Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
coat’, he is always to be found where the fire is hottest. ‘I never ask the soldier to expose himself where I do not personally lead,’ he later declared. ‘This the army knows and, I firmly believe, estimates.’8
Gough’s plan this morning has an unusual measure of subtlety: two feint attacks. His Sikh opponents have now been pushed back across the Sutlej River into their own territory everywhere save here near the village of Sobraon, where they hold a strong position facing southwards. It is shaped like a long, flattish letter U, a mile and a half wide along its southern side, with its open end to the river, and a pontoon bridge behind it. A Spanish officer in the service of the Sikhs has designed formidable defences, consisting of two concentric lines of earth ramparts, twelve feet high in places, with arrowhead bastions jutting out in front of the embankments and a broad ditch in front of them. On the Sikh right the ground is too sandy for the construction of high ramparts, and on these lower earthworks – too unstable to bear the weight of proper artillery – the Sikhs have planted a line of 200 zumbooruks, light swivel guns usually fired from a camel’s saddle.
The Sikh position is held by some 20,000 infantry with seventy guns, and there are more infantry and guns dug in on the north bank, covering the bridge. Gough has about the same number of men but fewer guns. However, drawing confidence from the fact that thirty of them are heavy howitzers and five are powerful 18-pounders, he decides on a three-hour bombardment by guns and rockets, followed by an infantry assault. His left-hand division, under Major General Sir Robert Dick, will attack the Sikh right, apparently their weakest sector, while his centre division, under Major General Sir Walter Gilbert, and his right division, under Major General Sir Harry Smith, will make feint attacks to prevent the Sikhs from concentrating to meet Dick’s assault. Gough’s situation is complicated by the fact that the Governor-General of British India, Sir Henry Hardinge, is present with the army. He is a lieutenant general too, and although he has volunteered to serve under Gough in his military capacity, he is not slow to exercise his superior civil authority if he feels it right to do so. He has approved the plan, but only in guarded terms. ‘Upon the fullest consideration of the question,’ he wrote, ‘if the artillery can be brought into play, I recommend you to attack. If it cannot and you anticipate a heavy loss, I would recommend you not to undertake it.’9
All this is hidden from Darby Fulcher as his battalion moves forward without drumbeat, in column in the dark at about 4.00 a.m. Ahead of it marches HM’s 31st Foot, and, a little less than two miles from the eastern face of the Sikh entrenchments, it deploys from column into line, with its right flank on the Sutlej and its left joining the 47th Bengal Native Infantry. The 50th swings into line about a hundred yards behind, with its grenadiers nudging the river bank and its light company, on the left of its line, in sight of the grenadiers of the 42nd Bengal Native Infantry. At the first sign of dawn, the whole line moves forward, to within range of the Sikh guns, and the men lie down. Even when the sun comes up it is still too misty to see what is happening, which is as well, for some of the British heavy guns are not yet in position.
At about 6.00 a.m. the first shots are fired. One young artillery officer is to remember the scene well:
On that day, when I first smelt powder, I served with the heavy howitzers and I can never forget the moment when old Gough (who was there in person) sent the order to ‘open fire’. No 1 fire! No 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six 10-inch shells hurtled through the mist just lifting, and could be seen in the still dark morning light, bursting in the enemy’s camp and entrenchments. A minute’s pause, and then the hum of a surprised camp like a vast hive, followed by the drums beating to arms, and the trumpets of the Sikh host sounding the alarm.10
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