DELHI
Delhi lies thirty-eight miles to the south-west of Meerut, a city
seven miles in circumference, ancient, stately, beautiful. The sacred
Jumna runs by it. Its grey, wide-curving girdle of crenellated walls,
is pierced with seven gates. It is a city of mosques and palaces and
gardens, and crowded native bazaars. Delhi in 1857 was of great political
importance, if only because the last representative of the Grand Mogul,
still bearing the title of the King of Delhi, resided there in semi-royal
state. The Imperial Palace, with its crowd of nearly 12,000 inmates,
formed a sort of tiny royal city within Delhi itself, and here, if
anywhere, mutiny might find a centre and a head.
Moreover, the huge magazines, stored with munitions of war, made the city
of the utmost military value to the British. Yet, by special treaty, no
British troops were lodged in Delhi itself; there were none encamped even
on the historic Ridge outside it.
The 3rd Cavalry, heading the long flight of mutineers, reached Delhi in
the early morning of the 11th of May. They spurred across the bridge,
slew the few casual Englishmen they met as they swept through the
streets, galloped to the king’s palace, and with loud shouts announced
that they had “slain all the English at Meerut, and had come to fight for
the faith.”
The king, old and nervous, hesitated. He had no reason for revolt.
Ambition was dead in him. His estates had thriven under British
administration. His revenues had risen from a little over £40,000 to
£140,000. He enjoyed all that he asked of the universe, a lazy, sensual,
opium-soaked life. Why should he exchange a musky and golden sloth, to
the Indian imagination so desirable, for the dreadful perils of revolt
and war? But the palace at Delhi was a moral plague-spot, a nest of
poisonous insects, a vast household in which fermented every bestial
passion to which human nature can sink. And discontent gave edge and fire
to every other evil force. A spark falling into such a magazine might
well produce an explosion. And the shouts of the revolted troopers from
Meerut at its gates supplied the necessary spark.
While the old king doubted, and hesitated, and scolded, the palace guards
opened the gates to the men of the 3rd Cavalry, who instantly swept in
and slaughtered the English officials and English ladies found in it.
Elsewhere mutiny found many victims. The Delhi Bank was attacked and
plundered, and the clerks and the manager with his family were slain.
The office of the _Delhi Gazette_ shared the same fate, the unfortunate
compositors being killed in the very act of setting up the “copy” which
told of the tragedy at Meerut. All Europeans found that day in the
streets of Delhi, down to the very babies, were killed without pity.
There were, as we have said, no white troops in Delhi. The city was held
by a Sepoy garrison, the 38th, 54th, and 74th Sepoy regiments, with a
battery of Sepoy artillery. The British officers of these regiments, when
news of the Meerut outbreak reached them, made no doubt but that Hewitt’s
artillery and cavalry from Meerut would follow fierce and fast on the
heels of the mutineers. The Sepoys were exhorted briefly to be true to
their salt, and the men stepped cheerfully off to close and hold the city
gates against the mutineers.
The chief scene of interest for the next few hours was the main-guard
of the Cashmere Gate. This was a small fortified enclosure in the rear
of the great gate itself, always held by a guard of fifty Sepoys under
a European officer. A low verandah ran around the inner wall of the
main-guard, inside which, were the quarters of the Sepoys; a ramp or
sloping stone causeway led to the summit of the gate itself, on which
stood a small two-roomed house, serving as quarters for the British
officer on duty. From the main-guard, two gates opened into the city
itself.
The guard on that day consisted of a detachment of the 38th Native
Infantry. They had broken into mutiny, and assisted with cheers and
laughter at the spectacle of Colonel Ripley, of the 54th N.I., with
other officers of that regiment, being hunted and sabred by some of the
mutinous light cavalry who had arrived from Meerut. Two companies of the
54th were sent hurriedly to the gate, and met the body of their colonel
being carried out literally hacked to pieces.
Colonel Vibart, one of the officers of the 54th, has given in his work,
“The Sepoy Mutiny,” a vivid account of the scene in the main-guard, as he
entered it. In one corner lay the dead bodies of five British officers
who had just been shot. The main-guard itself was crowded with Sepoys
in a mood of sullen disloyalty. Through the gate which opened on the
city could be seen the revolted cavalry troopers, in their French-grey
uniforms, their swords wet with the blood of the British officers they
had just slain. A cluster of terrified English ladies—some of them widows
already, though they knew it not—had sought refuge here, and their white
faces added a note of terror to the picture.
Major Abbott, with 150 men of the 74th N.I., presently marched into the
main-guard; but the hold of the officers on the men was of the slightest,
and when mutiny, in the mass of Sepoys crowded into the main-guard,
would break out into murder, nobody could guess.
