When the Mutiny broke out she, with some other ladies and a few Englishmen, took refuge in a cellar, and for nearly three days maintained a desperate defence against the crowds attacking them. The hero of the defence was a Baptist missionary, a former shipmate of Wilberforce’s, “a very tall and powerful man, with a bloodless face, grey eyes, a broad jaw, and a determined mouth.” One by one the men holding the cellar fell. Food failed, the ammunition was exhausted, and at last, behind the bodies of the fallen, piled up as a breastwork, stood only the brave missionary, with nothing but his sword to protect the crouching women and children. “Stripped to the waist, behind the ghastly rampart of the dead, the hero stood; and for hours this Horatius held his own. At last he fell, shot through the heart, and the bloodthirsty devils poured in.” Mrs. Leeson was covered by some of the dead bodies, and so escaped the doom of the other ladies, and at night crept out of that pit of the dead. She wandered through the dark streets, the only living Englishwoman in the great city, and saw, hanging up on the trees in the dusk, the headless trunks of white children and the mutilated bodies of Englishwomen. By happy chance she met a pitying native, who concealed her until she escaped in the fashion described, with more or less of imagination, by Wilberforce.
CHAPTER IV
CAWNPORE: THE SIEGE
The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon.
In these words Sir George Trevelyan sums up the famous struggle round the low mud-walls of Wheeler’s entrenchments at Cawnpore more than forty years ago; a struggle in which Saxon courage and Hindu cruelty were exhibited in their highest measure, and which must always form one of the most heartbreaking and yet kindling traditions of the British race. Volumes have been written about Cawnpore, but Trevelyan’s book remains its one adequate literary record. The writer has a faculty for resonant, not to say rhythmic prose, which recalls the style of his more famous uncle, Macaulay, and in his “Cawnpore” his picturesque sentences are flushed with a sympathy which gives them a more than literary grace.
Cawnpore at the time of the Mutiny was a great city, famous for its workers in leather, standing on the banks of the sacred Ganges, 270 miles S.E. from Delhi, and about 700 miles from Calcutta. It was a military station of great importance. Its vast magazine was stored with warlike material of every sort. It was the seat of civil administration for a rich district. But the characteristic British policy, which allows the Empire to expand indefinitely, without any corresponding expansion of the army which acts as its police and defence, left this great military station practically in the hands of the Sepoys alone. The British force at Cawnpore, in May 1857, consisted of sixty men of the 84th, sixty-five Madras Fusileers, fewer than sixty artillerymen, and a group of invalids belonging to the 32nd. The Sepoy force consisted of three strong infantry regiments and the 2nd Native Cavalry—a regiment of very evil fame.
Here, then, were all the elements of a great tragedy—a rich treasury and a huge arsenal, lying practically undefended; a strong force of Sepoys, bitter with mutiny; a turbulent city and crowded cantonments festering with crime; and only a handful of British soldiers to maintain the British flag! Had the British consisted merely of fighting men, though they counted only 300 bayonets against four regiments of splendidly trained Sepoys, and a hostile population of 60,000, their case would not have been desperate. But the little British garrison had under its guard a great company of women and children and sick folk—civilian households, the wives and families of the 32nd, and many more. For every fighting man who levelled his musket over Wheeler’s entrenchments during the siege, there were at least two non-combatants—women, or little children, or invalids. A company so helpless and so great could not march; it could not attack; it could only stand within its poor screen of mud-walls and, with the stubborn and quenchless courage natural to its blood, fight till it perished.
General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command at Cawnpore, was a gallant soldier, who had marched and fought for fifty years. But he had the fatal defect of being over seventy-five years of age. A little man, slender of build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his seventy-five years with respectable energy. But a man, no matter how brave, in whose veins ran the chill and thin blood of old age, was tragically handicapped in a crisis so fierce. Wheeler, moreover, who had married a Hindu wife, was too weakly credulous about the loyalty of his Sepoys. On May 18, scarcely a fortnight before the Mutiny, he telegraphed to Calcutta: “The plague is stayed. All well at Cawnpore!” He had been warned that Nana Sahib was treacherous, yet he called in his help, and put the Treasury in his charge for safety! This was committing the chickens, for security, to the benevolence and “good faith” of the fox! Not four days before the outbreak Wheeler actually sent back to Lucknow fifty men of the 84th who had been sent to him as a reinforcement. There was chivalry in that act, but there was besotted credulity too.
