With the fall of Delhi the tale of the Great Mutiny practically ends. Lucknow, it is true, remained to be captured. The broken forces of the mutineers had to be crushed in detail. A new system of civil administration had to be built up. The famous Company itself vanished—the native prophecy that the raj of the Company would last only a hundred years from Plassey thus being curiously fulfilled; and on September 1, 1858—less than a year after Delhi fell—the Queen was proclaimed throughout India as its Sovereign. But Hodson, who in addition to being a great soldier had a wizard-like insight into the real meaning of events, was right when, on the evening of the day on which the British flag was hoisted once more over the royal palace at Delhi, he wrote in his journal: “This day will be a memorable one in the annals of the empire. The restoration of British rule in the East dates from September 20, 1857.”

Yet there would be a certain failure in the dramatic completeness of the story were it to end leaving Lucknow in the hands of the rebels. The tale of the storming of the capital of Oude must be added as a pendant to that other great siege which planted the British flag on the walls of Delhi.

There was, in a sense, no “siege” of Lucknow by the British. There was no investment, no formal approaches, no zigzag of trenches. It was a storm, rather than a siege—though the fighting stretched from March 2 to March 21, 1858. But it was the last of the great military operations of the campaign which crushed the Mutiny. The fall of the city left the historic revolt without a centre. The war, henceforth, always excepting the brilliant campaign of Sir Hugh Rose in the Central Provinces, became a guerilla campaign; a campaign of petty sieges, of the hunting down of one Sepoy leader after another, of the rout of this petty body of mutineers, or of that. It is curious to note how great civilians and great soldiers differed in judgment as to the policy of undertaking the recapture of Lucknow at that particular moment. Colin Campbell’s strategy was to conduct a cool campaign in the hills of Rohilcund, and leave Lucknow alone for the present. That city would serve as a sort of draining ground, a centre into which all the mutineers would flow; and when cool weather came, Campbell, imprisoning Lucknow in a girdle of converging columns, would destroy or capture the mutineers in one vast “bag.” This was leisurely and wary strategy; but it overlooked the political elements in the problem. It was the scheme of a soldier rather than of a statesman. Lucknow, left for months undisturbed, would be a signal of hope for every revolted chief and mutinous Sepoy. It might well take the place of Delhi as the brain and heart of the Mutiny. It would be a sign to all India that the British did not feel themselves strong enough, as yet, to strike at the centre of the rebel power.

The civilian was wiser than the soldier, and Lord Canning’s views prevailed. But it is worth noting that Colin Campbell’s plan of “bagging” all the mutineers with one vast, far-stretching sweep in Lucknow would have been carried into effect on Lord Canning’s lines, but for a double blunder, which marked Campbell’s own conduct of the siege.

It was a great task to which the British Commander-in-chief now addressed himself. Lucknow was a huge honeycomb of native houses; a city more than twenty miles in circumference, with a turbulent population calculated variously at from 300,000 to 1,000,000 people. It had a garrison of 130,000 fighting men, with an overwhelming force of artillery. The Sepoy leaders, too, who knew the value of the spade in war, had spent months in making the city, as they believed, impregnable. Both Havelock and Colin Campbell, in fighting their way to the Residency, had broken into the city from the eastern front; and the Sepoys, with a touching simplicity, took it for granted that the third attack on the city would follow the lines of the earlier assaults. The British, that is, would cross the canal, and force a path to the Residency through the great gardens and stately buildings which occupied the space betwixt the mass of the city and the Goomtee; and they accordingly barred this approach by a triple line of formidable defences. The first was a vast flanked rampart, on the inner side of the canal, and to which the canal served as a wet ditch. The second was a great circular earthwork, like the curve of a railway embankment, which enclosed the Mess-house. Behind it rose what was, in fact, the citadel of Lucknow, the Kaisarbagh, or King’s Palace. Both these lines stretched from the river on one flank, to the mass of houses which constituted the town, on the other flank. They might be pierced, they could not be turned; and they bristled from flank to flank with heavy guns. The third line was a stupendous earthwork, covering the whole north front of the King’s Palace. Its guns swept the narrow space betwixt the palace and the river with their fire.

