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Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde

by Archibald Forbes · English · Gutenberg #48577 · 388,113 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde

Author: Archibald Forbes


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLIN CAMPBELL, LORD CLYDE ***

  TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
  corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
  the text and consultation of external sources.

  More detail can be found at the end of the book.




  English Men of Action

  COLIN CAMPBELL

  LORD CLYDE

[Illustration: (Publisher's colophon.)]

[Illustration: SIR COLIN CAMPBELL, LORD CLYDE

After the Picture by Sir FRANCIS GRANT, P.R.A.]




  COLIN CAMPBELL

  LORD CLYDE


  BY

  ARCHIBALD FORBES


  London
  MACMILLAN AND CO.
  AND NEW YORK
  1895

  _All rights reserved_




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I

                                                          PAGE
  EARLY LIFE--THE PENINSULA                                  1


  CHAPTER II

  COLONIAL AND HOME SERVICE                                 22


  CHAPTER III

  CHINA AND INDIA                                           39


  CHAPTER IV

  THE CRIMEA                                                82


  CHAPTER V

  THE INDIAN MUTINY--ORGANISATION--RELIEF OF
  LUCKNOW--DEFEAT OF GWALIOR CONTINGENT                    110


  CHAPTER VI

  THE STORMING OF LUCKNOW                                  144


  CHAPTER VII

  THE CAMPAIGN IN ROHILCUND                                173


  CHAPTER VIII

  THE CAMPAIGN IN CENTRAL INDIA                            187


  CHAPTER IX

  THE PACIFICATION OF OUDE--END OF THE MUTINY              198


  CHAPTER X

  FROM SIMLA TO WESTMINSTER ABBEY                          212




CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE--THE PENINSULA


The British Military Service is fertile in curious contrasts. Among
the officers who sailed from England for the East in the spring of
1854 were three veterans who had soldiered under the Great Duke in
Portugal and Spain. The fighting career of each of those men began
almost simultaneously; the senior of the three first confronted
an enemy's fire in 1807, the two others in the following year. In
1854 one of these officers, who was the son of a duke and who had
himself been raised to the peerage, was the Commander-in-Chief of
the expeditionary army. Lord Raglan was a lieutenant-colonel at
the age of twenty-four, a colonel at twenty-seven, a major-general
at thirty-seven. He had been colonel-in-chief of a regiment since
1830 and a lieutenant-general since 1838; and he was to become
a field-marshal before the year was out. Another, who belonged,
although irregularly, to an old and good family, whose father was a
distinguished if unfortunate general, and who enjoyed the patronage
and protection of one of our great houses, belonging though he
did to an arm of the service in which promotion has always been
exceptionally slow, was a lieutenant-colonel at thirty and a colonel
at forty, and was now a lieutenant-general on the Staff and second
in command of the expeditionary force. The third, who was the son
of a Glasgow carpenter, sailed for the East, it is true, with the
assurance of the command of a brigade; but, after a service of
forty-six years, his army-rank then and for three months later, was
still only that of colonel. Neither Lord Raglan nor Sir John Burgoyne
had ever heard a shot fired in anger since the memorable year of
Waterloo; but during the long peace both had been attaining step
after step of promotion, and holding lucrative and not particularly
arduous offices. Since the Peninsular days Colin Campbell had been
soldiering his steadfast way round the world, taking campaigns
and climates alike as they came to him in the way of duty,--now
a brigade-major, now serving and conquering in the command of a
division, now holding at the point of the bayonet the most dangerous
frontier of British India against onslaught after onslaught of the
turbulent hill-tribes beyond the border. He had fought not without
honour, for his Sovereign had made him a Knight of the Bath and
appointed him one of her own aides-de-camp. But there is a certain
barrenness in honours when unaccompanied by promotion, and it had
fallen to the lot of the son of the Glasgow carpenter to serve for
eighteen years in the capacity of a field-officer commanding a
regiment.

Yet even in the British military service the aphorism occasionally
holds good, that everything comes to him who knows how to wait. Colin
Campbell, the half-pay colonel of 1854, was a full general in 1858
and a peer of the realm in the same year; in 1862 he was gazetted
a field-marshal. In less than nine years the half-pay colonel had
attained the highest rank in the service,--a promotion of unique
rapidity apart from that conferred on soldiers of royal blood. Along
with Lord Clyde were gazetted field-marshals Sir Edward Blakeney and
Lord Gough, both of whom were lieutenant-generals of some twenty
years' standing when Colin Campbell was merely a colonel. Sir John
Burgoyne, almost immeasurably his senior in 1854, did not become a
field-marshal until 1868.

Colin Campbell was born in Glasgow on the 20th of October 1792, the
eldest of the four children of John Macliver, the Glasgow carpenter,
and his wife Agnes Campbell. How Colin Macliver came to bear the
name of Colin Campbell will presently be told. The family had gone
down in the world, but Colin Campbell came of good old stock on both
sides of the house. His grandfather, Laird of Ardnave in the island
of Islay, had been out in the Forty-five and so forfeited his estate.
General Shadwell, the biographer of Colin Campbell, states that his
mother was of a respectable family which had settled in Islay near
two centuries ago with its chief, the ancestor of the existing Earls
of Cawdor. But the Campbell who was the ancestor of the Cawdors was a
son of the second Earl of Argyle who fell at Flodden in 1513, and he
belonged to the first half of the sixteenth century; so that, since
Colin Campbell's maternal family settled in Islay with its chief, it
could reckon a longer existence than that ascribed to it by General
Shadwell. Not a few of Colin Campbell's kinsmen had served in the
army; and the uncle after whom he was christened had fallen as a
subaltern in the war of the American Revolution.

His earliest schooling he received at the Glasgow High School,
whence at the age of ten he was removed by his mother's brother,
Colonel John Campbell, and placed by him in the Royal Military and
Naval Academy at Gosport. Scarcely anything is on record regarding
young Colin's school-days there. The first Lord Chelmsford was one
of his schoolfellows; and there is a tradition that he spent his
holidays with the worthy couple by whom the Academy was established,
and by a descendant of whom it is still carried on. When barely
fifteen and a half his uncle presented him to the Duke of York, then
Commander-in-Chief, who promised him a commission; and supposing
him to be, as he said, "another of the clan," put down his name
as Colin Campbell, the name which he thenceforth bore. General
Shadwell states that on leaving the Duke's presence with his uncle,
young Colin made some comment on what he took to be a mistake on
the Duke's part in regard to his surname, to which the shrewd uncle
replied by telling him that "Campbell was a name which it would suit
him, for professional reasons, to adopt." The youngster was wise in
his generation, and does not appear to have had any compunction in
dropping the not particularly euphonious surname of Macliver. On the
26th of May 1808 young Campbell received the commission of ensign in
the Ninth Foot, now known as the Norfolk regiment; and within five
weeks from the date of his first commission he was promoted to a
lieutenancy in the same regiment.

He entered the service at an eventful moment. Napoleon had attained
the zenith of his marvellous career. He was the virtual master of
the whole of continental Europe. The royal family of Spain were in
effect his prisoners, and his brother Joseph had been proclaimed
King of Spain. The royal family of Portugal had departed to the New
World lest worse things should befall it, and Junot was ruling in
Lisbon in the name of his imperial master. But the Spaniards rose _en
masse_ in a national insurrection; and no sooner had they raised the
standard of independence than they felt the necessity of applying
to England for aid. Almost simultaneously the Portuguese rose, and
no severity on Junot's part availed to crush the universal revolt.
Almost on the very day on which young Campbell joined his regiment
in the Isle of Wight, the British force of nine thousand men to the
command of which Sir Arthur Wellesley was appointed, sailed from Cork
for the Peninsula. Spencer's division joined Wellesley in Mondego
Bay, and on the night of the 8th of August 1808 thirteen thousand
British soldiers bivouacked on the beach--the advanced guard of
an army which, after six years of many vicissitudes and much hard
fighting, was to expel from the Peninsula the last French soldier and
to contribute materially to the ruin of Napoleon.

Campbell was posted to the second battalion of the Ninth, commanded
by Colonel Cameron, an officer of whom he always spoke with
affectionate regard. The first battalion of the regiment had
already sailed from Cork, and the second, which belonged to General
Anstruther's brigade, took ship at Ramsgate for the Peninsula on
July 20th. Reaching the open sandy beach at the mouth of the Maceira
on the 19th of August, it was disembarked the same evening, and
bivouacked on the beach. Campbell notes, "lay out that night for the
first time in my life;" many a subsequent night did he lie out in
divers regions! On the following day the battalion joined the army
then encamped about the village of Vimiera. Wellesley had only landed
on the 8th, but already he had been the victor in the skirmish of
Obidos and the battle of Roleia; and now, on the 21st, he was again
to defeat Junot on the heights of Vimiera.

Directly in front of the village of that name rose a rugged isolated
height, with a flat summit commanding the ground in front and to
the left. Here was posted Anstruther's brigade, its left resting
on the village church and graveyard. Young Campbell was with the
rear company of his battalion, which stood halted in open column of
companies under the fierce fire of Laborde's artillery covering the
impending assault of his infantry. The captain of Campbell's company,
an officer inured to war, chose the occasion for leading the lad
out to the front of the battalion and walking with him along the
face of the leading company for several minutes, after which little
piece of experience he sent him back to his company. In narrating
the incident in after years Campbell was wont to add: "It was the
greatest kindness that could have been shown to me at such a time,
and through life I have been grateful for it." It is not unlikely
that the gallant and considerate old soldier may have intended not
alone to give to his young subaltern his baptism of fire, but also to
brace the nerves of the men of a battalion which, although part of a
regiment subsequently distinguished in many campaigns and battles,
was now for the first time in its military life to confront an enemy
and endure hostile fire.

The brigade was assailed at once in front and flank. The main
French column, headed by Laborde in person and preceded by swarms of
tirailleurs, mounted the face of the hill with great fury and loud
shouts. So impetuous was the onset that the British skirmishers were
driven in upon the lines, but steady volleys arrested the advance of
the French, and they broke and fled without waiting for the impending
bayonet charge. It would be interesting to know something of the
impressions made on young Campbell by his first experience of actual
war; but the curt entry in his memorandum is simply--"21st (August),
was engaged at the battle of Vimiera."

At the end of the brief campaign Campbell was transferred to the
first battalion of the Ninth, and had the good fortune to remain
under the command of Colonel Cameron, who had also been transferred.
In the beginning of October a despatch from England reached Lisbon,
instructing Sir John Moore to take command of the British army
intended to co-operate with the forces of Spain in an attempt to
expel the French from the Peninsula. The disasters which befell the
enterprise committed to Moore need not be recounted in detail because
of the circumstance that a young lieutenant shared in them in common
with the rest of the hapless force. The battalion in which Campbell
was serving was among the earliest troops to be put in motion. It
quitted its quarters at Quelus, near Lisbon on October 12th, and
reached Salamanca on November 11th. When Moore's army was organised
in divisions, the battalion formed part of Major-General Beresford's
brigade belonging to the division commanded by Lieutenant-General
Mackenzie Fraser. On reaching Salamanca Moore found that the Spanish
armies which he had come to support were already destroyed, and
that he himself was destitute alike of supplies and money. In this
situation it was his original intention to retire into Portugal,
which might have been his wisest course; but Moore was a man of a
high and ardent nature. When on the point of taking the offensive in
the hope of affording to the Spaniards breathing-time for organising
a defence of the southern provinces, he became aware that French
forces were converging on him from diverse points; and on the 24th of
December began the memorable retreat, the disasters of which cannot
be said to have been compensated for by the nominal victory of Coruña.

In the hardships and horrors of that midwinter retreat young Campbell
bore his share. Little, if any fighting came in his way, since the
division to which his battalion belonged was for the most part in
front. During the retreat it experienced a loss of one hundred and
fifty men; but they are all specified as having died on the march or
having been taken prisoners by the enemy. Nor had it the good fortune
to take part in the battle of Coruña, having been stationed in the
town during the fighting. There fell to a fatigue party detailed from
it the melancholy duty of digging on the rampart of Coruña the grave
of Moore, wherein under the fire of the French guns he was laid in
his "martial cloak" by his sorrowing Staff in the gray winter's dawn.
Beresford's brigade, to which Campbell's battalion belonged, covered
the embarkation and was the last to quit a shore of melancholy
memory. General Shadwell writes that, "To give some idea of the
discomforts of the retreat, Lord Clyde used to relate how for some
time before reaching Coruña he had to march with bare feet, the soles
of his boots being completely worn away. He had no means of replacing
them, and when he got on board ship he was unable to remove them, as
from constant wear and his inability to take them off the leather had
adhered so closely to the flesh of the legs that he was obliged to
steep them in water as hot as he could bear and have the leather cut
away in strips--a painful operation, as in the process pieces of the
skin were brought away with it."

After a stay in England of little more than six months Campbell's
battalion was again sent on foreign service, an item of the fine
army of forty thousand men under the command of the Earl of Chatham.
The main object of the undertaking, which is known as the Walcheren
Expedition, whose story occupies one of the darkest pages of
our military history, was to reduce the fortress of Antwerp and
destroy the French fleet lying under its shelter, in the hope of
disconcerting Napoleon and creating a diversion in favour of Austria.
But opportunities were lost, time was squandered, and the expedition
ended in disastrous failure. Montresor's brigade, to which Campbell's
battalion belonged, disembarked on the island of South Beveland in
the beginning of August, to be the gradual prey of fever and ague in
the pestilential marshes of the island. Nothing was achieved save
the barren capture of the fortress of Flushing; and towards the end
of September most of the land forces of the expedition, including
Campbell's battalion, returned to England. Over one-sixth of the
original army of forty thousand men had been buried in the swamps
of Walcheren and South Beveland; the survivors carried home with
them the seeds of the "Walcheren fever," which affected them more or
less for the rest of their lives. Colin Campbell was an intermittent
sufferer from it almost if not quite to the end of his life.

The second battalion of the Ninth had been in garrison at Gibraltar
since July, 1809, and to it Colin Campbell was transferred some
time in the course of the following year. In the beginning of 1811
the French Marshal Victor was blockading Cadiz, and General Graham
(afterwards Lord Lynedoch) determined on an attempt in concert with a
Spanish force to march on his rear and break the blockade. Landing at
Tarifa he picked up a detachment, which included the flank companies
of the Ninth in which Campbell was serving. Graham's division of
British troops was now somewhat over four thousand strong, and the
Spanish army of La Peña was at least thrice that strength. The allied
force reached the heights of Barrosa on March 5th. Graham anxiously
desired to hold that position, recognising its value; but he had
ceded the command to La Peña, who gave him the order to quit it and
move forward. In the conviction that La Peña himself would remain
there, he obeyed, leaving on Barrosa as baggage-guard the flank
companies of the Ninth and Eighty-Second regiments under Major Brown.
Graham had not gone far when La Peña abandoned the Barrosa position
with the mass of his force. Victor had been watching events under
cover of a forest, his three divisions well in hand; and now he saw
his opportunity. Villatte was to stand fast; Laval to intercept
the return of the British division to the height; Ruffin to seize
the height, sweep from it the allied rear-guard left there, and
disperse the baggage and followers. Major Brown held together the
flank companies he commanded, and withdrew slowly into the plain.
Graham promptly faced about and made haste to attack. Brown had sent
to Graham for orders, and was told that he was to fight; and the
gallant Brown, unsupported as he was, charged headlong on Ruffin's
front. Half his detachment went down under the enemy's first fire;
but he maintained the fight staunchly until Dilke's division came up,
when the whole, Dilke's people and Brown's stanch flank companies,
"with little order indeed, but in a fierce mood," in Napier's words,
rushed upwards to close quarters. The struggle lasted for an hour
and a half and was "most violent and bloody"; only the unconquerable
spirit of the British soldiers averted disaster and accomplished the
victory. Many a fierce fight was Colin Campbell to take part in, but
none more violent and bloody than this one on the heights of Barrosa.
His record of his own share in it is characteristically brief and
modest: "At the battle of Barrosa Lord Lynedoch was pleased to take
favourable notice of my conduct when left in command of the two flank
companies of my regiment, all the other officers being wounded."

Late in the same year Campbell saw some casual service while
temporarily attached to the Spanish army commanded by Ballasteros in
the south of Spain. In the disturbed state of the surrounding region
many Spanish families of rank were glad to find quiet shelter within
the fortress of Gibraltar, and their society was eagerly sought by
young Campbell, who was anxious to take the opportunity of improving
himself in the French and Spanish languages. When in December, 1811,
a French force under Laval undertook what proved an abortive and
final attempt to reduce the fortified town of Tarifa, he accompanied
the light company of his battalion to take part in the vigorous and
successful defence of the place, a result achieved by the courage and
devotion of the British garrison sent to hold it by General Campbell,
the wise and energetic governor of Gibraltar, and by the skill and
resource of Sir Charles Smith the chief engineer.

At the close of 1812 Colin Campbell had just turned his twentieth
year, and had been a soldier for four and a half years, during which
time he had seen no small variety of service. Vimiera and Barrosa
had been stiff fights, but neither belonged to the category of "big
wars" which are said to "make ambition virtue." Young Campbell had
virtue, and certainly did not lack honest ambition. In a sense he
had as yet not been very fortunate. In a period when interest was
almost everything, he had absolutely none. While he had been on a
side track of the great war, his more fortunate comrades of the
first battalion had fought at Busaco and Salamanca under the eye of
the Great Captain himself. But the time had now come when he, too,
was to belong to the army which Wellington was to lead to final and
decisive victory. He accompanied a draft from the second battalion
of his regiment which in January 1813 was sent to join the first
battalion lying in its winter cantonments in the vicinity of Lamego
on the lower Douro, and to his great joy found himself again under
the command of his original chief, Colonel Cameron. In its winter
quarters the allied army had recovered the cohesion and discipline
so sadly impaired during the retreat from Burgos in the preceding
autumn, and, strengthened by large reinforcements, was now in fine
form and high heart. The advance began in the middle of May, when
Wellington's army, seventy thousand strong, swept onward on a broad
front, turning the positions of the French and driving them before
it towards the Pyrenees. Of the three corps constituting that army
Sir Thomas Graham's had the left, consisting of the first, third,
and fifth divisions, to the second brigade of which, commanded by
General Hay, belonged the first battalion of the Ninth, to the light
company of which Colin Campbell was posted. The march of Graham's
corps through the difficult mountainous region of Tras-os-Montes and
onward to Vittoria was exceptionally arduous, but the obstacles were
skilfully surmounted. Of the part taken by his battalion on this
advance Colin Campbell kept a minute daily record, which has been
preserved. He acted as orderly officer to Lieutenant-Colonel Crawford
of his battalion, who commanded the flank companies of the third and
fifth divisions in the operation of crossing the Esla at Almandra
on May 31st. Continuing its march towards the north-east Graham's
corps crossed the Ebro with some skirmishing, and on the morning of
the 18th of June its advance debouched from the defile of Astri and
marched on Osma, where the French General Reille with two divisions
was unexpectedly met. Reille occupied the heights of Astalitz. The
light companies of the first brigade were sent against the enemy, who
were evincing an intent to retreat, and Campbell accompanied his
company. He notes as follows:--"This being our first encounter of the
campaign, the men were ardent and eager, and pressed the French most
wickedly. When the enemy began their movement to the rear, they were
constrained to hurry the pace of their columns, notwithstanding the
cloud of skirmishers which covered their retreat. Lord Wellington
came up about half-past three. We continued the pursuit until dusk,
when we were relieved by the light troops of the fourth division. The
ground on which we skirmished was so thickly wooded and so rugged and
uneven, that when we were relieved by the fourth division, and the
light companies were ordered to return to their respective regiments,
I found myself incapable of further exertion from fatigue and
exhaustion, occasioned by six hours of almost continuous skirmishing."

On the 20th Wellington's army moved down into the basin of Vittoria.
King Joseph's dispositions for the battle of Vittoria, which was
fought on June 21st, were distinctly bad. His right flank at Gamara
Mayor was too distant to be supported by the main body of his army,
yet the safe retreat of the latter in the event of defeat depended
on the staunchness of this isolated wing. Graham, moving southward
from Murguia by the Bilbao road, was to attack Reille who commanded
the French right, and to attempt the passage of the Zadora at Gamara
Mayor and Ariaga; should he succeed, the French would be turned, and
in great part enclosed between the Puebla mountains on one side and
the Zadora on the other by the corps of Hill and Wellington.

