Gandhi & Churchill (2 page)

It would last for eighteen terrible days. More than nine hundred people, men, women, and children, Europeans and Indians, were jammed into the hospital enclosure and its two brick buildings, one of which had only a thatched roof. They had no way to reach the garrison at Lucknow, who were about to be besieged themselves. Everyone who volunteered to try to sneak out to find help (including eventually William Shepherd) was either killed or captured. The Cawnpore “garrison”—in fact, not even a third were soldiers—was critically short of food, water, and ammunition, and protected by only a shallow trench and the four-foot mud wall around the main building. Cannonballs swept down on the helpless crowd night and day.

Wheeler’s own son, Lieutenant Godfrey Wheeler, was one of the first to die, beheaded by a round shot even as his sister was treating his wound from an earlier firefight. Another shot killed a soldier as he was trying to comfort his wife and her twin babies, then passed through his wife’s arm to maim one of their infants. Still another claimed Shepherd’s infant daughter on June 18. He and his wife had to watch her linger in agony for nearly thirty-six hours, “dying away gradually until she resembled the faded bud of a delicate flower.” Shepherd then wrapped her tiny body in some old clothes and buried it in a hole he scratched out with a knife. It was his and his wife’s seventh wedding anniversary.
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With temperatures rising past one hundred degrees during the day, and with the dust and tension, people became desperate for water. There was only one well in the compound, which was exposed to sniper fire from every side. One by one those who volunteered to draw water from it were killed. When a cannonball shattered the well house and winch, the garrison had to crawl under fire to lower the bucket by hand sixty feet down.

Meanwhile the two hundred or so British soldiers and handful of loyal sepoys, as well as every man who could fire a musket, managed to beat off attack after attack. Surrounded by unburied dead bodies festering in the heat, living on a handful of flour a day, they watched their loved ones die with no hope of relief or salvation. One stark fear drove them all: what would happen if they or their families were captured by the mutineers. They had heard that in Delhi women and children had been hacked to death or shot, as well as soldiers and civilian males. In Jhansi on June 8 rebels had rounded up every European man, woman, and child and murdered them all.

So it was Nana Sahib, not the Cawnpore garrison, who finally offered terms. He and his men were impatient to end the fruitless siege and move on. On June 24 he sent a message that those in the compound who were not part of the administration in Calcutta, and were willing to lay down their arms, would have guaranteed passage to Allahabad, where the British still had a garrison.

Wheeler opposed any deal with a man whose word was manifestly worthless. However, his brother officers persuaded him that once the rainy season began (and it was already overdue) their last remaining trenches and ramparts would be washed away in the monsoon. And what else could they do, they said, “with such a mixed multitude, in which there was a woman and a child for every man”?
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They would have to trust Nana Sahib and hope for the best.

Wheeler, surrounded by the sick and dying, was sick himself. He finally gave way. He agreed to a deal by which the garrison would be allowed to march under arms down to the Ganges and embark on boats to carry them downstream to Allahabad and safety.

“A truly strange spectacle” greeted the dawn in the entrenchment on June 27, remembered Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, as a crowd of gaunt and exhausted men, women, and children emerged from the battered hospital buildings. Some were barefoot, and most were in rags. Soldiers had given up their shirts and women their dresses in order to make bandages for the wounded. Many were shivering with fever. According to Thomson, “never, surely, was there such an emaciated, ghostly party of human beings as we”—emaciated and ghostly, certainly, for a party of Europeans in India.
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They loaded up willy-nilly into bullock carts, palanquins, and on some sixteen elephants Nana Sahib provided and began a slow, sad procession through the city. A great crowd followed them down to the river, and many of the sepoys gathered to jeer, although some were weeping with shame and offered to help their former officers and their families carry their few last belongings.

At last the procession reached the riverbank. The men and women gingerly descended the steep ravine, thick with prickly pear and elephant grass, to the beach where a dozen dilapidated barges with thatched roofs were drawn up in the mud. The crowd pressed forward, as Thomson and the other soldiers set down their muskets and waded out to the boats. They were standing waist deep in the water to help to load the women and children, when a sudden bugle call made everyone turn and glance back.

