Читать книгу Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny 1857-59 - William Forbes-Mitchell - Страница 7

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By the 25th of September the whole of the Ninety-Third were once more together in Chinsurah, and on the 28th the first company, the grenadiers under Captain Middleton, started by rail for Râneegunge en route for Lucknow, and a company followed daily in regular rotation till the light company left Chinsurah on the 7th of October. From Râneegunge to Benares the old bullock-train was arranged with relays of bullocks from eight to ten miles apart, according to the nature of the road, and six men were told off to each cart to ride and march by relief. Thus we proceeded, making an average advance of from twenty-five to thirty miles daily, halting every day about ten o'clock for cooking, resuming our march about four o'clock, and so on through the night for coolness; the bullocks did not average more than two and a half miles per hour, and there was always considerable delay at the different stations, changing teams. In this way my company reached Benares on the 17th of October. From Benares we proceeded by detachments of two or three companies to Allahabad; the country between Benares and Allahabad, being overrun by different bands of mutineers, was too dangerous for small detachments of one company. My company reached Allahabad on the 19th of October. There we were supplied with the usual Indian field equipment of tents, etc. By this time the railway had been pushed on in the direction of Cawnpore to a place called Lohunga, about forty-eight miles from Allahabad, but no stations were built. On the 22nd of October my company, with three others, left Allahabad, packed into open trucks or waggons used by the railway contractors for the construction of the line. From Lohunga we commenced our daily marches on foot, with our tents on elephants, en route for Cawnpore.

By this time a considerable force had assembled at Allahabad, consisting of artillery from the Cape, Peel's Naval Brigade, detachments of the Fifth Fusiliers, the Fifty-Third, and Ninetieth Light Infantry. But the only complete regiment was the Ninety-Third Highlanders, over a thousand men, in splendid condition, armed with the Enfield rifle, and, what was of more importance, well drilled to the use of it.

After leaving Lohunga, the first place of note which we reached was Futtehpore, seventy-two miles from Allahabad. At Futtehpore I met some native Christians whom I had first seen in Allahabad, and who were, or had been, connected with mission work, and could speak English. They had returned from Allahabad to look after property which they had been obliged to abandon when they fled from Futtehpore on the outbreak of the Mutiny. These men all knew Dr. Duff, or had heard of him, and were most anxious to talk to Dr. Duff's countrymen, as they called the Highlanders. From one of them I heard of the brave defence made by a solitary Englishman who refused to leave his post, and as I have never seen this alluded to in any of the histories of the Mutiny, I shall relate it.

When the insurrection broke out, Mr. Robert Tucker was the judge of Futtehpore, and like his namesake of Salvation Army fame, he combined the missionary with the civil-servant, and used to preach to the natives, who listened to him with seeming respect, but with concealed hatred in their hearts. One of the most regular attendants at these Christian meetings in the judge's house was a Mahommedan named Hikmut Oollah Khân, the native head of the police in Futtehpore, and Mr. Tucker had unbounded confidence in the friendship of this man and in the loyalty of the police. On the first certain signs of disturbance in the station Mr. Tucker despatched all the Christians, native and European, to Allahabad, but refused to move himself. My informant told me that he had stayed with the brave judge till the last, and had made his escape to Allahabad after Mr. Tucker was killed; but I had no means of testing the truth of that statement. He further stated that Mr. Tucker had sent away all the Christians to Allahabad during the night, and next day about noon he sent for Hikmut Oollah Khân, who had neglected to make his usual morning report, with an intimation that the judge wished to see him and his loyal police to make arrangements for the protection of the Treasury and other Government property. The "loyal and friendly" Hikmut Oollah Khân sent back a reply that it was then too hot for him to come out, and that the judge sâhib need not trouble himself about the Treasury. Considering that the Government of the English was at an end, the police would take care of the Treasury for the Bâdshâh of Delhi, to whom it rightly belonged, and till the cool of the evening the judge sâhib might repeat his Kaffir prayers, when the "loyal and friendly" Hikmut Oollah Khân, with a detachment of his loyal police, would come and give his Kaffir soul a quick despatch to Jehunnum. Such was the loyalty of Mr. Tucker's trusted and pampered friend!

