Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places

A >> Archibald Forbes >> Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places

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The position which bears and will bear to all time the title of the
Residency of Lucknow, is an elevated plateau of land, irregular in
surface, of which the highest point is occupied by the Residency building,
while the area around was studded irregularly with buildings, chiefly the
houses of the principal civilian officials of the station. When Campbell
brought away the garrison in November 1857 it lapsed into the hands of the
mutineers, who held it till his final occupation of the city and its
surroundings in March of the following year. They pulled down not a few of
the already shattered buildings, and left their fell imprint on the spot
in an atrociously ghastly way by desecrating the graves in which brave
hands had laid our dead country-people and flinging the exhumed corpses
into the Goomtee. When India once more became settled the Residency, its
commemorative features uninterfered with, was laid out as a garden and
flowers and shrubs now grow on soil once wet with the blood of heroes. The
_debris_ has been removed or dispersed; the shattered buildings are
prevented from crumbling farther; tablets bearing the names of the
different positions and places of interest are let into the walls; and it
is possible, by exploring the place map in hand, to identify all the
features of the defence. The avenue from the Baileyguard gate rises with a
steep slope to the Residency building. On either side of the approach and
hard by the gate, are the blistered and shattered remnants of two large
houses; that on the right is the banqueting house which was used as the
hospital during the siege; that on the left was Dr. Fayrer's house. The
banqueting house is a mere shell, riven everywhere with shot and pitted
over by musket-bullets as if it had suffered from smallpox. The
ground-floor has escaped with less damage but the banqueting hall itself
has been wholly wrecked by the persistent fire which the rebels showered
upon it, and to which, notwithstanding the mattresses and sandbags with
which the windows were blocked, several poor fellows fell victims as they
lay wounded on their cots. Dr. Fayrer's house is equally a battered ruin.
In its first floor, roofless and forlorn, its front torn open by shot and
the pillars of its windows jagged into fantastic fragments, is the veranda
in which Sir Henry Lawrence, 4th July 1857, died, exposed to fire to the
very last. At the top of the slope of the avenue and on the left front of
the Residency building as we approach it--on what, indeed, was once the
lawn--has been raised an artificial mound, its slopes covered with
flowering shrubs, its summit bearing the monumental obelisk on the
pedestal of which is the terse, appropriate inscription: "In memory of
Major-General Sir Henry Lawrence and the brave men who fell in defence of
the Residency. _Si monumentum quaeris Circumspice!_" Beyond this lies the
scathed and blighted ruin of the Residency House, once a large and
imposing structure, now so utterly wrecked and shivered that one wonders
how the crumbling reddish-gray walls are kept erect. The veranda was
battered down and much of the front of the building lies bodily open, the
structure being supported on the battered and distorted pillars assisted
by great balks of wood. Entering by the left wing I pass down a winding
stair into the bowels of the earth till I reach the spacious and lofty
vaults or _tykhana_ under the building. Here, the place affording
comparative safety, lived immured the women of the garrison, the soldiers'
wives, half-caste females, the wives of the meaner civilians and their
children. The poor creatures were seldom allowed to come up to the
surface, lest they should come in the way of the shot which constantly
lacerated the whole area, and few visitors were allowed access to them.
Veritably they were in a dungeon. Provisions were lowered down to them
from the window orifices near the roof of the vaulting, and there were
days when the firing was so heavy that orders were given to them not even
to rise from their beds on the floor. For shot occasionally found a way
even into the _tykhana_; you may see the holes it made in penetrating. The
miserables were billeted off ten in a room, and there they lived, without
sweepers, baths, dhobies, or any of the comforts which the climate makes
necessities. Here in these dungeons children were born, only for the most
part to die. Ascending another staircase I pass through some rooms in
which lived (and died) some of the ladies of the garrison, and passing
from the left wing by a shattered corridor am able to look up into the
room in which Sir Henry Lawrence received his death-wound. Access to it is
impossible by reason of the tottering condition of the structure; and
turning away I clamber up the worn staircase in the shot-riven tower on
the summit of which still stands the flagstaff on which were hoisted the
signals with which the garrison were wont to communicate with the
Alumbagh. The walls of the staircase and the flat roof of the tower are
scratched and written all over with the names of visitors; many of the
names are those of natives, but more are those of British soldiers, who
have occasionally added a piece of their mind in characteristically strong
language.

