Читать книгу The Tale of the Great Mutiny - W. H. Fitchett - Страница 4

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Delhi lies thirty-eight miles to the south-west of Meerut, a city seven miles in circumference, ancient, stately, beautiful. The sacred Jumna runs by it. Its grey, wide-curving girdle of crenellated walls, is pierced with seven gates. It is a city of mosques and palaces and gardens, and crowded native bazaars. Delhi in 1857 was of great political importance, if only because the last representative of the Grand Mogul, still bearing the title of the King of Delhi, resided there in semi-royal state. The Imperial Palace, with its crowd of nearly 12,000 inmates, formed a sort of tiny royal city within Delhi itself, and here, if anywhere, mutiny might find a centre and a head.

Moreover, the huge magazines, stored with munitions of war, made the city of the utmost military value to the British. Yet, by special treaty, no British troops were lodged in Delhi itself; there were none encamped even on the historic Ridge outside it.

The 3rd Cavalry, heading the long flight of mutineers, reached Delhi in the early morning of the 11th of May. They spurred across the bridge, slew the few casual Englishmen they met as they swept through the streets, galloped to the king’s palace, and with loud shouts announced that they had “slain all the English at Meerut, and had come to fight for the faith.”

The king, old and nervous, hesitated. He had no reason for revolt. Ambition was dead in him. His estates had thriven under British administration. His revenues had risen from a little over £40,000 to £140,000. He enjoyed all that he asked of the universe, a lazy, sensual, opium-soaked life. Why should he exchange a musky and golden sloth, to the Indian imagination so desirable, for the dreadful perils of revolt and war? But the palace at Delhi was a moral plague-spot, a nest of poisonous insects, a vast household in which fermented every bestial passion to which human nature can sink. And discontent gave edge and fire to every other evil force. A spark falling into such a magazine might well produce an explosion. And the shouts of the revolted troopers from Meerut at its gates supplied the necessary spark.

While the old king doubted, and hesitated, and scolded, the palace guards opened the gates to the men of the 3rd Cavalry, who instantly swept in and slaughtered the English officials and English ladies found in it. Elsewhere mutiny found many victims. The Delhi Bank was attacked and plundered, and the clerks and the manager with his family were slain. The office of the Delhi Gazette shared the same fate, the unfortunate compositors being killed in the very act of setting up the “copy” which told of the tragedy at Meerut. All Europeans found that day in the streets of Delhi, down to the very babies, were killed without pity.

There were, as we have said, no white troops in Delhi. The city was held by a Sepoy garrison, the 38th, 54th, and 74th Sepoy regiments, with a battery of Sepoy artillery. The British officers of these regiments, when news of the Meerut outbreak reached them, made no doubt but that Hewitt’s artillery and cavalry from Meerut would follow fierce and fast on the heels of the mutineers. The Sepoys were exhorted briefly to be true to their salt, and the men stepped cheerfully off to close and hold the city gates against the mutineers.

The chief scene of interest for the next few hours was the main-guard of the Cashmere Gate. This was a small fortified enclosure in the rear of the great gate itself, always held by a guard of fifty Sepoys under a European officer. A low verandah ran around the inner wall of the main-guard, inside which, were the quarters of the Sepoys; a ramp or sloping stone causeway led to the summit of the gate itself, on which stood a small two-roomed house, serving as quarters for the British officer on duty. From the main-guard, two gates opened into the city itself.

The guard on that day consisted of a detachment of the 38th Native Infantry. They had broken into mutiny, and assisted with cheers and laughter at the spectacle of Colonel Ripley, of the 54th N.I., with other officers of that regiment, being hunted and sabred by some of the mutinous light cavalry who had arrived from Meerut. Two companies of the 54th were sent hurriedly to the gate, and met the body of their colonel being carried out literally hacked to pieces.

Colonel Vibart, one of the officers of the 54th, has given in his work, “The Sepoy Mutiny,” a vivid account of the scene in the main-guard, as he entered it. In one corner lay the dead bodies of five British officers who had just been shot. The main-guard itself was crowded with Sepoys in a mood of sullen disloyalty. Through the gate which opened on the city could be seen the revolted cavalry troopers, in their French-grey uniforms, their swords wet with the blood of the British officers they had just slain. A cluster of terrified English ladies—some of them widows already, though they knew it not—had sought refuge here, and their white faces added a note of terror to the picture.

Major Abbott, with 150 men of the 74th N.I., presently marched into the main-guard; but the hold of the officers on the men was of the slightest, and when mutiny, in the mass of Sepoys crowded into the main-guard, would break out into murder, nobody could guess.

