by V. A. Stuart
The following afternoon, it was announced that the women and children, with the rest of the sick, were leaving the Residency entrenchment. They took a considerable time to pass through the intervening palaces and walled enclosures, and the light was fading when the head of a long, slow-moving procession of carriages, bullock carts, and litters reached the sap below Phillip’s gun position. Here all had to dismount from their conveyances in order to walk in single file along the scarp, past an area of open ground which was under fire from the Kaiser Bagh, and then up a slight slope on the far side, protected from enemy musketry only by the makeshift wood and canvas screens Peel had devised. Many of the women and most of the older children were already on foot, Phillip saw, and he turned his glass on them, only to lower it a few moments later when he realised that, in the dim light, it was impossible to make out individual faces among the crowd.
“Commander Hazard …” Peel’s voice came from behind and he spun round, startled, not having heard his approach for the thunderous clamour of the guns, whose fire—by order of the Commander-in-Chief—must continue, despite the women’s presence.
“Sir?” he acknowledged, a hand to his ear as Peel drew level with him.
“Take a party of twelve small-arms men, if you please,” the Shannon’s Captain requested formally. “And give those poor souls what assistance you can. I’ll relieve you here.” He added, smiling, “I hope you find her, Phillip—and the children too. Good luck!”
Phillip thanked him and, with his twelve seamen, descended to the sap. Quite a number of the women had already entered it, some walking slowly and feeling their way, others —anxious for an end to their ordeal—picking up their skirts and running as fast as they could, obedient to the advice of their escort to keep their heads low. He crossed to a mudspattered carriage, drawn by two emaciated horses and, opening its door, offered his hand to assist the occupants to alight. They did so apprehensively, staring about them as if unable to believe their eyes and Phillip studied them covertly.
They looked wan and ill, as though for a long time they had been deprived not only of food but also of sunlight and fresh air and he found himself wondering whether he would recognise his sister, even if she were among them. It had been almost seven years since he had seen her; she would have changed, in any event, with the years. The Harriet he remembered had been tall and slim, with long fair hair and the bluest of eyes, a beautiful girl just on the verge of womanhood, vivacious and … one of the women grasped his arm.
“Oh, sir …” She was thin and dark, clad in a torn cotton dress, and she sounded frightened. “Do we really have to run across that trench?”
“I’m afraid you must,” Phillip told her. “But don’t worry, it …” He saw her legs then and could not suppress a shudder, for they were grossly swollen and covered with open sores. “I’ll get one of my sailors to carry you across,” he amended lamely. “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”
He yielded his burden to a stalwart young seaman and returned to shepherd a little group of children into the trench, surprised and faintly shocked by their gravity and silence. They asked no questions, gave no greeting, obeyed his instructions instantly and did not flinch when a shower of grapeshot struck the edge of the parapet, spattering them with dust and stones, and he watched them go, sick with pity. Then another woman claimed his attention, a grey-haired, smiling woman, upon whose arm a pale and sickly girl was leaning. She refused his help, assuring him that she could manage and then asked, still smiling, if he was really a naval officer.
“We heard that a naval party had come to our rescue but until I saw you, I did not really believe it. What ship do you belong to?”
“Her Majesty’s ship Shannon, ma’am,” Phillip answered.
“God bless you!” the grey-haired woman said quietly and he saw that there were tears in her eyes, although the smile remained. As he walked beside her to the trench, he asked about Harriet but she shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t know for certain. Mrs Dorling, you say, from Sitapur? I remember the ladies from Sitapur arriving, just before the siege began but I … I’m not sure. So many of us have died, you see—the Chaplain, the Reverend Harris, told me only a little while ago that he had conducted five hundred funerals. His wife might know—she’s in that carriage just behind us. I’m so sorry I cannot help you.”
Phillip missed the Chaplain’s wife in the confusion, as darkness fell and a hail of musket balls struck the carriage from which she and half a dozen others had just descended, killing its syce and causing the horses to bolt. By the time order had been restored and the straggling line of women resumed the crossing, Mrs Harris and her companions had vanished and he was kept too busy to search for her. There were many who had to be carried now, pathetic, puny children and women too weak and ill to walk, and he and the seamen of his party lost count of the number of times they trudged the length of the sap and stumbled up the slope beyond, to hand their burdens to some soldiers of the escort on the other side.
