Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  We are told in the Bible that stripes shall be meted out according to faults, and if hanging is sufficient punishment for such wretches, it is too severe***** for ordinary mutineers. If I had them in my power to-day, and knew that I were to die tomorrow, I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with a perfectly easy conscience.66

  Nicholson even asked his colleague Herbert Edwardes to support ‘a Bill for the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the women and children at Delhi’. ‘The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening’, Nicholson explained.67 ‘There is a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad’, Canning warned the queen. ‘Not one man in ten seems to think the hanging and shooting of 40, or 50,000 mutineers besides other rebels, can be otherwise than practicable and right.’

  By the time he reached Cawnpore, Havelock was the hero of the piece. The public loved to see someone keeping the fight alive, even if most of his ‘battles’ had been small engagements which only served to scatter the mutineers, leaving them to regroup elsewhere. The harsh reality was that Havelock was distressingly short of men. He had lost hundreds of soldiers to the heat, and disarmed his native cavalry for fear they would mutiny. The need to leave precious troops to garrison Cawnpore would weaken his column still further. Havelock, however, was not the sort of general to be dismayed by inadequate manpower, dwindling supplies, blistering heat and suchlike humdrum practicalities, so on 29 July he set out again for Lucknow. After two days and two engagements which cost him a third of his ammunition, he pulled back. ‘My force is reduced by sickness and repeated combats to 1,364 rank and file with ten ill-equipped guns’, he telegraphed. ‘I could not therefore, move on against Lucknow now with any prospect of success.’ Nevertheless, five days later he tried again, but, as before, was forced to retire on Mungulwar. The men were exhausted. His surgeon warned that cholera had taken hold and would wipe out his troops within six weeks. ‘My 900 soldiers may be opposed to 5,000 organised troops’, warned Havelock on 19 August. ‘The loss of a battle would ruin everything in this part of India.’ He recommended a pause in the offensive. ‘I entirely concur’, replied Campbell.68

  Lucknow seemed doomed. ‘The hope of the poor garrison holding out till a larger force collects again is very faint indeed, for we know of them now, on 16 August, hemmed in, and provisions running short’, wrote Lady Canning. ‘If they stand and are rescued, it will be almost a miracle!’69 Tactically speaking, Lucknow was not the first priority and the cost in lives to relieve the garrison might exceed the number saved. Some in Calcutta argued the game was not worth the candle,70 but Lucknow had caught the public imagination. It had to be relieved.

  The question was not the will, but the means. With Havelock’s force depleted, Campbell would need to send a new army from Calcutta, but he had not the men to spare. So far, with a few minor exceptions,71 the mutiny had yet to envelop the Madras and Bombay presidencies, but if Campbell stripped them of British troops, they might become ungovernable. Depleted by the expedition to Persia, Madras had just one cavalry and five infantry regiments of the queen’s troops.72 Bombay was similarly stretched. As it was, Canning had already requested two battalions from Madras, one from Burma and all that could be spared from Ceylon and the Punjab. Lord Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, had asked for troops from Mauritius and the Cape, while Canning had despatched steamers to Singapore to recall the 2,500 troops heading for China,73 but all this would take time. The authorities at the Cape did not receive Elphinstone’s request until the first week of August,74 and it would be a couple of months before any battalions they sent reached India. By the time Campbell arrived in Calcutta, those few extra troops that had landed, such as the 37th Foot from Ceylon and the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers (diverted on their way to China), had already gone upcountry.75

  Materiel was just as scarce as men. In rebel hands lay the great arsenal at Delhi and the gun carriage factory at Futtehghur. In three months, the Company had done little to make up the shortfall. ‘They had prepared no means of transport; they had no horses, either for cavalry or artillery; Enfield rifle ammunition was deficient,’ complained Malleson, ‘flour was even running out; guns, gun carriages and harness for field batteries were unfit for service or did not exist.’ Indians were renowned for providing an army’s needs in short order, but ‘owing to the state of the country – the people hanging back in all directions – we have the greatest difficulty in securing even an insufficient supply of carriage, food and camp-followers’, reported Campbell.76 The thousands of camel drivers, gharrywans, butchers, bakers, bheesties, nautch girls and dobbie wallahs, chary of being branded collaborators, made Campbell’s supply problems quantitatively harder. He telegraphed his concerns to the Duke of Cambridge. ‘The cry is for new troops, that the Bengal army has entirely disappeared, that neither the Madras nor Bombay can be trusted’, the duke told Panmure:

  I must bring to your notice the wants of the Indian Army. It is clear from Sir Colin’s letter that it is deficient of everything, not a spare set of harness in store, no shoes, no ammunition, no man able to make use of the beautiful machinery sent out to make Minié bullets. It is almost incredible, yet from the first I feared it and told you so.

  Panmure was blasé. ‘I think things are in train to meet all deficiencies complained of by Sir Colin’, he replied, sure that revolt was a flash in the pan. ‘The Mutiny in India is no doubt vast, but it will vanish as suddenly as it sprung up; Delhi once taken, the mutineers will melt away.’77

  Campbell did enjoy one windfall. HMS Shannon, from the China flotilla – a state-of-the-art screw steam frigate, bristling with twenty 32-pounders, thirty 8in guns, one massive 68-pounder, and 300 men from the Royal Marine Light Infantry – had anchored in Calcutta on 8 August. On board was Lord Elgin, Ambassador Extraordinary to China. He placed the Shannon’s crew and arsenal at Campbell’s disposal,78 and ordered the captain of HMS Pearl to do the same. As in the Second Sikh War, there was a chronic shortage of heavy artillery in India, so the navy’s big guns were particularly welcome. Five days after Campbell’s arrival a Naval Brigade of these sailors and Marines left by steamer for Allahabad. This river route, a journey of 809 miles,79 normally took twenty to thirty days, but after ‘unusually severe’ rains ‘the strength of the stream makes the progress of the steamers very slow,’ reported Lady Canning.80 The alternative was not much quicker. The railway from Calcutta extended only 120 miles as far as Raneegunge, ‘a rambling chaotic place, a mere jumble of rusty nails and dusty trucks’.81 From there it was a 380-mile march through rebel territory up the Grand Trunk Road to Allahabad. ‘Think of moving an army, with all its appliances from Land’s End to John O’Groats a century ago’,* wrote the Rev. Alexander Duff, ‘and it may give some faint conception of the difficulty of moving an army and its stores by land from Calcutta to the capital of Oudh.’82

  Campbell knew the cost of marching troops through the tropics in summer, and so, to get what men he could muster to Havelock, he decided instead to organise a relay of bullock carts from Raneegunge to Allahabad. They were basic: ‘two wheels, without the faintest attempt at springs, and a fragile roof, made of thin staves of wood, covered with painted canvas, the curtains of which may be let down or rolled up at will’ recalled one soldier, ‘travelling at the brisk average pace of from two to two and a half miles per hour!’83 The officers’ allowance of one cart between two caused much harrumphing – they were used to bringing as many as thirty servants – but Campbell insisted impedimenta be kept to a minimum. ‘The commander-in-chief has most wisely reduced the amount of tent accommodation for officers and men far below the ordinary luxurious Indian allowance’, Canning informed the queen.84 To set an example, Campbell brought ‘perhaps the smallest retinue ever seen with a Commander-in-Chief in India’: a simple bell tent, ‘undistinguished by aught else except its position’.85**

  The rank and file travelled in convoys of twenty-five to forty wagons, six men to a cart, fou
r inside and two marching alongside on guard. ‘The bullocks and buffaloes, with their coolie drivers, were changed every eight or nine miles,’ explained Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander, ‘but these drivers persisted in going to sleep, and, falling off their seats, were frequently killed by the wagons going over their heads.’86 It was painfully slow, but reliable. Aside from a short break around noon, the bullocks plodded on day and night. Starting with fifty men a day, Campbell’s bullock train was soon carrying 200.87 It ran counter to the ‘action first, think afterwards’ school of strategy embraced by men like Edwardes and Lawrence, but it got the troops there intact and in good health.

