Golden Afternoon by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online

but managed to struggle ashore, the men were immediately killed and the women and children herded into carts and taken away to be imprisoned in the
Bibi-ghur
(women’s house), † where they were later joined by other wretched captives, of whom it is said that ‘only four or five’ were men.
    As for the 200 or so women and children who had survived the horrors of the siege and the massacre of the boats, they had just fifteen moredays to live. For when, barely more than a fortnight later, Dundu Pant heard the guns of the relief force firing within earshot of Cawnpore, he turned like a mad dog on the helpless prisoners and ordered his sepoys to open fire on them. When, to their eternal credit and the fury of the Nana Sahib, they refused, he ordered butchers to be brought in from the town’s abattoirs; men who, armed with sharpened swords and the knives and cleavers of their trade, set about butchering the close-packed mass of dazed and starving women and children.
    It had taken all day to kill them; and according to the onlookers, when the butchers’ weapons became blunted they were handed out through the windows to be re-sharpened or replaced by fresh ones. With the morning the avid crowds were back again in force, this time to watch the mangled bodies dragged out and thrown into a nearby well. Not all of them were dead, and one small boy who had lain all night, frozen with terror under the bodies of the dead, ran screaming round the well until one of the onlookers caught him by the legs and, swinging him against the rim, so that his head cracked on the stone, tossed him in. That savage mass-murder successfully accomplished, Dundu Pant marshalled 5,000 of his fighting men and marched out to meet the Company’s army …
    They were only narrowly defeated. But when their leader realized that the battle was lost, he took to his heels and fled into the
Terai
, * leaving his followers to face the music. His parting act before he fled was to order his guards to kill a Mrs Carter and her new-born infant. Which was done, despite the frantic protests of his wives and women, who had taken in and given refuge to the pregnant mother, whose baby had recently been born in the women’s quarters of his palace. Not a man to look back upon with pride as a national hero, I would have thought.
    By now the thunder of Havelock’s guns could be heard firing on the outskirts of the city. So when the last corpse was flung into the well, onlookers and perpetrators alike took to their heels without making the slightest effort to cap the well or to clear away the gruesome evidence of the butchery that had taken place in the
Bibi-ghur.
    The stench of that charnel-house, and the sight of those appalling wounds and silent gaping mouths and sightless eyes that stared up from the well at the men who had arrived too late, provoked an explosion ofrage and hatred among Havelock’s men, and marked an ugly turning-point in the campaign. For from that day forward men of the British regiments, who had felt no particular animosity to the mutineers and had always got on well with the sepoys, turned into vicious killers intent on revenge. They went into battle shouting as their war-cry: ‘
Remember Cawnpore! Remember Cawnpore!
’ And they remembered Cawnpore and killed without mercy and hanged without mercy, condemning a man as often as not for the colour of his skin as from any proof of guilt.
    The atrocities committed in revenge for those who were so brutally slaughtered at Cawnpore were as unforgivable as the deeds which prompted it. And, as ever, it was the innocent who suffered most. Countless Indians, many of them blameless, died violent deaths at the hands of infuriated soldiers who, blinded by the red fog of rage, forgot that they were, technically at least, Christians whose Bible states categorically that “‘Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, “I will repay."’ They preferred to take the