The moon rose and the enemy fire, although random and inaccurate, increased in volume, and several times the procession had to be halted until it slackened sufficiently to permit them to proceed. It was when he had almost given up hope that he saw a little boy of about five or six, dressed in a grubby white sailor suit, coming towards him. The boy was by himself, marching along with grave purposefulness, a tiny rifle roughly fashioned of wood held to his shoulder with military precision. In the moonlight, his face was so like Harriet’s, as he remembered it from childhood, that Phillip guessed instantly who he was.
Dropping to his knees beside the small, erect figure, he asked, his voice not steady, “Tell me, youngster—is your name Phillip Dorling?”
The boy stared at him, his thin, unwashed little face puckered in surprise. “Yes, sir, it is,” he confirmed. Then, puzzled, he looked at Phillip’s uniform. “You’re a sailor, sir, aren’t you? Not an Army officer?”
Resisting the impulse to hug him, Phillip nodded, bracing himself to ask the question. “Is your mother with you? Your mother and your sister Augusta?”
“My mother? Oh, yes, sir—she’s just behind. Over there.” He pointed. “Augusta’s asleep, I think—she’s not very well and Mamma is carrying her. Shall I take you to them, sir?”
“If you please,” Phillip said, his throat tight.
Harriet came to meet him, weary, stumbling with the weight of the child in her arms, but with a glad cry of recognition. He could find no words to say, could only repeat her name, as relief flooded over him. She was thin, as all of them were after the long siege, and the lovely fair hair he remembered was cropped short and flecked with silver but … She was alive and he had found her. He took the sleeping child from her and, with his free arm about her shoulders, led her across the sap.
EPILOGUE
The women and children reached the Sikanderbagh to find Sir Colin Campbell himself waiting to receive and welcome them and a meal set out on cloth-covered trestle tables. The dead from the battle for its possession had been counted and hurriedly buried but still the taint of death hung over the great, one-hundred-fifty-yard-square enclosure, with its battered walls and shot-pitted buildings and Harriet shuddered as she entered it with the rest.
But Sir Colin’s welcome was warm and the food, to those who had existed for almost five months on a near-starvation diet, unbelievably lavish, the sight of fresh meat, white bread and butter, fruit, and great urns of tea almost more than they could bear. Exhausted after her long walk through the shelltorn darkness, Harriet contented herself with cups of tea and a ham sandwich, but little Augusta, waking at last, could scarcely contain her delight at the sight of so much food, pointing to it excitedly.
“Mamma, there is a loaf of bread on the table! I’m certain of it—I can see it with my own eyes!”
Phillip, his mouth crammed, asked suddenly, “Mamma who was that gentleman who spoke to me? The one in sailor’s uniform, who carried Augusta through the sap?”
“That,” Harri
et told him, tears of happiness misting her eyes, “was your Uncle Phillip, darling … the one you are named after. I never expected to see him here.”
At eleven o’clock, the march was resumed, with doolies or carts for almost all of them, and they reached the Dilkusha at a little after 2 a.m. There were tents pitched into which they all crowded, to sleep the sleep of the exhausted, after partaking of tea and bread and butter provided for them by the officers of the 9th Lancers. Next morning, they were issued with rations by the commissariat and—indescribable joy, to women who had heard nothing from the outside world for so long— letters from home, which had been held in Cawnpore pending the relief, were distributed.
Harriet sat reading her mail for most of the day; there were letters from her parents, from Lucy and Graham, one from Phillip, posted in China and, tragically, a scrawled little note from Lavinia, addressed to her in Sitapur, which had somehow reached her with the rest. She wept over it and then resolutely folded and placed it in the bosom of her dress. Life, she told herself sadly, had to go on and, for the children’s sake, she must not yield to grief, for they were still in danger. The gunfire never ceased and on Saturday 21st the Lancers and the Artillery had to beat off a rebel attack on their camp. But gradually the garrison was being withdrawn from the Residency. Each day they came in, the gaunt, war-worn men of the Queen’s 32nd, the Highlanders of the 78th in tattered tartan, the gallant sepoys of the 13th Native Infantry, who had defended the Bailey Guard Gate throughout the siege, and the Sikhs of Hardinge’s Cavalry, on foot but still bearing themselves proudly, a handful of faithful household servants behind them.
