The Bengal troops at Nagode appear to have remained untouched by mutiny until the 25th of August. On that day the 50th native infantry shewed symptoms which caused some anxiety to the officers; two days afterwards disturbances took place, and at a period somewhat beyond the limit to which this chapter is confined the bulk of the regiment mutinied, and marched off to join mutineers elsewhere. About 250 of the sepoys remained true to their colours; they escorted their officers, and all the ladies and children, safely from Nagode to Mirzapore. These divergences among the men of the same regiment greatly complicate any attempts to elucidate the causes of the Indian mutiny generally. That the sepoys were often excited by temporary and exceptional impulses, is quite certain; and such impulses were wholly beyond the power of the Europeans correctly to estimate. There was one station at which a portion of a native regiment mutinied and shot an officer; the sepoys of his company threw themselves upon his body and wept, and then—joined the mutineers!
We pass from the Saugor province to those which were nominally under the control of Mr Colvin as lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Provinces—nominally, for, being himself shut up in Agra, he exercised scarcely any control beyond the walls of the fort. Of the Doab, sufficient has already been narrated to shew in what condition that fertile region was placed during the months of July and August. Where Havelock and Neill pitched their tents, there was British supremacy maintained; but beyond the three cities of Allahabad, Futtehpoor, and Cawnpore, and the high road connecting them, British power was little more than a name. Higher up the Doab, at Etawah, Minpooree, Furruckabad, Futteghur, Allygurh, Bolundshuhur, &c., anarchy was paramount. Crossing the Ganges into Oude, the cessation of British rule was still more complete. Scarcely an Englishman remained alive throughout the whole of Oude, except in Lucknow; all who had not been killed had precipitately escaped. Almost every landowner had become a petty chieftain, with his fort, his guns, and his band of retainers. In no part of India, at no time during the mutiny, was the hostility of the villagers more strikingly shewn than in Oude: in other provinces the inhabitants of the villages often aided the British troops on the march; but when Havelock, Neill, and Outram were in Oude, every village on the road had to be conquered, as if held by an avowed enemy. It has been often said that the Indian outbreak was a revolt of soldiery, not a rebellion of a people; but in Oude the contest was unquestionably with something more than the military only. Whether their love for their deposed king was sincere or only professed, the Oudians exhibited much animosity against the British. What the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow were doing, we shall see in the proper place.
Of Agra city, and the fort or residency in which the Europeans were for safety assembled, it will be remembered (p. [173]) that after peaceably but anxiously passing through the month of May, Mr Colvin, on the 1st of June, found it necessary or expedient to disarm the 44th and 67th Bengal native infantry—because two companies of those regiments had just mutinied near Muttra, and because the bulk of the regiments exhibited unmistakable signs of disaffection. This great and important city was then left under the charge of the 3d European Fusiliers, a corps of volunteer European cavalry under Lieutenant Greathed, and Captain D’Oyley’s field-battery of six guns. Most of the disarmed native troops deserted, to swell the insurgent ranks elsewhere; and in the course of the month the jail-guard deserted also. Thus June came to its end—the European residents still remaining at large, but making certain precautions for their common safety at night.
When July arrived, however, the state of affairs became much more serious. The Europeans were forced into a battle, which ended in a necessity for their shutting themselves up in the fort. The force was very weak. The 3d Europeans only numbered about 600 men, the militia and volunteers 200, and a few artillerymen belonging to the guns. Among the officers present were several who had belonged to the Gwalior Contingent, the various regiments and detachments of which had mutinied at Hattrass, Neemuch, Augur, Lullutpore, and Gwalior, on various days between the 28th of May and the 3d of July; these officers, having now no commands, were glad to render aid in any available way towards the defence of Agra. Just at this critical time, when the approach of a hostile force was imminent, the Europeans were further troubled by the sudden mutiny of the Kotah Contingent. This force—consisting of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, about 700 men in all—having been deemed loyal and trustworthy, had been brought about a month previously to Agra from the southwest, and had during that time remained true—collecting revenue, burning disaffected villages, capturing and hanging rebels and mutineers. They were brought in from the vicinity towards the close of June, to aid if necessary against the Neemuch mutineers, and were encamped half-way between the barracks and government-house. Suddenly and unexpectedly, on the evening of the 4th, the cavalry portion of the Contingent rose in revolt, fired at their officers, killed their sergeant-major, and then marched off, followed by the infantry and the artillery—all but a few gunners, who enabled the British to retain the two guns belonging to the Contingent. This revolt startled the authorities, and necessitated a change of plan, for it had been intended to attack the Neemuch force that very evening; nay, matters were even still worse, for the Kotah villains at once joined those from Neemuch.