The bank above them was suddenly thick with armed sepoys, all of them pointing their muskets into the helpless crowd. There was a tremendous crash as they poured out a volley, while from nearby houses hidden cannon opened up with grapeshot. With a shout, troopers from the Second Light Cavalry charged down the bank with drawn swords.

A soldier’s wife saw one cut down General Wheeler with a saber cut across the neck. “My son was killed near him,” she recalled later. “Some were stabbed with bayonets; others cut down. Children were stabbed and thrown into the river.” She heard the youngest daughter of Colonel Williams (who had been killed in the siege) say to a soldier who was about to bayonet her, “‘My father was always kind to sepoys.’ He turned away, [but] just then a villager struck her on the head with his club, and she fell into the water.”
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Men hurled torches into the boats, which soon became blazing pyres. “The air resounded with the shrieks of the women and children,” remembered another eyewitness, “and agonized prayers to God for mercy. The water was red with blood. My poor little sister…crying all the while: ‘Oh Amy don’t leave me!’ A few yards away I saw the boat containing my poor mother slowly burning, and I cowered on the deck overwhelmed with grief.”
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Lieutenant Thomson and a few of the men managed to climb into one of the barges. The boat’s oars were gone, and the rudder was shot away. It slowly drifted into the current while bullets whizzed and chipped at the gunwales. “The wounded and the dead were entangled in the bottom of the boat,” Thomson remembered. As they floated out of range, the men looked back with helpless rage at what was happening on the shore.

Smoke from the musketry and cannon, and from boats that had been set on fire, hung thick over the riverbank. When the shooting stopped, all the surviving men were dragged away and killed. The remaining women and children, about 125 in all, were herded up the bank. Seven girls—four British and three Eurasians, including Wheeler’s youngest daughter—were taken away by sepoys from the Second Cavalry.
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The rest were herded back through town to await whatever fate Nana Sahib and the mutineers had in store for them.

Meanwhile, in Allahabad, General Henry Havelock was struggling to pull together his tiny army for the relief of Cawnpore. There were few troops to be found. When the mutiny started, twelve of twenty-nine army battalions were far to the west in the Punjab, and another three were to the east in Burma—one reason the uprising was able to spread so quickly. Havelock’s scratch force numbered one thousand men from four different British regiments; 150 loyal Sikh infantry; a tiny detachment of native irregulars; and twenty-odd volunteer cavalrymen. Most of the latter were stranded officers from sepoy regiments that had mutinied and civilian clerks and employees from the East India Company. Many had volunteered to avenge the deaths of friends or loved ones—loved ones killed by the same natives whom they had thought they trusted, and had dominated, for more than a century.
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If personal revenge drove some of Havelock’s men, anger and a thirst for retribution drove the rest. One was Colonel James Neill of the First Madras Fusiliers. A bulky, hard-headed Scot with fierce whiskers and bushy eyebrows—“the finest-looking man I ever saw,” as one contemporary put it—Neill commanded one of the East India Company’s few European regiments. He had ruthlessly restored order in Allahabad when native regiments there killed their officers and threatened to join the rebellion. Neill’s battle-hardened Fusiliers, together with the Sikhs, had shot and hacked their way through Allahabad’s streets, then summarily hanged every man they found in a sepoy uniform, rebel or not.

An English officer wrote to his mother, “Every day ten or a dozen niggers are hanged.” For the next three months bullock carts would roam at night, collecting the bodies dangling by twos or threes from the Allahabad gallows, from tree branches, and from signposts in the market place, and take them to be dumped into the Ganges.
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“God grant that I may have acted with justice,” Neill wrote on June 17. “I know I have acted with severity.” A devout Christian, he firmly believed that “the Word of God gives no authority to the modern tenderness for human life.”
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But he had restored British control, first in Benares and then in Allahabad.

