General Hewitt did, indeed, very late in the evening march his troops on to the general parade-ground, and deployed them into line. But the Sepoys had vanished; some on errands of murder and rapine, the great body clattering off in disconnected groups along the thirty odd miles of dusty road, barred by two rivers, which led to Delhi.
One trivial miscalculation robbed the outbreak of what might well have been its most disastrous feature. The Sepoys calculated on finding the Rifles, armed only with their side-arms, in the church. But on that very evening, by some happy chance, the church parade was fixed for half-an-hour later than the previous Sunday. So the Native Cavalry galloped down to the lines of the Rifles half-an-hour too soon, and found their intended victims actually under arms! They wheeled off promptly towards the gaol; but the narrow margin of that half-hour saved the Rifles from surprise and slaughter.
Hewitt had, as we have seen, in addition to the Rifles, a strong troop of horse artillery and 600 British sabres in hand. He could have pursued the mutineers and cut them down ruthlessly in detail. The gallant officers of the Carabineers pleaded for an order to pursue, but in vain. Hewitt did not even send news to Delhi of the revolt! With a regiment of British rifles, 1000 strong, standing in line, he did not so much as shoot down, with one fierce and wholesome volley, the budmashes, who were busy in murder and outrage among the bungalows. When day broke Meerut showed streets of ruins blackened with fire, and splashed red with the blood of murdered Englishmen and Englishwomen. According to the official report, “groups of savages were actually seen gloating over the mangled and mutilated remains of their victims.” Yet Hewitt thought he satisfied all the obligations of a British soldier by peacefully and methodically collecting the bodies of slaughtered Englishmen and Englishwomen. He did not shoot or hang a single murderer!
It is idle, indeed, to ask what the English at Meerut did on the night of the 10th; it is simpler to say what they did not do. Hewitt did nothing that night; did nothing with equal diligence the next day—while the Sepoys that had fled from Meerut were slaying at will in the streets of Delhi. He allowed his brigade, in a helpless fashion, to bivouac on the parade-ground; then, in default of any ideas of his own, took somebody else’s equally helpless advice, and led his troops back to their cantonments to protect them!
General Hewitt explained afterwards that while he was responsible for the district, his brigadier, Archdale Wilson, was in command of the station. Wilson replied that “by the regulations, Section XVII.,” he was under the directions of General Hewitt, and, if he did nothing, it was because that inert warrior ordered nothing to be done. Wilson, it seems, advised Hewitt not to attempt any pursuit, as it was uncertain which way the mutineers had gone. That any attempt might be made to dispel that uncertainty did not occur, apparently, to either of the two surprising officers in command at Meerut! A battery of galloper guns outside the gates of Delhi might have saved that city. It might, indeed, have arrested the Great Mutiny.
But all India waited, listening in vain for the sound of Hewitt’s cannon. The divisional commander was reposing in his arm-chair at Meerut; his brigadier was contemplating “the regulations, Section XVII.,” and finding there reasons for doing nothing, while mutiny went unwhipped at Meerut, and was allowed at Delhi to find a home, a fortress, and a crowned head! It was rumoured, indeed, and believed for a moment, over half India, that the British in Meerut had perished to a man. How else could it be explained that, at a crisis so terrible, they had vanished so completely from human sight and hearing? Not till May 24—a fortnight after the outbreak—did a party of Dragoons move out from Meerut to suppress some local plunderers in the neighbourhood.
One flash of wrathful valour, it is true, lights up the ignominy of this story. A native butcher was boasting in the bazaar at Meerut how he had killed the wife of the adjutant of the 11th. One of the officers of that regiment heard the story. He suddenly made his appearance in the bazaar, seized the murderer, and brought him away a captive, holding a loaded pistol to his head. A drum-head court-martial was improvised, and the murderer was promptly hanged. But this represents well-nigh the only attempt made at Meerut during the first hours after the outbreak to punish the mutiny and vindicate law.
Colonel Mackenzie, indeed, relates one other incident of a kind to supply a grim satisfaction to the humane imagination even at this distance of time. Mackenzie was a subaltern in one of the revolting regiments—the 3rd Bengal Light Cavalry. When the mutiny broke out he rode straight to the lines, did his best to hold the men steady, and finally had to ride for his life with two brother officers, Lieutenant Craigie and Lieutenant Clarke. Here is Colonel Mackenzie’s story. The group, it must be remembered, were riding at a gallop.
The telegraph lines were cut, and a slack wire, which I did not see, as it swung across the road, caught me full on the chest, and bowled me over into the dust. Over my prostrate body poured the whole column of our followers, and I well remember my feelings as I looked up at the shining hoofs. Fortunately I was not hurt, and regaining my horse, I remounted, and soon nearly overtook Craigie and Clarke, when I was horror-struck to see a palanquin-gharry—a sort of box-shaped venetian-sided carriage—being dragged slowly onwards by its driverless horse, while beside it rode a trooper of the 3rd Cavalry, plunging his sword repeatedly through the open window into the body of its already dead occupant—an unfortunate European woman. But Nemesis was upon the murderer. In a moment Craigie had dealt him a swinging cut across the back of the neck, and Clarke had run him through the body. The wretch fell dead, the first Sepoy victim at Meerut to the sword of the avenger of blood.
For the next few weeks Hewitt was, probably, the best execrated man in all India. We have only to imagine what would have happened if a Lawrence, instead of a Hewitt, had commanded at Meerut that night, to realise for how much one fool counts in human history. That Hewitt did not stamp out mutiny or avenge murder in Meerut was bad; his most fatal blunder was, that he neither pursued the mutineers in their flight to Delhi, nor marched hard on their tracks to the help of the little British colony there.