THE BATTLE OF MEANEE
The desert--the world before it was born or after its death, the earth
without water, no cloud above, no tree below--space, silence, solitude,
all realised in one word--there is nothing like it in creation.
At midnight on January 5th the little column started for
Emanghur,--three hundred and fifty men of the Twenty-Second Regiment on
camels--two men on each--two twenty-four pounders drawn by camels, and
two hundred troopers of the Scinde Horse, with fifteen days' food and
four days' water. From a group of wells called Choonka, Napier sent back
a hundred and fifty of his horse, and pushed on with the remainder. For
seven days he held on through the sea of sand, and on the 12th reached
his object. It was deserted by the Beloochees, who had abandoned their
redoubtable stronghold at the approach of the British. On the last day's
march the men of the Twenty-Second had to dismount from their camels and
help to drag the heavy howitzer through the sand, all laughing and
joking, and with such strength! We shall see these men a few weeks later
doing still more splendid work, and will have a few words to say about
them; now we must hurry on. Napier blew up the desert fort and turned
his face back towards the Indus. On January 16th he is still toiling
through the sand waves, the men again dragging the guns, but with a
significant absence of laughter now that the chances of fight are over.
It is the anniversary of Corunna, and despite the labour and anxieties
which surround him, the General's mind is away in the past. He reviews
the long career now stretching like this desert into an immense horizon.
In this retrospect his mind fastens upon one satisfactory thought--he
and his brothers have not disgraced their father's memory. "We all
resolved not to disgrace him," he writes, "and were he now alive he
would be satisfied." The previous day, with the tremendous explosion of
the blowing up of Emanghur still ringing in his ears, he wrote: "All
last night I dreamed of my beloved mother; her beauteous face smiled
upon me. Am I going to meet her very soon?" No, they were not to meet
soon; for in spite of fierce battle and Scindian sun and life long past
its prime, he is still to realise in himself that mysterious promise
given in even a vaster desert than this to those who hold dear the
memory of father and mother--he will be left long in the land he is soon
to conquer.
By the end of January he has cleared the desert, reunited his column to
the main body, and turned the head of his advance to the south. All this
time negotiations were going on. Outram had gone to Hyderabad. The
Ameers were in wildest confusion; they would sign anything one day, on
the next it was protest, threat, or supplication. Camel and horse
messengers were flying through the land. But amid all this varying mass
of diplomatic rumour one fact was certain, the Ameers' fighting
feudatories were gathering, the wild sword and matchlock men of the
hills and the deserts were assembling at Hyderabad. The last day of
January had come. In another month or six weeks the terrible sun would
be hanging as a blazing furnace overhead, and it would be too late. "If
they would turn out thirty thousand men in my front it would relieve me
from the detestable feeling of having to deal with poor miserable devils
that cannot fight, and are seeking pardon by submission. Twenty times a
day I am forced to say to myself, 'Trust them not; they are all craft;
be not softened.'" Halting five days at Nowshara to allow further time
for negotiations and to rest his own troops, he resumes his march early
in February. He is at Sukurunda on the 10th, and here again he halts for
some days; for Outram has written from Hyderabad that the Ameers have
accepted the treaty, and he prays a further respite. But at this place
an event occurred which did much to decide the wavering balance between
peace and war. On the night of February 12th Napier's cavalry seized
some Beloochee chiefs passing the left of the camp. They were of the
Murree hill tribe, and the leader of the clan, Hyat Khan, was among
them. On him was found a letter from Ameer Mahomet of Hyderabad calling
upon him to assemble all his warriors and to march to Meanee on the 9th.
The discovery of this message at once decided Napier. He would march
straight to his front; he would attack whatever barred his road, be they
six or sixty thousand. The events that happened in these early days of
February, 1843, and the trembling balance which now was decided to the
side of war, have been made the occasion of long and fierce
controversy. Volumes were written on Napier's side and on Outram's
side. Did the Ameers mean war all the time, and were their professions
of peace only directed to delay events until their soldiers were
collected and the hot season had come? Or were they a poor helpless lot
of enervated rulers, driven to resist the aggression of the English
general, and only fighting at last when every other avenue of settlement
had been closed against them? To us now two things are very clear.
