Cawnpore

by George Otto Trevelyan

CONTENTS.

	PAGE
The Station	[1]
The Outbreak	[58]
The Siege	[112]
The Treachery	[179]
The Massacre	[245]

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CAWNPORE.

CHAPTER I.
THE STATION.

The city of Cawnpore lies on the south bank of the Ganges, which at that spot is about a quarter of a mile in breadth, and this too in the dry season: for, when the rains have filled the bed, the stream measures two thousand yards from shore to shore. And yet the river has still a thousand miles of his stately course to run before that, by many channels and under many names, he loses himself in the waters of the Bay of Bengal. In old times an officer appointed to Cawnpore thought himself fortunate if he could reach his station within three months from the day he left Fort William. But tow-ropes and punt-poles are now things of the past, and the traveller from Calcutta arrives at the end of his journey in little more than thirty hours.

By the treaty of Fyzabad, in 1775, the East India Company engaged to maintain a brigade for the defence of Oude. The revenues of a rich and extensive tract of country were appointed for the maintenance of this force, which was quartered at Cawnpore, the principal town of the district. In 1801, Lord Wellesley, who loved to carry matters with a masterful hand, closed the mortgage, and the territory lapsed to the Company, who accepted this new charge with some diffidence. Indeed, they were not a little uneasy at the splendid rapacity of their high-souled servant. No one understood better than he the full meaning of the finest lines of that poet whose graceful diction none like himself could imitate:—

"Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento:
Hæ tibi erunt artes: pacisque imponere morem;
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos."

But that policy which suited the temper of the Senate of old Rome was not exactly of a nature to please the Directors of a Joint Stock Company. It was very well for statesmen and generals to look for their reward in the pages of history. It behoved City men to keep an eye on the fluctuations of the Share list.

Thus it happened that, ever since the beginning of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Cawnpore had been a first-class military station. In the spring of 1857 it had attained an importance to which the events of the following summer gave a fatal shock. The recent annexation of Oude was an additional motive for keeping a strong hold on Cawnpore: for that city commanded the bridge over which passed the high road to Lucknow, the capital of our newly acquired province. At that time the station was occupied by three regiments of sepoys, the First, the Fifty-third, and the Fifty-sixth Bengal Infantry. The Second Cavalry, and a company of artillerymen, brought up the strength of the native force to three thousand men. Of Europeans and persons of European extraction, there were resident at Cawnpore more than a thousand. There were the officers attached to the sepoy battalions; sixty men of the Eighty-fourth regiment of the British line; seventy-eight invalids belonging to the Thirty-second regiment, then quartered at Lucknow, and destined to pass through the most fearful trial from which ever men emerged alive; fifteen of the Madras Fusileers; and fifty-nine of the Company's artillerymen: in all, some three hundred soldiers of English birth. Then there were the covenanted civilians, the aristocracy of Indian society; the lesser officials attached to the Post-office, the Public Works, and the Opium Departments; the Railway people; the merchants and shopkeepers,—Europeans some, others half-castes, or, as they would fain be called, Eurasians. There, too, (alas!) were the wives and little ones of the men of all these classes and grades, and in no slender proportion; for among our countrymen in India the marriage state is in special honour. There likewise were a great number of half-caste children belonging to the Cawnpore school, who were soon to buy at a very dear price the privilege of having been begotten by an European sire.

The military quarter was entirely distinct from the native city. And here let the English reader divest himself at once of all European ideas, and keep clear of them, as much as in him lies, during the whole course of this narrative. Let him put aside all preconceived notions of a barrack,—of a yard paved with rough stones, and darkened by buildings four storeys high, at the windows of which lounge stalwart warriors in various stages of déshabille, digesting their fresh boiled-beef by the aid of a short pipe and a languid gossip. Let him try to form to himself a picture of a military station in Northern India, for it was within the precincts of such a station that was played out the most terrible tragedy of our age.

The cantonments lay along the bank of the river, over a tract extending six miles from north-west to south-east: for, wheresoever in Hindostan Englishmen make their homes, no regard is had to economy of space. Each residence stands in a separate "compound," or paddock, of some three or four acres, surrounded by an uneven, crumbling mound and ditch, with here and there a ragged hedge of prickly pear: for all over India fences appear to exist rather for the purpose of marking boundaries than for any protection they afford against intruders. The house, like all houses outside the Calcutta Ditch, consists of a single storey, built of brick, coated with white plaster;—the whole premises, if the owner be a bachelor or a subaltern, in a most shabby and tumble-down condition. A flight of half a dozen steps leads up to a verandah which runs round three sides of the building. The noticeable objects here will probably be a native tailor, working in the attitude adopted by tailors in all lands where men wear clothes; a wretched being, squatted on his haunches, lazily pulling the string of a punkah that passes through a hole in the brickwork into the Sahib's bedroom, a monotonous occupation, which from time to time he sweetens by snatches of sleep; a Madras valet, spreading butter on the Sahib's morning toast with the greasy wing of a fowl; and, against the windward wall, a row of jars of porous red clay, in which water is cooling for the Sahib's morning bath.

The principal door leads at once into the sitting-room, a spacious, ill-kept, comfortless apartment; the most conspicuous article being a huge, oblong frame of wood and canvass suspended across the ceiling, and the prevailing impression an overwhelming sense of the presence of cobwebs. The furniture, which is scattered about in most unadmired disorder, is in the last stage of dilapidation. Every article in an Anglo-Indian household bears witness to the fact that Englishmen regard themselves but as sojourners in the locality where fate and the quartermaster-general may have placed them. A large rickety table in the centre of the room is strewn with three or four empty soda-water bottles, a half-emptied bottle of brandy, a corkscrew, glasses, playing-cards, chessmen, an Hindostanee dictionary, an inkstand, a revolver, a bundle of letters, a box of cigars, the supplement of Bell's Life, and a few odd volumes from the regimental book-club—of no very seductive quality, like enough, for the colonel's lady has kept the new novels, and the doctor, who is secretary to the club, has impounded the biographies, so that our ensign is fain to put up with "Aids to Faith," and the third volume of the "History of the Inductive Sciences." Then there are eight or ten chairs, a good half of which might well claim to be invalided on the score of wounds and long service; a couch with broken springs; a Japanese cabinet, bought as a bargain when the old major was sold up; and an easy cane chair of colossal dimensions, the arms of which are prolonged and flattened, so as to accommodate the occupant with a resting-place for his feet. In one corner stands a couple of hog-spears, supple, tough, and duly weighted with lead and barbed with steel of proof; a regulation sword; a buggy-whip; a hunting-crop; a double-barrelled rifle and a shot-gun—weapons which the owner depreciates as archaic, expressing his intention of providing himself, during his first visit to Europe, with a complete outfit from Purdey. On nails driven into the plaster hang a list of the men in the company to which the young fellow is attached; a caricature of the paymaster; a framed photograph of the cricket eleven of the public school where he was educated; and, if he be of a humorous turn, the last wigging, or letter of admonition and reproof, received from the colonel of his regiment.

In such a scene, and amidst such associations, does the English subaltern wear out the weary hours of the interminable Indian day: smoking; dozing; playing with his terrier; longing for the evening, or for a call from a brother-officer, with whom he may discuss the Army List, and partake of the ever-recurring refreshment of brandy and soda-water; lazily endeavouring to get some little insight into the languages of the hateful East by the help of a fat, fawning native tutor, and a stupid and indecent Oordoo work on mythology; pondering sadly on home landscapes and home recollections, as he gazes across the sharply-defined line of shadow thrown by the roof of the verandah into the outdoor heat and glare; with no pleasanter object of contemplation than the Patna sheep belonging to the Station Mutton Club, and his own modest stud, consisting of a raw-boned Australian horse and an old Cabul pony picketed under a group of mango-trees near the gate of the compound.

The centre apartment is flanked on either side by a smaller chamber; both of which are employed as bedrooms, if, for the sake of company or economy, our young friend is keeping house with some Addiscombe chum. Otherwise, the least desirable is set apart as a lumber-room; though, to judge from the condition of the articles in use, it is hard to imagine what degree of shabbiness would qualify furniture to become lumber in Bengal. The door into the Sahib's bedroom stands open, like every other door in British India; the multitude of servants, and the necessity for coolness, forbidding the very idea of privacy. There stands a bedstead of wood, worm-eaten, unplaned, unpolished; inclosed on all sides with musquito-curtains of white gauze, the edges carefully tucked in beneath the mattress, through which is dimly seen the recumbent form of the Sahib, clad in a silk shirt and linen drawers, the universal nightdress of the East. The poor boy is doing his best to recover, during the cooler morning hours, the arrears of the sleepless night, which he has passed in a state of feverish irritation—panting, perspiring, tossing from side to side in desire of a momentary relief from the tortures of Prickly Heat, the curse of young blood; anon, sallying into the verandah to rouse the nodding punkah-puller, more happy than his wakeful master. Little of ornament or convenience is to be seen around, save a capacious brass basin on an iron stand, and half a dozen trunks, of shape adapted to be slung in pairs on the hump of a bullock. An inner door affords a view into a bath-room, paved with rough bricks; the bath consisting of a space surrounded by a parapet some six inches high, in which the bather stands while his servant sluices him with cold water from a succession of jars. It may be that on a shelf at the bed's head are treasured some objects, trifling indeed in value, but made very dear by association; a few school prizes and leaving-books; a few sheets of flimsy pink paper, closely written, soiled, and frayed at every fold; one or two portraits in morocco cases, too sacred for the photographic album and the inspection and criticism of a stranger. There is something touching in these repositories, for they tell that, however much the lad may appear to be absorbed in the pursuits and pleasures of the mess-room, the parade-ground, the snipe-marsh, and the race-course, his highest thoughts and dearest hopes are far away in that land where he is never again to abide, until those hopes and thoughts have long been tamed and deadened by years and troubles.

Such are the quarters of a British subaltern. The home of a married pair may be somewhat more comfortable, and the residence of a man in high office considerably more magnificent; but the same characteristics prevail everywhere. A spirit of scrupulous order, and a snug domestic air, are not to be attained in an Indian household. At best a semi-barbarous profusion, an untidy splendour, and the absence of sordid cares, form the compensation for the loss of English comfort. Still, the lady must have her drawing-room, where she can display her wedding-presents, and the purchases which she made at the Calcutta auctions during the cold season before last. The Commissioner must have his sanctum, where he can wallow in papers, and write letters of censure to his collectors, letters of explanation to the Revenue Board, and letters of remonstrance to the local military authorities. The epicure cannot do without a roofed passage leading from his kitchen to his parlour; nor the sporting man without a loose box for the mare which he has entered for the Planter's Plate at Sonepore. Then, too, gentlemen of horticultural tastes like to devote a spare hour to superintending the labours of their gardeners: and the soil of Cawnpore well repays attention. Most kinds of European vegetables can be produced with success, while peaches and melons, shaddocks and limes, grow in native abundance: together with those fruits which an old Qui-hye loves so dearly, but which to a fresh English palate are a poor substitute indeed for hautboys and ribstone pippins;—the mango, with a flavour like turpentine, and the banana, with a flavour like an over-ripe pear; the guava, which has a taste of strawberries, and the custard-apple, which has no perceptible taste at all.

None of those institutions which render the ordinary life of the English officer in India somewhat less monotonous and objectless were wanting at Cawnpore. There was a church, whose fair white tower, rising among a group of lofty trees, for more than one dull and dusty mile greets the eyes of the traveller on the road from Lucknow. That church, which has stood scatheless through such strange vicissitudes, will soon be superseded by a more imposing temple, built to commemorate the great disaster of our race. There were meeting-houses of divers Protestant persuasions, a Roman Catholic chapel, and a mission of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. There was a race-course, as there is in every spot throughout the East where a handful of our countrymen have got together; a theatre, where the ladies of the garrison with good-natured amusement witnessed cornets and junior magistrates attempting to represent female whims and graces; a Freemason's lodge, where the work of initiation and instruction went merrily on in a temperature of 100° in the shade. There was a racket-court, and a library, and news-rooms, and billiard-rooms. There were the assembly-rooms, where dinners were given to passing Governors-General, and balls to high official dames, where questions of precedence were raised, and matches made and broken. There was a breakfast club, whither men repaired after their ride to discuss the powers that be over their morning toast, at that meal so dear to Britons from the Himalayas to Point de Galle, and from the Sutley to Hong-Kong, whether, as throughout Bengal, it be termed "little breakfast," or, as at Madras, it be known by the title of "early tea." There was the band-stand, the very heart and centre of up-country fashion, where the wit and beauty and gallantry of the station were nightly wont to congregate. There was the ice-club for the manufacture and supply of that luxury which becomes a necessity under the tropic of Cancer;—which more favoured Calcutta obtains straight from North American lakes, with Newfoundland codfish and Pennsylvanian apples embedded in the crystal mass. The markets were well supplied with fish, flesh, and fowl, at a cost that would gladden the heart of an English housewife, though Anglo-Indians complain loudly of the rise in prices, and grumble at being forced to pay sixpence a pound for mutton, and three shillings for a fat turkey. In the game season, quails, wild ducks, snipe, and black partridges were cheap and abundant; and a dish of ortolans, a treat which in Europe is confined to Italian tourists and Parisian millionaires, was a common adjunct to the second course at Cawnpore dinner-tables.

The quarters of the native troops presented a very different appearance from the English bungalows. Sepoy lines, generally speaking, consist of long rows of huts built of mud on a framework of bamboos, and thatched with straw. Every soldier has his own doghole, in which he keeps an inconceivable quantity of female relations, from his grandmother downwards. There he rules supreme: for no Sahib, be he ever so enthusiastic on the subject of sanitation and drainage, would care to intrude upon the mysteries of a sepoy household. At the ends of each row stand the habitations of the native officers attached to the company: two or three cabins round a tiny court-yard, fenced in with a mud wall a few feet in height. The sepoy, unlike a European soldier, never becomes wholly military in his tastes and habits. The dearest ambition of a villager is to increase the number of huts on his little premises, and that ambition is not to be quenched even by drill and pipe-clay.

Each of the regiments had a bazaar peculiar to itself, crowded with people employed in supplying the wants, and ministering to the pleasures of the battalion which honoured them with its patronage. Sutlers, corn-merchants, rice-merchants, sellers of cotton fabrics, of silver ornaments, of tobacco and stupefying drugs, jugglers, thieves, swarms of prostitutes, fakeers, and Thugs, retired from business, made up a motley and most unruly population, which was with difficulty kept in some show of order by the energy of Sir George Parker, the cantonment magistrate. The united crew of these dens of iniquity and sedition did not fall short of forty thousand in number.

The sepoys were tall men, the average height in a regiment being five feet eight inches, and, seen from a distance, in their scarlet coats and black trousers, they presented a sufficiently military appearance. But, on nearer inspection, there was something in the general effect displeasing to an eye accustomed to the men of Aldershot and Chalons. No Oriental seems at ease in European costume,—least of all in the English uniform so dear to the heart of the old tailor colonels. The native soldier in full dress wore a ludicrous and almost pathetic air of uneasiness and rigidity. His clothes hung on him as though he were a very angular wooden frame. Whether from consciousness of the figure which he cut in his red tunic, or from an instinctive fear of the contamination contained in Christian cloth, the sepoy was no sooner dismissed from parade or relieved from guard than he hastened to doff every shred of the dress provided by Government. Clad in the unprofessional but more congenial costume of a very scanty pair of linen drawers, he might be seen now seated over a pile of rice or a huge bannock, cooked for him by the women of his family; now, performing the copious ablutions, the obligation to which constitutes the single virtue of his national religion; now, submitting the crown of his head to the barber for a periodical shave; now, perchance, discussing with a circle of comrades the probability of the Emperor of the Russians joining with Brigadier Napoleon and the King of Roum in a scheme for destroying the power of the East India Company.

His pay was seven rupees, or fourteen shillings, a month. Small as this sum may appear to us, it was amply sufficient to endow the sepoy with far higher social consideration than is enjoyed by a private soldier in European countries. The purest of pure Brahmins, his faith forbade him from spending much money on the gratification of his appetite. The most confirmed gourmand in the battalion could never dream of a better dinner than some coarse fish from a neighbouring tank, flavoured by a handful of spices ground between two fragments of a gravestone abstracted from the last English cemetery on the line of march. Such luxuries as these could be procured at a rate that left even the private soldier a large margin whence to provide for any other calls that might be made upon his purse. He accordingly was regarded as a very considerable personage by the native populace. A peasant-proprietor or small shopkeeper thought it no small honour to receive an offer of marriage for his daughter from a gentleman serving in the ranks of the Company's army: and the sepoy was not slow to make use of his matrimonial advantages. A column of native troops on the march was accompanied from station to station by an endless string of small carts, each containing one or two veiled ladies, presumably young and pretty; one or two without veils, very indubitably old and ugly; together with a swarm of dusky brats with enormous stomachs, stark naked, with the almost nominal exception of a piece of tape fastened round the loins.

