Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official Part 67

38. The Governor-General's name was William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, I do not understand the signature M. W. Bentinck, which may be a misprint. The eulogium seems odd to a reader who remembers that the recipient had been for fifteen years the mistress and wife of the Butcher of Patna. But when it was written, the memory of the ma.s.sacre had been dimmed by the lapse of seventy-two years, and His Excellency may not have been well versed in the lady's history.

Perhaps the author was mistaken, and the letter was sent by Lady Bentinck, whose name was Mary.

CHAPTER 76

ON THE SPIRIT OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE IN THE NATIVE ARMY OF INDIA

Abolition of Corporal Punishment--Increase of Pay with Length of Service--Promotion by Seniority.

The following observations on a very important and interesting subject were not intended to form a portion of the present work.[1]

They serve to ill.u.s.trate, however, many pa.s.sages in the foregoing chapters touching the character of the natives of India; and the Afghan war having occurred since they were written, I cannot deny myself the gratification of presenting them to the public, since the courage and fidelity, which it was my object to show the British Government had a right to expect from its native troops and might always rely upon in the hour of need, have been so n.o.bly displayed.

I had one morning (November 14th, 1838) a visit from the senior native officer of my regiment, Shaikh Mahub Ali, a very fine old gentleman, who had recently attained the rank of 'Sardar Bahadur', and been invested with the new Order of British India.[2] He entered the service at the age of fifteen, and had served fifty-three years with great credit to himself, and fought in many an honourable field.

He had come over to Jubbulpore as president of a native general court-martial, and paid me several visits in company with another old officer of my regiment who was a member of the same court. The following is one of the many conversations I had with him, taken down as soon as he left me.

'What do you think, Sardar Bahadur, of the order prohibiting corporal punishment in the army; has it had a bad or a good effect?'

'It has had a very good effect.'

'What good has it produced?'

'It has reduced the number of courts martial to one-quarter of what they were before, and thereby lightened the duties of the officers; it has made the good men more careful, and the bad men more orderly than they used to be.'

'How has it produced this effect?'

'A bad man formerly went on recklessly from small offences to great ones in the hope of impunity; he knew that no regimental, cantonment, or brigade court martial could sentence him to be dismissed the service; and that they would not sentence him to be flogged, except for great crimes, because it involved at the same time dismissal from the service. If they sentenced him to be flogged, he still hoped that the punishment would be remitted. The general or officer confirming the sentence was generally unwilling to order it to be carried into effect, because the man must, after being flogged, be tumed out of the service, and the marks of the lash upon his back would prevent his getting service anywhere else. Now he knows that these courts can sentence him to be dismissed from the service--that he is liable to lose his bread for ordinary transgressions, and be sentenced to work on the roads for graver ones.[3] He is in consequence much more under restraint than he used to be.'

'And how has it tended to make the well-disposed more careful?'

'They were formerly liable to be led into errors by the example of the bad men, under the same hope of impunity; but they are now more on their guard. They have all relations among the native officers, who are continually impressing upon them the necessity of being on their guard, lest they be sent back upon their families--their mothers and fathers, wives and children, as beggars. To be dismissed from a service like that of the Company is a very great punishment; it subjects a man to the odium and indignation of all his family.

When in the Company's service, his friends know that a soldier gets his pay regularly, and can afford to send home a very large portion of it. They expect that he will do so; he feels that they will listen to no excuse, and he contracts habits of sobriety and prudence. If a man gets into the service of a native chief, his friends know that his pay is precarious, and they continue to maintain his family for many years without receiving a remittance from him, in the hope that his circ.u.mstances may one day improve. He contracts bad habits, and is not ashamed to make his appearance among them, knowing that his excuses will be received as valid. If one of the Company's sepoys[4]

were not to send home remittances for six months, some members of the family would be sent to know the reason why. If he could not explain, they would appeal to the native officers of the regiment, who would expostulate with him; and, if all failed, his wife and children would be tumed out of his father's house, unless they knew that he was gone to the wars; and he would be ashamed ever to show his face among them again.'

'And the gradual increase of pay with length of service has tended to increase the value of the service, has it not?'

'It has very much; there are in our regiment, out of eight hundred men, more than one hundred and fifty sepoys who get the increase of two rupees a month, and the same number that get the increase of one.

This they feel as an immense addition to the former seven rupees a month.[5] A prudent sepoy lives upon two, or at the utmost three, rupees a month in seasons of moderate plenty, and sends all the rest to his family. A great number of the sepoys of our regiment live upon the increase of two rupees, and send all their former seven to their families. The dismissal of a man from such a service as this distresses, not only him, but all his relations in the higher grades, who know how much of the comfort and happiness of his family depend upon his remaining and advancing in it; and they all try to make their young friends behave as they ought to do.'

