received white men--deserting sailors and such like--into their
tribes with much friendliness, is not a pretty story; being only
one of the many variations on the old theme of the white man's
greed for the black man's property. Of course it was necessary to
send troops out; and our commanders, hearing of the fortifications
or _pas_ erected by the Maoris, thought that such works could not
have been thrown up except to defend something, and that it would
be desirable to capture them. They therefore brought up a gun or
two with infinite labour, and after firing a certain number of
rounds, let loose their assaulting columns to the attack. Now as a
matter of fact the Maoris built their _pas_ upon no such principle;
and the loss of a _pa_ was nothing to them so long as no life was
lost with it. They therefore continued to build _pas_ in the hope
that the white men would ram their heads against them; and they
did so with considerate cunning, erecting their first _pa_ close
to the edge of the forest, retiring from that to a second further
within the woods, so as to lure the English deeper and deeper into
disadvantageous ground, and from that in turn to a third. By the
time the third was reached the English were unable to bring their
food any further, and, having lost heavily in their assaults, were
fain to retire and await reinforcements.
The chief difficulty, as in all savage campaigns, lay of course
in transport and supply. There were no roads or bridges, and
few animals, whether horses, mules or cattle; but as all the
settlements were on the sea, the Maoris had built their _pas_
in the vicinity, so as to be ready to attack the whites at any
moment. Still, even when the difficulty of transport and supply
was overcome, our commanders were greatly puzzled how to injure
the Maoris. So powerfully were the tree-trunks of a stockade laced
together, that even when broken by a shot they did not fall, but
remained suspended, a nasty if not impossible obstacle, by the
binders of supple-jack. Thus assaults were always costly, and
somehow the Maori garrison always contrived to escape. Again and
again a _pa_ was surrounded, but there was always a ravine or a
watercourse by which the Maoris slipped away; and when the British
column, maddened by heavy losses, broke into the earth-works, it
was to find no one there. Once two British columns stormed a _pa_,
enduring heavy fire until they reached the summit, when the Maoris
dived down into their subterranean galleries. The British soldiers,
rushing in from opposite sides, met at the top, and poured a
staggering volley into each other, whereupon up came the Maoris
from underground, and sent the assailants flying down again in
panic. Altogether the problem of the _pa_ seemed to be insoluble,
for the galleries and rifle-pits of the Maoris were so cunningly
constructed that a bombardment inflicted only trifling damage on
them. Critics at a distance wrote that every success (for such the
capture of a _pa_ was deemed to be) should be followed by a rapid
advance into the forest. But deep ravines and gullies covered
either with a network of supple-jacks, or with fallen logs and
trees hidden in bracken six or seven feet high, is not ground over
which men can advance rapidly. I know it because I have tried it;
and the unhappy soldiers, who had also tried it, waxed furious over
the ignorant presumption of those who talked such nonsense.
At last it occurred to a British officer that the Maoris wished
their _pas_ to be assaulted, and that they considered it a victory
when several scores of British fell in an attack upon a worthless
stronghold, while the defenders quietly retired with at most two or
three casualties. And this was the fact. Having grasped this truth
the officer determined not to attack them; but marched up to the
vicinity of a _pa_, sat down in front of it, and entrenched himself
and his guns before it. This did not suit the Maoris at all. They
saw that they would be obliged to go back sooner or later, without
the satisfaction of killing fifty or sixty of the enemy, and they
did not see where the process might end. In desperation they
attempted several attacks against the English earth-works, but were
repulsed with heavy loss, and were fain to draw back to another
_pa_ further within the forest. The British followed, and went
through the same performance again, with the same result. In a few
weeks these particular Maoris gave in, for they saw no prospect of
emerging from the forest again; and though they might have kept
themselves alive on fern-root, they knew that their warriors would
soon lose all physical strength upon such a diet. The Maori wars
lasted in one way or another for nearly twenty years in a desultory
fashion, partly owing to mismanagement, partly, I fear, because so
many contractors in the colonial towns made money out of them that
people were unwilling to let them come to an end. When the Imperial
troops and money were withdrawn, and the colonists were left to
finish the job for themselves, the trouble with the Maoris soon
ceased.
