In these words Sir George Trevelyan sums up the famous struggle round the low mud-walls of Wheeler’s entrenchments at Cawnpore more than forty years ago; a struggle in which Saxon courage and Hindu cruelty were exhibited in their highest measure, and which must always form one of the most heartbreaking and yet kindling traditions of the British race. Volumes have been written about Cawnpore, but Trevelyan’s book remains its one adequate literary record. The writer has a faculty for resonant, not to say rhythmic prose, which recalls the style of his more famous uncle, Macaulay, and in his “Cawnpore” his picturesque sentences are flushed with a sympathy which gives them a more than literary grace. Cawnpore at the time of the Mutiny was a great city, famous for its workers in leather, standing on the banks of the sacred Ganges, 270 miles S.E. from Delhi, and about 700 miles from Calcutta. It was a military station of great importance. Its vast magazine was stored with warlike material of every sort. It was the seat of civil administration for a rich district. But the characteristic British policy, which allows the Empire to expand indefinitely, without any corresponding expansion of the army which acts as its police and defence, left this great military station practically in the hands of the Sepoys alone. The British force at Cawnpore, in May 1857, consisted of sixty men of the 84th, sixty-five Madras Fusileers, fewer than sixty artillerymen, and a group of invalids belonging to the 32nd. The Sepoy force consisted of three strong infantry regiments and the 2nd Native Cavalry—a regiment of very evil fame. Here, then, were all the elements of a great tragedy—a rich treasury and a huge arsenal, lying practically undefended; a strong force of Sepoys, bitter with mutiny; a turbulent city and crowded cantonments festering with crime; and only a handful of British soldiers to maintain the British flag! Had the British consisted merely of fighting men, though they counted only 300 bayonets against four regiments of splendidly trained Sepoys, and a hostile population of 60,000, their case would not have been desperate. But the little British garrison had under its guard a great company of women and children and sick folk—civilian households, the wives and families of the 32nd, and many more. For every fighting man who levelled his musket over Wheeler’s entrenchments during the siege, there were at least two non-combatants—women, or little children, or invalids. A company so helpless and so great could not march; it could not attack; it could only stand within its poor screen of mud-walls and, with the stubborn and quenchless courage natural to its blood, fight till it perished.