Sir Charles Napier

It is wonderful to mark in his letters, reports, and journals how quickly he has mastered the complicated situation which surrounds him. Three weeks after he has taken command he has the military position secured. He will have three distinct groups of garrisons, with three points of concentration, and plans for separate or for united action. He has all the local magistrates against him, because they alone think of their individual towns, villages, or private houses, and they want troops scattered broadcast over the country. The Bradford Justice of the Peace would willingly see Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle given to the flames provided his own city had a soldier billeted in every attic; then a great local potentate would suddenly rush off to London and threaten the Home Office with terrible dangers if his particular park had not the three arms surrounding it. Notwithstanding all difficulties Napier works away, gets the troops into strategical positions, and, though he hates the work, throws all his energies into it. Here we have his plans and his opinions four weeks after he has taken command.

My men should be in three masses, one around Manchester, one around Newcastle to watch the colliers, one around Leeds and Hull to watch the other two; but such an arrangement of my force can only be effected in time. It would take a month to make the Secretary of State understand it, and then he would have a host of magistrates on his back. He behaves, however, very well, and stands by me against the magistrates, so that I have my own way in some degree. Were it allowed me in all things the country would soon be quieted. Poor fellows! they only want fair play and they would then be quiet enough, but they are harassed by taxes until they can bear it no longer. We could manage a large force of Chartists; but I trust in God nothing so horrible will happen. Would that I had gone to Australia, and thus been saved this work, produced by Tory injustice and Whig imbecility! The doctrine of slowly reforming while men are famishing is of all silly things the most silly – starving men cannot wait; and that the people of England have been and are ill-treated and ill-governed is my fixed opinion. The worship of mammon renders the minds of men base, their bodies feeble, and their morals bad. Manufactures debase man, woman, and child.

All through the summer of 1839 this work goes on. On May 25th a great meeting took place on Kersall Moor near Manchester. It passed over quietly. Napier had concentrated two thousand men and four guns in the vicinity, and he had further taken the original precaution of getting an introduction to a meeting of Chartist leaders, and telling them plainly that if they meant only to lay their grievances before Parliament they would have no opposition from him, and that neither soldier nor policeman would be allowed to disturb them, but that if there was the least disturbance of the peace he would use the force he had to quell it. Another step he took too in this same direction of prevention which should not be lost sight of. He had heard that the Chartists were very confident that their possession of five or six brass cannon was of immense importance to them, and that when the day of action would arrive these guns would give them victory. He at once secretly invites a leading Chartist chief to visit with him the artillery-barrack while the gunners are at work. The battery is drawn up, the command is given to dismount the guns, remount them and come into action. It is done in the usual brilliant and rapid manner, and the Chartist chief goes away from the parade not quite so confident that the five old brass carronades which are hidden away under some backyard rubbish will be equal to meet in action these perfectly served guns.

I have read many things in the life of this soldier, but nothing that does greater honour to him than this desire to use every means in his power to prevent the effusion of civil blood. There is in almost every military mind a pride of arms that tends to prevent a soldier taking any step with his enemies which might even remotely seem to be an avoidance of strife; but in this instance, when civil war is trembling in the balance, when the magistrates and many of the Government officials are calling out for vigorous measures, when Whigs and Tories are jointly agreed that stern repression is to be the rule of politics, we find the real soldier anxious only to avoid spilling the blood of his countrymen, ready to forget his own pride of arms, and to show the leaders of this multitude how useless must be their attempt to right their wrongs by force of arms.

In all this anxious time we find the mind of the man as keen to catch absurdities and note defects of system, military or civil, as it was in the past. Here is a bit of criticism, good to-day as when it was written fifty years ago. "I cannot conceive," he writes to an artillery officer, "how my account of barrack accommodation differs from yours. But this and other difficulties and irregularities proceed from the monstrous absurdity of giving the army half a dozen heads instead of one. The Ordnance alter your barracks, yet I know nothing of it, because we belong to separate armies – one under the Master-General of the Ordnance, the other under the Master-General of the Cavalry and Infantry. Then comes a third, the Master-General of Finance. Last, not least, the Master-General of the Home Office, more potent than all. Besides these, you and I have our little masters-general, the magistrates. God help the poor English army among so many cooks. Were it broth it would have been spoiled long ago." Just fourteen years later the Masters-General and their armies of conflicting clerks were to prove themselves more formidable destroyers of the English army in the Crimea than all the generals and soldiers of the Russian Czar.

The danger being for the moment past, Napier has time to run round his garrisons, and then up to London for twenty-four hours to be invested by the Queen with the Ribbon of the Bath. For many years he has not mixed with or seen his old comrades of Peninsular days; now he meets them at the Palace – alas! "worn, meagre, gray-headed, stooping old men, sinking fast! When we had last been together we were young, active, full of high spirits – dark or auburn locks. Now all are changed, all are parents, all full of cares. Well, the world is chained hand to hand, for there were also young soldiers there, just fledged, meet companions for their young Queen. They too will grow old, but will they have the memory of battles when like us they hurry towards the grave?" Fifty years have gone by, and Time has answered the last query. The fledglings of that day are now white and bent and broken, and when their old eyes gaze into the winter firelight, the Alma's height, the long valley of Balaklava, the slope of Inkermann, or the snow-clad mounds of the great siege rise before them, even as Corunna and Busaco and Fuentes d'Onoro and the breach at Badajos came back to the older veterans.

The picture given in Napier's journal is one that would have been worth painting, so full of contrast was it, so deep-set in history. "There was our pretty young Queen receiving our homage, and our old shrivelled bodies and gray heads were bowed before her throne, intimating our resolution to stand by it as we had stood when it was less amiably filled. I wonder what she thought of us old soldiers! We must have appeared to her like wild beasts. Lord Hill is old and has lost his teeth, poor Sir John Jones looked like a ghost, and Sir Alexander Dickson is evidently breaking. Thinking how these men had directed the British thunders of war I saw that death was the master. The brilliance of the Court vanished, and the grim spectre stared me in the face. His empire is creeping over all!"

