The proceedings of the Oudian intriguers during the month of June will presently be noticed in other ways; but it will be convenient first to attend to the affairs of Behar.
In former chapters it has been narrated, in sufficient fulness for the purpose in view, how the western provinces of Behar were troubled by the Jugdispore and Dinapoor rebels, and with how many difficulties Sir Edward Lugard had to contend in bringing his ‘Azimghur Field-force’ to bear against them. The month of June offered no exception to this state of things. Most harassing indeed were the labours which they brought upon him, testing his patience and perseverance more, perhaps, than his military skill. Notwithstanding the numerous defeats which they had suffered, these mutinied sepoys and armed budmashes were continually moving from place to place—giving evidence of their presence by murder, plunder, and burning. The jungles around Jugdispore afforded many facilities for hiding and secret flight. One of the many defeats inflicted by Sir Edward occurred on the 27th of May. Immediately afterwards a body of several hundreds of those insurgents issued from the eastern portion of the jungle, and shewed themselves in their true character as marauders bent on mischief, rather than as soldiers fighting for a definite cause. On the 30th they burned an indigo factory at Twining Gunge, a place near Dumoran; whilst on the same day another body advanced to the village of Rajpore, within eight miles of Buxar, and murdered two natives in government service. From thence they wandered, during the next four or five days, among the neighbouring villages, working mischief at every step. In anything like a military sense, these bands of marauders were contemptible; but so numerous were the unemployed and half-fed ruffians in the disturbed districts, that there were always materials at hand for swelling the numbers of these freebooting insurgents. Lugard was compelled to keep his troops moving about, between Arrah and Buxar; while the authorities at Ghazeepore and Benares were on the alert to check any advance of the rebels towards those cities. On the 2d of June he divided his force into two wings, and established camps at Keshwa and Dulleepore, with a line of posts across the jungle. On the next day he cut a broad road through the jungle to connect the two camps. Having thus completely hemmed a considerable body of the rebels within the southern end of the jungle, he attacked them with his whole force on the 4th, with a very successful result—so far as regarded the maintenance of military superiority. The rebels attempted for a time to make a stand; but the 10th and 84th foot, charging with the bayonet, defeated them with great slaughter. Here again, however, was the old story repeated; his hope of capturing the main body of rebels was frustrated; they broke up into small bands, and fled in various directions.
Instead of describing numerous petty contests that occurred during the month, it may be well to illustrate the peculiar characteristics of the struggle by one particular instance, to shew that the British troops in Behar had more certainty of hard work than chance of glory. During the first week in June, Sir Edward intrusted to Brigadier Douglas the duty of intercepting a body of rebels from the Jugdispore district towards Buxar—a difficult duty, on account of the ingenuity of the rebels in eluding pursuit. Douglas started on the 7th, taking with him H.M. 84th foot, a troop of the 4th Madras cavalry, three troops of the military train, and three guns of the royal horse-artillery. On that and the two following days he marched to Buxar, by way of Shahpoor and Saumgunje. Between the 10th and the 13th he was busily engaged in the almost hopeless task of catching the rebels who were known to be marching and marauding not far distant. Now he would descry a few hundred of them in a tope of trees, and send his horse-artillery to disperse them with grape-shot; now he would cross the little river Surronuddee, or the Kurrumnassa, or hasten to the Sheapoor Ghât, in the hope of cutting off fugitives; now he would march through or near the villages of Ghamur, Chawsa, or Barra, in search either of rebels or of intelligence. His success by no means repaid him for his harassing exertions; he could seldom rely on information obtained concerning the movements of the rebels, and still more seldom could he catch the rebels themselves. In his dispatch relating to these operations, the brigadier said: ‘Three men of the royal horse-artillery died during the night from the effects of the sun, and one man of the 84th.... The heat during the operations was intense, and the troops suffered much, particularly the 84th regiment, who have now been thirteen months in the field. I consider this regiment at present to be quite unfit for active service; the men have no positive disease, but they are so exhausted that they can neither eat nor sleep.’ If they could have encountered the enemy, and thoroughly vanquished them in a regular battle, the overworked and heat-worn soldiers would have borne this and more than this cheerfully; but they had to deal with rebels who eluded their search in an extraordinary way. Sir Edward Lugard, in a dispatch written on the 14th, dated from his camp at Narainpoor, near Jugdispore, adverted to this subject in the following terms: ‘To shew the rapidity and secrecy with which the rebels conduct their movements, I beg to state, that in order to guard against the return of any party from the west towards the jungles, without my getting timely intelligence, so that I might intercept them, I posted at Roop-Saugor—a village thirteen miles to my southwest, on the track taken by the rebels in their flight—Captain Rattray, with his Sikh battalion. He again threw forward scouts some miles in the same direction, and constantly had parties patrolling in the different villages. But in spite of every precaution, the rebel force were at Medneepore, within four miles of him, before he could communicate with me, and passed on towards the jungle the same night. Every endeavour to obtain information from the people of the district has proved vain; scarcely ever has any intelligence been given to us, until the time has passed when advantage could be taken of it.’
