“For my services, sir?” Phillip stared at him in dismay. “In what capacity, if I may ask?”
William Peel laid a friendly hand on his shoulder.
“To take command of the Company’s steam-screw gunboat Falcon,” Peel told him. “On loan to the Indian Navy. Her Captain has recently died and she’s under orders for China.” He sighed. “Obviously the Commodore isn’t aware that you have been wounded. You haven’t had a medical board yet, have you?”
Phillip shook his head. “No, not yet. I’d hoped—that is the surgeons had proposed one in ten days’ time. I was to be given a week’s sick leave, you see, and—”
Peel’s gay, infectious smile returned. “Then I suggest, my dear Phillip, that you take a fortnight’s sick leave and spend it away from this station. Have you not friends in Allahabad, to whom you wish to bid farewell before they depart for Calcutta and passage to England? Your mid, Johnny Lightfoot, seemed to think you had.”
Phillip reddened and then echoed his smile. “To tell you the truth, sir,” he confessed, “the girl I hope to marry is in Allahabad. I’d intended to seek her father’s consent to my proposal before they left, if I possibly could. Only—”
“Seek it, my dear fellow,” Peel advised. “And the best of luck to you!” He held out his hand. “I’m expecting Their Lordships’ to reply by overland telegraph and I don’t anticipate being deprived of one of my best officers, in order to fill a temporary vacancy in the Company’s Navy. I think it more than likely, however, that you’ll be ordered home. Perhaps …” He was smiling broadly. “Perhaps towards the end of March, Phillip. And I shall expect an invitation to the wedding, you know.”
Two days later, Phillip was on his way to Allahabad.
HISTORICAL NOTES
On events covered in The Sepoy Mutiny,
Massacre at Cawnpore, The Cannons of Lucknow,
and Guns to the Far East.
The mutiny of the sepoy Army of Bengal on Sunday, 10th May, 1857, began with the rising of the 3rd Light Cavalry in Meerut. Despite the fact that he had two thousand British troops under his command, the obese and senile Major-General William Hewitt handled the crisis so ineptly that, after an orgy of arson and slaughter, the Light Cavalry and their sepoy comrades of the 11th and 20th Native Infantry were permitted to reach Delhi, with scarcely a shot fired against them.
Here, supported by the native regiments of the garrison, they proclaimed the last of the Moguls, eighty-year-old Shah Bahadur, as Emperor of India, and seized the city, murdering British civil and military officers and massacring hundreds of Europeans and Indian Christians, who had been unable to make their escape. Hampered by both lack of British troops and inadequate transport for those available to him, the British Commander-in-Chief nevertheless contrived to establish a small force on the Ridge by 8th June. This force, which consisted of fewer than three thousand men of all arms—although it had won two pitched battles against the mutineers on the way to Delhi—was so greatly outnumbered and deficient in heavy artillery that it could only wait for reinforcements, unable, until these arrived, to attempt to recapture the city or even effectively to besiege it.
In Oudh—recently annexed by the East India Company and already, on this account, seething with discontent—the situation rapidly became critical as, in station after station, the native regiments broke out in revolt. A source of grave anxiety was Cawnpore, 53 miles northeast of Lucknow and on the opposite bank of the Ganges River. With some 375 women and children to protect, the commanding General, Sir Hugh Massey Wheeler, pinned his faith on the friendship of a native prince, the Nana Sahib, Maharajah of Bithur. He had only two hundred British soldiers in his garrison—among these seventy invalids and convalescent men of Her Majesty’s 32nd Regiment—about the same number of officers and civilian males, forty native Christian drummers, and a handful of loyal native officers and sepoys.
Betrayed by the Nana, the garrison held out for three weeks with epic heroism, in a mud-walled entrenchment at the height of the Indian summer, under constant attack by nine thousand rebels and surrounded by batteries of heavy calibre guns. Compelled finally to surrender when two hundred-fifty defenders had been killed and with their food and ammunition exhausted, the survivors were treacherously massacred on the river bank, where they had gone, on the promise of safe passage to Allahabad, on 27th June. By the time the Nana called a halt to the awful slaughter, all but 125 women and children and some sixty men had been killed. The men were shot; the women and children, many of them wounded, were held as hostages in a small, single-storey house known as the Bibigarh, together with female captives from other stations.
