CAWNPORE: THE SIEGE
The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the
story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages
in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can
tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun
never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and
children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during
twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands
of muskets and a score of heavy cannon.
In these words Sir George Trevelyan sums up the famous struggle round
the low mud-walls of Wheeler’s entrenchments at Cawnpore more than forty
years ago; a struggle in which Saxon courage and Hindu cruelty were
exhibited in their highest measure, and which must always form one of
the most heartbreaking and yet kindling traditions of the British race.
Volumes have been written about Cawnpore, but Trevelyan’s book remains
its one adequate literary record. The writer has a faculty for resonant,
not to say rhythmic prose, which recalls the style of his more famous
uncle, Macaulay, and in his “Cawnpore” his picturesque sentences are
flushed with a sympathy which gives them a more than literary grace.
Cawnpore at the time of the Mutiny was a great city, famous for its
workers in leather, standing on the banks of the sacred Ganges, 270 miles
S.E. from Delhi, and about 700 miles from Calcutta. It was a military
station of great importance. Its vast magazine was stored with warlike
material of every sort. It was the seat of civil administration for a
rich district. But the characteristic British policy, which allows the
Empire to expand indefinitely, without any corresponding expansion of
the army which acts as its police and defence, left this great military
station practically in the hands of the Sepoys alone. The British force
at Cawnpore, in May 1857, consisted of sixty men of the 84th, sixty-five
Madras Fusileers, fewer than sixty artillerymen, and a group of invalids
belonging to the 32nd. The Sepoy force consisted of three strong infantry
regiments and the 2nd Native Cavalry—a regiment of very evil fame.
Here, then, were all the elements of a great tragedy—a rich treasury and
a huge arsenal, lying practically undefended; a strong force of Sepoys,
bitter with mutiny; a turbulent city and crowded cantonments festering
with crime; and only a handful of British soldiers to maintain the
British flag! Had the British consisted merely of fighting men, though
they counted only 300 bayonets against four regiments of splendidly
trained Sepoys, and a hostile population of 60,000, their case would not
have been desperate. But the little British garrison had under its guard
a great company of women and children and sick folk—civilian households,
the wives and families of the 32nd, and many more. For every fighting man
who levelled his musket over Wheeler’s entrenchments during the siege,
there were at least two non-combatants—women, or little children, or
invalids. A company so helpless and so great could not march; it could
not attack; it could only stand within its poor screen of mud-walls and,
with the stubborn and quenchless courage natural to its blood, fight till
it perished.
General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command at Cawnpore, was a gallant
soldier, who had marched and fought for fifty years. But he had the fatal
defect of being over seventy-five years of age. A little man, slender of
build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his seventy-five years
with respectable energy. But a man, no matter how brave, in whose veins
ran the chill and thin blood of old age, was tragically handicapped in a
crisis so fierce. Wheeler, moreover, who had married a Hindu wife, was
too weakly credulous about the loyalty of his Sepoys. On May 18, scarcely
a fortnight before the Mutiny, he telegraphed to Calcutta: “The plague
is stayed. All well at Cawnpore!” He had been warned that Nana Sahib
was treacherous, yet he called in his help, and put the Treasury in his
charge for safety! This was committing the chickens, for security, to
the benevolence and “good faith” of the fox! Not four days before the
outbreak Wheeler actually sent back to Lucknow fifty men of the 84th who
had been sent to him as a reinforcement. There was chivalry in that act,
but there was besotted credulity too.
[Illustration: CAWNPORE June 1857.
General Wheeler’s Entrenchment June 4th.-27th. 1857.
Walker & Cockerell sc.]
But Wheeler’s most fatal mistake was in the choice he made of the place
where the British garrison was to make its last stand. The Cawnpore
magazine itself was a vast walled enclosure, covering three acres, with
strong buildings and exhaustless store of guns and ammunition, with the
river guarding one front, and a nullah acting as a ditch on another.
