Early on 27 July the three rebel regiments marched into Arrah in good order, won over the local Nujeeb police, released the prisoners from the local jail, and then began to pour down musket fire on what afterwards became celebrated as ‘the little house at Arrah’. That same afternoon they were joined by Kumar Singh, who immediately took command of a combined force in excess of ten thousand men. Every effort was made to induce the Sikhs defending the billiard hall to change sides, including bribery and threats. Those Sikhs could, in the words of one of those besieged, ‘have eaten the [European] men up for breakfast’, but they chose to stay and fight.
In Patna it was taken as a foregone conclusion that their friends in Arrah were lost. ‘We thought they would all be massacred,’ wrote Edward Lockwood, ‘but, in case they should be able to hold out for a time, HM 10th Regiment was sent to their relief, and Ross Mangles, Wake’s cousin, who was living with me, joined the force as a volunteer. I volunteered also, but the Commissioner would not let me go.’ This bald statement conveys nothing of the tension and drama that followed as Tayler, on hearing from Major-General Lloyd that he proposed to hold back the British troops in Dinapore for the defence of Patna, did his best to make the general change his mind and send troops to relieve Arrah. ‘I deprecated the measure,’ was how Tayler put it, ‘and strongly urged an immediate and active pursuit of the rebels.’ Finally Lloyd relented, to the extent of allowing him two hundred soldiers from HM 10th Foot. These were loaded on to the steamer’s barges and despatched up-river, only for the steamer to run aground on a sandbank. The general now called off the relief expedition – until a second steamer quite unexpectedly hove into view. After further delays and arguments Tayler again succeeded in making Lloyd change his mind, so that late on the afternoon of 29 July the second steamer, towing the original two hundred British soldiers from the stranded steamer plus an additional two hundred men, at last set off for Arrah. ‘The intense anxiety for the deliverance of this brave little band may be easily conceived,’ wrote Tayler, ‘and the feelings which swelled the hearts of all who saw the relieving force depart, full of hope and confidence, with smiling faces, and cheers of anticipated triumph, may perhaps be imagined.’
The next afternoon, 30 July, Bill Tayler drove his wife and daughter in a carriage down to the river-side to welcome the steamer bringing the relieving force back to Dinapore. To their dismay the vessel sailed straight past the usual mooring and anchored opposite the cantonment hospital. ‘Never have I witnessed so harrowing a scene,’ wrote Tayler afterwards:
too dreadful to forget, far too dreadful to attempt to describe, with any minuteness. Of the gallant band of 400 men which had left the shore in bright array, and in assurance of victory, but a few hours before, 180 had been left for dead on the field, several officers were no more, almost all the survivors were wounded. The scene that ensued was heart-rending, the soldiers’ wives rushed down, screaming, to the edge of the water, beating their breasts and tearing their hair, despondency and despair were depicted on every countenance.
Tayler returned to Patna with ‘the fearful conviction that the Arrah garrison was lost, irremediably lost!… The crisis, as far as Behar was concerned, had now evidently arrived.’ That same afternoon Edward Lockwood was seated on the veranda of Tayler’s bungalow taking Urdu lessons from an Indian munshi when he saw a ‘tramp-like figure’ staggering up the driveway. It proved to be his fellow assistant, Ross Mangles, ‘who briefly said, “We have had an awful licking; the 10th is pretty well annihilated, and I am one of the few to come back to tell the tale.”’ The relieving force had been ambushed in the dark by Kumar Singh’s forces and then pursued all the way to the steamer, Mangles carrying a wounded soldier on his back for the last five miles – an act of gallantry for which he subsequently received the Victoria Cross.
Soon after Mangles’ reappearance the commissioner drew up in his carriage. ‘My Munshi’, continues Lockwood, ‘then retired to spread the news like wild-fire through the town; and I went to the Commissioner, who I found had also heard of the disaster. But he, as usual, seemed to take the matter very coolly, although he did not dissent, when by way of opening the conversation, I said, “It seems we shall have hot work here presently… Surely you will call in the out-lying Europeans, and not let them be massacred in detail like the Arrah Garrison.”’ By Lockwood’s account, Tayler then replied that he was issuing orders ‘commanding or inviting – I forget which, but the point appears immaterial – the Europeans at the outlying stations to come in and rally at Patna’.
When he set down his recollections of this conversation many years later Lockwood added the observation that ‘if I could have peeped ahead and seen the events which occurred during the next few hours, I would joyously have committed an act of treachery, equal to that which I was supposed to have played on the Wahabees. I would have persuaded the Commissioner to entrust his orders of recall to me for delivery, and then, when no one was looking, slyly flung them all into the Ganges.’
After the near-massacre of the force sent to relieve it, Tayler had concluded that Arrah must fall, leaving Kumar Singh free to redirect his ten-thousand-strong force on Patna and the surrounding districts. He himself had barely enough troops left to defend Patna, let alone offer protection to his outlying sub-divisions. ‘It seemed to me evident’, he wrote, ‘that no out-station was in a position to protect itself against the force, which at any moment might be sent against it.’ The most endangered of these outstations was Gaya, sixty miles to the south, which besides being threatened by Kumar Singh from the north-west was also in danger of being attacked by three battalions of mutineers approaching from Bengal. To defend his station and his treasury the magistrate, Alonzo Money, had just fifty-five British soldiers and a hundred of Rattray’s Sikhs. ‘Under this appalling combination of dangers’, wrote Tayler, ‘I directed the withdrawal, and instructed the Magistrates [of Gaya and Tirhut] to come to Patna, as quickly as possible… bringing the treasure with them, unless, by so doing their personal safety was endangered.’
A quite unexpected turn of events now came about that later cast this order of withdrawal in the worst possible light. Tayler had been told that a relief force was planning to set out from Buxar, forty miles west of Arrah, in an attempt to relieve the besieged officers in their billiard hall, but this was no more than a handful of gunners commanded by a passed-over artillery major named Vincent Eyre plus an escort of barely a hundred and fifty fighting men. ‘It was the opinion of all,’ wrote Tayler, ‘that this small force would have but little chance of success against so large a body as was then under the command of Kooer Singh [Raja Kumar Singh].’ Accordingly, he wrote to the civil officer accompanying Major Eyre advising him that he should postpone his advance until more troops could be sent up-river to join them. This letter he sent open to Major-General Lloyd in Dinapore, ‘to be forwarded with such instructions as he should think fit to give. What orders he gave I do not precisely know.’
But before Tayler’s letter could be delivered Major Eyre had won a quite stunning victory, routing Kumar Singh’s forces with a desperate bayonet charge and so relieving the defenders at Arrah.