Page:The Indian Mutiny of 1857.djvu/291

Rh of artillery, with European gunners but native drivers. At Mehidpur the troops, with the exception of the officers, were natives.

The acting British Resident, or, as he was styled in official language, the Agent for the Governor-General, was Colonel Henry Marion Durand, one of the ablest and most prescient of the officers serving the Government of India. His career had been one of strange vicissitudes. The unselfishness of his nature had been the cause of his missing chances which seldom recur twice to the same individual.

The events of the 10th of May at Mírath, and the consequences of those events at Dehlí, had produced an unparalleled commotion in the native mind in the territories of Holkar. Durand felt his position to be one of peculiar importance. The maintenance of order in the country north of the Narbadá depended upon one of two contingencies: one was the fall of Dehlí, the other the arrival of reinforcements from Bombay. Now, the road from Bombay to Agra crossed the Narbadá at a point just below Indur, and ran thence through Central India to a point on the Chambal directly to the north of Gwáliár. The maintenance of this road was the prominent feature in the plan of Durand, He resolved, then, to maintain his own position as long as was possible; to sever, as far as he could, all communications between men of the regular army and those of the native contingents; to secure the Narbadá and the important road I have described; and to reassure the native princes under his superintendence.

But events were too strong even for Durand. Dehlí did not fall, and the reinforcements despatched from Bombay, under circumstances presently to be described,