Chapter 24

According to the old proverb, the bystander sees more of the game than those who share too closely in its passions. And assuredly, if it were asked, what it is that we who write upon Indian news aspire to effect, I may reply frankly, that, if but by a single suggestion any one of us should add something to the illumination of the great sepoy conspiracy--whether as to its ultimate purpose, or as to its machinery, or as to its wailing hopes, or if but by the merest trifle any one of us should take away something from the load of anxious terrors haunting the minds of all who have relations in India--that man will have earned his right to occupy the public ear. For my own part, I will not lose myself at present, when so much darkness prevails on many leading questions, in any views too large and theoretic for our present condition of light. And that I may not be tempted into doing so, I will proceed without regard to any systematic order, taking up, exactly as chance or preponderant interest may offer them, any urgent questions of the hour, before the progress of events may antiquate them, or time may exhale their flavour. This desultory and moody want of order has its attractions for many a state of nervous distraction. Every tenth reader may happen to share in the distraction, so far as it has an Indian origin. The same deadly anxiety on behalf of female relatives, separated from their male protectors in the centre of a howling wilderness, now dedicated as an altar to the dark Hindoo goddess of murder, may, in the reader also, as well as in the writer on Indian news, periodically be called on to submit to the insurmountable aggravation of delay. In such a case, what is good for one may be good for another. The same inexpressible terrors, so long as Nena Sahibs and other miscreant sons of hell are roaming through the infinite darkness, may prompt the same fretfulness of spirit; the same deadly irritation and restlessness, which cannot but sharpen the vision of fear, will sharpen also that of watching hope, and will continually read elements of consolation or trust in that which to the uninterested eye offers only a barren blank.

EUROPEANS.

I am not sorry that the first topic, which chance brings uppermost, is one which overflows with the wrath of inexhaustible disgust. What fiend of foolishness has suggested to our absurd kinsmen in the East, through the last sixty years, to generalise themselves under the name of _Europeans_? As if they were ashamed of their British connections, and precisely at that moment when they are leaving England, they begin to assume continental airs; when bidding farewell to Europe, they begin to style themselves _Europeans_, as if it were a greater thing to take up a visionary connection with the Continent, than to found a true and indestructible nobility upon their relationship to the one immortal island of this planet. There is no known spot of earth which has exerted upon the rest of the planet one-thousandth part of the influence which this noble island has exercised over the human race--exercised through the noblest organs; and yet, behold! these coxcombs of our own blood have no sooner landed on Indian soil, than they are anxious to disclaim the connection. Such at least is the _apparent_ construction of their usage. But mark the illogical consequences which follow. A noble British regiment suddenly, and for no rational purpose, receives a new baptism, and becomes a European regiment. The apologist for this folly will say, that a British regiment does not necessarily exclude Germans, for instance. But I answer that it _does_. The British Government have, during this very month of September, 1857, declared at Frankfort (in answer to obstinate applications from puppies who fancy that we cannot tame our rebels without _their_ assistance), '_that the British army, by its constitution, does not admit foreigners_.' But suppose that accidents of aristocratic patronage have now and then privately introduced a few Germans or Swedes into a very few regiments, surely this accident, improbable already, was not _more_ probable when the regiment was going away for twenty years (the old term of expatriation) to a half-year's distance from the Rhine and the Danube. The Germanism of the regiment might altogether evaporate in the East, but could not possibly increase. Next, observe this; if we must lose our nationality, and transmute ourselves into Europeans, for the very admirable reason that we were going away to climates far remote from Germany, then, at least, we ought not to call our native troops _sepoys_, but _Asiatics_. In this way only will there be any logical parity of antithesis. Scripturally, we are the children of Japheth; and, as all Asiatics are the sons of Shem, then we shall be able to mortify their conceit, by calling to their knowledge our biblical prophecy, that the sons of Japheth shall sit down in the tents of Shem. But, thirdly, even thus we should find ourselves in a dismal chaos of incoherences; for what is to become of 'Jack'? Must our sailors be re-baptised? Must Jack also be a _European_? Think of Admiral Seymour reporting to the Admiralty as a leader of Europeans! and exulting in having circumvented Yeh by Her Majesty's European crews! And then, lastly, come the Marines: must they also qualify for children of Europe? Was there ever such outrageous folly? One is sure, in the fine picturesque words of Chaucer, that, 'for very filth and shame,' neither admiral nor the youngest middy would disgrace himself by such ridiculous finery from the rag-fair of cosmopolitan swindling. The real origin of so savage an absurdity is this:--Amongst the commercial bodies of the three presidencies in all the leading cities, it became a matter of difficulty often to describe special individuals in any way legally operative. Your wish was to distinguish him from the native merchant or banker; but to do this by calling him a British merchant, &c., was possibly not true, and legally, therefore, not safe. He might be a Dane, a Russian, or a Frenchman; he was described, therefore, in a more generalising way, as a European. But a case so narrow as _that_--a case for pawnbrokers and old clothesmen--ought not to regulate the usage of great nations. Grand and spirit-stirring (especially in a land far _distant_ from home) are the recollections of towns or provinces connected with men's nativities. And poisonous to all such ancestral inspirations are the rascally devices of shroffs and money-changers.

