The North-West had by this time fallen from the feeble hands of Colvin into the grasp of the rebels. In Gwalior the British Resident, by his personal ascendency, held Scindia to his loyalty, though Scindia’s army revolted. But for George Lawrence, Rajpootana would have been lost. As for Oudh, there the struggle was becoming tragic. On the eve of the insurrection this province, seething with sedition, was put under the rule of Sir Henry Lawrence. Lucknow, with 700,000 inhabitants, was a hotbed of treason, and the success of the mutineers at Meerut agitated them profoundly. At the end of May the Sepoys in Lucknow rose and marched away to Delhi, leaving Lawrence with a handful of Europeans to hold a rebellious city. Cawnpore is forty miles south of Lucknow, and there General Wheeler and another devoted band were similarly situated. On the night of the 21st of May, Wheeler and the English population—about a thousand souls—withdrew into a kind of temporary fortress which he had created, and which he defended by some 210 men. At Cawnpore, in May, 1857, there was residing a young Mahratta noble, Nana Sahib by name, whose popular manners had rendered him a favourite in the English community. He had been the adopted heir of the last Peishwa of Berari, and his grievance against the Government was that Dalhousie refused to let him enjoy the pension guaranteed to the Peishwa and his successors. Nana Sahib had spent a season in London to press his claims, and had been most hospitably received. His agent, Azin Oolla Khan, had returned to India after visiting the Crimea, and bearing to his master tales which were partially true, of the defeats and humiliations which England had suffered during her war with Russia. Nana Sahib had been busy with plots against the English raj for many years, and his agents were ubiquitous. In Oudh they had been especially active, for they had taken every advantage of the mistakes of an over-zealous Commissioner—Mr. Coverley Jackson—to fan the flame of discontent in that province. Yet Wheeler trusted the Nana Sahib so implicitly that he put the treasury of Cawnpore in the charge of his personal retinue lest his own Native troops might fail him. On the 4th of June General Wheeler’s Sepoys revolted, joined Nana Sahib’s retinue in plundering the treasury, and then, laden with spoil, set out for Delhi. But the Nana’s idea was to win empire for himself rather than for a degenerate descendant of the Mogul dynasty. He therefore persuaded the rebels to return, and besiege the English garrison at Cawnpore. On the twentieth day of the siege he sent one of his prisoners, an old lady named Greenway, to General Wheeler, offering the beleaguered English a safe conduct to Allahabad if they would surrender. The offer was accepted. On the 27th of June the survivors—men, women, and children, about 450 in all—marched to the boats which had been prepared for them. As soon as they had embarked Nana Sahib treacherously opened fire on them, and converted an exodus into a massacre. One hundred and twenty-two captives were taken, and imprisoned in a house till the 15th of July, when they were butchered. Next morning their bodies, some still quivering with life, were thrown into a well. When tidings of this ghastly crime reached Europe, the nation was for a moment horror-stricken, but only for a moment. A cry of rage broke forth from the British people, and the Government hastened to send avenging reinforcements to the East. They could not, however, arrive in time to save Cawnpore, and when it fell, the rebels closed round Henry Lawrence at Lucknow. Two days after the siege began a stray shot mortally wounded him, and, after thirty-six hours of intense agony, one of the noblest hearts in India had ceased to beat for ever.
“It is evident,” said the Queen, in a letter to Lord Palmerston, commenting on these events, “from a comparison of the news with the map, that whereas hitherto the seat of the mutiny was Oudh, Delhi, and the Upper Ganges, to which localities all troops have been despatched, it has now broken out in their rear, cutting them off from the base of operations, viz., Calcutta, and that it has reached the gates of the seat of Government itself.” The North-West and Oudh were, in fact, lost. In the former province, a Mogul King held sway at Delhi, whilst Colvin was clinging to Agra with feeble hands. In Oudh, Nana Sahib, the viper of the insurrection, was installed at Cawnpore; whilst a small band of Englishmen, bewailing the loss of their heroic leader, stood desperately at bay at Lucknow. In six months, the Empire which had been created in a century, was shattered and in ruins. Yet the English clung to these ruins with the tenacity of despair, and what they had lost they were determined to re-conquer. Fortunately, they had in India what they lacked in the Crimea, two leaders who were alike competent to translate a high resolve into prompt action. These were Lawrence at Lahore, and Canning at Calcutta.
When the Mutiny first broke out General Anson was Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in India. It was said that he was a mere amateur soldier, and that in Simla he had accordingly found a congenial Capua. Family interest had sent him at one bound from the Turf some years before to the command of one of the Presidency armies. When the Commandership-in-Chief of the Indian Armies fell vacant, family interest had again secured the post for him. Had he been a man of capacity and energy the Mutiny would have been stamped out when it was feebly sporadic. After it became what Canning called “epidemic,” the task of repression was harder. Whether Anson would have risen to the level of his responsibilities the world will never know now, because he died in a fortnight after he began to grapple with the crisis.[342] His slender force was then taken in hand by Sir H. Barnard, who pressed on to the South, and who reached Alipore on the 5th of June, where he effected a junction with Sir Archdale Wilson, who had marched from Meerut. On the 8th Barnard drove the rebels from their entrenchments at Budlee Serái, four miles north of Delhi, where he repeated Raglan’s experiment in the Crimea—that of besieging a fortress, whose garrison was really besieging him. On the 5th of July Barnard died, to be succeeded by Reed, who in turn was succeeded by Wilson on the 17th of July. All four were sluggish generals, and it was well that John Lawrence, at Lahore, acted on them like a goad. Englishmen will not readily forget his famous telegram to Anson in May when he heard that the General was about to entrench himself at Umballa—“Clubs are trumps—not spades?” A vain controversy has arisen as to who can claim credit for the capture of Delhi; whether it was due to Wilson’s slow but cautious tactics, or to the engineering skill of Taylor, or the demoniac energy of Nicholson, or the dashing enterprise of Chamberlain, who brought succours from the Punjab. The man who really took the rebel stronghold was not a soldier but a civilian, for it was John Lawrence, at Lahore, and not any of the generals before Delhi, who was the bulwark of the war.[343]
When the Mutiny broke out the Punjab was—by the prompt action of Lawrence’s subordinates who disarmed sulking troops, and stamped out the germs of mutiny whenever and wherever they were visible—saved and secured.
