Chapter IV: The Treachery (2)

Four Englishwomen, and three others of mixed parentage, were appropriated and carried off by the soldiers of the Second Cavalry; a corps which, now that the fighting was over, never lost an opportunity of distinguishing itself. These men were summoned into the presence of the Nana, who remonstrated with them at some length, and insisted that the whole seven should be restored without delay. It may be that he regarded his prisoners as hostages, and was unwilling that they should be scattered about in places where he could not lay his hand upon them at the precise moment when his life or power might be at stake. All obeyed promptly, with the exception of Ali Khan, a young trooper, described as of "a fair complexion; height about five feet seven inches; long nose; dark eyes; wears a beard and small moustache." This fellow had selected, as his share of the booty, the youngest daughter of Sir Hugh. He must have been one of a pair who were observed "leading away from the boats a lady on horseback. She wore a green chintz gown, which appeared to be wet. She seemed to be eighteen or nineteen years of age." Ali Khan now contrived to spread a report that his victim flung herself down a well, after killing her captor, his wife, and his three children. His device met with extraordinary success. In Hindostan it is never a very difficult matter to find witnesses who will swear to anything; and, before long, a private in the Second began to remember that he had been passing his comrade's door when Miss Wheeler came out, with a sword in her hand, and said: "Go in and see how nicely I have rubbed the Corporal's feet." Another individual, blessed with an elastic memory, had been present at the dragging of the well, and had seen "Missy Baba taken out, dead and swollen." The impudent fabrication was generally accepted in the city and the cantonments; and met with ready credence in England, where the imaginations of men were excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions. Under one shape or another the incident long went the round of provincial theatres, and sensation magazines, and popular lectures illustrated with dissolving views. Meanwhile the poor girl was living quietly in the family of her master under a Mahomedan name. Our police made diligent inquiries, which resulted in a strong conviction that she had accompanied the flight of the rebels, and, after being hurried about from camping-ground to camping-ground, had met a natural death in a corner of Nepaul. She was by no means of pure English blood. To some the very statement of the fact may appear heartless, but truth demands that it should be made.

The ladies on board the escaped vessel had no reason to congratulate themselves on their fortune: for they were embarked on a voyage which, for concentrated misery, has no parallel even among the narratives of famous shipwrecks so dear to the taste of our forefathers. Soon after leaving the shore, Major Vibart had taken a large party off a sinking boat; so that more than five-score persons were crowded into a space which could barely accommodate fifty. It was difficult to propel the craft, and impossible to guide her. A shot from the southern bank sent her spinning round in the current, with a broken rudder; and the native boatmen had taken good care to leave behind neither oar nor punt-pole. Alternately stranding and drifting; paddling with planks torn from the bulwarks, and trying to steer with a spare stretcher; our countrymen tended down towards Allahabad at the rate of half a mile an hour, under a shower of canister and shells from either bank. "We were often," says Thomson, "within a hundred yards of the guns on the Oude side of the river, and saw them load, prime, and fire into our midst." Presently the bullocks which drew the sepoy artillery broke down in the deep sand of the Ganges; but incessant volleys of musketry, at point blank range, allowed our countrymen little leisure to rejoice over the intermission of the cannonade.

That day dismissed to Hades many valiant souls of warriors, and left their bodies a prize for dogs and every kind of fowl. But the will of God was accomplished. Ashe and Bolton leaped out to help haul the boat off a sunken bank: and a few minutes later she proceeded on her way without those two young Sahibs whom a thousand bullets had spared to perish here. Moore, regardless of an ill-set collar-bone, was pushing with might and main, when a musket-ball pierced his gallant heart. One and the same round shot at length killed Burney, and at length Glanville; and so maltreated a third officer that it would have been well had he died likewise. The wounded and the slain lay entangled together amidst the broken flooring. It was a matter of extreme difficulty to extricate the corpses from the bottom of the vessel: but the desire of decreasing her draft, and the intense heat of what proved to be the last day of that year's dry weather, obliged the crew to cast overboard the dear but useless cargo.

About five o'clock that evening the boat settled down deep in the sand. Our countrymen waited patiently till the sunset allowed them to disembark the women under the screen of darkness. Having thus lightened their unwieldy ark, they set to with a will, and succeeded eventually in getting her adrift. The rebels did what they could to impede the operation. They launched a fire-ship down the current, which came within a few feet of its mark; and, when this contrivance had miscarried, they shot off a flight of arrows tipped with lighted charcoal Though no very skilful archers, they could not well help hitting the thatched roof which loomed through the dusk like the top of a great barn: so that our people thought it better to cut away and tumble into the flood the entire framework of straw and bamboo. No one slept that night, and no one ate: for food there was none on board. They had abundance of water: for Ganges flowed beneath; and from overhead descended a light and refreshing shower, the unfailing precursor of the annual deluge.