During the summer of 1839 the Chartist agitation went on, and more than once England was on the verge of actual rebellion. Napier's position was a very peculiar one. Thoroughly in sympathy with the people in the objects they had in view, but sternly opposed to any attempt to obtain these objects by force, he ran the danger of falling between the two stools of opinion and duty. He was at this time sailing upon a very dangerous sea, and a single false movement might have involved England in bloodshed. In his letters and reports to his civil and military superiors we find the line ever distinctly drawn between the immediate repression of disorder, which he can answer for at any moment, and the permanent remedy for the evil, which must be the work of the Government. To the military authorities these expressions of opinion on the part of their subordinate appear utterly unprecedented. Napier has told the Commander-in-Chief that he can see no way to meet the evils but to concede to the people their just rights, while the principle of order is at the same time vigorously upheld. The answer to this is suggestive of many thoughts. "Lord Hill desires me to point out your observation and to suggest that you avoid all remarks having allusion to political questions; and I am to say, without entering into the merits of the question, that neither he, as Commander-in-Chief, nor you, as the Major-General commanding the Northern District, can have anything to do with the matter; it is therefore better that you should confine yourselves to what is strictly your provinces as military men." And there is another fact revealed to us in the pages of Napier's correspondence at this time which must strike the reader of to-day as strange. It is told in his account of a public dinner to which he was invited in September, 1839. He had accepted the invitation, thinking it would not be a party demonstration; but he soon found he was mistaken. All the great ones of the county were assembled, with the Lord-Lieutenant in the chair. "Church and State" was the first toast, and it was received with rapturous approval. Then, in the second place, came the health of the Queen. "Glasses were filled," writes Napier, "but not a sound of applause followed. Her Majesty's health was drunk in significant silence. No man cried 'God bless her' except myself. Then came 'The Queen Dowager [the widow of William the Fourth] and the rest of the royal family.' Instantly the room shook with shouts of applause." "You are in the wrong box, General," whispered Napier's right-hand neighbour, one of the members for the county. "So it seems, my lord," answers the irate soldier; "and the reigning Queen is in it too." How strangely this episode reads to-day; yet at the time it was common enough in the ranks of the Tory party. It was only a few years earlier that a widespread conspiracy was afloat among the men who called themselves the True Blues of their party to shut out the Princess Victoria from the throne and substitute the Duke of Cumberland for the succession. How far this conspiracy extended will not perhaps be fully known in our day; but in point of absolute loyalty to the person of the sovereign it is probable that the "rebel" Chartists at the time had a good deal more of it than had some of the supporters of Church and State who were so anxious to shoot them down.

Placed thus between the devil of the classes and the deep sea of the masses it is easy to surmise that Napier had no pleasant berth in this his first command as a general officer. Frequently we find him regretting his refusal of the Australian appointment two years earlier, and picturing to himself a land where men worked in the open air instead of in collieries or factories, a land where taxes were light and people were contented, and the grades of life were not marked by terrible extremes. Here are a few thoughts from his journal, worth in their plain truth and honest judgment many tons weight of the rubbish which the political economists of that time and since have poured forth to the world. "I was mad," he writes in August, 1839, "not to go out as governor of Australia. I could have founded there a great kingdom, with a systematic education, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the law of primogeniture as regards land. I would have so ruled Australia that the land should never have been thus collected." Then he goes on to the question of what constitutes the true prosperity of a nation. "Men," he writes, "are restless and discontented with poverty in manufacturing places. They have all its sufferings and have not those pleasures which make people content under it, that is, health, enjoyment of country life, fresh air, and interest in the seasons and in the various products of nature. The exhausted, unhealthy manufacturer has no such enjoyment; he has no resources but gin, gambling, and all kinds of debauchery. The countryman worships God, the manufacturer worships gold, and thus the practice of sin united to mammon-worship makes the ruffian. Yet such is the system which your political economists call the prosperity of the nation. Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is assuredly hung with Manchester cottons." As the year 1839 drew to a close, the starvation and misery seemed to deepen over the northern command. In November we read, "The streets of this town [Manchester] are horrible. The poor starving people go about in twenties and forties begging, but without the least insolence; and yet some rich villains and some foolish women choose to say they try to extort charity. It is a lie, an infernal lie; neither more nor less. Nothing can exceed the good behaviour of these poor people, except it be their cruel sufferings." Hard as had been his nine long years of inaction, and welcome as work was to his brain and hand hungry for toil, Napier loathes the employment which carries with it the danger of having to take the lives of his fellow-countrymen. On January 16th, 1840, we find him writing the following entry in his journal: "Anniversary of the battle of Corunna. Oh, that I should have outlived that day to be at war with my own countrymen! Better be dead than live to see a civil war!" In the summer of 1841 a rumour reaches him that he is soon to be offered an Indian command. The old fighting spirit kindles at once in his heart. It will be a pleasant change to the Indus, on the very threshold of the Afghan country where war is raging, from this northern district, where his command is "slavery under noodles." "Gladly shall I get away," he writes, "from this district; for how to deal with violence produced by starvation, by folly, by villainy, and even by a wish to do right, is a hard matter. A man is easily reconciled to act against misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action."

CHAPTER VIII

INDIA – THE WAR IN SCINDE

When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of age. More than forty years earlier he had begun his military career. Thirty-two years had passed since he had fought at Corunna; and since then what a life of action had been his! And yet this little thin figure, with eagle eye and beaked nose, and long hair streaked with white, which for more than forty years seemed to have been a volcano ever in action, had not yet spent the vast stock of vital energy which it started with. Very far from it. After all his wounds and wanderings, his shipwrecks and disasters, his sorrows and sicknesses, his blows and buffetings, here he was starting out for India, far more full of energy than ten out of a dozen ensigns going out from college to begin life.

On December 13th, 1841, Napier first set foot in India. He had come out by the overland route in two months, and looked upon the journey as a marvel of rapidity. It had cost him very dear; and when he landed in Bombay he had exactly two pounds in his pocket, and his bank-account was nil. "Had I then died," he writes, "there was not a farthing left for my children," and he was sixty years of age!

When Napier assumed command of the Poonah Division in the end of 1841, our dominion in India had entered upon a very critical stage of its history. Two years before this date we had sent an army into Afghanistan, ostensibly to seat a rival Ameer on the throne of Cabul – in reality to gain a footing in that mountain land. It was an Asiatic copy of Napoleon's invasion of Spain; and although the Afghans had no outside power to help them, the result was much the same as it had been in the Peninsula. There was at first an apparently easy conquest of the country, then a rising of the people, a retreat and surrender of the invaders, followed by fresh invasions carried on with the savage accessories usual where conquest endeavours to legalise its position by calling a people who are rightly struggling in the cause of their freedom "rebels." At this particular moment – the mid-winter of 1841 – a great disaster had befallen our arms. The garrison of Cabul, retreating from that place towards the Kyber Pass, had been annihilated in the defiles of Jugdulluck; the general, a few officers, and their wives having alone been saved by surrender. The two civil organisers of the invasion, M'Naughten and Burnes, had been killed, one in Cabul, the other at a conference with Akbar Khan. Sale still held Jellalabad with an Irish battalion; but the Kyber Pass was between him and India, and that defile was in possession of the Afghans. On the western side of Afghanistan our army held Ghuznee, Candahar, and Quetta; but again the Bolan Pass lay between our forces and Upper Scinde, where a small British army was cantoned on the Indus. When the news of these disasters, always magnified by native rumour, reached the countries which still intervened between our real Indian frontier and Afghanistan – Scinde and the Punjaub – signs of ill-concealed satisfaction began to manifest themselves among the princes and peoples of these still semi-independent States. This Afghan expedition had indeed been a wild and foolish venture, and the first blast of misfortune showed at once the full length and breadth of its absurdity. As each succeeding mail from the northern frontier brought to Bombay some fresh development of this critical situation, Napier bent his mind to master the complicated position of affairs; for daily it became more clear to his practised eye that the forces available on the Indian frontier were not adequate to retrieve the military situation, and that sooner or later he would be sent to the theatre of operations. When the crisis becomes really acute, favouritism lowers its front, and genius sees the road clear for action.

