The position which bears and will bear to all time the title of the Residency of Lucknow, is an elevated plateau of land, irregular in surface, of which the highest point is occupied by the Residency building, while the area around was studded irregularly with buildings, chiefly the houses of the principal civilian officials of the station. When Campbell brought away the garrison in November 1857 it lapsed into the hands of the mutineers, who held it till his final occupation of the city and its surroundings in March of the following year. They pulled down not a few of the already shattered buildings, and left their fell imprint on the spot in an atrociously ghastly way by desecrating the graves in which brave hands had laid our dead country-people and flinging the exhumed corpses into the Goomtee. When India once more became settled the Residency, its commemorative features uninterfered with, was laid out as a garden and flowers and shrubs now grow on soil once wet with the blood of heroes. The débris has been removed or dispersed; the shattered buildings are prevented from crumbling farther; tablets bearing the names of the different positions and places of interest are let into the walls; and it is possible, by exploring the place map in hand, to identify all the features of the defence. The avenue from the Baileyguard gate rises with a steep slope to the Residency building. On either side of the approach and hard by the gate, are the blistered and shattered remnants of two large houses; that on the right is the banqueting house which was used as the hospital during the siege; that on the left was Dr. Fayrer's house. The banqueting house is a mere shell, riven everywhere with shot and pitted over by musket-bullets as if it had suffered from smallpox. The ground-floor has escaped with less damage but the banqueting hall itself has been wholly wrecked by the persistent fire which the rebels showered upon it, and to which, notwithstanding the mattresses and sandbags with which the windows were blocked, several poor fellows fell victims as they lay wounded on their cots. Dr. Fayrer's house is equally a battered ruin. In its first floor, roofless and forlorn, its front torn open by shot and the pillars of its windows jagged into fantastic fragments, is the veranda in which Sir Henry Lawrence, 4th July 1857, died, exposed to fire to the very last. At the top of the slope of the avenue and on the left front of the Residency building as we approach it—on what, indeed, was once the lawn—has been raised an artificial mound, its slopes covered with flowering shrubs, its summit bearing the monumental obelisk on the pedestal of which is the terse, appropriate inscription: "In memory of Major-General Sir Henry Lawrence and the brave men who fell in defence of the Residency. Si monumentum quaeris Circumspice!" Beyond this lies the scathed and blighted ruin of the Residency House, once a large and imposing structure, now so utterly wrecked and shivered that one wonders how the crumbling reddish-gray walls are kept erect. The veranda was battered down and much of the front of the building lies bodily open, the structure being supported on the battered and distorted pillars assisted by great balks of wood. Entering by the left wing I pass down a winding stair into the bowels of the earth till I reach the spacious and lofty vaults or tykhana under the building. Here, the place affording comparative safety, lived immured the women of the garrison, the soldiers' wives, half-caste females, the wives of the meaner civilians and their children. The poor creatures were seldom allowed to come up to the surface, lest they should come in the way of the shot which constantly lacerated the whole area, and few visitors were allowed access to them. Veritably they were in a dungeon. Provisions were lowered down to them from the window orifices near the roof of the vaulting, and there were days when the firing was so heavy that orders were given to them not even to rise from their beds on the floor. For shot occasionally found a way even into the tykhana; you may see the holes it made in penetrating. The miserables were billeted off ten in a room, and there they lived, without sweepers, baths, dhobies, or any of the comforts which the climate makes necessities. Here in these dungeons children were born, only for the most part to die. Ascending another staircase I pass through some rooms in which lived (and died) some of the ladies of the garrison, and passing from the left wing by a shattered corridor am able to look up into the room in which Sir Henry Lawrence received his death-wound. Access to it is impossible by reason of the tottering condition of the structure; and turning away I clamber up the worn staircase in the shot-riven tower on the summit of which still stands the flagstaff on which were hoisted the signals with which the garrison were wont to communicate with the Alumbagh. The walls of the staircase and the flat roof of the tower are scratched and written all over with the names of visitors; many of the names are those of natives, but more are those of British soldiers, who have occasionally added a piece of their mind in characteristically strong language.
