Cawnpore

by George Otto Trevelyan

Nanukchund was hanging about the vicinity all the while the conflict was in progress. "On the fifteenth," he writes, "I perceived some sepoys and troopers running away in great confusion, and exclaiming that they would have an easy victory, as the British were few, and would soon be despatched. I was then sitting in an orchard, when I observed a shopkeeper running up. He came and seated himself under a tree near me, and told me that he was hastening to pack up his wife and children, as the Europeans would arrive shortly, and would spare nobody. I thought to myself, this must be true, and the gentlemen must be very savage. I returned to the city, and saw several villagers with their dresses changed coming along the banks of the Ganges, and I joined them. The terror in the hearts of all was so great that they asked each other no questions."

On the morrow, the day of the final struggle, Nanukchund says: "I was in the streets soon after noon-time. People who have seen the fighting declare that the rebels are running back, and that the mutineers are trying to escape from the battle. Intelligence of this sort was brought from time to time till it got dusk. The bad people are all crestfallen, and advising each other to quit the town. I saw Kalka, a barber by caste, who took service as a trooper under the Nana, running in for his life, and trying to get something to eat from the bazaar. A little while after it was proclaimed by beat of drum, that the inhabitants must not get alarmed, as there were only one hundred Europeans remaining: and that whoever brought in the head of an Englishman should receive a hundred rupees. But news came that the Sahibs were close upon the cantonments, and the man who was beating the drum abandoned it and fled."

At nightfall Dhoondoo Punth entered Cawnpore upon a chestnut horse drenched in perspiration, and with bleeding flanks. A fresh access of terror soon dismissed him again on his way towards Bithoor, sore and weary, his head swimming and his chest heaving. He was not in condition for such a gallop, the first earnest of that hardship and degradation which was thenceforward to be his portion. Far otherwise had he been wont to return to his palace after a visit of state in the English quarter, lolling, vinaigrette in hand, beneath the breath of fans, amidst the cushions of a luxurious carriage, surrounded by a moving hedge of outriders and running footmen. Once again in the home of his fathers he slept as the wicked sleep, whose sin has found them out; and, when the morrow's sun had set, he departed in craven trepidation, and was never after seen among the haunts of peaceful men. But he was true to himself, even in the crash of his falling dynasty: for, as he stepped on board the barge that was to transport him to the confines of Oude, he bethought him of the young mother who was recovering from the pains of childbirth in the recesses of the female apartments. For the first time he had practised economy in his enjoyments, and was now well repaid: for his savings had borne high interest. There were two English lives to take where a fortnight ago there had been but one. And then, having filled to overflowing the measure of his guilt, he passed away like a thief in the night, and left his wealth to the spoiler, and his halls to the owl and the snake.

Some months subsequently two of our spies, who had been commissioned to obtain information about Miss Wheeler, passed six days in the train of the fugitive Nana in the depths of an Oude wilderness. In the vicinity of his encampment they overtook a sepoy, with whom they got into conversation. He asked why they had come into the desert. They represented themselves as desirous of taking service with one of the Peishwa's eunuchs, and reminded the soldiers that they were old acquaintances of his own. He seems to have been a good-natured fellow: for he told them that it was a dangerous neighbourhood for strangers, but promised, since they had ventured that far, to introduce them as his fellow-villagers. They found from twelve to fifteen thousand people collected in the jungles. Everything betokened distress, disorder, and discontent. Food was scarce and dear. The Maharaja had appropriated the single pair of tents; so that his followers were fain to bivouack under the foliage, starving on rice bought at twelvepence a pound; wringing out their tattered garments, wet with the eternal rain; and sighing for the curry-pots and tight roofs of the Cawnpore cantonments. It is interesting to learn that the most poverty-stricken and dejected of all the mutineers were the troopers of the Second Cavalry. The horses had been reduced to less than a hundred, and the artillery to a couple of field-pieces. The Nana, attended by a servant with an umbrella, went daily to bathe in a river which flowed at the foot of the hill whereon his pavilion stood. A crowd regularly assembled to pay their respects as he passed. The two men especially noticed certain officers of his household: the treasurer and paymaster; the driver of his bullock-carriage; his chief baker, and chief gardener; his shampooer, his sweeper, his boatman, and his wrestlers, both Hindoo and Mahomedan. Bala was there, with the scar of an English bullet on his shoulder, which he has probably by this time carried to an obscure grave. The royal brothers were said to be very anxious to get back to ease and civilization. Their wives were disposed upon an adjoining range of heights, in company with the widows of Bajee Rao, who deserved better than to be transported about against their will in the suite of that unromantic Pretender. The ladies of the court travelled in six palanquins, and the gentlemen on as many elephants.

