The desert—the world before it was born or after its death, the earth without water, no cloud above, no tree below—space, silence, solitude, all realised in one word—there is nothing like it in creation.

At midnight on January 5th the little column started for Emanghur,—three hundred and fifty men of the Twenty-Second Regiment on camels—two men on each—two twenty-four pounders drawn by camels, and two hundred troopers of the Scinde Horse, with fifteen days' food and four days' water. From a group of wells called Choonka, Napier sent back a hundred and fifty of his horse, and pushed on with the remainder. For seven days he held on through the sea of sand, and on the 12th reached his object. It was deserted by the Beloochees, who had abandoned their redoubtable stronghold at the approach of the British. On the last day's march the men of the Twenty-Second had to dismount from their camels and help to drag the heavy howitzer through the sand, all laughing and joking, and with such strength! We shall see these men a few weeks later doing still more splendid work, and will have a few words to say about them; now we must hurry on. Napier blew up the desert fort and turned his face back towards the Indus. On January 16th he is still toiling through the sand waves, the men again dragging the guns, but with a significant absence of laughter now that the chances of fight are over. It is the anniversary of Corunna, and despite the labour and anxieties which surround him, the General's mind is away in the past. He reviews the long career now stretching like this desert into an immense horizon. In this retrospect his mind fastens upon one satisfactory thought—he and his brothers have not disgraced their father's memory. "We all resolved not to disgrace him," he writes, "and were he now alive he would be satisfied." The previous day, with the tremendous explosion of the blowing up of Emanghur still ringing in his ears, he wrote: "All last night I dreamed of my beloved mother; her beauteous face smiled upon me. Am I going to meet her very soon?" No, they were not to meet soon; for in spite of fierce battle and Scindian sun and life long past its prime, he is still to realise in himself that mysterious promise given in even a vaster desert than this to those who hold dear the memory of father and mother—he will be left long in the land he is soon to conquer.

By the end of January he has cleared the desert, reunited his column to the main body, and turned the head of his advance to the south. All this time negotiations were going on. Outram had gone to Hyderabad. The Ameers were in wildest confusion; they would sign anything one day, on the next it was protest, threat, or supplication. Camel and horse messengers were flying through the land. But amid all this varying mass of diplomatic rumour one fact was certain, the Ameers' fighting feudatories were gathering, the wild sword and matchlock men of the hills and the deserts were assembling at Hyderabad. The last day of January had come. In another month or six weeks the terrible sun would be hanging as a blazing furnace overhead, and it would be too late. "If they would turn out thirty thousand men in my front it would relieve me from the detestable feeling of having to deal with poor miserable devils that cannot fight, and are seeking pardon by submission. Twenty times a day I am forced to say to myself, 'Trust them not; they are all craft; be not softened.'" Halting five days at Nowshara to allow further time for negotiations and to rest his own troops, he resumes his march early in February. He is at Sukurunda on the 10th, and here again he halts for some days; for Outram has written from Hyderabad that the Ameers have accepted the treaty, and he prays a further respite. But at this place an event occurred which did much to decide the wavering balance between peace and war. On the night of February 12th Napier's cavalry seized some Beloochee chiefs passing the left of the camp. They were of the Murree hill tribe, and the leader of the clan, Hyat Khan, was among them. On him was found a letter from Ameer Mahomet of Hyderabad calling upon him to assemble all his warriors and to march to Meanee on the 9th. The discovery of this message at once decided Napier. He would march straight to his front; he would attack whatever barred his road, be they six or sixty thousand. The events that happened in these early days of February, 1843, and the trembling balance which now was decided to the side of war, have been made the occasion of long and fierce controversy. Volumes were written on Napier's side and on Outram's side. Did the Ameers mean war all the time, and were their professions of peace only directed to delay events until their soldiers were collected and the hot season had come? Or were they a poor helpless lot of enervated rulers, driven to resist the aggression of the English general, and only fighting at last when every other avenue of settlement had been closed against them? To us now two things are very clear. First, that Napier played the game of negotiation with the Ameers from first to last with an armed hand, ready to strike if there was hesitation on the part of his adversaries. Second, that his adversaries played precisely the same game with him. Both sides got their fighting men out. One began its march, the other took up its position of defence. That the flint on one side and the steel on the other, represented by their respective fighting forces, were anxious to come to blows there cannot be a doubt; and that when they found themselves only a few marches distant from each other they struck and fire flew, need never have been the cause of wonderment, least of all the cause of wonderment to soldiers. And now for the clash of flint and steel which bears the name of the battle of Meanee.

