II
The war against the sepoys was fought on three main fronts: in and around Delhi; along the road which passed through Cawnpore and Lucknow and into southern Awadh; and in central India.
The Delhi theatre was crucial. It was the base of the largest professional mutineer army, which had congregated there during June and July, and it contained their figurehead and counterweight to the authority of the Raj, Bahadur Shah. Delhi had been a magnet for all mutineers, drawing first the fugitives from Meerut who were augmented by men from the city’s garrison and, on 17–18 June, by sepoys from Nasirabad. The flow continued: the 6,000-strong Bareilly contingent arrived on 1 July, a force from Jhansi appeared on 18 July, followed by troops from the Jullundur garrison on the 22nd, and 4,000 men from Nimach four days later. By the beginning of August, there were probably between 30,000 and 40,000 former Bengali sepoys in Delhi. This formidable and potentially dangerous army chose to squander its energies on the defence of a position which was of greater symbolic than strategic value. In doing so, it allowed itself to be checkmated by the Delhi Field Force, which appeared outside the north-western wall of the city in June and refused to budge. At its largest, at the beginning of September, it contained 7,000 men, although at any one time up to a quarter of its strength was laid up, either sick or exhausted.
The siege of Delhi was a campaign of attrition in which nerve and sticking power ultimately mattered more than numbers. British forces were camped on the lee of the Delhi ridge, out of range of the superior rebel artillery. The conflict resolved itself into a series of assaults on British positions, all of which were repelled, but with losses which the defenders could ill afford. And yet, by successfully holding their ground against greater numbers, the Delhi Field Force gained a vital moral victory. The sepoys fought with a raw courage which impressed their adversaries, but, time and time again, they flinched when the moment came to press home the bayonet charge in the face of intense artillery and rifle fire. Here and elsewhere the mutineers were handicapped by their old-fashioned smooth-bore muskets, which were outranged by the more accurate new Enfield rifles now in use by many British units.
The unbroken sequence of reverses during July and August fostered defeatism among both soldiers and civilians inside Delhi. It could be detected in a letter sent on 3 August by Bahadur Shah turning down an offer of help from 6,000 ghazis (Muslim warriors). How could they dislodge the British, the emperor asked, when ten times their number of sepoys had failed?17 This sense of hopelessness permeated the rest of the city and, within three weeks, substantial numbers of mutineers were voting with their feet. Between 21 and 25 August the Jhansi, Bareilly and Nimach brigades abandoned the city and headed into the countryside, reducing its defenders by over 10,000.
The fugitives guessed that they were about to lose the safety of Delhi’s walls. On 4 September, a formidable siege train arrived in the British camp and a bombardment was soon in progress. All who heard the big guns knew that once the city fell, everyone inside faced retribution. One form it might take was revealed by British newspapers which had been obtained by the mutineers, containing reports that the former Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, had proposed mass castration of the city’s males and its appropriate re-naming as ‘Eunuchabad’.18 Morale suddenly rallied and, on 12 September, a British spy reported: ‘The soldiery are ready to fight to the last. None now desert.’19 Given the temper of their opponents, there was no alternative.
The city was stormed on 14 September and, after six days of fierce house-to-house fighting, it was finally subdued at a cost of over a thousand casualties. At one stage, during the night of the 15th–16th, a large body of British and Sikh soldiers temporarily fell out of the battle, lured by the untouched cellars of a city’s liquor dealer. Men collapsed drunk and others spread their good fortune by offering bottles of champagne and brandy to their comrades for a few pennies each. In exasperation, the commander, Brigadier-General Archdale Wilson, ordered the wholesale destruction of what was left of the bottles.
