Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914

Bombardier Nathaniel Bancroft, serving with a rocket battery this day, later recalled how:

The action commenced by a salvo from the guns, howitzer, mortar and rocket batteries. Such a salvo was never heard in the length and breadth of India before … and the reports of the guns were distinctly heard by the wounded in the hospital at Ferozepur, five and twenty miles away. Our light guns opened fire near Chota Sobraon with a battery of howitzers, and before half past six the whole of our cannonade was developed and every iron-throated gun, mortar and rocket battery … was raining a storm of missiles which boomed, hissed and hurtled through the air onto the trenches of the Sikhs.11

The excellent quality of Sikh artillery was no surprise to the British even before the war. In 1839 Captain the Hon. W. G. Osborne had been on an official visit to the Sikhs, and reported that although their European-trained infantry was perfectly adequate, their artillery was ‘by far the best and most powerful arm of the Sikh nation’. Its performance, firing grapeshot at a curtain 200 yards away, he thought:

would have been creditable to any artillery in the world. At the first round of grape, the curtain was cut clean away, and their shells at eight hundred and twelve hundred were thrown with a precision that is extraordinary when the short period of time they have known of even the existence of such a thing is taken into account.12

Mudki and Ferozeshah had demonstrated that Sikh gunners were not simply professionally adept, but were brave men too: they fought to the death even when their batteries were overrun by British infantry. Today at Sobraon they fire back with accuracy and determination, but the British artillery, too, is well handled. Private John Pearman, watching it all with the 3rd Light Dragoons, saw that ‘most of our artillery and field batteries had advanced to an easy range. The firing appeared like practice in Woolwich marshes.’ His regiment, on hand for pursuit when the Sikhs begin to give way, was not quite out of range. ‘We had in the regiment a half-breed greyhound,’ he recalled, ‘and the poor thing kept running after spent balls until the poor bitch could run no more, but she was not hurt.’13

At the very moment that when Harry Smith, looking at the bombardment from beyond the eastern edge of the Sikh position, thinks that British artillery is beginning to win the firefight, its fire perceptibly slackens. Gough has just been told that his guns have brought far fewer rounds into the field than had been ordered, and the bombardment cannot go on much longer.14 For Gough this comes as something of a relief from politicking and technical advice, and he decides to bring the battle, as he puts it, ‘to the arbitrament of musket and the bayonet’.

The prospect of another ghastly slogging match like Mudki or Ferozeshah has alarmed Hardinge, and Colonel Benson, one of his staff officers, gallops up to Gough with the suggestion that if he does not feel confident of succeeding without great loss he should break off the attack and treat the business as a siege, making deliberate approaches to the Sikh defences. Benson presses his point again, and when he ventures it a third time Gough explodes. ‘What! Withdraw the troops after the action has commenced, and when I feel confident of success,’ he roars. ‘Indeed I will not. Tell Sir Robert Dick to move on, in the name of God.’15

Bombardier Bancroft saw how Dick’s infantry, flanked by batteries of artillery,

moved to the close attack in magnificent order the infantry and the cannon aiding each other co-relatively. The former marched steadily in line, with its colours flying in the centre, and halting only to close in and connect where necessary; the latter taking up their respective positions at a gallop, until all were within three hundred yards of the Sikh batteries; but notwithstanding the regularity, the soldier-like coolness, and the scientific character of the assault … so terrible was the roar of musketry, the fire of heavy cannons, and of those pestilential little guns called ‘zumboorucks’ and so fast fell our dead and wounded beneath them all that it seemed impossible that the trenches could ever be won … But very soon the whole of our centre and right could see the gallant soldiery … swarming in scarlet masses over the banks, breastworks and fascines, driving the Sikhs before them within the area of their own defences over which the yellow and red colours of the 10th and 53rd were flying; and no less gallant was the bearing of the 43rd and 59th Native Infantry, who were brigaded with them and swept in with them ‘shoulder to shoulder’.16

‘Oh what a sight to sit on your horse,’ wrote John Pearman, ‘to look at those brave fellows as they tried several times to get into the enemy’s camp; and at last they did, but oh, what a loss of human life. God only knows who will have to answer for it.’17

The Sikh soldier Hookum Singh watched the same awesome spectacle from behind his zumbooruk on the rampart:

Nearer and nearer they came, as steadily as if they were on their own parade ground, and in perfect silence. A creeping feeling came over me; this silence seemed so unnatural. We Sikhs are, as you know, brave, but when we attack we begin firing our muskets and shouting our famous war-cry, but these men, saying never a word, advanced in perfect silence. They appeared to me as demons, evil spirits, bent on our destruction, and I could hardly refrain from firing.

