THE MORROW OF MEANEE--THE ACTION AT DUBBA
Exhausted by the prolonged strain of mind and body--"ready to drop," he
tells us, "from the fatigue of one constant cheer"--Napier lay down in
his cloak that night in the midst of the dead and dying. Terrible had
been the slaughter. More than twelve hundred dead lay in the dry bed of
the river immediately in front of where the British line had fought. The
woods and surrounding ground held a vast number of bodies. It is
estimated that not less than six or seven thousand Beloochees perished
in the battle. On our own side the loss, though severe, was slight
compared with that of the enemy. About two hundred and seventy of all
ranks had been killed and wounded--more than one-seventh of the total
number engaged. Of these, nineteen were officers--a third of the number
on the ground. These figures give us a good measure of the fierce nature
of the struggle, and of the bravery displayed on both sides; but the
true lesson of such heroism was not noticed at the time, or rather was
kept steadily out of sight by all save a few men, and that lesson was
this, that good and courageous leadership means brave and victorious
soldiers, and that bad leadership means cowardice and defeat. It was
but a year before this day of heroes at Meanee that there had been
whole days and weeks of cowardice at Cabul. Infantry, cavalry,
artillery; arms, powder, and shot--all the same, yet all the difference
between victory and defeat, between honour and dishonour in the two
results. It was this fact above every other that caused the display of
envious enmity from so many quarters towards Napier and his victory; the
contrast was too glaring, the youngest soldier in the ranks could read
it. But a year ago the world had beheld the most dishonourable and
inglorious chapter of our military history enacted near the head waters
of this same Indus river, and here, now, another hand playing the game
with the self-same cards had won it against greater odds and braver
enemies.
But if it was unpleasant in England to find the lesson of victory taught
so well by one who had ever opposed privilege, whether it called itself
Whig or Tory, still more disagreeable was it to certain classes in India
to find the man who had already, during his brief sojourn in the East,
vehemently assailed the most cherished abuses of Indian misgovernment
all at once the victor of a desperate battle. What was to be done in the
circumstances? They dared not depreciate the valour of the troops or the
desperate bravery they had overcome, but it was possible for them to
denounce the victorious old general. He had few friends among the
rulers. He had too frequently told them what he thought of them. He had
so often applied the salt of his satire to the great leech called
favouritism, that now his detractors were sure of finding an audience
ready to applaud when they launched the envenomed shaft, and spoke of
the "ferocity and blood-thirstiness" of the old chief, and did what
they could to lessen his glory,--that chief who wrote in his journal
how he had covered an enemy who had come too close to him with his
pistol, "but did not shoot, having great repugnance to kill with my own
hand unless attacked!"
It is a sorry story, and one we will gladly pass on from with this
observation. It would have been better had Napier treated the whole host
of his attackers, Indian editors and Indian civilians, English peers and
English pressmen, with silent contempt. The very virulence of their
denunciation was as quicksilver poured upon the glass of their envy. He
could see his own greatness all the better, and measure the shallowness
of the medium that revealed it to him. But there was one thing that the
detractors could not do; they could not hide from the soldiers of
England or India, or from the people of the United Kingdom, that this
battle of Meanee had been a victory with the old ring in it. Right up
comes the little army; no hesitation, no false movements; right thrown
forward because the Irish are there; left thrown back because the
enemy's guns are there; then a hand-to-hand fight for three hours in
which the old leader is ever out in front waving his hat, cheering with
his shrill voice, getting his hair singed with the closeness of guns
going off under his nose. No, they cannot blacken that picture, for
every man in the little army has seen it during these three hours, and
under its influence the very camp-followers have become daring soldiers.
"I bring to your notice," writes the officer commanding the artillery,
"the names of three native gun-lascars, who displayed the greatest
bravery in dragging the guns up to the edge of the bank, level with the
Twenty-Second line. I would not venture to do so had they not been mere
followers, entitled to no pension to themselves or reward to their
families had they fallen." Such is the force of a general's example.
Before night closed on the field the fruits of the victory were
apparent. Six Ameers of Scinde came in and surrendered themselves
prisoners of war, bringing with them the keys of Hyderabad, whose tall
towers were visible against the horizon five miles to the south. Then
Napier lay down to sleep, and so sound was his rest that when there is a
false alarm among the camp-followers towards morning they cannot rouse
him. Next morning he writes his despatches and tells the story of the
fight in short and vivid language. He does not forget the man in the
ranks, and for the first time in the history of our wars the private
soldier is personally named for his bravery. What a levelling general
this is! Yesterday he was levelling his enemies; now to-day he is
levelling his friends. They will not like it at home, he thinks. Well,
he cannot help that; they will have to like it some day, and the sooner
they begin to learn the better, so off goes the names of Drummer Martin
Delaney, and full Private James O'Neill, and Havildar Thackoor Ram, and
Subadar Eman Beet, and Trooper Mootee Sing, and many others.
