THE BATTLE OF KOREIGAUM

Suspecting, moreover, the Governor-General's intention of supplanting his authority by that of the rajah, who had long been detained as a mere pageant in the fortress of Wusota, not far from Sattara, he resolved to anticipate the attempt, by dispatching a party to carry him off, with all his family; he thus possessed, and had completely in his power, the persons whose legal claim, being better than his own, might have become formidable in the hands of the Marquis of Hastings. Bajee Rao then turned his steps westward to Punderpoor, in the province of Bejapore.

After garrisoning Poonah, under Colonel Burr, General Smith began his pursuit, and on the 29th of November had to force the Salpee Pass, leading to the table-land in which the Kistna has its source. This pass, Gokla, one of the Peishwa's bravest officers but most evil advisers, attempted to defend; but he was beaten, the pass cleared with ease, and the British troops pressed on. No fighting, but rapid and toilsome marches, ensued, the army of the Peishwa flying in a kind of zig-zag route, while he always kept two long marches in advance. With 5,000 of his best horse, Gokla was hovering near Smith's flanks to seize any advantage that might

occur.

On the 6th of December, Bajee Rao was forced

ting round the flank of the pursuing force. Passing mid-way between Seroor and Poonah, he continued his flight northward to Wattoor, on the Nassick road, where he was joined by his long-lost favourite, Trimbukjee Danglia, who brought him a considerable reinforcement of horse and foot.

Nassick seemed to be the point for which he was making. It is a populous city and the chief seat of Brahminical learning in Western India, having temples that are all picturesque and almost innumerable; but the Peishwa lost his opportunity by lingering at Wattoor for General Smith, who, in continuing the pursuit, marched considerably to the east, and proceeded so far on the 26th of December, that when the Peishwa was still at Wattoor, he was to the north-east of him, and advancing in a line, by which his further progress by the Nassick road would certainly be interrupted.

The Peishwa therefore, after wheeling to the north of Wattoor, returned to it, and on the 28th turned suddenly to the south, and retraced his steps to Poonah. Colonel Burr, who commanded in that city, apprehending an attack, solicited a reinforcement from Seroor. Accordingly, Captain Staunton (afterwards Colonel F. F. Staunton, C.B.), of the Bombay army, was detached at six in the evening of the 31st December, with the 2nd battalion of the 1st Bombay Native Infantry, mustering 600 bayonets, twenty-six artillerymen under Lieutenant Chisholm, of the Madras Artillery, and 300 auxiliary horse, under Lieutenant Swanston.

At ten o'clock in the morning of New Year's 1818, Captain Staunton's force, when

Day,

*"Memoirs of Central India."

1818

507

Aware of his intention, the Mahrattas sought to defeat it by pushing forward their infantry. Both parties entered the village about the same time, and a desperate struggle instantly ensued for the possession of it, and this actually continued from noon till sunset. Our troops were the first assailants in their attempts to expel the Arabs, but, failing to achieve this, they were compelled to defend what they had won; while the Arabs kept up a galling matchlock fire from a little fort of which they had possessed themselves, and from the terraced roofs of the houses at the same time, ever and anon rushing on, with the headlong courage of their race, upon the levelled bayonets of the sepoys, and also in the face of showers of grape from two guns, ad mirably served under Lieutenant Chisholm.

During this most desperate and protracted conflict, our troops, weary with their night march from Seroor, had to encounter, in endless succession, fresh parties of the enemy, whose vast superiority in numbers enabled them to send on large detachments; and, moreover, they had to fight for bare existence the live-long day, without food or water, and ere evening drew nigh their position was perilous in the extreme.

Of their eight officers, Lieutenant Chisholm had fallen; Lieutenants Swanston, Conellan, and Pattinson, with Assistant-Surgeon Wingate, were wounded, so that only Captain Staunton, Lieutenant Innes, and Dr. Wylie remained effective. A great number of the gunners had been killed or wounded, and all who remained untouched were sinking with fatigue. The three last-named officers led more than one desperate charge, and re-captured a gun which the Arabs had taken, and slaughtered them in heaps. Every man fought then with the knowledge that there was nothing left for him to choose except victory or torture and death. Thus the surgeons had to do the duty of combatants.

"The medical officers," said the Division Orders of General Smith, "also led the sepoys to charges

When evening came the chance of success seemed remote indeed. The enemy succeeded in capturing a choultry, in which many of the wounded had been deposited, and a horrid butchery of these ensued. Doctor Wingate was literally chopped into fragments, and a similar fate awaited the other wounded officers, when the building was recovered by a sudden onset, and every Arab in it was put to death. The re-capture of the gun is thus related by Duff:

"Lieutenant Thomas Pattinson, adjutant of the battalion, lying mortally wounded, being shot through the body, no sooner heard that the gun was taken, than getting up, he called to the grenadiers once more to follow him, and seizing a musket by the muzzle, rushed into the middle of the Arabs, striking them down right and left, until a second ball through his body completely disabled him. Lieutenant Pattinson had been nobly seconded; the sepoys thus led were irresistible; the gun was re-taken, and the dead Arabs, literally lying above each other, proved how desperately it had been defended.” ↑

Near it lay Lieutenant Chisholm, headless; on seeing this, Captain Staunton pointed to the corpse, and told his men that this fate awaited all who fell, dead or alive, into the hands of the enemy; and many who had been talking about surrendering now declared that they would fight to the last. Some water was procured about this time, and most grateful it proved to all, especially to the sepoys, whose lips were baked and dry through biting cartridges the entire day The enemy now began to relax their efforts, and by nine in the evening had evacuated the village.

