COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA
To India again, sixty-seven years old, and frequently suffering physical
pain such as few men can know. Only a month before sailing he had thus
described his sensations. "The injured nerves [of the face] carry
inflammation up to the brain and it is not to be borne. I cannot tell
what others may suffer, but they have not had the causes that affect me
to affect them; they have not had the nerves torn by a jagged ball
passing through, breaking nose-bones and jaw-bones, and lacerating
nerves, muscles, and mucous membranes; they can hardly therefore have
suffered as I do; if they have, their fortitude is beyond mine, for I
cannot bear even the thought of it. It makes every nerve in my body
tremble, even now, from writing on the subject."
On May 6th, 1849, Napier landed at Calcutta to find the Sikh War over.
Lord Gough had completely vanquished the Khalsa arms at Goojerat, and
resistance ceased from that day. Though perhaps in one sense this was a
disappointment to Napier, he rejoiced that a fine old soldier should
have been able by this victory to vindicate his military reputation. "It
was hard," he writes, "that a brave old veteran like Gough, whose whole
life has been devoted to his duty, should be dismissed from his command
and close his long career under undeserved abuse, because the Directors
kept him in a post that had become too difficult." But though actual
hostilities had ceased there was work enough in India for a score of
Commanders-in-Chief to set right. From top to bottom the whole
administrative and executive system of the Indian army was wrong, and
what was worse, was wrong from such a multiplicity of great and small
causes that any attempt to set it right might well have appeared
hopeless to the best administrative head ever set on the most vigorous
body. There was no single point or no half-dozen points upon which the
attempt at reform could be begun. It was not a passing distemper of the
military body. It was dry rot and organic disease showing itself
outwardly, indeed, in numerous symptoms of insubordination and lack of
discipline; but the roots of which nothing but a gigantic incision could
reach.
Leaving Calcutta in the end of May and proceeding by the slow methods of
travel then in vogue, the new Commander-in-Chief reached Simla late in
June. Here he met the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, and here in a
few weeks began those strifes and contentions which eventually broke the
old soldier's heart. Although the subjects of contention between the
Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General were many, and although all
interest in them individually has long since evaporated in time, they
still form, when viewed collectively in the light of the
ever-to-be-remembered catastrophe of 1857, by far the most momentous
reading that can be presented to-day to the statesman or the student of
our empire. For the issue fought out by this soldier Chief and this
civil Governor is yet before the nation, and some day or other will have
to be decided, even in larger lists than that which witnessed its first
great test in the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
War in a nation resembles a long and wasting disease in a human subject.
It has a period of convalescence, when all the weak points of the system
seem to threaten destruction even when the fever has passed. So it was
in India now. Ever since 1838 war had been going on in India or close
beyond its frontier. The Sikh War of 1849 ended the long catalogue, was
in fact the last gust of the Afghan storm; but every administrative
evil, civil and military, now lay exposed upon the weakened frame, and
Napier's quick eye, long trained in the experience of Scinde, read
almost at a glance the dangerous symptoms. Resolutely he bent himself to
the thankless task of reform. He was Commander-in-Chief of a great army,
but an army which had gone wholly wrong from the evil system which had
crept into it from a hundred sources. He would trace out these sources
of evil, cure them or cut them out, and leave India a record of his rule
as Commander-in-Chief which would be of greater service to her than if
he had led this army to the most brilliant victory. Such, in a few
words, was the purpose he set himself to work for from the moment he set
foot in India, and found that his task was not to be one of war.
Shortly after his arrival in Simla he began again to keep a journal, and
in its pages we see, as in a mirror, the source of every outward act of
his life traced out through every thought. In that journal the whole
story of his effort and his failure, of the endless communings with
those two great counsellors whom he long before declared should be the
only prompters a man of action should have, "his conscience and his
pillow," and of the difficulties and obstacles that met him at every
step, is set forth. Here at Simla he sits, thinking and writing,
collecting reports, reading despatches from every part of India, and
writing down a vast mass of advice and recommendation, of warning and
forecast, which, seven years later, are to seem like the prophecies of
some inspired seer.
