CHAPTER IV

CAWNPORE: THE SIEGE

The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon.

In these words Sir George Trevelyan sums up the famous struggle round the low mud-walls of Wheeler’s entrenchments at Cawnpore more than forty years ago; a struggle in which Saxon courage and Hindu cruelty were exhibited in their highest measure, and which must always form one of the most heartbreaking and yet kindling traditions of the British race. Volumes have been written about Cawnpore, but Trevelyan’s book remains its one adequate literary record. The writer has a faculty for resonant, not to say rhythmic prose, which recalls the style of his more famous uncle, Macaulay, and in his “Cawnpore” his picturesque sentences are flushed with a sympathy which gives them a more than literary grace.

Cawnpore at the time of the Mutiny was a great city, famous for its workers in leather, standing on the banks of the sacred Ganges, 270 miles S.E. from Delhi, and about 700 miles from Calcutta. It was a military station of great importance. Its vast magazine was stored with warlike material of every sort. It was the seat of civil administration for a rich district. But the characteristic British policy, which allows the Empire to expand indefinitely, without any corresponding expansion of the army which acts as its police and defence, left this great military station practically in the hands of the Sepoys alone. The British force at Cawnpore, in May 1857, consisted of sixty men of the 84th, sixty-five Madras Fusileers, fewer than sixty artillerymen, and a group of invalids belonging to the 32nd. The Sepoy force consisted of three strong infantry regiments and the 2nd Native Cavalry—a regiment of very evil fame.

Here, then, were all the elements of a great tragedy—a rich treasury and a huge arsenal, lying practically undefended; a strong force of Sepoys, bitter with mutiny; a turbulent city and crowded cantonments festering with crime; and only a handful of British soldiers to maintain the British flag! Had the British consisted merely of fighting men, though they counted only 300 bayonets against four regiments of splendidly trained Sepoys, and a hostile population of 60,000, their case would not have been desperate. But the little British garrison had under its guard a great company of women and children and sick folk—civilian households, the wives and families of the 32nd, and many more. For every fighting man who levelled his musket over Wheeler’s entrenchments during the siege, there were at least two non-combatants—women, or little children, or invalids. A company so helpless and so great could not march; it could not attack; it could only stand within its poor screen of mud-walls and, with the stubborn and quenchless courage natural to its blood, fight till it perished.

General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command at Cawnpore, was a gallant soldier, who had marched and fought for fifty years. But he had the fatal defect of being over seventy-five years of age. A little man, slender of build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his seventy-five years with respectable energy. But a man, no matter how brave, in whose veins ran the chill and thin blood of old age, was tragically handicapped in a crisis so fierce. Wheeler, moreover, who had married a Hindu wife, was too weakly credulous about the loyalty of his Sepoys. On May 18, scarcely a fortnight before the Mutiny, he telegraphed to Calcutta: “The plague is stayed. All well at Cawnpore!” He had been warned that Nana Sahib was treacherous, yet he called in his help, and put the Treasury in his charge for safety! This was committing the chickens, for security, to the benevolence and “good faith” of the fox! Not four days before the outbreak Wheeler actually sent back to Lucknow fifty men of the 84th who had been sent to him as a reinforcement. There was chivalry in that act, but there was besotted credulity too.

But Wheeler’s most fatal mistake was in the choice he made of the place where the British garrison was to make its last stand. The Cawnpore magazine itself was a vast walled enclosure, covering three acres, with strong buildings and exhaustless store of guns and ammunition, with the river guarding one front, and a nullah acting as a ditch on another. Here would have been shelter for the women and the sick, a magnificent fighting position for the men, abundant water, and a great store of cannon.

Wheeler, for reasons which nobody has ever yet guessed, neglected this strong post. He allowed its stores of cannon to be turned against himself. He chose, instead of this formidable and sheltered post, a patch of open plain six miles distant, with practically no water supply. He threw up a slender wall of earth, which a musket-ball could pierce, and over which an active cow could jump, and he crowded into this the whole British colony at Cawnpore.