At last the order came, ‘Fire’, and our whole battery as if from one gun fired into the advancing mass. The smoke was so great that for a moment I could not see the effect of our fire, but fully expected that we had destroyed the demons, so, what was my astonishment, when the smoke cleared away, to see them still advancing in perfect silence, but their numbers reduced to about one half. Loading my cannon, I fired again and again, making a gap or lane in their ranks each time; but on they came, in that awful silence, till they were within a short distance of our guns, when their colonel ordered them to halt and take breath, which they did under a heavy fire. Then, with a shout, such as only angry demons could give and which is still ringing in my ears, they made a rush for our guns, led by their colonel. In ten minutes it was all over; they leapt into the deep ditch or moat to our front, soon filling it, and then swarming up the opposite side on the shoulders of their comrades, dashed for the guns, which were still defended by a strong body of our infantry, who fought bravely. But who could withstand such fierce demons, with those awful bayonets, which they preferred to their guns – for not a shot did they fire the whole time – then, with a ringing cheer, which was heard for miles, they announced their victory.18

The cheer was premature. The Sikhs ‘took not the slightest notice’ of the fire of skirmishers thrown forward, on Gough’s orders, by Gilbert and Smith, but concentrated their efforts on counter-attacking Dick’s division, which was gradually forced back, out of the captured batteries. Sir Robert himself, a veteran of the Peninsular War, had already fallen, shot through the head. Gough’s plan lay in ruins, but he immediately ordered Gilbert and Smith to convert their feint attacks into real ones. As Gilbert’s men moved forward against earthworks so high that they could not be climbed without scaling ladders, even Gough’s courage faltered briefly. ‘Good God,’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ll be annihilated.’ Ensign Percy Innes, of the Bengal European Regiment, attacking with Gilbert’s division wrote of how:

The air, charged with sulphur, was stifling and so heated that it was almost unbearable. Now on rushed the Bengal European regiment with a determination which promised to carry everything before it; soon reaching the ditch which formed the outer defence, and springing into it, they found themselves confronted by massive walls, which in the distance had appeared less formidable, for now they found these works too high to escalade without ladders. To retire again was to encounter the storm of fire through which they had just passed, to remain in their present position was annihilation; therefore the Regiment, mortified and chagrined, was forced to seek shelter under cover of the bank of the dry river which it had left just a short time before.19

Harry Smith ordered his division forward as soon as he received the order to attack. Captain Longworth, who ended the day commanding HM’s 31st, later reported that the advance:

was no sooner discovered by the enemy than they opened upon us a most tremendous fire of round shot from the whole of the guns upon the left flank of their entrenched camp; shell, grape, canister and a very heavy fire of musketry were showered upon us as we neared the fortifications – but in spite of this, I am proud to say, the regiment advanced steadily and in the best order till within thirty paces of the entrenched camp, when a most destructive fire from overpowering numbers forced us to retire for a short distance, for the purpose of re-forming, as we left a full third of the regiment on the ground … 20

The 50th sets off in the wake of the 31st, in a line two-deep, its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Petit, with the colour party in the centre, captains on the right flank of their companies and sergeants and subalterns to the rear.21 Darby Fulcher marches just behind the centre of his company, smacking out the step with the steady drumbeat of ‘The Grenadiers’ March’, to which his comrades are entitled. The men are now stepping ‘uncommon stiff an’ slow’, with the straight-legged gait of fighting dogs, and are already walking over dead and wounded from the 31st. Some of these unfortunates still have fight left in them, and shout: ‘Come on, the old half-hundred! Pay them off for Mudki! Take the Brummagem to them, my darlings.’22 The fire from the embankment just 300 yards ahead is simply prodigious, with yellow flashes piercing a wall of white smoke, a mass of metal whooping overhead, some roundshot clearly visible as they bound along, and gusts of grape kicking up the yellow earth and clipping holes in the line.

