Little more than a month previously many of the European women would have enjoyed the luxuries common to the lifestyle of most Victorian memsahibs – the morning and evening baths, the frequent change into clean cotton gowns, the comfort of beds with mosquito nets, but above all, the privacy. These privileges were now little more than a memory. Circumstances had changed dramatically and womanly modesty had to be cast aside as they sat together trying in vain to pull the remnants of their attire about themselves. Perhaps the greatest indignity for some was the necessity of accepting a crude native diet of chapattis and lentil porridge, humiliatingly served up on pans bereft of the most basic utensils, by natives of the lowest caste.
Ragged, emaciated, infested with lice and tormented by flies, mosquitos and prickly heat, the weakest became easy victims to the twin scourges of dysentery and cholera, with Alice Lindsay already suffering from the initial stages of the latter. Inevitably in such cramped and airless quarters, many succumbed to infection, for the windows were shuttered against the possibility of escape, and the open courtyard measuring 40 feet by 16 feet was daily drenched by the monsoon rains. In the first week of their incarceration, as recorded by a Mahratta physician, there occurred thirty-six fatalities: eighteen women, seventeen children and a Hindu nurse. Each day brought further deaths until the Nana became so concerned by the diminishing number of hostages that he gave the order for them to be brought out twice a day, under guard, for air and exercise.
It made little difference for by 10 July, cholera had a firm grip on the community and that day Alice Lindsay was numbered among the fatalities recorded by a Bengali doctor. Her death was followed two days later by that of her mother Kate. Caroline and Fanny were left to face death in a more violent form but before that, the demise of their family was recorded by Caroline on a scrap of paper:
Mama died, 12th July
Alice died, 9th July [it had been recorded as the 10th by the doctor]
George died, 27th June
Entered the barracks, 21st May
Cavalry left, 5th June
First shot fired, 6th June
Uncle Willy died, 18th June
Aunt Lilly, 17th June
Left barracks 27th June
To a lesser degree the citizens of Cawnpore were also suffering from the new regime, and an increasing number of townspeople began to rue the change when English law was supplanted by anarchy. The depredation caused by 20,000 mercenaries in the Nana’s camp not being paid was becoming intolerable. In addition, revenue which could not be raised by voluntary means was being exacted in a none-too-gentle manner by the Nana’s tax collectors. A great deal of resentment was caused by a demand that all looted property be given up, and in searching the native quarters his agents thought nothing of breaking into the homes of the pensioned artillerymen and insulting their wives. So widespread did these violations become that a number of ‘golundazes’ confronted the Nana in Bithur with loaded muskets. They were eventually pacified by the Nana’s promise that the men concerned would be punished and the practice of ransacking their homes ended.
Nevertheless, resentment among the Muslims in the Nana’s court was growing, and to rally support Nana Sahib promoted a number of Muslim courtiers, notably Azimullah, who was appointed Collector of Nana’s dominions. Leadership of his army however remained firmly in Hindu hands. Teeka Singh was left in overall command, Jwala Prasad was made a brigadier, and Tatya Tope appointed Head of Commissariat.
Arrears of pay remained a sore point with the bulk of the Muslim sepoys and, wrote William Shepherd: ‘Mahomedans, calling themselves the descendants of the Prophet, wearing garments of the most extraordinary devices, and many covered over from head to foot with armour, laden with five or six different kinds of weapons, poured in from Oudh, and other parts of the country by hundreds.’ The houses of the townspeople were subjected to pillage and in some instances the Muslims ‘took forcible possession of their women’. Confusion was widespread among the merchants, leading one traveller to comment: ‘Since the day of my arrival I never found the bazaar open, unless it were a few poor shops. The shopkeepers and the citizens are extremely sorry for losing their safety and curse the mutineers from morning to evening. The people and the workmen starve, and the widows cry in their huts.’