“What do you call that place you are making out on the plain?” asked the Nana’s Prime Minister, Azimoolah, of a British officer. “You ought to call it the ‘Fort of Despair.’” “No, no,” answered the Englishman, with the pluck of his race, “we’ll call it the ‘Fort of Victory!’” Nevertheless, when Wheeler made that evil choice of a place of defence, he was constructing a veritable Fort of Despair.

Wheeler, it seems, did not occupy the magazine, as it was held by a Sepoy guard, and it would have “shown mistrust,” and might have precipitated a conflict, if he had attempted to move into it. But what more expressive and public sign of “mistrust” could be imagined than the construction of the entrenchment in the open plain? And what could more fatally damage British prestige than the spectacle of the entire British community, military and civilian, crowding into these worthless defences!

If Wheeler did not occupy the magazine, he might have blown it up, and with that act have turned to smoke all the resources of the rebels. This was left to be done by Sepoy hands six weeks later. Meanwhile, Wheeler left almost unlimited resources of guns and munitions of war in the hands of the mutineers—to be employed against himself!

In the grim pause, while waiting for the outbreak, the British garrison showed a cool and gallant patience. The women, children, and civilians took up their quarters every night within the earthworks, where some ten light guns were mounted. But to “show their confidence” in their men, and, if possible, still to hold them back from mutiny, the British officers slept with their regiments. To lead a forlorn hope up the broken slope of a breach, or to stand in an infantry square while, with thunder of galloping hoofs, a dozen squadrons of cavalry charge fiercely down, needs courage. But it was a finer strain of courage still which made a British officer leave his wife and children to sleep behind the guns, standing loaded with grape, to protect them from a rush of mutineers, while he himself walked calmly down to sleep—or, at least, to feign sleep—within the very lines of the mutineers themselves!

On the night of June 4 came the outbreak. The men of the 2nd Cavalry rushed to their stables, mounted, and, with mad shouts and wild firing of pistols, galloped off to seize the magazine and to “loot” the Treasury; and as they went they burnt and plundered and slew. The 1st Sepoys followed them at once; the other two Sepoy regiments—the 53rd and 56th—hesitated. Their officers, with entreaties and orders, kept them steady till the sun rose, and then, unfortunately, dismissed them to their tents. Here they were quickly corrupted by their comrades, who had returned laden with booty from the plundered Treasury.

But before they had actually broken into mutiny, while they were yet swaying to and fro in agitated groups, by some blunder a gun from Wheeler’s entrenchments opened on the Sepoys’ lines. The argument of the flying grape was final! The men broke, and—a tumultuous mob—made for the city. Even then, however, some eighty Sepoys kept their fidelity, and actually joined the British within their defences, and fought bravely side by side with them for nearly twenty desperate days.

For a few wild hours murder raged through the streets of Cawnpore. Then the mutineers turned their faces towards Delhi. Had no malign influence arrested their march the great tragedy might have been escaped, and the word “Cawnpore” would not be to-day the most tragical cluster of syllables in British history. But at this point the subtle and evil genius of Nana Sahib interposed with dire effect.

Nana Sahib—or, to give his proper name, Seereek Dhoondoo Punth—was a Hindu of low birth, who had been adopted by the Peishwa of Poonah, the last representative of a great Mahratta dynasty, a prince who had been dethroned, but assigned a royal pension by the East India Company. Nana Sahib on the Peishwa’s death, inherited his private fortune, a sum computed at £4,000,000 sterling; but he also claimed the great pension which the Peishwa enjoyed. The Company rejected that claim, and henceforth Nana Sahib was a man consumed with hate of the British name and power. He concealed that hate, however, beneath a smiling mask of courteous hospitality. His agent had seen the wasted British lines round Sebastopol, and reported to his master that the British strength was broken. Nana Sahib, too, who understood the Hindu character, saw that the Sepoy regiments in Bengal were drunk with arrogance, and inflamed to the verge of mere lunacy, with fanatical suspicions, while a British garrison was almost non-existent.

Here, then, were the elements of a great outbreak, and Nana Sahib believed that the British raj was about to perish. He threw in his lot with the mutineers, but he had no idea of following them to Delhi, and being merged in the crowd that plotted and wrangled in the royal palace there. He would build up a great power for himself round Cawnpore. He might make himself, he dreamed, the despot of Northern India. He might even, by-and-by, march as a conqueror down the valley of the Ganges, fight a new Plassey, very different from the last, and, to quote Trevelyan, “renew the Black Hole of Calcutta, under happier auspices and on a more generous scale, and so teach those Christian dogs what it was to flout a Mahratta!”

