Not until many months later did Malcolm learn the true cause of Roshinara Begum’s anxiety that he and his friends should hasten to Meerut, and let it be known on the way that they came from Cawnpore. Yet there were those in Bithoor that night who fully appreciated the tremendous influence on the course of political events that the direction of Winifred’s flight might exercise. The girl herself little dreamed she was such an important personage. But that is often the case with those who are destined to make history. In this instance, the balking of a Brahmin prince’s passions was destined to change the whole trend of affairs in northern India.

Nana Sahib escorted Mayne from Meerut to Cawnpore because the safeguarding of the Judicial Commissioner of Oudh was a strong card to play in that parlous game of empire. As he traveled south reports reached him on every hand that nothing could now stop the spread of the Mutiny, and, with greater certainty in his plans came a project that he would not have dared to harbor even a week earlier.

Winifred, naturally a high-spirited and lively girl, soon recovered from the fright of that fateful Sunday evening. She had seen little of the tragedy enacted in Meerut; she knew less of its real horrors. Notwithstanding the intense heat the open-air life of the march was healthy, and, in many respects, agreeable. The Nana was a courteous and considerate host. He took good care that his secret intelligence of occurrences at Delhi and other stations should remain hidden from Mayne, and, while his ambitions mounted each hour, he cast many a veiled glance at the graceful beauty of the fair English girl who moved like a sylph among the brown-skinned satyrs surrounding her.

Once the party had reached Bithoor the Nana’s tone changed. Instead of sending his European guests into Cawnpore, whence safe transit to Calcutta was still practicable, he kept them in his palace, on the pretext that the roads were disturbed. He contrived, at first, to hoodwink Mr. Mayne by giving him genuine news of the wholesale outbreak in the North-West, and by adding wholly false tidings of massacres at Allahabad, Benares, and towns in Upper Bengal. At last, when Mayne insisted on going into Cawnpore, the native threw aside pretense, said he could not “allow” him to depart, and virtually made uncle and niece prisoners.

But he treated them well. A clear-headed Brahmin, to whom intrigue was the breath of life, was not likely to make the mistake of being too precipitate in his actions. The wave of religious fanaticism sweeping over the land might recede as rapidly as it had risen. Muslim and Hindu, Pathan and Brahmin, hereditary foes who fraternized to-day, might be at each other’s throats to-morrow. So the Nana was a courteous jailer. Beyond the loss of their liberty the captives had nothing to complain of, and he met Mayne’s vehement reproaches with unmoved good humor, protesting all the while that he was acting for the best.

Winifred took fright, however. Her woman’s intuition looked beneath the mask. For her uncle’s sake she kept her suspicions to herself, but she suffered much in secret, and her distress might well have moved a man of finer character to sympathy. Each time she met the Nana he treated her with more apparent friendliness. She recoiled from his advances as she might shrink from a venomous snake.

Fortunately there were others in Bithoor who understood the Brahmin’s motives, and saw therein the germ of failure for their own plans. Nana Sahib was an exceedingly important factor in the success of the scheme that meditated the re-establishment of the Mogul dynasty. Recognized by the Mahrattas, the great warlike race of western India, as their leader, looked on as the pivot of Hindu support to the Mohammedan monarchy, it was absolutely essential that he should captain the rebel garrison of Cawnpore in a triumphant march to Delhi. For that reason a marriage distasteful to both had already been arranged between him and the Roshinara Begum. For that reason he had traveled to many centers of disaffection during the months of March and April, winning doubtful Hindu princes to the side of Bahadur Shah, by his tact and ready diplomacy. For that reason too, the native officers of the first regiments in revolt at Cawnpore made him swear, even at the twelfth hour, that he would lead them to Delhi.

