BOOKS.
GENERAL SIR ALEX. TAYLOR.*
"I LOOK on it that you and Nicholson, poor fellow, are the real captors of Delhi," wrote John Lawrence to Captain Taylor shortly after the siege. And John Lawrence's verdict Was that of Nicholson himself. "Remember to tell them that Alex. Taylor took Delhi," be said upon his deathbed. That is no small claim to glory; but Alex. Taylor's share in the capture of Delhi is only one of many fine feats in a long and adventurous life.
. Landing in India, eighteen years old, in 1845, he was posted to the then frontier town of Ferozepur, and arrived there just as hostilities were threatening with the Sikhs. Having brought with him from Chatham a reputation of being "great at boats," Taylor was at once put in charge of the flotilla of bridge-boats, which, in view of the likelihood of war—war in the land of the five rivers—had been sent up by water from Karachi. On December 12th the Sikh army, a hundred thousand strong, crossed the Sutlej, and Taylor had to sink his boats and retire to Ferozepur. There he was charged with the defence of the city—" with one six-pounder, my company of sappers, and a hundred and twenty convicts," while the remaining available troops fought three battles within twenty miles of its walls—first Mudki, then Ferozshah, and finally, in February 1846, Sobraen. During that period Taylor con- tracted smallpox, but recovered in time to watch the whole British army file across his bridge of boats towards Lahore, the capture of which ended the war—the first Sikh war.
Little more than a year later the murder of two English officers at Mahan started the second war. Lord Gough at first merely urged the Sikh Durbar to punish this outrage, and not until Herbert Edwardes, with his wild Pathan levies, had shown the way were any British troops actually set in motion. Taylor's task then became to float down the Sutlej the heavy guns required for breaching the walls of Malian; and with him went the chief engineer of the force, Major Robert Napier, afterwards Lord Napier of Magdala. Thus began a friendship and connexion which lasted many years. The siege operations only opened seriously on September 4th with the arrival of Taylor's train, and only ended with the capture of the citadel nearly five months later, when Taylor was wounded in the arm. From Multan Taylor, with his engineer park, turned north-east and reached Gujarat just in time to take part in the decisive battle of that name, and to have his horse shot under him. Accompanying Gilbert's army of pursuit, he next witnessed the dramatic surrender of the whole Sikh army and the retreat of Dost Muhammad's Afghans through the Khyber Pass.
The result of the two Sikh wars was the annexation of the Punjab. Its administration was placed under a board consisting of three members, Henry Lawrence, John Lawrence, and Charles Mansel—the "travelling, working, and sleeping partners" of the well-known epigram—whilst Robert Napier became the head of the Public Works Depart- ment. Being allowed to select his own subordinates, the latter appointed Taylor, then twenty-four years old and with no experience of civil engineering, executive head of a vast under- taking, the survey and construction of the Lahore-Peshawar road. Excluding further spells of active service and periods of leave, Taylor spent most of the next twenty-two years of his life upon this road; and by no means the least interesting portion of the book is that which deals with his work as a roadmaker and builder of bridges. The route crosses four out of the five great Punjab rivers. Of these Taylor succeeded in bridging three; and only lack of funds prevented him attempt- ing the fourth and greatest feat, the substitution of a permanent way for the ferry and boat bridge which since time immemorial had spanned the Indus at Atteck. However, though he failed to bridge these historic river rapids, he was the first • General Sir Alex. Taylor, B.B., his Times, his Friends, and his Work. By Ins daughter, A. Cameron Taylor. Two rola. London: Williams and Norgate. [23s.)
white man to swim them. A great athlete, he is said to have "stood on his bead in the middle of a mess table covered with glass, silver, and fruit, and this without deranging so much as a wine glass or a spoon, and then to have jumped it—with a leaf on edge placed across its centre."
The first seven years of solid work upon his road ended with the outbreak of the Mutiny. "Taylor," said the Chief Com- missioner on June 20th, "I want you to go to Delhi directly. I should like you to take charge of your corps, but your position will settle itself down there. Can you start to-morrow " Taylor could ; and covered the five hundred miles from Rawal Pindi to Delhi in five days. A chapter entitled "The Camp before Delhi "gives a most vivid account. replete with anecdote, of the progress of the earlier period of the siege and of the life lived on the Ridge. The engineer brigade was commanded by Colonel Baird Smith ; George Chesney was his brigade-major; and Taylor became his second- in-command. Ill-health, however, and pressure of other work compelled Baird Smith to delegate more to Taylor than would normally have been the case, and for all practical purposes the latter became the senior executive officer in the corps. To the engineers fell four chief duties : (1) the collection of siege material, (2) the training of the men who would be required to manipulate it under fire when the crisis came, (3) the ordering of the siege train, and (4) the preparation of a sound and carefully tested plan of attack. It was to this last that Taylor specially devoted himself, and proceeded to carry out a series of most daring reconnaissances, often alone, in order to decide the site of each battery necessary to breach the walls. Only his chief, Baird Smith, and his friend John Nicholson were kept fully cognisant of the results of these adventures and of his budding plans.
