That man—I suppose we are all agreed—who commanded in Meerut on Sunday the tenth day of May, in the year of Christ one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven, a day which will furnish an epoch for ever to the records of civilisation—that man who could have stopped the bloody kennel of hounds, but did not, racing in full cry to the homes of our unsuspecting brothers and sisters in Delhi—it were good for that man if he had not been born. He had notice such as might have wakened the dead early in the afternoon (2 or 3 o'clock P.M., I believe), and yet, at the end of a long summer day, torchlight found him barely putting his foot into the stirrup. And why into the stirrup at all? For what end, on what pretence, should he ever have played out the ridiculous pantomime and mockery of causing the cavalry to mount? Two missions there were to execute on that fatal night—first, to save our noble brothers and sisters at Delhi from a ruin that was destined to be total; secondly, to inflict instant and critical retribution upon those who had already opened the carnival of outrage, before they left Meerut. Oh, heaven and earth! heart so timid was there in all this world, sense of wrong so callous, as not to leap with frenzy of joy at so sublime a summons to wield the most impassioned functions of Providence—namely, hell-born destroyers to destroy in the very instant of their fancied triumph, and suffering innocence to raise from the dust in the very crisis of its last despairing prostration. Reader! it is not exaggeration—many a heart will bear witness in silence that it is not—if I should say that men exist, who would gladly pay down thirty years of life in exchange for powers so heavenly for redressing earthly wrongs. To the infamous torpor on that occasion, and the neglect of the fleeting hour that struck the signal for delivery and vengeance, are due many hundreds of the piteous outrages that have since polluted Bengal. Do I mean that, if the rebel capture of Delhi had been prevented, no subsequent outrages would have followed? By no means. Other horrors would have been perpetrated; but that first and greatest (always excepting the case of Cawnpore) would by all likelihood have been intercepted.[63]
But perhaps his military means were inadequate to the crisis? He had duties to Meerut, not less than duties of vengeance and of sudden deliverance for Delhi. True: he had so; and he had means for meeting all these duties. He had a well-mounted establishment of military force, duly organized in all its arms. Three-and-twenty hundreds he had of British, suitably proportioned as to infantry, cavalry, and artillery—a little army that would have faced anything that Delhi could at that time have put forward. Grant that Delhi could have mustered 5000 men: these are three propositions having no doubtful bearing upon such a fact:—
1. That cheerfully would this little British force have faced any Asiatic force of 5000 men, which, indeed, it can hardly be necessary to say, in the face of so large and so transcendent an experience.
2. That the Delhi force, could have reached the amount supposed of 5000 only after a junction with the Meerut mutineers; which junction it was the main business of the Meerut commander to intercept.
3. That this computation assumes also the whole of the Delhi garrison to be well affected to the mutineers; an assumption altogether unwarrantable on the outside of Delhi during the 10th and 11th of May.
Such were (1) the motives of the commander at Meerut towards a noble and energetic resolution; such were (2) his means.[64]
Thinking of that vile lacheté, which surrendered, with a girl's tameness, absolutely suffered to lapse, without effort, and as if a bauble, this great arsenal and magazine into the hands of the revolters, involuntarily we have regarded it all along as a deadly misfortune; and, upon each periodic mail, the whole nation has received the news of its non-capture as a capital disappointment.
But, on steadier consideration, apparently all this must be regarded as a very great error. Not that it could be any error to have wished for any course of events involving the safety of our poor slaughtered compatriots. That event would have been cheap at any price. But that dismal catastrophe having happened, to intercept that bitter wo having been already ripened into an impossibility by the 11th and 12th of May, seven-and-forty days before our thoughts at home began to settle upon India, thenceforwards it became a very great advantage—a supreme advantage—that Delhi should have been occupied by the mutineers. Briefly, then, why?
First of all, because this movement shut up within one ring fence the élite of the rebels (according to some calculations, at least three-and-twenty thousand of well-armed and well-disciplined men), that would otherwise have been roaming over the whole face of Bengal as marauders and murderers. These men, left to follow their own vagrant instincts, would, it is true, in some not inconsiderable proportion, have fallen victims to those fierce reactions of rustic vengeance which their own atrocities would very soon have provoked. But large concentrated masses would still have survived in a condition rapidly disposable as auxiliary bodies to all those towns invested by circumstances with a partisan interest, such as Lucknow, Benares, Cawnpore, Agra, Gwalior, and Allahabad.
Secondly, Delhi it was that opened the horrors of retribution; mark what chastisement it was that alighted from the very first upon all the scoundrels who sought, and fancied they could not fail to find, an asylum in Delhi. It is probable that hardly one in twenty of the mutineers came to Delhi without plunder, and for strong reasons this plunder would universally assume the shape of heavy metallic money. For the public treasuries in almost every station were rifled; and unhappily for the comfort of the robbers under the Bengal sun of June and July, very much of the East Indian money lies in silver—namely, rupees; of which, in the last generation, eight were sufficient to make an English pound; but at present ten are required by the evil destiny of sepoys. Everybody has read an anecdote of the painter Correggio, that, upon finishing a picture for some monastery, the malicious monks paid him for it in copper. The day of payment was hot, and poor Correggio was overweighted; he lay down under his copper affliction; and whether he died or not, is more than I remember. But doubtless, to the curious in Correggiosity, Pilkington will tell. For the sepoys, although their affliction took the shape of silver, and not of copper, virtually it was not less, considering the far more blazing sun. Mephistopheles might have arranged the whole affair. One could almost hear him whispering to each separate sepoy, as he stood amongst the treasury burglars, the reflection that those pensions, which the kind and munificent English Government granted to their old age or their infirmities, all over India, raising up memorial trophies of public gratitude or enlightened pity, never more would be heard of. All had perished, the justice that gave, the humble merit that received, the dutiful behaviour that hoped; and henceforwards of them and of their names, as after the earliest of rebellions, in the book of life 'was no remembrance.'