Victorian worthies

by George Henry Blore

Miāni (February 17, 1843) was the most glorious day in his life. With 2,400 troops, of whom barely 500 were Europeans, he attacked an army variously estimated between 20,000 and 40,000. Drawn up in a position, which they had themselves chosen, on the raised bank of a dry river bed, the Baluchī seemed to have every advantage on their side. But the British troops, advancing in echelon from the right, led by the 22nd Regiment, and developing an effective musketry fire, fought their way up to the outer slope of the steep bank and held it for three hours. Here the 22nd, with the two regiments of Bombay sepoys on their left, trusting chiefly to the bayonet, but firing occasional volleys, resisted the onslaught of Baluchī swordsmen in overwhelming numbers. During nearly all this time the two lines were less than twenty yards apart, and Napier was conspicuous on horseback riding coolly along the front of the British line. The matchlocks, with which many of the Baluchī were armed, seem to have been ineffective; their national weapon was the sword. The tribesmen were grand fighters but badly led. They attacked in detachments with no concerted action. For all that, the British line frequently staggered under the weight of their courageous rushes, and irregular firing went on across the narrow gap. Napier says, 'I expected death as much from our own men as from the enemy, and I was much singed by our fire—my whiskers twice or thrice so, and my face peppered by fellows who, in their fear, fired over all heads but mine, and nearly scattered my brains'. Not even Scarlett at Balaclava had a more miraculous escape. This exposure of his own person to risk was not due to mere recklessness. In his days at the Royal Military College he had carefully considered the occasions when a commander must expose himself to get the best out of his men; and from Coruña to Dabo he acted consistently on his principles. Early in the battle he had cleverly disposed his troops so as to neutralize in some measure the vast numerical superiority of the enemy; his few guns were well placed and well served. At a critical moment he ordered a charge of cavalry which broke the right of their position and threatened their camp; but the issue had to be decided by hard fighting, and all depended on the morale which was to carry the troops through such a punishing day.

The second battle was fought a month later at Dabo, near Hyderābād. The most redoubtable of the Amīrs, Sher Muhammad, known as 'the Lion of Mīrpur', had been gathering a force of his own and was only a few miles distant from Miāni when that battle was fought. Napier could have attacked him at once; but, to avoid bloodshed, he was ready to negotiate. 'The Lion' only used the respite to collect more troops, and was soon defying the British with a force of 25,000 men, full of ardour despite their recent defeat. Indeed Napier encouraged their confidence by spreading rumours of the terror prevailing in his own camp. He did not wish to exhaust his men needlessly by long marches in tropical heat; so he played a waiting game, gathering reinforcements and trusting that the enemy would soon give him a chance of fighting. This chance came on March 24, and with a force of 5,000 men and 19 guns Napier took another three hours to win his second battle and to drive Sher Muhammad from his position with the loss of 5,000 killed. The British losses were relatively trifling, amounting to 270, of whom 147 belonged to the sorely tried 22nd Regiment. They were all full of confidence and fought splendidly under the general's eye. 'The Lion' himself escaped northwards, and two months of hard marching and clever strategy were needed to prevent him stirring up trouble among the tribesmen. The climate took toll of the British troops and even the general was for a time prostrated by sunstroke; but the operations were successful and the last nucleus of an army was broken up by Colonel Jacob on June 15. Sher Muhammad ended his days ignominiously at Lahore, then the capital of the Sikhs, having outlived his fame and sunk into idleness and debauchery.

Thus in June 1843 the general could write in his diary: 'We have taught the Baluch that neither his sun nor his desert nor his jungles nor his nullahs can stop us. He will never face us more.' But Charles Napier's own work was far from being finished. He had to bind together the different elements in the province, to reconcile chieftain and peasant Baluch, Hindu, and Sindian, to living together in amity and submitting to British rule; and he had to set up a framework of military and civilian officers to carry on the work. He held firmly the principle that military rule must be temporary. For the moment it was more effective; but it was his business to prepare the new province for regular civil government as soon as was feasible. He showed his ingenuity in the personal interviews which he had with the chieftains; and the ascendancy which he won by his character was marked. Perhaps his qualities were such as could be more easily appreciated by orientals than by his own countrymen, for he was impetuous, self-reliant, and autocratic in no common degree. He was only one of a number of great Englishmen of this century whose direct personal contact with Eastern princes was worth scores of diplomatic letters and paper constitutions. Such men were Henry Lawrence, John Nicholson, and Charles Gordon; in them the power of Great Britain was incarnate in such a form as to strike the imagination and leave an ineffaceable impression. Many of the Amīrs wished to swear allegiance to a governor present in the flesh rather than to the distant queen beyond the sea, so strongly were they impressed by Napier's personal character.