"The clouds are below us," he writes to his sister, "flying in all
directions; and oftentimes, as one sits in a room, a cloud walks in as
unconcernedly as a Christian, and then melts away." So, too, below him
lay the thousand clouds of selfish struggle and petty contention which
for ever seem to hover over our government of India; but, alas! when
these clouds came up to Simla they did not melt away, but settled in a
thickening gloom between him and the goal he strove so hard to reach. "I
am working fifteen hours a day at my desk," he writes again, "working
myself to death here; and what fame awaits me? None! I work because it
is honest to earn my pay; but work is disagreeable in the
extreme--hateful. Were I to remain five years I might do some good to
this noble army; but for the short time I am to be here nothing can be
done--at least nothing worth the loss of health and happiness. Never,
however, did I know either, except when working in a garden or in
Cephalonia making roads and doing good." And now, it may be asked by
some persons, what were the reforms which this man endeavoured to
effect? Why did he not leave well alone? Forty years have passed since
Charles Napier "worked himself to death" at Simla, striving to set right
the army and the military administration of India. He was thwarted in
his labours, ridiculed for his fears, censured for his measures of
reform. The men who opposed him became the petted favourites of his
enemies. His own friends were marked out for enmity or neglect. He
resigned. Time passed. The old soldier sank into his grave, and the
hatred of his detractors did not ease its slander even when the tomb had
closed upon the hero. Seven years went by, and suddenly the storm he had
so vainly foretold broke upon India and upon England. The native army of
Bengal mutinied. India ran with blood. Men, women, and children perished
in thousands. Massacre and ruin overspread the land. Fortunately the
blow fell when the nation, at peace with the great powers of the world,
was able to concentrate all her energies upon India. But the struggle
was a life-and-death one, and had Bombay and Madras followed the lead of
Bengal, all was over. "Yes," I think I hear some one say, "but did not
the Bengal army rise in revolt because greased cartridges were given to
them with a new rifle?" My friend, the greased cartridge had to say to
the Indian Mutiny just what pulling the trigger of a gun has to say to
the loading of the charge. Long before ever a greased cartridge was
heard of, the big gun of India had been loaded and rammed and primed and
made ready to go off at the first hair-trigger's excuse it could find;
and it was this loading and priming that Charles Napier was doing his
utmost to draw from the gun during his tenure of Commander-in-Chiefship,
and it was this loading and priming that his opponents were filling
further and ramming harder by their ignorant opposition to him.
When the cool season begins, the Commander-in-Chief sets out upon his
tour of inspection. How different it is from the triumphal progress
heretofore usual! "What does an officer want in the field?" he had
written shortly before leaving England; "his bed, his tent, a blanket, a
second pair of breeches, a second pair of shoes, half a dozen shirts, a
second flannel waistcoat, a couple of towels, and a piece of soap; all
beyond is mere luxury, and not fit for a campaign." So, too, when the
Commander-in-Chief was seen on his tour with diminished elephants and
fewer camels and no bullocks, and only a third of the usual number of
tent-pitchers and half the force or establishment of _chupprassees_ and
absolutely no _doolie-wallahs_ at all, old Indians looked mutely at each
other in speechless deprecation of such enormities. Then a thousand
stories were circulated against the innovator. "He only gave claret at
dinner to his guests; his tent was not big enough to swing a cat in; and
because he had reduced the government _bheesties_ (water-carriers) by
half, it was clear he did not wash," etc., etc. But notwithstanding
these criticisms and censures, the Commander-in-Chief went on from
station to station, and never was examination so keen or inspection so
close. Nothing escaped the eye that looked through these big spectacles.
