'Well, sir,' says I, 'like you, I wouldn't trust the Nana as far as the tuck-shop.' (Someone laughed; homely old Flashy, you sec, with his schoolboy metaphors.) 'But as Moore here says — that don't matter. What does — or so it seems to me — is the fate of our ladies —' (here I looked red-faced and noble) ' — and the … the youngsters. If we accept the Nana's offer, at least there's a chance they'll come off safe.'
'You'd surrender?' says Wheeler, in a. strained voice.
'For myself?' growls I, and looked at the floor. 'Well, I never quite got the habit … goes against the grain, I reckon. Matter of honour — as someone said just now. And I suppose it can be said that honour demands we fight it out to the last —'
'Shabash!' cries Delafosse. 'Well done, Flashy!'
' — but, d'ye know, sir,' I went on, 'the day my honour has to be maintained by sacrificing Vibart's little boy — or ' I'unstall's mother — or Mrs Newnham's daughter, well … ' I raised my head and stared at the circle of faces, a strong, simple man stirred to his depths; you could have heard a pin drop. 'I don't know — I may be wrong … but I don't think my honour's worth that much, d'ye know?'
The beauty of it was, while it was the most fearful gammon, coming from me — it was stark truth for the rest of them, gallant and honourable souls that they were. The irony was that for my own cowardly, selfish reasons, I was arguing the sane and sensible course, and having to dress it up in high-sounding bilge in order to break down their fatuous notions of Duty. Reason wouldn't have done it, but to suggest that the true honour demanded surrender, for the women and children's sake — that shamed 'em into sanity.
Old Ewart put the final touch to it. 'And that, gentle-men, you would do well to bear in mind —' he glared almost defiantly at Delafosse' — is the opinion of the man who held Piper's Fort, and led the Light Brigade.'
Wheeler put it to the formality of a vote, but it was foregone now. When Moore and Whiting voted to surrender, even the fieriest of the younger men gave way, and inside half an hour Wheeler's answer was on its way to Nana, agreeing to capitulate with the honours of war.31 But he added the condition that we should not only keep our arms, but sixty rounds a man instead of the proposed twenty —'then, if there is treachery, it will profit him little,' he told us, and echoed the thought Azeemoolah had expressed in the afternoon: 'We can fight as well in the open as in this death-trap.' That was all he knew.
He was still fearful of treachery, you see. I was not — you may think I was deluding myself, but the fact was I couldn't see that the Nana had anything to gain by playing us false. I state that honestly now, and I've explained the details of the Cawnpore surrender because it was a momentous thing, not only in the Mutiny, but in Indian history. I had spoken — and, as I've said, I believe mine was the decisive voice — for surrender, because I saw it as the only way to save my skin. But apart from that vital consideration, I still believe that surrender was right, by every canon of soldiering and common sense. Call me a fool if you like, and shake your heads in the light of history — nothing could have been worse than fighting on in that doomed entrenchment.
Whatever misgivings Wheeler may have had, hardly anyone else shared them when word got round of what had been decided, and Azeemoolah and Jwala Pershad had come to the entrenchment with the Nana's undertakings all signed and witnessed: draught animals were to arrive at dawn for the mile-long journey to the river where boats would be waiting, and throughout the night there was bustle and eagerness and thanksgiving all through the garrison. It was as though a great shadow had been lifted; cooking fires blazed outside the barrack for the first time in weeks, the wounded were brought out of that stinking oven to lie in the open air, and even the children frolicked on the parapet where we'd been slashing at the sepoys two days before. Tired, worn faces were smiling, no one minded the dirt and stench any longer, or gave a thought to the rebels' massed guns and infantry a few hundred yards away; the firing had stopped, the fear of death had lifted, we were going out to safety, and throughout the night, over the din of packing and preparation, the sound of hymns rolled up to the night sky.
One of the few croakers was Ilderim. Wheeler had told those sepoys who had remained loyal and fought in the garrison to slip away over the southern rampart, for fear of reprisals from their mutinous fellows in the morning, but Ilderim wouldn't have it. He came to me in the dark at the north entrenchment, where I was smoking a cheroot and enjoying my peace of mind.
