Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places by Archibald Forbes

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The Memorial Church is in the form of a cross, and now that it has been
finished is not destitute of beauty as regards its interior. Perhaps it is
in place, but the noblest monument that could commemorate Cawnpore would
have been the maintenance, for the wonder of the world unto all time, of
the intrenchment and what it surrounded, as nearly as possible in the
condition in which they were left on the evacuation of the garrison. The
grandest monument in the world is the Residency of Lucknow, which remains
and is kept up substantially in the condition in which it was left when
Sir Colin Campbell brought out its garrison in November 1857; and the
Cawnpore intrenchment would have been a still nobler memorial as the
abiding testimony to a defence even more wonderful, although unfortunately
unsuccessful, than that of Lucknow. But the Memorial Church of Cawnpore
will always be interesting by reason of its site and of the memorial
tablets on the walls of its interior. In the left transept is a tablet "To
the memory of the Engineers of the East Indian Railway, who died and were
killed in the great insurrection of 1857; erected in affectionate
remembrance by their brother Engineers in the North-West Provinces." On
the left side of the nave are several tablets. One is to the memory of
poor young John Nicklen Martin, killed in the battle at Suttee Chowra
Ghaut. Another commemorates three officers, two sergeants, two corporals,
a drummer, and twenty privates of the 34th Regiment, killed at the
(second) Battle of Cawnpore on the 28th November 1857; the day on which
the Gwalior Contingent, seduced into rebellion by Tantia Topee, made
itself so unpleasant to General Windham, the "Cawnpore Runners," and other
regiments of that officer's command. A third tablet is "To the memory of
A.G. Chalwin, 2nd Light Cavalry, and his wife Louisa, who both perished
during the siege of Cawnpore in July 1857. These are they which came out
of great tribulation." A fourth commemorates Captain Gordon and Lieutenant
Hensley, of the 82nd Foot, also victims of the Gwalior Contingent. In the
right of the nave there is a tablet "Sacred to the memory of Philip Hayes
Jackson, who, with Jane, his wife, and her brother Ralf Blyth Croker, were
massacred by rebels at Cawnpore on 27th June." Another is to Lieutenant
Angelo, of the 16th Grenadiers Bengal Native Infantry, who also fell in
the boat massacre; and a third is to the memory of the gallant Stuart
Beatson, who was Havelock's adjutant-general, and who, dying as he was of
cholera, did his work at Pandoo Nuddee and Cawnpore in a _dhoolie_. In the
right transept are tablets in memory of the officers of the Connaught
Rangers, and of the officers and men of the 32nd Cornwall Regiment "who
fell in defence of Lucknow and Cawnpore and subsequent campaign"--fourteen
officers and 448 "women and men." And here, too, is perhaps the most
affecting memorial of any--a tablet "In memory of Mrs. Moore, Mrs.
Wainwright, Miss Wainwright, Mrs. Hill, forty-three soldiers' wives and
fifty-five children, murdered in Cawnpore in 1857."

It is easy enough now to follow the footsteps of Mrs. Moore, dangerous as
was that journey of hers, from the intrenchment to the corner of No. 2
Barrack, which she was wont to make when her husband went on duty there to
strengthen the hands of Mowbray Thomson. There is no trace now and the
very memory of its whereabouts is lost, of the bamboo hut in a sheltered
corner which the garrison of this exposed post built for the brave
gentlewoman. But No. 2 Barrack, except that it is finished and tenanted,
stands now very much as it did when Glanville first, and when he fell then
Mowbray Thomson, defended with a success which seems so wonderful when we
look at the place defended and its situation. The garrison was not always
the same. "My sixteen men," writes Thomson, "consisted in the first
instance of Ensign Henderson of the 56th Native Infantry, five or six of
the Madras Fusiliers, two plate-layers, and some men of the 84th. The
first instalment was soon disabled. The Madras Fusiliers were all shot at
their posts. Several of the 84th also fell, but in consequence of the
importance of the position, as soon as a loss in my little corps was
reported, Captain Moore sent us over a reinforcement from the
intrenchment. Sometimes a soldier, sometimes a civilian, came. The orders
given us were not to surrender with our lives, and we did our best to obey
them." And in a line with No. 2 Barrack is No. 4 Barrack, held with equal
stanchness by a party of Civil Engineers who had been employed on the East
Indian Railroad, and who had for their commander Captain Jenkins. Seven of
the engineers perished in defence of this post.

