While Outram was thus crossing the river on the 6th, Sir Colin remained simply on the defensive near the Dil Koosha, deferring all active operations until the subsidiary force had got into fighting order on the left bank. The enemy maintained a continuous fire from the Martinière; but the gunnery was not good, and very little mischief was occasioned. One of the most striking circumstances connected with the position and proceedings of the commander-in-chief was that he carried the electric telegraph with him from camp to camp, from post to post. Chiefly through the energy of Lieutenant Patrick Stewart, poles were set up and wires extended wherever Sir Colin went. Calcutta, Allahabad, Cawnpore, Buntara, and the Alum Bagh, could all communicate instantly; and now a wire made its appearance through a drawing-room window at the Dil Koosha itself, being stretched over a row of poles along the line of route which the commander-in-chief and his troops had followed. Nay, the wires even followed Outram over the river, and made their appearance—for the first time in the history of Oude—on the left bank. No sooner did Sir Colin advance a few miles, than Stewart followed him with poles and wires, galvanic batteries and signalling apparatus—daring all dangers, conquering all difficulties, and setting up a talking-machine close to the very enemy themselves. It may almost literally be said that, wherever he lay down his head at night, Sir Colin could touch a handle, and converse with Lord Canning at Allahabad before he went to sleep. The value of the electric telegraph was quite beyond all estimate during these wars and movements: it was worth a large army in itself.
On the 7th, Sir James Outram, while making his arrangements on the opposite side of the river, was attacked in great force by the enemy. On the preceding day, he had baffled them in all their attempts, with a loss of only 2 killed and 10 wounded; and he was not now likely to be seriously affected even by four or five times his number. The enemy occupied the race-course stand with infantry, and bodies of cavalry galloped up to the same spot with the intention of disturbing Outram’s camp. He resisted all the attacks, chased them to a distance with his cavalry, and maintained his advantageous camping-ground.[[143]] The road from Fyzabad and from the cantonment passed near his camp; and as all that region had for many months been entirely in the hands of the rebels, there was a liability at any moment of some sudden onslaught being made on him. The commander-in-chief had foreseen this, when he placed at the disposal of Outram a division strong enough to form a compact little army in itself.
The result of a careful reconnaissance made on the 8th, by Sir Colin, resulted in instructions to Outram to arrange his batteries during the night, and on the following day to attack the enemy’s position, the key to which was the Chukkur Walla Kothee. On the morning of the 9th, accordingly, Sir James made the attack with excellent effect; the enemy being driven out at all points, and the Yellow House seized. He advanced his whole force for some distance through ground affording excellent cover for the enemy. He was by that means enabled to bring his right flank forward to occupy the Fyzabad road, which he crossed by a bridge over a nullah, and to plant his batteries for the purpose of enfilading the works upon the canal. During this day’s operations, much skirmishing took place between his Sikhs and Rifles and the enemy; but the most obstinate contest was maintained within the Yellow House itself, where a few fanatics, shutting themselves up, resisted for several hours all attempts to dislodge them. They were at length expelled, fighting desperately to the last. Outram was then enabled to take the villages of Jeamoor and Jijowly, and to advance to the Padishah Bagh or King’s Garden, opposite the Fureed Buksh palace, and to commence an enfilade fire on the lines of the Kaiser Bagh defences.
While Outram was engaged in these successful operations of the 9th on the left bank of the Goomtee, a very heavy fire was kept up against the Martinière, from mortars and guns placed in position on the Dil Koosha plateau. Sir Colin had purposely deferred this assault until Outram had captured the Yellow House, and commenced that flank attack which so embarrassed the enemy. The sailors of the naval brigade were joyously engaged on this day; for the thicker the fight, the better were they pleased. They commanded four great guns on the road near the Dil Koosha; and with these they battered away, not only against the Martinière, but also against a cluster of small houses near that building. Captain Sir William Peel managed to throw not only shot and shell, but also rockets, into enclosures which contained numerous insurgent musketeers—a visitation which necessarily prompted a hasty flight. It had well-nigh been a bad day for the British, however; for Peel received a musket-ball in the thigh while walking about fearlessly among his guns; the ball was extracted under the influence of chloroform; but the wound nearly proved fatal through the eagerness of the gallant man to return to the fray. He was, however, spared for the present. The enemy resisted this day’s attack with a good deal of resolution; for they fired shot right over the Martinière towards the Dil Koosha, from guns in their bastions on the canal line of defence. When the cannonading had proceeded to the desired extent, a storming of the Martinière took place, by troops under the command of Sir Edward Lugard and other able officers. The instructions given by the commander-in-chief for this enterprise were minute and complete,[[144]] and were carried out to the letter. The infantry marched forward from their camp behind the Dil Koosha, their bayonets glittering in the sun; and it was remarked that the sight of these terrible bayonets appeared to throw the enemy into more trepidation than all the guns and howitzers, mortars and rockets. A bayonet-charge by the British was more than any of the ‘Pandies’ could bear. Silently and swiftly the Highlanders and Punjaubees marched on, the former towards the Martinière, and the latter towards the trenches that flanked that building; while the other regiments of Lugard’s column followed closely in the rear. Distracted by Outram’s enfilade fire from the other side of the river, and by Lugard’s advance in front, the enemy made but a feeble resistance. The 42d Highlanders and the Punjaubee infantry climbed up the intrenchment abutting on the river, and rushed along the whole line of works, till they got to the neighbourhood of Banks’s house. Meanwhile, another body of infantry advanced to the Martinière, and captured the building and the whole of the enclosure surrounding it. All this was done with very little bloodshed on either side; for Lugard’s men, in obedience to orders, did not fire; while the enemy escaped from the walls and trenches without maintaining a hand-to-hand contest. This abandonment of the defence-works would not have taken place so speedily had not Outram’s flanking fire enfiladed the whole line; but the insurgent artillerymen found it impossible to withstand the ordeal to which they were now exposed. Sir Colin’s plan had been so carefully made, and so admirably carried out, that this capture of the enemy’s exterior line of defence was effected almost without loss.
