THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCINDE
Scinde subdued in the open field, there still remained great work to be
done--work which tasks to a far larger degree the talent of man than any
feat of arms in war can do. War at best is but a pulling down, often a
very necessary operation, but all the same only the preliminary step of
clearing the ground for some better edifice.
For better, for worse, Scinde was now British, and Napier set at once to
work to consolidate his conquest, and secure to the conquered province
the best administration of justice he could devise for it. A terrible
misfortune came, however, to retard all plans for improvement. Early in
the autumn pestilence laid low almost the entire army of the Indus. A
slow and wasting form of fever broke out among both English and Indian
soldiers, and equally struck down the natives of Scinde. In the camp at
Hyderabad twenty-eight hundred men were down together. At Kurachee the
Twenty-Eighth Regiment could only muster about forty men fit for service
out of the entire battalion. At Sukkur, in Northern Scinde, sixteen
hundred were in hospital. There were only a few doctors to look after
this army of sick. Out of three cavalry regiments, only a hundred men
could mount their horses. People shook their heads gloomily, and Scinde
became known far and wide as the Unhappy Valley. Amid all this misery,
while "the land in its length and breadth was an hospital," as Napier
described it, we find him never giving in for a moment, working at his
plans for justice, repression of outrage, irrigation, roads, bridges,
moles, harbours, and embankments as though he was enjoying the
health-giving breezes of the Cephalonian mountains. Wonderful now to
read are the plans and visions of the future that then floated before
his mind. "Suez, Bombay, and Kurachee will hit Calcutta hard before
twenty years pass," he writes, "but Bombay will beat Kurachee, and be
the Liverpool if not the London of India." Nor has the pestilence
stilled in his heart dreams of further conquest. "How easily, were I
absolute," he says, "could I conquer all these countries and make
Kurachee the capital. With the Bombay soldiers of Meanee and Hyderabad I
could walk through all the lands. I would raise Beloochee regiments,
pass the Bolan in a turban, and spread rumours of a dream and the
prophet. Pleasant would be the banks of the Helmund to the host of
Mahomedans who would follow any conqueror." So passed the winter of
1844. Before the cool season was over, the troops had regained
comparative health, and were better able to face the terrible summer.
May and June came, as usual bringing sunstroke, disease, and death in
their train, but for Napier the hot season of 1844 had something worse
in store. His Chief, Lord Ellenborough, was suddenly recalled by the
East India Directors. This was a regular knock-down blow, for while
Lord Ellenborough was Viceroy of India Charles Napier could count upon
an unvarying support; he fought, as it were, with his back to a wall.
Now the wall was gone, and henceforth it seemed that the circle of his
enemies would be complete. "I see but one advantage in the unfortunate
recall of Lord Ellenborough," he writes; "it will oblige the Government
to destroy a Mercantile Republic which has arisen in the midst of the
British Monarchy." The prophecy was not to be fulfilled for thirteen
years, when the terrible mutiny of 1857--so often predicted by Napier,
and laughed at by his enemies--came like an avalanche to sweep before it
every vestige of the famous Association.