There is nothing more to see on the _maidan_, and one feels his anger
rising at the obliteration of everything that might help towards the
localisation of associations. Let us leave the scene of the defence and
follow the track of the defenders as they marched down to the scene of the
great treachery. The distance from the intrenchment to the ghaut is barely
a mile. Think of that stirrup-cup--that _doch an dhorras_--of cold water,
in which the hapless band pledged one another. The noble Moore cheerily
leads the way down the slope to the bridge with the white rails with an
advance guard of a handful of his 32nd men. The palanquins with the women,
the children, and the wounded follow, the latter bandaged up with strips
of women's gowns and petticoats, and fragments of shirt-sleeves. And then
come the fighting-men--a gallant, ragged, indomitable band. A martinet
colonel would stand aghast--for save a regimental button here and there,
he would find it hard to recognise the gaunt, hairy, sun-scorched squad
for British soldiers. But let who might incline to disown these few
war-worn men in their dirty flannel rags and fragmentary nankeen breeches,
their foes know them for what they are, and make way for the white sahibs
with no dressing indeed in their ranks, but each man with his rifle on his
shoulder, the deadly revolver in his belt, and the fearless glance in the
hollow eye. The wooden bridge with the white rails spans at right angles a
rough irregular glen which widens out as it approaches the river, some
three hundred yards distant from the bridge. It is a mere footpath that
leaves the road on the hither side of the bridge, and skirting the dry bed
of the nullah touches the river close to the old temple. By this footpath
it was that our countrymen and countrywomen passed down to the cruel
ambush which had been laid for them in the mouth of the glen. There are
few to whom the details of that fell scene are not familiar. What a
contrast between the turmoil and devilry of it and the serene calmness of
the all but solitude the ghaut now presents! On the knolls of the farther
side snug bungalows nestle among the trees, under the veranda of one of
which a lady is playing with her children. The village of Suttee Chowra on
the bluff on the left of the ghaut, where Tantia Topee's sepoys were
concealed, no longer exists; a pretty bungalow and its compound occupy its
site. The little temple on the water's edge by the ghaut is slowly
mouldering into decay; on the plaster of the coping of its river wall you
may still see the marks of the treacherous bullets. The stair which, built
against its wall, led down to the water's edge, has disappeared. Tantia
Topee's dispositions for the perpetration of the treachery could not now
succeed, for the Ganges has changed its course and there is deep water
close in shore at the ghaut. In the stream nearest to the Oude side the
river has cast up a long narrow dearah island, in the fertile mud of which
melons are cultivated where once whistled the shot from the guns on the
Oude side of the river. A Brahmin priest is placidly sunning himself on
the river platform of the temple over the dome of which hangs the foliage
of a peepul tree. A dhobie is washing the shirts of a sahib in the stream
that once was dyed with the blood of the sahibs. There is no monument
here, no superfluous reminder of the terrible tragedy. The man is not to
be envied whose eyes are dry, and whose heart beats its normal pulsations,
while he stands here alone on this spot so densely peopled by associations
at once so tragic and so glorious.

The scene of the final massacre lies some distance higher up the river. As
we cross the Ganges canal, the native city lying on our left, there rises
up before us the rich mass of foliage that forms the outer screen of the
beautiful Memorial Gardens. The hue of the greenery would be sombre but
for the blossoms which relieve it, emblem of the divine hope which
mitigated the gloom of despair for our countrywomen who perished so
cruelly in this balefully historic spot. Of the Beebeeghur, the term by
which among the natives is known the bungalow where the massacre was
perpetrated, not one stone now remains on another but neither its memory
nor its name will be lost for all time. Natives are strolling in the shady
flower-bordered walks of the Memorial Gardens, the prohibition which long
debarred their entrance having been wisely removed. In the centre of the
garden rises, fringed with cypresses, a low mound, the summit of which is
crowned by a circular screen, or border, of light and beautiful open-work
architecture. The circular space enclosed is sunken, and from the centre
of this sunken space there rises a pedestal on which stands the marble
presentment of an angel. There is no need to explain what episode in the
tragic story this monument commemorates; the inscription round the capital
of the pedestal tells its tale succinctly indeed, but the words burn.
"Sacred," it runs, "to the perpetual memory of the great company of
Christian people, chiefly women and children, who near this spot were
cruelly massacred by the followers of the rebel, Nana Doondoo Punth of
Blithoor; and cast, the dying with the dead, into the well below, on the
15th day of July 1857." A few paces to the north-west of the monument is
the spot where stood the bungalow in which the massacre was done; and now,
where the sight they saw maddened our countrymen long ago to a frenzy of
revenge, there bloom roses and violets. And a step farther on, in a
thicket of arbor vitae trees and cypresses, is the Memorial Churchyard,
with its many nameless mounds, for here were buried not a few who died
during the long occupation of Cawnpore, and in the combats around it. Here
there is a monument to Thornhill, the Judge of Futtehghur, Mary his wife,
and their two children, who perished in the massacre. Thornhill was one of
the males brought out from the bungalow and shot earlier in the afternoon
than when the women's time came. Another monument bears this inscription:
"Sacred to the memory of the women and children of the 32nd, this monument
is raised by twenty men of the same regiment, who were passing through
Cawnpore, 21st Nov. 1857." And among the tombstones are those of gallant
Douglas Campbell of the 78th, Woodford of the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade,
and Young of the 4th Bengal Native Infantry.

