STAMPING OUT MUTINY
Perhaps the most characteristic story of Sepoy outbreak is that at
Allahabad. The city stands at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna,
500 miles from Calcutta, and, with its strong fortress and great arsenal,
was a strategic point scarcely second in importance to Delhi. It had a
population of 75,000, highly fanatical in temper. Its arsenal was one
of the largest in India, having arms for 40,000 men and great stores
of artillery. Yet, with the exception of the magazine staff, there was
not a British soldier in the city! It was garrisoned by the 6th Native
Infantry, a wing of a Sikh regiment, the 9th, a battery of native
artillery, and some native cavalry.
Colonel Simpson of the 6th, who was in command, cherished the most
enthusiastic faith in his men. He looked on his cherished Sepoys as
a regiment of mere dusky-skinned Sir Galahads; each one of them was
as faithful as Milton’s Abdiel! Some sixty superannuated British
artillerymen, the youngest of them over fifty years of age, had been
thrown hurriedly into the fort itself as a garrison; and Colonel Simpson
strongly urged that his regiment should be taken into the fort in their
place as “a proof of confidence.” This would have been like putting a
committee of wolves inside the fold!
At evening parade on June 6, Colonel Simpson read to his Sepoys the
formal thanks of the Governor-General for their virtuous offer to go out
and fight the wicked mutineers at Delhi. He added a glowing eulogium of
their loyalty on his own account. The Sepoys cheered, Colonel Simpson and
his fellow-officers adjourned to the mess-room, and no doubt discoursed
with great comfort on the much-enduring fidelity of their men. Within
four hours of being thanked by Lord Canning and praised by Colonel
Simpson, the “faithful” Sepoys of the 6th Infantry had murdered seventeen
officers and all the women and children of English blood they could
capture, and were in full march to Delhi.
The tale is typical. At nine o’clock a bugle call sounded from the
lines—it was the signal for revolt. The men rushed to arms. The Sepoy
artillerymen holding the bridge swung their guns round, and opened fire
on their officers. Harward and Alexander, in command of the Native
Irregular Horse, and both officers of great promise, leaped into their
saddles, and galloped fiercely to the bridge to recapture the guns. When
they gave the order to charge, their treacherous followers suddenly
pulled up; and, followed by only three troopers, the officers rode at
the guns. Alexander, rising in his stirrups for one gallant sword-stroke,
was shot through the heart; and Harward had to gallop for his life.
Simpson and his officers in the meanwhile ran to the parade-ground to
“expostulate” with their men. Five officers were instantly shot down.
Colonel Simpson was beginning to address a new series of compliments
to his faithful Sepoys, but they turned their muskets upon him, and
interrupted his eloquence with a volley. By some miracle he escaped and
galloped off to the fort. He had to ride past the mess-house, and the
mess guard turned out and took pot shots at him as he rode. The unhappy
colonel reached the gate of the fort with a dying horse, a wounded arm,
and an entirely new theory of Sepoy loyalty.
But was the fort itself safe? Its garrison consisted of the sixty odd
superannuated artillerymen, a few civilian volunteers, the wing of a
Sikh regiment, and a company of the 9th Native Infantry. These men held
the gate, and were, of course, only waiting to open it to their revolted
comrades. If the Sikhs joined hands with them, there remained nothing
but hopeless massacre for the British. And only five days before, at
Benares, it must be remembered, a Sikh regiment had opened fire on its
officers! As a matter of fact, the Sikhs in the fort were effervescing
with excitement. Mutiny was in the air. Upon whom the Sikh muskets might
be turned, their owners themselves scarcely knew. It was a crisis of the
sort which overwhelms weak men, but gives a man of heroic will a supreme
opportunity. And, fortunately, a man with all the decision and courage
the moment needed was on the spot.
