uld have gladdened those dear to me, came to me when

all who loved me in my youth are gone.’190

EPILOGUE
The Ploughman settled the share More deep in the sun-
dried clod:-
‘Mogul, Mahratta, and Mlech from the North, And the
White Queen over the Seas –
God raises them up and driveth them forth
As the dust of the ploughshare flies in the breeze; But
the wheat and the cattle are all my care,
And the rest is the will of God.’
KIPLING, ‘What the People Said’

I F THE GREAT HEROES of Empire have their statues and

memorials, even if
their names are no longer familiar, the tens of thousands
of men, women and children who made the passage to
India and left their bones there have, for the most part,
gone as if they have never been. More than two million
of them were buried in the subcontinent, in churchyards
now imperilled or swamped by teeming cities, in
cantonment cemeteries, roadside burial grounds or the
great grave-pits on battlefields. Of the officers and men
who fell in the four great battles of the Sikh War of
1845–46, Mudki, Ferozeshah, Aliwal and Sobraon,
most ‘lie in nameless and ... in untraceable graves’.1
Colonel Patrick Maxwell, killed at Assaye in 1803
commanding the cavalry in the army commanded by
Major General Arthur Wellesley, lies beneath a peepul
tree on the battlefield. A stone still marks his resting-
place, but time and climate have effaced his name. And
of the men who died with him in what was,
proportionate to the numbers engaged, one of the Duke
of Wellington’s bloodiest battles, there is no trace
whatever.
Nor is there much enduring evidence of those killed by
disease and the climate. A brick obelisk near the village
of Jalozai, up on the North-West Frontier, once
commemorated:

