The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  Metcalfe House, he went on, was totally gutted, and its shell now formed the easternmost picket of the British position, abutting the bank of the Yamuna. So bad was the damage that Campbell thought that the looters had gone as far as ‘lighting a fire in each room … the only roof left is on [Theo’s old] Batchelor’s Bungalow’. But there was better news from Dilkusha: ‘We sent out some men to see the Kootub House,’ he wrote, ‘and they say, it is alright, it has not been looted and the servants are all there – it is very strange is it not?’

  Edward knew this would mean a lot to GG, who, like the rest of the family, had been deeply upset by the loss of their much-loved family home. It also meant something to them financially, for like many other British families in Delhi they had lost almost all their assets on 11 May. Theo had been much criticised within the family in the months leading up to the outbreak for failing to get on with the auction of his father’s library and artworks.52 In the event it had made little difference: what had been auctioned had been placed in the family account at the Delhi Bank, whose books and assets had gone up in flames several hours before Metcalfe House. Now at least there was a prospect that some of their father’s belongings might yet be saved intact from their other house near Mehrauli.

  Having passed on that piece of good news, Campbell then went on to give GG a gloomy assessment of the current British position on the Ridge.

  The Pandies came out at about 8 o’clock and kept up a vigorous attack on the advanced batteries in front of Hindoo Rao’s house … Our principal danger was from round shot and shell – the hottest fire I have ever experienced.

  I had to keep up a sharp fire all day to prevent the mutineers sneaking round to our left where we were very weak. It was an anxious time for me for I could not help feeling what a critical position it was. Our rifle companies are now so weak – I have only 30 men fit for duty, instead of about 70. I had about 4 men wounded none killed, thank God. I have much to be thankful for myself – for the narrow shaves were many – and besides the direct fire of the Pandies who kept trying to creep up to us, we had an incessant shower of spent bullets passing over us and hitting the rocks on all sides. I had one sergeant shot through the arm, one man wounded in the hand and another in the neck … Morgan, my junior sub got a touch of a spent ball in the leg – one man got a bullet through his cap, another a bit of shell thro his haversack, and another a splinter of a shell in his leg …

  Just as Maulvi Muhammad Baqar had promised his readers that divine support was clearly with the rebels, so Campbell now went on to assure GG that God was on the side of the British: ‘I trust my God will comfort my little wife,’ he wrote,

  for his comfort is the only real one, the only one which will stand all tests. You have managed so well there on your own, GG, and you must not be over afraid of the taking of Delhi, dearest. You know, I always told you I thought it would be a long affair, and from what I see of the natural as well as artificial defences of the Palace, I think we cannot take it satisfactorily, or do any good to the country until a larger force is collected – a larger siege and a larger supply of ammunition for our guns. I think an assault under present circumstances could not but be disastrous.

  I think the hand of God has been manifestly with us … I trust He will always make me do my duty bravely and honourably. I cannot feel the pleasure that others tend to do here, in looking at the dead mutineers. They are also all God’s creatures and I feel that much of the slaughter must be laid to our account. Pray Heaven that we may be humbled by God’s Grace.53

  Campbell’s anxieties reflected a growing realisation among the British on the Ridge. They had come to besiege, but clearly now did not have the numerical strength either to encircle or to take the town, and had no option but somehow to cling on and endure whatever the rebels threw at them until such a time as relief came. In the meantime, there were around 4,000 government troops against more than 20,000 rebels whose numbers were increasing every day. As General Wilson wrote to his wife, ‘We are still remaining in the same uncertainty as to what we are to do now we are here … Frankly I doubt we have the means to take Delhi, and that without the merciful assistance of the Almighty, I fear the result. I trust He will not forsake the cause of His own people …’54

  If there was some frustration with the current stalemate in the city, then there was much more so on the Ridge. ‘We go pottering about perfectly aware that we can do nothing else,’ wrote Fred Roberts. ‘This hanging about Delhi is very disheartening: [it] would be nothing if we could have a good fight and have done with it, but these Pandies are innumerable and never become less.’55

  Unlike the townspeople, the British had a fairly regular supply of food, coming down the Grand Trunk Road from Ambala in armed convoys; but in almost every other way their situation was worse than that of the Delhiwallahs below them. Quite apart from the daily attacks and the constant bombardment from the city, the troops of the Field Force had no shelter or shade except their tents, so that many of the troops ‘died from apoplexy and sunstroke, their faces turning quite black in a couple of minutes – a horrible sight’.56 There was no water, except for the Yamuna canal a mile to the rear, where the flow ‘were it not for the [revolting] flavour, would have passed for pea soup’. Sewage arrangements were primitive in the extreme.

