The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

It is amusing to know that Colin Campbell was at first disgusted, rather than delighted, with the daring rush which, with such indecent and unscientific haste, carried the Kaisarbagh. He is said, indeed, to have sent orders to Franks to evacuate the great post. Franks, however, was both a fine soldier and a hot-blooded Irishman, and he declined, in the bluntest form of speech, to give up the great stronghold his men had carried with a dash so brilliant.

Campbell’s imagination, it seems, was haunted by the sense that each Sepoy position, when it was carried, was an abandoned powder-magazine, packed thick with the possibilities of dreadful explosions. And facts justified that uncomfortable belief. The story of one such fatal explosion may be briefly told. In the Jumma Musjid no less than nine cart-loads of gunpowder were discovered. The powder was packed in tin cases, and it was resolved to destroy it by flinging the cases down a well. A line of men was formed, and the cases passed quickly from hand to hand. The first case flung down struck against the side of the well, and exploded. The flame ran from case to case along the whole line till it reached the carts. The cases in the very hands of the men exploded, the nine cart-loads went off in one terrific blast of flame and sound, and, with one exception, the whole party—numbering twenty-two men, with two engineer officers in command—was killed. The only man who escaped was the one that threw that fatal first case down the well!

When the Kaisarbagh and the Mess-house fell, and the third line of Sepoy defences was thus carried, Lucknow was practically in the British power. But on the next day, March 15, Colin Campbell, wary and war-wise soldier though he was, committed a second blunder, which helped to rob the success of some of its best fruits. He realised the blunder he committed when he held back Outram, and to remedy it he perpetrated a further mistake. He despatched his two cavalry brigades in pursuit of the flying Sepoys, and despatched them on the wrong roads. The absence of the cavalry created a huge gap in the British lines on the north of the Goomtee, and a great body of Sepoys, said to be more than 20,000 strong, escaped through it unharmed. “In this way,” says Lord Roberts, “the campaign, which should then have come to an end, was protracted for nearly a year by the fugitives spreading themselves over Oude, and occupying forts and other strong positions, from which they were able to offer resistance to our troops till the end of May 1859; thus causing needless loss of thousands of British soldiers.” That is a severe condemnation to be written by one great soldier on another.

Brigadier Campbell, with a strong body of horse and guns, hovered outside the Musabagh, ready to cut up the Sepoys when Outram had driven them out of that building. For some mysterious reason, and to the open disgust of the whole British army, he failed to cut up the flying Sepoys. It was, for his command, a day of inertness and failure; yet it was lit up by one splendid dash of personal daring. A small mud fort covered, at one point, the road along which the Sepoys were flying, and Campbell sent forward a party of cavalry—a troop of the 7th Hussars and a squadron of Hodson’s Horse, with two guns—to clear the Sepoys out of it. The guns flung a couple of shells over the walls of the fort, and it had the effect of a match flung into a beehive! The bees flew out, eager to sting! Some fifty rebels, headed by the village chief, a giant in size, suddenly rushed from the gate of the fort on the guns. They were upon the Hussars before they could be put in motion to charge, and the three troop officers were in an instant struck down. A cluster of the Sepoys bent over one of the three, Banks, slashing and thrusting at him, when Hegart, in command of the Hussars, rode single-handed to his rescue.

He broke through the group, shooting right and left with his revolver, wheeled and dashed through them again. He had shot three, and knocked over a fourth with the hilt of his sword, when two Sikhs galloped up to his aid, and Banks was saved, only to die of his wounds a few days later. When Hegart emerged from the fight everything he had about him, says Hope Grant, bore traces of his gallant struggle. His saddle and his horse were marked with sword-slashes, his sword-hilt was dinted, his martingale was cut, the silk pocket handkerchief with which his sword was tied to his wrist was severed as cleanly as with a razor.

The capture of Lucknow, in a space of time so brief, and at a cost so slight, was due in part, of course, to the splendid leadership of the officers and the daring of the men. But it was due, in even greater measure, to the skill of the engineers. It was an engineer’s plan that sent Outram, with his heavy guns, across the Goomtee, round the “toe” of the boot, and so took the lines of the Sepoys in reverse. It was clever engineering, again, which broke a way for the advance of the British left wing through the houses to the left of the great road. The Sepoys had taken it for granted that the advance of the British would be up that road, and they had turned it into a Valley of Death. Every parapeted housetop that looked down on the road was crowded with muskets. The road itself was merely a double line of crenellated walls, inaccessible to scaling ladders, swept by grape and case-shot from every cross street, pelted by musketry from every mosque roof and palace gable, and raked from end to end with the fire of great guns. But all these elaborate and terrible defences were made useless by the fact that the British engineers tore a road for their advance through the houses to the left of the great road, until the Kaisarbagh itself was reached and seized. The whole siege, indeed, is a lesson in the value of science in war. Brains count for more, in such a struggle, than even bullets.

The Residency itself fell with almost ludicrous tameness. Outram, on the 16th, forced his way across the Iron Bridge, and the Residency, though crowded with Sepoys, was yielded with scarcely a musket shot being fired in defence. The position which the Sepoys tried, in vain, for more than eighty days to carry, was taken by the British in less than as many minutes!

Map of NORTHERN INDIA showing distribution of troops on 1st. May 1857.

By permission, from Captain Trotter’s Life of John Nicholson, John Murray 1898.