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Updated: June 16, 2025
My case is in no wise parallel. I am absolutely without fear, regret, remorse, repentance, dread or terror in the matter of my killing Sergeant Burker. Exactly how and why I killed him, and how and why I am about to kill myself, I will now set forth, without the slightest exaggeration, special pleading or any other deviation from the truth....
He had been slaughtered by some roving joker, who had wrought upon him with a pick-handle. To one of his ears was pinned a scrap of greasy paper, upon which were scrambled the following sentiments in pencil- tracks: "The inqulosed boddy is that uv old Burker. Step litely, stranger, fer yer lize the mortil part uv wat you mus be sum da. Thers arrest for the weery!
Of course it was excellent material, all good riders and good shots, and well horsed. Burker and I were mounted by the R.H.A. Battery here, and the three drills we held, weekly, were seasons of delight to a horse-lover like myself. Now the horse I had was a high-spirited, powerful animal, and he possessed the trait, very common among horses, of hating to be pressed behind the saddle.
Then, one day, the wretched creature I called "butler" came to me with an air of great mystery and said: "Sahib, Sergeant Burker Sahib sending Mem Sahib bundle of flowers and chitti inside and diamond ring yesterday. His boy telling me and I seeing. He often coming here too when Sahib out. Both wicked peoples." I raised my hand to knock his lies down his throat and dropped it.
"Flanks of sections, proof." "Section leaders, proof." "Centre man, proof." "Prepare to mount." "Mount." "Sections right." "Sections left." The last two words were the last words Burker ever spoke.
"Dolores, Sergeant Burker met with an accident this morning on parade. He is dead. Let us never refer to him again." She fainted. I spent that night also in meditation, questioning myself and examining my soul with every honest endeavour to be not a self-deceiver. I came to the conclusion that I had acted rightly and in the only way in which a gentleman could act.
Wealth in all countries is the highest possible morality; but you carry the doctrine to so great an excess, that you scarcely suffer the poor man to exist at all. If he take a walk in the country, there's the Vagrant Act; and if he has not a penny to hire a cellar in town, he's snapped up by a Burker, and sent off to the surgeons in a sack.
If I said, "Go and live with your Burker," I should be committing a bigger crime than hers, for if he did take her in, it would not be for long. I sat the night through, pondered the question carefully, looked at it from all points of view and decided that Burker must die. Also that he must not drag me to jail or the scaffold as he went to his doom.
Returning to my lonely house, I sat me down and pondered this appalling event that had come like a torrent, sweeping away familiar landmarks of experience, idea, and belief. I was conscious of a dull anger against Burker and then against God. Why should He allow Burker to haunt me?... Why should Evil triumph?... Was I haunted?
I held that drill, with five sections of living men, and a single file of dead, who manoeuvred to my word. When I gave the order "With Numbers Three for action dismount," or "Right-hand men, for action dismount," Burker remained mounted. When I dismounted the whole troop, Burker remained mounted. Otherwise he drilled precisely as Number Twenty-one would have drilled in a troop of twenty-one men.
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