Eight Hundred Loads

by Arthur Wellesley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I was twenty-two years old in the summer of 1803, a lieutenant of the Madras establishment lent to the grain department, and I had never in my life been responsible for anything that could die.

That is not quite true. I had been responsible for a horse, and the horse had died, but it died of a colic at Seringapatam that nobody could have prevented, and nobody blamed me for it. In June of 1803 I was given eight hundred loads of rice and the bullocks that had carried them, and the bullocks were dying, and everybody blamed everybody.

The army lay in the Deccan that month, waiting on the negotiations with Scindia, and it was not an army that could fight. It was an army that could hardly stand still. The rains were late and thin. The country had been eaten by the Marathas the year before and burned by the famine the year before that, and from the camp to the horizon there was nothing green that a bullock could get its teeth into. The General had written to Colonel Close at Poona that he could not stay where he was for want of forage and could not move for want of cattle strong enough to carry. We all knew it, because the General's opinions went round the camp faster than his orders. On the ninth of June he moved a few miles, to find grass that turned out not to be there, and he left eight hundred loads of grain on the ground behind him.

I was left with them.

I had a havildar's party of sepoys from the 1st of the 8th, a sergeant of the 74th called Hosking who had been lent to me because he could count, and a writer from the contractor's office, a Brahmin named Narayan Rao, who kept the books of the grain and did not care to sleep on the ground. I had the eight hundred loads in sacks, stacked in four ranges under tarpaulins that did not quite cover them. I had something over three hundred bullocks still alive, standing among the stacks with their heads down. And I had an order in the General's hand, which I still have, and which said that the grain was to be brought on to the army the moment cattle could be found to carry it, and that I was to report every day what I had done towards finding them.

The first day I counted the bullocks. That was Hosking's idea. He said a man should always begin by knowing what he has.

We had three hundred and eleven. By the evening we had three hundred and six. They did not die in any way that was dramatic. A bullock would stop chewing and lie down, and in the morning it would be dead, and the kites would already be on the stacks beside it. Hosking had the carcasses dragged off and the hides taken, because hides were worth something, and Narayan Rao entered each hide in his book at a price I thought too low and did not argue with.

I wrote my first report that night by a lamp that had a moth in it. I said that I had three hundred and six bullocks, that none of them could carry a full load, and that I had no grass. I did not say what I proposed to do, because I proposed nothing. The General's answer came back the next afternoon by a hircarrah. It was four lines. The first line said that he had my report. The second said that he did not require to be told what I had not got. The third said that the brinjarries of Ramji Naik's tanda had engaged in the spring to carry for the army and had not come in, and that they were believed to be lying somewhere to the north-east, about the Seena. The fourth said that I was to find them.

I asked Narayan Rao what he knew about Ramji Naik. He said that Ramji Naik was a thief, as all brinjarries were thieves, and that he had been paid in advance at Hurryhur in the spring and had not delivered. I asked him how much the naik had been paid. Narayan Rao said that he would have to look. He looked for the whole of the evening and part of the next morning, and when he had finished looking he told me that the advance had been fourteen hundred rupees, and that it had been paid not by the department but by the contractor, whose servant he was. The contractor had sold the army the rice and had engaged the brinjarries to carry it. I did not then understand why that mattered. I understood it later.

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I went to find Ramji Naik on the twelfth of June, with Hosking, four sepoys and a guide from the nearest village. The guide was a cultivator who had lost his crop and his bullocks to the Marathas, and he would have guided us to the moon for the rupee I gave him. We rode north-east for most of a day through country I can still see if I shut my eyes. It was black earth cracked into plates, and every plate had curled up at the edges like a biscuit. There were villages with nobody in them. There were wells with ropes and no buckets, and wells with buckets and no water. Once we passed a field of jowari stalks that had been grazed down to the ground by something, and the guide pointed at it and said a word I did not know. Hosking said it meant brinjarries. They had been through.

We came on the tanda late in the afternoon, and we smelled it before we saw it. The smell was dung and smoke and cattle, and under it something sweetish that I did not then recognise. It lay along a dry nullah with a line of babul trees, and when we came over the rise I saw more cattle than I had seen in my life. I could not count them. I tried, and gave up at about two thousand. They were spread along the nullah and up the far side, and boys were moving among them with sticks. The women were at the fires. They wore red, with little mirrors sewn into it, and the mirrors caught the sun as they moved so that the whole camp seemed to wink at us. Nobody ran away and nobody came out to meet us. A dog barked, and then several more.

