e complete, but the first chapter of
Matthew and up to the middle of the seventh verse of the second chapter
are wanting. The Testament must have belonged to some Scotch Highlander
in the garrison. I have more than once thought of sending it home to the
Highland Society as a relic of the Mutiny.
From the entrenchment we went to the Suttee Chowrah _ghat_, where the
doomed garrison were permitted to embark in the boats in which they were
murdered, and traces of the treachery were still very plain, many
skeletons, etc., lying about unburied among the bushes.
We then went to see the slaughter-house in which the unfortunate women
and children had been barbarously murdered, and the well into which
their mangled bodies were afterwards flung. Our guide was a native of
the ordinary camp-follower class, who could speak intelligible
barrack-room English. He told us that he had been born in a battery of
European artillery, in which his forefathers had been shoeblacks for
unknown generations, and his name, he stated, was "Peshawarie," because
he had been born in Peshawur, when the English occupied it during the
first advance to Caubul. His apparent age coincided with this statement.
He claimed to have been in Sir Hugh Wheeler's entrenchment with the
artillery all the time of the siege, and to have had a narrow escape of
his life at the last. He told us a story which I have never seen
mentioned elsewhere, that the Nana Sahib, through a spy, tried to bribe
the commissariat bakers who had remained with the English to put arsenic
into the bread, which they refused to do, and that after the massacre of
the English at the _ghat_ the Nana had these bakers taken and put alive
into their own ovens, and there cooked and thrown to the pigs. These
bakers were Mahommedans. Of course, I had no means of testing the truth
of this statement.[3] Our guide showed no desire to minimise the horrors
of the massacre and the murders to which he said he had been an
eye-witness. However, from the traces, still too apparent, the bare
facts, without exaggeration, must have been horrible enough. But with
reference to the women and children, from the cross-questions I put to
our guide, I then formed the opinion, which I have never since altered,
that most of the European women had been most barbarously murdered, but
not dishonoured, with the exception of a few of the young and
good-looking ones, who, our guide stated, were forcibly carried off to
become Mahom
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