"Is the crisis so desperate that we need levy the ladies?" asked his adversary sarcastically. "Personally I want to leave them out of the question as much as I can. It is their intrusion into it which has done the mischief. I don't want to minimize these horrors; but if we could forget those massacres----"
"Forget them! I hope to God every Englishman will remember them when the time comes to avenge them! Ay! and make the murderers remember them, too."
"If I had them in my power to-day," put in the sonorous voice, "and knew I was to die to-morrow, I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them with an easy conscience."
"Bravo! sir," cried Hodson, "and I'd do executioner gladly."
John Nicholson's face flinched slightly. "There is generally a common hangman, I believe," he said; then turned on Jim Douglas with bent brows: "And you, sir?"
"I would kill them, sir; as I would kill a mad dog in the quickest way handy; as I'd kill every man found with arms in his hands. Treason is a worse crime than murder to us now; and by God! if I tortured anyone it would be the men who betrayed the garrison at Cawnpore. Yet even there, in our only real collapse, what has happened? It is reoccupied already--the road to it is hung with dead bodies. Havelock's march is one long procession of success. Yet we count ourselves beleaguered. Why? I can't understand it! Where has an order to charge, to advance boldly, met with a reverse? It seems to me that but for these massacres, this fear for women and children, we could hold our own gayly. Look at Lucknow----"
"Yes, Lucknow," assented Hodson savagely. "Sir Henry, the bravest, gentlest, dead! Women and children pent up--by Heaven! it's sickening to think what may have happened."
John Nicholson shot a quick glance at Jim Douglas.
"It proves my contention," said the latter. "Think of it! Fifteen hundred, English and natives, in a weak position with not even a palisade in some places between them and five times their number of trained soldiers backed by the wildest, wickedest, wantonest town rabble in India! What does it mean? Make every one of the fifteen hundred a paladin, and, by Heaven! they are heroes. Still, what does it mean?"
He spoke to the General, but he was silent.