Graham approached the valley of the Zadora about noon. Before moving
forward on the village of Abechuco, it became necessary to force
across the river the enemy's troops holding the heights on the
left and covering the bridges of Ariaza and Gamara Mayor. This was
accomplished after a short but sharp fight in which Colin Campbell
participated. Sarrut's French division retired across the stream,
and the British troops occupied the ground from which the enemy had
been driven. Campbell thus describes the sequel:--"While we were
halted the enemy occupied Gamara Mayor in considerable force, placed
two guns at the principal entrance into the village, threw a cloud
of skirmishers in front among the cornfields, and occupied with six
pieces of artillery the heights immediately behind the village on
the left bank. About 5 P.M. an order arrived from Lord Wellington
to press the enemy in our front. It was the extreme right of their
line; and the lower road leading to France, by which alone they could
retire their artillery and baggage, ran close to Gamara Mayor. The
left brigade moved down in contiguous columns of companies, and our
light companies were sent to cover the right flank of this attack.
The regiments, exposed to a heavy fire of musketry and artillery,
did not take a musket from the shoulder until they carried the
village. The enemy brought forward his reserves, and made many
desperate efforts to retake the bridge, but could not succeed. This
was repeated until the bridge became so heaped with dead and wounded
that they were rolled over the parapet into the river below. Our
light companies were closed upon the Ninth, and brought into the
village to support the second brigade. We were presently ordered
to the left to cover that flank of the village, and we occupied the
bank of the river, on the opposite side of which was the enemy. After
three hours' hard fighting they retired, leaving their guns in our
possession. Crossing the Zadora in pursuit, we followed them about a
league, and encamped near Metanco." The French left and centre had
been driven in, and Graham had closed to the enemy their retreat
by the Bayonne road, so that there remained to them only the road
leading towards Pampeluna, which was all but utterly blocked by
vehicles and fugitives. In the words of one of themselves, the French
at Vittoria lost all their equipages, all their guns, all their
treasure, all their stores, all their papers, so that no man could
prove even how much pay was due to him; generals and subordinate
officers alike were reduced to the clothes on their backs, and most
of them were barefooted.

After the battle of Vittoria Graham moved forward to the investment
of San Sebastian. In itself before that battle the fortress was of
little account, but since then the French General Rey had used great
energy in restoring its powers of defence; and its garrison at the
beginning of Graham's operations reached a total of about three
thousand men. San Sebastian is situated on a peninsula jutting out
into the sea, and is connected with the mainland by a narrow isthmus.
The western side of the peninsula is washed by the sea, the eastern
by the estuary of the river Urumea. At its northern extremity rose
the steep height of Monte Urgullo, the summit of which was occupied
by the castle of La Mota, a citadel of great strength, capable
of being defended after the town should have fallen. The town,
surrounded by a fortified _enceinte_, occupied the entire breadth
of the peninsula. The high curtain protecting it on the southern or
landward side had in front of it a large hornwork, with a ravelin
enclosed by a covered way and glacis. The east and west defences were
weak; along the eastern side the water of the Urumea estuary receded
at low tide for some distance from the foot of the wall, leaving
access thereto from the isthmus. At the neck of the peninsula, about
half a mile in advance of the town defences, was the height of San
Bartolomeo, near the eastern verge of which was the convent of the
same name. This building the French had fortified and had thrown up
a redoubt in connection with it, convent and redoubt forming the
advanced post of the garrison.

Graham was in command of the operations, his force amounting to
about ten thousand men. The obvious preliminary was the capture
of the redoubt and convent of San Bartolomeo. An attack on this
position, made on the 14th of July after an artillery preparation,
had failed with heavy loss. A second attempt made on the 17th was
more successful, three days of unintermitting artillery fire having
reduced the convent to ruins and silenced the redoubt. The attack
was made in two columns, the right one of which Colin Campbell
accompanied with his own, the light company. The chief fighting of
the day was done by his regiment, which stormed both convent and
redoubt and after some hard fighting drove the French out of the
adjacent suburb of San Martino and occupied what fire had spared
of it. In this affair the Ninth lost upwards of seventy officers
and soldiers. Campbell's laconic entry in his journal for this day
is simply, "Convent taken." But he must have distinguished himself
conspicuously, since in Graham's despatch to Lord Wellington, among
"the officers whose gallantry was most conspicuous in leading on
their men to overcome the variety of obstacles exposed to them" was
mentioned "Lieutenant Colin Campbell of the Ninth Foot."

The Commander-in-Chief desired judicious speed, and the operations
were hurried on unduly by men who were too impetuous to adhere to
the scheme sanctioned by their chief. After a four days' bombardment
of the place the assault was ordered for the early morning of the
25th. The storming-party consisted of a battalion of the Royals,
with the task of carrying the great breach; of the Thirty-Eighth,
told off to assail the lesser breach further to the right; and of
the Ninth, to act in support of the Royals. Colin Campbell had a
special position and a special duty, of a kind seldom entrusted to
a subaltern and markedly indicative of the estimation which he had
thus early earned. He was placed in the centre of the Royals with
twenty men of his (the light) company, having the light company
of the Royals as his immediate support and under his orders, and
accompanied by a ladder-party under an engineer officer. His specific
orders were on reaching the crest of the breach to gain the ramparts
on the left, sweep the curtain to the high work in the centre of the
main front, and there establish himself. The signal for an advance
to the assault was given prematurely, while it was still dark, by
the explosion of a mine, and the head of the storming-party moved
out of the trenches promptly but in straggling order. The space
between the exit from the parallel and the breach, some three hundred
yards, was very rugged, broken by projecting rocks, pools, seaweed
and other impediments. These difficulties, the darkness, and the
withering fire from the ramparts, increased the tendency to disorder,
and presently Campbell was not surprised to find an actual check.
The halted mass had opened fire and there was no moving it forward.
He pushed on past the halted body having there lost some men of
his detachment; and reached the breach, the lower part of which
he observed to be thickly strewn with killed and wounded. "There
were," to quote from his journal, "a few individual officers spread
on the face of the breach, but nothing more. These were cheering,
and gallantly exposing themselves to the close and destructive fire
directed on them from the round tower and other defences. In going up
I passed Jones of the Engineers[1] who was wounded; and on gaining
the top I was shot through the right hip and tumbled to the bottom.
Finding on rising that I was not disabled from moving, and observing
two officers of the Royals who were exerting themselves to lead some
of their men from under the line-wall near to the breach, I went
to assist their endeavours and again went up the breach with them,
when I was shot through the inside part of the left thigh." In the
language of the brilliant historian of the Peninsular War--"It was
in vain that Lieutenant Campbell, breaking through the tumultuous
crowd with the survivors of his chosen detachment, mounted the
ruins--twice he ascended, twice he was wounded, and all around him
died." The assault failed; and the siege of San Sebastian was
temporarily exchanged for a blockade. There was much angry discussion
and recrimination as to the causes of the disastrous issue. It was
remarked that no general or staff officer had quitted the trenches,
and that what leading there was devolved entirely on the regimental
officers. They, at least, had fought well and exposed themselves
freely, and none had behaved himself more gallantly than Colin
Campbell. This was heartily and handsomely acknowledged by Graham
when he thus wrote in his despatch to Lord Wellington describing
the assault:--"I beg to recommend to you Lieutenant Campbell of the
Ninth, who led the forlorn hope, and who was severely wounded in
the breach." Such a recognition, barren of immediate results though
it was, Colin Campbell probably thought cheaply earned at the cost
of a mere couple of bullet-holes. These, however, hindered him from
participating in the desperate fighting of the final and successful
assault on San Sebastian; and, indeed, when after the surrender of
the place his division departed, he had to remain an invalid in the
shattered town. He was now about to perpetrate the only breach of
military discipline ever laid to his charge. Having heard of the
early prospect of a battle, he and a brother officer who had also
been wounded took the liberty of deserting from hospital for the
purpose of joining their regiment. How long it took them to limp from
San Sebastian to Oryarzun is not specified; but they reached the
regiment on October 6th just in time to join the midnight march to
the left bank of the Bidassoa opposite Andaya, and on the following
morning to wade the river and enter France. The British cannonade
awoke the French to find their country invaded by an enemy and
hostile cannon-balls falling in their bivouacs.

From Andaya the division in which Colin Campbell marched sprang up
the slopes to assail the key of the position, the Croix des Bouquets.
To that stronghold reinforcements were hurrying, and attacks on it
had already been made in vain; "But," in the burning words of Napier,
"at this moment Cameron arrived with the Ninth regiment, and rushed
with great vehemence to the summit of the first height. The French
infantry opened ranks to let the guns retire, and then retreated
themselves at full speed to a second rise where they could only be
approached in a narrow front. Cameron quickly threw his men into
a single column and bore against this new position, which curving
inwards enabled the French to pour a concentrated fire upon his
regiment; nor did his violent course seem to dismay them until he
was within ten yards, when, appalled by the furious shout and charge
of the Ninth, they gave way and the ridges of the Croix des Bouquets
were won as far as the royal road." The regiment in this encounter
lost nearly one hundred men; and Colin Campbell, who commanded the
light company in its front, was now again severely wounded. The
breach of discipline he had committed in discharging himself from
the hospital his colonel condoned with no sterner punishment than
a severe reprimand, on account of his gallant conduct in the first
action fought on French soil.




CHAPTER II

COLONIAL AND HOME SERVICE


With the wound which struck him down on the Croix des Bouquets on the
7th of October 1813 Colin Campbell's active service in his original
regiment ended, and on the 9th of November in the same year he was
promoted to a captaincy without purchase in the Sixtieth Rifles.
Still enfeebled by his wounds, he came home before the end of the
year with the strongest recommendations to the Horse Guards from the
commanders under whom he had served in the field,--recommendations
which do not appear to have availed him materially. He made good
his claim to a temporary wound-pension of £100 a year, but the
application made on his behalf for staff-employment with Sir Thomas
Graham in Holland was not successful.

One would fain gain some introspection into the nature, character,
and tendencies of this young soldier, who in his twenty-first
year was already a veteran of war after more than five years of
pretty constant active service. It would be pleasant to have
opportunities for regarding him as something other than a mere
military lay-figure,--to attain to some conversance with his habits,
his tastes, his attitude towards his comrades, his relations with
his family, the character of such study and reading as he could find
time for, and so forth. But the means for doing this are altogether
lacking. Lord Clyde was a very modest man, and it was with reluctance
that he allowed his papers to be used for the purposes of a memoir.
He, however, left it by his will to the discretion of his trustees
to dispose of his papers, with the characteristic injunction: "If a
short memoir should appear to them to be absolutely necessary and
indispensable (which I should regret and hope may be avoided), then
it should be limited as much as possible to the modest recital of
the services of an old soldier." The trustees, seventeen years after
Lord Clyde's death, judged wisely in sanctioning the compilation of
a memoir, the material available for which was confided to the late
General Shadwell who had been long and intimately associated with
Lord Clyde both at home and on campaign. General Shadwell's biography
of his chief is a most careful and accurate work; but probably
because of a lack of such material as, for instance, familiar
correspondence affords, it somewhat fails to furnish an adequate
presentment of Colin Campbell as he was during the long years
before he emerged from comparative obscurity, and became gradually
a marked and characteristic figure familiar to and cherished by his
fellow-countrymen.

Campbell served with a battalion of the Sixtieth in Nova Scotia
from October, 1814, to July, 1815, when ill-health caused by his
wounds compelled him to return to Europe. After a course of thermal
treatment in southern France he served for two years at Gibraltar,
and early in 1819 followed to Barbadoes the Twenty-First Fusiliers
to which regiment he had been transferred. The next seven years
of his life he passed in the West Indies,--the first two years
of the seven in Barbadoes, the latter five in Demerara, where he
served as aide-de-camp and brigade-major to the Governor, General
Murray. The tropical climate of the West Indies agreed with him,
and notwithstanding recrudescences of Walcheren fever and frequent
annoyances from his wounds he was able to enjoy life and relish
the society of the colony. During his soldiering in Spain he and
his friend and comrade Seward had perforce lived on their pay,
and had firmly avoided incurring debt. With his captain's pay
and his wound-pension Campbell found himself no longer obliged
to live penuriously, and indeed was able to assist his father
by a considerable annual payment. And now in Demerara with his
staff-appointment he was so well off that, in his disregard for
money, he carelessly allowed his pension to lapse, a neglect which
he had bitter reason to regret later. His friend General Murray was
succeeded in the Demerara command by General Sir Benjamin D'Urban, a
distinguished Peninsular officer, between whom and his brigade-major
there was speedily engendered a mutual esteem and affection.
Probably, indeed, those years in Demerara were the pleasantest of
Colin Campbell's life. Comfortable (and we may be sure efficient) in
his staff-position, and the right hand man of a chief who loved him,
he was happy in his regiment and welcome everywhere in society. When
in November, 1825, the opportunity presented itself for his promotion
by purchase to a majority in his regiment, it was the spontaneous
generosity of a colonial friend which mainly enabled him to buy the
step. The promotion was of the greatest professional importance to
him, and indeed may be considered the turning-point of his career;
but it required him to vacate his pleasant appointment and to take
leave of the chief whose friendship he so warmly cherished. Returning
to England in 1826 to join the depôt of his regiment, he took home
with him the strongest recommendations from Sir Benjamin D'Urban to
the authorities at the Horse Guards; but he continued to serve with
his regiment at home until the autumn of 1832 in the rank of major,
although through the kindness of a relative the money was ready for
the purchase of his promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

General Shadwell furnishes us with an interesting sketch of Colin
Campbell's personal aspect from a portrait taken of him in his
uniform at this period of his career. "A profusion of curly brown
hair, a well-shaped mouth and a wide brow, already foreshadowing the
deep lines which became so marked a feature of his countenance in
later years, convey the idea of manliness and vigour. His height was
about five feet nine, his frame well knit and powerful; and but that
his shoulders were too broad for his height, his figure was that of a
symmetrically-made man. To an agreeable presence he added the charm
of engaging manners, which, according to the testimony of those who
were familiar with him at this period, rendered him popular both at
the dinner-table and in the drawing-room."

After several disappointments, in October, 1832, through the good
offices of Lord Fitzroy Somerset he was gazetted to an unattached
lieutenant-colonelcy by purchase. The promotion cost him £1300
and relegated him for a time to half-pay, "after," to use his own
words, "a period of nearly twenty-five years on full pay--viz.
upwards of five years as a subaltern, nearly thirteen as captain,
and seven as major." His time being now at his own disposal, his
active and energetic temperament would not allow him to vegetate
in idleness. He determined to watch the operations of the siege of
Antwerp conducted by a French force under Marshal Gérard against
the resolute but scanty Dutch garrison, which under the energetic
command of General Chassé was holding the citadel and outworks of
the historic Flemish city. He kept a detailed and technical journal
of the siege operations and of Chassé's obstinate defence, from
which he compiled reports for the Horse Guards; and for these he was
afterwards thanked by Lord Hill and Lord Fitzroy Somerset. It was an
experience which must have been of service to him when he came to
hold high command; as he wrote at the time, "To have been present at
and to have witnessed the operations of a siege commenced and carried
on _en règle_ to the crowning of the crest of the glacis, and the
establishment of the breaching and counter batteries thereon and the
descent of the ditch completed, has given me great satisfaction."
After the capitulation of Antwerp Campbell wintered in the quaint
old city of Marburg in Hesse-Cassel, with the twofold purpose of
acquiring the German language and of living economically. The summer
and autumn of 1833 he spent in Germany, but was in England during
most of 1834 undergoing disappointment after disappointment. His
means he found wholly inadequate for a London life, yet it was
clear that it would be unwise to absent himself from proximity to
the authorities. "Doing nothing and expecting nothing" is one dreary
note of this period. Indeed inaction, which he detested, and the
dregs in his constitution of the old pestilential Walcheren mischief,
were combining to make Colin Campbell morbid and desponding. Yet,
considering all things, he had attained better advancement than many
of his old Peninsular comrades. Take, for example, George Bell of
the Royals, a fellow subaltern with Campbell in Hay's brigade of
Graham's corps in the Vittoria campaign. Bell was a younger soldier
than Campbell by three years, but he had seen infinitely more
service than his senior. Bell "was engaged in the action of Arroyo
de Molino, the final siege of Badajos, capture of Fort Napoleon and
bridge at Almaraz, in the retreat from Burgos and Madrid, the battles
of Vittoria, the Pyrenees, Pass of Maya and Roncevalles, the Nive,
Bayonne, St. Pierre, Orthes, Tarbes, and Toulouse, with many other
affairs and skirmishes; and he possessed the Peninsular War medal
with seven clasps for as many pitched battles." Since the Peninsular
War he had fought in India and the Burmese War and had served in the
West Indies. And whereas Colin Campbell was a lieutenant-colonel
in 1832 George Bell was still a captain in 1839. To complete the
contrast, while Campbell was a peer and a full general in the middle
of 1858 Bell was still a colonel, after having fought throughout the
Crimean War in the command of a battalion. If the former despaired
of fortune when a lieutenant-colonel after twenty-seven years of
service, how bitterly must the latter have known the hope deferred
that maketh the heart sick when still a colonel after forty-eight
years of continuous service!

In the early part of 1835 Colin Campbell, still despondent, was
in London "living in very scanty hopes of employment." But in
May of that year he was offered and accepted the command of the
Ninety-Eighth regiment. Its service companies were at the Cape, but
as the regiment had nearly completed its period of foreign service
it was finally determined that it was not necessary that he should
join it there. How poor he was when he had the good fortune to revert
to full-pay, may be gathered from his hesitation to become a member
of the United Service Club. "My debts and embarrassments" he records
"indisposed me to entering it;" but a wise friend insisted upon his
taking up his election and backed his insistence by advancing the
entrance fees. The depôt of the Ninety-Eighth was at Devonport,
commanded by Captain Henry Eyre, afterwards General, and Colonel of
the Fifty-Ninth regiment; an officer between whom and Colin Campbell
there soon began a friendship which ripened into a most affectionate
and enduring intimacy. By dint of questioning this officer regarding
the minutest details of the regiment, its new chief was already
familiar with its interior economy before its arrival at Portsmouth
in the summer of 1837. He then assumed command, and at once set about
putting in practice the sound principles on which he himself had been
trained in the Ninth regiment,--principles which were the legacy of
Sir John Moore to the British army. In the camp at Shorncliffe that
great soldier had introduced a system of instruction and interior
economy which, in the words of General Shadwell, had produced in the
regiments serving under his command an excellence that had borne the
test of trial in the varied phases of the great Peninsular struggle,
and had left a permanent mark on the service at large. Campbell's
anxious and successful endeavour was to make the Ninety-Eighth a
well disciplined, thoroughly instructed and trustworthy regiment.
The material to his hand was good. He found the depôt in fine order;
the service companies brought home by Major Gregory required merely
the weeding out of some hard drinkers whose example was prejudicial
to the younger soldiers and whom the colonel was able to obtain
permission to discharge.

Colin Campbell had a genuine liking for and a thorough knowledge of
the private soldier. Throughout life he was by no means slow to wrath
when occasion stirred it, and sometimes, indeed, when the incentive
was inadequate, for hot Highland blood ran in his veins; and when
his face flushed and his gray eyes scintillated with passion, he was
not a man with whom it were wise to argue. The slack officer and the
bad soldier found no sympathy from a chief whose rebukes were strong
and whose punishments were stern; but he had a true comradeship with
those in whom he recognised some of that zeal of which he himself
had perhaps an excess. Himself ever sedulous in the fulfilment of
duty and sparing himself in nothing, he required of his officers a
scrupulous attention to their duties in everything regarding the
instruction, well-being, and conduct of their men. General Shadwell
writes: "Frugal in his habits by nature and force of circumstances,
Colonel Campbell laid stress on the observance of economy in the
officers' mess, believing a well-ordered establishment of this
kind to be the best index of a good regiment. Regarding the mess
as one of the principal levers of discipline, he made a rule of
attending it even when the frequent return of his fever and ague
rendered late dinners a physical discomfort. Cramped in his means,
he denied himself many little comforts in order that he might
have the wherewithal to return hospitality and be able to set an
example to his brother officers in the punctual discharge of his
mess liabilities. His intercourse with his officers off duty was
unrestrained and of the most friendly character. He sympathised with
them in their occupations and sports, and though the instruction and
discipline of the regiment was carried on with great strictness, the
best feeling pervaded all ranks."

