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During the summer of 1839 the Chartist agitation went on, and more than once England was on the verge of actual rebellion. Napier's position was a very peculiar one. Thoroughly in sympathy with the people in the objects they had in view, but sternly opposed to any attempt to obtain these objects by force, he ran the danger of falling between the two stools of opinion and duty. He was at this time sailing upon a very dangerous sea, and a single false movement might have involved England in bloodshed. In his letters and reports to his civil and military superiors we find the line ever distinctly drawn between the immediate repression of disorder, which he can answer for at any moment, and the permanent remedy for the evil, which must be the work of the Government. To the military authorities these expressions of opinion on the part of their subordinate appear utterly unprecedented. Napier has told the Commander-in-Chief that he can see no way to meet the evils but to concede to the people their just rights, while the principle of order is at the same time vigorously upheld. The answer to this is suggestive of many thoughts. "Lord Hill desires me to point out your observation and to suggest that you avoid all remarks having allusion to political questions; and I am to say, without entering into the merits of the question, that neither he, as Commander-in-Chief, nor you, as the Major-General commanding the Northern District, can have anything to do with the matter; it is therefore better that you should confine yourselves to what is strictly your provinces as military men." And there is another fact revealed to us in the pages of Napier's correspondence at this time which must strike the reader of to-day as strange. It is told in his account of a public dinner to which he was invited in September, 1839. He had accepted the invitation, thinking it would not be a party demonstration; but he soon found he was mistaken. All the great ones of the county were assembled, with the Lord-Lieutenant in the chair. "Church and State" was the first toast, and it was received with rapturous approval. Then, in the second place, came the health of the Queen. "Glasses were filled," writes Napier, "but not a sound of applause followed. Her Majesty's health was drunk in significant silence. No man cried 'God bless her' except myself. Then came 'The Queen Dowager [the widow of William the Fourth] and the rest of the royal family.' Instantly the room shook with shouts of applause." "You are in the wrong box, General," whispered Napier's right-hand neighbour, one of the members for the county. "So it seems, my lord," answers the irate soldier; "and the reigning Queen is in it too." How strangely this episode reads to-day; yet at the time it was common enough in the ranks of the Tory party. It was only a few years earlier that a widespread conspiracy was afloat among the men who called themselves the True Blues of their party to shut out the Princess Victoria from the throne and substitute the Duke of Cumberland for the succession. How far this conspiracy extended will not perhaps be fully known in our day; but in point of absolute loyalty to the person of the sovereign it is probable that the "rebel" Chartists at the time had a good deal more of it than had some of the supporters of Church and State who were so anxious to shoot them down.

Placed thus between the devil of the classes and the deep sea of the masses it is easy to surmise that Napier had no pleasant berth in this his first command as a general officer. Frequently we find him regretting his refusal of the Australian appointment two years earlier, and picturing to himself a land where men worked in the open air instead of in collieries or factories, a land where taxes were light and people were contented, and the grades of life were not marked by terrible extremes. Here are a few thoughts from his journal, worth in their plain truth and honest judgment many tons weight of the rubbish which the political economists of that time and since have poured forth to the world. "I was mad," he writes in August, 1839, "not to go out as governor of Australia. I could have founded there a great kingdom, with a systematic education, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the law of primogeniture as regards land. I would have so ruled Australia that the land should never have been thus collected." Then he goes on to the question of what constitutes the true prosperity of a nation. "Men," he writes, "are restless and discontented with poverty in manufacturing places. They have all its sufferings and have not those pleasures which make people content under it, that is, health, enjoyment of country life, fresh air, and interest in the seasons and in the various products of nature. The exhausted, unhealthy manufacturer has no such enjoyment; he has no resources but gin, gambling, and all kinds of debauchery. The countryman worships God, the manufacturer worships gold, and thus the practice of sin united to mammon-worship makes the ruffian. Yet such is the system which your political economists call the prosperity of the nation. Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is assuredly hung with Manchester cottons." As the year 1839 drew to a close, the starvation and misery seemed to deepen over the northern command. In November we read, "The streets of this town [Manchester] are horrible. The poor starving people go about in twenties and forties begging, but without the least insolence; and yet some rich villains and some foolish women choose to say they try to extort charity. It is a lie, an infernal lie; neither more nor less. Nothing can exceed the good behaviour of these poor people, except it be their cruel sufferings." Hard as had been his nine long years of inaction, and welcome as work was to his brain and hand hungry for toil, Napier loathes the employment which carries with it the danger of having to take the lives of his fellow-countrymen. On January 16th, 1840, we find him writing the following entry in his journal: "Anniversary of the battle of Corunna. Oh, that I should have outlived that day to be at war with my own countrymen! Better be dead than live to see a civil war!" In the summer of 1841 a rumour reaches him that he is soon to be offered an Indian command. The old fighting spirit kindles at once in his heart. It will be a pleasant change to the Indus, on the very threshold of the Afghan country where war is raging, from this northern district, where his command is "slavery under noodles." "Gladly shall I get away," he writes, "from this district; for how to deal with violence produced by starvation, by folly, by villainy, and even by a wish to do right, is a hard matter. A man is easily reconciled to act against misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action."

