by V. A. Stuart
Moslem butchers, Afghan merchants and the scum of the bazaar flocked to them and when the crowds became too dense they again divided, one mob making for the Bank and Civil Lines between the magazine and the Kashmir Gate, where most of the public buildings were situated, the other for the Darya Ganj, a European suburb beyond the palace, occupied by government clerks and pensioners and their families.
Both mobs were bent on slaughter, but neither had reached its destination when Captain Douglas dashed breathlessly down to the Calcutta Gate, where he was joined by the commissioner and several of his civil officials, including the chief magistrate, Sir Theo Metcalfe. They endeavoured bravely but unavailingly to restore order but were shouted down; the guard and Douglas’s own command now, it seemed, affected by the madness. When a sowar fired at him, Fraser called on the sepoys of the guard to do their duty and was met by sullen silence; grabbing a musket from one of the policemen standing impotently by, the commissioner shot down the man who had fired at him and instantly found himself under attack.
With one of his party dead and one wounded, he was forced to make his escape. Driving at full speed in his carriage, with the wounded Hutchinson beside him, he gained the comparative safety of the Lahore Gate, where he pulled up and waited for the others.
Metcalfe went to try to rally the police in the Chandni Chouk but Douglas, compelled to jump into the fort ditch to avoid being torn to pieces by the sepoys of his own bodyguard, was injured and had to be carried to his quarters above the gate. Here he was tended by the chaplain of Delhi, the Reverend Midgley Jennings who, with his daughter Annie and her friend, Mary Clifford, occupied adjoining rooms, but the mob had been close on his heels and their respite was short-lived.
Joined by a yelling crowd of palace menials, a band of sepoys and Light Cavalry sowars surged about the steps of the gatehouse, in a frenzied demonstration of hatred, and the commissioner was cut down as he made a last appeal for reason. The old king’s retainers slashed his body to a bloody pulp and then, waving their dripping tulwars, they rushed up the steps to the apartment where Douglas lay helpless, seeking fresh victims, and finding them in the persons of the chaplain and the two women. Jennings defended himself and them most valiantly, laying about him with a sword but the odds against him were too heavy and he went down beneath a shrieking wave of brown bodies, and the two terrified girls were dragged from the cupboard in which they had taken refuge.
When they, Douglas and Hutchinson were dead, one of the sowars picked up the bodyguard commander’s severed head, impaled it on his lance-tip and, leaping on to his horse, led his motley band of murderers on to the Government College where, he promised them, they would find more Christians to be killed for the Faith.
Other, similar bands were now on the rampage in the Delhi and London Bank, in the offices of the Delhi Gazette and in St John’s Church, killing, looting, burning, while in the Darya Ganj a terrible, cold-blooded massacre had just begun, from which only a handful were to escape.
In the great audience chamber of the palace, the old king had, at last and with reluctance, consented to receive a deputation of the mutineers. Informed of the death of the commissioner, he watched with trepidation as the Light Cavalry rode their horses across the carefully tended flower-beds and, joined by two hundred sepoys of the 11th and 20th Native Infantry who had lately arrived from Meerut, came thronging into his palace.
Faced by so many armed and threatening men, the king could do little save accept the allegiance they offered him. With what dignity he could muster, he seated himself on the throne of his ancestors and, as they knelt before him, in the name of Ghaziud-Din Mohammed Bahadur Shah, he gave them his blessing in a thin, quavering voice and then, bidding them disturb him no more, he retired unhappily to his own quarters.
Colonel John Ripley, at the head of his regiment—the hitherto loyal and well-disciplined 54th Native Infantry—approached the Main Guard at the Kashmir Gate with confidence. His two guns were following behind, under the command of an artillery subaltern, Lieutenant Wilson, and escorted by two companies of the 54th. It had taken a little while to muster them but, as General Graves had reminded him, there were two thousand British troops in Meerut and these must surely be on their way by now and could be counted on to quell the disturbance, if the 54th were unable to do so. The colonel anticipated no serious trouble, once he had gained entrance to the city and, even when a message reached him from Lieutenant Willoughby, with news that a mob was threatening the magazine, he was not unduly worried. He sent the messenger back to inform his commander that relief was at hand and rode through the inner wooden gate of the Main Guard without haste.