DELHI.

That man--I suppose we are all agreed--who commanded in Meerut on Sunday the tenth day of May, in the year of Christ one thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven, a day which will furnish an epoch for ever to the records of civilisation--that man who _could_ have stopped the bloody kennel of hounds, but did _not_, racing in full cry to the homes of our unsuspecting brothers and sisters in Delhi--it were good for that man if he had not been born. He had notice such as might have wakened the dead early in the afternoon (2 or 3 o'clock P.M., I believe), and yet, at the end of a long summer day, torchlight found him barely putting his foot into the stirrup. And why into the stirrup at all? For what end, on what pretence, should he ever have played out the ridiculous pantomime and mockery of causing the cavalry to mount? Two missions there were to execute on that fatal night--first, to save our noble brothers and sisters at Delhi from a ruin that was destined to be total; secondly, to inflict instant and critical retribution upon those who had already opened the carnival of outrage, before they left Meerut. Oh, heaven and earth! heart so timid was there in all this world, sense of wrong so callous, as not to leap with frenzy of joy at so sublime a summons to wield the most impassioned functions of Providence--namely, hell-born destroyers to destroy in the very instant of their fancied triumph, and suffering innocence to raise from the dust in the very crisis of its last despairing prostration. Reader! it is not exaggeration--many a heart will bear witness in silence that it is _not_--if I should say that men exist, who would gladly pay down thirty years of life in exchange for powers so heavenly for redressing earthly wrongs. To the infamous torpor on that occasion, and the neglect of the fleeting hour that struck the signal for delivery and vengeance, are due many hundreds of the piteous outrages that have since polluted Bengal. Do I mean that, if the rebel capture of Delhi had been prevented, no subsequent outrages would have followed? By no means. Other horrors would have been perpetrated; but that first and greatest (always excepting the case of Cawnpore) would by all likelihood have been intercepted.[63]

[Footnote 63: Here observe there were 2300 admirable British troops, and about 700 men of the mutineers, who might then have been attacked at a great advantage, whilst dispersed on errands of devastation. Contrast with these proportions the heroic exertions of the noble Havelock--fighting battle after battle, with perhaps never more than 1700 or 1800 British troops; and having scarcely a gun but what he captured from the enemy. And what were the numbers of his enemy? Five thousand in the earlier actions, and 10,000 to 12,000 in the last.]

But perhaps his military means were inadequate to the crisis? He had duties to Meerut, not less than duties of vengeance and of sudden deliverance for Delhi. True: he had so; and he had means for meeting all these duties. He had a well-mounted establishment of military force, duly organized in all its arms. Three-and-twenty hundreds he had of British, suitably proportioned as to infantry, cavalry, and artillery--a little army that would have faced anything that Delhi could at that time have put forward. Grant that Delhi could have mustered 5000 men: these are three propositions having no doubtful bearing upon such a fact:--

1. That cheerfully would this little British force have faced any Asiatic force of 5000 men, which, indeed, it can hardly be necessary to say, in the face of so large and so transcendent an experience.

2. That the Delhi force, could have reached the amount supposed of 5000 only after a junction with the Meerut mutineers; which junction it was the main business of the Meerut commander to intercept.

3. That this computation assumes also the whole of the Delhi garrison to be well affected to the mutineers; an assumption altogether unwarrantable on the _outside_ of Delhi during the 10th and 11th of May.

Such were (1) the _motives_ of the commander at Meerut towards a noble and energetic resolution; such were (2) his _means_.[64]

[Footnote 64: Mr. D. B. Jones comes forward to defend the commandant of Meerut. How? The last sentence only of his letter has any sort of reference to the public accusation; and this sentence replies, but not with _any_ mode of argument (sound or unsound), to a charge perfectly irrelevant, if it had ever existed--namely, an imaginary charge against the little army assembled on May 10 at Meerut. The short and summary answer is, that no such imaginary charge, pure and absolute moonshine, was ever advanced against the gallant force at Meerut.

Secondly, if it had, such a charge could have no bearing whatever upon that charge, loudly preferred against the commander of that district.

Thirdly, the charge has been (I presume) settled as regards its truth, and any grounds of disputation, this way or that, by the Governor-General. The newspapers have told us, and have not been contradicted, that Lord Canning has dismissed this functionary for '_supineness_.']

