as a gift—and Henry took them!
That was the last time that English sea-dogs pitted their skill and courage
against thos of Scotland—naturally.
We already know what
Scotland, with her handful of population, did to England in land fighting up
till the time of King James VI. The shadow of
Flodden passes by, of course, but Flodden was fought on English soil, and
there never was a battle that displayed more vividly the fighting capacity
of the Scot and his willingness to lay down his life for a good cause. Even
after that terrible set-back, it was no time at all until another Scottish
army had humbled England. It was the one composed of Covenanters, and led by
Alexander Leslie. It marched into England, smashed the English army at
Newburn, and remained on English soil until, by the Treaty of Ripon, peace
was declared. All the time that this Scottish army was in England—it
consisted of 500 mounted men and 22,000 foot soldiers—it received £40,000 a
month from the English Exchequer! [The presence of this victorious Scottish
army in England makes a huge jest of the Englishman's well-known boast, that
England has never known the foot of a conqueror since 1066.] Alexander
Leslie was a business man as well as a great military commander.
English historians claim that
the Scots were eventually beaten by Cromwell; but that is not quite true.
Man to man, beard to beard, Cromwell's soldiers were never the equal of
Scotsmen as fighters. The man who proved that Englishmen will submit to a
dictator as humbly as any other race was simply lucky in Scotland. At the
crucial stage of his barbarous campaign against the Scots, he was opposed by
David Leslie, and the Scottish commander, by superior strategy, had him cut
off and faced by certain defeat at Dunbar. We know what happened. A corps of
whey-faced and long-winded clerics converged on Leslie—if the truth were
known they had probably had a chat with Cromwell—and they gave the man no
peace until they had harangued him into leaving his impregnable position to
meet Cromwell's cavalry on the level ground. The Scots on that occasion were
beaten by English cart-horses and Scottish donkeys.
Not until England began to
get the benefit of Scotland's military and naval genius, and Scotland's
ferocity, did she blossom out as a real fighting nation. The curious fact
has never been noticed by English historians, and the Scottish people are so
excessively modest that they would naturally shrink from mentioning anything
that redounded to the credit of their ancestors. It has been our unpleasant
duty to develop this opaque patch of British military history, and we are
obliged, after considering the result, to push Jock Tamson forward. His name
is not nearly so well known in British military annals as that of Tommy
Atkins, but we shall see that it has meant a good deal to England.
To begin at the beginning of
England's modern military history, it is worth noting that the theory of the
strategy she employed so successfully in Europe was laid down by the great
Scottish military genius, Sir David Dundas. With rare judgment England
seized those ideas, and Sir David's Rules and Regulations for His Majesty's
Forces, and Rules and Regulations for the Cavalry, became the official
manuals for the British Army. They guided our troops to victories right up
to the beginning of the era of mechanical and chemical warfare.
England began to utilize
Scottish fighting material after the Union of the Crowns was consummated but
for some reason or other the great English historians overlooked the fact.
The Seven Years War is a case in point. Whoever heard of Scottish soldiers
in connection with it? What English child would believe that it was not a
glorious parade of English arms? Well, the war ended, as we know, in the
Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. Six years before that happy termination of the
conflict, however, there were eight battalions of Scottish infantry in the
Netherlands and only seven English battalions. In the second year of the war
England had increased the number of her battalions to fourteen, but the
Scottish battalions numbered eleven. In the third year of the war the number
of English battalions stood at fourteen, but the Scottish battalions had
been increased to thirteen. In the last year of the war there were
twenty-five English battalions in the war zone and fifteen Scottish
battalions—surely a proportion out of all reason, considering the small
population of Scotland. Still, it was a good thing that the Scots were there
in such numbers, for, as things turned out, they hung on and won the war
after their allies had wilted.