Lastly we come to those expeditions which even in these days
tend to be most dangerous and costly, I mean those to such
fever-stricken coasts as the Gold Coast and the Delta of the
Congo, where all supplies and stores must be carried on the heads
of men and women, and where even the strictest care may fail to
avert deadly sickness. Twice within forty years has a British
force marched to Coomassie; but the wise tendency nowadays is to
entrust such work almost exclusively to native troops who do not
suffer from the climate. The number of these troops has increased
enormously of late years with the extension of our rule in Africa;
and we are accustomed to treat the fact as a matter of course,
without a thought for the man who has made these foreign levies
what they are, and without whom they are nothing--the British
officer.
I have sketched for you very briefly the rise of the Empire,
and now at the close of this third lecture I am going to say a
word for the man who has had the chief share in winning it--the
British regimental officer. It is the fashion in some circles to
belittle him; and the press, in the plenitude of its ignorance,
took occasion during the South African War to cover him with
vulgar abuse, reproaching him for his ignorance of his profession
and various other shortcomings. As a matter of fact he was the
one man in South Africa who understood his business, and it was
he who brought the war to a successful conclusion. In these days
of democracy, so-called, it is common to vituperate, concurrently
with the officer, the English public schools where he obtained his
education. Neither officers nor public schools make any reply to
such criticisms; and they are quite right, for the British Empire
is a sufficient reply to the critics, who are fonder of framing
theories than of studying hard facts. I am not saying that our
public schools are perfect, for in many respects they seem to me
very faulty; nor shall I contend that the men who spring from them
are, in the ordinary sense of the term, educated, for they are not.
The German _gymnasium_ and French Lycée undoubtedly produce men who
are better schooled to the study of books, and more amply filled
with a certain description of facts. But at any rate the pupils
from our public schools become men who, after a certain amount of
military training, do not shrink from command, and are willing
to take responsibility. In brief, they are formed in character
if not cultivated in intellect; they are not ignorant of men,
whatever they may be of books; and they are willing to undertake
the government of men, not from mere lust of power, but from
instinctive delight in the task.
It is curious how often people complain of the ignorance and
narrowness of young officers, saying that they can think of nothing
outside their regiments, unless it be polo or some other game in
which the regiment is interested. No doubt it is better for men
of any profession to know something, and the more the better,
of subjects outside that profession; and yet what could more
profitably occupy an officer's thoughts than the men and horses
under his charge? Military routine can have no doubt a somewhat
straitening and deadening effect upon officers, even as academic
routine may injuriously affect the minds of school masters and
professors; and no doubt there are officers who chafe under it.
But the majority find more than sufficient interest in the study
of their men, in the selection of the promising for promotion,
the encouragement of the good, the improvement, suppression and
elimination of the bad, the bringing on of the backward, and above
all in honest endeavour to enter into the _thoughts_ of their
men--a task so difficult that not one in ten thousand succeeds in
mastering it. For they know that it is their business to lead men
and not drive them to discipline, and to inspire such confidence
between commanded and commander that even in the most desperate
situation he may be able to say, _I can depend upon my men_.
But even those who tire of military routine in time of peace
change their opinion when they go upon active service. In England
they cannot see why all kinds of tiresome details should not
be left to the sergeants, but in the field they soon discover
that the men will listen to and trust no one but an officer. The
non-commissioned officer does not suffice for them. He may be
a veteran of eighteen years' service; but the men will follow
a commissioned boy of eighteen fresh from Eton infinitely more
readily than they will the non-commissioned veteran. It is a
very remarkable fact, and to those who hold that all men are
equal it is extremely unpalatable; but a fact beyond question it
is, and not difficult of explanation. Men who by the fortune of
their birth are exempted from the bitterness of the struggle for
existence, trust their fellows because they have no reason to dread
their competition; men who have been brought up in the thick of
the fight with none but themselves to help them, see a possible
competitor--it may be even a dangerous enemy--in every neighbour,
and trust no one.
