Hearsey summoned the guard to advance, but the native officer answered
as before. The General, however, by a significant motion of his
revolver, gave the Jemmadar to understand that this time he had to
deal with a man of very different kidney from the Colonel. The guard,
accordingly, went forward; the Jemmadar in front, watched on either
side by a young Hearsey, pistol in hand. Their sire himself rode
straight at the mutineer, who, seeing that the game was up, turned the
muzzle to his own breast, touched the trigger with his toe, and fell,
severely hurt. He was secured, and conveyed to the hospital; and the
concourse dispersed quietly to their lines, after having been roundly
taken to task by the General for their cowardice and unsoldierlike
behaviour in standing by without moving a finger while their officers
were being cut to pieces.
Mungul Pandy was condemned by court-martial, and duly hanged on the
8th of April. At first there was some difficulty about finding an
executioner. Public opinion had become less squeamish before the year
was out. From this miserable fanatic was taken the name of "Pandy,"
which in Anglo-Indian slang signified mutineer. There were those who
loved to apply the horrible nickname of "white Pandies" to those wise
and good men who, amidst the general frenzy, preserved some spark
of justice and humanity; who would not lend their countenance to a
barbarous policy dictated by cruelty and craven fear; who refused to
devastate provinces and depopulate cities, to butcher the women of
Delhi and torture the shopkeepers of Allahabad, to confound innocent
and guilty in one vast proscription and one universal massacre: just
as, at the end of the last century, there were those who stigmatized as
"Jacobins" the English statesmen who could not be reviled or shocked
out of the belief that the king and the nobility of France had been
less sinned against than sinning; and that, in any case, it was not our
business to avenge the wrongs of alien dukes and marquisses upon the
senators who had abolished their privileges, the peasants who had shot
their game, and the board which was busily engaged in dividing their
provinces into departments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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