Hosking said quietly that if those cattle were in our lines we could carry the eight hundred loads to Poona and back.

The cattle were not in good order. I could see that from the rise. They were thin, with their hips standing up under the hide like tent-poles. As we rode down I saw that there were dead ones along the nullah too, more than we had at the stacks, and that the sweet smell was theirs.

Ramji Naik received us under a babul tree, on a cotton carpet that had been laid out by the time we got there. He was a man of perhaps fifty, not tall, with a grey beard and a turban of a colour I should call rust. He had a stick across his knees, the same kind of stick the boys carried among the cattle, and he did not get up. Beside him sat a younger man who I afterwards learned was his son, Khema. The son did most of the talking at first, in a Hindustani worse than mine. The father spoke only to him, in their own language, which I did not have a word of.

I said that I came from the General. I said that the tanda had engaged to carry for the army, that it had been paid an advance, and that the army needed it now.

The son said that the tanda knew it had been paid. It had been paid six hundred rupees.

I said fourteen hundred.

The son spoke to the father, and the father laughed. It was not an unpleasant laugh. It was the laugh of a man who has been told the price of a thing he has already bought.

The son said that the naik had put his mark on a paper at Hurryhur for fourteen hundred rupees, that six hundred rupees had been counted into his hand, and that the gomastah who counted it had said that the rest would be paid on delivery, less the charges. I asked what charges. The son did not know. Neither, I think, did the gomastah. The father said something, and the son said that the naik would like to know whether the General also paid his soldiers fourteen hundred and gave them six.

I did not answer that. I said that whatever had been paid, the tanda was under engagement and had not come in.

The son said that the tanda had come. It had come in May to the place it had been told to come to, and it had waited eleven days, and nobody had met it. There had been no grain to carry, because the contractor's rice was not there. There was no grass and no water. Then a man had come from Scindia's camp, from one of Scindia's sirdars. He had offered to buy all the cattle at a price, and the grain on them at another price. The naik had sent him away. Then the tanda had come north to the Seena, where the naik knew of grass that the army did not know of, and the grass had not been there either. The naik had lost three hundred head since Hurryhur. He would lose more.

The father spoke for the first time at length. The son translated it in pieces. It came to this. The naik did not care who won the war. He had carried for Tipu, and for the Nizam, and for the Company at Seringapatam, and for anybody who paid. He was not a soldier and he did not want to be one. No army in India had ever plundered a tanda that was carrying for it, or for anybody else, because every army knew that next year it would need the tanda again. That was the custom, and he kept it. He would carry for the General. He would carry for Scindia if Scindia paid. What he would not do was walk his cattle a hundred miles to the General's camp in a drought, to be told on arrival that the rest of his money was swallowed by charges, and to watch his bullocks die among the General's on the General's bare ground. A dead bullock did not carry for anybody.

I asked him what he wanted.

He said he wanted the eight hundred rupees.

Then he said something else, and the son hesitated, and the father said it again, more sharply. The son said that the naik wanted it in his hand, here, and not on a paper.

I had about forty rupees on me. I said so.

The father nodded as though that were the answer he had expected. He said that the gentleman should go back and tell the General what he had seen, and that he hoped the General was a man who could count.

We were given milk and a place to sleep, and in the morning Khema rode with us as far as the rise. He did not say anything all the way. At the top he pulled up, pointed with his stick at the grazed ground behind us and the long thin smoke of the camp, and said in Hindustani that the gentleman should notice there was no grass here either. Then he turned his horse and went down.

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I have since read many accounts of how an army in India was supplied. The best of them are written by men who were never in the grain department. None of them describes what it was to sit on a heap of rice sacks, with a pen, at twenty-two, knowing that your General already thought the brinjarries were cheats and that you were about to write and tell him the cheat was in his own camp.

I did not write that. I was not such a fool.

I sat down with Narayan Rao and the contractor's books, and I made him show me every entry concerning the tanda of Ramji Naik, from Hurryhur to the day the army had left the eight hundred loads. It took two days. Narayan Rao was not obstructive. He was very slow, and every question I asked him had to be put three times before he understood it. On the evening of the second day, when Hosking was standing behind him and I had stopped being polite, he understood all of them at once.

The paper at Hurryhur said fourteen hundred. The contractor's ledger said fourteen hundred paid. The gomastah's own daybook, which Narayan Rao had not meant to bring and had brought because it was in the same bundle, said six hundred paid and eight hundred retained against charges. The charges were not entered anywhere. The eight hundred had been drawn from the Company's treasure as an advance to brinjarries, on the contractor's certificate that it had been paid. Somewhere between Hurryhur and the Deccan it had stopped being anybody's money in particular.

