But on the whole the average Briton is apt to be grimly cheerful when a good fight is in progress, and even this dreadful siege was not without its humours. Thus Rees tells how, on the night of July 26, the men of his post were spreading themselves out in the chorus of “Cheer, Boys, cheer,” with the utmost strength of their voices, when an alarm was given at the front. They dashed out, and, with the unfinished syllables of that chorus yet on their lips, found themselves in the tumult and fury of a desperate assault. After the fight was over they returned and finished their interrupted song!
Innes, again, relates how, when a long mine of the enemy had been seized, and two officers were exploring its darkness, they heard the earth fall in behind them. One of the two, famous for his resonant laugh, shouted with a burst of merriment, “What fun! They are cutting us off,” and turned round gaily to charge on his foes!
Danger, in a word, had become an inspiring jest to these brave spirits. “Sam” Lawrence, who commanded the Redan, was famous for the cheerful view he always took of affairs. It was known that the Sepoys had several mines converging on the projecting horn of the Redan, and Lawrence, as unconquerably jolly as Mark Tapley himself, expressed his view of the situation to his brigadier by saying, with a laugh, that “he and his men expected very shortly to be up amongst the little birds!”
On June 14, Fayrer records, “If we can believe our enemies, we are the last Englishmen in the country.” This might or might not be the case; but the garrison determined grimly that, if they were the last of their race, they would not disgrace it. In the vernacular of the camp, they had agreed to “blow the whole ⸺ thing into the air” rather than surrender. “I was quite determined,” says Fayrer, “that they should not take me alive, and I would kill as many of them as I could before they took me.... Some men asked me to give them poison for their wives, if the enemy should get in. But this I absolutely refused to do.”
Courage, when high-strung, sometimes evolves an almost uncanny cheerfulness. The Sepoys brought a mortar into action that dropped shell after shell on one particular house. “We got the ladies up out of the Tyekhana,” records Fayrer, and they amused themselves by trying to be cheerful and singing part-songs in the portico, to the rushing of shells and the whistling of musket-balls. When before were such songs attempted to such an accompaniment? But the women of the Residency showed throughout a courage quite as high as that of the men. During the great assault on July 20, when, on the explosion of a mine, the Sepoys attempted to storm the Residency at half-a-dozen points, “every one,” says Fayrer, “was at his post, and poured shot, shell, grape, and musketry into them as hard as possible. The noise was frightful, the enemy shouting and urging each other on. It certainly seemed to me as if our time had come. But all the poor ladies were patiently awaiting the result in the Tyekhana.”