CHAPTER XV
THE ARMY IN INDIA—(b) THE FALL OF THE COMPANY AND AFTERWARDS—1825–1858
While peace reigned in Europe, as far as our army was concerned, for nearly forty years after Waterloo, our Eastern Empire had meanwhile been growing by war and conquest.
Reference has already been made to the introduction of the percussion musket, but the Afghan war of 1840 was the first campaign in which it was used, the 13th and many other regiments still carrying the “Brown Bess.”
It is curious to note, in referring to this period, what was the opinion of distinguished officers, both as regards the education necessary for an officer and what his expenses should be. Of course these were “piping times of peace” everywhere save in India; and the army, “kept in the background,” took little place in the general life of the nation.
With regard to such education, Sir John Burgoyne considered that the first four rules of arithmetic were sufficient for the young officer, and that with regard to fractions, “it is going a little too far.” He did not think one boy out of fifty could do either “simple equations or a little French,” that not one “educated gentleman” out of fifty could do “a sum of addition or subtraction by logarithms.” He was not of opinion that a knowledge of the theoretical part of the profession was necessary to make a very good subaltern officer, and thought it was not even required “to make a very good commanding officer in the field.” He saw no good in such training. He doubted “if the Duke of Wellington had any very high theoretic knowledge; it is very likely that he could not have solved a problem in Euclid, or even worked out a question in simple equations or logarithms.” When the leaders of the army held these views, it is not surprising that the educational standard of the examination for admission to the army was not high. So we find General Wetherall was not “a friend to an examination before an officer enters the army.” He thought the Horse Guards’ principle in looking over the papers of candidates for direct commissions very fair, when “if they find that the questions which a boy cannot pass are not very material, they allow the boy to pass.” But the same officer foreshadows the system that afterwards obtained, for a time, in agreeing with Lord Monck’s view that after the preliminary examination for the commission, he should be sent “for a year or two to the senior department at Sandhurst, before he was put to regimental duties.”
Such was the military domestic life of these years before the Mutiny; and in such a question the change was so gradual that it is hard to say when it really came. After 1858 there were many alterations in the inner life of the army, doubtless; but before then, notwithstanding the much-abused system of purchase, officers lived apparently less extravagantly than they do now. Modern extravagance is due, no doubt, to the general increase of luxury among all classes; but it is curious to read, in an official blue-book of the early fifties, Lieutenant-Colonel Adams’ evidence, in which he states: “Very many men never had a farthing in the regiment which I first joined, when we were quartered at Plymouth with a regiment of the Guards. There were people of all ranks there; there were guardsmen and cavalrymen. Colonel Stewart, the son of the famous philosopher Dugald Stewart, was a man of property. And people not only lived there without a farthing beside their pay, but our establishment was so good that frequently it has been remarked to me by officers of the Guards, ‘All your people are men of property.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I wish they were, but most of them get nothing beside their pay.’” It is strange to read opinions so much at variance with those of the bulk of the officers to-day. He did not think that the poorer men got into debt more readily than those with good allowances, which “stimulated them to keep horses and get into racing.” The whole style of living in the army must have been widely different from what it is now. Sir Howard Douglas’s evidence was: “When I first entered the service, the officers’ mess was very much what the sergeants’ mess is now. Subalterns could live on their pay, and did in every regiment live on their pay.” This statement, however, seems to refer to the days of the Peninsular War, and not to the long peace that followed it. With greater wealth in the country came also among all classes greater luxury, though possibly by slow degrees. General Wetherall, however, though he “knew a great many examples of men who had passed, and had been many years in the army without a shilling besides their pay, and who had saved money upon it,” considered a young officer should have “a minimum of £60 and a maximum of £100 per annum in addition to his pay.” Colonel Adams gave as his opinion: “You can never get one person out of fifty to enter into any studies whatever when once they have got their commission.” This was the general feeling during the period from 1825 to 1858. There is no doubt that the Crimean War first, and the Mutiny finally, altered much of this; but the change was very gradual none the less.
Turn now to the military history of the time in which these men lived. During the period under review, from 1825 to 1858 and afterwards, there were hostilities in the Levant in 1840–41, at Beirouth, D’Jebaila, Ornagacuan, Sidon, and Acre, under Sir Charles Napier, but these were mainly naval operations, in which the Royal Marines only of the army shared; and a second war occurred in Burmah in 1852, which will be dealt with in a later chapter; as also will the wars with China beginning in 1839, which resulted in the cession of the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain. There were also disturbances at Aden, suppressed by the 5th Foot and the Bombay European Regiment in 1840.
But before the Crimean War there were important campaigns fought in the Indian Peninsula which had important results. These were the first wars with the Afghans, that with the Ameers of Scinde, and the two Sikh campaigns. The first of these, that with Afghanistan, was induced by causes somewhat similar to those which caused a recrudescence of hostilities many years later. What were called Russian intrigues were at work, or supposed to be. At anyrate, a Russian agent appeared at Cabul, and a demand was made for his dismissal. The fear, which has not yet died out, that in Russia’s natural extension into Central Asia, if only as a counterpoise to our own antagonistic influence at Constantinople and in the Balkan Peninsula, where she wished her own influence to be supreme, there was a danger to our rule in India, was held then as now. It is clear, therefore, that in those days, as in these, we, at the bottom of us, are not at all satisfied that our rule has really linked these Eastern people to us. We rule only; we neither absorb nor are absorbed. The Russians do the former, and therein lies their strength. They are by origin Asiatics, and in going back to their birthplace, they retain the power England can never have. As barbaric hordes they invaded Eastern Europe. Checked there by the higher civilisation of the West, they have learned to impose on their natural Asiatic savagery the Western veneer. “Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar, the Central Asian, beneath.” They are new to Europe, these Russians. They, after the Turks, are the last of the invading Aryan waves. Stopped by the Western peoples, they have turned, like a river, backward to their source. Religious rancour is far less keen with them anywhere West or East, but especially East. Ali Khan, the rebel Samarcand nomad, settles down quite quietly with his fellows to become the decorated “Colonel Alikhanoff” of the Russian army, who helped, in some degree, to create the “Pendjeh incident.” Why not? They are both from the same stock, and separated by but a small interval of time.
Russia would have absorbed India; we have only conquered it. Every native officer is subordinate to the white soldier of the British “Raj.” Russia would have made them her equals. We have won the Empire by the sword, and must govern it thereby. We have colonised elsewhere, and even intermarried. In India we do neither. All the professions of native chieftains in India must be taken just for what every sensible man takes them. To love conquerors? Never! We English would never do so, however righteous the government of the alien power that held the reins might be. Given the best foreign government that could be devised over England, and there is not one man with the spirit of his forefathers in him that would not rise, when the time came, in open and avowed insurrection.