Major Abbott collected the dead bodies of the fallen officers, put them in an open bullock-cart, covered them with the skirts of some ladies’ dresses, and despatched the cart, with its tragic freight, to the cantonments on the Ridge. The cart found its way to the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, and was abandoned there; and when, a month afterwards, the force under Sir Henry Barnard marched on to the crest the cart still stood there, with the dead bodies of the unfortunate officers—by this time turned to skeletons—in it.

Matters quickly came to a crisis at the Cashmere Gate. About four o’clock in the afternoon there came in quick succession the sound of guns from the magazine. This was followed by a deep, sullen, and prolonged blast that shook the very walls of the main-guard itself, while up into the blue sky slowly climbed a mighty cloud of smoke. Willoughby had blown up the great powder-magazine; and the sound shook both the nerves and the loyalty of the Sepoys who crowded the main-guard. There was kindled amongst them the maddest agitation, not lessened by the sudden appearance of Willoughby and Forrest, scorched and blackened by the explosion from which they had in some marvellous fashion escaped.

Brigadier Graves, from the Ridge, now summoned Abbott and the men of the 74th back to that post. After some delay they commenced their march, two guns being sent in advance. But the first sound of their marching feet acted as a match to the human powder-magazine. The leading files of Abbott’s men had passed through the Cashmere Gate when the Sepoys of the 38th suddenly rushed at it and closed it, and commenced to fire on their officers. In a moment the main-guard was a scene of terror and massacre. It was filled with eddying smoke, with shouts, with the sound of crackling muskets, of swearing men and shrieking women. Here is Colonel Vibart’s description of the scene:—

The horrible truth now flashed on me—we were being massacred right and left, without any means of escape! Scarcely knowing what I was doing, I made for the ramp which leads from the courtyard to the bastion above. Every one appeared to be doing the same. Twice I was knocked over as we all frantically rushed up the slope, the bullets whistling past us like hail, and flattening themselves against the parapet with a frightful hiss. To this day it is a perfect marvel to me how any one of us escaped being hit. Poor Smith and Reveley, both of the 74th, were killed close beside me. The latter was carrying a loaded gun, and, raising himself with a dying effort, he discharged both barrels into a knot of Sepoys, and the next moment expired.

The struggling crowd of British officers and ladies reached the bastion and crowded into its embrasures, while the Sepoys from the main-guard below took deliberate pot-shots at them. Presently a light gun was brought to bear on the unhappy fugitives crouching on the summit of the bastion. The ditch was twenty-five feet below, but there was no choice. One by one the officers jumped down. Some buckled their sword-belts together and lowered the ladies. One very stout old lady, Colonel Vibart records, “would neither jump down nor be lowered down; would do nothing but scream. Just then another shot from the gun crashed into the parapet; somebody gave the poor woman a push, and she tumbled headlong into the ditch beneath.” Officers and ladies scrambled up the almost perpendicular bank which forms the farther wall of the ditch, and escaped into the jungle beyond, and began their peril-haunted flight to Meerut.

Abbott, of the 74th, had a less sensational escape. His men told him they had protected him as long as they could; he must now fly for his life. Abbott resisted long, but at last said, “Very well. I’m off to Meerut; but,” he added, with a soldier’s instinct, “give me the colours.” And, carrying the colours of his regiment, he set off with one other officer on his melancholy walk to Meerut.

LIEUTENANT GEORGE WILLOUGHBY, Bengal Artillery

Reproduced, by kind permission of his niece, Miss Wallace, from a photograph of an unfinished water-colour drawing, taken about 1857

The most heroic incident in Delhi that day was the defence and explosion of the great magazine. This was a huge building, standing some 600 yards from the Cashmere Gate, packed with munitions of war—cannon, ammunition, and rifles—sufficient to have armed half a nation, and only a handful of Englishmen to defend it. It was in charge of Lieutenant Willoughby, who had under him two other officers (Forrest and Raynor), four conductors (Buckley, Shaw, Scully, and Crowe), and two sergeants (Edwards and Stewart); a little garrison of nine brave men, whose names deserve to be immortalised.

Willoughby was a soldier of the quiet and coolly courageous order; his men were British soldiers of the ordinary stuff of which the rank and file of the British Army is made. Yet no ancient story or classic fable tells of any deed of daring and self-sacrifice nobler than that which this cluster of commonplace Englishmen was about to perform. The Three Hundred who kept the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian swarms, the Three, who, according to the familiar legend, held the bridge across the Tiber against Lars Porsena, were not of nobler fibre than the Nine who blew up the great magazine at Delhi rather than surrender it to the mutineers.