I set out on a pilgrimage under the still easily traceable contour of the
intrenchment. Passing "Sam Lawrence's Battery" above what was the
water-gate, I traverse the projecting tongue at the end of which stood the
"Redan Battery" whose fire swept the river face up to the iron bridge.
Returning, and passing the spot where "Evans's Battery" stood, I find
myself in the churchyard in a slight depression of the ground. Of the
church, which was itself a defensive post, not one stone remains on
another and the mutineers hacked to pieces the ground of the churchyard.
The ground is now neatly enclosed and ornamentally planted and is studded
with many monuments, few of which speak the truth when they profess to
cover the dust of those whom they commemorate. There are the regimental
monuments of the 5th Madras Fusiliers, the 84th (360 men besides
officers), the Royal Artillery, the 90th (a long list of officers and 271
men). The monument of the 1st Madras Fusiliers bears the names of Neill,
Stephenson, Renaud, and Arnold, and commemorates a loss of 352 men. There
is a monument to Mr. Polehampton the exemplary chaplain, and hard by a
plain slab bears the inscription, "Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to
do his duty; may the Lord have mercy on his soul!" words dictated by
himself on his deathbed. Other monuments commemorate Captain Graham of the
Bengal Cavalry and two children; Mr. Fairhurst the Roman Catholic chaplain;
Major Banks; Captain Fulton of the 32nd who earned the title of "Defender
of Lucknow;" Lucas, the travelling Irish gentleman who served as a
volunteer and fell in the last sortie; Captain Becher; Captain Moorsom;
poor Bensley Thornhill and his young daughter; "Mrs. Elizabeth Arne, burnt
with a shell-ball during the siege;" Lieutenant Cunliffe; Mr. Ommaney the
Judicial Commissioner; and others. The nameless hillocks of poor Jack
Private are plentiful, for here were buried many of those who fell in the
final capture; and there are children's graves. Interments take place
still. I saw a freshly-made grave; but only those are entitled to a last
resting-place here who were among the beleaguered during the long defence.
I have seen the medal for the defence of Lucknow on the breast of a man
who was a child in arms at the time of the siege, and such an one would
have the right to claim interment in this doubly hallowed ground. From the
churchyard I pass out along the narrow neck to that forlorn-hope post,
"Innes's Garrison," and along the western face of the intrenchment by the
sides of the sheep-house and the slaughter-house, to Gubbins's post. The
mere foundations of the house are visible which the stout civilian so
gallantly defended, and the famous tree, gradually pruned to a mere stump
by the enemy's fire, is no longer extant. Along the southern face of the
position there are no buildings which are not ruined. Sikh Square, the
Brigade Mess House, and the Martiniere boys' post, are alike represented
by fragmentary gray walls shivered with shot and shored up here and there
by beams. The rooms of the Begum Kothi near the centre of the position,
are still laterally entire but roofless. The walls of this structure are
exceptionally thick and here many of the ladies of the garrison were
quartered. All around the Residency position the native houses which at
the time of the siege crowded close up on the intrenchment, are now
destroyed; and indeed the native town has been curtailed into
comparatively small dimensions and is entirely separated from the area in
which the houses of the station are built.

