The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  At the top of the slope, Vibart looked down from the castellations of the bastion. Below lay a 25-foot drop into the ditch below – ‘one would have thought it madness at any other time’.73 Several other officers made the jump, and began trying to run up the almost vertical counterscarp. Vibart was about to join them when the screams of the Misses Forrest rang out from the officers’ quarters across the bastion. Their mother had just been wounded in the shoulder. Vibart ran over to where they were – ‘bullets all this while whistling through the windows’ – and helped them over to the parapet. The officers fastened their sword belts together, and with the help of Vibart and their father, one by one lowered the girls down.

  There still remained ‘one very stout old lady’ who began to scream, and refused to jump. By this point, the sepoys below had a cannon trained upon them, and a shot ‘crashed into the parapet a little to the right, covering us with splinters. It was madness to waste time in expostulation’, wrote Vibart; ‘somebody gave her a push and she tumbled headlong in the ditch beneath’.74

  One by one, the ten survivors – five men and five women – then attempted to scale the top of the counterscarp. ‘Again and again did the ladies almost reach the top, when the earth, crumbling away beneath their feet, sent them rolling back into the ditch. Despair, however, gave us superhuman energy, till at length we all succeeded in gaining the summit. We now ran down the short glacis, and plunged into some thick shrubbery that grew at the bottom.’

  As darkness fell, the survivors made their way through thick scrub towards the river, and then upstream towards Metcalfe House. On the way, they saw that they were being followed.

  Not waiting, however, to take a second look, we set off running hoping to reach the house before our pursuers overtook us … Thorny bushes tore the ladies’ dresses to shreds. On we ran, the perspiration streaming down our faces, our lips parched with thirst, and not daring to look behind us.75

  It was pitch dark by the time they reached Metcalfe House. The house was surrounded ‘by a crowd of suspicious-looking individuals’, but the refugees were kindly received by the staff, who were anxious to know the fate of Theo, who had not been seen since that morning. They were all taken down to the darkness of Sir Thomas’s cool underground billiard room, where the three Misses Forrests promptly fell fast asleep. In due course candles, food and bottles of beer all appeared. Mrs Forrest’s wound was dressed, and for three hours everyone rested.

  By nine o’clock, however, the staff warned that it was only a matter of time before the sepoys appeared from the cantonments, from which direction, only a short distance away, could be heard ‘the shouts of the mutineers, mingled with volleys of musketry and discharges of cannon’. Filling their pockets with food and bottles of water, the party set off again. The plan was to ford the Yamuna canal, and head off north-east cross-country, in the hope of reaching the British regiments at Meerut, 38 miles away. ‘Each of us took charge of a lady,’ wrote Vibart,

  and I had little Miss Forrest to my share. The poor little child kept asking all sorts of innocent questions, not being able to realise the fearful events that had occurred. In this manner we trudged on for about half an hour, when suddenly a bright streak of fire rose up behind us.

  They had left only just in time. A little downstream, the eerie colours reflected in the dark waters of the Yamuna, Metcalfe House was ablaze.

  By the fall of darkness, as the Muslim faithful paused to eat their iftar, the sunset Ramadan meal, the streets of Delhi were deserted again. Zahir Dehlavi, returning from the Fort, passed through a scene of devastation: ‘When I reached the Urdu Bazar road [next to the Jama Masjid]’, he wrote,

  it was completely quiet, and there was not a single bird to be heard or seen. Indeed there was a strange silence over the whole town, as if the city had turned suddenly into a wilderness. Shops were lying looted, the doors of all the houses and havelis were closed, and there was not a glimmer of light. Even the glass of the street lanterns lay broken. I went past the Kotwali and reached the gate of the small Dariba [in Chandni Chowk]. There I saw all the shops of the knife makers, sweet sellers and cloth merchants were all broken and looted, and in front of the silver merchant’s shop, a Brahmin beggar lay dying. He was still groaning, and on his back were three gaping wounds from swords. Finally I reached my house [in Matia Mahal]. It was only late evening now but already the door was closed, locked and bolted.76

