Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (29 page)

Wheeler’s entrenchment was in open ground about half a mile from the Ganges—a treeless place without a flicker of green, where black birds of prey circled always overhead, and the dry dust got into everything. Here the British were besieged for eighteen days. There were about a thousand of them, including 300 women and children. The two buildings were small single-story blocks with verandahs, and the arrangements (wrote Kaye, historian of the Mutiny as he was of the Afghan War) ‘violated all the decencies and proprieties of life, and shocked the modesty of … womanly nature’. Indeed all the feminist elements necessary to such a Victorian drama were present at Cawnpore. Several babies were born during the siege. There was a wedding. Children played among the guns, mothers pathetically kept up their journals. Stockings and lingerie were commandeered to provide wadding for damaged guns (‘the gentlewomen of Cawnpore’, as Kaye says, ‘gave up perhaps the most cherished components of their feminine attire to improve the ordnance …’).

But though it read like a parody in contemporary accounts, it was all too real. There was plenty of ammunition, but the commissariat supply was eccentric, and in the first days of the siege one
saw private soldiers drinking champagne with their tinned herrings, or rum with their puddings. Later everyone got a single meal a day, of split peas and flour, sometimes supplemented by horsemeat (‘though some ladies could not reconcile themselves’, we are told, ‘to this unaccustomed fare’). The sepoys never stormed the position, but they kept up a constant fire of musketry and artillery, night and day, so that the British never got any rest, were always at their guns, and were forced to make constant sorties to keep the enemy at a distance. Every day there were more casualties, and as the tension increased, the food ran short, the bombardment relentlessly continued and the sun blazed mercilessly on, several people went mad. Every drop of water had to be fetched from a well outside the entrenchment, and man after man was shot getting it. Another well was used for the disposal of corpses: the dead were laid in rows upon the verandahs, and when night fell they were dragged away from the steps, feet first.

The temperature rose sometimes to 138 degrees Fahrenheit, the guns were too hot to touch, and several men died of sunstroke. On June 12 the thatched roof of one of the barracks caught fire, and the building was burnt to ashes, through which the men of the 42nd Regiment raked with their bayonets, hoping to find their campaign medals: all the medical supplies were lost in the blaze, and the survivors were forced to draw in their defences, and huddle in the single building left. Poor Wheeler was now distraught. ‘We want aid, aid, aid!’ he wrote in a message smuggled across the river to the British garrison at Lucknow. ‘Surely we are not to die like rats in a cage? When his own son Godfrey was killed—‘Here a round shot came and killed young Wheeler’, recorded a graffito, ‘his brains and hair are scattered on the wall’—the old general was broken, and lay on his mattress all day long in tears.

By now the place was full of half-starved children, sick and wounded women, men blinded, insane, or helplessly apathetic. ‘June 17th’, recorded one young Englishwoman’s diary, ‘Aunt Lilly died. June 18th. Uncle Willy died. June 22nd … George died. July 9th. Alice died. July 12th. Mamma died’.
1
Yet on June 23 the most determined rebel assault was beaten off, and after thirteen days
of siege there was reached a kind of stale-mate. The sepoys were too timid to take the place by storm, but too impatient to starve it into submission. On June 25 a solitary Eurasian woman, barefoot, with a baby in her arms, appeared on the flat ground before the entrenchments, holding a flag of truce. They carried her half-fainting over the rampart, and she presented an envelope ceremoniously addressed to ‘The Subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’.

The Nana was offering terms. ‘All those who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie’, his unsigned message ran, ‘and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad’—100 miles away, and the first downstream city still held by the British. After a day of discussion with his officers, Wheeler accepted the offer, insisting only that his soldiers keep their side-arms, with 60 rounds of ammunition apiece. There were parleys on the flat ground before the entrenchment; the guns were handed over; and at dawn on June 27 the evacuation began.

Sixteen painted elephants, eight palanquins and a train of bullock-carts, with sullen mahouts and insolent drivers, took the sick and wounded out of the camp, down a shallow wooded gulley towards the river. Behind them straggled the walking survivors, rifles on their shoulders, scraps of baggage in their hands, ragged, dirty and silent. Most of the sepoys who swarmed around them treated them with contempt or contumely: others asked kindly after old friends or former officers. Crowds of sightseers followed too, but a few hundred yards before the river, where the track crossed a stream by a wooden bridge, they were all stopped. Only the British and their guards were allowed to proceed, the macabre procession of elephants, carts, palanquins and exhausted soldiers proceeding heavily in the heat towards the waterfront.

