Certain nations accused us of wanton cruelty in the slaying of the rebels at the time when the hand of retribution, guided by Sir Colin Campbell, fell upon the inhuman monsters who had weltered and gloried in the shedding of Christian blood. Could the stab of the bayonet, blowing from the cannon’s mouth or death by hanging ever atone for the fearful sufferings of the pure and innocent? In our humanity we scorned to devise new tortures or have recourse to those of the Inquisition to avenge the massacre of the Christian women who had been outraged and done to death. If those who escaped to the jungle suffered untold agony, it was nothing to that which the women who remained in Delhi had to undergo. An officer who had to be an unwilling witness of many of the scenes tells the following blood-curdling story:-- “The sepoys took forty-eight females, most of them girls from ten to fourteen, many delicately nurtured ladies, and kept them for the base purposes of the heads of the insurrection for a whole week. At the end of that time they made them strip themselves, and gave them up to the lowest of the people to abuse in broad daylight in the streets of Delhi. They then commenced the work of torturing them to death, cutting off their breasts, fingers, and noses. One lady was three days in dying. They flayed the face of another lady, and made her walk naked through the streets.” A number of officers, women, and children sought refuge in a mosque, where they were without food and water for several days. The men could have endured the hunger and thirst, but the suffering of the women and little children was intense. On the fourth day they treated with the sepoys, who on their oath swore to spare their lives and take them before the king. The men laid down their arms that they might get water for the suffering ones, and the whole party quitted the shelter of the mosque. They were instantly seized, and every one killed, eight officers, eight ladies, and eleven children perishing. The children were swung by the heels, and their brains dashed out in the presence of the parents. On every side were traces of murder and pillage, and it is said that even greater ferocity, if that were possible, was used at Delhi than by the great assassin Nana Sahib at Cawnpore. Certainly the atrocities practised are unequalled in barbarity and cruelty, and coming from men who had broken our bread and eaten our salt, they demanded the most condign punishment. Delhi was now in full possession of the mutineers, and this ancient city, with its hundred mosques and minarets, seemed lost to the British Empire, for the 200,000 inhabitants were in no way reluctant to accept the change in government.