Sir Charles Napier

At another station there is a young officer under arrest, awaiting the decision of the Commander-in-Chief upon his court-martial. He has been tried on a charge of having forgotten the respect due to his captain on a certain delicate occasion. The proofs were painfully clear; the young man had been convicted and sentenced to be cashiered. But there were many mitigating circumstances in the case; the officer was very young, and there was ample reason for supposing that the fruit he had stolen had not required much shaking. The Commander-in-Chief read the case carefully. "Sentence quashed," he wrote on the margin. "History records but one Joseph; this officer will return to his duty." These things, however, were but the play-moments of his progress; very serious matters soon claimed attention. In July, 1849, symptoms of mutiny began to manifest themselves in at least two regiments of Bengal Native Infantry stationed in the Punjaub. In November certain corps ordered to proceed to the Punjaub from Delhi openly showed insubordination. In December still graver signs of revolt occurred. The Thirty-Second Bengal Native Infantry refused to accept their pay, and mutinously demanded increased rates. The presence of a veteran general officer quelled this outbreak at Wuzzerabad, but a still more serious instance of insubordination was soon to manifest itself. In February, 1850, the Sixty-Sixth Regiment of Bengal Infantry broke into open mutiny at Govind Ghur, a suburb of Umritsur the sacred city of the Sikhs. The mutineers endeavoured to seize the fort, containing vast stores of arms and a large amount of treasure and ammunition. Again the vigorous action of an officer saved the gates, and a European regiment arriving in the nick of time overawed the rebellious Bengalees.

All these signs and portents of trouble were not lost upon the Commander-in-Chief; his resolution was quickly taken. By a stroke of the pen he disbanded the mutinous regiment, and put in its place a battalion of Ghoorka troops. The Governor-General was absent on a sea-voyage for the benefit of his health when this last alarming outbreak occurred at Umritsur. The case was urgent, the danger pressing. Twenty-four other Bengal regiments stationed in the Punjaub were known to be in close sympathy with the Sixty-Sixth; if the insubordination spread, the Sikh fires of resistance so lately quenched at Goojerat would again burst into flame. Gholab Singh was ready in Cashmere with a well-filled treasury and a large army to join the conflagration. The very existence of our Indian rule stood in peril. Napier was not the man to waste precious moments at such a crisis in seeking for precedents or covering his actions with the sanction of higher authority obtained by delay. He took three important steps.

Rightly judging that at such a moment any reduction of pay below the existing standard would give the discontent of the native troops a tangible and certain line of resistance, he directed that the promulgation of an order of the supreme Government, which would reduce the sepoys' allowances for rations below the standard then existing, and which had been originally framed chiefly to save the clerks in Calcutta trouble in their official documents, should be suspended, pending the result of a reference which would be made to the supreme Government on the subject. He next struck a crushing blow at the actual offenders in mutiny, by summarily disbanding the rebellious corps. And lastly he struck another vital blow at the entire Brahmin spirit of revolt, by enlisting Ghoorkas and putting them in the vacant places of the Bengalees, giving the new Ghoorka battalion the colours and number of the disbanded regiment.

Reviewing these lines of action now – even without the terrible after-light of the great Mutiny to guide our decision – it would be difficult for any sane man to find aught in them but ground for unqualified approval. They contain, indeed, such manifest evidences of sense and reason, that the man would appear to be bereft of the most elementary common sense who could find fault with them; and yet, incredible though it may well appear, not only was censure passed upon Napier for his action in this matter, but it was conveyed in such a rough and overbearing manner that the old soldier deemed it inconsistent with his honour to serve longer under such "shop-keeping" superiors. No other word can so fitly express the mental calibre of the men whose censure drove Charles Napier from the Indian command, and it is here used in a sense quite different from the usual caste acceptation of the term. The soldier and the shop-keeper must ever remain at opposite poles of thought. At their best, one goes out to fight for his country, and if necessary to die for it; the other remains at home to live, and to live well by it. At their worst, one acquires by force from the enemy, the other absorbs by fraud from his friends. But between the best and the worst there is a vast class of mental shop-keeping people who, although they do not keep any shops, are nevertheless always behind the counter, always asking themselves, "Will it pay?" always totting up a mental ledger, in which there is no double entry but only a single one of self. Nothing would be more delusive than to imagine this great class had any fixed limits of caste, rank, or profession. It may have been so once; it is not so now, nor has it been so for many generations. It reaches very high up the ladder now. It has titles, estates, coats-of-arms, moors, mountains, and the rest of it. It can be very prominent in both Houses of Parliament. But there is one thing it can never be, and that thing is a true soldier.