He did not forget his own countrymen, least of all that valued friend 'Thomas Atkins' and his comrade the sepoy. By the erection of spacious barracks he made the soldier's life more pleasant and his health more secure; and in a hundred other ways he showed his care and affection for them. In return few British generals have been so loved by the rank and file. He also gave much thought to material progress, to strengthening the fortress of Hyderābād, to developing the harbour at Karāchi, and, above all, to enriching the peasants by irrigation schemes. It was the story of Cephalonia on a bigger scale; but Napier was now twenty years older, overwhelmed with work, and he could give less attention to details. He did his best to find subordinates after his own heart, men who would 'scorn delights and live laborious days'. 'Does he wear varnished boots?' was a typical question that he put to a friend in Bombay, when a new engineer was commended to him. His own rewards were meagre. The Grand Cross of the Bath and the colonelcy of his favourite regiment, the 22nd, were all the recognition given for a campaign whose difficulties were minimized at home because he had mastered them so triumphantly.

Two other achievements belong to the period of his government of Sind. The campaign against the tribes of the Kachhi Hills, to the north-west of his province, rendered necessary by continued marauding, shows all his old mastery of organization. Any one who has glanced into Indian history knows the danger of these raids and the bitter experience which our Indian army has gained in them. In less than two months (January-March 1845) Napier had led five thousand men safely over burning deserts and through most difficult mountain country, had by careful strategy driven the marauders into a corner, forcing them to surrender with trifling loss, and had made an impression on the hill chieftains which lasted for many a year. This work, though slighted by the directors of the Company, received enthusiastic praise from such good judges of war as Lord Hardinge and the Duke of Wellington. The second emergency arose when the first Sikh war broke out in the Punjab. Napier felt so confident in the loyalty of his newly-pacified province that within six weeks he drew together an army of 15,000 men, and took post at Rohri, ready to co-operate against the Sikhs from the south, while Lord Hardinge advanced from the east. Before he could arrive, the decisive battle had been fought, and all he was asked to do was to assist in a council of war at Lahore. The mistakes made in the campaign had been numerous. No one saw them more clearly than Napier, and no one foretold more accurately the troubles which were to follow. For all that, he wrote in generous admiration of Lord Hardinge the Viceroy and Lord Gough the Commander-in-Chief at a time when criticism and personal bitterness were prevalent in many quarters.

After this he returned to Sind with health shattered and a longing for rest. He continued to work with vigour, but his mind was set on resignation; and the bad relations which had for years existed between him and the directors embittered his last months. No doubt he was impatient and self-willed, inclined to take short cuts through the system of dual control[14] and to justify them by his own single-hearted zeal for the good of the country. But the directors had eyes for all the slight irregularities, which are inevitable in the work of an original man, and failed entirely to estimate the priceless services that he rendered to British rule. In July 1847 he resigned and returned to Europe; but even now the end was not come. 'The tragedy must be re-acted a year or two hence,' he had written in March 1846, seeing clearly that the Sikhs had not been reconciled to British rule. In February 1849 the directors were forced by the national voice to send him out to take supreme military command and to retrieve the disasters with which the second Sikh war began. They were very reluctant to do so, and Napier himself had little wish for further exertions in so thankless a service. But the Duke of Wellington himself appealed to him, the nation spoke through all its organs, and he could not put his own wishes in the scale against the demands of public service.