I set out on a pilgrimage under the still easily traceable contour of the intrenchment. Passing "Sam Lawrence's Battery" above what was the water-gate, I traverse the projecting tongue at the end of which stood the "Redan Battery" whose fire swept the river face up to the iron bridge. Returning, and passing the spot where "Evans's Battery" stood, I find myself in the churchyard in a slight depression of the ground. Of the church, which was itself a defensive post, not one stone remains on another and the mutineers hacked to pieces the ground of the churchyard. The ground is now neatly enclosed and ornamentally planted and is studded with many monuments, few of which speak the truth when they profess to cover the dust of those whom they commemorate. There are the regimental monuments of the 5th Madras Fusiliers, the 84th (360 men besides officers), the Royal Artillery, the 90th (a long list of officers and 271 men). The monument of the 1st Madras Fusiliers bears the names of Neill, Stephenson, Renaud, and Arnold, and commemorates a loss of 352 men. There is a monument to Mr. Polehampton the exemplary chaplain, and hard by a plain slab bears the inscription, "Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty; may the Lord have mercy on his soul!" words dictated by himself on his deathbed. Other monuments commemorate Captain Graham of the Bengal Cavalry and two children; Mr. Fairhurst the Roman Catholic chaplain; Major Banks; Captain Fulton of the 32nd who earned the title of "Defender of Lucknow;" Lucas, the travelling Irish gentleman who served as a volunteer and fell in the last sortie; Captain Becher; Captain Moorsom; poor Bensley Thornhill and his young daughter; "Mrs. Elizabeth Arne, burnt with a shell-ball during the siege;" Lieutenant Cunliffe; Mr. Ommaney the Judicial Commissioner; and others. The nameless hillocks of poor Jack Private are plentiful, for here were buried many of those who fell in the final capture; and there are children's graves. Interments take place still. I saw a freshly-made grave; but only those are entitled to a last resting-place here who were among the beleaguered during the long defence. I have seen the medal for the defence of Lucknow on the breast of a man who was a child in arms at the time of the siege, and such an one would have the right to claim interment in this doubly hallowed ground. From the churchyard I pass out along the narrow neck to that forlorn-hope post, "Innes's Garrison," and along the western face of the intrenchment by the sides of the sheep-house and the slaughter-house, to Gubbins's post. The mere foundations of the house are visible which the stout civilian so gallantly defended, and the famous tree, gradually pruned to a mere stump by the enemy's fire, is no longer extant. Along the southern face of the position there are no buildings which are not ruined. Sikh Square, the Brigade Mess House, and the Martinière boys' post, are alike represented by fragmentary gray walls shivered with shot and shored up here and there by beams. The rooms of the Begum Kothi near the centre of the position, are still laterally entire but roofless. The walls of this structure are exceptionally thick and here many of the ladies of the garrison were quartered. All around the Residency position the native houses which at the time of the siege crowded close up on the intrenchment, are now destroyed; and indeed the native town has been curtailed into comparatively small dimensions and is entirely separated from the area in which the houses of the station are built.
