[18] Ficus Indica.
[19] The author is quite right in this surmise; the road was made through the old breach in 1861.
CHAPTER V
PERSONAL ANECDOTES—CAPTURE OF THE SHÂH NUJEEF—A FEARFUL EXPERIENCE
I must now leave for a little the general struggle, and turn to the actions of individual men as they fell under my own observation,—actions which neither appear in despatches nor in history; and, by the way, I may remark that one of the best accounts extant of the taking of the Shâh Nujeef is that of Colonel Alison, in Blackwood's Magazine for October, 1858. Both the Alisons were severely wounded on that occasion,—Colonel Archibald Alison, Military Secretary, and his brother, Captain F. M. Alison, A.D.C. to Sir Colin Campbell. I will now relate a service rendered by Sergeant M. W. Findlay, of my company, which was never noticed nor rewarded. Sergeant Findlay, let me state, merely considered that he had done his duty, but that is no reason why I should not mention his name. I believe he is still in India, and a distinguished officer of the Râjpootâna-Mâlwa Railway Volunteers at Ajmere. However, after Captain Peel's guns were dragged into position, the Ninety-Third took up whatever shelter they could get on the right and left of the guns, and I, with several others, got behind the walls of an unroofed mud hut, through which we made loopholes on the side next to the Shâh Nujeef, and were thus able to keep up a destructive fire on the enemy. Let me add here that the surgeons of the force were overwhelmed with work, and attending to the wounded in the thick of the fire. Some time after the attack had commenced we noticed Captain Alison and his horse in a heap together a few yards behind where we were in shelter. Sergeant Findlay rushed out, got the wounded officer clear of his dead horse under a perfect hail of bullets and round-shot, and carried him under the shelter of the walls where we were lying. He then ran off in search of a surgeon to bandage his wounds, which were bleeding very profusely; but the surgeons were all too busy, and Sir Colin was most strict on the point of wounds being attended to. Officers, no matter what their rank, had no precedence over the rank-and-file in this respect; in fact, Sir Colin often expressed the opinion that an officer could be far more easily replaced than a well-drilled private. However, there was no surgeon available; so Sergeant Findlay took his own bandage,—every soldier on going on active service is supplied with lint and a bandage to have them handy in case of wounds—set to work, stanched the bleeding, and bandaged up the wounds of Captain Alison in such a surgeon-like manner that, when Dr. Menzies of the Ninety-Third at length came to see him, he thought he had been attended to by a doctor. When he did discover that it was Sergeant Findlay who had put on the bandages, he expressed his surprise, and said that in all probability this prompt action had saved Captain Alison's life, who otherwise might have been weakened by loss of blood beyond recovery before a doctor could have attended to him. Dr. Menzies there and then applied to Captain Dawson to get Sergeant Findlay into the field-hospital as an extra assistant to attend to the wounded. In closing this incident I may remark that I have known men get the Victoria Cross for incurring far less danger than Sergeant Findlay did in exposing himself to bring Captain Alison under shelter. The bullets were literally flying round him like hail; several passed through his clothes, and his feather bonnet was shot off his head. When he had finished putting on the bandages he coolly remarked: "I must go out and get my bonnet for fear I get sunstruck;" so out he went for his hat, and before he got back scores of bullets were fired at him from the walls of the Shâh Nujeef.
The next man I shall refer to was Sergeant Daniel White, one of the coolest and most fearless men in the regiment. Sergeant White was a man of superior education, an excellent vocalist and reciter, with a most retentive memory, and one of the best amateur actors in the Ninety-Third. Under fire he was just as cool and collected as if he had been enacting the part of Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy.
In the force defending the Shâh Nujeef, in addition to the regular army, there was a large body of archers on the walls, armed with bows and arrows which they discharged with great force and precision, and on White raising his head above the wall an arrow was shot right into his feather bonnet. Inside of the wire cage of his bonnet, however, he had placed his forage cap, folded up, and instead of passing right through, the arrow stuck in the folds of the forage cap, and "Dan," as he was called, coolly pulled out the arrow, paraphrasing a quotation from Sir Walter Scott's Legend of Montrose, where Dugald Dalgetty and Ranald MacEagh made their escape from the castle of McCallum More. Looking at the arrow, "My conscience!" said White, "bows and arrows! bows and arrows! Have we got Robin Hood and Little John back again? Bows and arrows! My conscience, the sight has not been seen in civilised war for nearly two hundred years. Bows and arrows! And why not weavers' beams as in the days of Goliath? Ah! that Daniel White should be able to tell in the Saut Market of Glasgow that he had seen men fight with bows and arrows in the days of Enfield rifles! Well, well, Jack Pandy, since bows and arrows are the words, here's at you!" and with that he raised his feather bonnet on the point of his bayonet above the top of the wall, and immediately another arrow pierced it through, while a dozen more whizzed past a little wide of the mark.
Just then one poor fellow of the Ninety-Third, named Penny, of No. 2 company, raising his head for an instant a little above the wall, got an arrow right through his brain, the shaft projecting more than a foot out at the back of his head. As the poor lad fell dead at our feet, Sergeant White remarked, "Boys, this is no joke; we must pay them off." We all loaded and capped, and pushing up our feather bonnets again, a whole shower of arrows went past or through them. Up we sprang and returned a well-aimed volley from our rifles at point-blank distance, and more than half-a-dozen of the enemy went down. But one unfortunate man of the regiment, named Montgomery, of No. 6 company, exposed himself a little too long to watch the effect of our volley, and before he could get down into shelter again an arrow was sent right through his heart, passing clean through his body and falling on the ground a few yards behind him. He leaped about six feet straight up in the air, and fell stone dead. White could not resist making another quotation, but this time it was from the old English ballad of Chevy Chase.