The Sepoy Mutiny by V. A. Stuart

Author:V. A. Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590133361
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2001-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE bungalow’s defenders—three weary civilians, in bloodstained evening dress—came down from the roof, their smoking shotguns still grasped in their hands and from somewhere in the rear of the house, where they had been crouched in terror, emerged the wife of one of them, with two white-faced little boys. As their rescuers stood guard, they made a dash for the stables, harnessed two horses to a carriage and, profuse in their thanks, set off at a gallop for the Rifles’ barracks. The bodies of the children’s ayah and an old, white-bearded bearer, lying on the verandah, bore mute witness to the fact that some of the native servants had remained faithful and paid for their fidelity with their lives.

Alex and Melville Clark rode after the carriage through the rear gate of the compound, pausing there to make sure that it was unmolested and then, with common accord, riding into the next compound and the next. Their shouts were greeted by silence; in the fourth house they came to, they found the body of a woman, so mutilated as to be unrecognizable, and they turned their eyes away, sickened, from the two small, pathetic white bodies impaled on the wooden fence separating the rear veranda from the cookhouse.

“It’s no bloody use, sir,” Clark said, a sob in his voice. “We shan’t find anyone alive here now. We’re too late. But in the name of God, what have those damned Queen’s regiments been doing, while this was going on? They are barely half a mile away. Could they not hear the shooting, the infernal row that mob kicked up, the screams of that poor woman and her children?”

Craigie’s wife, young Mackenzie’s sister, and the pregnant Mrs Chambers—if they had stayed in or returned to their homes—were nearly two miles away, Alex thought, his throat suddenly tight. Some of the occupants of these bungalows might have escaped, might have found safety in the European barracks before the marauding sepoys struck. Pray God they had. But those living as far away as Mrs Craigie would have had no chance, unless Gough had got there in time.

“Heaven alone knows, Nobby,” he answered bitterly. “But I think we’d better go and find out. If it costs me my commission, I’m going to see that they take action to stop our men and the sepoys from marching on Delhi!”

They spurred their flagging horses into a gallop and met the first skirmishers of the 60th Rifles advancing, with fixed swordbayonets and their commanding officer at their head, down Chapel Street. From a furiously angry and despairingly outspoken Colonel Jones, who stopped them for information, they learned the reason for the delay.

“My regiment mustered for church parade at six o’clock,” he said. “The alarm was sounded, the R.S.M. quite properly sent them to change into greens—you can’t fight night actions in white. There was a slight hold-up because the magazine was locked and the men had only their emergency ten rounds. I had the infernal magazine broken into and issued a hundred rounds per man, which took about half an hour.

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