FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36  
37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   >>   >|  
e complete, but the first chapter of Matthew and up to the middle of the seventh verse of the second chapter are wanting. The Testament must have belonged to some Scotch Highlander in the garrison. I have more than once thought of sending it home to the Highland Society as a relic of the Mutiny. From the entrenchment we went to the Suttee Chowrah _ghat_, where the doomed garrison were permitted to embark in the boats in which they were murdered, and traces of the treachery were still very plain, many skeletons, etc., lying about unburied among the bushes. We then went to see the slaughter-house in which the unfortunate women and children had been barbarously murdered, and the well into which their mangled bodies were afterwards flung. Our guide was a native of the ordinary camp-follower class, who could speak intelligible barrack-room English. He told us that he had been born in a battery of European artillery, in which his forefathers had been shoeblacks for unknown generations, and his name, he stated, was "Peshawarie," because he had been born in Peshawur, when the English occupied it during the first advance to Caubul. His apparent age coincided with this statement. He claimed to have been in Sir Hugh Wheeler's entrenchment with the artillery all the time of the siege, and to have had a narrow escape of his life at the last. He told us a story which I have never seen mentioned elsewhere, that the Nana Sahib, through a spy, tried to bribe the commissariat bakers who had remained with the English to put arsenic into the bread, which they refused to do, and that after the massacre of the English at the _ghat_ the Nana had these bakers taken and put alive into their own ovens, and there cooked and thrown to the pigs. These bakers were Mahommedans. Of course, I had no means of testing the truth of this statement.[3] Our guide showed no desire to minimise the horrors of the massacre and the murders to which he said he had been an eye-witness. However, from the traces, still too apparent, the bare facts, without exaggeration, must have been horrible enough. But with reference to the women and children, from the cross-questions I put to our guide, I then formed the opinion, which I have never since altered, that most of the European women had been most barbarously murdered, but not dishonoured, with the exception of a few of the young and good-looking ones, who, our guide stated, were forcibly carried off to become Mahom
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36  
37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
English
 

murdered

 

bakers

 

European

 

artillery

 

stated

 
chapter
 

barbarously

 

massacre

 

children


traces

 

garrison

 

statement

 

apparent

 
entrenchment
 

narrow

 

escape

 

cooked

 

remained

 

complete


commissariat
 

arsenic

 

thrown

 
mentioned
 
refused
 

opinion

 

altered

 

formed

 

questions

 

reference


dishonoured

 

exception

 

carried

 

forcibly

 

horrible

 

exaggeration

 

showed

 
desire
 

testing

 

Mahommedans


minimise

 

horrors

 
However
 
witness
 

murders

 

skeletons

 
Testament
 

treachery

 
unburied
 

unfortunate