But, as a preliminary to all this, the great company of Christian people within Wheeler’s lines must be stamped out of existence. “The wolves, with their mates and whelps, had been hounded into their den, and now or never was the time to smoke them out and knock on the head the whole of that formidable brood.” So, with bribes, and promises, and threats, Nana brought back the Sepoys, who had begun their Delhi march, to Cawnpore.

On June 6, with an odd touch of official formality, Nana sent in notice to General Wheeler that he was about to attack his position. Sunday, June 7, was spent in hunting from their various places of concealment in Cawnpore all the unhappy Europeans who lingered there. One trembling family was discovered lurking under a bridge, another concealed in some native huts. They were dragged out with shouts of triumph and despatched. One Englishman, who had taken refuge in a native house, held it against the Sepoys till his last cartridge was expended, then walked out and bade them cut his throat—a request promptly complied with. When the safe and delightful luxury of hunting out solitary Europeans was exhausted, then began the attack on the British entrenchments.

The odds were tremendous! In the centre of Wheeler’s entrenchment stood two single-storeyed barracks, built of thin brickwork, with verandas, and one of them roofed with straw. The mud wall, which formed the defence of the position, was four feet high, so thin that a rifle-ball could pierce it, with rough gaps made for the ten light pieces which formed the artillery of the garrison. On the north side of the entrenchment was a little triangular outwork, which the British called the Redan. On its left front, some four hundred yards distant, was a row of unfinished barracks, part of which was held by the British, part by the Sepoys, and which became the scene of the most bloody fighting of the siege. Behind these slender bulwarks was gathered a company of perhaps a thousand souls, of whom more than half were women and children.

At first the barracks gave to the non-combatants a brief shelter; but the 24-pounders of the Sepoys pierced them as though they had been built of cheese, and before many hours they were shattered into wreck, and the besieged were practically without any shelter, not merely from the rain of lead, but from the consuming heat of Indian suns and the heavy dews of Indian nights.

Sometimes, indeed, the men dug holes in the earth, into which their wives and children might creep and be sheltered by a few planks from the intolerable glare of the sun, and the incessant flight of hostile bullets. Quite as commonly, however, a British officer or civilian, as he crouched behind the poor wall of earth, loaded musket in hand, saw the white faces of his children as they slept or moaned, in the ditch by his side, while the wasted figure of his wife bent over them. There was no privacy, or shelter, or rest. The supply of food quickly failed. There was not water enough to satisfy the little children who cried from thirst, or to bathe the shattered limbs of the wounded. The men had the fierce excitement of fighting; but who shall paint the anguish of English ladies—wives and mothers—who could not find water for their children’s fevered lips, or shelter them from sun and bullet.

The imagination lingers pitifully over those groups of British ladies sitting or crouching in the ditches under the earthworks: “Unshod, unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows. Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were infants born during the terrible three weeks—infants with no future.”

There were two wells in the encampment; one which, to quote Trevelyan, “yielded nothing then, which will yield nothing till the sea, too, gives up her dead.” It was some two hundred yards from the rampart, and lay open to the fire of the Sepoys’ batteries. It was turned into a sepulchre. Thither, night by night, the besieged carried their dead, and cast them into its depths with brief and whispered prayer; while the guns of the Sepoys thundered their requiem. Within three weeks 250 English people were cast by English hands into that strange grave. The other well lay also directly under hostile fire, and on it the Sepoy gunners, trained by British science, concentrated their fire night and day. Every drop of water drawn from it may be said to have been reddened with blood.

Over this handful of British people, faint with hunger, fevered with thirst, wasted by sickness, half mad with the sun’s heat, roared day and night a tempest of hostile shot. Never before, perhaps, was such a fire concentrated on one poor patch of soil. The Sepoys could mount as many guns as they chose, and almost of whatever calibre they pleased. And they could fire, within a distance ranging from 300 to 800 yards, from under almost shot-proof shelter. From roof and window of all the buildings commanding the entrenchments streamed, with scarcely a moment’s pause, showers of musketry bullets. At night the Sepoys crept within pistol-shot, and fired without cessation. Wheeler’s entrenchments were literally girdled with fire; they were whipped, day and night, with incessant volleys.