When the day broke, those of our officers who had learned the bearings of the locality during many a hot tramp after snipe and wild-fowl saw with chagrin that they had hardly gained ten miles in twice as many hours. And yet that dawn brought one last glimmer of hope. The wet weather had arrived: the river would soon be mounting fast: and nothing was to be seen of the enemy. Presently some natives walked down the bank for their morning wash; and Vibart sent on shore a native drummer, with five rupees in his hand, and directions to obtain information, and, if possible, some provisions. He accosted a peasant, who desisted from the occupation of cleaning his mouth with a bit of stick chewed into a tooth-brush, and listened very civilly to what our envoy had to say. This man undertook to procure some rice and flour, but assured the drummer that our people would have no further need of victuals, as Baboo Ram Bux, a powerful noble whose estates lay a little further down on the Oude side, had engaged that not an Englishman should pass his territory alive. He, however, showed no objection to take our money, and went inland, leaving behind his brass drinking-vessel to guarantee his fidelity: a pledge which he never came back to redeem. On hearing the report of their messenger the fugitives agreed to despair. After the manner of becalmed and starving mariners, Whiting pencilled some lines on a scrap of paper, which he enclosed in a bottle, and committed to the stream: the faithless stream, that has never rendered up the sad deposit.

At two in the afternoon the barge struck off a village called Nuzzufgur, which was within the boundary of Ram Bux. Straightway the shore was covered with a multitude of feudal militia, intermingled with sepoys and mounted troopers. A gun was brought forward, and unlimbered; but, while the artillerymen were taking their aim, there came down from heaven that unbroken sheet of water for which men had been looking during the past fortnight. The rains had begun in earnest. The piece could only be discharged once; but the storm did not protect our people from a keen fusillade. Whiting fell dead; and Harrison's trusty revolver here availed him nothing; and dark Blenman, sorely hurt, implored a comrade to put an end to his wayward existence. Vibart was shot through the arm, and his subordinates, Quin and Seppings; while Mrs. Seppings and Captain Turner of the First Infantry were badly wounded in the leg. After five hours of this bitter work there hove in sight a boat manned by fifty or sixty mutineers, armed to the teeth, who had been deputed by the Nana to follow and destroy the relics of our force. This vessel, likewise, ran on a sandbank; not altogether against the inclination of the crew, who did not relish the notion of forming themselves into a boarding-party. They liked the idea still less when a score of Englishmen came dashing at them through the shallows. The half-dozen ablest swimmers alone escaped to tell their master that, after all they had gone through, those extraordinary Sahibs were the same as ever.

Amidst pelting rain and freshening wind the second night closed in. Faint and hungry they sank asleep, those men who would only yield to death. At midnight some of their number awoke, and became conscious that they were again afloat. It was blowing a hurricane; the stream had risen; and there were found those who hoped. But daylight told another story, for it revealed that they had turned aside out of the navigable channel into a back water, from which egress was none. And then their vessel grounded, and the musketry recommenced. Vibart, who was already dying with a ball through either arm, desired Thomson and Delafosse to land and beat away the enemy, while those who remained attempted to ease off the boat. The two officers selected a sergeant and eleven rank and file of various regiments; and the party sallied forth, fortunate in that it was appointed for some to tread once more on English soil, and for the rest at least to die sword in hand. They had not departed many minutes when a host of insurgents poured down upon the helpless troop of women and wounded men, like wolves upon a flock of sheep deserted by their dogs. The boat was captured after a short but murderous conflict, and escorted back to Cawnpore by a strong body of horse and foot.

Thomson and Delafosse had enough on their hands already, and could do little or nothing towards a rescue. On gaining the shore they drove the foe in style over a considerable space; but were imperceptibly surrounded in flank and rear by fresh swarms of rebels. Then they faced about, and cut their way back to the place whence they started, bleeding, but undiminished in number. They recognised the spot, but the boat was gone, and so the little troop, reduced henceforward to travel afoot, followed the course of the stream; partly on the slender chance of catching up their lost companions; partly from an instinctive feeling which drew them in the direction of Allahabad, as the wounded rabbit makes for its burrow, or the winged partridge scurries to the nearest hedge. With an interval of twenty paces between man and man, to lessen the hazard of the hostile musketry, they retreated step by step, loading and firing as best they might upon the horde of pursuers, who pressed nearer and ever nearer. Shoeless on rugged ground, bareheaded beneath the burning sun, they fought over three weary miles of alternate rock and sand, until all but one got safe into a little temple, or "Sammy-house," as it is called in the jargon spoken by the British private in India; a jargon which he himself denominates "Moors." This rustic shrine, situated about a hundred yards from the river-brink, was just large enough to contain the thirteen as they stood erect. The mob of natives charged helter-skelter at the doorway, which was raised three feet above the surrounding earth; but there was no room for any of them inside, and they presently retired to a distance, except the eight or ten who had managed to squeeze themselves to the front. Clio cannot repress a smile as she records that among those who learned by experience that the rust of the rainy season had not yet blunted the British bayonets was a brother of Baboo Ram Bux; the inhospitable chieftain who knew no reverence for suppliants who had sought sanctuary in the precincts of his local gods, and who now sent an express to the Nana to the effect that the Nazarenes were still invincible.