  What remained of the British community in Delhi was now in full flight. James Morley had spent the evening hiding in the dhobi’s hut, listening to his servants discussing the murder of his wife and family – and his presumed death – outside. One man said it was very wrong to kill the memsahib and the children, and how were they going to get rozgar [employment]? But another said that we were kafirs, and now the King of Delhi would provide for everyone.’ With the dhobi’s assistance, Morley made his escape, dressed in the dhobi’s wife’s petticoat and veil. ‘I had been all my life in the country,’ wrote Morley, ‘but still I felt afraid lest anyone should speak to me. I did not know if they might remark that my chadar was held awkwardly and thus find me out.’ But they drove safely out of the city, past the unguarded city gates, sitting on the dhobi’s bullock cart beside a pile of dirty washing.

  Despite the late hour, the road was full of excited crowds hurrying into Delhi to loot, or else returning laden with plunder. At one point, a gang of men surrounded them and accused the dhobi of hiding treasures in the washing, but the old man coolly told them to search it, and, finding nothing, they let them go. After that the dhobi fended off further crowds by telling anyone they met to hurry on and loot the firangis before it was too late. As dawn came, they found shelter in a dharmashala next to a roadside temple.77

  Robert and Harriet Tytler, meanwhile, were heading in an overloaded carriage up the road to Karnal. Like every other British attempt to guide events that day, the flight from the Flagstaff Tower had started badly and soon descended into complete chaos. Tytler had planned a retreat that would have taken the women and children on the road to Meerut via the ford at Baghpat to the north-east. Almost immediately, however, the column had become fragmented, with half of the carriages setting off towards Baghpat while the others headed off in the wrong direction towards the cantonments. In the panic and confusion, Tytler lost his remaining sepoys, became separated from his wife, and ran into a body of Gujar tribesmen who had just come in from their village to join in the looting. They made a dash at Tytler with their iron-bound lathis, and tried to unhorse him; Tytler only just made it through.

  Tytler eventually caught up with Harriet and his children, who had headed off on the wrong road in a carriage accompanied by the wife of his colleague Captain Gardner. But when Mrs Gardner asked him what had happened to her husband, Tytler volunteered to go back and look for him. Gardner, it transpired, had failed to leave with the rest of the party, and was limping wounded through the burning cantonments when Tytler eventually found him. Twice more he passed through the midst of the Gujars, once on the way back to look for his friend, and one final time, with the wounded Gardner riding pillion behind him; each time the Gujars struck the men with their lathis and tried to pull them off.78

  Catching up with the carriage a second time, Tytler jumped on to it, and the party galloped forwards, Tytler driving the horses ‘at a terrific pace’, conscious that the sawar cavalry could by now have started after them in pursuit. ‘We had not gone far’, wrote Harriet, ‘before Gardner called out, “Tytler look back.”’79

  We cast our eyes in the direction of the cantonments and saw that every bungalow and the lines were on fire. It was a sickening sight, knowing that all we most valued was lost to us for ever, things that no money could ever purchase – a beloved dead child’s hair, manuscripts and paintings, books, clothes, furniture, a very large carriage, horses, buggy etc. Indeed we lost in money value, with my husband’s uniform some £20,000, a fortune to a poor military man in those days … But the one absorbing thought of flying for our
lives soon made us forget that which at any other time would have been an inconsolable trial.80

  The Wagentriebers, in contrast to the fleeing Tytlers, decided to take their chances in the Delhi suburbs and to fall back on the friends of Elizabeth Wagentrieber’s father, James Skinner.

  After Nawab Zia ud-Din Khan had visited them the previous evening they felt confident they could rely on his friendship, so from the Flagstaff Tower they made straight for the Nawab’s garden house to the north-west of the tower, a little way up the Karnal road, which the Nawab had often offered to them for weekends.

