Part 9
The map of India then was very different to what it is now. There was no red about it at all. In the East, France was practically mistress of the seas, whatever she might be elsewhere. The British flag only flew over one spot, and that only by sufferance. This was the little trading settlement of Madras, which was rented from the Nabob of the Carnatic, who was only the deputy of the deputy of the once mighty prince whom Europe knew vaguely as the Great Mogul.
Fort St. George and Fort St. David were mere parodies of military stations, and the nucleus of the army which was to conquer the whole Peninsula consisted chiefly of half-trained natives, miscellaneously armed with bows and arrows, swords and bucklers, and here and there a firelock. On the other hand, France possessed the Island of Mauritius and the town and district of Pondicherry, the former governed by Labourdonnais and the latter by Dupleix, both men of great capacity and still greater ambition.
France and England were just then at war in Europe, and Labourdonnais thought it a good time to crush English trade in India while it was yet in its infancy, so, in spite of all the British East Indian fleet could do to stop him, he appeared with his ships off Madras, landed a large body of troops, forced Fort St. George to surrender, and hoisted the French flag on its battlements.
Happily, this roused the jealousy of Dupleix. Labourdonnais had pledged his honour that Madras should be restored on the payment of a moderate ransom. Dupleix, who had already dreamt of being sole master of India, was determined that it should be wiped off the map altogether, so he accused his fellow Governor of trespassing on his preserves, and in the end succeeded in annulling his conditions and marching the Governor of Fort St. George, with the principal servants of the Company, in triumph off to Pondicherry.
Unfortunately for him, there was one whom he did not take, not a principal servant by any means, only an insignificant, underpaid quill-driver, who had slipped out of the town disguised as a Mussulman, and yet Dupleix would have made a very good bargain if he could have exchanged all his other prisoners of war for him.
Clive reached Fort St. David, a dependency of Fort St. George, in safety, and there, taking advantage of the anger roused by this gross breach of faith, he exchanged the pen for the sword, and the writer became an ensign in the East India Company’s army, such as it was.
Scarcely, however, had he done so than peace was made in Europe, and therefore in India. Clive, no doubt in great disgust, was sent back to his desk, but, happily for him and the British Empire, not for long. Fortunately, too, submarine telegraphs had not been invented then, and India was almost always a year behind Europe, so Governor Dupleix made up his mind to have a war on his own account, and the prize of this war was to be, as Macaulay puts it, “nothing less than the magnificent inheritance of the House of Tamerlane.”
To this end he took such skilful advantage of the disputes of the pretenders to the throne of Nizam al Mulk, the last of the great Viceroys of the Deccan, that within a very short time he secured the triumph of Mirzapha Jung, his _protégé_, and rose himself to such a position that, in the name of this puppet, he was the virtual ruler of thirty millions of people, and master of the whole Carnatic, saving only the city of Trichinopoly, which was all that was left to Mohammed Ali, the candidate with whom the English Company had sided in a half-hearted and wholly futile fashion.
At this juncture, Clive, who was now twenty-five years old, and who occupied a sort of hybrid post with the title of Commissary of the forces, took upon himself to represent to his superiors that unless something very decided was done, the French must invariably become Lords Paramount of the whole Peninsula. They hadn’t a notion what was to be done, but Clive had, and the brazen effrontery of his plan seems to have paralysed the authorities into giving him a free hand.
The situation was this: The triumphant Frenchman, believing his quickly-acquired dominion a permanent one, had raised a tall pillar to his own glory on the site of his greatest victory, and round this was growing up a city, the name of which in English meant the City of the Victory of Dupleix. Chunda Sahib, successor of Mirzapha, was besieging Trichinopoly, supported by several hundred trained French soldiers. Major Lawrence, commander of the English garrison at Madras, had gone to England, and the English Company possessed no officer of proved ability. The natives, dazzled by the rapid and brilliant triumphs of Dupleix, and remembering the times when they had seen his colours flying over Fort St. George, looked with contemptuous pity on the English as a remnant of feeble shopkeepers who were soon to be cast into the sea. And so, in all probability, they would have been if that historic pistol had gone off a few years before.
Clive, viewing the situation with true military genius, saw two facts: first, that it would be ridiculous with the force at his disposal to attack the besiegers of Trichinopoly; and second, that, if a dash were made at Arcot, the capital and favourite residence of the Nabobs of the Carnatic, which is rather less than a hundred miles inland from Madras, the siege of Trichinopoly would probably be raised, and so this he determined to do.
His army consisted of two hundred English soldiers and three hundred Sepoys, with eight English officers, of whom only two had ever seen an action. He made the journey by forced marches through the thunder and lightning and rain of the wet season, and so astounded the garrison of Arcot by his utterly unexpected appearance before the gates that they ran without striking a blow.
