General Neill was left in charge of the station, and ruled with an iron and a merciless hand.[65] His orders were: “Whenever a rebel is caught, he is to be instantly tried, and unless he can prove a defence, he is to be sentenced to be hanged at once; but the chief rebels or ringleaders I make first clean up a certain portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the street where the fearful murder and mutilation of women took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to the high-caste natives; they think by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so! My object is to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly, and barbarous deed, and to strike _terror_ into these rebels. The first caught was a subadar, or native officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up the very blood he had helped to shed. But I made the provost-marshal do his duty, and a few lashes soon made the miscreant accomplish his task. When done, he was taken out and immediately hanged, and buried in a ditch at the roadside. No one who has witnessed the scenes of murder, mutilation, and massacre can even listen to the word ‘mercy’ as applied to these fiends.” Havelock, meanwhile, was “pacifying” the neighbourhood with his handful of men. He destroyed Nana’s palace at Bithoor, he beat the rebels at Oonao, at Busserut Gunge, and Zaithpore, he attempted to relieve Lucknow; and though there was some desperate fighting, in which the British were locally successful, his force was too weak to reach the besieged, and he fell back, still fighting, to Cawnpore, reduced to but 800 men. He moved out again four days later, 1300 strong, to defeat the enemy at Bithoor again and return. But reinforcements were long in coming, for at Dinapore the regiments had mutinied and impeded communication with the south. Outram from Persia then assembled at Allahabad a column of 1500 men, including the 5th and 90th, and joined Havelock at Cawnpore. The most striking and noteworthy thing in all these operations is the exceeding smallness of the insignificant armies which were hastily assembled to crush the insurrection. Cawnpore itself was now safe, and it was around Lucknow, therefore, that the main interest centred till the suppression of the revolt. It was the last important point in the war, for Delhi was taken before Lucknow; and this is how Delhi fell.