The Last Mughal

by William Dalrymple

  For Zafar, making contact with the British, and exploring the possibility of coming to terms, was not difficult; in fact his wife and prime minister were already in indirect communication with the Ridge through Hodson’s intelligence chief, Maulvi Rajab Ali. Baqar probably chose the same route, and was asked to collate a newsletter to be sent up to the intelligence department in the British camp. A contemporary translation, presumably made at the time on the Ridge, of what appears to be Baqar’s first report survives in the archives of the Delhi Commissioner’s Office and gives an indication of why such an outspokenly enthusiastic rebel had become so thoroughly disillusioned in less than three months. ‘Since the Hindoo sepoys killed the five butchers for killing cows there have been great dissensions between the Hindus and Mahomedans in the rebel forces,’ he wrote.

  We, the respectable portion of the inhabitants are reduced to the last extremity by the violence of the sepoys, and have no hope of escaping with our lives. The General Bakht Khan’s spies dog me wherever I go. There are sentries over the house of Mufti Sadruddin Khan [Azurda] and all exit and entrances prohibited. Through Zinat Mahal I suggested to the King to open the gates and invite the English to come and seize the city, telling him that if he could destroy the mutineers it would be of great advantage to himself and his children. The King approved my advice and promised to do it. But Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, on account of the difference of our faith has prevented my counsels being carried out. The Hakim is a Sunni, the writer of this a Shia.119

  Neither man was to benefit from these belated attempts to make terms. Although both General Wilson on the Ridge and Lawrence in Lahore recommended to Calcutta that Zafar’s overtures should at least be explored, Canning was adamant that no negotiations of any sort should take place, and that on no account should Zafar be allowed to think that he would be permitted to keep his old title or position once the rebellion was crushed.120 The Mughal court was therefore left in limbo, unable to free itself from association with an uprising from which it felt increasingly alienated, and the defeat of which was now increasingly likely. Meanwhile Muhammad Baqar was kept on by Hodson as a spy, but failed to secure any sort of guarantee that his betrayal of the cause would save his life when the city fell.

  By the end of July there were clear signs that the military balance was now swinging irreversibly in favour of the British. Although the troops on the Ridge were still vastly outnumbered by those in the city, the attacks were growing fewer and less spirited every day, while dissension was increasing among the rebel leadership. ‘The tide is beginning to turn,’ wrote Greathed in a letter to his wife on 29 July, ‘and the waves already beat with less force against the rock of our defence.’121

  In the British camp thoughts now began to turn to ideas of revenge: the mass murder of the people of Delhi was openly and enthusiastically discussed, as was the levelling of the city. This vengefulness was stoked by the British press, which had just heard about the worst war crime against British civilians in the entire Uprising: the massacre of the 73 women and 124 children at the Bibigarh in Kanpur. One of the most bloodthirsty was George Wagentrieber, who, after his escape from Delhi, had made his way with his wife and family to Lahore, from where he now edited a reborn Delhi Gazette known as the Delhi Gazette Extra, which aimed at being a newsletter and cheerleader for the surviving members of the British community of Delhi. In issue after issue Wagentrieber called hysterically for the complete destruction of Delhi and the ‘annihilation of the demons who have so polluted its walls and blackened the pages of history with their hellish crimes’.122

  The storm of revolutionary atrocity and fiendish crime have swept over the British occupants of Bengal, leaving behind it a wreck of horror and desolation, only equalled by the ingratitude and crime displayed by the Hell hounds who have originated and executed thus far their diabolical scheme of raising once again the standard of the lascivious Prophet, in opposition to the new dispensation offered to mankind, in the man Christ Jesus, the son of God …

  Hindoo and Moslem have proclaimed their caste and their religion to the world in a mass of fiendish cruelty that stands as unparalleled in the world’s history. The punishment about to be inflicted will likewise be equivalent: Justice is Mercy – ‘blood for blood’ will be the watchword throughout the storm pending over the doomed city; the British soldier must hurry: the Avenging Angel uses you in the massacre that awaits your advance on Delhi.

