Zemindar

by Valerie Fitzgerald

  However, Sir Colin, unlike others before him, was true to his word, and before noon on the 14th we heard guns firing in the direction of the Dilkusha. Soon we could watch their smoke rising in slow peaceful puffs above the trees of the park, and by nightfall beacons on both the Dilkusha and the Martinière indicated that our relievers had accomplished their object for the day and were in possession of both buildings.

  As if to warn us not to allow those two far-off flames to raise our hopes too high, the pandies that night bombarded us with a concentrated enthusiasm that put the Old Garrison in mind of the worst nights of July.

  Next day brought anti-climax. It had been expected that Sir Colin would push on towards us, but no amount of scanning the treed horizon with anxious fieldglasses could raise the hint of a movement. At noon, troops of the enemy, both horse and foot, were seen to move out towards the Martinière with drums, bugles and fifes, and green flags flying. Then, after an anxious few hours, they were seen returning at a more accelerated pace than they had gone forth, and a few cheers rang out in the garrison at the sight. At dusk a semaphore was discerned on the roof of the Martinière, and after the usual delays, mistakes and rereadings, the message was passed to the garrison: ‘Advance tomorrow!’

  When darkness fell, Sir Colin began a heavy bombardment of some objective to his left, a ruse to mislead the enemy into thinking he would follow the same route as had the previous relief, for in fact, when morning came, he would approach us by a circuitous march to the right. For a while Kate and I stood on the verandah and watched shells soaring up like tailed comets among the stars, sometimes bursting in flight to light the whole eastern sky with their vicious radiance. It was not so much the pyrotechnics that interested us, as the novel sensation of knowing that those shells and rockets were aimed at someone other than ourselves. When Kate was driven inside by the cold, I remained where I was, glad to be alone in the noisy night with my thoughts.

  It was the fourth day of Oliver’s absence, the fifth night. The strain of not seeing him was becoming even more unendurable than the waiting for Sir Colin. The latter’s arrival now admitted of no conjecture. It was merely a matter of time, perhaps of only a few hours. But Oliver? Where was he? Could he have left the entrenchment? The idea was absurd, of course, but it haunted me nevertheless.

  Early on the following morning, the 140th day of the siege, the garrison began to crowd up on to any roof strong enough to hold a man, to enjoy the excitement of watching Sir Colin’s advance.

  For a while I too watched from the roof of the hospital, until a neighbour at the rail told me that Sir Colin’s troops were storming the Sikander Bagh (Alexander’s Garden), a large Mogul park enclosed in brick walls of massive size and height, and that the glints of light we now and then caught between the trees was the sun shining on massed bayonets as the men forced their way in. ‘Hand to hand it will be now,’ the man beside me murmured. ‘Rotten tough going; a bloody carnage it will be, though, once they’re in, the pandies will have no escape—not if we have enough men, that is.’ I climbed down to the ward, wanting to see no more.

  Through the day the battle continued. Building by building, palace by palace, mosque by domed mosque, and garden by garden, the inexorable tide pushed slowly towards us, while the guns grew nearer and the whitey-yellow smoke hung more thickly over the trees. Beyond the Chathar Manzil the new batteries were brought into play, the mines were sprung to breach the wall, and in the afternoon, at Havelock’s order, the ‘Advance’ was sounded and at last our own columns of assault sallied out, cheering, to fight in the open.

  That night a further new battery was thrown up at the most forward position we had won, and a howitzer and two heavy guns, with which it was to be armed, were manhandled into position.

  Early in the evening of the following day, November 17th, we heard in the distance the sound of cheering. Gradually it grew louder and nearer, as by word of mouth the news travelled with the cheers that General Outram and Sir Colin Campbell had met and the second relief was officially effected.

  Later we learned that it was Henry Kavanagh who had led Outram through a tumbled laneway near the Moti Mahal to where Sir Colin waited to shake him by the hand. At the time, however, we merely listened, awestruck, as slowly the cheers grew, travelling through groups of grimy men holding the far-flung palaces, by way of shouts and waved muskets and shots in the air, to signal the men behind them in batteries, earthworks and embattled orchards, until, as the joyful sound approached our populated walls, we knew it could mean nothing other than that the final meeting of the two forces had taken place.

