Sahib: The British Soldier in India 1750–1914. Richard Holmes
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there was an abortive mutiny around Calcutta, with the new cartridge, dissatisfaction of pay, and resentment about the annexation of Oudh amongst its causes. At much the same time local officials reported that chapatties (discs of unleavened bread) were being sent from village to village; there were rumours of imminent upheaval, and stories that British rule over India, begun at Plassey a century before, would soon be over. On 29 March, Sepoy Mungal Pandy of the 34th BNI at Barrackpore wounded his adjutant and sergeant major. Although both he and the guard commander, who had ordered his men not to detain Mungal Pandy, were hanged, things went from bad to worse. The skirmishers of the 3rd Light Cavalry at Meerut refused to handle the new cartridge, and most received long sentences of imprisonment with hard labour. On 9 May the convicted men were shackled on the parade ground, and on Sunday the 10th there was a large-scale rising at the cantonment. The mutineers killed perhaps fifty Europeans and Eurasians and their families, and then made for Delhi.
The best evidence suggests that even if the King of Delhi was not aware of the incipient mutiny, members of his household – described as ‘this inflammable mass of competing interests’ – certainly were.99 When the mutineers reached Delhi they made for the palace, killing Europeans en route. The native infantry regiments in the garrison promptly mutinied, murdering some of their officers. The eight British officers, warrant officers and NCOs in the Delhi arsenal defended the place as long as they could, and then fired the magazine, destroying large quantities of arms and gunpowder: miraculously, five of the men survived. The unlucky Bahadur Shah found himself the titular head of the revolt, but neither he nor anyone else exercised real control over the ‘Devil’s Wind’ that now blew so fiercely across northern India.
At Agra, John Colvin, Lieutenant Governor of the North-West Provinces, heard the news on 14 May and – for he was not a man of action – was persuaded to show a firm front. Lord Canning, the Governor-General, who had first been told of the Mutiny on the 12th, needed no such persuasion. He realised that the Mutiny could only be suppressed by force, and set about assembling the European regiments at his disposal, aided by the fact that troops were on their way back from an expedition to Persia and a force on its way to China could be recalled. He issued a proclamation affirming the government’s commitment to religious tolerance and urging all subjects not to listen to firebrands.
The Commander in Chief, General the Hon. George Anson, was at the government’s hot-weather retreat at Simla when he was told of the Mutiny. He sent orders to secure the great arsenals at Ferozepore, Jullundur and Philur, and by 15 May he had a strong brigade of Europeans at Ambala. But he was reluctant to move on Delhi until his preparations were complete, and although both Canning and Sir John Lawrence, chief commissioner of the Punjab, urged immediate action, he did not leave Ambala until 23 May. In the meantime there had been outbreaks of mutiny elsewhere, although in Peshawar, where Herbert Edwardes was chief commissioner, potentially mutinous units were swiftly disarmed. A strong ‘moveable column’ was quickly assembled under Brigadier Neville Chamberlain, while Edwardes’s deputy, John Nicholson, hustled about quashing mutinies and inflicting punishment on those he judged guilty: forty were blown from cannon in Peshawar.
On 26 May, Anson died of cholera on his way to Delhi, and was succeeded in command by Major General Sir Henry Barnard, who reached Alipore, eleven miles north of the city, by 5 June, having left the trees along their route heavy with the bodies of villagers who had, allegedly, mistreated fugitives. Another force, under Brigadier Archdale Wilson, left Meerut on 27 May and on 7 June the two columns met at Alipore, bringing the strength of the Delhi Field Force to just over 3,000 men. On 8 June the little army forced a strong position at Badli ke Serai, and camped that night on the ridge overlooking Delhi. But its senior officers reluctantly agreed that they were not strong enough to risk an assault on the city, and so, for the moment, they remained stuck fast, themselves under attack, while rebellion flared up elsewhere.
On hearing of the outbreak at Meerut, Sir Henry Lawrence, chief commissioner of Oudh, quickly prepared the area of his Residency at Lucknow for defence, and it became a place of refuge for survivors as revolt spread across the whole of Oudh. At Cawnpore, not far to the south, Major General Sir Hugh Wheeler threw up an entrenchment around the barracks, and he too prepared to meet an attack. The fate of these two little garrisons set the tone for much of what followed. Lucknow held out (although Lawrence himself was killed early on in the siege) until partial relief by Major General Sir James Outram and Major General Sir Henry Havelock in September, and final relief by Lieutenant General Sir Colin Campbell in November.
At Cawnpore, however, Wheeler held out until it became clear that his flimsy lines, packed with women and children, could no longer sustain the bombardment. The Nana Sahib had thrown in his lot with the rebels early on, and an emissary of Wheeler’s concluded an agreement with him which would give the garrison safe conduct to the River Ganges, where boats would be ready to take them downstream to safety. On 27 June, Wheeler’s little party hadjust embarked when the sepoys opened fire, and then waded into the river to finish off the surviving men. The remaining women and children were herded into a compound called the Bibighar and, when a relief column under Havelock neared Cawnpore, they were murdered on the Nana’s orders. Even the mutinous sepoys could not steel themselves to the task, and eventually five men, two of them butchers from the bazaar, hacked them to death: their bodies were thrown down a well.100
The massacre at Cawnpore inspired shocking retribution. Brigadier James Neill, second in command of the relief column, had already hanged men indiscriminately on the advance, and now he declared:
Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and unless he can prove a defence he is hanged at once; but the chief rebels or ringleaders I first make clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to high-class natives, they think that by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so …
The first I caught was a subadhar, a native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed; but I made the Provost-Marshal do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. Which done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and after death buried in a ditch by the roadside.101
Major Octavius Anson of HM’s 9th Lancers was at the Bibighar in October, and wrote that:
The blood, hair and garments of poor unfortunate women and children are still to be seen in the assembly-room and about the compound. Ouvry brought away the frock of a baby that could hardly have been more than a month old, and in Wheeler’s entrenchment he laid his hands on what must have been a Church Bible … It contained part of the sermon on the mount …
We saw lots of remnants of gowns, shoes and garments dyed in blood, and blood upon the walls in different places. Outside in the compound there was the skull of a woman, and hair about in the bushes. Oh, what pain … 102
Lieutenant Arthur Lang of the Bengal Engineers was furious:
Every man across the river whom I shall meet shall suffer for my visit to Cawnpore. I will never again, as I used to at Delhi, let off men who I catch in houses or elsewhere. I thought when I had killed twelve men outright and wounded or knocked over as many more at the battle of Agra, that I had done enough. I think now I shall never stop, if I get the chance again.103
At Delhi, meanwhile, there was little progress. General Barnard, like his predecessor, died of cholera, and his successor, Major General Reed, was so ill that he soon resigned command to Archdale Wilson and set off for the Punjab to regain his health. There were repeated attacks on the British position on the ridge, and its garrison felt that they were as much besieged as besiegers. The moveable column, now under the command of John Nicholson, a temporary brigadier general aged thirty-four, arrived on 14 August, but the sepoys, too, had been reinforced, and an assault was again postponed. A siege train of sorts had at last reached the ridge, and the first battery was ready on 8 September. By nightfall