The Cannons of Lucknow, page 25
General Anson, weakened by his exertions, died of cholera in camp at Karnaul and was succeeded as Commander-in-Chief by a Crimean veteran, General Barnard. By June 8th, after fighting another successful action against the mutineers at Badli-ke-serai, six miles outside Delhi, the combined British force—numbering fewer than 3,000 men of all arms—established itself on the Ridge to await the arrival of reinforcements, guns, medical supplies, and ammunition, which would enable them to attack the city. Until these reached them, they could only wait—outnumbered by well over ten to one—whilst, in the Punjab, the Chief Commissioner, Sir John Lawrence, made strenuous efforts to send them succour. He formed a “Movable Column,” lightly equipped and ready to move with speed against any area of disaffection, and disarmed a number of sepoy regiments, aware that before he dared denude the Punjab of British troops, he must make it and its frontiers secure. With the dynamic Nicholson succeeding to command of the Movable Column and a siege train in process of preparation, the recapture of Delhi became, at last, a less remote possibility than it had at first seemed.
But the preparations took time, and elsewhere in India the situation was critical as, in garrison after garrison, the pattern of Meerut was repeated—the native troops rose and the bazaar riffraff rose with them, eager to kill and plunder their white rulers. The districts were in a state of rebellion, communications were disrupted, the telegraph wires cut, and no traveller was safe, even on the Grand Trunk Road. The civil police threw in their lot with the mutineers, jails were broken into, and prisoners released to swell the growing ranks of lawless marauders. British officers and their families who managed to escape from their stations did so as fugitives, finding every man’s hand against them. The Chief Commissioner of Oudh, Sir Henry Lawrence—elder brother of the ruler of the Punjab—with typical farsightedness, had made his own preparations to withstand a siege in his Residency at Lucknow, whilst doing everything in his power to prevent a general uprising. Such was the respect in which even his enemies held him that he almost succeeded; throughout May and June, whilst other stations suffered mutiny, Lawrence contrived to keep the peace in Lucknow, continuing secretly to fortify and provision the Residency. Reinforcements could only reach him from Calcutta; the recapture of Delhi was the first priority and all the resources of the Punjab had to be concentrated on this objective, since Delhi and the old Emperor were the key to the suppression of the revolt.
A source of grave anxiety was Cawnpore, 53 miles northeast of Lucknow, on the opposite bank of the River Ganges. The garrison was predominantly native, consisting of the 2nd Light Cavalry and the 1st, 53rd, and 56th Native Infantry. The station commander, Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler, a veteran of the Sikh wars, had formed a close personal friendship with the adopted son of the last Peishwa of the Mahrattas, Dundoo Punth, a Hindu of Brahmin caste and the self-styled Maharajah of Bithur. Relying on the promises of this man—known best by his Mahratta title of Nana Sahib—Wheeler had agreed to call on the aid of his troops should his sepoys break out in mutiny. Even were they to do so, the Nana assured him, they would march immediately to join their comrades in Delhi, and all that Wheeler need fear would be attacks from the lawless elements of the native city. Accordingly, the old General decided against fortifying the stone-built Magazine, with its vast reserves of guns and ammunition, which had the disadvantage of lying six miles northwest of the city. Instead, after receiving the news of the outbreak in Meerut and the fall of Delhi, he constructed an earthwork entrenchment on the open plain to the south of the city and the Native Lines, close to the road from Allahabad, along which he expected his promised reinforcements to come.
Reinforcements were, indeed, being rushed north from Calcutta, over 600 miles away, but for all his frantic efforts the Governor-General, Lord Canning, had few European troops available. A wing of the Madras European Fusiliers, under the command of their Colonel, James Neill, reached Calcutta on 24th May from the Madras Presidency and Canning despatched them at once to Cawnpore. The small column reached Benares on 3rd June and Neill was compelled to delay his advance in order to put down a threatened insurrection there. It was the same story in Allahabad, where mutiny had already broken out prior to the arrival of the column on 11th June, after a forced march of 70 miles in three days.
