It was hardly surprising in light of this increasingly chaotic urban breakdown that Maulvi Muhammad Baqar’s Dihli Urdu Akbhar made for sombre reading. ‘Death hovers overhead on all sides,’ wrote Baqar in his editorial of 23 August. ‘What is happening all around us should be seen as a result of our [bad] deeds and actions. We have taken our base selves as our God, and do not consider the words and commands of the Almighty.’
Baqar also dwelt at some length on the acts of revenge being taken by the British in Kanpur and elsewhere: ‘now the Kafir Christians have begun to commit grave depredations, especially upon Muslims. Wherever they gain control they indiscriminately hang men, destroy entire villages, and where they cannot cause any harm to the victorious army, they take out their anger on our Emperor’s subjects’78
The most serious threat to any remaining hope of victory over the British continued, however, to be the disagreements between the different regiments; and these were now steadily growing worse than ever.
The leaders of the brigade from Nimach, the last large-scale addition to the rebel ranks, took against Bakht Khan’s authority even more strongly than the subahdars of the Meerut and Delhi regiments, and on 23 August went as far as to accuse him – quite unjustly – of collusion with the British, ‘withholding his soldiers until the British should receive reinforcements from England’.79
In all this, they were goaded on by the British spy and agent provocateur Gauri Shankar Sukul of the Haryana Regiment, who produced a Sikh witness who gave false evidence that he had seen Bakht Khan send notes to the Ridge. Bakht Khan swore his loyalty, but Zafar openly discussed the possibility of banning him from the Fort, while the officers of the Nimach brigade began hatching a plot to disarm the Bareilly troops by force.80
It was with a view to re-establishing his authority, and making one last concerted bid to oust the British, that Bakht Khan came up with an ingenious and ambitious new plan: his idea was to send out a large force by the Ajmeri Gate, which would set off as if retreating westwards. But rather than heading on towards Jaipur, the force would cross the Yamuna canal by the bridge near Najafgarh, and then double back to ambush the British from behind. It was exactly the sort of imaginative plan the rebels should have come up with two months earlier when the British were at their most vulnerable. By this stage Zafar was happy to agree to any plan that would remove the sepoys from his city. ‘Go, may God protect you!’ he said. ‘Show your loyalty by attacking the English; destroy them and return victorious.’81
So it was that, in pouring rain on 24 August, Bakht Khan headed off out of the city with one of the largest forces yet gathered for a single attack: 9,000 men and thirteen guns. They struck out, over the wet roads, for the walled village of Najafgarh, hoping to cross the canal just to the south of the village.
When the sepoys reached the Yamuna canal, just to the north of Palam, it was raining harder than ever, and they found that the bridge had been destroyed on the orders of General Wilson, as part of his strategy of keeping the sepoys away from the British rear. Bakht Khan had come prepared for this, and had the bridge repaired, but the job was done badly, and the bridge broke again almost as soon as the troops began to cross it. It was twenty-four hours before the repairs were completed, and during the wait the entire force was ‘exposed for a whole day and night to the inclemency of the season and thoroughly drenched with rain’. Moreover, ‘the rebel troops had [now] been practically starving for three days’.82
On the 25th, wet, hungry and disconsolate, the rebel force moved off again, passing in narrow file along the banks of the Najafgarh swamp, which lay beyond. It was hard going, according to Sa’id Mubarak Shah: ‘The troops were already greatly fatigued by the time they arrived at the swamp, or jhil, but had no time to rest and refresh themselves. The wheels of the gun carriages sank so continually in the swamp that the progress was very slow, and the sepoys had to wade through water which was above their knees.’83
When they set off from Delhi, Bakht Khan’s Bareilly troops had been in the lead. But after the halt at the bridge, it was the Nimach brigade, led by Bakht Khan’s rivals and enemies, General Sudhari Singh and Brigade Major Hira Singh, who led the column, followed by a small party from the Nasirabad regiment. Only two days before, the two Nimach generals had tried to topple Bakht Khan from his command. It was not a combination that boded well for the success of the expedition.
