Massacre at Cawnpore

by V. A. Stuart

  It was dusk when they set off to march the last two miles into Cawnpore and the men cheered their little general as he stood at the roadside to watch them pass.

  “Don’t cheer me,” he said, when he could make his voice heard. “Don’t cheer me—you did it all yourselves!”

  A report from spies sent forward to reconnoiter the approaches to the city finally halted the shuffling, footsore column. The women and children were dead; they had been massacred by the Nana’s orders. There was no longer any need for haste.

  On the morning of 17th July an advance guard of the 78th, Highlanders and the 64th entered Cawnpore and marched through its empty, ravaged streets to the Bibigarh to investigate the truth of the spies’ reports.

  EPILOGUE

  ALEX SHERIDAN stood sickened and white to the lips, outside the small, flat-roofed building in which the captives had been housed.

  Memories came flooding back; the shock and horror of what he had seen parted the mists that had mercifully clouded his brain and deadened his emotions for the past seventeen days. Now he remembered them, remembered the faces, and he saw Emmy’s face again, floating away from him in the muddy water at the Suttee Chowra Ghat and knew that, for as long as he lived, he would never again forget, would never be able to forget.

  Nothing he had seen could match what lay behind him in the room he had just left; he had passed within sight of the entrenchment and felt no emotion, had ridden through streets of roofless, gutted houses and looked on the wanton destruction of the city of Cawnpore unmoved … now he could only weep, and find no relief in tears.

  The place was a charnel house, inches deep in blood, with here and there a woman’s bonnet, shoes, the frilled muslin frock of a child, books, a torn Bible and, still hanging from the door, the flimsy rags with which a vain attempt had been made by those who had perished there to bar it to their murderers. The walls were scarred with sabre-slashes and the marks of bullets, with sword cuts low down, where some poor crouching woman or a tiny child had tried to ward off the blows aimed at them by their brutal assassins.

  He could not bring himself to cross the fifty feet between the door of the house and the well; others had done so and none more than once. A tough, hardened sergeant of the 64th had said, fighting down nausea, “I’ve faced death in every form but never anything like this. If they shot me for it, I could not look down that well again.”

  Alex started to move away and then halted, seeing a blood-flecked prayer-book in the grass at his feet. He bent and picked it up and read in the flyleaf; “Psalm 18:41.” His hand shaking, he knelt, the book on his knee, and slowly turned its pages, to find the verse indicated. It read: “They cried, but there was none to save; even unto the Lord, but He answered them not …” Blindly he let the book fall back into the foot-deep grass. Had it all been in vain, he asked himself bitterly, the defence of the entrenchment, the battle they had waged in Vibart’s boat, the long, hopeless flight, with their pursuers always close at their heels? He was alive but these poor innocents were dead, hideously, barbarously butchered by men without pity. They …

  A short distance from him, three men of the 78th in their scarlet jackets and tartan squatted down, dividing something between them. It was a tress of fair hair, Alex saw, and each man was counting the number that had fallen to his share.

  “A rebel shall die for each one of these,” a red-bearded corporal vowed passionately. “I swear it, on ma mither’s grave!”

  Alex approached them, his hand outheld and, when they hesitated, eyeing him uncertainly, he said harshly. “I was one of this garrison—these were my friends!”

  “You …aye, sir.” The corporal laid a lock of hair on his palm. Attached to it was a torn scrap of paper, on which was scrawled in pencil: “Jessica Vibart, aged four years.”

  “Likely you’ll have known the puir wee lassie, sir?” the corporal suggested diffidently.

  “Yes, I did.” His throat stiff, Alex placed hair and label in his breast pocket and turned away, not wishing to let the Highlanders see that he wept.

  “Some of us must live,” Edward Vibart had said. “Our betrayal must be avenged. We’ve no choice but to fight on.”

  He would avenge this most terrible of betrayals, he vowed; he would fight on and God willing, hunt down and bring to justice the man who had been the architect of it all.

  Within an hour, he was with the advance party marching towards Bithur.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  THE OUTBREAK of mutiny in the three native regiments stationed in Meerut on Sunday, 10th May, 1857 and the subsequent seizure of Delhi by the mutineers, aided by native troops of the garrison, was the first act in a tragedy which was to cost the lives of countless men, women and children in the Bengal Presidency.

