LUCKNOW AND HAVELOCK
Lucknow is only forty-five miles from Cawnpore. On July 25, Havelock,
at the head of his tiny but gallant force, by this time tempered in the
flame of battle to the quality of mere steel, crossed the Ganges in
a tempest of rain, and started to rescue the beleaguered garrison of
Lucknow from the fate of Cawnpore. But it was not until September 25 that
Outram and Havelock clambered through the shot-battered gun embrasure in
the low wall beside the Bailey Guard at Lucknow, and brought relief to
the hard-pressed garrison. And the story of those nine weeks is scribbled
over with records of daring and of achievement unsurpassed in the history
of war.
Havelock left 300 men under Neill to hold Cawnpore, where rough but
adequate entrenchments had been thrown up. Furious rains had swollen the
Ganges, and it took him four days to transport his little force across
its turbid and far-extended waters. He had under his command Neill’s
“blue-caps,” the 64th, the 84th, the 78th, and Brasyer’s Sikhs, a force
not quite 1500 strong—of which only 1200 were British—with ten small
field-pieces and a troop of sixty horsemen. And with this mere handful of
men a dozen strong positions had to be carried, a great river crossed,
and a huge city, swarming with enemies, pierced!
[Illustration: LUCKNOW 1857.
Walker & Cockerell sc.]
The village of Onao barred the road, some nine miles from the banks of
the Ganges. Every house was held by Oude irregulars, a stubborn and
hard-fighting race; the rain-water, lying deep on both flanks of the
village, made a turning movement impossible. The infantry had outmarched
the guns, and Havelock wished to keep them back till his artillery came
up.
But the men were fiercely impatient, and could hardly be restrained.
“Pray, sir,” urged Colonel Hamilton, of the 78th, “let them go at
the place and have done with it.” Havelock nodded, and in an instant
Highlanders and Fusileers, vehemently racing against each other, went at
a run into the village. Every house was a loopholed fortress, and the
fighting was stubborn and deadly. House after house broke into flames,
while clusters of Highlanders and Fusileers broke through doors and
windows. The Oude men, to quote Forbes’s phrase, “fought like wild cats
while they roasted.” The 64th next came up at the double, and the village
was carried.
Beyond the village the flying guns of the enemy halted, and drew up
across the narrow causeway, barring it with a fiery hedge of shot and
flame; but the “blue-caps,” their officers leading, swept like a human
whirlwind down on the guns, and the stubborn Oude gunners, to a man, were
bayoneted at their pieces.
Six miles further the walled town of Bussarat Gunj crossed the road, its
gateway spanning the whole width of the causeway. Havelock took his guns
within short range of the gateway, and commenced to batter it, whilst
he despatched the 64th to turn the town and cut off the retreat of the
enemy. It was clever strategy, but the 78th and the Fusileers were too
quick, the 64th too slow. Highlanders and “blue-caps” carried trench,
gateway, and battery with one sustained and angry rush, and as they came
storming through the gateway with bent heads and bayonets at the charge,
the enemy were driven, a jumble of flying horsemen, galloping artillery,
and wrecked infantry, through the town beyond it. The 64th, it is said,
marched reluctantly on their turning movement. The men were eager to
share the straight rush at the gate.
Young Havelock, mistaking the men’s temper, galloped up to the
regiment with a message from his impatient father that lost nothing in
carrying—“If you don’t go at the village I’ll send men that will go, and
put an everlasting disgrace on you!” Brave men do not lightly endure
the whip of a message like that, and Forbes relates how a private named
Paddy Cavanagh leaped from the ranks, ran single-handed in on the enemy,
“cursing his comrades with bitter Irish malisons as he sped, and was
literally hacked to pieces, fighting like a wild cat in the ranks of his
enemies”! How the 64th followed where valiant Paddy Cavanagh had led may
be imagined; but the late arrival of the 64th had spoiled Havelock’s
combination, and he was too much given to vehement rhetoric to spare the
heavy-footed 64th a lash of the whip. “Some of you,” he said in his order
of the day next morning, “fought yesterday as if the cholera had seized
your mind as well as your bodies!”