What life in Scinde meant to Napier in this hot season of 1844 we gather
from a letter written in June to his brother. "The Bengal troops at
Shikarpoor are in open mutiny," he writes, "and I am covered with boils,
that have for three weeks kept me in pain and eight days in bed. This,
with the heat and an attack of fever, has made me too weak to go to
Shikarpoor, for the sun is fierce up the river; many have been struck
down by it last week, and it would be difficult for me to bear a second
rap. Still I would risk it, but that a storm seems brewing at Mooltan,
and this extraordinary change of governors will not dispel it. To me
also it appears doubtful, if the Sikhs pour sixty or seventy thousand
men over the Sutlej, whether Gough has means to pull them up. I am
therefore nursing myself to be able to bolt northwards when we can act,
which is impossible now--three days under canvas would kill half the
Europeans." If Napier's reputation for foresight stood alone upon the
above letter, it would suffice to place him at the top of the far-seeing
leaders of his day. In the midst of all his sickness and discomfort he
accurately forecast the history of the coming years in India. The
intense activity of the man's mind is never more apparent than during
this terrible season, which prostrates thousands of younger men. His
letters teem with brilliant bits of thought on government, war, justice,
society, politics, taxation,--nothing comes amiss to him. Here, for
example, is a bit on war worth whole volumes of the stuff usually
written about it. "The man who leads an army cannot succeed unless his
whole mind is thrown into his work, any more than an actor can act
unless he feels his part as if he was the man he represents. It is not
saying 'Come and go' that wins battles; you must make the men you lead
come and go with a will to their work of death. The man who either
cannot or will not do this, but goes to war snivelling about virtue and
unrighteousness, will be left on the field of battle to fight for
himself." Here again is a little chapter on Indian government. "The
Indian system seems to be the crushing of the native plebeian and
supporting the aristocrat who, reason and facts tell us, is our deadly
enemy. He always must be, for we step into his place. The _ryot_ is
ruined by us, though willing to be our friend. Yet he is the man to whom
we must trust for keeping India--and the only one who can take it from
us, if we ill-use him, for then he joins his hated natural chief.
English and Indian may be amalgamated by just and equal laws--until we
are no longer strangers. The final result of our Indian conquests no man
can predict, but if we take the people by the hand we may count on
ruling India for ages. Justice--rigid justice, even severe justice--will
work miracles. India is safe if so ruled, but such deeds are done as
make me wonder that we hold it a year."
As the cool season of 1844-45 drew on, Napier set out on an expedition
against the hill tribes of Northern Scinde. Hitherto these wild clansmen
had had things pretty much their own way; in true Highland fashion they
were wont to sweep down upon the villages of the plain, killing men,
carrying off women and cattle, looting and devastating as they went.
Hard to catch were these Beloochee freebooters, for their wiry little
horses carried the riders quickly out of reach into some fastness where
pursuit, except in strength and with supplies for man and beast, was
hopeless. The hills which harboured these raiders ran along the entire
western frontier of Scinde, from the sea to the Bolan Pass. North of
that famous entrance to Afghanistan they curved to the east, approaching
the Indus not far from the point where that stream received the five
rivers of the Punjaub. Here, spreading out into a labyrinth of crag,
defile, and mountain, they formed a succession of natural fortresses,
the approaches to which were unknown to the outer world. This great
fastness, known as the Cutchee Hills, was distant from Kurachee more
than three hundred miles. Leaving Kurachee in the middle of November and
following a road which skirted a fringe of hills lying west of the
Indus, Napier reached his northern frontier after a month's march. It
was a pleasant change to get away from the sickly cantonments into the
desert and the hills, where the pure air, now cooled by the winter
nights, brought back health and strength to the little column. How
thoroughly the toil- and heat-worn soldier enjoyed this long march we
gather from his letters.
My march is a picturesque one (he writes). At this moment behind me
is my Mogul guard, some two hundred cavalry, with their splendid
Asiatic dress, and the sun's horizontal rays glancing with
coruscations of light along their bright sword-blades. Behind them
are three hundred infantry--the old bronzed soldiers of the
Thirteenth Regiment--the defenders of Jellalabad, veterans of
battle. So are the cavalry, for they charged at Meanee and
Hyderabad, where their scarlet turbans were seen sweeping through
the smoke--by their colour seeming to announce the bloody work they
were at. On these picturesque horsemen the sun is gleaming, while
the Lukkee hills are casting their long shades and the Kurta range
reflects from its crowning rock the broad beautiful lights. Below
me are hundreds of loaded camels with guards and drivers, rude
grotesque people, all slowly winding among the hills. Such is royal
life here, for it is grand and kingly to ride through the land that
we have conquered, with the men who fought. Yet, what is it all?
Were I a real king there would be something in it--but a mere
copper captain!
A fine picture of martial life in the East all the same, and when we
contrast it with a little bit of his experience a couple of days later,
we get the far-apart limits which held between them the nature of the
man. He is now writing from Schwan, where he has delayed his march two
days for the purpose of seeing justice done to the poor cultivators and
fishermen of that place.
