THE TRAGEDY OF CAWNPORE.
The interest of India is not wholly in the far historic past. Within
our own times it has been the theatre of stirring events. In coming
down from Upper India, we passed over the "dark and bloody ground" of
the Mutiny--one of the most terrible struggles of modern times--a
struggle unrelieved by any of the amenities of civilized warfare. On
the banks of the Ganges stands a dull old city, of which Bayard Taylor
once wrote: "Cawnpore is a pleasant spot, though it contains nothing
whatever to interest the traveller." That was true when he saw it,
twenty-four years ago. It was then a "sleepy" place. Everything had a
quiet and peaceful look. The river flowed peacefully along, and the
pretty bungalows of the English residents on its banks seemed like so
many castles of indolence, as they stood enclosed in spacious grounds,
under the shade of trees, whose leaves scarcely stirred in the sultry
air. But four years after that American traveller had passed, that
peaceful river ran with Christian blood, and that old Indian town
witnessed scenes of cruelty worse than that of the Black Hole of
Calcutta, committed by a monster more inhuman than Surajah Dowlah. The
memory of those scenes now gives a melancholy interest to the place,
such as belongs to no other in India.
It was midnight when we reached Cawnpore (we had left Saharanpur in
the morning), and we were utter strangers; but as we stepped from the
railway carriage, a stalwart American (Rev. Mr. Mansell of the
Methodist Mission) came up, and calling us by name, took us to his
home, and "kindly entreated us," and the next morning rode about the
city with us to show the sadly memorable places.
The outbreak of the Mutiny in India in 1857, took its English rulers
by surprise. They had held the country for a hundred years, and
thought they could hold it forever. So secure did they feel that they
had reduced their army to a minimum. In the Russian war, regiment
after regiment was called home to serve in the Crimea, till there were
left not more than twenty thousand British troops in all India--an
insignificant force to hold such a vast dependency; and weakened still
more by being scattered in small bodies over the country, with no
means of rapid concentration. There was hardly a railroad in India.
All movements of troops had to be made by long marches. Thus detached
and helpless, the military power was really in the hands of the
Sepoys, who garrisoned the towns, and whom the English had trained to
be good soldiers, with no suspicion that their skill and discipline
would ever be turned against themselves.
This was the opportunity for smothered discontent to break out into
open rebellion. There had long been among the people an uneasy and
restless feeling, such as is the precursor of revolution--a ground
swell, which sometimes comes before as well as after a storm. It was
just a hundred years since the battle of Plassey (fought June, 1757),
which decided the fate of India, and it was whispered that when the
century was complete, the English yoke should be broken, and India
should be free. The Crimean war had aroused a spirit of fanaticism
among the Mohammedans, which extended across the whole of Asia, and
fierce Moslems believed that if the English were but driven out, there
might be a reconstruction of the splendid old Mogul Empire. This was,
therefore, a critical moment, in which the defenceless state of India
offered a temptation to rebellion. Some there were (like the
Lawrences--Sir John in the Punjaub, and Sir Henry in Lucknow) whose
eyes were opened to the danger, and who warned the government. But it
could not believe a rebellion was possible; so that when the storm
burst, it was like a peal of thunder from a clear sky.
Thus taken by surprise, and off their guard, the English were at a
great disadvantage. But they quickly recovered themselves, and
prepared for a desperate defence. In towns where the garrisons were
chiefly of native troops, with only a small nucleus of English
officers and soldiers, the latter had no hope of safety, but to rally
all on whom they could rely, and retreat into the forts, and hold out
to the last. Such a quick movement saved Agra, where Sir William Muir
told me, he and hundreds of refugees with him, passed the whole time
of the mutiny, shut up in the fort. The same promptness saved
Allahabad. But in Delhi, where the rising took place a few days
before, the alarm was not taken quickly enough; the Sepoys rushed in,
shooting down their officers, and made themselves masters of the fort
and the city, which was not retaken till months after, at the close of
a long and terrible siege.
At Cawnpore there was no fort. Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command,
had three or four thousand troops, but not one man in ten was an
English soldier. The rest were Sepoys, who caught the fever of
disaffection, and marched off with horses and guns. Mustering the
little remnant of his force, he threw up intrenchments on the
parade-ground, into which he gathered some two hundred and fifty men
of different regiments. Adding to these "civilians" and native
servants, and the sick in the hospital, there were about 300 more,
with 330 women and children. The latter, of course, added nothing to
the strength of the garrison, but were a constant subject of care and
anxiety. But with this little force he defended himself bravely for
several weeks, beating off every attack of the enemy. But he was in no
condition to sustain a siege; his force was becoming rapidly reduced,
while foes were swarming around him. In this extremity, uncertain when
an English army could come to his relief, he received a proposal to
surrender, with the promise that all--men, women, and children--should
be allowed to depart in safety, and be provided with boats to take
them down the Ganges to Allahabad. He did not listen to these smooth
promises without inward misgivings. He was suspicious of treachery;
but the case was desperate, and Nana Sahib, who up to the time of the
Mutiny had protested great friendship for the English, took a solemn
oath that they should be protected. Thus tempted, they yielded to the
fatal surrender.
The next morning, June 27th, those who were left of the little
garrison marched out of their intrenchments, and were escorted by the
Sepoy army on their way to the boats. The women and children and
wounded were mounted on elephants, and thus conveyed down to the
river. With eagerness they embarked on the boats that were to carry
them to a place of safety, and pushed off into the stream. At that
moment a native officer who stood on the bank raised his sword, and a
masked battery opened on the boats with grape-shot. Instantly ensued a
scene of despair. Some of the boats sunk, others took fire, and men,
women, and children, were struggling in the water. The Mahratta
horsemen pushed into the stream, and cut down the men who tried to
save themselves (only four strong swimmers escaped), while the women
and children were spared to a worse fate. All the men who were brought
back to the shore were massacred on the spot, in the presence of this
human tiger, who feasted his eyes with their blood; and about two
hundred women and children were taken back into the town as prisoners,
in deeper wretchedness than before. They were kept in close
confinement nearly three weeks in dreadful uncertainty of their fate,
till the middle of July, when Havelock was approaching by forced
marches; and fearful that his prey should escape, Nana Sahib gave
orders that they should be put to death. No element of horror was
wanting in that fearful tragedy. Says one who saw the bodies the next
day, and whose wife and children were among those who perished:
"The poor ladies were ordered to come out, but neither
threats nor persuasions could induce them to do so. They
laid hold of each other by dozens, and clung so close that
it was impossible to separate them, or drag them out of the
building. The troopers therefore brought muskets, and after
firing a great many shots from the doors and windows, rushed
in with swords and bayonets. [One account says that, as
Hindoos shrink from the touch of blood, five Mohammedan
_butchers_ were sent in to complete the work.] Some of the
helpless creatures, in their agony, fell down at the feet of
their murderers, clasped their legs, and begged in the most
pitiful manner to spare their lives, but to no purpose. The
fearful deed was done most deliberately, and in the midst of
the most dreadful shrieks and cries of the victims. From a
little before sunset till candlelight was occupied in
completing the dreadful deed. The doors of the building were
then locked up for the night, and the murderers went to
their homes. Next morning it was found, on opening the
doors, that some ten or fifteen women, with a few of the
children, had managed to escape from death by falling and
hiding under the murdered bodies of their fellow-prisoners.
A fresh order was therefore sent to murder them also; but
the survivors, not being able to bear the idea of being cut
down, rushed out into the compound, and seeing a well, threw
themselves into it without hesitation, thus putting a period
to lives which it was impossible for them to save. The dead
bodies of those murdered on the preceding evening were then
ordered to be thrown into the same well, and 'jullars' were
employed to drag them along like dogs."[6]
The next day after the massacre, Havelock entered the city, and
officers and men rushed to the prison house, hoping to be in time to
save that unhappy company of English women and children. But what
horrors met their sight! Not one living remained. The place showed
traces of the late butchery. The floors were covered with blood. "Upon
the walls and pillars were the marks of bullets, and of cuts made by
sword-strokes, not high up as if men had fought with men, but low
down, and about the corners, where the poor crouching victims had been
cut to pieces." "Locks of long silky hair, torn shreds of dress,
little children's shoes and playthings, were strewn around."
The sight of these things drove the soldiers to madness. "When they
entered the charnel house, and read the writing on the walls
[sentences of wretchedness and despair], and saw the still clotted
blood, their grief, their rage, their desire for vengeance, knew no
bounds. Stalwart, bearded men, the stern soldiers of the ranks, came
out of that house perfectly unmanned, utterly unable to repress their
emotions." Following the track of blood from the prison to the well,
they found the mangled remains of all that martyred company. There the
tender English mother had been cast with every indignity, and the
child still living thrown down to die upon its mother's breast. Thus
were they heaped together, the dying and the dead, in one writhing,
palpitating mass.
Turning away from this ghastly sight, the soldiers asked only to meet
face to face the perpetrators of these horrible atrocities. But the
Sepoys, cowardly as they were cruel, fled at the approach of the
English. Those who were taken had to suffer for the whole. "All the
rebel Sepoys and troopers who were captured, were collectively tried
by a drumhead court-martial, and hanged." But for such a crime as the
cold-blooded murder of helpless women and children, death was not
enough--it should be death accompanied by shame and degradation. The
craven wretches were made to clean away the clotted blood--a task
peculiarly odious to a Hindoo. Says General Neill:
"Whenever a rebel is caught, he is immediately tried, and
unless he can prove a defence, he is sentenced to be hanged
at once; but the chief rebels, or ringleaders, I make first
clear up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two
inches deep in the shed where the fearful murder and
mutilation of women and children took place. To touch blood
is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives; they think by
doing so, they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think
so. My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a
revolting, cowardly, and barbarous deed, and to strike
terror into these rebels.
"The first I caught was a subahdar, or native officer--a
high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up
the very blood he had helped to shed; but I made the
provost-marshal do his duty, and a few lashes made the
miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out
and immediately hanged, and after death, buried in a ditch
at the roadside. No one who has witnessed the scenes of
murder, mutilation, and massacre, can ever listen to the
word mercy, as applied to these fiends.
"Among other wretches drawn from their skulking places, was
the man who gave Nana Sahib's orders for the massacre. After
this man's identity had been clearly established, and his
complicity in directing the massacre proved beyond all
doubt, he was compelled, upon his knees, to cleanse up a
portion of the blood yet scattered over the fatal yard, and
while yet foul from his sickening task, hung like a dog
before the gratified soldiers, one of whom writes: 'The
collector who gave the order for the murder of the poor
ladies, was taken prisoner day before yesterday, and now
hangs from a branch of a tree about two hundred yards off
the roadside.'"
What became of Nana Sahib after the Mutiny, is a mystery that probably
will never be solved. If he lived he sought safety in flight. Many of
the Mutineers took refuge in the jungle. The Government kept up a hunt
for him for years. Several times it was thought that he was
discovered. Only a year or two ago a man was arrested, who was said to
be Nana Sahib, but it proved to be a case of mistaken identity. In
going up from Delhi we rode in the same railway carriage with an old
army surgeon, whose testimony saved the life of the suspected man. He
had lived in Cawnpore before the Mutiny, and knew Nana Sahib well,
indeed had been his physician, and gave me much information about the
bloody Mahratta chief. He said he was not so bad a man by nature, as
he became when he was put forward as a leader in a desperate
enterprise, and surrounded by men who urged him on to every crime. So
long as he was under the wholesome restraint of English power, he was
a fair specimen of the "mild Hindoo," "as mild a mannered man as ever
scuttled ship or cut a throat." His movement was as soft as that of a
cat or a tiger. But like the tiger, when once he tasted blood, it
roused the wild beast in him, and he took a delight in killing. And so
he who might have lived quietly, and died in his bed, with a
reputation not worse than that of other Indian rulers, has left a name
in history as the most execrable monster of modern times. It seems a
defeat of justice that he cannot be discovered and brought to the
scaffold. But perhaps the judgment of God is more severe than that of
man. If he still lives, he has suffered a thousand deaths in these
twenty years.
My informant told me of the punishment that had come on many of these
men of blood. Retribution followed hard after their crimes. When the
rebellion was subdued, it was stamped out without mercy. The leaders
were shot away from guns. Others who were only less guilty had a short
trial and a swift punishment. In this work of meting out retribution,
this mild physician was himself obliged to be an instrument. Though
his profession was that of saving lives, and not of destroying them,
after the Mutiny he was appointed a Commissioner in the district of
Cawnpore, where he had lived, to try insurgents, with the power of
life and death, and with no appeal from his sentence! It was a
terrible responsibility, but he could not shrink from it, and he had
to execute many. Those especially who had been guilty of acts of
cruelty, could not ask for mercy which they had never shown. Among
those whom he captured was the native officer who had given the
signal, by raising his sword, to the masked battery to fire on the
boats. He said, "I took him to that very spot, and hung him there!"
All this sad history was in mind as we went down to the banks of the
Ganges, where that fearful tragedy took place not twenty years before.
The place still bears the name of the Slaughter Ghat, in memory of
that fearful deed. We imagined the scene that summer's morning, when
the stream was covered with the bodies of women and children, and the
air was filled with the shrieks of despair. With such bitter memories,
we recalled the swift retribution, and rejoiced that such a crime had
met with such a punishment.
