Chapter VI
1848-1854.
THE SECOND WAR WITH BURMA.
When the XVIIIth Royal Irish regiment arrived in India the Sikh War appeared to be over, and all chance of winning fresh laurels seemed relegated to the distant future. Further troubles, however, broke out in the Punjab, and for a time the regiment had every hope of again seeing active service under Sir Hugh Gough, as it was ordered up country and incorporated in the “Army of Reserve” on its arrival at Umballa in March, 1849. But Gough’s victory at Goozerat[145] had finally crushed the power of our gallant foes; the “Army of Reserve” was not called upon to take the field, and the Royal Irish remained at Umballa till the end of 1849, when they marched to Meerut, where a draft of two hundred and twenty recruits from home awaited them. The two flank companies did not accompany headquarters, as in November they had been sent on an important and interesting duty: they formed the European portion of the escort selected to guard the Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor-General of India, in his progress from Rurki to Lahore, the capital of the great province just added to the British dominions. This detachment of the XVIIIth was commanded by Captain C. A. Edwards, who in a statement prepared for this history mentions that as it was feared fanatics would attempt to murder the Governor-General in his sleep, four picked men of the Royal Irish at night patrolled the space between the inner and outer walls of Lord Dalhousie’s tent. These sentries appear to have been abnormally ceremonious in their manners, for the Governor-General, while warmly praising their incessant vigilance, said that he had only one fault to find with them--they would salute him when he was in his dressing-gown! It is not clear whether Edwards’ party were present at the historic scene of Dhuleep Singh’s deposition at Lahore, but they acted nominally as guard of honour, but virtually as escort to this important prisoner on his journey to Meerut. In the cold weather of 1850 the regiment was ordered back to Calcutta; from Allahabad the journey was by river, in flats towed by small steamers. On its arrival it was quartered in Fort William, where, when all outlying detachments had been collected, Colonel Reignolds had under his command a magnificent regiment of eleven hundred and five officers and men. As it was generally understood that the Royal Irish would be ordered home in a few months, many officers obtained leave of absence and started for England under the firm impression that for some time there would be no more fighting in the East.[146] But the truth of the saying “You never know your luck” has seldom been better illustrated than in the case of the XVIIIth at the beginning of 1852, when the regiment found itself hurried off to take part in an expedition to Burma.
The causes of this war, the second which the Burmese had forced upon us in the course of thirty years, were almost identical with those which had brought about the conflict with China, described in the preceding chapter. Persistent disregard of treaties and systematic oppression of European traders had culminated in maltreatment of British subjects so flagrant that our Government was compelled to seek redress by arms; and in each theatre of war the prestige of Britain was re-established by the combined efforts of both branches of the Service. The dissensions between England and the King of Ava, as the ruler of Burma was officially described, were brought to a climax by the misconduct of one of his lieutenants, the governor of Rangoon, who wantonly imprisoned the master of a British ship, and exposed him in the stocks to the gibes and insults of an Eastern rabble. When a squadron demanded reparation for this outrage the Burmese temporised, but soon so clearly showed they did not mean to mend their ways that the commodore seized a Burmese ship-of-war and blockaded the port of Rangoon. The truculent governor retaliated by confiscating the property of all British subjects within his reach; and the sailors thereupon towed their prize to sea under a heavy fire from the stockades on the banks of the Rangoon river. When this news reached Calcutta the Indian Government at once ordered a combined naval and military expedition[147] to rendezvous at the mouth of the branch of the Irrawaddy on which Rangoon stands, and on January 19, 1852, Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds with the headquarters and right wing of the regiment (444 all told) embarked at Calcutta, followed in a few weeks by Lieutenant-Colonel C. J. Coote with the left wing, 518 strong.[148] This was not the first time that the sails of a great British expedition had whitened Burmese waters. In 1824, the King of Ava had invaded the territories of the East India Company, an act of unprovoked aggression punished by the capture of Rangoon, and followed by a long series of operations, in which a very large number of the British troops perished of disease before the Burmese sued for peace, and ceded to us the provinces of Aracan and Tenasserim, long narrow strips of territory washed respectively by the waters of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Rangoon was restored to the King of Ava, and with it two hundred miles of coast-line that lay like a wedge between our new dominions.[149]
In the first phase of the campaign of 1852-53, the operations were chiefly confined to the capture of important towns near the mouths of the great rivers which, rising in the Himalayas, flow through the swamps and forests of Burma on their way to the Indian Ocean. The war-steamers forced their way up the streams and engaged the stockades and other defences on the banks; while the soldiers landed, stormed these works, and then, pushing forward into the jungle, carried the towns by assault. While the operations were confined to the immediate neighbourhood of rivers and navigable creeks no question of land transport arose, but when it became necessary to send columns of troops deep into the interior of the country, the innumerable difficulties of fighting in a pathless and tropical jungle at once made themselves felt. The ships could indeed bring stores to the point on the river from which the column struck inland; they could hold a base upon which the troops could fall back in case of need; but there the power of the navy ceased. The wants of the soldiers could only be supplied by bullock-carts or elephants, and the long lines of transport animals had to wind their way through a densely wooded country, admirably suited to the guerilla tactics of surprises and ambuscades. Like the Chinese, the Burmans though brave as individuals were undisciplined as soldiers, and as a rule preferred to fight behind ramparts to meeting their enemy in the field. In China the garrisons of the cities waited our attack behind high stone walls; in Burma the defenders of the towns manned huge timber stockades, in the building of which they were very skilful. A nation of woodsmen, with their sharp square-pointed swords they could hew down forest trees and run up timber barricades with extreme rapidity, and when time was allowed them they could produce really formidable fortifications, such as those awaiting the British at Rangoon. These consisted of a substantial rampart, fourteen or fifteen feet high, about twelve feet wide on the top, and revetted within and without by great teak logs placed vertically, with the lower ends sunk in the ground. The intervening space was filled with well-rammed earth. The logs of the outer revetment stretched up some six feet or more above the level of the parapet, every fourth or fifth log being cut some three feet shorter than the others to form loopholes and embrasures. There were many flanking towers; traverses protected the gates; the ditches were deep, often flooded with water, and protected by thick abattis. Guns, varying in calibre from 32-prs. to wall pieces and gingals, were mounted on the parapets. The infantry were armed with flint-lock muskets, many of them old weapons, worn out and sold as scrap iron by the British military authorities.
When the ships containing the Bengal contingent reached the mouth of the Rangoon river on April 2, 1852, Major-General H. Godwin, who was in command of the troops, sent a vessel under a flag of truce to inquire whether any answer had been received from the King of Ava to the letter containing the British demands for redress. The Burmese replied by firing on the flag of truce, and Godwin, not feeling strong enough to attack Rangoon until the Madras contingent had joined him, sailed for the capital of Tenasserim, Moulmein, at that time threatened by the garrison of the neighbouring Burmese city of Martaban. On the morning of the 5th of April the fleet opened fire upon Martaban, and under cover of the bombardment the right wing of the XVIIIth and part of the 80th landed; a storming party, led by the grenadier companies of these two regiments, scaled the wall, and in a short time the place was in our hands. Thanks to the diary of the late Colonel G. A. Elliot, then a subaltern in the Royal Irish, interesting particulars have been preserved of this little fight, in which the younger men in the regiment were in action for the first time. Under a heavy but badly directed fire the grenadiers dashed across the twenty yards of ground between the water’s edge and the main defence of the city, a thick wall fifteen feet high and about eight hundred yards in length. Here the enemy’s bullets began to take effect among the Royal Irish. Colonel Elliot writes that--
“Private Fergusson received three in his left arm, and died of his wounds,[150] John Donovan two in his left hand, Coleman one through his left arm. We ran up and got close under the wall in extended order; the General was seen to take off his hat and give a cheer, which our men returned and then quickly sprung up the wall, (which was overgrown with shrubs) and rushed upon the Burmese, who quickly retired to some jungle, whence they fired, though without much effect. While surmounting the wall one of our officers noticed a man in the regiment get on to the top and look intently into a large bush below him. Still gazing intently, he loosed a brick, flung it down into the bush, raised his musket and shot a Burmese who had been hiding there in cover. We then advanced, and joining part of the 80th, and one of our own companies, skirmished up one of the hills enclosed by the wall, driving the Burmese before us, and charging them whenever they appeared in numbers. The hill was very steep, and obstacles existed in the shape of felled trees with branches pointing downwards. At the top was a Pagoda, surrounded by a wall mounted with gingals, but as there was no resistance, the men rested here for an hour in the shade. We then moved down a lane which led towards the next hill; after advancing about two hundred yards we came to an open space where the bullets began to fly over our heads from the hill in front. The men halted, and Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds, XVIIIth, who was acting Brigadier, halted for reinforcements: ... but as soon as the Burmese saw that we had stopped, they began shouting and challenging us to come on, and after a while they poured down the hill towards us. Colonel Reignolds now allowed the men to charge, and with a cheer they dashed forward. The enemy ran back to a wall on the top of the hill and began a badly aimed fire; Glesson, Grenadier Company was struck in the mouth. The enemy evacuated the hill.”
After clearing a third hill the detachment whose fortunes Elliot has described joined the main body, and as the enemy were completely routed all marched back to the beach. The casualties in this affair were eight wounded, seven of whom were men of the Royal Irish; but many soldiers were struck down by the sun, a warning, unhappily disregarded, against the folly of wearing in the tropics the same uniform as that in use in the United Kingdom. In the despatch describing the capture of Martaban the following officers of the regiment were mentioned, viz., Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds; Captain A. N. Campbell, on whom devolved the command of the wing when Reignolds was ordered to act as Brigadier; and Captain A. Gillespie, grenadier company, who was the first man over the enemy’s fortifications.
Godwin had now secured the safety of Moulmein; and leaving a small garrison in Martaban, he returned with the greater part of his force to the Rangoon river, where the Madras contingent and reinforcements from Bengal awaited him. Among the latter was the left wing of the Royal Irish, who since its arrival had been employed with the Navy in destroying the stockades at the mouth of the river. On the 10th of April the fleet began to move up-stream, and next morning the steamers were in their appointed positions, ready to bombard the works which defended the landing-places giving access to Rangoon. The Burmese opened fire; the sailors replied with energy, and the cannonade continued till late in the day, when landing parties, among whom were detachments of the XVIIIth, stormed the stockades; and driving away the enemy, cleared the way for the disembarkation of the main body. Though General Godwin had served in the first expedition to Burma, his recollections of the topography of Rangoon would have been misleading had they not been supplemented by information supplied by a British trader, from whom he learned that since the war of 1824-26 part of the town had been abandoned and lay in ruins; a new quarter had sprung up, and the fortifications had been remodelled to meet the fresh conditions. Rangoon was now built in a rough square, with sides about three-quarters of a mile in length, surrounded by deep ditches, and walls sixteen feet high and eight feet thick. In the works was included the Shwe Dagon, turned into a citadel by the mounting of cannon upon the three tiers of huge terraces which support the foundations of this great pagoda. From the landing-places on the river to the gate in the southern wall is about a mile and a quarter; and the Burmese, remembering that in the first war we had marched by that road, concluded that the tactics of 1826 would be repeated in 1852, and concentrated the greater part of their artillery and about ten thousand troops on the southern section of the defences. Godwin, however, completely upset this scheme of defence by declining to attack where he was so obviously expected.
Early on the 12th of April the right column--composed of the XVIIIth, 51st, the 40th Bengal Native Infantry, two guns of the Madras Artillery, and a detachment of the Madras Sappers and Miners--landed, with a day’s cooked rations and sixty rounds of ammunition on their persons; by 7 A.M. they were advancing on an outwork, known as the “White House stockade,” which obstructed their path through the jungle. The field-guns, escorted by the grenadier and Light companies of the XVIIIth, shelled it till the 51st were ordered to the assault; the other companies of the regiment were following in support, when they were suddenly ordered to halt, and to crowd into the jungle to clear the track for the Madras Sappers and the parties of bluejackets and European soldiers who carried the scaling ladders, then urgently required at the front. Some of the Royal Irish had been detailed for this duty, which proved a dangerous one, as out of the four men of the regiment told off to the first ladder three were wounded. This delay threw the Royal Irish “out of the hunt,” and by the time they reached the stockade the 51st had stormed and occupied it. At this point General Godwin was forced to call a halt: five of the senior officers had been struck down by solar apoplexy, two of them fatally; many of the men lay on the ground senseless from sunstroke; all ranks were worn out by the overpowering heat, and he was forced to bivouac on the ground he had gained. From papers left by Colonel, then Lieutenant, C. Woodwright, XVIIIth, it appears that during the afternoon, while the Royal Irish were slaking their thirst at wells discovered in the jungle, a number of Burmese stalked the covering parties, surprised them by a heavy fire, and occupied a pagoda, from which they directed an annoying fusilade on the watering-place. While other portions of the regiment drove back the enemy’s skirmishers, Woodwright’s company was ordered to seize the pagoda: this was accomplished successfully, though with the loss of Colour-Sergeant Kelly and several men seriously wounded. Twice in the night the Burmese attempted to rush the bivouac of the Royal Irish, but were driven back by a few rounds of canister from light field-guns.
For more than forty hours General Godwin was unable to advance. His commissariat officers were very slow in issuing rations to replace the one-day’s supply carried by the troops; the gunners were equally slow in landing and transporting to the front the four 8-in. howitzers, on which he relied to make a breach in the defences of Rangoon; and it was not until 5 A.M. on the 14th that the column was again in motion. The XVIIIth and the 40th Bengal Native Infantry led, followed by the 51st and the 35th Madras Native Infantry; the 80th were in charge of the guns, and a Madras Native Infantry regiment kept up communication with the ships in the river. Working slowly through jungle so thick that paths had to be cut for the passage of the guns, Godwin avoided the enemy’s main stockades; but as his leading troops came within sight of the great pagoda, the guns on its terraces opened fire. Opposite the gate in the eastern wall, by which he proposed to force his way into Rangoon, the ground was so difficult that there was barely room for the XVIIIth and the 80th to form up in quarter columns, while they halted till the guns had made a practicable breach. The Burmese artillery played upon the easy target offered to them, and their skirmishers became so bold that five hundred muskets were required to keep them at a respectful distance from the main body of the infantry. The situation was becoming impossible when it was discovered that the gate had been opened, presumably to afford a safe retreat to the Burmese soldiers who were harassing our flanks. Godwin determined to assault forthwith, and placed Lieutenant-Colonel Coote in command of a storming party, composed of two companies of the Royal Irish, the wing of the 80th, and part of the 40th B.N.I. Under a galling fire, the column moved with great steadiness across a shallow valley, half a mile in width, and swept like a tidal wave over terrace after terrace until the Shwe Dagon was won. Then the Burmese broke and fled in panic, losing heavily in their retreat, especially at a point where part of the grenadier company of the Royal Irish fell upon them in flank with the bayonet, and in a short time Rangoon was in our hands. In the British land forces the casualties between the 11th and the 14th of April were a hundred and forty-five--two officers were killed and fourteen wounded; fifteen of the other ranks were killed, and a hundred and fourteen wounded. Nearly a third of these losses fell upon the Royal Irish: Lieutenant and Adjutant R. Doran, pierced by four bullets, fell mortally wounded at the foot of the pagoda;[151] Lieutenant-Colonel Coote, Captain W. T. Bruce, and Lieutenant G. A. Elliot were wounded; a sergeant and two privates were killed, a sergeant, a drummer, and thirty-seven privates wounded.[152] In his despatch General Godwin mentions four officers of the Royal Irish--Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds, who was in temporary command of a brigade, Lieutenant-Colonel Coote, Captain G. F. S. Call (Brigade Major), and Captain J. J. Wood, who brought the regiment out of action.
For the next few months the XVIIIth lay sweltering at Rangoon, where General Godwin was obliged to await the arrival of reinforcements before undertaking further operations on a large scale. During this period of enforced inaction life was by no means agreeable: the heat was intense, the labour of hut-building severe, the duties heavy, and there was much sickness among the troops. Two small expeditions pushed out north and west--the first occupied the town of Pegu; the second captured the city of Bassein, important as commanding one of the three navigable mouths of the Irrawaddy. In neither of these enterprises did the Royal Irish play any part. Their only “outing” at this time seems to have been a two-days’ hunt after a Burmese official whom the General was anxious to take prisoner. After hard marching they had their quarry almost within their grasp, when he disappeared into the jungle, leaving in their hands a string of carts laden with his numerous wives. In August it became known that the King of Ava, by no means disheartened by the loss of Rangoon and the other towns we had wrested from him, was gathering large forces near Prome, two hundred miles up the Irrawaddy. After a flotilla of gunboats had destroyed the stockades on the banks of the river near that town, Godwin determined to occupy it, to serve as an advanced base in the movement upon Ava, which he awaited the permission of Government to begin. When the long-expected reinforcements began to arrive, the Royal Irish found themselves in a division commanded by Sir John Cheape. The first brigade was under Lieutenant-Colonel Reignolds, and consisted of the XVIIIth, and the 40th and 67th Native Infantry regiments. Two officers of the Royal Irish were on the staff: Captain G. F. S. Call was Brigade Major to Reignolds’ brigade, Captain W. T. Bruce was Assistant Adjutant-General to the first division. This organisation, however, appears to have been merely one on paper, for in September Godwin announced to the troops that he was about to resume active operations, and warned the XVIIIth, the 80th, and the 35th Madras Native Infantry to hold themselves in readiness to embark under command of Brigadier-General Reignolds. These regiments, with some Artillery and Sappers and Miners, disembarked with slight opposition at Prome on the 9th of October, and on marching a short way inland found that the Burmese had disappeared. In the landing there were a few casualties, none of them among the Royal Irish; but that night the young soldiers of the regiment had a stern lesson in outpost duty--one of their comrades, who allowed himself to be surprised on sentry, was killed, and his head sent as a trophy to the King of Ava. While troops were being gradually passed up the river to Prome, the Burmese attacked our garrison in Pegu, and a considerable force had to be sent to the rescue, but the XVIIIth was not employed either in the relief of Pegu, or in the operations of a column sent to clear the jungles round Martaban.
For many months it continued to form part of the garrison of Prome, which was invested by the Burmese, who surrounded the place with stockades, thrown up in the jungle, a mile or two beyond our outposts. In November three companies helped to destroy one of these works, whose defenders had been active in intercepting supplies brought in by friendly natives. Later in the month two companies under Brevet-Major Edwards were sent on a much longer expedition; they formed the British contingent in a small column sent to rid the districts of Khangheim and Padaung of the enemy. Crossing to the right bank they worked up-stream, and at first met with little opposition, though they were “sniped at” by night. “On one occasion the watering-place was surrounded by a small party, and several sepoys who had gone there to fill their drinking-vessels were killed or wounded. The column passed the spot where a few days before the Captain of a native regiment with a small body of his men was surprised by the Burmese, and the place where they were beheaded was still plainly discernible by the blood-stains on the stones. The heads of the Captain and two men had been sent to Ava; their bodies were left on the banks of the river till buried by the English.”[153] The senior officer of the column broke down in health; Edwards succeeded to the command; and from the Digest of Service it appears that after several successful skirmishes he drove the Burmese into a place called Tomah, where he hemmed them in until March, 1853, when reinforcements of all arms enabled him to storm their stockade, and capture their guns, stores, and bullock-carts. During a lull in these operations Major Edwards was sent on a difficult, but interesting piece of work--to lead a small column to the top of the Tonghoo pass over the Yo-Ma range of mountains between Burma and Aracan, and there take charge of a hundred and forty-eight elephants, sent from India by the Governor-General to reinforce the transport of the army. Edwards’ command was composed of a hundred of the XVIIIth under Major Borrow, the same number of the 80th, two hundred Sikhs, and a few Madras Sappers and Miners, with three thousand coolies to carry the supplies and drive the slaughter cattle. All went well till the column began to ascend the foothills of the main range, when the coolies, frightened at the steep, jungle-covered slopes, flung down their loads and deserted in a body. As the European troops could carry but a portion of the stores, they soon ran out of tea, biscuit, and spirits, and had to fall back upon beef-on-the-hoof, and for many days had nothing to eat but meat; to the Sikhs, whose religion debared them from animal food, a small quantity of grain was supplied. A day or two after this breakdown of the transport the guides confessed that they had lost their way, so Edwards decided to work upwards, along the course of the streams that furrowed the mountain-side. Slowly but sturdily the troops breasted the hills; by day they hacked paths through the jungle; by night they slept in clothing soaked in many fords and torrents. Yet such was the stamina of the Europeans that during the expedition not one fell ill, and they outmarched the Sikhs, who broke down and had to be left behind. After nineteen days of this tremendous strain Edwards reached the rendezvous; the elephants had not yet come up, but a large supply of rice had already arrived, and his troops, eager for vegetable food, pounced on it with delight. In a few days the elephants lumbered up the pass, loaded with commissariat stores of every kind, on which the men feasted, while the animals rested after their climb. Then the long column of men and beasts crashed downwards through the forest and reached Padaung, on the Irrawaddy, in less than a quarter of the time occupied in the upward march. Official thanks were given to all ranks when the convoy of elephants was handed over to the transport department, and a month’s extra batta was granted to those who had taken part in the expedition.
The account of the doings of the XVIIIth at the front must now be broken by Lord Wolseley’s description of his first meeting with the regiment of which he is now the honoured Colonel-in-Chief. As a callow subaltern in the 80th, quite new to the practical side of war, he found himself at Rangoon in charge of a piquet, composed in part of very young soldiers of the XVIIIth, who had been left at the base under command of Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Grattan. These youngsters were not yet disciplined; they had been greatly amused at the young officer’s attempts to march his detachment to its post, and three of them, carried away by their high spirits, took liberties and refused to number off in the way he ordered. Wolseley promptly made prisoners of the culprits, and next morning
“had to appear at the Orderly Room of the Royal Irish detachment. It was a little room in a small teak-built hut, and there Colonel Grattan, C.B., of that historic regiment, daily dispensed justice to his young recruits. He was an old and amusing Irishman, full of quaint stories, and a very pleasant companion. Taken prisoner in the China War, he had been carried about in a cage as a show for the amusement of millions who had never before seen a European. His smiling face and grotesque grimaces always obtained for him a favourable reception. He greeted me pleasantly when I entered the orderly room, where--I may explain for Civilian readers--the Commanding Officer of every regiment and battalion in the Army holds a daily court to administer justice all round. Three prisoners from Tipperary were marched in bare-headed, and were drawn up facing the Colonel, who sat, pen in hand, behind a little table which separated them from him. A Corporal and a file of the guard, with drawn bayonets, stood beside the culprits, an acting Sergeant-Major, standing as all the others were, at ‘Attention’, made up the stage. A solemn silence that somewhat awed me pervaded the scene, and my shyness became greater when the funny-looking colonel addressing me, asked me sternly what complaint I had to make against the prisoners. I told my story as best I could, being extremely impressed by what I believed to be the gravity of the offence. My military reading and study of the Mutiny Act and Articles of War had led me to believe that, next to striking an officer or running away in battle, these prisoners had committed the most heinous offence in absolutely refusing to obey a lawful command when on outpost duty before the enemy. I expected they would be at once sent to trial before a general court martial, and either sentenced to death, or if their lives were spared in consideration of their youth and entire ignorance of a soldier’s duty, they would at least be transported.
