Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  At dawn on 12 November they set off. Despite Campbell’s baggage restrictions, it still ‘seemed to a European eye endless. Mile after mile of camels, walking patiently in long strings, and ceaseless rows of hackeries, drawn by strong but slow-paced bullocks, mingled with camp followers dressed in every imaginable variety of Eastern costume.’190 The cavalry and horse artillery easily swept aside 2,000 rebel sepoys contesting the way, and within a few hours Campbell was inside the Alumbagh. Here he found some of the elephants deposited back in September, now so emaciated every backbone stood out through the flesh like ‘an upturned deep-keeled sailing boat in a somewhat dilapidated condition’.191

  A semaphore post had been erected on the Alumbagh and another 3 miles away on the Residency (see Plate 28).* Communicating in secret across rebel-held Lucknow was made possible by a code Kavanagh had brought with him, but when Outram’s garrison saw Campbell’s first test message through their telescopes, ‘to our intense disappointment and confusion, we could make nothing intelligible of it. The first four letters were a complete puzzle – M Y Y R.’ In their excitement they had reversed the symbols. ‘We forthwith proceeded to develop the new key. The first four letters did not appear to throw much clearer light upon the puzzle. We read them as “goon.”’ Gradually, as more letters appeared, they spelt ‘Go on we are ready.’192

  Campbell set great store by, as Kavanagh put it, ‘artfully misleading persons as to his design’.193 The men still believed they would be following Havelock’s route over the Charbagh Bridge so, the next day, while the army rested to allow the heavy guns to catch up, Campbell led a reconnaissance in that direction to reinforce the perception among the rebels as well.

  Leaving the 75th Foot to guard the Alumbagh, on the morning of the 14th he advanced on the Dil Khooshah. ‘The country presented no obstacles to our march, a great portion of which lay through fields of Indian corn and other cultivation’, recalled Assistant Quartermaster-General Captain George Allgood. ‘An enclosed gurhee** at the village of Bunda, about 1,000 yards from the wall of the Dil Khooshah Park, was occupied by a small party of the enemy, but they were soon driven out by a few round shot from a light field battery.’194 The cavalry and horse artillery experienced only light resistance in the park itself. In the middle was the Nawab of Oudh’s four-storey shooting lodge, like many of Lucknow’s palaces, Indian-built but European-inspired, in this case a copy of Vanbrugh’s Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland. Here Campbell set up a field hospital and forward commissariat, leaving half his cavalry, five guns and the 8th Foot under Brigadier Little to protect them. Then it was on to that vast wedding cake of a building, La Martinière, with its ‘eccentric array of statues, the huge lions’ heads, the incongruous columns, arches, pillars, windows, and flights of stairs leading to nothing’.195 ‘A crowd of sepoys were [sic] collected round the building,’ recalled Roberts, ‘and as we showed ourselves on the brow of the hill, a number of round shot came tumbling in amongst us’.196 An hour’s bombardment drove out the rebels, chased across the canal by the Punjab cavalry.

  ‘We had a beautiful view over the buildings of Lucknow from the Martinière’, recalled Lieutenant Lang. ‘Forests of domes, minarets, and gilded pinnacles, stretching away as far as the eye could see.’197 On the school’s high tower Campbell lit beacons to signal his position to Outram, before constructing another semaphore post. Again the troops halted, waiting for Major Ewart’s rearguard, which was escorting ammunition, provisions and carriage for the garrison. Ewart had been delayed several times by the need to form up and face rebel detachments harassing his column. Meanwhile, Brigadiers Little and Russell had suffered one sepoy incursion towards the Dil Khooshah, and Campbell had had to send Hope’s brigade to deter a second. Already the British line of operations looked vulnerable.

  To maintain the fiction that he would attack through the middle of town, Campbell launched a mortar barrage on the Begum’s* Palace and nearby barracks. ‘To further strengthen the belief that operations would be carried on from our left, some of the piquets on our right were drawn in’, Roberts explained. ‘This induced the enemy to make a slight demonstration in that direction. They crossed the canal, but were speedily driven back by the Madras Horse Artillery guns.’198