First, that Napier played the game of negotiation with the Ameers from
first to last with an armed hand, ready to strike if there was
hesitation on the part of his adversaries. Second, that his adversaries
played precisely the same game with him. Both sides got their fighting
men out. One began its march, the other took up its position of defence.
That the flint on one side and the steel on the other, represented by
their respective fighting forces, were anxious to come to blows there
cannot be a doubt; and that when they found themselves only a few
marches distant from each other they struck and fire flew, need never
have been the cause of wonderment, least of all the cause of wonderment
to soldiers. And now for the clash of flint and steel which bears the
name of the battle of Meanee.
From the village of Hala, thirty-three miles north of Hyderabad, two
roads led to that city. One of these, that nearer the Indus, approached
the position of Meanee directly in front; the other, more to the east,
turned that place on its right. Napier reached Hala on the morning of
the 18th, and there his mind became immovably determined. In the
afternoon Outram arrived by steamer from Hyderabad, having been
attacked on the previous day in the Residency by a division of the
Beloochee army, with six guns. He had successfully resisted the attack
with his small force for some hours, but, finding his ammunition running
short, he withdrew with the little garrison to his steamers. There could
now be no further doubt that the Ameers had elected to appeal to the
sword, and the path was at last clear before Napier and his army. He
will advance along the road nearest to the river; if possible he will
manoeuvre to turn the enemy's right when he is face to face with him.
"There is but one thing--battle!" he writes on this day. "Had
Elphinstone fought, he would not have lost his character. Had Wellington
waited for Stevenson at Assaye, he would have been beaten. Monson
hesitated and retreated and was beaten." Then he pushed on to Muttaree,
one march from the Beloochee position. At this place, Muttaree, many
things happened. During the day and night various reports came in as to
the strength of the enemy. Outram says they are eighteen thousand
strong, the spies report twenty to twenty-five, and thirty thousand
Beloochees in position. They are flocking in so fast to Meanee that in
another day or two there may be sixty thousand assembled. "Let them be
sixty or one hundred thousand," is his reply, "I will fight." All the
arrangements for the advance are now made. He will move his little
army--it is only twenty-two hundred strong--after midnight, so as to
arrive in front of Meanee by nine o'clock next morning. Then he sits
down to write his letters and bring up his journal to date; for this
coming battle, which is to be his first essay as Commander-in-Chief, may
be his last as a soldier. "To fall will be to leave many I love," he
writes to his old and true friend John Kennedy; "but to go to many
loved, to my home! and that in any case must be soon"; for is he not
sixty-one years of age? Then, having written all his letters and closed
his journal with a message to his wife and children, which shows how the
grand heart of the man was ever torn by love and steeled by duty, he
goes out of his hut to visit the outposts and see that all is safe in
the sleeping camp. It is now midnight. He lies down--has three hours'
sleep, and at three A.M. the fall-in sounds and the march to Meanee
begins.
When day dawns the column is within a few miles of the enemy. The road
leads over a level plain of white silt with a few stunted bushes growing
at intervals upon it. To the right and left of this plain, extensive
woods close the view. These _shikargahs_ (hunting preserves) are about
three-quarters of a mile apart, and the intervening plain across which
the road leads is here and there seared by a _nullah_ or dry
watercourse. Clouds of dust rise into the morning air from the feet of
horses, men, camels, and the roll of wheels.
When there is good light to see, the halt is sounded and the men
breakfast; then the march is resumed, and in another hour the leading
scouts are in sight of the enemy. It is now eight o'clock. The enemy
seems to occupy a deep and sudden depression in the plain on a front of
twelve hundred yards, extending right across the line of advance and
touching the woods on each flank. Before his right flank there is a
village which he also occupies, but no other obstacle lies between the
British advancing column and the great hollow in which the Beloochee
line of battle has been formed. Napier halts his advanced guard, and
while awaiting the arrival of his main body, still a considerable
distance in rear, endeavours to obtain some idea of the enemy's strength
and position. It is no easy matter. The woods to right and left hide
whatever troops he has on these flanks, and the deep _nullah_ in front
conceals his strength in that direction; but beyond the _nullah_, where
the plain resumes its original level, the morning sun strikes upon
thousands of bits of steel, and a vague dust hanging overhead tells of a
vast concourse of human beings on the earth below it.