Quitting the Residency I drive westward by the river side, over the site
of the Captan Bazaar, past also that huge fortified heap the Muchee Bawn,
till I reach the beautiful enclosure in which the great Imambara stands.
This majestic structure--part temple, part convent, part palace, and now
part fortress--dominates the whole _terrain_, and from its lofty flat roof
one looks down on the plain where the weekly _hat_ or market is being
held, on the gardens and mansions across the river, and southward upon the
dense mass of houses which constitute the native city. Sentries promenade
the battlements of the Muchee Bawn, and the Imambara--an apartment to
which for space and height I know none in Europe comparable--is now used
as an arsenal, where are stored the great siege guns which William Peel
plied with so great skill and gallantry. Just outside the Imambara, on the
edge of the _maidan_ between it and the Moosabagh, I come on a little
railed churchyard where rest a few British soldiers who fell during Lord
Clyde's final operations in this direction. Then, with a sweep across the
plain to the south and by a slight ascent, I reach the gate of the city
which opens into the Chowk or principal street--the street traversed in
disguise by the dauntless Kavanagh when he went out from the garrison to
convey information and afford guidance to Sir Colin Campbell on his first
advance. The gatehouse is held by a strong force of native policemen,
armed as if they were soldiers; and as I pass the guard I stand in the
Chowk itself, in the midst of a throng of gaily clad male pedestrians,
women in chintz trousers, laden donkeys, multitudinous children, and still
more multitudinous stinks. All down both sides the fronts of the lower
stories are open, and in the recesses sit merchants displaying paltry
jewelry, slippers, pipes, turban cloths, and Manchester stuffs of the
gaudiest patterns. The main street of Lucknow has been called "The Street
of Silver," but I could find little among its jewelry either of silver or
of gold. The first floors all have balconies, and on these sit draped,
barefooted women of Rahab's profession. The women of Lucknow are fairer
and handsomer, and the men bolder and more stalwart, than those in Bengal,
and it takes no great penetration to discern that Lucknow is still ruled
by fear and not by love.

It remained for me still to investigate the scenes of the route by which
Lord Clyde came in on both his advances; but to do justice to these would
demand separate articles. Let me begin the hasty sketch at the Dilkoosha
Palace, two miles and more away to the east of the Residency; for on both
occasions the Dilkoosha was Clyde's base. Wajid Ali's twenty-foot wall has
now given place to an earthen embankment surrounding a beautiful pleasure
park, and there are now smooth green slopes instead of the dense forest
through which Clyde's soldiers marched on their turning movement. On a
swell in the midst of the park, commanding a view of the fantastic
architecture of the Martiniere down by the tank, stands the gaunt ruin of
the once trim and dainty Dilkoosha Palace or rather garden-house. From one
of the pepper-box turrets up there Lord Clyde directed the attack on the
Martiniere on his ultimate operation; and here it was that, as Dr. Russell
tells us, a round shot dispersed his staff on the adjacent leads. After
quietude was restored the Dilkoosha was the headquarters for a time of Sir
Hope Grant, but now it has been allowed to fall into decay although the
garden in the rear of it is prettily kept up. On the reverse slope behind
the Dilkoosha was the camp in one of the tents of which Havelock died. We
drive down the gentle slope once traversed at a rushing double by the
Black Watch on their way to carry the Martiniere, past the great tank out
of the centre of which rises the tall column to the memory of Claude
Martine, and reach the entrance of the fantastic building which he built,
in which he was buried, and which bears his name. We see at the angle of
the northern wing the slope up which the gun was run which played so
heavily on the Dilkoosha up on the wooded knoll there. The Martiniere is
now, as it was before the Mutiny, a college for European boys, and the
young fellows are playing on the terraces. Grotesque stone statues are in
niches and along the tops of the balconies; you may see on them the marks
of the bullets which the honest fellows of the Black Watch fired at them,
taking them for Pandies. I go down into a vault and see the tomb of Claude
Martine; but it is empty, for the mutineers desecrated his grave and
scattered his bones to the winds of heaven. Then I make for the roof,
through the dormitories of the boys and past fantastic stone griffins and
lions and Gorgons, till I reach the top of the tower and touch the
flagstaff from which, during the relief time, was given the answering
signal to that hoisted on the tower of the Residency. I stand in the
niches where the mutineer marksmen used to sit with their hookahs and take
pot shots at the Dilkoosha. I look down to the eastward on the Goomtee,
and note the spot where Outram crossed on that flank movement which would
have been very much more successful than it was had he been permitted to
drive it home. To the north-east beyond the topes is the battle-ground of
Chinhut, where Lawrence received so terrible a reverse at the beginning of
the siege. Due north is the Kookrail viaduct which Outram cleared with the
Rifles and the 79th, and in whose vicinity Jung Bahadour, the crafty and
bloodthirsty generalissimo of Nepaul, "co-operated" by a demonstration
which never became anything more. And to the west there lie stretched out
before me the domes, minarets, and spires of Lucknow, rising above the
foliage in which their bases are hidden, and the routes of Clyde in the
relief and capture. The rays of the afternoon sun are stirring into colour
the dusky gray of the Secunderbagh and of the Nuddun Rusool, or "Grave of
the Prophet," used as a powder magazine by the rebels. Below me, on the
lawn of the Martiniere, is the big gun--one of Claude Martine's casting--
which did the rebels so much service at the other angle of the Martiniere
and which was spiked at last by two men of Peel's naval brigade, who swam
the Goomtee for the purpose. That little enclosure slightly to the left
surrounds "all that can die" of that strange mixture of high spirit, cool
daring, and weak principle, the famous chief of Hodson's Horse. By
Hodson's side lies Captain da Costa of the 56th N.I., attached to
Brazier's Sikhs. Of this officer is told that, having lost many relatives
in the butchery of Cawnpore, he joined the regiment likeliest to be in the
front of the Lucknow fighting, and fell by one of the first shots fired in
the assault on the Kaiser-bagh.