Yet active service is by no means necessary to cure the officer
who is bored with military service at home. Send him away to
some outlandish corner of the Empire, and entrust him with the
training and command of a few hundred black soldiers, and he will
find exile, hardship and discomfort more congenial to him in
such company than the softest of lives at home. He realises that
everything, so far as those few hundred men are concerned, depends
upon himself; and he delights in the sensation. There are hundreds
of such officers in remote places quietly doing what some consider
the dirty work, but what they themselves know to be the most
honourable work, of the Empire. The officers of the Indian Army are
in precisely the same case. Few of us realise how much we owe to
them, and to how great an extent the Empire is dependent upon them.
Operatives in our huge over-grown towns, who exhaust themselves in
condemnation of everything military, never reflect that, but for
this handful of officers, their comrades of the Indian Army, and
the disciplined men, Indian too, but above all British, who serve
under them, millions of themselves who subsist upon our trade with
India would be in a state of starvation. Happily the officers, and
therefore the men who serve under them, do their duty patiently
and quietly without regarding the volumes of chatter which flow
unceasingly from the north country; for they know that empires are
won and governed not by talk but by action.
This, I think, is a thing that we should all do well to remember
from time to time. Exaggerated esteem for our Parliamentary
institutions has led us to attach too much importance to speeches.
Their original purpose was to persuade men to a common course of
action; but they have never been very efficacious, and in this
country have long been superseded by political organisation or,
in plain English, wire-pulling. People have a strange notion
that, without much chatter, there can be no liberty. But liberty
(whatever liberty may be) is a small thing to a nation compared
with discipline; and in fact liberty of any kind is impossible
without discipline. If I am to judge of a nation it is useless to
tell me of its political institutions, for the best of them will
work badly and the worst of them well according to the honesty of
the men whose business it is to apply them. Let me know what is
the state of its discipline, parental, social, national, and with
what spirit that discipline is borne. Let me know what are its
military institutions, and how far they are supported or ignored;
whether the citizens come forward with cheerfulness to fulfil
a national duty, or whether they are reckless, self-indulgent
shirkers who try to impose on a few the service that is common to
all, and take refuge in cant to disguise their cowardice. Then I
will tell you without reading a single speech whether the nation
is sound at heart or rotten. If the text of all the speeches ever
delivered in Parliament were destroyed to-morrow, the world would
lose remarkably little. Great men are best studied in their letters
and their actions, whether they were great speakers or not; and by
no means the worst way of appreciating the actions of very many of
them, both civilians and soldiers, is to read military history.
LECTURE IV
BRITISH CAMPAIGNS IN INDIA
To-day I propose to speak to you upon a very great and most
intractable subject--British Military History in India. It is
difficult to do so without saying something of the history of India
itself; yet the subject is so immense that I must compress the
whole of that vast story into one or two sentences.
Let me begin then by reminding you that what we call India is
divided into a northern portion, which extends from the Himalayas
southward to the Narbada river and the Vindhya Mountains and is
called Hindostan; and a southern portion called the Dekhan which
stretches from those boundaries southward to Cape Comorin. This
division is less arbitrary than a glance at the map would lead
you to suppose; for between these two huge territories there lies
a belt of barren and mountainous country, through which, before
the days of railways, there was practically but one passage,
famous in Indian military history as the Ajanta Pass. The earliest
invaders of whom we have any knowledge came by sea, and landing
in the extreme south worked their way from thence to the northern
boundary of the Dekhan. The people of the Dekhan still speak the
language of these invaders, which is unknown in Hindostan. The
next invaders, the Aryans, came through the passes of Afghanistan
from the north-west, bringing with them the religious and social
institutions which are known to us as Hinduism, Brahminism and
caste, and which still govern the lives of most of the millions
who now inhabit Hindostan. They penetrated, however, only into one
corner of the Dekhan--the north-west--where the Aryan language,
Marathi, betrays their presence.
