Cawnpore

by George Otto Trevelyan

Few of the Cawnpore mutineers survived to boast of their enterprise. Evil hunted these violent men to their overthrow. Those whom the halter and the bayonet spared had no reason to bless their exemption. Many whom pillage had enriched were slain for the sake of that which they had about them by banditti who confidently presumed that the law would not call in question the motives of him who exterminated a sepoy. All who returned to their villages empty-handed were greeted by their indignant families with bitter and most just reproaches. They had been excellently provided for by the bounty of God and the Company. Their pay secured them all the comforts which a Brahmin may enjoy, and left the wherewithal to help less fortunate kinsmen. Yet they flung away their advantages in wilful and selfish haste. They sinned alone and for their private ends; but alone they were not to suffer. They had changed the Sahibs into demons, and had conjured up tenfold more of these demons than had hitherto been conceived to exist. They had called down untold calamities upon the quiet peasantry of their native land. And all this misery they had wrought in pursuit of the vision of a military empire. Let them return to the desert, there to feed without interruption on the contemplation of their power and pre-eminence. Such were the taunts with which they were driven forth again into the jungles: some to die by the claws of tigers on whose lair they had intruded for refuge, or beneath the clubs of herdsmen whose cattle they had pilfered in the rage of hunger: others to wander about, drenched and famished, until amidst the branches of a tree into which they had climbed to seek safety from the hyænas and the ague, or on the sandy floor of a cave whither they had crept for shelter from the tempest, they found at once their death-bed and their sepulchre. The jackals alone can tell on what bush flutter the shreds of scarlet stuff which mark the spot where one of our revolted mercenaries has expiated his broken oath.

Soon after daybreak on Friday the seventeenth July, the English van was marching across the desolate plain which lay to southward of the city. Already the magical effect of the tropical rain had clothed that expanse of parched and dusty soil with luxuriant grass, in which rustled the feet of our soldiers as they pushed along, now stumbling over a hidden cannon-ball, and now kicking up the fragments of a sepoy skeleton. They traversed the deserted line of rebel posts, and halted beneath the walls of the roofless barracks, pitted with shot and blackened with flame, and beside the grave at whose mouth are scattered the bones of our people, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. Three Fridays back from that very morning the treaty of surrender was being attested by a faithless signature, and sworn to with perfidious vows: and again at a like interval of time the men of the Second Cavalry were firing their stables, and saddling their horses, and buckling on the swords that were to be fleshed in unmanly strife. So much had been done and endured within a period of six weeks and a space of six miles.

"At half past six A.M." writes Nanukchund, "the British force arrived in cantonments outside the city. Those of the citizens who were well-wishers to the Government brought them bread, butter, and milk. A great crowd of the town's people assembled to see what was going on. I also, who had not stepped out of my house for a month and a half for fear of being murdered, now came out and went to cantonments. Generals Havelock and Neill, and a number of other officers, were standing there. Fruiterers, milkmen, buttermen, bakers, and other sellers of provisions, were in attendance with their dollies. Those who were aware of what was coming had made preparations on the night previous by having provisions cooked in the bazaar. A little after eight the rebels who had mined the magazine set fire to the powder, and fled. The report of the explosion was so terrific, that the doors of city-houses fell off their hinges."

Our old friend was now in high spirits. His turn had come, and he showed himself fully equal to the occasion. "I continued," he says, "to attend on the Sahibs with a view of performing acts of loyalty. I set to work to find out what men of the city have been loyal, and which of them disloyal, and how some of the public officers came to present themselves to the Nana, while others contrived not to present themselves. I laboured night and day at great personal inconvenience to learn full particulars about these people. I questioned only honourable and upright men, and no others." He is especially disturbed at the assurance of one, Narain Rao, "who, just as I anticipated, wishes to pass himself off as a well-wisher to the Government. But there is a great crowd at this moment, and the Sahibs have no time to spare. It is also very difficult to find witnesses against him by private enquiries, and I see no chance of filing a complaint about it before any officer." It seems strange that the Sahibs could not afford time to pay off an old score that had really been incurred.