CHAPTER VIII
INDIA – THE WAR IN SCINDE

When Sir Charles Napier set out for India in the autumn of 1841 he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, an old man. He was sixty years of age. More than forty years earlier he had begun his military career. Thirty-two years had passed since he had fought at Corunna; and since then what a life of action had been his! And yet this little thin figure, with eagle eye and beaked nose, and long hair streaked with white, which for more than forty years seemed to have been a volcano ever in action, had not yet spent the vast stock of vital energy which it started with. Very far from it. After all his wounds and wanderings, his shipwrecks and disasters, his sorrows and sicknesses, his blows and buffetings, here he was starting out for India, far more full of energy than ten out of a dozen ensigns going out from college to begin life.

On December 13th, 1841, Napier first set foot in India. He had come out by the overland route in two months, and looked upon the journey as a marvel of rapidity. It had cost him very dear; and when he landed in Bombay he had exactly two pounds in his pocket, and his bank-account was nil. "Had I then died," he writes, "there was not a farthing left for my children," and he was sixty years of age!

When Napier assumed command of the Poonah Division in the end of 1841, our dominion in India had entered upon a very critical stage of its history. Two years before this date we had sent an army into Afghanistan, ostensibly to seat a rival Ameer on the throne of Cabul – in reality to gain a footing in that mountain land. It was an Asiatic copy of Napoleon's invasion of Spain; and although the Afghans had no outside power to help them, the result was much the same as it had been in the Peninsula. There was at first an apparently easy conquest of the country, then a rising of the people, a retreat and surrender of the invaders, followed by fresh invasions carried on with the savage accessories usual where conquest endeavours to legalise its position by calling a people who are rightly struggling in the cause of their freedom "rebels." At this particular moment – the mid-winter of 1841 – a great disaster had befallen our arms. The garrison of Cabul, retreating from that place towards the Kyber Pass, had been annihilated in the defiles of Jugdulluck; the general, a few officers, and their wives having alone been saved by surrender. The two civil organisers of the invasion, M'Naughten and Burnes, had been killed, one in Cabul, the other at a conference with Akbar Khan. Sale still held Jellalabad with an Irish battalion; but the Kyber Pass was between him and India, and that defile was in possession of the Afghans. On the western side of Afghanistan our army held Ghuznee, Candahar, and Quetta; but again the Bolan Pass lay between our forces and Upper Scinde, where a small British army was cantoned on the Indus. When the news of these disasters, always magnified by native rumour, reached the countries which still intervened between our real Indian frontier and Afghanistan – Scinde and the Punjaub – signs of ill-concealed satisfaction began to manifest themselves among the princes and peoples of these still semi-independent States. This Afghan expedition had indeed been a wild and foolish venture, and the first blast of misfortune showed at once the full length and breadth of its absurdity. As each succeeding mail from the northern frontier brought to Bombay some fresh development of this critical situation, Napier bent his mind to master the complicated position of affairs; for daily it became more clear to his practised eye that the forces available on the Indian frontier were not adequate to retrieve the military situation, and that sooner or later he would be sent to the theatre of operations. When the crisis becomes really acute, favouritism lowers its front, and genius sees the road clear for action.