_November 30th._--Still at Schwan, having halted to find out the
truth. The poor people came to me with earnest prayers,--they never
come without cause,--but they are such liars and so bad at
explaining, that were their language understood by me it would be
hard to reach facts. Yet, knowing well that at the bottom there is
gospel, that no set of poor wretches ever complain without a
foundation, here will I stay until the truth comes out, and relief
be given. On all these occasions my plan is a most unjust one, for
against all evidence I decide in favour of the poor, and argue
against the argument of the Government people as long as I can.
When borne down by proofs 'irrefragable,' like Alexander, I cut the
knot and give an atrocious verdict against 'clearest proof.' My
formula is this: punish the Government servants first, and inquire
about the right and wrong when there is time. This is the way to
prevent tyranny, to make the people happy, and to render public
servants honest. If the complaint is that they cheat Government,
oh! that is another question; then have fair trials and leniency.
We are all weak when temptation is strong.
Pity is it to lose a word of this ruler, who rules in fashion so
different from the law-giving of the usual bigwig. But space denies us
longer leave to delve in this rich mine of justice. It is a fine
picture--one that the world does not see enough of--this victorious old
soldier riding through the conquered land intent on justice, sparing
himself nothing to lift up the poor, to free the toiler, to unbind the
slave. A strong man, terrible only to the unjust, spreading everywhere
the one grand law of his life--"A privileged class cannot be permitted."
With him the quibbler, the _doctrinaire_, the political economist, has
no place. "Well did Napoleon say," he writes, "that the _doctrinaire_
and the political economist would ruin the most flourishing kingdom in
ten years. Well, they have no place yet in Scinde; there are no Whig
poor-laws here. Oh, it is glorious thus to crush Scindian Whiggism! and
don't I grind it till my heart dances? The poor fishermen who are now
making their lying howls of complaint at the door of my tent are right,
though I can't yet find the truth in the midst of their falsehoods." But
he stops by the shore of Lake Manchur until the truth is found out; and
then we read: "Marched this morning, having penetrated the mystery. The
collector has without my knowledge raised the taxation 40 per cent on
the very poorest class of the population. He is an amiable man, and so
religious that he would not cough on a Sunday, yet he has done a deed of
such cruelty as is enough to raise an insurrection. This discovery of
oppression is alone sufficient to repay the trouble of my journey." A
despot, you will say, reader, is this soldier judge, thus
Riding forth redressing human wrong.
Yes, a despot truly, and one who, if history had held more of them, we
might to-day have known a good deal less about human misery than we do.
And now with your permission we will proceed into the Cutchee Hills.
Napier reached Sukkur in the week preceding Christmas 1844. It had been
the base from whence he had moved to attack the Ameers two years
earlier. It was now to be his base against the hill tribes of Cutchee.
At the head of a confederacy of clans stood Beja Khan Doomkee, an old
and redoubtable warrior, strong in the inaccessible nature of his
mountains, strong, too, in being able to throw the glamour of Islam over
his raids and ravages, and stronger still in the bravery and
determination of the men whose creed of plunder was strangely coupled
with the old heroic virtues of that great Arab race from which they
sprang. How was this stout old robber with his eight or ten thousand
fighting men to be worsted? By the exact opposite of the ordinary rules
of war for civilised opponents: by dispersing the columns of attack,
while making each strong enough for separate resistance, he would force
the clansmen to mass together; the very ruggedness and aridity which
made their hills so formidable to an enemy would thus be turned against
themselves. Napier's columns, fed from their bases on the Indus, would
advance cautiously into the labyrinth; the hill-men, forced together in
masses, would eat out their supplies; the same walls of rock which kept
out an enemy would now keep in the assembled tribes.