Major W. G. A. Middleton, Ensign J. St. G. Drysdale,

Asst Surgeon S. Hope, 61 rank and file 13 Women, 15
children all of the 93rd Argyll and Sutherland
Highlanders Who died of cholera at or near This spot
during the month of October 1862,2
but it has long disappeared. The process of obliteration
started long before the British left. Walter Lawrence
remembered how:
sometimes one would come across waste and distant
places, the solitary tomb of some gallant officer who
had fallen fighting, but I never felt that this forlorn spot
was British soil for ever; indeed, I always wished that
the pyre rather than the grave had been our portion
when the end came. The hot winds, the deluge of the
rain and the relentless fig trees soon deal with these vain
sepulchres. But even sadder was the sight of a moated
and castellated hall, where once a soldier diplomat held
high state, now desolate and ‘full of doleful creatures’.
One night, driven by a pitiless rain and cold, I set my
bed in such a hall, but the great bats and the black
swarms of muskrats prevented sleep.3
A few of the great and the good who died in India had
their bodies preserved for reburial in their homeland.
Eyre Coote lies at Rockbourne on his West Park estate
in Hampshire, but has a splendid memorial in
Westminster Abbey, crowned by ‘a buxom young
Victory, somewhat under- winged for her admirable
plenitude’.4 Others returned home to find the long-
awaited moment a curious anticlimax. Colonel and Mrs
Muter sailed back after the Mutiny aboard the Eastern
Monarch, which was carrying a cargo of 200 tons of
saltpetre. The ship caught fire just off Portsmouth, and
although all but seven of the passengers and crew were
saved when she eventually blew up, the last Mrs Muter
saw ‘of the ship so long my home was in that tall,
sulphurous column which had risen from the mine over
which I had slept for many months’. The Muters headed
straight for London,
where we found difficulty in obtaining a bed. It was
Epsom Race week; the hotels were full, the metropolis
thronged. The waiters
looked suspiciously at our attire (though we had each
bought a ready- made suit at Portsmouth), and I fear
their suspicion was confirmed when they saw there was
not an article of baggage on the cab. There was
something dreary and disheartening beyond expression
in such a return to our country ... 5
Major Bayley was invited to a ball at Buckingham
Palace and was presented to the Queen, ‘as was the
case, I believe, with all field officers who had recently
returned from the seat of war in India’. He enjoyed a
long leave but then found himself posted to the depot at
Chatham, ‘a most unsatisfactory piece of service; after
two months of which, having received the offer of a
civil appointment in London, I sent in my papers, and
was gazetted out of the service on 18th April, 1859’6
Captain Griffiths discovered that the ‘Delhi heroes’ had
become damned nuisances:
There was no marching past before Her Majesty at
Windsor or elsewhere, no public distribution of medals
and rewards, no banquets given to the leading officers
of the force, and no record published of the arduous
duties in which they had been engaged. Those times are
changed, and the country has now rushed into the
opposite extremes of fulsome adulation, making a
laughing-stock of the army and covering with glory the
conquerors in a ten days’ war waged against the
wretched fellaheen soldiers of Egypt.7
The suave George Elers, who almost never put a foot
wrong, was led astray by his Indian habits. In 1805 he
was just back from India and visiting a family friend:
A bottle of Madeira was standing next to me at dinner,
and I mechanically seized and poured about half a
tumbler of it, according to custom, into water, as we do
in India. Oh the look of astonishment he gave! ‘Do you
know, young gentleman, what you are doing? Why you
might as well drink so much gold.’ 8
Elers never rose above the rank of captain, and in an
effort to secure the Duke of Wellington’s interest,
offered him a present, only to be curtly
informed that the duke ‘has no use for a Newfoundland
dog’.
For NCOs and men the joy of return all too often
chilled beneath
dockside drizzle. John Ryder returned home to
Leicester after the Sikh Wars, and was so changed that
his parents did not recognise him. He bought his father
a drink, and then another. But it was only when he said:
‘Well then, father, so you do not know me’ that his
father actually knew who he was. The same thing
happened with his mother, and it was not until Ryder
said ‘Mother, you ought to know me’ that: ‘The poor
old woman then knew me, and would have fallen to the
floor, had she not been caught.’9
John Pearman came home with his regiment in 1853,
and wrote how returning soldiers found themselves
something of a raree show:
It was a fine day, but it seemed very cold to us. I
thought I was never so cold with my cloak on. The
pleasure steam boats from London came down with the
roses of old England, dressed in white. They threw their
pocket handkerchiefs to us, and some flowers, as the
boats went round us, and kissed their hands, but they
were not allowed very close.
After being quartered in the casemates at Chatham they
were then
left to ourselves to be robbed, for on that night several
men lost their medals and money. There was a continual
scene of drinking, from seventy, eighty or ninety
prisoners to be taken before the Colonel every morning
for being absent and drunk.10
Frank Richards landed at Southampton, whence time-
expired men were sent to nearby Fort Brockhurst to be
issued with ‘a cheap ready-made suit ... ’. But before
setting off home to Wales:
we first said a lingering goodbye to one another over
our mugs of neck-oil in the Canteen, and it was a queer
experience being all in civilian clothes. When we first
gathered around the bar we had a job to recognise one
another: a man of my company remarked to me that it
was like a couple of caterpillars that have been bosom
pals all their life, nibbling away at the same cabbage-
leaf, day in, day out, and
suddenly they begin to meet as moths or butterflies and
begin to address each other as ‘Mr’ instead of Jack or
Dick.11
Richards was called up as a reservist in 1914 and served
with his regiment throughout the First World War,
winning the DCM and MM, but scorning promotion.
In ‘Shilling a Day’ Kipling described the plight of ex-
Troop Sergeant Major O’Kelly, waiting in the cold and
wet by the door of the Metropole Hotel in
Northumberland Avenue in London, in the hope that
somebody might give him a letter to deliver. The poem
concludes:
Think what ‘e’s been,
Think what ‘e’s seen.
Think of his pension an’ – GAWD SAVE THE
QUEEN.
Robert Waterfield, steadfast opponent of flogging, of
drunken officers and unfeeling discipline, ended his
own journal with just the same words, and Frank
Richards, the eternal private soldier, admitted that when