From the village of Hala, thirty-three miles north of Hyderabad, two roads led to that city. One of these, that nearer the Indus, approached the position of Meanee directly in front; the other, more to the east, turned that place on its right. Napier reached Hala on the morning of the 18th, and there his mind became immovably determined. In the afternoon Outram arrived by steamer from Hyderabad, having been attacked on the previous day in the Residency by a division of the Beloochee army, with six guns. He had successfully resisted the attack with his small force for some hours, but, finding his ammunition running short, he withdrew with the little garrison to his steamers. There could now be no further doubt that the Ameers had elected to appeal to the sword, and the path was at last clear before Napier and his army. He will advance along the road nearest to the river; if possible he will manoeuvre to turn the enemy's right when he is face to face with him. "There is but one thing—battle!" he writes on this day. "Had Elphinstone fought, he would not have lost his character. Had Wellington waited for Stevenson at Assaye, he would have been beaten. Monson hesitated and retreated and was beaten." Then he pushed on to Muttaree, one march from the Beloochee position. At this place, Muttaree, many things happened. During the day and night various reports came in as to the strength of the enemy. Outram says they are eighteen thousand strong, the spies report twenty to twenty-five, and thirty thousand Beloochees in position. They are flocking in so fast to Meanee that in another day or two there may be sixty thousand assembled. "Let them be sixty or one hundred thousand," is his reply, "I will fight." All the arrangements for the advance are now made. He will move his little army—it is only twenty-two hundred strong—after midnight, so as to arrive in front of Meanee by nine o'clock next morning. Then he sits down to write his letters and bring up his journal to date; for this coming battle, which is to be his first essay as Commander-in-Chief, may be his last as a soldier. "To fall will be to leave many I love," he writes to his old and true friend John Kennedy; "but to go to many loved, to my home! and that in any case must be soon"; for is he not sixty-one years of age? Then, having written all his letters and closed his journal with a message to his wife and children, which shows how the grand heart of the man was ever torn by love and steeled by duty, he goes out of his hut to visit the outposts and see that all is safe in the sleeping camp. It is now midnight. He lies down—has three hours' sleep, and at three A.M. the fall-in sounds and the march to Meanee begins.

When day dawns the column is within a few miles of the enemy. The road leads over a level plain of white silt with a few stunted bushes growing at intervals upon it. To the right and left of this plain, extensive woods close the view. These shikargahs (hunting preserves) are about three-quarters of a mile apart, and the intervening plain across which the road leads is here and there seared by a nullah or dry watercourse. Clouds of dust rise into the morning air from the feet of horses, men, camels, and the roll of wheels.

When there is good light to see, the halt is sounded and the men breakfast; then the march is resumed, and in another hour the leading scouts are in sight of the enemy. It is now eight o'clock. The enemy seems to occupy a deep and sudden depression in the plain on a front of twelve hundred yards, extending right across the line of advance and touching the woods on each flank. Before his right flank there is a village which he also occupies, but no other obstacle lies between the British advancing column and the great hollow in which the Beloochee line of battle has been formed. Napier halts his advanced guard, and while awaiting the arrival of his main body, still a considerable distance in rear, endeavours to obtain some idea of the enemy's strength and position. It is no easy matter. The woods to right and left hide whatever troops he has on these flanks, and the deep nullah in front conceals his strength in that direction; but beyond the nullah, where the plain resumes its original level, the morning sun strikes upon thousands of bits of steel, and a vague dust hanging overhead tells of a vast concourse of human beings on the earth below it.

