Then Outram, who had succeeded to the chief command as soon as Havelock joined hands with Inglis, called for a volunteer who would act as Sir Colin’s guide through the network of canals, roads, and scattered suburbs that added to the dangers of Lucknow’s narrow streets, and a man named Kavanagh, an uncovenanted civilian, offered his services.
It is not hard to picture Kavanagh’s lot if he were captured by the mutineers. His own views were definite on the point. Beneath his native disguise he carried a pistol, not for use against an enemy, but to take his own life if he failed to creep through the investing lines. But he succeeded, and lived to be the only civilian hero ever awarded the Victoria Cross.
Another incident of the march should be noted. Malcolm saw preparations being made to hang a Mohammedan who was suspected of having ill-treated Europeans. The man protested his innocence, but he was not listened to. Then Frank, thinking he remembered his face, questioned him and found he was the zemindar who helped Winifred, her uncle and himself during the flight from Cawnpore.
Such testimony from an officer more than sufficed to outweigh the slight evidence against the prisoner, who was set at liberty forthwith. During the remainder of his life he had ample leisure to reflect on the good fortune that led him to help the people who sought his assistance on that June night. Were it not for Malcolm’s interference he would have been hanged without mercy, and possibly not without good cause.
On the afternoon of November 11, Sir Colin Campbell reviewed his little army. It was drawn up in parade order, on a plain a few miles south of the Dilkusha. Three thousand four hundred men faced him, and the smallness of the number is eloquent of the magnitude of their task. Indeed, that is one of the salient features of each main episode of the Mutiny. Nicholson at Delhi, Havelock at Cawnpore and on the way to Lucknow, Colin Campbell in the pending action, and Sir Hugh Rose in many a hard fought battle in Central India, one and all were called on to attack and defeat ten times the number of sepoys.
But what fine troops they were who met the commander-in-chief’s gaze as they stood marshaled there, on that dusty Indian maidan. Peel’s sailors, with eight heavy guns, artillerymen standing by the cannon that had sounded the knell of Delhi from below the Ridge, the 9th Lancers, who held the right flank when the capture of Hindu Rao’s house would have meant the collapse of the assault, the 8th and 75th Foot, the 2d and 4th Punjabis—all these had followed the Lion of the Punjab when he stormed the Cashmere Bastion. Sikh Cavalry, too, and Hodson’s wild horsemen, and many another gallant soldier, fresh from the immortal siege, returned the General’s quiet scrutiny, as he rode past, and doubtless wondered how he would compare as a leader with the man whom they had left in the little cemetery at the foot of the Ridge.
It is on record that from the end of the line came a yell of welcome and recognition. The 93d Highlanders remembered what Campbell had done in the Crimea, and their joyful slogan brought a flush to the bronzed face of the old war dog when he learnt the significance of their greeting.
Next morning began a three day’s battle. Perhaps there was never an action so spectacular, so thrilling, so amazingly in earnest, as the continuous fight which brought about the Second Relief of Lucknow. At the Alumbagh, at the Dilkusha and La Martinière school, at the Secunder Bagh and the Shah Nujeef, were fought fiercely-contested combats that in other campaigns would have figured as independent battles, each highly important in the history of the time.