THE TALE OF
THE GREAT MUTINY

FIELD-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS, V.C., G.C.B.

From an engraving of the portrait by W. W. Ouless, R.A., by permission of Henry Graves & Co., Ltd.

THE TALE OF
THE GREAT MUTINY

BY
W. H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D.
AUTHOR OF “DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE,” “FIGHTS FOR
THE FLAG,” “HOW ENGLAND SAVED EUROPE,”
“WELLINGTON’S MEN,” ETC.

WITH PORTRAITS AND MAPS

THIRD IMPRESSION

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1903

[All rights reserved]

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

THE
TALE OF THE GREAT MUTINY

CHAPTER I
MUNGUL PANDY

The scene is Barrackpore, the date March 29, 1857. It is Sunday afternoon; but on the dusty floor of the parade-ground a drama is being enacted which is suggestive of anything but Sabbath peace. The quarter-guard of the 34th Native Infantry—tall men, erect and soldierly, and nearly all high-caste Brahmins—is drawn up in regular order. Behind it chatters and sways and eddies a confused mass of Sepoys, in all stages of dress and undress; some armed, some unarmed; but all fermenting with excitement. Some thirty yards in front of the line of the 34th swaggers to and fro a Sepoy named Mungul Pandy. He is half-drunk with bhang, and wholly drunk with religious fanaticism. Chin in air, loaded musket in hand, he struts backwards and forwards, at a sort of half-dance, shouting in shrill and nasal monotone, “Come out, you blackguards! Turn out, all of you! The English are upon us. Through biting these cartridges we shall all be made infidels!”

The man, in fact, is in that condition of mingled bhang and “nerves” which makes a Malay run amok; and every shout from his lips runs like a wave of sudden flame through the brains and along the nerves of the listening crowd of fellow-Sepoys. And as the Sepoys off duty come running up from every side, the crowd grows ever bigger, the excitement more intense, the tumult of chattering voices more passionate. A human powder magazine, in a word, is about to explode.

Suddenly there appears upon the scene the English adjutant, Lieutenant Baugh. A runner has brought the news to him as he lies in the sultry quiet of the Sunday afternoon in his quarters. The English officer is a man of decision. A saddled horse stands ready in the stable; he thrusts loaded pistols into the holsters, buckles on his sword, and gallops to the scene of trouble. The sound of galloping hoofs turns all Sepoy eyes up the road; and as that red-coated figure, the symbol of military authority, draws near, excitement through the Sepoy crowd goes up uncounted degrees. They are about to witness a duel between revolt and discipline, between a mutineer and an adjutant!

Mungul Pandy has at least one quality of a good soldier. He can face peril coolly. He steadies himself, and grows suddenly silent. He stands in the track of the galloping horse, musket at shoulder, the man himself moveless as a bronze image. And steadily the Englishman rides down upon him! The Sepoy’s musket suddenly flashes; the galloping horse swerves and stumbles; horse and man roll in the white dust of the road. But the horse only has been hit, and the adjutant struggles, dusty and bruised, from under the fallen beast, plucks a loaded pistol from the holster, and runs straight at the mutineer. Within ten paces of him he lifts his pistol and fires. There is a flash of red pistol-flame, a puff of white smoke, a gleam of whirling sword-blade. But a man who has just scrambled up, half-stunned, from a fallen horse, can scarcely be expected to shine as a marksman. Baugh has missed his man, and in another moment is himself cut down by Mungul Pandy’s tulwar. At this sight a Mohammedan Sepoy—Mungul Pandy was a Brahmin—runs out and catches the uplifted wrist of the victorious Mungul. Here is one Sepoy, at least, who cannot look on and see his English officer slain—least of all by a cow-worshipping Hindu!

Again the sound of running feet is heard on the road. It is the English sergeant-major, who has followed his officer, and he, too—red of face, scant of breath, but plucky of spirit—charges straight at the mutinous Pandy. But a sergeant-major, stout and middle-aged, who has run in uniform three-quarters of a mile on an Indian road and under an Indian sun, is scarcely in good condition for engaging in a single combat with a bhang-maddened Sepoy, and he, in turn, goes down under the mutineer’s tulwar.

How the white teeth gleam, and the black eyes flash, through the crowd of excited Sepoys! The clamour of voices takes a new shrillness. Two sahibs are down before their eyes, under the victorious arm of one of their comrades! The men who form the quarter-guard of the 34th, at the orders of their native officer, run forward a few paces at the double, but they do not attempt to seize the mutineer. Their sympathies are with him. They halt; they sway to and fro. The nearest smite with the butt-end of their muskets at the two wounded Englishmen.

A cluster of British officers by this time is on the scene; the colonel of the 34th himself has come up, and naturally takes command. He orders the men of the quarter-guard to seize the mutineers, and is told by the native officer in charge that the men “will not go on.” The colonel is, unhappily, not of the stuff of which heroes are made. He looks through his spectacles at Mungul Pandy. A six-foot Sepoy in open revolt, loaded musket in hand—himself loaded more dangerously by fanaticism strongly flavoured with bhang—while a thousand excited Sepoys look on trembling with angry sympathy, does not make a cheerful spectacle. “I felt it useless,” says the bewildered colonel, in his official report after the incident, “going on any further in the matter.... It would have been a useless sacrifice of life to order a European officer of the guard to seize him.... I left the guard and reported the matter to the brigadier.” Unhappy colonel! He may have had his red-tape virtues, but he was clearly not the man to suppress a mutiny. The mutiny, in a word, suppressed him! And let it be imagined how the spectacle of that hesitating colonel added a new element of wondering delight to the huge crowd of swaying Sepoys.

At this moment General Hearsey, the brigadier in charge, rides on to the parade-ground: a red-faced, wrathful, hard-fighting, iron-nerved veteran, with two sons, of blood as warlike as their father’s, riding behind him as aides. Hearsey, with quick military glance, takes in the whole scene—the mob of excited Sepoys, the sullen quarter-guard, the two red-coats lying in the road, and the victorious Mungul Pandy, musket in hand. As he rode up somebody called out, “Have a care; his musket is loaded.” To which the General replied, with military brevity, “Damn his musket!” “An oath,” says Trevelyan, “concerning which every true Englishman will make the customary invocation to the recording angel.”

Mungul Pandy covered the General with his musket. Hearsey found time to say to his son, “If I fall, John, rush in and put him to death somehow.” Then, pulling up his horse on the flank of the quarter-guard, he plucked a pistol from his holster, levelled it straight at the head of the native officer, and curtly ordered the men to advance and seize the mutineer. The level pistol, no doubt, had its own logic; but more effective than even the steady and tiny tube was the face that looked from behind it, with command and iron courage in every line. That masterful British will instantly asserted itself. The loose line of the quarter-guard stiffened with instinctive obedience; the men stepped forward; and Mungul Pandy, with one unsteady glance at Hearsey’s stern visage, turned with a quick movement the muzzle of his gun to his own breast, thrust his naked toe into the trigger, and fell, self-shot. He survived to be hanged, with due official ceremonies, seven days afterwards.

It was a true instinct which, after this, taught the British soldier to call every mutinous Sepoy a “Pandy.” That incident at Barrackpore is really the history of the Indian Mutiny in little. All its elements are there: the bhang-stimulated fanaticism of the Sepoy, with its quick contagion, running through all Sepoy ranks; the hasty rush of the solitary officer, gallant, but ill-fated, a single man trying to suppress a regiment. Here, too, is the colonel of the 34th, who, with a cluster of regiments on the point of mutiny, decides that it is “useless” to face a dangerously excited Sepoy armed with a musket, and retires to “report” the business to his brigadier. He is the type of that failure of official nerve—fortunately very rare—which gave the Mutiny its early successes. General Hearsey, again, with his grim “D⸺ his musket!” supplies the example of that courage, swift, fierce, and iron-nerved, that in the end crushed the Mutiny and restored the British Empire in India.

The Great Mutiny, as yet, has found neither its final historian, nor its sufficient poet. What other nation can show in its record such a cycle of heroism as that which lies in the history of the British in India between May 10, 1857—the date of the Meerut outbreak, and the true beginning of the Mutiny—and November 1, 1858, when the Queen’s proclamation officially marked its close? But the heroes in that great episode—the men of Lucknow, and Delhi, and Arrah, the men who marched and fought under Havelock, who held the Ridge at Delhi under Wilson, who stormed the Alumbagh under Clyde—though they could make history, could not write it. There are a hundred “Memoirs,” and “Journals,” and “Histories” of the great revolt, but the Mutiny still waits for its Thucydides and its Napier. Trevelyan’s “Cawnpore,” it is true, will hold its readers breathless with its fire, and movement, and graphic force; but it deals with only one picturesque and dreadful episode of the Great Mutiny. The “History of the Mutiny,” by Kaye and Malleson, is laborious, honest, accurate; but no one can pretend that it is very readable. It has Kinglake’s diffuseness without Kinglake’s literary charm. The work, too, is a sort of literary duet of a very controversial sort. Colonel Malleson, from the notes, continually contradicts Sir John Kaye in the text, and he does it with a bluntness, and a diligence, which have quite a humorous effect.

Not only is the Mutiny without an historian, but it remains without any finally convincing analysis of its causes. Justin McCarthy’s summary of the causes of the Mutiny, as given in his “History of Our Own Times,” is a typical example of wrong-headed judgment. Mr. McCarthy contemplates the Mutiny through the lens of his own politics, and almost regards it with complacency as a mere struggle for Home Rule! It was not a Mutiny, he says, like that at the Nore; it was a revolution, like that in France at the end of the eighteenth century. It was “a national and religious war,” a rising of the many races of India against the too oppressive Saxon. The native princes were in it as well as the native soldiers.

The plain facts of the case are fatal to that theory. The struggle was confined to one Presidency out of three. Only two dynastic princes—Nana Sahib and the Ranee of Jhansi—joined in the outbreak. The people in the country districts were passive; the British revenue, except over the actual field of strife, was regularly paid. If their own trained native soldiery turned against the British, other natives thronged in thousands to their flag. A hundred examples might be given where native loyalty and valour saved the situation for the English.

There were Sepoys on both sides of the entrenchment at Lucknow. Counting camp followers, native servants, &c., there were two black faces to every white face under the British flag which fluttered so proudly over the historic Ridge at Delhi. The “protected” Sikh chiefs, by their fidelity, kept British authority from temporary collapse betwixt the Jumna and the Sutlej. They formed what Sir Richard Temple calls “a political breakwater,” on which the fury of rebellious Hindustan broke in vain. The Chief of Pattalia employed 5000 troops in guarding the trunk road betwixt the Punjaub and Delhi, along which reinforcements and warlike supplies were flowing to the British force on the Ridge. This enabled the whole strength of the British to be concentrated on the siege. The Chief of Jhind was the first native ruler who appeared in the field with an armed force on the British side, and his troops took part in the final assault on Delhi. Golab Singh sent from his principality, stretching along the foot of the Himalayas, strong reinforcements to the British troops besieging Delhi. “The sight of these troops moving against the mutineers in the darkest hour of British fortunes produced,” says Sir Richard Temple, “a profound moral effect on the Punjaub.”

If John Lawrence had to disband or suppress 36,000 mutinous Sepoys in the Punjaub, he was able to enlist from Ghoorkas and Sikhs and the wild tribes on the Afghan borders more than another 36,000 to take their places. He fed the scanty and gallant force which kept the British flag flying before Delhi with an ever-flowing stream of native soldiers of sufficient fidelity. At the time of the Mutiny there were 38,000 British soldiers in a population of 180,000,000. If the Mutiny had been indeed a “national” uprising, what chances of survival would the handful of British have had?

It is quite true that the Mutiny, in its later stages, drew to itself political forces, and took a political aspect. The Hindu Sepoy, says Herbert Edwardes, “having mutinied about a cartridge, had nothing to propose for an Empire, and fell in, of necessity, with the only policy which was feasible at the moment, a Mohammedan king of Delhi. And so, with a revived Mogul dynasty at its head, the Mutiny took the form of a struggle between the Moslem and the Christian for empire, and this agitated every village in which there was a mosque or a mollah.” But the emergence of the Mogul dynasty in the struggle was an afterthought, not to say, an accident. The old king at Delhi, discrowned and almost forgotten, was caught up by the mutineers as a weapon or a flag.

The outbreak was thus, at the beginning, a purely military mutiny; but its complexion and character later on were affected by local circumstances. In Oude, for example, the Mutiny was welcomed, as it seemed to offer those dispossessed by the recent annexation, a chance of revenge. At Delhi it found a centre in the old king’s palace, an inspiration in Mohammedan fanaticism, and a nominal leader in the representative of the old Mogul dynasty. So the Mutiny grew into a new struggle for empire on the part of some of the Mohammedan princes.

Many of the contributing causes of the Mutiny are clear enough. Discipline had grown perilously lax throughout Bengal; and the Bengal troops were, of all who marched under the Company’s flag, the most dangerous when once they got out of hand. They consisted mainly of high-caste Brahmins and Rajpoots. They burned with caste pride. They were of incredible arrogance. The regiments, too, were made up largely of members of the same clan, and each regiment had its own complete staff of native officers. Conspiracy was easy in such a body. Secrets were safe. Interests and passions were common. When the British officers had all been slaughtered out, the regiment, as a fighting machine, was yet perfect. Each regiment was practically a unit, knit together by ties of common blood, and speech, and faith, ruled by common superstitions, and swayed by common passions.

The men had the petulance and the ignorance of children. They believed that the entire population of England consisted of 100,000 souls. When the first regiment of Highlanders landed, the whisper ran across the whole Presidency, that there were no more men in England, and that, in default of men, the women had been sent out! Later on, says Trevelyan, the native mind evolved another theory to explain the Highlanders’ kilts. They wore petticoats, it was whispered, as a public and visible symbol that their mission was to take vengeance for the murder of English ladies.

Many causes combined to enervate military discipline. There had been petty mutinies again and again, unavenged, or only half avenged. Mutineers had been petted, instead of being shot or hanged. Lord Dalhousie had weakened the despotic authority of the commanding officers, and had taught the Sepoy to appeal to the Government against his officers.

Now the Sepoy has one Celtic quality: his loyalty must have a personal object. He will endure, or even love, a despot, but it must be a despot he can see and hear. He can be ruled; but it must be by a person, not by a “system.” When the commander of a regiment of Sepoys ceased to be a despot, the symbol and centre of all authority, and became only a knot in a line of official red tape, he lost the respect of his Sepoys, and the power to control them. Said Rajah Maun Singh, in a remarkable letter to the Talookdars of his province: “There used to be twenty to twenty-five British officers to every 1000 men, and these officers were subordinate to one single man. But nowadays there are 1000 officers and 1000 kings among 1000 men: the men are officers and kings themselves, and when such is the case there are no soldiers to fight.”

Upon this mass of armed men, who had lost the first of soldierly habits, obedience, and who were fermenting with pride, fanaticism, and ignorance, there blew what the Hindus themselves called a “Devil’s wind,” charged with a thousand deadly influences. The wildest rumours ran from barracks to barracks. One of those mysterious and authorless predictions which run before, and sometimes cause, great events was current. Plassey was fought in 1757; the English raj, the prediction ran, would last exactly a century; so 1857 must see its fall. Whether the prophecy was Hindu or Mohammedan cannot be decided; but it had been current for a quarter of a century, and both Hindu and Mohammedan quoted it and believed it. As a matter of fact, the great Company did actually expire in 1857!

Good authorities hold that the greased cartridges were something more than the occasion of the Mutiny; they were its supreme producing cause. The history of the greased cartridges may be told almost in a sentence. “Brown Bess” had grown obsolete; the new rifle, with its grooved barrel, needed a lubricated cartridge, and it was whispered that the cartridge was greased with a compound of cow’s fat and swine’s fat, charged with villainous theological properties. It would destroy at once the caste of the Hindu, and the ceremonial purity of the Mohammedan! Sir John Lawrence declares that “the proximate cause of the Mutiny was the cartridge affair, and nothing else.” Mr. Lecky says that “recent researches have fully proved that the real, as well as the ostensible, cause of the Mutiny was the greased cartridges.” He adds, this is “a shameful and terrible fact.” The Sepoys, he apparently holds, were right in their belief that in the grease that smeared the cartridges was hidden a conspiracy against their religion! “If mutiny,” Mr. Lecky adds, “was ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.”

But is this accusation valid? That the military authorities really designed to inflict a religious wrong on the Sepoys in the matter of the cartridges no one, of course, believes. But there was, undoubtedly, much of heavy-handed clumsiness in the official management of the business. As a matter of fact, however, no greased cartridges were actually issued to any Sepoys. Some had been sent out from England, for the purpose of testing them under the Indian climate; large numbers had been actually manufactured in India; but the Sepoys took the alarm early, and none of the guilty cartridges were actually issued to the men. “From first to last,” says Kaye, “no such cartridges were ever issued to the Sepoys, save, perhaps, to a Ghoorka regiment, at their own request.”