The message of Hikmut Oollah Khân opened the eyes of the too confiding judge, but he did not flinch from his duty. Mr. Tucker had been a mighty hunter in his day, and possessed a good assortment of offensive and defensive arms, such as rifles, fowling-pieces, and hog-spears. He carefully arranged his ammunition and loaded every rifle and fowling-piece which he had, strongly barricaded the doors and windows of his house, and then sat quietly down to read his Bible. At sunset he saw a large body of the police, with the green banner of Islâm and Hikmut Oollah Khân at their head, entering his compound. They advanced, and called on Mr. Tucker to surrender in the name of the Bâdshâh of Delhi, and if he wished his life to be spared, he could have it on condition that he accepted the religion of Mahommed. This he resolutely refused to do, and tried to reason with the police, to which they replied by a volley. Mr. Tucker returned the fire, and before the doors of his house could be forced he had killed sixteen and wounded many more, when he fell pierced by both spears and bullets. So died the brave and God-fearing Robert Tucker, the glory of the Bengal Civil Service, and thus ended the defence of Futtehpore by one solitary Englishman against hundreds of rebels.

When the detachment of which my company formed part, marched through Futtehpore, it was rumoured that the Banda and Dinapore mutineers, joined by large bodies of budmâshes,[2] numbering over ten thousand men, with three batteries of regular artillery, mustering eighteen guns, had crossed the Jumna, and were threatening our communications with Allahabad. Owing to this report, No. 2, or Captain Cornwallis's company of the Ninety-Third, was left in the fort at Futtehpore to guard provisions, etc., as that post had been greatly strengthened by a party of sappers and was formed into a depôt for commissariat stores and ammunition, which were being pushed on by every available mode of conveyance from Allahabad. We left Futtehpore on the 25th of October, and arrived at Cawnpore on the morning of the 27th, having marched the forty-six miles in two days.

When we reached Cawnpore we found everything quiet, and Brigadier Wilson, of the Sixty-Fourth Regiment, in command. Wheeler's immortal entrenchment was deserted, but a much stronger one had lately been built, or rather was still under construction on the right (the Cawnpore) bank of the Ganges, to protect the bridge of boats crossing into Oude. This place was constructed of strong and well-planned earthworks, and every available coolie in Cawnpore was at work, from daylight till dark, strengthening the place. Bastions and ramparts were being constructed of every conceivable material, besides the usual gabions and fascines. Bales of cotton were built into the ramparts, bags of every size and shape, soldiers' knapsacks, etc., were filled with earth; in brief, everything that could possibly hold a few spadefuls of earth, and could thereby assist in raising a defensive breast-work, had been appropriated for building the parapet-walls, and a ditch of considerable depth and width was being excavated. On my recent visit to Cawnpore I looked for this fort in vain. Eventually I learned from Colonel Baddeley that it was some time ago dismantled and converted into the Government Harness and Saddlery Factory, the ramparts having been levelled and the ditch filled in with earth.

The day before we reached Cawnpore, a strong column from Delhi had arrived under command of Sir Hope Grant, and was encamped on the plain near the spot where the railway station now stands. The detachment of the Ninety-Third did not pitch tents, but was accommodated in some buildings, on which the roofs were still left, near General Wheeler's entrenchment. My company occupied the dâk bungalow, which, on my revisit to Cawnpore, appeared to me to have given place to the present Victoria Hotel.

