We then went to see the slaughter-house in which the unfortunate women and children had been barbarously murdered, and the well into which their mangled bodies were afterwards flung. Our guide was a native of the ordinary camp-follower class, who could speak intelligible barrack-room English. He told us that he had been born in a battery of European artillery, in which his forefathers had been shoeblacks for unknown generations, and his name, he stated, was "Peshawarie," because he had been born in Peshawur, when the English occupied it during the first advance to Caubul. His apparent age coincided with this statement. He claimed to have been in Sir Hugh Wheeler's entrenchment with the artillery all the time of the siege, and to have had a narrow escape of his life at the last. He told us a story which I have never seen mentioned elsewhere, that the Nânâ Sâhib, through a spy, tried to bribe the commissariat bakers who had remained with the English to put arsenic into the bread, which they refused to do, and that after the massacre of the English at the _ghât_ the Nânâ had these bakers taken and put alive into their own ovens, and there cooked and thrown to the pigs. These bakers were Mahommedans. Of course, I had no means of testing the truth of this statement.[3] Our guide showed no desire to minimise the horrors of the massacre and the murders to which he said he had been an eye-witness. However, from the traces, still too apparent, the bare facts, without exaggeration, must have been horrible enough. But with reference to the women and children, from the cross-questions I put to our guide, I then formed the opinion, which I have never since altered, that most of the European women had been most barbarously murdered, but not dishonoured, with the exception of a few of the young and good-looking ones, who, our guide stated, were forcibly carried off to become Mahommedans. But I need not dwell on these points. These are the opinions I formed in October, 1857, three months after the massacre, and nothing which I have since learnt during my thirty-five years' residence in India has led me to alter them.
Most of the men of my company visited the slaughter-house and well, and what we there saw was enough to fill our hearts with feelings which I need not here dwell on; it was long before those feelings could be controlled. On the date of my visit a great part of the house had not been cleaned out; the floors of the rooms were still covered with congealed blood, littered with trampled, torn dresses of women and children, shoes, slippers, and locks of long hair, many of which had evidently been severed from the living scalps by sword-cuts. But among the traces of barbarous torture and cruelty which excited horror and a desire for revenge, one stood out prominently beyond all others. It was an iron hook fixed into the wall of one of the rooms in the house, about six feet from the floor. I could not possibly say for what purpose this hook had originally been fixed in the wall. I examined it carefully, and it appeared to have been an old fixture, which had been seized on as a diabolic and convenient instrument of torture by the inhuman wretches engaged in murdering the women and children. This hook was covered with dried blood, and from the marks on the whitewashed wall, it was evident that a little child had been hung on to it by the neck with its face to the wall, where the poor thing must have struggled for long, perhaps in the sight of its helpless mother, because the wall all round the hook on a level with it was covered with the hand-prints, and below the hook with the foot-prints, in blood, of a little child.