Impossible Victories Read online

  There is, therefore, because of the legacy of these men, an excellent argument to be made that, the lessons of the Revolutionary War having been forgotten by 1812, the modern United States’ Army more properly has its origins in the Niagara Campaign of 1814, and especially in the Battles of Chippewa and Lundy’s Lane.

  Notes

  1. There were just sufficient blue uniforms to equip one regiment; they were given to the 21st Infantry. Shortage of blue cloth also meant that the West Point cadets began wearing grey uniforms in 1814, and they have continued to do so ever since, thereby perpetuating the memory of Left Division.

  2. Serving with the squadron was Lieutenant William Arnold; son of the notorious Benedict Arnold who had changed sides during the Revolutionary War.

  3. One of the ‘lost’ Irish regiments disbanded in 1922.

  4. Recorded by Scott in his Memoirs. The more popular version, These are regulars, by God!’ first appeared in Charles Elliott’s biography of Scott, published in 1937.

  5. The 103rd and 104th were disbanded in 1817, although the Canadian Army’s Royal New Brunswick Regiment retains an area connection to the latter. No connection exists with the 103rd and 104th Regiments added to the British Army following the Indian Mutiny, these being directly descended from European regiments in the service of the Honourable East India Company.

  6. It was typical of Scott that he should decline any responsibility for this. Instead, he blamed the militia officer who had, quite correctly, informed Brown of the British activity on the opposite bank of the Niagara, on the grounds that this had precipitated the action at Lundy’s Lane.

  7. The unpleasant Mr Willcocks was shot dead by a British or Canadian sniper during the siege. Those of his renegades who survived the war, knowing they faced the noose if they returned to Canada, were forced to make a new life for themselves in the United States.

  8. Among the buildings burned was the ‘President’s Palace’ on Pennsylvania Avenue. The sandstone walls of this were so badly marked by the fire that when it was rebuilt they were painted white and the building subsequently became known as The White House.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mission Impossible –

  The Reliefs of Lucknow

  Although in the years prior to and shortly after Independence some Indian politicians chose to regard the Great Mutiny of 1857 as a war of national liberation the idea is not tenable, for without widespread Indian assistance it would have taken the British authorities far longer than they did to contain and finally put down the outbreak; again, the fact that the Mutiny was largely confined to the Honourable East India Company’s Bengal Army, leaving the Bombay and Madras Armies almost untouched, in itself confirms that, while the rebellion covered a wide area, large parts of the sub-continent were either untouched by these events or actually hostile to those involved. Yet, it has to admitted that what took place amounted to more than a mutiny, since many of those who took up arms in support of the mutineers included some princely rulers and other elements of Indian society seeking the restoration of vested interests and influence that had been sharply curtailed by the Company’s rule.

  Most Indians had benefited from the Company’s presence, which brought peace, law and stability. On the other hand, in a society that was feudal and innately conservative, deeply religious and dominated by the concept of caste, the Company’s application of mid-Victorian zeal for the welfare of its subject people was sometimes dangerously insensitive. Thus, measures permitting widows to remarry and the establishment of a land title system where none had existed previously, resulting in the wholesale confiscation of land regarded as hereditary property, were met with quite unexpected anger. It was, however, Christian missionary activity which caused most anger among Hindus, especially the Brahmins, who saw in it a deliberate attempt to undermine the caste system which formed so fundamental an article of their own faith.

  Many of the Bengal Army’s sepoys were high-caste Hindus, recruited in the princely state of Oudh, which had been so seriously misgoverned that it had recently been annexed by the Company. This in itself caused widespread resentment, but what angered the majority of sepoys most was the imposition of new conditions of service requiring them to serve outside India if the need arose, since crossing the sea would deprive them of their caste. In such circumstances they were inclined to listen to tales of British shortcomings in the Crimea, simultaneously noting that there were fewer British troops present in India, and ponder the old augury that the Company’s rule would end during the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Plassey. Concurrently, messengers carrying a single chapatti began reaching the villages by night, always with instructions that four more chapattis should be baked and passed on to four more villages; no one knows to this day the origins of these strange arrivals, nor their intended significance, but to simple minds they foretold great and probably violent events.

  Normally, potential disaffection among the troops would have been quickly spotted and dealt with by their British officers. However, the formerly good relationship between officers and men, forged in such hard-fought struggles as the Sikh Wars, had become more distant during the years of peace that had followed. Some of the newer generation of junior officers, recently arrived from England, disliked the sepoys and spent as little time as possible with them. Others, more conscientious, saw trouble ahead but their warnings were brushed aside by superiors who, thinking of days past, simply refused to believe that the sepoys would not remain true to their salt.

  Matters were brought to a head by the attempted issue of the now notorious greased cartridges for the new Enfield rifle. A clever rumour was started to the effect that the grease was a compound of cow and pig fat and, since the cow was sacred to the Hindus and the pig abominated by Muslims, sepoys of both faiths believed that they would be defiled by contact with it. To many it seemed that the imposition of the cartridges was another step along the road towards enforced Christianity. Some regiments simply refused to accept them and were disbanded, their sepoys thus forfeiting both their pensions and the status in which they were held in their home villages.

