A Soldier's Experience; or, A Voice from the Ranks: Showing the Cost of War in Blood and Treasure. A Personal Narrative of the Crimean Campaign, from the Standpoint of the Ranks; the Indian Mutiny, and Some of its Atrocities; the Afghan Campaigns of 1863Gowing, T. (Timothy)
History
A Soldier's Experience; or, A Voice from the Ranks: Showing the Cost of War in Blood and Treasure. A Personal Narrative of the Crimean Campaign, from the Standpoint of the Ranks; the Indian Mutiny, and Some of its Atrocities; the Afghan Campaigns of 1863
Gowing, T. (Timothy)
Crimean War, 1853-1856 -- Personal narratives
I am most happy, however, to be able to record that there were a few
Natives who, in the midst of those scenes of blood, proved to the world
that they still retained feelings of humanity, and who nobly stood
forward to defend the defenceless (although of the same creed and caste
as the bloodthirsty villains by whom those horrors were perpetrated),
and some of them proved faithful to the last, even unto death. The
escape of many of the fugitives was miraculous, and one can trace the
hand of Providence working through it all. In some few instances they
managed to cut their way through their would-be murderers with a good
sword and a strong arm. In one case, a gentleman, when he found that all
was lost, and that there was no mercy to be expected from the hands of
those whom he had previously commanded, compelled his syce (groom), with
a revolver at his head, to put his horses into his carriage, in which he
immediately placed his wife and family. Armed to the teeth, he drove
off along the road to Kurnaul. He had not gone far when he was summoned
by a small party of the Mutineers to stop, but, handing the reins to his
poor wife, he shot three of them dead and pushed on. Finding, however,
that he was pursued, he at once placed his children at the bottom of the
carriage, and prepared to sell his life, and the lives of those near and
dear to him, dearly. Being well armed, as fast as his would-be murderers
came near him he shot them dead. His wife was wounded by a shot from one
of the villains, but he still kept on his way--it was life or death. One
of his boys kept loading for his father, and thus this gentleman managed
to bring down upwards of fifteen of his pursuers in about 12 minutes. He
then thought that, as they had dropped to the rear, all might go well;
so he easied his horses a little and stopped to look at his poor wife,
when to his horror he found that she had been shot dead, with her babe
at her breast--one ball had launched them both into eternity. In twenty
miles he was six times stopped after that, but on each occasion he
responded to the call by rolling his assailants over. He lived to help
to storm Delhi, and there revenge his poor wife and child.
A SURVIVOR'S NARRATIVE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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