Page:The Indian Mutiny of 1857.djvu/228

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200
Nana Sáhib massacres His Prisoners.

to one, and occupying a carefully prepared position, but they lay down happy because conscious of deserving. Well might Havelock tell them, as he did in the order he issued on the occasion, that 'he was satisfied and more than satisfied with them.' The troops and the general were alike worthy of one another. The loss sustained by the victors in this fierce contest was about 100 killed and wounded. Amongst those who passed away was Stuart Beatson, the Adjutant-General of the force, a daring and most accomplished officer, who fell a victim to cholera. Knowing his end approaching, he had yet insisted in following, on a tumbril, Barrow's cavalry into action. So keen was his soldierly perception that, despite his agony, he had pointed out to Barrow, at a critical phase of the action, an opportunity for a cavalry charge. That officer had promptly availed himself of the hint. In the very presence of the destroyer, whose clutch he knew to be upon him, Beatson could yet devote all his energies to the interests of his country. Such men are priceless. But the campaigns of the Crimea and Indian Mutiny proved that Great Britain had a store of them.

Meanwhile, Náná Sáhib had by a foul and barbarous massacre deprived the troops who had defeated him in the field of the most ardently desired fruits of their victory. When he saw, on the 15th, that the British soldiers were not to be withstood, when they had forced his position on the Pándu Nadí, and when he recognised that they would assail him in Kánhpur, he gave orders for the massacre of the women and children still confined in the little house I have described. These, with some fugitives from Fathgarh, numbered nearly 200. They were all, without one exception, brutally murdered by the myrmidons of the Náná, and their bodies were cast into a deep well adjacent to the house. The massacre was