With the Connaught Rangers

by Edward Herbert Maxwell

After Delhi had fallen, I was anxious to get a remembrance of the great siege, and I became possessor of the koran. For a long time it reposed in one of my portmanteaus, but a native came to see me one day and said that it was known by certain Mohammedans that a copy of the koran was in my possession, and that it was very valuable, being one of the three original copies, one of which was at Mecca, another at Delhi, and the last I forget where. So I packed it up very carefully and sent it home to Scotland. Thinking that the Bodleian library would value such an acquisition, I offered it through a friend, but was informed that the koran was incomplete; so it still belongs to me.

Among many interesting accounts of Delhi, there is none more curious than that contained in the autobiography of Sultan Baber, who lived A.D. 1526. He was the ancestor of the old king of Delhi, who lost his throne by the mutiny of 1857. Baber was born to the throne of Ferghana, or Transosian, now the Russian province of Khokan. Sherbany Khan, the leader of the Usbegs, took all from him, but Baber (which means tiger) conquered all his overwhelming difficulties by his energy and courage. He gained the throne of Kabul, and was ruler of that country in A.D. 1525. As he had many adherents, he determined to invade India. Sultan Baber wrote his own autobiography in a dialect of the Turkish language; it was translated into Persian, and also into English fifty years ago by Dr. Leyden. The civilization of India is Turkish to this day. Until the year 1857 Baber’s descendants continued to reign in Delhi. ‘There are four roads,’ writes Baber, ‘that lead from Kabul to India; in all these there are passes more or less difficult, Lamghanat and Kheiber, Bangash, Naghz, and Fernul.’ The Lamghanat road is the present route from Kabul to Peshawur, and it was by it that Baber and his horsemen marched, and his baggage and cannon were conveyed; it was the scene of the Kabul massacre in 1842, when a British army was cut to pieces; it witnessed the triumphal march of a British army in 1879.

‘A.D. 1526, April 12th—The Turks, under Baber, arrived within two marches of Panipat—which lies fifty miles from Delhi—and on the 21st of April the battle was fought that gave India foreign masters for many centuries, and a form of government that it still retains.’

‘The same night, April 21st, A.D. 1526, Prince Humayon and Kurajeh Khan were despatched to take Agra, seventy miles away. Baber marched to Delhi. Delhi for three thousand years had been a great city. It was contemporaneous with Nineveh and Babylon. The city of Delhi of that day was called Firozabad. On a rocky hill, which extends on one side of the city, was a citadel, built by King Feroze a hundred years before the Turkish invasion. On another side of the city was King Feroze’s other palace, in which stood a trophy of war, a large monolith of stone, surmounted by the Moslem emblem of the crescent shining in brass. On it were inscriptions in the Pali tongue, which recalled a long-forgotten king, Asoka, the King Alfred of Hindoo history.’

All this information I copied at the time of reading it—the most interesting account of Sultan Baber’s journal. When I was quartered in Delhi, in 1859, I have often ridden over to these ancient ruins, and examined the inscriptions on the stone pillar, which had then lost the Moslem emblem mentioned above. The courtyard was then used for the commissariat bullocks, and the dust, flying about everywhere, was almost blinding. Delhi, in ancient times, was the largest city in Hindostan, covering a space of twenty square miles. It has now dwindled down to a circumference of seven miles; but the ruins of its former grandeur still exist, and a vast tract is covered with remains of palaces and mausoleums. We drove out to the Kootub-minar, that wonderful monument of a by-gone age. We passed on our way the once famous observatory, now much dilapidated, and no longer used for astronomical observation. In the eleven miles’ drive we saw a succession of tombs, generally solid, square edifices, with domed tops. We stopped at the mausoleum of Sufter Jung, which stands in a garden, and is a graceful reminiscence of a prince of Oude. After a dusty drive across a sandy plain, we thought the patch of green on which the Kootub stands, with its shady trees, a most refreshing sight.

Passing through Aladdin’s Gate, a very fine arch, we saw before us the splendid column of the ‘Minar.’ It rises in a succession of marvellous sculptured fluted columns, two hundred and forty feet high, very wide at the base, and diminishing in circumference at each series of joints till the summit is reached. Like the campaniles attached to churches abroad, whence the bells ring out their summons to prayer, so from the height of the Kootub the faithful were called to their devotions in the adjacent mosque. Sultan Baber, in his journal, mentions the Kootub as ‘that strange, tall, unrivalled pillar, which was raised to call the faithful to prayer in the splendid mosque open to the blue heavens below.’ We were informed that the Kootub had been erected by a prince, to enable his daughter to ascend every day and look upon the holy river Jumna, a feat which, if performed by her, must have kept her in first-rate condition, for the Kootub is, I think, higher than the Monument of London, and the winding stair is very steep.

At length we were enabled to leave Delhi. There is no more agreeable duty than a long march in India during the cold weather. After all the necessary preparations have been made; after the means of transport have been collected, and various other arrangements, trying to the temper and patience of commanding-officer, adjutant, and quarter-master, have been got over, the regimental order-book contains the following announcement, that ‘The regiment will parade at 3 a.m.,’ the next day. On the same evening that these orders are read to the companies, a detachment has marched away, with the camp color-men and the married people; the former to lay out the lines of the camp, the latter to be out of the way of the regiment.

I always sent on a tent to be pitched by my own native servants, and, when we arrived at the camping ground in the morning, we found everything ready. What luxurious tents these were! Each one consisted of a drawing-room, bed-room, and dressing-room, with a broad verandah, formed by an outer covering. Indian servants have a wonderful knack of arranging a room. As the tent we slept in was denuded of all furniture, excepting beds and a chair or two, when we arrived in the morning, we entered apparently the same sitting-room we had occupied the previous day. Not a book was in a different place—everything was the same. On some marches we rode in advance of the regiment, on others we drove in my wife’s carriage; but, whichever way we travelled, we enjoyed ourselves much. The Grand Trunk road of India, along which we were journeying, was the finest made road in the world, smooth, and level as a billiard-table. Ten to twelve miles was the average length of a day’s march.

The men throve wonderfully. It was splendid to see them quickening their swinging steps as they came in sight of the new camping ground, marching in, every man in his ranks, to the lively sound of the band, playing ‘Patrick’s Day in the Morning.’ As each company came to its camping ground, it was halted, and piled arms by command of its captain, and then the men proceeded to pitch the tents. It was a fine sight to behold. When the bugle sounded a long, melancholy note, as if by magic a white canvas town rose up on the dusty plain.

Then a sudden lull would fall on the busy scene. The men were preparing for breakfast. The camels, eased of their loads, were driven off to find their food in the neighbourhood; the patient bullocks lay by their carts, and munched chopped straw, or ruminated on the hardships of their life, while the married women of the regiment, having arrived the night before, were the only visible people, and they were occupied scolding their servants; for in India all Europeans are waited on, and the wives of privates have their cooks and their washer-men. The married soldiers’ families on a long march travelled in large bamboo cages, covered with carpeting to keep out the sun as much as possible, and these cages were put on the common country carts, drawn by bullocks. We had a long line of fifty or sixty carts of married people, and, as they started in advance at about two in the afternoon on the same day as the regiment marched in, a great hush always seemed to fall on the camp as they creaked and groaned off on their way. The fresh early morning is very exhilarating, and the days are never too hot in the cold weather.