In spite of his excellent pay, the native soldier was almost invariably deep in debt. A strong sense of family ties, an extreme generosity towards poor connexions, is a marked trait in the Hindoo character, amiable indeed, but not encouraging to the student of Social Science. Whenever an Indian official steps into an income, relations of every degree flock from all parts of the continent to prey upon his facile affection: and the prospect of sharing the corner of a sepoy's hut and the parings of his pay proved sufficiently attractive to bring into cantonments herds of country cousins from Rohilcund and Shahabad. Neither would seven rupees a month adequately defray the occasional extravagances enjoined by "dustoor" or custom: dustoor, the breath of a Hindoo's nostrils, the motive of his actions, the staple of his conversation, the tyrant of his life. It has frequently happened that a private soldier has celebrated a marriage feast at a cost of three hundred rupees, to obtain which he must sell himself body and soul to one of those griping ruthless usurers who are the bugbears of Oriental society.

At the commencement of 1857, the condition of the native army was unsatisfactory in the highest degree. An impartial observer could not fail at every turn to note symptoms which proved beyond the possibility of a doubt that a bad spirit was abroad. But, unfortunately, those who had the best opportunity for observing these symptoms were not impartial. The officers of the old Bengal army regarded their soldiers with a fond credulity that was above suspicion and deaf to evidence: and no wonder: for on the fidelity of that army was staked all that they held most dear—professional reputation, social standing, the means of life, and, finally, life itself. It was in deference to their pardonable but most fatal prejudices that on this ominous subject silence was enforced during the years which preceded the outbreak. It was to please their pride of class that the tongues of more discerning men were tied, and their pens blunted. It was in vain that General Jacob, the stout Lord Warden of the Scinde Marches, wrote and expostulated with all his native energy and fire. Threatened and frowned on by his employers, sneered at by his fellow officers as an agitator and a busybody, he was at length brought to acknowledge that the tone of the Bengal army was a matter on which a wise man did well to hold his peace. That great commander, whose excellent military judgment, matured in European camps, revolted at a state of things so fraught with peril and scandal, learned too late that not even the audacity of a Napier, not even the glory of Meeanee, could protect him from the consequences of having presumed to call in question the faith of the sepoy. As the only apparent effect of his admonitions the turbulent and warlike province of Oude was annexed to our territory, and the ranks of our army were swelled by the addition of thousands of disaffected native mercenaries.

That discipline was lax, that insubordination was afoot, had long been known by many who dared not speak out the truth. As far back as the year 1845 there occurred a case in which a regiment broke into open mutiny, and pelted its officers through cantonments with the material employed in road-mending, a customary missile in Bengalee riots. A party of native infantry on a night march presented an appearance, absurd indeed, but to a thoughtful spectator not without serious significance. The men straggled along, carrying in their hands some beloved pipe, their most treasured possession, while their muskets were carelessly flung into the bullock-carts, in which not a few sepoys were snoring comfortably amidst the baggage. Even those on foot dozed as they walked, with that unaccountable capacity, common to all Hindoos, of going to sleep under the most adverse circumstances; the collar of their great-coat turned up and kept in its place by a strip of calico; their ears protected by folds of cloth passed underneath the chin and fastened over the top of the head, with a regimental forage-cap perched on the summit of this unsightly and unmartial head-gear. In some corps men had so little respect for military rule and custom as to strip off their uniforms even when on guard. There were those who in great part attributed these irregularities to the abolition of corporal punishment effected by Lord William Bentinck, that wise and true friend of the native population of India. It is to be hoped, for the cause of humanity and enlightenment, that men who so think are mistaken in their opinion. It cannot, however, be denied that, whatever be the reason, there was truth in the words spoken to a civilian by an old pensioned native officer:—"Ah Sahib!" said the veteran, "The army has ceased to fear."

At the siege of Mooltan, where native troops from all parts of India were collected into one army, the vile temper of the Bengal sepoys and the extraordinary indulgence displayed towards them by their officers became painfully apparent. These insolent high-caste mercenaries positively refused to labour in the trenches, and endeavoured to induce or force the modest and trusty Bombay soldiers to follow their example. On one occasion a mob of these rascals, being unable to persuade a fatigue-party of Bombay men to strike work, proceeded to revile and at length to stone their worthier comrades. A captain in a rifle regiment marked the ringleaders, but the Bengal officers flatly declined to take any steps in the matter, and the story was hushed up in order that their feelings might be spared. When the Sixty-sixth Native infantry mutinied, their chiefs endeavoured to palliate the guilt of the regiment; but Sir Charles Napier refused to see with any eyes save his own, and promptly disbanded the corps, which was replaced by an excellent levy of the valiant Highlanders of Nepaul. Sir Charles expressed great displeasure at the report sent in by the commanding officer of the regiment, and especially at a sentence which characterised what was in fact a shout of defiance as "a murmur of discontent." To the very last, at a time when mutiny and murder were rife from Peshawur to Dacca, each particular colonel was firmly impressed with the idea that his battalion would be the Abdiel of the army, faithful only to its oath and salt, to the recollections of bounty-money and the hopes of pension. "Pity," writes an officer of the Sixty-fifth regiment, "that Europeans abusing a corps cannot be strung up." On the twenty-second of May a letter appeared in the Englishman newspaper from Colonel Simpson, who commanded the Sixth Bengal Infantry at the all-important station of Allahabad. He was very indignant at the suspicions which had been expressed concerning the intentions of the men under his charge, who, according to him, "evince the utmost loyalty. So far from being mistrusted, they are our main protection." Not many days after he was glad to escape into the fort with a ball through his arm, while his officers were being butchered by the men on whom he had placed so unbounded a reliance. The "staunchness" of the sepoys was at that time so common a topic with their chiefs that the expression became a byword among Calcutta people; for at whatever station the colonel most loudly, pertinaciously, and angrily declared his regiment to be "staunch," it was to that quarter that men looked for the next tidings of massacre and outrage. It was not till he saw his own house in flames, and the rupees from the Government treasury scattered broad-cast over the parade-ground:—it was not till he looked down the barrels of sepoy muskets, and heard sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin to believe that his men were not as staunch as they should be; and yet, as will be seen in the course of this narrative, there might exist a degree of confidence and attachment which was proof even against that ordeal.

Respect for the obligations of blood-relationship is so strong in the Hindoo mind, that jobbery and nepotism flourish in Oriental society to an extent which would seem inconceivably audacious to the colder imagination of a western public servant. The system of family patronage runs through all ranks and classes. The Indian judge loves to surround himself with kindred clerks of the court and consanguineous ushers. The Indian superintendant of police prefers to have about him inspectors and sergeants bound to his interest by nearer ties than those of official dependence. The head bearer fills his master's house with young barbarians from his native village; and, in like manner, the veteran sepoys took measures to keep the regiment supplied with recruits from the neighbourhood in which they themselves had been born and bred. No strapping young Tewarry, or Pandy, who had a mind to shoulder a Company's musket and touch the Company's rupees, had long to wait for a place in the section of which the sergeant was his uncle and the corporal his brother-in-law. On the other hand, a stranger was soon driven from the regiment by that untiring and organized social oppression, in which, if we are to believe the daily press, military men of all nations and grades are such admirable adepts. And so it came to pass in the course of time that the company partook of the nature of a family, and the battalion of the nature of a clan. The consequence was that there existed a sympathy and freemasonry throughout the ranks of quite another tendency from that tone of regimental patriotism and martial brotherhood, known in European armies by the title of "esprit-de-corps." Such a state of things afforded peculiar facilities for conspiring. A disaffected body of sepoys possessed the power of a host, and the discretion of a clique. The most extensive and perilous designs could be matured in perfect secrecy, and carried into effect by the weight of a vast and unanimous multitude.

The real motive of the mutiny was the ambition of the soldiery. Spoilt, flattered, and idle, in the insolence of its presumed strength that pampered army thought nothing too good for itself, and nothing too formidable. High-caste Brahmins all, proud as Lucifer, they deemed that to them of right belonged the treasures and the empire of India. Hampered with debt, they looked for the day of a general spoliation. Chafing under restraint, they panted to indulge themselves in unbridled rapine and licence. They were bent upon the foundation of a gigantic military despotism. They looked forward to the time when Soubahdars and Jemmadars should be Maharajas and Nawabs; when the taxes should be collected by sepoy receivers-general, and paid into sepoy treasuries; when every private should have his zenana full of the loveliest daughters of Lahore and Rohilcund; when great landholders from Bundelcund and Orissa should come with cases of diamonds to beg a favourable decision from Mungul Pandy; when great merchants from Liverpool and Marseilles should come with bags of sovereigns to ask leave of Peer Bux to establish a factory at Mutlah or Chandernagore. They evinced an equal contempt for all the other classes of the inhabitants of India. They despised the excellent armies of Bombay and Madras, and their insolence was requited with bitter aversion. They looked down on the Ghoorkas as savages, and presumed to regard the heroes of Chillianwallah and Ferozeshah as a conquered race; as if, forsooth, it was sepoy prowess which, after more than one series of fierce and dubious battles, had at length prevailed over the brave and haughty warriors of the Punjaub. And at length, in the plenitude of their pride and folly, they began to call in question the efficacy of the English name.

We had, indeed, been negligent. We had been improvident even unto madness. Some twenty thousand European troops were scattered over the continent of India; for the security of which seventy thousand are now held to be barely sufficient. In the May of 1857, from Meerut in the North-west, to Dinapore in the South-east, two weak British regiments only were to be found. In these days, a battalion of English infantry may be placed at any important city in our dominions within the twenty-four hours. Then, all the field-batteries throughout the entire region of Oude, with a single exception, were manned by native gunners and drivers. Now, in every station on the plains, the artillerymen, the trained workmen of warfare, without whom in modern times an armed force is helpless, are one and all our own countrymen. Then, our only communication was along roads which the first rains turned into strips of bog, and up rivers treacherous with crossing currents and shifting sandbanks. Now, through the heart of every province, there run, or soon will run, those lines of rail and lines of wire, which defy alike season and distance.

The natives of India possess a sharp insight into matters that come within the limits of their own sphere, but are strangely ignorant of all that passes beyond those limits. The sepoy ringleaders knew to a man the strength, or rather the weakness, of European force in the North of India. But, incredible as it may appear, they were firmly impressed with the idea that they saw with their eyes the whole extent of our resources. Public opinion in Hindostan placed the population of the British Isles at something over a hundred thousand souls. This error was so universal that a native who did not share in the hallucination was sure to be a man of superior discernment and rare strength of mind. Hyder Ali and Runjeet Singh, the Hannibal and the Mithridates of India, had often in their mouths the same phrase concerning the power of the Company. They feared, they would say, not what they saw, but what they did not see. Jung Bahadur, the far-famed Mayor of the Palace of Nepaul, when the first dull rumour of the coming crisis began to be bruited, paid a visit to England on purpose to learn for himself what the state of the case really was; and returned firmly resolved not to take part against a power which could raise at a pinch hundreds of millions of money, and hundreds of thousands of men. On one occasion during the troubles, a party of sepoys attacked some guns worked by Sikh artillerymen, only to be beaten off with heavy loss. The officer in charge of the battery was much amused at hearing one of the men say to his comrades: "If those fools of pandies had ever been at Battses Hotel, Vere Street, Oxford Street, they would not have come on so boldly." On inquiry, it appeared that this judicious Punjaubee had gone to London in the service of some Anglo-Indian; where, as he stood at the mouth of Vere Street, he might see passing to and from Hyde Park in a single day as many Sahibs as would stock two such towns as Loodianah or Umritsur.

The conviction that all our available male population was already in India began to be shaken as, regiment after regiment, brigade upon brigade, angry fighting men of Saxon race came pouring up from Calcutta in a continuous stream, by road, by rail, and by river. And yet that conviction lingered long. When the magnificent array collected for the final siege of Lucknow passed through Cawnpore, our Sikh allies would have it that Sir Colin, like the stage manager at Astley's theatre, marched his men in at one end of the town and out at the other, and then brought them back outside the walls to repeat the same manœuvre. When the mutineers first caught sight of the Highland costume, they cried with joy that the men of England had been exhausted, and that the Company had been reduced to call out the women. They soon had reason to repent their mistake, and thenceforward adopted a theory more consistent with the fact, for they held that the petticoats were designed to remind their wearers that they had been sent to India to exact vengeance for the murder of the English ladies.

The insolence and greed of the soldiers, their impatience of discipline, and their lust of power, were the effective causes of the outbreak. But the proximate cause was the fancied insult which had been offered to their national religion. Upon this most vexed question, a distinguished civil servant, who held high office in Calcutta during those eventful months, is wont to say that he could never trust the judgment of a man who maintains that the greased cartridges had little to do with the mutiny. There are a class of our countrymen who delight in stigmatizing the natives of India as hypocrites and infidels. These men affect to disbelieve in the sincerity of the religious professions of any Mussulman who cannot resist the temptation of iced champagne, or of any Hindoo who indulges himself in a quiet slice of the joint which has appeared at his master's table. As if the men who are foremost to avenge the wrongs of their creed and to thrust it down the throats of their neighbours were always the most scrupulous in their obedience to its precepts! As if History was not full of covetous Fathers of the Church and polygamous Defenders of the Faith! Jehu was zealous to destroy the priests of the House of Baal, and to burn his images with fire: howbeit he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. Archbishop Laud was emphatically a good Churchman: and yet he too often forgot the blessing pronounced upon the merciful by the Divine founder of his Church, and the curse uttered against those who lade men with burdens grievous to be borne.

The mind of the sepoy reeked with religious prejudice. He had adopted his profession in accordance with the dictates of his superstition. He belonged to a sacred order, and his life was one long ceremony. He could not prepare his simple food without clearing for himself a separate plot of ground secure from the intrusion of others. Should a stranger step into this magic ring, the food which he had cooked was thrown untasted away. When some Bengal regiments were serving in China, it occasionally happened that an unlucky native of the country, intent on theft or barter, set his profane foot within the hallowed circle, and was immediately saluted with a volley of threats and missiles from the outraged soldier whose meal he had spoiled. The bewildered wretch would take to flight across the camping-ground, plunging through the kitchens, defiling dinners by the score, and, in whatever direction he turned, rousing about his ears a swarm of indignant hungry Brahmins. Even if the sepoy was inclined to become lax in his observances, there were not wanting ghostly advisers to check his latitudinarian tendencies. A battalion on march was usually preceded by two or three fakeers, the bloated, filthy, sensual wandering friars of the East; wild-looking fellows, in orange or salmon-coloured linen, if by good luck they deigned to wear any clothes at all; their locks of long hair matted in strange fashion with grease and dirt; their bodies sprinkled with ashes and daubed with coarse paint. So pernicious and irregular a custom was not tolerated in the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras: but in Bengal these fellows were highly regarded by the soldiers, and did duty as unofficial regimental chaplains.

Five parts tallow, five parts stearine, and one part wax, were the ingredients of that unsavoury composition, the memory of which will henceforward never perish as long as England has history and India has tradition. Captain Boxer, of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, was quite unable to offer any decided opinion as to the particular description of animal from which the tallow was derived, but was certain that the mixture was innocent of hog's lard. Not so thought the Brahmins of the regiments stationed in the vicinity of the capital. About the middle of January, 1857, amidst the frivolous and ill-natured gossip which is the chief material of Calcutta journalism, there peer out certain vague and uncomfortable paragraphs: "A rumour has been current among the sepoys at Dumdum and Barrackpore that they are to be baptized, and we hear that they are greatly alarmed in consequence. It should be explained to them that the only ceremony of the kind to which soldiers are required to submit is the baptism of fire." Again, a letter from Barrackpore announces that "bungalows here are set fire to every night." On the 10th of February, "a Hindu" solemnly warns the Governor-General thus: "My Lord, this is the most critical time ever reached in the administration of British India. Almost all the independent native Princes and Rajahs have been so much offended at the late Annexation policy, that they have begun to entertain deadly enmity to the British empire in India. Moreover, as for the internal defences of the empire, the cartridge question has created a strenuous movement in some portions of the Hindu sepoys, and will spread it through all their ranks over the whole country to the great insecurity of British rule." These notices, which we now read by the light of a terrible experience, appear side by side with satirical poems on their more fortunate comrades by military officers who cannot get civil employ; advertisements of a fancy fair for the advancement of native female education; and a proposition to appoint a committee of "eligible young civilians" to indemnify the ladies whose Europe bonnets have been ruined by the dust on the course. Ere many months were flown, eligible young civilians had far other matters to occupy their attention.

