All the King’s Men, page 37
His most severe criticism, however, was reserved for the British medical staff. He recorded on 21 January:
The shameful neglect that prevails through all [the medical] department, makes our hospitals mere slaughter-houses. Without covering, without attendance and even without clean straw and sufficient shelter from the weather, they are thrown together in heaps, unpitied, and unprotected, to perish from contagion; while legions of vultures, down to the stewards, nurses, and their numberless dependants, pamper their bodies and fill their coffers with the nation’s treasure, and like beasts of prey fatten on the blood and carcases of their unhappy fellow creatures … For the truth of what I say, I appeal to every man in the army who has only for a few hours observed with an attentive eye the general rule of conduct in our hospitals of late, and witness here the scene before me while I now write. A number of men laying on a scanty allowance of dirty wet straw, which from the heat of their bodies, sends up a visible steam, unable to help themselves; and though a sufficient number of men are liberally paid for their attendance, none has been near for several hours, even to help them to a drink of water.62
Soon after Brown wrote this, the Duke of York, snug in London, was informed by one of his former German subordinates that his army was no more. ‘The officers, their carriages, and a large train are safe,’ wrote General Walmoden on 3 February, ‘but the men are destroyed. The army has now more than six thousand fighting men, but it has all the drawbacks of thirty-three battalions, and consumes a vast quantity of forage.’63
By now the army had crossed the frontier into Germany, where, by and large, the locals were friendlier. And yet, as Corporal Brown noted, despite the ‘kindness of the inhabitants, outrages and depredations have been already committed here; a proof that no treatment, however kind, will prevent irregularities in the army, if the reins of discipline are slackened. A woman has been ravished and almost murdered by four of our men, who are discovered and in confinement.’64
Lieutenant-Colonel Wellesley was fortunate to receive permission to return to Britain from the Prussian port of Bremen in early March. The bulk of the army – the 33rd included – was not evacuated until mid-April. ‘The number embarked was nearly fifteen thousand,’ wrote Fortescue, ‘some proportion of the sick having been recovered; so that the losses after the retreat from the Leck [in mid-January] must have amounted to about six thousand men, of which not a tithe were killed or wounded in action. Thus disgracefully ended the first expedition of Pitt and Dundas to the Low Countries.’65
If Wellesley felt guilty for abandoning his men he never let on. Instead, years later, he put the blame for the army’s disintegration squarely on the senior officers. ‘Many of the regiments were excellent,’ he confided to Lord Stanhope, but the man in authority was generally ‘quite an imposter; in fact no one knew anything of the management of an army … The real reason why I succeeded in my own campaigns is because I was always on the spot – I saw everything, and did everything myself.’66
It was a useful lesson to learn. But though Wellesley had done well in his first campaign, he was still very much an amateur in the business of war who, for a time, seemed to have had his fill of active service. No sooner had he returned to Ireland in the spring of 1795 than he resumed his place in Parliament and as aide-de-camp to the lord lieutenant, and began to lobby for a permanent post in the Irish government: first as secretary at war and then, when that did not transpire, at either of the Revenue or Treasury boards. All were denied him though he was offered, thanks to his brother, the post of surveyor-general of the Ordnance. He refused it, not least because the incumbent (who would have to be turned out) was his old flame Kitty Pakenham’s uncle. Only once his political hopes had been dashed did Wellesley turn his mind back to soldiering.
17. Sepoy General
History in general, and the outcome of Britain’s long war against France in particular, might have been very different had the recently promoted Colonel the Honourable Arthur Wellesley died like so many other soldiers of a tropical fever in the West Indies. That is where he and the 33rd Foot were heading in early 1796 when a violent, but ultimately propitious, storm blew their transports back to a British port. By the time they were ready to resume their voyage, the 33rd’s posting had been changed to India. They finally arrived at Calcutta, after a torturous five-month voyage from the Cape, in February 1797.
