carried, and cut his leg almost to pieces. But in ten days he was steaming up the Indus, already full of schemes for fertilising the waste places and for making Kurrachee a great harbour-mart, through which should pass all the commerce of that huge valley. Already we hear no more of the 'bad cause;' misgovernment is grossly apparent; a country laid waste in game forests; feudalism in its most barbarous forms everywhere present. The Ameers who then ruled Scinde held by right of a conquest dating back some sixty years, and they ruled as a conquering race who ground down the native Scindees with a heavy heel. They are tyrants, and so are we; but the poor will have fairer play under our sceptre than under theirs.' 'We have no right to seize Scinde, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, and humane piece of rascality it will be.' 'The more powerful government must inevitably and at no distant period swallow up the weaker : would it not be better to come to that result at once?' His tone grows more and more confident, more emphatic. He has pity on the poor Scindees, who are seen to pick grains out of horses' dung for food; tax-wrung to the last, 'they live in a larder, yet starve.' 'The robber is master' in the rich alluvial soil round the Indus, where grain shoots up twelve feet high. There is no system of irrigation, and the spirit of his Cephalonian times is strong in him when he desires to curb this wild river.' 'If I can lay the first stone of a system that will give life and humanity to the Indus, my life will not be in vain, and I think I shall do so.' That is the thought he is happy in, the heartsease of his life; the indescribable longing for command is a passion, but one consciously rebuked. When he surveys his picturesque and far-reaching encampment at Alore, a town built by Alexander the Great (the memory of the old Western conqueror in these regions is never far from his mind), he writes: 'My God, how humbled I am when I think! How I exult when I behold! . . . A little wretched experience in the art of killing is all the superiority that I their commander can boast of.'

I am here concerned not to discuss the policy of Scindian conquest, only to trace the workings of Napier's mind. They are not obscure. If I thought,' he writes, 'Lord Ellenborough was acting on an unjust plan, I would, of course, obey my orders, but should deeply regret my position. But I do no such thing.'1 And why? Always the same answer. "The richness of the soil

1 Italics mine.-S. G.

is indescribable; it is Egypt; yet waste and desolate because the robber rules; when he falls, the peasant may cultivate in safety, not till then.'

That was his justification of himself to himself on grounds of general humanity. As an imperial necessity, the matter appeared to him not less plain. Afghanistan, when he went to Scinde, was scattered over with British forces detached from each other and from their base. These forces painfully, and in some cases ingloriously, extricated themselves from that dangerous country; as Napier said, though we could claim to have conquered, we had rather been kicked out than gone out. On the Punjab frontier the Sikh power hung like a thundercloud, and the British name had lost its terror. His duty in Scinde, as he conceived it, was to retrieve the imperial prestige; and to this end he would accept nothing less from the Ameers than unconditional obedience. The political staff whom he found in the country, with Outram at their head, advised him that the Ameers had no sinister purpose. Napier believed, and the event justified him, that they were bent upon expelling the English, and only deferred overt revolt till the summer should have given them the terrible sun for an ally. The original treaty forbidding them to levy tolls on the Indus had been infringed and was infringed while he was in the country; a penal treaty was substituted, and, though they nominally accepted this, letters of the Ameers were brought in urging the hill tribes to a rising, and it was apparent that armies were being drawn together. Napier decided to strike first. He was at Sukkur, two hundred miles north of Hyderabad, the stronghold of the Ameers' power; Khyrpoor, their northern capital, which was within twenty miles of him, he could terrorise. But on the left of his line of march southward lay the Scindian desert, and in that desert was the great fortress of Emaumghur, supposed inaccessible to Europeans. Napier was determined first to cut off the enemy from their retreat into the desert. He was sixty years old, and he had never before commanded an army in the field; but his first operation was to march southward along the eastern border of the Indus valley, and on January 5, 1843, he struck out into the desert with 350 soldiers of the 22nd Regiment mounted on camels, 200 of the Scinde Horse, and two 24-pounder guns. One hundred and fifty of the horse had to be sent back at the end of the first march; the guns had in many instances to be run up steep sandhills by the men; a day's march covered only ten

miles; but on January 12 the force reached Emaumghur to find the place evacuated. It was a great castle, with walls forty feet high, well stored with powder; Napier blew it up in one huge explosion, and made his way back across the rolling sandwavesthe expression borrowed by Sir Francis Doyle in his famous poem is used repeatedly in the journal.

Wellington, not lavish of his praise, wrote: Sir Charles Napier's march upon Emaumghur is one of the most curious military feats I have ever known to be performed or have ever perused an account of in my life. He moved his troops through the desert against hostile forces; he had his forces transported under circumstances of extreme difficulty, and in a manner the most extraordinary; and he cut off a retreat of the enemy which rendered it impossible for them ever to regain their position.'

