Massacre at Cawnpore Read online

  Athill Turner, wounded in both legs, lay with a rifle propped against the thwart in front of him; Edward Vibart, both arms disabled, lay on his back endeavouring to keep a look-out, so as to permit the fitter men to rest, and neither uttered a complaint, but the moans and cries of the dying and the frightened sobbing of the children were an added torment and Alex was thankful when Murphy offered to relieve him at the sweep. He fell asleep instantly, too spent to be conscious of grief, too exhausted to remember what had gone before or even to care what fate might lie in store for him.

  The horrors of the past two days faded and he was with Emmy, walking in the beautifully kept rose garden of the commissioner’s house at Adjodhabad.

  “Alex …” he heard Emmy’s voice, as clearly as if she were beside him—“Alex, I’m going to have a child. Oh, darling, I’m so happy! He’ll be a son, I know, and we’ll call him William, after William Beatson. You’re pleased, darling, aren’t you—as pleased and happy as I am? Oh, Alex, I love you!”

  He stirred restlessly, feeling the sun on his face, instinctively aware that the boat was aground again. The sound of firing and the whine of bullets passing overhead shocked him into full wakefulness and he dragged his stiff and rain-wet body to the stern. The two Light Cavalry subalterns, Daniell and Harrison—who had swum from the third boat the previous day—were both wounded, he saw, and poor young Macauley, himself white with pain, was endeavouring to staunch the bleeding from Daniell’s shattered arm.

  “We must have drifted out of the navigable channel during the night,” Vibart told him despairingly. “Look, we’re in a siding—and stuck fast, I fear, in full view of that village. The villagers must have seen us coming and sent for help—there are sepoys and some Oudh irregulars and a whole mob of matchlock men … Babu Ram Buksh’s, no doubt, on both banks. And they killed Georgie Ashe—the swine put a bullet through his head just now, when he and Wren went over the side to try to get us off. We’re finished, Alex … we can’t go on. We shall have to surrender in the hope that at least they’ll spare the women and children.”

  “They did not spare the women and children at the Suttee Chowra Ghat,” Alex reminded him. “And there are still about— what?”—he counted heads—“about a dozen of us unwounded.”

  Vibart sighed. “Well, if you want to make an attempt to drive them off, you have my blessing and my prayers. But—”

  “A last sortie,” Mowbray Thomson put in. He squatted down beside Alex, measuring the distance to the bank with narrowed eyes. “The do-or-die sally poor old John was always talking about before we left the entrenchment, eh? What about it, Alex? Shall we die like fighting men, taking some of these blasted rebels with us?”

  “For God’s sake, why not? What have we got to lose?” Alex felt his heart lift at the prospect. “We’ll give ’em something to remember us by—we’ll have at ’em with the bayonet.” He thought of Corporal Henegan and his cracked lips twisted into a smile. “The swine never could stand up to cold steel!” He looked round at the gaunt grey faces of the Queen’s soldiers, exhausted, unshaven, famished spectres of men, in their tattered uniforms and their bandages, most of them bare-footed. Sergeant Grady, Bannister and the big gunner, Sullivan, were already fixing bayonets to their rifles and, from somewhere in the bottom of the boat, Henry Delafosse had retrieved his sword. He offered it, eyes bright with the light of battle.

  “You can use this, can’t you, Alex? I’m sticking to my rifle.” He grinned. “Right, boys—who’s with us?”

  They slipped over the side, fourteen of them—Thomson, Delafosse, Grady, two Bengal Artillery gunners and the rest men of the 32nd and the 84th—and those of the wounded who could still hold a rifle prepared to give them covering fire.

  “We’ll be back for you, God willing, Eddie,” Alex promised. “Hang on as long as you can.”

  They reached the shore without suffering any casualties and their first charge drove back a crowd of sepoys, who—as those in the boat had been—were taken by surprise and fled in terror before the maddened, desperate assault of what they had evidently imagined to be a party of helpless fugitives, whose surrender was imminent. A mob of natives, armed with clubs and matchlocks, attempted to surround them but they cut their way through without the loss of a man and, breathless but triumphant, fired a volley into a troop of horsemen, which emptied several saddles and caused the rest to join the sepoys in ignominious flight.

