Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
tugging the string that moved the punkah – a swinging fan hung from the ceiling; sowar – actually a trooper in an Indian cavalry regiment – remained a term of abuse left over from the Mutiny; tatties were grass mats used to cover windows in hot weather, kept wet in an effort to reduce room temperature; a bheestie (like Kipling’s Gunga Din) was a water-carrier; a chatty was a spherical earthenware water pot, and a charpoy (a word still used in the British army until recently) a bed.
But writing about India presents a particular problem, because spelling, transliteration and terminology have changed. An author is often faced with the alternative of using outdated spellings which are nonetheless familiar to an English-speaking readership, or adopting current spellings which make history infinitely more difficult to follow. I had little difficulty in settling on Bombay rather than Mumbai and Madras instead of Chennai. It was harder to decide that my heroes would not look out from Kanpur across the Ganga to Avadh, as one might today, but would see Oudh across the Ganges from Cawnpore.22 I have retained the term Sikh Wars, Anglo-centric though it is, because that is what most (though not all) authors writing in English call them. More controversially, I call the events of 1857–59 the Mutiny, rather than the Indian Revolt, whilst happily acknowledging that it was not the exclusively military phenomenon that the word mutiny implies.
The quest for consistent transliteration would compel us to cross a bridge too far. We have already seen William Hodson write about Hindoos and Hindus in the same piece. The title pages of Richard Burton’s three books on Sind all rendered the spelling of the province differently, and although I style the place Sind, I cannot deny that the local regiments had Scinde in their title. Amongst the graves in Rajpura cemetery, Delhi, are those of two officers killed in the same battle, rendered on one tombstone as Badlee Surai and on the other as Badli ka Sarai. Lieutenant Richard Barter, who survived the battle, preferred Badli ke Serai, and so, generally, do I. Where I give an individual a rank it is generally the one he held at the time in question: Fred Roberts died a field marshal and a peer, but he was a subaltern on most of the occasions when I mention him.
Lastly, the India I write about now consists of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (with Burma administered by the British as part of India for much of the period). The old Indian army brought together men of many religions and none, and it is almost impossible to resist the conclusion that Partition was one of Britain’s less fortunate legacies. I have wandered about many of the battlefields described on the pages that follow, crossing the little River Cauvery to see where British cannon balls gouged the walls of Tipu’s fortress of Seringapatam in 1799, trudged through the mud (for it was the tail end of the monsoon) across Arthur Wellesley’s – the future Duke of Wellington’s – 1803 battlefield of Assaye, and looked, from the urban sprawl of Delhi’s Kashmir Gate, towards the ridge from which the British attacked the city. Perhaps most memorably, five years ago, I rode from Gilgit across the Shandur Pass to Chitral, brushing the Afghan frontier with my right sleeve, in the steps of Lieutenant Colonel James Kelly’s tiny force which raised the siege of Chitral in 1895. We rode into Chitral behind the bagpipes and drums of the Chitral Scouts, who were shrilling out those North-West Frontier favourites like ‘Hielan’ ‘Laddie’ and ‘Black Bear’, lasting evidence of the attraction of the music of one tribe of tough hillmen to another. In an orchard in the shadow of Chitral Fort I said goodbye to my Afghan pony, thick-necked, grey-coated and perverse, having narrowly decided against buying him so as to have the satisfaction of seeing his name on a tin.
Travelling in India and Pakistan is often uncomfortable, but feeling the harder edge of the subcontinent is a useful antidote to the excessive romanticism that, all too easily, seeps into this sort of subject. Twenty miles a day on beans and hay from the Karakoram to the Hindu Kush is no easy matter even today, but I can at least begin to imagine what it must have been like for men who did it in khaki drill jackets and ammunition boots. How their grandfathers coped with red serge and white cross-belts in the heat of the plains is another matter altogether, as we shall soon see.
Drums on the Sutlej
DARBY FULCHER, drummer in the grenadier company of HM’s 50th Regiment of Foot, normally wakes his comrades on campaign by walking through the lines of sleeping men, rapping out the insistent drumbeat of the General Call to Arms; but today, 10 February 1846, will be different. He is eighteen years old, with six years’ service in the army, all of it in India, where he arrived as a band boy in the summer of 1840. The result of a brief and tipsy union between a sailor and one of those mercenary Portsmouth ladies unkindly known as ‘the fireships of the sally-port’, young Darby decided that a red coat was better than an empty belly, and joined the 50th as it passed through Portsmouth on its way to embark.
Simply getting to India was not easy. The East Indiaman Ferguson, which carried the 50th’s recruits from Portsmouth, struck a shoal in the Torres Strait, but all her passengers and crew were safely taken off before she foundered, and he soon found himself in the military cantonment at Chinsura, just up the River Hooghly from Calcutta. The 50th lost twenty of its soldiers from cholera in its first months in India, before sailing to Moulmein in the autumn of 1841, in the expectation that friction with the King of Burma would lead to another war. But it was soon back in Chinsura, only to lose eighty more men (including, inauspiciously, Assistant Surgeon Burns) in another cholera epidemic.
A move up the Hooghly to a new garrison at Cawnpore proved scarcely less lethal: in three separate accidents the regiment lost four sergeants, the drum-major, sixty-three privates, four women and eleven children. On 29 December 1843, Darby Fulcher had his baptism of fire when a force under Major General Sir John Grey beat the fierce Marathas at Punniar and in which the 50th lost just an officer and eight men. Lieutenant Bellars, the regiment’s acting adjutant, described this battle in his diary:
Directly we reached the top of the hill … the enemy’s cannon balls were falling to the right and left of us, but being badly directed did us no harm. We moved a few paces over the hill, when they opened a heavy fire of grape and canister upon us, with four guns planted about fifty paces from the bottom of the hill, besides a tremendous fire from their infantry, who were in a small ravine. We made the best of our way down the hill, which was very high and steep, keeping the best order possible, and continuing our firing the whole time. We halted at the bottom under cover of a small bank and hedge, keeping up our fire for about ten minutes, when we were ordered to charge, which we did with a glorious cheer. But so well did the enemy stick to their guns, that the last discharge took place when we were within ten yards of them, and the gunners were only driven from their guns at the point of the bayonet. So determined were they, indeed, that until actually unable to move from wounds, they cut away with their sharp sabres at our men, many of whom were severely wounded by them. Thus ended this short but sharp skirmish, with the capture of four guns (one a large brass one) and a few prisoners.1
Fulcher’s dark hair, sharp features and prominent teeth made the sobriquet ‘band rat’ all too appropriate, and when he left the band to become a company drummer the name stuck. By now, as one of the many Irish wits in the 50th observed, he was a very big rat indeed, and should therefore be known as Bandicoot Fulcher. Colour Sergeant Thompson, as serious-minded as befitted the company’s senior non-commissioned officer, confirmed that this was wholly appropriate, for the bandicoot or musk rat ‘was distinguished by its troublesome smell’, and here too, he pronounced, there was a distinct resemblance.2 The abuse was as good-natured as barrack-room jokes can be, and Fulcher, big for his age, with a vocabulary of the most studied profanity and a taste for strong drink, fitted comfortably into the tight little world of the grenadier company, with its three officers and eighty NCOs and men. It was the senior of the 50th’s eight companies, leading the way when the battalion marched in column, and on its right when it shook out into line. Fulcher had no idea why it was called the grenadier company, for grenades (whatever they might be) had not been issued within living memory.
His job entailed