His unforeseen infatuation for an Englishwoman might upset the carefully-laid plot. Under other conditions a dose of poison would have removed poor Winifred from the scene, but that simple expedient was not to be thought of, as the Nana’s vengeful disposition was sufficiently well known to his associates to make them fear the outcome. Therefore they left nothing to chance, and actually brought the Princess Roshinara post haste from the north, believing that her presence would insure the inconstant wooer’s return with her at the right moment.

While the majority pulled in one way there was an active minority that wished the Nana to set up an independent kingdom. His nephew and his Mohammedan friend, Azim-ullah, were convinced that their faction would lose all influence as soon as their chief was swallowed up in the maelstrom of the imperial court. If Winifred supplied the spell that kept the Nana at Bithoor, they were quite content that it should be allowed to exercise its power.

Hence, Malcolm’s arrival gave the Begum a chance that her quick wit seized upon. Why not, she argued, connive at the Englishwoman’s escape, and let it become known that she had fled back to Meerut? When the Nana returned from Cawnpore, flushed with wine and conquest, this should be the first news that greeted him, and his amorous rage would go hand in hand with the other considerations that urged his immediate departure for the Mogul capital. That was not the device of a woman who loved – it savored rather of the cool state-craft of a Lucrezia Borgia.

No more curious mixture of plot and counterplot than this minor chapter of the Bithoor romance came to light during that disastrous upheaval in India. Never did events of the utmost magnitude hinge on incidents so trivial to the community at large. A truculent thief like Abdul Huq was able to defeat the intent of a king’s daughter, and a couple of alert troopers, riding to a bluff overlooking the river, could report that they saw the budgerow on which the sahib-log escaped drifting down stream towards Cawnpore! Thus the intrigue miscarried twice. Winifred was free; the clear inference to be drawn from the boat’s course was that her uncle and Malcolm would bring her straight to the protection of their friends in the cantonment.

There was a scene of violence, nearly culminating in murder, when Nana Sahib came to Bithoor at dawn. He met the scorn of Roshinara with a furious insolence that stopped short of bloodshed only on account of the prudence still governing most of his actions. Not yet was he drunk with power. That madness was soon to obsess him. But he lent a willing ear to the counsels of Rao Sahib and Azim-ullah. Soon after daybreak he galloped to Kulianpur, on the road to Delhi, whither some thousands of sepoys had already gone, and harangued them eloquently on the glory, not to speak of the loot, they would acquire by attacking the accursed English at Cawnpore.

They were easily swayed. Acclaiming the Nana as a prince worthy of obedience they marched after him, and thus sealed the doom of many hundreds of unhappy beings who thought until that moment they would be spared the dreadful fate that had befallen other stations.

Oddly enough, the high-born Brahmin who now saw his hopes of regal power in a fair way towards realization placed one act of soldierly courtesy to his credit before he made his name a synonym for all that is base and despicable in the conduct of warfare. He wrote a letter to Sir Hugh Wheeler warning the gallant old general that he might expect to be attacked forthwith. Perhaps it is straining a point to credit him with any sense of fair play. The letter may have been a last flicker of respect for the power of Britain, and inspired by a haunting fear of the consequences if the Mutiny failed. It is probable he wished to provide written proof of a plea that he was an unwilling agent in the clutch of a mutinous army. However that may be, he wrote, and never did letter carry more bitter disappointment to a Christian community.

Sir Hugh Wheeler having decided, most unfortunately as it happened, against occupying the strongly-built magazine on the river bank as a refuge, had constructed a flimsy entrenchment on a level plain close to the native lines. He was sure the sepoys would revolt, but he believed they would hurry off to Delhi, and he refused to give them an excuse for rebellion by seizing the magazine. Towards the end of May he wrote to Henry Lawrence at Lucknow for help, and Lawrence generously sent him fifty men of the 32d and half a battery of guns, though even this small force could ill be spared from the capital of Oudh. Sir Hugh made the further mistake of crediting Nana Sahib’s professions of loyalty. He actually entrusted the Treasury to the protection of the Nana’s retainers, in spite of Lawrence’s plainly-worded warning that the Brahmin’s recent movements placed him under grave suspicion.