On a bluff beside the river there stood a small white temple, attended by a tumble of thatched huts, through whose purlieus dogs and geese wandered, and monkeys bounded. Below it was the
ghat
at which the Hindu faithful performed their ablutions in the holy river. Only a narrow gap in the bluff, sprinkled with trees, gave access to the water’s edge. As they stumbled down to the waterfront, the British could not see far either up or down the river, but lying
off-shore in front of them they discovered some forty high-sterned river boats, thatched like floating haystacks, with their crews waiting impassively on deck. There was no jetty at the
ghat
. The fit men were made to wade into the stream, carrying their wives, children and wounded—a forlorn emaciated company, many of them bandaged or splinted, some carried out on stretchers, some clutching raggety bundles of possessions. Bewildered and terrified, watched by the silent boatmen and the sepoys leaning on their muskets on the shore, they scrambled dripping and bedraggled aboard the boats, nine or ten souls to each craft. The last people to embark, Major Vibart and his family, were seen aboard with every courtesy by sepoys who had been in Vibart’s regiment, and who insisted on carrying his bags.

On a platform before the little temple sat the Nana’s representative, a functionary of the court at Bithur, keenly watching events below, and cheerfully crowded around the bridge over the gulley behind, peering through the gap like spectators at a sporting contest, hundreds of sightseers waited to see the last humiliation of the Raj. As soon as Vibart was aboard something ominous happened: instead of pushing off, all the boatmen jumped overboard and hastily waded ashore. Pandemonium followed. The British opened fire on the boatmen, and simultaneously the troopers who had so politely escorted the Vibarts aboard opened fire upon the boats. In a moment there poured into the stationary flotilla, from guns hidden on both banks of the river, a heavy fire of grape-shot and musketballs. The British were overwhelmed. Soon the thatch of the boats was aflame, and the river was littered with corpses, and threshed with desperate survivors. Women crouched in the water up to their necks, babies floated helplessly downstream, men tried desperately to shove the boats into midstream and get away. Indian cavalrymen splashed about the shallows, slashing at survivors with their sabres, and the few people who managed to get ashore were either bayonetted then and there, or seized and whisked away beyond the gulley. Only one boat escaped, rudderless and oarless, and after nightmare adventures on stream and on land—chased through the night by maddened sepoys—besieged in a burning temple—without food, weapons, maps—at last two English officers and two Irish privates, all stark
naked, swam ashore in friendly territory to tell the story of Cawnpore.
1

Nobody else lived. Every man was killed. Every surviving woman and child was taken to a house called the Bibighar, the House of Women, a mud flat-roofed building beside the Ganges canal which a British officer had built for his Indian mistress long before. On the afternoon of July 15 several men, some of them butchers by trade, entered the Bibighar with sabres and long knives, and murdered them all. The limbs, heads and trunks of the dismembered dead were carried to a nearby well, and almost filled its 50-foot shaft.
2

The other sacramental episode of the Indian Mutiny was the siege of Lucknow. This city, annexed by the Raj only in the previous year, was naturally full of dissidents—deposed princes, soldiers of the disbanded royal army, dispossessed stipendiaries, and a vast number of citizens who, far from welcoming the new enlightenment, missed the delinquent old days of cheap opium and corruptible officials. The British, who had a low opinion of Oudh traditional life, ensconced themselves in a grand towered Residency and used as an ammunition store the Kadam Rasul, a building particularly sacred to
the Muslims of Oudh because it contained a stone impression of the Prophet’s footprint.

But the Chief Commissioner was Henry Lawrence, fresh from the Punjab, and he seemed to have things well in hand, pursuing a careful mean between conciliation and firmness, and assuming plenary-powers as commander of the military forces in Lucknow as well as head of the civil government. Lawrence thought he knew his Indians, and believed in trusting them as long as possible: ‘until we treat Natives, and especially Native soldiers, as having much the same feelings, the same ambitions, the same perceptions of ability and imbecility as ourselves, we shall never be safe’. The mutiny had flared quickly throughout Oudh, and by the middle of June only Lucknow itself remained in British control: but though Lawrence was not well, he exuded his habitual kindly confidence, personally supervising the military arrangements, and sometimes going into the city incognito to see how the wind was blowing.