At length, on the 26th of February, the Nineteenth Bengal Native Infantry, quartered at Berhampore, being directed to parade for exercise with blank ammunition, refused to obey the command, and in the course of the following night turned out with a great noise of drumming and shouting, broke open the bells of arms, and committed other acts of open mutiny. By order of the Governor-General the regiment was disarmed, marched down to Barrackpore, a distance of something over a hundred miles, and there disbanded by Major-General Hearsey, who performed his trying task with energy, discretion, and courage. As yet there had been no blood shed; but far worse was soon to come. The Thirty-fourth Native Infantry had for some time past been ripe for revolt. There were nearly six hundred high-caste men in the ranks, and the corps was stationed among local associations which fostered the most lively emotions in the minds of men in a state of high religious excitement. In the year 1825, Barrackpore had been the scene of a military tumult which had been repressed with timely severity. One of the ringleaders, a Brahmin sepoy, had been hanged in the presence of his comrades. This man was regarded as a martyr; the spot where he met his fate, on the edge of a large tank, was still pointed out to each new-comer; and the brass implements with which he performed his acts of worship had been preserved in the quarter-guard as relics of the departed saint. Unfortunately the regiment was commanded by an officer who thus describes himself in honest and manly language: "I beg to state that it has been my invariable plan to act on the broad line which Scripture enforces, that is, to speak without reserve to every person. When I therefore address natives on the subject of religion, whether individually or collectively, it has been no question with me whether the person or persons I addressed belonged to this or that regiment, or whether he is a shopkeeper, merchant, or otherwise, but I speak to all alike, as sinners in the sight of God; and I have no doubt that I have often in this way (indeed, am quite certain,) addressed sepoys of my own regiment, as also of other regiments at this and other stations where I have been quartered.... As to the question whether I have endeavoured to convert sepoys and others to Christianity, I would humbly reply that this has been my object; and, I conceive, it is the aim and end of every Christian who speaks the Word of God to another, namely, that the Lord would make him the happy instrument of converting his neighbour to God." Did not this good Colonel forget who it was who bade us give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast our pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend us?

On the 29th of March, a private of the Thirty-fourth, Mungul Pandy by name, under the combined influence of religious frenzy and intoxicating drugs, took into his head to swagger about in front of the lines, musket in hand, bawling: "Come out, you blackguards! The Europeans are upon us! From biting these cartridges we shall become infidels! Get ready! Turn out, all of you!" This conduct in the course of time brought down upon him the Adjutant and the serjeant-major, which in no wise disconcerted Mungul Pandy. He shot the officer's horse, disabled his bridle arm, and finally, with the assistance of some of the boldest among his comrades, desperately wounded and drove off both the Europeans. The Colonel next appeared on the stage. Here again it may be best to quote his own words: "The native officer at length ordered the guard to advance. They did so, six or seven paces, and halted. The native officer returned to me, stating that none of the men would go on. I felt it was useless going on any further in the matter. Some one, a native in undress, mentioned to me that the sepoy in front was a Brahmin, and that no one would hurt him. I considered it quite useless, and a useless sacrifice of life, to order a European officer with the guard to seize him, as he would, no doubt, have picked off the European officer, without his receiving any assistance from the guard. I then left the guard, and reported the matter to the Brigadier."

Fortunately there was at hand a man who had no scruple about the life of at least one European officer. Before many minutes had elapsed General Hearsey rode on to the parade-ground, and found it already covered with an agitated mob of sepoys, amongst whom might here and there be seen an English officer doing his best to prevent his men from following the example of Mungul Pandy, who had by this time reloaded his musket, and was now stalking about in the presence of his regiment, which had got together round the quarter-guard, brandishing his dripping sword, and shouting: "You have excited me to do this, and now, you blackguards, you will not join me!" An officer called out to Hearsey, "Have a care! His musket is loaded!" The General replied, "Damn his musket!" an oath concerning which every true Englishman will make the customary invocation to the Recording Angel.

Hearsey summoned the guard to advance, but the native officer answered as before. The General, however, by a significant motion of his revolver, gave the Jemmadar to understand that this time he had to deal with a man of very different kidney from the Colonel. The guard, accordingly, went forward; the Jemmadar in front, watched on either side by a young Hearsey, pistol in hand. Their sire himself rode straight at the mutineer, who, seeing that the game was up, turned the muzzle to his own breast, touched the trigger with his toe, and fell, severely hurt. He was secured, and conveyed to the hospital; and the concourse dispersed quietly to their lines, after having been roundly taken to task by the General for their cowardice and unsoldierlike behaviour in standing by without moving a finger while their officers were being cut to pieces.

Mungul Pandy was condemned by court-martial, and duly hanged on the 8th of April. At first there was some difficulty about finding an executioner. Public opinion had become less squeamish before the year was out. From this miserable fanatic was taken the name of "Pandy," which in Anglo-Indian slang signified mutineer. There were those who loved to apply the horrible nickname of "white Pandies" to those wise and good men who, amidst the general frenzy, preserved some spark of justice and humanity; who would not lend their countenance to a barbarous policy dictated by cruelty and craven fear; who refused to devastate provinces and depopulate cities, to butcher the women of Delhi and torture the shopkeepers of Allahabad, to confound innocent and guilty in one vast proscription and one universal massacre: just as, at the end of the last century, there were those who stigmatized as "Jacobins" the English statesmen who could not be reviled or shocked out of the belief that the king and the nobility of France had been less sinned against than sinning; and that, in any case, it was not our business to avenge the wrongs of alien dukes and marquisses upon the senators who had abolished their privileges, the peasants who had shot their game, and the board which was busily engaged in dividing their provinces into departments.

Seven companies of the Thirty-fourth regiment were disbanded, after all pecuniary claims had been discharged. The closing effect was dramatic enough. General Hearsey made the men a spirited harangue, reminding them of their misdeeds, and giving some hints as to their future conduct which they would have done well to have laid to heart. Then came the parting; not without tears, it is said, on both sides. The sepoys stripped off their accoutrements, and were ferried across the river, bag and baggage, in Government steamers, and there sent about their business. In order to disprove the report that the Company had designs against their religion, they were informed that every facility would be afforded them for visiting Hindoo shrines of repute before they bent their steps towards their villages in Oude and Bahar.

Unfortunately for themselves, the men of the two regiments broken up at Barrackpore were bent upon doing a far less innocent service to the cause of their faith than that of feeing, out of the arrears of their pay, the priests of Juggernauth and Gyah. The most active and determined among their number deliberately proceeded to spread over the whole continent of India the tidings of the late occurrences, told with more than Oriental exaggeration, and received with more than Oriental credulity. No society of rich and civilized Christians, who ever undertook to preach the gospel of peace and good-will, can have employed a more perfect system of organization than was adopted by these rascals, whose mission it was to preach the gospel of sedition and slaughter. By twos and threes, in various disguises, and on divers pretexts, they found their way to every native regiment in the three Presidencies. Wherever they went they related how the Queen of England had commanded that the Hindoos and Mussulmans of India should be made Christians, come what might; how the Governor-General, the Great Lord Sahib, had remonstrated with her, saying that he must first slay three hundred thousand holy and learned men of both religions; how the Queen had rejoined, "Let it then be done"; how the Great Lord Sahib had resolved to begin with the army, and had ordered the troops to bite cartridges smeared with the fat of cow and pig; how the sepoys at Barrackpore had bravely resisted the tyrannous and accursed mandate; how some had testified to the death, and some had suffered bonds and scourging, and all had been deprived of their rank and calling, and robbed of the pensions which they had earned by valour and fidelity and ancient service. Then their hearers were warned that a like fate was in store for all; that a strenuous and united effort could alone save their freedom and their religion; and that the hour was fast approaching when the Brahmins of the army must rule, or be for ever slaves and Christians. Sometimes, it was a couple of fakeers perched on an elephant; sometimes, a party of country-people on their way to the Ganges for their annual dip in the sacred stream; a gang of gipsies; a string of camel-drivers; or a troop of musicians escorting a celebrated nautch-dancer to her home in Cashmere, after a successful season in Bengal. However it might be, it invariably happened that, a few hours after the strangers had entered the station, the bazaar and the cantonments were in a ferment of gossip and conjecture; the sepoys at once grew sulky and idle; the Mahomedans of the town became insolent, and the Hindoos pert. The very domestic servants appeared to share the contagion; the cooks got drunk, and the grooms stupid; the water-carrier omitted to fill the bath, and the butler to ice the Moselle; the peon spent twice his usual number of hours in conveying a note to the next compound but one; while the bearers delighted to insult their mistress by smoking under her window, and coming bareheaded into her presence, whenever the Sahib and his horsewhip were well out of the way.

To us, who from the standing-point of complete and certain knowledge look back upon that March and April pregnant with a great and sombre future, it seems indeed miraculous that our countrymen then resident in India should not have entertained a suspicion of what those months would bring forth. It appears incredible that the officers should have lived their ordinary lives; hunting; dining; dancing; speculating on the probable height of the thermometer, and the possible chances of promotion; while within a few yards of their quarters the men were debating the programme of the coming mutiny; arranging who was to shoot down the adjutant, and who was to fire the thatch of the colonel's bungalow; discussing their hopes of assistance from Gwalior, Nepaul, and St. Petersburg. Can it be believed that morning after morning our countrymen looked down the row of dark faces and gleaming eyes, and never dreamed that in all that array, so fair and orderly to view, any heart beat with a loftier ambition than could be satisfied by a stripe or an epaulette; with a deadlier malice than might be gratified by the disappointment of some rival in the good opinion of the soubahdar? And yet, so it was. In spite of all that was said and written concerning the childlike docility of the affectionate sepoy, confidence and regard did not exist between the officer and the soldier. That the case had once been far otherwise was acknowledged on all sides; and the change was noted by military men of the old school with regret, qualified by a slight tincture of self-satisfaction. Young subalterns retorted that the ancient intimacy between superior and inferior was connected with the loose habits which disgraced Anglo-Indian society in days gone by, when the soldier pandared to the vices of his officer, or, at any rate, was cognisant of their existence. Those who have studied cause and effect will be slow to accept the theory that this estrangement between the mess-room and the lines was in any great measure due to the increased morality of the Indian army.

The root of the evil lay in the withdrawal of officers from regimental duty for employment on the staff and in the civil posts; a custom so dear to all who bore the great and time-honoured names, which had been conspicuous in the Court of Directors and at the Calcutta Council-board as far back as the time of Barwell and Warren Hastings. And yet, though family interest received due consideration from those who dispensed the good things of the service, it was unfortunate for the efficiency of the Bengal army that merit did not go without a share in the loaves and fishes. A young man on the threshold of his profession was recommended by his father, and entreated by his sisters, skilled like all Anglo-Indian ladies in the inscrutable mysteries of official success, to get away from his regiment as early as possible. The teaching of his relations was enforced by the golden words which dropped from the lips of the Chairman of the Honourable Court, when, on the prize-day at Addiscombe, the lad stood forth blushing with modest pride, the Pollock medal in his hand, the sword of honour under his arm, and a pile of military histories, emblazoned with the arms of the academy, on the table before him. After his arrival on Indian shores, the same advice was impressed upon him by his uncle the Sudder judge, his cousin the junior secretary, and his school-chum the probationary-sub-assistant-commissary-general.

Rich were the prizes open to the aspiring cadet:—rich, but far from rare. There were the political agencies at the courts of Holkar and Scindiah; at the seats of the ancient and romantic dynasties of Rajpootana; at that European station whence, in dangerous proximity, an English resident still watches with anxious glance the intrigues and feuds which agitate the nest of Arab and Rohilla cut-throats, who protect and terrify the Nizam of Hyderabad. There were the Deputy Commissionerships of Oude and the Punjaub, whose occupants enjoyed a salary almost equal to that of a Collector in the more settled provinces, with a far greater share of power and responsibility. There were the posts in the branches of administration more exclusively military: the Departments of the Adjutant-General, the Quarter-Master-General, the Commissary-General, and the Judge-Advocate-General. Finally, there were the numerous irregular corps in the Deccan and on the North-west Frontier, to each of which were attached some three or four captains and subalterns, who fully appreciated the increase of their pay, and the excitement afforded by their critical and interesting duties. In short, appointments which enabled officers to make money and reputation faster than was possible for their less fortunate brethren who remained in the line were so numerous that, after family claims had been satisfied, the surplus sufficed to absorb all the most promising and pushing youngsters in the Bengal Military service.

It was not only that this system drained the army of individual zeal and talent. The professional spirit of the mass could not thrive under so blighting an influence. The officers present with the corps gradually ceased to take pride in the conscientious performance of their regimental duties; for their employment upon those duties was a standing proof that they were wanting in ability and high official connexion. It was very difficult to throw much energy and enthusiasm into such work as escorting treasure, guarding jails, inspecting the cross-belts and listening to the grievances of sepoys, while a junior lieutenant in the same battalion was coercing refractory Rajahs, or scouring the border at the head of five hundred wild Pathan horsemen. What wonder if, under these circumstances, men became sick at heart? Disgusted at their position, they no longer made the welfare and happiness of their soldiers an all-important object: and neglect often deepened into aversion and contempt. The cadets, as was only too natural, caught the prevailing tone. Young men fresh from home are so shocked at the apparent deficiency of the Hindoo character of manliness, honesty, and self-respect, the qualities which Englishmen most regard, that, so to speak, their better impulses are apt to render them careless of the rights and sentiments of the native population. "Do I not well to be insolent?" is a question asked daily, in a more or less logical form, by the majority of our countrymen in India. It requires a larger stock of philosophy than generally falls to the share of a lad of nineteen in a new red coat, with his first month's pay in the pocket, to realize the conviction that an imperial people, who undertake to govern others, must first govern themselves; and that it is the height of folly and cruelty to subjugate a hundred millions of men, and then abuse them because they are as God made them, and not as we would fain have them.

And so it came to pass that to be sent back to head-quarters was "a shame," regimental duty was "a bore," and the sepoys were "niggers." That hateful word, which is now constantly on the tongue of all Anglo-Indians except civilians and missionaries, made its first appearance in decent society during the years which immediately preceded the mutiny. The immorality of the term is only equalled by the absurdity. To call the inhabitants of Hindostan "niggers," is just as unreasonable as it would be for Austrian officials to designate the subject populations of Venetia and Hungary by the collective title of "serfs." In the eyes of an English planter, or railway-contractor, there is no distinction of race or rank. Khoonds and Punjabees, Pariahs and Coolin Brahmins, bazaar-porters and Rajahs with a rent-roll of half a million, and a genealogy longer than that of Howards and Stanleys, are "niggers" alike, one and all, with the prefix of that profane epithet, which has been the Shibboleth of the Englishmen abroad since the days of Philip de Comines. And so, in a Bengal corps,—whether he were a grey-bearded Mahomedan soubahdar, the arbiter and exponent of regimental custom and tradition, or the high-caste Rajpoot, or a Sikh veteran marked with the scars of Sobraon,—every man knew well that he was dubbed "nigger" by some slip of an ensign, who could not tell his right hand from his left in any Oriental language. In such an atmosphere how could mutual attachment exist, or mutual confidence? How could there not exist dislike and disaffection; the bitterness of injured pride, and of feelings misunderstood or heedlessly contemned?

There were usually some eight or nine officers actually doing duty with a battalion. A colonel and doctor, three or four captains and lieutenants, and three or four ensigns, formed what was in those days considered to be a very respectable complement. The other members of the mess were far away from head-quarters, inditing minutes at Calcutta, deciding suits in some distant non-regulation province, or tracking the course of the Nile through the deserts of Nubia. Such, however, was not universally the case. Here and there might be found a corps where the regimental tone (that unwritten and impalpable law, not passed in words, nor enforced by overt penalties, but obeyed in silence and without question), had ordained that staff employment was not a legitimate object of ambition. The officers plumed themselves upon keeping all together, and rising one with another in the ordinary course of promotion. They shot tigers, and speared hogs, and played whist and billiards, and meanwhile looked well after their companies, and contrived to know something about the private history and character of every man under their command. They voted it unfashionable to attempt the pass examination in Hindoostanee, success in which was an indispensable qualification for the staff: an ordeal familiarly known as the P.H.; that pair of consonants which are seldom far from the lips, and never out of the thoughts, of the more aspiring subalterns of the Bengal army. And yet, averse as they were to grammars and dictionaries, these men spoke the vernacular languages with rare facility. But not even to such officers as these was breathed a syllable of that fearful secret, which England would have cheaply bought at the price of a million pounds for a single letter. Their soldiers entertained towards them a strong and genuine regard. It was not among the ranks which they commanded that the spirit of sedition was born and nurtured. But in the day of wrath there was no distinction of person. When the baneful sirocco of mutiny, called by the imaginative Hindoo "the Devil's Wind," was abroad in the air, all milder influences yielded before its withering blast. The consciousness of the authority of the "Fouj ki Bheera," or "general will of the army," was to individual men, or regiments, almost irresistible. Some troopers in Fisher's Irregular Cavalry performed a signal act of gallantry at Lucknow, during the early days of the outbreak, for which they received a handsome reward. While waiting for their money in the verandah of the commissioner's house, they fell into conversation with certain of their fellow-villagers among his servants. "We like our colonel," said they, "and will not allow him to be harmed; but, if the whole army turns, we must turn too." A week elapsed, and these men looked quietly on from their saddles, while Colonel Fisher was shot to death by a scoundrel in the lines of the military police. Then they threw aside all semblance of discipline; murdered the second in command; and shouted to the adjutant, who was a general favourite, to ride and begone, if he desired to spare them the pain of taking his life. At one large station the men were in open mutiny, and the officers had grouped themselves in front of the battalion, expecting every moment the fatal volley. They agreed, however, not to abandon hope until they had witnessed the effect produced by the presence of a captain of old standing in the service, who was apparently loved and trusted by the whole regiment, and especially by the grenadier company, to which he had been attached for many years. When his approach was announced, every eye turned towards his bungalow, which stood on the parade-ground, close to that flank where the grenadiers were stationed. He had not gone ten paces down the line before he fell dead, pierced by a bullet from the ranks of his own command.