Captain Staunton and his brave little band passed the night undisturbed; and when day dawned, the Mahratta army was still in sight, but drawing off towards Poonah. No other attack was made on Koreigaum; for where the gallant, if ferocious, Arabs had failed, it would have been a useless task for the Mahrattas to have made any attempt. They were preparing for a general flight, in consequence of hearing that General Smith was approaching. Unaware of this circumstance, Captain Staunton believed that they were simply taking up a position to intercept his advance on *E. I. Military Calendar. "History of the Mahrattas."

In the dark, on the night of the 2nd of January, he sacrificed much of his baggage to provide means for bringing off his wounded, whom he brought away with his guns, and with them reached Seroor by nine a.m. on the morning of the 3rd. Save a little water, the troops had received no food or refreshment since they began their advance on the 31st December. He had lost a third of the battalion and of the artillery in killed and wounded175 in all; and a third of the auxiliary horse were hors de combat, or missing. Among his wounded was the gallant Lieutenant Pattinson, a very powerful man, of six feet seven inches in height, who expired on reaching Seroor; and, during his last moments, was in the deepest distress, from a belief that his favourite regiment had been defeated.*

The Mahratta loss at Koreigaum was above 600 men. Both Gokla and Trimbukjee Danglia were present in directing the attacks; and once the latter fought his way into the heart of the village. While the carnage went on, the cowardly Bajee Rao viewed it safely from a rising ground two miles distant, on the opposite bank of the Beemah. There he frequently taunted his officers by asking them, impatiently, where were now their vaunts of cutting up the British, if they were baffled by one battalion. The Rajah of Sattara, who sat by his side, having put up an astabgeer as a shade from the sun, the Peishwa, in great alarm, requested him to put it down, lest the British should send a cannon-ball through it. When the battle was fairly lost, and the advance of Smith became certain, he started off for the south, and never drew bridle till he reached the banks of the Gatpurba river.

The gallant conduct of Captain Staunton and his slender force was much lauded in India and Great Britain. The East India Company voted him a purse of 500 guineas and a splendid sword of honour, with an inscription panegyrising his courage, skill, and devotion to duty; but the rewards bestowed on his brave soldiers bore not the least proportion to their merits.

The place where our slain were buried, near the pretty village of Koreigaum, was long unmarked. The native dead were thrown into an old dry well, and a covering of earth was strewed over them. Chisholm, Wingate, and the Europeans were buried on the bank of the Beemah, near the village; and a handsome pillar of polished granite marks the spot. It is seventy feet in height, and bears, in English, Persian, and Mahratta, the names of the

* Captain Duff-Princep-East India Calendar, &c.

Greatly to the surprise of the fugitive Peishwa, on reaching the Gatpurba, he found the country thereabout, which he believed to be friendly, already in possession of the inevitable British. General Munro (afterwards Sir Thomas Munro, Bart.), who had been sent from Madras to quiet those districts of the Carnatic which had been ceded in 1817 by the treaty of Poonah, had produced this sudden change by mustering a few regulars, in addition to his own escort, and taking advantage of all the population who were disaffected to the sway of the Mahrattas.

Few officers in India at this time won greater reputation than Munro. The son of a Glasgow merchant, who had been ruined by the revolt of the American colonies, he had joined the Madras Infantry in 1779, and through the Mysore and other wars had fought his way up to the highest commands.+ Invested by the Marquis of Hastings, at the crisis referred to, with the rank of Brigadier-General, he had reduced all the fortresses and over-run all the districts to which the Peishwa had now fled; and of the services he rendered his country then, we have a résumé in the speech of Mr. Canning, when moving, on the 4th March, in the following year, the vote of thanks in the House of Commons :-"To give some notion of the extent of country over which these actions were distributed, the distance between the most northern and most southern of the captured fortresses is not less than 700 miles. At the southern extremity of this long line of operations, and in a part of the campaign carried on in a district far from public gaze, and without opportunities of early and special notice, was employed a man whose name I should have been sorry to have passed over in silence. I allude to Colonel Thomas Munro, a gentleman whose rare qualifications the House of Commons acknowledged when he was examined at their bar on the renewal of the East India Company's Charter, and than whom Britain never produced a more accomplished statesman, nor India, fertile as it is in heroes, a more skilful soldier. This gentleman, whose occupations for some time past have rather been of a civil and administrative than of a military nature, was called, early in the war, to exercise abilities which, though dormant, had not rusted from disuse. went into the field with not more than from 500 to 600 men, of whom a very small proportion were Europeans, and marched into the Mahratta territories to take possession of the country which had

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