Major Abbott collected the dead bodies of the fallen officers, put them
in an open bullock-cart, covered them with the skirts of some ladies’
dresses, and despatched the cart, with its tragic freight, to the
cantonments on the Ridge. The cart found its way to the Flagstaff Tower
on the Ridge, and was abandoned there; and when, a month afterwards, the
force under Sir Henry Barnard marched on to the crest the cart still
stood there, with the dead bodies of the unfortunate officers—by this
time turned to skeletons—in it.
Matters quickly came to a crisis at the Cashmere Gate. About four o’clock
in the afternoon there came in quick succession the sound of guns from
the magazine. This was followed by a deep, sullen, and prolonged blast
that shook the very walls of the main-guard itself, while up into the
blue sky slowly climbed a mighty cloud of smoke. Willoughby had blown
up the great powder-magazine; and the sound shook both the nerves and
the loyalty of the Sepoys who crowded the main-guard. There was kindled
amongst them the maddest agitation, not lessened by the sudden appearance
of Willoughby and Forrest, scorched and blackened by the explosion from
which they had in some marvellous fashion escaped.
Brigadier Graves, from the Ridge, now summoned Abbott and the men of
the 74th back to that post. After some delay they commenced their march,
two guns being sent in advance. But the first sound of their marching
feet acted as a match to the human powder-magazine. The leading files of
Abbott’s men had passed through the Cashmere Gate when the Sepoys of the
38th suddenly rushed at it and closed it, and commenced to fire on their
officers. In a moment the main-guard was a scene of terror and massacre.
It was filled with eddying smoke, with shouts, with the sound of
crackling muskets, of swearing men and shrieking women. Here is Colonel
Vibart’s description of the scene:—
The horrible truth now flashed on me—we were being massacred
right and left, without any means of escape! Scarcely knowing
what I was doing, I made for the ramp which leads from the
courtyard to the bastion above. Every one appeared to be doing
the same. Twice I was knocked over as we all frantically rushed
up the slope, the bullets whistling past us like hail, and
flattening themselves against the parapet with a frightful
hiss. To this day it is a perfect marvel to me how any one of
us escaped being hit. Poor Smith and Reveley, both of the 74th,
were killed close beside me. The latter was carrying a loaded
gun, and, raising himself with a dying effort, he discharged
both barrels into a knot of Sepoys, and the next moment expired.
The struggling crowd of British officers and ladies reached the bastion
and crowded into its embrasures, while the Sepoys from the main-guard
below took deliberate pot-shots at them. Presently a light gun was
brought to bear on the unhappy fugitives crouching on the summit of the
bastion. The ditch was twenty-five feet below, but there was no choice.
One by one the officers jumped down. Some buckled their sword-belts
together and lowered the ladies. One very stout old lady, Colonel Vibart
records, “would neither jump down nor be lowered down; would do nothing
but scream. Just then another shot from the gun crashed into the parapet;
somebody gave the poor woman a push, and she tumbled headlong into the
ditch beneath.” Officers and ladies scrambled up the almost perpendicular
bank which forms the farther wall of the ditch, and escaped into the
jungle beyond, and began their peril-haunted flight to Meerut.
Abbott, of the 74th, had a less sensational escape. His men told him they
had protected him as long as they could; he must now fly for his life.
Abbott resisted long, but at last said, “Very well. I’m off to Meerut;
but,” he added, with a soldier’s instinct, “give me the colours.” And,
carrying the colours of his regiment, he set off with one other officer
on his melancholy walk to Meerut.
[Illustration: LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILLOUGHBY, BENGAL ARTILLERY
_Reproduced, by kind permission of his niece, MISS WALLACE, from a
photograph of an unfinished water-colour drawing, taken about 1857_]
The most heroic incident in Delhi that day was the defence and explosion
of the great magazine. This was a huge building, standing some 600 yards
from the Cashmere Gate, packed with munitions of war—cannon, ammunition,
and rifles—sufficient to have armed half a nation, and only a handful of
Englishmen to defend it. It was in charge of Lieutenant Willoughby, who
had under him two other officers (Forrest and Raynor), four conductors
(Buckley, Shaw, Scully, and Crowe), and two sergeants (Edwards and
Stewart); a little garrison of nine brave men, whose names deserve to be
immortalised.
Willoughby was a soldier of the quiet and coolly courageous order; his
men were British soldiers of the ordinary stuff of which the rank and
file of the British Army is made. Yet no ancient story or classic fable
tells of any deed of daring and self-sacrifice nobler than that which
this cluster of commonplace Englishmen was about to perform. The Three
Hundred who kept the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian swarms, the
Three, who, according to the familiar legend, held the bridge across
the Tiber against Lars Porsena, were not of nobler fibre than the Nine
who blew up the great magazine at Delhi rather than surrender it to the
mutineers.
