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PROLOGUE
Drums on the Sutlej

DARBY FULCHER, drummer in the grenadier company of HM’s 50th Regiment of Foot, normally wakes his comrades on campaign by walking through the lines of sleeping men, rapping out the insistent drumbeat of the General Call to Arms; but today, 10 February 1846, will be different. He is eighteen years old, with six years’ service in the army, all of it in India, where he arrived as a band boy in the summer of 1840. The result of a brief and tipsy union between a sailor and one of those mercenary Portsmouth ladies unkindly known as ‘the fireships of the sally-port’, young Darby decided that a red coat was better than an empty belly, and joined the 50th as it passed through Portsmouth on its way to embark.

Simply getting to India was not easy. The East Indiaman Ferguson, which carried the 50th’s recruits from Portsmouth, struck a shoal in the Torres Strait, but all her passengers and crew were safely taken off before she foundered, and he soon found himself in the military cantonment at Chinsura, just up the River Hooghly from Calcutta. The 50th lost twenty of its soldiers from cholera in its first months in India, before sailing to Moulmein in the autumn of 1841, in the expectation that friction with the King of Burma would lead to another war. But it was soon back in Chinsura, only to lose eighty more men (including, inauspiciously, Assistant Surgeon Burns) in another cholera epidemic.

A move up the Hooghly to a new garrison at Cawnpore proved scarcely less lethal: in three separate accidents the regiment lost four sergeants, the drum-major, sixty-three privates, four women and eleven children. On 29 December 1843, Darby Fulcher had his baptism of fire when a force under Major General Sir John Grey beat the fierce Marathas at Punniar and in which the 50th lost just an officer and eight men. Lieutenant Bellars, the regiment’s acting adjutant, described this battle in his diary:

Directly we reached the top of the hill … the enemy’s cannon balls were falling to the right and left of us, but being badly directed did us no harm. We moved a few paces over the hill, when they opened a heavy fire of grape and canister upon us, with four guns planted about fifty paces from the bottom of the hill, besides a tremendous fire from their infantry, who were in a small ravine. We made the best of our way down the hill, which was very high and steep, keeping the best order possible, and continuing our firing the whole time. We halted at the bottom under cover of a small bank and hedge, keeping up our fire for about ten minutes, when we were ordered to charge, which we did with a glorious cheer. But so well did the enemy stick to their guns, that the last discharge took place when we were within ten yards of them, and the gunners were only driven from their guns at the point of the bayonet. So determined were they, indeed, that until actually unable to move from wounds, they cut away with their sharp sabres at our men, many of whom were severely wounded by them. Thus ended this short but sharp skirmish, with the capture of four guns (one a large brass one) and a few prisoners.¹

Fulcher’s dark hair, sharp features and prominent teeth made the sobriquet ‘band rat’ all too appropriate, and when he left the band to become a company drummer the name stuck. By now, as one of the many Irish wits in the 50th observed, he was a very big rat indeed, and should therefore be known as Bandicoot Fulcher. Colour Sergeant Thompson, as serious-minded as befitted the company’s senior non-commissioned officer, confirmed that this was wholly appropriate, for the bandicoot or musk rat ‘was distinguished by its troublesome smell’, and here too, he pronounced, there was a distinct resemblance.² The abuse was as good-natured as barrack-room jokes can be, and Fulcher, big for his age, with a vocabulary of the most studied profanity and a taste for strong drink, fitted comfortably into the tight little world of the grenadier company, with its three officers and eighty NCOs and men. It was the senior of the 50th’s eight companies, leading the way when the battalion marched in column, and on its right when it shook out into line. Fulcher had no idea why it was called the grenadier company, for grenades (whatever they might be) had not been issued within living memory.