However, factional quarrels between Muslim and Hindu were quickly put to one side by the Nana with the news on 9 July that a punitive force 700 strong and led by Major Sydenham Renaud – of whom it was said ‘was rather inclined to hang all black creation’ – had left Allahabad on 30 June and was advancing rapidly along the Grand Trunk Road leaving a trail of burning villages in his wake.
The destruction being wrought by Renaud’s column was certainly against Lord Canning’s policy of peaceful resettlement, for the Governor General had hoped that by attacking only those villages occupied by the enemy, the native community would be encouraged to return to their homes ‘with every confidence in the restoration of British authority’. Renaud’s methods, however, were anything but selective and the stories of his ruthless exploits were legend.
The Times correspondent with the column was a shocked eyewitness to his methods of punishment. ‘In two days,’ reported William Russell, ‘forty-two men were hanged by the roadside, and a batch of twelve men were executed because their faces were turned the wrong way when they were met on the march.’ In a letter to his parents, a subaltern in the 78th Highlanders, who were bringing up the rear of the column, describes a scene of desolation with every village burnt to the ground and numerous bodies hanging from the trees by the roadside. Lieutenant George Digby Barker ended his letter by stating: ‘The bodies of the rebels hanging from the boughs of trees have now become so common that the soldiers call them acorns.’
It was the Major’ s practice to leave the corpses hanging a foot above the ground to provide food for the pigs and this, and no doubt similar atrocities, so horrified the people of Cawnpore that hundreds, fearful of the retribution to come, abandoned their homes and sought refuge in the countryside. Such panic was understandable for by early July, Havelock, with 1,200 European soldiers and six cannon, was also marching north from Allahabad with the intention of rescuing the hostages in Cawnpore before advancing to the relief of the beleagured garrison at Lucknow. Following close upon the heels of Major Renaud’s smaller column, Havelock’s troops passed through a desolate area bereft of human habitation save for the corpses hanging from the occasional peepul tree. William Oliver Swanston, a civilian volunteer who had joined Havelock’s movable column from Allahabad, wrote of the devastation caused by Renaud’s column. ‘The whole road was deserted, the villages empty and all in ruins, and every here and there bodies were to be seen hanging from the branches of trees. These had been executions carried out by Renaud’s force.’
The croaking of frogs in the swamps on either side of the road, and the hum of a myriad of insects encouraged by the damp and the heat, contributed to a degree of discomfort few in Havelock’s column ever forgot. The onset of the monsoon had given rise to conditions almost beyond endurance as the men trudged through an expanse of glutinous mud, subjected at one moment to a torrential downpour, followed by exposure to the glaring heat of a cloudless sky.
‘Rain coming up now,’ complained Lieutenant William Groom in a letter to his wife, ‘we shall have a wet march. I don’t expect to be dry again for a long time.’
Personal comfort was not an issue for Lieutenant Henry Moorsom, for the prospect of delivering the English prisoners from the custody of the Nana outweighed every other consideration. ‘Oh! ’Tis a heartrending, humiliating thought to see our countrymen, women and children, perishing within 50 miles of us without stirring a finger to aid them,’ he wrote. ‘I would we had a Sir Charles Napier here rather than a General Havelock, to determine their fate.’
Almost as though he was aware of such criticism, the 62-year-old General began to drive his men from one bivouac to the next in a series of forced marches which left the camp followers far behind
and often outdistanced the baggage train. Consequently, at the all-too-brief halts, there was seldom much to eat, but John Sherer remembered only the high humidity. ‘We sat on our beds drenched as if in a vapour bath,’ he recorded, an irritation endorsed by Captain Francis Cornwallis Maude, who noted: ‘The steam from the wet ground and our sodden tents together with the myriad of insects, put both our valises and our patience to the severest tests.’
Speed of movement was essential to Havelock, for Renaud’s detachment of a hundred irregular cavalry and 400 Madras Fusiliers was advancing along a different path unsupported by artillery, in danger of being overwhelmed by a stronger enemy. Eventually, on 12 July, three hours before dawn, the two columns met. Marching to the rousing tune of ‘The Cambells are Coming’, they entered the small village of Belanda, 4 miles from Fatehpur, where a cavalry patrol confirmed Havelock’s suspicion that Teeka Singh’s rebel army was massing for an attack.