Willoughby closed and barricaded the gates, and put opposite each two six-pounders, doubly loaded with grape; he placed a 24-pound howitzer so as to command both gates, and covered other vulnerable points with the fire of other guns. In all he had ten pieces of artillery in position—with only nine men to work them. He had, indeed, a score of native officials, and he thrust arms into their reluctant hands, but knew that at the first hostile shot they would run.

But the Nine could not hope to hold the magazine finally against a city in revolt. A fuse was accordingly run into the magazine itself, some barrels of powder were broken open, and their contents heaped on the end of the fuse. The fuse was carried into the open, and one of the party (Scully) stationed beside it, lighted port-fire in hand. Willoughby’s plan was to hold the magazine as long as he could work the guns. But when, as was inevitable, the wave of mutinous Sepoys swept over the walls, Willoughby was to give the signal by a wave of his hat, Scully would instantly light the fuse, and the magazine—with its stores of warlike material, its handful of brave defenders, and its swarm of eager assailants—would vanish in one huge thunderclap!

Presently there came a formal summons in the name of the King of Delhi to surrender the magazine. The summons met with a grim and curt refusal. Now the Sepoys came in solid columns down the narrow streets, swung round the magazine, and girdled it with shouts and a tempest of bullets. The native defenders, at the first shot, clambered down the walls and vanished, and the forlorn but gallant Nine were left alone. Hammers were beating fiercely on the gates. A score of improvised scaling-ladders were placed against the walls, and in a moment the Sepoys were swarming up. A gate was burst open, but, as the assailants tried to rush in, a blast of grape swept through them. Willoughby’s nine guns, each worked by a single gunner, poured their thunder of sound, and storm of shot, swiftly and steadily, on the swaying mass of Sepoys that blocked the gate.

Lieutenant Forrest, who survived the perils of that fierce hour, has told, in cool and soldierly language, its story:—

Buckley, assisted only by myself, loaded and fired in rapid succession the several guns above detailed, firing at least four rounds from each gun, and with the same steadiness as if standing on parade, although the enemy were then some hundreds in number, and kept up a hot fire of musketry on us within forty or fifty yards. After firing the last round, Buckley received a musket ball in his arm above the elbow; I, at the same time, was struck in the left hand by two musket balls.

When, before or since, has there been a contest so heroic or so hopeless? But what can Nine do against twice as many hundreds? From the summit of the walls a deadly fire is concentrated on the handful of gallant British. One after another drops. In another moment will come the rush of the bayonets. Willoughby looks round and sees Scully stooping with lighted port-fire over the fuse, and watching for the agreed signal. He lifts his hand. Coolly and swiftly Scully touches the fuse with his port-fire. The red spark runs along its centre; there is an earth-shaking crash, as of thunder, a sky-piercing leap of flame. The walls of the magazine are torn asunder; bodies of men and fragments of splintered arms fly aloft. The whole city seems to shake with the concussion, and a great pillar of smoke, mushroom-topped and huge, rises slowly in the sky. It is the signal to heaven and earth of how the Nine British, who kept the great magazine, had fulfilled their trust.

Of those gallant Nine, Scully, who fired the train, and four others vanished, along with hundreds of the mutineers, in one red rain. But, somehow, they themselves scarcely knew how, Willoughby, with his two officers, and Conductor Buckley found themselves, smoke-blackened and dazed, outside the magazine, and they escaped death, for the moment at least.

The fugitives who escaped from the Cashmere Gate had some very tragical experiences. Sinking from fatigue and hunger, scorched by the flame-like heat of the sun, wading rivers, toiling through jungles, hunted by villagers, they struggled on, seeking some place of refuge. Some reached Meerut, others Umballa, but many died. Of that much-enduring company of fugitives, it is recorded that the women often showed the highest degree of fortitude and patience. Yet more than one mother had to lay her child, killed by mere exposure or heat, in a nameless jungle grave; more than one wife had to see her husband die, of bullet or sword-stroke, at her feet.

But the fate of these wanderers was happier than that of the Europeans left in the city. Some twenty-seven—eleven of them being children and eight women—took refuge in a house near the great mosque. They held the house for three days, but, having no water, suffered all the agonies of thirst. The Sepoys set vessels of water in front of the house, and bade the poor besieged give up their arms and they should drink. They yielded, gave up the two miserable guns with which they had defended themselves, and were led out. No water was given them. Death alone was to cool those fever-blackened lips. They were set in a row, the eleven children and sixteen men and women, and shot. Let tender-hearted mothers picture that scene, transacted under the white glare of the Indian sun!

