The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

Brasyer’s glance and voice, his imperious will and daring, mastered the Sikhs, and they fell obediently into rank. He instantly marched them down, with loaded muskets, to the gate, and, with the help of the artillerymen with their port-fires, drove out the company of Sepoys that held it, and the fort was saved! But to master Sepoys in open revolt, by Sikhs on the edge of revolt, was a great feat, and shows for how much, at such a crisis, one clear heroic will counts.

That night Allahabad was given up to outrage and murder. Only above the fort itself flew the flag of England, and in the fort the handful of British officers, determined that the great arsenal should not fall into the hands of mutineers, were preparing to copy Willoughby’s desperate example at Delhi. Russell, of the artillery, who was in charge of the magazine, ran trains of powder into it, and stood ready to blow it up in the event of capture.

In the city itself every European or Eurasian was hunted like a rat through the streets, and slain with every accompaniment of cruelty. Outrage, in the ordinary sense, was not, on the whole, a marked feature of the Great Mutiny. The Sepoys, that is, were on fire with cruelty rather than with lust. But their cruelty spared neither age nor sex. The wife of a captain, according to one story current at the time—and perhaps not true—was literally boiled alive in ghee, or melted butter. Children were tossed on bayonets, men roasted in the flames of their own bungalows; women were mutilated and dismembered. The Sepoys plundered the Treasury, carrying off some £300,000 in booty.

One detail of the Allahabad massacre peculiarly shocked the imagination of British soldiers wherever the tale was told. At the mess-table of the 9th, that fatal night, there sat eight fresh-faced and boyish cadets just out from England. They had not yet joined their regiments, and military life, with all its fun and excitement, lay in the glamour of the unknown before them. When the bugle rang out on the parade-ground these eight unposted boy ensigns ran out with the other officers. They fell into the hands of the mutineers, and seven had their throats cut like sheep. The eighth, a boy of sixteen, was left for dead, but survived in spite of horrible wounds for four days, hiding himself in a ravine. On the fifth day he was discovered, dragged to the native lines, and thrust into a hut as a prisoner.

He found there a Christian catechist, who had formerly been a Mohammedan, and who was being tortured by the Sepoys to make him renounce his faith. The catechist’s courage had given way, but the gallant English lad—himself only sixteen years of age—urged the unhappy catechist, “Don’t deny Christ! Never deny Christ!” Neill reached Allahabad in time to rescue both catechist and ensign. But the ensign, Arthur Cheek, died of his wounds four days after Neill’s arrival. He had joined his regiment just eighteen days when murdered in this tragical fashion by his own men. It may be imagined how the massacre of the “poor little griffins” moved the British soldier to wrath everywhere.

For a few days mutiny and riot reigned supreme at Allahabad. Then, hot from Benares, there appeared on the scene Neill with a handful of his “Lambs,” as the Madras Fusileers, with admiring irony, were called. “Thank God, sir,” said the sentry at the gate of the fort, as Neill rode in; “you’ll save us yet!”

Neill is one of the cluster of great soldiers thrust into sudden fame by the crisis of the Mutiny, and is hardly to be judged by the standard of smaller men and of a tamer period. He was of Scottish blood, an Ayrshire man, with a vehement fighting quality, and a strain of iron resolve, which had come to him, perhaps, from a line of Covenanting ancestry. He was a veteran soldier, accustomed to govern wild clans and irregular troops, and had held high command in the Turkish contingent in the Crimea. On the domestic side, he was, as many stern and rough-natured men are, of singular tenderness. He was strongly religious, too, though he borrowed his religion rather from the Old Testament than the New.

When the Mutiny broke out Neill found himself in command of the Madras Fusileers, a regiment which included many wild spirits in its ranks, but which, in fighting quality, was a warlike instrument of singular efficiency. Neill and his “Lambs” were summoned from Madras by the crisis in Bengal, and Neill’s best qualities, as well as his worst—his fighting impulse, his Scottish pride of race, the natural vehemence of his temper, his soldierly hate of mutiny, the wrath of a strong man at outrages on women and children, and his fierce contempt for the feebleness shown by some of the “arm-chair colonels” of the Bengal Army—all threw their owner into a mood in which he was prepared to dare anything to crush the Mutiny and to punish the mutineers.

The Fusileers landed on the railway wharf at Calcutta, as night fell, on May 23. The great city of Benares was on the verge of revolt, and Neill’s “Lambs” were to be hurried up by express to its rescue. The station-master told Neill that unless he could get his men ashore in three minutes the train would start without them. But Neill was not the man to allow a railway time-table to stand betwixt him and the suppression of a mutiny. With an abrupt gesture, he put the station-master in charge of a sergeant and a file of Fusileers. The unhappy official shouted for help, but in another second stokers, firemen, and guard were in a row against the station wall, with a couple of “blue-caps” in charge of each. At the double the Fusileers came up the wharf, filed into the carriages, and the train, carrying the left wing of the regiment, moved off to Raneegange; thence the detachment was carried by bullock-carts to Benares. Leaving the bulk of his men to follow, Neill pushed on with the leading detachment to Benares.

Nowhere, perhaps, did English courage shine out with a clearer flame than at Benares. Benares is the holy city of Hinduism; it had a population of 300,000, fanatical and turbulent in the highest degree. The cantonment was held by three Sepoy regiments—all pledged to revolt—150 men of a British regiment, the 10th, and some thirty British gunners, with half a battery of artillery, under the command of Olpherts. But the cluster of soldiers and civilians responsible for the city—Tucker the commissioner, Frederick Gubbins the judge, Lind the magistrate, Ponsonby the brigadier, and Olpherts in command of the guns—held on to their post; by mere cool audacity kept the turbulent city in awe, and the mutinous Sepoys from breaking out; and sent on to other posts in greater peril than their own such scanty reinforcements of British troops as reached them. In the Commissioner, Tucker, at least, this heroic courage had a religious root. “The twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel,” he wrote to Lord Canning, “was their stand-by.” “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,” is the opening verse of David’s song in that chapter; “the God of my rock; in Him will I trust. He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge.”