Chapter V: The Massacre (2)

About half-an-hour after this the woman called "the Begum" informed the captives that the Peishwa had determined to have them killed. One of the ladies went up to the native officer who commanded the guard, and told him that she learned they were all to die. To this he replied that, if such were the case, he must have heard something about it; so that she had no cause to be afraid: and a soldier said to the Begum: "Your orders will not be obeyed. Who are you that you should give orders?" Upon this the woman fired up, and hurried off to lay the affair before the Nana. During her absence the sepoys discussed the matter, and resolved that they would never lift their weapons against the prisoners. One of them afterwards confessed to a friend that his own motive for so deciding was anxiety to stand well with the Sahibs, if ever they got back to Cawnpore. The Begum presently returned with five men, each carrying a sabre. Two were Hindoo peasants: the one thirty-five years of age, fair and tall, with long mustachios, but flat-faced and wall-eyed: the other considerably his senior, short, and of a sallow complexion. Two were butchers by calling: portly strapping fellows, both well on in life. The larger of the two was disfigured by the traces of the small-pox. They were Mahommedans, of course; as no Hindoo could adopt a trade which obliged him to spill the blood of a cow.

These four were dressed in dirty white clothes. The fifth, likewise a Mussulman, wore the red uniform of the Maharaja's body-guard, and is reported to have been the sweetheart of the Begum. He was called Survur Khan, and passed for a native of some distant province. A bystander remarked that he had hair on his hands.

The sepoys were bidden to fall on. Half-a-dozen among them advanced, and discharged their muskets through the windows at the ceiling of the apartments. Thereupon the five men entered. It was the short gloaming of Hindostan:--the hour when ladies take their evening drive. She who had accosted the officer was standing in the doorway. With her were the native doctor, and two Hindoo menials. That much of the business might be seen from the verandah, but all else was concealed amidst the interior gloom. Shrieks and scuffling acquainted those without that the journeymen were earning their hire. Survur Khan soon emerged with his sword broken off at the hilt. He procured another from the Nana's house, and a few minutes after appeared again on the same errand. The third blade was of better temper; or perhaps the thick of the work was already over. By the time darkness had closed in, the men came forth and locked up the house for the night. Then the screams ceased: but the groans lasted till morning.

The sun rose as usual. When he had been up nearly three hours the five repaired to the scene of their labours over-night. They were attended by a few sweepers, who proceeded to transfer the contents of the house to a dry well situated behind some trees which grew hard by. "The bodies," says one who was present throughout, "were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head. Those who had clothes worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive. I cannot say how many: but three could speak. They prayed for the sake of God that an end might be put to their sufferings. I remarked one very stout woman, an half-caste, who was severely wounded in both arms, who entreated to be killed. She and two or three others were placed against the bank of the cut by which bullocks go down in drawing water. The dead were first thrown in. Yes: there was a great crowd looking on: they were standing along the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and villagers. Yes: there were also sepoys. Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. They were running round the well (where else could they go to?) and there was none to save them. No; none said a word, or tried to save them."

At length the smallest of them made an infantile attempt to get away. The little thing had been frightened past bearing by the murder of one of the surviving ladies. He thus attracted the observation of a native, who flung him and his companions down the well. One deponent is of opinion that the man first took the trouble to kill the children. Others think not. The corpses of the gentlemen must have been committed to the same receptacle: for a townsman who looked over the brink fancied that there was "a Sahib uppermost." This is the history of what took place at Cawnpore, between four in the afternoon of one day and nine in the morning of another, almost under the shadow of the church-tower, and within call of the Theatre, the Assembly Rooms, and the Masonic Lodge. Long before noon on the sixteenth July there remained no living European within the circuit of the station.

