The Autobiography (called by its author “Various Anecdotes and Events of my Life”) was begun by Sir Harry Smith, then Lieutenant-Colonel Smith, at Glasgow in 1824. At that time it was only continued as far as page 15 of the present volume. On 11th August, 1844, when he had won his K.C.B., and was Adjutant-General of Her Majesty’s Forces in India, he resumed his task at Simla. He then wrote with such speed that on 15th October he was able to tell his sister that he had carried his narrative to the end of the campaign of Gwalior, that is, to 1844 ([p. 490]). Finally, on 7th September, 1846, when at Cawnpore in command of a Division, he began to add to what he had previously written an account of the campaign of the Sutlej, which had brought him fresh honours. This narrative was broken off abruptly in the middle of the Battle of Sobraon ([p. 550]), and was never completed. Accordingly, of Sir Harry Smith’s life from February, 1846, to his death on 12th October, 1860, we have no record by his own hand.
The Autobiography had been carefully preserved by Sir Harry’s former aide-de-camp and friend, General Sir Edward Alan Holdich, K.C.B., but, as it happened, I was not myself aware of its existence until, owing to the fresh interest awakened in Sir Harry Smith and his wife by the siege of Ladysmith early in 1900, I inquired from members of my family what memorials of my great-uncle were preserved. Sir Edward then put this manuscript and a number of letters and documents at my disposal. It appeared to me and to friends whom I consulted that the Autobiography was so full of romantic adventure and at the same time of such solid historical value that it ought no longer to remain unpublished, and Mr. John Murray, to whom I submitted a transcription of it, came at once to the same conclusion.
My task as Editor has not been a light one. In Sir Harry’s letter to Mrs. Sargant of 15th October, 1844,[1] he says of his manuscript, “I have never read a page of it since my scrawling it over at full gallop;” and in a letter of 14th January, 1845, “Harry Lorrequer would make a good story of it. You may ask him if you like, and let me know what he says of it.” It is clear from these passages that Sir Harry did not contemplate the publication of his story in the rough form in which he had written it, but imagined that some literary man, such as Charles Lever, might take it in hand, rewrite it with fictitious names, and so fashion out of it a military romance. The chapters[2] on Afghanistan and Gwalior, already written, were, however, of a serious character which would make them unsuitable for such treatment; and the same was the case with the chapters on the Sikh War, afterwards added. Whether Lever ever saw the manuscript I do not know; at any rate, the author’s idea was never carried out.
It is obvious that now that fifty years have passed, some of the reasons which made Sir Harry suggest such a transformation of his story are no longer in force. The actors in the events which he describes having almost all passed away, to suppress names would be meaningless and would deprive the book of the greater part of its interest. And for the sake of literary effect to rewrite Sir Harry’s story would be to destroy its great charm, the intimate relation in which it sets us with his fiery and romantic character.
The book here given to the public is not indeed word for word as Sir Harry wrote it. It has often been necessary to break up a long sentence, to invert a construction—sometimes to transpose a paragraph in order to bring it into closer connexion with the events to which it refers. But such changes have only been made when they seemed necessary to bring out more clearly the writer’s intention; the words are the author’s own, even where a specially awkward construction has been smoothed; and it may be broadly said that nothing has been added to Sir Harry’s narrative or omitted from it. Such slight additions to the text as seemed desirable, for example, names and dates of battles,[3] have been included in square brackets. In some cases, to avoid awkward parentheses, sentences of Sir Harry’s own have been relegated from the text to footnotes. Such notes are indicated by the addition of his initials (“H. G. S.”).
Sir Harry’s handwriting was not of the most legible order, as he admits, and I have had considerable difficulty in identifying some of the persons and places he mentions. Sometimes I have come to the conclusion that his own recollection was at fault, and in this case I have laid my difficulty before the reader.
I have not thought it my duty to normalize the spelling of proper names, such as those of towns in the Peninsula and in India, and the names of Kafir chiefs. Sir Harry himself spells such names in a variety of ways, and I have not thought absolute consistency a matter of importance, while to have re-written Indian names according to the modern official spelling would have been, as it seems to me, to perpetrate an anachronism.
I have, indeed, generally printed “Sutlej,” though Sir Harry frequently or generally wrote “Sutledge;” but I have kept in his own narrative his spelling “Ferozeshuhur” (which is, I believe, more correct) for the battle generally called “Ferozeshah.” Even Sir Harry’s native place (and my own) has two spellings, “Whittlesey” and “Whittlesea.” In his narrative I have preserved his usual spelling “Whittlesea,” but I have myself used the other, as I have been taught to do from a boy.
Perhaps it is worth while to mention here that Sir Harry’s name was strictly “Henry George Wakelyn Smith,” and it appears in this form in official documents. But having been always known in the army as “Harry Smith,” after attaining his knighthood he stoutly refused to become “Sir Henry,” and insisted on retaining the more familiar name.[4] As the year of his birth is constantly given as 1788, it is worth while to state that the Baptismal Register of St. Mary’s, Whittlesey, proves him to have been born on 28th June, 1787.