  By the morning of the 16th Campbell was ready for the final assault. After depositing men at the Alumbagh, the Dil Khooshah and now La Martinière, he had only around 3,000 left. They would have to overwhelm and then guard the string of palaces beside the river leading to the Residency. The first in Campbell’s sights was the Sekundrabagh. Initially the advance towards it was uneventful. The men easily forded the almost dry canal near its junction with the Goomtee and approached to within 150 yards of the palace. Here the road ran past a village, along a deep cutting forming a natural ambush point. Once in the lane, the column came under fierce enfilade fire.** ‘If these fellows allow one of us to get out of this cul-de-sac alive, they deserve every one of them to be hanged’, observed Alison.199 ‘The moment was critical, for our advance guard was jammed up in the narrow street which would scarcely admit of artillery and infantry passing’, explained Allgood. ‘It was, moreover, expected every minute that a direct fire would be opened on us down the lane up which we were advancing.’200

  The Sekundrabagh, from G.W. Forrest’s Selections from the Letters, Despatches and Other State Papers … of the Government of India 1857–58.

  Campbell ordered the 53rd to return fire to the right, while Captain Blunt’s gunners climbed the steep bank beside the road. ‘No commander of any troop of Horse Artillery of any other country in the world would, under any circumstances, have even attempted to negotiate such as bank as Blunt surmounted that forenoon’, wrote Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander.201 ‘The troop passed at a gallop through a cross-fire from the village and Sekundrabagh and opened fire within easy musket-range in a most daring manner’, recalled Campbell, who accompanied them,202 but in opening fire on the palace Blunt’s six guns drew such heavy fire that he lost a third of his troop. A musket ball passed right through one gunner, killing the man instantly, before hitting Campbell in the thigh. ‘It was a moment of acute anxiety,’ recalled Roberts, ‘until it was ascertained that no great damage had been done.’203 The commander-in-chief was left with only a bruise.

  Now that the road was clear of horse artillery, Hope’s 93rd advanced to dislodge the mutineers from the huts to their left, but found themselves facing a loop-holed wall. ‘In at the roof!’ ordered Campbell. ‘Tear off the tiles and go through the roof!’204 With these ancillary buildings occupied, Campbell could concentrate on the Sekundrabagh itself. It looked formidable. The perimeter wall was 20ft high and topped with battlements. Each of the four sides was 450ft long and buttressed at the corners with substantial bastions. ‘There was only one entrance, a gateway on the south side’, explained Roberts, ‘protected by a traverse of earth and masonry, over which was a double-storied guard-room.’205

  As it turned out, the Sekundrabagh’s fortifications proved insubstantial; so insubstantial that the artillery had difficulty establishing a breach. ‘The first shots from our guns passed through the wall, piercing it as though it were a piece of cloth, and without knocking the surrounding brickwork away’, explained Forbes-Mitchell.206 The sappers cut a hole in the bank next to the road to allow through an 18-pounder and an 8in howitzer, but after an hour and a half’s bombardment they had managed to smash only a small hole, ‘not more than 3 feet square and some 3 to 3½ feet from the ground’. Nevertheless, ‘Sir Colin Campbell, having decided that the breach was practicable, directed a bugler of the 93rd to sound the advance and, Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Ewart waving his sword to us, the whole British line rose to their feet with a cheer.’207 Now ‘began a charge which for heroic daring has never been surpassed and rarely equalled’.208 As the pipers struck up ‘On wi’ the Tartan’, towards the breach ran the 93rd, 53rd and 4th Punjab Infantry in a mad dash to be first inside.*

  The hole allowed only one man through at a time. Most we
re killed before they crossed the threshold, but enough made the attempt that a handful succeeded. ‘My feet had scarcely touched the ground inside, when a sepoy fired point blank at me from among the long grass a few yards distant,’ wrote Forbes-Mitchell:

  The bullet struck the thick brass clasp of my waist belt, but with such force that it sent me spinning heels over head [sic] … I was but stunned and regaining my feet and my breath too … I rushed on to the inner court of the building where I saw Ewart bare-headed, his feather bonnet having been shot off his head, engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fight with several of the enemy.209

  Further round the palace the 53rd forced their way in through a window,** while Private John Smith of the Madras Fusiliers, despite wounds from sword and bayonet, got inside via the main gateway.*** The 4th Punjabis made for the bastion at the north-west corner and, according to Gordon-Alexander, ‘effected by themselves, without the aid of artillery, or, I believe, of scaling ladders, a lodgement on the roof’.210

