THE ARMY IN THE FAR EAST—1819–75
The minor wars outside the main peninsula of Hindostan have been caused either by the expansion of the Empire of India in the only possible direction—eastward—or for the purposes of colonisation or trade.
A series of points on the road to the Pacific were gradually obtained, usually by purchase, between 1786 and 1824, such as Penang, and the land opposite in the Straits of Malacca, with Singapore and Malacca farther south. These guarded the sea-road to China, with whom we were eventually to be engaged in war.
But before that happened, Alompra, King of Ava, had played into the hands of those who were willing to add still more realms to those already under the British flag. He had conquered much of the southern peninsula, and, fancying himself irresistible, had raided our Cachar territories which bordered on his. He had seized the island of Shapuree and driven out the British guard there. Reluctant as was the East India Company to engage in further war after the costly campaigns with the Mahrattas, they had little choice. Prestige is all-important with semi-barbaric nations, and force alone wins respect. So this first expansion of empire into the Burma-Siamese peninsula began as a punitive expedition.
It commenced with an outbreak of mutiny, which future events in India rendered ominous. The 47th Bengal Regiment refused to embark for Burmah, lest they should lose caste. It is possible that their scruples were sincerely conscientious, and their contract of enlistment does not seem to have337 contemplated their employment beyond the seas. It was bad management to select those whose religious antagonism might be roused; but the order had been given, and on the continued refusal of the men to embark, they were fired on by European infantry and artillery and massacred.
Then the expedition started, on a three years’ campaign, in which the 1st Royals, 13th, 38th, 41st, 44th, 47th, 54th, 87th, and 89th shared, as did also the forerunner of the present 102nd or 1st Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers, besides numerous regiments of Madras Sepoys.
There had been some skirmishing with the invaders of Cachar, in the north-west, where General Shuldham was on guard, but the physical difficulties of forest and mountain rendered military operations extremely difficult; so that the second step was the occupation of Arracan by General Richards, with the 44th, 54th, and seven Sepoy battalions. Little else was done in that province, and the troops suffered terribly from sickness. Soon after Rangoon was taken by Sir A. Campbell, who had the 13th, 38th, and 41st Regiments, with a large force of Sepoys, as well as the remains of the 44th and 54th line Battalions, and this formed the base of all the future operations. The war throughout was peculiar. The chief villages and towns were on or near the banks of the Irrawaddy and its tributaries, and the whole district was covered by dense forests and marshes through which ran poor tracks which could scarcely be deemed roads. The enemy fought with bravery, but rarely ventured to meet the invader in the open, basing their defence on skilfully constructed stockades, which they rapidly erected. The physical difficulties were great, and led to delay, which in its turn led to a steady decimation of the white troops. Between June 1824 and March 1825, out of an average force of about 2800 men nearly 1400 had died. It was jungle fighting under the most severe conditions, and the whole strategic plan of attack was the successive assault and possession of the chief towns until the capital itself was reached.
But little headway was made at first. The first attempts on Kemmendine and Donabu failed; raids on Tavoy,338 Mergui, Tenasserim, Martaban, and Yé succeeded. There were constant skirmishes round Rangoon, in which the 38th and 13th especially distinguished themselves; and as Havelock says, in his Memoirs of the Three Campaigns, the enemy “acquitted themselves like men. They fell in heaps under the bayonet.”
