COLIN CAMPBELL LORD CLYDE BY ARCHIBALD FORBES London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1895 All rights reserved...

The British Military Service is fertile in curious contrasts. Among the officers who sailed from England for the East in the spring of 1854 were three veterans who had soldiered under the Great Duke in Portugal and Spain. The fighting career of each of those men began almost simultaneously; the senior of the three first confronted an enemy's fire in 1807, the two others in the following year. In 1854 one of these officers, who was the son of a duke and who had himself been raised to the peerage,

With the wound which struck him down on the Croix des Bouquets on the 7th of October 1813 Colin Campbell's active service in his original regiment ended, and on the 9th of November in the same year he was promoted to a captaincy without purchase in the Sixtieth Rifles. Still enfeebled by his wounds, he came home before the end of the year with the strongest recommendations to the Horse Guards from the commanders under whom he had served in the field,—recommendations which do not appear to have a

The Ninety-Eighth had been moved to Plymouth in anticipation of departure on foreign service, and on the 20th of December, 1841, it embarked for Hong-Kong on H.M.S. Belleisle , a line-of-battle ship which had been commissioned for transport service. According to present ideas the Belleisle , whose burden did not exceed 1750 tons, was abominably overcrowded, especially for a voyage of six months or longer. The Ninety-Eighth embarked eight hundred and ten strong; and what with staff officers, deta

Soon after his return to England Sir Colin Campbell vacated the command of the Ninety-Eighth and went on half-pay. He had earned a modest competence, and after those long years of campaigning abroad he considered himself at the age of sixty-one entitled to enjoy peaceful repose at home for the rest of his life. But this was not to be; there was still before him much arduous and active service in the field before he went to his final rest. Kinglake in his War in the Crimea pays Colin Campbell a f

In the beginning of 1857 the clouds that presaged the awful storm of mutiny which Sir Charles Napier had foretold and temporarily averted seven years earlier, were ominously gathering over the Bengal Presidency. On the 19th of February the first flash of actual outbreak burst forth at Berhampore. The revolt spread to Barrackpore, and in the course of a few weeks it became apparent that the spirit of insubordination was gradually but surely ripening throughout the Bengal army. In the middle of Ma

Sir Colin Campbell had effected the relief of the Residency of Lucknow and the withdrawal of its garrison, and he was now free to devote himself to the strategic prosecution of the main campaign. Some delay had to be endured pending the return of the carriage which had conveyed the great convoy from Lucknow to the advanced base at Allahabad; but the interval enabled him to concert the measures necessary for the restoration of British authority in the Gangetic Doab and the opening of communicatio

It will be remembered that in the beginning of the year, when the Commander-in-Chief was desirous of effecting the settlement of Rohilcund before proceeding to the final reduction of Lucknow in the autumn, the Governor-General had evinced his preference for postponing operations in Rohilcund and for proceeding as early as possible to the conquest of the capital of Oude. That great task had now been accomplished, and it was the opinion of the sagacious veteran that, Oude having been entered and L

The operations which, during the long campaign of the Mutiny, were carried on under Lord Clyde's direct supervision were confined to the region north of the Jumna; he himself never crossed that river. But in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief he was mainly responsible for the grand strategy of the campaign throughout the whole area of military operations, the outlines of which he had laid down in the scheme prepared during his voyage from England. Of this scheme an essential feature was, it may

Satisfied of the "military safety" of the troops engaged in Oude, Goruckpore, and Behar, the Doab and Rohilcund, Lord Clyde during his hot-weather residence at Allahabad was resolved not to endanger the health of his forces until he should be able "to move them on a general plan and with one common object." His design, therefore, was to remain quiescent until his preparations should be complete; and then, in his own words, "to break in upon the rebel bodies simultaneously in each province, to le

The Mutiny had come to an end, although there was still a ground-swell of disturbance on the Oude frontier opposite Nepaul, in Bundelcund, and in some other districts of Central India. It was not until the end of May, 1859, that Lord Clyde could confidently state that the last embers of rebellion had been extinguished, and that the provinces of India which during the preceding two years had been the scene of so much lawlessness, bloodshed, and disorder, were now subsiding into a state of profoun