Descending from the Martiniere tower I traverse the park to the westward
passing the grave of Captain Otway Mayne, cross the dry canal along which
are still visible the heaps of earth which mark the stupendous first line
of the rebels' defences, and bending to the left reach the Secunderbagh.
This famous place was a pleasure garden surrounded with a lofty wall with
turrets at the angles and a castellated gateway. The interior garden is
now waste and forlorn, the rank grass growing breast-high in the corners
where the slaughter was heaviest. Here in this little enclosure, not half
the size of the garden of Bedford Square, 2000 Sepoys died the death at
the hands of the 93rd, the 53rd, and the 4th Punjaubees. Their common
grave is under the low mound on the other side of the road. The loopholes
stand as they were left by the mutineers when our fellows came bursting in
through the ragged breach made in the reverse side from the main entrance
by Peel's guns. Farther on--that is, nearer to the Residency--I come to
the Shah Nujeef, with its strong exterior wall enclosing the domed temple
in its centre. It is still easy to trace the marks of the breach made in
the angle in the wall by Peel's battering guns, and the tree is still
standing up which Salmon, Southwell, and Harrison climbed in response to
his proffer of the Victoria Cross. Opposite the Shah Nujeef white girls
are playing on the lawn of that castellated building, for the Koorsheyd
Munzil, on the top of which there was hoisted the British flag in the face
of a _feu d'enfer_, is now a seminary for the daughters of Europeans. A
little beyond, on the plain in front of the Motee Mahal, is the spot where
Campbell met Outram and Havelock--a spot which, methinks, might well be
marked by a monument; and after this I lose my reckoning by reason of the
extent of the demolition, and am forced to resort to guesswork as to the
precise localities.

THE MILITARY COURAGE OF ROYALTY

Writing of the late Alexander III. of Russia, a foreign author has
recently permitted himself to observe: "Marvellous personal courage is not
a striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs as it was of the
English Tudors." It will be conceded that periods materially govern the
conditions under which sovereigns and their royal relatives have found
opportunities for proving their personal courage. The Tudor dynasty had
ended before the Romanoff dynasty began. It is true, indeed, that the
ending of the former with the death of Elizabeth in 1603 occurred only a
few years before the foundation of the latter by the election to the
Tzarship of Michael Feodorovitz Romanoff in 1612. But of the five
sovereigns of the Tudor dynasty it happened that only one, Henry VII., the
first monarch of that dynasty, found or made an opportunity for the
display of marked--scarcely perhaps of "marvellous"--personal courage; and
thus the selection of the Tudor dynasty by the writer referred to as
furnishing a contrasting illustration in the matter of personal courage to
that of the Romanoffs was not particularly fortunate. Henry VIII. was only
once in action; he shared in the skirmish known as the "Battle of the
Spurs," because of the precipitate flight of the French horse. Edward VI.
died at the age of sixteen, and the two remaining sovereigns of the
dynasty were women, of whom it is true that Elizabeth was a strong and
vigorous ruler, but in the nature of things had no opportunity for showing
"marvellous personal courage." Henry VII. literally found his crown in the
heart of the _melee_ on Bosworth field, it matters not which of the
alternative stories is correct, that he himself killed Richard, or that
Richard was killed in the act of striking him a desperate blow. But Henry
at Bosworth in 1485 still belonged to the days of chivalry--to an era in
which monarchs were also armour-clad knights, who headed charges in person
and gave and took with spear, sword, and battle-axe. Long before Peter the
Great, more than two centuries after Bosworth, foamed at the mouth with
rage and hacked with his sword at his panicstricken troops fleeing from
the field of Narva on that winter day of 1700, the face of warfare had
altered and the _metier_ of the commander, were he sovereign or were he
subject, had undergone a radical change.

