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408 fortified places, of a numerous artillery, of several arsenals and magazines. In trained soldiers they preponderated over the island garrison in the proportion of at least five to one. They inaugurated their revolt by successes which appealed to the imagination of an impulsive people. At Dehlí, at Kánhpur, at Jhánsí, in many parts of Oudh, and in the districts around Agra, they proved to them the possibility of expelling the foreign master. Then, too, the majority of the population in those districts, landowners and cultivators alike, displayed a marked sympathy with the revolted sipáhís. For the English, in those first five weeks, the situation was bristling with danger. A false move might have temporarily lost India. In a strictly military sense they were too few in numbers, and too scattered, to attempt an offensive defence. It is to their glory that, disregarding the strictly scientific view, they did attempt it. The men who administered British India recognised at a glance that a merely passive defence would ruin them. They displayed, then, the truest forecast when they insisted that the resources still available in the North-west and in the Panjáb should be employed in an offensive movement against Dehlí. That offensive movement saved them. Though Dehlí offered a resistance spreading over four months, yet the penning within her walls of the main army of the rebels gave to the surprised English the time necessary to improvise resources, to receive reinforcements, to straighten matters in other portions of the empire.

The secret of the success of the British in the stupendous conflict which was ushered in by the Mutiny at Mírath and the surprise of Dehlí, lay in the fact that they never, even in the darkest hour, despaired. When the news of the massacre of Kánhpur reached Calcutta, early in July, and the chattering Bengálís, who would have fainted at the