FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1]: From Colonel W. Wheler's defense.
[Footnote 2]: This question is one which must be asked as we look back through the years on this pitiful spectacle of the loyal regiment, unarmed, facing the disloyal one shooting down its officers. Briefly, on whom would the seventy men of the 11th, who never left the colors, the hundred and twenty men who returned to them after the short night of tumult was over, have fired if a company of English troops had come up to turn the balance in favor of loyalty?
[Footnote 3]: (How? His house lay a mile at least further off, and the Collector's office was on the only route a messenger could take. No record explains this. But the best ones mention casually that a telegram of warning came to Delhi in the early morning of the 11th. Whence? the wires to Meerut were cut. Lahore, Umballa, Agra, did not know the news themselves. Can the story--improbable in any other history, but in this record of fatal mistakes gaining a pathetic probability--which the old folk in Delhi tell be true? The story of a telegram sent unofficially from Meerut the night before, received while the Commissioner was at dinner, put unopened into his pocket, and forgotten.
Not susceptible of proof or disproof, it certainly explains three things:
1. Whence the warning telegram came.
2. Why the Commissioner received information before a man a good mile nearer the source.
3. Why the Collector at once sought for military aid.)
[Footnote 4]: From the account in the native papers.
[Footnote 5]: From a contemporaneous account.