While on the march from Umballa towards Delhi the Commander-in-Chief in India, General the Hon. George Anson, died of cholera at Kurnal on May 27th. Tidings of this misfortune did not reach the War Office until July 11th. On that same afternoon Sir Colin Campbell was sent for by Lord Panmure, who made him the offer of the high command rendered vacant by Anson's decease. Campbell promptly accepted the offer and expressed his readiness to start that same evening if necessary. He stipulated successfully that his friend Colonel Mansfield, then Consul-General at Warsaw (afterwards Lord Sandhurst), should be offered the appointment of chief of staff with the rank of major-general. This settled, Campbell had an interview with the Duke of Cambridge, then as now Commander-in-Chief, who approved of the selection of Major Alison[3] as military secretary, and of Sir David Baird and Lieutenant Alison as aides-de-camp.
It had been arranged at Sir Colin's interview with Lord Panmure that he should start next morning. He was ready and his modest kit complete; but sundry matters intervened delaying his departure for a few hours. The Queen, for one thing, had desired that he should wait on her. The Duke of Cambridge brought him to Buckingham Palace; and, so Sir Colin wrote in his journal, "Her Majesty's expressions of approval of my readiness to proceed at once were pleasant to receive from a Sovereign so good and so justly loved." He left London by the continental night train, full of a justifiable elation. "Never," he wrote, "did a man proceed on a mission of duty with a lighter heart and a feeling of greater humility, yet with a juster sense of the compliment that had been paid to a mere soldier of fortune like myself in being named to the highest command in the gift of the Crown." Hurrying through Paris he found time to breakfast with General Vinoy his old Crimean friend, and reaching Marseilles on the morning of the 14th he immediately embarked for India on a vessel which was in readiness with its steam up. During the voyage he prepared a strategic scheme, the essence of which was a great concentric advance upon the Central Indian States, to be undertaken by the whole disposable military forces of the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, that would effectually engage the whole rebel strength of those turbulent territories, and so in some degree divert the severe pressure of the Gwalior Contingent on the left flank of the long and precarious main line of communication. This object obtained, Bengal and the Punjaub once more united by the reconquest of the intervening territory, and the left flank and rear of the reconquered base secured by the reduction of Central India, the most arduous work of the war could be safely undertaken; the vast, populous, and bitterly hostile province of Oude might then be subdued, with the result of securing non-molestation on the right flank of the region through which the principal line of communication must pass. The operation of this grand strategic scheme was weakened and retarded by various causes; but the sound wisdom of Campbell's prescient conception was ultimately in great measure vindicated.