  There can be little doubt that the Meerut uprising was premature. Those who, for months past, had been plotting sedition had, in fact, chosen the end of May as the date on which the Army of Bengal was to break out in open rebellion against the East India Company’s rule and they, as well as officials of the Company, were taken in surprise. Meerut was the one station in all India which had a strong British garrison, but due to the inept handling of the situation by the divisional commander, Major-General William Hewitt, not only did the revolt succeed but Delhi, with an entirely native garrison, was permitted to fall into the hands of the mutineers without a single British soldier being sent from Meerut to prevent it. As a result, British prestige suffered an almost mortal blow and Delhi—ancient capital of the Moguls—became the focal point of the revolt, its recapture essential if the whole of India were not to be lost.

  In 1857, Britain was still recovering from the toll taken of her fighting strength by the Crimean War; she was about to embark on a war with China and had recently been fighting in Burma and Persia. India had been drained of white troops; there were only 40,000—exclusive of some 5000 British officers of native regiments—whilst the sepoys of the three Presidency Armies (Bengal, Madras and Bombay) numbered 311,000, with the Army of Bengal accounting for 150,000 of these.

  The territory for which this army was responsible included all northern India, from Calcutta to the Afghan frontier and the Punjab.

  The Punjab had only lately been subdued, following the two Sikh Wars of 1845–6 and 1848–9, and there was a constant threat of border raids by the Afghan tribes, so that most of the Queen’s regiments were stationed at these danger points and on the Burmese frontier, with 10,000 British and Indian troops in the Punjab alone.

  The 53rd Queen’s Regiment of Foot was at Calcutta, the 10th at Dinapur—400 miles up the River Ganges—the 32nd was at Lucknow and a newly raised regiment, the Company’s 3rd Bengal European Fusiliers, at Agra. The Meerut garrison, 38 miles from Delhi, consisted of the Queen’s 60th Rifles—1,000 strong—and 600 troopers of the 6th Dragoon Guards, with two batteries of artillery.

  Both the governor-general, Lord Canning, and the commander-inchief, General Anson, took action as swiftly and decisively as they could when news reached them of the disasters in Meerut and Delhi. From Government House in Calcutta, Canning summoned all available reinforcements. He recalled British regiments from Persia and Burma, sent for troops from Madras, Bombay and Ceylon and dispatched a fast steamer to Singapore to intercept the convoy, then on its way from England to China. Virtually all troops had to come by sea and, aware that delay was inevitable, Canning requested the chief commissioner of the Punjab, John Lawrence, to send every British soldier he could spare to swell the ranks of the Delhi Relief Force.

  This force was being assembled in Ambala by General Anson but the commander-in-chief was greatly hampered by lack of transport. The East India Company, in the interests of economy, had dispensed with the military Transport Establishment at the conclusion of the Sikh Wars, leaving the army to depend on hired civilian contractors, who were expected to provide coolies, carts, ammunition tumbrils and doolies for the sick and wounded, as well as a vast number of beasts of burden, all of which had to be commandeered from the
ir normal civilian employment and ownership. It was impossible to obtain these at the speed which the emergency demanded and the collection of provisions presented similar problems. The countryside was unsettled and the native cavalry regiments, which usually assisted with the collection, were unreliable and, in some cases, openly mutinous. To add to Anson’s difficulties, he could no longer depend on the Delhi arsenal to supply the guns and munitions he required, since Delhi was in the hands of the mutineers. The weapons of war had, in consequence, to be brought from Phillaur and Ferozepore—many miles to the north—and once again lack of transport caused frustrating delays.

  The unfortunate Anson, bombarded by urgent telegraphic instructions from Lord Canning and similar urgings from John Lawrence to advance immediately on Delhi, did the best he could with the means at his disposal. Within six days of the fall of Delhi, he had sent the first echelon of his hurriedly gathered Relief Force to Karnaul and had ordered the Meerut garrison to join his force at Baghpat, a few miles from Delhi. By 27th May, Anson himself, worn out by his efforts, had succumbed to an attack of cholera and his place as commander-in-chief was taken by General Barnard, who had served with distinction in the Crimea.

