Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  It had been Campbell’s hope that Havelock would assist with a breakout from the Residency that same day, but his efforts had been hit and miss. Havelock’s gunners had built a concealed battery behind an undermined wall, the idea being that the wall would be blown up, allowing the guns behind to launch a surprise barrage. Havelock’s chief engineer had used a charge 50 per cent bigger than usual, but by the day of Campbell’s assault ‘the powder had been down the mine thirty-six hours, the General not thinking Sir Colin Campbell would have taken four days from the Alumbagh to our position’.237 So, when detonated at 11 a.m., the damp powder was only ‘sufficient to shake and split the wall in several places, and to form a small breach’.238

  Havelock’s sappers fared little better at the Hirum Khana (‘Deer House’). Having rigged its wall to blow, at 3.15 p.m. ‘off went the mine and out I started from a small door-way’, recalled one of the garrison. ‘Conceive my despair on arriving at the breach that was to have been, to find that the mine had exploded ten yards short, causing a large crater, and the wall of my part of the Hirum Khana intact.’239 Frustrated by these failures, Havelock and Campbell were still separated by three-quarters of a mile as night fell.

  Next morning (the 17th) the British woke to a cacophony of ‘beating tom-toms’ and ‘ringing bells’ from inside Lucknow, accompanied by ‘a wild fire of musketry into the air’, as Gordon-Alexander recalled, ‘for spent bullets now began to drop all about the grounds of the Shah Nujif’.240 This seemed to presage a rebel counter-attack, but the minutes passed and the mutineers stayed behind their ramparts, so Campbell despatched Brigadier Russell to take four bungalows and the building known as Banks’s House, near where the road from the Dil Khooshah crossed the canal. His flank thus secured, Campbell pushed forward once more towards the Residency. Barring the way was the rebel-held Mess House of the 32nd Foot, sitting behind a deep ditch and a mud wall. The ground-floor windows, overlaid with iron gratings, had been three-quarters bricked up and the walls loop-holed.241 ‘I was determined to use the guns as much as possible in taking it’, explained Campbell. For six hours the artillery battered the position.

  Campbell selected Captain Garnet Wolseley of the 90th Foot to lead a storming party. Behind Wolseley would be a picket of the 53rd, the rest of the 90th, some of the Punjab Infantry and Major Barnston’s battalion. ‘All he said conveyed to me the impression that he did not think we should succeed at our first onslaught’, wrote Wolseley:

  But I was in the seventh heaven of delight and extremely proud at being thus selected for what Sir Colin evidently deemed a difficult and dangerous duty. I was pleased beyond measure with the kind expressions he used towards me – what children we all are, and how easily tickled by a great man’s praise!

  In the event, once over the wall Wolseley found the drawbridge lowered and his enemy gone. Through the Mess House the troops poured, on into the Taree Khotee and finally to the Motee Mahul (Pearl Palace), the last obstacle before the Residency. Here again the mutineers seemed to lose heart, and virtually abandoned the building.

  Only a few hundred yards divided defenders and rescuers and so, without waiting for the ground in between to be secured, Havelock, Outram and staff rushed excitedly out to greet their commander-in-chief (see Plate 29). Four of them were shot, fortunately none mortally. Captain Maude, ‘not knowing Sir Colin, nor having any particular raison d’être dans cette galère’, sensibly ‘sneaked off to get some tobacco, of which we were in desperate need’.242 Campbell found Outram in good spirits, ‘in no way broken down by the heavy load of responsibility’. Havelock, ‘on the contrary, looked ill, worn and depressed’, though he ‘brightened up a little when Norman told him he had been made a KCB’.243

  Once the enemy sharpshooters had been dislodged, and the path to the Residency made safe, Campbell’s forward troops piled into the compound. If they were expecting grateful ladies offering thanks and brandy with furrowed brow,244 instead they found unkempt, malnourished, lice-ridden civilians* asking what had taken them so long. Lieutenant Lang was shocked to find ‘the great part of the besieged looked pale and ill, some very much aged and worn out’.245 Upon seeing the 32nd Campbell told them they looked ‘more like an invalid Depot than the once fine regiment who fought with me on the Punjab and on the North-West Frontier’. He ordered every man be given a small loaf of bread and a dram of grog, ‘both of which I need not say were very much appreciated by us poor famished wretches’, wrote Private Metcalfe.246**