Before setting his columns in motion from the Indus, Napier adopted many
devices to lull the clans into a fancied security. The fever still clung
to his soldiers, and so deadly was its nature that nearly the whole of
the Seventy-Eighth Highlanders perished at Sukkur. But even this
terrible disaster was turned to account by the inexhaustible resource of
the commander. He sent messages to the Khan of Khelat that the sickness
of his soldiers and his own debility were so great that he could not
move against the tribes. These messages were designed to reach Beja
Khan. They did reach him, and emboldened by the news the hill-men
remained with their flocks and herds on the level and comparatively
fertile country where the desert first merges into the foot-hills of
Cutchee. Then Napier, suddenly launching his force in three columns,
dashed into this borderland by forced marches, surprised the tribes,
captured thousands of their cattle and most of their grain supplies, and
forcing them back into the mountains, sat down himself at the gates or
passes leading into the fastness to await the arrival of his guns,
infantry, and commissariat. It took some days before his columns were
ready to enter the defiles, and then the real mountain warfare began.
Very strange work it was; full of necessities of sudden change, of
ceaseless activity, of prolonged exertion, climbing of rocks, boring for
water, meeting each day's difficulty by some fresh combination, some new
expedient. A war where set rules did not apply, where the savage had to
be encountered by equal instinct and wider comprehension, but where,
nevertheless, the sharpest foresight was as essential to success as
though the theatre of the struggle had been on the soldier-trodden
plains of Europe. Broadly speaking, the plan of campaign was this. He
would enter the hills with four columns, one of which, his own, would be
the real fighting one; the other three would act as stoppers of the main
passes leading out of the mountains. Somewhere in the centre of the
cluster of fastnesses there was a kernel fastness called Truckee. It was
a famous spot in the robber legends of middle Asia, a kind of circular
basin having a wall of perpendicular rock six hundred feet high all
round it, with cleft entrance only at two places, one opening north, the
other south. The object of Napier's strategy was to compel the hill-men
to enter this central stronghold, for if once there, they were at his
mercy. But before he could force them into this final refuge he had to
learn for himself the paths and passes of the entire region, finding out
where there was water, securing each pass behind him before he made a
step forward in advance.
It was early January when the advance began. March had come before the
last move was played on the rugged chessboard, and Beja Khan and his men
were safe in Truckee. During all that interval the Commander's spirit
never seems to have flagged for a moment. Scattered through his journal
we find many instances of his having to find mental spirits for his
followers as well as for himself. There had been numerous prophecies of
failure from many quarters. "It was a wild-goose chase"--"Beja Khan was
too old and wary a bird to be caught"--"Beware of the mountain
passes,"--so ran the chorus of foreboding; and whenever a check occurred
or a delay had to be made for supplies, from these prophets of disaster
could be heard the inevitable "I told you so." That terrible croak in
war which half tells that the wish to retire is at least stepfather to
the thought of failure. Here is a little journal-picture which has a
good deal of future history in it. "_February 6th._--Waiting for
provisions; this delay is bad. Simpson is in the dismals, so am I, but
that won't feed us." Simpson belonged to that large class of excellent
officers who just want one thing to be good chiefs. Ten and a half years
later Simpson, still in the dismals, sat looking at his men falling
back, baffled, from the Russian Redan at Sebastopol. Perhaps had Napier
been there he would have been baffled too. It may be so, but in that
case I think they would have had to seek him under the muzzles of the
Russian guns.