Some fifty Europeans and Eurasians barricaded themselves in a strong house in the English quarter of the city. The house was stormed, the unhappy captives were dragged to the King of Delhi’s palace, and thrust into an underground cellar, with no windows and only one door. For five days they sweltered and sickened in that black hole. Then they were brought out, with one huge rope girdling them—men, women, and children, a pale-faced, haggard, half-naked crowd, crouching under one of the great trees in the palace garden. About them gathered a brutal mob of Sepoys and Budmashes, amongst whom was Abool Bukr, the heir-apparent to the King of Delhi. The whole of the victims were murdered, with every accompaniment of cruelty, and it is said that the heir-apparent himself devised horrible refinements of suffering.

Less than six months afterwards Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse, shot that princely murderer, with a cluster of his kinsfolk, under the walls of Delhi, and in the presence of some 6000 shuddering natives, first explaining, that they were the murderers of women and children. Their bodies were brought in a cart through the most public street of the city, laid side by side, under the tree and on the very spot where they had tortured and murdered our women.

Mutiny grows swiftly. On Sunday night was fired, from the ranks of the 20th Sepoys, the volley that slew Colonel Finnis, and was, so to speak, the opening note in the long miserere of the Mutiny. At four o’clock on Monday afternoon the thunder of the great magazine, as it exploded, shook the walls of Delhi. Before the grey light of Tuesday morning broke over the royal city every member of the British race in it was either slain or a captive.

When a powder-magazine is fired, the interval of time between the flash of the first ignited grain and the full-throated blast of the explosion is scarcely measurable. And if the cluster of keen and plotting brains behind the Great Mutiny had carried out their plans as they intended, the Mutiny would have had exactly this bewildering suddenness of arrival. There is what seems ample evidence to prove that Sunday, May 31, was fixed for the simultaneous rising of all the Sepoy regiments in Bengal. A small committee of conspirators was at work in each regiment, elaborating the details of the Mutiny. Parties were to be told off in each cantonment, to murder the British officers and their families while in church, to seize the treasury, release the prisoners, and capture the guns. The Sepoy regiments in Delhi were to take possession of that great city, with its arsenal.

The outbreak at Meerut not merely altered the date, it changed the character of the revolt. The powder-magazine exploded, so to speak, in separate patches, and at intervals spread over weeks. It was this circumstance—added to the fact that the Sepoys had rejected the greased cartridges, and with them the Enfield rifle, against which Brown Bess was at a fatal disadvantage—that, speaking humanly, robbed the Mutiny of half its terror, and helped to save the British Empire in India.

But, even allowing for all this, a powder-magazine—although it explodes only by instalments—is a highly uncomfortable residence while the explosion is going on; and seldom before or since, in the long stretch of human history, have human courage and fortitude been put to such a test, as in the case of the handful of British soldiers and civilians who held the North-West Provinces for England during the last days of May 1857.

Sir George Campbell, who was in Simla at the time, has told the story of how he stood one day, early in June, beside the telegraph operator in Umballa, and listened while the wire, to use his own words, “seemed to repeat the experience of Job.” “First we heard that the whole Jullunder brigade had mutinied, and were in full march in our direction, on the way to Delhi. While that message was still being spoken, came another message, to tell us that the troops in Rajpootana had mutinied, and that Rohilcund was lost; following which, I heard that the Moradabad regiment had gone, and that my brother and his young wife had been obliged to fly.”

Let it be remembered that the revolted districts equal in area France, Austria, and Prussia put together; in population they exceeded them. And over this great area, and through this huge population, the process described by the telegrams, to whose rueful syllables Sir George Campbell listened, was being swiftly and incessantly repeated. The British troops did not number 22,000 men, and they were scattered over a hundred military stations, and submerged in a population of 94,000,000. Let the reader imagine fifteen or sixteen British regiments sprinkled in microscopic fragments over an area so vast, and amongst populations so huge!

The Sepoy army in Bengal numbered 150,000 men, and within six weeks of the shot which killed Colonel Finnis at Meerut, of its 120 regiments of horse and foot, only twenty-five remained under the British flag, and not five of these could be depended upon! A whole army, in a word, magnificently drilled, perfectly officered, strong in cavalry, and yet more formidable in guns, was in open and murderous revolt. Some idea of the scale and completeness of the Mutiny can be gathered from the single fact that every regiment of regular cavalry, ten regiments of irregular cavalry out of eighteen, and sixty-three out of seventy-four regiments of infantry, then on the strength of the Bengal army, disappeared finally and completely from its roster!

