The Sun.
London, England, 1858-10-28 00:00:00

THE BLACK HOLE OF DUM-DUM:

The one point which supplies the whole popular
history of our eastern metropolis is the Black Hole of
Calcutta, the horrible sufferings of which are made
known by tales, by paintings, and by engravings,
and which furnishes sanitary authorities with the
trite example of death by suffocation in a burning
climate. This event happened in the year 1756;
and was commemorated by a monument, which,
being considered offensive to the mild Hindoo, and,
we have now reason to believe, distasteful and re-
proachful to the Indian Government, was removed,
and, in the year 1.54, the 100th anniversary of this
dreadful atrocity was commemorated by solemn
prayer and service. In India the Black Hole of
Calcutta, one would think, could not be forgotten ;
and yet the very efforts of the Government to
banish it from memory make one fearful that its
impressions have been effaced. There, at all events,
we should expect that Englishmen would not be
deprived of air, of the breath of life, by confine-
ment to narrow cells, and to the swiftly-engendered
pestilence of fever ; but soldiers in barracks, and
interlopers when in the hands of native officials,
have been made to know sufferings comparable to
those inflicted by the tyrant of Bengal. While the
most benevolent feelings have swayed the Admini-
stration in preserving the spirit and the semblance
of generosity to the natives ; while noble and dis-
interested motives have guided its members in
legislating for our subjects ; those very feelings and
motives, generating a tenderness of showing favour
or undue preference to a conquering race, have too
often covered a neglect of the wants of our soldiers
and the rights of our citizens.

We are not moved in saying this by a feeling of
anger or a spirit of faction ; we make allowances
for the policy of the East India Company and the
impression they produced on the minds of their
satellites and servants, and yet it may be that, as
they had succeeded soubahs and nabobs, they
thought they still owed allegiance to the Mogul of
Delhi, whose impress they kept on their coins, and
owed a local fealty to the communities of Brahmins
and Mahommedans they administered. Thus they
became as much the subjects of the lex loci as their
vassals, and were vassals, and subjects, and slaves.
It was an amiable weakness to become nabobs ; it
was perhaps a greater weakness to abstain from
torture, when all the native machinery of torture
was kept in orderly working ; but, altogether, the
position of the Company was one of political and
social weakness, the continuance of which much
longer would have been the fruitful nursery of
more political crimes on the part of the Company
and on the part of its subjects. Heaven alone
knows from what atrocities the single government
has saved us—from atrocities towards Hindoo and
English, from all the crimes that political weakness
and political cowardice are heirs to ; and this is the
heritage the Company has left to Lord Stanley.
Lord Stanley, in no ungenerous spirit, has striven
to spare the Company from reproach, and has ren-
dered the highest tribute to its motives ; but he
must not deceive himself or the public as to the
task before him, the great responsibilities which
the Company has created for him, and the shame,
disappointment, and disgrace, greater than the
glory, the power, and the prerogatives of his office,
if he fail to fulfil* what he has promised, and the
natives expect at his hands.
We say again, we seek not to speak in anger of
the Government when we dwell upon the fearful
atrocities which the late mail has made known
as having blackened the name of Dum-Dum,
and made its memory a name of horror to the men
who, in the fields of India, are contending for our
honour and the safety of our empire. We are told
that the wives and children of the successive regi-
ments of English soldiers landed at Calcutta,
unable to follow their husbands and fathers to the
field, have been crowded into the cantonments of
Dum-Dum, till nearly two thousand have been there
gathered at a tine, in numbers beyond the possi-
bility of the place to accommodate them. For the
women there was bare space, for the tender chil-
dren no adequate room and convenience. Of the
consequences the Government were warned by the
surgeons and the press, and the remedy, of re-
moval to Darjeeling, was laid before them ; but it
is to be presumed the fear of subjecting the natives
to the expense, and of showing such favour to
foreign women and children at such a time of re-
volt, led to the warning passing unheeded. We
now hear the frightful news that five hundred
women and children have swiftly perished by the
pestilence. Horrified at the consequences, the
head of the Government rushed to the canton-
ments, and earnestly applied himself to stay the
further slaughter, and remove the remaining suf-
ferers from the jaws of death. Too late for
mothers, for hundreds whose children will life-long
mourn their loss ; too late for hundreds of infants
and children dead and yet to die, whose fond
memories will foster griefs that time will canker
and not cure ; too late to save the widower and the
stricken father from sufferings no medal will com-
pensate, and no pension buy off—wounds not of
the body, which may be soothed, but of the mind,
which heal not, and to which glory and honours
are no ministers.