In every regiment there was a Soubahdar major, or native colonel; and in every company a Soubahdar, who answered to a European captain, and a Jemmadar, who answered to a European subaltern. These were the commissioned officers, who wore swords and sashes, sat on a court-martial, and were saluted by the rank and file. They had one and all carried the musket, and there was no approach to friendship or even to familiar intercourse between them and their Saxon brethren in arms, who considered that, if they offered their soubahdar a chair during an interview on regimental business, quite enough had been done to mark the difference between a commissioned and a non-commissioned sepoy. The sergeant and the corporal were represented by the havildar and the naick; titles which make the list of killed and wounded in Indian battles so bewildering to an English reader. Thus the Brahmin battalion had a complete outfit of Brahmin officers; and this it was that rendered the rebellious army so terribly efficient for evil. When every Englishman in a corps had been murdered or scared away, the organization none the less remained intact. The regiment was still a military machine finished in every part, compact, flexible, and capable as ever of a great and sustained exertion of strength and courage. This imperfect, but, it is to be feared, tedious sketch of the composition of our native force, as it existed before the mutiny, may well be closed with the oracular words of Sir Charles Napier, the Cassandra of the old Bengal army: "Your young, independent, wild cadet, will some day find the Indian army taken out of his hands by the soubahdars. They are steady, respectful, thoughtful, stern-looking men; very zealous and military: the sole instructors of all our soldiers."

The native town of Cawnpore contained sixty thousand inhabitants. It possessed no architectural beauties worthy to detain the traveller who, from those stately landing-places whence rise, tier above tier, the shrines and palaces of Benares, was hurrying on towards the ineffable glories of Agra. The most remarkable feature was a spacious boulevard, more than a hundred feet in breadth, called the Chandnee Choke, or street of silver. This name, common to the principal avenue in all the great cities of the north west, is a monument of the days of bad government and a primitive commercial system. When banks were few and robbers bold and numerous, men preferred to have some part of their wealth about their persons and in a portable form. A minister at a native court, however rich the harvest he might gather in during the fitful sunshine of royal favour, thought it well to keep a handful of diamonds and rubies in his girdle, as a provision against the day of disgrace and flight. Now, by the help of a bill of exchange and a single trusty agent, he may store up his gains in European stocks and debentures far out of reach of the greediest Nizam or the neediest Maharaja. In like manner, in old times, farmers and shopkeepers were wont to convert their superfluous rupees into ornaments of fantastic design for themselves, their wives, and their children. The unceasing flow of silver towards the east, which affords to political economists a constant sensation of pleasing bewilderment, is attributed in part to the fact that the Indian peasant still continues to invest his earnings on the wrists and ankles, the ears and noses of his family. Cawnpore was noted for the excellence and cheapness of all articles made of leather,—saddlery, boots and shoes, bottle-covers, helmets, and cheeroot-cases. The manufacture was introduced by a colony of Chinese, the frugal and industrious Lombards of India, who settled in the Bazaar many years ago. A subaltern could buy a set of harness for his buggy at something under three pounds, and thoroughly equip his hack for half that sum: and, if he was not very particular about shape and colour, he might pick up a serviceable country-bred horse for a hundred rupee note.

The city had an evil reputation. Situated on the frontier of two distinct jurisdictions, it swarmed with rascals from Oude, on their way to seek obscurity in British territory, and rascals from our north-west provinces, on their way to seek impunity in the dominions of the Nawab. Oonao, the half-way house on the road which led from Cawnpore to Lucknow, gave a name to a class of murders of peculiar atrocity. On and about that highway were constantly found the dead bodies of travellers: sepoys, for the most part, returning to their villages with their savings and the voucher for their pension. In most cases a rope was drawn tightly round the neck: but the surgeons who conducted the inquests gradually came to be of opinion that the victims had been poisoned, or, at any rate, stupefied, by being induced to smoke tobacco mixed with a noxious drug. The police exerted themselves in vain to obtain a clue to the mystery. Whenever a fresh officer of note was appointed to the district, the murderers made a point of presenting him with a "nuzzur," or "offering," in the shape of a larger than usual batch of corpses. The difficulty of detection was increased by an odious custom well known to all Anglo-Indian magistrates, which here flourished with extraordinary vigour. A malicious Hindoo will deliberately mangle the body of a person who has died from a natural cause, and fling it on the ground of some neighbour to whom the scamp may happen to bear a grudge. The unfortunate recipient finds himself involved in the consequences dreaded by the poor people in the Arabian Nights, when the hunchback was choked by a fishbone beneath their hospitable roof.

Bajee Rao, the Peishwa of Poonah, was the last monarch of one of those great Mahratta dynasties which long shared the sovereignty of the Central Highlands and the plunder of all Hindostan. So near a neighbour could not fail to be guilty of the amount of "treachery," "faithlessness," and "bad internal government," necessary to justify the annexation of his dominions. Urged by that painful necessity of taking what belongs to others, which is the inevitable result of all our dealings with Oriental powers, we dethroned Bajee Rao, confiscated his territories, and assigned him a residence at Bithoor, a small town twelve miles up the river from Cawnpore. Here he lived until his death in princely state, inasmuch as the Company always behaved with great generosity towards the princes whom it had plundered, after the manner of those open-handed thieves of fiction who fling back a couple of broad pieces to the traveller whom they have eased of his purse and watch. Bithoor was pleasantly situated upon the banks of the sacred stream, and was peculiarly suited to be the Saint Juste in which a retired Brahmin ruler might be content to end his days; for the spot was held in singular favour by Brahma. Here, after the creation had been accomplished, the deity had sacrificed a hecatomb, in token that his great work was good. The pin which fastened the divine sandal was picked up in after days, and inserted in the steps of the principal landing-place, where it may still be seen by the incredulous. At the full moon in November, prodigious crowds of pilgrims assemble from all parts of India to celebrate the present god with frankincense, and flowers, and barbarous music, and drunken frenzy. With his traditions and his greyhounds, his annuity of eighty thousand pounds, and his host of retainers, Bajee Rao led a splendid and not unhappy existence. But the old Mahratta had one sore trial. He had no son to inherit his possessions, perpetuate his name, and apply the torch to his funeral pyre: for the last office, so the inflexible law of his religion ordained, might be performed by none other than a filial hand. In this strait he had recourse to adoption, a ceremony which, by Hindoo law, entitles the favoured person to all the rights and privileges of an heir born of the body. His choice fell upon an individual who, according to some, was the son of a Poonah corn-merchant, while others say that he was born in great poverty at a miserable village in the vicinity of Bombay. The name of this man was Seereek Dhoondoo Punth: but the execration of mankind has found his cluster of titles too long for use, and prefers the more familiar appellation of "the Nana."

Bajee Rao died in 1851, and the heir forthwith put in a demand for the continuance of the pension which the Company had granted to his adopted father. The claim was disallowed, and the Nana, who at length began to despair of prevailing upon the Calcutta authorities, determined to go to the fountain-head, and accordingly despatched an agent to London. For this purpose he selected his confidential man of business, Azimoolah Khan, a clever adventurer, who began life as kitmutgar, or footman, in an Anglo-Indian family. In spite of his disadvantages, he acquired a thorough acquaintance with the English and French languages. He subsequently became a pupil, and thence a teacher, in the Government School at Cawnpore; in which position he attracted the notice of the Nana. Azimoolah arrived in town during the height of the season of 1854, and was welcomed with open arms by that portion of society which makes no inquiries into the antecedents of an aspirant to its favour, provided he be not a fellow-countryman or Christian. According to the creed of this class, every Hindoo was necessarily a prince, just as every Maronite is a martyr, and every Pole a patriot. Azimoolah speedily became a lion, and obtained more than even a lion's share of the sweetest of all flattery. The ladies voted him charming. Handsome and witty, endowed with plenty of assurance and an apparent abundance of diamonds and Cashmere shawls, the ex-kitmutgar seemed as fine a gentleman as the prime minister of Nepaul, or the Maharaja of the Punjaub. On the first day of the great vengeance, when Havelock's forlorn hope came to Bithoor, grim and eager, straight from the brink of the fatal well, our soldiers discovered amongst the possessions of this scoundrel letters from more than one titled lady couched in terms of the most courteous friendship. An indiscretion for which a sneer would be too severe a punishment, at such a moment excited bitter and painful emotion.

Great as were the successes which the agent of the Nana gained on his own account in Mayfair, he was able to effect very little for his master in Leadenhall Street and Westminster. In the reports which he transmitted to Bithoor he attributed his failure to the bribes which the Board of Control and the Privy Council had eaten at the hands of the East Indian Company; an explanation which appeared satisfactory to the Maharaja. On his way home Azimoolah passed through Constantinople at the time when our fortune in the Crimea was at the lowest ebb. During the mid-gloom of that terrible winter there was much talk among those who did not love us concerning the decadence of England and the youthful vigour of the Russian power. Of such gossip the clever Asiatic collected an ample budget, in order to console his baffled employer with cheery vaticinations relating to the approaching downfall of the British rule.

Although the Nana had failed in his attempt on the public purse, his wealth was still conspicuous even among the colossal incomes of Indian landholders. He had contrived to secure to himself the whole property of the ex-Peishwa; and strange stories were told about the means by which this end had been accomplished. The nephew of Bajee Rao started a claim for one half of his uncle's estate, which moiety he valued at more than three millions. The suit was dismissed, and the plaintiff never ceased to affirm that "the palm of the judge had been greased by the Nana:" but too much attention must not be paid to this declaration; for, whenever a native accuses the bench of corruption, he simply means that he has lost his case. It is certain that the Maharaja kept in confinement against their will the widows of his predecessor; for whose younger daughter he planned a marriage inconsistent with the rules and traditions of the family: an act of outrageous tyranny in the estimation of High Brahmins. He wedded the eldest sister to a husband whom she was never allowed to see; and, when her death occurred after no long interval, it was whispered about the neighbourhood that there had been very foul play in every sense of the word. Those fictitious tales of vice and atrocity, with which literary hacks of the vilest class feed the corrupt imaginations of their readers, too often find a parallel in the realities of a great oriental household. The doctrine of personal rights has no existence within the walls of a zenana. Nowhere was the mystery of iniquity deeper and darker than in the palace of Bithoor, which was indeed a worthy nest for such a vulture. There were rooms in that palace horribly unfit for any human eye, where both European and native artists had done their best to gratify a master who was willing to incur any expense for the completion of his loathsome picture-gallery.

In the apartments open to the inspection of English visitors there was nothing which could shock either modesty or humanity, though a Sahib of fastidious taste might take exception to the arrangement of the furniture and the decorations. The habits of an Oriental are so simple, his wants so few, that the most Anglified Hindoo gentleman can never acquire himself, and still less impart to his servants a thorough acquaintance with our complicated domestic appliances. There is something very droll in the sanctum occupied by the eldest son of a rich native family; where, by a display of Western art and civilization, "Young Bengal" excites the envy of his contemporaries, and scandalises those among his relatives who belong to the old school. A cast from an exquisite statuette of Thorwaldsen stands side by side with a gilt shepherdess, or Highlander, or other specimen of that vulgar ware which with us has long been banished from the farmhouse to the cottage. A copy of some Roman or Florentine Madonna hangs next to a coloured print of a ballet-dancer; while a proof signed by Holman Hunt or Millais is flanked by "Facing a Bullfinch" and "Swishing a Rasper" from the classical collection of Mr. Fores, of Piccadilly. Over a sideboard of carved oak has long ceased to tick a veneered clock, daubed with the representation of the Exchange at Philadelphia; and round the tent-table of some deceased or insolvent ensign are gathered half a dozen chairs which once graced the boudoir of a vice-regal dame. No Eastern Anglo-maniac possessed a more heterogeneous collection than the Nana, who, living far from Calcutta, the centre of exotic fashion, was reduced to content himself with whatever treasures might come into the market at casual up-country sales. A gentleman of some literary reputation, who was entertained by the Maharaja in days gone by, thus describes the Bithoor ménage:—"I sat down to a table twenty feet long (it had originally been the mess-table of a cavalry regiment) which was covered with a damask table-cloth of European manufacture, but instead of a dinner napkin there was a bedroom towel. The soup—for the steward had everything ready—was served up in a trifle-dish which had formed part of a dessert service belonging to the Ninth Lancers—at all events the arms of that regiment were upon it; but the plate into which I ladled it with a broken tea-cup was of the old willow pattern. The pilau which followed the soup was served upon a huge plated dish, but the plate from which I ate it was of the very commonest description. The knife was a bone-handled affair; the spoon and fork were silver, and of Calcutta make. The plated side-dishes, containing vegetables, were odd ones; one was round, the other oval. The pudding was brought in upon a soup-plate, of blue and gold pattern, and the cheese was placed before me on a glass dish belonging to a dessert service. The cool claret I drank out of a richly cut champagne glass, and the beer out of an American tumbler of the very worst quality."

The Maharaja had a large and excellent stable of horses, elephants, and camels; a well-appointed kennel; and a menagerie of pigeons, falcons, peacocks, and apes, which would have done credit to any Oriental monarch, from the days of Solomon downwards. His armoury was stocked with weapons of every age and country, from a masterpiece of Purdey, to the bow and arrows used by the Hillmen of Orissa. His reception-rooms sparkled with mirrors and chandeliers that had come direct from Birmingham; and his equipages had stood within the twelvemonth in the warehouses of Longacre. He possessed a vast store of gold and silver plate; and his wardrobe overflowed with shawls and jewellery, which on gala days were regarded with longing eyes by the Cawnpore ladies. Nor did they lack frequent opportunities of contemplating the Maharaja in his panoply of kincob and Cashmere scarfs, crowned with a tiara of pearls and diamonds, and girt with old Bajee Rao's sword of state, which report valued at three lacs of rupees. For the Nana seldom missed an occasion for giving a ball or a banquet in European style to the society of the station; although he would never accept an entertainment in return, because our Government, which refused to regard him as a royal personage, would not allow him the compliment of a salute. Nor did he treat his guests with the semi-barbarous discourtesy evinced by some native hosts, who pass the evening seated among a group of courtiers, scrutinizing the dancers through a lorgnette, and apparently regarding the whole proceeding as a ballet arranged for their individual amusement. The Maharaja mixed freely with the company; inquired after the health of the Major's lady; congratulated the judge on his rumoured promotion to the Sudder Court; joked the assistant magistrate about his last mishap in the hunting-field; and complimented the belle of the evening on the colour she had brought down from Simla. His wealth was abundant enough to allow of any vagaries of hospitality and personal extravagance, and does not seem to have been seriously impaired even by the expense entailed by a crowd of lazy myrmidons whom he kept about his person; a folly common to all high-born and opulent Hindoos. Every native landlord, who can induce his neighbours to dignify him with the title of Rajah, delights in flourishing about the country under the escort of a host of blackguards;—the horsemen armed with lances and old cavalry swords, and mounted on raw-boned, long-tailed horses, smeared with coarse paint;—the infantry straggling along under the weight of clubs, partizans, brass blunderbusses, and long matchlocks, of which the stock is studded with glass beads, and the muzzle shaped into the semblance of a dragon's mouth. The Nana kept several hundreds of these scamps in idleness and insolence. He provided them with four rupees a month, and a suit of clothes once a year; an allowance which they eked out by plundering the peasants for twenty miles round, and extorting an intermittent blackmail from the tradesmen of Cawnpore.

At the time of the mutiny the Nana was about thirty-six years of age. His complexion was sallow; his features strongly marked, and not unpleasing. Like all Mahrattas, both head and face were shaven clean. He was fat with that unhealthy corpulence which marks the Eastern voluptuary. The circumstances under which a young Rajah comes to maturity leave him a very scant chance of obtaining perfection, moral or physical. From his earliest years he is surrounded by flatterers and pandars. While still a child in the harem, it is the object of every one, beginning with his own mother, to obtain his ear by adulation, and by the freemasonry of corrupt discourse. During his boyhood he has no little peers on whom to exert his faculties for emulation and self-denial; and, when he has arrived at man's estate, he may look in vain for any object of honourable ambition amidst the dead level of national dependence. He never walks, save from his divan to his bath; never mounts one of the huge cream-coloured steeds, which on high feast-days amble behind his palanquin in melancholy cavalcade; never knows the sensation of honest fatigue and wholesome hunger. No whim ungratified; every propensity cherished and pampered; incapable of effort; incognizant of duty; he is vicious with deeper than Parisian immorality, and listless with more than Belgravian ennui. Long before the age at which a high-born Englishman makes his choice of Hercules between balls and blue-books, the effete sensuality of a Hindoo noble is reduced to seek gratification in the illicit charms of Indian hemp and French brandy. What wonder that in middle life he is flabby and gross beyond hope and compass; too feeble for manly exercise, too self-indulgent to practise a self-denying regimen?