Havelock had by this time marched fifteen miles, fought two battles,
used up one-third of his ammunition, and lost by bullet or cholera
about one-sixth of his force. At this rate of progress he would reach
Lucknow with powderless guns and 600 bayonets! Cawnpore itself, too, was
threatened, and at Dinapore, a vital point in the long water-line between
Calcutta and Allahabad, three regiments of Sepoys had broken into mutiny,
and threatened Havelock’s communications with the capital.
Havelock consulted with Tytler, his quartermaster-general, his chief
engineer, and his son. Young Havelock, with the effervescing and heady
valour of youth, was for “pushing on at all hazards”; the older men
declared this meant the entire destruction of the force, and perhaps the
loss of Lucknow, and Havelock was too good a soldier not to agree with
this view. It was an act of nobler courage to fall back than to advance,
but Havelock’s fine-tempered valour was equal to the feat, and he turned
the faces of his reluctant soldiers back to Cawnpore.
Neill, fierce and vehement by nature, when he heard the news, despatched
an amazing letter to his chief.
“You ought not to remain a day where you are,” he wrote. “You talk of
advancing as soon as reinforcements reach you. You ought to advance
again, and not halt until you have rescued, if possible, the garrison of
Lucknow.” Havelock, with that note of shrill temper which ran through his
character, was the last man to endure exhortations of this peremptory
quality from a subordinate. “There must be an end,” he wrote back, “to
these proceedings at once.” Nothing, he said, but the possible injury
to the public service prevented him from putting Neill under immediate
arrest! “But,” he added, “you now stand warned. Attempt no further
dictation!”
The truth is, both men were splendid soldiers, but of a type so different
that neither could understand the other. Neill was of the silent, dour
type; Havelock was too shrill and vocal for him. Havelock, on the other
hand, often felt Neill’s stern silence to be an unsyllabled reproof, and
he more than suspected Neill of the desire to overbear him. When Neill
joined him at Cawnpore, Havelock’s first words to him were, “Now, General
Neill, let us understand each other. You have no power or authority
here whilst I am here, and you are not to issue a single order here.”
There were the elements of a very pretty quarrel betwixt the two soldiers
who were upholding the flag of England at the heart of the Mutiny; and
yet, so essentially noble were both men, and so fine was their common
standard of soldierly duty, that they laid aside their personal quarrel
absolutely, and stood by each other with flawless loyalty till, under the
fatal archway at the Kaisarbagh, Neill fell, shot through the head.
Havelock telegraphed to Calcutta that he could not resume his march
to Lucknow till he had been reinforced by 1000 infantry and Olpherts’
battery complete. Yet on August 4, when he had been reinforced by merely
a single company and two guns, he started afresh for Lucknow, won
another costly victory at Bussarat Gunj, and then fell back once more
on Cawnpore, with cholera raging amongst his men. Almost every fourth
British soldier under his command was disabled either by sickness or
wounds. Havelock had simply to wait till reinforcements came up; but he
relieved his feelings while he waited by marching out and destroying
Bithoor, Nana Sahib’s palace.
The days crept past leaden-footed; reinforcements trickled in, so to
speak, drop by drop. Not till September 16 was Havelock ready for the
final march to Lucknow. And then Outram arrived to supersede him! It
was, in a sense, a cruel stroke to Havelock. But he and Outram were tried
comrades, knitted to each other by a friendship woven of the memories
and companionship of many years, and Outram was himself one of the most
chivalrous and self-effacing men that ever lived. The story of how he
refused to take the command out of Havelock’s hands, confined himself to
his civil office as commissioner, and put himself, as a mere volunteer,
under Havelock’s orders, is an oft-told and most noble tale.
On September 19 Havelock crossed the Ganges, by this time bridged,
with a force numbering 3000 men of all arms. The Madras Fusileers, the
5 th Fusileers, the 84th, and two companies of the 64th, under Neill,
formed the first brigade. The second brigade, under Colonel Hamilton,
consisted of the 78th Highlanders, the 90th, and Brasyer’s Sikhs. The
artillery consisted of three batteries, under Maude, Olpherts, and Eyre
respectively; and no guns that ever burned powder did more gallant and
desperate service than these. The pieces, indeed, might well have been
stored, as heroic relics, in some great museum. The cavalry was made up
of 109 volunteers and 59 native horsemen, under Barrow.