When the small, poorly equipped relief force, under Brigadier General Henry Havelock, fought its way up country from Allahabad and recaptured Cawnpore, it was learned that all the hostages had been brutally murdered on 15th July, when the British column was still engaging the Nana’s troops outside the city. Feeling ran high among Havelock’s soldiers, when details of the massacre became known, but the stern and deeply religious little General would permit no indiscriminate reprisals against the civilian population of Cawnpore. Punishment would be meted out to the guilty, but the most urgent task facing the column was the relief of Lucknow, which was now under siege by an estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand rebels.
Due to the foresight of the Chief Commissioner of Oudh, Sir Henry Lawrence, his Residency had been provisioned and preparations made for its defence but he, too, had insufficient British troops—a single regiment, the 32nd—and over twelve hundred women, children, and non-combatant males, who had all to be sheltered, protected, and fed. At the end of June, Lawrence suffered a disastrous reverse when he led a small force of his defenders to Chinhat, in an attempt to drive off the rebels and was himself mortally wounded when a round-shot entered through the window of his upper room at the Residency on 2nd July. Command was handed over to Colonel Inglis, of the 32nd, who sent urgent messages to Havelock, requesting aid.
General Havelock made his first attempt to relieve the garrison on July 29th, when he crossed the Ganges with fifteen hundred men—twelve hundred of them British and the rest Sikhs of the Ferozepore Regiment—and ten light field guns. He took no tents and twenty of his gunners were invalids of the Veteran Battalion; to his scant force of twenty Volunteer Cavalry were added some forty infantrymen, with experience of riding, whose cavalry training had of necessity been completed in less than a week. His four European regiments—Her Majesty’s 64th, 84th, and 78th Highlanders and the Company’s 1st Madras Fusiliers—had already suffered heavy casualties in the four actions they had fought between Allahabad and Cawnpore, and the terrible ravages of cholera, dysentry, and sunstroke daily reduced their number.
To hold Cawnpore and cover their crossing into Oudh, Havelock ordered the construction of an entrenchment, considerably stronger than General Wheeler’s had been, sited on a plateau overlooking the river, and well armed with guns. The Commanding Officer of the Madras Fusiliers, James Neill— whose promotion to Brigadier General was the reward for his ruthless suppression of the mutiny in Benares and Allahabad— was left to defend the newly constructed entrenchment with three hundred men. No sooner had Havelock departed than Neill set about executing any native who was even remotely suspected of complicity in the mutiny, reserving a terrible vengeance for those believed to have had a hand in the massacre at the Suttee Chowra Ghat or in the Bibigarh. His reign of terror earned him the unenviable title of “Butcher of Cawnpore.”
Havelock’s attempt to bring relief to the “heroic garrison of Lucknow” was, from the outset, doomed to failure. He had too few troops, inadequate transport, and sick carriage, and, in the ancient Kingdom of Oudh, every man’s hand was against him—the mutineers’ ranks swollen by the armed zamindars and peasants who flocked to join them in the insurrection. His small force was victorious in every action, fought against overwhelming odds; it attacked with deathless courage, taking fortified and entrenched positions at the point of the bayonet and inflict
ing twice and three times the number of casualties it suffered. But the rebel losses could be made good— Havelock’s could not and, although his column bravely battled its way to within thirty miles of Lucknow, the little General was compelled to retire to his base at Mungalwar, six miles into Oudh from the river crossing, no less than three times.
Havelock’s constantly reiterated plea for reinforcements was, at last, answered. On his return to Cawnpore on 17th August, he received news—via the Calcutta Gazette of 5th August—that command of the Dinapore Division had been given to Major General Sir James Outram, under whom he had served in the recent Persian campaign. Outram’s new command was to include that of Cawnpore, and he was reported to be moving with all possible speed up country with the two regiments for which Havelock had so often begged, the 5th Fusiliers and the 90th Light Infantry. Sir Colin Campbell, of Balaclava fame, had succeeded the somewhat ineffectual Patrick Grant as Commander-in-Chief, and Havelock’s chagrin, caused by his apparent supersession, was tempered by the new hope that the appointment of Colin Campbell engendered. It vanished completely when Outram, with a chivalrous generosity that was typical of him, announced that Havelock was to continue to command the now augmented relief column until Lucknow was entered. He, himself, he stated, would accompany the column in his civilian capacity as Chief Commissioner of Oudh and serve under his junior as a volunteer.
