CHAPTER V
CAWNPORE: THE MURDER GHAUT
It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded, men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage.
Trevelyan describes the scene:—
First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past, but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng of native bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the weight of the palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be discerned the pallid forms of the wounded; their limbs rudely bandaged with shirt-sleeves and old stockings and strips of gown and petticoat. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver in belt, followed they who could still walk and fight. Step was not kept in those ranks. Little was there of martial array, or soldier-like gait and attitude. In discoloured flannel and tattered nankeen, mute and in pensive mood, tramped by the remnant of the immortal garrison. These men had finished their toil, and had fought their battle, and now, if hope was all but dead within them, there survived at least no residue of fear.
Vibart, in his single person, constituted the rearguard. A wounded man lying in a bed carried by four native bearers, an English lady walking by his side, came out of the entrenchment shortly after the rest had left. It was Colonel Ewart, of the 34th, with his faithful wife. The little group could not overtake the main body, and when it had passed out of sight round a bend in the road a crowd of the colonel’s own Sepoys stopped the poor wife and her wounded husband. The porters were ordered to lay the bed down, and with brutal jests the Sepoys mocked their dying colonel. “Is not this a fine parade?” they asked, with shouts of laughter.
Then, mirth giving place to murder, they suddenly fell upon Ewart, and literally hewed him to pieces under the eyes of his agonised wife. They told her to go in peace, as they would not kill a woman, and by way of comment on the statement one of them stepped back to give himself room for the stroke, and slew her with a single blow.
The road to the Ganges, a little over a mile in length, crossed a little wooden bridge painted white, and swung to the right down a ravine to the river. “A vast multitude,” says Trevelyan, “speechless and motionless as spectres, watched their descent into that valley of the shadow of death.” Directly the last Englishman had crossed the bridge and turned down the lane, a double line of Sepoys was drawn across the entrance to the Ghaut, and slowly the great company made its way down to the river’s edge. Some forty boats were lying there—eight-oared country budgerows, clumsy structures, with thatched roofs, and looking not unlike floating hay-stacks. They lay in the shallow water a few yards from the bank.
A moment’s pause took place when the crowd of sahibs and memsahibs, with their wounded and the little ones, reached the water’s edge. There were no planks by which they could reach the boats, none of the boatmen spoke a word, or made a movement. They sat silent, like spectators at a tragedy.
Then the crowd splashed into the water. The wounded were lifted into the boats; women with their children clambered on board; the men were finding their places; the officers, standing knee-deep in the river, were helping the last and feeblest to embark. It was nine o’clock in the morning.