There had been, at first, only a native garrison in the cantonments near the capital of the Great Mogul. There was a contingent of European residents and a few officers, but no white troops. Practically, therefore, no resistance could be offered to the rising of the mutineers and to their brutality and bloodshed. Willoughby, with six other men, held the insurgents at bay long enough to blow up the great magazine, and when he fled, not a white was left alive in Delhi. Wilson, with the 60th and the Carbiniers from Meerut, commanded the advanced guard, and first engaged the enemy about fifteen miles from Delhi. The entire relieving force was under General Barnard, and contained detachments of the 9th Lancers and Carbiniers, and the 60th, 75th, 1st and 2nd Bengal Fusiliers, and some Ghoorkas, besides guns. Further resistance was experienced outside Delhi, and then Barnard sat down before the town. He seems to have been too weak for the work he had to do. Prolonged resistance only increased the morale of the mutineers, and gave them confidence. It is possible, therefore, that though the enemy fought throughout with the desperation of despair, an assault might have been successful, and the moral effect of victory at this juncture more than valuable. On the other hand, defeat would have been disastrous, and in Delhi were collected the largest, best organised, and most complete army the insurgents possessed. So the attack partook of the nature of a siege, without a complete investment of the fortress. The enemy were vigorous, and made frequent sorties, once even making an attack on the rear of the camp by a wide detour. On this day, the anniversary of Plassy, the fighting lasted for fifteen hours. The heat was terrific; the men were exhausted by long marches, little food, and incessant fighting. The generalship was of no high order. Neither Barnard nor Reid, his second in command, were equal to the occasion. In June the total force of Europeans numbered but 3000, with three battalions of Sikhs, Guides, and Ghoorkas, comparatively new levies.
Throughout all India, even those parts not then affected by the storm, panic began to spread. Calcutta was in terror, though the 37th and 53rd were there, and the Sepoys at Barrackpore had been disarmed. Elsewhere risings were common, sometimes suppressed by the bravery of a few; in other and more numerous cases, resulting in the death, with or without torture, of the mass of the European residents.
Thus the siege of Delhi drew to a conclusion, and the illness of the two leaders left General Wilson in charge of the operation. He was reinforced by Nicholson with 1000 Europeans and 1500 Sikhs. Small still as the army was, it was now able to take the offensive, and no more dashing officer than John Nicholson could have been selected for the duty. A force, some 7000 men strong, had left Delhi, to threaten the rear and communications of the army, and against this he moved with a mixed force, in which were the 9th, 61st, and 1st Fusiliers. The enemy was dispersed by the gallantry of the European troops who formed the first line, flanked by horse artillery batteries, and Nicholson retraced his steps to Delhi. It was the last of the sorties. By this time the siege train from Ferozepore had arrived, and with it a welcome reinforcement of a wing of the 8th Foot, a Belooch battalion, and detachments of the 9th and 60th, besides other native levies. By the 14th September two breaches had been made, and the assault was made in four columns. Of these, the first, under Jones, was directed on the Water Bastion, whence they were to move towards the Cashmere Gate, but he missed his way at first, and hence caused delay, but eventually he got in and pushed towards the Cabul Gate; the second, under Nicholson himself, carried the breach near the Cashmere Gate, and its leader fell mortally wounded near the Lahore Gate; the third, under Reid, attempted the Lahore Gate, but was repulsed with heavy loss; the 4th, under Campbell, had the difficult task of carrying the Cashmere Gate, which was blown in by a party consisting of Lieutenants Home and Salkeld, Sergeants Smith and Carmichael, and Corporal Burgess of the Engineers, Bugler Hawthorne of the 52nd, and 24 native sappers, though with severe loss. Through the gap charged the storming column of the Oxford Light Infantry, and by night the whole outer fringe of the city, from the Water Bastion to the Cabul Gate, was in the possession of the assailants, though the rest of the city was still in rebel hands. But not for long. The heart of the resistance was broken, and the 21st September 1857 saw the capture of the puppet king, and the death of his son and grandson, by the hands of Hodson of “Hodson’s Horse.”
Only Lucknow now remained in hostile hands. The fire was fast dying out in all parts of the empire, and therefore the operations could be conducted on a more consistent and deliberate plan. Lucknow had been in severe straits. Early in June a large force of rebels had assembled there and laid siege to the Residency, held by Lawrence with the 32nd, commanded by Inglis, and some 500 loyal natives. The details of that remarkable defence are such that it would be impossible in a brief space to enumerate the acts of heroism that accompanied the defence of Lucknow or the scientific skill with which the defenders, of whom Napier of Magdala was one, conducted the desperate contest.
