Chapter 25

2. It may be feared that the Governor-General has in the following point lamentably neglected a great duty of his place. It must have been remarked with astonishment, as a matter almost inexplicable, how it has arisen that so many gallant men, at the head of every regiment, should have suffered themselves to be slaughtered like sheep in a butcher's shambles. Surely five-and-twenty or thirty men, in youthful vigour, many of them capital shots, could easily have shot down 150 of the cowardly sepoys. So much work they could have finished with their revolvers. More than one amongst the ladies, in this hideous struggle, have shot down their two brace of black scoundrels apiece. But the officers, having the advantage of swords, would have accounted for a few score more. Why, then, have they not done this?--an act of energy so natural to our countrymen when thus roused to unforgiving vengeance. Simply because they have held themselves most nobly, and in defiance of their own individual interest, to be under engagements of fidelity to the Company, and obligations of forbearance to the dogs whom they commanded, up to the last moment of possible doubt. Now, from these engagements of honour the Governor-General should, by one universal act (applicable to the three Presidencies) have absolved them. For it cannot be alleged _now_ for an instant, that perhaps the regiments might mean to continue faithful. If they _do_ mean this, no harm will come to any party from the official dispensing order; the sepoys could suffer by it only in the case of treachery. And, in the meantime, there has emerged amongst them a new policy of treason, which requires of us to assume, in mere self-defence, that _all_ sepoys are meditating treason. It is this: they now reserve their final treason until the critical moment of action in the very crisis of battle. Ordered to charge the revolters, they discharge their carbines over their heads; or, if infantry, they blaze away with blank cartridge. This policy has been played off already eight or nine times; and by one time, as it happens, too many; for it was tried upon the stern Havelock, who took away both horses and carbines from the offenders. Too late it is _now_ for Bengal to baffle this sharper's trick. But Bombay and Madras, should _their_ turn come after all, might profit by the experience.

3. For years it has been our nursery bugbear, to apprehend a Russian invasion on the Indus. This, by testimony from every quarter (the last being that of Sir Roderick Murchison, who had travelled over most of the ground), is an infinitely impossible chimera; or at least until the Russians have colonized Khiva and Bokhara. Meantime, to those who have suffered anxiety from such an anticipation, let me suggest one consolation at least amongst the many horrors of the present scenes in Bengal--namely, that this perfidy of our troops was not displayed first in the very agony of conflict with Russia, or some more probable invader.

4. A dismal suggestion arises from the present condition of Bengal, which possibly it is too late now to regard as a warning. Ravaged by bands of marauders, no village safe from incursion, the usual culture of the soil must have been dangerously interrupted. Next, therefore, comes FAMINE (and note that the famines of India have been always excessive, from want of adequate carriage), and in the train of famine, inaudibly but surely, comes cholera; and then, perhaps, the guiltiest of races will pay down an expiation at which centuries will tremble. For in the grave of famishing nations treason languishes; the murderer has no escape; and the infant with its mother sleeps at last in peace.

* * * * *

_P.S._--The following memoranda, more or less connected with points noticed in the preceding paper, but received later, seem to merit attention:--

1. As to the strength of our army before Delhi, it seems, from better accounts, to be hardly less than 5000 men, of which one-half are British infantry; and the besieged seem, by the closest inquiries, to reach at the least 22,000 men.

2. Colonel Edwardes, so well known in connection with Moultan, has published an important fact--namely, that the sepoys _did_ rely, in a very great degree, upon the whole country rising, and that their disappointment and despair are consequently proportionable.

3. A great question arises--How it was possible for the sepoys--unquestionably not harbouring the smallest ill-will to the British--suddenly and almost universally to assail them with atrocities arguing the greatest. Even their own countrymen, with all their childish credulity, would not be made to believe that they really hated people with whom they had never had any but the kindest and most indulgent intercourse. I should imagine that the solution must do sought in two facts--first, in the deadly ennui and _tædium_ of sepoy life, which disposes them to catch maniacally at any opening for furious excitement; but, secondly, in the wish to forward the ends of the conspiracy under Mahometan misleading. Hence, in particular, the cruelties practised on women and children: for they argued that, though the British _men_ would face anything in their own persons before they would relax their hold on India, they would yet be appalled by the miseries of their female partners and children.

