Lawrence rode, hat in hand, wherever the fire was fiercest, cheering the men; but again and again he wrung his hands, and was heard to say, “My God! I have brought them to this!” A great body of native cavalry was about to charge down on the clusters of broken red-coats, when the thirty-six volunteers on horseback rode at them with such fury that the whole hostile mass was broken, and, with its two guns and sea of glittering sabres, was actually driven off in flight! The retreating column had reached the iron bridge; the Sepoys, outnumbering them by hundreds to one, were pressing on, when Lawrence saved them by a flash of warlike genius.
The British gun ammunition was exhausted, but Lawrence ordered the empty guns to be planted across the bridge, and the gunners to stand beside them with lighted port-fires, and before the menace of those unloaded guns the Sepoy pursuit was arrested! Out of his little European force no fewer than 112 men and five officers of the 32nd were slain. The memory of those gallant men poisoned Henry Lawrence’s dying moments. He blamed himself because, as he said, he “had been moved by the fear of man to undertake so hazardous an enterprise.”
How darkly that night settled down on Lucknow may be imagined. The scene when the broken troops, blackened with dust, staggering with exhaustion, bloody from wounds, came streaming into the Residency, was one of the wildest confusion. It seemed as if everything was lost. The victorious Sepoys might carry the Residency with one breathless rush. “The end of all things seemed to have come,” says Dr. Fayrer—who was busy dressing wounds amid all the tumult. “The poor ladies,” he adds, “who, like others, were anticipating immediate death, were perfectly calm, and showed great fortitude.” Lady Inglis has told how she “watched our poor soldiers returning—the most mournful sight. They were straggling in by twos and threes; some riding, some on guns, some supported by their comrades.” “Almost every other cavalry volunteer,” says another eye-witness, “was encumbered with two, three, or even four foot-soldiers; one perhaps holding his hand, another laying fast hold on the crupper, or the tail of the horse, or the stirrup, or on all together.”
Lady Inglis tells the story of how the news of Colonel Case’s death was brought to his wife. “Mrs. Case came up to me and said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Inglis, go to bed. I have just heard that your husband and mine are both safe.’ I said, ‘Why, I did not know Colonel Case went out.’ Just then John (Colonel Inglis) came in. He was crying, and after kissing me turned to Mrs. Case and said, ‘Poor Case!’ Never shall I forget the cry of agony from the poor widow.”
It was at a crisis like this that the gallant and masterful spirit of Henry Lawrence shone out. The Sepoys had a saying that “when Lawrence Sahib had looked once down to the ground, and once up to the sky, and stroked his beard, he knew what to do.” He had, that is, in an unrivalled degree, the faculty of seeing into the heart of a difficulty, and the twin faculty of swift decision. The disaster of Chinhut had changed the whole situation. Lawrence had armed and garrisoned a cluster of castellated buildings, called the Mutchee Bhawan, about a thousand yards from the Residency, for the purpose of over-awing the city. But his losses at Chinhut made it difficult to hold the Residency, and impossible to hold both the Residency and the Mutchee Bhawan; and on the morning of July 1, from a rough semaphore on the roof of the Residency, a message was signalled to the Mutchee Bhawan, “Retire to-night at twelve. Blow up well.”
Colonel Palmer, of the 48th Native Infantry, was in command at the Mutchee Bhawan; he called his officers together, and laid his plans with perfect skill and coolness. There was a magazine consisting of 250 barrels of gunpowder and nearly 1,000,000 cartridges; these were put together in a huge pile; every gun that could not be carried off was spiked, and at midnight the garrison filed silently out, and the fuse was lighted. The garrison reached the Residency gate without meeting an enemy, and just as the last man entered, with a shock as of an earthquake and a flame that for a moment lit up half the city, Mutchee Bhawan blew up. It turned out that a private of the 32nd was left drunk and sound asleep in the building. He was blown up, of course, but the next morning was standing, stark naked, hammering at the Residency gate, shouting, “Arrah, then, open your ⸺ gates!”
Lawrence had thus concentrated all his force within the lines of that scanty patch of soil which was to witness a defence as heroic and stubborn as that of Saragossa against the French, or of Jerusalem against the Romans; and which for the next eighty-eight days—till Havelock’s Highlanders, that is, with blackened faces and crimsoned bayonets came streaming through the Bailey Guard—was to be ringed with the fire of hostile guns.
What was called the Residency was really an irregular cluster of houses and gardens, covering an area of about thirty-three acres, looking down from a slight ridge upon the river Goomtee. In the centre stood the Residency itself, a lofty three-storeyed building with many windows and wide-circling verandahs: a spacious and comfortable residence, but singularly ill adapted for the purposes of war. The houses and gardens around it had been woven together with trenches and earthworks, with light batteries sprinkled at regular intervals on each front, and the external walls of the houses along the outer fronts were pierced with loopholes. But in the whole position there was not a defence anywhere that could resist artillery fire.
The whole position formed a rough, irregular pentagon. What may be called the northern front looked down a gentle slope, and across a line of native shops called the Captan Bazaar, to the river, the north-western angle being prolonged, like the horn of a rhinoceros, to include a little point of rising ground occupied by a residence known as Innes’s house.
The exterior defence was divided into seventeen posts, each post having its commandant and its tiny garrison of soldiers or of civilians, or of the few Sepoys still faithful to their salt. And each post had to fight, like Hal o’ the Wynd, for “its ain hand”; to dig its own trenches, drive its own mines, make sorties on its own account, and repel assaults with its own muskets and bayonets as best it could. One man from each post was detailed to fetch each morning provisions for the day, but, for the rest, the little cluster of smoke-blackened heroes held their post with desperate valour on their own account, and without communication with any other post. There were no reliefs. Every man was on continuous duty day and night, and if he cast himself down for a brief and broken slumber, it was with his musket by his side, and without undressing.