When once, however, the suspicions of the Sepoys were, rightly or wrongly, aroused, it was impossible to soothe them. The men were told that they might grease the cartridges themselves; but the paper in which the new cartridges were wrapped had now, to alarmed Sepoy eyes, a suspiciously greasy look, and the men refused to handle it.

The Sepoy conscience was, in truth, of very eccentric sensitiveness. Native hands made up the accused cartridges without concern; the Sepoys themselves used them freely—when they could get them—against the British after the Mutiny broke out. But a fanatical belief on the part of the Sepoys, that these particular cartridges concealed in their greasy folds a dark design against their religion, was undoubtedly the immediate occasion of the Great Mutiny. Yet it would be absurd to regard this as its single producing cause. In order to assert this, we must forget all the other evil forces at work to produce the cataclysm: the annexation of Oude; the denial of the sacred right of “adoption” to the native princes; the decay of discipline in the Sepoy ranks; the loss of reverence for their officers by the men, &c.

The Sepoys, it is clear, were, on many grounds, discontented with the conditions of their service. The keen, brooding, and somewhat melancholy genius of Henry Lawrence foresaw the coming trouble, and fastened on this as one of its causes. In an article written in March 1856, he says that the conditions of the Indian Army denied a career to any native soldier of genius, and this must put the best brains of the Sepoys in quarrel with the British rule. Ninety out of every hundred Sepoys, he said in substance, are satisfied; but the remaining ten are discontented, some of them to a dangerous degree; and the discontented ten were the best soldiers of the hundred! But, as it happened, the Mutiny threw up no native soldier of genius, except, perhaps, Tantia Topee, who was not a Sepoy!

“The salt water” was undoubtedly amongst the minor causes which provoked the Mutiny. The Sepoys dreaded the sea; they believed they could not cross it without a fatal loss of caste, and the new form of military oath, which made the Sepoy liable for over-sea service, was believed, by the veterans, to extend to them, even though they had not taken it: and so the Sepoy imagination was disquieted.

Lord Dalhousie’s over-Anglicised policy, it may be added, was at once too liberal, and too impatient, for the Eastern mind, with its obstinacy of habit, its hatred of change, its easily-roused suspiciousness. As Kaye puts it, Lord Dalhousie poured his new wine into old bottles, with too rash a hand. “The wine was good wine, strong wine, wine to gladden the heart of man;” but poured into such ancient and shrunken bottles too rashly, it was fatal. It was because we were “too English,” adds Kaye, that the great crisis arose; and “it was only because we were English that, when it arose, it did not overwhelm us.” We trod, in a word, with heavy-footed British clumsiness on the historic superstitions, the ancient habitudes of the Sepoys, and so provoked them to revolt. But the dour British character, which is at the root of British clumsiness, in the end, overbore the revolt.

The very virtues of the British rule, thus proved its peril. Its cool justice, its steadfast enforcement of order, its tireless warfare against crime, made it hated of all the lawless and predatory classes. Every native who lived by vice, chafed under a justice which might be slow and passionless, but which could not be bribed, and in the long-run could not be escaped.

Some, at least, of the dispossessed princes, diligently fanned these wild dreams and wilder suspicions which haunted the Sepoy mind, till it kindled into a flame. The Sepoys were told they had conquered India for the English; why should they not now conquer it for themselves? The chupatties—mysterious signals, coming whence no man knew, and meaning, no man could tell exactly what—passed from village to village. Usually with the chupatti ran a message—“Sub lal hojaega” (“everything will become red”)—a Sibylline announcement, which might be accepted as a warning against the too rapid spread of the English raj, or a grim prediction of universal bloodshed. Whence the chupatties came, or what they exactly meant, is even yet a matter of speculation. The one thing certain is, they were a storm signal, not very intelligible, perhaps, but highly effective.

That there was a conspiracy throughout Bengal for the simultaneous revolt of all Sepoys on May 31, cannot be doubted, and, on the whole, it was well for the English raj that the impatient troopers broke out at Meerut before the date agreed upon.

Sir Richard Temple, whose task it was to examine the ex-king of Delhi’s papers after the capture of the city, found amongst them an immense number of letters and reports from leading Mohammedans—priests and others. These letters glowed with fanatical fire. Temple declared they convinced him that “Mohammedan fanaticism is a volcanic agency, which will probably burst forth in eruptions from time to time.” But were Christian missions any source of political peril to British rule in India? On this point John Lawrence’s opinion ought to be final. He drafted a special despatch on the subject, and Sir Richard Temple, who was then his secretary, declares he “conned over and over again every paragraph as it was drafted.” It represented his final judgment on the subject. He held that “Christian things done in a Christian way could never be politically dangerous in India.” While scrupulously abstaining from interference in the religions of the people, the Government, he held, “should be more explicit than before”—not less explicit—“in avowing its Christian character.”

The explanation offered by the aged king of Delhi, is terse, and has probably as much of truth as more lengthy and philosophical theories. Colonel Vibart relates how, after the capture of Delhi, he went to see the king, and found him sitting cross-legged on a native bedstead, rocking himself to and fro. He was “a small and attenuated old man, apparently between eighty and ninety years of age, with a long white beard, and almost totally blind.” Some one asked the old king what was the real cause of the outbreak at Delhi. “I don’t know,” was the reply; “I suppose my people gave themselves up to the devil!”

The distribution of the British forces in Bengal, in 1857, it may be noted, made mutiny easy and safe. We have learned the lesson of the Mutiny to-day, and there are now 74,000 British troops, with 88 batteries of British artillery, in India, while the Sepoy regiments number only 150,000, with 13 batteries of artillery. But in 1857, the British garrison had sunk to 38,000, while the Sepoys numbered 200,000. Most of the artillery was in native hands. In Bengal itself, it might almost be said, there were no British troops, the bulk of them being garrisoned on the Afghan or Pegu frontiers. A map showing the distribution of troops on May 1, 1857—Sepoys in black dots, and British in red—is a thing to meditate over. Such a map is pustuled with black dots, an inky way stretching from Cabul to Calcutta; while the red points gleam faintly, and at far-stretched intervals.

All the principal cities were without European troops. There were none at Delhi, none at Benares, none at Allahabad. In the whole province of Oude there was only one British battery of artillery. The treasuries, the arsenals, the roads of the North-West Provinces, might almost be said to be wholly in the hands of Sepoys. Betwixt Meerut and Dinapore, a stretch of 1200 miles, there were to be found only two weak British regiments. Never was a prize so rich held with a hand so slack and careless! It was the evil fate of England, too, that when the storm broke, some of the most important posts were in the hands of men paralysed by mere routine, or in whom soldierly fire had been quenched by the chills of old age.

Of the deeper sources of the Mutiny, John Lawrence held, that the great numerical preponderance of the Sepoys in the military forces holding India, was the chief. “Was it to be expected,” he asked, “that the native soldiery, who had charge of our fortresses, arsenals, magazines, and treasuries, without adequate European control, should fail to gather extravagant ideas of their own importance?” It was the sense of power that induced them to rebel. The balance of numbers, and of visible strength, seemed to be overwhelmingly with them.

Taken geographically, the story of the Mutiny has three centres, and may be covered by the tragedy of Cawnpore, the assault on Delhi, and the heroic defence and relief of Lucknow. Taken in order of time, it has three stages. The first stretches from the outbreak at Meerut in May to the end of September. This is the heroic stage of the Mutiny. No reinforcements had arrived from England during these months. It was the period of the massacres, and of the tragedy of Cawnpore. Yet during those months Delhi was stormed, Cawnpore avenged, and Havelock made his amazing march, punctuated with daily battles, for the relief of Lucknow. The second stage extends from October 1857, to March 1858, when British troops were poured upon the scene of action, and Colin Campbell recaptured Lucknow, and broke the strength of the revolt. The third stage extends to the close of 1858, and marks the final suppression of the Mutiny.

The story, with its swift changes, its tragical sufferings, its alternation of disaster and triumph, is a warlike epic, and might rather be sung in dithyrambic strains, than told in cold and halting prose. If some genius could do for the Indian Mutiny what Napier has done for the Peninsular War, it would be the most kindling bit of literature in the English language. What a demonstration the whole story is, of the Imperial genius of the British race! “A nation,” to quote Hodson—himself one of the most brilliant actors in the great drama—“which could conquer a country like the Punjaub, with a Hindoostanee army, then turn the energies of the conquered Sikhs to subdue the very army by which they were tamed; which could fight out a position like Peshawur for years, in the very teeth of the Afghan tribes; and then, when suddenly deprived of the regiments which effected this, could unhesitatingly employ those very tribes to disarm and quell those regiments when in mutiny—a nation which could do this, is destined indeed to rule the world!”

These sketches do not pretend to be a reasoned and adequate “history” of the Mutiny. They are, as their title puts it, the “Tale” of the Mutiny—a simple chain of picturesque incidents, and, for the sake of dramatic completeness, the sketches are grouped round the three heroic names of the Mutiny—Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Delhi. Only the chief episodes in the great drama can be dealt with in a space so brief, and they will be told in simple fashion as tales, which illustrate the soldierly daring of the men, and the heroic fortitude of the women, of our race.

On the evening of May 10, 1857, the church bells were sounding their call to prayer across the parade-ground, and over the roofs of the cantonment at Meerut. It had been a day of fierce heat; the air had scorched like a white flame; all day long fiery winds had blown, hot as from the throat of a seven times heated furnace. The tiny English colony at Meerut—languid women, white-faced children, and officers in loosest undress—panted that long Sunday in their houses, behind the close blinds, and under the lazily swinging punkahs. But the cool night had come, the church bells were ringing, and in the dusk of evening, officers and their wives were strolling or driving towards the church. They little dreamed that the call of the church bells, as it rose and sank over the roofs of the native barracks, was, for many of them, the signal of doom. It summoned the native troops of Meerut to revolt; it marked the beginning of the Great Mutiny.

Yet the very last place, at which an explosion might have been expected, was Meerut. It was the one post in the north-west where the British forces were strongest. The Rifles were there, 1000 strong; the 6th Dragoons (Carabineers), 600 strong; together with a fine troop of horse artillery, and details of various other regiments. Not less, in a word, than 2200 British troops, in fair, if not in first-class, fighting condition, were at the station, while the native regiments at Meerut, horse and foot, did not reach 3000. It did not need a Lawrence or a Havelock at Meerut to make revolt impossible, or to stamp it instantly and fiercely out if it were attempted. A stroke of very ordinary soldiership might have accomplished this; and in that event, the Great Mutiny itself might have been averted.

The general in command at Meerut, however, had neither energy nor resolution. He had drowsed and nodded through some fifty years of routine service, rising by mere seniority. He was now old, obese, indolent, and notoriously incapable. He had agreeable manners, and a soothing habit of ignoring disagreeable facts. Lord Melbourne’s favourite question, “Why can’t you leave it alone?” represented General Hewitt’s intellect. These are qualities dear to the official mind, and explain General Hewitt’s rise to high rank, but they are not quite the gifts needed to suppress a mutiny. In General Hewitt’s case, the familiar fable of an army of lions commanded by an ass, was translated into history once more.

On the evening of May 5 cartridges were being served out for the next morning’s parade, and eighty-five men of the 3rd Native Cavalry refused to receive or handle them, though they were the old familiar greased cartridges, not the new, in whose curve, as we have seen, a conspiracy to rob the Hindu of his caste, and the Mohammedan of his ceremonial purity, was vehemently suspected to exist. The men were tried by a court-martial of fifteen native officers—six of them being Mohammedans and nine Hindus—and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

At daybreak on the 9th, the whole military force of the station was assembled to witness the military degradation of the men. The British, with muskets and cannon loaded, formed three sides of a hollow square; on the fourth were drawn up the native regiments, sullen, agitated, yet overawed by the sabres of the Dragoons, the grim lines of the steady Rifles, and the threatening muzzles of the loaded cannon. The eighty-five mutineers stood in the centre of the square.

One by one the men were stripped of their uniform—adorned in many instances with badges and medals, the symbols of proved courage and of ancient fidelity. One by one, with steady clang of hammer, the fetters were riveted on the limbs of the mutineers, while white faces and dark faces alike looked on. For a space of time, to be reckoned almost by hours, the monotonous beat of the hammer rang over the lines, steady as though frozen into stone, of the stern British, and over the sea of dark Sepoy faces that formed the fourth side of the square. In the eyes of these men, at least, the eighty-five manacled felons were martyrs.

The parade ended; the dishonoured eighty-five marched off with clank of chained feet to the local gaol. But that night, in the huts and round the camp fires of all the Sepoy regiments, the whispered talk was of mutiny and revenge. The very prostitutes in the native bazaars with angry scorn urged them to revolt. The men took fire. To wait for the 31st, the day fixed for simultaneous mutiny throughout Bengal, was too sore a trial for their patience. The next day was Sunday; the Sahibs would all be present at evening service in the church; they would be unarmed. So the church bells that called the British officers to prayer, should call their Sepoys to mutiny.

In the dusk of that historic Sabbath evening, as the church bells awoke, and sent their pulses of clangorous sound over the cantonment, the men of the 3rd Native Cavalry broke from their quarters, and in wild tumult, with brandished sabres and cries of “Deen! Deen!” galloped to the gaol, burst open the doors, and brought back in triumph the eighty-five “martyrs.” The Sepoy infantry regiments, the 11th and 20th, ran to their lines, and fell into rank under their native officers. A British sergeant, running with breathless speed, brought the news to Colonel Finnis of the 11th. “For God’s sake, sir,” he said, “fly! The men have mutinied.”

Finnis, a cool and gallant veteran, was the last of men to “fly.” He instantly rode down to the lines. The other British officers gathered round him, and for a brief space, with orders, gesticulations, and appeals, they held the swaying regiments steady, hoping every moment to hear the sound of the British dragoons and artillery sweeping to the scene of action. On the other side of the road stood the 20th Sepoys. The British officers there also, with entreaties and remonstrances and gestures, were trying to keep the men in line. For an hour, while the evening deepened, that strange scene, of twenty or thirty Englishmen keeping 2000 mutineers steady, lasted: and still there was no sound of rumbling guns, or beat of trampling hoofs, to tell of British artillery and sabres appearing on the scene. The general was asleep, or indifferent, or frightened, or helpless through sheer want of purpose or of brains!

Finnis, who saw that the 20th were on the point of breaking loose, left his own regiment, and rode over to help its officers. The dusk by this time had deepened almost into darkness. A square, soldierly figure, only dimly seen, Finnis drew bridle in front of the sullen line of the 20th, and leaned over his horse’s neck to address the men. At that moment a fiercer wave of excitement ran across the regiment. The men began to call out in the rear ranks. Suddenly the muskets of the front line fell to the present, a dancing splutter of flame swept irregularly along the front, and Finnis fell, riddled with bullets. The Great Mutiny had begun!

The 11th took fire at the sound of the crackling muskets of the 20th. They refused, indeed, to shoot their own officers, but hustled them roughly off the ground. The 20th, however, by this time were shooting at every white face in sight. The 3rd Cavalry galloped on errands of arson and murder to the officers’ houses. Flames broke out on every side. A score of bungalows were burning. The rabble in the bazaar added themselves to the mutineers, and shouts from the mob, the long-drawn-out splutter of venomous musketry, the shrieks of flying victims, broke the quiet of the Sabbath evening.

Such of the Europeans in Meerut that night as could make their escape to the British lines were safe; but for the rest, every person of European blood who fell into the hands of the mutineers or of the bazaar rabble was slain, irrespective of age or sex. Brave men were hunted like rats through the burning streets, or died, fighting for their wives and little ones. English women were outraged and mutilated. Little children were impaled on Sepoy bayonets, or hewn to bits with tulwars. And all this within rifle-shot of lines where might have been gathered, with a single bugle-blast, some 2200 British troops!

General Hewitt did, indeed, very late in the evening march his troops on to the general parade-ground, and deployed them into line. But the Sepoys had vanished; some on errands of murder and rapine, the great body clattering off in disconnected groups along the thirty odd miles of dusty road, barred by two rivers, which led to Delhi.

One trivial miscalculation robbed the outbreak of what might well have been its most disastrous feature. The Sepoys calculated on finding the Rifles, armed only with their side-arms, in the church. But on that very evening, by some happy chance, the church parade was fixed for half-an-hour later than the previous Sunday. So the Native Cavalry galloped down to the lines of the Rifles half-an-hour too soon, and found their intended victims actually under arms! They wheeled off promptly towards the gaol; but the narrow margin of that half-hour saved the Rifles from surprise and slaughter.