Scared by the passes through which the convoys had to move, the
camel-drivers had deserted with five hundred camels, leaving the column
without food; but Napier was equal to the emergency. Dismounting half
his fighting camel-corps he turned that Goliah of war, Fitzgerald, into
a commissariat man for the moment, sent him back for flour, and six days
later has forty-four thousand pounds of bread-stuff in his camp. How
terribly anxious are these moments when a commander finds himself and
his troops at the end of his food-tether no one but a commander of
troops can ever know. It is such moments that lay bare the bed-rock of
human nature, and show at once what stuff it is made of--granite, or
mere sandstone that the rush of events will wash away in the twinkling
of an eye. What stuff formed this bed-rock of Charles Napier's nature
one anecdote will suffice to show. During the two years that he has now
been at war in Scinde, fighting foes and so-called friends, fighting
disease, sun, distance, old age, and bodily weakness, he has never
ceased to send to his two girls left behind at Poonah, in Bombay, quires
of foolscap paper with sums in arithmetic, questions in grammar, and
lessons in geography duly set out for answer. While he is Governor and
Commander-in-Chief of Scinde he is acting governess to his children
fifteen hundred miles away in Bombay. The only other instance of similar
mental power that I know of is to be found in the directions for the
internal improvement of France, and the embellishment of her towns and
cities, sent by Napoleon from the snowy bivouacs of the Baltic provinces
and the slaughters of Heilsbronn and Eylau. Of course it was to be
expected that the desertion of the camel-transport, and the attacks of
the robbers upon the line of communications which preceded the flight of
the camel-men, should have increased to a dangerous extent the
forebodings of failure. Napier is furious. "I am fairly put to my trumps
by this desertion," he writes. "Well, exertion must augment. I will use
the camel-corps, and dismount half my cavalry, if need be. I will eat my
horse, Red Rover, sooner than flinch before these robber tribes. My
people murmur, but they only make my foot go deeper into the ground."
How lightly the eye scans such passages, and yet beneath them lies the
whole secret of success in war. "How easy then it must be," I think I
hear some reader say. "You have only to stick your heels in the sand,
cry out, 'I won't go back,' and the game is yours." Not so fast, good
friend. Blondin's crossing the chasm of Niagara was very easy to
Blondin, but woe betide the other man who ventured to try it. There were
generals even in our own time who thought they could copy Napier's
method of war, but what a terrible mess they made of it! The thing is
indeed very easy when you know how to do it, but that little secret is
only to be learned through long years of study and experience, and even
then it is only to be mastered by a select few. Make no mistake about
it, good reader. History is right when she walks behind great soldiers
noting their deeds. They are the rarest human products which she meets
with.
When Beja Khan and his confederate sirdars found themselves shut up
within the walls of Truckee they gave up the game and asked permission
to surrender. Leave was granted, and on March 9th they came out and laid
their swords at Napier's feet. With all their love of plunder they were
very splendid warriors, these Doomkee, Bhoogtee, and Jackranee chiefs
and clansmen, holding notions of the honour of arms which more civilised
soldiers would do well to follow. Here is one such notion. When Charles
Napier stood before the southern cleft or pass which gave entrance to
Truckee, another column under Beatson blocked the northern gate of the
stronghold. Although the two passes were only distant from each other in
a straight line across the labyrinth some half-dozen miles, they were
one or more days' journey asunder by the circuitous road round the
flank of the mountain rampart. One column therefore knew nothing of the
other's proceedings. While waiting thus opposite the northern entrance
Beatson determined to reconnoitre the interior of the vast chasm by
scaling the exterior wall of rock. For this purpose a part of the old
Thirteenth, veterans of Jellalabad, was sent up the mountain; the
ascent, long and arduous, was all but completed when it was observed
from below that the flat top of the rock held a strong force of the
enemy, entrenched behind a breastwork of stones. The ascending body of
the Thirteenth numbered only sixteen men, the enemy on the summit was
over sixty. In vain the officer who made this discovery tried to warn
the climbers of the dangers so close above them, but which they could
not see; his signs were mistaken by the men for fresh incentives to
advance, and they pushed on towards the top instead of retracing their
steps to the bottom. As the small party of eleven men gained the summit
they were greeted by a matchlock volley from the low breastwork in
front, followed by the charge of some seventy Beloochees, sword in hand.
