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Entering the garden, they avoided the terrace in front of the house, and sauntering through the groups of people who had gathered discussing the latest news, they took their seat in a secluded corner. Bathurst thought of the last time he had been there, when there had been a fete given by the Rajah to the residents of Cawnpore, and contrasted the present with the past.
Those they did meet passed them with the usual salutation. There was nothing strange in a party of peasants passing along the road. They might have been at work at Cawnpore, and be now returning to their native village to get away from the troubles there. After it became dark they went into a clump of trees half a mile distant from a village they could see along the road.
At length, towards the end of October, they reached Allahabad, at the junction of the Jumna and Ganges; and while one division was left to garrison that place, the remainder proceeded on towards Cawnpore by land.
The British troops who defended the intrenchments of Cawnpore for so long a period, and against such fearful odds and so treacherous an enemy, consisted of 60 men of the 84th Regiment, 74 men of the 32nd, 15 men of the Madras Fusiliers, and 59 men of the Company's artillery, besides the officers attached to the sepoy regiments.
Meanwhile reinforcements were arriving from England. In November Sir Colin Campbell reached Cawnpore at the head of a considerable army. He left General Windham with two thousand men to take charge of the intrenchment at Cawnpore, and then advanced against Lucknow with five thousand men and thirty guns.
I remained in Cawnpore about eight or ten days, and the place was at that time the seat of festivity and splendour. Dinners, balls, and routs, followed each other in quick succession, so that, at the end of the ten days, I was completely exhausted by dissipation. On the eleventh day, I again bent my way to Saugar, to join the division.
The Residency and its surroundings formed an irregular, lozenge-shaped inclosure, having its acute angles nearly north and south, the southern extremity being contiguous to the Cawnpore Road, and the northern point approaching near to the iron bridge over the river Goomtee.
His small force was weakened by heat and fever and reduced by cholera and dysentery; while the enemy occupied strong positions on both flanks. In the middle of August he fell back upon Cawnpore. During the four months that followed the revolt at Delhi on May 11th, all political interest was centred at the ancient capital of the sovereigns of Hindustan.
The station of Cawnpore was commanded by Sir Hugh Wheeler, a distinguished general in the company's service, who was verging on his seventieth year. He had spent fifty-four years in India, and had served only with native troops. He must have known the sepoys better than any other European in India.
After being introduced to Major Renaud the boys went to the tents allotted to their corps, which were already pitched, and Major Warrener asked the officers, and as many of the volunteers as his tent would hold, to listen to the account of the massacre of Cawnpore, which was now for the first time authentically told; for hitherto only native reports had come down from the city.
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