  They reloaded and pressed on, driving all opposition before them. Then Alex halted them, anxious to return to the boat with its cargo of wounded, but the mob they had scattered earlier had reformed and he saw, with dismay, that their retreat was cut off.

  “Come on!” Delafosse urged. “One more charge does it!”

  Stumbling with weariness, they turned and cut their way for the second time to the river bank, but the boat had vanished.

  “It will have refloated, without our weight, and drifted downstream,” Alex said, hoping against hope that this was true. He led them on, striking inland to avoid following a curve in the river; the cavalry keeping pace with them but just out of range, the matchlock men harassing them from the rear and the infantry retreating before them, pausing occasionally to fire spasmodic and ill-aimed volleys in their direction. About a mile downstream from their original landing place, they sighted the river again but, apart from a few small fishing boats drawn high up on the mud-flats, it was deserted. A line of sepoys, now firing from cover, barred their advance and, on the opposite bank, they could see others positioning themselves to contest any attempt they might make to cross the river.

  “This is it, Alex old man,” Mowbray Thomson said regretfully. “The boat must have fallen into their hands. How about making a stand over there?” He pointed to a small, stone-built temple among the trees to their left and Alex nodded his assent, too winded to speak. They fired a volley into the menacing line of sepoys and gained the shelter of the temple with a concerted rush, losing Sergeant Grady, who went down under a hail of bullets. Some of the other men were wounded but thirteen of them reached the temple and, for almost an hour, they defied all efforts to evict them, picking off any attacker who showed himself in the narrow aperture of the temple doorway.

  The end came when, unable to protect the sides and rear of their small stronghold, they heard logs and brushwood being heaped against its walls. The airless darkness of its interior started to fill with smoke and the crackle of flames told them that the wooden roof had caught alight. The men were starting to cough and retch and, as a beam crashed down from the blazing roof, Delafosse said hoarsely, “The swine have licked us, Alex. We can’t stay here—they’re making it too hot for us.”

  “There’s the river,” Alex reminded him. “A few strong swimmers might have a chance.”

  “If you think it’s worth a try, I’m game. But how many of us are strong swimmers? You, Tommy … fine. How many more?”

  Several voices answered him. “I’m not,” Alex stated flatly. He took the Adams from his belt. “Those who can swim, make a dash for the river. The rest of us will give you covering fire and hold them off as long as we can. Get into midstream and don’t try to land until you’re clear … pray God you make it.” He added, remembering Vibart, “Some of us must, if the Nana’s to get what he deserves. Bless you, my boys—it’s been a privilege to serve with all of you.”

  “And you, Alex my friend,” Mowbray Thomson told him warmly. He stripped off his shirt, his eyes streaming; Delafosse, Sullivan and Murphy followed his example. With two privates of the 84th and the gallant Bannister, they picked up their rifles and moved towards the door of the temple.

  “Now!” Alex yelled, his voice a harsh croak. They charged out through the blazing brushwood, half-blinded by smoke and the sepoys who were stoking the fire fell back before their levelled bayonets. Seven men reached the water and hurled themselves into it. Two had swum only a few yards when they were hit but five were in midstream, striking out for their lives, when Alex looked for them, Thomson’s fair h
ead just in front of Murphy’s dark one. Then he was fighting for his own life, he and the five men with him, their backs to the river, the high-pitched whine of the Enfields mingled with the crackle of the rebels’ muskets.

  A sowar of the irregular cavalry in a yellow chapkan rode at him, sabre raised. Alex pressed the trigger of the Adams and brought him down; he fired again and wounded the horse of a native officer, but the man slid from the saddle and came at him with two mounted men at his heels. He shot the jemadar and the first of the sowars but the other lunged at him, knocking him off balance and he was conscious of an agonising pain, which started on the left side of his head and spread until it seemed to envelope his whole body.

