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I was with my regiment in all Wellesley's brilliant campaigns; then taking dawk, I travelled across the country north-eastward, and had the honor of fighting by the side of Lord Lake at Laswaree, Deeg, Furruckabad, Futtyghur, and Bhurtpore: but I will not boast of my actions the military man knows them, MY SOVEREIGN appreciates them.
He knows, in the battles of Assaye and Poona, how Scindia was utterly routed; and how, at Laswaree and Delhi, the Mahrattas were scattered; and I do not think that he will venture upon giving battle. But if he does, I have no fear, whatever, of the result. It was more than his whole army could do to break up Monson's force, although composed entirely of native infantry, until it was near Agra.
But who gained the battle? Lord Lake is called Viscount Lake of Delhi and Laswaree, while Major Gaha nonsense, never mind HIM, never mind the charge he executed when, sabre in hand, he leaped the six-foot wall in the mouth of the roaring cannon, over the heads of the gleaming pikes; when, with one hand seizing the sacred peishcush, or fish which was the banner always borne before Scindiah, he, with his good sword, cut off the trunk of the famous white elephant, which, shrieking with agony, plunged madly into the Mahratta ranks, followed by his giant brethren, tossing, like chaff before the wind, the affrighted kitmatgars.
They did so, trusting to the strength of the rocky ridge on which they were posted; but that advantage, great as it was, by no means rendered them a match in close fight for the weighty arms and the determined resolution of the Europeans, any more than the discharges of their powerful batteries availed the Mahrattas in the latter part of the battles of Assaye and Laswaree, or, more recently, the Sikhs in the desperate conflict at Ferozepore in the Punjaub.
"There are very few men, I presume, who have not heard of Holkar's sudden and gallant incursion into the Dooab, in the year 1804, when we thought that the victory of Laswaree and the brilliant success at Deeg had completely finished him.
He accompanied me from Calcutta to Nagpore, when I went on a mission to the rajah, whom it was desirable to keep neutral until the war in Mysore was brought to an end. He was at Assaye, and journeyed in disguise across the country with me, to carry the news of that victory to General Lake. He took part with me in the cavalry charge at Laswaree, and in the retreat of Colonel Monson's column."
The description of the manner in which the Crusading warriors were here drawn into a pursuit of, and then enveloped by the Asiatic light horse, is precisely the same as that in which the legions of Crassus were destroyed; and might pass for a narrative of the way in which Napoleon's European cavalry were cut to pieces by the Arab horse at the combat at Salahout, near the Red Sea; or Lord Lake's horse worsted in the first part of the battle of Laswaree in India, before the infantry came up, and, by storming the batteries, restored the combat.
"Well, I shall not describe Delhi, which is doubtless well known to the reader; nor the siege of Agra, to which place we went from Delhi; nor the terrible day at Laswaree, which went nigh to finish the war. Suffice it to say that we were victorious, and that I was wounded; as I have invariably been in the two hundred and four occasions when I have found myself in action.
"There are very few men, I presume, who have not heard of Holkar's sudden and gallant incursion into the Dooab, in the year 1804, when we thought that the victory of Laswaree and the brilliant success at Deeg had completely finished him.
The victory of Laswaree cost the British eight hundred and twenty-four men, killed and wounded; but it completed the overthrow of the whole of the regiments trained by Perron and de Boigne, and laid the tract of country watered by the Jumna under the power of the British.
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