Part 26 (2/2)

What next was to be done? What but to bring the troop back without a defaulter--despite the taunts of escaping convicts, the temptations of comrades flushed by success--to the parade ground for orders. But there was no one to give them, for when the 3d Cavalry led the van of mutiny at Meerut their Colonel was in the European cantonment as field officer of the week, and there he ”conceived it his duty to remain.”

Perhaps rightly. And it is also conceivable that his absence made no difference, since it is, palpably, an easier task to make a regiment mutiny than to bring it back to its allegiance.

Meanwhile the officers of the other regiments, the 11th and the 20th, were facing their men boldly; facing the problem how to keep them steady till that squadron of the Carabineers should sweep down, followed by a company or two of the Rifles at the double, and turn the balance in favor of loyalty. It could not be long now. Nearly an hour had pa.s.sed since the first wild stampede to the jail. The refuse and rabble of the town were by this time swarming out of it, armed with sticks and staves; the two thousand and odd felons released from the jails were swarming in, seeking weapons. The danger grew every second, and the officers of the 11th, though their men stood steady as rocks behind them, counted the moments as they sped. For on the other side of the road, on the parade ground of the 20th regiment, the sepoys, ordered, as the 11th had been, to turn out unarmed, were barely restrained from rus.h.i.+ng the bells by the entreaties of their native officers; the European ones being powerless.

”Keep the men steady for me,” said Colonel Finnis to his second in command; ”I'll go over and see what I can do.”

He thought the voice of a man loved and trusted by one regiment, a man who could speak to his sepoys without an interpreter, might have power to steady another.

_Jai bahaduri!_ (Victory to courage!) muttered Soma under his breath as he watched his Colonel canter quietly into danger. And his finger hungered on that hot May evening for the cool of the trigger which was denied him.

_Jai bahaduri!_ A murmur seemed to run through the ranks, they dressed themselves firmer, squarer. Colonel Finnis, glancing back, saw a sight to gladden any commandant's heart. A regiment steady as a rock, drawn up as for parade, absolutely in hand despite that strange new sound in the air. The sound which above all others gets into men's brains like new wine. The sound of a file upon fetters--the sound of escape, of freedom, of license! It had been rising unchecked for half an hour from the lines of the 3d, whither the martyrs had been brought in triumph. It was rising now from the bazaar, the city, from every quiet corner where a prisoner might pause to hack and hammer at his leg-irons with the first tool he could find.

What was one man's voice against this sound, strengthened as it was by the cry of a trooper galloping madly from the north shouting that the English were in sight? What more likely? Had not ample time pa.s.sed for the whole British garrison to be coming with fixed bayonets and a whoop, to make short work of unarmed men who had not made up their minds?

That must be no longer!

”Quick! brothers. Quick! Kill! Kill! Down with the officers! Shoot ere the white faces come!”

It was a sudden wild yell of terror, of courage, of sheer cruelty. It drowned the scream of the Colonel's horse as it staggered under him.

It drowned his steady appealing voice, his faint sob, as he threw up his hands at the next shot, and fell, the first victim to the Great Revolt.

It drowned something else also. It drowned Soma's groan of wild, half-stupefied, helpless rage as he saw his Colonel fall,--the sahib who had led him to victory,--the sahib whom he loved, whom he was pledged to save. And his groan was echoed by many another brave man in those ranks, thus brought face to face suddenly with the necessity for decision.

”Steady, men, steady!”

That call, in the alien voice, echoed above the whistling of the bullets as they found a billet here and there among the ranks; for the men of the 20th, maddened by that fresh murder, now shot wildly at their officers.

”Steady, men! Steady, for G.o.d's sake!”

The entreaty was not in vain; they were steady still. Ay, steady, but unarmed! Steady as a rock still, but helpless!

Helpless, unarmed! By all the G.o.ds all men wors.h.i.+ped, men could not suffer that for long, when bullets were whistling into their ranks.

So there was a waver at last in the long line. A faint tremble, like the tremble of a curving wave ere it falls. Then, with a confused roar, an aimless sweeping away of all things in its path, it broke as a wave breaks upon a pebbly sh.o.r.e.

”To arms, brothers! Quick! fire! fire!”

Upon whom?[2] G.o.d knows! Not on their officers, for these were already being hustled to the rear, hustled into safety.

”Quick, brothers, quick! Kill! Kill!”

The cry rose on all sides now, as the wave of revolt surged on. But there was none left to kill; for the work was done in the 20th lines, and no new white faces came to stem the tide. Two thousand and odd Englishmen who might have stemmed it being still on the parade-ground by the church, waiting for orders, for ammunition, for a General, for everything save--thank Heaven!--for courage.

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