The Red Year Part 10

"Try it," said the Englishman. "I still have enough powder left to blow both armies into the air."

But the Nana meant to have no more fighting on equal terms. He signed the treaty, the guns were given up, and, on the night of June 26th, peace reigned within the ruined entrenchment.

Next morning that glorious garrison quitted the shot-torn plain they had hallowed by their deeds. And even the rebels pitied them. "As the wan and ragged column filed along the road, the women and children in bullock-carriages or on elephants, the wounded in palanquins, the fighting men on foot, sepoys came cl.u.s.tering round the officers they had betrayed, and talked in wonder and admiration of the surpa.s.sing heroism of the defense."

Those men of the rank and file at least were soldiers. They knew nothing of the awful project concocted by the Nana and his chief a.s.sociates, Rao Sahib, Tantia Topi, and Azim-ullah.

The procession made its way slowly towards the river, three quarters of a mile to the east. No doubt there were joyful hearts even in that sorrow-laden band. Men and women must have thought of far-off homes in England, and hoped that G.o.d would spare them to see their beloved country once more. Even the children, wide-eyed innocents, could not fail to be thankful that the noise of the guns had ceased, while the wounded were cheered by the belief that food and stores in plenty would soon be available.

At the foot of a tree-clad ravine leading to the Ganges were stationed a number of heavy native boats, with thatched roofs to s.h.i.+eld the occupants from the sun. They were partly drawn up on the mud at the water's edge to render easy the work of embarkation. Without hurry or confusion, the wounded, and the women and children, were placed on board.

Then some one noticed that the thatch on one of the boats was smoking, and it was found that glowing charcoal had been thrust into the straw.

About the same time it was discovered that the boats had neither oars, nor rudders, nor supplies of food. Before the dread significance of these things became clear, a bugle-call rang out. At once, both banks of the river became alive with armed sepoys, and a murderous rifle-fire was opened on the crowded boats. Guns, hidden among the trees, belched red-hot shot and grape at them, and the smoldering straw of the thatched roofs burst into flames.

Awakened to the unspeakable treachery of their foe, officers and men rushed into the water and strove with might and main to shove the boats into deep water. They failed, for the unwieldy craft had been hauled purposely too high.

Here Ashe and Moore, and Bolton, hero of that lonely ride through the enemy's country, fell. Here, too, men shot their own wives and children rather than permit them to fall into the hands of the fiends who had planned the ma.s.sacre. Savage troopers urged their horses into the water and slashed cowering women with their sabers. Infants were torn from their mothers' arms, and tossed by sepoys from bayonet to bayonet. The sick and wounded, lying helpless in the burning craft, died in the agony of fire, and the few bold spirits who even in that ghastly hour tried to beat off their cowardly a.s.sailants were surrounded and shot down by overwhelming numbers.

One heavily-laden boat was dragged into the stream, and a few officers and men clambered on board. The voyage they made would supply material for an epic. They were followed along the banks and pursued by armed craft on the river. They fought all day and throughout the night, and, when the ungoverned boat ran ash.o.r.e during a wild squall of wind and rain at daybreak, the surviving soldiers, a sergeant and eleven men, headed by Mowbray-Thomson of the 56th, and Delafosse of the 53d, sprang out and charged some hundreds of sepoys and hostile villagers who had gathered on the bank.

The craven-hearted gang yielded before the Englishmen's fierce onslaught. The tiny band turned to fight their way back, and found that the boat had drifted off again! Then they seized a Hindu temple on the bank and held it until the sepoys piled burning timber against the rear walls and threw bags of powder on the fire!

Fixing bayonets and leaving the sergeant dead in the doorway, they charged again into the ma.s.s of the enemy. Six fell. The remainder reached the river, threw aside their guns, and plunged boldly in. Two were shot while swimming, and one man, unable to swim any distance, coolly made his way ash.o.r.e again and faced his murderers until he sank beneath their blows.

Mowbray-Thomson, Delafosse, and Privates Murphy and Sullivan, swam six miles with the stream, and were finally rescued and helped by a friendly native.

Those four were all who came alive out of the Inferno of Cawnpore. The boat, after clearing the shoal, was captured by the mutineers. Major Vibart of the 2d Cavalry, who was so severely wounded that he could not join in the earlier fighting, and some eighty helpless souls under his command, were brought back to the city of death. There, by orders of the Nana, the men were slain forthwith and the women and children were taken to a building in which they found one hundred and twenty-five others, who had been spared for the Brahmin's own terrible purposes from the butchery at Ma.s.sacre Ghat on the 27th.

