Read Golden Afternoon for Free Online Page B

married the only sister of the ‘ten fighting Batteys’, three of whom served in the Corps of Guides and appear as real-life characters in
The Far Pavilions
. The work was published as
Kaye and Mallenson’s Indian Mutiny.
* Author of
Plain Tales from the Raj, The Princes
, etc.
* A school run by an appointed Board; predecessor of today’s state schools.

Chapter 3
    The story of Cawnpore would have differed very little from half a dozen other Mutiny stories, had it not been for the fact that the victims of the final horror of that terrible summer were all women and young children. Over 200 of them — all that were left of the ‘more than 1,000’ Europeans who had survived a horrendous twenty-one-day siege, followed by an even more horrific massacre in the shallows of the Ganges.
    When I see and hear some of the anti-British tump that is being dished out today by
son-et-lumière
shows at Delhi’s Red Fort, or in pamphlets sold in her bazaars, written by agitators still whipping that long dead horse, the Raj, and inciting racial hatred by retelling the tale of ‘Hodson’s brutal and unnecessary shooting of the unarmed sons of the King of Delhi’, * I am reminded that no mention is ever made of another hapless fifty or so non-combatants, of whom all but six were women and children whose menfolk had been killed on that fateful June day when Delhi rose against ‘John Company’s’ rule; and who, after being held captive for nearly three weeks in the fetid darkness of a stifling dungeon below the palace in that same Red Fort, were eventually dragged up into the glaring sunlight, to be butchered in an open courtyard by men armed with swords, bayonets and sabres, for the entertainment of a gaping, jostling crowd of onlookers …
    The bodies were left there all day to provide the citizens of Delhi with a free raree show. And in the evening they were piled on carts by men of the lowest caste, untouchables who are the disposers of rubbish and filth, and taken to the river-bank to be flung one by one into the placid Jumna. ‘Food for the crocodiles and the mud-turtles, the jackals and the scavenger birds: and a sign and a warning to a hundred villages as thebodies drifted with the slow stream, to be stranded on sandbars and burning-
ghats
and fish-traps, or caught in the eddies that washed the walls of fortified towns.’ *
    That story is
not
popular with the pamphleteers. Nor (though we still hear a lot about Amritsar and General Dyer) do we hear much about the fate of the Cawnpore garrison, whose numbers were roughly estimated as ‘well above a thousand souls’ (a figure that included their families, but not the scores of panic-stricken civilians who had flocked in from outlying stations to take refuge in General Wheeler’s pitifully inadequate entrenchments). Incredibly, the garrison stood siege there for twenty-one days, under continual fire and appalling daily losses, until eventually, driven by lack of food and almost no water, they were forced to accept the terms of surrender offered by the ‘Nana Sahib’ — Dundu Pant, Rajah of Bithor — now being written up as a heroic freedom fighter. The terms had included a solemn promise to send the remnants of the garrison in
budgerows
(large eight-oared river-boats with thatched roofs) down-river to Allahabad, and the ragged, starving survivors gave up their weapons, ammunition and treasure and, carrying their wounded on mattresses, managed to drag themselves down to the mile-distant river and on to the waiting boats. But it had been a trap.
    No sooner were they all aboard than a signal was blown by a bugler and immediately the boatmen set fire to the thatched roofs and, jumping into the river, waded ashore, allowing Dundu Pant’s soldiery to open fire from either bank on the helpless passengers. The wounded and too weak burned to death, and of those who were not drowned or shot in the river