Cawnpore

by George Otto Trevelyan

Meanwhile the women and children, whom the shot had missed and the flames spared, had been collected and brought to land in evil case. Many were pulled out from under the charred woodwork of the boats, and others were driven up from four feet depth of water. Before they emerged from the river, some of the ladies were roughly handled by the troopers, who tore away such ornaments as caught their fancy with little regard for ear or finger. But, when all had been assembled on the landing-place, sentries were posted around, with a strict charge to suffer no one to molest the prisoners. There they sat, a hundred and twenty and five by count, some on logs of timber, and others in the trodden sand, a very feeble company in sore distress. Their destitution aroused the compassion of a party of water-carriers, who gave them drink out of the skin's mouth, as they cowered beneath the pitiless sun. On the shore of the Ganges, in the midst of that devilish horde, those English girls and matrons abode till the morning was almost spent. And then they were led back along the road which they had traversed a few hours before; not as they came, for nothing was left them now, save a new grief and a sharper terror. In front, behind, and on either side, surged along a crowd of sepoys, exulting with an unholy joy, and rich with inglorious spoils. This one carried a girdleful of rupees and broken jewellery. That had secured a double-barrelled fowling-piece, marked with a name illustrious in the London trade. Another dragged a fine setter or Skye terrier, the pride of some cadet who, in too harsh a school, had taken his first and last lesson of war. They started beside the Fisherman's Temple. They threaded the winding lane. They plodded wearily past the white railing and the European bazaar; past the chapel, and the racket-court, and the ruinous intrenchment. Through the disputed line of outposts, and across the plain they went, until the procession halted before the pavilion of the Maharaja; who, after reviewing his captives, ordered them to be transported to the Savada House, and there confined until further notice. Two large rooms, where a number of native soldiers had slept nightly during the previous month, were cleared out for their reception; and a guard placed over them from the ranks of the Sixth regiment, which had lately marched in from Allahabad.

"I saw that many of the ladies were wounded," says one who watched them go by. "Their clothes had blood on them. Two were badly hurt, and had their heads bound up with handkerchiefs. Some were wet, covered with mud and blood; and some had their dresses torn, but all had clothes. I saw one or two children without clothes. There were no men in the party, but only some boys of twelve or thirteen years of age." Another eye-witness remarks: "The ladies' clothing was wet and soiled, and some of them were barefoot. Many were wounded. Two of them I observed well, as being wounded in the leg and under the arm." To such a plight had come the bloom which once, fresh from the breezes of home, charmed and puzzled Calcutta; and the toilettes whose importation and inspection supplied matter for a month's conjecture, and a week's happy occupation. Where were now the tact, the cultivation, and all the indefinable graces of refined womanhood? Simplicity and affectation, amiability and pride, coquetry and reserve, discretion and sweet susceptibility, were here confounded in a dull uniformity of woe.

Four Englishwomen, and three others of mixed parentage, were appropriated and carried off by the soldiers of the Second Cavalry; a corps which, now that the fighting was over, never lost an opportunity of distinguishing itself. These men were summoned into the presence of the Nana, who remonstrated with them at some length, and insisted that the whole seven should be restored without delay. It may be that he regarded his prisoners as hostages, and was unwilling that they should be scattered about in places where he could not lay his hand upon them at the precise moment when his life or power might be at stake. All obeyed promptly, with the exception of Ali Khan, a young trooper, described as of "a fair complexion; height about five feet seven inches; long nose; dark eyes; wears a beard and small moustache." This fellow had selected, as his share of the booty, the youngest daughter of Sir Hugh. He must have been one of a pair who were observed "leading away from the boats a lady on horseback. She wore a green chintz gown, which appeared to be wet. She seemed to be eighteen or nineteen years of age." Ali Khan now contrived to spread a report that his victim flung herself down a well, after killing her captor, his wife, and his three children. His device met with extraordinary success. In Hindostan it is never a very difficult matter to find witnesses who will swear to anything; and, before long, a private in the Second began to remember that he had been passing his comrade's door when Miss Wheeler came out, with a sword in her hand, and said: "Go in and see how nicely I have rubbed the Corporal's feet." Another individual, blessed with an elastic memory, had been present at the dragging of the well, and had seen "Missy Baba taken out, dead and swollen." The impudent fabrication was generally accepted in the city and the cantonments; and met with ready credence in England, where the imaginations of men were excited by a series of prurient and ghastly fictions. Under one shape or another the incident long went the round of provincial theatres, and sensation magazines, and popular lectures illustrated with dissolving views. Meanwhile the poor girl was living quietly in the family of her master under a Mahomedan name. Our police made diligent inquiries, which resulted in a strong conviction that she had accompanied the flight of the rebels, and, after being hurried about from camping-ground to camping-ground, had met a natural death in a corner of Nepaul. She was by no means of pure English blood. To some the very statement of the fact may appear heartless, but truth demands that it should be made.

The ladies on board the escaped vessel had no reason to congratulate themselves on their fortune: for they were embarked on a voyage which, for concentrated misery, has no parallel even among the narratives of famous shipwrecks so dear to the taste of our forefathers. Soon after leaving the shore, Major Vibart had taken a large party off a sinking boat; so that more than five-score persons were crowded into a space which could barely accommodate fifty. It was difficult to propel the craft, and impossible to guide her. A shot from the southern bank sent her spinning round in the current, with a broken rudder; and the native boatmen had taken good care to leave behind neither oar nor punt-pole. Alternately stranding and drifting; paddling with planks torn from the bulwarks, and trying to steer with a spare stretcher; our countrymen tended down towards Allahabad at the rate of half a mile an hour, under a shower of canister and shells from either bank. "We were often," says Thomson, "within a hundred yards of the guns on the Oude side of the river, and saw them load, prime, and fire into our midst." Presently the bullocks which drew the sepoy artillery broke down in the deep sand of the Ganges; but incessant volleys of musketry, at point blank range, allowed our countrymen little leisure to rejoice over the intermission of the cannonade.