The Scots did not get credit
for bringing victory out of defeat. They were merely pawns in the hands of
the military caste who ruled England, and they continued to play that
subservient role in the military operations of England on the Continent and
elsewhere. Seldom have finer soldiers been treated in such a cavalier
manner. On our own soil, as the years passed, the cool contempt of the
military bureaucrats towards Scotland was demonstrated again and again. One
of the first things the Government at Westminster did after the Union of
Parliaments had been achieved was to place all the Army contracts for
Scottish regiments with English tradesmen. Prior to the Union, of course,
Scottish soldiers had been equipped with clothing and weapons by Scottish
tradesmen. [The casual attitude of the military bureaucrats to-day towards
the Lowland regiments of Scotland—the finest fighting forces in these
islands—is merely a continuation of the old tradition.]
That was bad enough, but our
friends across the border followed it up by strengthening many of their own
wobbly fighting units with Scottish recruits, and became quite proud of
regiments that were largely composed of raw-boned men who spoke broad Scots
and Gaelic! The 47th Lancashire Regiment, raised in 1741, was a case in
point. The English were very proud of that old regiment. No wonder! It was
raised in Scotland. So were the 55th Westmorlands, in the year 1756. The
Second Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, raised in 1782, was entirely
Scottish. Such regiments as the 11th Foot, of Devonshire; the 7th Royal
Fusiliers, of the City of London; and the 38th Staffordshires, were all
stiffened up with Scots.
But let us get on with
England's wars. Dettingen, Fontenoy, and Ticonderaga take us past the middle
of the eighteenth century, and remind us that Scottish regiments fought with
great distinction for the Empire in those days; but we may pass them by with
a word [At Dettingen, in 1742, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, commanded by Sir
Andrew Agnew, were the spearhead of the British forces, and their fine
fighting qualities were noticed by James Wolfe, who took Quebec with
Scottish soldiers. At Fontenoy (1745) the Black Watch smashed the famous
French cavalry and covered the retreat of the British troops.] and proceed
to the first great conflict connected with the expansion of our modern
Empire —the war against the French in North America.
The key to victory in that
great struggle was the ancient French city of Quebec, perched far above the
majestic waters of the St. Lawrence River. The city was strongly fortified,
and its defender was General Montcalm, whose military genius was infinitely
superior to that of the British commanders of that day. The British troops,
8000 strong, commanded by General James Wolfe, came up the river in the
summer of 1759, and disembarked near the Isle of Orleans. The stage was set
for the battle that was to change the destinies of the two leading Powers of
Europe. Everything had worked smoothly, because the difficult task of
bringing the troops up the great river, and keeping the coast clear after
they had been disembarked, was in the hands of Admiral Sir Charles Saunders,
a very capable and determined Scot.
Displaying questionable
strategy at the outset, Wolfe attacked the French capital without studying
it sufficiently. He was repulsed from the impregnable heights with a loss of
400 men. Warned by that defeat, he remained on the river, under the
protection of Admiral Saunders, until September. The truth is that Wolfe was
getting jumpy; but the months of inaction had given him opportunities to
study the remarkable position of the city he had set out to capture, and he
learned, from one of his Scottish officers, that there was a path up the
beetling cliffs, at the spot now known as Wolfe's Cove. Time was pressing
the British Commander, for winter comes early on the St. Lawrence River, and
his supplies were running out. He decided to take his troops up the sketchy
path under cover of darkness.
The well-known story of the
famous assault, as written for our school histories, depicts General Wolfe
as the resourceful hero who carried through the daring project. The Scottish
soldiers who took part in it have been pretty well ignored by English
historians. It was a Highland officer, General Simon Fraser, who guided
Wolfe and the Fraser Highlanders up the cliffs in the dark; and it was
Fraser who, when the creeping, kilted men were challenged on the Heights of
Abraham by a French sentry, replied in French—thereby giving the British
soldiers their chance to silence the French outposts.
In the morning, Montcalm,
already beaten by corrupt French politicians, saw the Plains of Abraham
swarming with kilted men. Wolfe gave his attention to the right wing of the
army; the left wing was commanded by General James Murray, a Scot. Montcalm
came to the attack with his battalions of half-trained men, but he was
confronted by hardbitten Highlanders. Our musketry broke the French ranks,
and then, taking to the broadsword, the Frasers turned the battle into a
rout. Montcalm was killed. [Montcalm was one of the greatest military
geniuses, and one of the noblest characters, that France has produced. He is
the only man who defeated the British on four different occasions. He had
Wolfe's plan of attack figured out, but was crippled by Governor Vaudreuil.