Thinking of that vile _lacheté_, which surrendered, with a girl's tameness, absolutely suffered to lapse, without effort, and as if a bauble, this great arsenal and magazine into the hands of the revolters, involuntarily we have regarded it all along as a deadly misfortune; and, upon each periodic mail, the whole nation has received the news of its non-capture as a capital disappointment.

But, on steadier consideration, apparently all this must be regarded as a very great error. Not that it could be any error to have wished for any course of events involving the safety of our poor slaughtered compatriots. That event would have been cheap at _any_ price. But that dismal catastrophe _having_ happened, to intercept that bitter wo having been already ripened into an impossibility by the 11th and 12th of May, seven-and-forty days before our thoughts at home began to settle upon India, thenceforwards it became a very great advantage--a supreme advantage--that Delhi should have been occupied by the mutineers. Briefly, then, why?

First of all, because this movement shut up within one ring fence the _élite_ of the rebels (according to some calculations, at least three-and-twenty thousand of well-armed and well-disciplined men), that would otherwise have been roaming over the whole face of Bengal as marauders and murderers. These men, left to follow their own vagrant instincts, would, it is true, in some not inconsiderable proportion, have fallen victims to those fierce reactions of rustic vengeance which their own atrocities would very soon have provoked. But large concentrated masses would still have survived in a condition rapidly disposable as auxiliary bodies to all those towns invested by circumstances with a partisan interest, such as Lucknow, Benares, Cawnpore, Agra, Gwalior, and Allahabad.

Secondly, Delhi it was that opened the horrors of retribution; mark what chastisement it was that alighted from the very first upon all the scoundrels who sought, and fancied they could not fail to find, an asylum in Delhi. It is probable that hardly one in twenty of the mutineers came to Delhi without plunder, and for strong reasons this plunder would universally assume the shape of heavy metallic money. For the public treasuries in almost every station were rifled; and unhappily for the comfort of the robbers under the Bengal sun of June and July, very much of the East Indian money lies in silver--namely, rupees; of which, in the last generation, eight were sufficient to make an English pound; but at present ten are required by the evil destiny of sepoys. Everybody has read an anecdote of the painter Correggio, that, upon finishing a picture for some monastery, the malicious monks paid him for it in copper. The day of payment was hot, and poor Correggio was overweighted; he lay down under his copper affliction; and whether he died or not, is more than I remember. But doubtless, to the curious in Correggiosity, Pilkington will tell. For the sepoys, although _their_ affliction took the shape of silver, and not of copper, virtually it was not less, considering the far more blazing sun. Mephistopheles might have arranged the whole affair. One could almost hear him whispering to each separate sepoy, as he stood amongst the treasury burglars, the reflection that those _pensions_, which the kind and munificent English Government granted to their old age or their infirmities, all over India, raising up memorial trophies of public gratitude or enlightened pity, never more would be heard of. All had perished, the justice that gave, the humble merit that received, the dutiful behaviour that hoped; and henceforwards of them and of their names, as after the earliest of rebellions, in the book of life 'was no remembrance.'

Under these miserable thoughts the vast majority of the sepoys robbed largely, as opportunities continually opened upon them. Then, and chiefly _through_ their robberies, commenced their chastisement in good earnest. Every soldier by every comrade was viewed with hatred and suspicion; by the common labourer with the scrutiny of deep self-interest. The popular report of their sudden wealth travelled rapidly; every road, village, house, whether ahead or on their flanks, became a place of distrust and anxious jealousy; and Delhi seemed to offer the only safe asylum. Thither, as to a consecrated sanctuary, all hurried; and their first introduction to the duties of the new home they had adopted, would be a harsh and insolent summons to the chances of a desperate _sortie_ against men in whose presence their very souls sank. On reviewing the circumstances which _must_ have surrounded this Delhi life, probably no nearer resemblance to a hell of apostate spirits has ever existed. Money, carried in weighty parcels of coin, cannot be concealed. Swathed about the person, it disfigures the natural symmetries of the figure. The dilemma, therefore, in which every individual traitor stood was, that, if he escaped a special notice from every eye, this must have been because all his crimes had failed to bring him even a momentary gain. Having no money, he had no swollen trousers. For ever he had forfeited the pension that was the pledge of comfort and respectability to his family and his own old age. This he had sacrificed, in exchange for--nothing at all. But, on the other hand, if his robberies had been very productive and prosperous, in that proportion he became advertised to every eye, indicated and betrayed past all concealment to every ruffian less fortunate as a pillager. Delhi must in several points have ripened his troubles, and showed them on a magnifying disk. To have no confidential friend, or adviser, or depositary of a secret, is an inevitable evil amongst a population constitutionally treacherous. But now in Delhi this torment takes a more fearful shape. Every fifth or sixth day, when he is sternly ordered out upon his turn of duty, what shall he do with his money? He has by possibility 40 lbs. weight of silver, each pound worth about three guineas. In the very improbable case of his escaping the gallows, since the British Government will endeavour to net the whole monstrous crew that have one and all broken the _sacramentum militare_, for which scourging with rods and subsequent strangulation is the inevitable penalty, what will remain to his poor family? His cottage, that once had been his pride, will now betray him, as soon as ever movable columns are formed, and horse-patrols begin to inspect the roads. But, as to his money, in nineteen cases out of twenty, he will find himself obliged to throw it away in his flight, and will then find that through three months of intolerable suffering he has only been acting as steward for some British soldier.