  On arrival, they were warmly received by the mali (gardener). A goat was milked for Elizabeth Wagentrieber’s baby, and a meal of chapattis and vegetables prepared. The carriage and horses were hidden away, all traces of the wheels were rubbed out, and the harnesses hidden in the house. George Wagentrieber went up on to the roof with his stepdaughter Julia, the young infant Florence and with the guns they had brought, while Elizabeth stayed below on a charpoy with the chaukidar (nightwatchman), covering her face in a chador. She told the surly-looking chaukidar that if he gave any hint of betraying them in any way, her husband had his guns trained on him and would make sure to shoot him first.81

  The moon rose, and from the rooftop George could see fires burning all over Delhi and the cantonments ablaze; he could also hear the sound of repeated musket shots and the louder reports of field guns. Soon after the rattle of the last of the English carriages had passed up the Karnal road, troops of cavalry started to appear at the gate searching for Christians. ‘My mother had told the chaukidar not to show any objections to people wanting to come in as that would at once make them suspicious,’ remembered Julia.

  She would not let the chaukidar go near the gate or trust him away from her. Twice the rebels came to the gate, and hailed the chaukidar, asking him if he had given shelter to the Firangis. The last one, a trooper, came to within a few yards of where she was sitting, reined in his horse, and asked to be shown all over the house. But the chaukidar obeyed the injunctions my mother had given him and told the man that some Europeans had come past but they did not stay, and drove straight up the road, and that he was welcome to go all over the house if he chose. The man’s prompt reply seemed to satisfy the trooper who immediately rode off in search of those who were said to have gone past.82

  Towards midnight, however, reports began to reach the house that someone had betrayed the Wagentriebers, and that a further troop of twenty sawars were on their way. There seemed no option but immediate flight. Elizabeth harnessed the horses, and drove them to the front of the house; the children were put inside and George climbed on the box. ‘Before we entered upon the high road,’ wrote George,

  my dear wife advised me to keep my fire arms at hand, so I took a double-barrelled gun loaded with ball, and my pistol on the box with me, leaving two rifles inside: and telling my step-daughter, who was inside the carriage with the child, to hand them [to me] the moment I fired, we commended ourselves to the protection of the Most High, and entered upon the Grand Trunk Road.83

  The Tytlers had gone only about 15 miles from Delhi when their horse began to slow down with exhaustion. Stopping at a staging stable of the government dak or postal service, they were refused a replacement horse, until Tytler drew a gun on the official and took one by force.

  A few miles after leaving the stables, the wheels of their overloaded carriage all simultaneously disintegrated, leaving ‘the body of the carriage a hopeless wreck. There was nothing for it but to walk’. Each of the men took a child; their two heavily pregnant wives, and Harriet’s maid Marie, trudged on behind them, expecting to hear at any moment the clatter of the hoofs of the cavalry bearing down upon them.

  Instead, after a few miles they heard a carriage. It belonged to a young English girl who had earlier passed them on the road heading into Delhi and who had refused to listen to their cries of warning. Now, she refused Tytler’s request to take on any hitch-hikers.

  ‘I will do no such thing!’ was the reply to the request for a lift. ‘Do you mean to break down my carriage?’

  ‘Then I won’t ask you,’ said Tytler, and set to work to put Mrs Gardner, Marie and myself, with our children, inside the carriage.

  In this way, we went on until one of the hind wheels of the conveyance rolled off. ‘There,’ said the young woman (she was only sixteen), ‘I knew you would break my carriage. Now what am I to do?’84

  This time, help came in the form of the recently widowed Mrs Nixon, whose husband the head clerk of the Commissioner’s Office, Muhammad Baqar, had seen dead in the street with a biscuit in his mouth. She had made her escape on top of a mail cart, which amid all the chaos had left Delhi punctually at the appointed time as if nothing unusual was happening. The driver had ropes with which they reaffixed the wheels. The Tytlers slowly drove on for a few more miles before the springs of the carriage finally gave out completely and they abandoned their second conveyance on the road as they had done their first. They walked on ‘nearly overcome with fatigue in the heat of a May night … our thirst was terrible, with no water to be had except greeny mire from roadside pools that had not yet dried up’.