In each cantonment during the days preceding the revolt, the British officers on the spot were—to return to our figure—like men shut up in a powder-magazine with the train fired. There might be a dozen or twenty British officers with their families at a station held by a battery of native artillery, a couple of squadrons of native horse, and a regiment of native infantry—all plotting revolt and murder! Honour forbade the British to fly. To show a sign of mistrust or take a single visible precaution would be to precipitate the outbreak. Many of the old Bengal officers relied on their Sepoys, with a fond credulity that nothing could alarm, and that made them blind and deaf to the facts about them. “It was not,” says Trevelyan, “till he saw his own house in flames, and not till he looked down the barrels of Sepoy muskets, and heard Sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin to believe that his men were not as staunch as they ought to be.”

But all officers were not so blind as this. They knew their peril. They saw the tragedy coming. They walked day after day in front of the line of their men’s muskets on parade, not knowing when these iron tubes would break into red flame and flying bullets. They lay down night after night, knowing that the Sepoys in every hut were discussing the exact manner and time of their murder. Yet each man kept an untroubled brow, and went patiently the round of his duty, thanking God when he had no wife and child at the station to fall under the tender mercies of the mutineers. Farquhar, of the 7th Light Cavalry, writing to his mother at the time, said, “I slept every night dressed, with my revolver under my pillow, a drawn sword on my bed, and a loaded double-barrelled gun just under my bed. We remained in this jolly state,” he explained, “a fortnight.”

When the outbreak came, and the bungalows were in flames, and the men were shouting and firing on the parade-ground, it was a point of honour among the officers to hurry to the scene and make one last appeal to them, dying too often under the bullets of their own soldiers. The survivors then had to fly, with their women and children, and hide in the hot jungle or wander over the scorching plains, on which the white heat burns like a flame, suffering all the torments of thirst and weariness, of undressed wounds, and of wearing fever. If some great writer, with full knowledge and a pen of fire, could write the story of what was dared and suffered by Englishmen and Englishwomen at a hundred scattered posts throughout the North-West Provinces, in the early stages of the Mutiny, it would be one of the most moving and heroic tales in human records.

Sir Joseph Fayrer tells how, early in 1857, he was a member of a tiger-shooting expedition into the Terai. It was a merry party, and included some famous shots and great civil officials. They had killed their eleventh tiger when the first news of the rising reached the party. “All my companions,” says Fayrer, “except Gubbins, were victims of the Mutiny during the year. Thomason was murdered at Shah Jehanpore; Gonne in the Mullahpore district; Colonel Fischer was killed by the men of his own regiment; Thornhill was murdered at Seetapore; Lester was shot through the neck during the siege of Lucknow; Graydon was killed after the first relief of Lucknow.” Swift-following deaths of this sort have to be multiplied over the whole area of the Mutiny, before we can realise what it cost in life.

Fayrer, as a single example of the sort of tragedies which took place on every side, tells how his brother, who was an officer in a regiment of irregular cavalry, was killed. He was second in command of a detachment supposed to be of loyalty beyond suspicion. It had been sent by Lawrence from Lucknow to maintain order in the unsettled districts. There was no sign that the men intended to rise. The morning bugle had gone, the troop was ready to start, and young Fayrer, who had gone out, walked to a well with his charger’s bridle over his arm, and was drinking water from a cup. Suddenly one of his own troopers came up behind him and cut him down through the back of the neck with his tulwar. “The poor lad—only twenty-three—fell dead on the spot, gasping out the word ‘mother’ as he fell.” The troopers instantly rode at the three other British officers of the detachment. One of these slew three Sepoys before he was killed himself; the second, ill mounted, was overtaken and slain; the third, a splendid rider, made a reckless leap over a nullah, where his pursuers dared not follow, and so escaped.

Before describing the great drama at Cawnpore, or Lucknow, or Delhi, it is worth while to give, if only as hasty vignettes, some pictures of what happened at many of the stations scattered through Oude and the Punjaub. They are the opening episodes of a stupendous tragedy.