But until 1825 began, the only result of the operations had been the possession, more or less, of the coast line. Early in that year a famous Burmese general, one Maha Bandoola, who had marched through Arracan bearing with him heavy gold fetters wherewith to bind and make captive Lord Amherst, appeared before Rangoon. The “Lord of the golden foot” who ruled in Ava was exasperated at the capture of the place. His first order had been: “British ships have brought foreign soldiers to the mouth of the river. They are my prisoners. Cut me some thousand spans of rope to bind them.” The Burmese army therefore took up and entrenched a strong position at Kokaing, whence Rangoon was harassed; but, attacked in rear by Cotton with the 13th Regiment (which lost 53 men and 7 officers killed and wounded, out of a total of 220) and some Sepoys, and in front by Campbell with a force in which were the 38th, 41st, and 89th (recently arrived), the enemy, 25,000 strong, was badly beaten by about 1500 men, and fell back on Donabu. The 47th and Royals having arrived as reinforcements, Campbell pushed on toward Sarawak, but Cotton, attacking Donabu, was not in sufficient force to carry out his object; so the two wings united and attacked the place a second time, and after desperate fighting carried the defences of the town, and Bandoola was slain. He was a man of an inquiring disposition, and was anxious to see the properties of the common shell, one “with a very long fuse having been projected by the British. The live ‘creature’ was brought fizzing at a dreadful rate to him; and he, at some distance, surveyed with great curiosity the unfortunate men bringing the fiery fiend along. Another second or two and it burst, killing the carriers and every one beside it! Bandoola was thunderstruck, and for the whole of that day339 his courage left him.” The stockades were “made of solid teak beams about 17 feet high driven firmly into the earth. Behind this wooden wall the old brick ramparts of the place rose to a considerable height, affording a firm and elevated footing for the defenders. On the works were 150 cannon and several guns. A ditch surrounded them, and the passage of it was rendered difficult by spikes and great nails planted in the earth, by treacherous holes and other contrivances. Beyond the ditch were several rows of strong railings; but in front of all was the most formidable defence, an abattis of felled trees, thirty yards in breadth, extending quite round the works.”
This will give a good idea of the Burmese defences at that time.
The next post of importance occupied was Prome, still farther up the river, and here, though the lower part of the country was now in the undisturbed possession of the British, the Burmese army was not yet cowed, and 60,000 men assembled to blockade Prome. But, assisted by the fleet which accompanied the advance, the British pushed on, though opposed step by step, in a series of skirmishes in which the 87th and 41st showed distinguished gallantry; and after a more determined battle at Melloon, and another at Pagahan-Mew, within forty-five miles of Ava, a treaty of peace was concluded in February 1826, whereby Arracan, Yé, Tavoy, Mergui, and Tenasserim were added to the Indian Empire. The war had cost the lives of 3222 Europeans and 1766 Sepoys, and placed “Ava” on the colours of the 13th, 38th, 41st, 44th, 45th, 47th, 87th, and 89th Regiments of the line, as well as the Madras European Regiment, afterwards the 102nd Foot.
But the treaty of Yandaboo, granting safety to merchants and opening the country up to trade, was never really kept. So much did the native insolence increase, that in 1852 the foreign inhabitants of Rangoon embarked in the Proserpine, and the occupation of Burmah was temporarily suspended. But the Marquis of Dalhousie, then Governor-General, saw the danger of having a hostile State on our340 borders, especially if flushed with the idea of strength. In April of that year, therefore, an army in which were the 18th, 51st, and 80th, under General Godwin, proceeded to Burmah, and successively occupied, after but slight resistance, Martaban and Rangoon. In these operations the fleet as before were usefully employed. So terrible was the heat that many men, and Major Oakes, who commanded the artillery, perished from sunstroke; but the key to the position, the Golden Pagoda, was carried by the 80th and Royal Irish, after some stout fighting and comparatively little loss. Soon after, Bassein was again taken by the 51st and garrisoned while the enemy made an ineffective attack on Martaban; but the resistance in this war was by no means so vigorous as in 1825; and when Pegu, which had been subdued and partly destroyed during Alompra’s conquests, was taken by one company of the 80th and some Madras troops, the army advanced unopposed as far as Prome, which was taken with a loss of one man killed and one wounded. So hostilities ceased without any formal treaty; but Pegu was annexed, and a military road was commenced to unite Calcutta with Prome.
The final subjugation of Burmah presents few features of military interest. The feeble rule of the king necessitated his deposition, and the country was annexed therefore. Since then its pacification has steadily progressed, and the military operations have mainly consisted of moving against the bands of disbanded soldiery, or Dacoits, which successively formed in the country.