Not until the arrival of the siege train on September 4th was it possible to begin the execution of his "project," as he calls it, but within three days of that the first great breaching battery was erected in a single night—a triumph of careful foresight. The following night the three others were begun and completed by September 13th—and on September 14th the assault took place. Thanks to Nicholson's magnanimity. to Taylor fell the honour of leading the first wing of the first column, whilst Nicholson himself led the second. The number of Royal Engineer officers fit for duty sank from nineteen to nine in the course of this first day of the attack, but Taylor's only damage was a blow from a spent bullet on the breast-bone. The fighting inside the city continued for nearly a week. Taylor's share in these operations included the capture of the Burn Bastion (whence Nicholson bad been shot) and that of the Juma Masjid, where, in exuberance of spirits, he rode his horse up the great flight of stairs.
From Delhi Taylor joined one of the movable columns engaged in punitive expeditions in the Deab—" very jolly, wandering about the country taking guns," be calls it—but in February be fell in for further serious work, being appointed to the command of the Bengal Engineers destined for the third and final attack upon Lucknow—and under his old chief, Robert Napier. As at Delhi, Taylor took a very active part in all the preliminary measures and in the evolution of the plan, and again he led the first column in an assault—that upon the Begum's Palace. His luck, however, failed him this time, for he was shot through the leg, and so missed the final three days' fighting in Lucknow, and remained hors de combat for the rest of the Mutiny campaign. When the honours list was published Taylor became in 1858 a lieutenant-colonel and Companion of the Bath.
After a long spell of furlough, during which he married. Taylor returned in October 1860 to the charge of the Lahore- Peshawar road, having refused other more promising appoint- ments in his anxiety to complete the task begun in his youth. Three years later, however, he found himself again involved in warfare, being appointed Chief Engineer to the force detailed under Neville Chamberlain to destroy the strongholds of the Hindustani fanatics. The attempt to do so brought about hostilities with the Pathan tribesmen of Bunair, and the fighting which followed—the Ambeyla campaign—was as sharp and serious as any on the North-West Frontier before or since. Although the map might be better, the account of the dramatic defence of the "Eagle's Nest" and the "Crag Piquet" and of the turmoil which the unexpected crisis caused in Simla and Calcutta is admirably clear. With regard to the latter "My wonder is," wrote the Governor of Madras—a
wonder which we all must sometimes share—" that any military operation ever succeeds, there are so many people who insist upon meddling. 'Move on,' says one. 'Stop a little,' says another. 'Retreat,' says a third ; and no one seems to think that he is making an ass of him- self by attempting to direct operations in a country of which he is perfectly ignorant." Taylor was one of the little group of officers—Lord Roberts was another—who, escorted by the Guides, made the hazardous journey to Malka which was the last act in the Ambeyla drama, and which Sir Hugh Rose condemned as madness—" not one of the party will come back alive." Malka, however, was burnt right enough, and Taylor then returned to his road.
In 1868 he became a major-general, in 1871 Chief Engineer of the Punjab, and in 1873 Robert Napier, now Lord Napier and Commander-in-Chief, offered him the appointment of Quarter- master-General. Serious trouble with his eyes forced Taylor to decline the offer, and Sir Frederick Roberts was selected in his stead. On his recovery and return to India in 1877 Taylor was appointed Deputy Inspector-General of Military Works and President of the Defence of India Committee, at a time, too, when Indian defence was uppermost in the minds of many. Three years later he was appointed Secretary to the Government of India in the Public Works Department—the red ribbon of the department in which he had worked all his life—but within a few weeks of being appointed domestic troubles compelled him finally to resign.
The last phase of his public service was spent at home as President of the Royal Indian Engineering College, Cooper's Hill, a post he held for sixteen years, and where he added further laurels to his credit. He died in February, 1912.
His daughter's book is not a mere record of his life, out- lined above, but is an admirably lucid and charmingly written summary of at least twenty-five interesting and momentous years of Indian history—indeed it would be difficult anywhere to find a better and more readable account of the stirring times in which her father lived.
Previous page