But there were plenty at no great distance: for, about the turn of day, our force, after travelling five leagues, rested for a space in a hamlet buried amidst a forest of mango groves. A mile to northward lay the sepoy host, entrenched across the spot where the byway to Cawnpore branches from the Grand Trunk Road. Seven guns commanded the approaches, and behind a succession of fortified villages were gathered five thousand fighting men, prepared to strike a last blow for their necks and their booty. Havelock resolved to turn the flank of the Nana: for he was aware that, if an opponent assails a native army otherwise than as it intended to be assailed when it took up its position, the general for a certainty loses his head, and the soldiers their heart. The word was given, and our column defiled at a steady pace round the left of the hostile line. The Fusileers led, with two field-pieces in their rear. Then came the Highlanders, and the bulk of the artillery; followed by the Sixty-fourth, the Eighty-fourth, and the Sikh battalion. For some time the mutineers seemed to be unconscious of what was going on: deceived by clumps of fruit-trees, that screened our movement; and distracted by the sharp look-out which they were keeping straight ahead. But soon an evident sensation was created along their whole array. Their batteries began discharging shot and shell with greater liberality than accuracy; while a body of cavaliers pushed forward in the direction of our march, and made a demonstration that did not lead to much. As soon as the enemy's flank was completely exposed to the English attack, our troops halted, faced, and advanced in the order wherein they found themselves, covered by two companies of the Fusileers extended as skirmishers. Colonel Hamilton bade the pipes strike up, and led the Seventy-eighth against a cluster of houses defended by three guns. His horse was shot between his legs: but the kilts never stopped until they were masters of all inside the village. Three more pieces were captured by Major Stirling and the Sixty-fourth regiment. The rebel infantry were everywhere in full retreat: for the last half-hour nothing had been seen of the cavalry: and the battle appeared to be won.

Our fire had already ceased. The officers were congratulating each other on their easy victory: the privates were lighting their cheroots, and speculating on the probability of an extra allowance of rum: when of a sudden a twenty-four pounder, planted on the Cawnpore Road, opened with fatal precision upon our exhausted ranks. Two large masses of horsemen rode forward over the plain. The foot rallied, and came down with drums beating and colours flying: and the presence of a numerous staff, in gallant attire, announced that the Peishwa himself was there, bent on daring something great in defence of his tottering throne. Meanwhile our artillery cattle, tired out by continual labour over vile roads and under a burning sun, could no longer drag the cannon into action. The volunteers did whatever might be done by a dozen and a half planters mounted on untrained hunters. The insurgents grew insolent: our soldiers were falling fast: and the British general perceived that the crisis was not yet over. He despatched his son to the spot where the men of the Sixty-fourth were lying down under such cover as they could get, with an order to rise and charge.

They leapt to their feet, rejoicing to fling aside their inaction: and young Havelock placed himself at their head, and steered his horse straight for the muzzle of the gun: mindful, perhaps, how, four and forty years before, a light-haired strippling of his name and blood showed our allies on the banks of the Bidassoa that an English steed could clear a French breastwork.[5] But our people were not Spaniards: and more than one indignant veteran asked in grumbling tones whether the corps might not be trusted to the guidance of its own officers. Nor did their major need that any one should show him the way, when once he had dismounted, and thrown to a groom the bridle of his fidgety little charger, a shapely bay Arab, on whose back, four months later, he was shot dead amidst his shattered regiment in a glorious but ineffectual attempt to retrieve a disastrous day.

And then the mutineers realized the change that a few weeks had wrought in the nature of the task which they had selected and cut out for themselves. The affair was no longer with mixed groups of invalids and civilians, without strategy or discipline, resisting desperately wherever they might chance to be brought to bay. Now from left to right extended the unbroken line of white faces, and red cloth, and sparkling steel. In front of all, the field officer stepped briskly out, doing his best to keep ahead of his people. There marched the captains, duly posted on the flank of their companies; and the subalterns, gesticulating with their swords; and the sober, bearded serjeants, each behind his respective section. Embattled in their national order, and burning with more than their national lust of combat, on they came, the unconquerable British Infantry. The grape was flying thick and true. Files rolled over. Men stumbled, and recovered themselves, and went on for a while, and then turned and hobbled to the rear. But the Sixty-fourth was not to be denied. Closer and closer drew the measured tramp of feet: and the heart of the foe died within him, and his fire grew hasty and ill-directed. As the last volley cut the air overhead, our soldiers raised a mighty shout, and rushed forward, each at his own pace. And then every rebel thought only of himself. Those nearest the place were first to make away: but throughout the host there were none who still aspired to stay within push of the English bayonets. Such as had any stomach left for fighting were sickened by a dose of shrapnel and canister from four light guns, which Maude had driven up within point-blank range. Squadron after squadron, battalion upon battalion, these humbled Brahmins dropped their weapons, stripped off their packs, and spurred, and ran, and limped, and scrambled, back to the city that was to have been the chief and central abode of sepoy domination.

