The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Perhaps the most obstinate and bloody fighting during the siege took place in the line of unfinished barracks which crossed the S.W. angle of the entrenchments. The Sepoys held the northern half of this line of buildings. Of the three buildings to the south—which completely commanded the entrenchment—what was called “No. 4,” was held by a party of amateur soldiers—civil engineers employed on the East Indian railroads. There were a dozen of them, young fellows more familiar with theodolites than with rifles; but a cluster of English Lifeguards could not have fought with cooler bravery. And the civil engineers had a keenness of wit and a fertility of mechanical resource which veteran soldiers might easily have lacked.

Vainly the Sepoys pelted “No. 4” with 24-pounder shot, scourged it with musketry fire, or made wild rushes upon it. The gallant railway men devised new barriers for the doors, and new shields for the windows, and shot with cool and deadly aim, before which the Sepoys fell like rabbits. “No. 4,” like Hougoumont at Waterloo, might be battered into wreck, but could not be captured. In the Memorial Church at Cawnpore to-day, not the least touching tablet is one upon which is inscribed:—

To the memory of the Engineers of the East India Railway, who died and were killed in the great insurrection of 1857. Erected in affectionate remembrance by their brother Engineers in the North-Western Provinces.

Barrack No. 2 was a microscopic fortress, as fiercely attacked, and as valiantly defended as Barrack No. 4. It was first held by Lieutenant Glanville and a party of fourteen officers. Glanville was desperately wounded, and three-fourths of his heroic garrison killed; then the barrack was put in charge of Mowbray Thomson, of the 56th Native Infantry, one of the two officers who survived Cawnpore. Only sixteen men could find standing and fighting room in the barrack. The sixteen under Mowbray Thomson consisted of Ensign Henderson, a mere boy, half-a-dozen Madras Fusileers, two plate-layers from the railway works, and seven men of the 84th. As the garrison dwindled under the ever-scorching fire that played on the building, it was fed with new recruits. “Sometimes,” says Mowbray Thomson, “a civilian, sometimes a soldier came.” But soldier and civilian alike plied his rifle with a grim and silent courage that never grew flurried, and that never knew fear.

Mowbray Thomson, who was of an ingenious turn, contrived a perch in the topmost angle of the barrack wall, and planted there an officer named Stirling, who was at an age when other lads are playing at cricket with their schoolmates, but who was a quick and most deadly shot, and who “bagged” Sepoys as a sportsman, with a breech-loading shot-gun, might bag pheasants in a populous cover. Sometimes, on an agreed signal, the garrisons from No. 2 and No. 4 would dash out together, a little knot of ragged, unwashed, smoke-blackened Sahibs, counting about thirty in all, and running without regular order, but with that expression on their faces which the Sepoys knew meant tragical business; and, with musket and bayonet or hog-spear, they would sweep the line of barracks from end to end.

Nor was courage confined to the fighting men. In one fierce sally, at an early stage of the siege, eleven mutineers were captured. A desperate fight was raging at the moment, and every man was required at the front. A rope was hastily passed round the wrists of the eleven captured Sepoys, and they were put into the charge of the wife of a private of the 32nd, named Bridget Widdowson. Drawn sword in hand, this soldier’s wife, who had little children of her own in the beleaguered entrenchments, stood over the eleven mutineers, while they squatted nervously on their hams before her; and so business-like was the nourish of her weapon, so keen the sparkle in her eye, that not one man of the eleven dared to move. It was only when a guard of the stronger sex took Bridget’s place that the eleven, somehow, contrived to escape. Later on in the siege the supply of cartridges failed, and all the ladies were requisitioned for their stockings, to be used in the construction of new cartridges. When before, or since, did war claim for its service such strange material!

The Sepoys, at intervals, made furious assaults on the mud walls, but these were lined by shots too deadly, and held by hands too strong, to make success possible. Had the British, indeed, been the attacking force, they would have swept over the poor earthen barrier, not four feet high, with a single charge, before the siege was a dozen hours old. But, during the whole three weeks of their attack, though the Sepoys, counting fighting men, outnumbered their foes by, perhaps, thirty to one, they never succeeded in even reaching the irregular line of earth behind which the British stood.

Their best chance occurred when, on the eighth night of the bombardment, the thatch on the barrack used as a hospital, took fire. The whole building was quickly in flames, and in their red light the entrenchment, in every part, was as visible as at noonday. The barrack was used as a sleeping-place for the women and children of the 32nd. These fled from the burning building, but not all the sick and wounded could be rescued; some perished in the smoke and flame. That was, indeed, a night of horror. “The roar of the flames,” says Trevelyan, “lost every ten seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless anticipation of a sudden and agonising death; the group of crying women and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of ammunition, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom”—all this made up a strangely terrible scene.

It is a proof of the quality of Moore’s daring that, by way of proving to the Sepoys that this calamity had not lowered the spirits of the garrison, he organised on the following night a sally, and, with fifty picked men, dashed out on the rebel lines, swept them for many hundreds of yards, spiked a number of 24-pounder guns, and slew their gunners.

But the burning of the barracks was the fatal turning-point of the siege. It destroyed the last shelter of the sick and the women and children. The whole stock of medicines and of surgical appliances was consumed, and the wounded could no longer have their injuries dressed. The eighty odd Sepoys who formed part of the garrison had been lodged in the building now burned. It was deemed imprudent to allow them to mix with the garrison generally, and they were told to provide for themselves, and were allowed to steal out of the entrenchment and escape.