The Maharaja of Bithoor exhibited a lively interest in the proceedings of our Government at home and abroad, in our history, our arts, our religion, and our customs; although he was entirely ignorant of our language. He subscribed to all the leading Anglo-Indian journals, which were translated to him daily by an individual who had been unlucky enough to exchange a situation on the East Indian Railroad for the post of English Professor in the household of the Nana. The Rajah played billiards admirably, while he was yet slim enough to bend over the table without inconvenience. He especially delighted in the game, because it afforded him an opportunity for mixing on familiar terms with the officers of the garrison. Nothing could exceed the cordiality which he constantly displayed in his intercourse with our countrymen. The persons in authority placed an implicit confidence in his friendliness and good faith, and the ensigns emphatically pronounced him a capital fellow. He had a nod or a kind word for every Sahib in the station. There were hunting-parties and jewellery for the men, and picnics and shawls for the ladies. If a subaltern's wife required change of air, the Rajah's carriage was at the service of the young couple, and the European apartments at Bithoor were put in order to receive them. If a civilian had overworked himself in court, he had but to speak the word, and the Rajah's elephants were sent on to the Oude jungles. But none the less did he never for an instant forget the grudge which he bore our nation. While his face was all smiles, in his heart of hearts he brooded over the judgment of the Company, and the wrong of his despised claim. From his hour of repulse to his hour of vengeance his life was one long irony. Thenceforward his story would more fitly be told in the wild and mysterious rhythms of the old Greek drama than in sober English prose; for in truth that story finds no parallel, save in the ghastly tales which hang like a mist of blood round the accursed house of Pelops. The lads who, with his sapphires and rubies glistening on their fingers, sat laughing round his Thyestean table, had one and all been doomed to die by a warrant that admitted of no appeal. He had sworn that the injustice should be expiated by the blood of women who had never heard his grievance named;—of babies who had been born years after the question of that grievance had passed into oblivion. The great crime of Cawnpore blackens the page of history with a far deeper stain than Sicilian Vespers, or September massacres: for this atrocious act was prompted, not by diseased and mistaken patriotism, nor by the madness of superstition, nor yet by incontrollable fear that knew not pity. The motives of the deed were as mean as the execution was cowardly and treacherous. Among the subordinate villains there might be some who were possessed by bigotry and class-hatred: but the chief of the gang was actuated by no higher impulses than ruffled pride and disappointed greed.

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CHAPTER II.
THE OUTBREAK.

During the spring of 1857 the native society of Hindostan presented those remarkable phenomena which, in an Asiatic community, are the infallible symptoms of an approaching convulsion. The atmosphere was alive with rumours, of the nature peculiar to India;—strange and inconsequent fragments of warning or prediction, which, with reverent credulity, are passed from mouth to mouth throughout a million homesteads. No one can tell whence the dim whisper first arose, or what it may portend; it is received as a voice from heaven, and sent forward on its course without comment or delay; for the Hindoo people, like the Greeks of ancient time, hold Rumour to be divine. Some of these unwritten oracles undoubtedly grew spontaneously from the talk of men, and were to be regarded merely as indications of the agitated and uneasy condition of the public mind; but, beyond all question, some secret influence was at work to advertise, so to speak, the mutiny. The ringleaders of that gigantic conspiracy advisedly undertook to impress upon the world at large the idea that something was coming, the like of which had not been known before. Manifold and variously expressed as were the prevailing reports, all had one and the same tendency. With a thousand tongues, and in a thousand forms, they spoke of a great trial that awaited the national religions; a trial from which they were eventually to emerge unscathed and victorious. A prophecy had long been current, that the hundredth year from the battle of Plassy would witness the downfall of the English rule; and the hundredth year had arrived. A mandate had of late gone forth from the palace of Delhi, enjoining the Mahommedans at all their solemn gatherings to recite a song of lamentation, indited by the royal musician himself, which described in touching strains the humiliation of their race, and the degradation of their ancient faith, once triumphant from the Northern snows to the Southern strait, but now trodden under the foot of the infidel and the alien. In January, the peasants of Bengal were repeating to each other a sentence apparently devoid of meaning, "Sub lal hoga," "everything is to become red." Some referred this dubious announcement to the probable extension of our empire over the whole continent, when the scarlet coats of our soldiers would be seen at Hyderabad and Khatmandoo, in Cashmere and Travancore; while others hinted that there was something thicker than water, and of a deeper crimson than a British uniform. Side by side with like ambiguous sayings, were more plain-spoken assertions concerning cartridges smeared with lard, and flour mixed with the ground bones of cow and pig, and other treacherous devices by which the demon who swayed the sceptre of Hindostan, the impalpable but omnipotent Kumpani, aimed at the destruction of sect and caste, and the universal establishment of Christianity. And, finally, during the early days of March, every hamlet in the Gangetic provinces received from its neighbour the innocent present of two chupatties, or bannocks of salt and dough, which form the staple food of the population. This far-famed token, the fiery cross of India, had no definite signification. It notified generally that men would do well to keep themselves prepared, for that something was in the air. In after days, one who had learned their effect by bitter experience, likened the chupatties to the cake of barley-bread which foreshadowed the destruction of the host of Midian. And so, from hand to hand, and from house to house, and from village to village, the mysterious symbol flew, and spread through the length and breadth of the land confusion and questioning, a wild terror, and a wilder hope. Truly, it may be said that, as in Judæa of old, there was distress of nations, and perplexity; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things that were coming on the earth.

Meanwhile, at Cawnpore, people ate, and drank, and married, and gave in marriage, and led the ordinary life of an up-country station. The magistrate grumbled because the judge acquitted too large a per centage of his committals; and the collector pronounced himself ill-used because the revenue board would not allow him an additional lac of rupees for his pet embankment; and the subalterns complained that the police-magistrate did not permit them to impress men to act as beaters at less than the market rate of wages; and the captains, by the aid of the mess-room army-list, made those intricate calculations which are the delight of military men and the despair of civilians; and the ladies, those, at least, on whom during the past cold season Fortune and Hymen had smiled, began to allow that the weather had grown too warm for dancing, though still eminently favourable for morning calls; and one talked of sending her children home; and another of going herself to the hills; and, towards the end of April, a party of disbanded Brahmins of the Nineteenth regiment came from the west, and spread through the Sepoy lines strange tales of greased cartridges, and gibbets, and midnight tumults, and officers cut down in the midst of the parade-ground.

Before the month of May was half over, the English residents at Cawnpore were beginning to be made uneasy by the disagreeable character of the intelligence from Agra. Something had happened at Meerut, and it was feared that something had happened at Delhi. Guns had been heard all the night of the tenth. European travellers from the north-west, whose arrival had been confidently expected, did not make their appearance. A party of the police had gone out to look for them, but met nobody except a young Sepoy trotting down the road on a cavalry troop-horse, who refused to answer any questions. But in the meanwhile, by those secret channels through which in eastern regions bad news travels with more than proverbial celerity, it was well known in the bazaar that the Third Light Cavalry had turned upon their officers; that murder and arson had been the order of the day; that the vast native garrison of Delhi had risen to a man, and had butchered every Englishman on whom they could lay their hands; that mutiny had gotten to itself a nucleus and a stronghold in the capital of the Mogul. These tidings caused great excitement throughout the cantonments, and, especially, in the lines of the Second Cavalry, to whose regiment the corps which had set the example of sedition stood next on the rolls of the Bengal army.

The officer in command of the Cawnpore division was Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler, K.C.B. At the outbreak of the troubles, many of our most important stations were entrusted to the charge of men who had won their spurs at Seringapatam, and might well have been content to have closed their career at Mooltan. It was to our shame as a military nation that, during such a crisis, the fortunes of England too often depended on the anility of invalids who should have been comfortably telling their stories of the Mahratta war in the pump-rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton. History blushes to chide these veterans for shortcomings incidental to their age. It is hardly just to blame them for prating of Lord Lake, and whimpering about the unsoldierlike appearance which the troops presented without their stocks and with their sun-helmets, at a time when younger warriors would have been disarming, and blowing from guns, and securing treasure, and throwing up earthworks, and sending the women and children down the river to Calcutta. In this his second half-century of Indian service, Sir Hugh was among the oldest members of the old school of Bengal officers. He worshipped his sepoys; spoke their language like one of themselves; and, indeed, had testified to his predilection for the natives of Hindostan by the strongest proof which it is in the power of a man to give. Short and spare, he still rode and walked like a soldier: and appears to have been capable of as much exertion as could reasonably be expected from an Englishman who had spent beneath an Indian sun more than two-thirds of his seventy-five years. On the eighteenth of May, he despatched the following message to the seat of Government:

"All well at Cawnpore. Quiet, but excitement continues among the people. The final advance on Delhi will soon be made. The insurgents can only be about 3,000 in number, and are said to cling to the walls of Delhi, where they have put up a puppet-king. I grudge the escape of one of them. Calm and expert policy will soon reassure the public mind. The plague is, in truth, stayed."

The reader need not be alarmed at the length of the telegraphic news from Cawnpore. There is but little more to come.

For in truth the plague was very far from stayed. The soldiery knew their own strength, and were well inclined to turn the knowledge to profit. There were schoolmasters who might have taught them a lesson of quite another description: but it was a far cry to Barrackpore, and there was no Hearsay at hand. It happens that a native lawyer, Nanukchund by name, took the precaution to keep a full and faithful journal, from the fifteenth of May onwards. This man was bound to our interest by the indissoluble tie of a common fear. A personal enemy of the Nana, he was actually engaged in conducting the suit instituted by the nephew of Bajee Rao to establish his claim to the half of his uncle's estate. With genuine Hindoo sagacity, he foresaw the approaching struggle, and the ultimate triumph of the English power; and conjectured that a record of events compiled with accuracy, slightly tinged by a somewhat ostentatious loyalty, would certainly procure him credit, and, possibly, a comfortable official income. Two days before Sir Hugh made his cheerful report to the Governor-General, Nanukchund looked in on a friend employed at the Treasury, and there heard the native officers of the guard uttering traitorous language, while their men amused themselves by quarrelling with the townsfolk who went to the Treasury on business. They detained people who came out with money or stamp-papers, and would not release them till ordered to do so by the Soubahdar. "It began to be evident," says this shrewd observer, "that nobody had any authority but the Soubahdars and the sepoys."

At length the symptoms of the growing malady became too patent to be disregarded even by the most sanguine physician. It came to the ears of the General that the son of a trooper in the Second Cavalry had been boasting to his schoolfellows that he was in the secret of what his father's regiment intended to do for the good cause. And, about the same time, one Khan Mahomed, a sepoy of the Fifty-sixth, took upon himself to assert that on the fifth of the next month the native troops were to be deprived of their arms, assembled under the pretence of getting their pay, and then and there blown up from a mine constructed by the European officers in the intervals of billiards. This singularly unpleasant prophet seems to have been without honour in his own battalion. His comrades brought information to the adjutant, who gave himself no trouble about the matter, beyond telling them that the story was all a lie. Thereupon Khan Mahomed went to the cavalry lines, where he found an audience more ready to accept his tale. On this occasion he imported some squadrons of English troopers, who were to be equipped with the swords and horses of his hearers. The regiment was soon in a panic of rage and fear. It became necessary to take immediate measures. The incendiary was put in irons, and an urgent application for aid telegraphed to Lucknow. Sir Henry Lawrence was roused from his bed at midnight, and by break of day all the available post-carriages in the station were rolling along towards Cawnpore, crammed inside and out with English soldiers.

But, in an hour of evil omen, Sir Hugh bethought himself of invoking the assistance of a more dubious ally. The Nana had lately paid a visit to the capital of Oude, under pretence of seeing the lions of the place. The arrogance of his manner, and the discourtesy of his sudden and unannounced departure, had attracted the attention of Mr. Gubbins, the Financial Commissioner, who communicated to General Wheeler his suspicions, backed by the opinion of Sir Henry Lawrence. It may be that the fatal step was first suggested by the warning of wiser men. It may be that the idea had long been familiar to the mind of the infatuated veteran. At all events, the sole answer to the remonstrance from Lucknow was a message, dated the twenty-second of May, stating that "two guns, and three hundred men, cavalry and infantry, furnished by the Maharaja of Bithoor, came in this morning."

On their march to Cawnpore, these scoundrels furnished a striking proof of their discipline and good faith. Chimna Apa, a man of some property, who supplied the nephew of Bajee Rao with the means of carrying on his law-suit, was driving out of town in the direction of Bithoor, when he unexpectedly came upon this formidable array commanded by the rival litigant. Apa, like a sensible fellow, jumped off his conveyance, and ran into a neighbouring ravine. The Nana's people appropriated a valuable sword and five hundred rupees, which the fugitive had left behind in his haste, cudgelled the servants, and went off declaring that the master had better look to himself, as the British rule would only last a few days longer. This specimen of the services which these new protectors were likely to render to the cause of law and order was brought to the notice of the authorities; but they had gone too far to draw back. The Nana took up his quarters in the midst of the houses occupied by the civilians and their families; the Treasury, which contained upwards of a hundred thousand pounds, was put under the custody of his body-guard; and it was even proposed that the ladies and children should be placed in sanctuary in Bithoor palace.

There were some, however, who scrupled to entrust the honour of England and the lives of her daughters to the exclusive guardianship of a discontented Mahratta. At their instigation the General set to work in a dilatory spirit to provide an asylum where, if the worst should befall, we might shelter, for a while at least, the relics of our name and power. He does not appear to have thought of the magazine, which was admirably adapted for defence. A mud wall, four feet high, was thrown up round the buildings which composed the old dragoon hospital, and ten guns of various calibre were placed in position round the intrenchment, by which name the miserable contrivance was dignified. Orders were given to lay in supplies for twenty-five days. The stock of rice, butter, salt, tea, sugar, rum, beer, and preserved meats looked well enough on paper. But the master's eye, which in India is even more essential than elsewhere, was entirely wanting. The contractors behaved after their kind. Peas and flour formed the bulk of the supplies, and even these were ridiculously insufficient. The regimental officers, who had no very lively confidence in Sir Hugh as a caterer, sent in large contributions of liquor and hermetically-sealed tins from their mess-stores. The tangible results of a fortnight's labour and supervision, at a time when every hour was precious, and every day priceless, consisted in a few cart-loads of coarse native food, and a fence not high enough to keep out an active cow. Utterly insufficient as they were, the sight of these preparations had a most unfortunate influence upon the minds of the sepoys. The timid were seriously alarmed by the hostile attitude adopted by our countrymen. The bolder spirits rejoiced to witness so plain a confession of apprehension on the part of their officers; while the more honest and trustworthy among their number would say to each other: "The sahibs have lost all confidence in us, and we shall never get over it." Where there is a will, there is a way, even in such a strait. And where there is half a will, there is a way likewise; but it leads whither it is not good that brave men should go, to disaster and discomfort, to bootless sacrifice and inglorious ruin. During these days Azimoolah, while walking with a lieutenant who had been a great favourite at Bithoor, pointed to the fortification which was then in progress, and said:—

"What do you call that place you are making out in the plain?"

"I am sure I don't know," was the reply.

Azimoolah suggested that it should be called "The Fort of Despair." "No, no;" answered the Englishman, "we will call it the Fort of Victory:" an observation that was received by his companion with an air of incredulous assent, which he must have acquired in West End drawing-rooms.

And now ensued a period of ceaseless dread, of suspicion that never slumbered, of suspense hardly preferable to the most terrible certainty. The women and children spent the nights within the circuit of the intrenchment, while their husbands, with devotion that merited a better reward, pitched their tents among the sepoy huts, and so took what sleep they might. On the twentieth of May, flames broke out after dark in the lines of the First Native Infantry. In a moment the station was on the alert. Men hurried on their clothes, and clutched revolvers from under their pillows. Guns loaded with grape were trundled down to a preconcerted rendezvous. It was no easy matter to persuade people that so ill-timed a conflagration could be altogether accidental. The twenty-fourth of the month was the festival of the Eed: a season which Mahommedans celebrate with the blood of sheep and goats, though on this occasion there was serious cause to apprehend lest, in their religious enthusiasm, they should pant for nobler victims. Sir Hugh telegraphed to Lucknow his belief that nothing could avert a rising. The feast, however, passed off without any disturbance. The Mussulmans in our ranks paid their respects to their officers; acknowledged with apparent gratitude the customary present of a fat Patna sheep; and protested that, come what might, they would be faithful to their leaders:—a statement that was accepted for as much as it was worth.

