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strong powerful timbers of which it had been constructed, were washed down to our camp. The further advance of the enemy was now effectually put a stop to, not only on account of the destruction of the bridge, but because the surrounding country had become impassable. Their cavalry which had crossed were separated from their main body, and were in a terrible fright lest we should send out a force to cut them off. With difficulty they made their escape, by marching about sixteen miles up the canal, crossing by a bridge which we had not been able to destroy; from whence, crestfallen and in disorder, they made their way back to Delhi. The most remarkable circumstance connected with the above is, that at the very time the rain descended in such torrents on the enemy, we had not a single drop in our own camp. This was a wonderful interpo

sition of Providence."

Such an incident must have impressed deeply the minds of the handful of Englishmen, fighting, as they were aware, a desperate battle, and therefore having all the better claim, their cause being just, on that God to whom they were used to say that He alone fighteth for us. They ran such risks almost daily, for the sorties were numerous; they had treason even among themselves, small as their following was, and were obliged to disband and dismiss a native regiment, whose English officers-with that strange obstinacy of faith which was one of the features of the period-held by them stoutly till the last moment, refusing to believe in any possibility of desertion. To such a point did this faith go, that Sir Hope Grant informs us the Adjutant-General, after assembling and haranguing the native officers, presented the chief among them with a fine horse, which he received with protestations of devotion. "That very evening the native officer galloped off on his beautiful horse, and went over to the enemy." Several troopers,

however, of this disbanded regiment remained examples of fidelity, as an offset against the treachery of the others.

The siege of Delhi lasted more than three months. The small army, badly furnished in every way, attacked and attacking almost daily, sometimes surrounded by almost imunder blazing suns, enduring, with passable swamps, sometimes scorched little ease and perpetual fatigue, the worst that an Indian climate in its most terrible combination of fiery heat and fatal humidity could do, passed thus the months of June, July, and September, while England fumed and fretted over the sea, wondering and blaming its inaction. The siege-train only reached them on the 4th of September; and by that time, in consequence of the exertions made, chiefly by Sir John Lawrence, to reinforce them, their numbers altogether, including Sikhs, rose to 10,000. On the 13th September the final attack was made; and two days after, the vast crowd of insurgents were finally dispersed from the stronghold, and the city returned into British hands. We need not enter into details of a struggle which was accompanied by much desperate fighting, and by some losses on the English side which it would be difficult to overestimate. One of them, and perhaps the most important, was that of the brave General Nicholson, who was shot at the head of his brigade in an assault on the Lahore gate. There is a touch of genuine tragedy in the brief note made by Sir Hope of this brave soldier's deathbed.

"There was an unearthly stillness about the camp, very different to the vious to the assault. As I entered the bustle and activity which existed prehut, the gloomy darkness was made visible by one miserable dimly-burning candle. On a couch I saw a figure lying

stretched at full length, with a native standing beside him. The ghastly look of death was upon his countenance; and, on going nearer, I perceived it was poor Brigadier Nicholson, whom I had fast seen upon the walls of Delhi the day before, vigorous and animated, leading on his men gallantly. Everything was now changed for him-ambition, the hopes of rising to greatnessall was vanishing from before his eyes. He was like a noble oak riven asunder by a thunderbolt. As I approached he looked towards me, and in a deep sepulchral voice said, 'Who are you?' I told him, and spoke some kind words to him. He looked again, and after some time, with great difficulty, said, 'I thank you;' and then closed his

eyes."

Seldom has the death of a strong man, struck down in mid-career, been represented with more powerful and tragical brevity, simple as are the words in which this heartchilling picture is made.

Here terminates the more painful part of the narrative. It is true that the double episode of Lucknow kept England still on a strain of tremendous emotion scarcely equalled, perhaps, by anything called forth by a public event within the limits of this century at least; but all that was most appalling and cruel was now over, and the subduing of the mutiny became rather a matter of time than a desperate possibility. Havelock, Outram, Sir Colin Campbell, were all by this time in the field, men not likely to lose their heads in an emergency, and prepared, so far as calm courage, self-possession, and readiness of resource could prepare them, for everything that might befall them.