I pass over the innumerable tides of invasion which swept over
Hindostan from the north-west, until we come to the first
formidable inroad of Mohammedan Arabs in 999 A.D. The great
champions of Hinduism against Islam were the Rajputs, whose nobles
still represent the highest aristocracy and the bluest blood in
India. For a long time they combated desperately and with success;
but in 1193 the Mohammedans captured Delhi, and within another
twenty years they definitely overthrew the Rajputs and established
themselves as potential masters of India. For Delhi, though the
maps do not show it, is a great strategical position, marking
the centre of a kind of pass, where the access to India from the
north-west is narrowed to a tract, not above one hundred miles
broad, between the mountains on the north and a desert on the
south. Hence all the decisive battles of India against invaders
from the north-west have been fought within fifty miles of Delhi.
In the fifteenth century a new set of Mohammedan invaders--the
Turkis or Tartars--came down upon the Arabs, and after more than
a hundred years of raiding, invaded Hindostan in good earnest
under a great leader, Baber. In 1526 they became masters of
Delhi. Then for two hundred years strong man succeeded strong
man, and there was consolidated what is called the Mogul Empire.
Akbar, one of the great men of all time, reigned from 1556 until
1605--almost exactly the period of our own Elizabeth--and gathered
all India north of the Narbada, from Kandahar to the Bay of Bengal,
into a single Empire. His successors strove hard, though with
indifferent results, to subjugate the Dekhan; but by the middle
of the seventeenth century signs of decay were evident among the
Moguls. The Hindus, whether warriors as the Rajputs, or meek and
submissive, as the Bengalis, have an amazing power of silently
and gradually absorbing all alien races into themselves. At this
moment a sharp line divides Mohammedans from Hindus; and yet the
Mohammedans have already caught the system of caste from the
Hindus, and as centuries roll on will doubtless be more and more
drawn into the likeness of the Hindus, until the two races are
indistinguishable. Intermarriage contributes greatly to this; and
it was intermarriage with Hindu women, and the consequent dilution
of the stern Tartar blood, which weakened and ruined the Mogul
Emperors.
The last eminent man of the line, Aurungzib, perhaps inspired
by the deterioration of his countrymen, was a rabid Mohammedan
fanatic, so relentless in his persecutions that he raised up a
host of enemies and brought about the ruin of the Mogul Empire.
The Rajputs reappeared as the champions of Hinduism, but there
also came forward two new defenders. The first may be described as
a Puritan sect, the Sikhs. They were at the outset only martyrs,
but later, when a man of genius was born among them, they became
in the nineteenth century a great military power. The second and
more important were the Marathas, the followers of Sivaji Bonsla, a
petty chief from the hills above Bombay, who being a fine military
leader, wore out the armies of Aurungzib by what we call guerilla
tactics. What the Marathas were no one can say. They were not a
caste, nor a sect, nor a nation; but they were a homogeneous body,
and they would, but for us English, have become the masters of
India.