'Do you think that a great portion of the native officers of the army have the same feelings and opinions on the subject as you have?'

'They have all the same; there is not, I believe, one in a hundred that does not think as I do upon the subject. Flogging was an odious thing. A man was disgraced, not only before his regiment, but before the crowd that a.s.sembled to witness the punishment. Had he been suffered to remain in the regiment he could never have hoped to rise after having been flogged, or sentenced to be flogged; his hopes were all destroyed, and his spirit broken, and the order directing him to be dismissed was good; but, as I have said, he lost all hope of getting into any other service, and dared not show his face among his family at home.'

'You know who ordered the abolition of flogging?'

'Lord Bentinck.'[6]

'And you know that it was at his recommendation the Honourable Company gave the increase of pay with length of service?'

'We have heard so; and we feel towards him as we felt towards Lord Wellesley, Lord Hastings, and Lord Lake.'

'Do you think the army would serve again now with the same spirit as they served under Lord Lake?'

'The army would go to any part of the world to serve such masters--no army had ever masters that cared for them like ours. We never asked to have flogging abolished; nor did we ever ask to have an increase of pay with length of service; and yet both have been done for us by the Company Bahadur.'

The old Sardar Bahadur came again to visit me on the 1st of December, with all the native officers who had come over from Sagar to attend the court, seven in number. There were three very smart, sensible men among them; one of whom had been a volunteer at the capture of Java,[7] and the other[s] at that of the Isle of France.[8] They all told me that they considered the abolition of corporal punishment a great blessing to the native army. 'Some bad men who had already lost their character, and consequently all hope of promotion, might be in less dread than before; but they were very few, and their regiments would soon get rid of them under the new law that gave the power of dismissal to regimental courts martial.'

'But I find the European officers are almost all of opinion that the abolition of flogging has been, or will be, attended with bad consequences.'

'They, sir, apprehend that there will not be sufficient restraint upon the loose characters of the regiment; but now that the sepoys have got an increase of pay in proportion to length of service there will be no danger of that. Where can they ever hope to get such another service if they forfeit that of the Company? If the dread of losing such a service is not sufficient to keep the bad in order, that of being put to work upon the roads in irons will. The good can always be kept in order by lighter punishments, when they have so much at stake as the loss of such a service by frequent offences.

Some gentlemen think that a soldier does not feel disgraced by being flogged, unless the offence for which he has been flogged is in itself disgraceful. There is no soldier, sir, that does not feel disgraced by being tied up to the halberts and flogged in the face of all his comrades and the crowd that may choose to come and look at him; the sepoys are all of the same respectable families as ourselves, and they all enter the service in the hope of rising in time to the same stations as ourselves, if they conduct themselves well; their families look forward with the same hope. A man who has been tied up and flogged knows the disgrace that it will bring upon his family, and will sometimes rather die than return to it; indeed, as head of a family he could not be received at home.[9] But men do not feel disgraced in being flogged with a rattan at drill. While at the drill they consider themselves, and are considered by us all, as in the relation of scholars to their schoolmasters. Doing away with the rattan at drill had a very bad effect. Young men were formerly, with the judicious use of the rattan, made fit to join the regiment at furthest in six months; but since the abolition of the rattan it takes twelve months to make them fit to be seen in the ranks. There was much virtue in the rattan, and it should never have been given up. We have all been flogged with the rattan at the drill, and never felt ourselves disgraced by it-we were _s.h.a.girds_ (scholars), and the drill-sergeant, who had the rattan, was our _ustad_ (schoolmaster); but when we left the drill, and took our station in the ranks as sepoys, the case was altered, and we should have felt disgraced by a flogging, whatever might have been the nature of the offence we committed. The drill will never get on so well as it used to do, unless the rattan be called into use again; but we apprehend no evil from the abolition of corporal punishment afterwards. People are apt to attribute to this abolition offences that have nothing to do with it; and for which ample punishments are still provided. If a man fires at his officer, people are apt to say it is because flogging has been done away with; but a man who deliberately fires at his officer is prepared to undergo worse punishment than flogging.[10]

'Do you not think that the increase of pay with length of service to the sepoys will have a good effect in tending to give to regiments more active and intelligent native officers? Old sepoys who are not so will now have less cause to complain if pa.s.sed over, will they not?'

