Читать книгу The Tale of the Great Mutiny - W. H. Fitchett - Страница 5

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Perhaps the most characteristic story of Sepoy outbreak is that at Allahabad. The city stands at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna, 500 miles from Calcutta, and, with its strong fortress and great arsenal, was a strategic point scarcely second in importance to Delhi. It had a population of 75,000, highly fanatical in temper. Its arsenal was one of the largest in India, having arms for 40,000 men and great stores of artillery. Yet, with the exception of the magazine staff, there was not a British soldier in the city! It was garrisoned by the 6th Native Infantry, a wing of a Sikh regiment, the 9th, a battery of native artillery, and some native cavalry.

Colonel Simpson of the 6th, who was in command, cherished the most enthusiastic faith in his men. He looked on his cherished Sepoys as a regiment of mere dusky-skinned Sir Galahads; each one of them was as faithful as Milton’s Abdiel! Some sixty superannuated British artillerymen, the youngest of them over fifty years of age, had been thrown hurriedly into the fort itself as a garrison; and Colonel Simpson strongly urged that his regiment should be taken into the fort in their place as “a proof of confidence.” This would have been like putting a committee of wolves inside the fold!

At evening parade on June 6, Colonel Simpson read to his Sepoys the formal thanks of the Governor-General for their virtuous offer to go out and fight the wicked mutineers at Delhi. He added a glowing eulogium of their loyalty on his own account. The Sepoys cheered, Colonel Simpson and his fellow-officers adjourned to the mess-room, and no doubt discoursed with great comfort on the much-enduring fidelity of their men. Within four hours of being thanked by Lord Canning and praised by Colonel Simpson, the “faithful” Sepoys of the 6th Infantry had murdered seventeen officers and all the women and children of English blood they could capture, and were in full march to Delhi.

The tale is typical. At nine o’clock a bugle call sounded from the lines—it was the signal for revolt. The men rushed to arms. The Sepoy artillerymen holding the bridge swung their guns round, and opened fire on their officers. Harward and Alexander, in command of the Native Irregular Horse, and both officers of great promise, leaped into their saddles, and galloped fiercely to the bridge to recapture the guns. When they gave the order to charge, their treacherous followers suddenly pulled up; and, followed by only three troopers, the officers rode at the guns. Alexander, rising in his stirrups for one gallant sword-stroke, was shot through the heart; and Harward had to gallop for his life.

Simpson and his officers in the meanwhile ran to the parade-ground to “expostulate” with their men. Five officers were instantly shot down. Colonel Simpson was beginning to address a new series of compliments to his faithful Sepoys, but they turned their muskets upon him, and interrupted his eloquence with a volley. By some miracle he escaped and galloped off to the fort. He had to ride past the mess-house, and the mess guard turned out and took pot shots at him as he rode. The unhappy colonel reached the gate of the fort with a dying horse, a wounded arm, and an entirely new theory of Sepoy loyalty.

But was the fort itself safe? Its garrison consisted of the sixty odd superannuated artillerymen, a few civilian volunteers, the wing of a Sikh regiment, and a company of the 9th Native Infantry. These men held the gate, and were, of course, only waiting to open it to their revolted comrades. If the Sikhs joined hands with them, there remained nothing but hopeless massacre for the British. And only five days before, at Benares, it must be remembered, a Sikh regiment had opened fire on its officers! As a matter of fact, the Sikhs in the fort were effervescing with excitement. Mutiny was in the air. Upon whom the Sikh muskets might be turned, their owners themselves scarcely knew. It was a crisis of the sort which overwhelms weak men, but gives a man of heroic will a supreme opportunity. And, fortunately, a man with all the decision and courage the moment needed was on the spot.

Lieutenant Brasyer had fought as a private in the ranks through the Sutlej campaigns, and won a commission by his coolness and daring. He possessed exactly the genius needed for commanding irregular soldiery. He was an athlete, a fine swordsman, a man of the swiftest decision and most gallant courage. He is not unworthy, indeed, to be ranked for leadership and personal daring with Hodson of “Hodson’s Horse.” Brasyer had first to master his Sikhs, trembling on the verge of revolt themselves. Archibald Forbes has described his method: “Standing over the magazine with a red-hot iron in his hand, he swore by Nanac, Ram Das, Govind, and all other Gooroos of the Sikhs, that if his men did not promptly fall in and obey his orders he would blow the regiment to the Sikh equivalent of Hades.”

