Part 16 (2/2)

Yet the Nana was hard to beat, and on the road to Cawnpore he halted again, and fresh troops streaates to his help It was his last chance; but he knew that the little British army earied out, and he counted on his reinforceging as his hed fields heavy et, and knew that they needed the spur of excitehlanders or the Sixty-fourth?' cried he, and before the words were out of his e was taken

Still, even now the battle of Cawnpore was not ended Once more the sepoys re-formed, but always nearer the city, and their deadly fire was directed full upon us The general would have waited till our guns ca restless So turning his pony till he faced his troops, while the enehtly:

'The longer you look at it the less you will like it The brigade will advance, the left battalion leading'

The eneuns had reached the field of battle Next ht in that while the battle for the deliverance was being fought the women and children inside the walls had been shot by order of the Nana And, as a final blohen, the day after, the victor rode through the gate of Cawnpore, a er came to tell him that his old friend sir Henry Lawrence, the defender of Lucknow, had been struck by a shell a fortnight previously, and had died two days later in great agony

'Put on asped in an interval of pain, 'here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty, and may God have mercy on him'

For a while it seemed to Havelock that his whole mission had been a failure; and indeed he is said never to have recovered the two shocks that followed so close on each other, though there was no tiret Like Lawrence, hewas to put the town in a state of defence lest the Nana should return, and sternly to check with the penalty of death the plundering and drunkenness and other cri Neill with three hundred es, now terribly swollen by the late rains, into the kingdom of Oude, of which Lucknow is the capital

Not for a ht of the difficulties that lay before hie force, and his was now reduced to twelve hundred British soldiers, three hundred Sikhs, and ten guns, while cholera had begun to e had to beit

First, boats were collected, and as the boatmen secretly sided with the sepoys, the hundreds of little craft generally to be seen on the river had vanished At length about twenty were found concealed, and as the Ganges was dangerous to cross in its present state, the old boatular pay, to pilot the troops to the Oude bank Even under their skilled guidance the river was so broad that a boat could not perforht hours, and a week passed before the whole force was over and enca position in Oude

Well, they were at last on the sa; but they still had forty-five ht, and Havelock knew that the sepoy general had an instinct for war as keen as his own But Lucknow un the better

Two days after the landing of the British a battle was fought at Onao against the steady, well-disciplined soldiers of Oude, whose gunners were said to be the best in India The fighting was fiercer than any Havelock had yet experienced, but in the end the eneuns taken The next day there was another battle and another victory, but the general had lost a sixth of his one one-third of the way Nana Sahib was hovering about with a large body of troops, ready to fall on him; how under the circumstances was it possible for him to reach Lucknow?

Therefore, with soreness of heart, he gave the order to fall back till the reinforcements which he had been promised came up, and to send the sick and wounded, of which there were now loom and disappoint the road they had come; but far deeper and arrison at Lucknow They had looked on relief as so near and so certain that their hardshi+ps sees of the past Now it appeared as if they were abandoned, and the horrors of the siege felt tenfold harder to bear In the heat of an Indian summer the women and children were forced to leave the upper part of the residency, where at least there was light and air, and seek safety in tiny rooround, where shot and shell were less likely to penetrate

These cellars were sware rats, and, orse, there was a constant plague of flies and other insects Luckily, sir Henry Lawrence had collected large stores before he died, and had hidden away a quantity of corn so securely that colonel Inglis, the present co how long the siegeout rations There was no ar for the babies, and many of the with rats]

Meanwhile Neill sent over urgent requests that Havelock would come to his assistance in Cawnpore, as he was threatened on all sides and could not hold out in case of an attack Most reluctantly the general gave the order to recross the Ganges, but before doing so gave battle to a body of troops entrenched in his rear, and caused them to retreat This raised the spirits of his soldiers a little, and they entered Cawnpore in a better te orders had been given

It hile he was in Cawnpore that Havelock received notice thatfro to his superior rank in the army would naturally take coeneral sir Hugh Wheeler This Havelock quite understood, and though disappointed, felt no bitterness on the subject, welco Outram as an old friend, under whom he was ready to serve cheerfully

Outraenerous spirit of Havelock's reception was a proclamation which showed that he understood and appreciated the services which seeovernenerosity Till Lucknoas taken Havelock should be still in command, and it was Outram himself ould take the lower position

When Havelock had entered Cawnpore for the second ties of boats which had been thrown across the Ganges, so as to check any pursuit froe ht pass; and so hard did the , with Outram's reinforcements, of 3,179 soldiers, was oncetheuns captured In the confusion of the retreat the defeated are over the Sye, a deep river flowing across the plain between the Ganges and the Goomtee, so that when the British force arrived next day they found nothing to prevent their crossing at once, as even the fortifications on this further bank had been abandoned Soon a faint noise, as of thunder, broke on their ears

The rew bright and their feet trod uns of Lucknow, sixteen miles away