Captain Seppings asked leave to read prayers before they died. His hands were untied; one arm hung broken, but, standing up, he groped in his pocket for a little prayer-book, and commenced to read—but what prayer or psalm, none now can tell. “After he had read,” as the witness tells the story, “he shut the book, and the sahibs shook hands all round. Then the Sepoys fired. One sahib rolled one way, one another as they sat. But they were not dead, only wounded. So they went in and finished them off with swords.” When all was over, the twenty-four memsahibs, with their four children, were sent to swell the little crowd of captives in Savada-house. Some seventeen days of weeping life yet intervened between them and the fatal Well.
The story of the final act in the great tragedy at Cawnpore cannot be told without some account of events outside Cawnpore itself. A relieving force had been organised at Calcutta, of which Neill’s Fusileers at Allahabad were the advance guard; but a leader was wanted, and on June 17 Sir Patrick Grant brought Havelock, “the dust of Persia still in the crevices of his sword-handle,” to the Governor-General, saying, “Your Excellency, I have brought you the man.”
Havelock was sixty-two years of age when the great chance of his life came to him. A little man, prim, erect, alert, quick-footed, stern-featured, with snow-white moustache and beard. Havelock, no doubt, had his limitations. A strain of severity ran through his character. “He was always,” says one who served under him, “as sour as if he had swallowed a pint of vinegar, except when he was being shot at, and then he was as blithe as a schoolboy out for a holiday.” There is a touch of burlesque, of course, in that sentence; but Havelock was, no doubt, austere of temper, impatient of fools, and had a will that moved to its end with something of the fiery haste and scorn of obstacles proper to a cannon-ball. He was fond, too, of making Napoleonic orations to his men, and had a high-pitched, carrying voice, which could make itself audible to a regiment. And the British soldier in fighting mood is rather apt to be impatient of oratory.
But Havelock was a trained and scientific soldier, audacious and resolute in the highest degree; a deeply religious man, with a sense of duty of the antique sort, that scorned ease, and reckoned life, when weighed against honour, as a mere grain of wind-blown dust. And Havelock, somehow, inspired in his men a touch of that sternness of valour we associate with Cromwell’s Ironsides.