Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (30 page)

Still, four days was not too long to wait. Not everybody behaved well at Lucknow: we hear of people hoarding food, stealing, standing upon seniority. For the most part, though, the British in the shattered Residency stuck to the principles of their age and culture, even in this extremity. Not only did they read their Bibles assiduously, attend church service regularly, and even entertain each other to formal meals, but they lived according to the strictest tenets of supply and demand, such as their compatriots had tried so disastrously to enforce on the other side of the world in Ireland. Food was bought from traders at current market rates, which were by the nature of things astronomical, and Sir Henry Lawrence’s possessions were actually sold at auction within his ruined house, fetching very satisfactory prices.

The four days came and went. A week passed, and a month. It was not until September 23, after 90 days of siege, that the defenders heard gunfire on the other side of the city, and two days later there
burst into the compound a column of Highlanders, ragged, unshaven, kilted and furiously warlike, under the joint command of two remarkable generals, Henry Havelock and James Outram. Outram was an urbane old India hand, who had spent his youth in wars against Indians and Afghans, had put down sundry lesser insurrections, and had been Napier’s political officer in Sind. Since then he had emerged victorious from the footling Persian War of 1856, and here he was a Grand Commander of the Order of the Bath, gazetted to succeed Lawrence as Chief Commissioner for Oudh. He was the senior officer with the relieving force, but he had generously, or perhaps cautiously, conceded the operational command to the second general, a very different manner of soldier. Havelock was a veteran of the Queen’s army, a home-spun fighting commander. He had fought in practically every Indian battle during the past forty years, he had read all the military manuals, he had a blazing eye and a stubborn chin, and he had been converted many years before to a dogmatic Baptist creed. He believed absolutely in every word of the Bible, especially the bloodthirsty parts: for as Kaye innocently observed of him, ‘he was thoroughly persuaded in his own mind that war was righteous and carnage beautiful’. This was his first general command, all the same, and with these tremendous convictions to inspire him, and with the blood-maddened Highlanders at his heels, and the sophisticated Sir James always considerate at his elbow, he was just the man for the job. The Highlanders, overjoyed to find any survivors at all inside the Residency, bayonetted a few loyal sepoys in error as they entered, and played the bagpipes all night long in triumph.

But no sooner had the relieving force lifted the siege, than they were besieged themselves. There were only a thousand of them, many of them wounded, all exhausted. They were in scarcely better shape than the people they had come to rescue, and within the compound their presence soon proved to be more a curse than a blessing. By now conditions were desperate. People were eating sparrows, and smoking dried tea or chopped straw. The surgeons had run out of chloroform and performed operations in public among the beds. Dysentery and scurvy were rife, and so were lice—most of the soldiers had shaved their heads bald, heightening the nightmare flavour of the
experience. No building was much more than a shell—everything riddled with balls like smallpox, as the garrison chaplain put it—and into the ruins there now poured the torrential rains of the monsoon, dripping into every shelter, and clouding everything in a damp hot haze. All the time the rebel sappers mined beneath the compound, and one could often hear the clink of pick-axes far below one’s feet: the rebels drove twenty mines under the compound, the British drove twenty-one counter-mines, and there were sometimes macabre battles between the sappers far in the clammy underground. Through it all the Union Jack flew from the Residency tower, defiant among its ruins in the heart of the hostile city.

At the end of October word filtered in that a second relieving force, under General Colin Campbell, was approaching from the north, and so there stepped into the limelight a hero of Lucknow soon to become legendary. Henry Kavanagh was an Irishman, ginger-haired and very large, who had worked for the Post Office department, and had made his name within the compound by his intrepid behaviour in the mines, where he spent night after night with loaded pistol awaiting the arrival of rebel sappers, and sometimes shooting them through the narrowing wall that separated their respective galleries. He now volunteered to find his way through the enemy lines, make contact with Campbell, and guide the relieving force into the Residency. Heavily blacked with lamp-oil, disguised in turban, orange silk jacket and pyjama trousers, and accompanied by an Indian guide whose heroism was to be less devoutly remembered by posterity, Kavanagh swam the river, bluffed his way through the rebel check-posts, and met a British picket: eight days later he returned to the Residency, dressed this time in a cotton quilted tunic, corduroy breeches, thigh length jackboots and a pith helmet, to conduct Havelock and Outram triumphantly through the shattered slums to Campbell. As the three generals met, Campbell’s soldiers raised a cheer, and Havelock, at the moment of his glory, greeted them Napoleonically. ‘Soldiers’, he stentoriously cried, ‘I am happy to see you!’ (And a formidable lot they must have looked—Sikh cavalry in tangled draperies, English infantry in slate-grey, turbanned Punjabis, plumed and tartaned Highlanders, and the 9th Lancers, one of the smartest cavalry
regiments in Europe, with white turbans twisted around their forage-caps).
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This time the relieving force did not join the garrison within the compound, but merely kept Lucknow quiet to allow the withdrawal of the survivors. First came the women and children, on the night of November 18, through the ruins of the riverside palaces to the British lines—some in wagons, some in litters, some walking. They moved under constant fire, helped and jollied along by soldiers or by the sailors of Campbell’s naval brigade. Sometimes they were ushered into trenches, sometimes they passed through a camouflage of canvas screens. With them went all the crown jewels of the kings of Oudh, together with some
£
250,000 worth of treasure from the British Residency.

