This settlement had a specious aspect of some measure of permanency. It might have lasted longer if the state of his health had enabled Henry Lawrence to remain at his post; but it was unsound at the core, for a valiant and turbulent race does not bow the neck submissively after a single disastrous campaign on its frontier. But the Punjaub seemed in a state of unruffled peace when Colin Campbell shook hands with Henry Lawrence in the Residency of its capital. In those days the familiar sobriquet of "Kubhur-dar," of which the English is "Take care!", had not attached itself to him; but Campbell, even when his Highland blood was aflame in the rapture of actual battle, was never either reckless or careless; and the motto "Be Mindful," which he chose for his coat of arms when he was made a peer, was simply a condensation of the principles of cool wisdom and shrewd caution on which he acted through life. A strong Sikh force, he found, was located in and about Lahore, and the population of the city had a name for turbulence. In order to inform himself as to how the troops were posted in relation to the defences of the city, as well against an interior as an exterior attack, one of his earliest concerns was to make a careful inspection of the positions along with the responsible engineer. In choosing his residence he held it to be his duty to have it in the proximity of his troops. Soon after his arrival there was a fête in the Shalimar gardens to which all the garrison had been invited, but he allowed only half of the officers of his command to be absent from their men, giving as his reason that "if the Sikhs wanted to murder all the officers, they could not have a better chance than when these were gathered four miles away from their men, enjoying themselves at a fête." In the measures of precaution which he adopted he had the approval of Henry Lawrence and of Sir Charles Napier, to the latter of whom he wrote on the subject. Napier expressed himself in his trenchant fashion:—"I am delighted at all your precautions against surprise. In India we who take these pains are reckoned cowards. Be assured that English officers think it a fine dashing thing to be surprised—to take no precautions. Formerly it was an axiom in war that no man was fit to be a commander who permitted himself to be surprised; but things are on a more noble footing now!"
In the end of 1847 Henry Lawrence left Lahore and went home to England in the same ship with Lord Hardinge. A week before they sailed from Calcutta Hardinge's successor, Lord Dalhousie, arrived there and took the oaths as Governor-General,—a potentate at whose hands a few years later Colin Campbell was to receive treatment which caused the high-spirited soldier to resign the command he held and leave India. In the Lahore Residency Henry Lawrence was succeeded temporarily by his brother John, who in March, 1848, gave place to Sir Frederick Currie, a member of the Supreme Council. The position was one which required the experience and military knowledge of a soldier, but Sir Frederick Currie was a civilian. In January Sir John Littler had been succeeded in the Punjaub divisional command by Major-General Whish, an officer of the Company's service, an appointment which disappointed Colin Campbell who had hoped for the independent command of the Lahore brigade.
The deceptive quietude of the Punjaub was now to be exposed. When Sir Frederick Currie reached Lahore, he found there Moolraj the Governor of Mooltan, a man of vast wealth who had come to offer the resignation of his position for reasons that were chiefly personal. Moolraj stipulated for some conditions which were not conceded, and ultimately he resigned without any other condition than that of saving his honour in the eyes of his own people. A new Governor was appointed in his place, who set out for Mooltan accompanied by Mr. Vans Agnew of the Bengal Civil Service and Mr. Agnew's assistant, Lieutenant Anderson of the Bombay Army. Moolraj marched with the escort of the new Governor, to whom, on the day after the arrival of the party in Mooltan, he formally surrendered the fort. After the ceremony Agnew and Anderson started on their return to camp, Moolraj riding alongside the two English gentlemen. At the gate of the fortress Agnew was suddenly attacked,—run through by a spear and slashed by sword-cuts. At the same moment Anderson was cut down and desperately wounded. Moolraj galloped off, leaving the Englishmen to their fate. Khan Singh's people carried them into a temple wherein two days later they were brutally slaughtered; their bodies were cut to pieces and their heads thrown down at the feet of Moolraj. What share Moolraj had taken in this treacherous butchery was never clearly ascertained; but every indication pointed to his complicity. This much is certain, that on the morning after the assassination he transferred his family and treasure into the fort, and placed himself at the head of the insurrectionary movement by issuing a proclamation summoning all the inhabitants of the province, of every creed, to make common cause in a religious war against the Feringhees.
