That night at Cawnpore there were two busy spots, a mile distant from each other. In the entrenchments the poor survivors were preparing for their march, a march—though they knew it not—to the grave. Mothers were collecting the garments of their little ones. Some paid a last sad visit to the fatal well, where their dead were lying. Others were packing their scanty possessions, intending to carry them with them. Soldiers were cleaning their muskets and storing their cartridges. And a mile distant, Tantia Topee, the Nana’s general, was planting his cannon and arranging his Sepoys so as to pour upon the boats at a given signal a fire which should slay the whole unhappy company they carried. CHAPTER V CAWNPORE: THE MURDER GHAUT It was a company of some 450 persons—old and young, sick and wounded, men, women, and children—who filed out of Wheeler’s entrenchments on the morning of June 27, in that sad pilgrimage. Trevelyan describes the scene:— First came the men of the 32nd Regiment, their dauntless captain at their head; thinking little as ever of the past, but much of the future; and so marching unconscious towards the death which he had often courted. Then moved on the throng of native bearers, groaning in monotonous cadence beneath the weight of the palanquins, through whose sliding panels might be discerned the pallid forms of the wounded; their limbs rudely bandaged with shirt-sleeves and old stockings and strips of gown and petticoat. And next, musket on shoulder and revolver in belt, followed they who could still walk and fight. Step was not kept in those ranks. Little was there of martial array, or soldier-like gait and attitude. In discoloured flannel and tattered nankeen, mute and in pensive mood, tramped by the remnant of the immortal garrison. These men had finished their toil, and had fought their battle, and now, if hope was all but dead within them, there survived at least no residue of fear. Vibart, in his single person, constituted the rearguard. A wounded man lying in a bed carried by four native bearers, an English lady walking by his side, came out of the entrenchment shortly after the rest had left. It was Colonel Ewart, of the 34th, with his faithful wife. The little group could not overtake the main body, and when it had passed out of sight round a bend in the road a crowd of the colonel’s own Sepoys stopped the poor wife and her wounded husband. The porters were ordered to lay the bed down, and with brutal jests the Sepoys mocked their dying colonel. “Is not this a fine parade?” they asked, with shouts of laughter. Then, mirth giving place to murder, they suddenly fell upon Ewart, and literally hewed him to pieces under the eyes of his agonised wife. They told her to go in peace, as they would not kill a woman, and by way of comment on the statement one of them stepped back to give himself room for the stroke, and slew her with a single blow.