It can wear uniform and rise to high military rank, and have thousands of men serving under it, but for all that, we repeat, it can never be a real soldier – and the reason is simple, nowhere to be found more straightly stated than by a very deep thinker of our own time, who says: "I find this more and more true every day, that an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift of all truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people, quite terrific to such if they are capable of terror, and hateful to them if they are capable of nothing higher than hatred." There we have the whole story of Napier and his antagonists. There we have the explanation of what Balzac meant when he wrote, "There is nothing so terrible as the vengeance of the shop-keeper." Throughout more than forty years of his fighting life, Charles Napier was exposed to that hatred and that vengeance. It could not have been otherwise. To be hated is often the price the hero must pay in life for the love his name is to gather round it after death.

One little gleam of soldier service came to brighten these last months of so-called command in India. It was an expedition through the Kohat Pass on the northern frontier. The tribe of Afridees, incensed at an order of the Civil Government stopping their supply of salt, had risen, massacred a detachment of soldiers, and occupied the pass, cutting off the station of Kohat. Three days after the news of the disaster to the troops reached Napier, he had organised his column and was in march for Kohat. He fought his way through the pass, relieved the post, and fought his way back again. It was the last flicker of the flame which had begun forty-one years before in the march to Corunna. The last fighting item in the journal is suggestive of many thoughts. A young ensign had been shot in the pass, another officer was mortally wounded; forty years of war and death in the battlefield had not dulled the "infinitude of tenderness" in the old soldier's heart. "My God," he writes, "how hateful is war! yet better die gloriously like young Sitwell than as my dear John did in the agonies of cholera"; then recollecting that the true soldier has no more right to pick and choose the manner of his death than he has to pick and choose the manner of his life, he goes on: "Fool that I am, to think Sitwell's death the best! We know nothing. How can I know anything about it? It was the impulse of a fool to think one death better than another. Prepare to die bravely, and let death come in whatever form it pleases God to send him." So closes the military record. A little later he wrote again: "I shall now go to Oaklands [his home in Hampshire], and look at my father's sword, and think of the day he gave it into my young hands, and of the motto on a Spanish blade he had, 'Draw me not without cause; put me not up without honour.' I have not drawn his sword without cause, nor put it up without honour."

Charles Napier returned from his last fight at Kohat to find the reprimand of the Indian Government awaiting him. He at once resigned. He was quite prepared to stifle his personal feelings in the matter, but the sense of his powerlessness to remedy the evil he so plainly saw decided him. He would no longer remain accountable to the country for disaster he was helpless to prevent, exposed to a hundred secret shafts of his antagonists, and certain to find his old enemies, the Directors of Leadenhall Street, bitterly hostile to him, except when danger menaced their ill-gotten possession. He remembered also that fifty-two years earlier he had seen "that great and good soldier, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, resign command in Ireland because he could not agree with the civil government." Yes, he would resign. The Hampshire home looked pleasant from afar. What memories, what perfumes these garden-walks have for the tired toiler in life! What violet so sweet, what rose so thornless as those we see, looking back to some garden that has been, looking forward to one that can never be! Although Napier resigned his command in April he did not leave India until the following spring, having to await the arrival of his successor. The intervening months were not idly spent. To the latest moment of his stay he laboured to improve the army he loved so well, to instil into the officer higher ideals of duty and nobler purpose of life, and to improve the condition of the man in the ranks, who to him was now, as always, never "a common soldier." Feeling certain that the dreadful mortality then existing among the European troops in India resulted solely from the wretched barrack accommodation which the parsimony of the Government would only allow, he laboured incessantly to shame the Administration into more liberal and humane concession. Yet in this noble effort he was constantly thwarted. The height of his barrack-rooms was reduced, the materials for construction lessened. In vain he showed that sufficient cubic space meant thousands of lives annually saved, that height of the sleeping-rooms above the ground meant freedom from fevers and dysenteries. The various Boards of Control and clerks in Calcutta were not to be moved by such considerations. Terrible examples were before these various Boards and Directorates, but still they were not to be convinced. After the battles of the Sutlej the remains of a splendid regiment, the Fiftieth, were sent to occupy one of these ill-built death-traps at Loodiana. In one fell night the entire building collapsed, and three hundred men, women, and children perished in the ruins. Of course it was nobody's fault. The regulations had been strictly adhered to – and does not everybody know that regulation is infallible? Did they not once let a king of Spain burn to death in his palace because the regulation extinguisher of royal fires was not present at the conflagration?

