GENERAL NICHOLSON.*

Mn. KAYE has done work well worth doing very fairly well. The one grand drawback of all Indian work, no matter what, conquest, soldiership, statesmanship, conversion, or engineering, is the absence of the second highest reward, "fame," the appre- ciation of those whose appreciation is worth having. If you plan the capture of Minorca you are a considerable person, but if you sweep every European flag, as, for example, Lord Minto did, out of every Asiatic sea, take Java, Singapore, Macao, the Mauritius, Pondicherry, and the Isle de Bourbon all at once, and make England not only supreme but solitary, the work will be forgotten in three years, and the question will be whether you did or did not on some given occasion—dates producible—give some rather inconsiderate order which hurts an English interest. A man in India may lead Nicholson's life and Englishmen be unable to recall what he accomplished ; may add four kingdoms and three provinces to Her Majesty's dominions, as Lord Dal- houaie did, and find mean men questioning whether he was not a little too arrogant ; may organize a great and strictly original system of education, as Dr. Duff has done, or fill up a gap in human knowledge, as Dr. Ballantyne or Dr. Sprenger did, or be the St. Augustine of a race, like Dr. Kincaid or Mr. Page—the latter a quadroon utterly unknown to Englishmen outside " low " Baptist chapels, but nearer St. Paul than it has been given to man, Xavier perhaps excepted, yet to be ;— may build "bridges and things," like Mr. Turnbull—there is a bridge of that quiet Scotchman's in existence and in paying order to which nothing yet constructed, except the Britannia, bears the faintest comparison—and may in England be utterly forgotten. Who is to see what wondrous work is going on in a crater of the moon ? The thing is too distant, the surrouadings are too vast, the story is too remote from human sympathies. If an officer or a statesman has indeed helped to make Indian Five per Cents. " tranquil " some slight interest is felt in him, but the facts never get clearly to England, and interest dies away for want of food. All this while these Indians, who are doing big things, care only about what England is thinking of their doings. To be mentioned in the Times, to be named in Parliament—as General Neill says in one of his letters,—to be thought about by their countrymen, these are their rewards, the only rewards which com- pensate for the daily monotony of dreariness which, alternated with flashes of fierce excitement, makes up what Englishmen are pleased to call an Indian career. Well, Mr. Kaye has tried to dis- sipate this ignorance as far as regards one class of Indian labourers, and to all who read these books of his will dissipate it. A cadet, an artillery officer, an editor, an employe of the first rank, a successful historian, Mr. Kaye unites in his own person all the qualifications requisite to the biographer of the great Indian soldiers. We do not always agree with all he has said. As a rule he is too uniformly eulogistic, too indifferent to scien- tific anatomy, and he sometimes shows, as in his account of the differences between General Havelock and Colonel Neill, a strong trace of prejudice. We could have wished, too, that he had included in his series one or two of the less known men who have done considerable things, and hardly understand the principle on which he has omitted the most original genius India has produced, General Jacob, the misapprehended founder Sir Stamford Raffles, or the great administrator of recent time, General Mark Cubbon, Sir T. Munro, or many another successful worker. These, however, are trifles. Mr. Kaye has done what he professed to do, given lively, picturesque, and appreciative accounts of some of the best known Indian celebrities, Burnes, Conolly, and Pottinger, Todd, and Sir H. Lawrence, Neil and Nicholson among moderns, and among ancients Lord Cornwallis, Sir J. Malcolm, Mr. Elphin- stone, the Rev. H. Martyn, and Sir C. Metcalfe, of the latter of whom, by the way, he forms, in our judgment, far too high an opinion.

The most interesting sketch, however, is the last, that of General Nicholson, perhaps of all Indian celebrities the one least known in Europe. Ask any Anglo-Indian over thirty who was in his judg- ment the greatest man India had produced in his day, and he replies, Nicholson ; ask him why, and he answers vaguely, quotes

expeditions which seem to his interlocutor somewhat small, and generally tells some story which elicits the remark, "Ah! you Anglo-Indians lose your sense of the value of human life." The truth is, that India being a family party character is understood among Indians apart from deeds, and the Anglo-Indians had got it into their heads, correctly as we believe, that Nicholson was Clive over again, a man possessed of a military and administrative • Lives of Indian Officers, Illustrative of the Ilistot y of the Civil and Military Services of India. By John William Kaye. 2 rola London A. Suahau and Co.; Ball and Leidy.

