THE LATE SIR JOHN INGLIS.

New Zealander, Volume XIX, Issue 1791, 11 February 1863, Page 3

THE LATE SIR JOHN INGLIS.

(From the (t Standard.’’) The war in India of 1857, and the incidents of that thrilling drama of five years since, can hardly yet have faded from the raemoriesof men. The history of the war of the mutiny has never yet been lully written. That so grand an opportunity should be altogether lost of enforcing a moral that might be impressed with much advantage on this and future generations is, we tHink, much to be regretted. The living witnesses whose testimony would be so invaluable to the contemporary historian are passing away from?us one by one. Havelock is dead, and Henry Lawrence; and now Sir John Inglis, another of the defenders of Lucknow, is gone to his rest. For any oral information about the details of the eventlui siege which constitutes perhaps, the most thrilling chapter in history since the battle ot \\ aterloo established, gi’Uish gssendahpy is the war'd, Sir J, Oatsaci only ia lah io as. ‘ivaSj wa iiav®

diaries of ladies whose endurance under circumstances so trying was an honor to their sex, hut whose natural feminine timidity must tend to some extent to heighten the colours of the p’eture.

I Sir John Inglis, son of a bishop, son-in-law of ! a Lord Chancellor, owed his reputation to neither of these circumstances, but to the fact that in 1857 he commanded the beleagured garrison of Oude. Me entered the British army, in 1833, and' he has quitted it in 1862. During these thirty years, or thereabouts, he appears to have done his dutv as an honest English soldier. What more can man do than this? To have a thorough understanding of the business of his calling, to be able to command troops, to be determined that neither he nor they will ever flinch in the face of the enemy, to be able to march day and night f.ll his limbo fail beneath him, to be ready m summer suns and in wintry rains—these are the s'tuple duties of a British officer. He makes no display, no pretence of superior skill or “strategic ” science; he does not plume himself upon his bravery, looking upon courage of this sort as the common and universal quality ot men and bulldogs. Sir John Inglis, we say, entered the army in 1833. He served, four years afterwards, in the Canadian rebellion. He was ordered to India, and fought in the Punjab campaigns, in that war when our empire of the East was first challenged by that fierce nation of swarthy warriors, who since have fought on our s.de against the Bengalee and the Mahratta. lie led one of the columns of assault at Moultan. At Goojerat he obtained promotion by his conspicuous bravery. But it is in connection with that long agony at Lucknow that he will be remembered. Who does not recollect the autumn of that year 1857 when men and women in England, at a time, as usual, devoted to recreation and change of scene, found no pleasure in their holiday, and were diverted by nothing that they saw from the grim picture that was ever before the eves of their mind, of thousands of their countrymen, thousands of miles away, in peril from a horde of zealots to whom mercy was a word unknown, and whose passions were those of wild beasts. Js each successive mail cjme in exclamations of horror alternated with flushes of triumph. The universal mutiny, and the almost universal massacre, made us look upon the empire as lost, made us tremble for the safety of the English who remained in Calcutta and the other great cities of India, We were revived at hearing that the scattered English forces still held the field in most places against the mutineers. But then the news of the fearful massacre at Cawnpore plunged all England in mourning. In spite of the cry for vengeance that was raised from one end of the land to the other, it was well known to everyone that long before reinforcements could be sent to our troops in the peninsula the fate of the English garrison of India would be settled one way or another. Providentially Sir James Outram and Sir H. Havelock had been recently returned with their brave troops from Persia. Just when Nana Sahib was pompously proclaiming to Hindustan the annihilation of the British armies. General Havelock left Allahabad with some 1,5C0 men, and with them marched on Cawnpore, With his brave 61th and 78th Highlanders he beat the enemy wherever he could find him. The British people heard with delight that Havelock had won nine battles in about as many days. Indomitable courage, discipline, European prestige , and the consciousness of a good cause, seemed to carry everything befoi’e them, Cawnpore, was avenged, Bhitoor razed, hut the mutiny of the Dinapore native brigade paralysed for a time the efforts made to relieve Lucknow, where the whole of the British inhabi tants were besieged in the residency. Sir 11, Lawrence was wounded, and died. Inglis was left alone in command, and for weeks more, to the middle of September, the men and women of white race at Lucknow were threatened with a horrible death, the certainty of which seemed to be drawing nearer and nearer every day. At last they had even entertained the desperate project of blowing up their refuge and themselves sooner than that any should fall living into the hands of the furious mutineers. Then Outram joined Havelock, and they marched upon Lucknow and delivered their countrymen and countrywomen from their terrible danger. A few days before this Sir Archibald Wilson had taken Delhi. The British rule was restored in India, though the still feeble garrison of Lucknow could barely hold its own against the natives who besieged the city in overwhelming numbers, until the arrival of the last of its relievers, then known as Sir Colin Campbell. Thus ended the never-to-be-forgotten drama of Lucknow. Outram’s and Havelock’s force amounted to but 2,703 men, in all. There were 50,000 against them. The army that took Delhi, the chief stronghold of the insurgents, the capital ot ancient India, a city with a population of 150,000 souls, all at that time deeply disaffected to our rule, this army numbered less than 10,000 men, not quite half of them English. It is not always true what Napoleon said. Providence does not always favour the strongest battalions. The heroic attitude of our little army in India and the glorious episode of the defence of Lucknow in 1857 have created a prestige for this country for 100 years to come, and will adorn a far brighter and more unsullied page in history than all those fearful and causeless butcheries, those melees of hundreds of thousands against hundreds of thousands, in America.