But these alternations of confidence and alarm gradually settled down into chronic gloom. On the return of the Queen's birthday the usual compliment was omitted, lest the natives should interpret the firing of the salute as a signal for revolt. Even military loyalty dared not do honour to our sovereign in a garrison that was still nominally her own. A sergeant's wife was making some purchases in the bazaar, when a man, whose martial gait and spruce appearance clearly proclaimed the sepoy in undress, accosted the poor woman in these words:—"Ah! you will none of you come here much oftener; you will not be alive another week." Our countrymen began to keep watch all night by turns, armed to the teeth. As on a burning ship, when the sea runs high, and the last boat has been swamped or dashed to pieces, the crew wait with clenched teeth till the fire has reached the magazine, and say, "Now it is coming;" and again, "Now;" so the Englishmen at Cawnpore, ignorant what each day might bring forth, certain only that the catastrophe was not remote, sat, pistol in hand, and expected the inevitable. Some families endeavoured to get down to Allahabad ere it was yet too late. But the roads swarmed with rebellious peasantry, and liberated jail-birds: the shallows in the river forbade all passage in this the eighth month of the annual drought; and escape was found to be impracticable. Whatever destiny might have in store was to be shared by all alike.

During the closing days of May, people were writing hard to catch the Home Mail: and they did well, for it was their last. Strange, beyond conception of poet strange and sad, must have been the contents of that Cawnpore mail-bag. Imagine Colonel Ewart seated at his desk in a tent surrounded by line behind line of huts and camp-fires, in and about which are swaggering hundreds of insolent, faithless mercenaries. Picture that scene, and then read: "I do not wish to write gloomily, but there is no use in disguising the fact, that we are in the utmost danger; and, as I have said, if the troops do mutiny, my life must almost certainly be sacrificed; but I do not think they will venture to attack the intrenched position which is held by the European troops, so I hope in God that my wife and child will be saved.

"And now, dear A——, farewell. If, under God's providence, this be the last time I am to write to you, I entreat you to forgive all I have ever done to trouble you, and to think kindly of me. I know you will be everything a mother can be to my boy. I cannot write to him this time, dear little fellow. Kiss him for me. Kind love to my brothers."

So spoke the stout soldier, fearing not for himself, but for a wife who was worthy of the husband, as her own words show. "My dear child," she says, "is looking very delicate. My prayer is that she may be spared much suffering. The bitterness of death has been tasted by us many times during the last fortnight, and, should the reality come, I hope we may find strength to meet it with a truly Christian courage. It is not hard to die oneself, but to see a dear child suffer and perish, that is the hard, the bitter trial, and the cup which I must drink, should God not deem it fit that it should pass from me. My companion, Mrs. Hillersdon, is delightful. Poor young thing, she has such a gentle spirit, so unmurmuring, so desirous to meet the trial rightly, unselfish and sweet in every way. She has two children, and we feel that our duty to our little ones demands that we should exert ourselves to keep up health and spirits as much as possible." That is the temper with which the mothers of Englishmen should die, if die they must.

"Such nights of anxiety," she continues, "I would never have believed possible, and the days are full of excitement. Another fortnight, we expect, will decide our fate; and, whatever it may be, I trust we shall be able to bear it. If these are my last words to you, you will remember them lovingly, and always bear in mind that your affection and the love we have ever had for each other is an ingredient of comfort in these bitter times." Such was the tone of the letters which, thence and at that season, went forth to spread a terrible solicitude through many an English household. Very different from the tender confidences and innocent gossip, the reminiscences of sick leave and the anticipations of furlough, the directions to milliners and the inquiries about boarding-schools, which are the ordinary materials of the Home Correspondence from an Indian station.

Meanwhile, the Nana was in intimate communication with the ringleaders of the Second Cavalry. The black sheep of the regiment were wont to hold meetings at the quarters of a trooper named Shumshoodeen Rhan, and of Teeka Sing, a Hindoo Soubahdar, who, by his audacity and energy, had gained an ascendency among his colleagues. These gatherings were attended by Jwala Pershad, a hanger-on at Bithoor Palace, and Muddud Ali, who had lately resigned the service of the Maharaja and taken to horse-dealing, but who still used to visit his former master in the way of business. At length, Teeka Sing had the honour of an interview with the Nana himself, during which, according to the story current among his comrades, the Soubahdar spoke to this effect: "You have come to take charge of the magazine and treasury of the English; we all, Hindoos and Mahommedans, have united for our religions, and the whole Bengal army has become one in purpose. What do you say to it?" The Nana replied: "I, also, am at the disposal of the army." This very essential question having been so frankly answered, arrangements were made for a final consultation. One June evening, after dusk, the Maharaja, accompanied by his brother Bala and the ubiquitous Azimoolah, repaired to a landing-place on the Ganges, whither his emissaries had conducted Teeka Sing and his associates. The whole party seated themselves in a boat, and talked earnestly for the space of two hours. They appear to have arrived at a satisfactory conclusion; for, next day, Shumshoodeen wetted his prospective honours at the house of Azeezun, a favourite courtesan of the Second Cavalry troopers. In his tipsy fondness he told the girl that in a day or two the Nana would be paramount, and promised to stuff her house with gold mohurs from roof to cellar.

The Maharaja endeavoured to conceal his movements by shifting his residence to and fro between Bithoor and the cantonments; but he was closely watched by the spies of those among his own countrymen who had reason to dread his elevation. If British authority were to perish, if the sepoys and their new ally were in power but for a single week, it would go ill indeed with all who had ever crossed the Nana in love, law, or speculation. And, especially, any who had concern in the great law-suit would do well to look to themselves, litigant, paymaster, witness, and counsel alike. As early as the twenty-sixth of May, the sharp-sighted advocate, whose diary has been already quoted, drew up an account of the embryo conspiracy, and sent it in the form of a petition to the magistrate of the Station; "Who," says Nanukchund, "gave no heed to my petition, and got so vexed with me that I cannot describe his anger. He said to me, 'You have all along been speaking ill of the Nana, and filing suits against him in the civil courts. I cannot pay attention to any representation from a person so hostile to the Nana.' I replied that those affairs had no connexion with the present question, that the Nana had long harboured enmity to the Government, and a great number of rascals belonged to his party; that he (the Magistrate) would remember my caution, and that I had obtained certain intelligence, as the men of the Nana's household communicated it to Chimna Apa, my client. The Magistrate would listen to nothing. In despair, I did nothing further than keep a copy of the petition in my book. It is a hopeless case. Let us see what will be the end of all this neglect." A dramatist of ancient Greece would have attributed such obstinate blindness to the malice of some injured deity, misleading to their bane those whom he had marked for destruction. There is a Goddess of Delusion in the eternal order of things no less than in the Æschylean mythology.

The last mail had already left Cawnpore. At nine o'clock on the night of the third of June, went forth the last telegraphic message that ever reached the outer world. Thus it ran:—

"Sir Hugh Wheeler to the Secretary to the Government of India.

"All the orders and proclamations have been sent express, as the telegraph communication between this and Agra is obstructed.

"Sir Henry Lawrence having expressed some uneasiness, I have just sent him by post carriages out of my small force two officers and fifty men of Her Majesty's 84th Foot; conveyance for more not available. This leaves me weak, but I trust to holding my own until more Europeans arrive."

So it was. Prompted by a genuine sentiment of chivalry, Sir Hugh not only sent back the Lucknow reinforcement that had arrived during the previous week, but increased it by a detachment from his own scanty command. He doubtless considered that, at such a time, a loan of English bayonets should bear high interest. And it was well for these men that they were removed from the doomed garrison to a field where they might fight not without some prospect of life, some hope of victory. Those who were marked to remain and die were enough to do their country loss.

As in a frame predisposed to disease the slightest irregularity is productive of fatal results, so now at Cawnpore the smouldering fires of discontent and distrust were inflamed by an incident which at ordinary times would have passed almost without remark. There was resident at the station a cashiered subaltern whom it would be cruel to name; one of those miserable men who had sought relief from the mental vacuity and physical prostration of an Indian military life in the deadly solace of excess. This officer, whether in the wantonness of drink, or the horror of shattered nerves, fired a shot at a cavalry patrol who challenged him as he reeled out of his bungalow into the darkness. He missed his aim, as was natural under the circumstances; but the trooper lodged a complaint in the morning, and a court-martial was assembled which acquitted the Englishman, on the ground that he was intoxicated at the time, and that his musket had gone off under a mistake. The sepoys, familiar as they were with the brutality of low Europeans and the vagaries of military justice, would at a less critical season have expressed small surprise either at the outrage or the decision. But now their blood was up, and their pride awake, and they were not inclined to overrate the privileges of an Anglo-Saxon, or the sagacity of a military tribunal. The men of the Second Cavalry muttered angrily that possibly their own muskets might go off by mistake before very long, and this significant expression became proverbial throughout the whole native force. Additional point was given to the grim humour of the soldiery by the unwonted sight of the corpses of an English lady and gentleman, which, floating down the river from some distant scene of death, had turned aside into the canal that traversed the city of Cawnpore. Ganges was yet to bear many such dire burdens. Though wires had been cut, and mails burnt, and every road blockaded, these silent but unimpeachable messengers, in virtue of the safe-conduct granted to them alone, were long destined to carry from station to station the tidings of woe and dismay.

The end was not remote. That despair deferred, which had long made sick the hearts of our countrymen,—that great fear which was their companion day and night,—had now reached their consummation. On Thursday, the fourth of June: while far away on the banks of pleasant Thames, Eton was celebrating the birthday of her patron monarch with recitations from Julius Cæsar, and copious libations of unwonted champagne: at Cawnpore the men of the Second Cavalry were sharpening sabres, and distributing ammunition, and secreting their families and their property in the back-slums of the native city. In the mid-darkness of the succeeding night, when men were in their first sleep, three reports of a pistol, and a sudden and brilliant conflagration, showed that the hour had arrived. Teeka Sing, who was on picket duty with his troop, set the example of sedition, which was speedily followed by the entire corps. Some ran to set alight the house of the English riding-master; some to make a bonfire of the horse-litter; others to secure the treasure-chest and the colours. These last were stoutly opposed by the old Soubahdar-major, or native Colonel, who was cut down at his post after a gallant resistance. Then the regiment, mounted and accoutred, drew up on the high road. A bugle sounded, and two horsemen left the ranks, and went towards the lines of the First Native Infantry, and there cried in a loud voice through the gloom: "Our Soubahdar-major sends his compliments to the Soubahdar-major of the First, and wishes to know the reason of this delay, as the cavalry are drawn up on the road." Hereupon the sepoys, ignorant that the man in whose name they were invoked was at that moment lying senseless and bleeding in the quarter-guard as a punishment for his loyalty—ignorant of this, and perhaps not much caring—began to load their muskets, and hurry on their cross-belts, and pack up their valuables. Colonel Ewart was at once on the spot, and in vain endeavoured to recall his soldiers to their allegiance, saying to them in the Hindoostanee tongue: "My children! my children! this is not your usual conduct. Do not so great a wickedness!" But it was too late for argument or entreaty. The battalion turned out in a body, fraternized with the mutinous troopers, and marched off in their company towards Nawabgunge, the North-west suburb of Cawnpore, where lay the Treasury and the Magazine.

Meanwhile the alarm spread through the station. The Adjutants of the Fifty-third and Fifty-sixth regiments got their sepoys together on the parade-ground, and kept them under arms till the sun was well above the horizon. Then the Colonel of the Fifty-sixth marched his battalion down to the deserted lines of the Second Cavalry, collected and secured the horses and arms which had been left behind by the mutineers, and finally permitted his men to doff their uniforms and cook their breakfasts. The Major of the Fifty-third likewise dismissed his regiment, and at the same time summoned into the entrenchment all his native officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. At such a crisis it was singularly injudicious to leave the men to themselves, especially as in this corps the Soubahdars and Jemmadars were for the most part free from the taint of disaffection, and might have done much towards keeping the rank and file to their allegiance. During their absence a trooper of the Second Cavalry rode in among the huts with a message from the company of the Fifty-third which was posted at the Government Treasury, to the effect that the guard would allow no division of the spoil until their own regiment was on the spot to claim its share. Ere long four or five grenadiers of the Fifty-sixth were observed to steal across to the neighbouring lines, and soon after they were seen talking eagerly and in a low voice with a sergeant and private of the light company. Presently these two men shouted out: "Glory be to the great God! Gentlemen, prepare for action!" and a rush was made on the quarter-guard. The sergeant broke open the treasure-chest, and the private seized the colours. The native Captain who was in charge of the precious deposit stood his ground like a man; but he was fired at, hustled, and overpowered by numbers. In an instant all was uproar, confusion, and terror. The sergeant of the fourth company burst into tears, and ran to fetch the Adjutant; the soldiers of the fifth and light companies flung on their coats, loaded their muskets, and crammed their girdles with the regimental rupees; while the remainder of the corps came of their own accord on to the parade-ground with the intention of placing themselves under the command of their officers. Unfortunately at this moment Sir Hugh Wheeler, prompt with an ill-timed energy, and wary with a misplaced distrust, ordered the guns of the intrenchment to open fire upon the wavering multitude. At first the sepoys of the Fifty-third seemed unwilling to believe that their commander had adopted this cruel and uncourteous method of intimating to them that he dispensed with their services: but the third round proved too strong a test for their loyalty. They broke and fled along the main road: the greater part never stopping until they had joined the mutineers at Nawabgunge: though a considerable number preferred to conceal themselves in an adjacent ravine until such time as it should please Sir Hugh to allow them to come within gunshot of their own officers.

So went the Fifty-third. The story of the revolt of the Fifty-sixth is told with characteristic Hindoo simplicity by Khoda Bux, a commissioned officer of that regiment. He says: "I was sleeping in my house between twelve and one A.M., when Hossain Bux, Havildar, Grenadier Company, came and awoke me, and said, 'What? Are you not awake? There is a row in the cavalry lines, three reports of a pistol, and the Quarter-master Sergeant's bungalow is on fire.' I was astonished, and ordered the regiment to turn out, and went to give information to the Adjutant. He came out of his tent, and went with me to parade, and asked if the regiment was ready. I said, 'Yes, it is ready.' He said, 'Where is it?' I said, 'In front of the bells of arms.' He ordered them to form up in front of the quarter-guard. I formed them up, and made them ready. I received orders that, if any cavalry man came, he was instantly to be shot. In this way we passed the night with our officers. No one took off his uniform. The cavalry having mutinied went away to Delhi. In the morning the Adjutant ordered us to take off our uniforms, and eat our dinners. Then the guards were placed, and we took off our uniforms. The colonel came to us, and asked what Naick was on duty at the elephant sheds, as the cavalry and First Native Infantry wanted four elephants, which were under a guard of a Naick and four sepoys of the regiment, and he was greatly pleased they had refused to give them up, and that he was so content with the Naick that he should make him an Havildar. I said it was Gunga Deen, Naick, First Company. The First Regiment mutinied like the cavalry, and went away. After this the Colonel said, 'Bhowany Singh, Soubahdar, has been wounded by these mutineers. I will go and see him.' I and Annundeedeen, Havildar Major, went with the Colonel to the Cavalry Hospital, and saw Bhowany Singh, who was wounded. The Colonel was very much pleased with him. The Colonel then went to his bungalow, and I and Annundeedeen went to our lines, and, having taken off our uniforms, began to smoke; when Chain Singh, Havildar, came and said, 'Jemmadar, the regiment is turning out.' I asked by whose orders, and why. He said, 'I don't know.' I went outside, and saw that the Havildar was dreadfully frightened, and was buttoning his coat. I went with him to my company, and saw some of the men in the tent packing up their clothes, and others throwing them away. I asked them what was the matter, and why they were getting ready. They said, 'The Fifty-third regiment is getting ready, and so are we.' I said, 'Your regiment is the Fifty-sixth; what have you to do with the Fifty-third? It would be better for you first to shoot me, and then to do what you like afterwards.' Many of the men said, 'You are our senior officer; we will not kill you. Come with us.' I said, 'Very well; I will get ready, and come with you.' I went out of the tent very slowly for about a hundred yards, and then ran as fast as I could to the intrenchment, and told the Colonel and Adjutant that the regiment had mutinied. They said, 'Come with us, and we will see.' I said, 'Oh, gentlemen, all the regiment has mutinied, and are your enemies. It is not right for you to go to them.'"

While Khoda Bux was in search of his Colonel it happened that one of the round shots, fired with a view of frightening away the Sepoys of the Fifty-third rolled among the camp-kitchens of the Fifty-sixth. Hereupon Gunga Rai, a grenadier of an excitable and suspicious temperament, called out that they were all going to be killed, and took to his heels in the direction of Nawabgunge, followed by the whole mob of his comrades.