Each great building along this line of advance was itself a fortress, and everything which ingenuity could suggest, and toil execute, had been done to make the defence formidable. The task of fighting a way across these triple lines, and through this tangle of fortified houses, each girdled with rifle-pits, and loopholed from foundation to roof, might well have been deemed impossible.

In the previous November Colin Campbell had rescued the garrison of the Residency; but he was compelled to surrender Lucknow itself to the rebels. With great wisdom and audacity, however, he clung to the Alumbagh, planting Outram there, with a force of about 4000 men. The Alumbagh, thus held, was a sort of pistol levelled at the head of Lucknow, or a spear threatening its heart. It was a perpetual menace; a sign that the British still kept their hold of the revolted city, and, on some bloody errand of revenge, would speedily return to it. The task of holding a position so perilous exactly suited Outram’s cool brain and serene courage. He had nothing of Nicholson’s tempestuous valour, or of Hodson’s audacious daring. He lacked initiative. The temper which made Nelson, at Copenhagen, put the telescope to his blind eye, when his admiral was trying to call him off from the fight, was one which Outram could hardly have understood; and it was a temper which certainly never stirred in his own blood. But, given a definite task, Outram might be trusted to do it with perfect intelligence, and, if necessary, to die cheerfully in the doing of it.

For three months he held that perilous post in front of Lucknow, a tiny handful of troops bearding a great revolted city, with a garrison of 100,000 fighting men. He was attacked on front and rear and flank, and, more than once, with a force of over 60,000 men. No less than six great attacks, indeed, can be counted. But Outram held his post with exquisite skill and unshaken valour. His troops were veterans; his officers were fighters of unsurpassed quality. Brasyer commanded his Sikhs; Barrow and Wale led his scanty squadrons of horse; Vincent Eyre, Olpherts, and Maude, commanded his guns. With such troops, and such leaders, Outram, for more than three months, held his daring post in front of Lucknow, and beat back, with vast loss of life, the attacks hurled upon him. And the Alumbagh, thus victoriously held, served as a screen, behind which Campbell’s forces gathered for the leap on Lucknow.

Colin Campbell was happily delivered from the evil condition which had hitherto fettered all the operations of the British. He was not required to attempt, with a handful of men, the task of a great army. He had under his hands the finest fighting force any British general in India had yet commanded, an army of 31,000 men, with 164 guns. Of these, 9000 were Ghoorkas—the Nepaulese contingent under Jung Bahadur. It was late in reaching the field, and Campbell doubted whether he ought to wait for the Ghoorkas. But here, again, the civilian proved wiser than the soldier. “I am sure,” wrote Lord Canning, “we ought to wait for the Jung Bahadur, who would be driven wild to find himself deprived of a share in the work.” It was a political gain of the first order to show the greatest fighting prince in India arrayed under the British flag against the Mutiny.

Hope Grant, with the present Lord Roberts as his A.A.G., commanded the cavalry; Archdale Wilson the guns; Napier—afterwards of Magdala fame—the engineers. Outram, Lugard, and Walpole commanded the three infantry divisions. It was a fine army, admirably officered and led, and made a perfect fighting machine. And of all Campbell’s generals, no one, perhaps, served him better than did Robert Napier. He supplied the plan of attack, which made the Sepoy defences worthless, and enabled Lucknow to be carried, practically, in fourteen days, and at a loss of only 125 officers and men killed, and less than 600 wounded.