The rain fell as though another Noachian deluge was imminent. The
rice-fields on either side of the road were either lakes or quagmires.
The column, however, pushed on with eager and cheerful, if wet-footed,
courage. The Sepoys held the village of Mungulwagh strongly. Havelock
smote them in front with his artillery, turned their flank with his
infantry, marching—or rather splashing—through the swamps, and when the
Sepoys had been, in this manner, hustled out of the town, he launched
his little squadron of cavalry upon them. Outram rode among the troopers
armed with nothing but a gold-mounted cane, with which he thumped the
heads and shoulders of the flying enemy.
Here some mutineers, stained with special crimes, fell into Havelock’s
hands, and Maude, in his “Memories of the Mutiny,” tells how Havelock
asked him “if he knew how to blow a man from a gun.” This art does not
form part of the curriculum at Woolwich, but Maude could only touch his
cap and say he “would try.” Here is a grim picture of the doings of that
stern time:—
When we halted for the night, I moved one of my guns on to the
causeway, unlimbered it, and brought it into “action front.”
The evening was just beginning to grow dusk, and the enemy
were still in sight, on the crest of some rising ground a few
hundred yards distant. The remainder of my guns were “parked”
in a nice mango-tope to the right of the road.... The first man
led out was a fine-looking young Sepoy, with good features,
and a bold, resolute expression. He begged that he might not
be bound, but this could not be allowed, and I had his wrists
tied tightly each to the upper part of a wheel of the gun. Then
I depressed the muzzle, until it pointed to the pit of his
stomach, just below the sternum. We put no shot in, and I only
kept one gunner (besides the “firing” number) near the gun,
standing myself about 10 ft. to the left rear. The young Sepoy
looked undauntedly at us during the whole process of pinioning;
indeed, he never flinched for a moment. Then I ordered the
port-fire to be lighted, and gave the word “Fire!” There was a
considerable recoil from the gun, and a thick cloud of smoke
hung over us. As this cleared away, we saw two legs lying in
front of the gun, but no other sign of what had, just before,
been a human being and a brave man. At this moment, perhaps
from six to eight seconds after the explosion, down fell the
man’s head among us, slightly blackened, but otherwise scarcely
changed. It must have gone straight up into the air, probably
about 200 feet.
This was stern, uncanny occupation for a humane-minded British officer!
But the times were stern, the crisis supreme.
On the evening of the second day’s march the air was full of a faint,
far-off, vibrating sound. It was the distant roar of the enemy’s cannon
breaking like some angry and dreadful sea on the besieged Residency!
When the camp was pitched Havelock fired a royal salute, hoping the
sound would reach the ears of the beleaguered garrison, and tell them
rescue was coming; but the faint wind failed to carry the sound to the
Residency. When the soldiers began their march on September 23, Lucknow
was only sixteen miles distant, and by noon the Alumbagh was in sight,
held by a force of some 12,000 men.
Havelock turned the enemy’s right with his second brigade, while he
engaged the enemy’s guns with Eyre’s battery in front. Olpherts, with his
guns, was sent to assist the turning movement. Here is a stirring battle
picture drawn by Forbes:—
At a stretching gallop, with some volunteer cavalry in front
of it, the horse battery dashed up the road past the halted
first brigade, which cheered loudly as the cannon swept by,
Neill waving his cap and leading the cheering. On the left of
the road there was a great deep trench full of water, which
had somehow to be crossed. Led by Barrow, the cavalry escort
plunged in, and scrambled through, and then halted to watch
how Olpherts would conquer the obstacle. “Hell-fire Jack” was
quite equal to the occasion, and his men were as reckless as
himself. With no abatement of speed the guns were galloped into
the great trough. For a moment there was chaos—a wild medley of
detachments, drivers, guns, struggling horses, and splashing
water; and then the guns were out on the further side, nobody
and nothing the worse for the scramble, all hands on the alert
to obey Olpherts’ stentorian shout, “Forward at a gallop!”
