Battle of Ferozeshah War Memorial

This memorial was built by the British in 1869. The Battle of Ferozeshah was fought on 21 and 22 December 1845, three days after the indecisive clash at Mudki, and it proved the most desperate engagement of the First Anglo-Sikh War. Falling back from Mudki, the Sikh forces under Wazir Lal Singh threw up an oval entrenched camp around the village of Ferozeshah, about a mile and a half long and a mile across, ringed by walls and mines and defended by heavy guns of 24, 32 and 36-pounder calibre. Reinforced by three regular brigades, Lal Singh commanded some 32,000 men and roughly 100 guns. The British Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Hugh Gough, wished to attack at once, before Tej Singh's 30,000 men could join the Sikhs, but Governor General Sir Henry Hardinge used his civil authority to overrule him and insisted on waiting for General Littler's division from Ferozepur. The delay meant the assault began only at 4 p.m. on the shortest day of the year, leaving barely an hour of daylight, and the fighting fell into darkness as it had at Mudki. The Sikh artillery mauled the British advance. Littler's division went in unsupported and suffered heavily, with the sepoy battalions hanging back, and the attack on the right and centre took parts of the entrenchments only at great cost. The 3rd Light Dragoons, charging into the massed Ghorcharras, saved Gilbert's division from being overrun. A Sikh powder magazine then exploded, scattering both sides in confusion. That night the British camped in the dark, hungry, thirsty and freezing, while Gough and Hardinge moved among the squares; the mood was so grim that state papers were ordered to be destroyed and some officers urged a retreat to Ferozepur, which Gough refused. The Sikhs, by contrast, had fought well and their morale was high. At dawn on 22 December the British attacked again and carried the position against little resistance. Lal Singh had slipped away during the night, and many of the Ghorcharras with him, leaving the army leaderless. By about 1 p.m. the camp had fallen. Tej Singh then arrived from Ferozepur with a fresh force and pressed the exhausted British, whose ammunition was nearly spent. At the critical moment, the acting adjutant-general, Captain Lumley, sent the ammunition wagons and cavalry away to Ferozepur, giving Tej Singh a pretext to halt and withdraw, and the battle ended by 4 p.m. British casualties were about 2,415, of whom 694 were killed, against Sikh losses estimated at around 2,000. The treachery of Lal Singh and Tej Singh, who were acting on the regent Maharani Jind Kaur's wish to see the unruly Khalsa Army cut down to size, together with Hardinge's delay and Lumley's error, saved Gough from near-certain defeat.