ent of the
surviving women and children with their unfortunate fellow-sufferers
from Futtyghur in the Assembly Rooms at Cawnpore. Here they were all
massacred.

The army of relief was approaching, but it was too late to arrest
the awful conclusion to the defence of Cawnpore. Havelock advanced
from Allahabad with but 1300 men, including the 64th, 78th, and 1st
Madras Fusiliers, and after four severe skirmishes at Futtehpore and
elsewhere, during which the 64th and 78th carried a battery of guns,
and “went on with sloped arms like a wall till within a hundred yards
and not a shot was fired,” while, “At the word ‘Charge!’ they broke
like a pack of eager hounds, and the village was taken in an instant.”
When the column had reached Cawnpore, it had marched 126 miles in eight
days and captured 24 guns!

Ample vengeance was taken for the massacre. The sight alone of the
room where it had taken place inflamed the men beyond expression.
Old soldiers wept, others divided locks of the hair of their murdered
countrywomen and vowed revenge. There was little quarter given by
Havelock’s column from that time forward.

General Neill was left in charge of the station, and ruled with an
iron and a merciless hand.[65] His orders were: “Whenever a rebel is
caught, he is to be instantly tried, and unless he can prove a defence,
he is to be sentenced to be hanged at once; but the chief rebels or
ringleaders I make first clean up a certain portion of the pool of
blood, still two inches deep, in the street where the fearful murder
and mutilation of women took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to
the high-caste natives; they think by doing so they doom their souls
to perdition. Let them think so! My object is to inflict a fearful
punishment for a revolting, cowardly, and barbarous deed, and to strike
_terror_ into these rebels. The first caught was a subadar, or native
officer, a high-caste Brahmin, who tried to resist my order to clean up
the very blood he had helped to shed. But I made the provost-marshal
do his d