When the column arrives in line with the advanced guard there is a busy interval getting the immense baggage-train into defensive position, pushing forward guns and cavalry, deploying the infantry into line of battle, and trying to obtain from the top of some sand-dune a better view of the enemy's position. When all is ready for the final advance across the last thousand yards, one thing is certain to the General,—there is no chance of manoeuvring to gain the Beloochee flank. The woods are too dense, nullahs intersect them, they swarm with the enemy—there is nothing possible but to attack the centre straight in front across the bare white plain. There is a small mud village before the enemy's right flank, where the left shikargah touches the bank of the big hollow. The nearer bank of this big hollow has a slight incline towards the plain, and above its level edge many heads can be seen through the field-glasses, and tall matchlock-barrels are constantly moving along it. This hollow is in fact the bed of the Fullalee river, a deep channel which quits the main stream of the Indus three or four miles farther to the right and bends round here to the village of Meanee, where, making a sudden turn to the south, it bends back towards Hyderabad. It is a flowing river only when the Indus is in flood; now the Indus is low and the Fullalee is a deep wide water-course destitute of water, or holding it only in a few stagnant pools. It is in this dry river-bed that the main portion of the Beloochee army is drawn up, and beyond it, in a loop of level ground which the river-channel makes between its bend, can be seen the tents and camp-equipage of the chiefs whose clansmen are arrayed beneath.

Carrying the glass still to the right along the nearer edge of the dry channel, the eye noted that the shikargah, or jungle-cover, which formed the left of the Beloochee army had a high wall dividing it from the plain, and that about midway between the enemy and the British line a large gap or opening had been made in this formidable obstacle. In an instant the quick eye of the General noted this opening. It was the gate of a proposed trap. Through it the left wing of the enemy would debouch upon the rear of the British when the little army would have passed the spot to engage the centre in the Fullalee. In the angles formed by the shikargahs where they touched the Fullalee there were six guns in battery, while the entire front of the Beloochee position for a distance of some seven hundred yards had been cleared of even the stunted trees which elsewhere grew upon the plain. All these things Charles Napier took in in that short and anxious interval which preceded the final advance of his little army. It was not a sight that longer examination could make more pleasant. It was a strong and well-selected position, taken up with care and foresight, not to be turned on either flank, forcing the enemy that would attack it to show his hand at once, while it kept hidden from that assailant and safe from his shot, the main body of its defenders.

And now the British line of battle has reached to within nine hundred yards of this strong position which we have just glanced along. Let us see in what manner of military formation the English General moves his men to attack it. Line, of course; for every memory of his old soldier life held some precious moment consecrated to the glory of the red line of battle. Thirty years had rolled over him since he had seen that glorious infantry moving in all the splendour of its quiet courage to the shock of battle. Many things had changed since then, but the foot soldier was still the same. Now as in Peninsular days he came mostly from those lowly peasant homes which greed and foolish laws had not yet levelled with the ground. Now as in Peninsular days he was chiefly Irish. When Napier rode at the head of his marching column in Scinde, when he chatted as he loved to do at the halt or in the camp with the "man in the ranks," the habit of thought and mode of expression were the same as they had been in the far-off marches and bivouacs by the Tagus or the Coa. True, in this Scindian strife he had only a single regiment of that famous infantry in his army. But that single regiment was worth a host. "I have one British regiment," he had written only the previous night, "the Twenty-Second, magnificent Tipperary! I would not give your specimens for a deal just now." What manner of men these Tipperary soldiers were, Sir William Napier tells us in his Conquest of Scinde. The description is worth repeating, because the picture is rarer than it used to be. "On the left of the artillery," he writes, describing the advance to Meanee, "marched the Twenty-Second Regiment. This battalion, about four hundred in number, was composed almost entirely of Irishmen, strong of body, high-blooded, fierce, impetuous soldiers who saw nothing but victory before them, and counted not their enemies." On the left of the Twenty-Second Regiment marched four battalions of native infantry, resolute soldiers moving with the firm tread which discipline so easily assumes when it is conscious of being led by capacity and courage. In front of the line of infantry thus formed, the Scinde Horse on the left and the grenadier and light companies of the Twenty-Second Regiment were thrown forward for the double purpose of screening the movement of the main body in their rear and of drawing the fire and thereby revealing the position of the enemy in front. With this advanced line of skirmishers rides the General in blue uniform, and conspicuous from the helmeted head-dress which he wears. The soldiers are in the old red coatee with white lappels and forage caps covered with white cotton, for there was no light Karkee clothing or helmets of pith or cork in those days, and the British infantry marched under the sun of India clad almost in the military costume of an English winter.

When the skirmishers reach the large gap in the shikargah wall before mentioned, the perfect soldier nature of Napier shows itself—the instant adaptation of means to end which marks the man who has to do his thinking on horseback and amid the whistle of bullets, from the man who has to do it in an easy chair and at an office-table. The wide gap in the high wall has been recently made. It will be used to attack the right rear of our line when engaged in front at the edge of the Fullalee. He will block up this gap with the grenadiers of the Twenty-Second. He will close this gaping wound in his plan of battle with these stalwart Celts, who, he knows, will stop it with their blood. So the grenadiers are closed upon their right flank, wheeled to the right, and pushed into the opening. "He is a good man in a gap" had been a favourite saying among these soldiers when they were peasant lads at home to designate a stout-hearted comrade. They are to prove its truth now.

So, with the grenadier company standing in the gap on his right, his baggage parked in rear, with the camels tied down in a circle, heads inward, forming a rampart around it, and having an escort as strong as he could spare from his already attenuated front, Napier passes on to the assault, all the swords of his cavalry and the bayonets of his infantry just numbering eighteen hundred, while his enemy in the hollow and the woods reckons not a man less than thirty thousand chiefs and clansmen.

And now as the line of Échelon gets closer to the hollow the fire from matchlock and gun hits harder into the ranks of men moving in the old fighting formation, the red line of battle—thin, men have called it, but very thick for all that, with the memories of many triumphs. The leading line—the Twenty-Second Regiment—is only one hundred yards from the enemy. The moment had come for the skirmishers to fall back and give place to the chief combatants now so near each other. Napier puts himself in front of the Irishmen whose serried line of steel and scarlet extends two hundred yards from right to left, and then the command to charge rings out in his clear voice as three-and-thirty years earlier it sounded above the strife of Corunna. Until this moment the fire of the skirmishers has partly hidden the movement of formations behind; but when the magic word which flings the soldier on his enemy was heard, there came out of this veiling smoke a sight that no Beloochee warrior had ever seen before, for, bending with the forward surge of a mighty movement, the red wall of the Twenty-Second, fronted with steel, is coming on to the charge. It took little time to traverse the intervening space, and on the edge of the dry river-bed the two opposing forces met in battle. If to the Beloochee foeman the sight and sound of a British charge had been strange, not less terrible was the aspect of the field, as all at once it opened upon the Twenty-Second. Below them, in the huge bed of the Fullalee, a dense dark mass of warriors stood ready for the shock. With flashing swords and shields held high over turbaned heads, twenty thousand men shouting their war-cries and clashing sword and shield together seemed to wave fierce welcome to their enemies. For a moment it seems as though the vast disparity between the combatants must check the ardour of the advancing line; for a moment the red wall appears to stagger, but then the figure of the old General is seen pushing out in front of his soldiers, as with voice and gesture, and the hundred thoughts that find utterance at moments of extreme tension, he urges them to stand steady in this terrible combat. And nobly do these young soldiers—for this is their first battle—respond to the old leader's call. A hundred times the Beloochee clansmen, moving from the deep mass beneath, come surging up the incline, until from right to left the clash of scimitar and shield against bayonet and musket rings along the line, and a hundred times they reel back again, leaving the musket and the matchlock to continue the deadly strife until another mass of chosen champions again attempts the closer conflict. More than once the pressure of the foremost swordsmen and the appearance of the dense dark mass behind them cause the line of the Twenty-Second to recoil from the edge of the bank; but wherever the dinted front of fight is visible there too is quickly seen the leader, absolutely unconscious of danger, his eagle eye fixed upon the strife, his hand waving his soldiers on, his shrill clear voice ringing above shot and steel and shout of combatants—the clarion call of victory. The men behind him see in this figure of their chief something that hides from sight the whole host of Beloochee foemen. Who could go back while he is there? Who among them would not glory to die with such a leader? The youngest soldier in the ranks feels the inspiration of such magnificent courage. The bugler of the Twenty-Second, Martin Delaney, who runs at the General's stirrups, catches, without necessity of order, the thought of his chief, and three times when the line bends back before the Beloochee onslaught, the "advance" rings out unbidden from his lips.