The private letters and the local newspapers from many parts of India having now come in, it is possible through the fearful confusion to read some facts that would cause despair, were it not for two remembrances: first, what nation it is that supports the struggle; secondly, that of the six weeks immediately succeeding to the 10th of September, no two days, no period of forty-eight hours, _can_ pass without continued successions of reinforcements reaching Calcutta. It should be known that even the worst sailers among the transports--namely, exactly those which were despatched from England through the course of _July_ (not of August)--are all under contract to perform the voyage in seventy days; whereas many a calculation has proceeded on the old rate of ninety days. The small detachments of two and three hundreds, despatched on every successive day of July, are already arriving at their destination; and the August detachments, generally much stronger (800 or 900), all sailed in powerful steamers. Lord Elgin arrived at Calcutta in time to be reported by this mail, with marines (300) and others (300), most seasonably to meet the dangers and uproars of the great Mahometan festival. The bad tidings are chiefly these:--

1. The failure of a night-attack upon the Dinapore mutineers by detachments from two of our British regiments, with a loss of '200 _killed_'; in which, however, there _must_ be a mistake; for the total number of our attacking party was only 300. On the other hand, there may have been some call for a consciously desperate effort; and the enemy, having two regiments, would muster, probably, very nearly 2000 men; for the sepoy regiments are always strong in numbers, and these particular regiments had not suffered.

2. Much more ominous than these reports, is an estimate of our main force before Delhi at less than 2000 men. This, unhappily, is not intrinsically improbable. The force was, by many persons, never reckoned at more than 6000 or 7000 men; and this, when reduced by three-and-twenty conflicts (perhaps more), in which the enemy had the advantage of artillery more powerful than ours, and (what is worse) of trained artillerymen more numerous, might too naturally come down to the small number stated.

3. The doubtful condition of Lucknow, Benares, and Agra comes in the rear of all this to strike a frost into the heart, or would do so, again I say, if any other nation were concerned.

4. Worse still, because reluctantly unfolding facts that had previously been known and kept back, is the state of Bombay. When retreats on board the shipping are contemplated, or at least talked of, the mere insulated case of Kolapore becomes insignificant.

5. I read a depressing record in the very quarter whence all our hopes arise. In summing up the particular transports throughout July whose destination was Calcutta, I find that the total of troops ordered to that port in the thirty-one days of July was just 6500, and no more. Every place was rapidly becoming of secondary importance in comparison of the area stretching with a radius of 150 miles in every direction from the centre of Allahabad. And the one capital danger is too clearly this--that, being unable to throw in _overwhelming_ succours, those inadequate succours, matched against the countless resources of Hindoo vagrant ruffianism, may, at the utmost, enable us to keep a lingering hold, whilst endless successions of incomparably gallant men fall before our own rifles, our own guns, and that discipline of a cowardly race which we ourselves have taught. We are true to ourselves, and ever shall be so: that is a rock to build upon. Yet, if it should appear by January next that no deep impression has then been made upon revolting India, it will probably appear the best course to send no more rivulets of aid; but to _combine_ measures energetically with every colony or outpost of the empire; to call up even the marines and such sections of our naval forces as have often co-operated with the land forces (in the Chinese war especially); and to do all this with a perfect disregard of money. Lord Palmerston explained very sufficiently why it is that any powerful squadrons of ships, which would else have rendered such overwhelming succour against the towns along the line of the Ganges and Jumna, were unhappily disqualified for action, by the shallows and sand-banks on those great rivers. But this apology does not stand good as regards flotillas of gunboats or rafts with a very light draught of water; still less as regards the seamen and marines.

I conclude with these notices--too painfully entitled to some attention. Would to heaven they were _not_!

1. Calcutta itself is not by any means in a state of _security_, either in the English sense of that word (namely, freedom from danger), or in its old Latin sense of freedom from the _anxieties_ of danger. All depends upon the prosperity of our affairs at Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Cawnpore, and Allahabad. The possibility of a fanatical explosion, such as that which occurred recently at Patna, shows the inefficiency of our precautions and pretended police. I believe that the _native_ associations formed in Calcutta will be of little use. Either the members will be sleeping at the moment of outbreak, or will be separated from their arms. We are noble in our carelessness; our enemy is base, but his baseness, always in alliance with cunning and vigilance, tells cruelly against us.