Returning to Bithoor the Nana was proclaimed Peishwa amid the booming of cannon and the plaudits of his retainers. He pa.s.sed a week in drunken revels and debauchery, and when, in ignorance of its fate, a small company of European fugitives from Fategarh sought refuge at Cawnpore, he amused himself by having all the men but three killed in his presence. These three and the women and children who accompanied them, were sent to a small house known as the Bibigarh, in which the whole of the captives, now numbering two hundred and eleven, were imprisoned.

Many died, and they were happiest. The survivors were subjected to every indignity, given the coa.r.s.est food, and forced to grind corn for their conqueror, who, early in July, took up his abode in a large building at Cawnpore overlooking the house in which the unhappy people were penned.

But the period of their earthly sufferings was drawing to a close. An avenging army was moving swiftly up the Grand Trunk Road from Allahabad.

The Nana's nephew and two of his lieutenants, leading a large force against the British, were badly defeated. On the 15th of July came the alarming tidings that the Feringhis were only a day's march from the city.

The Furies must have chosen that date. The Nana, the man who thought himself fit to be a king, decided that Havelock would turn back if there were no more English left in Cawnpore! So as a preliminary to the greater tragedy, five men who had escaped death thus far--no one knows whence two of them came--were brought forth and slaughtered at the feet of the renowned Peishwa. Then a squad of sepoys were told to "shoot all the women and children in the Bibigarh through the windows of the house."

Poor wretches--they were afraid to refuse, yet their gorge rose at the deed, and they fired at the ceiling!

Such weakness was annoying to the puissant Brahmin. He selected two Mohammedan butchers, an Afghan, and two out-caste Hindus, to do his bidding. Armed with long knives these five fiends entered the shambles.

Alas, how can the scene that followed be described!

Yet, not even then was the sacrifice complete. Some who were wounded but not killed, a few children who crept under the garments of their dead mothers, lived until the morning. Not all the native soldiers were so lost to human sympathies that they did not shudder at the groans and m.u.f.fled cries that came all night from the house of sorrow. Some of them have left records of sights and sounds too horrible to translate from their Eastern tongue.

But the rumble of distant guns told the destroyer that his short-lived hour of triumph was nearly sped. In a paroxysm of rage and fear, he gave the final order, and the Well of Cawnpore thereby attained its ghastly immortality. By his command all that piteous company of women and children, the living and the dead together, were thrown into a deep well that stood in the garden of Bibigarh--the House of the Woman.

It was thus that Nana Sahib strove to cloak his crime. Yet never did foul murderer flaunt deed more glaringly in the face of Heaven. Fifty years have pa.s.sed, myriads of human beings have lived and died since the well swallowed the Nana's victims, but the memory of those gracious women, of those golden-haired children, of those dear little infants born while the guns thundered around the entrenchment, shall endure forever. The Nana sought oblivion and forgetfulness for his sin. He earned the anger of the G.o.ds and the malediction of the world, then and for all time.

CHAPTER VII

TO LUCKNOW

The tragedy of Ma.s.sacre Ghat, intensified by the crowning infamy of the Well, brought a new element into the struggle. Hitherto not one European in a hundred in India regarded the Mutiny as other than a local, though serious, attempt to revive a fallen dynasty. The excesses at Meerut, Delhi, and other towns were looked upon as the work of unbridled mobs.

Sepoys who revolted and shot their officers came under a different category to the slayers of tender women and children. But the planned and ordered treachery of Cawnpore changed all that. Thenceforth every British-born man in the country not only realized that the government had been forced into a t.i.tanic contest, but he was also swayed by a personal and absorbing l.u.s.t for vengeance. Officers and men, regulars and volunteers alike, took the field with the fixed intent of exacting an expiatory life for each hair on the head of those unhappy victims.

And they kept the vow they made. To this day, though half a century has pa.s.sed, the fertile plain of the Doab--that great tract between the Ganges and the Jumna--is dotted with the ruins of gutted towns and depopulated villages. But that was not yet. India was fated to be almost lost before it was won again.