From the river we drove to "the well," but here nothing is painful but
its memories. It is holy ground, which pious hands have decked with
flowers, and consecrated as a shrine of martyrdom. Around it many
acres have been laid out as a garden, with all manner of tropical
plants, and well-kept paths winding between, along which the stranger
walks slowly and sadly, thinking of those who suffered so much in
life, and that now sleep peacefully beyond the reach of pain. In the
centre of the garden the place of the well is enclosed, and over the
sacred spot where the bodies of the dead were thrown, stands a figure
in marble, which might be that of the angel of Resignation or of
Peace, with folded wings and face slightly bended, and arms across her
breast, and in her hands palm-branches, the emblems of victory.
The visit to these spots, consecrated by so much suffering, had an
added tenderness of interest, because some of our own countrymen and
countrywomen perished there. In those fearful scenes the blood of
Americans--men, women, and children--mingled with that of their
English kindred. One of the most terrible incidents of those weeks of
crime, was the massacre of a party from Futteghur that tried to escape
down the Ganges, hoping to reach Allahabad. As they approached
Cawnpore, they concealed themselves in the tall grass on an island,
but were discovered by the Sepoys, and made prisoners. Some of the
party were wealthy English residents, who offered a large ransom for
their lives. But their captors answered roughly: "What they wanted was
not money, but blood!" Brought before Nana Sahib, he ordered them
instantly to be put to death. Among them were four American
missionaries, with their wives, who showed in that hour of trial that
they knew how to suffer and to die. Of one of these I had heard a very
touching story but a few days before from my friend, Mr. Woodside.
When we were standing on the lower range of the Himalayas, looking off
to "the snows," he told me how he had once made an expedition with a
brother missionary among these mountains, which are full of villages,
like the hamlets in the High Alps. He pointed out in the distance the
very route they took, and even places on the sides of the successive
ranges where they pitched their tents. They started near the close of
September, and were out all October, and came in about the middle of
November, being gone six weeks. After long and weary marches for many
days, they came to a little village called Karsali near Jumnootree,
the source of the sacred river Jumna, near which rose a giant peak,
19,000 feet high (though we could but just see it on the horizon),
that till then had never been trodden by human foot, but which they,
like the daring Americans they were, determined to ascend. Their
guides shrank from the attempt, and refused to accompany them; but
they determined to make the ascent if they went alone, and at last,
rather than be left behind, their men followed, although one sank down
in the snow, and could not reach the summit. But the young
missionaries pressed on with fresh ardor, as they climbed higher and
higher. As they reached the upper altitudes, the summit, which to us
at a distance of ninety miles seemed but a peak or cone, broadened out
into a plateau of miles in extent; the snow was firm and hard; they
feared no crevasses, and strode on with fearless steps. But there was
something awful in the silence and the solitude. Not a living thing
could be seen on the face of earth or sky. Not a bird soared to such
heights; not an eagle or a vulture was abroad in search of prey; not a
bone on the waste of snow told where any adventurous explorer had
perished before them. Alone they marched over the fields of untrodden
snow, and started almost to hear their own voices in that upper air.
And yet such was their sense of freedom, that they could not contain
their joy. My companion, said Mr. Woodside, was very fond of a little
hymn in Hindostanee, a translation of the familiar lines:
I'm a pilgrim, I'm a stranger,
And I tarry but a night,
and as we went upward, he burst into singing, and sang joyously as he
strode over the fields of snow. Little he thought that the end of his
pilgrimage was so near! But six months later the Mutiny broke out, and
he was one of its first victims. He was of the party from Futteghur,
with a fate made more dreadful, because he had with him not only his
wife, but two children, and the monster spared neither age nor sex.
After the Mutiny, Mr. Woodside visited Cawnpore, and made diligent
inquiry for the particulars of his friend's death. It was difficult to
get the details, as the natives were very reticent, lest they should
be accused; but as near as he could learn, "Brother Campbell," as he
spoke of him, was led out with his wife--he holding one child in his
arms, and she leading another by the hand--and thus all together they
met their fate! Does this seem very hard? Yet was it not sweet that
they could thus die together, and could come up (like the family of
Christian in Pilgrim's Progress) in one group to the wicket gate? No
need had he to sing any more:
I'm a pilgrim, I'm a stranger,
And I tarry but a night,
for on that summer morning he passed up a shining pathway, whiter than
the fields of snow on the crest of the Himalayas, that led him
straight to the gates of gold. Let no man complain of the sacrifice,
who would claim the reward; for so it is written, "It is through much
tribulation that we must enter into the Kingdom of God."
FOOTNOTE:
[6] "Narrative of Mr. Shepherd." He owed his escape to the fact that
before the surrender of the garrison he had made an attempt to pass
through the rebel lines and carry word to Allahabad to hasten the
march of troops to its relief, and had been taken and thrown into
prison, and was there at the time of the massacre.