The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan 1856-7-8

In the official dispatch afterwards prepared by Inglis, full justice was done to the ingenuity and perseverance of the besiegers. Speaking of the large guns placed in batteries on every side of the enclosure, he said: ‘These were planted all round our post at small distances, some being actually within fifty yards of our defences, but in places where our own heavy guns could not reply to them; while the perseverance and ingenuity of the enemy in erecting barricades in front of and around their guns, in a very short time rendered all attempts to silence them by musketry entirely unavailing. Neither could they be effectually silenced by shells, by reason of their extreme proximity to our position, and because, moreover, the enemy had recourse to digging very narrow trenches about eight feet in depth in rear of each gun, in which the men lay while our shells were flying, and which so effectually concealed them, even while working the gun, that our baffled sharpshooters could only see their hands while in the act of loading.’

And now, the reader may ask, what were the ladies and children doing during this terrible month of July; and how did the officers and men fare in their domestic and personal matters? It is a sad tale, full of trouble and misery; and yet it is a heroic tale. No one flinched, no one dreamed for an instant of succumbing to the enemy. It must be remembered, as a beginning of all the privations, that the Europeans went into the Residency very scantily supplied with personal necessaries. When the cantonment was burned during the mutiny of the 31st of May, much property belonging to the officers was destroyed; and when every one hurried in for shelter after the disastrous 30th of June, no time was allowed for making purchases in the city, or bringing in property from bungalows or storehouses outside the official stronghold. Hence every one was driven to make the best of such commodities as had been secured by the last day of June. Even during the greater part of that month the troubles were many; the enclosure Residency was full of officers and men, all hard at work; the heat was excessive; cholera, dysentery, and small-pox were at their deadly work; the church being full of grain, those who sought religious aid in time of need met for divine service in any available spot; most of the native servants ran away when the troubles began; and many of them ended their service by robbing their masters.

How July opened for the British, may faintly be imagined. The commissariat chief was ill; no one could promptly organise that office under the sudden emergency; the food and draught bullocks, unattended to, roamed about the place; and many of them were shot, or tumbled into wells. Terrible work was it for the officers to bury the killed bullocks, lest their decaying carcasses should taint the air in excessively hot weather. Some of the artillery horses were driven mad for want of food and water. Day after day, after working hard in the trenches, the officers had to employ themselves at night in burying dead bullocks and horses – officers, be it understood; for the men were all employed as sentries or in other duties. It was not until after many days that they could turn out of the enclosure all the spare horses, and secure the rest. As the heat continued, and as the dead bodies of animals increased in number, the stench became overpowering, and was one of the greatest grievances to which the garrison were exposed; the temperature at night was often less patiently borne than that by day, and the officers and men were troubled by painful boils. Even when wet days occurred, matters were not much improved; for the hot vapours from stagnant pools engendered fever, cholera, dysentery, and diarrhœa. The children died rapidly, and the hospital-rooms were always full; the sick and wounded could not be carried to upper apartments, because the enemy’s shot and shell rendered all such places untenable. The officers were put on half-rations early in the month; and even those rations they in many cases had to cook for themselves, owing to the disappearance of the native servants. The English ladies suffered unnumbered privations and inconveniences. The clergyman’s wife, in her Diary, told of the very first day of the siege in these words: ‘No sooner was the first gun fired, than the ladies and children – congregated in large numbers in Dr Fayrer’s house – were all hurried down stairs into an underground room called the Tye Khana, damp, dark, and gloomy as a vault, and excessively dirty. Here we sat all day, feeling too miserable, anxious, and terrified to speak, the gentlemen occasionally coming down to reassure us and tell us how things were going on. – was nearly all the day in the hospital, where the scene was terrible; the place so crowded with wounded and dying men that there was no room to pass between them, and everything in a state of indescribable misery, discomfort, and confusion.’ In the preceding month it had been a hardship for the ladies to be deprived of the luxuries of Anglo-Indian life; but they were now driven to measure comforts by a different standard. They were called upon to sweep their own rooms, draw water from the wells, wash their own clothes, and perform all the menial duties of a household; while their husbands or fathers were cramped up in little outhouses or stables, or anywhere that might afford temporary shelter at night. When food became scanty and disease prevalent, these troubles were of course augmented, and difference of rank became almost obliterated where all had to suffer alike. Many families were huddled together in one large room, and all privacy was destroyed. The sick and wounded were, as may be supposed, in sad plight; for, kind as the rest were, there were too many harassing duties to permit them to help adequately those who were too weak to help themselves. Officers and men were lying about in the hospital rooms, covered with blood and often with vermin; the dhobees or washermen were too weak-handed for the preservation of cleanliness, and few of the British had the luxury of a change of linen; the windows being kept closed and barricaded, to prevent the entrance of shot from without, the pestilential atmosphere carried off almost as many unfortunates as the enemy’s missiles. The writer of the Lady’s Diary, whose narrative is seldom relieved by one gleam of cheerfulness, departs from her habitual sadness when describing the mode in which eleven ladies and seven children slept on the floor in the Tye Khana or cellar, ‘fitting into each other like bits into a puzzle.’ Chairs being few in number, most of the ladies sat on the floor, and at meal-times placed their plates on their knees. The cellar being perfectly dark, candles were lighted at meal-times. The reason for keeping so many persons in this subterranean abode was to lessen the chance of their being shot in any upper apartment. Of one torment, the flies, every person complained bitterly who was shut up in the Residency enclosure on those fearfully hot days. Mr Rees says: ‘They daily increased to such an extent that we at last began to feel life irksome, more on their account than from any other of our numerous troubles. In the day, flies; at night, mosquitoes. But the latter were bearable; the former intolerable. Lucknow had always been noted for its flies; but at no time had they been known to be so troublesome. The mass of putrid matter that was allowed to accumulate, the rains, the commissariat stores, the hospital, had attracted these insects in incredible numbers. The Egyptians could not possibly have been more molested than we were by this pest. They swarmed in millions, and though we blew daily some hundreds of thousands into the air, this seemed to make no diminution in their numbers; the ground was still black with them, and the tables were literally covered with these cursed flies. We could not sleep in the day on account of them. We could scarcely eat. Our beef, of which we got a tolerably small quantity every day, was usually studded with them; and when I ate my miserable boiled lentil-soup and unleavened bread, a number of scamps flew into my mouth, or tumbled into and floated about in my plate.’

Let us proceed, and watch the military operations of the month of August.

The fifth week of the siege opened with the same scenes as before, deepened in intensity. The enemy, it is true, did not attack with more vigour, but the defenders were gradually weakened in every one of their resources – except courage, and the resolution to bear all rather than yield to the enemy. Colonel Tytler’s letter had afforded hope that the relieving column under Havelock would arrive at Lucknow before the end of July; but when the 30th and 31st had passed, and the 1st and 2d of August had passed also, then were their hopes cruelly dashed. It required all the energy of Brigadier Inglis to keep up the spirits of himself and his companions under the disappointment. He did not know, and was destined to remain for some time in ignorance, that Havelock had been forced to return to Cawnpore, owing to the losses suffered by his heroic little band. About the beginning of the month, great numbers of additional rebel sepoys entered Lucknow, increasing the phalanx opposed to the British. They began a new mine near Sago’s house, and another near the Brigade Mess, in which many of the ladies and children were sheltered; and it required all the activity of the officers to frustrate these underground enemies. The rebels planted a 24-pounder near the iron bridge, to batter the church and the Residency. On one day a shell burst in a room of the Begum’s Kothee, where Lieutenant James and Mr Lawrence were ill in bed, but without injuring them; and on another a soldier was shot dead by a cannon-ball in the very centre room of the hospital. Inglis tried, but tried in vain, to get any one to take a letter, even so small as to go into a quill, to Havelock; the enterprise was so perilous, that the offer of a great reward fell powerless. Thus reduced to his own resources, he began anxiously to count up his stores and supplies: he protected the powder-magazine with heavy beams, laden with a great thickness of earth; and he got the civilians to labour at the earthworks, and to watch the batteries, for nearly all his engineers were ill. One engineer-officer, Captain Fulton, was happily spared from illness longer than most of the others; and he laboured unremittingly and most skilfully to baffle the enemy’s mining by countermining: he organised a body of sappers from among the humbler members of the garrison, and begged every one who did sentry-duty at night to listen for and give information concerning any underground sounds that denoted the driving of galleries or mines by the enemy. One of the ladies, Mrs Dorin, was among the number who this week fell from the shots of the enemy. An event of this kind was peculiarly distressing to all; an officer learns to brave death, but he is inexpressibly saddened when he sees tender women falling near him by bullets.