  Let us look a little beyond, and let us view Delhi, as Delhi must shortly be, re-occupied by the British Force, the General Commanding sitting in the Mogul’s Palace, and a hempen necklace around the King’s throat as a substitute for his crown, and his life sacrificed to British justice. What next? Our reply is this: Let Delhi sink into silence; still, still as the silence of the dead within its walls … whilst unceasing justice rolls on its course, encircling in its grasp and sacrificing at its shrine, the life of every native mixed up in this terrible storm.123

  That massacre of the inhabitants of Delhi, commanded and justified in the eyes of Victorian Evangelicals by their reading of the Christian scriptures, drew one step nearer on 5 August, when the news arrived on the Ridge that substantial reinforcements were finally on their way. In order to manage this feat, John Lawrence had had to strip the Punjab of almost all British troops, thus taking a colossal gamble that the Punjab would remain quiet. But a siege train one mile long loaded with heavy artillery had been gathered in Ferozepur and was now on the move, lumbering down the Grand Trunk Road, while the much faster Moveable Column had reached Ambala and was just days away from relieving the Field Force.

  Better still for the morale of the British troops on the Ridge, and especially for those who were looking forward to a bloody reckoning within the walls of Delhi, was the news, as the Moveable Column approached, that John Nicholson was now at its head.

  9

  THE TURN OF THE TIDE

  Brigadier General John Nicholson marched into the British camp on the Delhi Ridge just before breakfast on Friday, 14 August.

  With him came 1,000 British troops, 600 irregular horse – all Punjabi Muslims – from Multan, and a British artillery battery; 1,600 Sikh sepoys followed soon afterwards, thus effectively doubling the size of Wilson’s small army. But it was the presence of Nicholson himself, rather than the troops that accompanied him, which made the greatest impression on the beleaguered Delhi Field Force.1 ‘Nicholson is a host in himself,’ wrote Hodson to his wife. ‘The camp is [now] alive at the notion of something decisive taking place.’ The normally restrained Charles Griffiths was even more fulsome: ‘What added most to our strength was the presence amongst us of the hero John Nicholson,’ he wrote.

  Many stories are told of his prowess and skill … Spare in form, but of great stature, his whole appearance and mien stamped him as a ‘king of men.’ Calm and self-confident, full of resource and daring, no difficulties could daunt him. His indomitable spirit seemed at once to infuse fresh energy into the force … Nicholson’s name was in everyone’s mouth, and each soldier knew that vigorous measures would be taken to insure ultimate success.2

  Since leaving Peshawar in May, Nicholson – previously an obscure thirty-six-year-old soldier and civil servant on the North West Frontier, unknown outside his own small circle – had in the course of a few weeks become a legend among the British in northern India. The British, after all, badly needed some heroes after the succession of blunders and insensitivities that had precipitated the outbreak, and the slow, hesitant and bungling response that had allowed it to spread with such speed. Nicholson’s mixture of piety, gravity and courage, combined with his merciless capacity for extreme aggression and brutality, was exactly what was needed to put heart into the frustrated British troops sheltering behind their breastworks at the top of the Ridge.

  The troops of the Field Force had been worn down by daily attacks for two months now, and were alarmed by stories slowly filtering through of further outbreaks all over Hindustan; by the bad news coming out of the siege of
Lucknow and the death of the Residency’s great defender, Sir Henry Lawrence; and by the massacre of the British garrison along with their women and children at Kanpur. Most of all they were depressed by the timid incompetence of the senile General Hewitt at Meerut, and that of the frail and elderly Generals Anson, Barnard and Reed, the Field Force’s far from dazzling succession of commanders.

  For them, Nicholson was the perfect antidote to these tired and nervous old men, and long before he arrived in Delhi stories were already circulating: about the Moveable Column’s 46-mile-a-day forced marches; of how while his men rested in the shade, Nicholson would wait ‘erect and immobile on his horse in the full glare of the sun’, of how he never slept, and at night, when everyone else rested, would sit up writing his letters and dispatches; and of the degree to which Nicholson ‘hated sepoys with a hatred that no words could describe’.