'Do I slip away like a cur when someone throws a stone at it?' says he. 'No — I march with Wheeler Sahib and the rest of you tomorrow. And so that no pi-dog of a mutineer will take me for anything but what I am, I have put this on, for a killut*(*Dress of honour, usually on ceremonial occasions.) —' and as he stepped closer in the gloom, I saw he was in the full fig of a native officer of cavalry, white coat, gauntlets, long-tailed puggaree and all. 'It is just a down-country regiment's coat, which I took from one of those we slew the other day, but it will serve to mark me as a soldier.' He grinned, showing his teeth. 'And I shall take my sixty rounds — do thou likewise, blood- brother.'
'We're not going to need 'em, though,' says I, and he shrugged.
'Who knows? When the tiger has its paw on the goat's neck, and then smiles in friendship … Wheeler Sahib does not trust the Nana. Dost thou?'
'There's no choice, is there?' says I. 'But he's signed his name to a promise, after all —'
'And if he breaks it, the dead can complain,' says he, and spat. 'So I say — keep thy sixty rounds to hand, Flashman sahib.'
I didn't heed him much, for Pathans are notoriously suspicious of everyone, reason or none, and when day broke there was too much to do to waste time in thinking. The mutineers came in the first mists of dawn, with bullocks and elephants and carts to carry us to the river, and we had the herculean task of getting everyone into the convoy. There were two hundred wounded to be moved, and all the women and children, some of them just babes- in-arms, and old people who'd have been feeble enough even without three weeks on starvation rations. Everyone was tired and filthy and oddly dispirited now that the first flush of excitement had died away. As the sun came up it shone on a strange, nightmare sight that lives with me now only as a series of pictures as the evacuation of Cawnpore began.
I can see the straggling mass of the procession, the bullock-carts with their stretchers carrying the blood- stained figures of the wounded, gaunt and wasted; bedraggled white women, either sitting in the carts or standing patiently alongside, with children who looked like White-chapel waifs clinging to their skirts; our own men, ragged and haggard, with their muskets cradled, taking up station along the convoy; the red coats and sullen faces of the mutineers who were to shepherd us across the maidan and down to the river ghat beyond the distant trees where the boats were waiting. The dawn air was heavy with mist and suspicion and hatred, as Wheeler, with Moore at his elbow as always, stood up on the rampart and reviewed the battered remnants of his command, strung out along the entrenchment, waiting listlessly for the word to move while all around was the confused babble of voices, orders being shouted, officers hurrying up and down, elephants squealing, the carts creaking, children crying, and the kites beginning to swoop down on the emptying barracks.
Incidents and figures remain very clear — two civilians hauling down the tattered flag from the barrack roof, rolling it up carefully and bringing it to Wheeler, who stood absent-mindedly with it trailing from one hand while he shouted: 'Sarn't Grady! Is the south entrenchment clear, Sarn't Grady?' A little boy with curly hair, laughing and shouting 'Plop-plop!' as one of the elephants dropped its dung; his mother, a harassed young woman in a torn ball-gown (it had rosebuds embroidered, I recall) with a sleeping infant in her arms, slapped and shook him with her free hand, and then straightened her hair. A group of mutineers walking round the barracks, belabouring one of our native cooks who was limping along under a great load of pans. A British private, his uniform unrecognisable, being railed at by an old mem-sahib as he helped her into a cart, until she was settled, when she said, 'Thank you, my good man, thank you very much,' and began searching her reticule for a tip. Four mutineers were hurrying up and down the untidy convoy, calling out and searching, until they spotted Vibart and his family — and then they ran hallooing and calling 'Colonel sahib! Mem-sahib!', and seized on the family's baggage, and one of them, beaming and chuckling, lifted Vibart's little lad on to his shoulders, piggy-back, while the others shouted and shoved and made room for Mrs Vibart in a wagon. Vibart was dumbfounded, and two of the mutineers were weeping as they took his hand and carried his gear — I saw another one at it, too, an old grizzled havildar of the 56th, standing on the entrenchment gazing down into the ruin of the barracks with tears running down his white beard; he was shaking his head in grief, and then he would look no more, but turned about and stared across the maidan, still crying.
Most of the mutineers weren't so sentimental, though. One tried to snatch a musket from Whiting, and Whiting flung him off snarling and shouting: 'You want it, do you? I'll give you its contents fast enough, you damned dog, if you don't take care!' The pandies fell back, growling and shaking their fists, and another gang of them stood and jeered while old Colonel Ewart was carried on a palki to his place in the line. 'Is it not a fine parade, colonel
