Page 114 - Chronicle Vol 17

that he came across. Such belligerence abounded throughout the 32nd’s ranks, with Rees even describing a bedridden amputee being driven by ‘the desire for revenge’ to fire his musket one-handed at the Sepoys from the hospital window. Rees himself denounces the mutineers for ‘making war like wild beasts, not like men’, even professing he would have sympathised with their cause had it not been for their aforementioned atrocities. Perhaps this explains Rees’ ‘strange feel- ing of joy’ he described after shooting several rebels, causing him to think ‘only of the number I could kill’. In contrast, Julia Inglis describes the mutineers’ assaults as ‘half-hearted endeavours of our cowardly foe’, whilst Rees remarks how the Sepoys ‘will not come to the scratch... for him discretion is the better part of val- our’. Adelaide Case even proposes ‘the rebels never made a real attack; they were not bold enough’. Although these accounts must be accepted with caution due to obvious bias (accounts from the mutineers themselves are scarce due to literacy disparities), an argument can certainly be made that the defenders were better motivated than their foes, explaining much of the determination in which they fought, which is evidence in itself for this view.
These motivations arguably influenced the defenders’ strategy, which despite their weaker numbers and vulnerabilities, was characterised by an aggressive offensive spirit. Daring raids and sorties were frequently made, with ‘as usual, the brave 32nd leading’ to sabotage enemy guns and siege works. Here occurred countless examples of what Hichberger calls ‘miracles of courage’ by individual officers and men. Forrest provides such an example of the ‘most noble’ conduct of Corporal Cooney and Private Smith, who gave their lives destroying an enemy battery, which ‘could not have been accomplished’ without them. Three out of the four Victoria Crosses won by the regiment during the siege would be through similar actions. General Havelock’s reinforcements heightened this aggression, greatly increasing the number of sorties and even extending The Residency’s defensive perimeter. Even the garrison’s commander, Brigadier John Inglis of the 32nd, personally led such raids, including one particularly close call where he was nearly decapitated by an enemy’s sword after his pistol misfired, only to be saved by one of his men. Indeed, such actions could be costly, but they stymied the rebels’ besieging operations, lowered their morale, and overall prevented them from gaining the full initiative.
Examples like that of Brigadier Inglis highlight the final attribute behind the 32nd’s success; impeccable leadership, which in turn fostered the aforementioned quali- ties of the defenders, maximising their fighting prowess. This was at the expense of the rebels, as many historians argue that their primary shortcoming was a lack of capable leadership, which severely undermined their initial advantages. Yadav summarises a prevailing view amongst Indian academia that ‘the rebels showed a miserable lack of generalship’, with scholars such as Chattopadhyayav claim- ing that the leaders simply ‘lacked the personality’, whilst Shrivastava asserts that rebels’ leaders were ‘no match to the generalship, strategy, military skill, and discipline of the Britishers’. This is unsurprising, as the Sepoys (prior to the rebel- lion) were only commanded by British officers, meaning that they lacked any prior experience of leadership. Those who championed the rebels’ cause were
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