  Most of all, the British camp was agog with news of Nicholson’s recent victory at Trimmu Ghat, where he had, by a series of forced marches, pursued and ambushed an entire regiment of mutinous sepoys from Sialkot who were hastening to Delhi, and having caught them with their back to the River Ravi, made sure that every last sepoy was hunted down, so that ‘most of the sepoys [in the end] sought for safety in the swollen [monsoon-fed] waters of the Ravi and found death, only a very few being captured, and of course shot’.3 By August, word of the Moveable Column’s bloody exploits had reached even Calcutta, where an approving Canning wrote that Nicholson, ‘sweeping the country like the incarnation of vengeance, had struck terror into wavering hearts’.4

  There were very few who remained immune to the hero worship of this great imperial psychopath, but there were exceptions. On the march the young Lieutenant Edward Ommaney was shocked by Nicholson’s pointless viciousness: ‘He shows himself off to be a great brute,’ wrote Ommaney in his diary on 21 July. ‘For instance he thrashed a cook boy, for getting in his way in the line of march (he has a regular man, very muscular, to perform this duty). The boy complained, he was brought up again, and died from the effects of the 2nd thrashing.’5 He was equally horrified by the degree to which Nicholson had given a free hand to his troops to act with extreme violence against their helpless prisoners:

  A man of the 2nd Irregulars who showed the Sialkot Mutineers the ford, had his 2 hands cut off, a bayonet run through his body and then hung; batches of prisoners with their hands tied are taken out into jungle and the Sikhs let at them. Such cruelties must tell against us in the long run, and because these men have done the same to us … is no reason that we should emulate them. Kill them by all means by hanging and shooting the really guilty [but the innocent should be spared].6

  Nicholson also made a bad impression on some of the less brutalised officers on the Ridge. Major Reid, who had borne the brunt of the sepoy attacks with his Gurkhas in Hindu Rao’s House, wrote how ‘I thought I had never seen a man I disliked so much at first sight. His haughty manner and peculiar sneer I could not stand. He asked several questions as to the enemy’s position, and then passed silently on.’7 Hervey Greathed was also uncertain how to respond to this stern figure, who increasingly came to be seen as the real leader of the Field Force. In the officers’ mess on the night of his arrival, Nicholson sat silently throughout the meal with his huge Pathan manservant behind him, ‘a cocked revolver in one hand, and allowing none to hand a dish to his master save himself’.*8 As Greathed complained to his wife the following day:

  General Nicholson was at dinner. He is a fine, imposing man, who never speaks if he can help it, which is a great gift for a public man. But if we had all been as solemn and as taciturn during the last two months, I do not think we should have survived. Our genial, jolly mess dinners have kept up our spirits.9

  Immune to any such criticism, by early the following morning Nicholson was out and about, riding around the Ridge, studying the defences, inspecting batteries and breastworks, and beginning to form his plan for capturing the city. ‘A stranger of very striking appearance was remarked visiting all our pickets, and asking most searching enquiries about their strength and history,’ recalled one soldier.

  His attire gave no clue to his rank; it evidently never cost the owner a thought … It was soon made out that this was General Nicholson, whose person was not yet known in camp; and it was whispered at the same time that he was possessed of the most brilliant military genius. He was a man cast in a giant mould, with massive chest and powerful limbs, and an expression ardent and commanding, with a dash of roughness; features of stern beauty, a long black beard, and a deep sonorous voice. There was something of immense strength, talent and resolution in his whole frame and manner, and a power of ruling men on high occasions which no one could escape noticing.10

  The contrast with the neat, timid, goateed figure of General Wilson could not have been more striking, and a clash between the two was inevitable, especially given Nicholson’s habitual inability to accept orders from anyone. Wilson resented Nicholson’s patronising attitude: he was, after all, Nicholson’s commanding officer; while Nicholson was appalled by Wilson’s extreme caution and constant worrying. ‘Wilson says he will assume the offensive on the arrival of the heavy guns,’ Nicholson wrote to John Lawrence, ‘but he says it in an undecided sort of way which makes me doubt if he will do so if he is not kept up to the mark … He is not at all equal to the crisis, and I believe he feels it himself.’

