Then commenced the pursuit of the swimmers. Two were soon shot and sank; a third, swimming on his back, and not seeing where he was going, struck a sandspit, where some natives were waiting to beat out his brains at leisure. There remained four—Mowbray Thomson, Delafosse, and two privates, a pair of strong-limbed and brave-hearted Irishmen, named Murphy and Sullivan. This heroic and much-enduring four, diving like wild ducks at the flash of hostile muskets, out-swam and out-tired their pursuers. When at last they landed, they had between them “a flannel shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds”! They found refuge with a friendly landowner, and reached the British lines, though Sullivan died within a fortnight of reaching the place of safety.
Meanwhile, what had happened to the boat after the gallant fourteen left it? Its crew consisted of little else than wounded men, dead bodies, and exhausted women and children. Upon these swooped down a great crowd of enemies. The boat was captured, and its stem promptly turned back towards Cawnpore. On the morning of June 30, the boat lay again at the entrance of the fatal ghaut.
In the evidence taken long afterwards, there were brought back, according to one native witness, sixty sahibs, twenty-five memsahibs, and four children. “The Nana ordered the sahibs to be separated from the memsahibs, and shot. So the sahibs were seated on the ground, and two companies of the Nadiree Regiment stood ready to fire. Then said one of the memsahibs, the doctor’s wife (What doctor? How should I know?) ‘I will not leave my husband. If he must die, I will die with him.’ So she ran and sat down behind her husband, clasping him round the waist. Directly she said this, the other memsahibs said, ‘We also will die with our husbands,’ and they all sat down, each with her husband. Then their husbands said, ‘Go back,’ but they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered his soldiers; and they, going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they could not pull away the doctor’s wife.”
Captain Seppings asked leave to read prayers before they died. His hands were untied; one arm hung broken, but, standing up, he groped in his pocket for a little prayer-book, and commenced to read—but what prayer or psalm, none now can tell. “After he had read,” as the witness tells the story, “he shut the book, and the sahibs shook hands all round. Then the Sepoys fired. One sahib rolled one way, one another as they sat. But they were not dead, only wounded. So they went in and finished them off with swords.” When all was over, the twenty-four memsahibs, with their four children, were sent to swell the little crowd of captives in Savada-house. Some seventeen days of weeping life yet intervened between them and the fatal Well.
The story of the final act in the great tragedy at Cawnpore cannot be told without some account of events outside Cawnpore itself. A relieving force had been organised at Calcutta, of which Neill’s Fusileers at Allahabad were the advance guard; but a leader was wanted, and on June 17 Sir Patrick Grant brought Havelock, “the dust of Persia still in the crevices of his sword-handle,” to the Governor-General, saying, “Your Excellency, I have brought you the man.”
Havelock was sixty-two years of age when the great chance of his life came to him. A little man, prim, erect, alert, quick-footed, stern-featured, with snow-white moustache and beard. Havelock, no doubt, had his limitations. A strain of severity ran through his character. “He was always,” says one who served under him, “as sour as if he had swallowed a pint of vinegar, except when he was being shot at, and then he was as blithe as a schoolboy out for a holiday.” There is a touch of burlesque, of course, in that sentence; but Havelock was, no doubt, austere of temper, impatient of fools, and had a will that moved to its end with something of the fiery haste and scorn of obstacles proper to a cannon-ball. He was fond, too, of making Napoleonic orations to his men, and had a high-pitched, carrying voice, which could make itself audible to a regiment. And the British soldier in fighting mood is rather apt to be impatient of oratory.
But Havelock was a trained and scientific soldier, audacious and resolute in the highest degree; a deeply religious man, with a sense of duty of the antique sort, that scorned ease, and reckoned life, when weighed against honour, as a mere grain of wind-blown dust. And Havelock, somehow, inspired in his men a touch of that sternness of valour we associate with Cromwell’s Ironsides.
It is curious, in view of Havelock’s achievements and after-fame, to read in the current literature of the moment, the impression he made upon hasty critics in Calcutta and elsewhere. The Friend of India, the leading Calcutta journal, described him as a “fossil general”! Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “General Havelock is not in fashion. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome; but his little, old, stiff figure looks as active and fit for use as if he were made of steel.” She again and again refers to “dear little old Havelock, with his fussiness”—“fussiness” being in this case, little more than the impatience of a strong will set to a great task, and fretted by threads of red tape. Lord Hardinge had said, “If India is ever in danger, let Havelock be put in command of an army, and it will be saved.” And Havelock’s after-history amply justified that prediction.
Havelock had about the tiniest force that ever set forth to the task of saving an empire. It never was able to put on the actual battlefield 1500 men. There were 76 men of the Royal Artillery; less than 400 of the Madras Fusileers; less than 300 of the 78th Highlanders; 435 men of the 64th, and 190 of the 84th, with 450 Sikhs of somewhat doubtful loyalty, and 50 native irregular horse, whose disloyalty was not in the least doubtful. Havelock’s reliable cavalry consisted of 20 volunteers, amateurs mostly, under Barrow.
Measured against the scale of modern armies, Havelock’s force seems little more than a corporal’s guard. But the fighting value of this little army was not to be measured by counting its files. “Better soldiers,” says Archibald Forbes, “have never trod this earth.” They commenced their march from Allahabad on July 7; they marched, and fought, and conquered under the intolerable heat of an Indian midsummer, and against overwhelming odds; until when, on September 19—little more than eight weeks afterwards—Outram and Havelock crossed the Ganges in their advance on Lucknow, only 250 of Havelock’s “Ironsides” were left to take part in that advance. In the whole history of the war, men have seldom dared, and endured, and achieved more than did Havelock’s column in the gallant but vain struggle to relieve Cawnpore.