“When I had finished my awful indictment, the Colonel with his funny little grey eyes, frowned from under his long grey eyebrows, first at me and then in sternness at the boy prisoners before him. There was an awful pause; you could have heard a pin drop if any one there had had such an evidence of civilization ready for the occasion. I held my breath, not knowing what was coming. I looked at the Sergeant-Major; his face was wooden and devoid of all expression as he stolidly looked straight before him into nothing. In a moment a volley of oaths from the Colonel removed the atmospheric pressure. He called the prisoners ‘limbs of Satan,’ and choking, partly at least I should say because his vituperative vocabulary had come to an end, he jumped to his feet, upsetting the table, with its ink bottle, papers, etc., and rushed upon the prisoners, kicking hard at the nearest, and crying aloud: ‘Get out, ye blackguards; never let me see you again.’ Whether it was that the prisoners were accustomed to this mode of justice and, being frightened, were anxious to avoid the toes of their Colonel’s boots as he lashed out at them or not, they turned round and ran for their lives, the Sergeant-Major after them, with their caps, which he had been holding--according to regulation--whilst this strangely scenic trial was being enacted.
“I was in dismay, and for a moment thought of running too, but seeing the old Colonel burst out laughing, I tried to smile, but it was an unhealthy attempt at hilarity on my part. However, being assured the men would never forget the scene or misbehave again, I went away feeling rather that I had been the culprit, and had only escaped condign punishment through consideration of my youth and complete ignorance of all military customs and laws. I don’t know whether these three boys from Tipperary retained a lasting remembrance--as I did--of the curious mode of administering justice, but I am sure their Colonel’s conduct was far more in consonance with their views of propriety, and far better suited to the case, than any sentence of imprisonment and trial by court martial would have been. I laugh now as I think of the whole scene, and as I do so, I feel all the more how necessary it is that Irish soldiers should have Irish officers over them, who understand their curiously Eastern character, and who are consequently better able to deal with them than strangers can.”[154]
Until the middle of February, 1853, the headquarter companies at Prome had a weary time. Sickness was rampant; in a letter written at the end of November, 1852, an officer of the XVIIIth mentions that the regiment could only turn out 350 men fit to take the field. Ninety men had been buried at Rangoon, where cholera broke out a few hours after the capture of the great Pagoda; for a month the Royal Irish had been dying at the rate of almost one a day; 137 were in hospital; large numbers had broken down and been invalided out of the country. The other regiments were equally unhealthy, and out of the whole garrison of Prome the General could only count on some 900 effectives, whose numbers were daily reduced by the ravages of climate and by the strain of the guards and piquets, which, though cut down as low as safety permitted, told severely upon the troops who remained at duty. The only break in this harassing and monotonous existence was afforded by occasional reconnaissances and night attacks, in which the enemy showed themselves more anxious to murder and decapitate individual men than to close with any formed body of soldiers. Suddenly four companies of the Royal Irish were warned for an expedition to clear the line of communication, which was harassed by Myat Toon, a robber chieftain, who from his lair near Donobyu attacked the native boats in our employ on their way up the Irrawaddy with provisions for the front. The village of Donobyu was about fifty miles above Rangoon; it was connected with the Irrawaddy by a network of creeks, and surrounded by dense jungle, almost impassable from deep nullahs full of water, which cut up the ground in every direction. In this jungle Myat Toon had fortified many positions, formidable in themselves, and most difficult of access to Europeans. The sailors had made several spirited attempts to penetrate into this labyrinth, but their boats were unable to pass the barricades of logs and forest trees with which the waterways had been obstructed; and a combined force of bluejackets and soldiers, acting on land under a post-captain in the navy, was surprised and defeated with the loss of two guns. The army was now to take in hand the punishment of the seven or eight thousand guerillas who followed the fortunes of Myat Toon, and General Godwin selected Sir John Cheape to lead the avenging force, composed of a small body of Irregular Native cavalry, detachments of Madras Sappers and Madras and Bengal Artillery with one 24-pr. howitzer and a 9-pr. field-gun, two hundred of the XVIIIth under Captain A. W. F. S. Armstrong,[155] two hundred of the 51st, two hundred Sikhs, and the 67th Bengal Native Infantry regiment. Major F. Wigston, XVIIIth, was in charge of the right wing of the column, with Lieutenant F. Eteson, XVIIIth, as his staff-officer. Descending the river to within thirty-five miles of Donobyu, Cheape disembarked at Henzada, a village where a number of country bullock-carts awaited him. As he was led to believe that three or four days’ march would bring him to Myat Toon’s stockades, he decided to fill up his transport with seven or eight days’ rations, dash on his enemy, defeat him, and then hasten back to the steamers. Leaving behind him the sick, who, though it was barely a week since he left Prome, were already numerous, he plunged into an unknown country, where his guides proved useless, his information defective and misleading. He could not find the main body of Myat Toon’s men, though skirmishing dacoits hung on his flanks, and in four days he was obliged to fall back to the river for supplies. He now transferred his base to Donobyu, which was known to have been evacuated by the enemy, and sending his empty carts there by land under escort of a party of the XVIIIth, he re-embarked with the remainder of his troops for Donobyu, where he remained till the 7th of March, when the native regiment joined him, and with it a draft of recruits for the 80th and a large supply of commissariat stores. After providing for the safety of his base and of another batch of sick men, General Cheape started on his second hunt for Myat Toon, whose entrenchments he was again assured could be reached in three days. Now began a campaign, short in duration, but harassing beyond measure to the troops engaged in it. The soldiers had to feel their way along narrow paths, often obstructed by trees cut down across the track by foes, who rarely showed themselves by day, though they disturbed the bivouac by sniping shots at night. To bridge the nullahs took much time and labour; the burden of guarding the transport carts was heavy; the heat was steamy, exhausting, and depressing; fog hung over the face of the land until several hours after sunrise; the water was tainted, and cholera broke out among the men. Then rations began to run short, and the column was obliged to halt four days in this pestilential forest while a convoy brought up fresh supplies from Donobyu. After forming an advance base for his spare stores and the sick and wounded, Cheape once more pushed forward, and on the 17th the right wing came upon traces of the enemy, who had blocked the track with a series of abattis and recently felled trees. The Royal Irish were leading, for Wigston, remembering that it was St Patrick’s Day and anxious to do honour to the occasion, had detailed them as advance-guard to give them every chance of a fight, if the Burmese would so far oblige them. After they had turned these obstacles, or cut their way through them, they ran against a stockade held by Myat Toon’s followers, and with a wild yell dashed at the work, which with the help of the Sikhs they carried “most gallantly” at the point of the bayonet.[156] The defenders did not wait for the cold steel, but after firing up to the last moment bolted into the jungle. One man, however, lingered too long over his parting shot, and was pursued by two subalterns, Hewitt and Eteson, who gave chase down the bed of a dry watercourse. Hewitt slipped and fell; Eteson succeeded in running his quarry down, and was rewarded by obtaining from his prisoner much useful information about the enemy’s main position. In this little affair Lieutenant Woodwright and five rank and file were wounded. Next day there was sharp skirmishing before the approach of darkness forced Cheape to halt on a narrow path, leading towards the village reported to be the headquarters of Myat Toon. Very soon after the piquets had been posted and the bivouac formed, the fog fell so heavily as to render reconnaissance very difficult, but when the outposts reported that the enemy was busy felling trees and completing the defences of his position, Lieutenant Eteson, three officers of the Sikhs, and three Sepoys stole forward, ascertained where the enemy was at work, and then returning to the General, described the place with sufficient accuracy to enable the gunners to fire rockets at it with some effect.
At the first glimmer of dawn on the 19th of March, our scouts began to grope their way down a wet nullah close to the bivouac, and followed it to its junction with a large creek, where the sound of voices warned them that the Burmese were at hand. Creeping from tree to tree, the reconnoitrers reached the edge of the creek, and peering through the gloom dimly discerned Myat Toon’s works on the farther bank. The position was a strong one: the creek served as a moat to a line of cleverly built breastworks, well loopholed, and protected by abattis; the left rested on an impassable swamp; the right ended in a dense thicket. As far as the scouts could see, the enemy’s front was about a quarter of a mile long; but its prolongations into the jungle really gave it a length of twelve hundred yards. Cheape would gladly have turned the enemy’s right by a flank march; but to do so he would have had to cut a road through thick jungle, and the condition of the troops precluded his imposing so heavy a task upon them, for though their spirit was high, their bodies were enfeebled by the effect of scanty food and bad water, while their numbers had been much reduced by the ravages of dysentery and cholera. There was nothing for it but a frontal attack; slowly and in silence he moved towards the creek, and then under cover of the fog marched along its bank within a hundred yards of the Burmese stockades. For a time this processional movement was not discovered, for Myat Toon, convinced that the British would not leave their bivouac till the sun had dispelled the fog, had taken no precautions against surprise; then suddenly a rolling fire burst from the whole face of the works; to meet it, the Sikhs were extended along our bank of the nullah, while the remainder of the troops fell back into the jungle to form for battle. Thus began an engagement as confused as the ground on which it was fought. At first a musketry duel raged across the creek; then scouting parties, or, as we should now call them, battle patrols, ascertained that opposite the enemy’s right of the line of stockades the creek ran dry, and was crossed by a track, which proved to have been prepared for defence: large forest trees had been felled across it; it was swept with grape from the two guns captured from the navy, flanked by a detached work, and pitted with trous-de-loup. A storming party was hastily organised; and the detachment of the 80th attempted to force its way across to the other side of the creek, but being inadequately supported, failed in its object. Then the Royal Irish and the Sikhs tried to push through the dense belt of jungle on the right of the Burmese line, but could not pass the abattis and detached breastworks hidden in its thickets. Finally, the General decided that at all costs the track must be won and the stockades near it carried at the point of the bayonet. The troops, as may well be imagined, were by this time greatly scattered, and while the buglers were rallying the infantry, the Bengal artillerymen, with the help of stragglers from the British detachments, dragged their 24-pr. howitzer into action only twenty-five yards from the enemy, and covered the concentration of the foot soldiers by a destructive storm of canister. In this episode Private ---- Connors, Royal Irish, greatly distinguished himself. Early in the fight a Burmese bullet had broken his left arm; he made his way to the doctor, had the broken limb temporarily bound up, and then under heavy fire helped to run the howitzer up to the front, tugging at the spokes of a wheel with his right arm. At length a number of men from the XVIIIth, 51st, and 80th were collected, and, guided by Ensign Wolseley, charged down the track yelling at their enemies, who manned the parapets and shouted defiantly, “Come on, Come on!” to them in Burmese. This is not the place to describe how Wolseley led his mixed command, nor how he was struck down, hard hit, at the moment of victory; his personal adventures in this charge, the second he led during the engagement, are narrated in the first volume of his Autobiography. It is enough to say that the troops advanced with determination, swept over the works, and killed and wounded large numbers of the four thousand men opposed to them. Those of the Royal Irish who took part in the final rush were well to the front: Lieutenant W. P. Cockburn fell desperately wounded as he scaled a stockade; Lieutenant Eteson was one of the first into the main work; and a party, led by Lieutenant Woodwright, recaptured the two naval guns, and marked the number of the regiment upon them with a rusty nail.
Cheape’s success would have been complete if he had been able to secure Myat Toon; but the Chief escaped with his life, though with little else, for he was compelled to abandon all his supplies and munitions of war. To follow him farther into the jungle was impossible, for the health of the column was so bad that the General was obliged to return to Donobyu, and thence to Prome where his steamers anchored on April 2. The operations against Myat Toon had been costly; the losses in action were one hundred and thirty, while cholera alone caused more than a hundred deaths. Most of the casualties occurred on the 19th of March, when eleven men were killed and eighty-four officers and men wounded. In the Royal Irish regiment Lieutenant W. F. Cockburn died of his injuries; Major F. Wigston was severely wounded; a corporal and eight men were killed; a sergeant and twenty-six men wounded; three colour-sergeants and eleven men died of cholera;[157] and the health of the whole detachment was so much affected that on landing at Prome only twenty-two officers and men remained fit for duty. Major F. Wigston, Captain A. W. F. S. Armstrong, and Captain W. T. Bruce were mentioned in despatches.
The regiment was not again in action during the Burmese war, as negotiations for peace put a stop to all further operations in the field. The province of Pegu was annexed to England, and as soon as the new territory settled down, the XVIIIth was ordered to Calcutta, arrived there at the end of November 1853, and a few weeks later embarked for home.
In recognition of their services Majors F. Wigston and C. A. Edwards were awarded brevet-lieutenant-colonelcies, and Captains A. N. Campbell and W. T. Bruce brevet majorities. A medal and clasp was issued to all ranks, and the word “Pegu” was added to the battle honours of the regiment. The losses of the Royal Irish in this campaign were enormous. When they returned to India their roll had been reduced by three hundred and sixty-five officers and men, of whom but few had been killed in action or died of wounds; the remainder had fallen victims to the diseases which rendered the swamps and jungles of Burma fatal to Europeans.[158] The names of the officers who perished in Burma are recorded on the memorial at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Chapter VII
1854-1856.
THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA.
When the Royal Irish reached England in June, 1854, after a six months’ voyage from Calcutta, they were greeted by the news that for the first time since Waterloo Britain had become embroiled in a European war, and in alliance with France had sent troops to protect Turkey against the Russians, who had invaded the part of the Sultan’s dominions then known as the Danubian principalities. The Czar had long cast covetous eyes on Turkey, whose European provinces on the Ægean and the Sea of Marmora prevented the expansion of Russia towards the Mediterranean, and thus limited her seaboard to the Baltic and the Black Sea. In the middle of the nineteenth century Turkey appeared to be so decadent a country that its ruler was commonly described as “the sick man”; the Czar actually threw out suggestions to England that she should divide with him “the sick man’s heritage,” and on her indignant refusal he determined to bide his time and pick a quarrel with the Sultan on the first opportunity. A pretext soon presented itself in a dispute between the Greek and Latin branches of the Christian faith concerning their respective rights in the Holy Places of Jerusalem: the Czar hotly espoused the cause of the Greek Church, while the Emperor Napoleon III., reviving the historic claim of France to represent the Latin Church in Palestine, vigorously supported the views of the Roman Catholics. The Sultan, profoundly indifferent to the rivalries of those whom his religion taught him to regard as infidel dogs, attempted to propitiate both sides, but with such conspicuous ill-success that the Czar declared war against him in October, 1853, and invaded the Turkish provinces on the Danube. To defend Turkey against this wanton and unprovoked attack, England and France in the spring of 1854 landed a considerable number of troops at Varna, a Bulgarian port on the Black Sea. It was from no love of the Turks that England thus plunged into war with Russia: she took up arms in pursuance of the foreign policy which for centuries she has followed on the Continent, and sided with the weaker state--not on altruistic grounds but solely to preserve the balance of power in Europe, and to prevent the Czar from possessing himself of Constantinople, and thus obtaining direct access to the Mediterranean Sea.
The Anglo-French troops were still at Varna when, in the interests of peace, Austria brought such pressure upon the Czar that he recalled his armies from Turkish soil. But though the immediate danger to Constantinople was averted by this intervention, the governments of England and France agreed that there would be no safety for Turkey, and therefore no tranquillity in European politics, until the Russian fleet in the Black Sea had been captured or destroyed, and its base at Sebastopol levelled to the ground. When the demolition of this great naval station was thus determined on, the allies knew little of Sebastopol,[159] except that it was a fortress in the south of the Crimea, a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea from the mainland of Russia: and no soldier in western Europe had any conception of the difficulties awaiting the Anglo-French Expedition when it put to sea from Varna on September 7, 1854. Exclusive of the crews of the great fleet of warships by which the transports were escorted, the fighting men numbered about 63,000, of whom 28,000 were French, 7000 Turks, and 28,000 British. The French were under Marshal St Arnaud; Lord Raglan, who had served on Wellington’s staff in the Peninsular war, commanded the British troops. Neither of these officers lived to see the end of the campaign: St Arnaud died in September, 1854, and was succeeded by General Canrobert who, after a few months, resigned his post to General Pélissier: Lord Raglan fell a victim to cholera at the end of June, 1855, and was replaced by General Simpson. The Turks were commanded by Omar Pasha.
The effort to collect and equip for war the comparatively small body of men forming the British quota of the combined forces had greatly taxed the military resources of England. After the fall of the great Napoleon had restored peace to Europe, enormous reductions had been made in our military expenditure;[160] not only was the personnel of the army cut down, but the matériel was allowed to fall into decay. For more than thirty years every arm and every department of the service was systematically starved, with results well summed up by Lord Palmerston, who in 1846 bluntly informed his colleagues in the Cabinet that our military weakness was such that England existed “only by sufferance and by the forbearance of other Powers.” This opinion was endorsed by the highest authority in the British army, for Wellington himself acknowledged that our supply of guns, arms, ammunition, and all kinds of stores was inadequate. Nor were these grievous shortcomings atoned for by any high standard of efficiency amongst the troops, for though the drill and discipline of the army were alike excellent, neither the soldiers nor the departments vital to their existence in the field were trained in the slightest degree for active service; indeed, until 1853, when a few thousand men spent some weeks under canvas, no camp of exercise had been formed in England since the end of the Great War with France. Marksmanship was almost a lost art; and although the deadly volleys of the British infantry in the Peninsula had won for our troops the reputation of the best shots in Europe, musketry was so entirely neglected during the dead period after Waterloo, that the injunction “Fire low, and hit ’em in the legs, boys,” was the only instruction given to recruits. Even in the Foot Guards the men were considered to be masters of their weapon if, once in every three years, they fired thirty rounds of ball cartridge. The military education of the officers was no better than that of the rank and file; there was no attempt to teach them anything beyond barrack-square drill; the vast majority grew up ignorant of every detail of their profession, and as the Staff College at Camberley was not then in existence, the officers selected for employment on the staff proved in the majority of cases to be blind leaders of the blind. The few veterans of the Peninsula who were still to be found among the Generals had seen war on a grand scale; the officers who had served in eastern and colonial campaigns had acquired much useful knowledge in these distant operations, but with these exceptions the Staff and regimental officers were as untrained in the practice, as they were unversed in the theory of war.
When the Royal Irish reached England they were quartered at Chatham and Canterbury. At first there seemed no likelihood of their being actively employed, for when the regiment had left India many men had volunteered into other corps, and the climate of Burma had told so heavily on those who still remained with the Colours that a large number of them were unfit for active service. Fortune, however, befriended the XVIIIth; in October the flank companies under Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Edwards were ordered to Windsor, to strengthen the militia battalion which had replaced the regiment of Foot Guards at the Royal Castle. Her Majesty, Queen Victoria was much impressed by the bronzed and soldierly appearance of the detachment, and learning from Colonel Edwards that the regiment was most anxious to serve in the war, she was pleased to direct that the XVIIIth should proceed forthwith to the Crimea, where reinforcements were urgently required. As the result of the medical examination proved that less than four hundred men were fit for the campaign, volunteers were invited from other regiments: four hundred joined from the 94th, a hundred and fifty from the 51st, and smaller contingents from other corps. On December 8, 1854, the regiment, eight hundred and forty-eight strong,[161] embarked at Portsmouth in the s.s. Magdalene, and reached the Crimea at the end of the year, about three months and a half after the Allies had made good their footing on Russian soil.
To enable the reader to understand the condition of the British Expeditionary Force when the Magdalene steamed into the harbour of Balaclava, it is necessary to give a very short account of the main events of the war up to the end of 1854. Between the 14th and 18th of September the Allies[162] were engaged in landing at Kalamita Bay, about thirty miles north of Sebastopol; two days after their disembarkation was completed they forced the passage of the river Alma, defeating the Russians so completely that they were allowed to march southward without molestation, and to form bases on the coast within a few miles of Sebastopol, the British establishing themselves at Balaclava, a little port eight miles to the south, the French at Kamiesch Bay, six miles to the south-west of the fortress. The Russian stronghold lies on the shores of a harbour, in shape not unlike a T: the top of the letter is represented by an arm of the sea running eastward from the Euxine for about four miles, and varying in width from a thousand to twelve hundred yards, while the leg is formed by a narrow creek which from the south runs into the main inlet, about two miles from the entrance to the open sea. On these deep and sheltered waters the whole of the Russian fleet could ride in safety, protected by a ring of forts from attack by land or sea, and the labours of successive generations of engineers had converted the western shore of the creek, or inner harbour, into a vast arsenal and dockyard, round which a thriving and populous city had sprung up. The Generals of the Anglo-French forces soon ascertained by reconnaissance that they had not nearly men enough to invest the whole perimeter of the fortress, and at the same time to repel the attacks to be expected from the enemy’s field troops. All they could hope to accomplish was to pour upon one portion of the defences a fire so heavy as to become insupportable; and as the real power of the defence was obviously concentrated in the arsenals, stores, and barracks round the inner harbour, the Allies selected the southern works, those protecting the heart of the fortress, as the object of their first attack, and took up positions on the plateau between Balaclava and Sebastopol. Bounded on the north by the harbour, on the west and south by the sea, and on the east by the valley of the Tchernaya, the surface of this plateau, or “Upland” as the British termed it, was seamed by ravines which, beginning as mere depressions in the ground, grew deeper as they approached the fortress, finally becoming precipitous gorges, difficult for troops to cross. Close to the harbour the ground between these gorges rose into gentle elevations, crowned by works which, as soon as the Russians realised that the southern side of the fortress was threatened, were heavily armed and greatly strengthened. The largest of these ravines, dividing the plain from south to north, descended to the head of the inner harbour, and served as the boundary between the British on the right, and the French on the left of the besiegers’ line.
Owing to the inability of the Allies to invest the fortress completely, communication continued uninterrupted between the northern part of Sebastopol and the interior of the Crimea; early in October the civilian population quitted the town, and thus relieved the troops of the burden of feeding thousands of useless non-combatants. The forethought of the Russians had collected in the magazines of Sebastopol enormous supplies of guns, ammunition, and warlike stores; the commissariat was well provided; the garrison consisted of 38,000 men--soldiers, military workmen already partially trained to arms, and sailors from the men-of-war which, at the approach of the Allies, had been sunk to block the mouth of the outer harbour. Among the regular troops was an officer in himself worth an army--Todleben, an engineer who had already made his mark in the fighting on the Danube. When it became known that the Allies were sailing for the Crimea he was sent to Sebastopol, where he became the mainspring of the defence. His courage and genius, his versatility and resource, his boundless energy, his power of inspiring enthusiasm and devotion among his men won for him the deepest respect of his enemies, and the fervent admiration of his fellow countrymen, who with good reason claim for him a high place among great military engineers. He soon had an opportunity of displaying his talents. In the middle of October the Allies opened fire upon the fortress, and at the close of the bombardment had reason to be satisfied with the result, for the works were reduced to shapeless heaps, the batteries ruined, the guns disabled. But next morning the assailants discovered that in Todleben they had to meet a master-mind: during the night he had rebuilt the parapets, repaired the batteries, and replaced the damaged guns from the almost boundless supply of cannon at his command. On the 25th, the Russian Field army, which after its defeat at the Alma had retired into the interior of the Crimea to await reinforcements, made an unsuccessful attempt to break the line of communication between the British camps on the Upland and Balaclava. A few days later the Allies determined to assault the fortress, but their project was discovered by the enemy. At dawn on the 4th of November, the garrison and the field army together attacked the British right; and though after a desperate battle, to which the name of Inkerman has been given, the victory remained to the Allies, it was dearly bought: the British casualties were 597 killed and 1760 wounded, while those of the French were 143 killed and 786 wounded. The Russians on their side lost more than 12,000 men, of whom a very large proportion were left dead upon the field.
