The gallant medley on the banks of the Alma, and the fruitless interval of inaction that followed it, were told of as if men were speaking of some battle of the gods.

LXII.

THE STORY OF CAWNPORE.-KAYE.

[It was largely the fear that Russia, by getting control of the eastern Mediterranean, might throw herself across the most direct route between England and her great empire in the East, that induced the latter power to enter the Crimean war. But England little dreamed, at the close of the war, that a far greater danger to her power existed in India itself. For many years, and from a variety of causes, a smoldering discontent had existed among the populations of India, and it now (1857) broke out into open mutiny. The siege of Cawnpore by Nana Sahib, whose ambition was to restore the old empire of the Moguls, together with the subsequent surrender and massacre of the little English garrison, was one of the most thrilling incidents in the whole history of the mutiny. After the siege had lasted three weeks, the Nana offered conditions of surrender, one of which was that he would provide boats to convey the garrison down the river Ganges to a place of safety.]

THAT the boats were ready at the river-side had been ascertained by a committee of our own people; and when the dreary procession reached the appointed place of embarkation, the uncouth vessels were seen a little way in the stream, in shallow water, for it was the close of the dry season, and the river was at its lowest. The boats were the ordinary eight-oared budgerows of the country-ungainly structures with thatched roofs, looking at a distance like floating haystacks, and into these our people now began to crowd without order or method, even the women with children in their arms, with but little help from others, wading knee-deep in the water, and scrambling as they best could up the sides of the vessels. It was nine o'clock before the whole were em

barked, and some-Heaven only knows, for their voices are sealed-may have breathed more freely as they awaited the friendly order to push off and to drop down the stream toward the great goal of ultimate deliverance. But there were those on the river banks-those even in the boats themselves-who had far other thoughts, far other expectations. Every boat that had been prepared for our people was intended to be a human slaughter-house. They had not gone down to the banks of a friendly river that was to float them to a place of safety. They had been lured to the appointed shambles, there to be given up to cruel death.

No sooner were our people on board the boats than the foul design became apparent. The sound of a bugle was heard. The native boatmen clambered over the sides of the vessels, and sought the shore. Then a murderous fire of grape-shot and musket-balls was opened upon the wretched passengers from both banks of the river; and presently the thatch of the budgerows, cunningly ignited by hot cinders, burst into a blaze. There was then only a choice of cruel deaths for our dear Christian people. The men, or the foremost among them, strenuous in action to the last, leaped overboard, and strove, with shoulders to the hulls of the boats, to push them into mid-channel. But the bulk of the fleet remained immovable, and the conflagration was spreading. The sick and wounded were burnt to death, or more mercifully suffocated by the smoke; while the stronger women, with children in their arms, took to the river, to be shot down in the water, to be sabered in the stream by the mounted troopers, who rode in after them, to be bayoneted on reaching land, or to be made captives, and reserved for a later and more cruel immolation. The fewest words are here the best. I should have little taste to tell the foul details of this foul slaughter, even if authentic particulars were before me. It is better that they should remain in the obscurity of an uncertain whole; enough that no aspect of Christian humanity, not

the sight of the old general, who had nearly numbered his fourscore years, nor of the little babe still on its mother's breast, raised any feeling of compunction or of pity in these butchers on the river side. It sufficed that there was Christian blood to be shed.

While this terrible scene was being acted at the Ghaut, the Nana Sahib, having full faith in the malevolent activity of his lieutenants or the river bank, was awaiting the issue in his tent on the cantonment plain. It is related of him that, unquiet in mind, he moved about, passing hither and thither, in spite of the indolence of his habits and the obesity of his frame. After a while, tidings of the progress of the massacre were brought to him by a wounded trooper. What had been passing within him during those morning hours no human pen can reveal.