  They told us that that same cheer had travelled away from us, through the Shah Najaf and the Sikander Bagh and the Martinière, all the way back to the Dilkusha, so that, had one been able to hear it, the entire route fought over by Sir Colin and his men was loud with the huzzahs of victory.

  This second relief, we found, however, was very different to the first.

  No swarms of strange soldiery burst noisily into the entrenchment with tears on their faces, swinging children to their shoulders in joy at finding them alive. Most of Sir Colin’s troops were needed to hold open the route they had won, and only a comparatively few officers and men wandered through the enclave, viewing with incredulity the paucity of our defences and the shattered structures we had clung to so stubbornly.

  They were a different breed of men too, at first view, from the battle-weary veterans of many engagements who had accompanied Outram and Havelock. Blue-coated staff officers, correctly accoutred and adequately weaponed; storied stalwarts of the 93rd Highlanders in tartan and black-feathered bonnets; black-bearded Sikhs in their new drab uniforms called after the colour of earth ‘khaki’; the 90th, in the familiar scarlet and white; sepoys of the 53rd Native Infantry in French grey. Strangest of all to our eyes were the sailors of the warship Shannon that, bound for China, had been deflected to Calcutta, where the crew had disembarked and marched up-country to our aid, hauling their eight great guns by hand a good part of the way. In their naval blue and still wearing their round straw hats, they were spoken of with wonder by our sepoys as being ‘four feet tall, four feet broad and capable of carrying big guns on their heads’.

  All these newcomers were so well-dressed, so comfortably booted, that to us it seemed they must be amateurs of war, and we looked on them with a mixture of envy and resentment. Then we began to hear what they had done for us, in their fine uniforms and footgear, and changed our minds. They had fought a deadly succession of battles for our safety, almost within sight of us all the time, each one of which would assume in time the quality of legend. The battle for the Dilkusha, where the pandies fled with the fleeing deer; for the Martinière, whose grey turrets were reflected in its lake flowered strangely with red-coated pandies floating face-down among the water lilies; for the bloody Sikander Bagh, where the toll of enemy dead reached the symbolic number of 1,857; for the Shah Najaf, a strongpoint abandoned in despair by the enemy, fearful the sailors’ guns would ignite five thousand pounds of stored powder. Not a foot was traversed without a struggle. The few short miles between the Dilkusha and the Moti Mahal cost Sir Colin the lives of five hundred men.

  We ate white bread that night, a small portion each, and butter, and each received an orange and a tot of rum. Letters had arrived too, wagonloads of mail, newspapers and periodicals from home. Kate received several letters and wept as she read them, for her correspondents had not known of George’s death. But there was nothing for Charles, Emily or myself; our family could not have known that we had left Hassanganj or even that Hassanganj was no more. As I watched Kate weeping over her letters, I tried again to visualize Mount Bellew and the kind stolid faces of my aunt and uncle, but again the effort failed me. The knot of fear around my heart grew more constricted as I thought of England.

  On the following morning we were told that Sir Colin Campbell wanted the women and children to leave the entrenchment that same day. This order did not affect us unduly, for we had
few preparations to make and very little to pack; the women in the more favoured houses of the civilian staff, however, set up a cry of outrage that forced Sir Colin to give us twenty-four hours’ grace. Then we were told that not only the women and children would be leaving; Sir Colin had ordered the whole garrison to be withdrawn and the Residency completely evacuated.

  We had all been aware that the dependants and the sick would leave as soon as the route to Cawnpore was secure, but that the men themselves, all the men, would also have to retire was greeted with downright unbelief.

  For one hundred and forty-two days we had fought and endured in the belief that more than our own lives were at stake. I will not plead an altruism amounting to heroism; naturally our own lives and those of our loved ones were our first and most fundamental concern. But yet, when we thought of the matter, we had believed that, given the time and means to retake Lucknow, our long endurance would contribute to the overthrow of anarchy in the entire Kingdom of Oudh, and this belief had helped us to combat more than the pandies’ fire. It had given a measure of meaning to our sufferings.