Hewitt had, as we have seen, in addition to the Rifles, a strong troop of horse artillery and 600 British sabres in hand. He could have pursued the mutineers and cut them down ruthlessly in detail. The gallant officers of the Carabineers pleaded for an order to pursue, but in vain. Hewitt did not even send news to Delhi of the revolt! With a regiment of British rifles, 1000 strong, standing in line, he did not so much as shoot down, with one fierce and wholesome volley, the budmashes, who were busy in murder and outrage among the bungalows. When day broke Meerut showed streets of ruins blackened with fire, and splashed red with the blood of murdered Englishmen and Englishwomen. According to the official report, “groups of savages were actually seen gloating over the mangled and mutilated remains of their victims.” Yet Hewitt thought he satisfied all the obligations of a British soldier by peacefully and methodically collecting the bodies of slaughtered Englishmen and Englishwomen. He did not shoot or hang a single murderer!

It is idle, indeed, to ask what the English at Meerut did on the night of the 10th; it is simpler to say what they did not do. Hewitt did nothing that night; did nothing with equal diligence the next day—while the Sepoys that had fled from Meerut were slaying at will in the streets of Delhi. He allowed his brigade, in a helpless fashion, to bivouac on the parade-ground; then, in default of any ideas of his own, took somebody else’s equally helpless advice, and led his troops back to their cantonments to protect them!

General Hewitt explained afterwards that while he was responsible for the district, his brigadier, Archdale Wilson, was in command of the station. Wilson replied that “by the regulations, Section XVII.,” he was under the directions of General Hewitt, and, if he did nothing, it was because that inert warrior ordered nothing to be done. Wilson, it seems, advised Hewitt not to attempt any pursuit, as it was uncertain which way the mutineers had gone. That any attempt might be made to dispel that uncertainty did not occur, apparently, to either of the two surprising officers in command at Meerut! A battery of galloper guns outside the gates of Delhi might have saved that city. It might, indeed, have arrested the Great Mutiny.

But all India waited, listening in vain for the sound of Hewitt’s cannon. The divisional commander was reposing in his arm-chair at Meerut; his brigadier was contemplating “the regulations, Section XVII.,” and finding there reasons for doing nothing, while mutiny went unwhipped at Meerut, and was allowed at Delhi to find a home, a fortress, and a crowned head! It was rumoured, indeed, and believed for a moment, over half India, that the British in Meerut had perished to a man. How else could it be explained that, at a crisis so terrible, they had vanished so completely from human sight and hearing? Not till May 24—a fortnight after the outbreak—did a party of Dragoons move out from Meerut to suppress some local plunderers in the neighbourhood.

One flash of wrathful valour, it is true, lights up the ignominy of this story. A native butcher was boasting in the bazaar at Meerut how he had killed the wife of the adjutant of the 11th. One of the officers of that regiment heard the story. He suddenly made his appearance in the bazaar, seized the murderer, and brought him away a captive, holding a loaded pistol to his head. A drum-head court-martial was improvised, and the murderer was promptly hanged. But this represents well-nigh the only attempt made at Meerut during the first hours after the outbreak to punish the mutiny and vindicate law.

Colonel Mackenzie, indeed, relates one other incident of a kind to supply a grim satisfaction to the humane imagination even at this distance of time. Mackenzie was a subaltern in one of the revolting regiments—the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry. When the mutiny broke out he rode straight to the lines, did his best to hold the men steady, and finally had to ride for his life with two brother officers, Lieutenant Craigie and Lieutenant Clarke. Here is Colonel Mackenzie’s story. The group, it must be remembered, were riding at a gallop.

The telegraph lines were cut, and a slack wire, which I did not see, as it swung across the road, caught me full on the chest, and bowled me over into the dust. Over my prostrate body poured the whole column of our followers, and I well remember my feelings as I looked up at the shining hoofs. Fortunately I was not hurt, and regaining my horse, I remounted, and soon nearly overtook Craigie and Clarke, when I was horror-struck to see a palanquin-gharry—a sort of box-shaped venetian-sided carriage—being dragged slowly onwards by its driverless horse, while beside it rode a trooper of the 3rd Cavalry, plunging his sword repeatedly through the open window into the body of its already dead occupant—an unfortunate European woman. But Nemesis was upon the murderer. In a moment Craigie had dealt him a swinging cut across the back of the neck, and Clarke had run him through the body. The wretch fell dead, the first Sepoy victim at Meerut to the sword of the avenger of blood.

For the next few weeks Hewitt was, probably, the best execrated man in all India. We have only to imagine what would have happened if a Lawrence, instead of a Hewitt, had commanded at Meerut that night, to realise for how much one fool counts in human history. That Hewitt did not stamp out mutiny or avenge murder in Meerut was bad; his most fatal blunder was, that he neither pursued the mutineers in their flight to Delhi, nor marched hard on their tracks to the help of the little British colony there.

Lord Roberts, indeed, holds that pursuit would have been “futile,” and that no action by the British commanders at Meerut could have saved Delhi; and this is the judgment, recorded in cold blood nearly forty years afterwards, by one of the greatest of British soldiers. Had the Lord Roberts of Candahar, however, been in command himself at Meerut, it may be shrewdly suspected the mutineers would not have gone unpursued, nor Delhi unwarned! Amateur judgments are not, of course, to be trusted in military affairs; but to the impatient civilian judgment, it seems as if the massacres in Delhi, the long and bitter siege, the whole tragical tale of the Mutiny, might have been avoided if Hewitt had possessed one thrill of the fierce energy of Nicholson, or one breath of the proud courage of Havelock.

CHAPTER II
DELHI

Delhi lies thirty-eight miles to the south-west of Meerut, a city seven miles in circumference, ancient, stately, beautiful. The sacred Jumna runs by it. Its grey, wide-curving girdle of crenellated walls, is pierced with seven gates. It is a city of mosques and palaces and gardens, and crowded native bazaars. Delhi in 1857 was of great political importance, if only because the last representative of the Grand Mogul, still bearing the title of the King of Delhi, resided there in semi-royal state. The Imperial Palace, with its crowd of nearly 12,000 inmates, formed a sort of tiny royal city within Delhi itself, and here, if anywhere, mutiny might find a centre and a head.

Moreover, the huge magazines, stored with munitions of war, made the city of the utmost military value to the British. Yet, by special treaty, no British troops were lodged in Delhi itself; there were none encamped even on the historic Ridge outside it.

The 3rd Cavalry, heading the long flight of mutineers, reached Delhi in the early morning of the 11th of May. They spurred across the bridge, slew the few casual Englishmen they met as they swept through the streets, galloped to the king’s palace, and with loud shouts announced that they had “slain all the English at Meerut, and had come to fight for the faith.”

The king, old and nervous, hesitated. He had no reason for revolt. Ambition was dead in him. His estates had thriven under British administration. His revenues had risen from a little over £40,000 to £140,000. He enjoyed all that he asked of the universe, a lazy, sensual, opium-soaked life. Why should he exchange a musky and golden sloth, to the Indian imagination so desirable, for the dreadful perils of revolt and war? But the palace at Delhi was a moral plague-spot, a nest of poisonous insects, a vast household in which fermented every bestial passion to which human nature can sink. And discontent gave edge and fire to every other evil force. A spark falling into such a magazine might well produce an explosion. And the shouts of the revolted troopers from Meerut at its gates supplied the necessary spark.

While the old king doubted, and hesitated, and scolded, the palace guards opened the gates to the men of the 3rd Cavalry, who instantly swept in and slaughtered the English officials and English ladies found in it. Elsewhere mutiny found many victims. The Delhi Bank was attacked and plundered, and the clerks and the manager with his family were slain. The office of the Delhi Gazette shared the same fate, the unfortunate compositors being killed in the very act of setting up the “copy” which told of the tragedy at Meerut. All Europeans found that day in the streets of Delhi, down to the very babies, were killed without pity.

There were, as we have said, no white troops in Delhi. The city was held by a Sepoy garrison, the 38th, 54th, and 74th Sepoy regiments, with a battery of Sepoy artillery. The British officers of these regiments, when news of the Meerut outbreak reached them, made no doubt but that Hewitt’s artillery and cavalry from Meerut would follow fierce and fast on the heels of the mutineers. The Sepoys were exhorted briefly to be true to their salt, and the men stepped cheerfully off to close and hold the city gates against the mutineers.

The chief scene of interest for the next few hours was the main-guard of the Cashmere Gate. This was a small fortified enclosure in the rear of the great gate itself, always held by a guard of fifty Sepoys under a European officer. A low verandah ran around the inner wall of the main-guard, inside which, were the quarters of the Sepoys; a ramp or sloping stone causeway led to the summit of the gate itself, on which stood a small two-roomed house, serving as quarters for the British officer on duty. From the main-guard, two gates opened into the city itself.

The guard on that day consisted of a detachment of the 38th Native Infantry. They had broken into mutiny, and assisted with cheers and laughter at the spectacle of Colonel Ripley, of the 54th N.I., with other officers of that regiment, being hunted and sabred by some of the mutinous light cavalry who had arrived from Meerut. Two companies of the 54th were sent hurriedly to the gate, and met the body of their colonel being carried out literally hacked to pieces.

Colonel Vibart, one of the officers of the 54th, has given in his work, “The Sepoy Mutiny,” a vivid account of the scene in the main-guard, as he entered it. In one corner lay the dead bodies of five British officers who had just been shot. The main-guard itself was crowded with Sepoys in a mood of sullen disloyalty. Through the gate which opened on the city could be seen the revolted cavalry troopers, in their French-grey uniforms, their swords wet with the blood of the British officers they had just slain. A cluster of terrified English ladies—some of them widows already, though they knew it not—had sought refuge here, and their white faces added a note of terror to the picture.

Major Abbott, with 150 men of the 74th N.I., presently marched into the main-guard; but the hold of the officers on the men was of the slightest, and when mutiny, in the mass of Sepoys crowded into the main-guard, would break out into murder, nobody could guess.

Major Abbott collected the dead bodies of the fallen officers, put them in an open bullock-cart, covered them with the skirts of some ladies’ dresses, and despatched the cart, with its tragic freight, to the cantonments on the Ridge. The cart found its way to the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, and was abandoned there; and when, a month afterwards, the force under Sir Henry Barnard marched on to the crest the cart still stood there, with the dead bodies of the unfortunate officers—by this time turned to skeletons—in it.

Matters quickly came to a crisis at the Cashmere Gate. About four o’clock in the afternoon there came in quick succession the sound of guns from the magazine. This was followed by a deep, sullen, and prolonged blast that shook the very walls of the main-guard itself, while up into the blue sky slowly climbed a mighty cloud of smoke. Willoughby had blown up the great powder-magazine; and the sound shook both the nerves and the loyalty of the Sepoys who crowded the main-guard. There was kindled amongst them the maddest agitation, not lessened by the sudden appearance of Willoughby and Forrest, scorched and blackened by the explosion from which they had in some marvellous fashion escaped.

Brigadier Graves, from the Ridge, now summoned Abbott and the men of the 74th back to that post. After some delay they commenced their march, two guns being sent in advance. But the first sound of their marching feet acted as a match to the human powder-magazine. The leading files of Abbott’s men had passed through the Cashmere Gate when the Sepoys of the 38th suddenly rushed at it and closed it, and commenced to fire on their officers. In a moment the main-guard was a scene of terror and massacre. It was filled with eddying smoke, with shouts, with the sound of crackling muskets, of swearing men and shrieking women. Here is Colonel Vibart’s description of the scene:—

The horrible truth now flashed on me—we were being massacred right and left, without any means of escape! Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I made for the ramp which leads from the courtyard to the bastion above. Every one appeared to be doing the same. Twice I was knocked over as we all frantically rushed up the slope, the bullets whistling past us like hail, and flattening themselves against the parapet with a frightful hiss. To this day it is a perfect marvel to me how any one of us escaped being hit. Poor Smith and Reveley, both of the 74th, were killed close beside me. The latter was carrying a loaded gun, and, raising himself with a dying effort, he discharged both barrels into a knot of Sepoys, and the next moment expired.

The struggling crowd of British officers and ladies reached the bastion and crowded into its embrasures, while the Sepoys from the main-guard below took deliberate pot-shots at them. Presently a light gun was brought to bear on the unhappy fugitives crouching on the summit of the bastion. The ditch was twenty-five feet below, but there was no choice. One by one the officers jumped down. Some buckled their sword-belts together and lowered the ladies. One very stout old lady, Colonel Vibart records, “would neither jump down nor be lowered down; would do nothing but scream. Just then another shot from the gun crashed into the parapet; somebody gave the poor woman a push, and she tumbled headlong into the ditch beneath.” Officers and ladies scrambled up the almost perpendicular bank which forms the farther wall of the ditch, and escaped into the jungle beyond, and began their peril-haunted flight to Meerut.

Abbott, of the 74th, had a less sensational escape. His men told him they had protected him as long as they could; he must now fly for his life. Abbott resisted long, but at last said, “Very well. I’m off to Meerut; but,” he added, with a soldier’s instinct, “give me the colours.” And, carrying the colours of his regiment, he set off with one other officer on his melancholy walk to Meerut.

LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILLOUGHBY, Bengal Artillery

Reproduced, by kind permission of his niece, Miss Wallace, from a photograph of an unfinished water-colour drawing, taken about 1857

The most heroic incident in Delhi that day was the defence and explosion of the great magazine. This was a huge building, standing some 600 yards from the Cashmere Gate, packed with munitions of war—cannon, ammunition, and rifles—sufficient to have armed half a nation, and only a handful of Englishmen to defend it. It was in charge of Lieutenant Willoughby, who had under him two other officers (Forrest and Raynor), four conductors (Buckley, Shaw, Scully, and Crowe), and two sergeants (Edwards and Stewart); a little garrison of nine brave men, whose names deserve to be immortalised.

Willoughby was a soldier of the quiet and coolly courageous order; his men were British soldiers of the ordinary stuff of which the rank and file of the British Army is made. Yet no ancient story or classic fable tells of any deed of daring and self-sacrifice nobler than that which this cluster of commonplace Englishmen was about to perform. The Three Hundred who kept the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian swarms, the Three, who, according to the familiar legend, held the bridge across the Tiber against Lars Porsena, were not of nobler fibre than the Nine who blew up the great magazine at Delhi rather than surrender it to the mutineers.

Willoughby closed and barricaded the gates, and put opposite each two six-pounders, doubly loaded with grape; he placed a 24-pound howitzer so as to command both gates, and covered other vulnerable points with the fire of other guns. In all he had ten pieces of artillery in position—with only nine men to work them. He had, indeed, a score of native officials, and he thrust arms into their reluctant hands, but knew that at the first hostile shot they would run.

But the Nine could not hope to hold the magazine finally against a city in revolt. A fuse was accordingly run into the magazine itself, some barrels of powder were broken open, and their contents heaped on the end of the fuse. The fuse was carried into the open, and one of the party (Scully) stationed beside it, lighted port-fire in hand. Willoughby’s plan was to hold the magazine as long as he could work the guns. But when, as was inevitable, the wave of mutinous Sepoys swept over the walls, Willoughby was to give the signal by a wave of his hat, Scully would instantly light the fuse, and the magazine—with its stores of warlike material, its handful of brave defenders, and its swarm of eager assailants—would vanish in one huge thunderclap!

Presently there came a formal summons in the name of the King of Delhi to surrender the magazine. The summons met with a grim and curt refusal. Now the Sepoys came in solid columns down the narrow streets, swung round the magazine, and girdled it with shouts and a tempest of bullets. The native defenders, at the first shot, clambered down the walls and vanished, and the forlorn but gallant Nine were left alone. Hammers were beating fiercely on the gates. A score of improvised scaling-ladders were placed against the walls, and in a moment the Sepoys were swarming up. A gate was burst open, but, as the assailants tried to rush in, a blast of grape swept through them. Willoughby’s nine guns, each worked by a single gunner, poured their thunder of sound, and storm of shot, swiftly and steadily, on the swaying mass of Sepoys that blocked the gate.

Lieutenant Forrest, who survived the perils of that fierce hour, has told, in cool and soldierly language, its story:—

Buckley, assisted only by myself, loaded and fired in rapid succession the several guns above detailed, firing at least four rounds from each gun, and with the same steadiness as if standing on parade, although the enemy were then some hundreds in number, and kept up a hot fire of musketry on us within forty or fifty yards. After firing the last round, Buckley received a musket ball in his arm above the elbow; I, at the same time, was struck in the left hand by two musket balls.

When, before or since, has there been a contest so heroic or so hopeless? But what can Nine do against twice as many hundreds? From the summit of the walls a deadly fire is concentrated on the handful of gallant British. One after another drops. In another moment will come the rush of the bayonets. Willoughby looks round and sees Scully stooping with lighted port-fire over the fuse, and watching for the agreed signal. He lifts his hand. Coolly and swiftly Scully touches the fuse with his port-fire. The red spark runs along its centre; there is an earth-shaking crash, as of thunder, a sky-piercing leap of flame. The walls of the magazine are torn asunder; bodies of men and fragments of splintered arms fly aloft. The whole city seems to shake with the concussion, and a great pillar of smoke, mushroom-topped and huge, rises slowly in the sky. It is the signal to heaven and earth of how the Nine British, who kept the great magazine, had fulfilled their trust.