Here would have been shelter for the women and the sick, a magnificent
fighting position for the men, abundant water, and a great store of
cannon.
Wheeler, for reasons which nobody has ever yet guessed, neglected this
strong post. He allowed its stores of cannon to be turned against
himself. He chose, instead of this formidable and sheltered post, a patch
of open plain six miles distant, with practically no water supply. He
threw up a slender wall of earth, which a musket-ball could pierce, and
over which an active cow could jump, and he crowded into this the whole
British colony at Cawnpore.
“What do you call that place you are making out on the plain?” asked
the Nana’s Prime Minister, Azimoolah, of a British officer. “You ought
to call it the ‘Fort of Despair.’” “No, no,” answered the Englishman,
with the pluck of his race, “we’ll call it the ‘Fort of Victory!’”
Nevertheless, when Wheeler made that evil choice of a place of defence,
he was constructing a veritable Fort of Despair.
Wheeler, it seems, did not occupy the magazine, as it was held by a Sepoy
guard, and it would have “shown mistrust,” and might have precipitated a
conflict, if he had attempted to move into it. But what more expressive
and public sign of “mistrust” could be imagined than the construction of
the entrenchment in the open plain? And what could more fatally damage
British prestige than the spectacle of the entire British community,
military and civilian, crowding into these worthless defences!
If Wheeler did not occupy the magazine, he might have blown it up, and
with that act have turned to smoke all the resources of the rebels. This
was left to be done by Sepoy hands six weeks later. Meanwhile, Wheeler
left almost unlimited resources of guns and munitions of war in the hands
of the mutineers—to be employed against himself!
In the grim pause, while waiting for the outbreak, the British garrison
showed a cool and gallant patience. The women, children, and civilians
took up their quarters every night within the earthworks, where some
ten light guns were mounted. But to “show their confidence” in their
men, and, if possible, still to hold them back from mutiny, the British
officers slept with their regiments. To lead a forlorn hope up the
broken slope of a breach, or to stand in an infantry square while, with
thunder of galloping hoofs, a dozen squadrons of cavalry charge fiercely
down, needs courage. But it was a finer strain of courage still which
made a British officer leave his wife and children to sleep behind
the guns, standing loaded with grape, to protect them from a rush of
mutineers, while he himself walked calmly down to sleep—or, at least, to
feign sleep—within the very lines of the mutineers themselves!
On the night of June 4 came the outbreak. The men of the 2nd Cavalry
rushed to their stables, mounted, and, with mad shouts and wild firing
of pistols, galloped off to seize the magazine and to “loot” the
Treasury; and as they went they burnt and plundered and slew. The 1st
Sepoys followed them at once; the other two Sepoy regiments—the 53rd and
56th—hesitated. Their officers, with entreaties and orders, kept them
steady till the sun rose, and then, unfortunately, dismissed them to
their tents. Here they were quickly corrupted by their comrades, who had
returned laden with booty from the plundered Treasury.
But before they had actually broken into mutiny, while they were yet
swaying to and fro in agitated groups, by some blunder a gun from
Wheeler’s entrenchments opened on the Sepoys’ lines. The argument of the
flying grape was final! The men broke, and—a tumultuous mob—made for the
city. Even then, however, some eighty Sepoys kept their fidelity, and
actually joined the British within their defences, and fought bravely
side by side with them for nearly twenty desperate days.
For a few wild hours murder raged through the streets of Cawnpore. Then
the mutineers turned their faces towards Delhi. Had no malign influence
arrested their march the great tragedy might have been escaped, and
the word “Cawnpore” would not be to-day the most tragical cluster of
syllables in British history. But at this point the subtle and evil
genius of Nana Sahib interposed with dire effect.
Nana Sahib—or, to give his proper name, Seereek Dhoondoo Punth—was a
Hindu of low birth, who had been adopted by the Peishwa of Poonah, the
last representative of a great Mahratta dynasty, a prince who had been
dethroned, but assigned a royal pension by the East India Company.