  We could forget the hunger, the privation, the discomfort; the sweltering heat of July and the cutting cold of November nights; we could forget the sickness and the suppurating wounds, the smell, the dirt, the lice, rats, flies and mosquitoes. We could not forget the dead, who had died for the same hope for which we had struggled to live. Their lives, we felt suddenly, had been given uselessly.

  I suppose we were too tired and strained to be rational, but the knowledge that within a day the old enclosure would lie empty filled some with wrath, most with bitterness and all with a sharp unlikely grief.

  In the hospital, to which, having few preparations to make for our departure, Kate and I repaired as usual, the mood of the men was dour. A few loads of supplies and comforts had been brought in for the wounded, and long-cold pipes glowed comfortably as the men muttered and grumbled among themselves. They were all the familiar faces I saw about me, Sir Colin’s wounded having been removed to the Dilkusha, but marked with a discontented sullenness that scarcely fitted the occasion. I saw fear written on those plain, unshaven faces, too, for no fighting man could remain ignorant of the long torture of jogging litters or crowded, red-curtained ambulance carts, which would be his lot if wounded.

  ‘’E’s crazy, miss, and I don’t mind what ’e did at Balaclava,’ one man said to me, speaking of Sir Colin. ‘We got to stay put and beat the niggers back. ’Tain’t possible to get us all out and safe away through miles of pandies, nor yet you ladies and the nippers. We’ll be slaughtered in our doolies same as the poor bloody beggars was when ’Avelock come in!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ I countered sharply, because the same thought had occurred to me. ‘They are busy clearing a way for us now, digging trenches and erecting cover so that we will be quite safe. And don’t you hear the barrage? Those are our guns—a breaching fire on the Kaiser Bagh. The new troops will be with us all the way, they say, and we cannot possibly come to any harm.’

  The man subsided, muttering, but I knew I had failed to convince him.

  That evening Sir Colin called for a general muster of the combatants of the Old Garrison, every man and boy, white, brown or brindle, who had carried a gun.

  It was a long time since a parade had been called in the square before the Resident’s House. The last time must have been on the morning of the Battle of Chinhat, when, newly come to martial interests, I had watched with a thrill of excitement as Sir Henry Lawrence led his men, polished, pipe-clayed and swaggering under the eyes of their womenfolk, through the Baillie Guard—and to defeat. Now, four and a half months later, I watched again, but in a very different temper.

  Sir Colin and his staff stood on the broken steps of the Resident’s House, and had to wait an unconscionable time for our motley collection of men to gather and form up in what they hoped was correct military style.

  Sir Colin was a small man, untidy in appearance, with a brown face wrinkled as a walnut under a thatch of curly grey hair. He had many nicknames, from the ‘Auld Coudy’ of his own Scots of the 93rd Highlanders, to ‘Old Khabardar’ (go carefully) of the natives, to ‘Sir Crawling Camel’, as the young officers dubbed him who found his concentration on detail too irksome for time of war. The entrenchment was already enlivened by rumours and stories concerning him. He had fought as a private soldier at the retreat of Corunna, almost a lifetime before. His prowess in the Crimea was known to all, and how at Balaclava, instead of forming his troops into the wonted hollow square, he had thrown them out in a thin extended front that decimated the Russians’ charging cavalry, earning for his 93rd the appellation ‘The Thin Red Line Tipped with Steel’. It was said of him that, in time of war, he lay down to sleep fully accoutred and wearing his boots, and was so accessible to his men, he was prepared to see them even in his bath.

  As we waited, the waning sun pulled long shadows across the space of beaten earth on which the garrison was assembling; a chill wind lifted my short hair as I watched, and I saw Sir Colin shiver slightly and pull his blue patrol jacket closer over his chest. He removed his pith helmet and ran his fingers impatiently through his mass of curly hair, adding to the general dishevelment of his appearance.

  Many of the women had gathered to see their menfolk parade, and men of the new relief lounged around curiously, eyeing, in part derision and part admiration, the remnants of our force—something less than five hundred men of all ranks still capable of standing to attention. A further two hundred lay in the hospital.

