CHAPTER V

CAWNPORE: THE MURDER GHAUT

It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded, men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage.

Trevelyan describes the scene:—

First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past, but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng of native bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the weight of the palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be discerned the pallid forms of the wounded; their limbs rudely bandaged with shirt-sleeves and old stockings and strips of gown and petticoat. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver in belt, followed they who could still walk and fight. Step was not kept in those ranks. Little was there of martial array, or soldier-like gait and attitude. In discoloured flannel and tattered nankeen, mute and in pensive mood, tramped by the remnant of the immortal garrison. These men had finished their toil, and had fought their battle, and now, if hope was all but dead within them, there survived at least no residue of fear.

Vibart, in his single person, constituted the rearguard. A wounded man lying in a bed carried by four native bearers, an English lady walking by his side, came out of the entrenchment shortly after the rest had left. It was Colonel Ewart, of the 34th, with his faithful wife. The little group could not overtake the main body, and when it had passed out of sight round a bend in the road a crowd of the colonel’s own Sepoys stopped the poor wife and her wounded husband. The porters were ordered to lay the bed down, and with brutal jests the Sepoys mocked their dying colonel. “Is not this a fine parade?” they asked, with shouts of laughter.

Then, mirth giving place to murder, they suddenly fell upon Ewart, and literally hewed him to pieces under the eyes of his agonised wife. They told her to go in peace, as they would not kill a woman, and by way of comment on the statement one of them stepped back to give himself room for the stroke, and slew her with a single blow.

The road to the Ganges, a little over a mile in length, crossed a little wooden bridge painted white, and swung to the right down a ravine to the river. “A vast multitude,” says Trevelyan, “speechless and motionless as spectres, watched their descent into that valley of the shadow of death.” Directly the last Englishman had crossed the bridge and turned down the lane, a double line of Sepoys was drawn across the entrance to the Ghaut, and slowly the great company made its way down to the river’s edge. Some forty boats were lying there—eight-oared country budgerows, clumsy structures, with thatched roofs, and looking not unlike floating hay-stacks. They lay in the shallow water a few yards from the bank.

A moment’s pause took place when the crowd of sahibs and memsahibs, with their wounded and the little ones, reached the water’s edge. There were no planks by which they could reach the boats, none of the boatmen spoke a word, or made a movement. They sat silent, like spectators at a tragedy.

Then the crowd splashed into the water. The wounded were lifted into the boats; women with their children clambered on board; the men were finding their places; the officers, standing knee-deep in the river, were helping the last and feeblest to embark. It was nine o’clock in the morning.

Suddenly, in the hot morning air, a bugle screamed shrill and menacing, somewhere up the ravine. It was the signal! Out of the forty boats the native boatmen leaped, and splashed through the water to the bank. Into the straw roofs of many of the boats they thrust, almost in the act of leaping, red-hot embers, and nearly a score of boats were almost instantly red-crested with flames.

A little white Hindu temple high up on the bank overlooked the whole scene. Here sat Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, with a cluster of Sepoy officers. He controlled the whole drama from this point of vantage like a stage-manager; and, on his signal, from the lines of Sepoys who were lying concealed in the undergrowth, from guns perched high on the river-bank, and from both sides of the river at once, there broke upon the forty boats, with their flaming roofs and hapless crowds of white-faced passengers, a terrific storm of shot.

Those slain by the sudden bullet were many, and were happy in their fate. The wounded perished under the burning flakes and strangling smoke of the flaming straw roofs. Many leaped into the river, and, crouching chin-deep under the sides of the boats, tried to shelter themselves from the cruel tempest of shot. Some swam out into the stream till they sank in the reddened water under the leisurely aim of the Sepoys. Others, leaping into the water, tried to push off the stranded boats. Some of yet sterner temper, kneeling under the roofs of burning thatch, or standing waist-deep in the Ganges, fired back on the Sepoys, who by this time lined the river’s edge.

General Wheeler, according to one report, perished beneath the stroke of a Sepoy’s sword as he stepped out of his palkee. His daughters were slain with him, save one, the youngest, who, less happy, was carried off by a native trooper to die later. In the official evidence taken long afterwards is the account given by a half-caste Christian woman. “General Wheeler,” she said, “came last in a palkee. They carried him into the water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, ‘Carry me a little farther towards the boat.’ But a trooper said, ‘No; get out here.’ As the general got out of the palkee head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut with his sword through the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was killed near him. I saw it, alas! alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it, we did! and tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown into the river. The school-girls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes and hair catch fire.”

Presently the fire of the Sepoys ceased, and the wretched survivors of the massacre—125 in number—were dragged ashore. They came stumbling up the slope of the bank, a bedraggled company, their clothing dripping with the water of the Ganges, or soiled with its mud. They crept up the ravine down which, a brief hour before, they had walked with Hope shining before them. Now Grief kept pace with them; Despair went before them; Death followed after. They had left their dead in the river behind them; they were walking to a yet more cruel fate in front. “I saw that many of the ladies were wounded,” said one witness afterwards; “their clothes had blood on them. Some had their dresses torn, but all had clothes. I saw one or two children without clothes. There were no men in the party, but only some boys of twelve or thirteen years of age.”

