attackers with a single shot still lies on its emplacement in the Inner
Fort, though its carriage has long decayed and the barrel is disfigured
with graffiti.
Most of the buildings in the Inner Fort have vanished, or else are so
overgrown as to be invisible. There is, alas, no snake pit there. The
major gatehouses are still intact, without their gates, and a visitor
can only marvel at the suicidal bravery of the men who climbed from the
ravine to enter the twisting deathtrap of the Inner Fort’s northern
gate.
Defeat would surely have been their reward, had not Campbell and his
Light Company found a way up the side of the ravine and, with the help
of a ladder, scaled the wall and so attacked the gates from the inside.
By then Beny Singh, the Killadar, had already poisoned his wives,
lovers and daughters. He died, like Manu Bappoo, with his sword in his
hand.
Manu Bappoo almost certainly died in the breaches and not, as the novel
says, in the ravine, though that was where most of his men died,
trapped between the attackers who had captured the Outer Fort and the
ySth who were climbing the road from the plain. They should have found
refuge within the Inner Fort, and bolstered its de fences but for
reasons that have never been explained, the Inner Fort’s gates were
fast shut against the survivors of the Outer Fort’s garrison.
Elizabeth Longford, in Wellington, The Years of the Sword, quotes the
late Jac Weller as saying of Gawilghur, ‘three reasonably effective
troops of Boy Scouts armed with rocks could have kept out several times
their number of professional soldiers’. It is difficult to disagree.
Manu Bappoo and Beny Singh made no effort to protect the Outer Fort’s
walls with a glacis, which was their primary mistake, but their real
stronghold was the Inner Fort, and it fell far too swiftly. The
supposition is that the defenders were thoroughly demoralized, and the
few British casualties (about 150), most of them killed or wounded in
the assault on the gatehouse, testify to the swiftness of the victory.
A hundred and fifty sounds like a small ‘butcher’s bill’, and so it is,
but that should not hide the horror of the fight for the Inner Fort’s
gatehouse where Kenny died.
That fight occurred in a very small space and, for a brief while, must
have been as ghastly as, say, the struggle for Badajoz’s breaches nine
years later. Campbell’s escalade up the precipice saved an enormous
number of lives and cut a nasty fight blessedly short. Indeed, the
victory was so quick, and so cheaply gained, that a recent biography of
the Duke of Wellington (in 1803 he was still Sir Arthur Wellesley)
accords the siege less than three lines, yet to the redcoat who was
sweating up the hill to the plateau and who was expected to carry his
firelock and bayonet across the rocky isthmus to the breaches in the
double walls it was a significant place and his victory remarkable.
The real significance of Gawilghur lay in the future. Sir Arthur
Wellesley had now witnessed the assault of the breach at Seringapatam,
had escaladed the walls of Ahmednuggur and swept over the great de
fences of Gawilghur. In Portugal and Spain, confronted by even greater
de fences manned by determined French soldiers, it is claimed that he
underestimated the difficulties of siege work, having been lulled into
complacency by the ease of his Indian victories. There may be truth in
that, and at Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Burgos and San Sebastian he took
dreadful casualties. My own suspicion is that he did not so much
underestimate the ability of de fences to withstand him, as
overestimate the capacity of British troops to get through those de
fences and, astonishingly, they usually lived up to his expectations.
And it was Scotsmen who gave him those high expectations: the Scots who
used four ladders to capture a city at Ahmednuggur and one ladder to
bring down the great fortress of Gawilghur. Their bravery helped
disguise the fact that sieges were terrible work, so terrible that the
troops, regardless of their commander’s wishes, regarded a captured