Anxious to give his men a much-needed rest, the General reluctantly accepted the challenge, but any misgiving that his men were exhausted was misplaced, for, as a civilian volunteer confirmed later: ‘Out they came eager for the fray, like so many bulldogs and as jolly as possible, although just off a long march.’
The rebels, who themselves had marched 50 miles to face what they assumed to be Renaud’s small force, pushed forward, but within minutes of the beginning of the action shrapnel from Maude’s field guns, and a rapid fire from the Fusiliers’ Enfield rifles, whose accurate range of 900 yards gave Neill’s ‘Blue Caps’ an enormous advantage, so decimated the ranks of mutineers that they retired in disarray beyond Fatehpur. ‘Knock over that chap on the elephant,’ an officer had called out to Captain Maude. The round shot which brought down the elephant sent Tatya Tope sprawling on the ground unhurt but with his dignity severely bruised.
‘Thus the battle of Futtehpore was decided by the intrepid advance of our guns and skirmishers,’ commented Charles North. ‘Up to this time the troops had marched for 24 miles without a meal to sustain their over taxed energies; yet at 11.00 am Futtehpore was ours.’
‘This was my first experience in real warfare … the first time I had heard balls flying in earnest; and I must say, I did not like it,’ William Swanston confessed later. ‘I then thought I should never get accustomed to the whiz of a bullet, or the sing of a cannon ball; but I have learned that art and can now hear them all about me, and not even wink an eye’. The only casualty which could be attributed to the battle was Major North of the 60th Rifles when a bullock, consumed with fury by the pain of its wounds, ‘dashed violently against me,’ he wrote. Caught between its horns, he was flung some distance but was fortunate to escape with nothing more than severe bruising.
The troops now enjoyed a much-needed respite beneath a tope of mangos. ‘Most grateful was their shade after recent exposure to the fiery sunbeams, which seemed literally to pierce and seeth the brain,’ confessed Major North. ‘The relief was unforgettable.’
The humiliating ease with which his men had been defeated infuriated the Nana. His proclamation that ‘The yellow faced and narrow minded people have been sent to hell and Cawnpore has been conquered,’ was exposed as nothing more than an idle boast, and to many of his followers, it seemed that they themselves were exposed to an uncomfortable threat from British vengeance.
The report of the action presented by Teeka Singh dismayed the Nana’s advisors in Bithur. The problem now confronting them was to find a way of defeating Havelock’s column whilst it was still some distance from Cawnpore. At the same time, a second defeat was unthinkable for it would certainly put the new Peshwa’s reign in jeopardy. It was with this thought in mind that the Nana appointed Bala Rao, the younger of his two brothers, to lead a strengthened force into battle, telling him, ‘Kill all those men in the dirty shirts and blue caps, for they kill all my men before they fire.’
On 15 July, Bala Rao deployed his forces at Aong, a village 20 miles south of Cawnpore, spreading his men across the road behind two cannon in a bid to halt the British advance. The rebels were seen by a mounted patrol who reported back to Havelock that they were ensconced in a fortified position with a cavalry screen hovering on both flanks. Brigadier General Henry Havelock, a fervent Baptist given to distributing temperance tracts, was a competent if cautious commander, and in view of the threat to his baggage train from Bala Rao’s cavalry, he merely sent a third of his strength against Aong, whilst keeping the rest in reserve.
The walled gardens and trees in the village afforded excellent cover for the rebels who directed a heavy fire against the oncoming Highlanders and Madras Fusiliers.
Charging at the head of his beloved ‘lambs’, Major Renaud quickly cleared the village but in the fighting he was struck down and carried to the rear with a severe thigh wound. The musket ball which had buried itself in his thigh had also driven in a piece of his scabbard and he was soon to die from septicaemia. ‘He sank rapidly after the amputation of his left leg,’ reported Major North. ‘I had gone to see him, and found him in cheerful spirits, hoped for his ultimate recovery and now he is not. Sad realities of ruthless war.’ That incident proved to be the turning point in the battle, for roused to a high pitch of fury by the loss of their commander, the ‘Blue Caps’ swept the rebels from the village in a determined bayonet charge.
