Afterword

 

The Burmese war dragged on until the end of February 1826, with Campbell’s force getting within fifty miles of Ava before King Bagyidaw conceded defeat. Of the 3,500 British troops who originally landed at Rangoon, only a couple of hundred survived the campaign. All but 150 or so died from disease and sickness rather than by the enemy’s hand.

The sepoys fared little better, twelve thousand of the twenty-seven thousand who eventually landed at Rangoon failing to return. It was, simply, the worst-managed campaign in the long history of the British army. Maha Bundula deserves further mention. He was, even allowing for the generally atrocious quality of his peers, a very fine commander. His feats of forced marching through jungle and swamp in the midst of the monsoon were remarkable. He had a shrewd mind too.

He early came to the conclusion that the British could not be beaten: they could deploy more troops in both Arakan and Burma itself then he could possibly counter, and he was quick to recognize their technical superiority as well. On first encountering the explosive shell he is said to have gone into deep meditation for a whole day. When he realized that Bagyidaw would not sue for peace, he put himself in the front line and openly courted death. He was killed by a rocket in April 1825, and from then on both Bagyidaw’s and the army’s spirit seem to have ebbed. The controversy over the Bhurtpore prize money was very real.

Lord Combermere was held in high regard for his Peninsular record and for his determined conduct of the siege – he had to be physically restrained from taking part in the final assault – but there was first a widespread belief that the army had looted Bhurtpore rather than merely taking the legitimate spoils of war. And then the news that Combermere would retain all his share – close on £60,000 – provoked almost universal disgust when a private soldier received £4 and a sepoy half of that. The haul of ordnance at Bhurtpore was great too: 133 guns, and a further 301 ‘wall pieces’ firing a onepound ball. One of the biggest guns can be seen today at the eastern end of the parade ground at the Royal Artillery barracks, Woolwich.

The battle was the first time the lance was used in action by British cavalry, and the first time that Gurkhas fought on the British side. Of the great fortress itself, ‘the pride of Hindoostan’, nothing remains but a small and derelict part of the citadel. The walls were blown up or pulled down almost at once, and the jheels are now a spectacular bird sanctuary.

Bhurtpore fell to mines and the bayonet as my narrative recounts, but Serjeant-Major Armstrong’s innovation was in truth that of a slightly later military generation – and in America. The credit must go to the splendid men of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, recruited from the coal-mining districts of Schuykill County, who achieved devastating surprise over the Confederate defenders in the siege of Petersburg, 1865, prelude to the famed ‘battle of the crater’.

The medal inscribed ‘To the Army of India’, perhaps the most romantic of all, bears last among its twenty-four clasps that for ‘Bhurtpur’. The cavalry received especial praise from Lord Combermere, in marked contrast to the, at best, grudging recognition that the Duke of Wellington had usually bestowed, since ‘none of the Enemy escaped from the Fort but on the conditions of surrender’. Of Skinner’s Irregular Horse, Combermere said that ‘nothing could exceed the devotion and bravery of this valuable class of soldiery’; and James Skinner was granted an honorary King’s commission as a lieutenant-colonel and appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath.