Young Havelock, mistaking the men’s temper, galloped up to the regiment with a message from his impatient father that lost nothing in carrying—“If you don’t go at the village I’ll send men that will go, and put an everlasting disgrace on you!” Brave men do not lightly endure the whip of a message like that, and Forbes relates how a private named Paddy Cavanagh leaped from the ranks, ran single-handed in on the enemy, “cursing his comrades with bitter Irish malisons as he sped, and was literally hacked to pieces, fighting like a wild cat in the ranks of his enemies”! How the 64th followed where valiant Paddy Cavanagh had led may be imagined; but the late arrival of the 64th had spoiled Havelock’s combination, and he was too much given to vehement rhetoric to spare the heavy-footed 64th a lash of the whip. “Some of you,” he said in his order of the day next morning, “fought yesterday as if the cholera had seized your mind as well as your bodies!” Havelock had by this time marched fifteen miles, fought two battles, used up one-third of his ammunition, and lost by bullet or cholera about one-sixth of his force. At this rate of progress he would reach Lucknow with powderless guns and 600 bayonets! Cawnpore itself, too, was threatened, and at Dinapore, a vital point in the long water-line between Calcutta and Allahabad, three regiments of Sepoys had broken into mutiny, and threatened Havelock’s communications with the capital. Havelock consulted with Tytler, his quartermaster-general, his chief engineer, and his son. Young Havelock, with the effervescing and heady valour of youth, was for “pushing on at all hazards”; the older men declared this meant the entire destruction of the force, and perhaps the loss of Lucknow, and Havelock was too good a soldier not to agree with this view. It was an act of nobler courage to fall back than to advance, but Havelock’s fine-tempered valour was equal to the feat, and he turned the faces of his reluctant soldiers back to Cawnpore. Neill, fierce and vehement by nature, when he heard the news, despatched an amazing letter to his chief. “You ought not to remain a day where you are,” he wrote. “You talk of advancing as soon as reinforcements reach you. You ought to advance again, and not halt until you have rescued, if possible, the garrison of Lucknow.” Havelock, with that note of shrill temper which ran through his character, was the last man to endure exhortations of this peremptory quality from a subordinate. “There must be an end,” he wrote back, “to these proceedings at once.” Nothing, he said, but the possible injury to the public service prevented him from putting Neill under immediate arrest! “But,” he added, “you now stand warned. Attempt no further dictation!”