Brasyer’s glance and voice, his imperious will and daring, mastered the Sikhs, and they fell obediently into rank. He instantly marched them down, with loaded muskets, to the gate, and, with the help of the artillerymen with their port-fires, drove out the company of Sepoys that held it, and the fort was saved! But to master Sepoys in open revolt, by Sikhs on the edge of revolt, was a great feat, and shows for how much, at such a crisis, one clear heroic will counts.

That night Allahabad was given up to outrage and murder. Only above the fort itself flew the flag of England, and in the fort the handful of British officers, determined that the great arsenal should not fall into the hands of mutineers, were preparing to copy Willoughby’s desperate example at Delhi. Russell, of the artillery, who was in charge of the magazine, ran trains of powder into it, and stood ready to blow it up in the event of capture.

In the city itself every European or Eurasian was hunted like a rat through the streets, and slain with every accompaniment of cruelty. Outrage, in the ordinary sense, was not, on the whole, a marked feature of the Great Mutiny. The Sepoys, that is, were on fire with cruelty rather than with lust. But their cruelty spared neither age nor sex. The wife of a captain, according to one story current at the time—and perhaps not true—was literally boiled alive in ghee, or melted butter. Children were tossed on bayonets, men roasted in the flames of their own bungalows; women were mutilated and dismembered. The Sepoys plundered the Treasury, carrying off some £300,000 in booty.

One detail of the Allahabad massacre peculiarly shocked the imagination of British soldiers wherever the tale was told. At the mess-table of the 9th, that fatal night, there sat eight fresh-faced and boyish cadets just out from England. They had not yet joined their regiments, and military life, with all its fun and excitement, lay in the glamour of the unknown before them. When the bugle rang out on the parade-ground these eight unposted boy ensigns ran out with the other officers. They fell into the hands of the mutineers, and seven had their throats cut like sheep. The eighth, a boy of sixteen, was left for dead, but survived in spite of horrible wounds for four days, hiding himself in a ravine. On the fifth day he was discovered, dragged to the native lines, and thrust into a hut as a prisoner.

He found there a Christian catechist, who had formerly been a Mohammedan, and who was being tortured by the Sepoys to make him renounce his faith. The catechist’s courage had given way, but the gallant English lad—himself only sixteen years of age—urged the unhappy catechist, “Don’t deny Christ! Never deny Christ!” Neill reached Allahabad in time to rescue both catechist and ensign. But the ensign, Arthur Cheek, died of his wounds four days after Neill’s arrival. He had joined his regiment just eighteen days when murdered in this tragical fashion by his own men. It may be imagined how the massacre of the “poor little griffins” moved the British soldier to wrath everywhere.

For a few days mutiny and riot reigned supreme at Allahabad. Then, hot from Benares, there appeared on the scene Neill with a handful of his “Lambs,” as the Madras Fusileers, with admiring irony, were called. “Thank God, sir,” said the sentry at the gate of the fort, as Neill rode in; “you’ll save us yet!”

Neill is one of the cluster of great soldiers thrust into sudden fame by the crisis of the Mutiny, and is hardly to be judged by the standard of smaller men and of a tamer period. He was of Scottish blood, an Ayrshire man, with a vehement fighting quality, and a strain of iron resolve, which had come to him, perhaps, from a line of Covenanting ancestry. He was a veteran soldier, accustomed to govern wild clans and irregular troops, and had held high command in the Turkish contingent in the Crimea. On the domestic side, he was, as many stern and rough-natured men are, of singular tenderness. He was strongly religious, too, though he borrowed his religion rather from the Old Testament than the New.

When the Mutiny broke out Neill found himself in command of the Madras Fusileers, a regiment which included many wild spirits in its ranks, but which, in fighting quality, was a warlike instrument of singular efficiency. Neill and his “Lambs” were summoned from Madras by the crisis in Bengal, and Neill’s best qualities, as well as his worst—his fighting impulse, his Scottish pride of race, the natural vehemence of his temper, his soldierly hate of mutiny, the wrath of a strong man at outrages on women and children, and his fierce contempt for the feebleness shown by some of the “arm-chair colonels” of the Bengal Army—all threw their owner into a mood in which he was prepared to dare anything to crush the Mutiny and to punish the mutineers.