  ‘Cheering and shouting “Remember Cawnpore!” on we went, some at the breach in one of the corner towers and some over the loop-holed mud wall straight at the gate’, reported Lieutenant Lang. ‘Axes and muskets soon smashed in the gate, and then didn’t we get the revenge – the first good revenge I have seen!’211 ‘There was a very narrow staircase on each side of the arched gateway leading to an upper storey, well packed with the enemy’, recalled Wolseley. ‘Without a moment’s hesitation the Sikhs mounted these winding corkscrew-like stairs, and in a few minutes were amidst the enemy, cutting them up with their tulwars and hurling others out of the open windows.’ The Highlanders preferred the cold steel, fighting in threes, the middle man thrusting with his bayonet, protected by two flankers. As Colonel Innes remembered, ‘By the time the bayonet had done its works of retribution, the throats of our men were hoarse with shouting “Cawnpore! You bloody murderers!”’212

  Neither side took prisoners. The sepoys had been urged to ‘capture, put to the sword and annihilate the entire group of these perverted unbelievers and make every effort to extirpate them from this country’.213 They expected no mercy in return. ‘When they had fired their muskets, they hurled them amongst us like javelins, bayonets first,’ wrote Forbes-Mitchell, ‘and then drawing their tulwars, rushed madly on to their destruction, slashing in blind fury with their swords.’214 One rebel held out, up a staircase, for two hours, and only ‘when his ammunition was done, appeared on the roof at top [sic], and with fury, hurled his tulwar down amongst us, and fell amongst a volley of bullets’. ‘Sixty or more were taken alive and put up in a line and they got no mercy’, recalled Lang.’They got kicked and spit at and pricked with swords, and always with “Cawnpore, you scoundrels”, and then they were all shot.’215 Nearly 2,000 rebels were killed.**** ‘I never saw such a sight’, wrote Roberts. ‘They were literally in heaps and, when I went in, were a heaving mass, some dead, but most wounded and unable to get up from the crush. How so many got crowded together I can’t understand. You had to walk over them to cross the court.’216

  With the Sekundrabagh his, Campbell now ordered the storming of the barracks, half a mile to the south. ‘I believe it must have been nearly two o’clock when the 53rd and the 93rd were drawn off from the interior of the enclosure,’ wrote Gordon-Alexander, ‘leaving the Punjabis to dispose of the few men of the garrison who were still alive in various holes and corners of it.’217 At the same time, Brigadier Hope was instructed to occupy the village 300 yards west, next to Campbell’s next target, the Shah Nujif. Set 100 yards back from the road, this domed mausoleum was protected by a high wall. Between the wall and the road lay scattered outbuildings and thick, jungly gardens filled with mutineers. ‘The entrance to it had been covered by a regular work in masonry,’ reported Campbell, ‘and the top of the building was crowned with a parapet. From this, and from the defences in the garden, an unceasing fire of musketry was kept up.’218

  The artillery went ahead to blast a breach, while the 2nd Punjab Infantry stormed the Kuddum Russool, a shrine on a small mound east of the mausoleum. Major Barnston was told to clear the huts and scrub in front with his battalion of detachments: ‘If you cannot force your way in, get your men under cover near it, and come back and tell me what you have done and seen’, Campbell instructed. Under heavy fire, Barnston led his troops forward in skirmishing order and got close enough to set light to some of the outhouses, but as he turned back to report to the commander-in-chief, a shell splinter* from Blunt’s battery caught him in the thigh.219 ‘Whether it was that the men were depressed by the loss of their leader, or that they were not prepared for the very damaging fire which suddenly poured upon them, I know not, but certain it is that they wavered, and for a few minutes there was slight panic’, wrote Roberts. ‘Norman** was the first to grasp the situation. Putting spurs to his horse, he galloped into their midst, and called on them to pull themselves together; the men rallied at once.’220

  Despite shocking casualties*** and the loss of an ammunition wagon to enemy cannon, Peel’s guns maintained their fire for three hours, but without making much impression on the walls. Meanwhile, as men and ordnance arrived from the rear, a traffic jam was developing on the narrow road in front of the Shah Nujif, a situation aggravated by camp followers who, having looted buildings nearby, set them on fire. Greathed’s infantry had difficulty getting through the crush in single file. ‘The passage was for a time completely blocked up’, explained Alison. ‘It was only when the flames were abating that a string of camels, laden with small arms ammunition, which was urgently required by the troops engaged, could with great risk and toil be forced through the narrow and scorching pass.’221