4. It is most unfair, undoubtedly, to attack any man in our present imperfect state of information. But some neglects are unsusceptible of after excuse. One I have noticed, which cannot be denied or varnished, in Lord Canning. Another is this:--Had he offered 10,000 rupees (£1000 sterling) for the head of Nena Sahib, he would have got it in ten days, besides inflicting misery on the hell-kite.

III.

SUGGESTIONS UPON THE SECRET OF THE MUTINY.

(_January, 1858._)

The first question arises upon the true originators, proximate and immediate, of the mutiny--who were they? This question ploughs deeper than any which moves under an impulse of mere historic curiosity; and it is practically the main question. Knowing the true, instant, operative cause, already we know something of the remedy;--having sure information as to the ringleaders, we are enabled at once to read their motives in the past, to anticipate their policy in the future;--having the _persons_ indicated, those who first incited or encouraged the felonious agents, we can shorten the course of public vengeance; and in so vast a field of action can give a true direction from the first to the pursuit headed by our Indian police. For that should never be laid out of sight--that against rebels whose _least_ offence is their rebellion, against men who have massacred by torture women and children, the service of extermination belongs of right to executioners armed with whips and rods, with the _lassos_ of South America for noosing them, and, being noosed, with halters to hang them.[65] It should be made known by proclamation to the sepoys, that _de jure_, in strict interpretation of the principle concerned, they are hunted by the hangman; and that the British army, whilst obliged by the vast scale of the outrages to join in this hangman's chase, feel themselves dishonoured, and called to a work which properly is the inheritance of the gallows; and yet, again, become reconciled to the work, as the purgation of an earth polluted by the blood of the innocent.

[Footnote 65: '_To hang them:_'--But with a constant notification that, _after_ hanging, the criminals would be decapitated: otherwise the threat loses its sting. It seems to be a superstition universal amongst Southern Asiatics, unless possibly amongst the Malay race, that to suffer any dismemberment of the body operates disastrously upon the fate in the unseen world. And hence, no doubt, it has arisen that the gallows is not viewed in the light of a degrading punishment. Immunity from mutilation compensates any ignominy which might else attend it. Accordingly, we see in China that the innumerable victims of the present rebellion, captured in the vast province of Quantung by the cruel Yeh, were all beheaded by the sword in the blood-reeking privacies of Canton. And two centuries back, when the native dynasty was overthrown by the last Tartar invasion, the reigning emperor (having unlimited freedom of choice) ended his career by a halter: retiring to his orchard, he hanged both himself and his daughter.]