Lieutenant Brasyer had fought as a private in the ranks through the
Sutlej campaigns, and won a commission by his coolness and daring. He
possessed exactly the genius needed for commanding irregular soldiery. He
was an athlete, a fine swordsman, a man of the swiftest decision and most
gallant courage. He is not unworthy, indeed, to be ranked for leadership
and personal daring with Hodson of “Hodson’s Horse.” Brasyer had first to
master his Sikhs, trembling on the verge of revolt themselves. Archibald
Forbes has described his method: “Standing over the magazine with a
red-hot iron in his hand, he swore by Nanac, Ram Das, Govind, and all
other Gooroos of the Sikhs, that if his men did not promptly fall in and
obey his orders he would blow the regiment to the Sikh equivalent of
Hades.”
Brasyer’s glance and voice, his imperious will and daring, mastered
the Sikhs, and they fell obediently into rank. He instantly marched
them down, with loaded muskets, to the gate, and, with the help of the
artillerymen with their port-fires, drove out the company of Sepoys that
held it, and the fort was saved! But to master Sepoys in open revolt, by
Sikhs on the edge of revolt, was a great feat, and shows for how much,
at such a crisis, one clear heroic will counts.
That night Allahabad was given up to outrage and murder. Only above the
fort itself flew the flag of England, and in the fort the handful of
British officers, determined that the great arsenal should not fall into
the hands of mutineers, were preparing to copy Willoughby’s desperate
example at Delhi. Russell, of the artillery, who was in charge of the
magazine, ran trains of powder into it, and stood ready to blow it up in
the event of capture.
In the city itself every European or Eurasian was hunted like a rat
through the streets, and slain with every accompaniment of cruelty.
Outrage, in the ordinary sense, was not, on the whole, a marked feature
of the Great Mutiny. The Sepoys, that is, were on fire with cruelty
rather than with lust. But their cruelty spared neither age nor sex.
The wife of a captain, according to one story current at the time—and
perhaps not true—was literally boiled alive in ghee, or melted butter.
Children were tossed on bayonets, men roasted in the flames of their own
bungalows; women were mutilated and dismembered. The Sepoys plundered the
Treasury, carrying off some £300,000 in booty.
One detail of the Allahabad massacre peculiarly shocked the imagination
of British soldiers wherever the tale was told. At the mess-table of the
9th, that fatal night, there sat eight fresh-faced and boyish cadets
just out from England. They had not yet joined their regiments, and
military life, with all its fun and excitement, lay in the glamour of the
unknown before them. When the bugle rang out on the parade-ground these
eight unposted boy ensigns ran out with the other officers. They fell
into the hands of the mutineers, and seven had their throats cut like
sheep. The eighth, a boy of sixteen, was left for dead, but survived in
spite of horrible wounds for four days, hiding himself in a ravine. On
the fifth day he was discovered, dragged to the native lines, and thrust
into a hut as a prisoner.
He found there a Christian catechist, who had formerly been a Mohammedan,
and who was being tortured by the Sepoys to make him renounce his
faith. The catechist’s courage had given way, but the gallant English
lad—himself only sixteen years of age—urged the unhappy catechist, “Don’t
deny Christ! Never deny Christ!” Neill reached Allahabad in time to
rescue both catechist and ensign. But the ensign, Arthur Cheek, died of
his wounds four days after Neill’s arrival. He had joined his regiment
just eighteen days when murdered in this tragical fashion by his own men.
It may be imagined how the massacre of the “poor little griffins” moved
the British soldier to wrath everywhere.
For a few days mutiny and riot reigned supreme at Allahabad. Then, hot
from Benares, there appeared on the scene Neill with a handful of his
“Lambs,” as the Madras Fusileers, with admiring irony, were called.
“Thank God, sir,” said the sentry at the gate of the fort, as Neill rode
in; “you’ll save us yet!”