  Matters came to a head at Meerut on 24 April 1857 when an ill-considered attempt was made to impose the cartridges on the 3rd Light Cavalry. Eighty-five troopers who refused to accept them were court martialled, sentenced to a term of hard labour and publicly stripped of their uniforms before the entire garrison during a parade at which the British regiments pointedly carried loaded weapons and the native regiments did not.

  The authorities, somewhat belatedly, had already promised to look into the question of the offending grease but the sepoys were either unaware of this or, more probably, had simply lost confidence in them. By now, most of them felt they had been pushed so far that only three alternatives remained to them. They could accept the cartridges and in so doing damn their own souls; they could refuse them and suffer disgrace and harsh punishment; or they could mutiny and destroy the system that threatened them. On Sunday 10 May, while the British troops were at church parade, the native regiments at Meerut chose mutiny, embarking on a frenzied orgy of destruction and slaughter in which neither their British officers, nor the latters’ wives and families, were spared. Then, they set off for Delhi, only 36 miles distant, where similar horrific scenes were enacted.

  The mutiny spread like wildfire throughout the entire Bengal Army. Some of the more alert garrison commanders disarmed their native regiments before any real harm could be done. Others, slow to react, paid the penalty with their lives. Suddenly, all over northern India, small British garrisons, burdened with their families and refugees seeking their protection, found themselves fighting for their lives. Taken completely by surprise, the authorities struggled to put together a field force from the few British troops at their disposal and such Indian troops as remained loyal.

  One man who was not taken by surprise was Brigadier-General Sir Henry Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner for Oudh, who was based at Lucknow the state capital, in the centre of the most di
saffected area. Lawrence had originally been commissioned into the Bengal Artillery and had spent most of his life in India. Understanding the country and its people as he did, he had long been aware that a mutiny was probable and had taken suitable precautions.1

  Lucknow was a sprawling, labyrinthine Indian city bordered to its east by the river Gumtee and to the south by a canal. The principal buildings of the city, including palaces, temples and mosques, often enclosed by walls and separated by gardens, lay beside the river. Just to the north of these lay the British Residency, an odd combination of Indian and Italianate architecture, situated within its own enclosure on a small plateau. On all save the northern side the buildings of the city pressed close against the walls and in some areas overlooked them.

  In May Lawrence had begun to fortify the Residency, establishing a defended perimeter with gun positions, putting a garrison into a tumbledown fort named the Muchhee Bhowan a half-mile to the north, and laying in supplies of food, forage and ammunition. Plans were also made for the evacuation of the city’s European population into the Residency should the need arise.

  Lawrence had already disbanded one Oudh irregular unit when, on 14 May, news arrived of the Meerut mutiny. He received warning that the native element of his own garrison, including one cavalry regiment, three infantry regiments and an artillery battery, would mutiny during the evening of 30 May. This intelligence proved to be accurate, although the mutineers were chased out of the city and cantonment areas by the under-strength 32nd Regiment (later the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry) under the command of Colonel J. E. W. Inglis, and 4/1 Battery Bengal Artillery,2 a European unit, before they could approach the Residency.

  For their own security Lucknow’s European civilians had been brought into the Residency that day. An interesting list of their numbers has survived, paying due heed to the hierarchical social structure of the day. Thus, the entries showing the presence of 69 ladies and 68 ladies’ children is followed by those of 171 ‘other women’ and 196 of their children, 125 ‘uncovenanted servants’, and eight employees of the Martinière School, a large building to the south of the city that would feature prominently in later fighting. It was said that at first some of the ladies found themselves ‘utterly unable to cope without their husbands and servants,’ but when the Residency came under siege they buckled to in the hospital and kitchens, took the strain off the fighting men in as many ways as they could, loaded muskets and even fired them. One of the two surgeons present was Dr William Brydon who, wounded in several places and riding a dying horse, had staggered into the besieged fortress of Jellalabad during the First Afghan War, believing that he was the sole survivor of the massacred Kabul garrison; he was not, but was immortalised just the same by Lady Butler in her The Remnant of an Army.3

  By 12 June it was clear that every British outpost in Oudh had fallen. Lawrence and those with him were entirely alone in the enemy’s heartland without any immediate prospect of relief. Towards the end of the month this sense of isolation was heightened by the news that the Cawnpore garrison had surrendered, although the horrible details of its fate did not become known in their entirety for some time. Curiously, despite Lawrence’s fears to the contrary the rebels left Lucknow alone until 29 June, when a force estimated to number 500 infantry, 50 cavalry and one gun was said to have reached Chinhut, some ten miles distant. In fact, the enemy’s strength was well over ten times that quoted but Lawrence took no steps to verify the truth and allowed himself to be talked into attacking the rebels. Next day he set off with 300 men of the 32nd, 170 loyal sepoys, about 100 cavalry and eleven guns. Despite the fact that his opponents were trained, professional soldiers, many still wearing infantry scarlet or light cavalry silver-grey, he neglected to take the elementary precaution of reconnaissance and found himself engaged on the most unfavourable terms from the outset. His small force stood not the slightest chance of even winning the firefight and was driven back into the Residency having incurred 200 casualties and lost five guns, one of them a powerful eight-inch howitzer that was later used against the defences, to no purpose. The only benefit from the action was that the garrison of the Muchhee Bhowan was ordered to retire within the main perimeter that night, the move being completed without incident. It seems unlikely that the fort, which was blown up to prevent its occupation by the enemy, could have resisted independently for long and, given the subsequent casualties incurred within the Residency itself, it is probable that this too would have fallen without the additional manpower thus made available.