  After a week or two, the smell of the bloated, blackening, rotting bodies of the sepoys piled high on the slopes leading up to the Ridge grew more and more insupportable, and the rock was too hard to allow the digging of anything but the most shallow graves. ‘The day before yesterday I had the most wretched picquet,’ wrote one soldier to his mother. ‘There were about fifteen dead Pandies within ten yards in a state of decay, and stench was quite over powering, inhaling it as we did for 38 hours.’57 The small parties of British reinforcements arriving from the Punjab would always smell that they were nearing the city long before they could see it: ‘Through our nasal organs, we were most painfully aware of the scenes we were about to enter upon,’ wrote Colonel George Bourchier as he neared Delhi. ‘From Alipore to the camp, death in every shape greeted our approach; even the trees, hacked about for the camel’s food, had a most desolate appearance, throwing their naked boughs towards heaven as if invoking pity for themselves or punishment on their destroyers.’58

  The flies were another feature of the camp which few could forget. ‘They sought you out in your tent, at your meals, when occupied in the discharge of duty,’ wrote Padre Rotton, the camp chaplain.

  Whatever might be the dish you selected to feed upon, as soon as it was uncovered, a legion of flies would settle upon it; and even so simple a thing as a cup of tea would be filled in a few minutes, unless you were very careful, the surface of the liquid presenting a most revolting dark appearance from the flies floating thereon, some dead, others dying.59

  The sheer filthiness of life in the Ridge camp also horrified a young lieutenant, Charles Griffiths, who had just arrived from Ferozepur. Like Rotton, he immediately conceived a deep hatred for the flies, which seemed to be impossible to avoid. Many days, he wrote, began by being woken not by the sound of bugles or exploding shells, but with the sensation of flies crawling through your sleeping lips:

  They literally darkened the sky, descended in myriads and covering everything in our midst. Foul and loathsome they were, and we knew that they owed their existence to, and fattened upon, the putrid corpses of dead men and animals which lay rotting and unburied in every direction. The air was tainted with corruption and the heat was intense. Can it, then, be wondered that pestilence increased daily in our camp, claiming its victims from every regiment, native as well as European?60

  Things grew worse after the monsoon broke on 27 June and overnight transformed the Ridge into what Griffiths dubbed ‘a swamp and mudhole’ and Hodson ‘a steaming bog’. ‘The camp was literally turned into a pool,’ wrote Rotton in his diary, ‘and became very offensive to the sense of smell.’ Snakes, driven out of their holes, suddenly multiplied and were ‘dreaded alm
ost [as much as] if not more than the enemy’s missiles’. Black scorpions ‘like young lobsters’ were regularly found crawling through the bedding.61 At night sleep was all but impossible: if the damp heat and the smell were not enough, the boom of cannon, the baying of jackals and dogs, and what the Delhi Gazette Extra described as ‘the gurgling moan of obstinate camels’ made rest a distant hope.62 More seriously, in this humid, stinking, stagnant quagmire, cholera also broke out again, passing through the camp with astonishing and deadly speed.63 In such an unhealthy environment, and with only the most basic medical facilities, it was hardly surprising that almost none of the many wounded who had to go through an amputation survived to tell the tale.

  The officers at least had access to a regimental mess, a courtesy that was denied to the starving Christian and Anglo-Indian refugees who made it to the camp: Padre Rotton described his horror at seeing their ‘attenuated limbs, sunken and glazed eyes, drawn and pinched features, convulsive frame’.64 The regimental mess was also denied to the heavily pregnant Harriet Tytler and her children, who were forced to live in the cart containing the army treasure chest her husband had to guard. ‘We had no home outside of our cart,’ she wrote. ‘There we remained night and day, eating our meals in our laps.’65 It was a dangerous and exposed position, and before long

  a shell exploded quite close to the cart and a huge piece fell below the wheel, but thank God none of us were hurt … Captain Willock came over in the evening to see us. When a shell came over the Flagstaff Tower, whizzing as it came along until it fell within the mud walls of our sepoys’ lines close to where we were, and exploded there, poor Captain Willock jumped up saying, ‘My God what was that?’ I replied calmly, ‘Oh! It is only a shell.’ He was so astounded at the indifferent way I took it that he repeated it at the mess, after which it became a byword in the camp: ‘Oh! It is only a shell.’ Poor fellow, he never lived long enough to discover how accustomed one can get to such sounds from hearing them night and day.

  It was in her cart that Harriet gave birth to a son, at two in the morning on 21 June. It was not the joyful moment that such events usually are: ‘My baby was born with dysentery,’ wrote Harriet sadly (she had already seen several of her children die in India),

  and [he] was not expected to live for nearly a week. When the child was out of immediate danger, the kind-hearted doctor said: ‘Now, Mrs Tytler, you may think of giving him a name.’ Poor child, a pauper to begin with, his advent into this troublesome world was not a promising one. There he lay, near the opening of the van, with only a small square piece of flannel thrown over him, the setting moon shining brightly on his little face and nothing but the sound of alarms, calls and shot and shell as lullabies.66

  When the monsoon broke a week later, and water began coursing through the thatched roof of the cart, Harriet’s husband Robert moved her and the baby into an empty bell of arms,* whose floor he covered for them with straw. ‘I walked bare-footed with a wet sheet wrapped around my baby, and went into that bell of arms and there we remained,’ she wrote.