Wellesley had passed the time at sea by reading from his large trunk of books. They included histories, dictionaries, grammars and maps of India; but also several works of military history, notably Julius Caesar’s Commentaries (in Latin), fifteen volumes on Frederick the Great and Major-General Henry Lloyd’s Reflections on the Principles of the Art of War. There were works by Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke and Adam Smith, and, for lighter reading, ten volumes of Louvet de Couvray’s erotic Les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas.1 Wellesley’s library mirrored the contrasting sides of his character, a contradiction not lost on the governor-general of India, Sir John Shore, when they met shortly after the 33rd’s arrival. Shore found in Wellesley ‘a union of strong sense and boyish playfulness’, and thought he would distinguish himself if he had the chance.2
That opportunity did not come quickly, though Wellesley and the 33rd were part of an expedition to the Spanish colony of Manila in the Philippines – Spain and Holland having recently re-entered the war on France’s side – that got as far as Penang before it was recalled. But the arrival of a new governor-general in May 1798, following Shore’s resignation, changed everything; for the latest ruler of British India was none other than Wellesley’s brother Richard, the second Earl of Mornington. The total extent of territories controlled by the East India Company at this time was relatively modest: the Bengal Presidency was made up of just Bengal, Bihar and Benares (the last two provinces acquired in 1775 and 1781 respectively); the Bombay Presidency was confined to a relatively small area around the city of Bombay; while the Madras Confederacy was little more than ‘a few scattered districts’.3 And yet within seven years, by means of treaty and conquest, Mornington (or Marquess Wellesley as he became) had added huge tracts of land to each presidency, bringing British control to roughly half the Subcontinent. He achieved this by means of conquest and diplomacy, but particularly the former, and no soldier played a more prominent role than his brother Arthur.
Mornington arrived in India with a fixed determination to expand British rule – partly for the benefit of British trade, and partly to deny other European powers, particularly France, the chance to re-establish their own influence in the region. His main opponents were those powerful Indian princes who had been ‘driven by the imminent threat to their own independence to revitalize their administrations and create more effective military forces partly on European lines’.4 None was more obstinate than the pro-French Sultan of Mysore in southern India.
After Coote’s victory at Wandiwash in 1760, French influence in southern India had been reduced to a few trading posts; yet the desire to check British power and maintain useful alliances remained. ‘French agents, in some cases merchants and in others military officers on more or less unofficial reconnaissance missions,’ writes David Andress in 1789: The Revolutions That Shook the World, ‘visited the princely courts of southern India in the late 1760s and early 1770s, reporting back on British ambitions and the potential for their defeat.’5 French ‘volunteer’ officers also served as commanders and advisers to the armies of various Indian allies, notably Mysore, a huge territory located between British-influenced Hyderabad to the north and the smaller spice-producing states at the tip of India.
In the 1760s the Muslim general Hyder Ali had wrested control of Mysore from its weak Hindu prince, who remained as an ineffective figurehead. Having reorganized its army, Hyder took on the British at nearby Madras in the first Anglo-Mysore War, which ended in 1769, after a number of Mysore victories, in a peace treaty that provided for the restoration of all land seized, and for mutual aid and alliance in a defensive war. But when the agreement was tested in 1772, with the attack on Mysore from the north by the Hindu Maratha Confederacy, the British failed to provide military assistance and Hyder never forgave them. Thereafter he was a prime candidate for an alliance with the French, which was duly secured as France entered the American War of Independence in 1778. A year later he launched the second Anglo-Mysore War with French army and naval support, and, after yet more battlefield victories over the British, narrowly failed to capture Madras in 1780. ‘Only the frantic rallying of British forces from across the subcontinent,’ writes Andress, ‘along with a successful naval campaign to prevent the landing of French reinforcements, prevented a total defeat.’6
Three successive victories by Sir Eyre Coote, the hero of Wandiwash in 1760, helped convince Hyder that he could never completely defeat an enemy that had command of the sea. He died in December 1782 and was succeeded by his son Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger’ of Mysore, who was no less formidable a soldier and who already had victories over the British to his name. With the support of French engineers and artillery, Tipu was making good progress in his siege of the British fortress of Mangalore in 1783 when news of the Anglo-French ceasefire arrived, forcing him to break off the attack and make a separate peace that restored the status quo ante.