By the third day every window and door in the poor barracks which served as shelter to the sick, and to the women and children, had been beaten in; and shell and ball ranged at will through the rooms. One who saw the building after the siege wrote: “The walls are riddled with cannon-shot like the cells of a honeycomb. The doors are knocked into shapeless openings. Of the verandas only a few splintered rafters remain. At some of the angles the walls are knocked entirely away, and large chasms gape blackly at you.”

Never was a position more desperate; and never was there one held with a valour more obstinate. Wheeler’s men had everything that was most dear to them at their backs, and everything that was most hateful in their front; and under these conditions how they fought may be imagined. In the scanty garrison, too, were over a hundred officers of the regiments in mutiny, fighters of the finest quality. It was a _corps d’élite_; a garrison of officers!

Indian life, it may be added, develops all that is proudest and most manly in the British character. The Englishman there feels that he is a member of an imperial and conquering race. To rule men is his daily business. To hunt the fiercest game in the world is his amusement. The men who knelt behind Wheeler’s mud walls, had faced tigers in the jungle, had speared the wild boar in the plains, had heard the scream of a charging elephant. They were steady of nerve, quick of eye, deadly of aim, proud of their blood and race. They were standing at bay over their wives and little ones, playing a game in which the stake was a thousand British lives. And never before, or since, perhaps, was more gallant fighting done than behind Wheeler’s entrenchments.

The natural leaders of the garrison emerged in such a crisis, and their names ought to awaken to-day in British ears emotions of pride as lofty as that which Greeks knew when, in the rolling and sonorous cadences of Homer’s great epic, they heard the names of the heroes who fought and died round classic Troy. One of the most heroic figures in the siege is that of Captain Moore, of the 32nd, in charge of the cluster of invalids belonging to that regiment in Cawnpore. Moore was an Irishman, though with the fair hair and blue eyes proper to Saxon blood. To say that he was fearless is a very inadequate description of his temper. He delighted in the rapture and glow of battle. His courage had in it a certain cool and smiling quality that made flurry or anxiety impossible. Moore, in fact, carried about with him a sort of radiance, so that, as Trevelyan puts it, “wherever he had passed he left men something more courageous, and women something less unhappy.” This fair-haired Irishman was a born king of men, of unfailing resource and “dare-devil” courage. He was wounded early in the siege, and carried his arm in a sling, but he walked to and fro calmly amid a tempest of bullets, and the men would follow his cheerful leading against any odds.

The tiny little Redan on the north face of the entrenchment was held by Major Vibart, of the 2nd Cavalry. A dreadful cross-fire searched and raked this little triangle of earth, and the handful of heroes that held it had to be renewed again and again. But the Redan kept up its splutter of answering fire day and night for three weeks, and Vibart himself survived the siege, to perish under Sepoy bullets on the river. Ashe was a young artillery officer of great promise; he commanded a battery of three guns at the north-east corner of the entrenchments, and seldom were guns better aimed and better fought. Ashe had first to invent his gunners, and next to improvise his shot, firing 6-pound balls, for example, from a 9-pound muzzle. But his cool science and sleepless activity made his battery the terror of the Sepoys.

Delafosse, of the 53rd, one of the four men who actually survived the siege, was an officer as daring and almost as skilled as Ashe. He had charge of three 9-pounder guns at the south-east angle. On one occasion the carriage of a gun in his battery took fire, and the wood, made as inflammable as tinder by the fierce Indian sun, named and crackled. There was powder—and the peril of explosion—on every side. The Sepoys, noting the dancing flame, turned all their guns on the spot. Delafosse crawled beneath the burning carriage, turned on his back, and with his naked hands pulled down the red splinters, and scattered earth on the flames, fighting them in this desperate fashion till two soldiers ran up to his help, and the fire was put out.