Nanukchund was hanging about the vicinity all the while the conflict was in progress. "On the fifteenth," he writes, "I perceived some sepoys and troopers running away in great confusion, and exclaiming that they would have an easy victory, as the British were few, and would soon be despatched. I was then sitting in an orchard, when I observed a shopkeeper running up. He came and seated himself under a tree near me, and told me that he was hastening to pack up his wife and children, as the Europeans would arrive shortly, and would spare nobody. I thought to myself, this must be true, and the gentlemen must be very savage. I returned to the city, and saw several villagers with their dresses changed coming along the banks of the Ganges, and I joined them. The terror in the hearts of all was so great that they asked each other no questions."

On the morrow, the day of the final struggle, Nanukchund says: "I was in the streets soon after noon-time. People who have seen the fighting declare that the rebels are running back, and that the mutineers are trying to escape from the battle. Intelligence of this sort was brought from time to time till it got dusk. The bad people are all crestfallen, and advising each other to quit the town. I saw Kalka, a barber by caste, who took service as a trooper under the Nana, running in for his life, and trying to get something to eat from the bazaar. A little while after it was proclaimed by beat of drum, that the inhabitants must not get alarmed, as there were only one hundred Europeans remaining: and that whoever brought in the head of an Englishman should receive a hundred rupees. But news came that the Sahibs were close upon the cantonments, and the man who was beating the drum abandoned it and fled."

At nightfall Dhoondoo Punth entered Cawnpore upon a chestnut horse drenched in perspiration, and with bleeding flanks. A fresh access of terror soon dismissed him again on his way towards Bithoor, sore and weary, his head swimming and his chest heaving. He was not in condition for such a gallop, the first earnest of that hardship and degradation which was thenceforward to be his portion. Far otherwise had he been wont to return to his palace after a visit of state in the English quarter, lolling, vinaigrette in hand, beneath the breath of fans, amidst the cushions of a luxurious carriage, surrounded by a moving hedge of outriders and running footmen. Once again in the home of his fathers he slept as the wicked sleep, whose sin has found them out; and, when the morrow's sun had set, he departed in craven trepidation, and was never after seen among the haunts of peaceful men. But he was true to himself, even in the crash of his falling dynasty: for, as he stepped on board the barge that was to transport him to the confines of Oude, he bethought him of the young mother who was recovering from the pains of childbirth in the recesses of the female apartments. For the first time he had practised economy in his enjoyments, and was now well repaid: for his savings had borne high interest. There were two English lives to take where a fortnight ago there had been but one. And then, having filled to overflowing the measure of his guilt, he passed away like a thief in the night, and left his wealth to the spoiler, and his halls to the owl and the snake.

Some months subsequently two of our spies, who had been commissioned to obtain information about Miss Wheeler, passed six days in the train of the fugitive Nana in the depths of an Oude wilderness. In the vicinity of his encampment they overtook a sepoy, with whom they got into conversation. He asked why they had come into the desert. They represented themselves as desirous of taking service with one of the Peishwa's eunuchs, and reminded the soldiers that they were old acquaintances of his own. He seems to have been a good-natured fellow: for he told them that it was a dangerous neighbourhood for strangers, but promised, since they had ventured that far, to introduce them as his fellow-villagers. They found from twelve to fifteen thousand people collected in the jungles. Everything betokened distress, disorder, and discontent. Food was scarce and dear. The Maharaja had appropriated the single pair of tents; so that his followers were fain to bivouack under the foliage, starving on rice bought at twelvepence a pound; wringing out their tattered garments, wet with the eternal rain; and sighing for the curry-pots and tight roofs of the Cawnpore cantonments. It is interesting to learn that the most poverty-stricken and dejected of all the mutineers were the troopers of the Second Cavalry. The horses had been reduced to less than a hundred, and the artillery to a couple of field-pieces. The Nana, attended by a servant with an umbrella, went daily to bathe in a river which flowed at the foot of the hill whereon his pavilion stood. A crowd regularly assembled to pay their respects as he passed. The two men especially noticed certain officers of his household: the treasurer and paymaster; the driver of his bullock-carriage; his chief baker, and chief gardener; his shampooer, his sweeper, his boatman, and his wrestlers, both Hindoo and Mahomedan. Bala was there, with the scar of an English bullet on his shoulder, which he has probably by this time carried to an obscure grave. The royal brothers were said to be very anxious to get back to ease and civilization. Their wives were disposed upon an adjoining range of heights, in company with the widows of Bajee Rao, who deserved better than to be transported about against their will in the suite of that unromantic Pretender. The ladies of the court travelled in six palanquins, and the gentlemen on as many elephants.