The last operation undertaken in the peninsula was the expedition to Perak in 1875, which, formerly ruled by Siam, had after 1822 been independent.
Our possession of the country began in the customary way. Internal disturbance led us to assist one side, and place a Resident, Mr. J. W. Birch, in the country; and here again the usual results followed—his murder, and a punitive expedition. The small war was identical with those of the neighbouring state of Burmah, the ostensible reason for it the inadvisability of having a disturbed, internecine war-torn principality near341 our own possession of Wellesley Province, opposite Penang. The operations, similarly, were conducted along the Perak river; the country itself was heavily jungled and morassed; the enemy fought us behind stockades. The jungle was “so dense and dark, that during all the time not a vestige of sun or sky was visible overhead; and during the advance [on Kinta] they were without cover of any kind, and slept in the damp, dewy open.” The regiments, or portions thereof, employed were the 10th and the 3rd Buffs, with Ghoorkas and other native troops, aided by engineers, artillery, and naval brigades.
Of these latter there were three. Captain Butler, with some of the men of the Modeste and Ringdove, accompanied General Colborne on the Perak river, which was patrolled by the boats of the navy, and incursions from the north bank thereby prevented; Captain Garforth, with bluejackets of the Philomel, Modeste, and Ringdove, was with Ross in the Larut district; and Captain Stirling of the Thrush co-operated with Colonel Hill in Sunghi Uhjong.
The physical difficulties and the food supply, the want of roads and the climate, were the chief obstacles; but after a series of severe skirmishes between the Perak and Kinta rivers, at Kinta, Kotah Lama and Rathalma, the Malays accepted the inevitable, and fighting ceased. One remarkable result may be recorded. As soon as British rule was established, the Malays flocked in numbers to the settled land, and “Under British sway these have increased until they numbered 120 souls per square mile, while in the States governed by native sovereigns they have sunk down to about seven souls in the square mile.” The districts annexed, and righteously governed, had recently, as Sir Andrew Clarke stated, been “huge cockpits of slaughter.” The end here unquestionably justified the means.
* * * * *
The expedition to China was the natural outcome of our commercial expansion, as others had been produced by colonial expansion. The innate conservatism of China was342 at its highest about this time. Freedom of trade was not; and merchandise, etc., filtered only through the one doorway of Canton and Macao. Smuggling was rampant, especially in opium, and this was extensively imported into the country, notwithstanding the objections raised by the Chinese Government, which had, twenty years earlier, prohibited its use. From mere threats they proceeded to active measures. Some twenty thousand chests of opium were seized, and British merchants trading in the drug were imprisoned. Early in 1840, therefore, a combined naval and military expedition was fitted out, the latter consisting of native Indian regiments, together with the 18th, 26th, and 49th, and later on the 55th and 98th. The attack on the unwieldy empire was more or less coastal; its aim exhaustion rather than occupation of large areas of territory, the seizure of great towns rather than a connected campaign. The Island of Chusan was chosen as the primary base of operations, and the whole coast line, as far north as the Yangtse, was blockaded, but the loss from disease was far greater than that caused by battle, and the Cameronians were soon reduced from 900 to barely 300 strong. The resistance offered was of no great value. Each success was followed by negotiations which led to no result beyond the tedious prolongation of the war.
Thus, in 1841, detachments of the 18th, 26th, and 49th landed and took Chuenpee, the Bocca-Tigris Forts were destroyed, and Canton fell. The squadron from Hong Kong Harbour then captured Amoy, the marines and 26th occupying Kulangsu on the left of the entrance, and the 18th and 49th the great battery on the right, or city, side.
The flank of this long, low, coast battery was covered by a crenelated wall, and when the Royal Irish swarmed over it, the “Tiger Braves,” so called from their uniform and the tiger’s face on their huge wicker shields, endeavoured to frighten the invaders by yells and jumps. But it had little effect, and we “picked ’em off,” said one soldier, “like partridges on the wing.” This was the first campaign in which the percussion musket was employed.
343 Chusan was abandoned for a while, but reoccupied l............