The Burma Wars: 1824-1886 (Conflicts of Empire) Read online

  The deviousness of British policy was presumably deliberate, not accidental. By permitting hostile acts to be launched from their territory and at the same time taking a high-handed view of Burmese retaliation they were moving towards a situation in which war could easily come about.

  Lord Minto, Governor-General, was in fact already thinking of war. On 4 March 1812 he wrote to the East India Company’s Court of Directors in London that they had tolerated Burmese insolence and arrogance long enough and that the Court of Ava should be taught by war the greatness of British power. But the time was not ripe and the British Government opposed it. The Burmese next tried to solve the dispute by sending a mission to Calcutta to seek Chin Payan’s extradition to Burma, but the British summarily refused and the mission went home empty-handed. The rebel Chin Payan now thought he saw the drift of British intentions. Trying to bring matters to a head, he proposed that they should support him in occupying Arakan, when he would be their vassal there; otherwise, he declared, he would be their enemy. But he did not live to implement his threat.

  He invaded Arakan again in 1814 and this time the Burmese defeated him thoroughly. Deserted by his troops he fled into the mountains, where he died soon after. His end did not solve the problem, for the British were either unable or unwilling to stop Arakanese refugees using their territory as a base for raids into Burma and it remained a likely cause of war.

  So long had the issue gone on that King Bodawpaya seemingly grew desperate and began to threaten the British. In May 1817 he ordered the Rajah of Arakan to send his son with a letter demanding the surrender of the rebel tribesmen, called Mughs, to the British authorities at Chittagong. ‘The Mughs from your territory have injured and despoiled my country and have returned and received protection in your territory,’ the letter accused:

  The King of Ava has ordered me, in His Majesty’s name, to demand these Mughs. I therefore send my son Mung-pyng-ge-keo-dong-akhoon to you… The friendship which subsists between the King and the British Government is like gold and silver. It is like the affection of relations to each other… It is not proper to be at enmity, but the English Government does not try to preserve friendship. You seek for a state of affairs like fire and gunpowder.

  The Mughs of Arakan are the slaves of the King of Ava. The English Government has assisted the Mughs of our four provinces and given them residence. There will be a quarrel between us and you like fire… If this time you do not restore them according to my demand, and make no delays in doing so, the friendship subsisting between us will be broken… Therefore I write to you to restore the Mughs then our friendship will continue. Understand this.[9]

  The British were hardly pleased by this ultimatum. In a letter to the Viceroy of Pegu, the Governor-General — now Lord Hastings — blandly replied that the British Government ‘cannot without a violation of the principles of justice, on which it invariably acts, deliver up a body of people who have sought its protection, some of whom have resided in its territory for 30 years.’ The letter added that His Majesty could rely on the continued vigilance of British officers to prevent these disturbances to the tranquillity of his frontiers. After so much harassment it was scant comfort for King Bodawpaya.

  He decided to march, but first had another threatening letter sent to the Governor-General by the Burmese Rajah of Ramree, composed especially, it would seem, to impress the British with the monarch’s power. It is worth quoting at length as an example of Burmese psychological warfare at the time:

  I, Nameo Sura, Rajah of Ramree, placing my head under the royal feet, resembling the golden lily, and bowing to the commands of the most illustrious governor of the universe, King of great and exalted virtue, lord of white elephants, strict observer of divine laws, who fulfills the ten precepts and performs the good works commanded by former virtuous kings, who assists and protects all living beings, whether near or remote and possesses miraculous and invincible arms, etc., address and inform the Governor-General of Bengal that our mighty monarch is distinguished throughout the vast world by his unexampled piety and justice…

  The letter asserted that Chittagong, Moorshedabad, Ramu and Dacca did not belong to the English, but being originally subject to the Government of Arakan ‘now belonged to our sovereign’. The Governor-General of the English Company should ‘surrender these dominions and pay the taxes realised from them to our Government.