Perhaps the most obstinate and bloody fighting during the siege took place in the line of unfinished barracks which crossed the S.W. angle of the entrenchments. The Sepoys held the northern half of this line of buildings. Of the three buildings to the south—which completely commanded the entrenchment—what was called “No. 4,” was held by a party of amateur soldiers—civil engineers employed on the East Indian railroads. There were a dozen of them, young fellows more familiar with theodolites than with rifles; but a cluster of English Lifeguards could not have fought with cooler bravery. And the civil engineers had a keenness of wit and a fertility of mechanical resource which veteran soldiers might easily have lacked.

Vainly the Sepoys pelted “No. 4” with 24-pounder shot, scourged it with musketry fire, or made wild rushes upon it. The gallant railway men devised new barriers for the doors, and new shields for the windows, and shot with cool and deadly aim, before which the Sepoys fell like rabbits. “No. 4,” like Hougoumont at Waterloo, might be battered into wreck, but could not be captured. In the Memorial Church at Cawnpore to-day, not the least touching tablet is one upon which is inscribed:—

To the memory of the Engineers of the East India Railway, who died and were killed in the great insurrection of 1857. Erected in affectionate remembrance by their brother Engineers in the North-Western Provinces.

Barrack No. 2 was a microscopic fortress, as fiercely attacked, and as valiantly defended as Barrack No. 4. It was first held by Lieutenant Glanville and a party of fourteen officers. Glanville was desperately wounded, and three-fourths of his heroic garrison killed; then the barrack was put in charge of Mowbray Thomson, of the 56th Native Infantry, one of the two officers who survived Cawnpore. Only sixteen men could find standing and fighting room in the barrack. The sixteen under Mowbray Thomson consisted of Ensign Henderson, a mere boy, half-a-dozen Madras Fusileers, two plate-layers from the railway works, and seven men of the 84th. As the garrison dwindled under the ever-scorching fire that played on the building, it was fed with new recruits. “Sometimes,” says Mowbray Thomson, “a civilian, sometimes a soldier came.” But soldier and civilian alike plied his rifle with a grim and silent courage that never grew flurried, and that never knew fear.

Mowbray Thomson, who was of an ingenious turn, contrived a perch in the topmost angle of the barrack wall, and planted there an officer named Stirling, who was at an age when other lads are playing at cricket with their schoolmates, but who was a quick and most deadly shot, and who “bagged” Sepoys as a sportsman, with a breech-loading shot-gun, might bag pheasants in a populous cover. Sometimes, on an agreed signal, the garrisons from No. 2 and No. 4 would dash out together, a little knot of ragged, unwashed, smoke-blackened Sahibs, counting about thirty in all, and running without regular order, but with that expression on their faces which the Sepoys knew meant tragical business; and, with musket and bayonet or hog-spear, they would sweep the line of barracks from end to end.

Nor was courage confined to the fighting men. In one fierce sally, at an early stage of the siege, eleven mutineers were captured. A desperate fight was raging at the moment, and every man was required at the front. A rope was hastily passed round the wrists of the eleven captured Sepoys, and they were put into the charge of the wife of a private of the 32nd, named Bridget Widdowson. Drawn sword in hand, this soldier’s wife, who had little children of her own in the beleaguered entrenchments, stood over the eleven mutineers, while they squatted nervously on their hams before her; and so business-like was the nourish of her weapon, so keen the sparkle in her eye, that not one man of the eleven dared to move. It was only when a guard of the stronger sex took Bridget’s place that the eleven, somehow, contrived to escape. Later on in the siege the supply of cartridges failed, and all the ladies were requisitioned for their stockings, to be used in the construction of new cartridges. When before, or since, did war claim for its service such strange material!

The Sepoys, at intervals, made furious assaults on the mud walls, but these were lined by shots too deadly, and held by hands too strong, to make success possible. Had the British, indeed, been the attacking force, they would have swept over the poor earthen barrier, not four feet high, with a single charge, before the siege was a dozen hours old. But, during the whole three weeks of their attack, though the Sepoys, counting fighting men, outnumbered their foes by, perhaps, thirty to one, they never succeeded in even reaching the irregular line of earth behind which the British stood.

