that soon there would be a dust with the new master at Columbo. Seven years after our debut on that stage, the dust began. By the way, it is perhaps an impertinence to remark it, but there certainly is a sympathy between the motions of the Kandyan potentate and our European enemy Napoleon. Both pitched into us in 1803, and we pitched into both in 1815. That we call a coincidence. How the row began was thus :-Some incomprehensible intrigues had been proceeding for a time between the British governor or commandant, or whatever he might be, and the Kandyan prime minister. This minister, who was a noticeable man with large gray eyes, was called Pilamé Tilawé. We write his name after Mr. Bennett; but it is quite useless to study the pronunciation of it, seeing that he was hanged in 1812 (the year of Moscow), -a fact for which we are thankful as often as we think of it. Pil. (surely Tilawé cannot be pronounced Garlic ?) managed to get the king's head into Chancery, and then fibbed him. Why Major-General M'Dowall (then commanding our forces) should collude with Pil. Garlic is past our understanding. But so it was. Pil. said that a certain prince, collaterally connected with the royal house, by name Mootto Sawmé, who had fled to our protection, was, or might be thought to be, the lawful king. Upon which the British general proclaimed him. What followed is too shocking to dwell upon. Scarcely had Mootto, apparently a good creature, been inaugurated, when Pil. proposed his deposition,—to which General M'Dowall consented, and his own (Pil.'s) elevation to the throne. It is like a dream to say that this also was agreed to. King Pil. the First, and, God be thanked! the last, was raised to the―musnud, we suppose, or whatsoever they call it in Pil.'s jargon. So far there was little but farce; now comes the tragedy. A certain Major Davie was placed with a very inconsiderable garrison in the capital of the Kandyan empire, called by name Kandy. This officer, whom Mr. Bennett somewhere calls the "gallant," capitulated upon terms, and had the inconceivable folly to imagine that a base Kandyan chief would think himself bound by these terms. One of them was that he (Major Davie) and his troops should be allowed to retreat unmolested upon Columbo. Accordingly, fully armed and accoutred, the British troops began their march. At Wattépolowa a proposal was made to Major Davie that Mootto Sawmé (our protegé and instrument) should be delivered up to the Kandyan tiger. Oh, sorrow for the British name! he was delivered. Soon after, a second proposal came, that the British soldiers should deliver up their arms, and should march back to Kandy. It makes an Englishman shiver with indignation to hear that even this demand was complied with. Let us pause for one moment. Wherefore is it that in all similar cases,-in this Ceylonese case, in Major Baillie's Mysore case, in the Cabool case,uniformly the privates are wiser than their officers ? In a case of delicacy or doubtful policy certainly the officers would have been the party best able to solve the difficulties; but in a case of elementary danger, where manners disappear and great passions come upon the stage, strange it is that poor men, labouring men, men without education, always judge more truly of the crisis than men of high refinement. But this was seen by Wordsworth: thus spoke he, thirty-six years ago, of Germany, contrasted with the Tyrol :— "Her haughty schools Shall blush; and may not we with sorrow say- Than all the pride of intellect and thought?" The regiment chiefly concerned was the 19th (for which regiment the word Wattépolowa, the scene of their martyrdom, became afterwards a memorial war-cry). Still to this hour it forces tears of wrath into our eyes when we read the recital of the case. A dozen years ago we first read it in a very interesting book, published by the late Mr. Blackwood— the Life of Alexander Alexander. This Alexander was not personally present at the bloody catastrophe; but he was in Ceylon at the time, and knew the one sole fugitive1 from that fatal day. The soldiers of the 19th, not even in that hour of horror, forgot their discipline, or their duty, or their respectful attachment to their officers. When they were 1 Fugitive, observe. There were some others, and amongst them Major Davie, who, for private reasons, were suffered to survive as prisoners. ordered to ground their arms (oh, base idiot that could issue such an order!) they remonstrated most earnestly, but most respectfully. Major Davie, agitated and distracted by the scene, himself recalled the order. The men resumed their arms. Alas! again the fatal order was issued; again it was recalled; but finally, it was issued peremptorily. The men sorrowfully obeyed. We hurry to the odious conclusion. In parties of twos and of threes, our brave countrymen were called out by the horrid Kandyan tiger-cats. Disarmed by the frenzy of their moonstruck commander, what resistance could they make? One after one the parties called out to suffer were decapitated by the executioner. The officers, who had refused to give up their pistols, finding what was going on, blew out their brains with their own hands, now too bitterly feeling how much wiser had been the poor privates than themselves. At length there was stillness on the field. Night had come on. All were gone- "And darkness was the buryer of the dead." The reader may recollect a most picturesque murder near Manchester, about thirteen or fourteen years ago, perpetrated by two brothers named M'Kean, where a servant woman, whose throat had been