His job entailed a good deal more than drumming. A company’s two drummers were its captain’s confidential assistants, holding his horse and helping him into the saddle, running errands for him in barracks and standing close by him in the field to relay his orders and interpret other drumbeats. They administered floggings, under the eyes of the drum-major, sergeant major and adjutant. The humiliating ritual of drumming a disgraced soldier out of barracks involved the man, his badges and buttons cut away, being marched through the camp to the tune of ‘The Rogue’s March’:

Twenty I got for selling my coat

Twenty for selling my blanket

If ever I ‘list for a soldier again

The devil shall be my sergeant

He was then kicked through the barrack gate by the most junior drummer – the whole ghastly process sometimes being known as ‘John Drum’s entertainment’. Useful though they were in barracks and the field, drummers had a reputation for being badly behaved. Captain Albert Hervey of the 41st Madras Native Infantry recalled that:

While passing through a village early one morning there were a number of ducks waddling along to a piece of water hard by. Our drummers came right amongst them, several were snatched up unobserved, and crammed into the drums. At another time, as we passed through a toddy-tope, some of them contrived to get away and imbibe plentifully of tempting beverage. They are strange rascals are our drummers, and up to all kinds of mischief.³

Darby Fulcher wears a waist-length red serge ‘shell jacket’ closed by ten pewter buttons, with blue standing collar and pointed cuffs. The change to blue is recent; the regiment’s facings were once black, accounting for its nickname ‘The Dirty Half-Hundred’. His grenadier comrades show their elite status by crescent-shaped red shoulder wings edged with white, and Fulcher, in addition, is liberally chevroned with white drummer’s lace. His flat-topped Kilmarnock cap has a white canvas cover and his regiment’s number in a brass Roman numeral ‘L’ above its peak. Dark blue woollen trousers with a narrow red stripe fall over square-toed black boots, issued on the assumption that they will fit either foot. Fulcher’s function means that he is spared the white pipe-clayed cross-belts, supporting an ammunition pouch on the left and bayonet on the right, worn by his comrades; but, like them, he carries a circular water-bottle on a leather strap across his left shoulder and a white canvas haversack slung across his right. A short sword with a brass hilt sits over his left hip, and it is entirely in character for him to have sharpened it.⁴

His side drum hangs, for the moment, over his right shoulder, skin flat against his bent back, and he holds it there by one of its pipe-clayed cords.⁵ When he needs to use it he will hook it onto the drum carriage, the broad white belt that crosses his right shoulder, but there is no sense in doing that too soon, for the drum will rub against his left thigh and gall his knee, where it balances when his leg is bent.

Fulcher’s musical training derives from Samuel Potter’s book The Art of Beating the Drum, first published in 1810, but still passed on, becoming greasier with age, to successive drum-majors in the 50th. Potter advises:

Before a boy starts practicing a drum place him perfectly upright and place his left heel in the hollow of the right foot. Put the drum sticks into his hands, the right stick to be grasped by the whole hand 2½ inches from the top, similar to grasping a sword or stick when going to play Back-sword. The left hand one to be held between the thumb and forefinger close in the hollow, leaving the top as much protruding resembling a pen when going to write.

Fulcher begins each beat with his elbows level with his ears and the drumsticks meeting in front of his nose. He has long learnt ‘to beat the drum with ease to himself, and it will appear slight those who see him as it ought to be, the pride of every drummer to beat his Duty with an Air and Spirit’. He began by learning the Long Roll, and then went on to a series of rolls, flams, drags, strokes and lastly the paradiddle, a roll beaten with alternate sticks.

The liturgy of his trade is now burnt into his young brain, and he can rap out all the calls of barrack life and field service, quickly telling his captain what call the commanding officer’s drummer has just begun. He knows that on a normal morning in the field, with no marching or fighting to be done, he will beat Camp Taps, ‘the First Signal on the Drum; it must be repeated from Right to Left of the Line by a drummer of each regiment and return back from Left to Right previous to the reveille’.⁶ On campaign, however, the jaunty drag and paradiddle of the General is usually appropriate, and its message is blunt: officers and men are to rise at once and prepare to fall in under arms, for there is business at hand.

But this morning of 10 February 1846, the officers and men of the 50th fall in silently, without beat of drum, before daybreak, and set off in column, on a front of four men, company following company with short gaps between them, across a flat countryside liberally dotted with scrub. The morning smells of spice, smoke, urine and dung, shot through with a tang of tobacco – for many officers, even at this early hour, cannot be parted from a cheroot.

