Guns to the Far East (22 page)

“Aye, aye, sir.” Hay's voice was also calm.

Phillip accompanied Peel down to the bridge, the ensign— who gave his name as Truell—leading the way. The 53rd had brought in the body of their Colonel and laid it on one of the captured gun-limbers but now, exhausted by their charge, most of the men were squatting or lying in what shade they could find, in seeming indifference to the musket balls flying about their heads like a swarm of angry hornets. Captain Mowbray, wounded in the face by a charge of grape, greeted Peel's arrival with a grim assessment of the situation.

“They're too damned many for us, sir,” he ended, his tone resigned. “And the men are worn out. I fancy our only course is to withdraw. Men can't fight in this climate after a 24 mile forced march in the heat of the day. The Highlanders are in a worse state than we are and, between us, we've suffered over sixty casualties. God knows how many those poor devils of Engineers have lost and—”

Peel cut him short. “We can turn it our way yet,” he asserted. “Let's get those captured guns into action for a start and discourage their musketeers—Mr Watson, you know what to do. Bowse this gun 'round and send some grape into them …” He gave his orders with crisp decisiveness and the weary men, taking fresh heart, scrambled to their feet again, reaching for their rifles.
Doolies
were brought up and the wounded withdrawn; the two rebel guns, manned by scratch crews, opened up with devastating effect on their erstwhile owners. Phillip, having brought the second into action, left it under the able command of Midshipman Lightfoot—who appeared providentially with a message from Young—and set about collecting volunteers for the counter attack. There was no lack of them, despite the wounded Mowbray's gloomy assessment of their condition. Highlanders, Marines, and the 53rd formed up around him, and the baggage-guard of the 64th, fresher than the rest, came forward to a man, relinquishing responsibility for the baggage to footsore and slightly wounded men, while twenty of the Engineers, under a subaltern, grimly fixed bayonets again and took the right of the line.

Preceded by an accurate bombardment of the hillocks by Lieutenant Young's re-positioned field-guns, the attack was launched, led by Peel on the Colonel's big bay horse. Emerging from the village to pass round the embankment beyond, there was no slope to impede them and they drove their way right through the centre of the rebel line, cheering as they went. Hay's charge with his seamen completed the rout; the sepoys were soon in headlong flight, as position after position was taken at bayonet point. By half-past four, they had abandoned their hillocks and their camp-site, with its stores and ammunition, to the victorious British, leaving close on three hundred dead behind them.

Phillip, breathless and half-blinded by the streams of perspiration pouring down his face, came to a halt at last to find himself looking down at the body of a black-bearded Native Cavalry officer, whose pistol shot—fired at point-blank range—had miraculously skimmed over his head. He had no recollection of having killed the man but … He withdrew his sword from the medal-bedecked blue and silver jacket and saw that the blade was sticky with blood. Beside him, the 93rd's Commander, Captain Cornwall, dropped on one knee to examine the body and then looked up at him, a smile lighting his smoke-blackened face.

“Congratulations—you've just put a well-deserved end to one of the butchers of Cawnpore! This is Teeka Singh, the Nana's General of Cavalry … quite a prize, if I may say so.”

“Are you sure?” Phillip questioned doubtfully.

“Yes, pretty sure.” The Highland officer straightened up, brushing the dust from his bare knees. “For one thing, he's in the uniform of the Second Light Cavalry, the swine who mutinied at Cawnpore. For another, when our spies reported that he was here, I obtained a description of him from one of the Police sowars—short, inclined to corpulence, and with a black beard. He fits the description—it's Teeka Singh all right, Commander.”

An eye for an eye, Phillip thought, with bitter satisfaction … a Pandy general, one of the Nana's men, had paid with his life for Lavinia's murder.

“Then I hope his soul will rot in hell,” he said savagely and went to report to William Peel.

“We're going back to Bindki to make camp,” Peel told him. “Pursuit, alas, is out of the question—the men are too done up and we've too many wounded. Hay's among them but it's only slight—a graze on the hand—and poor young Stirling's taken a musket ball in the leg. In all, I think we've nearly a hundred casualties, but I haven't got the surgeon's report yet.” He expelled his breath in a weary sigh. “Dear God, I'm tired, Phillip! But our Jacks did pretty well, didn't they? They've had their baptism of fire as soldiers … I don't think they'll be found wanting when we get to Lucknow, do you?”