And now at last the chance came – the chance of leading an army of his countrymen in battle, the opportunity which he had longed for through all these weary years since that distant day when, writing to his mother from Hythe, he told her that his highest ambition was to live to command British soldiers in the field. That was just forty years ago, and here at last came the long-wished-for boon; but under what changed conditions! "Oh for forty as at Cephalonia," he writes, "when I laughed at eighteen hours' work under a burning sun; now at sixty how far will my carcass carry me? No great distance! Well, to try is glorious! I am hurrying fast towards the end; it will be fortunate to reach it in the hour of victory. Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather than by an army in the hour of victory?"

In March, 1842, Lord Ellenborough arrived in India as Governor-General. From Madras he wrote to Napier asking the latter to send him a statement of his views with respect to the manner in which the honour of our arms may be most effectually re-established in Afghanistan. The request found Napier prepared. At once a clear and precise plan was forwarded to meet the new Governor-General on his arrival at Calcutta. We must avenge the disasters to our arms, but how? By "a noble, generous, not a vindictive warfare," after which "it might be very practicable to retire from Afghanistan, leaving a friendly people behind us." What a grand type of soldier this! No military executions, no hanging of men whose only fault was a splendid and heroic love of their own land! Truly the dominion based on such old-world chivalry could laugh at the advance of the Russian – it would not need "a scientific frontier" to defend it.

As the year 1842 progressed, the state of Afghanistan still remained critical. In July Candahar and Jellalabad were still our advanced posts, and all the intervening valleys and defiles were in the hands of the Afghans. Behind, in the Punjaub and in Scinde, the spectacle of delay and indecision on the part of our generals was spreading wider the area of disturbance. Clearly some real chief was wanted to hold together all this wavering discontent which was seething from the sources of the Sutlej to the sea at Kurachee. At last the order came to move to Scinde. Napier received it on the anniversary of the battle of the Coa, fought thirty-two years earlier. At first the recollection that he is now in his sixty-first year, and that he has to leave behind him all he holds dear in life to go out to incessant action in a terrible climate, damps his spirit, but he quickly rallies. He will not even depend upon the advice of the "politicals," as he calls the Civil Servants in Scinde, who for once are to be subject to his orders. These men may be useful, he thinks, but that usefulness "cannot be as councillors to a general officer who should have none but his pillow and his courage." And so with these sentiments and a thousand others equally characteristic of indomitable resolution, courage, and self-dependency, he sets out for Scinde on September 3rd, 1842. "Old Oliver's day," he writes; "the day he won Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died; and a very good day to die on, as good as the second or the fourth – 'a crowning victory,' strange."

On the evening of the 3rd the Zenobia steamed out of Bombay harbour bound for Kurachee. Never did soldier proceed to the scene of action under more terrible conditions. The vessel carried a detachment of two hundred European troops. Scarcely had she put to sea before cholera of the most fatal type broke out among these soldiers. There was but one doctor on board, few medicines, no preparations to meet such a catastrophe. In an hour after the first case appeared many more had been attacked. Night fell. Drenching rain added to the horror. Scarcely were men attacked ere they died in contortions and agony impossible to describe. The beds of the stricken soldiers were laid on deck; and as they died the bodies were instantly cast overboard. All night long this terrible scene went on. When morning dawned twenty-six bodies had been thrown into the sea. For three days this awful scene continued. One-fourth of the entire troops had perished; eighty more men were down on the reeking, filthy deck. It was a time to try the sternest nerve. The worst scene of carnage on the battle-field could be nothing to this awful visitation. At last the port of Kurachee was gained; the flame of the fell disease seemed to have burned itself out; the survivors were got on shore, but a dozen more unfortunates were doomed to perish on land. In eight days sixty-four soldiers – just a third of the entire number embarked – had died; a few sailors, women, and children also perished.

Bad as was this beginning, it did not seem to damp the spirit or dull the energy of the commander. On September 10th he got on shore with his sick and dying. On the 12th he reviews the garrison of Kurachee, and looks to his ammunition and supplies. Before leaving Bombay he had visited the arsenal there, and had discovered some rockets lying in a corner. He had always a fondness for these somewhat erratic engines of war, and he brought them on with him to Scinde. Now at this review he determines to try one or two of them in front of the troops. An artillery officer, an engineer officer, and the General formed a kind of committee for letting off the missile, no one knowing apparently much about it. The second rocket would not go off when lighted; the committee incautiously approached, the rocket exploded, and the General's leg was cut clean across the calf by a sharp splinter of the iron case. This wound laid him up for a few days; but in a week, unable to stand the confinement any longer, he is carried on board a river steamer and proceeds up the Indus. Certainly a bad continuation to a bad beginning this accident. Yet Napier had good reason to hope that whatever else might stop his career it would not be his legs, for in the past, though sorely tried, they had stood to him well. As a boy at Celbridge he had, while leaping a fence, cut the flesh from his leg in a terrible manner; a few years later at Limerick he had smashed the bone while jumping a ditch to secure a dead snipe. Again, at Corunna, a bullet had damaged this unfortunate leg; and here now at Kurachee, thirty-three years later, this rocket has another gash at it. No use; he "will get the snipe" up this great Indus river, as forty-four years ago he got it on the banks of the Shannon.

And now, leaving this old veteran, but ever-young soldier, steaming up the great river by whose shores he is soon to become the central figure in a long series of great events, we will pause a moment to review the chapter of Scindian history which had led up to this moment.

In the year 1836 Afghanistan lay many hundred miles beyond our nearest frontier, and it is almost needless to say that Russia then lay many thousand miles beyond the farthest extreme of Afghanistan. Nevertheless it was determined by the Viceroy of India and his Council to invade Afghanistan across the intervening Sikh and Scindian territory, in order to upset the ruler of the first-named State, and to seat upon the throne of Cabul a king who had long been our puppet and our pensionary. It is of course unnecessary to add that our puppet and our pensionary was, in return for this service, to hand over to us the legs of his throne, the keys of his kingdom, and a good deal of the contents of his treasury. Between our frontier and that of Afghanistan lay the Punjaub and Scinde, through which States we were to invade the territory of Dost Mahomed by the passes of the Khyber and the Bolan. With the ruler of the Punjaub, Runjeet Singh, we were upon terms of closest offensive and defensive amity. He was, in fact, our ally in the invasion. With the rulers of Scinde, on the other hand, our relations were strained. Runjeet was rich, had a large army, and was a single despotic ruler. The Ameers of Scinde were rich too, but they had no regular army. They were fighting among themselves, filled with mutual jealousies, weak rulers of a separated State. The line of policy pursued towards these States by the Calcutta Government was a very obvious if a very flagrant one. Runjeet Singh, the Lion of Lahore, was to be bribed into acquiescence in our Afghan policy, by slices of territory taken from Afghanistan and Scinde, by large promises of plunder to be given him by Shah Soojah, our puppet king, and by subsidies from our own treasury. But with the Ameers of Scinde the process was to be altogether one of force. Pressed by an army on the middle Indus, by the Sikhs from the Punjaub, and by a flotilla on the coast, they were to be squeezed into compliance with our demands, which included cession of territory, fortresses, and seaports, payment of treasure to Shah Soojah, annual subsidies to ourselves, and rights of passage for troops and supplies. All these matters having been arranged to the complete dissatisfaction of the weak but indignant Ameers, our armies pressed on into the Khyber on one hand and the Bolan on the other. This was in 1838. We have already seen the final outcome of this forward Afghan policy in the early months of 1842. That the events in the Koord-Cabul and Jugdulluck Passes, when a single surviving horseman bore to Jellalabad the tidings of a disaster almost unparalleled in the annals of retreating armies, should have been received by the Ameers of Scinde without regret is not to be wondered at, and that they should see in it some opportunity of loosening the grasp of our power upon a territory which we still continued to speak of as independent is equally no subject of astonishment.