Although the politics of the war mean little to Darby Fulcher and his comrades, nobody present that morning has any doubt that this conflict (later known as the First Sikh War) is a very serious contest between the armies of British India and the Sikhs, who had crossed the River Sutlej, which bordered their territory, in December 1845. They would be beaten, if that is quite the right word for such doggedly fought, bloody and inconclusive battles, at Mudki on 18 December and at Ferozeshah three days later. In these two actions the 50th lost a total of 244 of its officers and men killed and wounded, amongst them the grenadier company’s other drummer. The regiment fought in the altogether more successful battle of Aliwal on 28 January 1846, when another eighty-six men were hit.

The dull odour of bodies in clothes changed too rarely is now heavily overlaid with the sulphurous, bad-egg stink of black powder, for British infantrymen still ply their trade with a smooth-bore muzzle-loading musket, and in the process smear both unburned powder and its greasy residue all over themselves.

This is not quite the same musket carried at Waterloo, for in September 1841, earlier than most, the regiment received muskets with the new percussion lock. A man no longer has to tip powder into the musket’s priming pan, snap the steel shut over it, and hope that when he presses the trigger the flint will strike sufficient spark to ignite the priming and go on to fire the main charge. He now places a small copper cap filled with fulminate of mercury onto the nipple fitted to his musket-barrel, just where the touch-hole used to be. When the trigger is pressed the cock falls to burst the cap and, barring the most uncommon accident, fires the musket. The 50th, drawn up in line two ranks deep, can loose off four volleys a minute. Although a soldier has little chance of hitting an individual aimed at 200 yards away, volleys can do shocking damage at close range. However, any experienced officer trudging forward through the bushes in the half-light will tell you that battles are not won by endless volleying. Indeed, some harbour the conviction that firing actually defers a decision, and it is important to bring the bayonet – sixteen inches of fluted steel – into play as quickly as possible.

This view would certainly have found favour with Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Gough, the sixty-seven-year-old Irishman in command of the British army during the First and Second Sikh Wars. A couplet composed by an officer with a classical education, for Alexander the Great had been stopped by the Sutlej, caught the feel of the man.

Sabres drawn and bayonets fixed,

Fight where fought Alexander.

Old Paddy Gough’s a cross betwixt

Bulldog and Salamander.

At Mudki and Ferozeshah, Gough launched direct attacks on well-held Sikh positions, and before the day is out, when told that the ammunition for his heavy guns is running low, he will exclaim: ‘Thank God! Then I’ll be at them with the bayonet.’⁷ Yet nobody can say that Hugh Gough spared himself. With his mane of white hair and long white ‘fighting coat’, he is always to be found where the fire is hottest. ‘I never ask the soldier to expose himself where I do not personally lead,’ he later declared. ‘This the army knows and, I firmly believe, estimates.’⁸

Gough’s plan this morning has an unusual measure of subtlety: two feint attacks. His Sikh opponents have now been pushed back across the Sutlej River into their own territory everywhere save here near the village of Sobraon, where they hold a strong position facing southwards. It is shaped like a long, flattish letter U, a mile and a half wide along its southern side, with its open end to the river, and a pontoon bridge behind it. A Spanish officer in the service of the Sikhs has designed formidable defences, consisting of two concentric lines of earth ramparts, twelve feet high in places, with arrowhead bastions jutting out in front of the embankments and a broad ditch in front of them. On the Sikh right the ground is too sandy for the construction of high ramparts, and on these lower earthworks – too unstable to bear the weight of proper artillery – the Sikhs have planted a line of 200 zumbooruks, light swivel guns usually fired from a camel’s saddle.