And now the ship had struck the reef towards which she had long been drifting, and had gone to pieces in the twinkling of an eye. It only remained for the crew to provision the boats and knock together some sort of a raft, as in that hour of sudden and bewildering peril best they might. Our officers at once proceeded to gather up the relics of the native force. Some went the round of the huts, while others, by the aid of a bugler, ferretted out the men who had sought a hiding-place in the ravine. There were found in all some eighty soldiers whose sense of duty had been stronger than their fear of the English nine-pounders. During the rest of the day, these sepoys were employed in carting and conveying within the intrenchment the muskets, ammunition, and accoutrements which were lying about in the lines. Meanwhile many of our countrymen commenced preparations for instant flight. All that day a stream of luggage and furniture was passing to and fro between the European quarter and the principal landing-places. In that season of uncertainty and danger, natives who followed the calling of porters and carriers could not be procured in the bazaar, so the work had to be done by the domestic servants. A sense of comparative relief now began to prevail throughout the community. Our officers felt that the time had arrived when they might consult without dishonour the security of themselves and their families. Their occupation was gone; and it seemed very well that their lives had not gone likewise. The blow had fallen; and they survived. They knew the worst; and that worst was better than the best which they had foreseen. Their military pride had been hurt by the sight of their battalion running from them like a parcel of street-boys at the appearance of a policeman; but in the cowardice of the sepoys lay the salvation of the officers. Besides, not only was it extremely improbable that the mutineers would ever venture again within range of Sir Hugh's artillery, but there existed a powerful attraction to draw them in quite another direction. Delhi was the centre towards which gravitated all the wandering atoms of sedition. There the green flag of the prophet had been unfurled, and the ancient imperial faith was again dominant. There, on his ancestral throne, sat the descendant of Shah Jehan, roi fainéant no longer, but endowed with a lurid splendour of princely independence. There, with arms dyed to the elbows in European blood, mustered the heroes of the great outbreak—the men who had hated with the deepest hate, and dared with the most headlong and effectual daring. Thither, to swell the ranks of that Prætorian guard, swarmed from every corner of Northern India all who had reason to covet the ruin of England, or to dread her triumph. And thither, as our countrymen were well aware, the Cawnpore mutineers designed to go without delay. Under a firm impression that all instant risk was at an end, a considerable number of officers passed the night of the fifth July in their private residences without the circuit of the intrenchment. Confidence had succeeded to distrust, cheerful activity to sombre and passive expectation. The faces of the sepoys were turned towards far Delhi. On the way to Allahabad, by road or by river, there was nothing which could stop armed and determined men. Their professional feelings wounded, but their throats uncut and their honour untarnished, there was good hope that within a month they might be smoking their cheroots in the verandah of the United Service Club in safe and luxurious Calcutta.

But it was not so to be. The rebellion had already gotten to itself a chief, and the chief had matured for himself a policy. When the mutineers had arrived at Nawabgunge they were given to understand that the Nana was in the neighbourhood. Accordingly he was waited on by a deputation of native officers and troopers who addressed him in these words: "Maharaja, a kingdom awaits you if you join our enterprise, but death if you side with our enemies." The ready reply was, "What have I to do with the British? I am altogether yours." The envoys then requested him to lead the troops to Delhi. He assented to their desire; and ended by placing his hand on the head of each of the party, and swearing fidelity to the national cause. Then the rebels returned to their comrades, and the business of spoliation began. The mutineers first marched in a body to the Treasury: the keeper of the keys was terrified into surrendering his charge: the doors were unlocked, and silver to the value of near a hundred thousand pounds sterling was distributed among the ranks of the four regiments. Then the concourse dispersed in search of plunder and mischief. Some broke open the jail, and turned loose upon society the concentrated rascality of one of the most rascally districts in our Eastern dominions. Others set fire to the magistrate's office and the Court House; and, in a fit of irrational malice, made a bonfire of all the Records, civil and criminal alike. Others again, after parading about with a flag hoisted upon the back of an elephant, vented their spite by cutting the cables of the bridge of boats, great part of which floated down the river. All European houses at the west end of the station were burned and sacked. An unhappy overseer of highways was fired upon, not without effect, and hunted along the road, the construction of which he had been engaged in superintending. When they had done as much damage as could be got into a single morning the mutineers packed their more valuable booty about their persons; filled a long caravan of carts with their property, their domestic gods, and their female relations of every degree; set forth on their adventurous journey; and, after a very easy afternoon's march, halted at Kullianpore, the first stage on the Delhi road.

But as soon as the deputation from the rebel army had left the presence of the Nana his most trusted advisers unanimously adjured him to give up the idea of accompanying the march on Delhi; and especially his âme damnée, Azimoolah, urged that if he allowed himself to be absorbed into the court of the Mogul he would lose all power and influence: that it would be far more politic to bring into subjection the country round Cawnpore, and so command all the avenues by which the English reinforcements could penetrate into the heart of the disaffected regions: that when once possessed of the keys of Delhi and the Punjaub he might bargain with the rebels for the captain-generalship of their armies, and the universal sovereignty of the north of India; and then, with twenty myriads of bayonets and sabres at his back, he might sweep down the valley of the Ganges, and wreak, once and for ever, his vengeance on the detested race; fight, on this its hundredth anniversary, a Plassey very different from the last; renew the Black Hole of Calcutta under happier auspices, and on a far more generous scale; and so teach those Christian dogs what it was to flout a Mahratta and cheat a Brahmin of royal blood. The eloquence of the ci-devant footman fired the Maharaja, who accordingly ordered his elephants and pushed on for Kullianpore, attended by his brothers Bala and Baba Bhut, and the indispensable Azimoolah. The ringleaders of the mutiny expressed their pleasure in being blessed once more with the light of his countenance, but displayed very little inclination to give up the idea of Delhi. On the contrary, they suggested that the Nana should stay behind at Cawnpore, and garrison the Magazine with his own retainers, while they themselves prosecuted their expedition towards the North West. To this Bala, a man of execrable temper, which, however, he appears to have been able to curb on occasion, replied that Sir Hugh Wheeler and his Europeans would make themselves very unpleasant to the defenders of the Magazine, and proposed that the mutineers should first return and clear out the intrenchment and then go off to Delhi. At this point the Maharaja threw in a prospect of unlimited pillage and an offer of a gold anklet to each sepoy, which produced an instant and favourable effect upon his audience. The mutineers agreed to retrace their steps, and not leave the station until they had put all the English to the sword. As a pledge of their earnest intention to carry out his desires they unanimously saluted the Nana as their Rajah, and proceeded forthwith to choose leaders who should command them in the field. Soubahdar Teeka Sing, the prime mover of the revolt, was appointed chief of the cavalry, with the title of General. Jemmadar Dulgunjun Sing became Colonel of the Fifty-third, and Soubahdar Gunga Deen Colonel of the Fifty-sixth.

There is a certain significance in these names: for they indicate that, in the opinion, at any rate, of the mutineers themselves, the boldest and most active among the authors of the mutiny were not Mussulmans, but Hindoos. The belief that such was in fact the case is now very generally entertained by our most thoughtful and observant public servants: but that belief is singularly unpalatable to the mass of the Anglo-Indian community. It was the fashion at the time to attribute the outbreak to the machinations of the Mahomedan population. Those ambitious zealots (such was the creed of the day) had never forgiven us for ousting them from their ancient pre-eminence. It was said that the professors of a proselytizing faith would never be reconciled to Nazarene domination; that the professors of an aggressive faith would never brook that others than they should assert the lofty privileges of an imperial race. And so our countrymen contended that every follower of the prophet was at heart a rebel and a traitor, and, therefore, must necessarily be at the bottom of all the rebellion and treachery in the land. The habit of assuming that men who hold certain opinions must be bent upon a certain course of action, and the habit of using that assumption to justify our own injustice is, and always has been, peculiarly English. Our ancestors took it for granted that their Roman Catholic countrymen were haunted by an incessant longing to compass the death of their own sovereign, and insisted upon treating as fanatics and assassins honest north-country squires who desired to compass nothing except the death of a bitch-fox. Our grandfathers took it for granted that every radical was a Jacobin, and that every Jacobin slept upon thorns as long as clergymen kept their glebes, and marquises kept their heads. Our fathers, and, it is to be feared, not a few of our brothers, took it for granted that every Jew fixed his hopes exclusively upon the day when his venerable faith should again flourish in its pristine haunts, and regarded England as a place of pleasant but not unprofitable exile; and, as a fitting corollary to so plausible a proposition, we deduced the conviction that Baron Rothschild would sacrifice the prosperity of his constituency to the interests of the New Jerusalem.

In the year 1857, our passion for visiting upon people the crimes which we thought they were bound by their tenets to commit ran riot throughout the north of India. Our proverbial tendency to give a dog a bad name and hang him was most barbarously and literally exemplified in the case of the unfortunate Moslem. After the capture of Delhi, every member of a class of religious enthusiasts named Ghazees were hung, as it were, ex officio; and it is to be feared that a vindictive and irresponsible judge, who plumed himself upon having a good eye for a Ghazee, sent to the gallows more than one individual, whose guilt consisted in looking as if he belonged to a sect which, probably, was hostile to our religion. It would have been equally humane and logical if the ministers of Queen Elizabeth had burned as a Jesuit every one who was bald on the crown of his head. The city of Patna, where the Mahomedan element was large and influential, was the favourite bugbear of the Calcutta alarmists. Happily for them, the officer in charge of that city shared their suspicions and prejudices, and afforded them inexpressible delight by discovering secret meetings, by intercepting treasonable correspondence, and by arresting leading bankers on the charge of harbouring mutineers. And yet, while tumult and massacre were rife in the great towns of Oude and the North-west, the disturbances in Patna were confined to one partial émeute, and one unpremeditated murder. At length the Governor of Bengal, tired of requesting to be informed why people had been executed in an irregular manner; sick of listening to the complaints of shopkeepers who were not allowed to leave their houses after nine at night, and disciples of Mahomedan professors whose studies were interrupted by the incarceration of their teachers, superseded the Commissioner, and appointed a successor, who at once gave his confidence to an able official of the Mahomedan persuasion. From that day forward Patna was as quiet as Madras.

No act of fidelity or self-sacrifice could exempt a Mussulman from the hatred and distrust of a large section of Anglo-Indian society. Syed Azimoodeen, whom Lord William Bentinck had thought worthy of his friendship and esteem, was among the defenders of the house at Arrah. The besiegers had set a price on his head, and had offered to spare the lives of the little garrison if he and one other were surrendered to their vengeance. As a reward for his loyalty, he became for some months subsequently the popular theme of abuse in the Anglo-Saxon papers. "Is it, or is it not the fact," so writes a correspondent, "that Syed Azimoodeen supplied the mutineers with information as to the hiding-places of English fugitives? Is it, or is it not the fact that Coer Sing gave particular injunctions to the sepoys, that, when the house was stormed, Syed Azimoodeen should be excepted from the slaughter?" This production proved too strong for the digestion even of the constant reader of a Calcutta journal. A few days afterwards there appeared a communication inquiring whether it was or was not the fact that Coer Sing had given particular orders that the bullets fired against the house should not hit Azimoodeen, and that, when the mine exploded, he should be dropped on to a feather-bed placed in the middle of the compound. But who can wonder at any excess of folly and ferocity in a publication which could stoop to insert a letter recommending the rack for "respectable Mahomedans?" When there were some hopes that an overflow of the river would complete the desolation of our Gangetic provinces, an Englishman was found inhuman enough to put these words on paper: "We accorded great favours to the rascally Mussulmans, but the rains are acting so as to nullify all our indulgences."

During the progress of the revolt, the apprehensions of our countrymen always became more intense at the approach of the great anniversaries of the Mahomedan religion. In the early summer, the festival of the Eed was to many an Anglo-Indian household a season of unspeakable anxiety, for men dreaded lest to themselves, as to the Egyptians in old time, the ceremony should prove a veritable Passover, solemnized by the death of their first-born. Later in the year came the Mohurrum, the most august and touching of all Oriental rites. It is impossible even for a Christian and an European to look on without emotion when the insignia of the mighty dead are borne along,—the crimson standard of the brother who perished by the sword, and the green standard of the brother who perished by poison:—when, midst a forest of silver staves and silken banners, are led the chargers of the heroes; while behind streams along a dense multitude, beating their breasts, and reciting in sad cadence the immutable formula of lamentation. Though nigh twelve hundred years have passed since the tragedy was enacted, the unfeigned earnestness and melancholy of the mourners excite in the spectator sympathy far more acute than is accorded even to the funeral of a contemporary. In the year 1857, Englishmen sat booted and spurred, pistol in belt and saddle on horse; and listened, as the tramp of feet, mingled with the clapping of hands and the dull murmur of "Ah me, for Hosein! Ah me, for Hassan!" died away in the distance. And yet the Eed and the Mohurrum passed without bloodshed; and men ceased to fear for their lives, and began to tremble for their cherished theory. And, in truth, it was just as probable that the Mahomedans of India should succeed in inciting to rebellion a hundred thousand Brahmin sepoys, by working upon their religious susceptibilities, as that the Orangemen of Ireland should organize and direct the Roman Catholic population in a crusade against the English Crown. However little may be the love lost between the rival creeds in the Emerald Isle, there is quite as small waste of that sentiment in the case of the rival superstitions of our Eastern dominions. On this question, so important when viewed with respect to the relations between ourselves and the class of our subjects most worthy of our consideration and regard, the eyes of our compatriots might have been opened at an early stage of the troubles by the report of a Court of Inquiry, which sat upon the disturbance at Barrackpore. That court, "from the evidence before them, are of opinion that the Sikhs and Mussulmans of the Thirty-fourth Regiment of Native Infantry are trustworthy soldiers of the State, but that the Hindoos generally of that corps are not trustworthy." But there is a blindness which it is idle to foment with the application of common sense, or to couch with the incisive point of fact; the blindness of terror and rage, and vengeance seeking in the dark for a victim and a pretext.

At dawn on the morning of the sixth of June, Sir Hugh Wheeler received a letter, in which the Nana announced his intention of at once commencing the attack. Our officers were summoned within the intrenchment, where, for a fortnight past, the women and children had already been in sanctuary. The order was obeyed with soldier-like promptitude, intensified by the consciousness of imminent peril. It fared ill with those who had indulged in a fond anticipation that their next change of lodging would be to Allahabad and Calcutta. With no notice of quarter, or month, or week; with no valuation for fixtures, or inventory of furniture, they were called upon to shift to a residence held on short and uncertain tenure, and at a fearful rent. There was no time for packing, or even for selection. There was not leisure to snatch a parting cup of coffee, or a handful of cigars, or an armful of favourite books, or a pith-helmet that had been tested by many a long day's tiger-shooting under the blazing Indian sun. All possessions, however hardly earned and highly prized,—all dear memorials of home and love,—were to be alike abandoned to the coming foe. He who, in that close and burning night of the mid summer, had on his house-top courted a little air and sleep, might not stay to take anything out of his house. He who had been on some early service in the field might not return back to take his clothes. Few and happy were they who had secured a single change of raiment; and those who, in the hurry of the moment, had stayed to dress themselves from head to foot, were by comparison not unfortunate. Half-clad, unbreakfasted, confused, and breathless, our countrymen huddled like shipwrecked sea-farers into the precincts of the fatal earthwork, which they entered only to suffer, and left only to die.

For that fortification had been erected under evil auspices. As of Hiel the Bethelite, so it may be said of poor Sir Hugh, that he marked out the ground in his first-born, and set up the épaulement in the youngest of his household. A chief, whose military eye had not been dulled by age, would have discerned the rare capabilities for defence afforded by the magazine, which consisted of an immense walled inclosure, containing numerous buildings and an inexhaustible store of guns and ammunition. The position was watered, and at the same time protected in the rear, by the Ganges. The public offices and the treasury were in the immediate vicinity, so that the records and the money might have been placed in safety at the cost of a few hours' labour. The doors of the jail would have been commanded by our cannon, and at least one tributary to the flood of disorder pent within its bounds. The native government officials, who for the most part resided at Nawabgunge, might have remained in communication with the civil authorities within the fortress; and the garrison could have been readily supplied with provisions from the loyal villages in the neighbourhood, and, indeed, from the city itself; which, says our old friend Nanukchund, "was like a certain wife who used to act up to the wishes of her husband, because she feared him, and then could also protect herself; but, when her husband died, she found herself under other people's control, and lived in licence." He further observes that "the Sahibs did the reverse of wisdom. They made the intrenchment far out in the plain and outside the city, without reflecting that, in case of mutiny breaking out, it would be surrounded by the rebels on all four sides, who would be assisted by the artillery of the Magazine, and the Government treasure so temptingly thrown in their way. Thus, to illustrate the proverb, the Sahibs put a sword into the enemy's hand, and thrust their own heads forward."