Tipu was prepared to bide his time. A more devout Muslim than his father, he came to see war against the British as a holy jihad, a fanaticism that caused Lord Cornwallis, the then governor-general, to condemn him in 1789 as having a ‘general character of bigotry … jealousy and hatred of Europeans’.7 What particularly alarmed Cornwallis was the dynamism and sophistication of Mysore’s army and economy, and Tipu’s continued – albeit unofficial – links with France. He continued to employ French soldiers, engineers and artillerymen, while his own craftsmen and ironsmiths produced modern artillery, including 1-lb. iron rockets that could travel 1,000 yards.* It was to curb this growing threat, therefore, that Cornwallis fought the third Anglo-Mysore War of 1790–92, deploying tens of thousands of British and Indian troops, and a huge siege train of hundreds of guns, to bring Tipu to heel.
Defeated and forced to sue for peace, Tipu agreed to surrender two of his sons as hostages and to cede almost half of his territory. But by the time Lord Mornington arrived in India in 1798, Tipu had revitalized both his army and his economy, and had begun to seek allies in India, the Ottoman Empire and the French Republic. While the last had no battalions to spare, it did provide moral support and expertise (in the form of military advisers), prompting Tipu to plant a ‘liberty tree’ in his fortress capital of Seringapatam.8 The alliance became official in January 1798 when the French governor of Mauritius published Tipu’s proclamation that he only awaited ‘the moment when the French shall come to his assistance to declare a war against the English who he ardently desires to expel from India’.9
Determined to break Tipu’s power for good, Mornington asked his brother Arthur to prepare the ground. But at first Colonel Wellesley was not convinced that war was necessary. ‘In my opinion,’ he wrote to Mornington from Madras on 28 June, ‘if it be possible to adopt a line of conduct which would not inevitably lead to war, provided it can be done with honour, which I think indispensable in this Government, it ought to be adopted in preference to that proposed.’10
Gradually, however, as more evidence of Tipu’s bad faith was discovered, Wellesley came to see the war as inevitable. As a preliminary measure, he advised the disarming of the neighbouring princely state of Hyderabad, whose 14,000-strong army was officered by Frenchmen. Mornington agreed and 6,000 Company troops were sent into Hyderabad in October. They arrived to discover that the local sepoys had already risen against their French officers, who were promptly handed over to the British. The elderly ruler (or nizam, as he was known) also agreed to a new treaty: under its terms his troops would henceforth be reorganized under British officers, and the 6,000 Company troops would remain in Hyderabad to guarantee the nizam’s security. The final piece of the jigsaw was put in place when Mornington concluded a separate treaty with the peshwa of the powerful Maratha Confederacy – an alliance of Hindu states that stretched from the border of Mysore to Delhi in northern India, and then the dominant Indian polity – who agreed not to side with Tipu in the event of a war between Britain and Mysore.
The question of who would command the invasion of Mysore, however, was still undecided, and the most that Colonel Wellesley could have hoped for at this juncture, given his relative inexperience, was a brigade. But fortune smiled on him when the more senior Colonel Henry Aston of the 12th Foot, the man chosen to prepare the Madras Army for the invasion, was mortally wounded in a duel with one of his officers in December 1798. Named as Aston’s replacement, Wellesley’s first task was to travel to neighbouring Hyderabad to prepare the nizam’s troops for war.
The trademark of all Wellesley’s campaigns was his thorough logistical preparations, and Mysore was no different. Aware that the invading army had to cross more than 250 miles of jungle and hill terrain to reach Tipu’s capital, and would not be able to live off the land, he encouraged merchants to bring in their produce from a wide area, and arranged for them to accompany the columns. He also assembled a siege train of two 24-pounders, thirty 18-pounders and eight long 9-pounders, with 1,200 rounds a gun, for the final assault; and he drilled the battalions in brigade formation with live firing exercises. So impressed was Lieutenant-General Sir George Harris, the commander-in-chief of Madras, that he congratulated Wellesley in a general order for bringing the invasion force to such an admirable state of organization and discipline.11
On 13 February 1799, with the preparations complete, the advance began. The plan was for a pincer attack on Seringapatam, with Harris advancing from Vellore in the east with an army of 21,000 men (including 1,000 cavalry and 4,300 Europeans), while a smaller force of 6,000 men from the Bombay Army, under Lieutenant-General James Stuart, marched from the western coast. Harris reached Amboor on 18 February; here he linked up with the 16,000 troops from Hyderabad. Many of Harris’s senior officers – four of whom were major-generals – were anxious for the Hyderabad command. But Harris preferred to give it to Wellesley, in addition to the command of the 33rd Foot. Not yet thirty, Wellesley would hold the local rank of brigadier-general and be in charge of a force equivalent to a British division. Not surprisingly, there were protests from the major-generals, but Harris was unmoved. No doubt he was influenced by Wellesley’s kinship to the governor-general; but he had also seen enough of the young colonel’s organizational ability to trust him with such a vital role.