The episode of Lucknow to which we have just referred was, however, of all others the most prolonged in tragic interest. The other great misfortunes of the English in India were known at least in England only after the occurrence; but for Lucknow we all, who are

VOL. CXV.-NO. DCXCIX.

old enough to recollect it, went through all the vicissitudes of hope and fear as much as if the besieged city had been an individual sufferer of our closest acquaintance. The death of Sir Henry Lawrence, one of the finest and noblest of those Christian soldiers who have made our English army illustrious, in the very commencement of that long agony, undergone by the cooped up remnant of British sufferers within the Residency—had given a melancholy tone at once to their story, and added discouragement to the misery they endured so bravely. Everybody remembers the heroic

march of Havelock to their reliefa march which was little less than a succession of battles against overwhelming numbers-his own little force never rising at its best beyond 2500 men, against armies five or six times as great, and often more. How he fought his way mile by mile; how the gallant and chivalrous Outram, on joining him, waived his superior rank and served as a volunteer, rather than take from his brother-in-arms the honour of concluding what he had so well begun; and how he relieved Lucknow only to be in his turn shut in, and to endure once more all the calamities of the siege which he had momentarily relieved, we need not attempt to tell over again. Havelock had served for many years humbly and without much notice, doing the work of a good soldier; but in this moment of extremity his turn came to show what was in him, and the unobtrusive Indian officer leaped at once into our national roll of heroes. The unfortunate concurrence of events which made him a prisoner in the very fortifications from whence he had so hasted and fought to deliver the captives, made his sudden glory only more noticeable. And it would be vain to attempt to describe the feelings of

H

the anxious and excited spectators in England when they found themselves called upon a second time to speculate whether deliverance would come in time, and to dread the possibility of the fall of Lucknow, with a second brave little army added to its first defenders.

The second siege had lasted for five or six weeks before we take up the story of the second deliverance in Sir Hope Grant's stirring narrative. He himself had been left in momentary inaction at Delhi while the troops scoured the neighbouring country, but had at last been sent for in haste, and was on his eager way to the succour of Lucknow when the newly appointed Commander-inchief, Sir Colin Campbell-sent out at a day's notice by one of those highly wrought impulses of popular feeling which now and then drive the British government and nation to an infallible choice of the right man— joined his small forces. Sir Colin, too, had been long a good officer merely, known in his profession, but not much out of it, and had already begun to long for retirement and quiet, when sudden laurels fell upon the man who was all at once discovered to be the man whom England most wanted in her moment of extremity. "You little expected," said Sir Hope as they met," when I last heard from you that you would be appointed Commander-in-Chief in India." "I should as soon have thought to be made Archbishop of Canterbury," said the other. It would be almost impossible to describe to any reader too young to recollect it, the feelings with which we in England watched the progress of the new Commander, whom we all felt somehow, individually, to be our special emissary for the salvation of India, upon that march to Lucknow. Sir Hope tells the story of the march itself in his usual self-controlled

and soldierly way-so many attacks of the enemy, so many difficulties of the road, marshes to drag the guns through, jungle to intercept the men, here " a heavy fire of infantry" suddenly opening upon them, there "an hour's pounding" with heavy guns to drive away a hostile outpost. The story of the excitement of a single peaceful family in England-its longing for news, its hopes and wild terrors, its perpetual discussion of what might be doing, and the close interest with which it followed every movement and watched for every mail—would, could we tell it in detail, be infinitely more emotional than the soldier's plain record of what he did from day to day, the bullets that played about him harmlessly, and all the various risks he ran, of which he makes nothing. By desperate fighting they struggled into the Residency, where they were welcomed with such enthusiasm as may easily be conceived, by the spent and weary garrison. But here, again, reality quite fails of the effect which imagination gives. "Soldiers," said Havelock, his eyes full of tears, to the men who flocked about him-"soldiers, I am happy to see you; soldiers, I am happy to think you have got into this place with a smaller loss than I had." But while these sober words were all that even the excitement of such a deliverance drew from the British general, with that obstinate incapacity for scenic effects that seems to mark the race-we at home found vent for our excitement in much more dramatic pictures of how the deliverance came. We remember a pretty story current at the time of how some Scotch lass, a soldier's daughter, was the first to hear from the rampart a far-off sound of the Highland pipes which announced the deliverers; how she was supposed to have gone crazy in her sudden joy; and how gradually that

craze of gladness communicated itself to all as the shrill sweet pibroch grew on the air, and the red-coats came in sight. The present writer owns to having put this story into verse, with some lingering hope that it might be true, in such a genuine passion of excitement as perhaps only youth is capable of. Nothing of this kind is in the simple narrative. Theirs was "a happy meeting" and much "cordial shaking of hands," says Sir Hope Grant, with true British quiet; and thus ended two terrible sieges and one of the most awful moments of suspense ever endured by any community,-suspense which the whole nation shared with the actual sufferers; for there was scarcely a man or woman in England who did not tremble to hear of another catastrophe such as that at Cawnpore until the beleaguered garrison and, above all, the women and children, were safe out of those dangerous walls.

The third expedition to Lucknow, undertaken only after this object was attained, and which ended in the complete dispersion of the rebels and re-possession of the city, though not less interesting in a military point of view nor less exciting as a warlike struggle, has no longer the dramatic and general interest of the former marches; and as we do not attempt to enter into any military review of the situation we will not follow the generals through the remaining campaign, which by degrees quenched all the sparks of evil, and reduced India again to quiet and subordination. Long ere this it had become apparent that this "brightest jewel in the British crown was not going to be snatched from us, and that the momentary chill of disaster which had struck the heart of the nation, with the strangest mixture of fear, anguish, and incredulity, was as

temporary as any other sudden shock which sends back the blood to the heart, only to fortify both soul and body, in an instant, with strenuous impulse to resist the evil and win back the tranquillity assailed. The courage of England at home was at once recovered when the women and children were out of danger, and no new outrage such as those which had chilled our blood was possible. The courage of our soldiers had never flagged. They, subjected to perpetual perils, had gone about their work always with imperturbable self-possession. At a very dark moment indeed, just before the first assault on Delhi, Sir Hope Grant himself, struck with this amazing calm, pauses in his hasty tale to make a note upon it. He, himself a soldier, wonders, as any man well might, at the perfect calm of both officers and soldiers. "Men," he says, "seemed to regard the coming struggle as if it were a cricket match in which every one felt confident his side would win.” There was even time for frolic after the first passion was over. It is only fair, however, to say that this was after the fall of Delhi and the deliverance of the Lucknow garrison had taken something of the sting out of the more horrible recollections of the war. We remember to have heard a somewhat dull officer, not ordinarily interesting in his conversation, tell the story of some portions of the earlier struggle with a fervour of recollection which turned his native dulness into dramatic force, and gave the hearer a sympathetic shudder, as he told of the grim look of the men when mercy was suggested to them, and how they said "Cawnpore!" to each other, with a stillness more terrible than any war cry, when they charged the enemy. There is little trace, however, of this wild vehemence of feeling in

Sir Hope Grant's story, and we read such an anecdote as the following, after all the more terrible recollections called forth by his narrative, with a certain sense of escape and relief.

"The 531 Regiment, principally composed of Irishmen, were a fine looking set of fellows, and equally good hands at fighting. Their discipline, however, was not by any means perfect, and it was difficult to keep them well in hand. They had been lying under the bank of a road which afforded but an inadequate protection, and had in consequence lost a good many men. All of a sudden, without a word from any of their officers, they rushed forward, and, utterly heedless of all efforts to stop them, made their way into the toll-house, in a few instants clearing out the enemy. The Commander-inChief was terribly annoyed, and riding up to the regiment, pitched into it well. But these wild Irishmen were incorrigible; whenever he began to speak, a lot of them exclaimed as loud as they could,Three cheers for the Commander-in-chief, boys!' until at last he himself was obliged to go away laughing."

A little while after this incident, we hear, with a pleasant sense of the always lessening cloud, of a sudden adventurous outburst made by Sir Hope and his brother officers "to see their wives," from whom they had been separated through all the painful and anxious time now happily almost at an end-an expedition upon which they seem to have set out with all the glee of delivered schoolboys, and which Sir Colin, grim but kindly old bachelor, permitted with humorous contempt and probably a touch of envy. Byand-by they could hear with pleasure of "some good pig-sticking," and "put up a large fox which gave us a fine chevy." Thus the time of misery and disaster came to an end, and the ordinary conditions of life, those common laws and common incidents which outlive all despairs

and troubles, resumed their usual sway on the very edge of the hurricane past.

It is, however, with a shudder that we find, very sparingly given— for Sir Hope does not seem to have any disposition to linger upon hor

rors-some details here and there

which call back to us with startling vividness the feelings which rendered us half crazy with excitement and horror at the time. Here is one brief but terrible incident.

Some poor people, officers with their wives and children, had taken refuge with the Rajah of Powaen, who soon, however, tired of them, and sent them off with an escort of their own revolted native soldiers.

"After the first day's march, two young officers, mere boys, who had just joined, being excessively fatigued and footsore, lagged behind, whereupon some of the Sepoys began pricking them up with their bayonets. One of the captains remonstrated with these brutes. The two poor lads, however, could not get on any faster, and the villains immediately put ther muskets to their heads and shot them. One of the party, a lady whom we had known very well at Umballa, was expecting her confinement, and was quite upset by all the horrors she had been forced peration at the fate which was evito pass through. Her husband, in desdently impending over them, shot her; another officer followed his example with his wife; and then the Sepoys fell upon their prisoners and murdered them all."

Never was there a simpler, less emotional record of perhaps the most terrible condition of affairs in which civilised men ever found themselves. Her husband, in desperation, shot her. It is impossible to conceive a more frightful climax of mortal anguish and misery.

Here, however, is a pendant, in the dismal reversal of positions later on, when the mutiny was all but quelled, and the wretched remnants of the rebel forces were being pur

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