The Cannons of Lucknow (14 page)

“Oh, yes, he knows. It was his suggestion, in fact, and he made it spontaneously when I mentioned that Mahoney was keen to volunteer. He—er—that is, Sheridan …” Major Stephenson hesitated. “General Neill wasn't himself the other night. I mean, it wasn't like him to lose his temper with a brother officer. He
is
a man of strong temper, of course, and he'd be the last to deny it, but I've served with him in the Blue Caps for more years than I care to count and he's one of the finest soldiers I've ever met. I've never known him to be unjust or to behave as he—well, as he did to you the other night. He had been very much provoked and—”

“I did not, to the best of my knowledge, provoke him,” Alex defended. “If any remarks of mine—made confidentially and
not
publicly—were overheard and repeated, I can only say that I regret it exceedingly. But, as the general himself remarked, we're all entitled to our opinions, and mine, as an officer of the Cawnpore garrison, may well have sounded critical. It may even be biased, but I cannot, in all conscience, apologise for that, Major.”

“No—er—in the circumstances, you had reason to feel strongly and I can sympathise, Colonel, I—” Lionel Stephenson avoided Alex's eye. “Some remarks of yours
were
repeated and unfortunately the general took exception to them. But as I said, he wasn't himself. Sydenham Renaud was one of his closest friends and the news of his death—the manner of it, too—distressed him greatly. When you add to that the reception General Havelock accorded him, his blunt demand that General Neill was to issue no orders here, and his refusal to permit him to accompany the advance to Lucknow … well, you can understand his feelings also, can you not?”

“Yes,” Alex conceded, a trifle reluctantly. “I can. But surely, Stephenson, he—”

“And the strain of the outbreaks in Benares and Allahabad had told heavily on him,” Stephenson persisted. “He performed miracles of organisation and improvisation to get the Regiment upcountry. The transport system was chaotic. Some of our men came by river, others by rail and
dak
and bullock train. Apart from two small detachments which arrived just before him, General Neill only had twenty-five men with him when he reached Benares. He found the native troops—three regiments of them—on the verge of mutiny and General Ponsonby incapable of taking decisive action. The Commissioner, Tucker, wanted the Thirty-Seventh disarmed—they were badly disaffected—but the old man flatly refused to listen to him. Neill was compelled to assume command in the middle of the disarming, which was deplorably mishandled by Ponsonby, when he did eventually agree that it was necessary. You never saw such an incompetent shambles, but”—he shrugged—“I won't take up your time by going into all that now. Suffice it to say that it was touch and go and, without any doubt, James Neill saved the day. I don't believe anyone else could have done what he did with the slender force of Europeans he had under his command. If he hadn't acted so firmly, the slaughter of our people in Benares would have matched that of Cawnpore, believe me … and the whole surrounding area would have risen up in arms against us.”

“He acted very firmly in the districts, by all accounts,” Alex said, with restraint. “I've even heard it said that he acted like the wrath of God, although, of course, not having been there, I can only go by what I've been told.”

Stephenson bristled. “It was no time for fainthearted measures or kid-glove diplomacy,” he asserted. “I
was
there and I know what I'm talking about. Whatever General Havelock may say about not meeting barbarism with barbarism, it's the only thing these people understand. We've got to show that we are the rulers; at the first sign of weakness, they'd be at our throats. They've proved it, time and again. I tell you, Sheridan, General Neill saved both Benares and Allahabad and, though he's as devout a Christian as General Havelock, he didn't do it by turning the other cheek!”

Conscious of growing impatience, Alex made a noncommittal rejoinder. The last thing he wanted was that his recruits' training programme should be disrupted by his absence, and, seeing that Mahoney and Cullmane had returned, he called them over and instructed them to carry on with indoor exercises. They obeyed him with alacrity and, watching them, he was pleased by the workmanlike way in which both men—and particularly his new sergeant—set about their task.

