The Sun.
London, England, 1858-03-29 00:00:00

is encamped some artillery on the march under Col.
I David%Wood, and the place contains large sheds
for soldiers en route.

CAWNPORE, Fei. 12.
The morning was just dawning, sharp and cold
and gray as we approached Cawnpore. Ilo• ' -
in vain for any evidence that we were on the 3 os
to a great city, though I could see many trao e.
the .existenee of a large camp. It was ee
melancholy interest that I gazed with stfai ei
eyes at each site,. known hitherto only by name, as
one after another they were pointed out by my corn-
Pinion. They were all masses of ruins. "See
that long white building all riddled with cannon
shot, and battered on every aide, with the little
broken parapet of earth before it ; that is Wheeler's
ihtrencriment." Strange as it may appear, from
the4istance at which we were the whole range of
these ill-fated buildings looked exactly like the
barracks, or what, we called the" White Budding',"
of Sebastopol after The siege. The spot was ill-
chosen for defence—a long quadrangular block of
houses on a level plain, without cover, and open to
fire from numerous houses all around it. Had the
maeazine been selected the position would have
been More defensible, eendethe enemy would have
bean deprived of the guns which they used with
fatal effect. But Sir Hugh Wheeler, like most old
In oaus, despised the enemy who appea'ed before
him, or at all evens- he disdained ..ban loving the
station as if from fear of anything they could do,
and prepared to defend a position which he scarcely
thought they would astral We all know the sail
result, which was br ,light home to usewi h re-
newed force when we filled the road from 'he house
to the river wite an irn 'gentry prose-sion of men,
women, anti children marching dowu to the boats,
already covered by the ambushed guns or their
cowardly and ferocious. enemy.
.Our road lay
through a flat, baked, burnt up country studded
with trees. On our left lay` the ;whitewashed
the
which Wheeler occupied. Before us, on
the right as upon the I,ft, we saw after a few
minutes' drive a scene of tremendous desolation—
house after house roofless, wiudowle4s, shattered
and root iu all directions, th-, p irticees and veran-
dahs' lying in fragments befce e them in what once
were their peculiar gardens-1 mg ranger of barracks',
storehouses, large bungalews broken up piecemeal,
anti covering tee site with heaps of broken brick,
earth, and dirty rubbish—chtece p'ereed by shot,
end open to every sun ray, the huge refters alone
standing—Government and mlitary offices mere
mounds of disintegrated masonry and 'he unsightly
mud walls of uativeresidences—lhe stumps of trees,
the withered branches of which were lying in every
enc'osure. Again E was reminded of the lost
mistress of the Euxine, and, failing to find a
parallel there for all his destruction, endeavoured
to recall the. descriptions by ancient writers of
cities devastated by barbaric conquerors.
Cewnpere, however, was only an extensive col-
lection of de• ached bungalows a-id offices spread
over an immense space of ground, and here and
there concentrated into piles of barracks, m igazin es,
and offices. The utter ugline'ss of brick when de-
prived of its • greatcoat of stucco, and the grew er
ugliness of mud walls in decay are there pi iles-ly
expo,ed by the band of the marauder and by the
canner, shot. But for the sad interest attached to
these hideous mounds, which forcibly remand one
of the unhoarded spaces in London where improve-
ment commissioners are at work, labelled "Rubbish
may be shot here," Cawnpore would be a most
vulgar, commonplace, agereg +to of uninhabitable
edifices. We drive on a little further and on our
right, amid many broken bungalows, there is
visible an enclosure with broken walls and shattered
gate posts, in the centre of which is a heap of brick, '
mud, and white plaster about two or three feet
leg!), scattered over 15 or 20 square yards of ground.
Close to this heap there are some leafless trees,
and on the topmast branch of one of these, just
over the centre of the mound, with its foul plumage
lighted up by the rays of the rising sun, s is a
horrid vulture. A few yards beyond this was of
the ruins of what had once been a house there rose
a ramp or sloping nesund of earth from the level of
tee ground to the e lge of a circular brick wall, the
top of which was covered in, and c'ca e by the well .
stood a monumental cro,s. It was scarcely ueces-
sary for my compani, n to say, "Teere is the house
and just beyond tt is the well." We pissed on by
the blackened wall of an absurdly tine masonic
lodge, and by the ruins of a very spacious
building called the Assembly-ro,uum, just op-
posite the ace/ie. of the •butcherr; . by a house
close to it, in which the Neva lived after
the omupation of the piece by the sepoys ; arid
then th ough the rem taus of mud gooses and bun-