The east front, which was to be attacked, resembled, roughly, a boot laid on its side. A great canal, running north and south, is the sole of the “boot”; the river Goomtee curves round the toe, and, running back sharply to the south, defines the top of the foot, and stretches up to what may be described as the ankle. The road across the Dilkusha bridge pierces the centre of what we have called the “sole,” and the triple line of Sepoy defences barred this line of approach. Napier’s plan was to bridge the Goomtee, pass a strong force, with heavy guns, in a wide sweep round the “toe” of the boot, on the northern bank of the river. The heavy guns, when placed in position on the north bank, would take in reverse all the Sepoy defences, and smite with a direct and overwhelming fire the chief positions—the Mess-house, the Secundrabagh, and the Residency, &c., which the Sepoys held. The Sepoy generals had constructed no defences on the north bank of the river, though it was strongly held by the rebel cavalry. Outram was to command the force operating from the north bank of the river. When his guns had swept the Sepoy defences from flank to flank, then the British left would advance, cross the Dilkusha bridge, and fight its way up to the Kaisarbagh and the Residency, Outram, with his flanking gun-fire, always pushing ahead.

The British right and left were thus like the two blades of a pair of scissors, thrust through the web of the Sepoy defences; and when the “scissors” closed, those defences would be cut clean through from east to west.

Campbell began his operations on the morning of March 3. Forbes-Mitchell, who stood in the ranks of the 93rd, looked out with a soldier’s eye over the domed mosques and sky-piercing minarets of the doomed city, sharp-cut against the morning sky. “I don’t think,” he writes, “I ever saw a prettier scene.” Forbes-Mitchell was not an artist, only a hard-fighting private in the 93rd; but Russell of the Times, who was familiar with all the great cities of the world, was just as deeply impressed as Forbes-Mitchell with the aspect that Lucknow wore that fateful morning, when the red tide of war was about to fill and flood its streets. This is how Russell describes the scene: “A vision of palaces, minarets, domes, azure and golden, cupolas, colonnades, long façades of fair perspective, in pillar and column, terraced roofs—all rising up amid a calm, still ocean of the brightest verdure. Look for miles and miles away, and still the ocean spreads, and the towers of the fairy city gleam in its midst. Spires of gold glitter in the sun. Turrets and gilded spheres shine like constellations. There is nothing mean or squalid to be seen. Here is a city more vast than Paris, as it seems, and more brilliant, lying before us.”

But there was the grim face of war hidden beneath the mask of smiling beauty which Lucknow presented that March morning. The soldiers, as they stood in their ranks, could see, line beyond line, the frowning Sepoy defences; while, in the foreground, Peel, with his blue-jackets, was getting his heavy 16-pounders into position for the fierce duel about to begin. Colin Campbell’s movement on his left, however, was but a feint, designed to mislead the enemy’s generals. On the night of the 4th the construction of two bridges across the Goomtee was begun. On the morning of the 5th one of them was completed, and the British infantry crossed, and threw up earthworks to defend the bridge-head. By midnight on the 5th both bridges were complete, with their approaches, and by four o’clock the troops were crossing. Hope Grant, in command of the cavalry, covered their front, and drove back the enemy’s horse.

The Queen’s Bays, a young regiment that had never yet been engaged, were in the advance. They got out of hand in their ardour, and rode recklessly on a body of Sepoy horse, smashed them with their charge, followed them over-eagerly into broken ground, and under heavy gun-fire. They came back broken from that wild charge, their major, Percy Smith, was killed, and the Bays themselves suffered badly.

Outram, meanwhile, had got round what we have called the “toe” of the boot, and, swinging to the left, followed the curve of the river bank till a point was reached which took the first line of the Sepoy defences beyond the river in reverse. Twenty-two heavy guns had been brought, by this time, across the river, and sites were chosen for two powerful batteries. Nicholson, of the Engineers, tells how he rode with Outram to the river bank, to choose the position of the first battery. “Got close,” he writes, “to the end of the enemy’s lines, and found we could see into the rear of these works. Poor creatures! They have not a grain of sense. They have thrown up the most tremendous works, and they are absolutely useless.” A stroke of clever generalship, in a word, had turned the Sepoy lines into mere paper screens.

