Two or three men refused to turn back, and actually reached the screen through which the further gun was fired. One of these was Lieutenant Butler, of the 1st Bengal Fusileers. As he came at the run through the white smoke he struck the screen heavily with his body; at that moment two Sepoys on the inner side thrust through the screen with their bayonets. The shining deadly points of steel passed on either side of Butler’s body, and he was pinned between them as between the suddenly appearing prongs of a fork! Butler, twisting his head, saw through a loophole the faces of the two Sepoys who held the bayonets, and who were still vehemently pushing, under the belief that they held their enemy impaled. With his revolver he coolly shot them both, and then fell back, pelted with bullets, but, somehow, unhurt, to his comrades, who were reforming for a second charge at the head of the lane.
On came the Fusileers again, a cluster of officers leading, well in advance of their men. Major Jacob, who commanded the regiment, raced in that heroic group. Speke was there, the brother of the African explorer; Greville, Wemyss, and the gallant Butler once again. The first gun in the lane was captured once more, and Greville, a cool and skilful soldier, promptly spiked it. But the interval betwixt the first gun and the second, had to be crossed. It was only a hundred yards, but on every foot of it a ceaseless and fiery hail of shot was beating. The officers, as they led, went down one by one. Jacob, one of the most gallant soldiers of the whole siege, fell, mortally wounded. Jacob’s special quality as a soldier was a strangely gentle but heroic coolness. The flame of battle left him at the temperature of an icicle; its thunder did not quicken his pulse by a single beat, and his soldiers had an absolute and exultant confidence in the quick sight, the swift action, the unfaltering composure of their gallant commander. Some of his men halted to pick him up when he fell, but he called to them to leave him, and press forward. Six other officers, one after another, were struck down; the rush slackened, it paused, the men ebbed sullenly back; the second attack had failed!
Nicholson, as the officer in general command of the assaulting columns, might well have remained at the Cashmere Gate, controlling the movements of the columns; but his eager, vehement spirit carried him always to the fighting front. He first accompanied Campbell’s column on its perilous march, but then rejoined his own proper column just as it came in sight of the Lahore Gate. The officers immediately about him—men themselves of the highest daring—advised that, as the attack of the fourth column had failed, it would be wise strategy to hold strongly the portion of the city they had carried and reorganise another general assault. They had done enough for the day. Their men had lost heavily, and were exhausted. They were in ignorance of the fortunes of the other columns.
But Nicholson’s fiery spirit was impatient of half measures or of delays. He was eager, moreover, to check the dangerous elation caused amongst the Sepoys by their repulse of the fourth column. So he resolutely launched a new assault on the Lahore Gate. How gallantly the officers led in an attack which yet their judgment condemned has been told.
Nicholson watched the twice-repeated rush of the Fusileers, and the fall, one by one, of the officers who led them. When the men for a second time fell back, Nicholson himself sprang into the lane, and, waving his sword, called on his men, with the deep, vibrating voice all knew, to follow their general. But even while he spoke, his sword pointing up the lane, his face, full of the passion of battle, turned towards the broken, staggering front of his men, a Sepoy leaned from the window of a house close by, pointed his musket across a distance of little more than three yards at Nicholson’s tall and stately figure, and shot him through the body. Nicholson fell. The wound was mortal; but, raising himself up on his elbow, he still called on the men to “go on.” He rejected impatiently the eager help that was offered to him, and declared he would lie there till the lane was carried. But, as Kaye puts it, he was asking dying what he had asked living—that which was all but impossible.
Colonel Graydon tells how he stooped over the fallen Nicholson, and begged to be allowed to convey him to a place of safety; but Nicholson declared “he would allow no man to remove him, but would die there.” It was, in fact, a characteristic flash of chivalry that made Nicholson at last consent to be removed. He would allow no one to touch him, says Trotter, “except Captain Hay, of the 60th Native Infantry, with whom he was not upon friendly terms. ‘I will make up my difference with you, Hay,’ he gasped out. ‘I will let you take me back.’”
The lane was strewn with the British dead. To carry it without artillery was hopeless. There were no better soldiers on the Ridge than the 1st Bengal Fusileers—“the dear old dirty-shirts” of Lord Lake. When they, on the morning of that day, broke through the embrasures of the Cashmere battery, one of their officers has left on record the statement that “the Sepoys fled as they saw the white faces of the Fusileers looking sternly at them.” They fled, that is, not from thrust of steel and flash of musket, but before the mere menace of those threatening, war-hardened countenances! The 1st, as a matter of fact, had their muskets slung behind, to enable them to use their hands in climbing the breach, and so, when they came up the crest of the breach and through the embrasures, the men had no muskets in their hands. The threat written on their faces literally put the Sepoys to flight. Where such men as these had failed, what troops could succeed?
The column fell slowly and sullenly back to the Cabul Gate, the wounded being sent to the rear. Lord Roberts tells us that, being sent by Wilson to ascertain how affairs were going on in the city, he observed as he rode through the Cashmere Gate a doolie by the side of the road without bearers, and with evidently a wounded man inside. He says:—
I dismounted to see if I could be of any use to the occupant, when I found, to my grief and consternation, that it was John Nicholson, with death written on his face. He told me that the bearers had put the doolie down and had gone off to plunder; that he was in great pain, and wished to be taken to the hospital. He was lying on his back, no wound was visible, and but for the pallor of his face, always colourless, there was no sign of the agony he must have been enduring. On my expressing a hope that he was not seriously wounded, he said, “I am dying; there is no chance for me.” The sight of that great man lying helpless and on the point of death was almost more than I could bear. Other men had daily died around me, friends and comrades had been killed beside me, but I never felt as I felt then—to lose Nicholson seemed to me at that moment to lose everything.
Nicholson’s fall, it is striking to note, impressed every one in that tiny and heroic army at Delhi exactly as it impressed Roberts. He lingered through all the days of slow, stubborn, resolute fighting, which won Delhi; but day by day the news about Nicholson’s fluctuating life was almost more important than the tidings that this position or that had been carried. Nicholson was a man with Clive’s genius for battle and mastery over men, while in the qualities of chivalry and honour he deserved to be classed with Outram or Havelock. He was only thirty-seven when he died; what fame he might have won, had he lived, no man can tell. He was certainly one of the greatest soldiers the English-speaking race has produced.