The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 1

Under these miserable thoughts the vast majority of the sepoys robbed largely, as opportunities continually opened upon them. Then, and chiefly through their robberies, commenced their chastisement in good earnest. Every soldier by every comrade was viewed with hatred and suspicion; by the common labourer with the scrutiny of deep self-interest. The popular report of their sudden wealth travelled rapidly; every road, village, house, whether ahead or on their flanks, became a place of distrust and anxious jealousy; and Delhi seemed to offer the only safe asylum. Thither, as to a consecrated sanctuary, all hurried; and their first introduction to the duties of the new home they had adopted, would be a harsh and insolent summons to the chances of a desperate sortie against men in whose presence their very souls sank. On reviewing the circumstances which must have surrounded this Delhi life, probably no nearer resemblance to a hell of apostate spirits has ever existed. Money, carried in weighty parcels of coin, cannot be concealed. Swathed about the person, it disfigures the natural symmetries of the figure. The dilemma, therefore, in which every individual traitor stood was, that, if he escaped a special notice from every eye, this must have been because all his crimes had failed to bring him even a momentary gain. Having no money, he had no swollen trousers. For ever he had forfeited the pension that was the pledge of comfort and respectability to his family and his own old age. This he had sacrificed, in exchange for—nothing at all. But, on the other hand, if his robberies had been very productive and prosperous, in that proportion he became advertised to every eye, indicated and betrayed past all concealment to every ruffian less fortunate as a pillager. Delhi must in several points have ripened his troubles, and showed them on a magnifying disk. To have no confidential friend, or adviser, or depositary of a secret, is an inevitable evil amongst a population constitutionally treacherous. But now in Delhi this torment takes a more fearful shape. Every fifth or sixth day, when he is sternly ordered out upon his turn of duty, what shall he do with his money? He has by possibility 40 lbs. weight of silver, each pound worth about three guineas. In the very improbable case of his escaping the gallows, since the British Government will endeavour to net the whole monstrous crew that have one and all broken the sacramentum militare, for which scourging with rods and subsequent strangulation is the inevitable penalty, what will remain to his poor family? His cottage, that once had been his pride, will now betray him, as soon as ever movable columns are formed, and horse-patrols begin to inspect the roads. But, as to his money, in nineteen cases out of twenty, he will find himself obliged to throw it away in his flight, and will then find that through three months of intolerable suffering he has only been acting as steward for some British soldier.

The private letters and the local newspapers from many parts of India having now come in, it is possible through the fearful confusion to read some facts that would cause despair, were it not for two remembrances: first, what nation it is that supports the struggle; secondly, that of the six weeks immediately succeeding to the 10th of September, no two days, no period of forty-eight hours, can pass without continued successions of reinforcements reaching Calcutta. It should be known that even the worst sailers among the transports—namely, exactly those which were despatched from England through the course of July (not of August)—are all under contract to perform the voyage in seventy days; whereas many a calculation has proceeded on the old rate of ninety days. The small detachments of two and three hundreds, despatched on every successive day of July, are already arriving at their destination; and the August detachments, generally much stronger (800 or 900), all sailed in powerful steamers. Lord Elgin arrived at Calcutta in time to be reported by this mail, with marines (300) and others (300), most seasonably to meet the dangers and uproars of the great Mahometan festival. The bad tidings are chiefly these:—

1. The failure of a night-attack upon the Dinapore mutineers by detachments from two of our British regiments, with a loss of '200 killed'; in which, however, there must be a mistake; for the total number of our attacking party was only 300. On the other hand, there may have been some call for a consciously desperate effort; and the enemy, having two regiments, would muster, probably, very nearly 2000 men; for the sepoy regiments are always strong in numbers, and these particular regiments had not suffered.

2. Much more ominous than these reports, is an estimate of our main force before Delhi at less than 2000 men. This, unhappily, is not intrinsically improbable. The force was, by many persons, never reckoned at more than 6000 or 7000 men; and this, when reduced by three-and-twenty conflicts (perhaps more), in which the enemy had the advantage of artillery more powerful than ours, and (what is worse) of trained artillerymen more numerous, might too naturally come down to the small number stated.