Our countrymen after this enjoyed a short respite, during which they shared a pint or two of putrid water which had collected at the bottom of a hole in the stone altar. Unfortunately the piety of the neighbourhood had of late failed to contribute any oblations of fruit or cakes, which would certainly not have been respected by the famished Christians. But the insurgents soon returned to the attack; made an unsuccessful attempt to dig up the foundations; and finally, with the view of smoking the besieged out of their citadel, constructed and set alight a large pile of faggots. It was not till the enemy showed signs of an intention to mend the fire with some bags of gunpowder that the garrison began to be seriously alarmed. Then they rushed out, scattering the embers with their bare feet, and leaped the parapet which enclosed the plot of dedicated ground. Six, who could not swim, ran full into the middle of the crowd, carrying their lives for sale to the best market. Seven reached the bank, and flung in their firelocks, and then themselves. The lead in their pouches dragged them so far down that the first flight of bullets splashed harmless on the troubled surface. By the time the sepoys had reloaded their pieces, a score of rapid strokes had rendered our countrymen by no means easy targets for an excited Hindoo marksman. Two were shot through the head. Another, overcome with exhaustion, turned over on his back, and yielded to the stream, which impelled him towards a shoal where his murderers were awaiting him with uplifted bludgeons. The others resisted the blandishments of the wily foe, who endeavoured to coax them within push of lance by offers of food and life, and, ducking like coots at the flash of musketry, swam, and floated, and swam again; while Ganges, as if resenting the desecration of his holy waves by such an Iliad of bloodshed, bare bravely up the chin of these fugitives who had confided themselves to his protection. One by one the hunters desisted from the chase. A trooper on horseback kept the game in view for some miles; but in the end he too fell behind, and was no more seen.

The four Englishmen were sitting up to their necks in water, two good leagues below the point where they first plunged, when the sound of approaching voices again sent them diving after the manner of otters surprised by the throng of hounds and spearmen. As they rose to the upper air, they were greeted with a shout of, "Sahib! Sahib! Why keep away? We are friends." The new-comers, however, were so formidable in aspect and equipment that Thomson refused to come to land until, after a short parley, they volunteered to throw their weapons into the river as a proof of their sincerity. Their assurances of amity afforded our countrymen a passable excuse for giving in, without inspiring any great amount of confidence. At the very worst, a blow on the head or a thrust in the chest killed more expeditiously than drowning or inanition. It was better to die and have done with it, than to endure all the torment of death without the repose, as of late had seemed to be their apportioned lot. And so they turned, and swam in, and were helped ashore naked as Ulysses when he was washed up on the Phæacian coast after his wrestle with the Adriatic surf. Like him, their knees and wrists gave away beneath them: for their vigour was subdued by long toil among the billows: and their bodies were livid and swollen; and much water oozed from mouth and nostril; and they lay without breath, and speech, and well nigh without life, stricken by an exceeding weariness. They had between them a flannel shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds. Exposure to the heat had puffed the skin of their shoulders with huge blisters, as if their clothes had been burned off their backs by fire. But they found an Alcinöus in the person of Dirigbijah Singh, a loyal gentleman of Oude; the landlord of that district, and the chieftain to whom their captors owed feudal allegiance. Good-natured as they proved to be, these fellows could not resist the temptation of plundering the Englishmen who had been so unaccountably delivered into their hands. They abstracted a cap-pouchful of rupees which poor Murphy had tied under his right knee, the nominal price, it may be, of some buckets drawn at a risk which could not be valued in money. After lying for a while wrapped in blankets, the refugees recovered strength sufficient to allow of their being supported to the nearest village, over a distance which appeared to them more miles than it was furlongs in reality. They were taken to the hut of the headman, who received them kindly, and set before them lentil porridge, wheat cakes, and preserves, of which they eat like men who had fed little and badly during a month past, and for seventy hours had not fed at all.

After a long meal and a short nap the Englishmen set out for the fort where Dirigbijah Singh resided; Thomson clad with the solitary shirt, and Delafosse in a borrowed rug. Private Murphy and Gunner Sullivan were suffering too much from recent wounds to care about appearances. The officers resigned to them an elephant which had been despatched for their conveyance, and bestrode a pony, like a pair of needy and valiant knights belonging to a primitive order. As they passed through the villages, peasants came forth with milk and sweatmeats, and discovered that the Sahibs had changed their opinion as to the acceptability of "dollies;" those presents of Oriental dainties which collectors and commissioners contemptuously make over to their servants, reserving a handful of pistachio nuts for the children, and a box of Cabul grapes to improve the dessert of their next dinner-party. Darkness set in ere the cavalcade rode up to the fort of Moorar Mhow. The rajah, an old man of venerable presence, was seated in the open air encircled by his sons, his body-guard, his tenants, and his torch-bearers, to the number of some hundred and fifty persons. He requested our countrymen to alight; inquired minutely into the story of the siege; evinced warm approbation of their courage, and wonder at their escape; and after promising his countenance and hospitality, sent them indoors to an abundant repast washed down with native wine. Tired of everything save eating, they supped right well, and then, stretched on horse-litter and covered with a bit of carpet, the wanderers rested at last. Soundly they slumbered that night; and soundly, too, slumbered their six comrades, on whom the moon looked down through her watery veil as they lay around the little temple amidst the trampled brushwood, on their brow the frown of battle, and in their breast the wound that doth not shame.