The sixth week arrived. The brigadier, by redoubling his offers, did at length succeed in obtaining the aid of a native, who started on the dangerous duty of conveying a small note to General Havelock at Cawnpore. This done, he renewed his anxious superintendence of matters within the enclosure. The enemy mounted on the top of Johannes’ house, and thence kept up a very annoying fire on the Brigade Mess. They also recommenced mining near the Redan. On the 8th of August the garrison could hear and see much marching and countermarching of troops within the city, without being able to divine its cause; they fondly hoped, when the booming of guns was heard, that Havelock was approaching. This hope was, however, speedily and bitterly dashed; for on the following day a great force of rebels was seen to approach from the direction of the cantonment, cross the river, and join the main body of the insurgents within Lucknow. This was a bad omen, for it prefigured an increase in the number, frequency, and varieties of attack. On the 10th the enemy succeeded in exploding one of their mines opposite Johannes’ house; it blew up sixty feet of palisades and earthen defences. Under cover of this surprise, and of a tremendous firing of guns, the enemy pushed forward into all the buildings near the Cawnpore Battery and Johannes’ house; but they encountered so steady and determined a resistance that they were beaten at all points. Near Sago’s house, too, they fired another mine, which blew up two soldiers; but here, in like manner, they were repulsed after a fierce contest. This explosion was accompanied or attended by an incident almost as strange as that connected with the soldier at Muchee Bhowan; the two men were blown into the air, but both escaped with their lives; one fell within the enclosure, slightly bruised, but not seriously injured; the other, falling into an open road between the enclosure and the enemy, jumped up when he found himself unhurt, and clambered over a wall or through the breach, untouched by the storm of bullets sent after him. On the same day there were other attacks on Innes’s, Anderson’s, and Gubbins’s houses or garrisons. Of the attacks on the Brigade Mess, the Cawnpore Battery, and Anderson’s house, Brigadier Inglis afterwards thus spoke in his dispatch: ‘The enemy sprang a mine close to the Brigade Mess, which entirely destroyed our defences for the space of twenty feet, and blew in a great portion of the outside wall of the house occupied by Mr Schilling’s garrison. On the dust clearing away, a breach appeared through which a regiment could have advanced in perfect order, and a few of the enemy came on with the utmost determination; but they were met with such a withering flank-fire of musketry from the officers and men holding the top of the Brigade Mess, that they beat a speedy retreat, leaving the more adventurous of their numbers lying on the crest of the breach. While this operation was going on, another large body advanced on the Cawnpore Battery, and succeeded in locating themselves for a few minutes in the ditch. They were, however, dislodged by hand-grenades. At Captain Anderson’s post, they also came boldly forward with scaling-ladders, which they planted against the wall; but here, as elsewhere, they were met with the most indomitable resolution; and the leaders being slain, the rest fled, leaving the ladders, and retreated to their batteries and loopholed defences, whence they kept up for the rest of the day an unusually heavy cannonade and musketry fire.’ All the attacks, it is true, were frustrated, but only by fearful labour on the part of the defenders; every man was worn down by exhaustion on this terrible day. A message or rather a rumour was received, obscure in its purport, but conveying the impression that Havelock had been baffled in his attempt to reach Lucknow: news that produced very great despondency in the garrison, among those who had become sick at heart as well as in body. When a cannon-ball rushed along and demolished the verandah of the Residency or chief-commissioner’s house, it could not do less than add to the trepidation of the numerous families domiciled within the walls of that building, already brought into a state of nervous agitation by the incessant noises and dangers. Death and wounds were as rife as ever during this week. A shot broke the leg of Ensign Studdy while breakfasting in the Residency; Captain Waterman was wounded; Lieutenant Bryce died of a wound received some days earlier; Major Anderson, chief-engineer, died of dysentery and over-fatigue, bringing grief to the whole garrison for the loss of a most valuable and intrepid officer. These were the chief names: those of humbler rank who fell to rise no more were too many to be officially recorded; they were hastily buried in the church-yard, and soon driven from the memories of those who had no time to dwell on the past.