The Fusileers landed on the railway wharf at Calcutta, as night fell, on May 23. The great city of Benares was on the verge of revolt, and Neill’s “Lambs” were to be hurried up by express to its rescue. The station-master told Neill that unless he could get his men ashore in three minutes the train would start without them. But Neill was not the man to allow a railway time-table to stand betwixt him and the suppression of a mutiny. With an abrupt gesture, he put the station-master in charge of a sergeant and a file of Fusileers. The unhappy official shouted for help, but in another second stokers, firemen, and guard were in a row against the station wall, with a couple of “blue-caps” in charge of each. At the double the Fusileers came up the wharf, filed into the carriages, and the train, carrying the left wing of the regiment, moved off to Raneegange; thence the detachment was carried by bullock-carts to Benares. Leaving the bulk of his men to follow, Neill pushed on with the leading detachment to Benares.

Nowhere, perhaps, did English courage shine out with a clearer flame than at Benares. Benares is the holy city of Hinduism; it had a population of 300,000, fanatical and turbulent in the highest degree. The cantonment was held by three Sepoy regiments—all pledged to revolt—150 men of a British regiment, the 10th, and some thirty British gunners, with half a battery of artillery, under the command of Olpherts. But the cluster of soldiers and civilians responsible for the city—Tucker the commissioner, Frederick Gubbins the judge, Lind the magistrate, Ponsonby the brigadier, and Olpherts in command of the guns—held on to their post; by mere cool audacity kept the turbulent city in awe, and the mutinous Sepoys from breaking out; and sent on to other posts in greater peril than their own such scanty reinforcements of British troops as reached them. In the Commissioner, Tucker, at least, this heroic courage had a religious root. “The twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel,” he wrote to Lord Canning, “was their stand-by.” “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer,” is the opening verse of David’s song in that chapter; “the God of my rock; in Him will I trust. He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge.”

Neill reached the city on June 3, and found himself on the very edge of a tragedy. The Sepoys had arranged for an outbreak on the night of June 4. The native troops numbered over 2000; the British troops, as we have seen, consisted of 150 men of the 10th, and thirty artillerymen with three guns. To these Neill added sixty of his “Lambs” whom he had brought with him. Neill put the impress of his vehement will on the brigadier, Ponsonby, in charge of the station, and at half-an-hour’s notice it was resolved to disarm the Sepoys.

The business was ill-managed. The Sepoys commenced to shoot, the Sikhs turned on their officers. Ponsonby, an old man, found “the sun” and the strain of the scene too much for him, and visibly broke down. He dismounted, and Neill, who had been grimly watching the scene, said abruptly, “General, I assume command.” Ponsonby assented in silence, and Neill instantly opened on the mutineers with grape and musketry fire, and, after a few minutes’ furious shooting, Sikh and Sepoy fled. The 250, that is, destroyed, in a military sense, the 2000!

Having stamped out the Mutiny—or, rather, scattered the mutineers—Neill devoted the next two or three days to punishing it. The Governor-General telegraphed orders to push on to Allahabad, but Neill believed in making thorough work, and he wired back, “Can’t move; wanted here.” And for the next three days he kept the gallows busy, and hanged without pause or pity. The Sepoys had shot down their officers, and murdered women and children, and Neill was bent on showing that this was a performance which brought in its track swift and terrible punishment. “Colonel Neill’s hangings” were, no doubt, of heroic scale, and, looked at through the cold perspective of forty years, wear a very black aspect. But Neill, rightly or wrongly, held that to strike, and to strike hard, and to strike swiftly, was the one policy in such a crisis.

Benares being secure, Neill pushed on across the seventy miles of dusty, heat-scorched road to Allahabad. He started with only forty-four of his “Lambs,” and covered the seventy miles in two night marches. When they reached the Ganges, almost every fourth man was down with sunstroke, Neill himself being amongst the number, and his men only kept him up by dashing buckets of water over his head and chest. The boat pushed from the bank; it was found to leak at a dozen points, and began to sink. The “blue-caps” relanded, and their officer, Spurgin, called for volunteers to beat the banks of the river in search of another boat.

Almost every man able to walk volunteered, and, in the heavy sand of the river-bank, with the furnace-like heat of an Indian sun setting on fire the very air they breathed, the Fusileers began their search for a boat to carry them across to Allahabad. More than one brave fellow fell and died from heat and exhaustion. But a boat was found, the gallant forty crossed, and marched—as many of them as could still keep their feet—a tiny but dauntless band, through the gates of the fort.

Other detachments followed quickly, and Neill flung himself with all the fire of his Scottish blood into the task of restoring the British raj in the great city. At daybreak he opened with his guns, from the fort, on the suburb held by the revolted Sepoys, and then sallied out with his scanty force, and burnt it over their rebel heads. “I myself,” he wrote to his wife, “was almost dying from complete exhaustion;” but his fierce spirit overbore the fainting body that carried it. He armed a river steamer with a howitzer and a party of volunteer riflemen, and employed it as a river patrol. He launched the fierce Sikhs—by this time heartily loyal—on the villages.

