General Sir Hugh Wheeler, who was in command at Cawnpore, was a gallant soldier, who had marched and fought for fifty years. But he had the fatal defect of being over seventy-five years of age. A little man, slender of build, with quick eye and erect figure, he carried his seventy-five years with respectable energy. But a man, no matter how brave, in whose veins ran the chill and thin blood of old age, was tragically handicapped in a crisis so fierce. Wheeler, moreover, who had married a Hindu wife, was too weakly credulous about the loyalty of his Sepoys. On May 18, scarcely a fortnight before the Mutiny, he telegraphed to Calcutta: “The plague is stayed. All well at Cawnpore!” He had been warned that Nana Sahib was treacherous, yet he called in his help, and put the Treasury in his charge for safety! This was committing the chickens, for security, to the benevolence and “good faith” of the fox! Not four days before the outbreak Wheeler actually sent back to Lucknow fifty men of the 84th who had been sent to him as a reinforcement. There was chivalry in that act, but there was besotted credulity too. [Illustration: CAWNPORE June 1857. General Wheeler’s Entrenchment June 4th.-27th. 1857. Walker & Cockerell sc.] But Wheeler’s most fatal mistake was in the choice he made of the place where the British garrison was to make its last stand. The Cawnpore magazine itself was a vast walled enclosure, covering three acres, with strong buildings and exhaustless store of guns and ammunition, with the river guarding one front, and a nullah acting as a ditch on another. Here would have been shelter for the women and the sick, a magnificent fighting position for the men, abundant water, and a great store of cannon. Wheeler, for reasons which nobody has ever yet guessed, neglected this strong post. He allowed its stores of cannon to be turned against himself. He chose, instead of this formidable and sheltered post, a patch of open plain six miles distant, with practically no water supply. He threw up a slender wall of earth, which a musket-ball could pierce, and over which an active cow could jump, and he crowded into this the whole British colony at Cawnpore. “What do you call that place you are making out on the plain?” asked the Nana’s Prime Minister, Azimoolah, of a British officer. “You ought to call it the ‘Fort of Despair.’” “No, no,” answered the Englishman, with the pluck of his race, “we’ll call it the ‘Fort of Victory!’” Nevertheless, when Wheeler made that evil choice of a place of defence, he was constructing a veritable Fort of Despair.