So far our army had not fared badly in the campaign: the hardships had not been greater than were to be expected on active service, and reinforcements had filled the gaps caused by casualties and disease. Cholera, indeed, hung about the camp, and the men were undoubtedly overworked, for when the Anglo-French generals drew up their plans for the siege, the share in the operations which Lord Raglan undertook was greater than his troops could accomplish without undue fatigue. But despite sickness and overstrain the health of the army was fairly good, and when, a few days after Inkerman, it was officially announced that the Allies would spend the winter in the Crimea, men looked forward to the prospect without great apprehension, for the weather was fine, and the Indian summer, bright, mild, and dry, gave no hint of the rigours of the coming winter. Suddenly a terrific storm of rain and wind burst upon the Crimea, levelled whole camps and blew the tents, and all that the tents contained, far and wide over the Upland; the supplies of food and forage at the front were destroyed, and communication with Balaclava was temporarily cut off by the force of the hurricane. Had the fleet of store-ships then at anchor at Balaclava, or lying off the port, escaped destruction, the damage, in great measure at least, could have been repaired; but twenty-one vessels were dashed to pieces, and eight more disabled. The ships that went to the bottom contained forage, ammunition, war-like stores of every kind, drugs and surgical appliances, warm flannel shirts and drawers, woollen stockings, boots and watch-coats--everything that the army most urgently required. When fresh supplies arrived at Balaclava from England the means of conveying them to the Upland was utterly inadequate, for we had landed without a transport corps, depending for land carriage on such horses and vehicles as could be seized in the Crimea. The animals thus obtained died fast from want of forage, and in January, 1855, the Commissariat department could only muster 333 horses and mules and 12 camels, while the divisional transport consisted of a few ponies, dying from starvation and overwork. Though horses in plenty were to be bought in the countries near the Crimea, and many transports were available to bring them to Balaclava, it was useless to import animals until forage arrived to feed them, and forage unhappily was an article of which the Treasury had neglected to make an adequate provision. Consequently upon the troops fell the whole labour of carrying on their shoulders from the port to the camps everything that was required, not only for their own support, but for the conduct of the siege. As was to be expected, the men broke down terribly fast; in November there were nearly 17,000 on the sick list; in December there were more than 19,000 ineffectives, and in January, 1855, no less than 23,076 men filled the hospitals. The horrors of this period of the war are well described by Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, who served on shore as a midshipman in one of the Naval brigades.
“In the early part of the winter the battalions at the front were generally on duty two nights out of three, and later, every alternate night. The life of the rank and file was thus spent:--The men were mustered carrying great-coat and blanket, just before dusk, and marched through a sea of mud into the trenches. These were cut up by deep holes from which boulders and stones had been taken, and into these holes on dark nights, the men often fell. When the soldier reached his position, he had to sit with his back to the parapet, and his feet drawn up close under his body to allow others to pass along the four-feet-wide trench. If he was not detailed for a working party, nor for piquet in the trenches or in advance of them, he might lie down, resting as best he could, in a wet ditch. Assuming that the soldier was not on piquet, and that there was no alarm--and these were of frequent occurrence--he could, after the working parties and their reliefs had ceased to move about the trenches, repose till daylight, when he marched back to camp, and after a few hours’ rest had to carry a load of some kind.
“The comparative repose enjoyed by those men who were required only as a guard, or reserve in the trenches, was very different to the condition of those who were employed from 200 to 300 yards in advance of our works, often within conversational distance of the opposing sentries. The reliefs for the sentries could snatch a dog’s sleep for four hours out of six, hoping their comrades would by remaining on the alert give them time to jump up ere the enemy was on them; but for the two hours that each man was out near the enemy, the strain on the nervous system would have been great even to a robust, well-fed man. These sentries had necessarily to stand absolutely still, silent and watchful, and as the severity of the weather became more and more marked, numbers of men whose frames were weakened by want of adequate nutritious food, were found in the morning frost-bitten and unable to move. One battalion which landed nearly 900 strong early in November, was actually in the trenches six nights out of seven, and then became so reduced, not only in numbers,[163] but also in the men’s bodily strength, that it was unable for some time to go there again.
“When the soldier got back to camp, he used to lie, often in a puddle, which chilled his bones, under a worn-out tent, through which the rain beat. The less robust would fall asleep, completely worn out, to awake shivering, and in many cases to be carried to a hospital tent scarcely more comfortable than the tent which they had left, and thence to a grave in two or three days. Those who were stronger, went out to collect roots of brushwood, or of vines, and roasted the green coffee ration in the lid of the canteen, afterwards pounding it in a fragment of shell with a stone, ere they boiled it for use. Others, unequal to this laborious process, would drink their rum, and eating a piece of biscuit, lie down again in the great-coat and blanket which they had brought, often wet through from the trenches.
“In the afternoon the soldier was sent on ‘fatigue’ duty from five to seven miles, according to the position of his camp, usually to Balaclava, to bring up rations. On his return he had again to gather fuel in order to boil the salt beef or salt pork in his mess tin, which did not hold water enough to abstract the salt. A portion of the meat therefore only was consumed, and it was necessary from time to time to tell off men to bury the quantities thrown away. Salt pork which was issued two days out of seven, was frequently eaten by the men in its raw state, from the difficulties of finding fuel to cook it.
“Shortly before dusk the soldier either marched back to the trenches, or lay down to sleep if he was not on piquet in front of the camp. Many men disliking to report themselves sick, were carried back from the trenches in the morning, and died a few hours afterwards. Those who were reported sick were taken to hospital, in many cases merely a bell tent; here the men lay, often in mud on the ground, and in many instances their diet was only salt meat and biscuit.[164] They were moreover so crowded together that the doctors could scarcely pass between the patients.
“The Regimental Medical officers unable to provide comforts, medicine or proper housing, were eager to send down their patients, even in storm and rain, to Balaclava, as the best chance of saving their lives. As we had no ambulances, and the French could not always lend us mule litter-transport, many were necessarily carried on cavalry horses, which slipping upon the hill outside Balaclava, often caused further injury or the death of the patient.
* * * * *
“The small schoolhouse at Balaclava, which we used as a hospital, held only between 300-400 men, thus the great majority of the sick and wounded were necessarily laid on the beach, exposed to all weathers, while awaiting their turn for embarcation in the transports. On the steamer running between Balaclava and the Bosphorus--a voyage of 36 to 48 hours--the soldier seldom got anything but tea and biscuit, sometimes only water. During this short but terribly trying passage, from 8 to 9% succumbed and were thrown overboard. Once on shore there was often a further painful wait on the beach before they were carried up to the hospital.
* * * * *
“We who saw the ‘old soldier’ die without a murmur may well be excused dilating on his virtues, when we endeavour to describe what he suffered for our country, the ministry of which, having given him a task far beyond his strength, failed to supply him with clothes and food. It is impossible to overpraise the disciplined silence of men under privations, which in a few weeks reduced one battalion from nearly 1000 effectives to a strength of 30 rank and file.”[165]
This misery was at its height when the Royal Irish disembarked at Balaclava on December 30, 1854; casualties, hardships, and disease had so thinned the British ranks that in January, 1855, to meet all requirements of the siege Lord Raglan had only 11,000 men at duty on the Upland, many of whom were only fit to be in hospital: one day, indeed, after providing fatigues to bring up the necessaries of life from Balaclava, he could only turn out two hundred and ninety officers and men to guard his trenches--about one-twentieth part of the garrisons of the forts opposite his works, against which at any moment the Russians might have directed a sortie. The regiments upon which the war had told most heavily had almost ceased to exist: one battalion paraded for duty with a few officers, a sergeant, and seven rank and file. With his army in such a condition, it was impossible for Lord Raglan to continue responsible for the whole of the ground allotted to him at the beginning of the siege, and the French, who had been very largely reinforced, and whose sufferings, though great, were in comparison with ours but insignificant, relieved him on the extreme right of his line. The material result of this necessary but deplorable admission of weakness was to “sandwich” the British between two wings of the French army, while morally it reduced us to the position of a mere contingent in the forces of Napoleon III. By England’s persistent neglect of all things military she had sown the storm, and her unhappy soldiers in the Crimea reaped the whirlwind; and it was not for many months, after thousands of lives had been wasted[166] and money spent like water, that her army was once more able to take its proper place in the forces of the alliance against Russia.
The Royal Irish were not at once sent up to the front, but for nearly a fortnight were employed on fatigues about the port. Thanks to this delay they were able to see their baggage and camp equipage safe on shore, and thus, when ordered to the Upland, they began the campaign well prepared to face the hardships that awaited them. In this respect they were far better off than the regiments which first landed in the Crimea. The original expedition had disembarked with hardly any vehicles; the men were so much enfeebled by the climate of Varna that they could not bear the weight of their knapsacks, which with the rest of the baggage were left on board the transports; and when these vessels ultimately reached Balaclava, knapsacks, stores, and regimental property of every kind were lost in the confusion which for many months reigned supreme at our base of operations. The miseries undergone by the troops who landed at the beginning of the war have already been described; and the ragged, jaded starvelings who dragged themselves from the camps on the Upland to the port of Balaclava on the daily quest for food were in pitiable contrast to the well-fed, well-clothed, well-shod men of the XVIIIth. These material advantages doubtless contributed largely towards the comparative immunity from sickness enjoyed by the regiment during the siege, but an even more important factor in its well-being was the presence in its ranks of a large number of soldiers who had been on active service, and of many officers who had learned in two long wars not only to take care of themselves, but also of the men under their command.
On January 12, 1855, the Royal Irish received orders to join Major-General Sir William Eyre’s brigade, then composed of the 4th, 38th, and 50th regiments, which formed part of the third division under Lieutenant-General Sir Richard England; and leaving a guard over such of their property as they could not carry with them, they started for the Upland. Their introduction to campaigning in the Crimea was a rude one; a blizzard raged as they floundered through deep snow along a track, marked by the bodies of transport animals killed by starvation and overwork; and when late in the afternoon they reached Eyre’s camp, they were told off by companies to find shelter in the lines of other corps, for their own tents had been left standing at Balaclava from want of transport to move them. When the Royal Irish succeeded in bringing up their tents from Balaclava, they settled down in camp with the handiness of seasoned troops. Most of the officers dug out the earth inside their tents to a depth of eighteen inches, piling the soil on the curtains to keep out the wind. There was no means of draining the inside of these habitations, “holes in the ground, roofed over with canvas,” as they were well described, but as the camp of the third division was pitched on dry and porous ground the XVIIIth were not troubled with water inside their tents, nor outside had they the miseries of mud and standing pools which made the camps on low ground so wretched. As for “warming the tents,” continues Captain Kemp’s[167] statement,
“in mine we improvised a stove out of an old square biscuit-tin; we let part of it into the earthen wall of the dug-out tent, and made a chimney-pipe out of round meat tins, slipped one inside the other. This chimney passing through the soil, came out clear of the canvas and was then turned upwards for a couple of feet. It answered well, though we were at times half smothered with the smoke. Wood for fuel was very scarce. A small quantity was served out for the soldiers’ cooking places, but the men had to carry it into camp on their shoulders for a distance of two miles or more. Their cooking was done in the usual trench in the open, but in very severe weather--rain, wind or snow--it was impossible to keep the fires going: this was one of the great hardships of the campaign. The cooking for the officers was done close to their tents, in holes or trenches dug by the servants, who used to throw the earth round the kitchen, and cover it with any bits of canvas they could find. Our servants had to forage for firewood, and generally brought back nothing but the wet roots of vines which they had grubbed up.”
Each officer took out with him to the war a canteen containing cooking utensils, plates, dishes, and cups, but the wear and tear of camp life soon made havoc of this kit. At a farewell dinner given in March by the XVIIIth to Colonel Reignolds when, completely broken down by hardships, he made over the regiment to Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Edwards and went home invalided, each of the officers had to cook some part of the feast in his own kitchen, and brought the remnants of his plates, knives and forks, and the articles of food he had provided to the dinner, where empty jam pots took the place of soup plates and champagne glasses.
As soon as the Royal Irish joined Eyre’s brigade they began to do duty in the trenches, where parties were sent for twelve hours at a time to guard the works, make good with sand-bags the damage done to the parapets by the enemy’s projectiles, and improve the drainage. In March, when the weather began to moderate, the tour of duty was increased to twenty-four hours, much to the men’s satisfaction, as those who were not wanted by day for guards or working parties snatched some hours’ sleep in the dry caves of the great ravine which, as has already been mentioned, marked the left of the British front. The duty, heavy for all, was particularly hard on the officers, who were often in the trenches for seventy-two hours in the week. By day they had to direct the men at their labours, by night to be prepared to meet an attack from the fortress. Thanks to their incessant care in seeing that the men were always ready for any emergency, and to half-hourly visits to the sentries, the officers of the XVIIIth were never surprised, and whenever the regiment was in the trenches the Russians received so unfriendly a welcome that they never attempted to push home, though on several occasions they crossed bayonets with the outlying sentries. These local attacks were not the only dangers of night work during the siege. If the wind served, and the Russians heard a party at work, they threw fireballs, which on striking the ground burst into a great flare; then, guided by the light, they poured grape upon the labourers, who used to throw themselves for shelter behind the parapet of the trench until the cannonade ceased. Things began to brighten on the Upland in March: a great burst of indignation at home against the archaic methods by which the army was administered had roused the officials of the War Office and the Treasury to a tardy sense of their shortcomings: a gang of navvies from England had almost finished a railway from Balaclava to the camps; a transport corps had been organised and was doing good service,[168] and the troops, once more properly clothed, discarded the weird garments with which they had covered their nakedness during the winter months, and began to resume the bearing of British soldiers. So marked was the improvement in the appearance of the men that some martinets considered that only one thing was required to bring the army up to its old level--the resumption of the stock, which by general consent had been discarded at the beginning of the war: but this relic of barbarism was not taken into use for many months, and then only on the ceremonial parades at the end of the war. In justice to the XVIIIth it should be said that throughout the siege all ranks managed to turn out respectably attired. The officers wore their red shell-jackets or blue frocks under the regimental great-coat; and they were also provided with a non-regulation garment, much like the “coat-warm-British” of the present day, made of serge, lined with rabbit-skin, and reaching almost to the knee. The great-coats of the men looked decent, and concealed the blankets below them, converted into loosely fitting under-coats by the simple expedient of cutting holes in them for the men’s arms to come through. All ranks had fur caps, the envy of the whole army. About this time the Minié rifles, with which the army were then supposed to be armed, were issued to the Royal Irish, who had been hurried off to the war equipped with Brown-Bess percussion muskets, the same weapons that they had used in Burma.
Even in the worst part of the winter the Allies never wholly discontinued their siege operations, and as the weather became less severe their parallels were pushed forward steadily towards Sebastopol. The Russians on their side had not been idle: large reinforcements from the field army so abundantly made good the losses of the garrison that Todleben could command the services of 6000, and even on occasions of 10,000 men in carrying out his improvements of the defences. He seized and fortified fresh ground overlooking some of the works of the Allies, and devised a successful method of harassing the men on duty in the trenches. Under cover of darkness he dug numbers of shallow rifle-pits within musketry range of our lines, posting in each a marksman whose duty it was to shoot at every living target he could see. These pits were gradually connected by continuous trenches, and became a source of much annoyance to the Anglo-French troops, who found them difficult to deal with: to turn the sharpshooters out with the bayonet was costly, while to shell so small a mark as they presented was very difficult, and therefore little sandbag forts were run up at intervals on the parapets of the trenches, manned by soldiers detailed to keep down the skirmishers’ fire. In spite, however, of Todleben’s efforts the Allies succeeded in arming their batteries with an imposing number of heavy guns, and early in April finished their preparations for a vigorous bombardment, the prelude (as it was universally believed) to the storming of Sebastopol. The French could bring to bear 378 pieces of ordnance; the British had only 123 guns and mortars available, but as for the most part they were much more powerful than those of the French, the difference in weight of metal was not great. The cannonade began on the 9th of April, and raged for ten days and nights, for though the guns did not fire after the sun was down, the mortars continued to play upon the fortress throughout the night. Though mitigated by Todleben’s genius for rapid repairs, the effect of the bombardment was very great, and all ranks were awaiting orders for the attack when Canrobert, who on the death of St Arnaud had succeeded to the command of the French, decreed that the assault was to be postponed.[169] The fire of the guns was gradually allowed to die down: the digging parties resumed work upon the approaches: and the Russians were allowed to carry out the restoration of their works without interruption other than that of occasional shots from our batteries. This bombardment cost the enemy 6000 men: in the ranks of the Allies the casualties were far smaller, amounting among the French to 1585, among the British to 265 of all ranks.
Up to the middle of June the record of the XVIIIth is one of exceedingly hard work, unbroken by the excitement of any important engagement. The Royal Irish were employed in many different ways. They toiled along the track, first from Balaclava, and then from railhead to the camps on the Upland, laden, to use the soldiers’ expression, “like commissariat mules,” with stores; they were on fatigues of every kind, from digging parallels and throwing up batteries to making gabions and fascines; and they took their turn in the trenches, where, though they demanded and often obtained the dangerous privilege of guarding the approaches nearest to the enemy, their losses were small. Between the 6th of February, when their first casualty occurred, and the 17th of June, only six men were killed and thirty-six wounded. Of these injuries, however, many were of the gravest nature: on one occasion a shell from a Russian mortar burst among a detachment on its way to the trenches and struck down ten of the party. To save the lives of the wounded the surgeons had to perform amputations upon each of them, and seven men lost a leg apiece, two an arm each, while the least hurt escaped with the loss of a hand. This comparative immunity from casualties, however, was not to last, for the regiment was now to be called upon to undergo an ordeal nearly as severe as those in its campaigns under William III. and Marlborough. At the beginning of June the immediate object of the Allies was the capture of three outlying fortifications, outposts which covered the left of the line of Russian defences. The trenches of the French right attack were faced by the White Works and a hill called “the Mamelon,” the latter of which barred the way to the Malakoff redoubt, one of the keys of the main position; the British sap led to “the Quarries,” where a number of works covered the Redan, a fort as formidable and as important as the Malakoff itself. On the 6th of June another great bombardment began; five hundred and forty-four pieces of heavy ordnance hurled shot and shell into the Russian works, and though answered by almost an equal number inflicted great injury: many cannon were dismounted and earth-works ruined before darkness imposed silence upon our guns, though not upon our howitzers, which continued to fire throughout the night. Thanks to the boundless energy of Todleben and the dogged industry of his men, much of the damage was made good before dawn; the cannon were remounted and the parapets rebuilt; but early in the morning the English and French re-opened fire with such terrible effect that in two hours the morale of the defenders was seriously affected. Then the infantry of the Allies was let loose, and after heavy fighting succeeded in taking the points assailed. In these achievements the XVIIIth had no part, as the third division was not employed in the capture of the Quarries.
As soon as these three outlying works had been taken, the Allies began to prepare for an attack on the Malakoff and the Redan, and on the 17th of June the batteries concentrated a furious fire on the Russian fortifications, with results so destructive to the enemy’s artillery that everything appeared to promise success for the assault on the morrow. Lord Raglan and Marshal Pélissier, who had recently been placed in command of the French army, had already agreed upon their plans; remembering how rapidly during the night of the 6th-7th of June the Russians had re-fitted their batteries, the Generals decided that the cannonade should be resumed at daylight for two hours, when it was calculated that the enemy’s guns would be silenced and the repairs of the night destroyed. The infantry was then to come into action, the French against the Malakoff, the British against the Redan. Barnard’s brigade of the third division was to support the storming columns, while on the extreme left Eyre, with the other brigade of the same division, was to threaten the fortifications on the Russian right of the Redan and in front of the Dockyard Creek, and to convert his demonstration into a serious attack if the assault on the Redan proved successful. Raglan’s preparations for the execution of his part of this scheme were completed, when suddenly, late on the night of the 17th, Pélissier informed the British Commander-in-Chief that he had resolved to dispense with the preliminary bombardment, and to storm the Malakoff at daybreak. Against his own judgment, and in an evil hour for the Allied armies, Raglan consented to this all-important change of plan; the infantry attacks on the Malakoff and the Redan were delivered without adequate artillery preparation; Todleben, who had done wonders during the night, was ready at every point, and the combined assault was beaten back with heavy loss. The only troops on whom Fortune smiled this day were those of Eyre’s brigade, who fought magnificently, and worthily sustained the honour of the British army. The brigade was at this time composed of the 9th, XVIIIth, 28th, 38th, and 44th regiments, but so heavily had the campaign told upon them that, when in the small hours of the 18th of June Eyre mustered these five battalions, there were but two thousand men in their depleted ranks. Covered by an advance-guard of a hundred and fifty sharpshooters--volunteers from each company in his command--the General left his camp while it was still black night, and marched down the great ravine towards the Dockyard Creek. At daybreak, just as the troops detailed for the assault on the Redan were swarming out of the trenches in which they had been assembled, Eyre’s advance-guard reached a cemetery, surprised the occupants of the rifle pits by which it was defended, and captured it without much trouble. This cemetery marked one flank of the enemy’s line, the other rested on a mamelon;[170] and to quote the words of Eyre’s report, the intervening ground “was intersected, and the road barricaded with stone walls, which our men were obliged to pull down under fire before they could advance. In rear of this position, towards the fortress, the enemy occupied several houses, there were bodies of the enemy seen in rear, but in what strength I could not say. This position, under cover of the walls of the fortress, was strong.” Well might General Eyre describe the position as “strong.” The suburb, of which these houses formed part, consisted of villas standing in gardens, planted with peach-trees in full blossom, and surrounded with low stone walls, thickly overgrown with vines. From several points it was commanded by the Russian artillery; to our “half-left” was the Garden Wall battery; in front rose the Creek battery, built at the head of the inner harbour of Sebastopol; on our right was the Barrack battery, and hidden behind the Redan were field-guns, which after the assault on that work had failed turned their fire upon Eyre’s regiments.