Yet a few weeks, and Dhoondoo Punth, stripped of even these relics of his former affluence and grandeur, escaped across the Nepaulese marches to a life of suspense, and toil, and privation amidst the Himalayan solitudes. The end of that man we know not, and may never know. Perchance, as they hover over some wild ravine or wind-swept peak, the eagles wonder at the great ruby which sparkles amidst the rags of a vagrant who perished amidst the snows of a past December. Perchance another generation will hear, not without a qualm of involuntary awe and pity, that the world-noted malefactor is at last to expiate misdeeds already classical. He may have eluded human justice. His hemp may be still to sow. But his place in history is fixed irreversibly and for ever. The most undaunted lover of paradox would hardly undertake to wash white that ensanguined fame.

"In the month of July, a year and a half ago," so deposes a native tradesman, eighteen months after the massacre, "I was in my house at Ooghoo, when ten or eleven persons, who had fled from Cawnpore, came to my shop, and asked for betel-leaf to chew. I showed them new betel-leaf; when two of them, both Hindoos, told me to fetch good old betel-leaf, or they would take my head off. I accordingly went to another seller of betel-leaf, and bought the kind they asked for, and told them the price of the same, namely ten pice. The two men said they would only give me two. I replied that the betel-leaf was worth ten pice, and that they ought at the least to give me eight pice: on which they said that they would kill me and all my family. I stated I was a poor man, and had got the betel-leaf from another person. They then said that they had shown no pity to the ladies and children whom they had just murdered, and who clung to their feet, and that they would have no pity upon me. They frightened me greatly, showing me a naked sword, covered with blood, and said that they would cut off my head with the same. I wept," says this weak-minded young man, "and my mother, hearing me cry, came out, and begged of them not to hurt me, and that she would let them have more betel-leaf. After this they drew water from a well close to my house, near a temple, and, conversing among themselves, I heard their companions ask the two men how many ladies they had killed. They replied that they had murdered twenty-one ladies and children, and had received a reward of twenty-one rupees; and added that at first the Nana ordered the sepoys to massacre the ladies; but they refused; and that they two, with three others, carried out the Nana's orders."

Another resident of Ooghoo thus tells his story: "The truth is that, shortly after the Nana fled, I was sitting under a tamarind tree, where all the men of the village assemble to talk, and was conversing with a few others about the massacre of the Europeans at Cawnpore. We were saying that the Nana ought not to have murdered the women and children: when Souracun, Brahmin, of Ooghoo, who is thirty-five years old, and has a defect in his eye, stated that the officials sent him to kill the ladies; that he struck one with his sword, which bent, and he then felt pity, and did not again strike. He showed us the bent sword." On this occasion Souracun seems to have sunk the twenty-one rupees: which, however, must have lasted him a good while if he made all his purchases at the same rate as he bought betel-leaf. "All the village heard that he was one of the murderers: but, since the British rule has been re-established, no one speaks of it for fear he would be hung, and his death be laid on their head."