The guard of the 38th presented arms and watched him uncertainly as, flanked by six of his officers and his European sergeant-major, he emerged into the open square beyond the gates, to be met by a large party of mounted Light Cavalry sowars. Backed by an armed and noisy crowd, they barred his way; the colonel ordered his own men to load and continue their advance, with bayonets fixed but, to his shocked surprise, the order was ignored. Instead, his men broke ranks and started to fraternize with the mutineers, who opened fire on the advancing group of officers. Six were killed and the colonel was ruthlessly cut down and, while lying on the ground, bayoneted by his own men and left for dead.
The 54th, now in open mutiny, dispersed to join their comrades from Meerut in carnage and looting and the mortally wounded colonel managed, somehow, to drag himself to the inner gate. From there, at his own request, he was taken back in a borrowed carriage to cantonments by the regimental surgeon, to make his horrifying report to General Graves.
The remaining two companies of the regiment, arriving with the guns, refused for a time to join the mutiny and both they and the guard of the 38th stayed at their posts. None attempted to molest the flood of frightened fugitives, mainly women and children from the Civil Lines, who came to seek refuge in the guardhouse. Those with conveyances were permitted to go on to the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, where General Graves had now directed all families to assemble. The rest stayed, with the surviving officers of the 54th, concealing themselves as best they could in the quarters of the guard commander—two small rooms at the summit of the gate.
In the magazine, which was situated between the Kashmir and Calcutta Gates, Lieutenant George Willoughby listened to the howling of the mob outside the walls and waited in vain for the succor he had been assured was soon to reach him. With his small staff of Europeans—Lieutenant George Forrest, his second-incommand, Lieutenant William Raynor, Conductors Buckley, Shaw and Scully, Sub-Conductor Crow and Sergeants Edwards and Stewart—he had made what preparations he could to ward off the expected attack. Inside the gate leading to the park, he had placed two 6-pounder guns, double-charged with grape; two more stood at the principal gate of the magazine, covered by another pair mounted in a bastion in its vicinity and, in front of the office, were ranged three more 6-pounders and a 24-pounder howitzer. As a precaution, the young ordnance commissary had caused a powder-train to be laid from the main powder store to the foot of a lime tree in the yard, where he stationed Conductor Scully, with orders to fire the train on receipt of a signal from his fellow Conductor Buckley, who would wave his hat if it was decided that the magazine could not be held.
The sun rose higher and the heat grew almost unbearable as the nine soldiers and a civilian clerk called Rayley, who had joined them from the judge’s office, stood grimly to their guns. A demand from the king, brought by his son and grandson, with a force of mutineers, called on them to yield the magazine, was refused and soon they heard the scrape of scaling ladders being placed against the walls as, from the tops of tombs in an old Christian cemetery which towered above them, the king’s bodyguard started to fire down on them.
On the Ridge, two miles outside the city, General Henry Graves waited in growing despair for the arrival of the expected relief column of British troops from Meerut. Two messengers who had volunteered to carry a request for aid to General Hewitt had failed t
o get through. The first, a young civilian named Marshall, had been shot down by a sentry of the 38th as he was fording the river. The second, the 74th’s surgeon, Dr Batson, had attempted to disguise himself as a native but he, too, had been seen and recognized and was now believed to be in the hands of the mutineers.
Graves had taken what steps were in his power to protect his position on the Ridge, with pickets drawn from the best and steadiest of his three regiments, the 74th; and these were still carrying out their duties with heartening loyalty, but the brigadier had received the report from Colonel Ripley with both incredulity and dismay. His dismay increased when intelligence of the Darya Ganj massacre was brought to him, but when this was followed by an appeal for reinforcements from the Kashmir Gate, he decided that he had no alternative save to answer it.