When Lord Ellenborough arrived in India in the spring of 1842 he was face to face with immense difficulties. The forward Afghan policy had collapsed. To an ignorant and presumptuous confidence paralysis and fear had succeeded. What was to be done? To reverse the engines and go full speed astern would only run the vessel of Indian policy upon the shoals and quicksands which the former mistaken and most unjust statecraft had produced. Napier knew all this nefarious history when he went to Scinde, but he knew too the utter impossibility of getting again into deep water by a recurrence to an absolutely just policy with the rulers of Scinde. He and his master, Lord Ellenborough, were the inheritors of this trouble. They had not made it, but assuredly they would be measured by it. In India, to go forward has often been to go wrong, but to go back in that country has always been to admit the wrong; and once to do that is to admit the truth of an argument which, if prolonged to its fullest consequences, must lead us to the sea-coast. What then was to be done? Reconquer Afghanistan; give it up to its old ruler again, and then fix the frontier of India at the frontier of Afghanistan. That was practically the policy determined upon by Lord Ellenborough, and when he made Charles Napier the right arm of its accomplishment he had secured the best pilot then navigating the troubled sea of English dominion in the East.

But when this policy had been once decided on, it would have been better to have openly admitted the necessity, and to have told the Ameers of Scinde plainly our intentions; let them then fight us if they liked. That course would have probably saved a vast effusion of blood. It certainly would have prevented the long and unhappy years of quarrel and recrimination that followed the conquest of Scinde, and the spectacle of two gallant and noble soldiers waging a lifelong war between each other upon the methods by which that conquest had been effected. Of this last phase, however, of the Scindian question we will speak later on.

Steaming up the Indus, Napier reached Hyderabad on September 25th, and had an interview with the Ameers of Scinde. They received him with extraordinary state and honour, for already the tide of war in Afghanistan had turned. Two armies marching from Jellalabad and Candahar had retaken Cabul, and another retiring from the Bolan would soon be on the middle Indus; while a general, of whom fame spoke highly, had just arrived with fresh troops at Kurachee.

Napier passed on from this reception, and early in October arrived at Sukkur, where important letters from Lord Ellenborough reached him; at the same time he received news that the English army had safely passed the Bolan, and that the war in Afghanistan was therefore closed. And now, for the first time in the life of this extraordinary soldier, we arrive at a point where the path is not clear. The situation which at this moment confronted him was perhaps as difficult a one as ever presented itself to a soldier-ruler in our time. The course pursued by Napier was long the subject of fierce controversy. Volumes were written upon it. It was angrily debated in Parliament, angrily commented upon in the Press, and as angrily defended and applauded on the other side. All this is long over; the heat, the fury, and the bitter words have passed with the generation that saw and read in the flesh of the doings on the Indus. The conquest of Scinde has taken its place in history, and we can now quietly estimate the difficulties, the rights, the wrongs, and what perhaps was stranger than all, the temptations of the time. We will lightly touch upon them all, remembering that our path lies upon the ashes of dead heroes. First for the situation. It was this. A great shock had just been given to the sagacity of British government in India, and what was more important, to the prestige of British arms in Asia. We had retreated from Afghanistan, after avenging our defeat it is true, but still by the fact of that retreat acknowledging that our policy had been wrong, and that our power of enforcing that policy had not been equal to its ambition. That was a very serious position for a power whose dominion in the East rested solely on the sword, and nowhere was it so serious as in the neutral borderlands through which we had passed in order to invade Afghanistan – the lands whose natural rights we had trenched upon, and whose sentiments of independence we had repeatedly outraged during the five years of this unfortunate enterprise. Now one fact was very clear to the Viceroy in Calcutta and to his lieutenant in Scinde – either we must withdraw altogether from the Indus, or we must strengthen our position there. The first course was altogether out of the question, the second became a necessity. Lord Ellenborough directed Napier to draft a new treaty, told him to present it to the Ameers, and if necessary to enforce its acceptance by arms. So far all was clear. In November, 1842, the new treaty was ready for presentation to the Ameers. Its provisions were indeed formidable. It took from the rulers of Scinde, towns, territory, rights of coinage, etc., and it especially dealt severely with the northern or Khyrpoor Ameers, who were rightly or wrongly suspected of having been desirous of profiting by the Afghan disasters in the preceding year. Two men of a widely different character appear at this moment upon the scene – Major James Outram of the Indian army, now political agent in Scinde, and His Highness Ali Moorad, one of the Ameers of Khyrpoor. No braver soldier ever bore the arms of England in the East than James Outram. No baser intriguer ever schemed and plotted for his own advancement than Ali Moorad of northern Scinde. Napier presented his treaty to the Ameers, and at the same time moved his troops into the territory the cession of which was claimed by the document. The Ameers accepted the treaty, but protested against its severity. The leading Ameer was a very old man, over eighty years of age, named Meer Roostum. Between him and his younger half-brother, Ali Moorad, lay a great gap of years – perhaps forty – and a still greater gap of hatred, for Ali longed to possess his elder brother's lands, rights, and puggaree, as the turban, or insignia of paramount power, was called. Outram was anxious to save the Ameers from the total destruction which he knew must await them if arms were made the arbitrament of the dispute. Ali Moorad saw that only by a recourse to war could his scheme of ambition be gratified. Between them stood Napier, determined upon using to the utmost the immense power which the Viceroy had placed in his hands, and seeing far beyond the present dispute a time when this valley of the Indus must all become British territory; seeing it in imagination, too, a happy valley waving with grain, peopled by a peaceful and contented population free from the exactions of semi barbarian chiefs, and enjoying the blessings of a government which would rule them with patriarchal justice – a picture the reality of which no human eye has ever looked on.

But above and beyond all this there was another spring in Charles Napier's mind, more potent than any picture, more powerful than any prompting. Above everything else he was a soldier. The clash of arms was dear to him as music to the ear of an Italian. No lover ever longed for mistress more than did this man long for fighting. Was he bloodthirsty? Not in the least. His heart was tender as a child's, his sympathies were far-reaching as a woman's; but for all that every fibre of his nature vibrated to the magic touch of military glory, and his earthly paradise was the front rank of battle.