There is good reason to believe that Souracun and his fellow met with their deserts. Mr. Batten, now in high office at Agra, was the first representative of settled government in the district of Cawnpore after the troubles began to subside. He had the honour of removing the gibbet from the ladies' well, and so tempered ferocity with common sense that those who once railed at him as squeamish have at length come to approve his conduct in spite of themselves. But he did not bear the sword in vain. There were brought before him two Hindoos, one advanced in years, and the other much his junior. These men were found guilty of having compassed the death of an Eurasian, and doomed to the gallows. No sooner had their sentence been pronounced than they poured forth a torrent of foul abuse, and were dragged from the dock shouting, and kicking, and cursing their judge and all his relatives on the maternal side.

Now, the Oriental, always polite, becomes doubly courteous when death is in immediate prospect. Then, more than ever, is he anxious to set the company at their ease, and to make away with any disagreeable sense of the false position in which the hangman stands towards the felon. A civilian at Lucknow was superintending an execution when the rope, which had doubtless borne more than one such strain, gave way, and the convict fell to the ground. As he rose, he turned to the Englishman, and said in the tone wherein men utter social conventionalities: "Sahib, the rope's broke." He felt that it was incumbent on him to do what he could towards relieving the general embarrassment arising from a pause in the proceedings, awkward for all parties, but especially for the commissioner, who was endowed with sensibility and genuine refinement.

Batten, than whom no man was more conversant with the native character, regarded the fury of his two prisoners as an extraordinary phenomenon, and requested an explanation from the bystanders. He was told that the pair were piqued at being condemned on so paltry a charge as the murder of a half-caste, after having taken the principal part in a strange and note-worthy exploit, at which they hinted in their cups; and that, poor as they seemed, they rode fine horses, and wore gorgeous shawls, which they were accustomed to speak of as having been presented to them by the Nana in token of his esteem and satisfaction.

Few of the Cawnpore mutineers survived to boast of their enterprise. Evil hunted these violent men to their overthrow. Those whom the halter and the bayonet spared had no reason to bless their exemption. Many whom pillage had enriched were slain for the sake of that which they had about them by banditti who confidently presumed that the law would not call in question the motives of him who exterminated a sepoy. All who returned to their villages empty-handed were greeted by their indignant families with bitter and most just reproaches. They had been excellently provided for by the bounty of God and the Company. Their pay secured them all the comforts which a Brahmin may enjoy, and left the wherewithal to help less fortunate kinsmen. Yet they flung away their advantages in wilful and selfish haste. They sinned alone and for their private ends; but alone they were not to suffer. They had changed the Sahibs into demons, and had conjured up tenfold more of these demons than had hitherto been conceived to exist. They had called down untold calamities upon the quiet peasantry of their native land. And all this misery they had wrought in pursuit of the vision of a military empire. Let them return to the desert, there to feed without interruption on the contemplation of their power and pre-eminence. Such were the taunts with which they were driven forth again into the jungles: some to die by the claws of tigers on whose lair they had intruded for refuge, or beneath the clubs of herdsmen whose cattle they had pilfered in the rage of hunger: others to wander about, drenched and famished, until amidst the branches of a tree into which they had climbed to seek safety from the hyænas and the ague, or on the sandy floor of a cave whither they had crept for shelter from the tempest, they found at once their death-bed and their sepulchre. The jackals alone can tell on what bush flutter the shreds of scarlet stuff which mark the spot where one of our revolted mercenaries has expiated his broken oath.

Soon after daybreak on Friday the seventeenth July, the English van was marching across the desolate plain which lay to southward of the city. Already the magical effect of the tropical rain had clothed that expanse of parched and dusty soil with luxuriant grass, in which rustled the feet of our soldiers as they pushed along, now stumbling over a hidden cannon-ball, and now kicking up the fragments of a sepoy skeleton. They traversed the deserted line of rebel posts, and halted beneath the walls of the roofless barracks, pitted with shot and blackened with flame, and beside the grave at whose mouth are scattered the bones of our people, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. Three Fridays back from that very morning the treaty of surrender was being attested by a faithless signature, and sworn to with perfidious vows: and again at a like interval of time the men of the Second Cavalry were firing their stables, and saddling their horses, and buckling on the swords that were to be fleshed in unmanly strife. So much had been done and endured within a period of six weeks and a space of six miles.