According to Sir Herbert Edwardes, it was the act of an English boy that saved the Punjaub. A very youthful operator—a mere lad—named Brendish, was by some accident alone in the Delhi Telegraph Office. When the Mutiny broke out he had to flee like the rest; but, before leaving, he wired a somewhat incoherent message to Umballa. “We must leave office,” it ran; “all the bungalows are on fire, burning down by the Sepoys of Meerut. They came in this morning.... Nine Europeans are killed.” That message reached Umballa, was sent on to Lahore, and was read there as a danger-signal so expressive, that the authorities at once decided to disarm the native troops at that station. The cryptic message was then flashed on to Peshawur, and was there read in the same sense, and acted upon with the same promptitude. Brendish was one of the few who afterwards escaped from Delhi.

At some of the stations, where cool heads and steadfast courage prevailed, the Sepoys were disarmed with swiftness and decision. This was especially the case in the Punjaub, where the cause of England was upheld by the kingly brain of John Lawrence, the swift decision of Herbert Edwardes, and the iron courage of Neville Chamberlain and of John Nicholson.

Lord Roberts has told how, on May 12, he was present as scribe at a council of war held in Peshawur. Round the table sat a cluster of gallant soldiers, such as might well take charge of the fortunes of a nation in the hour of its deadliest peril. Herbert Edwardes was there, and Neville Chamberlain, and Nicholson. They had to consider how to hold the Punjaub quiet while all Bengal was in a flame of mutiny. The Punjaub was a newly conquered province; its warlike population might well be expected to seize the first opportunity of rising against its conquerors. It was held by an army of over 80,000 troops, and of these only 15,000 were British—the rest, some 65,000, were almost sure to join the Mutiny. For every British soldier in the Punjaub, that is, there were four probable mutineers, while behind these was a warlike population, just subdued by the sword, and ready to rise again.

But the cool heads that met in that council were equal to their task. It was resolved to disarm all doubtful regiments, and raise new forces in their stead in the Punjaub itself, and from its wild frontier clans. A movable column, light-footed, hard-hitting, was to be formed under Neville Chamberlain’s command, with which to smite at revolt whenever it lifted its head. So the famous Movable Column came into being, commanded in turn by Chamberlain and by Nicholson. That column itself had to be purged heroically again and again to cleanse it from mutinous elements, till it practically came to consist of one field-battery, one troop of horse-artillery, and one infantry regiment, all British. Then it played a great part in the wild scenes of the Mutiny.

Before new levies could be raised in the Punjaub, however, the English had to give some striking proof of decision and strength. No Indian race will fight for masters who do not show some faculty for command. The crisis came at Peshawur itself, towards the end of May. The Sepoys had fixed May 22 for rising against their officers. On the 21st the 64th Native Infantry was to march into Peshawur, and on the following morning the revolt was to take place. Herbert Edwardes and Nicholson, however, were the last men in the world to be caught off their guard. At 7 A.M. on the morning of the 21st, parade was held, and, as the result of some clever manœuvres, the five native regiments found themselves confronted by a line of British muskets, and ordered to “pile arms.” The intending mutineers were reduced, almost with a gesture, to the condition of an unarmed mob, and that lightning-stroke of decision saved the Punjaub. Levies poured in; new regiments rose like magic; a loyal army became possible.

Little more than a fortnight afterwards, Neville Chamberlain discovered a plot in the 35th Native Infantry, and promptly blew two ringleaders from the guns, the first instance of that dramatic form of punishment in the Mutiny. Later, when Nicholson took command of the Movable Column, he was compelled to disarm two native regiments, the 35th and the 33rd. The 33rd was on its march to join the column, and Nicholson conducted the business with so nice an adjustment of time and method that the 35th had been disarmed, and their muskets and belts packed in carts and sent off to the fort, just as the 33rd marched up. As it halted it found itself, not side by side with a regiment of accomplices, but in front of a long and menacing line of British infantry and guns, and Roberts himself rode forward with the order to its colonel to pile arms. “What! disarm my regiment?” said that astonished officer, who was serenely unconscious that there was a mutinous brain under every shako in his regiment. When the order was repeated, the old colonel broke into actual tears. But there were sterner wills and stronger brains than his in command, and the 33rd was, in turn, reduced to harmlessness.

At Lahore, again, the Sepoys had an elaborate plot to kill their officers, overpower the European troops, and seize the treasury and the guns. Lahore was a city of 90,000 inhabitants, with a garrison of 2500 Sepoys in the city itself. The city troops were to rise first, and their success was to be signalled to Meanmeer, the military cantonment, six miles distant. Mutiny at Lahore was to be followed by revolt through all the military stations of the district, from the Rabee to the Sutlej. The plot, however, was discovered. General Corbett, a cool and gallant soldier, resolved to disarm the whole native garrison.