Next, at midnight on November 22, the old garrison marched out, breaking step to avoid arousing the suspicions of the rebels: and finally the rearguard, a few hundred gunners and Highlanders, crept past the Baillie Gate to join the army outside the city, leaving their camp-fires burning in the deserted ruins of the Residency. The siege of Lucknow was over. By dawn next day a procession six miles long, of soldiers, bullock-carts, litters, elephants, horsemen, sepoys and camp followers was crossing the silent plain towards Cawnpore—the babies crying now and then, the pipes intermittently playing, the tired grave generals in their palanquins, and all about them the great cloud of dust that marked the passage of armies, friendly or hostile, defeated or victorious, across the face of India.
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These were the epics of an event which was itself to be called, by the Anglo-Indian historian Sir Charles Crosthwaite, ‘the epic of the Race’. The rising grumbled on, in guerilla skirmish and punitive hunt, until the summer of 1859, but long before then the British had resumed their command of the sub-continent, and the myth of the Mutiny was permanently established in the Victorian folk-lore. It had never spread beyond the Ganges valley, nor had the other Company armies joined the Bengal sepoys. The Punjab had remained quiet under the masterly John Lawrence. Dost Mohammed had not taken advantage of the times to invade India and repossess the Peshawar country the Afghans claimed as their own. Despite their faulty intelligence and inept staff-work, the British had dealt efficiently with the rising, and the conduct of their armies did much to restore the British military reputation after the failures of the Crimea. The Indians were never to rise in arms against the Raj again, and far from weakening the imperial confidence of the British, on a conscious level at least the Mutiny hardened and coarsened it.

It brought out the worst in many of them. Even the heroines of the Lucknow siege, when they were relieved at last, came stumbling out with bags of rupees in their arms, and did nothing but grumble—‘not one of them said a gracious word to the soldiers who had saved them’, one officer recorded, ‘a fact which my men remarked upon’. Even that gentle cellist Hope Grant of the 9th Lancers, now a general and a knight, entering a Hindu temple at the ancient city of Ajoudia, contemptuously kicked over the sacred image of the monkey-god inside, ‘to the horror’, as he complacently recorded, ‘of the dirty fat priests about, who had worshipped, or pretended to worship it, since they were boys’. In general the British fought at least as savagely as the Indians, and in the aftermath of the tragedy
the worst national streaks of intolerance and chauvinism showed themselves: the restraining authority of Lord Canning, the new Governor-General, merely brought him the contemptuous epithet ‘Clemency’ Canning. The British saw the war as a straight fight between good and evil, and the savageries of the rebels, though they could hardly be exaggerated, were shamelessly exploited. Contemporary accounts are rich in gloating detail—every sepoy a crazed barbarian, every Englishwoman raped before mutilation. In memoir after memoir the Indians are pictured as faithless and brutal ingrates—‘niggers’, as they were now often called, who were animated by no normal instincts of mercy and kindness, and showed no sign that they might ever, even in God’s infinite mercy, be capable of redemption.

It was in an Old Testament mood that the Christian public of England now looked out to the smoking desolation of northern India.
The
Times
demanded death for every mutineer in India: ‘every tree and gable-end in the place should have its burden in the shape of a mutineer’s carcass’. The Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, proclaimed the nation’s support for ‘all who have the manliness to inflict the punishment’. The atrocities committed by the mutineers, declared Lord Palmerston, were ‘such as to be imagined and perpetrated only by demons sallying forth from the lowest depths of hell’. When every gibbet was red with blood, declared a speaker at the Oxford Union, when the ground in front of every cannon was strewn with rags and flesh and shattered bone, ‘then talk of mercy. Then you may find some to listen’.