  A force of 2,400 infantry, 600 cavalry and 22 light field guns was at Karnaul, lacking adequate medical supplies, heavy guns, reserves of ammunition, provisions and tentage, but Sir Henry Barnard nevertheless gave the order to begin the seventy-mile march to Delhi. On 30th May the Meerut force, under the command of Brigadier-General Archdale Wilson, fought and won the first battle of retribution against a vastly superior number of mutineers, with heavy guns, which disputed their passage at the Hindan River Bridge. Fighting with superb gallantry, two squadrons of the 6th Dragoon Guards, a wing of the 60th Rifles, one horse and one field battery and a few loyal native cavalry routed and put to flight six thousand rebels and captured five of their guns. After fighting a second successful engagement next morning, Wilson made his rendezvous with General Barnard, as instructed, at Baghpat.

  Still barely 4,000 strong, the combined relief force continued its advance and at the village of Badli-ka-Serai, six miles from Delhi, found 30,000 rebels in a strongly entrenched position, with thirty guns, waiting to oppose them. At dawn on 8th June the British attacked with such courage and vengeful ferocity that, with the loss of only 200 killed and wounded, they drove the enemy from their entrenchments at the point of the bayonet, inflicting over a thousand casualties and capturing thirteen guns. The mutineers retreated in disorder to Delhi and Barnard led his victorious troops back to the Ridge where, with the Union Jack once more flying from the Flagstaff Tower, plans for an assault on the city were eagerly discussed, as the various strong-points which overlooked it were occupied. Next day the famous Guides, commanded by Major Daly, joined the force, having marched down from the Punjab— a distance of 500 miles, which they had covered in twenty-seven days—adding three troops of cavalry and six companies of infantry to its number.

  Although fully aware of the tremendous psychological effect the capture of Delhi would have on the rest of India—and particularly on those native regiments that had not yet joined the mutiny—General Barnard was not blind to the fact that a formidable obstacle faced him. The city walls extended for seven miles and were of massive construction, 24 feet high and protected for two miles by the River Jumna and, for the rest of their length, by a ditch, 25 feet wide and 20 feet deep. Over a hundred guns were mounted in bastions at strategic points, each holding nine to twelve guns of heavy calibre, served by well-trained gunners, with 24-pounders covering the gates by which an assault force would have to enter. Behind the walls were a large fanatical population and an estimated 40,000 sepoys and police, whose numbers were augmented almost daily by fresh waves of mutineers from other stations, now flocking to join in the revolt.

  Barnard’s force was too small to do more than maintain a precarious hold on the two-mile-long Ridge, where their positions were under constant attack. He could not invest the city or prevent reinforcements from entering it and his few light field guns could make no impression on the towering walls of the Red Fort. He was short of munitions and supplies of every kind and had no reserves, whilst the defenders had a limitless supply of arms, taken from the arsenal on the Ridge when Brigadier Graves had been compelled to abandon it on 11th May. Nevertheless, elated by their initial successes at the Hindan and at Badli-ka-Serai, his troops were eager to attack and Barnard, against his better judgement, permitted an attempt to carry the city by assault to be made on 13th June.

  “The place is so strong,” he wrote to Lord Canning, “and my means so inadequate, that assault or regular approach are equally difficult—I may say impossible—and I have nothing left but to place all on the hazard of a die and attempt a coup-de-main, which I purpose to do. If successful, all will be well. But reverse will be fatal, for I have no reserve on which to retire … I see nothing for it but a determined rush and this, please God, you will hear of as successful.”

  The attack was badly planned and coordinated, however, and had to be abandoned. General Barnard decided reluctantly to await the arrival of a siege-train and much needed reinforcements. Both, due to the Herculean efforts of John Lawrence, were on their way from the Punjab but, as the original relief force had been, they were hampered by lack of transport. The effect of the British failure to recapture Delhi was, predictably, a spate of mutinous outbreaks throughout northern India.