Clive now found himself master of a half-ruined fort, which he at once proceeded to strengthen and victual as best he might, well knowing that he would have to fight for what he had got. Presently the panic-stricken garrison came back, and brought with it reinforcements which gave it the respectable strength of three thousand men. In the middle of the night on which they arrived and sat down before the town to think matters over, Clive, without waiting to be besieged as he should have done by all the rules of Eastern warfare, marched out, caught them napping, cut them to pieces, and marched back again without losing a man.
Naturally the news of such doings as this flew fast to Trichinopoly and Pondicherry, and clearly something had to be done to crush this insolent upstart before he gave any further trouble. To this end four thousand men were sent by Chunda Sahib, under his son Rajah, and by the time these reached the walls of the old fort they had been increased by reinforcements to ten thousand, and had, moreover, been joined by a detachment of a hundred and fifty French soldiers whom Dupleix had dispatched in hot haste from Pondicherry.
As has been said, the place they had come to attack was a half-ruined old fort, with dry ditches and hardly any defences worth serious mention, and its garrison by this time consisted only of a hundred and twenty Englishmen and two hundred Sepoys. Four of the eight officers were dead, and the commander of what looked very like a forlorn hope was an ex-quill-driver twenty-five years old.
And yet for fifty days and nights the besiegers hurled themselves in vain against the rotten and crumbling battlements behind which that dauntless handful of half-starved men had made up their minds either to stand till help came, or to fall like the heroes that they were.
The confidence and affection which the gallant young commander inspired in his men--European and native alike--during this terrible time is one of the most splendid tributes to his fame. When there was nothing left but rice to live and fight on, the very Sepoys came to him of their own will to ask that all the grain should be given to the Europeans, who wanted more nourishment than they did. As for them, they would gladly be content with the water that it was boiled in! Men like this are bad to beat, and so Rajah Sahib found in spite of all his enormous advantages.
But the splendid defence of Arcot had by this time done something more than hold the French and their allies in check. One Morari Row, the chief of a body of six thousand Mahrattas--the bandit ancestors of some of the finest soldiery that now fights under the flag of Britain--had been hired to defend Mohammed Ali against his enemies, but so far, instead of helping, he had been waiting to see which way the cat would jump. His personal experience of the British had taught him that, if they were not dogs or old women, they were seemingly only fit for the bazaar and the counting-house, and certainly no worthy allies for a race of warriors. But now the gallantry of Clive and his men was ringing all through the Carnatic, and Morari swore by all his gods that, since the English really could fight after all, and were able to help themselves to such purpose, he hadn’t the slightest objection to helping them.
Having decided this in his own prudent mind, he gave his warriors orders to march, and no sooner did it transpire that their objective was the sorely beleaguered fortress of Arcot than Rajah Sahib came to the conclusion that he had got a harder nut between his teeth than his jaws could crack, and so he made overtures of peace in the true Oriental style--that is to say, he offered a huge bribe for an unconditional surrender, and accompanied the offer with a threat of general assault and subsequent extermination if the offer were refused. The young quill-driver’s reply was characteristic.
“Tell Rajah Sahib,” he said to the envoy, “that I refuse his bribe with as much scorn as I receive his threat. Tell him also that his master and father is a usurper and his army a rabble, and bid him beware how he brings them into a breach defended by English soldiers.”
Rajah Sahib declined the warning, and prepared for attack by making his fanatic followers gloriously drunk with bhang and ether assorted drugs. He also selected the day of a great Moslem festival for the assault, and enlisted the services of some elephants, whose heads he covered with spiked plates of iron, and these, when the attack was delivered, were driven against the gates to act as living battering-rams.
But Clive had already foreseen that living battering-rams had the disadvantage of working both ways, and so the elephants were received with such a galling fire that, instead of charging the gates, they turned round and made lanes through the army behind them with distinctly demoralising effect.
This was a bad beginning, but the end was worse. Clive acted not only as general-in-command, but also as an ordinary gunner, and he seems, moreover, to have pretty well filled all the posts between. He worked as hard as any soldier or Sepoy of them all. There were more weapons than men to use them, so the rear ranks loaded and primed the muskets, and passed them up to the front as fast as they could be fired, and Rajah Sahib speedily learnt what Clive had meant by a breach defended by English soldiers, for the fire was so fast and fierce that the more men that he sent into the breach the more stopped there--and that was about all there was in it from his point of view.
Three times the onset was repeated, and three times the attacking swarms were mown down by the leaden hail-storm that swept the breach, and after the third time the Rajah and his merry men had had enough of it and retreated to their lines.