In the ordinary tour of duty the Ninety-Eighth removed from
Portsmouth to Weedon, and thence it proceeded to Manchester which
was in what was then known as the Northern District command, now
subdivided into the North-Eastern and North-Western Districts. In
those days there were no railways, and the long marches by road,
in many respects advantageous though they were, and worthy as they
are, at least to some extent, of being reverted to at present,
certainly tested severely the discipline of regiments. An officer
who took part in the marches of the Ninety-Eighth thus records his
recollections:--"The regiment was in such a high state of discipline
in these marches through the length and breadth of the land, that
none of those occurrences which have since been the subject of
complaint took place. Day after day I had seen the regiment turn out
without a man missing; and drunkenness was very trifling considering
how popular the army then was, and how liberally the men were
treated. The fact was that Colin Campbell appealed to the reason and
feelings of his men, and made it a point of honour with them to be
present and sober in their billets at tattoo and at morning parade
for the march. He could invite, as well as compel obedience."

In April, 1839, the command of the troops in the Northern District,
which then comprised eleven counties, was entrusted to Sir Charles
Napier. For some time previous the disquiet among the manufacturing
population in this wide region had occasioned great anxiety to
the Government; and it seemed that the Chartist movement might
culminate in actual insurrection. An outbreak was apprehended almost
momentarily, and might occur at any point; so that all over the north
magistrates were nervously calling for military protection. Napier
had at his disposition a force of barely four thousand men; and those
were so dispersed that on assuming command he found them broken up
into no fewer than twenty-six detachments, spread over half England.
Those scattered handfuls of soldiers were worse than useless; their
weakness was dangerous and actually invited to mischief. Fortified by
the cordial support of the Home Secretary Napier insisted on three
points: the concentration of his troops, and, where detachments had
to be granted, proper quarters for them so as to keep the soldiers
together; that magistrates instead of clamouring for troops should
rally loyal citizens around them for self-defence; that the army was
to be regarded as a force of ultimate reserve, and that therefore it
was the duty of Government to establish throughout the country a
strong police force,--a measure which was soon to be dealt with by
Sir Robert Peel.

Napier had been in command of the district for some three months
before he and Colin Campbell met, although in the interval they had
corresponded officially and thus may have come to know something
of each other. Napier, at least, had gauged the character of his
subordinate officer. In July he had ordered the Ninety-Eighth from
Hull to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Things were then at about their worst,
and Napier wrote: "Great anxiety about the colliers in the north.
I have sent Campbell, Ninety-Eighth, there from Hull. The colliers
had better be quiet; they will have a hardy soldier to deal with;
yet he will be gentle and just, or he should not be there." During
its march the Ninety-Eighth was halted in billets over Sunday in
York. It chanced that Napier during a tour of inspection arrived
there by coach about noon, and alighted at the inn where the hurried
coach-dinner was served. Ascertaining that Colonel Campbell was
quartered in the house, the General promptly introduced himself.
Mentioning the number of minutes allotted for the meal, he asked
if it would be possible to collect the men under arms before the
coach went on. With perfect confidence Colin Campbell replied in
the affirmative. The "assembly" was sounded; and as the men were
gathering from their billets Napier, as he ate, cross-examined the
colonel of the Ninety-Eighth regarding the internal economy of the
regiment. He then inspected the troops, and on finishing the last
company as the horses were being put to, he mounted the box with
the remark, "That's what I call inspecting a regiment." "It was,"
comments General Shadwell, "what some commanding officers might term
sharp practice; but it was a satisfactory test of the discipline
and order which Colin Campbell had perfected in the Ninety-Eighth."
And he adds that this hurried meeting "formed an important epoch
in Campbell's career. From that moment he conceived an esteem and
respect for the noble soldier under whose command he had been so
fortunate as to find himself placed, sentiments which speedily
developed into a feeling of affectionate regard well-nigh amounting
to veneration."

The arrival of the regiment at Newcastle was welcomed by the
magistrates, colliery owners, and county gentlemen of Northumberland,
who in their apprehension of a Chartist rising leaned upon its
commanding officer for the maintenance of order. At no period of
his career did Colin Campbell evince greater wisdom and shrewdness
than during this critical and sensitive time. Neither rash nor
weak, he reassured the apprehensive and awed the disaffected. He
visited in person many of the Chartist meetings, and was not slow to
discern that the movement included a large proportion of supporters
who advocated moral in preference to physical methods for the
accomplishment of their objects. He became convinced that no serious
rising would take place, yet he took every precaution to meet such a
contingency. The regiment was carefully trained in street firing, and
such dispositions as would be requisite in the event of the troops
being called upon to act were sedulously practised. The Ninety-Eighth
were loyal to a man, and their discipline was faultless. Once the
Chartists seized a drummer-boy of the regiment and forced him to
beat his drum at the head of a procession. The cry rose that the
soldiers were fraternising with the mob and a magistrate hurried
to the barracks with the ominous tidings. Campbell immediately
answered--"Come, and I will show how the soldiers feel in the matter,
midnight though it is!" Ordering the bugler to sound the "assembly"
he took the magistrate into the barrack-yard. From the barrack-rooms
came rushing out the soldiers armed and accoutred, venting vehement
imprecations on the malcontents; and Campbell grimly called the
magistrate's attention to the wholesome views expressed by a local
"Geordie" of the regiment, who frankly signified his readiness to
"stick his own grandmother if she were out." But midnight _alertes_
on scant provocation Campbell steadfastly discountenanced. His most
sedulous care was for the health of his men. He habitually dispensed
with all superfluous and needless guards, and he resolutely cut down
sentry-duty which he did not consider absolutely necessary for the
protection of public property or the requirements of the service.
In this solicitude for the well-being of the soldier Campbell was
stoutly upheld by Sir Charles Napier. Holding though he did to
his conviction that no rising would occur, he nevertheless could
not resist an urgent application from the magistracy of Durham
for military assistance, and he took upon himself to despatch a
detachment to that town, reporting his having done so to the general
commanding the district. Napier approved of his conduct, but enjoined
on him the exaction from the Durham authorities of the stipulation
specified in the following terms:--"If the detachment is to remain
at Durham, the magistrates must furnish a barrack with everything
requisite for the men, and this barrack must be so situated that
the communication with the open country can be maintained--that
is to say, on the outskirt of the town. It must also be perfectly
comfortable for the soldiers, and the officers' quarters attached
to it. Unless these conditions be complied with, you must inform
the magistrates that I must positively order the detachment back to
Newcastle. I will not have troops in billets."

The disaffection in the north gradually died down as Colin Campbell
had prognosticated; and his wise and judicious conduct during the
troublous time was fully acknowledged by the authorities. From the
Home Office came the following approval of his behaviour. "Lord John
Russell desires to express to you the satisfaction he has received
from the report of the Newcastle-on-Tyne magistrates of the prompt
and valuable services which you have constantly rendered them since
the commencement of their intercourse with you. Lord John Russell
has not failed to make known to Lord Hill" (the Commander-in-Chief)
"the testimony borne by the magistrates to your valuable services,
and Lord John requests that you will accept his best thanks for your
exertions, and for the zeal manifested by you in supporting the Civil
authorities, and in the preservation of the public peace." Lord
Fitzroy Somerset conveyed to Campbell Lord Hill's satisfaction in
learning that "his conduct had met with the unqualified approbation
of Her Majesty's Government;" and the magistrates of the county
tendered him their acknowledgment of the cordial and efficient manner
in which he and the troops under his command had co-operated with
the civil power in the preservation of the public peace.

It is the experience of all soldiers that a regiment broken up in
detachments tends to fall into slackness as well in discipline as
in drill. But throughout his command of the Ninety-Eighth Colin
Campbell had the invaluable advantage of having exceptionally good
and zealous officers serving under him. Alike at headquarters and on
detachment discipline was rigid without being unduly severe; and when
the regiment was together at Newcastle its drill was admirable,--"so
steady, so perfect in battalion movements, so rapid and intelligent
in light-infantry exercise." It was when the regiment was stationed
at Newcastle that Campbell taught it to advance firing in line, which
was a specially difficult movement with the old muzzle-loader of
the period, but which on two subsequent occasions he brought into
practice against the enemy with particularly advantageous results.

The Ninety-Eighth had been serving for more than two years in
the Northern District, and a move was imminent in the summer of
1841. But it would seem to have been considered that the regiment
before leaving the north should receive new colours, and those were
presented to it by Sir Charles Napier on the 12th of May on the
Newcastle racecourse in presence of a great assemblage gathered to
witness the ceremony. Sir Charles addressed the regiment in a long
oration in the true Napier vein, in the course of which he paid
an almost ruthless compliment to Colin Campbell. The episode, if
somewhat theatrical, must have had a stirring effect. In the course
of his address the General said: "Of the abilities for command which
your chief possesses, your own magnificent regiment is a proof. Of
his gallantry in action hear what history says, for I like to read to
you of such deeds and of such men; it stimulates young soldiers to
deeds of similar daring." Then he read from his brother's _History
of the Peninsular War_ the account of Lieutenant Campbell's conduct
in the breach of San Sebastian: "'Major Fraser,'" he read in his
sonorous tones, "'was killed in the flaming ruins; the intrepid
Jones stood there a while longer amidst a few heroic soldiers hoping
for aid; but none came, and he and those with him were struck down.
The engineer Machel had been killed early, and the men bearing the
ladders fell or were dispersed. Thus the rear of the column was in
absolute confusion before the head was beaten. It was in vain that
Colonel Greville of the Thirty-Eighth, Colonel Cameron of the Ninth,
Captain Archimbeau of the Royals, and many other regimental officers,
exerted themselves to rally their disciplined troops and refill the
breach; it was in vain that Lieutenant Campbell, breaking through
the tumultuous crowd with the survivors of his chosen detachment,
mounted the ruins--twice he ascended, twice he was wounded, and all
around him died.' There," continued Sir Charles--"there stands the
Lieutenant Campbell of whom I have been reading; and well I know
that, if need be, the soldiers of the Ninety-Eighth will follow him
as boldly as did those gallant men of the glorious Ninth who fell
fighting around him in the breaches of San Sebastian!"

In July the Ninety-Eighth left Newcastle for Ireland, where, however,
it remained only a few months, its term of home service being nearly
completed. The original intention was that it should be sent to the
Mauritius. Colin Campbell worked hard to have its destination altered
to Bermuda, in the belief that the strained relations then existing
between Great Britain and the United States would result in war, in
which event the regiment at Bermuda would be advantageously situated.
But the roster of service, he found, could not be dislocated to meet
his desire; and all that he could accomplish was the permission
on arrival at Mauritius to effect an exchange with the officer
commanding the Eighty-Seventh, then garrisoning the island, should
that officer desire to remain there, and to return to Great Britain
in command of that regiment. Later he had reason to believe that the
Ninety-Eighth was intended for service in China; but that this was so
he did not ascertain for certain until the middle of October, when he
was informed that the service companies were destined to take part in
the hostilities against China which had been in progress with more
or less vigour for the last two years, and which were intended to be
prosecuted to a final issue when Lord Ellenborough, in the beginning
of 1842, should succeed Lord Auckland as Governor-General of India.




CHAPTER III

CHINA AND INDIA


The Ninety-Eighth had been moved to Plymouth in anticipation of
departure on foreign service, and on the 20th of December, 1841,
it embarked for Hong-Kong on H.M.S. _Belleisle_, a line-of-battle
ship which had been commissioned for transport service. According to
present ideas the _Belleisle_, whose burden did not exceed 1750 tons,
was abominably overcrowded, especially for a voyage of six months
or longer. The Ninety-Eighth embarked eight hundred and ten strong;
and what with staff officers, details, women and children and crew,
the ship carried a total of nearly thirteen hundred souls. Among her
passengers was Major-General Lord Saltoun, the hero of Hougomont,
who was going out as second in command of the Chinese expeditionary
force. During a short stay in Simon's Bay Colin Campbell had the
pleasant opportunity of visiting his old Demerara chief Sir Benjamin
D'Urban, who since they last met had served a term of office as
Governor of Cape Colony, and was now living in retirement among his
orchards and vineyards a few miles from Cape Town. The _Belleisle_
made a fairly quick voyage to Hong-Kong, where she arrived on June
2nd, 1842, and where orders were awaiting the Ninety-Eighth to make
all haste to join the force of Sir Hugh Gough operating in the region
of the estuary of the Yang-tse-Kiang. Active hostilities had for some
time previously been in progress. After the capture of the town of
Chapoo on May 18th the fleet carrying the expeditionary force had
proceeded to an anchorage off the mouth of the Yang-tse-Kiang, where
it lay for a fortnight while the bar was being surveyed and buoyed.
The Chinese had constructed a great line of defensive works about
Woosung, but the British fleet anchored in face of the batteries on
the 16th of June, and as the result of a two hours' bombardment the
Chinese fire was crushed and the garrisons were driven from their
batteries by the sailors and troops. Shanghai was occupied, and
the expedition remained in the vicinity of Woosung while surveying
steamers were prospecting the river. It was during this halt that the
_Belleisle_ with the Ninety-Eighth aboard joined the expeditionary
force at Woosung on the 21st of June. The regiment was assigned to
the first brigade under Lord Saltoun, and occupied part of the third
division of vessels during the ascent of the river.

The expedition left Woosung on July 6th, its objectives being the
great cities of Chin-Kiang and Nanking. The strength of it was
overwhelming, for the fleet consisted of fifteen ships of war,
ten steamers and fifty transports and troop-ships, on which were
embarked nine thousand soldiers and three thousand disciplined
seamen ready for service on shore in case of need. The _Belleisle_
was off Chin-Kiang on the 19th, and on the morning of the 21st
the troops disembarked in three brigades. The columns of Sir Hugh
Gough and General Schoedde had some hard fighting with the Tartar
garrison of the city commanded by the gallant Haeling. Lord Saltoun's
brigade, with the Ninety-Eighth in advance, marched against a Chinese
force occupying a low ridge some miles inland and to westward of
the city. The opposition encountered was trivial, and was easily
overcome by the light company of the Ninety-Eighth in skirmishing
order supported by a few discharges from a mountain-battery. But
the regiment, debilitated as it was by a long tropical voyage in
an overcrowded ship, unsupplied with an equipment suitable for the
climate and wearing its ordinary European clothing, was in no case
to resist the fierce summer-heat of China. The sun had its will of
the men, thirteen of whom died on the ground; and Colin Campbell,
seasoned veteran as he was, was himself struck down, though he soon
recovered. From this day forth for months, and even for years,
disease maintained its fell grip on the victims of overcrowding,
and Napier would have been puzzled to recognise in the shattered
invalids of Hong-Kong the "beautiful regiment" which had sailed from
Plymouth in fine physique and high heart. On the night following
the disembarkation several cases of cholera occurred, and fever and
dysentery became immediately prevalent. Within ten days from the
landing at Chin-Kiang fifty-three men of the Ninety-Eighth had died,
and the _Belleisle_ was rapidly becoming a floating hospital.

A garrison was left in Chin-Kiang, and on August 4th the _Cornwallis_
man-of-war anchored in front of that very gate of Nanking which
twenty-six years earlier had been rudely shut in the face of a
British ambassador. Opposite that same gate it was destined that
severe terms should now be dictated by a victorious British
force. The mass of the expedition reached Nanking on the 9th and
preparations for the attack on that city were promptly begun.
The Ninety-Eighth men fit for service were transferred from the
_Belleisle_ to a steamer which conveyed them to a point where a
diversion was intended. Colin Campbell was too ill to accompany
his regiment, and when he joined it a few days later he was again
prostrated by fever. But Nanking escaped its imminent fate.
Negotiations resulted in a treaty of peace which was concluded on
August 26th; the expedition retraced its steps, and in October the
_Belleisle_ reached Hong-Kong with the wreck of the unfortunate
regiment. Even after those long months fate still kept imprisoned
on ship-board what remained of the hapless Ninety-Eighth. The
regiment had to remain on the _Belleisle_ until barracks could be
built for its reception. Writing to his sister in December, Colin
Campbell had the following sad tale to tell:--"The regiment has
lost by death up to this date two hundred and eighty-three men, and
there are still two hundred and thirty-one sick, of whom some fifty
or sixty will die; and generally, of those who may survive, there
will be some seventy or eighty men to be discharged in consequence
of their constitutions having been so completely broken down as to
unfit them for the duties of soldiers. This is the history of the
Ninety-Eighth regiment, which sailed from Plymouth in so effective a
state in all respects on the 20th of December of last year--and all
this destruction without having lost a man by the fire of the enemy!"
His estimate of the losses, grave as it was, did not reach the grim
actual total. From its landing at Chin-Kiang on July 21st, 1842,
up to February, 1844, a period of nineteen months, the unfortunate
regiment lost by death alone four hundred and thirty-two out of a
strength of seven hundred and sixty-six non-commissioned officers and
men; and there remained of it alive no more than three hundred and
thirty-four, an awful contrast to the full numbers with which it had
embarked at Plymouth twenty-six months earlier.

When the expeditionary force was broken up at the end of 1842 Colin
Campbell became commandant of the island of Hong-Kong, and he devoted
himself to the care of the survivors of his regiment. The worst cases
were sent to a hospital ship, those less serious to a temporary
hospital on shore. The remainder of the corps, some three hundred and
thirty men, at last, in February, 1843, quitted the _Belleisle_ and
occupied quarters at Stanley. While at Hong-Kong he learned that he
had been made a Companion of the Bath and aide-de-camp to the Queen,
the latter appointment conferring promotion to the rank of colonel.
In January, 1844, he left Hong-Kong to succeed General Schoedde in
command of the garrison quartered on the Island of Chusan, a transfer
which gave him the position of brigadier of the second class. In the
more bracing and salubrious climate of Chusan Campbell materially
regained his health; and he had not been many months in his new
command when he began his efforts to have the Ninety-Eighth removed
from its unhealthy quarters in Hong-Kong to the reinvigorating
atmosphere of Chusan. This he was able to accomplish in the earlier
months of 1845, and he immediately set about the restoration of the
regiment to its former efficiency. He was a rigorous task-master, but
if he did not spare others he never spared himself. He seldom missed
a parade, and except in the hot season there were three parades a
day. Leave of absence except on medical certificate was refused to
officers who had come from England with the regiment, on the ground
that their experience was needed to instruct the comparatively raw
material from the depôt. The officers of the Ninety-Eighth who
belonged to the garrison staff were also required to perform their
regimental duty. The painstaking and laborious chief thus notes in
his journal the progress of the regiment in the midsummer of 1845:
"Parade as usual morning and evening; men improving, but still in
great want of individual correctness in carriage, facings, motions
of the firelock, etc.; but they move in line and open column very
fairly, and I confidently expect before the end of the year to have
them more perfect than any battalion in this part of the world." When
toward the close of the year the health of the regiment was fully
re-established, its colonel conceived that it should undergo higher
tests than the ordinary movements of the drill-ground afforded. He
accordingly took it out into the open country and divided it into an
attacking and a defending force, in order to train the men in the
art of taking cover and skill in skirmishes over broken ground. By
the beginning of 1846 he was "quite at ease as to the appearance the
regiment would make on landing in India."

The time fixed by the treaty of Nanking for the evacuation of the
island of Chusan by the British troops was now approaching, and
on May 10th the Chinese authorities resumed jurisdiction over the
island. Until then Campbell's duties had not been purely military,
the entire civil charge of Chusan having been vested in his hands.
The most friendly relations existed between the British Brigadier and
the Chinese Commissioners. Arrangements were made without a trace
of friction for the preservation of the European burial-grounds
and in regard to other matters. Campbell was the recipient of an
interesting letter from the Commissioners, passages in which deserve
to be quoted:--"While observing and maintaining the treaty, you
have behaved with the utmost kindness and the greatest liberality
towards our own people, and have restrained by strict regulations
the military of your honourable country.... The very cottagers have
enjoyed tranquillity and protection, and have not been exposed to
the calamity of wandering about without a home. All this is owing
to the excellent and vigorous administration of you, the Honourable
Brigadier.... Now that you are about to return to your own country
crowned with honour, we wish you every happiness."