Neill is one of the cluster of great soldiers thrust into sudden fame by
the crisis of the Mutiny, and is hardly to be judged by the standard of
smaller men and of a tamer period. He was of Scottish blood, an Ayrshire
man, with a vehement fighting quality, and a strain of iron resolve,
which had come to him, perhaps, from a line of Covenanting ancestry. He
was a veteran soldier, accustomed to govern wild clans and irregular
troops, and had held high command in the Turkish contingent in the
Crimea. On the domestic side, he was, as many stern and rough-natured men
are, of singular tenderness. He was strongly religious, too, though he
borrowed his religion rather from the Old Testament than the New.
When the Mutiny broke out Neill found himself in command of the Madras
Fusileers, a regiment which included many wild spirits in its ranks,
but which, in fighting quality, was a warlike instrument of singular
efficiency. Neill and his “Lambs” were summoned from Madras by the crisis
in Bengal, and Neill’s best qualities, as well as his worst—his fighting
impulse, his Scottish pride of race, the natural vehemence of his temper,
his soldierly hate of mutiny, the wrath of a strong man at outrages on
women and children, and his fierce contempt for the feebleness shown by
some of the “arm-chair colonels” of the Bengal Army—all threw their
owner into a mood in which he was prepared to dare anything to crush the
Mutiny and to punish the mutineers.
The Fusileers landed on the railway wharf at Calcutta, as night fell,
on May 23. The great city of Benares was on the verge of revolt, and
Neill’s “Lambs” were to be hurried up by express to its rescue. The
station-master told Neill that unless he could get his men ashore
in three minutes the train would start without them. But Neill was
not the man to allow a railway time-table to stand betwixt him and
the suppression of a mutiny. With an abrupt gesture, he put the
station-master in charge of a sergeant and a file of Fusileers. The
unhappy official shouted for help, but in another second stokers,
firemen, and guard were in a row against the station wall, with a couple
of “blue-caps” in charge of each. At the double the Fusileers came up the
wharf, filed into the carriages, and the train, carrying the left wing of
the regiment, moved off to Raneegange; thence the detachment was carried
by bullock-carts to Benares. Leaving the bulk of his men to follow, Neill
pushed on with the leading detachment to Benares.
Nowhere, perhaps, did English courage shine out with a clearer flame than
at Benares. Benares is the holy city of Hinduism; it had a population of
300,000, fanatical and turbulent in the highest degree. The cantonment
was held by three Sepoy regiments—all pledged to revolt—150 men of a
British regiment, the 10th, and some thirty British gunners, with half a
battery of artillery, under the command of Olpherts. But the cluster of
soldiers and civilians responsible for the city—Tucker the commissioner,
Frederick Gubbins the judge, Lind the magistrate, Ponsonby the brigadier,
and Olpherts in command of the guns—held on to their post; by mere cool
audacity kept the turbulent city in awe, and the mutinous Sepoys from
breaking out; and sent on to other posts in greater peril than their
own such scanty reinforcements of British troops as reached them. In
the Commissioner, Tucker, at least, this heroic courage had a religious
root. “The twenty-second chapter of 2 Samuel,” he wrote to Lord Canning,
“was their stand-by.” “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my
deliverer,” is the opening verse of David’s song in that chapter; “the
God of my rock; in Him will I trust. He is my shield, and the horn of my
salvation, my high tower, and my refuge.”
Neill reached the city on June 3, and found himself on the very edge of
a tragedy. The Sepoys had arranged for an outbreak on the night of June
4. The native troops numbered over 2000; the British troops, as we have
seen, consisted of 150 men of the 10th, and thirty artillerymen with
three guns. To these Neill added sixty of his “Lambs” whom he had brought
with him. Neill put the impress of his vehement will on the brigadier,
Ponsonby, in charge of the station, and at half-an-hour’s notice it was
resolved to disarm the Sepoys.
The business was ill-managed. The Sepoys commenced to shoot, the Sikhs
turned on their officers. Ponsonby, an old man, found “the sun” and
the strain of the scene too much for him, and visibly broke down. He
dismounted, and Neill, who had been grimly watching the scene, said
abruptly, “General, I assume command.” Ponsonby assented in silence, and
Neill instantly opened on the mutineers with grape and musketry fire,
and, after a few minutes’ furious shooting, Sikh and Sepoy fled. The 250,
that is, destroyed, in a military sense, the 2000!
