How the shout of exultation ran round the seventeen shot-battered posts of the long-besieged entrenchments can be imagined. The women, the children, the very sick in the hospital, lent their voices to that shout. The Highlanders, who came first, poured their Celtic exclamations and blessings on the men and women they had rescued. “We expected to have found only your bones,” said one. That the children were still alive filled the gallant but soft-hearted Highlanders with amazed joy. “The big, rough-bearded soldiers,” wrote one of the rescued ladies, “were seizing the little children out of our arms, kissing them with tears running down their cheeks, and thanking God that they had come in time to save them from the fate of those at Cawnpore.”
Let it be remembered that for more than eighty days the garrison had lived under the shadow of death. No message, no whisper of news, from the outside world had reached them. Their rescuers were men of the same name and blood, who had fought their way as if through the flames of the Pit to reach and save them! And into what a mood of passionate joy amongst the delivered, and of passionate exultation and triumph amongst the deliverers, the crowd which thronged the Residency that night was lifted may be more easily imagined than described. It was a night worth living for; almost worth dying for.
Lady Inglis has told how she listened to the tremendous cheering that welcomed the British across the Residency lines, and how her husband brought up “a short, quiet-looking, grey-haired man,” who she guessed at once was Havelock. It was a great triumph, but a great price was paid for it. The relieving column, out of its 3000 men, lost in killed or wounded more than 700, nearly one in every four of its whole number!
One unfortunate incident marked the relief. As the Highlanders approached the Bailey Guard Gate they took Aitken’s men of the 13th for the enemy, and leaped upon them with gleaming and angry bayonets, and slew some before their blunder was discovered. It was never imagined that the very outpost of the heroic garrison would be found to consist of Sepoys, fighting with such long-enduring loyalty against their own countrymen. It was a very cruel fate for these faithful Sepoys to perish under the bayonets of the relieving force.