They were wild soldiers, gaunt, sinewy, and eager—the “Singh log” (“the lion people”), as they called themselves. Maude has left a graphic picture of the Sikhs who, at Allahabad, followed Brasyer as, with his flowing white beard, he led them in pursuit of the broken Sepoys, or hung with soldierly obedience on Neill’s stern orders. “When no fighting was on hand,” he says, “squads of the tall, upright, Hebraic-visaged Sikhs used to march into their commanding officer’s tent, where they stood at attention, in silence, with one hand raised at the orthodox salute. ‘What do you want, my men?’ was the question in Hindustani. ‘May it please the protector of the poor, we want two days’ leave.’ ‘What for?’ ‘To get drunk, Sahib!’ And their request, being considered reasonable, was usually granted!”

Neill, by the way, had to use these by no means ascetic Sikhs to keep his own “blue-caps” sober. The stocks of all the merchants in the city were practically without owners, and the finest champagnes and brandies were selling at 6d. per bottle. For a day or two it seemed probable that Neill’s little force would be swept out of existence in a mere ignoble torrent of drunkenness. Neill threatened the whip and the bullet in vain; and finally marched up the Sikhs and took peremptory possession of all intoxicating drinks.

On June 18 the fighting was over, the British were masters both of fort and city, where, fourteen days before, they had been little better than prisoners or fugitives. Then was repeated, in yet sterner fashion, the retribution which had struck terror through Benares. The gallows in Allahabad groaned under its heavy and quick-following burdens. In his diary Neill wrote: “God grant that I may have acted with justice. I know I have with severity, but, under all the circumstances, I trust for forgiveness. I have done all for the good of my country, to re-establish its prestige and power, and to put down this most barbarous and inhuman insurrection.” Then he recites cases of outrage and mutilation on English ladies and on little children, with details that still chill the natural blood with horror to read.

The Sepoys, it is to be noted, when the fighting was over, took their penalty with a sort of composed fatalism, to the Western imagination very amazing. Sir George Campbell tells the story of the execution of an old native officer, a subhadar, which he witnessed. “He was very cool and quiet, and submitted to be executed without remonstrance. But the rope broke, and he came down to the ground. He picked himself up, and it was rather a painful scene for the spectators. But he seemed to feel for their embarrassment, and thought it well to break the awkwardness of the situation by conversation, remarking that it was a very bad rope, and talking of little matters of that kind till another rope was procured, which made an end of him!”

It would be easy to write, or sing, a new and more wonderful Odyssey made up of the valiant combats, the wild adventures, and the distressful wanderings of little groups of Englishmen and Englishwomen, upon whom the tempest of the Mutiny broke.

Forbes-Mitchell, for example, tells the story of Robert Tucker, the judge at Futtehpore. Tucker was a great hunter, and also, like many Indian officials, an earnestly religious man, with an antique sense of duty. When the Mutiny broke out he despatched every European to Allahabad, but refused to move himself. This solitary Englishman, in a word, was determined to defend Futtehpore against all comers! Believing the native officer in charge of the police to be loyal, he sent a message to him asking him to come and make arrangements for the protection of the Treasury. This “loyal” official sent back word that the judge Sahib need not trouble himself about the Treasury; that, in the cool of the evening, he, with his “loyal” police, would come down and dismiss the dog of a judge himself to Hades!

Tucker had a hunter’s armoury—rifles, smooth-bores, and hog spears. He loaded every barrel, barricaded every door and window, and waited quietly, reading his Bible, till, when the cool breath of evening began to stir, he saw the police and the local budmashes, with the green banner of Islam fluttering over their heads, marching down to attack him. Tucker was offered his life on condition that he abandoned his Christianity. Then the fight broke out. For hours the musketry crackled, and was answered by the sharp note of Tucker’s rifle. Before midnight the brave judge lay, riddled with bullets and pierced with many spear-thrusts, dead on his own floor. But all round his house were strewn the bodies of those who had fallen before his cool and deadly aim.

Later on, at Kotah, a similar tragedy took place, the story of which is told by George Lawrence. Major Burton, the Resident at Kotah, with his two sons—one aged twenty-one, the other a lad of sixteen—and a single native servant, held the Residency for four hours against native troops with artillery, and a huge crowd of rioters. The Residency was at last set on fire, and Major Burton proposed to surrender on condition that the lives of his sons were spared. The gallant lads indignantly refused to accept the terms. They would all die together, they declared. They were holding the roof of the Residency against their assailants, and, as Lawrence tells the story, “they knelt down and prayed for the last time, and then calmly and heroically met their fate.” The mob by this time had obtained scaling-ladders. They swept over the roof, and slew the gallant three. Major Burton’s head was cut off, paraded round the town, and then fired from a gun.

