Cawnpore & Lucknow

by Donald Richards

  Of the garrison’s artillerymen, only a handful of the original crew were still alive but the volunteers serving the 12-pounders struck back as best they could, always exposed to a punishing ordeal from the enemy’s mortars and small-arms fire. Cannons were knocked from their carriages and in the south-east corner of the compound the tinder-dry wood of an ammunition limber took fire, threatening to blow that section of the works and its occupants to eternity. Showing remarkable coolness Lieutenant Henry George Delafosse crawled beneath the limber and, ignoring the shellfire, worked steadily to pull away the burning splinters whilst two redcoats hurried to his assistance with buckets of water to finally extinguish the fire.

  The thatched roof of the hospital building had long been regarded a hazard and at 5.00 pm on Sunday, 13 June, the worst fears of the wounded were realized when an incendiary projectile fell upon the thatch and assisted by a stiff breeze, set fire to the rafters. The ensuing conflagration, punctuated at intervals by thunderous explosions, cause panic among the helpless patients, and the women and children who had taken refuge there. So traumatic was the incident that a young Eurasian girl remembered it forty years later when, as Amelia Bennett, she published her memoirs of the siege. ‘The cries of the sick and wounded to be saved from the flames and the falling building were heart rending. The rebels guided in their firing by the blazing pile, poured a continual volley of shot and shell into the building, and the occupants were dragged out without regard to the excruciating pain of their wounds.’

  There was no help forthcoming from Wheeler’s entrenchments, for as William Shepherd later confessed:

  It was perfectly impracticable to save any of the wounded or the medicine in consequence of the insurgents collecting in very large bodies in the adjacent compounds and buildings, with their muskets and swords, ready every moment to pounce down on us, and the men were compelled to keep their places under the walls of the entrenchment, and could not bear a helping hand to those in the barracks.

  It was thanks to the prompt action described by Amelia, that just four people perished in the conflagration – the schoolmaster and his wife, and two artillerymen.

  As the rebels rushed forward to mount their assault against the trenches, Lieutenant Ashe made ready with his battery and directed ‘a most destructive charge of grape,’ remarked Mowbray Thomson. ‘Ashe was a great scourge to our enemies, in consequence of the surprising celerity and accuracy of the firing from his battery.’ The rebel attack was successfully beaten off following half an hour of furious gunfire which left the sandy plain littered with sepoy dead and wounded.

  The destruction of the hospital was a serious blow to the besieged for among the items lost were medical supplies vital to the well-being of the sick and wounded. ‘All that the surgeons could save,’ lamented Lieutenant Thomson, ‘was a box or two of surgical instruments and a small chest of medicine.’ Once that supply became exhausted, the plight of the sick became acute, and, ‘from the utter impossibility of extracting bullets, or dressing mutilations,’ he added, ‘casualties were increased in their fatality.’

  ‘It was now that our skirts were in demand,’ confessed Amelia Home. ‘We tore every vestige, even to our sleeves, to supply bandages for the wounded.’

  To the ordinary ranker, however, the loss of medical supplies was of secondary importance to the loss of his campaign medals and when the ashes of the barrack rooms had cooled sufficiently, the men of the 32nd ‘raked them over with bayonets and swords, making diligent search for their lost medals’. Gone now was the shelter the building had afforded against a summer temperature rising, in the trenches, to 120 degrees, which baked the stocks of muskets making them too hot for use. Sixty years later, an underground chamber was discovered beneath the site of the barracks which, had it been available, would have afforded a cool and bomb-proof shelter for the whole community.

  In the stifling heat, the women with their offspring who had previously availed themselves of the shade afforded by the hospital, now crouched together in the shallow trench, a sheet of canvas draped across a rude framework of splintered wood to serve as a canopy against the scorching rays of the sun. Eventually, even this crude shelter was torn away and to add to the mounting toll of casualties were those from heatstroke. ‘Those who all their lifetime had been accustomed to enjoy the coolness provided by the khus tatties and punkhas during the hot weather, or had never ventured out in the hot winds,’ observed Mowbray Thomson, ‘were thus pitilessly exposed a whole day, to the powerful heat of the sun.’