A building, called the Chaker Kothi, or Yellow House, had to be carried, as it commanded the site of one of the batteries. Most of the Sepoys holding the building fled when the British attacking party came on, but nine of them stubbornly clung to their post, and they fired so fast, and with so deadly an aim, that they shot down more than their own number before the position was carried. It was only, indeed, by firing salvos from a troop of horse artillery that this stubborn little garrison was driven out of the building at last. Then, from the summit of the Yellow House, a three-storey building, a flag—one of the colours of the Bengal Fusileers—was set up, a signal to the British left wing that Outram’s batteries were in position.

On the morning of the 9th, Outram’s guns opened on the first line of the Sepoy defences, that to which the canal served as a wet ditch, with a fire that swept it from flank to flank. Campbell was pouring the fire of Peel’s guns upon the Martinere, which served as a sort of outwork to the long canal-rampart, and at two o’clock the Highland regiments—the 42nd leading, the 93rd in support—were launched on the enemy’s position. The men of the 93rd were too impatient to be content with “supporting” the 42nd, and the two regiments raced down the slope side by side. Earthworks, trenches, rifle-pits were leaped or clambered over, and almost in a moment the Sepoys were in wild flight across the canal. The Highlanders, with the 4th Punjaub Rifles, followed them eagerly, and broke through the enemy’s first line.

Outram’s first battery, as we have said, was sweeping this line with a cruel flank fire. The Sepoys had been driven from their guns in the batteries that abutted on the river, and they seemed to be deserted. Adrian Hope’s men were attacking, at that moment, the farther, or southern, end of the line; and Butler, of the 1st Bengal Fusileers, with four privates, ran down to the bank of the river and tried to attract the attention of the British left, some third of a mile distant; but in vain. The river was sixty yards wide, the current ran swiftly, the farther bank was held by Sepoy batteries; and though no Sepoys could be seen, yet it might well be that scores were crouching under its shelter. Butler, however, with the ready daring of youth, threw off his coat and boots, scrambled down the river bank, plunged into the stream and swam across it. He climbed up the farther bank, mounted the parapet of the abandoned work, and, standing there, waved his arms to the distant Highlanders. It was not a very heroic figure! His wet uniform clung to his limbs, the water was running down hair and face. The Sepoys nigh at hand, opened a sharp fire upon him. But still that damp figure stood erect and cool, showing, clear against the sky-line.

Butler was seen from the British left, and the meaning of his gestures understood; but a staff officer, with more punctiliousness than common sense, objected to the troops moving along the line till orders had been received to that effect. So a brief delay occurred. Still that damp figure stood aloft, shot at from many points, but vehemently signalling. Now the Highlanders and Sikhs came eagerly on, and Butler, having handed over to them the battery which, wet and unarmed, he had captured, scrambled down into the river, and swam back to rejoin his regiment. It was a gallant feat, and the Victoria Cross, which rewarded it, was well earned.

That night the British were content with holding the enemy’s first line. On the 10th Campbell, who, for all his hot Scottish temper, was the wariest and most deliberate of generals, was content with pushing Outram’s batteries still farther up the north bank, so as to command the Mess-house and the Begum’s Palace. On the left, the building known as Banks’ House was battered with artillery, and carried. The two blades of the scissors, in a word, had been thrust far up into the city, and now they were to be closed! Betwixt the positions held to the right and to the left, stood the great mass of buildings known as the Begum Kothi, the Begum’s Palace. This was strongly held, and the fight which carried it was the most stubborn and bloody of the whole operations of the siege.

The guns played fiercely upon it for hours; by the middle of the afternoon a slight breach had been effected, and it was resolved to assault. Forbes-Mitchell says that the men of the 93rd were finishing their dinner when they noticed a stir amongst the staff officers. The brigadiers were putting their heads together. Suddenly the order was given for the 93rd to “fall in.” “This was quietly done, the officers taking their places, the men tightening their belts, and pressing their bonnets firmly on their heads, loosening the ammunition in their pouches, and seeing that the springs of their bayonets held tight.” A few seconds were spent in these grim preparations, then came the sharp word of command that stiffened the whole regiment into an attitude of silent eagerness. The Begum’s Palace was to be rushed.