His call for volunteers was insolently rejected by the 38th, but answered en masse by the 74th, and he sent them, under their commanding officer, Major Abbott, with two more guns, to the city at midday, keeping back only a detachment to guard the Ridge against a surprise attack. Of necessity, he also kept those of the 38th, who were not on guard duty—about two hundred men—aware that, if he allowed them to go to the city, they would immediately make common cause with the mutineers. His attempt to replace their guard at the main magazine on the Ridge met with ignominious failure, the sentries firing on the officer who brought the order for their withdrawal.
As news from the city became more alarming, the brigade commander ordered all women and children to leave cantonments and make their way up to the Ridge. The Flagstaff Tower, a round, 150-foot-high stone edifice, standing on the rocky spine of the Ridge itself, was the logical choice as a refuge for noncombatants and he set about making it secure. De Teissier’s last two guns were mounted at its foot and a detachment of native Christian bandboys placed behind them to supply ammunition to the gunners, but as the day wore on and more and more terrified fugitives crowded into the small, hot, airless building, it rapidly became untenable. There was no water supply; few, if any, of the women had been able to bring food with them, they were anxious for the safety of their menfolk, exhausted and afraid, the children fractious. Many of those who had escaped from the Civil Lines were panic-stricken; some had seen their husbands butchered in front of them and each new arrival added to the general despondency with a fresh tale of horror.
General Graves, still hoping for the appearance of the British troops he was convinced that his superior must have sent from Meerut, was reluctant to abandon his position, but by 3:30 P. M. he had received no word of their coming and nothing stirred on the Meerut road.
Watching that road with equal despair, from a bastion overlooking the Bridge of Boats, Lieutenant Willoughby shook his head and returned to his gun. For five hours he and his small party had defended the magazine, but now the walls were swarming with yelling rebels who leapt down from their scaling ladders to pour a withering fire on them, before making a concerted rush to force open the barricaded doors.
There were hundreds of them inside the walls and the six-pounders did terrible execution, but the defenders had no time to reload. Crow and Edwards, running back to the howitzer, were dead before they could reach it; Forrest and Buckley were both wounded. George Willoughby shouted to Buckley, who seized his hat with his uninjured hand and waved it high above his head. Conductor John Scully touched his lighted portfire to the powder-train and, with earth-shaking force, the whole building exploded, hurtling skywards in a red-tinged mushroom of smoke and taking over four hundred of the besiegers with it. Incredibly, six of the defenders made their escape, blackened and bleeding. Raynor and Buckley scrambled over the crumbling ruin of the wall and eventually reached Meerut; Willoughby, Forrest, Shaw and Stewart staggered to the Main Guard at the Kashmir Gate, Willoughby to meet his death in a village a few miles from Meerut.
With the roar of the explosion still ringing in his ears, General Graves decided that nothing more could be done to save Delhi, in view of the limited means now at his disposal and in the absence of the hoped-for aid from Meerut. Anxious to protect the evacuation of the fugitives from the Flagstaff Tower, he ordered the recall of the 74th and the two guns from the Kashmir Gate. This order was obeyed reluctantly by Major Abbott, and no sooner had he withdrawn his small and still loyal force than the guard of the 38th closed the gate and opened fire on those officers who had remained, killing three of them. The survivors, including the badly wounded Lieutenant Forrest, made a lifeline with their sword-slings and lowered the women 25 feet into the ditch below, then jumped down after them and, under heavy fire from the sepoys of the guard, scrambled up the almost perpendicular counterscarp, to find cover in the undergrowth on the far side. There they crouched until the fall of darkness enabled them to begin the long and perilous journey across country to Meerut.
With the return of the 74th, the exodus from the Flagstaff Tower was also beginning. Major Abbott had brought back just over half the men he had originally led to the stricken city; now, having seen their officers safely back to the Tower, even these men deserted, urging the major not to delay his own departure from the Ridge. Those on picket duty remained, however, among them some forty sepoys of the 38th, who assured their company commander, Captain Robert Tytler, that they would not harm him or oppose the retreat of any of the British officers and their families but, they insisted, the retreat must begin at once. They even offered their escort, on condition that Tytler would himself command them and that they would not be called upon to fire on their comrades but this was refused by the brigadier, and their impatience increased.