Major Stephenson, it was evident, held his late commanding officer in high esteem and, it was equally evident, had no intention of leaving until he had explained the circumstances which had caused Neill's outburst, however pressed for time his listener might be. After describing the measures taken to bring the Benares mutiny under control, he went on, “News that a similar situation threatened in Allahabad reached us by telegraph, but it was impossible for General Neill to leave immediately. He despatched two small parties by road on the sixth of June and he himself followed, on the evening of the ninth, with forty of our Fusiliers. He covered seventy miles in two night marches and had to fight his way across the river—the mutineers were holding the bridge of boats in strength. The general arrived exhausted and with half his force prostrate from sunstroke, to find that—thanks largely to Jeremiah Brasyer, who managed to keep his Sikhs loyal—the fort had been preserved. But the rest of the city was in a state of sedition. The jail had been broken into and the convicts released, a large portion of the Hindu quarter had been looted and set on fire, and every European who hadn't sought safety in the fort had been murdered. Some crazy Moslem fanatic had set himself up as ruler and the green flags of Islam were flying from the
Kotwalee
. Even inside the fort, there was trouble—the Sikhs had looted the stocks of liquor held there and poor Brasyer was uncertain whether he could control them.”

Alex had heard Brasyer's account of this unhappy incident and he nodded, frowning. Yet these same Sikhs, whose love of drinking had made them such a problem in the Fort at Allahabad, had fought like tigers beside their British comrades during the advance to Cawnpore and now, Brasyer had told him with pride, asked leave from their commander to get drunk …

“General Neill restored order, both inside the fort and then in the city. He was so ill that be could not stand,” Stephenson told him. “Indeed, he was barely able to sustain consciousness by taking repeated draughts of champagne and water, but he had himself carried into the batteries and there, lying on his back, he directed every operation. When I arrived, with two hundred of our men from Benares, Brasyer's Sikhs were given quarters outside the Fort and we took over the defence of the place from them and drove the mutineers from the city, together with their
moulvis
and their infernal Islamic flags.” Again he went into details and supplied the names of officers who had been shot down by their own rebellious regiments who, he added regretfully, had included seven newly joined ensigns of the 6th Native Infantry. “Mere boys of seventeen and eighteen, Sheridan! Poor little devils—they heard the alarm and ran out of their mess house to find out what was happening and the Pandies cut them down. And”—Stephenson's tone was angry—“that was the famous Sixth, the
Gowan-ki-paltan
, who volunteered, to a man, to march against Delhi in May, for which expression of loyalty they had received the official thanks of the governor-general only the previous day! Their C.O., Colonel Simpson, protested their loyalty to the last and wouldn't hear of their being disarmed … yet they were in the forefront of the mutiny! It's been the same story throughout the province; officers of native regiments simply would
not
believe their men capable of betrayal until it was too late.”

That, Alex reflected grimly, was the truth. In Meerut, where the smouldering embers of revolt had first been fanned into flame, Colonel Finnis of the 11th had not believed that his sepoys would betray their salt until they had shot him down on his own parade ground … and he had been only the first of many to die for his misplaced faith.

“You in Cawnpore,” Stephenson was saying earnestly, “probably thought of our relief column
as
a column, of regimental strength, Sheridan, but I assure you, it was not. Two hundred and forty of our men didn't reach Allahabad until the 22nd of June. They had to come by river and their progress was delayed by lack of water, so that they had to make long detours. And cholera broke out soon after my arrival—we lost eighty men in three days, with twice that number disabled from various causes—sunstroke, fever, dysentery, and wounds. Men reported for duty and collapsed in the ranks; fresh drafts marched in and collapsed when they arrived. It's doubtful whether we could have held out against a sustained attack, but fortunately the mutineers didn't try it—we drove them off and they made no attempt to wrest Allahabad from us. To make certain that they did not, General Neill executed all the prisoners who fell into our hands, in public and in their uniforms. The ringleaders and native officers, when we caught them, were blown from guns … and it had the desired effect, the effect the general set out to achieve. Sedition among the civilian population in the city and in the villages was swiftly quelled, our base was secure, we were able to obtain transport animals and camp followers, and the general was able to despatch Renaud's column to Cawnpore with a reasonable hope that it would get through. Before heaven, Sheridan, General Neill did all that was humanly possible to save your garrison! Cawnpore was never for a moment out of his thoughts and all his efforts were directed to relieving you. If anyone is to blame for the failure to relieve Cawnpore, it is not General Neill. Lay it rather on our government's total unpreparedness for this mutiny—or at the door of those who were deaf and blind to the warning that it was coming and did nothing to prevent it.”