Notwithstanding occasional attacks of ague which rendered him
liable to depression and irritation, Campbell appears to have been
fairly happy during his stay in Chusan. He writes on the eve of his
departure of "'my last walk' in Chusan, where I have passed many days
in quiet and peace, and where I have been enabled to save a little
money, with which I hope to render my last days somewhat comfortable.
My health upon the whole is pretty good; and altogether I have every
reason to be thankful to God for sending me to a situation wherein
I have been enabled to accomplish so much for my own benefit and
the comfort of others, whilst my duty kept me absent from them."
The latter allusion was to his father and sister, for both of whom
he had been able to make provision in the event of his predeceasing
them. Having left England heavily embarrassed, the increase of his
emoluments during his stay in China had enabled him to relieve
himself of liabilities, and this without being at all niggardly in
the hospitalities which he dispensed.

Sailing from Chusan on July 5th in the transport _Lord Hungerford_,
the colonel and headquarters of the Ninety-Eighth landed at Calcutta
on October 24th, 1846; the last of the detachments carried by
other transports arrived at the end of November, when the regiment
was complete. Colin Campbell meanwhile had been in charge of
Fort-William, but when the regiment began its march to Dinapore
in December he resumed its command. He really seemed to live for
the Ninety-Eighth. Lord Hardinge had expressed his intention of
appointing him a brigadier of the second class. "This," writes
Campbell, "is very flattering; but I would prefer to remain with
my regiment." He writes with soldierly pride of its conduct on the
route-march: "The march of the regiment has been conducted to my
entire satisfaction, no men falling out, and the distance of sections
so correctly preserved that their wheeling into line is like the
operation of a field-day. Those who follow me will benefit by this
order and regularity in conducting the line of march." On arrival at
Dinapore in the end of January, 1846, he found his appointment in
general orders as brigadier of the second class to command at Lahore.
Before starting for his new sphere he held what proved to be his last
inspection of the Ninety-Eighth. "Men steady as rocks," he writes,
"moving by bugle-sound as correctly as by word of command--equally
steady, accurate, and with the same precision." In the evening he
spoke to the regiment some simple manly, soldierly words, to which
the men must have listened with no little emotion. He dined with
the mess the same night, when the president rose and proposed his
health in connection with the day's inspection of the regiment and
the exertions he had made as commanding officer to produce such
results. "The toast," he wrote, "was received with great warmth and
cordiality.... I could not speak without emotion, and my manner could
not conceal my deep anxiety respecting a corps in which I had served
so long. I begged that, if their old colonel had been sometimes
anxious and impatient with them, they would forget the manner and
impatience of one who had no other thought or object in life but to
add to their honour and reputation collectively and individually."

Next day he started for Lahore, "feeling," as he records in his
restrained yet sincere manner, "more than I expected when taking
leave of the officers who happened to be at my quarters at the
moment of my departure." He had a pleasant meeting at Cawnpore with
his old West Indian comrades of the Twenty-First Fusiliers; and on
the road between Kurnal and Meerut he had an interview with the
Governor-General. Lord Hardinge received him with the frank kindness
of an old Peninsular man to a comrade, described Henry Lawrence, the
British Resident in the Punjaub, as "the King of the country, clever
and good-natured, but hot-tempered," and gave Campbell to understand
that if any part of the force in the Punjaub should be called upon
to take the field, he should have a command. A few days later he
reached Saharunpore, the headquarters for the time of Lord Gough, the
Commander-in-Chief, also an old Peninsular man, whom he found most
cordial and friendly. The old Chief asked him whether he could be of
any service to him. Colin Campbell, sedulous as ever for the welfare
of the Ninety-Eighth, replied that he had no favour to ask for
himself, but that his lordship would give him pleasure by removing
his regiment nearer to the frontier as early as might be, away from
its present station which afforded the men so many temptations to
drink. On his arrival at Lahore in the end of February, 1847, he was
cordially received by Henry Lawrence, whose guest at the Residency he
became until he should find accommodation for himself.

Campbell came into the Punjaub at a very interesting period. The
issue of the war of 1845-46 had placed that vast territory at the
mercy of the British Government, and Lord Hardinge might have
incorporated it with the Company's dominions. But he desired to
avoid the last resource of annexation; and although he considered it
necessary to punish the Sikh nation for past offences and to prevent
the recurrence of aggression, he professed his intention to perform
those duties without suppressing the political existence of the
Punjaub State. The Treaty of Lahore accorded a nominally independent
sovereignty to the boy Prince Dhulip Singh, a British Representative
was in residence at Lahore, and the Sikh army was being reorganised
and limited to a specified strength. Within a few months Lall
Singh, who had been appointed Prime Minister, had been deposed, and
a fresh treaty was signed in December, 1846, which provided that
a council of regency composed of eight leading Sikh chiefs should
be appointed to act under the control and guidance of the British
Resident, who was to exercise unlimited influence in all matters of
internal administration and external policy. British troops were to
be stationed in various forts and quarters throughout the country,
maintained from the revenues of the State. The management was to
continue for eight years until the Maharaja Dhulip Singh should reach
his majority. The treaty conferred on the Resident unprecedented
powers, and Major Henry Lawrence, an officer of the Company's
artillery, became in effect the successor of Runjeet Singh.

This settlement had a specious aspect of some measure of permanency.
It might have lasted longer if the state of his health had enabled
Henry Lawrence to remain at his post; but it was unsound at the core,
for a valiant and turbulent race does not bow the neck submissively
after a single disastrous campaign on its frontier. But the Punjaub
seemed in a state of unruffled peace when Colin Campbell shook hands
with Henry Lawrence in the Residency of its capital. In those days
the familiar _sobriquet_ of "Kubhur-dar," of which the English is
"Take care!", had not attached itself to him; but Campbell, even
when his Highland blood was aflame in the rapture of actual battle,
was never either reckless or careless; and the motto "Be Mindful,"
which he chose for his coat of arms when he was made a peer, was
simply a condensation of the principles of cool wisdom and shrewd
caution on which he acted through life. A strong Sikh force, he
found, was located in and about Lahore, and the population of the
city had a name for turbulence. In order to inform himself as to how
the troops were posted in relation to the defences of the city, as
well against an interior as an exterior attack, one of his earliest
concerns was to make a careful inspection of the positions along with
the responsible engineer. In choosing his residence he held it to be
his duty to have it in the proximity of his troops. Soon after his
arrival there was a _fête_ in the Shalimar gardens to which all the
garrison had been invited, but he allowed only half of the officers
of his command to be absent from their men, giving as his reason
that "if the Sikhs wanted to murder all the officers, they could not
have a better chance than when these were gathered four miles away
from their men, enjoying themselves at a _fête_." In the measures of
precaution which he adopted he had the approval of Henry Lawrence and
of Sir Charles Napier, to the latter of whom he wrote on the subject.
Napier expressed himself in his trenchant fashion:--"I am delighted
at all your precautions against surprise. In India we who take these
pains are reckoned cowards. Be assured that English officers think
it a fine dashing thing to be surprised--to take no precautions.
Formerly it was an axiom in war that no man was fit to be a commander
who permitted himself to be surprised; but things are on a more noble
footing now!"

In the end of 1847 Henry Lawrence left Lahore and went home to
England in the same ship with Lord Hardinge. A week before they
sailed from Calcutta Hardinge's successor, Lord Dalhousie, arrived
there and took the oaths as Governor-General,--a potentate at whose
hands a few years later Colin Campbell was to receive treatment
which caused the high-spirited soldier to resign the command he held
and leave India. In the Lahore Residency Henry Lawrence was succeeded
temporarily by his brother John, who in March, 1848, gave place to
Sir Frederick Currie, a member of the Supreme Council. The position
was one which required the experience and military knowledge of a
soldier, but Sir Frederick Currie was a civilian. In January Sir
John Littler had been succeeded in the Punjaub divisional command
by Major-General Whish, an officer of the Company's service, an
appointment which disappointed Colin Campbell who had hoped for the
independent command of the Lahore brigade.

The deceptive quietude of the Punjaub was now to be exposed. When
Sir Frederick Currie reached Lahore, he found there Moolraj the
Governor of Mooltan, a man of vast wealth who had come to offer the
resignation of his position for reasons that were chiefly personal.
Moolraj stipulated for some conditions which were not conceded, and
ultimately he resigned without any other condition than that of
saving his honour in the eyes of his own people. A new Governor was
appointed in his place, who set out for Mooltan accompanied by Mr.
Vans Agnew of the Bengal Civil Service and Mr. Agnew's assistant,
Lieutenant Anderson of the Bombay Army. Moolraj marched with the
escort of the new Governor, to whom, on the day after the arrival
of the party in Mooltan, he formally surrendered the fort. After
the ceremony Agnew and Anderson started on their return to camp,
Moolraj riding alongside the two English gentlemen. At the gate of
the fortress Agnew was suddenly attacked,--run through by a spear
and slashed by sword-cuts. At the same moment Anderson was cut down
and desperately wounded. Moolraj galloped off, leaving the Englishmen
to their fate. Khan Singh's people carried them into a temple wherein
two days later they were brutally slaughtered; their bodies were
cut to pieces and their heads thrown down at the feet of Moolraj.
What share Moolraj had taken in this treacherous butchery was never
clearly ascertained; but every indication pointed to his complicity.
This much is certain, that on the morning after the assassination he
transferred his family and treasure into the fort, and placed himself
at the head of the insurrectionary movement by issuing a proclamation
summoning all the inhabitants of the province, of every creed, to
make common cause in a religious war against the Feringhees.

News of the outrage and rising at Mooltan reached Lahore on April
24th. It was emphatically a time for prompt action, if an outbreak
was to be crushed which else might grow into a general revolt
throughout the Punjaub. It was extremely unlikely that the fort of
Mooltan was equipped for an early and stubborn defence. To maintain
our prestige was essential, for it was by prestige and promptitude
only that we have maintained our pre-eminence in India. Sir Henry
Lawrence would have marched the Lahore brigade on Mooltan without an
hour's hesitation. Lord Hardinge would have ordered up the troops and
siege-train from Ferozepore and the strong force collected at Bukkur;
and would have invested Mooltan before Moolraj could have made any
adequate preparations for prolonged defence. Marches through Scinde,
from the north-western frontier, and from Lahore, could not have
been made in the hot season without casualties; but, in the words of
Marshman, "our Empire in India had been acquired and maintained, not
by fair-weather campaigns, but by taking the field on every emergency
and at any season."

On the first tidings from Mooltan Sir Frederick Currie ordered a
strong brigade of all arms to prepare for a march on that stronghold,
being of opinion that the citadel, described in poor Agnew's report
as the strongest fort he had seen in India, would not maintain a
defence when a British force should present itself before it, but
that the garrison would immediately abandon Moolraj to his fate.
Colin Campbell, on the other hand, held that since the fort of
Mooltan was very strong it was to be anticipated that Moolraj would
obstinately defend it; in which case a brigade sent to Mooltan would
be obliged to remain inactive before it while siege-guns were being
brought up, or, as seemed more probable, should no reinforcements
arrive in support, it would have to retrace its steps followed and
harassed by Moolraj's active and troublesome rabble. Eventually,
in great measure because of the arguments advanced by Campbell,
the movement from Lahore on Mooltan was countermanded; and the
Commander-in-Chief, with the concurrence of the Governor-General,
intimated his resolve to postpone military operations until the cold
weather, when he would take the field in person.

Meanwhile a casual subaltern, for whom swift marches and hard
fighting in hot weather had no terrors, struck in on his own
responsibility. Gathering in the wild trans-Indus district of Bunnoo
some fifteen hundred men with a couple of guns, Lieutenant Herbert
Edwardes marched towards Mooltan. Colonel Cortland with two thousand
Pathans and six guns hastened to join him; and on May 20th the united
force defeated Moolraj's army six thousand strong. The loyal Nawab of
Bhawalpore sent a strong force of his warlike Daudputras across the
Sutlej to join hands with Edwardes and Cortland; and the junction had
just been accomplished on the field of Kinairi some twenty miles from
Mooltan, when the allies, about nine thousand strong, were attacked
by Moolraj with a force of about equal magnitude. After half a day's
hard fighting the enemy fled in confusion from the field. Edwardes
and Cortland moved up nearer to Mooltan, their force now raised to
a strength of about eighteen thousand; and there was a moment when
Moolraj seemed willing to surrender if his life were spared. But he
rallied his nerves and came out on July 1st with twelve thousand men
to give battle on the plain of Sudusain within sight of the walls of
Mooltan. After another obstinate fight his troops were thoroughly
beaten and fled headlong into the city. "Now," wrote Edwardes to the
Resident, "is the time to strike; I have got to the end of my tether.
If," added the gallant and clear-sighted subaltern, "you would only
send, with a few regular regiments, a few heavy guns and a mortar
battery, we could close Moolraj's account in a fortnight, and obviate
the necessity of assembling fifty thousand men in October."

Meanwhile the Resident had taken the strange course of empowering
the Lahore Durbar to despatch to Mooltan a Sikh force of some five
thousand men under Shere Singh. It was notorious that both commander
and troops were thoroughly disaffected; and so anxious was the
Resident to prevent the force from approaching Moolraj that Shere
Singh had orders to halt fifty miles short of Mooltan, and was only
allowed to join Edwardes after his victory of July 1st. In tardy
answer to that young officer's appeal for reinforcements, in the
end of July a force of seven thousand men with a siege-train was
ordered to converge on Mooltan from Lahore and Ferozepore under
the divisional command of General Whish. It had been chiefly at
Colin Campbell's dissuasion that the Resident had relinquished his
intention of sending a force to Mooltan in April. Campbell's argument
in that month had been the unfavourable season for marching; and
now in a season not less unfavourable he was scarcely justified in
considering himself the victim of a job in not obtaining the command
of the Lahore brigade ordered on Mooltan. The disappointment proved
fortunate, since a few months later he found himself in command of a
division in the field with the rank of brigadier-general. By August
24th the whole of Whish's field-force was before Mooltan, but it
was not until September 7th that the siege-guns were in position.
Moolraj, confident in the increased strength which our delay had
afforded him, spurned a summons to surrender. Active and bloody
approaches were carried on for a week, when Shere Singh with his
contingent suddenly passed over to the enemy. After this defection
Whish held it impossible to continue the siege, and he retired to a
position in the vicinity pending the arrival of reinforcements from
Bombay. The siege was reopened late in December: the city was stormed
after a hard fight; and finally on January 22nd, 1849, Moolraj
surrendered at discretion. It must be said of him that he had made a
heroic defence.

By the end of September, 1848, the local outbreak was fast swelling
into a national revolt. The flame of rebellion was spreading over
the Land of the Five Rivers, and by the end of October only a few
brave English officers were still holding together the last shreds
of British influence in the Punjaub outside of Lahore and the camp
of General Whish. Moolraj was the reverse of cordial to Shere Singh,
who on October 9th quitted Mooltan and marched northward towards
Lahore, his original force of five thousand men strengthened at every
step by the warriors of the old Khalsa army who flocked eagerly to
his standard. After threatening Lahore he moved westward to meet the
Bunnoo insurgents, who had mutinied and murdered their officers, and
he finally took up a position _à cheval_ of the Chenab at Ramnuggur,
his main body on the right bank of the river.

During the summer and autumn Colin Campbell passed an uneasy and
anxious time. It was not until the beginning of November that he had
the full assurance of being employed in the manifestly impending
campaign. By this time Cureton's cavalry brigade and Godby's infantry
brigade were in the Doab between the Ravee and the Chenab, and on
November 12th Colin Campbell joined Cureton there with two native
infantry regiments, taking command of the advanced force with the
temporary rank of brigadier-general. At length Lord Gough himself
took the field, and on the 19th he crossed the Ravee at the head
of an army of respectable strength. Apart from the division before
Mooltan and the garrison required for Lahore, he had available for
field service four British and eleven native infantry regiments. He
was strong in cavalry, with three fine British regiments, five of
native light cavalry, and five corps of irregular horse; and his
powerful artillery consisted of sixty horse and field-guns, eight
howitzers, and ten 18-pounders. On the early morning of the 22nd
his lordship, with Colin Campbell's infantry division and a cavalry
force under Cureton with horse and field artillery, marched from
Saharun towards Ramnuggur with the object of driving across the
Chenab some Sikh infantry reported to be still on the left bank. Some
small detachments hurrying towards the river were pursued somewhat
recklessly by horse-artillery, which had to retire under the heavy
fire opened from the Sikh batteries on the commanding right bank.
A gun and two waggons stuck fast in the deep sand and could not be
extricated. Colin Campbell suggested to Lord Gough the measure of
protecting the gun until it could be withdrawn at night, by placing
infantry to cover it in a ravine immediately in its rear; but the
Commander-in-Chief disapproved of this measure. The enemy lost no
time in sending the whole of his cavalry across the river to take
possession of the gun under cover of his overwhelming artillery fire.
Our cavalry was foolishly sent forward to charge the superior hostile
horse,--a folly which was committed, according to Colin Campbell,
under the personal direction of the Commander-in-Chief. Ouvry's
squadron of the Third Light Dragoons made a brilliant and useful
charge which materially aided the withdrawal of the artillery. In the
face of a heavy fire Colonel William Havelock, a noble soldier who
had fought in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, led on the Fourteenth
Light Dragoons to a desperate combat with the Sikh horse. The horses
of the dragoons were exhausted by the long gallop through the heavy
sand and the casualties were heavy. Among the slain was Havelock
himself, after a hand-to-hand combat; and while riding forward to
stay Havelock's last advance Brigadier-General Cureton, who had
raised himself to distinction from the ranks in which he had enlisted
as a runaway lad, was killed by a Sikh bullet.

Lord Gough withdrew his troops beyond the reach of the Sikh batteries
and awaited the arrival of his heavy guns and the remainder of
his force. If his intention was to refrain from coming to close
quarters with the enemy until the fall of Mooltan should bring him
reinforcements, he was well placed on the left bank of the Chenab,
covering Lahore and the siege of Mooltan and leaving Shere Singh
undisturbed. If on the other hand he preferred the offensive, that
offensive should have been prompt; a rapid stroke might have ended
the business, for the Sikhs, as the sequel proved, were eager enough
for fighting. And to all appearance the Commander-in-Chief meant to
gratify their desire. To do so he had in the first instance to cross
the Chenab. To accomplish this by direct assault on the Sikh position
on the opposite bank was impracticable; and he resolved to compel
the enemy's withdrawal by a wide turning movement with part of his
force under the command of Sir Joseph Thackwell, an experienced
soldier. Thackwell's command consisted of Colin Campbell's strong
division, a cavalry brigade, three troops of horse-artillery, two
field-batteries and two heavy guns,--in all about eight thousand men.
This force started in the early morning of December 1st, and after a
march of twenty-four miles up the left bank of the Chenab was across
that river at Wuzeerabad by noon of the 2nd. The same afternoon the
force marched ten miles down the right bank and bivouacked. During
the short march of the following morning Thackwell learned that a
brigade was on its way to reinforce him, crossing by an intermediate
ford; whereupon he halted the force and rode away in search of this
reinforcement. Before he departed Colin Campbell asked permission to
deploy and take up a position. Thackwell replied, "No--remain where
you are until my return."

The force was then in open ground in front of the village of
Sadoolapore, which has given its name to the engagement. Campbell
rode to the front to reconnoitre. In front of the centre were some
hostile horse; to the right in wooded ground some detachments of
cavalry and infantry were seen scattered about. Certain that the
enemy was in force and near at hand, he returned to the force and as
a measure of precaution occupied with an infantry company each of the
three villages in his front,--Langwala, Khamookhan and Rutta. The
force, in his own words, "was not in a state of formation for troops
to be when liable to be attacked at any moment. However, my orders
were imperative not to deploy." Two hours later the enemy opened
fire with their artillery from the woodland behind the villages. At
that moment Thackwell returned, and he ordered the companies holding
the three villages to withdraw and rejoin their respective corps.
The columns were immediately deployed. Between the British line and
the Sikh troops, which had occupied the villages and were firing
heavily from some twenty pieces of artillery while large bodies of
their cavalry were threatening both flanks of the British force,
was a smooth open space over which Thackwell desired to advance to
the attack. Colin Campbell suggested that "as they were coming on
so cockily, we should allow them to come out into the plain before
we moved." He states in his journal that, since presently the enemy
halted at the villages and there plied their artillery fire, he was
convinced that they did not intend to come further forward; and
that he twice begged of Thackwell to be allowed to attack with his
infantry but was not permitted. The affair then resolved itself
into a simple cannonade the result of which was to silence the
Sikh fire. By this time Thackwell had received permission from the
Commander-in-Chief to act as his judgment should dictate, whether
his reinforcements had come up or not. It seemed the moment for an
advance; the troops were full of eagerness, and a portion at least
of the enemy's guns were in Thackwell's grasp. Thackwell, however,
exercised caution for the time, hoping most likely for a decisive
victory on the morrow. But during the night the enemy withdrew and
marched away towards the Jhelum, probably without having sustained
serious loss. That of the British amounted to some seventy men.
Thackwell's turning movement had not been brilliant, and Sadoolapore
was not an affair to be very proud of; but it had brought about
the relinquishment by the Sikhs of their position on the right bank
of the Chenab, and this enabled the main British force to cross the
river. By the 5th the mass of the army was at Heylah, about midway
between Ramnuggur and Chillianwallah; but the Commander-in-Chief and
headquarters did not cross the Chenab until December 18th.