Willoughby closed and barricaded the gates, and put opposite each two
six-pounders, doubly loaded with grape; he placed a 24-pound howitzer
so as to command both gates, and covered other vulnerable points with
the fire of other guns. In all he had ten pieces of artillery in
position—with only nine men to work them. He had, indeed, a score of
native officials, and he thrust arms into their reluctant hands, but
knew that at the first hostile shot they would run.
But the Nine could not hope to hold the magazine finally against a city
in revolt. A fuse was accordingly run into the magazine itself, some
barrels of powder were broken open, and their contents heaped on the end
of the fuse. The fuse was carried into the open, and one of the party
(Scully) stationed beside it, lighted port-fire in hand. Willoughby’s
plan was to hold the magazine as long as he could work the guns. But
when, as was inevitable, the wave of mutinous Sepoys swept over the
walls, Willoughby was to give the signal by a wave of his hat, Scully
would instantly light the fuse, and the magazine—with its stores of
warlike material, its handful of brave defenders, and its swarm of eager
assailants—would vanish in one huge thunderclap!
Presently there came a formal summons in the name of the King of Delhi
to surrender the magazine. The summons met with a grim and curt refusal.
Now the Sepoys came in solid columns down the narrow streets, swung
round the magazine, and girdled it with shouts and a tempest of bullets.
The native defenders, at the first shot, clambered down the walls and
vanished, and the forlorn but gallant Nine were left alone. Hammers were
beating fiercely on the gates. A score of improvised scaling-ladders were
placed against the walls, and in a moment the Sepoys were swarming up. A
gate was burst open, but, as the assailants tried to rush in, a blast of
grape swept through them. Willoughby’s nine guns, each worked by a single
gunner, poured their thunder of sound, and storm of shot, swiftly and
steadily, on the swaying mass of Sepoys that blocked the gate.
Lieutenant Forrest, who survived the perils of that fierce hour, has
told, in cool and soldierly language, its story:—
Buckley, assisted only by myself, loaded and fired in rapid
succession the several guns above detailed, firing at least
four rounds from each gun, and with the same steadiness as if
standing on parade, although the enemy were then some hundreds
in number, and kept up a hot fire of musketry on us within
forty or fifty yards. After firing the last round, Buckley
received a musket ball in his arm above the elbow; I, at the
same time, was struck in the left hand by two musket balls.
When, before or since, has there been a contest so heroic or so hopeless?
But what can Nine do against twice as many hundreds? From the summit
of the walls a deadly fire is concentrated on the handful of gallant
British. One after another drops. In another moment will come the
rush of the bayonets. Willoughby looks round and sees Scully stooping
with lighted port-fire over the fuse, and watching for the agreed
signal. He lifts his hand. Coolly and swiftly Scully touches the fuse
with his port-fire. The red spark runs along its centre; there is an
earth-shaking crash, as of thunder, a sky-piercing leap of flame. The
walls of the magazine are torn asunder; bodies of men and fragments
of splintered arms fly aloft. The whole city seems to shake with the
concussion, and a great pillar of smoke, mushroom-topped and huge, rises
slowly in the sky. It is the signal to heaven and earth of how the Nine
British, who kept the great magazine, had fulfilled their trust.
Of those gallant Nine, Scully, who fired the train, and four others
vanished, along with hundreds of the mutineers, in one red rain. But,
somehow, they themselves scarcely knew how, Willoughby, with his two
officers, and Conductor Buckley found themselves, smoke-blackened and
dazed, outside the magazine, and they escaped death, for the moment at
least.
The fugitives who escaped from the Cashmere Gate had some very tragical
experiences. Sinking from fatigue and hunger, scorched by the flame-like
heat of the sun, wading rivers, toiling through jungles, hunted by
villagers, they struggled on, seeking some place of refuge. Some reached
Meerut, others Umballa, but many died. Of that much-enduring company of
fugitives, it is recorded that the women often showed the highest degree
of fortitude and patience. Yet more than one mother had to lay her child,
killed by mere exposure or heat, in a nameless jungle grave; more than
one wife had to see her husband die, of bullet or sword-stroke, at her
feet.
But the fate of these wanderers was happier than that of the Europeans
left in the city. Some twenty-seven—eleven of them being children and
eight women—took refuge in a house near the great mosque. They held the
house for three days, but, having no water, suffered all the agonies of
thirst. The Sepoys set vessels of water in front of the house, and bade
the poor besieged give up their arms and they should drink. They yielded,
gave up the two miserable guns with which they had defended themselves,
and were led out. No water was given them. Death alone was to cool those
fever-blackened lips. They were set in a row, the eleven children and
sixteen men and women, and shot. Let tender-hearted mothers picture that
scene, transacted under the white glare of the Indian sun!