He was right, Alex had, in all honesty, to admit. James Neill had done all and more than he could have been expected to do with one depleted regiment, a single gun battery of Europeans, and a handful of native troops of doubtful loyalty. He had saved two cities and kept open the road to Calcutta. Even the wholesale executions he had ordered and the reign of terror he had initiated had, according to Stephenson, been only the means to a wholly desirable end. Indeed, if his assessment of the situation was correct, it had been a question not of choice, but of expediency, so far as Neill was concerned. And there could be no denying that it had been successful—in Benares and Allahabad barbarism had been met by barbarism and the revolt suppressed, at a comparatively small cost in British lives. Whereas in Cawnpore, where over a thousand British soldiers and civilians and their families had been done to death by the most barbarous of all their enemies, General Havelock had issued stern orders that there were to be no indiscriminate reprisals … Alex sighed.

Would Havelock's Christian turning of the other cheek achieve more than Neill's covenanting campaign of vengeance, or would it, he wondered unhappily, be taken as a sign of weakness by a people to whom, in the past, might had always been right and the conqueror's power to govern had been vested in the fear he could inspire? Would Neill abide by Havelock's orders, when command of Cawnpore passed into his hands? It remained to be seen, but he, thank God, would not be there to find out.

“Well, I had better be on my way, I suppose.” Stephenson's voice broke into his thoughts and he saw that the Blue Caps' commanding officer, his self-imposed mission completed, was preparing at last to take his leave. “I hope that what I've told you may have helped to—er—clear the air, Sheridan. General Neill wasn't happy about what happened on Monday night, you know, and it's worried him ever since.”

“It has also worried me,” Alex admitted, conscious that this was an understatement. They rode together to the doorless entrance to the riding school and he asked, reining in there, “Has General Neill read my report yet, do you know?”

“On the siege? No”—Stephenson shook his head—“but General Havelock told him that he had received a report and he will, I feel sure, pass it on before he leaves here. I understand he hopes to cross on Saturday evening or Sunday at the latest. We're to begin our crossing on Saturday—the whole regiment. General Neill is to keep only the draft he brought in with him, young soldiers for the most part, and the Invalid Artillery men, stiffened by a few of Maude's walking wounded. A small enough force with which to hold Cawnpore in all conscience! However, the new entrenchment is coming on apace and the engineers have started work on gun emplacements. It's well situated and, unless an attack in overwhelming numbers is launched against him, the general is confident that he can hold his own. Have you seen the place?”

“Only in passing,” Alex answered. He listened, hiding his impatience, to a description of the new entrenchment and Neill's plans for its improvement and, when Major Stephenson finally took leave of him, returned thankfully to his recruits.

For the next two days, he devoted every hour of daylight to his training programme, abandoning the shelter of the Riding School to exercise his troop on the open plain. The monsoon rain continued unabated, but the men were keen and, despite being constantly soaked to the skin, they worked well and he was pleased with their progress. Their crossing into Oudh was to take place on the afternoon of Saturday, 25th July, and this, which would involve embarking their horses on pontoons and standing to their heads throughout the two- to three-hour crossing of the flooded river, would, he was aware, test their abilities as cavalrymen to the full. But there was neither time nor opportunity for any form of rehearsal; all the available pontoons were in daily use, transporting guns and bullock teams to the Oudh shore, and the overworked little steamer, which towed them, was constantly breaking down. The most Alex could do was to set up an edifice of planks in the riding school and demonstrate with this the way in which the horses would have to be handled.