That his soldier nature was all this time in a state of antagonism with the other nature of pity and love of abstract justice cannot be doubted for a moment. The conflict peeps out through hundreds of pages of his journals. How glad he would be if these Ameers would boldly reject the treaty and defy him! "I almost wish," he writes on December 5th, "that they proudly defied us and fought, for they are so weak, so humble, that punishing them goes against the grain." Most men who read his life to-day will echo that regret. All this while the unfortunate Ameers, divided by conflicting counsels, and distracted by the rumours of coming war which Ali Moorad industriously circulated among them, were drifting rapidly to ruin. The older men were for complete submission, the younger hands were advising resistance. The wild Beloochee matchlock men and the fierce horsemen of Scinde were clamorous not to allow the old fame of the Talpoors to die out in shameful surrender. The Feringhee, even when the treaty had been signed, would move on Hyderabad. The treasure of the Ameers was great, their harems were numerous. If they were doomed to lose all, better lose all with arms in their hands facing the invader. Such was the state of affairs during the month of December, 1842. The Ameers are irresolute and distracted by a thousand reports; Ali Moorad is deeply scheming to make Napier believe his relatives mean fighting; Outram, the Ameers' best friend, has been sent by Lord Ellenborough away from Scinde, and at Napier's request is about to return from Bombay; and Napier himself, dazzled with the realisation of his life-long dream of military glory, is about "to cut with the sword the Gordian knot" of Scindian politics. In the middle of the month of December he crossed his army from the right to the left bank of the Indus at Sukkur, and put his troops in column of route. The state of his mind at this moment is laid bare to us in his journal; on December 21st he writes thus:

Ten thousand fighting men and their followers are camped here at Alore, a town built by Alexander the Great. My tent overlooks this most beautiful encampment. The various sounds, the multitude of followers, the many costumes and languages, and the many religions, produce a strange scene which makes a man think, Why is all this? Why am I supreme? A little experience in the art of killing, of disobedience to Heaven's behests, is all the superiority that I, their commander, can boast of! How humbled thinking makes me feel! Still, I exult when beholding this force. I have worked my way to this great command, and am gratified at having it, yet despise myself for being so gratified! Yes, I despise myself, not as feeling unworthy to lead, for I am conscious of knowing how to lead, and my moral and physical courage are equal to the task; my contempt is for my worldliness. Am I not past sixty? Must I not soon be on the bed of death? And yet so weak as to care for these things. No, I do not. I pray to do what is right and just, and to have strength to say, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Alas, I have not the strength! Well, this comfort remains – with a secret and strong desire to guide in war, I have avoided it studiously!

At four o'clock in the morning following Christmas Day he put his troops in motion for the south. On the last night of the year he is encamped near Khyrpoor; to his right lies the level alluvial valley of the Indus, to his left the great desert of Scinde rolls away in measureless sand-waves. Walking in front of his tent and looking at the long line of camp fires, while the hum of his host floats up through the glorious Eastern night, he begins as it were to speak his thoughts aloud. All his plans are formed. "One night," he says, "I drank strong coffee and had a capital think for an hour. I got many matters decided in that hour." He will march first into the desert on his left and take the fort of Emanghur, a stronghold of the northern Ameers of high repute because it is an island in a waterless sea; then will come back to the Indus and direct his march upon Hyderabad. The Ameers will fly, he thinks, across the Indus, and the entire left bank of the river from the Punjaub to the sea will become British territory. If the Ameers elect to fight, well, he will be glad to give them every opportunity. "Peace and civilisation will then replace war and barbarism. My conscience will be light, for I see no wrong in so regulating a set of tyrants who are themselves invaders, and have in sixty years nearly destroyed the country. The people hate them. I may be wrong, but I cannot see it, and my conscience will not be troubled. I sleep well while trying to do this, and shall sleep sound when it is done." Here in these few words we have the picture of the invasion of Scinde as he then saw it. Nevertheless it was not the picture which India saw, which Outram saw, and which calm and impartial history must see to-day. And here let us look for a moment on the field of war, for war it was to be, that lay before this army camped under the winter starlight on this last night of 1842.

A vast dreary world was this Scinde. Men who knew it best called it the Unhappy Valley, and the name fitted accurately the nation. A flat, dusty, sun-scorched, fever-poisoned land; an Egypt turned the wrong way, and with a past so blurred and battered that no eye could read it; a changeless landscape of dusty distance through which the meanest habitations of men loomed at intervals, with ragged solitary acacia trees, and old broken mosques and mounds that had once been cities, and towns that were always shrinking, and graveyards that were ever growing. In the centre of this Unhappy Valley rolled the Indus – a broad rapid river when the summer flood poured down its silt-sided channel, a lean shrunken stream when winter heaped high his snowflakes in the mountains of Afghanistan; and yet a rich land wherever water could be given to its thirsty surface. Man had only to scuffle and hoe the baked dust, pour water over it, and in a month or two the arid plain became a waving sea of emerald green, to quickly change again to a vast level of yellowing grain. But it is a strange fact that wherever these conditions of dusty desert turned green with animal inundation are found, there too you will find man a slave and a tyrant. Grades there may be between, but always the lowest layers of the human strata will be slaves, and the upper ones will be their owners. And nowhere was this rule more certain than in Scinde. The native Scindian who grubbed the earth, dug the canal, and turned the water-wheel, was a slave. The Beloochee, whether he called himself predatory hill-man, settled lord of the valley, or ruling Ameer, was a tyrant. What the Mameluke had been to Egypt the Beloochee was to Scinde – a ruling caste, fierce fighters, making free with every rule of their prophet, faithful only to his fanatic spirit. Three separate groups of rulers called Ameers governed Scinde. They all claimed equal descent from the Talpoor chief who, seventy years before this period, had come down from Beloochistan and conquered the Unhappy Valley. There were the Ameers of Lower Scinde, who dwelt in Hyderabad; those of Upper Scinde, whose headquarters was Khyrpoor; and those of East Scinde, who ruled at Meerpoor. As their descent was equal, so their characters were alike. Prosperity and power and self-indulgence had taken the old Beloochee steel out of their natures. They drank, they feasted, they hunted, and they loved after the fashion of the East. That they were not so weak or so vicious as a thousand rulers of India lying farther south is clear, but it was only because they were nearer to the mountains from whose flinty rocks they had come three generations earlier. Everything that has ever descended from these grim northern hills has degenerated in India. The Arab fares no better than does his horse when once he passes those arid portals.

Such was the land and such the people with whom Napier was now to come to blows in the new year about to dawn. War had not been declared, but it was certain that some of the Ameers at least were gathering their Beloochee feudatories, that it was often stated in their durbars that the hot season, now near at hand, would paralyse the action of the English general, and that, as a bold and resolute front had ended in Afghanistan in the total withdrawal of the English armies, so might that most necessary adjunct to the string of diplomacy ensure the final retirement of the Feringhee from the territories of Scinde. Ever present in Napier's mind was this approaching hot season. Viewing the conduct of the principal Ameers through the glasses of his new friend and ally, Meer Ali Moorad, and seeing with his own eyes the evidence of their tyrannical rule over their subjects, he had resolved to anticipate all plans, to forestall all projects, to determine all events by marching at once upon the chief strongholds of the Ameers. If his innate love of justice whispered to him any suggestion that the cause of quarrel was not clear, that the chief Ameers were divided among themselves, and that moderate counsels would prevail over their fears and their weakness, the spectacle of their tyranny and worthlessness, of Beloochee bloodthirstiness and Scindian slavery, was ever before his vision to shut out such misgivings. The government of the Ameers seemed in his eyes as monstrous and unjust as had the Irish government of his boyish days or the English administration of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, and all the pent torrent of his nature longed to go out and crush it. Love of glory, hatred of oppression, these two most potent factors in the story of his life, called him to the field; he forgot that it is possible to be unjust even to injustice, and that if there were no criminals there need be no mercy.