Up to the day when the seventh week of the siege opened, there had been twenty letters sent for succour, first by Sir Henry Lawrence, and then by Brigadier Inglis; and to only one of these had a direct reply been received. Only a few of them, indeed, had reached their destinations; and of these few, a reply from one alone safely passed through all the perils between Cawnpore and Lucknow. As has been already said, this reply was not such as to comfort the British residents; they had to rouse themselves to a continuance of the same kind of exertions as before. The enemy did not give them one day, scarcely one hour, of rest. On the 12th of August so fierce an attack was made on the Cawnpore Battery, that all the defenders were forced to shield themselves from the balls and bullets – still remaining at hand, however, in case a closer assault were attempted. It being found, too, that a mine was being run by the enemy in the direction of Sago’s house, some of the officers made a daring sortie to examine this mine, much to their own peril. Then commenced, as before, a system of countermining, each party of miners being able to hear the other working in an adjoining gallery; it became a struggle which should blow the other up; the British succeeded, and shattered all the works of the enemy at that spot. Nothing in the whole progress of the siege was more extraordinary than this perpetual mining and countermining. While the infantry and artillery on both sides were at their usual deadly work in the open air, the Sappers and Miners were converting the ground beneath into a honey-comb of dark galleries and passages – the enemy attempting to blow up the defence-works, and the defenders attempting to anticipate this by blowing up the enemy. Whenever the firing by the mutineers slackened in any material degree, the defenders took advantage of the opportunity to make new sand-bags for batteries and earthworks, in place of the old ones which had been destroyed. The 15th of August was a white day within the enclosure; no burial took place. It was also rendered notable by the receipt of a letter from General Havelock – a letter telling of inability to afford present succour, and therefore a mournful letter; but still it was better than none, seeing that it pointed out to all the necessity for continued exertions in the common cause. Now came the time when a great increase of discomfort was in store for the numerous persons who had been accommodated in the Residency, the official house of the chief-commissioner. The building had been so shaken by shells and balls that it was no longer secure; and the inmates were removed to other quarters. On the 18th a terrible commotion took place; the enemy exploded a mine under the Sikh Square or barrack, and made a breach of thirty feet in the defence-boundary of the enclosure. Instantly all hands were set to work; boxes, planks, doors, beams, were brought from various quarters to stop up the gap; while muskets and pistols were brought to bear upon the assailants. Not only did the gallant fellows within the enclosure repel the enemy, but they made a sortie, and blew up some of the exterior buildings which were in inconvenient proximity. By the explosion on this day, Captain Orr, Lieutenant Meecham, and other officers and men, were hurled into the air, but with less serious results than might have been expected; several, however, were suffocated by the débris which fell upon them.

By the eighth week the garrison had become in a strange way accustomed to bullets and balls; that is, though always in misery of some kind or other, the report of firearms had been rendered so thoroughly familiar to them, through every day and night’s experience, that it was a matter of course to hear missiles whiz past the ear. Mr Rees, speaking of his daily movements from building to building in the enclosure, says: ‘At one time a bullet passed through my hat; at another I escaped being shot dead by one of the enemy’s best riflemen, by an unfortunate soldier passing unexpectedly before me, and receiving the wound through the temples instead; at another I moved off from a place where in less than a twinkling of an eye afterwards a musket-bullet stuck in the wall; at another, again, I was covered with dust and pieces of brick by a round-shot that struck the wall not two inches away from me; at another, again, a shell burst a couple of yards away from me, killing an old woman, and wounding a native boy and a native cook.’ Every day was marked by some vicissitudes. On the 20th, the enemy opened a tremendous cannonading, which knocked down a guard-room over the Mess-house, and lessened the number of places from which the garrison could obtain a look-out. The enemy were also on that day detected in the attempt to run new mines under the Cawnpore Battery and the Bailey guard. This led to a brilliant sortie, headed by Captain M’Cabe and Lieutenant Browne, which resulted not only in the spiking of two of the enemy’s guns, but also in the blowing up of Johannes’ house, which had been such a perpetual source of annoyance to the garrison. It was one of the best day’s work yet accomplished, and cheered the poor, hard-worked fellows for a time. Yet they had enough to trouble them; the Cawnpore and Redan batteries were almost knocked to pieces, and needed constant repair; the judicial office became so riddled with shot that the women and children had to be removed from it; the enemy’s sharpshooters were deadly accurate in their aim; their miners began new mines as fast as the old ones were destroyed or rendered innoxious; and Inglis’s little band was rapidly thinning.

Another week arrived, the last in August, and the ninth of this perilous life in the fortified enclosure. The days exhibited variations in the degree of danger, but not one really bright gleam cheered the hearts of the garrison. An advantage had been gained by the successful mining and blowing up of Johannes’ house, once the residence of a merchant of that name; it had been a post from which an African eunuch belonging to the late king’s court had kept up a most fatal and accurate fire into the enclosure, bringing down more Europeans than any other person in the enemy’s ranks. An advantage was thus gained, it is certain; but there were miseries in abundance in other quarters. Gubbins’s house had become so shot-riddled, that the ladies and children domiciled there were too much imperiled to remain longer; they were removed to other buildings, adding to the number of inmates in rooms already sadly overcrowded. Among the natives in the enclosure, desertions frequently took place; a fact at which no one could reasonably be surprised, but which nevertheless greatly added to the labours of those on whom devolved the defence of the place. Distressingly severe as those labours had all along been, they were now doubly so; for the enemy erected a new battery opposite the Bailey guard, and commenced new mines in all directions. As the defenders could seldom venture on a sortie to examine the enemy’s works of attack, they were driven to the construction of ‘listening-galleries’ – underground passages where the sound of the enemy’s mining picks and shovels could be heard. And then would be renewed the digging of countermines, and a struggle to determine which party should be the first to blow up the other. The Mohurrum or Mohammedan festival commenced this week; a period in which fanatical Mussulmans are so fierce against all who dissent from their faith, that the garrison apprehended a new onslaught with more force than ever; this fear passed away, however, for though there was much ‘tom-tom’ processioning and buffalo-horn bugling in the city, the attacks on the enclosure did not differ much from their usual character. Another letter was received from Havelock, which gave joy to men who found that they were not wholly forgotten by friends in the outer world; but when they heard that a period of at least three weeks longer must elapse before he could possibly reach them, their overcharged hearts sank again, and deep despondency existed for a time among them.