When the column arrives in line with the advanced guard there is a busy
interval getting the immense baggage-train into defensive position,
pushing forward guns and cavalry, deploying the infantry into line of
battle, and trying to obtain from the top of some sand-dune a better
view of the enemy's position. When all is ready for the final advance
across the last thousand yards, one thing is certain to the
General,--there is no chance of manoeuvring to gain the Beloochee flank.
The woods are too dense, _nullahs_ intersect them, they swarm with the
enemy--there is nothing possible but to attack the centre straight in
front across the bare white plain. There is a small mud village before
the enemy's right flank, where the left _shikargah_ touches the bank of
the big hollow. The nearer bank of this big hollow has a slight incline
towards the plain, and above its level edge many heads can be seen
through the field-glasses, and tall matchlock-barrels are constantly
moving along it. This hollow is in fact the bed of the Fullalee river, a
deep channel which quits the main stream of the Indus three or four
miles farther to the right and bends round here to the village of
Meanee, where, making a sudden turn to the south, it bends back towards
Hyderabad. It is a flowing river only when the Indus is in flood; now
the Indus is low and the Fullalee is a deep wide water-course destitute
of water, or holding it only in a few stagnant pools. It is in this dry
river-bed that the main portion of the Beloochee army is drawn up, and
beyond it, in a loop of level ground which the river-channel makes
between its bend, can be seen the tents and camp-equipage of the chiefs
whose clansmen are arrayed beneath.
Carrying the glass still to the right along the nearer edge of the dry
channel, the eye noted that the _shikargah_, or jungle-cover, which
formed the left of the Beloochee army had a high wall dividing it from
the plain, and that about midway between the enemy and the British line
a large gap or opening had been made in this formidable obstacle. In an
instant the quick eye of the General noted this opening. It was the gate
of a proposed trap. Through it the left wing of the enemy would debouch
upon the rear of the British when the little army would have passed the
spot to engage the centre in the Fullalee. In the angles formed by the
_shikargahs_ where they touched the Fullalee there were six guns in
battery, while the entire front of the Beloochee position for a distance
of some seven hundred yards had been cleared of even the stunted trees
which elsewhere grew upon the plain. All these things Charles Napier
took in in that short and anxious interval which preceded the final
advance of his little army. It was not a sight that longer examination
could make more pleasant. It was a strong and well-selected position,
taken up with care and foresight, not to be turned on either flank,
forcing the enemy that would attack it to show his hand at once, while
it kept hidden from that assailant and safe from his shot, the main body
of its defenders.
And now the British line of battle has reached to within nine hundred
yards of this strong position which we have just glanced along. Let us
see in what manner of military formation the English General moves his
men to attack it. Line, of course; for every memory of his old soldier
life held some precious moment consecrated to the glory of the red line
of battle. Thirty years had rolled over him since he had seen that
glorious infantry moving in all the splendour of its quiet courage to
the shock of battle. Many things had changed since then, but the foot
soldier was still the same. Now as in Peninsular days he came mostly
from those lowly peasant homes which greed and foolish laws had not yet
levelled with the ground. Now as in Peninsular days he was chiefly
Irish. When Napier rode at the head of his marching column in Scinde,
when he chatted as he loved to do at the halt or in the camp with the
"man in the ranks," the habit of thought and mode of expression were the
same as they had been in the far-off marches and bivouacs by the Tagus
or the Coa. True, in this Scindian strife he had only a single regiment
of that famous infantry in his army. But that single regiment was worth
a host. "I have one British regiment," he had written only the previous
night, "the Twenty-Second, magnificent Tipperary! I would not give your
_specimens_ for a deal just now." What manner of men these Tipperary
soldiers were, Sir William Napier tells us in his _Conquest of Scinde_.