BISMARCK

BEFORE AND DURING THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR

The ex-Chancellor of the German Empire owed nothing of his unique career
to adventitious advantages. Otto von Bismarck-Schoenhausen, who for more
than a generation was the most prominent and most powerful personality of
Europe, was essentially a self-made man. He was a younger son of a cadet
family of a knightly and ancient but somewhat decayed house, ranking among
the lesser nobility of the Alt Mark of Brandenburg. The square solid
mansion in which he was born, embowered among its trees in the region
between the Elbe and the Havel, might be taken by an Englishman for the
country residence of a Norfolk or Somersetshire squire of moderate
fortune. But memories cling around the massive old family place of
Schoenhausen, such as can belong to no English residence of equal date. In
the library door of the Brandenburg mansion are seen to this day three
deep fissures made by the bayonet points of French soldiers fresh from the
battlefield of Jena, who in their brutal lawlessness pursued the young and
beautiful chatelaine of the house and strove to crush in the door which
the fugitive had locked behind her. The lady thus terrified and outraged
was the mother of Bismarck; and the story told him in boyhood of his loved
mother's narrow escape from worse than death, and of his father's having
to conceal her in the depth of the adjoining forest, may well have
inspired their son with the ill-feeling against the French nation which he
never cared to disguise.

The Bismarcks had been fighting men from time immemorial, and the
combatant nature of the great scion of their race displayed itself in
frequent duels during his university career at Göttingen. In the series of
some eight-and-twenty duels in which he engaged during his first three
terms, he was wounded but twice--once in the leg and again on the cheek,
the mark of which latter wound he bears to this day. At one time he seems
to have all but decided to embrace the military career but for family
reasons he became a country gentleman, and if Europe had remained
undisturbed by revolution he might have lived and died a bucolic squire,
"Dyke Captain" of his district, with a seat in the Provincial Diet, a
liking for history and philosophy, a propensity to rowdyism and drinking
bouts of champagne and porter, and a character which defined itself in his
local appellation of "Mad Bismarck." _Dis aliter visum_. The Revolution of
1848 swept over Europe and Bismarck rallied to the support of his
sovereign. When in 1851 the young Landwehr lieutenant was sent to
Frankfort by that sovereign as the representative of Prussia in the German
Diet, he carried with him a reputation for unflinching devotion to the
Crown, for a conservatism which had been styled not only "mediaeval" but
"antediluvian," and for startling originality in his views as well as
fearlessness in expressing them. The latter attribute he displayed when,
in reply to a remark of a French diplomat on a question of policy, "_Cette
politique va vous conduire à Jena_," Bismarck significantly retorted,
"_Pourquoi pas à Leipsic ou à Waterloo?_" During his tenure of office at
Frankfort his conviction steadfastly strengthened that Prussia could
become a great nation only by shaking herself free from the Austrian
supremacy in Germany. "It is my conviction," he placed on record in a
despatch soon after the Crimean War, "that at no distant time we shall
have to fight with Austria for our very existence;" and he was yet more
emphatic when he wrote just before leaving Frankfort to take up his new
position as German Ambassador to Russia in the beginning of 1859: "I
recognise in our relations with the Bund a certain weakness affecting
Prussia, which, sooner or later, we shall have to cure _ferro et igni_"--
with fire and sword--words which embodied the first distinct enunciation
of that policy of "blood and iron" which was destined ultimately to bring
about the unification of Germany. His disgust was so strong that Prussia
did not assert herself against Austria in 1858 when the latter's hands
were full in Italy, that his continued presence at Frankfort was
considered unadvisable. He remained "in ice"--to use his own expression--
at St. Petersburg until early in 1862; and in September of that year,
after a few months of service as Prussian Ambassador at Paris, he was
appointed by King Wilhelm to the high and onerous post of
Minister-President with the portfolio of Foreign Secretary. It was then
that his great career as a European statesman really began.