Of a family of the human race it is not rationally possible to predicate a
typical generic characteristic of mind. A physical trait will endure down
the generations, as witness the Hapsburg lip and the swarthy complexion of
the Finch-Hattons, in the face of alliances from outside the races; but,
save as regards one exception, there is no assurance of a continuous
inheritance of mental attributes. What a contrast is there between
Frederick the Great and his father; between George III. and his successor;
between the present Emperor of Austria and his hapless son; between the
genial, wistful, and well-intentioned Alexander II. of Russia and the not
less well-intentioned but narrow-minded and despotic sovereign who
succeeded him! But there may be reserved one exception to the absence of
assurance of inherited mental attributes--one mental feature in which
identity takes the place of dissimilarity, and even of actual contrast.
And that feature--that inherited characteristic of a race whose
progenitors happily possessed it--is personal courage.

Take, for example, the Hohenzollerns. One need not hark back to Carlyle's
original Conrad, the seeker of his fortune who tramped down from the
ancestral cliff-castle on his way to take service under Barbarossa. Before
and since the "Grosse Kurfurst" there has been no Hohenzollern who has not
been a brave man. He himself was the hero of Fehrbellin. His son, the
first king of the line, Carlyle's "Expensive Herr," was "valiant in
action" during the third war of Louis XIV. The rugged Frederick William,
father of Frederick the Great, had his own tough piece of war against the
volcanic Charles XII. of Sweden and did a stout stroke of hard fighting at
Malplaquet. Of Fritz himself the world has full note. Bad, sensual,
debauched Hohenzollern as was his successor, Frederick the Fat, he had
fought stoutly in his youth-time under his illustrious uncle. His son,
Frederick William III., overthrown by Napoleon who called him a
"corporal," did good soldierly work in the "War of Liberation" and fought
his way to Paris in 1814. His eldest son, Frederick William IV., the
vague, benevolent dreamer whom _Punch_ used to call "King Clicquot" and
who died of softening of the brain, even he, too, as a lad had
distinguished himself in the "War of Liberation" and in the fighting
during the subsequent advance on Paris. As for grand old William I., the
real maker of the German Empire on the _quid facit per alium facit per se_
axiom, he died a veteran of many wars. He was not seventeen when he won
the Iron Cross by a service of conspicuous gallantry under heavy fire. He
took his chances in the bullet and shell fire at Koeniggraetz, and again on
the afternoon of Gravelotte. Not a Hohenzollern of them all but shared as
became their race in the dangers of the great war of 1870-71; even Prince
George, the music composer, the only non-soldier of the family, took the
field. William's noble son, whose premature death neither Germany nor
England has yet ceased to deplore, took the lead of one army; his nephew
Prince Frederick Charles, a great commander and a brilliant soldier, was
the leader of another. One of his brothers, Prince Albert the elder, made
the campaign as cavalry chief; whose son, Prince Albert junior, now a
veteran Field-Marshal, commanded a brigade of guard-cavalry with a skill
and daring not wholly devoid of recklessness. Another brother, Prince
Charles, the father of the "Red Prince," made the campaign with the royal
headquarters; Prince Adalbert, a cousin of the sovereign and head of the
Prussian Navy, had his horse shot under him on the battlefield of
Gravelotte.

The trait of personal courage has markedly characterised the House of
Hanover. As King of England George I. did no fighting, but before he
reached that position he had distinguished himself in war not a little;
against the Danes and Swedes in 1700 and in high command in the war of the
Spanish succession from 1701 to 1709. His successor, while yet young, had
displayed conspicuous valour in the battle of Oudenarde, and later in life
at Dettingen; and he was the last British monarch who took part in actual
warfare. Cumberland had no meritorious attribute save that of personal
courage, but that virtue in him was undeniable. At Dettingen he was
wounded in the forefront of the battle; at Fontenoy the "martial boy" was
ever in the heart of the fiercest fire, fighting at "a spiritual white
heat." His grand-nephew the Duke of York was an unfortunate soldier, but
his personal courage was unquestioned. In the present reign a cousin and a
son of the sovereign have done good service in the field; and that
venerable lady herself in situations of personal danger has consistently
maintained the calm courage of her race.

