Camps, Quarters, and Casual PlacesForbes, Archibald
History
Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places
Forbes, Archibald
Military camps; Military history, Modern
which is the terse, appropriate inscription: "In memory of
Major-General Sir Henry Lawrence and the brave men who fell in defence
of the Residency. _Si monumentum quaeris Circumspice!_" Beyond this
lies the scathed and blighted ruin of the Residency House, once a large
and imposing structure, now so utterly wrecked and shivered that one
wonders how the crumbling reddish-gray walls are kept erect. The
veranda was battered down and much of the front of the building lies
bodily open, the structure being supported on the battered and
distorted pillars assisted by great balks of wood. Entering by the left
wing I pass down a winding stair into the bowels of the earth till I
reach the spacious and lofty vaults or _tykhana_ under the building.
Here, the place affording comparative safety, lived immured the women
of the garrison, the soldiers' wives, half-caste females, the wives of
the meaner civilians and their children. The poor creatures were seldom
allowed to come up to the surface, lest they should come in the way of
the shot which constantly lacerated the whole area, and few visitors
were allowed access to them. Veritably they were in a dungeon.
Provisions were lowered down to them from the window orifices near the
roof of the vaulting, and there were days when the firing was so heavy
that orders were given to them not even to rise from their beds on the
floor. For shot occasionally found a way even into the _tykhana_; you
may see the holes it made in penetrating. The miserables were billeted
off ten in a room, and there they lived, without sweepers, baths,
dhobies, or any of the comforts which the climate makes necessities.
Here in these dungeons children were born, only for the most part to
die. Ascending another staircase I pass through some rooms in which
lived (and died) some of the ladies of the garrison, and passing from
the left wing by a shattered corridor am able to look up into the room
in which Sir Henry Lawrence received his death-wound. Access to it is
impossible by reason of the tottering condition of the structure; and
turning away I clamber up the worn staircase in the shot-riven tower on
the summit of which still stands the flagstaff on which were hoisted
the signals with which the garrison were wont to communicate with the
Alumbagh. The walls of the staircase and the flat roof of the tower are
scratched and written all over with the names of visitors; many of the
names are those of natives, but more are those of British soldiers, who
have occasionally added a piece of their mind in characteristically
strong language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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