  After such an experience I quite expected the baby and myself would die, but through God’s mercy we were none the worse and I was able to nurse my baby without the usual aid of a bottle of milk, there being neither bottles nor milk for love or money. We slept on the floor with only straw and a razai [quilt] under us, with no pillows to comfort us, till a poor officer who had been killed had his property sold, and my husband bought his sheets … [But] my baby never winked or blinked, sleeping through it all as he lay on his bed of straw. If he had laid on a feather bed in a palace he couldn’t have slept more soundly67

  Pressed to choose an appropriate name for the child, Harriet came up with something as idiosyncratic as her circumstance: Stanley Delhi Force Tytler.

  As July and the rains progressed, and the British breastworks and fortifications became over time increasingly sophisticated, more and more British began to die of cholera rather than sepoy bullets. It was part of Padre Rotton’s daily duties to make regular visits to the two cholera wards of the camp hospitals. ‘It required strong nerves to withstand the sickening sights of these two infirmaries,’ he wrote afterwards.

  The patients constantly retching made the place very offensive. The flies alighted on your face, and crawled down your back, through the opening given by the shirt collar, and occasionally also flew into your throat when you were reading with a dying man … My Bible, sadly marked in consequence of this plague, recalls every time I open its soiled pages many a painful countenance which I witnessed within those walls … So general was this mortal sickness in these hospitals, that at last I could only hope to discharge my duty by taking up a central position, with a chair for a hassock to kneel on in prayer, and make a general supplication for all the patients, while afterwards, with Bible in hand, I read and expounded some appropriate passage of scripture …68

  On 5 July, cholera claimed its second British general: having killed General Anson in Kurnal in May, it now removed his successor, General Barnard, as well. If both Anson and Barnard seemed inadequate leaders for the crisis in hand, then the third elderly commander to take the lead, General Sir Thomas Reed, was the worst of all: ‘old and feeble,’ thought Wilson, ‘more fit for the invalid couch than assuming command’.69 Others put it more bluntly. ‘I don’t see how we are ever going to get inside Delhi,’ wrote the young Scottish Lieutenant Thomas Cadell from East Lothian, ‘under the choice collection of muffs we have at our head.’70

  As was predicted by Hervey Greathed the day Reed took over, the elderly general was ‘too ill to do anything’71 A week later he was still languishing in his tent: ‘we see or hear nothing of General Reed’, wrote Greathed to his wife. ‘I wish I could say the same of a horse he has just bought, picketed close by; it has been roaring for the last two hours.’72 It was not long before Reed gave up the struggle completely, and opted instead for retirement in Simla. He left the Ridge on the I7th, after less than two weeks in charge, along with a caravan of sick and wounded; his last actions were to send away two units of nearmutinous cavalry who looked likely to desert, and to hand over command to General Wilson.

  Wilson, though always overcautious and far from imaginative, proved himself a towering strategic genius in comparison with his three predecessors. He was under no illusions about the difficulty of the task given to him. As he wrote to his wife when he heard of his appointment, ‘Oh! Ellen dear, this a fearful responsibility that has been thrown on my shoulders, and knowing as I do my own weakness and incapacity, I feel as if I should faint under the burden.’73 Yet for all his lack of energy and confidence, Wilson was a clear military thinker and was able to see that the British had for the moment no option but to choose a defensive strategy, and preserve their position until reinforcements arrived from the Punjab.

  He therefore forbade the sort of adventures that had been whittling away British numbers, such as costly and often undisciplined counter-attacks or ‘rat hunting’, chasing the retreating sepoys down the hill into the gardens of the Sabzi Mandi: two of these counter-attacks had recently come near to disaster, losing 220 men on one occasion, and a further 200 only five days later. He also systematically went about improving the quality of the breastworks, defences and entrenchments, and demolishing the bridges over the Yamuna canal at the back of the British position so as to avoid any possibility of further surprise attacks from the rear.74

  On 18 July he wrote a desperate letter to Sir John Lawrence in Lahore, outlining the seriousness of the British position, and the need, whatever the cost, for Lawrence to send reinforcements to the Ridge immediately:

  Confidential:

  Sir,

  I have consulted with Colonel Baird-Smith, the chief engineer of the force, and we have both come to the conclusion that any attempt now to assault the city of Delhy must end in our defeat and disaster.

  The force consists at present of 2200 Europeans and 1500 natives, a total of 3700 bayonets, while the insurgents are numberless, having been
reinforced by the mutinous regiments from every quarter. They are in a perfect state of preparation with strong defences and well equipped … The insurgents have attacked our positions twenty different times, and this day, they are out again making their twenty-first attack. It is true, they have been invariably driven back, but we have lost a great many men in doing so in killed and wounded …

  I have determined to hold out the position we now have to the last, as I consider it of the utmost importance to keep the insurgents now in Delhy from over-running the country. To enable me however to hold this position I must be strongly reinforced, and that speedily. I hear that there is no chance of relying from the forces collecting below [from Calcutta]. I therefore earnestly call upon you, to send me as quickly as you can such support as you can from the Punjab: a complete European regiment if possible, and one or two Seikh or Punjaubee regiments. I candidly tell you that unless speedily reinforced this force will soon be so reduced by casualties and sickness that nothing will be left, but a retreat to Kurnaul. The disasters attending such an unfortunate proceeding, I cannot calculate.