CAWNPORE: THE MURDER GHAUT
It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded,
men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the
morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage.
Trevelyan describes the scene:—
First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless
captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past,
but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards
the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng
of native bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the
weight of the palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be
discerned the pallid forms of the wounded; their limbs rudely
bandaged with shirt-sleeves and old stockings and strips of
gown and petticoat. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver
in belt, followed they who could still walk and fight. Step was
not kept in those ranks. Little was there of martial array,
or soldier-like gait and attitude. In discoloured flannel and
tattered nankeen, mute and in pensive mood, tramped by the
remnant of the immortal garrison. These men had finished their
toil, and had fought their battle, and now, if hope was all but
dead within them, there survived at least no residue of fear.
Vibart, in his single person, constituted the rearguard. A wounded man
lying in a bed carried by four native bearers, an English lady walking
by his side, came out of the entrenchment shortly after the rest had
left. It was Colonel Ewart, of the 34th, with his faithful wife. The
little group could not overtake the main body, and when it had passed out
of sight round a bend in the road a crowd of the colonel’s own Sepoys
stopped the poor wife and her wounded husband. The porters were ordered
to lay the bed down, and with brutal jests the Sepoys mocked their dying
colonel. “Is not this a fine parade?” they asked, with shouts of laughter.
Then, mirth giving place to murder, they suddenly fell upon Ewart, and
literally hewed him to pieces under the eyes of his agonised wife. They
told her to go in peace, as they would not kill a woman, and by way of
comment on the statement one of them stepped back to give himself room
for the stroke, and slew her with a single blow.
The road to the Ganges, a little over a mile in length, crossed a little
wooden bridge painted white, and swung to the right down a ravine to the
river. “A vast multitude,” says Trevelyan, “speechless and motionless
as spectres, watched their descent into that valley of the shadow of
death.” Directly the last Englishman had crossed the bridge and turned
down the lane, a double line of Sepoys was drawn across the entrance to
the Ghaut, and slowly the great company made its way down to the river’s
edge. Some forty boats were lying there—eight-oared country budgerows,
clumsy structures, with thatched roofs, and looking not unlike floating
hay-stacks. They lay in the shallow water a few yards from the bank.
A moment’s pause took place when the crowd of sahibs and memsahibs, with
their wounded and the little ones, reached the water’s edge. There were
no planks by which they could reach the boats, none of the boatmen spoke
a word, or made a movement. They sat silent, like spectators at a tragedy.
Then the crowd splashed into the water. The wounded were lifted into the
boats; women with their children clambered on board; the men were finding
their places; the officers, standing knee-deep in the river, were helping
the last and feeblest to embark. It was nine o’clock in the morning.
Suddenly, in the hot morning air, a bugle screamed shrill and menacing,
somewhere up the ravine. It was the signal! Out of the forty boats the
native boatmen leaped, and splashed through the water to the bank. Into
the straw roofs of many of the boats they thrust, almost in the act
of leaping, red-hot embers, and nearly a score of boats were almost
instantly red-crested with flames.
A little white Hindu temple high up on the bank overlooked the whole
scene. Here sat Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, with a cluster of Sepoy
officers. He controlled the whole drama from this point of vantage
like a stage-manager; and, on his signal, from the lines of Sepoys who
were lying concealed in the undergrowth, from guns perched high on
the river-bank, and from both sides of the river at once, there broke
upon the forty boats, with their flaming roofs and hapless crowds of
white-faced passengers, a terrific storm of shot.
Those slain by the sudden bullet were many, and were happy in their
fate. The wounded perished under the burning flakes and strangling smoke
of the flaming straw roofs. Many leaped into the river, and, crouching
chin-deep under the sides of the boats, tried to shelter themselves from
the cruel tempest of shot. Some swam out into the stream till they sank
in the reddened water under the leisurely aim of the Sepoys. Others,
leaping into the water, tried to push off the stranded boats. Some of yet
sterner temper, kneeling under the roofs of burning thatch, or standing
waist-deep in the Ganges, fired back on the Sepoys, who by this time
lined the river’s edge.
General Wheeler, according to one report, perished beneath the stroke
of a Sepoy’s sword as he stepped out of his palkee. His daughters were
slain with him, save one, the youngest, who, less happy, was carried off
by a native trooper to die later. In the official evidence taken long
afterwards is the account given by a half-caste Christian woman. “General
Wheeler,” she said, “came last in a palkee. They carried him into the
water near the boat. I stood close by. He said, ‘Carry me a little
farther towards the boat.’ But a trooper said, ‘No; get out here.’ As the
general got out of the palkee head foremost, the trooper gave him a cut
with his sword through the neck, and he fell into the water. My son was
killed near him. I saw it, alas! alas! Some were stabbed with bayonets;
others cut down. Little infants were torn in pieces. We saw it, we did!
and tell you only what we saw. Other children were stabbed and thrown
into the river. The school-girls were burnt to death. I saw their clothes
and hair catch fire.”
Presently the fire of the Sepoys ceased, and the wretched survivors of
the massacre—125 in number—were dragged ashore. They came stumbling up
the slope of the bank, a bedraggled company, their clothing dripping
with the water of the Ganges, or soiled with its mud. They crept up the
ravine down which, a brief hour before, they had walked with Hope shining
before them. Now Grief kept pace with them; Despair went before them;
Death followed after. They had left their dead in the river behind them;
they were walking to a yet more cruel fate in front. “I saw that many of
the ladies were wounded,” said one witness afterwards; “their clothes had
blood on them. Some had their dresses torn, but all had clothes. I saw
one or two children without clothes. There were no men in the party, but
only some boys of twelve or thirteen years of age.”