gelows, t 11 we reached the ruins of the Caw's-
po 0 he'd. Everything around us was dilapi-
dated—not a pane of glass in the !Token window,
the doors and ceilings broken, and here an f there
the liolea made by cannon shot; but we were glad
to find that some of the rooms were unoccupied,
and that such things as breakfast and dinner were
not unknown. The scene from the hotel—you
must dismiss from your mini all -associations con-
nected with the use of the word in Eerope, so far
as the outward aspect of the place is concerned—
was curious. Ruins—ruins, n :thing but ruins,
amid which troops of vultures were gorging them-
selves, mingled with buzzards, kite=, "adjutants,"
-and carrion crop's; a few tows pitched inside the
compound by travellers en route, vast processions
of cars drawn by oxen, and files of elephants and
camels passing along the dusty plains which were
swept continually by blasts that whirled before
them clouds of fine earth, brickdust, and the p3W-
dered su face of the compounds. The first thing
that struck me was the enormous number of
natives in our service and the prodigious number
of anima's in attendauce on such a small fragment
of our fore'. There were, indeed, no less than
55,000 or 60,000 camp followers, servants, bullock-
drivers, elephant-keepers, grass-cutters, syces, and
camel men attached to this force ; and as yet what
I have seen gives me not the faintest idea of the
impedimenta, animate and inanimate, of au Indian
army. Before breakfast we walked over to inspect
the site if the horrid butchery which has ren-
dered the sepoy mutiny infamous for ever. The
house in which it took place is now in ruins ; it
was pulled down to clear the grounds for the guns
of the tete de pout across the Ganges, and the
very outline of the walls is scarcely traceable. It
was originally built for and used as a zenana,
an enclosed residence, with a court-yard in the
centre, in which the stump of a tree was still stand-
ing ; and off this open space were the rooms in
which the massacre took place. The plaster of the
walls was still lying about in patches, but I could
not detect any trace of blood. Bits of cloth and
of women's dresses were stll visible amid the rub.
bish ; but there were none of the more painful
tokens of the dreadful tragedy which had been
enacted where we stood. There is reason to be-
lieve that the writing on the plaster, the purport of
which you know, did not exist when Havelock's
force entered the place. I have spoken with officers
who examined the walls, and every scratch in the
side of the rooms, ant' they declare that the appeal
to vengeance which is attributed to one of the
.wretched victims was not to be seen immediately
after we returned to Cawnpore, and that it had
been traced on the wall by some person who visited
the place subsequently. I shall hereafter mention
a circumstance which favours that supposition. As
there was nothing left of the house but a heap of
broken b icks and plaster and some few stumps of
brick pi!lsrs, we walked a few paces farther to the
wed in the rear of house, into which the bodies of
the slaug'atered women and children were thrown
by the murderers. It is now bricked over, and
there only remains a small circular ridge of brick
marking the wall of the well, which was not more
than nine or ten feet across. Beneath refit the
mangled remains of our countrywomen and their
little ones, and staeding there e e could well realise
the strength of teat indignation which steels the
hearts of our soldiers against the enemy. Within
a few feet of "the well," surrounded by a small
wooden paling, there stands a stone cross on a flat
slab, on two courses of masonry, the inscription on
which tells its abry

"In memor. of the women and children of her Ma-
jesty's 32d It.-gunent, who were slaughtered near this
a ,ot ou toe 16.11 of July, A.D. 1857. This memorial
was erected by 20 men of toe €awe recimett, who were
pas•ing through Cawnpore, November 21st, 1857."

This in•cription is engrave I on the upright
part of the slab, which is in the form of a Maltese
cross, within a circle of stone. In the quadrants
of this circle are inscribed, in red letters and in
the old Englis character, "1 believe in the
Emsumction of the Dead." The conception
and execution of this mewoiial were most credi-
table. In the ranks of a marching regiment were
foiled "20 men" who, with good feeling and ex-
cellent taste, have, impromptu, raised a memorial
of toe Cawnpore massacre, the sight of which must
touch one more deeply than any elaborate and
costly effort. We_retraced our steps through the
ruins, and after !breakfa-t proceeded to the camp
of the Commander-in-Chief, which is placed far
outside the city, near to the tete di) pont. The ap.
preach to it is marked by trains of oxen and bag-
gage animals, hackeries and bullock carts, dooliea-
cr litters for the wounded. Certainly the Cona.