W. H. Fitchett

“ The storm of sound grew louder, clearer, deeper. Suddenly, through the smoke and twilight, they caught a glimpse of figures on horseback, the gleam of bayonets, the white faces and red uniforms of British soldiers. An earthwork blocked the Bailey Gate itself, but the handful of men acting as the garrison of the gate, pulled hurriedly back from its ragged embrasure in the wall, to the left of the entrance, one of the guns, and through that embrasure—Outram, on his big Australian horse, leading—came the Highlanders, with Havelock and his staff; then the Sikhs; then the Fusileers. ”

“ There is the manoeuvring for the weather-gage, the thunder of the sudden broadside, the hurtle and crash of the shot, the stern, quick word of command as the clumsy guns are run in to be reloaded and fired again and again with furious haste. The ships drift into closer wrestle. Masts and yards come tumbling on to the blood-splashed decks. There is the grinding shock of the great wooden hulls as they meet, the wild leap of the boarders, the clash of cutlass on cutlass, the shout of victory, the sight of the fluttering flag as it sinks reluctantly from the mizzen of the beaten ship. ”

“ It was a corps d’élite; a garrison of officers!
Indian life, it may be added, develops all that is proudest and most manly in the British character. The Englishman there feels that he is a member of an imperial and conquering race. To rule men is his daily business. To hunt the fiercest game in the world is his amusement. The men who knelt behind Wheeler’s mud walls, had faced tigers in the jungle, had speared the wild boar in the plains, had heard the scream of a charging elephant. They were steady of nerve, quick of eye, deadly of aim, proud of their blood and race. ”

“ The men who fought under the blood-red flag of Great Britain, and under the split flag of Denmark with its white cross, were alike the descendants of the Vikings. The blood of the old sea-rovers ran hot and fierce in their veins. Nelson, with the glories of the Nile still ringing about his name, commanded the British fleet, and the fire of his eager and gallant spirit ran from ship to ship like so many volts of electricity. But the Danes fought in sight of their capital, under the eyes of their wives and children. ”

“ A thrill ran through the waiting columns, as each man, like a hound on the leash, braced himself up for the desperate rush. Nicholson had been standing, silent and alone, in front of his column; and now with a gesture of his hand he gave the signal. A shout, sudden, and stern, and fierce, broke through the air. It came from the 60th Rifles, who with a vehement cheer ran out to the front in skirmishing order, and in a moment the four columns were in swift and orderly movement. Then the enemy’s guns from every point broke into flame! ”

“ Yet what does the average Englishman to-day remember of the great sailor who, through the bitter November gales of 1759, kept dogged and tireless watch over the French fleet in Brest, destroyed that fleet with heroic daring amongst the sands of Quiberon, while the fury of a Bay of Biscay tempest almost drowned the roar of his guns, and so crushed a threatened invasion of England?
Hawke has been thrown by all-devouring Time into his wallet as mere "alms for oblivion"; yet amongst all the sea-dogs who ever sailed beneath "the blood-red flag" no one ever less deserved that fate. ”

“ The ship to be attacked lies, perhaps, floating in a tropic haze five miles off, and the attacking party must pull slowly, in a sweltering heat, up to the iron lips of her guns. The greedy, restless sea is under them, and a single shot may turn the eager boat's crew at any instant into a cluster of drowning wretches. When the ship is reached, officers and men must clamber over bulwarks and boarding-netting, exposed, almost helplessly, as they climb, to thrust of pike and shot of musket, and then leap down, singly and without order, on to the deck crowded with foes. ”

“ At this moment General Hearsey, the brigadier in charge, rides on to the parade-ground: a red-faced, wrathful, hard-fighting, iron-nerved veteran, with two sons, of blood as warlike as their father’s, riding behind him as aides. Hearsey, with quick military glance, takes in the whole scene—the mob of excited Sepoys, the sullen quarter-guard, the two red-coats lying in the road, and the victorious Mungul Pandy, musket in hand. ”

“ Hamilton was a silent, much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. In the cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to the minutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, it must be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, but lying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified port, under the fire of batteries mounting nearly 200 guns, and protected, in addition, by several gunboats. In a boat attack, too, Hamilton could carry only part of his crew with him; he must leave enough hands on board his own ship to work her. ”

“ But nature sometimes conceals an heroic spirit within a very unheroic-looking body. If in outward look there was something sheep-like in Montgomery’s appearance, there was a lion-like strain in his courage. He had only a hint of the coming storm. A couple of scanty telegrams brought in the news of the mutiny at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi. With quick vision Montgomery read the temper of the native troops at Meanmeer, and, with swifter decision than even that of Corbett, he advised that they should be instantly disarmed. ”

“ It was a great fight, the most memorable and dramatic sea-duel in naval history. The combatants were men of the same stock, and fought with equal bravery. Both nations, in fact, may be proud of a fight so frank, so fair, so gallant. The world, we may hope, will never witness another Shannon engaged in the fierce wrestle of battle with another Chesapeake, for the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes are knitted together by a bond woven of common blood and speech and political ideals that grows stronger every year. ”