Some fifty Europeans and Eurasians barricaded themselves in a strong
house in the English quarter of the city. The house was stormed, the
unhappy captives were dragged to the King of Delhi’s palace, and thrust
into an underground cellar, with no windows and only one door. For five
days they sweltered and sickened in that black hole. Then they were
brought out, with one huge rope girdling them—men, women, and children,
a pale-faced, haggard, half-naked crowd, crouching under one of the
great trees in the palace garden. About them gathered a brutal mob of
Sepoys and Budmashes, amongst whom was Abool Bukr, the heir-apparent to
the King of Delhi. The whole of the victims were murdered, with every
accompaniment of cruelty, and it is said that the heir-apparent himself
devised horrible refinements of suffering.
Less than six months afterwards Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, shot that
princely murderer, with a cluster of his kinsfolk, under the walls
of Delhi, and in the presence of some 6000 shuddering natives, first
explaining, that they were the murderers of women and children. Their
bodies were brought in a cart through the most public street of the city,
laid side by side, under the tree and on the very spot where they had
tortured and murdered our women.
Mutiny grows swiftly. On Sunday night was fired, from the ranks of the
20th Sepoys, the volley that slew Colonel Finnis, and was, so to speak,
the opening note in the long miserere of the Mutiny. At four o’clock on
Monday afternoon the thunder of the great magazine, as it exploded, shook
the walls of Delhi. Before the grey light of Tuesday morning broke over
the royal city every member of the British race in it was either slain or
a captive.
When a powder-magazine is fired, the interval of time between the flash
of the first ignited grain and the full-throated blast of the explosion
is scarcely measurable. And if the cluster of keen and plotting brains
behind the Great Mutiny had carried out their plans as they intended,
the Mutiny would have had exactly this bewildering suddenness of
arrival. There is what seems ample evidence to prove that Sunday, May
31, was fixed for the simultaneous rising of all the Sepoy regiments in
Bengal. A small committee of conspirators was at work in each regiment,
elaborating the details of the Mutiny. Parties were to be told off in
each cantonment, to murder the British officers and their families while
in church, to seize the treasury, release the prisoners, and capture the
guns. The Sepoy regiments in Delhi were to take possession of that great
city, with its arsenal.
The outbreak at Meerut not merely altered the date, it changed the
character of the revolt. The powder-magazine exploded, so to speak,
in separate patches, and at intervals spread over weeks. It was this
circumstance—added to the fact that the Sepoys had rejected the greased
cartridges, and with them the Enfield rifle, against which Brown Bess was
at a fatal disadvantage—that, speaking humanly, robbed the Mutiny of half
its terror, and helped to save the British Empire in India.
But, even allowing for all this, a powder-magazine—although it explodes
only by instalments—is a highly uncomfortable residence while the
explosion is going on; and seldom before or since, in the long stretch of
human history, have human courage and fortitude been put to such a test,
as in the case of the handful of British soldiers and civilians who held
the North-West Provinces for England during the last days of May 1857.
Sir George Campbell, who was in Simla at the time, has told the story of
how he stood one day, early in June, beside the telegraph operator in
Umballa, and listened while the wire, to use his own words, “seemed to
repeat the experience of Job.” “First we heard that the whole Jullunder
brigade had mutinied, and were in full march in our direction, on the
way to Delhi. While that message was still being spoken, came another
message, to tell us that the troops in Rajpootana had mutinied, and that
Rohilcund was lost; following which, I heard that the Moradabad regiment
had gone, and that my brother and his young wife had been obliged to fly.”
Let it be remembered that the revolted districts equal in area France,
Austria, and Prussia put together; in population they exceeded them.
And over this great area, and through this huge population, the process
described by the telegrams, to whose rueful syllables Sir George Campbell
listened, was being swiftly and incessantly repeated. The British troops
did not number 22,000 men, and they were scattered over a hundred
military stations, and submerged in a population of 94,000,000. Let
the reader imagine fifteen or sixteen British regiments sprinkled in
microscopic fragments over an area so vast, and amongst populations so
huge!
The Sepoy army in Bengal numbered 150,000 men, and within six weeks of
the shot which killed Colonel Finnis at Meerut, of its 120 regiments
of horse and foot, only twenty-five remained under the British flag,
and not five of these could be depended upon! A whole army, in a word,
magnificently drilled, perfectly officered, strong in cavalry, and yet
more formidable in guns, was in open and murderous revolt. Some idea of
the scale and completeness of the Mutiny can be gathered from the single
fact that every regiment of regular cavalry, ten regiments of irregular
cavalry out of eighteen, and sixty-three out of seventy-four regiments of
infantry, then on the strength of the Bengal army, disappeared finally
and completely from its roster!
