When Captain M'Donald, whose company we had joined, saw the two Fifty-Third boys, he told them that they had better rejoin their own regiment. Clary replied, "Sure, Captain, you don't mean it;" and seeing Dr. Munro, our surgeon, busy giving directions to his assistants and arranging bandages, etc., in a dooly, Clary went on:—"We have been sent by Lieutenant Munro of our company to take care of his namesake your doctor, who never thinks of himself, but is sure to be in the thick of the fight, looking out for wounded men. You of the Ninety-Third don't appreciate his worth. There's not another doctor in the army to equal him or to replace him should he get knocked over in this scrimmage, and we of the Fifty-Third have come to take care of him." "If that is the case," said Captain M'Donald, "I'll allow you to remain; but you must take care that no harm befalls our doctor, for he is a great friend of mine." And with that Captain M'Donald stepped aside and plucked a rose from a bush close by, (we were then formed up in what had been a beautiful garden), and going up to Munro he gave him the flower saying, "Good-bye, old friend, keep this for my sake." I have often recalled this incident and wondered if poor Captain M'Donald had any presentiment that he would be killed! Although he had been a captain for some years, he was still almost a boy. He was a son of General Sir John M'Donald, K.C.B., of Dalchosnie, Perthshire, and was wounded in his right arm early in the day by a splinter from a shell, but he refused to go to the rear, and remained at the head of his company, led it through the breach, and was shot down just inside, two bullets striking him almost at once, one right in his throat just over the breast-bone, as he was waving his claymore and cheering on his company. After the fight was over I made my way to where the dead were collected and cut off a lock of his hair and sent it to a young lady, Miss M. E. Ainsworth, of Inverighty House, Forfar, who, I knew, was acquainted with Captain M'Donald's family. I intended the lock of hair for his mother, and I did not know if his brother officers would think of sending any memento of him. I don't know if ever the lock of hair reached his mother or not. When I went to do this I found Captain M'Donald's soldier-servant crying beside the lifeless body of his late master, wringing his hands and saying, "Oh! but it was a shame to kill him." And so it was! I never saw a more girlish-looking face than his was in death; his features were so regular, and looked strangely like those of a wax doll, which was, I think, partly the effect of the wound in the throat. But to return to the assault.
When Captain McDonald fell the company was led by the senior lieutenant, and about twenty yards inside the breach in the outer rampart we were stopped by a ditch nearly eighteen feet wide and at least twelve to fourteen feet deep. It was easy enough to slide down to the bottom; the difficulty was to get up on the other side! However, there was no hesitation; the stormers dashed into the ditch, and running along to the right in search of some place where we could get up on the inside, we met part of the grenadier company headed by Lieutenant E. S. Wood, an active and daring young officer. I may here mention that there were two lieutenants of the name of Wood at this time in the Ninety-Third. One belonged to my company; his name was S. E. Wood and he was severely wounded at the relief of Lucknow and was, at the time of which I am writing, absent from the regiment. The one to whom I now refer was Lieutenant E. S. Wood of the grenadier company. When the two parties in the ditch met, both in search of a place to get out, Mr. Wood got on the shoulders of another grenadier and somehow scrambled up claymore in hand. He was certainly the first man inside the inner works of the Begum's palace, and when the enemy saw him emerge from the ditch they fled to barricade doors and windows to prevent us getting into the buildings. His action saved us, for the whole of us might have been shot like rats in the ditch if they had attacked Mr. Wood, instead of flying when they saw the tall grenadier claymore in hand. As soon as he saw the coast clear the lieutenant lay down on the top of the ditch, and was thus able to reach down and catch hold of the men's rifles by the bends of the bayonets; and with the aid of the men below pushing up behind, we were all soon pulled out of the ditch. When all were up, one of the men turned to Mr. Wood and said: "If any officer in the regiment deserves to get the Victoria Cross, sir, you do; for besides the risk you have run from the bullets of the enemy, it's more than a miracle that you're not shot by our own rifles; they're all on full-cock." And so it was! Seizing loaded rifles on full-cock by the muzzles, and pulling more than a score of men out of a deep ditch, was a dangerous thing to do; but no one thought of the danger, nor did anyone think of even easing the spring to half-cock, much less of firing his rifle off before being pulled up. However, Mr. Wood escaped, and after getting his captaincy he left the regiment and became Conservator of Forests in Oude. I may mention that Mr. Wood was a younger brother of Mr. H. W. I. Wood, for many years the well-known secretary to the Bengal Chamber of Commerce. He has just lately retired on his pension; I wonder if he ever recalls the danger he incurred from pulling his men out of the ditch of the Begum's palace by the muzzles of their loaded rifles on full-cock!