Phillip shook his head. “No, they won't, sir. And neither will you.”

A
fter spending a day
at Futtehpore to rest the men, obtain fresh gun-bullocks and send the wounded back to Allahabad, William Peel's party resumed the march to Cawnpore with the siege-train, arriving there on 3rd November. The Lucknow Relief Force was under orders to push on to Buntera—10 miles from their objective, where Brigadier Hope Grant's Movable Column from Delhi was waiting to join forces with them for the final advance.

Two companies of the 93rd had already left; Lieutenant Vaughan's party followed and Peel was ordered to leave with the rest of the siege-train and its escort on the 8th.

Phillip was thankful at the prospect of putting Cawnpore behind him. During the time they spent in camp there, he had seen the heartrending relics of the siege and massacre, and had entered and wondered at the mud-walled entrenchment which the garrison had defended with such heroic fortitude for three long and terrible weeks. The crumbling walls, the shell-battered, roofless buildings, the pathetic holes scooped in the bare, foul-smelling earth which had provided the only shelter General Wheeler's people had had, seemed to him even more terrible than the sun-bleached skeletons which still, in places, littered the river bank. It was impossible to identify the skeletons but, as he had stood in the burnt-out hospital on the east side of the entrenchment, it had been peopled with ghosts and, at every turn, he had imagined that he saw Lavinia coming to meet him with a baby in her arms, weeping and crying to him for aid.

He had not intended to go to the Bibigarh, although the yellow-painted bungalow in the centre of the city, where the Nana's poor hostages had been butchered, had become a place of pilgrimage for every newly arrived member of the Lucknow Force. Finally, in the company of Edward Daniels, he had done so reluctantly and had regretted it ever since. Brigadier-General Neill had ordered that the house should be kept exactly as it had been when General Havelock's Force had recaptured the city, Daniels told him. The well in the courtyard, into which the bodies of the victims had been flung, had been filled in and a memorial Cross erected over it but, inside the house itself, Neill's orders had been carried out to the letter and—a stone's throw from its ghastly, blood-splattered walls—a gallows stood in stark reminder of the retribution which Neill had exacted, from guilty and innocent alike.

“They say that any native, who was even remotely suspected of having taken part in either of the massacres, was hanged,” the midshipman added. “And they also say—I don't know if it's true, sir—that General Neill made each one of them clean up a measured patch of blood before they were executed. They were forced to go down on their hands and knees and cleanse the floor with their tongues. It sounds pretty revolting, but apparently the mere touch of Christian blood defiles them and Neill wanted them to believe that he'd taken their immortal souls, as well as their lives, in revenge for what they'd done to our poor women and children. When General Havelock returned from Oudh in the middle of August, he put a stop to it. He's very religious, it seems, and doesn't believe in what he calls meeting barbarism with barbarism. Not everyone agrees with him, I gather, but most people seem to think that Neill went too far. I don't know what to think. After going in there and seeing that room, I … I just don't know, sir.”

He had chattered on but Phillip had scarcely heard him as he had made his own, horror-stricken inspection of the small, shadowed room in which the pathetic survivors of the Suttee Chowra Ghat shambles had lived in fear for over two weeks before meeting their hideous death. The blood had dried—where it had not been cleansed and whitewashed over—to a black stain, none the less evocative for its change of colour and, from walls and verandah beams hung lengths of cord by which, Daniels told him, the children had been suspended to witness their mothers' slaughter and await their own. On the wall behind a door, a message had been scratched with a knife or some other sharp instrument, and he had read it, sickened.

“Countrymen and women, remember 15 July, 1857. Your wives and families are here in misery and at the disposal of savages, who have ravished both old and young and then killed us. Oh my child, my child! Countrymen, revenge it!”

“They didn't write that, sir,” Edward Daniels had assured him. “Although it's probably true. But some of General Havelock's soldiers are said to have carved the message with their bayonets, after they'd been in here a few days after it happened.”