  ‘Sir Colin was beginning to get extremely anxious,’ wrote Roberts, ‘and no wonder – the position was most uncomfortable and the prospect very gloomy. Three hours since the attack began!’222 Campbell resolved to risk everything on one last, all-out assault. Captain Middleton’s Royal Artillery would pitch into the enemy with grapeshot, while the 93rd launched forward. ‘Sir Colin then, to the surprise of the whole regiment, drew his sword, and placing himself at our head, led us at a steady double out into the open’, recalled Gordon-Alexander.223 It was the last time a commander-in-chief led his men from the front. ‘Nearly every officer of the headquarters’ staff was wounded or had his horse shot’, reported Norman. ‘My horse was hit twice.’224 Only Lieutenants McBean and Roberts made it without horse or rider injured. For the second time that day Campbell was hit by a spent bullet.****

  No scaling ladders were to hand, so Campbell ordered the 93rd to take cover among the mud huts in front of the Shah Nujif. ‘Our men were at first permitted to return the fire, but I should say with little or no effect, except to help enshroud us in a cloud of smoke’, recalled one officer. The rebels started throwing ‘a rough species of shell or grenade in the shape of earthenware water vessels filled with gunpowder and bits of iron, with a short fuse’, while, from the parapet, archers began firing. The Highlanders were contemptuous until ‘one poor fellow of the 93rd, raising his head for an instant above the wall, got an arrow right through his brain, the shaft projecting more than a foot out at the back of his head. As the poor lad fell dead at our feet Sergeant White remarked, “Boys, this is no joke, we must pay them off.”’225

  With the unhorsed Brigadier Hope, Lieutenant-Colonel Leith Hay and a staff officer helping on the ropes, Peel heaved one of his guns as close as he dared to the wall, ‘very much as if he had been laying the Shannon alongside an enemy’s frigate’, as Campbell put it.226 ‘We got the gun within about ten paces of it and fired away’, reported Lieutenant Salmon.227 Enemy musket balls began ‘raining on the gun itself with a noise like that which a crowd of schoolboys might make throwing stones at an empty saucepan’.228 ‘Covered by the fusillade of the infantry, the sailors shot fast and strong,’ recalled Alison, ‘but, though the masonry soon fell off in flakes’,229 still no breach appeared. ‘Some of the 93rd worked round to the main gateway on the south side to
our left,’ wrote Gordon-Alexander, ‘only to find that it was so strongly fortified and held as to be altogether unapproachable.’230

  The fight was becoming positively medieval. ‘Grenades and round-shot hurled from wall-pieces, arrows and brickbats, burning torches of rags and cotton saturated with oil – even boiling water was dashed on them!’ recalled Forbes-Mitchell.231 ‘An hour of this work had cost us no end of lives,’ wrote Lang, ‘and all light had gone, but that from the burning thatch, when it was decided that Peel’s breach was no good (for the outer wall breached revealed only an inner one intact).’232 It was almost dark, so Campbell ordered the rocket tubes forward to cover the retreat.

  Then from the battlements came the rebel bugle call for the advance. The sepoys’ fire ceased. ‘Just at that moment Sergeant John Paton of my company came running down the ravine that separated the Kuddum Russool from the Shah Nujif, completely out of breath through exertion’, wrote Forbes-Mitchell.233 Paton explained that he had found a way in. Brigadier Hope took fifty men to investigate. ‘With bayonets fixed, we proceeded down through some thick brushwood to our right, and found, not fifty yards off, the outer wall so broken down as to form a practicable breach,’ recalled Gordon-Alexander, ‘whether by the fire of some of our artillery or how I never heard.’ Clambering inside, they found the sepoys scattering, apparently petrified by the British rockets. ‘We paused and listened, by the Brigadier’s personal commands, because all was so quiet inside, and it was too dark to see more than twenty paces before us. After perhaps some fifty men had scrambled up … we moved cautiously along the parapet to our left’, Gordon-Alexander explained. ‘As the pipe-major had turned up, someone suggested that he should commence playing The Campbells are Coming to let Sir Colin Campbell, and possibly the garrison of the Residency know … that we were inside the Shah Nujif.’234 They found the mausoleum all but deserted. ‘We were able to catch only about a score of the fugitives, who were promptly bayoneted; the rest fled pell-mell into the Goomtee and it was then too dark to see to use the rifle.’235 ‘But for the existence of this little gap,’ Grant admitted, ‘Sir Colin would have been obliged to have withdrawn the force.’236*