The Cannons of Lucknow (33 page)

The mutineers received encouragement and active aid from a few Indian chiefs and princes, who were themselves driven to revolt by a very real sense of grievance as a result of the Company's policy of annexing (annexation by right of lapse) native states and land to which there was no direct heir. By means of this policy, implemented by Lord Dalhousie-Governor-General from 1848 to 1856—250,000 square miles were added to British Indian territory so that, by 1857, the Company held sway over some 838,000 square miles. Under Dalhousie, 21,000 plots of land, to which their owners could not prove documentary right of tenure, were confiscated; the States of Satara, Nagpur, and Jhansi were seized, and the Punjab and Scinde
*
conquered by force of arms. Finally the ancient kingdom of Oudh—from which the bulk of the sepoys of the Bengal Army were recruited—was also annexed.

Added to the resentment, by both princes and peasants, of this arbitrary seizure of their land, the root cause of the Mutiny was the fear—which rapidly became a widespread conviction among the sepoys—that their British commanders, on instructions from the Company, had embarked on a deliberate campaign aimed at destroying their caste system, with the ultimate intention of compelling the entire army to embrace the Christian religion. The issue of supposedly tainted cartridges, and the sepoys' refusal to accept them, was the excuse for the outbreak which, by the time Lord Canning succeeded Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General, had become inevitable.

The time was well chosen. In 1857 Britain was still recovering from the ravages of the Crimean War, she was fighting in China, and had recently been fighting in Burma and Persia. As a result, India had been drained of white troops, the British numbering only 40,000, plus about 5,000 serving with native regiments, whilst the sepoys in the three Presidency Armies (Bengal, Madras, and Bombay) numbered 311,000, with the bulk of the artillery in their hands. The territory for which the Bengal Army was responsible included all northern India, from Calcutta to the Afghan frontier and the Punjab. The Punjab had only lately been subdued, and there was a constant threat of Border raids by the Afghan tribes, so that most of the available British regiments (also called Queen's regiments, to distinguish them from the Company's) were stationed at these danger points and on the Burmese frontier, with 10,000 British and Indian troops in the Punjab alone.

The 53rd Queen's Regiment of Foot was in Calcutta, the 10th at Dinapore, 400 miles up the Ganges river; the 32nd was at Lucknow (capital of Oudh) and a newly raised Company regiment, the 3rd Bengal European Fusiliers, at Agra. Thirty-eight miles northeast of Delhi—ancient capital of the Moguls—at Meerut, there was a strong European garrison, consisting of the 60th Rifles, 1,000 strong, 600 troopers of the 6th Dragoon Guards, a troop of horse artillery, and details of various other regiments, 2,200 men in all. Stationed with them were three native regiments—the 3rd Light Cavalry and the 11th and 20th Bengal Native Infantry, under the command of 75-year-old Major-General William Hewitt, whose division included Delhi, which had an entirely native garrison.

On the face of it, Meerut seemed the most unlikely station in all India to become the scene of a revolt by native troops, and the outbreak, when it came, took everyone—not least the Commanding General and his Brigadier, Archdale Wilson—so completely by surprise that they did virtually nothing to put it down, with the result that Delhi was lost.

There had, of course, been warnings, but for the most part these were ignored or treated with scorn and disbelief, and the officers of the Bengal native regiments continued, until the last, to place the most implicit trust in the loyalty of the sepoys they commanded. The first tangible warning came early in 1857, with the incident of the greased cartridges. The new Enfield rifle, which had proved its superiority in the Crimea, was ordered to be issued to the Army in place of the outdated Brown Bess musket. Both were muzzle-loaders, but the cartridge of the new weapon included a greased patch at the top which—like the earlier, ungreased type—had to be torn off with the teeth. The greased patch was used to assist in ramming home the bullet, which was a tight fit in the rifle barrel. It had apparently not occurred to the Ordnance Committee in England or, indeed, to anyone in India, that the composition of the greased patch might offend against the religious scruples of high-caste Hindu sepoys, of whom there were a great many in the Army of Bengal.