In the autumn of 185 °Charles Napier set out on the homeward journey. The last scenes in India were pleasant to the old soldier about to close his long and eventful career. He reviews once more his own favourite Twenty-Second Regiment and presents them with new colours. The soldiers of Meanee and Hyderabad received their chief with a frantic enthusiasm and delight that more than made amends for the neglect of the great and powerful; and the entire army too, whose deep heart the follies and the fashions of the moment cannot reach, bent its head as the old hero passed; and whatever was honest and independent and noble – and there was plenty of each in the Civil Service of India – laid its tribute of respect in his path, until from Simla to Scinde and on to Bombay the long sun of his military life seemed to be setting in waves of glory. But the tribute of honour that touched him deepest was a magnificent sword which the sirdars and chiefs of Scinde presented to him at Hyderabad. Nearly eight years earlier these men had fought against Napier at Meanee and Dubba. He had honoured their bravery in the hour of their misfortune. Now about to quit, under a cloud of official censure everywhere made public, the scene of his toil and glory, they, his old enemies, came to lay at his feet this token of their admiration.

CHAPTER XIV

HOME – LAST ILLNESS – DEATH

In March, 1851, Napier reached England. Many times, returning from some scene of war or foreign service, had he seen the white cliffs rise out of the blue waves. This was to be his last arrival, and perhaps it was the saddest in all his life. "I retire with a reprimand," he had said a few months earlier; and although he tried hard to keep in view the fact that in circumstances of sudden and grave danger to the State he had acted firmly, courageously, honestly, and with absolute sense and wisdom in every step he had taken, still all that only served to drive deeper into his injustice-hating heart the sting of unmerited and unjust censure.

He came home to die. Not all at once, indeed, did the end come. Such gnarled old oaks do not wither of a sudden, no matter how rude may be the shock; but the iron had entered into his soul, and the months of life that still remained were to be chiefly passed in pain and suffering. At first, after his arrival, business took him to London, and the long-dreamt-of happy gardening-ground in Hampshire was denied him. All through life he had hated the great city. "To be in London is to be a beast – a harnessed and driven beast – and nothing more," he writes. Neither its dinners nor its compliments nor its "pompous insolence" had ever given him the least concern. Like another great soldier who, in this year, 1851, was about to begin that military career which was to render his name so famous, Charles Napier had a contempt for the capital of his country. When the Directors of the East India Company had been on their knees to him, and the Lord Mayor and the rest of the great dining dignitaries had been begging his attendance at their banquets during the Punjaub disasters, he had not been in the least elated; and neither now was he depressed by their studied neglect of him when danger had passed by. "I never was in spirits at a London party," he writes, "since I came out of my teens."

In April he gets away to Oaklands, and prepares to settle down to the repose of a country life. "At last a house of mine own," he says. "All my life I have longed for this." But scarcely is he at home ere the disease, contracted in Scinde, increased in India, and aggravated by the ill-usage of the past year, brings him to the verge of death. He rallies again, but his thoughts are now set upon the great leave-taking. In his journal we seem to see him all the clearer as the end approaches. "When I die may the poor regret me," he writes; "if they do, their judgment will be more in my favour than anything else. My pride and happiness through life has been that the soldiers loved me… I treated every soldier as my friend and comrade, whatever his rank was." What a contempt he has for the upstart in uniform, the martinet, the thing with the drawl and eyeglass! "As military knowledge decays, aristocratic, or rather upstart arrogance, increases," he writes. "A man of high breeding is hand and glove with his men, while the son of your millionaire hardly speaks to a soldier." Then he turns to the "coming world and all those I hope to meet there – Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar, Napoleon, and my father." But the long-looked-for peace of life in the country – the garden, the pets, and the rest of it – is not to be. He has a beautiful Pyrenean dog, Pastor by name. A neighbouring farmer wantonly shoots this noble animal. Napier tries to punish the man at law. The case is clear against the dog-killer, but the local jury acquits him in spite of judge and evidence. "Trial by jury is a farce," we read in the journal. "Why, if Goslin [the dog-killer] had murdered his wife and child, they [the jury] could not have treated him more gently!"