By the time we got out of the ditch we found every door and window of the palace buildings barricaded, and every loophole defended by an invisible enemy. But one barrier after another was forced, and men in small parties, headed by the officers, got possession of the inner square, where the enemy in large numbers stood ready for the struggle. But no thought of unequal numbers held us back. The command was given: "Keep well together, men, and use the bayonet; give them the Secundrabâgh and the sixteenth of November over again." I need not describe the fight. It raged for about two hours from court to court, and from room to room; the pipe-major, John M'Leod, playing the pipes inside as calmly as if he had been walking round the officers' mess-tent at a regimental festival. When all was over, General Sir Edward Lugard, who commanded the division, complimented the pipe-major on his coolness and bravery: "Ah, sir," said John, "I knew our boys would fight all the better when cheered by the bagpipes."
"Within about two hours from the time the signal for the assault was given, over eight hundred and sixty of the enemy lay dead within the inner court, and no quarter was sought or given. By this time we were broken up in small parties in a series of separate fights, all over the different detached buildings of the palace. Captain M'Donald being dead, the men who had been on piquet with me joined a party under Lieutenant Sergison, and while breaking in the door of a room, Mr. Sergison was shot dead at my side with several men. When we had partly broken in the door, I saw that there was a large number of the enemy inside the room, well armed with swords and spears, in addition to fire-arms of all sorts, and, not wishing to be either killed myself or have more of the men who were with me killed, I divided my party, placing some at each side of the door to shoot every man who showed himself, or attempted to rush out. I then sent two men back to the breach, where I knew Colonel Napier with his engineers were to be found, to get a few bags of gunpowder with slow-matches fixed, to light and pitch into the room. Instead of finding Napier, the two men sent by me found the redoubtable Major Hodson who had accompanied Napier as a volunteer in the storming of the palace. Hodson did not wait for the powder-bags, but, after showing the men where to go for them, came running up himself, sabre in hand. 'Where are the rebels?' he said. I pointed to the door of the room, and Hodson, shouting 'Come on!' was about to rush in. I implored him not to do so, saying, 'It's certain death; wait for the powder; I've sent men for powder-bags,' Hodson made a step forward, and I put out my hand to seize him by the shoulder to pull him out of the line of the doorway, when he fell back shot through the chest. He gasped out a few words, either 'Oh, my wife!' or, 'Oh, my mother!'—I cannot now rightly remember—but was immediately choked by blood. At the time I thought the bullet had passed through his lungs, but since then I have seen the memoir written by his brother, the Rev. George H. Hodson, Vicar of Enfield, in which it is stated that the bullet passed through his liver. However, I assisted to get him lifted into a dooly (by that time the bearers had got in and were collecting the wounded who were unable to walk), and I sent him back to where the surgeons were, fully expecting that he would be dead before anything could be done for him. It will thus be seen that the assertion that Major Hodson was looting when he was killed is untrue. No looting had been commenced, not even by Jung Bahâdoor's Goorkhas. That Major Hodson was killed through his own rashness cannot be denied; but for any one to say that he was looting is a cruel slander on one of the bravest of Englishmen."
Shortly after I had lifted poor Hodson into the dooly and sent him away in charge of his orderly, the two men who had gone for the powder came up with several bags, with slow-matches fixed in them. These we ignited, and then pitched the bags in through the door. Two or three bags very soon brought the enemy out, and they were bayoneted down without mercy. One of the men who were with me was, I think, Mr. Rule, who is now sans a leg, and employed by the G.I.P. Railway in Bombay, but was then a powerful young man of the light company. Rule rushed in among the rebels, using both bayonet and butt of his rifle, shouting, "Revenge for the death of Hodson!" and he killed more than half the men single-handed. By this time we had been over two hours inside the breach, and almost all opposition had ceased. Lieutenant and Adjutant "Willie" MacBean, as he was known to the officers, and "Paddy" MacBean to the men, encountered a havildâr, a nâik, and nine sepoys at one gate, and killed the whole eleven, one after the other. The havildâr was the last; and by the time he got out through the narrow gate, several men came to the assistance of MacBean, but he called to them not to interfere, and the havildâr and he went at it with their swords. At length MacBean made a feint cut, but instead gave the point, and put his sword through the chest of his opponent. For this MacBean got the Victoria Cross, mainly, I believe, because Sir Edward Lugard, the general in command of the division, was looking down from the ramparts above and saw the whole affair. I don't think that MacBean himself thought he had done anything extraordinary. He was an Inverness-shire ploughman before he enlisted, and rose from the ranks to command the regiment, and died a major-general. There were still a number of old soldiers in the regiment who had been privates with MacBean when I enlisted, and many anecdotes were related about him. One of these was that when MacBean first joined, he walked with a rolling gait, and the drill-corporal was rather abusive with him when learning his drill. At last he became so offensive that another recruit proposed to MacBean, who was a very powerful man, that they should call the corporal behind the canteen in the barrack-yard and give him a good thrashing, to which proposal MacBean replied: "Toots, toots, man, that would never do. I am going to command this regiment before I leave it, and it would be an ill beginning to be brought before the colonel for thrashing the drill-corporal!" MacBean kept to his purpose, and did live to command the regiment, going through every rank from private to major-general. I have seen it stated that he was a drummer-boy in the regiment, but that is not correct. He was kept seven years lance-corporal, partly because promotion went slow in the Ninety-Third, but several were promoted over him because, at the time of the disruption in the Church of Scotland, MacBean joined the Free Kirk party. This fact may appear strange to military readers of the present day with our short service and territorial regiments; but in the times of which I am writing, as I have before mentioned, the Ninety-Third was constituted as much after the arrangements of a Highland parish as those of a regiment in the army; and, to use the words of old Colonel Sparks who commanded, MacBean was passed over four promotions because "He was a d—d Free Kirker."