Nana Sahib on the Peishwa’s death, inherited his private fortune, a
sum computed at £4,000,000 sterling; but he also claimed the great
pension which the Peishwa enjoyed. The Company rejected that claim, and
henceforth Nana Sahib was a man consumed with hate of the British name
and power. He concealed that hate, however, beneath a smiling mask of
courteous hospitality. His agent had seen the wasted British lines round
Sebastopol, and reported to his master that the British strength was
broken. Nana Sahib, too, who understood the Hindu character, saw that
the Sepoy regiments in Bengal were drunk with arrogance, and inflamed
to the verge of mere lunacy, with fanatical suspicions, while a British
garrison was almost non-existent.
Here, then, were the elements of a great outbreak, and Nana Sahib
believed that the British raj was about to perish. He threw in his lot
with the mutineers, but he had no idea of following them to Delhi, and
being merged in the crowd that plotted and wrangled in the royal palace
there. He would build up a great power for himself round Cawnpore. He
might make himself, he dreamed, the despot of Northern India. He might
even, by-and-by, march as a conqueror down the valley of the Ganges,
fight a new Plassey, very different from the last, and, to quote
Trevelyan, “renew the Black Hole of Calcutta, under happier auspices and
on a more generous scale, and so teach those Christian dogs what it was
to flout a Mahratta!”
But, as a preliminary to all this, the great company of Christian people
within Wheeler’s lines must be stamped out of existence. “The wolves,
with their mates and whelps, had been hounded into their den, and now or
never was the time to smoke them out and knock on the head the whole of
that formidable brood.” So, with bribes, and promises, and threats, Nana
brought back the Sepoys, who had begun their Delhi march, to Cawnpore.
On June 6, with an odd touch of official formality, Nana sent in notice
to General Wheeler that he was about to attack his position. Sunday,
June 7, was spent in hunting from their various places of concealment
in Cawnpore all the unhappy Europeans who lingered there. One trembling
family was discovered lurking under a bridge, another concealed in some
native huts. They were dragged out with shouts of triumph and despatched.
One Englishman, who had taken refuge in a native house, held it against
the Sepoys till his last cartridge was expended, then walked out and bade
them cut his throat—a request promptly complied with. When the safe and
delightful luxury of hunting out solitary Europeans was exhausted, then
began the attack on the British entrenchments.
The odds were tremendous! In the centre of Wheeler’s entrenchment stood
two single-storeyed barracks, built of thin brickwork, with verandas, and
one of them roofed with straw. The mud wall, which formed the defence
of the position, was four feet high, so thin that a rifle-ball could
pierce it, with rough gaps made for the ten light pieces which formed
the artillery of the garrison. On the north side of the entrenchment was
a little triangular outwork, which the British called the Redan. On its
left front, some four hundred yards distant, was a row of unfinished
barracks, part of which was held by the British, part by the Sepoys, and
which became the scene of the most bloody fighting of the siege. Behind
these slender bulwarks was gathered a company of perhaps a thousand
souls, of whom more than half were women and children.
At first the barracks gave to the non-combatants a brief shelter; but
the 24-pounders of the Sepoys pierced them as though they had been built
of cheese, and before many hours they were shattered into wreck, and the
besieged were practically without any shelter, not merely from the rain
of lead, but from the consuming heat of Indian suns and the heavy dews of
Indian nights.
Sometimes, indeed, the men dug holes in the earth, into which their
wives and children might creep and be sheltered by a few planks from
the intolerable glare of the sun, and the incessant flight of hostile
bullets. Quite as commonly, however, a British officer or civilian, as
he crouched behind the poor wall of earth, loaded musket in hand, saw
the white faces of his children as they slept or moaned, in the ditch
by his side, while the wasted figure of his wife bent over them. There
was no privacy, or shelter, or rest. The supply of food quickly failed.