The final advance to the edge of the Fullalee, which brought the lines to striking distance, had been made in what is called Échelon of battalions from the right. That is to say, the Twenty-Second Regiment struck the enemy first, then the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys came into impact, and so on in succession until the entire line formed one continuous front along the bank of the dry river. The advantages of this method of assault were many. First, it allowed the Twenty-Second Regiment to give a lead to the entire line, for each succeeding battalion could see with what a front and bearing these splendid soldiers carried themselves in the charge. Then, too, it enabled each particular regiment to come into close quarters with the enemy upon a more regular and imposing front than had the advancing force formed a single line necessarily crowded and undulating by the exigencies of marching in a long continuous formation, and also it made the assault upon the enemy's left flank the last to come to shock of battle; for on this left flank the village of Meanee was held in advance of the river line, and the Beloochee guns in battery there had to be silenced before his infantry could be encountered.

We have already said that our own artillery moved on the extreme right of the infantry. Early in the action they closed up to the right flank of the Twenty-Second, and coming into action on a mound which there commanded the bed of the Fullalee, the farther bank of the river, and the wooded shikargah to the right, made havoc among the Beloochee centre on one side, and, on the other, among the left wing which was destined to fall upon our rear. Stopped by the grenadier company from issuing through the large gap in the wall, and taken in flank by two of the guns behind the mound, firing case-shot through another opening in the wall made by the Madras Sappers, this left wing of the enemy suffered so severely that it was unable to make any head. Napier had told the grenadier company to defend the opening to the last man, and nobly did they answer his behest. The captain of the company, Tew, died at his post, but no enemy passed the gap that day.

Meanwhile the fight on the edge of the dry channel went on with a sameness of fierceness that makes its recital almost monotonous. In no modern battle that we read of is the actual shock of opposing forces more than a question of a few moments' duration. Here at Meanee it is a matter of hours. For upwards of three hours this red line is fighting that mass of warriors at less than a dozen yards' distance, and often during the long conflict the interval between the combatants is not half as many feet. Over and over again heroic actions are performed in that limited area between the hosts that read like a page from some dim combat of Homeric legend. The commander of the Twenty-Fifth Bombay Sepoys, Teesdale, seeing the press of foemen in front of his men to be more than his line can stand, spurs into the midst of the surging mass, and falls, hewing his enemies to the last. But his spirit seems to have quitted his body only to enter into the three hundred men who have seen him fall, and the wavering line bears up again. So, too, when the Sepoy regiment next in line has to bear the brunt of the Beloochee charge, the commanding officer, Jackson, rides forward into the advancing enemy and goes down amid a whirl of sword-blades, his last stroke crashing through a shield vainly raised to save its owner's life, and beats back the Beloochee surge. M'Murdo of the Twenty-Second, riding as staff-officer to the General, cannot resist the intoxication of such combats. Seeing a chief conspicuous alike by martial bearing and richness of apparel, he rides into the enemy's ranks and engages him in single combat. Before they can meet M'Murdo's horse is killed, but the rider is quickly on his feet, and the combat begins. Both are dexterous swordsmen, and each seems to recognise in the other a foeman worthy of his steel; but the Scottish clansman is stouter of sword than his Beloochee rival, and Jan Mahomet Khan rolls from his saddle to join the throng which momentarily grows denser on the sandy river-bed.