Hamilton’s men marched and fought knee-deep in water; but the enemy’s
right was smashed, his centre tumbled into ruin, and the men of the
78th and the Fusileers actually carried the Alumbagh in ten minutes! To
tumble 12,000 men into flight, and carry the Alumbagh in this fashion,
and in a space so brief, was a great feat; and while the men were
in the exultation of victory, a messenger came riding in with the
news—unhappily not true—that Delhi had fallen!
On the 24th the little force rested, while its leaders matured their
plans for the advance to the Residency. Before them ran the great canal,
the road crossing it by what was called the Charbagh bridge. Havelock’s
plan was to bridge the Goomtee, the river into which the canal ran, march
along its further bank, round the city to its north-west angle, and
re-cross by the iron bridge immediately in front of the Residency, and
in this way avoid the necessity of forcing his way, with desperate and
bloody street-fighting, through the interlaced and tangled lanes of the
city.
But the soil between the canal and the river was little better than a
marsh, and it was determined to force the Charbagh bridge, advance on a
lane which skirted the left bank of the canal, then turn sharply to the
left, and fight a way across the city to the Residency.
Three hundred footsore and sick men were left to hold the Alumbagh. In
the grey dawn of September 25, Havelock’s men, scanty in number, worn
with marching, and hardened with a score of fights, were falling into
line for the final march, which was to relieve Lucknow. “The sergeants of
companies,” says an eye-witness, “acting on their orders, were shouting
‘Fall out, all you men that are footsore or sick;’ but many added the
taunt, ‘and all you fellows whose heart isn’t good as well!’” But no man
fell out of the ranks that grey September morning on that coward’s plea!
At half-past eight the bugles sang out the advance, and with a cheer, and
a quick step which the officers could scarcely restrain from breaking
into the double, the men moved off for the last act in this great
adventure.
Maude’s guns moved first, covered by two companies of the 5th
(Northumberland) Fusileers. Outram rode by Maude’s side with the leading
gun. Instantly, from a wide front, a cruel and deadly fire smote the
head of the little column. From the enemy’s batteries on either flank,
carefully laid and admirably served, from the cornfields, from the garden
walls, from the house-roofs, a terrific fire of musketry and cannon-shot
lashed, as with a scourge of flame, the causeway on which the English
guns were moving. Maude’s guns were halted, and opened fiercely in answer
to this fire. The men fell fast. A musket-ball passed through Outram’s
arm, but, says Maude, “he only smiled, and asked one of us to tie his
handkerchief tightly above the wound.” The cluster of British guns, with
their gallant gunners, stood in the very centre of a tempest of shot.
Here is a picture, drawn by Maude, of the carnage in his battery:—
Almost at the same moment the finest soldier in our battery,
and the best artilleryman I have ever known, Sergeant-Major
Alexander Lamont, had the whole of his stomach carried away
by a round shot. He looked up to me for a moment with a
piteous expression, but had only strength to utter two words,
“Oh! God!” when he sank dead on the road. Just then another
round shot took off the leg, high up the thigh, of the next
senior sergeant, John Kiernan. He was afterwards carried back
to the Alumbagh, but soon died from the shock. Kiernan was
an excellent specimen of a Roman Catholic North of Ireland
soldier. He was as true as steel. Another tragic sight on
that road was the death of a fine young gunner, the only one,
I believe, who wore an artillery jacket that day. A round
shot took his head clean off, and for about a second the body
stood straight up, surmounted by the red collar, and then fell
flat on the road. But as fast as the men of the leading gun
detachments were swept away by the enemy’s fire I replaced
them by volunteers from other guns. Several times I turned to
the calm, cool, grim general standing near, and asked him to
allow us to advance, as we could not possibly do any good by
halting there. He agreed with me, but did not like to take the
responsibility of ordering us to go on.