And now at last the chance came – the chance of leading an army of his countrymen in battle, the opportunity which he had longed for through all these weary years since that distant day when, writing to his mother from Hythe, he told her that his highest ambition was to live to command British soldiers in the field. That was just forty years ago, and here at last came the long-wished-for boon; but under what changed conditions! "Oh for forty as at Cephalonia," he writes, "when I laughed at eighteen hours' work under a burning sun; now at sixty how far will my carcass carry me? No great distance! Well, to try is glorious! I am hurrying fast towards the end; it will be fortunate to reach it in the hour of victory. Who would be buried by a sexton in a churchyard rather than by an army in the hour of victory?"

In March, 1842, Lord Ellenborough arrived in India as Governor-General. From Madras he wrote to Napier asking the latter to send him a statement of his views with respect to the manner in which the honour of our arms may be most effectually re-established in Afghanistan. The request found Napier prepared. At once a clear and precise plan was forwarded to meet the new Governor-General on his arrival at Calcutta. We must avenge the disasters to our arms, but how? By "a noble, generous, not a vindictive warfare," after which "it might be very practicable to retire from Afghanistan, leaving a friendly people behind us." What a grand type of soldier this! No military executions, no hanging of men whose only fault was a splendid and heroic love of their own land! Truly the dominion based on such old-world chivalry could laugh at the advance of the Russian – it would not need "a scientific frontier" to defend it.

As the year 1842 progressed, the state of Afghanistan still remained critical. In July Candahar and Jellalabad were still our advanced posts, and all the intervening valleys and defiles were in the hands of the Afghans. Behind, in the Punjaub and in Scinde, the spectacle of delay and indecision on the part of our generals was spreading wider the area of disturbance. Clearly some real chief was wanted to hold together all this wavering discontent which was seething from the sources of the Sutlej to the sea at Kurachee. At last the order came to move to Scinde. Napier received it on the anniversary of the battle of the Coa, fought thirty-two years earlier. At first the recollection that he is now in his sixty-first year, and that he has to leave behind him all he holds dear in life to go out to incessant action in a terrible climate, damps his spirit, but he quickly rallies. He will not even depend upon the advice of the "politicals," as he calls the Civil Servants in Scinde, who for once are to be subject to his orders. These men may be useful, he thinks, but that usefulness "cannot be as councillors to a general officer who should have none but his pillow and his courage." And so with these sentiments and a thousand others equally characteristic of indomitable resolution, courage, and self-dependency, he sets out for Scinde on September 3rd, 1842. "Old Oliver's day," he writes; "the day he won Dunbar and Worcester, and the day he died; and a very good day to die on, as good as the second or the fourth – 'a crowning victory,' strange."

On the evening of the 3rd the Zenobia steamed out of Bombay harbour bound for Kurachee. Never did soldier proceed to the scene of action under more terrible conditions. The vessel carried a detachment of two hundred European troops. Scarcely had she put to sea before cholera of the most fatal type broke out among these soldiers. There was but one doctor on board, few medicines, no preparations to meet such a catastrophe. In an hour after the first case appeared many more had been attacked. Night fell. Drenching rain added to the horror. Scarcely were men attacked ere they died in contortions and agony impossible to describe. The beds of the stricken soldiers were laid on deck; and as they died the bodies were instantly cast overboard. All night long this terrible scene went on. When morning dawned twenty-six bodies had been thrown into the sea. For three days this awful scene continued. One-fourth of the entire troops had perished; eighty more men were down on the reeking, filthy deck. It was a time to try the sternest nerve. The worst scene of carnage on the battle-field could be nothing to this awful visitation. At last the port of Kurachee was gained; the flame of the fell disease seemed to have burned itself out; the survivors were got on shore, but a dozen more unfortunates were doomed to perish on land. In eight days sixty-four soldiers – just a third of the entire number embarked – had died; a few sailors, women, and children also perished.