Having stamped out the Mutiny—or, rather, scattered the mutineers—Neill
devoted the next two or three days to punishing it. The Governor-General
telegraphed orders to push on to Allahabad, but Neill believed in making
thorough work, and he wired back, “Can’t move; wanted here.” And for the
next three days he kept the gallows busy, and hanged without pause or
pity. The Sepoys had shot down their officers, and murdered women and
children, and Neill was bent on showing that this was a performance which
brought in its track swift and terrible punishment. “Colonel Neill’s
hangings” were, no doubt, of heroic scale, and, looked at through the
cold perspective of forty years, wear a very black aspect. But Neill,
rightly or wrongly, held that to strike, and to strike hard, and to
strike swiftly, was the one policy in such a crisis.
Benares being secure, Neill pushed on across the seventy miles of dusty,
heat-scorched road to Allahabad. He started with only forty-four of his
“Lambs,” and covered the seventy miles in two night marches. When they
reached the Ganges, almost every fourth man was down with sunstroke,
Neill himself being amongst the number, and his men only kept him up by
dashing buckets of water over his head and chest. The boat pushed from
the bank; it was found to leak at a dozen points, and began to sink. The
“blue-caps” relanded, and their officer, Spurgin, called for volunteers
to beat the banks of the river in search of another boat.
Almost every man able to walk volunteered, and, in the heavy sand of the
river-bank, with the furnace-like heat of an Indian sun setting on fire
the very air they breathed, the Fusileers began their search for a boat
to carry them across to Allahabad. More than one brave fellow fell and
died from heat and exhaustion. But a boat was found, the gallant forty
crossed, and marched—as many of them as could still keep their feet—a
tiny but dauntless band, through the gates of the fort.
Other detachments followed quickly, and Neill flung himself with all the
fire of his Scottish blood into the task of restoring the British raj in
the great city. At daybreak he opened with his guns, from the fort, on
the suburb held by the revolted Sepoys, and then sallied out with his
scanty force, and burnt it over their rebel heads. “I myself,” he wrote
to his wife, “was almost dying from complete exhaustion;” but his fierce
spirit overbore the fainting body that carried it. He armed a river
steamer with a howitzer and a party of volunteer riflemen, and employed
it as a river patrol. He launched the fierce Sikhs—by this time heartily
loyal—on the villages.
They were wild soldiers, gaunt, sinewy, and eager—the “Singh log” (“the
lion people”), as they called themselves. Maude has left a graphic
picture of the Sikhs who, at Allahabad, followed Brasyer as, with his
flowing white beard, he led them in pursuit of the broken Sepoys, or hung
with soldierly obedience on Neill’s stern orders. “When no fighting was
on hand,” he says, “squads of the tall, upright, Hebraic-visaged Sikhs
used to march into their commanding officer’s tent, where they stood at
attention, in silence, with one hand raised at the orthodox salute. ‘What
do you want, my men?’ was the question in Hindustani. ‘May it please
the protector of the poor, we want two days’ leave.’ ‘What for?’ ‘To
get drunk, Sahib!’ And their request, being considered reasonable, was
usually granted!”
Neill, by the way, had to use these by no means ascetic Sikhs to keep
his own “blue-caps” sober. The stocks of all the merchants in the city
were practically without owners, and the finest champagnes and brandies
were selling at 6d. per bottle. For a day or two it seemed probable that
Neill’s little force would be swept out of existence in a mere ignoble
torrent of drunkenness. Neill threatened the whip and the bullet in vain;
and finally marched up the Sikhs and took peremptory possession of all
intoxicating drinks.