The sad company was marched back to the old cantonment, where the Nana himself came out to exult over his victims. Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “There were fifteen young ladies in Cawnpore, and at first they wrote such happy letters, saying time had never been so pleasant; it was every day like a picnic, and they hoped they would not be sent away; they said a regiment would come, and they felt quite safe. Poor, poor things; not one of them was saved.” How many of that girlish band of fifteen perished, with flaming hair and dress, in the boats? Or did they strand shivering in the icy chill of terror, amongst the captives over whom the tiger glance of Nana Sahib wandered in triumph? After being duly inspected, these poor captives were thrust into a couple of rooms in the Savada-house, and left to what reflections may be imagined.

Three boats out of the forty, meanwhile, had actually got away. Two drifted to the Oude shore, and were overtaken by instant massacre. One boat, however, had for the moment a happier fate. It caught the mid-current of the Ganges, and went drifting downwards; and that solitary drifting boat, without oars or rudder, bearing up in its crazy planks above the dark waters of the Ganges the sole survivors of the heroic garrison of Cawnpore, started on a wilder, stranger voyage than is recorded elsewhere in all history.

It was Vibart’s boat; and by a curious chance it included in its passengers the most heroic spirits in the garrison. Moore was there, and Ashe, and Delafosse; Mowbray Thomson swam out to it from his own boat, and with him Murphy, a private of the 32nd—two of the four who finally survived out of the whole garrison. The boat was intended to carry only fifty, but nearly a hundred fugitives were crowded within its crazy sides.

A cannon-shot smashed its rudder. It had no oars nor food. From either bank a hail of shot pursued it. Every now and again the clumsy boat would ground on some shallow; then, while the Sepoys shot fast and furiously, a group of officers would jump overboard, and push the clumsy craft afloat again.

Moore, pushing at the boat in this fashion, with broken collar-bone, was shot through the heart. Ashe and Bowden and Glanville shared the same fate. Soon the dying and the dead on the deck of this shot-pelted boat were as many as the living. “We had no food in the boat,” wrote Mowbray Thomson afterwards; “the water of the Ganges was all that passed our lips. The wounded and the dead were often entangled together in the bottom of the boat.”

When evening came the boat ran heavily aground. Under the screen of darkness the women and children were landed, and the boat, with great effort, floated again; the Sepoys accompanying the operation with volleys of musketry, flights of burning arrows, and even a clumsy attempt at a fire-ship. “No one slept that night, and no one ate, for food there was none on board.”

When day broke the tragical voyage was continued, still to an accompaniment of musketry bullets. At two o’clock the boat stranded again. “Major Vibart,” says Mowbray Thomson, “had been shot through one arm on the preceding day. Nevertheless, he got out, and, while helping to push off the boat, was shot through the other arm. Captain Turner had both his legs smashed, Captain Whiting was killed, Lieutenant Harrison was shot dead.” These are sample records from that strange log.

Towards evening a boat, manned by some sixty Sepoys, appeared in pursuit, but it, too, ran upon a sand-bank, and this gave the sahibs an opportunity at which they leaped with fierce joy. From the sorely battered boat, which had been pelted for nearly two days and nights with bullets, a score of haggard and ragged figures tumbled, and came splashing, with stern purpose, through the shallows. And then, for some twenty breathless minutes, the Sepoys, by way of change, instead of being hunters, became the hunted, and only some half-dozen, who were good swimmers, escaped to tell their comrades what the experience was like. Mowbray Thomson tells the story in disappointingly bald prose. “Instead of waiting for them to attack us,” he says, “eighteen or twenty of us charged them, and few of their number escaped to tell the story.”

Night fell black and stormy, and through falling rain and the sighing darkness the boat, with its freight of dead and dying, drifted on. It recalls the ship of which Tennyson sang, with its “dark freight, a vanished life.” In the morning it was found that the boat had drifted into some backwater whence escape was impossible. The Sepoys lined the bank and fired heavily. Vibart, who was dying, but still remained the master spirit of the little company, ordered a sally. “Whilst there was a sound arm among them that could load and fire, or thrust with the bayonet,” says Kaye, “still the great game of the English was to go to the front and smite the enemy, as a race that seldom waited to be smitten.”

Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse, with some twelve men of the 82nd and 34th, clambered over the side of the boat, waded ashore, and charged the Sepoys, who fled before them. They pressed eagerly on, shooting and stabbing, but presently found new crowds of the enemy gathering in their rear. The gallant fourteen faced about, and fought their way back to where they had left the boat. Alas! it had vanished.

They commenced to march along the river-bank in the direction of Allahabad, with an interval of twenty paces between each man, so as to make the fire of their pursuers less deadly. Shoeless, faint with hunger, bareheaded, they fought their way for some miles. Their pursuers grew rapidly in numbers and daring. One Englishman had fallen; the others wheeled suddenly round, and seized a small Hindu temple, determined to make a last stand there. There was just room enough for the thirteen to stand upright in the little shrine. Their pursuers, after a few minutes’ anxious pause, tried to rush the door; but, as the historian of the fight puts it, “there was no room for any of them inside”—though, as it turned out, a good deal of room was required outside for the dead bodies of those who had made the attempt.

An effort was made to smoke out, and then to burn out, the unconquerable sahibs. When these devices failed, gunpowder was brought up, and arrangements made for blowing the entire shrine, with its indomitable garrison, into space. Seeing these preparations, the British charged out. Seven of them, who could swim, stripped themselves, and headed the sally, intending to break through to the river.

