Cawnpore & Lucknow

by Donald Richards

  The officer took no further notice,’ reported Corporal Metcalfe, ‘and never troubled that sentry again.’ Lieutenant McCabe was later to suffer a mortal wound when leading a subsequent sortie against a rebel position.

  It was during the assault of 8 July that Henry Polehampton was struck by a musket ball. ‘At first I thought that it was a spent ball,’ he wrote, ‘but on looking, I saw a hole in the flesh.’ An examination of the wound showed that it was not serious and on the 17th he was confident enough to write: ‘Yesterday I walked the length of the ward for the first time. My wound going on very well, health very good.’ Unfortunately, the improvement was not to continue – two days later the Revd. Polehampton contracted cholera and on Tuesday, 21 July, he died.

  The artillery fire directed at the Residency, which had not ceased since the beginning of the siege, now showed signs of the rebels being short of ammunition. Missiles were now being used fabricated from bits of iron, bundles of stone and even blocks of wood as large as a metre in diameter. If the latter were largely ineffectual, they were at least a source of amusement to the battle-hardened veterans of the 32nd.

  ‘Here comes another barrel of beer,’ one would exclaim as he watched a balk of timber sail over the wall.

  ‘Be Jasus! They must t’ink we’re short of firewood,’ another would remark.

  On 10 July the garrison was to experience its first major assault when at 8.30 am an observer from a turret in the Residency noticed a massing of the enemy across the river, and at various other places in the vicinity of the perimeter defences which gave rise to great excitement. No immediate move was made by the rebels and a period of uneasy quiet was maintained until well after breakfast. Not a gun had been fired for almost two hours when a tremendous explosion shook plaster from the interior walls of the Residency building. The mine which had been planted to explode beneath the Redan Battery was, fortunately for the defenders, well short of its target – a miscalculation hidden from the mutineers by a thick cloud of sulphurous smoke.

  The horde of rebels who rushed towards the anticipated breech was met by a murderous discharge of grape which scythed through their ranks as they emerged from the smoke of the crater, bringing the charge to an immediate halt. It proved to be a temporary reverse and it was not long before almost every defender was engaged, and as the ferocity of the fighting increased, even the wounded left their sick beds to take up a musket, whilst those who could do little else, busied themselves in loading them. Rees, full of admiration, commented: ‘It was indeed heart rending to see these poor fellows staggering along to the scene of action. Pale, trembling with weakness, several of them bleeding from their wounds which had re-opened by the exertions they made.’

  The Calcutta merchant, himself hurrying to his post at the Water Gate as musket balls kicked up the dust around his feet, felt that his last moments had come. He breathed a short prayer bidding a fond farewell to those he ‘loved best in this world’, before taking up his musket in preparation to meet the enemy. But, as the noise of battle increased, any fear that Rees may have had quickly gave way to a nervous excitement culminating in a compelling desire to kill which, when he did, as he freely admitted, gave him a ‘strange feeling of joy’. ‘This tremendous fire of musketry and cannon, both from out and in, rendered our position one mass of sulphurous smoke, so that we could scarcely see,’ remembered Rees. ‘I must confess that for some minutes I felt the fear of death predominate within me. I was certain, and I think most of our little handful of men too, that this was our last day upon earth.’

  By this time the entire southern face of the Residency perimeter was under assault. Martin Gubbins’s house had long been the target of the artillery, the fire being severe enough to cause the ladies who earlier had taken up residence to abandon the upper rooms. The shattered upper storey was the only building to which a few of the more determined sepoys now gained access. They were quickly bayoneted out before others could join them, but such was the ferocity of the close-quarter fighting that Lieutenant Grant, hurling grenades as fast as they were made available, had the misfortune to seize one with a short fuse – it exploded, blowing off his hand and severely wounding an officer standing close to him.