Here the four Englishmen remained for three weeks unmolested and tolerably happy. They had spent at least one equal period of time in far less comfortable quarters. They wore coats and trousers cut by a native tailor. Their hurts were poulticed by a native doctor. They sat down thrice a day with British appetites to a meal of native food; and, whenever there was nothing else to be done, they slept. Heedless of the flies, which clustered about their bandaged limbs; careless of the future, and willingly oblivious of the past,--they dreamed, and woke, and yawned, and shifted their straw, and settled themselves down for another fit of drowsiness. Azimoolah might have his eye upon them: the Nana might have spoken the word of doom: up to Delhi and down to Patna every pass might be blockaded by a rebel post: but for the present they could doze, morning, noon, and eve. Their principal diversion consisted in viewing the performance by the Rajah and his priests of some quaint and pretty domestic rites. The master of the house paid them a daily and very pleasant visit; and his good lady sent constantly to ask after the welfare of the strangers, whose fearless deportment under their abject and precarious circumstances she had noted with womanly interest, as she gazed, herself invisible, from behind the fretted stone-work which fenced her verandah.

Thomson and his companions were forbidden by their host to set foot outside the circuit of the walls: as the vicinity was infested with rebels, who already regarded the country as their own, and appeared to imagine themselves welcome anywhere. There were generally some of them inside the fort, vapouring about, sword on thigh and matchlock in hand, and pestering the domestics to get them a sight of the Sahibs. The soldiers of the Cawnpore brigade were indulged in frequent interviews with their former officers, always in the presence of a detachment from the Rajah's body-guard. These mutineers were full of the great things that were going to be done in the course of the next year by the armies of the religious. A trooper had been despatched to Moscow on a camel, and was to return with a host of Russian Mussulmans. Such Englishmen as had not yet been knocked on the head were to be secured and shipped off at Calcutta; and afterwards the Nana would embark for Europe, conquer our island, and make it over to Hindoo shareholders constituted into a joint-stock Kumpani. That magic word would conjure up a fresh train of ideas, and they would descant upon the flagrant iniquity of Lord Dalhousie, and maintain that, had it not been for the annexation of Oude, the empire of John Kumpani might have endured for all time: but that it was not so ordained; inasmuch as the ancient oracles, which could not lie, had allotted to that empire a duration of a hundred years, and no more. This prediction came true, but not in the sense anticipated by the leaders of the insurrection. The honour of justifying this prophecy was reserved for Sir Charles Wood and Lord Stanley; not for Azimoolah and the Maharaja of Bithoor. That potentate repeatedly summoned Dirigbijah Singh to deliver up the refugees to his regal arbitrement: but the stout old fellow answered that he held of His Majesty the King of Oude, and knew nothing of Seereek Dhoondoo Punth and his pretensions to royalty. Havelock and Neill soon provided the Nana with more pressing business than the pursuit of his vengeance, or the assertion of his supremacy.

The Rajah came to the conclusion that a change of domicile was essential to the security of our countrymen, about the time that they were growing sated of laughing at sepoy bluster, and watching the Brahmins of the household ring bells and sprinkle flowers with holy water. They accordingly retired to the seclusion of a hamlet bordering on the river, where they amused themselves as best they could with a volume bearing the inscription "53rd Regiment Native Infantry Book Club;" which had been picked out of the stream by one among their attendants, as it floated by amidst a quantity of torn papers and smashed furniture: so many indications of the minute and searching character of the mischief that was being wrought above. After the lapse of a week, the Rajah sent them across to a landholder of his acquaintance, who lived on the south bank, and who undertook to hand them on to the nearest European encampment. They took leave of their chivalrous preserver with many expressions of unaffected regret, and a silent resolution never to rest until he had received some tangible mark of their gratitude and regard. On reaching the other shore their new patron packed them off towards Allahabad by a cross-road, in a bullock-cart without springs, preceded by an escort of four armed retainers. After bumping along for an hour the driver stopped, and informed them, in low and agitated tones, that there were guns ahead, planted athwart their path. And so they alighted, those way-worn fugitives, solicitous to learn whether they should again have to run, and swim, and lurk, and starve; and they crept stealthily along the edge of the road, and, turning the corner, found themselves within a few yards of the white and freckled face of an English sentry.

Five years subsequently Murphy left his old regiment, and volunteered for India in another corps. Presently it began to be rumoured at mess that there was a man in the ranks who had gone through the siege and the slaughter of Cawnpore. The Colonel made all necessary inquiries, and reported the matter to the Commander-in-chief: who at once appointed Murphy custodian of the Memorial Gardens. Here he may be seen, in the balmy forenoons of the cold weather, sauntering about in a pith helmet and linen jacket; a decent little Irishman, very ready to give a feeling and intelligent account of what took place under his immediate observation, and insisting much on the fact that he and the gunner, unable to speak a syllable of "Moors," would have been helpless but for the knowledge of Hindoostanee possessed by the sepoy officers. He retains a lively impression of the eagerness with which the English privates whom they encountered on the Allahabad highway contributed their allowances of liquor to treat the men who had not tasted beer for eight summer weeks. He points out the stone beneath which reposes poor Sullivan, who died of fatigue and debility, taking the form of cholera, within a fortnight of his restoration to safety. Delafosse lived once more to play the man, fighting under Chamberlain in the passes of the Hindoo Koosh: and Thomson to compose the story of what he had seen and undergone, so told that it may be read by a Christian without horror, and by an educated person without disgust. He was of opinion that a soldier who had performed his duty should not stoop to the vocabulary of a hangman. This man, scarred from head to heel with sepoy bullets,--who had carried his life in his hand for months together,--who had lost friends, possessions, and health in the frightful mêlée,--could still write like a modest and tolerant gentleman: while officers, to whom the rebellion had brought nothing except promotion and chance of distinction, were declaiming and printing about battues, and fine bags, and tucking up niggers, and polishing off twenty brace of Pandies. He made it his care that the worthy Rajah of Moorar Mhow should be rewarded with a handsome pension; that the faithful sepoys of his own battalion should obtain credit for their loyalty; that a fitting monument should be erected to the memory of his dead comrades; and that the services of his living companions in arms should not pass unrecorded. He left it for others to exult when shopkeepers and bankers, whose property had been confiscated by the Nana, and plundered by our own mutinous troops, were condemned and executed for having acknowledged a _de facto_ monarch; when pedlars and bazaar-porters were strung up by scores to a gallows planted across the mouth of the funereal well: truly a graceful tribute to the manes of gentle English women.[4]

