The British line swept across the enemy’s camp, and so complete was the surprise, so unexpected was the onslaught, that the chupatties were found in the very process of being cooked upon the fires, the bullocks stood tied behind the hackeries, the sick and wounded were lying in the hospitals. The smith left the forge and the surgeon his patient to fly from the avenging bayonets. Every tent was found exactly as its late occupants had sprung from it.
Beyond the camp the Gwalior contingent had rallied, and stood drawn up in steady lines. The eagerly advancing British line—to the wonder of the men—was halted. Suddenly through some fields of tall sugar-cane the 9th Lancers came galloping, and behind them, masked by the close lines of the Lancers, was a field battery. When the enemy saw the gleaming tips of the British lances, they fell instantly into squares of brigades, and opened fire on the cavalry at a distance of about three hundred yards. “Just as they commenced to fire,” says Forbes-Mitchell, “we could hear Sir Hope Grant, in a voice as loud as a trumpet, give the command to the cavalry, ‘Squadrons outwards!’ while Bourchier gave the order to his gunners, ‘Action front!’ The cavalry wheeled as if they had been at a review on the Calcutta parade-ground, and thus uncovered the guns.” The guns, charged with grape, were swung round, unlimbered as quick as lightning within about 250 yards of the squares, and round after round of grape was poured into the enemy with murderous effect, every charge going right through, leaving a lane of dead from four to five yards wide. The Highlanders could see the mounted officers of the enemy, as soon as they caught sight of the guns, dash out of the squares, and fly like lightning across the plain!
The victory, in a word, was complete. The Gwalior contingent was destroyed as a military force: its camp, magazines, and guns fell into the hands of the British, and Campbell urged a furious pursuit of the broken soldiery along the Calpee road. For fourteen miles the cavalry and horse artillery rode at the gallop, capturing ammunition waggons and baggage carts, dispersing and slaying such of the infantry as still tried to keep some formation, till at last the panting rebels flung away their arms, and fled into the jungle, or crouched in the fields of sugar-cane, seeking cover from the red sabres and lances of the horsemen. The enemy’s centre had no choice but to abandon the town, and fall hurriedly back and melt into the general stream of fugitives.
Nana Sahib, with the left wing, had the Bithoor road, diverging widely from the Calpee road, for his line of retreat, and Campbell pushed forward a strong force under General Mansfield, his chief of staff, to thrust the flying enemy off that road.
Mansfield was a brave man, singularly expert in the routine work of a military office, but quite unfitted for the rough shock of the battlefield. For one thing, he was very short-sighted, and, as Malleson puts it, “was too proud to trust to the sight of others.” He reached the point where he commanded the road, but halted his men, stared with dim and spectacled eyes at the stream of fugitives, with their guns, and allowed it all to flow past him undisturbed and unpursued. Nana Sahib himself, as it happened, rode somewhere amongst the fugitives, unsmitten by British lead! Campbell had to despatch Hope Grant the next day along the Bithoor road, in pursuit of this wing of the fugitives, and that fine soldier overtook the flying enemy after a march of twenty-five miles, captured all their guns, and tumbled them into hopeless ruin.
Campbell’s victory was splendid and memorable. With 5000 men he had overthrown 25,000, captured thirty-two guns and the whole of their baggage, and driven his enemy in flying rout along two diverging lines of retreat. And it was a victory won rather by the brains of the general than by the bayonets of the soldiers. Campbell’s entire loss in killed was only ninety-nine of all ranks. The army of 25,000 Campbell overthrew so utterly, it must be remembered, included the best-trained and most perfectly-equipped native force in all India—the Gwalior contingent, at least 10,000 strong.
CHAPTER X
DELHI: HOW THE RIDGE WAS HELD
All the passion, the tragedy, and the glory of the Indian Mutiny gathers round three great sieges. We vaguely remember a hundred tales of individual adventure elsewhere on the great stage of the Mutiny; we have perhaps a still fainter and more ghostly mental image of the combats Havelock fought on the road to Lucknow, and the battles by which Campbell crushed this body of rebels or that. But it is all a mist of confused recollections, a kaleidoscope of fast-fading pictures. But who does not remember the three great sieges of the Mutiny—Cawnpore, Lucknow, Delhi? The very names are like beacon lights flaming through leagues of night!
At Cawnpore the British were besieged and destroyed, a tragedy due to Wheeler’s fatal blunder in choosing the site where the British were to make their stand for life, and his failure in collecting provisions for the siege. At Lucknow, again, the British were besieged, but triumphed, becoming themselves in turn the besiegers. Success here was due to the genius of Henry Lawrence in organising the defences of the Residency, and his energy in storing supplies before the Mutiny broke out. The brave men who died behind Wheeler’s ridges of earth, or in the Slaughter Ghaut at Cawnpore, showed valour as lofty and enduring as that of the men who held the Residency with such invincible courage at Lucknow. But the interval between the tragedy at Cawnpore and the triumph at Lucknow is measured by the difference between the two leaders, Wheeler and Lawrence. Both were brave men, but Lawrence was a great captain.