The outbreak at Meerut not merely altered the date, it changed the character of the revolt. The powder-magazine exploded, so to speak, in separate patches, and at intervals spread over weeks. It was this circumstance—added to the fact that the Sepoys had rejected the greased cartridges, and with them the Enfield rifle, against which Brown Bess was at a fatal disadvantage—that, speaking humanly, robbed the Mutiny of half its terror, and helped to save the British Empire in India.
But, even allowing for all this, a powder-magazine—although it explodes only by instalments—is a highly uncomfortable residence while the explosion is going on; and seldom before or since, in the long stretch of human history, have human courage and fortitude been put to such a test, as in the case of the handful of British soldiers and civilians who held the North-West Provinces for England during the last days of May 1857.
Sir George Campbell, who was in Simla at the time, has told the story of how he stood one day, early in June, beside the telegraph operator in Umballa, and listened while the wire, to use his own words, “seemed to repeat the experience of Job.” “First we heard that the whole Jullunder brigade had mutinied, and were in full march in our direction, on the way to Delhi. While that message was still being spoken, came another message, to tell us that the troops in Rajpootana had mutinied, and that Rohilcund was lost; following which, I heard that the Moradabad regiment had gone, and that my brother and his young wife had been obliged to fly.”
Let it be remembered that the revolted districts equal in area France, Austria, and Prussia put together; in population they exceeded them. And over this great area, and through this huge population, the process described by the telegrams, to whose rueful syllables Sir George Campbell listened, was being swiftly and incessantly repeated. The British troops did not number 22,000 men, and they were scattered over a hundred military stations, and submerged in a population of 94,000,000. Let the reader imagine fifteen or sixteen British regiments sprinkled in microscopic fragments over an area so vast, and amongst populations so huge!
The Sepoy army in Bengal numbered 150,000 men, and within six weeks of the shot which killed Colonel Finnis at Meerut, of its 120 regiments of horse and foot, only twenty-five remained under the British flag, and not five of these could be depended upon! A whole army, in a word, magnificently drilled, perfectly officered, strong in cavalry, and yet more formidable in guns, was in open and murderous revolt. Some idea of the scale and completeness of the Mutiny can be gathered from the single fact that every regiment of regular cavalry, ten regiments of irregular cavalry out of eighteen, and sixty-three out of seventy-four regiments of infantry, then on the strength of the Bengal army, disappeared finally and completely from its roster!