Upon seeing Outram’s flag over the Yellow House at 2 p.m., Campbell had ordered forward Lugard’s 2nd division. Instead of Napier’s plan to assault the rebel lines north-west of the Dil Khooshah, near Banks’s House, Campbell followed his old route and send Lugard to take La Martinière. ‘The 42nd were first let loose and rushed at the huts about the Martinière Alms House’, recalled Lang:
I was with the 93rd, who were very indignant, jealous and impatient, and when the right was let loose, away we went at the double across the open in front of the building. Stumbling among the maze of trenches which Pandy had thrown up, we occupied the house and garden.*39
The men now made for the north end of the first rebel line of earthworks, where the canal met the Goomtee. One of Outram’s strongest batteries (ten guns) had been positioned opposite, on the north bank, near the hamlet of Jagauli, to enfilade these defences.** They had pounded these entrenchments so comprehensively that by the time Campbell’s troops reached them they appeared abandoned. Lieutenant Butler of the 1st Bengal Fusiliers volunteered to swim the Goomtee to make sure. A short while later Butler could be seen on the enemy parapet, signalling that the earthworks were empty. ‘The 4th Punjab Infantry, supported by the 42nd Highlanders, climbed up the entrenchment abutting on the Goomtee, and proceeded to sweep down the whole line of works till they got to the neighbourhood of Banks’s house,’ Campbell reported, ‘when it became necessary to close operations for the night.’40
The next day, 10 March, Lugard stormed Banks’s House, and from here Peel’s guns began firing on the Begum’s Palace. That night Outram established new batteries targeting the Mess House and the Kaiserbagh, and the following morning occupied the mosque on the old cantonment road, commanding the approach to the iron bridge near the Residency. Outram continued westwards, taking the stone bridge upstream, ‘the enemy however, were able to command it with guns, as well as with musketry from the tops of several high and strong stone houses, from the opposite side of the river’, he explained, ‘and the position was moreover, too distant, and the approaches too intricate, to warrant my holding it permanently with the force at my disposal’. He pulled back his men to the Badshahbagh, leaving a detachment guarding the north end of the iron bridge and the mosque.41
The same day, 11 March, the Sekundrabagh fell with minimal British casualties. According to Lieutenant Lang:
Medley, Carnegie and I, being with 100 sappers at the Sekundrabagh, and having a strong objection to the dreadful odour of the 1840 Pandies half-buried there, and being pretty sure that the Kuddum Russool was deserted, took three sappers and stole into it and found it empty. From the top of it we saw the Shah Nujif seemingly also deserted. So we moved into the Shah Nujif and fortified it.42
As these troops advanced along Campbell’s old route and occupied the palaces next to the Goomtee, so the other British pincer drove in westwards towards the Begum’s Palace, while Outram continued shelling the rebels from the rear.
On every front, the gunners and sappers led the assault. ‘The operation had now become one of engineering character,’ explained Campbell, ‘and the most earnest endeavours were made to save the infantry from being hazarded before due preparation had been made.’ ‘The chief engineer [Napier] pushed his approach with the greatest judgment … the troops immediately occupying the ground as he advanced, and the mortars being moved from one place to another, as the ground was won.’43 Steadily and with minimal losses, Campbell’s army was advancing, pressing on into the middle of Lucknow ready to take the Kaiserbagh.
It was at this critical moment that Jung and his Gurkhas arrived. Oblivious to the battle, Jung requested a royal salute for himself and one for each of his brothers. ‘Salutes are never fired at sieges’, fumed Campbell, before diplomatically consenting.44 Through gritted teeth, he scheduled a grand durbar in his state tent for 4 p.m. ‘Carpets were laid down and the Union Jack displayed and, terrible to be said, the bagpipers of the 93rd, fully provided with bags and pipes, were in attendance’,* recalled Russell. ‘Our old Chief, in honour of the occasion, had doffed his usual workman-like costume, and wore General’s full dress uniform’, wrote Roberts.45 ‘Four o’clock came, no signs of Jung Bahadoor’, reported Russell. ‘A quarter of an hour passed by; the Chief walked up and down with one hand behind his back, and the other working nervously.’46 The artillery had smashed two breaches in the Begum’s Palace and Campbell had scheduled an assault for 4.30 p.m.
