deplored the wholesale executions by the
civil power. Although as a soldier he would have been the last man in
the country to spare rebels caught with arms in their hands, or those
whose guilt was well known (and I know for certain that he held the
action of Major Hodson with regard to the Delhi princes to have been
justifiable), I well remember how emphatically I once heard him express
his disgust when, on the march back from Futtehghur to Cawnpore, he
entered a mango-tope full of rotting corpses, where one of those special
commissioners had passed through with a movable column a few days
before.

But I must return to my story. I had barely heard the news that Green
had been arrested as a spy, when he was brought to my guard by some of
the provost-marshal's staff, and handed over to me with instructions to
keep him safe till he should be called for next morning. He was
accompanied by the man who had carried his basket, who had also been
denounced as one of the butchers at Cawnpore in July, 1857. And here I
may state that the appearance of this man certainly did tally with the
description afterwards given of one of these butchers by Fitchett, an
Eurasian drummer attached to the Sixth Native Infantry which mutinied at
Cawnpore, who embraced the Mahommedan religion to save his life, and was
enrolled in the rebel force, but afterwards made his escape and
presented himself at Meerut for enlistment in the police levy raised in
October, 1858. What I am relating took place in February, 1858, about
eight months before the existence of Fitchett was known to the
authorities. However, when it was discovered that Fitchett had been
serving in one of the mutineers' regiments, he was called on to say what
he knew about the Cawnpore massacre, and I remember his statement was
considered the most consistent of any of the numerous narratives
published about it. Fitchett alleged that the sepoys of the Sixth
Native Infantry and other regiments, including the Nana Sahib's own
guard, had refused to kill the European women and children in the
_bibi-ghur_,[39] and that five men were then brought by a slave-girl or
mistress of the Nana to do it. Of the five men employed, two were
butchers and two were villagers, and the fifth man was "a stout
_bilaitee_[40] with very hairy hands." Fitchett further described one of
the butchers as a tall, ugly man, very dark, and very much disfigured by
smallpox, all points that tallied exactly with the appearan