In reference to these Jugdispore rebels, it has been remarked that they were neither Sikhs from the west, nor Poorbeahs from the east; but chiefly Bhojpoories of the Shahabad district, most of them born on Koer Singh’s own estates. Moreover, causes have been assigned for thinking that these, as well as other rebels, adhered most to those leaders who could treat them best, whether in pay or plunder, without much reference to their military abilities. ‘The extraordinary variations in the numbers of the insurgents may be partly accounted for by variations in the readiness of pay. Koer Singh, when he left Oude, had barely five hundred men in his train. As he marched, every straggling sepoy, every embarrassed scoundrel with a sword, enlisted in his service. By the time he reached Azimghur he had two thousand five hundred followers; most, but not all, well armed. The flight across the river dispersed them once more; and it was not till the check sustained by H.M. 35th that they thronged to him again. Apparently the leaders are well aware of the advantage this peculiarity affords. Thus, after their defeat by Sir E. Lugard, the great bulk of the Behar insurgents vanished; the work was apparently complete, and the military ends of the campaign to all appearance accomplished. The leaders, however, remained in the jungle, and in five days their followers were round them again; they had glided back in twos and threes, by paths on which no European would be met.’
After many weeks of fatiguing duty in this region, Sir Edward Lugard, worn with heat and sickness, resigned the command about the end of June; handing over to Colonel Douglas the office of chasing the Jugdispore rebels from place to place. Nor was it in that particular locality alone that this duty had to be fulfilled. Ummer Singh, equalling his deceased brother in activity, was no sooner defeated in one place than he made his appearance in another, carrying discord into villages where his presence was as little desired by natives as by Europeans. While Colonel Douglas was on his way towards the scene of his new command, news reached him that the English at Gayah had been driven into intrenchments by a party of a hundred and fifty rebel prisoners, who had been set at liberty by the native police employed to watch them, and were speedily joined by the jail convicts; all—prisoners, police, and convicts—became suddenly ‘patriots,’ and shewed their patriotism by threatening all the officials at the station. This is believed to have been done by some connivance with Ummer Singh. The Europeans at Gayah were thrown into a great ferment by this visitation; the few troops present were withdrawn into the intrenchment, as were likewise the civilians, ladies, and children. No immediate attack followed; but the incident furnished one among many proofs that the native police were, in most of the Bengal and Hindostan provinces, a source of more danger than protection to the British—except the Sikh police, who almost uniformly behaved well.
The transactions in Oude, during the month of June, told of rebels defeated but not disbanded, weakened but not captured. There were many leaders, and these required to be narrowly watched.
One of the first cares of the authorities was to place the important city of Lucknow in such a state of defence as to render it safe from attacks within and without. Various military works were planned by Colonel Napier, and were executed by Major Crommelin after Napier’s departure. From the vast extent of Lucknow, and the absence of any very prominent features of the ground, it was a difficult city to defend except by a large body of troops. The point which gave the nearest approach to a command over the city was the old fort or Muchee Bhowan, near which was the great Emanbarra, capable of sheltering a large number of troops. It was decided to select several spots as military posts, to clear the ground round those spots, and to open streets or roads of communication from post to post. The Muchee Bhowan was selected as the chief of these posts; a second was near the iron bridge leading over the Goomtee to the Fyzabad road; a third was on the site of the Residency, now a heap of ruins; a fourth was at the Moosa Bagh. All suburbs and buildings lying on the banks of the river, likely to intercept the free march of troops from the Muchee Bhowan to the Moosa Bagh, were ordered to be swept away. Large masses of houses were also removed, to form good military roads from the Muchee Bhowan to the Char Bagh, the Moosa Bagh, the stone bridge, the iron bridge, and the old cantonment. The vast range of palaces, such as the Fureed Buksh, the Chuttur Munzil, the Kaiser Bagh, &c., were converted temporarily into barracks, and all the streets and buildings near them either pulled down or thrown open. The Martinière, the Dil Koosha, and Banks’s house, were formed into military posts on the eastern side of the city. The two extremes of these posts, from northwest to southeast, were not far short of seven miles asunder; they would require a considerable number of troops for their occupancy and defence; but under any circumstances such would be required in the great capital of Oude for a long period to come.