Before describing the doings of the XVIIIth in detail it will be well to give a short account of the work done by the brigade as a whole. Such an account is to be found in the letter to ‘The Times’[171] by Sir William Russell, the celebrated war correspondent, who, writing only two days after the battle, seems to have obtained his facts from the reports supplied to Eyre by the officers commanding his units. As Russell’s letter is in substantial agreement with Eyre’s report to his divisional general, its evidence appears valuable. After mentioning that the advance-guard occupied the cemetery with small loss, he says--
“the moment the enemy retreated, their batteries opened a heavy fire on the place from the left of the Redan and from the Barrack battery. Four companies of the XVIIIth at once rushed on out of the cemetery towards the town, and actually succeeded in getting possession of the suburb. Captain Hayman was gallantly leading on his company when he was shot through the knee. Captain Esmonde followed, and the men, once established, prepared to defend the houses they occupied.[172] As they drove the Russians out, they were pelted with large stones by the latter on their way up to the battery, which quite overhangs the suburb. The Russians could not depress their guns sufficiently to fire down on our men, but they directed a severe flanking fire on them from an angle of the Redan works. There was nothing for it but to keep up a vigorous fire from the houses, and to delude the enemy into the belief that the occupiers were more numerous than they were. Meanwhile the Russians did their best to blow down the houses with shot and shell, and fired grape incessantly, but the soldiers kept close, though they lost men occasionally, and they were most materially aided by the fire of the regiments in the cemetery behind them, which was directed at the Russian embrasures; so that the enemy could not get out to fire on the troops below. The 9th regiment succeeded in effecting a lodgment in the houses in two or three different places, and held their position as well as the XVIIIth.... While these portions of the 9th and XVIIIth, and parties of the 44th and 28th were in the houses, the detachments of the same regiments and of the 38th kept up a hot fire from the cemetery on the Russians in the battery and on the sharpshooters, all the time being exposed to a tremendous shower of bullets, grape, round-shot, shell. The loss of the brigade under such circumstances, could not but be extremely severe. One part of it, separated from the other, was exposed to a destructive fire in houses, the upper portion of which crumbled into pieces or fell in under fire, and it was only by keeping in the lower storey, which was vaulted and well built, that they were enabled to hold their own. The other parts of it, far advanced from our batteries, were almost unprotected, and were under a constant mitraille and bombardment from guns which our batteries had failed to touch.”
Though the repulse of the main British column left Eyre in a situation of hourly increasing peril, he resolutely continued to hold the points which the dash and bravery of his troops had gained. At first he hoped that the Redan might yet be stormed, when his brigade would be ready to follow up the victory; and when it became clear that the attack was not to be renewed he declined to fall back, until an authority higher than his own had decided how much of the ground that his brigade had won was to be retained. Though Eyre was wounded comparatively early in the day, it was not until late in the afternoon that, after giving orders for the gradual withdrawal of the troops from the houses nearest to the enemy, he made over his command to the next senior officer and quitted the battlefield. The process of withdrawal took several hours, and it was not until 9 P.M. that the Royal Irish, the last regiment of the brigade to retire, began its march back to the camp of the third division.
How the XVIIIth fared must now be told, as far as possible, in the words of the officers who had the honour to be present. Late on the 17th, the rumour had run through the lines of the Royal Irish that the town was to be assaulted next day. The men were wild with joy at the prospect of taking part in the attack, and talked and sang in their tents so incessantly that the officers could get no rest during the few hours allowed the regiment for sleep. At 1 A.M. on the 18th of June, a date ever memorable in the annals of the regiment, six hundred and sixty-nine officers and men paraded in front of the camp of the 9th regiment, where the brigade was formed, the XVIIIth in front, the 44th, 38th, 28th, and 9th regiments following in the order named. On the march down the great ravine occurred an interesting instance of the rigidity of the drill which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, fettered the movements of the British army. It has been mentioned that every infantry regiment then had two flank companies of picked men: those of the right, or grenadier company, were chosen for height and strength; those of the left, or Light company, were selected for activity and intelligence. On the parade ground the rule was that all battalion movements should be made from the right, and consequently that in column the grenadier company should always lead. Colonel Edwards had learned in the school of the Chinese and Burmese wars that all drill is but the means to one end, the successful attack on an enemy; and thinking that on this occasion the quick-moving “Light Bobs” were the men first to be employed, marched off “left in front.” This daring innovation did not long pass unnoticed, and almost within sight of the enemy he was ordered to halt, and countermarch his regiment in order to bring the grenadier company to the head of the column. In 1855, the countermarch was an evolution slow and ponderous in broad daylight, and doubly difficult of execution in semi-darkness, at a time when the pulses of all ranks were throbbing with the excitement of a night march and an impending battle. After the manœuvre was carried out, the brigade once more advanced, forming into a mass of close columns whenever the ground permitted. Though it was now almost day the Russians had not yet detected the presence of Eyre’s troops, and the General took an opportunity of addressing the Royal Irish, telling them he knew they would prove themselves good soldiers and “this day do something that will ring in every cabin in Ireland.” Then he added, “Now, men, above all things you must be quiet or you’ll get peppered!” In answer to this very reasonable appeal a shout arose from the ranks, “All right, your Honour, we’ll get in. Three cheers for the General!” Before the officers could stop them the men had given three lusty cheers. Eyre remonstrated, but the Royal Irish were far too eager for the fray to be sensible, and in response to his reiterated entreaties for silence they burst out into stentorian cheering, this time for Old Ireland. “Let them go in and attack,” cried the General in despair; “they will only draw fire upon us!”
From a letter written by Colonel Edwards two days after the battle, it appears that while the advance-guard was driving the Russians from the cemetery at the point of the bayonet, the XVIIIth
“halted in the open ready for action. Just here the first round-shot danced among us, and as the advance party had extended and were under such cover as they could find, we met the intruder. That peculiar thud (once heard, never forgotten) denoted that the round-shot had told, two men being killed. But we were compelled to wait a little longer, and then the Grenadier company moved off in skirmishing order, soon followed by Nos. 1 and 2 companies. These three companies occupied the ruined houses on the Woronzoff road.”
As the grenadiers, led by Captain Armstrong, were pressing forward they found their way obstructed by one of the stone walls mentioned in General Eyre’s report. Two subalterns raced for the wall, and leapt it at the same moment: Lieutenant Taylor landed safely on the other side, but Lieutenant Meurant was shot dead as he rose at the jump. Soon afterwards the remainder of the regiment in column of sections was moved forward in support, along a lane leading towards the suburb from the great ravine, the rocky cliffs of which gave the XVIIIth some cover from cannon shot. The Russian riflemen, however, speedily found the range, “and the men,” says Colonel Edwards,
“commenced to fall fast. The General had given me orders to stand there, but the casualties were then so great that I put the men behind the houses and walls, which saved them much. I did not see the General again; he was wounded across the head.
“All this time the men were coming back from the front, hopping or crouching according to the nature of the wound, amongst them my friend Captain Hayman, supported by two men, shot through the knee, but with a cheerful smile on his face. Seeing that the advance was much weakened I supported them with two other companies, sending Major Kennedy to the front; he was shortly after slightly hit on the side of the head, but not compelled to return. The enemy knew well the position of the houses they were in, and threw the shell amongst them. Fancy one of these visitors falling within ten feet of you--down you must lie, and close too, and wait for its bursting, when you are fortunate if you have nothing worse than dust to complain of! They not only gave shells, but rifle-balls and grape, and many a poor fellow who went out to help a wounded comrade was obliged in his turn to be carried in desperately wounded.
“Again the front calls out for ammunition and more men. ‘Up, my boys, catch hold of that barrel of ammunition, and rush through the whizzing balls, the tearing grape!’ Away they go with a cheer! About 12 o’clock the last company but one went out and other companies, returning, dreadfully thinned, formed the support. Shortly after one, more men were wanted; I sent out the last company and went myself. Away we hop from stone to stone or bush: ‘ping-ping’ passes the rifle-bullet crashing around you; you feel the grape; never mind, on you must go! I found the advanced parties in a row of houses under the battery, regularly enclosed by a screen of projectiles; you could only creep about. In the morning these houses had been occupied by the Russians; by the time I got there, everything was broken:--pier glasses in shivers; the piano (or as a man called it, the music-box) torn open; beds, tables and wardrobes in jumbles of masses. The enemy did not like our being there, nor did they like that the houses gave us cover; they therefore set fire to them with shells. About 3 o’clock I received an order to retire, which I could not comply with as there were eighteen wounded men to bring away, which could not be done till dark.”
According to Colonel Edwards, the three companies of the XVIIIth in the ruined houses on the Woronzoff road and the other battalions of the brigade also received this order, and gradually drew back, leaving the greater part of the Royal Irish in a most dangerous situation.
“Every moment our small party was decreasing. What weary hours they seemed from three till eight, and just before it was time to move, the enemy brought field-pieces to bear upon the houses, and they commenced knocking them down about our heads. At last I heard with joy ‘The last wounded man has been carried off, Sir.’ ‘Well, then, go away by twos and threes: keep up a warm fire. When across the open, bugler, sound the Regimental Call and the Retire.’
“The work is done, but out of 669 men who left the camp, 250 of the Royal Irish had suffered more or less. We did not get home till ten o’clock, wearied and exhausted. The remainder of the brigade acted on our right, and the 44th lost nearly as many in proportion as we did. Our brigade was more than successful, and have received great praise, especially the Royal Irish regiment.”
In so broken and disjointed a combat it is always difficult for the General to select officers and men for special commendation. Eyre appears to have found it impossible to do so, and after stating in his report that every one in his brigade “most nobly performed his duty,” and that “the conduct of all was so exemplary that he could scarcely with justice particularize individuals,” he contented himself with mentioning the names of his staff and the officers commanding the advance-guard and the five regiments of the brigade. Colonel Edwards’ report on the part played by the XVIIIth doubtless recorded some of the deeds of valour performed by the Royal Irish; but unhappily no copy of this document has been preserved in the archives of the regiment. His letter, vivid and deeply interesting as it is, was written, it is believed, for the information of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, and aims obviously at giving a general account of the engagement, without any unnecessary detail. The “Digest of Service” should have contained every particular of the doings of the regiment, but unfortunately it was compiled by an officer who recorded the adventures of the XVIIIth in the Crimea in two or three loosely-written pages of foolscap, from which everything of historical value was omitted. Thus the only accounts of the exploits of the Royal Irish on the 18th of June are to be found in a few statements, contributed by officers many years after the war was over, and in the dry official words announcing the bestowal of decorations. Every soldier knows that for one specially brave deed reported after an engagement, scores pass unnoticed or are forgotten, and therefore the instances now given can be regarded only as specimens of the conduct of the regiment as a whole.
Captain Thomas Esmonde was awarded the Victoria Cross[173] for two acts of bravery, the first of which was performed on the 18th of June. The Gazette runs as follows: “for having, after being engaged in the attack on the Redan,[174] repeatedly assisted at great personal risk under a heavy fire of shell and grape, in rescuing wounded men from exposed situations; and also, while in command of a covering party two days after, for having rushed with the most prompt and daring gallantry to a spot where a fire-ball from the enemy had just been lodged, which he effectually extinguished before it had betrayed the position of the working party under his protection, thus saving it from a murderous fire of shell and grape, which was immediately opened upon the spot where the fire-ball had fallen.”
Captain Dillon volunteered to rescue from under a heavy fire of grape and musketry seven wounded men, who were lying in the houses nearest to the Russian works, and succeeded in doing so.
Sergeant John Grant belonged to one of the companies in the houses nearest to the Russian battery, and brought a message from his captain to Colonel Edwards. When Colonel Edwards saw that Sergeant Grant was bleeding from two severe wounds he desired him to fall back out of harm’s way, but Grant so earnestly begged to be allowed to return to his officer that Colonel Edwards permitted him once more to risk his life in crossing the fire-swept belt of ground between the supports and his own company. Grant lived for many years to enjoy an annuity of £20, which accompanied the medal for meritorious service in the field, awarded to him for this act of bravery.
Lieutenant T. D. Baker displayed great gallantry throughout the day, as did Sergeant John Gleeson, Corporal Niel O’Donnell, and privates J. Weir, E. Loughton, and J. Byrne.
As an instance of the spirit shown by the wounded who were left upon the field, this story is quoted from Russell’s account of the battle. During the armistice of the 19th for the collection of the wounded and the burial of the dead, Major-General Eyre came to the part of the cemetery where a sergeant of the Royal Irish lay, with both his legs broken by a round-shot. “General,” exclaimed the non-commissioned officer, “thank God, we did our work, anyway. Had I another pair of legs, the country and you would be welcome to them!”
The operations of the 17th and 18th cost the French 3500 men, the British 1500, the Russians 5400, and of the six generals and commanders, French and English, who led the attacks on the 18th, four were killed and one disabled. When Eyre’s casualty returns were made up, it was found that his brigade had lost 562 killed and wounded. To this total the Royal Irish contributed no less than 259, almost 39 per cent of the regiment as it went into action. Among the officers, Lieutenant J. W. Meurant was killed, and ten were wounded, several being dangerously or severely injured. They were--Major J. C. Kennedy; Captains J. Cormick, A. W. S. F. Armstong, M. Hayman, H. F. Stephenson, and J. G. Wilkinson; Lieutenants W. O’B. Taylor, W. Kemp, F. Fearnley, and C. Hotham. Of the other ranks 57 were killed or mortally wounded, 16 were dangerously and 87 severely wounded, and 88 more slightly injured.[175] The wounded were gradually carried back to the camp of the IIIrd brigade, which they soon filled to overflowing. To our modern ideas the preparations for their reception were singularly rough. “So many of us had been hit,” writes Captain Kemp, who himself had been struck by a bullet in the knee, “that the orderly room and mess huts and every other available place was appropriated for our use. At first my leg was doomed to come off, and I was laid on the amputation table for the purpose, but as I was too weak then it was left on till the morrow. Next day I was allowed to retain it by the decision of one of the staff surgeons, who said, most luckily for me, ‘Let us give the poor lad a chance,’ but I became very ill from fever and the intense heat of the tent,[176] and shortly afterwards was ordered home. I was moved to Balaclava in one of the ‘carrying chairs’ slung on the side of a mule, and fainted nearly all the way from sun and weakness.”
After their double repulse at the Malakoff and the Redan the Allies lost no time in resuming the ordinary operations of the siege: their approaches were steadily pushed forward, and their guns kept up a heavy fire upon the fortress. In July the average daily loss in Sebastopol was two hundred and fifty, while each day in August saw the strength of the garrison diminished by eight or nine hundred officers and men. The Russians, magnificently stubborn fighters as they were, began to realise that the place was becoming untenable. The parapets were crumbling under the projectiles of the Anglo-French artillery; many guns were disabled or worn out, and though there was still a large reserve of cannon in the arsenal, the fire of our mortars made it impossible to mount them on the shattered batteries. Round the disabled guns the dead lay in great heaps, while the wounded could not be moved till darkness brought some respite to the harassed garrison. Barracks, arsenals, and store-houses were all more or less in ruins; and the hospitals, overflowing into the streets and squares of the town, were rapidly emptied into a cemetery, grimly termed “the grave of the Hundred Thousand.” Towards the end of August the Russians determined to abandon Sebastopol; they began to build a bridge across the outer harbour, strong enough to carry guns and waggons upon its sixteen feet of roadway; threw up barricades across the streets of the town, and laid great mines under the forts and magazines. On the 5th of September, the Allies once more brought all their guns into action, and bombarded the fortress, almost without intermission, for three days and nights, and on the 8th, the French once more assaulted the Malakoff, and the British the Redan. As the third division was in the reserve and did not come into action, the XVIIIth regiment was not engaged, and therefore all that need be said about the result is that we failed to take the Redan, while the French carried the Malakoff, and succeeded in holding it against the strenuous efforts of the enemy to recapture it. These attacks were made by the Russian rear-guard to gain time for the retreat of the main body from the southern shores of the harbour, and were so far successful that when the French General heard that the head of the enemy’s column was marching over the bridge, he was still too uncertain of ultimate success to attempt any interference with the retirement. During the night the Russians successfully exploded many of their mines; destroyed their few remaining warships; set fire to the town in many places, and called in the troops from the forts; and by daybreak on the 9th the whole of the garrison, carrying with them most of the wounded, had crossed the bridge, broken it behind them, and found safety on the heights to the north of the harbour of Sebastopol. The losses on both sides in this, the last important episode in the Crimean War, were very heavy. Our defeat at the Redan cost us 2271 officers and men, among whom were three generals, wounded: the French casualties amounted to 7567 of all ranks, including five generals killed and four wounded: the Russians lost nine generals and 12,906 other officers and men.
With the fall of the fortress the war in the Crimea came virtually to an end. The Allies had accomplished their self-imposed task of destroying Sebastopol and the Black Sea fleet; there was no immediate object to be gained by a pitched battle with the Russian Field army; disagreements on questions of future policy caused a considerable amount of friction between the Ministers of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon III., and fettered the movements of the Generals, who engaged in no further operations except two comparatively unimportant raids against the towns of Eupatoria and Kilburn, in neither of which the XVIIIth regiment took part. The French, indeed, were not anxious, if indeed they were able, to continue the war; but the English had atoned, though very tardily, for their previous neglect of their army, by preparing so energetically for another campaign, that in November there were in the Crimea 51,000 British troops, a contingent of 20,000 Turks, raised, trained, and officered by Englishmen, and a German legion of ten thousand men.[177] The good health of this large body of soldiery showed how excellent our system of administration had become at the seat of war; at home recruits were forthcoming in great numbers; the militia had relieved the troops in the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean of much garrison duty; Malta was full of trained soldiers, eager to be employed on active service; in short, the Army, purified by the ordeal it had passed through, had become once more a first-rate fighting machine. But the troops arriving after the fall of the fortress had no opportunity of distinguishing themselves, for though the enemy annoyed us by cannonading Sebastopol from the northern shore of the harbour, he made no offensive movement against the camps on the Upland. Thus the second winter in the Crimea was a time of comparative rest for the greater part of the army, though not for the regiments placed at the disposal of the Royal Engineers to complete the destruction of the forts, arsenals, and dockyards of the fortress. To the Royal Irish fell a very heavy task, the demolition of the docks in the inner harbour. As Colonel Edwards was senior to the engineer officer in charge of the work, the headquarters of the XVIIIth remained outside the town, and Major Call was placed in command of the working parties, which practically consisted of the whole of the Royal Irish. The labour of preparing the docks for destruction was very great, and the hardships of the men extreme: to quote the words of the general order of February 7, 1856, praising the zeal and perseverance of all ranks, and thanking Major Call, among other officers, for his valuable services, “the work was carried out in the depth of winter; the docks occasionally flooded, the shafts filled with water, the pumps choked with frost; but all ranks united to overcome difficulties, and the mass of ruins is a proof of the success attending the cheerful performance of a laborious duty.”
This official record is not the only testimony to the good behaviour of the Royal Irish while they worked like navvies in the docks. General C. G. Gordon, who as a young officer of Royal Engineers had served in the Crimea, replied to a request for information about the doings of the XVIIIth at the siege of Sebastopol in a characteristic letter:--
“PORT LOUIS, 3/3/82.
“MY DEAR MAJOR SAVILE,--Thanks for your note received to-day. I am afraid I cannot write anything which would be of value about the 18th Royal Irish, as it is now 28 years ago or nearly so, since the Crimea. I know that they were a favourite regiment with the R.E. for work, both in the trenches and in the destruction of the docks, from the energy and pluck of the officers and men, and it was then that I formed my opinion of Irishmen being of a different nature than other Britishers inasmuch as they required a certain management and consideration, which, if given them, would enable you, so to speak, to hold their lives in your hand. The officers liked the men and the men liked the officers; they were a jovial lot altogether, but they would do anything if you spoke and treated them as if you liked them, which I certainly did. You know what great hardships they went through in the Docks in working at the shafts which, 30 feet deep, were often full of water, if left, unpumped out, for 12 hours. Poor devils! wet, draggled, in their low ammunition boots, I used to feel much for them, for the Generals used to be down on them because they were troublesome, which they were when people did not know how to manage them.
“Kindest regards to General Edwards, a fine, clever old officer who had all our respect.
“I am sorry I can write you no details.--Believe me, yours sincerely,
“C. G. GORDON.”
It will be noticed that neither in the official expression of thanks nor in Gordon’s letter is there any reference to the fact that the Russians frequently shelled the working parties at the docks. The troops were so used to being under fire that they looked upon it as an everyday occurrence, and a few casualties were considered unworthy of notice. Thanks, however, to Colonel Elliot’s diary, we know that rheumatic fever and frost-bite were not the only dangers to which the Royal Irish were exposed. On December 3, 1855, the Russians fired two hundred and fifty shells, wounding four men of the regiment; on the 21st they dropped three shells into a barrack-room, luckily without hitting any one, but smashing beds, knapsacks, and rifles in every direction; on the last day of the year a shell carried away the arm of a private, ---- Fitzgerald.
While with immense difficulty the English and French engineers were levelling the naval and military buildings to the ground, and shattering the docks beyond all hope of restoration, the diplomatists of Europe were doing their utmost to bring hostilities to an end; late in February an armistice was arranged, and on the 30th of March, 1856, the world was gladdened by the news that peace had been proclaimed. The effort to save Constantinople from the Russians, though successful, had cost England dear, as these grim figures show--
----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+------- | | | | | | Killed.| Died of| Died of | Wounded.| Total. | | Wounds.| Disease.| | ----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+------- Officers | 157 | 86 | 147 | 515 | 905 | | | | | Non-Commissioned | | | | | Officers | 161 | 85 | 574 | 579 | 1,399 | | | | | Privates | 2,437 | 1,848 | 15,320 | 10,782 | 30,387 ----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+------- | 2,755 | 2,019 | 16,041 | 11,876 | 32,691 ----------------------+--------+--------+---------+---------+-------
Though our Allies also suffered severely, the losses of the Western Powers and of the Ottoman Empire pale into insignificance before those of the Russians. During the last six months of the siege 81,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in or around Sebastopol; the whole campaign in the Crimea cost the Czar 153,000 troops; while the reinforcements from the interior of Russia endured such terrible hardships on the march to the Black Sea that hundreds of thousands of men broke down on the way. It is believed that Russia’s total loss during the war was not less than half a million of men.
The casualties in the XVIIIth Royal Irish regiment were--
Officers--
Killed Lieutenant J. W. Meurant. Died of disease Lieutenant E. D. Ricard. Wounded Major J. C. Kennedy. Captains J. Cormick, A. W. S. F. Armstrong, M. Hayman, H. F. Stephenson, J. Wilkinson. Lieutenants W. O’B. Taylor, W. Kemp, F. Fearnley, C. Hotham.
