them and their city to fire and sword, and have left only a ruin behind.
The practice of “blowing men from guns” in India during the Rebellion also needs a few words of explanation. The act has been much misunderstood, especially in this country. I have met with strange assertions upon this matter, some of which assumed that the Sepoys were actually rammed into the guns, and then fired out! and too often has it been said or supposed that the act was perpetrated as a refinement of cruelty. Both of these opinions are mistaken. The mode of death in this case was, usually, to sink a stake in the ground, and tie the man to it; the gun was behind him, from six to eight feet distant, loaded with blank cartridge, and, when discharged, it dissipated the man's remains. It was a quick and painless mode of death, for the man was annihilated, as it were, ere he knew that he was struck. But what the Sepoys objected to in it was, the dishonor done to the body, its integrity being destroyed, so that the Shraad could not be performed for them. [The Shraad is a funeral ceremony, which all caste Hindoos invest with the highest significance, as essential to their having a happy transmigration; the dissipation of the mortal remains of a man thus executed would necessarily render its importance impossible, and so expose the disembodied ghost, in their opinion, to a wandering, indefinite condition in the other world, which they regard as dreadful; and, to avoid this liability, when condemned to die they would plead, as a mercy, to be hung or shot with the musket—any mode—but not to be blown away.]
Knowing that this was the only procedure of which their wretched consciences were afraid, two of the English officers—one of them being General Corbett, at Lahore—threatened this mode of punishment upon Sepoy troops whom they could not otherwise restrain from rebelling. Corbett did, at last, execute it upon twelve of the ringleaders of a Sepoy regiment which, during the height of his anxiety for the safety of the Punjab, rose one morning and shot their officers, and marched for Delhi. He took two Sikh regiments and pursued and scattered them, bringing back these leaders for