After a few hours' rest, we were allowed to go out in parties of ten or twelve to visit the horrid scene of the recent treachery and massacre. The first place my party reached was General Wheeler's so-called entrenchment, the ramparts of which at the highest places did not exceed four feet, and were so thin that at the top they could never have been bullet-proof! The entrenchment and the barracks inside of it were complete ruins, and the only wonder about it was how the small force could have held out so long. In the rooms of the building were still lying strewn about the remains of articles of women's and children's clothing, broken toys, torn pictures, books, pieces of music, etc. Among the books, I picked up a New Testament in Gaelic, but without any name on it. All the blank leaves had been torn out, and at the time I formed the opinion that they had been used for gun-waddings, because, close beside the Testament, there was a broken single-barrelled duck gun, which had evidently been smashed by a 9-pounder shot lying near. I annexed the Testament as a relic, and still have it. The Psalms and Paraphrases in Gaelic verses are complete, but the first chapter of Matthew and up to the middle of the seventh verse of the second chapter are wanting. The Testament must have belonged to some Scotch Highlander in the garrison. I have more than once thought of sending it home to the Highland Society as a relic of the Mutiny.

From the entrenchment we went to the Suttee Chowrah ghât, where the doomed garrison were permitted to embark in the boats in which they were murdered, and traces of the treachery were still very plain, many skeletons, etc., lying about unburied among the bushes.

We then went to see the slaughter-house in which the unfortunate women and children had been barbarously murdered, and the well into which their mangled bodies were afterwards flung. Our guide was a native of the ordinary camp-follower class, who could speak intelligible barrack-room English. He told us that he had been born in a battery of European artillery, in which his forefathers had been shoeblacks for unknown generations, and his name, he stated, was "Peshawarie," because he had been born in Peshawur, when the English occupied it during the first advance to Caubul. His apparent age coincided with this statement. He claimed to have been in Sir Hugh Wheeler's entrenchment with the artillery all the time of the siege, and to have had a narrow escape of his life at the last. He told us a story which I have never seen mentioned elsewhere, that the Nânâ Sâhib, through a spy, tried to bribe the commissariat bakers who had remained with the English to put arsenic into the bread, which they refused to do, and that after the massacre of the English at the ghât the Nânâ had these bakers taken and put alive into their own ovens, and there cooked and thrown to the pigs. These bakers were Mahommedans. Of course, I had no means of testing the truth of this statement.[3] Our guide showed no desire to minimise the horrors of the massacre and the murders to which he said he had been an eye-witness. However, from the traces, still too apparent, the bare facts, without exaggeration, must have been horrible enough. But with reference to the women and children, from the cross-questions I put to our guide, I then formed the opinion, which I have never since altered, that most of the European women had been most barbarously murdered, but not dishonoured, with the exception of a few of the young and good-looking ones, who, our guide stated, were forcibly carried off to become Mahommedans. But I need not dwell on these points. These are the opinions I formed in October, 1857, three months after the massacre, and nothing which I have since learnt during my thirty-five years' residence in India has led me to alter them.

Most of the men of my company visited the slaughter-house and well, and what we there saw was enough to fill our hearts with feelings which I need not here dwell on; it was long before those feelings could be controlled. On the date of my visit a great part of the house had not been cleaned out; the floors of the rooms were still covered with congealed blood, littered with trampled, torn dresses of women and children, shoes, slippers, and locks of long hair, many of which had evidently been severed from the living scalps by sword-cuts. But among the traces of barbarous torture and cruelty which excited horror and a desire for revenge, one stood out prominently beyond all others. It was an iron hook fixed into the wall of one of the rooms in the house, about six feet from the floor. I could not possibly say for what purpose this hook had originally been fixed in the wall. I examined it carefully, and it appeared to have been an old fixture, which had been seized on as a diabolic and convenient instrument of torture by the inhuman wretches engaged in murdering the women and children. This hook was covered with dried blood, and from the marks on the whitewashed wall, it was evident that a little child had been hung on to it by the neck with its face to the wall, where the poor thing must have struggled for long, perhaps in the sight of its helpless mother, because the wall all round the hook on a level with it was covered with the hand-prints, and below the hook with the foot-prints, in blood, of a little child.

At the time of my visit the well was only about half-filled in, and the bodies of the victims only partially covered with earth. A gallows, with three or four ropes ready attached, stood facing the slaughter-house, half-way between it and the well; and during my stay three wretches were hanged, after having been flogged, and each made to clean about a square foot of the blood from the floor of the house. Our guide told us that these men had only been captured the day before, tried that morning, and found guilty as having assisted at the massacre.