The Alum Bagh continued to be maintained, as an important and useful station on the road from Lucknow to Cawnpore. It was destined to live in history as a place which Sir James Outram had defended for nearly four months against armed forces estimated at little short of a hundred thousand men. It was not originally a fort, only a palace in the midst of a walled garden; but it presented facilities for being made into useful shelter for troops. Another place, the bridge of Bunnee, over the river Sye, was also carefully maintained as an important military post between Lucknow and Cawnpore. During the latter part of May, the English troops employed with Sir Hope Grant in various expeditions against the enemy suffered severely from the heat; and it was found necessary to give the 38th regiment a temporary sojourn in the Emanbarra at Lucknow, supplying their place by the 53d. On the 3d of June the Bunnee force moved out, to disperse a body of rebels who had posted themselves near Pooroa. There was another duty of a singular kind intrusted to these troops. The Rajah of Kupoorthully, a Sikh chieftain, who had rendered valuable services to the government in time of need, received as a reward an extensive jaghire or domain in Oude. In order that he might defend both himself and British interests in that domain, he was assisted in intrenching himself, and was supplied with guns, mortars, and ammunition; this was irrespective of his own force of four thousand Sikh troops.
Shortly after the opening of the month, rumours reached the authorities at Lucknow that a body of rebels, estimated at seventeen or eighteen thousand, had crossed the Gogra, and taken up a position at Ramnuggur Dhumaree, under the orders of Gorhuccus Singh. The correctness of this report was not certain—nor of others that Madhoo Singh was at the head of five thousand rebels at Goosaengunje, Benee Madhoo with a small number in the Poorwah district, and Dunkha Shah with a larger force near Chinhut. Still, though these numbers were probably exaggerated by alarmists, it was not considered prudent to leave the northeast region of Oude unprotected. Accordingly, a movable column was organised, to proceed towards Fyzabad.
Sir Hope Grant, intrusted at that time with the conduct of military affairs in Oude, himself conducted an expedition towards the districts just adverted to. A little before midnight on the 12th of June, acting on information which had reached him, he marched from Lucknow to Chinhut, and thence towards Nawabgunge, on the Fyzabad road. His force consisted of the 2d and 3d battalions of the Rifle Brigade, the 5th Punjaub Rifles, a detachment of Engineers and Sappers, the 7th Hussars, two squadrons of the 2d Dragoon Guards, Hodson’s Horse, a squadron of the first Sikh cavalry, a troop of mounted police, a troop of horse-artillery, and two light field-batteries. Leaving a garrison column at Chinhut, under Colonel Purnell, and intrusting the same officer with the temporary charge of the baggage and supplies belonging to the column, Sir Hope resumed his march during the night towards Nawabgunge, where sixteen thousand rebels had assembled, with several guns. By daylight on the following morning he crossed the Beti Nuddee at Quadrigunje, by means of a ford. He had purposely adopted this route instead of advancing to the bridge on the Fyzabad road; in order that, after crossing the nullah, he might get between the enemy and a large jungle. As a strong force of rebels defended the ford, a sharp artillery-fire, kept up by Mackinnon’s horse-artillery and Johnson’s battery, was necessary to effect this passage. Having surmounted this obstacle, Sir Hope, approaching nearer to Nawabgunge, got into the jungle district. Here the rebels made an attempt to surround him on all sides, and pick off his men by repeated volleys of musketry. The general speedily changed the aspect of affairs. He sent a troop of horse-artillery to the front; Johnson’s battery and two squadrons of horse were sent to defend the left; while a larger body confronted the rebels on the right—where the enemy apparently expected to find and to capture Sir Hope’s baggage. The struggle was very fierce, and the slaughter of the rebels considerable; the enemy, fanatical as well as numerous, gave exercise for all Grant’s boldness and sagacity in contending with them. The victory was complete—and yet it was indefinite; for the rebels, as usual, escaped, to renew their mischief at some other time and place. Nearly six hundred of their number were slain; the wounded were much more numerous. Hope Grant’s list of killed and wounded numbered about a hundred. Many of the rebels were Ghazees or Mohammedan fanatics, far more difficult to deal with than the mutinied sepoys. Adverting to some of the operations on the right flank, Grant said in his dispatch: ‘On arriving at this point, I found that a large number of Ghazees, with two guns, had come out on the open plain, and attacked Hodson’s Horse. I immediately ordered up the other four guns under the command of Lieutenant Percival, and two squadrons of the 7th Hussars under Major Sir W. Russell, and opened grape upon them within three or four hundred yards with terrible effect. But the fanatics made the most determined resistance; and two men in the midst of a shower of grape brought forward two green standards, which they planted in the ground beside their guns, and rallied their men. Captain Atherley’s two companies of the 3d battalion Rifle Brigade at this moment advanced to the attack, which obliged the rebels to move off. The cavalry then got between them and the guns; and the 7th Hussars, led gallantly by Sir W. Russell, supported by Hodson’s Horse under Major Daly, swept through them—killing every man.’ Whatever may have been the causes, proximate or remote, of the mutiny, it is quite evident that such Mussulman fanatics as these, with their green flag of rebellion and their cries of ‘Deen! deen!’ had been worked up, or had worked themselves up, to something like a sincere belief that they were fighting for their religion.