On the morning of Sunday the 5th of July (again Sunday!), an army of mutineers being known to be near at hand, a reconnoitring party was sent out to examine their position. The enemy were found to consist of about 4000 infantry and 1000 cavalry, with ten or twelve guns; they comprised the 72d B. N. I., the 7th Gwalior Contingent infantry, the 1st Bengal native cavalry, the Malwah Contingent cavalry—which had joined the Neemuch men at Mehidpore—and fragments of other mutinied regiments, together with a very efficient artillery corps. The arrival of the Neemuch mutineers had for some time been expected; and as soon as it was known, on the 3d, that the enemy had reached Futtehpore Sikri, about twenty miles from Agra, the ladies and children, as well as many of the civilians and traders, had as a measure of precaution abandoned their houses in the city, and gone into the fort, which had been cleaned out, made as habitable as possible, and largely supplied with provisions. The reconnoitring party returned to announce that the enemy were at Shahgunje, a village close to the lieutenant-governor’s house, three miles from the cantonment and four from the fort. The authorities at Agra resolved at once to go out and fight the enemy in open field; seeing that the native citizens had begun to think slightingly of their British masters, and that it was necessary to remove any suspicion of fear or timidity. The brigadier made up a force equal to about one-eighth of the enemy’s numbers; it consisted of seven very weak companies of the 3d European Fusiliers, the militia and volunteers, and a battery of artillery. The infantry were placed under Colonel Riddell, and the artillery under Captain D’Oyley. As to the volunteer cavalry, it was made up of a curious medley of unemployed military officers, civilians, merchants, and writers—all willing to share the common danger for the common good; but with untrained horses, and without regular cavalry drill, they laboured under many disadvantages. About 200 men of the 3d Europeans remained behind to guard the fort.
At noon, the opposing forces met. The enemy occupied a strong position behind Shahgunje, with their guns flanking the village, and the cavalry flanking the guns. The British advanced in line, with their guns on each flank, the infantry in the middle, and the mounted militia and volunteers in the rear. When about six hundred yards from the enemy, the infantry were ordered to lie down, to allow the guns to do their work against the village, from behind the houses and walls of which the enemy’s riflemen opened a very destructive fire. It was a bad omen that women were seen in the village loading the rifles and muskets and handing them to the mutineers to fire. For two hours an exchange of artillery-fire was kept up—extremely fierce; shrapnel shells, round-shot, and grape-shot, filling the air. A tumbril belonging to D’Oyley’s battery now blew up, disabling one of the guns; the enemy’s cavalry took advantage of this to gallop forward and charge; but the 3d Europeans, jumping up, let fly a volley which effectually deterred them. Most of the officers and soldiers had wished during these two hours for a bolder course of action—a capture of the enemy’s guns by a direct charge of infantry. Then followed a rapid musketry-fire, and a chasing of the enemy out of the village by most of the infantry—the rest guarding the guns. Unfortunately another tumbril blew up, disabling another gun; and, moreover, D’Oyley had used up all the ammunition which had been supplied to him. Upon this the order was given for retreat to the city; and the retreat was made—much to the mortification of the troops, for they had really won a victory. The rebels, it was afterwards known, were themselves out of ammunition, and were just about to retreat when they saw the retreat of the British; their infantry marched off towards Muttra, but their cavalry and one gun harassed the British during their return to the city. The artillery-fire of the mutineers during the battle was spoken of with admiration even by those who were every minute suffering from it; the native artillerymen had learned to use effectively against us those guns which they had been paid and fed to use in our defence. If the cavalry had been equally effective, the British would probably have been cut off to a man. This battle of Agra was a severe one to the British, for one-fourth of the small force were killed or wounded. The officers suffered much: Majors Prendergast and Thomas, Captains D’Oyley, Lamb, and Alexander, Lieutenants Pond, Fellowes, Cockburn, Williams, and Bramley, were wounded, as well as many gentlemen belonging to the volunteer horse. The loss of Captain D’Oyley was very much deplored, for he was a great favourite. While managing his guns, a shot struck him; he sat on the carriage, giving orders, in spite of his wound; but at last he fell, saying: ‘Ah, they have done for me now! Put a stone over my grave, and say I died at my guns.’ He sank the next day.