Harriet found many friends in camp and from them, she learnt the incredible story of how the withdrawal had been made under the very noses of the rebel host. Guns in the Residency had been spiked and lights left burning; the defenders had filed out, leaving to Brigadier Inglis the sad honour of closing the gate of the Residency and, marching in tense silence, the last of the old garrison had passed along the route the women and children had followed, the outlying pickets falling in behind them, still without a shouted word or a bugle call. Covered by the guns of the Shannon Brigade and of the Horse Artillery, the rearguard of the 93rd had bivouacked five hundred yards from the Kaiser Bagh in which, still pounded by the Shannon’s twenty-four-pounder broadsides, the rebels waited for the attack that never came. Then, as cheers from the sailors signalled another breach in its massive walls, the Highlanders had heaped logs on their bivouac fires and silently slipped away to serve as rearguard to the slowly moving guns as they, too, received the order to withdraw.
On the 24th the women and children were told that they were to move to the Alam Bagh and they heard, with intense sadness, that General Havelock—so recently promoted to a knighthood and the rank of Major-General—had died from an attack of dysentery in a tent in the Dilkusha. His body was borne to the Alam Bagh by a party of the soldiers he had led to nine valiant victories and there interred, the pipers of his favourite regiment, the 78th, playing him to his last long resting place.
Harriet was worn out when she and the children lay down at last in their tent at the Alam Bagh. The journey was only one of four miles but, starting at 11 a.m., they had been all day on the road, crowded with a dozen others into an open bullock cart. With so great a mass of waggons, carts, camels, bullocks, and elephants all loaded with baggage, the sick and wounded, and the women, clutching their children, in litters or on carts, confusion was inevitable and, every ten minutes, the long procession came to a standstill. Sir Colin, fuming at the chaotic lack of organisation and the delays, sent his Staff officers galloping this way and that and, after a while, some sort of order was restored, but the dust was suffocating, the heat almost unbearable. Tents had not been pitched when the head of the column reached the camp-site and, when finally this was rectified, the women and the wounded were found to have suffered a number of deaths.
Harriet wakened next morning to realise that, for the first time in five months, no cannon were firing. Anxious for Phillip, she sat up, straining her ears. The children continued to sleep but … She recalled a young midshipman, who had given his name as Lightfoot, who had sought her out during the march to tell her that her brother was with the two naval guns covering the retreat.
“Commander Hazard’s compliments, ma’am,” the boy had said. “And I’m to tell you that he will be with you as soon as his duties permit.”
Weary and spent, the children fractious, she had scarcely taken it in but now she remembered and began to feel anxiety. General Outram, she had been told, was to remain in the Alam Bagh with artillery and four thousand troops, to prevent pursuit from Lucknow when the column took the road, and to hold the rebels in check, until the Commander-in-Chief returned with reinforcements to recapture the city they had now been compelled to abandon. Would Phillip, she wondered unhappily, be left behind with his guns? It seemed on the cards but no one was able to tell her and the naval guns had not yet left the Dilkusha.
All day she fretted, learning without enthusiasm that the column was under orders to leave for Cawnpore, guarded by the three thousand remaining troops, on the 27th. Most of the old garrison and the regiments of Havelock’s Force were to go but, probe and question as she might, Harriet could glean no news of whether or not the Naval Brigade would accompany them.
On the evening of the 26th, as she was picking up her scanty possessions, she heard a glad cry from little Phillip and, running to the tent flap, saw that he was pointing excitedly to a long line of yoked bullocks pulling the great, unwieldy siegeguns. Overcome with relief, Harriet dropped her tired head into her hands and wept.
She was still weeping when Phillip found her.