At five in the evening on the twenty-eighth of June, the Nana held a state review in honour of his victory of the preceding day. His force looked well on paper, and made a very respectable show in the field. There turned out six entire regiments of foot, and two of horse; besides strong detachments from battalions which had been disbanded at a distance from Cawnpore. The ranks of the artillery were perceptibly thinned by three weeks of desperate fighting. To them was especially due the success of the cause: and they now bore the brunt of the rejoicing. Few but zealous, they worked their pieces with a will, and fired away their ammunition as if henceforward there was no occasion for keeping any against the day of battle; as if the clubs of villagers and the daggers of banditti might safely be trusted to gather up the leavings of the sepoys. Bala Rao was welcomed on to the ground with seventeen discharges. The Maharaja himself at length enjoyed the compliment of the royal reception which had been so ardently coveted and so strenuously denied. He was greeted on his appearance by the full sum of twenty-one explosions, each bought with a day of carnage. His ears tingling at the unaccustomed sensation, he congratulated the mutineers on their common triumph, and promised to distribute a hundred thousand rupees as an instalment of the debt which he owed to the army: an announcement that produced a repetition of the salute. Then he took his departure: but the enthusiasm which he left behind could evaporate only in a wholesale expenditure of Government powder. The nephew of the Nana, and his brother Baba Bhut, were each honoured with seventeen reports. Bala, who was deservedly a favourite with that gang of disciplined assassins, came in for a second bout of eleven guns: while Jwala Pershad and Tantia Topee got the same number a-piece. This closed the proceedings: during which Tantia, whose mind had decidedly a practical cast, was better employed than in listening to an idle cannonade. He was closeted with a man of business named Dabeedeen, liquidating accounts with the owners of the flotilla which had been sunk or burned. Between four and five thousand rupees were paid over as compensation for the boats; and fifty pounds were put aside to remunerate the bargemen for their share in the operations. It was afterwards asserted that Dabeedeen took undue precautions to avoid cheating himself in the transaction.

On the morrow, some boys loitering about on the Oude side of the river came upon an English officer skulking in a ravine. He was of tall stature, and about forty years old, with a bit of sacking twisted round his waist, but otherwise naked. The children imparted their discovery to the peasants of an adjoining hamlet, who took the fugitive to their headman. The unhappy gentleman did not speak any native language, and could only point towards the East with an imploring gesture, and pronounce the word "Lucknow." They gave him sugar, which he eat up greedily with both hands, and so afforded a bystander an opportunity for observing that he bore the mark of a ring fresh on his finger. Touched by the contrast of his fallen state, these good people showed a disposition to do what they could for his preservation; but just then some landholders of the neighbourhood arrived at the head of a numerous array, and prevailed over these benevolent intentions by threats of present violence and future punishment. A short while afterwards, an ex-clerk of the commissariat department met fifty or sixty fellows "with drawn sabres and lighted matches, bringing along a Sahib bound." They halted under a grove which stood near the chapel of ease, and sent one of their party to fetch the Nana. In his stead came Baba Bhut, and, in the name of his brother, bade them kill their prisoner. To this they answered: "Put weapons into his hand, and let him strike us, and then we will strike in return: but we will not slay him thus." Some troopers of the Second Cavalry, who happened to be in attendance, had a less nice theory of honour. Three-quarters of an hour subsequently, while the clerk was performing his ablutions, the corpse was thrown into the Ganges, gashed all over with sword-cuts.

All the night of the twenty-ninth our people who had been captured at Nuzzufgur by Baboo Ram Bux were slowly remounting the stream. As it grew light they began to recognise objects and places which they had trusted never again to behold: and, two hours before noon, the doomed boatload lay to at the landing-place whence they had set forth, to return thus after three such days as had not repaid them for the trouble of making their escape. What ensued an Englishman would willingly tell in phrases not his own. The following account was taken from the lips of a native spy, and is supported by a mass of evidence. The mention of General Wheeler is, of course, inaccurate.