genius of the highest order, exerting the same mesmeric in- fluence over native minds, and tormented by the same terrible haughtiness of temper, a haughtiness almost amounting to ferotity. For months before he died there was a fixed idea among Indians, shared by superiors as well as inferiors, that if ever the ultimate crisis came, Nicholson would be the man to save the Empire ; that if ever the system gave way, and the dominant race was com- pelled to reorganize itself and do battle for its existence, Nicholson would be the fitting Dictator. Mr. Kaye's sketch, though necessarily slight and incomplete, will, we think, enable outsiders to understand the causes of a feeling which was at one time at once almost universal

and almost inexplicable. A son of a doctor in Dublin, but nephew of Sir James Hogg, and therefore with unlimited Indian interest, Nicholson first turns up a tall stripling of eighteen in the Afghan

war, driving the enemy back three times at the point of the bayonet, and crying with rage and grief as in obedience only to superior order he surrendered his sword. He was at this time and remained through life a man of that stern, somewhat narrow, Calvinistic piety which has marked so many of the great Indians, and which seems to be developed and intensified by the constant contact with Paganism and its vices. He endured but did not greatly suffer by the Afghan imprisonment, and after a brief service in the Commissariat and in Cashmere, where he bitterly complained he had nothing to do, he finally accepted what is called in India " political " office in the Punjab. In 1848 oe- cuffed the great outbreak at Mooltan, followed by the rising of the Sikh army, and Nicholson, then at Pashawur, sick with fever, was ordered to seize Attock, a most important post, threatened by Chuttur Singh. The garrison was known to be mutinous, and Colonel George Lawrence, then in command at Peshawur, could spare him but sixty men. Rising, however, from a sick bed, "he made a forced march to Attock, and arrived before the fort just in time to prevent that portion of the garrison which was hostile to us from closing the gate against him. 'He bad travelled,' says my informant, 'so fast that but few of his escort had been able to keep up with him ; but with these few he at once commanded the sub- mission of all but the most desperate, and these he soon quelled by his personal prowess. A company of Sikhs in command of one of the gates were prepared for resistance, but he at once threw himself among them, made them arrest their own leaders, and in a few minutes was master of the position. This I learnt after- wards from eye-witnesses who served under me. Having made the place secure, placing in charge the persons whom he could best trust, he lost no time in taking the field, and by his rapid movements for a long time checked the troops • from Hazareh, preventing them from getting into open country, and proceeding to join Shere Singh's army.'" He raised levies from the popula- tion, alarmed a mutinous regiment till it laid down its arms and offered to follow wherever he might lead, and with the whole country in flames held his own wild district in safety. He was a terrible disciplinarian, detesting plunder, and declaring that be would rather quit the Army than not obtain the power of inflicting death to restrain the excesses to which all troops are addicted in the hour of victory.

In 1851, the Punjab having been annexed and Nicholson

recruited by a holiday spent in England, Vienna, and Turkey —where he joined in a plot for rescuing Kossuth by force—

Nicholson was appointed Sub-Prefect of Bunnoo, the most lawless tract in the Punjab, which his savage determination and rigorous justice soon reduced to order. Claiming almost absolute power, distributing punishments like rain, he was still sternly just and benevolent, and in five years' rule among a people to whom the Highlanders of two centuries since are civilized he absolutely extinguished crime :—

"Of what class is John Nicholson?" wrote Sir Herbert Edwardes. "Of none, for truly he stands alone. But he belongs essentially to the school of Henry Lawrence. I only knocked down the walls of the Bunnoo forth. John Nicholson has since reduced the people (the most ignorant, depraved, and bloodthirsty in the Punjab) to such a state of good order and respect for the laws, that in the last year of his charge not only was there no murder, burglary, or highway robbery, but not an attempt at any of these crimes. The Bunnoochees, reflecting on their own metamorphosis in the village gatherings under the vines, by the streams they once delighted so to fight for, have come to the con- clusion that the good Mohammedans of historic ages must have been just like Nikkul Seyn !' They emphatically approve him as every inch a Ruler. And so he is. It is difficult to describe him. He must be seen. Lord Dalhcusie—no mean judge—perhaps summed up his high military and administrative qualities, when he called him 'a tower of strength.' I can only say that I think him equally fit to be commis- sioner of a civil division or general of an army. Of the strength of his personal character I will only tell two anecdotes. 1. If you visit either the battle-field of Goojrat or Chillianwallah, the country people begin the narrative of the battles thus, Nikkul Seyn stood just there.' 2. A brotherhood of Fakeers in Hazareh abandoned all forms of Asiatic

monachism, and commenced the worship of ' Nikkul Seyn ;' which they still continue ! Repeatedly they have met John Nicholson since, and fallen at his feet as their Gooroo (religions or spiritual guide). He has flogged them soundly on every occasion, and sometimes imprisoned them ; but the sect of the iNikkul Seynees' remains as devoted as ever.