Bad as was this beginning, it did not seem to damp the spirit or dull the energy of the commander. On September 10th he got on shore with his sick and dying. On the 12th he reviews the garrison of Kurachee, and looks to his ammunition and supplies. Before leaving Bombay he had visited the arsenal there, and had discovered some rockets lying in a corner. He had always a fondness for these somewhat erratic engines of war, and he brought them on with him to Scinde. Now at this review he determines to try one or two of them in front of the troops. An artillery officer, an engineer officer, and the General formed a kind of committee for letting off the missile, no one knowing apparently much about it. The second rocket would not go off when lighted; the committee incautiously approached, the rocket exploded, and the General's leg was cut clean across the calf by a sharp splinter of the iron case. This wound laid him up for a few days; but in a week, unable to stand the confinement any longer, he is carried on board a river steamer and proceeds up the Indus. Certainly a bad continuation to a bad beginning this accident. Yet Napier had good reason to hope that whatever else might stop his career it would not be his legs, for in the past, though sorely tried, they had stood to him well. As a boy at Celbridge he had, while leaping a fence, cut the flesh from his leg in a terrible manner; a few years later at Limerick he had smashed the bone while jumping a ditch to secure a dead snipe. Again, at Corunna, a bullet had damaged this unfortunate leg; and here now at Kurachee, thirty-three years later, this rocket has another gash at it. No use; he "will get the snipe" up this great Indus river, as forty-four years ago he got it on the banks of the Shannon.

And now, leaving this old veteran, but ever-young soldier, steaming up the great river by whose shores he is soon to become the central figure in a long series of great events, we will pause a moment to review the chapter of Scindian history which had led up to this moment.

In the year 1836 Afghanistan lay many hundred miles beyond our nearest frontier, and it is almost needless to say that Russia then lay many thousand miles beyond the farthest extreme of Afghanistan. Nevertheless it was determined by the Viceroy of India and his Council to invade Afghanistan across the intervening Sikh and Scindian territory, in order to upset the ruler of the first-named State, and to seat upon the throne of Cabul a king who had long been our puppet and our pensionary. It is of course unnecessary to add that our puppet and our pensionary was, in return for this service, to hand over to us the legs of his throne, the keys of his kingdom, and a good deal of the contents of his treasury. Between our frontier and that of Afghanistan lay the Punjaub and Scinde, through which States we were to invade the territory of Dost Mahomed by the passes of the Khyber and the Bolan. With the ruler of the Punjaub, Runjeet Singh, we were upon terms of closest offensive and defensive amity. He was, in fact, our ally in the invasion. With the rulers of Scinde, on the other hand, our relations were strained. Runjeet was rich, had a large army, and was a single despotic ruler. The Ameers of Scinde were rich too, but they had no regular army. They were fighting among themselves, filled with mutual jealousies, weak rulers of a separated State. The line of policy pursued towards these States by the Calcutta Government was a very obvious if a very flagrant one. Runjeet Singh, the Lion of Lahore, was to be bribed into acquiescence in our Afghan policy, by slices of territory taken from Afghanistan and Scinde, by large promises of plunder to be given him by Shah Soojah, our puppet king, and by subsidies from our own treasury. But with the Ameers of Scinde the process was to be altogether one of force. Pressed by an army on the middle Indus, by the Sikhs from the Punjaub, and by a flotilla on the coast, they were to be squeezed into compliance with our demands, which included cession of territory, fortresses, and seaports, payment of treasure to Shah Soojah, annual subsidies to ourselves, and rights of passage for troops and supplies. All these matters having been arranged to the complete dissatisfaction of the weak but indignant Ameers, our armies pressed on into the Khyber on one hand and the Bolan on the other. This was in 1838. We have already seen the final outcome of this forward Afghan policy in the early months of 1842. That the events in the Koord-Cabul and Jugdulluck Passes, when a single surviving horseman bore to Jellalabad the tidings of a disaster almost unparalleled in the annals of retreating armies, should have been received by the Ameers of Scinde without regret is not to be wondered at, and that they should see in it some opportunity of loosening the grasp of our power upon a territory which we still continued to speak of as independent is equally no subject of astonishment.

