On this I asked him, "Were you in Cawnpore when the Mutiny broke out?" To which he replied: "No, thank God! I was in my home in Rohilcund; and my hands are unstained by the blood of any one, excepting those who have fallen in the field of battle. I knew that the storm was about to burst, and had gone to place my wife and children in safety, and I was in my village when I heard the news of the mutinies at Meerut and Bareilly. I immediately hastened to join the Bareilly brigade, and marched with them for Delhi. There I was appointed engineer-in-chief, and set about strengthening the defences by the aid of a party of the Company's engineers which had mutinied on the march from Roorkee to Meerut. I remained in Delhi till it was taken by the English in September. I then made my way to Lucknow with as many men as I could collect of the scattered forces. We first marched to Muttra, where we were obliged to halt till I threw a bridge of boats across the Jumna for the retreat of the army. We had still a force of over thirty thousand men under the command of Prince Feroz Shâh and General Bukht Khân. As soon as I reached Lucknow I was honoured with the post of chief-engineer. I was in Lucknow in November when your regiment assisted to relieve the Residency. I saw the horrible slaughter in the Secundrabâgh. I had directed the defences of that place the night before, and was looking on from the Shâh Nujeef when you assaulted it. I had posted over three thousand of the best troops in Lucknow in the Secundrabâgh, as it was the key to the position, and not a man escaped. I nearly fainted; my liver turned to water when I saw the green flag pulled down, and a Highland bonnet set up on the flag-staff which I had erected the night before. I knew then that all was over, and directed the guns of the Shâh Nujeef to open fire on the Secundrabâgh. Since then I have planned and superintended the construction of all the defensive works in and around Lucknow. You will see them when you return, and if the sepoys and artillerymen stand firmly behind them, many of the English army will lose the number of their mess, as you call it, before you again become masters of Lucknow."

I then asked him if it was true that the man he had called Micky on our first acquaintance had been one of the men employed by the Nânâ to butcher the women and children at Cawnpore in July? To this he replied: "I believe it is true, but I did not know this when I employed him; he was merely recommended to me as a man on whom I could depend. If I had known then that he was a murderer of women and children, I should have had nothing to do with him, for it is he who has brought bad luck on me; it is my kismut, and I must suffer. Your English proverb says, 'You cannot touch pitch and escape defilement,' and I must suffer; Allah is just. It is the conduct of wretches such as these that has brought the anger of Allah on our cause." On this I asked him if he knew whether there was any truth in the report of the European women having been dishonoured before being murdered. "Sâhib," he replied, "you are a stranger to this country or you would not ask such a question. Any one who knows anything of the customs of this country and the strict rules of caste, knows that all such stories are lies, invented to stir up race-hatred, as if we had not enough of that on both sides already. That the women and children were cruelly murdered I admit, but not one of them was dishonoured; and all the sentences written on the walls of the houses in Cawnpore, such as, 'We are at the mercy of savages, who have ravished young and old,' and such like, which have appeared in the Indian papers and been copied from them into the English ones, are malicious forgeries, and were written on the walls after the re-occupation of Cawnpore by General Outram's and Havelock's forces. Although I was not there myself, I have spoken with many who were there, and I know that what I tell you is true."

I then asked him if he could give me any idea of the reason that had led the Nânâ to order the commission of such a cold-blooded, cowardly crime. "Asiatics," he said, "are weak, and their promises are not to be relied on, but that springs more from indifference to obligations than from prearranged treachery. When they make promises, they intend to keep them; but when they find them inconvenient, they choose to forget them. And so it was, I believe, with the Nânâ Sâhib. He intended to have spared the women and children, but they had an enemy in his zenâna in the person of a female fiend who had formerly been a slave-girl, and there were many about the Nânâ (Azeemoolla Khân for one) who wished to see him so irretrievably implicated in rebellion that there would be no possibility for him to draw back. So this woman was powerfully supported in her evil counsel, and obtained permission to have the English ladies killed; and after the sepoys of the Sixth Native Infantry and the Nânâ's own guard had refused to do the horrible work, this woman went and procured the wretches who did it. This information I have from General Tântia Topee, who quarrelled with the Nânâ on this same matter. What I tell you is true: the murder of the European women and children at Cawnpore was a woman's crime, for there is no fiend equal to a female fiend; but what cause she had for enmity against the unfortunate ladies I don't know—I never inquired."

Those of my readers who were in India at the time may remember that something about this slave-girl was said in all the native evidence collected at the time on the subject of the Cawnpore massacre.

I next asked Mahomed Ali Khân if he knew whether there was any truth in the stories about General Wheeler's daughter having shot four or five men with a revolver, and then leaped into the well at Cawnpore. "All these stories," was his answer, "are pure inventions with no foundation of truth. General Wheeler's daughter is still alive, and is now in Lucknow; she has become a Mussulmânee, and has married according to Mahommedan law the man who protected her; whether she may ever return to her own people I know not."

In such conversation I passed the night with my prisoner, and towards daybreak I permitted him to perform his ablutions and morning devotions, after which he once more thanked me, and prayed that Allah might reward me for my kindness to His oppressed servant. Once, and only once, did he show any weakness, in alluding to his wife and two boys in their faraway home in Rohilcund, when he remarked that they would never know the fate of their unfortunate father. But he at once checked himself, saying, "I have read French history as well as English; I must remember Danton, and show no weakness." He then produced a gold ring which was concealed among his hair, and asked me if I would accept it and keep it in remembrance of him, in token of his gratitude. It was, he said, the only thing he could give me, as everything of value had been taken from him when he was arrested. He went on to say that the ring in question was only a common one, not worth more than ten rupees, but that it had been given to him by a holy man in Constantinople as a talisman, though the charm had been broken when he had joined the unlucky man who was his fellow-prisoner. I accepted the ring, which he placed on my finger with a blessing and a prayer for my preservation, and he told me to look on it and remember Mahomed Khân when I was in front of the fortifications of Lucknow, and no evil would befall me. He had hardly finished speaking when a guard from the provost-marshal came with an order to take over the prisoners, and I handed this man over with a sincere feeling of pity for his fate.

Immediately after, I received orders that the division would march at sunrise for Lucknow, and that my party was to join the rear-guard, after the ammunition-park and siege-train had moved on. The sun was high in the heavens before we left the encamping-ground, and in passing under a tree on the side of the Cawnpore and Lucknow road, I looked up, and was horrified to see my late prisoner and his companion hanging stark and stiffened corpses! I could hardly repress a tear as I passed. But on the 11th of March, in the assault on the Begum's Kothee, I remembered Mahomed Ali Khân and looked on the ring. I am thankful to say that I went through the rest of the campaign without a scratch, and the thoughts of my kindness to this unfortunate man certainly did not inspire me with any desire to shirk danger. I still have the ring, the only piece of Mutiny plunder I ever possessed, and shall hand it down to my children together with the history of Mahomed Ali Khân.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] Butler.

[38] It must also be remembered that these officials knew much more of the terrible facts attending the Mutiny—of the wholesale murder (and even worse) of English women and the slaughter of English children—than the rank and file were permitted to hear; and that they were also, both from their station and their experience, far better able to decide the measures best calculated to crush the imminent danger threatening our dominion in India.