pieces; its possessions had no longer to be saved, they had to be re-won. The cry for Its answer. And, as the story of massacre and defeat was told in Calcutta and London, and, hideous as it was, was exaggerated in the telling of it, there arose from the British vengeance. public and the British press, both in India and at home, a wild cry for retributive vengeance, which good men would gladly forget, but even good men will possibly excuse. For man, in periods of excitement, whatever be the colour of his skin, loses the self-control which custom imposes, and meets outrage with outrage, slaughter with slaughter. Halfmad from panic,1 quite mad from fury, men of gentle birth and kindly hearts wrote and did things which nothing but the horror of the occasion could excuse. The pamphlet which was most widely read at the time declared that, "as a preliminary measure it will be necessary, merciless as it may sound to English ears, to hunt down every mutineer. India will not be secure so long as a single man still remains alive." 2 The precepts of the writer were adopted in many parts of India. One officer, to whose gallantry in the field his country stands in debt, recollecting the Hindoo doctrine that the man who lost his caste had no hope hereafter, forced the murderers whom he hanged to lick up a portion of the blood of their victims. A writer who has become famous, defending this policy, declared it good that the murderers "should leave this world with the conviction that their vile souls were about to migrate into the bodies of cats and monkeys.3 One deputy-commissioner, after shooting without trial 237 sepoys, flung their dead bodies into a well, and concluded the despatch in which he described this massacre with the sickening phrase, "There is a well at 1 Lord Canning says: "The panic of some of the people here, officers of Government, who ought to set the example of a bold front at least, seeing that some of them have swords by their sides, is disgraceful.' Lawrence, p. 575. 2 Red Pamphlet, Pt. i. p. 46. 4 " Life of Sir H. 3 Ibid., P. 166. Holmes, in his History of the Indian Mutiny, calls the act "a splendid assumption of responsibility," p. 373, but he does not refer to the despatch. John Lawrence, with far truer judgment, approved the act of his subordinate, but called the account of it "that nauseous despatch." Life of Lord Lawrence, vol. ii. p. 175. Cawnpore, but there is also a well at Ujnalla." In the march on Delhi, officers selected to serve on courts-martial "swore that they would hang their prisoners, guilty or innocent." Prisoners condemned to death after a hasty trial were mocked and tortured by ignorant privates before their execution, while educated officers looked on and approved.”1 When Delhi ultimately fell, a British officer, the bravest of the brave, slew the king's sons in cold blood with his own hand. The pillage which followed the fall of the imperial city was more complete than that which had disgraced its capture by the barbarian, Nadir Shah. Natives were brought forward in batches to be tried by a military commission, or by special commissioners, each one of whom had been invested by the Supreme Government with full power of life and death. These judges were in no mood to show mercy. Almost all who were tried were condemned, and almost all who were condemned were sentenced to death. A four-square gallows was erected in a conspicuous place in the city, and five or six culprits were hanged every day. English officers used to sit by, puffing at their cigars, and look on at the convulsive struggles of these victims.2 More than three thousand men, twenty-nine of whom were members of the Royal Family, were thus hanged. In the Punjab, excluding those slain in arms, 2384 sepoys were executed. The Governor-General declared that the proceedings of the Courts were "indiscriminate judicial murder." "There is," so he wrote to the queen, “a rabid and indiscriminate vindictiveness abroad; . . . not one man in ten seems to think that the hanging and shooting of forty or 1 Holmes's History of Indian Mutiny, p. 124; History of Siege of Delhi, by an Officer who served there, pp. 59, 60; and cf. Kaye's Sepoy War, vol. ii. p. 170 and note. For the retribution at Benares, ibid., p. 236; for that at Allahabad, ibid., p. 268. I have not specifically referred to either of these in the text. The Native servants of the relieving army at Delhi were shamefully treated by their employers. See ibid., p. 605. For the retribution at Cawnpore, see Kaye's Sepoy War, vol. ii. p. 399; and Valbezen, English in India, p. 166. 2 The text is taken word for word from Holmes's History of the Indian Mutiny, p. 406; cf. Life of Lord Lawrence, vol. ii. pp. 218, 253, and 262. 3 Valbezen, The English in India, p. 127. fifty thousand mutineers can be otherwise than practicable and right." "Lord Canning will easily believe," so ran the queen's reply, "how entirely the queen shares his feelings of sorrow and indignation at the unchristian spirit, shown, alas! also to a great extent here by the public, towards Indians in general and towards sepoys without discrimination." 