After some tentative efforts the Lucknow mutineers on the 21st made a serious attempt on both flanks of Outram's position behind the Alumbagh. Assailed by artillery and cavalry they accepted a defeat after sustaining heavy loss. They came at him again on the 25th, when they fought under the eyes of the Begum and her minister. Between twenty and thirty thousand came into the field. But Outram handled these masses so roughly that they gave way, and their retreat became a headlong rout when British cavalry attacked them on both flanks. Outram's loss was trivial; the enemy suffered heavily.
Towards the end of January the convoy of ladies from Agra had passed safely through Cawnpore on their way down country, and a month later Walpole rejoined the army after having given the Agra convoy escort to Allahabad. The whole siege-train by this time had come up; the engineer park, the commissariat supplies, the countless legions of camp-followers. The dense battalions, the glittering squadrons, the well-horsed batteries had traversed the bridges across the Ganges, and were faring over the sandy plains of Oude, every man's face set towards Lucknow. It was a great convergence. Such a force India had never before seen. Under the Commander-in-Chief were arrayed seventeen battalions of infantry, fifteen of which were British, twenty-eight squadrons of cavalry, including four English regiments, fifty-four light and eighty heavy guns and mortars; while from the south, right across Oude, Franks with three British and six Ghoorka battalions with twenty guns was pressing on strenuously, and from the south-east Jung Bahadoor with nine thousand men and twenty-four guns was marching on the common goal, to join the strange miscellaneous force whose rendezvous was before the rebel defences of the capital of Oude.
On February 27th Sir Colin Campbell established his temporary headquarters at Buntera, where the Second Division had already arrived. His force had now increased to eighteen thousand seven hundred men with eighty heavy guns and mortars and fifty-four field-guns; and in addition he could reckon on Franks' column and eventually on the Nepaulese contingent under Jung Bahadoor, when his total effective would amount to about thirty-one thousand men and one hundred and sixty-four guns. To the command of the artillery was assigned Sir Archdale Wilson of Delhi fame: the brigade of engineers was confided to the able charge of Brigadier Robert Napier; and the cavalry division was placed under Brigadier-General Hope Grant. Of the three infantry divisions, the first was under Major-General Sir James Outram, the second under Brigadier-General Sir E. Lugard, the third under Brigadier-General Walpole. Sir Colin had come to the conclusion that it would be impossible to invest the city, the circumference of which was quite twenty miles, and he determined, therefore, to operate simultaneously upon both sides of the Goomtee. By so doing he would be able to enfilade with his artillery fire the enemy's triple line of works, and thus weaken the resistance to his advance on the line of the canal and the approaches to the Kaiserbagh, which the rebels regarded as their citadel. It was covered by three successive lines of defence, of which the outer conformed to the line of the canal, the second circled round the Mess House and the Motee Mahal, and the inner one was the principal rampart of the Kaiserbagh itself. Those lines were flanked by numerous bastions, and rested at one end on the Goomtee, at the other on the massive buildings of the Huzrut Gunj, all of which were strongly fortified and flanked the street in every direction. The artillery of the defence was believed to consist of about one hundred and thirty guns. Apart from the normal population of Lucknow, which was reckoned about two hundred and eighty thousand, a turbulent and bitterly hostile community, the rebel garrison was estimated to amount to one hundred thousand fighting men, consisting of mutineers of the sepoy army, the Oude force, irregular regiments, and the levies of disaffected chiefs.