From Egypt to Japan

by Henry M. Field

"The poor ladies were ordered to come out, but neither threats nor persuasions could induce them to do so. They laid hold of each other by dozens, and clung so close that it was impossible to separate them, or drag them out of the building. The troopers therefore brought muskets, and after firing a great many shots from the doors and windows, rushed in with swords and bayonets. [One account says that, as Hindoos shrink from the touch of blood, five Mohammedan butchers were sent in to complete the work.] Some of the helpless creatures, in their agony, fell down at the feet of their murderers, clasped their legs, and begged in the most pitiful manner to spare their lives, but to no purpose. The fearful deed was done most deliberately, and in the midst of the most dreadful shrieks and cries of the victims. From a little before sunset till candlelight was occupied in completing the dreadful deed. The doors of the building were then locked up for the night, and the murderers went to their homes. Next morning it was found, on opening the doors, that some ten or fifteen women, with a few of the children, had managed to escape from death by falling and hiding under the murdered bodies of their fellow-prisoners. A fresh order was therefore sent to murder them also; but the survivors, not being able to bear the idea of being cut down, rushed out into the compound, and seeing a well, threw themselves into it without hesitation, thus putting a period to lives which it was impossible for them to save. The dead bodies of those murdered on the preceding evening were then ordered to be thrown into the same well, and 'jullars' were employed to drag them along like dogs."[6]

The next day after the massacre, Havelock entered the city, and officers and men rushed to the prison house, hoping to be in time to save that unhappy company of English women and children. But what horrors met their sight! Not one living remained. The place showed traces of the late butchery. The floors were covered with blood. "Upon the walls and pillars were the marks of bullets, and of cuts made by sword-strokes, not high up as if men had fought with men, but low down, and about the corners, where the poor crouching victims had been cut to pieces." "Locks of long silky hair, torn shreds of dress, little children's shoes and playthings, were strewn around."

The sight of these things drove the soldiers to madness. "When they entered the charnel house, and read the writing on the walls [sentences of wretchedness and despair], and saw the still clotted blood, their grief, their rage, their desire for vengeance, knew no bounds. Stalwart, bearded men, the stern soldiers of the ranks, came out of that house perfectly unmanned, utterly unable to repress their emotions." Following the track of blood from the prison to the well, they found the mangled remains of all that martyred company. There the tender English mother had been cast with every indignity, and the child still living thrown down to die upon its mother's breast. Thus were they heaped together, the dying and the dead, in one writhing, palpitating mass.

Turning away from this ghastly sight, the soldiers asked only to meet face to face the perpetrators of these horrible atrocities. But the Sepoys, cowardly as they were cruel, fled at the approach of the English. Those who were taken had to suffer for the whole. "All the rebel Sepoys and troopers who were captured, were collectively tried by a drumhead court-martial, and hanged." But for such a crime as the cold-blooded murder of helpless women and children, death was not enough—it should be death accompanied by shame and degradation. The craven wretches were made to clean away the clotted blood—a task peculiarly odious to a Hindoo. Says General Neill:

"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 clear up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of 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, and barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels.

"The first I caught was a subahdar, 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-marshal do his duty, and a few lashes 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. No one who has witnessed the scenes of murder, mutilation, and massacre, can ever listen to the word mercy, as applied to these fiends.

"Among other wretches drawn from their skulking places, was the man who gave Nana Sahib's orders for the massacre. After this man's identity had been clearly established, and his complicity in directing the massacre proved beyond all doubt, he was compelled, upon his knees, to cleanse up a portion of the blood yet scattered over the fatal yard, and while yet foul from his sickening task, hung like a dog before the gratified soldiers, one of whom writes: 'The collector who gave the order for the murder of the poor ladies, was taken prisoner day before yesterday, and now hangs from a branch of a tree about two hundred yards off the roadside.'"

What became of Nana Sahib after the Mutiny, is a mystery that probably will never be solved. If he lived he sought safety in flight. Many of the Mutineers took refuge in the jungle. The Government kept up a hunt for him for years. Several times it was thought that he was discovered. Only a year or two ago a man was arrested, who was said to be Nana Sahib, but it proved to be a case of mistaken identity. In going up from Delhi we rode in the same railway carriage with an old army surgeon, whose testimony saved the life of the suspected man. He had lived in Cawnpore before the Mutiny, and knew Nana Sahib well, indeed had been his physician, and gave me much information about the bloody Mahratta chief. He said he was not so bad a man by nature, as he became when he was put forward as a leader in a desperate enterprise, and surrounded by men who urged him on to every crime. So long as he was under the wholesome restraint of English power, he was a fair specimen of the "mild Hindoo," "as mild a mannered man as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat." His movement was as soft as that of a cat or a tiger. But like the tiger, when once he tasted blood, it roused the wild beast in him, and he took a delight in killing. And so he who might have lived quietly, and died in his bed, with a reputation not worse than that of other Indian rulers, has left a name in history as the most execrable monster of modern times. It seems a defeat of justice that he cannot be discovered and brought to the scaffold. But perhaps the judgment of God is more severe than that of man. If he still lives, he has suffered a thousand deaths in these twenty years.

My informant told me of the punishment that had come on many of these men of blood. Retribution followed hard after their crimes. When the rebellion was subdued, it was stamped out without mercy. The leaders were shot away from guns. Others who were only less guilty had a short trial and a swift punishment. In this work of meting out retribution, this mild physician was himself obliged to be an instrument. Though his profession was that of saving lives, and not of destroying them, after the Mutiny he was appointed a Commissioner in the district of Cawnpore, where he had lived, to try insurgents, with the power of life and death, and with no appeal from his sentence! It was a terrible responsibility, but he could not shrink from it, and he had to execute many. Those especially who had been guilty of acts of cruelty, could not ask for mercy which they had never shown. Among those whom he captured was the native officer who had given the signal, by raising his sword, to the masked battery to fire on the boats. He said, "I took him to that very spot, and hung him there!" All this sad history was in mind as we went down to the banks of the Ganges, where that fearful tragedy took place not twenty years before. The place still bears the name of the Slaughter Ghat, in memory of that fearful deed. We imagined the scene that summer's morning, when the stream was covered with the bodies of women and children, and the air was filled with the shrieks of despair. With such bitter memories, we recalled the swift retribution, and rejoiced that such a crime had met with such a punishment.

From the river we drove to "the well," but here nothing is painful but its memories. It is holy ground, which pious hands have decked with flowers, and consecrated as a shrine of martyrdom. Around it many acres have been laid out as a garden, with all manner of tropical plants, and well-kept paths winding between, along which the stranger walks slowly and sadly, thinking of those who suffered so much in life, and that now sleep peacefully beyond the reach of pain. In the centre of the garden the place of the well is enclosed, and over the sacred spot where the bodies of the dead were thrown, stands a figure in marble, which might be that of the angel of Resignation or of Peace, with folded wings and face slightly bended, and arms across her breast, and in her hands palm-branches, the emblems of victory.