When Lord Ellenborough arrived in India in the spring of 1842 he was face to face with immense difficulties. The forward Afghan policy had collapsed. To an ignorant and presumptuous confidence paralysis and fear had succeeded. What was to be done? To reverse the engines and go full speed astern would only run the vessel of Indian policy upon the shoals and quicksands which the former mistaken and most unjust statecraft had produced. Napier knew all this nefarious history when he went to Scinde, but he knew too the utter impossibility of getting again into deep water by a recurrence to an absolutely just policy with the rulers of Scinde. He and his master, Lord Ellenborough, were the inheritors of this trouble. They had not made it, but assuredly they would be measured by it. In India, to go forward has often been to go wrong, but to go back in that country has always been to admit the wrong; and once to do that is to admit the truth of an argument which, if prolonged to its fullest consequences, must lead us to the sea-coast. What then was to be done? Reconquer Afghanistan; give it up to its old ruler again, and then fix the frontier of India at the frontier of Afghanistan. That was practically the policy determined upon by Lord Ellenborough, and when he made Charles Napier the right arm of its accomplishment he had secured the best pilot then navigating the troubled sea of English dominion in the East.

But when this policy had been once decided on, it would have been better to have openly admitted the necessity, and to have told the Ameers of Scinde plainly our intentions; let them then fight us if they liked. That course would have probably saved a vast effusion of blood. It certainly would have prevented the long and unhappy years of quarrel and recrimination that followed the conquest of Scinde, and the spectacle of two gallant and noble soldiers waging a lifelong war between each other upon the methods by which that conquest had been effected. Of this last phase, however, of the Scindian question we will speak later on.

Steaming up the Indus, Napier reached Hyderabad on September 25th, and had an interview with the Ameers of Scinde. They received him with extraordinary state and honour, for already the tide of war in Afghanistan had turned. Two armies marching from Jellalabad and Candahar had retaken Cabul, and another retiring from the Bolan would soon be on the middle Indus; while a general, of whom fame spoke highly, had just arrived with fresh troops at Kurachee.