On the night of May 12, three days before the date fixed for the Mutiny, a military ball was to be held. This arrangement was not changed, lest the suspicions of the Sepoys should be aroused, and dancing was kept up till two o’clock in the morning. Then the officers at grey dawn hurried to the parade-ground, where, by instructions issued the day before, the whole brigade was assembled, nominally to hear some general orders read. These were read in the usual fashion at the head of each regiment. Then some brigade manœuvres followed, and these were so adroitly arranged that, at their close, the native regiments found themselves in quarter-distance column, with five companies of a British regiment, the 81st, opposite them in line, the guns being still in the rear of the 81st.

In a single sentence, brief and stern, the order was given for the native regiments to “pile arms.” The Grenadiers of the 16th, to whom the order was first addressed, hesitated; the men began to handle their arms; for one breathless moment it was doubtful whether they would obey or fight. But simultaneously with the words “pile arms,” the 81st had fallen back, coolly and swiftly, between the guns, and the Sepoys, almost at a breath, found themselves covered by a battery of twelve pieces loaded with grape, the artillerymen standing in position with burning port-fires, whilst along the line of the 81st behind ran the stern order, “Load,” and already the click of the ramrods in the muskets was heard.

The nerve of the Sepoys failed! Sullenly they piled arms, and 600 English, by adroitness and daring, disarmed 2500 Sepoys without a shot! What five minutes before had been a menace to the British power was made harmless.

Montgomery, the chief civil officer at Lahore, divides with Corbett the honour of the brilliant stroke of soldiership which saved the city. Never was there a less heroic figure in outward appearance than that of Montgomery. He was short, stout, soft-spoken, rubicund-faced, and bore, indeed, a ludicrous resemblance to Mr. Pickwick as depicted by the humorous pencil of “Phiz.” He was familiarly known, as a matter of fact, to all Englishmen in his province by the sobriquet of “Pickwick.” But nature sometimes conceals an heroic spirit within a very unheroic-looking body. If in outward look there was something sheep-like in Montgomery’s appearance, there was a lion-like strain in his courage. He had only a hint of the coming storm. A couple of scanty telegrams brought in the news of the mutiny at Meerut and the seizure of Delhi. With quick vision Montgomery read the temper of the native troops at Meanmeer, and, with swifter decision than even that of Corbett, he advised that they should be instantly disarmed. That decision averted a great disaster.

The whole story shows what is possible to clear judgment and resolute courage; but where these failed, or where some old Bengal officer retained his blind and fond credulity as to the “staunchness” of his men, then great tragedies became possible.

Thus at Futteghur, some seventy miles from Cawnpore, the 10th Native Infantry, with some irregular troops, held the cantonments. General Goldie was divisional commander; Colonel Smith held command of the 10th, and cherished a piously confident belief in the loyalty of his Sepoys. The civilians, with a shrewder insight into the state of affairs, believed mutiny certain, and murder highly probable, and determined to leave the station. On June 4 a little fleet of boats, laden with almost the entire English colony in the place—merchants, shopkeepers, missionaries, with their wives and children—started down the river, to the huge disgust of Colonel Smith, who thought their departure a libel on his beloved Sepoys. Part of the company found refuge with a friendly Zemindar, while three boats, containing nearly seventy persons—of whom forty-nine were women and children—pushed on to Cawnpore. In Cawnpore, however, though they were in ignorance of the fact, Wheeler and his gallant few were already fighting for life against overwhelming odds.

News soon reached the Sepoy lines at Cawnpore that three boat-loads of Sahibs were on the river, and a rush was made for them. The poor victims had pulled in to the bank and were enjoying “afternoon tea” when the horde of mutineers burst upon them. Some tried to hide in the long grass, which was set on fire above them. The rest, scorched, wounded, half-naked, with bleeding feet—mothers trying to shelter or carry their children—were dragged to the presence of Nana Sahib. The ladies and children were ordered to sit on the ground; their husbands, with their hands tied, were arranged in careful order behind them. Being thus picturesquely arranged for easy murder, some files of the 2nd Cavalry were marched up to kill the whole. The process was lengthy, wives clinging to their husbands, mothers trying to shelter their little ones with their own bodies from the keen cavalry swords. Nana Sahib watched the whole process with the leisurely and discriminating interest of a connoisseur.