At first it was hoped that relief would come in a fortnight, but eighty-seven weary days passed before the first help came. Then Havelock attempted it alone, with some 1300 troops, as has been already pointed out, but though unsuccessful, his advance had relieved the pressure on the beleaguered garrison, and enabled them by a bold sortie to reprovision the Residency, where provisions had run short.
His next effort was after Outram had been appointed to the chief command; but the latter magnanimously refused to take the work off Havelock’s hands, and offered to accompany him simply as “Chief Commissioner of Oudh.” The army, 2500 strong, in two brigades, in which served the 5th, 64th, 84th, and 1st Madras Fusiliers, the 78th and 90th, starting from Cawnpore, crossed the Ganges by a pontoon bridge, and so brought about the first real assistance to the garrison of Lucknow. The march was opposed from the outset. There was severe fighting at the Alumbagh, “the garden of the Lady Alum, or beauty of the world,” four miles from the Residency; but the British attack was irresistible, and five guns were taken. The next stand made was at the Charbagh, or “Four gardens,” but Outram with the Fusiliers, 5th, 6th, and 84th, carried the line of palisaded guns with a cheer, and Havelock, with the 78th and 90th, dashed into the town, carrying everything before them, though every inch of ground was disputed. Obstacles had been created on all sides, and the houses prepared for defence and loopholed, were occupied. But the “petticoated devils,” as the mutineers termed the Highlanders they met in battle for the first time, drove everything before them until the Residency was reached. It was only just in time, for the mutineers had driven mines beneath the defending walls, and soon all would have been over. In the assault some four hundred men had fallen, and among them the gallant General Neill. But the “relief” was a reinforcement only. The combined garrison was too weak to force its way through the still overwhelming masses of the enemy, with so many non-combatants to guard. So Havelock and Outram were, like Inglis, besieged in their turn for nearly fifty days.
During this time, Greathed, with the 84th, some of the 9th Lancers, and the 3rd Bengal Infantry, afterwards the 107th Regiment of the line, had cleared the country about Alighur and Agra; and Sir Hope Grant had reached Cawnpore with a column, and moved to Alumbagh, defeating the rebels at Canouj on the way. Here he was joined by Sir Colin Campbell, and the final relief of Lucknow was begun with Peel’s Naval Brigade, a strong force of artillery, and the 9th Lancers, 8th, 53rd, 75th, and 93rd Regiments of the line, which, with other troops, made a total of about 3500 men, to which were soon added detachments of the 23rd, 82nd, etc., and others of the 5th, 64th, and 78th.
The route chosen was by way of the Secunderabagh, “Alexander’s garden,” where the first severe skirmish took place, and here some 2000 of the enemy perished by the bayonet alone. Small wonder that with the recent remembrance of “Cawnpore,” no quarter was asked or given. It was too late for mercy. The fighting continued from building to building and from garden to garden, till on the 17th, Outram and Havelock met Sir Colin Campbell, who had begun his soldier’s career far back in the Peninsular days, when he carried the colours of the 9th Foot at Corunna, outside the battered walls so long and so gallantly held. The cost to the relieving force had been 467 officers and men killed and wounded. Even now it was impossible to remain and continue the contest. Occupying the Alumbagh with a brigade under Outram, the Lucknow garrison evacuated the blood-stained ruins of the Residency. There too Havelock died.
“The retreat was admirably executed, and was a perfect lesson in such combinations. Each exterior line came gradually retiring through its supports, till at length nothing remained but the last line of infantry and guns, with which I remained myself, to crush the enemy, had he dared to follow up the pickets. The only line of retreat lay through a long and tortuous lane, and all these precautions were absolutely necessary to ensure the safety of the force.”
An instance of the fury which characterised the fighting at the Secunderabagh is admirably told in Forbes Mitchell’s Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny. The hero of the story, around whose private history there was evidently more romance than usually falls to most men, bore the name of Quaker Wallace, the final name being fictitious, the first a nickname; and when the signal for the assault was given, he “went into the Secunderabagh like one of the furies, plainly seeking death, but not meeting it, and quoting the 116th Psalm, Scotch version, in metre, beginning at the first verse—