Nevertheless, Wheeler acted with method. His judgment was clear, if occasionally mistaken, and he had every reason to believe that the only attacks he would be called on to repel would be made by the bazaar mob.

On the night of June 4th, the thousand men, women and children who had gathered behind the four-foot mud wall that formed the entrenchment were left unmolested by the mutineers. During the 5th they watched the destruction of their bungalows, and knew that the rebels were plundering the city, robbing rich native merchants quite as readily as they killed any Europeans who were not under Wheeler’s charge. Late that day came Nana Sahib’s letter. It was a bitter disappointment, but “the valiant never taste death but once,” and the Britons in Cawnpore resolved to teach the mutineers that the men who had conquered them many times in the field could repeat the lesson again and again.

About ten o’clock on the morning of the 6th, flames rising from houses near at hand gave evidence of the approach of the rebels. Irregular spurts of musketry heralded the appearance of confused masses of armed men. A cannon-ball crashed through the mud wall and bounded across the enclosure. A bugle sounded shrilly and the defenders ran to their posts. The wailing of women and the cries of frightened children, helpless creatures only half protected by two barracks situated in the southern corner of the entrenchment, mingled with the din of the answering guns, and in that fatal hour the siege of Cawnpore began.

In the tear-stained story of humanity there has never been aught to surpass the thrilling record of Cawnpore. It contains every element of heroism and tragedy. Four hundred English soldiers, seventy of whom were invalids, with a few dozens of civilians and faithful sepoys – standing behind a breast-high fortification that would not stop a bullet – exposed to the fierce rays of an Indian sun – ill-fed, almost waterless, and driven to numb despair by the sufferings of their loved ones – these men, enduring all and daring all, held at bay four thousand well-armed, well-housed, and well-fed troops for twenty-one days.

Not for a moment was the strain relaxed. Day and night the rebels poured into the entrenchment a ceaseless hail of iron and lead. Cannon-balls, solid and red-hot, shells with carefully arranged time fuses, and bullets from those self-same cartridges that the superfine feelings of Brahmin soldiers forbade them to touch, were hurled at the hapless garrison from all quarters. In the first week every gunner in the place was killed or wounded. Women and children were shot as though they were in the front line of the defense. No corner was safe from the enemy’s fire. Every human being behind that absurdly inadequate wall was exposed to constant and equal danger.

Here is an extract from Holmes’s history:

“A private was walking with his wife when a single bullet killed him, broke both her arms, and wounded an infant she was carrying. An officer was talking with a comrade at the main guard when a musket-ball struck him; and, as he was limping painfully to the barracks to have his wound dressed, Lieutenant Mowbray-Thomson of the 56th, who was supporting him, was struck also, and both fell helplessly to the ground. Presently as Thomson lay wofully sick of his wound, another officer came to condole with him, and he too received a wound from which he died before the end of the siege. Young Godfrey Wheeler, a son of the General, was lying wounded in one of the barracks when a round shot crashed through the walls of the room and carried off his head in the sight of his mother and sisters. Little children, straggling outside the wall, were deliberately shot down.”

On the night of June the 11th a red-hot cannon-ball set fire to one of the barracks which was used as a hospital. The flames inspired the enemy’s gunners to fresh efforts and provided them with an excellent target, yet the garrison dared all perils of gun-fire and falling rafters and masonry, while they rescued the inmates. It is on record that the gallant men of the 32d, when the flames had subsided, though a heavy fusillade was still kept up by the rebels, were seen raking the ashes in order to find their lost medals, the medals they had won in the deadly fighting that preceded the fall of Sevastopol.