All is dark and fearful in this tragedy. Early in
the year the Government were first warned by
their officers ; and in this country it is now months
ago that General Tremenheere was giving evidence
before the chairman and directors of the Company,
and other members of Parliament, as to the neces-
sity of placing the soldiers' children in a school at
Darjeeling. These warnings were no vague predic-
tions, made on the chance speculation of some event
happening at some time or other to give them effect,
or lingering on to be forgotten and to escape re-
proach. In the world of science pestilence is to
be foretold and reckoned upon as surely as the
orbit of some wandering star—cholera moves in its
orbit with satellites in its train, and fever rotates
as time and season roll on. In June, as the Go-
vernment had been warmed, disease made its ap-
pearance ; through July it increased, and yet bore
on through August.
The scenes that took place before and after the
catastrophe were in their nature appalling ; in
buildings, in space and accommodation inadequate,
were crowded decent English women and the drabs
of the streets, filthy Irish and their countrywomen
from the better ranks, the neglected Highland
women—the children of all of these, tidy or dirty,
well or ill-behaved, as their mothers had trained
them, and in such a throng all power of separation
and the very bases of discipline were utterly want-
ing. Three sergeants and two clergymen were
left night and day fruitlessly to toil at their noble
labours, to combat with ignorance, vice, and disease.
Many of the women, the scum of England and
Ireland, already given to drunkenness, found ready
indulgence in a fatal vice. Dirtiness—a fatal
habit in India—was the habit' of too many
of the ignorant ; and very many, accustomed
at home to wander about with uncovered
heads, so exposed themselves to peril. Vice and
ignorance maintained their sway ; and it is said,
scenes of disorder took place of a character too dis-
graceful to be recorded, and an amount of moral
and physical suffering was witnessed to which at
home, happily, we can present no parallel. By
these influences the officials were baffled, and, over-
wrought in ministering to the dying, they were
no longer able to save men from death. The Govern-
ment spared no medicine, it denied the people no
food, but denied them air, climate, shelter, health.
During these many months the women and chil-
dren could gradually have been conveyed to Dar-
jeeling, where, within the distance of 400 miles from
Calcutta, the children of powerful officials and
wealthy residents are brought up in one of the
finest countries of the world. There the children
would have been at school, as the happier few aro
at Kussowlie and Mount Aboo by the munificence
of the Lawrences, and many of the mothers and
their children would have obtained welcome employ-
ment in the families of invalid residents, and in the
establishments of the settlers. On the enlargement
of the depot many of them would have rendered
invaluable aid as nurses of our wounded soldiers.
True it is, that though the Government has in hand
the provision of better transit, the journey is tedious
and expensive ; but the steam-boat would take the
travellers half-way, and it -was no great task for
the authorities to conquer 150 miles of road, though

there is waterway to the foot of the hills. Had
General Tremenheere and his coadjutors been Hs'
tened to, by this time a thousand women and chil-
dren would have been saved; for let none believe
that the five hundred so recorded as dead are
all the victims that pestilence will claim, for even
those who have survived for the time will drop
hereafter week by week and month by month;
hlad these lives been saved, a noble help well'
have been given to an infant colony, for which the
Government, which has for many years been
anxious to give encouragement, could not so read-lb'
enlist settlers from England.
Did this sad tale stand by itself it might be read
with silent sorrow, in the wish to banish it from
our minds. We can give no such poor comfort'
It has happened in the east, within reach of Cal.
outta—it has happened in the west, on the waters
of the Indus—it is the tale of every cantonment le
India—it is what Ronald Martin and Julius Jet'
freys have disinterestedly laboured for years to set
at rest, and for which they have still to labour, for
the re-construction of the Indian army will not be
complete till the English soldier is cared for as
Runjeet Singh would have cared for him, and the
main stations of our army are placed in the Hires'
layas, the outlines of the Hindoo Koosh, the
luga range, and the Ghauts.
We have spoken of many of these poor women,
living and dead, as vicious and depraved, but We
cannot forget whose they are and who are the
fathers of their little neglected children. Magi
even of the worst, are the wives of the best or
ducted of our soldiers, of the older men who have
withstood temptation and have good conduct re'
wards, of the medal men of our former campaigns'
The women, too, more particularly, are the wives
of the non .commissioned officers, of those well-de'
serving men to whom we are so much indebted far
the discipline and prowess of our own regiments
and of our native levies. If, too, we have
spoken of those whose life, having been one of
temptations, they are now the sacrifice to those
temptations, who cannot bethink himself of the
hard life, the thrift, the pinching, the toil, travel'
homeless wandering and patient suffering of the
soldier's poor wife, with her little family, tried as
none now in England are tried, as none in wilt's
was once poor Ireland are tried—women who live
a life of penury, to share their husband's scant Pen'
sion till widowhood, and then to reach the work-
house. Few are there of these well-behaved toiling
women, even the wives of non-commissioned officers'
who, in their unsettled life, can obtain any means
of achieving a better condition for themselves or
their children. Soldiers' wives are truly of the
poor, for whom charity barely steps in, when the
triumph of the nation has been won by the wide''
hood of many. What must be the feeling of these
men, for whom our love has been earned, and 0,1/
whom our lavish praise is boastingly bestowed'
when they hear the saddening news of these cols•
mities, when every mail that leaves takes hole
tidings of their glory, when every mail they gee
brings tidings of the loss of those they love ? 03,
young soldier goes to the field with no care for this,
but not unmindful of the sufferings of women he boss'
known, of children with whom he has played
soldiers will play, and of the sorrows of men olderand more honoured than himself, whose present 1:
is the glass in which he sees his own future. 'IV'
older men—there are noble Highlanders
them, whose wives were from their native hills
there are gallant Irish, of whom their mothers were
in earliest years the youthful brides, the sweet
,
hearts of the same townland—there are men
grey hairs, whose elder sons fell in the Crimea and
at Lucknow, and whose last young favourites
died unseen, unkissed, unblest at Dum Dum. e
These are the men on whom the tardiness of 11'
Government has fallen, and the sufferers ersa
many ; one mourns a wife, and one a child, 9120
moodily a man drops upon the march, or ills';uo
desperately to the fight, and throws away a rife mit
more. None will think these men do not feel., uto
those must know the soldier's life to summon
their thoughts, as he does, in the lone watch-h°l
of the night, or that dull waiting-time of doubt an
hope before the light, the memory of a woman I°''e4 a
for years and far away—of children starved, Of
the babe whose features, perhaps, the fortunes
that fight may leave to him unknown for ever.
There is a sad and solemn pleasure in these
thoughts, a long-enduring hope and steadfastness
in their contemplation ; but when those hopes 7g
,tx
shattered, and their object lies in some coffin
away, then is that man desolate, with the ste
dictates of military duty to check his grief, anto
nought but the rough kindness of his comrades
soothe such woe.