On June 18 the fighting was over, the British were masters both of fort
and city, where, fourteen days before, they had been little better than
prisoners or fugitives. Then was repeated, in yet sterner fashion, the
retribution which had struck terror through Benares. The gallows in
Allahabad groaned under its heavy and quick-following burdens. In his
diary Neill wrote: “God grant that I may have acted with justice. I know
I have with severity, but, under all the circumstances, I trust for
forgiveness. I have done all for the good of my country, to re-establish
its prestige and power, and to put down this most barbarous and inhuman
insurrection.” Then he recites cases of outrage and mutilation on English
ladies and on little children, with details that still chill the natural
blood with horror to read.
The Sepoys, it is to be noted, when the fighting was over, took their
penalty with a sort of composed fatalism, to the Western imagination
very amazing. Sir George Campbell tells the story of the execution of an
old native officer, a subhadar, which he witnessed. “He was very cool
and quiet, and submitted to be executed without remonstrance. But the
rope broke, and he came down to the ground. He picked himself up, and it
was rather a painful scene for the spectators. But he seemed to feel for
their embarrassment, and thought it well to break the awkwardness of the
situation by conversation, remarking that it was a very bad rope, and
talking of little matters of that kind till another rope was procured,
which made an end of him!”
It would be easy to write, or sing, a new and more wonderful Odyssey
made up of the valiant combats, the wild adventures, and the distressful
wanderings of little groups of Englishmen and Englishwomen, upon whom the
tempest of the Mutiny broke.
Forbes-Mitchell, for example, tells the story of Robert Tucker, the judge
at Futtehpore. Tucker was a great hunter, and also, like many Indian
officials, an earnestly religious man, with an antique sense of duty.
When the Mutiny broke out he despatched every European to Allahabad,
but refused to move himself. This solitary Englishman, in a word, was
determined to defend Futtehpore against all comers! Believing the native
officer in charge of the police to be loyal, he sent a message to him
asking him to come and make arrangements for the protection of the
Treasury. This “loyal” official sent back word that the judge Sahib need
not trouble himself about the Treasury; that, in the cool of the evening,
he, with his “loyal” police, would come down and dismiss the dog of a
judge himself to Hades!
Tucker had a hunter’s armoury—rifles, smooth-bores, and hog spears.
He loaded every barrel, barricaded every door and window, and waited
quietly, reading his Bible, till, when the cool breath of evening began
to stir, he saw the police and the local budmashes, with the green banner
of Islam fluttering over their heads, marching down to attack him. Tucker
was offered his life on condition that he abandoned his Christianity.
Then the fight broke out. For hours the musketry crackled, and was
answered by the sharp note of Tucker’s rifle. Before midnight the brave
judge lay, riddled with bullets and pierced with many spear-thrusts, dead
on his own floor. But all round his house were strewn the bodies of those
who had fallen before his cool and deadly aim.
Later on, at Kotah, a similar tragedy took place, the story of which is
told by George Lawrence. Major Burton, the Resident at Kotah, with his
two sons—one aged twenty-one, the other a lad of sixteen—and a single
native servant, held the Residency for four hours against native troops
with artillery, and a huge crowd of rioters. The Residency was at last
set on fire, and Major Burton proposed to surrender on condition that
the lives of his sons were spared. The gallant lads indignantly refused
to accept the terms. They would all die together, they declared. They
were holding the roof of the Residency against their assailants, and, as
Lawrence tells the story, “they knelt down and prayed for the last time,
and then calmly and heroically met their fate.” The mob by this time had
obtained scaling-ladders. They swept over the roof, and slew the gallant
three. Major Burton’s head was cut off, paraded round the town, and then
fired from a gun.
One of the most surprising of these personal adventures was that which
overtook the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, Sir T. Metcalfe. Wilberforce,
in his “Unrecorded Chapter of the Indian Mutiny,” tells the tale, and
says he heard it twice over from Sir T. Metcalfe’s own lips—though
Wilberforce’s stories sometimes are vehemently suspected to belong to the
realm of fiction rather than of sober history. His account of Metcalfe’s
adventure, however, is at least _ben trovato_.