I asked Narayan Rao whether this was usual. He said, with a kind of tired dignity that I have never forgotten, that it was not usual for an officer to look.

That night I wrote to the General. I have the copy still. I took the whole of the night over it, and most of it I struck out. What I sent was this. I said that I had found the tanda of Ramji Naik on the Seena, with about two thousand head of cattle in better condition than ours, which was not saying much. I said that the naik acknowledged his engagement and said he had come to the rendezvous in May, waited eleven days, and found no grain to carry. I said that he had been paid six hundred rupees and not fourteen hundred, and I set down the three entries side by side, the paper, the ledger and the daybook, with the dates. I said that the naik had been offered a price for his cattle and grain by an agent of Scindia's and had refused it. I said that he would carry for the army on payment, in his own hand, of the eight hundred rupees outstanding. I said that I believed him, and that I did not know whether I ought to.

I did not say anything about grass, because I had no grass to report. I had thought of putting in Khema's remark at the rise. I left it out, because I could not tell whether it was a threat or a joke, and the General did not like being told things that might be either.

I sent it by the hircarrah before dawn. That day four more of our bullocks died.

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The answer came on the second day after. It was longer than four lines.

The General said that he had my letter. He said that he had sent for the contractor's principal agent and would deal with him. He did not say how, and I did not hear for some weeks. When I did hear, it was that the eight hundred rupees had been stopped from the contractor's next payment, along with a good deal more that had turned up once someone began to look. He said that he had observed before that the brinjarries' tricks were very great. He did not withdraw the remark. He added that he now had reason to think theirs were not the only tricks in the camp, and that he did not propose to be cheated by anybody, in either direction.

Then he gave his orders, in the order in which he always gave them, which was the order in which things had to happen.

A treasure party would reach me on the sixteenth with eight hundred rupees in silver, under a subadar's guard. I was to take it to Ramji Naik myself, count it into his hand myself in front of his people, and take his mark on a receipt written in Hindustani and in English, of which he was to keep one copy. I was not to promise him anything further. I was to tell him that the General would pay at the agreed rate for every load delivered into camp. Payment would be made on delivery, at the tent of the officer of the grain department, in the presence of the naik or his son. It would be made by that officer and by no contractor's servant.

Then came the part I had not thought of. The naik was to be asked where he believed grass was to be had between the Seena and the army, and in what quantity. His opinion was to be reported to the General in his own words, so far as I could take them down. The General would decide the line of the army's next march partly upon it.

Last, the General said that I should take care of the silver. Eight hundred rupees, he said, was a sum for which men in that country had been murdered on a road, and he did not wish to lose either it or me, in that order.

Hosking read the letter over my shoulder. He said it was a good letter. I asked him what he meant. He said it was a good letter because it told you what to do on the sixteenth, and on the seventeenth, and on the eighteenth, and did not tell you how anybody felt about anything.

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The silver came on the sixteenth, in two iron-bound boxes on a camel, with a subadar and twelve sepoys who looked at our stacks and our dying bullocks as though they had been sent to guard a burial. We set off for the Seena that afternoon and were at the nullah on the seventeenth, a little after noon.

The tanda had moved two miles up the nullah since I had been there. The dead cattle had been left where they were, and the kites had them. The carpet was spread under a different tree. Ramji Naik was sitting on it, with his stick across his knees and Khema beside him, as though he had not stirred since the twelfth.

I had the boxes brought and opened in front of him. Then I did what the General had ordered, which was also, I think, the only thing that would have served. I counted it. I counted it aloud, in Hindustani, in piles of ten. Khema counted with me, also aloud, in their own language, and every so often one of us lost count and we went back. It took a long time. A crowd collected while we were at it. There were women in their red and mirrors, with their arms ringed to the elbow in bone and brass, and old men, and the boys who herded the cattle, and the subadar's sepoys, and Hosking. Nobody spoke except the two of us counting. When we reached eight hundred the naik leaned forward and put his hand flat on the last pile, as a man puts his hand on a horse, and left it there a moment.

Then he made his mark on both receipts. He did it with care, a sign I took at first for a letter and afterwards learned was a brand they put on cattle. He gave one copy to Khema, who folded it into his turban.