News of the outrage and rising at Mooltan reached Lahore on April 24th. It was emphatically a time for prompt action, if an outbreak was to be crushed which else might grow into a general revolt throughout the Punjaub. It was extremely unlikely that the fort of Mooltan was equipped for an early and stubborn defence. To maintain our prestige was essential, for it was by prestige and promptitude only that we have maintained our pre-eminence in India. Sir Henry Lawrence would have marched the Lahore brigade on Mooltan without an hour's hesitation. Lord Hardinge would have ordered up the troops and siege-train from Ferozepore and the strong force collected at Bukkur; and would have invested Mooltan before Moolraj could have made any adequate preparations for prolonged defence. Marches through Scinde, from the north-western frontier, and from Lahore, could not have been made in the hot season without casualties; but, in the words of Marshman, "our Empire in India had been acquired and maintained, not by fair-weather campaigns, but by taking the field on every emergency and at any season."
On the first tidings from Mooltan Sir Frederick Currie ordered a strong brigade of all arms to prepare for a march on that stronghold, being of opinion that the citadel, described in poor Agnew's report as the strongest fort he had seen in India, would not maintain a defence when a British force should present itself before it, but that the garrison would immediately abandon Moolraj to his fate. Colin Campbell, on the other hand, held that since the fort of Mooltan was very strong it was to be anticipated that Moolraj would obstinately defend it; in which case a brigade sent to Mooltan would be obliged to remain inactive before it while siege-guns were being brought up, or, as seemed more probable, should no reinforcements arrive in support, it would have to retrace its steps followed and harassed by Moolraj's active and troublesome rabble. Eventually, in great measure because of the arguments advanced by Campbell, the movement from Lahore on Mooltan was countermanded; and the Commander-in-Chief, with the concurrence of the Governor-General, intimated his resolve to postpone military operations until the cold weather, when he would take the field in person.
Meanwhile a casual subaltern, for whom swift marches and hard fighting in hot weather had no terrors, struck in on his own responsibility. Gathering in the wild trans-Indus district of Bunnoo some fifteen hundred men with a couple of guns, Lieutenant Herbert Edwardes marched towards Mooltan. Colonel Cortland with two thousand Pathans and six guns hastened to join him; and on May 20th the united force defeated Moolraj's army six thousand strong. The loyal Nawab of Bhawalpore sent a strong force of his warlike Daudputras across the Sutlej to join hands with Edwardes and Cortland; and the junction had just been accomplished on the field of Kinairi some twenty miles from Mooltan, when the allies, about nine thousand strong, were attacked by Moolraj with a force of about equal magnitude. After half a day's hard fighting the enemy fled in confusion from the field. Edwardes and Cortland moved up nearer to Mooltan, their force now raised to a strength of about eighteen thousand; and there was a moment when Moolraj seemed willing to surrender if his life were spared. But he rallied his nerves and came out on July 1st with twelve thousand men to give battle on the plain of Sudusain within sight of the walls of Mooltan. After another obstinate fight his troops were thoroughly beaten and fled headlong into the city. "Now," wrote Edwardes to the Resident, "is the time to strike; I have got to the end of my tether. If," added the gallant and clear-sighted subaltern, "you would only send, with a few regular regiments, a few heavy guns and a mortar battery, we could close Moolraj's account in a fortnight, and obviate the necessity of assembling fifty thousand men in October."
Meanwhile the Resident had taken the strange course of empowering the Lahore Durbar to despatch to Mooltan a Sikh force of some five thousand men under Shere Singh. It was notorious that both commander and troops were thoroughly disaffected; and so anxious was the Resident to prevent the force from approaching Moolraj that Shere Singh had orders to halt fifty miles short of Mooltan, and was only allowed to join Edwardes after his victory of July 1st. In tardy answer to that young officer's appeal for reinforcements, in the end of July a force of seven thousand men with a siege-train was ordered to converge on Mooltan from Lahore and Ferozepore under the divisional command of General Whish. It had been chiefly at Colin Campbell's dissuasion that the Resident had relinquished his intention of sending a force to Mooltan in April. Campbell's argument in that month had been the unfavourable season for marching; and now in a season not less unfavourable he was scarcely justified in considering himself the victim of a job in not obtaining the command of the Lahore brigade ordered on Mooltan. The disappointment proved fortunate, since a few months later he found himself in command of a division in the field with the rank of brigadier-general. By August 24th the whole of Whish's field-force was before Mooltan, but it was not until September 7th that the siege-guns were in position. Moolraj, confident in the increased strength which our delay had afforded him, spurned a summons to surrender. Active and bloody approaches were carried on for a week, when Shere Singh with his contingent suddenly passed over to the enemy. After this defection Whish held it impossible to continue the siege, and he retired to a position in the vicinity pending the arrival of reinforcements from Bombay. The siege was reopened late in December: the city was stormed after a hard fight; and finally on January 22nd, 1849, Moolraj surrendered at discretion. It must be said of him that he had made a heroic defence.