Their best chance occurred when, on the eighth night of the bombardment, the thatch on the barrack used as a hospital, took fire. The whole building was quickly in flames, and in their red light the entrenchment, in every part, was as visible as at noonday. The barrack was used as a sleeping-place for the women and children of the 32nd. These fled from the burning building, but not all the sick and wounded could be rescued; some perished in the smoke and flame. That was, indeed, a night of horror. “The roar of the flames,” says Trevelyan, “lost every ten seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless anticipation of a sudden and agonising death; the group of crying women and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of ammunition, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom”—all this made up a strangely terrible scene.

It is a proof of the quality of Moore’s daring that, by way of proving to the Sepoys that this calamity had not lowered the spirits of the garrison, he organised on the following night a sally, and, with fifty picked men, dashed out on the rebel lines, swept them for many hundreds of yards, spiked a number of 24-pounder guns, and slew their gunners.

But the burning of the barracks was the fatal turning-point of the siege. It destroyed the last shelter of the sick and the women and children. The whole stock of medicines and of surgical appliances was consumed, and the wounded could no longer have their injuries dressed. The eighty odd Sepoys who formed part of the garrison had been lodged in the building now burned. It was deemed imprudent to allow them to mix with the garrison generally, and they were told to provide for themselves, and were allowed to steal out of the entrenchment and escape.

The deaths amongst the British multiplied fast. The fire of the Sepoys grew more furious. “The round shot crashed and spun through the windows, raked the earthworks, and skipped about the open ground in every corner of our position. The bullets cut the air, and pattered on the wall like hail. The great shells rolled hissing along the floors and down the trenches, and, bursting, spread around them a circle of wreck and mutilation and promiscuous destruction.”

How fast the poor besieged wretches perished under this deadly hail may be imagined. A bomb, for example, fell into a cluster of seven ladies and slew them all in a breath. A soldier’s wife, carrying a twin child on each shoulder, with her husband by her side, was crossing a fire-raked angle of the entrenchment. The same ball slew the husband, shattered both elbows of the wife, and tore asunder the body of one of the little twins. General Wheeler’s son was lying wounded. His mother and two sisters were busy tending him, his father looking on, when a cannon-ball tore through the wall of the room and smashed the wounded lad’s head literally to fragments.

One well had been turned into a sepulchre; to-day it is built over, and on the monument above it is written this inscription:—

In a well under this enclosure were laid by the hands of their fellows in suffering the bodies of men, women, and children who died hard by during the heroic defence of Wheeler’s entrenchment, when beleaguered by the rebel Nana.

Then follows a verse from Psalm cxli:—

“Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are unto Thee, O God the Lord.”

The scanty supplies of water for that thirst-wasted crowd had to be drawn from the other well, and on it the Sepoys, day and night, concentrated their fire. To draw from it was a literal service of death. One brave-hearted civilian, named John MacKillop, described himself as “no fighting man,” but claimed to be appointed “captain of the well,” and devoted himself to the business of drawing water, the most dangerous task of the whole entrenchment. He kept to his task for nearly a week, and then, while drawing a vessel of water, was shot.

He staggered a few paces, mortally wounded, then fell, but held up with his dying hands the vessel filled with the precious fluid, and begged one who ran to his help to carry it to the lady to whom he had promised it. Bayard, dying on the banks of the Secia, and handing the water for which he himself thirsted to another dying soldier, has not a better title to be remembered than simple-minded John MacKillop, the “captain” of the Cawnpore well.

On June 24—when for nineteen days the wretched garrison had been under gun-fire—Wheeler writes to Lawrence, “All our carriages more or less disabled, ammunition short.... We have no instruments, no medicine: the British spirit alone remains; but it cannot last for ever.... Surely we are not left to die like rats in a cage.” Lawrence writes back on June 27, giving what encouragement he can, and warning him not to accept any terms. “You cannot rely on the Nana’s promises. _Il a tué beaucoup de prisonniers._”

By the twenty-first day of the siege the position of the British was hopeless. Food had almost completely failed. Their guns had become unserviceable. The unconquerable garrison was fast dwindling. “At rare intervals behind the earthwork they stood—gaunt and feeble likenesses of men—clutching with muffled fingers the barrels of their muskets, which glowed with heat intolerable to the naked hand, so fierce was the blaze of the mid-day sun.” They might have sallied out and cut their way through their enemies, or died fighting amongst them; and they would have done so fifty times over but for one consideration. They could not take their women and children with them; they could not abandon them. There was the certainty, too, that the Indian rains, long delayed, must soon burst upon them. Then their firearms would be rendered useless; the holes in which the women and children crouched would be flooded; their wall of mud would be washed away.

