CHAPTER XVII
THE EXPIATION
Two hours after midnight—that is a time of rest and peace in most lands. Men have either ceased or not yet begun their toil. Even warfare, the deadliest task of all, slackens its energy, and the ghostly reaper leans on his scythe while wearied soldiers sleep. Wellington knew this when he said that the bravest man was he who possessed “two-o’clock-in-the-morning” courage, for shadows then become real, and dangers anticipated but unseen are magnified tenfold.
Yet, soon after two o’clock in the morning of September 14, 1857, four thousand five hundred soldiers assembled behind the Ridge for the greatest achievement that the Mutiny had demanded during the four months of its wonderful history. They were divided into five columns, one being a reserve, and the task before them was to carry by assault a strongly fortified city, surrounded by seven miles of wall and ditch, held by forty thousand trained soldiers and equipped with ample store of guns and ammunition. Success meant the certain loss of one man among four—failure would carry with it a rout and massacre unexampled in modern war.
Men had fallen in greater numbers in the Crimea, it is true—a British army had been swallowed alive in the wild Khyber Pass—but these were only incidents in prolonged campaigns, whereas the collapse of the assailants of Delhi would set free a torrent of murder, rapine and pillage, such as the utmost triumph of the rebels had not yet produced.
The Punjab, the whole of the Northwest, Central India and Rajputana, all northern Bengal and Bombay, must have been submerged in the flood if the gates of Delhi were unbarred. It is not to be marveled at, therefore, that General Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief, “looked nervous and anxious” as he rode slowly along the front of the gathering columns, nor that many of the British officers and men received the Holy Communion at the hands of their chaplains, ere they mustered for what might prove to be their last parade.
In some tents, of their own accord, the soldiers read the Old Testament lesson of the day. With that extraordinary aptness which the chronicles of the prophets often display in their relation to current events, the chapter foretold the doom of Nineveh: “Woe to the bloody city! It is full of lies and robbery ... draw the waters for the siege, fortify thy strongholds ... then shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off; it shall eat thee up like the canker-worm.”
How thrilling, how intensely personal and human, these words must have sounded in their ears, for it should ever be borne in mind that the Britons who recovered India in ’57 were not only determined to avenge the barbarities inflicted on unoffending women and children, but were inspired by a religious enthusiasm that showed itself in almost every diary kept and letter sent home during the war.