  As he had explained to Outram before the assault, Campbell planned to evacuate the Residency and leave Lucknow to the rebels, but Outram considered this too shabby an end to the epic siege. With Grant, he insisted they storm the Kaiserbagh, the key rebel stronghold, and rescue the handful of British hostages incarcerated there since late October. Once it fell, argued Outram, so too would Lucknow. Campbell, however, was short on musket and field ammunition247 and still uneasy about the threat from Tantia. His little army was ‘quite insufficient at one and the same time to protect and escort 1500 women, children and sick, to reduce Lucknow swarming with rebels, and crush the Gwalior contingent’, pointed out Norman.248 The assault had already resulted in 122 men and officers killed, 414 wounded, and five missing.

  If the commander-in-chief was not prepared to subdue the Kaiserbagh, then he must at the very least leave a garrison of 600 in the Residency, insisted Outram and Havelock. Otherwise, ‘a larger body of troops will be expended in watching Oudh than in holding Lucknow’. Outram cautioned that withdrawal would also make Oudh’s loyal talookdars despair and join forces with the rebels.249 Almost all the senior officers supported him. As Forrest wrote, it ‘required a bolder heart to refuse it than to storm the breach at San Sebastian’, but Campbell was unswerving. ‘I have always been of the opinion that the position taken up by the lamented Sir Henry Lawrence was a false one,’ he reported to the governor-general, ‘and after becoming acquainted with the ground, and [having] worked my troops upon it to relieve the garrison, that opinion is confirmed … To commit another garrison in this immense city is to repeat a military error, and I cannot consent to it.’250

  ‘That the Chief was right, there can be no room for doubt’, wrote Roberts.251 It was folly to expect 600 men to defend a position which three times that number had barely managed. The compound was by now so riddled with shot that parts of the Residency had collapsed (see Plate 26). The enemy’s mines were more extensive than ever. Supplies would be just as awkward to procure and it would only take one decent sepoy commander like Tantia, and the barricades would be overrun. ‘It was not improbable that a leader might suddenly be found with the required spirit and influence, to conduct the rebels and mutineers to victory,’ argued Kavanagh, ‘for the valour of the defenders was not so great a security as the cowardice of the besiegers.’252

  The governor-general, however, refused to abandon Oudh. He cabled, insisting Campbell ‘retain a safe position between Lucknow and the Ganges. A complete withdrawal will do us much mischief.’253 But where? There were a good 50 miles between the city and the sacred river. With the matter unresolved, Outram and Campbell agreed the civilians at least should be evacuated within twenty-four hours. ‘We were told we were to take nothing with us but what we could carry in our hands, and many immediately began to make a bonfire of their property, determined the rebels should not appropriate it’, recalled Lady Inglis.254 ‘We set to work to destroy everything … I burnt all my books, clothing, papers, and letters, in fact all I had in the world, save a few things that I kept in our overland box’, wrote Mrs Polehampton. ‘You will imagine how much vexed I was the next morning, when it was too late to save all my other things, to hear that each lady was to have a camel for her own use.’255

  Next came the question of which route to take. Once across the canal, the 5 miles of rough ground to the Dil Khooshah presented a gruelling journey for hackeries loaded with women and children, sick and injured. Alternatively, they could use the metalled road past Banks’s House and the barracks
– the path originally recommended by Outram as a line of attack. This would be faster, but leave the convoy vulnerable to rebel artillery. Campbell asked Brigadier Russell to reconnoitre and, if possible, silence the enemy guns. In the process Colonel Biddulph (deputy quartermaster-general) was killed, Russell was injured by round shot, and his men, forced to abandon a hospital when enemy shells set fire to the thatched roof. ‘This decided Sir Colin to give up the idea of withdrawing the relieved garrison by Banks’s house’, explained Roberts.256 They would take the longer, bumpier but safer route, via the Sekundrabagh, La Martinière, Dil Khooshah and Alumbagh.