The battle for Delhi was marked by random massacres of sepoys and civilians, for all within the city were held responsible for the murders of Europeans four months before, even if they had been passive onlookers. Bahadur Shah had taken refuge five miles beyond the walls in the Hamayun, one of those elaborate mausoleums which his Mughal ancestors had erected to advertise their power. His sanctuary was revealed by his eldest son’s father-in-law, Mirza Ali Bakht, whom a grateful government rewarded with his life and, later, an annual pension of 25,000 rupees for himself and ten rupees a day for the seventy-six of his kinsfolk who were dependent on him.20 The prince’s information led Hodson to Bahadur Shah’s final refuge, a gloomy anteroom now disfigured by graffiti, on 19 September. The emperor was taken prisoner and returned to his palace to be tried for treason against a government which had once claimed that its powers derived from his forefathers. He was found guilty and sent into comfortable exile in Rangoon with his wife, Zinat Mahal.
The next day, Hodson and his sowars returned to the Hamayun to arrest two of Bahadur’s sons, Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan, and his grandson, Mirza Abu Bakr. Arthur Lang heard that ‘orders had been given that no princes are to be brought in alive’, which was understandable, given that Delhi had only just been pacified and there were plenty of Mughal retainers and ghazis hanging around the Hamayun.21 The three youths were seized by Hodson who, alarmed by the menacing crowd which threatened to overwhelm his small detachment, ordered them to strip. They accepted their fate without any show of emotion and were shot by Hodson, who then had their corpses thrown into a cart. No onlooker intervened. The murders were applauded by Hodson’s brother officers, who believed he had despatched three potential rebel leaders, each of whom had been an accomplice to the slaughter of their countrymen and women. The story ran through the army that each time Hodson pulled the trigger his mind had been convulsed by the image of a distraught English girl who, it was said, had been chained to a Delhi parapet by the mutineers and had been killed by British fire.22
Other minds were full of visions of wealth. Delhi suffered a systematic and thorough sacking, as later did Lucknow. The treasure-seekers’ methods were brutal. Lieutenant Lindsay told his family how ‘a very nice fat-looking sleek Hindu’ had been taken down to the cellar of his house where pistols were fired at him in the dark to make him reveal where he had buried 90,000 rupees. ‘Another corpulent nigger’ had knives thrown at him ‘after the manner of the Chinese jugglers’.23 It was highly likely that both these unfortunates may have been among the rich banias and merchants from whom the sepoys and emperor had extorted cash during the siege. The Delhi looters shared the common belief that their recent exertions justified special rewards. ‘Rode into Kotah and did a little plundering,’ Veterinary Surgeon Edward Grey of the 8th Hussars casually noted in his diary for 6 April 1858. He ordered Indian regimental servants to kick in the door of a temple where, to their horror, he pulled down some statues before stealing one, ‘a small female idol in marble tricked out in tinsel finery’.24 Wherever the armies marched in India during 1857 and 1858 there were similar acts by men for whom personal profit was a compensation for weeks of discomfort and peril. All through the final Lucknow campaign, The Times’s correspondent, William Howard Russell, heard men say, ‘If it were not for the rupees I would not stay in the confounded country for an hour.’25
The fall of Delhi was a signal catastrophe for the mutineers. Their principal army had been fragmented, many fugitives heading south-east towards Awadh, which had now become the main centre for resistance. There had been a stalemate in this region after Havelock’s severely weakened forces had failed to break through to Lucknow. His successor, Outram, felt strong enough to resume the advance and reached the residency on 26 September after heavy losses. Trapped inside the city, his army and what was left of the original defenders faced a second siege, which lasted until 14 November when Campbell cut his way through with 3,400 men. They included sailors from the frigate Shannon, wit
h sixty eight-pounder guns and war rockets under the command of Captain Sir William Peel, the son of the former Prime Minister. Still not strong enough to overcome the besieging forces nominally led by Nana Sahib, Campbell prudently decided to evacuate the city and retire to his base near Unao to await reinforcements.
