Havelock’s men had marched nineteen miles, and fought and won a great battle, without a particle of food, and so dreadful was the heat that twelve men died of sunstroke. Havelock camped on July 13 to give his men rest, resumed his march on the 14th, and on the morning of the 15th found the Sepoys drawn up in great strength in front of a village called Aong, twenty-two miles south of Cawnpore. Renaud led his Fusileers straight at the village, and carried it with a furious bayonet charge, but the gallant leader of the “blue caps” fell, mortally wounded, in the charge. Maude’s guns smashed the enemy’s artillery, and when the Highlanders and the 64th were seen coming on, the Sepoys again fled.
Havelock pressed steadily on, and found the Sepoys had rallied and were drawn up in a strong position, covered by a rivulet, swollen bank-high with recent rains, known as Pandoo Nuddee. A fine stone bridge crossed the river; it was guarded by a 24-pound gun, a 25-pound carronade, and a strong force of infantry. Havelock quickly developed his plan of attack. Maude raced forward with his guns, and placed them at three different points, so as to bring a concentric fire to bear on the bridge. Maude’s first blast of spherical case-shell broke the sponge staves of the heavy guns in the rebel battery, and rendered them useless.
The Sepoys tried to blow up the bridge. But Maude’s fire was hot; Stephenson, with his “blue caps,” was coming up at the double, and the Sepoys got flurried. They had mined the bridge, and the mine was fired prematurely. The explosion shattered the parapet of the bridge, but through the white smoke came the Fusileers, their bayonets sparkling vengefully. The Highlanders followed eagerly in support. The bridge was carried, the guns taken, the rebel gunners bayoneted, the rebel centre pierced and broken, and the rebel army itself swept northwards, with infinite dust and noise, in a mere tumult of panic-stricken flight.
The British camped for the night on the battlefield. At three o’clock in the morning, with the stars sparkling keenly over their heads, and a full moon flooding the camp with its white light, Havelock formed up his men. He told them he had learned there were some 200 women and children still held as prisoners in Cawnpore, the survivors of the massacre of June 27. “Think of our women and the little ones,” he said, “in the power of those devils incarnate.” The men answered with a shout, and, without waiting for the word of command, went “fours right,” and took the road.
It was a march of twenty miles. The sun rose and scorched the silent and panting ranks of the British with its pitiless heat. The Highlanders suffered most; they were wholly unprepared for a summer campaign, and were actually wearing the heavy woollen doublets intended for winter use; but their stubborn Northern blood sustained them. Every now and again, indeed, some poor fellow in the ranks dropped as though shot through the head, literally killed with the heat. Nana Sahib himself held the approach to Cawnpore, with 7000 troops and a powerful artillery, and his position was found to be of great strength.
Havelock studied it a few minutes with keen and soldierly glance, and formed his plans. He had the genius which can use rules, but which also, on occasion, can dispense with rules. He violated all the accepted canons of war in his attack upon the Nana’s position. He amused the enemy’s front with the fire of a company of the Fusileers, and the manœuvres of Barrow’s twenty volunteer sabres, while with his whole force he himself swept round to the right to turn the Nana’s flank. Havelock, that is, risked his baggage and his communications, to strike a daring blow for victory.
As Havelock’s men pressed grimly forward, screened by a small grove, they heard the bands of the Sepoy regiments playing “Auld lang syne” and “Cheer, boys, cheer,” and the sound made the men clutch their muskets with a little touch of added fury. The Sepoys discovered Havelock’s strategy rather late, and swung their guns round to meet it. Their fire smote the flank of Havelock’s column cruelly, but the British never paused nor faltered. When Havelock judged his turning movement was sufficiently advanced, he wheeled the column into line. His light guns were insufficient to beat down the fire of the heavy pieces worked by the rebels, and he launched his Highlanders at the battery. They moved dourly forward under a heavy fire, till within eighty yards of the guns. Then the bayonets came down to the charge, and with heads bent low and kilts flying in the wind, the Highlanders went in with a run. The charge was in perfect silence, not a shot nor a shout being heard; but it was so furious that mound and guns were carried in an instant, and the village itself swept through. As Forbes describes it, “Mad with the ardour of battle, every drop of Highland blood afire in every vein, the Ross-shire men crashed right through the village, and cleared it before they dropped out of the double.” They had crushed the enemy’s left, taken its guns, and sent a great mass of Sepoys whirling to the rear.
But the moment they emerged from the village, the great howitzer in the Nana’s centre opened fire upon the Highlanders, and once more the unequal duel between bayonet and cannon had to be renewed. Havelock himself galloped up to where the Highlanders were reforming after the confusion and rapture of their rush, and, pointing with his sword to the great howitzer, pouring its red torrent of flame upon them, cried: “Now, Highlanders! another charge like that wins the day.”
The Gaelic blood was still on fire. The officers could hardly restrain their men till they were roughly formed. In another moment the kilts and bonnets and bayonets of the 78th were pouring in a torrent over the big gun, and the rebel centre was broken! Meanwhile the 64th and 84th had thrust roughly back Nana Sahib’s right wing; but, fighting bravely, the Sepoys clung with unusual courage to a village about a mile to the rear of the position they first held, and their guns, drawn up in its front, fired fast and with deadly effect.
The Highlanders, pressing on from the centre, found themselves shoulder to shoulder with the 64th, advancing from the left. Maude’s guns, with the teams utterly exhausted, were a mile to the rear. Men were dropping fast in the British ranks, worn out with marching and charging under heat so cruel. In the smoke-blackened lines men were stumbling from very fatigue as they advanced on the quick red flashes and eddying smoke of the battery which covered the village. But Havelock, riding with the leading files, knew the soldier’s nature “from the crown of his shako down to his ammunition boots.” “Who,” he cried, “is to take that village—the Highlanders or the 64th?” Both regiments had Northern blood in them—the 64th is now known as the North Staffordshire—and that sudden appeal, that pitted regiment against regiment, sent the stout Midlanders of the 64th and the hot-blooded Gaels from the clachans and glens and loch sides of Ross-shire, forward in one racing charge that carried guns and village without a check.