For the past three weeks Neill had been desperately anxious to push on to save the garrison at Cawnpore. Finally on July 7 Havelock was marching to the rescue. On the twelfth Havelock’s troops beat a sepoy force near the Mughal princely residence of Fatehpur and pillaged and burned its ancient mosques. Marching under a blazing sun that left men dying of heatstroke, then under a drenching downpour as the monsoon rolled across the plain, Havelock and his men grimly made their way to the outskirts of Cawnpore, hanging “rebels” as they went.

By now they all knew the story of Nana Sahib’s treachery and of the women who had been taken hostage. “By God’s help,” Havelock told his tired and hungry men (all their meat had spoiled in the heat and they were living on hard biscuits), “we shall save them, or every man of us die in the attempt.”
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The rebels made a final stand outside the city: they broke before a last-minute charge led by Havelock’s son. Nana Sahib galloped away in panic, while his demoralized army fled. By afternoon British soldiers took possession of Cawnpore and began looking for the house where they had been told the women and children were being held.

The streets and bazaar were deserted. The residents of Cawnpore had almost all gone into hiding, terrified of what the British would do once they learned the truth. In the eerie silence the ragged men finally came upon the house, called the Bibighar, off a side street—ironically, a house a British officer had built for his Indian mistress.
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Once inside, the soldiers dashed frantically from room to room but found no one, only a tremendous litter of women and children’s clothes, petticoats, straw hats, slippers, toys, pages from ripped Bibles, and the occasional daguerreotype in a cracked case. All of it was soaked in blood.

At last they were able to follow the grisly trail out the back and down into the courtyard, then to the well at the corner of the garden. With the help of reluctant eyewitnesses, they were able to reconstruct what had happened. As Havelock’s troops closed on the city, Nana Sahib decided that the English and Eurasian women and children—tightly jammed into the tiny house and dying daily from heat, dysentery, and cholera—would make inconvenient witnesses. On July 16 he or one of his henchmen had ordered all of them, every last woman and child, put to death.

Even sepoys who had participated in the earlier attack at the river refused to carry out this cold-blooded act of slaughter. Finally five men—two local Muslim butchers, two indigent Hindu peasants, and a member of Nana Sahib’s bodyguard—were found who were willing to enter the Bibighar with
tulwar
s (a type of scimitar) and complete the job. All day the screams and shrieks from inside the house reverberated through Cawnpore’s streets. Even after the killers left at nightfall, the terrible sounds continued.
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The next morning a huge crowd had gathered, many standing on the garden wall as low-caste sweepers were sent in to take the bodies out. “The bodies were dragged out, most of them by the hair of the head,” testified an eyewitness later. “Those who had clothes worth taking were stripped. Some of the women were alive. I cannot say how many.” So were three little boys. They were running in circles, screaming hysterically, as the mutilated bodies were dragged down to the well and thrown in.
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Finally the little boys were killed and thrown in as well: one of them had his brains dashed out against a tree. The British soldiers could still see “an eye glazed and withered…smashed into the coarse bark.”

Giddy with exhaustion, thirst, and horror, some soldiers were in tears. Some vomited at the sight. Their commanding officer, Major Bingham, gazed down into the well, where naked bodies, limbs, and heads could be clearly seen in the bloodred water. “The
poor poor
creatures!” he exclaimed in sobbing tones.
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It seemed an unbelievable act. The deliberate butchery of innocent women and children touched a raw nerve in the Victorian sensibility.
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What had been a desire for retribution became a general bloodlust.

Captain Neill set the tone. He had arrived on July 20 and immediately ordered that every sepoy prisoner be taken to the Bibighar before execution. There each would be made to kneel and lick up the blood on the floor: he specifically ordered that “the task will be as revolting…to each miscreant’s feeling as possible,” knowing full well that touching blood was deeply abhorrent to high-caste Hindus.
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Some prisoners had to be whipped for ten minutes before they would do the disgusting act. Neill was unmoved: “No one who has witnessed the scenes of murder, mutilation, and massacre can ever listen to the word ‘mercy’ applied to these fiends.”