CHAPTER XI.
THE FIRST SIKH WAR—continued.
REGULAR AND IRREGULAR INFANTRY—SIKH ARMY, 1845.
incessant volleys of musketry; but no Sikh offered to submit—no disciple of Govind asked for quarter. Everywhere they showed a bold front to the victors, whilst many rushed singly forth to meet assured death. Step by step they were forced back to the bridge of boats, which gave way under the pressure. The river had suddenly risen seven feet during the night, making the ford impassable. In the crowd many of their mounted officers, grey-bearded old chiefs, scorning to save themselves, were seen waving their swords on high, calling on their men to drive back the English, to vindicate their honour or die. Their heroic efforts to retrieve the day were of no avail; destruction awaited them on every side. The horse artillery coming up poured in a hot fire among them; terrible was the carnage, and thousands were drowned attempting to swim across. The Khalsa was disastrously routed; 67 cannon, 200 swivel guns, numerous standards, and vast munitions of war were the spoils of victory. Sir Henry Hardinge referred to it as "one of the most daring ever achieved, by which in open day a triple line of breastworks, flanked by formidable redoubts, bristling with guns, manned by thirty-two regular regiments of infantry, were assaulted and carried."
The British loss was 2400 killed and wounded,—about one-sixth of their force engaged,—that of the Sikhs in killed, wounded, and drowned being estimated at 10,000. Some of the English regiments, on whom the brunt of the fighting fell, lost one-third of their strength.
On the following day a party of Sikhs came in with a request to take away the bodies of their slain chiefs, among them that of Sardar Sham Singh, whose death they all deplored, a comrade of Ranjit Singh and an experienced and gallant old soldier. He had opposed the ill-fated cry of war against the British, but, unheeded in Council, threw in his lot with the Khalsa when the die was cast, and at the head of his men joined the army. At Sobraon he announced his determination not to survive another defeat, which he feared more than death. Dressed in white clothes, he was, with his long flowing white beard, conspicuous on the ramparts cheering on his ardent followers, directing the gunners where to fire on the English soldiers, confident, if they were destroyed, the day was gained. He fell honoured by his gallant opponents. His wife, a high-spirited Sikh dame, on hearing at her home of the defeat of the Khalsa, without waiting for details, immolated herself on the funeral pyre, as she said she knew her lord was dead, he having assured her he would not disgrace his family by returning defeated.
On the night of the victory at Sobraon advanced brigades were pushed across the river, and by the 13th the whole force was over and marching to the capital, which was reached without opposition within a week. The shattered remnant of the Sikh army retired and halted near Lahore, ready to lay down their arms. Within the short period of sixty days from the time when the Sikhs crossed the Sutlej so confident of victory, the British force, far inferior in numbers of men and guns, but superior in everything which makes for success, had defeated the flower of the great Khalsa in four well-fought-out pitched battles and wrested from them in action 220 guns, while only 14,000 of that derelict army now remained in the field. The much-plundered city of Lahore was amazed to find that it was spared from pillage, and to hear that the British had committed no outrages during their victorious march and scrupulously paid for everything they took. There was now nothing left to encourage the Sikhs to continue the contest; they had been well and fairly beaten, but they had forgot nothing of their praetorian pride. Their vanity was mortally wounded, so they raised the cry of treachery and turned on their Brahman leaders, to whom they ascribed all their disasters. They had, however, learned a good deal and unlearned much regarding the British; but, as was shown later on, they were not yet subdued, although they had found out that it was not bravery, of which they had plenty, nor numbers and good arms alone, that made a successful army, but also good generals and good leaders. An old Sikh soldier remarked to an English officer after the battle, "If we only had had your sahibs [officers] to lead and direct us in the way they did your soldiers, there would have been another story to tell."
The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, in the House of Commons, when proposing the thanks of Parliament to the Indian Army of the Sutlej, spoke enthusiastically of their victories, interrupted by no single failure,—unsullied by any imputations on our arms or character,—and quoted from a letter to him the generous tribute of their brave veteran chief to the gallant foe: "Policy precluded me from publicly recording my sentiments on the splendid gallantry of our fallen foe, or to record the acts of heroism displayed not only individually but almost collectively by the Sikh sardars and army; and I declare, were it not from a deep conviction that my country's good demanded the sacrifice, I could have wept to witness the fearful slaughter of so devoted a body of men."
The Sikh army—the weapon which Ranjit Singh had so well forged—turned against his best friends, the British, who met in it the hardest fighting enemy they had encountered in the East, and whose gallantry and steadiness in action excited the admiration of their opponents just as that of their remote ancestors the Getæ or Indo-Scythic warriors at Arbela, twenty-two centuries before, when fighting under Darius against the Macedonian phalanx, drew forth the praise of the great Alexander. The names of Moodkee, Ferozeshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon have rung in history. A great tradition connected with the rise of our Indian Empire hovers round them, immortalising the unsurpassed example of unflinching courage set by the British soldier. They are emblazoned alongside other glorious battle-scrolls on the colours of the distinguished regiments who so nobly maintained on the banks of the Sutlej the high reputation of those before them in building up England's power.