Who then, again I ask--who are those that, after seven months' watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous convulsion? Individual opinions on this question, and such as could plead a weight of authority in regard to experience, to local advantages for conjecture, and to official opportunities for overlooking intercepted letters, there have been many; and at first (say from May 10 to the end of June), in the absence of any strong counter-arguments, some of these were entitled to the full benefit of their _personal_ weight (such weight, I mean, as could be drawn from the position or from the known character of him who announced the opinion). But now--namely, on the 15th of December (or, looking to India, say the 10th of November)--we are entitled to something weightier. And what _is_ there which generally would be held weightier? First, there are the confessions of dying criminals;--I mean, that, logically, we must reserve such a head, as likely to offer itself sooner or later. Tempers vary as to obduracy, and circumstances vary. All men will not share in the obstinacy of partisan pride; or not, by many degrees, equally. And again, some amongst the many thousands who leave families will have favours to ask. They all know secretly the perfect trustworthiness of the British Government. And when matters have come to a case of choice between a wife and children, in the one scale, and a fraternity consciously criminal, in the other, it may be judged which is likely to prevail. What through the coercion of mere circumstances--what through the entreaties of wife and children, co-operating with such circumstances--or sometimes through weakness of nature, or through relenting of compunction--it is not to be doubted that, as the cohesion of party begins rapidly to relax under approaching ruin, there will be confessions in abundance. For as yet, under the timid policy of the sepoys--hardly ever venturing out of cover, either skulking amongst bushy woodlands, or sneaking into house-shelter, or slinking back within the range of their great guns--it has naturally happened that our prisoners have been exceedingly few. But the decisive battle before Lucknow will tell us another story. There will at last be cavalry to _reap_ the harvest when our soldiery have won it. The prisoners will begin to accumulate by thousands; executions will proceed through week after week; and a large variety of cases will yield us a commensurate crop of confessions. These, when they come, will tell us, no doubt, most of what the sepoys can be supposed to know. But, meantime, how much is _that_? Too probably, except in the case of here and there some specially intelligent or specially influential sepoy officer, indispensable as a go-between to the non-military conspirators moving in darkness behind the rebel army, nothing at all was communicated to the bulk of the privates, beyond the mere detail of movements required by the varying circumstantialities of each particular case. But of the ultimate purpose, of the main strategic policy, or of the transcendent interests over-riding the narrow counsels that fell under the knowledge of the illiterate soldier, since no part was requisite to the fulfilment of each man's separate duty, no part would be communicated. It is barely possible that so much light as may be won from confessions, combined with so much further light as may be supposed to lurk amongst the mass of unexamined papers left behind them by the rebels at Delhi, might tell us something important. But any result to be expected from the Delhi papers is a doubtful contingency. It is uncertain whether they will ever be brought under the review of zeal united to sagacity sufficient for sustaining a search purely disinterested. Promising no great triumph for any literary purpose, proving as little, perhaps, one way or other, as the mathematician in the old story complained that the _Æneid_ proved--these papers, unless worked by an enamoured bookworm (or paperworm), will probably be confiscated to some domestic purpose, of singeing chickens or lighting fires.

But, in any case, whether speaking by confessions or by the varied memoranda (orders to subaltern officers, resolutions adopted by meetings, records of military councils, petitions, or suggestions on the public service, addressed to the king, &c.), abandoned in the palace at Delhi, the soldier can tell no more than he knew, which, under any theory of the case, must have been very little. Better, therefore, than all expectations fixed on the vile soldiery, whom, in every sense, and in all directions, I believe to have been brutally ignorant, and through their ignorance mainly to have been used as blind servile instruments--better and easier it would be to examine narrowly whether, in the whole course and evolution of this stupendous tragedy, there may not be found some characterising feature or distinguishing incident, that may secretly report the agency, and betray, by the style and character of the workmanship, _who_ might be the particular class of workmen standing at the centre of this unparalleled conspiracy. I think that we stand in this dilemma: either, on the one hand, that the miserable sepoys, who were the sole acting managers, were also the sole contrivers of the plot--in which case we can look for further light only to the judicial confessions; or, on the other hand, that an order of agents far higher in rank than any subaltern members of our army, and who were enabled by this rank and corresponding wealth to use these soldiers as their dupes and tools, stood in the background, holding the springs of the machinery in their hands, with a view to purposes transcending by far any that could ever suggest themselves to persons of obscure station, having no prospect of benefiting by their own fullest success. In this case, we shall learn nothing from the confessions of those who must, upon a principle of mere self-preservation, have been excluded from all real knowledge of the dreadful scheme to which they were made parties, simply as perpetrators of its murders and outrages. Here it is equally vain to look for revelations from the mercenary workers, who know nothing, or from the elevated leaders, who know all, but have an interest of life and death in dissembling their knowledge. Revelations of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not, reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made a self-revelation--a silent but significant revelation, pointing the attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy.