Well might his tomb bear this moving epitaph: ' 'Le destin en lui derebant
La Victoire, L'a recompense par Une Mori GlorieuseI"]
Wolfe was killed. The command of the British Army was taken over by General
Murray, and it was this gallant Scot who completed the campaign that ended
in the downfall of the French in the New World.
The next war in which British
soldiers defended British honour—and property!—was the short and merry
tussle with Surajah Dowlah in 1764. In dealing with that troublesome Indian
potentate, the British War Office displayed one of its rare outbreaks of
genius, for it left the campaign in the hands of a Scotsman, Sir Hector
Munro, who demonstrated, in very short order, that wild men from the Indian
hills can be tamed by wild men from the hills of Argyllshire and points
north.
Scotsmen were not so
prominent in the next war into which the country blundered—the American War
of Independence. It was precipitated by a wrong-headed English King, aided
and abetted by stupid English jingoes, and its vast operations, on land and
sea, were conducted almost exclusively by Englishmen. A Scotsman exposed the
inefficiency of the British Fleet. [John Paul Jones was the Scot in
question. With much smaller ships he repeatedly outwitted and out-fought
British men-of-war, eventually crossing the Atlantic and successfully
raiding the English coast.] On land the English commanders, Burgoyne, Howe,
and Cornwallis, made such a ghastly mess of things that their clumsy tactics
make painful reading even to-day. Highland regiments captured Fort
Washington, then Howe nullified the victory by hanging back and going into
winter quarters. It was just the respite that General Washington needed to
whip his army together again. Burgoyne, on his way down from Canada to join
Howe, was defeated at Saratoga Springs, largely because he had ordered
Fraser's Highlanders to retreat. The only credit which came to British arms
in that war of arrogance and stupidity was the splendid showing made by the
Scottish regiments, even under notoriously bad generalship. The Scots
Guards, for instance, never encountered a single defeat, and they were in
hot actions at Brooklyn, Brandywine, Fort Washington, Germantown, and
Catawba River. If the men in command had been as worthy of their uniforms as
the Scottish soldiers were, the American War of Independence would have had
a very different result for British prestige and British power.
Having lost the American
Colonies, our statesmen and militarists handed themselves some bouquets, in
the form of titles, and then proceeded to wear themselves out promoting
little wars that were necessary to the maintenance of our honour. We had to
rush to the defence of Gibraltar; but the danger of losing The Rock was
averted by General Elliott, who did not belong to Weston-super-Mare. Then
came the fearful reverses to the British Army in France in 1794, when, in
that terrible retreat from Nimeguen, General Dundas and the Black Watch
saved our troops from complete annihilation. We had five years of uneasy
peace, then trouble broke out in Mysore. Tipoo Sahib was on the rampage. He
was eventually bottled up in Seringapatam, his capital city, and the task of
bearding him was given to Major-General Baird, a Scot. Baird led Highland
regiments to the attack, and the fact that he meant business was shown by
the speedy way he went about his job, for within six minutes after giving
the Highlanders the word to go, he saw the British flag fluttering on the
walls of Seringapatam.
Those were little wars, mere
military hors d'oeuvre leading up to a struggle in which England's very
existence was threatened. The shadow of Napoleon Bonaparte was sweeping
across Europe. It had touched Africa. French troops were in Egypt. The
threat against England was plain. The British Fleet, loaded with troops,
sailed for Aboukir Bay, and there, in the face of French fire, General Sir
Ralph Abercromby and Major-General Moore, both Scots, succeeded in landing
their troops. They struck immediately at Alexandria, and there the
battle-scarred veterans of the Black Watch stood firm against French
cavalry. Sir Ralph Abercromby was killed, but another Scot, General
Hutchinson, took his place, and a few months later the French troops,
numbering 13,000, surrendered. The Scots had won the first round with
Napoleon. [In 1797, following the defeat of the Spaniards off Cape St.
Vincent, the British Fleet mutinied. Admiral Adam Duncan, of Dundee, who was
keeping his eye on the Dutch Fleet, had only two ships left, but fooled the
Dutch by signalling to an imaginary fleet. Shortly afterwards he smashed the
Dutch in the Battle of Camperdown.]
The shadow of the Corsican
lay blacker than ever across Europe, however. He was quite convinced that he
was a superman—as a matter of fact, his methods were those of the
high-pressure American salesman—and he stuck his hand into his waistcoat
very dramatically and declared that Great Britain's power must be broken.
Allons! There was, of course, the difficulty of getting at England,
[Napoleon's plan to land a huge army in England was frustrated by the
vigilance of Sir Robert Calder, an Elginshire man, who commanded the British
squadron detailed to watch the French armada. He bottled the French Admiral
up at Ferrol, and kept him bottled up.] so Napoleon, after failing in his
plan to land troops in Kent, evolved his Continental System, by which the
Continental countries were forbidden to import English goods. Spain stood it
for a while, then rebelled. It was the spark that set Europe on fire. Great
Britain, not too reluctantly, moved to the support of Spain, and the
Peninsular War began.
The chief interest which this
campaign holds for the British people lies in the fact that it threw into
prominence two great military geniuses—Arthur Wellesley and Sir John
Moore—and that it demonstrated that Napoleon's sales-manager methods could
be beaten by something better—real military genius. Wellesley's great day
was yet to come—at Waterloo. The Peninsular War belongs to Sir John Moore,
for it was glorified by his courage and his dazzling strategy. Indeed, one
may search the pages of military history and not find a more classic example
of intuitive skill in handling an army than was exhibited by Sir John Moore,
of Glasgow, in his dramatic retreat to Corunna. Viewed from the broad angle
of its relationship to the frightful struggle that followed, it stands out
clearly as a set-back from which Napoleon never recovered.
The Corsican's plan was to
advance rapidly into Spain with a vast army and wipe the British troops out
of the Peninsular. His divisions poured over the mountains. Sault was at
Saldana. Napoleon himself was hurrying inland from Madrid with 40,000
infantry and cavalry. Other French generals with well-equipped divisions
were converging on the little British Army. It was a grim display of power
and remorseless speed.
Sir John Moore matched his
wits against those of Napoleon, and proved himself the cleverer tactician.
He struck quickly at the French lines of communication, then retreated with
deliberate skill and speed, keeping out of the range of the vast pincers
that reached out for him, and cunningly leading the vast French armies far
from their bases. From first to last, the execution of the withdrawal was a
classic example of courage, skill, and endurance. Invincible Scottish
regiments fought the rearguard action as the little British expeditionary
force was guided out of the reach of Napoleon's ponderous machine. The
retreat was accomplished in the dead of winter, under incredible hardships,
but it was the master-stroke that changed the whole trend of the struggle
against Napoleon. While he was pursuing the phantom-like British Army, word
came that Austria had turned against France. Like a disgusted sales-manager
who has seen his whirlwind campaign fall short of its objective, Napoleon
left for Paris, leaving Sault to deal with Sir John Moore.
Sir John led his gaunt men
into Corunna. Somebody had blundered at the War Office. There were no
transports waiting to carry the weary troops to safety. Sir John turned his
face to the foe. Corunna was hurriedly fortified. The French launched their
formidable attack. It was really a battle between picked French troops and
seasoned Scottish troops that followed, and the cold steel of the
Highlanders brought victory to this country. Victory!—but tragedy as well,
for in the savage engagement Sir John Moore received a mortal wound and,
with a few calm words, died. Thus ended the career of one of the few able
military commanders this country has ever produced, and one of the most
humane and exalted characters that have ever served in the Army.
We buried him darkly at dead
of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light,
And the lantern dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.
The scene of war shifted
again. The year was 1815. Napoleon, stealing away from Elba, had set France
on fire again. He had come back to his hypnotized army, and the hour had
come, as he put it, "to measure himself with Wellington". The culmination of
the long struggle between Napoleon and Great Britain came, with a vast
crescendo of clashing arms and a shambles that stunned Europe. Waterloo!
There have been a great many
nonsensical things said about the famous battle, and not the least
nonsensical of them was the Duke of Wellington's statement that it was won
on the playing-fields of Eton. There is a certain type of Briton who does
believe that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,
simply because that type of Briton finds it difficult to believe that a war
not won by public school men of the right sort would be a vulgar conflict.
Waterloo was a vulgar
conflict—a conflict in which the best troops of France belaboured the best
troops of Great Britain at close range. It was no fit place for the young
gentlemen of Eton, because staff-officers did not count at all. It was a
case of batter and smash, with the odds in favour of the troops that could
stand up longest under gruelling punishment. Men looked into the whites of
one another's eyes. Wellington himself was up with the veterans, swearing
like a trooper, and had to jump a hedge. Napoleon had to shake himself out
of his Man of Destiny pose, and urged his troops forward with the dramatic
zeal of a cheer-leader at an American college football game. There was no
strategy worth mentioning. The armies just faced each other on the slopes,
like neat plantations of trees, and hammered away till the French troops
threw up the sponge. In short, Waterloo was an exceedingly vulgar battle,
and Eton may be thankful for the fact that her sons had very little to do
with the beastly business.
The men who broke Napoleon's
heart that day and sent him reeling towards Paris and oblivion had hair on
their cheekbones and heather in their voices. They faced the best men that
Napoleon could call up, and broke them. One fact emerges from the smoke of
the battle—the turning-point came with the desperate hand-to-hand fight
around the farmhouse of Hougomont. Napoleon's brother, Jerome, was sent to
take this strategic point. He poured men against it. The Black Watch and the
Gordons were holding the line left of the road leading to Brussels. The
troops to the right and left of them gave way. [Wellington made no secret of
the fact that he had trouble with the English regiments. General Allan, his
private secretary, quotes him as saying that he owed the victory entirely to
the admirable conduct of the old Spanish infantry (these were the troops,
largely Scottish, who had served so gloriously under Sir John Moore in the
Peninsular), and that the other English regiments were unsteady and alarmed,
and had to be handled severely in order to prevent them from leaving the
field altogether!] It was at this crucial moment that the Highlanders were
ordered to charge. The Scots Greys moved up, passed through the opened ranks
of the infantry, and to the skirl of the bagpipes and the wild cry of
"Scotland for ever!" the famous charge that broke the French attack was
under way. With the Gordons hanging to their stirrups, the Scots Greys
thundered into the French column, shattering it. The tide had turned. Well
might Sir Denis Pack ride up like a madman, shouting: "Highlanders, you have
won the day!" They had. Napoleon was beaten, but he made one more desperate
attempt to retrieve himself. The famous French Guards were sent into the
shambles. The very earth rocked with the force of their assault; but the
British lines, with Scottish regiments in the key positions, stood firm as
the Rock of Appin. It was then that Wellington decided to advance his whole
line, and, cursing at Lord Uxbridge, who did not see the genius of this
masterstroke and tried to hold things back, the Commander-in-Chief drove his
weary men forward—to victory.
The Duke of Wellington was
Irish. He went into politics, and like most men with military minds, made a
proper ass of himself when dealing with peace-time problems. It was during
this unhappy period of his life that he said so many foolish things, and the
most foolish of all was his statement that the Battle of Waterloo was won on
the playing-fields of Eton. He should have known that Eton would never see
the humour of it.
With Napoleon out of the way,
England waxed rich and mighty. All sorts of sharp business men made fortunes
in our expanding export trade, and with more money than they knew what to do
with, and no idea that their descendants would have to pay income taxes,
they established themselves in the fine big empty mansions that are such an
intriguing feature of our landscape—and newspaper advertising—to-day. The
dear old colonies, with the help of the United States, emptied these
mansions by building factories and supplying their own needs; but before
that happened, England—that is, the word that had come to mean Great
Britain—had to fight a good many times for her struggling outposts. The
fighting was done largely by Scots.
While the clouds of Waterloo
were piling up, for instance, England was obliged to unsheath the sword in
Nepal. Lord Minto, General Auchterlony, and Sir John Malcolm were the men in
charge of the campaign, and when they called off their troops the Nepal
durbar had formed a new opinion of Scottish soldiers and England had added
the rich hill territories of Simla, Mussoorie, and Naini Tal to her Indian
Empire.
A far bigger task awaited
Scotsmen in India, but in the meantime the middle and upper classes of
England (formerly Great Britain) settled down comfortably to forty years of
peace and prosperity. The tocsin of war sounded again in 1854. Something had
gone wrong in the Crimea—something that involved England's honour. Mr.
Gladstone rumbled. The Times thundered. The upper classes became
exclamatory, and agreed that the time had come to teach Russia a lesson.
The Crimean War was really a
story of gallant Scottish soldiers in the field, capable Scottish Admirals
in the surrounding seas, [Admiral J. W. Dundas commanded the Black Sea
Fleet, and Admiral Sir Charles Napier, another Scot, commanded the Baltic
Fleet. Napier was treated scandalously by the Admiralty. He was succeeded by
Admiral the Hon. R. Dundas, another Scot, who smashed the great fortress at
Sveaborg.] and muddling, half-hearted politicians at home. Sir Colin
Campbell, of Glasgow, was the Commander-in-Chief of the Highland Brigade,
and with this superb fighting machine—it included the Black Watch, the
Camerons, and the Sutherland Highlanders—at his disposal, proceeded against
the Russians.
We have always been thrilled
by Sir Colin's tactics, for in those days Army commanders had to expose
themselves to danger. Instead of sitting in comfortable quarters far from
the scene of the fighting, issuing terse orders and stabbing viciously at
maps with bronze paper-cutters, they had to lead their men to death and
glory. Sir Colin Campbell was the last of the British Generals who pursued
that old-fashioned policy, and he did it artistically, inspiring great
artists to paint stirring scenes in which shouting men, neighing horses, and
bullet-riddled flags are gloriously mixed up. Personally conducted battles,
so to speak, with Sir Colin up in front waving a sword. Forward!
The enemy, forty thousand
strong, and supported by 106 guns, had made himself comfortable on the left
bank of the Alma. It was necessary to "shift him", as the Scots say, and he
was shifted. The British troops, who formed the left wing of the advance,
were outnumbered twenty to one. Faced by such odds, they began to falter. It
was at this critical stage of the advance that Sir Colin Campbell showed his
mettle, and the mettle of the regiments he loved.
"Forward, the Forty-second!"
came his order.
To the skirl of the bagpipes,
the Highland Brigade moved forward against twelve Russian regiments! It
seemed to be asking too much of the Scots, but they continued to go forward.
They forded the Alma, halted for a while on the face of the heights, then
moved forward again, waiting for the word. It came at last. The long line of
bayonets gleamed, away went the Highlanders, and they did not stop until
they had routed the Russians and sent them flying helter-skelter towards
Sevastopol.
The war was not yet won. At
Balaclava the Sutherlands had to face Russian cavalry, and they reduced it
to a disorganized tangle of horses and men. Then came the dismal siege of
Sevastopol, which subjected our soldiers to unspeakable hardships and
finally exposed the lukewarm and lackadaisical attitude of the piddling
politicians in London towards the conduct of the war. It was almost more
than the country deserved when the Russians evacuated Sevastopol in
September of 1855, and many a man at home would have liked to have seen the
Highland Brigade turned loose in the House of Commons with fixed bayonets.
Never, in all her history, has England been more gallantly served by
Scottish soldiers than during the Crimean War.
England had learned, by this
time, to rely on Scottish Generals and Scottish soldiers, so when real
trouble developed in India—and it did in 1857, when the pampered Sepoy
regiments mutinied at Meerut, old Sir Colin Campbell was asked to take
things in hand. It took time to get out to the Bay of Bengal in those days,
of course, and before the hero of the Crimea got there a lot of things had
happened. The massacre at Delhi was one of them, and if there had been any
doubts in English minds about the gravity of the Sepoy insurrections, that
cold-blooded murder of helpless women and children wiped them away. The
whole of India was a smouldering volcano, liable at any moment to erupt and
wipe out the handful of British people then living in the country. Delhi was
really recaptured by John Nicholson and the army of Sikhs he raised.