It was a block of buildings of vast size and strength. The breach was little more than a scratch in the wall of the gateway, which it needed the activity of a goat to climb, and which only British soldiers, daringly led, would have undertaken to assault in the teeth of a numerous enemy. And there were nearly 5000 Sepoys within that tangle of courts! The storming party consisted of the 93rd and the 4th Punjaub Rifles, led by Adrian Hope. The 93rd led, the Punjaubees were in support, and the rush was fierce and daring. It is said that the adjutant of the 93rd, McBean, cut down with his own sword no less than eleven of the enemy, in forcing his way through the breach; and he won the Victoria Cross by his performance. He was an Inverness ploughman when he enlisted in the 93rd, and he rose through all its ranks until he commanded the regiment.

Captain M’Donald was shot dead while leading his men. His senior lieutenant took the company on, until the charging crowd was stopped by a ditch eighteen feet wide, and from twelve to fourteen feet deep. The stormers leaped, with hardly a pause, into the ditch, but it seemed impossible to climb up the farther bank. Wood, of the Grenadier company, however, clambered on the shoulders of a tall private, and, claymore in hand, mounted the farther side. The spectacle of a Highland bonnet and menacing claymore, making its appearance above the ditch, proved too much for the Sepoys. They fled, and Wood pulled up man after man by the muzzle of his rifle—the rifles, it may be mentioned as an interesting detail, were all loaded, and on full cock! Highlanders and Punjaubees, racing side by side, had now broken into the great palace. Every doorway was barred and loopholed, and the Sepoys fought desperately; but the Highlanders, with the Punjaubees in generous rivalry, broke through barrier after barrier, till they reached the inner square, filled with a mass of Sepoys. “The word,” Forbes-Mitchell says, was “keep well together, men, and use the bayonet,” and that order was diligently obeyed. The combat raged for over two hours, the pipe-major of the 93rd blowing his pipes shrilly during the whole time. “I knew,” he said afterwards, “our boys would fight all the better while they heard the bagpipes.” When the main fight was over, in the inner court of the Begum’s Palace, alone, over 860 of the enemy lay dead. Colin Campbell himself described it as “the sternest struggle which occurred during the siege.”

That most gallant, but ill-fated soldier, Adrian Hope, personally led one of the storming parties. It is said that he got in through a window, up to which he was lifted, and through which he was pushed by his men. He was sent headlong and sprawling upon a group of Sepoys in the dark room inside. That apparition of the huge, red-headed Celt tumbling upon them, sword and pistol in hand, was too much for the Sepoys, and they fled without striking a blow!

Perhaps the most gallant soldier that perished within the blood-splashed courts of Begum Kothi was Hodson, of “Hodson’s Horse.” Robert Napier tells the story of how, when he was in the act of reconnoitring the breach, he found Hodson suddenly standing beside him, and saying, laughingly, “I am come to take care of you.” The two watched the rush of the stormers up the breach, and listened to the sound of the fierce tumult within the walls. Presently, arm-in-arm, they quietly climbed the breach, and found the last embers of the conflict still spluttering within. Napier was called away by some duty and Hodson went forward alone.

At the back of the mosque ran a narrow lane, bordered by rooms in which many of the flying Sepoys had found shelter. Forbes-Mitchell says they had broken open the door of one of these rooms, and saw it was crowded with Sepoys. He placed some of his party on each side of the door, and sent back two men to the breach to get a few bags of gunpowder, with slow matches fixed, intending to light one of these and fling it into the room, by way of summarily clearing out the Sepoys. At that moment Hodson came quickly up, sword in hand. “Where are the rebels?” he demanded grimly. Forbes-Mitchell’s narrative runs: “I pointed to the door of the room, and Hodson, shouting, ‘Come on,’ was about to rush in. I implored him not to do so, saying ‘It’s certain death; wait for the powder; I’ve sent men for powder-bags.’ Hodson made a step forward, and I put out my hand to seize him by the shoulder to pull him out of the line of the doorway, when he fell back, shot through the chest. He gasped out a few words, either, ‘Oh, my wife,’ or ‘Oh, my mother’—I cannot now rightly remember—but was immediately choked by blood.”