In each cantonment during the days preceding the revolt, the British
officers on the spot were—to return to our figure—like men shut up in a
powder-magazine with the train fired. There might be a dozen or twenty
British officers with their families at a station held by a battery of
native artillery, a couple of squadrons of native horse, and a regiment
of native infantry—all plotting revolt and murder! Honour forbade the
British to fly. To show a sign of mistrust or take a single visible
precaution would be to precipitate the outbreak. Many of the old Bengal
officers relied on their Sepoys, with a fond credulity that nothing could
alarm, and that made them blind and deaf to the facts about them. “It
was not,” says Trevelyan, “till he saw his own house in flames, and
not till he looked down the barrels of Sepoy muskets, and heard Sepoy
bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin
to believe that his men were not as staunch as they ought to be.”
But all officers were not so blind as this. They knew their peril. They
saw the tragedy coming. They walked day after day in front of the line of
their men’s muskets on parade, not knowing when these iron tubes would
break into red flame and flying bullets. They lay down night after night,
knowing that the Sepoys in every hut were discussing the exact manner
and time of their murder. Yet each man kept an untroubled brow, and went
patiently the round of his duty, thanking God when he had no wife and
child at the station to fall under the tender mercies of the mutineers.
Farquhar, of the 7th Light Cavalry, writing to his mother at the time,
said, “I slept every night dressed, with my revolver under my pillow, a
drawn sword on my bed, and a loaded double-barrelled gun just under my
bed. We remained in this jolly state,” he explained, “a fortnight.”
When the outbreak came, and the bungalows were in flames, and the men
were shouting and firing on the parade-ground, it was a point of honour
among the officers to hurry to the scene and make one last appeal to
them, dying too often under the bullets of their own soldiers. The
survivors then had to fly, with their women and children, and hide
in the hot jungle or wander over the scorching plains, on which the
white heat burns like a flame, suffering all the torments of thirst and
weariness, of undressed wounds, and of wearing fever. If some great
writer, with full knowledge and a pen of fire, could write the story of
what was dared and suffered by Englishmen and Englishwomen at a hundred
scattered posts throughout the North-West Provinces, in the early stages
of the Mutiny, it would be one of the most moving and heroic tales in
human records.
Sir Joseph Fayrer tells how, early in 1857, he was a member of a
tiger-shooting expedition into the Terai. It was a merry party, and
included some famous shots and great civil officials. They had killed
their eleventh tiger when the first news of the rising reached the party.
“All my companions,” says Fayrer, “except Gubbins, were victims of the
Mutiny during the year. Thomason was murdered at Shah Jehanpore; Gonne in
the Mullahpore district; Colonel Fischer was killed by the men of his own
regiment; Thornhill was murdered at Seetapore; Lester was shot through
the neck during the siege of Lucknow; Graydon was killed after the first
relief of Lucknow.” Swift-following deaths of this sort have to be
multiplied over the whole area of the Mutiny, before we can realise what
it cost in life.
Fayrer, as a single example of the sort of tragedies which took place on
every side, tells how his brother, who was an officer in a regiment of
irregular cavalry, was killed. He was second in command of a detachment
supposed to be of loyalty beyond suspicion. It had been sent by Lawrence
from Lucknow to maintain order in the unsettled districts. There was
no sign that the men intended to rise. The morning bugle had gone, the
troop was ready to start, and young Fayrer, who had gone out, walked to
a well with his charger’s bridle over his arm, and was drinking water
from a cup. Suddenly one of his own troopers came up behind him and cut
him down through the back of the neck with his tulwar. “The poor lad—only
twenty-three—fell dead on the spot, gasping out the word ‘mother’ as he
fell.” The troopers instantly rode at the three other British officers
of the detachment. One of these slew three Sepoys before he was killed
himself; the second, ill mounted, was overtaken and slain; the third, a
splendid rider, made a reckless leap over a nullah, where his pursuers
dared not follow, and so escaped.
Before describing the great drama at Cawnpore, or Lucknow, or Delhi, it
is worth while to give, if only as hasty vignettes, some pictures of what
happened at many of the stations scattered through Oude and the Punjaub.
They are the opening episodes of a stupendous tragedy.
