It is more than probable that Wellington's Indian experience stood him in good stead when in the Peninsula he had to face the task of converting the untrained Portuguese into good troops. Discipline is essentially the same, whatever the race or character of the men to be subjected to it. They have to learn prompt obedience to orders, the habit of relying implicitly on their officers for military guidance, familiarity with the idea that duty must be done first and personal safety left to take care of itself, coolness and presence of mind in encountering danger, even unexpectedly. All this the Portuguese had to learn, but in other respects they were like enough to his English troops, already disciplined to his hand. They were Europeans and Christians, that is to say they recognised more or less the same moral code: they were patriotic, striving with foreign assistance to deliver their homes from the foreign conqueror. They had motives for responding to the call made on them which are intelligible, and cogent, to any European. The native troops that Wellington had learned to employ in India were like them in one important point, their being called on to trust and follow a foreign leader; they were like them also, as the event proved, in capacity to profit by training; but in ideas and habits they were totally different.

The British conquest of India is one of the most astonishing, as well as important, things in modern history: and the wonder of it consists mainly in the fact that the English from the first were successful not only in getting their subjects to fight for them, but in transforming them, for military purposes, almost into Englishmen. Men of the most varied types were from time to time brought under the spell. Hindoos with a peculiar and very ancient civilisation of their own, the higher castes regarding themselves as socially and morally the salt of the earth, the lower castes accustomed to permanent and almost degrading inferiority; Mahommedans who had once been conquerors and deemed themselves the born superiors of their former slaves; fierce hill-men very low down in the scale of civilisation; strangest of all, the Sikhs with their national and religious enthusiasm still young,—all alike became the zealous soldiers of their rulers from over the sea. Nor was this all: the sepoys imbibed the military qualities of the men who fought beside them, including the superb tenacity which makes the British soldier always hard to beat.

The English battles in India were nearly all fought against odds, occasionally enormous; and in every case, except in some of the battles during the Mutiny, the bulk of the army consisted of native troops. What is the explanation of this phenomenon, unique in history? One main cause clearly was, to quote Colonel Malleson's[89] words: "the trusting and faithful nature, the impressionable character, the passionate appreciation of great qualities, which formed alike the strength and the weakness of those races;" but this description hardly applies to all the multifarious races of India, though doubtless it does to many, and pre-eminently to the people of Bengal, where practically the British dominion was founded. Half of the explanation must be looked for on the other side. Unless the natives of India had been capable of receiving the impression, obviously none could have been made: but the Englishmen who laid the foundation of our Indian empire possessed the requisite qualities for creating it. They made their followers understand that when an Englishman said a thing he meant it, and this in two senses. If he made a statement he believed it to be true; also, and more important, if he gave a promise or declared a purpose, he would fulfil it. Further they taught the natives to understand that when a thing was undertaken, it must be done; difficulties must be vanquished, odds, no matter how great, must be encountered, if such things came into the day's work. The coolness with which they assumed the certainty of success naturally went a great way towards achieving it, and was all-powerful in convincing the natives, ignorant, but by no means stupid, that the English possessed an inexhaustible reserve of strength and resource. Then the English treated their native soldiers well, looked after them more steadily and intelligently than any Indian princes would have cared or known how to do, and taught them to feel that they were invincible. The very strangeness of the Englishman's motives and principles of action made them all the more impressive to men who saw that they were successful. And the fact that the sepoys were assumed by their officers to be capable of great things went far to make them so. Never give in, never mind odds; these were the maxims on which the men of whom Clive is but the most conspicuous, habitually acted; and the results were that these became the accepted rules of conduct for Englishmen in India, and that the native soldiers of whatever race learned to rely implicitly on their officers.

Scores, hundreds of times in the last century and a half, in matters great and small, English officers have acted on these principles as a matter of course; and equally as a matter of course their native soldiers have done under English leadership what they never would have dreamed of doing if left to themselves. Courage, most of the races which furnished sepoys possessed in abundance; and that courage they placed at the disposal of the foreigners in whom they recognised fertility of resource, power of combination, so far above their own level, that they seemed to belong to a superior order of beings. Nor can there be any doubt that the fact of their being so regarded helped to raise the English above their natural level.[90] They must live up to their position, both to the traditions of the service and to the idea entertained of them. When they cease to do this, the hold of England on India will be precarious. Whether they are tending to do so may be judged from the history of any and every little war, such for instance as the Kanjut expedition in 1891, the most notable feature of which was the storming of Thol, and which is fully and picturesquely described in Mr. E. F. Knight's book, Where Three Empires Meet. Even more characteristic of the needs, and the achievements, of British rule in India, is a narrative of an incident on a very small scale, done in the way of everyday business, which is given in a tolerably recent newspaper (the Spectator of April 23, 1892) from a letter of the chief actor.