Outram reached Cawnpore on 15th September, bringing 1,268 men with him and a battery of heavy, elephant-drawn guns. These reinforcements brought the total number of troops to a little over three thousand men—twenty-four hundred of them British—with three batteries of artillery. By the evening of 20th September, leaving three hundred men to hold Cawnpore, the whole force had crossed the Ganges, with General Havelock in official command, and his two brigades under General Neill and Colonel Hamilton, of the 78th. The Sye was crossed on 23rd September in fine weather. After a hard-fought battle with some ten thousand rebels two miles from the city, the Alam Bagh Palace was captured.
The British Column bivouacked in and around the Alam Bagh that night. The next day was spent resting by the troops and in careful reconnaissance by Havelock and Outram and their senior staff officers. The two Generals were not in agreement as to the best way in which to gain the Residency, but, owing to the waterlogged state of the ground—which rendered moving the heavy guns well-nigh impossible—Havelock finally consented to abandon his own plan in favour of that put forward by Outram.
This entailed crossing by the Char Bagh bridge and— instead of advancing through a maze of heavily defended streets direct to the Residency—taking a circuitous route along the canal bank to the then undefended Sikander Bagh Palace, from the shelter of which the final advance would be made under cover of two other walled Palaces, leaving only five hundred yards of the Khas Bazaar between the column and its objective, the Bailey Guard gate of the Residency.
The men, too, despite their weariness, were eager to reach their objective, the memory of the Cawnpore massacre still vivid in their minds. They had been inspired also by the news which had reached them in camp at the Alam Bagh, that Delhi had been recaptured, and they greeted their little General’s decision to “push on and get it over” with heartening cheers.
Accordingly, all the sick and wounded and half of Eyre’s heavy guns were brought within the walls of the captured Alam Bagh, and, leaving three hundred men under Major MacIntyre of the 78th to defend it, the final advance on Lucknow began on 25th September.
The casualties were appalling. Out of the two thousand men who made the assault, 535 fell dead or wounded, among them James Neill, shot through the head at point-blank range by a rebel sniper. Havelock and Outram reached the Residency unscathed—although Outram had earlier suffered a wound in the arm—to find themselves the centre of a crowd of cheering, exultant defenders, who sallied forth, rifles at the ready, to assist them over a low mud wall in front of the Bailey Guard gate, just as darkness fell. After five long and anxious months, the Residency at Lucknow had been relieved.
Major General Sir James Outram, as Chief Commissioner for Oudh in succession to Sir Henry Lawrence and senior military officer, formally took command of both the relief force and the garrison on the morning of 26th September. It was evident even then that the original plan—which had been to evacuate the Residency garrison to Cawnpore—would have to be abandoned. There were four hundred-seventy women and children, and to the garrison’s sick and wounded had now been added those of the relief force, making a total of some fifteen hundred, for whom there was insufficient carriage available. The original defenders had been reduced to seven hundred fifty gaunt and famished men, of whom half were Sikhs and loyal sepoys but, their ranks swelled by the addition of the relief force, Outram decided that he could hold Lucknow until the troops Sir Colin Campbell was gathering arrived to reinforce him.
On 16th July, 1857, having embarked the Earl of Elgin and his staff, the frigate Shannon, Captain William Peel, VC, accompanied by the Pearl, Captain Edward Sotheby, sailed from Hong Kong to Calcutta. At 5 p.m. on 8th August, the steam-screw Shannon dropped anchor off the Esplanade, Calcutta, and the Governor-General, Lord Canning, gratefully accepted Lord Elgin’s offer of the two frigates to the Indian Government to aid in the suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny.
