The Tale of the Great Mutiny

by W. H. Fitchett

From July 1 the captives, 210 in number, had been crowded into a small building containing two rooms, each 20 ft. by 10 ft., and an open court some fifteen yards square. In that suffering and helpless crowd were five men, guessed to have been Colonels Smith and Goldie, Mr. Thornhill, the judge of Futteghur, and two others. They had neither furniture nor bedding, nor even straw, and were fed daily on a scanty ration of native bread and milk. Two of the ladies were taken across each morning to the Nana’s stables, and made to grind corn at a hand-mill for hours together. This was done, not for the sake of the scanty store of flour the poor captives ground out, but by way of insult. To the Eastern imagination, when a dead enemy’s womankind grind corn in the house of his slayer, captivity has reached its blackest depths. The English ladies, according to native testimony, did not object to do the work of slaves in this fashion, as it, at least, enabled them to carry back a handful of flour to their hungry little ones.

Sickness mercifully broke out amongst the captives, and in a week eighteen women and seven children died. A native doctor kept a list of these, and after Havelock captured Cawnpore the list was discovered. Months afterwards there was sad joy in many an English household when, on the evidence of this list, it was known that their loved ones had, in this way, anticipated and escaped the Nana’s vengeance. One poor wife, in the sadness of that captivity, gave birth to a little one, and in the native doctor’s list of deaths is the pathetic record—a tragedy in each syllable—“An infant two days old.”

The evidence seems to show that during these terrible days the women were not exposed to outrage in the ordinary sense of that word, or to mutilation, but every indignity and horror which the Hindu imagination could plan short of that was emptied upon them, and some of the younger women, at least, were carried off to the harems of one or other of the Nana’s generals. On the face of the earth there could have been at the time no other scene of anguish resembling that in the crowded and darkened rooms of the Bebeeghur, where so great a company of women and children, forsaken of hope, with the death of all their dearest behind them, sat waiting for death themselves.

Nana Sahib was an epicure in cruelty, and was disposed to take his murders in dainty and lingering instalments. At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 15 he sent over some of his officers to the Bebeeghur, and bade the Englishmen come forth. They came out, the two colonels, the judge, a merchant named Greenaway, and his son, and with them a sixth, an English boy, fourteen years of age, nameless now, but apparently willing to share the perilous responsibilities of “being a man.” Poor lad! Motherless, his name all unknown, his father, perhaps, floating a disfigured corpse on the sliding current of the muddy Ganges, he appears for a moment, a slender, boyish figure, in the living frescoes of that grim tragedy, and then vanishes.

Under the cool shade of a lime tree sat Nana Sahib, dark of face, gaudy of dress, and round him a cluster of his kinsmen and officers, Bala Rao among them, whose wounded shoulder was now to be avenged. Brief ceremony was shown to this little cluster of haggard and ragged sahibs. A grim nod from the Nana, a disorderly line of Sepoys with levelled muskets and retracted lips, and the six were shot down and their bodies cast on the dusty roadside for every passer-by to spit at.

A little before five o’clock a woman from the Nana’s household stepped inside the door of the Bebeeghur, and looked over the crowd of weary mothers and wan-faced children. A curious stillness fell on the little company, while, in careless accents, the woman gave the dreadful order: they were “all to be killed”! One English lady, with quiet courage, stepped up to the native officer who commanded the guard, and asked “if it was true they were all to be murdered.” Even the Sepoys shrank from a crime so strange and wanton. The officer bade the Englishwomen not to be afraid, and the woman from the Nana’s harem was told roughly by the soldiers that her orders would not be obeyed.

It seemed monstrous indeed that an order which was to send 200 helpless human beings to death should be brought, like a message about some domestic trifle, on a servant-woman’s lips. The messenger vanished. The Sepoys on guard consulted together and agreed that with their own hands, at least, they would not slay the prisoners. According to one account they were ordered by a new messenger to fire through the windows upon the company of women and children, many now praying within. They obeyed the order to fire, and the sudden wave of flame and smoke, with the crash of twenty discharged muskets, swept over the heads of the captive crowd within. But the Sepoys, of design, fired high, and no one was wounded.

When Havelock’s men afterwards entered those rooms, one little detail bore mute witness to the use to which some of the ladies had turned the few minutes which followed the volley of the Sepoys. They evidently tore strips from their dresses, and with them tried to tie the door fast; and still those broken strips of linen and silk were hanging from the door handles when Havelock’s men, two days afterwards, entered Cawnpore.

Crime never wants instruments, and Nana Sahib soon found scoundrels willing to carry out his orders. It was a little after five o’clock—just when Stephenson’s Fusileers and Hamilton’s Highlanders were sweeping over the bridge at Pandoo Nuddee—that five men, each carrying a tulwar, walked to the door of the Bebeeghur. Two were rough peasants; two belonged to the butcher’s caste; one wore the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard. The five men entered, and the shuddering crowd of women and children was before them. The crowd, who watched as the door opened, saw standing erect on the threshold the English lady who had asked the native officer whether they were all to be killed. Then the door was closed, and over the scene that followed the horrified imagination refuses to linger.

Wailing, broken shrieks, the sound of running feet crept out on the shuddering air. Presently the door opened, and the man in the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard came out with his sword broken short off at the hilt. There were 212 to be killed, and the strain on steel blades as well as on human muscles was severe!