  From somewhere, a long way away, he heard a scream, which went on and on, waking ghastly echoes in his head. Dimly he realised that he was lying on his back, with a great weight on top of him, pinning him down and he heard the thud of hooves, galloping past and, it seemed, over him. After that a black void opened and he sank into it, thankful for the oblivion it brought him.

  The sun was setting when, slowly and painfully, consciousness returned. In the subdued light, as he peered about him, he could see only vague shapes—what appeared to be a tree in the distance and beyond it the shell of a gutted building. The temple, of course—the one in which they had sheltered and the rebels had set on fire. There were vultures on the tree and strutting, satiated, in front of the ruined temple …

  Alex struggled to sit up, memory returning, as he cautiously raised his head. A heavy weight held his legs as if in a vice and, after another struggle, he managed to wrench himself free and to identify the weight—and the stench beginning to emanate from it—as the dead body of a horse. Its rider, a sowar in a yellow chapkan, lay a few feet from it, also dead.

  There were other bodies scattered between the temple and the river bank and the vultures were at work on some of them; more of the foul birds rose on flapping wings, disturbed by his sudden movement as he started to limp towards the temple, looking warily about him in search of hidden enemies. But the living were his enemies, not the dead and there was no one left alive here, save for himself … there were no Hindu bodies either, he saw. Only the Moslem sowars and the British dead had been left to the vultures; the villagers, being devout Hindus, had carried off those of their own kind for cremation and the proper funeral rites. Filled with a cold anger at this evidence of their callousness, Alex searched for and found the men who had been with him and, summoning all his strength, dragged them, one after the other, to the river and cast them in.

  On his last journey, which took him right up to the temple steps, he saw a horse tethered to a tree behind it. The animal was wounded in the neck but, apart from this, it appeared to be in fair shape and, when his self-imposed task was completed, he returned to examine it more carefully. It was a black country-bred, with a good deal of Arab in it and, standing a little under sixteen hands, it reminded him of his own purebred charger, Sultan, which he had been compelled to leave in Lucknow. Until this moment, he had been so intent on removing the bodies of his men from the predators which infested the temple ghat, that he had given no thought to the problem of how best to make a bid for escape but the discovery of the horse set his dazed mind working.

  He felt curiously light-headed and almost carefree, unable to move at more than walking pace and there were, he realised, odd gaps in his memory, which he could not fill in, try as he might. There was an odd tingling sensation in his head, which also puzzled him and, putting up his hand to investigate the cause, he was astonished when his searching fingers encountered a deep cut that had laid his skull bare from temple to ear and continued across his left cheek to the corner of his mouth. He felt no pain and the bleeding—which had probably been profuse, judging by the extent and depth of the wound—had long since ceased. Shock and concussion, he decided, must be the cause of his strange state, combined with lack of food. But he was in danger—that, at least, he knew—and it would behoove him to get as far away from this place of the dead as he could. The horse would carry him; it was a sowar’s horse, with a carbine in the saddle boot, only … he looked down at the stump of his right arm. He could neither use nor load a carbine; he would have to arm himself with a sabre and … yes, find his Adams pistol.

  Slowly, like a sleepwalker, Alex returned to the river bank. His search for the pistol was successful; he stumbled on it, lying in the sand, close to the body of the jemadar in the yellow chapkan. He squatted down, still without haste, and with infinite effort, cleaned and reloaded the pistol. He took the jemadar’s sabre and was about to return with his newly acquired weapons to fetch the horse when another memory, dredged up from the depths of his mind, made him pause. He had been asked, by General Wheeler, to make an attempt to get through to Allahabad; to make contact with Neill and his relief column … yes, that was it, of course it was! And he had planned to do so in the guise of a sepoy, because the road to Allahabad was patrolled by the Nana’s troops, his cavalry, and no European had any chance of getting past them.