There was not water enough to satisfy the little children who cried from
thirst, or to bathe the shattered limbs of the wounded. The men had the
fierce excitement of fighting; but who shall paint the anguish of English
ladies—wives and mothers—who could not find water for their children’s
fevered lips, or shelter them from sun and bullet.
The imagination lingers pitifully over those groups of British ladies
sitting or crouching in the ditches under the earthworks: “Unshod,
unkempt, ragged and squalid, haggard and emaciated, parched with drought
and faint with hunger, they sat waiting to hear that they were widows.
Woe was it in those days unto them that were with child. There were
infants born during the terrible three weeks—infants with no future.”
There were two wells in the encampment; one which, to quote Trevelyan,
“yielded nothing then, which will yield nothing till the sea, too,
gives up her dead.” It was some two hundred yards from the rampart, and
lay open to the fire of the Sepoys’ batteries. It was turned into a
sepulchre. Thither, night by night, the besieged carried their dead, and
cast them into its depths with brief and whispered prayer; while the guns
of the Sepoys thundered their requiem. Within three weeks 250 English
people were cast by English hands into that strange grave. The other
well lay also directly under hostile fire, and on it the Sepoy gunners,
trained by British science, concentrated their fire night and day. Every
drop of water drawn from it may be said to have been reddened with blood.
Over this handful of British people, faint with hunger, fevered with
thirst, wasted by sickness, half mad with the sun’s heat, roared day
and night a tempest of hostile shot. Never before, perhaps, was such a
fire concentrated on one poor patch of soil. The Sepoys could mount as
many guns as they chose, and almost of whatever calibre they pleased.
And they could fire, within a distance ranging from 300 to 800 yards,
from under almost shot-proof shelter. From roof and window of all the
buildings commanding the entrenchments streamed, with scarcely a moment’s
pause, showers of musketry bullets. At night the Sepoys crept within
pistol-shot, and fired without cessation. Wheeler’s entrenchments were
literally girdled with fire; they were whipped, day and night, with
incessant volleys.
By the third day every window and door in the poor barracks which served
as shelter to the sick, and to the women and children, had been beaten
in; and shell and ball ranged at will through the rooms. One who saw the
building after the siege wrote: “The walls are riddled with cannon-shot
like the cells of a honeycomb. The doors are knocked into shapeless
openings. Of the verandas only a few splintered rafters remain. At some
of the angles the walls are knocked entirely away, and large chasms gape
blackly at you.”
Never was a position more desperate; and never was there one held with a
valour more obstinate. Wheeler’s men had everything that was most dear
to them at their backs, and everything that was most hateful in their
front; and under these conditions how they fought may be imagined. In
the scanty garrison, too, were over a hundred officers of the regiments
in mutiny, fighters of the finest quality. It was a _corps d’élite_; a
garrison of officers!
Indian life, it may be added, develops all that is proudest and most
manly in the British character. The Englishman there feels that he is
a member of an imperial and conquering race. To rule men is his daily
business. To hunt the fiercest game in the world is his amusement.
The men who knelt behind Wheeler’s mud walls, had faced tigers in the
jungle, had speared the wild boar in the plains, had heard the scream of
a charging elephant. They were steady of nerve, quick of eye, deadly of
aim, proud of their blood and race. They were standing at bay over their
wives and little ones, playing a game in which the stake was a thousand
British lives. And never before, or since, perhaps, was more gallant
fighting done than behind Wheeler’s entrenchments.