Now, it has not escaped the notice of many people that two most extraordinary classes of outrages, perpetrated or attempted, have marked a very large majority of the mutinous explosions; outrages that were in the last degree unnatural, as out of harmony with the whole temper and spirit of intercourse generally prevailing between the sepoys and their British officers. The case is peculiarly striking. No reproach on the character of their manners was ever alleged against their British officers by any section or subdivision of the sepoy soldiery. Indeed, the reproach, where any existed, ran in the very opposite channel. Too great indulgence to the sepoy, a spirit of concession too facile to their very whims and caprices, and generally too relaxed a state of discipline--these features it was of the British bearing towards the native soldiery which too often, and reasonably, provoked severe censures from the observing. The very case[66] which I adduced some months back, where an intelligent British officer, in the course of his evidence before some court-martial, mentioned, in illustration of the decaying discipline, that for some considerable space of time he had noticed a growing disrespect on the part of the privates; in particular, that, on coming into the cantonments of his own regiment, the men had ceased to rise from their seats, and took no notice of his presence--this one anecdote sufficiently exemplified the quality of the errors prevailing in the deportment of our countrymen to their native soldiery; and that it would be ludicrous to charge them with any harshness or severity of manner. Such being too notoriously the case, whence could possibly arise the bloody carnage by which, in almost every case, the sepoys inaugurated, or tried to inaugurate, their emancipation from British rule? Our continental neighbours at first grossly misinterpreted the case; and more excusably than in many other misinterpretations. Certainly it was unavoidable at first to read, in this frenzy of bloodshed, the vindictive retaliations of men that had suffered horrible and ineffable indignities at our hands. It was apparently the old case of African slaves in some West Indian colony--St. Domingo, for instance--breaking loose from the yoke, and murdering (often with cruel torments) the whole households of their oppressors. But a month dissipated these groundless commentaries. The most prejudiced Frenchman could not fail to observe that no sepoy regiment ever alluded to any rigour of treatment, or any haughtiness of demeanour. His complaints centred in the one sole subject of religion; even as to which he did not generally pretend to any certain knowledge, but simply to a very strong belief or persuasion that we secretly meditated, not that we openly avowed or deliberately pursued, a purpose of coercing him into Christianity. This, were it even true, though a false and most erroneous policy, could not be taxed with ill-will. A man's own religion, if it is sincerely such, is that which he profoundly believes to be the truth. Now, in seeking to inoculate another with that which sincerely he believes to be eminently the truth, though proceeding by false methods, a man acts in a spirit of benignity. So that, on all hands, the hellish fury of the sepoy was felt to be unnatural, artificially assumed, and, by a reasonable inference, was held to be a mask for something else that he wished to conceal. But what? What was that something else which he wished to conceal? The sepoy simulated, in order that he might dissimulate. He pretended a wrong sustained, that he might call away attention from a wrong which he designed. At this point I (and no doubt in company with multitudes beside that had watched the case) became sensible of an alien presence secretly intruding into this pretended quarrel of the native soldier. It was no sepoy that was moving at the centre of this feud: the objects towards which it ultimately tended were not such as could by possibility interest the poor, miserable, idolatrous native. What was _he_ to gain by the overthrow of the British Government? The poor simpleton, who had been decoyed into this monstrous field of strife, opened the game by renouncing all the vast advantages which he and his children to the hundredth generation might draw from the system of the Company, and entered upon a career towards distant objects that for _him_ have absolutely no meaning or intelligible existence. At this point it was that two enigmas, previously insoluble, suddenly received the fullest explanation:--

1. What was the meaning of that hellish fury suddenly developed towards officers with whom previously the sepoy had lived on terms of reciprocal amity?

2. What cause had led to that incomprehensible enmity manifested, in the process of these ferocious scenes, towards the wives and children of the officers? Surely, if his wish were to eliminate their families from the Indian territory, that purpose was sufficiently secured by the massacre of him whose exertions obtained a livelihood for the rest of the household.

[Footnote 66: This case was entirely misapprehended by a journalist who happened to extract the passage. He understood me to mean that this particular mode of disrespect to their British officers had operated as a _cause_ of evil; whereas I alleged it simply as an evidence and exponent of evil habits criminally tolerated amongst the very lowest orders of our mercenary troops.]

It was tolerably certain that the widows and their children would not remain much longer in the Indian territory, when it no longer offered them an asylum or a livelihood. Now, since personally, and viewed apart from their husbands, these ladies could have no interest for the murdering sepoys, it became more and more unintelligible on what principle, steady motive, or fugitive impulse, these incarnate demons could persist in cherishing any feeling whatever to those poor, ruined women, who, when their anchorage should be cut away by the murder of their husbands, would become mere waifs and derelicts stranded upon the Indian shores.