Three more marches brought us to Cawnpore, where we arrived on the 26th October.

We now for the first time heard the miserable ‘story of Cawnpore.’  We were told how, owing to Sir Hugh Wheeler’s misplaced belief in the loyalty of the sepoys, with whom he had served for upwards of half a century, and to the confiding old soldier’s trust in the friendship of the miscreant Nana, and in the latter’s ability to defend him until succour should arrive, he had neglected to take precautionary measures for laying in supplies or for fortifying the two exposed barracks which, for some unaccountable reason, had been chosen as a place of refuge, instead of the easily defensible and well-stored magazine.  Our visit to this scene of suffering and disaster was more harrowing than it is in the power of words to express; the sights which met our eyes, and the reflections they gave rise to, were quite maddening, and could not but increase tenfold the feelings of animosity and desire for vengeance which the disloyalty and barbarity of the mutineers in other places had aroused in the hearts of our British soldiers.  Tresses of hair, pieces of ladies’ dresses, books crumpled and torn, bits of work and scraps of music, just as they had been left by the wretched owners on the fatal morning of the 27th June, when they started for that terrible walk to the boats provided by the Nana as the bait to induce them to capitulate.[2] One could not but picture to one’s self the awful suffering those thousand Christian souls of both sexes and of all ages must have endured during twenty-one days of misery and anxiety, their numbers hourly diminished by disease, privation, the terrific rays of a June sun, and the storm of shot, shell, and bullets which never ceased to be poured into them.  When one looked on the ruined, roofless barracks, with their hastily constructed parapet and ditch (a mere apology for a defence), one marvelled how 465 men, not more than half of them soldiers by profession, could have held out for three long weeks against the thousands of disciplined troops and hordes of armed retainers whom the Nana was able to bring to the attack.

It is impossible to describe the feelings with which we looked on the Sati-Choura Ghat, where was perpetrated the basest of all the Nana’s base acts of perfidy;[3] or the intense sadness and indignation which overpowered us as we followed the road along which 121 women and children (many of them well born and delicately nurtured) wended their weary way, amidst jeers and insults, to meet the terrible fate awaiting them.  After their husbands and protectors had been slain, the wretched company of widows and orphans were first taken to the Savada house, and then to the little Native hut, where they were doomed to live through two more weeks of intensest misery, until at length the end came, and the last scene in that long drama of foulest treachery and unequalled brutality was enacted.  Our unfortunate countrywomen, with their little children, as my readers will remember, were murdered as the sound of Havelock’s avenging guns was heard.