He is out at earliest dawn looking into matters in a regimental
cantonment as closely as though he had been quartermaster-sergeant. One
morning in some cantonment they miss him; he is not in the barracks nor
on the parade-ground. The colonel gets nervous. "Go," he says to the
adjutant, "go to the sergeant-major on the parade, and ask him if he has
seen the Commander-in-Chief." But the sergeant-major is also missing; he
is not on the parade. "Then ride over to his quarters and see if he is
there." They go over to the staff-sergeant's quarters, and there sure
enough is the missing sergeant-major, having a cup of tea and a bit of
bread inside with a stranger. The nervous colonel becomes irate. The
sergeant-major has no right to be in his quarters at such a critical
time, when the most hawk-eyed Commander-in-Chief that ever held office
is prowling about. "What are you doing in your quarters,
sergeant-major?"--"The Commander-in-Chief is having some ration-bread
and commissariat tea inside, sir," replies the sergeant-major, with a
twinkle in his austere eye. And now out comes the missing Commander,
face to face with the much-perplexed and puffed colonel. There is
lightning in the eye behind the glasses. "And this is the bread your men
are getting, sir," he says, holding out a half-eaten crust. "No wonder
you have half your regiment in hospital."
At another station there is a young officer under arrest, awaiting the
decision of the Commander-in-Chief upon his court-martial. He has been
tried on a charge of having forgotten the respect due to his captain on
a certain delicate occasion. The proofs were painfully clear; the young
man had been convicted and sentenced to be cashiered. But there were
many mitigating circumstances in the case; the officer was very young,
and there was ample reason for supposing that the fruit he had stolen
had not required much shaking. The Commander-in-Chief read the case
carefully. "Sentence quashed," he wrote on the margin. "History records
but one Joseph; this officer will return to his duty." These things,
however, were but the play-moments of his progress; very serious matters
soon claimed attention. In July, 1849, symptoms of mutiny began to
manifest themselves in at least two regiments of Bengal Native Infantry
stationed in the Punjaub. In November certain corps ordered to proceed
to the Punjaub from Delhi openly showed insubordination. In December
still graver signs of revolt occurred. The Thirty-Second Bengal Native
Infantry refused to accept their pay, and mutinously demanded increased
rates. The presence of a veteran general officer quelled this outbreak
at Wuzzerabad, but a still more serious instance of insubordination was
soon to manifest itself. In February, 1850, the Sixty-Sixth Regiment of
Bengal Infantry broke into open mutiny at Govind Ghur, a suburb of
Umritsur the sacred city of the Sikhs. The mutineers endeavoured to
seize the fort, containing vast stores of arms and a large amount of
treasure and ammunition. Again the vigorous action of an officer saved
the gates, and a European regiment arriving in the nick of time overawed
the rebellious Bengalees.
All these signs and portents of trouble were not lost upon the
Commander-in-Chief; his resolution was quickly taken. By a stroke of the
pen he disbanded the mutinous regiment, and put in its place a battalion
of Ghoorka troops. The Governor-General was absent on a sea-voyage for
the benefit of his health when this last alarming outbreak occurred at
Umritsur. The case was urgent, the danger pressing. Twenty-four other
Bengal regiments stationed in the Punjaub were known to be in close
sympathy with the Sixty-Sixth; if the insubordination spread, the Sikh
fires of resistance so lately quenched at Goojerat would again burst
into flame. Gholab Singh was ready in Cashmere with a well-filled
treasury and a large army to join the conflagration. The very existence
of our Indian rule stood in peril. Napier was not the man to waste
precious moments at such a crisis in seeking for precedents or covering
his actions with the sanction of higher authority obtained by delay. He
took three important steps.
