810 INDIA [HISTORY. meant. They believed it was by their prowess that the Punjab had been conquered, and all India was held quiet. The numerous dethroned princes, their heirs and their widows, were the first to learn and take advantage of the spirit of disaffection that was abroad. They had heard of the Crimean war, and were told that Russia was the per petual enemy of England. They had money in abundance with which they could buy the assistance of skilful intriguers. They had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, by a revolution. In this critical state of affairs, of which the Government had no official knowledge, a rumour ran through the can tonments of the Bengal army that cartridges had been served out greased with the fat of animals unclean alike to Hindu and Mahometan. After this, nothing could quiet the minds of the sepoys. Fires occurred nightly in the native lines ; officers were insulted by their men ; all con fidence was gone, and only the form of discipline remained. On the afternoon of Sunday, May 10, 1857, the sepoys at Meerut (Mirath) broke into open mutiny. Their first mad frenzy marked by its excess the change from their usually quiet manners and orderly habits. They broke into the jail, and then ran through the cantonments, cutting down every European they met. At last they streamed off to the neighbouring city of Delhi, to stir up the native garrison and the criminal population of that great city, and to place themselves under the authority of the discrowned Mughal emperor. Meerut was the largest military station in India, with a strong European garrison of foot, horse, and guns, suf ficient to overwhelm the mutineers before ever they reached Delhi. But just as the sepoys acted in irrational panic, so did British officers in but too many cases act with equally irrational indecision. The news of the outbreak was telegraphed to Delhi, and nothing more was done that night. The next morning the Mahometans of Delhi rose, and all that the Europeans there could do was to blow up the magazine. A rallying centre and a traditional name was thus given to the revolt, which forthwith spread like wild fire through all the North- Western Provinces and Oudh down into Lower Bengal. The same narrative must suffice for all, though each episode has its own peculiar story of sadness and devotion. The sepoys rose on their officers, without warning, and sometimes after protestations of fidelity. The Europeans, or persons of Christian faith, were massacred, sometimes also women and children. The jail was broken open, the treasure plundered, and then all marched off to some centre of revolt, to join in what had now become a national war. Only in the Punjab were the sepoys anticipated by the stern measures of repression and disarmament adopted by Sir John Lawrence and his lieutenants, among whom Edwardes and Nicholson were Loyalty conspicuous. The Sikh population never wavered. Crowds of Sikhs of willing recruits came down from the Afghan hills. And thus the Punjab, instead of being itself a source of danger, was able to furnish a portion of its own garrison for the siege of Delhi. In Lower Bengal most of the sepoys mutinied, and then dispersed in different directions. The native armies of Madras and Bombay remained true to their colours. In Central India the contingents of many of the great chiefs sooner or later joined the rebels, but the Mahometan state of Hyderabad was kept loyal by the authority of its able minister Sir Salar Jang. The main interest of the sepoy war gathers round the three cities of Cawnpur, Lucknow, and Delhi. The can tonments at Cawnpur contained the largest native garrison in India ; and in the immediate neighbourhood, at Bithur, was the palace of Dandhu Panth, the disinherited heir of the last peshwa, whose more familiar appellation of Ndna Sahib will ever be handed down to the infamy of history. At first the NAna was profuse in his professions of loyalty, but as soon as the sepoys mutinied he put himself at their head, and was proclaimed peshwd of the Marhattas. The Europeans at Cawnpur, who numbered more women and children than fighting men, shut themselves up in improvised entrenchments, where they sustained a siege for nineteen days under the sun of a tropical June. At last, trusting Caw to a safe conduct from the Nana as far as Allahabad, they pur .. surrendered their position, and to the number of four sacjv hundred and fifty individuals embarked in boats on the Ganges. Forthwith a murderous fire was opened upon them from the river bank. Only a single boat escaped, and but four men, who swam across to the protection of a friendly raja, ultimately survived to tell the tale. The rest of the men were massacred on the spot ; the women and children, numbering one hundred and twenty-five, were reserved for the same fate a few days later, when the avenging army of Havelock was at hand. Sir Henry Lawrence, the chief commissioner of Oudh, had foreseen the coming storm with a prophetic eye. He had fortified and provisioned the residency at Lucknow in good time, and thither he retired with all the European inhabitants and a weak British regiment on July 2. Two days later he was mortally wounded by a shell. But his example Sieg inspired the little garrison to hold out under unparalleled Lucl hardships and against enormous odds, until relieved by no Havelock and Outram on September 25. But the relieving force was itself invested by fresh swarms of rebels, and it was not till November that Sir Colin Campbell, afterwards Lord Clyde, cut his way into Lucknow, and effected the final deliverance of the garrison. The siege of Delhi began on June 8, just one month after the original outbreak at Meerut. Siege in the proper sense of the word it was not, for the British army, encamped on the historic ridge, never exceeded 8000 men, while the rebels within the walls were more than 30,000 strong. In the middle of August Nicholson arrived with a reinforcement from the Punjab, but his own encouraging presence was more valuable than the reinforcement he brought. On September 14 the Stor assault was delivered, and after six days desperate fighting Del11 in the streets Delhi was again won. Nicholson fell at the head of the storming party. Hodson, the intrepid leader . of a corps of irregular horse, hunted down and brought in as prisoner the old Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, and then in cold blood shot down the emperor s sons with his own hand. After the fall of Delhi and the final relief of Lucknow the war loses its dramatic interest, though fighting went on in various parts of the country for eighteen months longer. The population of Oudh and Rohilkhand, stimulated by the presence of the begum of Oudh, the nawab of Bareilly, and Nana Sahib himself, had joined the mutinous sepoys en masse. In this quarter of India alone, it was the revolt of a people rather than the mutiny of an army that had to be quelled. Sir Colin Campbell in person conducted the campaign in Oudh, which lasted through two cold seasons. Valuable assistance was lent by Sir Jang Bahadur of Nepal, at the head of a numerous army of Gurkhas. Town after town was occupied, fort Suppi after fort was stormed, until at length the last gun had been S101 J. recaptured and the last- fugitive had fled across the mi frontier by January 1859 In the meanwhile Sir Hugh Rose (afterwards Lord Strathnairn),with another army from Bombay, was conducting an equally brilliant campaign in Central India, His most formidable antagonists were the disinherited rani of JhAnsf, and Tantia Topi, whose military talent had previously inspired Nana Sahib with all the capacity for resistance that he ever displayed. The rani died fighting bravely at the head of her troops in June 1858 ; Tantia Topi, after doubling backwards and forwards through Central India, was at last betrayed and run down
in April 1859.