The natural leaders of the garrison emerged in such a crisis, and their
names ought to awaken to-day in British ears emotions of pride as lofty
as that which Greeks knew when, in the rolling and sonorous cadences of
Homer’s great epic, they heard the names of the heroes who fought and
died round classic Troy. One of the most heroic figures in the siege is
that of Captain Moore, of the 32nd, in charge of the cluster of invalids
belonging to that regiment in Cawnpore. Moore was an Irishman, though
with the fair hair and blue eyes proper to Saxon blood. To say that he
was fearless is a very inadequate description of his temper. He delighted
in the rapture and glow of battle. His courage had in it a certain cool
and smiling quality that made flurry or anxiety impossible. Moore, in
fact, carried about with him a sort of radiance, so that, as Trevelyan
puts it, “wherever he had passed he left men something more courageous,
and women something less unhappy.” This fair-haired Irishman was a born
king of men, of unfailing resource and “dare-devil” courage. He was
wounded early in the siege, and carried his arm in a sling, but he walked
to and fro calmly amid a tempest of bullets, and the men would follow his
cheerful leading against any odds.
The tiny little Redan on the north face of the entrenchment was held by
Major Vibart, of the 2nd Cavalry. A dreadful cross-fire searched and
raked this little triangle of earth, and the handful of heroes that
held it had to be renewed again and again. But the Redan kept up its
splutter of answering fire day and night for three weeks, and Vibart
himself survived the siege, to perish under Sepoy bullets on the river.
Ashe was a young artillery officer of great promise; he commanded a
battery of three guns at the north-east corner of the entrenchments,
and seldom were guns better aimed and better fought. Ashe had first to
invent his gunners, and next to improvise his shot, firing 6-pound balls,
for example, from a 9-pound muzzle. But his cool science and sleepless
activity made his battery the terror of the Sepoys.
Delafosse, of the 53rd, one of the four men who actually survived the
siege, was an officer as daring and almost as skilled as Ashe. He had
charge of three 9-pounder guns at the south-east angle. On one occasion
the carriage of a gun in his battery took fire, and the wood, made as
inflammable as tinder by the fierce Indian sun, named and crackled. There
was powder—and the peril of explosion—on every side. The Sepoys, noting
the dancing flame, turned all their guns on the spot. Delafosse crawled
beneath the burning carriage, turned on his back, and with his naked
hands pulled down the red splinters, and scattered earth on the flames,
fighting them in this desperate fashion till two soldiers ran up to his
help, and the fire was put out.
Perhaps the most obstinate and bloody fighting during the siege took
place in the line of unfinished barracks which crossed the S.W. angle
of the entrenchments. The Sepoys held the northern half of this line of
buildings. Of the three buildings to the south—which completely commanded
the entrenchment—what was called “No. 4,” was held by a party of amateur
soldiers—civil engineers employed on the East Indian railroads. There
were a dozen of them, young fellows more familiar with theodolites than
with rifles; but a cluster of English Lifeguards could not have fought
with cooler bravery. And the civil engineers had a keenness of wit and a
fertility of mechanical resource which veteran soldiers might easily have
lacked.
Vainly the Sepoys pelted “No. 4” with 24-pounder shot, scourged it with
musketry fire, or made wild rushes upon it. The gallant railway men
devised new barriers for the doors, and new shields for the windows, and
shot with cool and deadly aim, before which the Sepoys fell like rabbits.
“No. 4,” like Hougoumont at Waterloo, might be battered into wreck, but
could not be captured. In the Memorial Church at Cawnpore to-day, not the
least touching tablet is one upon which is inscribed:—
To the memory of the Engineers of the East India Railway, who
died and were killed in the great insurrection of 1857. Erected
in affectionate remembrance by their brother Engineers in the
North-Western Provinces.
Barrack No. 2 was a microscopic fortress, as fiercely attacked, and as
valiantly defended as Barrack No. 4. It was first held by Lieutenant
Glanville and a party of fourteen officers. Glanville was desperately
wounded, and three-fourths of his heroic garrison killed; then the
barrack was put in charge of Mowbray Thomson, of the 56th Native
Infantry, one of the two officers who survived Cawnpore. Only sixteen men
could find standing and fighting room in the barrack. The sixteen under
Mowbray Thomson consisted of Ensign Henderson, a mere boy, half-a-dozen
Madras Fusileers, two plate-layers from the railway works, and seven men
of the 84th. As the garrison dwindled under the ever-scorching fire that
played on the building, it was fed with new recruits. “Sometimes,” says
Mowbray Thomson, “a civilian, sometimes a soldier came.” But soldier and
civilian alike plied his rifle with a grim and silent courage that never
grew flurried, and that never knew fear.
