Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water / The Journal of a Tour Through the British Empire and America

by Ethel Gwendoline Vincent

The Residency, Lucknow.

The Residency is not in the least disappointing. It is like what we should imagine and picture to ourselves. An unimposing gateway, flanked by two turret towers, with broken walls and ditches. Nothing grand or striking about it, for it was only a fortified barrack; but the surrounding walls and buildings riddled with shot, and showing large cavities where a shell has burst, tell its simple but awful tale of bitter suffering. Here for five long months a little band of 1800 heroic Englishmen, with 400 or 500 faithful sepoys, defended themselves bravely, starvation staring them in the face, looking day by day for the relief which so tardily came. So closely invested were they by the ferocious hordes of rebels, that the sepoys within were taunted by the rebels without the entrenchment. Morning after morning the enemy's battery opened fire, weakening day by day their feeble defences, attacking first one position and then another, always repulsed, but always with some ill-spared loss to the small body of defenders. The Residency ruins extend for a mile and a half, and looking round now at the low walls, in no part more than four feet high, and the shallow trenches, it seems well-nigh impossible how the defenders kept at bay the rebels so long as they did. Everything is left as far as possible as it was at the time of "the Relief." At the suggestion of the Prince of Wales, tablets have been let into the walls, and posts erected at all the famous points of defence. We trace thus the position of each regiment, and even the rooms in the several houses in the Residency enclosure, occupied by the officers' wives before the siege.

Grand as the study of the general outline is—of each spot memorable for some gallant defence—of one more life from the heroic little band laid down—the intensity of interest concentrates in certain spots: such as Dr. Fayrer's House, where Sir Henry Lawrence was brought after his leg was fractured by a bullet, and the four walls are shown (for the roof and floor are gone) of the room where he died. Also the room where the walls, battered with shot, fell in, burying some soldiers of the 32nd; the underground apartments where the women and children were kept for safety, and where so many of them died from privation and disease. In another room we saw the hole made by a shell, which entered the window and exploded against the opposite wall, killing an officer's wife on the spot from the shock and fright. Then there is the world-renowned Baillie Guard Gate, the scene of the deadliest repulses and corresponding deeds of courage.

The flagstaff on the tower of the Residency is the same as was there during the siege. Broken in half by a bullet one day, it was riveted together as we now see it. The flag was kept flying during the whole of those five months. Every Sunday it is now raised again. Adjoining the tower we see the ruins of the cook-house and the well, which was accessible during the siege by a covered way. In the centre of this quadrangle, on a raised mound, stands the exceedingly beautiful Greek cross, erected to the memory of Sir Henry Lawrence and his comrades in arms who fell.

All praise is due, we think, to Lord Northbrook, for having during his viceroyalty added to the monuments which are erected to our soldiers, who only died doing their duty, by presenting an obelisk to the memory of the sepoys who, amid the general rise of their countrymen, remained faithful to the British. The inscriptions on the four sides are in English, Hindustani, Persian, and Oudhee. Another cross has been erected to the memory of the 93rd Highlanders, giving the names and the different entrenchments where their men fell, and engraved with the crests of the regiment—an elephant and a stag.

The grey building, broken and unroofed, where all is so quiet and neat, is soothing after the terrible tale of hardship and bloodshed we have just been tracing out amongst its walls.

The masses of begonia hanging from the tower, the lawns and gardens, the gravel paths, would efface such memories, but yet the ghastly reminders always remain in those riddled walls, those sudden gaps, where the masses of masonry have been torn away by shot and shell. It is as well perhaps for them to remain—to warn us of the blood already shed to retain our hold on our Indian empire. It is as well that they should remain, to tell us to ask ourselves, should occasion in the future arise, "Shall we pour out the blood of the nation again to keep that which we have unflinchingly gotten?"

We were more than charmed with the Residency. The complex memories which it leaves with us will linger harmoniously for many a day. It is one of the things which has interested and pleased us most in all our travels.

Passing along the road where the mutineers first gathered in force, and showed a spirit of hostility, we see the iron bridge where their quarters were.

Two unfinished works of Muhammed Ali Shah are before us. One is the Watch Tower or Sut Khunda, of which only four stories of the seven projected were finished. It stands there rotting away, a monument to the finger of death, which respects not the designs or intentions of man. The other is the "musjid" or mosque, intended to surpass the famous Jumna Musjid of Delhi, and which also remains incomplete, the scaffolding rotting away, as it was left eighteen years ago at the time of the Shah's death.