In each cantonment during the days preceding the revolt, the British officers on the spot were—to return to our figure—like men shut up in a powder-magazine with the train fired. There might be a dozen or twenty British officers with their families at a station held by a battery of native artillery, a couple of squadrons of native horse, and a regiment of native infantry—all plotting revolt and murder! Honour forbade the British to fly. To show a sign of mistrust or take a single visible precaution would be to precipitate the outbreak. Many of the old Bengal officers relied on their Sepoys, with a fond credulity that nothing could alarm, and that made them blind and deaf to the facts about them. “It was not,” says Trevelyan, “till he saw his own house in flames, and not till he looked down the barrels of Sepoy muskets, and heard Sepoy bullets whizzing round his ears, that an old Bengal officer could begin to believe that his men were not as staunch as they ought to be.” But all officers were not so blind as this. They knew their peril. They saw the tragedy coming. They walked day after day in front of the line of their men’s muskets on parade, not knowing when these iron tubes would break into red flame and flying bullets. They lay down night after night, knowing that the Sepoys in every hut were discussing the exact manner and time of their murder. Yet each man kept an untroubled brow, and went patiently the round of his duty, thanking God when he had no wife and child at the station to fall under the tender mercies of the mutineers. Farquhar, of the 7th Light Cavalry, writing to his mother at the time, said, “I slept every night dressed, with my revolver under my pillow, a drawn sword on my bed, and a loaded double-barrelled gun just under my bed. We remained in this jolly state,” he explained, “a fortnight.” When the outbreak came, and the bungalows were in flames, and the men were shouting and firing on the parade-ground, it was a point of honour among the officers to hurry to the scene and make one last appeal to them, dying too often under the bullets of their own soldiers. The survivors then had to fly, with their women and children, and hide in the hot jungle or wander over the scorching plains, on which the white heat burns like a flame, suffering all the torments of thirst and weariness, of undressed wounds, and of wearing fever. If some great writer, with full knowledge and a pen of fire, could write the story of what was dared and suffered by Englishmen and Englishwomen at a hundred scattered posts throughout the North-West Provinces, in the early stages of the Mutiny, it would be one of the most moving and heroic tales in human records.