Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

To this end he took such skilful advantage of the disputes of the pretenders to the throne of Nizam al Mulk, the last of the great Viceroys of the Deccan, that within a very short time he secured the triumph of Mirzapha Jung, his protégé, and rose himself to such a position that, in the name of this puppet, he was the virtual ruler of thirty millions of people, and master of the whole Carnatic, saving only the city of Trichinopoly, which was all that was left to Mohammed Ali, the candidate with whom the English Company had sided in a half-hearted and wholly futile fashion.

At this juncture, Clive, who was now twenty-five years old, and who occupied a sort of hybrid post with the title of Commissary of the forces, took upon himself to represent to his superiors that unless something very decided was done, the French must invariably become Lords Paramount of the whole Peninsula. They hadn’t a notion what was to be done, but Clive had, and the brazen effrontery of his plan seems to have paralysed the authorities into giving him a free hand.

The situation was this: The triumphant Frenchman, believing his quickly-acquired dominion a permanent one, had raised a tall pillar to his own glory on the site of his greatest victory, and round this was growing up a city, the name of which in English meant the City of the Victory of Dupleix. Chunda Sahib, successor of Mirzapha, was besieging Trichinopoly, supported by several hundred trained French soldiers. Major Lawrence, commander of the English garrison at Madras, had gone to England, and the English Company possessed no officer of proved ability. The natives, dazzled by the rapid and brilliant triumphs of Dupleix, and remembering the times when they had seen his colours flying over Fort St. George, looked with contemptuous pity on the English as a remnant of feeble shopkeepers who were soon to be cast into the sea. And so, in all probability, they would have been if that historic pistol had gone off a few years before.

Clive, viewing the situation with true military genius, saw two facts: first, that it would be ridiculous with the force at his disposal to attack the besiegers of Trichinopoly; and second, that, if a dash were made at Arcot, the capital and favourite residence of the Nabobs of the Carnatic, which is rather less than a hundred miles inland from Madras, the siege of Trichinopoly would probably be raised, and so this he determined to do.

His army consisted of two hundred English soldiers and three hundred Sepoys, with eight English officers, of whom only two had ever seen an action. He made the journey by forced marches through the thunder and lightning and rain of the wet season, and so astounded the garrison of Arcot by his utterly unexpected appearance before the gates that they ran without striking a blow.

Clive now found himself master of a half-ruined fort, which he at once proceeded to strengthen and victual as best he might, well knowing that he would have to fight for what he had got. Presently the panic-stricken garrison came back, and brought with it reinforcements which gave it the respectable strength of three thousand men. In the middle of the night on which they arrived and sat down before the town to think matters over, Clive, without waiting to be besieged as he should have done by all the rules of Eastern warfare, marched out, caught them napping, cut them to pieces, and marched back again without losing a man.

Naturally the news of such doings as this flew fast to Trichinopoly and Pondicherry, and clearly something had to be done to crush this insolent upstart before he gave any further trouble. To this end four thousand men were sent by Chunda Sahib, under his son Rajah, and by the time these reached the walls of the old fort they had been increased by reinforcements to ten thousand, and had, moreover, been joined by a detachment of a hundred and fifty French soldiers whom Dupleix had dispatched in hot haste from Pondicherry.

As has been said, the place they had come to attack was a half-ruined old fort, with dry ditches and hardly any defences worth serious mention, and its garrison by this time consisted only of a hundred and twenty Englishmen and two hundred Sepoys. Four of the eight officers were dead, and the commander of what looked very like a forlorn hope was an ex-quill-driver twenty-five years old.

And yet for fifty days and nights the besiegers hurled themselves in vain against the rotten and crumbling battlements behind which that dauntless handful of half-starved men had made up their minds either to stand till help came, or to fall like the heroes that they were.

The confidence and affection which the gallant young commander inspired in his men—European and native alike—during this terrible time is one of the most splendid tributes to his fame. When there was nothing left but rice to live and fight on, the very Sepoys came to him of their own will to ask that all the grain should be given to the Europeans, who wanted more nourishment than they did. As for them, they would gladly be content with the water that it was boiled in! Men like this are bad to beat, and so Rajah Sahib found in spite of all his enormous advantages.