  ‘There was no shelter for the men now anywhere during the day,’ wrote Lieutenant Delafosse, ‘and from this date we lost five or six men daily from heatstroke.’

  At night the temperature plunged and although no doubt the change was welcome, the steaming ground added to the discomfort of the shivering refugees.

  ‘As the days passed, faces that had been beautiful became chiselled with deep furrows, haggard despair seated itself where there had been a month before only smiles,’ remembered Mowbray Thomson. ‘Some were slowly sinking into the settled vacancy of look which marked insanity.’

  Amelia Horne’s mother, who was seven months pregnant, was one such teetering on the edge of madness. ‘I used to sit and listen to her ravings, muttered in broken sentences,’ wrote Amelia. ‘Her one theme was her mother whom she wanted to see. At one moment she would be calling for a conveyance to take her to her mother, and the next her mind would wander away to something else.’ As she listened to her mother, Amelia could be forgiven for wondering: ‘Great God, how was it possible that human beings could endure so much.’

  Each day brought more deaths. Captain Jenkins, his jaw shattered by a musket ball, ‘lived for two or three days in excruciating agony’, reported Mowbray Thomson, ‘and died from exhaustion.’ Few women could have suffered more than Emma Haliday. Tortured by an insatiable thirst brought on by smallpox, her once fair skin erupting in ugly pustules leaving it scarred and pitted. Grieving for her husband and child, she lingered until the siege was brought to an end when death probably came as a merciful relief. The grim business of disposing of the dead posed a problem for the community. ‘Not one of our killed was sewn in a bag,’ reported Thomson, ‘we had neither materials nor time for such labour. At nightfall each day the slain were buried as decently as circumstances would permit.’

  ‘It was a difficult matter to dig graves for the dead on account of the hardness of the earth,’ admitted William Shepherd. ‘So that with few exceptions the bodies had to be put in a well outside the entrenchment.’ The well in question, close to barrack block No. 4, which had been empty of water even at the beginning, was by the end of the siege to receive the remains of 250 men, women and children.

  Many believed that the threat posed by the proselytizing of Christian missionaries to the Muslim and Hindu faiths had led to the sepoy revolt, but when faced with the consequence of their missionary zeal, no one responded with greater courage than Edward Theophilus Moncrieff, the station chaplain. Ignoring the iron fragments from bursting shells and the musketry directed at him, Moncrieff went from post to post reading prayers and giving what little comfort he could to the wounded and the dying.

  ‘Short and interrupted as these services were,’ related Mowbray Thomson, ‘they proved an invaluable privilege. Mr Moncrieff was held in high estimation by the whole garrison before the mutiny, his self denial and constancy in the thickest of our perils made him yet more greatly beloved by us all.’

  Following eighteen days of physical and mental torment which few could ever have imagined, the situation facing the besieged had now reached a critical stage. Years later, William Shepherd could write with considerable understatement ‘Nothing could surpass the awful miseries, and the horrible privations experienced by the besieged garrison. The stench arising from the dead bodies of horses … and the unusually great influx of flies rendered the place extremely disagreeable.’

  The serious shortage of food and water, coupled with the nauseous stench aris
ing from animal and human remains which lay rotting in the sun, posed a threat of disease which the overworked medical staff could do little to mitigate. The well in use as a sepulchre was almost full and it was only through the gruesome activities of the vultures, which gorged upon the putrefying remains, that the risk to health was to some degree lessened.

  A message carried to Martin Gubbins in Lucknow, by a native fortunate enough to slip through the rebel lines undetected, reflected the despair of a commander on the brink of abandoning hope. ‘We have no instruments, no medicines, provisions for 8 or 10 days at farthest, and no possibility of getting any as all communication with the town is cut off,’ wrote General Wheeler. ‘The enemy have two 24-pounders and several other guns. We have only eight 9-pounders. We want aid, aid, aid.’

