The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

The strength of the mutineers was a varying and uncertain quantity. Sometimes it was wildly guessed to have risen to 100,000, at other times to have sunk to 30,000. Colonel Inglis, in his official report of the siege, after speaking of “the terrific and incessant fire day and night,” says “there could not have been less than 8000 men firing at one time into our position.” This describes the common experience of eighty-eight days. And yet this great host, with all their constant tempest of fire, their repeated assaults, their innumerable mines, never gained a single foot of that ground above which flew the flag of England!

Sir Henry Lawrence’s keen and forecasting intellect made the triumphant defence of Lucknow possible, but in that defence he himself took the briefest share. The siege practically began on July 1. Lawrence had taken up his quarters in a room in the Residency, which gave him a complete view of the enemy, but was also peculiarly open to their fire. On that first day the Sepoys threw an 8-inch shell into the room where Lawrence was sitting, but he escaped without injury. He was entreated to change his quarters, but answered, with a laugh, he did not think the enemy had a gunner good enough to put a second shot through that same window! He was still pressed, however, to change, and at last he consented to do so “when he had arranged for moving his papers.”

At 8 P.M. on July 2 Lawrence was lying on his bed in this room, with Colonel Wilson sitting beside him writing down some instructions from his lips. Lawrence’s nephew, George, was reclining on a bed a few feet distant from his uncle; a coolie sat on the floor pulling the punkah. Suddenly, with a terrific rush, a second shell from that fatal howitzer broke into the room and exploded there. As George Lawrence describes it, “There was an instant’s darkness, and a kind of red glare, and a blast as of thunder. I found myself uninjured, though covered with bricks from top to toe.” The very clothes were torn off Wilson’s body, but he, too, was uninjured. Lawrence was the only member of the group struck by the exploding shell, and he was mortally wounded, the whole of the lower part of his body being shattered.

Colonel Wilson tells graphically the story of the exploding shell, the sheet of flame, the blast of sound, the dust, the thick darkness, the strangling smoke. He was himself thrown on the floor, and lay for a few moments stunned. Staggering to his feet, he cried, “Sir Henry, are you hurt?” “Twice I thus called without any answer; the third time he said, in a low tone, ‘I am killed.’” When the dust cleared away, it was seen that the coverlet on Lawrence’s bed, a moment before white, was now crimsoned with his blood. He died on the morning of July 4, and the story of the thirty-six hours between his wound and his death is strangely pathetic.

Fayrer, who was the resident surgeon, was brought hurriedly in, and Lawrence in a whisper asked him how long he had to live. A fragment of the shell had struck the hip and comminuted the upper part of the thigh-bone. The wound was plainly fatal; and as the walls of the room in which Lawrence lay were shaking continually to the stroke of the enemy’s round-shot, the dying man was carried to the verandah of Dr. Fayrer’s house, and there lay through the night, while life ebbed away. The Sepoys, somehow, got to know that Lawrence was lying under this particular verandah, and they turned on it what Fayrer describes as a “most fiendish fire of round-shot and musketry.” Through it all Lawrence kept the most perfect composure. He named his successor, Major Banks, and dictated exact and most luminous instructions as to the conduct of the siege. No finer proof of his clear, tenacious, forecasting intellect can be imagined than is supplied by the counsels which, whispered with dying breath, he gave to those on whom the responsibility of the defence must rest. Lawrence thought of everything and foresaw everything. The whole tactics of defence—how to keep the English members of the garrison in health, how to use the Sepoys, how to economise the provisions. “Entrench, entrench,” was the burden of his whispered counsels, urged with dying lips. “Let every man,” he said, “die at his post, but never make terms.” Only when he mentioned his wife’s name did his iron composure fail, and he wept those rare, reluctant tears which strong men know. He wished to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The service was held in the open verandah, the sound of the chaplain’s voice being broken by the incessant crackle of hostile muskets and the crash of cannon-ball. Brave men knelt with unshamed tears by Lawrence’s bedside, and partook of the Sacrament with him.

After it was over the dying man begged them to kiss him. The whole story, indeed, recalls that scene in the cockpit of the Victory, and the dying Nelson’s “Kiss me, Hardy!” “Bury me,” said Lawrence, “without any fuss, and in the same grave with any men of the garrison who may die at that time.” Then, records his biographer, “speaking rather to himself than to those about him,” he framed his own immortal epitaph, a sentence which deserves to be remembered as long as Nelson’s great signal itself, and which, indeed, has the same key-word: “Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. May God have mercy on him.” It is not so well known that Lawrence wished a verse of Scripture should be added to his epitaph. To the chaplain, Harris, he said, “This text I should like, ‘To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against Him.’” “It was,” he added, with a sudden touch of loving memory, “on my dear wife’s tomb.”

He was buried at nightfall. The combat was raging fiercely along each front of the Residency’s defences, and not an officer could follow the general to his grave. Four men of the 32nd were detailed to carry his body to its last rough resting-place. Before they lifted the couch on which it lay, one soldier drew down the sheet, and stooping, kissed with rough and quivering lips the dead man’s forehead, and each man of the party followed his example. What better sign of soldierly honour could be imagined? Lawrence’s burial curiously recalls that of Sir John Moore at Corunna. He, too, was buried, according to somewhat inaccurate tradition, “darkly, at the dead of night,” and had for his requiem the thunder of the foeman’s guns.

The story of the siege is, in the main, one of personal combats; of the duels of hostile sharpshooters; of desperate fighting underground in the mines; of sorties by the few against the many; of the assaults of thousands repulsed by scores. As a type of the long-enduring courage with which individual “posts” were held may be taken the single fact that Captain Anderson, whose residence formed what was called “Anderson’s post,” and who had a garrison of only twenty men, held his position for five months, though a battery of nine 9-pounder guns was playing upon it almost day and night!