Perhaps some slight spasm of remorse may have come upon him, or he may have thought that better use might be made of some of our people alive than dead. But whether moved by pity or by craft, he sent orders back by the messenger that no more women and childen should be slain, but that not an Englishman should be left alive. So the murderers, after butchering, or trying to butcher, the reinnant of our fighting men, stayed their hands and ceased from the slaughter; and a number of weaker victims, computed with probable accuracy at a hundred and twenty-five, some sorely wounded, some half-drowned, all dripping with the water of the Ganges and begrimed with its mud, were carried back in custody to Cawnpore, by the way they had come, envying, perhaps, those whose destiny had been already accomplished.

But among the men-survivors of the Cawnpore garrison -were some who battled bravely for their lives, and sold them dearly. Strong swimmers took to the river, but often sunk in the reddened water beneath the fire of their pursuers; while others, making toward the land lower down the stream, stood at bay on bank or islet, and made vain but

gallant use of the cherished revolver in the last grim energies of death. There was nothing strange, perhaps, in the fact that the foremost heroes of the defense were the last even now to yield up their lives to the fury of the enemy. One boat held Moore and Vibart, Whiting and Mowbray-Thomson, Ashe, Delafosse, Bolton, and others, who had been conspicuous in the annals of that heroic defense. By some accident or oversight the thatch had escaped ignition. Lighter, too, than the rest, or perhaps more vigorously propelled by the shoulders of these strong men, it drifted down the stream; but Moore was shot through the heart in the act of propulsion, and Ashe and Bolton perished while engaged in the same work. The grape and round-shot from the Oude bank of the river ere long began to complete the massacre. The dying and the dead lay thickly together entangled in the bottom of the boat, and for the living there was not a mouthful of food.

As the day waned it was clear that the activity of the enemy had not abated. That one drifting boat, on the dark waters of the Ganges, without boatman, without oars, without a rudder, was not to be left alone with such sorry chance of escape; so a blazing budgerow was sent down the river after it, and burning arrows were discharged at its roof. Still, however, the boat was true to its occupants; and with the new day, now grounding on sand-banks, now pushed off again into the stream, it made weary progress between the two hostile banks, every hour lighter, for every hour brought more messengers of death. At sunset a pursuing boat from Cawnpore, with fifty or sixty armed natives on board, came after our people, with orders to board and destroy them. But the pursuers also grounded on a sand-bank; and then there was one of those last grand spasms of courage even in death which are seldom absent from the story of English heroism. Exhausted, famishing, sick and wounded, as they were, they would not wait to be attacked. A little party of

officers and soldiers armed themselves to the teeth, and fell heavily upon the people who had come down to destroy them. Very few of the pursuers returned to tell the story of their pursuit. This was the last victory of the hero-martyrs of Cawnpore. They took the enemy's boat, and found in it good stores of ammunition. They would rather have found a little food. Victors as they were, they returned to the cover of the boat only to wrestle with a more formidable enemy. For starvation was staring them in the face.

Sleep fell upon the survivors; and when they woke the wind had risen, and the boat was drifting down the streamin the darkness they knew not whither; and some even then had waking dreams of a coming deliverance. But with the first glimmer of the morning despair came upon them. The boat had been carried out of the main channel of the river into a creek or siding, where the enemy soon discerned it, and poured a shower of musket balls upon its miserable inmates. Then Vibart, who lay helpless, with both arms shot through, issued his last orders. It was a forlorn hope. But while there was a sound arm among them, that could load and fire, or thrust with a bayonet, still the great game of the English was to go to the front and smite the enemy, as a race that seldom waited to be smitten. So MowbrayThomson and Delafosse, with a little band of European soldiers of the Thirty-second and the Eighty-fourth, landed to attack their assailants. The fierce energy of desperation drove them forward. Sepoys and villagers, armed and unarmed, surged around them, but they charged through the astonished multitude, and made their way back again through the crowd of blacks to the point from which they had started. Then they saw that the boat was gone. The fourteen were left upon the pitiless land, while their doomed companions floated down the pitiless water.

There was one more stand to be made by Mowbray-Thomson and his comrades. As they returned along the bank of