Wellington: The Iron Duke

Major General Wellesley moved off in March 1803, his own army numbering just under 15,000 men, with a Hyderabad force of nearly 9,000 also under his command. He was well aware that his task was to restore the Peshwa but not to bring about a wider war with the Marathas as he did so. In fact, there was no resistance. The careful preparations ensured that the march of some 600 miles was swift, and rigid discipline ensured that local inhabitants were not alienated by plundering. His leading cavalry reached Poona on 20 April, but the Peshwa would not re-enter his capital till 13 May, when the stars were propitious. Wellesley observed that he was ‘a prince, the only principle of whose character is insincerity’. He made heavy weather of re-establishing himself, but at the same time was already negotiating with the other Maratha princes. In May, Holkar raided into Hyderabad territory, replying civilly to Wellesley’s letter of remonstrance, stating that the Nizam of Hyderabad owed him money. The Nizam was in fact mortally ill, which induced Stuart in Madras to send troops to Hyderabad to help maintain order. This added to the political tension between the Marathas and the Company. Although open war was still not inevitable, Scindia was striving to draw the other Maratha chiefs into a coalition against the British.

Wellesley, as usual, was preoccupied with his logistics. His line of communication ran back down to Mysore, and although he did his best to ensure against its collapse when the monsoon came – locally-made coracles, ‘basket boats’, were stockpiled at all likely river-crossings – it would be much easier if he could open a shorter line to Bombay. However, the authorities there lacked his own attention to detail, and sent him pontoons for river-crossing at the moment when the weather broke, and the wagons carrying them foundered on the very first day. Stuart generously told the governor-general that he had no wish to take command, for Wellesley’s ‘extensive knowledge and influence … and his eminent military talents’ made him ideally suited for the appointment in which, Stuart was sure, his army would render ‘very distinguished services’. Accordingly, in June 1803, an order from Mornington gave Wellesley full military and political authority in central India, and he immediately ordered Colonel John Collins, British Resident at Scindia’s camp still on Maratha territory, now close to the Nizam of Hyderabad’s fortress of Ajanta, to ask Scindia precisely what he objected to in the treaty of Bassein. Wellesley was prepared to make minor concessions and was anxious not to fire the first shot in a new war. On 25 June, he told Colonel James Stevenson, his principal subordinate, that: ‘It will be our duty to carry out the war, with activity, when it shall begin, but it is equally so to avoid hostilities, if we possibly can …’29 On 3 August, Collins reported that Scindia and the Rajah of Berar would give no direct answer to his demands, and had left for the Nizam’s nearby fortress of Aurungabad. Wellesley at once announced that he was obliged to go to war ‘in order to secure the interests of the British government and its allies’.30

The Maratha armies looked formidable on paper. The core of Scindia’s invading force was his regular infantry, about 15,000 strong, which was trained and led by European officers and organised in brigades called ‘compoos’, including some cavalry and a few guns. Colonel Pohlmann, once a sergeant in a Hanoverian regiment in British service, commanded the largest, with about 7,500 men; the Begum Somroo, widow of a German mercenary who had become one of Scindia’s vassals, had recruited a slightly smaller force, commanded on her behalf by Colonel Saleur, and Colonel Baptiste Filoze, of Neapolitan-Indian ancestry, commanded a third. Scindia’s army had about eighty field pieces and a few heavier guns. His irregular troops included 10–20,000 infantry, and there were something between 30–60,000 light cavalry.

The governor-general had tried to persuade British subjects serving the Marathas to relinquish their posts, promising them employment if they did so and prosecution for treason if they refused. Some were certainly reluctant to fight. ‘John Roach Englishman and George Blake Scotsman lately commanding each a gun in the service of the Begum’ informed Wellesley that they ‘left camp by permission upon remonstrance against being employed to fight’ and told their countrymen all they knew.31 Stewart, an officer of Pohlmann’s compoo, also joined the British as soon as he could, as did Grant, brigade major (chief of staff) to one of the compoos. But some certainly stayed to fight, for Wellesley told Colonel Collins that some of his wounded had been killed by the cavalry attached to the compoos, and a British officer in enemy service had been heard to say to another: ‘You understand the language better than I do. Desire the jemadar [native junior officer] of that body of horse to go and cut up those wounded European soldiers.’32