The odds were desperate; the Thirteenth men were blown by the steep
ascent; the ground on which they stood was a dizzy ledge, faced by the
stone breastwork and flanked by tremendous precipices. No man flinched;
fighting with desperate valour they fell on that terrible but glorious
stage, in sight of their comrades below, who were unable to give them
help. Six out of the eleven fell at once; five others, four of them
wounded, were pushed over the rocks, rolling down upon their half-dozen
comrades who had not yet gained the summit. How hard they fought and
died one incident will tell. Private John Maloney, fighting amid a press
of enemies, and seeing two comrades, Burke and Rohan, down in the
_melée_, discharged two muskets into the breast of a Beloochee, and ran
another through with his bayonet. The Beloochee had strength and courage
to unfix the bayonet, draw it from his body, and stab Maloney with his
own weapon before he himself fell dead upon the rock. Maloney, although
severely wounded, made good his retreat and brought off his two
comrades. So much for the fighting on both sides. Now for the chivalry
of those hill-men. When a chief fell bravely in battle it was an old
custom among the clans to tie a red or green thread around his right or
left wrist, the red thread on the right wrist being the mark of highest
valour. Well, when that evening the bodies of the six slain soldiers
were found at the foot of the rocks, rolled over from the top by the
Beloochee garrison above, each body had a red thread, not on one wrist,
but on both.[4]
The expedition against the hill tribes was over, but larger warfare was
at hand. North of Scinde a vast region of unrest lay simmering in
strife. Runjeet Singh was dead, and the great army he had called into
being was rapidly pushing the country to the brink of the precipice of
war. Napier had long predicted the Punjaub war, but his warnings had
been lightly listened to, and when in December, 1846, the Sikhs suddenly
threw a large force across the Sutlej, they found a British army
cantoned far in front of its magazines, unprovided with the essentials
of a campaign--reserve ammunition and transport--able to fight, indeed,
with all the vehemence of its old traditions, but lacking that
leadership which, by power of forecast and preparation, draws from the
courage of the soldier the utmost result of victory.
Between December, 1846, and February, 1847, four sanguinary actions were
fought on the banks of the Sutlej--the Sikh soldiery were brave and
devoted warriors, but of their leaders the most influential were large
recipients of English gold, and the remainder were ignorant of all the
rules of war. Nevertheless the bravery of the common soldiers made the
campaign more than once doubtful, and it was only in the final conflict
at Sobraon on February 10th, 1847, that the campaign was decided.
Meanwhile, the steps which Napier had long foreseen as necessary in
Scinde, but in the timely execution of which he had been constantly
thwarted by higher authority, were ordered to be taken with all
despatch. Moodkee and Ferozeshah had suddenly revealed the strength of
the Sikh army, and Scinde was looked to in the hour of anxiety for aid
against this powerful enemy. With what extraordinary rapidity Napier
assembled his army at Roree for a forward movement towards the Punjaub
has long passed from the recollection of men. On December 24th the order
reached him at Kurachee. Forty-two days later, a most compact fighting
force of fifteen thousand men, fifty-four field guns, and a siege-train
stood ready, the whole complete for a six months' campaign; so complete
indeed in power of movement, capacity for sustained effort, and full
possession of all the requisites of war that it might, as an offensive
force, be reckoned at twice its actual numbers. Organisation, transport
system, and equipment are the wheels of war--without them the best army
is but a muzzled bulldog tied to a short chain.
But this admirable force was not to be used. The battle of Sobraon was
the prelude to a patched-up peace, which divided the Sikh State,
depleted the Sikh treasury, but left intact the Sikh army. The
generalship on the Sutlej had been indifferent; the policy that followed
the campaign was still larger marked by want of foresight. Napier,
ordered to leave his army at Bahawalpore, had proceeded alone to Lahore
to advise and assist the negotiations for peace. He joined Hardinge,
Gough, and Smith in the Sikh capital, receiving a tremendous ovation
from the troops and a cordial welcome from the three chiefs, who, if
they were not brilliant generals, were chivalrous and gallant soldiers.
It must have been a fine sight these four old warriors of the Peninsula
going in state to the palace of the Maharajah at Lahore. Napier, though
keen to catch the errors of the campaign, has nothing but honour and
regard for his brother-generals. "Gough is a glorious old fellow," he
writes; "brave as _ten_ lions, each with two sets of teeth and two
tails." "Harry Smith did his work well." And of Hardinge's answer to
those who urged him to retreat during the night after the first day's
carnage at Ferozeshah--"No, we will abide the break of day, and then
either sweep all before us or die honourably"--he cannot say too much;
but all this does not blind him to the waste of human life that want of
foresight had caused. "We have beaten the Sikhs in every action," he
writes, "with our glorious, most glorious soldiers, but thousands of
those brave men have bit the dust who ought now to be standing sword in
hand victorious at the gates of Lahore." "Do you recollect saying to
me," he asks his brother, "'Our soldiers will fight any general through
his blunders'? Well, now, judge your own prophecy." Finally, all the
foresight of the man's mind comes out in these prophetic words, written
when the war had just closed, "This tragedy must be reacted a year or
two hence; we shall have another war." Chillianwallah and Goojerat had
yet to be.