And the revenge was terrible enough. Indians called it ‘the Devil’s Wind’. ‘No maudlin clemency’, wrote an eye-witness of the recapture of Cawnpore, ‘was to mark the fall of the city’, and it is probably true that no British Army in history has been so inflamed with furious passion as were the Queen’s regiments in India then. ‘Cawnpore! Cawnpore!’ they used to shout, as they stormed another rebel position with their merciless bayonets, slashing and spiking, taking no prisoners, and going on to burn, hang and sometimes disembowel. Officers were as maddened as their men. When the British found the charnel house of the Bibighar, they made their captives lick the caked blood from its floor before hanging them, and afterwards
arranged guided tours of the premises for regiments passing through. Whole villages were burnt and all their inhabitants hanged. Passers-by who ventured to turn their backs upon a punitive column were often shot for insolence. Looting was indiscriminate and unchecked—‘the men are wild with fury and lust of gold’, reported an eye-witness at Lucknow, ‘—literally drunk with plunder … faces black with powder; cross-belts specked with blood; coats stuffed out with all sorts of valuables’.

The British armies swept across the country in a kind of fever—we read of a force marching sixty miles in twenty-four hours in the middle of May, of three officers galloping non-stop for thirty miles to an action, of 130 miles covered in sixteen hours by relays of horses, galloping all the way. Most of the regiments came to look like wild insurrectionists themselves: their spanking uniforms were long worn out, and officers and men alike wore what they pleased—tweed coats, turbans, cloaks, making them all seem, stripped of order’s livery, beyond order’s authority too. One well-known field artillery unit, whose harnesses, we are told, seemed to be held together with pieces of string, was commanded by a major in a fez and a Turkish cloak, tied around the waist with rope, and marshalled by a battery sergeant-major in a coat made from the green baize of a billiard table. ‘The gentlemen must be very savage’, an Indian lawyer of Cawnpore noted apprehensively in his diary, and when the warship
Pearl
sailed up the Hooghly to Calcutta and fired a ceremonial salute, the crews of the country boats jumped overboard in terror, and the crowds on the quay fled for their lives, assuming it to be a signal for the destruction of the city.

When, after the end of the fighting, inquiries were held, court-martials conducted, and sentences legally passed, condemned mutineers were lashed to the muzzles of guns and blown to pieces to the beat of drums. The cruelty of the British matched the cruelty of the Indians, and both sides fought equally from the heart. Though many Englishman soon looked back to their revengeful passions with remorse, still the relationship between rulers and ruled never returned to its old pragmatism, Indians and British accepting the best and worst in each other as transient phenomena of history. After 1857 the Raj regarded itself as a ruling enclave, different in kind
from its brown heathen subjects—an institution rather than a community, whose best intentions and most useful works were, for ever after, to be tinged ineradicably with distrust, disapproval or superiority. And as we shall presently discover, the emotions of the Mutiny found their echoes all over the British Empire, permanently affecting its attitudes, and leaving scars and superstitions that were never quite healed or exorcised.

For a last picture of this most horrible of imperial wars, let us return to Delhi, where the tottering old king, still writing his melancholy lyrics among the sprawling sepoys in his garden, remained the figurehead of the rising. His reluctant return to authority was brief. Long before the end of the mutiny, even before the relief of Lucknow, John Lawrence had formed a flying column in the Punjab, British and Sikh, and had sent it storming down the Grand Trunk Road to the relief of Delhi. John Nicholson commanded it, and leading his own regiment of Sikh irregular horsemen, fiercer and leaner than ever, was William Hodson. Such a combination of the righteous and the predatory could hardly lose. ‘Where have we foiled when we acted vigorously?’ Lawrence rhetorically demanded, dispatching his young men to the rescue of the Raj. ‘Where have we succeeded when guided by timid counsels?’ The Punjab Movable Column, clattering at twenty-seven miles a day down the great road, fell upon Delhi with irresistible spirit, and in a week of street fighting recaptured the city, Nicholson entering the pantheon of empire, as was almost pre-ordained, by dying in the hour of victory at the Kashmir Gate.
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