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By Root 1217 0

in the subcontinent. The rebels found a merciless leader in the Nana Sahib of Cawnpore. According to contemporary accounts, when he first heard about events 250 miles distant in Delhi, Nana Sahib told a British officer that he ‘lamented the outbreak’, and offered to provide protection for European wives and families. But Nana Sahib – a fleshy, middle-aged man – was the adopted son of the previous king, and therefore a victim of the Company’s new Doctrine of Lapse which decreed that only natural-born sons could succeed to their fathers’ lands. When the mutineers contacted him he decided to take their side. On 6 June he laid siege to the British encampment, which was now packed with refugees who had poured into Cawnpore as news of the uprising spread. For nearly three weeks the rebel forces pounded the British with cannon and sniper shots. The medical supplies were destroyed by fire. Unable to move, unable even to bury their dead, the British were soon also ravaged by thirst, hunger and disease. Survivors later talked of how some of the besieged were blinded by shellfire and shrapnel or broken by despair. Under the constant bombardment, some went mad. Women did their best to comfort the children, but both suffered at least as badly as the men. The British commander, General Sir Hugh Wheeler, smuggled a desperate call out to the British garrison at Lucknow – ‘Surely we are not to die like rats in a cage?’ But no help came. When his own son was decapitated by artillery fire (‘Here a round shot came and killed young Wheeler,’ someone later scrawled at the site; ‘his brains and hair are scattered on the wall’), the general’s spirit broke.

On the evening of 24 June, the shelling stopped. After a couple of hours the British sentries watched as a figure emerged from Nana Sahib’s lines. It was a stumbling, barefoot woman, and as she came closer they identified her as Rose Greenway, one of Nana Sahib’s prisoners. She was carrying a piece of paper. It was addressed to ‘The Subjects of Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria’, and it offered safe passage by boat down the Ganges to Allahabad, well over 100 miles away. The officers argued hotly over whether the promise could be trusted and whether they should accept an offer of any kind. But the place was filled with sick and dying and General Wheeler had learned that they had a mere three days’ supply of food left. So, on the morning of 27 June, summoning what was left of its dignity, a miserable procession made its way to the riverbank. All were gaunt and haggard, military uniforms tattered, many of them in their underclothes. Those who could walk helped to carry the sick and wounded. ‘The old – battered and bruised –’, recalled one of the very few survivors, ‘babbled like children; others had a vacant stare in their eyes, as if they beheld visions of the future. Many a little child was raving mad.’

When they reached the water’s edge they found a flotilla of boats waiting and those who could do so waded out to them, dragging the injured. In what seemed a surprisingly kind gesture, Major Edward Vibart of the 2nd Bengal Light Cavalry found that Indian soldiers he had previously commanded insisted upon carrying his bags. Then suddenly, instead of pushing off, the boat crews jumped overboard and from all around the rebels – including those who had just carried Major Vibart’s bags – poured musket fire and grapeshot into the boats. The thatched roofs on some of the vessels caught fire, and those who leaped into the water and made it to the bank then had to evade the swords of mutineer cavalrymen in the shallows. Captured British soldiers were either shot or beheaded, their bodies tied into bundles of five or six and thrown in the river. A single boat escaped, chased downriver by rebels, and eventually two English officers and two Irish privates struggled ashore in territory belonging to a sympathetic rajah to tell the story of an almost unthinkable calamity.

But the worst was still to come at Cawnpore. Over one hundred women and children who had been previously captured and had not been