The night passed in anxious watching, every man in his place and every gun loaded, but their last shot had been fired and the morning light showed that Rajah Sahib and what was left of his army had found the work too much highly seasoned for their taste; that they had just run away, leaving all their guns, ammunition, and stores to be picked up by the victors at their leisure.
Such was the forever memorable defence of Arcot, and such too was the practical foundation of the British Empire in India. It was the work of a hundred and twenty-five English soldiers and two hundred Sepoys, inspired to heroism by a young man whom Fortune had suddenly plucked out of the wrong place and set down in the right one.
Clive was by no means the man to look upon work as done because it was well begun. The authorities at Fort St. George promptly sent him two hundred more English soldiers and seven hundred Sepoys, and with this force--which was quite a large army for him--he marched out to join hands with Morari Row, attacked Rajah Sahib at the head of five thousand men with a stiffening of three hundred French regulars, hit him very hard, and generally convinced people that an Englishman worthy of his name and race had at length taken matters in hand.
Unhappily, however, the English were not as strong in the council-chamber as they were in the field, and while the authorities were hesitating, Rajah Sahib and Dupleix retrieved their loss to such purpose that a native army supported by four hundred French troops marched almost up to the walls of Fort St. George and proceeded to amuse themselves by laying the settlement waste, with the result that Captain Clive had to come to the rescue, and the end was another overwhelming defeat, during which about half of the French regulars were either killed or taken prisoners.
This physical victory was followed by a moral one no less effective. The vaingloriously-named City of the Victory of Dupleix, surmounted by its magniloquently inscribed pillar, lay at Clive’s mercy and directly in his path, and he promptly pulled the pillar down and wiped the city off the face of the earth. He didn’t do this because he personally disliked either Dupleix or his nation, but in doing it he showed that he was statesman as well as soldier, for, as he well knew, the destruction of the City of Victory was to the waiting and watching millions of India the symbol of the destruction and discredit of the French power, and the establishment and vindication of the British. From that day to this Britain’s star in the East has been in the ascendant and that of France on the decline.
How completely all this and what followed was the work of one man, and one only is eloquently shown by the pronouncement of old Morari Row to the effect that the English who followed Clive must be of quite a different tribe or breed to those who followed anybody else, and further by the fact that he inflicted two decisive defeats upon the French at Covelong and Chingleput, with a force consisting of five hundred raw Sepoy levies, and two hundred newly-imported scourings of the London slums, who had so little of the soldier in them that when a shot killed one in the first skirmish all the rest turned round and ran away; while on another occasion the report of a cannon so frightened the sentries that they all left their posts, and one of them was discovered occupying a strategic position at the bottom of a well!
And yet Clive, somehow, made steady, disciplined soldiers out of this miserable rabble, and, though at last he was so ill that he could hardly stand, led them to victory and turned the French out of their forts--which was perhaps a miracle even greater than the making of Cromwell’s Ironsides.
After this the young man, having well earned a holiday, got married and came home for his honeymoon. He was at once hailed as the saviour of India--or at any rate of the East India Company, the directors of which drained many a good bottle of port to the toast of “General” Clive; and even his father half incredulously admitted that “after all it seemed that the booby had something in him.”
But “the booby,” who had come back moderately rich, bore no malice, and at once began to repair the evil of his youth by paying off all the debts of his family. He then proceeded to waste his substance and his time by getting into Parliament and getting turned out again on petition, after which he very properly went back to India to do work that parliamentary orators couldn’t do.
His first exploit was the reduction of the pirate stronghold of Gheriah, which had long dominated the whole Arabian Gulf, the next was the Avenging of one of the blackest crimes in history. There is no need to tell of it here, for is not the story of the Black Hole of Calcutta deep-graven in the memory of every man and woman, boy and girl, of Anglo-Saxon blood? Forty-eight hours after the news reached Madras Clive was given the command of nine hundred British infantry and fifteen hundred Sepoys, and with this army, supported by a fleet under Admiral Watson, he marched to the conquest of an empire half as large as Europe.
Curiously enough, however, he began by treating with Surajah Dowlah--the arch-criminal of the Black Hole--instead of crushing him, and, more amazing still, during the course of the negotiations, he deliberately forged Admiral Watson’s name to a treaty intended to deceive an adherent whom he knew to have made terms with the other side. It is the most inexplicable act in his career, and, being so, it is only a waste of words to try and explain it away. He did it, and there’s an end of it.