  In Oudh, the situation grew hourly more critical. Sir Henry Lawrence, chief commissioner of the recently annexed province, had made good use of the weeks of inaction which had followed the Meerut mutiny. He had fortified and provisioned the Residency at Lucknow, in anticipation of a siege and, as the first signs of trouble began to manifest themselves among the native troops, he ordered all women and children to take refuge within the fortified area. On 30th May, having asked for and obtained plenary military powers, he took resolute action when four of his native regiments rose and drove them from their lines at the head of the Queen’s 32nd. Next morning, after a sharp engagement on the racecourse, he pursued them for ten miles and took sixty prisoners. His courageous leadership not only averted a massacre but also induced several hundred sepoys to remain loyal, including virtually all the Sikhs of the garrison. With 600 women and children and a total of a thousand Europeans capable of bearing arms—among them 153 civilians—Lawrence prepared to defend his Residency, aided by some 700 loyal native troops and pensioners, only a few of whom subsequently deserted to the rebels.

  In Cawnpore, 53 miles to the north-east, the garrison commander, the 75-year-old Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler, had also made preparations for a place of shelter and refuge in which to protect his non-combatant Europeans, of whom 375 were women and children and 74 invalids of the 32nd, left behind when the regiment moved to Lucknow. His command consisted of four native regiments—the 2nd Native Cavalry, and the 1st, 53rd and 56th Native Infantry—with sixty British artillerymen, fifty men of the 84th Queen’s and fifteen Madras European Fusiliers. To these, when the native regiments finally rose, were added their officers and a handful of railway engineers and civilians—about 300 in all.

  Wheeler’s choice of a site for a defensive stand was made contrary to the advice of the majority of his officers, who believed that the Magazine—a strongly-built, walled-in enclosure at the river’s edge six miles north of the military station—would better have served the purpose. It contained ample stores of guns and ammunition and could, his staff officers argued, be defended almost indefinitely. The old general overruled them and, instead, elected to occupy two newly-built European barracks—one a hospital—round which he ordered an earthwork parapet, with gun emplacements, to be constructed. His chosen site was on open ground on the south-eastern extremity near the Cantonment, the road from Allahabad and the south, along which he expected his promised reinforcements to come, at the end of their 700-mile march from Calcutta. In addition, it was very close to the bungalows occupied by the British civil and military reside
nts and therefore easier to reach, should a sudden crisis arise, than the Magazine.

  There, however, its advantage over the latter ended. The barrack buildings were of thin brickwork, one had a roof thatched with straw, and the parapet—for all the frantic labour put into its construction— was little more than a mud wall, far from bullet-proof and incapable of withstanding a determined assault. Wheeler had eight 9-pounder guns mounted at intervals along the parapet and laid in stocks of ammunition and provisions for 25 days. There was a good well within the enclosure and, in the belief that the sepoys, if they mutinied, would make at once for Delhi, the old general was satisfied that he could hold off any attacks made by riff-raff from the city until relief reached him … or until the news that Delhi had been recaptured put an end to the threat of mutiny.

  Against the repeated advice of Sir Henry Lawrence, he continued to put complete trust in the Maharajah of Bithur—better known by his Mahratta name of the Nana Sahib—with whom he and his Indian wife were on terms of close personal friendship. When it became evident that neither the fall of Delhi nor the hoped-for reinforcements were likely to prevent the mutiny of his four native regiments, Wheeler called on his friend the Maharajah for assistance. Receiving this, in the shape of 300 men of the Nana’s own bodyguard, he entrusted the defence of the Treasury and the Magazine—with its priceless store of arms—solely to them. So convinced of their trustworthiness was he that, when the first hundred men of the 84th Queen’s Regiment reached him from Calcutta on the 3rd June, he sent half of them on to Lucknow, together with some reserves of the 32nd, to aid in Lawrence’s defence, believing their assurance that other reinforcements were close on their heels.

  The Madras European Fusiliers had landed in Calcutta on 24th May and he received word that they were proceeding up-country with all possible speed, by rail, road and river steamer. Their commander, Colonel James Neill, an experienced Crimean veteran, entered Benares on 3rd June and would, General Wheeler was certain, lose no time in pressing on to Cawnpore and Lucknow.