all detachments of troops in isolated positions; he concentrated them
at the important points. He interviewed alarmed magistrates, and he
attended, in person and unarmed, a large gathering of Chartists. To all
he spoke calmly but resolutely. He made it clear to the rich that he
would not order a shot to be fired while peaceful measures were
possible; he made it equally clear to the Chartists that he would
suppress disorder, if it arose, promptly and mercilessly. With only four
thousand troops under his command to control all the industrial
districts of the north, Newcastle and Manchester, Sheffield and
Nottingham, he did his work effectually without a shot being fired. 'Ars
est celare artem': and just because of his success, few observers
realized from how great a danger the community had been preserved.

[Note 13: His first wife, whom he married in 1827, died in 1832. He
married again in 1835.]

Thus he had proved his versatile talents in regimental service in the
Peninsula, in the reclamation of an eastern island from barbarism, and
in the control of disorder at home. It was not till he had reached the
age of sixty that he was to prove these gifts in the highest sphere, in
the handling of an army in the field and in the direction of a campaign.
But the offer of a command in India roused his indomitable spirit, the
more so as trouble was threatening on the north-west frontier. An
ill-judged interference in Afgh[=a]nist[=a]n had in 1841 caused the
massacre near K[=a]bul of one British force: other contingents were
besieged in Jal[=a]l[=a]b[=a]d and Ghazni, and were in danger of a
similar fate, and the prestige of British arms was at its lowest in the
valley of the Indus. Lord Ellenborough, the new Viceroy, turned to
Charles Napier for advice, and in April 1842 he was given the command in
Upper and Lower Sind, the districts comprising the lower Indus valley.
It was his first experience of India and his first command in war. He
was sixty years old and he had not faced an enemy's army in the field
since the age of twenty-five. As he said, 'I go to command in Sind with
no orders, no instructions, no precise line of policy given! How many
men are in Sind? How many soldiers to command? No one knows!... They
tell me I must form and model the staff of the army altogether! Feeling
myself but an apprentice in Indian matters, I yet look in vain for a
master.' But the years of study and preparation had not been in vain,
and respon