  ‘If this is refused… generals with powerful forces will be dispatched both by land and sea, and I shall myself come for the purpose of storming, capturing and destroying the whole of the English possessions, which I shall afterwards offer to my government. But I send this letter in the first place to make the demand on the Governor-General.’[10]

  It was an outright threat of invasion. Lord Hastings answered that if he could suppose that the letter had been dictated by the King of Ava ‘the British Government would be justified in considering war already declared, and in consequence, destroying the trade of His Majesty’s empire.’[11]

  For a short time the march to war was interrupted by King Bodawpaya’s death, early in 1819. His grandson, Bagyidaw, without opposition seized the palace and thus was duly acknowledged as his successor. Said to be no less arrogant and capricious than Bodawpaya, but much less able, he was dominated by his second wife, a lady whose power, since she was by no means beautiful, was ascribed to witchcraft. Ambitious she certainly was, however, and she encouraged the new King Bagyidaw to follow his grandfather’s policy of challenging the British.

  Bagyidaw’s first move was to the north. The rajah of the small independent state of Manipur, separated from India only by the even smaller state of Cachar, failed to arrive to pay homage after Bagyidaw’s accession to the throne. Urged on by his queen, Bagyidaw determined to depose him and add the state to his own dominions. He sent Maha Bandula at the end of the rainy season with an army that made short work of the Manipur rajah’s forces and occupied the country.

  Now the Burmese were well placed to attack India through the river plains of Cachar. But the British forestalled them, promptly marched troops in to Cachar and ‘took the state under their protection’.

  Bagyidaw in turn sent the victorious Bundula into the border state of Assam where he now defeated the Assamese rajah. Assam, whose forces the British had armed, was also declared a Burmese province. It was something of a reversal for the British.

  Encouraged by these successes, the Burmese next attacked the island of Shapuri, at the mouth of the Naaf river, the boundary between Chittagong and Arakan, acknowledged as British territory through long occupation. Having killed a number of the guard on the island and hoisted their flag the Burmese withdrew.

  In reply to the British protest, the Rajah of Arakan replied rudely on behalf of the king: ‘If you want tranquillity be quiet, but if you rebuild a stockade on Shein-ma-bu [Shapuri] I will cause to be taken by force of arms the cities of Dacca and Moorshedabad, which originally belonged to the Arakan rajah…’

  The British responded to these threats of invasion by moving troop reinforcements to danger spots on the eastern frontier; at the same time they proposed negotiations to clarify the Chittagong-Arakanese frontier. A peaceful solution in their favour still seemed possible to them.

  Then in January 1824, the Burmese took the last step towards war. The Burmese commander in Manipur had been warned not to occupy the key state of Cachar, which had a common frontier with the British-Indian province of Dacca. But nevertheless two Burmese columns entered Cachar and defeated the British-Indian forces who opposed them. Having tested the enemy’s strength they then withdrew into Manipur.

  The British were faced now with a hostile enemy on all points of the eastern frontier. It was a dangerous situation. In India itself, however, they were now secure. Lord Hastings had destroyed the challenge of the Marathas and they had nothing now to fear from the French, for Napoleon was defeated. They were thus free to make their eastern frontier secure by overcoming the Burmese. And they were now ready.

  No
less confident in their military prowess were the Burmese; for though they had only the smallest idea of British military skill at its best their recent victorious skirmishes with the small forces of British-Indian troops had confirmed their opinions of their own powers. And had they not three times defeated the powerful Chinese armies which less than fifty years ago had invaded them?

  King Bagyidaw therefore decided that the white strangers called British must be crushed, their possessions in Bengal seized. And during the assembly of ministers and generals in the Hall of Audience in January 1824, Maha Bandula was given his orders to attack.

  Everyone at the Court of Ava, the British learned in due course, was confident that Calcutta would soon be taken. But Bagyidaw had made a tragic mistake. He was about to expose his kingdom, held together by the fragile ties of myth and legend, to the destructive force of western materialism; and from this contagion there could be no retreat.