Only a single company of Her Majesty’s 84th and fifteen of the Fusiliers actually reached Cawnpore at the end of May and, confident that Neill’s column would follow in a matter of a week or so, General Wheeler sent half of the 84th and fifty men of the 32nd on to Lucknow to augment Sir Henry Lawrence’s garrison. Aware, however, that his four native regiments were dangerously disaffected, he called on the Nana Sahib for the promised Bithur troops. When 300 were sent in response to his request, he placed both the Magazine and the Treasury under their protection and ordered all Europeans and Eurasian Christians to take refuge in the entrenchment.
Work on this had not been completed when he was compelled to occupy it but, trusting in his alliance with the Nana, Wheeler was not unduly worried. Conditions were unpleasantly crowded; he had two brick buildings—one a hospital for European troops, with a thatched roof—and a four-acre site, surrounded by a four-foot-high breastwork built of mud, already crumbling in the heat, and a single well, from which all drinking water had to be drawn. Into it came close to a thousand souls, of whom nearly 400 were women and children. To defend his position, he had nine light-calibre guns, 210 European soldiers—59 gunners and 70 invalids and convalescent men of the 32nd among them—about 200 officers and civilian males, 40 native Christian drummers, and 20 loyal native officers and sepoys, in addition to some 50 noncombatant Indian servants.
The native regiments mutinied during the night of 4th June. The Nana’s troops yielded both Magazine and Treasury to them and the sepoys, without making any attempt to molest the garrison in the entrenchment, set off on the road to Delhi—as the Nana had predicted they would. He, however, in cynical betrayal of General Wheeler’s trust, persuaded them to remain in Cawnpore under his own banner, and on the morning of 6th June, all four regiments launched an attack on the frail earthworks, swiftly followed by a bombardment by guns looted from the Magazine.
The garrison of Cawnpore held out heroically and against well-nigh impossible odds for three weeks.* With the temperature standing at 130 degrees, lacking shade of any kind, their well under constant fire and their thatched-roofed hospital burnt to the ground, their defence is one of the epics of the Sepoy Mutiny. The ranks of the besiegers were swelled by mutineers from other stations, until they numbered in the region of eight or nine thousand; they had batteries of 24-pounder guns forming a ring of steel round the crumbling mud breastwork of the entrenchment and, at the height of the bombardment, as many as 300 missiles an hour were striking the battered buildings and raking the open compound. Two hundred and fifty of the defenders were killed—including almost all the trained artillerymen—but the guns continued to hold the enemy at bay, served by officers and civilians. Wounded infantry soldiers manned the shattered parapet, often without relief, beating off attacks by day and night, and on several occasions small parties of defenders made daring sallies to spike the insurgents’ guns and blow up their ammunition.
The suffering endured by the women and children was appalling, with mental agony added to physical misery. Toward the end, when there were no medicines to treat the sick and rations had been reduced to a handful of uncooked grain and a few sips of water, only the conviction that Neill’s column was on its way to their relief kept the hopes of the stricken garrison alive. Neill did not come, and all save two of their small 9-pounder guns were put out of action when the Nana sent a Eurasian woman, whom he had been holding captive, to offer the survivors a safe passage to Allahabad by river. He promised boats and swore a solemn oath that, if the garrison agreed to surrender their entrenchment and leave Cawnpore, they might do so under arms and without molestation.
Having little choice, these terms were accepted and, on the morning of the 27th June, their sick and wounded carried in palanquins and carts and on elephants provided by the Nana, the 437 survivors of the garrison made their way down to the Suttee Chowra Ghat, where boats were waiting for them. The embarkation had scarcely commenced when hidden guns opened up on them with grape and canister and, from the slope leading down to the landing place, sepoys poured a withering fire of musketry into those who were struggling, waist-deep in water, to board the boats. The straw-thatched awnings of the boats were set on fire, and a number of cavalry sowars spurred their horses into the shallows to sabre terrified women and children who had flung themselves overboard to escape the flames.