On January 5th, 1843, he struck out with a small force for the desert fortress of Emanghur.

CHAPTER IX

THE BATTLE OF MEANEE

The desert – the world before it was born or after its death, the earth without water, no cloud above, no tree below – space, silence, solitude, all realised in one word – there is nothing like it in creation.

At midnight on January 5th the little column started for Emanghur, – three hundred and fifty men of the Twenty-Second Regiment on camels – two men on each – two twenty-four pounders drawn by camels, and two hundred troopers of the Scinde Horse, with fifteen days' food and four days' water. From a group of wells called Choonka, Napier sent back a hundred and fifty of his horse, and pushed on with the remainder. For seven days he held on through the sea of sand, and on the 12th reached his object. It was deserted by the Beloochees, who had abandoned their redoubtable stronghold at the approach of the British. On the last day's march the men of the Twenty-Second had to dismount from their camels and help to drag the heavy howitzer through the sand, all laughing and joking, and with such strength! We shall see these men a few weeks later doing still more splendid work, and will have a few words to say about them; now we must hurry on. Napier blew up the desert fort and turned his face back towards the Indus. On January 16th he is still toiling through the sand waves, the men again dragging the guns, but with a significant absence of laughter now that the chances of fight are over. It is the anniversary of Corunna, and despite the labour and anxieties which surround him, the General's mind is away in the past. He reviews the long career now stretching like this desert into an immense horizon. In this retrospect his mind fastens upon one satisfactory thought – he and his brothers have not disgraced their father's memory. "We all resolved not to disgrace him," he writes, "and were he now alive he would be satisfied." The previous day, with the tremendous explosion of the blowing up of Emanghur still ringing in his ears, he wrote: "All last night I dreamed of my beloved mother; her beauteous face smiled upon me. Am I going to meet her very soon?" No, they were not to meet soon; for in spite of fierce battle and Scindian sun and life long past its prime, he is still to realise in himself that mysterious promise given in even a vaster desert than this to those who hold dear the memory of father and mother – he will be left long in the land he is soon to conquer.

By the end of January he has cleared the desert, reunited his column to the main body, and turned the head of his advance to the south. All this time negotiations were going on. Outram had gone to Hyderabad. The Ameers were in wildest confusion; they would sign anything one day, on the next it was protest, threat, or supplication. Camel and horse messengers were flying through the land. But amid all this varying mass of diplomatic rumour one fact was certain, the Ameers' fighting feudatories were gathering, the wild sword and matchlock men of the hills and the deserts were assembling at Hyderabad. The last day of January had come. In another month or six weeks the terrible sun would be hanging as a blazing furnace overhead, and it would be too late. "If they would turn out thirty thousand men in my front it would relieve me from the detestable feeling of having to deal with poor miserable devils that cannot fight, and are seeking pardon by submission. Twenty times a day I am forced to say to myself, 'Trust them not; they are all craft; be not softened.'" Halting five days at Nowshara to allow further time for negotiations and to rest his own troops, he resumes his march early in February. He is at Sukurunda on the 10th, and here again he halts for some days; for Outram has written from Hyderabad that the Ameers have accepted the treaty, and he prays a further respite. But at this place an event occurred which did much to decide the wavering balance between peace and war. On the night of February 12th Napier's cavalry seized some Beloochee chiefs passing the left of the camp. They were of the Murree hill tribe, and the leader of the clan, Hyat Khan, was among them. On him was found a letter from Ameer Mahomet of Hyderabad calling upon him to assemble all his warriors and to march to Meanee on the 9th. The discovery of this message at once decided Napier. He would march straight to his front; he would attack whatever barred his road, be they six or sixty thousand. The events that happened in these early days of February, 1843, and the trembling balance which now was decided to the side of war, have been made the occasion of long and fierce controversy. Volumes were written on Napier's side and on Outram's side. Did the Ameers mean war all the time, and were their professions of peace only directed to delay events until their soldiers were collected and the hot season had come? Or were they a poor helpless lot of enervated rulers, driven to resist the aggression of the English general, and only fighting at last when every other avenue of settlement had been closed against them? To us now two things are very clear. First, that Napier played the game of negotiation with the Ameers from first to last with an armed hand, ready to strike if there was hesitation on the part of his adversaries. Second, that his adversaries played precisely the same game with him. Both sides got their fighting men out. One began its march, the other took up its position of defence. That the flint on one side and the steel on the other, represented by their respective fighting forces, were anxious to come to blows there cannot be a doubt; and that when they found themselves only a few marches distant from each other they struck and fire flew, need never have been the cause of wonderment, least of all the cause of wonderment to soldiers. And now for the clash of flint and steel which bears the name of the battle of Meanee.

From the village of Hala, thirty-three miles north of Hyderabad, two roads led to that city. One of these, that nearer the Indus, approached the position of Meanee directly in front; the other, more to the east, turned that place on its right. Napier reached Hala on the morning of the 18th, and there his mind became immovably determined. In the afternoon Outram arrived by steamer from Hyderabad, having been attacked on the previous day in the Residency by a division of the Beloochee army, with six guns. He had successfully resisted the attack with his small force for some hours, but, finding his ammunition running short, he withdrew with the little garrison to his steamers. There could now be no further doubt that the Ameers had elected to appeal to the sword, and the path was at last clear before Napier and his army. He will advance along the road nearest to the river; if possible he will manœuvre to turn the enemy's right when he is face to face with him. "There is but one thing – battle!" he writes on this day. "Had Elphinstone fought, he would not have lost his character. Had Wellington waited for Stevenson at Assaye, he would have been beaten. Monson hesitated and retreated and was beaten." Then he pushed on to Muttaree, one march from the Beloochee position. At this place, Muttaree, many things happened. During the day and night various reports came in as to the strength of the enemy. Outram says they are eighteen thousand strong, the spies report twenty to twenty-five, and thirty thousand Beloochees in position. They are flocking in so fast to Meanee that in another day or two there may be sixty thousand assembled. "Let them be sixty or one hundred thousand," is his reply, "I will fight." All the arrangements for the advance are now made. He will move his little army – it is only twenty-two hundred strong – after midnight, so as to arrive in front of Meanee by nine o'clock next morning. Then he sits down to write his letters and bring up his journal to date; for this coming battle, which is to be his first essay as Commander-in-Chief, may be his last as a soldier. "To fall will be to leave many I love," he writes to his old and true friend John Kennedy; "but to go to many loved, to my home! and that in any case must be soon"; for is he not sixty-one years of age? Then, having written all his letters and closed his journal with a message to his wife and children, which shows how the grand heart of the man was ever torn by love and steeled by duty, he goes out of his hut to visit the outposts and see that all is safe in the sleeping camp. It is now midnight. He lies down – has three hours' sleep, and at three A.M. the fall-in sounds and the march to Meanee begins.

When day dawns the column is within a few miles of the enemy. The road leads over a level plain of white silt with a few stunted bushes growing at intervals upon it. To the right and left of this plain, extensive woods close the view. These shikargahs (hunting preserves) are about three-quarters of a mile apart, and the intervening plain across which the road leads is here and there seared by a nullah or dry watercourse. Clouds of dust rise into the morning air from the feet of horses, men, camels, and the roll of wheels.