Then, at the entrance to the tent, appeared ‘a spare active figure, unwearied as yet by his years’, ‘magnificently dressed, his turban ornamented with a splendid tiara of diamonds and emeralds’. Jung’s ‘countenance was remarkably intelligent, and though he had the flat Nepalese features, he was dignified in his bearing and manner’, wrote Grant. ‘There was however, a suspicious glance in his eye, so characteristic of the Eastern disposition.’47 There followed ‘a good deal of bowing and salaaming’, according to Russell, ‘as the Maharajah introduced his brothers and great officers to the Chief’, before ‘in the midst of the durbar an officer of Mansfield’s staff comes in to announce to Sir Colin that “the Begum Kothie is taken. Very little loss on our side. About five hundred of the enemy killed!” As we could not cheer aloud, every man did so mentally.’48 ‘The effect was magical’, wrote another correspondent. ‘The unfinished programme of solemn nonsense was cast to the winds.’49
First in had been the 93rd and the 4th Punjab Infantry, with Franks’ Gurkhas in support. The 5,000 mutineers inside defended every yard. ‘It raged for two hours from court to court, and from room to room,’ recalled Forbes-Mitchell, ‘the pipe-major, John McLeod, playing the pipes inside as calmly as if he had been walking round the officers’ mess tent at a regimental festival.’ ‘The 93rd lost two officers killed, and were very savage,’ wrote Lieutenant Lang, ‘dragging out bodies, heaping them up and making assurance doubly sure with the bayonet.’50 The Highlanders used bags of gunpowder to clear each room of rebels. ‘This set fire to their clothing and to whatever furniture there was … and when day broke on the 12th there were hundreds of bodies all round, some still burning and others half-burnt’, reported Forbes-Mitchell. ‘The stench was sickening.’51 Just one prisoner was taken.52 ‘Altogether 600 corpses were counted and buried’, wrote Captain Maude. ‘On the second night the effluvium from the festering heap of bodies, though they were covered in earth, was so overpowering that I was totally unable to sleep.’53 ‘This was the sternest struggle which occurred during the siege’, reported Campbell.54 British casualties were thirty-one killed and eighty-six wounded.55 For some this was not nearly enough. ‘The 93rd went into action eight hundred strong, and their casualties little exceeded sixty,’ complained Fortescue, ‘from which the inevitable inference is that the mutinied sepoy, if boldly attacked, was not a very formidable foe.’56 The same foe had decimated Havelock’s column, obliterated Wheeler at Cawnpore and surrounded the British in Delhi, but because Campbell defeated them economically, they had to be second-rate.
Campbell now sat tight for two days while Napier constructed new batteries. The troops were fretful, but the commander-in-chief wanted to give his gunners more time, especially since the quality of the shells was proving unreliable. To make matters worse, Peel’s rockets were also behaving unpredictably. ‘The sticks had got too dry, and caught fire, and away went the rocket anywhere but where it was wanted,’ explained Colonel Jones, ‘and the composition had also got too dry, and burnt so quickly, as, in many cases, to fall or explode far short of their proper range.’57
Having given his artillery every chance to pulverise the enemy, on 14 March Campbell launched another push. Jung’s Gurkhas moved in from the south, while British artillery drew a bead on the next palatial obstacle, the Little Imambarra, lying between the Begum’s Palace and the Kaiserbagh. This time the breach was taken by a combination of Sikhs and the 10th Foot. ‘The men were excited and eager to go on’, wrote one officer. ‘Without orders the Sikhs, like monkeys, climbed a wall and opened a lar
ge gate … We rushed onwards, cleared 40 guns in battery en route, driving all before us.’ Finding themselves in a building overlooking the Kaiserbagh, the Punjabis began firing on the enemy gunners below, while the 10th Foot penetrated the enemy’s second line, and encircled the Taree Khotee and the Mess House. The 300 mutineers inside were put to the sword. One of Campbell’s staff officers rode back to report the news. ‘I saw Norman, at his usual canter, hurrying across the street’, Russell recalled. ‘“What is it, Norman? Have we got the Imambarra?” “The Imambarra! Why man, we’re in the Kaiserbagh!” Here indeed was news. The camp was in commotion. Syces [Indian grooms] running to and fro, the Chief and all his staff calling for their horses.’58
Campbell ordered the men forward from the Sekundrabagh and Shah Nujif, and called for reinforcements to press home the advantage. The Kaiserbagh’s mutineers were not prepared to mount a death-or-glory last stand, and fled. Its satellite strongholds, including the Motee Mahul and the Chuttur Manzil, put up very little resistance. The great citadel, expected to be the siege’s costliest prize, had fallen at a discount. ‘Everyone felt that, although much remained to be done before the final expulsion of the rebels, the most difficult part of the undertaking had been overcome’, reported Campbell.59 It all sounded ridiculously easy: the troops would descend on a rebel position, meet token resistance and so occupy another palace. But that ease was only ensured by withering barrages enfilading the rebel lines, a tactic in turn facilitated by Outram’s flanking manoeuvre. As Lady Canning observed of Campbell, ‘When he has done things so easily it has been because he laid his plans so well that he made it easy.’60
