endeavour to join her son as soon as the roads should be open, and to
show him the spot where the Colonel was buried. I told her I did not
know the spot. She said the groom who had remained with them in the
intrenchment would show it to me." To judge from the attachment of her
servants, Mrs. Williams must have ruled her household like a true lady
of the kindly old Anglo-Indian school.
No prayer was said, no blessing invoked, no passover eaten before
that inauspicious exodus. Moore went about from group to group, and
impressed upon his colleagues that it would be idle to attempt to
preserve order in the embarkation. His instructions were to push
off as soon as all had been got on board, and make for the opposite
shore, where further arrangements might be completed at leisure and in
comparative safety. And then a drink of water was handed in at the
door of each palanquin, and the expedition set forth. A mob of peasants
at once rushed upon the deserted premises, and spread themselves about
in quest of plunder. They might have spared their pains. A camel-rider,
who entered among the first, saw nothing except "three useless brass
guns that had been split, two leathern bottles of liquid butter, a sack
of fine flour, and the bodies of eleven Europeans. They were on quilts
on the floor, some of them still breathing, though dying from severe
gunshot wounds."
The show was not such as would dazzle a vulgar eye: but in the soul
of those with whom glory is not skin-deep, the retinue of an imperial
coronation would fail to inspire the reverence excited by that ragged
and spiritless cavalcade. First came the men of the Thirty-second
regiment, their dauntless captain at the head;--thinking little, as
ever, of the past, but much of the future;--and so marching unconscious
towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the
throng of naked bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the
weight of palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be discerned
the pallid forms of the wounded;--their limbs rudely bandaged with
shirtsleeves, and old stockings, and strips of gown and petticoat.
Mayhap, as they jolted along, they fed their sickly fancies with a
listless anticipation that the hour was not remote when they might
forget the miserable present amidst the joys of ice, and lemonade, and
clean sheets, and nourishment more appetising than parched grain and
bad pease-porridge. Behind these creaked a caravan of carts, dragged
by bullocks, on which were huddled ladies used to a very different
equipage; while here and there paced a stately elephant, his tusks
adorned with rings of brass, and his forehead painted in grotesque
patterns, who, perchance, a century back, was tugging a gun across
the field of Plassey, and who now bore a cluster of English women and
children clinging nervously to the ropes which encircled his huge
girth. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver in belt, followed
they who could still walk and fight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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