On the 10th, while Outram was engaged in strengthening the position which he had taken up, he sent Hope Grant with the cavalry of the division to patrol over the whole of the country between the left bank of the Goomtee and the old cantonment. This was done with the view of preventing any surprise by the approach of bodies of the rebels in that quarter. An extensive system of patrolling or reconnaissance had formed from the first a part of Sir Colin’s plan for the tactics of the siege. Outram on this day brought his heavy guns into a position to rake the enemy’s lines, to annoy the Kaiser Bagh with a vertical and direct fire, to attack the suburbs in the vicinity of the iron and stone bridges, and to command the iron bridge from the left bank; all of which operations he carried out with great success. The enemy, however, still held the right end of the iron bridge so pertinaciously, that it was not until after a very heavy cannonading that the conquest was effected.
On the city side of the river, on this day, the operations consisted mainly in securing the conquests effected on the 9th. At a very early hour in the morning, while yet dusk, the rebel sepoys advanced in great strength to reoccupy the defence-line of the canal, apparently not knowing that the Highlanders and Punjaubees had maintained that position during the night; they were speedily undeceived by a volley of musketry which put them to flight. At sunrise a disposition of troops and heavy guns was made by Lugard for an attack on Banks’s house; and this house, captured about noon, was at once secured as a strong military post.
Thus did this remarkable siege go on day after day. Nothing was hurried, nothing unforeseen. All the movements were made as if the city and its environs formed a vast chess-board on which the commander-in-chief could see the position of all the pieces and pawns. Nay, so fully had he studied the matter, that he had some such command over the ground as is maintained by a chess-player who conducts and wins a game without seeing the board. Every force, every movement, was made conducive to one common end—the conquest of the city without the loss of much British blood, and without leaving any lurking-place in the hands of the enemy.
The conquest and fortifying of Banks’s house enabled Sir Colin to commence the second part of his operations. Having captured the enemy’s exterior line of defence, he had now to attack the second or middle line, which (as has been already shewn) began at the river-side near the Motee Mehal, the Mess-house, and the Emanbarra. The plan he formed was to use the great block of houses and palaces extending from Banks’s house to the Kaiser Bagh as an approach, instead of sapping up towards the second line of works. ‘The operation,’ as he said in his dispatch, ‘had now become one of an engineering character; and the most earnest endeavours were made to save the infantry from being hazarded before due preparation had been made.’ The chief engineer, Brigadier Napier, placed his batteries in such positions as to shell and breach a large block of the palaces known as the Begum Kothee. This bombardment, on the 11th, was long and severe; for the front of the palaces was screened by outhouses, earthworks, and parapets, which required to be well battered before the infantry could make the assault. The 8-inch guns of the naval brigade were the chief instruments in this formidable cannonade. At length, about four o’clock in the afternoon, Napier announced that the breaches were practicable, and Lugard at once made arrangements for storming the Begum Kothee. He had with him the 93d Highlanders, the 4th Punjaub Rifles, and 1000 Goorkhas, and was aided in the assault by Adrian Hope. His troops speedily secured the whole block of buildings, and inflicted a very heavy loss on the enemy. The attack was one of a desperate character, and was characterised by Sir Colin as ‘the sternest struggle which occurred during the siege.’ From that point Napier pushed his engineering approaches with great judgment through the enclosures, by the aid of the sappers and the heavy guns; the troops immediately occupying the ground as he advanced, and the mortars being moved from one position to another as the ground was won on which they could be placed. Outram was not idle during these operations. He obtained possession of the iron bridge, leading over the river from the cantonment to the city, and swept away the enemy from every part of the left bank of the river between that bridge and the Padishah Bagh; thus leaving him in a position to enfilade the central and inner lines of defence established by the enemy among the palaces.