On the afternoon of the 18th August, the first party of the Shannon’s Naval Brigade was embarked aboard a river steamer and flat to travel up the Ganges River to Allahabad. Under the command of Captain Peel, this party consisted of 408 officers and men, including Royal Marines, with ten of the frigate’s sixty-eight-pounder guns, a twenty-four-pounder howitzer, eight rocket-tubes and field-pieces, with four hundred rounds of shot and shell for each gun. A second detachment, under the First Lieutenant, James Vaughan, numbering one hundred twenty, left Calcutta a month later. Both detachments reached Allahabad at about the same time—early in October—and, coming under the orders of General Sir James Outram and later, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Colin Campbell, at first undertook garrison duties in the fort at Allahabad. By the end of the month, however, the whole Brigade—with the exception of two hundred forty, including sick and convalescent men— advanced to Cawnpore to join the Lucknow Relief Force, under Sir Colin Campbell, taking part in the successful evacuation of the Residency garrison on 22nd–23rd November. In the fierce fighting which preceded the evacuation and in the subsequent battle for Cawnpore, the Naval Brigade won high praise—in particular during the attack on the strongly held Shah Nujeef Mosque.
In his despatch, Sir Colin Campbell wrote: “Captain Peel led up his heavy guns with extraordinary gallantry, within a few yards of the building, to batter the massive stone wall … It was an action almost unexampled in war. Captain Peel behaved much as if he had been laying the Shannon alongside an enemy frigate …” A total of two hundred seamen and Marines fought in the Relief of Lucknow, with six 24-pounder guns, two 8-inch howitzers and two rocket-tubes, the Marines and seamen rifle companies forming a strong infantry escort to the guns.
The Pearl Brigade went up country to Dinapore in September and, although none took part in the relief of Lucknow, they, too, played a gallant part in the suppression of the Mutiny.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Government of India State Papers: Edited G. W. Forrest, Calcutta Military Department Press, 1902. 2 vols.
The Sepoy War in India: J. W. Kaye, FRS., 3 vols., W. H. Allen, 1870.
History of the Indian Mutiny: Col. G. B. Malleson, CSL., 3 vols., Longmans, 1896.
History of the Indian Mutiny: T. Rice Holmes, Macmillan, 1898.
The Tale of the Great Mutiny: W. H. Fitchett, Smith, Elder, 1904.
The History of the Indian Mutiny: Charles Ball, 6 vols, London Printing & Publishing Co., circa 1860.
Addiscombe: Its Heroes and Men of Note: Col. H. M. Vibart, Constable, 1894.
Way to Glory: J. C. Pollock, John Murray, 1957 (Life of Havelock).
1857: S. N. Sen, Government of India Press (reprinted 1958).
T
he Sound of Fury: Richard Collier, Collins, 1963.
The History of India: James Grant, Cassell, circa 1888.
The Bengal Horse Artillery: Maj. Gen. B. P. Hughes, Arms & Armour Press, 1971.
Lucknow and the Oude Mutiny: Lt. Gen. Mcleod Innes, VC, R. E. A. D. Innes & Co. 1896.
Journal of the Siege of Lucknow: Maria Germon, edited Michael Edwardes, Constable (orig. pub. 1870).
The Orchid House: Michael Edwardes, Cassell, 1960.
Accounts of the Siege and Massacre at Cawnpore: Lt. Mowbray Thomson, 53rd. N. I., and G. W. Shepherd (Survivors). The Illustrated London News, 1856–8.
Naval Brigades in the Indian Mutiny: Edited Cdr W. B. Rowbotham, RN, Naval Records Society.
Shannon’s Brigade in India: Lt. Edmund H. Verney, RN, Saunders, Otley & Co., 1862.
The Defence of Cawnpore: Lt. Col. J. Adye, CB, Longmans, Brown, 1858.
GLOSSARY OF INDIAN TERMS
Ayah: nurse or maid servant
Baba: child
Bearer: personal, usually head, servant
Bhisti: water bearer
Boorka: all-enveloping cotton garment worn by purdah women when mixing with the outside world
Brahmin: high-caste Hindu
Chapkan: knee-length tunic
Charpoy: string bed
Chitti: a chit, a written order
Chuprassi: a uniformed door-keeper
Daffadar: sergeant, cavalry
Dhoti: a loincloth worn by men in India
Din: faith
Dhoolie: stretcher or covered litter for conveyance of wounded
Eurasian: half-caste, usually children born of British fathers and Indian mothers
Ekka: small, single-horse-drawn cart, often curtained for conveyance of purdah women
Fakir: itinerant holy man
Feringhi: foreigner (term of disrespect)
Ghat: river bank, landing place, quay
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