“By defeating the more powerful Maratha army and effectively knocking it out of the war, Wellesley fissured the confederates and demonstrated the superiority of his own native and British troops.”

By Josh Provin

MAJOR General Arthur Wellesley was a ‘wonderful man,’ thought the Peshwarian loyalist, Bapu Gokhale; nothing seemed to daunt him. Admittedly, the ways of the English were strange to him, it had to be said. They were, after all, happy to fight endless wars, thousands of miles from their homeland, at the word of a cabal of merchants. That was strange enough. But also because they thought nothing of storming a city as strong as Ahmednagar, putting its garrison to the sword and investing the citadel before breakfast, as if it was just part of the ordinary morning routine.

On 12 August, 1803, the 34-year-old Wellesley, his staff, his hard-bitten British and Indian troops, and slightly unsettled allies watched the garrison of the fortress march out in surrender. “What can withstand them?” Gokhale had asked.

In risking his men’s lives before breakfast, Wellesley had struck the first blow of the Second Maratha War proper, a conflict that would prove much more expensive and costly than his brother, the Governor General, had anticipated when he signed the Treaty of Bassein with Bajirao II, the Peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy, in late 1802.

What had started as a straight-forward operation to restore Bajirao to the Maratha throne burst into a general conflict when the Peshwa’s enemies and former allies refused to abide by his treaty with the British.

Ahmednager stands at the western side of the Deccan plateau, a dominating geographical feature of central India. Already an unforgiving landscape upon which to fight a war, it was made only more inhospitable by recent famines and past conflicts.

One British officer with the engineers, John Blackiston, was not exaggerating when he wrote in later life: “No hardships experienced in European warfare, except indeed during a severe winter’s campaign, which does not often occur, can be compared with those endured by an Indian army in the field.”

It was here in the dusty, all but roadless Maharashtra region of the Deccan, however, where Wellesley would have to conduct his campaign against Daulatrao Sindhia of Gwalior, a maharajah in the Maratha Confederacy, and the Nagpur ruler Ragoji Bhonsle of Berrar, both of whom refused to abide by the Treaty of Bassein.

Wellesley had just over 9,000 men and 17 guns, plus over 5,400 allied Mysore and Maratha irregular cavalry at his newly captured supply base at Ahmednager. In the coming expedition, he would be cooperating with Colonel James Stevenson’s 7,920 strong East India Company contingent operating from Aurangabad, 72 miles to the north. 

Theoretically the British allied Nizam of Hyderabad’s army of 12,000 men and 40 guns would also be in the field to protect their state, but they would play only a supporting role. The security of the frontier of Hyderabad was of paramount importance to Wellesley; Maratha Confederates would try to exploit that.

Dualatrao Sindhia, the young maharajah of Gwalior, was some 270 miles away from Wellesley, at Ajanta, 75 miles from Burhanpur on the Tapi River, which flows west through central India into the Arabian Sea between the Godavari in the south and the Narmada in the north. He commanded 16,700 cavalry, three regular brigades comprising over 9,400 men, 35 siege guns and 170 field guns. His forces were joined by Bhonsle, with 20,000 cavalry, 6,000 infantry (including six regular battalions) and 34 to 40 guns with over 500 rockets. This constituted the field force with which he would defend his Deccan possessions. 

Wellesley’s army was not Dualatrao Sindhia’s only concern. His French commander in Hindustan, Pierre Cuillier-Perron, would oppose British commander-in-chief, Lord Lake to defend Delhi. 

And if facing two British invasions was not enough, Sindhia was desperately short of allies and officers. Although he had Bhonsle with him, the civil war that had started the current conflict had left him politically isolated from the most talented Maratha general, Yashwantrao Holkar, who’s highly mobile army would keep its distance until all seemed lost. 

Further compounding Sindhia’s troubles was the effort by the British to cripple the effectiveness of his regular army by bribing away its mercenary European officer corps, threatening charges of treason to all who stayed.

Wellesley crossed the Godavari on 18 August, 1803. His plan: to use the swollen rivers of the region to constrict the mobility of his enemy, prevent them pillaging for subsistence and raiding friendly territory, and deprive them of bases from which to operate between Ajanta and the Godavari. His reasoning, based on a classical interpretation of Maratha predatory warfare, was that he could bridge any river he chose and capture any fortress he came across more rapidly than the Marathas. 

Wellesley was also highly confident in the caliber of his troops, all of whom had either already been conditioned for hard service in 1799 at Mysore or on the bruising march to restore the Peshwa. The army even marched with surveyors’ wheels to keep track of their progress and Wellesley proudly estimated his infantry were trudging along at three miles an hour.

Supplying his army as it slogged across a practical wasteland was among the general’s chief concerns.

“The country is completely exhausted,’ Wellesley wrote. “The villages depopulated, and large tracts of excellent land uncultivated.” 

The British forces depended on massive herds of bullocks driven by grain merchants contracted to supply the army. These herds formed part of the living city that followed most armies in India, typically being twice as large as the army itself.

The first test of his marching capability was when Dualatrao Sindhia pushed his hordes of cavalry through the pass at Ajanta on 24 August. This massive force nimbly avoided Colonel Stevenson’s army, which had left Aurangabad and took Jalna from where they could potentially threaten Hyderbad. Wellesley force-marched back to the Godavari to block Sindhia who drew back and Wellesley recommenced his movement northwards.

The challenge for Wellesley now was to protect his baggage train and supplies. Maratha irregulars infested the countryside and it became dangerous to allow foragers to go out without a strong guard, or to allow livestock to graze any great distance from the camps. The general took a lead from Caesar’s book (which he had with him in India) and fortified each night like a Roman legion marching camp. 

The army would set out again before dawn, the troops being abruptly awoken by the long rolls of the call-to-arms, then spending hours on the move before the midday sun took its toll on the columns.

On 29 August, Wellesley met Colonel John Collins, the emissary to Sindhia, near Aurangabad. The general listened with barely concealed amusement as the figure before him, whose comically antiquated military tunic, breeches, stockings and powdered wig, one staff officer said, made him look like “a monkey dressed up for Bartholomew fair,” told him of the strength of the Maratha Regular Corps. 

“I tell you, General,” Collins warned, “As to their cavalry, you may ride over them wherever you meet them; but their infantry and guns will astonish you.”

Weeks later, at an anonymous tongue of land squeezed between the Juah and Kistna Rivers, north of Budnapur and Jalna, as Wellesley’s infantry advanced through the hail of shot and grape that was dismembering and disembowelling men at every step, no one was laughing.

“[The Maratha] Infantry, of which there were three campoos, fought well,” reported Wellesley, speaking of what would go down in history as the Battle of Assaye, declaring that they “appeared determined to contend with them [the British and Presidency Infantry] to the last, and who were driven from their guns only by the bayonet.” Collins had been right.

In the stunned aftermath of Assaye, a third of Wellesley’s force lay dead or wounded, his cavalry commander, Colonel Maxwell had been killed, and the general himself had been dismounted three times. But by some miracle, he had routed an army at least twice his own number.

By defeating the more powerful Maratha army and effectively knocking it out of the war, Wellesley fissured the confederates and demonstrated the superiority of his own native and British troops. 

Wellesley pressed forward, pursuing Bhonsle’s army, which made a dash for the Nizam’s territory, forcing the general to undertake a series of tremendous marches through October and November to head off and then pursue the Maratha back into his own kingdom of Berrar.

On 29 November, Wellesley and Stevenson were united and advancing to attack Bhonsle’s field army at a place called Argaum. Wellesley displayed supreme control and leadership when the Maratha guns opened fire, causing confusion in the head of the column, guiding the panicking troops, expecting another hellish Assaye cannonade, back into line as if nothing had happened before routing the enemy in a supreme display of military confidence, Wellesley opined that if he had had an extra hour of daylight not an enemy would have escaped.

Military operations in the Deccan concluded with the Siege of Gawilghur, where the survivors of Bhonsle’s army fled after Argaum. Situated on an isthmus of rock, atop a formidable cliff, the British had to drag and winch their guns up the inclines and through the forested mountains to a small clearing above the fortress from where they were able to batter down the walls and storm the fortress on 15 December. A short but brutal street-fight was followed by looting, and high casualties for the Maratha defenders who surrendered only after many had been killed.

Wellesley, who had never had much enthusiasm for the war, was generous to Sindhia and Bhonsle and was therefore angered when his brother the governor general decided to take a harder line with them. The victorious general left India in 1805, a rich man and an experienced one. He later claimed that he learned as much as he ever did about war in India. Despite his successes against the French, he was scathingly known in France, and even in Prussia as “a General of Sepoys.”

On 18 June 1815, as the Duke of Wellington, he was heard to invoke this piece of Gallic mockery, vowing to show Napoleon how such a general defended a position. I have often wondered if he didn’t secretly wish he had some battalions of sepoys with him in Belgium when he faced the onslaught of Napoleon’s Armee du Nord. 

If, as he said, Wellington truly based everything he later did on his experience in India, then we might be forgiven for amending a common anachronism and say that rather than the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton, it was in reality won upon the famine haunted plains of the Deccan during the war that forged the Duke of Wellington as a military commander.

Josh Provin is the author of Bullocks Grain, and Good Madeira: The Maratha & Jat Campaigns and the Rise of an Indian Army 1803-1806. The founder of the website Adventures in HistoryLand, you can follow him on Twitter.