  2: KINGS OF THE GOLDEN PALACE

  Lord Amherst, the Governor-General who had succeeded the brilliant Lord Hastings, declared war on Burma on 5 March 1824. In a proclamation that was also a justification of this move, he asserted that the causes of war between the two countries were the Burmese acts of encroachment and aggression committed on the south-east frontier, the attack on the island of Shapuri and the invasion of Cachar. He added with typical Victorian self-righteousness that the Government had ‘considered it its duty to make large allowances for the peculiar circumstances and character of the Burmese Government and people. The consciousness of the power to repel and punish aggression has strengthened the motives of forebearance.’

  Haughty, but restrained came the reply of the Burmese Viceroy of Pegu, on the king’s behalf. Their officers on the frontiers had full power to act, he announced ominously, and until all was settled ‘communications need not be made to the golden feet’.

  Having declared war the British had now to think about their plan of campaign in this unknown tropical country. General Sir Edward Paget, the Commander-in-Chief in India, who some fourteen years earlier had distinguished himself in the Peninsula campaign both with Moore and with Wellington, now showed little enthusiasm at all for the enterprise. His was the voice of reason and of military good sense. He believed that if the eastern frontier was put ‘in even a tolerable state of defence’ the Burmese would make no very serious attempt to pass it.

  But, he declared, if he was mistaken and the Burmese armies actually invaded, he was ‘inclined to hope that our military operations on the eastern frontier will be confined to their expulsion from our territories and to the re-establishment of those states along the line of our frontier which have been over-run and conquered by the Burmese.’ Any military campaign against the kingdom of Ava he deprecated. ‘Instead of armies, fortresses and cities, I am led to believe that we shall find nothing but jungle, pestilence and famine,’ he wrote, with remarkable foresight.

  Sir Edward had learned that the Burmese climate and terrain alone were foes enough for an invading army. In the hot season, February to May, the troops, clad in their stifling red serge jackets, would broil in temperatures reaching 105 degrees Fahrenheit. For another four months, in the rainy season, June to mid-October, as the monsoon’s deluge crashed down like a waterfall and turned nearly the whole country into a string of steaming lakes, they would be immobilised, a prey to sickness and disease. Only for the three months of the cool season, November to the end of January, would they be able to campaign effectively.

  The terrain would be no less hostile. A range of mountains, the Arakan Yomas, ran the length of the country from north to south, while the Lushai Hills, rugged jungle regions ranging up to 12,000 feet, extended east to west south of Manipur and Cachar. Great rivers, the Irrawaddy, Sittang, Chindwin and Salween, plunged through the deep green valleys which divided the mountains, forests and jungles. Altogether, for an army with its miles of supply wagons, its lumbering artillery and its thousands of marching men the tropical climate and rugged terrain combined were daunting, even for the redcoats, with their array of Indian victories.

  General Paget also knew that in these conditions the Burmese army, though not so well armed as the British, could be a dangerous foe. It is worth inspecting it in some detail. The regular army, mainly the palace guard, consisted only of about 3,000 men, but along the river banks in the villages of flimsy houses built on stilts and surrounded by vivid green paddy fields lived the peasantry whom the king conscripted in time of war. From the golden palace a mandate issued to the viceroys of the provinces ordered that a precise number of men should present themselves on a given day at a certain rendezvous. Colonel Symes called them a nation of soldiers, ‘every man in the kingdom being liable to be called on for military service…’

  Conscripts were supplied with one of the ancient muskets upon which the Burmese army depended, with ten rounds of ammunition and gunpowder, or a sword, spear and entrenching tool and a daily allowance of rice, which they supplemented with fruit and herbs from the land. Sometimes their uniforms consisted of black quilted cotton campaigning jackets and a patch of red cloth which they wore on their heads; sometimes they were practically naked; nor were they entitled to pay, the king regarding them as his slaves, living to carry out his wishes.

