Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
The moral effect upon our soldiers of this battle, we may believe to
have been decisive of the campaign. The prodigious preponderance of the
Sikhs in numerical strength; the weight, and celerity, and accuracy of
their batteries; their stanch and obstinate courage, which often went
down only before the intolerable contact of the bayonet, had been made
undeniably manifest. What had they availed against our imperturbable
intrepidity, under circumstances and at a moment in which we might have
thrown, almost without dishonour, the blame of discomfiture upon
physical infirmities, that overmaster the brave and the strong as
relentlessly as the timid and feeble? What would they avail, when the
chances were fairer for us--the collision more even? When the fight at
Moodkee was done, there was not, of the surviving victors, a Queen's
soldier or a sepoy who had not already settled to his own satisfaction
the whole campaign of the Sutlej, in the pithy but comprehensive
conviction, that he should drub the Sikhs whenever he met them. The
logician smiles at the vulnerable reasoning; the soldier smiles, too,
and feels himself clad in better armour than steel or brass. There had
been a reciprocal amicable emulation every where prevalent throughout
the battle, between the officers and the men, between our Indian and our
European troops. The Governor-General shared all the perils of the
field; Sale and M'Caskill "foremost fighting fell;" while our native
regiments vied with, and were not excelled by, their British comrades in
active daring or unswerving steadiness. One temper, one will, and a
universal mutual confidence, thrilled through, cemented, and fired the
whole mass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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