  But Sir Henry Lawrence was powerless to help however. On 16 June he replied to General Wheeler’s plea, pointing out that ‘with the enemy’s command of the river, we could not possibly get a single man into your entrenchment.’ He added, ‘we are strong in our entrenchment but by attempting the passage of the river, we should be sacrificing a large detachment without a prospect of helping you. Pray do not think me selfish. I would run much risk could I see commensurate prospect of success. In the present scheme I see none.’

  On the 24th, General Wheeler replied in what was to be his last message: ‘All our carriages more or less disabled, ammunition short; British spirit alone remains, but it cannot last for ever … We have lost everything belonging to us, and have not even a change of linen … we have been cruelly deserted and left to our fate. Surely we are not to die like rats in a cage.’

  Three days later Wheeler’s cry for help was answered by Sir Henry, assuring him that reinforcements were on their way from Calcutta and urging him not to enter into negotiations with the Nana Sahib. The General was never to see the letter, for by then the fighting was over and the next tragic episode in the saga of Cawnpore was about to begin.

  Chapter 5

  MISPLACED HOPES

  Although failing light afforded a respite from sniper activity, darkness brought no relief from the constant artillery fire. There was scarcely a corner of the compound which offered shelter from the jagged pieces of metal thrown out by bursting shells, or the lethal ricocheting round shot. A shell fragmented with fatal consequence to a group of soldiers’ wives huddled together for mutual comfort behind a sandbagged parapet, whilst a private of the 32nd, seeking a resting place for the night with his family, was struck by a ball which, passing through his body, broke both elbows of his wife and wounded one of the two babies she was holding. She was seen a few days afterwards by Mowbray Thomson in the main guard room, ‘lying upon her back, with the two children, twins, one at each breast, while the mother’s bosom refused not what her arms had no power to administer’. Both she and the twins died shortly afterwards.

  In this nightmare of choking dust and swirling smoke, only the very young were blissfully ignorant of their perilous position. At the tender age of three most children barely noticed the absence of an ayah and many youngsters played with spent musket balls, completely indifferent to the missiles which sailed past ‘with a noise like giant bees’.

  Some of the older children faced their situation with as much patience as the calmest adult. William Shepherd’s 5½-year-old daughter, Polly, was just such an example. ‘I have often caught her eyes swollen with suppressed tears, fixed sometimes upon her mother’s features and sometimes upon mine, yet the desire not to pain lis was self-evident,’ wrote the Commissary clerk. ‘She would sometimes whisper her desires to our servant Thakooranee, at the same time begging her in a most pitiful manner not to mention to papa and mamma, as they would be grieved.’

  William Shepherd was to suffer additional anguish when on 17 June, as his wife sat nursing their two-year-old daughter, a ricocheting musket ball lodged in the child’s neck. A surgeon removed the bullet but within twenty-four hours ’she faded away,’ wrote Shepherd, ‘until she resembled the bud of a delicate flower.’

  Some 500 yards to the south-east of Wheeler’s entrenchment stood the barracks built to house the Company’s sepoys, and in one, a group of fifty, all loyal to their British officers, were defying every attempt by the rebels to drive them from the block. For three days they had exchanged fire with the mutineers, but during the afternoon of the 9th an incendiary set fire to the thatched roof and as smoke and flames swept through the building, Havildar Ram Buksh ran across 500 yards of open ground to beg the officer in charge of that part of the entrenchment to allow his sepoys to join the garrison troops. ‘The Major then told us that he could do nothing for us, there being an order of General Wheeler preventing any native from entering the entrenchment,’ recalled Havildar Ram Buksh. All that the Major was prepared to do was to reward the sepoys with a few rupees and provide a certificate attesting to their loyalty, with the advice to look to their own safety. At nightfall the sepoys, a few from the 1st and 56th NI, but the majority from the 53rd NI, made their escape. Some sought refuge in a mango grove, others like Ram Buksh, after confronting roving bands of peasants, reached their villages without mishap. A few were apprehended by rebels and taken back to Cawnpore. Fortunately for them, after being relieved of their weapons and anything else of value, they were released after undergoing a beating.