"At half past six A.M." writes Nanukchund, "the British force arrived in cantonments outside the city. Those of the citizens who were well-wishers to the Government brought them bread, butter, and milk. A great crowd of the town's people assembled to see what was going on. I also, who had not stepped out of my house for a month and a half for fear of being murdered, now came out and went to cantonments. Generals Havelock and Neill, and a number of other officers, were standing there. Fruiterers, milkmen, buttermen, bakers, and other sellers of provisions, were in attendance with their dollies. Those who were aware of what was coming had made preparations on the night previous by having provisions cooked in the bazaar. A little after eight the rebels who had mined the magazine set fire to the powder, and fled. The report of the explosion was so terrific, that the doors of city-houses fell off their hinges."

Our old friend was now in high spirits. His turn had come, and he showed himself fully equal to the occasion. "I continued," he says, "to attend on the Sahibs with a view of performing acts of loyalty. I set to work to find out what men of the city have been loyal, and which of them disloyal, and how some of the public officers came to present themselves to the Nana, while others contrived not to present themselves. I laboured night and day at great personal inconvenience to learn full particulars about these people. I questioned only honourable and upright men, and no others." He is especially disturbed at the assurance of one, Narain Rao, "who, just as I anticipated, wishes to pass himself off as a well-wisher to the Government. But there is a great crowd at this moment, and the Sahibs have no time to spare. It is also very difficult to find witnesses against him by private enquiries, and I see no chance of filing a complaint about it before any officer." It seems strange that the Sahibs could not afford time to pay off an old score that had really been incurred.

After the first outbreak of joy and welcome the inhabitants of Cawnpore began to be aware that the English were no longer the same men, if indeed they were men at all. The citizens, with their wives and children, poured forth into the country by crowds, without stopping to calculate whether they could establish their innocence. At such an assize, and in the eyes of such a jury, absence was the only defence that could avail aught. From noon till midnight, on the Lucknow and Delhi highway were to be seen immense mobs rushing eastward and westward in headlong haste. They did well both for their own security and for our honour. The heat of the climate and the conflict, the scarcity of food and the constant presence of disease, the talk which they had heard at Calcutta, the deeds that they had been allowed and even enjoined to commit during their upward progress, had depraved the conscience and destroyed the self-control of our unhappy soldiers. Reckless as men who for many weeks had never known what it was to be certain of another hour's life,--half starved, and more than half intoxicated,--they regarded carnage as a duty and rapine as a pleasure. Havelock, in a report to the Commander in Chief, thus writes: "I have ordered all the beer, wine, spirits, and every drinkable thing at Cawnpore, to be purchased by the Commissariat. It will then be guarded by a few men. If it remained at Cawnpore it would require half my force to keep it from being drunk up by the other half, and I should not have a soldier in camp. While I was winning a victory on the sixteenth some of my men were plundering the Commissariat on the line of march."

And so the general purchased all the liquor. Oh that he could have bought up the blood also! It was idle to count upon the forbearance of poor ignorant privates, when the ablest among our officers had forgotten alike the age in which he lived, and the religion that he professed. This is an extract from a letter which would that Neill had never found occasion to indite!

"Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and, unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to be hanged at once: but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first to clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of the women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives. They think, by doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so. My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels. The first I caught was a soubahdar, or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed: but I made the provost-martial do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and, after death, buried in a ditch at the roadside."

For a parallel to such an episode we must explore far back into the depths of time. Homer relates the punishment that befell those maidservants, who in the palace of Ithaca had been unmindful of what they owed to their absent lord. First they bore forth from the hall the dead bodies of their paramours and placed them in the vestibule, staggering beneath the weight: while Ulysses urged on the work by word and gesture: and they laboured at the ungrateful task, wailing, and shedding bitter tears. And afterwards with water and sponges they washed the tables and the seats: and Telemachus and his henchmen scraped with spades the floor of the chamber. But, when they had set the house in order, the women were led out, and cooped up for a while in a corner of the well-fenced court, in a strait place, whence escape was none. And then Telemachus slung from the roof the cable of a dark-prowed ship, and made it fast to a pillar of the colonnade, stretching it high and taut, so that no foot might feel the ground. And, as when swift thrushes or doves, making for their nest, have dashed into a snare which a fowler had planted across the thicket: so these women were fastened in a row, with a halter round every neck, to die in unseemly fashion. And their feet fluttered a moment in the air: but not for long.