He had decided that the garrison, with the entire British community, should be concentrated within the Residency compound. This elaborate complex of buildings stood among flowered lawns in the very centre of Lucknow. To the north flowed the river Gumti, to the east was the huge tumbled pile of the Farhat Bakhsh, ‘the Delight-Giver’, the palace of the kings of Oudh. Closely around the compound walls straggled the native city, a foetid maze of alleys and bazaars, and towering over its gardens stood the Residency itself, a tall and ugly thing, from whose upper stories one could survey the whole expanse of the city, its towers, domes and minarets rising splendidly from the squalor at their feet. Within the thirty-three acres of the compound there were sixteen separate buildings—bungalows, stables, barracks, orderly rooms—and all this enclave, surrounded by mud ramparts, Lawrence now turned into a fortress. Trenches were dug, palisades erected, booby-traps set, wire entanglements laid. Artillery batteries were posted around the perimeter, and within the buildings the Residency staff prepared themselves for a siege. By the time the mutiny broke out in Lucknow, towards the end of June, the entire European population of the place, including a garrison of some 1,700 men, was entrenched within the compound.

Soon everyone in England would know the topography of this place, and remember its names—the Baillie Gate, the Redan Battery, Sago’s Garrison, Grant’s Bastion. Anglo-Indian life was encapsulated there, grand ladies of the Company establishment to clerks and shopkeepers who were only just acceptable as Britons at all. There were merchants of several foreign nationalities, too, and many loyal Indian sepoys who had voluntarily joined the garrison—half the defending force was Indian—and several important political prisoners, including two princes of the royal house at Delhi. Tightly within their thirty-three acres this heterogeneous company huddled for safety, beneath the god-like authority of the Resident: beyond the walls the whole of Oudh was soon in hostile hands, and every house overlooking the ramparts had its quota of snipers and archers.

Almost the first casualty was Lawrence himself. A howitzer shell fell in his room, and when through the smoke and dust somebody call ‘Sir Henry! Are you hurt?’ there came after a short pause the faint but decisive reply: ‘I am killed’. He lived in fact for two days more, giving detailed instructions to his successor about the defence of the garrison, and was buried quietly in the Residency graveyard beneath his own epitaph—‘Here Lies Henry Lawrence, Who Tried To Do His Duty’. Without him the British sank into fatalism. The heat now was ferocious, the bombardment was unremitting, and one could hardly move a foot in the open without a sniper’s shot from over the walls. One by one the buildings toppled, until the whole compound was a sort of wreck. Food ran short. The air stank of carrion and excrement. Many of the women lived in cellars, where they were plagued by mice and rats, and often fell into gloomy fits of foreboding. ‘In the evening, Mrs Inglis went to see Mrs Cooper, and found Mrs Martin sitting with her. They all had a consultation as to what they would consider best to be done in case the enemy were to get in, and whether it would be right to put an end to ourselves if they did so, to save ourselves from the horrors we should have to endure. Some of the ladies keep laudanum and prussic acid always near them’. (But Mrs Case and Mrs Inglis agreed that they should merely prepare themselves for death, leaving the rest ‘in the hands of Him who knows what is best for us’.)

Many of the Indian sepoys now deserted, and by July, 1858, the British were losing an average of ten men a day killed and wounded—among the wounded, after gallant service from the first day of the siege, was Dr Brydon, whom we last saw slumped on his pony outside Jalalabad twenty years before.
1
Sometimes rumours reached them of help on the way, and on August 15 a message arrived from the British. ‘We march tomorrow for Lucknow,’ it said. ‘We shall push on as speedily as possible. We hope to reach you in four days at furthest’. And it added in Greek script, in case of interception: ‘You must aid us in every way, even to cutting your way out if we cannot force our way in. We are only a small force.’ This was cold comfort for the defenders, now reduced to 350 European soldiers and some 300 sepoys. They were harassed by constant mining operations under the ramparts—sometimes mines exploded well within the compound, and twice the ramparts themselves were temporarily breached. There were 200 women to care for, with 230 children, and 120 sick and wounded, and the rebels now had 18-pounder guns within 150 yards of the walls. The compound was a shambles.