The scene is Barrackpore, the date March 29, 1857. It is Sunday afternoon; but on the dusty floor of the parade-ground a drama is being enacted which is suggestive of anything but Sabbath peace. The quarter-guard of the 34th Native Infantry—tall men, erect and soldierly, and nearly all high-caste Brahmins—is drawn up in regular order. Behind it chatters and sways and eddies a confused mass of Sepoys, in all stages of dress and undress; some armed, some unarmed; but all fermenting with excitement

Delhi lies thirty-eight miles to the south-west of Meerut, a city seven miles in circumference, ancient, stately, beautiful. The sacred Jumna runs by it. Its grey, wide-curving girdle of crenellated walls, is pierced with seven gates. It is a city of mosques and palaces and gardens, and crowded native bazaars. Delhi in 1857 was of great political importance, if only because the last representative of the Grand Mogul, still bearing the title of the King of Delhi, resided there in semi-royal state

Perhaps the most characteristic story of Sepoy outbreak is that at Allahabad. The city stands at the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna, 500 miles from Calcutta, and, with its strong fortress and great arsenal, was a strategic point scarcely second in importance to Delhi. It had a population of 75,000, highly fanatical in temper. Its arsenal was one of the largest in India, having arms for 40,000 men and great stores of artillery. Yet, with the exception of the magazine staff, there was not a

The annals of warfare contain no episode so painful as the story of this siege. It moves to tears as surely as the pages in which the greatest of all historians tells, as only he can tell, the last agony of the Athenian host in Sicily. The sun never before looked on such a sight as a crowd of women and children cooped within a small space, and exposed, during twenty days and nights, to the concentrated fire of thousands of muskets and a score of heavy cannon. In these words Sir George Trevelyan

It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded, men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage. Trevelyan describes the scene:— First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past, but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng of native bearers, groaning in monotonous

On the night of May 30, 1857, the steps of the Residency at Lucknow witnessed a strange sight. On the uppermost steps stood a group of British officers in uniform. Sir Henry Lawrence was there, with his staff; Banks, the chief commissioner; Colonel Inglis, of the 32nd. The glare of a flaming house a hundred and fifty yards distant threw on the group a light as intense almost as noonday. Forty paces in front of the group stood a long line of Sepoys loading in swift silence. The light of the flame

Lucknow is only forty-five miles from Cawnpore. On July 25, Havelock, at the head of his tiny but gallant force, by this time tempered in the flame of battle to the quality of mere steel, crossed the Ganges in a tempest of rain, and started to rescue the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow from the fate of Cawnpore. But it was not until September 25 that Outram and Havelock clambered through the shot-battered gun embrasure in the low wall beside the Bailey Guard at Lucknow, and brought relief to the

Havelock fought his way through blood and fire into the Residency, but he shrank from leading a great procession of women and children and wounded men along that via dolorosa —that pathway of blood—by which, at so grim a cost, he had himself reached the beleaguered garrison. The Residency, it was clear, must be held, since the great company of helpless women and children it sheltered could not be carried off. So what Havelock and Outram really accomplished was not so much a Relief as a Reinforce

The losses of the beleaguered English during the siege of the Residency were, of course, great. When the siege began the garrison consisted of 927 Europeans—not three out of four being soldiers—and 765 natives. Up to the date of the relief by Havelock—87 days—350 Europeans, more than one out of every three of the whole European force, were killed or died of disease! It is curious to note how all the swiftly-changing events and passions of the Mutiny are reflected in such of the diaries and journ

All the passion, the tragedy, and the glory of the Indian Mutiny gathers round three great sieges. We vaguely remember a hundred tales of individual adventure elsewhere on the great stage of the Mutiny; we have perhaps a still fainter and more ghostly mental image of the combats Havelock fought on the road to Lucknow, and the battles by which Campbell crushed this body of rebels or that. But it is all a mist of confused recollections, a kaleidoscope of fast-fading pictures. But who does not reme

On September 13 four engineer officers—Medley and Lang, Greathed and Home—undertook the perilous task of examining the breaches in the enemy’s defences. Medley and Lang were detailed to examine the Cashmere Bastion, and Lang asked to be allowed to go while it was yet daylight. Leave was granted; and, with an escort of four men of the 60th, he crept to the edge of the cover on the British front, then coolly ran up the glacis and sat down upon the top of the counterscarp, under a heavy fire, study

There remained the great palace, the last stronghold of the Mutiny, a building famous in history and in romance. The 60th Rifles were launched against it, the gates were blown open, and the troops broke their way in. They found it practically deserted. The garrison had fled, the king and his household were fugitives, and the clash of British bayonets, the tramp of British feet, rang through the abandoned halls and ruined corridors of the palace of the Mogul. The flight of the garrison from the i

With the fall of Delhi the tale of the Great Mutiny practically ends. Lucknow, it is true, remained to be captured. The broken forces of the mutineers had to be crushed in detail. A new system of civil administration had to be built up. The famous Company itself vanished—the native prophecy that the raj of the Company would last only a hundred years from Plassey thus being curiously fulfilled; and on September 1, 1858—less than a year after Delhi fell—the Queen was proclaimed throughout India as