Yet, so curiously constituted is the native mind, the blowing-up of the magazine was the final tocsin of revolt. It seemed to place beyond doubt that which all men were saying. The king was fighting the English. Islam was in the field against the Nazarene. The Mogul Empire was born again and the iron grip of British rule was relaxed. At once the sepoys at the Kashmir Gate fired a volley at the nearest officers, of whom three fell dead.
Two survivors rushed up the bastion and jumped into the ditch. Others, hearing the shrieks of some women in the guard room, poor creatures who had escaped from the city, ran through a hail of bullets and got them out. Fastening belts and handkerchiefs together, the men lowered the women into the fosse and, with extraordinary exertions, lifted them up the opposite side.
At the Flagstaff Tower the 74th and the remainder of the 38th suddenly told their officers that they would obey them no longer. When this last shred of hope was gone, the Brigadier reluctantly gave the order to retreat. The women and children were placed in carriages and a mournful procession began to straggle through the deserted cantonment along the Alipur Road.
Soon the fugitives saw their bungalows on fire. “Then,” says that accurate and impartial historian of the Mutiny, Mr. T. R. E. Holmes, “began that piteous flight, the first of many such incidents which hardened the hearts of the British to inflict a terrible revenge.... Driven to hide in jungles or morasses from despicable vagrants—robbed, and scourged, and mocked by villagers who had entrapped them with promises of help—scorched by the blazing sun, blistered by burning winds, half-drowned in rivers which they had to ford or swim across, naked, weary and starving, they wandered on; while some fell dead by the wayside, and others, unable to move farther, were abandoned by their sorrowing friends to die on the road.”
In such wise did the British leave Imperial Delhi. They came back, later, but many things had to happen meanwhile.
The volcanic outburst in the Delhi district might have been paralleled farther north were not the Punjab fortunate in its rulers. Sir John Lawrence was Chief Commissioner at Lahore. When that fateful telegram from Delhi was received in the capital of the Punjab he was on his way to Murree, a charming and secluded hill station, for the benefit of his health. But, like most great men, Lawrence had the faculty of surrounding himself with able lieutenants.
His deputy, Robert Montgomery, whose singularly benevolent aspect concealed an iron will, saw at once that if the Punjab followed the lead of Meerut and Delhi, India would be lost. Lahore had a mixed population of a hundred thousand Sikhs and Mohammedans, born soldiers every man, and ready to take any side that promised to settle disputes by cold steel rather than legal codes. If these hot heads, with their millions of co-religionists in the land of the Five Rivers, were allowed to gain the upper hand, they would sweep through the country from the mountains to the sea.
The troops, British and native, were stationed in the cantonment of Mian-mir, some five miles from Lahore. There were one native cavalry regiment and three native infantry battalions whose loyalty might be measured by minutes as soon as they learnt that the standard of Bahadur Shah was floating over the palace at Delhi. To quell them the authorities had the 81st Foot and two batteries of horse artillery, or, proportionately, far less a force than that at Meerut, the Britons being outnumbered eight times by the natives.
Montgomery coolly drove to Mian-mir on the morning of the 12th, took counsel with the Brigadier, Stuart Corbett, and made his plans. A ball was fixed for that night. All society attended it, and men who knew that the morrow’s sun might set on a scene of bloodshed and desolation danced gaily with the ladies of Lahore. Surely those few who were in the secret of the scheme arranged by Montgomery and Corbett must have thought of a more famous ball at Brussels on a June night in 1815.
Next morning the garrison fell in for a general parade of all arms. The artillery and 81st were on the right of the line, the native infantry in the center, and the sowars on the left. A proclamation by Government announcing the disbandment of the 34th at Barrackpore was read, and may have given some inkling of coming events to the more thoughtful among the sepoys. But they had no time for secret murmurings. Maneuvers began instantly. In a few minutes the native troops found themselves confronted by the 81st and the two batteries of artillery.