God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  In this engagement Elahi Bux’s youngest son Akbari Ali became a martyr; he may well have been the moulvi referred to above who was summarily hanged.

  The fate of the surviving members of the mutinous 55th was a melancholy one. Having crossed the Indus on rafts of inflated animal skins they entered Hazara with letters from the unrecognised Padshah of Swat directing all good Muslims to help them and denouncing all who did not. This cut no ice with the Hazariwals, who not only informed Major Becher, the British Assistant Commissioner, of the sepoys’ movements but harried them every foot of the way, hurling down boulders on them and picking off the stragglers. ‘The Mahomedan women’, recorded Becher, ‘were shocked by these strange, dark men cooking and bathing almost naked; they were most of them armed with muskets, or rifles and swords, but had little clothing and no cover from the rain and night dews . . . Every step of their advance now brought new embarrassments; the knapsacks and bayonets and many of the muskets were cast down the rocks, and a large payment of silver could scarcely procure a seer [kilo] of flour.’

  The ever-dwindling band struggled on through this wild country until in early July they surmounted the ridge that divided Kohistan from the Khagan valley. They then made their way up the Kunhar River and entered a deep nullah, or ravine, which they knew led to Kashmir and safety. At the head of this nullah was a high mountain pass, but it was blocked with snow. Trapped, they had no option but to stand and fight as the Sayyeds, Kohistanis, Gujars and other local tribesmen moved in for the kill: ‘It was a rainy day, and as they appeared through the mists on the hills beating their drums and flaunting their pennons the hearts of the mutineers despaired. Checked everywhere, there seemed no hope, and after a faint resistance and a slaughter of a few of their number, they surrendered their arms, and 124 more prisoners were afterwards made over to the escort which I had despatched to receive them.’ The prisoners were tried by Becher, found guilty of mutiny and executed in different parts of the district of Hazara. ‘They met their deaths’, concluded Becher, ‘with the calmest bearing. Those who were hung spoke only to request that they might be blown from the guns instead . . . Thus hunted to the last like wild beasts was consummated the miserable fate of the 55th Regiment.’ The Kunhar gully is still spoken of locally as Purbiala nar katha – ‘the ravine of the killing of the plainsmen’.

  Meanwhile in Patna, Commissioner Tayler had once again appealed to Major-General Lloyd in Dinapore to disband two of his three Bengal Infantry regiments, and had again been assured that there was no need. He then concentrated his efforts on reducing the threat posed by the other suspected conspirators linked to the rebels in Lucknow and Delhi. A police officer named Waris Ali, with ties to the royal family at Delhi, was found with a bundle of incriminating letters showing that he and a prominent mullah named Ali Kareem were in contact with the Delhi rebels. The letters were coded: one referred to a major commercial enterprise with many partners from the east and west in which extensive profits were to be made; another spoke of a savoury pullao now ready for eating, and urged the recipient to bring all his friends to enjoy it, even if it meant making sacrifices. Ali Kareem was forewarned and initially evaded arrest, but Waris Ali was tried and found guilty of conspiracy to overthrow the Government. Much to young Edward Lockwood’s horror, he found himself in sole charge of Waris Ali’s public execution. ‘When I mounted my man upon the gallows,’ recorded Lockwood, ‘he appealed to his compatriots to rescue him. But the sight of my rosy cheeks and awful European hat, had such a terrifying effect upon the crowd that no one stirred, and when the Surgeon came, the man was dead. I always thought the natives a very tractable, pleasant set of fellows after that.’