The British watched the vast army of sepoys leave the city through their field glasses: ‘They were seen from the Ridge for hours trooping out of the Lahore and Ajmir Gates,’ wrote Charles Griffiths, ‘and proceeding to our right rear.’84 When the reports of Bakht Khan’s departure reached General Wilson, he knew exactly whom to send to head him off: indeed, in many ways he was even more anxious to get John Nicholson out of the camp than Zafar was to lose Bakht Khan.
Nicholson set off with the Moveable Column in torrential rain at 4 a.m. the following morning, the 25th. In addition to his own men, he brought three troops of horse artillery and a mixed party of British infantry from the Field Force, including his own younger brother, Charles Nicholson, as well as Charles Griffiths and Edward Vibart. In all, Nicholson’s small army amounted to 2,500 men, half of them British. In the lead, acting as guide to the back roads of Delhi, was Theo Metcalfe.
Wilson’s one order had been to stick to the roads and not get lost in the monsoon bogs. Nicholson immediately ignored the advice and took a short cut that Theo recommended through flooded countryside, where the horse artillery had to be pulled out of kneedeep mud. Despite the mud and the downpour, Nicholson managed to galvanise the column to move along at his customary speed, believing as ever that surprise was all. The column quick-marched for six hours, stopped at 10 a.m. for a damp two-hour breakfast at the village of Munglaee, then resumed the march at noon, through torrents of rain.85 Instructions were issued that the column should march in silence, ‘without noise of any kind’.86
Just before four o’clock in the afternoon, two miles north of Najafgarh, Theo was in the lead, investigating another possible short cut, when he came across the advance scouts of the Nimach brigade, who immediately charged. The sawars cut at him, but as on 11 May, Theo managed to avoid their thrusts, and made it back safely to the main column.87
Ahead, directly in front of the British troops, on the other side of a canal, lay an old Mughal caravanserai. There the advance guard of the Nimach force were resting, guarded by nine guns, waiting for the rest of their column to catch up; well behind them, still near the Palam bridge, were Bakht Khan’s Bareilly troops. Many of the sepoys were asleep; others, having piled their arms, were pitching the camp, ‘and many had taken off their belts and accoutrements’.88 The exhausted British troops had now been on the road for twelve hours, and had marched some 20 miles in pouring rain, much of it wading through thick mud, and crossing two swamps ‘waist-high in the water, and carrying their ammunition pouches on their heads’; but Nicholson had no hesitation in ordering an immediate assault, so as to take the sepoys unaware.89
The sepoys’ guns were trained on the bridge across the canal, so Nicholson got the British troops to cross the canal by a ford to one side, and quickly formed up in two lines on the other side. Nicholson rode up and down the line shouting out to the troops to reserve their fire until close to the enemy batteries, and then to charge with fixed bayonets. ‘He was answered with a cheer,’ wrote Charles Griffiths, ‘and the line advanced across the plain, steady and unbroken as though on parade.’90
The enemy had opened fire, and were answered by our guns, the infantry marching with sloped guns at the quick-step till within 100 yards, when we delivered a volley. Then the war cry of the British soldiers was heard, and the two regiments came to the charge, and ran at the double towards the serai.
Lt Gabbett of my regiment was the first man to reach the entrenchment, and passing through an embrasure, received a bayonet thrust in his left breast, which stretched him on the ground … [dying] of an internal haemorrhage soon after. But the men
followed, clearing everything before them, capturing the four guns in the serai, bayoneting the rebels, and firing at those who had taken flight at our approach.91
Nicholson led the charge, but one of the first to engage with the sepoys was Edward Vibart. ‘We stormed their position and drove them from it … capturing the whole of their camp, ammunition and baggage,’ he wrote to his one surviving sister the following day.
