Cawnpore

by George Otto Trevelyan

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.