3. The doubtful condition of Lucknow, Benares, and Agra comes in the rear of all this to strike a frost into the heart, or would do so, again I say, if any other nation were concerned.

4. Worse still, because reluctantly unfolding facts that had previously been known and kept back, is the state of Bombay. When retreats on board the shipping are contemplated, or at least talked of, the mere insulated case of Kolapore becomes insignificant.

5. I read a depressing record in the very quarter whence all our hopes arise. In summing up the particular transports throughout July whose destination was Calcutta, I find that the total of troops ordered to that port in the thirty-one days of July was just 6500, and no more. Every place was rapidly becoming of secondary importance in comparison of the area stretching with a radius of 150 miles in every direction from the centre of Allahabad. And the one capital danger is too clearly this—that, being unable to throw in overwhelming succours, those inadequate succours, matched against the countless resources of Hindoo vagrant ruffianism, may, at the utmost, enable us to keep a lingering hold, whilst endless successions of incomparably gallant men fall before our own rifles, our own guns, and that discipline of a cowardly race which we ourselves have taught. We are true to ourselves, and ever shall be so: that is a rock to build upon. Yet, if it should appear by January next that no deep impression has then been made upon revolting India, it will probably appear the best course to send no more rivulets of aid; but to combine measures energetically with every colony or outpost of the empire; to call up even the marines and such sections of our naval forces as have often co-operated with the land forces (in the Chinese war especially); and to do all this with a perfect disregard of money. Lord Palmerston explained very sufficiently why it is that any powerful squadrons of ships, which would else have rendered such overwhelming succour against the towns along the line of the Ganges and Jumna, were unhappily disqualified for action, by the shallows and sand-banks on those great rivers. But this apology does not stand good as regards flotillas of gunboats or rafts with a very light draught of water; still less as regards the seamen and marines.

I conclude with these notices—too painfully entitled to some attention. Would to heaven they were not!

1. Calcutta itself is not by any means in a state of security, either in the English sense of that word (namely, freedom from danger), or in its old Latin sense of freedom from the anxieties of danger. All depends upon the prosperity of our affairs at Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, Cawnpore, and Allahabad. The possibility of a fanatical explosion, such as that which occurred recently at Patna, shows the inefficiency of our precautions and pretended police. I believe that the native associations formed in Calcutta will be of little use. Either the members will be sleeping at the moment of outbreak, or will be separated from their arms. We are noble in our carelessness; our enemy is base, but his baseness, always in alliance with cunning and vigilance, tells cruelly against us.

2. It may be feared that the Governor-General has in the following point lamentably neglected a great duty of his place. It must have been remarked with astonishment, as a matter almost inexplicable, how it has arisen that so many gallant men, at the head of every regiment, should have suffered themselves to be slaughtered like sheep in a butcher's shambles. Surely five-and-twenty or thirty men, in youthful vigour, many of them capital shots, could easily have shot down 150 of the cowardly sepoys. So much work they could have finished with their revolvers. More than one amongst the ladies, in this hideous struggle, have shot down their two brace of black scoundrels apiece. But the officers, having the advantage of swords, would have accounted for a few score more. Why, then, have they not done this?—an act of energy so natural to our countrymen when thus roused to unforgiving vengeance. Simply because they have held themselves most nobly, and in defiance of their own individual interest, to be under engagements of fidelity to the Company, and obligations of forbearance to the dogs whom they commanded, up to the last moment of possible doubt. Now, from these engagements of honour the Governor-General should, by one universal act (applicable to the three Presidencies) have absolved them. For it cannot be alleged now for an instant, that perhaps the regiments might mean to continue faithful. If they do mean this, no harm will come to any party from the official dispensing order; the sepoys could suffer by it only in the case of treachery. And, in the meantime, there has emerged amongst them a new policy of treason, which requires of us to assume, in mere self-defence, that all sepoys are meditating treason. It is this: they now reserve their final treason until the critical moment of action in the very crisis of battle. Ordered to charge the revolters, they discharge their carbines over their heads; or, if infantry, they blaze away with blank cartridge. This policy has been played off already eight or nine times; and by one time, as it happens, too many; for it was tried upon the stern Havelock, who took away both horses and carbines from the offenders. Too late it is now for Bengal to baffle this sharper's trick. But Bombay and Madras, should their turn come after all, might profit by the experience.