Mowbray Thomson, who was of an ingenious turn, contrived a perch in the
topmost angle of the barrack wall, and planted there an officer named
Stirling, who was at an age when other lads are playing at cricket with
their schoolmates, but who was a quick and most deadly shot, and who
“bagged” Sepoys as a sportsman, with a breech-loading shot-gun, might
bag pheasants in a populous cover. Sometimes, on an agreed signal, the
garrisons from No. 2 and No. 4 would dash out together, a little knot of
ragged, unwashed, smoke-blackened Sahibs, counting about thirty in all,
and running without regular order, but with that expression on their
faces which the Sepoys knew meant tragical business; and, with musket and
bayonet or hog-spear, they would sweep the line of barracks from end to
end.
Nor was courage confined to the fighting men. In one fierce sally, at an
early stage of the siege, eleven mutineers were captured. A desperate
fight was raging at the moment, and every man was required at the front.
A rope was hastily passed round the wrists of the eleven captured
Sepoys, and they were put into the charge of the wife of a private of the
32nd, named Bridget Widdowson. Drawn sword in hand, this soldier’s wife,
who had little children of her own in the beleaguered entrenchments,
stood over the eleven mutineers, while they squatted nervously on their
hams before her; and so business-like was the nourish of her weapon, so
keen the sparkle in her eye, that not one man of the eleven dared to
move. It was only when a guard of the stronger sex took Bridget’s place
that the eleven, somehow, contrived to escape. Later on in the siege the
supply of cartridges failed, and all the ladies were requisitioned for
their stockings, to be used in the construction of new cartridges. When
before, or since, did war claim for its service such strange material!
The Sepoys, at intervals, made furious assaults on the mud walls, but
these were lined by shots too deadly, and held by hands too strong,
to make success possible. Had the British, indeed, been the attacking
force, they would have swept over the poor earthen barrier, not four feet
high, with a single charge, before the siege was a dozen hours old. But,
during the whole three weeks of their attack, though the Sepoys, counting
fighting men, outnumbered their foes by, perhaps, thirty to one, they
never succeeded in even reaching the irregular line of earth behind which
the British stood.
Their best chance occurred when, on the eighth night of the bombardment,
the thatch on the barrack used as a hospital, took fire. The whole
building was quickly in flames, and in their red light the entrenchment,
in every part, was as visible as at noonday. The barrack was used as
a sleeping-place for the women and children of the 32nd. These fled
from the burning building, but not all the sick and wounded could be
rescued; some perished in the smoke and flame. That was, indeed, a night
of horror. “The roar of the flames,” says Trevelyan, “lost every ten
seconds in the peal of the rebel artillery; the whistle of the great
shot; the shrieks of the sufferers, who forgot their pain in the helpless
anticipation of a sudden and agonising death; the group of crying women
and children huddled together in the ditch; the stream of men running to
and fro between the houses, laden with sacks of provisions, and kegs of
ammunition, and living burdens more precious still; the guards crouching
silent and watchful, finger on trigger, each at his station along the
external wall; the forms of countless foes, revealed now and again by the
fitful glare, prowling around through the outer gloom”—all this made up a
strangely terrible scene.
It is a proof of the quality of Moore’s daring that, by way of proving
to the Sepoys that this calamity had not lowered the spirits of the
garrison, he organised on the following night a sally, and, with fifty
picked men, dashed out on the rebel lines, swept them for many hundreds
of yards, spiked a number of 24-pounder guns, and slew their gunners.
But the burning of the barracks was the fatal turning-point of the siege.