With the Kaiserbagh overpowered, the time had come for Outram to launch his men across the iron bridge and stop the rebels escaping westwards. His horse artillery limbered up and the breastwork across the bridge was removed. ‘All was ready for the advance, when General Outram and staff arrived’, reported Lieutenant Majendie. Outram explained to his astonished troops, ‘that Sir Colin Campbell had ordered him not to cross, if he saw the chance of losing a single man [my italics]’.61 Instead of landing the killer blow, the commander-in-chief was going to let his enemy escape into Oudh, leaving ‘the province swarming with armed rebels still capable of resistance’, complained Burne. ‘Another year of desultory fighting was quite needlessly imposed upon the British Army,’ claimed Jocelyn,62 resulting in ‘the needless loss of thousands of British soldiers’,* as Roberts put it.63 ‘That order derogates from his claim to be placed in the rank of the greatest commanders’, wrote Malleson. In consequence, ‘he must be classed as a great general of the second rank.’64
What was Campbell thinking? Most historians have interpreted this order literally, that Campbell meant it was fine to cross the bridge, so long as no one got killed; in other words, the only issue he had with an advance was casualties. ‘The order was consistent with Campbell’s character and his perception of future needs’, argued the only modern historian to examine the campaign in detail. He was ‘determined to husband his precious army’,65 but ‘by giving way to his desire to save the lives of his men’, as Evelyn Wood put it, ‘he expended many more lives and much more money than he would have done had he accorded General Outram a free hand.’66 Yet, in the light of the losses Campbell had incurred at Lucknow in November, and at the Begum’s Palace three days before, this does not make sense. Yes, Campbell was keen to ‘husband his precious army’, but he accepted casualties where necessary. He understood that one cannot fight a war without them. If he really wanted the bridge, he would have risked it. Rather, the order seems figurative: a prohibition, simply an inverted way of saying, ‘Don’t take the bridge.’ So the question is not, why was Campbell unwilling to suffer any casualties to take the bridge, but rather, why did he want Outram to stay on the north bank and let the rebels flee?
Practical considerations might explain it. Was it even feasible for Outram to corner the rebels if he crossed the bridge? The sepoys were not a single army like the French at Vitoria, who, fleeing with their materiel, had kept to one road. Lucknow housed a conglomeration of soldiers, retainers and badmashes fighting under one banner, but with very different ideas of where to run if push came to shove. Because Lucknow lacked a city wall restricting the rebels to a few guardable exits, they could escape from a thousand different points. ‘The city, for all practical purposes, was twenty miles in circumference; and he could not have guarded all the outlets without a very much larger army than that which was at his disposal,’ argued historian George Dodd.67 As one cavalry officer wrote:
It needs no great effort of imagination to conceive how difficult was the task of preventing, with a small brigade of Cavalry and Horse Artillery, so long a line from being penetrated by bands of fugitives at one point or another, even by day, still more under cover of night.68
That the British were not stopping Lucknow’s native civilians from leaving made that task a great deal harder. On 8 March, Captain Oliver Jones was riding from the Dil Khooshah towards the Goomtee. Any refugee deserting Lucknow westwards past the Dil Khooshah had to pass through heavily fortified rebel entrenchments before braving countryside beyond patrolled by Hodson’s Horse. Nevertheless, Jones stumbled across ‘a long string of people with their bullock carts and so forth … I suppose they were people escaping from Lucknow, and their object was to do so as quickly and quietly as possible.’69 Jones let them go. If a caravan of refugees could get out through the most militarised part of Lucknow, the notion of corralling every rebel in town was absurd. After the Battle of Cawnpore, Roberts had seen routed sepoys ‘throwing away their arms and divesting themselves of their uniform, that they might pass for harmless peasants’.70 In Lucknow they could just as easily drop their muskets and claim to be innocent townsfolk. The volunteers among them were not in uniform anyway, allowing them to blend seamlessly with a population twice that of Delhi, inhabiting ‘a wilderness of lanes and narrow tortuous streets, nearly as large as Paris’.