LORD LAWRENCE.
After this Delhi seemed to him to be the very keystone of the insurrection. To take it there was no risk too great to run—no hazard too perilous to undergo.[344] Though his own position at Lahore was dangerous enough, he threw himself on the people, and staked everything on the fidelity of the Sikhs. He summoned the old gunners of the Khálsa from their fields. The low-caste “Muzbis” he converted into sappers. The fierce chieftains, who had fought against us in ’48 and ’49, together with their followers, he hurried on to the rebel city, thereby stripping his province of local leaders who might have organised a rising. “From, the Punjab arsenals,” says one of Lawrence’s critics, “the siege-trains were equipped; from the Punjab districts vast amounts of carriage were gathered and despatched systematically with their loads to Delhi; from the Punjab treasuries the sinews of war were furnished. Men were raised by tens of thousands to replace the Sepoys—raised, indeed, in such numbers that—as constantly comes out in Lawrence’s correspondence—the dread was for a long time never absent from his mind lest this might be overdone, and new danger might arise from the Punjabis becoming conscious of their strength.”[345] What wonder, then, that in England as in India, where it was admitted that the fall of Delhi broke the neck of the insurrection, all men who knew the circumstances of the case, who knew how he had to stimulate laggards,[346] strengthen faint hearts, overcome jealousies, sweep away obstructions—“all greeted Sir John Lawrence by acclamation as the man who had done more than any single man to save the Indian Empire”?[347] And justly. For had the great and warlike Sikh nation, in the midst of which Lawrence stood like a lion at bay, risen against the British raj, “all would have been lost save honour.” He saw, in fact, that the Khálsa banner must be carried into our own lines, otherwise it would be swept into the lines of the enemy; and it was this inspiration of genius that really saved India. Delhi fell before the attacks of the reinforced army, after six days’ fighting, on the 20th of September, and on the 21st the Mogul king was captured by Captain Hodson (“Hodson of Hodson’s Horse”), who next day shot, with his own hand, his two sons, and hung up their bodies in the most public place in the city.[348]
The fall of Delhi was not the end, but the beginning of the end, of the Mutiny. Oudh had to be recovered, and if it be said that Lawrence captured Delhi, it is but right to say that Canning wrested Oudh from the grasp of the insurgents. His position in Calcutta was an embarrassing one. A terrible panic had paralysed those round him. Though they seemed able to do nothing but clamour for vengeance and for blood;[349] yet in the whirlwind of their passion Canning stood “steadfast as a pillar in a storm.” He was one of those who at such a moment “attain the wise indifference of the wise” to everything save the paramount demands of practical duty. He sent to Bombay, Madras, and Ceylon for reinforcements. He intercepted at Singapore the force that was on its way to China to support Lord Elgin, who had been sent to supersede Sir John Bowring,[350] and he armed Henry and John Lawrence with absolute power in Oudh and the Punjab. On the 23rd of May, Neill brought to Calcutta the first of the reinforcements from Madras. Havelock followed with two regiments from Persia, superseding Neill; and after him came Outram, who was to supersede Havelock and succeed Henry Lawrence as Chief Commissioner in Oudh. Outram, however, refused to deprive Havelock of the honour of relieving Lucknow, and accompanied him merely in his civil capacity. On the 17th, Havelock forced his way to the scene of the massacre at Cawnpore, where the sickening relics of Nana Sahib’s crime were still visible. Onwards his Army of Vengeance swept with hungry hearts to Lucknow, which they entered on the 25th of September, after a great variety of perilous adventure. When the imprisoned garrison, who had long been listening with strained ears for the beat of the English drums, met their rescuers, the scene was inexpressibly touching. The Highlanders, usually the most stolid and least emotional of our troops, had become dangerously excited after they entered Cawnpore; and, in the engagements on the march to Lucknow, they had fought, contrary to their wont, more like savages than civilised men. But when they marched into Lucknow their hearts softened. Oblivious of discipline and decorum, they rushed from their ranks, shaking hands with the ladies, lifting up the little children in their brawny arms, and passing them along from hand to hand, to be pressed to rough and bearded lips. Outram now took over the supreme command; but, finding himself again surrounded by the enemy in overwhelming numbers, he decided not to withdraw from the city. Lucknow had therefore to be relieved again.
The death of Anson, and the startling development of the insurrection in midsummer, together with the pressing appeals of the Queen, roused the Cabinet to action. They sent out reinforcements, and on the 11th of July decided to appoint Sir Colin Campbell as Anson’s successor. When asked by Lord Panmure when he could start, Campbell answered, laconically, “To-morrow;” and, as a matter of fact, with little more than the kit of a common soldier, the veteran did start next night.[351] On the 17th of August he arrived at Calcutta, and toiled without ceasing to organise an army. The greatest military historian of our time has said that Campbell had a genuine and natural love for war, and he was one of those whose hearts beat stronger in the hour of battle than at any other moment of their lives. But he loved victory better than combat; and when he fought, he fought to win. Hence the extraordinary pains he took with his preparations, and the time he spent, or, as some of his panic-stricken critics in Calcutta said, wasted, in making arrangements which would virtually guarantee success. It was not till the 27th of