When there is good light to see, the halt is sounded and the men breakfast; then the march is resumed, and in another hour the leading scouts are in sight of the enemy. It is now eight o'clock. The enemy seems to occupy a deep and sudden depression in the plain on a front of twelve hundred yards, extending right across the line of advance and touching the woods on each flank. Before his right flank there is a village which he also occupies, but no other obstacle lies between the British advancing column and the great hollow in which the Beloochee line of battle has been formed. Napier halts his advanced guard, and while awaiting the arrival of his main body, still a considerable distance in rear, endeavours to obtain some idea of the enemy's strength and position. It is no easy matter. The woods to right and left hide whatever troops he has on these flanks, and the deep nullah in front conceals his strength in that direction; but beyond the nullah, where the plain resumes its original level, the morning sun strikes upon thousands of bits of steel, and a vague dust hanging overhead tells of a vast concourse of human beings on the earth below it.

When the column arrives in line with the advanced guard there is a busy interval getting the immense baggage-train into defensive position, pushing forward guns and cavalry, deploying the infantry into line of battle, and trying to obtain from the top of some sand-dune a better view of the enemy's position. When all is ready for the final advance across the last thousand yards, one thing is certain to the General, – there is no chance of manœuvring to gain the Beloochee flank. The woods are too dense, nullahs intersect them, they swarm with the enemy – there is nothing possible but to attack the centre straight in front across the bare white plain. There is a small mud village before the enemy's right flank, where the left shikargah touches the bank of the big hollow. The nearer bank of this big hollow has a slight incline towards the plain, and above its level edge many heads can be seen through the field-glasses, and tall matchlock-barrels are constantly moving along it. This hollow is in fact the bed of the Fullalee river, a deep channel which quits the main stream of the Indus three or four miles farther to the right and bends round here to the village of Meanee, where, making a sudden turn to the south, it bends back towards Hyderabad. It is a flowing river only when the Indus is in flood; now the Indus is low and the Fullalee is a deep wide water-course destitute of water, or holding it only in a few stagnant pools. It is in this dry river-bed that the main portion of the Beloochee army is drawn up, and beyond it, in a loop of level ground which the river-channel makes between its bend, can be seen the tents and camp-equipage of the chiefs whose clansmen are arrayed beneath.

Carrying the glass still to the right along the nearer edge of the dry channel, the eye noted that the shikargah, or jungle-cover, which formed the left of the Beloochee army had a high wall dividing it from the plain, and that about midway between the enemy and the British line a large gap or opening had been made in this formidable obstacle. In an instant the quick eye of the General noted this opening. It was the gate of a proposed trap. Through it the left wing of the enemy would debouch upon the rear of the British when the little army would have passed the spot to engage the centre in the Fullalee. In the angles formed by the shikargahs where they touched the Fullalee there were six guns in battery, while the entire front of the Beloochee position for a distance of some seven hundred yards had been cleared of even the stunted trees which elsewhere grew upon the plain. All these things Charles Napier took in in that short and anxious interval which preceded the final advance of his little army. It was not a sight that longer examination could make more pleasant. It was a strong and well-selected position, taken up with care and foresight, not to be turned on either flank, forcing the enemy that would attack it to show his hand at once, while it kept hidden from that assailant and safe from his shot, the main body of its defenders.

And now the British line of battle has reached to within nine hundred yards of this strong position which we have just glanced along. Let us see in what manner of military formation the English General moves his men to attack it. Line, of course; for every memory of his old soldier life held some precious moment consecrated to the glory of the red line of battle. Thirty years had rolled over him since he had seen that glorious infantry moving in all the splendour of its quiet courage to the shock of battle. Many things had changed since then, but the foot soldier was still the same. Now as in Peninsular days he came mostly from those lowly peasant homes which greed and foolish laws had not yet levelled with the ground. Now as in Peninsular days he was chiefly Irish. When Napier rode at the head of his marching column in Scinde, when he chatted as he loved to do at the halt or in the camp with the "man in the ranks," the habit of thought and mode of expression were the same as they had been in the far-off marches and bivouacs by the Tagus or the Coa. True, in this Scindian strife he had only a single regiment of that famous infantry in his army. But that single regiment was worth a host. "I have one British regiment," he had written only the previous night, "the Twenty-Second, magnificent Tipperary! I would not give your specimens for a deal just now." What manner of men these Tipperary soldiers were, Sir William Napier tells us in his Conquest of Scinde. The description is worth repeating, because the picture is rarer than it used to be. "On the left of the artillery," he writes, describing the advance to Meanee, "marched the Twenty-Second Regiment. This battalion, about four hundred in number, was composed almost entirely of Irishmen, strong of body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers who saw nothing but victory before them, and counted not their enemies." On the left of the Twenty-Second Regiment marched four battalions of native infantry, resolute soldiers moving with the firm tread which discipline so easily assumes when it is conscious of being led by capacity and courage. In front of the line of infantry thus formed, the Scinde Horse on the left and the grenadier and light companies of the Twenty-Second Regiment were thrown forward for the double purpose of screening the movement of the main body in their rear and of drawing the fire and thereby revealing the position of the enemy in front. With this advanced line of skirmishers rides the General in blue uniform, and conspicuous from the helmeted head-dress which he wears. The soldiers are in the old red coatee with white lappels and forage caps covered with white cotton, for there was no light Karkee clothing or helmets of pith or cork in those days, and the British infantry marched under the sun of India clad almost in the military costume of an English winter.

When the skirmishers reach the large gap in the shikargah wall before mentioned, the perfect soldier nature of Napier shows itself – the instant adaptation of means to end which marks the man who has to do his thinking on horseback and amid the whistle of bullets, from the man who has to do it in an easy chair and at an office-table. The wide gap in the high wall has been recently made. It will be used to attack the right rear of our line when engaged in front at the edge of the Fullalee. He will block up this gap with the grenadiers of the Twenty-Second. He will close this gaping wound in his plan of battle with these stalwart Celts, who, he knows, will stop it with their blood. So the grenadiers are closed upon their right flank, wheeled to the right, and pushed into the opening. "He is a good man in a gap" had been a favourite saying among these soldiers when they were peasant lads at home to designate a stout-hearted comrade. They are to prove its truth now.

So, with the grenadier company standing in the gap on his right, his baggage parked in rear, with the camels tied down in a circle, heads inward, forming a rampart around it, and having an escort as strong as he could spare from his already attenuated front, Napier passes on to the assault, all the swords of his cavalry and the bayonets of his infantry just numbering eighteen hundred, while his enemy in the hollow and the woods reckons not a man less than thirty thousand chiefs and clansmen.