The British returned to Agra—not to the city, but to the fort; for three or four thousand prisoners had got loose during the day, and had begun to fire all the European buildings in the city. Officers and privates, civilians and ladies, all who wrote of the events at Agra at that time, told of the wild licence of that day and night. One eye-witness said: ‘Hardly a house has escaped destruction; and such houses and their contents as were not consumed by fire have been completely gutted and destroyed by other means. In fact, even if we were to leave the fort to-morrow, there are not four houses in the place with roofs remaining under which we could obtain shelter; and as for household property and other things left outside, there is not a single article in existence in serviceable order. The very doors and windows are removed, and every bit of wood torn out, so that nothing remains but the bare brick walls. Things are strewed about the roads and streets in every direction; and wherever you move you see broken chairs and tables, carriages in fragments, crockery, books, and every kind of property wantonly destroyed.’ An officer of the 3d Europeans, after describing the battle, and the return of the little force to the fort, said: ‘Immediately afterwards the work of destruction commenced, the budmashes began to plunder, bungalows on every side were set on fire—one continued blaze the whole night. I went out the next morning. ‘Twas a dreadful sight indeed; Agra was destroyed; churches, colleges, dwelling-houses, barracks, everything burned.’
But they had something more to think of than the devastation in Agra city; they had to contemplate their own situation in Agra Fort. Among the number of Europeans, some had already borne strange adversities. One officer had escaped, with his wife, in extraordinary guise, from Gwalior at the time of the mutiny of the Contingent at that place. He had been obliged to quit his wife at their bungalow in the midst of great danger, to hasten down to his regiment in the lines; and when he found his influence with his men had come to naught, and that shots were aimed at him, three sepoys resolved to save him. They took off his hat, boots, and trousers, wrapped him in a horse-cloth, huddled him between them, and passed him off as a woman. They left him on the bank of a stream, and went to fetch his wife from a position of great peril. She being too weak to walk, they made up a horse-cloth into a sort of bag, tied it to a musket, put her into it, shouldered the musket horizontally, and carried her seven miles—her husband walking by her side, barefoot over sharp stones. After meeting with further assistance, they reached Agra somewhat more in comfort. Another officer, who had likewise served in the Gwalior Contingent, and who had seen much hard service before the mutiny of his corps compelled him to flee to Agra, counted up the wreck of his property after the battle of the 5th of July, and found it to consist of ‘a coat, a shirt, the greater portion of a pair of breeches, a pair of jack-boots, one sock, a right good sword’—and a cannon-ball through his leg; yet, recognising the useful truth that grumbling and complaining are but poor medicines in a time of trouble, he bore up cheerfully, and even cheered up Mr Colvin, who was at that time nearly worn to the grave by sickness and anxiety. An officer of the 3d Europeans said in a letter: ‘I lost everything in the world.... The enemy went quietly off; but here we are; we can’t get out—no place to go to—nothing to do but to wait for assistance.’ And a few days afterwards he added: ‘Here we are like rats in a trap; there are from four to five thousand people in this fort, military and civil, Eurasians, half-castes, &c.; and when we shall get out, is a thing to be guessed at.’ A surgeon of the recently mutinied Gwalior Contingent thus spoke of what he saw around him: ‘The scene in the fort for the first few days was a trying one. All the native servants ran off. I had eleven in the morning, and at night not one. Ladies were seen cooking their own food, officers drawing and carrying water from the wells, &c. Many people were ruined, having escaped with only their clothes on their backs. We are now shut up here, five hundred fighting-men with ammunition, and about four or five thousand altogether, eagerly awaiting the arrival of European troops.’ A commissariat officer said: ‘Here we are all living in gun-sheds and casemates. The appearance of the interior is amusing, and the streets (of the fort) are named; we have Regent and Oxford Streets, the Quadrant, Burlington and Lowther Arcades, and Trafalgar Square.’ The wife of one of the officers described her strange home: ‘We are leading a very unsettled ship-like life. No one is allowed to leave the fort, except bodies of armed men. We are living in a place they call Palace Yard; it is a square, with a gallery round it, having open arches; every married couple are allowed two arches.... It is no easy matter to keep our arches clean and tidy.’ As all the Europeans in Agra went to live in the fort, the number included the staff of the Mofussilite (’Provincial European’) newspaper, one of the journals which had for some time been published in that city; the issue for the 3d of July had been printed at the usual office of the paper; but none other appeared for twelve days, when a Mofussilite was printed within the fort itself.