It turned out to be a tricky operation, and there were some nervous moments when Tatya Topi approached the isolated detachment holding Cawnpore at the head of the 15,000-strong Gwalior contingent. Hitherto malevolent neutrals, the Gwalior force had kept out of the fighting, living off subsidies from the pro-British Baji Rao. It played its hand too late and was defeated by Campbell on 6 December and fell back on Kalpi. Although not decisive, the actions around Cawnpore and Lucknow at the end of 1857 confirmed the verdict at Delhi: the tide of the conflict had turned irreversibly against the mutineers.
The final knock-out blow was delivered on 28 February 1858, when Campbell renewed his offensive against Lucknow. He now commanded 31,000 men, the largest army yet fielded by the Company, including reinforcements from Britain, the Punjab and Nepal which had joined him during the winter. The big push was first directed against Lucknow, which fell on 15 March after savage street fighting, something which Campbell had hoped to avoid. He was then free to proceed at leisure into Awadh and pick off the fragments of Nana Sahib’s army and, simultaneously, pacify the province and adjacent areas which were still defiant. The war now became what one officer called ‘manhunting’, a term which was as accurate as any in describing the many cross-country chases after fugitives who either sought safety in strongholds or tried to throw back their pursuers by rearguard actions. It was a type of warfare that strongly appealed to the sporting officer of the Hodson mould. One, on discovering that a party of mutineers had hidden in a cornfield, ordered it to be beaten as if for partridges, while his soldiers shot at the game and men who were flushed out. The ‘best sport’, he warmly recalled, was provided by the running sepoys.26
There were more opportunities for this grim diversion during operations in central India. Early in 1858, Sir Hugh Rose ordered a two-pronged invasion of the disaffected districts by columns based at Mhow and Jabalpur. He encountered fierce resistance during his march on Jhansi, which was taken early in March, and afterwards from the combined forces of its rani, Lakshmi Bai, and Tatya Topi. They suddenly entered Gwalior, where the bulk of the raja’s army defected to them, and then began what turned out to be a nine-month, 3,000-mile peregrination through parts of Gwalior, Indore and Nagpur. Lakshmi Bai was killed early on, displaying the same reckless spirit which now animated so many engaged in what they must have known was an unwinnable last-ditch campaign. On 24 June, dressed as a Maratha horseman, she was wounded and knocked from her horse by a trooper of the 8th Hussars during a skirmish. As the British horsemen retired from the action, she spotted her assailant and fired at him with her carbine. She missed and he shot her dead, only realising who she was from the jewels she was wearing which, like so much else of value found during this war, soon disappeared.27
Tatya Topi fought on, avoiding pitched battles and, in classic partisan fashion, utilising the goodwill of local sympathisers. An officer who trailed him through forests and over hills noted how he could always call on local chiefs for reinforcements. In the end, Tatya Topi fell to the Raj’s moneybags rather than its bullets, after one of his close associates, Man Singh, accepted a bribe to betray him. He was hanged in March 1859.
III
Man Singh’s duplicity was a striking reminder that the suppression of the Indian Mutiny had been a civil war in which large numbers of Indians had made common cause with the British. It would be impossible to under-emphasise the value of these collaborators in filling the ranks of armies and supplying them with cash, victuals, transport, and, perhaps most important of all, intelligence. Knowledge of the enemy’s capacities, dispositions, plans and morale was crucial throughout a conflict in which British commanders had to assess as precisely as possible the odds they were facing. This information could only be obtained by native spies, for with a few, very rare exceptions, Europeans could never successfully pass themselves off as Indians. Natives were also essential to maintain communications between isolated outposts and armies wherever and whenever the dak post (relays of camel- or horse-mounted messengers) or electric telegraph had been disrupted.