Our own start in India was humble; but the East India Company
began in the early years of the seventeenth century to establish
factories, or trading depots, at various points on the coast,
including one at Madras in 1640 and on the Hugli in 1651. Bombay,
which was part of the dowry of Katharine of Bragança, was leased
to the Company in 1661, and Calcutta was founded in 1690. But
all the factories suffered much during the incessant fighting
between Sivaji and Aurungzib; and the Company in 1686 declared its
intention of making reprisals. It had already formed the nuclei
of European armies in Madras in 1644 and in Bombay in 1668; and
had begun to enlist native troops in 1683. But meanwhile another
European power, the French, had established factories in Madras at
Pondicherry and in Bengal at Chandernagore in the year 1674; and
the progress of events was such as to offer great temptation to
foreign adventurers. Aurungzib died in 1707, and with the passing
of the last strong man the realm of the Moguls crumbled rapidly
away. The viceroy of the Dekhan set himself up as an independent
sovereign at Haiderabad; a Hindu dynasty was founded at Tanjore;
another imperial official seized Oude; one adventurer laid hold
of Bengal; another of Rohilkhand; countless soldiers of fortune
planted themselves as petty chieftains in hill-fortresses; a
Persian invader sacked Delhi; and an Afghan chieftain conquered
the whole of the western Punjab. India had never been in a more
appalling welter of confusion and chaos than in the midst of the
eighteenth century.
Just at this period the English and French for the first time
came to blows in the Peninsula, the pretext being the war of the
Austrian Succession. The French, represented at Pondicherry by a
very able agent, Dupleix, had initiated a policy of diplomatic
interference in the affairs of the neighbouring states, having an
army of seven thousand Sepoys to back them. The British on the
other hand stuck to their trading, and, as usual, were unprepared
for any attack. The French therefore besieged and took Madras in
1746; but, being reinforced in time, the British in turn besieged
but did not take Pondicherry. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle
followed, which put an end to hostilities; and Madras was restored
to us in exchange for Louisburg. The most significant incident of
the war, however, was that the Nawab of the Carnatic, the nominal
suzerain of both the English and the French on the Coromandel
coast, had attempted to keep the peace between them; and that his
raw levies, to the number of ten thousand, had been swept off the
field in five minutes by two hundred and fifty French soldiers and
thrice that number of trained Sepoys. This showed that a handful of
disciplined European soldiers could suffice to rout any primitive
Oriental host. Another important matter was that the operations
against the French had revealed a remarkable leader in the British
ranks, namely Major Stringer Lawrence, a simple man who could
hardly write his name, but a fine soldier and a judge of men. For
he selected from the counting-house of the Company a young clerk
named Robert Clive, took his military education in hand, and to all
intents adopted him as his son.
Meanwhile the death of the Nawab of the Carnatic and of the Viceroy
of the Dekhan almost simultaneously gave Dupleix an opportunity,
which he did not neglect, of making French influence paramount
at both Courts. The succession, as almost invariably happens in
the East, was disputed; and Dupleix, by supporting in each case
one candidate, saw his way to making him a puppet and himself
the actual ruler. The English of course supported the rival
candidates; and thus, though France and England were at peace, the
representatives of both nations in India were at war as auxiliaries
of native princes. Stringer Lawrence being at home on leave,
English military affairs went sadly wrong; and at one moment the
situation was so desperate that it was only saved by a diversion
against Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, by the young but not
uninstructed volunteer Clive. However in 1752 Lawrence returned,
and in that and the following year he gained victory after victory
over the French. The centre of the fighting, by a singular chain
of accidents, was the city of Trichinopoly; and in the plain
before it Lawrence, with forces ranging from eight hundred to
three thousand regular troops, two-thirds of them Sepoys, against
superior numbers of French, fought a series of beautiful little
actions, out-manœuvring his enemy on the open ground by what would
now be called parade movements, but which were then the finest
achievements of training and discipline. In 1754 Dupleix was
recalled to France to answer for misconduct, and the struggle was
closed by a suspension of arms. The interest of these few years,
1748 to 1754, is that, France and England being at peace, their
fleets could not intervene in the contest; otherwise the power
which enjoyed supremacy at sea was bound to win, being always able
to bring out her own reinforcements and exclude those of the enemy.
When the fight was resumed, the influence of superiority at sea
was very clearly seen; but meanwhile the year 1753 had witnessed a
new departure in British policy in India, namely the arrival of a
king's regiment, the 39th Dorsetshire, which still bears the motto
_Primus in Indis_. Henceforward the rivalry in the great peninsula
was not to be between trading companies but between nations.