Yet a few weeks, and Dhoondoo Punth, stripped of even these relics of his former affluence and grandeur, escaped across the Nepaulese marches to a life of suspense, and toil, and privation amidst the Himalayan solitudes. The end of that man we know not, and may never know. Perchance, as they hover over some wild ravine or wind-swept peak, the eagles wonder at the great ruby which sparkles amidst the rags of a vagrant who perished amidst the snows of a past December. Perchance another generation will hear, not without a qualm of involuntary awe and pity, that the world-noted malefactor is at last to expiate misdeeds already classical. He may have eluded human justice. His hemp may be still to sow. But his place in history is fixed irreversibly and for ever. The most undaunted lover of paradox would hardly undertake to wash white that ensanguined fame.

"In the month of July, a year and a half ago," so deposes a native tradesman, eighteen months after the massacre, "I was in my house at Ooghoo, when ten or eleven persons, who had fled from Cawnpore, came to my shop, and asked for betel-leaf to chew. I showed them new betel-leaf; when two of them, both Hindoos, told me to fetch good old betel-leaf, or they would take my head off. I accordingly went to another seller of betel-leaf, and bought the kind they asked for, and told them the price of the same, namely ten pice. The two men said they would only give me two. I replied that the betel-leaf was worth ten pice, and that they ought at the least to give me eight pice: on which they said that they would kill me and all my family. I stated I was a poor man, and had got the betel-leaf from another person. They then said that they had shown no pity to the ladies and children whom they had just murdered, and who clung to their feet, and that they would have no pity upon me. They frightened me greatly, showing me a naked sword, covered with blood, and said that they would cut off my head with the same. I wept," says this weak-minded young man, "and my mother, hearing me cry, came out, and begged of them not to hurt me, and that she would let them have more betel-leaf. After this they drew water from a well close to my house, near a temple, and, conversing among themselves, I heard their companions ask the two men how many ladies they had killed. They replied that they had murdered twenty-one ladies and children, and had received a reward of twenty-one rupees; and added that at first the Nana ordered the sepoys to massacre the ladies; but they refused; and that they two, with three others, carried out the Nana's orders."

Another resident of Ooghoo thus tells his story: "The truth is that, shortly after the Nana fled, I was sitting under a tamarind tree, where all the men of the village assemble to talk, and was conversing with a few others about the massacre of the Europeans at Cawnpore. We were saying that the Nana ought not to have murdered the women and children: when Souracun, Brahmin, of Ooghoo, who is thirty-five years old, and has a defect in his eye, stated that the officials sent him to kill the ladies; that he struck one with his sword, which bent, and he then felt pity, and did not again strike. He showed us the bent sword." On this occasion Souracun seems to have sunk the twenty-one rupees: which, however, must have lasted him a good while if he made all his purchases at the same rate as he bought betel-leaf. "All the village heard that he was one of the murderers: but, since the British rule has been re-established, no one speaks of it for fear he would be hung, and his death be laid on their head."

There is good reason to believe that Souracun and his fellow met with their deserts. Mr. Batten, now in high office at Agra, was the first representative of settled government in the district of Cawnpore after the troubles began to subside. He had the honour of removing the gibbet from the ladies' well, and so tempered ferocity with common sense that those who once railed at him as squeamish have at length come to approve his conduct in spite of themselves. But he did not bear the sword in vain. There were brought before him two Hindoos, one advanced in years, and the other much his junior. These men were found guilty of having compassed the death of an Eurasian, and doomed to the gallows. No sooner had their sentence been pronounced than they poured forth a torrent of foul abuse, and were dragged from the dock shouting, and kicking, and cursing their judge and all his relatives on the maternal side.

Now, the Oriental, always polite, becomes doubly courteous when death is in immediate prospect. Then, more than ever, is he anxious to set the company at their ease, and to make away with any disagreeable sense of the false position in which the hangman stands towards the felon. A civilian at Lucknow was superintending an execution when the rope, which had doubtless borne more than one such strain, gave way, and the convict fell to the ground. As he rose, he turned to the Englishman, and said in the tone wherein men utter social conventionalities: "Sahib, the rope's broke." He felt that it was incumbent on him to do what he could towards relieving the general embarrassment arising from a pause in the proceedings, awkward for all parties, but especially for the commissioner, who was endowed with sensibility and genuine refinement.

Batten, than whom no man was more conversant with the native character, regarded the fury of his two prisoners as an extraordinary phenomenon, and requested an explanation from the bystanders. He was told that the pair were piqued at being condemned on so paltry a charge as the murder of a half-caste, after having taken the principal part in a strange and note-worthy exploit, at which they hinted in their cups; and that, poor as they seemed, they rode fine horses, and wore gorgeous shawls, which they were accustomed to speak of as having been presented to them by the Nana in token of his esteem and satisfaction.