The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Yet there would be a certain failure in the dramatic completeness of the story were it to end leaving Lucknow in the hands of the rebels. The tale of the storming of the capital of Oude must be added as a pendant to that other great siege which planted the British flag on the walls of Delhi.

There was, in a sense, no “siege” of Lucknow by the British. There was no investment, no formal approaches, no zigzag of trenches. It was a storm, rather than a siege—though the fighting stretched from March 2 to March 21, 1858. But it was the last of the great military operations of the campaign which crushed the Mutiny. The fall of the city left the historic revolt without a centre. The war, henceforth, always excepting the brilliant campaign of Sir Hugh Rose in the Central Provinces, became a guerilla campaign; a campaign of petty sieges, of the hunting down of one Sepoy leader after another, of the rout of this petty body of mutineers, or of that. It is curious to note how great civilians and great soldiers differed in judgment as to the policy of undertaking the recapture of Lucknow at that particular moment. Colin Campbell’s strategy was to conduct a cool campaign in the hills of Rohilcund, and leave Lucknow alone for the present. That city would serve as a sort of draining ground, a centre into which all the mutineers would flow; and when cool weather came, Campbell, imprisoning Lucknow in a girdle of converging columns, would destroy or capture the mutineers in one vast “bag.” This was leisurely and wary strategy; but it overlooked the political elements in the problem. It was the scheme of a soldier rather than of a statesman. Lucknow, left for months undisturbed, would be a signal of hope for every revolted chief and mutinous Sepoy. It might well take the place of Delhi as the brain and heart of the Mutiny. It would be a sign to all India that the British did not feel themselves strong enough, as yet, to strike at the centre of the rebel power.

The civilian was wiser than the soldier, and Lord Canning’s views prevailed. But it is worth noting that Colin Campbell’s plan of “bagging” all the mutineers with one vast, far-stretching sweep in Lucknow would have been carried into effect on Lord Canning’s lines, but for a double blunder, which marked Campbell’s own conduct of the siege.

It was a great task to which the British Commander-in-chief now addressed himself. Lucknow was a huge honeycomb of native houses; a city more than twenty miles in circumference, with a turbulent population calculated variously at from 300,000 to 1,000,000 people. It had a garrison of 130,000 fighting men, with an overwhelming force of artillery. The Sepoy leaders, too, who knew the value of the spade in war, had spent months in making the city, as they believed, impregnable. Both Havelock and Colin Campbell, in fighting their way to the Residency, had broken into the city from the eastern front; and the Sepoys, with a touching simplicity, took it for granted that the third attack on the city would follow the lines of the earlier assaults. The British, that is, would cross the canal, and force a path to the Residency through the great gardens and stately buildings which occupied the space betwixt the mass of the city and the Goomtee; and they accordingly barred this approach by a triple line of formidable defences. The first was a vast flanked rampart, on the inner side of the canal, and to which the canal served as a wet ditch. The second was a great circular earthwork, like the curve of a railway embankment, which enclosed the Mess-house. Behind it rose what was, in fact, the citadel of Lucknow, the Kaisarbagh, or King’s Palace. Both these lines stretched from the river on one flank, to the mass of houses which constituted the town, on the other flank. They might be pierced, they could not be turned; and they bristled from flank to flank with heavy guns. The third line was a stupendous earthwork, covering the whole north front of the King’s Palace. Its guns swept the narrow space betwixt the palace and the river with their fire.

Each great building along this line of advance was itself a fortress, and everything which ingenuity could suggest, and toil execute, had been done to make the defence formidable. The task of fighting a way across these triple lines, and through this tangle of fortified houses, each girdled with rifle-pits, and loopholed from foundation to roof, might well have been deemed impossible.

In the previous November Colin Campbell had rescued the garrison of the Residency; but he was compelled to surrender Lucknow itself to the rebels. With great wisdom and audacity, however, he clung to the Alumbagh, planting Outram there, with a force of about 4000 men. The Alumbagh, thus held, was a sort of pistol levelled at the head of Lucknow, or a spear threatening its heart. It was a perpetual menace; a sign that the British still kept their hold of the revolted city, and, on some bloody errand of revenge, would speedily return to it. The task of holding a position so perilous exactly suited Outram’s cool brain and serene courage. He had nothing of Nicholson’s tempestuous valour, or of Hodson’s audacious daring. He lacked initiative. The temper which made Nelson, at Copenhagen, put the telescope to his blind eye, when his admiral was trying to call him off from the fight, was one which Outram could hardly have understood; and it was a temper which certainly never stirred in his own blood. But, given a definite task, Outram might be trusted to do it with perfect intelligence, and, if necessary, to die cheerfully in the doing of it.

For three months he held that perilous post in front of Lucknow, a tiny handful of troops bearding a great revolted city, with a garrison of 100,000 fighting men. He was attacked on front and rear and flank, and, more than once, with a force of over 60,000 men. No less than six great attacks, indeed, can be counted. But Outram held his post with exquisite skill and unshaken valour. His troops were veterans; his officers were fighters of unsurpassed quality. Brasyer commanded his Sikhs; Barrow and Wale led his scanty squadrons of horse; Vincent Eyre, Olpherts, and Maude, commanded his guns. With such troops, and such leaders, Outram, for more than three months, held his daring post in front of Lucknow, and beat back, with vast loss of life, the attacks hurled upon him. And the Alumbagh, thus victoriously held, served as a screen, behind which Campbell’s forces gathered for the leap on Lucknow.

Colin Campbell was happily delivered from the evil condition which had hitherto fettered all the operations of the British. He was not required to attempt, with a handful of men, the task of a great army. He had under his hands the finest fighting force any British general in India had yet commanded, an army of 31,000 men, with 164 guns. Of these, 9000 were Ghoorkas—the Nepaulese contingent under Jung Bahadur. It was late in reaching the field, and Campbell doubted whether he ought to wait for the Ghoorkas. But here, again, the civilian proved wiser than the soldier. “I am sure,” wrote Lord Canning, “we ought to wait for the Jung Bahadur, who would be driven wild to find himself deprived of a share in the work.” It was a political gain of the first order to show the greatest fighting prince in India arrayed under the British flag against the Mutiny.