  First to go were the sick and wounded. Setting out on the morning of the 18th they made it without incident to the Sekundrabagh, but the vulnerability of the British position was underscored that afternoon when mutineers launched a sortie at the middle of Campbell’s line. The only men available to plug the hole were two weak infantry companies and one troop of horse artillery, led by Campbell in person. ‘The whole of the force under my immediate command being one outlying picquet,’ he wrote, ‘every man remained on duty, and was constantly subject to annoyance from the enemy’s fire.’ If the rebels organised a concerted attack, he would be cut off from the Alumbagh and his escape route home.

  On the 19th, after a day’s postponement, Campbell began evacuating the civilians. ‘Elephants, camels, 150 dhoolies taken from different regiments, and all the wheeled transport that could be collected, were then assembled in motley confusion opposite the gate’, recalled Grant. Those vehicles already in the Residency were dusted off, but ‘the best of the carriages presented a miserable appearance, being most of them pierced with bullet holes, and the seats and cloth rotted by exposure.’257 Animals to draw them were in short supply too – not that the memsahibs let that stand in the way of a gracious exit. ‘Mrs Case’s carriage was drawn by coolies,’ recalled Lady Inglis, ‘there being no horses available.’258

  Everyone took as much as they dared. ‘I dressed in all the clothes I could,’ wrote Mrs Germon, ‘four flannel waistcoats, three pairs of stockings, three chemises, three drawers, one flannel and four white petticoats, my pink flannel dressing gown skirt, plaid jacket and over all my cloth, dress and jacket … I forgot to say I had sewed dear Mother’s fish-knife and fork in my pink skirt.’259 She was travelling light. Campbell’s own ‘baggage was carried by one camel in a pair of camel trunks’,260 so he had little patience with materialists. ‘A large circular drawing-room table, which somebody had evidently a wish to take away, being discovered by the Chief’, was ‘peremptorily ordered to be abandoned on the road side’.261 Lieutenant Innes remembered the commander-in-chief ‘swearing at us for dreaming of bringing out anything with us, and occasionally, in his rage at what he called the crowds of baggage, ordering the loads of various camels to be thrown away’.262 That Campbell still found carriage for the Nawab’s crown jewels,* certain state prisoners and twenty-three lakhs of company rupees, made the garrison even more indignant.

  At noon they began passing through the Bailey Guard Gate (see Plate 27), that ‘old, haggard skeleton of a gateway, pitted with bullet marks, and with the ragged plaster dropping bit by bit from its sides, as though it were dying by inches of the thousand wounds which it had received in our service’.263 ‘The scene of ruin, devastation, and misery which presented itself to our eyes when we got out, I never, never shall forget,’ wrote Mrs Case. ‘To describe it would be impossible; but the horrors of war presented themselves with full force in the mass of shattered buildings and dilapidated gateways through which we passed.’264 It was an oddly sullen column. ‘In many instances it was curious to see how little pleasure the fact of their being no longer prisoners caused them’, explained Grant. ‘They appeared to be almost wedded to the Residency.’265 ‘I did not see a happy or a contented or a smiling face amongst that crowd,’ recalled Wolseley, ‘not one of them said a gracious word to the soldiers who had saved them.’266

  Campbell wanted the convoy removed ‘without exposing it to the chance of even a stray musket-shot’.267 To this end, from the Residency to the Motee Munzil (part of the Motee Mahul), ‘screens, formed of the canvas walls of tents, or doors placed on each side of the way … concealed the march of the fugitives from the enemy’. Where the position was especially exposed, a trench was dug with gabions either side. Here the civilians had to get down from their carriages and walk.268

  It was several hours before they reached the relative safety of the Sekundrabagh, where they would halt. Lieutenant Gordon-Alexander of the 93rd had been instructed to make the place presentable and, having granted his men ‘an extra ration of rum to fortify them against the fearful stench’, had cleared 500 of the corpses left from the fight on the 16th. The rest were ‘either buried or entombed by plastering up with mud the rooms in which they lay’.269 The civilians stayed in the grounds of the palace until dusk. ‘Some bread and tea was procured with difficulty,’ Norman recalled, ‘and the Commander-in-Chief himself, who not long before had received a packet of English newspapers, went round and distributed them to the ladies’.270 ‘He was very kind in his manner,’ wrote Lady Inglis, ‘and talked about us as “dear creatures”, meaning the ladies; at the same time, I knew he was wishing us very far away, and no wonder!’271