Then come other worries of a more serious character. The East India Directors are doing all that wealth and power can do to take from him his Scinde prize-money. He was not the Commander-in-Chief of the army, they say, with a monstrous effrontery; and of course they have anonymous scribblers everywhere at work to blacken and defame their enemy. So, between the local numskull murdering his pet dogs and the cosmopolitan master-shop-keeper vilifying his character, the last months of the old soldier's life are vexed and unhappy.

Still, as the end draws nearer many bright gleams of sunshine come to gladden the old man's heart. Not only is the great heart of the nation with him, but all the kings of thought are on his side too. When the great Duke passes to his rest no figure in the throng of war-worn veterans around the coffin was so eagerly sought for as that of the man who, forty-two years earlier, had waved his hat to Lord Wellington when, unable to speak as he was carried desperately wounded from the fierce fight at Busaco, he thought this mute farewell was to be a last adieu. Men noted too with inward sense of satisfaction at the scene in St. Paul's that "the eagle face and bold strong eye" of the veteran who stood by the dead Duke's bier gave promise that England had a great war-leader still left to her.

But the "eagle face and the bold strong eye" were only those echoes of bygone life which are said to be strong as the shadows gather. And the shadows were gathering fast now. In June, 1853, the illness that was to prove mortal began. Still, we find him writing letters to help some old soldier who had served him in Scinde, and in the very last letter that he seems ever to have written, the names of Sergeant Power and Privates Burke and Maloney stand witness to the love for the private soldier which this heroic heart carried to the very verge of the grave. In July he was brought to Oaklands, as he wished that the end should come to him in his own home. There, stretched upon a little camp-bed in a room on the ground-floor of the house, he waited for death. It came with those slow hours of pain and suffering which so frequently mark the passing away of those in whom the spirit of life has been strong, and who have fought death so often that he seems afraid to approach and seize such tough antagonists. Frequently during the weeks of illness the old instincts would assert themselves in the sufferer. He would ask his veteran brother to defend his memory when he was gone, from the attacks of his enemies; or he would send messages through his son-in-law to the "poor soldiers," to tell them how he had loved them; and once he asked that his favourite charger, Red Rover – the horse that had carried him through the storm of battle at Meanee – might be brought to the bedside, so that for a last time he might speak a word to and caress the animal; but the poor beast seemed to realise the mortal danger of his old master, and shrank startled from the sick couch. As the month of August drew to a close it was evident to those who lovingly watched beside the sufferer that the end was close at hand. It came on the early morning of the 29th. The full light of the summer morning was streaming into the room, lighting up the shields, swords, and standards of Eastern fight which hung upon the walls; the old colours of the Twenty-Second, rent and torn by shot, moved gently in the air, fresh with the perfume of the ripened summer; wife, children, brothers, servants, and two veteran soldiers who had stood behind him in battle, watched – some praying, some weeping, some immovable and fixed in their sorrow – the final dissolution; and just as the heroic spirit passed to Him who had sent it upon earth, filled with so many noble aspirations and generous sympathies, a brave man who stood near caught the flags of the Twenty-Second Regiment from their resting-place and waved these shattered emblems of battle above the dying soldier. So closed the life of Charles Napier. When a great soldier who had carried the arms of Rome into remotest regions lay dying in the imperial city, the historian Tacitus tells us that "in the last glimpse of light" the hero "looked with an asking eye for something that was absent." Not so with Napier. Those he had loved so devotedly, those who had fought around him so bravely, those who had shielded his name in life from the malice of enemies, and who were still to do battle for him when he was in the grave – all these loving, true, and faithful figures met his last look on earth.