“It’s all right,” he told her gently and took her into his arms. “We’ll get you back safely—nothing is more certain.” Harriet clung to him, smiling through her tears.
The worst was over, she told herself thankfully. From now on, every step she and the children took would be a step nearer to freedom. And Phillip would be with them, to help them on their way.
BOOKS CONSULTED
CONTEMPORARY
The Mutinies in Oudh and the Siege of the Lucknow Residency: Martin Gubbins (Richard Bentley, 1858).
A Lady’s Diary of the Siege of Lucknow: Mrs G. Harris (John Murray, 1858).
Lucknow and Oudh in the Mutiny: Lt.-Gen. James Innes (A. D. Innes, 1895).
The Siege of Lucknow: The Hon. Julia Inglis (Osgood, MacIlvaine, 1892).
A Middy’s Recollections: Victor Montagu (Black, 1898).
Memories of the Mutiny: Col. F. C. Maude & J. W. Sherer (Remington, 1894).
Journal of the Siege of Lucknow: Maria Germon (privately printed 1870: Edited by Michael Edwardes Constable).
The Relief of Lucknow: William Forbes-Mitchell (1893; Edited by Michael Edwardes for The Folio Society, 1962).
Memoirs of Sir Henry Havelock: Marshman 1867 (Longman’s,1891).
The Shannon’s Brigade in India: Edmund Hope Verney (Saunders, Otley & Co., 1862).
Recollections of a Winter’s Campaign on India: Captain Oliver Jones, R.N. (Saunders, Otley & Co., 1859).
Letters from Lord Canning to Vernon Smith Esq. (private papers, kindly lent by Jane Vansittart, author of From Minnie with Love).
The Illustrated London News, 1857–8–9.
Papers of Dr N. Cheevers, Medical Secretariat, Calcutta (private collection of letters, cuttings from Indian newspapers, printed Orders in Council, telegraph messages 1857–9, obtained from Mr H. J. Varnham, Blackheath).
HISTORICAL REFERENCES
The Naval Brigades in the Indian Mutiny: Edited by Commander W. B. Rowbotham, R.N. (Navy Records Society, 1948).
The Second China War: Edited by Captain D. Bonner, R.N., and E. W. R. Lumby (Navy Records Society, 1954).
History of the Indian Mutiny: T. R. Holmes (Macmillan, 1898).
History of the Indian Mutiny: Charles Ball (London Pub. Co.,1858).
History of the Indian Mutiny: 3 vols.
G. W. Forrest, C.I.E. (Blackwood, 1904).
The Tale of the Great Mutiny: W. H. Fitchett (Smith, Elder, 1904).
The Sound of Fury: Richard Collier (Collins, 1963).
Eighteen Fifty-Seven: S. N. Sen (Govt. of India, 1957).
My thanks for aid in obtaining reference books to
York City Public Library and Mr Victor Sutcliffe of Stroud,
Glos., and research undertaken by Mr Peter Gaston.
GLOSSARY OF INDIAN TERMS
Ayan: nurse or maid servant
Baba: child
Bearer: personal, usually head, servant
Bhisti: water bearer
Boorka: all-enveloping cotton garment worn by purdah women when mixing with the outside world
Brahmin: high-caste Hindu
Chapkan: knee-length tunic
Charpoy: string bed
Chitti: a chit, a written order
Chuprassi: a uniformed door-keeper
Daffadar: sergeant, cavalry
Dhoti: a loincloth worn by men in India
Din: faith
Doolie: stretcher or covered litter for conveyance of wounded
Eurasian: half-caste, usually children born of British fathers and Indian mothers
Ekka: small, single-horse-drawn cart, often curtained for conveyance of purdah women
Fakir: itinerant holy man
Feringhi: foreigner (term of disrespect)
Ghat: river bank, landing place, quay
Godown: storeroom, warehouse
Golandaz: gunner, native
Havildar/Havildar-Major: sergeant/sergeant major, infantry
Jemadar: native officer, all arms
Ji/Ji-han: yes
Lal-kote: British soldier
Log: people (baba-log: children)
Mahout: the keeper and driver of an elephant