The Sikh position is held by some 20,000 infantry with seventy guns, and there are more infantry and guns dug in on the north bank, covering the bridge. Gough has about the same number of men but fewer guns. However, drawing confidence from the fact that thirty of them are heavy howitzers and five are powerful 18-pounders, he decides on a three-hour bombardment by guns and rockets, followed by an infantry assault. His left-hand division, under Major General Sir Robert Dick, will attack the Sikh right, apparently their weakest sector, while his centre division, under Major General Sir Walter Gilbert, and his right division, under Major General Sir Harry Smith, will make feint attacks to prevent the Sikhs from concentrating to meet Dick’s assault. Gough’s situation is complicated by the fact that the Governor-General of British India, Sir Henry Hardinge, is present with the army. He is a lieutenant general too, and although he has volunteered to serve under Gough in his military capacity, he is not slow to exercise his superior civil authority if he feels it right to do so. He has approved the plan, but only in guarded terms. ‘Upon the fullest consideration of the question,’ he wrote, ‘if the artillery can be brought into play, I recommend you to attack. If it cannot and you anticipate a heavy loss, I would recommend you not to undertake it.’⁹

All this is hidden from Darby Fulcher as his battalion moves forward without drumbeat, in column in the dark at about 4.00 a.m. Ahead of it marches HM’s 31st Foot, and, a little less than two miles from the eastern face of the Sikh entrenchments, it deploys from column into line, with its right flank on the Sutlej and its left joining the 47th Bengal Native Infantry. The 50th swings into line about a hundred yards behind, with its grenadiers nudging the river bank and its light company, on the left of its line, in sight of the grenadiers of the 42nd Bengal Native Infantry. At the first sign of dawn, the whole line moves forward, to within range of the Sikh guns, and the men lie down. Even when the sun comes up it is still too misty to see what is happening, which is as well, for some of the British heavy guns are not yet in position.

At about 6.00 a.m. the first shots are fired. One young artillery officer is to remember the scene well:

On that day, when I first smelt powder, I served with the heavy howitzers and I can never forget the moment when old Gough (who was there in person) sent the order to ‘open fire’. No 1 fire! No 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six 10-inch shells hurtled through the mist just lifting, and could be seen in the still dark morning light, bursting in the enemy’s camp and entrenchments. A minute’s pause, and then the hum of a surprised camp like a vast hive, followed by the drums beating to arms, and the trumpets of the Sikh host sounding the alarm.¹⁰

Bombardier Nathaniel Bancroft, serving with a rocket battery this day, later recalled how:

The action commenced by a salvo from the guns, howitzer, mortar and rocket batteries. Such a salvo was never heard in the length and breadth of India before … and the reports of the guns were distinctly heard by the wounded in the hospital at Ferozepur, five and twenty miles away. Our light guns opened fire near Chota Sobraon with a battery of howitzers, and before half past six the whole of our cannonade was developed and every iron-throated gun, mortar and rocket battery … was raining a storm of missiles which boomed, hissed and hurtled through the air onto the trenches of the Sikhs.¹¹

The excellent quality of Sikh artillery was no surprise to the British even before the war. In 1839 Captain the Hon. W. G. Osborne had been on an official visit to the Sikhs, and reported that although their European-trained infantry was perfectly adequate, their artillery was ‘by far the best and most powerful arm of the Sikh nation’. Its performance, firing grapeshot at a curtain 200 yards away, he thought:

would have been creditable to any artillery in the world. At the first round of grape, the curtain was cut clean away, and their shells at eight hundred and twelve hundred were thrown with a precision that is extraordinary when the short period of time they have known of even the existence of such a thing is taken into account.¹²

Mudki and Ferozeshah had demonstrated that Sikh gunners were not simply professionally adept, but were brave men too: they fought to the death even when their batteries were overrun by British infantry. Today at Sobraon they fire back with accuracy and determination, but the British artillery, too, is well handled. Private John Pearman, watching it all with the 3rd Light Dragoons, saw that ‘most of our artillery and field batteries had advanced to an easy range. The firing appeared like practice in Woolwich marshes.’ His regiment, on hand for pursuit when the Sikhs begin to give way, was not quite out of range. ‘We had in the regiment a half-breed greyhound,’ he recalled, ‘and the poor thing kept running after spent balls until the poor bitch could run no more, but she was not hurt.’¹³

At the very moment that when Harry Smith, looking at the bombardment from beyond the eastern edge of the Sikh position, thinks that British artillery is beginning to win the firefight, its fire perceptibly slackens. Gough has just been told that his guns have brought far fewer rounds into the field than had been ordered, and the bombardment cannot go on much longer.¹⁴ For Gough this comes as something of a relief from politicking and technical advice, and he decides to bring the battle, as he puts it, ‘to the arbitrament of musket and the bayonet’.