he heard of the death of King Edward VII he was as
shocked as if he had lost a close family member. Few
men who fought in India were sustained by any abstract
concept of Empire, but they liked to feel that they were
doing the monarch’s business. The men of the 93rd
Highlanders often reflected, during the Mutiny, on how
proud the Queen would be of their day’s work. They
were usually monarchist in the same way that they were
religious: by simple acceptance, without abstruse
notions of politics or theology to get in the way.
A fortunate handful found their lives governed by ‘God
above and duty below’. But for most men there was an
unshakable, often edgily jingoistic, belief in the
superiority of all things British laced into the conviction
that his own regiment (even if down on its luck at the
moment) was the best in the army (inter-regimental
rivalry always being an important factor in combat
motivation). In the claustrophobic world of the barrack
room, as Nathaniel Bancroft affirmed: ‘A soldier was
nobody unless he had a comrade.’ Mates were
comrades and brothers, accomplices and advocates,
and the infantry section or gun detachment often fought
as much for their comrades as against the enemy.
Many returning warriors – officers and men alike –
never forgot India. When Richard Purvis died in 1885,
doctor of divinity, justice of the peace for Hampshire
and for forty-four years ‘rector of this parish’, his
memorial plaque also remembered that he had once
been a captain in the 30th Bengal Native Infantry.
Major General Henry Daly received his knighthood in
1875 but told his old friend Sir George Lawrence that it
‘came with a deep shadow. The three to whom it would
have been pride and joy knew it not’: over a short
period he had lost his only brother, his mother-in-law
and his wife. ‘My life in India seems a thing of
yesterday,’ he told Lawrence, ‘and when I call up the
incidents and time, it is passing strange, for until this
dark blow came I felt no older or colder than when I
landed a boy of seventeen.’12
The dog Bobby, veteran of Maiwand, came home to the
66th’s depot at Brock Barracks on Reading’s Oxford
Road. Sadly, a cab wheel succeeded where jezails and
Khyber knives had failed, and the terrier was run over.
Harry Smith’s black Arab charger Aliwal (renamed
from Jim Crow after the battle) carried him stylishly
when he commanded the Northern and Midland
Districts in the 1850s: he enjoyed galloping up to lines
of infantry and stopping suddenly when he reached
them. Smith was briefly considered for the post of
commander in chief in the Crimea, but ‘impaired health
and liability to excitement’ ruled him out. Fred
Roberts’s little grey charger, Vonolel, died peacefully
in 1899 at the age of twenty-seven and is buried in the
grounds of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham in
Ireland. Roberts himself died of pneumonia in France in
1914 while visiting Indian troops. His father, Major
General Sir Abraham Roberts, of the Company’s
service, had been born in 1784. Their two long lives arc
out across most of the period described in this book.
Harry, the eldest son of Henry Havelock, would
eventually die on Indian soil, as his father and uncle
had. He received a VC for Lucknow on his father’s
recommendation. It was resented by some, not for this
fact in itself, but because, as a staff officer, he had
rallied troops and therefore cast an implied slur on their
regimental officers. His baronetcy and VC were both
gazetted in 1858, and he was also granted £1,000 a year
for life. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1873, and
then sat in Parliament as a
Liberal Unionist MP. In 1897 he was visiting the North-
West Frontier with a parliamentary commission, but
had never acquired the habits of caution: he was sniped
by an Afridi and bled to death.
For most officers and administrators coming home was
a case of readmission into the middle classes: ‘one of
ten millions plus a CSI [Companion of the Order of the
Star of India]’, as Kipling was to put it.13 Their houses
had Benares-ware brass trays and rugs made in Agra
jail: there were tulwars in the hall stand, prodigiously
tusked boars’ heads on the dining-room wall, and hog-
spears rusting gently under the stairs. Generations of
India hands knew that it would eventually happen to
them, and speculated, in those sporting days and banjo
evenings out on the kadir of Meerut, on what must
come.
After years as you sit, perchance, in some less happy
spot smoking your pipe before the fire, the old scenes
shall rise again before you. You shall, it may be, take
the dull grey road and cross the river in the dawn. You
shall hear the piteous whine of the beggars, and the
terrible cry of the lepers at the tollgate ... You shall see
the women washing in their red saris, the horses
slipping on the creaking boats ... You shall face rising
sun, while before you stretches the dead white sand
with purple line of grass and blacker sky above ...
You shall, in fancy, return once more when evening
shadows fall, past streams of carts laden with sleepy
contented people drawn by still more peaceful mild-
eyed oxen. The raiyet at his plough, the well man
singing to his cattle, as they labour at the well, ‘Ram
Ram, my children, turn again, for the chursa is now
full’ – they shall live in your thoughts again.14
But too many soldiers drew a blank in the great Indian
lottery. For every one who saved enough pay or prize
money to make a decent start there were a dozen who
returned broke, former apprentices in pipe-clay and
bayonet-drill, masters of a trade that nobody wanted.
But they would have been well aware that, despite this,
they were – in a sense – the lucky ones: the twenty
years from 1874–94 costs 5th Fusiliers 232 dead,
almost all of them killed by disease. The poet Aliph
Cheem was right to allow a soldier about to leave India
to reflect on his dead comrades:
Good-bye, my friends: although the bullet did not lay
you low,
A thought, a tear upon your graves, at least your
brothers owe;
Ye died for England, though ye died not ‘midst the
cannon’s boom, Nor any ‘mentioned in dispatches’
glorified your tomb.15
We began with one drummer, and let us end with
another. Drummer Thomas Flinn of HM’s 64th Foot
won the VC at Lucknow when he was still short of his
sixteenth birthday, for dashing into a battery through
heavy fire, and taking on two of the gunners although
he was already wounded. He celebrated his investiture
well but not wisely, and two days later he was
imprisoned for drunkenness. He left the army in 1869,
the latter end of his career a catalogue of minor
disciplinary offences, and died in a workhouse in
Athlone in 1892. A Napoleonic general once told a
British officer that if his soldiers were as good, he
would look after them better: that is no unfair comment
on the men who won and held India. Like their
grandsons and great-grandsons, they deserved better of
the land that bore them.

