Page:Volunteering in India.djvu/112

98 Sunker Tewāre (that was his name), though seemingly a man over sixty years of age, and with a frame enfeebled from inability to sustain manual labour, still retained that dignified demeanour characteristic of the high-caste Rajput soldier.

Sitting in the midst of us he said, in a voice broken by emotion — by genuine emotion: “I was formeriy a Sepoy in the Bengal Army, but wounds and frost-bites having incapacitated me for military service since the Afghan War in 1840, I am a pensioner of that army. I deplore the deeds of blood by which India has been polluted.” And here finishing this prefatory flourish, he related to us so voluminous a narrative concerning the origin of the Mutiny, that I have not the space within the limits allotted to these brief chapters to more than summarily compress into a small compass a true translation of it; and I would ask the reader to bear in mind, as he peruses the story, that it is from the mouth of a bona-fide Sepoy, who, had he been in the ranks of the Bengal Army during the days of the Mutiny, himself would have become — by his own showing — a mutineer, like his brethren at that moment in arms against us.

The history of the Indian Mutiny in all its phases, and from every point of view, has been written until a host of uninformed people imagine the subject to be completely worn out, and well-nigh threadbare. But is it so? In reply I venture to say the subject is almost as inexhaustible to-day, as it was upwards of thirty years ago; and so it will continue, until every