  The distance to Lucknow was twice as far as Wellington had trekked across Spain, so Campbell wanted a solid supply chain in place before starting an offensive. His plan was to get men and materiel forward, but wait until the cold season before campaigning.88 Inevitably, this infuriated those cocksure subalterns desperate to win their spurs. ‘On my arrival here I found officers of every rank anxious to be sent at least as divisional commanders, and at the head of small columns independent of all control’, Campbell complained to John Lawrence.89 He refused almost all of them. This failure to allow ‘active columns under energetic commanders moving about the revolted provinces’ was inexcusable, argued Burne (one of Campbell’s principal critics), but even 500 men were precious and, once in rebel territory, there was a very real danger detachments would be ambushed, besieged or massacred. Small columns could only chase rebels from one area to another, not pacify the countryside. Campbell preferred to mass his troops rather than, as Havelock had done, fritter them away in endless skirmishes. As Fortescue observed, ‘There is one principle in warfare which, though constantly transgressed by the British … remains eternally true: namely that to send forth a weak army and reinforce it by driblets is to ensure for it the greatest possible wastage and the least possible power.’90 It took more character to wait until he had a strong army before moving, than it did to launch a dozen forays which would win headlines but lose the war.

  Unfortunately for Campbell, the Lucknow garrison was setting the timetable, and they could wait no longer. On 23 August Havelock forwarded Inglis’s latest message (already a week old): ‘If you hope to save this force no time must be lost in pushing forward’, he had warned. ‘We are daily being attacked by the enemy, who are within a few yards of our defences … If our native force, who are losing confidence, leave us, I do not know how the defences are to be manned.’91 Disease was rife and supplies running low. Fresh vegetables were particularly scarce and, following the rains, the chopped straw packed in the racquets court had swelled and brought down the roof and walls.92 By putting the garrison on half rations, Inglis thought he could eke out the food until 10 September, but Havelock would still be too weak to relieve him in the interim. Cholera had reduced his column to 700 men fit for duty. ‘If regiments cannot be sent me, I see no alternative but abandoning for a time the advantages I have gained’, Havelock warned his commander-in-chief. If more troops were not promised by ‘return of telegraph’, he would withdraw to Allahabad.93 All Campbell could send were kind words.

  Reinforcing Havelock was proving impossible. Each time Campbell despatched troops, they were commandeered by local administrators.94 ‘At one period, out of about 2,400 who were proceeding by the different routes to Allahabad, 1,800 were, on one pretence or another, laid hold of by the civil power,’ reported Major Alison, Campbell’s military secretary.95 Canning was not helping. As far as he was concerned, it was ‘impossible to adhere rigidly to the rule of keeping our whole moveable European Force together, and to avoid all detached operations’, so on 22 August he instructed troops be despatched to Patna to protect the opium crop.96

  Meanwhile, those ‘energetic’ commanders already in rebel territory were blazing a trail of death and desolation. Brigadier Neill, ‘the Victorian militant Christian personified’,97 was a case in point. His impatience with tin gods had earned him a good press as a man of action. When his troops were boarding their train in Calcutta, ‘A jack-in-office station-master called out to me very insolently that I was late, and that the train would not wait for me a moment’, explained Neill:

  I put him under charge of a sergeant’s guard … The other officials were equally threatening and impertinent … I then placed a guard over the engineer and stoker, got all my men safely into the train and then released the railway people. Off went the train, only ten minutes after time … I told the gentlemen that their conduct was that of traitors and rebels.98