At last the order to move on came, and Charbagh bridge was reached. It
was defended on the further side by a solid earthen rampart 7ft. high,
but with a narrow slit in the middle through which one man at a time
could pass. It was armed with six guns, two of them 24-pounders. Tall
houses, crowded with musketrymen, covered the bridge with their fire, and
solid battalions were drawn up in its rear. Maude was planted with two
of his guns in the open, and within short range of the enemy’s battery,
and commenced a valiant duel with it. Outram led the 5th Fusileers by
a detour for the purpose of smiting the battery at the bridge-head with
a flank-fire. Maude’s two guns were fighting six, at a distance of 150
yards, and his gunners fell fast.
Again and again he had to call for volunteers to work his guns from the
Madras Fusileers lying down under cover near him. The guns were of an
ancient pattern, and carried a large leathern pouch full of loose powder
for priming uses. “As the lane was very narrow,” says Maude, “the two
guns were exceedingly close to one another, and when in their recoil they
passed each other, amid a shower of sparks and smoke, they frequently
set fire to the loose powder in the priming pouches, and blew the poor
gunners up!” Yet Maude’s gallant lads worked their guns unflinchingly.
Neill stood in a bay of a garden wall close by, with his “blue-caps”
lying down under cover, waiting till Outram’s flanking movement should
tell on the enemy’s battery; and Maude, with his artillerymen almost
all shot down, said to young Havelock, “Do something, in the name of
Heaven!” Havelock rode through the tempest of shot to Neill, and urged
an immediate rush on the bridge; but Neill, with soldierly coolness,
declared he would not move without orders. Then young Havelock played a
boyish and gallant trick. He rode quietly off, turned round a bend in
the road, and a moment after came back at a gallop, gave a smart salute
to Neill as he pulled up his horse on its haunches, and said, as though
bringing an order from his father, “You are to carry the bridge at once,
sir!”
At the word, Arnold, who commanded the “blue-caps,” leaped to his feet
and raced on to the bridge, his men rising with a shout and following
him. Havelock and Tytler overtook him at a gallop, and the bridge in a
moment was covered with a mass of charging soldiers.
But a blast of shots from the guns at its head—the deep bellow of the
24-pounders sounding high above the tumult—swept the bridge for a moment
clear. Arnold had fallen with both legs smashed, Tytler’s horse had
gone down with its brave rider; only young Havelock and a corporal of
the Fusileers, named Jakes, stood unhurt. Havelock rode coolly up to
the rampart of earth, and, waving his sword, called to the Fusileers to
“come on”; and Corporal Jakes, as he busily plied his musket, shouted
to Havelock, soothingly, “Never fear, sir! We’ll soon have the beggars
out of that!” All this took but a few seconds of time; the Sepoys were
toiling with frantic energy to reload their guns. Then through the white
smoke came the rush of the Madras Fusileers—an officer leading. Over the
bridge, up the seven-foot rampart, through the intervals betwixt the guns
as with a single impulse, came the levelled bayonets and fierce faces of
the charging British, and the bridge was won!
The entire British force came swiftly over, the 78th was left to hold the
bridge and form the rearguard, while the British column swung round to
the right and pushed on through the narrow lane that bordered the canal.
The 78th, while guarding the bridge, had a very trying experience. A
great force of the enemy came down the Cawnpore road with banners flying
and loud beating of drums, and flung itself with wild courage on the
Highlanders. A little stone temple stood a hundred yards up the road,
commanding the bridge; the Sepoys took possession of this, and from it
galled the Highlanders cruelly with their fire. Hastings, of the 78th,
stepped out to the front, and called for volunteers to storm the temple.
There was an angry rush of Highlanders up the road; the temple was
carried at the point of the bayonet, and then held as a sort of outwork
to the bridge.
The Sepoys next brought up three brass guns, and lashed temple and road
alike with their fire. Webster, an officer of the 78th, famous for his
swordsmanship and strength, called out, “Who’s for these infernal guns?”
and ran out, sword in hand. His Highlanders followed him, but could not
overtake Webster, who sprang upon the guns, and slew a gunner, just in
the act of putting his linstock to the touch-hole, with a stroke so
mighty that it clove the Sepoy through skull and jaws almost to the
collar-bone! The guns were captured, dragged with a triumphant skirl
of the pipes to the canal, and flung in, and the Highlanders set off to
follow the column.