Of those gallant Nine, Scully, who fired the train, and four others vanished, along with hundreds of the mutineers, in one red rain. But, somehow, they themselves scarcely knew how, Willoughby, with his two officers, and Conductor Buckley found themselves, smoke-blackened and dazed, outside the magazine, and they escaped death, for the moment at least.

The fugitives who escaped from the Cashmere Gate had some very tragical experiences. Sinking from fatigue and hunger, scorched by the flame-like heat of the sun, wading rivers, toiling through jungles, hunted by villagers, they struggled on, seeking some place of refuge. Some reached Meerut, others Umballa, but many died. Of that much-enduring company of fugitives, it is recorded that the women often showed the highest degree of fortitude and patience. Yet more than one mother had to lay her child, killed by mere exposure or heat, in a nameless jungle grave; more than one wife had to see her husband die, of bullet or sword-stroke, at her feet.

But the fate of these wanderers was happier than that of the Europeans left in the city. Some twenty-seven—eleven of them being children and eight women—took refuge in a house near the great mosque. They held the house for three days, but, having no water, suffered all the agonies of thirst. The Sepoys set vessels of water in front of the house, and bade the poor besieged give up their arms and they should drink. They yielded, gave up the two miserable guns with which they had defended themselves, and were led out. No water was given them. Death alone was to cool those fever-blackened lips. They were set in a row, the eleven children and sixteen men and women, and shot. Let tender-hearted mothers picture that scene, transacted under the white glare of the Indian sun!

Some fifty Europeans and Eurasians barricaded themselves in a strong house in the English quarter of the city. The house was stormed, the unhappy captives were dragged to the King of Delhi’s palace, and thrust into an underground cellar, with no windows and only one door. For five days they sweltered and sickened in that black hole. Then they were brought out, with one huge rope girdling them—men, women, and children, a pale-faced, haggard, half-naked crowd, crouching under one of the great trees in the palace garden. About them gathered a brutal mob of Sepoys and Budmashes, amongst whom was Abool Bukr, the heir-apparent to the King of Delhi. The whole of the victims were murdered, with every accompaniment of cruelty, and it is said that the heir-apparent himself devised horrible refinements of suffering.

Less than six months afterwards Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, shot that princely murderer, with a cluster of his kinsfolk, under the walls of Delhi, and in the presence of some 6000 shuddering natives, first explaining, that they were the murderers of women and children. Their bodies were brought in a cart through the most public street of the city, laid side by side, under the tree and on the very spot where they had tortured and murdered our women.

Mutiny grows swiftly. On Sunday night was fired, from the ranks of the 20th Sepoys, the volley that slew Colonel Finnis, and was, so to speak, the opening note in the long miserere of the Mutiny. At four o’clock on Monday afternoon the thunder of the great magazine, as it exploded, shook the walls of Delhi. Before the grey light of Tuesday morning broke over the royal city every member of the British race in it was either slain or a captive.

When a powder-magazine is fired, the interval of time between the flash of the first ignited grain and the full-throated blast of the explosion is scarcely measurable. And if the cluster of keen and plotting brains behind the Great Mutiny had carried out their plans as they intended, the Mutiny would have had exactly this bewildering suddenness of arrival. There is what seems ample evidence to prove that Sunday, May 31, was fixed for the simultaneous rising of all the Sepoy regiments in Bengal. A small committee of conspirators was at work in each regiment, elaborating the details of the Mutiny. Parties were to be told off in each cantonment, to murder the British officers and their families while in church, to seize the treasury, release the prisoners, and capture the guns. The Sepoy regiments in Delhi were to take possession of that great city, with its arsenal.

The outbreak at Meerut not merely altered the date, it changed the character of the revolt. The powder-magazine exploded, so to speak, in separate patches, and at intervals spread over weeks. It was this circumstance—added to the fact that the Sepoys had rejected the greased cartridges, and with them the Enfield rifle, against which Brown Bess was at a fatal disadvantage—that, speaking humanly, robbed the Mutiny of half its terror, and helped to save the British Empire in India.

But, even allowing for all this, a powder-magazine—although it explodes only by instalments—is a highly uncomfortable residence while the explosion is going on; and seldom before or since, in the long stretch of human history, have human courage and fortitude been put to such a test, as in the case of the handful of British soldiers and civilians who held the North-West Provinces for England during the last days of May 1857.

Sir George Campbell, who was in Simla at the time, has told the story of how he stood one day, early in June, beside the telegraph operator in Umballa, and listened while the wire, to use his own words, “seemed to repeat the experience of Job.” “First we heard that the whole Jullunder brigade had mutinied, and were in full march in our direction, on the way to Delhi. While that message was still being spoken, came another message, to tell us that the troops in Rajpootana had mutinied, and that Rohilcund was lost; following which, I heard that the Moradabad regiment had gone, and that my brother and his young wife had been obliged to fly.”

Let it be remembered that the revolted districts equal in area France, Austria, and Prussia put together; in population they exceeded them. And over this great area, and through this huge population, the process described by the telegrams, to whose rueful syllables Sir George Campbell listened, was being swiftly and incessantly repeated. The British troops did not number 22,000 men, and they were scattered over a hundred military stations, and submerged in a population of 94,000,000. Let the reader imagine fifteen or sixteen British regiments sprinkled in microscopic fragments over an area so vast, and amongst populations so huge!

The Sepoy army in Bengal numbered 150,000 men, and within six weeks of the shot which killed Colonel Finnis at Meerut, of its 120 regiments of horse and foot, only twenty-five remained under the British flag, and not five of these could be depended upon! A whole army, in a word, magnificently drilled, perfectly officered, strong in cavalry, and yet more formidable in guns, was in open and murderous revolt. Some idea of the scale and completeness of the Mutiny can be gathered from the single fact that every regiment of regular cavalry, ten regiments of irregular cavalry out of eighteen, and sixty-three out of seventy-four regiments of infantry, then on the strength of the Bengal army, disappeared finally and completely from its roster!

In each cantonment during the days preceding the revolt, the British officers on the spot were—to return to our figure—like men shut up in a powder-magazine with the train fired. There might be a dozen or twenty British officers with their families at a station held by a battery of native artillery, a couple of squadrons of native horse, and a regiment of native infantry—all plotting revolt and murder! Honour forbade the British to fly. To show a sign of mistrust or take a single visible precaution would be to precipitate the outbreak. Many of the old Bengal officers relied on their Sepoys, with a fond credulity that nothing could alarm, and that made them blind and deaf to the facts about them. “It was not,” says Trevelyan, “till he saw his own house in flames, and not till he looked down the barrels of Sepoy muskets, and heard Sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin to believe that his men were not as staunch as they ought to be.”

But all officers were not so blind as this. They knew their peril. They saw the tragedy coming. They walked day after day in front of the line of their men’s muskets on parade, not knowing when these iron tubes would break into red flame and flying bullets. They lay down night after night, knowing that the Sepoys in every hut were discussing the exact manner and time of their murder. Yet each man kept an untroubled brow, and went patiently the round of his duty, thanking God when he had no wife and child at the station to fall under the tender mercies of the mutineers. Farquhar, of the 7th Light Cavalry, writing to his mother at the time, said, “I slept every night dressed, with my revolver under my pillow, a drawn sword on my bed, and a loaded double-barrelled gun just under my bed. We remained in this jolly state,” he explained, “a fortnight.”

When the outbreak came, and the bungalows were in flames, and the men were shouting and firing on the parade-ground, it was a point of honour among the officers to hurry to the scene and make one last appeal to them, dying too often under the bullets of their own soldiers. The survivors then had to fly, with their women and children, and hide in the hot jungle or wander over the scorching plains, on which the white heat burns like a flame, suffering all the torments of thirst and weariness, of undressed wounds, and of wearing fever. If some great writer, with full knowledge and a pen of fire, could write the story of what was dared and suffered by Englishmen and Englishwomen at a hundred scattered posts throughout the North-West Provinces, in the early stages of the Mutiny, it would be one of the most moving and heroic tales in human records.

Sir Joseph Fayrer tells how, early in 1857, he was a member of a tiger-shooting expedition into the Terai. It was a merry party, and included some famous shots and great civil officials. They had killed their eleventh tiger when the first news of the rising reached the party. “All my companions,” says Fayrer, “except Gubbins, were victims of the Mutiny during the year. Thomason was murdered at Shah Jehanpore; Gonne in the Mullahpore district; Colonel Fischer was killed by the men of his own regiment; Thornhill was murdered at Seetapore; Lester was shot through the neck during the siege of Lucknow; Graydon was killed after the first relief of Lucknow.” Swift-following deaths of this sort have to be multiplied over the whole area of the Mutiny, before we can realise what it cost in life.

Fayrer, as a single example of the sort of tragedies which took place on every side, tells how his brother, who was an officer in a regiment of irregular cavalry, was killed. He was second in command of a detachment supposed to be of loyalty beyond suspicion. It had been sent by Lawrence from Lucknow to maintain order in the unsettled districts. There was no sign that the men intended to rise. The morning bugle had gone, the troop was ready to start, and young Fayrer, who had gone out, walked to a well with his charger’s bridle over his arm, and was drinking water from a cup. Suddenly one of his own troopers came up behind him and cut him down through the back of the neck with his tulwar. “The poor lad—only twenty-three—fell dead on the spot, gasping out the word ‘mother’ as he fell.” The troopers instantly rode at the three other British officers of the detachment. One of these slew three Sepoys before he was killed himself; the second, ill mounted, was overtaken and slain; the third, a splendid rider, made a reckless leap over a nullah, where his pursuers dared not follow, and so escaped.

Before describing the great drama at Cawnpore, or Lucknow, or Delhi, it is worth while to give, if only as hasty vignettes, some pictures of what happened at many of the stations scattered through Oude and the Punjaub. They are the opening episodes of a stupendous tragedy.

According to Sir Herbert Edwardes, it was the act of an English boy that saved the Punjaub. A very youthful operator—a mere lad—named Brendish, was by some accident alone in the Delhi Telegraph Office. When the Mutiny broke out he had to flee like the rest; but, before leaving, he wired a somewhat incoherent message to Umballa. “We must leave office,” it ran; “all the bungalows are on fire, burning down by the Sepoys of Meerut. They came in this morning.... Nine Europeans are killed.” That message reached Umballa, was sent on to Lahore, and was read there as a danger-signal so expressive, that the authorities at once decided to disarm the native troops at that station. The cryptic message was then flashed on to Peshawur, and was there read in the same sense, and acted upon with the same promptitude. Brendish was one of the few who afterwards escaped from Delhi.

At some of the stations, where cool heads and steadfast courage prevailed, the Sepoys were disarmed with swiftness and decision. This was especially the case in the Punjaub, where the cause of England was upheld by the kingly brain of John Lawrence, the swift decision of Herbert Edwardes, and the iron courage of Neville Chamberlain and of John Nicholson.

Lord Roberts has told how, on May 12, he was present as scribe at a council of war held in Peshawur. Round the table sat a cluster of gallant soldiers, such as might well take charge of the fortunes of a nation in the hour of its deadliest peril. Herbert Edwardes was there, and Neville Chamberlain, and Nicholson. They had to consider how to hold the Punjaub quiet while all Bengal was in a flame of mutiny. The Punjaub was a newly conquered province; its warlike population might well be expected to seize the first opportunity of rising against its conquerors. It was held by an army of over 80,000 troops, and of these only 15,000 were British—the rest, some 65,000, were almost sure to join the Mutiny. For every British soldier in the Punjaub, that is, there were four probable mutineers, while behind these was a warlike population, just subdued by the sword, and ready to rise again.

But the cool heads that met in that council were equal to their task. It was resolved to disarm all doubtful regiments, and raise new forces in their stead in the Punjaub itself, and from its wild frontier clans. A movable column, light-footed, hard-hitting, was to be formed under Neville Chamberlain’s command, with which to smite at revolt whenever it lifted its head. So the famous Movable Column came into being, commanded in turn by Chamberlain and by Nicholson. That column itself had to be purged heroically again and again to cleanse it from mutinous elements, till it practically came to consist of one field-battery, one troop of horse-artillery, and one infantry regiment, all British. Then it played a great part in the wild scenes of the Mutiny.

Before new levies could be raised in the Punjaub, however, the English had to give some striking proof of decision and strength. No Indian race will fight for masters who do not show some faculty for command. The crisis came at Peshawur itself, towards the end of May. The Sepoys had fixed May 22 for rising against their officers. On the 21st the 64th Native Infantry was to march into Peshawur, and on the following morning the revolt was to take place. Herbert Edwardes and Nicholson, however, were the last men in the world to be caught off their guard. At 7 A.M. on the morning of the 21st, parade was held, and, as the result of some clever manœuvres, the five native regiments found themselves confronted by a line of British muskets, and ordered to “pile arms.” The intending mutineers were reduced, almost with a gesture, to the condition of an unarmed mob, and that lightning-stroke of decision saved the Punjaub. Levies poured in; new regiments rose like magic; a loyal army became possible.

Little more than a fortnight afterwards, Neville Chamberlain discovered a plot in the 35th Native Infantry, and promptly blew two ringleaders from the guns, the first instance of that dramatic form of punishment in the Mutiny. Later, when Nicholson took command of the Movable Column, he was compelled to disarm two native regiments, the 35th and the 33rd. The 33rd was on its march to join the column, and Nicholson conducted the business with so nice an adjustment of time and method that the 35th had been disarmed, and their muskets and belts packed in carts and sent off to the fort, just as the 33rd marched up. As it halted it found itself, not side by side with a regiment of accomplices, but in front of a long and menacing line of British infantry and guns, and Roberts himself rode forward with the order to its colonel to pile arms. “What! disarm my regiment?” said that astonished officer, who was serenely unconscious that there was a mutinous brain under every shako in his regiment. When the order was repeated, the old colonel broke into actual tears. But there were sterner wills and stronger brains than his in command, and the 33rd was, in turn, reduced to harmlessness.

At Lahore, again, the Sepoys had an elaborate plot to kill their officers, overpower the European troops, and seize the treasury and the guns. Lahore was a city of 90,000 inhabitants, with a garrison of 2500 Sepoys in the city itself. The city troops were to rise first, and their success was to be signalled to Meanmeer, the military cantonment, six miles distant. Mutiny at Lahore was to be followed by revolt through all the military stations of the district, from the Rabee to the Sutlej. The plot, however, was discovered. General Corbett, a cool and gallant soldier, resolved to disarm the whole native garrison.

On the night of May 12, three days before the date fixed for the Mutiny, a military ball was to be held. This arrangement was not changed, lest the suspicions of the Sepoys should be aroused, and dancing was kept up till two o’clock in the morning. Then the officers at grey dawn hurried to the parade-ground, where, by instructions issued the day before, the whole brigade was assembled, nominally to hear some general orders read. These were read in the usual fashion at the head of each regiment. Then some brigade manœuvres followed, and these were so adroitly arranged that, at their close, the native regiments found themselves in quarter-distance column, with five companies of a British regiment, the 81st, opposite them in line, the guns being still in the rear of the 81st.

In a single sentence, brief and stern, the order was given for the native regiments to “pile arms.” The Grenadiers of the 16th, to whom the order was first addressed, hesitated; the men began to handle their arms; for one breathless moment it was doubtful whether they would obey or fight. But simultaneously with the words “pile arms,” the 81st had fallen back, coolly and swiftly, between the guns, and the Sepoys, almost at a breath, found themselves covered by a battery of twelve pieces loaded with grape, the artillerymen standing in position with burning port-fires, whilst along the line of the 81st behind ran the stern order, “Load,” and already the click of the ramrods in the muskets was heard.

The nerve of the Sepoys failed! Sullenly they piled arms, and 600 English, by adroitness and daring, disarmed 2500 Sepoys without a shot! What five minutes before had been a menace to the British power was made harmless.

Montgomery, the chief civil officer at Lahore, divides with Corbett the honour of the brilliant stroke of soldiership which saved the city. Never was there a less heroic figure in outward appearance than that of Montgomery. He was short, stout, soft-spoken, rubicund-faced, and bore, indeed, a ludicrous resemblance to Mr. Pickwick as depicted by the humorous pencil of “Phiz.” He was familiarly known, as a matter of fact, to all Englishmen in his province by the sobriquet of “Pickwick.” But nature sometimes conceals an heroic spirit within a very unheroic-looking body. If in outward look there was something sheep-like in Montgomery’s appearance, there was a lion-like strain in his courage. He had only a hint of the coming storm. A couple of scanty telegrams brought in the news of the mutiny at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi. With quick vision Montgomery read the temper of the native troops at Meanmeer, and, with swifter decision than even that of Corbett, he advised that they should be instantly disarmed. That decision averted a great disaster.