But I must hark back to my story and to the Begum's palace on the evening of the 11th of March, 1858. By the time darkness set in all opposition had ceased, but there were still numbers of the mutineers hiding in the rooms. Our loss was small compared with that inflicted on the enemy. Our regiment had one captain, one lieutenant, and thirteen rank and file killed; Lieutenant Grimston, Ensign Hastie, and forty-five men wounded. Many of the wounded died afterwards; but eight hundred and sixty of the enemy lay dead in the centre court alone, and many hundreds more were killed in the different enclosures and buildings. That night we bivouacked in the courts of the palace, placing strong guards all round. When daylight broke on the morning of the 12th of March, the sights around were horrible. I have already mentioned that many sepoys had to be dislodged from the close rooms around the palace by exploding bags of gunpowder among them, and this set fire to their clothing and to whatever furniture there was in the rooms; and when day broke on the 12th, there were hundreds of bodies all round, some still burning and others half-burnt, and the stench was sickening. However, the Begum's palace was the key to the enemy's position. During the day large parties of camp-followers were brought in to drag out the dead of the enemy, and throw them into the ditch which had given us so much trouble to cross, and our batteries were advanced to bombard the Imâmbâra and Kaiserbâgh.
During the forenoon of the 12th, I remember seeing Mr. Russell of The Times going round making notes, and General Lugard telling him to take care and not to attempt to go into any dark room for fear of being "potted" by concealed Pandies. Many such were hunted out during the day, and as there was no quarter for them they fought desperately. We had one sergeant killed at this work and several men wounded. During the afternoon a divisional order by General Sir Edward Lugard was read to us, as follows:—
"Major-General Sir Edward Lugard begs to thank Brigadier the Honourable Adrian Hope, Colonel Leith-Hay, and the officers and men of the Ninety-Third who exclusively carried the position known as the Begum's Kothee. No words are sufficient to express the gallantry, devotion, and fearless intrepidity displayed by every officer and man in the regiment. The Major-General will not fail to bring their conduct prominently to the notice of his Excellency the Commander-in-Chief."
During the day Sir Colin himself visited the position, and told us that arrangements would be made for our relief the following day, and on Saturday, the 13th, we returned to camp and rested all the following Sunday. So far as I remember, the two men of the Fifty-Third, Lance-Corporal Clary and his comrade, remained with us till after the place was taken, and then returned to their own regiment when the fighting was over, reporting to Lieutenant Munro that they had gone to take care of his brother, Doctor Munro of the Ninety-Third.
There were many individual acts of bravery performed during the assault, and it is difficult to single them out. But before closing this chapter I may relate a rather laughable incident that happened to a man of my company named Johnny Ross. He was a little fellow, and there were two of the same name in the company, one tall and the other short, so they were named respectively John and Johnny. Before falling in for the assault on the Begum's palace, Johnny Ross and George Puller, with some others, had been playing cards in a sheltered corner, and in some way quarrelled over the game. When the signal was given for the "fall in," Puller and Ross were still arguing the point in dispute, and Puller told Ross to "shut up." Just at that very moment a spent bullet struck Ross in the mouth, knocking in four of his front teeth. Johnny thought it was Puller who had struck him, and at once returned the blow; when Puller quietly replied, "You d—d fool, it was not I who struck you; you've got a bullet in your mouth." And so it was: Johnny Ross put up his hand to his mouth, and spat out four front teeth and a leaden bullet. He at once apologised to Puller for having struck him, and added, "How will I manage to bite my cartridges the noo?" Those were the days of muzzle-loading cartridges, which had to be torn open with the teeth when loading.