In the other ranks, 41 were killed, 44 died of wounds, 70 died from accident or disease, and 275 were wounded. Their names will be found in Appendix 2 (I).[178]
During the first nine months of its service in the Crimea, the regiment was reinforced by 289 non-commissioned officers and men, who arrived in drafts from home, and later from Malta where the four reserve companies were stationed; and on September 9, although between 140 and 150 men had been killed or died in hospital, and 219 had been invalided or become ineffective from various causes, there remained, exclusive of officers, no less than 724 effectives present with the Colours.[179] The XVIIIth regiment was among the last to leave the Crimea; it was not until June 20, that it embarked on H.M.S. Majestic, an eighty-gun ship, fitted with an auxiliary screw. Though the crew received their soldier passengers most hospitably, the voyage was not an agreeable one. The subalterns were berthed in the cockpit, where, as one of them recorded in his diary, “there was no room to wash, or dress, or put our baggage; sentries and reliefs passed through our sleeping-place all night long, shaking us out of our hammocks; then at a certain hour ruthless sailors came and packed away the hammocks, whether you wanted to get up or not; and finally, there was no place to be sick, for the bulwarks were so high that you could not see over them!” On the 18th of July the Royal Irish landed at Portsmouth, entrained for Farnborough, and were marching thence to Aldershot when they were ordered to quicken their pace as Queen Victoria was waiting to welcome the regiment. Colonel Edwards thus describes Her Majesty’s inspection of the soldiers who had fought her battles in China, Burma, and the Crimea: “When formed in line the appearance of the regiment showed signs of service, the old clothing, long beards, and the dust of the march giving the men but a sorry aspect. Her Majesty, passing down the line on foot, requested me to point out men most deserving of her notice. My answer was, ‘Were I to do so, the whole regiment would step to the front.’ However, several of the wounded officers and men were presented. When the Queen arrived in front of the Colours, I respectfuly submitted to Her Majesty that the regimental badge of the Harp and Crown had been removed from the uniforms of the men, and the Queen most graciously gave orders that they should be restored.”
For their services in the Crimea many officers, non-commissioned officers, and men received promotion or reward. Lieutenant-Colonels C. A. Edwards and J. C. Kennedy were appointed to be Companions of the Order of the Bath; Edwards also was made a Brevet-Colonel; Major G. F. S. Call, Captains J. Cormick, A. W. S. F. Armstrong, J. Laurie, and M. J. Hayman each received a step in brevet rank. Captain T. Esmonde was one of the first to receive the Victoria Cross, and the newly instituted medal for distinguished conduct in the field was awarded to Sergeant H. Morton, Corporals M. Egan and T. Murphy, and the following private soldiers, viz., R. Baglin, E. Erwin, T. Flannery, H. Forrestall, R. Marshall, W. Major, J. M. Guinness, N. O’Neill, J. Sessman, 2830 P. Whelan, 3521 P. Whelan.[180] In the matter of foreign decorations the XVIIIth fared well, as each of our Allies presented orders or medals to specially deserving officers and men. Brevet-Colonel Edwards, Brevet-Majors Armstrong and Hayman, Sergeant-Major T. Watt, and Sergeant J. Grant were created members of the French Legion of Honour by Napoleon III., who also bestowed war medals on Colour-Sergeant E. Dunne, Sergeant J. Harvey, Sergeant J. Gleeson, Corporal N. O’Donnell, and Privates J. Cox, E. Laughton, and J. Byrne. Victor Emmanuel gave the Sardinian war medal to Lieutenant-Colonel J. C. Kennedy, Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Call, Lieutenant T. D. Baker, and Private J. Weir. The Turkish Order of the Medjidie was awarded to Colonel Edwards, Lieutenant-Colonel J. C. Kennedy, Brevet-Major Cormick, and Lieutenants C. Hotham, O’B. Taylor, W. Kemp, and C. J. Coote. The British medal for the Crimea and clasp for Sebastopol and the Turkish medal were awarded to all who had taken part in the siege, and the word “Sebastopol” added to the battle honours of the regiment.
A stained-glass window has been placed in the north transept of St Patrick’s Cathedral in honour of those who fell in the war with Russia.
Chapter VIII
1856-1859.
OPERATIONS DURING THE MUTINY IN INDIA.
Four days after the Queen had inspected the regiment it moved to Dublin, where the arrival of the reserve companies from Malta and the depôt from Preston brought up the numbers at headquarters to seventeen hundred and sixty-nine of all ranks. On the 25th of August, new Colours were presented by the Earl of Carlisle, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the old Colours finding a fitting resting-place in St Patrick’s Cathedral, where they hang over the monuments to the Royal Irishmen who laid down their lives for their country in the swamps of China, in the jungles of Burma, and on the blood-stained glacis of the fortress of Sebastopol. A few months later the regiment was warned for foreign service, this time at the Cape of Good Hope, but the order was cancelled when the news reached England that the native army of Bengal had mutinied, and the XVIIIth remained in Ireland, very indignant at not being sent at once to help quell the rising in India. It was not until the autumn of 1857 that the War Office determined to employ the Royal Irish in the East: an advance party of three companies (in all, 208 officers and men) embarked on September 24, followed in two months by headquarters and the remainder of the XVIIIth (666 of all ranks), who reached Bombay early in February, 1858.[181] They landed, hoping to be in time to take an active part in the campaign, and their disappointment was bitter when they were ordered to Poona, a great city in the Bombay Presidency. The Royal Irish found much heavy work awaiting them, for the place was then, as it still is, a hot-bed of sedition, ready to revolt at any moment; and the troops were constantly under arms to prevent an outbreak. But as the accounts of successive British victories in northern and central India reached the malcontents, the danger diminished, and in April, 1858, the local situation had sufficiently improved to warrant the withdrawal of part of the British garrison from Poona. On the Royal Irish was thrown the duty of providing detachments in various places in western India, to watch native regiments of doubtful loyalty, and help the civil power in re-establishing law and order round their posts. With the dispersal of the regiment disappeared its chances of service as a complete unit, but each company commander still hoped to have to deal individually with a body of rebels, or with one of the bands of marauders called into existence by the mutiny. Fate, however, was not kind to the Royal Irish in 1858-59: the strenuous work of the detachments was unrelieved by a single fight, and even when three or four companies were brought together for some combined movement they had no luck; in extreme heat they made forced marches, cut roads through jungle, forded rivers, but all to no purpose: wherever they went the enemy disappeared, to fall into the hands of some column operating many miles away.
In a letter from D^r Ffolliott, one of the regimental assistant-surgeons, are preserved a few details of the experiences of one of the detachments. Captain J. Canavan started from Poona on April 23, 1858, with two subalterns and a hundred and twenty of the Royal Irish, a company of Bombay native infantry, camel transport, and dhoolies for the sick and wounded, and at the end of a month’s hard marching brought his column to Asseerghur without a casualty and with no sick men. According to Ffolliott, who was in medical charge, this immunity from disease was due to the care taken to keep the men’s clothing dry at the numerous fords through which the road ran: the troops were allowed ample time to undress before going into the water, and to put their clothes on again before the march was resumed. Asseerghur was an old native fortress, perched on the top of an almost perpendicular rock rising nearly eight hundred feet out of the plain. As it had never been occupied by European troops, there were no barracks; the men were quartered in an old mosque; while the officers occupied a large bungalow, where they used to entertain a few European ladies who had taken refuge in Asseerghur while their husbands were in the field. Every week there was a dinner-party, followed by a dance to the drums and fifes of the detachment.
On his way to take up the command of a brigade at Mhow, Colonel Edwards was present at one of these entertainments, where he must have been pleased at the determination of his officers to keep up their spirits under the bitter disappointment of finding themselves thus completely “sidetracked.” In November, Asseerghur was greatly excited at the report that Tantia Tope was in the neighbourhood. Tantia was one of the few native leaders who had shown good military qualities; he had fought well against Lord Strathnairn (then Sir Hugh Rose) in central India, and when after many defeats he had betaken himself to the country north of the Nerbudda, he had evaded the columns threatening him from many directions. The net, however, was now closing in upon him; it was believed he would try to break southwards into the Deccan, and as Asseerghur commanded one of the approaches to this part of India it became a place of temporary importance. One evening the Fort Adjutant bustled into the quarters of the XVIIIth with great news: in a few hours Tantia Tope, with eight or nine thousand men, was going to attack Burhanpore, a rich and populous town not many miles away; Canavan with fifty men of the Royal Irish was to throw himself into the city, and Ffolliott was to accompany him. While Canavan was issuing his orders, Ffolliott went off to make medical arrangements at the hospital, where, to use his own words, “I found every sick man in war paint. My acting hospital sergeant said there was not much the matter with them; they had heard there was to be a fight that night, and wanted to join the party going, so I discharged them out of hospital. Canavan made no distinction; the first fifty for duty were ordered to fall out, and in two hours from the time we were warned we were on the march.” As Canavan and his party were considered to be going on a forlorn hope, every European not on duty was on the parade ground to wish the Royal Irish “good luck” as they moved off, and the ladies were in tears, until their grief was changed to mirth at the discovery that the doctor had filled his pouch, not with medical appliances, but with revolver cartridges. Many of the garrison sat up till dawn, listening anxiously for the burst of fire with which it was feared the detachment would be overwhelmed. But no crash of musketry broke the stillness of the night, and before Canavan reached Burhanpore he learned the place had been reinforced by a larger column, with whose movements the Commandant of Asseerghur was unacquainted, and that Tantia Tope had disappeared. As no fighting was expected, Canavan was ordered to return to his own post without delay--another instance of bad luck, for in a day or two there was a sharp skirmish near Burhanpore, in which his company would certainly have taken part.
In January, 1859, the greater part of the regiment was brought together under Lieutenant-Colonel Call, and made many marches through the district of Jaulna, vainly pursuing Rohilla freebooters who had no intention of standing up to fight. As soon as these robber bands dispersed, the XVIIIth went back to garrison duty at detached posts, and in three or four months, when the country had begun to settle down, most of the companies joined headquarters at Sholapur, and then marched to Hyderabad in the Deccan, which they reached on June 21, 1859. The muster roll shows that three officers, Captain W. F. G. Forster, Lieutenant T. Watt, and Assistant-Surgeon C. E. Porteous, and twenty-seven of the rank and file died of disease during the Indian Mutiny campaign.[182]
Chapter IX
1858-1882.
RAISING OF THE SECOND BATTALION: THE WAR IN NEW ZEALAND.
After the Indian Mutiny a considerable increase in the strength of the army was sanctioned by Parliament, for the reasons stated in chapter x., and additional units of infantry were raised, not as new regiments but as second battalions of existing organisations. The XVIIIth was one of the regiments selected for this augmentation, and on March 25, 1858, forty-four years after the original second battalion had been disbanded,[183] the nucleus of a new second battalion was formed at Enniskillen by the transfer from the first battalion of a hundred seasoned soldiers.[184] A hundred and fifty men joined from the Dublin City militia; other militia regiments contributed volunteers, and recruits came in fast from the north of Ireland. For the first few months of its existence the new battalion was in charge of Major A. W. S. F. Armstrong; then Lieutenant-Colonel A. N. Campbell, on promotion from the first battalion, assumed the command which he continued to hold until October, 1859, when he exchanged with Lieutenant-Colonel A. A. Chapman, 48th regiment. In the same month the battalion was sent to England, and two years later to the Channel Isles, where the detachment at Alderney did good service in fighting a great fire which threatened to devastate the island. Though the greater part of the rank and file was composed of growing lads, “the ready and willing spirit displayed by all and their coolness under such circumstances”[185] greatly impressed the local authorities. This incident proved, if proof had been necessary, that the task of converting a mass of recruits into trained and disciplined soldiers had been entrusted to good hands; and early in 1863, the second battalion was considered to be fit for foreign service, and was selected to relieve one of the regiments then garrisoning New Zealand. When the various detachments from Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney had concentrated at Parkhurst in the Isle of Wight, they were inspected by Major-General Lord William Paulet, who in a complimentary speech commented with pleasure on the great increase in the height of the men since he had last seen the battalion eighteen months before.
On April 2, 1863, the headquarters and eight companies under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Chapman sailed from Portsmouth in the ship Elizabeth Anne Bright, followed on the 12th by the two service companies under Brevet-Colonel G. J. Carey in the ship Norwood.[186] The depôt companies were stationed at Buttevant. After a prosperous and, for a sailing-ship, a rapid voyage of ninety-one days, the Elizabeth Anne Bright on the 4th of July reached Auckland, where three weeks later the Norwood arrived also. When the leading ship dropped anchor, the Royal Irish learned that war had broken out with the natives, and that the battalion was to take the field at once. Before describing the part played by the XVIIIth in the campaign a short account must be given of the Maoris, the enemy at whose hands the second battalion was to receive its baptism of fire. According to native traditions, New Zealand was peopled many centuries ago by an adventurous race (said by ethnologists to be of Malay stock) who, swarming off from the Melanesian archipelago, crossed the Southern Pacific in war canoes and landed in New Zealand, which they named the Land of the Long White Cloud. Either the country was uninhabited or the aborigines were easily conquered, for no trace of their presence is found in Maori folklore. The newcomers first occupied the coasts, and then gradually spread over the whole of the North and South islands, forming clans which recognised no central authority and held all land within their borders as the property not of individuals but of the tribe. Between the tribes there was incessant strife, which hardened the Maoris into a nation of fighting men, skilled not only in every wile of savage warfare but also, as we shall see, in the art of fortifying their strongholds.
The existence of the Maoris and the very position of the country they inhabited remained unknown to Europeans until 1642, when Tasman, the great Dutch navigator, sighted the Land of the Long White Cloud. His government kept the information to themselves; and Captain Cook, a British explorer even more celebrated than his Dutch forerunner, rediscovered New Zealand in 1769, established friendly relations with the natives, and took formal possession of the country for his sovereign, George III. But neither at that time nor for many years later was England in the mood to develop her new acquisition. Her conflict with the American colonists, her struggle with the European coalition which supported their rebellion, and her gigantic efforts to save the Continent of Europe from the domination of Napoleon, had taxed her resources to the utmost; and it was not until seventy years after Cook had annexed the country that definite official steps were taken to assert British authority in New Zealand. But long before our Government decided to occupy the islands, adventurous Britons had established themselves among the Maoris. The penal settlement, formed towards the close of the eighteenth century at Sydney, provided a port from which New Zealand became accessible from the mainland of Australia, and a brisk trade gradually sprang up between the natives and ship’s captains in timber, potatoes, and native flax. Nor were these the only articles of commerce. Collectors of curiosities in Europe were eager to possess specimens of the tattooing or face ornamentation for which the Maoris were celebrated, and the heads of warriors, defeated and slain in battle and preserved as trophies in the villages of the victors, were eagerly exchanged for the muskets with which the white strangers were armed. By degrees little settlements of Europeans grew up at various points along the coast--each an Alsatia to which escaped convicts, deserters from the garrison of Sydney, run-away sailors, riff-raff of every kind, sought a refuge from the trammels of civilisation. Many of these wanderers threw in their lot with the natives: some perished miserably; others were well treated and lived with the Maoris for many years. A few of the survivors were men of some education, and from their reminiscences, and those of the missionaries and pioneers who arrived from England in the early “forties,” it is possible to form an idea of the Maoris before they became tamed by British influence. Their character as a nation was very complex. Though cannibals, and bloodthirsty to a degree, their sense of honour was high, and their word once pledged was considered inviolable. They were by no means devoid of chivalry; their language was full of poetry; their manners were dignified; their laws were well defined, and the tenure of land and the ownership of movable property were regulated by customs, enforced by the power of the whole clan.
In the course of years the condition of the European settlements became a serious scandal; law and order were unknown, and there were constant collisions between the natives and the Europeans, in which the white men appear to have been frequently the aggressors. The Governor of New South Wales, who was supposed to exercise a shadowy authority over the British in New Zealand, reported strongly to the Colonial Office on the subject, and the missionaries loudly complained that their efforts among the Maoris were hampered by the presence of a considerable number of Europeans, whose conduct was unrestrained by any form of government. In 1840, England yielded to the pressure of public opinion and formally annexed New Zealand. This step, ostensibly taken solely for the benefit of the Maoris, was also influenced by political considerations, for the French had long desired to establish themselves in the Southern Pacific: ever since the time of Cook their ships had occasionally visited New Zealand, and it was known that France was preparing to found a colony in the South island. An English frigate, the Druid, sailed with the newly-appointed Governor about the same time as L’Aube, a French man-of-war started in charge of a transport full of emigrants for New Zealand. Our ship outstripped the French vessels, and when L’Aube reached the South island her captain, to his bitter mortification, found that the Union Jack had been hoisted forty-eight hours before!
The terms upon which New Zealand passed into the hands of the Crown were almost unique in the history of England. Our possessions in the East have been won by the sword in wars forced upon us by the lawlessness of the neighbouring States. In America the presence of a large French garrison in Canada and at the mouth of the St Lawrence was a thunder cloud constantly overhanging the New England colonies until we captured Quebec in the Seven Years’ War. In the southern hemisphere Australia was a no-man’s land--a wilderness inhabited only by a few tribes of degraded savages. The necessity of defending the colonists in South Africa against the attacks of marauding Kaffirs has caused the gradual extension of British rule from Cape Town on the Atlantic to Zululand on the Indian Ocean. But in New Zealand the chiefs were treated as our equals when, at the solemn treaty of Waitanga in 1840, they ceded on behalf of their clans the sovereignty of their territories to Queen Victoria, and accepted her protection, and with it all the rights and privileges of British subjects.
For several years after this treaty was made the country seemed thoroughly quiet: large numbers of emigrants arrived from England and prospered greatly in their new homes; and the majority of Maoris appeared to acquiesce in our presence. Some of the clans were glad to be saved from internecine strife; others appreciated the increased demand for their staple productions of flax and timber, which was one of the results of the European influx; but others again, especially the tribes in the centre of the North island, grew dissatisfied with the new order of things, and elected a king to rule over them, who established a capital at Ngaruawahia, a strategic point at the junction of the Waikato and Waipa rivers.[187] From a mistaken policy of non-intervention this movement was not put down, and it rapidly degenerated into openly expressed antagonism towards the settlers. In 1862, to quote the words of one of the Ministers of the Crown, it “presented the following features:--
“An elected king, a very young man of no force of character, surrounded by a few ambitious chiefs who formed a little mock court, and by a body-guard who kept him from all vulgar contact and from even the inspection of Europeans, except on humiliating terms; entirely powerless to enforce among his subjects the decisions of his magistrates; an army, if it might be called so, of 5000 to 10,000 followers scattered over the country, but organised so that large numbers could be concentrated at any one point on short notice; large accumulated supplies of food, of arms and ammunition; a position in the centre of the island from which a descent could be made in a few hours on any of the European settlements; roads prohibited to be made through two-thirds of the island; the large rivers barred against steamers so that nine-tenths of the country was closed against the ordinary means of travel and transport; the Queen’s law set at utter defiance; her magistrates treated with supercilious contempt; her writs torn to pieces and trampled under foot; Europeans who had married native women driven out of the King’s districts, while their wives and children were taken from them, unless they would recognise and pay an annual tribute to the King; all this accompanied by an exhibition of the utmost arrogance and undisguised contempt for the power of the Queen, the Governor and the Europeans.”[188]
The safety of the colony was threatened seriously by these sullenly rebellious tribes; and when in 1863, a body of the King’s followers intervened in a dispute between Maoris and Europeans in the south-west of the North island, war became inevitable. The King’s party, which was largely composed of the Waikato tribe, planned to open the campaign by raiding Auckland and exterminating its white inhabitants. Lieutenant-General Sir Duncan A. Cameron, who was in command of the Imperial troops in New Zealand, and Sir George Grey, the Governor of the colony, decided to anticipate the Maoris by advancing upon their strongholds in the wild country south of the Waikato. This river rises in the centre of the North island and winds its way northwards from its source to within forty miles of Auckland, when it turns sharply to the south-west at the native village of Te Ta. Here a tributary, the Mangatawhari creek, joins it from the north-east, and the two streams marked the northern limit of the district held by the followers of the King. Civilisation had spread about twenty-five miles to the south of Auckland, and a metalled road ran past scores of prosperous farms, tangible proofs of the success which had attended the colonists in this part of New Zealand. At the village of Drury the good road was replaced by a rough and narrow track, which winding through a broad belt of bush known as the Hunua forest, crossed very undulating country much cut up by deep ravines, half buried in ferns and scrub. This dense forest, which a series of almost impenetrable thickets rendered ideal for Maori offensive tactics, was to be the scene of many skirmishes in which detachments of the XVIIIth greatly distinguished themselves.
The arrival of the Royal Irish brought up the number of regular battalions in New Zealand to seven;[189] but by no means all of these were available for the front. It was necessary to keep up the strength of the detachments in various parts of both islands; the line of communication absorbed a great quantity of fighting men, and garrisons had to be provided for the settlers in lonely hamlets and isolated farms. Though at one time during the war the armed whites in the colony reached the respectable total of 15,000 men, the greatest force of regular and volunteer troops actually under the hand of the General at any time appears never to have exceeded two thousand five hundred. To form an accurate estimate of the numbers against us is impossible, for many tribes remained neutral, others were on our side, while others again took but a fitful part in the operations and preferred to plunder settlers rather than to meet soldiers in the field. One point, however, seems quite clear; on every occasion when there was serious fighting we greatly out-numbered our savage but very gallant foes.
As soon as the Royal Irish landed they were sent to Otahuhu, a camp a little to the south of Auckland, where General Cameron was concentrating his troops. Here the battalion received their campaigning kit: officers and men were provided with blue serge “jumpers,” haversacks, water-bottles and pannikins: all ranks carried a blanket and waterproof sheet, rolled, and slung over the left shoulder; the men were armed with Enfield rifles and bayonets. Five days later the column marched through Drury to the Queen’s redoubt, a work which commanded the crossing of the Waikato at Te Ta. A detachment of two hundred of the XVIIIth, under Captain Inman, was dropped at Drury to hold that post on the line of communication, and a few days later the whole of the battalion appears to have been echeloned along the bush track between Drury and the Queen’s redoubt. On hearing that Cameron was in motion the Maoris divided their forces: one column was to hold the British at the Waikato while the other was to turn Cameron’s left, harass his communications, and if possible swoop upon Auckland. It was with the enemy’s right wing that the Royal Irish were chiefly engaged for the first few months of the war, but before giving an account of their doings it is necessary to sketch very briefly the operations south of the Waikato.