On the night of June 4th, when the roomy budgerow carrying Winifred Mayne and her escort drifted away from the walls of the Nana's palace at Bithoor, there was not a breath of wind on the river. The mat sail was useless, but a four-mile-an-hour current carried the unwieldy craft slowly down stream, and there was not the slightest doubt in the minds of either of the Englishmen on board as to their course of action.

Mr. Mayne was acquainted with Cawnpore and Sir Hugh Wheeler was an old friend of his.

"Wheeler has no great force at his disposal," said he to Malcolm. "It is evident that the native regiments have just broken out here, but, by this time, our people in the cantonment must have heard of events elsewhere, and they have surely seized the Magazine, which is well fortified and stands on the river. If I can believe a word that the Nana said, the sepoys will rush off to Delhi to-night, just as they did at Meerut, Aligarh, and Etawah. I am convinced that our best plan is to hug the right bank and disembark near the Magazine."

"Is it far?" asked Malcolm.

"About eight miles."

"I wonder why the Begum was so insistent that we should go back along the Grand Trunk Road?"

Mayne hesitated. He knew that Winifred was listening.

"It is hard to account for the vagaries of a woman's mind, or, shall I say, of the mind of such a woman," he answered lightly. "You will remember that when you came to our a.s.sistance outside Meerut she was determined to take us, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, to Delhi."

Malcolm, who had heard Ros.h.i.+nara's impa.s.sioned speech and looked into her blazing eyes, thought that her motives were stronger than mere caprice. He never dreamed of the true reason, but he feared that she knew Cawnpore had fallen and her curiously friendly regard for himself might have inspired her advice. Here, again, Winifred's presence tied his tongue.

"Well," he said, with a cheerless laugh, "I, at any rate, must endeavor to reach Wheeler. I am supposed to be bearing despatches, but they were taken from me when I was knocked off my horse in the village--"

"Were you attacked?" asked Winifred, and the quiet solicitude in her voice was sweetest music in her lover's ears.

His brief recital of the night's adventures was followed by the story of the others' journey and detention at Bithoor. It may be thought that Mr.

Mayne, with his long experience of India, should have read more clearly the sinister lesson to be derived from the treatment meted out that night to a British Officer by the detachment of sowars, amplified, as it was, by their open references to the Nana as a Maharajah. But he was not yet disillusioned. And, if his judgment were at fault, he erred in good company, for Sir Henry Lawrence, Chief Commissioner at Lucknow, was even then resisting the appeals, the almost insubordinate urging, of the headstrong Martin Gubbins that the sepoys in the capital of Oudh should be disarmed.

Meanwhile the boat lurched onward. Soon a red glow in the sky proclaimed that they were nearing Cawnpore. Though well aware that the European houses were on fire, they were confident that the Magazine would be held. They helped Akhab Khan, Chumru, and the two troopers to rig a pair of long sweeps, and prepared to guide the budgerow to the landing-place.

Winifred was stationed at the rudder. As it chanced the three sowars took one oar and Chumru helped the sahibs with the other, and the two sets of rowers were partly screened from each other by the horses.

Malcolm was saying something to Winifred when the native bent near him and whispered:

"Talk on, sahib, but listen! Your men intend to jump ash.o.r.e and leave you. They have been bitten by the wolf. Don't try to stop them. Name of Allah, let them go!"

Frank's heart throbbed under this dramatic development. He had no reason to doubt his servant's statement. The faithful fellow had nursed him through a fever with the devotion of a brother, and Malcolm hadreciprocated this fidelity by refusing to part with him when he, in turn, was stricken down by smallpox. In fact, Frank was the only European in Meerut who would employ the man, whose extraordinary appearance went against him. Cross-eyed, wide-mouthed, and broken-nosed, with a straggling black beard that ill concealed the tokens on his face of the dread disease from which he had suffered, Chumru looked a cut-throat of the worst type, "a hungry, lean-fac'd villain, a mere anatomy." Aware of his own ill repute, he made the most of it. He tied his turban with an aggressive twist, and was wont to scowl so vindictively at the mess khamsamah that his master, quite unconsciously, always secured the wing of a chicken or the best cut of the joint.

Yet this gnome-like creature was true to his salt at a time when he must have felt that his sahib, together with every other sahib in India, was doomed; his eyes now shot fiery, if oblique, shafts of indignation as he muttered his thrilling news.

Malcolm did not attempt to question him. He glanced at the sowars, and saw that their carbines were slung across their shoulders. Chumru interpreted the look correctly.