By the end of September, 1848, the local outbreak was fast swelling into a national revolt. The flame of rebellion was spreading over the Land of the Five Rivers, and by the end of October only a few brave English officers were still holding together the last shreds of British influence in the Punjaub outside of Lahore and the camp of General Whish. Moolraj was the reverse of cordial to Shere Singh, who on October 9th quitted Mooltan and marched northward towards Lahore, his original force of five thousand men strengthened at every step by the warriors of the old Khalsa army who flocked eagerly to his standard. After threatening Lahore he moved westward to meet the Bunnoo insurgents, who had mutinied and murdered their officers, and he finally took up a position à cheval of the Chenab at Ramnuggur, his main body on the right bank of the river.
During the summer and autumn Colin Campbell passed an uneasy and anxious time. It was not until the beginning of November that he had the full assurance of being employed in the manifestly impending campaign. By this time Cureton's cavalry brigade and Godby's infantry brigade were in the Doab between the Ravee and the Chenab, and on November 12th Colin Campbell joined Cureton there with two native infantry regiments, taking command of the advanced force with the temporary rank of brigadier-general. At length Lord Gough himself took the field, and on the 19th he crossed the Ravee at the head of an army of respectable strength. Apart from the division before Mooltan and the garrison required for Lahore, he had available for field service four British and eleven native infantry regiments. He was strong in cavalry, with three fine British regiments, five of native light cavalry, and five corps of irregular horse; and his powerful artillery consisted of sixty horse and field-guns, eight howitzers, and ten 18-pounders. On the early morning of the 22nd his lordship, with Colin Campbell's infantry division and a cavalry force under Cureton with horse and field artillery, marched from Saharun towards Ramnuggur with the object of driving across the Chenab some Sikh infantry reported to be still on the left bank. Some small detachments hurrying towards the river were pursued somewhat recklessly by horse-artillery, which had to retire under the heavy fire opened from the Sikh batteries on the commanding right bank. A gun and two waggons stuck fast in the deep sand and could not be extricated. Colin Campbell suggested to Lord Gough the measure of protecting the gun until it could be withdrawn at night, by placing infantry to cover it in a ravine immediately in its rear; but the Commander-in-Chief disapproved of this measure. The enemy lost no time in sending the whole of his cavalry across the river to take possession of the gun under cover of his overwhelming artillery fire. Our cavalry was foolishly sent forward to charge the superior hostile horse,—a folly which was committed, according to Colin Campbell, under the personal direction of the Commander-in-Chief. Ouvry's squadron of the Third Light Dragoons made a brilliant and useful charge which materially aided the withdrawal of the artillery. In the face of a heavy fire Colonel William Havelock, a noble soldier who had fought in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, led on the Fourteenth Light Dragoons to a desperate combat with the Sikh horse. The horses of the dragoons were exhausted by the long gallop through the heavy sand and the casualties were heavy. Among the slain was Havelock himself, after a hand-to-hand combat; and while riding forward to stay Havelock's last advance Brigadier-General Cureton, who had raised himself to distinction from the ranks in which he had enlisted as a runaway lad, was killed by a Sikh bullet.
Lord Gough withdrew his troops beyond the reach of the Sikh batteries and awaited the arrival of his heavy guns and the remainder of his force. If his intention was to refrain from coming to close quarters with the enemy until the fall of Mooltan should bring him reinforcements, he was well placed on the left bank of the Chenab, covering Lahore and the siege of Mooltan and leaving Shere Singh undisturbed. If on the other hand he preferred the offensive, that offensive should have been prompt; a rapid stroke might have ended the business, for the Sikhs, as the sequel proved, were eager enough for fighting. And to all appearance the Commander-in-Chief meant to gratify their desire. To do so he had in the first instance to cross the Chenab. To accomplish this by direct assault on the Sikh position on the opposite bank was impracticable; and he resolved to compel the enemy's withdrawal by a wide turning movement with part of his force under the command of Sir Joseph Thackwell, an experienced soldier. Thackwell's command consisted of Colin Campbell's strong division, a cavalry brigade, three troops of horse-artillery, two field-batteries and two heavy guns,—in all about eight thousand men. This force started in the early morning of December 1st, and after a march of twenty-four miles up the left bank of the Chenab was across that river at Wuzeerabad by noon of the 2nd. The same afternoon the force marched ten miles down the right bank and bivouacked. During the short march of the following morning Thackwell learned that a brigade was on its way to reinforce him, crossing by an intermediate ford; whereupon he halted the force and rode away in search of this reinforcement. Before he departed Colin Campbell asked permission to deploy and take up a position. Thackwell replied, "No—remain where you are until my return."