  For a while it looked as though Tayler’s measures had succeeded in damping down talk of revolt in Patna, but on 27 June virtually the entire garrison at Cawnpore, three hundred miles up-river, was massacred beside the Ganges after vacating their defences under a truce. Three days later Sir Henry Lawrence and his beleaguered garrison at the Lucknow Residency suffered a defeat so severe that it appeared they too were on the brink of destruction. Within days the news of these two reverses had reached Patna, and on 3 July a large mob waving banners, banging drums and chanting ‘Deen! Deen!’ attacked the Roman Catholic Mission in the heart of the native town. Word of the rioting was quickly brought to the Commissioner, and Rattray’s Sikhs were despatched to restore order. The riot was swiftly broken up, but not before Dr Lyell, assistant to the opium agent, had been set upon and killed. A wounded rioter was seized and taken to the hospital to be treated. There Subedar Hedayut Ali, Rattray’s second-in-command, gained his confidence and he began to talk. This led to the arrest of thirty-one alleged conspirators, including a bookseller named PIR ALI KHAN, ‘noted for his enthusiasm for his religion and his hatred of the English’. Tayler already had information suggesting that Pir Ali was the leading member of a cell taking its orders from the rebels in Lucknow, and now a bundle of letters found in his possession confirmed this. They had come from a fellow bookseller in Lucknow and contained instructions as to how Pir Ali was to further the cause of the Futteh ooper Nasara or Victory over the Nazarenes. Pir Ali had also been charged with the task of persuading the leaders of the Wahhabis in Patna to join the revolt, but in this he had failed, probably because the Lucknow correspondent had urged that the rebels should join forces with all religious groups in India, even if that meant working with Shias and Hindus.

  All those arrested were tried before an emergency tribunal set up by Tayler, and were found guilty on various counts, Pir Ali and sixteen others being sentenced to death. Shortly before his execution Pir Ali was taken before Tayler to be questioned further. ‘He was calm, self-possessed and almost dignified,’ wrote Tayler later. ‘He taunted me with the oppression I had exercised, and concluded his speech by saying, “You may hang me, or such as me, every day, but thousands will rise in my place, and your object will never be gained”.’

  With this last round of arrests Bill Tayler severed Patna’s links with the rebels in Delhi and Lucknow.

  The immediate threat lifted, the Europeans quartered in the commissioner’s bungalow felt able to take life less seriously. The open ground in front of the circuit house holding the Wahhabi leaders was turned into a recreation area upon which, in Edward Lockwood’s words, ‘we challenged the Sikhs to cope with us in feats of agility and strength . . . The Wahabees used to sit in the verandah of their house telling their beads, and viewing what doubtless they called our antics unworthy of sober men. But it was quite impossible to judge from their Fagin-like faces, in which low cunning was mingled with ferocity, whether they were pleased or not, for they never laughed or even smiled.’

  In the evenings Lockwood and his colleagues applied themselves to keeping up their spirits in other ways:

  Occasionally we would have a dance – the Lancers being most affected – in which all were obliged to join. We wore no coats, but Garibaldi jackets of gaudy colours, and leather belts, in which our revolvers, hardly ever laid aside, were stuck, and high untanned leather boots, of native make. These in time were wont to draggle down, giving us the appearance of ruffians on the stage. Every one was obliged to do what, I believe, is called the steps, and when the fiddle struck up and we all went round, old and young together, those who smoked being armed with churchwarden pipes, which someone had procured somehow, the effect was so very comical, and we looked such awful idiots, that I could hardly stand for laughing.

  To those sharing his quarters Bill Tayler was now the hero of the hour. ‘The Commissioner was daily receiving congratulations from all parts of India regarding his successful policy,’ recorded his youthful assistant. ‘Indeed some of us went so far as to address Mrs Tayler as “My Lady” in anticipation of the decoration we supposed in store for her gallant husband.’ However, a serious breach had now opened between Tayler and the Collector of Patna, Mr Woodcock, on the one hand, and the sessions judge, Mr Farquharson, and the two magistrates, Mr Lewis and Mr Elliott, on the other. The fir
st party felt that the second were failing in their duties to uphold the law and were showing marked signs of pusillanimity, while the second considered that Tayler had cut too many judicial corners in arresting and sentencing on the basis of suspicion rather than proof. Furthermore, Tayler had acted without proper consultation with Calcutta and in some instances against the advice of his colleagues, so providing further ammunition for his critics. Both in Calcutta and in Patna Tayler’s enemies were already working to bring about his downfall.

  Despite Major-General Lloyd’s assurances, the loyalties of the Bengal Native Infantry regiments in the military cantonment at Dinapore continued to trouble Tayler. His fears were at last realised when just after midday on 25 July Subedar Hedayut Ali appeared at his office ‘in a state of excitement’ and told him that the sepoys there were showing unmistakable signs of a ‘mutinous spirit’. Still unwilling to take the drastic step of disarming his BNI regiments, Major-General Lloyd had compromised. A battalion of British infantry, towed in barges by a steamer, had recently arrived at Dinapore on their way up-river to Benares. Heartened by their presence, he had ordered a general parade at which the sepoys were to be required to surrender the percussion caps of their muskets. Quite inexplicably, however, this parade was held while the British troops, HM 10th Regiment of Foot, were having their dinner in a mess-hall and while he himself took lunch aboard the steamer moored off Dinapore. The moment the first company of sepoys were commanded to hand over their percussion caps they broke ranks, ran for their weapons, and began firing on their officers.