The task of creating a messenger and espionage network from scratch was allocated to a handful of younger men, most notably the magistrate William Muir in Agra and Major Herbert Bruce, formerly of the Punjab police, who worked under Neill, Havelock and Campbell. They recruited loyal and venal Indians like Raja Nahr Singh, Delhi spymaster, who paid his men ten rupees a day for information, which he had secretly conveyed to Muir at Agra.28 Muir also had his own agents inside the city within a few days of the mutiny there, and they supplemented what soon became a steady flow of intelligence on the state of the rebels’ morale, stocks of ammunition and reserves of cash. Some of these snoopers were amateurs, tempted by the rewards, but there were also a few professionals who had worked for business houses, like the Seths of Mathura. Mukdum Baksh appears to have been one of this class, for after the fall of Delhi he moved across country to Bareilly, where he was detected and executed at Nana Sahib’s orders.29 He appears, not surprisingly given his occupation, to have been an elusive figure, even to his masters who found it hard to find anything about him and his activities after the war, when his family were asking for compensation. There was also at least one gentleman spy, Khan Jehan Khan, a nephew of the Raja of Jorhat and ‘a first-rate English scholar’, who worked in Delhi during the siege. His expenses claim was subsequently rejected by the Punjab government which, after reconsideration of his services, gave him, as fitted his rank, a horse and fine robes worth 1,500 rupees.30
Major Herbert’s spies penetrated the camp of the Gwalior force and brought back intelligence that revealed its movements and Tatya Topi’s intentions and, during December 1857, provided forewarnings of mutineer offensives from Lucknow. His agents may have been among those arrested in Lucknow during the second siege, some carrying letters in English, and interrogated by Wajid Ali, a former police officer.31
Obtaining such information seems to have been easier in Delhi, for what today would be called field security was easy-going or non-existent. On 2 July, Mabub Khan, a Guides trooper in mufti, was able to pass through the Lahore gate into Delhi where he wandered through the lines of the Bareilly and Ruhelkhand contingents and gossiped with the mutineers. He then left the city by way of the Ajmer gate and made his way back to the headquarters of the Delhi Field Force where he reported what he had heard. Given that the camps of both sides were open to the world and filled with men and women of every caste, race and tribe it was not hard for the spy to come and go as he pleased. Sir Colin Campbell understood this and warned Willam Howard Russell against unguarded chatter. ‘You will be among a set of fellows here, surrounded as all of us are, by natives who understand all that is going on better than we think. They talk about what is happening, or what is going to take place; and that gets to the ears of the enemy. So that our best plans may be frustrated. It is most essential for us to preserve secrecy in war, especially in a country like this.’32
Since eavesdroppers were paid for what they had overheard or uncovered, there was an unavoidable tendency for them to say what they knew would satisfy their employers. Mutineers inside Delhi heard of British privations and cash crises and similar revelations about conditions within the city reached British ears. Invention may also have played a part in the intelligence war. In Rajasthan, Colonel Pierce was faced with so many conflicting reports that he suspected he was being fed fables and only accepted as genuine intelligence that which was confirmed by at least two sources.33
The mutineers developed a counter-intelligence service which was on the look-out for British cossids (messengers). A pair, caught by patrols between Delhi and Agra, were beheaded and another two, Sikhs, were blown from cannon. As a precaution against their le
tters falling into enemy hands, commanders set down sensitive information in French or used the Greek alphabet which, they assumed, would not be understood. These missives were carried by professional carriers who, when the hazards were greatest, commanded their own price. During the dire days of mid-May 1857, a cossid charged fifty rupees for taking a letter from Kurnaul to Mathura, ten times the normal rate.34
Money or the prospect of it commanded allegiance during the Mutiny, as it had in every Indian conflict for the past hundred years. This fact of life was immediately recognised by the British who, whenever faced with signs of unrest, always took measures to safeguard district treasuries. Attempts to remove stockpiled taxes from Mathura and Azamgarh acted as catalysts for mutinies, with sepoys trying to stop the departure of carts crammed with rupees. At Azamgarh, a native officer complained to Charles Horne that the British had slighted Indian religions. Pointing to the bags of coins, Horne sharply riposted: ‘Here’s your caste, faith and religion.’35
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