Seven naked sahibs, charging through smoke and flame, with levelled bayonets, would naturally be a somewhat disquieting apparition, and the seven had no difficulty in breaking through their enemies, and reaching the Ganges. The other six, who could not swim, ran full into the Sepoy mass, and died mute and fighting.

Then commenced the pursuit of the swimmers. Two were soon shot and sank; a third, swimming on his back, and not seeing where he was going, struck a sandspit, where some natives were waiting to beat out his brains at leisure. There remained four—Mowbray Thomson, Delafosse, and two privates, a pair of strong-limbed and brave-hearted Irishmen, named Murphy and Sullivan. This heroic and much-enduring four, diving like wild ducks at the flash of hostile muskets, out-swam and out-tired their pursuers. When at last they landed, they had between them “a flannel shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds”! They found refuge with a friendly landowner, and reached the British lines, though Sullivan died within a fortnight of reaching the place of safety.

Meanwhile, what had happened to the boat after the gallant fourteen left it? Its crew consisted of little else than wounded men, dead bodies, and exhausted women and children. Upon these swooped down a great crowd of enemies. The boat was captured, and its stem promptly turned back towards Cawnpore. On the morning of June 30, the boat lay again at the entrance of the fatal ghaut.

In the evidence taken long afterwards, there were brought back, according to one native witness, sixty sahibs, twenty-five memsahibs, and four children. “The Nana ordered the sahibs to be separated from the memsahibs, and shot. So the sahibs were seated on the ground, and two companies of the Nadiree Regiment stood ready to fire. Then said one of the memsahibs, the doctor’s wife (What doctor? How should I know?) ‘I will not leave my husband. If he must die, I will die with him.’ So she ran and sat down behind her husband, clasping him round the waist. Directly she said this, the other memsahibs said, ‘We also will die with our husbands,’ and they all sat down, each with her husband. Then their husbands said, ‘Go back,’ but they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered his soldiers; and they, going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they could not pull away the doctor’s wife.”

Captain Seppings asked leave to read prayers before they died. His hands were untied; one arm hung broken, but, standing up, he groped in his pocket for a little prayer-book, and commenced to read—but what prayer or psalm, none now can tell. “After he had read,” as the witness tells the story, “he shut the book, and the sahibs shook hands all round. Then the Sepoys fired. One sahib rolled one way, one another as they sat. But they were not dead, only wounded. So they went in and finished them off with swords.” When all was over, the twenty-four memsahibs, with their four children, were sent to swell the little crowd of captives in Savada-house. Some seventeen days of weeping life yet intervened between them and the fatal Well.

The story of the final act in the great tragedy at Cawnpore cannot be told without some account of events outside Cawnpore itself. A relieving force had been organised at Calcutta, of which Neill’s Fusileers at Allahabad were the advance guard; but a leader was wanted, and on June 17 Sir Patrick Grant brought Havelock, “the dust of Persia still in the crevices of his sword-handle,” to the Governor-General, saying, “Your Excellency, I have brought you the man.”

Havelock was sixty-two years of age when the great chance of his life came to him. A little man, prim, erect, alert, quick-footed, stern-featured, with snow-white moustache and beard. Havelock, no doubt, had his limitations. A strain of severity ran through his character. “He was always,” says one who served under him, “as sour as if he had swallowed a pint of vinegar, except when he was being shot at, and then he was as blithe as a schoolboy out for a holiday.” There is a touch of burlesque, of course, in that sentence; but Havelock was, no doubt, austere of temper, impatient of fools, and had a will that moved to its end with something of the fiery haste and scorn of obstacles proper to a cannon-ball. He was fond, too, of making Napoleonic orations to his men, and had a high-pitched, carrying voice, which could make itself audible to a regiment. And the British soldier in fighting mood is rather apt to be impatient of oratory.

But Havelock was a trained and scientific soldier, audacious and resolute in the highest degree; a deeply religious man, with a sense of duty of the antique sort, that scorned ease, and reckoned life, when weighed against honour, as a mere grain of wind-blown dust. And Havelock, somehow, inspired in his men a touch of that sternness of valour we associate with Cromwell’s Ironsides.

It is curious, in view of Havelock’s achievements and after-fame, to read in the current literature of the moment, the impression he made upon hasty critics in Calcutta and elsewhere. The _Friend of India_, the leading Calcutta journal, described him as a “fossil general”! Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “General Havelock is not in fashion. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome; but his little, old, stiff figure looks as active and fit for use as if he were made of steel.” She again and again refers to “dear little old Havelock, with his fussiness”—“fussiness” being in this case, little more than the impatience of a strong will set to a great task, and fretted by threads of red tape. Lord Hardinge had said, “If India is ever in danger, let Havelock be put in command of an army, and it will be saved.” And Havelock’s after-history amply justified that prediction.

Havelock had about the tiniest force that ever set forth to the task of saving an empire. It never was able to put on the actual battlefield 1500 men. There were 76 men of the Royal Artillery; less than 400 of the Madras Fusileers; less than 300 of the 78th Highlanders; 435 men of the 64th, and 190 of the 84th, with 450 Sikhs of somewhat doubtful loyalty, and 50 native irregular horse, whose disloyalty was not in the least doubtful. Havelock’s reliable cavalry consisted of 20 volunteers, amateurs mostly, under Barrow.

