The History of the Indian Revolt and of the Expeditions to Persia, China and Japan 1856-7-8. Dodd George
melodramatic and improbable.
A slight allusion has been made above to Brigadier Neill’s proceedings at Cawnpore, after the fatal 17th of July. In what relation he stood to the reconquering force will be noticed in its due place; but it may be well here to quote a passage from a private letter, written independently of his public dispatches: ‘I am collecting all the property of the deceased, and trying to trace if any have survived; but as yet have not succeeded in finding one.’ [Captain Bruce’s research, presently to be mentioned, had not then been made.] ‘Man, woman, and child, seem all to have been murdered. As soon as that monster Nena Sahib heard of the success of our troops, and of their having forced the bridge about twenty miles from Cawnpore, he ordered the wholesale butchery of the poor women and children. I find the officers’ servants behaved shamefully, and were in the plot, all but the lowest-caste ones. They deserted their masters and plundered them. 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 clean 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, barbarous deed, and to strike terror into these rebels… The well of mutilated bodies – alas! containing upwards of two hundred women and children – I have had decently covered in and built up as one grave.’
With one additional testimony, we will close this scene of gloomy horror. The Earl of Shaftesbury, as was noticed in a former page, took occasion soon after the news of the Cawnpore atrocities reached London, to advert at a public meeting to the shrinking abhorrence with which those deeds were regarded, and to the failure of the journalists to present the full and fearful truth. He himself mentioned an incident, not as an example of the worst that had been done by the incarnate fiends at Cawnpore, but to indicate how much remains to be told if pen dare write or tongue utter it: ‘I have seen a copy of a letter written and sent to England by an officer of rank who was one of the first that entered Cawnpore a few hours after the perpetration of the frightful massacre… To his unutterable dismay, he saw a number of European women stripped stark naked, lying on their backs, fastened by the arms and legs; and there many of them had been lying four or five days exposed to a burning sun; others had been more recently laid down; others again had been actually hacked to pieces, and so recently, that the blood which streamed from their mangled bodies was still warm. He found children of ten, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen years of age treated in the same horrible manner at the corners of the streets and in all parts of the town: attended by every circumstance of insult, the most awful and the most degrading, the most horrible and frightful to the conception, and the most revolting to the dignity and feelings of civilised men. Cawnpore was only a sample of what was perpetrated in various parts of that vast region, and that with a refinement of cruelty never before heard of. Women and children have been massacred before; but I don’t believe there is any instance on record where children have been reserved in cold blood to be most cruelly and anatomically tortured in the presence of their horrified parents before being finally put to death.’
Something must be said here concerning the devastated property at Cawnpore, in relation to the miserable beings to whom it had once belonged. When the city was again in British hands, and the Rajah of Bithoor driven out with the curses of all English hearts resting on him, it was found to be in such a devastated state, so far as regarded Europeans, that Brigadier Neill was at a loss what to do with the wrecks of spoliated property. He requested Captain Bruce, of the 5th Punjaub cavalry, whom he had appointed temporarily superintendent of police, to write to the Calcutta newspapers, inviting the aid of any one able to identify the property. The letter said: ‘The property of the unfortunate people who lost their lives here has been collected in one spot; and any which can be recognised will be handed over to the owners, or put up to auction for the benefit of the estates of the deceased. There is a good deal of property belonging to the different mercantile firms here, as well as to the heirs of deceased officers, &c.; but when I mention that every house was gutted, and the property scattered over sixty or seventy square miles of country, it will be apparent how impossible it was to take care of individual interests… Almost all the former European residents here having been murdered by the miscreant Nena Sahib, there is no one forthcoming to recognise or give any information concerning the property that has been saved.’ At a later date Captain Bruce captured one of the boatmen who had come down from Futteghur with the first party of unhappy fugitives from that place; the man had a large amount of English jewellery in his possession, comprising brooches, earrings, bracelets, clasps, studs, shawl-pins, hair-lockets, gold chains, and similar articles. The boatman had probably secreted the jewel-caskets of the unfortunate ladies, at or shortly before the forcible landing of the boat-party at Bithoor.
A much more painful inquiry, than any relating to property, was that relating to the loss of life. When Captain Bruce, after many days of sedulous inquiry, had collected all the available information bearing on the fate of the hapless sufferers, he arrived at these conclusions – that the only Europeans who escaped from the boat-massacre, and really obtained their liberty, were two officers and two soldiers – probably Lieutenant Delafosse and three of his companions; that the only one who remained in Cawnpore and yet preserved his life, was a pensioner of the 3d light dragoons, who was concealed in the city by a trooper of the 4th light cavalry; and that there were, on the 31st of July, six Englishmen, three Englishwomen, and three children, concealed and protected by the Rajah of Calpee, across the Jumna; but it was not stated, and perhaps not known, whether they had gone thither from Cawnpore. Mr Shepherd himself was not included in this list. When Lieutenant Delafosse, about a fortnight after the recapture of Cawnpore, was requested by Brigadier Neill to furnish the best list he could of the English sufferers at that place, he endeavoured to separate the victims into three groups, according as they had died in the intrenchment, in the boats, or in the house of slaughter. But this was necessarily a very imperfect list; for, on the one hand, he knew nothing of the two parties of fugitives from Futteghur; while, on the other, he speaks of many persons who came into the station with their families on account of disturbance, and whose names he did not know. Taking the matter in a military estimate, however, he gave the names of one general (Wheeler), one brigadier (Jack), three colonels, five majors, thirteen captains, thirty-nine lieutenants, five ensigns, and nine doctors or army-surgeons; Lady and Miss Wheeler, Sir George Parker, and two clergymen or missionaries, were among the other members in his melancholy list. No guess can be made of the total numbers from this document, for the persons included under the word ‘family’ are seldom specified by name or number. The mournful truth was indeed only too evident that many complete families – families consisting of very numerous members – were among the slaughtered. When the lists began to be made out, of those who had been known as Cawnpore residents or Futteghur fugitives, and who were found dead when the English recaptured the place, there were such entries as these – ‘Greenway: Mr, two Mrs, Martha, Jane, John, Henry’ – ‘Fitzgerald: John, Margaret, Mary, Tom, Ellen’ – ‘Gilpin: Mrs, William, Harriet, Sarah, Jane, F.’ – ‘Reid: Mr, Susan, James, Julia, C., Charles’ – ‘Reeve: Mrs, Mary, Catherine, Ellen, Nelly, Jane, Cornelia, Deon.’
Religious men, thoughtful men – and, on the other hand, men wrought up to a pitch of exasperated feeling – afterwards spoke of the fatal well as a spot that should be marked in some way for the observance of posterity. Two church missionaries were among the murdered at Cawnpore; and it was urged in many quarters that a Christian church, built with the splendour and resources of a great nation, would be a suitable erection at that spot – as an appropriate memorial to the dead, a striking lesson to the living, and the commencement of a grand effort to Christianise the heathen millions of India. Whether a church be the right covering for a hideous pit containing nearly two hundred mangled bodies of gentle English women and children; and whether rival creeds would struggle for precedency in the management of its construction, its details, and the form of its service – may fairly admit of doubt; but with or without a church, the English in no parts of the world are ever likely to forget The Well at Cawnpore!
Nena Sahib’s Proclamations.– When Generals Neill and Havelock were at Cawnpore, during a period subsequent to that comprised within the range of the present chapter,