The whole story shows what is possible to clear judgment and resolute courage; but where these failed, or where some old Bengal officer retained his blind and fond credulity as to the “staunchness” of his men, then great tragedies became possible.

Thus at Futteghur, some seventy miles from Cawnpore, the 10th Native Infantry, with some irregular troops, held the cantonments. General Goldie was divisional commander; Colonel Smith held command of the 10th, and cherished a piously confident belief in the loyalty of his Sepoys. The civilians, with a shrewder insight into the state of affairs, believed mutiny certain, and murder highly probable, and determined to leave the station. On June 4 a little fleet of boats, laden with almost the entire English colony in the place—merchants, shopkeepers, missionaries, with their wives and children—started down the river, to the huge disgust of Colonel Smith, who thought their departure a libel on his beloved Sepoys. Part of the company found refuge with a friendly Zemindar, while three boats, containing nearly seventy persons—of whom forty-nine were women and children—pushed on to Cawnpore. In Cawnpore, however, though they were in ignorance of the fact, Wheeler and his gallant few were already fighting for life against overwhelming odds.

News soon reached the Sepoy lines at Cawnpore that three boat-loads of Sahibs were on the river, and a rush was made for them. The poor victims had pulled in to the bank and were enjoying “afternoon tea” when the horde of mutineers burst upon them. Some tried to hide in the long grass, which was set on fire above them. The rest, scorched, wounded, half-naked, with bleeding feet—mothers trying to shelter or carry their children—were dragged to the presence of Nana Sahib. The ladies and children were ordered to sit on the ground; their husbands, with their hands tied, were arranged in careful order behind them. Being thus picturesquely arranged for easy murder, some files of the 2nd Cavalry were marched up to kill the whole. The process was lengthy, wives clinging to their husbands, mothers trying to shelter their little ones with their own bodies from the keen cavalry swords. Nana Sahib watched the whole process with the leisurely and discriminating interest of a connoisseur.

On June 18 Colonel Smith’s trusted Sepoys broke into open revolt at the station, whence these poor fugitives had fled. The little British garrison, consisting of thirty fighting men, with sixty ladies and children, took refuge in a low mud fort, and held it for nearly three weeks. Then they fought their way to their boats and fled. They were fiercely pursued. One boat grounded, and its miserable passengers were summarily murdered. Death by bullets, by sunstroke, by drowning, pursued the rest. One boat-load escaped, but escaped only to reach Cawnpore, and to perish amid the horrors of the slaughter-house there.

One survivor has left a record of that dreadful voyage. He was in the boat that first grounded and was boarded by the Sepoys. He describes how the passengers were shot, and how “Major Robertson, seeing no hope, begged the ladies to come into the water rather than fall into their hands. While the ladies were throwing themselves into the water I jumped into the boat, took up a loaded musket, and, going astern, shot a Sepoy.... Mr. and Mrs. Fisher were about twenty yards from the boat; he had his child in his arms, apparently lifeless. Mrs. Fisher could not stand against the current; her dress, which acted like a sail, knocked her down, when she was helped up by Mr. Fisher.... Early the next morning a voice hailed us from the shore, which we recognised as Mr. Fisher’s. He came on board, and informed us that his poor wife and child had been drowned in his arms.”

For skill, daring, and promptitude, nothing exceeded the fashion in which the incipient mutiny at Multan was trampled out. At no other post were the conditions more perilous. The garrison consisted of a troop of native horse-artillery, two regiments of native infantry, and the 1st Irregular Cavalry; the only English troops were 50 artillerymen in charge of the magazine. Here, then, were 50 British artillerymen, without guns, opposed to over 3000 Sepoys—horse, foot, and artillery!

The decisive factor in the problem was the character of the British commander, Major Chamberlain. His strong will and genius for command held the 1st Irregular Cavalry steady. They were Hindus from the neighbourhood of Delhi, with a full measure of the superstition and pride of caste which swept away other regiments. But they believed in their commander. He swayed their imaginations as with a touch of magic. The spell of his looks and voice, his imperious will, overbore the impulse to revolt. His men declared they would follow him to the death! Chamberlain resolved to disarm the other native regiments, and he performed the perilous feat, not only with miraculous audacity, but with a miraculous nicety of arrangement.

The 2nd Punjaub Infantry and the 1st Punjaub Cavalry were to arrive at the station on a given day. They were native troops, but could—for the moment at least—be trusted. The new troops came in at nightfall. At 4 A.M. the next morning the two Sepoy regiments and a troop of native artillery were marched out as if for an ordinary parade. They were suddenly halted; the Punjaub troops quietly marched betwixt them and their lines; the fifty English gunners took their places beside the guns of the native artillery, and a little band of Sikh cavalry that could be trusted rode up to the flank of the guns.

Then Chamberlain gave the order to the suspected regiments to “pile arms.” One Sepoy shouted, “Don’t give up your arms! Fight for them;” but his English adjutant instantly grasped him by the throat, shook him as a terrier would shake a rat, and flung him on the ground. The mutinous Sepoys hesitated; their courage sank; they meekly piled arms, were marched back weaponless to their barracks, and the station was saved. But it was a great feat to disarm a whole garrison with only fifty English gunners. The regiment of irregular cavalry was permanently saved by the spell of Chamberlain’s authority, and, as a reward, is still the 1st Regiment of Bengal Cavalry.

Some of the revolting regiments, it is satisfactory to know, had very distressful experiences. They found that mutiny was a bad investment. Let the tale of the 55th, for example, be told. The regiment broke into open mutiny at Mardan on May 22, fired on their officers, and marched off to the hills with the regimental colours and treasure. Its colonel, Spottiswoode, blew out his brains in mingled grief and despair when he saw his “faithful” Sepoys in open revolt.

Meanwhile, the most menacing figure in all the great drama of the Mutiny—that of Nicholson—made its appearance on the track of the mutineers. Nicholson overtook them on the 24th, after a ride of seventy miles, slew 150, captured another 150 with the stolen colours, and promptly executed forty of his prisoners by blowing them from his guns. The rest of the broken regiment crossed the border, were hunted down by the hill-tribes, fell into the hands of Mohammedan fanatics, were “converted” by the argument of whip and sword, or were sold as slaves. “One fat old subahdar,” says Mr. Cave-Browne, “was sold for four annas (sixpence)”! Mutiny, it is clear, proved a very bitter experience for the unhappy 55th! The legend that has grown round the wanderings of this broken regiment is told by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in his vivid story, “The Lost Legion.”

CHAPTER III
STAMPING OUT MUTINY

Perhaps the most characteristic story of Sepoy outbreak is that at Allahabad. The city stands at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna, 500 miles from Calcutta, and, with its strong fortress and great arsenal, was a strategic point scarcely second in importance to Delhi. It had a population of 75,000, highly fanatical in temper. Its arsenal was one of the largest in India, having arms for 40,000 men and great stores of artillery. Yet, with the exception of the magazine staff, there was not a British soldier in the city! It was garrisoned by the 6th Native Infantry, a wing of a Sikh regiment, the 9th, a battery of native artillery, and some native cavalry.

Colonel Simpson of the 6th, who was in command, cherished the most enthusiastic faith in his men. He looked on his cherished Sepoys as a regiment of mere dusky-skinned Sir Galahads; each one of them was as faithful as Milton’s Abdiel! Some sixty superannuated British artillerymen, the youngest of them over fifty years of age, had been thrown hurriedly into the fort itself as a garrison; and Colonel Simpson strongly urged that his regiment should be taken into the fort in their place as “a proof of confidence.” This would have been like putting a committee of wolves inside the fold!

At evening parade on June 6, Colonel Simpson read to his Sepoys the formal thanks of the Governor-General for their virtuous offer to go out and fight the wicked mutineers at Delhi. He added a glowing eulogium of their loyalty on his own account. The Sepoys cheered, Colonel Simpson and his fellow-officers adjourned to the mess-room, and no doubt discoursed with great comfort on the much-enduring fidelity of their men. Within four hours of being thanked by Lord Canning and praised by Colonel Simpson, the “faithful” Sepoys of the 6th Infantry had murdered seventeen officers and all the women and children of English blood they could capture, and were in full march to Delhi.

The tale is typical. At nine o’clock a bugle call sounded from the lines—it was the signal for revolt. The men rushed to arms. The Sepoy artillerymen holding the bridge swung their guns round, and opened fire on their officers. Harward and Alexander, in command of the Native Irregular Horse, and both officers of great promise, leaped into their saddles, and galloped fiercely to the bridge to recapture the guns. When they gave the order to charge, their treacherous followers suddenly pulled up; and, followed by only three troopers, the officers rode at the guns. Alexander, rising in his stirrups for one gallant sword-stroke, was shot through the heart; and Harward had to gallop for his life.

Simpson and his officers in the meanwhile ran to the parade-ground to “expostulate” with their men. Five officers were instantly shot down. Colonel Simpson was beginning to address a new series of compliments to his faithful Sepoys, but they turned their muskets upon him, and interrupted his eloquence with a volley. By some miracle he escaped and galloped off to the fort. He had to ride past the mess-house, and the mess guard turned out and took pot shots at him as he rode. The unhappy colonel reached the gate of the fort with a dying horse, a wounded arm, and an entirely new theory of Sepoy loyalty.

But was the fort itself safe? Its garrison consisted of the sixty odd superannuated artillerymen, a few civilian volunteers, the wing of a Sikh regiment, and a company of the 9th Native Infantry. These men held the gate, and were, of course, only waiting to open it to their revolted comrades. If the Sikhs joined hands with them, there remained nothing but hopeless massacre for the British. And only five days before, at Benares, it must be remembered, a Sikh regiment had opened fire on its officers! As a matter of fact, the Sikhs in the fort were effervescing with excitement. Mutiny was in the air. Upon whom the Sikh muskets might be turned, their owners themselves scarcely knew. It was a crisis of the sort which overwhelms weak men, but gives a man of heroic will a supreme opportunity. And, fortunately, a man with all the decision and courage the moment needed was on the spot.

Lieutenant Brasyer had fought as a private in the ranks through the Sutlej campaigns, and won a commission by his coolness and daring. He possessed exactly the genius needed for commanding irregular soldiery. He was an athlete, a fine swordsman, a man of the swiftest decision and most gallant courage. He is not unworthy, indeed, to be ranked for leadership and personal daring with Hodson of “Hodson’s Horse.” Brasyer had first to master his Sikhs, trembling on the verge of revolt themselves. Archibald Forbes has described his method: “Standing over the magazine with a red-hot iron in his hand, he swore by Nanac, Ram Das, Govind, and all other Gooroos of the Sikhs, that if his men did not promptly fall in and obey his orders he would blow the regiment to the Sikh equivalent of Hades.”

Brasyer’s glance and voice, his imperious will and daring, mastered the Sikhs, and they fell obediently into rank. He instantly marched them down, with loaded muskets, to the gate, and, with the help of the artillerymen with their port-fires, drove out the company of Sepoys that held it, and the fort was saved! But to master Sepoys in open revolt, by Sikhs on the edge of revolt, was a great feat, and shows for how much, at such a crisis, one clear heroic will counts.

That night Allahabad was given up to outrage and murder. Only above the fort itself flew the flag of England, and in the fort the handful of British officers, determined that the great arsenal should not fall into the hands of mutineers, were preparing to copy Willoughby’s desperate example at Delhi. Russell, of the artillery, who was in charge of the magazine, ran trains of powder into it, and stood ready to blow it up in the event of capture.

In the city itself every European or Eurasian was hunted like a rat through the streets, and slain with every accompaniment of cruelty. Outrage, in the ordinary sense, was not, on the whole, a marked feature of the Great Mutiny. The Sepoys, that is, were on fire with cruelty rather than with lust. But their cruelty spared neither age nor sex. The wife of a captain, according to one story current at the time—and perhaps not true—was literally boiled alive in ghee, or melted butter. Children were tossed on bayonets, men roasted in the flames of their own bungalows; women were mutilated and dismembered. The Sepoys plundered the Treasury, carrying off some £300,000 in booty.

One detail of the Allahabad massacre peculiarly shocked the imagination of British soldiers wherever the tale was told. At the mess-table of the 9th, that fatal night, there sat eight fresh-faced and boyish cadets just out from England. They had not yet joined their regiments, and military life, with all its fun and excitement, lay in the glamour of the unknown before them. When the bugle rang out on the parade-ground these eight unposted boy ensigns ran out with the other officers. They fell into the hands of the mutineers, and seven had their throats cut like sheep. The eighth, a boy of sixteen, was left for dead, but survived in spite of horrible wounds for four days, hiding himself in a ravine. On the fifth day he was discovered, dragged to the native lines, and thrust into a hut as a prisoner.

He found there a Christian catechist, who had formerly been a Mohammedan, and who was being tortured by the Sepoys to make him renounce his faith. The catechist’s courage had given way, but the gallant English lad—himself only sixteen years of age—urged the unhappy catechist, “Don’t deny Christ! Never deny Christ!” Neill reached Allahabad in time to rescue both catechist and ensign. But the ensign, Arthur Cheek, died of his wounds four days after Neill’s arrival. He had joined his regiment just eighteen days when murdered in this tragical fashion by his own men. It may be imagined how the massacre of the “poor little griffins” moved the British soldier to wrath everywhere.

For a few days mutiny and riot reigned supreme at Allahabad. Then, hot from Benares, there appeared on the scene Neill with a handful of his “Lambs,” as the Madras Fusileers, with admiring irony, were called. “Thank God, sir,” said the sentry at the gate of the fort, as Neill rode in; “you’ll save us yet!”

Neill is one of the cluster of great soldiers thrust into sudden fame by the crisis of the Mutiny, and is hardly to be judged by the standard of smaller men and of a tamer period. He was of Scottish blood, an Ayrshire man, with a vehement fighting quality, and a strain of iron resolve, which had come to him, perhaps, from a line of Covenanting ancestry. He was a veteran soldier, accustomed to govern wild clans and irregular troops, and had held high command in the Turkish contingent in the Crimea. On the domestic side, he was, as many stern and rough-natured men are, of singular tenderness. He was strongly religious, too, though he borrowed his religion rather from the Old Testament than the New.

When the Mutiny broke out Neill found himself in command of the Madras Fusileers, a regiment which included many wild spirits in its ranks, but which, in fighting quality, was a warlike instrument of singular efficiency. Neill and his “Lambs” were summoned from Madras by the crisis in Bengal, and Neill’s best qualities, as well as his worst—his fighting impulse, his Scottish pride of race, the natural vehemence of his temper, his soldierly hate of mutiny, the wrath of a strong man at outrages on women and children, and his fierce contempt for the feebleness shown by some of the “arm-chair colonels” of the Bengal Army—all threw their owner into a mood in which he was prepared to dare anything to crush the Mutiny and to punish the mutineers.

The Fusileers landed on the railway wharf at Calcutta, as night fell, on May 23. The great city of Benares was on the verge of revolt, and Neill’s “Lambs” were to be hurried up by express to its rescue. The station-master told Neill that unless he could get his men ashore in three minutes the train would start without them. But Neill was not the man to allow a railway time-table to stand betwixt him and the suppression of a mutiny. With an abrupt gesture, he put the station-master in charge of a sergeant and a file of Fusileers. The unhappy official shouted for help, but in another second stokers, firemen, and guard were in a row against the station wall, with a couple of “blue-caps” in charge of each. At the double the Fusileers came up the wharf, filed into the carriages, and the train, carrying the left wing of the regiment, moved off to Raneegange; thence the detachment was carried by bullock-carts to Benares. Leaving the bulk of his men to follow, Neill pushed on with the leading detachment to Benares.

Nowhere, perhaps, did English courage shine out with a clearer flame than at Benares. Benares is the holy city of Hinduism; it had a population of 300,000, fanatical and turbulent in the highest degree. The cantonment was held by three Sepoy regiments—all pledged to revolt—150 men of a British regiment, the 10th, and some thirty British gunners, with half a battery of artillery, under the command of Olpherts. But the cluster of soldiers and civilians responsible for the city—Tucker the commissioner, Frederick Gubbins the judge, Lind the magistrate, Ponsonby the brigadier, and Olpherts in command of the guns—held on to their post; by mere cool audacity kept the turbulent city in awe, and the mutinous Sepoys from breaking out; and sent on to other posts in greater peril than their own such scanty reinforcements of British troops as reached them. In the Commissioner, Tucker, at least, this heroic courage had a religious root. “The twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel,” he wrote to Lord Canning, “was their stand-by.” “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,” is the opening verse of David’s song in that chapter; “the God of my rock; in Him will I trust. He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge.”

Neill reached the city on June 3, and found himself on the very edge of a tragedy. The Sepoys had arranged for an outbreak on the night of June 4. The native troops numbered over 2000; the British troops, as we have seen, consisted of 150 men of the 10th, and thirty artillerymen with three guns. To these Neill added sixty of his “Lambs” whom he had brought with him. Neill put the impress of his vehement will on the brigadier, Ponsonby, in charge of the station, and at half-an-hour’s notice it was resolved to disarm the Sepoys.