It destroyed the last shelter of the sick and the women and children. The
whole stock of medicines and of surgical appliances was consumed, and
the wounded could no longer have their injuries dressed. The eighty odd
Sepoys who formed part of the garrison had been lodged in the building
now burned. It was deemed imprudent to allow them to mix with the
garrison generally, and they were told to provide for themselves, and
were allowed to steal out of the entrenchment and escape.
The deaths amongst the British multiplied fast. The fire of the Sepoys
grew more furious. “The round shot crashed and spun through the windows,
raked the earthworks, and skipped about the open ground in every corner
of our position. The bullets cut the air, and pattered on the wall
like hail. The great shells rolled hissing along the floors and down
the trenches, and, bursting, spread around them a circle of wreck and
mutilation and promiscuous destruction.”
How fast the poor besieged wretches perished under this deadly hail may
be imagined. A bomb, for example, fell into a cluster of seven ladies and
slew them all in a breath. A soldier’s wife, carrying a twin child on
each shoulder, with her husband by her side, was crossing a fire-raked
angle of the entrenchment. The same ball slew the husband, shattered both
elbows of the wife, and tore asunder the body of one of the little twins.
General Wheeler’s son was lying wounded. His mother and two sisters were
busy tending him, his father looking on, when a cannon-ball tore through
the wall of the room and smashed the wounded lad’s head literally to
fragments.
One well had been turned into a sepulchre; to-day it is built over, and
on the monument above it is written this inscription:—
In a well under this enclosure were laid by the hands of their
fellows in suffering the bodies of men, women, and children
who died hard by during the heroic defence of Wheeler’s
entrenchment, when beleaguered by the rebel Nana.
Then follows a verse from Psalm cxli:—
“Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one
cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. But mine eyes are
unto Thee, O God the Lord.”
The scanty supplies of water for that thirst-wasted crowd had to be drawn
from the other well, and on it the Sepoys, day and night, concentrated
their fire. To draw from it was a literal service of death. One
brave-hearted civilian, named John MacKillop, described himself as “no
fighting man,” but claimed to be appointed “captain of the well,” and
devoted himself to the business of drawing water, the most dangerous task
of the whole entrenchment. He kept to his task for nearly a week, and
then, while drawing a vessel of water, was shot.
He staggered a few paces, mortally wounded, then fell, but held up with
his dying hands the vessel filled with the precious fluid, and begged one
who ran to his help to carry it to the lady to whom he had promised it.
Bayard, dying on the banks of the Secia, and handing the water for which
he himself thirsted to another dying soldier, has not a better title to
be remembered than simple-minded John MacKillop, the “captain” of the
Cawnpore well.
On June 24—when for nineteen days the wretched garrison had been under
gun-fire—Wheeler writes to Lawrence, “All our carriages more or less
disabled, ammunition short.... We have no instruments, no medicine: the
British spirit alone remains; but it cannot last for ever.... Surely we
are not left to die like rats in a cage.” Lawrence writes back on June
27, giving what encouragement he can, and warning him not to accept any
terms. “You cannot rely on the Nana’s promises. _Il a tué beaucoup de
prisonniers._”
By the twenty-first day of the siege the position of the British was
hopeless. Food had almost completely failed. Their guns had become
unserviceable. The unconquerable garrison was fast dwindling. “At rare
intervals behind the earthwork they stood—gaunt and feeble likenesses
of men—clutching with muffled fingers the barrels of their muskets,
which glowed with heat intolerable to the naked hand, so fierce was the
blaze of the mid-day sun.” They might have sallied out and cut their way
through their enemies, or died fighting amongst them; and they would have
done so fifty times over but for one consideration. They could not take
their women and children with them; they could not abandon them. There
was the certainty, too, that the Indian rains, long delayed, must soon
burst upon them. Then their firearms would be rendered useless; the holes
in which the women and children crouched would be flooded; their wall of
mud would be washed away.
