Page:The story of the Indian mutiny; (IA storyofindianmut00monciala).pdf/60

 whose fate was never rightly known. Others, wounded or exhausted, lay down to die by the way. Those who contrived to reach a haven of safety, had almost all moving tales to tell of adventure, of suffering, of perilous escape—tales such as, in the course of the next months, would be too common all over Northern India, and would not lose in the telling.

Many as these atrocities were, they might have been multiplied tenfold had the rebels acted with more prudence and less passion. So little did we know of the minds of our native soldiers, that it is still a matter of debate how far the Mutiny had been the work of deliberate design. But, at the time, it was widely believed by men too excited to be calm judges, that the outbreak at Meerut came a mercy in disguise, as it brought about the premature and incomplete explosion of a deep-laid plot for the whole Bengal army to rise on the same day, when thousands of Europeans, taken without warning and defence at a hundred different points, might have perished in a general massacre.