The description is worth repeating, because the picture is rarer than
it used to be. "On the left of the artillery," he writes, describing the
advance to Meanee, "marched the Twenty-Second Regiment. This battalion,
about four hundred in number, was composed almost entirely of Irishmen,
strong of body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers who saw nothing
but victory before them, and counted not their enemies." On the left of
the Twenty-Second Regiment marched four battalions of native infantry,
resolute soldiers moving with the firm tread which discipline so easily
assumes when it is conscious of being led by capacity and courage. In
front of the line of infantry thus formed, the Scinde Horse on the left
and the grenadier and light companies of the Twenty-Second Regiment were
thrown forward for the double purpose of screening the movement of the
main body in their rear and of drawing the fire and thereby revealing
the position of the enemy in front. With this advanced line of
skirmishers rides the General in blue uniform, and conspicuous from the
helmeted head-dress which he wears. The soldiers are in the old red
coatee with white lappels and forage caps covered with white cotton, for
there was no light Karkee clothing or helmets of pith or cork in those
days, and the British infantry marched under the sun of India clad
almost in the military costume of an English winter.
When the skirmishers reach the large gap in the _shikargah_ wall before
mentioned, the perfect soldier nature of Napier shows itself--the
instant adaptation of means to end which marks the man who has to do his
thinking on horseback and amid the whistle of bullets, from the man who
has to do it in an easy chair and at an office-table. The wide gap in
the high wall has been recently made. It will be used to attack the
right rear of our line when engaged in front at the edge of the
Fullalee. He will block up this gap with the grenadiers of the
Twenty-Second. He will close this gaping wound in his plan of battle
with these stalwart Celts, who, he knows, will stop it with their blood.
So the grenadiers are closed upon their right flank, wheeled to the
right, and pushed into the opening. "He is a good man in a gap" had been
a favourite saying among these soldiers when they were peasant lads at
home to designate a stout-hearted comrade. They are to prove its truth
now.
So, with the grenadier company standing in the gap on his right, his
baggage parked in rear, with the camels tied down in a circle, heads
inward, forming a rampart around it, and having an escort as strong as
he could spare from his already attenuated front, Napier passes on to
the assault, all the swords of his cavalry and the bayonets of his
infantry just numbering eighteen hundred, while his enemy in the hollow
and the woods reckons not a man less than thirty thousand chiefs and
clansmen.
And now as the line of _échelon_ gets closer to the hollow the fire from
matchlock and gun hits harder into the ranks of men moving in the old
fighting formation, the red line of battle--thin, men have called it,
but very thick for all that, with the memories of many triumphs. The
leading line--the Twenty-Second Regiment--is only one hundred yards from
the enemy. The moment had come for the skirmishers to fall back and give
place to the chief combatants now so near each other. Napier puts
himself in front of the Irishmen whose serried line of steel and scarlet
extends two hundred yards from right to left, and then the command to
charge rings out in his clear voice as three-and-thirty years earlier it
sounded above the strife of Corunna. Until this moment the fire of the
skirmishers has partly hidden the movement of formations behind; but
when the magic word which flings the soldier on his enemy was heard,
there came out of this veiling smoke a sight that no Beloochee warrior
had ever seen before, for, bending with the forward surge of a mighty
movement, the red wall of the Twenty-Second, fronted with steel, is
coming on to the charge. It took little time to traverse the intervening
space, and on the edge of the dry river-bed the two opposing forces met
in battle. If to the Beloochee foeman the sight and sound of a British
charge had been strange, not less terrible was the aspect of the field,
as all at once it opened upon the Twenty-Second. Below them, in the huge
bed of the Fullalee, a dense dark mass of warriors stood ready for the
shock. With flashing swords and shields held high over turbaned heads,
twenty thousand men shouting their war-cries and clashing sword and
shield together seemed to wave fierce welcome to their enemies. For a
moment it seems as though the vast disparity between the combatants must
check the ardour of the advancing line; for a moment the red wall
appears to stagger, but then the figure of the old General is seen
pushing out in front of his soldiers, as with voice and gesture, and the
hundred thoughts that find utterance at moments of extreme tension, he
urges them to stand steady in this terrible combat. And nobly do these
young soldiers--for this is their first battle--respond to the old
leader's call. A hundred times the Beloochee clansmen, moving from the
deep mass beneath, come surging up the incline, until from right to left
the clash of scimitar and shield against bayonet and musket rings along
the line, and a hundred times they reel back again, leaving the musket
and the matchlock to continue the deadly strife until another mass of
chosen champions again attempts the closer conflict. More than once the
pressure of the foremost swordsmen and the appearance of the dense dark
mass behind them cause the line of the Twenty-Second to recoil from the
edge of the bank; but wherever the dinted front of fight is visible
there too is quickly seen the leader, absolutely unconscious of danger,
his eagle eye fixed upon the strife, his hand waving his soldiers on,
his shrill clear voice ringing above shot and steel and shout of
combatants--the clarion call of victory. The men behind him see in this
figure of their chief something that hides from sight the whole host of
Beloochee foemen. Who could go back while he is there? Who among them
would not glory to die with such a leader? The youngest soldier in the
ranks feels the inspiration of such magnificent courage. The bugler of
the Twenty-Second, Martin Delaney, who runs at the General's stirrups,
catches, without necessity of order, the thought of his chief, and three
times when the line bends back before the Beloochee onslaught, the
"advance" rings out unbidden from his lips.