If until then Lord Gough had been trammelled by superior authority,
a few days later he was set free to act on his own judgment,--the
result of which was simply absolute inaction until January, 1849.
On the 11th of that month he reviewed his troops at Lassourie, and
next day he was encamped at Dinjhi, whence the Sikh army had fallen
back into the sheltering jungle, its right resting on Mung, its left
on the broken ground and strong entrenchments about the village
and heights of Russoul. Colin Campbell had been suffering from
fever resulting from night exposure in bivouac during Thackwell's
flank march; he had been on the sick list until the 10th and was
still weak. In the memoir of the late Sir Henry Durand by his son
occurs an interesting passage illustrative of Campbell's anxiety
that the ground on which the enemy's position was to be approached
should be properly reconnoitred. Durand writes: "Whilst in the
Commander-in-Chief's camp to-day (11th) the projected attack on the
enemy's position was described to me by General Campbell. He had just
been with the Commander-in-Chief, who had spoken of attacking the
Sikh position on the 13th. Campbell, seeing that his lordship had no
intention of properly reconnoitring the position, was anxious on the
subject; and we went into the tent of Tremenheere the chief engineer,
to discuss the matter. Campbell opened on the subject, announcing
the intention to attack, and that it was to be done blindly, that
was to say without any reconnaissance but such as the moment might
afford on debouching from the jungle. He advocated a second march
from Dinjhi, the force prepared to bivouac for the night, and that
the 13th should be passed by the engineers in reconnoitring. Campbell
wished Tremenheere to suggest this measure in a quiet way to the
Commander-in-Chief; but he said that since the passage of the Chenab
the Chief was determined to take no advice, nor brook any volunteered
opinions; and he proposed that I should speak to John Gough (the
Commander-in-Chief's nephew) and try to engage him to put it into the
Commander-in-Chief's mind to adopt such a course." It is not certain
that anything came of this improvised council of war: but there is no
question that up to the afternoon of the 13th Lord Gough intended to
defer the attack until the following morning.

Early on the 13th the army was at length marching on the enemy. The
heavy guns moved along the road leading over the Russoul ridge to
the Jhelum fords. Gilbert's division marched on their right, Colin
Campbell's (the third) on their left, with the cavalry and light
artillery on their respective flanks. The original intention was
that Gilbert's (the right) division, with the greater part of the
field-guns, was to advance on Russoul, while Campbell's division and
the heavy guns should stand fast on the left, overthrow the left of
the Sikhs, and thus cut them off from retiring along the high road
toward Jhelum. Their left thus turned, Gilbert and Campbell were
to operate conjointly against the Sikh line, which it was hoped
would be rolled back upon Moong and driven to the southward. A
reconnaissance made by Tremenheere and Durand reported the road clear
and practicable up to Russoul, but that the enemy was marching down
from the heights apparently to take up a position on the plain. The
march was resumed to beyond the village of Umrao; but when deserters
brought in the intelligence that the enemy was forming to the left
front of Gough's line of march behind the village of Chillianwallah,
he quitted the Russoul road, inclined to his left, and moved straight
on Chillianwallah. An outpost on the mound of Chillianwallah was
driven in upon the main body of the enemy, and from that elevated
position was clearly discernible the Sikh army drawn out in battle
array. Its right centre directly in front of Chillianwallah was about
two miles distant from that village, but less from the British line,
which was being deployed about five hundred yards in its front. There
was a gap nearly three-quarters of a mile wide between the right
wing of the Sikhs under Utar Singh, and the right of the main body
under Shere Singh. The British line when deployed could do little
more than oppose a front to Shere Singh's centre and right, which
latter, however, it overlapped a little, so that part of Campbell's
left brigade was opposite to a section of the gap between Shere
Singh's right and Utar Singh's left. Between the hostile lines there
intervened a belt of rather dense low jungle, not forest, but a
mixture of thorny mimosa bushes and wild caper.

It was near two o'clock in the afternoon of a winter day, and the
troops had been under arms since daybreak. Lord Gough, therefore,
wisely determined to defer the action until the morrow, and the
camping-ground was being marked out. But the Sikh leaders knew well
how prone to kindle was the temperament of the gallant old Chief.
They themselves were keen for fighting, and the British commander
needed little provocation to reciprocate their mood when they gave
him a challenge of a few cannon shots. Late in the day though it was,
he determined on immediate attack. The heavy guns were ordered up and
opened fire at a range of some sixteen hundred yards, the gunners in
the thick jungle having no other means of judging distance than by
timing the intervals between the flash and report of the Sikh guns.
The advance of the infantry soon obliged the fire of the British
guns to cease. The line pressed on eagerly, its formation somewhat
impaired by the thickness of the jungle through which it had to force
its way, and met in the teeth as it pushed forward by the artillery
fire which the enemy, no longer smitten by the heavy guns, poured on
the advancing ranks of the British infantry. For a while nothing but
the roar of the Sikh artillery was to be heard; but after a short
time the sharp rattle of the musketry told that the conflict had
begun in earnest and that the British infantry were closing on the
hostile guns. Of the two divisions Gilbert's had the right, Colin
Campbell's the left. The latter had been the first to receive the
order to advance and was the first engaged. Pennycuick commanded
Campbell's right brigade, consisting of the Twenty-Fourth Queen's,
and the Twenty-Fifth and Forty-Fifth native infantry regiments;
Hoggan's, his left brigade, was formed of the Sixty-First Queen's and
the Thirty-Sixth and Forty-Sixth Sepoy regiments. In the interval
between the brigades moved a field-battery, and on the left of the
division three guns of another. At some distance on Campbell's left
were a cavalry brigade and three troops of horse-artillery under
Thackwell, whose duty it was to engage the attention of Utar Singh's
detachment and to attempt to hinder that force from taking Campbell
in flank and in reverse. The nature of the ground to be fought
over rendered it impossible that the divisional commander could
superintend the attack of more than one brigade; and Colin Campbell
had arranged with Pennycuick that he himself should remain with the
left brigade. Pennycuick's brigade experienced an adverse fate.
During the advance its regiments were exposed to the fire of some
eighteen guns on a mound directly in their front, from which they
suffered very severely. The Twenty-Fourth, a fine and exceptionally
strong regiment, advancing rapidly on the hostile batteries carried
them by storm, but encountered a deadly fire from the infantry masses
on either flank of the guns. The regiment sustained fearful losses.
Pennycuick and thirteen officers of the regiment were killed at the
guns, nine were wounded, two hundred and three of the men were killed
and two hundred and sixty-six wounded. The native regiments of the
brigade failed adequately to support the Twenty-Fourth, and musketry
volleys from the Sikh infantry, followed by a rush of cavalry,
completed the disorder and defeat of the ill-fated body. Already
broken, it now fled, pursued with great havoc by the Sikh horse
almost to its original position at the beginning of the action.

Hoggan's brigade, the left of Colin Campbell's division, had better
fortune. Campbell himself conducted it and its advance was made
without any great difficulty. Its experiences he thus described in
his journal:--"I took care to regulate the rate of march of the
centre or directing regiment (H.M.'s Sixty-First), so that all could
keep up; and consequently the brigade emerged from the wood in a
very tolerable line. We found the enemy posted on an open space on a
slight rise. He had four guns, which played upon us in our advance;
a large body of cavalry stood directly in front of the Sixty-First,
and on the cavalry's left a large body of infantry in face of the
Thirty-Sixth N.I. That regiment went at the Sikh infantry and was
repulsed; the Sixty-First moved gallantly and steadily on the Sikh
cavalry in its front, which slowly retired. When the Sixty-First had
nearly reached the ground which the cavalry had occupied, I ordered
the regiment to open its fire to hasten their departure." This fire
was delivered as the corps advanced in line, a manœuvre constantly
practised by Campbell, and it put the Sikh cavalry to a hasty flight.
At this moment the enemy pushed forward two of their guns to within
about twenty-five yards of the right flank of the Sixty-First, and
opened with grape while their infantry were actually in rear of its
right. Campbell promptly wheeled to the right the two right companies
of the Sixty-First and headed them in their charge on the two Sikh
guns. Those were captured, whereupon the two companies opened fire
on the flank of the Sikh infantry in pursuit of the Thirty-Sixth
Native Infantry and obliged the former to desist and fall back. While
the Sixty-First was completing its new alignment to the right, an
evolution by which Shere Singh's right flank was effectually turned,
the enemy advanced with two more guns strongly supported by infantry.
Neither of the two native regiments had succeeded in forming on
the new alignment of the Sixty-First; "but," writes Campbell, "the
confident bearing of the enemy and the approaching and steady fire of
grape from their two guns made it necessary to advance, and to charge
when we got within proper distance. I gave the word to advance and
subsequently to charge, heading the Sixty-First immediately opposite
the guns as I had done in the former instance. These two attacks," he
continues, "gave the greatest confidence to the Sixty-First, and it
was evident that in personally guiding and commanding the soldiers
in these two successful attacks under difficult circumstances, I had
gained the complete confidence and liking of the corps, and that with
it I could undertake with perfect certainty of success anything that
could be accomplished by men."

While Campbell was leading the earlier charge on the two first Sikh
guns, one of the enemy's artillerymen who had already fired at him
from under a gun apparently without result, rushed forward sword in
hand and cut at the General, inflicting a deep sword-cut on his right
arm. Not until the following morning was it discovered that the Sikh
gunner's bullet had found its billet, fortunately an innocuous one.
It had smashed to atoms the ivory handle of a small pistol which
Campbell carried in a pocket of his waistcoat, and had also broken
the bow of his watch. The Sikh's aim was true, and but for the pistol
and the watch Colin Campbell would never have seen another battle.
His charger was found to be wounded by a musket-shot which had
passed through both sides of the mouth and finally had lodged and
flattened in the curb-chain.

The journal thus continues:--"After the capture of the second two
guns, and the dispersion of the enemy, we proceeded rolling up his
line, continuing along the line of the hostile position until we had
taken thirteen guns, all of them by the Sixty-First at the point
of the bayonet. We finally met Mountain's brigade coming from the
opposite direction. During our progress we were on several occasions
threatened by the enemy's cavalry on our flank and rear. The guns
were all spiked, but having no means with the force to remove them
and it being too small to admit of any portion being withdrawn for
their protection, they were, with the exception of the last three
that were taken, unavoidably left on the field."

Colin Campbell had to fight hard for his success, and it was well
for him that in the gallant Sixty-First he had a staunch and
resolute English regiment. But he would have had to fight yet more
hard, and then might not have attained success, if away on his left
Thackwell had not been holding Utar Singh in check and impeding his
efforts to harass Campbell's flank and rear. Brind's three troops
of horse-artillery expended some twelve hundred rounds in a hot
duel with Utar Singh's cannon which else would have been playing on
Campbell's flank, and Unett's gallant troopers of the famous "Third
Light" crashed through Sikh infantry edging away to their left with
intent to take Campbell in reverse. Thackwell did his valiant best
until he and his command were called away to the endangered right,
but before then he had time to serve Campbell materially, although
he could not entirely prevent Utar Singh's people from molesting that
commander; and although Campbell did not record the critical episode,
there was a period when he found himself engaged simultaneously in
front, flank, and rear, and when the brigade was extricated from
its entanglement only by his own ready skill and the indomitable
staunchness of the noble Sixty-First.

In spite of the disasters which chequered it the battle of
Chillianwallah may be regarded as a technical victory for the British
arms, since the enemy was compelled to quit the field, although they
only retired into the strong position on the Russoul heights from
which in the morning they had descended into the plain to fight. The
moral results of the action were dismal, and the cost of the barren
struggle was a loss of two thousand four hundred killed and wounded.
At home the intelligence of this waste of blood excited feelings
of alarm and indignation, and Sir Charles Napier was immediately
despatched to India to supersede Lord Gough in the position of
Commander-in-Chief. Meanwhile the army lay passive in its encampment
at Chillianwallah, within sight of the Sikh position at Russoul,
awaiting the surrender of Mooltan and the accession of strength it
would receive in consequence of that event. The Sikh leader more than
once gave the British Commander-in-Chief an opportunity to fight, but
Gough with tardy wisdom resisted the offered temptation, resolved not
to join issues until his reinforcements from Mooltan should reach
him. On the night of February 13th the Sikh army abandoned Russoul,
marched round the British right flank, and on the 14th was well
on its way to Goojerat. Gough, who had slowly followed to within
a march of Goojerat, was joined at Koonjah by the Mooltan force
on the 18th and 19th, and on the 20th advanced to Shadawal whence
the Sikh encampment around the town of Goojerat was within sight.
The battlefield of February 21st was the wide plain to the south
of Goojerat, intersected by two dry water-courses. The Sikh line
of battle extended from Morarea Tibba, where their cavalry was in
force, along an easterly bend of the Bimber (the western) channel,
thence across the plain, behind the three villages of Kalra which
were occupied by infantry, to Malka-wallah a village on the left
bank of the eastern channel. Against this extended front advanced
the British army, now twenty-three thousand strong with ninety guns,
eighteen of which were heavy siege-pieces. The heavy guns, followed
by two and a half infantry brigades, moved over the plain between
the two channels. Campbell's division and Dundas' brigade were on
the left bank of the western channel, with Thackwell's cavalry still
further to the left. The Sikhs, ever ready with their artillery,
opened the battle with that arm. Gough at last had been taught by
hard experience that an artillery preparation should precede his
favourite "cold steel." The British batteries went out to the front
and began a magnificent and effective cannonade which lasted for
two hours and crushed the fire of the Sikh guns. The infantry then
deployed and marched forward, stormed the three Kalra villages
after experiencing a desperate and prolonged resistance, and swept
on up the plain toward Goojerat. There was little bloodshed on the
right of the Bimber channel, where marched Campbell and Dundas,
but there was plenty of that skill which spares precious lives.
Campbell describes how he handled his division:--"I formed my two
brigades in contiguous columns of regiments with a very strong line
of skirmishers--the artillery in line with the skirmishers. When we
arrived within long range of the enemy's guns, we deployed into line.
In this order, the artillery--twelve 9-pounders with the skirmishers
and the infantry in line close in rear, advanced as at a review;
the guns firing into the masses of infantry and cavalry behind the
nullah, who gradually melted away and took shelter in its channel. I
then caused the artillery of my division to be turned on the flank of
these throngs while the Bombay troop of horse-artillery fired direct
on their front. I finally dislodged them by artillery which enfiladed
the nullah, and which was moved forward and placed in position
for that object. I was ordered to storm this nullah; but to have
done so with infantry would have occasioned a useless and needless
sacrifice of life. Recognising that the result could be obtained
by gun-fire without risking the life of a man, I proceeded on my
own responsibility to employ my artillery in enfilading the nullah;
and after thus clearing it of the enemy, I had the satisfaction of
seeing the whole of our left wing pass this formidable defence of the
enemy's right wing without firing a shot or losing a man. We had too
much slaughter at Chillianwallah because due precaution had not been
taken to prevent it by the employment of our magnificent artillery.
Having felt this strongly and expressed it to the Commander-in-Chief
in warm terms, I had determined to employ this arm thenceforth to the
fullest extent; and I did so, accordingly, in the battle of Goojerat."

The discomfiture of the enemy was thorough. Cavalry, infantry,
and artillery left the field in utter confusion. The rout was too
complete to allow of the reunion of formed bodies in anything
like order. A body of Sikh horse with a brigade of Afghan cavalry
adventured an advance on Thackwell's flank. He hurled against them
the Scinde Horse and the Ninth Lancers, and a wild stampede resulted.
The rest of the British cavalry struck in and rushed on, dispersing,
riding over, and trampling down the Sikh infantry, capturing guns
and waggons, and converting the discomfited enemy into a shapeless
mass of fugitives. The horsemen did not draw rein until they had
ridden fifteen miles beyond Goojerat, by which time the army of
Shere Singh was a wreck, deprived of its camp, its standards, and
fifty-three of its cherished guns. On the morning after the battle
Sir Walter Gilbert started in pursuit of the broken Sikh host, while
Campbell took out his division in the direction of Dowlutanuggur,
but the latter was recalled on the 25th. On March 6th, however, he
received the order to join Gilbert's force in room of Brigadier
Mountain who had been injured by the accidental discharge of his
pistol. On the road to Rawul Pindi on the 15th he passed the greater
part of the Sikh army with its chiefs, who were laying down their
arms. Campbell was moved by the fine attitude of the men of the
Khalsa army. "There was," he wrote, "nothing cringing in the manner
of these men in laying down their arms. They acknowledged themselves
beaten, and they were starving--destitute alike of food and money.
Each man as he laid down his arms received a rupee to enable him to
support himself while on his way to his home. The greater number of
the old men especially, when laying down their arms, made a deep
reverence or salaam as they placed their swords on the heap, with the
muttered words 'Runjeet Singh is dead to-day!' This was said with
deep feeling; they are undoubtedly a fine and brave people." On the
21st Gilbert and Campbell reached Peshawur, and the latter encamped
near the fort of Jumrood at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, through
which the Afghans, whom Dost Mahomed had sent into the Punjaub to
reinforce the Sikhs in their warfare with the British forces, had
retreated very shortly before. The campaign was at an end; and early
in April Colin Campbell took command of the Sind Sagur District
with his headquarters at Rawul Pindi. There he shared a house with
his friend Mansfield, who in the time of the Mutiny was to be his
Chief-of-Staff. In July there occurred an event which called for all
his firmness and discretion. Two native infantry regiments stationed
at Rawul Pindi refused to accept the cantonment scale of pay, which
was lower than they had been receiving when on campaign. Evidence
was clear that the combination to resist the cantonment scale had
spread to other stations, and the situation was temporarily critical;
but fortunately there was a British regiment at Rawul Pindi, and
the sepoys came to reason without the necessity on Campbell's part
of resorting to strong measures. When at Rawul Pindi he had the
gratification to learn of his having been promoted to be a Knight of
the Bath for his services in the recent campaign; and Sir Charles
Napier in sending him the intimation added that "no man had won it
better," and expressed the hope that "he would long wear the spurs."

In November he was transferred to the divisional command of the
Peshawur District, a more important, but also a more unquiet post
than Rawul Pindi. Thenceforth for three years he was to be the
Warden of the turbulent north-western frontier. It pleased him to
find in his command his old regiment the Ninety-Eighth, and also the
Sixty-First which he had led at Chillianwallah. When in February,
1850, Sir Charles Napier reached Peshawur on a tour of inspection,
Sir Colin was able to assemble for review quite a little army of
all ranks; three troops of horse-artillery and two field-batteries,
three cavalry regiments, three European and three native infantry
regiments. While Sir Charles was in Colin Campbell's district, it
happened that he came under hostile fire for the last time in his
tumultuous life. Between Peshawur and Kohat, both places in British
territory, a mountain road ran outside that territory through a long
and dangerous defile. The Afridis inhabiting the intervening hill
country had complained that their subsidy for keeping open the pass
had not been paid, and in revenge had slaughtered a working party
of sappers and miners. Sir Charles determined to force the defile
in person. Campbell, on Napier's requisition, detailed a tolerably
strong force as escort to the Commander-in-Chief. It chanced that
before starting Napier inspected a regiment of irregulars under the
control of the much-vaunted Punjaub Government. The men were of fine
physique, but "one soldier had a musket without a lock, another a
lock without a musket. A stalwart soldier, his broad chest swelling
with military pride, his eyes sparkling with a malicious twinkle,
held on his shoulder between his finger and thumb a flint--his
only arm." The defile was duly forced, but its passage was one
long skirmish. Kohat was inspected and reinforced, but Napier, on
commencing his return march, found that the pickets left to keep the
road open had been roughly handled and had suffered serious loss.
The Afridis were very daring, and actually fired on Sir Charles
and his staff at short range. The loss sustained in this somewhat
quixotic expedition amounted to one hundred and ten men killed and
wounded--"not much," comments Napier grimly, "when one considers
the terrible defile through which we passed, defended by a warlike
race." His biographer calls the enterprise an "interesting episode";
it certainly was not a very wise enterprise to be undertaken by
the Commander-in-Chief of British India. It was Napier's last
eccentricity of a military character. By the end of the year he
resigned the command of the army of India, and was succeeded by Sir
William Gomm, an old brother officer of Colin Campbell in the Ninth
in the Peninsula days.