No sign of help came from without. Wheeler’s last despatch, dated June 24, ended with the words, “We want aid, aid, aid.” But not merely no aid, no whisper even from the outer world reached the unhappy garrison.

The Sepoys, on their part, were growing weary of the siege. Their losses were enormous. They might batter the entrenchments into dust, but they could not capture an inch of the blackened area these shot-wrecked lines of earth girdled. These Sahibs were fiercer than wounded tigers. They were, indeed, perplexingly and disquietingly aggressive. They were perpetually making fierce little sallies, whose track was marked by slaughtered Sepoys. Nana Sahib felt there was real danger that his allies might abandon their desperate task. He therefore undertook to accomplish by craft what the Sepoys could not do with cannon and bayonet.

Nana Sahib unearthed from some gloomy room in the building which formed his headquarters a captive Englishwoman waiting to be slaughtered, and sent her as a messenger to the entrenchments on the morning of June 24. “All those,” ran the brief note, “who are in no way connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie, and are willing to lay down their arms, shall receive a safe passage to Allahabad.”

Wheeler, with a soldier’s pride, was unwilling to give up the patch of ground he held for the Queen. The younger men, with the flame of battle in their blood, were eager to fight to the bitter end. To trust to the faith of mutineers, or to the humanity of a Hindu of Nana Sahib’s tiger-like nature, they argued, was a sadly desperate venture. Yet that way there might lie a chance of life for the women and children. Death was certain if the siege lasted. It might be less certain if they capitulated.

The 25th was spent in negotiations. Moore and two others met the Nana’s representatives at a spot 200 yards outside the entrenchments. They offered to surrender on condition that they were allowed to march out under arms, with sixty rounds of ammunition to each man; that carriages were provided for the wounded, the ladies, and the children; and that boats, duly stocked with food, were supplied to carry them to Allahabad. In the afternoon the Nana sent in a verbal message saying that he accepted the terms, and the British must march out that night. They refused to do this, as they needed to make some preparations. On this, the Nana sent an insolent message announcing that he must have his will; that if they delayed he would open on them with all his guns; and, as they were perishing fast from mere hunger, a few hours would leave not one of them alive.

Whiting, a gallant soldier, met the insolent threat with high courage. Let the Nana’s soldiers, if they liked, he answered, try to carry the entrenchments. They had tried in vain for three weeks to do so. “If pushed to the last extremity,” Whiting added, “they had powder enough in the magazine to blow both armies into the Ganges!”

Then the Nana changed his tone, and grew effusively polite. His emissaries condoled with Wheeler for the sufferings he had gone through. But, thanks to Allah, the Ever-Merciful, all was ended now! The sahibs and the memsahibs had nothing before them but a pleasant river voyage to their friends! A committee of British officers, under a guard of rebel cavalry, inspected the boats gathered at the landing-place, scarcely a mile distant from the entrenchments; at their request temporary floors of bamboos were laid down in the boats, and roofs of thatch stretched over them.

Nana Sahib, as a matter of fact, meant murder; murder, sudden, bloody, and all-embracing. But he enjoyed, so to speak, toying with his unconscious victims beforehand. Over the gorgon-like visage of murder he hung a smiling and dainty mask, and with soft-voiced courtesy he consented to all arrangements for the “comfort” of his victims!

That night at Cawnpore there were two busy spots, a mile distant from each other. In the entrenchments the poor survivors were preparing for their march, a march—though they knew it not—to the grave. Mothers were collecting the garments of their little ones. Some paid a last sad visit to the fatal well, where their dead were lying. Others were packing their scanty possessions, intending to carry them with them. Soldiers were cleaning their muskets and storing their cartridges. And a mile distant, Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, was planting his cannon and arranging his Sepoys so as to pour upon the boats at a given signal a fire which should slay the whole unhappy company they carried.