1 Lawrence at Lahore. But, amidst the cries for vengeance and the taunts of the crowd around them, there were happily two men in high office in India who could discriminate between massacre and punishment, and resolutely resist involving guilty and innocent in a common fate. And these two men, who proved their coolness in panic and their capacity in danger, were stationed at vast distances one from the other, and were separated by the rebellion. For one of them, John Lawrence, was at Lahore; the other, the Governor-General, was at Calcutta. Good fortune has frequently befallen England in the hour of her peril; it was her singular good fortune in 1857 that Lawrence was in the Punjab. If the rest of India had been impoverished by the draining of her best men into the old Sikh kingdom, the debt was nobly repaid when the crisis of 1857 occurred. To the outward observer, Lawrence's situation was almost as difficult as that of his brother at Lucknow. He was surrounded by the most warlike population in India, large portions of his garrison consisted of Hindoo soldiers, and his frontier was exposed to the incursions of bold and hostile tribes. A man in such a situation might easily have concluded that his first duty was to maintain his own authority unimpaired, and to strengthen his own position. But Lawrence had the courage to perceive that one way of averting danger was to affect to despise it, and that the best method of preventing the spread of mutiny from the Hindoo to the Sikh was to fling the Sikh at the Hindoo. With the training, moreover, of only a civil servant, but with the instinct of a soldier, he saw that Delhi was the centre of the revolt; that everything should be risked, and that almost everything should be sacri 1 Life of Prince Consort, vol. iv. pp. 146, 147. ficed, to the paramount necessity of an immediate onslaught on the Mogul capital. "Clubs, not spades, are trumps," 1 was his emphatic declaration when he heard that Anson was entrenching himself at Umballa, instead of ordering an immediate advance. The siege of Delhi would have been delayed, its capture would have been almost indefinitely postponed, if Lawrence had not hurried men, guns, and stores from the Punjab. The hero of the assault was Nicholson, a Punjab officer. The Commander-inChief. The command in India was held in 1857 by Anson, a man whose untimely end might have saved him from some of the strictures to which he has been exposed. His life had been devoted rather to pleasure than to war, his appointment had been due rather to his birth than his merit, and he formed therefore an easy mark for hostile criticism.2 Yet it may be fairly pleaded that, if he did not do much, he had not much time for doing it. News of the mutiny reached him at Simla on the 12th of May. He reached Umballa on the 15th. Though the number of troops available was small, though stores were deficient and transport scanty, against his own judgment he decided to advance. On the 25th he had already reached Kurnaul, and there, on the following day, he was seized with cholera, and on the 27th May he died. The critic who denounces the incapacity of the commander should recollect that the only period of Anson's life which engages the attention of the historian was limited to fifteen days, and that in those fifteen days he moved from Simla to Umballa, and from Umballa to 1 Life of Lord Lawrence, vol. ii. p. 22; cf. Kaye's Sepoy War, vol. ii. pp. 151-155. His death. 2 Mr. Holmes, quoting Sir H. Norman, that Anson did the best that could have been done under the circumstances, adds the sneer that he did his best. Hist. of Indian Mutiny, p. 123, note. Sir J. Kaye gives a fairer account of him, Hist. of Sepoy War, vol. i. p. 393; and cf. vol. ii. pp. 137–171. He adds that "there was one thing at least to be said in his favour, he was not an old man. Sir J. Kaye was probably thinking of his description of Elphinstone at Cabul, "the poor old man.' Historians would do well to verify their facts. Anson in 1857 was older than Elphinstone in 1841. " " 3 See Major (now Sir H.) Norman's Narrative of Campagin of Delhi Army, pp. 1-6. Kurnaul. Where is the commander, in ancient or modern history, whose reputation could stand, if it were judged only by the first fifteen days of hurried preparation for a campaign? Consistently with the plan which Anson had drawn up, Barnard, who succeeded him, at once resumed his march southwards. On the 5th of June, nine days after Barnard. Anson's death, he was at Alipore, and there he was joined, on the 7th of June, by a welcome reinforcement which had marched in accordance with Anson's orders from Meerut under Wilson, and which, in its march, had twice proved its metal against the mutineers. Thus reinforced, on the 8th of June, Barnard attacked the mutineers in an entrenched position at Badlee Serai, four miles to the north of Delhi; and, driving the enemy from his trenches, won a noble victory.1 The victory of the 8th of June won for the British the famous ridge which overlooked the town, and which they were The siege destined to hold under an Indian sun for three long of Delhi. weary months. And during those months they remained, as their brothers-in-arms had remained before them in the Crimea, nominally a besieging, really a besieged army; in the presence of a strong enemy, a weak force, anxious for its communications, ill-provided with supplies, and exposed, without adequate shelter, to the fierce rays of a summer sun in India. And before the end came the army-waiting, fighting, suffering-was deprived of its second chief. Barnard died of cholera on the 5th of July, and was tempo Archdale rarily succeeded by Reed. On the 17th of July, Reed made over the command to Wilson.2 It is not possible, in a short narrative of this kind, to pronounce any decisive opinion on the merits of these four commanders. Two of them, Anson and Barnard, have found a competent military apologist, and the brief periods for which they were spared, and the difficulties which they had to encounter, ought perhaps to save them from other criticism. 3 1 Sir H. Norman's Narrative of Campaign of Delhi Army, p. 7. 2 Holmes's Hist. of Indian Mutiny, p. 358. 8 For Sir H. Norman's character of Barnard, see his Narrative, p. 22. Of |