Wellesley had already decided that he must act boldly. He told Colonel Stevenson that ‘the best thing you can do is to move forward yourself with the Company’s cavalry and all the Nizam’s and dash at the first party that comes into your neighbourhood … A long defensive war would ruin us and will answer no purpose whatever.’33 On 8 August 1803, he broke camp and marched to Ahmednuggur, the nearest Maratha-held fort. It was held by one of Scindia’s regular battalions under French officers and about 1,000 reliable Arab mercenaries, but Wellesley believed that this was too small a force to hold the fort and the surrounding town (the pettah), although both were walled. He determined to carry the town by assault, using ladders to scale the walls, without preliminary bombardment. The 78th Highlanders led the assault, and when they were beaten back, a lieutenant of the grenadier company, Colin Campbell – who was to die a general in 1847-hung his claymore from his wrist with a scarf to climb the better, and laid about him when he topped the wall. Other units entered elsewhere, and in twenty minutes the town was taken. One of the Peshwa’s officers summed it all up:

The English are a strange people, and their General a wonderful man. They came here in the morning, looked at the pettah wall, walked over it, killed the garrison, and returned to breakfast! What can withstand them?34

The fort capitulated on the 12th once Wellesley’s guns had breached the wall and the assaulting columns were formed and ready.

With Ahmednuggur in his hands, Wellesley snapped up all Scindia’s possessions south of the Godavari, and then crossed the river with an army of 2,200 Europeans and 5,000 sepoys, with 2,200 light cavalry from Mysore and 4,000 of the Peshwa’s cavalry. He reached Aurungabad, on the edge of the Nizam’s territory, on 29 August, and rode on to meet Colonel Collins, encamped just to the north. Collins told him that he need not worry about the Maratha horse – ‘You may ride over them, General, whenever you meet them’ – but his regulars were a different matter altogether. Collins had seen Scindia’s army at close quarters for five months, and declared that: ‘Their infantry and the guns attached to it will surprise you.’35

Wellesley was at Aurungabad, and Stevenson, with more than 10,000 men, was at Kolsah, a hundred miles away to the east. At first Wellesley feared that the Maratha cavalry, up on the frontier between these two forces, would use its superior mobility to raid deep into the Nizam’s territory. After nearly a month of shadow-boxing Wellesley and Stevenson met at Budnapoor on 21st September, and agreed a plan by which the two armies, moving separately, would manoeuvre in order to catch Scindia’s main army in or around Borkardan. The first phase went well enough, and Wellesley reached Paugy and Stevenson Khamagaon on the 22nd September. On the following day, Wellesley’s force, which as usual had left camp well before dawn so as to complete most of its marching before the heat of the day, reached Naulniah just before midday. Borkardan was another ten miles on, and camp was already being laid out when a cavalry troop brought in some brinjarries who reported that the Maratha army, with three compoos and abundant cavalry, was not at Borkardan at all. It was much closer, on the far bank of the River Kaitna, under the command of Colonel Pohlmann.

Wellesley went forward with a strong cavalry escort and reached a spot from which he could see the Marathas, in all perhaps 200,000 strong, in the process of breaking camp. As he later told the governor-general, ‘it was obvious that the attack was to be no longer delayed’.36 If he waited for Stevenson, the Marathas would slip away, but if he attacked at once they must either fight, or flee and abandon their guns. He quickly discarded the option of a frontal assault, and instead led his army parallel with the river as far as the village of Peepulgaon. Just across the river lay the village of Waroor, and he decided that the villages would not have been built so close together without ‘some habitual means of communication’ between them: there simply had to be a ford.

I visited the battlefield in September 2001. The monsoon was late, but the heavens had finally opened when I flew in to Aurungabad the day before. Although two four-wheel drive vehicles took us out to the battlefield through the smoky early morning bustle of village India, the rivers had all risen alarmingly and the tracks were pure mud. North of Peepulgaon we borrowed a tractor and trailer, and slithered our way to the River Kaitna, looking, like Wellesley two hundred years earlier, for a ford. We found it just where Wellesley had expected it to be, between the two villages. I have long felt that there is a particular merit to viewing a battlefield from horseback: that extra few feet of height improves the view, and horses can go where most vehicles cannot. Rani, a tricolour Kathiawari horse with the breed’s signature ears – furry equine radars that curve round to cross above the horse’s head and seem capable of 360-degree movement – was not at her best after three hours in the back of a truck. As I nudged her down the muddy slope into the fast-flowing Kaitna, my spirits, cast down by the weather and worries about more floods, lifted.

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