In fact, the rebels had been showing their heels for days. On the night of 13 March, the day before Outram asked to cross the bridge, Campbell told Russell that his spies reported sepoys ‘leaving the city in great numbers’.71 The commander-in-chief was unconcerned. For him, it was enough that the rebels’ will was broken. All the fight seemed to have gone from them. ‘We are so destitute that it is difficult to describe’, complained one mutineer. ‘God knows there is no ammunition left.’72 ‘Individuals can escape but supplies are completely cut off’, Roberts told his father on 12 March. ‘This disheartens them more than anything. Many run away every night, some make for Bareilly, but the chief part go to their homes,** hoping their lives will be spared.’73
There is another, more radical explanation of the order not to cross the bridge. What has never been considered is whether Campbell’s anxiety was as much to save the lives of the rebels as his own troops. Penning in the enemy meant a bloodbath. Lucknow was already a scene ‘of indiscriminate massacre’, according to Lieutenant Majendie. ‘Sepoy or Oudh villager, it mattered not – no questions were asked; his skin was black, and did not that suffice?’74 The lust for vengeance came from all corps. Sikh troops, finding a lone surviving sepoy at the Yellow House, pulled him ‘by the legs to a convenient place, where he was held down, pricked in the face and body by the bayonets of some of the soldiery, whilst others collected fuel for a small pyre’, reported Russell. ‘When all was ready – the man was roasted alive! There were Englishmen looking on, more than one officer saw it. No one offered to interfere!’75 As one naval chaplain put it, ‘Few ever went through the empty formality of making prisoners.’76 ‘I never let my men take prisoners, but shoot them at once’, explained William Hodson.77 To many British officers, this seemed perfectly reasonable. For one thing, the punishment for mutiny was death, so why take mutineers alive? For another, it is a difficult thing to take a man prisoner who expects no mercy. As Forbes-Mitchell reported when the Highlanders found a Ghazi, ‘Some of the light company tried to take the youngster
prisoner, but it was no use; he cut at every one so madly that they had to bayonet him.’78
The inhumanity was mutual. ‘Wherever the rebels meet a Christian, or a white man, they at once slay him pitilessly’, Russell explained. ‘Wherever we meet a rebel in arms, or any man on whom suspicion rests, we kill him with equal celerity.’79 Even the wounded were fair game. Lieutenant Majendie watched British soldiers drag ‘out a decrepit old man, severely wounded in the thigh’. ‘“Ave his nut off” cried one; “Hang the brute” cried another; “Put him out of mess” said a third; “Give him a Cawnpore dinner” shouted a fourth. (The soldiers call six inches of steel a Cawnpore dinner).’ Two of the men led him away.
The soldiers returned to their games of cards and their pipes, and seemed to feel no further interest in the matter, except when the two executioners returned, and one of their comrades carelessly asked, ‘Well, Bill, what did yer do to him?’ ‘Oh’, said the man, as he wiped the blood off an old tulwar, with an air of cool and horrible indifference which no words can convey, ‘Oh! Sliced his ‘ed off!’ resuming his rubber and dropping the subject much as a man might who had drowned a litter of puppies.80
No other British general in the nineteenth century was faced with the choice confronting Campbell that day. ‘The case of the men now holding Lucknow is so desperate that it will be a second Sekundrabagh on a greater scale,’ one correspondent predicted, ‘and guerra a la morte [sic] will be the motto of the belligerents.’81 ‘Had Sir Colin Campbell not bound Outram’s hands so tightly the advance would have taken place,’ wrote Russell, ‘and a tremendous slaughter of the enemy must have followed.’ ‘Their slain would have been counted by thousands’, argued Malleson.82 Many welcomed it. ‘It was Campbell’s imperative duty to inflict the greatest possible punishment upon them’, insisted Fortescue.83 He would have been the toast of Calcutta, but when the fury subsided he would have been labelled the most murderous general in British history.
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