effectually cut, rose up, after an interval, from the ground at a most critical moment (so critical that, by that act, and at that second of time, she drew off the murderer's hand from the throat of a second victim), staggered, in her delirium, to the door of a room where sometimes a club had been held, doubtless under some idea of obtaining aid, and at the door, after walking some fifty feet, dropped down dead.1 Not less astonishing was the resurrection, as it might be called, of an English corporal, cut, mangled, re-mangled, and left without sign of life. Suddenly he rose up, stiff and gory; dying and delirious, as he felt himself, with misery and exhaustion and wounds, he swam rivers, threaded enemies, and, moving day and night, came suddenly upon an army of Kandyans: here he prepared himself with pleasure for the death that now seemed inevitable, when, by a fortunate accident, for want of a fitter 1 The story recurs in De Quincey's Supplementary Narrative to his "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts."-M. man, he was selected as an ambassador to the English officer commanding a Kandyan garrison, and thus once more escaped miraculously. Sometimes, when we are thinking over the great scenes of tragedy through which Europe passed from 1805 to 1815, suddenly, from the bosom of utter darkness, a blaze of light arises; a curtain is drawn up; a saloon is revealed. We see a man sitting there alone, in an attitude of alarm and expectation. What does he expect? What is it that he fears? He is listening for the chariot-wheels of a fugitive army. At intervals he raises his head; and we know him now for the Abbé de Pradt-the place, Warsaw-the time, early in December 1812. All at once the rushing of cavalry is heard ; the door is thrown open; a stranger enters. We see, as in Cornelius Agrippa's mirror, his haggard features; it is a momentary king, having the sign of a felon's death written secretly on his brow; it is Murat; he raises his hands with a gesture of horror as he advances to M. l'Abbé. We hear his words "L'Abbé, all is lost!" Even so, when the English soldier, reeling from his anguish and weariness, was admitted into the beleaguered fortress, his first words, more homely in expression than Murat's, were to the same dreadful purpose: "Your honour,” he said, "all is dished"; and, this being uttered by way of prologue, he then delivered himself of the message with which he had been charged, and that was a challenge from the Kandyan general to come out and fight without aid from his artillery. The dismal report was just in time; darkness was then coming on. The English officer spiked his guns; and, with his garrison, fled by night from a fort in which else he would have perished by starvation or by storm, had Kandyan forces been equal to such an effort. This corporal was, strictly speaking, the only man who escaped,-one or two other survivors having been reserved as captives, for some special reasons. Of this captive party was Major Davie, the commander, whom Mr. Bennett salutes by the title of "gallant," and regrets that "the strong arm of death " had intercepted his apology. He could have made no apology. Plea or palliation he had none. To have polluted the British honour in treacher ously yielding up to murder (and absolutely for nothing in return) a prince whom we ourselves had seduced into rebellion; to have forced his men and officers into laying down their arms, and suing for the mercy of wretches the most perfidious on earth these were acts as to which atonement or explanation was hopeless for him, forgiveness impossible for England. So this man is to be called "the gallant "—is he? We will thank Mr. Bennett to tell us who was that officer subsequently seen walking about in Ceylon, no matter whether in Western Columbo, or in Eastern Trincomalé, long enough for reaping his dishonour,—though, by accident, not for a court-martial ? Behold, what a curse rests in this British Island upon those men who, when the clock of honour has sounded the hour for their departure, cannot turn their dying eyes nobly to the land of their nativity-stretch out their hands to the glorious Island in farewell homage, and say with military pride, as even the poor gladiators (who were but slaves) said to Cæsar when they passed his chair to their death, “ Morituri te salutamus!" This man, and Mr. Bennett knows it,because he was encrusted with the leprosy of cowardice, and because upon him lay the blood of those to whom he should have been in loco parentis, made a solitude wherever he appeared men ran from him as from an incarnation of pestilence; and between him and free intercourse with his countrymen, from the hour of his dishonour in the field to the hour of his death, there flowed a river of separation, there were stretched lines of interdict heavier than ever Pope ordained, there brooded a schism like that of death, a silence like that of the grave; making known for ever the deep damnation of the infamy which on this earth settles upon the troubled resting-place of him who, through cowardice, has shrunk away from his duty, and, on the day of trial, has broken the bond which bound him to his country. : Surely there needed no arrear of sorrow to consummate this disaster. Yet two aggravations there were, which afterwards transpired, irritating the British soldiers to madness. One was soon reported: viz. that one hundred and twenty sick or wounded men, lying in an hospital, had been massacred without a motive by the children of hell with whom we were contending. The other was not discovered until 1815. |