  Tayler immediately put out a general alarm: ‘I barely had time to summon the different residents to our house, and make all necessary arrangements for protection and defence, before the two signal guns were heard, and we knew that the ball had commenced.’ The rattle of musketry followed, which Tayler and those gathering at his bungalow took to be the British regiment suppressing the mutineers: ‘As we listened to the firing, which could be plainly heard from Patna, we calculated how many mutineers would be destroyed. Some said 600, others 800, some perhaps not more than 500!’

  But at Dinapore one disaster had been followed by another. On hearing the firing the British troops in the mess-hall had run out on to the parade ground, but no senior officer appeared to give them any orders, Major-General Lloyd having decided that he ‘should be most useful on board the steamer with guns and riflemen etc.’ Astonished to find themselves at complete liberty, the mutineers loaded themselves with arms and ammunition and marched unimpeded out of Dinapore.

  Fortunately for Patna, the three regiments headed westwards, away from the city and the civil lines and towards the sub-division of Shahabad, with the intention of joining the Rajput landowner Raja Kumar Singh. He now put himself at the head of a local army of Rajputs numbering some seven thousand men, and both armies then converged on the Shahabad district headquarters: the little town of Arrah. Here a local railway engineer named Boyle had long put up with the jeers of his friends as he converted what was intended to be the station billiard hall into a fortified redoubt. This now became the refuge of Arrah’s official staff, consisting of the Collector, Herewald Wake, his Muslim deputy, and fourteen other Britons and Eurasians. With them was a contingent of fifty Sikhs from Rattray’s police battalion, which Tayler had providentially sent back to Arrah from Patna only a few days earlier.

  Early on 27 July the three rebel regiments marched into Arrah in good order, won over the local Nujeeb police, released the prisoners from the local jail, and then began to pour down musket fire on what afterwards became celebrated as ‘the little house at Arrah’. That same afternoon they were joined by Kumar Singh, who immediately took command of a combined force in excess of ten thousand men. Every effort was made to induce the Sikhs defending the billiard hall to change sides, including bribery and threats. Those Sikhs could, in the words of one of those besieged, ‘have eaten the [European] men up for breakfast’, but they chose to stay and fight.

  In Patna it was taken as a foregone conclusion that their friends in Arrah were lost. ‘We thought they would all be massacred,’ wrote Edward Lockwood, ‘but, in case they should be able to hold out for a time, HM 10th Regiment was sent to their relief, and Ross Mangles, Wake’s cousin, who was living with me, joined the force as a volunteer. I volunteered also, but the Commissioner would not let me go.’ This bald statement conveys nothing of the tension and drama that followed as Tayler, on hearing from Major-General Lloyd that he proposed to hold back the British troops in Dinapore for the defence of Patna, did his best to make the general change his mind and send troops to relieve Arrah. ‘I deprecated the measure,’ was how Tayler put it, ‘and strongly urged an immediate and active pursuit of the rebels.’ Finally Lloyd relented, to the extent of allowing him two hundred soldiers from HM 10th Foot. These were loaded on to the steamer’s barges and despatched up-river, only for the steamer to run aground on a sandbank. The general now called off the relief expedition – until a second steamer quite unexpectedly hove into view. After further delays and arguments Tayler again succeeded in making Lloyd change his mind, so that late on the afternoon of 29 July the second steamer, towing the original two hundred British soldiers from the stranded steamer plus an additional two hundred men, at last set off for Arrah. ‘The intense anxiety for the deliverance of this brave little band may be easily conceived,’ wrote Tayler, ‘and the feelings which swelled the hearts of all who saw the relieving force depart, full of hope and confidence, with smiling faces, and cheers of anticipated triumph, may perhaps be imagined.’

