From the Secunder Bagh we proceed to the fantastic pile of buildings which the French adventurer, Claude Martin, erected as a residence for himself. Martin was a native of the city of Lyons, and served under Lally in the regiment of Loraine. After Chandernagore was taken by Clive he entered the service of the East India Company, and rose to the rank of Captain. He then entered the service of the Nawab of Oude, but was allowed by the Company to retain his rank and enjoy promotion. The Marquis of Hastings, who, when Governor-General, visited Lucknow (October, 1814), writes:

"The house, built in the English style, stands upon a gentle elevation with some extent of lawn about it. On returning to Constantia I had the opportunity of considering that mansion. It was erected by General Martyn, a native of Lyons in France, who came to India as a private soldier. Having got into the service of Asoph-oo-Dowlah, he distinguished himself by his talents so as to obtain rapid promotion; but his strict accuracy to punctuality in all pecuniary concerns was more beneficial to him. His character in that respect became so established that the natives who had amassed money and dreaded the rapacious gripe of the sovereign, entrusted their riches to the care of General Martyn. Such amplitude of funds enabled him to take advantage of many favourable opportunities, and to make many advantageous speculations, so that he gathered extraordinary wealth. He expended some of it in erecting this house on a plan entirely his own. The idea of it was probably taken from those castles of pastry which used to adorn desserts in former days. The mansion consisted of three stories gradually diminishing in the size of the square, so as to leave to the two upper stories a broad space between the apartments and the parapet which covered the wall of the story below it. This was for the purpose of defence, with a view to which the building was constructed. The doors of the principal floor were plated with iron, and each window was protected by an iron grate. Loopholes from passages above gave the means of firing in perfect security upon any persons who should force their way into these lower apartments. The spiral stone staircases were blocked

at intervals with iron doors; in short, the whole was framed for protracted and desperate resistance. The parapets and pinnacles were decorated with a profusion of plaster lions, Grecian gods, and Chinese figures, forming the most whimsical assemblage imaginable. Still, the magnitude of the building, with its cupolas and spires, gave it a certain magnificence."

Leaving the Martinière, there is yet one spot sacred to Englishmen to be visited before quitting Lucknow. It is the tomb of Havelock. A lofty obelisk marks his restingplace :

"On the low plain by the Alum Bagh," wrote a gallant soldier, they made his humble grave; and Campbell and Outram, and Inglis, and many a stout soldier who had followed him in all his headlong march, and through the long fatal street, were gathered there to perform the last rites to one of England's noblest dead. As long as the memory of great deeds, and high courage, and spotless self-devotion is cherished amongst his countrymen, so long will Havelock's lonely tomb in the grove beneath the scorching Eastern sky, hard by the vast city, the scene alike of his toil, his triumph and his death, be regarded as one of the most holy of the many holy spots where her patriot soldiers lie."

X

CAWNPORE

HE story of Cawnpore is as tragic as the tale of the last

THE

agonies of the Athenian host in Sicily, and it will be of interest to Englishmen as long as we care to remember the story of our people. Some of our Indian administrators would like to destroy all memory of that great agony of our race, the Indian Mutiny. But time cannot utterly destroy the written records of great events or the theatre of their enactment. The ridge at Delhi, the Lucknow Residency, and the Ghat at Cawnpore are the witnesses of that worldwide tragedy which the flow of centuries will not wipe from memory. And it would not be well they should be effaced. The story of the Mutiny is the prose epic of our Indian Empire, and those who read it in the right spirit will find something beyond cruel atrocities, exciting adventures, or battle scenes. And nowhere surely do the lessons which the Indian Mutiny convey speak with a clearer and nobler voice than they speak at the Residency at Lucknow and the ill-fated Ghat at Cawnpore.

The city of Cawnpore, forty miles south-west of Lucknow, lies on the south bank of the Ganges which formed from very ancient times the frontier defence of the people of Oude and Bengal against their northern neighbours. When Clive decided to maintain and strengthen Oude as a friendly state interposed between Bengal and Northern India, he selected Cawnpore on account of its advanced and com

manding position as the best station in the Nawab of Oude's dominions to canton the brigade lent to him subject to a subsidy for the protection of the frontier. In 1801, when Cawnpore was comprehended within the limits of the Company's powers, it became the frontier station of the time, and attained the prominent military position of being the headquarters of the field command of Bengal, a command which, while including the King's and Company's troops, artillery, cavalry and infantry, amounted to 40,000 effectives. The advance of our frontier to the north, however, occasioned a revisal of our military position, and Cawnpore was most unwisely denuded of its European troops. In the spring of 1857 sixty-one European artillerymen with six guns were the only representatives of the English army at Cawnpore. And at Cawnpore resided the pretender to the honours of the Mahratta Peshwa. The native troops consisted of the 1st, 53rd and 56th Native Infantry, the 2nd Cavalry, and the native gunners attached to the battery, about 3,000 in number. Most of these men had been recruited from the neighbouring province of Oude, whose annexation had touched their pride and affected their interests. It only required a single act of imprudence-the greased cartridges which roused their caste prejudices-to drive them to mutiny. In May, 1857, the officer in command of the Cawnpore division was Major-General Sir Hugh Wheeler, K.C.B., who had for upwards of fifty years been attached to the Bengal army, had served with it in quarters and on the field: who had fought and bled in its ranks, who had a pride in the courage and devotion of the sepoy and a thorough knowledge of his language and mode of life. But no European can completely gauge the feelings and passions of an Oriental. General Wheeler visited the lines daily and had long conversations with the men in the hope of maintaining their confidence and of allaying the feverish excitability which had arisen on account of the belief that their religion was being en

dangered by the use of defiled cartridges. The men conversed with the General and his son, his aide-de-camp, without reserve and without any sign of sullenness, but their fears were not allayed nor their anxiety lessened. On June 3 General Wheeler reported to the Governor-General"All quiet, but subject to constant fits of excitement." At a late hour that evening he despatched another message to Lord Canning. "Sir Henry Lawrence having expressed some uneasiness, I have just sent him by dak gharries out of my small force two officers and fifty men, Her Majesty's 84th foot; any conveyance for more not available. This leaves me weak, but I trust holding my own until more Europeans arrive."

This was the last message that reached Lord Canning from Sir Hugh Wheeler and it was worthy of the gallant soldier. He had at a comrade's call denuded his own scanty command, though every day brought him fresh reports of the mutineers' intentions to surround him. The very evening that he sent forth fifty men to the aid of Henry Lawrence news reached him that an outbreak of the cavalry was imminent, so he issued orders that the women and non-combatants should assemble within the entrenchment, and that night about eight hundred souls went to their prison-grave. Of these about four hundred were women and children. To guard them there were about two hundred English soldiers of all arms, eighty officers, a few civilians and a small body of loyal sepoys.1

The places where the women and children assembled were two large barracks, formerly the hospital barracks of a dragoon regiment, and at the time occupied by the depôt of Her Majesty's 32nd Regiment consisting of the invalids, and women and children of the regiment. They were single

▾ Selections from the Letters, Despatches and other State Papers preserved in the Military Department of the Government of India, Edited by George W. Forrest. Vol. ii., Lucknow (Introduction, p. 154).