The first reports of Sepoy outrages which
circulated in England were undoubtedly exaggerated, but enough
remains of sickening truth as to the cruelties endured by English
women and children at the hand of the mutineers to account for the
fury which filled the breasts of their avenging countrymen, and
seemed to lend them supernatural strength and courage, and, alas! in
some instances, to merge that courage in ferocity. Delhi had been
deeply guilty, when the mutineers seized it, in respect of inhuman
outrage on the helpless non-combatants; but the story of Cawnpore is
darker yet, and is still after all these years fresh in our memories.
A peculiar blackness of iniquity clings about it. That show of amity
with which the Nana Sahib responded to the summons of Sir Hugh
Wheeler, the hard-pressed commanding officer in the city, only that
he might act against him; those false promises by which the little
garrison, unconquerable by any force, was beguiled to give itself up
to mere butchery; the long captivity of the few scores of women and
children who survived the general slaughter, only, after many dreary
days of painful suspense, to be murdered in their prison-house as
Havelock drew near the gates of Cawnpore: all these circumstances of
especial horror made men regard their chief instigator rather as one
of the lower fiends masquerading in human guise than as a
fellow-creature moved by any motives common to men.
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