On the next day the sepoy army, though so boastful and vainglorious, dared to make their first attempt to carry the entrenchment by assault. By one bold charge they must have crushed the defenders, if by sheer weight of numbers alone. They advanced, with fiendish yells and much seeming confidence. But they could not face those stern warriors who lined the shattered wall. After a short but fierce struggle they fled, leaving the plain littered with corpses.

So the safer bombardment was renewed, its fury envenomed by the conscious disparity of the besiegers when they tried to press home the attack. Each day the garrison dwindled; each day the rebels received fresh accessions of strength. Of the few guns mounted in the British position, one had lost its muzzle, another was thrown from its carriage and two were so battered by the enemy’s artillery that they could not be used. The hospital fire had destroyed all the surgical instruments and medical stores, so the wounded had to lie waiting for death, while those who still bore arms eked out existence on a daily dole of a handful of flour and a few ounces of split peas.

Yet the men of Cawnpore fought on, while their wives and sisters and daughters helped uncomplainingly, making up packets of ammunition, loading rifles for the men to fire, and even giving their stockings to the gunners to provide cases for grape-shot.

There was only one well inside the entrenchment. Knowing its paramount importance, the rebels mounted guns in such wise that a constant fire could be kept up throughout the night on that special point. Yet there never was lacking a volunteer, either man or woman, to go to that well and obtain the precious water. It remains to this day a mournful relic of the siege, with its broken gear and shattered circular wall, while the indentations made by such of the cannon-balls as failed to dislodge the masonry are plain to be seen.

The sepoys spared none. Tiny children, tottering to the well in broad daylight, were pelted with musketry. Conceivably that might be war. When beleaguered people will not yield humanity must stand aside and weep. There was a deed to come that was not war, but the black horror of abomination, worthy of the excesses of a man-eating tiger, though shorn of the tiger’s excuse that he kills in order that he may live. The well in the entrenchment was the Well of Life. There was another well in Cawnpore destined to be the Well of Death.

If proof were needed of the extraordinary condition of India during the early period of the Mutiny, it was given by an incident that occurred soon after the first assault was beaten off. In broad daylight, while the garrison were maintaining the unceasing duel of cannon and small arms, they were astounded by the spectacle of a British officer galloping across the plain. He was fired at by the sepoys, of course, but horse and man escaped untouched and the low barrier was leaped without effort. The newcomer was Lieutenant Bolton of the 7th Cavalry. Sent out from Lucknow on district duty he was suddenly deserted by his men, and he rode alone towards Cawnpore, the nearest British station. Unhappily the story of that adventurous ride is lost for ever. Poor Bolton supplied Cawnpore’s last re-enforcement.

Sir Hugh Wheeler, ably seconded in the defense by Captain Moore of the 32d, sent out emissaries, Eurasians and natives, to seek aid from Lucknow and Allahabad, the one about thirty-five, the other a hundred miles distant. Lawrence wrote “with a breaking heart” that he could spare no troops from Lucknow. The messengers never even reached Allahabad.

On June 23 the Nana’s hosts again nerved themselves for a desperate attack, and again were they flung off from that tumble-down wall. Then, all their valor fled, they fell back on a foul device. A white woman, Mrs. Henry Jacobi, who had been taken prisoner early in the month, crossed the plain holding a white flag. Wheeler and Moore and other senior officers went to meet her. She carried a letter from Nana Sahib, offering safe conduct to Allahabad for all the garrison “except those who were connected with the acts of Lord Dalhousie.”

Now Dalhousie resigned the vice-royalty in February, 1856. It was he who had refused to continue to Nana Sahib the Peishwa’s pension; assuredly there was none in Cawnpore responsible for the acts of a former viceroy. At any rate, whatsoever that curious reservation meant, the majority of the staff were opposed to surrender. Unfortunately Captain Moore, whose bravery was in the mouths of all, who, though wounded and ill, had been “the life and soul of the defense,” persuaded Sir Hugh Wheeler and the others that an honorable capitulation was their sole resource. Succor could not arrive, he argued, and they were in duty bound to save the surviving civilians and the women and children.