According to Sir Herbert Edwardes, it was the act of an English boy that
saved the Punjaub. A very youthful operator—a mere lad—named Brendish,
was by some accident alone in the Delhi Telegraph Office. When the
Mutiny broke out he had to flee like the rest; but, before leaving, he
wired a somewhat incoherent message to Umballa. “We must leave office,”
it ran; “all the bungalows are on fire, burning down by the Sepoys of
Meerut. They came in this morning.... Nine Europeans are killed.” That
message reached Umballa, was sent on to Lahore, and was read there as
a danger-signal so expressive, that the authorities at once decided
to disarm the native troops at that station. The cryptic message was
then flashed on to Peshawur, and was there read in the same sense, and
acted upon with the same promptitude. Brendish was one of the few who
afterwards escaped from Delhi.
At some of the stations, where cool heads and steadfast courage
prevailed, the Sepoys were disarmed with swiftness and decision. This
was especially the case in the Punjaub, where the cause of England was
upheld by the kingly brain of John Lawrence, the swift decision of
Herbert Edwardes, and the iron courage of Neville Chamberlain and of John
Nicholson.
Lord Roberts has told how, on May 12, he was present as scribe at a
council of war held in Peshawur. Round the table sat a cluster of gallant
soldiers, such as might well take charge of the fortunes of a nation in
the hour of its deadliest peril. Herbert Edwardes was there, and Neville
Chamberlain, and Nicholson. They had to consider how to hold the Punjaub
quiet while all Bengal was in a flame of mutiny. The Punjaub was a newly
conquered province; its warlike population might well be expected to
seize the first opportunity of rising against its conquerors. It was
held by an army of over 80,000 troops, and of these only 15,000 were
British—the rest, some 65,000, were almost sure to join the Mutiny. For
every British soldier in the Punjaub, that is, there were four probable
mutineers, while behind these was a warlike population, just subdued by
the sword, and ready to rise again.
But the cool heads that met in that council were equal to their task.
It was resolved to disarm all doubtful regiments, and raise new forces
in their stead in the Punjaub itself, and from its wild frontier clans.
A movable column, light-footed, hard-hitting, was to be formed under
Neville Chamberlain’s command, with which to smite at revolt whenever it
lifted its head. So the famous Movable Column came into being, commanded
in turn by Chamberlain and by Nicholson. That column itself had to be
purged heroically again and again to cleanse it from mutinous elements,
till it practically came to consist of one field-battery, one troop of
horse-artillery, and one infantry regiment, all British. Then it played a
great part in the wild scenes of the Mutiny.
Before new levies could be raised in the Punjaub, however, the English
had to give some striking proof of decision and strength. No Indian race
will fight for masters who do not show some faculty for command. The
crisis came at Peshawur itself, towards the end of May. The Sepoys had
fixed May 22 for rising against their officers. On the 21st the 64th
Native Infantry was to march into Peshawur, and on the following morning
the revolt was to take place. Herbert Edwardes and Nicholson, however,
were the last men in the world to be caught off their guard. At 7 A.M.
on the morning of the 21st, parade was held, and, as the result of some
clever manœuvres, the five native regiments found themselves confronted
by a line of British muskets, and ordered to “pile arms.” The intending
mutineers were reduced, almost with a gesture, to the condition of an
unarmed mob, and that lightning-stroke of decision saved the Punjaub.
Levies poured in; new regiments rose like magic; a loyal army became
possible.
Little more than a fortnight afterwards, Neville Chamberlain discovered
a plot in the 35th Native Infantry, and promptly blew two ringleaders
from the guns, the first instance of that dramatic form of punishment in
the Mutiny. Later, when Nicholson took command of the Movable Column, he
was compelled to disarm two native regiments, the 35th and the 33rd. The
33rd was on its march to join the column, and Nicholson conducted the
business with so nice an adjustment of time and method that the 35th had
been disarmed, and their muskets and belts packed in carts and sent off
to the fort, just as the 33rd marched up. As it halted it found itself,
not side by side with a regiment of accomplices, but in front of a long
and menacing line of British infantry and guns, and Roberts himself rode
forward with the order to its colonel to pile arms. “What! disarm my
regiment?” said that astonished officer, who was serenely unconscious
that there was a mutinous brain under every shako in his regiment. When
the order was repeated, the old colonel broke into actual tears. But
there were sterner wills and stronger brains than his in command, and the
33rd was, in turn, reduced to harmlessness.
At Lahore, again, the Sepoys had an elaborate plot to kill their
officers, overpower the European troops, and seize the treasury and the
guns. Lahore was a city of 90,000 inhabitants, with a garrison of 2500
Sepoys in the city itself. The city troops were to rise first, and their
success was to be signalled to Meanmeer, the military cantonment, six
miles distant. Mutiny at Lahore was to be followed by revolt through all
the military stations of the district, from the Rabee to the Sutlej.
