DICK STAPLES
OF
THE 'QUEEN'S OWN,'
DICK STAPLES OF THE 'QUEEN'S OWN.'
When I came back, boys, after my fighting in India was over, you laughed at my old red coat (for I had no other)—a trifle tattered, I dare say it was, as well it might be, after all I had gone through in it latterly; but you never forgot, boys, that it was the old Red Rag, that tells of England's glory!
The company to which I belonged—the Grenadiers of the 'Queen's Own' (for Grenadiers were not abolished till soon after the time of the Indian Mutiny)—was cantoned at Jubbulpore, in the month of July, when all Bengal was seething with revolt, and murder and outrage were occurring everywhere. All was quiet as yet in Jubbulpore, which I may tell you is in Berar, on the tableland of the Deccan; but ugly rumours came from time to time about the 50th and 52nd Bengal Sepoy regiments, who were stationed at Nagode, the nearest post to us, and which, of all the Bengal army, were eventually the last to revolt.
Neither tongue nor pen can describe what we—the handful of Europeans among the millions of India—endured at that terrible time, when the souls of fathers and mothers, of husbands and wives, daily grew sick with anxiety, while the atrocities of Delhi and Cawnpore, and more than a hundred other places, made our soldiers go mad in their longing for revenge. But all that is history now.
In the same cantonments with us was a regiment of Punjaubees, who had as yet remained quiet; but more could not be said of them, and we of the Queen's Own watched them closely, for we were only one to ten of them, and as no order for disarming them had come, we pretended to trust them, and affected a frankness and faith in our bearing with them we were far from feeling.