At the arsenal at Dum Dum, near Calcutta, a lascar of humble caste was abused by a Brahmin sepoy of the 34th Native Infantry. The man retaliated with the claim that the new Enfield cartridges were smeared with the fat of the cow (sacred to Hindus) and of the pig (considered unclean by Mohammedans). Biting it, the lascar jeered, would destroy the caste of the Hindu and the ceremonial purity of the Mohammedan, and this story spread like wildfire throughout the native regiments. The men were assured that they might grease the cartridges with their own ghee (native butter) or tear them by hand, but the sepoys still refused to accept them, and the leaders of both the Hindu and Mohammedan faiths—conscious that their own power was waning under British rule—fanned the flames of suspicion assiduously. Fakirs and holy men travelled from garrison to garrison and an ancient prophecy was revived and whispered among them—the Battle of Plassey had been fought in 1757 and John Company, the prediction ran, would last for exactly a hundred years, so that this year would see its fall.

Several native regiments were disbanded for refusal to accept the new cartridges and a sepoy named Mangal Pandy—who was to give his name to all mutineers a few months later—was executed at Berhampur, 100 miles from Calcutta, for firing on his British officers.

In Meerut, early on the morning of Saturday, 9th May, General Hewitt ordered a punishment parade of his garrison and, under the guns of the European artillery, he had eighty-five sowars of the 3rd Light Cavalry—men who had previously been condemned by court martial for refusal to accept the infamous cartridges—publicly stripped of their uniforms and put in irons. Next day, when the British troops were preparing for Church Parade, the Light Cavalry mutinied, released their condemned comrades from the jail, and then, joined by the two native infantry regiments, indulged in an orgy of arson and looting, slaughtered a number of Europeans, and finally set off for Delhi. General Hewitt's inept handling of the situation and his failure to pursue them sealed the fate of Delhi. The native troops there joined the mutineers from Meerut and, after an appalling massacre of Europeans and native Christians, the survivors were compelled to flee, and the eighty-year-old Shah Bahadur, last of the Moguls, was proclaimed Emperor of India. Delhi became the focal point of the Great Mutiny, and from all the outlying stations of northern India, during the ensuing weeks, more and more native troops rose in rebellion and, having in most cases killed their British officers or attempted to do so, they too made for Delhi.

The Governor-General, Lord Canning, and the Commander-in-Chief, General Anson, took what action they could to stem the tide of anarchy. Canning recalled British troops from Persia and Burma and sent for others then on their way to China; Anson, greatly hampered by lack of transport and difficulties in communication, nevertheless contrived to send a small and ill-equipped force to endeavour to recapture Delhi. Brigadier Archdale Wilson was ordered to march from Meerut to join him, with the 60th Rifles and the 6th Dragoon Guards, and the first successful action was fought against the mutineers at the Hindan River crossing outside Delhi on May 30th and 31st.

General Anson, weakened by his exertions, died of cholera in camp at Karnaul and was succeeded as Commander-in-Chief by a Crimean veteran, General Barnard. By June 8th, after fighting another successful action against the mutineers at Badli-ke-serai, six miles outside Delhi, the combined British force—numbering fewer than 3,000 men of all arms—established itself on the Ridge to await the arrival of reinforcements, guns, medical supplies, and ammunition, which would enable them to attack the city. Until these reached them, they could only wait—outnumbered by well over ten to one—whilst, in the Punjab, the Chief Commissioner, Sir John Lawrence, made strenuous efforts to send them succour. He formed a “Movable Column,” lightly equipped and ready to move with speed against any area of disaffection, and disarmed a number of sepoy regiments, aware that before he dared denude the Punjab of British troops, he must make it and its frontiers secure. With the dynamic Nicholson succeeding to command of the Movable Column and a siege train in process of preparation, the recapture of Delhi became, at last, a less remote possibility than it had at first seemed.