The plot, however, was discovered. General Corbett, a cool and gallant
soldier, resolved to disarm the whole native garrison.
On the night of May 12, three days before the date fixed for the Mutiny,
a military ball was to be held. This arrangement was not changed, lest
the suspicions of the Sepoys should be aroused, and dancing was kept up
till two o’clock in the morning. Then the officers at grey dawn hurried
to the parade-ground, where, by instructions issued the day before,
the whole brigade was assembled, nominally to hear some general orders
read. These were read in the usual fashion at the head of each regiment.
Then some brigade manœuvres followed, and these were so adroitly
arranged that, at their close, the native regiments found themselves in
quarter-distance column, with five companies of a British regiment, the
81st, opposite them in line, the guns being still in the rear of the 81st.
In a single sentence, brief and stern, the order was given for the native
regiments to “pile arms.” The Grenadiers of the 16th, to whom the order
was first addressed, hesitated; the men began to handle their arms; for
one breathless moment it was doubtful whether they would obey or fight.
But simultaneously with the words “pile arms,” the 81st had fallen back,
coolly and swiftly, between the guns, and the Sepoys, almost at a breath,
found themselves covered by a battery of twelve pieces loaded with grape,
the artillerymen standing in position with burning port-fires, whilst
along the line of the 81st behind ran the stern order, “Load,” and
already the click of the ramrods in the muskets was heard.
The nerve of the Sepoys failed! Sullenly they piled arms, and 600
English, by adroitness and daring, disarmed 2500 Sepoys without a shot!
What five minutes before had been a menace to the British power was made
harmless.
Montgomery, the chief civil officer at Lahore, divides with Corbett the
honour of the brilliant stroke of soldiership which saved the city.
Never was there a less heroic figure in outward appearance than that
of Montgomery. He was short, stout, soft-spoken, rubicund-faced, and
bore, indeed, a ludicrous resemblance to Mr. Pickwick as depicted by the
humorous pencil of “Phiz.” He was familiarly known, as a matter of fact,
to all Englishmen in his province by the sobriquet of “Pickwick.” But
nature sometimes conceals an heroic spirit within a very unheroic-looking
body. If in outward look there was something sheep-like in Montgomery’s
appearance, there was a lion-like strain in his courage. He had only a
hint of the coming storm. A couple of scanty telegrams brought in the
news of the mutiny at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi. With quick vision
Montgomery read the temper of the native troops at Meanmeer, and, with
swifter decision than even that of Corbett, he advised that they should
be instantly disarmed. That decision averted a great disaster.
The whole story shows what is possible to clear judgment and resolute
courage; but where these failed, or where some old Bengal officer
retained his blind and fond credulity as to the “staunchness” of his
men, then great tragedies became possible.
Thus at Futteghur, some seventy miles from Cawnpore, the 10th Native
Infantry, with some irregular troops, held the cantonments. General
Goldie was divisional commander; Colonel Smith held command of the 10th,
and cherished a piously confident belief in the loyalty of his Sepoys.
The civilians, with a shrewder insight into the state of affairs,
believed mutiny certain, and murder highly probable, and determined
to leave the station. On June 4 a little fleet of boats, laden with
almost the entire English colony in the place—merchants, shopkeepers,
missionaries, with their wives and children—started down the river, to
the huge disgust of Colonel Smith, who thought their departure a libel
on his beloved Sepoys. Part of the company found refuge with a friendly
Zemindar, while three boats, containing nearly seventy persons—of whom
forty-nine were women and children—pushed on to Cawnpore. In Cawnpore,
however, though they were in ignorance of the fact, Wheeler and his
gallant few were already fighting for life against overwhelming odds.
News soon reached the Sepoy lines at Cawnpore that three boat-loads
of Sahibs were on the river, and a rush was made for them. The poor
victims had pulled in to the bank and were enjoying “afternoon tea” when
the horde of mutineers burst upon them. Some tried to hide in the long
grass, which was set on fire above them. The rest, scorched, wounded,
half-naked, with bleeding feet—mothers trying to shelter or carry their
children—were dragged to the presence of Nana Sahib. The ladies and
children were ordered to sit on the ground; their husbands, with their
hands tied, were arranged in careful order behind them. Being thus
picturesquely arranged for easy murder, some files of the 2nd Cavalry
were marched up to kill the whole. The process was lengthy, wives
clinging to their husbands, mothers trying to shelter their little ones
with their own bodies from the keen cavalry swords. Nana Sahib watched
the whole process with the leisurely and discriminating interest of a
connoisseur.
