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Then there came a short and busy interval, in which what is called "the world" ran mad after the hero, not, indeed, because any more of a hero than he had been a month or a year or twenty years before, but simply because "the world" thought he could do it a good turn in the matter of its brothers and sons and nephews. The redoubtable "Dowb" had to be "taken care of" all along the line, and who can take care of him better than a Commander-in-Chief in India? One little item from that time should not be forgotten by those who want to know what manner of man this Charles Napier was. Just before starting for the East a sudden command reached him summoning him to dine at Osborne. He has no Court dress. There is a yellow or drab waistcoat, however, of old-world fashion and finery upon which he has set store for years. What could be nicer than this garment? They tell him that it is somewhat out of date – that it is too high in the collar or too long in the body; in fact, that it won't do. What is to be done? Only this. He has a valet – Nicholas by name, Frenchman and dandy – and this valet has a very fine waistcoat. So the waistcoat of Nicholas is produced, and off to the Isle of Wight goes the Commander-in-Chief to kiss the hand of the sovereign he has served so well. No man is a hero to his valet, says the proverb. We cannot say what Nicholas thought of his master; but this we can say, that among many soldier hearts throbbing for their Queen, Her Majesty had none more truly heroic than the old one that beat that day beneath the valet's waistcoat.

CHAPTER XIII
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA

To India again, sixty-seven years old, and frequently suffering physical pain such as few men can know. Only a month before sailing he had thus described his sensations. "The injured nerves [of the face] carry inflammation up to the brain and it is not to be borne. I cannot tell what others may suffer, but they have not had the causes that affect me to affect them; they have not had the nerves torn by a jagged ball passing through, breaking nose-bones and jaw-bones, and lacerating nerves, muscles, and mucous membranes; they can hardly therefore have suffered as I do; if they have, their fortitude is beyond mine, for I cannot bear even the thought of it. It makes every nerve in my body tremble, even now, from writing on the subject."

On May 6th, 1849, Napier landed at Calcutta to find the Sikh War over. Lord Gough had completely vanquished the Khalsa arms at Goojerat, and resistance ceased from that day. Though perhaps in one sense this was a disappointment to Napier, he rejoiced that a fine old soldier should have been able by this victory to vindicate his military reputation. "It was hard," he writes, "that a brave old veteran like Gough, whose whole life has been devoted to his duty, should be dismissed from his command and close his long career under undeserved abuse, because the Directors kept him in a post that had become too difficult." But though actual hostilities had ceased there was work enough in India for a score of Commanders-in-Chief to set right. From top to bottom the whole administrative and executive system of the Indian army was wrong, and what was worse, was wrong from such a multiplicity of great and small causes that any attempt to set it right might well have appeared hopeless to the best administrative head ever set on the most vigorous body. There was no single point or no half-dozen points upon which the attempt at reform could be begun. It was not a passing distemper of the military body. It was dry rot and organic disease showing itself outwardly, indeed, in numerous symptoms of insubordination and lack of discipline; but the roots of which nothing but a gigantic incision could reach.

Leaving Calcutta in the end of May and proceeding by the slow methods of travel then in vogue, the new Commander-in-Chief reached Simla late in June. Here he met the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, and here in a few weeks began those strifes and contentions which eventually broke the old soldier's heart. Although the subjects of contention between the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor-General were many, and although all interest in them individually has long since evaporated in time, they still form, when viewed collectively in the light of the ever-to-be-remembered catastrophe of 1857, by far the most momentous reading that can be presented to-day to the statesman or the student of our empire. For the issue fought out by this soldier Chief and this civil Governor is yet before the nation, and some day or other will have to be decided, even in larger lists than that which witnessed its first great test in the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

War in a nation resembles a long and wasting disease in a human subject. It has a period of convalescence, when all the weak points of the system seem to threaten destruction even when the fever has passed. So it was in India now. Ever since 1838 war had been going on in India or close beyond its frontier. The Sikh War of 1849 ended the long catalogue, was in fact the last gust of the Afghan storm; but every administrative evil, civil and military, now lay exposed upon the weakened frame, and Napier's quick eye, long trained in the experience of Scinde, read almost at a glance the dangerous symptoms. Resolutely he bent himself to the thankless task of reform. He was Commander-in-Chief of a great army, but an army which had gone wholly wrong from the evil system which had crept into it from a hundred sources. He would trace out these sources of evil, cure them or cut them out, and leave India a record of his rule as Commander-in-Chief which would be of greater service to her than if he had led this army to the most brilliant victory. Such, in a few words, was the purpose he set himself to work for from the moment he set foot in India, and found that his task was not to be one of war.