Quitting the Residency I drive westward by the river side, over the site of the Captan Bazaar, past also that huge fortified heap the Muchee Bawn, till I reach the beautiful enclosure in which the great Imambara stands. This majestic structure—part temple, part convent, part palace, and now part fortress—dominates the whole terrain, and from its lofty flat roof one looks down on the plain where the weekly hât or market is being held, on the gardens and mansions across the river, and southward upon the dense mass of houses which constitute the native city. Sentries promenade the battlements of the Muchee Bawn, and the Imambara—an apartment to which for space and height I know none in Europe comparable—is now used as an arsenal, where are stored the great siege guns which William Peel plied with so great skill and gallantry. Just outside the Imambara, on the edge of the maidan between it and the Moosabagh, I come on a little railed churchyard where rest a few British soldiers who fell during Lord Clyde's final operations in this direction. Then, with a sweep across the plain to the south and by a slight ascent, I reach the gate of the city which opens into the Chowk or principal street—the street traversed in disguise by the dauntless Kavanagh when he went out from the garrison to convey information and afford guidance to Sir Colin Campbell on his first advance. The gatehouse is held by a strong force of native policemen, armed as if they were soldiers; and as I pass the guard I stand in the Chowk itself, in the midst of a throng of gaily clad male pedestrians, women in chintz trousers, laden donkeys, multitudinous children, and still more multitudinous stinks. All down both sides the fronts of the lower stories are open, and in the recesses sit merchants displaying paltry jewelry, slippers, pipes, turban cloths, and Manchester stuffs of the gaudiest patterns. The main street of Lucknow has been called "The Street of Silver," but I could find little among its jewelry either of silver or of gold. The first floors all have balconies, and on these sit draped, barefooted women of Rahab's profession. The women of Lucknow are fairer and handsomer, and the men bolder and more stalwart, than those in Bengal, and it takes no great penetration to discern that Lucknow is still ruled by fear and not by love.
It remained for me still to investigate the scenes of the route by which Lord Clyde came in on both his advances; but to do justice to these would demand separate articles. Let me begin the hasty sketch at the Dilkoosha Palace, two miles and more away to the east of the Residency; for on both occasions the Dilkoosha was Clyde's base. Wajid Ali's twenty-foot wall has now given place to an earthen embankment surrounding a beautiful pleasure park, and there are now smooth green slopes instead of the dense forest through which Clyde's soldiers marched on their turning movement. On a swell in the midst of the park, commanding a view of the fantastic architecture of the Martinière down by the tank, stands the gaunt ruin of the once trim and dainty Dilkoosha Palace or rather garden-house. From one of the pepper-box turrets up there Lord Clyde directed the attack on the Martinière on his ultimate operation; and here it was that, as Dr. Russell tells us, a round shot dispersed his staff on the adjacent leads. After quietude was restored the Dilkoosha was the headquarters for a time of Sir Hope Grant, but now it has been allowed to fall into decay although the garden in the rear of it is prettily kept up. On the reverse slope behind the Dilkoosha was the camp in one of the tents of which Havelock died. We drive down the gentle slope once traversed at a rushing double by the Black Watch on their way to carry the Martinière, past the great tank out of the centre of which rises the tall column to the memory of Claude Martine, and reach the entrance of the fantastic building which he built, in which he was buried, and which bears his name. We see at the angle of the northern wing the slope up which the gun was run which played so heavily on the Dilkoosha up on the wooded knoll there. The Martinière is now, as it was before the Mutiny, a college for European boys, and the young fellows are playing on the terraces. Grotesque stone statues are in niches and along the tops of the balconies; you may see on them the marks of the bullets which the honest fellows of the Black Watch fired at them, taking them for Pandies. I go down into a vault and see the tomb of Claude Martine; but it is empty, for the mutineers desecrated his grave and scattered his bones to the winds of heaven. Then I make for the roof, through the dormitories of the boys and past fantastic stone griffins and lions and Gorgons, till I reach the top of the tower and touch the flagstaff from which, during the relief time, was given the answering signal to that hoisted on the tower of the Residency. I stand in the niches where the mutineer marksmen used to sit with their hookahs and take pot shots at the Dilkoosha. I look down to the eastward on the Goomtee, and note the spot where Outram crossed on that flank movement which would have been very much more successful than it was had he been permitted to drive it home. To the north-east beyond the topes is the battle-ground of Chinhut, where Lawrence received so terrible a reverse at the beginning of the siege. Due north is the Kookrail viaduct which Outram cleared with the Rifles and the 79th, and in whose vicinity Jung Bahadour, the crafty and bloodthirsty generalissimo of Nepaul, "co-operated" by a demonstration which never became anything more. And to the west there lie stretched out before me the domes, minarets, and spires of Lucknow, rising above the foliage in which their bases are hidden, and the routes of Clyde in the relief and capture. The rays of the afternoon sun are stirring into colour the dusky gray of the Secunderbagh and of the Nuddun Rusool, or "Grave of the Prophet," used as a powder magazine by the rebels. Below me, on the lawn of the Martinière, is the big gun—one of Claude Martine's casting—which did the rebels so much service at the other angle of the Martinière and which was spiked at last by two men of Peel's naval brigade, who swam the Goomtee for the purpose. That little enclosure slightly to the left surrounds "all that can die" of that strange mixture of high spirit, cool daring, and weak principle, the famous chief of Hodson's Horse. By Hodson's side lies Captain da Costa of the 56th N.I., attached to Brazier's Sikhs. Of this officer is told that, having lost many relatives in the butchery of Cawnpore, he joined the regiment likeliest to be in the front of the Lucknow fighting, and fell by one of the first shots fired in the assault on the Kaiser-bagh.
