The Devil's Wind - The Story of the Naval Brigade At Lucknow, from the Letters of Edmund Hope Verney and Other Papers Concerning the Enterprise of the . Shannon in the Campaign in India, 1857-58 by Verney, Major-General G. L

Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., London, 1956. UK first edition, hard bound in dj, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, VG/VG- condition ( dj shows medium wear at edges & price clipped ), 176 pages, illus, maps. appendices, bibliog, index.-------------------------------------- the famous Naval Brigade of H.M.S. Shannon played a major role, under Captain William Peel,youngest Captain in the Navy, already a national hero, had won the V.C. in the Crimean War, and under whose leadership Members of the Brigade won between them five more V.C.s. Bringing much-needed reinforcement to the hard-pressed British troops in India, they served with the army in some of the major engagements of the Mutiny, fighting over a thousand miles from the sea. This book is the remarkable story of their six weeks' journey from Calcutta to the scene of the fighting, much of it on foot, with their huge eight-inch guns dragged by two elephants or twenty-six bullocks apiece ; of their many engagements, including the victory near Cawnpore, where teams of forty seamen dragged their guns into the front line, and later ran with them for the first ten miles of a fifteen-mile pursuit; of how they bombarded enemy-held palaces at such close range that gun crews were wounded by flying pieces of masonry; of the gallant Highlanders with whom they often shared the honours of battle ; of the first relief of Lucknow, and much more.