  Later letters revealed the spat deepening: ‘Wilson’s head is going,’ Nicholson told Lawrence in mid-August. ‘He says so himself, and it is quite evident he speaks the truth.’ Ruder still was a letter to Lawrence three weeks later: I have seen lots of useless generals in my day,’ wrote Nicholson, ‘but such an ignorant, croaking obstructive as he is I have never hitherto met with, and nothing will induce me to serve a day under his personal command after the fall of this place.’11

  Yet even as Nicholson continued to complain, the logic of Wilson’s approach – of building up the Ridge’s defences and waiting until the siege train arrived – was being vindicated. For the rebel attacks had not ceased, and though they had become more infrequent, every time a new regiment of mutinous sepoys marched in over the Bridge of Boats, the troops were made to prove themselves by attacking the Ridge before they were accepted as part of the rebel army. The growing British success in dealing with such mass assaults at virtually no cost to themselves was largely due to Wilson’s defensive precautions.

  Several days earlier, after the Nimach sepoy regiment arrived from Rajasthan with ‘several thousand men, ten field guns and three mortars’, they had made a concerted attack on the Ridge. Supported by the Gwalior brigade and twelve field guns, their attack continued throughout the night, and right through until noon the following day. By lunchtime, over a thousand sepoys lay dead, but British casualties were minimal, and amounted to only forty-six wounded and killed. It was, thought Henry Daly of the Guides,* ‘the most successful and scientific drubbing we have shown Pandy. His loss has been great; his ammunition has been expended by cartloads; and he has never seen our men. These are the lessons we should teach when acting on the defensive’.12

  Safe within their entrenchments, the British were more aware than ever of the sheer, blind, tragic bravery of their adversaries. ‘Nothing could exceed their persistent courage in fighting almost every day,’ wrote Charles Griffiths, ‘and though beaten on every occasion, returning over and over again to renew their combat.’13

  The attacks from the city were not just growing more ineffective, they were also becoming more and more infrequent: as Hervey Greathed wrote to his wife on 4 August, ‘scarcely a shot has been fired since the 2nd, even from the batteries, and it will be simple impertinence if they try another attack’.14

  As the fighting grew quieter, and the confidence of the British greater, more diversions were found to occupy those with time on their hands. Some went fishing in the Yamuna canal at the back of the Ridge. Others played football, cricket and quoits, and one day there was a pony race. Greathed started
going for daily rides beyond the encampment, and noted he ‘could [now] ride with safety for long distances’, while admitting to his wife that the stink from the ‘effluvia of dead animals beyond the precincts of the camp takes away from the pleasure of such excursions’.15

  There was also more food and more luxuries around: a vast flock of sheep had been driven down from Ferozepur, providing welcome supplies of fresh mutton, while the Anglophile rajas of the Punjab had begun sending down regular supplies of grain. A day’s march to the north of Delhi, the Raja of Jheend guarded an efficiently managed British supply base at Rhai.16 For those who could afford it, Peake & Allen of Ambala had opened a shop selling such rare exotica as tooth powder, pins, paper, chocolates and ‘some good Moselle’, though their brandy, at 8 rupees a bottle, was out of the reach of most pockets. More affordable was the beer offered by the Parsi merchants Jehangeer and Cowasjee, who undercut Peake & Allen to offer their ‘best English bottled’ for 15 rupees a dozen.17

  There were still many deaths daily from cholera, and the stink of decaying bodies and animals on the Ridge was worse than ever; but there was widespread awareness in the trenches that the tide had begun to turn, and spirits were much higher than a month previously. ‘I must say’, wrote Hervey Greathed on 6 August,

  that there is less croaking and more cheeriness here than perhaps in any other spot in India … The mutineers have been defeated in 25 combats since we encamped on our present ground and they have now received all the reinforcements on which they can reckon, and are exhausting their supply of munitions. On the other hand our force will shortly be reinforced … and it is not likely the fall of the city can be delayed beyond the end of the month. The delusion that our Raj is at an end is losing its hold even on the minds of the most ignorant and turbulent. I do not anticipate much difficulty in restoring our authority.18