Measured against the scale of modern armies, Havelock’s force seems little more than a corporal’s guard. But the fighting value of this little army was not to be measured by counting its files. “Better soldiers,” says Archibald Forbes, “have never trod this earth.” They commenced their march from Allahabad on July 7; they marched, and fought, and conquered under the intolerable heat of an Indian midsummer, and against overwhelming odds; until when, on September 19—little more than eight weeks afterwards—Outram and Havelock crossed the Ganges in their advance on Lucknow, only 250 of Havelock’s “Ironsides” were left to take part in that advance. In the whole history of the war, men have seldom dared, and endured, and achieved more than did Havelock’s column in the gallant but vain struggle to relieve Cawnpore.

Maude commanded its tiny battery; Hamilton led the Highlanders; Stirling the 64th; the gallant, ill-fated Renaud, the Fusileers. Stuart Beatson was Havelock’s assistant adjutant-general; Fraser Tytler was his assistant quartermaster—general. Of the Highlanders—the Ross-shire Buff’s—Forbes says, “It was a remarkable regiment; Scottish to the backbone; Highland to the core of its heart. Its ranks were filled with Mackenzies, Macdonalds, Tullochs, Macnabs, Rosses, Gunns, and Mackays. The Christian name of half the Grenadier company was Donald. It could glow with the Highland fervour; it could be sullen with the Highland dourness; and it may be added, it could charge with the stern and irresistible valour of the North.”

When the little force began its march for Cawnpore, the soil was swampy with the first furious showers of the rainy season, and in the intervals of the rain, the skies were white with the glare of an Indian sun in July. “For the first three days,” says Maude, “they waded in a sea of slush, knee-deep now, and now breast-high, while the flood of tropical rain beat down from overhead. As far to right and left as eye could pierce extended one vast morass.” After these three days’ toil through rain and mud, the rains vanished; the sky above them became like white flame, and, till they reached Cawnpore, Havelock’s troops had to march and fight under a sun that was well-nigh as deadly as the enemy’s bullets.

On July 11 Havelock marched fifteen miles under the intolerable heat to Arrapore. Camping for a few hours, he started again at midnight, picked up Renaud’s men while the stars were yet glittering in the heaven, pushed steadily on, and at seven o’clock, after a march of sixteen miles, camped at Belinda, four miles out of Futtehpore. The men had outmarched the tents and baggage, and were almost exhausted. They had fallen out, and were scattered under the trees, “some rubbing melted fat on their blistered feet, others cooling their chafes in the pools; many more too dead-beaten to do anything but lie still.” It was Sunday morning.

Suddenly there broke above the groups of tired soldiery the roar of cannon. Grape-shot swept over the camp. Over the crest and down the opposite slopes rode, with shouts and brandished tulwars, a huge mass of rebel cavalry. It was a genuine surprise! But the bugles rang out shrilly over the scattered clusters of Havelock’s men. They fell instantly into formation; skirmishers ran to the front, and the enemy’s cavalry came to an abrupt halt. It was a surprise for them, too. They had expected to see only Renaud’s composite force—a mere handful; what they beheld instead, was Havelock’s steady and workmanlike front.

Havelock did not attack immediately. His cool judgment warned him that his over-wearied soldiers needed rest before being flung into the fight, and orders were given for the men to lie down in rank. Presently the rebel cavalry wheeled aside, and revealed a long front of infantry, with batteries of artillery, and the rebel general, finding the British motionless, actually began a movement to turn their flank.

Then Havelock struck, and struck swiftly and hard. Maude’s battery was sent forward. He took his pieces at a run to within 200 yards of the enemy’s front, wheeled round, and opened fire. The British infantry, covered by a spray of skirmishers armed with Enfield rifles, swept steadily forward. The rebel general, conspicuous on a gorgeously adorned elephant, was busy directing the movements of his force; and Maude tells the story of how Stuart Beatson, who stood near his guns, asked him to “knock over that chap on the elephant.” “I dismounted,” says Maude, “and laid the gun myself, a 9-pounder, at ‘line of metal’ (700 yards) range, and my first shot went in under the beast’s tail, and came out at his chest, rolling it over and giving its rider a bad fall.”

Its rider, as it happened, was Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general; and had that 9-pound ball struck him, instead of his elephant, it might have saved the lives of the women and children in Cawnpore.

Meanwhile, the 64th and the Highlanders in one resolute charge had swept over the rebel guns. Renaud, with his Fusileers, had crumpled up their flank, and the Nana’s troops, a torrent of fugitives, were in full flight to Futtehpore. The battle was practically won in ten minutes, all the rebel guns being captured—so fierce and swift was the British advance.

The rebel Sepoys knew the fighting quality of the sahibs; but now they found a quite new fierceness in it. Havelock’s soldiers were on fire to avenge a thousand murders. And, flying fast, as Trevelyan puts it, the Nana’s troops “told everywhere that the sahibs had come back in strange guise; some draped like women to remind them what manner of wrong they were sworn to requite; others, conspicuous by tall blue caps, who hit their mark without being seen to fire—the native description of the Enfield rifle with which the Madras Fusileers were armed.”