3. For years it has been our nursery bugbear, to apprehend a Russian invasion on the Indus. This, by testimony from every quarter (the last being that of Sir Roderick Murchison, who had travelled over most of the ground), is an infinitely impossible chimera; or at least until the Russians have colonized Khiva and Bokhara. Meantime, to those who have suffered anxiety from such an anticipation, let me suggest one consolation at least amongst the many horrors of the present scenes in Bengal—namely, that this perfidy of our troops was not displayed first in the very agony of conflict with Russia, or some more probable invader.

4. A dismal suggestion arises from the present condition of Bengal, which possibly it is too late now to regard as a warning. Ravaged by bands of marauders, no village safe from incursion, the usual culture of the soil must have been dangerously interrupted. Next, therefore, comes Famine (and note that the famines of India have been always excessive, from want of adequate carriage), and in the train of famine, inaudibly but surely, comes cholera; and then, perhaps, the guiltiest of races will pay down an expiation at which centuries will tremble. For in the grave of famishing nations treason languishes; the murderer has no escape; and the infant with its mother sleeps at last in peace.

P.S.—The following memoranda, more or less connected with points noticed in the preceding paper, but received later, seem to merit attention:—

1. As to the strength of our army before Delhi, it seems, from better accounts, to be hardly less than 5000 men, of which one-half are British infantry; and the besieged seem, by the closest inquiries, to reach at the least 22,000 men.

2. Colonel Edwardes, so well known in connection with Moultan, has published an important fact—namely, that the sepoys did rely, in a very great degree, upon the whole country rising, and that their disappointment and despair are consequently proportionable.

3. A great question arises—How it was possible for the sepoys—unquestionably not harbouring the smallest ill-will to the British—suddenly and almost universally to assail them with atrocities arguing the greatest. Even their own countrymen, with all their childish credulity, would not be made to believe that they really hated people with whom they had never had any but the kindest and most indulgent intercourse. I should imagine that the solution must do sought in two facts—first, in the deadly ennui and tædium of sepoy life, which disposes them to catch maniacally at any opening for furious excitement; but, secondly, in the wish to forward the ends of the conspiracy under Mahometan misleading. Hence, in particular, the cruelties practised on women and children: for they argued that, though the British men would face anything in their own persons before they would relax their hold on India, they would yet be appalled by the miseries of their female partners and children.

4. It is most unfair, undoubtedly, to attack any man in our present imperfect state of information. But some neglects are unsusceptible of after excuse. One I have noticed, which cannot be denied or varnished, in Lord Canning. Another is this:—Had he offered 10,000 rupees (£1000 sterling) for the head of Nena Sahib, he would have got it in ten days, besides inflicting misery on the hell-kite.

III. SUGGESTIONS UPON THE SECRET OF THE MUTINY

(January, 1858.)

The first question arises upon the true originators, proximate and immediate, of the mutiny—who were they? This question ploughs deeper than any which moves under an impulse of mere historic curiosity; and it is practically the main question. Knowing the true, instant, operative cause, already we know something of the remedy;—having sure information as to the ringleaders, we are enabled at once to read their motives in the past, to anticipate their policy in the future;—having the persons indicated, those who first incited or encouraged the felonious agents, we can shorten the course of public vengeance; and in so vast a field of action can give a true direction from the first to the pursuit headed by our Indian police. For that should never be laid out of sight—that against rebels whose least offence is their rebellion, against men who have massacred by torture women and children, the service of extermination belongs of right to executioners armed with whips and rods, with the lassos of South America for noosing them, and, being noosed, with halters to hang them.65 It should be made known by proclamation to the sepoys, that de jure, in strict interpretation of the principle concerned, they are hunted by the hangman; and that the British army, whilst obliged by the vast scale of the outrages to join in this hangman's chase, feel themselves dishonoured, and called to a work which properly is the inheritance of the gallows; and yet, again, become reconciled to the work, as the purgation of an earth polluted by the blood of the innocent.