Having buried his dead, rested his living, and sent off his despatches,
Napier moved his little army to Hyderabad, hoisted the British flag on
the great tower of the fortress, and put his force in camp four miles
farther west on the Indus. He was still far from the end of hostilities.
He had defeated over thirty thousand Beloochees at Meanee, but there
were fifteen thousand more who had not reached the field of battle that
day, and these now formed a rallying-point for the bands which had
withdrawn from that stubborn fight beaten but not routed. Shere Mahomet,
Ameer of Meerpoor, the leader of this force--the only real fighting man
among the Scindian princes--had still to be reckoned with, and that
reckoning was in no degree rendered easier by the fact that since
Meanee, the real weakness of the British in numbers had become known to
the whole world of Scinde. Everybody had seen the slender column that
had taken possession of Hyderabad, and was now entrenched on the left
bank of the Indus four miles from the city. Let the Lion of Meerpoor
bide his time, gather all the Beloochee clansmen, and when the sun once
more hung straight over the Scindian desert fall on the Feringhee. It
was a pretty plan, and no doubt might have had fair chance of at least a
temporary success had it been played against a less experienced enemy
than this old war-dog now entrenched upon the Indus. For him two things
were necessary. First, he must obtain reinforcements for his army;
second, he must draw the Lion closer to his camp. When the time comes
for making another spring it will not do to go seeking this Scindian
chief afar off, in deserts that are glowing like live coals in the
midsummer sun. So two lines of policy are pursued by Napier. He sends up
and down the Indus for every man and gun he hopes to lay hands on, and
he spreads abroad in Hyderabad the story of his own weakness. The Lion,
scared by Meanee, had fallen back towards his deserts; now, lured by
these accounts of paucity of numbers, sickness, etc., he draws forward
again, until he is only six miles beyond Hyderabad and within one march
of the Indus. It was now the middle of March; the reinforcements are
approaching. Stack with fifteen hundred men and five guns is only five
marches distant to the north. The Lion can strike at Stack before he
joins Napier, but on his side Sir Charles is watchful. If the Lion moves
to fall on Stack, he, Napier, will make a spring at the Lion's flank. It
is a pretty game, but one of course only possible to play in war with a
half-savage enemy. On March 22nd Stack is passing Meanee. The Lion makes
a weak attempt to gobble up his fifteen hundred men, but Napier has sent
out a strong force of cavalry and guns to help his lieutenant, and Stack
gets safely in on the 22nd. On the same day boats arrive from north and
south with more reinforcements and supplies, and on the following
everything is ready for the attack on the Lion, who is just nine miles
distant, entrenched up to his eyes and tail in woods, _nullahs_, and
villages at Dubba, five miles from Hyderabad.
Napier has five thousand men all told, the Lion has five-and-twenty
thousand. The odds are long, but longer ones had been faced at Meanee,
and the Tipperary men are still at the head of the column, and neither
they nor their general have the slightest doubt about the result. The
army marches before daybreak, and the morning is yet young when it is in
sight of the enemy. The Lion is lying low, well hidden in his _nullahs_
of which he has a double line, one flank resting on the village of Dubba
and the old Fullalee channel, the other well screened by wood. He has
eleven guns in front of Dubba. The British column now forms line as at
Meanee, but this time the Twenty-Second take the left, opposite the
fortified village and the battery, because there will be the thick of
the fight. The advance is again to be in _échelon_ of battalions, the
Twenty-Second leading. When all is ready, the guns, of which Napier has
nineteen, open on the Beloochee position, then the Twenty-Second lead
straight upon Dubba. Into the _nullah_, through the _nullah_, out of the
_nullah_, right through the double line of entrenchments goes this
"ever-glorious regiment," strewing the ground with enemies, and leaving
more than a third of its own numbers down too. The fighting here and at
the village of Dubba is very stubborn, for at this point the brave
African chief Hoche Mahomet has taken his stand, and the fierce
valour--which forty years later we are to know more about--marks his
presence. But Meanee has taken the steel out of the Beloochee swordsmen,
and the whole position is soon in our hands. This time Napier is strong
in cavalry, and a vigorous pursuit followed the broken bands as they
retreated towards Meerpoor. In this fight at Dubba as at Meanee Napier
has many escapes. A bullet breaks the hilt of his sword; the orderly
riding behind him has his horse disabled with a sword-cut; as they gain
the village a magazine blows up in the midst of them; but the General is
not touched. As usual he is in the very thick of the fighting, cheered
everywhere by the soldiers. They are all young enough to be his
children, but they watch him as a lioness would watch her last remaining
cub, Private Tim Kelly constituting himself as special protector, and
bayoneting every Beloochee that comes near his child. Six months later
we find Napier has not forgotten these splendid soldiers. Writing to the
Governor-General and thanking him for the promise of a medal for the
battles, he thus speaks of his men: "Now I can wear my Grand Cross at
ease, but while my officers and men received nothing my Ribbon sat
uncomfortably on my shoulder. Now I can meet Corporal Tim Kelly and
Delaney the bugler without a blush." And then comes a bit which deserves
record so long as history tells of heroism. Here it is: "I find that
twelve wounded men of the Twenty-Second concealed their wounds at Dubba,
thinking there would be another fight. They were discovered by a long
hot march which they could not complete, and when they fell they had to
own the truth. Two of them had been shot clean through both legs. How is
it possible to defeat British troops? It was for the Duke of York to
discover that!"
