The Sikh losses were /bout 10,000, against 320 dead and more than 2000 wounded on the British side, but it has to be remembered that most e~ the Khalsa died in the river, and for a time the battle ha~ been on a knife-edge. After the repulse of his first attack9 Gough launched an assault on the right and centre, and has recorded comment, as he watched Gilbert's men storming the ramparts, was: "Good God, they'll be annihilated!" (the Hardinge, Inns, Rait, Khushwant Singh, and others.)
51. Later Field-Marshal Lord Napier of Magdala (1810-90), famous for perhaps the most successful campaign in British imperial history, the maI h on Magdala, Abyssinia (1868), in which Flashman is believed to have taken part. Napier was a brilliant soldier, organiser, and engineer, but his great devotion was to art, and he was still taking lessons at the age of 78.
52. Sir Henry Lawrence (1810`57) best known for his defence of Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny, in which he was killed, but he previously had a distinguished career in the army and the political service, serving in Burma and in the Afghan and Sikh wars. Tall, gaunt, hot-tempered and impatient of contradiction, he also had a romantic side, and was the author of a love story, Adventurer in the Punjaub, which, according to Dr M'Gregor, was also a mine of information about the country and its politics. And he succeeded in seeing the Maharani Jeendan in Lahore after the war, when Gardner persuaded her to show her head and shoulders over a garden wall, "to the gratification of the officers [Lawrence and Robert Napier]". (See M'Gregor, Gardner, D. N. B. )
53. As in previous volumes of the Papers, one is reminded of how small was the group of officers who shaped the course of empire in Africa and the Far East; the same names cross Flashman's path again and again—Napier, Havelock, Broadfoot, Lawrence; Herbert Edwardes, who was Lawrence's assistant and won great fame in the Mutiny; wild John Nicholson, who was literally worshipped as a divinity by a frontier sect, the Nickleseynites; Hope Grant, the monosyllabic, 'cello-playing Scot who led the march to Peking and was rated by Flashman the most dangerous fighting man alive; "Rake" Hodson, the violent ruffian who commanded the famous Guides and founded Hodson's Horse; and others whom he knew elsewhere, but not in the Punjab—Frederick ("Bobs") Roberts; Garnet Wolseley, the original "model of a modern major-general"; "Chinese" Gordon of Khartoum, and one-armed Sam Browne whose belt has made him the most famous of them all. A distinguished company who tended to go one of two ways: knighthood (or peerage) and general rank, or a grave in the outposts.
54. Dr W. L. M'Gregor, who served throughout the Sikh War, is one of its major historians, and an enthusiast on military medicine. Anyone wishing to study the war is recommended to him, and to Captain J. D. Cunningham, who also served in the campaign, and was in political intelligence. They do not always agree with each other, but their knowledge of the Punjab and its personalities makes them invaluable sources.
55. The terms of the first Treaty of Lahore, March 9, 1846, are to be found in Cunningham, M'Gregor, and Hardinge. They are as Goolab Singh predicted, with additional clauses giving Britain passage for troops through the Punjab, a pledge not to interfere in Punjabi internal affairs, and a prohibition on the enlistment of European or American mercenaries in the Punjab without British consent. Supplementary articles provided for the stationing of a British force at Lahore for one year—this was at the request of the Lahore durbar, who rightly conceived themselves to be in need of protection.
56. Goolab Singh, the "Golden Hen" and stormy petrel of Kashmir, was every bit as deplorable, and quite as personally engaging, as Flashman portrays him. He was born about 1788, and to describe his career of intrigue, murder, warfare, and knavery would take a long chapter; it suffices to say that as a leading light of the Dogra Hindus who opposed the Sikhs in the power struggle following Runjeet Singh's death, he not only survived but ended with a kingdom of his own, Kashmir. He did it by shameless duplicity, conspiring with the British while pretending sympathy for the Punjab cause, and no one was ever more expert at playing both ends against the middle. His character was admirably summed up by his friend and agent, Colonel Gardner, who described it as repulsive, ambitious, avaricious, and capable of the most inhuman systematic cruelty simply to invest his name with terror; at the same time he was charming, genial, opium-addicted, given to telling long stories, and hail-fellow with the poorest of his subjects. A fine soldier and sturdy fighter, he was also a wise and careful ruler, and perhaps the most revealing thing about him is that while Gardner published his character study in Goolab's lifetime, they remained the best of friends, (See Gardner, Carmichael Smyth, and others.)