It is curious that an act, which the Pagan poet allows an old moss-trooper and his son to perpetrate in the flush of revenge and victory, should have been revived by a Christian warrior after the lapse of twenty-five centuries. And it must be owned that Neill surpassed his model: for apparently the primary object of Ulysses was to sweep away the traces of the butchery, and make his refectory clean and habitable: an unpleasant drudgery, which, as with the simplicity of a primitive Greek he reflected, might as well be performed by the least worthy members of his household before they were taken to execution: whereas the Englishman desired only to wound the sentiments of the doomed men, and prolong their prospect of death with a vista of eternal misery. And this, when the rallying-cry of the insurrection was the preservation of caste:--when in the wide-spread confidence that our faith did not seek to extend itself by carnal weapons lay the salvation of the British supremacy!

But there was a spectacle to be witnessed which might excuse much. Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts: not high up, as where men have fought; but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid a blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied round the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerrotype-cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of card-board, and marked "Ned's hair, with love:" but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors. All who on that day passed within the fatal doors agree positively to assert that no inscription of any sort or kind was visible on the walls. Before the month was out, the bad habit, common to low Englishmen, of scribbling where they ought not, here displaying itself in an odious form, had covered the principal buildings of Cawnpore with vulgar and disgusting forgeries, false in date, in taste, in spelling, and in fact.

There were found two slips of paper: one bearing in an unknown hand a brief but correct outline of our disasters. On the other a Miss Lindsay had kept an account of the killed and wounded in a single family. It runs thus, telling its own tale:

"Entered the barracks May 21st.
Cavalry left June 5th.
First shot fired June 6th.
Aunt Lilly died June 17th.
Uncle Willy died June 18th.
Left barracks June 27th.
George died June 27th.
Alice died July 9th.
Mamma died July 12th."

The writer, with her two surviving sisters, perished in the final massacre.

The library of the captives was small indeed: but such books as they had were to the purpose. The earliest comers discovered among the vestiges of slaughter a treatise, entitled "Preparation for Death:" and a bible, which must have travelled in Major Vibart's barge down to Nuzzufgur and back to Cawnpore, as may be gathered from the following record:

"27th June. Went to the boats.
29th. Taken out of boats.
30th. Taken to Sevadah Kothi. Fatal day."

Fatal indeed: for that was the day when "the wives sat down, each by her husband;" when "the sepoys, going in, pulled them away forcibly; but could not pull away the doctor's wife, who there remained;" when "one Sahib rolled one way, and one another, as they sat." That bible was a present from the dead to the dead: for on the fly-leaf appeared this address: "For darling Mamma, from her affectionate daughter, Isabella Blair:" the "Bella Blair," whose fate is mentioned in the letter from young Masters to his father. The list was closed by a church service, from which the cover had been stripped, and many pages at the end torn off. Unbound and incomplete, it had fulfilled its mission: for it opened of itself where, within a crumpled and crimson-sprinkled margin, might be read the concise and beautiful supplications of our Litany. It concluded, that mutilated copy, with the forty-seventh Psalm, wherein David thanks the Almighty for a victory and a saving mercy:

"O, clap your hands together, all ye people: O, sing unto God with the voice of melody. He shall subdue the people under us: and the nations under our feet. God is gone up with a merry noise, and the Lord with the sound of a trump. God rejoiceth over the heathen: God sitteth on his holy seat. God, which is very high exalted, doth defend the earth, as it were with a shield."

Such were the printed lines which, from amidst the rent tresses, and shivered toys, and the scraps of muslin dyed with the most costly of all pigments, lay staring up to high heaven in tacit but impressive irony.

