to be, that lay before this army camped
under the winter starlight on this last night of 1842.
A vast dreary world was this Scinde. Men who knew it best called it the
Unhappy Valley, and the name fitted accurately the nation. A flat,
dusty, sun-scorched, fever-poisoned land; an Egypt turned the wrong way,
and with a past so blurred and battered that no eye could read it; a
changeless landscape of dusty distance through which the meanest
habitations of men loomed at intervals, with ragged solitary acacia
trees, and old broken mosques and mounds that had once been cities, and
towns that were always shrinking, and graveyards that were ever growing.
In the centre of this Unhappy Valley rolled the Indus--a broad rapid
river when the summer flood poured down its silt-sided channel, a lean
shrunken stream when winter heaped high his snowflakes in the mountains
of Afghanistan; and yet a rich land wherever water could be given to its
thirsty surface. Man had only to scuffle and hoe the baked dust, pour
water over it, and in a month or two the arid plain became a waving sea
of emerald green, to quickly change again to a vast level of yellowing
grain. But it is a strange fact that wherever these conditions of dusty
desert turned green with animal inundation are found, there too you will
find man a slave and a tyrant. Grades there may be between, but always
the lowest layers of the human strata will be slaves, and the upper ones
will be their owners. And nowhere was this rule more certain than in
Scinde. The native Scindian who grubbed the earth, dug the canal, and
turned the water-wheel, was a slave. The Beloochee, whether he called
himself predatory hill-man, settled lord of the valley, or ruling Ameer,
was a tyrant. What the Mameluke had been to Egypt the Beloochee was to
Scinde--a ruling caste, fierce fighters, making free with every rule of
their prophet, faithful only to his fanatic spirit. Three separate
groups of rulers called Ameers governed Scinde. They all claimed equal
descent from the Talpoor chief who, seventy years before this period,
had come down from Beloochistan and conquered the Unhappy Valley. There
were the Ameers of Lower Scinde, who dwelt in Hyderabad; those of Upper
Scinde, whose headquarters was Khyrpoor; and those of East Scinde, who
ruled at Meerpoor. As their descent was equal, so their characters were
alike. Prosperity and power and self-indulgence had taken the old
Beloochee steel out of their natures. They drank, they feasted, they
hunted, and they loved after the fashion of the East. That they were not
so weak or so vicious as a thousand rulers of India lying farther south
is clear, but it was only because they were nearer to the mountains from
whose flinty rocks they had come three generations earlier. Everything
that has ever descended from these grim northern hills has degenerated
in India. The Arab fares no better than does his horse when once he
passes those arid portals.
Such was the land and such the people with whom Napier was now to come
to blows in the new year about to dawn. War had not been declared, but
it was certain that some of the Ameers at least were gathering their
Beloochee feudatories, that it was often stated in their durbars that
the hot season, now near at hand, would paralyse the action of the
English general, and that, as a bold and resolute front had ended in
Afghanistan in the total withdrawal of the English armies, so might that
most necessary adjunct to the string of diplomacy ensure the final
retirement of the Feringhee from the territories of Scinde. Ever present
in Napier's mind was this approaching hot season. Viewing the conduct of
the principal Ameers through the glasses of his new friend and ally,
Meer Ali Moorad, and seeing with his own eyes the evidence of their
tyrannical rule over their subjects, he had resolved to anticipate all
plans, to forestall all projects, to determine all events by marching at
once upon the chief strongholds of the Ameers. If his innate love of
justice whispered to him any suggestion that the cause of quarrel was
not clear, that the chief Ameers were divided among themselves, and that
moderate counsels would prevail over their fears and their weakness, the
spectacle of their tyranny and worthlessness, of Beloochee
bloodthirstiness and Scindian slavery, was ever before his vision to
shut out such misgivings. The government of the Ameers seemed in his
eyes as monstrous and unjust as had the Irish government of his boyish
days or the English administration of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and all
the pent torrent of his nature longed to go out and crush it. Love of
glory, hatred of oppression, these two most potent factors in the story
of his life, called him to the field; he forgot that it is possible to
be unjust even to injustice, and that if there were no criminals there
need be no mercy.
On January 5th, 1843, he struck out with a small force for the desert
fortress of Emanghur.