  Once night had fallen, they left for the Dil Khooshah. The track leading south was deep sand and unsuitable for carriages, so Campbell arranged dhoolies.272 ‘The only sounds were the tramp, tramp, tramp of the dhooly bearers and the screaming of the jackals,’ recalled Mrs Harris. ‘It was an awful time; one felt as if one’s life hung in a balance with the fate we had so long dreaded.’273 ‘After a six mile walk, in ankle deep sand, we were halted in a field and told to make ourselves comfortable for the night,’ complained Mr Willock, a civil servant. ‘Here we were in a pretty plight. Nothing to cover ourselves with, while the cold was intense. So we lay till the morning, when we rose stiff and cold, with a poor prospect of finding our servants in a camp of 9,000 men.’274 Despite four months of having ‘to tend their children, and even to wash their own clothes, as well as to cook their scanty meals unaided’,275 the civilians’ airs reasserted themselves with unwelcome haste. When the men of No. 6 Company, the 93rd, offered them their tea ration, they rejected it because there was no milk to go with it. ‘The men were not slow to give these ungrateful people a bit of their mind’, wrote Gordon-Alexander.276 And Campbell would have to nursemaid this lot all the way back to Calcutta.

  With the civilians, sick and wounded safely away, there remained the question of whether to withdraw the garrison. Outram was still convinced that giving up Lucknow was a grave error. Though Campbell’s junior in the army, he was Chief Commissioner for Oudh, making him the senior political officer, so he demanded Campbell obtain the governor-general’s agreement before a full retreat. On the 20th, Campbell telegraphed Canning, recommending the abandonment of the Residency and the establishment of ‘a strong moveable division outside the town’. ‘Such a division would aid in subduing the country hereafter and its position would be quite sufficient evidence of our intention not to abandon the province of Oudh’, he insisted. ‘Owing to the expression of opinion by the political authority in the country [i.e. Outram] I have delayed further movement till I shall receive your Lordship’s reply.’277 The next day Canning cabled to confirm Campbell’s plan would ‘answer every purpose of policy’, and that he could go ahead and evacuate.278

  The engineers set to bursting the extensive arsenal of native guns inside the compound, so they would be of no use to the enemy, while the remaining shot was dropped down wells. Peel maintained his bombardment of the Kaiserbagh to convince the enemy that an assault was imminent. Campbell had decided against blowing up the Residency, in favour of a secret withdrawal.279 ‘No one ever dreamed for a moment of such a measure’, complained Mrs Harris. ‘We were indeed thunderstruck’, agreed Lady Inglis. ‘It seemed to us we could have driven the enemy completely out of Lucknow, re-established our supremacy, and marched out
triumphantly.’ ‘You may imagine the rage of the old garrison who had so long held out’, wrote Innes. ‘We were unutterably disquieted with Sir C. for the way in which he had behaved, treating us all in the most unfeeling way.’280

  At midnight on 22 November the evacuation began. ‘First, the garrison in immediate contact with the enemy at the furthest extremity of the Residency position was marched out’, explained one officer. ‘Every other garrison in turn fell behind it, and so passed out through the Bailey Guard Gate. Regiment by regiment was withdrawn with the utmost order and regularity. The whole operation resembled the movement of a telescope.’281 The troops fell back successively, ‘by sixes and sevens, as quietly as possible and not in a compact body’, wrote Grant, ‘lest the enemy might become aware of our intention’.282 ‘The most intense silence prevailed,’ recalled Allgood, ‘interrupted now and then by one of Captain Peel’s rockets or by a stray musket shot from one of the enemy’s sentries at an imaginary foe.’283 ‘The scheme for this very delicate movement had been most carefully considered beforehand by General Mansfield,’ Roberts explained, ‘the clever chief of staff, who clearly explained to all concerned the parts they had to play, and emphatically impressed upon them that success depended on his directions being followed to the letter, and on their being carried out without the slightest noise or confusion.’284