So an armistice was agreed to on June 26, and representatives of both sides met to discuss terms. It was arranged that the garrison should evacuate their position, surrender their guns and treasure, retain their rifles and a quantity of ammunition, and be provided with river transport to Allahabad.

The Nana asked that the defenders should march out that night. Wheeler refused.

“I shall renew the bombardment, and put every one of you to death in a few days,” threatened the Brahmin.

“Try it,” said the Englishman. “I still have enough powder left to blow both armies into the air.”

But the Nana meant to have no more fighting on equal terms. He signed the treaty, the guns were given up, and, on the night of June 26th, peace reigned within the ruined entrenchment.

Next morning that glorious garrison quitted the shot-torn plain they had hallowed by their deeds. And even the rebels pitied them. “As the wan and ragged column filed along the road, the women and children in bullock-carriages or on elephants, the wounded in palanquins, the fighting men on foot, sepoys came clustering round the officers they had betrayed, and talked in wonder and admiration of the surpassing heroism of the defense.”

Those men of the rank and file at least were soldiers. They knew nothing of the awful project concocted by the Nana and his chief associates, Rao Sahib, Tantia Topi, and Azim-ullah.

The procession made its way slowly towards the river, three quarters of a mile to the east. No doubt there were joyful hearts even in that sorrow-laden band. Men and women must have thought of far-off homes in England, and hoped that God would spare them to see their beloved country once more. Even the children, wide-eyed innocents, could not fail to be thankful that the noise of the guns had ceased, while the wounded were cheered by the belief that food and stores in plenty would soon be available.

At the foot of a tree-clad ravine leading to the Ganges were stationed a number of heavy native boats, with thatched roofs to shield the occupants from the sun. They were partly drawn up on the mud at the water’s edge to render easy the work of embarkation. Without hurry or confusion, the wounded, and the women and children, were placed on board.

Then some one noticed that the thatch on one of the boats was smoking, and it was found that glowing charcoal had been thrust into the straw. About the same time it was discovered that the boats had neither oars, nor rudders, nor supplies of food. Before the dread significance of these things became clear, a bugle-call rang out. At once, both banks of the river became alive with armed sepoys, and a murderous rifle-fire was opened on the crowded boats. Guns, hidden among the trees, belched red-hot shot and grape at them, and the smoldering straw of the thatched roofs burst into flames.

Awakened to the unspeakable treachery of their foe, officers and men rushed into the water and strove with might and main to shove the boats into deep water. They failed, for the unwieldy craft had been hauled purposely too high.

Here Ashe and Moore, and Bolton, hero of that lonely ride through the enemy’s country, fell. Here, too, men shot their own wives and children rather than permit them to fall into the hands of the fiends who had planned the massacre. Savage troopers urged their horses into the water and slashed cowering women with their sabers. Infants were torn from their mothers’ arms, and tossed by sepoys from bayonet to bayonet. The sick and wounded, lying helpless in the burning craft, died in the agony of fire, and the few bold spirits who even in that ghastly hour tried to beat off their cowardly assailants were surrounded and shot down by overwhelming numbers.

One heavily-laden boat was dragged into the stream, and a few officers and men clambered on board. The voyage they made would supply material for an epic. They were followed along the banks and pursued by armed craft on the river. They fought all day and throughout the night, and, when the ungoverned boat ran ashore during a wild squall of wind and rain at daybreak, the surviving soldiers, a sergeant and eleven men, headed by Mowbray-Thomson of the 56th, and Delafosse of the 53d, sprang out and charged some hundreds of sepoys and hostile villagers who had gathered on the bank.

The craven-hearted gang yielded before the Englishmen’s fierce onslaught. The tiny band turned to fight their way back, and found that the boat had drifted off again! Then they seized a Hindu temple on the bank and held it until the sepoys piled burning timber against the rear walls and threw bags of powder on the fire!