Such was indeed the case. If the choice of the site for our place of refuge had been confided to Azimoolah and Teeka Sing, they could not have selected one more favourable for the attack. The Dragoon hospital stood in the centre of a vast open space, flat with the flatness of Bengal, on the south bank of the canal which separated the military quarter from the Native city, the bridge of boats, the civil station, and the magazine. The establishment consisted of two single-storied barracks surrounded by spacious verandahs; each intended to afford accommodation for a company of a hundred men. The building that was somewhat the larger of the two was thatched with straw, which circumstance alone rendered the position untenable. The other was roofed with concrete, a condition usually expressed by the word "pucka;" that ubiquitous adjective which is the essential ingredient of Anglo-Indian conversation. Both houses were constructed of thin brickwork, hardly proof against the rays of an Eastern sun, and far too frail to resist a twenty-four pound shot. The hospital was provided with a due modicum of cooking sheds and servants' huts; and in front of the thatched barrack was a well, protected by a slight parapet. By order of Sir Hugh these premises had been enclosed in a mud-wall of the shape of a rectangular parallelogram; four feet in height; three feet in thickness at the base; and twenty-four inches at the crest, which was therefore pervious to a bullet from an Enfield rifle. The batteries were constructed by the very simple expedient of leaving an aperture of a size proportioned to the number of the guns: so that our artillerymen served their pieces, as in the field, with their persons entirely exposed to the fire of the enemy.

Behind those slender bulwarks was gathered a mixed and feeble company, to the full sum of a thousand souls. Of these, four hundred and sixty-five were men, of every age and profession. Their wives and grown daughters were about two hundred and eighty in number, and their little ones at least as many. All who were able to bear arms, twenty score by count, were at once called together, and told off in batches under their respective officers. The north side of the intrenchment, facing the river, was strengthened by a poor little triangular outwork, which our garrison entitled "the Redan;" as if to cheer themselves, during their cruel and inglorious struggle, with a reminiscence of chivalrous European warfare. This important post was entrusted to Major Vibart, of the Second Cavalry, assisted by Captain Jenkins. At the north-eastern corner, Lieutenants Ashe and Sotheby superintended a battery of one twenty-four pounder howitzer and two nine-pounders. Captain Kempland had charge of the east curtain, while at the south-eastern angle stood three nine-pounder guns under the charge of Lieutenants Eckford, Burney, and Delafosse; of whom one was destined to show upon happier fields of battle how the soldiers of Cawnpore fought and bled. Next in order came the main-guard, held by Lieutenant Turnbull, and flanked by a tiny rifled piece carrying a three-pound ball, which was manned by a detachment under the orders of Major Prout. Towards the north, Lieutenants Dempster and Martin directed the working of three nine-pounders; and their next neighbour was Captain Whiting, who felt the Redan with his right, and thus closed the circuit of the defence. The general supervision of the artillery devolved upon Major Larkins; but that officer was incapacitated by illness from taking a very active part in the operations.

There was no time to be lost. While the commanders of the various posts were choosing their parties, and placing their sentries, and dispensing their share of the arms and ammunition, already the roar of great guns, and the clouds of black smoke rising fast and frequent in the north-west quarter, told them that the warning of the Nana was no empty menace. As when, during some great hurricane, such as of late passed o'er pale Calcutta, the tidal wave comes surging up the river, unlooked for and irresistible, leaving in its track desolation and ruin, the wrecks of ships and the corpses of men—so on that morning, over doomed Cawnpore, swept the returning flood of mutiny and misrule. At break of day the whole rebel array poured down the Delhi road in a compact body, with the Maharaja at their head, who had good reason to be proud of his following. It was a force which would have done credit to any Mahratta chief in the palmiest days of that redoubted race. There was an entire regiment of excellent cavalry, well mounted and equipped. There was a detachment of gunners and drivers from the Oude Artillery, who had been despatched as a loan from Lucknow to Cawnpore, just in time to enable them to take part in the revolt. There were the Nana's own myrmidons, who made up by attachment to his cause what they wanted in military skill. Lastly, there were three fine battalions of Bengal sepoys, led by experienced sepoy officers, armed with English muskets, and trained by English discipline. When the mutineers arrived at the outskirts of the station, Teeka Sing, the General, postponing his private gain and malice to the public good, repaired at once to the magazine, and spent the morning in securing a fleet of thirty boats which lay beneath the walls, laden with shot, shell, and heavy cannon. The guns in serviceable order he sent off towards the intrenchment on carriages drawn by Government bullocks; and those which were not in condition for immediate use, he compelled the artificers of the establishment to brush up on the Government lathes. But the main body of the insurgents displayed no such foresight or self-control. They kept close order no longer, but spread themselves out to the right and left, and, robbing, burning, and murdering as they went, bore southwards over the civil quarter and the native city. Sir George Parker and a party of his friends, who, inobservant of the coming storm, were lingering over their last breakfast in his pleasant villa, had barely time to fly for their lives. Four office-clerks, who lived together in a shop on the banks of the canal, after a valiant resistance, were smoked out of their lodging, and slain as they fled. The troopers of the Second Cavalry galloped up and down the lanes of the black town, hunting for Englishmen; and the low-caste Mahomedans of the bazaar—the sword-polishers, the cotton-spinners, and the dealers in silver ornaments—joined eagerly in the chase. One European was run down and worried to death in a garden. Another, a gentleman advanced in age, had concealed himself in a hut near the posting-house, in company with his wife, his little daughter, and his son, a boy of sixteen years. The wretched family were tracked to their hiding-place, arrested, and dragged before the Nana, who ordered them for instant execution; and they were happy at least in this, that they died together, and without delay. Proclamation was made that every building in which shelter had been given to Europeans, Eurasians, or Christians of any extraction, should first be plundered, and then razed to the ground. This announcement provided the rebels with a pretext for breaking open and ransacking the dwellings of many respectable natives. Buddree Nath, the commissariat contractor, who was accused of secreting Lady Wheeler and her daughters, lost the savings of a lifetime in the course of a single hour. The scum of the city made the most of their period of licence, and, when any portable property came in their way, took good care not to inquire very closely into the creed of the owner. Among others, the King of Oude is supposed to have suffered a heavy loss. Forty thousand rupees belonging to a Hindoo merchant were taken from a cart which stood in the premises of the post-office, and removed into the most blackguard districts of the neighbourhood. A gang of cavalry soldiers went down the Street of Silver, the main thoroughfare of the town, beating in the doors of the cloth-merchants and money-changers, insulting the trembling tradesmen, and carrying off all the valuables on which they could lay their hands. Meanwhile, those mutineers whose religious spite overcame their desire for lucre, were deriving intense enjoyment from the occupation of cannonading the church. Another large company of Brahmin sepoys, whose orthodox indignation took a more practical turn, and could not content itself with the somewhat tame pastime of persecuting senseless brick and plaster, marched off to the Mahomedan quarter; bombarded the residence of the Nunhey Nawab, the most influential Mussulman noble of the vicinity; blew open the gates; smashed the glass-ware and the porcelain; appropriated the contents of the wardrobe and the plate-chest; and told the master of the house to consider himself a prisoner. They then proceeded to take into custody other leading gentlemen of the same persuasion, and returned to the Nana loaded with spoil, and followed by a line of sedan-chairs containing the persons of their captives.

As the morning advanced, the reports of the musketry and the tumult of voices grew more and more distinct to the ears of our countrymen. Nearer and ever nearer rolled the flames of the blazing houses, and the white puffs which betokened the presence of artillery. At length, stung by a generous impatience, Lieutenant Ashe took out his guns to reconnoitre, accompanied by some five and twenty volunteers. The party had barely gone forward a quarter of a mile, when they caught sight of the rebel van, which had already passed the canal, and occupied in force the neighbourhood of the bridge. Our people returned faster than they went, and not all; for one, at least, Lieutenant Ashburner, was never again seen or heard of; and poor Mr. Murphy, of the East Indian Railway, brought back with him a wound, to which he succumbed before the day was out. He enjoyed the melancholy honour of being buried in a solitary coffin which had been found in a corner of the hospital; and shared with one other, a lady who died of fever, enviable in that she was the first, the privilege of being decently interred within the precincts of the intrenchment. There soon came to be scanty leisure for funeral rites. At ten o'clock the mutineers fired their first shot, from a nine-pounder gun, which they had brought down to the vacant lines of the First Infantry. The ball struck the crest of the mud wall, and glided over into the smaller barrack, where it broke the leg of an unhappy native footman, who breathed his last in the course of the afternoon. This terrible and unwonted visitor, the precursor of many, scared indoors a large assembly of ladies and children who were sitting and playing in and about the verandahs; and sent to their posts the fighting men, most of whom had now their earliest experience of the sensation produced by the whizzing rush of a round shot; an ominous sound, which, ere long, became familiar to them as the click of the billiard-ball to a marker, or the buzz of the tennis-ball to an habitué of Princes' Club.

And so the siege had begun. The first stroke had been played in that momentous contest, of which the stake was a thousand English lives; since nothing remained for our countrymen to protect save their bare existences and the empty shadow of the British rule. The first game had gone against us. The Nana had won the regiments; and the regiments had won their colours, their weapons, and their pay. Why needed they to grudge the losers their breath? Why, for a possession of no value, except to the owner, should they deliberately commence a hazardous and protracted match of double or quits? Power and authority, treasures and munitions, the sinews and the muscles of war, had alike passed over to the sepoys. What temptation was there to run the manifold public chances of battle, and incur the personal risk which none can avoid who bring angry Englishmen to bay, in order to destroy a handful of disheartened invalids and civilians; scarcely numerous enough to escort their women and children in safety to Allahabad through the perils of eddies, and quicksands, and bands of highwaymen recruited and emboldened in those months of general anarchy?

But it came to pass that their heart was hardened, and they would not let our people go. The ringleaders of the mutiny knew well that their position was one of utmost hazard. They had been too criminal to be forgiven, and too successful to be forgotten. Henceforward their aim was to implicate their comrades beyond the hope of pardon; to place between them and their former condition of life a gulf filled with English blood. And when the Nana exhorted his followers to slay and spare not, he spoke to willing ears; for between them and our countrymen there existed a degree of mutual distrust which could only end in mutual extermination. The minds of men were so agitated and disordered by anger and uneasiness, that the sole chance of life for either party lay in the utter destruction of the other. Already quarter was no longer given, and, indeed, could hardly be said to be worth the asking. A European knew that, if one set of Pandies entertained any qualms of compassion or gratitude, the next squad who came across him would infallibly cut his throat; and a sepoy knew that, if his captors took the trouble to drag him about in their train for a few days, the magistrate at the first station on the road would have him hung before the officer in command of the party had emerged from the bath-room. This was no generous rivalry of national vigour and skill and prowess. Little of military science was here, and less of military courtesy. With clenched teeth and bated breath, the Brahmin and the Saxon closed for the death-grapple; well aware that, when once their fingers were on each other's throats, one only of the combatants would ever rise from the trampled sand.

As soon as the Rubicon of insurrection had been passed; as soon as the gauntlet of sedition had been thrown; the first care of the mutineers was to get rid of all who had been the witnesses of their guilt, and who might hereafter be the judges. No sepoy felt secure of his neck and plunder as long as one solitary Englishman remained on Indian soil; for our revolted mercenaries shared to the full that strange mixture of veneration, bewilderment, aversion, and terror, with which our Eastern subjects still regard that extraordinary people who, in the course of a single decade, expanded from a handful of clerks and factors to a galaxy of warriors and proconsuls. It is hardly possible for a man brought up amidst European scenes and associations to realize the idea conceived of him and his countrymen by a thoroughbred Hindoo. On the one hand, the natives must acknowledge our vast superiority in the arts of war and rule. Our railways, and steamships, and Armstrong guns, are tangible facts which cannot be slighted. They must be perfectly alive to the knowledge that we have conquered them, and are governing them in a more systematic and downright manner than they have ever been governed before. But, on the other hand, many of our usages must appear in their eyes most debased and revolting. It is difficult to imagine the horror with which a punctilious and devout Brahmin cannot but regard a people who eat the flesh of cow and pig, and drink various sorts of strong liquors from morning till night. It is at least as hard for such a man to look up to us as his betters, morally and socially, as it would be for us to place among the most civilized nations of the world a population which was in the habit of dining on human flesh, and intoxicating itself daily with laudanum and salvolatile. The peculiar qualities which mark the Englishman are peculiarly distasteful to the Oriental, and are sure to be widely distorted when seen from his point of view. Our energy and earnestness appear oppressive and importunate to the languid, voluptuous aristocracy of the East. Our very honesty seems ostentatious and contemptible to the wily and tortuous Hindoo mind. That magnificent disregard of les convenances, which among Continental nations is held to be a distinguishing mark of our countrymen, is inexplicable and hateful to a race who consider external pomp and reticent solemnity to be the necessary accompaniments of rank, worth, and power. Add the mysterious awe by which we are shrouded in the eyes of the native population, which very generally attributes to magic our uniform success in everything we take in hand, and you will have some notion of the picture presented to the Brahmin imagination by an indefatigable, public-spirited, plain-spoken, beer-drinking, cigar-smoking, tiger-shooting, public servant. We should not be far wrong if we were content to allow that we are regarded by the natives of Hindostan as a species of quaint and somewhat objectionable demons, with a rare aptitude for fighting and administration; foul and degraded in our habits, though with reference to those habits not to be judged by the same standard as ordinary men; not altogether malevolent, but entirely wayward and unaccountable; a race of demi-devils, neither quite human, nor quite supernatural; not wholly bad, yet far from perfectly beneficent; who have been settled down in the country by the will of fate, and seem very much inclined to stay there by our own. With this impression on his mind the Bengal sepoy desired with a nervous and morbid anxiety to get quit of the Sahibs by fair means or foul. He did not care to expose us to unnecessary misery and humiliation; to torture our men, or to outrage our women. His sole object was to see the last of us: to get done with us for good and for ever. Ignorant beyond conception of European geography and statistics, he had convinced himself that, if once the Anglo-Indians of every sex and age were killed off, from the Governor General to the serjeant-major's baby, there did not exist the wherewithal to replace them. And therefore he said in his heart: "Come, and let us destroy them together. Let us cut them off from being a nation, that their name may be no more in remembrance." He conceived that Great Britain had been drained dry of men to recruit the garrison of our Asiatic empire; that our home population consisted of nurses and children, of invalids who had left the East for a while in quest of health, and veterans who had retired to live at ease on their share of the treasures of Hindostan. He fancied that the tidings of a general massacre of our people would render our island a home of helpless mourners: he found that those tidings changed it into a nest of reckless and pitiless avengers. He believed our power to be a chimera, and he discovered it to be a hydra. He learned too late that he had digged a pit for himself, and had fallen into the ditch which he had made; that his mischief and his violent dealings had come down upon his own head: that Englishmen were many, and that, when the occasion served, their feet too were not slow to shed blood: that our soldiers could kill within the year more heathen than our missionaries had converted in the course of a century: that our social science talk about the sacredness of human life, and our May Meeting talk concerning our duty towards those benighted souls for whom Christ died, meant that we were to forgive most of those who had never injured us, plunder none but such as were worth robbing, and seldom hang an innocent Hindoo if we could catch a guilty one: that the great principles of mercy and justice and charity must cease to be eternally true until the injured pride of a mighty nation had been satisfied, its wrath glutted, and its sway restored.

But though apprehension and dislike had inspired the rebels with a determination to destroy every English man off the face of the land, had they no feeling of ruth for the sufferings and the fate of our women? Never in European warfare has the sword been deliberately pointed at a female breast; save during those rare seasons, indelible from memory and inexpiable by national remorse, when, after the mad carnage of a successful escalade, drunkenness and licence have ruled the hour. If the Nana knew the valour and strength of our officers too well to allow him to be merciful, how came it that he did not respect the weakness of our ladies? No one can rightly read the history of the mutinies unless he constantly takes into account the wide and radical difference between the views held by Europeans and Asiatics with reference to the treatment and position of the weaker sex. We, who still live among the records and associations of chivalry, horrify Utilitarians and Positivists by persisting in regarding women as goddesses. The Hindoos, who allow their sisters and daughters few or no personal rights,—the Mahomedans, who do not even allow them souls,—cannot bring themselves to look upon them as better than playthings. The pride of a Mussulman servant is painfully wounded by a scolding from the mistress of the house, and he takes every opportunity of showing his contempt for her by various childish impertinences. Among the numberless symptoms of our national eccentricity, that which seems most extraordinary to a native is our submitting to be governed by a woman. And as a Hindoo fails to appreciate the social standing of an English lady, so it is to be feared that he gives her little credit for her domestic virtues. Her free and unrestrained life excites in his mind the most singular and unjust ideas. To see women walking in public, driving about in open carriages, dining, and talking, and dancing with men connected with them neither by blood nor marriage, never fails to produce upon him a false and unfortunate impression.[1] And therefore it happened that a sepoy corporal, whose estimate of an European lady was curiously compounded of contempt, disapprobation, and misconception, was little adapted to entertain those sentiments of knightly tenderness and devotion which Petrarch and Cowley have handed down to us from the days of Bayard and Henry of Navarre. In the eyes of such a man every Englishwoman was but the mother of an English child, and every English child was a sucking tyrant. The wolves, with their mates and whelps, had been hounded into their den, and now or never was the time to smoke them out, and knock on the head the whole of that formidable brood. And so, on the first Saturday of that June—these, bent on a wholesale butchery; those, prepared to play the man for their dear life, and for lives dearer still,—with widely different hope, but with equal resolution, on either side of the meagre rampart besiegers and besieged mustered for the battle.