On June 18 Colonel Smith’s trusted Sepoys broke into open revolt at
the station, whence these poor fugitives had fled. The little British
garrison, consisting of thirty fighting men, with sixty ladies and
children, took refuge in a low mud fort, and held it for nearly three
weeks. Then they fought their way to their boats and fled. They were
fiercely pursued. One boat grounded, and its miserable passengers were
summarily murdered. Death by bullets, by sunstroke, by drowning, pursued
the rest. One boat-load escaped, but escaped only to reach Cawnpore, and
to perish amid the horrors of the slaughter-house there.
One survivor has left a record of that dreadful voyage. He was in the
boat that first grounded and was boarded by the Sepoys. He describes
how the passengers were shot, and how “Major Robertson, seeing no hope,
begged the ladies to come into the water rather than fall into their
hands. While the ladies were throwing themselves into the water I
jumped into the boat, took up a loaded musket, and, going astern, shot
a Sepoy.... Mr. and Mrs. Fisher were about twenty yards from the boat;
he had his child in his arms, apparently lifeless. Mrs. Fisher could not
stand against the current; her dress, which acted like a sail, knocked
her down, when she was helped up by Mr. Fisher.... Early the next morning
a voice hailed us from the shore, which we recognised as Mr. Fisher’s.
He came on board, and informed us that his poor wife and child had been
drowned in his arms.”
For skill, daring, and promptitude, nothing exceeded the fashion in which
the incipient mutiny at Multan was trampled out. At no other post were
the conditions more perilous. The garrison consisted of a troop of native
horse-artillery, two regiments of native infantry, and the 1st Irregular
Cavalry; the only English troops were 50 artillerymen in charge of the
magazine. Here, then, were 50 British artillerymen, without guns, opposed
to over 3000 Sepoys—horse, foot, and artillery!
The decisive factor in the problem was the character of the British
commander, Major Chamberlain. His strong will and genius for command
held the 1st Irregular Cavalry steady. They were Hindus from the
neighbourhood of Delhi, with a full measure of the superstition and pride
of caste which swept away other regiments. But they believed in their
commander. He swayed their imaginations as with a touch of magic. The
spell of his looks and voice, his imperious will, overbore the impulse to
revolt. His men declared they would follow him to the death! Chamberlain
resolved to disarm the other native regiments, and he performed the
perilous feat, not only with miraculous audacity, but with a miraculous
nicety of arrangement.
The 2nd Punjaub Infantry and the 1st Punjaub Cavalry were to arrive at
the station on a given day. They were native troops, but could—for the
moment at least—be trusted. The new troops came in at nightfall. At 4
A.M. the next morning the two Sepoy regiments and a troop of native
artillery were marched out as if for an ordinary parade. They were
suddenly halted; the Punjaub troops quietly marched betwixt them and
their lines; the fifty English gunners took their places beside the guns
of the native artillery, and a little band of Sikh cavalry that could be
trusted rode up to the flank of the guns.
Then Chamberlain gave the order to the suspected regiments to “pile
arms.” One Sepoy shouted, “Don’t give up your arms! Fight for them;” but
his English adjutant instantly grasped him by the throat, shook him as
a terrier would shake a rat, and flung him on the ground. The mutinous
Sepoys hesitated; their courage sank; they meekly piled arms, were
marched back weaponless to their barracks, and the station was saved. But
it was a great feat to disarm a whole garrison with only fifty English
gunners. The regiment of irregular cavalry was permanently saved by the
spell of Chamberlain’s authority, and, as a reward, is still the 1st
Regiment of Bengal Cavalry.
Some of the revolting regiments, it is satisfactory to know, had very
distressful experiences. They found that mutiny was a bad investment.
Let the tale of the 55th, for example, be told. The regiment broke into
open mutiny at Mardan on May 22, fired on their officers, and marched
off to the hills with the regimental colours and treasure. Its colonel,
Spottiswoode, blew out his brains in mingled grief and despair when he
saw his “faithful” Sepoys in open revolt.
Meanwhile, the most menacing figure in all the great drama of the
Mutiny—that of Nicholson—made its appearance on the track of the
mutineers. Nicholson overtook them on the 24th, after a ride of seventy
miles, slew 150, captured another 150 with the stolen colours, and
promptly executed forty of his prisoners by blowing them from his guns.
The rest of the broken regiment crossed the border, were hunted down
by the hill-tribes, fell into the hands of Mohammedan fanatics, were
“converted” by the argument of whip and sword, or were sold as slaves.
“One fat old subahdar,” says Mr. Cave-Browne, “was sold for four annas
(sixpence)”! Mutiny, it is clear, proved a very bitter experience for
the unhappy 55th! The legend that has grown round the wanderings of this
broken regiment is told by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in his vivid story, “The
Lost Legion.”