We advanced to the charge, in the face of all their people and musketry pouring out from behind a square walled enclosure loopholed all around. With one tremendous cheer headed by our General we drove them out at the point of the bayonet – Oh I can’t tell you what a maddening feeling came over me as I rushed and I thought of our beloved parents, and burned for vengeance. It was my first battle and God in his mercy was again pleased to preserve me, though men close to me were struck down. A bullet even hit my sword, saving the life of a man just behind me – but what pleasure is there now in describing all this? All before us is but darkness and misery. My own darling mother’s face is always before me …92
Vibart was not the only person in despair that day. When Nicholson attacked, most of the sepoys were still trudging forward, strung out along the bank of the swamp, unable to move left or right, and hemmed in fore and aft by their fellow sepoys. Even at the edge of the swamp the mud was terrible, and many were wading up to their knees in the bog. ‘While thus struggling in the morass, the British guns opened upon them,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah.
The grape from twelve guns now poured into the Nimach troops and the infantry and artillery became helplessly fixed in the marsh. They could neither advance nor retreat and numbers began to fall. To make matters worse they were unable to see the British guns which were dealing such destruction in their ranks, as they were hidden by trees and high standing crops. Notwithstanding the extreme difficulty of their position, the rebel artillery fired repeatedly and the sepoys also. But when men can neither advance nor retire, there is no help for them, and the brave man and the coward have nothing for it but to stop and die. On that day 470 of the Nimach brigade, horse, foot and artillery were killed by grape shot alone.93
Worse still for the future coherence of the rebel force was Bakht Khan’s response when word reached him near the Palam bridge that the Nimach troops ahead had engaged the British. Three days earlier, the Nimach generals had accused him of treachery, and now he was in no hurry to come to their rescue. Instead, on hearing the guns, Bakht Khan halted the reserve. ‘The real fact was that he and the officers of the Nimach force were not on good terms,’ wrote Sa’id Mubarak Shah.
On this account one party desired the ruin of the other. Each leader wanted his own name alone to be famous, and himself hailed as a victor. [Luckily] the Nasirabad brigade had advanced on the right and their fire proved fatal to upwards of a hundred of the British, thereby enabling the remaining portion of the Nimach men to get out of the swamp. Had it not been for this, not a man, not even an animal belonging to that brigade would have escaped alive. Their guns fell into the hands of the British, and the mutineer army fled in utter disorder, while the round shot unceasingly harassed them in their flight. At length, staggering along exhausted and totally disorganised they reached Bakht Khan’s fresh troops, and retired along with them, while the Europeans took the captured guns to pieces, placed them on elephants and carried them to their camp on the Ridge.94
For both sides it was a crucial turning point. For the first time since Badli ki Serai two and a half months earlier, the Delhi Field Force had engaged the rebel troops in an open battle, and the scale of the defeat, and the blow to rebel morale, meant that neither side had any doubt that a full-scale assault on the city was now imminent.
A week later, on 4 September, the elephants of the 8-mile-long siege train finally trundled into the British camp, pulling with them sixty heavy howitzers and mortars, preceded by long lines of 653 ‘hackeries’ – bullock carts full of ammunition, shrapnel shell, round-shot and grape canister, much of it newly produced in the Punjab ordnance factories, which had continued to function efficiently throughout the Uprising. Many of the siege guns were so enormous – especially the six giant 24-pounders – that it took teams of elephants to pull them.*95 Accompanying the siege train were an escort of 400 European infantry, a large party of Sikh cavalry and ‘the Belooch battalion, a most savage-looking lot of men’, according to Charles Griffiths.96
The next day Hervey Greathed went to visit all the supplies being unpacked in the Engineers Park. Here Richard Baird-Smith, an irrigation expert from the Punjab who had been conscripted as chief engineer of the Field Force, was busy making his plans: ‘The supply of shot and shell seems sufficient to grind Delhi to powder,’ wrote Greathed.
