The battle seemed won, and Havelock, reforming his column, moved steadily forward. But the Nana was playing his last card, and his generals at least showed desperate courage. They made a third stand athwart the Cawnpore road, and within a short distance of Cawnpore itself. A 24-pounder, flanked on either side by guns of lighter calibre, covered the Nana’s front, and his infantry, a solid mass, was drawn up behind the guns. Havelock’s men had marched twenty miles, and made a dozen desperate charges. Their guns were far in the rear. Yet to halt was to be destroyed.
Havelock allowed his men to fling themselves panting on the ground for a few minutes; then, riding to the front, and turning his back to the enemy’s guns, so as to face the men, he cried in his keen, high-pitched voice, “The longer you look at it, men, the less you will like it! The brigade will advance—left battalion leading.”
The left battalion was the 64th. Major Stirling promptly brought forward his leading files, and Havelock’s son and aide-de-camp galloped down, and, riding beside Stirling, shared with him the leadership of the charge—a circumstance for which the 64th, as a matter of fact, scarcely forgave him, as they wanted no better leadership than that of their own major. There was less of élan and dash about this charge than in the earlier charges of the day; but in steady valour it was unsurpassed.
On came the 64th, silently and coolly. Havelock himself, in a letter to his wife, wrote with a father’s pride about his son. “I never saw so brave a youth,” he wrote, “as the boy Harry: he placed himself opposite the muzzle of a gun that was scattering death into the ranks of the 64th Queen’s, and led on the regiment under a shower of grape to its capture. This finished the fight. The grape was deadly, but he calm, as if telling George stories about India.”
When the steady but shot-tormented line of the 64th found itself so near the battery that through the whirling smoke they could see the toiling gunners and the gleam of Sepoy bayonets beyond them, then the British soldiers made their leap. With a shout they charged on and over the guns, and through the lines behind, and Nana Sahib’s force was utterly and finally crushed. Havelock had not a sabre to launch on the flying foe; but his tired infantry, who had marched twenty miles, and fought without pause for four hours, kept up the pursuit till the outer edge of Cawnpore was reached. Then Havelock halted them; and, piling arms, the exhausted soldiers dropped in sections where they stood, falling asleep on the bare ground, careless of food or tents.
They were aroused long before daybreak, and through their ranks ran in whispers the story, grim and terrible, of the massacre which, by only a few hours, had cheated their splendid valour of its reward.
How great was the valour, how stubborn the endurance, shown thus far by Havelock’s men is not easily realised. In nine days—betwixt July 7-16—they had, to quote their commander’s words “marched under the Indian sun of July 126 miles, and fought four actions.” What better proof of hardihood, valour, and discipline could be imagined? But the British soldier is a queer compound, with very sudden and surprising alternations of virtue. When Cawnpore was won and plundered, immense stores of beer and spirits fell into the hands of the soldiers, and for a time it seemed as if Havelock’s band of heroes would dissolve into a mere ignoble gang of drunkards. Havelock promptly ordered every drinkable thing in Cawnpore to be bought or seized. “If I had not done this,” he wrote, “it would have required one half my force to keep the other half sober, and I should not have had a soldier in camp!”
Whether the terror of Havelock’s advance on Cawnpore actually caused the massacre of the English captives there may be doubted; it certainly hastened it. Nana Sahib, to whom murder was a luxury, would no more have spared the women and the children than a tiger would spare a lamb lying under its paw. But even a tiger has its lazy moods, and, say, immediately after a full meal, is temporarily careless about fresh slaughter. Nana Sahib had supped full of cruelty, and was disposed, for a brief period at all events, to allow his captives to live. Moreover, some of the women in his own harem sent him word they would slay themselves and their children if he murdered the memsahibs and their little ones. But on the night of July 15 the fugitives from Pandoo Nuddee reached Cawnpore, amongst them being Bala Rao, the Nana’s brother and general, who brought from the fight a bullet in his shoulder, and a new argument for murder in his heart.
In a council held between the Nana and his chief officials that night, the fate of the captives was discussed. Teeka Sing understood British nature so ill that he argued Havelock’s men would be robbed of their only motive for continuing their advance on Cawnpore if the captives were slain. They might, he urged, risk the perils of a new battle for the sake of rescuing the captives, but not for the mere pleasure of burying them. That they might have the passion to avenge them did not enter into Teeka Sing’s somewhat limited intelligence. Other chiefs argued, again, that if the captives were allowed to live, they might prove very inconvenient witnesses against a good many people.
It is probable that the strongest argument on the side of murder was the mere joy of killing somebody with a white face. Havelock’s Fusileers and Highlanders declined to allow themselves to be killed; they were, in fact, slaying the Nana’s Sepoys with disconcerting fury and despatch. But the heroes who had fled again and again before a British force one-fifth their number, could revenge themselves in perfect security by slaying the helpless women and children imprisoned in the Bebeeghur. So the order for massacre went forth.