‘I never saw anything so fine,’ remarked John Sherer, ‘they went on with sloped arms, like a wall, till within 100 yards, and not a shot was fired. At the word ‘Charge!’ they broke like a pack of eager hounds, and the village was taken in an instant.’ Meanwhile, Maude’s artillery had been blasting the mutineers on the road with a mixture of grape and shrapnel to such good effect that many of the rebel artillerymen abandoned their cannon and fled to the rear. Thus deprived of a sizeable portion of his artillery, Bala Rao was forced to retire to a second position a few miles beyond the village where a single bridge crossed the Pandu river.
About two hours after the battle at Aong, Havelock learned from a sympathetic native that the rebels were in strength behind the bridge and had mined one of its three stone arches. Knowing that the destruction of the bridge would delay his advance on Cawnpore by several days, Havelock roused his men for one last effort. Believing that the women and children were still alive he promised his men: ‘With God’s help, men, we will save them, or every man of us die in the attempt.’
The relief march was of some 16 miles under a fierce sun ‘which glared down with intolerable radiance,’ recalled North, ‘till the brain reeled and the eyeballs ached’, but Havelock’s men responded magnificently even to the extent of missing their breakfast in their haste to get to grips with the rebels holding the Cawnpore prisoners.
At the village of Maharajpore, a little more than 6 miles from the Pandu river, many of Havelock’s weary troops, whose only means of quenching their raging thirst had been a dubious pool of rain water which had given rise to an outbreak of diarrhoea, came across an unusual but welcome discovery.
‘On the line of march this morning,’ wrote Lieutenant Groom to his wife, ‘we found in a village, twenty-five casks of porter, fancy that! It is the best thing we have done yet. Guns are all over the country, but porter is not.’ However, the discovery of the ale proved to be too great a temptation to some. ‘Immediately before we started, a supply of porter had been issued,’ wrote Charles North, ‘and the pernicious effects of this heavy drink were too speedily manifest for as the men advanced under a broiling sun, numbers fell out of the ranks and lay motionless upon the roadside, utterly insensible’ – perhaps not altogether surprising considering that the men of the 78th Foot were wearing the traditional Highland dress of thick tartan kilt, woollen jacket and plumed bonnet. The Movable Column’s loss that day amounted to twelve men from heatstroke.
Encouraged by Havelock’s victory at Aong, villagers sympathetic to the British informed the General that the rebels had crossed the single bridge over the River Pandu and now held a position of strength. In fact, seven guns commanded the road a
nd more than 5,000 mutineers were deployed in an arc behind a series of mud-walled river villages, to meet what their leaders believed would be a frontal assault along the Grand Trunk Road. But Havelock was a veteran of too many Indian campaigns to be caught in such an obvious fashion, and he decided instead to outflank the enemy position. It was a manoeuvre helped by an extensive grove of mango trees, and at 1.30 pm his troops advanced ’dreadfully tired and with the sun fearfully bright’. In the van were the Madras Fusiliers with two light field pieces, followed by the 78th of Foot, with the 64th, 84th and a battalion of Sikhs bringing up the rear with the artillery.
The movement which succeeded in turning the rebels left flank was executed with great precision and before the enemy became aware of the danger, the General had wheeled the columns into line. Ignoring the round shot which smashed through the trees, splintering the trunks and bringing down a shower of branches, the Highlanders advanced beneath a film of cloud which far from shielding them from the sun’s rays, only seemed to reflect the heat more intensely. As they neared the enemy, grape and case shot began to take effect but the stirring sound of the pipes raised the Scots’ fighting spirit and sent them ‘bounding forward with rigid jaws and hearts as hard as stone’.
Cawnpore & Lucknow Page 11