But the preparations took time, and elsewhere in India the situation was critical as, in garrison after garrison, the pattern of Meerut was repeated—the native troops rose and the bazaar riffraff rose with them, eager to kill and plunder their white rulers. The districts were in a state of rebellion, communications were disrupted, the telegraph wires cut, and no traveller was safe, even on the Grand Trunk Road. The civil police threw in their lot with the mutineers, jails were broken into, and prisoners released to swell the growing ranks of lawless marauders. British officers and their families who managed to escape from their stations did so as fugitives, finding every man's hand against them. The Chief Commissioner of Oudh, Sir Henry Lawrence—elder brother of the ruler of the Punjab—with typical farsightedness, had made his own preparations to withstand a siege in his Residency at Lucknow, whilst doing everything in his power to prevent a general uprising. Such was the respect in which even his enemies held him that he almost succeeded; throughout May and June, whilst other stations suffered mutiny, Lawrence contrived to keep the peace in Lucknow, continuing secretly to fortify and provision the Residency. Reinforcements could only reach him from Calcutta; the recapture of Delhi was the first priority and all the resources of the Punjab had to be concentrated on this objective, since Delhi and the old Emperor were the key to the suppression of the revolt.

A source of grave anxiety was Cawnpore, 53 miles northeast of Lucknow, on the opposite bank of the River Ganges. The garrison was predominantly native, consisting of the 2nd Light Cavalry and the 1st, 53rd, and 56th Native Infantry. The station commander, Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler, a veteran of the Sikh wars, had formed a close personal friendship with the adopted son of the last Peishwa of the Mahrattas, Dundoo Punth, a Hindu of Brahmin caste and the self-styled Maharajah of Bithur. Relying on the promises of this man—known best by his Mahratta title of Nana Sahib—Wheeler had agreed to call on the aid of his troops should his sepoys break out in mutiny. Even were they to do so, the Nana assured him, they would march immediately to join their comrades in Delhi, and all that Wheeler need fear would be attacks from the lawless elements of the native city. Accordingly, the old General decided against fortifying the stone-built Magazine, with its vast reserves of guns and ammunition, which had the disadvantage of lying six miles northwest of the city. Instead, after receiving the news of the outbreak in Meerut and the fall of Delhi, he constructed an earthwork entrenchment on the open plain to the south of the city and the Native Lines, close to the road from Allahabad, along which he expected his promised reinforcements to come.

Reinforcements were, indeed, being rushed north from Calcutta, over 600 miles away, but for all his frantic efforts the Governor-General, Lord Canning, had few European troops available. A wing of the Madras European Fusiliers, under the command of their Colonel, James Neill, reached Calcutta on 24th May from the Madras Presidency and Canning despatched them at once to Cawnpore. The small column reached Benares on 3rd June and Neill was compelled to delay his advance in order to put down a threatened insurrection there. It was the same story in Allahabad, where mutiny had already broken out prior to the arrival of the column on 11th June, after a forced march of 70 miles in three days.

Only a single company of Her Majesty's 84th and fifteen of the Fusiliers actually reached Cawnpore at the end of May and, confident that Neill's column would follow in a matter of a week or so, General Wheeler sent half of the 84th and fifty men of the 32nd on to Lucknow to augment Sir Henry Lawrence's garrison. Aware, however, that his four native regiments were dangerously disaffected, he called on the Nana Sahib for the promised Bithur troops. When 300 were sent in response to his request, he placed both the Magazine and the Treasury under their protection and ordered all Europeans and Eurasian Christians to take refuge in the entrenchment.

Work on this had not been completed when he was compelled to occupy it but, trusting in his alliance with the Nana, Wheeler was not unduly worried. Conditions were unpleasantly crowded; he had two brick buildings—one a hospital for European troops, with a thatched roof—and a four-acre site, surrounded by a four-foot-high breastwork built of mud, already crumbling in the heat, and a single well, from which all drinking water had to be drawn. Into it came close to a thousand souls, of whom nearly 400 were women and children. To defend his position, he had nine light-calibre guns, 210 European soldiers—59 gunners and 70 invalids and convalescent men of the 32nd among them—about 200 officers and civilian males, 40 native Christian drummers, and 20 loyal native officers and sepoys, in addition to some 50 noncombatant Indian servants.

The native regiments mutinied during the night of 4th June. The Nana's troops yielded both Magazine and Treasury to them and the sepoys, without making any attempt to molest the garrison in the entrenchment, set off on the road to Delhi—as the Nana had predicted they would. He, however, in cynical betrayal of General Wheeler's trust, persuaded them to remain in Cawnpore under his own banner, and on the morning of 6th June, all four regiments launched an attack on the frail earthworks, swiftly followed by a bombardment by guns looted from the Magazine.