The foreign author has written that "marvellous personal courage is not
the striking characteristic of the dynasty of the Romanoffs." He makes an
exception to this quasi-indictment in favour of the Emperor Nicholas, who,
he admits, "was absolutely ignorant of fear, and could face a band of
insurgents with the calm self-possession of a shepherd surveying his
bleating sheep." The monarch who at the moment of his accession
illustrated the dominant force of his character by confronting amid the
bullet fire the ferocious mutiny of half an army corps, and who crushed
the bloodthirsty _emeute_ with dauntless resolution and iron hand; the man
who, facing the populace of St. Petersburg crazed with terror of the
cholera and red with the blood of slaughtered physicians, quelled its
panic-fury by commanding the people in the sternest tones of his sonorous
voice to kneel in the dust and propitiate by prayers the wrath of the
Almighty--such a man is scarcely, perhaps, adequately characterised by the
expressions which have been quoted. But setting aside this instance of the
fearlessness of Nicholas, facts appear to refute pretty conclusively
reflections on the personal courage of the Romanoffs. No purpose can be
served by cumbering the record by going back into the period of Russia's
semi-civilisation; illustrations from three generations may reasonably
suffice. At Austerlitz Alexander I. was close up to the fighting line in
the Pratzen section of that great battle, and so recklessly did he expose
himself that the report spread rearward that he had fallen. He was riding
with Moreau in the heart of the bloody turmoil before Dresden when a
French cannon-ball mortally wounded the renegade French general, and he
was splashed by the latter's blood. Moreau had insisted on riding on the
outside, else the ball which caused his death would certainly have struck
Alexander. That monarch participated actively and forwardly in most of the
battles of the campaign of 1814 which culminated in the allied occupation
of Paris. Marmont's bullets were still flying when he rode on to the hill
of Belleville and looked down through the smoke of battle on the French
capital. The captious foreign writer has admitted that Nicholas, the
successor of Alexander, was "absolutely ignorant of fear," and I have
cited a convincing instance of his "marvellous personal courage." Two of
his sons--the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael--were under fire in the
battle of Inkerman and shared for some time the perils of the siege of
Sevastopol. Alexander II. was certainly a man of real, although quiet and
undemonstrative, personal courage. But for his disregard of the
precautions by which the police sought to surround him he probably would
have been alive to-day. The Third Section was wholly unrepresented in
Bulgaria and His Majesty's protection on campaign consisted merely of a
handful of Cossacks. No cordon of sentries surrounded his simple camp; his
tent at Pavlo and the dilapidated Turkish house which for weeks was his
residence at Gorni Studen were alike destitute of any guards. The imperial
Court of Russia is said to be the most punctiliously ceremonious of all
courts; in the field the Tzar absolutely dispensed with any sort of
ceremony. He dined with his suite and staff at a frugal table in a spare
hospital marquee; his guests, the foreign attaches and any passing
officers or strangers who happened to be in camp. When he drove out his
escort consisted of a couple of Cossacks. In the woods about Biela at the
beginning of the war there still remained some forlorn bivouacs of Turkish
families; he would alight and visit those, his sole companion the
aide-de-camp on duty; and would fearlessly venture among the sullen Turks
all of whom were armed with deadly weapons, try to persuade them to return
to their homes, and, unmoved by their refusal, promise to send them food
and medicine. Dispensing with all etiquette he would see without delay any
one coming in with tidings from fighting points, were he officer,
civilian, or war correspondent. During the September attack on Plevna he
was continually in the field while daylight lasted, looking out on the
slaughter from an eminence within range of the Turkish cannon-fire, and
manifestly enduring keen anguish at the spectacle of the losses sustained
by his brave, patient troops. Later, during the investment of Plevna, his
point of observation was a redoubt on the Radischevo ridge still closer to
the Turkish front of fire, and it was thence he witnessed the surrender of
Osman's army on the memorable 10th December 1877. If Alexander was
fearless alike in camp and in the field on campaign, he was certainly not
less so in St. Petersburg, when he returned thither after the fall of
Plevna.

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