During the day the mutilated bodies of our men were recovered from the ditch. The Sikhs burnt theirs, while a large fatigue party of the Forty-Second and Ninety-Third was employed digging one long grave in a tope of trees not far from the camp. About four o'clock in the afternoon the funeral took place, Brigadier Hope and the officers on the right, wrapped in their tartan plaids, the non-commissioned officers and the privates on their left, each sewn up in a blanket. The Rev. Mr. Cowie, whom we of the Ninety-Third had nicknamed "the Fighting Padre," afterwards Bishop of Auckland, New Zealand, and the Rev. Mr. Ross, chaplain of the Forty-Second, conducted the service, Mr. Ross reading the ninetieth Psalm and Mr. Cowie the rest of the service. The pipers of the Forty-Second and Ninety-Third, with muffled drums, played The Flowers of the Forest as a dead march. In all my experience in the army or out of it I never witnessed such intense grief, both among officers and men, as was expressed at this funeral. Many of all ranks sobbed like tender-hearted women. I especially remember our surgeon, "kind-hearted Billy Munro" as the men called him; also Lieutenants Archie Butter and Dick Cunningham, who were aides-de-camp to Adrian Hope. Cunningham had rejoined the regiment after recovery from his wounds at Kudjwa in October, 1857, but they had left him too lame to march, and he was a supernumerary aide-de-camp to Brigadier Hope; he and Butter were both alongside the brigadier, I believe, when he was struck down by the renegade ruffian.
We halted during the 17th, and strong fatigue-parties were employed with the engineers destroying the fort by blowing up the gateways. The place was ever after known in the Ninety-Third as "Walpole's Castle." On the 18th we marched, and on the 22nd we came upon the retreating rebels at a place called Sirsa, on the Râmgunga. The Ninth Lancers and Horse-Artillery and two companies of the Ninety-Third (I forget their numbers) crossed the Râmgunga by a ford and intercepted the retreat of a large number of the enemy, who were escaping by a bridge of boats, the material for which the country people had collected for them. But their retreat was now completely cut off, and about three hundred of them were reported either killed or drowned in the Râmgunga.
About 3 P.M. a tremendous sandstorm, with thunder, and rain in torrents, came on. The Râmgunga became so swollen that it was impossible for the detachment of the Ninety-Third to recross, and they bivouacked in a deserted village on the opposite side, without tents, the officers hailing across that they could make themselves very comfortable for the night if they could only get some tea and sugar, as the men had biscuits, and they had secured a quantity of flour and some goats in the village. But the boats which the enemy had collected had all broken adrift, and there was apparently no possibility of sending anything across to our comrades. This dilemma evoked an act of real cool pluck on the part of our commissariat gomâshta,[44] bâboo Hera Lâll Chatterjee, whom I have before mentioned in my seventh chapter in reference to the plunder of a cartload of biscuits at Bunnee bridge on the retreat from Lucknow. By this time Hera Lâll had become better acquainted with the "wild Highlanders," and was even ready to risk his life to carry a ration of tea and sugar to them. This he made into a bundle, which he tied on the crown of his head, and although several of the officers tried to dissuade him from the attempt, he tightened his chudder[45] round his waist, and declaring that he had often swum the Hooghly, and that the Râmgunga should not deprive the officers and men of a detachment of his regiment of their tea, he plunged into the river, and safely reached the other side with his precious freight on his head! This little incident was never forgotten in the regiment so long as Hera Lâll remained the commissariat gomâshta of the Ninety-Third. He was then a young man, certainly not more than twenty. Although thirty-five more years of rough-and-tumble life have now considerably grizzled his appearance, he must often look back with pride to that stormy April evening in 1858, when he risked his life in the Râmgunga to carry a tin-pot of tea to the British soldiers.
Among the enemy killed that day were several wearing the uniforms stripped from the dead of the Forty-Second in the ditch of Rooyah; so, of course, we concluded that this was Nirput Singh's force, and the defeat and capture of its guns in some measure, I have no doubt, re-established General Walpole in the good opinion of the authorities, but not much in that of the force under his command.
Nothing else of consequence occurred till about the 27th of April, when our force rejoined the Commander-in-Chief's column, which had advanced via Futtehghur, and we heard that Sir William Peel had died of smallpox at Cawnpore on his way to Calcutta. The news went through the camp from regiment to regiment, and caused almost as much sorrow in the Ninety-Third as the death of poor Adrian Hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] See Appendix B.
[44] Native assistant in charge of stores.
[45] A wrapper worn by Bengalee men and up-country women.