From the field of Dubba the victors pressed on to finish the war. Two
days after the fight the infantry are twenty, and the cavalry forty,
miles from the scene of battle. The Lion's capital, Meerpoor, was
occupied on March 26th, his desert fort at Omercote surrendered on April
4th. The war was practically over. "This completes the conquest of
Scinde," writes Napier when he hears that Omercote is his; "every place
is in my possession, and, thank God, I have done with war! Never again
am I likely to see another shot fired in anger. Now I shall work at
Scinde as in Cephalonia to do good, to create, to improve, to end
destruction, to raise up order." So he hoped; but it was not to be as he
thought. Peace was yet some months distant, and even when it came with
Beloochee on the Indus, a warfare of words and pens with a whole host of
enemies at home and in India was to embitter the remaining future of the
conqueror's life. The Lion got clear away from Dubba, and by the middle
of May he had again rallied to his standard some ten thousand men. He
was now fifty miles north of Hyderabad, on the line Napier had followed
when moving from Sukkur to Meanee. The heat was at its worst. No one who
has not felt the power of the sun in lands where the desert acts as a
vast fire-brick to scorch life to a cinder can realise this terrible
temperature. One only chance remains for European life under such
conditions--it is entire abstinence from alcoholic drink. In Scinde as
in other parts of India alcohol was plentiful, and the loss among the
soldiers was proportionally great. In the end of May Napier moved once
more against the Lion. Two other columns were also directed from north
and east against him. Thus between the three advancing forces and the
Indus it was hoped he might be crushed. Despite terrific heat and an
inundation now at its height, these columns gradually drew to their
object; but there was no real fight now left in the Beloochee clansmen;
Roberts near Schwan, and Jacob at Shadadpoor, defeated his soldiers with
ease, and the Lion became a fugitive in the foot-hills of Beloochistan.
It was full time for hostilities to cease. On June 14th Napier's column
reached Nusserpoor, some ten or twelve miles east of Meanee; his men
were dropping by scores; the air seemed to be on fire. Suddenly through
this furnace-heated atmosphere came the distant sound of cannon. It was
the last echo of the war; Jacob was fighting the Lion twenty miles to
the north. When mid-day arrived the heat grew more intense. In one hour
forty-three European soldiers were down with sunstroke, and before
evening they were all dead. One more had to fall before the terrible
day was over. It was the General. He was sitting writing in his tent,
and had just written: "Our lives are on the _simmer_ now, and will soon
boil; the natives cannot stand it; and I have been obliged to take my
poor horse, Red Rover, into my tent, where he lies down exhausted, and
makes me very hot. I did not bring a thermometer--what use would it be
to lobster boiling alive?" Then he fell struck by heat apoplexy.
Fortunately the doctors were near, all the restoratives were quickly
applied, and life was saved. As they were tying up his arm after
bleeding, a horseman came galloping to the tent. He carried a despatch
from Jacob announcing the final victory over Shere Mahomet. What effect
the news had on the prostrate old soldier we learn from the journal ten
days later, when he is able again to write an entry. "Jacob's message
roused me from my lethargy as much as the bleeding; it relieved my mind,
for then I knew my plans had succeeded, and the Beloochee had found that
his deserts and his fierce sun could not stop me. We lost many men by
heat; but all must die some time, and no time better than when giving an
enemy a lesson."