During our visit a party of officers came to the slaughter-house, among whom was Dr. Munro, Surgeon of the Ninety-Third, now Surgeon-General Sir William Munro. When I saw him he was examining the hook covered with dried blood and the hand and foot-prints of the child on the wall, with the tears streaming down his cheeks. He was a most kind-hearted man, and I remember, when he came out of the house, that he cast a look of pity on the three wretches about to be hanged, and I overheard him say to another officer who was with him: "This is horrible and unchristian to look at; but I do hope those are the same wretches who tortured the little child on the hook inside that room." At this time there was no writing either in pencil or charcoal on the walls of the slaughter-house. I am positive on this point, because I looked for any writing. There was writing on the walls of the barracks inside General Wheeler's entrenchment, but not on the walls of the slaughter-house, though they were much splashed with blood and slashed with sword-cuts, where blows aimed at the victims had evidently been dodged and the swords had struck the walls. Such marks were most numerous in the corners of the rooms. The number of victims butchered in the house, counted and buried in the well by General Havelock's force, was one hundred and eighteen women and ninety-two children.

Up to the date of my visit, a brigade-order, issued by Brigadier-General J. G. S. Neill, First Madras Fusiliers, was still in force. This order bears date the 25th of July, 1857. I have not now an exact copy of it, but its purport was to this effect:—That, after trial and condemnation, all prisoners found guilty of having taken part in the murder of the European women and children, were to be taken into the slaughter-house by Major Brace's méhter[4] police, and there made to crouch down, and with their mouths lick clean a square foot of the blood-soaked floor before being taken to the gallows and hanged. This order was carried out in my presence as regards the three wretches who were hanged that morning. The dried blood on the floor was first moistened with water, and the lash of the warder was applied till the wretches kneeled down and cleaned their square foot of flooring. This order remained in force till the arrival of Sir Colin Campbell in Cawnpore on the 3rd of November, 1857, when he promptly put a stop to it as unworthy of the English name and a Christian Government. General Neill has been much blamed for this order; but in condemning the action we must not overlook the provocation. The general saw more of the horrors of Cawnpore than I did; but what I saw, and the stories which were told by natives who claimed to have been eye-witnesses of the horrible scenes which they described, were enough to make the words mercy and pardon appear a mockery; and in passing judgment on him we must not forget the proclamations of the Nânâ Sâhib. These have often been published, and I will only give one extract bearing on the murder of the women and children. The extract is as follows, and was part of a proclamation placarded all over Cawnpore: "To extinguish a fire and leave a spark, to kill a snake and preserve its young, is not the wisdom of men of sense."

However, let General Neill speak for himself. The following is a copy of one of his own letters, taken from Colonel White's Reminiscences. On page 135 he writes: "The Well and Slaughter-house, Cawnpore.—My object was to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, and barbarous deed, and to strike terror into the rebels. The first I caught was a subadar or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order of the 25th of July 1857, to clean the very blood which he had helped to shed; but I made the provost-marshall do his duty, and a few lashes compelled the miscreant to accomplish his work. When done he was taken out and immediately hanged, and buried in a ditch by the roadside. No one who has witnessed the scenes of murder, mutilation, and massacre can ever listen to the word 'mercy' as applicable to these fiends."

As already said, before condemning General Neill's order we must give due weight to the terrible provocation, the horrible scenes he saw, and the still more horrible stories he heard related by natives who either had or pretended to have been eye-witnesses of the facts they described. Even after the lapse of thirty-five years such horrors cannot be calmly contemplated; they can only be hinted at here. Such stories were common in camp, and believed not only by the soldiers in the ranks, but by officers of position; and in judging General Neill's order we must give due weight to the passionate nature of the man, and recollect that General Havelock, his senior, must have approved of the order, or he would have cancelled it.