In March, 1851, Lord Dalhousie visited Peshawur and discussed with
Sir Colin the policy to be adopted towards the troublesome and
turbulent tribes on the north-western border. Scarcely had the
Governor-General gone when news came in that a Momund tribe, of the
region north of Peshawur between the Swat and Cabul rivers, had
been raiding into British territory. Dalhousie left to Sir Colin
the decision whether to make signal reprisals or to adopt defensive
measures, and, as the result of the description of the wild and
rugged region sent him by Sir Colin after a reconnaissance he had
made, elected for the defensive as an experiment. It failed, for in
October the Momunds of Michni made an irruption upon some villages
within British territory. The Governor-General now decided on an
immediate resort to active measures, and Sir Colin was ordered to
inflict summary chastisement on the offending tribe. He marched
from Peshawur on October 25th with a force of all arms about
twelve hundred strong, and advanced to the confines of the Michni
territory. He did not hurry, because he desired that his political
officer should have opportunity to inform the inhabitants of the
conditions intended to be offered them; which were annexation of
the territory, exile for the irreconcilables, and the retention of
their lands by the cultivators on payment of revenue. Campbell's
humane view was that "to drive into the hills the whole population
of Michni, occupying some seven and twenty villages, could only
result in forcing them to prey on the plunder of the villages inside
the border." The villages and fortalices whose inhabitants were
implicated in the violation of British territory were destroyed under
a harmless fire maintained by the mountaineers; but, as Campbell
records, "while engaged in duties in which no soldier can take
pleasure no lives were lost on either side. God knows the rendering
homeless of two or three hundred families is a despicable task
enough, without adding loss of life to this severe punishment."
The British camp was more than once assailed by bodies of Momund
tribes, and one of those attacks was made by some five thousand
hillmen whom Sir Colin dispersed by shell fire. A fort was built and
garrisoned in the Michni country, and the field-force returned to
Peshawur in February, 1852. With the results it had accomplished the
Governor-General expressed his entire satisfaction.

The column had scarcely settled down in Peshawur when fresh troubles
were reported from the wearyful Momund frontier. Sir Colin hurried
thither with two horse-artillery guns and two hundred and sixty
native troopers, to find the Momund chief Sadut Khan in position
on the edge of the Panj Pao upland, fronting towards Muttah, with
six thousand matchlock men and some eighty horsemen. The affair
had its interesting features. Sir Colin took in reverse the Momund
hordes with his artillery fire, broke up their masses, put them to
flight, and pursued them. As he was preparing to return the Momunds
suddenly wheeled in their tracks and rushed upon him over the broken
ground. The guns were instantly unlimbered, and double charges of
grape checked the wild and gallant attack,--a brilliant rally after
the endurance of two hours' shell fire followed by a hasty retreat.
The mountaineers continued to press Campbell's slow retirement
across the table-land, notwithstanding the fire of grape which he
maintained. The incident strengthened his belief in the superior
efficacy of defensive operations, and he declined to fall in with
the anxious wish of the Punjaub Board of Administration that he
should act on the offensive against the Momunds, on the ground that
he was not prepared to execute operations of that character without
the most precise orders by the Commander-in-Chief, the authority
to which he was responsible. His reply met with the full approval
of the Commander-in-Chief, which however the Governor-General did
not share. Sir Colin maintained his ground with the approval of the
former authority, when pressed by the Commissioner of Peshawur to
enter Swat. Meanwhile the Ootman-Kheyl tribe had become implicated in
the murder of a native official in British employ at Charsuddah. Sir
Colin had no hesitation in taking measures to inflict punishment on
this powerful and turbulent clan. A column of all arms, two thousand
four hundred and fifty strong, was assembled on the left bank of the
Swat river, and on May 11th proceeded to destroy a group of deserted
villages belonging to the Ootman-Kheyl. The column then advanced on
the large village of Prangurh, the Ootman-Kheyl stronghold. It had
been prepared for defence, and was crowded with men who opened fire
on Sir Colin's advanced guard. Covered by artillery fire his troops
carried the village with a rush, after a stout defence on the part
of the enemy. During the destruction of Prangurh letters were found
proving a strong feeling of hostility towards the British Government
on the part of the rulers of Swat. Sir Colin then fell in with the
views of the Commissioner, and declared himself prepared to invade
the Swat territory unless he should be absolutely prohibited by the
Commander-in-Chief.

The British force next moved upon Iskakote, a large village of
Ranizai, a dependency of Swat, whither large bodies of hillmen
hastened to defend the village and valley. Sir Colin estimated the
number of the hostile clansmen to be not less than six thousand.
They made a stubborn resistance, and endured a sharp cannonade with
great firmness. The Guides and Ghoorkas stormed the nullah with some
hand-to-hand fighting, whereupon, having suffered severe loss, the
enemy broke up and made for the hills pursued by the cavalry.

The Commander-in-Chief interposed no veto on the invasion of Swat,
but it became apparent to Sir Colin Campbell that the transport
for that operation was inadequate and inefficient. Experience of
the opposition he had encountered in the Iskakote affair, and a
subsequent reconnaissance in the Ranizai valley, convinced him
that his infantry would require a reinforcement of two thousand
five hundred men, without receiving which he could not proceed to
the invasion of Swat. The Punjaub Board of Administration refused
his requisition for the number of troops he asked, and as it was
unadvisable to keep the force in the field in the hot weather, the
column returned to Peshawur in the beginning of June.

Campbell had already been made aware by the Commander-in-Chief
of the Governor-General's dissatisfaction, which in the shape of
a formal censure awaited him at Peshawur. Lord Dalhousie used
expressions which must have cut the old fighting man to the quick.
His lordship chose to tell the soldier of many battles that he had
manifested "over-cautious reluctance" in advancing against the Swat
marauders in March. Presently came the further charge that not only
had he "transgressed the bounds of his proper province," but that
"he had placed himself in an attitude of direct and proclaimed
insubordination to the authority of the Governor-General in Council."
Campbell replied with disciplined dignity and self-respect,
expressing his regret that expressions so strong should have been
used in regard to him, and his painful surprise that after a
lifetime of unswerving military subordination he should be accused
of the reverse. He was aware that he was in disaccord with the
Government, and already when in the field he had determined to
resign his command, an intention which he had communicated to the
Commander-in-Chief. To that old friend he wrote without heat:--"I
have come to the conclusion that I should be wanting in what is due
to myself, if, after what has passed, I were to continue in this
command; there is a limit at which a man's forbearance ought to stop,
and that limit has in my case been reached."

Sir Colin resigned his command on July 25th. He declined a farewell
banquet to which the officers of the Peshawur garrison desired to
invite him, believing that in the circumstances to accept the honour
would be contrary to the spirit of the Queen's regulations. After
spending three months in the bracing hill-station of Murree, in the
end of October he visited at Dugshai the Ninety-Eighth regiment,
to his original position as senior lieutenant-colonel of which he
had reverted on the resignation of his divisional command; then,
after a brief visit to Simla, he sailed from Bombay, arriving
in England in March, 1853. Before leaving India he had read the
official acknowledgment by the Government of the services of the
troops engaged in the recent operations. The despatch recorded the
Governor-General's regret "that any incident should have occurred
to deserve a censure of any portion of Sir Colin Campbell's
conduct;" but it "acknowledged in the most ample terms the ability,
the personal intrepidity and activity, and the sterling soldierly
qualities, which this distinguished officer had displayed in the
military command of the troops at Peshawur upon every occasion on
which they had taken the field." The _amende honorable_ was well
enough in its lumbering way; but it could scarcely take away the
bitter flavour of the barbed and venomous insinuation conveyed in the
cruel words "over-cautious reluctance."




CHAPTER IV

THE CRIMEA


Soon after his return to England Sir Colin Campbell vacated the
command of the Ninety-Eighth and went on half-pay. He had earned a
modest competence, and after those long years of campaigning abroad
he considered himself at the age of sixty-one entitled to enjoy
peaceful repose at home for the rest of his life. But this was not to
be; there was still before him much arduous and active service in the
field before he went to his final rest.

Kinglake in his _War in the Crimea_ pays Colin Campbell a fine
tribute--not less fine, however, than deserved; a passage from which
may fittingly be inserted here:--

"After serving with all this glory for some forty-five years, he
returned to England; but between the Queen and him stood a dense
crowd of families extending further than the eye could reach, and
armed with strange precedents which made it out to be right that
people who had seen no service should be invested with high command,
and that Sir Colin Campbell should be only a colonel. Yet he was of
so fine a nature that, although he did not always avoid great bursts
of anger, there was no ignoble bitterness in his sense of wrong.
He awaited the time when perhaps he might have high command, and be
able to serve his country in a sphere proportioned to his strength.
His friends, however, were angry for his sake; and along with their
strong devotion to him, there was bred a fierce hatred of a system of
military dispensation which could keep in the background a man thus
tried and thus known."

The time was soon to come when such a man as Colin Campbell could
no longer be kept in the background. England and France had formed
an alliance in defence of Turkey against Russia, and in the end of
March, 1854, war was actually declared. English troops had already
been despatched to the East; Lord Raglan had been appointed to the
command of the expeditionary force, and Sir Colin Campbell had been
nominated to a brigade command. He embarked for the East on the 3rd
of April accompanied by Major Sterling his brigade-major and Captain
Shadwell his aide-de-camp. On the 23rd he reached Constantinople,
where on the arrival of Lord Raglan a few days later he was
appointed to the Highland Brigade consisting of the Forty-Second,
Seventy-Ninth, and Ninety-Third regiments. That brigade and the
Guards formed the First Division, of which the Duke of Cambridge had
the command. The Highland Brigade was completed in the second week of
June by the arrival of the Forty-Second.

Although himself a Highlander, it had never until now fallen to the
lot of Colin Campbell to command Highlanders. But he understood
the Highland nature, which has its marked peculiarities; and he
speedily won the respect and goodwill of the fine soldiers whom he
was privileged to command. A thoroughly good understanding soon
grew up between him and them; not only was he commanding officer of
the brigade; he was also regarded as somewhat in the character of
the chief of a clan. He was fortunate in finding in the commanding
officer of the Forty-Second, the son of his old chief Sir John
Cameron of the Ninth, and not less fortunate in being able to
avail himself of Colonel Cameron's long experience at the head of
a Highland regiment in many important details connected with the
internal management and economy of the brigade.

In accordance with the scheme of operations agreed upon by the
English and French commanders in conference with Omar Pasha at Varna,
the allied armies were gradually concentrated about that place and
inland therefrom in support of the Turkish army at Schumla. The
position at Varna was found unhealthy and the Duke of Cambridge
marched his division on to the plateau of Aladyn, where it was
visited by Omar Pasha who expressed his great admiration of the
magnificent appearance of the Guards and Highlanders paraded for
his inspection. But tidings arrived that the Russians had raised
the siege of Silistria and recrossed the Danube, and presently the
troops of the Tsar withdrew altogether from the Principalities. The
object for which the allied armies had been moved into Bulgaria no
longer existed; and on July 18th the resolution was taken to make a
descent on the Crimea and assail Sevastopol. The preparations for
this daring enterprise were at length completed, and the Highland
Brigade embarked at Varna on August 29th. Sir Colin sailed in the
steam-transport _Emu_. He was now at length a Major-General after a
service of forty-six years and one month; the date of the promotion
was July 10th. "This rank," he remarks philosophically, "has arrived
at a period of life when the small additional income which it carries
with it is the only circumstance connected with the promotion in
which I take any interest."

The voyage across the Black Sea, the landing on Crimean soil, and the
advance to the Alma, are familiar history to every reader. Campbell
had given up his journal before the landing, and all that he wrote
of his personal experiences in the battle of the Alma is contained
in two letters, one to his sister, the other to his friend Colonel
Eyre. The former is a mere sketch, alluding to the fine courage
exhibited by his young Highlanders and to the circumstance, mentioned
with characteristic modesty, that "he was supposed to have made a
disposition and an attack of importance which led to results of
considerable advantage." He thus concludes, "I lost my best horse--a
noble animal. He was first shot in the hip the ball passing through
my sabretasche, and the second ball went right through his body
passing through the heart. He sank at once, and Shadwell kindly lent
me his horse which I immediately mounted."

The letter to Colonel Eyre is more detailed. "When," he writes,
"the Light Division was ordered to advance, we (the First Division)
followed in close support. My brigade was on the left of the Guards.
On the face of the slope immediately in front of the Light Division,
the enemy had made a large redoubt protected on each side by
artillery on the heights above and on either side, covered on flanks
and front by a direct as well as an enfilading fire. This artillery
was supported by numerous large masses of troops near their guns,
and also by other large masses in rear on the inward slopes of the
heights. These heights extended far to the enemy's right, with a
bare slope without bush or tree to afford cover down to the bank of
the river, on which we had to form and advance to the attack after
crossing.

"The vineyards and garden enclosures in the narrow valley through
which the river runs, completely broke the formation of the troops.
They crossed necessarily in a disorderly manner; but the left
bank being high, I was able to collect my right regiment (the
Forty-Second) under its cover. On gaining the top of the bank I
observed a large portion of the Light Division advancing to attack
the redoubt, which was a good deal to the right of my right regiment.
I hastened its formation, the other two regiments being still
struggling through the difficult bottom from which I had emerged....
The Forty-Second continued its advance, followed, as I had previously
ordered, by the two other regiments (Ninety-Third and Seventy-Ninth)
in _échelon_, forming in that order as they gained in succession the
summit of the left bank of the Alma. On gaining the ascent we found
the enemy who had withdrawn from the redoubt, attempting to form on
two large masses of troops advancing over the plateau to meet the
attack of the Forty-Second. The men were too much blown to charge,
so they opened fire while advancing in line, an operation in which
I had practised them, and they drove before them in confusion with
cheers and a terrible slaughter both masses and the fugitives from
the redoubt.

"Before reaching the inner crest of the heights, another heavy
mass of troops came forward against the Forty-Second, and this was
disposed of in the same manner as the two first we encountered. I
halted the regiment on the inner crest of the heights, still firing
and killing more of the enemy as they were descending the inner
slope, when two large bodies came down from the right of the enemy's
position direct on the left flank of the Forty-Second. Just at this
moment the Ninety-Third showed itself coming over the table-land, and
attacked these bodies, which did not yield readily. The Ninety-Third,
which I had great difficulty in restraining from following the
enemy, had only time to inflict great loss, when two bodies of
fresh infantry with some cavalry, came boldly forward against the
left flank of the Ninety-Third, whereupon the Seventy-Ninth made
its appearance over the hill, and went at these troops with cheers,
causing them great loss and forcing them away in great confusion. The
Guards during these operations were away to my right, quite removed
from the scene of this fight which I have described. It was a fight
of the Highland Brigade.

"Lord Raglan came up afterwards and sent for me. When I approached
him I observed his eyes to fill and his lips and countenance to
quiver. He gave me a cordial shake of the hand, but he could not
speak. The men cheered very much. I told them I was going on to ask
of the Commander-in-Chief a great favour,--that he would permit me
to have the honour of wearing the Highland bonnet during the rest of
the campaign, which pleased them very greatly, and so ended my part
in the fight of the 20th inst.... My men behaved nobly. I never saw
troops march to battle with greater _sang froid_ and order than those
three Highland regiments.... I write on the ground. I have neither
stool to sit on nor bed to lie on. I am in capital health, for which
I have to be very thankful. Cholera is rife among us, and carrying
off many fine fellows of all ranks!"

This description is not in Kinglake's style, but in its soldierly
curtness it may strike the reader as having the valuable attribute of
greater directness and lucidity, and it was written by the man who
not only controlled every movement on his own side of the fight on
the left of the great redoubt, but also watched with cool, keen eyes
every evolution of his adversaries. He had need to be on the alert,
if ever man had; for he had to his hand but three battalions, and he
had in his front no fewer than twelve Russian battalions each one of
which was numerically stronger than any one of his three. Nor were
his opponents raw militia or reserve battalions such as confronted
Prince Napoleon's division. The Russian regiments on the British
side of the great road, the Vladimir, Sousdal, Kazan, and Ouglitz,
constituted the Sixteenth Division, the division _d'élite_ of the
Tsar's troops of the line; that same division which three and twenty
years later won for Skobeleff his electrical successes. It was twelve
battalions of this historical division against whose massive columns
Colin Campbell led his brigade in the old two-deep British line
formation with the result he has told in his quiet sober manner. No
wonder that Lord Raglan's "eyes filled and his lips and countenance
quivered" as, too much moved to speak, he shook the hand of the
commander of the Highland Brigade.

"So ended my part in the fight of the 20th inst.," writes Sir Colin
in the soldierly and modest narrative of his share in the victory
which he sent home to his friend Eyre. That narrative, lucid
though it is, is also almost provokingly curt. Fortunately, thanks
chiefly to the industry of Kinglake, there exists the material for
supplementing and amplifying it. According to that writer during the
last of the halts on the march on the morning of the Alma, while the
men were lying down in the sunshine, Sir Colin, the provident soldier
of experience, quietly remarked to one of his officers, "This will be
a good time for the men to get loose half of their cartridges;" and
Kinglake adds that, "when the command travelled along the ranks of
the Highlanders, it lit up the faces of the men one after another,
assuring them that now at length, and after long experience, they
indeed would go into action."

It does not appear that Colin Campbell ever made any reference to
an incident which Kinglake mentions. The brigade of Guards before
crossing the river was exposed, it seems, to a fire of artillery,
which, as is not uncommon with that arm, struck down some men. There
was a tendency to hesitation, when, according to Kinglake, some
weak-kneed brother in the shape of an officer of "obscure rank" had
the pusillanimity or the impertinence to exclaim, "The brigade of
Guards will be destroyed; ought it not to fall back?" "When Sir Colin
Campbell heard this saying," says Kinglake in his high-strung manner,
"his blood rose so high that the answer he gave--impassioned and
far-resounding--was of a quality to govern events:--'It is better,
sir, that every man of Her Majesty's Guards should lie dead on the
field than that they should turn their backs upon the enemy!' Doubts
and questionings ceased. The division marched forward."

Mr. Kinglake owns that he did not himself hear the words; and it is
permissible, therefore, to doubt whether they were uttered. They
certainly are not in Colin Campbell's manner. It would have been
more like him to express himself in strong and frank vernacular to,
or of the officer of "obscure rank" who had evinced a propensity for
"falling back." No doubt he was with the Duke of Cambridge in front
of the left of the Coldstreams when the Guards were encountering
obstacles among the vineyards before reaching the river. In that
position the Highland Brigade would be under his eye. Sir Colin
Campbell, a soldier inured to war, certainly was of great service
on the advance to the brigade of Guards, scarcely a man of which
had ever seen a shot fired in anger. He remained near the Duke of
Cambridge until the Guards had crossed the river; and when the
Light Division was retreating in disorder on the brigade of Guards
he advised His Royal Highness to move the latter somewhat to the
left, to avoid the dislocation of his line which otherwise would be
occasioned by the rush of fugitives. After the momentary confusion
caused by the retreat of the Light Division behind the advancing
Guards to reform, the Duke thought it would be well to make a short
halt for the purpose of dressing his line, but Sir Colin earnestly
desired him to make no such delay but to press forward on the enemy
with the initial impulse, and the advice was followed with triumphant
result.