On July 12, 1863, Cameron crossed the river and dislodged the enemy from the heights of Koheroa above the Mangatawhari creek. He was, however, unable to follow up this initial success; for nearly three months difficulties of land transport, the want of steamers of sufficiently light draught for river work, and the activity of the Maoris on his rear prevented further movements against the series of works which at various points commanded the right bank of the Waikato. The military genius of the Maoris and its limitations were alike revealed in these fortifications, in which the system of defence evolved by a long series of inter-tribal conflicts had been cleverly adapted to new conditions of war. Before firearms were introduced into New Zealand, the
“Maoris’ pahs, or stockaded and entrenched villages, usually perched on cliffs and jutting points overhanging river or sea, were defended by a double palisade, the outer fence of stout stakes, the inner of high solid trunks. Between them was a shallow ditch. Platforms as much as forty feet high supplied coigns of vantage for the look-out. Thence, too, darts and stones could be hurled at the besiegers. With the help of a throwing stick, or rather whip, wooden spears could be thrown in the sieges more than a hundred yards. Ignorant of the bow and arrow, and the boomerang, the Maoris knew and used the sling; with it red-hot stones would be hurled over the palisades among the rush-thatched huts of an assaulted village, a stratagem all the more difficult to cope with as Maori pahs seldom contained wells or springs of water.”[190]
In the series of skirmishes dignified by the name of the Maori war of 1860-61 the natives had carefully studied our tactics and our weapons; and in the war of 1863-66, in order to bring into play the muskets and double-barrelled guns with which they were armed, and to minimise the effect of our rifle and shell fire, they selected positions open in front, with flanks resting on rivers, swamps, or impenetrable bush. They made great use of earthworks and of redoubts, square or oblong in shape, flanked at opposite angles by bastions and surrounded by ditches, in some cases twelve feet wide and measuring eighteen feet from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the parapet. Pushed out to the front and flanks were two or three tiers of rifle-pits or short trenches, connected by sunk roads with each other and with the main work. The marksmen in these pits were often protected by head cover, made of trunks of trees or of hurdles thatched with fern and covered deep with earth; and to break the force of a bayonet charge, stout palisades were sometimes built in front of the rifle-pits with spaces left for grazing fire to sweep over the glacis. Yet though this system of fortification showed that to their natural cleverness the Maoris added the power of rapidly absorbing new ideas, their intelligence failed them in one essential particular. In the selection of a position they never realised the importance of a good water-supply, and when an attack was threatened they neglected to store their works with water, trusting to their young men to bring in by night the quantity required for the next day’s consumption. Thus after a close investment of a few days they had no alternative but to cut their way out or to surrender.
While General Cameron was waiting for his river steamers, a rumour reached the Maoris at Meri-Meri, the position nearest to Cameron’s encampment, that the General and his soldiers were short of food. Under a flag of truce the Chiefs sent down the river a little fleet of canoes laden with potatoes and milch-goats as a present to the British troops. This was by no means an isolated instance of native chivalry, for, to use the slang of the present day, the Maoris were “sportsmen,” and always said that there was no glory in fighting hungry men. When at length the arrival of river craft enabled Cameron to move, he threatened the front of the works of Meri-Meri with five hundred men, among whom were a detachment of Royal Irish, while a turning party of rather greater strength, in barges mounted with Armstrong guns, was towed to a landing-place in rear of the enemy’s works. The Maoris did not await the attack, but fled southwards across country which recent rains had made impassable for Europeans. Cameron occupied their position, which the detachment of the XVIIIth fortified under the direction of the Royal Engineers. In November the General took an important step towards freeing the line of communication from the natives who harassed his convoys in the Hunua forest and ravaged the farms in the neighbourhood of Auckland. Many of these guerillas came from the country round the estuary of the Thames river, and thither he sent an expedition under Brevet-Colonel Carey, XVIIIth regiment, to overawe the district and establish a line of blockhouses between the Thames and the Waikato. While Carey was carrying out his mission successfully Cameron pushed up the river, and on November 20th, attacked the formidable works at Rangiriri, the Maoris’ second position on the Waikato. Before the enemy had been thoroughly shaken by artillery the order was given for the assault, and though repeated and gallant charges were delivered, the troops that day achieved but a partial success, bought at the cost of 132 casualties. Under cover of the night several hundred of the enemy escaped; the remainder, 183 in number, surrendered at daybreak and were made prisoners of war. In this engagement the Royal Irish were represented only by one officer, Captain and Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Sir H. Havelock, V.C.,[191] then serving on the headquarter staff as D.A.Q.M.G., and a few men. The losses at Rangiriri greatly dispirited the enemy, who allowed Cameron to march unmolested up the right bank of the Waikato, and on December 9, 1863, to occupy Ngaruawahia, the capital of the rebellious country.
The Royal Irish were hard at work on the line of communication during this time. Tracks had to be cut through virgin forest and garrisons provided for settlers’ farms; convoys needed large escorts, while the road along which the waggons lumbered had to be strongly piquetted and constantly patrolled. In these duties detachments of the XVIIIth met with many exciting adventures; they alternately rescued parties of other regiments from imminent danger or were themselves saved from destruction by the timely arrival of reinforcements. Many laurels were won in these skirmishes, of which the details, as far as they have been preserved, are here recorded.[192] Six days after the headquarters of the battalion had reached the Queen’s redoubt Captain Ring, with Ensign Bicknell, two sergeants, and forty-seven rank and file, was sent in charge of a convoy to Drury. The track passed through a forest, thus described by an officer of great experience of campaigning in the forests of many parts of the British Empire: “The bush of New Zealand is wonderfully dense and entangled. A European going into it about twenty yards and turning round three times is quite at a loss to find his way out again unless he is somewhat of an Indian path-finder and can judge of the points of the compass by the bark of the trees, the sun, &c. Trying to run through the bush one is tripped up by the supplejack and other creepers.”[193] While on the march Ring fell into an ambuscade of about 140 Maoris; fire was opened by invisible enemies upon his advance-guard, his right flank, and his rear; a driver and two horses in the centre of the convoy fell wounded; the line of waggons was thrown into confusion, and the Maoris attacked his left flank. He retired immediately with as many men as he could concentrate, and, in skirmishing order, kept the enemy at bay for some time; then seeing himself nearly surrounded he retreated into a settler’s farm, which he held until some of Inman’s detachment at Drury extricated him from his dangerous situation. In this affair four men were killed and ten wounded.[194]
Soon after this affair Ring found himself in charge of a mixed body of troops at Keri-Keri, on the road which runs north-east from Drury through the Wairoa country to the coast. With him were five officers and about two hundred rank and file of the battalion, and two officers and a hundred men of a New Zealand militia regiment. In the morning of the 22nd of July he learned that a number of natives had murderously attacked two settlers, and immediately afterwards heard heavy firing about two miles off near Pukekewereke, where sixteen volunteers were defending themselves against very heavy odds. Leaving the militia and two officers and a hundred of his own men to hold the post, he hurried to the rescue with Lieutenant Wray, Ensigns Jackson and Butts, and the remainder of the Royal Irish. On reaching the scene of the skirmish Ring opened fire, and, to use the words of his report, “the natives retreated to my former entrenchment above the wharé[195] at Keri-Keri; the fire of the skirmishers drove them down the side of the hill into the brushwood; the leading skirmishers on the right, under Lieutenant Wray, took possession of the hill and kept up fire on them; I, with another body of skirmishers, proceeding to take that on the right flank, but found that the natives, who mustered a strong force, nearly surrounded me; here I lost a man killed, whose rifle and bayonet were taken possession of by the natives, though not without serious loss to them. I then concentrated my men on the entrenchment, and having heard from a Royal Artillery officer who rode up to my position that the 65th regiment was in my immediate vicinity, I requested that he would inform the officer commanding the 65th that there was a track in the enemy’s rear, and that if an attack were made in that direction it would be of great service. As it was quite impossible for me to follow so strong a force of the enemy into the bush with my small force, I remained in the entrenched position until close on sunset, keeping a steady fire on the enemy, who were endeavouring to obtain the body of the private who was killed and whom I would not leave. I repeatedly tried to obtain possession of the body by sending out volunteers of the man’s company, but desisted, finding it would entail greater loss. I was about to retire, leaving a rear-guard in the entrenchment, when the mounted artillery arrived.” The gunners were closely followed by a party of the 65th, who threw themselves into the fray with great spirit. On the appearance of these fresh troops the natives drew off into bush so thick that no pursuit was possible, and after the body of the dead soldier had been recovered the whole force returned to their entrenchments. This affair cost the battalion one man killed and four wounded.[196] For Ring’s conduct and good judgment on this occasion General Cameron recommended him for a brevet-majority, to which he had been gazetted in England before he fell mortally wounded at the engagement of Orakau on March 31, 1864. The detachment was commended for the firmness with which they had held their ground against superior numbers.
The next time any of the XVIIIth were in action seems to have been on the 25th of August. The attack on Ring’s convoy had shown how easily traffic could be stopped in the Hunua forest. To make communication safer through this belt of bush the Government of New Zealand set a large number of men to cut down the scrub on either side of the road. Soldiers as well as civilians were employed on the work; among the former were a party of a corps which appears not only to have been ignorant of the first principles of warfare, but grossly disobedient to orders. General Cameron had officially reminded the troops that axe-men should always be protected by a covering party; but the detachment disregarded this order and, far from taking precautions for their safety, piled arms near the road under charge of a single sentry. The Maoris crawled through the bush, rushed the sentry, and before the detachment could regain their rifles nearly all the arms had fallen into the enemy’s hands. Several of the ---- were hit; the remainder, defenceless without their rifles, had fallen back for shelter into the forest, when the guard of a convoy, chiefly composed of a company of the Royal Irish, under Captain R. P. Bishopp, appeared on the scene, and after an hour’s sharp skirmishing succeeded in driving away the enemy. In this affair one man of the XVIIIth was wounded.[197] Early in September the headquarters of the Royal Irish were moved to Drury, leaving two companies under Captain Noblett to man the Queen’s redoubt. During the month three detachments of the battalion had brushes with the enemy. Half a mile from the village of Pokeno, near the Queen’s redoubt, a party of 62 non-commissioned officers and men, under Ensign C. Dawson, were attacked by a body of natives, who fired into them from the rear. A bayonet charge drove the enemy into a gully, down which the Royal Irish pursued them for half a mile, when a burst of war-whoops and yells from the village warned Dawson to collect his men to meet a fresh danger. Making his way back to Pokeno, he was received by a volley from Maoris hidden among the stumps and logs of timber in a clearing in front of the village, and from another party on his left flank. Dawson had his men well in hand, kept them in skirmishing order, and maintained a steady fire from all available cover, until he was extricated from this unpleasant situation by the arrival of a party of the 40th, and later by a further reinforcement, the escort to a convoy commanded by Captain Noblett, XVIIIth regiment. The Maoris fled before the levelled bayonets of the combined detachments and took refuge in the bush, into which the soldiers could not follow. A few days later, a convoy in charge of a body of volunteers broke down at Pukekohe, near Drury; some of the Royal Irish, under Captain Inman, were sent to its assistance, and found the waggons stuck in deep mud, while the Maoris were attacking the stockade which contained the garrison of the post. Inman’s party rescued the convoy; then, reinforced by the volunteers, they went in with the cold steel, and received praise from General Cameron for “the gallant manner in which they charged the enemy, driving him back into the bush with severe loss from the position he had taken up near the stockade.” For his services on this and other occasions Captain Inman received a Brevet-Majority.
About the same time another party of the XVIIIth were in action on the Wairoa road, along which various blockhouses had been built to cover the approach to Auckland. One of these works, the Galloway redoubt, was in charge of Major Lyon, an ex-imperial officer, under whose orders some of the battalion were placed. On the 15th of September the Maoris attacked the redoubt, but were beaten off, after an affair in which the steadiness of the Royal Irish was conspicuous. Two days later Lyon, who had been reinforced by another party of the XVIIIth under Lieutenant Russell, took the offensive, and under cover of darkness led his troops towards Otau, a native village occupied by local insurgents. It was found to be on the far side of a river, and while Lyon searched for a ford, he engaged the enemy with musketry--according to a well-known historian, with unexpectedly important results--
“Across the stream at early dawn a detachment of the XVIIIth regiment poured concentrated fire upon the wharés [huts]. They did not know that within them was a band of Maoris, who had come to join the fighting, and who, under the volleys poured upon the huts, fell like sheep. The troops, unable to cross the stream, withdrew, unconscious of what they had done. Major Lyon, who made a circuit by a bridge, found the settlement deserted. ‘The wharés,’ he said, ‘were riddled with shot, blood in profusion both inside and out. They were unmistakably taken by surprise.’ In after years a Maori who was present told how extensive was the slaughter unwittingly inflicted by the XVIIIth, who exercised themselves by firing at the huts without knowing how they were occupied. As the wounded and dead were carried away before Major Lyon reached the spot, he also was ignorant of the severity of the blow inflicted.”[198]
In October, the battalion were again fortunate enough to rescue a party of New Zealand volunteers from a dangerous situation. An officer of the irregulars while reconnoitring a large body of natives near his post at Manku, was drawn into an engagement, forced back into his stockade, and closely surrounded. The news reached Drury in the evening, and a strong party of the XVIIIth under Captain Noblett was at once sent, with some of the 70th, to the relief of the volunteers. Pushing on throughout the night the troops early in the morning reached Manku, from which the Maoris decamped promptly, thus depriving the Royal Irish of the excitement of a skirmish. They at once returned to Drury, where they arrived after twenty-two hours’ continuous marching. At the end of the month two companies in charge of Captain Noblett reinforced Ring’s post in the Wairoa country; and in November an expedition, largely composed of the Royal Irish, was sent to avenge outrages committed on the settlers in this district. The marauders had stockaded themselves in a position surrounded by dense bush, swamps, and precipitous ravines, but after a skirmish the pah was captured and destroyed.
In war opportunities of distinction do not come to every officer, and such in a marked degree was the case in New Zealand, where much good work was done by some of the officers of the XVIIIth whose names do not appear in General Cameron’s reports. Though the vigorous action of the troops on the line of communication and in the Wairoa country prevented the Maoris from raiding Auckland itself, it was impossible for Cameron with the small number of men at his disposal to carry the war into the enemy’s country, and at the same time protect all the outlying farms cleared in the bush by enterprising settlers. In most cases the colonists abandoned their farms, sent their women and children to Auckland, and turned themselves into a militia, which proved a valuable asset in the British force. Occasionally, however, the entire population of a settlement held its ground, and required help from the troops. Thus, in September, Captain Kemp[199] with 150 of the Royal Irish was sent to the relief of one of these outposts of civilisation; a forced march through virgin forest, past many farms which the Maoris had looted and burned to the ground, brought him to his destination, where he found the colonists had thrown up stockades round their tiny church, in peaceful times used by various denominations as a place of worship, but now turned into the keep of the primitive fortress. Leaving these brave pioneers a supply of provisions and cartridges, and a small party of troops to give backbone to the defence, he returned to Drury, where his next duty was to form a post at a deserted farm on the line of communication. With his own company and fifty men under Lieutenant Briggs he cut down tree ferns, and with their trunks, lashed together with wild vines (locally known as supplejack), built a strong palisade, eight feet in height, enclosing not only the farm buildings but also space enough for the tents of his detachment. As soon as the farm had been placed in a state of defence, the British instinct of cleanliness asserted itself, and the house and outbuildings were thoroughly cleansed; then parties of men were sent out to “round up” the farmer’s cattle which had strayed into the forest, while others improved the defences and escorted the convoys to the next post on the way to the front. Encouraged by the presence of the detachment the farmer returned with his family to his house, which can hardly be described as a peaceful home, for, to quote Captain Kemp’s diary, “Our nights were disturbed by seeing lights in the bush. I burned all the low scrub (near the farm), and twice a-week took out a skirmishing party and scoured the forest: we saw a few natives but they always escaped us in the thick undergrowth. However we were not further molested.” Kemp’s diary then briefly records a succession of escorts to convoys and to prisoners taken at the fight of Rangariri; much road-making, and marches knee-deep in swamps.
In January, 1864, the Royal Irish were employed in various ways.[200] Part of the battalion was sent to guard the line of communication from the Queen’s redoubt southward to Ngaruawahia; the remainder formed the garrisons of the chain of works which Brevet-Colonel Carey had established between the Waikato and the estuary of the Thames. Thanks to Captain Kemp, we know something of the hard work done by those of the XVIIIth who were in charge of these posts. On the 7th of January, with two hundred men, he
“marched to the Surrey redoubt; it was very hot as we skirted the swamps and many men fainted from the heat. We placed a detachment in the redoubt, slept in the open outside it, and marched at 5.30 A.M. next day eight miles to the Esk redoubt on high ground in open fern-covered country. Here I left Briggs and a detachment and took my company down to the Miranda redoubt, four miles farther on, situated at the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the estuary of the Thames and defended by a small river on the north side. Here I had command of two hundred men, one half being Waikato militia. We enlarged the redoubt and made a road down to the landing-place (previously all stores were dragged up the face of the cliff and the Commissariat suffered heavy losses). We made a floating bridge over the small river, sunk a well for drinking water, and built a small redoubt on the approach from the south in which a strong piquet was posted at night. Boats being unable to come in at low water we made a causeway across the mud flats to a deep-water landing-place.... We were annoyed at first by spies and small parties of the enemy at night, so I sent out scouring parties and destroyed their villages, bringing in large quantities of beautiful peaches, potatoes, and other vegetables.”
At the end of January, General Cameron had accumulated enough stores at Ngaruawahia to warrant his advancing farther to the southward. He therefore worked up the right bank of the Waipa, building and garrisoning redoubts as he advanced, and in a few days reached the village of Te Rore, where for nearly three weeks he was brought to a halt--not by the enemy, but by the eternal difficulty of supply and transport. Shoals in the rivers made water-carriage uncertain, and though the crews of the little steamers, the flat-bottomed row-boats, and the other craft specially built for the expedition did their best, this mode of transport was always liable to break down. By land things were no better. In the plain between the Waikato and Waipa rivers there were hardly any roads, and the native paths, winding through forests of tree ferns, were so narrow that men could only march in single file. These paths crossed innumerable creeks running in deep watercourses, impassable for guns or waggons till roads had been cut down the steep banks and bridges thrown over the streams. The difficulty of keeping supplied even the small number of men--less than 2500--who were concentrated at Te Rore was enormous, for though Cameron’s headquarters were only eighty miles from his base at Auckland, every box of “stores had to be shifted twelve or fourteen times on account of changes of land and water carriage.”[201] To relieve this strain Cameron cut a road through the bush to Raglan, a port twenty miles distant on the west coast, and thus gained a second or subsidiary base, but as a set-off to this advantage a considerable number of men were necessarily withdrawn from active operations to guard the new line of communication.
While the advance depôt at Te Rore was being gradually filled up, the Maoris threw up a formidable chain of works to bar farther advance into their country; but after a few skirmishes they were manœuvred from these positions and disappeared into the mountains in the centre of the island. To prevent their return down the Waikato river, a post was formed on its left bank at Pukerima, and manned by the headquarter companies of the XVIIIth from Ngaruawahia. The stay of the battalion at the Maori capital had been uneventful, though to celebrate the temporary reunion of most of the companies pony races and sports for the men were organised, and made a welcome break in the monotony of the campaign, for in the long intervals between active operations amusements for all ranks were not to be obtained. An officer writes: “There were very few opportunities during the war for gymkhanas and that sort of thing, and a ‘sing-song’ over the camp-fire was as much as could be attempted. Occasionally a little duck-shooting from canoes was obtainable if we were stationed near a river, or more rarely a raid on the semi-wild boar sometimes to be met with in the bush. Pigeon-shooting was sometimes to be had, but this was about all.”
Not all the companies went with headquarters to the new post; some held the works on the lower reaches of the river, and a detachment of four companies under Captain Ring was at Te Awamutu, where Colonel Carey, recently promoted to be Brigadier-General and second-in-command of the forces in New Zealand, was throwing up strong redoubts. Here everything appeared to be quiet until a scouting party of colonists discovered that a number of Maoris had slipped back to the Waikato plain, and were vigorously entrenching themselves a few miles off near the native village of Orakau. Carey at once reconnoitred the pah, and decided to move on the enemy’s position during the night; the main column was to advance on Orakau,[202] while smaller parties were to place themselves by forced marches on the enemy’s flank and rear. Like a good soldier, Carey did not issue his orders till the last moment, and it was not till after dark on the 30th of March that the officers of the detachment of the XVIIIth heard the news, which reached them in a very dramatic manner. They were sitting at mess in a native hut, dimly lighted by a few camp lanterns, when the voice of a staff officer was heard calling for Ring, who in a few minutes returned, looking pale and depressed. Waiting until the soldier servants had left the hut to reply to his comrades’ inquiries as to the cause of his sudden gloom, he explained that the detachment was to march that night to attack the pah, and he added in confidence that he had a presentiment that his last hour was close at hand. “I have taken part in many affairs of this kind,” he said, “but I have never felt as I do now.” When his friends “chaffed” him and tried to cheer him up, he answered, “Oh! never fear. I’ll do my duty.” After issuing the necessary orders to the detachment he wrote his farewell letters, hastily put his affairs in order, and then marched off with the advance-guard, which he had the honour on this occasion to command.
The column reached Orakau at dawn on March 31. The Maoris, though evidently taken by surprise, opened fire on the advance-guard, composed of 120 Royal Irish and a party of 20 men of an irregular corps, known as the Forest Rangers. Ring extended his men into skirmishing order, and, supported by a company of the 40th, led them to the attack. The position, which apparently had not been reconnoitred adequately, proved very formidable. On a swelling down the Maoris had thrown up an “earthwork with good flank defences, deep ditches, with posts and rails outside, and nearly covered from view by flax-bushes, peach-trees, and high fern.”[203] Though repulsed by the fire of their unseen enemies Ring’s men re-formed quickly, and reinforced by a second company of the 40th, made another but equally futile effort to storm the works, being again beaten back with the loss of several officers and men, among whom was Brevet-Major Ring, mortally wounded. When Captain Baker, XVIIIth, D.A.A.G., saw that Ring was down, he flung himself off his horse, and calling for volunteers led a third assault. This failed also, but though these three attacks were unsuccessful, they served their purpose by so completely occupying the attention of the enemy that he did not realise that the British troops were hemming him in on every side; and though the cordon was at first but slender it sufficed to prevent reinforcements from throwing themselves into the pah. At midday a large party of Maoris tried to break through our lines from the outside, but a few shells and the musketry of the outposts kept them at a respectful distance, unable to do more than excite their besieged comrades to further resistance by shouts and war dances. As soon as the detached columns detailed to surround the pah were in their places, Carey began to sap up to the works, covering his movements with artillery fire. In defending themselves against this bombardment the Maoris showed great resource. “Long bundles of fern were cut and bound with strips of green flax until an enormous mass of yielding fern received the harmless cannon-balls and guarded the earthworks.”[204]
Throughout the afternoon and night the besieged kept up a heavy fire upon the troops, who “dug themselves in” so effectually with their bayonets that the casualties were few. The sap was pushed on vigorously, and on the 1st of April various small reinforcements, snatched up from the line of communication, reached Carey. Among them was a party of the XVIIIth under Captain Inman, composed of 1 captain, 2 subalterns, 8 sergeants, 2 drummers, and 110 rank and file, and 70 officers and men of the 70th; after marching all night, they were sent at once into the trenches and rifle-pits with which the pah was being rapidly encircled. Though the enemy kept up a heavy fire upon the men digging in the sap, the work went on without intermission until the morning of the 2nd, when Lieutenant-Colonel Havelock brought into camp a quantity of hand-grenades, which a brave artilleryman, at the risk of his life, hurled into the enemy’s rifle-pits. Under cover of the confusion produced by these missiles Carey ran into the sap a 6-pr. Armstrong gun, whose fire breached the palisades, and beat down the musketry directed upon the working-parties. The situation had improved so much that he was preparing to assault, when General Cameron ordered him to stay his hand. The General had recently arrived on the scene, but not wishing to deprive Carey of his command announced that he was present as a spectator only; learning, however, that many women and children were in the pah, he desired that the garrison should be given the chance to surrender before the attack was pressed home. The condition of the Maoris was now desperate. When surprised by our sudden swoop on Orakau, they had little or no water in the pah; our line of outposts and rifle-pits proved impenetrable to the parties who sought for water in the night; their only food was raw potatoes; their losses in fighting men had been considerable, and their supply of bullets was almost exhausted. Yet they disdained to yield, and when an interpreter addressed them, saying, “Hear the word of the General: you have done enough to show that you are brave men; your case is hopeless; surrender, and your lives will be spared;” they haughtily replied, “This is the word of the Maori: we will fight for ever and ever and ever.” They were then invited to send away the women, and answered, “The women will fight as well as we.”