The men are dressing by the centre, glancing in occasionally to take station on the colours, and closing in to left or right as comrades are hit. Lieutenant Colonel Petit is still mounted (he had a horse shot under him at Mudki) and is in more danger at his height than he would be four feet lower, for a lot of the fire is going high. An officer will later admit that: ‘It is a miracle that we were not properly riddled, but … the guns had so sunk in the sand that the gunners could not depress the muzzles sufficiently, and therefore most of the grape went over our heads.’23 Petit shouts something inaudible, raises his drawn sword and sweeps it down to the left. Almost immediately a ruffle ripples out from the centre as drummers relay the order, and captains shout: ‘By the left … left incline.’ The battalion begins to swing like a great gate, pivoting on the light company, on its left, whose men are scarcely moving, their sergeants hissing: ‘By the left … Step short, step short.’ The grenadiers, in contrast, have ground to make up, and stride out boldly. Petit is edging leftwards to avoid the worst of the carnage ahead, and when he is satisfied with the new alignment, his sword comes up. Another burst of drumming, and captains repeat: ‘By the centre … For … ward.’

The change of direction is little help. The ramparts are now only 100 yards ahead, and it is all too clear that the 31st has reached the end of its tether. Its commanding officer has been knocked from his horse by a flurry of grapeshot which has bent his sword double, and the regiment begins to drift backwards like tide ebbing from rocks, coming straight for the advancing line of the 50th. Lieutenant Colonel Petit’s sword-point comes up again. ‘50th … division into column … Quick march,’ he yells, and the drumbeats ripple out again. This time each of the companies swings from line into its own small column. Towards the end of his long life, Colour Sergeant Thompson still recalled the moment well:

The thing that impressed me most in the whole campaign, was the steadiness with which the 50th at Sobraon, formed fours under tremendous fire, to allow the 31st, who were retreating in disorder, to pass through their ranks, and then formed up as if on parade … You know how catching a panic is, and it struck me as a most trying ordeal.24

With the survivors of the 31st safely through, the eight little columns close back into line at once. There are shrieks just ahead, for some Sikhs have dashed down to cut up the wounded in the ditch. At its very edge the 50th halts, fires a single volley at point-bank range – its men aiming for the embrasures and parapet – and then charges, not with the coarse bark of formal hurrahs, but with a dreadful, sobbing, throaty roar. The Sikhs, wholly undaunted, wave swords and muskets, and shriek out their own war-cry ‘Sat Sri Akal’. Some attackers scramble up the earthworks, jump through the embrasures and set about the gunners who, true to form, lash out with rammers and handspikes. But most edge to the right, along the ditch, and begin to fan out across a narrow strip of open ground between the northernmost bastion and the river. Lieutenant Colonel Petit is down, and command passes quickly amongst the captains as they too are hit.

Not that command means much now, with the regiment breaking up into little knots of men laying on with bayonet and butt. Most soldiers are giving clean, straight thrusts, as they have been taught, but some, in the passion of the moment, swing the bayonet upwards with ‘the haymaker’s lift’ that can carry a skewered opponent right off his feet. It is not a tactic to be recommended, for sometimes the bayonet snaps clean off, and this is no place to be defenceless. Sergeant Major Cantwell has just run a Sikh ensign through with his sword and seized his colour when he himself is cut down by a vicious blow from a tulwar (the Hindustani for sword): his body, stripped and gashed, will be found in the ditch at the end of the fighting.