The sad company was marched back to the old cantonment, where the Nana
himself came out to exult over his victims. Lady Canning, in her journal,
writes: “There were fifteen young ladies in Cawnpore, and at first they
wrote such happy letters, saying time had never been so pleasant; it was
every day like a picnic, and they hoped they would not be sent away;
they said a regiment would come, and they felt quite safe. Poor, poor
things; not one of them was saved.” How many of that girlish band of
fifteen perished, with flaming hair and dress, in the boats? Or did they
strand shivering in the icy chill of terror, amongst the captives over
whom the tiger glance of Nana Sahib wandered in triumph? After being duly
inspected, these poor captives were thrust into a couple of rooms in the
Savada-house, and left to what reflections may be imagined.
Three boats out of the forty, meanwhile, had actually got away. Two
drifted to the Oude shore, and were overtaken by instant massacre.
One boat, however, had for the moment a happier fate. It caught the
mid-current of the Ganges, and went drifting downwards; and that solitary
drifting boat, without oars or rudder, bearing up in its crazy planks
above the dark waters of the Ganges the sole survivors of the heroic
garrison of Cawnpore, started on a wilder, stranger voyage than is
recorded elsewhere in all history.
It was Vibart’s boat; and by a curious chance it included in its
passengers the most heroic spirits in the garrison. Moore was there, and
Ashe, and Delafosse; Mowbray Thomson swam out to it from his own boat,
and with him Murphy, a private of the 32nd—two of the four who finally
survived out of the whole garrison. The boat was intended to carry only
fifty, but nearly a hundred fugitives were crowded within its crazy sides.
A cannon-shot smashed its rudder. It had no oars nor food. From either
bank a hail of shot pursued it. Every now and again the clumsy boat would
ground on some shallow; then, while the Sepoys shot fast and furiously, a
group of officers would jump overboard, and push the clumsy craft afloat
again.
Moore, pushing at the boat in this fashion, with broken collar-bone,
was shot through the heart. Ashe and Bowden and Glanville shared the
same fate. Soon the dying and the dead on the deck of this shot-pelted
boat were as many as the living. “We had no food in the boat,” wrote
Mowbray Thomson afterwards; “the water of the Ganges was all that passed
our lips. The wounded and the dead were often entangled together in the
bottom of the boat.”
When evening came the boat ran heavily aground. Under the screen of
darkness the women and children were landed, and the boat, with great
effort, floated again; the Sepoys accompanying the operation with
volleys of musketry, flights of burning arrows, and even a clumsy attempt
at a fire-ship. “No one slept that night, and no one ate, for food there
was none on board.”
When day broke the tragical voyage was continued, still to an
accompaniment of musketry bullets. At two o’clock the boat stranded
again. “Major Vibart,” says Mowbray Thomson, “had been shot through one
arm on the preceding day. Nevertheless, he got out, and, while helping
to push off the boat, was shot through the other arm. Captain Turner had
both his legs smashed, Captain Whiting was killed, Lieutenant Harrison
was shot dead.” These are sample records from that strange log.
Towards evening a boat, manned by some sixty Sepoys, appeared in
pursuit, but it, too, ran upon a sand-bank, and this gave the sahibs
an opportunity at which they leaped with fierce joy. From the sorely
battered boat, which had been pelted for nearly two days and nights
with bullets, a score of haggard and ragged figures tumbled, and came
splashing, with stern purpose, through the shallows. And then, for some
twenty breathless minutes, the Sepoys, by way of change, instead of being
hunters, became the hunted, and only some half-dozen, who were good
swimmers, escaped to tell their comrades what the experience was like.
Mowbray Thomson tells the story in disappointingly bald prose. “Instead
of waiting for them to attack us,” he says, “eighteen or twenty of us
charged them, and few of their number escaped to tell the story.”
Night fell black and stormy, and through falling rain and the sighing
darkness the boat, with its freight of dead and dying, drifted on. It
recalls the ship of which Tennyson sang, with its “dark freight, a
vanished life.” In the morning it was found that the boat had drifted
into some backwater whence escape was impossible. The Sepoys lined the
bank and fired heavily. Vibart, who was dying, but still remained the
master spirit of the little company, ordered a sally. “Whilst there was
a sound arm among them that could load and fire, or thrust with the
bayonet,” says Kaye, “still the great game of the English was to go
to the front and smite the enemy, as a race that seldom waited to be
smitten.”
Mowbray Thomson and Delafosse, with some twelve men of the 82nd and
34th, clambered over the side of the boat, waded ashore, and charged
the Sepoys, who fled before them. They pressed eagerly on, shooting and
stabbing, but presently found new crowds of the enemy gathering in their
rear. The gallant fourteen faced about, and fought their way back to
where they had left the boat. Alas! it had vanished.
They commenced to march along the river-bank in the direction of
Allahabad, with an interval of twenty paces between each man, so as
to make the fire of their pursuers less deadly. Shoeless, faint with
hunger, bareheaded, they fought their way for some miles. Their pursuers
grew rapidly in numbers and daring. One Englishman had fallen; the others
wheeled suddenly round, and seized a small Hindu temple, determined to
make a last stand there. There was just room enough for the thirteen to
stand upright in the little shrine. Their pursuers, after a few minutes’
anxious pause, tried to rush the door; but, as the historian of the fight
puts it, “there was no room for any of them inside”—though, as it turned
out, a good deal of room was required outside for the dead bodies of
those who had made the attempt.
An effort was made to smoke out, and then to burn out, the unconquerable
sahibs. When these devices failed, gunpowder was brought up, and
arrangements made for blowing the entire shrine, with its indomitable
garrison, into space. Seeing these preparations, the British charged out.
Seven of them, who could swim, stripped themselves, and headed the sally,
intending to break through to the river.
Seven naked sahibs, charging through smoke and flame, with levelled
bayonets, would naturally be a somewhat disquieting apparition, and the
seven had no difficulty in breaking through their enemies, and reaching
the Ganges. The other six, who could not swim, ran full into the Sepoy
mass, and died mute and fighting.
Then commenced the pursuit of the swimmers. Two were soon shot and
sank; a third, swimming on his back, and not seeing where he was going,
struck a sandspit, where some natives were waiting to beat out his
brains at leisure. There remained four—Mowbray Thomson, Delafosse, and
two privates, a pair of strong-limbed and brave-hearted Irishmen, named
Murphy and Sullivan. This heroic and much-enduring four, diving like
wild ducks at the flash of hostile muskets, out-swam and out-tired their
pursuers. When at last they landed, they had between them “a flannel
shirt, a strip of linen cloth, and five severe wounds”! They found refuge
with a friendly landowner, and reached the British lines, though Sullivan
died within a fortnight of reaching the place of safety.
Meanwhile, what had happened to the boat after the gallant fourteen left
it? Its crew consisted of little else than wounded men, dead bodies, and
exhausted women and children. Upon these swooped down a great crowd of
enemies. The boat was captured, and its stem promptly turned back towards
Cawnpore. On the morning of June 30, the boat lay again at the entrance
of the fatal ghaut.
In the evidence taken long afterwards, there were brought back,
according to one native witness, sixty sahibs, twenty-five memsahibs,
and four children. “The Nana ordered the sahibs to be separated from the
memsahibs, and shot. So the sahibs were seated on the ground, and two
companies of the Nadiree Regiment stood ready to fire. Then said one
of the memsahibs, the doctor’s wife (What doctor? How should I know?)
‘I will not leave my husband. If he must die, I will die with him.’ So
she ran and sat down behind her husband, clasping him round the waist.
Directly she said this, the other memsahibs said, ‘We also will die with
our husbands,’ and they all sat down, each with her husband. Then their
husbands said, ‘Go back,’ but they would not. Whereupon the Nana ordered
his soldiers; and they, going in, pulled them away forcibly. But they
could not pull away the doctor’s wife.”
Captain Seppings asked leave to read prayers before they died. His hands
were untied; one arm hung broken, but, standing up, he groped in his
pocket for a little prayer-book, and commenced to read—but what prayer
or psalm, none now can tell. “After he had read,” as the witness tells
the story, “he shut the book, and the sahibs shook hands all round. Then
the Sepoys fired. One sahib rolled one way, one another as they sat.
But they were not dead, only wounded. So they went in and finished them
off with swords.” When all was over, the twenty-four memsahibs, with
their four children, were sent to swell the little crowd of captives in
Savada-house. Some seventeen days of weeping life yet intervened between
them and the fatal Well.
The story of the final act in the great tragedy at Cawnpore cannot be
told without some account of events outside Cawnpore itself. A relieving
force had been organised at Calcutta, of which Neill’s Fusileers at
Allahabad were the advance guard; but a leader was wanted, and on June
17 Sir Patrick Grant brought Havelock, “the dust of Persia still in the
crevices of his sword-handle,” to the Governor-General, saying, “Your
Excellency, I have brought you the man.”
Havelock was sixty-two years of age when the great chance of his
life came to him. A little man, prim, erect, alert, quick-footed,
stern-featured, with snow-white moustache and beard. Havelock, no doubt,
had his limitations. A strain of severity ran through his character.
“He was always,” says one who served under him, “as sour as if he had
swallowed a pint of vinegar, except when he was being shot at, and then
he was as blithe as a schoolboy out for a holiday.” There is a touch
of burlesque, of course, in that sentence; but Havelock was, no doubt,
austere of temper, impatient of fools, and had a will that moved to its
end with something of the fiery haste and scorn of obstacles proper to a
cannon-ball. He was fond, too, of making Napoleonic orations to his men,
and had a high-pitched, carrying voice, which could make itself audible
to a regiment. And the British soldier in fighting mood is rather apt to
be impatient of oratory.
But Havelock was a trained and scientific soldier, audacious and resolute
in the highest degree; a deeply religious man, with a sense of duty of
the antique sort, that scorned ease, and reckoned life, when weighed
against honour, as a mere grain of wind-blown dust. And Havelock,
somehow, inspired in his men a touch of that sternness of valour we
associate with Cromwell’s Ironsides.
It is curious, in view of Havelock’s achievements and after-fame, to
read in the current literature of the moment, the impression he made
upon hasty critics in Calcutta and elsewhere. The _Friend of India_,
the leading Calcutta journal, described him as a “fossil general”!
Lady Canning, in her journal, writes: “General Havelock is not in
fashion. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome; but his little, old,
stiff figure looks as active and fit for use as if he were made of
steel.” She again and again refers to “dear little old Havelock, with
his fussiness”—“fussiness” being in this case, little more than the
impatience of a strong will set to a great task, and fretted by threads
of red tape. Lord Hardinge had said, “If India is ever in danger, let
Havelock be put in command of an army, and it will be saved.” And
Havelock’s after-history amply justified that prediction.
Havelock had about the tiniest force that ever set forth to the task of
saving an empire. It never was able to put on the actual battlefield
1500 men. There were 76 men of the Royal Artillery; less than 400 of
the Madras Fusileers; less than 300 of the 78th Highlanders; 435 men
of the 64th, and 190 of the 84th, with 450 Sikhs of somewhat doubtful
loyalty, and 50 native irregular horse, whose disloyalty was not in the
least doubtful. Havelock’s reliable cavalry consisted of 20 volunteers,
amateurs mostly, under Barrow.
Measured against the scale of modern armies, Havelock’s force seems
little more than a corporal’s guard. But the fighting value of this
little army was not to be measured by counting its files. “Better
soldiers,” says Archibald Forbes, “have never trod this earth.” They
commenced their march from Allahabad on July 7; they marched, and fought,
and conquered under the intolerable heat of an Indian midsummer, and
against overwhelming odds; until when, on September 19—little more than
eight weeks afterwards—Outram and Havelock crossed the Ganges in their
advance on Lucknow, only 250 of Havelock’s “Ironsides” were left to take
part in that advance. In the whole history of the war, men have seldom
dared, and endured, and achieved more than did Havelock’s column in the
gallant but vain struggle to relieve Cawnpore.
Maude commanded its tiny battery; Hamilton led the Highlanders;
Stirling the 64th; the gallant, ill-fated Renaud, the Fusileers. Stuart
Beatson was Havelock’s assistant adjutant-general; Fraser Tytler was
his assistant quartermaster—general. Of the Highlanders—the Ross-shire
Buff’s—Forbes says, “It was a remarkable regiment; Scottish to the
backbone; Highland to the core of its heart. Its ranks were filled with
Mackenzies, Macdonalds, Tullochs, Macnabs, Rosses, Gunns, and Mackays.
The Christian name of half the Grenadier company was Donald. It could
glow with the Highland fervour; it could be sullen with the Highland
dourness; and it may be added, it could charge with the stern and
irresistible valour of the North.”
When the little force began its march for Cawnpore, the soil was swampy
with the first furious showers of the rainy season, and in the intervals
of the rain, the skies were white with the glare of an Indian sun in
July. “For the first three days,” says Maude, “they waded in a sea of
slush, knee-deep now, and now breast-high, while the flood of tropical
rain beat down from overhead. As far to right and left as eye could
pierce extended one vast morass.” After these three days’ toil through
rain and mud, the rains vanished; the sky above them became like white
flame, and, till they reached Cawnpore, Havelock’s troops had to march
and fight under a sun that was well-nigh as deadly as the enemy’s bullets.
On July 11 Havelock marched fifteen miles under the intolerable heat to
Arrapore. Camping for a few hours, he started again at midnight, picked
up Renaud’s men while the stars were yet glittering in the heaven, pushed
steadily on, and at seven o’clock, after a march of sixteen miles,
camped at Belinda, four miles out of Futtehpore. The men had outmarched
the tents and baggage, and were almost exhausted. They had fallen out,
and were scattered under the trees, “some rubbing melted fat on their
blistered feet, others cooling their chafes in the pools; many more too
dead-beaten to do anything but lie still.” It was Sunday morning.
Suddenly there broke above the groups of tired soldiery the roar of
cannon. Grape-shot swept over the camp. Over the crest and down the
opposite slopes rode, with shouts and brandished tulwars, a huge mass of
rebel cavalry. It was a genuine surprise! But the bugles rang out shrilly
over the scattered clusters of Havelock’s men. They fell instantly into
formation; skirmishers ran to the front, and the enemy’s cavalry came to
an abrupt halt. It was a surprise for them, too. They had expected to see
only Renaud’s composite force—a mere handful; what they beheld instead,
was Havelock’s steady and workmanlike front.
Havelock did not attack immediately. His cool judgment warned him that
his over-wearied soldiers needed rest before being flung into the fight,
and orders were given for the men to lie down in rank. Presently the
rebel cavalry wheeled aside, and revealed a long front of infantry,
with batteries of artillery, and the rebel general, finding the British
motionless, actually began a movement to turn their flank.
Then Havelock struck, and struck swiftly and hard. Maude’s battery was
sent forward. He took his pieces at a run to within 200 yards of the
enemy’s front, wheeled round, and opened fire. The British infantry,
covered by a spray of skirmishers armed with Enfield rifles, swept
steadily forward. The rebel general, conspicuous on a gorgeously adorned
elephant, was busy directing the movements of his force; and Maude tells
the story of how Stuart Beatson, who stood near his guns, asked him to
“knock over that chap on the elephant.” “I dismounted,” says Maude, “and
laid the gun myself, a 9-pounder, at ‘line of metal’ (700 yards) range,
and my first shot went in under the beast’s tail, and came out at his
chest, rolling it over and giving its rider a bad fall.”
Its rider, as it happened, was Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general; and had
that 9-pound ball struck him, instead of his elephant, it might have
saved the lives of the women and children in Cawnpore.
Meanwhile, the 64th and the Highlanders in one resolute charge had swept
over the rebel guns. Renaud, with his Fusileers, had crumpled up their
flank, and the Nana’s troops, a torrent of fugitives, were in full flight
to Futtehpore. The battle was practically won in ten minutes, all the
rebel guns being captured—so fierce and swift was the British advance.
The rebel Sepoys knew the fighting quality of the sahibs; but now they
found a quite new fierceness in it. Havelock’s soldiers were on fire to
avenge a thousand murders. And, flying fast, as Trevelyan puts it, the
Nana’s troops “told everywhere that the sahibs had come back in strange
guise; some draped like women to remind them what manner of wrong they
were sworn to requite; others, conspicuous by tall blue caps, who hit
their mark without being seen to fire—the native description of the
Enfield rifle with which the Madras Fusileers were armed.”
The fight at Futtehpore is memorable as being the first occasion on
which British troops and the rebel Sepoys met in open battle. The Nana
had shortly before issued a proclamation announcing that the British had
“all been destroyed and sent to hell by the pious and sagacious troops
who were firm to their religion”; and, as “no trace of them was left,
it became the duty of all the subjects of the Government to rejoice
at the delightful intelligence.” But Futtehpore showed that “all the
yellow-faced and narrow-minded people” had not been “sent to hell.” They
had reappeared, indeed, with uncomfortable energy, and a disagreeable
determination to despatch every Sepoy they could capture somewhere in
that direction!
Havelock’s men had marched nineteen miles, and fought and won a great
battle, without a particle of food, and so dreadful was the heat that
twelve men died of sunstroke. Havelock camped on July 13 to give his
men rest, resumed his march on the 14th, and on the morning of the
15th found the Sepoys drawn up in great strength in front of a village
called Aong, twenty-two miles south of Cawnpore. Renaud led his Fusileers
straight at the village, and carried it with a furious bayonet charge,
but the gallant leader of the “blue caps” fell, mortally wounded, in
the charge. Maude’s guns smashed the enemy’s artillery, and when the
Highlanders and the 64th were seen coming on, the Sepoys again fled.
Havelock pressed steadily on, and found the Sepoys had rallied and were
drawn up in a strong position, covered by a rivulet, swollen bank-high
with recent rains, known as Pandoo Nuddee. A fine stone bridge crossed
the river; it was guarded by a 24-pound gun, a 25-pound carronade, and a
strong force of infantry. Havelock quickly developed his plan of attack.
Maude raced forward with his guns, and placed them at three different
points, so as to bring a concentric fire to bear on the bridge. Maude’s
first blast of spherical case-shell broke the sponge staves of the heavy
guns in the rebel battery, and rendered them useless.
The Sepoys tried to blow up the bridge. But Maude’s fire was hot;
Stephenson, with his “blue caps,” was coming up at the double, and the
Sepoys got flurried. They had mined the bridge, and the mine was fired
prematurely. The explosion shattered the parapet of the bridge, but
through the white smoke came the Fusileers, their bayonets sparkling
vengefully. The Highlanders followed eagerly in support. The bridge was
carried, the guns taken, the rebel gunners bayoneted, the rebel centre
pierced and broken, and the rebel army itself swept northwards, with
infinite dust and noise, in a mere tumult of panic-stricken flight.
The British camped for the night on the battlefield. At three o’clock in
the morning, with the stars sparkling keenly over their heads, and a full
moon flooding the camp with its white light, Havelock formed up his men.
He told them he had learned there were some 200 women and children still
held as prisoners in Cawnpore, the survivors of the massacre of June 27.
“Think of our women and the little ones,” he said, “in the power of those
devils incarnate.” The men answered with a shout, and, without waiting
for the word of command, went “fours right,” and took the road.
It was a march of twenty miles. The sun rose and scorched the silent and
panting ranks of the British with its pitiless heat. The Highlanders
suffered most; they were wholly unprepared for a summer campaign, and
were actually wearing the heavy woollen doublets intended for winter use;
but their stubborn Northern blood sustained them. Every now and again,
indeed, some poor fellow in the ranks dropped as though shot through
the head, literally killed with the heat. Nana Sahib himself held the
approach to Cawnpore, with 7000 troops and a powerful artillery, and his
position was found to be of great strength.
Havelock studied it a few minutes with keen and soldierly glance, and
formed his plans. He had the genius which can use rules, but which also,
on occasion, can dispense with rules. He violated all the accepted canons
of war in his attack upon the Nana’s position. He amused the enemy’s
front with the fire of a company of the Fusileers, and the manœuvres of
Barrow’s twenty volunteer sabres, while with his whole force he himself
swept round to the right to turn the Nana’s flank. Havelock, that is,
risked his baggage and his communications, to strike a daring blow for
victory.
As Havelock’s men pressed grimly forward, screened by a small grove,
they heard the bands of the Sepoy regiments playing “Auld lang syne” and
“Cheer, boys, cheer,” and the sound made the men clutch their muskets
with a little touch of added fury. The Sepoys discovered Havelock’s
strategy rather late, and swung their guns round to meet it. Their fire
smote the flank of Havelock’s column cruelly, but the British never
paused nor faltered. When Havelock judged his turning movement was
sufficiently advanced, he wheeled the column into line. His light guns
were insufficient to beat down the fire of the heavy pieces worked by the
rebels, and he launched his Highlanders at the battery. They moved dourly
forward under a heavy fire, till within eighty yards of the guns. Then
the bayonets came down to the charge, and with heads bent low and kilts
flying in the wind, the Highlanders went in with a run. The charge was
in perfect silence, not a shot nor a shout being heard; but it was so
furious that mound and guns were carried in an instant, and the village
itself swept through. As Forbes describes it, “Mad with the ardour of
battle, every drop of Highland blood afire in every vein, the Ross-shire
men crashed right through the village, and cleared it before they dropped
out of the double.” They had crushed the enemy’s left, taken its guns,
and sent a great mass of Sepoys whirling to the rear.
But the moment they emerged from the village, the great howitzer in
the Nana’s centre opened fire upon the Highlanders, and once more the
unequal duel between bayonet and cannon had to be renewed. Havelock
himself galloped up to where the Highlanders were reforming after the
confusion and rapture of their rush, and, pointing with his sword to the
great howitzer, pouring its red torrent of flame upon them, cried: “Now,
Highlanders! another charge like that wins the day.”
The Gaelic blood was still on fire. The officers could hardly restrain
their men till they were roughly formed. In another moment the kilts and
bonnets and bayonets of the 78th were pouring in a torrent over the big
gun, and the rebel centre was broken! Meanwhile the 64th and 84th had
thrust roughly back Nana Sahib’s right wing; but, fighting bravely, the
Sepoys clung with unusual courage to a village about a mile to the rear
of the position they first held, and their guns, drawn up in its front,
fired fast and with deadly effect.
The Highlanders, pressing on from the centre, found themselves shoulder
to shoulder with the 64th, advancing from the left. Maude’s guns, with
the teams utterly exhausted, were a mile to the rear. Men were dropping
fast in the British ranks, worn out with marching and charging under
heat so cruel. In the smoke-blackened lines men were stumbling from very
fatigue as they advanced on the quick red flashes and eddying smoke
of the battery which covered the village. But Havelock, riding with
the leading files, knew the soldier’s nature “from the crown of his
shako down to his ammunition boots.” “Who,” he cried, “is to take that
village—the Highlanders or the 64th?” Both regiments had Northern blood
in them—the 64th is now known as the North Staffordshire—and that sudden
appeal, that pitted regiment against regiment, sent the stout Midlanders
of the 64th and the hot-blooded Gaels from the clachans and glens and
loch sides of Ross-shire, forward in one racing charge that carried guns
and village without a check.
The battle seemed won, and Havelock, reforming his column, moved steadily
forward. But the Nana was playing his last card, and his generals
at least showed desperate courage. They made a third stand athwart
the Cawnpore road, and within a short distance of Cawnpore itself. A
24-pounder, flanked on either side by guns of lighter calibre, covered
the Nana’s front, and his infantry, a solid mass, was drawn up behind the
guns. Havelock’s men had marched twenty miles, and made a dozen desperate
charges. Their guns were far in the rear. Yet to halt was to be destroyed.
Havelock allowed his men to fling themselves panting on the ground for
a few minutes; then, riding to the front, and turning his back to the
enemy’s guns, so as to face the men, he cried in his keen, high-pitched
voice, “The longer you look at it, men, the less you will like it! The
brigade will advance—left battalion leading.”
The left battalion was the 64th. Major Stirling promptly brought forward
his leading files, and Havelock’s son and aide-de-camp galloped down,
and, riding beside Stirling, shared with him the leadership of the
charge—a circumstance for which the 64th, as a matter of fact, scarcely
forgave him, as they wanted no better leadership than that of their own
major. There was less of _élan_ and dash about this charge than in the
earlier charges of the day; but in steady valour it was unsurpassed.
On came the 64th, silently and coolly. Havelock himself, in a letter to
his wife, wrote with a father’s pride about his son. “I never saw so
brave a youth,” he wrote, “as the boy Harry: he placed himself opposite
the muzzle of a gun that was scattering death into the ranks of the 64th
Queen’s, and led on the regiment under a shower of grape to its capture.
This finished the fight. The grape was deadly, but he calm, as if telling
George stories about India.”
When the steady but shot-tormented line of the 64th found itself so near
the battery that through the whirling smoke they could see the toiling
gunners and the gleam of Sepoy bayonets beyond them, then the British
soldiers made their leap. With a shout they charged on and over the guns,
and through the lines behind, and Nana Sahib’s force was utterly and
finally crushed. Havelock had not a sabre to launch on the flying foe;
but his tired infantry, who had marched twenty miles, and fought without
pause for four hours, kept up the pursuit till the outer edge of Cawnpore
was reached. Then Havelock halted them; and, piling arms, the exhausted
soldiers dropped in sections where they stood, falling asleep on the bare
ground, careless of food or tents.
They were aroused long before daybreak, and through their ranks ran in
whispers the story, grim and terrible, of the massacre which, by only a
few hours, had cheated their splendid valour of its reward.
How great was the valour, how stubborn the endurance, shown thus far
by Havelock’s men is not easily realised. In nine days—betwixt July
7-16—they had, to quote their commander’s words “marched under the Indian
sun of July 126 miles, and fought four actions.” What better proof of
hardihood, valour, and discipline could be imagined? But the British
soldier is a queer compound, with very sudden and surprising alternations
of virtue. When Cawnpore was won and plundered, immense stores of beer
and spirits fell into the hands of the soldiers, and for a time it seemed
as if Havelock’s band of heroes would dissolve into a mere ignoble gang
of drunkards. Havelock promptly ordered every drinkable thing in Cawnpore
to be bought or seized. “If I had not done this,” he wrote, “it would
have required one half my force to keep the other half sober, and I
should not have had a soldier in camp!”
Whether the terror of Havelock’s advance on Cawnpore actually caused
the massacre of the English captives there may be doubted; it certainly
hastened it. Nana Sahib, to whom murder was a luxury, would no more have
spared the women and the children than a tiger would spare a lamb lying
under its paw. But even a tiger has its lazy moods, and, say, immediately
after a full meal, is temporarily careless about fresh slaughter. Nana
Sahib had supped full of cruelty, and was disposed, for a brief period at
all events, to allow his captives to live. Moreover, some of the women
in his own harem sent him word they would slay themselves and their
children if he murdered the memsahibs and their little ones. But on the
night of July 15 the fugitives from Pandoo Nuddee reached Cawnpore,
amongst them being Bala Rao, the Nana’s brother and general, who brought
from the fight a bullet in his shoulder, and a new argument for murder in
his heart.
In a council held between the Nana and his chief officials that night,
the fate of the captives was discussed. Teeka Sing understood British
nature so ill that he argued Havelock’s men would be robbed of their only
motive for continuing their advance on Cawnpore if the captives were
slain. They might, he urged, risk the perils of a new battle for the sake
of rescuing the captives, but not for the mere pleasure of burying them.
That they might have the passion to avenge them did not enter into Teeka
Sing’s somewhat limited intelligence. Other chiefs argued, again, that
if the captives were allowed to live, they might prove very inconvenient
witnesses against a good many people.
It is probable that the strongest argument on the side of murder was the
mere joy of killing somebody with a white face. Havelock’s Fusileers and
Highlanders declined to allow themselves to be killed; they were, in
fact, slaying the Nana’s Sepoys with disconcerting fury and despatch. But
the heroes who had fled again and again before a British force one-fifth
their number, could revenge themselves in perfect security by slaying the
helpless women and children imprisoned in the Bebeeghur. So the order for
massacre went forth.
From July 1 the captives, 210 in number, had been crowded into a small
building containing two rooms, each 20 ft. by 10 ft., and an open court
some fifteen yards square. In that suffering and helpless crowd were
five men, guessed to have been Colonels Smith and Goldie, Mr. Thornhill,
the judge of Futteghur, and two others. They had neither furniture nor
bedding, nor even straw, and were fed daily on a scanty ration of native
bread and milk. Two of the ladies were taken across each morning to the
Nana’s stables, and made to grind corn at a hand-mill for hours together.
This was done, not for the sake of the scanty store of flour the poor
captives ground out, but by way of insult. To the Eastern imagination,
when a dead enemy’s womankind grind corn in the house of his slayer,
captivity has reached its blackest depths. The English ladies, according
to native testimony, did not object to do the work of slaves in this
fashion, as it, at least, enabled them to carry back a handful of flour
to their hungry little ones.
Sickness mercifully broke out amongst the captives, and in a week
eighteen women and seven children died. A native doctor kept a list of
these, and after Havelock captured Cawnpore the list was discovered.
Months afterwards there was sad joy in many an English household when,
on the evidence of this list, it was known that their loved ones had, in
this way, anticipated and escaped the Nana’s vengeance. One poor wife,
in the sadness of that captivity, gave birth to a little one, and in the
native doctor’s list of deaths is the pathetic record—a tragedy in each
syllable—“An infant two days old.”
The evidence seems to show that during these terrible days the women
were not exposed to outrage in the ordinary sense of that word, or to
mutilation, but every indignity and horror which the Hindu imagination
could plan short of that was emptied upon them, and some of the younger
women, at least, were carried off to the harems of one or other of the
Nana’s generals. On the face of the earth there could have been at
the time no other scene of anguish resembling that in the crowded and
darkened rooms of the Bebeeghur, where so great a company of women and
children, forsaken of hope, with the death of all their dearest behind
them, sat waiting for death themselves.
Nana Sahib was an epicure in cruelty, and was disposed to take his
murders in dainty and lingering instalments. At four o’clock on the
afternoon of July 15 he sent over some of his officers to the Bebeeghur,
and bade the Englishmen come forth. They came out, the two colonels, the
judge, a merchant named Greenaway, and his son, and with them a sixth,
an English boy, fourteen years of age, nameless now, but apparently
willing to share the perilous responsibilities of “being a man.” Poor
lad! Motherless, his name all unknown, his father, perhaps, floating a
disfigured corpse on the sliding current of the muddy Ganges, he appears
for a moment, a slender, boyish figure, in the living frescoes of that
grim tragedy, and then vanishes.
Under the cool shade of a lime tree sat Nana Sahib, dark of face, gaudy
of dress, and round him a cluster of his kinsmen and officers, Bala Rao
among them, whose wounded shoulder was now to be avenged. Brief ceremony
was shown to this little cluster of haggard and ragged sahibs. A grim
nod from the Nana, a disorderly line of Sepoys with levelled muskets and
retracted lips, and the six were shot down and their bodies cast on the
dusty roadside for every passer-by to spit at.
A little before five o’clock a woman from the Nana’s household stepped
inside the door of the Bebeeghur, and looked over the crowd of weary
mothers and wan-faced children. A curious stillness fell on the little
company, while, in careless accents, the woman gave the dreadful order:
they were “all to be killed”! One English lady, with quiet courage,
stepped up to the native officer who commanded the guard, and asked “if
it was true they were all to be murdered.” Even the Sepoys shrank from a
crime so strange and wanton. The officer bade the Englishwomen not to
be afraid, and the woman from the Nana’s harem was told roughly by the
soldiers that her orders would not be obeyed.
It seemed monstrous indeed that an order which was to send 200 helpless
human beings to death should be brought, like a message about some
domestic trifle, on a servant-woman’s lips. The messenger vanished. The
Sepoys on guard consulted together and agreed that with their own hands,
at least, they would not slay the prisoners. According to one account
they were ordered by a new messenger to fire through the windows upon the
company of women and children, many now praying within. They obeyed the
order to fire, and the sudden wave of flame and smoke, with the crash
of twenty discharged muskets, swept over the heads of the captive crowd
within. But the Sepoys, of design, fired high, and no one was wounded.
When Havelock’s men afterwards entered those rooms, one little detail
bore mute witness to the use to which some of the ladies had turned the
few minutes which followed the volley of the Sepoys. They evidently tore
strips from their dresses, and with them tried to tie the door fast; and
still those broken strips of linen and silk were hanging from the door
handles when Havelock’s men, two days afterwards, entered Cawnpore.
Crime never wants instruments, and Nana Sahib soon found scoundrels
willing to carry out his orders. It was a little after five o’clock—just
when Stephenson’s Fusileers and Hamilton’s Highlanders were sweeping over
the bridge at Pandoo Nuddee—that five men, each carrying a tulwar, walked
to the door of the Bebeeghur. Two were rough peasants; two belonged to
the butcher’s caste; one wore the red uniform of the Nana’s bodyguard.
The five men entered, and the shuddering crowd of women and children was
before them. The crowd, who watched as the door opened, saw standing
erect on the threshold the English lady who had asked the native officer
whether they were all to be killed. Then the door was closed, and over
the scene that followed the horrified imagination refuses to linger.
Wailing, broken shrieks, the sound of running feet crept out on the
shuddering air. Presently the door opened, and the man in the red uniform
of the Nana’s bodyguard came out with his sword broken short off at the
hilt. There were 212 to be killed, and the strain on steel blades as well
as on human muscles was severe!
He borrowed a fresh sword, and went back to his work, again carefully
closing the door behind him. After a while he re-emerged once more with
a broken blade, and, arming himself afresh, returned a third time to
his dreadful business. It was dark when the five men—all alike now with
reddened garments—came out and locked the door behind them, leaving
that great company of wives and mothers and little children in the
slaughter-house. The men had done their work but roughly, and all through
the night, though no cry was heard in the Bebeeghur, yet sounds, as if
sighs from dying lips, and the rustle as of struggling bodies, seemed to
creep out into the darkness incessantly through its sullen windows and
hard-shut doors.
At eight o’clock the next morning the five men returned, attended by a
few sweepers. They opened the door, and commenced to drag the nearer
bodies, by their long tresses of hair, across the courtyard to the fatal
well, hard by. Then, amongst the bodies lying prone over all the floor,
there was a sudden stir of living things. Were the dead coming back to
life?
Native evidence, collected afterwards, reports that a few children and
nearly a dozen women had contrived to escape death by hiding under the
bodies of the slain. They had lain in that dreadful concealment all
night, but when the five returned they crept out with pitiful cries. Some
of these were slain without parley; some ran like hunted animals round
the courtyard, and then threw themselves down the well. One by one the
victims were dragged out, stripped, and, many of them yet living, were
flung into that dreadful grave.
One native witness, quoted by Trevelyan, says, “There was a great crowd
looking on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. They
were principally city people and villagers. Yes, there were also Sepoys.
Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must
have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. They were running
round the well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save
them. No, none said a word, or tried to save them.” The youngest of these
children, a tender little fellow, lunatic with terror, broke loose and
ran like a hare across the courtyard. He was captured by an unsympathetic
spectator, brought back, and flung down the well.
It was two days after this, on July 17, that three men of the 78th
entered the court, for Havelock was now in possession of Cawnpore, and
the Nana was a fugitive. The whispers and gestures of the natives drew
their attention to the shut door of the bungalow. One of the Highlanders
pushed open the door and stepped inside. “The next moment,” to quote
Archibald Forbes, “he came rushing out, his face ghastly, his hands
working convulsively, his whole aspect, as he strove in vain to gasp out
some articulate sounds, showing that he had seen some dreadful sight.” No
living thing was in the place; but the matting that covered the floor was
one great sponge of blood, and he who had crossed it found himself, to
borrow Burns’s phrase, “red wat shod.”
Little pools of blood filled up each inequality in the rough floor.
It was strewn with pitiful relics, broken combs, pinafores, children’s
shoes, little hats, the leaves of books, fragments of letters. The
plastered wall was hacked with sword-cuts, “not high up, as where men had
fought, but low down and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched
to avoid a blow.” Long locks of hair were strewn about, severed, but not
with scissors.
There were no inscriptions on the walls, but many a pitiful record
upon the scattered papers on the floor. A few childish curls marked
“Ned’s hair, with love;” the fly-leaf of a Bible, with a loving
inscription—giver and recipient now both dead; a prayer-book, pages
splashed red where once praying eyes had lingered. The pages of one
grimly appropriate book—Drelincourt’s “Preparation for Death”—were
scattered over the whole floor.
* * * * *
To write this story is a distress, to read it must be well-nigh an
anguish. Yet we may well endure to know what our countrymen and
countrywomen have suffered. Their sufferings are part of the price at
which a great empire has been built.
Into what a passion of fury—half generous, half devilish—the soldiers
who looked on these things were kindled may well be imagined. It will be
remembered that Neill compelled some of the Sepoys captured at Cawnpore,
and guilty of a share in this tragedy—high-caste Brahmins—to clean up,
under the whip, a few square inches of the blood-stained floor, and
then immediately hanged them, burying them in a ditch afterwards. These
Brahmins, that is, were first ceremonially defiled, and then executed.
That was an inhumanity unworthy of the English name, which Lord Clyde
promptly forbade.
Nana Sahib had fled the palace. Principality, and power, and wealth, all
had vanished. He was, like Cain, a fugitive on the face of the earth. In
what disguises he hid himself, through what remote and lonely regions he
wandered, where he died, or how, no man knows. His name has become an
execration, his memory a horror.
The Bebeeghur has disappeared. The site where it once stood is now a
beautiful garden. In the centre of the garden, circled with a fringe of
ever-sighing cypresses, is a low mound, with fence of open stonework. The
circular space within is sunken, and upon the centre of the sunken floor
rises the figure—not too artistic, unhappily—of an angel in marble, with
clasped hands and outspread wings. On the pedestal runs the inscription:
“Sacred to the perpetual memory of the great company of Christian people,
chiefly women and children, who, near this spot, were cruelly massacred
by the followers of the rebel Nana Doondoo Punth, of Bithoor, and cast,
the dying and the dead, into the well below, on the 15th day of July
1857.”