They brought him back to Hyderabad, and the wonderful constitution,
tempered and twisted into birdcage wire by years of temperance and
labour, again asserted itself, and within a fortnight of the blow of the
sun he comes up smiling to the hundred cares of war and government, and
to the still more wearing worries of assault from open and concealed
enemies in England and India. For a long time he is very weak. All the
reaction of these four anxious months, all the waste of life-power which
war brings with it, now capped by sunstroke, and still further
accentuated by calumny and ill-natured criticism, are too much for him,
and it seems that he must soon lay his bones in the sands of Scinde.
"Even to mount my horse," he writes, "is an exertion. I, who ten years
ago did not know what fatigue was, and who even a few months ago at
Poonah knocked off fifty-four miles in the heat, am now distressed by
four miles! This last illness has floored me, and even my mind has lost
its energy; yet it is good to die in harness." These forebodings were
not to be verified. The long Scindian summer wore away, and with the end
of August cooler weather began to dawn on the Unhappy Valley. Gradually
we find the old tone coming back into the journal, the old ring into the
letters. He has a hundred plans for the improvement of Scinde and the
happiness of its people. He will chain the Indus in its channel, cut
canals for irrigation, lessen the taxes, lighten the lot of the
labourer, curb the power of the chiefs--in fine, make a Happy Valley out
of this long dreary, dusty, sun-baked land. Alas! it was only a pleasant
dream. The man who would do all this must be something more than a
governor reporting home by every mail, and called upon to reply to every
silly question which ignorance, prompted by mammon or malice, may
dictate. One thing he is determined upon. He will give the labourer
justice, cost what it may. He has caught two tax-collectors riding
roughshod over the peasants. "I will make," he writes, "such an example
of them as shall show the poor people my resolution to protect them.
Yes, I will make this land happy if life is left me for a year. I shall
have no more Beloochees to kill. Battle! victory! spirit-stirring sounds
in the bosom of society; but to me--O God, how my spirit rejects them!
Not one feeling of joy or exultation entered my head at Meanee or
Dubba--all was agony. I can use no better word. To win was the least
bloody thing to be done, and was my work for the day; but with it came
anxiety, pain of heart, disgust, and a longing never to have quitted
Celbridge; to have passed my life in the 'round field,' and in the
'devil's acre,' and under the yew trees on the terrace amongst the
sparrows--these were the feelings that flashed in my head after the
battles." And then he goes on to speak his thoughts upon government and
justice, and very noticeable thoughts they are too--never more worthy of
attention than to-day. "People think," he writes, "and justly sometimes,
that to execute the law is the great thing; they fancy this to be
_justice_. Cast away details, good man, and take what the people call
justice, not what the laws call justice, and execute that. Both legal
and popular justice have their evils, but assuredly the people's justice
is a thousand times nearer to God's justice. Justice must go with the
people, not against the people; that is the way to govern nations, and
not by square and compass." Very old words these, rung so often in the
ears of rulers that they have long ago forgotten their import, until all
at once their truth is brought home to heart again by the loss of a
crown or the revolt of a colony.
Now arrived from England the list of honours and rewards for the
victories. Immediately upon the receipt of the news of Meanee Lord
Ellenborough had appointed Napier Governor of Scinde, with fullest
powers. The _Gazette_ made him only a Grand Cross of the Bath. Peerages
had been bestowed for very small fractions of victory in Afghanistan;
but for these real triumphs in Scinde there was to be no such reward,
and it was better that it should have been so. The gold of Napier's
nature did not want the stamp of mere rank; perhaps it would not carry
the alloy which the modern mint finds necessary for the operation. But
although the reward of the victor was thus carefully limited, it was
quite sufficient to call forth many open expressions of ill-will, and
still more numerous secret assaults of envious antagonists.
Unfortunately for Napier, these he could not meet with silent contempt.
The noble nature of the man could accept neglect with stoical
indifference; but the fighting nature of the soldier could not brook the
stings of political or journalistic cavillers. And it must be
acknowledged these last were enough to rouse the lion of St. Mark
himself, even had that celebrated animal imbibed from his master his
full share of virtues. Everything was cavilled at; motive, action, and
result were attacked, and from the highest Director of the East India
Company in Leadenhall Street to the most insignificant editor of an
Indian newspaper in the service of the civilian interest in Bombay or
Calcutta, came the stinging flight of query, innuendo, or direct
condemnation. The reason for much of this animosity was not hard to
find. Napier had dared to tell unpalatable truths about the
impoverishment of India through the horde of locusts who, under the name
of Government, had settled upon it. The man who could tell the Directors
of the East India Company that their military policy tended to the
mutiny of their soldiers, and their civil system was a huge source of
Indian spoliation, was not likely to find much favour with the richest
and most powerful, and, it may be added, the most commercial company
the world has ever seen; nor was he likely to be a _persona grata_ with
the officials who administered the affairs of that gigantic corporation.
This is the true key to solve the now perplexing question of the
antagonism encountered by Charles Napier from the moment of his success
at Meanee to the end of his life. The pride of aristocratic privilege in
high place is a dangerous thing to touch; but the pride of the
plutocratic Solomon in his right to reap the labour of those who toil
and spin is a thousand times a more venturesome thing to trench upon.
Added to these causes for negative recognition of brilliant service, and
positive condemnation from many quarters, there was a political state of
things which influenced the opinion of the moment. Lord Ellenborough was
not popular. The Whig policy of action beyond the Indian frontier had
been most disastrous. The contrast between it and the campaign on the
Indus was painfully apparent. It was like some long day of storm and
gloom which had closed in a glorious sunset; and while the morning and
mid-day of tempest had been Whig, the evening glory had come under a
Tory administration. In reading the history of all these squabbles now,
the chief regret we experience is that Napier should have bothered
himself with their presence. Indeed, in his moments of calm reflection
he appears to have rated them at their true worth. "Honours!" he writes
about this time; "I have had honour sufficient in both battles. At
Meanee, when we forced the Fullalee, the Twenty-Second, seeing me at
their head, gave me three cheers louder than all the firing. And at
Dubba, when I returned nearly alone from the pursuit with the cavalry,
the whole Line gave me three cheers. One wants nothing more than the
praise of men who know how to judge movements."
With these soldiers indeed, officers and men, his popularity was
unbounded. They knew the truth. Many among them had seen to their cost
the fruits of bad leadership in Cabul, and had learnt to value the truth
of the old Greek proverb, which declared that "a herd of deer led by a
lion was more formidable to the enemy than a herd of lions led by a
deer." And they knew that though this small, spare, eagle-beaked and
falcon-eyed leader worked them till they dropped beneath the fierce sun
of Scinde, there was no heat of sun or fatigue of march or press of
battle which he did not take his lion's share of. Even when now, in this
autumn of 1843, an enemy more formidable to soldiers attacked them, when
the deadliest fever stalked through the rough camps along the Indus, and
the graveyards grew as the ranks thinned, no murmur rose from the rank
and file, but silently the fate was accepted which sent hundreds of them
to an inglorious death. Here and there through the journals we come on
entries that tell more powerfully than any record of figures could do
what this mortality must have been. "Alas!" we read only a few months
after Meanee, "these two brave soldiers, Kelly and Delaney of the
Twenty-Second, are dead. They fought by my side, Kelly at Dubba and
Delaney at Meanee. Three times, when I thought the Twenty-Second could
not stand the furious rush of the swordsmen, Delaney sounded the
advance, and each time the line made a pace or two nearer to the enemy."
Difficult now is it for us to believe that at this time, when the
soldiers of the army of Scinde were dying by hundreds in hospital, they
were denied the last consolations of their religion. "There is no
Catholic clergyman here," writes Napier in October, 1843. "The Mussulman
and the Hindoo have their teachers; the Christian has none. The Catholic
clergyman is more required than the Protestant, because Catholics are
more dependent upon their clergy for religious consolation than the
Protestants are; and the Catholic soldier dies in great distress if he
has not a clergyman to administer to him. But, exclusive of all other
reasons, I can hardly believe that a Christian government will refuse
his pastor to the soldier serving in a climate where death is so rife,
and the buoyant spirit of man is crushed by the debilitating effects of
disease and heat. I cannot believe that such a government will allow
Mammon to cross the path of our Saviour, to stand between the soldier
and his God, and let his drooping mind thirst in vain for the support
which his Church ought to afford." No wonder that the Governor who
could, in such glowing words, rebuke the greed of his governors and
champion the cause of the lowly should find few friends in high place;
that the reward of rank, given before and since for such trivial result
or such maculated victory, should have been denied to the brilliant
victor of Meanee and conqueror of Scinde; that the thanks of Parliament
should have been delayed till the greater part of the army thanked was
in its grave; and that the leader of that army should find himself and
his victories the objects of all the secret shafts and mysterious
machinery which wealth, power, and malevolent envy could set in motion
against him.