Who then, again I ask—who are those that, after seven months' watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous convulsion? Individual opinions on this question, and such as could plead a weight of authority in regard to experience, to local advantages for conjecture, and to official opportunities for overlooking intercepted letters, there have been many; and at first (say from May 10 to the end of June), in the absence of any strong counter-arguments, some of these were entitled to the full benefit of their personal weight (such weight, I mean, as could be drawn from the position or from the known character of him who announced the opinion). But now—namely, on the 15th of December (or, looking to India, say the 10th of November)—we are entitled to something weightier. And what is there which generally would be held weightier? First, there are the confessions of dying criminals;—I mean, that, logically, we must reserve such a head, as likely to offer itself sooner or later. Tempers vary as to obduracy, and circumstances vary. All men will not share in the obstinacy of partisan pride; or not, by many degrees, equally. And again, some amongst the many thousands who leave families will have favours to ask. They all know secretly the perfect trustworthiness of the British Government. And when matters have come to a case of choice between a wife and children, in the one scale, and a fraternity consciously criminal, in the other, it may be judged which is likely to prevail. What through the coercion of mere circumstances—what through the entreaties of wife and children, co-operating with such circumstances—or sometimes through weakness of nature, or through relenting of compunction—it is not to be doubted that, as the cohesion of party begins rapidly to relax under approaching ruin, there will be confessions in abundance. For as yet, under the timid policy of the sepoys—hardly ever venturing out of cover, either skulking amongst bushy woodlands, or sneaking into house-shelter, or slinking back within the range of their great guns—it has naturally happened that our prisoners have been exceedingly few. But the decisive battle before Lucknow will tell us another story. There will at last be cavalry to reap the harvest when our soldiery have won it. The prisoners will begin to accumulate by thousands; executions will proceed through week after week; and a large variety of cases will yield us a commensurate crop of confessions. These, when they come, will tell us, no doubt, most of what the sepoys can be supposed to know. But, meantime, how much is that? Too probably, except in the case of here and there some specially intelligent or specially influential sepoy officer, indispensable as a go-between to the non-military conspirators moving in darkness behind the rebel army, nothing at all was communicated to the bulk of the privates, beyond the mere detail of movements required by the varying circumstantialities of each particular case. But of the ultimate purpose, of the main strategic policy, or of the transcendent interests over-riding the narrow counsels that fell under the knowledge of the illiterate soldier, since no part was requisite to the fulfilment of each man's separate duty, no part would be communicated. It is barely possible that so much light as may be won from confessions, combined with so much further light as may be supposed to lurk amongst the mass of unexamined papers left behind them by the rebels at Delhi, might tell us something important. But any result to be expected from the Delhi papers is a doubtful contingency. It is uncertain whether they will ever be brought under the review of zeal united to sagacity sufficient for sustaining a search purely disinterested. Promising no great triumph for any literary purpose, proving as little, perhaps, one way or other, as the mathematician in the old story complained that the Æneid proved—these papers, unless worked by an enamoured bookworm (or paperworm), will probably be confiscated to some domestic purpose, of singeing chickens or lighting fires.

But, in any case, whether speaking by confessions or by the varied memoranda (orders to subaltern officers, resolutions adopted by meetings, records of military councils, petitions, or suggestions on the public service, addressed to the king, &c.), abandoned in the palace at Delhi, the soldier can tell no more than he knew, which, under any theory of the case, must have been very little. Better, therefore, than all expectations fixed on the vile soldiery, whom, in every sense, and in all directions, I believe to have been brutally ignorant, and through their ignorance mainly to have been used as blind servile instruments—better and easier it would be to examine narrowly whether, in the whole course and evolution of this stupendous tragedy, there may not be found some characterising feature or distinguishing incident, that may secretly report the agency, and betray, by the style and character of the workmanship, who might be the particular class of workmen standing at the centre of this unparalleled conspiracy. I think that we stand in this dilemma: either, on the one hand, that the miserable sepoys, who were the sole acting managers, were also the sole contrivers of the plot—in which case we can look for further light only to the judicial confessions; or, on the other hand, that an order of agents far higher in rank than any subaltern members of our army, and who were enabled by this rank and corresponding wealth to use these soldiers as their dupes and tools, stood in the background, holding the springs of the machinery in their hands, with a view to purposes transcending by far any that could ever suggest themselves to persons of obscure station, having no prospect of benefiting by their own fullest success. In this case, we shall learn nothing from the confessions of those who must, upon a principle of mere self-preservation, have been excluded from all real knowledge of the dreadful scheme to which they were made parties, simply as perpetrators of its murders and outrages. Here it is equally vain to look for revelations from the mercenary workers, who know nothing, or from the elevated leaders, who know all, but have an interest of life and death in dissembling their knowledge. Revelations of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not, reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made a self-revelation—a silent but significant revelation, pointing the attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy.