After the first outbreak of joy and welcome the inhabitants of Cawnpore began to be aware that the English were no longer the same men, if indeed they were men at all. The citizens, with their wives and children, poured forth into the country by crowds, without stopping to calculate whether they could establish their innocence. At such an assize, and in the eyes of such a jury, absence was the only defence that could avail aught. From noon till midnight, on the Lucknow and Delhi highway were to be seen immense mobs rushing eastward and westward in headlong haste. They did well both for their own security and for our honour. The heat of the climate and the conflict, the scarcity of food and the constant presence of disease, the talk which they had heard at Calcutta, the deeds that they had been allowed and even enjoined to commit during their upward progress, had depraved the conscience and destroyed the self-control of our unhappy soldiers. Reckless as men who for many weeks had never known what it was to be certain of another hour's life,—half starved, and more than half intoxicated,—they regarded carnage as a duty and rapine as a pleasure. Havelock, in a report to the Commander in Chief, thus writes: "I have ordered all the beer, wine, spirits, and every drinkable thing at Cawnpore, to be purchased by the Commissariat. It will then be guarded by a few men. If it remained at Cawnpore it would require half my force to keep it from being drunk up by the other half, and I should not have a soldier in camp. While I was winning a victory on the sixteenth some of my men were plundering the Commissariat on the line of march."

And so the general purchased all the liquor. Oh that he could have bought up the blood also! It was idle to count upon the forbearance of poor ignorant privates, when the ablest among our officers had forgotten alike the age in which he lived, and the religion that he professed. This is an extract from a letter which would that Neill had never found occasion to indite!

"Whenever a rebel is caught he is immediately tried, and, unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to be hanged at once: but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first to clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of the women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives. They think, by doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so. My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels. The first I caught was a soubahdar, or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed: but I made the provost-martial do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and, after death, buried in a ditch at the roadside."

For a parallel to such an episode we must explore far back into the depths of time. Homer relates the punishment that befell those maidservants, who in the palace of Ithaca had been unmindful of what they owed to their absent lord. First they bore forth from the hall the dead bodies of their paramours and placed them in the vestibule, staggering beneath the weight: while Ulysses urged on the work by word and gesture: and they laboured at the ungrateful task, wailing, and shedding bitter tears. And afterwards with water and sponges they washed the tables and the seats: and Telemachus and his henchmen scraped with spades the floor of the chamber. But, when they had set the house in order, the women were led out, and cooped up for a while in a corner of the well-fenced court, in a strait place, whence escape was none. And then Telemachus slung from the roof the cable of a dark-prowed ship, and made it fast to a pillar of the colonnade, stretching it high and taut, so that no foot might feel the ground. And, as when swift thrushes or doves, making for their nest, have dashed into a snare which a fowler had planted across the thicket: so these women were fastened in a row, with a halter round every neck, to die in unseemly fashion. And their feet fluttered a moment in the air: but not for long.

It is curious that an act, which the Pagan poet allows an old moss-trooper and his son to perpetrate in the flush of revenge and victory, should have been revived by a Christian warrior after the lapse of twenty-five centuries. And it must be owned that Neill surpassed his model: for apparently the primary object of Ulysses was to sweep away the traces of the butchery, and make his refectory clean and habitable: an unpleasant drudgery, which, as with the simplicity of a primitive Greek he reflected, might as well be performed by the least worthy members of his household before they were taken to execution: whereas the Englishman desired only to wound the sentiments of the doomed men, and prolong their prospect of death with a vista of eternal misery. And this, when the rallying-cry of the insurrection was the preservation of caste:—when in the wide-spread confidence that our faith did not seek to extend itself by carnal weapons lay the salvation of the British supremacy!

But there was a spectacle to be witnessed which might excuse much. Those who, straight from the contested field, wandered sobbing through the rooms of the ladies' house, saw what it were well could the outraged earth have straightway hidden. The inner apartment was ankle-deep in blood. The plaster was scored with sword-cuts: not high up, as where men have fought; but low down, and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid a blow. Strips of dresses, vainly tied round the handles of the doors, signified the contrivance to which feminine despair had resorted as a means of keeping out the murderers. Broken combs were there, and the frills of children's trousers, and torn cuffs and pinafores, and little round hats, and one or two shoes with burst latchets, and one or two daguerrotype-cases with cracked glasses. An officer picked up a few curls, preserved in a bit of card-board, and marked "Ned's hair, with love:" but around were strewn locks, some near a yard in length, dissevered, not as a keepsake, by quite other scissors. All who on that day passed within the fatal doors agree positively to assert that no inscription of any sort or kind was visible on the walls. Before the month was out, the bad habit, common to low Englishmen, of scribbling where they ought not, here displaying itself in an odious form, had covered the principal buildings of Cawnpore with vulgar and disgusting forgeries, false in date, in taste, in spelling, and in fact.