TILL THEIR LEGS WILL SWELL.
Journals of An Itinerant Army Officer
The reading eye craves something original. Something written that taps the tinfoil of memory and things forgotten through the eye.
A book or article to one’s taste is rare to come by these days. Nay, these days anything new is hard to come by, so well educated and well informed have we all become or so I thought. Good writing has always been less common than we assume and more so in this AI age of processed artificiality.
I recently found a book to read that gave out the same old thrill of standing on the doorway of a great new world. I had in my hands a very old journal of an artillery lieutenant of the East India Company’s horse artillery. I felt the fraternal pull one feels towards members of one’s own family. He was from my tribe or rather I was from his tribe of journal writing officers. We were separated by two hundred years of service in the same army. Much had changed and much seemed the same too.
The journals were from the Second Anglo-Maratha war of 1804-5. He has left treasures on each page. The honesty and lack of guile is inconceivable in today’s day and age. Independent writing is rare and moreover as it has no ACR value, it is a vocation that nobody seeks. That Mr. Young the writer of this journal, possessed extraordinary gifts of courage, intellect, independent observation and a very strong constitution, there is no doubt. You have to be cut from iron cloth to march for ten hours in the baking heat of an Indian month of June, fight a few odd battles in the day and then cap the day by writing all the happenings of the day in your journal before sleeping. And to do this day after day, month after month, is mind boggling. But many men have done it and will continue doing it, whatever the odds because they write for the future generations that will come.
Mr. Young laments the shortage of officers in the artillery, whereas infantry and cavalry seem to be getting a regular supply of new officers. He is not satisfied with the level of training of the native artillery men (Golundaazes). He is part of a field force that is fighting the Marathas under Jaswant Rao Holkar. We the present-day army officers don’t know much about Jaswant Rao Holkar. No part B, Part D, JC or staff College entrance paper expects today’s army officers to know or understand conditions of warfare in native India two hundred years ago, at least to my knowledge. I could be wrong also. Holkar hasn’t received much acclaim or recognition in the lamplight of Indian military history.
Mr. Young writes down much of what filters down to him through others in the camp. In the pre tv-radio-internet-social-media age, the young officers out on campaign must have been talking a hell of a lot to stave off boredom. Some of the cribs of the officers of Indian Army two hundred and twenty-two years ago sound the same as they do today. It is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realizes how absolutely modern the best of all old things is.
Mr. Young has criticized history’s great military names. He hasn’t spared Wellesley who defeated Napoleon in Europe, nor Lord Gerard Lake. These two won or wangled a lot of Indian territory for the East India Company. Young was careful to strike out the names of these mighty men. You can’t speak contritely against mighty names even today.
Why I hook on to Young’s journals is that he lacks guile in writing. He writes the truth with a virgin pen. He says they are there to win territory and loot and plunder and conquer India for profit and profit alone. Although the modern readers of India like to hungrily swallow the story of India’s loot, pillage and plunder from writings of popular writers selling million-copy block busters, who would collect things from original source writers like Young?
It is beyond my powers to condense a journal of 263 pages into a small essay. Young writes on November 10,1804 that Maratha Chieftain Jaswant Rao Holkar is now left with only 5000 troops as 7000 Sikhs who had joined him have deserted. They were disgusted with Holkar for always avoiding pitched battles with the firanghi army and they reproached him for cowardice.
When Mr. Young learns of the desertion of the Sikhs, this is the astonishing observation he makes in his journal:
“The term cowardice is misapplied on Holkar. Holkar acts upon system and to tell the melancholy truth, HAS FOUND OUT THE TRUE SECRET OF HOW TO FIGHT THE ENGLISH. All former enemies of ours, from days of Lord Clive, to those of General Lake so late as the last war, met us in the open field with vast, nay incredible advantages in numbers and in artillery. Yet we have always beat them and again would do so from our GREAT SUPERIOR KNOWLEDGE OF THE ART OF WAR. Holkar has had the singular penetration and good sense to see and acknowledge this inferiority at regular warfare, and in casting about for some other way, he has hit upon the only safe and true expedient to annoy us. Letters of his to Ameer Khan, intercepted in Bundelkhand last campaign, declared his intentions of trying to ruin us and knock up our troops by constantly avoiding fighting, by perpetually harassing our camps, cutting off our supplies, carrying away of our baggage, cutting up all detachments and small parties. Making irruptions into our own country, whither we must of necessity follow and to use his own remarkable words, knowing as he did, ‘impossibility of Europeans resisting the effects of hard work in this baneful climate.’ Compelling us to march wherever he leads, ‘UNTIL THE VERY LEGS OF FRINGIES SHOULD SWELL and they be obliged to give up.’ Our legs have not literally swelled but if we have to undergo the fatigues we have experienced since we left Delhi for any long time, even that part of his plan will be realized and that too soon.” (sic)
In the meantime, while I have been bricking up this essay about an original Indian military mind never taught to us, Jaswant Rao Holkar, and the redeeming journal writer Lieutenant James Young, my in-tray has filled up and it’s time to cross the chasm of thought from early nineteenth century to early twenty-first century.