"Lieutenant G. F. MacMunn, R.A., had been ordered to march with fourteen men, of whom, fortunately for him, twelve were Goorkhas, to convey some stores, principally rum, from Myitchina to Sadon, a small fortified post in Burmah, a distance of about fifty miles. The road was considered perfectly safe, and about twenty-five miles were passed in tranquillity, when the young lieutenant—he cannot be above twenty-two—received information which showed that some rebels of the Kachyen tribe intended to bar his path. This meant that he must either retreat, or force his way along a rough road, continually crossed by streams, and lined with jungle on each side, through a hostile force which might number hundreds, and did number sixty at least, armed with muskets, and sufficiently instructed in the military art to build stockades both of timber and stone. Lieutenant MacMunn, who had probably never heard a gun fired in anger in his life, seems not to have doubted for a moment about his duty. The people in Sadon, he thought, would want the rum, and he pushed on, to find the enemy holding a ford where the water was up to his shoulders. He plunged in with three Goorkhas, and forded the eighty yards of water, 'getting volleyed at awfully,' but was left unwounded, and 'rushed' one side of the stockade, and then, bringing over the rest of his men, rushed the remaining works. The Kachyens fled, but four miles in advance towards Sadon halted again, constructed another stockade, and filled the jungle on each side of the road with musketeers, who poured in, as the Goorkhas advanced, a deadly fire. The Jemadar was shot through the lungs, a Goorkha hit in the foot, and Lieutenant MacMunn wounded in the wrist; but he went down into the jungle with two men only, the remainder forming a rearguard, and carried the stockade, the Kachyens firing futile volleys, and the Englishman and his comrades, as he writes in school-boy slang, 'giving them beans.' Sadon was now visible, and encouraged by the sight, Lieutenant MacMunn pressed on; but the Kachyens were not tired of the fight, and had erected another stockade, this time of stone, across the road, with a ditch five feet deep by ten feet broad in front of it, a proof in itself of their considerable numbers and skill. The lieutenant asked 'the boys' if they would 'follow straight,' and they being Goorkhas, half-mad with fighting, and understanding by this time quite clearly what manner of lad was leading them, 'yelled' that they would, and did. Into and out of the ditch, and up to the stockade, and again the Kachyens fled, only to turn once more, and—but we must let Lieutenant MacMunn tell the rest of his own story. 'It took us half-an-hour to repair the road and pull down the stockade; and on and on, wondering where our friends were.' (The garrison of Sadon knew nothing of the advancing party or its danger.) 'One mile on they again fired at us from the jungle; but the road was clear, and we hurried on down the hill, where we had to cross a river bridged by our sappers. On the way down they banged away at us, and near the river they had stuck in any amount of pointed spikes in the road, and while we pulled these up they fired again and again, and we volleyed in return. We then hurried down to the bridge; to our dismay it was destroyed, so we had to cross the river by wading lower down, and very deep it was. It was quite dark, and took us quite half-an-hour to get every one across, and then the road was blocked with spikes and trees, and the Kachins fired continually. At last we got to Sadon village, half-a-mile below the fort which our fellows had made. In the village from every house and corner they fired. My horse was shot in the hind-leg, the bullet going through the muscle, and a driver was hit too. The Goorkha ponies broke loose and galloped about, the mules went in every direction, and the Goorkhas cursed and blazed away, and still no sign from our friends, and I began to fear the fort had been taken. I put the wounded driver on a pony, and we hurried on, collecting what ponies and mules we could. In ten minutes more we saw the fort in the darkness ahead, and I started off a ringing cheer, followed by my men; bugles rang out, and they cheered in reply, and in another minute we were inside. I was surrounded by men on all sides, patting me on the back, holding me up, giving me water, asking questions.'"

CHAPTER XVI
INDIA
PART I.—CONQUEST

The history of the foundation of the English empire in India is full of paradoxes. The East India Company had no purpose beyond trade: they had been allowed to form settlements at various places, and like other landowners had a few armed men to protect them against possible violence; but they did not dream even of asserting their independence of the native princes. It was the French, not the English, who won the first victory against great odds over a native army, and so disclosed the arcanum imperii, the secret that European discipline would prevail against almost any numbers, and that native soldiers, trained in the European method and fighting alongside of European comrades, could be made almost equally effective. The restless ambition of Dupleix, striving to establish French dominion in southern India, led him to attack the English of Madras, as hereditary enemies at home as well as possible rivals in India. The English were driven to war in self-defence, and they found in Clive a leader who was nearly Dupleix's equal as a statesman, and was also, what Dupleix was not, a born general. Down to 1751 it had been supposed in India that the English could not fight: they had certainly shown no inclination for war. Clive's defence at Arcot, followed by his victory in the field over a very superior force commanded by a Frenchman, transferred to his countrymen that moral and military preponderance which Dupleix had gained for the French. No better illustration can be found of the principle that the boldest course is generally the safest, than Clive's victory at Cauveripak.[91]