ABSTRACT
Just as Cawnpore has three distinct phases in its tragedy: the Intrenchment, the Ghaut, and Massacre House, so the siege of Lucknow is divided into a corresponding number of separate sections: the siege, the reinforcement by Sir Henry Havelock, and the relief by Sir Co n Campbell. So, rst, let us enter the Residency as it stands and totters today — as it stood and tottered at its relief. Leaving the Royal Hotel shortly before nine, I drove along broad and airy streets till a tall and battered gateway loomed ahead. We had reached the Baillie Guard. But what was le ? Shelled for eighty-seven days by four 64-lb. guns and ri es incalculable, at a range of one hundred and y yards, what would you expect? What I saw: a skeleton, but one that made the blood pulse quicker through one’s veins. Literally whipped with shot and grape, the arch showed daylight through a hundred gaps; on the right grins Aitken’s battery wall, now the height of a man’s waist and the spot through which (a gun being rst pulled back) Sir Henry Havelock and Sir James Outram entered on the 25th of September, 1857. e forti cations are all gone; the labyrinth of houses which in those days breathed upon the faces of our outposts are cleared away; the men who at a thousand points faced death for eight-six long days and nights before assistance came, sleep, many of them, in a sacred acre in the centre of the grounds; the sunshine falls upon gaping walls; birds twitter in trees that once heard the whistle of the rebel guns; lawns, once green are they were blackened by the re and shell of y thousand sepoys, again grow green; houses that one day stood peacefully upon the Gumti’s shore are now replaced by pillars graven with immortal names; and you pass through the Baillie Guard gateway into the sacred grounds within.