During this month of August, the women and children, the sick and wounded, of course suffered much more terribly than in the previous month of July. Every kind of peril and discomfort had increased in severity; every means of succour and solace had diminished in quantity. Death struck down many; disease and wounds laid low a still greater number; and those who remained were a prey to carking cares, which wore down both mind and body. Those who, in a Christian country, are accustomed to pay the last token of respect to departed friends by decent funeral ceremonies, were often pained by their disability to do so in the Lucknow enclosure, under the straitened circumstances of their position. The Rev. Mr Polehampton, after working day and night in his kindly offices among the sick and wounded, was at length himself struck down by cholera; and then came the mournful question, whether he could have a coffin and a separate grave. The writer of the Diary, wife of the clergyman who succeeded Mr Polehampton in his duties as a pastor, says that her husband read the funeral-service over the dead body in presence of the mourning widow, on the day and in the room where the death took place, before removal for instant interment. ‘She (the widow) was extremely anxious he should have a coffin, a wish it seemed impossible to gratify; but – instituted a search, and found one stored away with some old boxes under the staircase in the hospital; and he also had a separate grave dug for him. Since the siege, the bodies have hitherto always been buried several in the same grave, and sewn up in their bedding, as there are no people and no time to make coffins.’ In their troubled state of feeling, vexations affected the different members of the imprisoned community more acutely than would have been the case at other times. The plague of flies can be adverted to in a half-laughing manner by a man in health; but in the Lucknow enclosure it was a real plague, a source of exquisite misery, against which more complaints were uttered than almost anything else. There were also troublesome and painful boils on the person, brought on by high temperature and insufficient diet and medicines. Whatever might be the amount of care taken, bullocks were frequently killed by the shot of the enemy; and as animals so dying were not fit for human food, it became necessary to bury the carcasses at once. A frightful duty this was, mostly performed (as has already been stated) at night by officers, whose few hours of possible sleep were cut short by this revolting sort of labour. No one could leave the enclosure, except native servants determined on escape; not an inch of ground belonged to the British beyond the limits of the intrenched position; and therefore whatever had to be put out of sight – dead bodies of human beings, carcasses of bullocks and horses, garbage and refuse of every kind – could only so be treated by being buried underground in the few open spots between the buildings. And this, too, in the August of an Indian climate, when even the best sanitary arrangements fail to remove offensive odours. The officers, in all their letters and diaries, spoke of this portion of their labours as being most distressing; while the poor women, cabined by dozens together in single rooms, yearned, but yearned in vain, for the breathing of a little air free from impurities. They dared not move out, for the balls and bullets of the enemy were whizzing across and into every open spot. Sometimes an 18-pounder shot would burst into a room where two or three of them were dressing, or where a larger number were at meals. In some of the houses or ‘garrisons,’ where many ladies formed one community, they used to take it in turn to keep awake for hourly watches during the night; one of them said in a letter: ‘I don’t exactly know what is gained by these night-watchings – except that we are all very nervous, and are expecting some dreadful catastrophe to happen.’ The little children died off rapidly, their maladies being more than could be met by the resources at hand; and those who bore up against the afflictions were much emaciated. The husbands and fathers, worn out with daily fatigue and nightly watching, had little solace to afford their families; and thus the women and children were left to pass the weary hours as best they could. A few little creatures, ‘siege-babies,’ as their poor mothers called them, came into the world during this stormy period; and with them each day was a struggle for life. When the native servants one by one escaped, the discomforts of the English women of course underwent much aggravation; and when the house or bungalow of Mr Gubbins became untenable through shot and bullet, the difficulty was immense of finding shelter elsewhere; every place was already overcrowded. Much additional misery befell the officers and men from this fact – that the commissariat quarter, offensive to every sense on account of the organic accumulations inseparable from the slaughtering and cutting up of animals – was one of the weakest parts in the whole enclosure, and required to be guarded at all hours by armed men, who loathed the spot for the reason just mentioned. The chaplain, too, found the church-yard getting into such a horrible state that he dared not go near the graves to read the funeral-service. Mr Rees mentions an instance to illustrate the anxieties of those who, willing to suffer themselves, were almost crushed by witnessing the privations of those dear to them. ‘He’ (mentioning one of the officers) ‘had at first told me of his wife being feverish and quite overcome with the abominable life she had to lead. And then he talked to me of his boy Herbert; how he was attacked with cholera, and feared he was very ill; and how, instead of being able to watch by his bedside, he had been all night digging at Captain Fulton’s mine; and then how his child next night was convulsed, and what little hope of his darling being spared to them – how heart-rending the boy’s sufferings were to his parents’ feelings – how even his (the father’s) iron constitution was at last giving way – how he had neither medicine, nor attendance, nor proper food for the child – and how the blowing up of the mine so close to his sick child had frightened him. And then to-day he told me, with tears in his eyes, that yesterday – the anniversary of his birthday – his poor child was called away. “God’s will be done,” said he; “but it is terrible to think of. At night we dug a hole in the garden, and there, wrapped in a blanket, we laid him.”’ This case is not singular; many another poor parent’s heart was thus torn.