Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/323

Rh It may be well here to consider for a moment the alleged severities which some of the English soldiers and commanders inflicted upon those red-handed Sepoys. Who will wonder, as he thinks of the men that stood around the door of that “Slaughter House,” (as it was long after called,) and who gazed upon a sight that no other men had ever seen, and who, as they reflected upon all they had themselves so vainly endured to save those whose gory mementoes lay before them, causing these sun-burned soldiers to sob and weep like children, that such soldiers, in such circumstances, should have vowed vengeance against the perpetrators of this matchless cruelty? Does not even humanity, in advance, require a gentle judgment upon their feelings and resolutions, or the retributions which they afterward administered?

One of them told me that, as they stood around the door and looked in, a tuft of hair, from a lady's head, floated on the congealed mass; a comrade went in, walking on his heels to keep his shoes above the gore, and snatching up the handful of hair, he returned to them and proposed they should share it among them. They stood around in a circle, and divided it, taking an oath that they would have a Sepoy life for each hair they held! This dreadful resolution may be forgiven. General Havelock was a man of mercy as well as of valor, and impressed his authority upon them, so as to keep them from exercising this vengeance upon any save resisting rebels and convicted criminals. Two of his Aids, Generals Neill and Renaud, were more severe; they felt it their duty to break the caste, as well as to take the life, of the more prominent murderers who fell into their hands, by requiring these Brahmin Sepoys to wipe up the blood which their leader had caused to be shed; reminding one of the punishment inflicted by Ulysses in the palace of Ithaca, as related by Homer, only that the provocation was so much greater at Cawnpore. Under any other civilization than Christianity, in its hour of triumph, retaliation would have been general and undiscriminating. The citizens of Cawnpore well knew that a Hindoo or Moslem army, in such an opportunity, and with such a deed to revenge, would have given