His assurance had been of some slight consolation but, walking dazedly from the house of massacre, Phillip felt a savage anger well up inside him and it did not fade until long after his return to camp, becoming then a nagging ache from which, sleeping or waking, there was no relief. Most of the men in the column—seamen, soldiers, and Marines—felt much as he did following their arrival in Cawnpore, and there was little grumbling, however arduously they might have to toil and however little rest was permitted them, as preparations for the advance on Lucknow were completed and they moved out to join Brigadier-General Hope Grant's camp at Buntera.

The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Colin Campbell, reached Allahabad on 1st November. Received at the Bridge of Boats by the
Shannon
's cutter, with a guard of honour and a salute of seventeen guns, he had left at first light and entered Cawnpore on the evening of 3rd. The sight of his familiar small, slightly stooped figure in the immaculate blue frock coat put fresh heart into all of them and, in particular, into those who had served with him in the Crimea. Inevitably, he had aged but he had lost none of his energy; his temper was as explosive as ever, his eye as keen and searching, his voice, with its aggressively Scots accent, as rasping as Phillip remembered it from that day at Balaclava when—his “thin red line” of 93rd Highlanders all that stood between the Russians and the Harbour—he had warned them that they must die where they stood, if need be, and had then admonished them for their eagerness.

Another Crimean veteran, Major-General Windham—one of the heroes of the British attack on the Redan at Sebastopol in 1855—had been chosen by Sir Colin to assume the unenviable responsibility of the Cawnpore command during his absence. Despite the ever-present threat posed by the Gwalior contingent—five thousand well-trained sepoys, with twentyfour guns, only forty miles away, across the Jumna at Kalpi— and the Nana's levies, also amounting to about five thousand, only five hundred British and five hundred and fifty Madras troops could be spared from the Lucknow Relief Force for Cawnpore's defence, and William Peel had returned from his first meeting with the Commander-in-Chief looking strained and anxious.

“Sir Colin has asked me to leave an officer of lieutenant's rank and two guns' crews here,” he told Phillip. “Fifty of our best gunners, he specified, to assist in General Windham's defence. You've seen the entrenchment General Neill constructed at the Baxi Ghat, to cover the Bridge of Boats across the river, haven't you?”

“Yes, I have, sir.” Phillip waited, frowning. If Sir Colin Campbell's request was complied with—as obviously it would have to be—the strength of the Naval Brigade would be barely two hundred, including Marines and rifle companies.

“The entrenchment's solid enough,” Peel went on thoughtfully. “And well supplied with guns and ammunition. Whatever happens, Windham should be able to hold it with a thousand men—even if the Gwalior contingent and the Nana attack him simultaneously. But Sir Colin is anxious, so I've had to agree … although it's going to leave us pretty short. Ted Hay's the obvious choice to command the guns' crews, with young Garvey as his second-in-command and the two cadets … and you'd better select the men least able to march, Phillip, and detail them to stay here.”

“None of them will like it,” Phillip said reluctantly.

“For God's sake, I know they won't!” Peel sighed. “But I can't refuse a direct request from the Commander-in-Chief, can I? As he pointed out to us this morning, he's taking a hell of a gamble by going to Lucknow at all, before securing his base here. He's on the horns of a dilemma. If he attempts to meet and defeat the Gwalior rebels and the Nana, they can hold him up indefinitely. Since they're on the other side of the Jumna and all the boats are in their hands, they can choose their own time and place to do battle. If the Chief waits, Lucknow could well fall—they've been under siege for over four months, poor souls—and if he goes to their relief, he knows that the Nana will almost certainly attack Cawnpore. His only chance and the one he's gambling on, is that he can push on to Lucknow, evacuate the garrison, and return here before the Nana and his allies have had time to launch their attack.”

“He'll be cutting it fine, will he not?” Phillip demurred.

“Yes, he will,” Peel agreed. “But what else can he do? Even with the addition of Hope Grant's column from Delhi, he only has … what? About five thousand men of all arms available to him. In the circumstances, the minimum number he can leave here is a thousand, the absolute minimum. With the rest, he must defeat an estimated sixty thousand Pandies at Lucknow.”