Napier passed on from this reception, and early in October arrived at Sukkur, where important letters from Lord Ellenborough reached him; at the same time he received news that the English army had safely passed the Bolan, and that the war in Afghanistan was therefore closed. And now, for the first time in the life of this extraordinary soldier, we arrive at a point where the path is not clear. The situation which at this moment confronted him was perhaps as difficult a one as ever presented itself to a soldier-ruler in our time. The course pursued by Napier was long the subject of fierce controversy. Volumes were written upon it. It was angrily debated in Parliament, angrily commented upon in the Press, and as angrily defended and applauded on the other side. All this is long over; the heat, the fury, and the bitter words have passed with the generation that saw and read in the flesh of the doings on the Indus. The conquest of Scinde has taken its place in history, and we can now quietly estimate the difficulties, the rights, the wrongs, and what perhaps was stranger than all, the temptations of the time. We will lightly touch upon them all, remembering that our path lies upon the ashes of dead heroes. First for the situation. It was this. A great shock had just been given to the sagacity of British government in India, and what was more important, to the prestige of British arms in Asia. We had retreated from Afghanistan, after avenging our defeat it is true, but still by the fact of that retreat acknowledging that our policy had been wrong, and that our power of enforcing that policy had not been equal to its ambition. That was a very serious position for a power whose dominion in the East rested solely on the sword, and nowhere was it so serious as in the neutral borderlands through which we had passed in order to invade Afghanistan – the lands whose natural rights we had trenched upon, and whose sentiments of independence we had repeatedly outraged during the five years of this unfortunate enterprise. Now one fact was very clear to the Viceroy in Calcutta and to his lieutenant in Scinde – either we must withdraw altogether from the Indus, or we must strengthen our position there. The first course was altogether out of the question, the second became a necessity. Lord Ellenborough directed Napier to draft a new treaty, told him to present it to the Ameers, and if necessary to enforce its acceptance by arms. So far all was clear. In November, 1842, the new treaty was ready for presentation to the Ameers. Its provisions were indeed formidable. It took from the rulers of Scinde, towns, territory, rights of coinage, etc., and it especially dealt severely with the northern or Khyrpoor Ameers, who were rightly or wrongly suspected of having been desirous of profiting by the Afghan disasters in the preceding year. Two men of a widely different character appear at this moment upon the scene – Major James Outram of the Indian army, now political agent in Scinde, and His Highness Ali Moorad, one of the Ameers of Khyrpoor. No braver soldier ever bore the arms of England in the East than James Outram. No baser intriguer ever schemed and plotted for his own advancement than Ali Moorad of northern Scinde. Napier presented his treaty to the Ameers, and at the same time moved his troops into the territory the cession of which was claimed by the document. The Ameers accepted the treaty, but protested against its severity. The leading Ameer was a very old man, over eighty years of age, named Meer Roostum. Between him and his younger half-brother, Ali Moorad, lay a great gap of years – perhaps forty – and a still greater gap of hatred, for Ali longed to possess his elder brother's lands, rights, and puggaree, as the turban, or insignia of paramount power, was called. Outram was anxious to save the Ameers from the total destruction which he knew must await them if arms were made the arbitrament of the dispute. Ali Moorad saw that only by a recourse to war could his scheme of ambition be gratified. Between them stood Napier, determined upon using to the utmost the immense power which the Viceroy had placed in his hands, and seeing far beyond the present dispute a time when this valley of the Indus must all become British territory; seeing it in imagination, too, a happy valley waving with grain, peopled by a peaceful and contented population free from the exactions of semi barbarian chiefs, and enjoying the blessings of a government which would rule them with patriarchal justice – a picture the reality of which no human eye has ever looked on.

But above and beyond all this there was another spring in Charles Napier's mind, more potent than any picture, more powerful than any prompting. Above everything else he was a soldier. The clash of arms was dear to him as music to the ear of an Italian. No lover ever longed for mistress more than did this man long for fighting. Was he bloodthirsty? Not in the least. His heart was tender as a child's, his sympathies were far-reaching as a woman's; but for all that every fibre of his nature vibrated to the magic touch of military glory, and his earthly paradise was the front rank of battle.

That his soldier nature was all this time in a state of antagonism with the other nature of pity and love of abstract justice cannot be doubted for a moment. The conflict peeps out through hundreds of pages of his journals. How glad he would be if these Ameers would boldly reject the treaty and defy him! "I almost wish," he writes on December 5th, "that they proudly defied us and fought, for they are so weak, so humble, that punishing them goes against the grain." Most men who read his life to-day will echo that regret. All this while the unfortunate Ameers, divided by conflicting counsels, and distracted by the rumours of coming war which Ali Moorad industriously circulated among them, were drifting rapidly to ruin. The older men were for complete submission, the younger hands were advising resistance. The wild Beloochee matchlock men and the fierce horsemen of Scinde were clamorous not to allow the old fame of the Talpoors to die out in shameful surrender. The Feringhee, even when the treaty had been signed, would move on Hyderabad. The treasure of the Ameers was great, their harems were numerous. If they were doomed to lose all, better lose all with arms in their hands facing the invader. Such was the state of affairs during the month of December, 1842. The Ameers are irresolute and distracted by a thousand reports; Ali Moorad is deeply scheming to make Napier believe his relatives mean fighting; Outram, the Ameers' best friend, has been sent by Lord Ellenborough away from Scinde, and at Napier's request is about to return from Bombay; and Napier himself, dazzled with the realisation of his life-long dream of military glory, is about "to cut with the sword the Gordian knot" of Scindian politics. In the middle of the month of December he crossed his army from the right to the left bank of the Indus at Sukkur, and put his troops in column of route. The state of his mind at this moment is laid bare to us in his journal; on December 21st he writes thus: