Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c56.s10: § 5. Arthur Wellesley’s war preparations
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c56.s10
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§ 5. Arthur Wellesley’s war preparations
v4.c56.s10.1
While in the north Gerard Lake was training his army by personally heading vast troop exercises and daily camaraderie with his officers in the hunting-field and dinner parties, where the wine cup overflowed till long past midnight,—in the south Arthur Wellesley was sharpening his military machine equally well but by a different method. The “bleak sublimity of his genius” made him work in isolation. The future conqueror of Napoleon had already discovered that “a modern army marches on its stomach.” Therefore, in his earliest Indian campaign, Arthur Wellesley set himself to ensuring the food supply of his troops by organizing the famous Mysore bullock teams with as much care and success as he showed later in building up his mule transport in the Peninsular War. In addition, he with tireless industry experimented and perfected the plan of using coracles (oval row-boats made of sewn hides stretched over wicker-work frames) for ferrying his troops over the rocky rivers of the south. In this way he discovered the exact number of men or weight of material that each coracle could safely carry. At the same time he kept his detachment commanders awake to the necessity of constantly guarding against their store of bullock-fodder catching fire.
v4.c56.s10.2
Arthur Wellesley did all this work while hampered by the absence of a staff in the real sense of the term, the slackness and sometimes obstruction of the civil Government of Bombay (on which he had to depend for most of his needs), and the large proportion of inefficient and even refractory subordinate officers whom he could not promptly punish because he had none to replace them.
v4.c56.s10.3
The Wellingtonian tactics, familiar to students of his Peninsular campaigns, were absent from his Indian battles. Here was no employment of the line against the column, no sheltering of his infantry under cover while the enemy’s tumultuous attack spent itself in vain by advancing over broken ground. At Assaye and Argaon, Wellington himself had to advance and attack before the enemy's fire could be subdued and the enemy columns thrown into disorder. Above all, he had no adequate staff; everywhere the general had to go in person to set a tactical move in operation, instead of sending a staff officer to see it done; at Assaye, a civilian like Mountstuart Elphinstone was practically his aide-de-camp throughout the fighting. The planned cohesion of the parts that characterized his battles in Europe was impossible under Indian conditions; every tactical move on his side had to be improvised then and there under the stress of the actual circumstances. And the smallness of his force, especially in cavalry, made pursuit impossible and robbed him of the chance of gaining the fullest fruits from his victory in the stricken field.