"There were brought back," says the man, "sixty Sahibs, twenty-five Mem Sahibs, and four children. The Nana ordered the Sahibs to be separated from the Mem Sahibs, and shot by the First Bengal Native Infantry. But they said, 'We will not shoot Wheeler Sahib, who has made our regiment's name great, and whose son is our Quarter-master. Neither will we kill the Sahib people. Put them in prison.' Then said the Nadiree regiment: 'What word is this? Put them in prison? We will kill the males.' So the Sahibs were seated on the ground: and two companies of the Nadiree regiment stood with their muskets, ready to fire. Then said one of the Mem Sahibs, the doctor's wife: (What doctor? How should I know?) 'I will not leave my husband. If we must die, I will die with him.' So she ran, and sat down behind her husband, clasping him round the waist. Directly she said this, the other Mem Sahibs said: 'We also will die with our husbands.' And they all sat down, each by her husband. Then their husbands said: 'Go back;' but they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered his soldiers; and they, going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they could not pull away the doctor's wife, who there remained. Then the Padre called out to the Nana, and requested leave to read prayers before they died." (This Padre was Captain Seppings, with his broken arm. The doctor's wife, good soul, is known to have been Mrs. Boyes.) "The Nana granted it, and the Padre's hands were loosened so far as to enable him to take a small book from his pocket, with which he read. But all this time one of the Sahibs, who was shot in the arm, kept crying out to the sepoys: 'If you mean to kill us, why don't you set about it quickly and have the work done?'" Poor impatient Sahib! Making the responses in his passionate way! "After the Padre had read a few prayers, he shut the book, and the Sahibs shook hands all round. Then the sepoys fired. One Sahib rolled one way, one another, as they sat. But they were not dead: only wounded. So they went in and finished them off with swords."

Here is a thing which was actually done on the last Tuesday of June, eight years back from the present date. Three months before, these Sahibs and Mem Sahibs were passing an existence no more eventful, and apparently no less secure than the career of a county-court judge, or a military man quartered at Sheffield or Colchester. They laid their plans for the Meerut race-meeting and the biennial trip to an Himalayan station in a confidence of fruition equal to that with which a home-staying public servant anticipates the cup-day at Ascot, and the pass which he is going to discover in September. In April, Cawnpore society was lamenting the departure of one period of cold weather, and looking forward to the arrival of another; but, ere the rains had well set in, it had come to this, that the last batch of English officers were lying stiff and stark on the parade-ground, in front of the building where their widows and orphans were enduring a brief imprisonment for life.

The number of captives had yet to receive a final addition. At the station of Futtehgur, which was situated about seventy miles up the river from Cawnpore, some hundred and eighty English people of every age and profession were alive when the month of June commenced. The cantonments were occupied by the Tenth Native Infantry, under the command of Colonel Smith, a man distinguished by courage so closely allied with rashness, and firmness so nearly akin to obstinacy, that the European residents could not have fared worse had they been under the charge of a waverer or a coward. He was a zealous adherent of that sect among the Bengal officers which worshipped the sepoy. A willing martyr to the creed that he professed, his devotion would have excused his fanaticism, had he been the only victim: but no personal calamity can atone for pedantry which staked and lost nine score English souls on the truth of the axiom that a mutineer was still docile and affectionate until he could be proved a murderer.

During the latter half of May successive tidings of massacre, insurrection, and, finally, of an approaching rebel force, excited the fears of our countrymen, and the impious hopes of the soldiery: as turbulent a set of scamps as any in Northern India. At length Mr. Probyn, the magistrate of the district, whose acute discernment, if left to itself, would have saved a large asset of life from the wreck of our fortunes, took measures for evacuating Futtehgur before the extreme crisis. He put himself into communication with Hurdeo Bux, a loyal noble whose estates lay on the left bank, and obtained an escort of fifty picked men and the offer of an asylum. At midnight, between the third and fourth of June, more than a hundred of the English inhabitants started down the river in a fleet of twelve or thirteen boats, laden with baggage, merchandise, furniture, and an ample store of provisions. Colonel Smith was not a little disgusted that so many people should combine to put a slight upon his pet battalion; but consoled himself with the reflection that time and the issue would judge between the sepoys and their defamers. The fugitives comprised the merchants of the place, and the planters of the vicinity; the civilians, missionaries, clerks, craftsmen, and pensioners; together with at least forty women, several nurseries of children, and a multitude of native domestics. They anchored for refreshment after accomplishing a stage of four leagues, and, before breakfast was finished, were joined by certain officers of the Tenth, who announced that the regiment had mutinied on parade, and that all was over at Futtehgur. The expedition proceeded on its way, under a desultory fire of musketry from the country people, who were for the most part hostile to our cause. Next morning arrived the bailiff of Hurdeo Bux, who brought Probyn an invitation from his master to take refuge in his fort of Dhurrumpore. It was resolved to split the party. The magistrate, with forty others, accepted the proffered hospitality: while three of the most roomy vessels, containing nineteen men, twenty-three women, and twenty-six children, pushed forwards in the direction of Cawnpore.

