by V. A. Stuart
Tight-lipped, Sir Colin Campbell spurred on. Met on the bridge by the subaltern commanding the guard, the old Chief reprimanded him harshly when he expressed his relief, adding excitedly that the garrison was at its last gasp.
“How dare you suggest, sir,” he demanded, “That any of Her Majesty’s troops are at their last gasp? Shame on you, sir!” Waving the abashed young officer wrathfully aside, he turned to Alex. “Get yourself a fresh horse and ride back to Mungalwar. Tell Brigadier Grant I want his heavy guns in position to cover this bridge before daylight—Captain Peel’s twenty-four-pounder, too, if it’s humanly possible. And warn Grant that I shall require his brigade with the cavalry and horsed batteries, to cross into Cawnpore at first light. I shall go across now to confer with General Windham but tell the Brigadier I’ll rejoin him within the hour. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, sir,” Alex acknowledged.
“Then ride as you never rode in your life,” the commander-in-chief bade him. “We must have those guns if we’re to save Cawnpore!”
It was a nightmare ride in the gathering darkness and on a borrowed infantry officer’s charger, but the way was all too familiar, and Alex found Bouchier’s battery already limbering up in anticipation of the order to advance. Guns and cavalry moved forward at a gallop as the moon rose, and just before dawn, Peel’s seamen reached the river bank, manhandling their great, unwieldy twenty-four-pounder gun along the rutted track behind the line of straining bullocks to which it was yoked.
Enemy gun batteries opened fire on the bridge, but the British guns made instant reply, as Hope Grant’s cavalry and light guns clattered across. By mid-day, the column was occupying the plain, facing the city, its left covering the Allahabad road, and the battle to save Cawnpore had begun.
* Henry Kavanagh was the first civilian to be awarded the Victoria Cross. In addition, his courage was rewarded by promotion to assistant commissioner’s rank and a donation of 20,000 rupees, made by the Government of India.
* Flags were flown at half-mast in New York when news of Havelock’s death was received there.
HISTORICAL NOTES
Events covered in The Sepoy Mutiny, Massacre at Cawnpore and The Cannons of Lucknow
THE MUTINY of the sepoy Army of Bengal began on Sunday, May 10, 1857, with the rising of the 3rd Light Cavalry in Meerut. Despite the fact that he had 2,000 British troops under his command, the obese and senile Major General William Hewitt handled the crisis so ineptly that, after an orgy of arson and slaughter, the Light Cavalry and their sepoy comrades of the 11th and 20th Native Infantry were permitted to reach Delhi, with scarcely a shot fired against them.
Here, supported by the native regiments of the garrison, they proclaimed the last of the Moguls, 80-year-old Shah Bahadur, as Emperor of India, and seized the city, murdering British civil and military officers and massacring hundreds of Europeans and Indian Christians, who had been unable to make their escape. Hampered by both lack of British troops and inadequate transport for those available to him, the British commander-in-chief nevertheless contrived to establish a small force on the Ridge by June 8. This force, which consisted of fewer than 3,000 men of all arms—although it had won two pitched battles against the mutineers on the way to Delhi—was so greatly outnumbered and deficient in heavy artillery that it could only wait for reinforcements, unable, until these arrived, to attempt to recapture the city or even to effectively besiege it.
In Oudh—recently annexed by the East India Company and already, on this account, seething with discontent—the situation rapidly became critical as, in station after station, the native regiments broke out in revolt. A source of grave anxiety was Cawnpore, 53 miles northeast of Lucknow and on the opposite bank of the Ganges River. With some 375 women and children to protect, the commanding General, Sir Hugh Massey Wheeler, pinned his faith on the friendship of a native prince, the Nana Sahib, Maharajah of Bithur. He had only 200 British soldiers in his garrison—among these 70 invalids and convalescent men of Her Majesty’s 32nd Regiment—about the same number of officers and civilian males, 40 native Christian drummers, and a handful of loyal native officers and sepoys.