It fell to Sir Colin Campbell and his Highland Brigade to protect the
left flank of the British army, with three battalions to vanquish
and put to flight eight Russian battalions, and to compel the
retreat of four more. The arena of this exploit was the slopes and
hollows of the Kourganè _terrain_ to the Russian right of the great
redoubt from which the British Light Division had been forced to
recoil with heavy loss. On the extreme Russian right flank and rear
stood three thousand horsemen, and to protect his own left Campbell
had given the order to the Seventy-Ninth, the left regiment of his
brigade, to go into column. But a little later, when he had ridden
forward and so gained a wider scope of view, it became apparent to
his experienced eye that he need fear nothing from the stolid array
of Russian cavalry on his flank. He therefore recalled his order to
the Seventy-Ninth and allowed it to go forward in line. His brigade
after crossing the Alma fell into direct _échelon_ of regiments, the
Forty-Second on the right being the leading regiment of the three,
the Ninety-Third in the centre, and the Seventy-Ninth on the left.
Just before the Guards began their advance on the redoubt which
the right Vladimir column was still holding, Sir Colin Campbell
was in his saddle in front of the left of the Coldstreams talking
occasionally with the Duke of Cambridge. When the Guards began
their advance Sir Colin also proceeded to act. He discerned that
by swiftly moving a battalion up to the crest in front of him, he
would be on the flank of the position about the great redoubt where
the right Vladimir column was confronting the Guards. This attitude
of his would probably compel the retirement of the Vladimirs; if it
did not, by wheeling to his right he would strike the flank of the
Russian column while the Guards were assailing its front. He had the
weapon wherewith to effect this stroke ready to his hand in the
Forty-Second, which having crossed the river now stood ranged in line.

Before his brigade had moved from column into line Campbell had
spoken a few straightforward soldierly words to his men, the gist
of which has been commemorated. "Now, men," said he, "you are going
into action. Remember this: whoever is wounded--no matter what his
rank--must lie where he falls till the bandsmen come to attend to
him. No soldiers must go carrying off wounded comrades. If any man
does such a thing his name shall be stuck up in his parish church.
The army will be watching you; make me proud of the Highland
Brigade!" And now, when the time had come for action and that rugged
slope had to be surmounted, he rode to the head of the "Black Watch"
and gave to the regiment the command "Forward, Forty-Second!"

He himself with his staff rode rapidly in advance up to the crest.
In his immediate front there lay before him a broad and rather deep
depression on the further side of which there faced him the right
Kazan column of two battalions, on the left of which was reforming
the right Vladimir column whose retreat from the vicinity of the
redoubt had been compelled by the pressure of the Guards on front and
flank. Both columns had suffered considerably; but assuming their
previous losses to have been one-third of their original strength,
they[2] still numbered three thousand against the eight hundred and
thirty of the Forty-Second. And when Campbell looked to his left,
he saw on the neck bounding the left of the hollow another and a
heavier column consisting of two perfectly fresh battalions of the
Sousdal regiment. This last column, however, was stationary, and
notwithstanding that the men were out of breath Sir Colin sent the
Forty-Second, firing as it advanced, straight across the hollow
against the Kazan and Vladimir columns. The regiment had not gone
many paces when it was seen that the left Sousdal column had left the
neck and was marching direct on the left flank of the Forty-Second.
Campbell immediately halted the regiment and was about to throw
back its left wing to deal with the Sousdal advance, when glancing
over his left shoulder he saw that the Ninety-Third, his centre
battalion, had reached the crest. In its eagerness its formation had
become disturbed. Campbell rode to its front, halted and reformed it
under fire, and then led it forward against the flank of the Sousdal
column. The Forty-Second meanwhile had resumed its advance against
the Vladimir and Kazan columns.

Before the onslaughts of the two Scottish regiments the Russian
columns were staggering, and their officers had extreme difficulty
in compelling their men to retain their formation, when from the
upper ground on the left was seen moving down yet another Russian
column,--the right Sousdal column--and heading straight for the flank
of the Ninety-Third. It was taken in the flagrant offence of daring
to march across the front of a battalion advancing in line. At that
instant the Seventy-Ninth came bounding forward; after a moment's
halt to dress their ranks, the Cameron men sprang at the flank of the
Sousdal column and shattered it by the fierce fire poured into its
huddled ranks. And now, the left Sousdal column almost simultaneously
discomfited by the Ninety-Third, and the Kazan and Vladimir columns
which the "Black Watch" had assailed being in full retreat, the hill
spurs and hollows became thronged by the disordered masses of the
enemy. Kinglake brilliantly pictures the culmination of the triumph
of the Highlanders:--"Knowing their hearts, and deeming that the
time was one when the voice of his people might fitly enough be
heard, the Chief touched or half-lifted his hat in the way of a man
assenting. Then along the Kourganè slopes and thence west almost home
to the Causeway, the hillsides were made to resound with that joyous
assuring cry which is the natural utterance of a northern people
so long as it is warlike and free." It is curious that nowhere in
his vivid description of the part taken by the Highland Brigade in
the achievement of the victory of the Alma, does Kinglake make any
mention of the bagpipes. It is certain that they were in full blast
during the advance of the regiments and throughout the fighting, and
their shrill strains must have astonished the Russians not less than
did the waving tartans and nodding plumes of the Highlanders.

Sir Colin, careful ever in the midst of victory, halted his brigade
on the ground it had already won, for his supports were yet distant;
and mindful of his situation as the guardian of the left of the army,
he showed a front to the south-east as well as to the east. The great
Ouglitz column, four thousand strong and still untouched, remained
over against the halted British brigade. Chafing at the defeat of
its comrades, it moved down from its height, striving to hinder
their retreat and force them back into action. But the Ouglitz
column itself had in its turn to withdraw from under the fire of the
Highland Brigade, and to accept the less adventurous task of covering
the retreat of its vanquished fellow-columns.

After the flank march to the south side of Sevastopol the allied
forces took possession of the Chersonese upland, and the Highland
Brigade, leaving the Ninety-Third at Balaclava, encamped with the
Guards in rear of the Light Division. Lord Raglan was solicitous
regarding the port of Balaclava which had become the British base of
operations, and measures had already been set on foot to protect it
by a series of batteries and field-works. On the 16th of October Sir
Colin was assigned by the Commander-in-Chief to the command of the
troops and defences covering the port, and he promptly undertook the
important and responsible duty of protecting the rear of the army.
The inner defences of Balaclava consisted of a series of batteries
connected by a continuous trench extending from the sea eastward of
the port round the landward face of the heights to the chapel of
St. Elias near the road from Balaclava to the Traktir bridge. This
line of batteries and trench was held by some twelve hundred marines
landed from the fleet with a weak detachment of marine artillery.
About Kadikoi, on the low ground at the head of the gorge leading
down to Balaclava, were several batteries, and in front of that
village was the camp of the Ninety-Third Highlanders with Barker's
field-battery on its flank. The exterior line of defence consisted
of a chain of redoubts on the low ridge dividing the southern or
inner plain from the exterior or northern valley, along which on
the 25th of October the British light cavalry brigade was to make
its memorable charge. Those redoubts, which were still unfinished
on the day of the battle, were very weak. They were garrisoned by
Turks, and their armament consisted of but nine guns in all. It was
to the assault of those poor redoubts that Liprandi's field-army,
some twenty-four thousand strong, advanced across the Tchernaya at
daybreak of the 25th. Doubtless the Russian general had ulterior
designs, comprising the discomfiture of Campbell's Highlanders and an
attempt against Balaclava.

Riding with Lord Lucan in the early morning of the day of Balaclava,
Sir Colin Campbell witnessed the advance of the Russian columns, and
it was by his advice that the cavalry chief refrained from taking the
offensive. One after another of the four easternmost redoubts fell
into Russian possession. The Turks garrisoning No. 1 made a gallant
and stubborn defence; but they were only six hundred against eleven
battalions with thirty guns, and after losing one-fourth of their
number they fled towards Balaclava followed by the garrisons of the
other redoubts. The Turks rallied for a time on either flank of the
Ninety-Third, which stood drawn up in line in front of the knoll
before Kadikoi. Sir Colin's active share in the further proceedings
of the day was soon over. He sums it up in a few sentences of his
official report:--"When the enemy had taken possession of the
redoubts, their artillery advanced with a mass of cavalry and
their guns ranged. The Ninety-Third Highlanders, with one hundred
invalids under Colonel Daveney, occupied, very inefficiently from
the smallness of their numbers, the slightly rising ground in front
of No. 4 battery. As I found that round shot and shell began to
cause casualties among the Ninety-Third and the Turkish battalions on
their right and left flanks, I made them retire a few paces behind
the crest of the hillock. During this period our batteries on the
heights manned by the Royal and Marine artillerymen made excellent
practice on the enemy's cavalry which came over the hill in our
front. One body of that cavalry, amounting to about four hundred,
turned to their left, separating themselves from those who attacked
Lord Lucan's division, and charged the Ninety-Third, who immediately
advanced to the crest of the hill on which they stood and opened
their fire, forcing the Russian cavalry to turn to their left; after
which the latter made an attempt to turn the right flank of the
Ninety-Third on observing the flight of the Turks who had been posted
there. Upon this the grenadiers of the Ninety-Third under Captain
Ross were wheeled up to their right and fired upon the enemy, and by
this manœuvre entirely discomfited them."

The erratic charge upon him of four Russian squadrons gave the old
infantry commander very little concern. That approach he confronted
calmly in line,--the "thin red streak tipped with a line of steel"
which a brilliant phrase-maker has made historical. When it was a
subject of remark in his presence that the Ninety-Third never altered
its formation to receive the Russian cavalry in a period when the
square was the approved formation in which to meet an onslaught of
horse, he said in his genial way, "No--I did not think it worth while
to form them even four deep." His concern was in the fact that his
regiment was the only infantry body on the British side in the field,
while the Russian chief was the master of many battalions. Those six
companies of kilted men, with a few guns, were the sole protection
of the port the possession of which alone enabled the British army
to remain in the Crimea. It was in the consciousness of a momentous
responsibility that, as he rode along the face of his noble regiment,
he judged it wise to impart to the men the gravity of the occasion.
"Remember," said he, "there is no retreat from here, men! You must
die where you stand!" The cheery answer must have gone to his
heart--"Aye, aye, Sir Colin; we'll do that!"

There were a great many young soldiers in the ranks of the
Ninety-Third, and it needed to be controlled with a firm hand. As
the Russian squadron approached, the impetuous youngsters of the
regiment, stirred by their northern blood, evinced a propensity to
break ranks and rush forward to meet the Muscovite sabres with the
British bayonet; but, in the words of Kinglake, "In a moment Sir
Colin was heard shouting fiercely, 'Ninety-Third, Ninety-Third! damn
all that eagerness!'" and the angry voice of the old soldier quickly
steadied the line.

The main mass of the Russian cavalry, from which the four squadrons
which were repulsed by the Ninety-Third had detached themselves, rode
up the north valley until it was abreast of the abandoned redoubt
No. 4, when it inclined to its left, crossed the low ridge and moved
down the gentle hither slope falling into the inner valley. It was
there met by the charge of the British heavy cavalry brigade; and
during the short but warm encounter Barker's battery, at Sir Colin's
order, opened fire with round shot on the Russian centre and rear.
The Ninety-Third watched with keen rapture their fellow-countrymen
of the Scots Greys slashing their way through the graycoated mass of
Russian troopers; and when the enemy's column wavered, broke, and
then fled in disorder, Scarlett's victorious troopers were greeted
from afar by the ringing cheers of the delighted Highlanders. When
the brigade had completed its triumph, Sir Colin Campbell came
galloping up to offer his congratulations. As he approached the Greys
he uncovered and spoke to the regiment. "Greys! gallant Greys!" he
exclaimed, "I am sixty-one years old, and if I were young again I
should be proud to be in your ranks." Sir Colin does not appear to
have seen anything of the subsequent charge made by Cardigan at the
head of the light cavalry brigade, which was made down the north or
outer valley, on the further side of the ridge on the crest of which
were the abandoned redoubts.

In the afternoon the troops which had moved down from the plateau
in the morning returned to their camps, but the Forty-Second and
Seventy-Ninth passed again under the command of their own brigade
commander. The contiguity of the enemy's forces in such great
strength made very welcome the accession to Sir Colin's scanty
means of defence. During this critical night the Forty-Second and
Seventy-Ninth held the ground between the Ninety-Third camp and the
foot of the Marine heights, and Vinoy's French brigade was sent to
the high ground overlooking the Kadikoi gorge to strengthen Sir Colin
in the defence of his position. He was so apprehensive of a night
attack that he placed the Ninety-Third in No. 4 battery, half the
men posted behind the parapet, the other half lying down with their
loaded rifles by their sides. He himself was on the alert throughout
the night, moving about among the men; his anxiety was great, for
he was not aware of the distaste of the Russians for night attacks.
Amidst his cares it was pleasant to receive and promulgate the
following general order complimenting himself and the Ninety-Third
on their conduct on the 25th: "The Commander of the forces feels
deeply indebted to Major-General Sir Colin Campbell for his able and
persevering exertions in the action of the 25th; and he has great
pleasure in publishing to the army the brilliant manner in which
the Ninety-Third Highlanders under his able directions repulsed the
enemy's cavalry."

For weeks, while the Russians were so close, Sir Colin never relaxed
his activity and vigilance. Not for an hour did he leave the
position. He was awake and about all night and the little sleep he
took was by snatches in the daytime. By constant industry and with
many devices he laboured to strengthen and improve his defences. The
first relief from toil and anxiety which he experienced was when on
December 5th the Russian field-army withdrew across the Tchernaya
to Tchorgoum. "Then," writes Shadwell, "that night for the first
time Sir Colin lay down with his clothes off in the house; but even
with a roof over his head he was restless; and such was the tension
of his nervous system from the continuous strain of long weeks of
anxious watching, that an officer who shared his room was startled
in the middle of the night by his chief jumping up and shouting,
'Stand to your arms!'" Towards the end of December the Seventy-First
Highlanders arrived and joined his command, and on Christmas Day he
received the notification of his appointment to the colonelcy of the
Sixty-Seventh regiment.

Towards the end of January, 1855, Sir Colin was able to have nearly
all his troops hutted. Before the end of the first week in February
the whole brigade was comfortably in huts; and he was able to spare
daily large fatigue-parties for the carriage of shot and shell to
the front. An experience he underwent on February 20th illustrates
the risks and vicissitudes attending an attempt to effect a combined
movement in the darkness of a winter night. Sir Colin had received
instructions to support, with four infantry regiments and a force
of artillery and cavalry, the movement of a considerable body of
French troops under General Bosquet, with the object of surprising
the Russian troops on the right bank of the Tchernaya behind the
Traktir bridge. It was a bitter night of snow and frost, but the
English details duly rendezvoused and marched to the named point
without seeing anything of Bosquet's people. Sir Colin covered the
bridge and left bank with a couple of battalions, holding the rest
in reserve; his troops were in position before daybreak. He was not
entitled to take the offensive save in combination with the French,
of whom there was no appearance. The Russians as day broke were seen
taking up positions, but they remained on the defensive. Sir Colin
stood fast until 8.30 A.M. expecting the arrival of Bosquet; then,
concluding that the expedition had been countermanded, he prepared to
return. His conjecture was correct; a countermand had been despatched
which had duly reached Bosquet, but the messenger charged with the
countermand for Campbell had lost his way and did not arrive. As the
British force was about retiring the French general Vinoy appeared
with his brigade. He had learnt at daybreak that no countermand had
reached Kadikoi, whereupon the gallant Frenchman, unsolicited and
on his own responsibility, hurried with his brigade to support his
English comrade who, isolated as he was and with an overwhelmingly
strong force in his front, might well have found himself in
difficulties. Vinoy's kindly and helpful action was heartily
appreciated by Sir Colin's soldiers.

In the end of February the brigade of Guards came down to Balaclava
from the front, and Sir Colin, who had succeeded the Duke of
Cambridge in the command of the First Division, now had the whole
of it under him. By steadfast labour and attention he had very
materially increased and developed the strength and scope of the
Balaclava lines. When he contrasted the existing with the early state
of the position, he frankly owned that for a great part of the time
he "had held the lines by sheer impudence." In May he experienced
a great mortification in not being allowed to accompany, on the
expedition to Kertch, his Highland Brigade and other details of his
original Balaclava command. Lord Raglan tried to pay him a compliment
by explaining that he could not be spared from the position which he
had guarded so long and so well; but Campbell felt the disappointment
deeply, nor was it mitigated when a newly-arrived Highland regiment
with detachments for the Brigade was sent off to join the Kertch
expedition. On its return the First Division, now again reunited
under his command, moved up to the front in the middle of June. It
was in reserve and not engaged in the unsuccessful assault on the
Redan on June 18th; and thenceforth for a time it took its regular
term of duty in the trenches. But Sir Colin was soon to undergo
another disappointment. He had been cherishing the hope that the
division, which was in full efficacy and high _morale_, would take
a prominent part in the final assault on Sevastopol, and he had
prepared a scheme of operations in case the conduct of the assault
should be committed to him. But he had now to endure the disruption
of his command. The Highland Brigade was withdrawn from the First
Division and formed into a separate division, the complement of which
was to be made up by the addition of other Scottish regiments. The
nucleus of the new Highland Division, consisting of the Forty-Second,
Seventy-Second, Seventy-Ninth, and Ninety-Third regiments, was sent
down to Kamara in support of the Sardinians, and remained there until
September when it returned to the front to serve as a reserve to the
troops taking part in the final assault. The British assault on the
Redan unfortunately failed, and Sir Colin took up the defence of the
trenches with his Highland regiments on the withdrawal of the troops
employed in the abortive affair. The same evening he was desired
by the Commander-in-Chief to hold himself in readiness to make a
renewed assault on the Redan with his Highlanders on the following
day. But during the night the Russians withdrew to the north side. A
patrol of the Ninety-Third entered the Redan at midnight and found it
abandoned. The long siege was over, and Sevastopol had fallen at last.

Sir Colin Campbell was a man who could admire a brave and skilful
enemy. He wrote: "The Russians, it must be acknowledged, made a noble
defence; and surely never was a retreat from an untenable position
so wonderfully well-managed, carried out as it was in the face of a
powerful enemy and without any loss whatever, while the withdrawal
of the troops from their defences through the town and across a
single bridge was being effected. I cannot conceive anything more
perfect and complete in every detail than the manner in which they
accomplished the withdrawal from Sevastopol and the transport of
their troops across the harbour.... While they fired all the other
magazines along the line of their defences, they did not touch those
in the Great Redan--an act of great humanity, for the whole of our
wounded who remained in the ditch and our trenches would have been
destroyed. Indeed, before the Russians left the Redan some of our
wounded were carefully dressed by them and placed in safety from the
fire of our own shells."

Campbell's position in the Crimea had become exceedingly
uncomfortable. Before the final assault General Simpson had informed
him that he was desired by Lord Panmure to offer him the Malta
command, an offer which appeared an indirect attempt to remove
him from the army. Later he became by virtue of seniority second
in command, and it was known that Simpson was about to vacate the
chief command. The tone of the press was emphatic in favour of the
employment of a younger man in that position, and the Government
followed the lead of the journals. Sir Colin could not but realise
that his presence with the army in the Crimea was no longer desired
by the War Minister. Having seen the Highland Division comfortably
hutted for the winter during which no active operations in the
field would be possible, he took farewell of his troops and sailed
for England on November 3rd. Three days later was announced Sir
William Codrington's nomination to the chief command; and with
that despatch came a letter from Lord Panmure to Sir Colin, the
contents of which he did not learn until he visited his lordship on
his arrival in London on November 17th. This letter, in Campbell's
own words, "contained an appeal to my patriotism of the strongest
nature, to induce me to accept a command under Codrington." To his
old friend Lord Hardinge, now Commander-in-Chief, Campbell frankly
said that he had come home to tender his resignation. "But," he
added, "if her Majesty should ask me to place myself under a junior
officer, I could not resist any request of hers." He was promptly
commanded to Windsor; and, to quote General Shadwell, "the gracious
reception accorded to him by the Queen and the Prince Consort struck
a responsive chord in Sir Colin's heart. It completely dispelled
all angry feeling from his mind, and in a true spirit of loyalty he
expressed to her Majesty his readiness to return to the Crimea and
'to serve under a corporal if she wished it.'" At the Queen's request
he sat for his photograph, and by her Majesty's special desire, "the
gallant and amiable old soldier was asked to have it taken in the
uniform he wore at the Alma and at Balaclava."

