Months afterwards, Lawrence, looking from the Ridge over the scene of the long and bloody struggle, said to his companion with a sigh, “Think of all the genius and bravery buried here!” The environs of Delhi, the reverse slope of that rocky crest from which the British guns thundered on the rebel city, are indeed sown thick with the graves of brave men who died to maintain the British Empire in India.
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.