  About 400 yards to the east, the rebels closed on the Cawnpore Battery with bugles blowing, drums beating and the green banner of Islam streaming in the breeze. Again and again a screaming horde of mutineers would surge against the redoubt, but each time they were met with dozens of bursting grenades and blistering volleys of musketry. Close by the Cawnpore Battery, at Lieutenant Anderson’s outpost, several mutineers managed to force their way through the stockade to reach the front of the ditch. Mr Capper, the volunteer who had survived the alarming experience of being buried alive, heard one of the sepoys call to his comrades, ‘The place is ours, there’s no one here!’ Outraged to think that a rebel could believe that the post could be left undefended, Capper yelled back, ‘There are plenty of us here, you rascal,’ and accompanied his shout with a musket shot which toppled the rebel into the ditch.

  Three separate attacks were repelled, but Lieutenant Anderson was beset by fears that the volunteers manning the posts on either side of him might be overrun. ‘We well knew what we had to expect if we were defeated, and therefore each individual fought for his life,’ he wrote. ‘Each loophole displayed a steady flash of musketry, as defeat would have been certain death to every soul in the garrison … We dreaded that the other posts might have been further pressed than we were. At intervals I heard the cry: “More men this way!” and off would rush two or three … and then the same cry was repeated in the opposite direction.’

  Cowering in their rooms listening to the noise of battle, the women expected at any moment to hear that the sepoys had broken through, and the thought occurred to Mrs Case: ‘What would be the feelings of any lady suddenly transported from quiet, peaceful England to this room, around which the bullets are whizzing, the round shot falling, and now and then a loud explosion, as if a mine was blowing up, which I think is almost worse than all the sharp and fast firing of the musketry?’

  Equally alarmed was Mrs Georgina Harris, wife of the other Cawnpore chaplain.

  ‘Huddled together in the underground room called the Tye Khana, damp, dark, and gloomy as a vault, and extremely dirty,’ she wrote. ‘Here we sat all day feeling miserable, anxious, and terrified to speak.’ Alone among her companions, Mrs Harris seems to have recognized that there may well have been some justification for the uprising when she wrote: ‘No doubt it is a judgment of God, and that we have greatly abused our power.’

  By 4 o’clock in the afternoon it was becoming clear that the attack had failed. The firing began to slacken and groups of sepoys could be seen retiring, carrying their wounded with them. The broken ground around the Residency was littered with corpses and when, an hour later, a group advanced bearing a white flag, seeking to remove their dead, the defenders made haste to comply. That the sepoys had suffered a grievous number of casualties was evident in the great number of carts used to carry them away. At the end of the engagement, a relieved Mr Rees, powder blackened and bruised from the repeated discharges of his musket, wrote: ‘A wash, a little repose, my poor dinner and a cigar after it, put me into the most enviable frame of mind.’

  The garrison, although exhausted from their exertions beneath a blazing sun, were elated at the unexpected ease with which the rebel attacks had been beaten off. Casualties had not been excessive considering that the conflict had continued unabated from 9.00 am until 4.30 pm. Just seventeen Europeans killed or wounded, together with ten loyal sepoys.

  The next day saw a resumption of hostilities but on a much reduced scale. The objective of the mutineers now was to secure suitable sites for mining operations. They were driven off with fierce exchanges of musketry at the Redan, but near Martin Gubbins’s house they succeeded in breaking through a wall into a lane bordering the compound. Here the only obstacle between them and the house was a low barrier of earth, but the roofto
p commanding the lane was occupied by the Financial Commissioner himself, armed with a pair of double-barrelled shotguns. So effective was his fire that in the short time it took to bring reinforcements, not a single sepoy succeeded in crossing the lane. Any satisfaction he might have enjoyed from that fact, however, was cut short by the sound of a heavy fall behind him – a musket ball had struck Major Banks in the head, killing him instantly. He was buried that night with the rest of the day’s fatalities, much regretted by the men of the 32nd.