It was while these serious and important operations were in progress, on the 11th of March, that the commander-in-chief was called upon to attend to a ceremonial affair, from which he would doubtless have willingly been spared. The preceding chapters have shewn how Jung Bahadoor, descending from the Nepaulese mountains with an army of 9000 Goorkhas, rendered a little service in the Goruckpore and Jounpoor districts, and then advanced into Oude to assist in the operations against Lucknow. His movements had been dilatory; and Sir Colin was forced to arrange all the details of the siege as if no reliance could be placed in this ally. At length, however, on the afternoon of the 11th, Jung Bahadoor appeared at the Dil Koosha; he and Sir Colin met for the first time. The meeting was a curious one. The Nepaul chieftain, thoroughly Asiatic in everything, prepared for the interview as one on which he might lavish all his splendour of gold, satin, pearls, and diamonds; the old Highland officer, on the other hand, plain beyond the usual plainness of a soldier in all that concerned personal indulgences,[[145]] was somewhat tried even by the necessity for his full regimentals and decorative appendages. A continuous battle was going on, in which he thought of his soldiers’ lives, and of the tactics necessary to insure a victory; at such a time, and in such a climate, he would gladly have dispensed with the scarlet and the feathers of his rank, and of the oriental compliments in which truth takes little part. A tasteful canopy was prepared in front of Sir Colin’s mess-tent; and here were assembled the commander-in-chief, Archdale Wilson, Hope Grant, a glittering group of staff-officers and aids-de-camp, a Highland guard of honour, an escort of Lancers, bands, pipers, drums, flags, and all the paraphernalia for a military show. Sir Colin was punctual; Jung Bahadoor was not. Sir Colin, his thoughts all the while directed towards Lugard’s operations at the Begum Kothee, felt the approaching ceremony, and the delay in beginning it, as a sore interruption. At length the Nepaulese chieftain appeared. Jung Bahadoor had, as Nepaulese ambassador, made himself famous in London a few years before, by his gorgeous dress and lavish expenditure; and he now appeared in fully as great splendour. The presentations, the greetings, the compliments, the speeches, were all of the wonted kind; but when Captain Hope Johnstone, as one of the officers of the chief of the staff, entered to announce that ‘the Begum Kothee is taken,’ Sir Colin broke through all ceremony, expressed a soldier’s pleasure at the news, and brought the interview to a termination. Jung Bahadoor returned to his own camp; and the commander-in-chief instantly resumed his ordinary military duties. Sir Colin was evidently somewhat puzzled to know how best to employ his gorgeous colleague; although his courtesy would not allow him to shew it. The Goorkhas moved close to the canal on the 13th; and on the following day Sir Colin requested Jung Bahadoor to cross the canal, and attack the suburbs to the left of Banks’s house. As he was obliged, just at that critical time, to mass all the available strength of his British troops in the double attack along the banks of the Goomtee, the commander-in-chief had few to spare for his left wing; and he speaks of the troops of the Nepaulese leader as being ‘most advantageously employed for several days,’ in thus covering his left.
We return to the siege operations. So great had been the progress made on the 11th, that the development of the commander-in-chief’s strategy became every hour more and more clear. Outram’s heavy fire with guns and mortars produced great effect on the Kaiser Bagh; while the Begum Kothee became a post from which an attack could be made on the Emanbarra, a large building situated between the Begum Kothee and the Kaiser Bagh.[[146]] The Begum Kothee palace, when visited by the officers of the staff on the morning of the 12th, astonished them by the strength which the enemy had given to it. The walls were so loopholed for musketry, the bastions and cannon were so numerous, the ditch around it was so deep, and the earthen rampart so high, that all marvelled how it came to be so easily captured on the preceding day. The enemy might have held it against double of Lugard’s force, had they not been paralysed by the bayonet. It was a strange sight, on the following morning, to see Highlanders and Punjaubees roaming about gorgeous saloons and zenanas, still containing many articles of dress and personal ornaments which the ladies of the palace had not had time to carry away with them. Whither the inmates had fled, the conquerors at that time did not know, and in all probability did not care. It was a strange and unnatural sight; splendour and blood appeared to have struggled for mastery in the various courts and rooms of the palace, many contests having taken place with small numbers of the enemy.[[147]] From this building, we have said, Sir Colin determined that progress should be made towards the Emanbarra, not by open assault, but by sapping through a mass of intermediate buildings.