After this abortive negotiation fire was reopened on both sides, and some of the troops appear to have lost their heads and attempted to storm the pah without orders.[205] One of these unauthorised assaults was led by a soldier in the XVIIIth, Private Hannon, who, throwing his forage cap over a partially breached spot in the defences, dashed after it with some twenty men, for the most part belonging to New Zealand corps. After clambering over a stout fence they dropped into a ditch, where Hannon and nine other brave men were mown down by a volley fired at point-blank range. But though a similar attack by a party of regulars and volunteers also failed to carry another weak spot in the fortifications, every hour saw the Maoris less able to face the storm of grape-shot, hand-grenades, and rifle-bullets poured upon them on every side. Suddenly Rewi, their war chief, decided to cut his way out or to perish in the attempt. While his followers mustered among the huts round which their works were built, they sang one of the hymns taught them by the missionaries, and then, remembering the old days before white men had settled in New Zealand, chanted invocations to their ancient gods.
“Their voices,” says Rusden, “were heard by the wondering English, who were to marvel still more at their daring. At the rear a double line of the investing troops had been thrown back under cover to enable a gun to open fire. Through that opening, about four o’clock in the broad day, chanting their appeal to the God of battles and moving steadily as in scorn of their foes, the Maoris marched towards the narrow neck of swamp between the ridge and mound. Carey (in his official report) said they rushed. Mr Fox writes that an eye-witness told him ‘they were in a great column, the women, the children, and the great chiefs in the centre, and they marched out as cool and steady as if they had been going to Church.’ Rewi ordered that no shot should be fired. The little ammunition left was needed for defence in the desperate course through the swamp.... Some accounts state that as if to deceive the troops and gain time for the fugitives, a Maori, while his countrymen departed, sprang up with a white flag on the parapet and was riddled by bullets. One chief, more successful, diverted the English for a few moments; he walked coolly towards the troops and surrendered.”[206]
The regiment (not the XVIIIth) charged with the defence of the ground across which the Maori column was moving, was disposed in two lines, the foremost lying under a bank which, while it covered the men from fire from the pah, prevented their watching the ground in front of them. The Maoris marched towards this bank, and, incredible as it seems, passed through these two lines of British regular troops, apparently without opposition. It was rumoured at the time that before the men in the first line discovered that the natives were out of their trenches, the Maoris had actually jumped over their heads and were well on their way towards the second line! Thanks to the energy of the General and his staff and the zeal of the remainder of the troops, the natives did not escape in a body, but were headed off by a handful of mounted men, who punished them severely in a pursuit which lasted until nightfall. Thirty-three prisoners fell into our hands; more than a hundred bodies were found on the field; it was known that at least twenty men had been buried in the pah, while traces in the bush proved that a considerable number of killed and wounded had been carried away after the troops had been recalled to camp. The natives themselves acknowledged to a loss of two hundred, out of a strength considered by General Cameron not to exceed three hundred fighting men. Well might the British General in his despatch say that it was impossible not to admire the heroic courage and devotion of the Maoris in defending themselves so long against overwhelming numbers.[207]
When the Royal Irish were let loose, the men were wild to avenge the death of Captain Ring, who was deservedly respected and admired by all ranks in the regiment. Though the officers did all they could to prevent unnecessary slaughter, more than one Maori was slain in the belief that it was he who had fired the shot which laid Ring low. When a fugitive was overtaken the cry arose, “That’s the man that killed the Captain!”--then came a wild yell, a bayonet thrust, and all was over. Not all the XVIIIth, however, were believers in such stern methods: two instances of clemency are recorded, one of which unhappily ended fatally to the poor Irishman. A soldier overtook and seized a Maori and spared his life; the prisoner was lying on the ground exhausted and apparently harmless, and his captor had turned away for a moment, when the native seized a rifle and shot him dead. The savage’s triumph was short-lived, however, for other men of the XVIIIth were on the spot and silenced him for ever. In the other case there was no such tragedy. Early in the pursuit a Maori was taken prisoner and placed in the charge of two privates, who, as they heard the shouts of their comrades dying away in the distance, cursed their bad luck in being obliged to remain behind. An officer came up when their impatience reached its climax, and overheard this conversation. “Shall we kill him, Barney?” Barney thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “I couldn’t kill the craytur in cold blood, Pat, but I wish we were quit of him.” “Kick him and let him go,” was the ready response. No sooner said than done; the prisoner disappeared into the bush, while Pat and Barney hurried after the regiment!
The British losses were sixteen killed and fifty-two wounded. The casualties among the Royal Irish were one officer (Brevet-Major Ring) and eight of the other ranks killed or mortally wounded, nine non-commissioned officers and men wounded.[208] In his official report Brigadier-General Carey, after expressing his deep regret at the death of Brevet-Major Ring, brought the services of Captain Inman to the notice of the General Officer commanding in New Zealand.
After the capture of Orakau the enemy retired again into the mountains, whither Cameron did not deem it prudent to follow him; and when the disaffected tribes in other parts of the North island heard how inconclusively the campaign on the Waikato had ended, there was an insurrection in the east, chiefly memorable for our defeat at the Gate pah, while in the south-west (the Taranaki country) there were frequent skirmishes between the troops and hostile natives.[209] To neither of these scenes of action were the Royal Irish summoned; after occupying Ngaruawahia for three months the regiment marched to Otahuhu camp, where it formed part of the garrison of Auckland during the remainder of the year.
At the beginning of 1865, the Royal Irish were sent to the south-west coast of the North island, to reinforce the small number of regular troops holding the Taranaki (or New Plymouth) district, where since the war began the British had been able to do little more than to hold redoubts round a few settlements, and to send occasional punitive expeditions into the enemy’s country. In the beginning of the campaign the rebel tribes, the adherents of the King, had fought us solely on political grounds; they objected to our presence and wished to drive us out of New Zealand, but no question of religion entered into the quarrel. Many of the Maoris had embraced Christianity, and had become such strict Sabbatarians that on one occasion the garrison of a besieged pah left their works on a Sunday morning to attend chapel, with results disastrous to themselves. But early in 1864, the British learned that a set of fanatics had arisen, named Hau-Haus, whose tenets, appealing to all that was worst in the Maori character, were a weird mixture of cannibalism, paganism, and Christianity.[210] In April 1864, a detachment of the 57th was badly cut up near New Plymouth; an officer, Captain Lloyd, and six men were killed by the Hau-Haus, who cut off their heads and drank their blood. A few days later, according to the native accounts, the Angel Gabriel appeared and ordered Lloyd’s head to be exhumed and carried throughout New Zealand, to serve as the medium of Jehovah’s communication with man. As soon as the head was disinterred it appointed priests, and announced that thanks to the protection of Gabriel and his angels the followers of the new religion would be invulnerable: the Virgin Mary would be constantly present with them: the religion of England was false and its scriptures must be burned; men and women were to live together promiscuously; the priests would obtain victories by shouting the word “Hau,”[211] and could invoke the help of legions of angels for the extermination of the whites. As soon as New Zealand had rid itself of the English, men would arrive from heaven to teach the Maoris all the arts and sciences known to Europeans. This extraordinary creed is believed to have been evolved by educated and unscrupulous natives, who realised that the Maoris had been shaken in their allegiance to the “King movement” by the result of the Waikato campaign, and that a stronger bond of union was required than a purely political organisation, the fortunes of which were not then in the ascendant.
Though in several affairs with the 57th the Hau-Haus learned by bitter experience that they were by no means invulnerable to Enfield bullets, the new religion found many converts. The tribes in the south-west of the North island had always been turbulent and hostile. They had committed grave and unprovoked outrages, such as the murder of a party of soldiers in 1863, which heralded the outbreak of the war. They were now in a state of open hostility, and almost the only part of the district which acknowledged the Queen’s rule was the ground enclosed by the redoubts round the settlements of Taranaki and Wanganui. The Government of New Zealand decided that there could be no peace until the tribesmen had been chastised, their power broken, and their country opened up. To accomplish these objects General Cameron had about five thousand troops, a thousand white volunteers, and a thousand native auxiliaries. His plan of campaign was that two columns, one based on Taranaki, the other on Wanganui, should force their way along the coast until they joined hands on the road between these two settlements.
On January 2, 1865, a detachment of seven companies (about 500 of all ranks) of the Royal Irish, under Major J. H. Rocke, embarked for Wanganui in H.M.S. Falcon and Eclipse, the remainder of the battalion being left under Lieutenant-Colonel Chapman at Otahuhu camp. On the voyage the Eclipse ran ashore on a sandbank, but the soldiers were transhipped to another vessel, and on reaching their destination took their place in a column commanded by Colonel Waddy, 50th, consisting of the Royal Irish; 50th; detachments of Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, and a small party of extemporised cavalry, in all 963 officers and men. On January 24, Waddy moved up the coast towards the Waitotara river. The route first led past settlers’ farms, well-planted and rich in clover-fields, and then skirted native villages, deserted by the Maoris, who had left their peach-groves and patches of tobacco, Indian corn, and water-melons to the mercy of the troops. Next came a weary stretch of steep sandhills, and it was late in the afternoon when Waddy halted near a lake close to the Maori village of Nukumaru. During the march no enemies had shown themselves, and from Colonel Waddy’s report it appears that the camp was formed before the outposts were in position. When the tents were pitched piquets were sent out; among them was a party of the Royal Irish, under Captain Hugh Shaw, with orders to take up ground half a mile to the north of the camp. Shaw moved off in skirmishing order and cautiously approached a patch of bush close to the village, which it was necessary to occupy. It was not until he was within thirty yards of this bush that a large number of Maoris, lurking in the thicket, disclosed their presence by a heavy fire. Though surprised, Shaw kept his head, and remembering that he had just passed a small ditch with a fence in front of it, rallied his party behind this meagre cover, which was but sixty yards from the Maoris’ position. As soon as he had set his rifles to work he counted his men, and found that one was missing, lying hard hit half-way between the piquet and the natives in the bush. Shaw was in a dilemma. To leave the man where he was would condemn him to certain death, for at nightfall he would inevitably be tomahawked by the Maoris: to order a few of the piquet to bring him in was to expose the rescue party to very great danger, nor did Shaw wish to send men on a forlorn hope unless he himself led them. Yet, if he did head a rescue party, he was technically abandoning his post, and, during his absence, throwing upon his subordinates the responsibility not only for the lives of the piquet but for the safety of the whole camp. Shaw decided to face this risk--a very grave one, as the events of the next day proved--and called for volunteers to help him save the wounded man. Four private soldiers, Brandon, Brien, Kearnes, and Clampitt sprang to their feet and dashed headlong after their officer. In a few moments these five gallant men were bending over their comrade, whom they found still living. The air around them seemed alive with bullets, for the piquet was firing viciously at the puffs of smoke which marked the lairs of the Maori sharpshooters, while the enemy concentrated his musketry upon the rescuers. There was no time to consult how best to move the wounded man: Shaw caused him to be hoisted upon his own back, and, staggering under the weight, carried him back in triumph to the piquet. Incredible as it may seem, neither Shaw nor any of his companions were hit in this adventure. Shaw was awarded the Victoria Cross, while privates James Kearnes, George Clampitt, and John Brandon were presented with the silver medal for distinguished conduct in the field.[212]
The sound of the firing brought up Major Rocke with a hundred men of the battalion, and thanks to this reinforcement the piquet was able to maintain so hot a fusilade that the enemy did not attempt either to surround, or to close in upon them. For some hours the fire-fight raged, the natives returning shot for shot; then the musketry died down, and the Maoris stole away to the shelter of a neighbouring pah. Early on the morning of the 25th, the piquet was relieved by Captain Noblett with seventy-five of his own men, and twenty-five of the 50th regiment. On the right he posted his party of the XVIIIth near the village, while on the left his detachment of the 50th watched a deep watercourse, with banks covered by a thick growth of wild flax. On the far side of this watercourse was another piquet, also of the 50th, but not under Noblett’s command. During the forenoon not an enemy was seen; the bush seemed absolutely deserted, but it was the lull before the storm. In the middle of the day the Maoris suddenly abandoned their traditional policy of standing on the defensive in carefully fortified positions, and two columns, in all about 600 men, falling simultaneously on the flanks of Noblett’s piquet swept it before them, and pushed forward so vigorously through the breach thus made in the outpost line that for a time the safety of the camp was seriously imperilled. From the scanty details preserved of this interesting fight it appears that about two P.M. Captain Noblett heard firing on his left, where Enfield bullets were falling among his detachment of the 50th. On hurrying to the point of danger, he discovered that these badly directed bullets came from the far side of the watercourse, where the distant piquet of the 50th was trying to stem a Maori rush. After making necessary dispositions he ran back to the right of his ground, to find that there also the natives were attacking in strength; they had set fire to the bush, and under cover of the smoke were pushing fast through the village, and driving the piquet of the XVIIIth backwards towards the camp. When the alarm was given all the troops not on outpost fell in and hurried up to the front. The first party ready to move was Captain Daubeny’s company of the XVIIIth; in a short time they met Captain Noblett’s piquet in full retreat; Noblett rallied his men upon the reinforcement, and then the two detachments, extending into skirmishing order, by their steady front and well-sustained fire effectively checked the enemy. Elsewhere, however, things did not go so well, and the natives were almost in the camp before the combined effect of a charge of mounted men and the shells of 6-pr. Armstrong guns drove them back into the bush. In their retreat the Maoris abandoned twenty-two killed and two wounded, and succeeded in carrying away about seventy dead or injured warriors. In the two days’ fighting the British casualties were--officers, one killed and two wounded; other ranks, fifteen killed and thirty wounded. The losses of the XVIIIth were three private soldiers killed and twelve wounded, one mortally.[213] The General in his report favourably mentioned the names of Major Rocke, Captain Shaw, and Captain Dawson.
After this repulse the Maoris retired to a pah close by at Wereroa, a position which they deemed impregnable. This opinion General Cameron appeared to share, for he did not attack, but, hoping to entice the enemy out of his works, moved slowly up the coast. At the mouth of the Waitotara river Major Rocke and four companies of the Royal Irish were left to guard a bridge of casks, while the remainder of the battalion, recently joined by the three headquarter companies under Lieutenant-Colonel Chapman, marched with the rest of the column to Patea. Here they remained for many months in charge of a line of posts on the road between Wanganui and Taranaki, sharing in only one of the few operations which took place in this part of the country in 1865.[214]
The state of affairs in New Zealand at this time was very unfortunate. General Cameron, who commanded the Queen’s troops, was at daggers drawn with Sir George Grey, the Governor of the colony. The New Zealand ministry was wrangling fiercely with the Cabinet at home, for at the very time that Cameron announced he could not carry out Grey’s policy without considerable reinforcements of regular troops, the Colonial Office intimated that the War Office was about to withdraw five battalions from New Zealand.[215] The General was already worn out by physical fatigue and mental anxiety: the threatened withdrawal of the troops was the last straw on the camel’s back; on the ground of ill-health Cameron asked to be relieved of his command, and in August, 1865, was succeeded by Major-General Trevor Chute. About a month before the new Commander-in-Chief arrived, Sir George Grey, who had in vain urged Cameron to attack the pah at Wereroa, remembered that before entering the service of the Colonial Office he had been a captain in the army, and determined to prove to the Maoris that their vaunted stronghold was not impregnable. On the morning of July 20, he assembled a small column, consisting of a hundred of the 14th regiment, an equal number of the Royal Irish under Captain Noblett, and about four hundred and seventy colonists and friendly natives. In his plan of attack Grey allotted a duty to the regular troops which required great discipline and steadiness: they were to demonstrate, and threaten an attack upon the front, the best defended face of the fortification, while the colonists and “friendlies,” by a long and circuitous march, established themselves on ground from which the rear of the Maori works could be commanded. The two hundred regular troops pitched their tents well within view of the natives, threw out posts, marched and counter-marched, and successfully “bluffed” the enemy into the belief that a large body of soldiers were preparing for an assault. The irregulars succeeded in placing themselves unseen in rear of the pah; there was some work with the rifle, and then the Maoris, seized with panic, swarmed down a steep cliff and abandoned their fortress, almost without firing a shot in its defence. A reinforcement of fifty of the XVIIIth were brought up from the line of communication by Major Rocke, who was now in command of the regiment,[216] but they took no part in the affair. The enemy lost fifty men and many stores: in Sir George Grey’s column there appear to have been no casualties.
For the rest of the year 1865 the headquarters of the battalion remained at Patea, with detachments along the coast. In December, General Chute was directed by the Governor to prepare an expedition against the Hau-Haus who infested the country between Taranaki and Wanganui. He drew a hundred officers and men under Major Rocke from the posts held by the Royal Irish; 139 of all ranks from the 14th regiment; about 100 from the 50th, and with 45 of the Forest Rangers and 300 native auxiliaries, took the field at the beginning of January, 1866. After making himself master of the strongly palisaded village of Otahuhu,[217] he led his column on a more difficult enterprise, the capture of the Putahi pah, which stood in a clearing on the top of a hill, 500 feet in height, with sides rough with spurs, seamed in every direction by watercourses, and covered with dense jungle. Only one path led from the plain to the summit through this labyrinth, difficult in itself and rendered almost impassable by the stockades and other defences with which it was known to bristle. Chute decided to avoid this death-trap by attacking the pah from the rear. Long before dawn on the 7th of January, 1866, his troops had begun a march, which in his despatch he described as “one continued struggle through a dense primeval forest and bush, over ravines and gullies which could in most cases only be ascended and descended by the aid of supple jack, and then only with great difficulty. The distance to be traversed could not have exceeded four miles, but the obstacles and obstructions opposed to us made it a severe task for four hours.” General Chute’s method of attacking the Maori works was rough but effective. “There was usually,” writes General Alexander, “an open plateau in front of the pahs; he brought his men there to the edge of the bush, and when his line and supports and natives in reserve were all ready he made his bugler sound a single G; the men advanced from under cover, and on the double G being given a rush was made at the pah, hatchets were drawn from the belts of the men, the withes of the outer fence were suddenly cut, the palisading broken through, and the pah stormed with cheering in the smoke.” Such was his plan at the capture of Putahi. As soon as the Forest Rangers reached the plateau they opened out into skirmishing order, lying down within 400 yards of the enemy to cover the formation of the remainder of the troops, who as they emerged gradually from the bush were extended--the detachment of the XVIIIth on the right, the 14th in the centre, and the 50th on the left, with the native contingent in reserve. It was more than an hour before the soldiers at the rear of the column, breathless from their exertions in scaling precipices, had found their places in the ranks. During that time the Hau-Hau garrison, about two hundred strong, had first performed a war dance to keep up their spirits, and then fired, but with little effect, upon the troops. When Chute’s line was in order he gave the word to advance. Under a heavy but almost harmless fusilade the soldiers moved forward, as steadily as on an ordinary parade; when they were within eighty yards of the enemy the double G was sounded; they charged and burst into the pah, driving the enemy before them headlong into the bush. A general pursuit followed, in which the Hau-Haus are said to have lost considerably; then the troops were called off; the pah was destroyed and the column marched back to camp. In this affair the British casualties were two men killed and ten wounded, none of them belonging to the XVIIIth.
In the course of the next few days General Chute captured several more of the Hau-Hau strongholds, and wound up his punitive expedition by marching round the east of Mount Egmont to Taranaki, by a track believed to be impracticable for civilised troops. In these successes, however, the XVIIIth had no share, for Rocke’s party was ordered back to Patea the day after the Putahi pah was captured. With Chute’s march the war, as far as most of the regular army was concerned, came to an end. The British Government decided that the Imperial forces should no longer be actively employed, as it considered that the Maoris had been sufficiently weakened for the colonists to finish the struggle without further help from the mother country.[218] Nearly all the troops were accordingly withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Wanganui; the Royal Irish, however, remained in their old posts in the Patea-Wanganui district, which continued to be much harassed by rebellious tribes. Communication along the coast road was interrupted; small parties of colonists were frequently surprised and murdered; and the local forces were twice rudely handled in operations in the bush. Occasionally the garrisons of the posts made sorties against the insurgents, but nothing of importance occurred until October, 1866, when the Governor arrived at Patea and called upon Major Rocke for the help of his regiment in quelling disturbances in the country round Wanganui. Major Rocke was in the happy position of being his own commanding-officer, with no senior present to whom the question had to be referred. He joyfully responded to Sir George Grey’s appeal by organising a mobile column of three hundred Royal Irish and an equal number of New Zealand militia, and led the combined force to Waingongoro, where the Governor at an interview with the rebel leaders failed to persuade them to lay down their arms. Sir George Grey at once moved towards Papoia, a native village buried in the heart of the forest, believed to be strongly fortified, and known to be approachable only by difficult paths. He determined to surprise this village by an attack at dawn, and Rocke accordingly paraded his men at midnight on the 17th-18th of October. The Royal Irish led the march, preceded by a storming party under Lieutenant Pringle, who had volunteered for this dangerous duty. Silently, and with every precaution to avoid giving the alarm to their watchful enemy, the Royal Irish slowly followed the friendly natives who guided them along a steep and narrow track. At daybreak the men at the head of the column noticed that the path was leading into a glen, and a few minutes later discovered that across this glen the Hau-Haus had thrown a huge barricade, nine feet in height, made of the trunks of trees and crowned with a stiff “post and rails” fence. At this moment a number of natives, hidden in the bush, opened a heavy fire upon the storming party, but Pringle disregarded this flank attack, and with his men rushed at the barricade, breached it with axes, and drove the defenders into the bush. The rest of the column poured through the gap and swarmed into the village, which the Maoris hastily abandoned, leaving several dead behind them. This success, obtained without loss to the XVIIIth, was quickly followed up by Rocke, who, making his way across country hitherto believed to be impassable to Europeans, raided several hostile villages, which the Hau-Haus, cowed by the capture of Papoia, abandoned without resistance. At the conclusion of this three weeks’ campaign, the gallantry of Lieutenant Pringle in his charge on the barricade was brought to the notice of the officer commanding the troops in New Zealand; and two of the men who accompanied him, privates Acton and Hennigan, were awarded the medal for distinguished conduct in the field.[219] It may here be mentioned that although this affair was the last in which regular soldiers took part, it was not until 1869 that the issue of a medal for the New Zealand war was sanctioned, while not until 1870 was leave given to the regiments which had been engaged in the war to add the words “New Zealand” to the battle honours on their Colours. For their services Brevet-Colonel G. J. Carey and Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Sir H. M. Havelock, Bart., V.C., were created Companions of the Order of the Bath; Major J. H. Rocke received a Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonelcy; and Captains J. Inman and T. D. Baker were promoted to Brevet-Majorities.
