Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [49]
Mrs Hersham’s and Mrs Kendal’s babies died: they get diarrhoea, for which there seems no cure …
Part of the roof of the Residency fell in this morning and buried six men of the 32nd; only two were dug out alive …
The smell in the churchyard is so offensive that it has made J. quite ill; and when he came back he vomited about two hours incessantly …
Mr Graham committed suicide this morning; he was quite out of his mind …
Three prisoners were brought in, and were undergoing a summary trial by drum-head court-martial, when a round shot struck and killed the trio …
The hospital is so densely crowded that many have to lie outside in the open air, without bed or shelter – amputated arms and legs lying about in heaps all over the hospital and little can be done to alleviate the intense discomfort and pain of the poor sufferers …
Mrs D.’s baby was christened this afternoon. Charlie D. was one godfather; I stood proxy. There were twenty-five funerals this evening …
Poor C.D. was quite delirious when I went to him this morning. It will indeed be wonderful if he lives, for not a single case of amputation during the siege has recovered …
This horrific drama was being played out in and around the elegant red-stone buildings the British had had built for them at Lucknow. The most imposing of these was the vast Residency, the seat of British power, and the scene of balls and investitures, billiard tournaments and concerts. Now it was punctured by cannonballs and reeked of sickness and decomposition. The improvised fortifications around the compound eventually extended to a circumference of about a mile. Inside, at the start of the siege, sheltered almost 800 British soldiers, about 50 drummers, 160 European civilians, 720 loyal Indian troops, a further 700 camp-followers and some 500 women and children. They were surrounded by the best part of 10,000 mutineers and supporters. One of the striking aspects of the diaries and recollections of the survivors is how the spirit of free enterprise which had animated the British in India still flourished in the appalling siege conditions, with some people almost starving, while others enjoyed dinners accompanied by sherry, champagne and claret. When someone died, their effects were auctioned off, with astonishing prices being commanded by food and soap.
As the siege dragged on for month after month, conditions inside the barricades grew worse and worse. Traders who had never wielded a gun took duty on the battered walls, one of them wearing a suit cut from the baize which had covered the Residency billiard table. At the sound of another assault, men struggled from the makeshift hospital to the battlements, the strain causing their wounds to reopen. Wives made bandages from their underclothes, nursed the wounded and prepared what food was available, which, the moment it was laid on a plate, was so covered in flies that no one could see what it was any longer. Children ran messages (the local school at La Martinière was subsequently awarded a British medal for the role played by its pupils). From outside the compound the mutineers taunted them with British bugle calls and turned British artillery on British citizens. Starving pack animals and horses went mad and then died, adding to the stench of severed limbs and overflowing latrines. Some especially horrific vignettes became particularly well known later, like the mother who sat sewing with her ten-year-old daughter and a baby at her side when a cannonball crashed through the wall and tore off the little girl’s head. The shock was so great that the mother lost her milk and her baby died of starvation. Those not killed or maimed by the incoming fire were prey to cholera, smallpox, dysentery and scurvy: by the middle of July, Europeans were dying at the rate of ten each day (none of the records seems to have bothered with a tally of the number of loyal Indians who perished). The chaplain’s wife recorded that her husband had had to conduct 500 funerals inside the embattled compound.