Shortly after his arrival in Simla he began again to keep a journal, and in its pages we see, as in a mirror, the source of every outward act of his life traced out through every thought. In that journal the whole story of his effort and his failure, of the endless communings with those two great counsellors whom he long before declared should be the only prompters a man of action should have, "his conscience and his pillow," and of the difficulties and obstacles that met him at every step, is set forth. Here at Simla he sits, thinking and writing, collecting reports, reading despatches from every part of India, and writing down a vast mass of advice and recommendation, of warning and forecast, which, seven years later, are to seem like the prophecies of some inspired seer.

"The clouds are below us," he writes to his sister, "flying in all directions; and oftentimes, as one sits in a room, a cloud walks in as unconcernedly as a Christian, and then melts away." So, too, below him lay the thousand clouds of selfish struggle and petty contention which for ever seem to hover over our government of India; but, alas! when these clouds came up to Simla they did not melt away, but settled in a thickening gloom between him and the goal he strove so hard to reach. "I am working fifteen hours a day at my desk," he writes again, "working myself to death here; and what fame awaits me? None! I work because it is honest to earn my pay; but work is disagreeable in the extreme – hateful. Were I to remain five years I might do some good to this noble army; but for the short time I am to be here nothing can be done – at least nothing worth the loss of health and happiness. Never, however, did I know either, except when working in a garden or in Cephalonia making roads and doing good." And now, it may be asked by some persons, what were the reforms which this man endeavoured to effect? Why did he not leave well alone? Forty years have passed since Charles Napier "worked himself to death" at Simla, striving to set right the army and the military administration of India. He was thwarted in his labours, ridiculed for his fears, censured for his measures of reform. The men who opposed him became the petted favourites of his enemies. His own friends were marked out for enmity or neglect. He resigned. Time passed. The old soldier sank into his grave, and the hatred of his detractors did not ease its slander even when the tomb had closed upon the hero. Seven years went by, and suddenly the storm he had so vainly foretold broke upon India and upon England. The native army of Bengal mutinied. India ran with blood. Men, women, and children perished in thousands. Massacre and ruin overspread the land. Fortunately the blow fell when the nation, at peace with the great powers of the world, was able to concentrate all her energies upon India. But the struggle was a life-and-death one, and had Bombay and Madras followed the lead of Bengal, all was over. "Yes," I think I hear some one say, "but did not the Bengal army rise in revolt because greased cartridges were given to them with a new rifle?" My friend, the greased cartridge had to say to the Indian Mutiny just what pulling the trigger of a gun has to say to the loading of the charge. Long before ever a greased cartridge was heard of, the big gun of India had been loaded and rammed and primed and made ready to go off at the first hair-trigger's excuse it could find; and it was this loading and priming that Charles Napier was doing his utmost to draw from the gun during his tenure of Commander-in-Chiefship, and it was this loading and priming that his opponents were filling further and ramming harder by their ignorant opposition to him.

When the cool season begins, the Commander-in-Chief sets out upon his tour of inspection. How different it is from the triumphal progress heretofore usual! "What does an officer want in the field?" he had written shortly before leaving England; "his bed, his tent, a blanket, a second pair of breeches, a second pair of shoes, half a dozen shirts, a second flannel waistcoat, a couple of towels, and a piece of soap; all beyond is mere luxury, and not fit for a campaign." So, too, when the Commander-in-Chief was seen on his tour with diminished elephants and fewer camels and no bullocks, and only a third of the usual number of tent-pitchers and half the force or establishment of chupprassees and absolutely no doolie-wallahs at all, old Indians looked mutely at each other in speechless deprecation of such enormities. Then a thousand stories were circulated against the innovator. "He only gave claret at dinner to his guests; his tent was not big enough to swing a cat in; and because he had reduced the government bheesties (water-carriers) by half, it was clear he did not wash," etc., etc. But notwithstanding these criticisms and censures, the Commander-in-Chief went on from station to station, and never was examination so keen or inspection so close. Nothing escaped the eye that looked through these big spectacles. He is out at earliest dawn looking into matters in a regimental cantonment as closely as though he had been quartermaster-sergeant. One morning in some cantonment they miss him; he is not in the barracks nor on the parade-ground. The colonel gets nervous. "Go," he says to the adjutant, "go to the sergeant-major on the parade, and ask him if he has seen the Commander-in-Chief." But the sergeant-major is also missing; he is not on the parade. "Then ride over to his quarters and see if he is there." They go over to the staff-sergeant's quarters, and there sure enough is the missing sergeant-major, having a cup of tea and a bit of bread inside with a stranger. The nervous colonel becomes irate. The sergeant-major has no right to be in his quarters at such a critical time, when the most hawk-eyed Commander-in-Chief that ever held office is prowling about. "What are you doing in your quarters, sergeant-major?" – "The Commander-in-Chief is having some ration-bread and commissariat tea inside, sir," replies the sergeant-major, with a twinkle in his austere eye. And now out comes the missing Commander, face to face with the much-perplexed and puffed colonel. There is lightning in the eye behind the glasses. "And this is the bread your men are getting, sir," he says, holding out a half-eaten crust. "No wonder you have half your regiment in hospital."

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.