Now, it has not escaped the notice of many people that two most extraordinary classes of outrages, perpetrated or attempted, have marked a very large majority of the mutinous explosions; outrages that were in the last degree unnatural, as out of harmony with the whole temper and spirit of intercourse generally prevailing between the sepoys and their British officers. The case is peculiarly striking. No reproach on the character of their manners was ever alleged against their British officers by any section or subdivision of the sepoy soldiery. Indeed, the reproach, where any existed, ran in the very opposite channel. Too great indulgence to the sepoy, a spirit of concession too facile to their very whims and caprices, and generally too relaxed a state of discipline—these features it was of the British bearing towards the native soldiery which too often, and reasonably, provoked severe censures from the observing. The very case66 which I adduced some months back, where an intelligent British officer, in the course of his evidence before some court-martial, mentioned, in illustration of the decaying discipline, that for some considerable space of time he had noticed a growing disrespect on the part of the privates; in particular, that, on coming into the cantonments of his own regiment, the men had ceased to rise from their seats, and took no notice of his presence—this one anecdote sufficiently exemplified the quality of the errors prevailing in the deportment of our countrymen to their native soldiery; and that it would be ludicrous to charge them with any harshness or severity of manner. Such being too notoriously the case, whence could possibly arise the bloody carnage by which, in almost every case, the sepoys inaugurated, or tried to inaugurate, their emancipation from British rule? Our continental neighbours at first grossly misinterpreted the case; and more excusably than in many other misinterpretations. Certainly it was unavoidable at first to read, in this frenzy of bloodshed, the vindictive retaliations of men that had suffered horrible and ineffable indignities at our hands. It was apparently the old case of African slaves in some West Indian colony—St. Domingo, for instance—breaking loose from the yoke, and murdering (often with cruel torments) the whole households of their oppressors. But a month dissipated these groundless commentaries. The most prejudiced Frenchman could not fail to observe that no sepoy regiment ever alluded to any rigour of treatment, or any haughtiness of demeanour. His complaints centred in the one sole subject of religion; even as to which he did not generally pretend to any certain knowledge, but simply to a very strong belief or persuasion that we secretly meditated, not that we openly avowed or deliberately pursued, a purpose of coercing him into Christianity. This, were it even true, though a false and most erroneous policy, could not be taxed with ill-will. A man's own religion, if it is sincerely such, is that which he profoundly believes to be the truth. Now, in seeking to inoculate another with that which sincerely he believes to be eminently the truth, though proceeding by false methods, a man acts in a spirit of benignity. So that, on all hands, the hellish fury of the sepoy was felt to be unnatural, artificially assumed, and, by a reasonable inference, was held to be a mask for something else that he wished to conceal. But what? What was that something else which he wished to conceal? The sepoy simulated, in order that he might dissimulate. He pretended a wrong sustained, that he might call away attention from a wrong which he designed. At this point I (and no doubt in company with multitudes beside that had watched the case) became sensible of an alien presence secretly intruding into this pretended quarrel of the native soldier. It was no sepoy that was moving at the centre of this feud: the objects towards which it ultimately tended were not such as could by possibility interest the poor, miserable, idolatrous native. What was he to gain by the overthrow of the British Government? The poor simpleton, who had been decoyed into this monstrous field of strife, opened the game by renouncing all the vast advantages which he and his children to the hundredth generation might draw from the system of the Company, and entered upon a career towards distant objects that for him have absolutely no meaning or intelligible existence. At this point it was that two enigmas, previously insoluble, suddenly received the fullest explanation:—