  Hope that relief might be just a matter of days away had long been a major topic of conversation and, just before 6.00 pm on 29 July, the sound of distant gunfire and the faint echo of cheering from beyond the city suburbs gave rise to the belief that the relief column were about to break through the rebel cordon. Many in the garrison jostled their way to the roof of the Brigade Mess in order to catch a glimpse of the relief column. Mrs Case, abandoning her meal in the general confusion, thought it just as likely to be a fresh horde of rebels, but with the arrival of an angry Colonel Inglis the truth became apparent. ‘It’s the most absurd thing I have ever heard,’ he was heard to declare. An overzealous officer keeping watch had misinterpreted the noise of musketry for the approach of the relief force – in fact, the firing had been a native salute to the newly chosen ruler of Oude. When the light faded, and with it the last glimmering hope of outside help, morale sank to a new low. Survival now seemed merely a matter of chance, and as the rain poured down and every day became ever more tedious, only a belief in their own determination to survive kept the defenders morale from crumbling entirely.

  Chapter 11

  THE MARCH OF

  HENRY HAVELOCK

  The failure of the rebel attack of 10 July had shown that, without the customary leadership of their British officers, the sepoys had been unable to co-ordinate or press home their numerical advantage. Even the artillerymen seemed to have been ill advised, for rather than concentrate on breaching the perimeter walls, the gunners chose to target the upper storeys of the building, and in this they were guilty of errors in ranging. Quite often the piece would have such a high angle of elevation set that its ball would describe a neat curve over the Residency and fall within the rebel lines on the opposite side.

  Mining remained the garrison’s greatest fear, with good reason, for between 10 July and 5 September, seven mines erupted with varying degrees of destruction and casualties. On the south face of the perimeter the rebel-occupied houses were so close that correct alignment of the gallery from the shaft hardly mattered. The only effective countermeasure open to the defenders was to sink shafts themselves and dig listening galleries in the area most likely to be used by the sepoys. Fortunately, the ranks of the 32nd contained a number of Cornish and Derbyshire ex-miners, and in Captain Peter Fulton the garrison possessed an experienced and resourceful engineer. It was said that he was accompanied everywhere by a devoted Sikh, carrying on his back a barrel of powder. Such was Fulton’s skill that the shaft he sank would often be close enough to enable his miners to break into the enemy gallery and use it for their own purposes. It was not unusual for shafts of up to 30 feet deep to be sunk in the earth, and from them galleries would be excavated horizontally in the direction of the enemy’s workings. Supports were seldom necessary since the earth was firm, and because the galleries were never of a great length, ventilation was not a problem.

  But it was a far from comfortable task for the officer keeping a listening watch for enemy activity – for after lowering himself into the shaft on the end of a rope, he would be obliged to crawl along the gallery on his stomach to his listening post, with no way of overcoming the darkness other than by the occasional use of a candle. The heat can only be imagined, as might also be the torment from the high-pitched hum of a mosquito which was often the only sound to break the silence. Captain Fulton played a major role in these activities, often sitting for hours at a time, listening for the first faint sound of a pick which would betray the direction of the rebel workings.

  On one occasion Fulton forced an entry into an enemy gallery with a crowbar. Startled by his sudden appearance the native miners fled in terror, whereupon he took away the candle they had left burning and with the assistance of his faithful Sikh, carried a barrel of powder to the point where the rebel’s gallery met the shaft. Captain Fulton later recorded with justified satisfaction: ‘We destroyed the whole with great éclat and enjoyment of the fun and excitement, to say nothing of the success.’ Fulton was eventually to meet his end, not as a result of mining activities, but in a trench when the back of his head was smashed by a 3-pound round shot.

  ‘He had ever been foremost in the fighting and his loss to us all was irreparable,’ wrote Ensign Ruggles.

  By the beginning of August the plight of the garrison was becoming desperate. ‘Everyone is getting very dispirited,’ commented Mrs Bartrum. ‘No news of relief. They say we are forgotten and that reinforcements will never appear … This hope deferred does indeed make the heart sick.’ Such gloomy predictions and the rain which fell from a leaden sky, for the monsoon was at its height, had a depressing effect upon many in the Residency. Some, whose survival had been due as much to the exercise of caution as to good fortune, now walked casually past gaps in the defence works not caring whether they lived or died. Each death increased the workload of the survivors, weakening their resistance to such an extent that painful skin eruptions occurred with increasing frequency, as did diarrhoea.

