A little after eight o’clock Kavanagh, with his native guide, crept to the bank of the Goomtee, which ran to the north of the Residency entrenchment. The river was a hundred yards wide, and between four feet and five feet deep. Both men stripped, crept down the bank, and slipped, as silently as otters, into the stream. Here for a moment, as Kavanagh in his narrative confesses, his courage failed him. The shadowy bank beyond the black river was held by some 60,000 merciless enemies. He had to pass through their camps and guards, and through miles of city streets beyond. If detected, he would certainly perish by torture. “If my guide had been within my reach,” he says, “I should perhaps have pulled him back and abandoned the enterprise.” But the guide was already vanishing, a sort of crouching shadow, into the blackness of the further bank; and, hardening his heart, Kavanagh stole on through the sliding gloom of the river.
Both men crept up a ditch that pierced the river-bank to a cluster of trees, and there dressed; and then, with his tulwar on his shoulder and the swagger of a budmash, Kavanagh went boldly forward with his guide. A matchlock man first met the adventurous pair and peered suspiciously at them from under his turban. Kavanagh in a loud voice volunteered the remark that “the night was cold,” and passed on. They had to cross the iron bridge which spanned the Goomtee, and the officer on guard challenged them lazily from the balcony of a two-storeyed house. Kavanagh himself hung back in the shade, while his guide went forward and told the story of how they belonged to a village some miles distant, and were going to the city from their homes.
They were allowed to pass, ran the gauntlet of many troops of Sepoys, re-crossed the Goomtee by what was called the stone bridge, and passed unsuspected along the principal street of Lucknow, jostling their way through the crowds, and so reached the open fields beyond the city. “I had not been in green fields,” writes Kavanagh, “for five months. Everything around us smelt sweet, and a carrot I took from the roadside was the most delicious thing I had ever tasted!” But it was difficult to find their way in the night. They wandered into the Dilkusha Park, and stumbled upon a battery of guns, which Kavanagh, to the terror of his guide, insisted upon inspecting.
They next blundered into the canal, but still wandered on, till they fell into the hands of a guard of twenty-five Sepoys, and Kavanagh’s guide, in his terror, dropped in the dust of the road the letter he was carrying from Outram to Campbell. Kavanagh, however, kept his coolness, and after some parleying he and his guide were allowed to pass on. The much-enduring pair next found themselves entangled in a swamp, and, waist-deep in its slime and weeds, they struggled on for two hours, when they reached solid ground again. Kavanagh insisted on lying down to rest for a time. Next they crept between some Sepoy pickets which, with true native carelessness, had thrown out no sentries, and finally, just as the eastern sky was growing white with the coming day, the two adventurers heard the challenge, “Who comes there?” from under the shadow of a great tree!
It was a British cavalry picket, and Kavanagh had soon the happiness of pouring into Sir Colin Campbell’s ears the messages and information he brought, while a flag, hoisted at twelve o’clock on the summit of the Alumbagh, told Outram that his messenger had succeeded, and that both the garrison and the relieving force had now a common plan. It is difficult to imagine a higher example of human courage than that supplied by “Lucknow” Kavanagh, as he was afterwards called, and never was the Victoria Cross better won.
On the afternoon of the 15th Campbell made an elaborate reconnaissance on his extreme left, and all night he thundered in that direction with his guns, and the enemy gathered in full strength on that line, persuaded that the British would advance on it. But by daybreak on the 16th Campbell was moving off, light-footed and swift, by his right, exactly where the enemy did not expect him! He had little over 3000 bayonets in his force, but he was strong in artillery, counting in all thirty-nine guns, six mortars, and two rocket-tubes, and he hoped to smash by the weight of his fire every obstacle that stood in his path to the Residency. Yet, be it remembered, he was moving on the arc of a great fortified central position, held by a hostile force not less than 60,000 strong, or more than fifteen times more numerous than his own.
Blunt’s guns and a company of the 53rd formed Campbell’s advance-guard. They crossed the canal, followed for a mile the river-bank, and then swung sharply to the left by a road which ran parallel to the rear of the Secundrabagh. This was a great garden, 150 yards on each face, with walls twenty feet high, and a circular bastion at each angle, and from its rear face, as the head of the British column came in sight, broke an angry tempest of musket-shot, a fire which, it must be remembered, smote the advancing British column on the flank. Cavalry and infantry were helpless in the narrow lane, and something like a “jam” took place. Blunt, however, an officer of great daring, with an enthusiastic belief that British guns could go anywhere and do anything, cut the knot of the difficulty. The bank of the lane was so steep that it seemed impossible that horses and guns could climb it, but Blunt, with cool decision, put the guns in motion, swung the horses’ heads sharply round, and, with whip and spur and shout, his gunners drove the snorting, panting horses up the bank into the open space under the fire of the Secundrabagh.
Travers, with two of his 18-pounders, came stumbling and struggling up the steep bank after Blunt. The guns were swung round, and, within musket-shot distance of the crowded walls and under a tempest of bullets, they opened a breaching fire on the face of the Secundrabagh. The British infantry meanwhile, lying down under the bank of the lane, waited for the moment of assault. Forbes-Mitchell gives a very realistic picture of the march up the lane, and the waiting under the shelter of a low mud-wall while the breach was being made, through which they must charge. Campbell himself, before the men moved up, had given amusingly prosaic instructions as to how they were to fight. When they swept into the Secundrabagh they were to “keep together in clusters of threes, and rely on nothing but the bayonet.” The central man of each group of three was to attack, and his comrades, right and left, guard him with their bayonets, &c.
As the 93rd moved up the lane, Forbes-Mitchell relates how they saw sitting on the roadside a naked Hindu, with shaven head and face streaked with white and red paint, busy counting his rosary, and unmoved by the tumult of battle. A Highlander said to a young staff-officer who was just passing, “I would like to try my bayonet on the hide of that painted scoundrel, sir; he looks a murderer.” “Don’t touch him,” answered the staff-officer, “he is a harmless Hindu mendicant; it is the Mohammedans who are to blame for the horrors of the Mutiny.” Scarcely had he spoken the words when the Hindu stopped counting his beads, slipped his hands under the mat on which he sat, and, with a single movement, drew out a short bell-mouthed blunderbuss and fired into the unfortunate staff-officer’s breast, killing him instantly, and himself dying a moment afterwards, under the reddened bayonets of half-a-dozen furious Highlanders.
Sir Colin Campbell himself stood by the guns, watching the balls tearing away flakes from the stubborn bricks which formed the immense thickness of the wall. Every now and then he repressed the eagerness of the Highlanders or Sikhs, waiting to make their rush. “Lie down, 93rd!” he said. “Lie down! Every man of you is worth his weight in gold to England to-day.” For nearly three-quarters of an hour that strange scene lasted, the British guns battering the tough brick wall, while from hundreds of loopholes a tempest of bullets scourged the toiling gunners. Twice over the detachments at the guns had to be renewed before the breach could be made.