Nicholson was the first man to step over the broken walls of the city, and
in doing so he was killed.
Meanwhile, murderers were
running amuck in the country, and the English people gasped with horror when
the news came that Nana Sahib had murdered 122 women and children at
Cawnpore. An avenging arm was reaching across India, however. General
Havelock was on the way to the scene of the horror. He left Calcutta with
the 78th Highlanders, and when the dusky rebels saw his kilted, hard-bitten
men, the word flew around that the wives of the men murdered in Delhi and
Cawnpore had appeared. They were wives from hell, as the Sepoys found out.
It was said, by witnesses of the attack on Nana Sahib, that some of the
Scots were crying with sheer emotion when they plunged their bayonets into
the disciplined gangsters who had massacred the British women and children.
Scots had come to grips with
the most dangerous uprising that the Empire has ever faced. General Havelock
and Sir James Outram marched on to the relief of Lucknow; the Seaforth
Highlanders cut their way through the Sepoys with cold steel, and, fighting
desperately all the way, cleared the road to the Residency. There, as we
know, Havelock and Outram were besieged for six weary weeks, but the
Campbells were coming. Sir Colin's pipers were heard at last outside the
walls:
Louder, nearer, fierce as
vengeance,
Sharp and shrill as swords at strife,
Came the wild MacGregor's clan-call,
Stinging all the air to life.
A hole was battered in the
walls of the city, and the British troops passed through. The Sikhs, with
most of their officers shot, hesitated. Sir Colin Campbell broke the
dangerous spell. "Colonel Ewart, bring on the tartan!" the old boy yelled.
The tartan came on, like a mob of madmen. From building to building they
raced, hacking mercilessly with their bayonets and over the insane din of
the slaughter squeale the mad pibroch of battle.
It was a great dramatic
moment in military history when Sir Colin Campbell, Sir James Outram, and
General Havelock shook hands in the Residency; but the most desperate phase
of the Indian Mutiny had yet to come. Sir Colin knew it, and he acted
quickly. The garrison was hustled away to Cawnpore before the surrounding
hordes of maddened Sepoys suspected that the move was in contemplation.
General Havelock, racked by disease, worry, and fatigue, died on the road.
Outram carried on. The crisis of the Mutiny was approaching. Time was
precious. Sir Colin drove his weary men towards Cawnpore. They reached the
Ganges at last, halted, then, led by the Highlanders of the Forty-second,
scattered 25,000 Sepoys with the bayonet.
Lucknow remained—and the
humbling of that citadel of sedition proved to be the most desperate battle
of the whole Mutiny. Again it was a case of Scots against Sepoys, in the
ratio of one to ten; but the veterans of the Black Watch, the Sutherlands,
and the Camerons fought with berserk fury, and when they paused to wipe
their bayonet, Lucknow was won. With its fall the Indian Mutiny fizzled out.
The Indian Mutiny, of which
it may be said that it was scotched by Scotsmen, was the last of a series of
dangerous wars in which our country had been engaged. Fifty-seven years were
to pass away before the Empire was threatened seriously again, but in that
long interval of comparative peace we had to defend our rights in China, the
Soudan, Afghanistan and South Africa. In all of these campaigns 'Scotsmen
bore the brunt of the fighting, but the fibre of the race received its
supreme test in the Great War. This is what we gave to England during that
life-and-death struggle: [In applying to official Scottish sources for the
total number of Scotsmen who were killed in the Great War, we made the
astounding discovery that the figures are not available, and that they have
never been compiled. The names of all Scotsmen killed in the Great War are
preserved in the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle, but to
get the total figures it would be necessary, we are informed, to take up
residence in Edinburgh for several weeks in order to go through the Honour
Rolls in Crown Square and count the names therein. Surely it is time that
the Scottish people knew, from official sources, how many of their
countrymen died in the Great War.]
Sir Douglas Haig, of
Bemersyde, Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France, and the most
promising generation that was ever reared on Scottish soil.
Yet the blood runs strongly
still. The breed goes marching on. New generations fill the places of those
who went out, with high faces, into the Great Storm. Scotland For Ever!
Tho' much is taken, much
abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts.
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!