'If the sepoys thought that the increase of pay was given with this view, they would rather not have it at all. To pa.s.s over men merely because they happen to have grown old, we consider very cruel and unjust. They all enter the service young, and go on doing their duty till they become old, in the hope that they shall get promotion when it comes to their turn. If they are disappointed, and young men, or greater favourites with their European officers, are put over their heads, they become heart-broken. We all feel for them, and are always sorry to see an old soldier pa.s.sed over, unless he has been guilty of any manifest crime, or neglect of duty. He has always some relations among the native officers who know his family, for we all try to get our relations into the same regiment with ourselves when they are eligible. They know what that family will suffer when they learn that he has no longer any hopes of rising in the service, and has become miserable. Supersessions create distress and bad feelings throughout a regiment, even when the best men are promoted, which cannot always be the case; for the greatest favourites are not always the best men.

Many of our old European officers, like yourself, are absent on staff or civil employments; and the command of companies often devolves upon very young subalterns, who know little or nothing of the character of their men. They recommend those whom they have found most active and intelligent, and believe to be the best; but their opportunities of learning the characters of the men have been few.

They have seen and observed the young, active, and forward; but they often know nothing of the steady, un.o.btrusive old soldier, who has done his duty ably in all situations, without placing himself prominently forward in any. The commanding officers seldom remain long with the same regiment, and, consequently, seldom know enough of the men to be able to judge of the justice of the selections for promotion. Where a man has been guilty of a crime, or neglected his duty, we feel no sympathy for him, and are not ashamed to tell him so, and put him down[11] when he complains.'

Here the old Subadar, who had been at the taking of the Isle of France, mentioned that when he was senior Jemadar of his regiment, and a vacancy had occurred to bring him in as Subadar, he was sent for by his commanding officer, and told that, by orders from headquarters, he was to be pa.s.sed over, on account of his advanced age, and supposed infirmity. 'I felt,' said the old man, 'as if I had been struck by lightning, and _fell down dead_. The colonel was a good man, and had seen much service. He had me taken into the open air; and when I recovered, he told me that he would write to the Commander-in-Chief, and represent my case. He did so, and I was promoted; and I have since done my duty as Subadar for ten years.'[12]

The Sardar Bahadur told me that only two men in our regiment had been that year superseded, one for insolence, and the other for neglect of duty; and that officers and sepoys were all happy in consequence--the young, because they felt more secure of being promoted if they did their duty; and the old, because, they felt an interest in their young relations. 'In those regiments,' said he, 'where supersessions have been more numerous, old and young are dispirited and unhappy.

They all feel that the _good old rule of right_ (_hakk_), as long as a man does his duty well, can no longer be relied upon.'

When two companies of my regiment pa.s.sed through Jubbulpore a few days after this conversation on their way from Sagar to Seoni, I rode out a mile or two to meet them. They had not seen me for sixteen years, but almost all the native commissioned and non-commissioned officers were personally known to me. They were all very glad to see me, and I rode along with them to their place of encampment, where I had ready a feast of sweetmeats. They liked me as a young man, and are, I believe, proud of me as an old one. Old and young spoke with evident delight of the rigid adherence on the part of the present commanding officer, Colonel Presgrave, to the good old rule of 'hakk'

(right) in the recent promotions to the vacancies occasioned by the annual transfer to the invalid establishment. We might, no doubt, have in every regiment a few smarter native officers by disregarding this rule than by adhering to it; but we should, in the diminution of the good feeling towards the European officers and the Government, lose a thousand times more than we gained. They now go on from youth to old age, from the drill to the retired pension, happy and satisfied that there is no service on earth so good for them.[13]

With admirable _moral_, but little or no _literary_ education, the native officers of our regiments never dream of aspiring to anything more than is now held out to them, and the ma.s.s of the soldiers are inspired with devotion to the service, and every feeling with which we could wish to have them inspired, by the hope of becoming officers in time, if they discharge their duties faithfully and zealously.

Deprive the ma.s.s of this hope, give the commissions to an _exclusive cla.s.s_ of natives, or to a favoured few, chosen often, if not commonly, without reference to the feelings or qualifications we most want in our native officers, and our native army will soon cease to have the same feelings of devotion towards the Government, and of attachment and respect towards their European officers that they now have. The young, ambitions, and aspiring native officers will soon try to teach the great ma.s.s that their interest and that of the European officers and European Government are by no means one and the same, as they have been hitherto led to suppose; and it is upon the good feeling of this great ma.s.s that we have to depend for support.

To secure this good feeling, we can well afford to sacrifice a little efficiency at the drill. It was unwise in one of the commanders-in- chief to direct that no soldier in our Bengal native regiments should be promoted unless he could read and write-it was to prohibit the promotion of the best, and direct the promotion of the worst, soldiers in the ranks. In India a military officer is rated as a gentleman by his birth, that is _caste_, and by his deportment in all his relations of life, not by his _knowledge of books_.

