The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

The imagination lingers pitifully over those groups of British ladies sitting or crouching in the ditches under the earthworks: “Unshod, unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows. Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were infants born during the terrible three weeks—infants with no future.”

There were two wells in the encampment; one which, to quote Trevelyan, “yielded nothing then, which will yield nothing till the sea, too, gives up her dead.” It was some two hundred yards from the rampart, and lay open to the fire of the Sepoys’ batteries. It was turned into a sepulchre. Thither, night by night, the besieged carried their dead, and cast them into its depths with brief and whispered prayer; while the guns of the Sepoys thundered their requiem. Within three weeks 250 English people were cast by English hands into that strange grave. The other well lay also directly under hostile fire, and on it the Sepoy gunners, trained by British science, concentrated their fire night and day. Every drop of water drawn from it may be said to have been reddened with blood.

Over this handful of British people, faint with hunger, fevered with thirst, wasted by sickness, half mad with the sun’s heat, roared day and night a tempest of hostile shot. Never before, perhaps, was such a fire concentrated on one poor patch of soil. The Sepoys could mount as many guns as they chose, and almost of whatever calibre they pleased. And they could fire, within a distance ranging from 300 to 800 yards, from under almost shot-proof shelter. From roof and window of all the buildings commanding the entrenchments streamed, with scarcely a moment’s pause, showers of musketry bullets. At night the Sepoys crept within pistol-shot, and fired without cessation. Wheeler’s entrenchments were literally girdled with fire; they were whipped, day and night, with incessant volleys.

By the third day every window and door in the poor barracks which served as shelter to the sick, and to the women and children, had been beaten in; and shell and ball ranged at will through the rooms. One who saw the building after the siege wrote: “The walls are riddled with cannon-shot like the cells of a honeycomb. The doors are knocked into shapeless openings. Of the verandas only a few splintered rafters remain. At some of the angles the walls are knocked entirely away, and large chasms gape blackly at you.”

Never was a position more desperate; and never was there one held with a valour more obstinate. Wheeler’s men had everything that was most dear to them at their backs, and everything that was most hateful in their front; and under these conditions how they fought may be imagined. In the scanty garrison, too, were over a hundred officers of the regiments in mutiny, fighters of the finest quality. It was a corps d’élite; a garrison of officers!

Indian life, it may be added, develops all that is proudest and most manly in the British character. The Englishman there feels that he is a member of an imperial and conquering race. To rule men is his daily business. To hunt the fiercest game in the world is his amusement. The men who knelt behind Wheeler’s mud walls, had faced tigers in the jungle, had speared the wild boar in the plains, had heard the scream of a charging elephant. They were steady of nerve, quick of eye, deadly of aim, proud of their blood and race. They were standing at bay over their wives and little ones, playing a game in which the stake was a thousand British lives. And never before, or since, perhaps, was more gallant fighting done than behind Wheeler’s entrenchments.

The natural leaders of the garrison emerged in such a crisis, and their names ought to awaken to-day in British ears emotions of pride as lofty as that which Greeks knew when, in the rolling and sonorous cadences of Homer’s great epic, they heard the names of the heroes who fought and died round classic Troy. One of the most heroic figures in the siege is that of Captain Moore, of the 32nd, in charge of the cluster of invalids belonging to that regiment in Cawnpore. Moore was an Irishman, though with the fair hair and blue eyes proper to Saxon blood. To say that he was fearless is a very inadequate description of his temper. He delighted in the rapture and glow of battle. His courage had in it a certain cool and smiling quality that made flurry or anxiety impossible. Moore, in fact, carried about with him a sort of radiance, so that, as Trevelyan puts it, “wherever he had passed he left men something more courageous, and women something less unhappy.” This fair-haired Irishman was a born king of men, of unfailing resource and “dare-devil” courage. He was wounded early in the siege, and carried his arm in a sling, but he walked to and fro calmly amid a tempest of bullets, and the men would follow his cheerful leading against any odds.

The tiny little Redan on the north face of the entrenchment was held by Major Vibart, of the 2nd Cavalry. A dreadful cross-fire searched and raked this little triangle of earth, and the handful of heroes that held it had to be renewed again and again. But the Redan kept up its splutter of answering fire day and night for three weeks, and Vibart himself survived the siege, to perish under Sepoy bullets on the river. Ashe was a young artillery officer of great promise; he commanded a battery of three guns at the north-east corner of the entrenchments, and seldom were guns better aimed and better fought. Ashe had first to invent his gunners, and next to improvise his shot, firing 6-pound balls, for example, from a 9-pound muzzle. But his cool science and sleepless activity made his battery the terror of the Sepoys.

Delafosse, of the 53rd, one of the four men who actually survived the siege, was an officer as daring and almost as skilled as Ashe. He had charge of three 9-pounder guns at the south-east angle. On one occasion the carriage of a gun in his battery took fire, and the wood, made as inflammable as tinder by the fierce Indian sun, named and crackled. There was powder—and the peril of explosion—on every side. The Sepoys, noting the dancing flame, turned all their guns on the spot. Delafosse crawled beneath the burning carriage, turned on his back, and with his naked hands pulled down the red splinters, and scattered earth on the flames, fighting them in this desperate fashion till two soldiers ran up to his help, and the fire was put out.