At another period of this awful battle the young Cornet dismounted beside a stream to drink, and to allow his horse to do the same. While so occupied, Colonel Wellesley came up to follow his example, and they conversed for a few minutes while dipping their hands and faces in the brook (or river). As they did so, there slowly oozed down upon them, trickling through the water, a streamlet of blood. Of course they both turned away in horror and remounted to return to the battle.
At last the tremendous struggle was over. An army of 4,500 or 5,000 tired English troops, had routed five times as many horsemen and perhaps twenty times as many infantry of the warlike Mahrattas. The field was clear and the English flag waved over the English Marathon.
After this the poor, wearied soldiers were compelled to ride back ten miles to camp for the night; and when they reached their ground and dismounted, many of them—my father among the rest—fell on the earth and slept where they lay. Next morning they marched back to the field of Assaye and the scene which met their eyes was one which no lapse of years could efface from memory. The pomp and glory and joy of victory were past; the horror of it was before them in mangled corpses of men and horses, over which hung clouds of flies and vultures. Fourteen officers of his own regiment, whose last meal on earth he had shared in convivial merriment, my father saw buried together in one grave. Then the band of the regiment played “The Rose Tree” and the men marched away with set faces. Long years afterwards I happened to play that old air on the piano, but my father stopped me, “Do not play that tune, pray! I cannot bear the memories it brings to me.”
After Assaye my father fought at Argaon (or Argaum), a battle which Mr. Turner describes as “even more decisive than the last”; and on December 14th he joined in the terrific storming of the great fortress of Gawiljarh, with which the war in the Deccan terminated. He received medals for Assaye and Argaum, just fifty years after those battles were fought!
Charles Cobbe,
1857.
After his return from India, my father remained at his mother’s house in Bath till 1809, when he married my dear mother, then living with her guardians close by, at 29, Royal Crescent; and brought her to Newbridge, where they both lived, as I have described, with few and short interruptions till she died in October, 1847, and he in November, 1857. For all that half century he acted nobly the part to which he was called, of landlord, magistrate and head of a family. There was nothing in him of the ideal Irish, fox-hunting, happy-go-lucky, much indebted Squire. There never was a year in his life in which every one of his bills was not settled. His books, piled on his study table, showed the regular payment, week by week, of all his labourers for fifty years. No quarter day passed without every servant in the house receiving his, or her wages. So far was Newbridge from a Castle Rackrent that though much in it of the furniture and decorations belonged to the previous century, everything was kept in perfect order and repair in the house and in the stables, coach-houses and beautiful old garden. Punctuality reigned under the old soldier’s régime; clocks and bells and gongs sounded regularly for prayers and meals; and dinner was served sharply to the moment. I should indeed be at a loss to say in what respect my father betrayed his Anglo-Irish race, if it were not his high spirit.
At last, and very soon after the photograph which I am inserting in this book was taken, the long, good life drew to its end in peace. I have found a letter which I wrote to Harriet St. Leger a day or two after his death, and I will here transcribe part of it, rather than narrate the event afresh.
“Nov. 14th, 1857.
“Dearest Harriet,