The Rajput, the Brahman, and the proud Pathan who attains a commission, and deports himself like an officer, never thinks himself, or is thought by others, deficient in anything that const.i.tutes the gentleman, because he happens not to be at the same time a clerk. He has from his childhood been taught to consider the quill and the sword as two distinct professions, both useful and honourable when honourably pursued; and having chosen the sword, he thinks he does quite enough in learning how to use and support it through all grades, and ought not to be expected to encroach on the profession of the penman. This is a tone of feeling which it is clearly the interest of Government rather to foster than discourage, and the order which militated so much against it has happily been either rescinded or disregarded.

Three-fourths of the recruits of our Bengal native infantry are drawn from the Rajput peasantry of the kingdom of Oudh, on the left bank of the Ganges, where their affections have been linked to the soil for a long series of generations.[14] The good feelings of the families from which they are drawn continue through the whole period of their service to exercise a salutary influence over their conduct as men and as soldiers. Though they never take their families with them, they visit them on furlough every two or three years, and always return to them when the surgeon considers a change of air necessary to their recovery from sickness. Their family circles are always present to their imaginations; and the recollections of their last visit, the hopes of the next, and the a.s.surance that their conduct as men and as soldiers in the interval will be reported to those circles by their many comrades, who are annually returning on furlough to the same parts of the country, tend to produce a general and uniform propriety of conduct, that is hardly to be found among the soldiers of any other army in the world, and which seems incomprehensible to those unacquainted with its source--veneration for parents cherished through life, and a never-impaired love of home, and of all the dear objects by which it is const.i.tuted.

Our Indian native army is perhaps the only entirely voluntary standing army that has been ever known, and it is, to all intents and purposes, entirely voluntary, and as such must be treated.[15] We can have no other native army in India, and without such an army we could not maintain our dominion a day. Our best officers have always understood this quite well; and they have never tried to flog and hara.s.s men out of all that we find good in them for our purposes. Any regiment in our service might lay down their arms and disperse to- morrow, without our having a chance of apprehending one deserter among them all.[16]

When Frederick the Great of Prussia reviewed his army of sixty thousand men in Pomerania, previous to his invasion of Silesia, he asked the Prince d'Anhalt, who accompanied him, what he most admired in the scene before him.

'Sire,' replied the prince, 'I admire at once the fine appearance of the men, and the regularity and perfection of their movements and evolutions.'

'For my part,' said Frederick, 'this is not what excites my astonishment, since with the advantage of money, time, and care, these are easily attained. It is that you and I, my dear cousin, should be in the midst of such an army as this in perfect safety.

Here are sixty thousand men who are all _irreconcilable enemies to both you and myself_', not one among them that is not a man of more strength and better armed than either, yet they all tremble at our presence, while it would be folly on our part to tremble at theirs-- such is the wonderful effect of order, vigilance, and subordination.'

But a reasonable man might ask, what were the circ.u.mstances which enabled Frederick to keep in a state of order and subordination an army composed of soldiers who were 'irreconcilable enemies' of their Prince and of their officers? He could have told the Prince d'Anhalt, had he chose to do so; for Frederick was a man who thought deeply.

The chief circ.u.mstance favourable to his ambition was the imbecility of the old French Government, then in its dotage, and unable to see that an army of involuntary soldiers was no longer compatible with the state of the nation. This Government had reduced its soldiers to a condition worse than that of the common labourers upon the roads, while it deprived them of all hope of rising, and all feeling of pride in the profession.[17] Desertion became easy from the extension of the French dominion and from the circ.u.mstance of so many belligerent powers around requiring good soldiers; and no odium attended desertion, where everything was done to degrade, and nothing to exalt the soldier in his own esteem and that of society.

Instead of following the course of events and rendering the condition of the soldier less odious by increasing his pay and hope of promotion, and diminis.h.i.+ng the labour and disgrace to which he was liable, and thereby filling her regiments with voluntary soldiers when involuntary ones could no longer be obtained, the Government of France reduced the soldier's pay to one-half the rate of wages which a common labourer got on the roads, and put them under restraints and restrictions that made them feel every day, and every hour, that they were slaves. To prevent desertions by severe examples under this high-pressure System, they had recourse first to slitting the noses and cutting off the ears of deserters, and, lastly, to shooting them as fast as they could catch them.[18] But all was in vain; and Frederick of Prussia alone got fifty thousand of the finest soldiers in the world from the French regiments, who composed one-third of his army, and enabled him to keep all the rest in that state of discipline that improved so much its efficiency, in the same manner as the deserters from the Roman legions, which took place under similar circ.u.mstances, became the flower of the army of Mithridates.[19]