It is good that the house and the well of horror have been replaced by a fair garden and a graceful shrine. But there let piety stay her hand. A truce thenceforward to that mistaken reverence which loves to express sorrow and admiration in guineas, and rupees, and the net product of fancy bazaars! Too often already have architect and sculptor disguised the place where a notable thing was done. India still contains some sacred plots untouched by the art of the decorator,--some shapeless ruins more venerable than dedicated aisle or stately mausoleum. Still, amidst the fantastic edifices of Lucknow, hard by a shattered gateway, rise or lie prostrate the pillars of a grass-grown portico. Beneath that verandah, in the July evening, preferring the risk of the hostile missiles to the confinement of a stifling cellar, was dying Henry Lawrence, the man who tried to do his duty. It was not time and the weather that made bare of plaster the brickwork of the old gate. There from summer into winter,--until of his two hundred musketeers he had buried four-score and five, and sent to hospital three-score and sixteen,--earning his Cross in ragged flannel trousers and a jersey of dubious hue, burly Jack Aitken bore up the unequal fray. An Englishman does not require any extraneous incentives to emotion when, leaning against the beams of that archway, he recalls who have thereby gone in and out, bent on what errands, and thinking what thoughts. Between those door-posts have walked Peel, and Havelock, and gentle Outram, and stout Sir Colin, heroes who no longer tread the earth. Through the same entrance passed, but not erect, the form of a tall grey soldier, stern even in death, with a bullet-wound in the centre of his forehead, whom the orderlies announced in whispers to be Neill of the Madras army. At Delhi still, before the police-court in the Street of Silver, may be seen the platform whereon, naked to the waist and besmeared with dirt and blood, were exposed to three autumn suns the corpses of the last descendants of Timour, slain and spoiled by one who knew neither pity nor scruple. Still, after an evening stroll along the ridge outside the battlements, as on his return he descends the slope rough with crag and brushwood, the visitor may come upon a mound of rubbish so beaten with shot that it is not easy to discern what of it is artificial rampart, and what is broken ground. The rocks coated with frequent films of lead, and the wreck of a small temple, testify that this is the famous post, known in military history as the "Sammy-house picket," which Briton, and Sikh, and Ghoorka, fighting shoulder to shoulder, hardly made good throughout the hundred days of the terrible siege. On the summit of the tottering dome, at a height of some twelve feet from the soil, presides a Hindoo idol with an elephant's head. There he sits, a stupid little god, with arms reposing on his knees, gazing across the valley at the minarets of the ancient capital, as though he had never seen any stranger sight than the tourist in his white dress and dust-coloured helmet, or heard any sounds more wild and maddening than the chirping of the grasshoppers, and the lowing of the belated cattle as they stray homeward to their stalls. Not urn, nor monolith, nor broken column is so fit a monument for brave men as the crumbling breastwork and the battered wall. And in like manner the dire agony of Cawnpore needs not to be figured in marble, or cut into granite, or cast of bronze. There is no fear lest we should forget the story of our people. The whole place is their tomb, and the name thereof is their epitaph. When the traveller from Allahabad, rousing himself to learn at what stage of his journey he may have arrived, is aware of a voice proclaiming through the darkness the city of melancholy fame,--then those accents, heard for the first time on the very spot itself which they designate, recall, more vividly than written or engraven eloquence, the memory of fruitless valour and unutterable woe.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Napier's "History of the War in the Peninsula." Book xx. Chapter iv.

THE END.

R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL.

Transcriber's Notes

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

Inconsistent hyphenation fixed.

P. 8: into the vernadah -> into the verandah.

P. 24: insolence and green -> insolence and greed.

P. 26: A battalian on march -> A battalion on march.

P. 50: paid to this delaration -> paid to this declaration.

P. 65: prophet seem to have been -> prophet seems to have been.

P. 80: their commander had adoped -> their commander had adopted.

P. 84: worst was beter -> worst was better.

P. 116: made night hideous -> made the night hideous.

P. 119: coat of white paster -> coat of white plaster.

P. 124: day week -> day.

P. 139: what they lake in energy -> what they lack in energy.

P. 172: We have been connonaded -> We have been cannonaded.

P. 215: our people though -> our people thought.

P. 236: hord of mutineers -> horde of mutineers.

P. 237: such an autcry -> such an outcry.

P. 291: Bramhin -> Brahmin.