Let me here mention, before I take leave of the Secundrabâgh, that I have often been told that the hole in the wall by which the Ninety-Third entered is still in existence. This I had heard from several sources, and on Sunday morning, the 21st of August, 1892, when revisiting Lucknow, I left the Royal Hotel with a guide who did not know that I had ever seen Lucknow before, and who assured me that the breach had been preserved just as it was left on the 16th of November, 1857, after the Ninety-Third had passed through it; and I had made up my mind to re-enter the Secundrabâgh once again by the same old hole. On reaching the gate I therefore made the gharry stop, and walked round the outside of the wall to the hole; but as soon as I arrived at the spot I saw that the gap pointed out to me as the one by which the Ninety-Third entered was a fraud, and I astonished the guide by refusing to pass through it. The hole now shown as the one by which we entered was made through the wall by an 18-pounder gun, which was brought from Cawnpore by Captain Blount's troop of Royal Horse-Artillery. This was about twenty yards to the left of the real hole, and was made to enable a few men to keep up a cross fire through it till the stormers could get footing inside the actual breach. This post was held by Sergeant James Morrison and several sharp-shooters from my company, who, by direction of Sir Colin, made a rush on this hole before the order was given for the Fourth Punjâb Infantry to storm. Any military man of the least experience seeing the hole and its size now, thirty-five years after the event, will know this to be a fact. The real breach was much bigger and could admit three men abreast, and, as near as I can judge, was about the centre of the road which now passes through the Secundrabâgh. The guide, I may say, admitted such to be the case when he found that I had seen the Secundrabâgh before his time. Although it was only a hole, and not what is correctly called a breach, in the wall, it was so wide, and the surrounding parts of the wall had been so shaken by round-shot, that the upper portion forming the arch must have fallen down within a few years after 1857, and this evidently formed a convenient breach in the wall through which the present road has been constructed.[19] The smaller hole meanwhile has been laid hold of by the guides as the identical passage by which the Secundrabâgh was stormed.
Having corrected the guide on this point, I will now give my recollections of the assault on the Shâh Nujeef, and the Kuddum Russool which stands on its right, advancing from the Secundrabâgh.
The Kuddum Russool was a strongly-built domed mosque not nearly so large as the Shâh Nujeef, but it had been surrounded by a strong wall and converted into a powder magazine by the English between the annexation of Lucknow and the outbreak of the Mutiny. I think this fact is mentioned by Mr. Gubbins in his Mutinies in Oude. The Kuddum Russool was still used by the mutineers as a powder-magazine, but the powder had been conveyed from it into the tomb of the Shâh Nujeef, when the latter was converted into a post of defence to bar our advance on the Residency.
Before the order was given for the attack on the Shâh Nujeef, I may mention that the quartermaster-general's department had made an estimate of the number of the enemy slain in the Secundrabâgh from their appearance and from their parade-states of that morning. The mutineers, let me say, had still kept up their English discipline and parade-forms, and their parade-states and muster-rolls of the 16th of November were discovered among other documents in a room of the Secundrabâgh which had been their general's quarters and orderly-room. It was then found that four separate regiments had occupied the Secundrabâgh, numbering about two thousand five hundred men, and these had been augmented by a number of budmâshes from the city, bringing up the list of actual slain in the house and garden to about three thousand. Of these, over two thousand lay dead inside the rooms of the main building and the inner court. The colours, drums, etc., of the Seventy-First Native Infantry and the Eleventh Oude Irregular Infantry were captured. The mutineers fought under their English colours, and there were several Mahommedan standards of green silk captured besides the English colours. The Seventy-First Native Infantry was one of the crack corps of the Company's army, and many of the men were wearing the Punjâb medals on their breasts. This regiment and the Eleventh Oude Irregulars were simply annihilated. On examining the bodies of the dead, over fifty men of the Seventy-First were found to have furloughs, or leave-certificates, signed by their former commanding officer in their pockets, showing that they had been on leave when their regiment mutinied and had rejoined their colours to fight against us. It is a curious fact that after the Mutiny was suppressed, many sepoys tendered these leave-certificates as proof that they had not taken part in the rebellion; and I believe all such got enrolled either in the police or in the new regiments that were being raised, and obtained their back pay. And doubtless if the Ninety-Third and Fifty-Third bayonets had not cancelled those of the Seventy-First Native Infantry all those loyal men would afterwards have presented their leave-certificates, and have claimed pay for the time they were fighting against us!
When the number of the slain was reported to Sir Colin, he turned to Brigadier Hope, and said "This morning's work will strike terror into the sepoys,—it will strike terror into them," and he repeated it several times. Then turning to us again he said: "Ninety-Third, you have bravely done your share of this morning's work, and Cawnpore is avenged! There is more hard work to be done; but unless as a last resource, I will not call on you to storm more positions to-day. Your duty will be to cover the guns after they are dragged into position. But, my boys, if need be, remember I depend on you to carry the next position in the same daring manner in which you carried the Secundrabâgh." With that some one from the ranks called out, "Will we get a medal for this, Sir Colin?" To which he replied: "Well, my lads, I can't say what Her Majesty's Government may do; but if you don't get a medal, all I can say is you have deserved one better than any troops I have ever seen under fire. I shall inform the Governor-General, and, through him, Her Majesty the Queen, that I have never seen troops behave better." The order was then given to man the drag-ropes of Peel's guns for the advance on the Shâh Nujeef, and obeyed with a cheer; and, as it turned out, the Ninety-Third had to storm that position also.
The advance on the Shâh Nujeef has been so often described that I will cut my recollections of it short. At the word of command Captain Middleton's battery of Royal Artillery dashed forward with loud cheers, the drivers waving their whips and the gunners their caps as they passed us and Peel's guns at the gallop. The 24-pounder guns meanwhile were dragged along by our men and the sailors in the teeth of a perfect hail of lead and iron from the enemy's batteries. In the middle of the march a poor sailor lad, just in front of me, had his leg carried clean off above the knee by a round-shot, and, although knocked head over heels by the force of the shot, he sat bolt upright on the grass, with the blood spouting from the stump of his limb like water from the hose of a fire-engine, and shouted, "Here goes a shilling a day, a shilling a day! Pitch into them, boys, pitch into them! Remember Cawnpore, Ninety-Third, remember Cawnpore! Go at them, my hearties!" and he fell back in a dead faint, and on we went. I afterwards heard that the poor fellow was dead before a doctor could reach the spot to bind up his limb.
I will conclude this chapter with an extract from Sir Colin's despatch on the advance on the Shâh Nujeef:
The Ninety-Third and Captain Peel's guns rolled on in one irresistible wave, the men falling fast, but the column advanced till the heavy guns were within twenty yards of the walls of the Shâh Nujeef, where they were unlimbered and poured in round after round against the massive walls of the building, the withering fire of the Highlanders covering the Naval Brigade from great loss. But it was an action almost unexampled in war. Captain Peel behaved very much as if he had been laying the Shannon alongside an enemy's frigate.
But in this despatch Sir Colin does not mention that he was himself wounded by a bullet after it had passed through the head of a Ninety-Third grenadier.