  Thus far, anyone might warm to him, but once in mutineer country Neill’s brusqueness had turned to brutality. As he advanced towards Allahabad, villages were burnt to the ground, often with the inhabitants still cowering inside. Anyone with the faintest whiff of rebellion about them was summarily slaughtered. One historian estimated the death toll at 6,000.99 Neill’s subordinate, Major Renaud, was just as merciless. His ‘executions of natives in the line of the march were indiscriminate to the last degree’, reported Russell. ‘In two days forty-two men were hanged on the roadside, and a batch of twelve men were executed because their faces were “turned the wrong way” when they were met on the march. All the villages in his front were burned when he halted.’ ‘His executions were so numerous’, Russell continued, ‘that one of the officers attached to his column had to remonstrate with him on the ground that if he depopulated the country he could get no supplies for the men.’100 Those fears were well founded. Soon, ‘camp-followers of all kinds were “almost unprocurable” … Everywhere the terror-stricken Natives stood aloof from the chastising Englishmen.’101

  ‘Sir Colin is utterly opposed to such extreme and reckless severity,’ confirmed Russell, ‘though he is the last man in the world to spare mutinous soldiers with arms in their hands.’102 ‘He seems for every vigorous measure, and for fairness and justice’, wrote Lady Canning, but ‘there is nothing bloodthirsty about him’.103 ‘I well remember how emphatically I once heard him express his disgust when … he entered a mango-tope full of rotting corpses, where one of the special commissioners had passed through with a moveable column a few days before’,104 recalled Sergeant Forbes-Mitchell of the 93rd.

  That said, Campbell had to be careful not to muzzle Neill, and appear soft-hearted. Mercy had already nearly cost Canning his job. In June 1857 the Indian government had appointed commissioners with summary powers to try mutineers. They were soon imposing the same ruthlessly partial justice as Colonel Leahy had done thirty years before in Demerara. ‘The innocent as well as the guilty, without regard of age or sex, were indiscriminately punished’, confirmed one officer. ‘Stories went about of people who had sent trusted servants out in the morning on an errand and in the evening recognised them on the gallows, hanged for rebellion’, recalled one civil servant.105 ‘It would greatly add to the difficulties of settling the country hereafter, if a spirit of animosity against their rulers were engendered in the minds of the people,’ Canning had warned, ‘and if their feelings were embittered by the remembrance of needless bloodshed.’ Consequently, on 31 July, the governor-general clarified his policy in a private circular to senior officers. The burning of villages was to be a last resort. Only those rebels who were guilty of violence could expect death. Those who surrendered unarmed, or had simply deserted, would just be imprisoned. When this pronouncement leaked, Canning was ‘assailed with a storm of obloquy for which we should in vain seek a precedent in history’, as Trevelyan put it:

  Punch, ‘Too civil by half’, 7 November 1857.

  To read the newspapers of that day, you would believe that Lord Canning was at the bottom of the whole mutiny … His crying sin was this, that he took little or no pleasure in the extermination of the people whom he had been commissioned by his Sovereign to govern and protect.106

  In India he was dismissed as the ‘Pandy Peer’107 while in London The Times decried ‘the Clemency of Canning’.* The Lancaster Gazette condemned his ‘namby-pamby proclamations in favour of leniency and s
oft dealing’.108 Punch printed a cartoon of Canning staying the hand of a British soldier about to bayonet a sepoy, while in the foreground lay the inevitable dead white babies.109 Back in Calcutta, locals started a petition to have the governor-general recalled.110

  Campbell had to appear tough or they would be calling for his head too. He could not afford to condemn Neill, already hailed as ‘a sort of demi-god’ and the ‘Saviour of India’.111 ‘Neill’s wholesome severity, I may here remark, met with universal applause’, as another soldier reported.112 When John Grant, the new Lieutenant-Governor of the Central Provinces, reportedly countermanded Neill’s executions in Allahabad, there was such an outcry that Canning had to launch an official enquiry. As it transpired, Neill was just limbering up. When he heard of the massacres at Cawnpore, Neill wrote:

  I can never spare a Sepoy again. All that fall into my hands will be dead men … I wish to show the natives of India that the punishment inflicted by us for such deeds will be the heaviest, the most revolting to their feelings, and why they must ever remember, however objectionable in the estimation of some of our Brahminized, infatuated, elderly gentlemen.113