The fight at Futtehpore is memorable as being the first occasion on which British troops and the rebel Sepoys met in open battle. The Nana had shortly before issued a proclamation announcing that the British had “all been destroyed and sent to hell by the pious and sagacious troops who were firm to their religion”; and, as “no trace of them was left, it became the duty of all the subjects of the Government to rejoice at the delightful intelligence.” But Futtehpore showed that “all the yellow-faced and narrow-minded people” had not been “sent to hell.” They had reappeared, indeed, with uncomfortable energy, and a disagreeable determination to despatch every Sepoy they could capture somewhere in that direction!

Havelock’s men had marched nineteen miles, and fought and won a great battle, without a particle of food, and so dreadful was the heat that twelve men died of sunstroke. Havelock camped on July 13 to give his men rest, resumed his march on the 14th, and on the morning of the 15th found the Sepoys drawn up in great strength in front of a village called Aong, twenty-two miles south of Cawnpore. Renaud led his Fusileers straight at the village, and carried it with a furious bayonet charge, but the gallant leader of the “blue caps” fell, mortally wounded, in the charge. Maude’s guns smashed the enemy’s artillery, and when the Highlanders and the 64th were seen coming on, the Sepoys again fled.

Havelock pressed steadily on, and found the Sepoys had rallied and were drawn up in a strong position, covered by a rivulet, swollen bank-high with recent rains, known as Pandoo Nuddee. A fine stone bridge crossed the river; it was guarded by a 24-pound gun, a 25-pound carronade, and a strong force of infantry. Havelock quickly developed his plan of attack. Maude raced forward with his guns, and placed them at three different points, so as to bring a concentric fire to bear on the bridge. Maude’s first blast of spherical case-shell broke the sponge staves of the heavy guns in the rebel battery, and rendered them useless.

The Sepoys tried to blow up the bridge. But Maude’s fire was hot; Stephenson, with his “blue caps,” was coming up at the double, and the Sepoys got flurried. They had mined the bridge, and the mine was fired prematurely. The explosion shattered the parapet of the bridge, but through the white smoke came the Fusileers, their bayonets sparkling vengefully. The Highlanders followed eagerly in support. The bridge was carried, the guns taken, the rebel gunners bayoneted, the rebel centre pierced and broken, and the rebel army itself swept northwards, with infinite dust and noise, in a mere tumult of panic-stricken flight.

The British camped for the night on the battlefield. At three o’clock in the morning, with the stars sparkling keenly over their heads, and a full moon flooding the camp with its white light, Havelock formed up his men. He told them he had learned there were some 200 women and children still held as prisoners in Cawnpore, the survivors of the massacre of June 27. “Think of our women and the little ones,” he said, “in the power of those devils incarnate.” The men answered with a shout, and, without waiting for the word of command, went “fours right,” and took the road.

It was a march of twenty miles. The sun rose and scorched the silent and panting ranks of the British with its pitiless heat. The Highlanders suffered most; they were wholly unprepared for a summer campaign, and were actually wearing the heavy woollen doublets intended for winter use; but their stubborn Northern blood sustained them. Every now and again, indeed, some poor fellow in the ranks dropped as though shot through the head, literally killed with the heat. Nana Sahib himself held the approach to Cawnpore, with 7000 troops and a powerful artillery, and his position was found to be of great strength.

Havelock studied it a few minutes with keen and soldierly glance, and formed his plans. He had the genius which can use rules, but which also, on occasion, can dispense with rules. He violated all the accepted canons of war in his attack upon the Nana’s position. He amused the enemy’s front with the fire of a company of the Fusileers, and the manœuvres of Barrow’s twenty volunteer sabres, while with his whole force he himself swept round to the right to turn the Nana’s flank. Havelock, that is, risked his baggage and his communications, to strike a daring blow for victory.

As Havelock’s men pressed grimly forward, screened by a small grove, they heard the bands of the Sepoy regiments playing “Auld lang syne” and “Cheer, boys, cheer,” and the sound made the men clutch their muskets with a little touch of added fury. The Sepoys discovered Havelock’s strategy rather late, and swung their guns round to meet it. Their fire smote the flank of Havelock’s column cruelly, but the British never paused nor faltered. When Havelock judged his turning movement was sufficiently advanced, he wheeled the column into line. His light guns were insufficient to beat down the fire of the heavy pieces worked by the rebels, and he launched his Highlanders at the battery. They moved dourly forward under a heavy fire, till within eighty yards of the guns. Then the bayonets came down to the charge, and with heads bent low and kilts flying in the wind, the Highlanders went in with a run. The charge was in perfect silence, not a shot nor a shout being heard; but it was so furious that mound and guns were carried in an instant, and the village itself swept through. As Forbes describes it, “Mad with the ardour of battle, every drop of Highland blood afire in every vein, the Ross-shire men crashed right through the village, and cleared it before they dropped out of the double.” They had crushed the enemy’s left, taken its guns, and sent a great mass of Sepoys whirling to the rear.

But the moment they emerged from the village, the great howitzer in the Nana’s centre opened fire upon the Highlanders, and once more the unequal duel between bayonet and cannon had to be renewed. Havelock himself galloped up to where the Highlanders were reforming after the confusion and rapture of their rush, and, pointing with his sword to the great howitzer, pouring its red torrent of flame upon them, cried: “Now, Highlanders! another charge like that wins the day.”