Betrayed by the Nana, the garrison held out for three weeks with epic heroism, in a mud-walled entrenchment at the height of the Indian summer, under constant attack by 9,000 rebels and surrounded by batteries of heavy caliber guns. Compelled finally to surrender when 250 defenders had been killed and with their food and ammunition exhausted, the survivors were treacherously massacred on the river bank, where they had gone, on the promise of safe passage to Allahabad, on June 27. By the time the Nana called a halt to the awful slaughter, all but 125 women and children and some 60 men had been killed. The men were shot; the women and children, many of them wounded, were held as hostages in a small, single-story house known as the Bibigarh, together with female captives from other stations.
When the small, poorly equipped relief force, under Brigadier General Henry Havelock, fought its way upcountry from Allahabad and recaptured Cawnpore, it was learned that all the hostages had been brutally murdered on July 15, when the British column was still engaging the Nana’s troops outside the city. Feeling ran high among Havelock’s soldiers, when details of the massacre became known, but the stern and deeply religious little General would permit no indiscriminate reprisals against the civilian population of Cawnpore. Barbarism, he told them, must not be met with barbarism. Punishment would be meted out to the guilty, but the most urgent task facing the column was the relief of Lucknow, which was now under siege by an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 rebels.
Due to the foresight of the Chief Commissioner of Oudh Sir Henry Lawrence, his Residency had been provisioned and preparations made for its defense but he, too, had insufficient British troops—a single regiment, the 32nd—and over 1,200 women, children, and noncombatant males, who had all to be sheltered, protected, and fed. At the end of June, Lawrence suffered a disastrous reverse when he led a small force of his defenders to Chinhat, in an attempt to drive off the rebels and was himself mortally wounded when a round shot entered through the window of his upper room at the Residency on July 2. Command was handed over to Colonel Inglis, of the 32nd, who sent urgent messages to Havelock, requesting aid. At Chinhat, 293 men and 5 guns—which included an 8-inch howitzer—had been lost, and a further 78 men were wounded or sick. A 2000-yard-long defensive perimeter had now to be defended by 1,720 fighting men, of whom over 700 were loyal natives who might or might not remain loyal.
General Havelock made his first attempt to relieve the garrison on July 29, when he crossed the Ganges with 1,500 men—1,200 of them British and the rest Sikhs of the Ferozepore Regiment—and 10 light field guns. He took no tents and 20 of his gunners were invalids of the Veteran Battalion; to his scant force of 20 Volunteer Cavalry were added some 40 infantrymen, with experience of riding, whose cavalry training had of necessity been completed in less than a week. His four European regiments—Her Majesty’s 64th, 84th, and 78th Highlanders and the Company’s 1st Madras Fusiliers— had already suffered heavy casualties in the four actions they had fought between Allahabad and Cawnpore, and the terrible ravages of cholera, dysentery, and sunstroke daily reduced their number.
To hold Cawnpore and cover their crossing into Oudh, Havelock ordered the construction of an entrenchment, considerably stronger than General Wheeler’s had been, sited on a plateau overlooking the river, and well armed with guns. The Commanding Officer of the Madras Fusiliers, James Neill—whose promotion to Brigadier General was the reward for his ruthless suppression of the mutiny in Benares and Allahabad—was left to defend the newly constructed entrenchment with 300 men. No sooner had Havelock departed than Neill set about executing any native who was even remotely suspected of complicity in the mutiny, reserving a terrible vengeance for those believed to have had a hand in the massacre at the Suttee Chowra Ghat or in the Bibigarh. His reign of terror earned him the unenviable title of “Butcher of Cawnpore,” and his disloyal and derogatory dispatches to the
Governor General and commander-in-chief, in which he blamed Havelock for his failure to relieve Lucknow, considerably tarnished his hitherto fine record.