Back to Scinde again to take up the old labour of civil administration,
and work out to practical solution a hundred problems of justice,
commerce, land-tenure, agriculture, and taxation,--in fine, to build
upon the space cleared by war the stately edifice of a wise and
beneficent human government, keeping always in view certain fundamental
rules of honesty, truth, justice, and wisdom, learned long years before
in Ireland at his father's side.
Napier's system of rule was after all a very old one. It went back
before ever a political economist set pen to paper. Anybody who will
turn to the pages of Massinger will find it set forth clearly enough at
the time King and Parliament were coming to loggerheads over certain
things called Prerogative and Privilege--words which, if the weal of the
soil-tiller be forgotten, are only empty and meaningless balderdash.
Here are the men whose goods are lawful prize in the philosophy of the
old dramatist--
The cormorant that lives in expectation
Of a long wished-for dearth, and smiling grinds
The faces of the poor;
The grand encloser of the Commons for
His private profit or delight;
The usurer,
Greedy at his own price to make a purchase,
Taking advantage upon bond or mortgage
From a prodigal--
These you may grind to powder.
And now these are they who should be spared and shielded:
The scholar,
Whose wealth lies in their heads and not their pockets;
Soldiers that have bled in their country's service;
The rent-rack'd farmer, needy market-folk;
The sweaty labourer, carriers that transport
The goods of other men--are privileged;
But above all let none presume to offer
Violence to women, for our king hath sworn
Who that way's a delinquent, without mercy
Swings for it, by martial law.
Here we have the pith and essence of Napier's government in Scinde, very
simple, and probably containing more law-giving wisdom than half the
black-lettered statutes made and provided since Massinger wrote them
down two hundred and fifty years ago.
For eighteen months longer--until September, 1847--Napier remained in
Scinde, labouring to rule its people on the strictest lines of honest
justice. Two more hot seasons scorched his now age-weakened frame, and
again came terrible visitations of cholera and fever, to lay low many a
gallant friend and make aching gaps in his own domestic circle; but
these trials he accepted as a soldier accepts on the battle-field the
bullets which whistle as they go,--for want of life. But there was one
thing which he could not accept with the same courageous calmness: it
was the systematic censure upon his actions, vilification of his
motives, and abuse of himself, which deepened in intensity as the load
of life grew heavier through age. When a traveller through tropical
forests touches a hornets' nest the enraged insects rush out and sting
him on the moment; but the hornets' nest which Napier had disturbed in
India was not to be appeased by any sudden ebullition of its wrath. Much
more slow and deadly was its method. He had dared to speak the honest
truth that was in him about the greed and rapacity of London Directors,
and the waste, the extravagance, and the luxury of their English
servants in the East; he had committed that sin which power never
pardons, the championing of the poor and oppressed against the rich and
ruling ones of the earth. Now he had to pay the penalty, and from a
thousand sources it was demanded at his hands. There was to be no mercy
for this man who had not only dared to condemn the abuses of power, but
had added the insult of smiting his opponents with the keen Damascus
blade of his genius. To condemn plutocratic power has ever been bad
enough, but to ridicule the truffle-fed and the truculent tyrant has
been a thousand times worse. So for the closing years of his rule in
Scinde, and indeed, one may say, almost up to the hour of his death,
Napier had to bear slings and arrows that rained upon him from open and
from unseen enemies. When the critic of to-day, scanning the pages of
the now forgotten literature which deals with this long vituperative
contest--sometimes carried on in Parliament, sometimes in the Press,
often in books, official papers, and Minutes of Council--he cannot
repress a feeling of regret that Napier should ever have noticed a tithe
of the abuse and censure which was heaped upon him. Still we must
remember that first of all he was a soldier, quick to strike when
struck, never counting the cost of his blow against wrong or injustice
or oppression of the poor; ever ready to turn his defence into assault,
and to storm with brightest and keenest sword-blade the entrenchments of
his assailants. One can picture, for instance, the dull rage of some of
his ministerial antagonists in this year 1847, when after they had
worried him with a thousand queries upon a variety of false accusations
circulated by his enemies in Bombay as to his injurious treatment of the
cultivators in Scinde, he takes particular pains to inform the
Government in England that he can send them eleven thousand tons of
wheat from the Indus to feed the then starving people of Ireland.