The business was ill-managed. The Sepoys commenced to shoot, the Sikhs turned on their officers. Ponsonby, an old man, found “the sun” and the strain of the scene too much for him, and visibly broke down. He dismounted, and Neill, who had been grimly watching the scene, said abruptly, “General, I assume command.” Ponsonby assented in silence, and Neill instantly opened on the mutineers with grape and musketry fire, and, after a few minutes’ furious shooting, Sikh and Sepoy fled. The 250, that is, destroyed, in a military sense, the 2000!

Having stamped out the Mutiny—or, rather, scattered the mutineers—Neill devoted the next two or three days to punishing it. The Governor-General telegraphed orders to push on to Allahabad, but Neill believed in making thorough work, and he wired back, “Can’t move; wanted here.” And for the next three days he kept the gallows busy, and hanged without pause or pity. The Sepoys had shot down their officers, and murdered women and children, and Neill was bent on showing that this was a performance which brought in its track swift and terrible punishment. “Colonel Neill’s hangings” were, no doubt, of heroic scale, and, looked at through the cold perspective of forty years, wear a very black aspect. But Neill, rightly or wrongly, held that to strike, and to strike hard, and to strike swiftly, was the one policy in such a crisis.

Benares being secure, Neill pushed on across the seventy miles of dusty, heat-scorched road to Allahabad. He started with only forty-four of his “Lambs,” and covered the seventy miles in two night marches. When they reached the Ganges, almost every fourth man was down with sunstroke, Neill himself being amongst the number, and his men only kept him up by dashing buckets of water over his head and chest. The boat pushed from the bank; it was found to leak at a dozen points, and began to sink. The “blue-caps” relanded, and their officer, Spurgin, called for volunteers to beat the banks of the river in search of another boat.

Almost every man able to walk volunteered, and, in the heavy sand of the river-bank, with the furnace-like heat of an Indian sun setting on fire the very air they breathed, the Fusileers began their search for a boat to carry them across to Allahabad. More than one brave fellow fell and died from heat and exhaustion. But a boat was found, the gallant forty crossed, and marched—as many of them as could still keep their feet—a tiny but dauntless band, through the gates of the fort.

Other detachments followed quickly, and Neill flung himself with all the fire of his Scottish blood into the task of restoring the British raj in the great city. At daybreak he opened with his guns, from the fort, on the suburb held by the revolted Sepoys, and then sallied out with his scanty force, and burnt it over their rebel heads. “I myself,” he wrote to his wife, “was almost dying from complete exhaustion;” but his fierce spirit overbore the fainting body that carried it. He armed a river steamer with a howitzer and a party of volunteer riflemen, and employed it as a river patrol. He launched the fierce Sikhs—by this time heartily loyal—on the villages.

They were wild soldiers, gaunt, sinewy, and eager—the “Singh log” (“the lion people”), as they called themselves. Maude has left a graphic picture of the Sikhs who, at Allahabad, followed Brasyer as, with his flowing white beard, he led them in pursuit of the broken Sepoys, or hung with soldierly obedience on Neill’s stern orders. “When no fighting was on hand,” he says, “squads of the tall, upright, Hebraic-visaged Sikhs used to march into their commanding officer’s tent, where they stood at attention, in silence, with one hand raised at the orthodox salute. ‘What do you want, my men?’ was the question in Hindustani. ‘May it please the protector of the poor, we want two days’ leave.’ ‘What for?’ ‘To get drunk, Sahib!’ And their request, being considered reasonable, was usually granted!”

Neill, by the way, had to use these by no means ascetic Sikhs to keep his own “blue-caps” sober. The stocks of all the merchants in the city were practically without owners, and the finest champagnes and brandies were selling at 6d. per bottle. For a day or two it seemed probable that Neill’s little force would be swept out of existence in a mere ignoble torrent of drunkenness. Neill threatened the whip and the bullet in vain; and finally marched up the Sikhs and took peremptory possession of all intoxicating drinks.

On June 18 the fighting was over, the British were masters both of fort and city, where, fourteen days before, they had been little better than prisoners or fugitives. Then was repeated, in yet sterner fashion, the retribution which had struck terror through Benares. The gallows in Allahabad groaned under its heavy and quick-following burdens. In his diary Neill wrote: “God grant that I may have acted with justice. I know I have with severity, but, under all the circumstances, I trust for forgiveness. I have done all for the good of my country, to re-establish its prestige and power, and to put down this most barbarous and inhuman insurrection.” Then he recites cases of outrage and mutilation on English ladies and on little children, with details that still chill the natural blood with horror to read.

The Sepoys, it is to be noted, when the fighting was over, took their penalty with a sort of composed fatalism, to the Western imagination very amazing. Sir George Campbell tells the story of the execution of an old native officer, a subhadar, which he witnessed. “He was very cool and quiet, and submitted to be executed without remonstrance. But the rope broke, and he came down to the ground. He picked himself up, and it was rather a painful scene for the spectators. But he seemed to feel for their embarrassment, and thought it well to break the awkwardness of the situation by conversation, remarking that it was a very bad rope, and talking of little matters of that kind till another rope was procured, which made an end of him!”

It would be easy to write, or sing, a new and more wonderful Odyssey made up of the valiant combats, the wild adventures, and the distressful wanderings of little groups of Englishmen and Englishwomen, upon whom the tempest of the Mutiny broke.

Forbes-Mitchell, for example, tells the story of Robert Tucker, the judge at Futtehpore. Tucker was a great hunter, and also, like many Indian officials, an earnestly religious man, with an antique sense of duty. When the Mutiny broke out he despatched every European to Allahabad, but refused to move himself. This solitary Englishman, in a word, was determined to defend Futtehpore against all comers! Believing the native officer in charge of the police to be loyal, he sent a message to him asking him to come and make arrangements for the protection of the Treasury. This “loyal” official sent back word that the judge Sahib need not trouble himself about the Treasury; that, in the cool of the evening, he, with his “loyal” police, would come down and dismiss the dog of a judge himself to Hades!

Tucker had a hunter’s armoury—rifles, smooth-bores, and hog spears. He loaded every barrel, barricaded every door and window, and waited quietly, reading his Bible, till, when the cool breath of evening began to stir, he saw the police and the local budmashes, with the green banner of Islam fluttering over their heads, marching down to attack him. Tucker was offered his life on condition that he abandoned his Christianity. Then the fight broke out. For hours the musketry crackled, and was answered by the sharp note of Tucker’s rifle. Before midnight the brave judge lay, riddled with bullets and pierced with many spear-thrusts, dead on his own floor. But all round his house were strewn the bodies of those who had fallen before his cool and deadly aim.

Later on, at Kotah, a similar tragedy took place, the story of which is told by George Lawrence. Major Burton, the Resident at Kotah, with his two sons—one aged twenty-one, the other a lad of sixteen—and a single native servant, held the Residency for four hours against native troops with artillery, and a huge crowd of rioters. The Residency was at last set on fire, and Major Burton proposed to surrender on condition that the lives of his sons were spared. The gallant lads indignantly refused to accept the terms. They would all die together, they declared. They were holding the roof of the Residency against their assailants, and, as Lawrence tells the story, “they knelt down and prayed for the last time, and then calmly and heroically met their fate.” The mob by this time had obtained scaling-ladders. They swept over the roof, and slew the gallant three. Major Burton’s head was cut off, paraded round the town, and then fired from a gun.

One of the most surprising of these personal adventures was that which overtook the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, Sir T. Metcalfe. Wilberforce, in his “Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny,” tells the tale, and says he heard it twice over from Sir T. Metcalfe’s own lips—though Wilberforce’s stories sometimes are vehemently suspected to belong to the realm of fiction rather than of sober history. His account of Metcalfe’s adventure, however, is at least ben trovato.

Metcalfe escaped from Delhi on horseback, hotly pursued by some native cavalry. His horse broke down, and in despair Metcalfe appealed to a friendly-looking native to conceal him from his pursuers. The man led him to a cave, told him he would save him if possible, and, striking his horse on the flank, sent it galloping down the road, while Metcalfe crept through the black throat of the cave into concealment. Presently Metcalfe heard his pursuers ride up, fiercely question his protector, and finally propose to search the cave.

On this my friend burst out laughing, and, raising his voice so that I must hear, he said, “Oh yes, search the cave. Do search it. But I’ll tell you what you will find. You will find a great red devil in there; he lives up at the end of the cave. You won’t be able to see him, because the cave turns at the end, and the devil always stands just round the turn, and he has got a great long knife in his hand, and the moment your head appears round the corner he will slice it off, and then he will pull the body in to him and eat it. Go in; do go in—the poor devil is hungry. It is three weeks since he had anything to eat, and then it was only a goat. He loves men, does this red devil; and if you all go in he will have such a meal!”

Metcalfe guessed that he was intended to hear this speech and act upon it. The cave, a short distance from the entrance, turned at right angles. He stood with his sword uplifted just round the corner, while a line of dismounted cavalry, in single file, one daring fellow leading, came slowly up the cave. As soon as the leader put his head in the darkness round the corner, Metcalfe smote with all his strength. The fellow’s head rolled from his body, and his companions, with a yell of terror, and tumbling one over another in the darkness, fled. “Did you see him?” demanded Metcalfe’s friend outside. “Do go back; he wants more than one.” But the rebel cavalry had had enough. The men who had gone up the cave declared that they had actually seen the red fiend, and been scorched by the gleam of his eyes; and, mounting their horses, they fled.

“Why did you save my life?” Metcalfe asked his protector. “Because you are a just man,” was the reply. “How do you know that?” asked Metcalfe. “You decided a case against me in your court,” was the unexpected reply. “I and all my family had won the case in the inferior courts by lying, but you found us out, and gave judgment against us. If you had given the case for me I would not have saved your life!”

Wilberforce tells another tale which graphically illustrates the wild adventures of those wild days. Early one morning he was on picket duty outside Delhi, and in the grey dawn saw two men and a boy hurrying along the road from the city. They were evidently fugitives, and, telling his men not to fire on them, Wilberforce went forward to meet them. When the group came up the boy ran forward, threw his arms round Wilberforce’s neck, and, with an exclamation in English, kissed him. The “boy” was a woman named Mrs. Leeson, the sole survivor of the Delhi massacre. She had been concealed for more than three months by a friendly native, and had at last escaped disguised as an Afghan boy.

When the Mutiny broke out she, with some other ladies and a few Englishmen, took refuge in a cellar, and for nearly three days maintained a desperate defence against the crowds attacking them. The hero of the defence was a Baptist missionary, a former shipmate of Wilberforce’s, “a very tall and powerful man, with a bloodless face, grey eyes, a broad jaw, and a determined mouth.” One by one the men holding the cellar fell. Food failed, the ammunition was exhausted, and at last, behind the bodies of the fallen, piled up as a breastwork, stood only the brave missionary, with nothing but his sword to protect the crouching women and children. “Stripped to the waist, behind the ghastly rampart of the dead, the hero stood; and for hours this Horatius held his own. At last he fell, shot through the heart, and the bloodthirsty devils poured in.” Mrs. Leeson was covered by some of the dead bodies, and so escaped the doom of the other ladies, and at night crept out of that pit of the dead. She wandered through the dark streets, the only living Englishwoman in the great city, and saw, hanging up on the trees in the dusk, the headless trunks of white children and the mutilated bodies of Englishwomen. By happy chance she met a pitying native, who concealed her until she escaped in the fashion described, with more or less of imagination, by Wilberforce.

CHAPTER IV
CAWNPORE: THE SIEGE

The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon.

In these words Sir George Trevelyan sums up the famous struggle round the low mud-walls of Wheeler’s entrenchments at Cawnpore more than forty years ago; a struggle in which Saxon courage and Hindu cruelty were exhibited in their highest measure, and which must always form one of the most heartbreaking and yet kindling traditions of the British race. Volumes have been written about Cawnpore, but Trevelyan’s book remains its one adequate literary record. The writer has a faculty for resonant, not to say rhythmic prose, which recalls the style of his more famous uncle, Macaulay, and in his “Cawnpore” his picturesque sentences are flushed with a sympathy which gives them a more than literary grace.

Cawnpore at the time of the Mutiny was a great city, famous for its workers in leather, standing on the banks of the sacred Ganges, 270 miles S.E. from Delhi, and about 700 miles from Calcutta. It was a military station of great importance. Its vast magazine was stored with warlike material of every sort. It was the seat of civil administration for a rich district. But the characteristic British policy, which allows the Empire to expand indefinitely, without any corresponding expansion of the army which acts as its police and defence, left this great military station practically in the hands of the Sepoys alone. The British force at Cawnpore, in May 1857, consisted of sixty men of the 84th, sixty-five Madras Fusileers, fewer than sixty artillerymen, and a group of invalids belonging to the 32nd. The Sepoy force consisted of three strong infantry regiments and the 2nd Native Cavalry—a regiment of very evil fame.

Here, then, were all the elements of a great tragedy—a rich treasury and a huge arsenal, lying practically undefended; a strong force of Sepoys, bitter with mutiny; a turbulent city and crowded cantonments festering with crime; and only a handful of British soldiers to maintain the British flag! Had the British consisted merely of fighting men, though they counted only 300 bayonets against four regiments of splendidly trained Sepoys, and a hostile population of 60,000, their case would not have been desperate. But the little British garrison had under its guard a great company of women and children and sick folk—civilian households, the wives and families of the 32nd, and many more. For every fighting man who levelled his musket over Wheeler’s entrenchments during the siege, there were at least two non-combatants—women, or little children, or invalids. A company so helpless and so great could not march; it could not attack; it could only stand within its poor screen of mud-walls and, with the stubborn and quenchless courage natural to its blood, fight till it perished.

General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command at Cawnpore, was a gallant soldier, who had marched and fought for fifty years. But he had the fatal defect of being over seventy-five years of age. A little man, slender of build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his seventy-five years with respectable energy. But a man, no matter how brave, in whose veins ran the chill and thin blood of old age, was tragically handicapped in a crisis so fierce. Wheeler, moreover, who had married a Hindu wife, was too weakly credulous about the loyalty of his Sepoys. On May 18, scarcely a fortnight before the Mutiny, he telegraphed to Calcutta: “The plague is stayed. All well at Cawnpore!” He had been warned that Nana Sahib was treacherous, yet he called in his help, and put the Treasury in his charge for safety! This was committing the chickens, for security, to the benevolence and “good faith” of the fox! Not four days before the outbreak Wheeler actually sent back to Lucknow fifty men of the 84th who had been sent to him as a reinforcement. There was chivalry in that act, but there was besotted credulity too.

CAWNPORE June 1857.

General Wheeler’s Entrenchment June 4th.-27th. 1857.

Walker & Cockerell sc.

But Wheeler’s most fatal mistake was in the choice he made of the place where the British garrison was to make its last stand. The Cawnpore magazine itself was a vast walled enclosure, covering three acres, with strong buildings and exhaustless store of guns and ammunition, with the river guarding one front, and a nullah acting as a ditch on another. Here would have been shelter for the women and the sick, a magnificent fighting position for the men, abundant water, and a great store of cannon.

Wheeler, for reasons which nobody has ever yet guessed, neglected this strong post. He allowed its stores of cannon to be turned against himself. He chose, instead of this formidable and sheltered post, a patch of open plain six miles distant, with practically no water supply. He threw up a slender wall of earth, which a musket-ball could pierce, and over which an active cow could jump, and he crowded into this the whole British colony at Cawnpore.

“What do you call that place you are making out on the plain?” asked the Nana’s Prime Minister, Azimoolah, of a British officer. “You ought to call it the ‘Fort of Despair.’” “No, no,” answered the Englishman, with the pluck of his race, “we’ll call it the ‘Fort of Victory!’” Nevertheless, when Wheeler made that evil choice of a place of defence, he was constructing a veritable Fort of Despair.

Wheeler, it seems, did not occupy the magazine, as it was held by a Sepoy guard, and it would have “shown mistrust,” and might have precipitated a conflict, if he had attempted to move into it. But what more expressive and public sign of “mistrust” could be imagined than the construction of the entrenchment in the open plain? And what could more fatally damage British prestige than the spectacle of the entire British community, military and civilian, crowding into these worthless defences!

If Wheeler did not occupy the magazine, he might have blown it up, and with that act have turned to smoke all the resources of the rebels. This was left to be done by Sepoy hands six weeks later. Meanwhile, Wheeler left almost unlimited resources of guns and munitions of war in the hands of the mutineers—to be employed against himself!

