How lightly the eye scans such passages, and yet beneath them lies the whole secret of success in war. "How easy then it must be," I think I hear some reader say. "You have only to stick your heels in the sand, cry out, 'I won't go back,' and the game is yours." Not so fast, good friend. Blondin's crossing the chasm of Niagara was very easy to Blondin, but woe betide the other man who ventured to try it. There were generals even in our own time who thought they could copy Napier's method of war, but what a terrible mess they made of it! The thing is indeed very easy when you know how to do it, but that little secret is only to be learned through long years of study and experience, and even then it is only to be mastered by a select few. Make no mistake about it, good reader. History is right when she walks behind great soldiers noting their deeds. They are the rarest human products which she meets with.
When Beja Khan and his confederate sirdars found themselves shut up within the walls of Truckee they gave up the game and asked permission to surrender. Leave was granted, and on March 9th they came out and laid their swords at Napier's feet. With all their love of plunder they were very splendid warriors, these Doomkee, Bhoogtee, and Jackranee chiefs and clansmen, holding notions of the honour of arms which more civilised soldiers would do well to follow. Here is one such notion. When Charles Napier stood before the southern cleft or pass which gave entrance to Truckee, another column under Beatson blocked the northern gate of the stronghold. Although the two passes were only distant from each other in a straight line across the labyrinth some half-dozen miles, they were one or more days' journey asunder by the circuitous road round the flank of the mountain rampart. One column therefore knew nothing of the other's proceedings. While waiting thus opposite the northern entrance Beatson determined to reconnoitre the interior of the vast chasm by scaling the exterior wall of rock. For this purpose a part of the old Thirteenth, veterans of Jellalabad, was sent up the mountain; the ascent, long and arduous, was all but completed when it was observed from below that the flat top of the rock held a strong force of the enemy, entrenched behind a breastwork of stones. The ascending body of the Thirteenth numbered only sixteen men, the enemy on the summit was over sixty. In vain the officer who made this discovery tried to warn the climbers of the dangers so close above them, but which they could not see; his signs were mistaken by the men for fresh incentives to advance, and they pushed on towards the top instead of retracing their steps to the bottom. As the small party of eleven men gained the summit they were greeted by a matchlock volley from the low breastwork in front, followed by the charge of some seventy Beloochees, sword in hand. The odds were desperate; the Thirteenth men were blown by the steep ascent; the ground on which they stood was a dizzy ledge, faced by the stone breastwork and flanked by tremendous precipices. No man flinched; fighting with desperate valour they fell on that terrible but glorious stage, in sight of their comrades below, who were unable to give them help. Six out of the eleven fell at once; five others, four of them wounded, were pushed over the rocks, rolling down upon their half-dozen comrades who had not yet gained the summit. How hard they fought and died one incident will tell. Private John Maloney, fighting amid a press of enemies, and seeing two comrades, Burke and Rohan, down in the melée, discharged two muskets into the breast of a Beloochee, and ran another through with his bayonet. The Beloochee had strength and courage to unfix the bayonet, draw it from his body, and stab Maloney with his own weapon before he himself fell dead upon the rock. Maloney, although severely wounded, made good his retreat and brought off his two comrades. So much for the fighting on both sides. Now for the chivalry of those hill-men. When a chief fell bravely in battle it was an old custom among the clans to tie a red or green thread around his right or left wrist, the red thread on the right wrist being the mark of highest valour. Well, when that evening the bodies of the six slain soldiers were found at the foot of the rocks, rolled over from the top by the Beloochee garrison above, each body had a red thread, not on one wrist, but on both.[4]
The expedition against the hill tribes was over, but larger warfare was at hand. North of Scinde a vast region of unrest lay simmering in strife. Runjeet Singh was dead, and the great army he had called into being was rapidly pushing the country to the brink of the precipice of war. Napier had long predicted the Punjaub war, but his warnings had been lightly listened to, and when in December, 1846, the Sikhs suddenly threw a large force across the Sutlej, they found a British army cantoned far in front of its magazines, unprovided with the essentials of a campaign—reserve ammunition and transport—able to fight, indeed, with all the vehemence of its old traditions, but lacking that leadership which, by power of forecast and preparation, draws from the courage of the soldier the utmost result of victory.