The Gaelic blood was still on fire. The officers could hardly restrain their men till they were roughly formed. In another moment the kilts and bonnets and bayonets of the 78th were pouring in a torrent over the big gun, and the rebel centre was broken! Meanwhile the 64th and 84th had thrust roughly back Nana Sahib’s right wing; but, fighting bravely, the Sepoys clung with unusual courage to a village about a mile to the rear of the position they first held, and their guns, drawn up in its front, fired fast and with deadly effect.

The Highlanders, pressing on from the centre, found themselves shoulder to shoulder with the 64th, advancing from the left. Maude’s guns, with the teams utterly exhausted, were a mile to the rear. Men were dropping fast in the British ranks, worn out with marching and charging under heat so cruel. In the smoke-blackened lines men were stumbling from very fatigue as they advanced on the quick red flashes and eddying smoke of the battery which covered the village. But Havelock, riding with the leading files, knew the soldier’s nature “from the crown of his shako down to his ammunition boots.” “Who,” he cried, “is to take that village—the Highlanders or the 64th?” Both regiments had Northern blood in them—the 64th is now known as the North Staffordshire—and that sudden appeal, that pitted regiment against regiment, sent the stout Midlanders of the 64th and the hot-blooded Gaels from the clachans and glens and loch sides of Ross-shire, forward in one racing charge that carried guns and village without a check.

The battle seemed won, and Havelock, reforming his column, moved steadily forward. But the Nana was playing his last card, and his generals at least showed desperate courage. They made a third stand athwart the Cawnpore road, and within a short distance of Cawnpore itself. A 24-pounder, flanked on either side by guns of lighter calibre, covered the Nana’s front, and his infantry, a solid mass, was drawn up behind the guns. Havelock’s men had marched twenty miles, and made a dozen desperate charges. Their guns were far in the rear. Yet to halt was to be destroyed.

Havelock allowed his men to fling themselves panting on the ground for a few minutes; then, riding to the front, and turning his back to the enemy’s guns, so as to face the men, he cried in his keen, high-pitched voice, “The longer you look at it, men, the less you will like it! The brigade will advance—left battalion leading.”

The left battalion was the 64th. Major Stirling promptly brought forward his leading files, and Havelock’s son and aide-de-camp galloped down, and, riding beside Stirling, shared with him the leadership of the charge—a circumstance for which the 64th, as a matter of fact, scarcely forgave him, as they wanted no better leadership than that of their own major. There was less of _élan_ and dash about this charge than in the earlier charges of the day; but in steady valour it was unsurpassed.

On came the 64th, silently and coolly. Havelock himself, in a letter to his wife, wrote with a father’s pride about his son. “I never saw so brave a youth,” he wrote, “as the boy Harry: he placed himself opposite the muzzle of a gun that was scattering death into the ranks of the 64th Queen’s, and led on the regiment under a shower of grape to its capture. This finished the fight. The grape was deadly, but he calm, as if telling George stories about India.”

When the steady but shot-tormented line of the 64th found itself so near the battery that through the whirling smoke they could see the toiling gunners and the gleam of Sepoy bayonets beyond them, then the British soldiers made their leap. With a shout they charged on and over the guns, and through the lines behind, and Nana Sahib’s force was utterly and finally crushed. Havelock had not a sabre to launch on the flying foe; but his tired infantry, who had marched twenty miles, and fought without pause for four hours, kept up the pursuit till the outer edge of Cawnpore was reached. Then Havelock halted them; and, piling arms, the exhausted soldiers dropped in sections where they stood, falling asleep on the bare ground, careless of food or tents.

They were aroused long before daybreak, and through their ranks ran in whispers the story, grim and terrible, of the massacre which, by only a few hours, had cheated their splendid valour of its reward.

How great was the valour, how stubborn the endurance, shown thus far by Havelock’s men is not easily realised. In nine days—betwixt July 7-16—they had, to quote their commander’s words “marched under the Indian sun of July 126 miles, and fought four actions.” What better proof of hardihood, valour, and discipline could be imagined? But the British soldier is a queer compound, with very sudden and surprising alternations of virtue. When Cawnpore was won and plundered, immense stores of beer and spirits fell into the hands of the soldiers, and for a time it seemed as if Havelock’s band of heroes would dissolve into a mere ignoble gang of drunkards. Havelock promptly ordered every drinkable thing in Cawnpore to be bought or seized. “If I had not done this,” he wrote, “it would have required one half my force to keep the other half sober, and I should not have had a soldier in camp!”

Whether the terror of Havelock’s advance on Cawnpore actually caused the massacre of the English captives there may be doubted; it certainly hastened it. Nana Sahib, to whom murder was a luxury, would no more have spared the women and the children than a tiger would spare a lamb lying under its paw. But even a tiger has its lazy moods, and, say, immediately after a full meal, is temporarily careless about fresh slaughter. Nana Sahib had supped full of cruelty, and was disposed, for a brief period at all events, to allow his captives to live. Moreover, some of the women in his own harem sent him word they would slay themselves and their children if he murdered the memsahibs and their little ones. But on the night of July 15 the fugitives from Pandoo Nuddee reached Cawnpore, amongst them being Bala Rao, the Nana’s brother and general, who brought from the fight a bullet in his shoulder, and a new argument for murder in his heart.

