with them
for Delhi. There I was appointed engineer-in-chief, and set about
strengthening the defences by the aid of a party of the Company's
engineers which had mutinied on the march from Roorkee to Meerut. I
remained in Delhi till it was taken by the English in September. I then
made my way to Lucknow with as many men as I could collect of the
scattered forces. We first marched to Muttra, where we were obliged to
halt till I threw a bridge of boats across the Jumna for the retreat of
the army. We had still a force of over thirty thousand men under the
command of Prince Feroz Shah and General Bukht Khan. As soon as I
reached Lucknow I was honoured with the post of chief-engineer. I was in
Lucknow in November when your regiment assisted to relieve the
Residency. I saw the horrible slaughter in the Secundrabagh. I had
directed the defences of that place the night before, and was looking
on from the Shah Nujeef when you assaulted it. I had posted over three
thousand of the best troops in Lucknow in the Secundrabagh, as it was
the key to the position, and not a man escaped. I nearly fainted; my
liver turned to water when I saw the green flag pulled down, and a
Highland bonnet set up on the flag-staff which I had erected the night
before. I knew then that all was over, and directed the guns of the Shah
Nujeef to open fire on the Secundrabagh. Since then I have planned and
superintended the construction of all the defensive works in and around
Lucknow. You will see them when you return, and if the sepoys and
artillerymen stand firmly behind them, many of the English army will
lose the number of their mess, as you call it, before you again become
masters of Lucknow."

I then asked him if it was true that the man he had called Micky on our
first acquaintance had been one of the men employed by the Nana to
butcher the women and children at Cawnpore in July? To this he replied:
"I believe it is true, but I did not know this when I employed him; he
was merely recommended to me as a man on whom I could depend. If I had
known then that he was a murderer of women and children, I should have
had nothing to do with him, for it is he who has brought bad luck on me;
it is my _kismut_, and I must suffer. Your English proverb says, 'You
cannot touch pitch and escape defilement,' and I must suffer; Allah is
just. It is the conduct of wretches such as these that has brought the
anger of Allah on our cause." On this I asked him if he knew w