The final advance to the edge of the Fullalee, which brought the lines
to striking distance, had been made in what is called _échelon_ of
battalions from the right. That is to say, the Twenty-Second Regiment
struck the enemy first, then the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys came into impact,
and so on in succession until the entire line formed one continuous
front along the bank of the dry river. The advantages of this method of
assault were many. First, it allowed the Twenty-Second Regiment to give
a lead to the entire line, for each succeeding battalion could see with
what a front and bearing these splendid soldiers carried themselves in
the charge. Then, too, it enabled each particular regiment to come into
close quarters with the enemy upon a more regular and imposing front
than had the advancing force formed a single line necessarily crowded
and undulating by the exigencies of marching in a long continuous
formation, and also it made the assault upon the enemy's left flank the
last to come to shock of battle; for on this left flank the village of
Meanee was held in advance of the river line, and the Beloochee guns in
battery there had to be silenced before his infantry could be
encountered.
We have already said that our own artillery moved on the extreme right
of the infantry. Early in the action they closed up to the right flank
of the Twenty-Second, and coming into action on a mound which there
commanded the bed of the Fullalee, the farther bank of the river, and
the wooded _shikargah_ to the right, made havoc among the Beloochee
centre on one side, and, on the other, among the left wing which was
destined to fall upon our rear. Stopped by the grenadier company from
issuing through the large gap in the wall, and taken in flank by two of
the guns behind the mound, firing case-shot through another opening in
the wall made by the Madras Sappers, this left wing of the enemy
suffered so severely that it was unable to make any head. Napier had
told the grenadier company to defend the opening to the last man, and
nobly did they answer his behest. The captain of the company, Tew, died
at his post, but no enemy passed the gap that day.
Meanwhile the fight on the edge of the dry channel went on with a
sameness of fierceness that makes its recital almost monotonous. In no
modern battle that we read of is the actual shock of opposing forces
more than a question of a few moments' duration. Here at Meanee it is a
matter of hours. For upwards of three hours this red line is fighting
that mass of warriors at less than a dozen yards' distance, and often
during the long conflict the interval between the combatants is not half
as many feet. Over and over again heroic actions are performed in that
limited area between the hosts that read like a page from some dim
combat of Homeric legend. The commander of the Twenty-Fifth Bombay
Sepoys, Teesdale, seeing the press of foemen in front of his men to be
more than his line can stand, spurs into the midst of the surging mass,
and falls, hewing his enemies to the last. But his spirit seems to have
quitted his body only to enter into the three hundred men who have seen
him fall, and the wavering line bears up again. So, too, when the Sepoy
regiment next in line has to bear the brunt of the Beloochee charge, the
commanding officer, Jackson, rides forward into the advancing enemy and
goes down amid a whirl of sword-blades, his last stroke crashing through
a shield vainly raised to save its owner's life, and beats back the
Beloochee surge. M'Murdo of the Twenty-Second, riding as staff-officer
to the General, cannot resist the intoxication of such combats. Seeing a
chief conspicuous alike by martial bearing and richness of apparel, he
rides into the enemy's ranks and engages him in single combat. Before
they can meet M'Murdo's horse is killed, but the rider is quickly on his
feet, and the combat begins. Both are dexterous swordsmen, and each
seems to recognise in the other a foeman worthy of his steel; but the
Scottish clansman is stouter of sword than his Beloochee rival, and Jan
Mahomet Khan rolls from his saddle to join the throng which momentarily
grows denser on the sandy river-bed.
