Above the Residency flew, in haughty challenge to the whole world, the flag of England. That flag provoked in a quite curious degree the wrath of the mutineers. Every gun that could be brought to bear on it pelted it with shot, and again and again the staff was carried away. But the damage was instantly repaired, and through the whole of that desperate siege, while the tumult of the fight raged on every face of the entrenchments—
“Ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew!”
Upon this patch of soil, a little over thirty acres in extent, ringed with trenches and palisades, with loopholed house-walls and low earthworks, were gathered some 3000 human beings. Of these, more than 600 were European women and children; nearly 700 were native servants, non-combatants; another 700 were Sepoys, of somewhat dubious loyalty. The real fighting strength of the garrison consisted of 535 men of the 32nd, 50 of the 84th, 89 artillerymen, 100 British officers—mainly escapees from revolted regiments—and 153 civilians, mostly clerks, who now suddenly had to exchange the pen for the musket and bayonet.
About 900 British, that is, constituted the true fighting force of Lucknow, and these 900 had to be distributed amongst seventeen “posts,” or batteries, and round the 2500 yards, or thereabouts, of constantly threatened front. This gave an average of, roughly, fifty men to each post, a number, of course, which grew less every day.
The position had one remarkable feature. The Residency resembled nothing so much as a low island, set in a sea of native houses. Lawrence, with wise prevision, had attempted to clear each front of the Residency, and from June 12 he had some 600 workmen employed on this task. Nawabs’ palaces and coolies’ huts alike were attacked with pickaxe and gunpowder; but the undertaking was stupendous, and practically only the upper storeys of these houses were destroyed, so that they could not sweep the British entrenchments with their fire. But the lower walls were left standing, and these afforded perfect cover to the Sepoys, and enabled them to carry on their mining operations undetected.
Along the eastern face these houses were at distances from the British entrenchments ranging from twenty-five to fifty yards; on the southern face they came up to within thirteen yards of the Residency front, an interval, say, as wide as a city lane! So close were the two hostile lines for those eighty-eight desperate days, that the British could easily overhear the talk of the Sepoys; and when bullets ceased to fly across the narrow space between, expletives—couched in shrill Hindu or in rough Anglo-Saxon—naturally took their place!