But enough of massacre and revenge for the present; I shall return to General Neill's order when I describe my revisit to Cawnpore. In the meantime I should much like to know whether the late Major A. H. S. Neill, who commanded the Central India Horse, and was shot on parade by Sowar Mazar Ali, at Augur, Central India, on the 14th of March, 1887, was a son of General Neill of Mutiny fame. Mazar Ali was sentenced to death by Sir Lepel Griffin, as Governor-General's agent; but I did not see a full account of the trial, and I ask for the above information to corroborate a statement made to me, on my late visit to the scenes of the Mutiny, by a native who admitted that he had been an armourer in the rebel force at Cawnpore, but had joined the English after the defeat of the Gwalior Contingent in December, 1857.[5]

General Hope Grant's brigade and part of the Ninety-Third Highlanders crossed the bridge of boats at Cawnpore, and entered Oude on the 30th of October, with a convoy of provisions and ammunition en route to Lucknow. My company, with three others, remained in Cawnpore three days longer, and crossed into Oude on the 2nd of November, encamping a short distance from the bridge of boats.

On the morning of the 3rd a salute was fired from the mud fort on the Cawnpore side, from which we learned, to the great delight of the Ninety-Third, that Sir Colin Campbell had come up from Calcutta. Shortly after the salute some of our officers joined us from the Cawnpore side, and gave us the news, which had been brought by the Commander-in-Chief, that a few days before three companies of the Fifty-Third and Captain Cornwallis's company, No. 2, of the Ninety-Third, which had been left at Futtehpore, with part of the Naval Brigade under Captain William Peel, had formed a force of about five hundred men under the command of Colonel Powell of the Fifty-Third, marched out from Futtehpore to a place called Khujwah, and attacked and beaten the Banda and Dinapore mutineers, numbering over ten thousand, who had been threatening our communications with Allahabad. The victory for some time had been doubtful, as the mutineers were a well-equipped force, strongly posted and numbering more than twenty to one of the attacking force, possessing moreover, three well-drilled batteries of artillery, comprising eighteen guns. Colonel Powell was killed early in the action, and the command then devolved on Captain Peel of the Naval Brigade. Although hard pressed at first, the force eventually gained a complete and glorious victory, totally routing the rebels, capturing most of their guns, and driving the remnant of them across the Jumna, whence they had come. The company of the Ninety-Third lost heavily, having one officer wounded and sixteen men killed or wounded. The officer, Lieutenant Cunyngham (now Sir R. K. A. Dick-Cunyngham of Prestonfield, Edinburgh), was reported to have lost a leg, which caused general sorrow and regret throughout the regiment, as he was a most promising young officer and very popular with the men. During the day when more correct and fuller reports came in, we were all very glad to hear that, although severely wounded, the lieutenant had not lost a limb, and that the surgeons considered they would not only be able to save his leg, but that he might be fit to return to duty in a few months, which he eventually did, and was present at the siege of Lucknow.

During the afternoon of the 3rd of November more stores of provisions and ammunition crossed the river with some of Peel's 24-pounder guns, and on the morning of the 4th, long before daylight, we were on the march for Lucknow, under command of Colonel Leith-Hay, leaving Cawnpore and its horrors behind us, but neither forgotten nor disregarded. Every man in the regiment was determined to risk his life to save the women and children in the Residency of Lucknow from a similar fate. None were inclined to pay any heed to the French maxim that les représailles sont toujours inutiles, nor inclined to ponder and moralise on the lesson and warning given by the horrible catastrophe which had overtaken our people at Cawnpore. Many too were inclined to blame the Commander-in-Chief for having cancelled the brigade order of General Neill.

Before concluding this chapter I wish my readers to note that I merely describe facts as they appeared to me in 1857. Nothing is further from my intention than to revive the old race-hatreds. The real causes of the Mutiny and its horrors have yet to be written. I merely mention facts to show the incentive the troops had to make light of forced marches, under short rations and a double load of ammunition for want of other means of carriage, with an overwhelming enemy in front, and no means whatever of obtaining reinforcements or recovering from a defeat.