“Go, Sahib,” they bade Tytler. “This is no longer a place for you.”
In buggies, in carriages carrying three times their normal load, in carts and artillery tumbrils, on horseback and even on foot, the refugees left the Ridge, some hoping to reach Kurnal, nearly eighty miles to the north, others going towards Meerut in the conviction that they would meet the British relief column, on its belated way to their rescue.
Finally only General Graves, his brigade major, Captain Nicolls and a surgeon named Stewart remained. Graves, unable to contact Meerut because the telegraph line had not been repaired, had managed to send a report of his plight to Ambala, 160 miles to the north, with the request that it should be forwarded to the commander-in-chief in Simla. An eighteen-year-old telegraph operator, William Brendish, had also sent his own version of the tragic happenings in Delhi to his fellow operator in Ambala, and Graves could only pray that both messages had got through. His own message, sent in the early afternoon, when he had ordered the telegraph office reopened, had been dictated before the full extent of the mutiny was known, and had read: “Cantonments in a state of siege. Mutineers from Meerut 3rd Light Cavalry. Numbers not known, said to be 150 men. Cut off communication with Meerut. Taken possession of Bridge of Boats. 54th N. I. sent against them but would not act. Several officers killed and wounded. City in a state of considerable excitement. Troops sent down but nothing known yet. Further information will be forwarded.”
He had been able to forward no further information, because the office had been burnt down and the line cut; Todd, the telegraph master, had been killed when searching for the break in the line to Meerut and his possession of the Bridge of Boats had lasted only until the second party of mutineers had crossed it from the Meerut road, but the brigadier at Ambala would surely read between the lines. Even so, the nearest help he could expect would have to come from Kurnal, since General Hewitt at Meerut had inexplicably failed to pursue the mutineers. Had they all been killed in Meerut, he wondered, and then dismissed the thought. It was impossible; Hewitt had two thousand British troops under his command and the despatch Commissioner Fraser had received from Meerut had not suggested anything of the kind. A few officers shot down by their own men, the native lines set on fire, some families murdered. … The sowars of the 3rd Light Cavalry had, it seemed, reserved the full force of their treacherous fury for the unhappy Christian inhabitants of Delhi, and Hewitt, damn
his soul, had not even seen fit to send his British cavalry after them! What, in God’s name, was he doing with his Carabineers, his Rifles and his Horse Artillery … still defending his position from a few bazaar budmashes and escaped convicts, when in Delhi the streets were running in blood?
“Huzoor,” a subadar of the 74th said urgently, “the men grow impatient to join their comrades in the city. General Sahib,” there were tears in his eyes, Henry Graves saw, “we have served together for many years, you have commanded my regiment and I love you as my father. Go from here, I beg you, lest those Moslem devils of sowars come in search of you, with murder in their hearts. My men will not fire on them, even to save your life, huzoor. Will you not go, while there is yet time?”
The general turned to him sadly. “I have one last duty to perform, Subadar Sahib. Bid my bugler sound Assembly.”
The native officer hesitated, then motioned to the bugler to obey the order. The man raised his instrument to his lips and, as darkness fell over the Ridge, the shrill, clear notes of the call to the Colours sounded eerily. Always in the past, the sepoys of John Company had obeyed it; now only the subadar heard and answered the summons. He stood rigidly to attention, a lone, dark figure against the red glow now rising skywards from the deserted cantonment bungalows, as the looters and arsonists commenced their work of destruction; but the others remained where they were.
The commander of the Delhi Brigade turned away. Mounting his horse, he saluted the subadar and dismissed him. To the rest he said, “We shall come back and exact retribution for what has been done here this day. I thank you for the loyalty you have shown … but remember my words. If you betray your salt, the punishment is death!”
“The Company’s Raj is ended!” one of the sepoys called after him and added tauntingly, “No white soldiers have come from Meerut. All are dead! We shall not die!”