Free Sahib by Richard Holmes Page B

Redcoat, most notably John Shipp, twice commissioned from the ranks, earning his own immortality before the ramparts of Bhurtpore. There were occasions that found Mr Atkins at his sweaty, foul-mouthed, dark-humoured and powder-grimed best, going steadily forward to the tuck of drum at Wandiwash and Buxar, and carrying the Sikh entrenchments by the blind fury of his assault at Sobraon. It was hard not to admire some of those soldier sahibs, political officers acting as baby proconsuls, keeping whole provinces safe by the strength of their wills and the force of their personalities. True, there were momentswhen their uncompromising rectitude gave me pause for thought, and although I am more for than against John Nicholson, those grey eyes still make me feel profoundly uneasy.
    ‘The sands of time have choked these men and the women who followed them, and the erosion of the decades has often effaced their memorials. But they live on in their words, and, or so I hope, through my pen.’
    Yet there were times when it was hard to like Atkins, perhaps when he had a head full of arrack and was intent on mischief in the bazaar, or perhaps when, after a hard-fought battle or bloody storm, he was looting what he could carry, smashing what he could not, and killing anyone who tried to stop him. I had not realised when I began just how difficult it would be to write about the Mutiny, which showed neither side at its best and often revealed the British at their most vengeful and embittered. Nor had I thought that I would resent the way that the openness of Georgian India, with its British gentlemen dressing in Mughal style and its easy recognition that love was no respecter of colour or creed, was elbowed aside by the sniffiness of Victorian India with its missionaries and memsahibs and its whispered asides about sable beauties and dark ladies. I cannot imagine how India could have been won and held without the memsahibs, those indomitable women who travelled the roads of India with their broods, in summer’s heat or pelting monsoon. But I do wish that they had not defined their own caste system quite so sharply in a land which already had castes enough.
    Lastly, it is hard not to feel pride tinged with sorrow when I consider the whole imperial achievement. Pride because, when all is said and done, this was an empirehonestly ruled, which laid foundations that still sustain the most populous democracy in the world. Sorrow because, just as the Indian climate scorches, rots and corrodes, so the visible traces of the men who stood sentry-go at Fort Jamrud, marched with grim desperation from one cholera camp to another, and scampered amongst the bullet-puffs in a busy skirmish-line have disappeared. This was the army of the Victorian print and the Kipling poem, gone as if it had never been. And that, I suppose, is the big idea I was so cautious about at the very beginning, and the link between the books of my trilogy. The sands of time have choked these men and the women who followed them, and the erosion of the decades has often effaced their memorials. But they live on in their words, and, or so I hope, through my pen.

Read on
Other Books by Richard Holmes.
    Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front
    Holmes’s immaculate history of the First World War puts the British soldier in the trenches centre-stage, compellingly telling the story of this epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it.
    Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket
    The bestselling history of the British soldier from 1700 to 1900, a period in which methods of warfare and the social make-up of the British army changed little, and in which the Empire was forged.
    Wellington: The Iron Duke
    The exhilarating story of Britain’s greatest ever soldier. The Duke of Wellington’s remarkable life and audacious campaigns are vividly recreated in this book.
    The First World War in Photographs
    An astonishing and