THE TALE OF THE GREAT MUTINY.

BY THE REV. W. H. FITCHETT,

AUTHOR OF DEEDS THAT WON THE EMPIRE.'

IV.

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 60 men of the 84th, 65 Madras Fusileers, fewer than 60 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.

Copyright, 1901, by the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, in the United States of America,

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 50 years. But he had the fatal defect of being over 75 years of age. A little man, slender of build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his 75 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 50 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.

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.

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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, to still 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 4,000,000l. 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-andby, 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!"

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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.