And they reached their destination. On the evening of the ninth of June the little squadron was brought to on a sandbank a few furlongs above Nawabgunge, the north-west suburb of Cawnpore. Here they abode forty-eight hours, listening to the ceaseless cannonade which pealed along the stream from the south. Then they sent a messenger bearing a request for permission to pass on their way: the answer to which was brought by a horde of mutineers, who had no sooner appeared in view than the boatmen set the thatch alight, and fell with bludgeons and sabres upon the passengers, who were taking their afternoon tea, and who now threw themselves over the bulwarks, and sought concealment in a patch of high grass. But their cover was fired by the rebel guns; two ladies and a child were scorched or suffocated to death; and the rest of the company fell into the hands of the troopers of the Second Cavalry, to whose _esprit-de-corps_ this one-sided work was more suited than the dubious contest which was raging around our intrenchment. The captives were made fast to a long rope, and marched as far as ladies with bare and bleeding feet could carry the babies and drag along the children: for by this time all their servants had fled, with the exception of two Ayahs and a few menials of the very lowest order. Here, as elsewhere, fortitude and fidelity were in inverse proportion to dignity of caste. Our people spent the night supperless, on the spot where they had halted; and at daybreak, after breakfasting on a mouthful of water a-piece, were distributed among sixteen bullock carts, and conveyed into the presence of the Nana: to whom they pointed out the folly of which he would be guilty if he indulged himself in wanton and indiscriminate murder. It was no easy task, they bade him reflect, to empty Europe of Europeans. He is said to have been inclined to mercy: but Bala Rao, who, if there was a choice between the brothers, seems to have been the blackest villain of the three, made such an outcry that the Nana stifled his nascent humanity in order to prevent the scandal of a family quarrel. The ladies and the little ones received orders to seat themselves on the ground; and the gentlemen, with their hands tied behind them, were drawn up as a rear rank. The Second Cavalry had soon another victory to inscribe upon their standards. "I witnessed all this with my own eyes," says a Hindoo nurse, who, while they were both above the soil, would not lose sight of her dear young charge: "for I was sitting about thirty paces on one side. Two pits were dug, and all the bodies thrown in. The Nana was not present. May God take vengeance on him, and on these wicked men!" Nanukchund notes in his diary that "reports of guns were heard from the direction of Nawabgunge. A little after twelve A.M. two dead bodies of Europeans were seen floating down the Ganges; and sepoys were seen in a boat coming down behind these corpses and firing off their muskets as they came." Next day he found occasion to seek a retreat in a village which lay at some distance up the river. "I perceived," he writes, "bodies of ladies and gentlemen lying along the banks of the Ganges. I cannot describe the grief I felt at this sight. The corpses could not float down from the shallowness of the river. I saw three boats and a barge which had been burnt by the rebels. I questioned the people of the place, and learned that wine and other articles of merchandise were in the boats, but the boatmen had plundered the liquors, and, when drunk, cut down the gentlemen."

Soon after, "a body of troopers from the Nana came to seize me, and surrounded the house where I was. But I was saved from the hands of these ruffians, and kept in concealment in a garden. At nightfall the gardener sent four men with me, and thus I managed to reach the shore. It was not, however, my fate to find a boat, and I resolved to drown myself in the river, as I thought it better to die than to fall into the hands of so cruel a foe. After midnight I left the garden. The first ford I came to had water up to the waist only, and it was moonlight: so I waded across, and reached the next channel. There I saw the corpses of the Europeans whom the boatmen had slain when drunk: I cannot tell the exact number of bodies, but they extended here and there about a mile. I saw three dead young ladies. They all were dressed, but the low-caste people had commenced to take off their clothes; and some had been torn by animals. Portions of property, books, and papers, belonging to the plundered boats, were also strewn about the shores. These drunken boatmen were armed, some with clubs, some with weapons; and they were running about the woods like wild men. I cannot describe the terror that seized me at this moment. How I sighed for the British rule! I was trembling with fear, and knew not where I was going. On reaching the opposite bank I was senseless for four hours."

Meanwhile at Futtehgur was being played an unique tragi-comedy. On the fourth of June, during morning parade, twenty thousand pounds' worth of Government silver was in course of removal from the treasury to the fort. This mark of distrust, coming close upon the departure of the flotilla, proved too much for the sensibility of these military Brahmins; a number of whom stepped out from the ranks, surrounded the carts, and insisted that the money should be taken to their own quarters. Colonel Smith and the adjutant came forward and expostulated with the insurgents; but they were pushed up against the wall, and kept within a semicircle of levelled bayonets until the cash was safely deposited in the middle of the sepoy lines. These proceedings caused a slight unpleasantness, which did not wholly disappear until the troops had been gratified with an advance of two months' pay, a promise of six months' extra allowances, and an assurance that the treasure should henceforward be kept on the parade-ground under their exclusive custody: inasmuch as the Company's property could be nowhere so secure as in the guardianship of the Company's soldiers. That evening Smith harangued as many of the battalion as chose to attend; told them that their conduct had been disgraceful, but threw the blame on the shoulders of the recruits; and entreated them to believe that he could forgive and forget. He then pronounced the regiment faithful and staunch. And so the first little difficulty between the colonel and his men had been patched up, and both parties were living together on terms of contemptuous acquiescence on the one side, and doting credulity on the other.