GLOSSARY OF INDIAN
TERMS
Most of these terms are English renditions of words
originally in Persian, Sanskrit or Hindustani. I have
generally adhered to the spellings in Henry Yule and A.
C. Burnell’s work, Hobson-Jobson, but the usual
caveats apply: bheestie, for example, sometimes
appears as bhisti, beastie, and much else besides.
Kipling preferred bhisti for his hero Gunga Din, and
favoured dooli rather than dhoolie or doolie for the
Indian stretcher.
Akalis – Sikh regiments of religious enthusiasts
anna – one-sixteenth of a rupee
ayah – nurse, lady’s maid
babu – properly a term of respect attached to a man’s
name, but by extension an Indian clerk who wrote
English or sometimes, with a note of disparagement, an
‘educated Indian’
bat – language, especially soldier’s slang
batta – extra financial allowance
bazaar – market or street of shops; market-place bhail –
bullock
bheestie/bhisti – water-carrier
bibi – lady, but in the British context, Indian mistress
brinjarry – itinerant dealer, especially in grain or salt
budmash – knave, villain
bundook – gun; the common term for a matchlock, but
might be used colloquially for rifle or shotgun
chapatty – flat circular cake of unleavened bread, patted
flat with the hand and baked on a griddle
charpoy – bed
chatty – spherical earthenware water pot
congee-house – prison, especially a regiment’s lock-up,
where the regime was more liberal than in its guard-
room
crore – one hundred lakhs