Rightly judging that at such a moment any reduction of pay below the
existing standard would give the discontent of the native troops a
tangible and certain line of resistance, he directed that the
promulgation of an order of the supreme Government, which would reduce
the sepoys' allowances for rations below the standard then existing, and
which had been originally framed chiefly to save the clerks in Calcutta
trouble in their official documents, should be suspended, pending the
result of a reference which would be made to the supreme Government on
the subject. He next struck a crushing blow at the actual offenders in
mutiny, by summarily disbanding the rebellious corps. And lastly he
struck another vital blow at the entire Brahmin spirit of revolt, by
enlisting Ghoorkas and putting them in the vacant places of the
Bengalees, giving the new Ghoorka battalion the colours and number of
the disbanded regiment.
Reviewing these lines of action now--even without the terrible
after-light of the great Mutiny to guide our decision--it would be
difficult for any sane man to find aught in them but ground for
unqualified approval. They contain, indeed, such manifest evidences of
sense and reason, that the man would appear to be bereft of the most
elementary common sense who could find fault with them; and yet,
incredible though it may well appear, not only was censure passed upon
Napier for his action in this matter, but it was conveyed in such a
rough and overbearing manner that the old soldier deemed it inconsistent
with his honour to serve longer under such "shop-keeping" superiors. No
other word can so fitly express the mental calibre of the men whose
censure drove Charles Napier from the Indian command, and it is here
used in a sense quite different from the usual caste acceptation of the
term. The soldier and the shop-keeper must ever remain at opposite poles
of thought. At their best, one goes out to fight for his country, and if
necessary to die for it; the other remains at home to live, and to live
well by it. At their worst, one acquires by force from the enemy, the
other absorbs by fraud from his friends. But between the best and the
worst there is a vast class of mental shop-keeping people who, although
they do not keep any shops, are nevertheless always behind the counter,
always asking themselves, "Will it pay?" always totting up a mental
ledger, in which there is no double entry but only a single one of self.
Nothing would be more delusive than to imagine this great class had any
fixed limits of caste, rank, or profession. It may have been so once; it
is not so now, nor has it been so for many generations. It reaches very
high up the ladder now. It has titles, estates, coats-of-arms, moors,
mountains, and the rest of it. It can be very prominent in both Houses
of Parliament. But there is one thing it can never be, and that thing is
a true soldier.
It can wear uniform and rise to high military rank, and have thousands
of men serving under it, but for all that, we repeat, it can never be a
real soldier--and the reason is simple, nowhere to be found more
straightly stated than by a very deep thinker of our own time, who says:
"I find this more and more true every day, that an infinitude of
tenderness is the chief gift of all truly great men. It is sure to
involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an
appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid,
and vulgar people, quite terrific to such if they are capable of terror,
and hateful to them if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred."
There we have the whole story of Napier and his antagonists. There we
have the explanation of what Balzac meant when he wrote, "There is
nothing so terrible as the vengeance of the shop-keeper." Throughout
more than forty years of his fighting life, Charles Napier was exposed
to that hatred and that vengeance. It could not have been otherwise. To
be hated is often the price the hero must pay in life for the love his
name is to gather round it after death.
One little gleam of soldier service came to brighten these last months
of so-called command in India. It was an expedition through the Kohat
Pass on the northern frontier. The tribe of Afridees, incensed at an
order of the Civil Government stopping their supply of salt, had risen,
massacred a detachment of soldiers, and occupied the pass, cutting off
the station of Kohat. Three days after the news of the disaster to the
troops reached Napier, he had organised his column and was in march for
Kohat. He fought his way through the pass, relieved the post, and fought
his way back again. It was the last flicker of the flame which had begun
forty-one years before in the march to Corunna. The last fighting item
in the journal is suggestive of many thoughts. A young ensign had been
shot in the pass, another officer was mortally wounded; forty years of
war and death in the battlefield had not dulled the "infinitude of
tenderness" in the old soldier's heart. "My God," he writes, "how
hateful is war! yet better die gloriously like young Sitwell than as my
dear John did in the agonies of cholera"; then recollecting that the
true soldier has no more right to pick and choose the manner of his
death than he has to pick and choose the manner of his life, he goes on:
"Fool that I am, to think Sitwell's death the best! We know nothing. How
can I know anything about it? It was the impulse of a fool to think one
death better than another. Prepare to die bravely, and let death come in
whatever form it pleases God to send him." So closes the military
record. A little later he wrote again: "I shall now go to Oaklands [his
home in Hampshire], and look at my father's sword, and think of the day
he gave it into my young hands, and of the motto on a Spanish blade he
had, 'Draw me not without cause; put me not up without honour.' I have
not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour."