Between December, 1846, and February, 1847, four sanguinary actions were fought on the banks of the Sutlej—the Sikh soldiery were brave and devoted warriors, but of their leaders the most influential were large recipients of English gold, and the remainder were ignorant of all the rules of war. Nevertheless the bravery of the common soldiers made the campaign more than once doubtful, and it was only in the final conflict at Sobraon on February 10th, 1847, that the campaign was decided. Meanwhile, the steps which Napier had long foreseen as necessary in Scinde, but in the timely execution of which he had been constantly thwarted by higher authority, were ordered to be taken with all despatch. Moodkee and Ferozeshah had suddenly revealed the strength of the Sikh army, and Scinde was looked to in the hour of anxiety for aid against this powerful enemy. With what extraordinary rapidity Napier assembled his army at Roree for a forward movement towards the Punjaub has long passed from the recollection of men. On December 24th the order reached him at Kurachee. Forty-two days later, a most compact fighting force of fifteen thousand men, fifty-four field guns, and a siege-train stood ready, the whole complete for a six months' campaign; so complete indeed in power of movement, capacity for sustained effort, and full possession of all the requisites of war that it might, as an offensive force, be reckoned at twice its actual numbers. Organisation, transport system, and equipment are the wheels of war—without them the best army is but a muzzled bulldog tied to a short chain.
But this admirable force was not to be used. The battle of Sobraon was the prelude to a patched-up peace, which divided the Sikh State, depleted the Sikh treasury, but left intact the Sikh army. The generalship on the Sutlej had been indifferent; the policy that followed the campaign was still larger marked by want of foresight. Napier, ordered to leave his army at Bahawalpore, had proceeded alone to Lahore to advise and assist the negotiations for peace. He joined Hardinge, Gough, and Smith in the Sikh capital, receiving a tremendous ovation from the troops and a cordial welcome from the three chiefs, who, if they were not brilliant generals, were chivalrous and gallant soldiers. It must have been a fine sight these four old warriors of the Peninsula going in state to the palace of the Maharajah at Lahore. Napier, though keen to catch the errors of the campaign, has nothing but honour and regard for his brother-generals. "Gough is a glorious old fellow," he writes; "brave as ten lions, each with two sets of teeth and two tails." "Harry Smith did his work well." And of Hardinge's answer to those who urged him to retreat during the night after the first day's carnage at Ferozeshah—"No, we will abide the break of day, and then either sweep all before us or die honourably"—he cannot say too much; but all this does not blind him to the waste of human life that want of foresight had caused. "We have beaten the Sikhs in every action," he writes, "with our glorious, most glorious soldiers, but thousands of those brave men have bit the dust who ought now to be standing sword in hand victorious at the gates of Lahore." "Do you recollect saying to me," he asks his brother, "'Our soldiers will fight any general through his blunders'? Well, now, judge your own prophecy." Finally, all the foresight of the man's mind comes out in these prophetic words, written when the war had just closed, "This tragedy must be reacted a year or two hence; we shall have another war." Chillianwallah and Goojerat had yet to be.
Back to Scinde again to take up the old labour of civil administration, and work out to practical solution a hundred problems of justice, commerce, land-tenure, agriculture, and taxation,—in fine, to build upon the space cleared by war the stately edifice of a wise and beneficent human government, keeping always in view certain fundamental rules of honesty, truth, justice, and wisdom, learned long years before in Ireland at his father's side.
Napier's system of rule was after all a very old one. It went back before ever a political economist set pen to paper. Anybody who will turn to the pages of Massinger will find it set forth clearly enough at the time King and Parliament were coming to loggerheads over certain things called Prerogative and Privilege—words which, if the weal of the soil-tiller be forgotten, are only empty and meaningless balderdash. Here are the men whose goods are lawful prize in the philosophy of the old dramatist—
The cormorant that lives in expectation
Of a long wished-for dearth, and smiling grinds