During the time the Royal Irish were engaged in active operations against the Maoris their casualties were--
Officers--
Died of wounds, Brevet-Major J. T. Ring. Died from accident or disease, Lieutenants F. P. Leonard and O. R. Lawson. Ensign G. B. Jenkins.
Other ranks--
Killed or died of wounds, 17; died from accident or disease, 39; wounded, 36.[220]
Until March 1867, the regiment continued to hold the line of posts between Patea and Wanganui; then the condition of the country warranted the concentration of the Royal Irish at the latter place, where they remained till December, when headquarters and six companies were sent to Auckland, with two detachments, each of two companies, at Napier and Taranaki. When the headquarter companies reached Auckland the command of the battalion was assumed by Lieutenant-Colonel G. A. Elliot, who had arrived from England on promotion from the first battalion, vice Colonel Chapman, retired on half-pay. At this time the effective strength of the battalion was 861, all told.[221]
There is little of interest to chronicle in the doings of the battalion during the year 1868. The headquarters remained at Auckland, with detachments in various parts of the colony. The armament of the Royal Irish was modernised by the issue of Snider breech-loading rifles to replace the muzzle-loading Enfields with which the men had hitherto been provided. In December Colonel Beatson, the officer who for a year and a half had commanded the troops in New Zealand, left the colony; before sailing he issued farewell orders in which he expressed his “unqualified satisfaction with the correct and soldierly conduct of the 2nd battalion, XVIIIth Royal Irish regiment, which reflects credit not only on themselves alone but also on the British army of which they are now almost the only representatives in this distant colony.” Early in 1869, the battalion was warned to be in readiness to relieve the 50th in Australia. The European population, however, strongly opposed the departure of the Royal Irish: officers and men were alike popular with all classes of society, and while on personal grounds the colonists wished to retain the regiment among them, from the political point of view they deprecated the withdrawal of the XVIIIth, who were the rear-guard of the British army in New Zealand. As a concession the Ministry at home reluctantly postponed the departure of the battalion, but after a few months again ordered it to Australia. The Government of New Zealand remonstrated warmly against this decision, and offered to guarantee for five years any annual payment which the War Office might fix as the price of the retention of the XVIIIth. But as the Imperial Government had decided to throw upon the settlers the responsibility for the defence of the colony, it decided that no regular troops should remain in New Zealand, and at the beginning of 1870 the battalion embarked, the headquarters and four companies for Sydney, and detachments of two companies each for Melbourne, Adelaide, and Hobart.
How highly the Royal Irish were appreciated in New Zealand will be seen by the following extracts from official documents, newspaper articles, and farewell speeches on the subject of their departure. Sir George Bowen, who succeeded Sir George Grey as Governor of the colony, recorded his “sense of the important service rendered by the 2nd battalion, XVIIIth Royal Irish during the present rebellion, and also of the admirable conduct of the officers and men, who have invariably maintained the most cordial relations with their fellow-subjects. Their approaching departure is viewed with deep and general regret both on public and on personal grounds.”[222]
In a speech made by Sir George Arney, Chief Justice of the Colony, on the 16th of February 1870, the following passage occurs:--
“I believe that every inhabitant of New Zealand has heard often of the 18th Royal Irish--has heard not only of that gallant and distinguished regiment, but also of the society of gentlemen who have won the affections, I believe, and certainly have commanded the respect, of the whole colony. And that which I have said of the Officers, I may in some degree also say of the men. As the head of one special department, I can say that during my long sojourn here, I have known no other regiment which has been so distinguished by its freedom from crime; and the men of this regiment have themselves thus become respected, not only by those of their immediate class, but by all classes of society in the Colony. That circumstance must be taken as due not only to the efficient command of the Officer at the head of the regiment, but also to the temper and discretion with which his orders have been carried out by the Officers of the regiment. I will say but little on the fact that this Colony is now losing the presence of this gallant regiment; it is a subject which, I believe, is a painful one to the hearts of the whole of the colonists in New Zealand. I believe that the 18th will be universally regretted, as they are now universally respected.”
The Ministers of the New Zealand government also gave their testimony to the good conduct of the regiment in a communication to the Governor.
“MEMORANDUM FOR HIS EXCELLENCY.
“Ministers cannot permit the last detachment of Her Majesty’s 18th regiment to leave the Colony without expressing the regret which they feel at the departure of the regiment, and bearing testimony of the uniform good conduct of the force under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot, during the period of its service in the Colony; the sentiment which the Government thus places on record is that of the whole community.
“The Government also desires to express the feeling which it entertains of the readiness which Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot, and the Officers commanding detachments under him, have always displayed to aid the Colony as far as lay in their power.
“The Government also desires to record its appreciation of the uniform courtesy and consideration which they have experienced on the part of Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot in their communications with him through His Excellency the Governor.
“(Signed) WILLIAM FOX, “Premier.”
By the beginning of March, 1870, the various detachments of the regiment had settled down in their new stations, but they were not destined long to enjoy the pleasures of life in the capitals of the Australian colonies,[223] for very soon came orders for the regiment to return to England. The policy of withdrawing all Imperial troops from New Zealand had been carried out. It was now Australia’s turn to be denuded of her garrison, and in August 1870, after hundreds of men had taken their discharges in order to settle in Australasia, the Royal Irish embarked for Plymouth. The sailing ship Silver Eagle left Sydney on the 21st of August with the four headquarter companies; Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot was in command, and with him were one captain, four subalterns, two surgeons, and one hundred and thirty-five other ranks. On board the sailing ship Corona, which left Melbourne about the same time, were Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Rocke and two other field-officers, five captains, nine subalterns, and two hundred and forty-six other ranks. The Corona arrived at Plymouth on November 16; the Silver Eagle made so long a voyage round Cape Horn that before she reached port on December 5th, it was currently reported that she had been lost at sea.
* * * * *
The Australians were profoundly moved when the Royal Irish left their shores. The XVIIIth was already very popular, and apart from this personal feeling, the settlers were deeply wounded at the removal of this, the last British regiment of the garrison of Australasia. While all men regarded this step as the breaking of one of the few visible links between the mother country and her offshoots in the southern hemisphere, many pessimists hinted that the policy of the Home government was intended to force all the colonies into a declaration of independence. When the Corona sailed from Melbourne fifty thousand people crowded to the beach to wave a sad farewell to the XVIIIth, gloomily comparing the departure of the regiment with the abandonment of Britain by the Roman legions. Happily these prophets of evil were mistaken. The loyalty of the colonies to the Empire is unimpaired, and the tie of sentiment has been strengthened by the presence in three African campaigns of large bodies of volunteers from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who fought shoulder to shoulder with Imperial troops in quarrels with which the colonists were concerned solely as members of the British race. Though the offer of two thousand Australasian militia and volunteers to serve against the Boers in the war of 1881 was refused by Mr Gladstone’s government, four years later eight hundred men from New South Wales were fighting at Suakim, and four hundred Canadian voyageurs were steering whale-boats upon the Nile in the expedition towards Khartoum: while in the recent struggle with the Boers for the possession of South Africa, nearly thirty thousand men from Greater Britain represented the oversea provinces of the Empire in the army of the old country.
* * * * *
When the second battalion landed in England, it was quartered at Devonport, where the energies of the officers and non-commissioned officers were devoted to welding into shape the recruits enlisted to fill its depleted ranks. These youths were of poor physique and small stature, and only three hundred were finally accepted as suitable for the Service, but good food and systematic training did wonders for them: in a year their average height had increased an inch, while they had grown two inches wider round the chest. The burden of drilling and disciplining this mass of raw material fell upon the adjutant, Lieutenant H. B. Moore; his success was so conspicuous that when he left the army in 1873, Lieutenant-Colonel S. Wilson, who in 1871 had succeeded Colonel Elliot in command, warmly thanked him for his work in a regimental order. During the six years spent by the battalion at various garrison towns in England nothing of interest occurred, except that the Royal Irish were represented in the Ashantee war by Major T. D. Baker and Lieutenant I. W. Graves, both of whom were mentioned in despatches.[224] In June, 1876, the retirement of Colonel Wilson placed Lieutenant-Colonel R. H. Daniel in command; and in the following month began a tour of duty in Ireland, as barren of events as had been that in England. The battalion was at Kilkenny in the spring of 1878, when in anticipation of a possible war with Russia part of the reserve was called out, and four hundred men from the Kilkenny and Wexford militia were poured into the ranks of the Royal Irish, whose officers led a strenuous life during the three months of the embodiment. On the death of Colonel Daniel in May, 1882, Lieutenant-Colonel C. F. Gregorie arranged an exchange with Lieutenant-Colonel M. J. R. M‘Gregor, first battalion, and was gazetted to the command of the second battalion on September 14, 1878. After passing three years in Ireland, the home battalion of the Royal Irish spent two years at Aldershot, and then was moved to Chatham where the marching-in state showed a strength of 15 officers, 37 sergeants, 12 drummers and 356 rank and file. Here it remained until August, 1882, when it embarked for Egypt on active service.
X. THE FIRST BATTALION
1865-1884.
CHANGES IN ARMY ORGANISATION: THE SECOND AFGHAN WAR.
While the second battalion of the Royal Irish regiment was winning its spurs in New Zealand, the first was quartered in southern India. At the end of 1865 it was ordered home; volunteering into other corps was permitted, and 381 non-commissioned officers and men elected to finish their service in the East, while 29 officers[225] and 450 other ranks, with 44 women and 72 children, embarked in February, 1866, at Bombay in two ships, the slower of which did not reach England until the end of June. Two years later the battalion was sent to Ireland, and in August, 1871, was warned for another tour of foreign service. This order filled all ranks with dismay, for if any corps in the British army had the right to expect a long rest at home it was the first battalion of the XVIIIth. Since 1692, when it first landed on the Continent, it had spent a hundred and nineteen years out of the United Kingdom, and between 1837, when it sailed for Ceylon, and its return from India in 1866, it had served abroad with one short break of less than six months’ duration; it had fought with distinction in China, in Burma, and in the Crimea, and had shared in the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. To explain why the War Office sent the first battalion on foreign service again so quickly, it becomes necessary to allude briefly to the long series of changes in the organisation of the army which began to take effect in 1870.
The strain thrown on the military resources of Britain by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny had convinced even the most determined economists in the House of Commons not only that the army was too small, but that it was utterly lacking in power of rapid expansion in case of need. To increase its numbers in time of peace was comparatively easy, and by the addition in 1858-59 of second battalions to the twenty-five senior regiments of the line, the infantry was materially strengthened. But to render the army more elastic, more fit to meet a sudden national emergency, was a far more difficult matter. The process by which the XVIIIth was brought up to war strength for the Crimea[226] was the only method then known for making a regiment ready to take the field, for as there were no reservists to replace men too weakly or too young for a campaign, the ranks of a corps ordered on active service could only be filled by the depletion of other units, which by this process of “robbing Peter to pay Paul” were reduced to impotence, until they in turn had obtained recruits and trained the raw material into soldiers. Of the various attempts to form an adequate reserve one only was successful--the “militia reserve,” composed of the best men in the constitutional force, who for a small annual retaining fee undertook in case of need to serve as regular soldiers in any part of the world. But this was only a reversion to the methods of the Crimean days, for it called away the pick of the militia at the moment when they were required, if not for active service, at least for garrison duty at home and in the Mediterranean; and at best it could produce but a limited supply of men who were obviously very inferior in quality to well-trained ex-regular soldiers. The problem of how to create an adequate reserve remained virtually unsolved for many years, though numberless committees were appointed to consider the question in all its bearings. The subject was, indeed, most complex. The army at home had to be prepared to defend the British Isles, to embark on expeditions beyond the limits of the United Kingdom, and to replace the waste caused by death, by invaliding, and by the discharge of “time-expired” men among the troops abroad, of whom 70,000 were quartered in India, while nearly 50,000 more were scattered in garrisons among our fortresses and colonies in other parts of the world. Gradually the opinion gained ground that it was hopeless to expect the army to discharge these varied duties, unless there was behind it a large body of highly-trained and disciplined men who, when a war was imminent, could be counted upon to reinforce the troops at home; and the brilliant success of the Prussians in “the Seven Weeks’ War” of 1866, determined our government to adopt a modification of the German principle of short service with the Colours, followed by a period of service in the Reserve. To devise a system suitable to an army recruited by voluntary enlistment, and of which a very large proportion is normally stationed abroad, required years of preparation, and it was not until 1870 that Mr Cardwell, then Secretary of State for War, began to introduce the great innovations which modernised the British army. By the abolition of “purchase,” rich men were no longer able to buy their steps, and by the power of the purse obtain promotion over the heads of their poorer comrades; the ages were fixed at which officers of various ranks were to retire, so that a reasonable flow of promotion was obtained; the garrisons of the tropical colonies were reduced, while those of the great oversea provinces were gradually withdrawn; recruits were enlisted for twelve years--the first six to be passed with the Colours, and the remainder in the Reserve; while to provide for an adequate and systematic flow of trained men to India and our other outlying possessions, regiments were linked together in pairs--one serving at home, the other abroad. One of the functions of the “home” battalion was to impart to the recruits the ground-work of military training, and, when the young soldiers were fit to serve out of the United Kingdom, to send them in drafts to the “foreign” battalion, where they remained for the rest of their service with the Colours, and then on their return to the United Kingdom were transferred to the Reserve. In the first twenty-five regiments, which already possessed two battalions, the process of “linking” was effected without the difficulty and friction which frequently occurred in cases where two corps, strangers to each other in tradition and sentiment, were suddenly brought into the intimate relation of virtual partnership; and when in 1882, regiments ceased to be designated by numbers, and the identity of the original units was merged into that of the territorial regiment, the XVIIIth became the Royal Irish regiment with no regret beyond that of the loss of the number under which it had won distinctions in every part of the world.
As the second battalion had only just returned from New Zealand and Australia, it was the turn of the first battalion, under the newly introduced system, to go abroad; and on January 18, 1872, Lieutenant-Colonel G. H. Pocklington, with 26 officers and 606 other ranks, embarked for Malta. After three years the first battalion, 917 strong, sailed for India under command of Lieutenant-Colonel E. L. Dillon, and early in December reached Bareilly, where it was quartered for nearly four years. While it was at this station His Majesty King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, made a Royal progress through the Eastern Empire that would one day be his, and on the 6th of March, 1876, stopped at Bareilly on his way from the Terai to Allahabad: His Royal Highness was received by a guard of honour of the Royal Irish, while the remainder of the battalion lined the avenue through which he passed on his way to the palace of the Nawab of Rampore. In the evening the Prince did the battalion the honour of dining with the officers, and gave to the mess portraits of the Princess of Wales and himself as a memento of his visit, and a few days later two large steel engravings of the Prince and Princess of Wales were sent by His Royal Highness as a present to the sergeants’ mess. A year later the death occurred of Field-Marshal Sir John Forster Fitzgerald, G.C.B.,[227] who since 1850, when he succeeded Lord Aylmer, had been the Colonel of the XVIIIth, Royal Irish regiment. This veteran, whose age had earned for him the title of “the father of the British Army,” was born in Ireland in 1786, before the abolition of the iniquitous system by which wealthy men were allowed to buy commissions for infants prattling in the nursery. At the mature age of eight Fitzgerald was a captain in the regular army, at seventeen he was a major, and he obtained his lieutenant-colonelcy when only twenty-four years of age. He served in the Peninsula, commanding a brigade in the battle of the Pyrenees in 1813; in 1854 he became General, and in 1875 received a Field-Marshal’s bâton. He died in March, 1877, at Tours, and by the special order of Marshal Macmahon, then President of the French Republic, the whole of the garrison attended the funeral to pay to the British officer the honours accorded to Frenchmen of his exalted military rank. He was succeeded as Colonel of the XVIIIth by Lieutenant-General Clement A. Edwards, C.B.[228]
The first battalion changed stations from Bareilly to Ferozepore in February, 1878, and just after Lieutenant-Colonel M. MacGregor succeeded to the command on September 13, 1878, two companies were detached to Mooltan, while a third was sent to Dera Ismail Khan, one of the posts guarding the north-west frontier of India. For a few days there seemed to be a chance of “blooding” some of the young soldiers of the XVIIIth, for the Mahsood Waziris raided into our country and burned the town of Tank some thirty miles from Dera Ismail Khan. The native cavalry of the garrison were at once sent to the scene of the outrage, and fell heavily upon the freebooters, many of whom were killed and wounded, while the remainder fled to the neighbouring hills, where they threw up sangars and challenged us to attack them. But the officer in command of the British column was not disposed to squander the lives of his troops by assaulting stone breast-works without a preliminary bombardment; and remembering that some of the Royal Irish had been taught gun-drill at Dera Ismail Khan, he ordered up a couple of pieces, manned by soldiers of the XVIIIth under an officer of the regiment, Lieutenant H. Shuldham-Lye. The amateur gunners, “spoiling for a fight,” pushed on to Tank at speed, but when the tribesmen heard that guns were to be used against them they suddenly dispersed, and the little campaign came to an end. For its services the detachment was officially thanked by the officer in command of the operations.
A few months after the Royal Irish arrived at Ferozepore Russian intrigues involved Britain in war with Afghanistan, an independent State whose mountains overhang part of the north-west frontier of India. As early as 1837, England and Russia were contending for the privilege of directing the foreign policy of the Amir of Afghanistan, upon whose borders the rival European Powers were advancing by giant strides in the course of their Asiatic conquests; and when the Amir, Dost Mahomed, cordially welcomed a Russian officer, who brought from the Czar proposals for an alliance against England, our government determined to depose Dost Mahomed and to replace him with a nominee of their own. The attempt to carry this scheme into execution produced the first Afghan war, in which the Czar made no effort to help the Amir, being satisfied at having involved his great rival in an expensive and disastrous campaign with the country he proposed some day to use as a stepping-stone in the invasion of India. At the end of the Crimean war Russia, foiled in her projects against Turkey, devoted her energies to the subjugation of Central Asia, where vast territories fell into her hands; and by the conquest of Khiva in 1873, she advanced her outposts to within four hundred miles of our Indian frontier, establishing herself within easy striking distance of Afghanistan. Shere Ali, the Amir, trembling for his independence, offered his friendship to England if she would give him a specific promise of help against Muscovite aggression, but as our government refused any such guarantee he decided to throw in his lot with Russia. In 1877, there was war between the Sultan and the Czar, and as it seemed probable that England would again intervene by force of arms to save Turkey from annihilation, the Russians intrigued more vigorously than ever with Afghanistan, sending a military envoy to the Amir, who received him with every mark of distinction. To counteract the effect produced in every village in India by the knowledge that a Russian envoy had been officially welcomed at Kabul, the Viceroy decided that a British mission should visit Shere Ali, who was informed that Sir Neville Chamberlain was coming to discuss matters of importance with him in a friendly spirit. In due time the mission set forth from Peshawar, but in the Khyber Pass, just within the Amir’s boundary, its members were turned back by Afghan troops, who under orders from Kabul refused to allow them to advance farther into Afghanistan. As Shere Ali declined to apologise for this insult, war became inevitable, and after our ultimatum had been rejected British troops invaded his country from various points.
It is not proposed to describe the operations of the second Afghan war, for the first battalion of the Royal Irish, upon whom fortune had frowned during the Mutiny, were still pursued by ill luck, and played but the smallest part in the campaign. Though the war began in November 1878, it was not until the beginning of the following year that the first battalion was ordered up from Ferozepore to join the reserve division of the Northern Afghanistan field force at Peshawar. A few weeks later this division was broken up; the battalion was transferred to the Khyber Line force; and on May 2, 1879, eight hundred and four stalwart Royal Irishmen found themselves at the foot of the great wall of rock which forbids access to Afghanistan from the plains of India.[229] This natural rampart is pierced by the Khyber Pass--a dark and gloomy gorge, winding its way between high mountains which so nearly approach each other that in places their rugged sides are only ten or twelve feet apart. Through this defile, one of the most difficult in the world, runs the track which for centuries has been the highway of commerce between Central Asia and Hindustan. In the middle of the pass the mountains, suddenly receding, form a plain, where the battalion spent the next ten months in discharging the useful but unattractive duties which fall to the lot of line of communication troops. They had to hold Lundi Kotal and Ali Musjid; to provide escorts for convoys through the pass, and to piquet the neighbouring hills. The guards were numerous, for the local tribesmen were expert thieves, to whom every British rifle was worth its weight in rupees; and notwithstanding the vigilance of the sentries in the sangars round the camp, Afridi robbers succeeded in abstracting a few firearms from the tents in which the men were sleeping. A good many non-commissioned officers and privates were lucky enough to escape from the drudgery of this existence by obtaining employment as signallers on the Kabul-Peshawar line, where from constant practice they became experts with flag and heliograph. During the summer there was a sharp outbreak of cholera in the battalion, which cost the lives of Quartermaster R. Barrett and sixty of the other ranks.[230] “It came up from India in the most curious way, right along the signallers’ posts. We heard of it first at Jumrood; a few days afterwards a man in the first post was taken ill; a few days more and the second post was attacked, though there appeared to be no communication possible (except by heliograph) between the posts, and it gradually kept on till it reached the regiment. We knew it was coming; we could not move, and I think,” writes an officer, “that it showed the staunchness of the Royal Irish that they never went to pieces at all.” To keep up the spirits of the men and give them some amusement the officers rigged up a gymnasium and laid out a polo-ground and racecourse, where regimental gymkhanas were often held.
Although the first battalion was not actively engaged in the Afghan war, the officers and men who served in the Khyber Pass received the medal, and the regiment was permitted to add the words “Afghanistan 1879-80” to its battle honours. At the end of the campaign in 1881 the Royal Irish returned to India, and for the next two years and a half oscillated between the great cantonment of Rawal Pindi and the hill station of Kuldurrah. On May 23, 1882, when Lieutenant-Colonel M. MacGregor’s term of command expired, he was succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel H. Shaw, V.C., and in July of the same year the death of Lieutenant-General Edwards broke one of the few links still connecting the XVIIIth with its campaigns in the middle of the nineteenth century. He died full of years and honours, respected and admired not only by the regiment with which he had passed the best years of his life, but by every officer and man with whom he had served during his long career.[231] Lieutenant-General and Honorary General Sir Alexander Macdonnell, K.C.B., was appointed to replace him as Colonel.[232] A few weeks after the Royal Irish lost their Colonel, the second battalion sailed from England for Egypt to take part in the campaign described in the next chapter. The first battalion continued to serve in India until August, 1884, when in its turn it was summoned to Egypt as one of the corps selected for the attempt to rescue General Gordon from the dangers besetting him at Khartoum. The account of the doings of the first battalion in the Nile Expedition will be found in chapter xii.