dâk – post or transport by relay of men or horse, thus

dâk-ghari for post- cart and dâk-bungalow for
travellers’ accommodation at each stage of a journey
dal – Indian dish of lentils
dhobi – washing, and so dhobi-wallah for washerman
dirzi – tailor
doolie – curtained stretcher, covered litter, light
palanquin; thus doolie- bearers
doray – south Indian equivalent of sahib, and so
doresani for memsahib dubash – literally ‘man of two
languages’, and so strictly interpreter, but by extension
servant, especially in Madras
duck – slang term for inhabitants of the Bombay
presidency
firman – Mogul emperor’s edict
gingall or jingall – heavy musket or wall-piece
golandaz – literally ball-throwers, and thus gunners
gorchurra – Sikh irregular cavalry
iqbal – notion of luck or good fortune
jagir – landholding assignment
jemadar- Indian infantry officer, roughly equivalent to
lieutenant
Khalsa – the Sikh army
khansamah – housekeeper, or head waiter
khitmagar – waiter
kotwal – tribal policeman, magistrate
lakh – 100,000 rupees
lal bazaar – literally red bazaar; British regimental
brothel
lascar – originally an inferior class of artilleryman, or a
tent-pitcher in camp, but soon widely used to mean
sailor
log – people, as in Kipling’s bandar-log, monkey-
people
looty – plunderer
lota – spherical brass pot used for the carriage of water
mansabari system – system of ranks in the Mogul
empire, related (at least in theory) to the obligation to
provide a specified number of soldiers
mansabdaryaboo, or yaboo – Afghan pony
maranacha poshak – literally ‘clothes of the dead’, long
saffrondyed gowns worn by Rajput men going out to
fight to the death
massaul – torch
mate, matey-boy – assistant servant, especially in
Madras mehtar – sweeper or scavenger
memsahib – European woman, by implication European
lady Misls – Sikh confederacies
mofussil – country stations and districts, as opposed to
the sudder, the chief station of the area
mohur – gold coin pre-dating British arrival in India but
widely used after it mull – contraction of mulligatawny
(a spicy soup) applied as a distinctive term for members
of the Madras presidency
munshi – interpreter, language teacher, and secretary or
writer more generally
nawab – Mogul title for governor/nobleman
nullah – ravine or gully
palankeen – a box-litter for travelling in, with a pole
projecting fore and aft, carried on the shoulder of four
or six men
palkee-gharry – coach shaped rather like a palankeen
on wheels panchaychats – Sikh army all-ranks
committees
pandy – colloquial name for sepoy mutineers, from
Mangal Pandy, one of the first of them in 1857
pani – water, and thus brandy-pawnee, brandy and
water
pettah – the suburb of a fortress, often with its own
defensive wall pice/pie – small copper coin worth one
quarter of an anna or one sixty- fourth of a rupee
pucka –ripe, mature, cooked; often used of solid
building materials like local bricks and mortar, and by
implication permanent or reliable puckrerow – the
imperative of the Hindustani verb ‘cause to be seized’:
British army slang for to lay hold of or steal
puggaree – turban, but generally used for cloth/scarf
wrapped around hat pultan – Indian for regiment
(probably derived from the French peloton for platoon)
punkah – swinging fan hung from the ceiling; operated
by a punkah-wallah qui-hi – literally ‘Is any one there?’
used when summoning a servant. Nickname for a
member of the Bengal presidency
rissaldar/ressaldar – Indian cavalry officer, roughly
equivalent to captain rissaldar-major – senior Indian
officer in a cavalry regiment
rupee – standard coin of the Anglo-Indian monetary
system, existing in several local versions until
standardised in 1836: of 180 grs weight and 165 grs
pure silver
ryot – peasant farmer
sepoy – Indian regular soldier
silladar- cavalryman who furnished (at least in theory)
his own horse and equipment
sleetah – large saddlebag usually slung from a camel
sowar – Indian trooper
subadar – Indian officer, roughly equivalent to captain
subadar-major – senior Indian officer in an infantry
regiment
sudder—the central station of a district (see mofussil)
suttee – the rite of widow-burning
syce – groom
taluqdars – large landowner, especially in Oudh
tattie – grass mat used to cover windows
tattoo – Indian-bred pony
thermantidote – enclosed fan used to propel air into a
room, usually through a wetted tattie
thuggee – murderous practice carried out by thugs, an
organisation of assassins largely suppressed in the
1820s
tulwar – sabre, typically with a curved blade, cruciform
guard and disc- shaped pommel
wallah – person employed or concerned with
something, as in dhobi-wallah for laundryman.
Developed to make words like box-wallah, initially a
native itinerant pedlar but then (somewhat derisively) a
British businessman; and competition-wallah for
member of the Indian Civil Service appointed by
competitive examination. Like so much of bat it slipped
comfortably into army use outside India to produce
words like machine-gun-wallah for machine-gun officer
woordie-major – Indian adjutant of a cavalry regiment
yahoo – Afghan pony
zamindar- landholder, in theory holding land for which
he paid rent to the government, not to any intermediary
zenana – apartments of the house in which women were
secluded zumbooruk – light swivel gun, usually fired
from a camel’s saddle