There was no exaggeration in the accounts of the number of persons thus strangely incarcerated. So completely were the Europeans and their native servants at Agra shut up within the fort, and so much was that place regarded as a refuge for those who had been forced to flee from other stations, that it gradually became crowded to an extraordinary degree. On the 26th of July Mr Colvin determined to take a census of all the persons who slept within the fort on that night; he did so, and found them to amount to no less a number than 5845[[71]]—all of whom had to be supplied with their daily food under military or garrison arrangements. More than 2000 of the number were children, who could render little or no return for the services so anxiously demanded by and for them. Provided, however, the supply of food and other necessaries were sufficient, the danger of the position was not at all comparable to that of Sir Hugh Wheeler at Cawnpore or of Brigadier Inglis at Lucknow. The fort at Agra (see wood-cut, p. [109]) was a very large structure, a sort of triangle whose sides extended from three to five eighths of a mile each; it contained numerous large buildings within the walls, of which the chief were the palace of Shahjehan, the Hall of Audience built by the same emperor, and the Moti Musjid or Pearl Mosque. All the buildings were at once appropriated, in various ways, to the wants of the enormous number of persons who sought shelter therein. The defences of the place, too, were greatly strengthened; sixty guns of heavy calibre were mounted on the bastions; thirteen large mortars were placed in position; the powder-magazines were secured from accidental explosion; the external defences were improved by the levelling of many houses in the city which approached too near the fort; and preparations were completed for blowing up the superb Jumma Musjid (p. [229]) if any attempt were made by a hostile force to occupy it, seeing that its upper ranges commanded the interior of the fort. The only insurgent force at that time in possession of guns and mortars powerful enough to breach strong walls was the Gwalior Contingent; and even if Scindia lost all hold over that force, Agra was provisioned for ten months, and had ammunition enough to stand a whole year’s siege. An officer of a mutinied Gwalior regiment, writing from Agra after some weeks’ confinement, said: ‘Almost all the roads are closed, and it is only by secret messengers and spies that we can get any intelligence of what is going on in the convulsed world around us. My letters from Scotland used to reach me in thirty days; now if I get one in eighty days I congratulate myself on my good-luck.... As for this fort, we can hold it against any number for months; our only fear being for the women and children, who would suffer much, and of whom we have some three thousand. The health of the troops, &c., is, thank God, excellent, and the wounded are doing well.’ Nevertheless, with all their sense of security, the Europeans within the fort had enough to do to maintain their cheerfulness. On the day and night of the 5th of July, property had been burned and despoiled in the city to an enormous amount; and most of this had belonged to the present inmates of the fort. The merchants had been prosperous, their large shops had abounded with the most costly articles of necessity and luxury—and now nearly all was gone. The military officers had of course less to lose, but their deprivation was perhaps still more complete.
Throughout July and August the state of affairs thus continued at Agra. The danger was small, but the discomforts of course numerous. Mr Colvin sent repeated applications for a relieving force. There was, however, none to aid him. His health failed greatly, and he did not bear up against the anxieties of his position with the cheerful firmness exhibited by many other of the officials at that trying time. Brigadier Polwhele, former military commandant, was superseded by Colonel Cotton when the account of the battle of the 5th of July became known at Calcutta. Occasional sallies were made from the fort, to punish isolated bodies of rebels at Futtehpore Sikri, Hattrass, and Allygurh; but the European troops were too few to be very effective in this way. The most note-worthy exploit took place during the latter half of August, when Mr Colvin requested Colonel Cotton to organise a small force for driving some mutineers from Allygurh. Major Montgomery set forth with this miniature army,[[72]] reached Hattrass on the 21st, and there learned that 6000 mutineers, under Ghose Mahomed Khan, náib or lieutenant of the King of Delhi, were prepared to resist him at Allygurh. Montgomery marched from Allygurh to Sarsnee on the 23d, rested for the night in an indigo factory and other buildings, and advanced on the following day to Allygurh. There ensued a sharp conflict of two hours’ duration, in gardens and enclosures outside the town; it ended in the defeat and dispersion of the enemy, who left 300 dead on the field. The battle was a gallant affair, worthy of ranking with those of Havelock; for Montgomery contended against twenty times his own number; and, moreover, many of the troops among the enemy were Ghazees or fanatic Mussulmans who engaged fiercely in hand-to-hand contests with some of his troops. His detachment of men was too small to enable him to enter and reoccupy Allygurh: he was obliged to leave that place in the hands of the rebels, and to return to Hattrass; but having replenished his stock of ammunition and supplies, he advanced again to Allygurh, held it for several days, and left a detachment there when he took his departure.