Fixing bayonets and leaving the sergeant dead in the doorway, they charged again into the mass of the enemy. Six fell. The remainder reached the river, threw aside their guns, and plunged boldly in. Two were shot while swimming, and one man, unable to swim any distance, coolly made his way ashore again and faced his murderers until he sank beneath their blows.

Mowbray-Thomson, Delafosse, and Privates Murphy and Sullivan, swam six miles with the stream, and were finally rescued and helped by a friendly native.

Those four were all who came alive out of the Inferno of Cawnpore. The boat, after clearing the shoal, was captured by the mutineers. Major Vibart of the 2d Cavalry, who was so severely wounded that he could not join in the earlier fighting, and some eighty helpless souls under his command, were brought back to the city of death. There, by orders of the Nana, the men were slain forthwith and the women and children were taken to a building in which they found one hundred and twenty-five others, who had been spared for the Brahmin’s own terrible purposes from the butchery at Massacre Ghât on the 27th.

Returning to Bithoor the Nana was proclaimed Peishwa amid the booming of cannon and the plaudits of his retainers. He passed a week in drunken revels and debauchery, and when, in ignorance of its fate, a small company of European fugitives from Fategarh sought refuge at Cawnpore, he amused himself by having all the men but three killed in his presence. These three and the women and children who accompanied them, were sent to a small house known as the Bibigarh, in which the whole of the captives, now numbering two hundred and eleven, were imprisoned.

Many died, and they were happiest. The survivors were subjected to every indignity, given the coarsest food, and forced to grind corn for their conqueror, who, early in July, took up his abode in a large building at Cawnpore overlooking the house in which the unhappy people were penned.

But the period of their earthly sufferings was drawing to a close. An avenging army was moving swiftly up the Grand Trunk Road from Allahabad. The Nana’s nephew and two of his lieutenants, leading a large force against the British, were badly defeated. On the 15th of July came the alarming tidings that the Feringhis were only a day’s march from the city.

The Furies must have chosen that date. The Nana, the man who thought himself fit to be a king, decided that Havelock would turn back if there were no more English left in Cawnpore! So as a preliminary to the greater tragedy, five men who had escaped death thus far – no one knows whence two of them came – were brought forth and slaughtered at the feet of the renowned Peishwa. Then a squad of sepoys were told to “shoot all the women and children in the Bibigarh through the windows of the house.”

Poor wretches – they were afraid to refuse, yet their gorge rose at the deed, and they fired at the ceiling!

Such weakness was annoying to the puissant Brahmin. He selected two Mohammedan butchers, an Afghan, and two out-caste Hindus, to do his bidding. Armed with long knives these five fiends entered the shambles. Alas, how can the scene that followed be described!

Yet, not even then was the sacrifice complete. Some who were wounded but not killed, a few children who crept under the garments of their dead mothers, lived until the morning. Not all the native soldiers were so lost to human sympathies that they did not shudder at the groans and muffled cries that came all night from the house of sorrow. Some of them have left records of sights and sounds too horrible to translate from their Eastern tongue.

But the rumble of distant guns told the destroyer that his short-lived hour of triumph was nearly sped. In a paroxysm of rage and fear, he gave the final order, and the Well of Cawnpore thereby attained its ghastly immortality. By his command all that piteous company of women and children, the living and the dead together, were thrown into a deep well that stood in the garden of Bibigarh – the House of the Woman.

It was thus that Nana Sahib strove to cloak his crime. Yet never did foul murderer flaunt deed more glaringly in the face of Heaven. Fifty years have passed, myriads of human beings have lived and died since the well swallowed the Nana’s victims, but the memory of those gracious women, of those golden-haired children, of those dear little infants born while the guns thundered around the entrenchment, shall endure forever. The Nana sought oblivion and forgetfulness for his sin. He earned the anger of the gods and the malediction of the world, then and for all time.