  It was nearly dawn when they commandeered their final vehicle of the day: an arms tumbrel full of broken weaponry on its way to the now-destroyed Delhi magazine. The two drivers ran away at the sight of Tytler’s revolver and the party headed slowly on, arriving at Karnal at ten in the morning.

  The Tytlers waited all day for their friends and colleagues to join them. But by that evening, of all the crowd that had left the Flagstaff Tower, only six Delhi refugees had so far made it through.85

  The Wagentriebers’ journey up the same road made that of the Tytlers, difficult as it was, seem like a picnic. They had left it too late, and the road was now swarming with Gujar tribesmen, intent on plundering refugees and stragglers. ‘We may have proceeded a mile,’ remembered George,

  when my wife pointed out to me a knot of people drawn up on both sides of the road in advance of us. They were evidently up to no good, so I prepared to protect myself and my family. As we approached, they closed in across the road, and I presented my gun at them which had the effect of keeping them off, but they followed the carriage screaming and flourishing clubs and sticks in a very menacing manner.

  We left them far behind, only to fall in with a second body; this time more numerous and formidable. As we approached they drew across the road in front of our horses, holding up spears, swords and lathees in a threatening manner, and loudly calling out thammo! [stop!] To this I replied by pointing my gun and calling out hut jao! [move away!] But one, more daring than the rest, stepped forward and seized the horse’s head by the rein, and I seeing nothing for it, fired, the rascal falling behind the carriage. The remainder fell back, my wife whipped up the horses and dashed on, but the ruffians followed very fast, and thinking they were gaining on us I fired a rifle shot, and hit one man, the foremost, in the abdomen. He fell and the others contented themselves with howling and heaping abuse upon the heads of myself and my family for generations.86

  When they had got a little ahead, Elizabeth stopped the carriage and got the horses’ harness in order, while her husband reloaded the weapons. They had not gone far when a third set of Gujars closed in on them, and this time succeeded in clubbing one of the horses on the head. Again, Wagentrieber shot down the leading man, but not before his wife too had been struck a tremendous blow with an iron-tipped lathi. A second man ran up beside the carriage, sword in hand, and was also shot down; a third succeeded in climbing on to the hood of the carriage and was in the act of striking a potentially fatal blow when he too was shot down by George.

  They had not got far ahead of the third group of Gujars before they ran straight into a large party of sepoys. They were returning from training in the Enfield rifle at Ambala, and surrounded the carriage, asking what the family were doing out on such a road at such a time, apparently ignorant of the dramatic events which had taken pla
ce. At this point the Gujars caught up, and stood glaring at the Wagentriebers from a distance. Seeing no alternative, and noticing how friendly the soldiers appeared, Elizabeth begged the sepoys for their help, telling them that she was the daughter of James Skinner, Sikandar Sahib, ‘and so entitled to the protection of all true soldiers’. This, it turned out, was exactly the right note to have struck:

  ‘You are indeed a great man’s daughter,’ they said. ‘We knew Col Skinner, and it was our regiment which was sent to escort his remains from Rohtak to Delhi.’87

  In an instant four or five of them stepped forward and standing beside our carriage, levelled their muskets at our enemies, telling them to keep off or they would certainly fire …

  After this we were not molested at close quarters, the villains confining their attacks to spears, lathis, and heavy stones thrown at us in showers from behind the parapets of bridges, which most providentially struck none of us. One of our mares sustained severe cuts and bruises, and the carriage bore marks of great ill-usage.88

  The name of Skinner saved them yet again, when, soon after dawn, the family drew up by a village well, and threw some water over the horses to refresh them. A crowd soon gathered, many of whom appeared to be far from friendly. One, however, turned out to be an old servant of Sikandar Sahib, who had once had an estate in the area. ‘He was a respectable old man with a long white beard,’ remembered the Wagentriebers’ daughter Julia. ‘He seemed to know my mother though she had no recollection of him.’