They did not follow in its immediate track, but made a wide sweep to the
right, and both sections of the column, with much stern fighting, reached
what was called the Chutter Munzil Palace. “Here,” says Forbes, “were the
chiefs of the little army. On his big ‘waler’ sat Outram, a splash of
blood across his face, and one arm in a sling, the Malacca cane, which
formed his sole weapon in battle, still grasped in the hand of the sound
limb. Havelock, on foot, was walking up and down on Outram’s near side,
with short steps. All around them, at a little distance, were officers,
and outside of the circle so formed were soldiers, guns, wounded men,
bullocks, camels”—all the tumult, in a word, of the battle.
Outram and Havelock disagreed as to the next step to be taken. Outram—the
cooler brain of the two—wished to halt for the night, and then to push
their way in the morning through the successive courts of the palaces
right up to the Residency. Havelock was eager to complete the day’s work,
and reach the Residency with a final and desperate rush.
A long, winding, and narrow street stretched before them up to the Bailey
Guard Gate, the entrance to the Residency. It was true that every cross
street that broke its length was swept by the fire of the enemy’s guns,
that the houses were loopholed and crowded with Sepoys, and from the
flat roofs of the houses above a tempest of fire would be poured upon
the British. But Havelock was full of warlike impatience. “There is the
street,” said he; “we see the worst. We shall be slated, but we can push
through, and get it over.” Outram acknowledged afterwards that he ought
to have said, “Havelock, we have virtually reached the Residency. I now
take the command;” but he added to the confession, “My temper got a
little the better of me, and I said, ‘In God’s name, then, let us go on.’”
The Highlanders led, Havelock and Outram riding with their leading
files. Brasyer’s Sikhs followed. It was, as Forbes says, “a true _via
dolorosa_.” From house-roof, from door, from window, from every cross
lane poured a tempest of shot, and through it the British could only push
with dogged, all-enduring courage, seldom halting to fire back. And this
experience stretched over more than three-quarters of a mile! Here is a
little battle vignette taken from Forbes:—
In the foremost company of the Highland regiment were two
staunch comrades, named Glandell and M’Donough, Irishmen and
Catholics among the Scots and Presbyterians. In this street of
death M’Donough’s leg was shattered by a bullet. He fell, but
was not left to die. His stalwart chum raised the wounded man,
took him on his back, and trudged on with his heavy burden.
Nor did the hale man, thus encumbered, permit himself to be
a non-combatant. When a chance offered him to fire a shot,
Glandell propped his wounded comrade up against some wall,
and would betake himself to his rifle, while it could be of
service. Then he would pick M’Donough up again, and stagger
cheerily onward, till the well-deserved goal of safety was
reached.
The road at one point ran under an archway, and here Neill met with
his death-shot. He drew up his horse by the arch quite coolly, and was
steadying the soldiers as they swept through it. A Sepoy leaned forward
from a window above the arch, with his musket almost touching Neill’s
head. Neill sat with his face turned to his shoulder, watching a gun
going through the archway, when the Sepoy fired. His bullet struck the
side of Neill’s head above the ear, and killed him instantly. Out of the
tumult and passion of the fight thus dropped, in a moment, this most
gallant of soldiers.
Still the fierce fight raged. Still, beaten with a tempest of shot, the
tormented column pushed on its dogged way. Suddenly from the head of
the column rose a mighty shout. It was not the cry of soldiers at the
charge, full of the wrath of battle. It was a great cry of exultation and
triumph. Through the grey twilight, dark with eddying smoke, the leading
files of the British had seen the battered archway of the Bailey Guard.
The goal was reached.