Colonel Gordon-Alexander, who took part in the assault, and saw Hodson come on the scene, gives a similar account of the manner in which Hodson received his wound; but it illustrates the unreliability of human testimony to notice how he and Forbes-Mitchell, who were both actors in the tragedy, flatly contradict each other from this point. Gordon-Alexander says that a man of his company, whom he had sent over to warn Hodson, “never stopped, but ran in at the door and pinned the man who had shot Hodson, with his bayonet, before he had time to reload. There was only one other Sepoy in the doorway, and he was bayoneted, too.” Forbes-Mitchell says that after Hodson had been carried off, the bags of powder, with slow matches in them, were brought up. “These we lit, and then pitched the bags in through the door. Two or three bags very soon brought the enemy out, and they were bayoneted. One of the 93rd, a man named Rule, rushed in among the rebels, using both bayonet and butt of his rifle, shouting, ‘Revenge for Hodson!’ and he killed more than half the men single-handed.” But, according to Gordon-Alexander, there were only two Sepoys in the room, and no powder-bags were necessary to drive them out!

Hodson was a soldier of real genius, but was pursued through life, and to his very grave, by a swarm of baseless calumnies. When he was buried, Colin Campbell himself stood by the grave, and, as the coffin of the dead soldier sank from sight, the British commander-in-chief burst into tears. Those tears, rolling down the cheeks of so great and fine a soldier, are Hodson’s best vindication and memorial.

Meanwhile, some other formidable buildings—the Secundrabagh, the Shah Nujeef, &c.—had fallen, almost without resistance, into the hands of the British. Outram was steadily pushing on along the northern bank, and scourging with his flank fire each position the Sepoys held. The 12th and the 13th were employed by the engineers in pushing on a line of advance through the houses, to the left of the main road, thus avoiding the fire of the Sepoys. On the morning of the 14th the Imambarah, a mass of minarets, flat roofs, and long, ornamental frontage, was stormed by Brasyer’s Sikhs. Outram, by this time, had seized the iron bridge to the west of the Residency. He was in a position to cork the neck of the bottle, that is, and to make flight impossible for the great mass of the Sepoys. But this splendid position was thrown away by the first of the two great blunders which mar Colin Campbell’s conduct of the siege.

Outram asked permission to force the bridge, and take the Sepoys, still holding the Kaisarbagh and the Residency, in the rear. Campbell consented, but forbade him crossing, if, in the process, he would lose a single man. Now, the bridge was held in force by the Sepoys, and guarded by a battery, and to force it would necessarily risk many lives. But war is a business of risks, and the gain beyond was enormous. A soldier like Nicholson, or Neill, or Hodson, would have interpreted Campbell’s order generously; or they would have stormed the bridge without orders, and would have trusted to the justification which success always gives. But Outram was of a less audacious type. An order, to him, was sacro-sanct. He made no attempt to cross the bridge, but looked on, while the defeated Sepoys streamed past in thousands, escaping to the open country, there to kindle the fires of a costly guerilla warfare.

The preparations to pass the bridge, it may be added, were marked by fine valour on the part of one of Outram’s engineers. Outram himself had, at the beginning of the operations, thrown a barricade across the bridge, to prevent the Sepoys crossing. When, in turn, he himself had to force his way across, it was necessary to remove this barricade, and to do it in broad daylight, and under a fierce and sustained fire from the Sepoys. Wynne, of the Engineers, and a sergeant named Paul, undertook the perilous task. They crept forward, crouching under the parapet of the bridge; then, kneeling down, they removed one sand-bag after another from the barricade, passing each bag back along the line of men, from hand to hand. But, as the level of the barricade sank, the two gallant engineers were exposed more fully to the Sepoy muskets. The fire was furious. Yet Wynne and his companion coolly pulled down the barricade, bag by bag, till the lowest tier was reached, and then ran back unharmed.