That day dismissed to Hades many valiant souls of warriors, and left their bodies a prize for dogs and every kind of fowl. But the will of God was accomplished. Ashe and Bolton leaped out to help haul the boat off a sunken bank: and a few minutes later she proceeded on her way without those two young Sahibs whom a thousand bullets had spared to perish here. Moore, regardless of an ill-set collar-bone, was pushing with might and main, when a musket-ball pierced his gallant heart. One and the same round shot at length killed Burney, and at length Glanville; and so maltreated a third officer that it would have been well had he died likewise. The wounded and the slain lay entangled together amidst the broken flooring. It was a matter of extreme difficulty to extricate the corpses from the bottom of the vessel: but the desire of decreasing her draft, and the intense heat of what proved to be the last day of that year's dry weather, obliged the crew to cast overboard the dear but useless cargo.

About five o'clock that evening the boat settled down deep in the sand. Our countrymen waited patiently till the sunset allowed them to disembark the women under the screen of darkness. Having thus lightened their unwieldy ark, they set to with a will, and succeeded eventually in getting her adrift. The rebels did what they could to impede the operation. They launched a fire-ship down the current, which came within a few feet of its mark; and, when this contrivance had miscarried, they shot off a flight of arrows tipped with lighted charcoal Though no very skilful archers, they could not well help hitting the thatched roof which loomed through the dusk like the top of a great barn: so that our people thought it better to cut away and tumble into the flood the entire framework of straw and bamboo. No one slept that night, and no one ate: for food there was none on board. They had abundance of water: for Ganges flowed beneath; and from overhead descended a light and refreshing shower, the unfailing precursor of the annual deluge.

When the day broke, those of our officers who had learned the bearings of the locality during many a hot tramp after snipe and wild-fowl saw with chagrin that they had hardly gained ten miles in twice as many hours. And yet that dawn brought one last glimmer of hope. The wet weather had arrived: the river would soon be mounting fast: and nothing was to be seen of the enemy. Presently some natives walked down the bank for their morning wash; and Vibart sent on shore a native drummer, with five rupees in his hand, and directions to obtain information, and, if possible, some provisions. He accosted a peasant, who desisted from the occupation of cleaning his mouth with a bit of stick chewed into a tooth-brush, and listened very civilly to what our envoy had to say. This man undertook to procure some rice and flour, but assured the drummer that our people would have no further need of victuals, as Baboo Ram Bux, a powerful noble whose estates lay a little further down on the Oude side, had engaged that not an Englishman should pass his territory alive. He, however, showed no objection to take our money, and went inland, leaving behind his brass drinking-vessel to guarantee his fidelity: a pledge which he never came back to redeem. On hearing the report of their messenger the fugitives agreed to despair. After the manner of becalmed and starving mariners, Whiting pencilled some lines on a scrap of paper, which he enclosed in a bottle, and committed to the stream: the faithless stream, that has never rendered up the sad deposit.

At two in the afternoon the barge struck off a village called Nuzzufgur, which was within the boundary of Ram Bux. Straightway the shore was covered with a multitude of feudal militia, intermingled with sepoys and mounted troopers. A gun was brought forward, and unlimbered; but, while the artillerymen were taking their aim, there came down from heaven that unbroken sheet of water for which men had been looking during the past fortnight. The rains had begun in earnest. The piece could only be discharged once; but the storm did not protect our people from a keen fusillade. Whiting fell dead; and Harrison's trusty revolver here availed him nothing; and dark Blenman, sorely hurt, implored a comrade to put an end to his wayward existence. Vibart was shot through the arm, and his subordinates, Quin and Seppings; while Mrs. Seppings and Captain Turner of the First Infantry were badly wounded in the leg. After five hours of this bitter work there hove in sight a boat manned by fifty or sixty mutineers, armed to the teeth, who had been deputed by the Nana to follow and destroy the relics of our force. This vessel, likewise, ran on a sandbank; not altogether against the inclination of the crew, who did not relish the notion of forming themselves into a boarding-party. They liked the idea still less when a score of Englishmen came dashing at them through the shallows. The half-dozen ablest swimmers alone escaped to tell their master that, after all they had gone through, those extraordinary Sahibs were the same as ever.

Amidst pelting rain and freshening wind the second night closed in. Faint and hungry they sank asleep, those men who would only yield to death. At midnight some of their number awoke, and became conscious that they were again afloat. It was blowing a hurricane; the stream had risen; and there were found those who hoped. But daylight told another story, for it revealed that they had turned aside out of the navigable channel into a back water, from which egress was none. And then their vessel grounded, and the musketry recommenced. Vibart, who was already dying with a ball through either arm, desired Thomson and Delafosse to land and beat away the enemy, while those who remained attempted to ease off the boat. The two officers selected a sergeant and eleven rank and file of various regiments; and the party sallied forth, fortunate in that it was appointed for some to tread once more on English soil, and for the rest at least to die sword in hand. They had not departed many minutes when a host of insurgents poured down upon the helpless troop of women and wounded men, like wolves upon a flock of sheep deserted by their dogs. The boat was captured after a short but murderous conflict, and escorted back to Cawnpore by a strong body of horse and foot.