In the grim pause, while waiting for the outbreak, the British garrison showed a cool and gallant patience. The women, children, and civilians took up their quarters every night within the earthworks, where some ten light guns were mounted. But to “show their confidence” in their men, and, if possible, still to hold them back from mutiny, the British officers slept with their regiments. To lead a forlorn hope up the broken slope of a breach, or to stand in an infantry square while, with thunder of galloping hoofs, a dozen squadrons of cavalry charge fiercely down, needs courage. But it was a finer strain of courage still which made a British officer leave his wife and children to sleep behind the guns, standing loaded with grape, to protect them from a rush of mutineers, while he himself walked calmly down to sleep—or, at least, to feign sleep—within the very lines of the mutineers themselves!

On the night of June 4 came the outbreak. The men of the 2nd Cavalry rushed to their stables, mounted, and, with mad shouts and wild firing of pistols, galloped off to seize the magazine and to “loot” the Treasury; and as they went they burnt and plundered and slew. The 1st Sepoys followed them at once; the other two Sepoy regiments—the 53rd and 56th—hesitated. Their officers, with entreaties and orders, kept them steady till the sun rose, and then, unfortunately, dismissed them to their tents. Here they were quickly corrupted by their comrades, who had returned laden with booty from the plundered Treasury.

But before they had actually broken into mutiny, while they were yet swaying to and fro in agitated groups, by some blunder a gun from Wheeler’s entrenchments opened on the Sepoys’ lines. The argument of the flying grape was final! The men broke, and—a tumultuous mob—made for the city. Even then, however, some eighty Sepoys kept their fidelity, and actually joined the British within their defences, and fought bravely side by side with them for nearly twenty desperate days.

For a few wild hours murder raged through the streets of Cawnpore. Then the mutineers turned their faces towards Delhi. Had no malign influence arrested their march the great tragedy might have been escaped, and the word “Cawnpore” would not be to-day the most tragical cluster of syllables in British history. But at this point the subtle and evil genius of Nana Sahib interposed with dire effect.

Nana Sahib—or, to give his proper name, Seereek Dhoondoo Punth—was a Hindu of low birth, who had been adopted by the Peishwa of Poonah, the last representative of a great Mahratta dynasty, a prince who had been dethroned, but assigned a royal pension by the East India Company. Nana Sahib on the Peishwa’s death, inherited his private fortune, a sum computed at £4,000,000 sterling; but he also claimed the great pension which the Peishwa enjoyed. The Company rejected that claim, and henceforth Nana Sahib was a man consumed with hate of the British name and power. He concealed that hate, however, beneath a smiling mask of courteous hospitality. His agent had seen the wasted British lines round Sebastopol, and reported to his master that the British strength was broken. Nana Sahib, too, who understood the Hindu character, saw that the Sepoy regiments in Bengal were drunk with arrogance, and inflamed to the verge of mere lunacy, with fanatical suspicions, while a British garrison was almost non-existent.

Here, then, were the elements of a great outbreak, and Nana Sahib believed that the British raj was about to perish. He threw in his lot with the mutineers, but he had no idea of following them to Delhi, and being merged in the crowd that plotted and wrangled in the royal palace there. He would build up a great power for himself round Cawnpore. He might make himself, he dreamed, the despot of Northern India. He might even, by-and-by, march as a conqueror down the valley of the Ganges, fight a new Plassey, very different from the last, and, to quote Trevelyan, “renew the Black Hole of Calcutta, under happier auspices and on a more generous scale, and so teach those Christian dogs what it was to flout a Mahratta!”

But, as a preliminary to all this, the great company of Christian people within Wheeler’s lines must be stamped out of existence. “The wolves, with their mates and whelps, had been hounded into their den, and now or never was the time to smoke them out and knock on the head the whole of that formidable brood.” So, with bribes, and promises, and threats, Nana brought back the Sepoys, who had begun their Delhi march, to Cawnpore.

On June 6, with an odd touch of official formality, Nana sent in notice to General Wheeler that he was about to attack his position. Sunday, June 7, was spent in hunting from their various places of concealment in Cawnpore all the unhappy Europeans who lingered there. One trembling family was discovered lurking under a bridge, another concealed in some native huts. They were dragged out with shouts of triumph and despatched. One Englishman, who had taken refuge in a native house, held it against the Sepoys till his last cartridge was expended, then walked out and bade them cut his throat—a request promptly complied with. When the safe and delightful luxury of hunting out solitary Europeans was exhausted, then began the attack on the British entrenchments.

The odds were tremendous! In the centre of Wheeler’s entrenchment stood two single-storeyed barracks, built of thin brickwork, with verandas, and one of them roofed with straw. The mud wall, which formed the defence of the position, was four feet high, so thin that a rifle-ball could pierce it, with rough gaps made for the ten light pieces which formed the artillery of the garrison. On the north side of the entrenchment was a little triangular outwork, which the British called the Redan. On its left front, some four hundred yards distant, was a row of unfinished barracks, part of which was held by the British, part by the Sepoys, and which became the scene of the most bloody fighting of the siege. Behind these slender bulwarks was gathered a company of perhaps a thousand souls, of whom more than half were women and children.

At first the barracks gave to the non-combatants a brief shelter; but the 24-pounders of the Sepoys pierced them as though they had been built of cheese, and before many hours they were shattered into wreck, and the besieged were practically without any shelter, not merely from the rain of lead, but from the consuming heat of Indian suns and the heavy dews of Indian nights.

Sometimes, indeed, the men dug holes in the earth, into which their wives and children might creep and be sheltered by a few planks from the intolerable glare of the sun, and the incessant flight of hostile bullets. Quite as commonly, however, a British officer or civilian, as he crouched behind the poor wall of earth, loaded musket in hand, saw the white faces of his children as they slept or moaned, in the ditch by his side, while the wasted figure of his wife bent over them. There was no privacy, or shelter, or rest. The supply of food quickly failed. There was not water enough to satisfy the little children who cried from thirst, or to bathe the shattered limbs of the wounded. The men had the fierce excitement of fighting; but who shall paint the anguish of English ladies—wives and mothers—who could not find water for their children’s fevered lips, or shelter them from sun and bullet.

The imagination lingers pitifully over those groups of British ladies sitting or crouching in the ditches under the earthworks: “Unshod, unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows. Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were infants born during the terrible three weeks—infants with no future.”

There were two wells in the encampment; one which, to quote Trevelyan, “yielded nothing then, which will yield nothing till the sea, too, gives up her dead.” It was some two hundred yards from the rampart, and lay open to the fire of the Sepoys’ batteries. It was turned into a sepulchre. Thither, night by night, the besieged carried their dead, and cast them into its depths with brief and whispered prayer; while the guns of the Sepoys thundered their requiem. Within three weeks 250 English people were cast by English hands into that strange grave. The other well lay also directly under hostile fire, and on it the Sepoy gunners, trained by British science, concentrated their fire night and day. Every drop of water drawn from it may be said to have been reddened with blood.

Over this handful of British people, faint with hunger, fevered with thirst, wasted by sickness, half mad with the sun’s heat, roared day and night a tempest of hostile shot. Never before, perhaps, was such a fire concentrated on one poor patch of soil. The Sepoys could mount as many guns as they chose, and almost of whatever calibre they pleased. And they could fire, within a distance ranging from 300 to 800 yards, from under almost shot-proof shelter. From roof and window of all the buildings commanding the entrenchments streamed, with scarcely a moment’s pause, showers of musketry bullets. At night the Sepoys crept within pistol-shot, and fired without cessation. Wheeler’s entrenchments were literally girdled with fire; they were whipped, day and night, with incessant volleys.

By the third day every window and door in the poor barracks which served as shelter to the sick, and to the women and children, had been beaten in; and shell and ball ranged at will through the rooms. One who saw the building after the siege wrote: “The walls are riddled with cannon-shot like the cells of a honeycomb. The doors are knocked into shapeless openings. Of the verandas only a few splintered rafters remain. At some of the angles the walls are knocked entirely away, and large chasms gape blackly at you.”

Never was a position more desperate; and never was there one held with a valour more obstinate. Wheeler’s men had everything that was most dear to them at their backs, and everything that was most hateful in their front; and under these conditions how they fought may be imagined. In the scanty garrison, too, were over a hundred officers of the regiments in mutiny, fighters of the finest quality. It was a corps d’élite; a garrison of officers!

Indian life, it may be added, develops all that is proudest and most manly in the British character. The Englishman there feels that he is a member of an imperial and conquering race. To rule men is his daily business. To hunt the fiercest game in the world is his amusement. The men who knelt behind Wheeler’s mud walls, had faced tigers in the jungle, had speared the wild boar in the plains, had heard the scream of a charging elephant. They were steady of nerve, quick of eye, deadly of aim, proud of their blood and race. They were standing at bay over their wives and little ones, playing a game in which the stake was a thousand British lives. And never before, or since, perhaps, was more gallant fighting done than behind Wheeler’s entrenchments.

The natural leaders of the garrison emerged in such a crisis, and their names ought to awaken to-day in British ears emotions of pride as lofty as that which Greeks knew when, in the rolling and sonorous cadences of Homer’s great epic, they heard the names of the heroes who fought and died round classic Troy. One of the most heroic figures in the siege is that of Captain Moore, of the 32nd, in charge of the cluster of invalids belonging to that regiment in Cawnpore. Moore was an Irishman, though with the fair hair and blue eyes proper to Saxon blood. To say that he was fearless is a very inadequate description of his temper. He delighted in the rapture and glow of battle. His courage had in it a certain cool and smiling quality that made flurry or anxiety impossible. Moore, in fact, carried about with him a sort of radiance, so that, as Trevelyan puts it, “wherever he had passed he left men something more courageous, and women something less unhappy.” This fair-haired Irishman was a born king of men, of unfailing resource and “dare-devil” courage. He was wounded early in the siege, and carried his arm in a sling, but he walked to and fro calmly amid a tempest of bullets, and the men would follow his cheerful leading against any odds.

The tiny little Redan on the north face of the entrenchment was held by Major Vibart, of the 2nd Cavalry. A dreadful cross-fire searched and raked this little triangle of earth, and the handful of heroes that held it had to be renewed again and again. But the Redan kept up its splutter of answering fire day and night for three weeks, and Vibart himself survived the siege, to perish under Sepoy bullets on the river. Ashe was a young artillery officer of great promise; he commanded a battery of three guns at the north-east corner of the entrenchments, and seldom were guns better aimed and better fought. Ashe had first to invent his gunners, and next to improvise his shot, firing 6-pound balls, for example, from a 9-pound muzzle. But his cool science and sleepless activity made his battery the terror of the Sepoys.

Delafosse, of the 53rd, one of the four men who actually survived the siege, was an officer as daring and almost as skilled as Ashe. He had charge of three 9-pounder guns at the south-east angle. On one occasion the carriage of a gun in his battery took fire, and the wood, made as inflammable as tinder by the fierce Indian sun, named and crackled. There was powder—and the peril of explosion—on every side. The Sepoys, noting the dancing flame, turned all their guns on the spot. Delafosse crawled beneath the burning carriage, turned on his back, and with his naked hands pulled down the red splinters, and scattered earth on the flames, fighting them in this desperate fashion till two soldiers ran up to his help, and the fire was put out.

Perhaps the most obstinate and bloody fighting during the siege took place in the line of unfinished barracks which crossed the S.W. angle of the entrenchments. The Sepoys held the northern half of this line of buildings. Of the three buildings to the south—which completely commanded the entrenchment—what was called “No. 4,” was held by a party of amateur soldiers—civil engineers employed on the East Indian railroads. There were a dozen of them, young fellows more familiar with theodolites than with rifles; but a cluster of English Lifeguards could not have fought with cooler bravery. And the civil engineers had a keenness of wit and a fertility of mechanical resource which veteran soldiers might easily have lacked.

Vainly the Sepoys pelted “No. 4” with 24-pounder shot, scourged it with musketry fire, or made wild rushes upon it. The gallant railway men devised new barriers for the doors, and new shields for the windows, and shot with cool and deadly aim, before which the Sepoys fell like rabbits. “No. 4,” like Hougoumont at Waterloo, might be battered into wreck, but could not be captured. In the Memorial Church at Cawnpore to-day, not the least touching tablet is one upon which is inscribed:—

To the memory of the Engineers of the East India Railway, who died and were killed in the great insurrection of 1857. Erected in affectionate remembrance by their brother Engineers in the North-Western Provinces.

Barrack No. 2 was a microscopic fortress, as fiercely attacked, and as valiantly defended as Barrack No. 4. It was first held by Lieutenant Glanville and a party of fourteen officers. Glanville was desperately wounded, and three-fourths of his heroic garrison killed; then the barrack was put in charge of Mowbray Thomson, of the 56th Native Infantry, one of the two officers who survived Cawnpore. Only sixteen men could find standing and fighting room in the barrack. The sixteen under Mowbray Thomson consisted of Ensign Henderson, a mere boy, half-a-dozen Madras Fusileers, two plate-layers from the railway works, and seven men of the 84th. As the garrison dwindled under the ever-scorching fire that played on the building, it was fed with new recruits. “Sometimes,” says Mowbray Thomson, “a civilian, sometimes a soldier came.” But soldier and civilian alike plied his rifle with a grim and silent courage that never grew flurried, and that never knew fear.

Mowbray Thomson, who was of an ingenious turn, contrived a perch in the topmost angle of the barrack wall, and planted there an officer named Stirling, who was at an age when other lads are playing at cricket with their schoolmates, but who was a quick and most deadly shot, and who “bagged” Sepoys as a sportsman, with a breech-loading shot-gun, might bag pheasants in a populous cover. Sometimes, on an agreed signal, the garrisons from No. 2 and No. 4 would dash out together, a little knot of ragged, unwashed, smoke-blackened Sahibs, counting about thirty in all, and running without regular order, but with that expression on their faces which the Sepoys knew meant tragical business; and, with musket and bayonet or hog-spear, they would sweep the line of barracks from end to end.

Nor was courage confined to the fighting men. In one fierce sally, at an early stage of the siege, eleven mutineers were captured. A desperate fight was raging at the moment, and every man was required at the front. A rope was hastily passed round the wrists of the eleven captured Sepoys, and they were put into the charge of the wife of a private of the 32nd, named Bridget Widdowson. Drawn sword in hand, this soldier’s wife, who had little children of her own in the beleaguered entrenchments, stood over the eleven mutineers, while they squatted nervously on their hams before her; and so business-like was the nourish of her weapon, so keen the sparkle in her eye, that not one man of the eleven dared to move. It was only when a guard of the stronger sex took Bridget’s place that the eleven, somehow, contrived to escape. Later on in the siege the supply of cartridges failed, and all the ladies were requisitioned for their stockings, to be used in the construction of new cartridges. When before, or since, did war claim for its service such strange material!

The Sepoys, at intervals, made furious assaults on the mud walls, but these were lined by shots too deadly, and held by hands too strong, to make success possible. Had the British, indeed, been the attacking force, they would have swept over the poor earthen barrier, not four feet high, with a single charge, before the siege was a dozen hours old. But, during the whole three weeks of their attack, though the Sepoys, counting fighting men, outnumbered their foes by, perhaps, thirty to one, they never succeeded in even reaching the irregular line of earth behind which the British stood.

Their best chance occurred when, on the eighth night of the bombardment, the thatch on the barrack used as a hospital, took fire. The whole building was quickly in flames, and in their red light the entrenchment, in every part, was as visible as at noonday. The barrack was used as a sleeping-place for the women and children of the 32nd. These fled from the burning building, but not all the sick and wounded could be rescued; some perished in the smoke and flame. That was, indeed, a night of horror. “The roar of the flames,” says Trevelyan, “lost every ten seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless anticipation of a sudden and agonising death; the group of crying women and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of ammunition, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom”—all this made up a strangely terrible scene.

It is a proof of the quality of Moore’s daring that, by way of proving to the Sepoys that this calamity had not lowered the spirits of the garrison, he organised on the following night a sally, and, with fifty picked men, dashed out on the rebel lines, swept them for many hundreds of yards, spiked a number of 24-pounder guns, and slew their gunners.

But the burning of the barracks was the fatal turning-point of the siege. It destroyed the last shelter of the sick and the women and children. The whole stock of medicines and of surgical appliances was consumed, and the wounded could no longer have their injuries dressed. The eighty odd Sepoys who formed part of the garrison had been lodged in the building now burned. It was deemed imprudent to allow them to mix with the garrison generally, and they were told to provide for themselves, and were allowed to steal out of the entrenchment and escape.

The deaths amongst the British multiplied fast. The fire of the Sepoys grew more furious. “The round shot crashed and spun through the windows, raked the earthworks, and skipped about the open ground in every corner of our position. The bullets cut the air, and pattered on the wall like hail. The great shells rolled hissing along the floors and down the trenches, and, bursting, spread around them a circle of wreck and mutilation and promiscuous destruction.”

