The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan 1856-7-8. Dodd George
the mania infected them; and the captain, seeing the jail opened and the prisoners liberated, hastened back. The road from the town to the cantonment was in an uproar; the infantry and the bazaar-people were in crowds, armed and firing; and he saw one of the miscreant troopers stab to death an Englishwoman, the wife of the Meerut hotel-keeper, as she passed. Soon a ball whizzed past his own car, and he saw one of his own troopers aiming at him; he shouted: ‘Was that meant for me?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply; ‘I will have your blood!’ The captain detected this man as one whom he had been obliged to punish for carelessness and disobedience. The man fired again, but again missed his aim; and although the other troopers did not join in this, they made no attempt to check or seize the assailant. The captain, abandoned gradually by all but a very few troopers, at length reached the European lines, where he took part in the proceedings afterwards adopted. Meanwhile the poor wife had passed two hours of terrible suspense. Believing at first that the carabinier whom she had saved might have been the main object of attack, she hid his uniform, dressed him in a coat of her husband’s, and bade him sit with herself and family, for mutual safety. Out of doors she heard shots and shouts, and saw houses burning. In the next bungalow, speedily fired, was the wife of an adjutant lately arrived from England; she was entreated to come over for shelter, but not arriving, servants were sent in to seek her. A horrid sight met them: the hapless lady lay on the floor in a pool of blood, dead, and mutilated in a way that the pen refuses to describe. The noises and flames increased; eight or ten flaming bungalows were in sight at once; and many a struggle took place between the captain’s servants and the mutineers, during which it was quite uncertain whether one more burning, one more massacre, would ensue. Troopers rushed into the bungalow, endeavouring to fire it; while others, with a lingering affection towards the family of their officer, prevented them. The husband arrived, in speechless agony concerning the safety of those dear to him. Wrapped in black stable-blankets, to hide their light dresses, all left the house amid a glare of flame from neighbouring buildings, and hid under trees in the garden; whence they sped to a small ruin near at hand, where, throughout the remainder of the night, they crouched listening to the noises without. Bands of armed men passed in and out of the bungalow compound during the night, and were only prevented from prosecuting a search, by an assurance from the domestics that the officer’s family had effected their escape. When morning came, the (now) houseless Europeans, with about twenty troopers who remained faithful to the last – though agitated by strange waverings and irresolution – left the place, taking with them such few clothes and trinkets as could be hastily collected, and started off for the Carabiniers’ lines, passing on their way the smouldering ruins of many bungalows and public buildings.
Howsoever the narratives might vary in details, in substance they were all alike; they spoke of a night of burning, slaughter, and dismay. Wherever there was a bungalow, the European inhabitants of which did not succeed in escaping to the English lines, there was murder perpetrated. The escape of Mr Greathed, civil commissioner for Meerut, was a narrow one. His house – flat-roofed, as it fortunately happened – was one of the first attacked by the mutineers: at the first alarm, Mr and Mrs Greathed fled to the roof; thither, on the least intimation from any of the servants, the miscreants would have followed them; but the servants persisted that the family had departed; and the assailants, after searching every room in the house, took their departure. One officer after another, as he rushed from his bungalow to call his men back to their allegiance, was shot down; and wherever the mutineers and their ruffian companions brought murder into a house, they mingled with the murder a degree of barbarity quite appalling and unexpected. There were a few Europeans in the town and vicinity not connected with the military department; and these, unless they effected their escape, were treated like the rest; rank, age, and sex were equally disregarded – or, if sex made any difference, women, gentle English women, were treated more ruthlessly than men. An officer of the 20th, living in his bungalow with his wife and two children, was sought out by the ruffians: the father and mother were killed; but a faithful ayah snatched up the two children and carried them off to a place of safety – the poor innocents never again saw their parents alive. An English sergeant was living with his wife and six children beyond the limits of the cantonment; he and three of his little ones were massacred in a way that must for very shame be left untold: the mother, with the other three, all bleeding and mutilated, managed to crawl to the European lines about midnight.
With what inexpressible astonishment were the narratives of these deeds heard and perused! Men who had been in India, or were familiar with Indian affairs, knew that the sepoys had before risen in mutiny, and had shot their officers; but it was something strange to them, a terrible novelty, that tender women and little children – injuring none, and throwing a halo of refinement around all – should be so vilely treated as to render death a relief. The contrast to all that was considered characteristic of the Hindoo was so great, that to this day it remains to many an Indian veteran a horrid enigma – a mystery insoluble even if his heart-sickness would lead him to the attempt. Be it remembered that for a whole century the natives had been largely trusted in the relations of social life; and had well justified that trust. Many an English lady (it has been observed by an eloquent reviewer, whose words we have before quoted) has travelled from one end of the country to the other – along desert roads, through thick jungles, or on vast solitary rivers – miles and miles away from the companionship of white men, without the slightest anxiety. Her native servants, Mohammedans and Hindoos, were her protectors; and she was as safe in such custody as in an English home. Her slightest caprice was as a law to her attendants. These swarthy bearded men, ready at her beck, ever treated her with the most delicate respect, ever appeared to bear about with them a chivalrous sense of the sacredness of their charge. Not a word or a gesture ever alarmed her modesty or excited her fear; and her husband, father, brother never hesitated to confide her to such guardianship. It was in the year 1857 that the charm of this delicate fidelity was first broken; and broken so appallingly, that men were long incredulous that such things could be.
But the children, the sabred and mangled little ones – that these could be so treated by the same natives, was more astounding to the Anglo-Indians than even the treatment of the women. ‘Few of our countrymen have ever returned from India without deploring the loss of their native servants. In the nursery they are, perhaps, more missed than in any other part of the establishment. There are, doubtless, hundreds of English parents in this country who remember with feelings of kindliness and gratitude the nusery bearers, or male nurses, who attended their children. The patience, the gentleness, the tenderness with which these white-robed swarthy Indians attend the little children of their European masters, surpass even the love of women. You may see them sitting for hour after hour, with their little infantine charges, amusing them with toys, fanning them when they slumber, brushing away the flies, or pacing the verandah with the little ones in their arms, droning the low monotonous lullaby which charms them to sleep; and all this without a shadow on the brow, without a gesture of impatience, without a single petulant word. No matter how peevish, how wayward, how unreasonable, how exacting the child may be, the native bearer only smiles, shews his white teeth, or shakes his black locks, giving back a word of endearment in reply to young master’s imperious discontent. In the sick-room, doubly gentle and doubly patient, his noiseless ministrations are continued through long days, often through long nights, as though hunger and weariness were human frailties to be cast off at such a time. It is little to say that these poor hirelings often love their master’s children with greater tenderness than their own. Parted from their little charges, they may often be seen weeping like children themselves; and have been known, in after-years, to travel hundreds of miles to see the brave young ensign or the blooming maiden whom they once dandled in their arms.’ These men, it is true, were domestic servants, not sepoys or soldiers fighting in the army of the Company; but it is equally true that the British officers, almost without exception, trusted implicitly to the sepoys who acted as orderlies or servants to them; and that those orderlies shewed themselves worthy of the trust, by their scrupulous respect to the ladies of each household, and their tender affection for the little ones born under the roof of the bungalow. Hence the mingled wonderment and grief when fiend-like cruelties suddenly destroyed the charm of this reliance.
Allowing the veil to remain, at present, drawn over still greater horrors in other places, it must be admitted that the principal atrocities at Meerut were perpetrated by the twelve hundred miscreants liberated from the jail, aided by the general rabble of the town. The native troops