The Story of the British Army

by Charles Cooper King

No campaign or war is more difficult to describe briefly or follow than that of the great Mutiny. It lasted for twelve months. It was fought by mere detachments of Europeans, isolated from each other. When one was victorious it joined another, and the two combined made at once for the point of nearest danger, or where their aid was most required. No connected plan was at first possible. The very insurrection itself spread irregularly and spasmodically. It could not be said for long that a general rising took place. The rebels had no real head, but acted independently under isolated leaders. It was a war in which the skill and personal courage of the European was to be measured against the courage, great in many instances, but less determined than that of their foes, of the native troops.

If there were real grievances in India as regards our rule, it must have been common in all the Presidencies. But in Madras there was only unrest, never real danger. In Bombay, save in one case, at Kolapore, the same conditions obtained; but the whole region of the Ganges between Lower Bengal and the Punjaub was the scene of general revolt, general massacre in most instances of the European troops. There were more than forty military stations where revolt occurred. In many of them the European army speedily regained the ascendancy. But three centres stand out among the dreadful details of the dismal story—Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Delhi; and the last was, as far as there was a centre at all, the focus of the whole Mutiny. The insurrection was without plan, and was a complete surprise. Had it been otherwise, had the mutineers made common cause, had less delay been given to the British to concentrate their strength in India, from other neighbouring colonies and from home, the end might have been more distant, the struggle more prolonged, but the final result would have been none the less assured.

Fortunately, the great semi-independent states remained either quiescent, or offered active help; on the other hand, the method first adopted of disbanding the mutinous regiments, and therefore instigating them in one sense to reinforce the Delhi centre, where arms were numerous, only strengthened the insurrection. Stronger men in the beginning, like Napoleon’s “whiff of grape shot,” might have nipped the whole thing in the bud. If the few mutineers had been shot down first, and then told, as far as the rest went, to lay down their arms, “the beginning of wisdom” might have grown somewhat more rapidly into the souls of those who, influenced by example, hysteria, religious mania, and drugs, also began to think of revolt. Nothing is more catching than such epidemics. When, at one time, sundry British soldiers thought it would be an out-of-the-common act to shoot their officers on parade, the stupid, wicked idea spread, until the authorities were wise enough to put the hysteria down by the summary method of speedy trial and death.

Of the three most important places, that of Cawnpore is of chief interest, from its sentimental side. The fugitive survivors of the rising at Futtyghur fled down the Ganges as far as Cawnpore, where they were confined in the Assembly Rooms, by the order of Nana Sahib of Bithoor, who commanded the rebels there. The garrison of Cawnpore, at no time strong in Europeans, had been denuded of some of the white troops to reinforce Lucknow. There were but 150 European soldiers all told, including detachments of the 32nd, 84th, and Madras Fusiliers, when the storm burst. A rude entrenchment had been formed round the hospital barracks and the soldiers’ church, and was defended by eight guns. Opposed to this handful were at least three revolted battalions, besides all the ruffians of the city, supported by a number of 24-pounders. In such a case the end could not be long coming, though it delayed for twenty-two days.

Though the greatest bravery was shown, such as when Captain John Moore of the 32nd, though severely wounded, made a sortie with twenty-five men, and spiked some of the enemy’s guns, the buildings were soon so riddled with shot as to afford little protection, and a portion of the hospital had been fired by shells and burnt. So the capitulation was made, on the solemn oath of Nana Sahib, that no life should be taken. Needless to say, that promise was not kept. On reaching the river bank, the massacre began, and culminated in the shooting or bayoneting of the whole of the white men, and the temporary confinement of the surviving women and children with their unfortunate fellow-sufferers from Futtyghur in the Assembly Rooms at Cawnpore. Here they were all massacred.

The army of relief was approaching, but it was too late to arrest the awful conclusion to the defence of Cawnpore. Havelock advanced from Allahabad with but 1300 men, including the 64th, 78th, and 1st Madras Fusiliers, and after four severe skirmishes at Futtehpore and elsewhere, during which the 64th and 78th carried a battery of guns, and “went on with sloped arms like a wall till within a hundred yards and not a shot was fired,” while, “At the word ‘Charge!’ they broke like a pack of eager hounds, and the village was taken in an instant.” When the column had reached Cawnpore, it had marched 126 miles in eight days and captured 24 guns!

Ample vengeance was taken for the massacre. The sight alone of the room where it had taken place inflamed the men beyond expression. Old soldiers wept, others divided locks of the hair of their murdered countrywomen and vowed revenge. There was little quarter given by Havelock’s column from that time forward.

General Neill was left in charge of the station, and ruled with an iron and a merciless hand.[65] His orders were: “Whenever a rebel is caught, he is to be instantly tried, and unless he can prove a defence, he is to be sentenced to be hanged at once; but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the street where the fearful murder and mutilation of women took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives; they think by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so! My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, and barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels. The first caught was a subadar, or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed. But I made the provost-marshal do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and buried in a ditch at the roadside. No one who has witnessed the scenes of murder, mutilation, and massacre can even listen to the word ‘mercy’ as applied to these fiends.”

Havelock, meanwhile, was “pacifying” the neighbourhood with his handful of men. He destroyed Nana’s palace at Bithoor, he beat the rebels at Oonao, at Busserut Gunge, and Zaithpore, he attempted to relieve Lucknow; and though there was some desperate fighting, in which the British were locally successful, his force was too weak to reach the besieged, and he fell back, still fighting, to Cawnpore, reduced to but 800 men. He moved out again four days later, 1300 strong, to defeat the enemy at Bithoor again and return. But reinforcements were long in coming, for at Dinapore the regiments had mutinied and impeded communication with the south. Outram from Persia then assembled at Allahabad a column of 1500 men, including the 5th and 90th, and joined Havelock at Cawnpore. The most striking and noteworthy thing in all these operations is the exceeding smallness of the insignificant armies which were hastily assembled to crush the insurrection.

Cawnpore itself was now safe, and it was around Lucknow, therefore, that the main interest centred till the suppression of the revolt. It was the last important point in the war, for Delhi was taken before Lucknow; and this is how Delhi fell.