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More reviews by Nigel Collett
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Sahib: The British Soldier in India, 1750-1914 by Richard Holmes
I had the good fortune to be taught by RICHARD HOLMES many years ago when he was lecturing in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Since then he has progressed to greater things, and is now Professor of Military and Security Studies at Cranfield University, and one of Britain's foremost military historians, but he has not lost the art of bringing Britain's military history to life. After a day in the gym or on the range, it took a lot to keep the young officers in his class awake; Holmes's class had no nodding heads. In SAHIB: THE BRITISH SOLDIER IN INDIA, 1750-1914, his most recent work in a series which has so far included Redcoats, the story of the British soldier in the days of the musket, and Tommy, his account of lives in the trenches in the 1st World War, Holmes is on his liveliest form. His speciality is history in the words and lives of those who lived it, and this time he turns to the soldiers who won and garrisoned the British Indian Empire, the officers and men of both the British regular forces and the forces of John Company, then the Indian Army, alongside whom they served.
It is an enormous story and one which requires a big book to encompass it. This Sahib certainly is, being some 572 pages long, including the usual scholarly apparatus, but Holmes writes with a touch light enough to carry the reader's interest through every aspect of the lives of his subjects. He makes prolific and entertaining use of the words of these men (and some women, for he does not omit the views of the soldiers' wives, sweethearts and whores) to illuminate their passage out to India, their sufferings on campaign, their sports and games and the stifling social life they endured in cantonment and station. This is an account of Anglo-Indian soldiering intended not to analyse but to paint an impression of a whole way of life. Fortunately, it is an account which avoids the tempting descent into mawkish sympathy exhibited by earlier writers (supreme amongst whom was Philip Mason, whose account of the Indian army is in fact an elegy to "loyalty to comrades, fidelity to an oath, courage under stress"). Holmes avoids this trap to give us warts and all. His descriptions are vivid and merciless. Among the many eccentric Britons in his pages, he describes one commanding officer "in front of his tent stark naked as the day he was born talking to the orderly sergeants, flapping away the flies which buzzed about him with a towel." Of two sisters who graced the dining rooms of Calcutta's finest social circles: "They are both great talkers, old and ugly, and both stink like pole cats."
Much of the book, as one would expect, covers life on campaign, on the marches and retreats, battles and sieges that occupied the Army for the whole of the 164 years that Holmes covers (his choice of the period 1750-1914 is a little strange; perhaps he intends a further volume to take the story to its end at Partition in 1947?). This is the period of the establishment of British power, Clive's victory at Plassey, the defeat of Hyder Ali, Tipu Sultan and the Mahrattas, the absorption of huge territories in the Punjab and Sind. It is also the period of the catastrophe in the 1st Afghan war and of the horrific bloodshed of the 1857 Mutiny (or Rising, as others would call it today; but this is a book about the British, so Holmes makes no bones about adopting their terminology). There is plenty here for lovers of military history. Holmes recounts in gory detail the carnage of the battlefields and the ghastly treatment that was all that could be afforded their casualties. His quotations, and he is particularly rich here, take us through the most harrowing encounters of the Mutiny and the horrors of it suppression. His descriptions of the orgies of rape, destruction and plunder, which habitually attended the British sack of Indian cities, can but shock. The suffering Holmes describes of the soldiers unlucky enough to be posted to the Afghan wars, or to be captured by Indian potentates trammelled by no local form of the Geneva Conventions, reminds us that soldiering was a very brutal profession, one which left few alive to draw their pension at its end. Between 1736 and 1834 only some 10% of John Company's officers survived to take the final voyage home.
A life exposed to debilitating climate, endemic diseases and hard drinking (the future Duke of Wellington was reckoned to be abstemious in only drinking "four or five glasses with people at dinner, and about a pint of claret thereafter") killed many quickly and ruined the health of most. Venereal disease was everywhere; rates of infection ran at between 32-45% of all ranks in British regiments in India in the 1830s. Yet despite all this, the romance of India and the lure of the wealth to be made there never failed to attract generations of young men to its armies. Holmes calculates that over the period he covers, several millions of British officers and men served and died in India. Their love-hate relationship with the sub-continent is clear in the memoirs which he quotes with such joyful abundance. They loved the place, even as it killed them.
Holmes has written a fine survey, a work which will long stand as a description of the men who soldiered for the Crown and for John Company in the Indies. The lines he quotes from Kipling, sad lines on the lot of the pensioner returned home to poverty and death, can serve more happily to sum up this book:
Think what 'e's been
Think what 'e's seen
Think of his pension an' --
Gawd save the Queen.
Nigel Collett
27/10/2005
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