Descending from the Martinière tower I traverse the park to the westward passing the grave of Captain Otway Mayne, cross the dry canal along which are still visible the heaps of earth which mark the stupendous first line of the rebels' defences, and bending to the left reach the Secunderbagh. This famous place was a pleasure garden surrounded with a lofty wall with turrets at the angles and a castellated gateway. The interior garden is now waste and forlorn, the rank grass growing breast-high in the corners where the slaughter was heaviest. Here in this little enclosure, not half the size of the garden of Bedford Square, 2000 Sepoys died the death at the hands of the 93rd, the 53rd, and the 4th Punjaubees. Their common grave is under the low mound on the other side of the road. The loopholes stand as they were left by the mutineers when our fellows came bursting in through the ragged breach made in the reverse side from the main entrance by Peel's guns. Farther on—that is, nearer to the Residency—I come to the Shah Nujeef, with its strong exterior wall enclosing the domed temple in its centre. It is still easy to trace the marks of the breach made in the angle in the wall by Peel's battering guns, and the tree is still standing up which Salmon, Southwell, and Harrison climbed in response to his proffer of the Victoria Cross. Opposite the Shah Nujeef white girls are playing on the lawn of that castellated building, for the Koorsheyd Munzil, on the top of which there was hoisted the British flag in the face of a feu d'enfer, is now a seminary for the daughters of Europeans. A little beyond, on the plain in front of the Motee Mahal, is the spot where Campbell met Outram and Havelock—a spot which, methinks, might well be marked by a monument; and after this I lose my reckoning by reason of the extent of the demolition, and am forced to resort to guesswork as to the precise localities.
THE MILITARY COURAGE OF ROYALTY
Writing of the late Alexander III. of Russia, a foreign author has recently permitted himself to observe: "Marvellous personal courage is not a striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs as it was of the English Tudors." It will be conceded that periods materially govern the conditions under which sovereigns and their royal relatives have found opportunities for proving their personal courage. The Tudor dynasty had ended before the Romanoff dynasty began. It is true, indeed, that the ending of the former with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 occurred only a few years before the foundation of the latter by the election to the Tzarship of Michael Feodorovitz Romanoff in 1612. But of the five sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty it happened that only one, Henry VII., the first monarch of that dynasty, found or made an opportunity for the display of marked—scarcely perhaps of "marvellous"—personal courage; and thus the selection of the Tudor dynasty by the writer referred to as furnishing a contrasting illustration in the matter of personal courage to that of the Romanoffs was not particularly fortunate. Henry VIII. was only once in action; he shared in the skirmish known as the "Battle of the Spurs," because of the precipitate flight of the French horse. Edward VI. died at the age of sixteen, and the two remaining sovereigns of the dynasty were women, of whom it is true that Elizabeth was a strong and vigorous ruler, but in the nature of things had no opportunity for showing "marvellous personal courage." Henry VII. literally found his crown in the heart of the mêlée on Bosworth field, it matters not which of the alternative stories is correct, that he himself killed Richard, or that Richard was killed in the act of striking him a desperate blow. But Henry at Bosworth in 1485 still belonged to the days of chivalry—to an era in which monarchs were also armour-clad knights, who headed charges in person and gave and took with spear, sword, and battle-axe. Long before Peter the Great, more than two centuries after Bosworth, foamed at the mouth with rage and hacked with his sword at his panicstricken troops fleeing from the field of Narva on that winter day of 1700, the face of warfare had altered and the métier of the commander, were he sovereign or were he subject, had undergone a radical change.