Havelock’s attempt to bring relief to the “heroic garrison of Lucknow” was, from the outset, doomed to failure. He had too few troops, inadequate transport, and sick carriage, and, in the ancient Kingdom of Oudh, every man’s hand was against him, the mutineers’ ranks swollen by the armed zamindars and peasants who flocked to join them in the insurrection. His small force was victorious in every action, fought against overwhelming odds; it attacked with deathless courage, taking fortified and entrenched positions at the point of the bayonet and inflicting twice and three times the number of casualties it suffered. But the rebel losses could be made good—Havelock’s could not and, although his column bravely battled its way to within thirty miles of Lucknow, the little general was compelled to retire to his base at Mungalwar, six miles into Oudh from the river crossing, no less than three times. Faced with the alternative of abandoning his sick and wounded at the roadside and continuing the march on Lucknow with fewer than seven hundred men, his ammunition almost exhausted, he made the only decision he could make and withdrew from the advanced position he had so hardly won.
On the third occasion, he was left with no choice.A frantic message from Neill reached him on August 11, with the warning that the Nana Sahib had gathered a large force at Bithur, 16 miles from Cawnpore, with which he was threatening to recapture the city. Havelock again advanced to Busheratgunj, inflicted a salutary defeat on the Oudh rebels, and then led his weary and greatly depleted column back to Cawnpore on August 13th. But there could be no rest for them. Leaving barely a hundred men to hold the entrenchment, the gallant little General marched to Bithur during the night of the 15th and the next day won a resounding victory over the Nana’s 4,000 crack sepoy troops. The Nana himself fled across the river into Oudh, and the one-time commander of his bodyguard, Tantia Topi, was reported to have made contact with the mutinied Gwalior Contingent at Kalpi in order to enlist their aid.
Havelock’s constantly reiterated plea for reinforcements was, at last, answered. On his return to Cawnpore on August 17, he received news—via the Calcutta Gazette of August 5—that command of the Dinapore Division had been given to Major General Sir James Out-ram, under whom he had served in the recent Persian campaign. Outram’s new command was to include that of Cawnpore, and he was reported to be moving with all possible speed up-country with the two regiments for which Havelock had so often begged, the 5th Fusiliers and the 90th Light Infantry. Sir Colin Campbell, of Balaclava fame, had succeeded the somewhat ineffectual Patrick Grant as commander-in-chief, and Havelock’s chagrin, caused by his apparent supersession, was tempered by the new hope that the appointment of Colin Campbell engendered. It vanished completely when Out-ram, with a chivalrous generosity that was typical of him, announced that Havelock was to continue to command the now augmented relief column until Lucknow was entered. He himself, he stated, would accompany the column in his civilian capacity as chief commissioner of Oudh and serve under his junior as a volunteer.
Outram reached Cawnpore on September 15, bringing 1,268 men with him and a battery of heavy, elephant-drawn guns. These reinforcements brought the total number of troops to a little over 3,000 men—2,400 of them British—with three batteries of artillery, commanded respectively by Captains Francis Maude, R.A. (whose bullock-drawn nine-pounders had accompanied the column from Allahabad at the beginning of July and played a gallant part in all its nine victorious actions), William Olpherts (horsed nine-pounders) and Vincent Eyre (two 24-pounders and two 8-inch howitzers). Captain Lousada Barrow’s Volunteer Cavalry—a mere 20 strong when they had joined in July—now augmented by more hurriedly trained infantrymen and by 50 loyal sowars of the 12th Irregulars, under the command of Captain William Johnson and the General’s nephew, Charles Havelock, led the way across the newly repaired bridge of boats into Oudh. By the evening of September 20, leaving 300 men to hold Cawnpore, the whole force had crossed the Ganges, with General Havelock in official command, and his two brigades under General Neill and Colonel Hamilton, of the 78th.
The rebels opposed them at their old camping ground at Mungalwar and were brushed aside; the column—free at last of the scourge of cholera—advanced through the once fiercely contested battlefields at Unao and Busseratgunj and, in heavy rain, reached the Sai River at Bunni, driving the fleeing enemy before them in disorder. Here, with Lucknow only sixteen miles distant, a royal salute was fired to announce the column’s impending arrival to the garrison. The Sai was crossed on September 23 in fine weather. After a hard-fought battle with some 10,000 rebels two miles from the city, the Alam Bagh Palace was captured, the cavalry and horsed guns pursuing the broken remnants of the enemy force right up to the heavily defended Char Bagh bridge over the canal, whence the mosques, minarets, and domed palaces of Lucknow itself could be seen clearly.
