The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Let it be remembered that the revolted districts equal in area France, Austria, and Prussia put together; in population they exceeded them. And over this great area, and through this huge population, the process described by the telegrams, to whose rueful syllables Sir George Campbell listened, was being swiftly and incessantly repeated. The British troops did not number 22,000 men, and they were scattered over a hundred military stations, and submerged in a population of 94,000,000. Let the reader imagine fifteen or sixteen British regiments sprinkled in microscopic fragments over an area so vast, and amongst populations so huge!

The Sepoy army in Bengal numbered 150,000 men, and within six weeks of the shot which killed Colonel Finnis at Meerut, of its 120 regiments of horse and foot, only twenty-five remained under the British flag, and not five of these could be depended upon! A whole army, in a word, magnificently drilled, perfectly officered, strong in cavalry, and yet more formidable in guns, was in open and murderous revolt. Some idea of the scale and completeness of the Mutiny can be gathered from the single fact that every regiment of regular cavalry, ten regiments of irregular cavalry out of eighteen, and sixty-three out of seventy-four regiments of infantry, then on the strength of the Bengal army, disappeared finally and completely from its roster!

In each cantonment during the days preceding the revolt, the British officers on the spot were—to return to our figure—like men shut up in a powder-magazine with the train fired. There might be a dozen or twenty British officers with their families at a station held by a battery of native artillery, a couple of squadrons of native horse, and a regiment of native infantry—all plotting revolt and murder! Honour forbade the British to fly. To show a sign of mistrust or take a single visible precaution would be to precipitate the outbreak. Many of the old Bengal officers relied on their Sepoys, with a fond credulity that nothing could alarm, and that made them blind and deaf to the facts about them. “It was not,” says Trevelyan, “till he saw his own house in flames, and not till he looked down the barrels of Sepoy muskets, and heard Sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin to believe that his men were not as staunch as they ought to be.”

But all officers were not so blind as this. They knew their peril. They saw the tragedy coming. They walked day after day in front of the line of their men’s muskets on parade, not knowing when these iron tubes would break into red flame and flying bullets. They lay down night after night, knowing that the Sepoys in every hut were discussing the exact manner and time of their murder. Yet each man kept an untroubled brow, and went patiently the round of his duty, thanking God when he had no wife and child at the station to fall under the tender mercies of the mutineers. Farquhar, of the 7th Light Cavalry, writing to his mother at the time, said, “I slept every night dressed, with my revolver under my pillow, a drawn sword on my bed, and a loaded double-barrelled gun just under my bed. We remained in this jolly state,” he explained, “a fortnight.”

When the outbreak came, and the bungalows were in flames, and the men were shouting and firing on the parade-ground, it was a point of honour among the officers to hurry to the scene and make one last appeal to them, dying too often under the bullets of their own soldiers. The survivors then had to fly, with their women and children, and hide in the hot jungle or wander over the scorching plains, on which the white heat burns like a flame, suffering all the torments of thirst and weariness, of undressed wounds, and of wearing fever. If some great writer, with full knowledge and a pen of fire, could write the story of what was dared and suffered by Englishmen and Englishwomen at a hundred scattered posts throughout the North-West Provinces, in the early stages of the Mutiny, it would be one of the most moving and heroic tales in human records.

Sir Joseph Fayrer tells how, early in 1857, he was a member of a tiger-shooting expedition into the Terai. It was a merry party, and included some famous shots and great civil officials. They had killed their eleventh tiger when the first news of the rising reached the party. “All my companions,” says Fayrer, “except Gubbins, were victims of the Mutiny during the year. Thomason was murdered at Shah Jehanpore; Gonne in the Mullahpore district; Colonel Fischer was killed by the men of his own regiment; Thornhill was murdered at Seetapore; Lester was shot through the neck during the siege of Lucknow; Graydon was killed after the first relief of Lucknow.” Swift-following deaths of this sort have to be multiplied over the whole area of the Mutiny, before we can realise what it cost in life.

Fayrer, as a single example of the sort of tragedies which took place on every side, tells how his brother, who was an officer in a regiment of irregular cavalry, was killed. He was second in command of a detachment supposed to be of loyalty beyond suspicion. It had been sent by Lawrence from Lucknow to maintain order in the unsettled districts. There was no sign that the men intended to rise. The morning bugle had gone, the troop was ready to start, and young Fayrer, who had gone out, walked to a well with his charger’s bridle over his arm, and was drinking water from a cup. Suddenly one of his own troopers came up behind him and cut him down through the back of the neck with his tulwar. “The poor lad—only twenty-three—fell dead on the spot, gasping out the word ‘mother’ as he fell.” The troopers instantly rode at the three other British officers of the detachment. One of these slew three Sepoys before he was killed himself; the second, ill mounted, was overtaken and slain; the third, a splendid rider, made a reckless leap over a nullah, where his pursuers dared not follow, and so escaped.

Before describing the great drama at Cawnpore, or Lucknow, or Delhi, it is worth while to give, if only as hasty vignettes, some pictures of what happened at many of the stations scattered through Oude and the Punjaub. They are the opening episodes of a stupendous tragedy.

According to Sir Herbert Edwardes, it was the act of an English boy that saved the Punjaub. A very youthful operator—a mere lad—named Brendish, was by some accident alone in the Delhi Telegraph Office. When the Mutiny broke out he had to flee like the rest; but, before leaving, he wired a somewhat incoherent message to Umballa. “We must leave office,” it ran; “all the bungalows are on fire, burning down by the Sepoys of Meerut. They came in this morning.... Nine Europeans are killed.” That message reached Umballa, was sent on to Lahore, and was read there as a danger-signal so expressive, that the authorities at once decided to disarm the native troops at that station. The cryptic message was then flashed on to Peshawur, and was there read in the same sense, and acted upon with the same promptitude. Brendish was one of the few who afterwards escaped from Delhi.