They laid Charles Napier beneath the grass of the old garrison graveyard in Portsmouth, for the dull resentment of oligarchic faction is strongest in the death of heroes, and a studied silence closed the doors of the two great cathedrals of the capital against ashes which would have honoured even the roll of the mighty dead who sleep within these hallowed precincts. Faction, for the moment dressed in power, forgot that by neglecting to place the body of Charles Napier with his peers, it was only insulting the dust of ten centuries of English heroism; and yet even in this neglect the animosity of power misplaced was but able to effect its own discomfiture, for Napier sleeps in death as he lived in life – among the brave and humble soldiers he had loved to lead; and neither lofty dome nor glory of Gothic cathedral could fitter hold his ashes than the narrow grave beside the shore where the foot of Nelson last touched the soil of England.

It was on September 8th, 1853, that the funeral took place at Portsmouth. Sixty thousand people – and all the soldiers who could come from miles around, not marching as a matter of duty, but flocking of their own accord and at their own expense to do honour to their dead comrade – followed the procession in reverent silence. Well might the soldiers of England mourn, not indeed for the leader but for themselves. Little more than one year had to pass ere these Linesmen, these Highlanders, these Riflemen, and twenty thousand of their brethren, lions though they were, would be dying like sheep on the plateau before Sebastopol – dying for the want of some real leader of men to think for them, to strive for them, to lead them. Two years later to a day, on September 8th, 1855, men looking gloomily at the Russian Redan and its baffled assailants might well remember "the eagle face and bold strong eye" and vainly long for one hour of Meanee's leading.

Nations, no matter how powerful, cannot afford to ill-use or neglect their heroes, for punishment follows swiftly such neglect, and falls where least expected. In an old Irish manuscript that has but lately seen the light, there is given in a few terse words a definition of the attributes of character which go to form a leader of men. "Five things," says this quaint chronicle, "are required in a general. Knowledge, Valour, Foresight, Authoritie, and Fortune. He that is not endowed for all or for most of these virtues is not to be reputed fit for his charge. Nor can this glory be purchased but by practice and proof; for the greatest fencer is not always the best fighter, nor the fairest tilter the ablest soldier, nor the primest favourite in court the fittest commander in camp." How aptly this description of a leader fits Charles Napier the reader can best judge. Knowledge, Valour, and Foresight he possessed to an extraordinary degree. Authority, so pertinaciously denied him by his chiefs, he asserted over men without the smallest difficulty. Fortune in the field was also largely his. How hard he practised to perfect all these gifts, and how repeated was their proof, no one who has read his life will venture to deny. But Charles Napier was many other things besides a great general. He had a hundred gifts and graces of character that must have made him famous in any sphere of life he had selected, and made him famous, not by the passive assent given by his fellows to his possession of some local eminence of character showing large amid the level of their own mediocrity, but by the sheer force of the genius that was in him, the flame of which was certain to force its way to the surface, despite all the efforts of envy to keep it down. Never lived there soldier who had so little greatness thrust upon him. From the day he began his military career to the moment he hung up his father's sword at Oaklands he had to win every grade and every honour three times over. He seemed, indeed, to delight in the consciousness that he possessed this triple power of conquest. Do what they would to deny him, he would go out again and force them to acknowledge him. And it was this inward consciousness of power that made him despise the trappings of rank or position which other men held so high. Like his great ancestor, Henry of Navarre, he laughed at pomp and parade. "Pomp, parade, and severe gravity of expression," said the great Bourbon, "belong to those who feel that without them they would have nothing that would impress respect. By the grace of God I have in myself that which makes me think I am worthy of being a king." So, too, like the Béarnois, Napier grounded his greatness deep down in the welfare of the peasant, in his love for them, and in the first prerogative of true leadership, the right of thinking and toiling for the benefit of the poor and humble. "My predecessors thought themselves dishonoured by knowing the value of a teston," Henry used to say. "I am anxious to know the value of half a denier, and what difficulty the poor have to get it. For I want all my subjects to have a fowl in the pot every Sunday." So was it with this soldier who was sixth in descent from the first Bourbon, and who fought so hard to keep the last on a throne his race would never have forfeited had they but remembered this golden rule of all true kingship.