Metcalfe escaped from Delhi on horseback, hotly pursued by some native
cavalry. His horse broke down, and in despair Metcalfe appealed to a
friendly-looking native to conceal him from his pursuers. The man led
him to a cave, told him he would save him if possible, and, striking his
horse on the flank, sent it galloping down the road, while Metcalfe
crept through the black throat of the cave into concealment. Presently
Metcalfe heard his pursuers ride up, fiercely question his protector, and
finally propose to search the cave.
On this my friend burst out laughing, and, raising his voice so
that I must hear, he said, “Oh yes, search the cave. Do search
it. But I’ll tell you what you will find. You will find a great
red devil in there; he lives up at the end of the cave. You
won’t be able to see him, because the cave turns at the end,
and the devil always stands just round the turn, and he has
got a great long knife in his hand, and the moment your head
appears round the corner he will slice it off, and then he will
pull the body in to him and eat it. Go in; do go in—the poor
devil is hungry. It is three weeks since he had anything to
eat, and then it was only a goat. He loves men, does this red
devil; and if you all go in he will have such a meal!”
Metcalfe guessed that he was intended to hear this speech and act upon
it. The cave, a short distance from the entrance, turned at right angles.
He stood with his sword uplifted just round the corner, while a line
of dismounted cavalry, in single file, one daring fellow leading, came
slowly up the cave. As soon as the leader put his head in the darkness
round the corner, Metcalfe smote with all his strength. The fellow’s
head rolled from his body, and his companions, with a yell of terror,
and tumbling one over another in the darkness, fled. “Did you see him?”
demanded Metcalfe’s friend outside. “Do go back; he wants more than
one.” But the rebel cavalry had had enough. The men who had gone up
the cave declared that they had actually seen the red fiend, and been
scorched by the gleam of his eyes; and, mounting their horses, they fled.
“Why did you save my life?” Metcalfe asked his protector. “Because you
are a just man,” was the reply. “How do you know that?” asked Metcalfe.
“You decided a case against me in your court,” was the unexpected reply.
“I and all my family had won the case in the inferior courts by lying,
but you found us out, and gave judgment against us. If you had given the
case for me I would not have saved your life!”
Wilberforce tells another tale which graphically illustrates the wild
adventures of those wild days. Early one morning he was on picket duty
outside Delhi, and in the grey dawn saw two men and a boy hurrying along
the road from the city. They were evidently fugitives, and, telling his
men not to fire on them, Wilberforce went forward to meet them. When the
group came up the boy ran forward, threw his arms round Wilberforce’s
neck, and, with an exclamation in English, kissed him. The “boy” was a
woman named Mrs. Leeson, the sole survivor of the Delhi massacre. She had
been concealed for more than three months by a friendly native, and had
at last escaped disguised as an Afghan boy.
When the Mutiny broke out she, with some other ladies and a few
Englishmen, took refuge in a cellar, and for nearly three days maintained
a desperate defence against the crowds attacking them. The hero of the
defence was a Baptist missionary, a former shipmate of Wilberforce’s, “a
very tall and powerful man, with a bloodless face, grey eyes, a broad
jaw, and a determined mouth.” One by one the men holding the cellar fell.
Food failed, the ammunition was exhausted, and at last, behind the bodies
of the fallen, piled up as a breastwork, stood only the brave missionary,
with nothing but his sword to protect the crouching women and children.
“Stripped to the waist, behind the ghastly rampart of the dead, the
hero stood; and for hours this Horatius held his own. At last he fell,
shot through the heart, and the bloodthirsty devils poured in.” Mrs.
Leeson was covered by some of the dead bodies, and so escaped the doom
of the other ladies, and at night crept out of that pit of the dead. She
wandered through the dark streets, the only living Englishwoman in the
great city, and saw, hanging up on the trees in the dusk, the headless
trunks of white children and the mutilated bodies of Englishwomen. By
happy chance she met a pitying native, who concealed her until she
escaped in the fashion described, with more or less of imagination, by
Wilberforce.