I told him the rest. Payment on delivery, at the agreed rate, into the hand of the naik or his son, at the tent of the officer of the grain department, by that officer and no other. He listened, and asked who the officer of the grain department would be. I said that I supposed it would be me. He looked at me for some time and said something to Khema, who did not translate it. Afterwards, when we knew each other better, Khema told me it had been: then he had better not die.

Then I asked him where the grass was.

He laughed at that, the same laugh as before. He had expected the question five days earlier, and I had not asked it.

What he told me took most of the afternoon, and I wrote it down as nearly as I could. I have it in front of me now, in a hand I hardly recognise. He said there was no grass in the country the army was in and there would be none until the rains came properly, and the rains would come properly late this year, perhaps not until July. He said there was grass along the Godavery, to the north, on the low ground by the river where the water stood longest. He said that the Marathas knew it too and would graze it first if they were let. He said that a tanda of his size could live on it for a month, and an army with its followers for perhaps half that, and that both together could not live on it at all. He said that the army should not try to graze its own cattle and the tanda's in one place. The army should go to the grass, and the tanda should carry between the grass and the grain, and should not be kept standing in the army's lines, eating what the army's cattle needed. He said that a bullock that stood still in a drought was a dead bullock. A bullock that walked might be a dead bullock too, but it might first be somewhere useful.

I asked how he knew about the grass on the Godavery.

He said his grandfather had carried for the Nizam's armies over that ground, and his father after him, and he after his father. In forty years he had walked every road between the Kistna and the Taptee with cattle. It was not a matter of knowing. It was what he did instead of reading.

I put all of this into my report, in his words so far as I had them. I have never known what weight the General gave it. I know that the army went north. I know that before the end of the summer the General was buying bullocks of his own in the country and using the Bombay arrangements for managing them, which were better than ours, and depending less on the brinjarries than he had. I know that in August he took Ahmednuggur and crossed the Godavery, and that in September he fought at Assaye, of which so much has been written that I need write nothing. I know that for the rest of his life he said all he knew of war he had learned in India, and that by this he meant bullocks as much as battles. I do not claim that he learned any of it from me, or from Ramji Naik. I claim that we were part of the arithmetic.

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The tanda came in to the stacks on the twentieth of June.

I heard it before I saw it, before dawn. There was a noise of bells, which the lead bullocks wore, and of whistling and calling, low and continuous, and under the bells a sound like a river, which was hooves on dry ground. Hosking came out of his tent in his shirt and stood beside me. The sepoys stood up from their fires. Narayan Rao came out with his book.

They came out of the grey in a column that took the better part of an hour to pass any given point. The lead bullocks had painted horns and cloths with mirrors on their backs. The women walked beside them with sticks, and the boys ran up and down the column. Ramji Naik came on a pony near the head, with Khema on foot beside him, and they did not hurry. When they came to the stacks the column broke up without any order that I could hear given. Each family went to a range of sacks, and they began loading.

I had not seen brinjarries load before. Two men lifted the sack, a woman slipped the pack-saddle under it, and the cords were across and knotted before I could see how. Each load was two sacks, slung one on either side. Narayan Rao stood at the end of the first range with his book, entering each load as it went past, and Khema stood beside him with a notched stick, cutting a notch for every load. Whenever the two of them differed, which was often in the first hour and seldom after it, they stopped the whole range until they agreed.

By noon they had taken up four hundred and twelve loads. By evening the stacks were down to a scatter of torn sacks and the tarpaulins. Hosking walked along the empty ground with his hands behind his back, kicking spilled rice into little heaps. He was not a man who could bear to see anything wasted.

Our own bullocks, the two hundred and some that were left, went with the tanda unloaded. Ramji Naik had looked them over and said that loaded they would die in two marches, and that unloaded they might live to the river. Some of them did.

We marched the next morning. I rode at the tail, with the treasure party and its empty boxes, and the subadar, and the dust of a mile and a half of cattle in front of us. Somewhere around the middle of the day Khema dropped back along the column and rode beside me for a while without speaking, and then he held out his notched stick.

I took it. There were eight hundred notches on it, in rows, cut deep and neat. Two of them, near the end, had been cut across with a second stroke.

I asked him what they were.

He said they were the two loads Narayan Rao had entered in his book as spoiled, which were not spoiled, and which were on the eleventh bullock from the end of his father's own string. The naik thought the gentleman would wish to know where they were, and would wish to pay for them on delivery, at the agreed rate.

I turned in the saddle and looked back down the column for the eleventh bullock from the end of the naik's string. I could not tell which one it was. They all looked the same to me, and they all kept walking.

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Arthūrō Wellesleiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Arthur Wellesley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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