Once or twice the old General is himself in the press of the fight. He is practically unarmed, because his right hand had been disabled a few days earlier by a blow which he had dealt a camel-driver who was maltreating his camel, and the Scindian's head being about fifty times harder than the General's hand, a dislocated wrist was the result. So intent is he on the larger battle that the men around him are scarcely noticed, and more than once his life is saved by a soldier or an officer interposing between him and an enemy intent on slaying the old chief, who seems to him exactly what he is—the guiding spirit of this storm of war. Thus Lieutenant Marston saves his General's life in front of the Twenty-Fifth Sepoys by springing between a Beloochee soldier and Napier's charger at the moment the enemy is about to strike. The blow cuts deep into the brass scales on Marston's shoulder, and the Beloochee goes down between the sword of the officer and the bayonet of a private who has run in to the melÉe. Again he gets entangled in the press in front, and is in close peril when a sergeant of the Twenty-Second saves him; and as the old man emerges unscathed from the surf of shield and sword, the whole Twenty-Second line shouts his name and greets him with a wild Irish cheer of rapture ringing high above the clash of battle. It is at this time that the drummer Delaney, who keeps everywhere on foot beside his General, performs the most conspicuous act of valour done during the day. In the midst of the melÉe he sees a mounted chief leading on his men. Delaney seizes a musket and bayonet, rushes upon the horseman, and Meer Wullee Mahomet Khan goes down in full sight of both armies, while the victor returns with the rich sword and shield of the Beloochee leader.

There are no revolvers yet, no breechloading arms, nothing but the sword for the officer and the flint musket and bayonet for the men; and fighting means something more than shoving cartridges in at one end of a tube and blowing them out at the other, twenty to the minute, by the simple action of pulling a finger. "At Meanee," says M'Murdo, "the muskets of the men often ceased to go off, from the pans becoming clogged with powder, and then you would see soldiers, taking advantage of a momentary lull in the onslaught, wiping out the priming pans with a piece of rag, or fixing a new flint in the hammer." Sometimes these manifold inducements to old "brown Bess" to continue work have to be suspended in order to receive on levelled bayonets a wild Beloochee rush, and then frequently could be seen the spectacle of men impaled upon the steel, still hacking down the enemy they had been able to reach only in death.

This desperate battle has continued for three hours, when for the first time the Beloochees show symptoms of defeat. The moment has in fact come which in every fight marks the turn of the tide of conflict, and quick as thought Napier seizes its arrival. His staff officers fly to the left carrying orders to the Scinde Horse and the Bengal Cavalry to penetrate at all hazards through the right of the enemy's line, and fall upon his rear. The orders are well obeyed, and soon the red turbans of Jacob's Horse and the Bengal Cavalry are seen streaming through the Fullalee, and, mounting the opposite slope where the Beloochee camp is pitched, they capture guns, camp, standards, and all the varied insignia of Eastern war. The battle of Meanee is won. Then, beginning with the Twenty-Second, there went up a great cheer of victory. How those Tipperary throats poured forth their triumph, as bounding forward, the men so long assailed became assailants, and driving down the now slippery incline they bore back in quickening movement the wavering mass of swordsmen! Perhaps there was something in that Irish cheer that told the old General there was the note of love as well as of pride in the ring. Why not? Had he not always stood up for them and for their land? Had not their detractors ever been his enemies? Had not he dammed back the tide of his own success in life by championing their unfashionable cause? Soldiers catch quickly thoughts and facts that come to other men through study and reflection. They were proud of him, they loved him, and for more than half a century their valour and their misfortunes had touched the springs of admiration and sorrow in his heart. How he valued these cheers on the field of Meanee his journal of the following day tells. "The Twenty-Second gave me three cheers after the fight, and one during it," he writes. "Her Majesty has no honour to give that can equal that." What a leader! What soldiers!