Eric Ratcliffe - Wellington in India I

Calcutta nights, light memories:
claret and billiards, games of dice,
ladies of elegance, trivia and muslin,
but keen esprit de corps, training,
time for drinking. Calcutta nights,
the races, officers' parties,
fraternal mess dinners and social graces
of the King's Thirty-Third for the colonel.

But ever the knife, external
in bandit darkness, the smell of excrement
beyond the fort along the Hooghly.
Fighting confined to fever's strife,
quick summer movement to Penang,
quit for Company's safety.
Ever alertness for Tipu, French advisers,
never peace at Cornwallis's price
achieved; Haidar's Mysore
reduced but a treacherous fang
of Tipu in fortressed Seringapatam,
buttressed by Mogul succession.
The truce broken. No longer friends,
Mahratta confederates. once made
supporters of Clive at Arcot. Seen
to do nothing, protect nothing
meant eclipse of Empire after its dawn,
with the French keen at the door,
Company losses, failure of trade,
renewal of piracy off the Malabar coast.

Mangalore. Would they land, the French?
make treaties with princes sealed with sugared lips,
array at Hyderabad under the tricolour,
buttons impressed with the Cap of Liberty?
Already 'Citizen Tipu' was on tongue tips
from the Western Ghats to the coast.
Not long before another Dupleix!

Masses of men of the Little Corporal,
from Europe to Egypt, then to India
were at least quite possible. Josephine,
survivor of the sharpness of the Terror,
would need to number her nights
if her Corsican's needle point
compassed to east!

Eric Ratcliffe

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