The British column bivouacked in and around the Alam Bagh that night.The next day was spent resting by the troops and in careful reconnaissance by Havelock and Outram and their senior staff officers.The two generals were not in agreement as to the best way in which to gain the Residency, but, owing to the waterlogged state of the ground—which rendered moving the heavy guns well-nigh impossible—Havelock finally consented to abandon his own plan in favor of that put forward by Outram.
This entailed crossing by the Char Bagh bridge and—instead of advancing through a maze of heavily defended streets direct to the Residency—to take a circuitous route along the canal bank to the then undefended Sikander Bagh Palace, from the shelter of which the final advance would be made under cover of two other walled palaces, leaving only 500 yards of the Khas Bazaar between the column and its objective, the Bailey Guard gate of the Residency. Accordingly, all the sick and wounded and half of Eyre’s heavy guns were brought within the walls of the captured Alam Bagh, and, leaving 300 men under Major MacIntyre of the 78th to defend it, the final advance on Lucknow began on September 25.
The Char Bagh bridge was taken with great gallantry by a party of Madras Fusiliers and 84th, led by Colonel Tytler, Havelock’s chief of staff, and his son Harry, the column’s D.A.A.G., but at bitter cost, almost half of Maude’s gunners being killed and Outram being wounded in the arm. With infantry volunteers replacing the gunners and led gallantly by Neill, the advance along the canal bank continued. The Sikander Bagh was reached without much opposition, the rebels having been taken by surprise and unprepared for the route chosen by the British column.
Recovering from their surprise, however, they launched an attack on the rear-guard of the 78th Highlanders and the Volunteer Cavalry, then covering the crossing of the baggage and ammunition trains.The attack was beaten off, with severe losses on both sides but in the resultant delay and confusion, the Highlanders and the Volunteers—instead of following the main body to the Sikander Baghtook a more direct route. It was a providential error, for it brought them out at the rear of the Kaiser Bagh Palace, from which fiercely defended stronghold a battery of twenty-four-pounder guns had brought Havelock’s column to a halt, forcing them to take refuge in a narrow passageway formed by the walls of the Moti Mahal Palace, still a mile from the Residency. Highlanders and Volunteers charged the rebel guns from the rear and, bayoneting the gunners, put two and the twenty-four-pounders out of action—temporarily at least—before rejoining the main body, which now advanced through the king’s stables to halt again under cover of the walls of the Chutter Munzil Palace.
The light was beginning to fade and the men were weary from their exertions and the heavy fighting; the Kaiser Bagh guns and those in the one-time Mess House of the 32nd had caught the leading regiments in a savage cross-fire, causing many casualties as they battled their way into the defended stables. Outram advised a halt during the hours of darkness, to enable the men to rest and the baggage train and rear-guard to catch up, but Havelock—fearful that the garrison of Lucknow might fall to the prolonged artillery attack no
w being launched against the Residency—was determined to go on. The men, too, despite their weariness, were eager to reach their objective, the memory of the Cawnpore massacre still vivid in their minds.They had been inspired also by the news, which had reached them in camp at the Alam Bagh, that Delhi had been recaptured, and they greeted their little General’s decision to “push on and get it over” with heartening cheers when, reluctantly, Outram acceded to it.
Hitherto, although he had officially relinquished command of the relief force to Havelock, Outram’s advice had never been ignored and the result had been, all too often, the confusion of a divided command. But now Henry Havelock stood firm. He knew the fighting spirit of the men he led—at Mungalwar, during an inspection, he had claimed that every one deserved the name of “hero” and, in a loud, clear voice reminiscent of the Havelock of old, he gave his orders.
The wounded among them his courageous son Harry—the baggage train, and the two heavy guns were to remain inside the Moti Mahal Palace, with a guard of two companies of the 90th, under their commanding officer, Colonel Campbell. The field batteries, guided by Captain Moorsom and under strong escort, were to seek a different and safer route to the Residency, since the street leading through the Khas Bazaar was obstructed by trenches and therefore impassible for them.