Charles Napier returned from his last fight at Kohat to find the
reprimand of the Indian Government awaiting him. He at once resigned. He
was quite prepared to stifle his personal feelings in the matter, but
the sense of his powerlessness to remedy the evil he so plainly saw
decided him. He would no longer remain accountable to the country for
disaster he was helpless to prevent, exposed to a hundred secret shafts
of his antagonists, and certain to find his old enemies, the Directors
of Leadenhall Street, bitterly hostile to him, except when danger
menaced their ill-gotten possession. He remembered also that fifty-two
years earlier he had seen "that great and good soldier, Sir Ralph
Abercrombie, resign command in Ireland because he could not agree with
the civil government." Yes, he would resign. The Hampshire home looked
pleasant from afar. What memories, what perfumes these garden-walks have
for the tired toiler in life! What violet so sweet, what rose so
thornless as those we see, looking back to some garden that has been,
looking forward to one that can never be! Although Napier resigned his
command in April he did not leave India until the following spring,
having to await the arrival of his successor. The intervening months
were not idly spent. To the latest moment of his stay he laboured to
improve the army he loved so well, to instil into the officer higher
ideals of duty and nobler purpose of life, and to improve the condition
of the man in the ranks, who to him was now, as always, never "a common
soldier." Feeling certain that the dreadful mortality then existing
among the European troops in India resulted solely from the wretched
barrack accommodation which the parsimony of the Government would only
allow, he laboured incessantly to shame the Administration into more
liberal and humane concession. Yet in this noble effort he was
constantly thwarted. The height of his barrack-rooms was reduced, the
materials for construction lessened. In vain he showed that sufficient
cubic space meant thousands of lives annually saved, that height of the
sleeping-rooms above the ground meant freedom from fevers and
dysenteries. The various Boards of Control and clerks in Calcutta were
not to be moved by such considerations. Terrible examples were before
these various Boards and Directorates, but still they were not to be
convinced. After the battles of the Sutlej the remains of a splendid
regiment, the Fiftieth, were sent to occupy one of these ill-built
death-traps at Loodiana. In one fell night the entire building
collapsed, and three hundred men, women, and children perished in the
ruins. Of course it was nobody's fault. The regulations had been
strictly adhered to--and does not everybody know that regulation is
infallible? Did they not once let a king of Spain burn to death in his
palace because the regulation extinguisher of royal fires was not
present at the conflagration?
In the autumn of 1850 Charles Napier set out on the homeward journey.
The last scenes in India were pleasant to the old soldier about to close
his long and eventful career. He reviews once more his own favourite
Twenty-Second Regiment and presents them with new colours. The soldiers
of Meanee and Hyderabad received their chief with a frantic enthusiasm
and delight that more than made amends for the neglect of the great and
powerful; and the entire army too, whose deep heart the follies and the
fashions of the moment cannot reach, bent its head as the old hero
passed; and whatever was honest and independent and noble--and there was
plenty of each in the Civil Service of India--laid its tribute of
respect in his path, until from Simla to Scinde and on to Bombay the
long sun of his military life seemed to be setting in waves of glory.
But the tribute of honour that touched him deepest was a magnificent
sword which the sirdars and chiefs of Scinde presented to him at
Hyderabad. Nearly eight years earlier these men had fought against
Napier at Meanee and Dubba. He had honoured their bravery in the hour of
their misfortune. Now about to quit, under a cloud of official censure
everywhere made public, the scene of his toil and glory, they, his old
enemies, came to lay at his feet this token of their admiration.