The impression is all but universal that King Wilhelm throughout the
eventful years which followed was but the figure-head of the ship at the
helm of which stood Bismarck, strong, shrewd, subtle, cynical, and
unscrupulous. This conception I believe to be utterly wrong. I hold
Wilhelm to have been the virtual maker of the united Germany and the
creator of the German Empire; and that the accomplishment of both those
objects, the former leading up to the latter, was already quietly in his
mind long before he mounted the throne. I consider him to have possessed
the shrewdest insight into character. I believe him to have been quite
unscrupulous, when once he had brought himself to cross the threshold of a
line of action. I discern in him this curious, although not very rare,
phase of character, that although resolutely bent on a purpose he was apt
to be irresolute and even reluctant in bringing himself to consent to
measures whereby that purpose was to be accomplished. He was that apparent
contradiction in terms, a bold hesitator; he habitually needed, and knew
that he needed, to have his hand apparently forced for the achievement of
the end he was most bent upon. He knew full well that his aspirations
could be fulfilled only at the bayonet point; and recognising the defects
of the army, he had while still Regent set himself energetically to the
task of making Prussia the greatest military power of Europe. He it was
who had put into the hands of Prussian soldiers the weapon that won
Königgrätz. With his clear eye for the right man he had found Moltke and
placed the premier strategist of his day at the head of the General Staff.
Roon he picked out as if by intuition from comparative obscurity, and
assigned to him the work of preparing and carrying out that scheme of army
reform which all continental Europe has copied.

And then, constant in the furtherance of his purposes, Wilhelm
deliberately invented Bismarck. He had steadfastly taken note of the man
whom he chose to be his minister from the big Landwehr lieutenant's first
commission to the Frankfort Diet in 1851; probably, indeed, earlier, when
Bismarck was a rare but forcible speaker in Frederick Wilhelm's
"quasi-Parliament." In Bismarck Wilhelm saw precisely the man he wanted--
the complement of himself; arbitrary as he was, unscrupulous as he was,
but bolder and at the same time more wise. Knowing where he himself was
lacking, he recognised the man who, when he himself should have the
impulse to balk and hesitate, was of that hardier nature--"grit" the
Americans call it--to take him hard by the head and force him over the
fence which all the while he had been longing to be on the other side of.
To a monarch of this character Bismarck was simply the ideal guide and
support--the man to urge him on when hesitating, to restrain him when
over-ardent. Wilhelm had all along thoroughly realised that war with
Austria was among the inevitables between him and the accomplishment of
his aims, and had accepted it as such when it was yet afar off; but when
confronted full with it his nerve failed him, and Bismarck--engaged among
other things for just such an emergency--had to act as the spur to prick
the side of his master's intent. The spur having done its work Wilhelm was
himself again; he really enjoyed Königgrätz and would fain have dictated
peace to Austria from the Hofburg of Vienna. In his zeal for promoting
German unity at Prussia's bayonet point he lost his head a little, and on
Bismarck devolved, in his own words, "the ungrateful duty of diluting the
wine of victory with the water of moderation." One of the beads on the
surface of the former fluid was certainly thus early the Imperial idea;
but the time for its fulfilment Bismarck wisely judged not yet ripe. As it
approached four years later, the diary of the Crown Prince depicts with
unconscious humour the amusing progress of the "weakening" of Wilhelm's
opposition to the Kaisership; it weakened in good time quite out of the
sort of existence it had ever had, and Wilhelm was ready for the
Kaisership before the Kaisership was ready for him.

Bismarck as Premier began as he meant to go on, with uncompromising
masterfulness. The Chamber and the nation might probably have fallen in
willingly with Wilhelm's scheme for the reorganisation and reinforcement
of the army, had it been possible to divulge the intent in furtherance of
which the increased armament was being created. But since neither monarch
nor minister could even hint at the objects in view, the nation was set
against that increased armament for which it could discern no apparent
use. So the Chamber, session after session, went through the accustomed
formula of rejecting the military reorganisation bill as well as the
military expenditure estimates. "No surrender" was the steadfast motto of
Bismarck and his royal master. The constitution, such as it was, in effect
was suspended. The Upper House voted everything it was asked to vote;
loans were duly effected, the revenues were collected and the military
disbursements were made, right in the teeth of the popular will and the
veto of the representatives of the nation. Bismarck became the best-hated
man in Prussia. He was compared to Catiline and Strafford; he was
threatened with impeachment; the House and the nation clamoured to the
King for his dismissal and for the sovereign's return to the path of
constitutional government.

