In the city many were murdered. The guard of the 38th at dusk also turned on their officers and many refugees at the Kashmir Gate who had no conveyance, most of whom escaped to the jungle and eventually wandered to Meerut. In the city one house with Eurasian refugees held out, till cannon were brought and forty odd Christians, mostly women and children, were held in the fort, only to be massacred a day or two later. The old puppet king, over eighty, grandson of he of Lord Lake's day, and his dissolute sons, willy-nilly, accepted the Mutineer throne.
By night-fall no Christian was alive in Delhi save the miserables in the Palace. The British people and the British flag and Christianity had disappeared. The Ridge cantonment lay bare and smoking.
A month later the British, as related, had returned, driving fiercely before them bodies of Sepoys who had moved out to meet them, and now the Ridge was alive with them, looking down on the city of guilt, the British flag flying and the British bugles ringing out the old camp calls. Curiously enough the Mutineer bugles did the same, and their bands even played the British airs, and the irregimental marches, and "Cheer, boys, cheer!" "My love ins like the red, red rose," came across in the evening air, and even the British National Anthem as His Majesty sat in durbar!
The occupation of the Ridge, however, did not, as many imagined, mean the investment of the city, and only, as explained, did its far right approach thereto. The Ridge, it is true, covered the camp, but only by dint of holding in strength this right or north west end was the camp protected, while the effervescing of the city to the populous suburb of Kissengunj via the Grand Trunk Road, and the garden one of the Sabzi Mandi, suburbs which the small British force could not possibly hold, gave the Mutineers constant access to the British flank. This was the cause of much fierce street and garden fighting, and heavily-treed orchards and gardens still further extended round the British rear.
The Delhi Field Force
The Delhi Field Force, which the Pioneers had joined, had already been through many vicissitudes, and had suffered severely from climate, sickness and casualties. It consisted of two bodies; the European troops from Umballa and the Simla Hills, with one or two doubtful Indian Corps, and those from Meerut under Brigadier Archdale Wilson, Commandant of the Bengal Artillery.+ Two sharp fights had been fought, and valuable lives lost, before the Ridge was gained.
General the Hon. George Anson, the Commander-in-Chief, who had acted with the greatest energy, had died of cholera at Kurnal at the head of the northern column, and Major General Sir Henry Barnard* succeeded to the command of the Field Force, till he too succumbed to heat and over exertion. The veteran General Reed, the "dictator" in the Punjab referred to, came down, in poor health, to act as Commander-in-Chief, and actually joined the force before it reached Delhi, and controlled the routine of the Headquarters of the Bengal Army, which was in camp with the Field Force. General Barnard died in July of cholera, and Reed assumed executive command; he, too, soon broke down in health and the doctors sent him of to the hills, whereon Brigadier Wilson was appointed to command, with the rank of major-general. At his back was Brigadier-General Neville Chamberlain, the commander of the Punjab Irregular Force, and the movable column. He had come down to take office as Adjutant-General of the Army, as his predecessor had just been killed, but he, too, was badly wounded, and in bed. The force organized in two brigades had not been systematically handled with due regard to rest and health of troops, till General Wilson, with systematic mind and wide Indian experience, took over.
A controversy long raged as to whether or not the Field Force could or should have carried the city by a coup de main after its first arrival, before the city garrison, acting as a magnet to corps mutinying for many miles round, had become too strong. Instructed opinion considered not, and two Field-Marshals, Lord Roberts and Sir Henry Norman, who were there in the energy of their youth, have both recorded their matured opinion, that it was not a possible feat, and had it been tactically successful would have produced stalemate from the losses which must have occurred, and rendered the British survivors impotent to control the storm.
The public generally, including Sir John Lawrence, who should have known better, did not understand the strength and efficient state of its walls and bastions, nor how ample was the supply of arms, material and ammunition in the Mutineers hands for arming all who joined them, notably deserters from disarmed regiments.
The light horse artillery and field guns with which Sir Henry Barnard approached the place were powerless before the heavy artillery within, and Phillour, the nearest arsenal, could only provide the lightest of siege trains. The Commander-in-Chief, had however, ordered this to be prepared, and it was soon on its way via Umballa.
The situation very soon developed into an impasse. More mutinous corps flocked into Delhi, while the British on the Ridge were fighting constant sorties, heat, cholera and dysentery.
+9th Lancers; 1 troop H.A.; 75th Foot; 60th N.I.; 9th Bengal Cavalry; 1 troop Horse Artillery; 60th Rifles; Sirmoor Battalion (Gurkhas); 120 Bengal Sappers and Miners. *Chief of Staff in the Crimea at the end of that campaign. |