In a council held between the Nana and his chief officials that night, the fate of the captives was discussed. Teeka Sing understood British nature so ill that he argued Havelock’s men would be robbed of their only motive for continuing their advance on Cawnpore if the captives were slain. They might, he urged, risk the perils of a new battle for the sake of rescuing the captives, but not for the mere pleasure of burying them. That they might have the passion to avenge them did not enter into Teeka Sing’s somewhat limited intelligence. Other chiefs argued, again, that if the captives were allowed to live, they might prove very inconvenient witnesses against a good many people.

It is probable that the strongest argument on the side of murder was the mere joy of killing somebody with a white face. Havelock’s Fusileers and Highlanders declined to allow themselves to be killed; they were, in fact, slaying the Nana’s Sepoys with disconcerting fury and despatch. But the heroes who had fled again and again before a British force one-fifth their number, could revenge themselves in perfect security by slaying the helpless women and children imprisoned in the Bebeeghur. So the order for massacre went forth.

From July 1 the captives, 210 in number, had been crowded into a small building containing two rooms, each 20 ft. by 10 ft., and an open court some fifteen yards square. In that suffering and helpless crowd were five men, guessed to have been Colonels Smith and Goldie, Mr. Thornhill, the judge of Futteghur, and two others. They had neither furniture nor bedding, nor even straw, and were fed daily on a scanty ration of native bread and milk. Two of the ladies were taken across each morning to the Nana’s stables, and made to grind corn at a hand-mill for hours together. This was done, not for the sake of the scanty store of flour the poor captives ground out, but by way of insult. To the Eastern imagination, when a dead enemy’s womankind grind corn in the house of his slayer, captivity has reached its blackest depths. The English ladies, according to native testimony, did not object to do the work of slaves in this fashion, as it, at least, enabled them to carry back a handful of flour to their hungry little ones.

Sickness mercifully broke out amongst the captives, and in a week eighteen women and seven children died. A native doctor kept a list of these, and after Havelock captured Cawnpore the list was discovered. Months afterwards there was sad joy in many an English household when, on the evidence of this list, it was known that their loved ones had, in this way, anticipated and escaped the Nana’s vengeance. One poor wife, in the sadness of that captivity, gave birth to a little one, and in the native doctor’s list of deaths is the pathetic record—a tragedy in each syllable—“An infant two days old.”

The evidence seems to show that during these terrible days the women were not exposed to outrage in the ordinary sense of that word, or to mutilation, but every indignity and horror which the Hindu imagination could plan short of that was emptied upon them, and some of the younger women, at least, were carried off to the harems of one or other of the Nana’s generals. On the face of the earth there could have been at the time no other scene of anguish resembling that in the crowded and darkened rooms of the Bebeeghur, where so great a company of women and children, forsaken of hope, with the death of all their dearest behind them, sat waiting for death themselves.

Nana Sahib was an epicure in cruelty, and was disposed to take his murders in dainty and lingering instalments. At four o’clock on the afternoon of July 15 he sent over some of his officers to the Bebeeghur, and bade the Englishmen come forth. They came out, the two colonels, the judge, a merchant named Greenaway, and his son, and with them a sixth, an English boy, fourteen years of age, nameless now, but apparently willing to share the perilous responsibilities of “being a man.” Poor lad! Motherless, his name all unknown, his father, perhaps, floating a disfigured corpse on the sliding current of the muddy Ganges, he appears for a moment, a slender, boyish figure, in the living frescoes of that grim tragedy, and then vanishes.

Under the cool shade of a lime tree sat Nana Sahib, dark of face, gaudy of dress, and round him a cluster of his kinsmen and officers, Bala Rao among them, whose wounded shoulder was now to be avenged. Brief ceremony was shown to this little cluster of haggard and ragged sahibs. A grim nod from the Nana, a disorderly line of Sepoys with levelled muskets and retracted lips, and the six were shot down and their bodies cast on the dusty roadside for every passer-by to spit at.

A little before five o’clock a woman from the Nana’s household stepped inside the door of the Bebeeghur, and looked over the crowd of weary mothers and wan-faced children. A curious stillness fell on the little company, while, in careless accents, the woman gave the dreadful order: they were “all to be killed”! One English lady, with quiet courage, stepped up to the native officer who commanded the guard, and asked “if it was true they were all to be murdered.” Even the Sepoys shrank from a crime so strange and wanton. The officer bade the Englishwomen not to be afraid, and the woman from the Nana’s harem was told roughly by the soldiers that her orders would not be obeyed.

It seemed monstrous indeed that an order which was to send 200 helpless human beings to death should be brought, like a message about some domestic trifle, on a servant-woman’s lips. The messenger vanished. The Sepoys on guard consulted together and agreed that with their own hands, at least, they would not slay the prisoners. According to one account they were ordered by a new messenger to fire through the windows upon the company of women and children, many now praying within. They obeyed the order to fire, and the sudden wave of flame and smoke, with the crash of twenty discharged muskets, swept over the heads of the captive crowd within. But the Sepoys, of design, fired high, and no one was wounded.

When Havelock’s men afterwards entered those rooms, one little detail bore mute witness to the use to which some of the ladies had turned the few minutes which followed the volley of the Sepoys. They evidently tore strips from their dresses, and with them tried to tie the door fast; and still those broken strips of linen and silk were hanging from the door handles when Havelock’s men, two days afterwards, entered Cawnpore.