He made all speed and reached Calcutta early in May, but he found no enemy to fight. The issue had been decided by Lord Gough and the hard fighting of Chiliānwāla. He had been cheated by fortune, as in 1815, and he never knew the joy of battle again. He was accustomed to settle everything as a dictator; he found it difficult to act as part of an administrative machine. He was unfamiliar with the routine of Indian official life, and he was now growing old; he was impatient of forms, impetuous in his likes and dislikes, outspoken in praise and condemnation. His relations with the masterful Viceroy, Lord Dalhousie, were soon clouded; and though he delighted in the friendship of Colin Campbell and many other able soldiers, he was too old to adapt himself to new men and new measures. In 1850 the rumblings of the storm, which was to break seven years later, could already be heard, and Napier had much anxiety over the mutinous spirit rising in the sepoy regiments. He did his best to go to the bottom of the trouble and to establish confidence and friendly relations between British and natives, but he had not time enough to achieve permanent results, and he was often fettered by the regulations of the political service. His predictions were as striking now as in the first Sikh war; but he was not content to predict and to sit idle. He was unwearied in working for the reform of barracks, though his plans were often spoiled by the careless execution of others. He was urgent for a better tone among regimental officers and for more consideration on their part towards their soldiers. If more men in high position had similarly exerted themselves, the mutiny would have been less widespread and less fatal. His resignation was due to a dispute with Lord Dalhousie about the sepoys' pay. Napier acted ultra vires in suspending on his own responsibility an order of the Government, because he believed the situation to be critical, while the Viceroy refused to regard this as justified. His departure, in December 1850, was the signal for an outburst of feeling among officers, soldiers, and all who knew him. His return by way of Sind was a triumphal progress.

He had two years to live when he set foot again in England, and most of this was spent at Oaklands near Portsmouth. His health had been ruined in the public service; but he continued to take a keen interest in passing events and to write on military subjects to Colin Campbell and other friends. At the same time he devoted much of his time to his neighbours and his farm. In 1852 he attended as pall-bearer at the Duke of Wellington's funeral; his own was not far distant. His brother, Sir William, describes the last scene thus: 'On the morning of August 29th 1853, at 5 o'clock, he expired like a soldier on a naked camp bedstead, the windows of the room open and the fresh air of Heaven blowing on his manly face—as the last breath escaped, Montagu McMurdo (his son-in-law), with a sudden inspiration, snatched the old colours of the 22nd Regiment, the colour that had been borne at Miāni and Hyderābād, and waved them over the dying hero. Thus Charles Napier passed from the world.'

He was a man who roused enthusiastic devotion and provoked strong resentment. Like Gordon, he was a man who could rule others, but could not be ruled; and his official career left many heart-burnings behind. His equally passionate brother, Sir William, who wrote his life, took up the feud as a legacy and pursued it in print for many years. It is regrettable that such men cannot work without friction; but in all things it was devotion to the public service, and not personal ambition, that carried Charles Napier to such extremes. From his youth he had trained himself to such a pitch of self-denial and ascetic rigour that he could not make allowance for the frailties of the average man. His keen eye and swift brain made him too impatient of the shortcomings of conscientious officials. He was ready to work fifteen hours a day when the need came; he was able to pierce into the heart of a matter while others would be puzzling round the fringes of it. Rarely in his long and laborious career did an emergency arise capable of bringing out all his gifts; and his greatest exploits were performed on scenes unfamiliar to the mass of his fellow countrymen. But a few opinions can be given to show that he was rated at his full value by the foremost men of the day.

Perhaps the most striking testimony comes from one who never saw him; it was written three years after his death, when his brother's biography appeared. It was Carlyle, the biographer of Cromwell and Frederick the Great, the most famous man of letters of the day, who wrote in 1856: 'The fine and noble qualities of the man are very recognizable to me; his piercing, subtle intellect turned all to the practical, giving him just insight into men and into things; his inexhaustible, adroit contrivances; his fiery valour; sharp promptitude to seize the good moment that will not return. A lynx-eyed, fiery man, with the spirit of an old knight in him; more of a hero than any modern I have seen for a long time.' A second tribute comes from one who had known him as an officer and was a supreme judge of military genius. Wellington was not given to extravagant words, but on many occasions he expressed himself in the warmest terms about Napier's talents and services. In 1844, speaking of the Sind campaign in the House of Lords, he said: 'My Lords, I must say that, after giving the fullest consideration to these operations, I have never known any instance of an officer who has shown in a higher degree that he possesses all the qualities and qualifications necessary to enable him to conduct great operations.' In the House of Commons at the same time Sir Robert Peel—the ablest administrative statesman of that generation, who had read for himself some of Napier's masterly dispatches—said: 'No one ever doubted Sir Charles Napier's military powers; but in his other character he does surprise me—he is possessed of extraordinary talent for civil administration.' Again, he speaks of him as 'one of three brothers who have engrafted on the stem of an ancient and honourable lineage that personal nobility which is derived from unblemished private character, from the highest sense of personal honour, and from repeated proofs of valour in the field, which have made their name conspicuous in the records of their country'.