“SHIVA THE DESTROYER.”
Close to the Suttee Choura Ghaut, the place at which the garrison were to embark, there rose a Hindoo temple; it was known as the Hurdes, or the Fisherman’s Temple. It stood upon the banks of the Ganges, and its shadows darkened the water. Many a religious festival had been held within its walls, and many a pious Hindoo fisherman had come from afar, that he might fall down before the god it enshrined, and invoke a blessing upon himself and his calling. But on the morning that the English people went forth from their defences, it was devoted to a far different purpose.
Enthroned on a “chaboutree,” or platform, of the temple, sat Tantia Topee. He had been commissioned by Nana Sahib to carry out the hellish work. Near him were Azimoolah, and Teeka Singh, and they were surrounded with numerous dependants. From their position, they were enabled to command an uninterrupted view of the river, through the open doors and windows. At the proper time the fatal signal was to be given in that temple by Tantia Topee. The signal was to be the blast of a bugle.
But all unmindful of the awful danger, the garrison went on—women, and children, and men, who had survived the horrors of those awful weeks—gaunt, and ghastly, their garments hanging in shreds, and scarcely covering their emaciated bodies, enfeebled by want, their bones almost protruding through their skins, some wounded, and bearing upon them the indelible marks of the battle.
In the hearts of most was a glimmering of a peaceful future.
Here a little child carried in its arms a broken and smoke-blackened doll; there a woman huddled to her breast some household treasure that had been saved from the great wreck; but they were a pitiable crowd. The beautiful had left their beauty; the young had left their youth in the battered barracks; and even the faces of the children were pinched and wizened, showing how fearful had been the suffering during those dark weeks.
The wounded were carried mostly in palkees (palanquins); the women and children were in rough native carts, a few rode on elephants; and the able-bodied men marched. But the attempt at martial array was but a mockery—they were soldiers only in spirit. Outwardly they were starving tatterdemalions.
The grim old warrior, General Wheeler, was accompanied by his wife and daughters. He was worn and broken spirited—for the capitulation had crushed his heart. In spite of the starvation which stared him in the face, in spite of the hordes of rebels arrayed against them, and in spite of the sickness and misery which were upon them, the poor old man was reluctant to surrender, for he still hoped for succour from outside. But his officers had forced it upon him, for the sake of the unhappy women and children.
It was but a mile down to the Ghaut, but it was a long, long weary journey. The place of embarkation was reached at last, and the weary eyes of the people saw the fleet of boats that they hoped were to convey them to safety. They were common country eight-oared boats, known as “budgerows.” They were unwieldy things, with heavy thatched roofs, so that they resembled, from a distance, stacks of hay. It was the close of an unusually dry season, and the water was at its shallowest—the mud and sand-banks being far above the water in many places. The banks of the river were lined with natives, who had turned out in thousands to see the humiliated English. There were thousands of soldiers there too—horse, foot, and artillery. The troopers sat with their horses’ heads turned towards the river, and seemed impatient for the sport to commence.
Such a deep-laid plot, such a diabolical act of treachery, the world had surely never known before. Not even the imagination of Danté could have conceived blacker-hearted demons to have peopled his “Inferno” with, than those surging crowds of natives. Those floating budgerows were not to be arks of safety, but human slaughter-houses.
Slowly the people embarked, and, as they did so, there floated out into the stream a small wooden idol: it represented the Hindoo god Shiva—Shiva the Destroyer. As it was pushed out into the stream, every native who saw it smiled, for he knew too well what it signified.
General Wheeler remained till the last. He had been riding in a palanquin, and as he put his head out, a scimitar flashed in the air, and the brave veteran rolled into the water a corpse. Almost at the same moment Tantia Topee raised his hand in the temple, and the notes of a bugle rose clear and distinct. Then the foul design became apparent, and the unhappy people knew that they had been lured into a death-trap. From every conceivable point on both sides of the river, there belched forth fire, and grape and musket balls were poured into the doomed passengers; in a little while the thatch of the budgerows burst into flame, for in every roof hot cinders had been previously inserted. Men leapt overboard, and strove to push the vessels out into the stream, but the majority of the boats remained immovable. The conflagration spread; the sick and wounded were burnt to death. The stronger women took to the water with their children in their arms, but they were shot down or sabred by the troopers, who rode in after them.
In a large and elegant tent on the cantonment plain, the fiend and tiger, Nana Sahib, paced uneasily. He heard the booming of the guns, the rattle of the musketry, and occasionally the dying shriek of an unhappy woman was borne upon his ear. He knew that Shiva the Destroyer was doing his hellish work. Perhaps as he paced up and down, there came into his black heart a pang of remorse, or, more probably, a thrill of fear; for in his solitude he might have seen a vision of the Great White Hand that was to smite him into the dust. Or perhaps there stole over him a sense that there was a destroyer mightier even than Shiva—even the Supreme God of the Christians, who would exact a terrible retribution for his unutterable crimes.
It is certain that as Dundoo Pant paced his tent, he was ill at ease. He was haunted by the ghosts of his victims, even as was that bloody tyrant of infamous memory, Richard the Third, the night before Bosworth.
“Ah! What do you want?” cried the guilty Nana, as a messenger suddenly entered the tent—so suddenly that the conscience of Dundoo caused his heart to leap into his mouth.
“The work speeds well, your Highness,” said the man, kneeling before his master; “but these Feringhees are fighting to the death.”
“Go back with all haste to Tantia Topee, and say that, as he values his own life, not another woman or child is to be slaughtered; but let every man with a white face be hacked to pieces. Mark me well. Not an Englishman is to be spared! Tell Azimoolah to see to all this.”
The messenger withdrew, and the tiger ground his teeth and resumed his walk.
Down at the Ghaut the work was truly speeding well, but when the Nana’s message arrived it stopped as far as the women were concerned; and about one hundred and thirty women and children—some fearfully wounded, others half drowned and dripping with the slime of the Ganges—were carried back in captivity to Cawnpore.
Thirty-nine boats had been destroyed; but there was one that got into the fairway of the stream, and down on the dark bosom of the waters it drifted, a lonely waif. There were no boatmen, there were no oars, there was no rudder, but there were hearts of steel on board; heroes who would die, ay, suffer death a hundred times before they would surrender. That solitary boat contained about eighty men—such men that, if they had had a fair chance, not all the legions of the accursed Nana could have conquered them. Slowly it drifted on between the banks. Hissing shot and burning arrows were discharged at it in showers, but it seemed almost as if it had been surrounded with a charm, for it drifted on unscathed. Next a blazing budgerow was sent after it, but that failed to harm it, and its occupants, slender as was the chance, began to think that they would escape. But as the sun commenced to decline, and burnish the river with his golden rays, a boat, filled with about sixty men, was sent in pursuit, with orders from Tantia Topee to slaughter every Englishman. The lonely boat grounded on a sand-bank. Hope sank again. On came the would-be destroyers, and their boat stuck on the same bank. Then occurred a last grand burst of courage—courage even in death, and which is always so conspicuous in British heroism. On the bows of the pursuer there stood up a tall, powerful Sepoy, and, in a loud voice, cried:
“In the name of the Nana Sahib, I call upon you to surrender.”
He might as well have called upon the winds to stay their course, or the tides to cease to flow. Surrender forsooth! And to the Nana Sahib, the insatiable Tiger of Cawnpore, whose name, and name of all his race, will descend to posterity covered with infamy, and who will be held up to execration and scorn until time shall be no more!