On his way back to the Crimea he visited Paris where he was presented
to the Emperor and Empress, and where to his great joy he found
his genial Crimean friend General Vinoy. When he returned to the
Crimea he found that the division of the army into two army corps,
the Government's intention to carry out which scheme Lord Panmure's
letter had intimated to him and to take the command of one of which
it was that he had returned to the East, had not been effected,
and that Sir William Codrington did not intend to carry out the
arrangement until immediately before the army should take the field.
The Highland Division was placed under him with the understanding
that it should contribute the nucleus of an army corps to be formed
later if hostilities were to be prosecuted. He quartered himself at
Kamara with his division, resolved, as he wrote--"to accommodate
himself to all that might happen, and that nothing should disturb the
cordiality which ought to exist between himself and the commander
under whose orders he was to serve." He had not long to practise
patience. By the end of February, 1856, an armistice was arranged
and in the beginning of April peace was proclaimed. Before finally
leaving the Crimea Sir Colin assembled the regiments of the original
Highland Brigade that he might take farewell of the soldiers who had
served under him since the beginning of the war. He was not much of
an orator, but when he was moved he could be eloquent in language
which went right to the hearts of soldiers. His farewell was uttered
in the following words worthy alike of him and of them.

"Soldiers of the Forty-Second, Seventy-Ninth, and Ninety-Third!--old
Highland Brigade with whom I passed the early and perilous part of
this war, I have now to take leave of you. In a few hours I shall be
on board ship, never to see you again as a body. A long farewell!
I am now old and shall not be called to serve any more; and nothing
will remain to me but the memory of my campaigns, and the memory
too, of the enduring, hardy, generous soldiers with whom I have been
associated, and whose name and glory will long be kept alive in the
hearts of our countrymen. When you go home, as you gradually fulfil
your term of service, each to his family and his cottage, you will
tell the story of your immortal advance in that victorious _échelon_
up the heights of Alma, and may speak of the old brigadier who led
you, and who loved you so well. Your children and your children's
children will repeat the tale to other generations, when only a
few lines of history will remain to record all the enthusiasm and
discipline which have borne you so stoutly to the end of this war.
Our native land will never forget the name of the Highland Brigade,
and in some future war the nation will call for another one to equal
this, which it never can surpass. Though I shall be gone, the thought
of you will go with me wherever I may be, and cheer my old age with
a glorious recollection of dangers confronted and hardships endured.
The bagpipes will never sound near me without carrying me back to
those bright days when I was at your head and wore the bonnet which
you gained for me, and the honourable decorations on my breast,
many of which I owe to your conduct. Brave soldiers, kind comrades,
farewell!"

This address, delivered with much feeling, was received with manifest
emotion by the troops, who regarded as final the separation from
the chief they had learned to regard with affection. They did not
know that the farewell was to be but temporary, and that ere long
the three regiments would be under his command in another continent,
ready there to display the same soldierly virtues which had already
earned them the gratitude of their chief and countrymen.

In the summer of 1856 Sir Colin was appointed to the post of
Inspector-General of Infantry in succession to the Duke of Cambridge,
who became Commander-in-Chief of the army on the resignation of Lord
Hardinge. In December of that year he was sent to Berlin as the
representative of her Majesty, on the errand of presenting to his
Royal Highness the Prince of Prussia (afterwards the Emperor William
the First) the insignia of the military Grand Cross of the Order
of the Bath. During the first half of 1857 he was actively engaged
in the official duties of his important position. Beginning with
the depôts in the south of England, he then spent some time in his
inspections in Ireland, whence he visited Scotland and returned to
London in the beginning of June. How retentive was his memory for
faces, names, and events, is illustrated by the following incident
told on the authority of the gentleman to whom Sir Colin related it.
"While," said Campbell, "I was inspecting the depôt at Chichester,
I noticed that an old man, evidently an old soldier though in plain
clothes, was constantly on the ground and apparently watching my
movements. As I was leaving the barrack-yard at the end of the
inspection, he came towards me, drew himself up, made the military
salute, and with much respect said, 'Sir Colin, may I speak to you?
Look at me, sir! do you recollect me?' I looked at him and replied,
'Yes, I do.' 'What is my name?' he asked. I told him. 'Yes, sir;
and where did you last see me?' 'In the breach of San Sebastian,' I
replied, 'badly wounded by my side.' 'Right, sir!' answered the old
soldier. 'I can tell you something more,' I added--'you were No. --
in the front rank of my company.' 'Right, sir!' said the veteran. I
was putting my hand into my pocket to make the old man a present,
when he stepped forward, laid his hand on my wrist, and said:--'No,
sir; that is not what I want; but you will be going to Shorncliffe to
inspect the depôt there. I have a son in the Inniskillings quartered
at that station, and if you will call him out and tell him that you
knew his father, that is what I should wish.'"

The anecdote is a typical sample of the kindly and self-respecting
relations of the men of the old army with their officers, before
the era of short service set in. When Colin Campbell commanded the
Ninety-Eighth he knew the face, name, and character of every man in
the regiment. When he was Commander-in-Chief in India, which position
he was now immediately to attain, he could recognise by name all the
Crimean men of his favourite regiment the Ninety-Third Highlanders.




CHAPTER V

THE INDIAN MUTINY--ORGANISATION--RELIEF OF LUCKNOW--DEFEAT OF GWALIOR
CONTINGENT


In the beginning of 1857 the clouds that presaged the awful storm
of mutiny which Sir Charles Napier had foretold and temporarily
averted seven years earlier, were ominously gathering over the
Bengal Presidency. On the 19th of February the first flash of
actual outbreak burst forth at Berhampore. The revolt spread to
Barrackpore, and in the course of a few weeks it became apparent
that the spirit of insubordination was gradually but surely ripening
throughout the Bengal army. In the middle of May the crisis which
had been threatening for three months came to a head at Meerut. The
revolt of the native troops at that great station was consummated
in rapine and slaughter. Delhi, with its vast munitions of war
unprotected save by a handful of devoted European soldiers, fell
into the hands of the insurgents. The pensioned King of Delhi was
drawn from his senile obscurity and proclaimed Emperor of India, and
the great city became the capital of a rival power and the centre
of attraction to the revolted army. The native regiments in the
stations of the North-West Provinces broke out successively into
revolt and hastened tumultuously to Delhi, which soon contained
within its walls a turbulent mass of many thousand mutinous soldiers.
Within a month after the outbreak at Meerut British authority had
become almost extinct throughout the North-West Provinces. From
Meerut to Allahabad, among a population of some thirty millions and
throughout an area of many hundred miles, there remained no vestige
of British occupation, save where at Agra the British residents were
waiting anxiously for the signal to withdraw from their bungalows
into the shelter of Akbar's fort, and the hapless people closely
beleaguered in Wheeler's miserable entrenchment at Cawnpore. Across
the Ganges throughout Oude, British men, women, and children were
being mercilessly slaughtered by revolted sepoys; and Henry Lawrence,
himself in the midst of troops scarcely caring to cloak their
mutinous intentions, had soon sadly to realise that all Oude was
gone except the Lucknow Residency, where he was to die after having
exhausted himself in successful exertions to make that position
defensible by the brave and steadfast men who survived him.

While on the march from Umballa towards Delhi the Commander-in-Chief
in India, General the Hon. George Anson, died of cholera at Kurnal
on May 27th. Tidings of this misfortune did not reach the War
Office until July 11th. On that same afternoon Sir Colin Campbell
was sent for by Lord Panmure, who made him the offer of the high
command rendered vacant by Anson's decease. Campbell promptly
accepted the offer and expressed his readiness to start that same
evening if necessary. He stipulated successfully that his friend
Colonel Mansfield, then Consul-General at Warsaw (afterwards Lord
Sandhurst), should be offered the appointment of chief of staff with
the rank of major-general. This settled, Campbell had an interview
with the Duke of Cambridge, then as now Commander-in-Chief, who
approved of the selection of Major Alison[3] as military secretary,
and of Sir David Baird and Lieutenant Alison as aides-de-camp.

It had been arranged at Sir Colin's interview with Lord Panmure
that he should start next morning. He was ready and his modest kit
complete; but sundry matters intervened delaying his departure for
a few hours. The Queen, for one thing, had desired that he should
wait on her. The Duke of Cambridge brought him to Buckingham Palace;
and, so Sir Colin wrote in his journal, "Her Majesty's expressions of
approval of my readiness to proceed at once were pleasant to receive
from a Sovereign so good and so justly loved." He left London by the
continental night train, full of a justifiable elation. "Never,"
he wrote, "did a man proceed on a mission of duty with a lighter
heart and a feeling of greater humility, yet with a juster sense
of the compliment that had been paid to a mere soldier of fortune
like myself in being named to the highest command in the gift of
the Crown." Hurrying through Paris he found time to breakfast with
General Vinoy his old Crimean friend, and reaching Marseilles on
the morning of the 14th he immediately embarked for India on a
vessel which was in readiness with its steam up. During the voyage
he prepared a strategic scheme, the essence of which was a great
concentric advance upon the Central Indian States, to be undertaken
by the whole disposable military forces of the Madras and Bombay
Presidencies, that would effectually engage the whole rebel strength
of those turbulent territories, and so in some degree divert the
severe pressure of the Gwalior Contingent on the left flank of the
long and precarious main line of communication. This object obtained,
Bengal and the Punjaub once more united by the reconquest of the
intervening territory, and the left flank and rear of the reconquered
base secured by the reduction of Central India, the most arduous
work of the war could be safely undertaken; the vast, populous, and
bitterly hostile province of Oude might then be subdued, with the
result of securing non-molestation on the right flank of the region
through which the principal line of communication must pass. The
operation of this grand strategic scheme was weakened and retarded
by various causes; but the sound wisdom of Campbell's prescient
conception was ultimately in great measure vindicated.

The new Commander-in-Chief landed at Calcutta on the 13th of August
and became Lord Canning's guest at Government House. The situation
which confronted him was gloomy almost to utter hopelessness.
It was true, indeed, that John Lawrence was holding the Punjaub
in his strong hand, and was pressing forward all his available
reinforcements to strengthen the British force contending against
overwhelming odds before the walls of Delhi. But meanwhile that
force was little over four thousand strong, and it seemed more than
doubtful whether it could hold its ground until reinforcements should
reach it. The garrison at Agra was isolated and cut off from all
communication. That of Lucknow, hemmed within the feebly-defensive
position of the Residency and its environs by many thousands of
fierce and relentless enemies, encumbered also with a great company
of helpless women and children, had numbers wholly inadequate to
man the defences and was maintaining an almost hopeless resistance
against overwhelming odds. Havelock, at the head of less than two
thousand brave men, had fought his way from Allahabad to Cawnpore,
too late to save the lives of the hapless women and children who had
been reserved from the massacre of the men of Wheeler's command only
to endure a crueller fate. His gallant and persistent efforts to
relieve Lucknow had failed and he had been obliged to fall back to
Cawnpore, where with an attenuated force he was maintaining himself
precariously in the face of the threatening attitude of the revolted
Gwalior Contingent on the further bank of the Jumna.

Through the gloom there was one gleam of sunshine. The fortress of
Allahabad, with its magazines of military stores, remained in British
possession. At the point where the Ganges and the Jumna blend their
waters, distant by land five hundred miles from Calcutta, it was a
position of the highest strategical importance, forming as it did
an advanced base for operations in the regions beyond having for
their object the relief of beleaguered places and the restoration of
communications with Delhi and the Punjaub. From Calcutta to Allahabad
there were two available routes; by the Ganges a distance of eight
hundred miles, to accomplish which by steamer required from twenty
to thirty days; by the land route of five hundred miles, one hundred
and twenty of which was by railway and three hundred and eighty by
the Grand Trunk Road. The troops as they landed were despatched up
country in detachments by one or other of those routes. The common
objective for the time was Allahabad, where Sir James Outram, who
had returned from the command of the Persian expedition and had left
Calcutta on the 6th of August to assume the command of the combined
Cawnpore and Dinapore divisions along with the civil appointment
of Chief Commissioner in Oude, was to collect the detachments of
reinforcements as they arrived, preparatory to moving upward to
Cawnpore there to join Havelock and advance with him to attempt the
relief of the beleaguered garrison in the Residency of Lucknow.

But the troops, which as soon as possible after landing at Calcutta
should have been pushing straight up country to Allahabad either by
land or by water, suffered unavoidable detentions by the way. So
disturbed was the country that posts had to be maintained to keep
the routes open, and their occupation absorbed a certain proportion
of the scanty European force. The mutinies of native troops at
Dinapore and Bhagulpore caused the temporary detention by the local
authorities of important reinforcements; and it was not until the
first week of September that Outram was able to collect his scattered
detachments at Allahabad. After a sharp and successful fight on the
way he reached Cawnpore on September 15th; bringing reinforcements
which raised to a strength of about three thousand men the force
of which he chivalrously waived the command in favour of Havelock.
Ten days later was accomplished what is commonly though erroneously
styled the First Relief of Lucknow,--not a "relief" in any sense of
the term, but simply a great augmentation to the defensive strength
of the garrison which had been holding the weak position of the
Residency with a heroism so staunch.

Sir Colin found Calcutta all but entirely bare of material for a
campaign; nothing was in readiness for the equipment of the troops
fast converging on his base on the Hooghly. Means of transport there
were scarcely any; horses for cavalry or artillery there were none;
ammunition for the Enfield rifles was deficient; flour even was
running out; guns, gun-carriages, and harness for the field-batteries
were either unfit for active service or did not exist. Prompt and
active were the exertions made by the energetic Chief and his
subordinates to cope with needs so pressing. Horses were purchased
no matter at what cost; ammunition was gathered in far and wide;
flour was commissioned from the Cape; field-guns were cast at the
Cossipore foundry; gun-carriages and harness were made up with all
possible haste. The Commissariat and Ordnance departments were
stirred from their lethargy and stimulated to an activity previously
undreamed of; and the whole military machine was set throbbing at
high pressure. As the falling of the Ganges gradually made the river
route precarious, great exertions were made to quicken and extend the
means of transport by the Grand Trunk Road, for which purpose the
Bullock Train, as it was called, was established. Relays of soldiers
travelled up night after night in bullock-waggons, halting during the
heat of the day at prepared resting-places. Ultimately this system
was so perfected that two hundred men were daily forwarded from the
end of the railway at Raneegunge; and they reached Allahabad after
about a fortnight's travel, perfectly fresh and fit for immediate
service.

In the midst of the pressure of his preparations Sir Colin found time
to write with soldierly appreciation and cordiality to the principal
officers now under his command. His first message to Outram concluded
with the words, "It is an exceeding satisfaction to me to have your
assistance, and to find you in your present position." To Havelock
he wrote: "The sustained energy, promptitude, and vigorous action
by which your whole proceedings have been marked during the late
difficult operations deserve the highest praise. I beg you to express
to the officers and men under your command the pride and satisfaction
I have experienced in reading your reports of the intrepid valour
they have displayed upon every occasion they have encountered the
vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and how nobly they have
maintained the qualities for which British soldiers have ever been
distinguished--high courage and endurance." To Archdale Wilson,
commanding the force before Delhi, he sent on August 23rd some words
of generous encouragement, the first communication which had reached
that officer from any military authority for many weeks: "I must
delay no longer to congratulate you on the manner in which the force
under your command has conducted itself and upheld the honour of our
arms. You may count on my support and help in every mode in which it
may be possible for me to afford them." And when on September 26th
the happy news reached him that Delhi, the head and heart of the
rebellion as it was then considered to have been, was once more in
the occupation of a British garrison, the Chief promptly telegraphed
to Wilson, "Accept my hearty congratulations on your brilliant
success."

It seems quite clear that Sir Colin regarded it as virtually certain
that Outram, who assumed command when Havelock and he had fought
their way into the Lucknow Residency, would succeed in speedily
effecting the relief and withdrawal of the garrison which was
still holding that precarious position. But his confident hope
for the prompt relief of Lucknow was doomed to early and utter
disappointment. Outram's column had proved to be simply in the nature
of a reinforcement, and that, too, with no corresponding addition to
the supplies of the original garrison. The beleaguerment was close;
the position environed by some sixty thousand armed and rancorous
enemies. Outram sent word on October 7th, just a fortnight after
his entry, to the effect that by eating his horses and gun-draught
bullocks he would be able to subsist for a month; and he added that a
force equal at least to two strong brigades would be required for the
extrication of the garrison.

The sudden and pressing danger threatening Outram's isolated and
beleaguered force in Lucknow imposed on the Commander-in-Chief the
most urgent exertions. Every military department was stimulated to
the utmost; the whole resources of the Government were thrown into
violent action. Stores, provisions, carriages, ammunition, guns, all
were hurried forward upon Allahabad. But the available resources
were sadly limited. The infantry were straggled in small detachments
all along the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Cawnpore. No cavalry
existed except some two hundred men of the military train, and there
were scarcely any horses for the field-batteries which were being
organised at Allahabad. All told, the troops on the up-country march
constituted a force hardly equivalent to a single weak brigade,
less than half the strength which Outram had specified as requisite
for his extrication. To relieve Lucknow in time seemed a sheer
impossibility and disaster to the garrison there inevitable.

Fortunately, while every nerve was being strained to succour Outram
from below, the welcome tidings were received that invaluable
co-operation was approaching from the opposite direction. As soon
as Delhi had fallen General Wilson had sent out in pursuit of the
fugitive rebels a mixed column under the command of Colonel Greathed.
The strength of this force amounted to two thousand eight hundred
men, of whom nine hundred and thirty were Europeans. It was made up
of two troops and one battery of artillery with sixteen guns, the
Ninth Lancers three hundred strong, the Eighth and Seventy-Fifth
Regiments four hundred and fifty strong, two hundred native sappers,
four hundred Punjaub cavalry, and two regiments of Punjaub infantry
twelve hundred strong. Marching down the Gangetic Doab, Greathed
defeated bodies of mutineers at Bolundshuhur, Malaghun, and Allyghur.
Failing to overtake the main body of fugitives which had crossed his
front towards Oude, he pushed on to Agra by forced marches, and had
barely pitched his camp there when he was suddenly attacked by the
Indore brigade. Recovering from their momentary surprise, the British
troops notwithstanding their exhaustion met the hostile onslaught
with vigour, and after a sharp engagement routed the enemy with heavy
slaughter and the capture of thirteen guns and a great quantity of
baggage and stores in the lengthened pursuit following on the combat.
During the march from Agra down the Doab Colonel Hope Grant overtook
the column, and having taken command of it in virtue of seniority
arrived at Cawnpore on October 26th. Four days later, at the head of
the Delhi column reinforced by several companies of the Ninety-Third
Highlanders and some infantry detachments, he crossed the Ganges into
Oude. Strictly enjoined to refrain from any serious operation pending
the arrival of the Commander-in-Chief, Grant halted at Buntera, six
miles short of the Alum Bagh, with the garrison of which position
he established communications. As the reinforcements and supplies
reached Cawnpore they were sent forward to the depôt-camp at Buntera.
The arrival of this Delhi column was of priceless value to Sir Colin,
on whom his all but utter want of cavalry and his deficiency in
field-artillery had hitherto weighed sorely. The column had come well
provided with carriage, a hardly less valuable acquisition than the
cavalry and artillery it brought. Now the Chief had to his hand the
elements wherewith to organise a field-force strong enough to justify
the opening of active operations at an early date.

Sir Colin left Calcutta on the 27th of October, and hurried with all
speed to the seat of war. On the way he narrowly escaped falling
into the hands of a body of mutineers who were crossing the road
just as he came up. At Allahabad on November 1st intelligence
reached him that Outram considered himself able to hold out on
further reduced rations until beyond the middle of the month,--a
welcome announcement, since it afforded Sir Colin more time to
complete his arrangements and gave opportunity for the arrival of
reinforcements still on the way. On the morning of the 3rd he reached
Cawnpore, where he remained a few days to get the engineer train and
commissariat in trim for the projected operation.

That operation was of the most difficult and embarrassing character.
Its urgent objective was the relief of Lucknow, whence came an
importunate cry for succour. Yet to attempt the immediate relief
of Lucknow was at the imminent risk of the sacrifice of his
communications; and the result of relieving the city at the cost of
the forfeiture of his communications, would be simply

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