Such was the state of things which Probyn found when, after an interval of four days, he rode into the cantonment accompanied by a lieutenant and an ensign of the Tenth. Immediately upon their arrival the colonel informed the magistrate that his services were no longer required, as the district was entirely under martial law, and put the two subalterns in arrest for having deserted their posts. The poor lads represented that they had been driven from Futtehgur by the fire of their own companies: but this man, whom sepoy steel pointed at his chest would not convince of sepoy disaffection, refused to accept the word of his officers when it clashed with a darling theory. Probyn, who foresaw the result, wrote to the Europeans then residing under the roof of Hurdeo Bux, stating that in his opinion the battalion could not possibly be kept together; and recommending that their host should put his fort into a defensible condition, and engage five hundred matchlock-men on the credit of the English Government. Feeling that he was useless while in the same locality with the colonel, he shook from his feet the dust of the devoted station, and made his way back to Dhurrumpore.

He was followed by a letter from Smith earnestly inviting the refugees to leave their new ally, and throw themselves into the arms of their natural protectors, the native soldiers of the Tenth regiment. He affirmed that there were at least a hundred and fifty men upon whom he absolutely relied; and that, if the worst should come to the worst, he could with their aid fight his way down to Allahabad. The poor creatures, who were very uncomfortably lodged, and who regretted the punkahs and musquito-curtains, the soda-water and bottled beer of their abandoned homes, jumped at the proposition in spite of all the logic and eloquence which Probyn could bring to bear upon their infatuation. He persuaded no one except his own family, and a solitary civilian, who had escaped from a slaughter and tumult in Rohilcund too narrowly and recently for him to care to move again. The rest of the party returned to Futtehgur, and re-instated themselves in the good graces of the deluded veteran. Before very long, they were treated with a specimen of sepoy loyalty. On the sixteenth of June the colonel took measures to carry out a capital sentence of the civil courts. The soldiery, however, considered that at such a time there might be something awkward in the precedent of an execution, and intimated that the criminal had better be released. Their intimation met with prompt obedience.

The Seetapore mutineers, laden with English booty, and reeking with English blood, were now close at hand. Their ringleaders despatched a letter to the men of the Tenth, calling upon them to murder their officers: to which the reply was: "Come. We will not oppose you. We have sworn not to do so: but our vows do not bind you." So little reciprocity of affection existed in that indecorous dalliance between authority and sedition. On the eighteenth of June the troops, eager to fling aside even the pretence of submission and the semblance of discipline, broke forth into open rebellion; sacked the public chest; and set up a pretender, whom the event showed to be better than a mere puppet. The Europeans shut themselves up in the fort, in company with Kalay Khan, the sole representative of the colonel's hundred and fifty faithful sepoys. That evening the Seetapore mutineers marched into the station, hungry for pillage; and, on discovering an empty treasury, vented their rage by killing every man of the Tenth on whom they could lay hands. In the course of a week, however, stimulated by the prospect of a liberal bounty, and the co-operation of some powerful Rohilla chieftains, the regiments made up their differences, and united to exterminate the common enemy. For ten days and nights five and thirty of our countrymen maintained against as many hundred assailants a rambling tumble-down old earthwork extending over a space of twenty acres. They fired bags of screws and scrap-iron for grape, and the heads of sledge-hammers for round-shot. They repulsed three general assaults. They lived amidst an atmosphere alive with bullets and flying splinters, and din with the smoke of blazing houses and exploding mines. At length, when the besiegers were gradually but surely blowing their way through the rampart, the defenders took to their boats, and dropped down the current, encumbered by thrice their own number of women, children, and invalids.

The rest is soon told. The river was low: the pursuit hot and persistent. The barges grounded; and were got off; and grounded for the last time. The crews waded ashore to drive away the hostile sharpshooters: and some were borne back dying; and some never stirred from the spot where they fell. Vessels hove in view, unwarlike in their external aspect; but which, as they ran alongside, proved to be crammed with swordsmen and musketeers. And then ensued mad confusion, and promiscuous butchery, and suicide that did not merit the name. On the tenth evening of July, after losing a life for every mile of the voyage, the expedition got as far as Nawabgunge, but no farther. The ladies helped to swell the throng of prisoners, and their husbands were sent whither the men of the Cawnpore garrison had gone before. Three only were spared, upon their engaging to bring about that the citadel of Allahabad should be made over to the rebellion. The Nana had reason for his self-denial. It was worth his while to forego any gratification to purchase security in the southern quarter. That was the direction in which was brewing the storm of retribution and reconquest.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] On the unimportant point of the identity of the messenger a strange discrepancy exists between the best informed authorities. Captain Thomson "recognized her as Mrs. Greenway." On the other hand, the confidential servant of Mr. Greenway affirms that the choice of the Nana fell upon Mrs. Jacobi, and his statement is supported by the great majority of the depositions.

[4] A single specimen will suffice of the style which, during those days, a British officer, a Colonel and Companion of the Bath, allowed himself to adopt in a published work. The page is headed "Major Ouvry's Battue."

"Major Ouvry had made his dispositions for 'a bag.' Unlike a true member of the chase, who loves to see his fox take well to the open, he had headed his game; spreading his cavalry right and left of the road, to beat back the high crops into which the enemy had skulked. Forming his line precisely as he would have beaten a field of turnips for game, a scene commenced which baffles all description."

Unhappily it does not baffle the description of Colonel George Bouchier, C.B. who proceeds as follows:--