Nicholson was of Irish birth, the son of a Dublin physician, who had seen twenty years’ service in India—service brilliant and varied beyond even what is common in that field of great deeds. There is no space here to tell the story of Nicholson’s career, but as he rode into the British camp that August morning, he was beyond all question the most picturesque and striking figure in India. He was a man of splendid physique, and is said to have borne an almost bewildering resemblance to the Czar Nicholas. He was six feet two in height, strongly built, with a flowing dark-coloured beard, colourless face, grey eyes, with dark pupils, in whose depths, when he was aroused, a point of steady light, as of steel or of flame, would kindle. Few men, indeed, could sustain the piercing look of those lustrous, menacing eyes. His voice had a curious depth in it; his whole bearing a singular air of command and strength—an impression which his habit of rare and curt speech intensified. “He was a man,” says one who knew him well, “cast in a giant mould, with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression, ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and sonorous voice. His imperial air never left him.” “Nicholson,” says Lord Roberts, “impressed me more profoundly than any man I had ever met before, or have ever met since.”
Nicholson, like the Lawrences, like Havelock, and Herbert Edwardes, and many of the Indian heroes of that generation, was a man of rough but sincere piety, and this did not weaken his soldiership—it rather gave a new loftiness to its ideals and a steadier pulse to its courage. “If there is a desperate deed to be done in India,” Herbert Edwardes told Lord Canning, “John Nicholson is the man to do it”; and exactly that impression and conviction Nicholson kindled in everybody about him.
“He had,” says Mrs. Steel, “the great gift. He could put his own heart into a whole camp, and make it believe it was its own.” Such a masterful will and personality as that of Nicholson took absolutely captive the imagination of the wild, irregular soldiery of which he was the leader.
What was Nicholson’s fighting quality, indeed, may be judged, say, from the fashion in which he smashed up the mutinous Sepoys at Mardan (as told in Trotter’s “Life” of him), and chased them mile after mile towards the hills of Swat, Nicholson leading the pursuit on his huge grey charger, “his great sword felling a Sepoy at every stroke!” His faculty for strategy, and for swift, sustained movement is, again, told by the manner in which he intercepted and destroyed the Sealkote mutineers at the fords of the Ravi on their way to Delhi, The mutineers were two days’ march ahead of him, and Nicholson made a forced march of forty-four miles in a single day, and under a July sun in India, to get within stroke of them. Nicholson’s little force started at 9 P.M. on July 10, and marched twenty-six miles without a break; after a halt of two hours they started on their second stage of eighteen miles at 10 A.M. During the hottest hour of the afternoon the force camped in a grove of trees, and the men fell, exhausted, into instant slumber.
Presently an officer, awakening, looked round for his general. “He saw Nicholson,” says Trotter, “in the middle of the hot, dusty road, sitting bolt upright on his horse in the full glare of that July sun, waiting like a sentinel turned to stone for the moment when his men should resume their march!” They might take shelter from the heat, but he scorned it. A march so swift and fierce was followed by an attack equally vehement, Nicholson leading the rush on the enemy’s guns in person, and with his own sword cutting literally in two a rebel gunner in the very act of putting his linstock to the touch-hole of his cannon.
The worship of force is natural to the Eastern mind; and, in 1848, when Nicholson was scouring the country between the Attock and the Jhelum, making incredible marches, and shattering with almost incredible valour whole armies with a mere handful of troops, the mingled admiration and dread of the native mind rose to the pieties of a religion. “To this day,” a border chief told Younghusband, twelve years after Nicholson was dead, “our women at night wake trembling, and saying they hear the tramp of Nikalsain’s war-horse!” A brotherhood of Fakirs renounced all other creeds, and devoted themselves to the worship of “Nikkul-Seyn.” They would lie in wait for Nicholson, and fall at his feet with votive offerings.
Nicholson tried to cure their inconvenient piety by a vigorous application of the whip, and flogged them soundly on every opportunity. But this, to the Fakir mind, supplied only another proof of the great Irishman’s divinity; and, to quote Herbert Edwardes, “the sect of Nikkul-Seynees remained as devoted as ever. Sanguis martyrum est semen Ecclesiæ! On one occasion, after a satisfactory whipping, Nicholson released his devotees on the condition that they would transfer their adoration to John Becher; but as soon as they attained their freedom they resumed their worship of the relentless Nikkul-Seyn.” The last of the sect, says Raikes, dug his own grave, and was found dead in it shortly after the news came that Nicholson had fallen at Delhi.
Nicholson’s ardour had made him outride the movable column he was bringing up to reinforce the besiegers; but on August 14, with drums beating and flags flying, and welcomed with cheers by the whole camp, that gallant little force marched in. It consisted of the 52nd, 680 strong, a wing of the 61st, the second Punjaub Infantry, with some Beloochees and military police, and a field battery.
Work for such a force, and under such a leader, was quickly found. The siege train intended to breach the walls of Delhi was slowly creeping along the road from the Punjaub, and with unusual daring a great force of mutineers marched from Delhi to intercept this convoy. The movement was detected, and on August 25 Nicholson, with 1600 infantry, 400 cavalry, and a battery of field guns, set out to cut off the Sepoy force.
The rain fell in ceaseless, wind-blown sheets, as only Indian rain can fall. The country to be crossed was mottled with swamps. The roads were mere threads of liquid mud, and the march was of incredible difficulty. The enemy was overtaken at Nujutgurh, after a sort of wading march which lasted twelve hours. “No other man in India,” wrote a good soldier afterwards, “would have taken that column to Nujutgurh. An artillery officer told me that at one time the water was over his horses’ backs, and he thought they could not possibly get out of their difficulties. But he looked ahead, and saw Nicholson’s great form riding steadily on as if nothing was the matter.”