On June 18 Colonel Smith’s trusted Sepoys broke into open revolt at the station, whence these poor fugitives had fled. The little British garrison, consisting of thirty fighting men, with sixty ladies and children, took refuge in a low mud fort, and held it for nearly three weeks. Then they fought their way to their boats and fled. They were fiercely pursued. One boat grounded, and its miserable passengers were summarily murdered. Death by bullets, by sunstroke, by drowning, pursued the rest. One boat-load escaped, but escaped only to reach Cawnpore, and to perish amid the horrors of the slaughter-house there.

One survivor has left a record of that dreadful voyage. He was in the boat that first grounded and was boarded by the Sepoys. He describes how the passengers were shot, and how “Major Robertson, seeing no hope, begged the ladies to come into the water rather than fall into their hands. While the ladies were throwing themselves into the water I jumped into the boat, took up a loaded musket, and, going astern, shot a Sepoy.... Mr. and Mrs. Fisher were about twenty yards from the boat; he had his child in his arms, apparently lifeless. Mrs. Fisher could not stand against the current; her dress, which acted like a sail, knocked her down, when she was helped up by Mr. Fisher.... Early the next morning a voice hailed us from the shore, which we recognised as Mr. Fisher’s. He came on board, and informed us that his poor wife and child had been drowned in his arms.”

For skill, daring, and promptitude, nothing exceeded the fashion in which the incipient mutiny at Multan was trampled out. At no other post were the conditions more perilous. The garrison consisted of a troop of native horse-artillery, two regiments of native infantry, and the 1st Irregular Cavalry; the only English troops were 50 artillerymen in charge of the magazine. Here, then, were 50 British artillerymen, without guns, opposed to over 3000 Sepoys—horse, foot, and artillery!

The decisive factor in the problem was the character of the British commander, Major Chamberlain. His strong will and genius for command held the 1st Irregular Cavalry steady. They were Hindus from the neighbourhood of Delhi, with a full measure of the superstition and pride of caste which swept away other regiments. But they believed in their commander. He swayed their imaginations as with a touch of magic. The spell of his looks and voice, his imperious will, overbore the impulse to revolt. His men declared they would follow him to the death! Chamberlain resolved to disarm the other native regiments, and he performed the perilous feat, not only with miraculous audacity, but with a miraculous nicety of arrangement.

The 2nd Punjaub Infantry and the 1st Punjaub Cavalry were to arrive at the station on a given day. They were native troops, but could—for the moment at least—be trusted. The new troops came in at nightfall. At 4 A.M. the next morning the two Sepoy regiments and a troop of native artillery were marched out as if for an ordinary parade. They were suddenly halted; the Punjaub troops quietly marched betwixt them and their lines; the fifty English gunners took their places beside the guns of the native artillery, and a little band of Sikh cavalry that could be trusted rode up to the flank of the guns.

Then Chamberlain gave the order to the suspected regiments to “pile arms.” One Sepoy shouted, “Don’t give up your arms! Fight for them;” but his English adjutant instantly grasped him by the throat, shook him as a terrier would shake a rat, and flung him on the ground. The mutinous Sepoys hesitated; their courage sank; they meekly piled arms, were marched back weaponless to their barracks, and the station was saved. But it was a great feat to disarm a whole garrison with only fifty English gunners. The regiment of irregular cavalry was permanently saved by the spell of Chamberlain’s authority, and, as a reward, is still the 1st Regiment of Bengal Cavalry.

Some of the revolting regiments, it is satisfactory to know, had very distressful experiences. They found that mutiny was a bad investment. Let the tale of the 55th, for example, be told. The regiment broke into open mutiny at Mardan on May 22, fired on their officers, and marched off to the hills with the regimental colours and treasure. Its colonel, Spottiswoode, blew out his brains in mingled grief and despair when he saw his “faithful” Sepoys in open revolt.

Meanwhile, the most menacing figure in all the great drama of the Mutiny—that of Nicholson—made its appearance on the track of the mutineers. Nicholson overtook them on the 24th, after a ride of seventy miles, slew 150, captured another 150 with the stolen colours, and promptly executed forty of his prisoners by blowing them from his guns. The rest of the broken regiment crossed the border, were hunted down by the hill-tribes, fell into the hands of Mohammedan fanatics, were “converted” by the argument of whip and sword, or were sold as slaves. “One fat old subahdar,” says Mr. Cave-Browne, “was sold for four annas (sixpence)”! Mutiny, it is clear, proved a very bitter experience for the unhappy 55th! The legend that has grown round the wanderings of this broken regiment is told by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in his vivid story, “The Lost Legion.”