And now as the line of échelon gets closer to the hollow the fire from matchlock and gun hits harder into the ranks of men moving in the old fighting formation, the red line of battle – thin, men have called it, but very thick for all that, with the memories of many triumphs. The leading line – the Twenty-Second Regiment – is only one hundred yards from the enemy. The moment had come for the skirmishers to fall back and give place to the chief combatants now so near each other. Napier puts himself in front of the Irishmen whose serried line of steel and scarlet extends two hundred yards from right to left, and then the command to charge rings out in his clear voice as three-and-thirty years earlier it sounded above the strife of Corunna. Until this moment the fire of the skirmishers has partly hidden the movement of formations behind; but when the magic word which flings the soldier on his enemy was heard, there came out of this veiling smoke a sight that no Beloochee warrior had ever seen before, for, bending with the forward surge of a mighty movement, the red wall of the Twenty-Second, fronted with steel, is coming on to the charge. It took little time to traverse the intervening space, and on the edge of the dry river-bed the two opposing forces met in battle. If to the Beloochee foeman the sight and sound of a British charge had been strange, not less terrible was the aspect of the field, as all at once it opened upon the Twenty-Second. Below them, in the huge bed of the Fullalee, a dense dark mass of warriors stood ready for the shock. With flashing swords and shields held high over turbaned heads, twenty thousand men shouting their war-cries and clashing sword and shield together seemed to wave fierce welcome to their enemies. For a moment it seems as though the vast disparity between the combatants must check the ardour of the advancing line; for a moment the red wall appears to stagger, but then the figure of the old General is seen pushing out in front of his soldiers, as with voice and gesture, and the hundred thoughts that find utterance at moments of extreme tension, he urges them to stand steady in this terrible combat. And nobly do these young soldiers – for this is their first battle – respond to the old leader's call. A hundred times the Beloochee clansmen, moving from the deep mass beneath, come surging up the incline, until from right to left the clash of scimitar and shield against bayonet and musket rings along the line, and a hundred times they reel back again, leaving the musket and the matchlock to continue the deadly strife until another mass of chosen champions again attempts the closer conflict. More than once the pressure of the foremost swordsmen and the appearance of the dense dark mass behind them cause the line of the Twenty-Second to recoil from the edge of the bank; but wherever the dinted front of fight is visible there too is quickly seen the leader, absolutely unconscious of danger, his eagle eye fixed upon the strife, his hand waving his soldiers on, his shrill clear voice ringing above shot and steel and shout of combatants – the clarion call of victory. The men behind him see in this figure of their chief something that hides from sight the whole host of Beloochee foemen. Who could go back while he is there? Who among them would not glory to die with such a leader? The youngest soldier in the ranks feels the inspiration of such magnificent courage. The bugler of the Twenty-Second, Martin Delaney, who runs at the General's stirrups, catches, without necessity of order, the thought of his chief, and three times when the line bends back before the Beloochee onslaught, the "advance" rings out unbidden from his lips.

The final advance to the edge of the Fullalee, which brought the lines to striking distance, had been made in what is called échelon of battalions from the right. That is to say, the Twenty-Second Regiment struck the enemy first, then the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys came into impact, and so on in succession until the entire line formed one continuous front along the bank of the dry river. The advantages of this method of assault were many. First, it allowed the Twenty-Second Regiment to give a lead to the entire line, for each succeeding battalion could see with what a front and bearing these splendid soldiers carried themselves in the charge. Then, too, it enabled each particular regiment to come into close quarters with the enemy upon a more regular and imposing front than had the advancing force formed a single line necessarily crowded and undulating by the exigencies of marching in a long continuous formation, and also it made the assault upon the enemy's left flank the last to come to shock of battle; for on this left flank the village of Meanee was held in advance of the river line, and the Beloochee guns in battery there had to be silenced before his infantry could be encountered.

We have already said that our own artillery moved on the extreme right of the infantry. Early in the action they closed up to the right flank of the Twenty-Second, and coming into action on a mound which there commanded the bed of the Fullalee, the farther bank of the river, and the wooded shikargah to the right, made havoc among the Beloochee centre on one side, and, on the other, among the left wing which was destined to fall upon our rear. Stopped by the grenadier company from issuing through the large gap in the wall, and taken in flank by two of the guns behind the mound, firing case-shot through another opening in the wall made by the Madras Sappers, this left wing of the enemy suffered so severely that it was unable to make any head. Napier had told the grenadier company to defend the opening to the last man, and nobly did they answer his behest. The captain of the company, Tew, died at his post, but no enemy passed the gap that day.

Meanwhile the fight on the edge of the dry channel went on with a sameness of fierceness that makes its recital almost monotonous. In no modern battle that we read of is the actual shock of opposing forces more than a question of a few moments' duration. Here at Meanee it is a matter of hours. For upwards of three hours this red line is fighting that mass of warriors at less than a dozen yards' distance, and often during the long conflict the interval between the combatants is not half as many feet. Over and over again heroic actions are performed in that limited area between the hosts that read like a page from some dim combat of Homeric legend. The commander of the Twenty-Fifth Bombay Sepoys, Teesdale, seeing the press of foemen in front of his men to be more than his line can stand, spurs into the midst of the surging mass, and falls, hewing his enemies to the last. But his spirit seems to have quitted his body only to enter into the three hundred men who have seen him fall, and the wavering line bears up again. So, too, when the Sepoy regiment next in line has to bear the brunt of the Beloochee charge, the commanding officer, Jackson, rides forward into the advancing enemy and goes down amid a whirl of sword-blades, his last stroke crashing through a shield vainly raised to save its owner's life, and beats back the Beloochee surge. M'Murdo of the Twenty-Second, riding as staff-officer to the General, cannot resist the intoxication of such combats. Seeing a chief conspicuous alike by martial bearing and richness of apparel, he rides into the enemy's ranks and engages him in single combat. Before they can meet M'Murdo's horse is killed, but the rider is quickly on his feet, and the combat begins. Both are dexterous swordsmen, and each seems to recognise in the other a foeman worthy of his steel; but the Scottish clansman is stouter of sword than his Beloochee rival, and Jan Mahomet Khan rolls from his saddle to join the throng which momentarily grows denser on the sandy river-bed.

Once or twice the old General is himself in the press of the fight. He is practically unarmed, because his right hand had been disabled a few days earlier by a blow which he had dealt a camel-driver who was maltreating his camel, and the Scindian's head being about fifty times harder than the General's hand, a dislocated wrist was the result. So intent is he on the larger battle that the men around him are scarcely noticed, and more than once his life is saved by a soldier or an officer interposing between him and an enemy intent on slaying the old chief, who seems to him exactly what he is – the guiding spirit of this storm of war. Thus Lieutenant Marston saves his General's life in front of the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys by springing between a Beloochee soldier and Napier's charger at the moment the enemy is about to strike. The blow cuts deep into the brass scales on Marston's shoulder, and the Beloochee goes down between the sword of the officer and the bayonet of a private who has run in to the melée. Again he gets entangled in the press in front, and is in close peril when a sergeant of the Twenty-Second saves him; and as the old man emerges unscathed from the surf of shield and sword, the whole Twenty-Second line shouts his name and greets him with a wild Irish cheer of rapture ringing high above the clash of battle. It is at this time that the drummer Delaney, who keeps everywhere on foot beside his General, performs the most conspicuous act of valour done during the day. In the midst of the melée he sees a mounted chief leading on his men. Delaney seizes a musket and bayonet, rushes upon the horseman, and Meer Wullee Mahomet Khan goes down in full sight of both armies, while the victor returns with the rich sword and shield of the Beloochee leader.