The prospect of another ghastly slogging match like Mudki or Ferozeshah has alarmed Hardinge, and Colonel Benson, one of his staff officers, gallops up to Gough with the suggestion that if he does not feel confident of succeeding without great loss he should break off the attack and treat the business as a siege, making deliberate approaches to the Sikh defences. Benson presses his point again, and when he ventures it a third time Gough explodes. ‘What! Withdraw the troops after the action has commenced, and when I feel confident of success,’ he roars. ‘Indeed I will not. Tell Sir Robert Dick to move on, in the name of God.’¹⁵

Bombardier Bancroft saw how Dick’s infantry, flanked by batteries of artillery,

moved to the close attack in magnificent order the infantry and the cannon aiding each other co-relatively. The former marched steadily in line, with its colours flying in the centre, and halting only to close in and connect where necessary; the latter taking up their respective positions at a gallop, until all were within three hundred yards of the Sikh batteries; but notwithstanding the regularity, the soldier-like coolness, and the scientific character of the assault … so terrible was the roar of musketry, the fire of heavy cannons, and of those pestilential little guns called ‘zumboorucks’ and so fast fell our dead and wounded beneath them all that it seemed impossible that the trenches could ever be won … But very soon the whole of our centre and right could see the gallant soldiery … swarming in scarlet masses over the banks, breastworks and fascines, driving the Sikhs before them within the area of their own defences over which the yellow and red colours of the 10th and 53rd were flying; and no less gallant was the bearing of the 43rd and 59th Native Infantry, who were brigaded with them and swept in with them ‘shoulder to shoulder’.¹⁶

‘Oh what a sight to sit on your horse,’ wrote John Pearman, ‘to look at those brave fellows as they tried several times to get into the enemy’s camp; and at last they did, but oh, what a loss of human life. God only knows who will have to answer for it.’¹⁷

The Sikh soldier Hookum Singh watched the same awesome spectacle from behind his zumbooruk on the rampart:

Nearer and nearer they came, as steadily as if they were on their own parade ground, and in perfect silence. A creeping feeling came over me; this silence seemed so unnatural. We Sikhs are, as you know, brave, but when we attack we begin firing our muskets and shouting our famous war-cry, but these men, saying never a word, advanced in perfect silence. They appeared to me as demons, evil spirits, bent on our destruction, and I could hardly refrain from firing.

At last the order came, ‘Fire’, and our whole battery as if from one gun fired into the advancing mass. The smoke was so great that for a moment I could not see the effect of our fire, but fully expected that we had destroyed the demons, so, what was my astonishment, when the smoke cleared away, to see them still advancing in perfect silence, but their numbers reduced to about one half. Loading my cannon, I fired again and again, making a gap or lane in their ranks each time; but on they came, in that awful silence, till they were within a short distance of our guns, when their colonel ordered them to halt and take breath, which they did under a heavy fire. Then, with a shout, such as only angry demons could give and which is still ringing in my ears, they made a rush for our guns, led by their colonel. In ten minutes it was all over; they leapt into the deep ditch or moat to our front, soon filling it, and then swarming up the opposite side on the shoulders of their comrades, dashed for the guns, which were still defended by a strong body of our infantry, who fought bravely. But who could withstand such fierce demons, with those awful bayonets, which they preferred to their guns – for not a shot did they fire the whole time – then, with a ringing cheer, which was heard for miles, they announced their victory.¹⁸

The cheer was premature. The Sikhs ‘took not the slightest notice’ of the fire of skirmishers thrown forward, on Gough’s orders, by Gilbert and Smith, but concentrated their efforts on counter-attacking Dick’s division, which was gradually forced back, out of the captured batteries. Sir Robert himself, a veteran of the Peninsular War, had already fallen, shot through the head. Gough’s plan lay in ruins, but he immediately ordered Gilbert and Smith to convert their feint attacks into real ones. As Gilbert’s men moved forward against earthworks so high that they could not be climbed without scaling ladders, even Gough’s courage faltered briefly. ‘Good God,’ he exclaimed. ‘They’ll be annihilated.’ Ensign Percy Innes, of the Bengal European Regiment, attacking with Gilbert’s division wrote of how:

The air, charged with sulphur, was stifling and so heated that it was almost unbearable. Now on rushed the Bengal European regiment with a determination which promised to carry everything before it; soon reaching the ditch which formed the outer defence, and springing into it, they found themselves confronted by massive walls, which in the distance had appeared less formidable, for now they found these works too high to escalade without ladders. To retire again was to encounter the storm of fire through which they had just passed, to remain in their present position was annihilation; therefore the Regiment, mortified and chagrined, was forced to seek shelter under cover of the bank of the dry river which it had left just a short time before.¹⁹

Harry Smith ordered his division forward as soon as he received the order to attack. Captain Longworth, who ended the day commanding HM’s 31st, later reported that the advance:

was no sooner discovered by the enemy than they opened upon us a most tremendous fire of round shot from the whole of the guns upon the left flank of their entrenched camp; shell, grape, canister and a very heavy fire of musketry were showered upon us as we neared the fortifications – but in spite of this, I am proud to say, the regiment advanced steadily and in the best order till within thirty paces of the entrenched camp, when a most destructive fire from overpowering numbers forced us to retire for a short distance, for the purpose of re-forming, as we left a full third of the regiment on the ground … ²⁰

The 50th sets off in the wake of the 31st, in a line two-deep, its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Petit, with the colour party in the centre, captains on the right flank of their companies and sergeants and subalterns to the rear.²¹ Darby Fulcher marches just behind the centre of his company, smacking out the step with the steady drumbeat of ‘The Grenadiers’ March’, to which his comrades are entitled. The men are now stepping ‘uncommon stiff an’ slow’, with the straight-legged gait of fighting dogs, and are already walking over dead and wounded from the 31st. Some of these unfortunates still have fight left in them, and shout: ‘Come on, the old half-hundred! Pay them off for Mudki! Take the Brummagem to them, my darlings.’²² The fire from the embankment just 300 yards ahead is simply prodigious, with yellow flashes piercing a wall of white smoke, a mass of metal whooping overhead, some roundshot clearly visible as they bound along, and gusts of grape kicking up the yellow earth and clipping holes in the line.

The men are dressing by the centre, glancing in occasionally to take station on the colours, and closing in to left or right as comrades are hit. Lieutenant Colonel Petit is still mounted (he had a horse shot under him at Mudki) and is in more danger at his height than he would be four feet lower, for a lot of the fire is going high. An officer will later admit that: ‘It is a miracle that we were not properly riddled, but … the guns had so sunk in the sand that the gunners could not depress the muzzles sufficiently, and therefore most of the grape went over our heads.’²³ Petit shouts something inaudible, raises his drawn sword and sweeps it down to the left. Almost immediately a ruffle ripples out from the centre as drummers relay the order, and captains shout: ‘By the left … left incline.’ The battalion begins to swing like a great gate, pivoting on the light company, on its left, whose men are scarcely moving, their sergeants hissing: ‘By the left … Step short, step short.’ The grenadiers, in contrast, have ground to make up, and stride out boldly. Petit is edging leftwards to avoid the worst of the carnage ahead, and when he is satisfied with the new alignment, his sword comes up. Another burst of drumming, and captains repeat: ‘By the centre … For … ward.’

The change of direction is little help. The ramparts are now only 100 yards ahead, and it is all too clear that the 31st has reached the end of its tether. Its commanding officer has been knocked from his horse by a flurry of grapeshot which has bent his sword double, and the regiment begins to drift backwards like tide ebbing from rocks, coming straight for the advancing line of the 50th. Lieutenant Colonel Petit’s sword-point comes up again. ‘50th … division into column … Quick march,’ he yells, and the drumbeats ripple out again. This time each of the companies swings from line into its own small column. Towards the end of his long life, Colour Sergeant Thompson still recalled the moment well:

The thing that impressed me most in the whole campaign, was the steadiness with which the 50th at Sobraon, formed fours under tremendous fire, to allow the 31st, who were retreating in disorder, to pass through their ranks, and then formed up as if on parade … You know how catching a panic is, and it struck me as a most trying ordeal.²⁴