The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Of those gallant Nine, Scully, who fired the train, and four others vanished, along with hundreds of the mutineers, in one red rain. But, somehow, they themselves scarcely knew how, Willoughby, with his two officers, and Conductor Buckley found themselves, smoke-blackened and dazed, outside the magazine, and they escaped death, for the moment at least.

The fugitives who escaped from the Cashmere Gate had some very tragical experiences. Sinking from fatigue and hunger, scorched by the flame-like heat of the sun, wading rivers, toiling through jungles, hunted by villagers, they struggled on, seeking some place of refuge. Some reached Meerut, others Umballa, but many died. Of that much-enduring company of fugitives, it is recorded that the women often showed the highest degree of fortitude and patience. Yet more than one mother had to lay her child, killed by mere exposure or heat, in a nameless jungle grave; more than one wife had to see her husband die, of bullet or sword-stroke, at her feet.

But the fate of these wanderers was happier than that of the Europeans left in the city. Some twenty-seven—eleven of them being children and eight women—took refuge in a house near the great mosque. They held the house for three days, but, having no water, suffered all the agonies of thirst. The Sepoys set vessels of water in front of the house, and bade the poor besieged give up their arms and they should drink. They yielded, gave up the two miserable guns with which they had defended themselves, and were led out. No water was given them. Death alone was to cool those fever-blackened lips. They were set in a row, the eleven children and sixteen men and women, and shot. Let tender-hearted mothers picture that scene, transacted under the white glare of the Indian sun!

Some fifty Europeans and Eurasians barricaded themselves in a strong house in the English quarter of the city. The house was stormed, the unhappy captives were dragged to the King of Delhi’s palace, and thrust into an underground cellar, with no windows and only one door. For five days they sweltered and sickened in that black hole. Then they were brought out, with one huge rope girdling them—men, women, and children, a pale-faced, haggard, half-naked crowd, crouching under one of the great trees in the palace garden. About them gathered a brutal mob of Sepoys and Budmashes, amongst whom was Abool Bukr, the heir-apparent to the King of Delhi. The whole of the victims were murdered, with every accompaniment of cruelty, and it is said that the heir-apparent himself devised horrible refinements of suffering.

Less than six months afterwards Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, shot that princely murderer, with a cluster of his kinsfolk, under the walls of Delhi, and in the presence of some 6000 shuddering natives, first explaining, that they were the murderers of women and children. Their bodies were brought in a cart through the most public street of the city, laid side by side, under the tree and on the very spot where they had tortured and murdered our women.

Mutiny grows swiftly. On Sunday night was fired, from the ranks of the 20th Sepoys, the volley that slew Colonel Finnis, and was, so to speak, the opening note in the long miserere of the Mutiny. At four o’clock on Monday afternoon the thunder of the great magazine, as it exploded, shook the walls of Delhi. Before the grey light of Tuesday morning broke over the royal city every member of the British race in it was either slain or a captive.

When a powder-magazine is fired, the interval of time between the flash of the first ignited grain and the full-throated blast of the explosion is scarcely measurable. And if the cluster of keen and plotting brains behind the Great Mutiny had carried out their plans as they intended, the Mutiny would have had exactly this bewildering suddenness of arrival. There is what seems ample evidence to prove that Sunday, May 31, was fixed for the simultaneous rising of all the Sepoy regiments in Bengal. A small committee of conspirators was at work in each regiment, elaborating the details of the Mutiny. Parties were to be told off in each cantonment, to murder the British officers and their families while in church, to seize the treasury, release the prisoners, and capture the guns. The Sepoy regiments in Delhi were to take possession of that great city, with its arsenal.

The outbreak at Meerut not merely altered the date, it changed the character of the revolt. The powder-magazine exploded, so to speak, in separate patches, and at intervals spread over weeks. It was this circumstance—added to the fact that the Sepoys had rejected the greased cartridges, and with them the Enfield rifle, against which Brown Bess was at a fatal disadvantage—that, speaking humanly, robbed the Mutiny of half its terror, and helped to save the British Empire in India.

But, even allowing for all this, a powder-magazine—although it explodes only by instalments—is a highly uncomfortable residence while the explosion is going on; and seldom before or since, in the long stretch of human history, have human courage and fortitude been put to such a test, as in the case of the handful of British soldiers and civilians who held the North-West Provinces for England during the last days of May 1857.

Sir George Campbell, who was in Simla at the time, has told the story of how he stood one day, early in June, beside the telegraph operator in Umballa, and listened while the wire, to use his own words, “seemed to repeat the experience of Job.” “First we heard that the whole Jullunder brigade had mutinied, and were in full march in our direction, on the way to Delhi. While that message was still being spoken, came another message, to tell us that the troops in Rajpootana had mutinied, and that Rohilcund was lost; following which, I heard that the Moradabad regiment had gone, and that my brother and his young wife had been obliged to fly.”