Ranjit Singh's star set in red anarchy. Anti-British feeling ever since his death prevailed as the remedy to distract the Khalsa. The moment they thought was favourable to take the fatal step to occupy the Cis-Sutlej Sikh states, to rally their population to the blood-and-plunder cry. The British were nearly caught by their own unwillingness to move—to believe that the Khalsa was in earnest. Dilatory measures to move up troops to meet the menace being deemed expedient by the political authorities, the strong men armed were within our gates when the assembly sounded; but hard marching, and the devotion of the British soldier in response to Gough's stern appeal to close with the enemy, saved the situation. He stood eye to eye in front of an active strong power having greater elements at his back and in our own territory. The Sikh giant commenced the fight by delivering with his fist a solid blow full in the Briton's face. It was quickly and strongly returned, and he was grievously worsted. The problem Sir Hugh Gough had to deal with was to confine the war to the banks of the Sutlej. It was more of a soldier's war than a general's. He did not attempt to bring off strategical movements in the nature of evading the enemy, to fall on him unawares or force him to shift his ground to fight. He had few but very good troops. Support was far off; his main object was to meet the enemy and fight,—the harder the fighting the better, in order by bold tactics to shorten the war,—and he succeeded. At every stage he was greatly outnumbered; he saw that a stubborn foe behind works was not to be beaten down by his own inferior gun-fire, their guns being far more numerous, heavier, and well served. The keynote of his tactics was a bold intrepid charge—close quarters and the bayonet—to impress the enemy by audacity and daring. He clung with bulldog tenacity to the Sikhs after Ferozeshah, rejecting proposals to harry their rear over the river, waiting to deal a final knock-out blow when his force was refreshed, so as to leave farther advance unopposed. After this had been done our friends in rear and ahead were as thick as flies in summer. He was essentially a fighting general, a hard hitter, whose maxim was "L'audace, toujours l'audace." He grasped success. The generals, among them veterans of the Peninsula, Waterloo, and Afghanistan, were first and foremost in the thick of battle, exposing their lives freely and rousing the daring of their men to the utmost by personal example, several of them falling "in the rapture of the strife," cheering on to victory. With a small determined force it was the only decisive form of conducting the campaign, and every one was inspired by the direct spirit of their gallant chief. It made a great impression on the Sikhs, who would have extended the area of operations had strategical manœuvring been resorted to. They found that, whether in the open field or behind formidable works, they had met more than their match.
Immediately after the crushing defeat at Sobraon, the Lahore durbar, with all the Sikh sardars and army delegates, sued for peace on any terms, and the young Maharaja, with Raja Gulab Singh, came into the British camp to submit in the name of his Government. The work of the soldier having been completed and the enemy made amenable to reason at the point of the bayonet, a thick velvet glove was now put on the iron hand and generous terms dictated. By a treaty ratified in March 1846 the Maharaja was restored to the throne, the country between the Sutlej and Bias rivers ceded to the British, and a war indemnity of one and a half millions sterling imposed; but as this amount was not forthcoming from an empty treasury, the hill country north of the plains of the Punjab was also ceded as an equivalent for one million. The regular army of the Lahore State was not to exceed twenty-five infantry battalions with 12,000 cavalry, to be paid and organised under the system which existed in the time of Ranjit Singh, the guns remaining in the arsenal being left to them. 250 guns, including all that had been pointed against the British, were marched off to Calcutta under escort, to be seen by all India as the spoils of battle and victory.
At the urgent request of the Durbar, who feared the disbanded Khalsa army, a British force of 10,000 men was left till the close of the year for the protection of the Maharaja and the city of Lahore, pending reorganisation of the Government and their army, which time was afterwards, on a special appeal signed by fifty-two of the chief sardars, by a new treaty in December 1846, extended reluctantly by the Governor-General until the Maharaja should attain his majority in 1854. The British Government invested the Dogra Raja Gulab Singh with the title of Maharaja, and in consideration of his paying out of his wealth, amassed during the troublous times, one million sterling of the war indemnity for the impoverished Durbar, Kashmir with its dependencies was transferred to him as independent ruler and vassal of the British—a very bad bargain for the Government, which unfortunately was rendered necessary by the political exigency of the moment. He, however, now reaped what he had sown by craft, and attained the object of all the diplomacy and bloodshed of his family since the death of his patron Ranjit Singh. The Maharani Jindan was acknowledged as queen-regent of the state, with her minion Raja Lai Singh as executive minister, and Major Henry Lawrence was left in charge of political affairs at Lahore with a voice in the Durbar.