Meanwhile, events elsewhere had moved too fast for the British commander-in-chief. Brasyer’s Sikhs, with some companies of the 10th Foot, had stormed the Imambarah. The flying Sepoys took refuge in the next and strongest of all the Sepoy works, the citadel of the whole defence, the Kaisarbagh, a blaze of gilded spires, cupolas and domes, all turned into a vast fortification. The Sikhs and the 10th followed vehemently and closely, while some of the men of the 90th, led by young Havelock, carried a palace close to the Kaisarbagh, from which they commanded three of its bastions. They opened on them a fire so deadly that the Sepoys fled from their guns. The engineers wished to stay any further attack; the programme for the day was exhausted, and, in Colin Campbell’s leisurely tactics, nothing further was meant to be done that day.

But the stormers were eager; Sikhs and Highlanders alike had the fire of victory in their blood. They clambered through an embrasure, and forced their way into the Kaisarbagh, Havelock running back and bringing up some companies of the 10th Foot. Brasyer pushed out beyond the Kaisarbagh, indeed, to the Mess-house. Franks and Napier brought up new troops, and the Kaisarbagh itself was swept from end to end.

All the wealth of India seemed to have been gathered within that great mass of gilded walls, and all this was now given up to mad and wasteful plunder. The men, to use Russell’s phrase, were “drunk with plunder.” They literally waded through court after court, piled high with embroidered cloths, gold and silver brocade, arms rough with jewels, shawls heavy with gold, banners, cloaks, pictures, vases. The men had the wealth of kings under their feet!

It was a day of great deeds. Two successive lines of defensive works, vast as railway embankments, garrisoned by an army, and backed by a great citadel, had been carried in succession. And yet the chief military gain of this great feat was lost, owing to Colin Campbell’s absurd order, which held Outram back from carrying the iron bridge, and enabled the flying Sepoys to escape in thousands, to relight the flame of war throughout the whole of Oude.

It is amusing to know that Colin Campbell was at first disgusted, rather than delighted, with the daring rush which, with such indecent and unscientific haste, carried the Kaisarbagh. He is said, indeed, to have sent orders to Franks to evacuate the great post. Franks, however, was both a fine soldier and a hot-blooded Irishman, and he declined, in the bluntest form of speech, to give up the great stronghold his men had carried with a dash so brilliant.

Campbell’s imagination, it seems, was haunted by the sense that each Sepoy position, when it was carried, was an abandoned powder-magazine, packed thick with the possibilities of dreadful explosions. And facts justified that uncomfortable belief. The story of one such fatal explosion may be briefly told. In the Jumma Musjid no less than nine cart-loads of gunpowder were discovered. The powder was packed in tin cases, and it was resolved to destroy it by flinging the cases down a well. A line of men was formed, and the cases passed quickly from hand to hand. The first case flung down struck against the side of the well, and exploded. The flame ran from case to case along the whole line till it reached the carts. The cases in the very hands of the men exploded, the nine cart-loads went off in one terrific blast of flame and sound, and, with one exception, the whole party—numbering twenty-two men, with two engineer officers in command—was killed. The only man who escaped was the one that threw that fatal first case down the well!

When the Kaisarbagh and the Mess-house fell, and the third line of Sepoy defences was thus carried, Lucknow was practically in the British power. But on the next day, March 15, Colin Campbell, wary and war-wise soldier though he was, committed a second blunder, which helped to rob the success of some of its best fruits. He realised the blunder he committed when he held back Outram, and to remedy it he perpetrated a further mistake. He despatched his two cavalry brigades in pursuit of the flying Sepoys, and despatched them on the wrong roads. The absence of the cavalry created a huge gap in the British lines on the north of the Goomtee, and a great body of Sepoys, said to be more than 20,000 strong, escaped through it unharmed. “In this way,” says Lord Roberts, “the campaign, which should then have come to an end, was protracted for nearly a year by the fugitives spreading themselves over Oude, and occupying forts and other strong positions, from which they were able to offer resistance to our troops till the end of May 1859; thus causing needless loss of thousands of British soldiers.” That is a severe condemnation to be written by one great soldier on another.