No sign of help came from without. Wheeler’s last despatch, dated June
24, ended with the words, “We want aid, aid, aid.” But not merely no aid,
no whisper even from the outer world reached the unhappy garrison.
The Sepoys, on their part, were growing weary of the siege. Their losses
were enormous. They might batter the entrenchments into dust, but they
could not capture an inch of the blackened area these shot-wrecked
lines of earth girdled. These Sahibs were fiercer than wounded tigers.
They were, indeed, perplexingly and disquietingly aggressive. They were
perpetually making fierce little sallies, whose track was marked by
slaughtered Sepoys. Nana Sahib felt there was real danger that his allies
might abandon their desperate task. He therefore undertook to accomplish
by craft what the Sepoys could not do with cannon and bayonet.
Nana Sahib unearthed from some gloomy room in the building which formed
his headquarters a captive Englishwoman waiting to be slaughtered, and
sent her as a messenger to the entrenchments on the morning of June 24.
“All those,” ran the brief note, “who are in no way connected with the
acts of Lord Dalhousie, and are willing to lay down their arms, shall
receive a safe passage to Allahabad.”
Wheeler, with a soldier’s pride, was unwilling to give up the patch of
ground he held for the Queen. The younger men, with the flame of battle
in their blood, were eager to fight to the bitter end. To trust to
the faith of mutineers, or to the humanity of a Hindu of Nana Sahib’s
tiger-like nature, they argued, was a sadly desperate venture. Yet
that way there might lie a chance of life for the women and children.
Death was certain if the siege lasted. It might be less certain if they
capitulated.
The 25th was spent in negotiations. Moore and two others met the Nana’s
representatives at a spot 200 yards outside the entrenchments. They
offered to surrender on condition that they were allowed to march out
under arms, with sixty rounds of ammunition to each man; that carriages
were provided for the wounded, the ladies, and the children; and that
boats, duly stocked with food, were supplied to carry them to Allahabad.
In the afternoon the Nana sent in a verbal message saying that he
accepted the terms, and the British must march out that night. They
refused to do this, as they needed to make some preparations. On this,
the Nana sent an insolent message announcing that he must have his will;
that if they delayed he would open on them with all his guns; and, as
they were perishing fast from mere hunger, a few hours would leave not
one of them alive.
Whiting, a gallant soldier, met the insolent threat with high courage.
Let the Nana’s soldiers, if they liked, he answered, try to carry the
entrenchments. They had tried in vain for three weeks to do so. “If
pushed to the last extremity,” Whiting added, “they had powder enough in
the magazine to blow both armies into the Ganges!”
Then the Nana changed his tone, and grew effusively polite. His
emissaries condoled with Wheeler for the sufferings he had gone through.
But, thanks to Allah, the Ever-Merciful, all was ended now! The sahibs
and the memsahibs had nothing before them but a pleasant river voyage to
their friends! A committee of British officers, under a guard of rebel
cavalry, inspected the boats gathered at the landing-place, scarcely a
mile distant from the entrenchments; at their request temporary floors
of bamboos were laid down in the boats, and roofs of thatch stretched
over them.
Nana Sahib, as a matter of fact, meant murder; murder, sudden, bloody,
and all-embracing. But he enjoyed, so to speak, toying with his
unconscious victims beforehand. Over the gorgon-like visage of murder
he hung a smiling and dainty mask, and with soft-voiced courtesy he
consented to all arrangements for the “comfort” of his victims!
That night at Cawnpore there were two busy spots, a mile distant from
each other. In the entrenchments the poor survivors were preparing for
their march, a march—though they knew it not—to the grave. Mothers were
collecting the garments of their little ones. Some paid a last sad visit
to the fatal well, where their dead were lying. Others were packing their
scanty possessions, intending to carry them with them. Soldiers were
cleaning their muskets and storing their cartridges. And a mile distant,
Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, was planting his cannon and arranging
his Sepoys so as to pour upon the boats at a given signal a fire which
should slay the whole unhappy company they carried.