Once or twice the old General is himself in the press of the fight. He
is practically unarmed, because his right hand had been disabled a few
days earlier by a blow which he had dealt a camel-driver who was
maltreating his camel, and the Scindian's head being about fifty times
harder than the General's hand, a dislocated wrist was the result. So
intent is he on the larger battle that the men around him are scarcely
noticed, and more than once his life is saved by a soldier or an officer
interposing between him and an enemy intent on slaying the old chief,
who seems to him exactly what he is--the guiding spirit of this storm of
war. Thus Lieutenant Marston saves his General's life in front of the
Twenty-Fifth Sepoys by springing between a Beloochee soldier and
Napier's charger at the moment the enemy is about to strike. The blow
cuts deep into the brass scales on Marston's shoulder, and the Beloochee
goes down between the sword of the officer and the bayonet of a private
who has run in to the _melée_. Again he gets entangled in the press in
front, and is in close peril when a sergeant of the Twenty-Second saves
him; and as the old man emerges unscathed from the surf of shield and
sword, the whole Twenty-Second line shouts his name and greets him with
a wild Irish cheer of rapture ringing high above the clash of battle. It
is at this time that the drummer Delaney, who keeps everywhere on foot
beside his General, performs the most conspicuous act of valour done
during the day. In the midst of the _melée_ he sees a mounted chief
leading on his men. Delaney seizes a musket and bayonet, rushes upon the
horseman, and Meer Wullee Mahomet Khan goes down in full sight of both
armies, while the victor returns with the rich sword and shield of the
Beloochee leader.
There are no revolvers yet, no breechloading arms, nothing but the sword
for the officer and the flint musket and bayonet for the men; and
fighting means something more than shoving cartridges in at one end of a
tube and blowing them out at the other, twenty to the minute, by the
simple action of pulling a finger. "At Meanee," says M'Murdo, "the
muskets of the men often ceased to go off, from the pans becoming
clogged with powder, and then you would see soldiers, taking advantage
of a momentary lull in the onslaught, wiping out the priming pans with a
piece of rag, or fixing a new flint in the hammer." Sometimes these
manifold inducements to old "brown Bess" to continue work have to be
suspended in order to receive on levelled bayonets a wild Beloochee
rush, and then frequently could be seen the spectacle of men impaled
upon the steel, still hacking down the enemy they had been able to reach
only in death.
This desperate battle has continued for three hours, when for the first
time the Beloochees show symptoms of defeat. The moment has in fact come
which in every fight marks the turn of the tide of conflict, and quick
as thought Napier seizes its arrival. His staff officers fly to the left
carrying orders to the Scinde Horse and the Bengal Cavalry to penetrate
at all hazards through the right of the enemy's line, and fall upon his
rear. The orders are well obeyed, and soon the red turbans of Jacob's
Horse and the Bengal Cavalry are seen streaming through the Fullalee,
and, mounting the opposite slope where the Beloochee camp is pitched,
they capture guns, camp, standards, and all the varied insignia of
Eastern war. The battle of Meanee is won. Then, beginning with the
Twenty-Second, there went up a great cheer of victory. How those
Tipperary throats poured forth their triumph, as bounding forward, the
men so long assailed became assailants, and driving down the now
slippery incline they bore back in quickening movement the wavering mass
of swordsmen! Perhaps there was something in that Irish cheer that told
the old General there was the note of love as well as of pride in the
ring. Why not? Had he not always stood up for them and for their land?
Had not their detractors ever been his enemies? Had not he dammed back
the tide of his own success in life by championing their unfashionable
cause? Soldiers catch quickly thoughts and facts that come to other men
through study and reflection. They were proud of him, they loved him,
and for more than half a century their valour and their misfortunes had
touched the springs of admiration and sorrow in his heart. How he valued
these cheers on the field of Meanee his journal of the following day
tells. "The Twenty-Second gave me three cheers after the fight, and one
during it," he writes. "Her Majesty has no honour to give that can equal
that." What a leader! What soldiers!