The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

But Lawrence was exactly the man for a great crisis. He had a kingly faculty for choosing fit instruments. He saw with perfect clearness every detail of the visible landscape; but he had also that subtler vision—which only great poets and great statesmen possess—of the tendencies and forces which underlie external facts and determine their flow. The Celtic element in him, perhaps, gave Lawrence that rare and subtle faculty; but by virtue of his Scottish strain he was essentially a man of action. He could grasp a great purpose with a hand of steel, and hold it unshaken through all the shocks of conflict and adversity.

Lawrence, it may be added, was pre-eminently fortunate in his officers. Partly by the attraction which draws like to like, and partly by his own rare genius for choosing fit instruments, he had gathered round him a group of splendid soldiers and administrators, all in the prime of life. Nicholson, for example, was only thirty-five; Edwardes and Neville Chamberlain only thirty-seven. The general average of age, indeed, on Lawrence’s staff was much below that of India in general. All the energy of youth, in brief, was in Lawrence’s men; all the sagacity of ripest statesmanship was in Lawrence himself.

Lawrence’s contribution to the history of the Mutiny must be compressed into a dozen sentences. In 1857 he was Chief Commissioner of the Punjaub, the “land of the five rivers,” with a population of 20,000,000. The Punjaub was newly-conquered territory; its population was the most warlike in India; its frontiers marched for 800 miles with those of Afghanistan, and the hill passes were held by wild Moslem clans always ready to storm down with clattering shield and gleaming spear on the fat, defenceless plains at their feet. In eight years, under the régime of the Lawrences, the Punjaub was rendered orderly, loyal, and prosperous; while the Punjaub Frontier Force, a body of 12,000 men, which kept the mountain tribes in order, was perhaps the first body of native troops which ever followed British officers into battle.

Then came the cataclysm of the Mutiny. As with the shock of an earthquake, British rule in Northern India seemed to crumble to the ground, and British officers who yesterday were rulers of kingdoms and cities, were to-day fugitives, or fighting in tiny and broken clusters for their lives. The Mutiny, too, cut Oude and the Punjaub off from the centre of authority at Calcutta. For weeks no whisper from the outside world reached Lawrence. He was left to keep his own head and shape his own policy.

His policy may be told almost in a sentence. He anticipated mutiny, and outpaced it. He disarmed with iron resolution and swift decision all the Sepoy regiments whose loyalty was doubtful, and put all the forts, arsenals, treasuries, and strategic points in the Punjaub under the guard of British bayonets. Then he organised a movable column of European troops—scanty in dimensions, but of the finest fighting quality—under the command, first, of Neville Chamberlain, and next of Nicholson; and this force stood ready to strike at any point where mutiny threatened to lift its head. In the Punjaub, that is, mutiny was anticipated, robbed of weapons and left helpless, and under the ceaseless menace of the light-footed, almost ubiquitous, movable column.

Next, having dismissed into air, as with a gesture of his hand, the army whose loyalty was tainted, Lawrence had to create another native army, with loyalty above reproach. And from the wild mountain clans and the Sikhs—themselves a conquered people—Lawrence actually created a new army, nearly 50,000 strong, with which he was able to crush the very Sepoys who, under British leadership, had been the conquerors of the Punjaub!

Lawrence’s genius and masterful will, too, determined the whole strategy to be employed for the suppression of the Mutiny. He settled the question that Delhi must be instantly besieged. He formed a military base for the siege at Umballa, a distance of a hundred miles, and he kept sleepless guard over that long line of communications. He fed the besieging force with supplies and munitions of every kind; reinforced it with, first, his own frontier troops, the famous Guides and the Ghoorkas, and, later, with his own movable column. He cast into the scale against Delhi, in effect, his last coin, his last cartridge, and his last man. And in that terrible game, on which hung the fate of the British rule in India, Lawrence won! “Through him,” wrote Lord Canning, “Delhi fell.” And the fall of Delhi rang the knell of the Mutiny.

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HERBERT B. EDWARDES, K.C.B., K.C.S.I.