Crime never wants instruments, and Nana Sahib soon found scoundrels willing to carry out his orders. It was a little after five o’clock—just when Stephenson’s Fusileers and Hamilton’s Highlanders were sweeping over the bridge at Pandoo Nuddee—that five men, each carrying a tulwar, walked to the door of the Bebeeghur. Two were rough peasants; two belonged to the butcher’s caste; one wore the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard. The five men entered, and the shuddering crowd of women and children was before them. The crowd, who watched as the door opened, saw standing erect on the threshold the English lady who had asked the native officer whether they were all to be killed. Then the door was closed, and over the scene that followed the horrified imagination refuses to linger.

Wailing, broken shrieks, the sound of running feet crept out on the shuddering air. Presently the door opened, and the man in the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard came out with his sword broken short off at the hilt. There were 212 to be killed, and the strain on steel blades as well as on human muscles was severe!

He borrowed a fresh sword, and went back to his work, again carefully closing the door behind him. After a while he re-emerged once more with a broken blade, and, arming himself afresh, returned a third time to his dreadful business. It was dark when the five men—all alike now with reddened garments—came out and locked the door behind them, leaving that great company of wives and mothers and little children in the slaughter-house. The men had done their work but roughly, and all through the night, though no cry was heard in the Bebeeghur, yet sounds, as if sighs from dying lips, and the rustle as of struggling bodies, seemed to creep out into the darkness incessantly through its sullen windows and hard-shut doors.

At eight o’clock the next morning the five men returned, attended by a few sweepers. They opened the door, and commenced to drag the nearer bodies, by their long tresses of hair, across the courtyard to the fatal well, hard by. Then, amongst the bodies lying prone over all the floor, there was a sudden stir of living things. Were the dead coming back to life?

Native evidence, collected afterwards, reports that a few children and nearly a dozen women had contrived to escape death by hiding under the bodies of the slain. They had lain in that dreadful concealment all night, but when the five returned they crept out with pitiful cries. Some of these were slain without parley; some ran like hunted animals round the courtyard, and then threw themselves down the well. One by one the victims were dragged out, stripped, and, many of them yet living, were flung into that dreadful grave.

One native witness, quoted by Trevelyan, says, “There was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and villagers. Yes, there were also Sepoys. Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. They were running round the well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save them. No, none said a word, or tried to save them.” The youngest of these children, a tender little fellow, lunatic with terror, broke loose and ran like a hare across the courtyard. He was captured by an unsympathetic spectator, brought back, and flung down the well.

It was two days after this, on July 17, that three men of the 78th entered the court, for Havelock was now in possession of Cawnpore, and the Nana was a fugitive. The whispers and gestures of the natives drew their attention to the shut door of the bungalow. One of the Highlanders pushed open the door and stepped inside. “The next moment,” to quote Archibald Forbes, “he came rushing out, his face ghastly, his hands working convulsively, his whole aspect, as he strove in vain to gasp out some articulate sounds, showing that he had seen some dreadful sight.” No living thing was in the place; but the matting that covered the floor was one great sponge of blood, and he who had crossed it found himself, to borrow Burns’s phrase, “red wat shod.”

Little pools of blood filled up each inequality in the rough floor. It was strewn with pitiful relics, broken combs, pinafores, children’s shoes, little hats, the leaves of books, fragments of letters. The plastered wall was hacked with sword-cuts, “not high up, as where men had fought, but low down and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid a blow.” Long locks of hair were strewn about, severed, but not with scissors.

There were no inscriptions on the walls, but many a pitiful record upon the scattered papers on the floor. A few childish curls marked “Ned’s hair, with love;” the fly-leaf of a Bible, with a loving inscription—giver and recipient now both dead; a prayer-book, pages splashed red where once praying eyes had lingered. The pages of one grimly appropriate book—Drelincourt’s “Preparation for Death”—were scattered over the whole floor.

* * * * *

To write this story is a distress, to read it must be well-nigh an anguish. Yet we may well endure to know what our countrymen and countrywomen have suffered. Their sufferings are part of the price at which a great empire has been built.

Into what a passion of fury—half generous, half devilish—the soldiers who looked on these things were kindled may well be imagined. It will be remembered that Neill compelled some of the Sepoys captured at Cawnpore, and guilty of a share in this tragedy—high-caste Brahmins—to clean up, under the whip, a few square inches of the blood-stained floor, and then immediately hanged them, burying them in a ditch afterwards. These Brahmins, that is, were first ceremonially defiled, and then executed. That was an inhumanity unworthy of the English name, which Lord Clyde promptly forbade.

Nana Sahib had fled the palace. Principality, and power, and wealth, all had vanished. He was, like Cain, a fugitive on the face of the earth. In what disguises he hid himself, through what remote and lonely regions he wandered, where he died, or how, no man knows. His name has become an execration, his memory a horror.

The Bebeeghur has disappeared. The site where it once stood is now a beautiful garden. In the centre of the garden, circled with a fringe of ever-sighing cypresses, is a low mound, with fence of open stonework. The circular space within is sunken, and upon the centre of the sunken floor rises the figure—not too artistic, unhappily—of an angel in marble, with clasped hands and outspread wings. On the pedestal runs the inscription: “Sacred to the perpetual memory of the great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children, who, near this spot, were cruelly massacred by the followers of the rebel Nana Doondoo Punth, of Bithoor, and cast, the dying and the dead, into the well below, on the 15th day of July 1857.”