I have not seen the programme of operations, but every day’s work is chalked out and written down in elaborate detail. Baird Smith is not a man to forget the smallest trifle. The Engineers park is a busy scene. There are forests of gabions, and acres of fascines, all ready to be transported to the scene of action; and platform for guns and frameworks of magazines, sandbags, entrenching tools, ladders and everything requisite for the construction of batteries and for the attack.97
The following day, the British began constructing the heavy batteries that would break down the city walls, as Punjabi sappers worked under the guidance of British military engineers. It was not work that was possible to keep secret. From the walls and bastions, the rebel artillerymen targeted the construction parties; inevitably it was the Indian coolies who suffered the brunt of their shelling, while their British masters looked on with mild, detached disdain: ‘with that passive bravery so characteristic of the natives,’ wrote Fred Roberts, ‘as man after man was knocked over, they would stop for a moment, weep a little over a fallen friend, place his body in a row along with the rest, and then work on as before’.98
General Bakht Khan returned from Najafgarh in disgrace, and was abused at the durbar for having left the Nimach troops to be defeated without attempting to come to their aid. Even Zafar, increasingly detached from proceedings in recent weeks, regained some of his lucidity in the light of the disaster, and ‘sent a messenger to General Bakht Khan, telling him he had been false to his salt in turning away from the field of battle’.99
For a week the army seemed on the verge of a second mutiny. There was wild talk among the sepoys of deposing Zinat Mahal – whom they rightly accused of keeping up a correspondence with the British – and replacing her as Queen with her predecessor, Taj Begum, ‘unless their pay was forthcoming in fifteen days’,100 Zinat Mahal’s father, Mirza Quli Khan, was also briefly arrested by a group of sepoys, apparently acting on their own initiative. Others mooted the idea of deposing Zafar in favour of Mirza Jawan Bakht, who had been almost invisible throughout the siege. One day 500 sepoys gathered outside the Diwan i-Khas and accused Mirza Abu Bakr and Mirza Khizr Sultan of embezzling funds, and that they ‘had taken severallakh of rupees from people in the city and given nothing to the army’. Zafar in desperation handed over all the remaining silver in the Palace to the sepoys, telling them, ‘sell it, and divide the proceeds among yourselves for pay’.101
Yet as the British siege batteries inched closer and, on 8 September, began pounding the city walls, the realisation that the end was now imminent galvanised the rebel forces into the state of coherence and unity that had eluded them throughout the siege. Much of the credit for this must go to Mirza Mughal, whose office began to produce a torrent of orders for the city’s defence, and issued a final appeal in his father’s name for the citizens to unite against the kafirs: ‘This is a religious war,’ he wrote on the 6th, ordering that the words should be proclaimed by the beat of the drum through the city. ‘It is being prosecuted on account of the faith, and it behoves all Hindu and Musalman residents of the Imperial City, or of the villages out in the country to … continue true to their faiths and creeds, and to slay the English and their servants.’102
The British siege guns were now blazing away at the n
orthern face of the city walls: by 12 September, all sixty guns were firing round after round, as fast as they could, twenty-four hours a day: ‘the din and roar were defeaning’, wrote Charles Griffiths. ‘Day and night salvos of artillery were heard, roll following roll in endless succession.’103 It was worse still to be on the receiving end: ‘The cannons and the mortars on the Ridge were constantly at work,’ wrote Zahir Dehlavi. ‘God alone knows how many there were. That day all the doors and walls of the city were trembling, and fire was raining from the sky. It was as if hell had been let loose on earth.’104
What the British did not know was that on the other side of the walls, Mirza Mughal had begun to construct an elaborate system of barricades and street defences, including a damdama or mud fort in the area in front of Kashmiri Gate, realising that once the British were within the walls, their troops would be far more vulnerable than they had ever been behind their carefully built breastworks on the Ridge.105 His plan seems to have been to encourage the British to leave their impregnable entrenchments, and lure them into the city streets, where they would lose their strategic advantage, and where cannon primed with grapeshot, as well as nests full of snipers, would be ready and waiting for them. Certainly, the British were allowed to take the ground between the Ridge and the city walls without much resistance; but once within easy range of the city walls, the rebel forces struck back with force.
Already the exposed working parties attempting to build gun platforms on the flat ground near the walls proved a more inviting target than any that had been offered to the rebels since June: ‘the kafirs are now in range’, wrote Mirza Mughal to the officers on 8 September. ‘Come and give battle. We can shoot very well from the top of the walls. There should be no delay and no dereliction of duty, because the enemy is now at the gates, and everybody should courageously gird up their loins.’106
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