Of a family of the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but, save as regards one exception, there is no assurance of a continuous inheritance of mental attributes. What a contrast is there between Frederick the Great and his father; between George III. and his successor; between the present Emperor of Austria and his hapless son; between the genial, wistful, and well-intentioned Alexander II. of Russia and the not less well-intentioned but narrow-minded and despotic sovereign who succeeded him! But there may be reserved one exception to the absence of assurance of inherited mental attributes—one mental feature in which identity takes the place of dissimilarity, and even of actual contrast. And that feature—that inherited characteristic of a race whose progenitors happily possessed it—is personal courage.
Take, for example, the Hohenzollerns. One need not hark back to Carlyle's original Conrad, the seeker of his fortune who tramped down from the ancestral cliff-castle on his way to take service under Barbarossa. Before and since the "Grosse Kurfurst" there has been no Hohenzollern who has not been a brave man. He himself was the hero of Fehrbellin. His son, the first king of the line, Carlyle's "Expensive Herr," was "valiant in action" during the third war of Louis XIV. The rugged Frederick William, father of Frederick the Great, had his own tough piece of war against the volcanic Charles XII. of Sweden and did a stout stroke of hard fighting at Malplaquet. Of Fritz himself the world has full note. Bad, sensual, debauched Hohenzollern as was his successor, Frederick the Fat, he had fought stoutly in his youth-time under his illustrious uncle. His son, Frederick William III., overthrown by Napoleon who called him a "corporal," did good soldierly work in the "War of Liberation" and fought his way to Paris in 1814. His eldest son, Frederick William IV., the vague, benevolent dreamer whom Punch used to call "King Clicquot" and who died of softening of the brain, even he, too, as a lad had distinguished himself in the "War of Liberation" and in the fighting during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the real maker of the German Empire on the quid facit per alium facit per se axiom, he died a veteran of many wars. He was not seventeen when he won the Iron Cross by a service of conspicuous gallantry under heavy fire. He took his chances in the bullet and shell fire at Königgrätz, and again on the afternoon of Gravelotte. Not a Hohenzollern of them all but shared as became their race in the dangers of the great war of 1870-71; even Prince George, the music composer, the only non-soldier of the family, took the field. William's noble son, whose premature death neither Germany nor England has yet ceased to deplore, took the lead of one army; his nephew Prince Frederick Charles, a great commander and a brilliant soldier, was the leader of another. One of his brothers, Prince Albert the elder, made the campaign as cavalry chief; whose son, Prince Albert junior, now a veteran Field-Marshal, commanded a brigade of guard-cavalry with a skill and daring not wholly devoid of recklessness. Another brother, Prince Charles, the father of the "Red Prince," made the campaign with the royal headquarters; Prince Adalbert, a cousin of the sovereign and head of the Prussian Navy, had his horse shot under him on the battlefield of Gravelotte.
The trait of personal courage has markedly characterised the House of Hanover. As King of England George I. did no fighting, but before he reached that position he had distinguished himself in war not a little; against the Danes and Swedes in 1700 and in high command in the war of the Spanish succession from 1701 to 1709. His successor, while yet young, had displayed conspicuous valour in the battle of Oudenarde, and later in life at Dettingen; and he was the last British monarch who took part in actual warfare. Cumberland had no meritorious attribute save that of personal courage, but that virtue in him was undeniable. At Dettingen he was wounded in the forefront of the battle; at Fontenoy the "martial boy" was ever in the heart of the fiercest fire, fighting at "a spiritual white heat." His grand-nephew the Duke of York was an unfortunate soldier, but his personal courage was unquestioned. In the present reign a cousin and a son of the sovereign have done good service in the field; and that venerable lady herself in situations of personal danger has consistently maintained the calm courage of her race.