  The affair at Chinhut had been a disaster for the Residency garrison. Not only did the rebels close in very quickly around the defences, but many of their fellows also converged on Lucknow, bringing with them every malcontent in Oudh, all of them elated by the British defeat. Many of the large buildings immediately outside the perimeter had not been demolished, an omission for which the garrison began to pay at once.

  ‘Our heaviest losses,’ wrote Inglis in his despatch, ‘have been caused by fire from the enemy’s sharpshooters, stationed in the adjoining mosques and houses of the native nobility, the necessity of destroying which had been repeatedly drawn to the attention of Sir Henry (Lawrence) by the staff of engineers. But his invariable reply was, “Spare the holy places, and private property too, as far as possible.” And we have consequently suffered severely from our very tenderness to the religious prejudices, and respect to the right of our rebellious citizens and soldiery. As soon as the enemy had thoroughly completed the investment of the Residency they occupied these houses, some of which were within easy pistol shot of our barricades, in immense force, and rapidly made loopholes on those sides which bore on our post, from which they kept up a terrific and incessant fire, day and night, which caused us many daily casualties, as there could not have been less than 8,000 men firing at one time into our position. Moreover, there was no place in the whole of our works that could be considered safe, for several of the sick and wounded, lying in the banqueting hall, which had been turned into a hospital, were killed in the very centre of the building.

  ‘Neither were the enemy idle in erecting batteries. They soon had from twenty to twenty-five guns in position, some of them of a very large calibre. These were planted all round our post at small distances, some being actually within fifty yards of our defences, but in places where our own heavy guns could not reply to them, while the perseverance and ingenuity of the enemy in erecting barricades in front of and around their guns in a very short time, rendered all attempts to silence them by musketry unavailing. Neither could they be effectually silenced by shells, by reason of their extreme proximity to our position, and because, moreover, the enemy had recourse to digging very narrow trenches, about eight feet in depth, in rear of each gun, in which the men lay while our shells were flying, and which so effectually concealed them, even while working the gun, that our baffled sharpshooters could only see their heads while in the act of loading.’

  On 1 July Lawrence was sitting in his room, talking to a Mr Coupar, when a shell passed between them and exploded without causing injury to either. Lawrence brushed aside his staff’s suggestion that he should change his quarters with the remark that it was unlikely that the enemy could repeat the performance. Unfortunately, they did, the very next day, and Lawrence was mortally wounded. It might well be said that his long years of civil administration had dulled the edge of his military instincts, but it cannot be denied that his foresight and planning saved hundreds of lives, nor that by his decision to defend the Residency he tied down thousands of mutineers whose presence elsewhere might have been critical.

  Inglis, later promoted brigadier-general, assumed command, instituting a series of successful sorties that wrecked the enemy’s forward posts and spiked his guns, thereby teaching him that, for all the firepower at his disposal, he had taken rather too much for granted. These restored the garrison’s understandably shaky morale, enabling it to endure the constant sniping and beat off periodic attacks. Finding their prolonged fire i
neffective and unable to penetrate the defences, the rebels resorted to mining. As soon as this was detected the garrison’s engineers, assisted by a number of Cornish tin miners from the 32nd, put counter-measures into effect. Although these stealthy subterranean contests generally ended in favour of the defenders, on 10 August the enemy succeeded in blowing up a 20-foot section of the defences and bringing down the outside wall of a house in the process. With pardonable exaggeration, Inglis recorded that a regiment could have marched through the resulting breach in perfect order. In the event, the few mutineers who tried to rush it were either brought down or fled in the face of a withering fire from the roof of the nearby brigade mess; the poor response in itself suggests that the mine could well have been detonated by accident.

  The garrison also had its enemies within the walls. Because of the cramped living conditions diseases such as cholera, dysentery and smallpox, encouraged by poor sanitation and the difficulties involved in disposing of human and animal remains, killed or incapacitated nearly as many as the mutineers’ guns. The inadequate diet induced scurvy and other skin diseases; heatstroke and trauma also took their toll. In the hospital the wounded and sick, for whom there were insufficient beds, sometimes lay crowded together on the floor in rows while flies feasted on their bloodied bandages. To add to these difficulties, Dr Brydon was himself wounded. Nevertheless, whenever the mutineers attacked, those who could walk left the hospital to take their place on the defences or, if they were too weak to fight, busied themselves loading muskets. No doubt what remained in every single mind was that if the Residency fell those within it – men, women and children alike – would be savagely butchered.