  Attack rather than defence being preferred, a Burmese army of 10,000 or 20,000 approached as near as safety permitted to a hostile force. Then, while the musket-men gave covering fire, the spearmen, working always in pairs, dug a series of foxholes more or less in line like an entrenchment, according to the tactical plan.

  Two men occupied each hole, shaped to protect them against both the enemy’s fire and bad weather. It held a bed of leaves or brushwood, so that one man could rest while the other kept watch. A Burmese army of several thousand could thus approach an enemy and go underground within an hour. Thereafter in the dark the spearmen would dig another series of foxholes nearer the enemy positions, which before daybreak the entire army would occupy. In this way they would gradually creep up to a strong enemy until they were near enough to overwhelm him by sheer numbers in a fierce attack.

  But while their digging-in was comparable with First World War tactics and to some extent those of the Americans in Vietnam, the general tactics of the Burmese resembled those of medieval European armies. These were divided into missile fighters using bows and arrows, and shock troops equipped with sword, spear or pike. The Burmese musket-men — the missile fighters — picked off the enemy as they could, from a relative distance, until the shock troops were near enough to attack with sword and spear. During close fighting this division was not always maintained since the musket-men, whose weapons were equipped with bayonets, also fulfilled the role of shock troops.

  In defence, the Burmese relied upon a system of stockading, which though elaborate, could be surmounted, as the British, pondering their best method of fighting the war early in 1824, were to find out. Constructed from beams of solid teak up to seventeen feet long, or of bamboo for more quickly erected stockades, they were fronted by ditches about eight feet deep and fifteen feet wide planted with sharpened bamboo stakes. In some stockades a high wooden fence fronted the ditch, then perhaps another space sown with stakes. Loopholes pierced the stockade itself and behind them came platforms for light guns and sharpshooters.

  In the great trees which covered the terrain over which they were accustomed to fight, Burmese generals built observation posts and artillery platforms, the small artillery piece often found in Asiatic armies called a jingal being most often used, a weapon easily manoeuvreable by two men, firing a ball weighing half to three-quarters of a pound. Elephants carried the Burmese heavy artillery, and generals with their aides and baggage. There was also a small force of cavalry, about a thousand, part of the king’s guard. Armed with an eight-foot spear, the cavalrymen rode with short stirrups and loose rein on high hard saddles with gilded or painted circular leather flaps hanging down on the horse’s flanks.

  Apart from these apparently formidable land for
ces which the British would have to face, the Burmese king possessed a force of war-boats manned by marines, which Symes, who had not been idle during his stay, described as ‘the most respectable part of the Burmese military force’. They might possibly challenge a British maritime invasion. The largest of them were eighty to a hundred feet long and about eight feet wide, manned by fifty to sixty oarsmen whose swords and lances lay beside them ready for action, and another thirty soldiers armed with firelocks. A six, nine or twelve-pounder gun was mounted on the vessel’s bows.

  Their attack [noted Symes] is extremely impetuous. They advance with great rapidity and sing a war song… They generally try to grapple and when this is effected the action becomes very severe, as these people are endowed with great courage, strength and activity… The vessels being low in the water, their greatest danger is of being run down by a larger boat striking on their broadside…

  The rowers are also practised to row backwards and impel the vessel with the stern foremost. This is the mode of retreat, by means of which the artillery still bears on their opponent. The largest of the war-boats do not draw more than three feet of water… Their sides are either gilt down to the water’s edge or plain, according to the rank of the person in command. Gilded boats are only permitted to princes of the blood or to persons holding the highest stations, such as maywoon (viceroy) of a province, and a minister of state.

  Some 500 war-boats, made from a solid trunk of teak, were ready at short notice, every town or village near the rivers supplying an agreed number of men and boats.

  Discipline in these Burmese armies was sternly enforced. Veneration of the king played some part in it, but fear of punishment by death for himself, his wife, children and parents if he deserted or was guilty of cowardice in face of the enemy urged the luckless conscript to do or die. Wrote Father San Germano, an Italian priest who lived in Burma for fifty years: