They brought him back to Hyderabad, and the wonderful constitution, tempered and twisted into birdcage wire by years of temperance and labour, again asserted itself, and within a fortnight of the blow of the sun he comes up smiling to the hundred cares of war and government, and to the still more wearing worries of assault from open and concealed enemies in England and India. For a long time he is very weak. All the reaction of these four anxious months, all the waste of life-power which war brings with it, now capped by sunstroke, and still further accentuated by calumny and ill-natured criticism, are too much for him, and it seems that he must soon lay his bones in the sands of Scinde. "Even to mount my horse," he writes, "is an exertion. I, who ten years ago did not know what fatigue was, and who even a few months ago at Poonah knocked off fifty-four miles in the heat, am now distressed by four miles! This last illness has floored me, and even my mind has lost its energy; yet it is good to die in harness." These forebodings were not to be verified. The long Scindian summer wore away, and with the end of August cooler weather began to dawn on the Unhappy Valley. Gradually we find the old tone coming back into the journal, the old ring into the letters. He has a hundred plans for the improvement of Scinde and the happiness of its people. He will chain the Indus in its channel, cut canals for irrigation, lessen the taxes, lighten the lot of the labourer, curb the power of the chiefs—in fine, make a Happy Valley out of this long dreary, dusty, sun-baked land. Alas! it was only a pleasant dream. The man who would do all this must be something more than a governor reporting home by every mail, and called upon to reply to every silly question which ignorance, prompted by mammon or malice, may dictate. One thing he is determined upon. He will give the labourer justice, cost what it may. He has caught two tax-collectors riding roughshod over the peasants. "I will make," he writes, "such an example of them as shall show the poor people my resolution to protect them. Yes, I will make this land happy if life is left me for a year. I shall have no more Beloochees to kill. Battle! victory! spirit-stirring sounds in the bosom of society; but to me—O God, how my spirit rejects them! Not one feeling of joy or exultation entered my head at Meanee or Dubba—all was agony. I can use no better word. To win was the least bloody thing to be done, and was my work for the day; but with it came anxiety, pain of heart, disgust, and a longing never to have quitted Celbridge; to have passed my life in the 'round field,' and in the 'devil's acre,' and under the yew trees on the terrace amongst the sparrows—these were the feelings that flashed in my head after the battles." And then he goes on to speak his thoughts upon government and justice, and very noticeable thoughts they are too—never more worthy of attention than to-day. "People think," he writes, "and justly sometimes, that to execute the law is the great thing; they fancy this to be justice. Cast away details, good man, and take what the people call justice, not what the laws call justice, and execute that. Both legal and popular justice have their evils, but assuredly the people's justice is a thousand times nearer to God's justice. Justice must go with the people, not against the people; that is the way to govern nations, and not by square and compass." Very old words these, rung so often in the ears of rulers that they have long ago forgotten their import, until all at once their truth is brought home to heart again by the loss of a crown or the revolt of a colony.
Now arrived from England the list of honours and rewards for the victories. Immediately upon the receipt of the news of Meanee Lord Ellenborough had appointed Napier Governor of Scinde, with fullest powers. The Gazette made him only a Grand Cross of the Bath. Peerages had been bestowed for very small fractions of victory in Afghanistan; but for these real triumphs in Scinde there was to be no such reward, and it was better that it should have been so. The gold of Napier's nature did not want the stamp of mere rank; perhaps it would not carry the alloy which the modern mint finds necessary for the operation. But although the reward of the victor was thus carefully limited, it was quite sufficient to call forth many open expressions of ill-will, and still more numerous secret assaults of envious antagonists. Unfortunately for Napier, these he could not meet with silent contempt. The noble nature of the man could accept neglect with stoical indifference; but the fighting nature of the soldier could not brook the stings of political or journalistic cavillers. And it must be acknowledged these last were enough to rouse the lion of St. Mark himself, even had that celebrated animal imbibed from his master his full share of virtues. Everything was cavilled at; motive, action, and result were attacked, and from the highest Director of the East India Company in Leadenhall Street to the most insignificant editor of an Indian newspaper in the service of the civilian interest in Bombay or Calcutta, came the stinging flight of query, innuendo, or direct condemnation. The reason for much of this animosity was not hard to find. Napier had dared to tell unpalatable truths about the impoverishment of India through the horde of locusts who, under the name of Government, had settled upon it. The man who could tell the Directors of the East India Company that their military policy tended to the mutiny of their soldiers, and their civil system was a huge source of Indian spoliation, was not likely to find much favour with the richest and most powerful, and, it may be added, the most commercial company the world has ever seen; nor was he likely to be a persona grata with the officials who administered the affairs of that gigantic corporation. This is the true key to solve the now perplexing question of the antagonism encountered by Charles Napier from the moment of his success at Meanee to the end of his life. The pride of aristocratic privilege in high place is a dangerous thing to touch; but the pride of the plutocratic Solomon in his right to reap the labour of those who toil and spin is a thousand times a more venturesome thing to trench upon. Added to these causes for negative recognition of brilliant service, and positive condemnation from many quarters, there was a political state of things which influenced the opinion of the moment. Lord Ellenborough was not popular. The Whig policy of action beyond the Indian frontier had been most disastrous. The contrast between it and the campaign on the Indus was painfully apparent. It was like some long day of storm and gloom which had closed in a glorious sunset; and while the morning and mid-day of tempest had been Whig, the evening glory had come under a Tory administration. In reading the history of all these squabbles now, the chief regret we experience is that Napier should have bothered himself with their presence. Indeed, in his moments of calm reflection he appears to have rated them at their true worth. "Honours!" he writes about this time; "I have had honour sufficient in both battles. At Meanee, when we forced the Fullalee, the Twenty-Second, seeing me at their head, gave me three cheers louder than all the firing. And at Dubba, when I returned nearly alone from the pursuit with the cavalry, the whole Line gave me three cheers. One wants nothing more than the praise of men who know how to judge movements."
With these soldiers indeed, officers and men, his popularity was unbounded. They knew the truth. Many among them had seen to their cost the fruits of bad leadership in Cabul, and had learnt to value the truth of the old Greek proverb, which declared that "a herd of deer led by a lion was more formidable to the enemy than a herd of lions led by a deer." And they knew that though this small, spare, eagle-beaked and falcon-eyed leader worked them till they dropped beneath the fierce sun of Scinde, there was no heat of sun or fatigue of march or press of battle which he did not take his lion's share of. Even when now, in this autumn of 1843, an enemy more formidable to soldiers attacked them, when the deadliest fever stalked through the rough camps along the Indus, and the graveyards grew as the ranks thinned, no murmur rose from the rank and file, but silently the fate was accepted which sent hundreds of them to an inglorious death. Here and there through the journals we come on entries that tell more powerfully than any record of figures could do what this mortality must have been. "Alas!" we read only a few months after Meanee, "these two brave soldiers, Kelly and Delaney of the Twenty-Second, are dead. They fought by my side, Kelly at Dubba and Delaney at Meanee. Three times, when I thought the Twenty-Second could not stand the furious rush of the swordsmen, Delaney sounded the advance, and each time the line made a pace or two nearer to the enemy." Difficult now is it for us to believe that at this time, when the soldiers of the army of Scinde were dying by hundreds in hospital, they were denied the last consolations of their religion. "There is no Catholic clergyman here," writes Napier in October, 1843. "The Mussulman and the Hindoo have their teachers; the Christian has none. The Catholic clergyman is more required than the Protestant, because Catholics are more dependent upon their clergy for religious consolation than the Protestants are; and the Catholic soldier dies in great distress if he has not a clergyman to administer to him. But, exclusive of all other reasons, I can hardly believe that a Christian government will refuse his pastor to the soldier serving in a climate where death is so rife, and the buoyant spirit of man is crushed by the debilitating effects of disease and heat. I cannot believe that such a government will allow Mammon to cross the path of our Saviour, to stand between the soldier and his God, and let his drooping mind thirst in vain for the support which his Church ought to afford." No wonder that the Governor who could, in such glowing words, rebuke the greed of his governors and champion the cause of the lowly should find few friends in high place; that the reward of rank, given before and since for such trivial result or such maculated victory, should have been denied to the brilliant victor of Meanee and conqueror of Scinde; that the thanks of Parliament should have been delayed till the greater part of the army thanked was in its grave; and that the leader of that army should find himself and his victories the objects of all the secret shafts and mysterious machinery which wealth, power, and malevolent envy could set in motion against him.
CHAPTER XI THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCINDE
Scinde subdued in the open field, there still remained great work to be done—work which tasks to a far larger degree the talent of man than any feat of arms in war can do. War at best is but a pulling down, often a very necessary operation, but all the same only the preliminary step of clearing the ground for some better edifice.