The 31st has already recovered itself not far behind, and it too returns to the attack, quickly losing Lieutenant Tritton, who has carried the Queen’s colour and Ensign Jones, with the regimental colour. Lieutenant Noel picks up the fallen Queen’s colour, and pushes on round the edge of the earthworks, while Sergeant Bernard McCabe takes the regimental colour and plants it on the rampart. Harry Smith has fought in dozens of battles in his fifty-seven years, and won his Spanish bride, Juanita, on that dreadful night in April 1812 when Wellington’s army stormed the Spanish town of Badajoz. But what followed his division’s entry into the Sikh entrenchment exceeded anything he had ever seen:

And such a hand to hand contest ensued, for twenty-five minutes I could barely hold my own. Mixed together, swords and targets against bayonets, and a fire on both sides. I was never in such a personal fight for half the time, but my bull-dogs of the Thirty-first and old 50th stood up like men, well supported by the native regiments …

In another letter he wrote that: ‘The old Thirty-first and 50th laid on like devils. This last was a brutal bull-dog fight.’25

Although nobody on this part of the field has the least idea of it, the attackers have made good progress elsewhere, though at terrible cost. In the centre Gilbert is wounded and both his brigade commanders are dead, but at their third attempt his men have managed to get up onto the Sikh parapet by scrambling up on one another’s shoulders. There is movement on Gough’s left too, where Dick’s men are up on the rampart and beginning to seep down behind it. Whatever Gough’s limitations, he has an acute sense for the balance of a battle, and knows that this one has now begun to tilt his way. Part of Major General Sir Joseph Thackwell’s cavalry division is at hand, and he orders it forward. ‘It was now our turn,’ wrote John Pearman;

It was given: ‘Forward, 3rd King’s Own Light Dragoons,’ an order the colonel used when he was in a good temper. On we went by the dead and dying, and partly over the poor fellows, and up the parapet our horses scrambled. One of the Sikh artillery men struck at me with his sponge staff but missed me, hitting my horse on the hindquarters which made the horse bend down. I cut round at him but cannot say where, as there was such a smoke on. I went with the rest through the Camp at their battalions which we broke up.26

There would later follow an unedifying squabble as to whose attack was actually decisive, with Thackwell complaining that Gough’s dispatch did not do sufficient justice to his charge. But it seems true to say that it was the simultaneous concentric attack that was the Sikhs’ undoing. Nor were they helped by the fact that Tej Singh, their commander in chief, who had been in treasonable dealings with the British, had fled during the night. Yet even now this, the most formidable army ever encountered by the British in India, fought it out resolutely. Old Sham Singh, comrade-in-arms of Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh State, had sworn to conquer or die, and Captain J. D. Cunningham saw that he was as good as his word.

Calling on all around to fight for the Guru, who had promised everlasting bliss to the brave, he repeatedly rallied his shattered ranks, and at last fell a martyr on a heap of his slain countrymen. Others might be seen standing on the ramparts amongst a shower of balls, waving defiance with their swords, or telling the gunners where the fair-headed English pressed closest together … The parapets were sprinkled with blood from end to end; the trenches were filled with the dead and the dying. Amid the deafening roar of cannon, and the multitudinous fire of musketry, shouts of triumph or scorn were yet heard, and the flashing of innumerable swords was yet visible; from time to time exploding magazines of powder threw bursting shells and beams of wood and banks of earth high above the agitated sea of smoke and flame which enveloped the hosts of combatants … 27

As the Sikhs began to give way, slowly and stubbornly, they found that ‘by a strange fatality’ the Sutlej had risen seven feet during the night because of rain upstream, and was now unfordable. The single bridge was their only means of escape, and Captain Arthur Hardinge, serving on his father’s staff, watched what happened:

I saw the bridge at that moment overcrowded with guns, horses, and soldiers of all arms, swaying to and fro, till at last with a crash it disappeared into the running waters, carrying with it all those who had vainly hoped to reach the opposite shore. The artillery, now brought down to the water’s edge, completed the slaughter. Few escaped; none, it may be said, surrendered.28

Robert Cust, also on Hardinge’s staff, wrote that:

The stream was choked with the dead and dying – the sandbags were covered with bodies floating leisurely down. It was an awful scene, fearful carnage. The dead Sikh lay inside his trenches – the dead European marked too distinctively the line each regiment had taken, the advance. The living Europeans remarked that nought could resist the bayonet … Our loss was heavy and the ground was here and there strewn with the slain, among whom I recognised a fine and handsome lad whom I had well known, young Hamilton, brother of Alistair Stewart. There he lay, his auburn hair weltering in his blood, his forehead fearfully gashed, fingers cut off. Still warm, but quite dead.29