  It had been found necessary to considerably reduce the meat ration – that of the men by a quarter, and the women by a half. ‘We only get 12 ounces of meat per man a day,’ recorded Ludlow Smith, ‘and if a man is not present at his meal at feeding time, he has to go without and as this often happens, there are a lot of half starving fellows about the Garrison ready to eat anything.’ Lack of variety was another irritant to those who had exhausted their own private store, for their diet now consisted of a monotonous portion of atta – a coarse ground corn with all the husks left unsifted, and dal, an unsavoury mixture of black lentils and rice. It was particularly galling to Rees to discover that people to whom he had in the past given little luxuries, refused to return a spoonful of sugar or even a handful of flour, despite having more than enough for their own purposes. ‘A siege,’ thought Rees bitterly, ‘was certainly the best school in which to learn character.’

  With no servants to operate the punkahs, the women were tormented by swarms of flies. Especially loathsome were the bloated flies which accompanied each spoonful of food. Hunger alone made the fare palatable, for as Mrs Bartrum confessed, it was difficult to tell what it was they were supposed to be eating. ‘It resembled nothing so much as a black and living mass.’

  The garrison’s greatest need was for fresh green vegetables as a palliative against scurvy, and many were the risks taken by individuals to gather the leaves of a lush green plant to be found growing among the ruins outside the Residency. As always, it was the very young children on a milkless diet who suffered the most. ‘All the children are very bad,’ confessed Mrs Harris. ‘The want of fresh air and exercise, and the loss of their accustomed food, have made them all ill.’ Pale faced, large eyed and weak from hunger and fear, their deaths multiplied at an alarming rate. Many of the older children were orphans who had grown indifferent to the danger which was all around them.

  Doctor Gilbert Hadow was particularly touched by their plight and recorded his concern in a diary entry. ‘You saw the little things drooping and dying from day to day. This was the saddest part of all.’

  Katherine Bartrum went in constant fear for her little boy, but, as she freely acknowledged, there was little she could do but ‘pray, cook what food there was, fan away the flies and read a psalm for comfort in tribulation’.

  The one encouraging feature at this time was the steadfast attitude of the garrison’s loyal sepoys who resisted every inducement to go over to the mutineers. ‘Leave the infidels and come out. We’ll give you good food and plenty of it,�
� was a typical blandishment offered to them, according to Lieutenant Anderson. ‘Our sepoys would reply: “We have eaten the Company’s salt. We cannot break faith with our masters like you have.”’

  On 10 August, the defenders of the various outposts were enjoying a morning cup of tea prepared from burnt wheat, when their attention was drawn to an unusual amount of activity within the rebel lines. It was to be the prelude to the first of three major assaults, the second coming eight days later and the final one on 5 September. The garrison was alerted at once and as the rebel artillery began its usual preliminary bombardment of the Residency, the women retired to the basement where in almost total darkness they could do little else but try to comfort the screaming children. It was to be more than an hour before a massive explosion caused Mrs Case, who had been sitting at a table writing, to rise in alarm at what at first appeared to be an earth tremor. It was immediately followed by a sound ‘the like of which she never wished to hear again’.

  The eruption which so terrified Colonel Case’s widow and the rest of the ladies was the result of a mine sprung by the enemy close to the Brigade Mess. When the smoke and dust drifted away, the defenders manning the outposts were appalled to see that 30 feet of the wall had been totally destroyed, together with the greater part of an adjacent house. No sooner did the dust settle than sepoys were seen to be crawling through the long grass keeping up a continuous fire of musketry. Behind them came hordes of rebels screaming their hate of the infidels as they rushed towards the breach yawning invitingly before them. The defenders had not been caught unprepared, however, and the roof of the Brigade Mess, which had escaped serious damage, sparkled with flashes of rifle and musket fire. So determined was the resistance of the garrison that the rebel attack was halted in its tracks and the sepoys sent reeling back in confusion.