The transit of news had been greatly accelerated over large tracts of the globe by the use of electricity, but it still took many weeks to convey intelligence between Great Britain and her Empire in India. Little did the people who assembled in London on June 23, 1857, to celebrate the centenary of the Battle of Plassey, by which Bengal was added to the British Dominions, imagine that at that very moment Bengal was the scene of a conflict as mighty in scope as it was horrifying in detail. |Startling News from India.| The story burst upon England with the suddenness of a tornado. The Sepoy army had risen in revolt, murdered their officers, proclaimed the King of Delhi Emperor of India, and the whole peninsula was in rebellion. There had been awful massacres too; English men, women, and children had been slaughtered in hundreds; most hideous of all there were circumstantial stories of outrage, followed by torture, committed upon our women. A terrible moan for vengeance rose throughout the land. There were few families who had not relations, or at least friends and acquaintances, among the British communities in India; the suddenness of the news was not the most appalling part of it; it was the ghastly details of the story that so deeply moved the nation. Black and bloody as the reality afterwards proved to be, the mutineers were not shown to have been guilty of the worst horrors imputed to them in the early days of the rising. Englishwomen perished as women perished in the worst of mediæval massacres, but they were not subjected to outrage or torture, as was circumstantially affirmed and universally believed at first.
From a Photograph] [by Eyre & Spottiswoode.
MACHINE-GUN SHOP AT THE SMALL ARMS FACTORY, ENFIELD.
Photographed from examples] [in the Tower Armouries.
THE FIRE-ARMS OF THE EARLY YEARS OF HER MAJESTY’S REIGN.
1. “Brown Bess” (smooth-bore flint-lock).
2. Baker’s rifle (flint-lock).
3. Baker’s rifle, with sword-bayonet.
4. Brunswick rifle (percussion).
5. Minié rifle (1851).
The above were all in use at the time of the Crimean War.