When the Nana at last ordered a halt to the ghastly massacre, 125 dazed and mud-spattered women and children were dragged ashore, many of them wounded. They were taken as hostages, but any men who had survived the treacherous attack were butchered out of hand. The same fate awaited those who had contrived to make their escape in a single leaking boat. Pursued by guns and cavalry on both banks, for three days and nights they held off their assailants, only to be taken by a zamindar on the Oudh side of the river when their boat drifted out of the main channel and ran aground. Only a handful, who were unwounded, reached the shore; they made a last gallant stand and four finally escaped after swimming for six miles downriver under a galling fire from sepoys on shore.
Conflicting rumours as to the fate of the Cawnpore garrison reached Allahabad some days later. By this time, Neill had quelled the mutineers, hanging many of them and blowing the ringleaders from the mouths of cannon, and a force was collecting there to relieve Cawnpore and reinforce Lucknow. Brigadier-General Henry Havelock, on his return from the campaign in Persia, had been appointed to command the relief force, and it was he who questioned the two native spies who had brought news of the fall of Sir Hugh Wheeler’s garrison and the Nana Sahib’s treachery. A number of his officers refused to believe the spies’ report, but Havelock had no doubt that it was true; even when it was later contradicted, the Brigadier adhered to his belief and, learning that British women and children were being held hostage, he exerted every effort to get his force on the road to Cawnpore. Hampered, as always, by lack of transport, he gave the order to begin the march on Tuesday, 7th July. His force was small, consisting of the 64th Foot and the 78th Highlanders—like himself, fresh from Persia—two companies of the 84th and a detachment of Madras Fusiliers, 150 Sikhs of the Ferozepore Regiment, and a six-gun field battery, manned by a scratch force of gunners, under the command of Captain Maude. The cavalry were his weakest arm—apart from twenty “gentlemen volunteers” under Captain Lousada Barrow, he had only a troop of irregulars, of doubtful loyalty, and just under a thousand of his force were Europeans.
Ahead of him, a still smaller advance force had been despatched under the command of Captain Renaud of the Fusiliers—300 men of his own regiment, 400 Sikhs, 95 irregular cavalry sowars, and two guns—and, fearful lest the Nana launch an attack on Renaud before he could join forces with him, Havelock sent an urgent message, ordering the advance guard to wait and rendezvous with him outside Fatepur. After an exhausting march, in the worst season of the year, Havelock caught up with Renaud on 12th July, just in time to meet and defeat 3,500 of the Nana’s rebel army, which was advancing, with a large force of cavalry and twelve guns, in the belief that only Renaud’s handful were opposed to them. They were routed by Havelock’s superior tactical use of his artillery and Enfield riflemen: all twelve guns fell into his hands and his only losses were from heatstroke.
Still in appalling conditions, which alternated between blazing heat and torrential rain, the British column took Fatepur and continued its advance. The irregular cavalry refused to charge and had to be disarmed; the infantrymen were exhausted, plagued by thirst, and frequently unable to take time to cook and consume their rations. They were stricken by cholera and always heavily outnumbered but, spurred on by the knowledge that the lives of the Nana’s hostages depended on them and inspired by the personal gallantry and splendid leadership displayed by Havelock himself, they routed the enemy at Aong, at the Panda Nudi bridge, and finally in a savage battle outside Cawnpore, where the 78th Highlanders in particular covered themselves with glory.
Between the 7th and the 16th July, they marched 126 miles and fought four actions, the last with barely 800 infantrymen in line and their only cavalry Barrow’s twenty gentlemen volunteers, taking the Nana’s well-sited 24-pounder guns at the point of the bayonet, in a series of charges which demanded the utmost in courage and steadiness of the weary, half-starved men. But it was to be in vain. They entered Cawnpore to find that the hapless women and children who had survived the siege and the massacre at the Suttee Chowra Ghat, together with other fugitives from upriver stations, 210 in all, had been mercilessly butchered by the Nana’ orders on 15th July, following his defeat at the Panda Nudi crossing.