  The next afternoon, 30 July, Bill Tayler drove his wife and daughter in a carriage down to the river-side to welcome the steamer bringing the relieving force back to Dinapore. To their dismay the vessel sailed straight past the usual mooring and anchored opposite the cantonment hospital. ‘Never have I witnessed so harrowing a scene,’ wrote Tayler afterwards:

  too dreadful to forget, far too dreadful to attempt to describe, with any minuteness. Of the gallant band of 400 men which had left the shore in bright array, and in assurance of victory, but a few hours before, 180 had been left for dead on the field, several officers were no more, almost all the survivors were wounded. The scene that ensued was heart-rending, the soldiers’ wives rushed down, screaming, to the edge of the water, beating their breasts and tearing their hair, despondency and despair were depicted on every countenance.

  Tayler returned to Patna with ‘the fearful conviction that the Arrah garrison was lost, irremediably lost! . . . The crisis, as far as Behar was concerned, had now evidently arrived.’ That same afternoon Edward Lockwood was seated on the veranda of Tayler’s bungalow taking Urdu lessons from an Indian munshi when he saw a ‘tramp-like figure’ staggering up the driveway. It proved to be his fellow assistant, Ross Mangles, ‘who briefly said, “We have had an awful licking; the 10th is pretty well annihilated, and I am one of the few to come back to tell the tale.”’ The relieving force had been ambushed in the dark by Kumar Singh’s forces and then pursued all the way to the steamer, Mangles carrying a wounded soldier on his back for the last five miles – an act of gallantry for which he subsequently received the Victoria Cross.

  Soon after Mangles’ reappearance the commissioner drew up in his carriage. ‘My Munshi’, continues Lockwood, ‘then retired to spread the news like wild-fire through the town; and I went to the Commissioner, who I found had also heard of the disaster. But he, as usual, seemed to take the matter very coolly, although he did not dissent, when by way of opening the conversation, I said, “It seems we shall have hot work here presently . . . Surely you will call in the out-lying Europeans, and not let them be massacred in detail like the Arrah Garrison.”’ By Lockwood’s account, Tayler then replied that he was issuing orders ‘commanding or inviting – I forget which, but the point appears immaterial – the Europeans at the outlying stations to come in and rally at Patna’.

  When he set down his recollections of this conversation many years later Lockwood added the observation th
at ‘if I could have peeped ahead and seen the events which occurred during the next few hours, I would joyously have committed an act of treachery, equal to that which I was supposed to have played on the Wahabees. I would have persuaded the Commissioner to entrust his orders of recall to me for delivery, and then, when no one was looking, slyly flung them all into the Ganges.’

  After the near-massacre of the force sent to relieve it, Tayler had concluded that Arrah must fall, leaving Kumar Singh free to redirect his ten-thousand-strong force on Patna and the surrounding districts. He himself had barely enough troops left to defend Patna, let alone offer protection to his outlying sub-divisions. ‘It seemed to me evident’, he wrote, ‘that no out-station was in a position to protect itself against the force, which at any moment might be sent against it.’ The most endangered of these outstations was Gaya, sixty miles to the south, which besides being threatened by Kumar Singh from the north-west was also in danger of being attacked by three battalions of mutineers approaching from Bengal. To defend his station and his treasury the magistrate, Alonzo Money, had just fifty-five British soldiers and a hundred of Rattray’s Sikhs. ‘Under this appalling combination of dangers’, wrote Tayler, ‘I directed the withdrawal, and instructed the Magistrates [of Gaya and Tirhut] to come to Patna, as quickly as possible . . . bringing the treasure with them, unless, by so doing their personal safety was endangered.’

  A quite unexpected turn of events now came about that later cast this order of withdrawal in the worst possible light. Tayler had been told that a relief force was planning to set out from Buxar, forty miles west of Arrah, in an attempt to relieve the besieged officers in their billiard hall, but this was no more than a handful of gunners commanded by a passed-over artillery major named Vincent Eyre plus an escort of barely a hundred and fifty fighting men. ‘It was the opinion of all,’ wrote Tayler, ‘that this small force would have but little chance of success against so large a body as was then under the command of Kooer Singh [Raja Kumar Singh].’ Accordingly, he wrote to the civil officer accompanying Major Eyre advising him that he should postpone his advance until more troops could be sent up-river to join them. This letter he sent open to Major-General Lloyd in Dinapore, ‘to be forwarded with such instructions as he should think fit to give. What orders he gave I do not precisely know.’