“ To lead a forlorn [90] hope up the broken slope of a breach, or to stand in an infantry square while, with thunder of galloping hoofs, a dozen squadrons of cavalry charge fiercely down, needs courage. But it was a finer strain of courage still which made a British officer leave his wife and children to sleep behind the guns, standing loaded with grape, to protect them from a rush of mutineers, while he himself walked calmly down to sleep—or, at least, to feign sleep—within the very lines of the mutineers themselves! ”

“ It was a crash of swaying masts and bellying sails, while below rose the shouting of the crews, and, like the thrusts of fiery swords, the flames shot out from the sides of the great three-deckers against each other, and over all rolled the thunder and the smoke of a Titanic sea-fight. Nothing more murderous than close fighting betwixt the huge wooden ships of those days can well be imagined. The Victory, the largest British ship present in the action, was only 186 feet long and 52 feet broad; yet in that little area 1000 men fought, 100 great guns thundered. ”

“ Above the Residency flew, in haughty challenge to the whole world, the flag of England. That flag provoked in a quite curious degree the wrath of the mutineers. Every gun that could be brought to bear on it pelted it with shot, and again and again the staff was carried away. But the damage was instantly repaired, and through the whole of that desperate siege, while the tumult of the fight raged on every face of the entrenchments—
“Ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew!” ”

“ At Quiberon, in the same year, Hawke, amid a tempest, destroyed a mighty fleet that threatened England with invasion; and on the heights of Abraham, Wolfe broke the French power in America. "We are forced," said Horace Walpole, the wit of his day, "to ask every morning what new victory there is, for fear of missing one." Yet, of all the great deeds of that annus mirabilis, the victory which overthrew Montcalm and gave Quebec to England—a victory achieved by the genius of Pitt and the daring of Wolfe—was, if not the most shining in quality, the most far-reaching in its results. ”

“ Some twenty-seven—eleven of them being children and eight women—took refuge in a house near the great mosque. They held the house for three days, but, having no water, suffered all the agonies of thirst. The Sepoys set vessels of water in front of the house, and bade the poor besieged give up their arms and they should drink. They yielded, gave up the two miserable guns with which they had defended themselves, and were led out. No water was given them. Death alone was to cool those fever-blackened lips. They were set in a row, the eleven children and sixteen men and women, and shot. ”

“ To the courage of a knight-errant Cochrane added the shrewd and humorous sagacity of a Scotchman. If he had commanded fleets he would have rivalled the victories of Nelson, and perhaps even have outshone the Nile and Trafalgar. And to warlike genius of the first order Cochrane added a certain weird and impish ingenuity which his enemies found simply resistless. Was there ever a cruise in naval history like that of Cochrane in his brig misnamed the Speedy, a mere coasting tub that would neither steer nor tack, and whose entire broadside Cochrane himself could carry in his pockets! ”

“ Sometimes, indeed, the men dug holes in the earth, into which their wives and children might creep and be sheltered by a few planks from the intolerable glare of the sun, and the incessant flight of hostile bullets. Quite as commonly, however, a British officer or civilian, as he crouched behind the poor wall of earth, loaded musket in hand, saw the white faces of his children as they slept or moaned, in the ditch by his side, while the wasted figure of his wife bent over them. ”

“ At 7.50 on the morning of July 6, an uncertain gust of air carried the leading British ship, the Pompée, round Cabrita; Hood, in the Venerable, lay becalmed in the offing; the flagship, with the rest of the squadron, were mere pyramids of idle canvas on the rim of the horizon.
The Pompée drifted down the whole French line, scorched with the fire of batteries and of gunboats, as well as by the broadsides of the great French ships, and at 8.45 dropped her anchor so close to the Formidable—a ship much bigger than itself—that the Frenchman's buoy lay outside her. ”

“ In an instant there rose, as if out of the ground, before the eyes of the astonished French, the serried lines of the 43rd and 52nd, and what a moment before was empty space was now filled with the frowning visage of battle. The British lines broke into one stern and deep-toned shout, and 1800 bayonets, in one long line of gleaming points, came swiftly down upon the French. To stand against that moving hedge of deadly and level steel was impossible; yet each man in the leading section of the French raised his musket and fired, and two officers and ten soldiers fell before them. ”

“ Squadron after squadron came over the ridge, like successive human waves; then, like a sea broken loose, the flood of furious horsemen inundated the whole slope on which the squares were drawn up. But each square, a tiny, immovable island of red, with its fringe of smoke and steel and darting flame, stood doggedly resolute. No French leader, however daring, ventured to ride home on the very bayonets. The flood of maddened men and horses swung sullenly back across the ridge, while the British gunners ran out and scourged them with grape as they rode down the slope. ”

“ He must have a very slow-beating imagination who cannot realise the picturesqueness of these ancient sea-duels. Two frigates cruising for prey catch the far-off gleam of each other's topsails over the rim of the horizon. They approach each other warily, two high-sniffing sea-mastiffs. A glimpse of fluttering colour—the red flag and the drapeau blanc, or the Union Jack and the tricolour—reveals to each ship its foe. The men stand grimly at quarters; the captain, with perhaps a solitary lieutenant, and a middy as aide-de-camp, is on his quarter-deck. ”