For better, for worse, Scinde was now British, and Napier set at once to work to consolidate his conquest, and secure to the conquered province the best administration of justice he could devise for it. A terrible misfortune came, however, to retard all plans for improvement. Early in the autumn pestilence laid low almost the entire army of the Indus. A slow and wasting form of fever broke out among both English and Indian soldiers, and equally struck down the natives of Scinde. In the camp at Hyderabad twenty-eight hundred men were down together. At Kurachee the Twenty-Eighth Regiment could only muster about forty men fit for service out of the entire battalion. At Sukkur, in Northern Scinde, sixteen hundred were in hospital. There were only a few doctors to look after this army of sick. Out of three cavalry regiments, only a hundred men could mount their horses. People shook their heads gloomily, and Scinde became known far and wide as the Unhappy Valley. Amid all this misery, while "the land in its length and breadth was an hospital," as Napier described it, we find him never giving in for a moment, working at his plans for justice, repression of outrage, irrigation, roads, bridges, moles, harbours, and embankments as though he was enjoying the health-giving breezes of the Cephalonian mountains. Wonderful now to read are the plans and visions of the future that then floated before his mind. "Suez, Bombay, and Kurachee will hit Calcutta hard before twenty years pass," he writes, "but Bombay will beat Kurachee, and be the Liverpool if not the London of India." Nor has the pestilence stilled in his heart dreams of further conquest. "How easily, were I absolute," he says, "could I conquer all these countries and make Kurachee the capital. With the Bombay soldiers of Meanee and Hyderabad I could walk through all the lands. I would raise Beloochee regiments, pass the Bolan in a turban, and spread rumours of a dream and the prophet. Pleasant would be the banks of the Helmund to the host of Mahomedans who would follow any conqueror." So passed the winter of 1844. Before the cool season was over, the troops had regained comparative health, and were better able to face the terrible summer. May and June came, as usual bringing sunstroke, disease, and death in their train, but for Napier the hot season of 1844 had something worse in store. His Chief, Lord Ellenborough, was suddenly recalled by the East India Directors. This was a regular knock-down blow, for while Lord Ellenborough was Viceroy of India Charles Napier could count upon an unvarying support; he fought, as it were, with his back to a wall. Now the wall was gone, and henceforth it seemed that the circle of his enemies would be complete. "I see but one advantage in the unfortunate recall of Lord Ellenborough," he writes; "it will oblige the Government to destroy a Mercantile Republic which has arisen in the midst of the British Monarchy." The prophecy was not to be fulfilled for thirteen years, when the terrible mutiny of 1857—so often predicted by Napier, and laughed at by his enemies—came like an avalanche to sweep before it every vestige of the famous Association.
What life in Scinde meant to Napier in this hot season of 1844 we gather from a letter written in June to his brother. "The Bengal troops at Shikarpoor are in open mutiny," he writes, "and I am covered with boils, that have for three weeks kept me in pain and eight days in bed. This, with the heat and an attack of fever, has made me too weak to go to Shikarpoor, for the sun is fierce up the river; many have been struck down by it last week, and it would be difficult for me to bear a second rap. Still I would risk it, but that a storm seems brewing at Mooltan, and this extraordinary change of governors will not dispel it. To me also it appears doubtful, if the Sikhs pour sixty or seventy thousand men over the Sutlej, whether Gough has means to pull them up. I am therefore nursing myself to be able to bolt northwards when we can act, which is impossible now—three days under canvas would kill half the Europeans." If Napier's reputation for foresight stood alone upon the above letter, it would suffice to place him at the top of the far-seeing leaders of his day. In the midst of all his sickness and discomfort he accurately forecast the history of the coming years in India. The intense activity of the man's mind is never more apparent than during this terrible season, which prostrates thousands of younger men. His letters teem with brilliant bits of thought on government, war, justice, society, politics, taxation,—nothing comes amiss to him. Here, for example, is a bit on war worth whole volumes of the stuff usually written about it. "The man who leads an army cannot succeed unless his whole mind is thrown into his work, any more than an actor can act unless he feels his part as if he was the man he represents. It is not saying 'Come and go' that wins battles; you must make the men you lead come and go with a will to their work of death. The man who either cannot or will not do this, but goes to war snivelling about virtue and unrighteousness, will be left on the field of battle to fight for himself." Here again is a little chapter on Indian government. "The Indian system seems to be the crushing of the native plebeian and supporting the aristocrat who, reason and facts tell us, is our deadly enemy. He always must be, for we step into his place. The ryot is ruined by us, though willing to be our friend. Yet he is the man to whom we must trust for keeping India—and the only one who can take it from us, if we ill-use him, for then he joins his hated natural chief. English and Indian may be amalgamated by just and equal laws—until we are no longer strangers. The final result of our Indian conquests no man can predict, but if we take the people by the hand we may count on ruling India for ages. Justice—rigid justice, even severe justice—will work miracles. India is safe if so ruled, but such deeds are done as make me wonder that we hold it a year."
As the cool season of 1844-45 drew on, Napier set out on an expedition against the hill tribes of Northern Scinde. Hitherto these wild clansmen had had things pretty much their own way; in true Highland fashion they were wont to sweep down upon the villages of the plain, killing men, carrying off women and cattle, looting and devastating as they went. Hard to catch were these Beloochee freebooters, for their wiry little horses carried the riders quickly out of reach into some fastness where pursuit, except in strength and with supplies for man and beast, was hopeless. The hills which harboured these raiders ran along the entire western frontier of Scinde, from the sea to the Bolan Pass. North of that famous entrance to Afghanistan they curved to the east, approaching the Indus not far from the point where that stream received the five rivers of the Punjaub. Here, spreading out into a labyrinth of crag, defile, and mountain, they formed a succession of natural fortresses, the approaches to which were unknown to the outer world. This great fastness, known as the Cutchee Hills, was distant from Kurachee more than three hundred miles. Leaving Kurachee in the middle of November and following a road which skirted a fringe of hills lying west of the Indus, Napier reached his northern frontier after a month's march. It was a pleasant change to get away from the sickly cantonments into the desert and the hills, where the pure air, now cooled by the winter nights, brought back health and strength to the little column. How thoroughly the toil- and heat-worn soldier enjoyed this long march we gather from his letters.