  He bent and, with some distaste, stripped the jemadar’s body of its uniform. The chapkan was stained with blood but so was his own ragged shirt; the exchange would be to his advantage and he made it, pleased to find that chapkan and the voluminous white pantaloons were a comfortable fit, the fellow’s soft, hand-tooled leather boots equally so. He wound the green pugree about his head, thrust the Adams into his sword-belt and, as an afterthought, opened the jemadar’s food pouch. It contained chapattis, some dried meat and a bag of dhal. He wolfed the meat and the chapattis, collected another pouch and a bag of grain and, mounting the horse, set off across country just as darkness fell, in search of a safe refuge in which to spend the night.

  Six miles down-river, natives on the Oudh shore had persuaded the four exhausted swimmers—Thomson, Delafosse, Murphy and Sullivan—to come ashore. They had been fearful, at first, having been so often deceived, but the natives had thrown down their matchlocks in earnest of their good faith and assured them repeatedly that their Rajah was a friend of the British.

  They could not go on; poor Sullivan was wounded in the back and at his last gasp and the fifth man who had escaped with them had been taken by their pursuers an hour or so earlier. They stumbled up the bank and their rescuers fetched blankets in which, after allowing them to rest for a time, they carried them to their village, where the headman received them with a kindness they had ceased to expect from any native. He gave them a meal, provided them with charpoys and let them sleep. Next morning, soon after 5 a.m., the Rajah, Drigbiji Singh, sent a party of his retainers, with ponies and an elephant, to transport them to his fort at Moorar Mhow. After partaking of a meal of buffalo milk, chapattis and native sweetmeats, they set off, arriving at nightfall at their destination.

  Once again they slept and the following morning a native doctor dressed their wounds and a tailor furnished them with fresh clothing and native-made shoes. Three times during their month-long stay at Moorar Mhow, messengers came from the Nana demanding the surrender of their persons, but Drigbiji Singh sent them back empty-handed. On 29th July when they had recovered and he considered the roads safe, the Rajah sent them under escort across the river and meeting a patrol of the 84th Foot after travelling some nine or ten miles, they marched to Cawnpore on 31st July.

  The luckless wounded in Edward Vibart’s boat were captured by the followers of Babu Ram Buksh, zamindar of Dowriakhera, within a short while of the landing of the fourteen fit men at Sheorajpore. True to his promise, the zamindar sent them back to the Nana in bullock carts. They reached Cawnpore on 30th June, passing by the scene of the massacre at the Suttee Chowra Ghat on their way, their hopeless, pain-dimmed eyes gazing on the charred shells of the boats which still floated in the muddy water. Bloated bodies lay at the water’s edge—the bodies of their friends and comrades, unrecognisable now—abandoned to the vultures and the prowling jackals, and to the human predators, who had stripped them of everything of value before turning their bac
ks on the carnage.

  The Nana had called a halt to the slaughter after an hour or so, and had ordered that the women and children, who had escaped the bullets and tulwars of his soldiers, were to be spared. A hundred and twenty-five dazed and mud-spattered souls were dragged ashore, many of them wounded and, mocked by grinning sepoys and jeered at by the bazaar budmashes, they were taken in open carts to the Savada Koti, a brick building close to the Nana’s camp, in which Mrs Jacobi and a number of other female captives were being held. One or two of the younger women and some Eurasian girls were seized by the sowars of the Light Cavalry—contrary to the Nana’s orders—and carried off to the city.

  No aid was given to the sick and wounded for three days; they lay moaning on the bare floor of their prison with nothing but water and a few handfuls of coarse grain to keep them alive. With a single exception, the men who had not been butchered out of hand as they stumbled back to the ghat were taken out and executed, soon after their arrival at the camp. The exception was Lieutenant John Saunders, of the Queen’s 84th who, with half a dozen men of the advance guard, had put up so stubborn a resistance that he was only taken when all the rest of his party had been killed or disabled. With an escort of sowars guarding him closely, he was brought before the Nana for sentence to be passed on him and, defiant to the last, he drew a six-shot revolver which had been concealed on his person. With this, he killed two of his guards and wounded a third and, breaking free, attempted to bring down the Nana himself with his last remaining shot. Unhappily for him, he fired well wide of his target and, being again overcome, was subjected to the most fiendish punishment.