Near the burnt-out Assembly Rooms, in a small, yellow-painted brick building known as the Bibigarh—the House of Women—the ghastly evidence of the slaughter was still plainly to be seen. The place was a charnel house, inches deep in blood, with here and there a woman’s bonnet, the frilled muslin frock of a child, books, a torn Bible, and, still hanging from the door, the flimsy rags with which a vain attempt had been made by those who had perished there to bar it to their murderers. With grim irony, the pages from a book entitled Preparation for Death lay scattered about the blood-stained floor and the walls were scarred with sabre-slashes and the marks of bullets. Some of the sword-cuts were low down, as if some poor, cowering woman or terrified child had tried to ward off the blows aimed at them by their brutal assassins.
In the courtyard outside, the bodies of the victims were found in a 50-foot-deep well, which was crammed to within six feet of the top with dismembered limbs and torsos stripped naked by savage hands. The battle-hardened men of the advance party, who were the first to find and uncover the well, turned from it, sickened and appalled, thirsting for the blood of the man who had perpetrated such an outrage. But the Nana had fled, after blowing up the Magazine, taking his treasure with him but abandoning Cawnpore to the victors. Havelock’s bitter, vengeful soldiers marched to his palace at Bithur in search of him, but this, too, they found abandoned. The Nana was reported to have withdrawn, with 3,000 regular troops and a number of newly raised levies, to wait an opportunity to launch an attack on Havelock’s rear, should he cross the Ganges into Oudh in an attempt to relieve Lucknow. After taking possession of the thirteen guns he had left behind, with their transport elephants, the British force set his palace on fire and returned to Cawnpore.
From Lucknow, borne by the courageous spy Ungud, came the melancholy news that Sir Henry Lawrence was dead. On the morning of 2nd July a round-shot had entered through the window of his upper room in the Residency, which had shattered his pelvis. Two days after receiving this terrible wound, he had handed over command to Colonel Inglis, of H.M.’s 32nd, and Major Banks, the Civil Commissioner, and lapsed finally into unconsciousness.
Lawrence had suffered a disastrous reverse on 30th June, when—yielding to the demands for action from the Financial Commissioner, Martin Gubbins—he had, against his better judgement, led a force of 700 men against the mutineers at Chinhat. Betrayed by his native gunners, who had deserted to the enemy, he had lost 300 men and five guns, including a 24-pounder howitzer, and the position was now desperate. With news of Lawrence’s death, Inglis sent an urgent plea to Havelock for aid; Lucknow was completely invested; the besiegers numbered many thousands—without aid, it would be impossible to hold out for more than a few days.
Although his losses from cholera were now acute and only 227 men of H.M.’s 84th Foot, led by Colonel Neill from Allahabad, had reached him as reinforcements, Havelock decided that he had no choice but to endeavour to fight his way through to Lucknow. He adhered to his decision, even when a regretful message reached him by telegraph from Sir Patrick Grant, the Bengal Army’s acting Commander-in-Chief, from Calcutta, with the warning that two European regiments he had been promised could not now be sent to him for at least two months. The sepoy regiments at Dinapore had mutinied; the 5th Fusiliers and the 90th Foot were required to deal with the outbreak. Havelock must rely on his own resources if he made any attempt to relieve Lucknow.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” the General told his son Harry, recently appointed Deputy-Assistant adjutant-general in place of Major Stuart Beatson, who had died of cholera, “we can but die with our swords in our hands.”
BOOKS CONSULTED
Government of India State Papers: edited G. W. Forrest, Calcutta Military Department Press, 1902. 2 vols.
The Sepoy War in India: J.W. Kaye, FRS.,3 vols., W.H. Allen,1870.
History of the Indian Mutiny: Col. G. B. Malleson, CSI., 3 vols., Longmans, 1896.
History of the Indian Mutiny: T. Rice Holmes, Macmillan, 1898.
The Tale of the Great Mutiny: W. H. Fitchett, Smith, Elder, 1904.
The History of the Indian Mutiny: Charles Ball, 6 vols. London Printing & Publishing Co., circa 1860.
Addiscombe: Its Heroes and Men of Note: Col. H. M. Vibart, Constable, 1894.
Way to Glory: J. C. Pollock, John Murray, 1957 (Life of Havelock).
1857: S. N. Sen, Government of India Press (reprinted 1958).
The Sound of Fury: Richard Collier, Collins, 1963.