The same wise boldness which he showed in this his first enterprise was the mark of his action throughout. War was not even yet counted for certain; Napier had taken with him Ali Murad, the Ameer who was master of Emaumghur, and secured his nominal consent to the work of destruction; he still believed. that the Ameers might be overawed, and readily granted Outram leave to proceed to Hyderabad and negotiate; but while doing so he steadily advanced southward. The Ameers parleyed interminably, endeavoured to induce Napier to come in person into Hyderabad; but, failing in their object, attacked the Residency. Outram beat off the assailants and escaped by river to rejoin Napier. On February 17 was fought the battle of Meeanee, and on the 19th Hyderabad surrendered, and Napier took up his quarters there; but the war was not over. Shere Mohammed, the Lion of Meerpoor, who with 12,000 men was advancing to join the other Ameers at Meeanee, was still undefeated, and was their best soldier; Napier's force was still insignificant in comparison with the multitudes about him. He was, however, speedily reinforced by the men from north and south, and on March 24 attacked the Lion at Dubba, six miles from Hyderabad. The disparity of numbers was not so great as at Meeanee; Shere Mohammed had some 25,000 against Napier's 5,000; but his army was in a strong position, and the Beloochees fought desperately. But the European army had the confidence of victory, and the result was never for a moment in doubt. At Meeanee things were very different. There Napier was able to put into line barely 2,000 men; the enemy numbered probably rather over

30,000 than under. Owing to the smallness of the European force, any attempt to turn the Belooch position was impossible. The smaller force advanced straight against the long line of enemies, who were protected in great part by a deep nullah, and the battle was fought hand to hand. Yet a chance gave to the General that opportunity to avail himself of chance which marks a great commander. On the left of the Belooch position was a wood screened by a wall, which advanced at an angle from the Belooch line. In this wall was one gap, and as the British advanced to a point nearly level with this gap, Napier saw that troops were posted in the wood, ready to rush through the gap upon the British flank when the two lines became engaged. I saw,' he writes, that the wall was not loopholed and had no banquette, because a man sitting astride on the top and firing matchlocks at us evidently stooped to reach them from men on the ground who handed them up. There were no heads on the wall either, which I well knew discipline could not have prevented had there been a banquette.' Instantly, therefore, he detached a company under Captain Tew, bidding him to block the gap, and if necessary die there. The officer carried out his orders to the letter; with sixty men he held the thousands who were in the wood back behind the wall till the British line had got between them and the main body, breached the wall, and turned artillery upon the masses thus penned up; and he died in doing it.

But the main battle was fought breast to breast. Musket was to matchlock what breechloader was to muzzle-loader; but what decided the fight was the close order which the bayonet admits as against the loose order required to use the sword. For three hours and a half the lines were not three yards apart. Napier himself was obliged to go to the front and rally the 22nd and the 25th Native Infantry, and being in the front he could not retire. A year later he wrote in his journal, looking back:

When in the fight I held my life as gone; for as to escaping, all idea of that vanished when I saw the 22nd giving way and was obliged to ride between the fires of two lines not twenty yards apart. I expected death as much from our men as the enemy, and I was much singed by our fire; my whiskers twice or thrice so, and my face peppered by fellows who in their fear fired high over all heads but mine, and nearly scattered my brains. In agony I rode, holding my reins with a broken hand' (he had sprained it a few days before), and quite unequal to a single combat, had a

Beloochee picked me out, as one was about to do when Marston slew him.' Lieutenant Marston of the 25th had thrown himself between, and received on his shoulder a blow intended for the General. 'It cut nearly through the brass scales on Marston's shoulder,' Napier writes elsewhere: the red ribbon will not grace mine more.' All the journals and letters after Meeanee are full of records of the valour of his subordinates. When a medal was decreed to the troops, he wrote to Lord Ellenborough:

'Whilst the officers and soldiers received nothing, my ribbon sat uncomfortably on my shoulder; now I can meet Corporal Tim Kelly and Delany the bugler without a blush.' These men were his orderlies at Dubba and Meeanee-Delany at Meeanee. 'Three times, when I thought the 22nd could not stand the furious rush of the swordsmen, Delany sounded the advance, and each time the line made a pace or two nearer the enemy.' 'Here be it recollected' (adds William Napier) 'that the fighting was hand to hand, that each pace in advance was under a descending sword, and that to sound his bugle Delany resigned all self-defence.' Two more things should be recorded. After the action the 22nd gave the General three cheers on the field; but they had cheered him once already in the heat of the fight. And the despatch relating the day of Meeanee was the first in which a British General recorded by name the merit of non-commissioned officers and privates.

It is outside the purpose of this paper to follow Napier in his task of organising European rule in Scinde-a task more congenial to him than conquest. But the deadly quarrel with Outram which sprang out of these cannot be passed over; it has a painful prominence in Sir William's Life of his brother; and one may at least suggest certain considerations. Outram wrote to his mother a few days before Meeanee: Sir Charles Napier is fortunately so good and kind-hearted a man that he would never drive the Ameers to extremity as long as he could prevent bloodshed.' Outram was called 'the Bayard of British India;' it was Sir Charles Napier at a public banquet who fixed the name upon him. While they were in personal relations, they differed absolutely upon policy, but they admired and, one may say, loved each other. It was when Outram went home that third persons repeated words of his to William Napier, infinitely more jealous of his brother's fame than that brother himself; and, owing to an unhappy punctiliousness, the two men never met. Had they met I cannot but think the quarrel would never have arisen; VOL. VIII.-NO. 43, N.S.

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