  Although food stocks were a cause for concern, the most pressing problem given the stifling heat was a need to satisfy the garrison’s insatiable demand for water. The native water carriers had long since fled, and it was left to each family to fetch water for themselves and their dependants. The only available well had from the beginning of the siege been a favourite target of the rebel artillerymen. Within a matter of days the parapet, framework and hoist machinery had been demolished by round shot, and each bucket had to be hauled up from a depth of 60 feet by hand, whilst subject to musketry and shellfire. Even at night, the creaking of the windlass was sufficient to bring a hail of grape-shot directed at the well head.

  ‘The sufferings of the women and children from thirst were intense,’ wrote Mowbray Thomson, ‘and the men could scarcely endure the cries for drink which were almost perpetual from the poor little babes, terribly unconscious they were, most of them, of the great, great cost at which only it could be procured.’

  ‘We had to practise great economy in respect of our water ration,’ emphasized Amelia Horne, ‘and had to drink it in sips, not knowing when the next supply would be forthcoming. Notwithstanding the danger, cheerfully would the men go and draw it rather than see us perish from thirst.’

  As Amy Home pointed out, despite its hazards the task of drawing water from the well never lacked for volunteers and Lieutenant Thomson takes especial pride in citing the example of John McKillop, the joint magistrate of Cawnpore, who although no military man, was determined to make his contribution whatever the cost. In furtherance of what he considered to be his duty towards the more vulnerable in the community, he undertook the dangerous business of drawing water for the women and children. This brave thirty-year-old Bengal civil servant survived a week before sustaining a mortal wound, and, recorded Thomson, ‘with his last breath requested that somebody would go and draw water for a lady to whom he had promised it’.

  The drawing of water and the loss of medical supplies were not the only problems facing the garrison – the store of provisions was also rapidly declining. ‘My poor little brothers and sisters, wee little things as they were, felt the want of food dreadfully,’ wrote a young Eurasian girl, ‘and would have eaten the most loathsome thing had it been served up as an article of diet.’

  By the third week in June the deteriorating situation in Cawnpore was giving rise to anxiety among government circles in Calcutta. Lady Canning entered in her diary:

  Cawnpore is now the most anxious position, but everyone speaks alike of Sir Hugh Wheeler and his brave spirit. There is not a better soldier, & all say, if anyone can hold it he will. But all the civilians & women & children have taken refuge there, & he has
very few troops even now. We know that the native troops have turned and left him, & fired the town, & he is shut up & probably short of provisions, so there is great reason for anxiety, & it will be some time before he can be relieved from Allahabad, about 130 miles off.

  Back in the entrenchment, unwilling to accept that there was little hope of relief, attempts were made to contact the outside world through the efforts of trusted natives willing to act as couriers for relatively large sums of money in rupees. Theirs was an extremely dangerous mission for if caught they invariably faced execution or were returned horribly mutilated having had ‘boiling oil applied to their severed appendages’. An early volunteer had been Private Blenman, an Eurasian, ‘but so dark in complexion as easily to have been taken for a native’, who on 24 May had courageously left the trenches in the hope of reaching Allahabad with news of the garrison’s desperate position. With considerable skill he succeeded in passing through the cordon of rebels, but was apprehended by villagers just as dawn was breaking. Fortunately for Blenman, his story of being a ‘leather dresser’ was believed and he was eventually able to slip back to the entrenchment none the worse for his adventure.

  Although almost no one now believed in the speedy arrival of a relief force, hope still existed and each morning the powder-blackened and sweat-stained defenders would search the shimmering horizon for a glimpse of European troops marching along the Grand Trunk Road from Lucknow. Most were at a loss to understand why the relief force should be taking so long to reach them.