The next act in the now swiftly passing drama was the first and only council of war that Clive ever held. It was the eve of Plassey, an occasion ever memorable in the annals, not only of Britain but of the whole Orient. He was on one bank of the river, Surajah Dowlah was on the other with an army outnumbering his by twenty to one, splendidly equipped, very strong in artillery, and, as usual, supported and officered by the inevitable Frenchmen. The river was the Rubicon which lay between Clive and the Empire of India--and for once in his life he hesitated.
He called a council of war. It decided against crossing the river with three thousand men in face of sixty thousand, and Clive endorsed the verdict. Then he went apart under some palm trees and held another and a wiser council with himself, and this council promptly and utterly revoked the decision of the other.
The next morning the river was crossed and the next night the little army encamped within a mile of the Nabob’s host. At sunrise the next day Surajah Dowlah, who in the midst of his myriads had passed a night haunted, as has been suggested, by the ghosts of the men and women who perished in the Black Hole, sent forth his forty thousand infantry, his fifteen thousand cavalry, his batteries of fifty guns, and his iron-plated war-elephants to crush the invader once and for all, and on they went like some huge tidal wave, roaring and rushing, to overwhelm some little tree-clad island--and then, just as the human avalanche was in mid-career, the despot weakling’s will wavered, or, more probably, his mind broke down, and he gave the order to halt and retreat, almost before a blow was struck.
It was the moment of grace for Clive and he seized it. The three thousand charged the sixty thousand, and all of a sudden the impending tragedy on which the fate of all India from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin depended, was turned into a farce. Of the sixty thousand only five hundred were slain; of the three thousand twenty-two were killed and fifty wounded. The whole thing was over in an hour, and India was won.
To Clive himself the result was an appointment as Governor-General over the whole of the Company’s territory in Bengal, and this virtually raised him to an authority higher than that of a throne, and, to his everlasting honour be it said, that in an age and country of almost universal corruption, he never abused it. Victory after victory in the field, and triumph after triumph in policy now followed fast upon each other, till French, Dutch, and native princes alike were crushed to impotence or reduced to grovelling submission, and the crowning victory of Chinsurah set the seal of absolute supremacy upon British rule in India.
Three months after this Clive again came home, the possessor of fairly won wealth which was only exceeded by the magnitude of his fame, to be hailed as the greatest of British living Commanders, and to be rewarded, first with a place in the Irish, and then with one in the British Peerage.
The story of his five years’ stay in England is not an edifying one. It is a story of wild extravagance, fierce and unworthy jealousies in the very councils of that Company to which he had given more lands and subjects than any European monarch possessed, and of general dissatisfaction and disillusion.
But meanwhile the way to his last and perhaps his greatest triumph was being prepared for him. As year after year passed it became more and more plain that the empire he had created could not get on without him. The men put in authority after him by the Company had but one object in life and that was to “shake the Pagoda Tree.” In other words, to set prince against prince and state against state for the sole purpose of making money out of their differences, and generally to squeeze the utmost amount of gold out of the country in the shortest possible time.
Corruption which scandalised even that corrupt age revelled in hitherto unheard-of excesses. Everything was neglected but money-making, and the lately-terrible English name was fast becoming a scoff and a by-word even to the plundered and the oppressed. So in the end Clive went out again, it being seen that he only could end a situation fast becoming impossible.
But this time it was not to fight French, or Indian, or Dutchman, but his own countrymen, and to win in the Council Chamber a victory that was perhaps greater than any he had won on the battlefield. In eighteen months he did what he had said he would do, and replaced chaos with cosmos. It was a fitting climax to his life’s work, and yet such is the irony of Fate and the baseness of human nature that it also came near to proving his personal ruin.
He had fought and conquered the evil spirits of greed, corruption, and private extortion, but he had not killed them. The hatred of the evil-doer pursued him across the seas and roused up all the old jealousies at home. On his first and second returns he had been hailed, first as a man of the most brilliant promise and then as a man who had splendidly fulfilled that promise. But now, in the country which he had enriched by the addition of a whole empire no charge was so base that it was not believed against him. He had put down the oppressor, the extortioner, and the money-grubber, and he came back to his native land to be arraigned before a committee of the House of Commons as all these and something of a criminal to boot!
But with this third home-coming of his, his story as an Empire-Maker ends. It is well to know that he came triumphantly out of all the toils that his jealous and unworthy enemies had laid for him, and in this he was happier than his great rival Dupleix, who sank through all the gradations of poverty and misery into a nameless grave. But still the work of his foes and that of the terrible Indian climate had not been without effect. Crippled both in mind and body, he at last sought refuge in opium from the tortures of the diseases which he had contracted in the service of his country.
Time after time his genius blazed out again through the glooms that were settling over his later days, and so great was the faith of the Government in him that he was actually asked to go and do for North America what he had done for India.