Sanguis martyrorum est semen Ecclesia3.' On the last whipping, John Nicholson released them, on the condition that they would trans- fer their adoration to John Becher ; but arrived at their monastery in Hazareh, they once more resumed the worship of the relentless Nikkul Seyn.' "

His hold over all natives was almost as great as over his devotees Oncea fanatic tried to murder him, but not knowing him asked a chuprassie (messenger) which was he. "We are all Nikkul Seyns- here," replied the man, throwing himself before him, only to be pushed aside by Nicholson, who, snatching a musket from a sentry,. bade the assassin surrender. "He replied that either he or I must die ; so I had no alternative, and shot him through the heart, the ball passing through a religious book, which he had tied on his chest apparently as a charm." At last, in 1857, the great mutiny came, and Colonel Nicholson was one of the three men whose energy saved Peshawtm He was ordered, after the great disarmament of the Sepoy garrison, to accompany the movable column to attack the 55th, which had seized Nowshera :-

No sooner did this force appear in the distance, than the 65th Native. Infantry, with the exception of about 120 men, broke from the fort and fled, as Colonel Chute well described it, "tumultuously," towards the hills of Swat. Then followed a pursuit, which, to look back on, is to renew all sorrow for the dear-bought victory of Delhi. Chase was given with both artillery, cavalry, and infantry, but the mutineers had got. far ahead, and bad ground so checked the guns that they never got, within range. Colonel Nicholson, with a handful of horsemen, hurled himself like a thunderbolt on the route of a thousand mutineers. Even he (in a private note to me, for he seldom reported officially anything he did himself) admitted that the 55th fought determinately, "as men always do who have no chance of escape but by their own exertions." They broke before his charge, and scattered over the country in sec- tions and in companies. They were hunted out of villages, and grappled with in ravines, and driven over the ridges all that day, from Fort Murclan to the border of Swat, and found respite only in the failing light. 120 dead bodies were numbered on their line of flight, and thrice that number must have borne off wounds ; 150 were taken prisoners, and the regimental colours and 200 stands of arms recovered. Colonel Nicholson himself was twenty hours in the saddle, and, under a binning sun, could not have traversed less than seventy miles.

On the 22nd of June Nicholson, created a local Brigadier-General, was appointed to command a movable column to traverse the Punjab, and if needful assist the besieging force before Delhi. There were two doubtful regiments at Phillour, whom the General quietly ordered to join him, and then disarmed without a struggle, and a great force at Sealkote which Nicholson cut to pieces, finally arriving in Delhi just in time to prevent a dangerous attack on the rear of the besieging force. Marching through a. morass which no other officer would have faced, Nicholson fell with his handful of troops on the enemy, estimated at from four to six thousand, and utterly dispersed them, the first tremendous blow which had fallen on the mutineers. It was not, however,. merely as a leader that he was of use. From the moment of his arrival there was a new heart in the camp, and also a new vigilance. Brigadier Chamberlain writes of him :—

Of all the superior officers in the force, not one took the pains he did to study our position and provide for its safety. Hardly a day passed but what he visited every battery, breastwork, and post ; and frequently at night, though not on duty, would ride round our outer line of sentries to see that the men were on the alerts and to bring to notice any point he considered not duly provided for. When the arrival of a siege train and reinforcements enabled us to assume the offensive, John Nicholson was the only officer, not being an engineer, who took the trouble to study the ground which was to become of so much importance to us; and had it not been for his going down that night, I believe that we might have had to capture, at considerable loss of life, the positions which he was certainly the main cause of our occupying without resistance. From the day of the trenches being opened to the day of the assault, he was con- stantly on the move from one battery to another, and when he returned to camp, he was constantly riding backwards and forwards to the chief engineer endeavouring to remove any difficulties.

He had a haughty contempt for the majority of the Generals with the Army. "Daly," writes Sir H. Edwardes,—

Daly, speaking last night of John Nicholson' said that he had a genius for war. He was a grand fellow. He did not know his own powers. But he was beginning to find them out. His merits were re- coguized throughout the camp. Between the 6th and 14th of September be rose higher and higher in the minds of all, and when General Wilson's arrangements for the attack were read outs and the post of honour was given to Nicholson, not a man thought that he was superseded. He was much pleased at getting the Commissionership of Leiah. I said, "Oh, you will not take it, now that you are sure to re- main a General, and get a division." He laughed haughtily, and said, "A General ! You don't think I'd like to be a General of Division, do you? Look at them ! Look at the Generals !"

It was to him that the final resolution to carry Delhi by assault was due, and it is sufficient to say of him that in the universal opinion of India its success did not repay the Empire for his loss. He was shot through the chest, still leading on his men, and expired in terrible pain, leaving a memory which is still so vivid in India that when a native guide points out the site of the great battle of Goojerat, the first word he says is, "There stood Nikkul Seyn." Brave to rashness, haughty to arrogance, he was perhaps the one man India has produced of late in whom there was the true heroic mood, the contempt for difficulties, political or physical, the profound belief that victory is always with the assailant, which the present school seems to lack. This quality is always the one which inspires Anglo-Indians, whose greatest fault is a latent conviction that their work is too big for them, and perhaps the best testimonial to his genius is that in that jealous and exacting community, so given to gossip and to favouritism, no man ever murmured at supersession by Nicholson. It was impossible to promote him too fast, and when he died he might have been made Commander-in-Chief without a resignation. As Major Lawrence felt to Clive, so every Indian officer felt to Nicholson : it could not be a discredit to give way to a heaven-born ruler of men.