Subadar Sita Ram, attacking with his regiment of Bengal Native Infantry, recalled that ‘not one’ of the Sikhs asked for quarter. But as he approached the bridge he saw:

an English soldier about to bayonet a wounded Sikh. To my surprise, the man begged for mercy, a thing no Sikh had ever been known to do during the war. The soldier then pulled off the man’s turban and jacket, and after this I saw him kick the prostrate man and then run him through several times with his bayonet. Several other soldiers kicked the body with great contempt and ran their bayonets through it. I was told later that this was a deserter from some European regiment who had been fighting with the Sikhs against his comrades.30

The fighting was over by midday. The Sikhs had lost around 8–10,000 men, many of them drowned in the Sutlej, lashed into ‘bloody foam’ by British grapeshot, and all the guns they had taken south of the river. Gough’s little army suffered 2,283 killed and wounded. Private Richard Perkes of the Bengal Europeans, who maintained an irregular correspondence with his brother in England, announced:

I have been in the two greatest battles that ever were fought in India that is Frosheshaw and Saboon. I have gone through the whole of it without receiving one scar which I am very sorry to say that a great many of my comrades his laid low. It was a miracle how any off us escaped for the balls had yoused to come as thick as a shower of hail the same I wish never to see again.31

The burden had fallen most heavily on the British infantry, although there was widespread agreement that the Indian troops, heartened by Harry Smith’s neat little victory at Aliwal, had fought much better than at Mudki or Ferozeshah. Sita Ram admitted that: ‘It is well known that the sepoys dreaded the Sikhs as they were very strong men, but in spite of everything their officers led them on.’32 And amongst the native troops it was the newly raised Gurkhas of the Naisiri and Simoor Battalions that attracted most interest. Bombardier Bancroft wrote that: ‘Our two battalions of Goorkhas, active and ferocious Nepalese armed with the short weapon of their native mountains, were a source of great terror to the Sikhs throughout the conflict and the subsequent fight.’33

The survivors of the 50th formed up just outside the Sikh entrenchment under the command of Lieutenant Wiley, the senior surviving officer. Although the regiment was no stranger to loss, this had been a terrible battle, on a par with Ferozeshah. One lieutenant, the sergeant major, a sergeant and forty-three men lay dead; eleven officers, eight sergeants, a drummer and 177 men lay wounded. Lieutenant Colonel Petit survived his wound to be appointed a Companion of the Bath for this day’s work.

Gough’s victory at Sobraon brought the war to an immediate end. He was rewarded with a peerage, becoming Baron Gough of Chinkiangfoo in China and of Maharajpore and the Sutlej in the East Indies, with a pension of £2,000 a year from the government and another £2,000 from the East India Company. The Governor-General became Viscount Hardinge of Lahore and Durham, with an even more generous pension. Juanita Smith became doubly a lady, for Harry was created a baronet with ‘of Aliwal’ added as special distinction, but sadly there was no son to inherit the title.

Drummer Fulcher would rank rather lower in the list of rewards. He had jettisoned his drum after it was stove in by a piece of canister-shot and defended himself during the worst of the fighting with a discarded musket (using techniques more appropriate to alleys behind Portsmouth’s Commercial Road than to anything taught on the drill-square), received a nasty sword-cut behind the ear and ran his bayonet clean through the Sikh that inflicted it. More than a century later we might expect a young man to be indelibly marked by what he has seen and done, but Bandicoot Fulcher is showing little sign of it. Rum-and-water grog is being served out as the men are forming up, and it is clear that the quartermaster has overestimated the requirement: today almost half the 50th is taking its dram elsewhere. Fulcher receives a double ration of grog, and has already pocketed 30 Sikh nanaukshaee rupees and an assortment of lesser coins, the result of a little light pillaging amongst the dead up on the rampart. He will later receive a medal with the ribbon colours of Waterloo reversed, ‘which we all got. We also got twelve months batta [extra pay] and prize money, £7 12s 6d.’34 It might take Fulcher’s mother six months of hasty couplings to make as much. There are worse things, he thinks, than to be eighteen – pockets full of cash and head full of rum – and alive in a landscape so thickly populated by the dead.

I IN INDIA’S SUNNY CLIME

Now in Injia’s sunny clime,

Where I used to spend my time