SEPOY GENERALS.
[TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
Ste,—There is a material error in the interesting review of " Sepoy Generals " which appeared in the 'Spectator of January 18th. The reviewer states that had it not been for Herbert Edwardes "the Punjaub would have been abandoned to save Delhi." The question at . issue between Lord LaWrence and Herbert Edwardes was not the retention or the sacrifice of the Punjaub, but the retention of Peshawur, an outlying and trans-Indus district, and a very different matter. The whole question between these two eminent men is fully and dispassionately treated in. Lord Lawrence's Biography by Mr. Bosworth Smith, Vol. II., chap. 4, pp. 165-65. It is also fairly discussed by Kaye in Vol. II. of his " History of the Mutiny," chap. 6. Lord Lawrence, looking forward to an extremity, of peril, was prepared as a last resource, if , the safety of the Empire, or, in other words, the successful Prosecution of the siege of Delhi, demanded it, to ask Dost MidroMmed to occupy and keep Peshawur. He (Lord Lawrence) would thus have been able to set free three thousand English troops from that canton- ment, and they could have been sent to Delhi at once. Edwardes and Nicholson and Cotton, it is admitted, were of opinion that it would be a fatal policy to abandon Peshawar and retire back across the Indus. Bnt 'Lord Lawrence never for one moment contemplated giving up the Punjaub. On the contrary, it is clear that he looked to retain our hold on Mooltan, Lahore, and Amritsar. The well- known and often-quoted telegram of Lord Canning to 'Law- rence was " Hold on to Peshawur to the last" : not a word about the whole of 'the Punjaub. Fortunately, the last extremity was not experienced, though Lord Lawrence almost denuded his province of troops, and sent down to Delhi every man he could spare. But whether the abandonment of Peshawur would have been a very bad or a 'good policy, it is quite certain that the views of Edwardes that " Delhi was not India," that General. Reid must either get " into Delhi with the force at his commond or abandon the siege," were not shared by the majority of military and civil officers at the time. Delhi in August and September, 1857,' was India itself. It had been the residence of Mogul Emperors whose names were familiar to countless Mahommedans and Hindoos. The revolted regiments, when they bad sacked local Treasuries and had broken open local gaols, made off, one after another, to the famous capital. The question on the lips of every one, Englishman or native, from Lord Canning down to' the youngest Subaltern or the Assistant-Magistrate, from the hesitating Rajput or the exulting Nawab down to the shop- keeper of Benares, the Babu at Bhowanipur, was, Would Delhi fall, and when ? The failure of the siege or the retreat of our army must have cost us our Indian Empire, at least for the time. When the city was recovered in September we all breathed freely, and we felt, that whatever remained to be done the neck of the Mutiny was broken. The "Punjaub was saved," as your reviewer puts it, and with it our supremacy, but not by Herbert Edwardes. I write with a clear and vivid recollection of an iron time when I was serving in Bengal, and I may say of the Mutiny as an Irish orator said of his Irish. Parliament : "I sat by its cradle, I followed its hearse."—I am, Sir, &c.,
WALTER SCOTT SETON-ICARR,
67 Lotondes Square. H.M.'s Bengal C.S. (Retired).
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