How fast the poor besieged wretches perished under this deadly hail may be imagined. A bomb, for example, fell into a cluster of seven ladies and slew them all in a breath. A soldier’s wife, carrying a twin child on each shoulder, with her husband by her side, was crossing a fire-raked angle of the entrenchment. The same ball slew the husband, shattered both elbows of the wife, and tore asunder the body of one of the little twins. General Wheeler’s son was lying wounded. His mother and two sisters were busy tending him, his father looking on, when a cannon-ball tore through the wall of the room and smashed the wounded lad’s head literally to fragments.

One well had been turned into a sepulchre; to-day it is built over, and on the monument above it is written this inscription:—

In a well under this enclosure were laid by the hands of their fellows in suffering the bodies of men, women, and children who died hard by during the heroic defence of Wheeler’s entrenchment, when beleaguered by the rebel Nana.

Then follows a verse from Psalm cxli:—

“Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are unto Thee, O God the Lord.”

The scanty supplies of water for that thirst-wasted crowd had to be drawn from the other well, and on it the Sepoys, day and night, concentrated their fire. To draw from it was a literal service of death. One brave-hearted civilian, named John MacKillop, described himself as “no fighting man,” but claimed to be appointed “captain of the well,” and devoted himself to the business of drawing water, the most dangerous task of the whole entrenchment. He kept to his task for nearly a week, and then, while drawing a vessel of water, was shot.

He staggered a few paces, mortally wounded, then fell, but held up with his dying hands the vessel filled with the precious fluid, and begged one who ran to his help to carry it to the lady to whom he had promised it. Bayard, dying on the banks of the Secia, and handing the water for which he himself thirsted to another dying soldier, has not a better title to be remembered than simple-minded John MacKillop, the “captain” of the Cawnpore well.

On June 24—when for nineteen days the wretched garrison had been under gun-fire—Wheeler writes to Lawrence, “All our carriages more or less disabled, ammunition short.... We have no instruments, no medicine: the British spirit alone remains; but it cannot last for ever.... Surely we are not left to die like rats in a cage.” Lawrence writes back on June 27, giving what encouragement he can, and warning him not to accept any terms. “You cannot rely on the Nana’s promises. Il a tué beaucoup de prisonniers.”

By the twenty-first day of the siege the position of the British was hopeless. Food had almost completely failed. Their guns had become unserviceable. The unconquerable garrison was fast dwindling. “At rare intervals behind the earthwork they stood—gaunt and feeble likenesses of men—clutching with muffled fingers the barrels of their muskets, which glowed with heat intolerable to the naked hand, so fierce was the blaze of the mid-day sun.” They might have sallied out and cut their way through their enemies, or died fighting amongst them; and they would have done so fifty times over but for one consideration. They could not take their women and children with them; they could not abandon them. There was the certainty, too, that the Indian rains, long delayed, must soon burst upon them. Then their firearms would be rendered useless; the holes in which the women and children crouched would be flooded; their wall of mud would be washed away.

No sign of help came from without. Wheeler’s last despatch, dated June 24, ended with the words, “We want aid, aid, aid.” But not merely no aid, no whisper even from the outer world reached the unhappy garrison.

The Sepoys, on their part, were growing weary of the siege. Their losses were enormous. They might batter the entrenchments into dust, but they could not capture an inch of the blackened area these shot-wrecked lines of earth girdled. These Sahibs were fiercer than wounded tigers. They were, indeed, perplexingly and disquietingly aggressive. They were perpetually making fierce little sallies, whose track was marked by slaughtered Sepoys. Nana Sahib felt there was real danger that his allies might abandon their desperate task. He therefore undertook to accomplish by craft what the Sepoys could not do with cannon and bayonet.

Nana Sahib unearthed from some gloomy room in the building which formed his headquarters a captive Englishwoman waiting to be slaughtered, and sent her as a messenger to the entrenchments on the morning of June 24. “All those,” ran the brief note, “who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad.”

Wheeler, with a soldier’s pride, was unwilling to give up the patch of ground he held for the Queen. The younger men, with the flame of battle in their blood, were eager to fight to the bitter end. To trust to the faith of mutineers, or to the humanity of a Hindu of Nana Sahib’s tiger-like nature, they argued, was a sadly desperate venture. Yet that way there might lie a chance of life for the women and children. Death was certain if the siege lasted. It might be less certain if they capitulated.

The 25th was spent in negotiations. Moore and two others met the Nana’s representatives at a spot 200 yards outside the entrenchments. They offered to surrender on condition that they were allowed to march out under arms, with sixty rounds of ammunition to each man; that carriages were provided for the wounded, the ladies, and the children; and that boats, duly stocked with food, were supplied to carry them to Allahabad. In the afternoon the Nana sent in a verbal message saying that he accepted the terms, and the British must march out that night. They refused to do this, as they needed to make some preparations. On this, the Nana sent an insolent message announcing that he must have his will; that if they delayed he would open on them with all his guns; and, as they were perishing fast from mere hunger, a few hours would leave not one of them alive.

Whiting, a gallant soldier, met the insolent threat with high courage. Let the Nana’s soldiers, if they liked, he answered, try to carry the entrenchments. They had tried in vain for three weeks to do so. “If pushed to the last extremity,” Whiting added, “they had powder enough in the magazine to blow both armies into the Ganges!”

Then the Nana changed his tone, and grew effusively polite. His emissaries condoled with Wheeler for the sufferings he had gone through. But, thanks to Allah, the Ever-Merciful, all was ended now! The sahibs and the memsahibs had nothing before them but a pleasant river voyage to their friends! A committee of British officers, under a guard of rebel cavalry, inspected the boats gathered at the landing-place, scarcely a mile distant from the entrenchments; at their request temporary floors of bamboos were laid down in the boats, and roofs of thatch stretched over them.

Nana Sahib, as a matter of fact, meant murder; murder, sudden, bloody, and all-embracing. But he enjoyed, so to speak, toying with his unconscious victims beforehand. Over the gorgon-like visage of murder he hung a smiling and dainty mask, and with soft-voiced courtesy he consented to all arrangements for the “comfort” of his victims!

That night at Cawnpore there were two busy spots, a mile distant from each other. In the entrenchments the poor survivors were preparing for their march, a march—though they knew it not—to the grave. Mothers were collecting the garments of their little ones. Some paid a last sad visit to the fatal well, where their dead were lying. Others were packing their scanty possessions, intending to carry them with them. Soldiers were cleaning their muskets and storing their cartridges. And a mile distant, Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, was planting his cannon and arranging his Sepoys so as to pour upon the boats at a given signal a fire which should slay the whole unhappy company they carried.

CHAPTER V
CAWNPORE: THE MURDER GHAUT

It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded, men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage.

Trevelyan describes the scene:—

First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past, but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng of native bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the weight of the palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be discerned the pallid forms of the wounded; their limbs rudely bandaged with shirt-sleeves and old stockings and strips of gown and petticoat. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver in belt, followed they who could still walk and fight. Step was not kept in those ranks. Little was there of martial array, or soldier-like gait and attitude. In discoloured flannel and tattered nankeen, mute and in pensive mood, tramped by the remnant of the immortal garrison. These men had finished their toil, and had fought their battle, and now, if hope was all but dead within them, there survived at least no residue of fear.

Vibart, in his single person, constituted the rearguard. A wounded man lying in a bed carried by four native bearers, an English lady walking by his side, came out of the entrenchment shortly after the rest had left. It was Colonel Ewart, of the 34th, with his faithful wife. The little group could not overtake the main body, and when it had passed out of sight round a bend in the road a crowd of the colonel’s own Sepoys stopped the poor wife and her wounded husband. The porters were ordered to lay the bed down, and with brutal jests the Sepoys mocked their dying colonel. “Is not this a fine parade?” they asked, with shouts of laughter.

Then, mirth giving place to murder, they suddenly fell upon Ewart, and literally hewed him to pieces under the eyes of his agonised wife. They told her to go in peace, as they would not kill a woman, and by way of comment on the statement one of them stepped back to give himself room for the stroke, and slew her with a single blow.

The road to the Ganges, a little over a mile in length, crossed a little wooden bridge painted white, and swung to the right down a ravine to the river. “A vast multitude,” says Trevelyan, “speechless and motionless as spectres, watched their descent into that valley of the shadow of death.” Directly the last Englishman had crossed the bridge and turned down the lane, a double line of Sepoys was drawn across the entrance to the Ghaut, and slowly the great company made its way down to the river’s edge. Some forty boats were lying there—eight-oared country budgerows, clumsy structures, with thatched roofs, and looking not unlike floating hay-stacks. They lay in the shallow water a few yards from the bank.

A moment’s pause took place when the crowd of sahibs and memsahibs, with their wounded and the little ones, reached the water’s edge. There were no planks by which they could reach the boats, none of the boatmen spoke a word, or made a movement. They sat silent, like spectators at a tragedy.

Then the crowd splashed into the water. The wounded were lifted into the boats; women with their children clambered on board; the men were finding their places; the officers, standing knee-deep in the river, were helping the last and feeblest to embark. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

Suddenly, in the hot morning air, a bugle screamed shrill and menacing, somewhere up the ravine. It was the signal! Out of the forty boats the native boatmen leaped, and splashed through the water to the bank. Into the straw roofs of many of the boats they thrust, almost in the act of leaping, red-hot embers, and nearly a score of boats were almost instantly red-crested with flames.

A little white Hindu temple high up on the bank overlooked the whole scene. Here sat Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, with a cluster of Sepoy officers. He controlled the whole drama from this point of vantage like a stage-manager; and, on his signal, from the lines of Sepoys who were lying concealed in the undergrowth, from guns perched high on the river-bank, and from both sides of the river at once, there broke upon the forty boats, with their flaming roofs and hapless crowds of white-faced passengers, a terrific storm of shot.

Those slain by the sudden bullet were many, and were happy in their fate. The wounded perished under the burning flakes and strangling smoke of the flaming straw roofs. Many leaped into the river, and, crouching chin-deep under the sides of the boats, tried to shelter themselves from the cruel tempest of shot. Some swam out into the stream till they sank in the reddened water under the leisurely aim of the Sepoys. Others, leaping into the water, tried to push off the stranded boats. Some of yet sterner temper, kneeling under the roofs of burning thatch, or standing waist-deep in the Ganges, fired back on the Sepoys, who by this time lined the river’s edge.

General Wheeler, according to one report, perished beneath the stroke of a Sepoy’s sword as he stepped out of his palkee. His daughters were slain with him, save one, the youngest, who, less happy, was carried off by a native trooper to die later. In the official evidence taken long afterwards is the account given by a half-caste Christian woman. “General Wheeler,” she said, “came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, ‘Carry me a little farther towards the boat.’ But a trooper said, ‘No; get out here.’ As the general got out of the palkee head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword through the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it, alas! alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it, we did! and tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The school-girls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire.”

Presently the fire of the Sepoys ceased, and the wretched survivors of the massacre—125 in number—were dragged ashore. They came stumbling up the slope of the bank, a bedraggled company, their clothing dripping with the water of the Ganges, or soiled with its mud. They crept up the ravine down which, a brief hour before, they had walked with Hope shining before them. Now Grief kept pace with them; Despair went before them; Death followed after. They had left their dead in the river behind them; they were walking to a yet more cruel fate in front. “I saw that many of the ladies were wounded,” said one witness afterwards; “their clothes had blood on them. Some had their dresses torn, but all had clothes. I saw one or two children without clothes. There were no men in the party, but only some boys of twelve or thirteen years of age.”

The sad company was marched back to the old cantonment, where the Nana himself came out to exult over his victims. Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “There were fifteen young ladies in Cawnpore, and at first they wrote such happy letters, saying time had never been so pleasant; it was every day like a picnic, and they hoped they would not be sent away; they said a regiment would come, and they felt quite safe. Poor, poor things; not one of them was saved.” How many of that girlish band of fifteen perished, with flaming hair and dress, in the boats? Or did they strand shivering in the icy chill of terror, amongst the captives over whom the tiger glance of Nana Sahib wandered in triumph? After being duly inspected, these poor captives were thrust into a couple of rooms in the Savada-house, and left to what reflections may be imagined.

Three boats out of the forty, meanwhile, had actually got away. Two drifted to the Oude shore, and were overtaken by instant massacre. One boat, however, had for the moment a happier fate. It caught the mid-current of the Ganges, and went drifting downwards; and that solitary drifting boat, without oars or rudder, bearing up in its crazy planks above the dark waters of the Ganges the sole survivors of the heroic garrison of Cawnpore, started on a wilder, stranger voyage than is recorded elsewhere in all history.

It was Vibart’s boat; and by a curious chance it included in its passengers the most heroic spirits in the garrison. Moore was there, and Ashe, and Delafosse; Mowbray Thomson swam out to it from his own boat, and with him Murphy, a private of the 32nd—two of the four who finally survived out of the whole garrison. The boat was intended to carry only fifty, but nearly a hundred fugitives were crowded within its crazy sides.

A cannon-shot smashed its rudder. It had no oars nor food. From either bank a hail of shot pursued it. Every now and again the clumsy boat would ground on some shallow; then, while the Sepoys shot fast and furiously, a group of officers would jump overboard, and push the clumsy craft afloat again.

Moore, pushing at the boat in this fashion, with broken collar-bone, was shot through the heart. Ashe and Bowden and Glanville shared the same fate. Soon the dying and the dead on the deck of this shot-pelted boat were as many as the living. “We had no food in the boat,” wrote Mowbray Thomson afterwards; “the water of the Ganges was all that passed our lips. The wounded and the dead were often entangled together in the bottom of the boat.”

When evening came the boat ran heavily aground. Under the screen of darkness the women and children were landed, and the boat, with great effort, floated again; the Sepoys accompanying the operation with volleys of musketry, flights of burning arrows, and even a clumsy attempt at a fire-ship. “No one slept that night, and no one ate, for food there was none on board.”

When day broke the tragical voyage was continued, still to an accompaniment of musketry bullets. At two o’clock the boat stranded again. “Major Vibart,” says Mowbray Thomson, “had been shot through one arm on the preceding day. Nevertheless, he got out, and, while helping to push off the boat, was shot through the other arm. Captain Turner had both his legs smashed, Captain Whiting was killed, Lieutenant Harrison was shot dead.” These are sample records from that strange log.

Towards evening a boat, manned by some sixty Sepoys, appeared in pursuit, but it, too, ran upon a sand-bank, and this gave the sahibs an opportunity at which they leaped with fierce joy. From the sorely battered boat, which had been pelted for nearly two days and nights with bullets, a score of haggard and ragged figures tumbled, and came splashing, with stern purpose, through the shallows. And then, for some twenty breathless minutes, the Sepoys, by way of change, instead of being hunters, became the hunted, and only some half-dozen, who were good swimmers, escaped to tell their comrades what the experience was like. Mowbray Thomson tells the story in disappointingly bald prose. “Instead of waiting for them to attack us,” he says, “eighteen or twenty of us charged them, and few of their number escaped to tell the story.”

Night fell black and stormy, and through falling rain and the sighing darkness the boat, with its freight of dead and dying, drifted on. It recalls the ship of which Tennyson sang, with its “dark freight, a vanished life.” In the morning it was found that the boat had drifted into some backwater whence escape was impossible. The Sepoys lined the bank and fired heavily. Vibart, who was dying, but still remained the master spirit of the little company, ordered a sally. “Whilst there was a sound arm among them that could load and fire, or thrust with the bayonet,” says Kaye, “still the great game of the English was to go to the front and smite the enemy, as a race that seldom waited to be smitten.”

Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse, with some twelve men of the 82nd and 34th, clambered over the side of the boat, waded ashore, and charged the Sepoys, who fled before them. They pressed eagerly on, shooting and stabbing, but presently found new crowds of the enemy gathering in their rear. The gallant fourteen faced about, and fought their way back to where they had left the boat. Alas! it had vanished.

They commenced to march along the river-bank in the direction of Allahabad, with an interval of twenty paces between each man, so as to make the fire of their pursuers less deadly. Shoeless, faint with hunger, bareheaded, they fought their way for some miles. Their pursuers grew rapidly in numbers and daring. One Englishman had fallen; the others wheeled suddenly round, and seized a small Hindu temple, determined to make a last stand there. There was just room enough for the thirteen to stand upright in the little shrine. Their pursuers, after a few minutes’ anxious pause, tried to rush the door; but, as the historian of the fight puts it, “there was no room for any of them inside”—though, as it turned out, a good deal of room was required outside for the dead bodies of those who had made the attempt.

An effort was made to smoke out, and then to burn out, the unconquerable sahibs. When these devices failed, gunpowder was brought up, and arrangements made for blowing the entire shrine, with its indomitable garrison, into space. Seeing these preparations, the British charged out. Seven of them, who could swim, stripped themselves, and headed the sally, intending to break through to the river.

Seven naked sahibs, charging through smoke and flame, with levelled bayonets, would naturally be a somewhat disquieting apparition, and the seven had no difficulty in breaking through their enemies, and reaching the Ganges. The other six, who could not swim, ran full into the Sepoy mass, and died mute and fighting.