Page:The Mutiny of the Bengal Army.djvu/47

Rh to be related: some who were for six weeks afterwards despaired of have since turned up living; their adventures have to be told: the great proportion of them, we know, met with all but insurmountable difficulties and dangers, and the escapes of many remind one of the supernatural. Up to the date of writing but few authentic accounts have been received, but sufficient is known to make us long for the time when the story of each individual's adventures can be published.

Meanwhile the rebels reigned supreme in Delhi. Undismayed by the loss incurred at the magazine, perhaps thereby rendered more furious, they ruthlessly pursued every Christian. The officers' bungalows were all entered and searched: they were not, in a single instance, pillaged by the Sepoys: they significantly remarked that they wanted only life. Their deeds, too, have yet to be recorded and revenged. Language cannot describe the bitter animosity or the savage cruelty evinced by those who, up to a recent period, had been the chief pillar of British supremacy!

It will be sufficient to add, that from the first moment the King of Delhi showed sympathy with the revolters: the Europeans, who fled to him for refuge, he handed over to their tender mercies: their several regiments he called after the names of his sons; he proclaimed himself Emperor of India; and, after the first few days of disorder he appointed Lall Khan, a subahdar of the 3d Cavalry, commander-in-chief of his army. He threw for a great stake, and has more than once been within an ace of winning it.

To show how the revolt at Meerut gave the signal for a general rise over India; how successively the troops at Ferozpore, at Benares, at Allahabad, and at Cawnpore, in the provinces of Oudh and Rohilcund, rose against us, and for a time achieved success; how the atrocities of Meerut and Delhi were surpassed by those of Oudh and Allahabad, will be my task on a future occasion. I shall then be able to prove, if indeed proof be required, (for I hope and believe that the people of England will have already judged and decided), how, up to the very last moment, the members of the Government, true to their principle of "India for the Civil Service," refused to open their eyes to the magnitude of the danger, and endeavoured as much as possible to conceal its extent from Lord Canning; how, in pursuance of this policy, they rudely declined to take precautions against a rising of the troops at Barrackpore, until an accident disclosed a plan which was to have been executed on the following day for murdering every European; how, in spite of their miserable policy, Calcutta has three times been providentially preserved when on the very brink apparently of destruction; how, notwithstanding their assumed blindness to the public danger, the principal civil servants of Government took most extensive precautions for their own security. I shall also show how precisely the same policy was pursued in the North-west provinces; how Mr. John Colvin, when the massacres of Meerut and Delhi were fresh in the recollection of all, offered free pardon to the rebels on the sole condition of their laying down their arms; how, up to this hour, no official proclamation has been published disavowing that act; how by its operation many