Brigadier Campbell, with a strong body of horse and guns, hovered outside the Musabagh, ready to cut up the Sepoys when Outram had driven them out of that building. For some mysterious reason, and to the open disgust of the whole British army, he failed to cut up the flying Sepoys. It was, for his command, a day of inertness and failure; yet it was lit up by one splendid dash of personal daring. A small mud fort covered, at one point, the road along which the Sepoys were flying, and Campbell sent forward a party of cavalry—a troop of the 7th Hussars and a squadron of Hodson’s Horse, with two guns—to clear the Sepoys out of it. The guns flung a couple of shells over the walls of the fort, and it had the effect of a match flung into a beehive! The bees flew out, eager to sting! Some fifty rebels, headed by the village chief, a giant in size, suddenly rushed from the gate of the fort on the guns. They were upon the Hussars before they could be put in motion to charge, and the three troop officers were in an instant struck down. A cluster of the Sepoys bent over one of the three, Banks, slashing and thrusting at him, when Hegart, in command of the Hussars, rode single-handed to his rescue.

He broke through the group, shooting right and left with his revolver, wheeled and dashed through them again. He had shot three, and knocked over a fourth with the hilt of his sword, when two Sikhs galloped up to his aid, and Banks was saved, only to die of his wounds a few days later. When Hegart emerged from the fight everything he had about him, says Hope Grant, bore traces of his gallant struggle. His saddle and his horse were marked with sword-slashes, his sword-hilt was dinted, his martingale was cut, the silk pocket handkerchief with which his sword was tied to his wrist was severed as cleanly as with a razor.

The capture of Lucknow, in a space of time so brief, and at a cost so slight, was due in part, of course, to the splendid leadership of the officers and the daring of the men. But it was due, in even greater measure, to the skill of the engineers. It was an engineer’s plan that sent Outram, with his heavy guns, across the Goomtee, round the “toe” of the boot, and so took the lines of the Sepoys in reverse. It was clever engineering, again, which broke a way for the advance of the British left wing through the houses to the left of the great road. The Sepoys had taken it for granted that the advance of the British would be up that road, and they had turned it into a Valley of Death. Every parapeted housetop that looked down on the road was crowded with muskets. The road itself was merely a double line of crenellated walls, inaccessible to scaling ladders, swept by grape and case-shot from every cross street, pelted by musketry from every mosque roof and palace gable, and raked from end to end with the fire of great guns. But all these elaborate and terrible defences were made useless by the fact that the British engineers tore a road for their advance through the houses to the left of the great road, until the Kaisarbagh itself was reached and seized. The whole siege, indeed, is a lesson in the value of science in war. Brains count for more, in such a struggle, than even bullets.

The Residency itself fell with almost ludicrous tameness. Outram, on the 16th, forced his way across the Iron Bridge, and the Residency, though crowded with Sepoys, was yielded with scarcely a musket shot being fired in defence. The position which the Sepoys tried, in vain, for more than eighty days to carry, was taken by the British in less than as many minutes!

Lucknow did not fall, however, without one eccentric and highly illogical flash of valour being shown by the Sepoys. The Moulvie of Fyzabad was the most obstinate and daring of the leaders thrown up by the great Mutiny. He was a soldier, indeed, who, on the Sepoys’ side, rivals Tantia Topee himself for generalship; while, for personal daring, he leaves the Nana’s general hopelessly behind. The Moulvie had made his escape from Lucknow, but in a mood of sudden wrath, turned his face towards the city again. He returned, and occupied a strong building, from which he was only expelled with much hard fighting by the 93rd and the 4th Punjaub Infantry. The fight was hopeless from the outset; the city had fallen, further resistance was a mere idle waste of life. Yet the Sepoys showed a more desperate courage in this combat than at any other point throughout the siege. For so much does the influence of one brave man count!