On 6 March the huge Madras column – trailed by more than 100,000 camp followers – entered Mysore territory. Eight years earlier, when Cornwallis had invaded by the same route, Tipu had defended Bangalore. This time Tipu destroyed its defences and withdrew to the west, burning crops as he went. It was a wise move. In 1792 the failure of his army’s supplies had forced Cornwallis to abandon his march on Seringapatam and make peace on terms that, though harsh, left Tipu on his throne. The ‘Tiger’ clearly hoped for a similar outcome.
The first serious test for Harris’s force was near the village of Malavalli, barely 30 miles from Seringapatam, on 27 March. The column had just completed a 6-mile march when scouts reported a large enemy force on a low ridge to the west, blocking the main road to Tipu’s capital. Harris decided to give battle immediately, and advanced with his Madras force to the north of the road and Wellesley’s Hyderabad Contingent to the south. As he neared the enemy position, Wellesley ordered his battalions to form from column into a two-deep line, with the battalions echeloned from the right, 200 yards between each, and the 33rd in the van.
Expecting the Mysore troops to hold fast, Wellesley was astonished to see 2,000 of Tipu’s French-trained infantry advancing in column on the 33rd ‘with the utmost steadiness’.12 He responded by ordering the 33rd to halt and fire repeated volleys that eventually broke up the attack, though Tipu’s men ‘behaved better than they have ever been known to behave’.13 Some of them even stood up to the 33rd’s bayonet charge, but others fled and, before long, the whole force was streaming back up the hill. On the far side of the road, Tipu’s cavalry attacked the forward Madras brigade, under Major-General David Baird, but it was only to buy time while the rest of the infantry withdrew. Even then, the retreating sepoys were badly cut up by pursuing horsemen from the 19th Light Dragoons and two units of Indian horse.
The road to Seringapatam was now open, but so exhausted and reduced in number were his bullocks that it took Harris more than a week to cover the 28 miles to the capital. He finally arrived 2 miles to the west of Seringapatam’s defences on 5 April, having made a wide detour to the south; Tipu, meanwhile, had withdrawn into the fortress itself, which was sited on the western end of an island in the River Cauvery, with its northern and western walls flanked by branches of the river. In the rainy season the river was a formidable barrier: too deep to ford and too fast-flowing to cross in boats. But it was still the dry season and the river was little more than a trickle; the walls flanked by the Cauvery, moreover, were less formidable than those open to the rest of the island. For both these reasons, Harris had chosen to breach the fortress’s western wall. But first Harris had to clear a number of enemy outposts in front of the river, notably a strong position in a tope, or thicket, of trees that was enclosed within a drainage canal known as The Aqueduct.
Wellesley was given the job of clearing the tope and the neighbouring village of Sultanpettah, while a Colonel Shaw made a simultaneous attack on an outpost to the north. Both operations would take place after dark on the 5th. So confident was Wellesley that he wrote to assure his brother that ‘we shall be masters of this place before much time passes over our Heads.’14 But he had badly underestimated the fighting quality of the Mysore troops and the difficulty of the terrain. That afternoon, unsure of his objective, he had asked Harris to ride out in front of the lines and point out the exact place. ‘Upon looking at the tope as I came in just now,’ he observed to Harris, ‘it appeared to me that when you get possession of the bank of [The Aqueduct], you have the tope as a matter of course, as the latter is in the rear of the former.’15 Harris, however, was too busy to survey the ground and Wellesley also failed to reconnoitre. He did not realize that the tope was criss-crossed with irrigation channels from 4 to 6 feet deep, and almost impossible to negotiate in the dark.