Clearly this was an offence beyond pardon!
In October, 1847, Charles Napier quitted Scinde and set his face for
England. He came back broken in health but absolutely unbent in spirit.
How full he is of great thoughts--of conquests which should benefit
humanity; of freedom which would strike down monopoly and privilege and
tyranny; of reform which would not stop short until it had reached the
lowest depths of the social system. "Were I Emperor of the East and
thirty years of age," he writes, "I would have Constantinople on one
side and Pekin on the other before twenty years, and all between should
be grand, free, and happy. The Emperor of Russia should be done;
freedom and the Press should burn along his frontier like touch-paper
until half his subjects were mine in heart." Then he turns to Ireland.
To be dictator of that country "would be worth living for." The heads of
his system of rule are worth recalling to-day, though they are more than
forty years old. First of all he would send "the whole of the bishops
and deacons of the Church as by law established to New Zealand, there to
eat or to be eaten by cannibals." Then the tillers of the soil should be
made secure, a wise system of agriculture taught and enforced, all
uncultivated land taxed; then he would hang the editors of noisy
newspapers, fire on the mob if it rose against him, and hang its
leaders, particularly if they were Catholic priests. But it is very
worthy of remark that his drastic measures would not be taken until all
other efforts at reform had failed. Poor-law commissioners would have to
work on the public roads and all clearers of land be summarily hanged
without benefit of clergy. Beneath this serio-comic exposition of Irish
government one or two facts are very noticeable. The bishops who had
revenue without flocks, and the landlords who wished to have flocks
instead of tenants, were given highest place in the penal pillory; after
them came the Irish priests and people.
In May, 1848, Napier reached England. He had spent the winter in the
Mediterranean, as it was feared his health could ill stand the sudden
change from Scinde to an English December. But while loitering by the
shores of the sunny sea he is not idle; despite illness and bodily pain
his mind is busy recalling the past or forecasting the future. The
anniversaries of his Scindian battles call forth the remark, "I would
rather have finished the roads in Cephalonia than have fought Austerlitz
or Waterloo."
Europe, then seething in the fever fit which threw from her system a
good deal of the poison placed in it by the Congress of Vienna, is
scanned by the veteran soldier with an eye that gleams again with the
old fire at the final triumph of those principles of human right which
he had in earlier days loved as a man, though compelled to combat as a
soldier. Had we not interfered in the affairs of France there would have
been no "'48 Revolution," he writes; "Louis Philippe would have been
what nature fitted him for--a pedlar."
When he arrived in England an attempt was made by a small but powerful
clique to boycott him, but the people broke the barrier of this wretched
enmity, and he was soon taken to the great heart of the nation he had
served so well. Amid all the addresses, the dinners, and the
congratulations, there comes a little touch that tells us the
conqueror's heart is still true to the conscript's love. A Radical
shoemaker in Bath has written to welcome home the victor. "I am more
flattered by Bolwell's letter," replies the veteran, "than by dinners
from all the clubs in London." Many natures stand firm under the rain of
adversity, for she is an old and withered hag; only the real hero
resists the smiles of success, for she comes hiding the thorn under rosy
cheeks and laughing lips.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] It should be unnecessary to remind my readers of the fine poem in
which Sir Francis Doyle, whose heart always went out to knightly deeds,
has commemorated this incident,--_The Red Thread of Honour_.