  Justly, the foremost ranks were composed of the men of the 32nd Foot, who had borne the brunt not only of the siege, but of the forays and sorties that had taken place since the first relief. Two hundred and fifty remained of the nine hundred and fifty who had marched into Lucknow the previous December. Behind the 32nd, sternly to attention, stood a couple of hundred sepoys and sowars, Sikhs, Punjabis, men of Oudh. Then the volunteer cavalry, long since bereft of their horses: planters, merchants, professional men from the city, and the odd unfortunate traveller, like Charles, cut off in Lucknow by the rebellion. Behind these again were the covenanted clerks and the uncovenanted, and at the very rear fifteen of the older boys of the Martinière School, proudly shouldering the muskets that proved them men. White men, brown men, Eurasians; soldiers, scholars, fortune-hunters and schoolboys. Brave men, all.

  A hush fell as Brigadier Inglis, sword raised, advanced to the steps to accompany Sir Colin down the lines of ragged upright figures.

  Not a man wore uniform; even the Brigadier, with a couple of pistols in his belt, looked more like a buccaneer than a soldier. A few men wore shakos still; some sported broad-brimmed felt hats; a few had pith sunhelmets or cloth caps, but most were bareheaded. Their breeches were patched and shabby, their shirts dyed in ink or curry powder. Boots were a rarity, shoes were tied together with string; a few were barefoot. Here and there a man proudly stuck out his chest beneath a faded scarlet jacket; the rest, having discarded their makeshift cloaks of native quilts for the parade, shivered in the evening chill.

  Sir Colin, very erect, his small white beard out-thrust pugnaciously, marched with military exactitude up and down the tattered ranks. Sometimes he paused before a man for a few words; sometimes he shook his head, in unbelief it seemed to me. On the steps Outram stood with his arms crossed on his burly chest and nodded his head in silent approbation of the scene. Near him, Havelock, supported by an aide, bowed his head in what was probably prayer.

  Among the women crowding the area, hardly an eye was dry, for hardly a life had remained untouched by personal tragedy since that last parade on the morning of Chinhat. Of we four females from the Gaol—for Jessie held Pearl in her arms— two had been widowed on the same day, one had lost her mother, and only I had been bereaved of a comparatively distant relative. Our group was representative of all the other women gathered there.

  ‘George! Oh, George!’ I heard Kate whisper to herself, and saw her fumble in the pocket of her skirt
for her rosary. Jessie, not much given to tears, sniffed with what was probably sorrow, though it might have been indignation at Kate’s tears.

  ‘Well,’ observed a burly ‘Shannon’ standing near us, ‘even to a sailor, they don’t look much like soldiers, but by all that’s holy, they are God’s good fighting men!’

  ‘Aye! Oh, aye! And so were them that’s gone, lad,’ sighed Jessie. ‘So were them that’s gone!’

  My eyes searched the silent ranks for Oliver. Charles I found soon enough among the volunteers, and then Toddy-Bob, whose shortness made a gap in the line like a drawn tooth. Ishmial I could not see; he was probably on the far side of the square, among the other loyal servants who had borne arms with the garrison. But where was Oliver? If I could only mark where he was, I would not let him escape without speaking to him. And then I remembered. Of course, Oliver had not made part of the Old Garrison.

  Disappointment brought tears to my eyes. Ever since the parade was called, I had promised myself that at last I would see him, talk to him, explain that night on the Gaol verandah; that much at least I must do. How could I have been so thoughtless, so forgetful? Perhaps because, despite his absence, he had been so present in my mind all through the first months of the siege, I had somehow deceived myself into the belief that he had been physically present.

  With so many men now flooding every inch of space before the Resident’s House, and with dusk darkening the scene by the moment, I knew there was no use in looking for him among the bystanders, even if he were present, which, in view of his opinions on military matters, seemed unlikely. My interest in the parade immediately abated.

  We returned to the Gaol in a melancholy silence, all of us occupied with thoughts of the men we had lost.