But the long "conflict-time" was drawing near its close, and the triumph
of the monarch and his minister over the constitution was approaching. The
policy of doing political evil that national advantage might come was, for
once at least, to stand vindicated. War with Austria as the outcome of
Bismarck's astute if unscrupulous statecraft was imminent when the hostile
parliament was dissolved; and a general election took place amidst the
fervid outburst of enthusiasm which the earlier victories of the Prussian
arms in the "Seven Weeks' War" stirred throughout the nation. The prospect
of war had been unpopular in the extreme, but the tidings of the first
success kindled the flame of patriotism. Bismarck lost for ever the title
of the "best-hated man in Prussia" in the loud volume of the enthusiastic
greetings of the populace, and on the day of Münchengrätz and Skalitz
Prussia now rejoiced to put her stubborn neck under the great minister's
foot.

The mingled truculence and tortuousness of the diplomacy by which Bismarck
sapped up to the short but decisive war, the issue of which gave to
Prussia the virtual headship of Germany and contributed so greatly toward
the unification of the Fatherland, constitute a striking illustration of
his methods in statecraft. He was fairly entitled to say, "_Ego qui
feci_." He had achieved his aim in defiance of the nation. The Court threw
its weight into the scale against the war; to the Crown Prince the strife
with Austria was notoriously repugnant. The King himself, as the crisis
approached, evinced marked hesitation. How triumphantly the event
vindicated the policy of the great Premier, is a matter of history. He has
frankly owned that if the decisive battle should have resulted in a
Prussian defeat, he had resolved not to survive the shipwreck of his hopes
and schemes. And there was a period in the course of the colossal struggle
of Königgrätz, when to many men it seemed that the wielders of the
needle-gun were having the worst of the battle. An awful hour for
Bismarck, conscious of the load of responsibility which he carried. With
great effort he could indeed maintain a calm visage, but his heart was
beating and every pulse of him throbbing. In his torture of suspense he
caught at straws. Moltke asked him for a cigar. As Bismarck handed him his
cigar case he snatched a shred of comfort from the inference that if
matters were very bad Moltke could hardly care to smoke. But Moltke was
not only in a frame for tobacco but Bismarck watched with what deliberate
coolness the great strategist inspected and smelt at cigar after cigar
before making his final selection; and he dared to infer that the man who
best understood the situation was in no perturbation as to the ultimate
outcome. The opportune arrival of the Crown Prince's army on the Austrian
right flank decided the business, and that arrival Bismarck was the first
to discern. Lines were dimly visible on the hither slope of the Chlum
heights; but they were pronounced to be ploughed ridges. Bismarck closed
his field-glasses with a snap and exclaimed, "No, these are not plough
furrows; the spaces are not equal; they are marching lines!" And he was
right.

Eighteen days after the victory of Königgrätz the Prussian hosts were in
line on the historic Marchfeld whence the spires of Vienna could be dimly
seen through the heat-haze. The soldiers were eager for the storm of the
famous lines of Florisdorf and King Wilhelm was keen to enter the Austrian
capital. But now the practical wisdom of Bismarck stepped in and his
arguments for moderation prevailed. The peace which ended the Seven Weeks'
War revolutionised the face of Germany. Austria accepted her utter exile
from Germany, recognised the dissolution of the old Bund, and consented to
non-participation in the new North German Confederation of which Prussia
was to have the unquestioned military and diplomatic leadership. Prussia
annexed Hanover, Electoral Hesse, Nassau, Sleswig and Holstein,
Frankfort-on-Main, and portions of Hesse-Darmstadt and Bavaria. Her
territorial acquisitions amounted to over 6500 square miles with a
population exceeding 4,000,000, and the states with which she had been in
conflict paid as war indemnity sums reaching nearly to £10,000,000
sterling. In a material sense, it had not been a bad seven weeks for
Prussia; in a sense other than material, she had profited incalculably
more. She was now, in fact as in name, one of the "Great Powers" of
Europe. The nation realised at length what manner of man this Bismarck was
and what it owed to him. When the inner history of the period comes to be
written, it will be recognised that at no time of his extraordinary career
did Bismarck prove himself a greater statesman than during the five days
of armistice in July 1866, when he fought his diplomatic Königgrätz in the
Castle of Nikolsburg and assuaged the wounds of the Austrian defeat by
terms the moderation of which went far to obliterate the memory of the
rancour of the recent strife.

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