One of the most surprising of these personal adventures was that which overtook the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, Sir T. Metcalfe. Wilberforce, in his “Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny,” tells the tale, and says he heard it twice over from Sir T. Metcalfe’s own lips—though Wilberforce’s stories sometimes are vehemently suspected to belong to the realm of fiction rather than of sober history. His account of Metcalfe’s adventure, however, is at least ben trovato.

Metcalfe escaped from Delhi on horseback, hotly pursued by some native cavalry. His horse broke down, and in despair Metcalfe appealed to a friendly-looking native to conceal him from his pursuers. The man led him to a cave, told him he would save him if possible, and, striking his horse on the flank, sent it galloping down the road, while Metcalfe crept through the black throat of the cave into concealment. Presently Metcalfe heard his pursuers ride up, fiercely question his protector, and finally propose to search the cave.

On this my friend burst out laughing, and, raising his voice so that I must hear, he said, “Oh yes, search the cave. Do search it. But I’ll tell you what you will find. You will find a great red devil in there; he lives up at the end of the cave. You won’t be able to see him, because the cave turns at the end, and the devil always stands just round the turn, and he has got a great long knife in his hand, and the moment your head appears round the corner he will slice it off, and then he will pull the body in to him and eat it. Go in; do go in—the poor devil is hungry. It is three weeks since he had anything to eat, and then it was only a goat. He loves men, does this red devil; and if you all go in he will have such a meal!”

Metcalfe guessed that he was intended to hear this speech and act upon it. The cave, a short distance from the entrance, turned at right angles. He stood with his sword uplifted just round the corner, while a line of dismounted cavalry, in single file, one daring fellow leading, came slowly up the cave. As soon as the leader put his head in the darkness round the corner, Metcalfe smote with all his strength. The fellow’s head rolled from his body, and his companions, with a yell of terror, and tumbling one over another in the darkness, fled. “Did you see him?” demanded Metcalfe’s friend outside. “Do go back; he wants more than one.” But the rebel cavalry had had enough. The men who had gone up the cave declared that they had actually seen the red fiend, and been scorched by the gleam of his eyes; and, mounting their horses, they fled.

“Why did you save my life?” Metcalfe asked his protector. “Because you are a just man,” was the reply. “How do you know that?” asked Metcalfe. “You decided a case against me in your court,” was the unexpected reply. “I and all my family had won the case in the inferior courts by lying, but you found us out, and gave judgment against us. If you had given the case for me I would not have saved your life!”

Wilberforce tells another tale which graphically illustrates the wild adventures of those wild days. Early one morning he was on picket duty outside Delhi, and in the grey dawn saw two men and a boy hurrying along the road from the city. They were evidently fugitives, and, telling his men not to fire on them, Wilberforce went forward to meet them. When the group came up the boy ran forward, threw his arms round Wilberforce’s neck, and, with an exclamation in English, kissed him. The “boy” was a woman named Mrs. Leeson, the sole survivor of the Delhi massacre. She had been concealed for more than three months by a friendly native, and had at last escaped disguised as an Afghan boy.

When the Mutiny broke out she, with some other ladies and a few Englishmen, took refuge in a cellar, and for nearly three days maintained a desperate defence against the crowds attacking them. The hero of the defence was a Baptist missionary, a former shipmate of Wilberforce’s, “a very tall and powerful man, with a bloodless face, grey eyes, a broad jaw, and a determined mouth.” One by one the men holding the cellar fell. Food failed, the ammunition was exhausted, and at last, behind the bodies of the fallen, piled up as a breastwork, stood only the brave missionary, with nothing but his sword to protect the crouching women and children. “Stripped to the waist, behind the ghastly rampart of the dead, the hero stood; and for hours this Horatius held his own. At last he fell, shot through the heart, and the bloodthirsty devils poured in.” Mrs. Leeson was covered by some of the dead bodies, and so escaped the doom of the other ladies, and at night crept out of that pit of the dead. She wandered through the dark streets, the only living Englishwoman in the great city, and saw, hanging up on the trees in the dusk, the headless trunks of white children and the mutilated bodies of Englishwomen. By happy chance she met a pitying native, who concealed her until she escaped in the fashion described, with more or less of imagination, by Wilberforce.