The beleaguered garrison had listened, with what eagerness may be
imagined, to the tumult of the fight as it crept nearer them. Its smoke
was blowing over their defences. Those who watched the advance from
the Residency could measure the approach of the relieving force by the
attitudes and gestures of the Sepoys on the house-tops, as they fired
furiously down on the gallant column forcing its way along the streets
beneath them. The storm of sound grew louder, clearer, deeper. Suddenly,
through the smoke and twilight, they caught a glimpse of figures on
horseback, the gleam of bayonets, the white faces and red uniforms of
British soldiers. An earthwork blocked the Bailey Gate itself, but the
handful of men acting as the garrison of the gate, pulled hurriedly back
from its ragged embrasure in the wall, to the left of the entrance, one
of the guns, and through that embrasure—Outram, on his big Australian
horse, leading—came the Highlanders, with Havelock and his staff; then
the Sikhs; then the Fusileers. The Residency was reached!
How the shout of exultation ran round the seventeen shot-battered posts
of the long-besieged entrenchments can be imagined. The women, the
children, the very sick in the hospital, lent their voices to that shout.
The Highlanders, who came first, poured their Celtic exclamations and
blessings on the men and women they had rescued. “We expected to have
found only your bones,” said one. That the children were still alive
filled the gallant but soft-hearted Highlanders with amazed joy. “The
big, rough-bearded soldiers,” wrote one of the rescued ladies, “were
seizing the little children out of our arms, kissing them with tears
running down their cheeks, and thanking God that they had come in time to
save them from the fate of those at Cawnpore.”
Let it be remembered that for more than eighty days the garrison had
lived under the shadow of death. No message, no whisper of news, from the
outside world had reached them. Their rescuers were men of the same name
and blood, who had fought their way as if through the flames of the Pit
to reach and save them! And into what a mood of passionate joy amongst
the delivered, and of passionate exultation and triumph amongst the
deliverers, the crowd which thronged the Residency that night was lifted
may be more easily imagined than described. It was a night worth living
for; almost worth dying for.
Lady Inglis has told how she listened to the tremendous cheering that
welcomed the British across the Residency lines, and how her husband
brought up “a short, quiet-looking, grey-haired man,” who she guessed at
once was Havelock. It was a great triumph, but a great price was paid for
it. The relieving column, out of its 3000 men, lost in killed or wounded
more than 700, nearly one in every four of its whole number!
One unfortunate incident marked the relief. As the Highlanders approached
the Bailey Guard Gate they took Aitken’s men of the 13th for the enemy,
and leaped upon them with gleaming and angry bayonets, and slew some
before their blunder was discovered. It was never imagined that the very
outpost of the heroic garrison would be found to consist of Sepoys,
fighting with such long-enduring loyalty against their own countrymen.
It was a very cruel fate for these faithful Sepoys to perish under the
bayonets of the relieving force.
Still another remarkable incident may be described. A cluster of doolies,
with wounded officers and men, lost its way in the tangled streets and
was cut off. Nine men of the escort, with five wounded, took refuge in
a small building which formed one side of the gateway where Neill had
been shot; and for a whole day and night they defended themselves against
overwhelming numbers. Dr. Home, of the 90th, was one of the party, and
has left a graphic account of what is perhaps the most brilliant little
incident in the whole history of the siege.
The Sepoys kept up a bitter and tireless fire on the single doorway of
the room held by the nine. One of the British, a Fusileer named M’Manus,
stood outside the doorway, sheltering himself behind a pillar, and
shot down man after man of the enemy. So cool and quick and deadly was
his fire that the Sepoys feared to make a rush. At last their leader,
to encourage them, shouted there were but three sahibs in the house,
whereupon the whole fourteen, wounded included, joined in a loud cheer to
undeceive them. Captain Arnold, of the Fusileers, lay wounded in one of
the abandoned doolies visible through the doorway. Two gallant privates,
Ryan and M’Manus, charged out through the fire and carried their officer
into the house. They ran out a second time and brought in a wounded
private; but in each case the comrade they carried was mortally wounded
while in their arms.
Again and again some leader of the Sepoys ran out, heading a charge on
the doorway; but each time the leader was shot, and the Sepoys fell back.
The sorely beleaguered party was rescued the next morning. Just when hope
seemed to have abandoned them, a new blast of musketry volleys was heard
at a little distance, and one of the Fusileers recognised the regular
sound. He jumped up, shouting, “Oh, boys, them’s our own chaps!”